Manchester United has announced that it has sacked Portuguese manager Jose Mourinho ‘with immediate effect’ after two and a half years in charge with the club currently sitting in 6th place in the Premier League table.

United announced in an official statement on Tuesday: “The club would like to thank Jose for his work during his time at Manchester United and to wish him success in the future.

And the partying gift, not too shabby, Mourinho will get 30m euros for ending with contract with United.

“A new caretaker manager will be appointed until the end of the current season, while the club conducts a thorough recruitment process for a new, full-time manager.”

The start of the 2018/19 season has been rather rocky for United; The Red Devils are currently sixth in the league having amassed just 26 points from 17 matches, and having crashed out of the Carabao Cup to Championship side Derby in September.

Most recently, United lost 3-1 away to Liverpool on Sunday, that lackluster performance against one of the club’s biggest rivals at Anfield proved to be the final nail in the coffin for Mourinho.

United also face a tough draw in the last 16 of the UEFA Champions League against high-flying big spenders Paris Saint-Germain, who boast wonder kid Kylian Mbappe in their front line alongside Edinson Cavani and Neymar.

It is reported that former Man United captain and current club coach Michael Carrick will immediately take over training duties with a permanent, external appointment expected to take the reins until the end of the season.

France says the door is still open for the United Kingdom to hold a second Brexit referendum, as a deadlock in London over the matter has raised the prospects of either a second plebiscite or a “no-deal” Brexit.

“The door remains open, but it will be up to them (the Brits) to choose, not us,” said France’s European Affairs Minister Nathalie Loiseau in an interview with French TV station CNews on Thursday.

On June 23, 2016, Britons voted — with a slight majority — for their country to leave the European Union (EU). However, the vote proved to be very divisive, with many still urging the government to consider a second referendum that could allow people to vote for Britain to drop Brexit.

Incumbent Prime Minister Theresa May faces a deadlock in parliament over a deal she has negotiated with the EU. But she has faced tough opposition.

Among those urging Britons to vote in a second referendum is former Prime Minister Tony Blair — a high-profile figure. Early this month, Blair said May’s deal had pleased neither “Brexiteers” nor “Remainers,” adding that a second Brexit referendum should be a choice between remaining and a hard Brexit.

“The only way to resolve this is to have the option remain or leave, but leave on terms that make it clear this is hard Brexit,” he said on December 3.

May is currently under fire in London for delaying a parliamentary vote on the Brexit withdrawal deal that her negotiators hammered out over 17 months.

The main opposition Labour Party has requested a no-confidence vote against the prime minister while pro-EU groups, including the Scottish National Party, seek a motion against the government as a whole.

Neither initiative is likely to come to a vote, meaning that the pullout plan will likely be put before legislators in mid-January.

May survived another confidence vote tabled by members of her own Conservative Party last week but she came out of the process badly bruised, and the Brexit vote could still go against her.

The British prime minister has time and again ruled out a second plebiscite as an option.

Elsewhere in her remarks, Loiseau, the French minister, said that her country was also taking measures to minimize any potential impact if the UK were to exit the EU without a Brexit deal, reiterating previous statements to that effect.

Back in October, French Budget Minister Gerald Darmanin said France was hiring 700 additional customs officers and more border control facilities in case Britain exited the EU without a Brexit deal.

Original source

Facebook said Thursday that the Bangladesh government appeared to be linked to imposter news sites posting pro-government, anti-opposition content ahead of a looming general election.

The social media giant said it had shut down nine pages and six accounts on its Bangladesh platform after discovering that they purported to be reputable news sites such as bdnews24 or the BBC Bengali service, among others.

“[T]hese pages were designed to look like independent news outlets and posted pro-government and anti-opposition content. Our investigation indicates that this activity is linked to individuals associated with the Bangladesh government,” said a statement by Head of Cybersecurity Policy Nathaniel Gleicher.

The pages and accounts were shut down for “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” which Facebook defines as groups of pages or people working together to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing, Gleicher said.

Twitter announced similar action Thursday against 15 accounts linked to the Bangladesh government for “coordinated platform manipulation,” although it did not elaborate on what the manipulation entailed.

Bangladesh government officials were not immediately available for comment on the allegations.

More than 100 million Bangladeshi voters are eligible to vote in the upcoming Dec. 30 general election, the first contested election since 2008, in which Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is seeking an unprecedented fourth term in office. Hasina ran unopposed in 2014.

BenarNews reported in November that clones of leading news and information sites including Prothom Alo and BDFactCheck.com were being used to spread fake content. The sites typically contained several real news stories as well as the false ones along with a single extra character in the URL.

Bangladesh officials said at the time that they were moving to shut down such sites.

“I have come to know about it. I have also visited some fake websites. No doubt, this is a crime,” Information and Telecommunications Minister Mustafa Jabbar told BenarNews.

Sample posts shared by Facebook on Thursday showed a site called bdsnews24.com falsely reporting on Oct. 31 that opposition leader Khaleda Zia had fired the general secretary of her Bangladesh Nationalist Party, and a site called BBC-Bangla reported on Nov. 14 that BNP had split into “two clear factions,” including one that was promoting unrest.

The BBC-Bangla site includes what looks like a BBC news logo with the blue check mark Facebook uses to indicate a site is authentic.

“The BBC takes fake social media accounts very seriously. When we become aware of accounts which impersonate the BBC, we notify the relevant platforms requesting their removal where appropriate. We welcome actions being taken by social media platforms to protect trusted news sources,” a BBC spokesperson told BenarNews.

The accounts spent U.S. $800 on Facebook advertising between July 2017 and November 2018, Facebook said. Boosting posts with Facebook advertising increases the likelihood they are seen.

Also on Thursday, Twitter said it had suspended 15 accounts in Bangladesh for “coordinated platform manipulation.”

“Based on our initial analysis, it appears that some of these accounts may have ties to state-sponsored actors,” said a tweet by Twitter Safety, a division of the messaging company that says it educates users about digital citizenship and online safety.

An investigation into the manipulative behavior was ongoing, it said, without elaborating on the nature of the content. “However, at this point, we have taken action on a total of 15 accounts,” it said.

As Christmas approaches, officials in China have requested strict controls on festive celebrations as the country continues its crackdown on religions at the end of a year that has seen stepped-up persecution of Christians.

Shops and street vendors alike are reportedly being banned from selling wares considered “controversial” by the state in various parts of the country.

Meanwhile, some underground churches — including those organized at people’s homes, and others not sanctioned by the officially atheist, communist government — have been warned not to hold any gatherings.

A notice issued by the Urban Management Bureau in Langfang city of Hebei province in northern China on Dec. 15 that was circulated online requires all local law enforcement agencies to “comprehensively ban all Christmas items such as Christmas trees and Santa Claus placed along the street.”

Moreover, they have been instructed to “clear away all Christmas stickers, banners, signs, light-box advertisements and other related promotional items.”

Christmas-themed performances and other “religious propaganda activities” have also been strictly forbidden at public areas like parks and malls. If any are detected, they must be “closely monitored and reported in a timely manner,” the edict states.

In addition to schools, parks, malls, supermarkets and commercial districts, local authorities must also closely monitor vendors, who can be prosecuted if found selling Christmas trees, Christmas apples or images of Santa.

Christmas has been slowly gaining in popularity among young Chinese despite it lacking a public holiday or the cultural roots that make it such a big deal in Western countries. Reports last year claimed Christmas apples were proving a hit among the food-loving Chinese public, causing their prices to soar.

The state-run Global Times even cited one student in Chongqing who sold over 4,000 to his schoolmates in just two weeks.

Some critics suggested their sales were partly a result of China’s love of Apple products like the iPhone. Others say it relates to tradition: the Chinese refer to Christmas Eve is ping’an ye, which means a safe and peaceful night; this is similar to the Chinese word for apple, pingguo.

But the social and political landscape appears to have become less Christmas friendly this winter.

“All law enforcement agencies should attach great importance to [this warning] and strictly follow the requirements,” the notice read. “During the festival, especially on Dec. 23, 24 and 25, all agencies must remain vigilant and alert, and carry out intensive inspections to ensure a clean city environment,” it continued.  

A bureau employee, who declined to give his name, told the Global Times on Dec. 17 “the action is not targeted at Christmas, but is part of local authorities’ efforts to [ensure places like Langfang] get rated as a ‘national civilized city’ [by the state].”

According to the report, the award is presented every three years to honor those cities that can boast of a strong economy, good social development, impressive new infrastructure, and outstanding public services. The employee said managing roadside stalls and migrant vendors was a routine affair, especially over Christmas when illegal sales proliferate. 

The report quoted a professor at China University of Political Science and Law as saying that urban management bureaus’ main goal was to better regulate retailers rather than outlaw Christmas altogether.

Some Catholics interviewed by ucanews.com suggested the crackdown in Langfang was drawing such concern and public ire that “we suspect the authorities may be forced to change their tone.”

That being said, some social groups are showing the government their support. A video that went viral recently shows a group of elderly women in military-style camouflage clothing on the streets of Huaihua city in Hunan province in central China scolding a shopkeeper for having Christmas decorations. One of the women is shown reading a statement proclaiming Christmas as “the birthday of an old foreign man” (Jesus).

She also associates the festival with the Eight-Nation Alliance – a military coalition that was set up in response to China’s Boxer Rebellion – suggesting those who celebrate Christmas are effectively condoning the past “slaughter” of their countrymen.

“Why should we celebrate his birthday as he never benefited the Chinese?” she asks in the video, which has taken flak even from the Chinese public.

One parishioner at a church in Hebei, who gave his name as Paul, told ucanews.com the state has been using Christmas to stir up love of the motherland.

“I heard some places are now allowing Christmas trees be placed there in the name of patriotism,” he said.

A priest in northeastern China, who declined to give his name, said many underground churches had received notices to cancel their Christmas Mass, as well as related services and activities, or face the consequences. He had not received any such warning but said he would have no choice but to obey one should it come.

NHS trusts are struggling to produce contingency plans for Brexit because of the continuing uncertainty about the UK’s future relationship with the European Union, reveals an investigation published by The BMJ.

Many have been unable to accurately forecast how crucial areas such as supply chains, medicines, and workforce will be affected after the 29 March exit deadline.

The BMJ sent Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to all 231 NHS trusts in England and 26 health boards across Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland and received 182 responses (a 71% response rate) – 161 from NHS trusts and 21 from health boards.

The analysis found that only 9% of English trusts (15 out of 161 that responded) have established a committee or body to oversee preparations for Brexit. Out of the 21 health boards in Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland that responded (out of a total of 26), 14 have set up a committee.

The BMJ also asked trusts and health boards to disclose any current risk assessment related to Brexit.

Only a quarter (26%) of those that responded (47 out of 182) were able to disclose this information, with a number saying they were still assessing the risk. Those that have been done are largely thin on detail and similar risks have often been assessed differently from trust to trust.

Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, the body representing NHS trusts in England, told The BMJ: “All of the uncertainty has just exacerbated an already difficult situation. Trusts have planned as far as they can, but so much of this is reliant on central government action.”

The Department of Health and Social Care, which is overseeing central coordination of risk areas such as medicines, food, medical devices, and clinical consumables, has said trusts are responsible for their own contingency activity. On Monday 17 December, the health secretary Matt Hancock told the BBC’s Newsnight that the Department had instituted “full no-deal planning” for the NHS.

Hancock has sought to reassure MPs that NHS supplies, workforce, and medicines regulation will be secure in the event of a no deal “if everybody does everything they need to do.” But with the terms of Brexit still uncertain, much of the detail of what trusts actually “need to do” is not clear.

Trusts have drawn up lists of contracts that could be affected by a “no deal,” but most have been unable to move beyond basic scenario planning for Brexit.

The investigation did find that some trusts and health boards are taking action to support their EU staff, including paying for them to achieve settled status, while others have issued instructions not to stockpile medicines or write longer prescriptions for patients in the weeks leading up to Brexit, as requested by the Government.

For example, Royal United Hospital Bath NHS Trust, which has set up a Brexit committee, said it would advise doctors not to overprescribe, but it said that some products, such as furosemide and EpiPens, were “already in short supply.”

Commenting on the findings, Martin McKee, professor of European Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “The picture painted by these responses is extremely concerning. It is clear that any form of Brexit will have profound implications for the NHS.”

He added: “Even though ministers have been unable to provide reassurance that patients will not die as a result of their policies, they have been unable to offer any useful guidance for trusts. It is inconceivable that the NHS will be prepared for anything other than a situation that, in effect, continues the current arrangements by the end of March 2019.”

Genomic analyses can reveal the geographic origins of indigenous Aboriginal Australian remains currently held in museums, a new study reports.

Critically, this could allow these remains to be returned to their original communities – a result Aboriginal Australians have fought to achieve for decades.

According to the authors, their study has significant implications for future repatriation of ancient peoples, Aboriginal Australians and beyond.

Indigenous peoples around the world have been greatly affected by European colonization. Since the arrival of the British to Australia in 1788, Aboriginal Australian remains have been collected for scientific research or for museums.

Many indigenous people believe that their ancestors’ spirits cannot rest until their remains are returned to their ancestral lands, and thus, over many decades, Aboriginal Australians have requested that their ancestors’ remains be returned.

Unfortunately, in most cases, the geographic origin, tribal affiliation, or language group of many of these remains, respectively, are unknown, thus preventing repatriation.

Recent advances have suggested that genomic analyses could aid in repatriation, yet few genomic studies to date have attempted to recover ancient Aboriginal Australian DNA specifically, and none of them have been able to obtain and sequence nuclear DNA from this region, where the climate is harsh.

To determine if genomic analyses can be used to successfully determine the origin of indigenous skeletal remains, Joanne L. Wright and colleagues obtained and sequenced ten nuclear genomes and 27 mitochondrial DNA genomes from pre-European Australian samples of known provenance.

They compared these ancient samples to the nuclear genomes of 100 modern Aboriginal Australians also of known provenance.

Their analysis showed that, for most all of the ancient nuclear genomes, the most closely related contemporary genome was from people living today in the same geographic region. Their results also suggest that mitochondrial sequences, if used in repatriation efforts in Australia, would result in a significant percentage (~7%) of remains being returned to the wrong Indigenous group.

Thus, say the authors, mitochondrial DNA alone is not recommended for repatriation.

Bidi smoking cost India 805.5 billion rupees in ill health and early deaths in 2017 alone, finds research published in the journal Tobacco Control.

The poor already bear the brunt of these costs, and unhindered use of bidi tobacco threatens to push even more households into poverty, the researcher warns.

Bidi is very popular in India, accounting for most (81%) of the tobacco smoked and 72 million regular users over the age of 15.

Although bidi contains less tobacco than conventional cigarettes, the nicotine content is significantly higher. And the relatively low burn point forces smokers to breathe in more of the harmful chemicals produced.

Bidi smoking is implicated in several types of cancer, tuberculosis, and various long term lung conditions. But despite its impact on the nation’s health, it has been taxed at a rate that is a fraction of that applied to cigarettes, says the researcher.

The financial toll taken by bidi smoking in India has never been calculated. To try and put this right, the researcher drew on several sources of national and international data to estimate the direct and indirect costs of treating the ill health and early deaths attributable to the habit among 30-69 year olds in 2017.

His calculations revealed that bidi smoking cost India INR 805.5 billion (US$12.4 billion) in terms of ill health and early deaths.

Direct costs-tests, drugs, doctors’ fees, hospital stays, and transport-make up around a fifth of this total (just under 21%; INR 168.7 bn), with the remainder made up of indirect costs-accommodation for relatives/carers and loss of household income (INR 811.2 bn).

Given that around one in four 30 to 69 year old men smokes bidi, the habit takes a disproportionate toll on the nation’s men, says the researcher.

These figures amount to around 0.5 per cent of the goods and services (GDP) India produces and more than 2 per cent of its total health spend, he calculates. Yet the tax revenue derived from bidi smoking came to just INR4.17 billion in 2016-17.

Nearly one in five households in India faces “catastrophic expenditures” due to healthcare costs, the researcher points out, with more than 63 million people pushed into poverty, as a result.

“Diseases associated with bidi smoking add to this, potentially pushing more people into poverty,” he writes, suggesting that about 15 million face poverty because of spending on tobacco and associated health costs.

“Expenditure on tobacco also crowds out expenditure on food and education in India, especially among the poor,” he adds.

“Despite overwhelming evidence on the effectiveness of taxing tobacco products, taxation as a tool to regulate bidi smoking has been highly underutilised in India,” he insists, calling for for a tax hike on bidi tobacco to halt its unfettered consumption.

“Allowing bidi consumption to continue unhindered would make income distribution even more regressive, as the poor will continue to bear a disproportionately large share of economic costs from bidi smoking due to their higher bidi smoking prevalence,” he concludes.

As we reach the end of the year, the economic recovery in the United States is approaching a new record for duration. In June, it will have its tenth birthday, passing the 1990s recovery as the longest one in US history. While recoveries do not die of old age, they do die. The length of this recovery has many looking for recession prospects on the horizon. At the moment, they are not clearly visible.

Before examining the risks, it is worth saying a bit about the good news. The length of the recovery has allowed the unemployment rate to fall to 3.7 percent, the lowest rate in almost 50 years.

It is important to remember that many people, including many in policymaking positions at the Federal Reserve Board, did not want the unemployment rate to fall this low. They argued that the inflation rate would begin to spiral upward if the unemployment rate fell below 5.0 percent.

We hit the 5.0 percent level in September of 2015. The world would look very different today if the inflation hawks had carried the day and the Fed raised interest rates enough to prevent the unemployment rate from dipping below this 5.0 percent mark.

If we flip the story and looked at employment rates, the employment rate for prime-age workers (ages 25 to 54) was 2.5 percentage points lower in September of 2015 than it is today. That translates into another 3.2 million people with jobs.

Furthermore, the beneficiaries have been overwhelmingly the most disadvantaged in the labor market. The unemployment rate for African Americans has fallen by 3.3 percentage points in the last three years. For Hispanics, the drop has been almost 2.0 percentage points. For workers with just a high school degree, the drop was 1.7 percentage points, and for workers without a high school degree, the drop was 2.3 percentage points.

The tighter labor market has also meant rising wages for those at the middle and bottom of the income ladder. The average hourly wage was rising at just over a 2.0 percent annual rate in the fall of 2015. In the most recent data, it was rising at a rate of slightly more than 3.0 percent.

Based on this acceleration in wage growth, it reasonable to speculate that wages for workers at the middle and bottom end of the labor market are 1.0-1.5 percent higher than they would have been if the Fed had slammed on the breaks back in 2015. While that may not sound like a big deal, for a worker earning $40,000 a year, that could be another $600 a year in wage income.

In aggregate, if a tighter labor market raised wages for the bottom half of the workforce by 1.5 percentage points, this translates into roughly another $50 billion a year in higher wages for this group. If we assume that most of the 3.2 million new jobs went to people in the bottom half, that amounts to another $90 billion in wage income. It is very hard to envision a new or expanded social program that gives $140 billion a year to people in the bottom half of the income distribution.

But enough of the good news, what about the next recession? Everyone keeps looking back to the last recession and trying to identify a bubble that will burst, causing another financial crisis and sinking the economy. Fortunately, there is no serious story here.

Many analysts point to the corporate bond market where there has been a large expansion of risky debt. While it is totally plausible that much of this debt will default if the economy slows, there is just not the same basis for the sort of downward spiral we saw with the collapse of the housing bubble.

In worst case scenarios, the holders of this debt take a hit of $300-$400 billion. That’s bad news for them, but in an economy with close to $100 trillion in assets, that is not the stuff of recessions, much less major financial crises.

The stock market continues to be high by historical standards and could quite plausibly drop another 10 percent. This would be a hit to the wealth of many high- and upper middle-income people. But unlike the late 1990s, the stock market is not now driving the economy. The lost consumption as a result of diminished stock wealth would dampen growth by perhaps 0.5 percentage points at the low end, to 1.0 percentage points at the high end. Such loss would not drop the economy into a recession.

Housing prices are high, as I have noted in the past, but they seem driven by the fundamentals in the market, which are also driving up rents. Furthermore, construction has remained weak in this recovery, so there is not much room to fall, unlike in the bubble years.

With no obvious bubbles to burst, this leaves rate hikes from the Fed as the most likely source of the next recession. The Fed’s rate hikes to date have undoubtedly had the effect of slowing growth. This is most evident in the housing market where most data on sales and construction are down from year-ago levels.

The Fed’s rate hikes have also helped to push up the value of the dollar, which has increased the trade deficit. Higher rates have also played some role in dampening private investment as well as infrastructure investment by state and local governments.

The Fed has been reasonably cautious to date. Past rate hikes are unlikely to sink the recovery. Hopefully its caution will continue and it will allow workers to get further gains from a tight labor market. But if I had to take a bet as to what would be the cause of the next recession, it would be the Fed. After all, excessive rate hikes by the Fed have been the cause of most prior post-war recessions. They will also be the most likely cause of the next one.

This column originally ran on The Hankyoreh (Korea).

By Matthew Allen

The Swiss stock exchange is just one of several trading platforms gearing up for an anticipated wave of cryptoasset trading. So what’s behind this move?

The SIX Group which runs the Swiss exchange, is one of the front-runners in a race to build a blockchain-style distributed ledger platform that is required to trade such assets. 

Distributed ledger technology (DLT), which includes blockchain, promises a number of efficiencies: faster, cheaper trading, a reduction in paperwork and the option of issuing numerous tokens to each security. Dividing ownership rights of high value assets, such as real estate, would lower financial barriers for smaller players to invest and small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to more easily issue shares. 

Things have moved on since bitcoin and the initial coin offering (ICO) crowd investing wave burst onto the scene. The new kid on the block is the security token, a digital representation of asset ownership.

A security token is encrypted digital code that shadows financial instruments such as shares, bonds or even real estate and art. Tokens are a coded marker of who owns the underlying security and can be passed directly from one person to another, with each transaction recorded on the blockchain, or other forms of DLT.

Big players move in

Until recently, cryptoassets have been the domain of a growing number of independent, largely unregulated exchanges. But with the arrival of tokenised securities, big national stock exchanges are now moving into position.

SIX Group announced in July that it is building a “fully integrated end-to-end trading, settlement and custody service for digital assets” that will start to be rolled out in mid-2019. DLT will enable trades, clearing, settlement and custody carried out in one stroke, saving time and cost. The platform will also host a new form of tokenised company share that would allow smaller firms to more easily raise capital by listing.

The Stuttgart stock exchange, Germany’s second largest platform that also owns Bern’s stock exchange, is poised to launch the “Bison” app for cryptocurrency trading through a subsidiary and will follow this up with a “multilateral trading venue for cryptocurrencies and tokens”. 

Intercontinental Exchange, which owns a number of platforms including the New York Stock Exchange, is part of a consortium that plans to launch the Bakkt exchange to “unlock the transformative potential of digital assets across global markets and commerce.”

The Stock Exchange of Thailand plans to become the regional leader in Asia with a new regulated digital exchange as an “alternative venue for fund-raising and investment opportunities”.

Shanghai, London, Frankfurt, Australia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Malta and Gibraltar are also among those in the race to upgrade at least parts of their trading services with DLT to tap into the nascent “token economy”. Next year will see the launch of some such exchanges.

What will this look like in future?

The big exchanges are currently jostling for early adopter advantage, but the new technology has yet to be put to the test at scale. SIX says it will start rolling out its platform by the end of next summer, offering a limited range of as-yet-to-be-defined services to start with. No-one wants to be left behind, but equally, no-one wants to move too fast and make a mistake.

Daniel Diemers of PwC Strategy&, which advises SIX, says that it makes sense to offer the entire trading value chain under one roof. “Traders don’t want to go to 10 different venues for matching trades, clearing and settlement etc,” he told swissinfo.ch. “They will want the whole package at one venue, professionally executed.”

One of the potentially profitable business lines could be providing quality, real-time market data services for this new form of trading, Diemers believes. Charging subscription fees to gain access to data feeds or providing specialised risk management services could prove a lucrative side line.

But one of the potential stumbling blocks to fast adoption is that regulation is still lagging behind technological advances. For example, technology allows ownership of assets to be tokenised and freely passed around independent of the security itself, but this has yet to be codified in law. This is something the Swiss government is looking to change.

Different countries are taking their own approach to regulating the token economy. Liechtenstein is in the process of creating a new blockchain law while Switzerland appears to be veering down the route of updating existing legislation to incorporate cryptoassets.

Where would this leave the independents?

According to PwC, the ten largest global crypto exchanges currently control around 70% of daily trading volume in cryptoassets. In Switzerland, exchanges include Taurus, Swiss Crypto Exchange SCX and Lykke, which recently partnered with Dutch trading platform Nxchange.

Diemers believes that the arrival of national exchanges could see a consolidation, with some mid-sized independents either going out of business or merging with the heavyweights.

However, Swiss digital assets firm Taurus is of the opinion that digital versions of national exchanges won’t have it all their own way. Taurus Group co-founder Lamine Brahimi says there is room for all types of exchanges and potential opportunities for collaboration between different types.

“The digital assets market is quite diverse and segmented and there is room for incumbents and new players,” Brahimi told swissinfo.ch. “You also need access to the right skills, knowledge and technical infrastructure.”

For a start, institutional antipathy to cryptocurrencies will place them at a disadvantage to embracers of bitcoin, Brahimi said. But he admits that any exchange will need regulatory approval if it is to flourish in the long run. “There is strong demand from institutional investors [banks and asset managers] for truly regulated digital assets exchanges applying to the highest institutional standards,” he said. “So far, there are none.”

To this end, Taurus is applying to the Swiss financial regulator for a broker-dealer license.

Who else stands to gain?

Security token advocates believe that this technology will transform the financial markets, allowing more people to raise capital and trade in a faster, more cost-effective way.

This would open the door to a range of players beyond exchanges. If all goes to plan, small and medium sized companies (SMEs) would be able to easily issue shares and raise money for expansion. The increased volume of trading could also benefit banks and asset managers that derive fees from placing trades on behalf of clients or trade their own assets.

A number of specialised financial players are setting up in Switzerland to catch the token economy wave. These include Melonport, a portal for asset managers to engage in cryptoasset trading, tokenised alternative asset provider Smart Valor and Instimatch, which is exploring blockchain options for its digital platform that matches borrowers and lenders in the corporate debt market. 

Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)

DLT is a digital system for keeping records of who owns particular assets and making sure the books balance when they change hands. It is designed to replace centralised accounting systems run by banks and government agencies etc. 

DLT does this by allowing everyone within the system to view and approve transactions. The system stores the complete history of all transactions on an encrypted digital ledger, which is visible to all participants. Blockchain, the basis for decentralised cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is one form of DLT.

By Akshobh Giridharadas

A few weeks from now, we will be welcoming 2019. And that means premature election fever in the United States with several candidates forming presidential exploratory committees to realistically assess their chances in 2020.

Since the end of the Cold War, foreign policy has traditionally taken a backseat in the primaries. The focus is skewed towards domestic issues with candidates contesting the amount of resources and spending that need to be devoted towards increasing prosperity and economic growth versus fulfilling social objectives and improving quality of life.

As a leading global superpower, America’s foreign policy and the liberal hegemonic outlook has long touted promoting prosperity across the globe. However, a wise man once stated that charity begins at home. Hence, it would be ironic for the US to remain a superpower echoing the terms of prosperity across the globe if its own backyard were to see more and more wilted roses.

Promoting prosperity is central to America’s long-term future. The US is the world’s leading superpower and boasts the world’s largest economy, a robust military presence and sophisticated technology but its secret sauce is the shared values and ideals of democracy, free speech, peace and prosperity that epitomises the American dream for its citizens and immigrants who choose to buy into this shared vision.

A strong economy has enabled US citizens to live more bountiful and secure lives, and it provided the foundation for a strong defence. Over the long-term, the US can only remain secure if it preserves the core elements of American power. That is a robust economy, an innovative private sector, world-class infrastructure, a government that encourages efficiency and promotes fair competition, and a well-educated population. Investments in each of these areas will yield invaluable long-term benefits and are essential to preserving America’s position as the leading global power.

When it comes to assessing some of the tensions facing American policymakers, some of the four key assessments they often grapple with include balancing efficiency vs equity or thinking about long term goals as opposed to short-term goals. Then there is a general interest vs particular specific interest and last but not least, there is the comfort of security & stability vs opting for dynamism & innovation.

When it comes to assessing some of the tensions facing American policymakers, some of the four key assessments they often grapple with include balancing efficiency vs equity or thinking about long term goals as opposed to short-term goals.

Then there is a general interest vs particular specific interest and last but not least, there is the comfort of security & stability vs opting for dynamism & innovation.

When it comes to the long-term vs the short-term conundrum, the question is, is it worth taking on short-term pains to reap the fruition of long-term gains? More often than not, policy makers make decisions thinking only about its immediate effect in the short run. This could be to appease the electoral multitude, or they lack the perspicacity to witness the long-term gains.

This is evinced when discussing the themes of research, development and innovation. America’s unarguable dominant position as the pioneer of cutting-edge technology was due to heavy investments in research towards technology and innovation. There was a unique trifecta of the government, universities and the private sector all cumulatively invested (figuratively and literally) in funding research to come up with the next generation of technology.

The short-term conundrum is obvious – why pay excessive greenback now towards research and technology that may not provide any tangible results? Could these funds not be allocated towards social welfare schemes such as Social Security and Medicare, that have direct short term and long-term benefits?

This further accentuates the second conundrum of security & stability as opposed to dynamism & innovation. Investing heavily in science and technology has enabled the US to consolidate its dominant position in the geopolitical scenario. Investment in space technology and NASA not only helped send the first human to the moon, but its geopolitical implications saw the Americans beat the Soviets in the space race. Silicon Valley is a dynamic place that is one of the last to see the light (sunrise) in the world, but one of the first places where new inventions see the light of day. It is ubiquitous with technology and is a place that epitomises innovation. Silicon Valley has helped California become the world’s fifth largest economy and contributed to the nation’s coffers.

Policymakers also tussle between general interest as opposed to specific interest. Technology and innovation would not have been possible without investing in quality primary, secondary and higher education.

The current discourse around education enlightened the perspective that future generations need to be prepared to face an ephemeral world with various global challenges. Subsidized quality public education works for the larger general interest. However, the more the populace that get quality education, the more the specific interest groups will acquire engineers, scientists, and technical specialists in STEM careers to pursue groundbreaking research and development (R&D).

Despite a perceived threat of losing its numero-uno position as the dominant economic powerhouse, the United States ‘still leads the world in the number of high-quality research and education facilities. This is the allure for the brightest prodigious talents from across the world that buy their share into the American Dream.

Investing in the next generation through education is not just a social must but has phenomenal economic importance and is a critical ingredient in sustaining long-term national strength.

Bryant Welch’s new edition of his book, State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind, purports to diagnose the mental illness that produces support for and tolerance of Donald Trump in particular, and the Republican Party in general. To some extent it does so, although it’s mostly very familiar stuff, partly excusable because the first edition came out a decade ago. Welch, by the way, deserves credit for opposing participation in torture by the American Psychological Association.

What I find most illuminating in the book is the first-person account of an apparent sufferer of PHSD (Post Hillary Stress Disorder). I imagine that someone unfamiliar with the notion that Fox News lies and that political campaigns exploit bigotry and fears, or someone eager to hear reassuring accounts of how all evil originates among Republicans, would have a very different reaction to the book. My reaction is sympathy for the apparent trauma inflicted on apparently well-off educated people by Hillary Clinton’s defeat, combined with outrage at the hypocrisies and in particular the militarism of Democratic partisanship.

“Awareness, deeper psychological awareness itself,” Welch writes in his new prefatory note, “must become America’s new Manhattan Project.” Seriously? The creation of a new nuclear bomb? Is that the absolute best metaphor for the efforts of a book that diagnoses half the United States as remarkably evil and the other half as essentially good — even while the bipartisan effort to build “more usable” nuclear bombs speeds ahead back here in reality? Well, yeah, perhaps it is. What else was the Cold War on the international level?

The fact that most everything Welch denounces in Republicans is accurate, while Democrats share many of the same faults and pile on others of their own is apparently disturbing in its perplexity. It’s not difficult to comprehend. There has to be resistance to comprehending it. “The mind,” Welch writes, “becomes so dependent on and pays such irrational obeisance to anyone who can protect it from perplexity that it steadfastly overlooks incompetence or severe character flaws in the admired charismatic leader.” Welch’s book proceeds to overlook all of the following in Hillary Clinton’s performance as an outstanding neoconservative:

She said President Obama was wrong not to launch missile strikes on Syria in 2013.

She pushed hard for the overthrow of Qadaffi in 2011.

She supported the coup government in Honduras in 2009. (Where do those refugees come from, again?)

She long backed escalation and prolongation of war in Afghanistan.

She voted for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

She skillfully promoted the White House justification for the war on Iraq.

She did not hesitate to back the use of drones for targeted killing.

She consistently backed the military initiatives of Israel.

She was not ashamed to laugh at the killing of Qadaffi.

She did not hesitate to warn that she could obliterate Iran.

She was not afraid to antagonize Russia.

She helped facilitate a military coup in Ukraine.

She had the financial support of the arms makers and many of their foreign customers.

She waived restrictions at the State Department on selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar, all states wise enough to donate to the Clinton Foundation.

She supported President Bill Clinton’s wars and the power of the president to make war without Congress.

She advocated for arming fighters in Syria.

She supported an escalation in Iraq even before President Bush did.

Here are comments from a few of her supporters:

“For this former Republican, and perhaps for others, the only choice will be to vote for Hillary Clinton. The party cannot be saved, but the country still can be.” —Robert Kagan

“I have a sense that she’s one of the more competent members of the current administration and it would be interesting to speculate about how she might perform were she to be president.” —Dick Cheney

“I’ve known her for many years now, and I respect her intellect. And she ran the State Department in the most effective way that I’ve ever seen.” —Henry Kissinger

Welch objects to criticism of Hillary Clinton’s financial corruption, and associates such criticism with trying to connect Barack Obama to Paris Hilton or questioning John Kerry’s war-heroism, suggesting I guess that Hillary Clinton’s financial corruption is either nonexistent or heroically militaristic.

The 2017 2007 escalation of the war on Iraq, for Welch, was the work of President George W. Bush and not in any way of the Democratic Congress that had just been elected to end that war. Meanwhile, the 2009 escalation of the war on Afghanistan doesn’t exist or isn’t worth mentioning. In fact, the whole presidency of Barack Obama almost doesn’t exist in various sections of this book which repeatedly leaps from accounts of Bush’s outrages right into Trump’s as if there was no gap between them during which the same or very similar outrages continued.

This partisanship is paralleled in its division of people into good and bad groups by Welch’s patriotism. Welch explicitly claims that nations, not just actual individual people, can go through mental processes. He writes that the crimes of 9-11 traumatized a nation and its people, including Welch himself, because for the first time — and apparently the last time — violent deaths occurred in world history. And those deaths were all of “Americans,” Welch writes, and therefore worth acknowledging, he implies, ignoring the 12% or so of the 9-11 victims who were not from the United States. This sort of attitude, in which mass slaughters by the U.S. military before and after 9-11 are not “traumatizing” but 9-11 is, results from an extreme and extremely accepted sort of bigotry, but it also causes it by suggesting the same view to readers.

The war on Iraq of 2003 was, according to Welch, the “first openly acknowledged preemptive war in American history,” and waging it had negative effects “for our country” and apparently for nobody else worth mentioning. I wonder if any Iraqis were hurt? According to Welch, “America,” and not just its government, is responsible for the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq and the creation of ISIS. But Welch acknowledges that Bush was eager for war on Iraq prior to 9-11, and that his excuses for it were just that. However, Welch walks right up to the edge of claiming that believing war lies is acceptable because people are pathetic babies. He then denounces the war lies. He then proclaims his belief in them.

“With remarkable ease,” Welch writes, “America’s cause went from eliminating weapons of mass destruction to evicting an evil dictator to spreading democracy, because the idea that our leaders might have been wrong, incompetent, or worse was simply too disconcerting a proposition for many Americans to consider.” Welch cannot even write the obvious and well-documented fact that “our leaders” were lying. He never mentions that Hillary Clinton promoted the weapons-of-mass-destruction lies. Welch goes on to make clear that he actually believes the evicting an evil dictator lie and describes the war as “America’s attempt to liberate Iraq from a ruthless dictator who had killed tens of thousands of Kurds.” He also believes the spreading-democracy lie but blames the Bush Administration for failing to realize that there was “no historical basis” for democracy among the primitives being bombed in Iraq. Welch even believes in the whole mission and denounces the outing of Valerie Plame as putting at risk “our efforts in the war on terror.” Whose what?

This is typical Democratic partisanship. You denounce an unpopular war while supporting it. You claim the loyalty of anti-Republicans, then hopelessly try to win the votes of Republicans, while alienating independent, thinking people. Welch even admits that Al Gore’s top advisor and speech writer on his presidential campaign was eager for war on Iraq and believed Gore was too, but praises Gore as radically different from Bush because he deleted a line threatening war on Iraq from a speech.

John Kerry throughout the book is repeatedly “a decorated war hero” much like Gore who becomes “a foreign-policy expert” and “one of the most respected experts on defense matters in the history of the United States Senate” who “served [defensively??!] in Vietnam.”

For Welch, war is not illegal or immoral, but a nation should analyze its emotions prior to launching a war, and should make proper emotional use of its enemies: “[O]ur enemies actually help us maintain a cohesive sense of reality.” Is he referring to foreign enemies or Republicans? This book suggests both. Welch refers without any attempt at evidence to “Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election” and claims “We actually appointed a Russian operative to be our National Security Advisor.” He laments energy invested in opposing documented outrages by Trump which he thinks should go into “the possibility that Russia is gaining control of our executive branch of government.” The line between the Russian enemy and the Republican enemy is blurred, and the blame for Post Hillary Stress Disorder is dispersed.

Welch diagnoses in “the American mind” paranoia, sexual perplexity, and envy. The first he believes has been created by exploitation of 911, the big real fact, while the other two have been created out of whole cloth. And the combination serves, he thinks, to explain hatred of Hillary Clinton. But all three, as far as I can tell, are generated by a wide variety of lies, while there is no such thing as “whole cloth.”

Welch’s understanding of envy seems to especially lack understanding: “What could Americans be envious of? Despite our national pockets of poverty, most Americans participate heavily in a vast consumer economy their parents never imagined.” Let’s set this comment against reality for a moment. For many in the United States life is harder than it was for their parents. It’s also harder than for many around them. Poverty and economic insecurity are extremely widespread. The United States has the highest inequality and the highest poverty of any wealthy country. This almost certainly contributes to envy of wealthier U.S. citizens and, to a far lesser extent, envy of people in other nations — while contributing to a passionate patriotism that is stronger among the poor than the wealthy, perhaps in part because it covers up envy of more equal and prosperous places. Welch goes on to rightly criticize advertising for promoting envy, but the notion that it promotes it out of nowhere is a notion shared by the right wing of U.S. politics.

In Welch’s view, Trump exploited women’s envy of Hillary to get them to vote against Hillary, while men hated her out of pity for themselves and their need to look down on all women. This is certainly a plausible part of an explanation for the attitudes of some people, mostly people who were probably planning to vote for whoever was the most racist, patriotic, and plutocratic regardless of any specifics. And Welch himself promotes the attitudes he criticizes through the usual hypocrisies, such as mocking George W. Bush for having been a cheerleader. But the paranoid-sexually-insecure-envious-hateful-people-did-it does little better than the Putin-did-it explanation of Hillary Defeat Trauma. I would recommend, instead, the following healing steps:

Stop identifying with a corrupt government or any portion of it. Work to improve it, but don’t consider that work self-improvement.

Stop imagining that social change comes primarily through elections.

Stop identifying with a political party and with a population that makes up 4% of the species you should identify with.

Recognize that an extremely broken and corrupt election system allowed Trump to “win” despite his having lost. Fix these problems before worrying about nefarious Russian masterminds or bitter insecure racists: the Electoral College, voter ID laws, the lack of verifiable hand-counted paper ballots, the Presidential Debates Commission, the corporate media, the rigged Democratic Party primaries that deprived that party of its strongest candidate according to numerous polls, the racist stripping of names from voter rolls in various states, the open criminal intimidation and incitement of violence by Trump, the disenfranchisement of people convicted of crimes, the ridiculous lack of automatic voter registration and of an election holiday and of sufficient polling places.

Recognize that Hillary Clinton was one of the few candidates awful enough to have come anywhere close to shocking Donald Trump by losing to him. She was the epitome of financial corruption and the lack of any consistent belief or integrity. She lost a couple of swing states, studies suggest, to the understandable belief among military families that she was the most likely to get their loved ones killed. She turned off all kinds of constituencies by appearing to give a damn exclusively about herself.

Face head on the apparently somehow frightening perplexity that is somehow supposed to arise in your poor little brain from the fact that lots of people also disliked Hillary Clinton because they were sexists or racists or other despicable things, and from the fact that this fact doesn’t somehow erase all the facts listed above.

The New York Times recently ran a piece with astounding implications that didn’t get very much attention. The headline read: “Two Decades After 9/11, Militants Have Only Multiplied.”

The story reported on a recent study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a pillar of the American foreign policy establishment. CSIS concluded that the number of Islamist militants operating around the globe is nearly four times what it was when the U.S. government began fighting them in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Despite a cost of nearly $6 trillion dollars and the loss of nearly 7,000 U.S. military service members, the war on terror has clearly failed.

The study estimated that Islamist militants now number 230,000 and are spread across 70 countries, with fighters recovering from conventional battle defeats in Iraq and Syria likely to launch guerrilla attacks there and in other nations. Yet CSIS warns that withdrawing American forces from Africa and the Middle East, which the military has already started to do as it prioritizes countering conventional powers, will only help terrorists. The report states that the West has failed to address the root causes of terrorism and concludes that “[p]erhaps the most important component of Western policy should be helping regimes that are facing terrorism improve governance and deal more effectively with economic, sectarian, and other grievances.”

Seth G. Jones, one of the study’s authors, predicts dire consequences if this is not done: “Some of these groups do want to target Americans overseas and at home, particularly the Islamic State and Al Qaeda. All this indicates that terrorism is alive and well, and that Americans should be concerned.”

The Soufan Center of New York, which also studies terrorism, recently characterized the results of America’s counterterrorism campaigns as “mixed at best.” The center argued that one achievement has been the absence in the United States of another terrorist attack of the magnitude of 9/11 in the years since, even though the terrorists’ ideology has metastasized. Yet the center admitted that “many of the conflicts that comprise America’s global counterterrorism campaign have a fiercely local component to them, meaning there is little that a Western country and its military can actually do to impact events on the ground for a sustained period of time.”

The shocking CSIS statistics about the growing threat from Islamist terrorism are an arresting signal that U.S. policy must change drastically and soon. Yet the think tank’s report and one of its authors seem to conclude the U.S. government merely needs to rethink its adjustment of priorities: Instead of slogging through unending brushfire counterterrorism wars (at least nine are currently being conducted), Washington should favour planning for conventional threats from possible nation-states while spending more American resources to help developing countries deal with societal grievances and with governance. The Soufan Center implies that the absence of a 9/11-scale attack is due to U.S. government counterterrorism campaigns. Yet in all the years before 9/11, North America experienced very few terrorist attacks compared to other, more conflict-ridden continents. North America, and especially the United States, sits far away from the world’s centers of conflict. It presents problems of logistics and sanctuary for such terrorists. The Soufan Center is correct, however, that most terrorist groups have primarily local grievances. This can be said of even “global” terror groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS.

The “war on terror” has been a disaster, as the CSIS statistics imply, simply because the U.S. government has never been honest with the American people on the underlying causes of the anti-U.S. terrorist attacks that do occur. George W. Bush, after the 9/11 attacks, told Americans that they were attacked because of their freedoms. Osama bin Laden, the perpetrator of the strikes, noted sarcastically that if that were the case, he could just as well have attacked Sweden. He was very specific that his war on the United States was in response to Washington’s military support of the corrupt government of Saudi Arabia, which is the guardian of the holiest sites in Islam. ISIS originated from resistance to the unneeded U.S. invasion of Iraq and spread from there.

So instead of running at least nine counterterrorism wars at once—and escalating them as the Trump administration has—President Trump should follow his stated instinct to avoid unnecessary wars. He should not let the military, the foreign policy establishment, or think tanks and the media goad him into continuing these endless fiascos. Radical Islamism has existed for centuries and may exist for centuries more, but it is usually fueled by local grievances. It need not and likely will not be directed at the United States. The excessive use of American military power in Islamic countries and around the world is not the solution to terrorism. It only breeds terrorism and retaliation.

This article was published at Real Clear Worldand is reprinted with permission.

By Jonathan Cook*

Two years of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as a Middle East peacemaking team appear to be having a transformative effect – and in ways that will please neither of them.

The American public is now evenly split between those who want a two-state solution and those who prefer a single state, shared by Israelis and Palestinians, according to a survey published last week by the University of Maryland.

And if a Palestinian state is off the table – as a growing number of analysts of the region conclude, given Israel’s intransigence and the endless postponement of Mr. Trump’s peace plan – then support for one state rises steeply, to nearly two-thirds of Americans.

But Mr. Netanyahu cannot take comfort from the thought that ordinary Americans share his vision of a single state of Greater Israel. Respondents demand a one-state solution guaranteeing Israelis and Palestinians equal rights.

By contrast, only 17 percent of Americans expressing a view – presumably Christian evangelicals and hardline Jewish advocates for Israel – prefer the approach of Israel’s governing parties: either to continue the occupation or annex Palestinian areas without offering the inhabitants citizenship.

All of this is occurring even though US politicians and the media express no support for a one-state solution. In fact, quite the reverse.

The movement to boycott Israel, known as BDS, is growing on US campuses but vilified by Washington officials, who claim its goal is to end Israel as a Jewish state by bringing about a single state, in which all inhabitants would be equal. The US Congress is even considering legislation to outlaw boycott activism.

And last month CNN sacked its commentator Marc Lamont Hill for using a speech at the United Nations to advocate a one-state solution – a position endorsed by 35 percent of the US public.

There is every reason to assume that, over time, these figures will swing even more sharply against Mr. Netanyahu’s Greater Israel plans and against Washington’s claims to be an honest broker.

Among younger Americans, support for one state climbs to 42 percent. That makes it easily the most popular outcome among this age group for a Middle East peace deal.

In another sign of how far removed Washington is from the American public, 40 percent of respondents want the US to impose sanctions to stop Israel expanding its settlements on Palestinian territory. In short, they support the most severe penalty on the BDS platform.

And who is chiefly to blame for Washington’s unresponsiveness? Some 38 percent say that Israel has “too much influence” on US politics.

That is a view almost reflexively cited by Israel lobbyists as evidence of anti-semitism. And yet a similar proportion of US Jews share concerns about Israel’s meddling.

In part, the survey’s findings should be understood as a logical reaction to the Oslo peace process. Backed by the US for the past quarter-century, it has failed to produce any benefits for the Palestinians.

But the findings signify more. Oslo’s interminable talks over two states have provided Israel with an alibi to seize more Palestinian land for its illegal settlements.

Under cover of an Oslo “consensus”, Israel has transferred ever-larger numbers of Jews into the occupied territories, thereby making a peaceful resolution of the conflict near impossible. According to the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, that is a war crime.

Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the court in The Hague, warned this month that she was close to finishing a preliminary inquiry needed before she can decide whether to investigate Israel for war crimes, including the settlements.

The reality, however, is that the ICC has been dragging out the inquiry to avoid arriving at a decision that would inevitably provoke a backlash from the White House. Nonetheless, the facts are staring the court in the face.

Israel’s logic – and proof that it is in gross violation of international law – were fully on display this week. The Israeli army locked down the Ramallah, the effective and supposedly self-governing capital of occupied Palestine, as “punishment” after two Israeli soldiers were shot dead outside the city.

The Netanyahu government also approved yet another splurge of settlement-building, again supposedly in “retaliation” for a recent upsurge in Palestinian attacks.

But Israel and its western allies know only too well that settlements and Palestinian violence are intrinsically linked. One leads to the other.

Palestinians directly experience the settlements’ land grabs as Israeli state-sanctioned violence. Their communities are ever more tightly ghettoized, their movements more narrowly policed to maintain the settlers’ privileges.

If Palestinians resist such restrictions or their own displacement, if they assert their rights and their dignity, clashes with soldiers or settlers are inescapable. Violence is inbuilt into Israel’s settlement project.

Israel has constructed a perfect, self-rationalizing system in the occupied territories. It inflicts war crimes on Palestinians, who then weakly lash out, justifying yet more Israeli war crimes as Israel flaunts its victimhood, all to a soundtrack of western consolation.

The hypocrisy is becoming ever harder to hide, and the cognitive dissonance ever harder for western publics to stomach.

In Israel itself, institutionalized racism against the country’s large minority of Palestinian citizens – a fifth of the population – is being entrenched in full view.

Last week Natalie Portman, an American-Israeli actor, voiced her disgust at what she termed the “racist” Nation-State Basic Law, legislation passed in the summer that formally classifies Israel’s Palestinian population as inferior.

Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s grown-up son, voiced a sentiment widely popular in Israel last week when he wrote on Facebook that he wished “All the Muslims [sic] leave the land of Israel”. He was referring to Greater Israel – a territorial area that does not differentiate between Israel and the occupied territories.

In fact, Israel’s Jim Crow-style policies – segregation of the type once inflicted on African-Americans in the US – is becoming ever more overt.

Last month the Jewish city of Afula banned Palestinian citizens from entering its main public park while vowing it wanted to “preserve its Jewish character”. A court case last week showed that a major Israeli construction firm has systematically blocked Palestinian citizens from buying houses near Jews. And the parliament is expanding a law to prevent Palestinian citizens from living on almost all of Israel’s land.

A bill to reverse this trend, committing Israel instead to “equal political rights amongst all its citizens”, was drummed out of the parliament last week by an overwhelming majority of legislators.

Americans, like other Westerners, are waking up to this ugly reality. A growing number understand that it is time for a new, single state model, one that ends Israel’s treatment of Jews as separate from and superior to Palestinians, and instead offers freedom and equality for all.

(A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.)

*Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit his website www.jonathan-cook.net.

Responsible innovation that considers the wider impacts on society is key to smart farming, according to academics at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Agriculture is undergoing a technology revolution supported by policy-makers around the world. While smart technologies will play an important role in achieving improved productivity and greater eco-efficiency, critics have suggested that consideration of the social impacts is being side-lined.

In a new journal article Dr David Rose and Dr Jason Chilvers, from UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences, argue that the concept of responsible innovation should underpin the so-called fourth agricultural revolution, ensuring that innovations also provide social benefits and address potentially negative side-effects.

Each of the previous revolutions was radical at the time – the first representing a transition from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture, the second relating to the British Agricultural Revolution in the 18th century, and the third to post-war productivity increases associated with mechanisation and the Green Revolution in the developing world.

The current ‘agri-tech’ developments come at a time when the UK government has provided £90 million of public money to transform food production in order to be at the forefront of global advanced sustainable agriculture. Many other countries are also prioritising smart agri-tech.

This, combined with private investment from organisations including IBM, Barclays, and Microsoft, means that ‘Agriculture 4.0’ is underway, with technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics increasingly being used in farming.

Dr Rose, a lecturer in human geography, said: “All of these emergent technologies have uses in farming and may provide many benefits. For example, robotics could plug potential lost labour post-Brexit in industries such as fruit picking, while robotics and AI could enable better chemical application, saving farmers money and protecting the environment. They could also attract new, younger farmers to an ageing industry.”

Writing in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, Dr Rose and Dr Chilvers warn though that agri-tech could also have side-effects, bringing potential environmental, ethical, and social costs.

“In light of controversial agri-tech precedents, it is beyond doubt that smart farming is going to cause similar controversy. Robotics and AI could cause job losses or change the nature of farming in ways that are undesirable to some farmers. Others might be left behind by technological advancement, while wider society might not like how food is being produced,” said Dr Rose.

“We therefore encourage policy-makers, funders, technology companies and researchers to consider the views of both farming communities and wider society. We advocate that this new agricultural tech revolution, particularly the areas funded by public money, should be responsible, considering the winners, but particularly the potential losers of change.

Dr Rose added: “This means better ways, both formal and informal, to include farmers and the public in decision-making, as well as advisors and other key stakeholders sharing their views. Wider society should be able to change the direction of travel, and ask whether we want to go there. They should be able to question and contest whether benefits to productivity should supersede social, ethical, or environmental concerns, and be able to convince innovators to change design processes.

“Responsible innovation frameworks should be tested in practice to see if they can make tech more responsible. More responsible tech saves controversy, such as that surrounding genetic modification, ensures farmers and the public are behind it, and can help to deliver on the policy objectives.”

Earlier this year, the United Nations announced some much-needed, positive news about the environment: The ozone layer, which shields the Earth from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation, and which was severely depleted by decades of human-derived, ozone-destroying chemicals, is on the road to recovery.

The dramatic turnaround is a direct result of regulations set by the 1987 Montreal Protocol, a global treaty under which nearly every country in the world, including the United States, successfully acted to ban the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the main agents of ozone depletion. As a result of this sustained international effort, the United Nations projects that the ozone layer is likely to completely heal by around the middle of the century.

But a new MIT study, published in Nature Geoscience, identifies another threat to the ozone layer’s recovery: chloroform — a colorless, sweet-smelling compound that is primarily used in the manufacturing of products such as Teflon and various refrigerants. The researchers found that between 2010 and 2015, emissions and concentrations of chloroform in the global atmosphere have increased significantly.

They were able to trace the source of these emissions to East Asia, where it appears that production of products from chloroform is on the rise. If chloroform emissions continue to increase, the researchers predict that the recovery of the ozone layer could be delayed by four to eight years.

“[Ozone recovery] is not as fast as people were hoping, and we show that chloroform is going to slow it down further,” says co-author Ronald Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT. “We’re getting these little side stories now that say, just a minute, species are rising that shouldn’t be rising. And certainly a conclusion here is that this needs to be looked at.”

Xuekun Fang, a senior postdoc in Prinn’s group, is the lead author of the paper, which includes researchers from South Korea, Japan, England, Australia, and California.

Short stay, big rise

Chloroform is among a class of compounds called “very short-lived substances” (VSLS), for their relatively brief stay in the atmosphere (about five months for chloroform). If the chemical were to linger, it would be more likely to get lofted into the stratosphere, where it would, like CFCs, decompose into ozone-destroying chlorine. But because it is generally assumed that chloroform and other VSLSs are unlikely to do any real damage to ozone, the Montreal Protocol does not stipulate regulating the compounds.

“But now that we’re at the stage where emissions of the more long-lived compounds are going down, the further recovery of the ozone layer can be slowed down by relatively small sources, such as very short-lived species — and there are a lot of them,” Prinn says.

Prinn, Fang, and their colleagues monitor such compounds, along with other trace gases, with the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) — a network of coastal and mountain stations around the world that has been continuously measuring the composition of the global atmosphere since 1978.

There are 13 active stations scattered around the world, including in California, Europe, Asia, and Australia. At each station, air inlets atop typically 30-foot-tall towers pull in air about 20 times per day, and researchers use automated instruments to analyze the atmospheric concentrations of more than 50 greenhouse and ozone-depleting gases. With stations around the world monitoring gases at such a high frequency, AGAGE provides a highly accurate way to identify which emissions might be rising and where these emissions may originate.

When Fang began looking through AGAGE data, he noticed an increasing trend in the concentrations of chloroform around the world between 2010 and 2015. He also observed about three times the amount of atmospheric chloroform in the Northern Hemisphere compared to the Southern Hemisphere, suggesting that the source of these emissions stemmed somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.

Using an atmospheric model, Fang’s collaborators on the paper estimated that between 2000 and 2010, global chloroform emissions remained at about 270 kilotons per year. However, this number began climbing after 2010, reaching a high of 324 kilotons per year in 2015. Fang observed that most stations in the AGAGE network did not measure substantial increases in the magnitude of spikes in chloroform, indicating negligible emission rises in their respective regions, including Europe, Australia, and the western United States. However, two stations in East Asia — one in Hateruma, Japan, and the other in Gosan, South Korea — showed dramatic increases in the frequency and magnitude of spikes in the ozone-depleting gas.

The rise in global chloroform emissions seemed, then, to come from East Asia. To investigate further, the team used two different three-dimensional atmospheric models that simulate the movement of gases and chemicals, given global circulation patterns. Each model can essentially trace the origins of a certain parcel of air. Fang and his colleagues fed AGAGE data from 2010 to 2015 into the two models and found that they both agreed on chloroform’s source: East Asia.

“We conclude that eastern China can explain almost all the global increase,” Fang says. “We also found that the major chloroform production factories and industrialized areas in China are spatially correlated with the emissions hotspots. And some industrial reports show that chloroform use has increased, though we are not fully clear about the relationship between chloroform production and use, and the increase in chloroform emissions.”

“An unfortunate coherence”

Last year, researchers from the United Kingdom reported on the potential threat to the ozone layer from another very short-lived substance, dichloromethane, which, like chloroform, is used as a feedstock to produce other industrial chemicals. Those researchers estimated how both ozone and chlorine levels in the stratosphere would change with increasing levels of dichloromethane in the atmosphere.

Fang and his colleagues used similar methods to gauge the effect of increasing chloroform levels on ozone recovery. They found that if concentrations remained steady at 2015 levels, the increase observed from 2010 to 2015 would delay ozone recovery by about five months. If, however, concentrations were to continue climbing as they have through 2050, this would set a complete healing of the ozone layer back by four to eight years.

The fact that the rise in chloroform stems from East Asia adds further urgency to the situation. This region is especially susceptible to monsoons, typhoons, and other extreme storms that could give chloroform and other short-lived species a boost into the stratosphere, where they would eventually decompose into the chlorine that eats away at ozone.

“There’s an unfortunate coherence between where chloroform is being emitted and where there are frequent storms that puncture the top of the troposphere and go into the stratosphere,” Prinn says. “So, a bigger fraction of what’s released in East Asia gets into the stratosphere than in other parts of the world.”

Fang and Prinn say that the study is a “heads-up” to scientists and regulators that the journey toward repairing the ozone layer is not yet over.

“Our paper found that chloroform in the atmosphere is increasing, and we identified the regions of this emission increase and the potential impacts on future ozone recovery,” Fang says. “So future regulations may need to be made for these short-lived species.”

“Now is the time to do it, when it’s sort of the beginning of this trend,” Prinn adds. “Otherwise, you will get more and more of these factories built, which is what happened with CFCs, where more and more end uses were found beyond refrigerants. For chloroform, people will surely find additional uses for it.”

Like raindrops streaking across the windows of your car while you drive through a rainstorm, water droplets in clouds travel in airflow streamlines — following currents of air usually without touching. However, the air inside clouds tends to be turbulent, as any nervous flier can attest to, and swirling turbulent air causes droplets to cluster.

For 20 years, atmospheric scientists have conjectured that water droplets do indeed cluster inside clouds, largely owing to the knowledge that turbulent airflows are full of spinning vortices that mix fluids well. But clouds swirl on such vast scales, that doubts persisted whether the turbulence simulated by a computer or generated in a laboratory could be translated to the atmosphere. A team of atmospheric science researchers have taken instruments to the atmosphere itself, and have confirmed that water droplets do indeed cluster together inside clouds.

The article, “Fine-Scale Droplet Clustering in Atmospheric Clouds: 3D Radial Distribution Function from Airborne Digital Holography” was published in November in the journal Physical Review Letters.

To make this determination, the researchers took their experiments to the sky, using an airborne holographic instrument known as the HOLODEC, short for the holographic detector for clouds. The instrument is fixed under the wing of Gulfstream-V High-performance Instrumented Airborne Platform for Environmental Research aircraft operated by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The HOLODEC resembles a claw, its prongs can record three-dimensional images to capture the shape, size and spatial position of everything that passes between.

“The clustering signal that we observed is really small, so as is often the case in science, a careful analysis had to be performed to detect a small signal and to convince ourselves that it was real,” said Raymond Shaw, professor of physics and director of the atmospheric sciences doctoral program.

Extended Across the Sky

Susanne Glienke, who was a visiting doctoral researcher at Michigan Tech from the Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry and the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany, conducted the data collection and holographic image analysis. She then passed the information to Mike Larsen, associate professor at the College of Charleston and Michigan Tech alumnus, who looked at how tightly droplets cluster by calculating the probability of finding two droplets spaced apart at a specific distance compared to the probability of finding them at the same distance in a randomly distributed setting. He determined droplet clustering becomes more pronounced at smaller particle-to-particle distances.

“If droplets cluster in the clouds, they are more likely to collide,” Glienke said. “Collisions increase the rate at which droplets grow, and therefore can decrease the time needed until precipitation begins.”

Glienke notes that knowing about clustering improves the general knowledge of clouds and can lead to improvements in forecasting the behavior of the clouds: When will they rain? How long will the clouds last?

Additionally, apart from influencing rain, clustering also decreases cloud lifetime. If a cloud dissipates quicker, it has a smaller influence on the radiation budget — and influences global climate, if many clouds are involved.

The experiment required a long continuous sample, flying the plane through stratocumulus cloud decks at a constant altitude.

“We were not sure if we would be able to detect a signal,” Shaw said. “The clouds we sampled are weakly turbulent, but have the advantage of being spread out over hundreds of kilometers, so we could sample and average for a long time.”

Marine clouds behave differently from clouds over land. Continental clouds typically have smaller droplets, due to more abundant cloud condensation nuclei, which are needed for water to condense on. Continental clouds, which are typically more turbulent, are more likely to have clustered droplets.

The Sky’s the Limit

Because the clouds examined in the study were not particularly turbulent, which meant that a random distribution of droplets was more likely, it made the presence of clustered droplets all the more important.

“We were excited and skeptical at the same time, when we first saw a signal emerge from the very noisy data,” he said. “It took a lot of discussion and testing to become confident that the signal was significant and not an instrumental artifact.”

Shaw notes that this validation is important to the field of atmospheric science because the detected clustering signal is consistent with concepts developed during the past two decades, based on lab and theoretical work.

“In clouds with more intense turbulence, the clustering signal could be much stronger, and could influence the rate at which cloud droplets collide to form drizzle drops,” Shaw said. “But exactly how that happens will need more work.”

The work shows there is still much to be learned about clouds and their effects on the planet.

An eerie calm exists over the villages of Fedelisan, Sagada and Dalican of Bontoc of Mountain Province, Philippines. It is because, there is no telling how many killings will again turn the pristine waters red. Not too long ago, ten people died and scores injured in prolonged tribal war over water.

Water has become a major bone of contention not only in villages but also nationwide. Water-related conflicts have been increasing lately. The Philippine National Police (PNP) in four regions covering 56 provinces, identified 34 areas last year where shooting and killing erupted due to conflicts on water rights, boundaries, use and sharing.

In urban areas, it may not be long before the problem of diminishing water resource goes uncontrolled towards social unrest. Per capita demands are increasing and per capita water availability is declining due to population growth and trends in economic development.

The country’s capital Manila is the most vulnerable to water scarcity, so are the major cities Baguio, Cebu, Bacolod, Iloilo, Olongapo, Angeles. Cagayan de Oro, Pagadian and Davao city; the Philippine Center for Water and Sanitation (PCWS) said. These cities are currently experiencing severe water shortages.

Enough Water But Unavailable For All

It may be unthinkable because according to Dr. Peter H. Glieck of the Pacific Institute for Environment (PIE), the country happens to have 323 km^3 per year of total renewable fresh water supply, third most bountiful in Southeast Asia after Indonesia and Malaysia. But think again. Of that amount, the country can only withdraw a total of 29.5 per cent yearly of water.

Dr. Glieck reported in the 2012 edition of the “World Water” says, the Philippines will need some 393 per cent of total withdrawal starting year 2000 until the next ten years. Of the total withdrawable amount, 18 per cent is consumed for domestic use, 21 per cent for industrial purposes and 61 per cent for agricultural irrigation.

Luzon itself is a paradoxical case. Even with the Gran Cordillera, Caraballo and Sierra Madre ranges which cradle three giant river basins; Agno, Angat and Cagayan, water scarcity has not only become a problem in the country’s biggest island. It is also causing sanitation constraints and increasing incidences of water-related diseases and amount of land irrigated is falling as competition for agricultural water is being strained to the limit.

Deforestation and Water Mismanagement Are Culprits

Not surprisingly, massive deforestation is behind the problem. Deforestation is rampant nationwide. If the country’s deforestation rate pegged at 1,500 hectares a day as of 1995 by the World Resources Institute (WRI) is not scary enough, deforestation rates in several provinces are more alarming with many provinces falling below the ideal 60:40 forest-settlement ratio to maintain ecological balance. The Cordillera Ecological Center, an environmental NGO at least six provinces in the Cordillera region have only between 20 – 30 forest cover, based from LANDSAT estimates, with the province Benguet having the least forest cover.

The country itself has only a little more than 4 million hectares of forests left, 700,000 hectares of which are virgin forests as bared by former Senate committee on environment Sen. Loren Legarda. But it may not be long before these are wiped out, what with the deforestation rate far outstripping reforestation efforts.

According to former director of PCWS Director Rory Villaluna, deforestation is not the only cause for worsening water inadequacy. Rather, water resources like river basins, rivers, creeks, brooks and underground water are inadequately protected, conserved and rehabilitated. She said water levels have not only gone down. These are being polluted at an alarming rate such that it is not fit for domestic or agricultural use.

Such statements only prove Sen. Legarda’s lamentable revelation that only one forester guards and protects every 3,000 hectares of forests in the country.

“We often equate water with forests but actually ill water management and use has only aggravated the sad state of our watersheds—our main sources of water. Much water, if not only polluted and poisoned can be used back for the burgeoning population”, Villaluna says. “We ask what forests can give us, but we don’t do enough to give back to conserve our forests and water”, she added with finality, albeit hinting that water should really be managed..

Dying Rivers

The Agno River of the Philippines is a very good example. While it feeds three dams—San Roque, Ambuklao and Binga which generate 1,200 megawatts of electricity, it is dying.

From its headwaters in Mount Data and Loo, Buguias, Benguet, now the country’s center of highland vegetable production, toxic pesticides find their way to the river. All along its stretch, vegetable gardens using dangerous broad spectrum pesticides exist. The deadly chemicals eventually find their way to the river through soil and water surface as well as underground run-off.

As the river reaches Itogon municipality, cyanide and mercury from the various mines and hundreds of pocket miners seep to the river. A Japan Integrated Cooperative Agency (JICA) study in 1990 showed that at Lingayen Gulf, Pangasinan, the delta of Agno, shellfishes have trace deposits of cyanide and mercury.

Mercurial and cyanide poisoning cause weakening of the human body, and these are characterized by symptoms coughing, vomiting, reddening of eyes, nausea and difficulty of breathing, the late Dr. Charles Cheng, a noted medical researcher and director of the Baguio-based Chinese-Filipino General Hospital said.

Because both have cumulative effects, they may not kill instantly in small deposits in the human body. But when accumulation defeats the tolerable level of the human body, instant death occurs, Dr. Cheng said.

Aside from the two deadly chemicals, an independent assessment team commissioned by the Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the International Rivers Network (IRN) found several more harmful chemicals in Agno’s river. Dr. Sergio Feld of the team identified these as lead, selenium, molybdenum, iron, manganese, zinc, arsenic, copper, nickel and even radioactive compounds like uranium.

The Manila-based Upland NGO Committee (UNAC) say 27 rivers which used to provide household water, irrigation, fishing haven, and washing and swimming grounds are “crying in silence” as they go to die in dams or either run dry. UNAC Committee member and secretary general of the NGO Bantay Mina Nestor Caoli says six of the 27 rivers – Balili, Agno, Baroro, Balincaquin, Bued and Dagupan—are biologically dead due to mining.

Six more rivers are heavily polluted and silted by mining activities. These are Naguillan, Upper Magat, Caraballo, Santa Fe, Amburayan and Pasil. Expanding agricultural operations are pouring pesticide elements into the river, Caoli said. The dead and dying rivers are adversely affecting economic and social activities of people living within and along the rivers’ headwaters and tributaries, UNAC said.

CEC added one river that feeds the country’s vegetable bowl, Balili River is being killed mainly by solid waste pollution including human excrement from Baguio City, a known highland tourism city. An estimated 3,000 tons monthly of human excreta is treated by the Baguio Sewage Plant but still find their way to Balili river.

The Cordillera, it appears, is fast turning out to be the region of not only the “dammed, damned, but also of dying rivers”,CEC said.

The government’s Environmental Management Bureau (EMB) of the DENR came out with a different view but still complements the above-said findings of the NGOs. It says Amburayan and Baroro rivers of La Union are dead, so are Agno and Dagupan of Pangasinan.

Even rivers in Bulacan and Batangas are dying; Balagtas, Bocaue, Guiguinto, Marilao and Meycauayan in Bulacan and Dumaca-a in the province of Batangas.

In Luzon’s heart, Metro Manila, nine river sub-basins are may soon have only poisoned water. These are Obando-Malabon-Navotas estuary in Balut and Malabon, Marikina in Payatas, Tullahan in Valenzuela, the three Taguig-Napindan river basins in Taguig and Taguig-Napindan in Fort Bonifacio. These are in the most critical situations among the country’s 18 river basins whose areas total to more than 110,000 square kilometers.

No Water Means Death Of Communities

The dead and silent rivers are now the subject of fierce rhetoric from environmentalists hell-bent on protecting what is left of the country’s water sources. NGOs in Luzon look squarely at logging companies, mines, dams and insensitive farmers as culprits. Forester George Facsoy of the Cordillera Ecological Center, for instance, sees the death of rivers as the decapitation of communities from the ecosystem that once supported them.

In the Cordillera, “water is looked upon as life itself”, as the Igorot hero Macli-ing Dulag once said. Death of a river means people will suffer deep economic recession. There will be no farms and fishing areas, and people will be marginalized, making them dependent on outside culture difficult for them to adapt to, he said.

The precious water from rivers replenishes the paddies and deposits fertile silt onto thousands of hectares of farms which foster populations along rivers. If and when the rivers run dry, the imprint of many centuries of human civilizations’ cumulative toiling, ethnic culture and identity will be forever lost, he said.

Groundwater Will Be Affected

The extinction of rivers will directly affect underground water resources, the National Water Resources Center (NWRC) warned. Of all the nation’s provinces, only 12 have groundwater resources that are expected to provide water in the near future. Not one of these has a groundwater area of more than 30,000 hectares—meaning—population density will definitely bear hard on water that these sources can provide.

Groundwater, often looked upon as an unreliable resource, is possible of being lost . It is very vulnerable and with the water and sanitation sectors’ poor management of it, like surface water, it may soon be lost to oblivion

If so, biodiversity will be lost too, and economic and social activities will altogether be disrupted, especially in the lower regions.

Waters wars Will be Fought This Millenium

The specter of water crisis will cause communities to fight tooth and nail for possession and use. The politics of water is as difficult as preventing a war. It makes rivers no longer “deep and wide” as the song goes, but the rift between communities.

Sandra Postel of the influential Worldwatch Institute says “in efforts to seek and prevent water as flashpoints of conflict, there is a must for mediators to allocate strategies where communities or nations can agree to equal sharing.” Easier said than done, especially so when no law exists where pressure is put on lower communities to either pay for the water that flows or die without. Moreso, putting water scarcity to the already crowded policy agenda of the government has not yet been done with genuine interest by Philippine law-makers. Even though the challenge to recognize water scarcity as an increasingly powerful cause of political and social instability is so great. In fact, politicians have yet to pass a Code of Conduct for the water and sanitation sector.

“Communities and even counties will go to war”, warned Facsoy and the government may find it too late to act.” The villages in Mountain Province are not the only volatile places. This year’s drought, the impending long, hot summer and El Nino next year, need not spell these out.

*About the Author: Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan wrote for the British Panos News and Features and GEMINI News Service, the Brunei Times, and US Environment News Service. In the Philippines, he wrote for DEPTHNews of the Press Foundation of Asia, Today, the Philippine Post, and Vera Files. A practicing environmentalist, he holds postgraduate degrees in environment resource management and development studies as a European Union (EU) Fellow at University College, Dublin, Ireland. He is currently a Fellow of Echoing Green Foundation of New York City. He now writes for Business Mirror and Eurasia Review.

ExxonMobil said Thursday that it has been named 2018 Large Cap Company of the Year and Explorer of the Year by the World Oil and Gas Council in recognition of excellence and innovation in the global energy industry.

Brad Corson, president of ExxonMobil Upstream Ventures, accepted the award for Large Cap Company of the Year.

Corson said, “We are honored to be recognized as an industry leader and are confident that the growth strategy we are currently implementing will drive long-term shareholder value and industry-leading returns. This award is a reflection of the dedication of our employees and their daily commitment to excellence.”

During the year, ExxonMobil announced a number of discoveries, acquisitions and other activities around the world. The company’s industry-leading portfolio underpins aggressive growth plans.

These opportunities span all of the corporation’s business lines and represent the most attractive investment portfolio since the Exxon and Mobil merger, the company said.

ExxonMobil was also the recipient of the Explorer of the Year award for the second year in a row.

“We appreciate the Council’s recognition of our efforts to add the highest quality resources to our development portfolio as well as continuing to build on our leading acreage position,” said Steve Greenlee, president of ExxonMobil Exploration Company.

“Particularly encouraging this year was our drilling success in Guyana as well as capture of a large number of quality drilling opportunities in Brazil.”

Taking the overall picture of the Eurasian landmass over the past 25 years, it is clear that Russian power has been receding. Although it is fashionable to say that Russia is resurgent and that Moscow’s actions in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova are good examples of this, in fact, Russia’s influence in those countries has only diminished. In the early 2000s, where civilians in these countries were either neutral or pro-Russian, now they are unequivocally pro-Western. Moreover, the former universal communist doctrine has been supplanted

by a particular concept of the “Russian world” and the trouble is that this new, at times vague, notion is not welcomed in the neighboring countries. Even in Belarus, the idea of Russia being a friendly partner is already a forgotten one.

Therefore, from a strategic point of view, politicians in the Kremlin should be worried that Russia’s sphere of influence is diminishing. This leads to the following question: since geopolitical differences between Russia and the West are wide and Russia is likely to lose more, can Moscow take a different path? In other words, can Russia become economically powerful? Various elements of modern Russia’s internal or foreign policy actually point to a negative answer to the posed question.

For example, over the past several years, a slump in most of the secondary industries, except for those currently owned by foreign companies (e.g. those producing passenger cars or domestic supplies of refrigerators, washing machines and television sets), has been seen in the Russian economy.

Underdevelopment of the country’s economy is also hampered by the growing centralization of power inside the country, which nearly borders on authoritarianism. It is still not as it was back in the Soviet period, but it nevertheless makes it harder for the economy to develop, as largely only one – political – elite garners most profits from Russia’ economic productivity. Growing centralization of power therefore means that it will be getting more and more difficult for the political elite to renounce it.

The need for economic changes is essential for Russia. This might be clear to many, but the willingness to carry out reforms is quite different. In fact, the decision to implement changes comes when the political elite and ordinary people understand that the State is in a dire situation. In today’s Russia, quite the opposite is happening. The elite, at least for the moment, is not carrying out fundamental reforms to change the course of the State’s economic development, whereas ordinary people are precluded from active participation in state affairs. This leads to the conclusion that a revolution from the top will not happen in modern Russia. President Vladimir Putin will unlikely be as Peter I or Alexander II were when the top-to-bottom revolution took place in the Russian Empire.

Politicians in Russia also know that a robust middle class, independent of oil revenues and state-managed wealth redistribution, can make the subservience of the population less probable. This very thinking drives the basic idea why fundamental reforms are not forthcoming. But it is not only about Darwinist thinking on the part of the Russian elite. In fact, the introduction of economic reforms in Russia is a very difficult process, as the country’s past shows, and typically borders on revolution.

The last point needed for Russia to introduce a successful economic reform will be its association with the world it aspires to be a part of. Is it West or Asia-Pacific? – the two most powerful economies in the world, and two very different political systems. The recent geopolitical problems with Western countries matter, and taking on the European development model might be problematic for the Russian political elite as it will prove the West’s superiority in a period when the Kremlin portrays Europe as decadent and troublesome. The list of reasons can go on and on, but the above problems are crucial as to why Russia nowadays is the way it is

This article was published by Georgia Today.

By Malik Ibrahim*

News that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have driven Islamic State (IS) fighters to the country’s eastern reaches shows that the tide is finally turning against the extremists. While it’s estimated that IS still has thousands of fighters at large, the Kurdish-led SDF has, with US support, gradually eroded the last urban pocket of IS-held territory in the region, close to the border with neighboring Iraq.

But although the American-led coalition has hailed the recent capture of the town of Hajin as evidence that the conflict is entering its ‘end days,’ it’s important to remember that the real fight – that of rebuilding a land and a people torn apart by years of warfare – is only just beginning.

Iraq is still counting the costs

Indeed, one year after the defeat of Islamic State in Iraq, the country continues to grapple with the poisonous legacy left by the terrorist group. This month, Iraq is marking the first anniversary of its victory over IS, following a bitter three-year campaign that saw the death of tens of thousands of its people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more.

In a bid to re-establish a sense of normality, as well as to fend off protests over alleged corruption and the failure to deliver adequate public services, the government declared a national holiday, with Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi encouraging citizens to celebrate the country’s triumph over the ‘enemies of life, dignity, freedom and peace.’ It has also begun reopening sections of its heavily guarded ‘Green Zone’ – home to key government offices and foreign embassies – an area that had previously been shrouded in blast walls and barbed wire.

Government efforts notwithstanding, Iraq remains badly affected by the violent rule of Islamic State. According to the Norwegian Refugee Council, more than 1.8 million Iraqis are still displaced, with most unable to return to homes that are damaged or destroyed, while 8 million more need humanitarian aid, and thousands of children fathered by IS militants have been left in limbo without a national identity. Meanwhile, IS forces and sympathizers continue to carry out attacks on Iraqi targets – as well as further afield, as evidenced by the recent shootings in Strasbourg, France.

Rebuilding countries and communities

Those communities recovering from the devastation of war are struggling to rebuild the infrastructure that will allow them to look to the future. Raqqa, the former de facto capital of the Islamic State ‘caliphate’ in Syria, had around 80 percent of its infrastructure destroyed during the liberation battle in 2017, including the majority of bridges that provide essential links to other cities.

Major projects are ongoing to re-establish water and sewage supplies, as well as to replace schools and hospitals. Yet it’s a massive task and it’s hard to see how more ambitious projects, including tackling the power sector, can be addressed in the short term. Away from the cities, farmers and people living in rural communities also need help to rebuild their lives but assistance is in short supply: the US recently announced a $230 million cut in so-called ‘stabilization’ funding to northeast Syria, instead focusing its resources on the recovery of Raqqa.

A living legacy of forced occupation

Infrastructure problems aside, the trauma in the bodies and minds of the people who were forced to live in territory occupied by Islamic State is still very real. Many others are grappling with the effects of rape and abuse by IS militants. It was a legacy evoked by Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nadia Murad, in remarks last weekend at the Doha Forum, a global platform for dialogue hosted by the Gulf state of Qatar. Speaking before conference attendees, Murad called for the protection of women from her Yazidi minority group until IS leaders are “brought to the international courts.”

Her remarks came only days after she had returned to her village in the Sinjar region, where she promised to use her prize money to build a hospital. In August 2014, this village had turned into a horror scene following two weeks’ siege by IS forces. Throughout 2014, the extremist group had attacked towns throughout Sinjar, with the intention of ethnically cleansing the country of its minority Yazidi population. Thousands of Yazidi men were killed, while the Yazidi women – including Murad – were abducted and held as sex slaves by the terror group. Murad managed to escape her captors and was later able to tell her story from a refugee camp, but it’s thought that around 3,200 women are still in IS hands. Five years later, most of the 500,000 Yazidi people remain displaced, with some living rough at the top of Mount Sinjar, apparently forgotten by the rest of the world.

The co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, Murad is a leading advocate for survivors of genocide and sexual violence. Her work involves raising awareness about Islamic State’s genocidal campaign against her people in the international community, to secure support for its victims and to help rebuild the Yazidi homeland. She was instrumental in persuading the UN to open an investigation into the war crimes committed by IS in Iraq.

Speaking at the Doha Forum, Murad expressed a simple, yet heartfelt, wish: ‘I hope, as a matter of fact, the international community will help the Yazidis come back to their villages and get back their dignity… I dream about returning to Sinjar and living a noble life.’

Planning for the long term

It’s a wish echoed by communities across the region. While news of SDF gains in Hajin is broadly welcomed as evidence of the waning influence of extremist forces in Syria, the destruction wrought by years of conflict in the region means there’s a long way to go before its people can regain and sense of lasting security, address ethnological tensions, and begin to plan for a peaceful future.

Long-term stabilization must now be the goal, with the emphasis not only on tackling a broken infrastructure but on establishing support programs that will enable ordinary people to rebuild their lives and families.

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