Societal acceptance of domestic violence against women is widespread in developing countries, with 36 per cent of people believing it is justified in certain situations.

Using Demographic and Health Surveys conducted between 2005-2017, researchers at the University of Bristol analysed data from 1.17 million men and women in 49 low- and middle-income countries.

These findings, published in the journal PLOS ONE today [31 October] and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Future Research Leaders award, will help shape national and international strategies to prevent domestic violence.

Surveys measured whether people thought a husband or partner was justified in beating his wife or partner is she goes out without telling him, argues with him, neglects the children, suspects her of being unfaithful, refuses to have sex, or burns the food.

On average, 36 per cent of people thought it was justified in at least one of these situations. Attitudes towards domestic violence varied significantly across the 49 countries with only three per cent of people justifying it in the Dominican Republic, in the Caribbean, compared to 83 per cent in Timor-Leste, South East Asia.

Overall, the societal acceptance of domestic violence was higher in South Asia with nearly half the population (47 per cent) justifying it and in Sub-Saharan Africa (38 per cent), compared with Latin America and the Caribbean (12 per cent), Europe and Central Asia (29 per cent).

In 36 of the 49 countries, mainly in South East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, women were more likely to justify the behaviour than men.

Country-level factors, especially the political environment, played an important role in the acceptance of domestic violence. For example, this attitude of acceptance was more prevalent in countries which have experienced frequent and severe political conflict within the past five years.

Furthermore, the societal acceptance of domestic violence among men was lower in countries with more democratic regimes.

People in countries where women had more economic rights were less likely to justify domestic violence. These findings suggest that expanding women’s economic rights can serve to challenge existing social norms around gender roles and the expectations of women and men.

Dr LynnMarie Sardinha, an ESRC Research Fellow in Domestic Violence and Health at the University of Bristol, led the research. She said: “This is the first study of its kind and the insights it gives us into people’s attitudes towards domestic violence in the Global South and the influence of country-level factors and environment are invaluable if we’re to tackle this global problem.

“The widespread justification of domestic violence by women in highly patriarchal societies suggests women have internalised the idea that a husband who physically punishes his wife or verbally reprimands her has exercised a right that serves her interest. They perceive this behaviour as legitimate disciplining, rather than an act of violence.

“Our findings highlight the need for tailored, geographically-differentiated and gender specific interventions targeting acceptance of domestic violence. There is need for much greater focus on addressing the acceptance of domestic violence through targeted initiatives in societies affected by political conflict. Although domestic violence is exacerbated during and after armed conflict it’s prevention in these societies has received little attention.

“Interestingly, our findings suggest that the commonly-used measures of countries’ gender quality scores, for example, women’s labour force participation, and number of seats held by women in national parliament did not significantly influence society’s acceptance of domestic violence. This highlights the need for international domestic violence prevention policies to consider that a sole focus on narrowly defined economic or political ’empowerment’ alone are not sufficient in challenging existing discriminatory gender norms.

“Given that, as estimated by the World Health Organisation, 30 per cent of women globally have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner at least once in their lifetime, the prevention of domestic violence is both urgent and vital.

“Domestic violence has serious consequences for women’s physical, mental, sexual and reproductive health, negatively impacts on the well-being of children and families and has implications for wider society’s economic and social development.”

This project resulted in the construction of a first-of-its-kind global meta-database on societal attitudes to domestic violence, and a comprehensive range of diverse high quality internationally comparable socio-economic, political and legislative metadata from UN sources and other topic-specific databases.

Researchers hope the findings will inform the development of effective prevention programmes, targeting the factors which lead to domestic violence being accepted by different societies.

Several multilateral organisations, including the World Health Organisation and the United Nations, have already expressed an interest in using the data to help monitor its goal of achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls (goal five of the UN Sustainable Goals Agenda to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all) that includes the elimination of all forms of violence against women and girls.

For each year during the past quarter century, the world’s oceans have absorbed an amount of heat energy that is 150 times the energy humans produce as electricity annually, according to a study led by researchers at Princeton and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego. The strong ocean warming the researchers found suggests that Earth is more sensitive to fossil-fuel emissions than previously thought.

The researchers reported in the journal Nature Nov. 1 that the world’s oceans took up more than 13 zettajoules — which is a joule, the standard unit of energy, followed by 21 zeroes — of heat energy each year between 1991 and 2016. The study was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Princeton Environmental Institute.

First author Laure Resplandy, an assistant professor of geosciences and the Princeton Environmental Institute, said that her and her co-authors’ estimate is more than 60 percent higher than the figure in the 2014 Fifth Assessment Report on climate change from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“Imagine if the ocean was only 30 feet deep,” said Resplandy, who was a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps. “Our data show that it would have warmed by 6.5 degrees Celsius [11.7 degrees Fahrenheit] every decade since 1991. In comparison, the estimate of the last IPCC assessment report would correspond to a warming of only 4 degrees Celsius [7.2 degrees Fahrenheit] every decade.”

Scientists know that the ocean takes up roughly 90 percent of all the excess energy produced as the Earth warms, so knowing the actual amount of energy makes it possible to estimate the surface warming we can expect, said co-author Ralph Keeling, a Scripps Oceanography geophysicist and Resplandy’s former postdoctoral adviser.

“The result significantly increases the confidence we can place in estimates of ocean warming and therefore helps reduce uncertainty in the climate sensitivity, particularly closing off the possibility of very low climate sensitivity,” Keeling said.

Climate sensitivity is used to evaluate allowable emissions for mitigation strategies. Most climate scientists have agreed in the past decade that if global average temperatures exceed pre-industrial levels by 2? (3.6?), it is all but certain that society will face widespread and dangerous consequences of climate change.

The researchers’ findings suggest that if society is to prevent temperatures from rising above that mark, emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas produced by human activities, must be reduced by 25 percent compared to what was previously estimated, Resplandy said.

The researchers’ results are the first to come from a measuring technique independent from the dominant method behind existing research, she said.

Previous estimates relied on millions of spot measurements of ocean temperature, which were interpolated to calculate total heat content. Gaps in coverage, however, make this approach uncertain. A network of robotic sensors known as Argo now makes comprehensive measurements of ocean temperature and salinity across the globe, but the network only has complete data going back to 2007 and only measures the upper half of the ocean. Several reassessments of heat content have been made in recent years using the ocean-temperature data – including the recent Argo data — which has led to upward revisions of the IPCC estimate.

Resplandy and her co-authors used Scripps’ high-precision measurements of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air to determine how much heat the oceans have stored during the time span they studied. They measured ocean heat by looking at the combined amount of O2 and CO2 in air, a quantity they call “atmospheric potential oxygen” or APO. The method depends on the fact that oxygen and carbon dioxide are both less soluble in warmer water.

As the ocean warms, these gases tend to be released into the air, which increases APO levels. APO also is influenced by burning fossil fuels and by an ocean process involving the uptake of excess fossil-fuel CO2. By comparing the changes in APO they observed with the changes expected due to fossil-fuel use and carbon dioxide uptake, the researchers were able to calculate how much APO emanated from the ocean becoming warmer. That amount coincides the heat-energy content of the ocean.

Removing the appendix early in life reduces the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease by 19 to 25 percent, according to the largest and most comprehensive study of its kind, published today in Science Translational Medicine.

The findings also solidify the role of the gut and immune system in the genesis of the disease, and reveal that the appendix acts as a major reservoir for abnormally folded alpha-synuclein proteins, which are closely linked to Parkinson’s onset and progression.

“Our results point to the appendix as a site of origin for Parkinson’s and provide a path forward for devising new treatment strategies that leverage the gastrointestinal tract’s role in the development of the disease,” said Viviane Labrie, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Van Andel Research Institute (VARI) and senior author of the study. “Despite having a reputation as largely unnecessary, the appendix actually plays a major part in our immune systems, in regulating the makeup of our gut bacteria and now, as shown by our work, in Parkinson’s disease.”

The reduced risk for Parkinson’s was only apparent when the appendix and the alpha-synuclein contained within it were removed early in life, years before the onset of Parkinson’s, suggesting that the appendix may be involved in disease initiation. Removal of the appendix after the disease process starts, however, had no effect on disease progression.

In a general population, people who had an appendectomy were 19 percent less likely to develop Parkinson’s. This effect was magnified in people who live in rural areas, with appendectomies resulting in a 25 percent reduction in disease risk. Parkinson’s often is more prevalent in rural populations, a trend that has been associated with increased exposure to pesticides.

The study also demonstrated that appendectomy can delay disease progression in people who go on to develop Parkinson’s, pushing back diagnosis by an average of 3.6 years. Because there are no definitive tests for Parkinson’s, people often are diagnosed after motor symptoms such as tremor or rigidity arise. By then, the disease typically is quite advanced, with significant damage to the area of the brain that regulates voluntary movement.

Conversely, appendectomies had no apparent benefit in people whose disease was linked to genetic mutations passed down through their families, a group that comprises fewer than 10 percent of cases.

“Our findings today add a new layer to our understanding of this incredibly complex disease,” said Bryan Killinger, Ph.D., the study’s first author and a postdoctoral fellow in Labrie’s laboratory. “We have shown that the appendix is a hub for the accumulation of clumped forms of alpha-synuclein proteins, which are implicated in Parkinson’s disease. This knowledge will be invaluable as we explore new prevention and treatment strategies.”

Labrie and her team also found clumps of alpha-synuclein in the appendixes of healthy people of all ages as well as people with Parkinson’s, raising new questions about the mechanisms that give rise to the disease and propel its progression. Clumped alpha-synuclein is considered to be a key hallmark of Parkinson’s; previously, it was thought to only be present in people with the disease.

“We were surprised that pathogenic forms of alpha-synuclein were so pervasive in the appendixes of people both with and without Parkinson’s. It appears that these aggregates — although toxic when in the brain — are quite normal when in the appendix. This clearly suggests their presence alone cannot be the cause of the disease,” Labrie said. “Parkinson’s is relatively rare — less than 1 percent of the population — so there has to be some other mechanism or confluence of events that allows the appendix to affect Parkinson’s risk. That’s what we plan to look at next; which factor or factors tip the scale in favor of Parkinson’s?”

Data for the study were gleaned from an in-depth characterization and visualization of alpha-synuclein forms in the appendix, which bore a remarkable resemblance to those found in the Parkinson’s disease brain, as well as analyses of two large health-record databases. The first dataset was garnered from the Swedish National Patient Registry, a one-of-a-kind database that contains de-identified medical diagnoses and surgical histories for the Swedish population beginning in 1964, and Statistics Sweden, a Swedish governmental agency responsible for official national statistics. The team at VARI collaborated with researchers at Lund University, Sweden, to comb through records for 1,698,000 people followed up to 52 years, a total of nearly 92 million person-years. The second dataset was from the Parkinson’s Progression Marker Initiative (PPMI), which includes details about patient diagnosis, age of onset, demographics and genetic information.

Using ancient proteins and DNA recovered from tiny pieces of animal bone, archaeologists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography (IAET) at the Russian Academy of Sciences-Siberia have discovered evidence that domestic animals -cattle, sheep, and goat – made their way into the high mountain corridors of southern Kyrgyzstan more than four millennia ago, as published in a study in PLOS ONE.

Long before the formal creation of the Silk Road – a complex system of trade routes linking East and West Eurasia through its arid continental interior- pastoral herders living in the mountains of Central Asia helped form new cultural and biological links across this region. However, in many of the most important channels of the Silk Road itself, including Kyrgyzstan’s Alay Valley (a large mountain corridor linking northwest China with the oases cities of Bukhara and Samarkand), very little is known about the lifeways of early people who lived there in the centuries and millennia preceding the Silk Road era.

In 2017, an international team of researchers, led by Dr. Svetlana Shnaider (IAET), Dr. Aida Abdykanova (American University of Central Asia), and Dr. William Taylor (MPI-SHH), identified a series of never-before-seen habitation sites along the mountain margins that form Kyrgzstan’s southern border with Tajikistan. Test excavations and survey at these sites produced archaeological animal bones that promised to shed light on how people used the Alay region in the past. When Taylor and colleagues analyzed the bones that had been recovered, however, they were so small and badly broken that researchers could no longer use their size and shape to identify which species they originally belonged to. “We were crushed,” says Shnaider. “To get so close to understanding the early economy of one of the most important channels of the Silk Road -and come up empty-handed – was incredibly disheartening.”

However, Taylor and his colleagues then applied a technique known as Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry, or ZooMS. This method uses laser-based, mass spectrometry to identify the peptide building blocks that make up collagen inside the bone itself – peptides that differ across animal taxa, and produce unique “fingerprints” that can be used to identify otherwise unrecognizable pieces of bone. With this technique, Dr. Taylor and his colleagues discovered that people living in the Alay Valley began herding sheep, goat, and cattle by at least 4300 years ago. Combining their work with ancient DNA research at France’s University of Toulouse, they also found that in later centuries, as Silk Road trade flourished across the region, transport animals like domestic horses and Bactrian camel became increasingly significant in Alay. Their results are published in PLOS ONE.

For Taylor, this research is especially exciting because of the range of possibilities it points to for archaeological research across the high mountains of Inner Asia. In many parts of the region, fragmented assemblages like the ones analyzed in this study are commonplace in the archaeological record. “This study shows us that biomolecular methods like ZooMS and ancient DNA can take the fragmented piles of bone that have been almost worthless to archaeologists,” he says, “and open up a whole new world of insights into the human story across Central Asia.”

Once again, humanity might be well served to take heed from a history lesson. When the climate changed, when crops failed and famine threatened, the peoples of ancient Asia responded. They moved. They started growing different crops. They created new trade networks and innovated their way to solutions in other ways too.

So suggests new research by Jade d’Alpoim Guedes of the University of California San Diego and Kyle Bocinsky of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Colorado, Washington State University and the University of Montana.

Their paper, published in the journal Science Advances, describes a computer model they developed that shows for the first time when and where in Asia staple crops would have thrived or fared poorly between 5,000 and 1,000 years ago.

When the climate cooled, people moved away or turned to pastoralism – herds can thrive in grassland where food grains can’t. And they turned to trade. These strategies eventually coalesced into the development of the Silk Road, d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky argue. In some areas they also diversified the types of crops they planted.

With their new computer model, the researchers were able to examine in detail how changing climate transformed people’s ability to produce food in particular places, and that enabled them to get at the causes of cultural shift.

“There’s been a large body of literature in archaeology on past climates, but earlier studies were mostly only able to draw correlations between changes in climate and civilization,” said lead author d’Alpoim Guedes, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. “What we’re showing in this work is exactly how changes in temperature and precipitation, over space and time, would have actually impacted people – by affecting what they could and couldn’t grow.”

D’Alpoim Guedes is an archaeologist who specializes in paleoethnobotany – analyzing ancient plant remains – to understand how human subsistence strategies changed over time. Bocinsky is a computational archaeologist. The duo developed their model by combining contemporary weather station data from across Asia with a hemisphere-wide paleoclimate reconstruction to create a simulation across space and time of how temperature in Asia changed. They also added data on archaeological sites and the record of seeds found there.

One major transition in climate – global cooling at the time – happened around 3,700 to 3,000 years ago. And what is true now was true then: changing temperatures don’t affect all regions of the globe equally. The effects are most pronounced in high latitude and high-altitude areas, and d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky show how dramatic the changes were, for example, in Mongolia and the Tibetan Plateau. There, around 3,500 years before the present, broomcorn and foxtail millet would have failed to come to harvest about half of the time. People had to abandon the crop in favor of more cold-tolerant ones like wheat and barley.

They also argue that cooling temperatures made it increasingly difficult to grow key grain crops across Northern China between AD 291 and 360, something that may have ended up playing a key role in the relocation of the Chinese capital to from Xi’an to what is now Nanjing, in the south of the country.

This was not a painless move – not like finding a better apartment across town. Historical records report on catastrophic harvests (read: famines). And there were major migrations of people, accompanied, the researchers say, by the myriad little conflicts these migrations often bring, as well as bloody struggles.

Climate change also stimulated the development of transportation infrastructure across Asia, the co-authors say, including the later Sui Dynasty’s decision to invest in a major capital public project and create China’s Grand Canal. The Grand Canal, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the world’s longest and oldest canal, linking the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. It was a major facilitator for the movement of people and their trade goods.

D’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky’s paper in Science Advances [DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aar4491] carries a positive title – “Climate change stimulated agricultural innovation and exchange across Asia” – but the co-authors also warn against a completely Pollyanna view.

“Crises are opportunities for culture change and innovation,” Bocinsky said. “But the speed and scale of our current climate change predicament are different.”

The impacts of warming going forward are going to be quicker and greater, and humanity has had 4000 years to adjust to a cooler world, d’Alpoim Guedes said. “With global warming these long-lasting patterns of adaptation will begin to change in ways that are unpredictable,” she said. “And there might not be the behavioral flexibility for this, given current politics around the world.”

Also mechanized, industrialized agriculture and global agricultural policy are pushing us toward mono-culture of crops, said d’Alpoim Guedes. We need to move in the opposite direction instead. “Studies like ours show that bet-hedging and investing in diversity have been our best bets for adapting to climate change,” she said. “That is what allowed us to adapt in past, and we need to be mindful of that for our future, too.”

For those wishing to reproduce the paper’s findings: The code is open source and any user of the free statistical software R can download the package the authors are making available and run the analysis themselves. Researchers can also extend d’Alpoim Guedes and Bocinsky’s findings by running analysis on other crops and other locations in different parts of the world. It is even possible, the co-authors say, to modify their code and then, potentially, to project for future crop failures.

President Trump’s protectionism has a distinctive focus on disrupting US access to global supply chains. This column reveals that the major economies had in fact begun to impose additional trade protection on intermediate inputs even prior to 2016. New barriers targeting cross-border supply chains simply arose through policies aside from headline tariffs. Some of this new protection has also already spread beyond China’s trade and begun to cover exports from other countries. These results, combined with more recent policy actions, widen the possibility of a negative protectionist impact on the global sourcing of parts and components.

By Chad Bown*

By Jaya Ramachandran

The Government of the Republic of Seychelles, an archipelago of 115 granite and coral islands in the Indian Ocean, off East Africa, has been acclaimed for showing “the leadership to create the world’s first sustainable Blue Bond”.

The pioneering financial instrument was launched within four weeks of the High-Level Forum the government of Seychelles organised together with the 79-member African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States at the United Nations headquarters in New York focusing on the emerging new “blue economy” underlining the protection and preservation of the world’s heavily-exploited oceans.

The concept for a Seychelles Blue Bond to support the island nation’s transition to sustainable fisheries was conceived in 2014 by The Prince of Wales’ International Sustainability Unit, says its former director Justin Mundy, Distinguished Fellow, World Resources Institute.

“Therefore, I am delighted that the Government of the Seychelles has shown the leadership to create the world’s first sustainable Blue Bond,” adds Mundy. “The bond demonstrates that institutional investors can become involved in helping to build a truly sustainable blue economy that supports critical marine ecosystems while providing economic prosperity for local communities and Island Developing States.”

Announcing the launch of the pioneering bond at the Our Ocean Conference in Bali on October 29-30, 2018, Vincent Meriton, Vice-President of the Republic of Seychelles said: “We are honoured to be the first nation to pioneer such a novel financing instrument.”

The Blue Bond, which is part of an initiative that combines public and private investment to mobilize resources for empowering local communities and businesses, “will greatly assist Seychelles in achieving a transition to sustainable fisheries and safeguarding our oceans while we sustainably develop our blue economy,” Meriton added.

Marine resources are critical to the country’s economic growth. After tourism, the fisheries sector is the country’s most important industry, contributing significantly to annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employing 17 percent of the population. Fish products make up around 95 percent of the total value of domestic exports.

The Seychelles is home to numerous beaches, coral reefs and nature reserves, as well as rare animals such as giant Aldabra tortoises. It also has the mountain rainforests of Morne Seychellois National Park and beaches, including Beau Vallon and Anse Takamaka.

The Seychelles has a land area of 455 square km spread across an Exclusive Economic Zone of approximately 1.4 million square km. As one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, Seychelles is balancing the need to both develop economically and protect its natural endowment.

With this in view, Laura Tuck, Vice President of Sustainable Development at the World Bank, said: “The World Bank is excited to be involved in the launch of this sovereign Blue Bond and believes it can serve as a model for other small island developing states and coastal countries. It is a powerful signal that investors are increasingly interested in supporting the sustainable management and development of our oceans for generations to come.”

CEO and Chairperson of The Global Environment Facility (GEF), Naoko Ishii, added: “The Seychelles Blue Bond is a significant milestone in our long-standing support for ocean conservation, and the GEF is proud to invest in developing national blue economies that protect the rich marine ecosystem while supporting economic growth, improved livelihoods and jobs.”

The bond, which has raised US$15 million from international investors, demonstrates the potential for countries to harness capital markets for financing the sustainable use of marine resources. The World Bank assisted in developing the Blue Bond and reaching out to the three investors: Calvert Impact Capital, Nuveen, and U.S. Headquartered Prudential Financial, Inc.

Proceeds from the bond will include support for the expansion of marine protected areas, improved governance of priority fisheries and the development of the Seychelles’ blue economy. Grants and loans will be provided through the Blue Grants Fund and Blue Investment Fund, managed respectively by the Seychelles’ Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust (SeyCCAT) and the Development Bank of Seychelles (DBS).

“We are privileged to be working with the many partners involved in this unique transaction, and we are excited about the possibilities to back pre-development and growth stage projects in support of Seychelles’ blue economy, said Martin Callow, CEO of the Seychelles Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust, which will co-manage proceeds from the bond.

“With these new resources, our guiding principles, and the blended finance structure that we have developed, we will support Seychelles’ ambitions to create a diversified blue economy and, importantly, to safeguard fisheries and ocean ecosystems,” Callow added.

DBS CEO Daniel Gappy noted: “The Development Bank of Seychelles (DBS), through its mandate, is here to support Seychelles in its quest to promote and sustainably develop the country’s fisheries sector.”

DBS will co-manage proceeds from the bond via the creation of the Blue Investment Fund.

“Establishing the Blue Investment Fund will bring additional exposure both locally and internationally for the Bank and will provide opportunities to enhance our competency in fund management for positive environmental, social and governance outcomes,” Gappy said

According to a press release, the Seychelles Blue Bond is partially guaranteed by a US$5 million guarantee from the World Bank (IBRD) and further supported by a US$5 million concessional loan from the GEF which will partially cover interest payments for the bond.

Proceeds from the bond will also contribute to the World Bank’s South West Indian Ocean Fisheries Governance and Shared Growth Program, which supports countries in the region to sustainably manage their fisheries and increase economic benefits from their fisheries sectors.

A World Bank team comprising experts from its Treasury, Legal, Environmental and Finance groups worked with investors, structured the Blue Bond and assisted the Government in setting up a platform for channeling its proceeds.

While the business case for a sovereign Blue Bond was initially identified through support to Seychelles from Prince of Wales’ Charities International Sustainability Unit, Standard Chartered acted as placement agent for the bond and Latham & Watkins LLP advised the World Bank as external counsel. Clifford Chance LLP acted as transaction counsel, a World Bank press release said.

The significance of the world’s first Blue Bond was emphasized by investors.

Jenn Pryce, CEO of Calvert Impact Capital, said: “The Blue Bond demonstrates the potential for capital markets to scale sustainable oceans solutions that expertly align marine conservation and economic opportunity.”

The oceans finance market is quite nascent, but the need for capital to address threats to the health of our ocean is increasingly urgent. “The Blue Bond sets a great example of the type of bold leadership from governments and financing from public and private sectors that we need more of,” Pryce added.

“Climate change has created both challenges and possibilities for investors. Its attractive relative valuation and the technical and financial support of the World Bank make the first Blue Bond a significant opportunity for our clients,” said Stephen M. Liberatore, manager of Nuveen’s ESG fixed income strategies, including the TIAA-CREF Social Choice Bond Fund.

“Sustainable development of blue economies such as the Seychelles aligns with our view that investing with a responsible approach is both prudent and financially rewarding in the long-term. We hope this transaction serves as a template for creative impact investment solutions in the future,” Liberatore added.

“Sustainable access to food sources, such as fisheries in the Seychelles, can have a transformative impact on communities, providing both sustenance and an opportunity for individuals to achieve financial stability,” said Andrea Kaufman, Vice President, Impact Investments at U.S. Headquartered Prudential Financial, Inc.

“Prudential shares the long-term vision of the World Bank to make the Blue Bond a model for future investments to preserve the sustainability of water resources for generations to come,” Kaufman added.

Daniel Hanna, Global Head of Sustainable Finance and Global Head of Public Sector & Development Organisations, Standard Chartered Bank, said: “Standard Chartered is proud to play a leading role in the world’s first sovereign Blue Bond. This landmark transaction is testament to our commitment to find innovative ways to mobilise capital to tackle development issues. The Seychelles Blue Bond will help protect the health of our oceans while developing a blue economy and serve as a powerful example for how finance can play a role as an important force for good.”

By Atul Pant*

After a prolonged wait, the Director General Civil Aviation’s (DGCA’s) Civilian Aviation Requirements (CAR) for Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), popularly called drones, were finally released on 27 August 2018 and would take effect from 1 December 2018. Alongside, the DGCA also published FAQs to guide and clarify some specific regulatory aspects of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flying.

It is now well understood that the future will be the era of UAVs. However, the flip-side of UAVs has also started to gain prominence since the last decade, where incidents of near misses with aircraft, breaches of privacy and threats of terrorism have started to become increasingly reported. As a result, whatever little UAV flying used to go on in India was also disallowed in the civil sector in 2014. Vide a DGCA Public Notice dated 7 October 2014, UAV flying without clearance from multiple high level agencies was disallowed until the appropriate rules and regulations were put in place. The DGCA Public Notice highlighted the safety issue and security threat as the main reasons for restricting UAV flying.

In these four years, however, the role of UAVs the world over saw an uptick and their prohibition in India started to hamper progress and was becoming counterproductive. Since then, civil UAV operations have been awaiting the go ahead of the government to make a start in many sectors. The commercial and professional uses of UAVs will lie in relieving humans from ‘Dirty, Dangerous and Dull’ jobs as well as in effecting savings in terms of time, effort and costs that are often needed in many tasks like inspection, supervision, deliveries, photography, etc. UAVs are also appealing recreational devices, for children and hobbyists.

The terrorism potential of drones was quite a menacing one and it increased substantially in the last two decades. Terrorist organisations in West Asia increasingly employed drones not only for making propaganda films and intelligence gathering but also for attacks on coalition forces using small calibre bombs. The latter highlighted the potential for more sensational attacks by using chemical, radiological or biological weapons or substances on populations anywhere. In fact, experts had started warning that it was only a matter of time before such an attack took place. All this alerted governments to the importance of enacting laws, rules and requirements to govern the manufacture and operations of UAVs in the civil sector.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued its UAV regulations in June 2016, and modified them further for hobby and recreational flying in October 2018 vide FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018. The UK Civil Aviation Authority also put out an elaborate set of regulations in March 2015 vide CAP 722. The European Union issued its own set of drone regulations on 12 June 2018, Russia did so in March 2016, and the Civil Aviation Administration of China in June 2018. As in the case of other aviation laws, these regulations are considerably similar to each other and generally focused on safety and security. Most of these regulations are also under revision after having undergone ‘testing’.

The new DGCA regulations also seem to have drawn their essence and benefitted from the prevailing laws in other nations. Its different aspects bear many similarities, for example, in weight categories, flight ceilings, flying in controlled airspaces, etc. While the release of the CAR is the first such effort in Indian aviation regulatory framework for UAVs, the question is whether these would be effective in curbing the menace of drones and, if not, what more needs to be done.

At present, the CAR, though fairly well drafted, have emerged just as a gap filler for UAS operations in the civil sector. The DGCA seems to have taken a very cautious approach in framing the requirements. The CAR are highly restrictive and will initially prove to be cumbersome for UAV operators to meet, especially fresh starters. But they have indeed given an opening for UAV operations and over time could be effective in ensuring safe operations of registered drones to an extent. This is where other countries’ regulations have mostly reached so far.

The CAR get their teeth from the IPC, Aircraft Act 1934, Aircraft Rules 1937 and other civilian aviation rules of the DGCA. This is similar to the approach taken by other nations. A second aspect is that UAVs are still an evolving technology with many aspects such as reliability yet to match the levels of manned aircraft. Therefore, as UAV operations evolve and mature, so will the regulatory framework evolve in parallel. The DGCA has indicated a similar intention and is reportedly constituting a task force to draft the next set of regulations, which have been termed by the media as the ‘Indian Drone Policy 2.0’ and which could come out sooner than later.

Some of the other noteworthy aspects of the CAR are:

• all administrative and procedural control of drones would be website based (called Digital Sky Platform) on the DGCA’s website, right from applying for a Unique Identification Number (UAV registration number called UIN) to the filing of flight plans and obtaining briefings;
• compulsory UIN for all UAVs above ‘nano’ category (250 grams upwards);
• only daylight and line of sight flying permitted;
• no flying by foreigners or foreign entities;
• no carriage of living payload’
• informing the police even for micro category drone flying below 200 feet;
• ceiling of 400 feet;
• no flying within the vicinity of airports, sensitive areas, crowd gatherings, etc.

All of this is with a caveat of case to case basis clearance for things that are not allowed in the present regulations, but considered desirable. Four mandatory electronic systems have to be fitted on the UAVs above ‘micro’ category (weighing two kilograms or more and divided into Small, Medium and Large categories) in uncontrolled airspace: Global Navigation Satellite System, Automatic Flight Termination or Return Home systems, RFID and GSM SIM Card or No Permission No Take-off, and a flight controller with data logging facility. These will substantially enhance the safety of UAVs and the accountability of drone operators. More safety electronics have been mandated on UAVs operating in controlled airspace (where there is air traffic) like Geofencing, SSR transponder, detect and avoid capability, etc.

All this, however, does not eliminate or alleviate the threat posed by drones. However, in the absence of a regulatory framework, it was difficult to bring violators to book, which the CAR now provide. A lot will now depend on how well the regulations are implemented. Most of the commercial and professional users of UAVs will fall in line as they generally like to adhere to and stay within the framework of rules and regulations, and were in fact looking forward to a regulatory mechanism so that they could launch operations, as a flurry of related enthusiastic media articles after the release of regulations indicates. Even hobbyists would generally stick to the rules. The CAR have tried to exempt the very small category of drones (‘nano’ and ‘micro’) from the burden of stricter requirements outside controlled air spaces (restricted air spaces) and flying at low heights, thus catering for children’s toys and hobby flying, which, as such, would be very difficult to control. These small drones could, however, be converted into flying bombs or chemical spray devices. Controlling their use through law and supervision is very difficult indeed, with experts opining that ‘it was now not a matter of ‘if’ but of ‘when’ such a terror attack will take place.’

The real threat would emanate from UAVs operated by malevolent individuals with the intention of causing harm. It will be very difficult to control as not only hobby and toy UAVs could be modified, but drones could also be made out of components using ‘Do-it-Yourself’ kits or components removed from toy drones with a certain amount of autonomy in flying. UAVs could easily be innovated from commonly and more and more easily available items and materials with electronic components. Aeromodelling hobby stores have models and UAV electronics are easily available.

Serious and sensational terrorist acts could be rather easily pulled-off using UAVs, which would be difficult to counter. A drone attack on the Venezuelan President during a military parade on 4 August 2018 is a good recent example. Countering such a threat would need to include measures like putting a cap on power systems or tightly controlling the sale of electronics which could be used as control systems, online sale of each and every drone sold by the vendors, electronic defence systems in controlled airspaces, etc. So much more would need to be done to curb the flip side of drone usage. The current regulations in place are only the first step.

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:
*Group Captain Atul Pant is a serving member of the Indian Air Force.

Source:
This article was published by IDSA

Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa has assumed duties as the Finance and Economic Affairs Minister, on Wednesday. Addressing the event, he stated that the fuel price formula introduced by the past government has to be changed.

Mahinda Rajapaksa stated that he worked in this same ministry contentedly for long in the past. He said that, when the tsunami hit the country, they could resolve economic woes of the country within a short amount of time despite many issues.

Rajapaksa further said that he acted with proper financial management when he was the finance minister during the war. Although the global oil prices rose, he was able to keep the economy stable during his term in the ministry and was also systematically reduced the budget deficiency, according to him.

Claiming that democracy in the country was disappearing due to postponement of elections, Rajapaksa said that by now the world has been shown that the country is moving towards a dictatorship.

The finance ministry today faces many challenges; taxing system should be set up and a certainty on the economy should be established, he said.

Rural economy has severely degraded today and the urban environment has also declined, he added. Local industries have declined and even incense sticks are imported today, pointed out Rajapaksa.

Rajapaksa added that he worked as the finance minister while being President and now again as the Prime Minister. He hopes to protect the country and build the economy for the benefit of the future generations of the country, further said Mahinda Rajapaksa.

By Ajit Kumar Singh*

Parliamentary Elections were conducted across 32 out of 34 Provinces on October 20 and October 21, 2018. The Parliamentary Elections were earlier scheduled for October 20 only. However, it were extended into a second day on October 21, after hundreds of polling stations were closed on the first day of voting due to technical issues.

Elections in Kandhar Province were postponed due to an attack by Taliban terrorists on October 18, 2018, which left the Provincial Police Chief General Abdul Raziq and Provincial Intelligence Chief General Abdul Momin dead. Elections in the Province were subsequently held on October 27. The attackers had also targeted the Commander of the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Forces in Afghanistan, General Scott Miller, who escaped unhurt.

According to reports, Elections in Ghazni Province were postponed over disagreements around constituencies as well as security issues. Significantly, Ghazni Province had briefly fallen to the Taliban in August 2018. The Independent Election Commission (IEC) clarified on October 27, 2018, that Parliamentary Elections in Ghazni Province could possibly be held at the same time as Presidential Elections in April 2019.

In the evening of October 21, 2018, Abdul Badi Sayad, head of IEC, stated that the voter turnout was “impressive”, at 45 per cent across 32 Provinces. These Provinces have a total of 8,292,548 registered voters. The voting percentage in Kandhar Province, with a total of 567,608 registered voters, was not known at the time of writing. Ghazni Province, which is yet to go to the polls, has 57,951 registered voters. The total number of registered voters in the country is 8,918,107.

The Elections were marred by significant violence. Afghanistan’s Interior Minister Wais Barmak confirmed on October 20, 2018, that 192 ‘security incidents’ had occurred across the nation on the day of parliamentary polling. According to varying media reports, at least 67 people — 27 civilians, nine security force (SF) personnel, and 31 terrorists — were killed and 126 were injured in 192 attacks by militants on October 20, the first day of Elections. Reports indicate that there were more than 50 incidents reported on October 21 as well, the second day of Elections.

Partial data compiled by the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM) identified at least 26 election-related incidents of violence across Afghanistan after voter-registration began (data till October 28, 2018). These incidents resulted in 181 deaths [149 civilians, 18 SF personnel, and 14 militants] and 303 injured. Voter registration for the Parliamentary Elections began on April 14, 2018. Significantly, on April 1, 2018, IEC Chairman Abdul Badi Sayat had confirmed that the long-delayed Afghan Parliamentary Elections would be held on October 20. No election-related incident of violence was reported across Afghanistan between April 1, 2018, and April 13, 2018.

Preliminary results will not be released before mid-November and final results are expected in December.

Before the October 2018 Elections, Afghanistan had held two Parliamentary elections since the end of Taliban rule, the first in 2005 and the second in 2010. The third election – which was due in April-May 2015, as the five-year term of the present Parliament was set to expire on June 22, 2015 –were repeatedly postponed both because of security fears as well as disagreements on how to ensure a fair vote after the bitterly contested Presidential Election of 2014. In the meantime, President Ashraf Ghani extended the Parliament’s mandate until a vote could be held, through a decree issued on June 19, 2015. The current Parliament is operating under this decree.

A comparative analysis of the 2018 and 2010 elections clearly demonstrates that the present exercise has been more successful – in terms of voter participation and providing security on Election Day. According to IEC, the voting percentage rose from 40 to 45 per cent. However, during the 2005 Parliamentary Elections, a 49 per cent voter turnout was recorded.

Moreover, the level of violence (in terms of incidents on election day) also declined in 2018 as compared to 2010. According to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), 488 incidents were recorded on election day, September 18, 2010, as against 192 confirmed by the Afghan Government for October 21, 2018. Fatalities, however, have gone up. Figures from the Afghan Ministry of Defense revealed that 24 individuals were killed on election day in 2010 (13 police officers and 11 civilians). 67 fatalities have been confirmed by the Government on October 21, 2018.

Crucially, 58 and 60 per cent of voters risked their lives to cast their votes in the two phases of the Presidential election in April and June 2014, despite Taliban threats and escalating violence, suggesting a tremendous surge in popular support to the democratic process. 382 violent incidents on Election Day in April 2014 failed to deter voters. The 2009 Presidential elections had recorded a turnout of 38.7 per cent.

The present Election, amidst rising violence and doomsday predictions in Afghanistan, are a major achievement for the Government and Security Forces. An UNAMA release on October 20 observed,

These elections were the first completely run by Afghan authorities since 2001 and are an important milestone in Afghanistan’s transition to self-reliance…

Again, on October 24, 2018, UNAMA stressed that

…the elections, which have been carried out under difficult security conditions under full Afghan ownership, constitute an important moment in the democratic development in Afghanistan.”

The achievement is greater in view of a rapidly deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan. According to the UNAMA Mid-Year Report released on July 15, 2018, the number of civilians killed in the country hit a record high in the first half of the year, with 1,692 civilian fatalities – the highest recorded in the same time period in any year over the decade since the agency began documenting civilian casualties in 2009. There were 1,672 civilian deaths in 2017, 1644 in 2016 and 1615 in 2015, over the same time period.

The Taliban have sustained their capacities for tremendous disruption. According to the 40th Quarterly Report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), as of May 15, 2018, there were 229 Districts under Afghan Government control (74) or influence (155), only 56.3 per cent of the total number of Districts in the country. This represented no change in District control since the preceding quarter, but was a slight improvement over the 57 per cent reported in May 2017. The number of contested Districts – controlled by neither the Afghan Government nor the insurgents –however, increased by three in the quarter under review, to 122 Districts, with 30 per cent of Afghanistan’s Districts now in the ‘contested’ category. 14 per cent of all Afghan Districts were under Taliban control according to SIGAR’S 39th Quarterly Report, and this remained unchanged in the 40th Quarterly Report.

Afghan Presidential Elections are now due in April 2019. Kabul will struggle to ensure a more peaceful election and one that is seen to be transparent and fair. The latter challenge is there tremendous, with bitter accusations marring the Presidential elections of 2014, and widespread allegations of rigging and malpractices against the Government in the present Parliamentary polls as well. On October 21, 2018, Independent Electoral Complaint Commission (IECC) disclosed that it had already received 5,547 complaints, even as the process was ongoing. According to a report dated October 25, 2018, at least 7,000 complaints had been received by the IECC. The report also claimed that another 5,000 complaints were received by TOLO News, an Afghan New Agency, and further 1,300 complaints by the Free and Fair Election Forum of Afghanistan, an independent agency.

Significantly, in the 2004 Presidential Elections, fatalities during the campaign period (September 7 to October 7) totaled 196. The Presidential elections of October 9, 2004, were widely seen as fair. As a result, post-election violence was relatively low. On the other hand, the 2009 Presidential Elections saw a total of 1,173 persons killed during the campaign period (June 16 to August 18). The elections, which were held on August 20, 2009, were themselves marred by bitter controversy, so much so that a runoff election was declared on November 7, 2009, though this finally called off on November 2, after the runner up, Abdullah Abdullah decided, on November 1, not to contest, citing the “inappropriate actions of the Government and the election commission.” The level of violence surged. Acrimonious Presidential elections followed in 2014. However, both the candidates, Abdullah Abdullah, the former Foreign Minister, and Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, former Finance Minister, decided to form a National Unity Government (NUG). Nevertheless, internal discord within the Government continues, even as violence has increased since 2014.

Free, fair and peaceful Presidential Elections in April 2019 will go a long way in consolidating the culture of democracy in Afghanistan, further delegitimizing the Taliban and paving the way towards a resolution of the bloody confrontations that have crippled the country for decades now.

*Ajit Kumar Singh
Research Fellow, Institute for Conflict Management

By Deepak Kumar Nayak*

On October 20, 2018, Security Forces (SFs) killed at least three Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) cadres during an encounter, which ensued when SFs launched a combing operation in the Madpal Forest of Bijapur District. SFs later recovered the bodies of the slainMaoists, a .303 rifle, live rounds, a tiffin bomb, cordex detonating cord, ‘revolutionary’ literature and other material from the encounter site. A day earlier, SFs had destroyed two Maoist camps in the Indravati National Park forest area in the District.

On October 13, 2018, SFs killed one CPI-Maoist cadre and injured another at a weekly market in the Cherpal area of Bijapur District. According to reports, Maoists carried out an attack targeting SFs in the market, injuring one Police constable. One Maoist was killed in the retaliatory fire,while another sustained a bullet injury, and was later arrested.

On August 3, 2018, one CPI-Maoist cadre was killed and two Policemen received injuries in an encounter at Basaguda village in Bijapur District. Ratan Lal Dangi,Deputy Inspector General (DIG) of Police, South Bastar Range,disclosed that around five or six Maoists opened fire at a weekly market in Basaguda in which two Policemen sustained injuries. One Maoist was shot dead in retaliatory fire by the Police.

On July 19, 2018, SFs killed at least eight CPI-Maoist cadres, including three women, during an encounter near Timinar and Pusnar villages in Bijapur District. The gun battle between the Maoists and the SFs took place while SFs were out on an anti-Maoist operation. Sundarraj P., DIG (anti-Naxal operations), disclosed that two INSAS (Indian Small Arms System) assault rifles, two .303 rifles, one 12 bore gun and a few muzzle loading guns were recovered from the encounter site.

According to partial data collated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), at least 38 Maoists have been killed in 12separate incidents in Bijapur District in 2018 (data till October 29, 2018). During the corresponding period in 2017, 12 Maoists had been killed in 10 incidents. A total of 19 Maoist cadres were killed in the District in 14 incidents through 2017.

There were at least 33 Maoist fatalities in 17 incidents in 2016; 17 in nine incidents in 2015; 20 in 12 incidents in 2014; 11 in seven incidents in 2013; 27 in seven incidents in 2012; 14 in seven incidents in 2011; 31 in eight incidents in 2010;41 in 12 incidents in 2009;44 in 11 incidents in 2008 and 10 in four incidents in 2007. Notably, the District of Bijapur was carved out from the erstwhile Dantewada District on May 11, 2007.

With still over two months to go in 2018, the year has recorded the second highest fatalities among the Maoists, on year on year basis, recorded since 2008, when the total was 44.

There has also been an increase in the number of SF fatalities in the current year. At least 12 SF personnel have died so far in the current year. During the corresponding period of 2017, Bijapur had accounted for seven SF fatalities. There were a total of seven fatalities in this category through 2017. A maximum of 23 fatalities was reportedin this category in 2007.

SFs have improved their kill ratio in the current year,at1:3.16 in 2018 (data till October 29). SFs had secured a positive kill ratio in 2017, at1:1.71; and 2016 at 1:3.85(data till October 29 for both years), as well. The ratio remained in favour of SFs through 2016 (1:3.66) and 2017 (1:2.71). The kill ratio has remained in favour of SFs since 2012.

Further, 56 Maoists have been arrested by SFs during combing operations in Bijapur District in 2018(data till October 29), according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal.During the corresponding period in 2017, at least 37 Maoists had been arrested, as against a total of 68 through 2017.

Moreover, at least 15 Maoists have surrendered in 2018, as a result of the pressure from the SFs. During the corresponding period in 2017, 11 Maoists had surrendered. There were no more surrenders in the remaining period of 2017.

Civilian fatalities, a crucial index of the security situation in an area, have also been on a decline since 2014, and touched its lowest at three in 2017. Though there has been an increase in the number of fatalities in this category, at five,in the current year, the last of these killings was recorded on May 16, 2018, when CPI-Maoist cadres killed an employee of a construction contractor and set four construction vehicles on fire in Bijapur District.At peak in 2009, Bijapur accounted for 28 civilian fatalities.

On April 8, 2018, Chief Minister Raman Singh claimed that “frustrated Maoists” are losing influence due to joint action of the State and Central Governments, which have put the Chhattisgarh on the path of development by building roads, schools and hospitals in remote and inaccessible areas, which were earlier hotbeds of Maoist activity. He, however, admitting the reality that many Districts in Chhattisgarh remained backward, including Bijapur, Dantewada, and Sukma, adding:

Naxalism can only be countered by development. Wherever we are constructing roads and working on development, the Maoists are losing their foothold. Now, we have reached very close and are moving ahead in an important direction to root out the menace.

In the relatively backward areas of the State, including Bijapur, the fight is far from over. An overview of fatalities since Bijapur’s creation on May 11, 2007, illustrates that the District has registered at least 622 Maoist-linked fatalities, including 305 Maoists, 156 SF personnel and 161 civilians, roughly 25.89 per cent of the total of 2,402 fatalities, including 921 Maoists, 906 SF personnel and 575 civilians, recorded in Chhattisgarh during this period (data till October 29, 2018).

Bijapur falls within the troubled Bastar Division of Chhattisgarh, which remains the principal challenge for the State, and is the worst affected region in the country. Bijapur is also listed among the eight worst Left Wing Extremism (LWE) affected Districts in Chhattisgarh and the 30 worst-affected Districts identified by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (UMHA) across the country, in 2018. On August 1, 2018, UMHAdisclosed that Bijapur, along with seven other Districts (Bastar, Dantewada, Kanker, Kondagaon, Narayanpur, Rajnandgaon and Sukma) of Chhattisgarh are among 30 Districts in seven States which are most affected byLWE violence. These 30 Districts accounted for 88 per cent of violent incidents and 94 per cent of deaths in the countryin 2017. Nonetheless, UMHAasserted that resolute implementation of the National Policy and Action Plan (NPAP) by the Central and State Governments has resulted in considerable improvement of the situation both in terms of reduction of violence and geographical spread. The number of violent incidents declined to 908 in 2017 from a high of 2,258 in 2009 across the country. The geographical spread of violence has also shrunk considerably.

On October 8, 2018, intelligence units operating in Chhattisgarh warned of heightened Maoist activity in the State, especially in Bijapur, Dantewada, Narayanpur and Sukma, in the run-up to the State Assembly elections, to be held in two phases State Assembly on November 12 and November 20, 2018. Significantly, the Maoists killed at least four Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel and injured another two in an ambush on October 27, 2018, near the CRPF’s Murdana camp under Awapalli Police Station in Bijapur District.

The State and Central Governments have taken several measures, both for the operational containment of the Maoists, as well as for the developmental and administrative improvement of insurgency afflicted regions. A further consolidation and intensification of focused and intelligence-based operations is now inevitable.

According to an August 5, 2018, report, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) has taken responsibility, for the first time, to ensure the completion of a 4.5-kilometres vital stretch of an RCC (Roller Compacted Concrete) road between Bhairamgarh and Keshkutul in southern Bijapur District. Sanjay Arora, CRPF Inspector General, Chhattisgarh, on July 23, 2018, disclosed,

We picked the bid as a contractor to build the road as no private contractor was coming forward to do the task due to the fear of Naxals. The task is almost complete and only a culvert at Permapara is to be built now…. It is held up due to the ongoing heavy monsoon rains and shall be completed soon.

Significant improvements in Police capacity are also on record in the District. According to a September 18, 2018, report, two Police Stations –Bhopalpatnam and Madded –in Bijapur have been found to be in accordance with the requirements of the Quality Management System International Standards Organisation (ISO) 9001:2015 certification [maintenance of law and order, prevention & detection of crime, establishing peace and tranquillity and achieving other policing activities]. Bastar range Inspector General of Police (IGP), Vivekanand Sinha disclosed,

This is indeed a historic achievement for the Bastar police. For the first time the two Police Stations in any left-wing extremism (LWE) area in the country got the ISO certificates. The people-centric approach and the initiatives taken under the community policing to win the heart and minds of masses by the Bastar police were equally instrumental in achieving the given aim and the people-friendly policing. Gradually we will see more Police Stations with such certification.

Without doubt, the Maoists are facing a severe threat in their erstwhile strongholds, including Bijapur, as well as across Chhattisgarh and India at large.The Maoists have, however, engineered several cycles of resurgencesin the past. Sustained efforts by SFs and other State agencies will be necessary if lasting peace is to be established in Bijapur and across the State.

*Deepak Kumar Nayak
Research Assistant, Institute for Conflict Management

Moving left has been a Brazilian political tendency for some time, a tendency affirmed through the 1990s and 2000s with the presidential administrations of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. But this is the same country also famed for its share of murderous military dictatorships and political convulsions. The worm would eventually turn.

Between 1964 and 1985, the military privileged itself with direct interventions in civilian and political life, ensuring a line of generals for president in the name of protective emergency. The trumping of civilian rule in 1964 had come in response to the centre-left reformist government of the Brazilian Labor Party’s João Goulart. The brutal reaction became an inspirational blueprint for Latin American governments to follow: right wing governments obsessed with corporatist principles and suspicious of civil liberties.

That particular model, and precedent, offers lessons in the coming to power of former army parachutist Jair Messias Bolsonaro. At the 2016 impeachment vote held in the Lower House of the Brazilian Congress against President Dilma Rousseff (notably cast by a chamber half-filled by members facing various criminal investigations), Bolsonaro recalled 1964, the year when the country was supposedly rescued from the relentless approach of godless communism. His own ballot, as Perry Anderson reminds us, was dedicated to the conscientious torturer-in-chief, Colonel Carlos Brilhante Ustra.

Colonel Ustra was adamant before a Truth Commission hearing in May 2013: “I fought terrorism.” Like Bolsonaro, he saw no moderation in any left-wing platform, a scourge that needed to be tortured into oblivion. “Their aim was to depose the military and implement communism in Brazil. That was written in their programmes.” In 2016, Bolsonaro aired views drawn straight from the Ustra school of simple thinking: torture was appropriate, the right to vote should be questioned and the National Congress needed to be opposed.

The overthrow of Goulart had been premised on the military’s harnessing of opposition from large landowners, the interests of big business and corporations, the Catholic Church and elements of the middleclass. The forces that threaten the legacy of leftist reforms (30 million lifted out of poverty between 2002 and 2014), tarnished by the lingering stains of corruption linked to the state oil firm Petrobras and the Odebrecht construction firm, are similar. These are, however, marked by a fundamental difference: the very same middle class boosted in numbers by progressive governments are now falling for personalities of reaction.

In the considered opinion of sociologist Atilio A. Boron, “They see those that declare an inferior economic position a threat, and therefore they are prone to have discriminatory, aggressive and offensive positions to the popular sectors.” Poverty, as the ultimate, dangerous crime.

Despite every major Brazilian political party being implicated in the orgiastic exercise of graft exposed in the economic downturn following 2013, Bolsonaro proved savvy enough to distance himself, and members of his own Social Liberal Party, from the filled trough. The Workers Party (PT) was left holding the can of guilt, while the far-right movement courted a troubled angst-ridden middle class.

Bolsonaro’s approach to the period of military presidents is to avoid using the term altogether. (Another point of resentment towards Rousseff was her establishment of a truth commission to investigate the human rights abuses and disappearances perpetrated at the time.) He merely concedes to “excesses, because during wars innocents die”. This is the fundamental law of survival: to keep a society safe, a few skulls have to be shattered. He is keen to keep his friends close and the military even closer, promising to place the Ministry of Defence within purview of military, rather than civilian personnel, and involving members of the Armed Forces in his government.

Bolsonaro has similarly modelled his campaign, and accompanying promises, on a Trump-style agenda of making Brazil great again, a coarser programme of self-inflation that contrasts with the previous Rousseff platform of “Larger Brazil”. His trip to the United States in October last year was a mission of instruction.

He, like Trump, has his own variant of the message of draining the fetid swamp of political corruption, though, like his source of inspiration, remains reticent on what to fill it with. He, like Trump, has a certain liking for the “law and order” message that emphasises muscle and arms over the logic and sober restraint of gun control. “It won’t be any better,” he argues about the policy of reducing gun ownership as a means of reducing violence. “If there were three or four armed people here now,” he speculated on the television channel Record, “I’d be certain that some nutter wouldn’t be able to come in through that door and do something bad.”

Bolsonaro’s vision – nutters meeting nutters – features jungle retributions and protections, the state’s tactical outsourcing of violence in favour of privatised security. “Why can’t a truck driver have the right to carry a gun? Just think about it; put yourself in the shoes of a truck driver. He nods off at the petrol station… and when he wakes up the next day his spare tyre has gone.” Not that the state is entirely absent from this savage equation: where police killings (autos de resistência) increase, he surmises, “violence goes down in the region where they took place.”

The current political move in Latin America is to the right. Conservative governments now hold sway in Chile and Colombia. The historical dislike for the keen meddling of Washington has, temporarily, taken second place. Arms of approval are being extended. Bolsonaro, to make that point, has already made his position on what regional foreign policy will look like. “Trump is an example to me… I plan to get closer to him for the good of both Brazil and the United States. We can take his examples from here back to Brazil.”

By León M. Gómez Rivas*

It was with great pleasure that I received the invitation to contribute to this brief commemorative series on a great Catalonian – and therefore Spanish – thinker of the nineteenth century. I have before me the previous entries by Josep Castellà and Alejandro Chafuen (who kindly cites a commentary I wrote for the Juan de Mariana Institute, in which I dealt with Balmes’s pioneering insights into the theory of marginal utility). These previous articles form a perfect summary of some of the subjects Jaime Balmes covered, beginning with the value theory of economics, as well as his critical analysis of socialism, which he experienced firsthand during his trips to Paris in the 1830s.

In this vein, we recall that Balmes’s family owned and operated a small business in Vic (their business was the manufacture of rabbit-skin caps), and thus he was personally acquainted with the nascent textile industry and its use of steam power in the production process. We have an interesting letter he wrote to his brother, in which he describes the technological advances he observed in France. Those trips also gave rise to an essay entitled La Población (“Population”), which demonstrates his clear notion of the demographic revolution then taking place in industrialized Europe. Relying on a work by Ramón de la Sagra, Jaime Balmes cites a number of philosophers and economists who had written on that subject from two different perspectives: “The first, whose defenders include Montesquieu, Necker, Mirabeau, Adam Smith, Everett, [and] Moren de Vindé, holds that states’ strength and wealth are in proportion to population increase, since population is considered in light of its productive potential. The other, defended by Ortés, Ricci, Franklin, J. Stewart, Arthur Young, Towesend [sic], Malthus, J.B. Say, Ricardo, Destutt de Tracy, Droz, Duchatel, Blanqui, Sismondi, de Coux, [and] Godwin, considers population increase a true evil” (Estudios sociales).

A final comment – coming from Ernest Lluch – on Jaime Balmes’s economic views brings us to the interesting debate on liberalism and protectionism, already present in the first half of the nineteenth century. Lluch explained that Catalonian entrepreneurs were fearful of English capacities, preferring Gibraltar remain under British control in exchange for some protectionist laws for their industry. Balmes also entered into this debate with some far-seeing ideas, such as the recognition that England saw a threat, not just a market to expand into, from Catalonia’s textile industry. Other innovative proposals by Balmes included industrial diversification in Catalonia rather than the established specialization in textiles, and also a concern for professional training and formation. Balmes implemented many of these ideas through an organization linked to Fomento del Trabajo Nacional (a Catalonian employers’ organization founded in 1771). As Fomento is still in existence, it would be a valuable effort to conduct further research on this point.

By Raphaël Lima*

In the wake of this week’s widespread repudiation of interventionist and socialist political parties in Brazil — and a sudden surge in widespread support for market-friendly candidates — I’ve received many questions: How did Brazil do this? How do you guys have so many libertarians? How did you guys get all of this done? How did you elect these people? How did this happen?

These questions are asked to me and other Brazilian libertarians by every non-Brazilian libertarian I meet.

If you are not aware of the growth of the libertarian movement in Brazil, then consider visiting one of our events. Nothing beats the experience. More and more, they draw hundreds of people, many of them charging for attendance and at a not-very-friendly price. They must do this because we can only fit so many people in the rooms we can rent.

Or you can go to schools or universities and see students reading and quoting Mises, Rothbard and Hoppe, standing up to left-wing teachers preaching the gospel of the state, and organizing student groups. I’ve launched a website where you can check-in as a libertarian and start a libertarian-oriented group, and every person registered in a 50-kilometer radius gets an email notification. With little effort and promotion, we have now over 200 registered groups, most of them in schools or universities.

You could also do the opposite: go to left-wing meetings and ask what they despise, what they are concerned with. Apart from the rising of a new right wing and your average socialist patter, you’ll hear about the “ultraliberals”, you’ll hear lamentations on how people no longer adhere to allowable opinion and dare defy statist dogma, wielding such lowly things as the internet and “neoliberal” authors such as Mises to argue in favor of the free market, deregulation and even ending the state.

But perhaps one of the most intriguing examples I can tell is of a city councilman from a fifty-thousand-population city in the south of Brazil. He was elected almost unintentionally, having run only to support his party. After being sworn in, he started to look into public administration and economics. He found the Mises Institute Brazil, my channel, read a few books and a little over one year later, he finally realized that what the city chamber did was a waste of time and money.

Much can also be seen without having to board a plane to Brazil. A stroll through the best selling books on Amazon Brazil will likely raise some eyebrows. As of this writing, Six Lessons1 by Mises is third-place in economics, with The Anticapitalist Mentality coming in at sixth and The Free Market and its Enemies at eleventh. Fernando Ulrich’s book on Bitcoin comes in at fourteenth, Rothbard’s What has Government Done to Our Money in fifteenth, Human Action at seventeenth, with Hoppe’s What Must Be Done in nineteenth. Twenty-two of the fifty best selling books are related to free-market economics, with some Adam Smith in the middle of it.

Six of the fifty best selling books in politics also have a liberty touch to them, one of them being Hoppe’s Democracy, the God that Failed, clocking in at forty-first. I suspect this is distorted downwards as due to the election any book with “fascism” on the title has sold well, since the left has made a huge storm around it.

Another simple number is my YouTube channel about libertarianism. Just under half a million subscribers, 76 million views and growing.

The fact is that people are changing in their minds.

Statistics seem to support this. A study done in March of this year tried to show that the majority of Brazilians still support a large state. That in itself is already proof that libertarianism is growing: people felt compelled to try and find data to say otherwise, they felt threatened and needed reassurance.

At any rate, the study backfired in a way few people realized: 3.6% of people stated that the state should be completely out of welfare, education, health, old age care and pensions, and inequality of income. They said the state should get out of matters in relations between the sexes and minority groups. Adding to that, 10.5%, or 22 million people, were in favor of complete freedom to the markets.

A Brief History of the Brazilian Liberty Movement

What’s also impressive is how fast we got here. Just four years ago it would be pants-on-head insane to propose that this would happen in Brazil. Hard-left candidate and president Dilma Rousseff had just been re-elected despite her painfully obvious incompetence and a brewing corruption scandal. No opposition party existed, and her government would clearly take a hard line in favor of a multitude of pro-tax, pro-regulation interventionist policies, coupled with seemingly endless government spending.

All was lost, it seemed to us. Many lovers of liberty were planning their escape from the country, and the path to Venezuela was all but a statistical inevitability.

No more than five or six years ago a liberty-related event would hardly draw more than fifty people in large cities, and before that, people who defended libertarianism had good reason to be concerned with political persecution, since the left-wing government seemed undefeatable. And yet, it was all soundly defeated in this week’s election.

But who are these new candidates who won, replacing the old regime?

Only a few candidates adhered to a consistent libertarian platform. Many adhered largely to the economic points, while being distinctly non-libertarian on issues like decriminalizing drugs, adoption by homosexual couples, or homeschooling — which is illegal in Brazil. Nevertheless, the overall discussion has turned towards much less state meddling in the economy, balancing the budget and radical privatization and deregulation.

One of the most impressive feats was done by Romeu Zema, a very successful businessman and one of those I call “libertarians that don’t know they are libertarian” who decided to run for governor of Minas Gerais, under the NOVO party. He and the party sported the most heavily free-market platform in the election and brought in a whopping 72% of the vote in the run-offs. NOVO also elected 8 people to the house of representatives, one of which I supported as a “full” libertarian, and twelve representatives at state level, four of which I supported. Add to that Bruno Souza, a bona fide libertarian elected for the state legislation of Santa Catarina by another party, and a senator elected by Livres, a liberal-in-the-original-sense-of-the-word group linked to many different parties, and we have an impressive show for the first federal elections where libertarians ran.

Adding to that, there are many candidates in both federal chambers and state legislatures that ran on a clearly much more free-market line than ever imaginable. Many of them may be lying, spewing whatever they think will stick, but even that would be something of a victory. If politicians are defending free markets out of electoral convenience, it means the ideas are spreading and they can do naught but surrender to the wave.

But many of them are likely sincere, even though contradictory in some points, which is what you would expect from people who are brand new to the movement. Many parties elected representatives that have truly woken up to realize that socialism and state meddling are burdens, and that people are better off free. How many? It’s interesting to say that we simply don’t know for sure. That’s how many of them there are. Only their voting will truly tell.

Finally, we have the case of president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro. It’s difficult to find an article in English about him that doesn’t simply repeat the smears and distortions heaved at him by the Brazilian media. It doesn’t help that only in the last year he learned how to not say unclear and confused statements that can easily be distorted into anything by his opponents.

Proper criticism of him should be centered on inconsistencies, fumbles and mistakes, and portraying him as an authoritarian threat is misleading at best. While he has made statements that can be interpreted as authoritarian, he’s not more so than the average Brazilian, and far less of a menace than anything the leftists have fielded in the last thirty years. His first speech after the victory featured a table with four books: the constitution, the bible, a biography of Churchhill, and a book by Olavo de Carvalho, a leading and famous Brazilian conservative philosopher.

But he’s no libertarian. If one had to put a name to it, he’s a market-friendly conservative, but don’t get hung up on titles. A notable red flag is his complete opposition to decriminalization of drugs, and an education plan that is considerably centralizing. His economic proposals are by far the most free-market to ever win an election in Brazil and he has made extensive and ample declarations in favor of the defense of private property, there are flaws in the details. He still defends a central bank, has not exhibited opposition to the income tax, is reluctant on privatizing companies he deems “strategic,” whatever that may mean, and while there are economists of Austrian inclination around him, the bulk of them are monetarists, with all that this entails. Paulo Guedes, his economist-in-chief is a well-known Chicago School lover of the free-market, and one can have hope this will mean far more good things than bad. Lastly, he defends increasing decentralization of power, which is welcome.

Yet we will only truly know when the tests come around. Brazil is in urgent need of deep reforms, and after three and a half presidential mandates from the Workers Party, there is much do be undone. Many of the measures necessary will be deeply unpopular, easy to be twisted by the Left, and complicated. The speech and promise part are done, now is the time to act and see what comes of it, but if he manages to score a third of what he has planned, we’re in for a lot more freedom than we could possibly imagine just a few years ago.

And yet what really should get our hopes up is not what we have achieved so far, but that we are only in the beginning of something deeper. Libertarianism is on the rise, bringing people from all political positions into realizing that it is ethical and better to let people leave their lives peacefully. In the long run, it’s not this or that election that matters, but the tendency, the intellectual path being taken by the minds of the people. And that path is going towards liberty.

Pro-market organizations are springing up all over the place, new books are being translated and written, and students are organizing more and more. Entrepreneurs of the country are increasingly realizing that protectionism, subsidies, and artificially lowered interest rates are forces of destruction. People are realizing that business regulations, taxes and bureaucracy hurt the poor disproportionally, keeping them from taking their first steps. Further, reforms and the breathing spaces for freedom that they will open will create some breeding ground for liberty to show in practice what it preaches. Once people experience its effect in their lives and see the results, it’s hard to think they will give it up easily.

Which brings us back to the question of how we got here. The short answer is that we don’t really know for sure, we are just as stupefied as everyone else. We just got used to feeling like that all the time and got on with spreading liberty all the same.

Yet some names are unavoidable. Dilma Rousseff’s incompetent government, the economic crisis she and her party brought about, plus two enormous corruption scandals were undeniably fundamental for this libertarian awakening. Few things help the libertarian arguments as having people in government who are so clearly a band of thieves writ large, and government services are so clearly an unsalvageable disaster.

But that alone doesn’t do it. There are many people who brought the ideas of liberty to the people. One cannot pass up Henry Maksoud, who in the seventies and eighties was translating Mises and Hayek on his typewriter and running his “Visão” magazine, dedicated to promoting freedom. Since he wasn’t a journalist, the law and the journalists union held that he couldn’t be the head editor of the magazine, so he paid the fine every month and got on with it.

And there are many others, too many to name completely, who spent the last decade running up and down the country doing lectures, talks, classes and fomenting study groups. Most if not all of them did so at a personal and financial loss, in times where the eternal victory of socialism in Brazil was all but a matter of time, in completely hostile places such as left-wing dominated universities, almost always gathering a handful of people willing to listen.

The Mises Institute Brazil has also been fundamental to this process. By translating dozens of books and spreading them all over the country, and holding strong, clear and deep articles predicting the economic crises in Brazil as early as 2011, they set up an intellectual foundation that even the Left dares only to take careful swipes at.

Another cornerstone were entrepreneurial associations such as the Instituto de Estudos Empresariais in Rio Grande do Sul or the many Institutos de Formação de Lideres, spread all over the country. They brought in entrepreneurs from many different paths to learn about Mises, Hayek, liberty, economics and politics, and were fundamental in sowing the many types of seeds a movement such as ours needs.

Lastly, we have the internet and all its wonders. With my simple YouTube channel I can reach a hundred thousand people a day, and many other channels, Facebook pages, twitter accounts, blogs and all form an ecosystem of ideas that help us get the ideas of liberty into all corners of this country.

If you are interested in finding out more, then by all means come to Brazil and see it for yourself. We’d love to figure out how to package it and export it to the world.

About the author:
*Raphaël Lima is a popular media commentator and author in Brazil. His Youtube channel is one of the largest and most closely watched in the country.

Source:
This article was published by the MISES Institute

Notes
1. Published in English as Economic Policy. 

South Korea and India agreed with the US on the outline of deals that would allow it to keep importing some Iranian oil after it asked the United States for “maximum flexibility” this week, according to Asian officials.

No final decision has been made and an announcement is unlikely before US sanctions on Iran are re-imposed Nov. 5, the officials said, asking not to be identified because the information is confidential. That opens the possibility that the terms could still be modified or the deals scrapped entirely.

The waivers would ensure at least some Iranian oil continues to flow to the global market, potentially calming fears of a supply crunch and further suppressing international oil prices just before mid-term elections in the US Brent crude has fallen 14 percent from over $85 a barrel last month on signs that other OPEC producers will pump more to offset any supply gap, according to Bloomberg.

Almost all buyers have been negotiating with the US for waivers. That was after the US President Donald Trump in May withdrew from a nuclear agreement with Tehran hammered out by his predecessor, Barack Obama, and said he would re-impose economic curbs lifted under that 2015 accord.

India’s payments for the Iranian oil will go into a local escrow account, which can be used for barter trade with the Middle East producer, one of the people said.

A waiver would allow companies to buy limited volumes of Iranian oil without running the risk of being shut out of the US financial system. In India, it would provide some relief by allowing the purchase of relatively cheap crude as the government faces protests over higher fuel costs before national elections next year.

And for South Korea, a US exemption would mean a resumption in imports of the Persian Gulf state’s South Pars condensate, a type of ultra-light oil that is particularly critical for the Asian nation because many of its plants are geared to process it.

Buffalo Bishop Richard J. Malone didn’t come across too well on the October 28 edition of “60 Minutes.” But there is more to this story than what the CBS show aired. None of the parties to this story come to the table with their hands clean.

Bishop Malone has admitted making bad decisions, but he maintains that his overall record is defensible. The “60 Minutes” segment detailed some of those bad decisions. For example, giving Father Arthur Smith, a known homosexual predator, a clean slate, and then assigning him to the post of cruise ship chaplain was indefensible.

Some priests have come forward with complaints against Bishop Malone. Father Bob Zilliox contends there are eight or nine priests in the Buffalo diocese who should not be in the priesthood. If he is correct, then this would be a very serious situation, one in need of immediate redress.

The “60 Minutes” episode focused heavily on the claims made by Bishop Malone’s former executive assistant, Siobhan O’Connor; she worked for him for three years. The 35-year-old quit her job on August 10, but not before anonymously turning over to WKBW-TV copies of files she obtained. The ABC-affiliate ran a three-part series on her and the church documents, and that, in turn, led CBS to interview O’Connor.

Did O’Connor ever appraise Bishop Malone of her concerns? Yes, she spoke to him in March. He said he was handling these matters. Did she do anything further, in the five months before she quit? She wrote an opinion column in the Buffalo News in May, stating her sympathy for the victims of abuse, but she never said a word about any wrongdoing by the bishop or anyone else in the diocese. “60 Minutes” did not ask her to explain herself.

O’Connor has moved quickly from the inquiring assistant to the courageous activist. According to CBS News, she wants a “cleansing” of the Church, saying that “full financial bankruptcy” is preferable to what she witnessed. That is quite a statement given her limited experience working with priests and bishops. Interestingly, on November 13, when the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops assemble in Baltimore for their fall meeting, she will be speaking at a rally organized by anti-Church zealots.

It appears O’Connor is fast learning the ropes of how to “cleanse” the Church. Most of those who work for the Catholic Church have never heard of Mitchell Garabedian, but somehow O’Connor has. He is a Boston attorney with a long-standing hatred of the Catholic Church—he does not hide his animus. He was at her side at a press conference on October 30 in Buffalo, saying he is prepared to defend her, if necessary.

Garabedian and I locked horns in 2011 when a Boston priest, Father Charles Murphy, died. As I said at the time, Murphy died “a broken man.” The man who broke him was Garabedian.

In 2006, Garabedian sued Father Murphy for inappropriately touching a minor 25 years earlier; on the eve of the trial, the woman dropped her suit. In 2010, he sued the priest again, this time for allegedly fondling a  man 40 years earlier. The accuser was deep in debt and his credibility was questioned even by his own family!

When Father Murphy died, Brian McGrory of the Boston Globe called what Garabedian did to him “a disgrace.” I called Garabedian at the time to see if he had any regrets about pressing charges against Father Murphy, and he immediately went into a rage, screaming like a madman. I asked him to calm down, but he continued to go ballistic, making sweeping condemnations of all priests. This is the kind of lawyer that the former executive assistant managed to find.

The media involved come across even worse. On October 30, Bishop Malone released an email that O’Connor sent to employees at the diocese the day before she quit. In it, she commended the bishop for his great work, saying “it has been a privilege to work by your side as you shepherd our diocese.” She specifically singled out his holiness, as well as his “Sheen-like eloquence” (a reference to one of the Church’s towering American figures, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen).

O’Connor closed her letter thanking Bishop Malone for “all the opportunities I’ve had and lessons I’ve learned while working for you and with you.”

Remember, she had already leaked damaging information to the press about Malone. Did she lie about the bishop in her praiseworthy remarks, or is she simply a duplicitous activist?

When Bishop Malone released O’Connor’s letter, the Associated Press, the most powerful wire service in the nation, took the occasion to make him the bad guy. In a short news story, it said, “Bishop Blasts Whistleblower Who Copied Sex Misconduct Files.” Malone did nothing of the kind: He made public her letter, noting how contradictory it was. AP intentionally misled readers, trying to exculpate O’Connor.

CBS, and “60 Minutes” in particular, also deserve to be criticized. It has had its share of accused molesters working in the most important jobs in the company—Charlie Rose, Jeff Fager, and Les Moonves—yet it never has time to turn its “60 Minutes” cameras on them. In August, Brian Steinberg, writing for Variety, said, “The allegations are worthy of an investigation by ’60 Minutes’—if only they weren’t about the news division that produces the show.”

Dozens of women have accused Rose, the CBS anchor and pundit, of sexual misconduct—he allegedly likes to expose himself—dating back to 1986. According to a Washington Post blog story, “Rumors about Rose’s behavior have circulated for years.”

One of Rose’s assistants, Kyle Godfrey-Ryan, “recalled at least a dozen instances where Rose walked nude in front to her while she worked in one of his New York City homes.” He also made sexually charged phone calls to the then-21-year-old late at night or in the early morning.

Did she report it? Yes, she told Yvette Vega, Rose’s long-time executive producer. “She [Vega] would just shrug and just say, ‘That’s just Charlie being Charlie.'” To show what a class act Rose was, when he found out that Godrey-Ryan told a mutual friend about his behavior, he fired her.

Before he became chairman of CBS News in 2011, Fager was the executive producer of “60 Minutes.” He then took over the reins at “60 Minutes” again in 2015. He has been accused by six women of sexual misconduct, especially when he was drunk. Fager is also accused of covering up for his sexually compromised workplace buddies who reported to him.

Moonves was CBS chief executive for 20 years; it ended in September when he stepped down amidst serious sexual misconduct allegations. He has also been accused of promoting several men known for their sexual misconduct. This may sound familiar: CBS quietly paid settlements to the women who complained.

Just recently, it was reported that more than 250 women who work at CBS have spoken to investigators. Some, however, refuse to talk because they don’t trust the company.

Not only will CBS not authorize “60 Minutes” to disclose the depth of its own sexual abuse scandal, it has the nerve to claim that all priests are engaged in a cover-up. The “60 Minutes” producer of the O’Connor segment, Guy Campanile, told CBS News that “the church is made of people, but the ones in charge are priests [evidently they are not people] and priests are so good at keeping secrets.”

Would that include New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who outed Theodore McCarrick? It wasn’t the media which did that. Moreover, just this week Dolan made public some accusations against one of his auxiliary bishops, stemming from alleged offenses that occurred decades ago. Does CBS—or any media outlet in the nation—have a program like the New York archdiocese that outs suspected abusers? Why not?

NBC is just as phony. Its Buffalo affiliate, WGRZ-TV, has unveiled a petition asking the public to pressure the Buffalo diocese to publicly release the full list of accused priests. If it were serious about the issue of sexual abuse—and not “getting the Church”—it would begin by pressing NBC to make public a list of all those employees who have been accused of sexual misconduct.

After all, Matt Lauer is hardly the only NBC employee to have been accused of being a predator. Last year, Variety wrote the following. “Lauer’s conduct was not a secret among other employees at ‘Today,’ numerous sources say. At least one of the anchors would gossip about stories she had heard, spreading them among the staff. ‘Management sucks there,’ says a former reporter….They protected the s*** out of Matt Lauer.”

Addie Zinone, who worked for Lauer, and media critic Ken Auletta, confirm that many others knew something was wrong. Joe Scarborough, co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” had this to say about Lauer. “The whole theme was that he does the show and then he has sex with people, with employees. So this was whispered behind closed doors? No, it was shouted from the mountaintops and everybody laughed about it.” Including, evidently, Scarborough, who never said a public word about it.

Jessica Steyers, who worked at NBC Sports, has spoken out about the constant harassment by coworkers, and the nonchalant reaction by executives. Karin Roland, a feminist who has examined NBC, says “this happens as the result of a culture and a pattern of protecting stars and making them untouchable.”

Most of the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church occurred in the last century, primarily between 1965 and 1985. But when it comes to sexual abuse in Hollywood and in the media, it is as bad today as it ever was. Lucky for them there is little interest in outing the dregs among them. They’d rather focus on accused priests from a half-century ago.

Prenatal exposure to malaria considerably alters the newborn’s innate immune response (i.e. its first line of defence), particularly when the placenta has been infected, according to a study led by ISGlobal – an institution supported by “la Caixa” Foundation-, the Clinical Research Unit of Nanoro (CRUN) and the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp (ITM). The results, published in BMC Medicine, could help explain why some babies are more susceptible to malaria than others during their first year of life.

Despite the large-scale implementation of intermittent preventive treatment (IPTp) to avoid malaria during pregnancy, a great number of babies in endemic countries are born to mothers with infection by Plasmodium falciparum. The type of prenatal exposure to malaria (whether the infection is systemic or in the placenta) is believed to affect the risk of developing disease in the first years of life, although the mechanisms are poorly understood.

In this study, the research team evaluated whether prenatal exposure to malaria could lead to changes in the so-called innate immune response, which does not involve antibodies and represents the new-borns’ first line of defence against malaria. To do so, the researchers determined the type of prenatal exposure (i.e. systemic infection versus acute, chronic or past placental infection) in a cohort with over 300 mothers and their babies that had participated in a clinical trial in Burkina Faso. Using cord blood, they assessed the production of cytokines and chemokines (mediators of the immune system) upon incubation with a series of molecules that are common to many pathogens and recognised by cells from the innate immune system.

They found that blood cord cells from babies exposed to malaria produced less mediators when non-stimulated, as compared to unexposed babies. However, cells from babies exposed to past placental infection were hyper-reactive upon stimulation. Certain biomarkers were associated with protection while others were associated with malaria risk during the first year of life. “The different effect on the newborn’s immune response depending on the type of exposure may explain why some babies are more susceptible than others to developing malaria,” explains Carlota Dobaño, ISGlobal researcher and co-director of the study together with Anna Rosanas-Urgell, from ITM. “This may also have implications regarding how these babies respond to other infections or to vaccines that contain adjuvants”, she adds.

Given that past placental malaria, which potentially occurs early during pregnancy, has a profound effect on the newborn’s immune response, the authors conclude “a strategy to screen and treat malaria should be implemented as early as possible in the first trimester.”

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree on anti-Ukrainian sanctions on Thursday.

The retaliatory measures taken as a response to the “unfriendly Ukrainian actions against Russian citizens”, strike 332 Ukrainian individuals and 68 entities, according to a document published on the government’s official website.

Son of Ukraine’s president Alexey Poroshenko, Minister of the Interior Arsen Avakov, ex-Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko and a number of other Ukrainian top officials are on the Russian black list.

The sanctions hit the biggest Ukrainian enterprises like Naftogaz, Dneproazot and Glikohim.

The decree implies the freezing and ban for transferring assets from Russia of the persons and companies from the sanctions list.

Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said in a daily conference call with journalists that Russia had not initiated the sanctions but was only responding to the sanctions by Ukraine.

Original source

Researchers at the University of Minnesota and the Somali, Latino, and Hmong Partnership for Health and Wellness have new evidence that the gut microbiota of immigrants and refugees rapidly Westernize after a person’s arrival in the United States. The study of communities migrating from Southeast Asia to the U.S., published in the journal Cell, could provide insight into some of the metabolic health issues, including obesity and diabetes, affecting immigrants to the country.

“We found that immigrants begin losing their native microbes almost immediately after arriving in the U.S. and then acquire alien microbes that are more common in European-American people,” says senior author Dan Knights, a computer scientist and quantitative biologist at the University of Minnesota. “But the new microbes aren’t enough to compensate for the loss of the native microbes, so we see a big overall loss of diversity.”

It has been shown before that people in developing nations have a much greater diversity of bacteria in their gut microbiome, the population of beneficial microbes living in humans’ intestines, than people living in the U.S. “But it was striking to see this loss of diversity actually happening in people who were changing countries or migrating from a developing nation to the U.S.,” he says.

The research was conducted with assistance from–and inspired by–Minnesota’s large community of refugees and immigrants from Southeast Asia, particularly the Hmong and Karen peoples, ethnic minorities that originally were from China and Burma and that today have communities in Thailand. The study used a community-based participatory research approach: members of the Hmong and Karen communities in both Minnesota and Thailand were involved in designing the study, recruiting participants, and educating their communities about the findings.

“Obesity was a concern that was coming up a lot for the Hmong and Karen communities here. In other studies, the microbiome had been related to obesity, so we wanted to know if there was potentially a relationship in immigrants and make any findings relevant and available to the communities. These are vulnerable populations, so we definitely try to make all of our methods as sensitive to that as possible and make sure that they have a stake in the research,” says first author Pajau Vangay.

Knights, Vangay, and their team compared the gut microbiota of Hmong and Karen people still living in Thailand; Hmong and Karen people who had immigrated to the U.S.; the children of those immigrants; and Caucasian American controls. They also were able to follow a group of 19 Karen refugees as they relocated from Thailand to the U.S., which meant they could track how the refugees’ gut microbiomes changed longitudinally in their first six to nine months in the U.S.

And the researchers did find that significant changes happened that fast: in those first six to nine months, the Western strain Bacteroides began to displace the non-Western bacteria strain Prevotella. But this Westernization also continued to happen over the course of the first decade in the U.S., and overall microbiome diversity decreased the longer the immigrants had been in the U.S. The participants’ food logs suggested that eating a more Western diet played a role in perturbing the microbiome but couldn’t explain all the changes.

The changes were even more pronounced in their children. “We don’t know for sure why this is happening. It could be that this has to do with actually being born in the USA or growing up in the context of a more typical US diet. But it was clear that the loss of diversity was compounded across generations. And that’s something that has been seen in animal models before, but not in humans,” says Knights.

Although the research didn’t establish a cause-and-effect relationship between the microbiome changes in immigrants and the immigrant obesity epidemic, it did show a correlation: greater westernization of the microbiome was associated with greater obesity.

Knights believes that this research has a lot to tell us about our health. “When you move to a new country, you pick up a new microbiome. And that’s changing not just what species of microbes you have, but also what enzymes they carry, which may affect what kinds of food you can digest and how your diet interacts with your health,” he says. “This might not always be a bad thing, but we do see that Westernization of the microbiome is associated with obesity in immigrants, so this could an interesting avenue for future research into treatment of obesity, both in immigrants and potentially in the broader population.”

By Nielmar de Oliveira

Petrobras International Braspetro BV (Pibbv), a subsidiary of Brazil’s state-controlled giant Petrobras, unveiled the selling of its 50 percent stake in Petrobras Oil & Gas B.V. (Po&gbv), a joint venture in the Netherlands with BTG Pactual E&P B.V. with assets in Nigeria. The contract with the purchasing company, Petrovida Holding B.V was signed Wednesday (Oct. 31).

Petrovida is formed by partners Vitol Investment Partnership II Ltd, Africa Oil Corp, and Delonex Energy Ltd. The transaction is estimated to reach over $1.5 billion. Of the total, Petrobras will receive $1.407 billion in cash, subject to change until the operation is concluded, plus a future payment up to $123 million.

According to Petrobras, “The conclusion of the transaction will be subject to the meeting of usual preceding conditions, including the approval of relevant agencies in Nigeria.”

Fields in Nigeria

Despite not being the operator in any of the fields, Po&gbv owns an eight percent stake in the OML 127 block, where the Agbami producing field is located, and a 16 percent stake in the OML 130 block, with Akpo producing field and the Egina field, in its final stage of development. The share of the production due to Petrobras is some 21 thousand barrels of oil equivalent per day.

The move is said to come as part of Petrobras’s Partnerships and Divestment Program, as set forth in the Business and Management Plan 2018–2022, and the continuous portfolio management, with a focus on investment in Brazil’s pre-salt oil.