By Lojien Ben Gassem

Visitors to this year’s Janadriyah Festival are taking a trip down many a memory lane, especially at the fair’s Madinah village.

In fact, the festival’s younger visitors are sure to be getting a healthy glimpse into how their forefathers lived in historic regions, such as Yanbu, Al-Ula and Khaibar.

Handicrafts, paintings and folkloric elements have also been put on display by the very local families that made them.

Madinah village stood out to the crowds thanks to the large wall that mimics the city’s ancient fortress. The village entrance is marked by simulations of the city’s famous Anbariah and Masri gateways. The Shami gate at the back of the village also drew many crowds thanks to its distinct Hijazi imprint.

Madinah house

The house that depicts Madinah paints a vivid picture of how houses were built in the past and how people lived through the ages, dating back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

Maryam Al-Hamed, head of the women’s delegation, said: “Visitors will have a chance to explore the region’s poetry, documentaries, lectures and seminars about the famous city’s landmarks, as well as the history and development of the Prophet’s Mosque.”

Traditional crafts

The city’s craftsmen, especially their coppersmiths, are renowned for their unique work because residents used copper in everything, from kettles and kitchen items to copper plate sets, back in the day.

Madinah was home to many skilled craftsmen in the iron industry who made lamps and lanterns, among other essentials. Visitors can find these stores in the market wing of the village.

Visitors can also watch the “sakka,” who used to carry water, and the “fawakherji,” who makes pottery, at work.

Getting high on VR

The festival embraced the future with virtual reality (VR) providing education, entertainment and training for visitors.

People were able to experience paragliding at a private security VR pavilion, while a separate exhibition was used to warn of the dangers of celebratory gunfire.

Visitors to a different pavilion donned headsets for a driving simulation exercise, which was particularly welcomed by women at the festival who used the occasion to learn about the rules of the road and traffic violations.

Many visitors said that VR technology was being widely used in education and training and that its deployment was likely to increase in the future.

By Kamran Reza Chowdhury

Bangladesh’s main opposition alliance declared Monday that its victorious candidates would not take the oath as new MPs to protest alleged vote-tampering in Sunday’s national polls, while Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said her ruling coalition had won a “credible and transparent” election through a landslide.

The National Unity Front (NUF) opposition bloc won a mere seven parliamentary seats compared with the Grand Alliance coalition, which took 288 seats out of 299 that were up for grabs in the polls, according to the nation’s Election Commission.

“We have rejected the results of the election, so we will not go to parliament. Our MPs will not take the oath,” Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir, secretary general of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), one of the leading parties in the opposition alliance, told reporters in Dhaka.

As many as 83.2 million people, or 80 percent of eligible Bangladeshi voters, cast ballots in the 11^th general election – the first national polls contested in a decade – the commission reported on Monday. It turned down calls from the opposition that the votes be thrown out and polls be held again because of allegations of massive ballot rigging.

“The Awami League has snatched the people’s rights to franchise in a premeditated way. We completely reject this election,” said Alamgir, who was elected to parliament from the Bogra constituency, adding that the NUF demanded that new elections be held under a neutral caretaker government.

“Our MPs cannot take the oath and sit in the assembly,” Mahmudur Rahman Manna, a key leader of the recently formed NUF coalition, told BenarNews. “If our MPs go to parliament, we will contradict ourselves.”

PM: ‘They overwhelmingly voted for us’

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Hasina, 71, spoke to reporters for the first time after securing a record fourth and third consecutive one.

The people had once again picked her Awami League party, which heads the Grand Alliance, because it had brought the country positive economic change, including reducing the poverty rate change and raising the Gross Domestic Product, the state-run BSS news agency quoted her as saying.

“They (the people) wanted continuity of the government, [and] development for which
they overwhelmingly voted for us,” said Hasina, who received congratulatory messages on Monday from Bangladesh’s giant neighbors to the west and east, India and China.

The Asian rivals both maintain bilateral relations with Dhaka and have sizeable economic investments in the country of 160 million people.

Awami’s victory was “credible and transparent,” but the opposition NUF lost because “people did not know who the opposition leader was,” Hasina added.

Kamal Hossain, 84, a former Awami stalwart who had worked under Hasina’s father – the founding leader of Bangladesh who was assassinated in a coup in 1975 – spearheaded the NUF during the election campaign but was not running for any parliamentary seats.

The NUF had forged an alliance with the BNP, Awami’s traditional rival party whose leader, Khaleda Zia, was disqualified from participating in the election because she was convicted and jailed over corruption charges – which, her supporters said, were politically motivated.

While Hasina basked in the glow of her party’s victory by saying it would prolong the country’s economic stability, Nizam Uddin Ahmed, a political science professor at Chittagong University, suggested that Awami’s landslide victory would create “further political instability.”

“People will definitely question the result. They will not accept the outcome,” he told BenarNews. “When a ruling party candidate gets 250,000 votes while a BNP gets 10,000, [this] is unacceptable to the voters.”

“All political parties contested the election. We had an opportunity to bring long-term political stability. But this chance is lost,” Ahmed added.

‘This is not a vote’

According to a statement from Bangladesh’s government, the Election Commission had declared that Awami won a “substantial majority” in parliament by taking 267 seats in Sunday’s vote, although results from one constituency were postponed because of alleged irregularities at three polling centers. Nationwide, polling was suspended at only 16 centers in all, the statement said.

“In the end, almost all foreign observers have issued statements affirming that the elections were orderly, fair and mostly peaceful,” the government said.

Among the 18 countries and organizations that were approved to send 176 observers to monitor the polls, the United States deployed the largest contingent, made up of 65 observers, according to a list from the Election Commission.

In the week before the vote, the U.S. State Department and American ambassador to Dhaka issued statements expressing concern that the polls be free and fair as well as staged in a safe atmosphere.

On Monday, a spokeswoman for the Washington-based International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES), which was accredited to send observers, told Benar it could not comment on whether the Bangladeshi elections were held in a free and fair manner.

K.M. Nurul Huda, the embattled head of the Election Commission whom the opposition had accused of being biased for the government during the run-up to the polls, on Monday described Sunday’s vote as “peaceful” and “fair.” Police, however, had said that at least 16 people were killed in political-related violence nationwide on Saturday and Sunday.

“No, we will not hold a fresh election; there is no scope for holding an election anew,” Huda told reporters in Dhaka.

He also rejected allegations from the NUF that officials and activists from the ruling Awami League party had been spotted stuffing ballot boxes ahead of the 11^th general election.

“This is a totally untrue statement,” the elections chief said, adding, “We, the election commission, are satisfied … We have not received a single written allegation of irregularities.”

As soon as Huda left the media briefing room, Mahbub Uddin Khokon, a barrister and BNP candidate, came in, saying he had filed written complaints with the commission about alleged voter fraud in his constituency.

“Across the country, the style of rigging was the same,” Khokon told BenarNews.

“The police, the ruling party armed cadres, the administration and the election commission officials stuffed the ballots in advanced to get the ruling party candidates elected,” he alleged. “They kicked the agents of Sheaf of Paddy out of the centers and cast false votes in the presence of the police and administrative officials.”

He was alluding to the symbol of the NUF coalition.

On Sunday night, Islami Andolon, a faith-based independent party, said it had filed written complaints about fraud in at least 24 constituencies, where its appointed poll monitors were allegedly beaten and forced out of polling centers.

The party said other irregularities had occurred, including the stuffing of ballot boxes, the closing of police centers at 11 a.m., and the casting of falsified votes. The party fielded candidates for all 299 seats but did not win a single one.

“This is not a vote. This is a farce. We reject this election,” Yousuf Ahmad, the secretary general of Islamic Andolan, told BenarNews.

Meanwhile, a BenarNews correspondent who on Sunday visited a polling center in Rupganj, a sub-district near Dhaka, said he saw no voters at the polling booths. Some local people, including a 12-year-old boy, were stamping seals on ballot papers in the presence of a police constable.

When the group saw that journalists were observing them, they ran away.

“There may be one or two such cases. Very peaceful voting is going on. By 12:45 p.m., over 2,400 out of 3,100 votes have been cast. You go, now,” a presiding officer, who was on site but declined to identify himself, told the Benar reporter.

(RFE/RL) — Iran says a Taliban delegation has made a rare visit to Tehran for talks with a senior Iranian official on efforts to end Afghanistan’s 17-year-long war.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi said on December 31 that the Taliban delegation arrived on December 30 and met with Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi.

Qassemi said talks focused on “security issues aimed at driving the peace process in Afghanistan.” He said Kabul was informed about the meeting.

It was not the first such meeting between the Taliban and Iranian officials.

Ali Shamkhani of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council confirmed last week in Kabul that such talks have taken place in the past and would continue.

The Taliban have recently held talks in several regional countries amid Washington’s plans to withdraw up to half the 14,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

A letter from Cardinal Marc Ouellet indicates that the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops had blocked the U.S. bishops from voting on proposals to address the sex abuse crisis in November because the congregation believed more time was needed to discuss the measures.

The Associated Press reported Jan. 1 that it had obtained a letter from Cardinal Ouellet, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, addressed to U.S. bishops’ conference president Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston.

The letter, dated Nov. 11, says that proposals which had been scheduled for a vote by the bishops’ conference needed more time and discussion to “properly mature.” Ouellet indicated that the Vatican congregation had numerous canonical objections to the proposals.

On Nov. 12, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston announced that the Vatican had directed the U.S. bishops’ conference to delay a vote on two key proposals which had been expected to form the basis for the Church’s response to the sexual abuse crisis.

The proposals to establish a new code of conduct for bishops and create of a lay-led body to investigate bishops accused of misconduct had been scheduled to receive a vote at the fall gathering of the bishops’ conference, which was held Nov. 12-14 in Baltimore.

DiNardo said he received a directive from the Congregation for Bishops, insisting that consideration of the new measures be delayed until the conclusion of a special meeting called by Pope Francis for February. That meeting, which will include the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences, will address the global sexual abuse crisis.

DiNardo said he had only been told of the Vatican’s decision one day before the start of the U.S. bishops’ fall meeting in Baltimore.

However, according to the Associated Press, Ouellet first told DiNardo on Nov. 6 that the bishops should not vote on the proposals, and repeated the instruction in his Nov. 11 letter, saying, “Considering the nature and scope of the documents being proposed by the (conference), I believe it would have been beneficial to have allowed for more time to consult with this and other congregations with competence over the ministry and discipline of bishops.”

DiNardo on Jan. 1 told the Associated Press that he had shared the “content and direction” of the proposals with the Vatican in October. He said he moved forward with drafting the final text when he did not meet with any opposition.

“We had not planned, nor had the Holy See made a request, to share the texts prior to the body of bishops having had an opportunity to amend them,” he said, adding that he assumed the Vatican would be able to “review and offer adjustments” to the measures after the U.S. bishops voted to approve them.

“It is now clear there were different expectations on the bishops conference’s part and Rome’s part that may have affected the understanding of these proposals,” DiNardo said in a statement. “From our perspective, they were designed to stop short of where the authority of the Holy See began.”

In his letter, Ouellet acknowledged that the bishops’ conference has autonomy to discuss and approve measures, but added “the conference’s work must always be integrated within the hierarchical structure and universal law of the church.” He mentioned a need to “incorporate the input and fruits” of the February meeting in Rome.

DiNardo told the AP that he had cautioned Ouellet that a failure to vote on the proposals “would prove a great disappointment to the faithful, who were expecting their bishops to take just action.”

By Michael Lelyveld

Have foreign investors lost interest in China?

Based on the latest official figures, it appears that investors may be holding back until the outcome of the trade war with the United States becomes known.

As with much of the official data in China, the evidence is clouded, fragmented and inconclusive.

Yet, despite the uncertainties over Chinese statistics, it seems clear that foreign investment growth has fallen far below the double-digit rates of a decade ago.

Some reports have been quick to cite a “sharp deterioration in business confidence” among China investors following a steep drop in November’s foreign direct investment (FDI), reported by the Ministry of Commerce (MOC).

FDI for the month plunged 26.3 percent from a year earlier to 92.1 billion yuan, the MOC said in December.

The November decline looked even worse in dollar terms, as U.S. $13.6 billion of FDI fell 27.6 percent year-on-year, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Investors in China were “spooked” by fears of more tariff increases “at a time of high uncertainty about the impact the dispute was having on China’s economy,” the South China Morning Post reported on Dec. 13.

“Given the prospect of additional tariffs, foreign companies are afraid to invest in China now,” the paper quoted Shen Jianguang, chief economist at JD Finance in Beijing, as saying.

As evidence of the cooling trend, the report cited a recent decision by California-based camera maker GoPro Inc. to move some production out of China and a reported plan by South Korea’s Samsung Group to close a smartphone factory in the northeastern city of Tianjin.

‘Base effect’ argument

The FDI results were perhaps the worst of the economic figures released for the month, which was generally marked by a slowdown of growth rather than absolute declines.

The MOC had a ready explanation for the poor monthly showing on FDI, noting the “high base of comparison” with a surge of investment recorded in November 2017.

A check of the record appears to support the “base effect” argument, since the MOC reported a 90.7-percent jump in FDI a year earlier, although there has been no explanation for the sudden increase. FDI for the full year rose at a much milder 7.9-percent rate in yuan terms, boosting the total to a record high.

But 11-month FDI numbers for 2018 are significantly lower, dropping 1.3 percent from a year earlier to 793.3 billion yuan and rising only 1.1 percent in dollar terms to U.S. $121.3 billion, the MOC said.

Xinhua called the FDI inflows for the 11-month period “basically stable.”

Loss of confidence in China may be one explanation for the falloff. Investors may also be waiting to see what new opportunities emerge from negotiations with the United States before making commitments. If that is the case, FDI growth could rebound in 2019.

Reasons for caution

Derek Scissors, an Asia economist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, noted several likely causes of the apparent slump but also reasons for caution in drawing conclusions.

“Changes in monthly FDI numbers can be driven by a single disbursal. No repeat a year later and there’s a ‘crash,'” he said by email, warning against over-interpreting the results.

FDI numbers are often “a product of Chinese money sent overseas coming back,” said Scissors. In that case, there may be variable effects from government policies and capital controls.

The MOC report suggests that FDI totals are the result of many smaller investments rather than big headline deals. In the 11-month period, the agency recorded 54,703 new overseas-funded ventures, an increase of 77.5 percent.

But Scissors believes that “true foreign money is declining faster than 1.1 percent. Why? Because China’s economy has been slowing,” he said.

Official statements from the government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have stressed “resilience” in the face of economic pressures. But growth rates were already on a steady decline before the trade war with Washington accelerated the slide.

“Many economists say the slowdown is the worst since the global financial crisis a decade ago,” The New York Times reported on Dec. 14.

It may be too soon to see an impact from shifts in U.S. tariff policy, or the mild market access concessions that China has announced so far, said Scissors.

“My guess is that new or existing potential investors are inactive and waiting for clarity,” he said.

Over the past year, China has outlined plans to ease investment curbs for a limited number of sectors.

Last April, the government took the first step in the auto sector, ending foreign share limits for manufacturers of new energy vehicles (NEVs) and gradually allowing majority ownership of joint ventures for other car makers in the next several years.

In June, the government announced more opening-up measures with a long-awaited revision of its “negative list,” trimming the number of sectors off-limits to foreign investors from 63 to 48.

The new list offered 22 measures to phase out prohibitions in “finance, transportation, professional services, infrastructure, energy, resources and agriculture,” state media said.

The government has promised that more access for foreign investment is on the way. On Dec. 23, an MOC official told Xinhua that the negative list is likely to be shortened further in 2019.

In the past week, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress took steps to unify China’s legislation on foreign investment, which is currently covered by three separate laws.

Under the new draft law, foreign companies would receive “pre-established national treatment … and have equal rights to participate in activities, including issuing stock and government procurement,” Xinhua said on Dec. 23.

And in an apparent scramble to signal concessions before expected tariff talks in January, the government announced new deletions from its separate “market access negative list” on Dec. 25.

The new list for market access would cut 177 items, leaving 151 restrictions, and eliminate 288 specific rules, while 581 remain in place, Xinhua said.

Response from investors

But the response from investors until now has been underwhelming. There have been few takers for the breaks in the automotive sector so far.

Despite initial enthusiasm, most foreign automakers have decided to stand pat with their local partners after investing heavily in their existing arrangements. In any case, the changes for passenger car joint ventures would not be allowed until 2022.

A further complication is that the investment break comes just in time for a downturn in the auto market. Some recently-opened factories are already standing idle, The Wall Street Journal reported this week.

The government also plans to open the financial sector with eased limits for banks, asset managers, investment firms and insurers under new rules announced in May.

This week, the official English-language China Daily reported that international firms are rushing to apply for business licenses to take advantage of the asset management opportunities.

One reported investment in financial services follows the recent approval for Swiss-based UBS Group AG to raise its share in its Chinese brokerage joint venture from 24.99 percent to 51 percent.

The decision is notable in light of the company’s reported warning in October to some of its bankers not to travel to China after a Singapore-based employee was detained and prevented from leaving the country.

UBS has not commented on the matter, according to news agencies. In a statement carried by Xinhua on Dec. 1, CEO Sergio Ermotti stressed the company’s long-term commitment to the Chinese market.

“The further opening up of China’s financial sector represents great opportunities for our wealth management, investment bank and asset management businesses,” Ermotti said.

Risk will continue

While the attractions for foreign investment are likely to continue, so will the risks.

China’s tit-for-tat detentions of three Canadian citizens followed the detention of Huawei Technologies CFO Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver at the request of U.S. prosecutors, further complicating prospects for international business.

Scissors said it is too soon to tell whether the cases will affect investment decisions.

“There’s not enough of a detention pattern for it to matter yet,” he said.

Economic growth rates and opportunities may be the biggest factors for FDI recovery in the coming year. But far more significant market opening may be needed to reverse long-term trends.

A look back at FDI data shows that growth has been falling steadily for well over a decade after hitting an average annual rate of over 26 percent in 2004-2008, according to World Bank statistics. China last recorded double-digit FDI growth in 2010.

Scissors said that if trade war tensions continue in the coming year, the effect on foreign investment may not show up in the official reporting.

“The signal of a major downward move will not be official numbers, of course, but multinationals independently reporting disinvestment,” he said.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is appealing to States to urgently offer safe ports and disembarkation to two NGO vessels on the Mediterranean carrying 49 rescued refugees and migrants, including young children.

32 people have been on board the Sea Watch 3 vessel since 22 December, while a further 17 were rescued by Sea Eye on 29 December.

Time is increasingly of the essence. Rough seas are expected in the coming hours and conditions on the boats are likely to deteriorate.

“Decisive leadership is required, in line with fundamental values of humanity and compassion, to offer safe disembarkation and bring the 49 safely to land,” said Vincent Cochetel, UNHCR Special Envoy for the Central Mediterranean. “Negotiations on which States will subsequently receive them must come only after they are safely ashore.”

More than 2,240 people have either died or gone missing at sea attempting to reach Europe via the Mediterranean in 2018, despite a significant reduction in the number of arrivals. UNHCR commends the work of NGO search and rescue vessels for their critical role towards preventing the death toll from being far higher.

In 2019, there is a critical need to end the current boat-by-boat approach, and for States to implement a regional arrangement that provides shipmasters with clarity and predictability on where to disembark refugees and migrants rescued on the Mediterranean

Last year, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued “a red alert” over a range of dangers confronting the world, which “still persist” as 2019 looms: “These are anxious times for many, and our world is undergoing a stress test,” the UN chief said on Saturday in his message for the New Year.

He reiterated one of his clarion calls during 2018 over climate change, saying that it was still “running faster than we are,” and that deepening geo-political divisions are making conflicts more difficult to resolve.

Record numbers of people are moving in search of safety and protection, inequality is growing and “people are questioning a world in which a handful of people hold the same wealth as half of humanity,” he said.

Moreover, he stated that intolerance was on the rise while trust is declining.

‘Reasons for hope’

“But”, Mr. Guterres continued, “there are also reasons for hope”, notably in Yemen where breakthrough talks have created an opportunity at least, for peace.

The Secretary-General also cited the September agreement signed in Riyadh between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which has eased long-running tensions and brought improved prospects to an entire region as cause for optimism. 

Likewise, he pointed to the agreement between warring parties in South Sudan which has revitalized chances for peace, “bringing more progress in the past four months than in the previous four years.”

The UN was also able to bring countries together in Katowice, Poland, to agree on a programme to implement the Paris Agreement on climate change.

“Now we need to increase ambition to beat this existential threat,” asserted Mr. Guterres. “It’s time to seize our last best chance” and “stop uncontrolled and spiraling climate change.”

In recent weeks, the UN also oversaw landmark global agreements on migration and refugees, “that will help to save lives and overcome damaging myths.”

And people everywhere are mobilizing behind the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which he called “our global blueprint for peace, justice and prosperity on a healthy planet.”

“When international cooperation works, the world wins”, the UN chief stressed.

He maintained that in 2019, the UN “will continue to bring people together to build bridges and create space for solutions” , keeping up the pressure for change.

“As we begin this New Year, let’s resolve to confront threats, defend human dignity and build a better future – together,” concluded the Secretary-General, wishing the world a peaceful, prosperous and healthy 2019.

Large quantities of rich Christmas food appear to boost Danes’ cholesterol levels. Right after the Christmas break, levels are 20% higher than in the summer. So says a new study carried out by researchers from the Department of Clinical Biochemistry at Copenhagen University Hospital and the Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Copenhagen.

All that butter and cream in Christmas food may possibly boost cholesterol levels more than assumed up to now. In a new study of 25,000 Danes, researchers conclude that cholesterol levels after the Christmas holiday are 20% higher than they are in the summer.

So the study by researchers at Copenhagen University Hospital and the University of Copenhagen shows that the risk of having elevated cholesterol is six times higher after the Christmas break.

“Our study shows strong indications that cholesterol levels are influenced by the fatty food we consume when celebrating Christmas. The fact that so many people have high cholesterol readings straight after the Christmas holiday is very surprising,” says Dr. Anne Langsted, M.D., who is one of the authors of the article.

Nine out of ten of the people participating in the so-called Copenhagen General Population Study had elevated cholesterol after Christmas. People who already have high cholesterol should perhaps be even more alert to their cholesterol levels during the Christmas holidays.

“For individuals, this could mean that if their cholesterol readings are high straight after Christmas, and they could consider having another test taken later on in the year,” says another of the article’s authors, Dr. Signe Vedel-Krogh, M.D.

“In any event, there is a greater risk of finding that you have elevated cholesterol if you go to the doctor and have your cholesterol tested straight after Christmas. It is important to be aware of this, both for doctors who treat high cholesterol and those wishing to keep their cholesterol levels down,” she concludes.

The article “The Christmas holidays are followed immediately by a period of hypercholesterolemia” has just been published in the international journal Atherosclerosis.

Facts about cholesterol

If you have too much cholesterol in your blood, your arteries can get furred up and there is a greater risk of developing heart attacks and stroke.

Heart attacks and strokes are what kill most people worldwide.

Around 50 researchers and policymakers gathered at the ERIAFF network & European Forested regions workshop “Successful regional bioeconomy strategies – what should they look like?” In this event, BioMonitor, represented by Myrna van Leeuwen from Wageningen University and Research was able to assist and understand the needs of the policymakers in their effort to strengthen the circularity and sustainability in existing policies related to the bioeconomy.

The new EU Bioeconomy Strategy released this October listed down three main Action Plans that serve as a basis for Europe to progress towards a circular bioeconomy. These are scaling up and strengthening the bio-based sectors, rapidly deploying the bioeconomies across Europe,protecting the ecosystem and understanding the ecological limitations of the bioeconomy.

The meeting was attended by policy makers, both at EU and regional level, as well as representatives from EU research environment. From the H2020 community, BioMonitor was joined together with Power4Bio. This workshop has provided participants with a valuable opportunity for an exchange and to get to the bottom of the EU bioeconomy policies – starting with the regional policies. The policymakers levelled with themselves during the workshop and identified the gaps and imbalances they face, particularly in terms oflack of regional data on socio-economic, environmental and societal aspects. In addition, they stressed the need for good and reliable indicators (with a clear definition and a clear metrics) for measuring and monitoring the bioeconomy development.

BioMonitor is a H2020 project composed of 18 partners from universities, statistical and standardisation institutes, consultancies and data modelling experts. It will monitor and measure the bioeconomy’s impacts on socio-economic and environmental aspects by using the data and analysis tools.

In her presentation Myrna van Leeuwen explained to the regional representatives how BioMonitor may be of help in addressing specific policy and research questions and indicators they are looking for, thanks to the robust data system (which will be embedded in official statistics) and the model analysis framework which will be developed by the project. In this way, regional officers will be supported in their need to benchmark and compare the performance of their own region by using a set of indicators universally used among the EU regions.

Starting from the regional perspective, BioMonitor will be aligning to the actions mentioned in the recent EU Bioeconomy Strategy. A systems wide-monitor approach will then be created in order to track the progress of EU regions’ towards a sustainable and circular bioeconomy based on its various drivers such as job creation, climate mitigation, renewed and strengthened EU industrial base, circular economy, healthy ecosystems and biodiversity.

“This workshop was very valuable for BioMonitor as the stakeholders involved expressed their needs – based on own practical experience – on having a (regional) monitoring tool that relies on a set of reliable, harmonized, consistent, open and countable data,” says Myrna van Leeuwen. “Such tool will help for building trust among all actors involved in the trajectory towards a bioeconomy, i.e. farms, firms, governmental authorities, and the consumer.“

The Indian engagement with the US, whether in the form of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy or the four-nation Quad also implies that the regional nations pay not only for their supposed strategic upkeep viz. China, but also take care of all-American strategic interests in these parts. There is no denying that President Trump’s actions are mostly in conformity with the script, his own poll manifesto and public utterances and irresistible tweets, from time to time.

By N Sathiya Moorthy

Independent of Iraq’s political reaction to US President Donald Trump’s decision to pull-out of Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and its impact on security of the region as a whole, India may soon be called upon to re-assess the reliability of Washington’s Indo-Pacific geo-strategic and military initiative. It is no more about the re-christening of the original ‘Asia-Pacific’ US military out-reach to friends in the region. Instead, it is a discomforting thought for friends of the US in Asia-Pacific if the military ties with the US is in Trump’s line of vision next — and if so, to what end?

Americans have fancy terms like ‘drawdown’ for troop-withdrawals, ‘lockdown’ for treasury shutdown and ‘landfall’ for cyclones crossing the shores. As much as ‘third world’ nations accepted American geo-strategic partnership and military purchases, they have adopted the terms as well in everyday usage, especially by sections of the local media. But ‘troop-withdrawal’ is still troop-withdrawal. Despite packaging it well for his domestic constituency and unsure international peaceniks, Trump’s declaration that the US will not be the ‘global policeman’ again has consequences for India, now, more than any time in the post-Cold War past.

It took a lot of American effort in the aftermath of India’s Pokhran-II nuclear tests in 2018 to woo India into its orbit of influence. It may have as much to do with India gate-crashing into the exclusive and at a time exclusivist club of nuclear weapon states. In a way, Pokhran-II alone called the all-American bluff on Pakistani nuclear capability. Otherwise, Pakistan should go down in history as the only nation-state to have developed nuclear capabilities first, and nuclear weapons later on — in less than three weeks. (Pakistan’s Chagai-I and Chagai-II nuclear tests occurred on 28 and 30 May 1998.)

The then defence minister George Fernandes, in a leaked missive, was quoted as declaring that Pokhran-II was not to counter Pakistan, but China — the other nuclear neighbour — with intent and potential to grow as an up and coming nuclear power. Pokhran-II called the Chinese bluff as well, because Pakistan’s Chagai tests also brought out to fore Beijing’s assistance for Islamabad on the nuclear front, as with conventional weapons supplies.

India needed new global friends after the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago, to counter the emerging threats along the long and adversarial land borders, and the possibilities of the same extending this time to cover the neighbouring seas. China’s ‘String of Pearls’ strategy, as an American academic called it, aimed at the same it ended in the same too. The earlier post-Cold War Russian refusal to supply the committed cryogenic engine for India’s space programme, under American threat to Moscow, possibly meant that New Delhi should be doing direct business with Washington rather than looking for aliases and alternatives

Unpredictable, yet..

It was an US idea to create the Indo-Pacific quadrilateral, including India, Japan and Australia to counter an emerging Chinese geo-strategic outreach. It was also an American decision to re-calibrate and re-christen Washington’s ‘Asia-Pacific’ strategy into ‘Indo-Pacific’ strategy. The idea was to pep-up the Indian strategic morale and send out a message to all other stakeholders involved with the US in Asia, about the shift. Earlier, to most Americans and most American military strategists, Asia had meant Southeast Asia with Japan as a possible add-on. Not any more.

All work on wooing India and re-calibrating America’s geo-strategic policy to Indo-Pacific was done by Trump’s predecessors. The question is if the Trump-talk to pull out of South Korea, or make Seoul pay for the upkeep of American forces on its territory was only a part of that strategy. The question goes on: if the hard-and-loose talk of an unpredictable president like was required for the US policy-makers to shift and sift the decided strategy. If not, they may still have to explain as to what they had really meant by re-calibrating and re-christening their Asia-Pacific policy.

The question then moves to the present, where the American decision to pull out of Iraq first, and possibly Afghanistan later, has consequences for India, the non-Pacific component in the American Indo-Pacific strategy. Granting that the term ‘Indo’ referred to all of the Indian Ocean, and not just India, then still the question remains if the US, by its unthinking and untimely pullout, was leaving it all to India to decide on the future course of New Delhi’s presence and prominence in its immediate neighbourhood.

Maybe, at least a section of the American strategic community may have the Vietnam example, where after America’s disastrous military expedition and disquieting pullout — the two nations and two people became friends. The message for India could also be that after the American pullout, Washington could manage India’s borders and the immediate neighbourhood better through political and economic incentives in ways where their military expedition had failed miserably. If that were the case, then it could well mean that India had nothing to worry from those parts.

Hit where it hurts

If the possible American thinking did not work out, at least for India, then it could well mean a further weakening of land borders. Here, not only two major State actors in China and Pakistan, but also non-State actors of the IS and Al Qaeda kinds could well join other ISI-backed anti-India terrorists from across the border and inside, too. An American pullout from the region after playing havoc with Pakistan and Pakistani psyche, in the process, could cause greater problems from India than with the US forces in Afghanistan, and also keeping an eye on Pakistan without India having to be worried too much, too far.

The Indian engagement with the US, whether in the form of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy or the four-nation Quad also implies that the regional nations pay not only for their supposed strategic upkeep viz. China, but also take care of all-American strategic interests in these parts. There is no denying that President Trump’s actions are mostly in conformity with the script, his own poll manifesto and public utterances and irresistible tweets, from time to time. Trump thus cannot be blamed, but then like the one-off cryogenic disaster viz. Russia, under then president Boris Yeltsin, the current American drawdown initiatives may have lessons for India. If nothing else, India, which has just begun warming up to Washington as it was to Moscow during the Cold War years, may end up going back to the stop-listen-proceed mode all over again.

Successive American administrations have unilaterally taken international political and geo-strategic decisions, and threatened non-compliers with economic sanctions. India faced it after Pokhran-I and II. More recently, Trump’s America threatened India with sanctions, for wanting to proceed with the fighter deal with Russia and oil purchases from Iran. While the American sanctions against these two nations are America’s business, it is easy for American Congressmen — and at times the Administration — to cite the Congress, to slap sanctions on other nations doing business with those that the US brand as ‘evil’ one day — and lift them when Washington considers as not-so-evil, the day after.

Earning every Dollar

Both Russia and Iran have been in and out of America’s sanctions lists from time to time. If nations like India with long-term deals with such other nations were to get caught in the cross-fire, they cannot be blamed for non-compliance. At the end of the day, at least in the case of the Russia sanctions — sought to be forced down India’s throats as well — there is a lesson for the US.

As a businessman, Donald Trump, more than any other American President before him would have understood that with sanctions against selling American weapons and fighters to a nation like India, if the latter were to thumb its nose at Washington, it could well increase that much more military business in Moscow. In turn, it could increase the Russian political clout viz. India, as it was during the Soviet era.

The US should also be aware of the new India-UAE deal for trade that does not require the American dollar. Already, India did business on oil with Iran in a near-similar basis before Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, lifted the sanctions against Tehran. Earlier, India’s Sri Lankan neighbour too wanted to do business with Iran on oil through India — and in Indian Rupee. Even without it, the then Maldivian government of president Mohammed Nasheed had repeated urged India to start off a bilateral direct-currency transaction without involving the American Dollar as the exchange mechanism.

As pointed out often, individuals and businesses, as much as governments, have been losing heavily in doing international transactions through the Dollar. To them, the US has to only print them, but they all have to earn them, Dollar by another Dollar — and also pay the US transactional costs. This again, the US didn’t have to earn.

By Jorge Valero

(EurActiv) — “Europe is back”, EU officials proclaimed at the beginning of 2018, buoyed by political impetus and the momentum of economic growth. The optimism didn’t last long. As the year ends, many lament the missed opportunity to deepen monetary union. But 2019 cannot be ‘business as usual’, they warn. The stakes are too high.

A senior diplomat says that we should write down the details of the coming period, as we may be witnessing history in the making.

Divisions have not only taken root within the EU family, but also among those who wish to leave the union. In the United Kingdom, the split between those who continue to support Brexit at all costs, and those who want to remain in the EU seems insurmountable, leaving the country in a dangerous stalemate. 

But there is another and still deeper division in Europe and beyond, between the rulers and the ruled, between an elite and a citizenship that feels neglected.

The Brexit vote was just the canary in the coal mine, said one European diplomat. 

“Unless we start getting serious about ‘l’Europe qui protege’, voters will tell us the same, only louder”, the official added.

French president Emmanuel Macron’s U-turn following the protests of the ‘yellow vests’ illustrates the zeitgeist of this period.

The European economy has been growing for almost two years, and public accounts look healthier. But the boom period was not felt by many. In Italy, dissatisfaction brought a  populist and eurosceptic government to power.

On the other hand, member states were incapable of seizing the calm waters to bolster the euro.

Political and geographical centre

While the expansive cycle is running out of steam, EU’s political centre is shifting closer to its geographical one. 

The Franco-German axis continues to lose dynamism, dragged by a defensive French president and a lame-duck German chancellor. 

The traces of what Europe could bring are rather to be found in Hungary or Austria. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban appears to see where history is taking us.

Faced with a world of complex problems, growing uncertainties and a clumsy Europe, its illiberal model offers simple solutions and a protective image. Less than 250km away, Austrian Sebastian Kurz whitewashed populist and eurosceptic forces by bringing them into his Government. 

Kurz, the youngest prime minister in the EU, was among those to refuse to sign the non-binding UN Migration Pact this month, despite holding the rotating presidency of the EU.

But migration has not been (and won’t be) the only issue responsible for cracking the bloc. Progress on the economic and monetary union with further mutualisation of risks, either with European protection of bank deposits or the unemployed, remains stuck at the member states’ table.

In the first case, Germany represents the only substantial obstacle, while the Netherlands leads a strong group against any eurozone budget that could serve to cushion future economic shocks. 

Against this background, the long-awaited package to deepen the eurozone turned into a minimal agreement this month, after more than a year of lofty speeches and technical discussions.

All out?

This depressing landscape should force pro-European parties to go all out ahead of the European elections next May. 

But the combative spirit hardly shines, not even among the most pro-European governments.

”I believe that the EU should be much more ambitious,” said Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, when asked about the lack of progress at the last summit in December.

“Each government defends its national position as a country”, he said. Nothing else to add to drum up support, or to ignite citizens’ spirit in this critical period.

On the opposite camp, those who want to empty Europe from within see a substantial shift within the EU machinery within their reach. No matter if that implies burying their compatriots under a pile of debt, as in Italy, or dismantling the rule of law, as in Hungary.

“Changing Europe is a big goal,” Italy’s Interior Minister Matteo Salvini told Time magazine. “It is at our fingertips”.

“If you follow the trend of what has happened in Italy, Austria, Germany, France and other countries, the European Parliament will change,” Hungarian State Secretary for Communication Zoltan Kovacs told EURACTIV.com in October.

Orban’s spokesman strips populism of its bad reputation. Because, in his opinion, it simply illustrates the fracture between what people really want and the elite interprets about the European project. Voters no longer want to share more sovereignty, but maintain “effective cooperation between Member States,” he concluded.

But this 2019 will prove how cold it is outside the union. The UK economy will be surpassed  by France, and by its former colony India. The glorious past Brexiteers hoped to recover outside the EU is back, but not as they expected.

However, the bloc has no reasons to boast. The self-searching process to agree on a common vision to complete the European project has failed to bring results. 

A summit planned on 9 May in Romania risks becoming another milestone to nowhere, while the builders still argue about the future they want to share.

More ungovernable

The Union will become more ungovernable next year. Although Eurosceptic parties will not achieve their goal of conquering a third of seats in the next European Parliament in May, few doubt that their position will be strong enough to hamper legislative activity.

More problematic will be the presence in the new Commission of at least a quarter of its members sent by governments allergic to European integration.

As some European officials lament, the common position is no longer the principle of “an ever closer union” carved out in the treaties, but the aspiration to shield this cracking bloc from enormous difficulties.

Donald Trump does not care about what Europeans may believe or want to defend.

Nor he is concerned about breaking the international consensus on climate change, the other major global challenge closest to the European’s heart.

Trump Administration’s priority is to contain China, in trade, in the economy, in technology.

The confrontation between Washington and Beijing could gain momentum in February if the weak truce reached in December comes to an end. 

Europe could become a collateral victim the same month, if Trump concludes European cars are a threat and imposes new tariffs, as part of his attempts to reshape global trade.

Deeper problems

With so little clarity about the future Europe wants, and even less willingness to advance on the strategic flaws of the bloc on the economy, migration and energy, Europe will fight to keep its two feet on the ground instead of taking a step forward.

But the problems are deeper, and not only for Europe.

The complexity of steering a boat with 500 million citizens, 28 member states and fifty EU institutions and agencies only amplifies the challenges that many other leaders face elsewhere.

Democracy urgently needs fine tuning. Decades of progress and protests extended voting rights to reach universal suffrage. Now the representative system must surpass the ballot box to embrace a greater participatory nature.

”Europe must urgently embrace a new participatory paradigm that puts citizens at the forefront of the agenda and monitoring powers,” says Alberto Alemanno, a Jean Monnet professor in EU law at HEC Paris.

Otherwise, the risk is that Europe will continue to walk toward the darkness corners of its past.

“The answers of the past no longer suffice for the questions of today, let alone tomorrow”, warns a European diplomat.

But there is still hope. In Hungary, citizens are taking the streets like never before against Orban’s authoritarian grip. Opposition and civil society are fighting to erode his control by seeking to engage in new ways with communities in rural areas where Orban remains largely undisputed.

The new Volt movement already brings together almost 15,000 people in some thirty countries, with 10 parties in Member States, attracted by the idea of ​​a united and citizens’ driven Europe.

“This election should be a fight between old ways of doing politics and a new way of doing politics, a new way that is inclusive, in which people participate, in which people have their voice heard,” Colombe Cahen-Salvador, one of its founders told EURACTIV.com

Hope was strangled from the top this year. But 2019 could bring fresh energy and ambition badly needed from the bottom. A united Europe without Europeans on board is almost an oxymoron. It may seem complicated today. But the consequences of not exhausting every possible way to relaunch the European project will prove even more disastrous.

The media continue to be in a panic over the drop in the stock market over the last few weeks. Fortunately for political pundits, there is no expectation that they have any clue about the subjects on which they opine.  For those more interested in economics than hysterics, the drop in the market is not a big deal.

The market is at best very loosely related to the economy. It generally rises in recoveries and falls in recessions, but it also has all sorts of movements that are not obviously related to anything in the real economy.

The most famous example of such an erratic movement was the crash in October of 1987. The market fell by more than 20 percent in a single day. There was no obvious event in the economy or politics that explained this fall, which hit markets around the world. Nor did the decline presage a recession. The economy continued to grow at a healthy pace through 1988 and 1989. It didn’t fall into a recession until June of 1990, more than two years later.

There is little reason to believe the recent decline will have any larger impact on the economy than the 1987 crash. As a practical matter, stock prices have almost no impact on investment. The bubble of the late 1990s was the major exception, when companies were directly issuing stock to finance investment.

Stock prices do affect consumption through the wealth effect, but the recent decline is not large enough to have all that much impact. Also, since it was just reversing a sharp run-up in the prior 18 months, it essentially means that we will not see some of the positive wealth effect that the economy would have felt otherwise.

Basically, the hysteria over the drop in the stock market is either people in the media displaying their ignorance or a political swipe at Donald Trump by people who apparently don’t think there are substantive reasons to criticize him. This drop is not the sort of thing that serious people should concern themselves with.

Wealth Inequality and the Stock Market

One of the most bizarre aspects of the market’s recent decline is that many of the same people who have been decrying the rise in wealth inequality in this recovery have been complaining about the drop in the market. This is bizarre because the rise in wealth inequality is the run-up in the stock market over the last decade.

Stock is disproportionately held by the rich, with the richest 1.0 percent of families hold almost 40 percent of stock wealth held by individuals, and the top 0.5 percent of families holding almost a quarter of stock wealth. This means that when the market rises, the rich get richer relative to everyone else.  Conversely, when the market falls wealth inequality is reduced.

For most middle class people their house is their main asset. House prices have been outpacing inflation in recent years, but generally house prices increase roughly in line with the rate of inflation. It is not a good story when house prices rise more rapidly. Rapid rises in house prices mean that homeowners become wealthier, but it places houses further out of the reach of those who don’t already own a home. Furthermore, if the rise in house prices reflects the fundamentals in the housing market it means that rents are also rising. If the rise in house prices doesn’t reflect the fundamentals in the housing market then we have a bubble, as was the case in the last decade. This is also not good news.

Anyhow, it is not really plausible to tell a story where rises in housing wealth will allow the middle class reduce the wealth gap in the context of a rapidly rising stock market. It is also not plausible to tell a story of the wealth gap closing appreciably due to increased savings by low and middle class families. Suppose the bottom 100 million families increased their annual savings by $5,000. This would be a huge increase After three years they will have accumulated another $1.5 trillion in savings. In a context where total wealth is near $100 trillion, this is barely a drop in the bucket.

I have argued elsewhere that wealth is really not a very useful measure, but those who think it is have an obligation to be consistent. The long and short, is that you get to either complain about wealth inequality or a falling stock market. You don’t get to complain about both.

The Stock Plunge and Stock Returns

Much of the commentary on the drop in the stock market ignores its absolute levels. In spite of the drop, the price to earnings ratio for the stock market as a whole is still close to 20 to 1. This compares to a long-run average of close to 15 to 1. And, it is important to remember that corporate profits remain at extraordinarily high levels as a share of GDP. It is reasonable to think that a tight labor market will allow workers to get back some of the income share they lost in the weak labor market following the Great Recession. We may also hope that a Democratic Congress, and possibly a Democrat in the White House in 2021, will retake some of the tax cut that Trump gave to U.S. corporations last year.

For these reasons it is wrong to see the drop in the market as being a great buying opportunity. I don’t do market analysis for a living and am not in the habit of giving stock advice, but no one would have seen the current levels in the stock market as being low if we had not seen the run-up of the prior two years. The fact that we did see this run-up should not change our perceptions of proper market valuation.

The other point is a simple arithmetic one that seems to be too simple for most economists to grasp. The returns that we can expect on stock are inversely related to the price to earnings ratio. When the price to earnings ratios are low, then returns can be high. When price to earnings ratios are high, returns will be low.

This is important because price to earnings ratios have historically been much lower, as I just pointed out. This allowed for higher returns. The long-term average for real returns had been over 7.0 percent prior to 2000. It has been considerably lower in the last two decades, with the recent plunge putting the annual average under 4.5 percent.

This is noteworthy for two reasons. First, if we go back to the late 1990s both Democrats and Republicans thought it was a clever idea to put Social Security money in the stock market. Democrats wanted to put the Social Security trust fund in the stock market, while Republicans wanted workers to hold individual accounts that would be largely placed in the stock market. In both cases they assumed that the stock market would continue to provide 7.0 percent real returns in spite of the high price to earnings ratios that exists at that time.

I was rather lonely in arguing that these sorts of returns would not be possible.  And it does make a difference. If someone invested $1,000 in the market in 1998, and got 7.0 percent real returns, their money would have increased to $3,870 in 1998 dollars. However, given the returns we have actually seen, a $1,000 invested in 1998 would only be worth $2,410 today. The gap between 7.0 percent annual returns and 4.5 percent is a big deal and it becomes even bigger over time. If we looked at it over 30 years, it would be $7,610 versus $3,750. After 40 years, $14,970 compared with $5,820.

The other point about the 4.5 percent returns over the last two decades is that it means that shareholders have not been doing great. The run-up in the stock market from 1980 to 1998 meant that people who held stock forty years ago did quite well, but the people who bought into the market in the last two decades have not.

For some reason there is little awareness of this fact. This is likely due to the fact that people do not distinguish between corporate profits, which are very high, especially after the tax cut, and the returns to shareholders. This is not a question of feeling sorry for shareholders, since the rich hold such a disproportionate share of stock wealth. It is simply a question of whether shareholders have been doing especially well in the last two decades.

The fact their returns have not been good means that they could be allies in trying to bring down CEO pay. CEO pay is essentially coming out of profits that could otherwise go toward higher returns.

There are two reason for preferring the money goes to shareholders rather than CEOs. While most shares are held by the rich, a substantial portion is held by pension funds and middle class people with 401(k)s. By contrast, every penny of CEO compensation goes to someone in the top 0.01 percent.

More importantly, CEO pay affects pay structures throughout the economy. If CEO pay were again 20 to 30 times the pay of ordinary workers, instead of 200 to 300 times their pay, it would bring down pay at the top of the corporate hierarchy more generally. We might see the second and third tier of corporate executives getting pay in the high hundreds of thousands instead of millions. The same would be true of presidents and CEOs of universities and other non-profits.

Shareholders should be seen as allies in this effort. They have every bit as much reason to want to see lower CEO pay as lower pay for manufacturing workers or retail clerks. We should look to help them in that effort and part of the story is increasing their stock returns.

This column originally ran on Dean Baker’s blog.

By William L. Anderson*

American journalists seem mired in fantasy worlds, at least where it comes to economic analysis, and perhaps we see no greater show of ignorance than in the discussion of the presence of businesses in the poorest areas of inner cities. Time and again, pundits make the specious claim that people in cities are poor because of the presence of small businesses, such as groceries owned by Korean immigrants .

Today, the targets are the Dollar General and Dollar Tree store, which offer inexpensive goods, along with a wide assortment of canned and dried foods, along with milk, meat, eggs, and frozen foods. Declares Tanvi Misra in Citylab :

It has become an increasingly common story: A dollar store opens up in an economically depressed area with scarce healthy and affordable food options, sometimes with the help of local tax incentives. It advertises hard-to-beat low prices but it offers little in terms of fresh produce and nutritious items—further trapping residents in a cycle of poverty and ill-health.

Misra quotes the Institute for Local Self Reliance: “While dollar stores sometimes fill a need in cash-strapped communities, growing evidence suggests these stores are not merely a byproduct of economic distress; they’re a cause of it.”

This is an interesting and extraordinary claim: the presence of retail stores that make goods available to people who otherwise would have few or no shopping choices at all is the cause of the poverty that grips the regions where these people live. Furthermore, as more of these stores are built and located in the inner cities, the people living there become poorer as a result of the very presence of these businesses.

Misra then tries to clarify her claims:

Dollar stores have succeeded in part by capitalizing on a series of powerful economic and social forces—white flight, the recent recession, the so-called “retail apocalypse”—all of which have opened up gaping holes in food access. But while dollar stores might not be causing these inequalities per se, they appear to be perpetuating them. The savings they claim to offer shoppers in the communities they move to makes them, in some ways, a little poorer.

How does this phenomenon – that Dollar Stores perpetuate and further conditions of poverty – occur? How does making goods available at affordable prices that would not be possible in the absence of such businesses perpetuate poverty? The pundits reply in two words: food deserts.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a food desert is a part

of the country vapid of fresh fruit, vegetables, and other healthful whole foods, usually found in impoverished areas. This is largely due to a lack of grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and healthy food providers.

Dollar stores, say the critics, sell mostly processed of canned foods and do not have sections providing fresh foods and vegetables. Therefore, according to the “logic” of the left, because a certain class of foods is not sold at these kinds of stores, therefore they are preventing the sale of such food. Leftist journalists and other critics of private enterprise simply claim that because there are Dollar stores in the inner cities and because these stores don’t sell fresh fruit and vegetables, that therefore private enterprise is the cause for creation of so-called food deserts.

This accusation against businesses, however, does not fly with the facts. In recent decades, Korean immigrants have opened many small groceries in cities like Los Angeles and New York City – and often are met with hostility, violence, and outright murder. During the 1992 Los Angeles riots, inner-city residents often deliberately targeted Korean-owned businesses and police refused to protect them, leaving the merchants to arm and defend themselves.

Likewise, during the 2015 Baltimore riots, rioters looted and burned many Korean-owned enterprises , claiming that Koreans were “exploiting” customers. In New York, it was not uncommon for groups tied to Al Sharpton to organize boycotts and violent demonstrations against Korean store owners. The Koreans were people who risked their own resources to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to neighborhoods where such enterprises had not previously existed, but instead faced violence, boycotts, and outright racist rhetoric against their Asian ethnicity. They did so in an attempt to make a living, not out of benevolence, but their risk-taking nonetheless provided opportunities for inner city residents that they would not have had otherwise.

As for food choices, the claim that fresh food (or maybe semi-fresh, given the distances these foods are hauled, especially in winter) food is more nutritious than frozen or canned foods is overblown. The January 27, 2014, edition of the Journal of Lifestyle Medicine said that “fruits and vegetables packaged as frozen or canned are cost-effective and nutritious options for meeting daily vegetable and fruit recommendations in the context of a healthy diet.” In other words, one can both eat healthy and shop at the Dollar Store, leftist accusations to the contrary.

While much of the rhetoric against Korean and other Asian merchants in the inner cities often is hateful, at least no one has carried out “studies” that accuse these merchants of causing poverty where it had not existed before. As one reads Misra’s article and the quotes from the “experts,” one finds a series of contradictory statements and a lack of understanding of basic economic concepts. For example, she writes:

Today, dollar stores are thriving both in the poorest of small rural towns , where environmental changes or globalization have wiped out economic activity, and larger cities like Baltimore, where decades of disinvestment in largely African American communities have left vast tracts barren of retail options. In a recent blog post tracking their rise in low-income parts of Baltimore , planner and architect Klaus Philipsen observes that dollar stores are now “flourishing in many poorer neighborhoods like a parasite.” (Emphasis mine)

She continues:

The problem is not just the stores themselves. According to the ILSR, they tend to create fewer jobs on average than independent groceries—9 versus 14. The low-wage jobs they do create aren’t of great quality . And it’s not entirely clear if their offerings are that much more affordable either. When economists compared the price of goods like flour and raisins of the same weight, they noticed that dollar store products were higher cost than those at the nearby Walmart or Costco.

Lest one be concerned that Dollar Stores ( according to The Guardian ) are “ripping off consumers with higher prices, Misra also claims the firm is undercutting other businesses with low prices:

Then there’s their negative effect on others stores nearby. When a dollar store opened up in Haven, Kansas—subsidized through tax breaks by the local government—sales at the the nearby Foodliner grocery store dropped by 30 percent, The Guardian reported earlier this year. While the ILSR doesn’t have quantitative data supporting this effect on supermarkets in the vicinity, anecdotally, they surmise that “the difference in margins is just enough that the local stores are not able to stay in business when there are so few options and there is an undercutting of prices,” Donahue said.

The comparison with Wal-Mart is rich. No company has been more accused by the left of malfeasance than Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart charges low prices and changes the local retail landscape, then the company is said to be predatory. But if Wal-Mart or Dollar Stores charge prices that the pundits deem “too high,” then the stores also are engaged in “predatory” behavior. Furthermore, urban activists time and again have sought to keep stores like Wal-Mart from locating in large cities, but when other retailers move into the void, leftist activist condemn those stores, too.

As for jobs, the purpose of retail stores is to provide goods for customers; no one has touted them as an employment program. However, no matter what leftists might claim , jobs are not the “cause” of poverty. That assumes that people are better off with no income (and no employment) than they are earning money. It is true that retail jobs do not pay very well – something to be expected – but to claim that people are better off having no job, no income, and no available food to purchase than having the presence of a Dollar Store in a city is ludicrous on its face.

So, the American left gives us another set of ridiculous propositions. They demand high-paying jobs but no employers; they demand an abundance of food and other goods, but also demand that no place to sell these items be permitted to be located anywhere.

Dollar Stores are not boutiques, but neither are they the poverty-causing, starvation-producing hellholes that the critics claim them to be. In many urban communities, they are places where poor people can purchase necessities and decent food and snacks. In rural areas and small towns, they mean people don’t have to drive long distances to buy what they need. To put it another way, they serve their customer base well, but it is not a customer base of elite journalists and politicians.

*About the author: William L. Anderson is a professor of economics at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland.

Source: This article was published by the MISES Institute

Sri Lanka’s President Maithripala Sirisena urged the support of all people for anti-corruption programs being carried out in the country extensively. The President, in a special message, observed that ‘2019’ is a year against corruption adding that a large-scale national programme has been implemented to fight against corruption. He noted that corruption has become the bane of the country’s development.

“I invite you all to unite in brotherhood to achieve the noble goals of the motherland. We need to understand our responsibilities and duties as well as the challenges before us when dealing with contemporary political and socio-economic problems,” the President said.

The President also underlined the need to work towards accomplishing the Sustainable Development Goals. “I request all of your support and participation to successfully implement the national programme for sustainable development to alleviate the poverty, to create a prosperous economy and to protect the environment,” he added.

The President expressed his keen interest in carrying forward “Gramashakthi National Movement” meant for poverty alleviation and “Protect Children” national programme meant for building a physically and mentally strong and healthy future generation.

“We should react to hatred with love and kindness and to inhumanity with humanity. We should confront pessimism with optimism, indiscipline with discipline and social injustice with social justice. We should endure both praise and insult during our work,” the President added in his message.

Red flag laws allow law enforcement personnel or family members to petition a judge to issue a restraining order to restrict a person’s access to firearms without that person being present. They require a full hearing to be scheduled quickly, to allow the gun owner to respond. A longer order can be issued during the full hearing if there is enough evidence that the person is dangerous.

Six states have red flag laws, and they are being considered in another 22 states. There is bipartisan support in Congress for federal red flag laws. Regardless of how one feels about the Second Amendment giving citizens the right to bear arms, red flag laws set a dangerous precedent. They allow government to take away people’s rights even when no one has violated any laws.

After shootings have occurred, investigators have been able to look back and discover actions the shooter undertook and words the shooter said that sound like red flags, indicating that person could be a danger to others. The idea behind red flag laws is that if people see those red flags and act to take firearms away from potentially dangerous individuals, shootings could be prevented.

Although we may be alarmed by things people say, citizens also have First Amendment rights to free speech, and we are on shaky ground if we say that people exercising their First Amendment rights should lose their Second Amendment rights. Lots of people say alarming things, and few of them actually engage in violent behavior.

Red flag laws are a form of predictive policing. Their intent is to intervene before a crime is committed, based on evidence that suggests a person fits the profile of a criminal. If a person fits the profile of people who have committed shootings in the past, the red flags are up and law enforcement moves in to prevent that person from criminal activity, even though the person has done nothing illegal.

Similar types of law enforcement occur for other suspected crimes. Civil asset forfeiture allows police to seize assets they suspect were used in criminal activity, even though nobody has been charged with a crime. In the case of civil asset forfeiture, police suspect a crime has already occurred, whereas with red flag laws they just suspect a crime might occur in the future. But in both cases, nobody is accused of a crime. And in both cases, it is up to the accused to prove their innocence.

Red flag laws go a step beyond civil asset forfeiture, though, because civil asset forfeiture takes place when law enforcement personnel think a crime may have taken place, whereas red flag laws apply to cases where no crime has occurred.

Many people think it is a good idea to take guns away from people who are likely to commit crimes with them. But to do so means taking constitutionally guaranteed rights away from people who have violated no laws. This sets a dangerous precedent by giving government the ability to take away the rights of innocent people, just because somebody in government believes they may commit crimes in the future.

Many people will think “I haven’t done anything to make people think I’ll be a mass shooter, so I don’t have to worry that the government will seize my guns.” And people who don’t own guns have even more reason to think these red flag laws will not violate their rights; they will only be made safer because more guns can be seized before they can do harm.

Once the precedent is established that government can take away people’s rights before they have committed any crimes, everybody is potentially vulnerable. Making large cash deposits into your bank account? You might be a drug dealer or a tax evader. Buying gold? Could be trying to hide your cash transactions. Buying Bitcoin? No reason to do that except to avoid government scrutiny. Do you use more electricity than your neighbors? You might be hiding a marijuana grow house. Have lots of Islamic friends on Facebook? Probably a terrorist.

Don’t think that just because you don’t own guns, or you don’t have any red flags in your background, that red flag laws are no threat to you. Remember the well-known poem by German pastor Martin Niemöller:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Red flag laws are a threat to everybody’s rights because they give the government the ability to take away the constitutional rights of people who have violated no laws. You could be next.

This article was published by The Beacon

By Sarral Sharma

J&K’s separatist leaders are under pressure to keep their political relevance intact in the aftermath of the outbreak of violence beginning July 2016. Despite their personal and ideological differences, three top separatist leaders–Yasin Malik, Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq– were led to establish the Joint Resistance Leadership (JRL) in late-2016 to streamline street protests and galvanise a united front regarding developments in the so-called ‘self-determination’ movement. This article will look at how the ‘new-age’ militancy poses a challenge to the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC)-led separatist movement, with the latter finding it difficult to maintain its political and territorial influence in the Valley.

The JRL regularly issues ‘protest calendars’ and calls for bandhs (shutdown) or election boycotts in pursuit of their goals. However, this is in part fuelled by challenges in light of the emerging new militancy. In the last two years, religion has been given significant relevance over politics as far as the local militancy is concerned. As a result, separatist leaders have also begun speaking on matters related to Islam, quite apart from politics, in their taqreers (speeches or sermons). Despite these contextual changes, local militants have not stopped criticising or intimidating the separatist leaders for their ‘limited’ participation in the Azadi (freedom) movement.

Thus, while some analysts are of the opinion that the erosion of the Hurriyat’s relevance in the Valley, as popularly suggested, is somewhat over-exaggerated, there is certainly cause for concern from the perspective of the separatist movement. Recent instances such as masked youth raising pro-Islamic State (IS) slogans from Mirwaiz’s pulpit, the killing of a separatist leader in South Kashmir by ‘unknown’ assailants, and not allowing separatist leaders at militant funerals suggest a growing anger against the Hurriyat leadership. In a rare incident, former Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) commander Zakir Musa even threatened graphic physical harm to Hurriyat leaders, including Geelani, if they continued to call their struggle a “political and not Islamic one.” Further, with the emergence of IS and al Qaeda modules in Kashmir, some new-age militants are calling for the creation of an Islamic ‘Caliphate’ over a democratic state.

The Hurriyat faction is currently unable to translate motivation into action given Geelani’s deteriorating health, and other separatist leaders failing to muster enough public support. This precarious position is a result of not just the post-2016 situation in the Valley, but also factors that existed pre-2016 that have compounded pressure on the separatist leadership. These include New Delhi’s attempts to either completely sideline or limit the leadership’s role in the Kashmir issue; raids conducted by the National Investigative Agency (NIA) on middle-rung separatist leaders, and growing apprehension about who would be Geelani’s successor.

The Modi government, in its first year in power in 2014, called off foreign secretary-level talks with Pakistan because Islamabad’s then high commissioner in New Delhi held a meeting with the Hurriyat leaders. Since then, the separatist leaders have been kept out of any bilateral engagement between India and Pakistan. In the meantime, the NIA has charged some separatist leaders for fomenting street violence in the Valley. These arrests came at a time when the Hurriyat leadership was already facing troubles in controlling the street agitations that began after Wani’s killing. The separatists–who issued several protest calendars in the hope of staying relevant – tried to use the arrests to play the ‘victim’ card in a bid to gain some public sympathy – but to no avail.

In terms of territory, the Hurriyat’s influence has further degraded in South Kashmir in the past two and a half years. Their hold or relevance remains restricted to the traditional pockets of North and Central Kashmir. Since July 2016, there is a growing impression that the Hurriyat is no longer central to the separatist movement in Kashmir. The vacuum created due to their apparent absence in some parts of the Valley may lead to more hard-line elements taking over in the future. With the emergence of social media platforms that offer easy access to propaganda literature, the region has become more malleable to religious radicalisation. The Hurriyat may find it difficult to control an individual(s)-driven movement in today’s Kashmir. So far, they have not been able to come up with an alternative or counter-strategy to address the challenges that arise from the existence of self-motivated and radicalised youth.

Given the current situation in Kashmir, the separatist leadership is likely to lose more credibility in the near future. More importantly, as the ‘new-age’ militancy gains more ground, separatist leaders face a realistic fear of losing their influence or being marginalised. The separatist leaders may be increasingly targeted by a disorganised, possibly ‘leaderless’ militant movement in Kashmir. New Delhi may seek to turn the situation to its advantage by playing with these insecurities. However, it may be wiser for New Delhi to offer an alternative arrangement to the separatist leaders, as discrediting them completely does not appear to be a favourable policy consideration in the current circumstances in J&K. 

*Sarral Sharma, Senior Researcher, Centre for Internal and Regional Security (IReS)

Meteor burst communication is based on using meteors as cryptography assistants. Meteor trails reflect radio waves, which makes them suitable for radio transmissions at distances of up to 2,000 kilometers. Unpredictable nature of meteors makes pose a significant hindrance for signal interception.

Associate Professor Amir Sulimov explains, “Each meteor trail forms a kind of a shadow resembling an ellipse on the Earth’s surface. All communication stations within that area can tune in on the channel. Meteor trails help determine a specific area where potential malefactors can try to intercept the signal.”

Traditionally, it was theorized that the longest radius of interception lies along the radio line between legal points A and D, while the shortest radius, conversely, is perpendicular to that axis.

“In our research, we are the first to show that this trend may not be persistent in meteor systems, especially on short lines of less than 500 km. Because of the random nature of meteor arrivals, orientations of the large and small radiuses can differ significantly. And the degree of that difference is also variating, depending on seasonal and daily meteor cycles. Such regularities make meteor communication interception quite difficult.

“Experiments and models showed that the practical possibility of intercepting a meteor channel disappears at 30 kilometer distances, but theoretical chances persist at distances of up 300 km along small radiuses and 850 kilometers along large radiuses,” concludes Sulimov.

The obtained data may be used for meteor cryptography. Further research should show the distances at which partial interception of cryptographic keys is feasible.

The South China Sea is considered one of the world’s major potential flash points for conflict between big powers. But it takes two to tango –or to tangle. So it is critical for regional stability that the U.S. get its South China Sea policy and actions ‘right’. Although tough on China, US Secretary of Defense James Mattis was seen by many as reliable, measured and not unnecessarily confrontational despite the urgings of  more bellicose voices inside and outside the administration. Indeed, in the midst of the overall deterioration of US-China relations he provided some stability in military to military relations. Now pundits are pondering the implications of his abrupt departure. The views and style of his eventual successor will be a major factor in US-China military relations going forward. But the strategic and US domestic political context in the South China Sea remains more or less the same and will present pressing and potential issues requiring decisions regarding US policy and there.

The US-China disputes in the South China Sea are infused by a much deeper contest over the future of the Asian regional order and their respective roles in it. At base the dialectic is simple and stark. America wants to remain the leading strategic power in Asia and China wants to replace it.

China’s President Xi Jinping has proclaimed that that his country’s burgeoning wealth and power has validated the Communist Party’s (and his ) leadership. He has declared defiantly that “No one is in the position to dictate to the Chinese people what should and should not be done”. The stakes are very high for Xi’s China. It is unlikely to be intimidated and ‘pull in its horns’ in its own ‘backyard’. Indeed it may well meet US bluster, threats and provocative actions with its own. Its nationalists in the government and among netizens –and particularly those in the People’s Liberation Army Navy –will press China’s leadership to respond to any further “provocations’. This means that more military to military incidents are likely and that they may make past such international incidents seem minor by comparison. Overreaction could cause kinetic conflict.

The context of the next Defense Secretary’s decision making will also be influenced by US President Donald Trump’s predilection for ‘isolationism’ and ‘America First’ including his skepticism of alliances that Mattis supported. Trump seems wary of expending more American blood and treasure to defend allies like Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan, especially if they militarily provoke China while expecting US back up. This could counterbalance any appointee’s urge to flex US muscles in the Asian region. Moreover, Trump’s abrupt unilateral withdrawal of US troops from Syria and Afghanistan may stimulate friends and allies in Southeast Asia to realize they are probably on their own and act accordingly.

Mattis’ approach to China was in keeping with the U.S.’s new National Security Strategy that delineated China as a “strategic competitor” and a “revisionist” nation, warning that “a geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order is taking place in the Indo-Pacific region”. 

Under Mattis, the U.S. stepped up the frequency of its provocative Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) challenging China’s claims. He demonstrated US support for Taiwan by approving three transits of the sensitive Taiwan Strait in one year by warships after a previous hiatus of a year. He also approved new arms sales to Taiwan which really angered China. Under Mattis there was an increased frequency of flyovers of the South China Sea by nuclear-capable B52 bombers. He also excoriated China for “coercing and intimidating” rival claimants there and he was so concerned about China’s “militarization” of its occupied features that he rescinded an invitation to China for the world’s largest multilateral maritime exercise –RIMPAC 2018.  Moreover he promoted and allowed the US military to amply demonstrate the US policy that the US would “fly, sail and operate wherever international law allowed”.

However Mattis did try to reassure China early on in his tenure by saying “At this time, we do not see any need for dramatic military moves at all” and he maintained that the U.S. is not trying to “contain” China. He tamped down the rivalry by observing that China and the U.S. would sometimes “step on each other’s toes” and that the two powers needed to find ways to manage their relationship.

Some say there has already been a recent incremental shift to a more aggressive US military posture in the South China Sea.  US military ‘incrementalism’ there is compatible US National Security Adviser John Bolton’s penchant for taking greater risks than his recent predecessors. He appears to have concentrated control of security matters and Trump is clearly distracted. At least in the near future Bolton will have increased influence on US security policy and actions. Whether the new defense secretary will have the personal clout and connections to counterbalance possible bad decisions by Trump or Bolton on South China Sea issues is an open question.

The new Defense Secretary will be faced with many issues and specific decisions regarding the South China Sea.  What will the U.S. do if –or more probably when –a Chinese warship again blocks a US warship challenging China’s claims? In the previous dangerous incident involving the Decatur, Mattis choose not to kinetically escalate.

Will the U.S. clarify its interpretation of its obligation to support the Philippines militarily if it is attacked in the Spratlys? If it does so in the positive –as the Philippines is demanding and  bellicose US pundits are recommending–the Philippines could, through intent or miscalculation, draw the U.S. into military conflict with China.

Will the new Secretary continue to recruit and encourage other powers –like the U.K., France and China’s nemesis Japan to either join it in its FONOPs or undertake their own challenging China’s claims? On 27 December, the Pentagon’s top Asia official urged Australia and other US allies to boost their military presence in the South China Sea. And will he or she continue or even increase its provocative ISR probes in the face of China’s increasingly shrill protests?

Hopefully, whoever is nominated and confirmed as the next US Secretary of Defense will understand –as Mattis apparently did –that overreaction to small crises can produce war just as easily as policy failure. More importantly he or she should understand that although in the past “the purpose of a nation’s military forces had been to win major wars, it now must be to prevent them” especially when potential conflict involves nuclear powers.

This piece first appeared in the South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/article/2180253/post-mattis-south-china-sea-can-next-defence

The regions currently administered by the Kurds in Syria include the Kurdish-majority Qamishli and al-Hasakah in northeastern Syria, and the Arab-majority towns of Manbij to the west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria and Kobani to the east of the Euphrates River along the Turkish border.

The oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate in eastern Syria has been contested between the Syrian government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, and it also contains a few pockets of the remnants of the Islamic State militants alongside both eastern and western banks of the Euphrates River.

The Turkish “east of Euphrates” military doctrine basically means that the Turkish armed forces would not tolerate the presence of the Syrian PYD/YPG Kurds – which the Turks regard as “terrorists” allied to the PKK Kurdish separatist group in Turkey – in Manbij and Kobani, in line with the longstanding Turkish policy of denying the Kurds any Syrian territory to the west of the Euphrates River in northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border.

On Friday, the Syrian army said it entered Manbij for the first time in years, after the Syrian Kurds urged Damascus to protect the town from the threat of impending Turkish military offensive, though Turkish President Erdogan has termed the handover a “psyops” by the Kurds.

According to a report by RT: [1] “A high-ranking Turkish delegation arrived in Moscow on Saturday, only a day after international media broke news on Kurdish militias inviting Syrian forces to enter Manbij before the Turks do. Syria’s military proclaimed they ‘raised the flag’ over Manbij, but there have been no independent reports confirming the moving of troops into the city.”

The report notes: “The Saturday Moscow meeting was key to preventing all actors of the Syrian war from locking horns over the Kurdish enclave, Middle East experts believe.”

“Obviously, Turkey will insist that it is their forces that should enter Manbij, Russia will of course insist the city should be handed over to Assad’s forces,” Kirill Semenov, an Islamic studies expert with Russia’s Institute for Innovative Development, told RT.

The report further adds: “Realpolitik, of course, plays a role here as various locations across Syria might be used as a bargaining chip by all parties to the conflict. Semenov suggested the Turks may agree on Syrian forces taking some parts of Idlib province in exchange for Damascus’ consent for a Turkish offensive toward Manbij or Kobani.”

It becomes abundantly clear after reading the RT report that a land swap agreement between Ankara and Damascus under the auspices of Moscow is in the offing to avoid standoff over Manbij.

The agreement would likely stipulate that Damascus would give Ankara free hand to mount offensives in the Kurdish-occupied Manbij and Kobani in northern Syria in return for Ankara withdrawing its militant proxies from Maarat al-Numan, Khan Sheikhoun and Jisr al-Shughour, all of which are strategically located in the south of Idlib governorate.

Just as Ankara cannot tolerate the presence of the Kurds in northern Syria along Turkey’s southern border in line with its “east of Euphrates” military doctrine, similarly even Ankara would acknowledge the fact that Damascus cannot possibly conceive the long-term presence of Ankara’s jihadist proxies in the aforementioned strategic locations in the south of Idlib governorate threatening the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia.

If such a land swap agreement is concluded between Ankara and Damascus, it would be a win-win for all parties to the Syrian conflict, excluding the Kurds, of course. But the response of Damascus and Moscow to the concerns of the Kurds has been tepid of late.

Not only have the Kurds committed the perfidy of acting as the proxies of Washington during the Syrian conflict which abandoned them after Trump’s announcement of withdrawal of American troops from Syria, but we must also recall another momentous event that took place in Deir al-Zor governorate in February.

On February 7, the US B-52 bombers and Apache helicopters struck a contingent of Syrian government troops and allied forces in Deir al-Zor that reportedly [2] killed and wounded scores of Russian military contractors working for the Russian private security firm, the Wagner group.

The survivors described the bombing as an absolute massacre, and Kremlin lost more Russian citizens in one day than it had lost throughout its more than three-year-long military campaign in support of the Syrian government since September 2015.

The reason why Washington struck Russian contractors working in Syria was that the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – which is mainly comprised of Kurdish YPG militias – had reportedly handed over the control of some areas east of Euphrates River to Deir al-Zor Military Council (DMC), which is the Arab-led component of SDF, and had relocated several battalions of Kurdish YPG militias to Afrin and along Syria’s northern border with Turkey in order to defend the Kurdish-held areas against the onslaught of the Turkish armed forces and allied Syrian militant proxies during Ankara’s “Operation Olive Branch” in Syria’s northwest that lasted from January to March 2017.

Syrian forces with the backing of Russian contractors took advantage of the opportunity and crossed the Euphrates River to capture an oil refinery located to the east of Euphrates River in the Kurdish-held area of Deir al-Zor.

The US Air Force responded with full force, knowing well the ragtag Arab component of SDF – mainly comprised of local Arab tribesmen and mercenaries to make the Kurdish-led SDF appear more representative and inclusive – was simply not a match for the superior training and arms of Syrian troops and Russian military contractors, consequently causing a carnage in which scores of Russian citizens lost their lives. Clearly, Moscow and Damascus hold the Kurds responsible for the atrocity along with Washington.

Regarding the dominant group of Syrian militants in the Idlib governorate, according to a May 2017 report [3] by CBC Canada, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which was formerly known as al-Nusra Front until July 2016 and then as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS) until January 2017, had been removed from the terror watch-list of the US after it merged with fighters from Zenki Brigade and hardline jihadists from Ahrar al-Sham and rebranded itself as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in January 2017.

The US State Department is hesitant to label Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) a terror group, despite the group’s links to al-Qaeda, as the US government had directly funded and armed the Zenki Brigade, one of the constituents of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), with sophisticated weaponry including the US-made antitank missiles.

The purpose behind the rebranding of al-Nusra Front, first as Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (JFS) and then as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and purported severing of ties with al-Qaeda, was to legitimize itself and to make it easier for its patrons to send money and arms.

Washington blacklisted al-Nusra Front in December 2012 and persuaded its regional allies Saudi Arabia and Turkey to ban it, too. Although al-Nusra Front’s name has been in the list of proscribed organizations of Saudi Arabia and Turkey since 2014, it kept receiving money and arms from its regional patrons.

Finally, regarding the deep ideological ties between the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front, although the current al-Nusra Front has been led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, he was appointed [4] as the emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, in January 2012. In fact, al-Jolani’s Nusra Front is only a splinter group of the Islamic State, which split from its parent organization in April 2013 over a leadership dispute between the two organizations.

Sources and links:

[1] Land swap between Turkey and Syria – an option to avoid standoff over Manbij:
https://www.rt.com/news/447698-syria-manbij-russia-turkey-talks/

[2] Russian toll in Syria battle was 300 killed and wounded:
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-mideast-crisis-syria-russia-casualtie/russian-toll-in-syria-battle-was-300-killed-and-wounded-sources-idUKKCN1FZ2EI

[3] Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate escapes from terror list:
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/terror-list-omission-1.4114621

[4] Al-Julani was appointed as the emir of al-Nusra Front by al-Baghdadi:
http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/16689

The biggest New Year and Christmas Eve celebrations for the Ankara audience is to attend CSO, Bilkent Symphony and Opera concerts.

This year, Bilkent Symphony tickets were released over the internet months ago, and they were all sold. We had a beautiful program, scheduled on 26-27 December, Wednesday and Thursday nights.

Conductor Ferenc Gabor, Soprano Burcu Uyar, Waltzes, Polkas, Songs, J. Strauss II, A. Dvorak, B. Smetana, J. Brahms, J. Offenbach, F. Lehar

We went to Bilkent concert hall on 26-December Wednesday night with -7C outside temperature. The parking lot was not fully cleaned. The road was clear, but the road and parking lot edges were full of snow. We went early, we parked our car in a secluded location. There were those who didn’t come because of the cold weather. Some of the seats were empty.

The viewers without tickets found empty seats easily. The conductor showed average performance. Soprano had not warmed her voice up enough at first, then her voice was turned on. In the program, there were no repeat, no bis, no surprises. Orchestra played short music in a row. We clapped, the concert’s over.

CSO (Presidential Philharmonic Orchestra) new year concert tickets went on sale 10 days ago, tickets were sold on the same day. Concert days were 26-27-28 December, Wednesday- Thursday – Friday

Argentine charismatic conductor Tulio Gagliardo Vargas and Soprano Mehlika Karadeniz, lyric Tenor Aydın Uştuk moved the program.

The program included Strauss, Dvorak, Leoncavallo, Bizet, Lehar, Lara, Webber, Kalman, Sorozabal, Khachaturyan, Mancini, Capua, Lehar. On 27- December night, Argentinian conductor declared that “Turkey’s best philharmonic orchestra is CSO”, I fully agree. We should not miss Thursday and Friday evening concerts in the new year.

In Talatpaşa boulevard and in underground tunnel, there is ongoing infrastructure renovation. The road on the CSO side drops to one lane. There are pits on the road. We parked the car in the opposite parking lot of the opera, it was more practical and easy. The weather was still very cold, there were empty seat, and those without ticket found seats easy. It’s been a lot of fun that night, we’re very pleased.

Opera tickets were also cold out. New Years concerts were on 28-29 December, Friday – Saturday nights. We went to the 29th December night concert. The weather was very cold. We went early. We have left our car in the rear parking lot. The building has been renovated. Interior items have not yet been replaced. When we went to the building, the heating radiators had just been burned, we sat in the lobby with our coats. The interior was warmed up over time, the balcony was very hot.

Great Conductor Antonio Pirolli led the great orchestra. Soloists Murat Karahan, Feryal Turkoglu, Eralp Kiyici, Ezgi Karakaya, sang the program. In the first part we listened to short arias of opera. In the second part, songs, tangos, unforgettable works of Turkish music were presented. Audience sang together with the soloists. It was a very enjoyable unforgettable year-end concert.

Somel Trio Jazz music program was scheduled on the night of December 25 in the Ankara Erimtan Museum. Mozart House Christmas and new year programs are available. Capella concert was given in MEB Shura Concert Hall. There was Alegria concert at the Ankara University Morphology Hall on the 25th of December.

There are concert programs at Hacettepe Conservatory, Başkent and other Ankara universities.

Izmir Elhamra, Istanbul Sureyya – Samsun-Antalya-Mersin operas have new year classical music programs. Eskişehir-Bursa concert programs can be found in social media, also in Borusan, İş Sanat, Zorlu PSM, CRR concert programs. There is a new year concert at Sabancı University.

If you can’t find a concert ticket, you can wait at the main gate of the concert hall and grab the return ticket, for not much money. In fact, they don’t turn down the ones that come to the door at cold night , they let you in at the last minute, you can watch them on the side corridor.

Another option is sitting in front of the TV at home, watching the BBC British Royal Albert Hall, USA Chicago, Germany Berlin-Munich, Austria Vienna. It is an easy alternative for you to watch the Viennese operas or other new year concert programs.

The New Years concert of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra will be broadcast on BBC TV as well as in TRT HABER TV channel on 1 January 2019 at 1300.

The Berlin Philharmonic performed in the days of 29-30-31 December under the direction of world famous conductor Daniel Barenboim.

Prague and Paris classical music concerts will be on TV broadcasts on New Year’s concerts. You will be able to watch them all over the internet.