The British are discovering that Brexit is a decision far too big for one close vote riddled with faulty information.

By Jolyon Howorth*

The Brexit process ground to a halt after UK Prime Minister Theresa May realized that the number of votes necessary to get her “deal” through the House of Commons fell short by, in her own words, “a significant margin” – as many as 200 votes. She accordingly cancelled the vote.

Disapproval for the package, after more than two years of debate under two prime ministers, came from three quarters: The “hard Brexiters” wish for a complete break from the European Union. The residual Remainers had never abandoned hope of reversing Brexit. Others prefer another type of “soft Brexit,” such as the EU relationship currently enjoyed by Norway. May’s proposals were seen as making little sense. In part, but only in part, because of the intractability of the Irish border situation – leaving the Irish border open to trade, people and services in the event of no deal while awaiting more negotiations. This would leave the United Kingdom indefinitely bound to adhere to almost all obligations of EU membership while abandoning any role in the decision-making process and continuing to pay into the EU budget.

Some decisions are so massive that snap judgment is not enough, and sustained constitutional approval over time is required.

 It is worth stepping back to consider the math behind May’s mission to withdraw the UK from EU membership. It has become almost commonplace for commentators to write that “a majority of the British people” or, if an attempt at nuance is made, “a majority of the electorate” voted to Leave the EU. This, for starters, is incorrect. It is true, that of those who cast a vote, 51.9 percent voted Leave and 48.1 percent Remain. The numbers of registered voters at the time of the referendum was about 46.5 million and turnout was about 72 percent. Those voting Leave numbered 15,188,406 – 32.66 percent of registered voters. Not all UK citizens of voting age were registered. Given that membership of the EU had been the default constitutional situation in the United Kingdom since 1973, the reality is that less than one third of UK citizens actively voted to Leave.

The parliamentary arithmetic is more revealing. Prior to the referendum, constituents called upon British MPs to declare their position: Those backing Leave numbered 158; those backing Remain numbered 479. Within the Conservative Party, deeply divided on the issue, 138 backed Leave while 185 backed Remain. The corresponding figures for Labour were 10 and 218. Former Prime Minister David Cameron scheduled a referendum rather than a parliamentary vote because he was confident that a sizeable majority would back Remain, putting an end to the civil war over this issue that had so bedeviled conservative administrations of his predecessors Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

The math is incontrovertible. Those actively in favor of leaving the EU constituted at most one third of the UK electorate and less than a quarter of MPs. This raises the issue of whether a constitutional change of such magnitude should be enacted by a simple majority of those casting a ballot – as opposed to by a much higher percentage – say two thirds, as is the case in many countries, including the United States. It also raises the question of whether direct democracy, a plebiscite, as opposed to representative democracy, a parliamentary vote, is the most appropriate means of making such a profound, complex and far-reaching decision.

The way in which this math has translated into the current political impasse is instructive. Hapless Cameron resigned. An internal Conservative Party selection process chose his successor, Theresa May. May, who had favored Remain, decided that the best way of attracting a maximum number of Conservative MP votes was to coin the slogan “Brexit means Brexit.” Like many Conservative MPs, she was nervous about the verdict of citizens who had voted Leave.

Thus, the politics of Leave  transmogrified into the mantra that “the people have spoken” and that democracy demands respect for their verdict. There are two problems with this approach.  The first is that democracy presupposes the ability of voters to change direction in a subsequent ballot. Leaving the EU, however, was not intended to be reversible. The second problem, more intractable, was that no one – May and least of all the electorate – had the slightest idea what leaving the EU would involve.

The politics of May’s Brexit mission involved many self-inflicted wounds. The decision taken on 29 March 2017 to invoke Article 50 of the EU Treaty – starting a clock that would oblige the UK to quit the EU two years later – was gratuitously premature. There was no vestige of consensus in March 2017, within the Tory Party or the country, as to what precisely the UK was trying to negotiate with the EU.

May’s decision to call an election in June 2017 in the hope of giving herself a large majority in Parliament to boost her negotiating position, backfired massively when she succeeded in losing the Tories’ existing majority and found herself hostage to a small extremist Irish party.

Above all, her unbending determination to deliver on her promise that “Brexit means Brexit” has been her undoing. Within months, it became clear to most objective observers that May herself did not have a clear or achievable objective. In an uncompromising speech in January 2017, she laid down several “red lines” insisting that unless the EU respected these, the UK would leave without a deal, threatening chaos for both the UK and the EU. These included ruling out membership of either the single market or the customs union, refusing the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, refusing to pay into the EU budget, and signing a free-trade agreement with the EU while simultaneously signing trade agreements around the world under her new slogan of “Global Britain.”

To date, she has failed to deliver on any of these red lines. Leaving the EU has turned out to be infinitely more difficult than May imagined. The government’s own economic forecasts confirmed those by an overwhelming majority of experts: The UK economy would suffer significantly from Brexit.

By the summer of 2018, the EU had imposed a package of concessions on the UK. This package made little sense, not so much a “deal” as scrapings May had extracted from the depths of the EU barrel. That package, known as the “Chequers Plan” for the name of the prime minister’s country house where it was discussed with her cabinet, led to the resignation of her main cabinet colleagues and today’s impasse.

This is where the math and the politics come into direct collision. She is at least 150 MPs short of a majority for her package. More than a third of her MPs, 117, have disavowed her.  The number of UK citizens polling in favor of Remain has risen while those clinging to Leave have dropped.  Current polls put the respective scores at 55 to 45. Since the referendum, 700,000 older voters, who favored Leave by 70 percent, have died. A similar number of younger voters who favored Remain by 70 percent have joined the electoral register.

May nevertheless rejects mounting pressure for a second referendum, which would put the Brexit question to an electorate fully aware of the issues and the stakes, as “undemocratic” – since it reneges on her promise that “Brexit means Brexit.” It would take an act of unparalleled statesmanship for May to acknowledge that the fundamental problem with Brexit is Brexit. If the math had favored Remain in 2016, the indications are that a second vote would confirm that preference. That is the essence of democracy. To hold out against such a course would be fundamentally undemocratic.

*Jolyon Howorth is a visiting professor of public policy with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He was a visiting professor of political science and international affairs at Yale University since 2002. He is professor emeritus of European politics at the University of Bath, United Kingdom, and visiting professor at Luiss Universitá Guido Carli, Rome. His recent publications include Security and Defense Policy in the European Union (second edition, 2014) and Defending Europe: The EU, NATO and the Quest for European Autonomy (edited with J. Keeler, 2003). Howorth is currently studying power transition in the contemporary world.

By Rev. Anthony Perkins*

These are difficult times that divide Christians from their neighbors and from one another. In large part this is because we do not agree on how to relate with secular culture and which parts of it, if any, can be blessed. Eastern Orthodox theologian and ethicist Vigen Guroian’s new analysis of secularism and how it insulates us from the power of the Gospel is timely and spot on. We can look to his work, and especially the collection of essays in The Orthodox Reality: Culture, Theology, and Ethics in the Modern World (Baker Academic, 2018), to see where he comes down on each of the major issues. He is, for example, pro-life, pro-traditional marriage and family, and pro-reestablishment of communion between East and West. But his views on specific issues are less important than understanding the process he used to arrive at them. His main point is that the widespread application of that process – a living connection to God through traditional worship – would lead, not just to a consensus on issues, but to the creation of a culture that can actually replace (rather than just battle) secularism.

Building on Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s For the Life of the World, Guroian argues that secularism separates all things, even sacred ones, from their source and turns them into objects. Groups then argue with one another about what criteria to use to evaluate these objects to find their virtue. Conservative Christians living in a secular culture become just one of many groups, endorsing what they consider to be better, more traditional and correct evaluations than their opponents. If their tactics and rhetoric are good, their standards of virtue may dominate for a while. But they will have succeeded at the expense of the truth and will have further reified the dominance of the heresy of secularism, because they themselves will have removed holy concepts from their contexts for utilitarian reasons. (See especially chapter 4.) This is a powerful observation that helps us understand why we seem to be losing the cultural war.

There are others who understand this, see the implications, and are enjoying some success in fighting back. Jordan Peterson is one of them. Peterson first won acclaim through his public refutation of state-enforced political correctness (and especially new gender pronouns), but he seems to have known that even victory in this domain would have been insufficient. Rather than turning this into a battle of competing evaluations, even one as useful and winnable as the value of social cohesion and of tradition over feelings, Peterson used his acclaim to help us reconnect the objects – and their proper evaluation – to their proximate source: traditional Judeo-Christian mythology.

Peterson’s YouTube series “The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories” goes through the major events and ideas of the Bible from Genesis onward and describes the time-tested wisdom they reveal about mankind, the world, and meaning – as well as how the society based on this wisdom created the most prosperous, good, and noble civilization in the history of mankind. This is hardly novel. Hundreds of thousands of churches in America offer Bible study classes that teach similar lessons every week. What is novel is Peterson’s reach. This video series has millions of views, has bolstered the confidence of many conservatives, and is especially popular with millennial men, a demographic traditional institutions have found hard to connect with. His success demonstrates that people are hungry for meaning and are willing to look to religion for answers. Peterson’s work is good, but it is not enough.

The Orthodox Reality explains why Peterson’s approach won’t succeed unless it is grafted onto or leads people towards something deeper. Secularism does not just objectify ideas like marriage, sexuality, and virtue; it is equally capable of objectifying – and thus dismissing – cultures and the mythologies that gave rise to them. Peterson’s approach is the best that secularism can offer, but as long as it works from within its confines, it cannot replace it. The problem is not just that the “good” of something in Peterson’s worldview is defined by its fitness or utility rather than its intrinsic value. The problem is that it allows for no living connection with anything really true or good. His agnostic approach to mythology and virtue is politically useful to the extent it privileges Western culture and the Judeo-Christian symbols and stories that are linked to them (these are “specifications of the symbolical ontology of creation,” as Guroian describes them on p. 135), but Guroian convincingly makes the case that they cannot heal, bless, and perfect mankind or the cosmos if they are cut off from their true Source.

The answer to the problems of our day is not just a restored commitment to the traditional Western canon and mythology, but a commitment to experiencing God through the traditional liturgical worship and sacraments of the Church, and allowing that experience to enliven us and the culture that rises up around us. The strength and beauty of Guroian’s theology is that it, like him, has been formed by that very experience. He writes in the chapter on marriage that, just as the Eucharist reveals the “epiphanic character” of the bread and wine that are the “natural symbols of flesh and blood, ” so to the service of marriage reveals the unique capacity of a male and female couple to become “one Christic and ecclesial being.” He is not proof-texting the marriage ceremony to support a traditional understanding of marriage. He is indeed expressing a truth that a life of worship and prayer has made obvious to him (and that is available to all who have allowed themselves to be reformed through their own immersion).

Similarly, when he points to the unique sacramental communion of traditional marital “coupling, ” he is less arguing against cultural norms of fornication and sodomy in favor of biblical morality than he is describing a specific example of how God works in the world to perfect His children. Unmarried sex may feel good, but Guroian is trying to help us understand that feelings and strong opinions, even ones derived from an abstract commitment to traditional morality, are poor substitutes for a connection with the living God. Without that connection and the true love it sustains, even the perfect words of “men and angels” are as a “noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (I Corinthians 13:1).

Guroian does a great job describing how we fell into this heretical rut in Part I and II of The Orthodox Reality. There was a time when we knew that God was with us. The Holy Bible and tradition, Christianity’s symbols and stories, the concepts of virtue, asceticism, and morality; all these were the words He used to voice His love for us, a love that He shared with us continually through worship and mystery/ sacrament. As a happy marriage fills a home with peace and hospitality that increases and shares its love (p. 145), so our joyful union with Him created a culture that deepened the awesome reality of His presence. As the rituals of home life manifest the harmony between those who live there and give it shape, so our connection with God through “prayer and sacrament” allowed us to “remember and regain” the “divine culture” that was lost to us through the Fall (p. 15). Secularism ruined this. For a while we missed this ruination. We celebrated the way Christian concepts, after having been liberated from their “religious” context, became universal, not anticipating how this liberation would eventually allow people to attack Christian institutions with the very concepts Christianity gave them as they redefined them to meet their needs (pp. 59, 129).

Guroian points out that Orthodoxy, with its insistence on the permanence of God’s uncreated energies pervading creation, has been somewhat immune to the encroachment of secularism (pp. 46-47), but also notes that the Orthodox have squandered the evangelical opportunity this provides through ethnophyletism and a decrease in the kind of commitment to creedal truths that would keep their spirituality from descending into syncretic mysticism and therapeutic deism along with the rest of the world (p. 49). Because we have been defined by secularism, we are less interested in what worship is than what it does, and thus we disable the vehicle of our deliverance.

So what is the answer? Guroian is insistent that responding to secularism is fraught with danger (a special danger for converts – a very American fortress mentality – is found on p. 76). Nor can we hope to bless its more noble parts the way we have done with other cultures. The best answer he gives in The Orthodox Reality is the response Dostoyevsky gave to the penetrating attacks of the middle brother, Ivan, in The Brothers Karamazov, a response he gives in the witness of the younger brother, Alyosha. Alyosha did not give a point-by-point refutation of Ivan’s arguments, nor did he attack him or refuse to live with him. Rather, his actions provided “a religious vision that refute[d] Ivan’s assertion that the love that Christ taught is neither possible for human beings nor triumphant over evil and death.”

Rather than trying to fight a losing battle to reclaim the lost Christian culture of pre-Enlightenment Europe, Guroian argues that Christians need to create a new organic version: an Orthodox- Catholic culture that grows out of our complete dedication to our mutual, sacramental, credal, and evangelical life in Christ. This book may not provide a complete guide on how to do this, but it is a prophetic description of what secularism has done and the destruction that awaits us if we further isolate ourselves from the Source.

*About the author: Fr. Anthony is a priest in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA and a professor at St. Sophia Ukrainian Orthodox Theological Seminary.

Source: This article was published by the Acton Institute

By Carmen Elena Dorobăț*

After over three years of following the disastrous effects of socialism unfolding in Venezuela I can confidently say that 99% of the articles I’ve read on the issue will sooner or later point out that Venezuela’s crisis is not only surprisingly dire, but rather counterintuitive given that it is one of the most oil rich countries in the world, with probably the largest proven reserves. As a result, most analyses will conclude that it is the current president’s incompetence on the one hand, and the fall in oil prices in the last 5 years on the other, that have brought about the collapse of the once-prosperous South American economy. The latest example is the short video posted by The Economist, which, in summarizing Venezuela’s recent history, explains that “after Mr Chavez—who had spent generously when oil prices were booming—died in 2013, oil prices crashed and… Maduro inherited an economic crisis which he made worse with his ineptness. The country plunged into chaos.”

That the gravity of the situation is still surprising to most commentators when it should have been expected long ago is something I’ve discussed before. I would like now to focus on the implicit economic fallacy that underlines the assumption that a country is bound to be inherently prosperous if it owns significant natural resources, particularly oil.

First of all, it is merely an impression that Venezuela was indeed prosperous in a healthy way at some point in the past. The large-scale exploitation of its rich oil reserves, first discovered before the Spanish conquest, began only in 1910. Before, Simon Bolivar’s 1811 decree stated national ownership of all domestic mines and production was minimal at first. The beginning of the Venezuelan oil industry was also still plagued by government intervention, as drilling and refining were still only permitted via governmental concessions—usually offered to close friends of the 1920s Gómez administration. Later in 1975-76, a monopoly of oil production was handed to the state-owned enterprise Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), then the world’s third largest refiner after Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon, as the Venezuelan oil industry was fully nationalized.1 Although foreign companies were allowed minority partnerships, the taxes they had to pay were significantly increased during the Chavez administration.

During this turbulent history, oil production waxed and waned, following state directives rather than market incentives, yet booming oil prices in the early 2000s allowed for large cash windfalls. But eventually after 2005 all revenues from it began to be rerouted by the government into Chavez’s lavish social missions, which covered everything from free health clinics to neighborhood basketball courts.

It is this period that most commentators see as one of great Venezuelan prosperity. But this prosperity was illusory, a mere veneer for the consumption of capital that was occurring. Capital goods—especially those in the oil industry—were being misused and depleted through central planning. For a while, this created an apparent wave of prosperity and development that Joseph Stiglitz called “impressive” at the time and that Mises had long before likened to burning one’s own furniture to heat up the room. But as soon as capital wore out, the façade collapsed and the centrally planned mismanagement of the resources was revealed. No matter how rich in resources the country still is, those resources were and still are used inefficiently and wastefully. Alternatively, Switzerland is very poor in mineral resources—or any natural resources, mind—and has not been plunged into an inflationary crisis. 

Chavez not only failed to eradicate poverty, as he claimed, but he laid the country squarely down the path of socialism and all its disastrous effects were merely magnified by Maduro. The latter is, contrary to its Western critics, not inept, but rather a committed and consistent socialist dictator, who only escalated and tightened, in good socialist fashion, government control over everything from currency and prices to political dissent and free speech. This, and falling world oil prices, certainly sped up the disintegration of the Venezuelan economy, but did not cause it.

What originally caused the Venezuelan crisis was not oil, nor can oil now be inherently its cure. The cause of Venezuela’s collapse is the stunting of domestic capital accumulation that began with monetary and social policies of the preceding century and whose effects are now fully felt. And it is the same brand of poor economic policies and government spending (albeit not in the same degree) that is sought after and implemented in the U.S. or Europe, where it is touted either as innovative, stimulating, or anti-cyclical.

In 1952, in The Plight of Underdeveloped Nations, Mises was discussing Iran’s plans to nationalize their oil industry and was pointing out the precise—and since unchanged—hypocrisy of the West in criticizing socialist policies they were themselves implementing at home:

If it is right for the British to nationalize the British coal mines, it cannot be wrong for the Iranians to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. If Mr. Attlee [Labour Party leader and prime minister of England from 1945–1951] were consistent, he would have congratulated the Iranians on their great socialist achievement. But no socialist can be or ever was consistent.

Mises’s further analysis in that essay—quoted below at length—can be used not only to cut through to the heart of the current Venezuelan problems, but to lay out the only solution for overcoming the crisis and allow for true prosperity. And as you might have guessed, it does not involve mentioning the large oil reserves at all:

What the underdeveloped nations must do if they sincerely want to eradicate penury and to improve the economic conditions of their destitute masses is to adopt those policies of “rugged individualism” which have created the welfare of Western Europe and the United States. They must resort to laissez faire; they must remove all obstacles fettering the spirit of enterprise and stunting domestic capital accumulation and the inflow of capital from abroad.

But what the governments of these countries are really doing today is just the contrary. Instead of emulating the polices that created the comparative wealth and welfare of the capitalistic nations, they are choosing those contemporary policies of the West which slow down the further accumulation of capital and lay stress on what they consider to be a fairer distribution of wealth and income. Leaving aside the problem whether or not these policies are beneficial to the economically advanced nations, it must be emphasized that they are patently nonsensical when resorted to in the economically backward countries. Where there is very little to be distributed, a policy of an allegedly “fairer” redistribution is of no use at all. […]

The problem of rendering the underdeveloped nations more prosperous cannot be solved by material aid. It is a spiritual and intellectual problem. Prosperity is not simply a matter of capital investment. It is an ideological issue. What the underdeveloped countries need first is the ideology of economic freedom and private enterprise and initiative that makes for the accumulation and maintenance of capital as well as for the employment of the available capital for the best possible and cheapest satisfaction of the most urgent wants of the consumers.

*About the author: Dr. Carmen Elena Dorobăț is a Fellow of the Mises Institute and assistant professor of business and economics at Leeds Trinity University in the United Kingdom. She has a PhD in economics from the University of Angers, and is the recipient of the 2015 O.P. Alford III Prize in Political Economy and the 2017 Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Excellence in Research and Teaching. Her research interests include international trade, monetary theory and policy, and the history of economic thought. Contact Carmen Elena Dorobăț

Source: This article was published by the MISES Institute

Notes:

1. See Alvarez, J. and J. Fiorito (2005) Venezuelan Oil Unifying Latin-America, Stanford University, available at https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297a/Venezuelan%20Oil%20Unifying%20Latin%20America.doc

By Hannah Brockhaus

Following the allegations made by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò about the case of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, many have called for official Vatican files on the former cardinal to be released. While this may seem like the easiest way of assessing the truth of Viganò’s claims, many of the documents in question could be protected by the “pontifical secret.” But what is that?

The pontifical secret, also sometimes called papal secrecy, is a rule of confidentiality protecting sensitive information regarding the governance of the universal Church. It is similar to the “classified” or “confidential” status common in companies or civil governments.

While the use of the English word “secret” in relation to Church documents and processes is often invoked dramatically, the term is actually taken from the Latin word “secreto,” which simply means “confidential.”

According to the “Secreta continere,” a canonical instruction issued by the Secretariat of State in 1974, those bound by the pontifical secret take an oath at the beginning of their service in the Curia or the diplomatic corps, promising to “in no way, under any pretext, whether of greater good, or of very urgent and very grave reason,” to break the secret.

Materials covered by the pontifical secret include diplomatic communications made between the Vatican’s nunciatures around the world, but also apply to a range of other subjects. These include private dossiers and recommendations on priests and bishops being considered for promotion. Controversially, the secret also covers penal processes concerning major crimes handled by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, including cases involving the sexual abuse of minors.

The reasons why the secret is applied to different materials depend upon the circumstances. Private communications between what are effectively papal embassies and the Vatican’s Secretariat of State are protected by confidentiality in the same way, and for the same reasons, that other diplomatic correspondence is kept classified. Files pertaining to bishops or prospective bishops are handled in much the same manner as confidential personnel matters are treated in companies or other institutions.

In judicial cases, the secret is meant to protect the privacy of victims, the good name of the accused (at least until they are convicted), and even the confidentiality of the accusers, who might be under the authority of someone under investigation.

Concerning the case of Archbishop McCarrick, Vatican files could conceivably contain materials covering all of these categories. In addition to possible penal processes and the circumstances surrounding his various promotions – including what was known about his behavior at different times – records could also concern any work undertaken by McCarrick as a papal envoy in different places including, for example, China.

As the name “pontifical secret” implies, it is only the pope – or someone empowered by him – who can dispense from it. Those hoping for curial officials to act on their own initiative, even for the supposed good of the Church, are likely to be disappointed. If they were to do so, they could find themselves subjected to disciplinary measures in the same way that any government official might if they were to release classified documents without authorization.

The seriousness of any violation of the secret by curial officials in relation to McCarrick’s case would depend on the nature of the material disclosed.

Fr. Pablo Gefaell Chamochín, a canon lawyer and professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, told CNA that if a person is judged to have acted in violation of pontifical secrecy, he or she could be subjected to punishment.

Pointing to the Secretariat of State’s instruction, Gefaell said, “if the violation of pontifical secrecy becomes known, a penalty proportionate to the wrongdoing and the damage it causes could be inflicted by the competent dicastery.”

Canon law does not establish a specific penalty for a violation of the secret. It would be left to the discretion of the competent Vatican authority to decide what the appropriate punishment would be for a particular violation, Gefaell clarified.

Regarding the potential release of any documents relating to Archbishop McCarrick, potentially held either at the apostolic nunciature in Washington, D.C. or at the Congregation for Bishops in Rome, it is Pope Francis alone who could order their effective declassification.

Until the pope decides otherwise, it is unlikely that Vatican officials bound by oath to observe the secret will be making any new documents available.

As a Christian Palestinian living in a politically-charged America, I look forward every year to the Christmas holiday season, a period of about 30 days during which the world pauses from its violent chaos to think about the plight of the quickly vanishing segment of Christians who are barely surviving in the Middle East.

During the rest of the year, save around Easter in the spring, it is rare for politicians, world leaders, activists and the media to bother themselves about the plight of Christian Arabs. Christian Arabs are like the canary in the cage, a method used many years ago by miners and underground explorers to warn of the first signs of peril. If the canary is still alive, the miners have little to fear. If the canary falters and dies, it means the miners are in grave danger. 

The Christian Arab canary is faltering in the Middle East cage but, unfortunately, no one is really paying attention — other than the pandering that the Christmas season has evolved into, during which Israelis, Americans and even Arabs each try to use the topic of Middle East Christians for their own political gain. 

Despite deep roots in the Middle East, the Christian population continues to dwindle. But it is not the numbers that concern me and nor should they concern anyone the most. What should concern everyone is how Christian Arabs have been marginalized and have vanished into the bigger picture. 

Last summer, Pope Francis used a visit to the Mediterranean city of Bari on the eastern coast of Italy, which is often described as “the window to the Middle East,” to sound a canary-like alarm that the Christians of the Middle East have become victims of a “murderous indifference.” 

Accompanied by the heads or representatives of most of the Christian World, including the Orthodox and Assyrian churches, Catholics and Lutherans, Francis urged the gathering to unite under the motto: “Peace be upon you. Christians together for the Middle East.” 

But Christians are not together. Only months earlier, in January 2018, US Vice President Mike Pence visited Jordan. He was received by King Abdullah, who expressed concern about President Donald Trump’s decision to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and then went to Israel where he addressed the Knesset, including the empty seats of Arab members protesting his callous disregard for genuine peace. 

In accepting his nomination for vice president on Trump’s Republican ticket in 2016, Pence described himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order,” playing the Christian card in the hopes of solidifying America’s large white-Christian voter bloc.

And solidify that vote Trump and Pence did in the presidential election, with 75 percent voting to support their ticket. And yet, as the second-most powerful man in the world, Pence spent little time speaking about Middle East Christians, preferring instead to merely promise to support the needs of only a segment of Christians who are living in Iraq.

Pence defended Trump’s decision to strip financial aid from Palestinians, a demand made by Israel, and pandered to the needs of Iraq’s Christians as being the representatives of the entire region. Like many Americans, Pence forgets that Christians originated in the Holy Land and that Jerusalem is important to them, too. He has chosen to ignore the fact that Christians suffer equally alongside Muslims under brutal Israeli military occupation. 

With that, Christians can find little hope for their own future, even as delicate canaries who play such a significant role as the first front to a worsening Middle East region. I think of the true centers of Christianity.

Not in Washington DC or in America, which claims to be a “Christian country” and yet turns its backs on Christian Arabs. Not in Rome, where the Pope courageously but diplomatically challenges Israel’s atrocities to no avail. I think of Bethlehem, where the prophet of Christianity was born, and the nearby Christian cities of Beit Jala and Beit Sahour, where his teachings are recited everyday. I think of Nazareth, where Jesus lived, and the vanishing Christian populations such as the surviving Taybeh in Palestine’s Israeli-occupied West Bank. I think of Jerusalem, which has been surrendered by the world to Israel’s desecrations and violence. I think of how dim the Christian lights have become in those cities as the canaries struggle to breathe. 

But most of all, I think of how Christians around the world have turned their backs and abandoned the heart of their faith, forgetting their barely surviving ancestors in the Holy Land. If Arab Christians are allowed to be forgotten, then the future of the Middle East is bleak. The canaries in the Middle East are struggling to survive and warn the region and the world of the impending catastrophe that is being allowed to happen.

And no one is listening.

The problem with the Fed hiking rates now is that Trump has already stressed the paychecks of most Americans. The rate hike will make matters worse.

Most Americans are still living in the shadow of the Great Recession that started in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009. More Americans have jobs, but their pay has barely risen when adjusted for inflation.

Many are worse off due to the escalating costs of housing, healthcare, and education. And the value of whatever assets they own is less than in 2007.

Trump has added to their burden by undermining the Affordable Care Act, rolling back overtime pay, hobbling labor organizing, reducing taxes on corporations and the wealthy but not on most workers, allowing states to cut Medicaid, and imposing tariffs that increase the prices of many goods.

All of which suggests we’re careening toward the same sort of crash we had in 2008, and possibly as bad as 1929.

Clear away the financial rubble from those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and what they as workers could produce.

Each of these imbalances finally tipped the economy over.

The same imbalance has been growing again. The richest 1 percent of Americans now takes home about 20 percent of total income, and owns over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. These are close to the peaks of 1928 and 2007.

The underlying problem isn’t that Americans have been living beyond their means. It’s that their means haven’t been keeping up with the growing economy. Most gains have gone to the top.

But the rich only spend a small fraction of what they earn. The economy depends on the spending of middle and working class families.

By the first quarter of this year, household debt was at a record high of $13.2 trillion. Almost 80 percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.

The last time household debt was nearly this high was just before the Great Recession. Between 1983 and 2007, household debt soared while most economic gains went to the top.

If the majority of households had taken home a larger share of national income, they wouldn’t have needed to go so deeply into debt.

Similarly, between 1913 and 1928, the ratio of personal debt to the total national economy nearly doubled. 

After the 1929 crash, the government invented new ways to boost the wages of most Americans – Social Security, unemployment insurance, overtime pay, a minimum wage, the requirement that employers bargain with labor unions, and, finally, a full-employment program called World War II.

By contrast, after the 2007 crash the government bailed out the banks and pumped enough money into the economy to contain the slide. But apart from the Affordable Care Act, nothing was done to address the underlying problem of stagnant wages.

Without wage growth, most American workers can’t continue to buy. They’re in the same sort of debt trap that preceded the 2008 and 1929 crashes. Auto and home sales already are declining. 

The Fed’s rate hike will only worsen this. 

Ten years after the start of the Great Recession, it’s important to understand that the root of the collapse wasn’t a banking crisis. It was the growing imbalance between consumer spending and total output – brought on by stagnant wages and widening inequality.

That imbalance is back. Watch your wallets.

Using the infrared satellite AKARI, a Japanese research team has detected the existence of water in the form of hydrated minerals in a number of asteroids for the first time. This discovery will contribute to our understanding of the distribution of water in our solar system, the evolution of asteroids, and the origin of water on Earth.

The findings were made by the team led by the Project Assistant Professor Fumihiko Usui (Graduate School of Science, Kobe University), the Associate Senior Researcher Sunao Hasegawa, the Aerospace Project Research Associate Takafumi Ootsubo (Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), and Professor Emeritus Takashi Onaka (Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo). The results were published in the online Advanced Access edition of Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

Our Earth is an aqua-planet, and is the only planet in our solar system where the presence of water on the planet surface has been confirmed. We are, however, not yet sure how our Earth acquired water. Recent studies have shown that other celestial bodies in our solar system have, or used to have, water in some form. Asteroids are considered to be one of the candidates that brought water to Earth. Note that the liquid water is not flowing on the surface of asteroids, but water is retained in asteroids as hydrated minerals, which were produced by chemical reactions of water and anhydrous rocks that occurred inside the asteroids, that is, aqueous alteration. Hydrated minerals are stable even above the sublimation temperature of water ice. Thus, by looking for hydrated minerals, we can investigate whether asteroids have water.

Infrared wavelengths contain characteristic spectral features of various substances, such as molecules, ice, and minerals, which cannot be observed at visible wavelengths. Therefore, it is indispensable to observe at infrared wavelengths for the study of solar system objects. Hydrated minerals exhibit diagnostic absorption features at around 2.7 micrometers. The absorption of water vapor and carbon dioxide in the terrestrial atmosphere prevents us from observing this wavelength with ground-based telescopes. It is absolutely necessary to make observations from outside of the atmosphere, that is, in space. However, observations with space-borne telescopes have been scarce; the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), launched in 1995, did not have a sufficient sensitivity to make spectroscopy of faint asteroids and the Spitzer Space Telescope, launched in 2003, did not have a coverage of this wavelength range. For this reason, it has not fully been understood how much water is contained in asteroids.

The Japanese infrared satellite AKARI, launched in February 2006, was equipped with the Infrared Camera (IRC) that allowed us to obtain spectra at near-infrared wavelengths from 2 to 5 micrometers. Using this unique function, the spectroscopic observations of 66 asteroids (figure 1) were carried out and their near-infrared spectra were obtained. This provides the first opportunity to study the features of hydrated minerals in asteroids at around the wavelength of 2.7 micrometers.

The observations detected absorption, which were attributed to hydrated minerals for 17 C-type asteroids (figure 2). C-type asteroids, which appear dark at visible wavelengths, were believed to be rich in water and organic material, but the present observations with AKARI are the first to directly confirm the presence of hydrated minerals in these asteroids. The absorption strength detected at around 2.7 micrometers varies for each asteroid, and some show absorption features of other substances, such as water ice and ammonia-rich material at around 3.1 micrometers.

When examining C-type asteroids in more detail, the research team discovered a clear relationship between the wavelength of the deepest absorption and the depth of the absorption for the 2.7 micrometers feature (figure 3). This shows a trend seen in the process where hydrated minerals are being heated up and gradually losing water. The heating energy could be supplied by the solar wind plasma, micrometeorite impacts, or the decay heat from radioactive isotopes in the rocks. This trend had been predicted by meteorite measurements, but this is the first time that it has been confirmed in asteroids. Many C-type asteroids display this trend, suggesting that C-type asteroids were formed by the agglomeration of rocks and water ice, then aqueous alteration occurred in the interior of asteroids to form hydrated minerals, and finally C-type asteroids were heated and dehydrated.

On the other hand, rocky S-type asteroids were considered to not contain water, unlike C-type asteroids. In the present study, hydrated minerals were not detected in most S-types, but it was newly discovered that there are exceptional cases of a few asteroids that show slight signs of hydrated minerals. The signs of water found in such S-type asteroids were probably not generated by aqueous alteration as in C-types, but were produced by collisions of other hydrated asteroids, that is, it is the exogenous origin that brought about the hydrated minerals. Asteroid collisions with each other occasionally occur. At the early stage of the solar system formation, a number of small bodies including asteroids were larger than the present, and collisional events must have been more frequent. From the fact that Earth would have experienced collisions with many asteroids, it is imagined that at least some amount of water on Earth was brought from asteroids by such collisions.

This study has confirmed the presence of water in asteroids. Spectra of the observed asteroids show common patterns. The size and the distance from the sun of the asteroid can be considered as important factors making differences of the spectra. To fully understand the observed patterns, it is necessary to accumulate observations of more asteroids as well as to compare with the measurement of meteorites collected on Earth. Dr. Usui comments: “By solving this puzzle, we can make a significant step towards identifying the source of Earth’s water and unveiling the secret of how life began on Earth”.

AKARI completed its operation in November 2011. For the next opportunity to perform spectroscopy in 2.7 micrometer wavelength with space-borne telescope, we will have to wait until the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope by NASA, scheduled in 2021.

Currently, the Japanese asteroid explorer Hayabusa2 and the American OSIRIS-REx are surveying asteroids (162173) Ryugu and (101955) Bennu, respectively. Each explorer has a capability to make measurements in the 2.7 micrometer range to look for the signature of water. “In-situ” observations of asteroids with spacecrafts can provide detailed information about craters and topography, aspects that ground-based and Earth-orbiting telescopes cannot reveal. The present results significantly help increase the scientific values of the data obtained by the explorers and understand the properties of asteroids Ryugu and Bennu in details.

Thermal-sensing cameras mounted on drones may offer a safer and more cost-effective way to locate nests of the elusive European nightjar in forestry work and construction areas, according to new research presented at the British Ecological Society’s annual meeting in Birmingham today.

Ecologists from Cardiff University recently conducted a pilot study in Bryn, a Natural Resources Wales managed conifer plantation in South Wales, to test the suitability of drones to detect nest sites of the protected European nightjar.

“The current methods of searching for nightjar nests on foot are expensive and can pose a health and safety risk for people, particularly when accessing clearfell worksites”, said Mike Shewring, a PhD student at Cardiff University.

“Nightjars are camouflaged to look just like a fallen log or dead wood. They nest on the ground and ‘sit tight’ when approached to avoid detection, which makes it nearly impossible to spot them during the day when they are inactive”, he added.

To test the new method, the team used the drones to take thermal photographs at nest sites, where observations and radio tracking previously showed European nightjars were breeding between May and August. Images were taken at various heights (10, 20 and 50 metres) at dawn, midday and dusk. The nests were observed from a distance to see if the drones caused any disturbance.

From the photographs, the researchers could detect nests due to the high temperature contrast between the nightjar’s body (40°C) and the colder background area. Images taken at 10 metres and during cooler times of the day (dawn and dusk) proved most useful. The known elevations at which the drones were flown allowed the team to estimate the body size of the nightjars to confirm the species.

“Our preliminary findings demonstrate the potential of drones for surveying nightjars during their breeding season, allowing forestry managers to locate nests more accurately and plan their works adequately. This methodology could also have wider applications, since it could technically be adapted to detect any warm-blooded species”, commented project supervisor Dr Robert Thomas.

All nightjars sat tight on their nests during the drone flights, as they usually do to avoid being detected by predators.

“We don’t know whether the nightjars perceived the drones as a predator. This would be interesting to explore in future studies to ensure that the sight and sound of drones don’t have any negative impacts on the birds’ stress levels or metabolism”, Shewring concluded.

Slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates under the ocean drag about three times more water down into the deep Earth than previously estimated, according to a first-of-its-kind seismic study that spans the Mariana Trench, a crescent-shaped trench in the Western Pacific that measures 1,500 miles long and is the deepest ocean trench in the world.

The observations from the trench have important implications for the global water cycle, according to researchers at Washington University in St. Louis whose work is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

“People knew that subduction zones could bring down water, but they didn’t know how much water,” said Chen Cai, lead author of the study, which was published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

“This research shows that subduction zones move far more water into Earth’s deep interior — many miles below the surface — than previously thought,” said Candace Major, a program director in NSF’s Division of Ocean Sciences. “The results highlight the important role of subduction zones in Earth’s water cycle.”

Researchers listened to more than a year’s worth of Earth’s rumblings, from ambient noise to actual earthquakes, using a network of 19 ocean-bottom seismographs deployed across the Mariana Trench, along with seven island-based seismographs.

“Previous estimates vary widely on the amount of water that is subducted deeper than 60 miles,” said Doug Wiens, a geoscientist at Washington University and co-author of the paper. “The main source of uncertainty in these calculations was the initial water content of the subducting uppermost mantle.”

The Mariana Trench is where the western Pacific Ocean plate slides beneath the Mariana Plate and sinks deep into the Earth’s mantle as the plates slowly converge.

The new seismic observations paint a more detailed picture of the Pacific Plate bending into the trench, resolving its 3D structure and tracking the relative speeds of types of rock that have different capabilities for holding water.

Rock can grab and hold onto water in a variety of ways. Ocean water atop the tectonic plate runs down into the Earth’s crust and upper mantle along fault lines that lace the area where the plates collide and bend. Then it gets trapped.

Under certain temperatures and pressure conditions, chemical reactions force the water into a non-liquid form — hydrous minerals (wet rocks) — locking the water into the plate. Then the plate continues to crawl ever deeper into the Earth’s mantle, ferrying the water with it.

Previous studies at subduction zones like the Mariana Trench have noted that the subducting plate could hold water. But they didn’t determine how much water it held or how deep it went.

The seismic images Cai and Wiens obtained show that the area of hydrated rock at the Mariana Trench extends almost 20 miles beneath the seafloor — much deeper than previously thought.

The amount of water in this block of hydrated rock is considerable, the scientists said.

For the Mariana Trench region alone, four times more water subducts than previously calculated. These results can be extrapolated to predict the conditions in other ocean trenches worldwide.

“If other old, cold subducting slabs contain similarly thick layers of hydrous mantle, then estimates of the global water flux into the mantle at depths greater than 60 miles must be increased by a factor of about three,” said Wiens.

For water in the Earth, what goes down must come up. All the water going into the Earth at subduction zones must be coming back up somehow, not continuously piling up inside the Earth.

Scientists believe that most of the water that goes down at a trench comes back into the atmosphere as water vapor when volcanoes erupt. But with the revised estimates of water from the new study, the amount of water going in seems to greatly exceed the amount of water coming out.

“The estimates of water coming back out through the volcanic arc are probably very uncertain,” said Wiens, who hopes that this study will encourage other researchers to reconsider their models for how water moves out.

“Does the amount of water vary substantially from one subduction zone to another, based on the kind of faulting where the plate bends?” Wiens asked. “There have been suggestions of that in Alaska and in Central America. But no one has yet looked at deeper structures like we were able to do in the Mariana Trench.”

A new study has found that London police officers visibly armed with electroshock ‘Taser’ weapons were more likely to be assaulted, and used force 48% more often, than those on unarmed shifts.

However, while use of force can include everything from restraint and handcuffing to CS spray, the Tasers themselves were only fired twice during the year-long study period.

Criminologists from the University of Cambridge say the findings suggest that Tasers can trigger the ‘weapons effect’: a psychological phenomenon in which sight of a weapon increases aggressive behaviour.

While the ‘weapons effect’ has been repeatedly demonstrated in simulated conditions over the last forty years, this is one of the largest studies to show it “in the field” and the first to reveal the effect in law enforcement.

The Cambridge researchers say their findings, published today in the journal Criminal Justice and Behaviour, may well apply to policing situations in which other forms of weaponry – including the lethal variety – are involved.

“We found that officers are more likely to be assaulted when carrying electroshock weaponry, and more likely to apply force,” said lead researcher Dr Barak Ariel from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology.

“It is well established that the visual cue of a weapon can stimulate aggression. While our research does not pierce the ‘black box’ of decision-making, the only difference between our two study conditions was the presence of a Taser device.”

“There was no increase in injury of suspects or complaints, suggesting it was not the police instigating hostilities. The presence of Tasers appears to provoke a pattern where suspects become more aggressive toward officers, who in turn respond more forcefully,” he said.

The City of London force is responsible for policing the ‘Square Mile’ business district in the centre of London. It also holds national responsibility for Economic Crime and prioritises counter-terrorism, violent crime and public order due to its central location.

The force was the first in England and Wales to test “extended deployment” of Tasers – described as “conducted energy devices” in UK policing – to frontline officers. During the rollout, police chiefs allowed Ariel and colleagues to conduct a major experiment.

Between June 2016 and June 2017 the researchers randomly allocated 400 frontline shifts a Taser-carrying officer and compared the results to an equal number of unarmed shifts over the same period. A total of 5,981 incidents occurred during the study.

Use of force by police carrying Tasers was 48% higher than the officers on unarmed shifts. In what researchers call a “contagion effect”, even those unarmed officers accompanying Taser carriers on ‘treatment’ shifts used force 19% more often than those on Taser-free ‘control’ shifts.

Six physical assaults against police were recorded during shifts with Taser-carrying officers, compared to just three on the unarmed ‘control’ shifts. While the numbers are small, assaults against officers are rare, and researchers argue that this doubling is significant.

Despite the increased hostility uncovered by the study, actual use of electroshock weapons was minimal over the study period, with just nine “deholsterings” – only two of which resulted in electric shocks applied to a suspect.

“The City of London police rarely discharged Tasers during the study. Yet the very presence of the weapon led to increased hostility between the police and public,” said Ariel.

The weapons effect was first shown by psychologist Leonard Berkowitz in 1967, in a laboratory experiment involving the administering of electric shocks in the presence of a rifle – an experiment that Ariel points out has been replicated 78 times.

“For many, a weapon is a deterrence. However, some individuals interpret the sight of a weapon as an aggressive cue – a threat that creates a hostile environment,” he said.

“The response is consequently a ‘fight or flight’ dilemma that can result in a behavioural manifestation of aggression and assault. This is what we think we are seeing in our Taser experiment.”

“It would not be surprising to find that serious or violent offenders fit this criteria, especially young males – the very type of suspect that is regularly in direct contact with frontline police.”

Half a million police officers in the United States regularly carry Tasers, and electroshock weapons are now becoming part of frontline policing across the UK.

The study author’s offer a simple solution to bypass the weapons effect: conceal the Tasers. “The relatively inexpensive policy change of keeping Tasers hidden from sight should not limit efficacy, but could reduce the weapons effect we see in the study,” said Ariel.

“This conclusion could be generalised to all types of police armoury, including the lethal firearms carried by police officers. If the presence of weapons can lead to aggression by suspects, so its concealment should be able to reduce aggression and increase officer safety,” he said.

Study co-author Chief Superintendent David Lawes, from the City of London Police, said: “Following the findings of the study, we are exploring whether a simple holster change or weapon position move will nullify the weapons effect issue shown in the experiment. We have also updated our training package for officers carrying Tasers to make them aware of the findings.”

“The use of Tasers have been a proportionate and sensible introduction to policing against a backdrop of unsophisticated terror attacks and an increase in violent crime across London.

“The City of London Police seeks to ensure that any major changes to policy are supported by an evidence base and we wanted to be confident that an extension of Taser deployments to our frontline responders was the right thing to do for both our officers and the public they serve.

“A number of other forces are interested in replicating the study to add to the evidence base and see whether the experiment produces the same results outside of London.

“Across our force, we will continue to use evidence to define how we target problems, which tactics we should use and how we can ensure policing is efficient and safer for both the general public and our officers.”

America lost 20,360 children and teens in 2016 — 60 percent of them to preventable injuries, a new study shows. More than 4,000 of them died in motor vehicle crashes, though prevention efforts and better trauma care have cut the death rate of young people from such crashes in half in less than two decades.

Meanwhile, firearms — the number two cause of death in youth – claimed the lives of more than 3,140 children and teens in 2016, according to the new findings from a University of Michigan team

That’s about eight children a day, according to their special report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Unlike vehicle crashes, the rate of firearm-related death for those aged 1 to 19 years has stayed around the same for nearly the past two decades, the new analysis shows. That rate is more than 36 times as high as the average rate across 12 other high-income countries.

The new study, by members of the U-M Injury Prevention Center, was done using publicly available data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database of information from death certificates.

It’s the first time all causes of child and adolescent death have been tallied by both mechanism and intent, and that rates of these causes of death over time have been calculated for all the top causes.

Cancer, which accounted for 1,853 deaths of those age 1 to 19, comes in third place, and its death rate has dropped since the start of the study period. Suffocation – mainly suicides by hanging and other means – was fourth, and is on the rise.

Those causes are followed by drowning, drug overdoses/poisonings and birth defects, each with just under 1,000 deaths and steady decreases in death rates over the last 17 years for both drowning and birth defects.

Lead author Rebecca Cunningham, M.D., director of the U-M center and an emergency medicine physician at Michigan Medicine, U-M’s academic medical center, notes that firearm-related deaths occur at about the same rate in urban, rural and suburban settings.

“Firearm deaths of children and adolescents are an ‘everybody’ problem, not a problem for just certain population,” says Cunningham, a professor in the U-M Department of Emergency Medicine. “Homicides account for 60 percent of those deaths, suicide about 35 percent, unintentional or accidental injuries about one percent and mass shootings slightly less than one percent.”

She adds, “By using a data-driven approach to studying these deaths, I hope we can guide the U.S. to apply our resources to help us understand what we can do to prevent these deaths across the country.”

More about firearm deaths

Ever since 1999, the researchers show, about 4 of every 100,000 American children and adolescents have died by a gun-related homicide, suicide or unintended shooting each year.

Firearm deaths affect all areas of America, the study shows. Urban adolescents are twice as likely to die in homicides as rural youth, while rural teens have a rate of suicides that’s twice as high as the rate for urban youth. Suburban teens who die of firearm-related causes do so of suicide and homicide at roughly equal rates.

For children between the ages of 1 and 9 years, unintentional injuries were the leading cause of firearm death.

Boys had firearm death rates five times that of girls, and African-American young people had a firearm death rate nearly three times that of white children and teens.

Other causes, and a call for action

Co-author Maureen Walton, MPH, Ph.D., associate director of the Injury Prevention Center and professor in the U-M Department of Psychiatry, notes that drug poisoning and overdose have risen to be the sixth leading cause of death for young people.

This is largely due to increases in opioid overdoses, which the study shows account for over half of drug overdoses among adolescents, says Walton, who is the associate director of child research at the U-M Addiction Center.

Motor vehicle crashes kill nearly three times as many children and teens per 100,000 in rural areas, compared with in urban and near-urban areas – even when the researchers adjusted the data to account for the extra miles traveled each year by drivers in rural areas.

“Our country has spent billions to decrease car crash injuries and deaths for kids and adults, and has made it a leading priority for several federal agencies. Safety in a crash is now a selling point for cars,” says Cunningham. This implementation of ‘prevention science’ has resulted in the steady decrease in motor vehicle crash deaths for children and teens over the past 20 years.

“At the same time, we have dozens of teams of scientists and clinicians working on prevention and treatment of pediatric cancers, congenital conditions and heart diseases,” conditions where death rates have also fallen,” she adds. “We hope these data help put firearm deaths of young people in the proper context, so we can study and test potential preventive measures while respecting the Second Amendment rights of gun owners.”

Some of the efforts to reduce firearm deaths among children and teens could be led by physicians, she adds. She recalls learning about the early warning signs and diagnostic steps for childhood cancers such as leukemia, and for other serious childhood ailments, during her residency training. But today’s medical students and residents get little or no training about how to ask parents if guns are present, and stored safely and securely, in their homes.

U-M firearm injury prevention researcher and emergency physician Patrick Carter, M.D., assistant director of the Injury Prevention Center, co-authored the study.

“Firearm risk to children and adolescents, whether from unintentional or intentional use of a gun, is a serious medical issue that all of us in the profession can help address,” he says. “The results from this study certainly have inspired me as a physician to know that we need to be doing better. We hope that these findings will also encourage other physicians to know that this is indeed their ‘lane’ to be working in, to be preventing firearm related injury and death.”

By Joe Torres

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has warned that he will place tribal people in “hamlets” to keep them from being influenced by communist rebels.

In a speech on Dec. 18, the president said he would implement the policy before the year’s end “so that [his critics] won’t invent stories.”

“I will hamlet them. Why? Because if they remain scattered, they are really in danger,” said Duterte during a summit of village leaders in the southern region of Mindanao.

“I cannot get their loyalty if they are scattered because they are afraid to be far from each other,” said the president. He said the hamlets would be declared tribal territories that will be guarded by the tribal people themselves, although soldiers and policemen would be asked to secure the areas.

The president said the plan would be implemented “throughout the Philippines.”

Duterte’s plan is reminiscent of the United States’ Strategic Hamlet Program during the Vietnam War that aimed at combatting the communists’ influence over the rural population. In the Philippines “hamletting” was among the human rights violations committed by former dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1970s.

Hamletting involves putting villagers in one place in an attempt to prevent them from having contact with insurgents. Duterte earlier announced that he would move tribal communities to “temporary shelters” as part of his counterinsurgency plan in Mindanao. 

“Now I will hamlet them,” he said on Dec. 16.  “You natives won’t be able to say that you’re being imprisoned. But I will make a secure place for you that will be your territory in the meantime,” he added.

Pya Macliing Malayao, secretary-general of tribal group Katribu, said she was not surprised by Duterte’s announcement, especially after martial law in Mindanao was extended for another year.

“In the background of these attacks [on tribal communities] are big corporations and so-called development projects that are encroaching ancestral territories,” said Malayao.

Duterte said in his speech that communists have always tried to control the tribes and arm them, which is why reviving the peace negotiations with the rebels would be “futile.”

Peace talks between the government and the communist rebels collapsed in 2017 after Duterte ordered the terminations of negotiations following rebel attacks on military camps.

Seven Indian fishing trawlers held by the Sri Lanka Navy, while engaging in illegal fishing in Sri Lankan territorial waters, were released from Sri Lankan custody on Wednesday, with the assistance of the Sri Lanka Coast Guard.

The released trawlers had been seized in 2015, 2016 and 2017 for trespassing on Sri Lankan territorial waters.

These trawlers moored at the jetties of Trincomalee and Jaffna were repaired by a dedicated team of Indian engineers who recently arrived in Sri Lanka, before their release.

Accordingly, the Fast Attack Craft CG 402 of the Sri Lanka Coast Guard assisted the handing over of 07 trawlers to the Indian Coast Guard Ship Ameya at the IMBL north of Kankesanthurei last evening.

Islamic State has executed over 700 prisoners in eastern Syria in the past two months, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Wednesday.

Citing dozens of security sources within ISIS as well as civilians living in areas under the group’s control, the Observatory said the prisoners were among a total of 1,350 civilians and fighters held by the group.

Observatory head Rami Abdul Rahman said that the executions had taken place since the United States-backed Syrian Democratic Forces had relaunched their assault on the militants in October.

Many of those killed were buried in mass graves.

ISIS also executed three more people Wednesday for “smuggling civilians” out of the enclave toward SDF-held areas, the Observatory said.

About 200 people are thought to have fled in the last 24 hours, it added. The SDF this month said that it would open up humanitarian corridors for those trying to flee the beleaguered pocket, with over 1,000 civilians reported to have escaped since Nov. 30.

With the SDF pushing deeper into Daesh territory, the militants also moved over 350 prisoners farther west of the Euphrates River, Abdul Rahman said.

The SDF, with the help of U.S. air power and special forces, has been battling ISIS in the Deir al-Zor area – the militant group’s final pocket of control in Syria – for the past several months.

Despite setbacks, the Kurdish alliance entered the strategic town of Hajin this month, clawing back territory previously lost to the extremists.

SDF Commander in Chief Mazloum Kobani told Reuters last week that at least 5,000 ISIS fighters remained holed up in the enclave, including many foreign fighters.

ISIS’s self-proclaimed caliphate at its height encompassed a third of Syria and Iraq, but has since crumbled, reducing the militants control to a small pocket in eastern Syria.

Original source

Federal and state authorities should take urgent measures to curb police killings in Rio de Janeiro state, which have reached a record high, Human Rights Watch said.

From January through November, 2018, police killed 1,444 people in Rio de Janeiro state, according to the Public Security Institute (ISP, in the Portuguese acronym), a state agency. That means that Rio will finish the year with the highest number of police killings since the state started collecting that data in 1998. The previous record was 1,330 in 2007.

“Military-style security operations that leave a trail of death in poor neighborhoods do not enhance public security,” said Daniel Wilkinson, Americas managing director  at Human Rights Watch. “On the contrary, these killings make communities fear the police and much less likely to collaborate with the police in the fight against crime.”

While Rio police sometimes kill people in legitimate self-defense, research from Human Rights Watch and other groups shows that many killings are, in reality, extrajudicial executions.

Abuses by police make members of the affected communities less likely to report crime, to assist with criminal investigations, and to stand witness at trial, Human Rights Watch said.

Extrajudicial killings by some officers also put the lives of other officers in danger, by antagonizing law-abiding citizens of the communities they patrol. In addition, gang members are less likely to surrender peacefully to police when cornered if they believe they will be executed.

In January, in response to a Human Rights Watch report about police killings, Rio de Janeiro’s Secretariat of Public Security said that the military police had established a goal of reducing the number of police killings in 2018 by at least 20 percent.

In reality, the number of police killings from January through November was 39% higher than the same period in 2017. In addition, news media reported nine killings of Rio de Janeiro residents by army personnel deployed in public security operations in 2018. Those killings are not included in the official state statistics because they are not investigated by civil police but rather by the Armed Forces themselves.

From January through November, 31 police officers were killed while on duty, the same number as the same period in 2017, said ISP, which does not provide data about officers killed off duty. At least three soldiers were also killed while on duty.

On February 16, the outgoing Brazilian president, Michael Temer, put public security and prisons in Rio de Janeiro in the hands of the army. In June, General Walter Braga Netto, the commander in charge of  public security operations in Rio, released a detailed “strategic plan” with the overall goal of reducing crime and increasing the “sense of security” of the population. The plan made no mention of the military police’s promise at the beginning of the year to lower police killings and said nothing about punishing officers who committed abuses.

Although violent deaths fluctuated from month to month, the overall number from March – the first full month that the army was in charge of public security in Rio – through November was virtually the same as in the same period in 2017.

From March through November, police killings went up 38 percent compared with the same period in 2017, ISP data show.

In March, an elite squad of military police killed eight people in a raid in Rocinha neighborhood; and another six in May during a raid in Cidade de Deus.

In June, police allegedly opened fire from a helicopter into Rio’s heavily-populated Maré neighborhood. Police never confirmed they opened fire from the air, but residents counted more than a hundred bullet marks on the ground. Seven people died in the raid, including 14-year-old Marcos Vinícius da Silva, who was on his way to school. Before he died, da Silva told his mother the bullet that hit him came from a police armored vehicle. “Didn’t they see my school uniform?” he asked her, his mother later said.  In a report to prosecutors, the civil police called the operation “a great success.” 

Instead of seeing the excessive use of force by police as a problem, President-elect Jair Bolsonaro has essentially promised to give “carte blanche” to police to kill even more people. Rio de Janeiro´s new governor, Wilson Witzel, who belongs to Bolsonaro´s Social Liberal party, has said that police should shoot to kill, without warning, anyone carrying an assault rifle — including using  snipers and drones — even if the person is not threatening anyone. International human rights standards only allow police to deliberately kill people when necessary to protect their own lives or the lives of others.

 “The mission of the police is to protect people, including those who live in poor neighborhoods,” Wilkinson said. “The excessive use of lethal force puts everyone at risk.”  

The battle for autocephaly for the Ukrainian Orthodox is now over, Aleksandr Soldatov says, whose outcome has “gigantic political and cultural-symbolic meaning.” But the battle for the Russian Orthodox Church is only beginning, and that fight has if anything even greater significance.

The outcome of the Ukrainian battle, the Russian commentator says, “restructures world Orthodoxy” and Christianity as a whole and “pushes aside the Moscow Patriarchate with its “’Russian world’ pretensions into quite marginal positions” not only internationally but at home (graniru.org/opinion/m.274312.html).

“Symbolically, autocephaly raises the status of Ukraine as a state, making it not just ‘a remnant of an empire’ seeking its independence but as a self-standing Christian nation with its own thousand-year church tradition,” something Moscow-centered states have sought repeatedly to deny and suppress.

With Ukrainian autocephaly having been achieved, Soldatov says, “there is a 100 percent chance” that the Moscow Patriarchate will again enter into a new period of “isolation because its break with canonical communion with the Constantinople Patriarchate over Ukraine has not been supported by a single [Orthodox] church.”

“The independence of the Kyiv church was annexed by Moscow together with left-bank Ukraine at the end of the 17^thcentury. On October 11 of this year, the Constantinople patriarch officially denounced its agreement on the temporary administration of the Kyiv metropolitan which it gave to Moscow in 1686,” Soldatov points out.

Constantinople “asserts that Moscow immediately violated all the conditions of this act but that Constantinople for all these 330 years did not have the political possibility to restore justice. Now such a possibility has appeared: for this was required the bloody war in the Donbass. The majority of Ukrainians agree that it is impossible to reach agreement with Putin.”

Ukraine has tried to achieve autocephaly over the past century, but not one of its efforts until now achieved that goal. Moscow was too strong. But the events of this week show the world “that now neither the Moscow Patriarchate nor the Moscow Kremlin has the weight” necessary to stop this restoration of historical justice.

This achievement would not have happened without the efforts of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, and his goals were“above all” political, Soldatov argues; “and Moscow reacted to Ukrainian autocephaly above all politically” rather than as a church issue. The main question remains whether Putin is prepared to launch ‘’a war for the faith’” in this century.

“Undoubtedly, the triumph of Ukrainian autocephaly has already led to a significant decline in the rating of Patriarch Kirill both in Russia itself and beyond its borders,” a decline that is even more striking because of the rise of Putin favorite, Metropolitan Tikhon, who appears to be a more flexible and clever church politician than Kirill.

But Tikhon and Putin are not now ina position to restore Moscow to the position it once occupied.  “On the map of world Orthodoxy, Ukraine is a key territory: namely control of Ukraine guaranteed the Russian Orthodox Church the status of the leader of Orthodox by number of parishes.” The ROC MP will now lose most if not all of those. 

“Despite all the ‘heroic’ rhetoric of the present leadership of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate,” most priests and parishioners now within it view the hierarchy as a state institution rather than a church. They might not have been willing to break with it before Ukrainian autocephaly, but over time, most of them will. 

“The battle for Ukrainian autocephaly is thus finished,” Soldatov says; but the most interesting aspect of this development is beginning: the global restructuring of Orthodoxy promises to be enormous and – sooner or later – will reach Russia as well.”

Afghanistan is yet at another cross road of history and in dire need of political leadership and statesmanship to steer it in a post US and NATO engagement era. The history of Afghanistan is characterised by conquerors and conquests. Afghans are deemed great warriors, entrepreneurs, writers and poets but no statesmen to pull out a divided nation at times of crisis towards an a unifying prosperous state. This is primarily due to the dominance of politics of emotions than calculation, ethnic diversity, harsh geography, economic dependency and above all a predatory neighborhood. The art of statecraft which involves formulation of a vision, mobilization capacity, farsight, patience and consensus building with cold calculations across the board within the social fabric of the Afghan society has been missing for years from the country’s political landscape and modern history.

Afghan leaders have consistently failed to agree on national interests which are deemed as redlines for state apparatus and political actors to cross. On the other hand, the absence of a professional apolitical civil service to remain neutral and professional for delivering political agenda of various parties has been one of the major drivers of state failure in the country.

Over the years, Afghan leaders have consistently failed to generate a vision for the country with a stable political narrative, an indigenous economy and a system to produce a consensus over it. They have been confined to ethnic vote banking and lacked the necessary national appeal and mobilization capacity to rally Afghans behind a vision.

King Amanullah Khan (1919-1929) was the first to generate a vision and try to modernize the country but failed due to hastiness of his reforms, lack of financial resources and underestimation of the strength of the deep rooted traditions which has bound this country for centuries. He died in exile with that vision after a short span of his reign.

On the other hand – the longest serving Afghan head of state, King Zahir Shah (1933-1973), who run the country less of a state but more of a conglomerate of fiefdoms on the payroll of Central Government in Kabul. He had a Jirga centric governance style and believed more on the tribal chiefs than his own institutions. He built a social contract through local tribal elders and religious leaders with the people and they delivered on the taxes, rule of law and obedience he expected from the citizens. Though in his 40 years reign – he never portrayed a vision for the country that was primarily due to his young age assuming the throne after the assassination of his father, King Nader Khan, and the politics of uncles who were his Prime Ministers.

Except President Daud Khan (1973-1978), the subsequent set of Afghan leaders had short lived tenures and almost all of them met violent death, the latest casualty was late President Burhanuddin Rabbani blown up by a Taliban peace envoy. They were all too busy preserving their political power on the face of coups and regional proxies inside the state apparatus.

President Daud is fondly remembered for his 5 year plans and outreach to the west and the Islamic world but he failed miserably in his great rebalancing act and neglected the growing strength of communists, backed by Moscow, within his security forces. He is seen as the single Afghan president who formulated a vision for the country through his five year plans and tried to mobilize all the political, economic and social potential resources of the country in the direction of modernization and his vision.

Rarely have any Afghan politician in the modern times presented a statesman’s vision for the country or been transformed from an ethnic leader or warlord to that of a politician and eventually a statesman, almost none. Like all every all politics in Afghanistan is local. The geography of thought and the mind of the many Afghan political leaders does not extend beyond their district, province, region or ethnic group and even then they lack a vision and program for their district, province, region or ethnicity. It is the politics of divide and rule and the politics of fear.

Afghan politics still remain an ethnic, patronage system with a heavily clientelistic approach in view of the declining foreign aid. For years to come – “Money” and the “Barrel of the Gun” will set the agenda for the grassroots politics of the country. It is a sad reality that should be managed but cannot be avoided in view of the ground realities and absence of monopoly of violence in the hands of state.

Post Soviet Union invasion, Afghan leaders have been systematically targeted and killed almost based on an organized plan by various proxy factions all over the country in order to replace them with a more extremists and younger generation of tribal and religious fanatics. This has wreaked havoc in the social fabric of the country and continue to this day. Many of the tolerant, national and moderate Afghan elders and leaders are now replaced by younger extremist generation of Afghan elites.

Cross ethnic appeal and financial resources constraint have handicapped the Afghan leaders to generate vision and political programs for the country because they won’t be able to deliver on it. Every Afghan leader even at the community level will have to think twice before promising a new scheme. Afghan politics and leaders are still stuck in vote bank ethnic politics and for them to transition into more cross ethnic programmatic politics will be hard and long time to come.

Afghanistan and its leaders were once known for their moderate version of Islam and toleration towards other religious such as Judaism, Hindus and Sikhs whose temples and synagogues are still present to this day across the country.

Today a new generation of Afghan leaders have emerged which would require time and space in order to break out from the prisons of their ethnic politics and find a cross ethnic nationwide appeal. It has always been the cross ethnic mobilization capacity problem for the Afghan leaders to win the trust of all ethnic groups and find a national appeal.

Even today some of the ethnic leaders lack the necessary mobilization capacity of the Afghans for a variety of reasons chief among them the question of financial resources, trust deficit due to years of war and ethnic profiteering by warlords The new generation of Afghan leaders need to break with the past and show patience, perseverance and farsight in dealing with modern challenges of Afghanistan at home and abroad. Afghanistan needs new breed of leaders with a new vision and skill set to transform the country. The future of Afghanistan will depend on the vision, mission and values of these newly emerging leaders for the country and history awaits to judge them.

*Tamim Asey is the former Afghan Deputy Minister of Defense and Director General at the Afghan National Security Council. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Security studies in London. He can be reached via twitter @tamimasey and Facebook @Tamim Asey.

A disagreement between major Indonesian religious leaders and the government on how to respond to China’s crackdown on Turkic Muslims raises questions about the Islamic World’s ability to sustain its silence about what amounts to one of the most concerted assaults on the faith in recent history.

Rejecting a call on the government by the Indonesian Ulema Council, the country’s top clerical body, to condemn the crackdown that has seen up to one million Turkic Muslims detained in re-education camps in China’s north-western province of Xinjiang, Indonesian vice-president Jusuf Kalla insisted that the government would not interfere in the internal affairs of others.

The disagreement could take on greater significance after elections in April next year which incumbent president Joko Widodo is expected to win. Mr. Widodo’s vice-presidential running mate, Ma’ruf Amin, is the ulema’s council’s chairman. Since joining the presidential ticket, Mr. Amin has retained his council position as non-active chairman.

Nonetheless, eager to attract Chinese infrastructure investment, Mr. Kalla’s position is in line with a majority of Muslim countries, who have opted to remain silent in a bid not to jeopardize relations with the People’s Republic even if many of them have responded angrily to far less threatening incidents such as the condemnation of British writer Salman Rushdie for his novel, The Satanic Verses; the cartoon depiction in Denmark of the Prophet Mohammed; and the burning of a Qur’an by an American pastor.

In a similar vein, Mushahid Hussain, chairman of Pakistan’s Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, said the cardinal principle of Pakistan-China relations was to refrain from commenting on anything to do with another other country’s domestic issues even though some 200 small Pakistani businessmen have been campaigning for the release of their Uyghur spouses from Chinese camps and either the  lifting of travel bans on their children or being allowed to visit them.

 “Given the relationship of Pakistan with China, and in the Muslim world in particular, the Chinese narrative is apparently being accepted across the board as the one that is correct,” Mr. Hussain told Associated Press.

By the same token, Turkey with its ethnic and cultural links to China’s Turkic Muslims and past support for Uyghur aspirations has adopted a similar attitude as Chinese investment and financial aid expands.

With the exception of a few protests in Bangladesh and India and critical statements by Malaysian leaders, Muslims across the globe have largely refrained from pressuring their governments to speak out about developments in Xinjiang. If anything, China retains its status of Asia’s top tourism destination for Muslim travellers.

Nabeel Shariff, founder of UK-based halal holiday company Serendipity Tailormade, struggled with the ethical aspects of promoting Muslim tourism to China, but concluded that “In a way, it makes sure the Uygur community are not forgotten.”

Mr. Shariff’s justification notwithstanding, there is little public evidence of the plight of China’s Turkic Muslims being in the Muslim public eye. Muslim and Chinese leaders appear to be betting that the silence is sustainable. That threatens to be a risky strategy.

For one, the crackdown in Xinjiang is expanding to the Hui, China’s non-Turkic Muslims. The autonomous region of Ningxia Hui recently signed a cooperation agreement on anti-terrorism with Xinjiang in a bid to learn from the crackdown on the Turkic Muslims or in the words of the Global Times, a Communist Party organ, “to learn from Xinjiang’s experiences in promoting social stability.”

Mounting Western criticism of the crackdown, that is toughest on Muslims, but also targets other religious groups, including evangelists, puts Muslim nations on the spot. The criticism is likely to lead to Western companies boycotting products made in Xinjiang by inmates of the re-education camps, which China describes as institutions for vocational training, or people who were recently released but forced to work in factories associated with the crackdown.

An Associated Press investigation published this week tracked the shipment of sportswear from a factory linked to the camps to Badger Sportswear in the United States that supplies university bookshops and sports teams around the country. “We will voluntarily halt sourcing and will move production elsewhere while we investigate the matters raised,” said Badger CEO John Anton.

New Jersey Republican Congressman Chris Smith, a member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, called on the Trump Administration to ban imports from Chinese companies associated with detention camps.

A potential black swan is anti-Chinese sentiment in a number of Muslim countries, some of which have ethnic links to China’s Turkic Muslims, as a result of perceptions of Chinese commercial terms for project finance and loans associated with the People’s Republic’s infrastructure-driven Belt and Road initiative that are perceived to be debt traps.

In an illustration of the risk, Kunaysh Sultanov, a member of the Kazakh parliament and former deputy prime minister and ambassador to China, took issue with the government’s walking a tight rope, attempting to balance its relations with its need to stand up for the rights of Kazaks.

“There should be talks taking place with the Chinese delegates. Every delegation that goes there should be bringing this topic up… The key issue is that of the human rights of ethnic Kazakhs in any country of the world being respected,” Mr. Sultanov said after a Chinese camp worker of Kazakh descent who had escaped to the Central Asian republic testified in court about what she had witnessed.

Suppose you were building a cartel — a group of business interests who coordinate to fix high prices that consumers must pay. How would you design it? Received economic wisdom says transparency among cartel members is crucial: If colluding suppliers share information, they can keep prices high and monitor members of the cartel to make sure no one deviates from the cartel’s norms.

A newly published paper co-authored by MIT economist Alexander Wolitzky offers a different idea: Firms do not have to share information extensively in order to collude. Indeed, the paper contends, extensive information-sharing can help firms undercut cartels and gain market share for themselves.

“If I’m thinking about entering your market, which I’m not supposed to do, but if I’m tempted to do it, then I can do it better if I have this information about your market,” Wolitzky says. The corollary, he notes, is that there appear to be cases where “by not sharing information about their pricing behavior, the firms make it easier to sustain collusion.”

The paper is thus a rethinking of an important policy topic: In the U.S., Europe, and across the world, governments are charged with regulating cartels and collusion, in an attempt to ensure that consumers can benefit from market competition.

Given the prevailing notion that data-sharing helps cartels, firms investigated for price-fixing can argue that they must not be illegally colluding if the evidence shows they have not been extensively sharing information with other businesses.

“Because of this conventional wisdom that firms that collude share a lot of information, a firm’s defense is, ‘We weren’t sharing so much information,'” Wolitzky says. And yet, as the new paper suggests, that level of cooperation may not be necessary for collusion to occur.

The paper, “Maintaining Privacy in Cartels,” is by Takuo Sugaya, an associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Wolitzky, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Economics; it appears in the December issue of the Journal of Political Economy.

What’s the whole story?

The current paper adds to a body of academic literature whose best-known component is “A Theory of Oligopoly,” a 1964 paper by economist George Stigler, which describes how the availability of information should help cartels maintain their grip on prices. Some subsequent empirical work also shows that in some conditions, increased transparency helps cartels sustain themselves.

Sugaya and Wolitzky do not deny that a degree of transparency among cartel members helps collusion occur, but they complicate this picture by introducing alternate circumstances, in which less transparency helps cartels thrive and more transparency undercuts them.

“We’re investigating the generality of this [older] result, and whether it tells the whole story,” says Wolitzky.

The paper by the scholars builds a new model of firm behavior oriented around the “home-market principle” of collusion, in which cartels reduce the competitive supply of products in each other’s markets — which may often be segmented by geographic reach. North American and European firms in the same industry, in this scenario, would stay away from each other’s territory, thereby reducing competition.

In the study, the authors contend that there are three effects that increased transparency has on cartels. Transparency within cartels enables firms to keep each other in check, and it helps them coordinate prices — but it also “lets individual firms tailor deviations to current market conditions,” as they write in the paper.

This last point, Sugaya and Wolizky assert, has been seriously underexplored by scholars in the past. In the model they propose, the “deviation gain” — what happens when a firms leaves the cartel — “is strictly larger when all prices and quantities are observable,” that is, when the firm has more information about its erstwhile collaborators.

Real cartels, low transparency

The proposition that a relative lack of information-sharing coexists with collusion is not just an arbitrary function of the authors’ model, but something supported by empirical evidence as well, as they note in the paper. The European Commission, for instance, has uncovered several cartels that seemingly made a point of limiting transparency: The firms in question largely shared just industry-wide sales data among all members, not extensive firm-level data.

These low-transparency cartels include industries such as plasterboard production, copper plumbing tube manufacturing, and plastics — all of whom structured their collusion operations around intermediaries. Those intermediaries — industry associations, in some cases — handled the sensitive information and only distributed small portions of it to the individual firms.

A more vivid example comes from a graphite manufacturing cartel, as Sugaya and Wolitzky recount. At a meeting of cartel representatives, each member secretly entered their own sales data into a calculator passed around the room, in such a way that the firms could only learn the industry-wide sales volume, not the specific sales data of each firm.

Such examples indicate that “conventional wisdom may not tell the whole story” when it comes to cartels and transparency, Sugaya and Wolitzky write.

To be sure, the new theory developed by the scholars does not propose a uniform relationship between transparency and collusion; it all depends on the circumstances.

“It would be nice to have a very thorough characterization of when more information among cartel members makes colluding easier, and when it makes it harder,” Wolitzky says.

In the new model, Sugaya and Wolitzky do suggest that greater transparency corresponds with collusion specifically in volatile business conditions, which may necessitate more robust long-term projections of sales and demand. By contrast, given less volatile, more consistent consumer demand over time, firms need less transparency to deviate from tacit collusion agreements and undercut their erstwhile cartel partners. As the authors acknowledge, firm behavior within cartels, in a variety of these circumstances, could use further study.

By Jorge Valero

European flag carriers Iberia and Aer Lingus will no longer be permitted to fly within Spain and Ireland, their member states’ territories, or to any other EU airport if the UK leaves the EU without an agreement, in less than 100 days.

After Brexit, International Airlines Group, their parent company, may fail to reach a majority EU-ownership, a requirement needed in order to maintain operating licenses.

The European Commission proposed on Wednesday (19 December) to grant special rights to air transport after UK’s departure on 29 March, as part of the contingency plans in case of a no-deal divorce.

But special permissions would be limited to ensuring basic connectivity between the EU and the UK. This would imply flights “point to point” between the UK territory and an EU airport.

These exceptional rights would be granted only for one year. However, the Commission could decide unilaterally to prolong them.

As a result, Iberia and Aer Lingus, the flag carriers of Spain and Ireland, will not be allowed to fly within their territory after Brexit, or to any other airport in the EU.

These two member states’ longstanding companies would not be the only ones impacted. Vueling, also part of IAG, would be also affected.

Other firms, including Easyjet, could also see its flights limited to direct connections between the UK and the EU.

In documents published on Wednesday, the Commission stressed that “in order to maintain the validity of an operating license, and the freedom to provide intra-EU air services, all the conditions for the operating license need to be respected, including being majority EU-owned and controlled.”

“If the conditions are no longer fulfilled as a consequence of the United Kingdom’ withdrawal from the EU, the operating license will no longer be valid,” the EU executive added.

The Commission argued that the special permissions could not cover more connections because “contingency measures cannot replicate the benefits of membership of the Union” or the terms of the transition period included in the withdrawal treaty.

EU officials did not want to speculate on the situation of specific companies. They instead insisted that everything would depend on the airline’s ability to demonstrate compliance with ownership rules under EU law.

The only exception would be if an international agreement was reached between the UK and the EU, which is still not the case.

The Commission explained that air carrier stakeholders had been warned since the beginning of the Brexit talks more than a year and a half ago, and they could take “all measure required” to reach the 51% threshold of EU ownership “for the sake of business continuity”.

That would imply that IAG would have to make room for EU-based stakeholders. However, the company will face an uphill battle to convince its owners.

Qatar Airways, IAG’s largest stakeholder, had signalled that would like to expand its ownership in the group.

Still, the company hopes that it would maintain its operating license after Brexit date.

“We are confident that we will comply with the EU and the UK ownership and control rules post-Brexit,” a spokesperson told EURACTIV.com.

Reciprocity

The situation could worsen for these air carriers if the UK does not reciprocate. EU officials said that special permission for “point to point” flights between the UK and the EU would only happen if Downing Street spells out the landing rights for EU air carriers.

In order to ensure reciprocity, the Commission is ready to adjust the availability for UK air carriers in EU territory.

The Commission’s contingency plans aims to avoid “very disruptive consequences” following the UK’s departure from the bloc without agreement.

To that end, the executive also issued guidelines to the member states to ensure that the 1.5 million British citizens living in the EU can remain through speedy processes, avoiding too much bureaucracy.

But these permissions would be conditional on the UK taking similar measures for the 3.5 million EU citizens living in its territory.