The Iraqi interior ministry announced that the country’s intelligence forces have defused ISIL’s plots to carry out terrorist attacks in Iran, Turkey and Iraq’s Suleimaniyeh province.

“The intelligence team which had infiltrated the terrorist groups could provide the quadrilateral coalition of Iraq, Syria, Iran and Russia with intelligence about ISIL’s moves,” the head of al-Soqour intelligence group at the Iraqi interior ministry Abu Ali al-Basari was quoted as saying by Iraq’s SNG news agency on Sunday.

He added that the terrorists had plots to carry out terrorist attacks in Turkey, Iran and Suleimaniyeh region, noting that the numerous airstrikes launched by the Russian fighter jets in Syria foiled the ISIL plots to infiltrate Iran, Iraq, Turkey and some of the European states and operations in Raqqa and Albu Kamal in Syria.

The Quadrilateral Intelligence Sharing Center, with military attachés from Iran, Russia, Iraq and Syria, is headed by the Iraqi Military Information Organization since its foundation in 2015.

The Quadrilateral Intelligence Sharing Center of Iran, Russia, Iraq and Syria holds different meetings to broaden cooperation in the fight against terrorism.

The participants discuss activities of the four countries in the security and intelligence fields and present security reports on countering terrorism.

Tehran, Moscow, Baghdad and Damascus have stressed the need to expand cooperation between the four countries in the fight against the ISIL terrorists and other terrorist groups.

Iran’s president nominated four men to run the country’s major economic ministries whose heads have resigned or been impeached by the Parliament in recent weeks.

n a letter to the Parliament on Sunday, President Hassan Rouhani proposed his picks to fill the vacancies in the four ministries.

Farhad Dejpasand has been nominated as the new minister of Economic Affairs and Finance. The former minister, Massoud Karbasian, was dismissed by the Parliament in late August.

President Rouhani, who accepted Minister of Industry, Mine and Trade Mohammad Shariatmadari’s resignation a few days ago, chose him as the new minister of Cooperative, Labor and Welfare, whose previous chief Ali Rabiee received a vote of no confidence from the Parliament on August 8.

In his proposal, the president has named Mohammad Eslami as the new head of the Ministry of Roads and Urban Development. Abbas Akhoundi resigned from the ministry on Saturday.

Also, Rouhani nominated Reza Rahmani as the minister of Industry, Mine and Trade.

The lawmakers would soon begin sessions to discuss the credentials and backgrounds of the proposed ministers for a vote of confidence.

Rouhani won the second term in May 2017 election.

The death of Saudi  journalist Jamal Khashoggi was the result of a “rogue operation” by people acting beyond the scope of their authority, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said on Sunday.

“This is a terrible mistake. This is a terrible tragedy,” he said, offering sympathy to the Khashoggi family. “Our condolences go out to them. We feel their pain. I assure them that those responsible will be held accountable.

“The individuals did this out of the scope of their authority,” Al-Jubeir told Fox News in the US, and none of those involved had close ties to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “There were not people closely tied to him. This was an operation that was a rogue operation.”

Khashoggi died in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 6 when he visited to complete some paperwork related to his divorce. Saudi Arabia said on Saturday that 18 Saudis had been arrested in connection with his death.

Conflicting reports about whether Khashoggi had left the consulate prompted the investigation, and Saudi Arabia would continue to provide information on the case “as it becomes available,” Al-Jubeir said on Sunday.

Separately, an unindentified Saudi official told the Reuters news agency that the initial account of Khashoggi’s disappearance had been based on “false information reported internally at the time.”

“Once it became clear these initial mission reports were false, the government launched an internal investigation and refrained from further public comment,” the official said.

He said the deputy head of the General Intelligence Presidency, Ahmed Al-Asiri, had assembled a 15-member team to meet Khashoggi at the consulate and try to convince him to return to Saudi Arabia.

Things went wrong from the start, the official said. When Khashoggi raised his voice, the team panicked. They placed him in a chokehold and covered his mouth. “They tried to prevent him from shouting, but he died,” the official said. “The intention was not to kill him.”

To cover up their misdeed, the team rolled up Khashoggi’s body in a rug, took it out in a consular vehicle and handed it over to a “local cooperator.” A team member donned Khashoggi’s clothes and left through the back door of the consulate in an attempt to make it look as if Khashoggi had walked out of the building.

The official said the team then wrote a false report for their superiors.

Saudi political analyst and international relations scholar Dr. Hamdan Al-Shehri told Arab News: “This should put an end to all the spurious stories that were being dished out by different media outlets. Today’s explanation should put all the conspiracy theories to rest.”

By Peter Welby*

“The biggest split in Christianity for 1,000 years,” screamed the headline in Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper, announcing the decision of the most senior bishop of the Eastern Orthodox Church to recognize the independence of Ukraine’s Orthodox Church from that of Russia. That headline pulls in the reader but overstates the crisis. A split in the Christian Church in the 16th century by some estimates cost up to 17 million lives across Europe by the end of the 17th century. It became known as the Reformation. That is not to say there is no crisis. As with many, if not most, splits in the history of Christianity — at least for the past 1,500 years — politics is just as significant as theology, and in this case perhaps more so.

To describe the Eastern Orthodox Church as a Byzantine institution is no exercise in hyperbole. It can trace its direct political ancestry to the Emperor Constantine. Its most senior bishop lives in Istanbul, which the church still calls Constantinople. And — perhaps unsurprisingly for a church that was set up by an emperor — its theology often ties it to government.

That often makes it a nationalist church, which is reflected in its structure. It is made up of 15 (now 16) autocephalous local churches that recognize one another as part of the same wider church, but are almost entirely independent of each other. At the center of the network sits the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople, recognized as the first among equals by the leaders of the different churches.

Those churches are usually closely tied to their local governments, perhaps none more so than the Russian Orthodox Church. The breakup of empires, then, has often led to tensions in the churches as newly formed independent states want their own independent church, as happened in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Russian Orthodox Church does not like splits. According to The Times newspaper, archbishops of Canterbury are routinely welcomed to their post with a letter from the patriarch of Moscow declaring them to be anathema, cheerily signed “with best wishes.” But politically, when the splitters are from its own jurisdiction, the hatred is real and has consequences.

And in this case, when the splitters muster support for their cause from within the wider Orthodox Church because of the actions of the Russian state in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the Russian Orthodox Church goes ballistic.

In a total denial of reality, a Russian Orthodox Church spokesman last week said the ecumenical patriarch had “excluded himself from canonical Orthodoxy,” as if it was not the Russian church that found itself isolated. In fact, a grant to Russia of jurisdiction over the Ukrainian church in 1686 is regarded by the Ecumenical Patriarchate as a loan of authority for expediency (the Ottomans had only just been repulsed from Vienna) rather than a gift.

It is hard to tell which the Russian church dislikes more: The ecumenical patriarch’s recognition of a split in its jurisdiction, or its simultaneous effective repudiation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regional adventurism. Criticism of the president is, in the Russian Orthodox Church’s eyes, a pretty major sin. When Putin was running for his third term in 2012, Patriarch Kirill described him as a “miracle of God.”

Putin is not afraid to give a sacred twist to his foreign policy, justifying the annexation of Crimea on the basis that it was from there that Russian Christianity originated. But the church does not shy away from such interpretations either, with a spokesman for the patriarch describing Russia’s intervention in Syria in 2015 as a “holy battle.”

There remain many unknowns in this story. Russian pressure may force a reversal of the ecumenical patriarch’s decision. The Russian church may quietly make its way back into the fold after a decent interval of sulking (certainly, this is nothing on the great theological disputes of the early church). Resolution of the political situation in Ukraine would certainly help matters.

But if the split becomes permanent (and church splits often do), it is not nearly as severe as Russian spokesmen make out. Russian religious demographics vary wildly depending on who you ask, but anything between 43 percent and 72 percent of Russians regard themselves as Orthodox — somewhere between 62 million and 104 million people. This has risen from as little as 31 percent in 1991, commensurate with the ever-closer identification of the church with the state.

But this does not tell the full story. Despite a claim by a church leader in 2016 that three new churches are opened in Russia every day, according to a Pew poll only 7 percent of Russians attend church at least once a month — just over 10 million people. That is still a lot, but in the context of Eastern Orthodoxy as a whole, not a crushing blow.

The greater problem that Russian distance may cause the other Orthodox churches is financial. The Russian Orthodox Church is not short on cash. In 2012, there was a scandal over a picture of the patriarch wearing a luxury watch.

The church responded in the time-honored fashion of 20th-century Russian politics by doctoring the photo so that the watch disappeared, and the patriarch gave an interview denying that he had ever worn it. Farcically, however, the doctored photo still had the reflection of the watch, on his wrist, on the glossy tabletop.

But by recognizing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the ecumenical patriarch has deprived the Russian church of a third of its territory. It seems likely that Eastern Orthodoxy will survive regardless.

* Peter Welby is a consultant on religion and global affairs, specializing in the Arab world. Previously, he was the managing editor of a think tank on religious extremism, the Centre on Religion & Geopolitics, and worked in public affairs in the Gulf. He is based in London, and has lived in Egypt and Yemen. Twitter: @pdcwelby

By Ken Bredemeier

Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan is vowing to reveal what he says is the “naked truth” about the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Erdogan told an Istanbul rally Sunday “We are looking for justice here and this will be revealed in all its naked truth, not through some ordinary steps.”

Erdogan spoke to U.S. President Donald Trump by telephone Sunday, a Turkey’s state-run news agency reports. It says both agree the Khashoggi case needs to be “cleared up with all aspects.”

Saudi Arabia says it made “a huge and grave mistake” in Khashoggi’s killing inside its Istanbul consulate and vowed those responsible for it would be held accountable.

Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told Fox News Sunday that Saudi agents “did this out of the scope of their authority,” calling it “a rogue operation.”

The top Saudi diplomat offered his condolences to Khashoggi’s family, but disclosed no new information about how the writer was killed, where his body is or if Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — the country’s de facto ruler – was involved.

“There obviously was a tremendous mistake made and what compounded the mistake was the attempt to try to cover up,” al-Jubeir said. “That is unacceptable in any government.”

Saudi Arabia claims the 59-year-old Khashoggi was killed October 2 after an argument leading to a fist fight — an explanation that has drawn widespread international scorn and skepticism, including from Trump. After he initially seemed willing to believe Saudi accounts, the president now says “obviously there has been deception, and there has been lies.”

Al-Jubeir said in the Fox television interview, “This is an aberration. This is a mistake and those responsible will be punished for it. We want to make sure that we know what happened and we want to make sure that those responsible be held to account.” Saudi Arabia says it has fired five key officials linked to the death and arrested 18 others.

Critics are questioning how a team of 15 Saudi agents could fly to Istanbul to meet Khashoggi and eventually kill him without the crown prince’s knowledge and consent. But al-Jubeir said, “There were not people closely tied to him,” although news accounts have said that several Saudi security officials close to Mohammed were involved.

Khashoggi was living in the U.S. in self-imposed exile, writing columns for The Washington Post that were critical of Mohammed and Saudi Arabia’s intervention in the conflict in Yemen.

Trump told the Post that Saudi Arabia has been an “incredible ally” of the United States for decades and it is possible the crown prince did not order Saudi agents to kill Khashoggi.

“Nobody has told me he is responsible. Nobody has told me he is not responsible,” the U.S. leader said. “We have not reached that point…I would love if he was not responsible.”

Numerous U.S. lawmakers, including Trump’s Republican colleagues, are calling for sanctions against the Saudis. Turkish investigators say Saudi agents tortured Khashoggi, decapitated him and then dismembered his body.

Trump told the Post that “something will take place” in response to Khashoggi’s death, but said the United States should not let the incident disrupt a possible $110 billion weapons sale to Riyadh he announced last year.

“It’s the largest order in history,” Trump said. “To give that up would hurt us far more than it hurts them. Then all they’ll do is go to Russia or go to China. All that’s doing is hurting us.”

But one Trump supporter, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, told Fox “I don’t think arms should ever be seen as a jobs program.”

Other U.S. lawmakers voiced skepticism of the Saudi explanation for Khashoggi’s death.

Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN he believes Mohammed bin Salman was responsible, saying, “Yes, I think he did it.”

A Trump critic, Democratic California Congressman Adam Schiff, told ABC News, “This ought to be a relationship-altering event for the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that we ought to suspend military sales, we ought to suspend certain security assistance.”

U.S. officials are faced with reconciling the Saudi explanation for Khashoggi’s death and Turkey’s claim an audio recording exists of Khashoggi’s torture and death. Trump denies U.S. officials have heard the audio or read transcripts of it, but the Post quoted sources saying that Central Intelligence Agency officials have listened to the audio. Verification of it would make it difficult to accept the Saudi explanation for Khashoggi’s death.

European leaders and the human rights group Amnesty International expressed skepticism about the Saudi explanation.

Britain, Germany and France issued a joint statement condemning the killing of Khashoggi and said there is an “urgent need for clarification of exactly what happened.” They said the Saudi explanation for the journalist’s death needs to be supported by facts in order to be credible.

European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the circumstances around Khashoggi’s death are deeply troubling, and called for a thorough, credible and transparent investigation.

Amnesty International called on Saudi Arabia to “immediately produce” Khashoggi’s body so an autopsy can be performed.

Amnesty’s director of campaigns for the Middle East, Samah Hadid, said a United Nations investigation would be necessary to avoid a “Saudi whitewash” of the circumstances surrounding Khashoggi’s death. Hadid said such a cover-up may have been done to preserve Saudi Arabia’s international business ties.

House of Representatives candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has likened climate change to Nazi Germany, saying the two pose a similar kind of “existential threat.”

“So we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II,” the Democratic Socialist told a crowd at a campaign event on Friday. “And so we’ve been here before and we have a blueprint of doing this before.”

What we did was that we chose to mobilize our entire economy and industrialized our entire economy and we put hundreds of thousands if not millions of people to work in defending our shores and defending this country,” the 29-year-old stated. “We have to do the same thing in order to get us to 100 percent renewable energy, and that’s just the truth of it.”

Ocasio-Cortez, known for her progressive views, has made headlines since pulling off a surprise win over Rep. Joe Crowley (D-NY) in the state’s 14th Congressional District primary in May.

The 29-year-old has campaigned with Bernie Sanders this year, on a drive to advance far-left candidates, but refused on Thursday to endorse his possible candidacy in the 2020 presidential race. Sanders also declined to endorse Ocasio-Cortez in the battle against Crowley – even though she’d worked on his 2016 campaign.

Sanders isn’t the only Democrat to refuse to endorse the progressive candidate, as her defeat of Crowley sent shockwaves throughout the Democratic party. Her name was left off a list of 81 candidates endorsed by former President Barack Obama in August, though an expanded version of that list –published earlier this month– includes her name.

Meanwhile, former Sen. Joe Lieberman recently took aim at Ocasio-Cortez’s policies in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.

Ocasio-Cortez is campaigning on a platform of Medicare for all, housing as a human right, stricter gun control, criminal justice reform, and for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) to be abolished.

If Ocasio-Cortez is victorious in November, she will be the youngest woman to be elected to Congress.

(RFE/RL) — Russia has warned the United States not to go ahead with its planned withdrawal from a key Cold War-era arms-control treaty with Moscow, saying it could trigger retaliatory measures.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on October 21 that unilateral U.S. withdrawal would be “very dangerous” and lead to a “military-technical” retaliation.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who signed the original document back in 1987, said the move showed Washington’s “lack of wisdom.”

The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) prohibits the United States and Russia from possessing, producing, or deploying medium-range, ground-launched cruise missiles, with a range of between 500 kilometers and 5,500 kilometers.

Russia, for its part, has repeatedly denied the U.S. accusations and also alleged that some elements of the U.S. missile-defense systems in Europe were in violation of the agreement.

The treaty was the first arms-control agreement to eliminate an entire class of missiles.

“We’re going to terminate the agreement and we’re going to pull out,” Trump told reporters on October 20 during a campaign stop in Nevada, adding that Washington will not let Russia “go out and do weapons [while] we’re not allowed to.”

“We’ll have to develop those weapons, unless Russia comes to us and China comes to us and they all come to us and say let’s really get smart and let’s none of us develop those weapons,” the U.S. president added.

China, which is not a signatory to the treaty, has faced no limits on developing intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

Bolton To Moscow

Trump made the declaration as his national security adviser, John Bolton, flew to Moscow for talks with Russian officials about the INF and other issues.

Withdrawing from the treaty “would be a very dangerous step that, I’m sure, not only will not be comprehended by the international community but will provoke serious condemnation,” TASS news agency cited Ryabkov as saying on October 21.

He accused the U.S. administration of using the treaty in an attempt to blackmail the Kremlin, putting global security at risk.

Ryabkov also said that if the United States continues to act “clumsily and crudely” and unilaterally back out of international agreements, then Russia will have no choice but to undertake unspecified measures of a “military-technical nature,” according to the RIA Novosti news agency.

“But we would rather things did not get that far,” he added.

Gorbachev, now 87 years old, said it would be a mistake for Washington to quit the treaty.

“Getting rid of the treaty is a mistake,” he told Russia’s Interfax news agency, stressing that officials “absolutely must not tear up old agreements on disarmament.”

“All the agreements aimed at nuclear disarmament and limitation of nuclear arms must be preserved to save life on Earth,” he said.

Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the Russian Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee, said that a unilateral U.S. withdrawal from INF would cancel out all attempts at disarmament.

“Humanity is threatened by total chaos in the field of nuclear weapons,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

Meanwhile, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said Washington should consider the consequences of pulling out of the international treaty, which he described as “an important pillar of our European security architecture.”

“We have often urged Russia to address serious allegations that it is violating the agreement. We now urge the U.S. to consider the possible consequences,” Maas said in an October 21 statement.

Asked about the U.S. decision, a senior U.S. administration official speaking on condition of anonymity told RFE/RL that: “Across two administrations, the United States and our allies have attempted to bring Russia back into full and verifiable compliance with INF.”

“Despite our objections, Russia continues to produce and field prohibited cruise misses and has ignored calls for transparency,” he added.

The Guardian and The New York Times reported on October 19 that U.S. officials had begun notifying European allies of the U.S. decision to withdraw. The Times said also that no final decision had been made.

Trump’s declaration came just days after Putin said Russia would only use its nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack on the country, in what some arms control experts said appeared to be an important clarification of Russian doctrine.

Putin’s comments appeared in part to be a response to the new U.S. “nuclear posture review,” a Defense Department planning document that lays out the criteria for when Washington would use nuclear weapons.

The review, released in February, calls for revamping the U.S. arsenal and developing new low-yield atomic weapons.

The document also highlighted a Russian doctrine that experts say has been around since the Cold War but has gained new attention amid the tensions between Moscow and Washington.

Under that doctrine, known as “escalate to de-escalate,” Moscow stipulates it would use or threaten to use smaller-yield nuclear weapons in a limited conventional conflict in Europe to compel the United States and NATO to back down.

That was seen by many Western officials as lowering the threshold for when such weapons would be used.

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov aspires to annex far more of Ingushetia than even the portion he got a month ago, more than a third of the smaller republic and possibly all of it into a reconstituted Chechen-Ingush Republic. But Kadyrov also has his eye on a district in Daghestan, according to an article in Moscow’s Voyennoye obozreniye today.

That article features a map of Kadyrov’s territorial aspirations to underscore its basic conclusion that whatever anyone hopes for, “the Chechen-Ingush conflict will be continuing,” opening a Pandora’s box of border changes and violence all around that North Caucasus republic (topwar.ru/148645-checheno-ingushskij-konflikt-prodolzhaetsja.html).

Kadyrov’s aspirations with regard to Ingushetia are not only well known but have been much commented upon by Ingush activists who see the border agreement he secured form Yunus-Bek Yevkurov as only a way station on the route for the absorption of their republic by the more numerous Chechens.

But the Chechen leader’s territorial goals with regard to Daghestan have received much less attention at least in recent years. The Moscow article suggests that they deserve more attention because they could easily become an even more explosive conflict than the one Chechnya and Ingushetia have been locked in over the last six weeks.

Kadyrov’s primary focus is on the Aukhovsky region in Daghestan which was part of Chechnya before the Chechens were deported by Stalin in 1944 but has since been part of Daghestan. In recent times, there have been clashes between the Chechens who have returned there and other ethnic groups.

The Chechen leader last year visited the area to push for establishing a regional government, and the Chechen community there appealed to Putin for a boost in status, something that did not sit well with the other nationalities who viewed it as an effort by Kadyrov to set the stage for its annexation (youtube.com/watch?v=kjOn9cHmvkI and flnka.ru/video/17213-chechency-dagestana-prizvali-putina-vossozdat-auhovskiy-rayon.html).

A detailed article from 2014 provides a good retelling of the complicated history of the relations of the various ethnic groups in this region and in particular their land disputes as the population has exploded. Its author, Gulya Arifezova, explicitly says that rumors have long circulated that Kadyrov has a personal interest in this Daghestani region (kavpolit.com/articles/auhovskij_rajon_konflikt_dlinoju_v_pokolenija-4114/).

Given the Moscow military journal’s reference to the possibility that Kadyrov will now seek to annex the region, the danger of an explosion needs to be kept in mind. But so too do three other factors that may restrain Kadyrov unless he has concluded that he has nothing to lose by going for broke.

First, unlike in Ingushetia, which is mono-ethnic, Daghestan is the most ethnically diverse place in the Russian Federation. Any effort to change one border there would likely trigger demands for changes of others both in the south and in the north.

Second, again unlike in Ingushetia, the head of Daghestan is very much Putin’s man, and it is implausible that the Kremlin leader would support either explicitly or implicitly a move that would undermine Makhchkala.

And third, Moscow and the Daghestanis are well aware of these realities and would certainly resist Kadyrov far more vigorously than Yevkurov did. That doesn’t mean that the Chechen leader won’t try something, but it makes it less likely that he would get away with it.

Obviously, Moscow security planners, the chief readership of Voyennoye obozreniye, are concerned about what even an effort to change Daghestani borders would mean for Russian control. Otherwise they would not have published the provocative map showing that Kadyrov hopes for yet another Anschluss.

By D. Padma Kumar Pillay*

On October 04, 2018, India handed over seven Rohingya immigrants to the Myanmar authorities at Moreh on the India-Myanmar border. The Supreme Court allowed their deportation on the ground that Myanmar had accepted them as citizens. Around 40,000 Rohingya refugees are believed to be in India, though only 18,000 have registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The Ministry of Home Affairs has asked state governments to start collecting the biometrics of Rohingyas who have illegally entered the country so that they can be deported to Myanmar. Rohingyas have been living in India since before the arrival of the recent wave of refugees in 2017.

It is noteworthy that Parsis, Jews, Armenians, Poles and many other communities had made India their home when they were persecuted in their countries of origin. In recent history, India has hosted the Dalai Lama and lakhs of his followers fleeing Chinese occupation and ethnic cleansing of Tibet, as well as millions of East Pakistani refugees fleeing genocide in 1970-71. Lakhs of Tamil refugees fleeing ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka were given refuge, as were Afghans and Somalians. In fact, the partition of India had resulted in the movement of millions of refugees, and many of those refugees became successful entrepreneurs and professionals, making significant contributions to the Indian economy, and indeed, its social and cultural environment.

The Rohingyas are one of the world’s “most persecuted” communities. Around 1.2 million live in Myanmar’s Rakhine state where they have co-habited for generations with others for over hundreds of years. They may have converted to Islam in the wake of trade contacts with the Arab world, as happened in Kerala and Maldives, but there are even today a sprinkling of Hindus amongst them. Today, in Buddhist majority Myanmar, the Rohingyas are, however, termed as ‘illegal immigrants’ after the adoption of the Citizenship Law of 1982 which does not recognise this community as one of the 135 legally recognised ethnic groups of Myanmar.

The violence – and the institutionalised discrimination against the Rohingyas – surprisingly also appears to have left Nobel Laureate and Myanmar’s State Counsellor Aung Sang Syu Ki unmoved, despite her own long record of struggle against an undemocratic regime. As a result of the violence, which reportedly includes killings, house burning and sexual violence, thousands of Rohingyas have been fleeing, mainly to Bangladesh; that number has now reached half a million. Among them are about 500 Hindus, showing that the campaign of violence in Rakhine is one of deadly majoritarianism, intolerant of any minority. Around 40,000 Rohingyas have found their way into India having illegally crossed the India-Bangladesh border to escape from a living hell in Myanmar.

The Rohingyas have lent themselves to be viewed with suspicion because reports claim that some of them are involved in drug trafficking in the Northeast and are conduits for terror activities. The Government of India had filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court stating that the Rohingyas are illegal immigrants and must be deported as they are a serious security threat. India thereafter repatriated the first batch of Rohingyas to Myanmar.

Most refugees dream of going home one day. This was true of the refugees during the Partition of India, many of whom still dream of visiting their homes someday. It is true of Syrian refugees who have seen their country crumble. It was true of the Bangladeshis and the Sri Lankans as well as the dream of every Tibetan. India has successfully repatriated several refugees in the recent past. But the situation back in Myanmar is so dire that the refugees cannot imagine of returning. Further, the core principle of the UN Refugee Convention requires that refugees cannot be returned to the country where they face serious threats to life or freedom. The principle of non-refoulement, or non-forcible return of refugees, considered a rule of customary international law, is binding on all states whether they have signed the Convention or not. India has also, rightly and consistently, endorsed the principle of non-refoulement at various international platforms including the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee which discusses human rights issues, the UN Human Rights Council and at the Executive Committee of UNHCR. At the 66th session of the UNHCR Executive Committee in 2015, the Indian delegation had affirmed:

“India’s assimilative civilizational heritage, inherent capabilities as a State with a good record of non-refoulement, hosting and assimilating refugees gives us a rounded perspective on dealing with matters pertaining to refugees and other persons of concern. India has a tradition of receiving refugees and migrants since millennia. We remain committed to these principles as these have been part of Indian ethos and civilization.”1

The government and its agencies are capable of sifting out those Rohingyas who might actually have links to terror organisations from the rest of the group. India’s security and intelligence apparatus also has the wherewithal to handle individual members of the Rohingya community in India on a case to case basis. The mere possibility or “threat” of violence by some members of the group does not warrant collective punishment of the entire group. During the exodus of Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, those that were suspected to have links to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) did enter India, but Tamil refugees as a group were not turned away on the grounds of “national security”. To ultimately force all Rohingyas including women and children to return on the grounds of “threat to security” is not merely a violation of international law but is also against our humanitarian heritage and standards of morality. The strident calls for “deportation” are contrary to India’s long-held humanitarian principles, including our cherished belief in vasudhaiva kutumbakam.

The Rohingyas clearly face a threat to life and are not recognised as citizens in Myanmar. Deportation thus is a move that could endanger their lives and is also in violation of the international law of non-refoulement. One of the key conditions for repatriation is the grant of full citizenship — and not “residency” or “certificates of identity “as is being offered to the Rohingyas.

One might ask why India should be hospitable to a group of refugees whose own country has disowned them. The answer lies in our ancient culture and in India’s traditional humanitarian approach to refugees from times immemorial. The Mahabharata as well as Jataka recount the example of Chakravarti Shibi, a worthy descendant of Bharat and an ancestor of Lord Ram, who offers refuge to a dove from a hawk that wished to eat it. To honour his word to protect all those who seek refuge, the noble Chakravarti offered his own flesh in place of the dove when the hawk claimed that the bird was its food and was needed to nourish his own body and that of his family and that he too as a subject seeks justice from the noble king. The king, realising his obligation, offered his own life to uphold dharma. Today India faces a similar test where one must choose between what is righteous and in accordance with our dharma and Bharatiya Samskriti.

The answer also lies in India’s responsibility as a member of the international community, as a democracy, and as an aspiring global leader. It can also show the West that the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ is not something that is to be merely spoken of within the confines of ivory towers, but is about defending and protecting people’s right to life and dignity. India has always walked the talk in standing up for the weak and oppressed since times immemorial.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India

About the author:
*Col. (Dr) D.P.K. Pillay, SC is Research Fellow at IDSA New Delhi.

Source:
This article was published by IDSA

Notes:

• 1. “Statement by H.E. Mr. Ajit Kumar, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of India to the UN during the General Debate”, 66th Session of Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Permanent Mission of India, Geneva, October 07, 2015, at https://www.pmindiaun.gov.in/pages.php?id=1183

By Istvan Hlinyanszky

Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist and frequent critic of the Saudi regime, attends a meeting at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. His wife waits outside for him in a car, but her husband never exits the building. He has disappeared without a trace.

President Trump, after a call with the Saudi King: “maybe it was ‘rogue elements’ who killed him.”

Russia, a longtime enemy of the West, dusts off its Soviet-era information warfare playbook and makes it fit for purpose in the digital era. It puts these new methods to use by nurturing societal divisions and promoting parties sympathetic to Russian interests in elections across the democratic world. Intelligence agencies on both side of the Atlantic detect these activities and try to sound the alarm.

President Trump, after a summit with his Russian counterpart: “I don’t see any reason why Russia” would be responsible [for election interference].”

North Korea, a repressive regime that’s still technically at war with a US ally, flouts the international non-proliferation regime and becomes a de facto nuclear power. In the subsequent years it establishes a diplomatic pattern of promising big, delivering nothing, and employing all manner of schemes to induce appeasement from the international community, including rampant cyber-attacks and the sinking the Cheonan in 2010. The Trump regime initiates a new diplomatic initiative that’s front-loaded with concessions long sought by the North Koreans. Unsurprisingly, there has been no tangible progress toward denuclearization since then.

President Trump, after receiving a new letter from Kim Jong-un: “We’re in love.”

It’s hard to miss the strange pattern emerging in Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders.

Trump seems willing to take friends and enemies alike at their word more so than any other US president in memory. Really, more than any elected leader in memory. You’d think that Saddam Hussein could have dodged Desert Storm if Trump were in power, just say the Iraqis were filming a war movie and then compliment the president on his tan.

But what is it that makes President Trump so eminently suggestible?

It could be that that’s just the way he is: easily duped. There’s no shortage of evidence to suggest this is the case. And many of these accounts come from administration insiders who would presumably know what they’re talking about.

If Trump truly is a dunce, then what does it say about the state of US civilization, where apparently anyone can become president so long as they’re blessed with a little luck and a “small” family loan of one (or several hundred) million dollars?

It’s far more likely that President Trump knows what he’s doing on some level. Trump isn’t dumb; he just assumes that we, the public, are dumb. He’ll say whatever he wants, no matter how ridiculous it sounds in the moment, because he knows that it won’t be long before the great gears of the news cycle churn out some new tidbit of scandal to titillate us.

And who can argue that he’s wrong? A growing number of us are simply willing to take the word of those who are in power. Good news is a win for the home team, fodder for our confirmation bias. Bad news is fake news: abjectly false, misleading, and/or planted by shadowy vested interests. And whenever a powerful figure is implicated in wrongdoing, a simple (or perhaps furious) denial is happily accepted as the height of exonerating evidence.

The dynamic leaves no room for consideration of the golden question: “Who benefits?” Could it be that the stupefying “rogue element” jaw-dropper has something to do with President Trump’s rumored business ties to Saudi Arabia? Of course not; Trump has firmly denied any such links on Twitter (fake news!). And what’s more, Crown Prince Mohammad Bin-Salman has given his word that his government had nothing to do with it. Case closed.

Trump might be suggestible to the point of absurdity, but who are we to judge when we’re just as bad?

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the authors are theirs alone and don’t reflect the official position of Geopoliticalmonitor.com or any other institution.

America’s international alliances are transforming in fundamental ways. The likelihood of World War III is increasing, and has been increasing ever since 2012 when the US first slapped Russia with the Magnitsky Act sanctions. In fact, one matter driving these changing alliances now toward unprecedented realignments is that some nations’ leaders want to do whatever they can to prevent WW III.

On October 17^th, America’s Military Times bannered “Why today’s troops fear a new war is coming soon” and reported, “About 46 percent of troops who responded to the anonymous survey of currently serving Military Times readers said they believe the US will be drawn into a new war within the next year. That’s a jarring increase from only about 5 percent who said the same thing in a similar poll conducted in September 2017.” Their special fear is of war against Russia and/or China: “About 71 percent of troops said Russia was a significant threat, up 18 points from last year’s survey. And 69 percent of troops said China poses a significant threat, up 24 points from last year.” The US spends around half of the entire world’s military budget; and, after 9/11, has invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, and perpetrated a bloody coup turning Ukraine into a rabidly anti-Russian government on Russia’s very doorstep and even an applicant for NATO membership though, in 2009, before Obama’s coup overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected Government, even US media reported that “barely 25 percent of Ukrainians favor joining NATO.” After 1991 when Russia’s anti-American Warsaw Pact military alliance ended, America’s anti-Russian NATO military alliance expanded right up to Russia’s very borders. Nonetheless, these troops aren’t afraid that the US is posing a threat to Russia and maybe to China, but that Russia and China are both posing threats against America; they trust their Government; it’s what they’re taught to believe. But the reality is very different. And it involves all of the “great power” relationships — not only US, Russia, and China.

The precipitating event for the breakup that’s now occurring in international alliances, happened on October 2^nd, when Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the leader of Saudi Arabia, went into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul Turkey, and disappeared.

Allegedly, the dictator of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, had Khashoggi murdered and chopped-up inside that Consulate, within no more than two hours of his entrance there. Russia announced exactly a week later, on October 9th, that Salman had just bought Russia’s world-leading S-400 anti-missile system, for $2 billion. US President Donald Trump and the US Congress will thus now need to determine whether to slap sanctions against Saudi Arabia for that purchase of Russian weaponry, just like the US has already been threatening to do to fellow-NATO-member Turkey after its leader, President Tayyip Erdogan, likewise, recently purchased S-400s. (Trump and Congress also threatened India’s Modi this way, for its purchase of several S-400s.) But even without this Saudi S-400 purchase, some in Washington have been proposing cancellation of Saudi Arabia’s $404 billion purchase of US-made weaponry, the largest armaments-sale in history, which Trump had negotiated with Salman in 2017 and which is the likeliest cause of today’s booming US stock market. The news-media call it a $110 billion sale, but only the first-year of the ten-year commitment is $110 billion; the total deal is a 10-year commitment, at around $400 billion. (Though initially it had been 10 years at $350 billion, CNBC headlined nine months later, “Trump wants Saudi Arabia to buy more American-made weapons” and reported: “In the past nine months alone, the US has secured $54 billion in foreign military sales to Saudi Arabia.” So, without seeing the actual signed deal, to confirm with certainty, one can assume that the total now is $404 billion.) Low-balling the amount is done in order to hide the national embarrassment of the military-industrial-complex’s now being the actual basis of America’s booming stock market.

Salman’s purchase of that $2 billion Russian S-400 could place the vastly larger $404 billion US arms-sale to Saudi Arabia (and America’s consequent stock-boom and full employment) even more in jeopardy than it already is. America’s two most-core Middle Eastern allies, Saudi Arabia and Turkey (and Israel is only a distant third, and has no other option than to do whatever the US Government requires it to do), could soon become no longer US allies. America’s most important international alliances have never before been in such jeopardy. Turkey is likelier to re-align with Russia than Saudi Arabia is, but even if Turkey becomes the only one to switch, that would be an earthquake in international relations. If both Turkey and Saudi Arabia go, it would be an earthquake, not just in international relations, but in world history. It could happen; and, if it does, then the reality that we know today will be gone and will become replaced by arrangements that virtually no one today is even thinking about, at all.

Jamal Khashoggi, a member and champion of the Muslim Brotherhood (as is Tayyip Erdogan — which is another reason why Erdogan would be especially unlikely to relent on this matter), was a nephew of the recently deceased billionaire international-arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi; press adviser to the billionaire Saudi chief of intelligence and Ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Saud; and, more recently, a protégé of billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud (who also is a Muslim Brotherhood member). Of course, he was also a columnist for the Washington Post, which makes impossible his case being ignored in the US

On 4 November 2017, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud, and many other Princes and billionaires, were seized by the forces of the billionaire Prince Salman, the heir-apparent to the throne of his father, King Salman al-Saud, who is the world’s only trillionaire. What’s essential to understand is that in order for any Saud Prince (such as this Crown Prince, Salman) to become King Saud (and thus to inherit his father’s trillion-dollar-plus fortune), he must first win the approval of the nation’s Wahhab clergy or “Ulema”, and so Saudi Arabia is both a monarchy and a theocracy. There has long been a global competition between two fundamentalist-Sunni groups: the Saud-funded Al Qaeda versus the Thani-funded Muslim Brotherhood. Ever since the Saud family and the Wahhab clergy agreed in 1744 to take control of all Arabs and to convert or kill all Shia, the Sauds have been (and are) anti-Shia and insist upon fundamentalist Sunni rule. Al Qaeda represents the Wahhabist and Saud view, which advocates elimination of Shiites and accepts hereditary monarchy as the power to impose Sunni Islamic law and rejects democracy; the Muslim Brotherhood represents instead the more tolerant Thani view, which accepts Shia and also accepts imposition of Islamic law by means of democracy, and not only by means of dynasty. Both Prince and King Salman hate the Shia-accepting Muslim Brotherhood, whose top funder is the competing Thani family, who own Qatar; the Thanis don’t hate democracy and Shiites and Iran enough to suit the Sauds and especially the Salmans. They’re not sufficiently anti-Iran and anti-Shiite and anti-democracy.

Khashoggi had explained why he shared the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideals: “We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere. We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.” He was out to save the world by making it a fundamentalist Sunni world, somehow without using terrorism to do it. Like him, the Thanis and Erdogan don’t share such extreme extremism as the Sauds demand.

Furthermore, On October 16^th, Gabriel Sherman at Vanity Fair bannered “HOW JAMAL KHASHOGGI FELL OUT WITH BIN SALMAN”, and he wrote that Khashoggi had told him, back in March, that the reason he had turned against Prince Salman, and why the Washington Post had hired him, was what had happened on 4 November 2017: “‘When the arrests started happening, I flipped. I decided it was time to speak,’ he told me. Khashoggi subsequently landed a column in The Washington Post.” Furthermore, Khashoggi told Sherman, “The people M.B.S. arrested were not radicals. The majority were reformers for women’s rights and open society. He arrested them to spread fear. He is replacing religious intolerance with political closure.” This was the difference between Al Qaeda versus the Muslim Brotherhood.

The competition between, on the one hand, the pro-Muslim-Brotherhood Thanis and Erdogan, versus the pro-Al-Qaeda Sauds, UAE and Kuwait, on the other; is forcing the US to choose between those two sides, or else even possibly lose both of them and even to go instead with Shia Islam as America’s Muslim partners. The biggest US Middle Eastern military bases in the Middle East are Al Udeid in the Thanis’ Qatar, and Incirlik in Turkey. Both of those are Muslim Brotherhood Sunni territory, not Al Qaeda Sunni territory. The US under Trump has been more pro-Al-Qaeda (pro-Saud) than the US had been under Obama, but doesn’t want to lose those bases. (President Obama had supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi in Egypt. But he also vetoed the congressional bill for investigating whether the Sauds had done 9/11. He wanted friends on both sides of the Sunni divide. But he killed Al Qaeda’s founding leader, bin Laden. And yet he continued being staunchly pro Al Qaeda against Russia.)

Turkey has been a US ally through its membership (since 1952) in the NATO anti-Russia alliance. Saudi Arabia has been a US ally since a major 1938 Rockefeller oil-discovery there, and especially since US President Richard Nixon in the early 1970sswitched gold for oil as the physical basis for the dollar’s value in international commerce. But for both of these till-now US allies to be buying the world’s best anti-missile system from the very same country that the US aristocracy has secretly been trying ultimately to conquer even after the USS.R. and its Warsaw Pact military alliance and its communism all ended in 1991, is a shock, and an insult, to America’s aristocracy (the billionaires), coming from two of their most important former allies.

What is at stake now is not only the value-basis of the US dollar and the continuance of America’s NATO alliance against Russia, but, more basically than either, is the full realization of the dream by Cecil Rhodes in 1877 and of George Soros today, for a unified and all-inclusive UK-US empire to become ruler over the entire world — the first-ever all-encompassing global empire. Britain importantly bonded King Saud and his family to its Empire, at the time of World War I, against the Ottoman Empire. That was the Sauds’ alliance against Turkey’s empire. After World War II, US became the leader of this joint UK-US empire, as Rhodes had expected ultimately to happen. Ever since 2000, Erdogan has been scheming to restore Turkey’s role as the world’s primary Islamic empire, and so to squelch the Saud family’s aspirations to achieve dominance over global Islam. Ever since 1744, the Saud family has been trying to achieve that dominance as being the fundamentalist-Sunni champion against the fundamentalist-Shiite leadership since 1979 in Iran. But, now, the Sunni Sauds’ main competitor might no longer be Shiite Iran, but instead turn out to be Sunni Turkey, after all — which had been the Sauds’ main enemy at the very start of the 20^th Century.

What will the US do, as the collapse of its aristocracy’s dream of global conquest after the fall of communism, is now gathering force even to bring into question such key former allies of America’s aristocracy, as Turkey, and as the world’s richest family (by far), the Saud family (the owners of Saudi Arabia)?

Perhaps the Sauds are making this stunning weapons-purchase from Russia because the prominent critic of the Sauds, Saudi citizen (and nephew of the global arms-merchant Adnan Khashoggi) Jamal Khashoggi, was recorded by loads of hidden cameras and audio recording devices including the watch and cellphone of the victim Jamal Khashoggi himself, as he was being murdered and chopped-up inside the Saudi Embassy in Constantinople-Istanbul when seeking papers that were required in order for him to marry his Turkish fiancé — as the Turkish Government now claims. This is an incident that reverberates hugely against the more-than-a-century-long goal of the UK-US aristocracies for those billionaires to take control over the entire world — including Russia.

Erdogan got shaken to resist the UK-US alliance, when on 15 July 2016, there was a coup-attempt against Erdogan, which endangered his life. The UK-US’s establishments kept the coup-attempt’s very existence almost hidden in their media for several days, because the attempt had failed and the ‘news’-media hadn’t received instructions on how to report what had just happened — the usual CIA-MI6 pipelines ‘informing’ them were probably silent, because those sources were prepared only for delivering the storyline for a successful coup, and it hadn’t been successful — it instead failed.

So, for example, UK’s Independent headlined on July 18^th, “Turkey coup attempt: Rebel jets had Erdogan’s plane in their sights but did not fire, officials claim: ‘Why they didn’t fire is a mystery,’ former military officer says,” and they raised the question in their report, of whether this had actually been a coup-attempt or instead an event that had been planned by the Erdogan regime in order for him then to be enabled to impose martial law so as to eliminate his political opponents: “Conspiracy theorists are saying the attempted military coup was faked, comparing it to the Reichstag fire – the 1933 arson attack on the German parliament building used by Hitler as an excuse to suspend civil liberties and order mass arrests of his opponents.” If you then click onto that “attempted military coup was faked”, you will come to this same newspaper’s report, dated July 16th, which was headlined “Turkey coup: Conspiracy theorists claim power grab attempt was faked by Erdogan”. It’s unusual for an Establishment news-medium to provide any sort of credence to the possibility that a false-flag event has occurred, but if the empire’s intelligence services were providing no information, then even an Establishment ‘news’-medium can do such a thing — anything in order to pretend to have news that’s worthy of publishing about an important event.

But also on July 18^th, yet another Establishment ‘news’-medium, Newsweek, headlined “PUTIN CALLS ERDOGAN TO VOICE SUPPORT FOR ORDER IN TURKEY” and used this event as an opportunity to publicize a statement by an expelled Russian billionaire who had actually been expelled because he had cheated Russia on his tax-returns. Newsweek hid that fact. This supposed billionaire-champion of democracy was there approvingly quoted in a passage: “Many in Russia drew parallels between Erdogan and Putin, hinting Putin may fear mutiny in his own ranks. ‘Well done Turkey,’ Putin rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky tweeted as news of the coup broke on Friday.” (That’s “Putin rival,” instead of billionaire tax-crook. Brainwashing is done that way.) Every possible anti-Russian angle to this attempted coup was pursued: the angle here was, the failed coup had been attempted for the sake of ‘democracy’.

On July 21^st, Al-Araby headlined “Russia ‘warned Erdogan about coup’ moments before assassination attempt”, and reported that,

Russian intelligence warned President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that factions within the army were planning a coup – possibly saving the Turkish leader’s life – Iranian state media has alleged.

Moscow reportedly received “highly sensitive army exchanges and encoded radio messages showing that the Turkish army was readying to stage a coup”, Fars News Agency said, citing Arab sources.

An unnamed Turkish diplomatic source confirmed that intelligence services “received intel from its Russian counterpart that warned of an impending coup”.

Russian spies… informed Ankara that several military helicopters were dispatched to Erdogan’s hotel to “arrest or kill him”.

The CIA edits, and on some matters, even writes, Wikipedia articles; and their article on the “2016 Turkish coup d’état attempt” says nothing at all about this advance-notice by Putin — the key fact about the event, if it’s true. They don’t even mention it as something that might have happened (and which would explain even much that Wikipedia’s article does report). Is this absence because the CIA thinks that it’s not true, or because the CIA knows that it is true and perhaps also that the CIA itself was involved in the coup-attempt and so wants to keep this fact out of their account and out of the public’s consciousness altogether?

Also on July 21^st, Alexander Mercouris, who is deeply knowledgeable about international relations, headlined at his The Duran, “Why Reports of the Russian Tip Off to Erdogan May Be True”, and he presented a stunning case, which could more accurately have been headlined “Why Reports of the Russian Tip Off to Erdogan Are Almost Certainly True.”

I further have documented its extreme likelihood, headlining at Strategic Culture Foundation on August 18th, “What Was Behind the Turkish Coup-Attempt?” But, of course, Wikipedia doesn’t link to sites such as The Duran, or Strategic Culture Foundation, because a controlled news-and-information system-environment is essential to the effective functioning of any dictatorship (and also see this and this, with yet further documentation that the US is no democracy, at all).

So: ever since 15 July 2016, Turkey has been veering away from the US and toward Russia, in its national-security policies.

But the only major prior indication that the Sauds might do likewise was when the Sauds’ intelligence-chief, head of the National Intelligence Council, and former US Ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, secretly met with Putin in Moscow on 31 July 2013 in order to try to pry Russia away from protecting the Governments of both Syria and Iran — Bandar even told Putin “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the [upcoming Sochi Winter Olympic] games are controlled by us.” Bandar also promised to buy up to $15 billion of Russian-made weapons, if Putin would abandon protection of the sovereignty of the Syrian and Iranian Governments. Putin said no. Bandar was the long-time friend of Israel who had donated heavily to Al Qaeda prior to the 9/11 attacks, even out of his personal account. He was especially close to both US President Bushes.

The Trump arms-deal with Saudi Arabia is enormous — $404 billion over ten years — and it very much is at stake now because of the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. America’s ‘news’-media hide this reality.

For example, the 16 October 2018 NPR “Morning Edition” program headlined “Trump Says He Won’t Scrap Arms Deal Over Missing Saudi Journalist” and host Steve Inskeep diminished the importance of Trump’s enormous arms-deal with Saudi Arabia. Inskeep interviewed a supposed expert on international arms-sales. He asked her about Saudi Arabia, whether they are “a really lucrative market for weapons” and she said “Arms sales aren’t this lucrative big deal for the United States,” because “arms sales are a pretty inefficient employment mechanism,” which wasn’t even relevant to answering the question that had been asked. She went on to say they’re not lucrative because “sometimes weapons are given on grant or on favorable credit terms,” but that too was irrelevant but just pointed to the fact that the US taxpayer is often subsidizing those extremely lucrative — for the weapons-firms — transactions. Her answer ignored that Lockheed Martin etc. benefit just the same; only taxpayers lose when it’s subsidized. Inskeep: “You’re saying that there aren’t actually many jobs at stake?” She answered: “That’s what we’ve seen in the past.” But she again falsified, because what the econometric studies actually show is that armaments-expenditures produce less economic growth than non-‘defense’ spending does. (In fact, in the US, military spending actually decreases long-term GDP-growth.) Yet still, adding $404 billion to US manufacturing sales in any field (‘defense’ or otherwise) is an enormous short-term boost. (Inskeep and his guest never even mentioned the amount, $404 billion in this deal; the program was geared to idiots and to keeping them such. It was geared to deceive.) Both the questioner and the ‘expert’ were geared toward hiding the basic reality, certainly not to explaining it. Trump’s largest boost to US GDP thus far has been that $404 billion arms-sale he made to Prince Salman in 2017. It caused stock-values of those armaments-firms to soar, and will (unless cancelled) produce an enormous number of new jobs in the US making those weapons, once the specific contracts have become finalized. But the boosts to armaments-makers’ stock values are already evident. And yet not once in that segment was it mentioned that the Saudi deal was for $404 billion of US-made weapons over a ten-year period. That sale dwarfs any previous weapons-sale in history. NPR simply lied; they deceived their audience. One might say it’s instead because of incompetence on their part, but those program-hosts and producers and guests are hired and engaged and retained because they possess this kind of ‘incompetence’. It’s no mistake, and it is systematic throughout the mainstream Western ‘news’-media. It is lying ‘news’-media. So, as a result, the American public cannot understand US-Saudi relations and other matters that are basic understandings by and for the aristocracy. These are propaganda-media, not news-media.

In fact, just the day earlier, on October 15th, NPR had even headlined “Fact Check: How Much Does Saudi Arabia Spend On Arms Deals With The US?” The sub-head was “President Trump says he does not want to endanger what he describes as a $110 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. But the actual figure is considerably lower.” They reported that, “Since Donald Trump has been president, the United States and Saudi Arabia have concluded less than $4-billion-worth of arms agreements.” No mention was made of the $350 billion figure, much less of the $404 billion one. It’s as if the agreements didn’t exist. Of course, the US Government could have been lying, and maybe Trump actually had made no deal whatsoever with the Sauds. But that’s not the type of lie which NPR alleged here. Anyone nowadays who trusts what either the US Government or its news-media say, is trusting demonstrably untrustworthy sources — and this too is not the type of lying (their own lying) that NPR says exists. They just lie.

Saudi Arabia’s purchase now of Russia’s S-400 does indicate that the US aristocracy might lose their most important foreign ally, the Saud family, and that international relations could transform in transformative ways, not just superficially. It’s only a sign, but what it signals is enormously significant — and US ‘news’-media are hiding it.

The General Manager of the Saud family’s Al Arabya international TV channel that was established in order to compete against the Thani family’s Al Jazeera international TV channel, issued stark warnings to the US, on Sunday, October 14th. Headlining “US sanctions on Riyadh would mean Washington is stabbing itself,” he closed: “If Washington imposes sanctions on Riyadh, it will stab its own economy to death, even though it thinks that it is stabbing only Riyadh!” In between those were: The Kingdom is considering “more than 30 potential measures to be taken against the imposition of sanctions on Riyadh.” Included among them are: the price of oil “jumping to $100, or $200, or even double that figure.” Also “a Russian military base in Tabuk, northwest of Saudi Arabia.” More realistically, however, he threatened: “An oil barrel may be priced in a different currency, Chinese yuan, perhaps, instead of the dollar. And oil is the most important commodity traded by the dollar today.” And, he did not miss this one, either:

It will not be strange that Riyadh would stop buying weapons from the US. Riyadh is the most important customer of US companies, as Saudi Arabia buys 10 percent of the total weapons that these US companies produce, and buys 85 percent from the US army which means what’s left for the rest of the world is only five percent; [and that’s] in addition to the end of Riyadh’s investments in the US government which reaches $800 billion.

For the very first time publicly, a mouthpiece for the Saud family has now said publicly that the US doesn’t control the Saudi Government; the Saudi Government controls the US

If the relationship between the Saud family and the US is the relationship between a dog and its tail, which is which? Perhaps Cecil Rhodes, were he to return, would be so shocked, he’d have a heart-attack and die a second time.

UPDATE: As this is being written, on October 19^th, there has been speculation that the Saudi Government is planning to admit that individual(s) in it had made bad errors, which tragically ended in a botched interrogation of Khashoggi at the Consulate in Istanbul. This response would not be credible in any case, because of the long history, going back decades, of prominent potential opponents of the Saud family being inexplicably disappeared and never heard from (or about) again. For one example, the headline from this past May 30th, six months ago, remains current news, as of even today: “NAWAF AL RASHEED, SON OF PRINCE TALAL BIN ABDULAZIZ AL RASHEED, DISAPPEARED SINCE MAY 12 DEPORTATION TO SAUDI ARABIA”. And, going back to before Crown Prince Salman, to the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing ‘suspects’, all of them simply disappeared, never to be heard from (or about) again — no public trial, nothing at all. There are many such cases, of many different kinds. This is normal Saudi practice — not abnormal at all. What is abnormal is that Jamal Khashoggi had just been hired by perhaps the world’s second-wealthiest person, Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, to write articles against the Crown-Prince son, and future heir, of overwhelmingly the world’s wealthiest person, King Salman. That’s what is different from those such prior instances.

*Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010

This fall, China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), first announced by President Xi Jinping in September 2013, turned five years old. Since its announcement, the BRI has made considerable progress – notably in the domain of physical connectivity – but not without generating its fair share of controversy and debate. With President Xi’s term extension, his flagship initiative is bound to accelerate, especially as the confluence of burgeoning demand for infrastructure among developing countries and China’s desire to export its surplus capacity continue to be “push” factors for the initiative. Furthermore, the trade war with the U.S. and the increasing stringency of the review process of Chinese acquisition deals in developed economies only intensifies China’s search for alternate markets for investment. Anticipating the increased momentum, it is important to take stock of five critical challenges for the BRI as it enters its fifth year.

The first challenge to the Belt and Road is debt sustainability, which has both domestic and international dimensions. Despite China’s aggressive push to invest overseas and its higher appetite for risk, it is a latecomer in lending and development finance, a club traditionally dominated by advanced economies. However, while extending credit to underserved subprime markets constitutes one entry strategy, it could be a double-edged sword for both China and the host states. For instance, it is hard to reconcile taming China’s mounting public debt with its practice of making investments in risky and volatile places. On the other hand, if China’s bullish outlook on host states’ economic development were to bear fruit, its intervention would be considered a game-changer. Hence, it is a high-stakes tactic which could dramatically backfire if done without due diligence.

The second challenge is finding creative and acceptable risk mitigation measures. The use of natural resources as an alternative form of payment on loans and the use of equity-for-debt swaps have raised concerns internationally. Critics point to Beijing’s use of loans to corner the resources and strategic assets of debtor countries, which provides fodder to the narrative of “debt trap diplomacy.” While the BRI is not charity and the Chinese enterprises involved rightfully expect returns, devising reasonable terms for heavily indebted countries is crucial for the BRI’s public image. China’s capacity to build and manage world-class infrastructure at home is beyond doubt, but developing a framework to make overseas projects viable may take time. This is especially true for countries where the state does not play as dominant a role in the economy as it does in China. Hence, an element of prudence when planning commercially unsound, big-ticket projects is needed in order to lower the financial risk for China and ensure the project has a positive impact for host states.

The third challenge is the need to expand the local element of BRI projects to address concerns that China’s supply chain stands to benefit more than host states from infrastructure projects. Wherever possible, Chinese contractors should source inputs such as labor, materials, and provisions locally, to better contribute to local economies. Partnerships with local firms, known for their intimate knowledge of the domestic business environment, would be ideal. Skills, knowledge and technology transfer are also essential to building local capacity and diminishing dependence on China for operations and maintenance. While this would affect the scale, speed and efficiency of Chinese construction projects, it would bolster the BRI’s inclusivity and disseminate benefits locally right from the construction phase.

The fourth challenge is factoring in potential leadership changes in BRI participating states. Recent electoral cycles in Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Pakistan placed China-backed projects in a quandary. Threats to review, postpone, renegotiate or cancel projects hurt Chinese investments, sour relations, and cast uncertainty over long-term projects. However, these are realities that China has to consider. Allegations of corruption and irregularities, whether confirmed or perceived, put pressure on the new leadership to scrap or renegotiate foreign-funded projects. Hence, ensuring fair and sound conditions, from initial bidding to final construction, is a form of insurance against such political headwinds.

China must also realize that it is not enough to rely on positive relations with the present government. This is especially true for democracies where other actors, such as the political opposition, local businesses, civil society, mass media, and academia wield considerable influence and are critical in supporting or effecting leadership change. One of the BRI’s five goals, the promotion of cultural exchange and people-to-people bonds, will play an important role. Cultivating long-term ties with multiple stakeholders in host countries is a crucial investment which will be key not just to the success of the BRI, but for China’s broader vision of building a community of shared future for mankind.

The fifth challenge is the need to find the proper balance between setting or modifying financial standards and a commitment to introducing new ones. China’s rise as a new aid donor unsettles long established international lending norms. While some disruptions are needed in order to update current lending guidelines, an abrupt departure from long-held standards could erode systemic safeguards against debt overexposure in less developed BRI host countries. This may imperil borrowing states and the health of development finance markets. However, China’s entry into the fray of the development finance world is supported by strong, decades-old undercurrents. For years, developing and underdeveloped countries have complained about the conditions attached to IMF-World Bank loans. Hence, China’s pledge of “no-strings attached” credit resonates well. Finally, rigid multilateral lending institutions have to date been unable to provide space for emerging economies to contribute in shaping the world aid agenda.

In 2016, possibly in response to China’s expanding aid activities, the OECD created revised guidelines for sustainable lending. Beijing may find value in reflecting on this document. For better or worse, China’s massive aid portfolio throws a spotlight on the apparent advantage of state over private capital when investing in long gestation, mid-to-high risk projects in underdeveloped and developing country markets. Thus, China compels traditional funders and private finance to rethink how to better respond to the huge infrastructure demand in the global South.

As the Belt and Road enters its fifth year, Chinese policymakers are likely to progress in their ability to manage evolving challenges to the initiative. If the BRI is a way for China to promote its reform and opening-up process, China must allow for flexibility instead of applying a cut-and-dry development formula for partner countries. In this regard, commitment to joint consultation, cooperation and mutual benefit must go beyond the slogans. Finally, the BRI’s success may hinge on China’s ability to balance domestic imperatives and the interests of participating states with its desire to blaze a new trail and effect reform of global governance structures.

This article was published by China-US Focus

“Afterwards, when the buddha reminisced about the war to his uncle Mustapha, he recounted how he had stumbled across the field of leaking bone-marrows towards his fallen companion; and how, long before he reached Farooq’s praying corpse, he was brought up short by the field’s greatest secret.”  – Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude

In this brief essay, being a close reading of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, I will focus on two aspects of authorial craft, first on Rushdie’s use of sentences packed with elements of narrative arc and characterization ala’ the opening line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, and second, the author’s use of extensive monologue and deep inner conversations reminiscence of the long passages of James Joyce and those writing “streams of consciousness”. This brief essay will employ examples from the 2006 edition of the novel.

Saleem Sinai, Portrait of a child as India

Perhaps the story of the independence of India in 1947 is so painful and even so deadly, so bloody, so violent, leading to the birth of “Medusa-like” creatures of a nation-state primarily East and West Pakistan and later Bangladesh, still leaving Kashmir as a pariah region to be fought over tooth and nail and with guns and nationalistic glory, till today, leading to the India-Pakistan arms race and as oftentimes reported over the decades, the atomic bombs tested in the Kashmir region — in all these the story may have inspired Salman Rushdie to place the burden of storytelling on a child, purposely switched at birth, a freak of a child as chronicled,  with a constant runny nose and an ugly one to go with the face, protaganized to lead the “Congress” of children (as in the Indian Congress at its infancy) yet endowed with magical powers not only to see the future but to alter its course. The child-nation — perhaps Saleem Sinai – a Salman Rushdie as I hypothesized — is the nation-state-metaphor of India with the poignancy and tragedy of the inability to breathe life and freedom to the Kashmiris. (pg. 533)

In Saleem Sinai, whose last name carried the semantic nobility of Ibnu Sina or Avicenna (pgs. 348-349) the great Muslim physician and philosopher, lies the authorial license of Salman Rushdie to assume different narrative voices — of the “I”, the “primordial and philosophical; ‘I'”, the “you”, and the “he” and the narrator even calling him as a “Saleem Sinai” as a distant character altogether, whose role as a protagonist is akin to the mythical role of the Greek figure of wisdom persona non-grata and metaphysically-ahistorical-metaphysical-teacher-wanderer, Hermes, or in the Islamic myth of similar theological functionality, the figure of the prophet Khidr who is said to be wiser than Moses or Musa.

In authoring and metaphorizing such characterization of the young yet ageing-post-British India, plagued with uncertainties of multiplicities I sense in literary intonation that Rushdie was sympathetic towards the idea of keeping India as a union, rather than see it partitioned and be broken apart and allow the blood of sectoral and religious violence to color the flag of independence (pg. 503). Saleem Sinai, the boy is a metaphor of a young India with hope yet as he was growing up, as his life became enmeshed and endangered by the complex interplay between nationalism and the fatal excesses of it, became not only disillusioned by the consequences of the events within and even beyond his control, and by the gradual unveiling of the secrets, mostly leading to deadly consequences, of the people he knew as well as he loved.

Saleem Sinai is a victim of history he too was part of its creation, albeit like prophecies, meant to be fulfilled through him a “chosen one”. A poignant moment was when, at the beginning of Book Three, Saleem chose to renounce life, to live in the present, to detest the ideas of memory and to not be historied by history and ideology, and to resort to sit under a tree and become, or at least to be perceived as looking like a “buddha”, directing child-soldiers to search for enemies, mostly vegetarians and Hindus, and annihilate them, in the name of the emerging “Land of the Pure” called Pakistan. (pg. 402-403). The scene was set in a killing field of East Pakistan, circa 1947, a place that gave birth to what is now Bangladesh.

In authoring and giving life to Saleem, Rushdie was engaging in a mode of deep reflection and conjuring a sense of alternate history, although not much was narrated of the horrifying deaths of millions that greeted the independence and partition of India.

Rushdie’s Marquezian moments

In his novel, the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote these opening lines to One Hundred Years of Solitude:

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” (pg. 1)

Interesting, notably, in this line is the completeness of the narrative arc, with characters-setting-plot all in one, as well as the complexity of the theme that foreshadowed the end of one’s life that began with the act of discovery of a father-son moment-of-joyous-learning to the act of demise of a man-society planned-death scene. I consider this a unique Marquezian moment employing the craft of, though simple foreshadowing, tells a complete story of life and death in one sentence, addressing the philosophical question of Fate and Free Will and the hegemonic-ideologic-matrix of human existence.

Using this example of how authors foreshadow, the following passages will illustrate Salman Rushdie’s use of it in controlling the process of storytelling, especially for a novel as complex and linguistically-hyper-innovative such as Midnight’s Children.

In a similar vein as the Marquezian opening, Rushdie wrote:

“Afterwards, when the buddha reminisced about the war to his uncle Mustapha, he recounted how he had stumbled across the field of leaking bone-marrows towards his fallen companion; and how, long before he reached Farooq’s praying corpse, he was brought up short by the field’s greatest secret (p. 428).

Language is proposed to not only represent reality or to misrepresent it, to construct social and psychological reality depending on what analytical framework one uses to analyze the idea of language — not only this as a notion of reality-constructing thought-formation womb of ideational-to-linguistic device of the self, but also is proposed as the shaper and deconstructor of reality.

Rushdie’s Joycean moments

William Faulkner, Virginia Wolf, and James Joyce are master narrators who employed the literary device of “stream of consciousness”, characterized by the character’s use of internal monologue expressed for the public to read. Joyce was fond of using long sentences to express his inner sensibilities as well as insensibilities. It is a powerful literary device which gives the effect of the reader understanding what’s in the head of the character. A wealth of study linking literary work and its relationship with inner-world inner-workings have been produced, to chronicle the use of this device.

Herein lie the idea of inner language, if framed from the (Lev) Vygotskian point of view, as a universe of inner reality itself waiting to define what is outside. This idea of the inner-outer carnivalesque interplay of language that defines “realities-that-too-are-subjective” can best shed light on the use of “stream of consciousness” as authorial strategy.

In Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie oftentimes bring readers into a Time-collapsing-Reality-altering excursion of the inner world of the character.

To exemplify the point of Rushdie’s sub- and supra- consciousness depiction of the voice of the main character, as in one of the longest sentences he crafted, in the novel (pgs. 391-393 and pgs. 479-482), characteristic of the intense inner dialogue of Saleem Sinai the child-nation-memory-narrator of Rushdie’s Bakhtinian-Vygotskian postmodern novel of Hindu-epic proportion.

Other authorial strategies to study

Besides the Marquezian-Joycean moments evident in Rushdie’s story of the birth of India, I propose we study other innovative devices the author used, to make this story not only a cultural-philosophically engaging one but a banquet of linguistic delight with innovative dishes for one to enjoy and in the process see how new words and phrases and sentence-structures are invented, at times breaking away from the standard norms of the English Language teachers of the language attempt to teach to new and novice users. (Here I am reminded of William Shakespeare as the inventor of more than 2000 English words and phrases of which Rushdie was heavily influenced by when asked in an interview)

Among these are: bracketed explanation, erratic but strategic shifting of narrator’s voice (Saleem the ‘buddha’ moment, pg. 425), combined words to signify intensity, usage of  foreign words left untranslated, seemingly-hanging-dangling sentences, character’s use of dialect and idiolects (Reverend Mother, Tai the boatman, the three child soldiers and one died as a jihadist, the Daccan scavenging peasant, Eva, etc.), hybridizing food and intense feeling and big emotions (in describing Saleem’s scheming and hypocritical Aunt Alia), use of colors to describe intensity of emotions (scene at the Pioneer’s Café, pg. 238-239) complex and layered metaphorism, and most importantly the infusion of magic into realism to heal the wounds of history (throughout the book, especially at the scene of the congress of the midnight’s children, on pg. 291-294). In the tradition of what I’d call a Rushdian narratival absurdity and his playfulness-laced-with-deadly criticisms, I discerned, at the novel’s ending, the major shift of voice in which he confessed that in the story, he falsified/fictionalized the idea of the protagonist being switched at birth – after all! This is an irony, not only from the idea of deconstructing the act of authoring itself, but to do a “mega-trick” on the readers, after 500-pages of the novel (pgs. 510-511), tells me one thing: one needs to do a meta-reading of the Midnight’s Children and see the Bakhtinian (“the death of the author” and perhaps his reincarnation next) logic in seeing through Rushdie’s anguish and longingness for peace and philosophy, rather than his warning to others in engaging in the patheticness and pathos of politics. (see Saleem’s final speech to the Midnight’s Children, pgs. 500-502) These are amongst the key elements of the style worth exploring, making the novel a document of immense value on the creative use and transmogrification of the English language

Conclusion

Elegantly crafted One-Hundred Years of Solitude-like opening passages used as event-shifting-prophecy-crafting narrative-arc markers throughout, useful as page-turners in mid-chapters, the use of extensive one-paragraph passages to capture the cyberneticism and existential moments of the protagonist Saleem Sinai’s shifting, evolving, mutating states of consciousness ala (James Joycean mode) – in a “neurological-fictional-narratival mode”, as I see it – these two are the key elements if style I focused in this brief essay: the Marquezian-Joycean moments in Salman Rushdie’s modern nation-and-narration-self-and cultural-location-postmodern-novel, Midnight’s Children.

I end this brief analysis of authorial craft with a passage emblematic of the theme of the story, of longingness of the conclusion to personal history and to return to the “motherland” or the “fatherland” – a passage conclusive inconclusive, a sartor-resartus, of the tailor retailoring, of doing and undoing, framed by the Marquezian mode, albeit in reverse and in retrospect:

“… and I see that I shall never reach Kashmir, like Jehangir the Mughal Emperor I shall die with Kashmir on my lips, unable to see the valley of delights to which men go to enjoy, or to end it, or both; because now I see other figures in the crowd, the terrifying figures of a war-hero with lethal knees, who has found out how I cheated him of his birthright, he is pushing towards me through the crowds which is now wholly composed of familiar faces … “(pg. 533).

And thus, poetic justice is served when Saleem Sinai meets his nemesis, Lord Shiva reincarnated. When the young India meets the forces of destruction, in a yuga, or a tumultuous period of an illusionary world!

Bibliography

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. (1998).  One Hundred Years of Solitude. (New York: HarperPerennial)

Rushdie, Salman (2016). Midnight’s Children. (New York: Vintage International)

Embattled Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman could prove to be not only a cat with nine lives but also one that makes even stranger jumps.

King Salman’s announcement that Prince Mohammed was put in charge of reorganizing Saudi intelligence at the same time that the kingdom for the first time admitted that journalist Jamal Khashoggi had been killed in its Istanbul consulate signalled that the crown prince’s wings were not being clipped, at least not immediately and not publicly.

With little prospect for a palace coup and a frail King Salman unlikely to assume for any lengthy period full control of the levers of power, Prince Mohammed, viewed by many as reckless and impulsive, could emerge from the Khashoggi crisis, that has severely tarnished the kingdom’s image and strained relations with the United States and Western powers, even more defiant rather than chastened by international condemnation of the journalist’s killing.

A pinned tweet by Saud Al-Qahtani, the close associate of Prince Mohammed who this weekend was among several fired senior official reads: “Some brothers blame me for what they view as harshness. But everything has its time, and talk these days requires such language.” That apparently was and could remain Prince Mohammed’s motto.

Said former CIA official, Middle East expert and novelist Graham E. Fuller in a bid to identify the logic of the madness: “As the geopolitics of the world changes—particularly with the emergence of new power centres like China, the return of Russia, the growing independence of Turkey, the resistance of Iran to US domination in the Gulf, the waywardness of Israel, and the greater role of India and many other smaller players—the emergence of a more aggressive and adventuristic Saudi Arabia is not surprising.”

Prince Mohammed’s domestic status and mettle is likely to be put to the test as the crisis unfolds with Turkey leaking further evidence of what happened to Mr. Khashoggi or officially publishing whatever proof it has.

Turkish leaks or officially announced evidence would likely cast further doubt on Saudi Arabia’s assertion that Mr. Khashoggi died in a brawl in the consulate and fuel US Congressional and European parliamentary calls for sanctions, possibly including an arms embargo, against the kingdom.

In a sharp rebuke, US President Donald J. Trump responded to Saudi Arabia’s widely criticized official version of what happened to Mr. Khashoggi by saying that “obviously there’s been deception, and there’s been lies.”.

A prominent Saudi commentator and close associate of Prince Mohammed, Turki Aldakhil, warned in advance of the Saudi admission that the kingdom would respond to Western sanctions by cosying up to Russia and China. No doubt that could happen if Saudi Arabia is forced to seeks alternative to shield itself against possible sanctions.

That, however, does not mean that Prince Mohammed could not be brazen in his effort to engineer a situation in which the Trump administration would have no choice but to fully reengage with the kingdom.

Despite pundits’ suggestion that Mr. Trump’s Saudi Arabia-anchored Middle East strategy that appears focussed on isolating Iran, crippling it economically with harsh sanctions, and potentially forcing a change of regime is in jeopardy because of the damage Prince Mohammed’s international reputation has suffered, Iran could prove to be the crown prince’s window of opportunity.

“The problem is that under MBS, Saudi Arabia has become an unreliable strategic partner whose every move seems to help rather than hinder Iran. Yemen intervention is both a humanitarian disaster and a low cost/high gain opportunity for Iran,” tweeted former US Middle East negotiator Martin Indyk, referring to Prince Mohammed by his initials.

Mr. “Trump needed to make clear he wouldn’t validate or protect him from Congressional reaction unless he took responsibility. It’s too late for that now. Therefore I fear he will neither step up or grow up, the crisis will deepen and Iran will continue to reap the windfall,” Mr. Indyk said in another tweet.

If that was likely an unintended consequence of Prince Mohammed’s overly assertive policy and crude and ill-fated attempts to put his stamp on the Middle East prior to the murder of Mr. Khashoggi, it may since in a twisted manner serve his purpose.

To the degree that Prince Mohammed has had a thought-out grand strategy since his ascendancy in 2015, it was to ensure US support and Washington’s reengagement in what he saw as a common interest: projection of Saudi power at the expense of Iran.

Speaking to The Economist in 2016, Prince Mohammed spelled out his vision of the global balance of power and where he believed Saudi interests lie. “The United States must realise that they are the number one in the world and they have to act like it,” the prince said.

In an indication that he was determined to ensure US re-engagement in the Middle East, Prince Mohammed added: “We did not put enough efforts in order to get our point across. We believe that this will change in the future.”

Beyond the shared US-Saudi goal of clipping Iran’s wings, Prince Mohammed catered to Mr. Trump’s priority of garnering economic advantage for the United States and creating jobs. Mr. Trump’s assertion that he wants to safeguard US$450 billion in deals with Saudi Arabia as he contemplates possible punishment for the killing of Mr. Khashoggi is based on the crown prince’s dangling of opportunity.

“When President Trump became president, we’ve changed our armament strategy again for the next 10 years to put more than 60 percent with the United States of America. That’s why we’ve created the $400 billion in opportunities, armaments and investment opportunities, and other trade opportunities. So this is a good achievement for President Trump, for Saudi Arabia,” Prince Mohammed said days after Mr. Khashoggi disappeared.

The crown prince drove the point home by transferring US$100 million to the US, making good on a long standing promise to support efforts to stabilize Syria, at the very moment that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week landed in Riyadh in a bid to defuse the Khashoggi crisis.

A potential effort by Prince Mohammed to engineer a situation in which stepped-up tensions with Iran supersede the fallout of the Khashoggi crisis, particularly in the US, could be fuelled by changing attitudes and tactics in Iran itself.

The shift is being driven by Iran’s need to evade blacklisting by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an international anti-money laundering and terrorism finance watchdog. Meeting the group’s demands for enhanced legislation and implementation is a pre-requisite for ensuring continued European support for circumventing crippling US sanctions.

In recognition of that, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dropped his objection to adoption of the FATF-conform legislation.

If that were not worrisome enough for Prince Mohammed, potential Iranian efforts to engage if not with the Trump administration with those segments of the US political elite that are opposed to the president could move the crown prince to significantly raise the stakes, try to thwart Iranian efforts, and put the Khashoggi crisis behind him.

Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, head of parliament’s influential national security and foreign policy commission, signalled the potential shift in Iranian policy by suggesting that “there is a new diplomatic atmosphere for de-escalation with America. There is room for adopting the diplomacy of talk and lobbying by Iran with the current which opposes Trump… The diplomatic channel with America should not be closed because America is not just about Trump.”

Should he opt, to escalate Middle Eastern tensions, Prince Mohammed could aggravate the war in Yemen, viewed by Saudi Arabia and the Trump administration as a proxy war with Iran, or seek to provoke Iran by attempting to stir unrest among its multiple ethnic minorities.

To succeed, Prince Mohammed would have to ensure that Iran takes the bait. So far, Iran has sat back, gloating as the crown prince and the kingdom are increasingly cornered by the Khashoggi crisis, not wanting to jeopardize its potential outreach to Mr. Trump’s opponents as well as Europe.

That could change if Prince Mohammed decides to act on his vow in 2017 that “we won’t wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia Instead, we will work so that the battle is for them in Iran, not in Saudi Arabia.”

Ever since Donald Trump emerged as the candidate of the Republican party for US Presidential election, he has been bitterly criticized on various counts by the opposition democratic party and significant section of the US media. Several persons who do not belong to the political or media class but hold positions in different capacities in various walks of life were also highly critical of Trump during the Presidential election campaign.

However, to the surprise of all and disappointment of his pledged critics, Trump was elected as US President and it is now nearly two years since he assumed office.

As President of USA, there have been number of commissions and omissions by President Trump and most US media continue the relentless criticism of Trump’s actions and speeches at every opportunity and do not even show the courtesy that a reigning President of USA normally commands.

While President Trump has almost declared US media as his number one enemy and has been retaliating top media houses in US with choicest abuses and returning the media in the same coin, there are number of others including some of his own party men and who have held positions under US President for sometime too have not been spared. The net result is that the US media now looks “vibrant “with all sorts of choicest terms due to constant exchanges between President Trump and his critics and media. It appears that such “vibrant media shows “ would continue till President Trump’s term ends.

The watchers of US scenario and world media also seem to be enjoying the political spectacle in President Trump’s USA with considerable curiosity and seem to be treating it as exciting entertainment show.

President Trump has also aimed his shoot outs at other world leaders including Canadian Prime Minister. He has not spared the leadership of several European nations on different occasions, while defending the US interests and demanding that the role of USA as significant financial contributor for NATO and programmes of UNO should be duly recognized and perhaps, rewarded in kind.

Now, inspite of all such scenario and what some critics call as eccentricities of Trump, the question is whether Trump’s Presidentship is as chaotic as it is made to look.

While the opposition parties in USA and his pledged critics even have been speaking about impeaching President Trump for some of his past deeds and present actions, it appears that all these “slaughter” have not really weakened President Trump or made him to change his ways. He continues to be what he is, as has been seen during the Presidential campaign and subsequent position as President of USA.

Several of his measures and policy initiatives as US President are extremely bold and daring, like of which no other President of USA in recent times has shown. Even his strongest critics have to admit this.

His meeting the North Korean President Kim Jong-Un in Singapore after his war of words with him and bringing the maverick North Korean President to discussion table and moving towards peace is pragmatic and positive strategy of great historical significance. In the process, President Trump has saved the world from the brink of war with North Korea.

The trade war that Trump has launched with China may have shocked and somewhat destabilized the world trade and economy, but many Americans believe that China has to be brought under control, as it is aspiring to become the super power in the world replacing USA and is seeking to dominate the Asian neighbors. China’s aggression in Tibet and forcibly occupying the peaceful country and forcing the respected Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama to move out of Tibet is still in the memory of the world even after six decades and this aggression of China has made all it’s neighbours fearful of China’s role and targets.

The fact is that China’s economic gains have been largely at the cost of USA, as USA has emerged as the largest export market for China and in the process slowly making US dependent on China to meet it’s requirement of certain goods and services to some extent.

Several Asian countries and even some European countries are silently appreciative of President trump’s trade war with China, realizing that it would ultimately benefit their interests and economy too.

Certainly, US business and trade would gain by the trade war with China and this is a definite strategy of President Trump in implementing his much publicized policy of “America first”.

The fact is that the immigrant policy of President Trump and his declared objective of protecting jobs for Americans in USA enjoy large level of support in USA, particularly since no other President in the recent past have the courage to take such initiatives. His blow hot and blow cold policy in dealing with Mexico with regard to immigrant issue seem to be now starting to pay dividend.

Many political analysts even think that in spite of strong and sustained media campaign against President Trump, his strong and decisive actions will get him one more term as President of USA.

Certainly, Trump is not going to change his ways. His recent praise of Congress man for assault on British reporter , calling the congress man “a tough cookie” is viewed by many people as “un President like “ outburst. But, this is the type of stuff that President Trump is made of.

All said and done, many Americans and perhaps, even observers in other countries may conclude that Trump’s governance is not as chaotic as it is made to look and his basic decisiveness in approach ultimately serve the interest of his country and this is what is expected from a US President.

Labrador retrievers, the second most popular dog breed in the UK, are vulnerable to a number of health conditions, according to a study published in the open access journal Canine Genetics and Epidemiology.

Researchers at The University of Sydney, Australia, in collaboration with the Royal Veterinary College, London found that the most common health issues in Labrador retrievers over a one-year period were obesity, ear infections and joint conditions.

Professor Paul McGreevy, the corresponding author, said: “Labrador retrievers are reportedly prone to many disorders but accurate information about how common certain health problems are in the general pet population is lacking. This is the first study to include a large number of Labrador retrievers based on records gathered from hundreds of UK vet clinics. It provides owners with information on the issues that they should look out for in Labrador retrievers.”

McGreevy added: “One interesting finding from our research is that the average life-span of Labrador retrievers was 12 years, but chocolate-colored Labradors showed a 10% shorter lifespan than black or yellow Labradors. We also found that ear infections and skin diseases were more common in chocolate Labradors than non-chocolate Labradors.”

The authors suggest that the higher number of skin and ear infections in chocolate Labradors may be due to genetics. Chocolate color is recessive in dogs, which means that the gene for chocolate color must be present in both the parents for the puppies to be chocolate colored. When targeting chocolate coat color, breeders may be more likely to use only Labradors which carry the chocolate coat gene and the reduced gene pool may include a higher proportion of genes involved in ear and skin conditions.

The authors analyzed data on 33,320 Labrador retrievers in the VetCompass™ Programme, which collects electronic patient data on dogs attending UK veterinary practices. They extracted data on disorder and mortality from a random sample of 2,074 (6.2%) of these dogs.

Professor Paul McGreevy said: “We also found that 8.8% of Labrador retrievers are overweight or obese, one of the highest percentages among the dog breeds in the VetCompass™ database. There were more overweight and obese dogs among male Labradors that had been neutered than amongst those that had not, but there was no such pattern for female Labradors.”

The authors caution that the study may under-estimate the true number of dogs with health problems, as the data are likely to include more severely affected animals that require veterinary management and there may be lower reporting of health issues in less affected Labrador retrievers.

In the first study of its kind, cannabis oil has been shown to significantly improve the symptoms of Crohn’s disease and the quality of life of sufferers but, contrary to previous medical thinking, has no effect on gut inflammation.

In a randomised, placebo-controlled study, researchers from Israel have shown that cannabis can produce clinical remission in up to 65% of individuals after 8 weeks of treatment, but that this improvement does not appear to result from a dampening down of the underlying inflammatory process.

Speaking at UEG Week 2018 in Vienna, lead researcher, Dr Timna Naftali explained, “Cannabis has been used for centuries to treat a wide range of medical conditions, and studies have shown that many people with Crohn’s disease use cannabis regularly to relieve their symptoms. It has always been thought that this improvement was related to a reduction in inflammation in the gut and the aim of this study was to investigate this.”

The Israeli team recruited 46 people with moderately severe Crohn’s disease, and randomized them to receive 8 weeks of treatment with either cannabis oil containing 15% cannabidiol and 4% tetrahydrocannabinol or placebo. Symptom severity and quality of life were measured before, during, and after treatment using validated research instruments. Inflammation in the gut was assessed endoscopically and by measuring inflammatory markers in blood and stool samples.

After 8 weeks of treatment, the group receiving the cannabis oil had a significant reduction in their Crohn’s disease symptoms compared with the placebo group, and 65%met strict criteria for clinical remission (versus 35% of the placebo recipients). The cannabis group also had significant improvements in their quality of life compared with the placebo group.

“We have previously demonstrated that cannabis can produce measurable improvements in Crohn’s disease symptoms but, to our surprise, we saw no statistically significant improvements in endoscopic scores or in the inflammatory markers we measured in the cannabis oil group compared with the placebo group,” said Dr Naftali. “We know that cannabinoids can have profound anti-inflammatory effects but this study indicates that the improvement in symptoms may not be related to these anti-inflammatory properties.”

Looking ahead, the research group plans to explore further the potential anti-inflammatory properties of cannabis in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease. “There are very good grounds to believe that the endocannabinoid system is a potential therapeutic target in Crohn’s disease and other gastrointestinal diseases,” said Dr Naftali. “For now, however, we can only consider medicinal cannabis as an alternative or additional intervention that provides temporary symptom relief for some people with Crohn’s disease.”

Scientists at Queen Mary University of London have developed an app to understand why some rhythms are more difficult to perform than others.

They collected and analysed a huge dataset of more than 100,000 people and found that changing rhythm is more difficult than playing a complex individual rhythm.

The app challenges users to play Clapping Music – a ground-breaking piece of music written by contemporary classical composer Steve Reich which is performed entirely by clapping.

In the original piece, two people clap the same short rhythmic pattern while one shifts the pattern gradually until the patterns align again.

In the app, developed with the London Sinfonietta and Touchpress, the device takes the part of the performer playing the static pattern and the user takes the part of the performer making the pattern transitions.

Rather than clapping, players tap in a performance area in the lower part of the screen.

Users from more than 100 countries have downloaded the app more than 250,000 times since the launch in July 2015. The research focused on the first 12 months, including 109,303 players and a total of 46 million rows of gameplay data.

The results, published in the journal PLOS ONE, provide a new understanding of the musical factors that determine how easy or difficult it is to play a rhythm.

Traditionally this has been studied in the lab with small numbers of participants reproducing simple artificial rhythms. These results extend the scope to performance of a real piece of music and a much broader demographic.

They show that performance accuracy varied not with the complexity of the individual rhythms in the piece but with the complexity of transitioning between rhythms, which is not something that has been investigated in traditional lab-based music psychology.

Lead author Dr Sam Duffy, from Queen Mary’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, said: “It is quite rare in music psychology to study the performance of rhythms that change, especially when played in ensemble with another player, and yet these are very common in actual music.”

She added: “In spite of the apparent simplicity of Clapping Music, it is a challenging piece to perform and the app generated a very large and complex set of data to analyse.”

In previous research, theoretical models have proven useful in predicting individual rhythm reproduction performance for artificial rhythms in the laboratory. However, a striking finding from this research is that none of these measures predicted how accurately players performed the 12 different rhythms that make up Clapping Music.

This could mean that these measures only apply to the simple artificial rhythms used in laboratory studies but a more likely interpretation is that they do apply to real music but have a small effect when compared to the much greater influence of transition difficulty between rhythms. This has implications for composers and also for the way in which rhythm is taught.

In the app, there were three levels of difficulty – easy, medium and hard: 19 per cent of players (21,603 players) completed an entire performance of the piece without making a mistake at some level and 5 per cent (5,685 players) completed the game at the hardest level. For completed games, average accuracy was 91 per cent at the hard level, 84 per cent at the medium level and 78 per cent at the easy level.

The researchers hope the findings could lead to similar large-scale game-based approaches to investigating other aspects of music psychology than rhythm and even the psychology of other artistic areas such as music and dance.

“We have shown that data collected from a game-based app can provide detailed empirical evidence of how pattern complexity influences ensemble rhythmic performance,” said Dr Marcus Pearce, the project’s senior author, also from Queen Mary’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science.

A sign of desperation before the firing squad is jitteriness and the desperate sense that history needs revision. You were not the one responsible for the debacles and the cockups; everybody and everything else was. You knew who was guilty, and needed to tell everybody about it. You bluster, you boast and you stumble; you look more buffoon than statesman; more clown than king.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, along with his deputy Josh Frydenberg, had just witnessed an event without modern parallel in Australian politics: a by-election swing against the sitting government without peer, the unlosable seat that slipped through the fingers of the conservative establishment. More to the point, a seat in Sydney with a conservative pedigree stretching over a century had fallen to an independent, the former Australian Medical Association President Kerryn Phelps who managed to tick the necessary boxes of a social progressivism alloyed to the centre (think climate change, an appropriately adapted energy policy, lukewarm humanitarianism).

Morrison’s nerves were less those of Leonidas’ three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae facing the Persian forces than a cavalry charge before modernised panzer divisions. Beside him was the Liberal’s candidate, Dave Sharma, who seemed to become a puppet at points, drawn to the prime minister, then held tightly to avoid escape. “Today,” he explained, “is a tough day.” The prime minister droned, he explicated and he, tediously, hoped that his troops would be regenerated by a tonic of Liberal values.

It did not take him long to move into a manic exposition about the greatest threat of all: the Labor Party’s Bill Shorten. Ignore, suggested Morrison, the bloodletting in his own party, or that the previous prime minister had held the seat of Wentworth and was currently gloating in New York with a Cheshire Cat’s grin. Ignore the near fastidious bankruptcy of his government on matters environmental, on the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding on Nauru, on the dangers of fiddling with embassies, notably when involving the Israel-Palestine issue.

Then, just before dashing for the exit, he suggested that those values held by his own party were those shared with the war ravaged participants of the Invictus Games. “Tonight I had the great privilege of joining those, and I don’t want to make a political point of this, at the Invictus Games but Invictus is all about the indomitable spirit. But you know we’ve got an indomitable spirit in this party.”

For all Morrison’s tawdry and pedestrian efforts, he claims to be rather good on the marketing side of things, better briefed on the more instinctive side of the voters. He was part of a tourism campaign that produced the vulgar tits-and-bum “So where the bloody hell are you?” campaign. He mined prejudice as Immigration Minister, becoming the standard bearer for the “Stop the Boats” policy of the Abbott government. (Refugees in detention centres in perpetuity good; refugees finding their way to Australia risking drowning, bad.)

In a vain effort to seduce the Australian voter, he has attempted to make analogies that would be far better kept at a gathering of withered, porridge-fed minds. Forrest Gump was recruited. “With independents,” Morris condescendingly lectured those on the Wentworth electoral roll, “you certainly don’t know what you are ever going to get.” It all had to with that “good old box of chocolates – you never know what you are going to get when it comes to voting independent.”

Another contemptible effort on the prime minister’s part to mollify estranged Australian voters came through Twitter, featuring a video where he discusses the “Canberra bubble” and its hermetic repellence. “The Canberra bubble is what happens down here when people get caught up with all sorts of gossip and rubbish and that’s probably why most of you switch off any time you hear a politician talk.” With jaw dropping incredulity, he proceeds to explain that, “What’s important is that we have to stay focused on the stuff that really matters and is real.”

In discussing that reality, Morrison puts one foot up as he leans against his desk, ever workmanlike, and throws candied optimism at his pretend audience. The job figures have been excellent; and the legislation reducing the company tax rate for small and medium businesses to 25 percent has been passed. “We’re just gettin’ on with it.” Except in areas where he is not, a point that Phelps hammered home during her campaign.

The Canberra bubble is vogue for politicians watching the rapid demise of their job prospects. “Outside the Canberra bubble,” tweeted Nationals MP Darren Chester back in August, “there’s 25 million Australians dealing with real issues today. I’m appalled and bitterly disappointed with the events in Parliament House today.” Chester could not wait to return to Gippsland “and spend time with some normal people.” Notably, his own party is considering going the way of the Liberals in what will feature the beheading of yet another leader in federal politics, this time the cadaverous pale-sheeted Michael McCormack. His own reality – survival before the bull of Barnaby Joyce’s next charge – is to increase his credentials by bribing the electorate: some 16 projects funded by the $272 million regional growth fund.

The gruesome reality for “Scomo” is that Shorten need merely hibernate till the next federal election, a bear waiting nature’s call to awake and feed. Forget dull, data heavy policy announcements, the yawn promoting press conferences, the debates that induce both soporific tendencies and amnesia. Forget the sloganeering from ALP President Wayne Swan, who boasts that the current cohort has the most comprehensive suite of policies any opposition has ever had. Perhaps, and here the Labor Party have form, the suicidal impulse that seems to manifest a few weeks prior to an election, can be averted. This is a government that has been generous to a fault in gifting the opposition the next electoral victory.

Truth be told, Sharma was composed and chivalrous, even if he did feel, subsequently, that the former member of Wentworth might have done better. (A Turnbull letter of endorsement? A smile of approval?) Qualities of graciousness and sporting acknowledgment are alien in the modern Australian political scene, and it is perhaps appropriate that he was rehearsing for his repeat performance come 2019, when the Morrison government risks being buried without honours or much fanfare.

No one needs to be romantic or even hopeful that this result will shatter the withering seal that is Canberra. Phelps is sincere enough to wish for a change in Australian politics, though it is clear that such desires can be misplaced. Canberra draws in fecund idealists and leaves them barren. It chews them, masticates over them, and spits out the undesirables. It also encourages the massacre of leaders in deranged orgies of bloodletting, witnessed by media spectators with ringside seats.

The current state of politics is corroded beyond recognition, picked bare by the party apparatchiks, focus group philosophy and a staleness that has turned many voters into the mould of apathy and disgust. Should the new member of Wentworth be firm, resolutely irritating for the voters of her seat, she would have at least taken that first step to make Parliament do something it has long ceased to do: be representative.