Despite warmer ties over the past two years, China’s maritime row with the Philippines did not escape discussion during President Xi Jinping’s historic visit to Manila on November 20 and 21. It was tackled in the context of dispute management, confidence-building and the pursuit of practical cooperation, however, reaffirming both sides’ commitment to the present track. Nevertheless, while improved ties are welcome, they are no guarantee of a calmer South China Sea. HK Business Briefing Get updates direct to your inbox E-mail * By registering you agree to our T&Cs & Privacy Policy

In the joint statement issued at the conclusion of the state visit, the first by a Chinese head of state in 13 years, the Philippines and China acknowledged the dispute but agreed that it is not the sum of their bilateral ties. The two countries recognised their, and Asean’s, concerted efforts to foster relative stability in the contested sea. Even a controversial memorandum of understanding for joint oil and gas exploration was reached. Both sides also expressed support for crafting an effective code of conduct.

A week before the visit, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte stressed the importance of achieving a code of conduct as soon as possible. However, while such a code may build confidence and manage disputes between claimants, it may not necessarily ease tensions between great powers out to project their might into the tempestuous sea.

Duterte wants China, as the biggest claimant, to demonstrate responsibility through restraint and proper behaviour. This is not the first time he has asked China to temper its actions in the South China Sea; in August, he called out China for its bellicose air warnings to routine patrols in the area. At the same time, he also recognised the increasing US-China tussle over navigational and overflight freedoms in the contested sea and how this heightens the risk of potential conflict, with grave consequences for small littoral states like the Philippines.

This highlights the inadequacy of the code of conduct in governing interaction between claimant and non-claimant states. Hence, even with Manila’s best efforts – as Asean-China country coordinator – to shepherd the conclusion of an effective code, peace and stability in the strategic maritime space may prove elusive.

Despite relative stability in the past two years, China’s artificial islands and their capabilities still raise regional anxieties. While not referenced in the Asean-China summit statement, the chairman’s statements at the 33rd Asean Summit and sixth Asean-US Summit cited “concerns on the land reclamations and activities in the area, which have eroded trust and confidence, increased tensions and may undermine peace, security and stability in the region”. Asean and the United States also “emphasised the importance of non-militarisation and self-restraint”.

Moreover, while China’s installation of weather stations on its artificial islands may be in tune with its intent to provide public goods and play down its expanding security footprint, the dual nature of China’s structures and hardening of its effective occupation in the contested sea will not be taken lightly by other claimants.

Yet, incremental progress in confidence-building and dispute management continues to gather momentum. One concrete contribution of the 2018 Asean Summit is the adoption of a multilateral guideline to manage unintentional encounters between military aircraft. Asean countries and China also agreed to complete the first reading of the single draft code of conduct negotiating text by 2019. Before this, hotline communications between the foreign affairs ministries of the 11 countries had already gone operational, along with the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea.

During Xi’s visit, Manila and Beijing agreed to exercise self-restraint and strengthen coastguard and military dialogue and liaison mechanisms, allowing rapid responses to on-the-ground situations, as well as enhancing mutual trust. Such mechanisms can help prevent situations from reaching crisis proportions. Both sides also agreed to promote maritime cooperation in non-sensitive areas such as ensuring safety of life at sea and marine environmental protection.

Duterte’s inclination for dialogue and quiet diplomacy with China over the South China Sea is unlikely to change as long as the “red lines” are observed. Filipinos were able to resume fishing in what they call Bajo de Masinloc  (the Scarborough Shoal), which China had virtually occupied since the 2012 stand-off. China has yet to build structures on the shoal despite persistent rumours. Routine patrols in Philippine-held features in the Kalayaan  (Spratlys) also continue, although they are not without incident.

In addition, China stayed away from undertaking unilateral drilling in the West Philippine Sea while both sides iron out a framework that would facilitate joint exploration. Although allegations of fishermen being harassed or intimidated surface, they are isolated incidents. As long as they remain so, the Bilateral Consultation Mechanism, Foreign Ministry Consultations and the Joint Coast Guard Committee for Maritime Cooperation will remain platforms for addressing concerns.

This month, Manila will convene the eighth Asean Maritime Forum (AMF) and the sixth Expanded AMF. Progress in handling maritime emergencies and promoting cooperation in the South China Sea may be tabled and, barring major incidents, the present course adopted by both sides will remain steady. That said, the US-China contest over military navigation and overflight in the strategic maritime space will continue to be a test of mettle.

This article appeared at South China Morning Post and is reprinted with permission.

By Anand Kumar*

he United States finds its position increasingly challenged by two emerging powers with global ambitions, China and Russia. This rivalry now threatens to engulf the continent of Africa as well. China has expanded its economic interests in Africa even as the US and European countries pulled back from the continent. During the last one decade, China has become the largest trading partner of Africa. Punching above its weight, Russia has also joined the competition and its presence in the continent, which was dormant after World War II, now extends from the Central African Republic (CAR) to Eritrea.1 In response to this new geo-strategic competition, the US has recently devised a new ‘Africa strategy’

The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union had left the US without any rival. As a result, in the post-Cold War era, every year from 1994 to 2001, the US considered terrorism as a significant danger to its national security.2 By 1998, terrorism ranked in the top tier of threats for the US, along with other transnational dangers such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. In February 2001, seven months before September 11, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) testified that terrorism was the single greatest threat to US national security.3 That belief, which was strengthened by the September 11 attacks and the War on Terror that the US waged thereafter, is now changing. There seems to be a consensus among both Republicans and Democrats that China poses a more immediate threat to US interests and its security than anything else.

This change in the source of threat perception is now getting reflected in changes being effected in American policy. The US is now trying to counter China through various means and in various regions. One of the largest battle grounds is likely to be Africa. In 2017, China established its first overseas military base in Djibouti. The Chinese military base is in close vicinity of the US base in Djibouti which had been established earlier to aid counter terror operations in Africa.

Speaking at the Washington-based conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, on 13 December 2018, the US National Security Adviser John Bolton said that in Africa the greatest threat is not from poverty or Islamic extremism but from the expansionist policies of China and Russia. He accused these countries of deliberately and aggressively targeting investments in the continent to gain a competitive advantage over the United States. He also alleged that China was using bribes, opaque agreements and the strategic use of debt to make African states comply with its wishes and demands. According to Bolton, China’s ultimate goal of using its predatory influence over Africa to advance its global dominance would ultimately leave the continent in a far worse shape. Bolton also accused Russia of seeking to increase its influence in Africa by advancing political and economic relationships with little regard for the rule of law or accountable and transparent governance. He also blamed Russia for continuing to sell arms and energy in exchange for votes in the United Nations and claimed that both China and Russia were extracting resources from the region for their own benefit.

This has led to the Trump administration’s framing of a new Africa strategy whereby it plans to give more attention to the African continent. The new Africa strategy is designed to benefit both America as well as Africa. Bolton stated that under “our new approach, every decision we make, every policy we pursue, and every dollar of aid we spend will further US priorities in the region.” The new strategy is expected to bring new jobs to America by increasing trade with Africa, which, in turn, would also be beneficial for the African people. In short, it is transactional in nature.

Under its new Africa Strategy, the US now also wants to re-evaluate its engagement in UN peacekeeping operations in the continent and discontinue the ineffective ones. It also says that America would no longer provide indiscriminate assistance to all African countries. Instead, it would select its partners on the basis of their voting patterns in the United Nations. It would also not support countries that are governed by corrupt leaders who just siphon off money as a result of which benefit flows to the people.

The new US strategy, to a large measure, is also designed to counter growing Chinese influence on the continent. As part of this policy, the Trump administration in October 2018 decided to create a US International Development Finance Corporation (IDFC) with a funding of $ 60 billion. This would provide loan and risk insurance to American companies to make it easier for them to invest in Africa. However, this American plan pales into insignificance when compared with the Chinese plan to spend $60 billion over the next three years.

The US also wants African nations to take ownership over peace and security in their neighbourhood. However, this approach of the US has not worked in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan. African nations need sufficient stability to attract foreign investment, which they are incapable of achieving in the near future on their own. Also, many African leaders who are perceived to be corrupt prefer Chinese economic assistance as it does not ask uncomfortable questions about the rule of law, democracy and human rights. Moreover, Bolton has himself conceded that the US has limited resources to compete with the tens of billions of dollars that China is pouring into Africa. In this situation, it is not very clear how effective America’s new strategy would be in Africa in containing China. But it has definitely made African people worried that their continent might be used to advance the agenda of major global powers.

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

*About the author: Anand Kumar is Associate Fellow at Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses.

Source: This article was published by IDSA

Notes:

• 1. Salem Solomon, “From the CAR to Eritrea, Russia’s African Ambitions Unfold,” at https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-in-africa/4653190.html
• 2. Amy B. Zegart, “An Empirical Analysis of Failed Intelligence Reforms before September 11,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 121, No. 1 (Spring 2006), p. 40.
• 3. Ibid

By Allen Mendenhall*

Samuel Moyn, a Yale law professor, recently asked, “What is ‘cultural Marxism?’” His answer: “Nothing of the kind actually exists.” Moyn attributes the term cultural Marxism to the “runaway alt-right imagination,” claiming that it implicates zany conspiracy theories and has been “percolating for years through global sewers of hatred.”

Alexander Zubatov, an attorney writing in Tablet, countered that the “somewhat unclear and contested” term cultural Marxism “has been in circulation for over forty years.” It has, moreover, “perfectly respectable uses outside the dark, dank silos of the far right.” He concluded that cultural Marxism is neither a “conspiracy” nor a “mere right-wing ‘phantasmagoria,’” but a “coherent intellectual program, a constellation of dangerous ideas.”

In this debate, I side with Zubatov. Here’s why.

Despite the bewildering range of controversies and meanings attributed to it, cultural Marxism (the term and the movement) has a deep, complex history in Theory. The word “Theory” (with a capital T) is the general heading for research within the interpretative branches of the humanities known as cultural and critical studies, literary criticism, and literary theory — each of which includes a variety of approaches from the phenomenological to the psychoanalytic. In the United States, Theory is commonly taught and applied in English departments, although its influence is discernable throughout the humanities.

A brief genealogy of different schools of Theory — which originated outside English departments, among philosophers and sociologists for example, but became part of English departments’ core curricula — shows not only that cultural Marxism is a nameable, describable phenomenon, but also that it proliferates beyond the academy.

Scholars versed in Theory are reasonably suspicious of crude, tendentious portrayals of their field. Nevertheless, these fields retain elements of Marxism that, in my view, require heightened and sustained scrutiny. Given estimates that communism killed over 100 million people, we must openly and honestly discuss those currents of Marxism that run through different modes of interpretation and schools of thought. To avoid complicity, moreover, we must ask whether and why Marxist ideas, however attenuated, still motivate leading scholars and spread into the broader culture.

English departments sprang up in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in increasingly professionalized studies of literature and other forms of aesthetic expression. As English became a distinct university discipline with its own curriculum, it moved away from the study of British literature and canonical works of the Western tradition in translation, and toward the philosophies that guide textual interpretation.

Although a short, sweeping survey of what followed may not satisfy those in the field, it provides others with the relevant background.

The New Criticism

The first major school to establish itself in English departments was the New Criticism. Its counterpart was Russian formalism, characterized by figures like Victor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson, who attempted to distinguish literary texts from other texts, examining what qualities made written representations poetic, compelling, original, or moving rather than merely practical or utilitarian.

One such quality was defamiliarization. Literature, in other words, defamiliarizes language by using sound, syntax, metaphor, alliteration, assonance, and other rhetorical devices.

The New Criticism, which was chiefly pedagogical, emphasized close reading, maintaining that readers searching for meaning must isolate the text under consideration from externalities like authorial intent, biography, or historical context. This method is similar to legal textualism whereby judges look strictly at the language of a statute, not to legislative history or intent, to interpret the import or meaning of that statute. The New Critics coined the term “intentional fallacy” to refer to the search for the meaning of a text anywhere but in the text itself. The New Criticism is associated with John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, I. A. Richards, and T.S. Eliot. In a way, all subsequent schools of Theory are responses or reactions to the New Criticism.

Structuralism and Post-Structuralism

Structuralism permeated French intellectual circles in the 1960s. Through structuralism, thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Louis Althusser imported leftist politics into the study of literary texts. Structuralism is rooted in the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist who observed how linguistic signs become differentiated within a system of language. When we say or write something, we do it according to rules and conventions in which our anticipated audience also operates. The implied order we use and communicate in is the “structure” referred to in structuralism.

The French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss extended Saussure’s ideas about the linguistic sign to culture, arguing that the beliefs, values, and characteristic features of a social group function according to a set of tacitly known rules. These structures are “discourse,” a term that encompasses cultural norms and not just language practices.

Out of structuralism and post-structuralism emerged Structural Marxism, a school of thought linked to Althusser that analyzes the role of the state in perpetuating the dominance of the ruling class, the capitalists.

Marxism and Neo-Marxism

In the 1930s and 1940s, the Frankfurt School popularized the type of work usually labeled as “cultural Marxism.” Figures involved or associated with this school include Erich Fromm, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin. These men revised, repurposed, and extended classical Marxism by emphasizing culture and ideology, incorporating insights from emerging fields such as psychoanalysis, and researching the rise of mass media and mass culture.

Dissatisfied with economic determinism and the illusory coherence of historical materialism—and jaded by the failures of socialist and communist governments—these thinkers retooled Marxist tactics and premises in their own ways without entirely repudiating Marxist designs or ambitions.

Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars like Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson were explicit in embracing Marxism. They rejected the New Critical approaches that divorced literature from culture, stressing that literature reflected class and economic interest, social and political structures, and power. Accordingly, they considered how literary texts reproduced (or undermined) cultural or economic structures and conditions.

Slavoj Žižek arguably has done more than any member of the Frankfurt School to integrate psychoanalysis into Marxist variants. “Žižek’s scholarship holds a particularly high place within cultural criticism that seeks to account for the intersections between psychoanalysis and Marxism,” wrote the scholar Erin Labbie.1 She added, “Žižek’s prolific writings about ideology, revealing the relationships between psychoanalysis and Marxism, have altered the way in which literary and cultural criticism is approached and accomplished to the extent that most scholars can no longer hold tightly to the former notion that the two fields are at odds.”2 Žižek is just one among many continental philosophers whose Marxist and Marxist-inflected prognostications command the attention of American academics.

Deconstruction

Jacques Derrida is recognized as the founder of deconstruction. He borrowed from Saussure’s theory that the meaning of a linguistic sign depends on its relation to its opposite, or to things from which it differs. For instance, the meaning of male depends on the meaning of female; the meaning of happy depends on the meaning of sad; and so forth. Thus, the theoretical difference between two opposing terms, or binaries, unites them in our consciousness. And one binary is privileged while the other is devalued. For example, “beautiful” is privileged over “ugly,” and “good” over “bad.”

The result is a hierarchy of binaries that are contextually or arbitrarily dependent, according to Derrida, and cannot be fixed or definite across time and space. That is because meaning exists in a state of flux, never becoming part of an object or idea.

Derrida himself, having re-read The Communist Manifesto, recognized the “spectral” furtherance of a “spirit” of Marx and Marxism.3 Although Derrida’s so-called “hauntology” precludes the messianic meta-narratives of unfulfilled Marxism, commentators have salvaged from Derrida a modified Marxism for the climate of today’s “late capitalism.”

Derrida used the term diffèrance to describe the elusive process humans use to attach meaning to arbitrary signs, even if signs—the codes and grammatical structures of communication — cannot adequately represent an actual object or idea in reality. Derrida’s theories had a broad impact that enabled him and his followers to consider linguistic signs and the concepts created by those signs, many of which were central to the Western tradition and Western culture. For example, Derrida’s critique of logocentrism contests nearly all philosophical foundations deriving from Athens and Jerusalem.

New Historicism

New Historicism, a multifaceted enterprise, is associated with Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt. It looks at historical forces and conditions with a structuralist and post-structuralist eye, treating literary texts as both products of and contributors to discourse and discursive communities. It is founded on the idea that literature and art circulate through discourse and inform and destabilize cultural norms and institutions.

New historicists explore how literary representations reinforce power structures or work against entrenched privilege, extrapolating from Foucault’s paradox that power grows when it is subverted because it is able to reassert itself over the subversive person or act in a show of power. Marxism and materialism often surface when new historicists seek to highlight texts and authors (or literary scenes and characters) in terms of their effects on culture, class, and power. New historicists focus on low-class or marginalized figures, supplying them with a voice or agency and giving them overdue attention. This political reclamation, while purporting to provide context, nevertheless risks projecting contemporary concerns onto works that are situated in a particular culture and historical moment.

In the words of literary critic Paul Cantor, “There is a difference between political approaches to literature and politicized approaches, that is, between those that rightly take into account the centrality of political concerns in many literary classics and those that willfully seek to reinterpret and virtually recreate class works in light of contemporary political agendas.”4

Cultural Marxism Is Real

Much of the outcry about cultural Marxism is outrageous, uninformed, and conspiratorial. Some of it simplifies, ignores, or downplays the fissures and tensions among leftist groups and ideas. Cultural Marxism cannot be reduced, for instance, to “political correctness” or “identity politics.” (I recommend Andrew Lynn’s short piece “Cultural Marxism” in the Fall 2018 issue of The Hedgehog Review for a concise critique of sloppy and paranoid treatments of cultural Marxism.)

Nevertheless, Marxism pervades Theory, despite the competition among the several ideas under that broad label. Sometimes this Marxism is self-evident; at other times, it’s residual and implied. At any rate, it has attained a distinct but evolving character as literary scholars have reworked classical Marxism to account for the relation of literature and culture to class, power, and discourse.

Feminism, gender studies, critical race theory, post-colonialism, disability studies — these and other disciplines routinely get pulled through one or more of the theoretical paradigms I’ve outlined. The fact that they’re guided by Marxism or adopt Marxist terms and concepts, however, does not make them off-limits or unworthy of attention.

Which brings me to a warning: Condemning these ideas as forbidden, as dangers that corrupt young minds, might have unintended consequences. Marxist spinoffs must be studied to be comprehensively understood. Don’t remove them from the curriculum: contextualize them, challenge them, and question them. Don’t reify their power by ignoring or neglecting them.

Popular iterations of cultural Marxism reveal themselves in the casual use of terms like “privilege,” “alienation,” “commodification,” “fetishism,” “materialism,” “hegemony,” or “superstructure.” As Zubatov wrote for Tablet, “It is a short step from Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’ to the now-ubiquitous toxic memes of ‘patriarchy,’ ‘heteronormativity,’ ‘white supremacy,’ ‘white privilege,’ ‘white fragility,’ ‘and whiteness.’” He adds, “It is a short step from the Marxist and cultural Marxist premise that ideas are, at their core, expressions of power to rampant, divisive identity politics and the routine judging of people and their cultural contributions based on their race, gender, sexuality and religion.”

My brief summary is merely the simplified, approximate version of a much larger and more complex story, but it orients curious readers who wish to learn more about cultural Marxism in literary studies. Today, English departments suffer from the lack of a clearly defined mission, purpose, and identity. Having lost rigor in favor of leftist politics as their chief end of study, English departments at many universities are jeopardized by the renewed emphasis on practical skills and jobs training. Just as English departments replaced religion and classics departments as the principal places to study culture, so too could future departments or schools replace English departments.

And those places may not tolerate political agitations posturing as pedagogical technique.

The point, however, is that cultural Marxism exists. It has a history, followers, adherents, and left a perceptible mark on academic subjects and lines of inquiry. Moyn may wish it out of existence, or dismiss it as a bogeyman, but it is real. We must know its effects on society, and in what forms it materializes in our culture. Moyn’s intemperate polemic demonstrates, in fact, the urgency and importance of examining cultural Marxism, rather than closing our eyes to its meaning, properties, and significance.

Editor’s Note: Allen Mendenhall’s recent video interview with the Martin Center touches on themes from this article. 

This article was originally published by the Martin Center.

*About the author: Allen Mendenhall is Associate Dean and Executive Director of the Blackstone Center for Law and Liberty at Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law. Visit his website at AllenMendenhall.com.

Source: This article was published by the MISES Institute

Notes:

1. Erin F. Labbie, “Žižek Avec Lacan: Splitting the Dialectics of Desire,” Slovene Studies, Vol. 25 (2003), p. 23.

2. Ibid.

3. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (Peggy Kamuf, trans.) (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 3-4.

4. Paul Cantor, “Shakespeare—‘For all time’?” The Public Interest , Issue 110 (1993), p. 35.

(RFE/RL) — Iran soon will put two satellites into orbit using domestically made rockets, President Hassan Rohani has said, despite U.S. concerns that the launches could help further develop the country’s ballistic missiles.

“Soon, in the coming weeks, we will send two satellites into space using our domestically-made rockets,” Rohani said on January 10 during a commemoration for the late President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iranian state television reported.

He gave no further details about the rockets and satellites.

Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Iran not to proceed with “provocative” plans to launch three rockets, called Space Launch Vehicles (SLV), claiming they were “virtually identical” to nuclear-capable ballistic missiles and would violate a UN resolution.

“The United States will not stand by and watch the Iranian regime’s destructive policies place international stability and security at risk,” Pompeo said in a January 3 statement.

Resolution 2231, which enshrined Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, called on Tehran “not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”

Tehran, which considers its space program a matter of national pride, insists that its space-vehicle launches and missile tests do not violate the resolution and will continue.

Iran typically displays achievements in its space program in February, during the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which brought the current, clerically dominated regime to power.

This year will mark the 40th anniversary of the revolution.

Iran has sent several short-lived satellites into orbit over the past decade, and in 2013 launched a monkey into space.

Despite Russia’s denial of any involvement in the upcoming Israeli elections, with a senior Moscow official saying that people should not read the Israeli media, intelligence sources in Tel Aviv announced there were several indications for such intervention, adding that Israel’s cyber army fended off several attacks.

Director of the Shin Bet domestic security service Nadav Argaman discussed the issue, saying security forces were concerned about foreign interference that could affect the Knesset elections’ outcome.

Speaking at a Friends of Tel Aviv University conference, Argaman said that a foreign country intended to launch cyber attacks in order to influence Israel’s general elections.

The issue is considered an internal matter, however, several journalists attending the conference reported the news, which prompted the military censorship to issue an order banning the publication of Argaman’s statement. The military gag was later lifted when reporters threatened of filing a lawsuit, though the naming of the country in question is still prohibited.

“I don’t know in favor of whom or against whom the foreign country will interfere. At this point, I cannot say which political interest plays a role here, however, a foreign country will attempt to meddle in the April elections and I know what I’m talking about,” the Shin Bet director said.

However, head of left-wing Meretz party, Tamar Zandberg, demanded security services make sure that Putin doesn’t “steal the elections for his friend, the tyrant Bibi,” using the nickname of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In her statement, Zandberg was referring to the close ties between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Netanyahu.

Labor MK Ayelet Nahmias-Verbin submitted a request to urgently convene the Knesset’s cyber subcommittee.

State Comptroller, Judge Yosef Shapira said earlier Tuesday that his office was already planning to conduct a comprehensive examination of the issue of cybersecurity in relation to the upcoming elections. He indicated that examining this issue “is a difficult challenge, however, we must adjust ourselves to the times we live in order to stay relevant.”

In response, Netanyahu told reporters that: “Israel is prepared to thwart a cyber intervention, we’re prepared for any scenario and there’s no country more prepared than we are.”

Discussions of a possible intervention in the Israeli elections came at a time when the race for the post of prime minister appears to be intensifying, and the results of internal polls conducted by the Likud have begun to worry Netanyahu, especially after it was said that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit is determined to summon Netanyahu for a hearing in the corruption cases against him.

On Tuesday, Channel 10 published results of a poll which indicated that the Prime Minister continues to lead as Israelis’ preferred candidate for prime minister, but former IDF chief Benny Gantz appears to be closing the gap.

The poll found that when presented with a choice between the two, 41 percent of the public chose Netanyahu while 38 percent picked Gantz. Twenty-one percent were undecided.

Channel 10 also revealed that nearly half of the public, 49 percent, do not believe Netanyahu’s claims that his criminal investigations are being conducted unfairly, while 33 percent believe him and 18 percent are undecided. However, among the Jewish public, those who believe Netanyahu amount to 38 percent.

An area of international waters off the coast of Syria in the Mediterranean Sea has been closed off for imminent Russian missile firing drills, a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) circulated Wednesday has revealed, according to Al-Masdar News.

The drills, to be held January on 9-10, 16-17, 23-24 and 30-31, will see the area closed off to both ships and civilian aircraft between 10 am and 6 pm Moscow time.

Russia has repeatedly held drills in the Mediterranean Sea off the Syrian coast in 2018, with the largest such exercises held in September, when 26 ships and 34 aircraft engaged in training in the area amid threats by the US-led coalition to launch airstrikes against Syria under the pretext of the use of chemical weapons in the country’s rebel and terrorist-held Idlib province.

Nearly a dozen militant groups are believed to be operating in Idlib, including the so-called National Front for the Liberation of Syria and Jabhat al-Nusra*, which is part of the al-Qaeda franchise.

In November, Russia deployed the Kalibr missile-armed Admiral Makarov frigate to the Mediterranean. Russia has repeatedly used Kalibrs against Daesh (ISIS)*, al-Nusra and other terrorist groups in Syria. The long-range missiles were first used in October 2015, when gunboats in the Caspian Sea launched Kalibrs at targets over 1,500 km away in Syria.

Russia beefed up its Mediterranean Sea deployment this summer, deploying the Admiral Grigorovich, Admiral Essen and Pytlivy frigates to the area, along with the Nikolai Filchenkov landing ship and the Vishny Volochek missile corvette.

The western Mediterranean has been the source of considerable friction between regional and world powers in recent months.

Over the weekend, a US spy plane was spotted over western Syria near the Russian base at Hmeimim. Last month, a US P-8A Poseidon was detected flying off of Syria’s coast over waters which had been closed for Russian naval drills.

By Bijay Kumar Minj

Widespread protests continue in northeast India after the government passed a controversial bill this week to grant citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from neighboring nations.

Critics have blasted the move as being politically motivated in an election year — the general election is due in the coming months as the ruling party’s term ends in May — and say it violates the country’s secular values.

The Lower House of parliament (Lok Sabha) passed the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016 on Jan. 8 as an amendment of the Citizens Act of 1955. It aims to offer Indian citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who illegally moved to India from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan prior to Dec. 31, 2014.

“The church does not promote nor endorse the bill because it goes against the sentiments of local people who are against it. This bill will adversely affect them,” said Archbishop John Moolachira of Guwahati in northeastern Assam state.

Thousands of people in seven northeastern states have been protesting the bill’s passage since Jan. 7 when it was tabled in parliament. Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the bill as a form of atonement for the wrongs committed during India’s partition in 1947, which led to the creation of Pakistan.

The protests turned violent in several areas on Jan. 8 as mobs targeted the offices of Modi’s pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). At least six people were injured in clashes, three of them critically, when police fired at a crowd in Agarthala, the capital of Tripura state, local media reported.

Despite the protests, the government passed the bill during the final session of parliament before the polls. Critics say it is a tool to appease Hindu voters ahead of the poll.

The bill satisfies a longstanding demand by pro-Hindu groups, who wanted it to check the growth of the Muslim population because of an influx of migrants from Bangladesh.

No reliable data is available on how many migrants have entered India but a statement made in parliament in 2004 shows that at least 12 million people from Bangladesh are now living in the country, at least half of whom are Muslims.

The decision to exclude Muslims violates a constitutional guarantee to not discriminate against people based on their religion, according to regional parties who are continuing their protests. Moreover, the new law would change the demography of the region, they say.

It “will set fire to Assam and the Northeast. There is no objection to [admitting] refugees from Afghanistan and Pakistan, but make this a secular bill. Why mention only six religions? Don’t just limit it to three countries,” Saugata Ray, the Trinamool Congress Party’s MP for Dum Dum in West Bengal state, told the media during an address in New Delhi.

The party governs West Bengal. Archbishop Moolachira called the bill “a political stunt.”

The prelate said “local people are against it because it targets a particular community, which is not just. Our rules and regulations should treat all people equally irrespective of caste, creed and religion.”

Christians form a majority in Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland, three northeastern states where Hindus represent less than 10 percent of the population. Nearly a third of the population in Arunachal Pradesh are Christian while another third is Hindu, with the rest mostly following tribal religions.

Among the other states in the region, only in Tripura do Hindus hold a strong majority of more than 80 percent. They comprise 61 percent of the population in Assam and just 41 percent in Manipur. Assam Gana Parishad, the BJP’s coalition partner, parted ways with the ruling party when the bill was tabled.

Representatives of the party said they could not condone its passage as it works against the cultural and linguistic identity of the indigenous people of the state. All opposition parties including Congress opposed the idea of granting citizenship on the basis of religion.

By John Feffer*

The Republican Party, since its takeover by Reaganauts in the 1980s, has long favored shrinking the federal government to the point at which it can be “drowned in the bathtub,” to use Grover Norquist’s colorful phrase.

Tax cuts reduce the federal budget. Budget cuts weaken social programs. Even cutting remarks have their effect. Reagan got plenty of laughs when he said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the federal government and I’m here to help.’”

With the partial shutdown of the federal government entering its third week, Americans are learning that the nine most truly terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m the president and I’m here to help…myself.”

Trump isn’t content to use the executive office to enrich himself and his circle. He’s warping national policy to serve his own interests as well. Trump believes via Fox News that his presidency is doomed (and his second term nipped in the bud) if he doesn’t fulfil his signature promise of building a wall. The government shutdown is all about Trump and his self-serving impulses.

To that end, Trump has threatened to extend the shutdown as long as it takes in order to squeeze funding out of Congress for his cherished wall. And why wouldn’t he? He’s got the bathtub ready and a funeral oration already written.

Shutting down government won’t lose any votes from furloughed federal workers (the vast majority of whom already despise him). Yes, the shutdown is unpopular, but the president’s base of support is delighted to see even a partial draining of the swamp. And shutdowns, as FiveThirtyEight concludes from an admittedly small sample, don’t seem to have long-term impact on public opinion.

But the truly frightening part of this standoff between Trump and the rest of government is his threat to invoke a state of emergency so he can direct the U.S. military to build his wall.

The president admires autocrats who can just get the job done. Rule by decree is the first stepping stone to transforming democracy into dictatorship. Declaring a state of emergency would be Trump’s desperate attempt to hold on to and ultimately expand the power that is slipping through his fingers in the aftermath of the midterm elections.

Channeling the Fascists

Rule by decree has an undistinguished, undemocratic parentage. In the Weimar Republic of the 1920s and 1930s, the German constitution contained the controversial article 48, which granted the president the right to rule by decree in the case of a national emergency. German leaders invoked this right several times between 1930 and 1933.

But the most momentous decree came in the wake of the Reichstag fire, six days before German elections in 1933. Hitler, already appointed chancellor at that point, persuaded German President Paul von Hindenburg to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree. No doubt inspired by Benito Mussolini and his use of emergency powers to establish fascism in Italy in the 1920s, the Nazis then took full advantage the authority granted them by Hindenburg’s decree to remake Germany into a dictatorship.

Modern democracies retain a certain echo of this tradition of decrees. In the United States, for instance, presidents can issue executive orders without having to declare a state of emergency.

Trump has already shown a marked preference for this style of governance. During his first two years in office, he issued 91 executive orders — 55 in 2017 and 36 in 2018. By contrast, Obama issued an average of 35 per year, George W. Bush 36. Many of Trump’s executive orders — such as withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement, the Paris climate accord, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal — place Trump in opposition to international and national consensus.

Trump has also used his executive privilege to take bold stands in foreign policy that diverge, in some cases sharply, from the consensus of the policymaking community. He defied the advice of his advisors to sit down one-on-one with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Most recently, he announced U.S. military withdrawal from Syria, generating considerable pushback from the foreign policy mandarin class. Like a stopped clock, an erratic commander-in-chief can be right once in a while.

These steps are authoritative but not authoritarian. Executive orders aren’t out-and-out decrees — the courts can say no, as they’ve done several times in the Trump era. Trump’s freewheeling foreign policy moves also face certain constraints. A deal with North Korea would require congressional consent. His decision to remove troops from Syria has already been modified by members of his own administration, with National Security Advisor John Bolton stipulating certain conditions that will delay or even nullify withdrawal.

But Trump’s threat to declare a state of emergency at the border would up the ante considerably. True, presidents frequently declare states of emergency under the National Emergencies Act. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama declared a dozen or so each (most of them still in effect). But these declarations pertained almost exclusively to war or terrorism.

Trump’s attempt to circumvent the congressional standoff over his wall is a different matter altogether.

Can He Do It?

As Bruce Ackerman points out in The New York Times, the president can’t use the military to execute his plan. In the wake of the Katrina disaster, Congress created an exemption to the general rule prohibiting the military from enforcing domestic laws. The Obama administration then rolled back that particular exemption.

Ackerman further predicts that if Trump attempts to go forward with his plan anyway, Congress would block him. Indeed, as Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA) has said. “If Harry Truman couldn’t nationalize the steel industry during wartime, this president doesn’t have the power to declare an emergency and build a multibillion-dollar wall on the border.”

Moreover, Trump’s “wall” doesn’t qualify as an urgent response to a crisis. There is no state of emergency at the border. There have been a few protests, on each side of the border, most recently around the closing of a shelter in Tijuana. But that hardly qualifies as a clear and present danger. The number of illegal border crossings fell to a historic low in 2017, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Nor did the situation change in 2018.

The Trump administration has claimed that 4,000 known or suspected terrorists were stopped at the border in 2018. Not true: The vast majority of those people on the list of suspected terrorists were stopped at airports around the world. In the first half of 2018, only six non-Americanson the list were stopped at the southern border.

Trump will no doubt repeat some of these lies this week in his first televised Oval Office speech. This is another privilege of his position: to speak directly to the American people. And the networks, despite some misgivings about the president’s indifference to the truth, will air the speech. Trump has already delegitimized the mainstream media as “fake news,” and he is now artfully playing them for his own purposes.

For those who believe that the American system of checks and balances will prevent Trump from getting his way, think again. As Elizabeth Goitien explains in The Atlantic, the American system has its own equivalent of Article 48 of the Weimar constitution:

Unknown to most Americans, a parallel legal regime allows the president to sidestep many of the constraints that normally apply. The moment the president declares a “national emergency” — a decision that is entirely within his discretion — more than 100 special provisions become available to him. While many of these tee up reasonable responses to genuine emergencies, some appear dangerously suited to a leader bent on amassing or retaining power. For instance, the president can, with the flick of his pen, activate laws allowing him to shut down many kinds of electronic communications inside the United States or freeze Americans’ bank accounts.

Goitien worries that Trump could also use the Insurrection Act to deploy U.S. troops on the streets of American cities. So, imagine that protests spring up around the country against Trump’s declaration of a national emergency. That could in turn serve as the justification for Trump sending in troops to suppress a “threat to the public order.”

In this way, the United States could go from a state of emergency at the border to martial law throughout the country.

Trump’s public support remains low and his political influence is on the decline. He’s surrounded almost exclusively now by advisors who favor his most autocratic impulses. It’s not inconceivable that Trump will use his standoff with Congress over the border wall as his Reichstag moment.

Over a decade ago, in another political era altogether, the Los Angeles Times charged in an editorial that ruling by decree was not democratic. This would seem to be a no-brainer. But one prominent reader disagreed. He wrote, “This is not the mark of dictatorial rule but rather a new way of envisioning popular participation and democracy.”

The writer was the Venezuelan ambassador to the United States, trying to defend his boss, Hugo Chavez, from the charge that he was governing like a dictator. This is the playbook that Trump is reading. This is the company that Trump keeps. This is the clear and present danger that America now faces.

* John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article originally appeared.

A Seattle Q13 Fox employee has been placed on leave after a disturbing “deepfake” video of President Trump aired during his national address on border security this week, according to mynorthwest.com.

In addition to dialing up the orange to oompa-loompa proportions, somehow the TV station was able to manipulate Trump on the fly to show him creepily sticking his tongue out at viewers.

That comparison reveals the Q13 video creating a loop of the President licking his lips — making it seem bizarre and unbalanced — it also seems that someone distorted the President’s face and my have added an orange tone to his skin -mynorthwest.com

In a statement to MyNorthWest, Q13’s news director said “We are investigating this to determine what happened,” adding “This does not meet our editorial standards and we regret if it is seen as portraying the President in a negative light. The editor responsible for editing the footage is being placed on leave while we investigate further.”

The most disturbing part of the prank is that Trump’s speech was manipulated in real time – a technological feat known as “Deep Fakes” – a convincing computer generated manipulation which can produce an almost believable impersonation of an individual.

Most recently Nvidia showcased an AI algorithm that can create realistic looking photos of people who don’t exist.

And in China, state-run Xinhua news agency has rolled out an AI anchor which is disturbingly lifelike. “AI anchors have officially become members of the Xinhua News Agency reporting team,” said the agency, adding “They will work with other anchors to bring you authoritative, timely and accurate news information in both Chinese and English.”

The new AI anchors, launched by Xinhua and Beijing-based search engine operator Sogou during the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, can deliver the news with “the same effect” as human anchors because the machine learning programme is able to synthesise realistic-looking speech, lip movements and facial expressions, according to a Xinhua news report on Wednesday. -SCMP

We wonder if the MSM will give their Seattle comrades a pass for doctoring the Trump video, unlike the treatment received by Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson, who was falsely accused of doctoring footage of CNN’s Jim Acosta pushing a White House intern.

It may be an exaggeration to say that the murder of one man can change the trajectory of relationships among multiple nations in the Middle East.  But the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, appears to have done precisely that.  David Hearst’s riveting account of secret meetings among Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Israel designed to woo Bashar al Assad back into the Arab fold; and machinations designed to box out Turkey and elevate it to Public Enemy Number 1, was published this week in Middle East Eye.

As he wrote:

The diplomatic initiative was agreed at a secret meeting held in a Gulf capital last month which was attended by senior intelligence officials from the four countries including Yossi Cohen, the director of Mossad,

An added element in the calculations of those participating in this meeting was the likelihood that the U.S., under Donald Trump, had exhausted its ability to influence events either in Syria or Turkey in ways that could benefit them.  The Saudis in particular hoped that the U.S. would offer fulsome support for their response to the Khashoggi murder so that the world would put the scandal behind it.  However, Congressional outrage at both the murder and Trump’s attempt to whitewash it, have defeated that strategy.  As a result, MBS has turned to his brothers in arms, the Israelis and his Gulf cousins to ride out the storm.

But their deliberations reveal they haven’t entirely given up on the U.S.  In order to encourage its continued engagement on behalf of Saudi Arabia, the assembled group proposed to ease the planned U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by brokering talks with the Taliban aimed at stabilizing that country in preparation for the troop drawdown.  Further, on the same day Secretary of State Pompeo visited Riyadh, the Saudis made a $100-million “payment.”  The report doesn’t indicate the nature or purpose of the payment.  But given a president who has dollar-signs for eyeballs, such blandishments would not go unnoticed or appreciated.

There is a new Syrian wrinkle: instead of fighting Assad and his allies, those convening have decided to take a different tack.  Since Assad has essentially won the war against Sunni Islamists foes long-supported by Saudi Arabia and its allies, the new approach might be characterized as: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. 

Invite Assad to rejoin the Arab League and restore diplomatic relations with member states broken off at the beginning of the civil war.  Offer billions of aid to rebuild Syria. And offer support to Assad in his efforts to regain control of northern regions of his country now controlled by Turkish forces and their allies.

Under the old saying: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the group determined to throw its weight behind Syrian and Turkish Kurds fighting against Turkey, which itself has endured a long struggle to tame a Kurdish insurgency inside its borders.

The Sunni axis desperately wants to persuade Assad to either renounce of reduce his reliance on his Iranian allies.  But the language used is itself patronizing and belittled the Syrian leader as much as it cajoled him to comply:

“They did not expect Bashar to break relations with Iran, but they wanted Bashar to use the Iranians rather than be used by them,” a Gulf official briefed on the discussions said.

“The message was: ‘Return back to how your father treated the Iranians, at least as an equal at the table, rather than subservient to Iranian interests.’”

Perhaps the most important aspect of this meeting was the realization among those attending that Iran, which had been the foremost enemy for many of them (especially the Saudis and Israel) was fading in that role.  In light of the Khashoggi killing and Turkey’s rise as a formidable military power in the region, playing major roles both in Syria and Iraq, Erdogan had risen to the top of the heap of villains confronting the Sunni alliance.

This suits the Israelis perfectly since Erdogan has been a thorn in their side for a decade or more.  Every statement he makes about Palestine or Gaza incites greater animosity towards him as he compares Israel to the Nazis  in its treatment of the Palestinians.  Israel has also arrested a number of Turkish nationals, including academics, who are making pilgrimages to the Jerusalem holy sites.  While some have been deported, a number have been imprisoned for long periods.

What’s noticeable about this shift is that Israel has long held Iran as its most dangerous foe in the region.  Bibi Netanyahu, according to numerous accounts, was once hours away from ordering a massive air strike on Iranian nuclear sites, only to be called off the plan by his military and intelligence chiefs.  Iran is the Israeli’s bete noire.  His punching bad which he can always rely on to rally his voters when politics call for it.

Perhaps with Assad’s victory, Bibi believes Iran can no longer be relied on to stir up mass fear and anxiety.  So a new bogeyman is needed.  Erdogan, whose dictatorial proclivities make him an easy caricature, as the ayatollahs once were, is an easy target.  He bellows, he hectors, he shouts down his enemies.  He’s a megalomaniac with a caliph-complex.  Almost a cartoon figure.  After milking Iran as Israel’s existential enemy for so long that it has exhausted its usefulness, Bibi now seeks a suitable replacement.  Turkey’s authoritarian leader more than fits the bill.

This article was published at Tikun Olam

In 2011, when then-Representative Ron Paul (R-TX) was seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he spoke passionately from the debate stage against the US government having a fence at the US-Mexico border. “I think this fence business,” said Paul at a debate held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, “is designed, and may well be used, against us and keep us in.” “In economic turmoil, the people want to leave with their capital and there’s capital controls and there’s people control,” continued Paul, “so, every time you think of a fence keeping all those bad people out, think about those fences maybe being used against us.”

With President Donald Trump saying the United States government will remain partially shut down until Congress delivers to him money to pay for wall building at the US-Mexico border, Paul has again been asked about his thoughts regarding such a wall or fence, this time in a Tuesday CNBC television interview. Again, Paul offered a strong rebuke of the idea, with an emphasis on the potential of the barrier — be it a fence or a wall — being used against Americans.

Paul declares in the Tuesday interview, much like he did on the debate stage years earlier, “I don’t want to wall people in, and I don’t want to wall people out.” Instead of a wall, Paul proposes, to deal with immigration concerns, removing both welfare incentives and an “easy road to citizenship” for people who come to America.

Watch Paul’s wall comments in the CNBC interview here:

This article was published by RonPaul Institute.

The new rulebook guides on implementation of the Paris Climate Change Agreement and represents a way forward on global action.

By Elkanah Babatunde*

The UN Conference of the Parties on Climate Change ended with the adoption of a 133-page rulebook for the implementation of the 2015 Paris Agreement – culmination of three years of negotiations. Overall, while the rulebook is a step forward in ensuring global climate-change action, it makes little effort to ensure protection of those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

The adoption of renewable energies and other forms of climate protections, especially in the developing world, is not a simple affair. Such action is anticipated to cost billions if not trillions of dollars. Obligations under the new rulebook are minimal – and COP24 portends developing countries taking on substantial obligations for climate change. Provision of climate finance is however a necessity both for protecting the world’s most vulnerable populations and for achieving more ambitious temperature goals.

Negotiating blocs sought to address significant issues that pertain to global climate-change governance including implementation of nationally determined contributions, climate finance, transparency and accountability. While the Paris Agreement provides general rules rather than specific guidelines on these issues, the rulebook provides the operational details. Parties generally agreed on issues such as climate pledge guidance, Article 4 of the agreement; climate finance reporting, Article 9; global stocktake, or inventory, Article 14; and compliance. Still, other issues proved more contentious.

The rulebook does oblige developed countries to report on climate finance provided to developing countries and provides guidelines for this report. However, the rules on climate finance remain largely permissive. Developed countries retain the right to determine what is climate financing, and this may include funds not traditionally classified as climate finance such as concessional and non-concessional loans, guarantees, equity and investments, whether from public or private sources. This creates leeway for developed countries to include loans and other types of funding as climate finance, and thereby render the Paris Agreement’s target of raising US$100 billion annually by 2020 redundant as a wide range of funds are now considered climate finance. This seems to be a step backwards from the framework convention, which requires that developed countries commit to “new and additional” financial resources in favor of developing countries.

The rulebook fails to provide clarity or specifics on how the existing climate fund target of US$100 billion or the transfer of technology to developing states might be achieved. Provision of finance and technology to developing countries is not a new requirement under international climate change law, and the missing link has always been its implementation. Real success of the rulebook with regard to climate finance would have been specific rules that ensure developed countries carried out this transfer. The rulebook, for all practical purposes, has not enhanced provision of financial support for developing countries and merely provides for collection of data on finance when such funding is provided – it includes no guidelines ensuring that the funds are given in the first place. The rulebook requires a report, necessary only when there has been a transfer of finance or technology.

Another shortfall of the rulebook is an inability to provide obligatory rules on loss and damage suffered by vulnerable and often the least developed states due to climate change despite having contributed the least to its cause. The climate-change regime has yet to provide a system for supporting those suffering loss and damage from the effects of climate change. The Paris Agreement recognized the importance of addressing loss and damage, and the expectation was for the rulebook to flesh out this recognition into specifics requiring action on the part of wealthier nations to ensure the protection of smaller states. Island states such as Kiribati, Fiji, Solomon Islands and the Marshall islands may have to relocate all or part of their populace to a new locations due to climate change. Unfortunately, the rulebook merely states that parties “may take into account, as appropriate… efforts to avert, minimise and address loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change.” Instead of creating an obligation, the rulebook again uses permissive wording in discussing the need to protect the world’s most vulnerable from climate change. The rulebook’s failure to create an obligation leaves small-island and other vulnerable countries without protection.

Differentiation was another issue in the rulebook, touching on the dichotomy between developing and developed nations in climate-change negotiations. While parties at the conference agreed on the need for transparency rules, there were contentious debates on whether the principle of differentiation should apply to the application of rules. In the end, the conference decided that a single set of rules be applicable to all countries, permitting flexibility as necessary in the light of each country’s capacity. This is a significant development. Prior to this time, only developed nations had an obligation to report on their emissions, and the new standard reveals both the heightened concern and the willingness of developing countries to take up legal obligations under international climate-change law.

Parties failed to reach agreement on implementation of Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which provides that parties establish a market mechanism for trading carbon emissions as had initially been set up under the Kyoto Protocol. This issue drove the conference into an extra day of meetings and was deferred for discussion until December and COP25 to be held in Chile. Brazil insisted, with quiet support from China and India, that carbon credits accrued under the Kyoto mechanism should be eligible for accounting by the new market mechanism adopted under the rulebook. Several parties resisted the plan, describing verification mechanisms under the Kyoto Protocol as weak and ineffective, thus suggesting that credits under that system could not be trusted.

The rulebook also fails to set an ambitious target required to deal with the urgency of climate change as announced in the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Certain countries such as the United States, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait, opposed adoption of the IPCC report that noted the necessity for a 1.5˚C emission reduction target before the year 2030. To achieve this objective, fossil fuels must be completely discontinued by 2050, and rejection of the IPCC report by these major oil producers must be understood in this context. The report’s rejection reveals that lack of political will more than lack of scientific knowledge impedes climate-change action. Despite increasing consensus among scientists, urgent action remains subject to the willingness of political figures who lead these negotiations. Political leaders fear the costs and sacrifices required of constituents if new technologies are not found quickly. In developing nations, this entails convincing people that they cannot aspire to more lavish lifestyles while wealthy nations must curtail consumerism.

On the positive side, the rulebook’s adoption helps reinforce confidence in multilateralism given the increasing growth of nationalism in various countries of the world, especially the June 2017 withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement. The willingness of states to continue to come together to take joint actions for tacking climate change is commendable – yet the world is sorely in need of leaders who will invest in research, alternative fuels and protection of the vulnerable.

*Elkanah Babatunde is a 2018-2019 Fox fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University. He is also a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town. His research centers on Africa and international climate change law and policy.

Bad decision-making is a trait oftentimes associated with drug addicts and pathological gamblers, but what about people who excessively use social media? New research from Michigan State University shows a connection between social media use and impaired risky decision-making, which is commonly deficient in substance addiction.

“Around one-third of humans on the planet are using social media, and some of these people are displaying maladaptive, excessive use of these sites,” said Dar Meshi, lead author and assistant professor at MSU. “Our findings will hopefully motivate the field to take social media overuse seriously.”

The findings, published in the Journal of Behavior Addictions, are the first to examine the relationship between social media use and risky decision-making capabilities.

“Decision making is oftentimes compromised in individuals with substance use disorders. They sometimes fail to learn from their mistakes and continue down a path of negative outcomes,” Meshi said. “But no one previously looked at this behavior as it relates to excessive social media users, so we investigated this possible parallel between excessive social media users and substance abusers. While we didn’t test for the cause of poor decision-making, we tested for its correlation with problematic social media use.”

Meshi and his co-authors had 71 participants take a survey that measured their psychological dependence on Facebook, similar to addiction. Questions on the survey asked about users’ preoccupation with the platform, their feelings when unable to use it, attempts to quit and the impact that Facebook has had on their job or studies.

The researchers then had the participants do the Iowa Gambling Task, a common exercise used by psychologists to measure decision-making. To successfully complete the task, users identify outcome patterns in decks of cards to choose the best possible deck.

Meshi and his colleagues found that by the end of the gambling task, the worse people performed by choosing from bad decks, the more excessive their social media use. The better they did in the task, the less their social media use. This result is complementary to results with substance abusers. People who abuse opioids, cocaine, methamphetamine, among others – have similar outcomes on the Iowa Gambling Task, thus showing the same deficiency in decision-making.

“With so many people around the world using social media, it’s critical for us to understand its use,” Meshi said. “I believe that social media has tremendous benefits for individuals, but there’s also a dark side when people can’t pull themselves away. We need to better understand this drive so we can determine if excessive social media use should be considered an addiction.”

Many stars explode as luminous supernovae when, swollen with age, they run out of fuel for nuclear fusion. But some stars can go supernova simply because they have a close and pesky companion star that, one day, perturbs its partner so much that it explodes.

These latter events can happen in binary star systems, where two stars attempt to share dominion. While the exploding star gives off lots of evidence about its identity, astronomers must engage in detective work to learn about the errant companion that triggered the explosion.

On Jan. 10 at the 2019 American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle, an international team of astronomers announced that they have identified the type of companion star that made its partner in a binary system, a carbon-oxygen white dwarf star, explode. Through repeated observations of SN 2015cp, a supernova 545 million light years away, the team detected hydrogen-rich debris that the companion star had shed prior to the explosion.

“The presence of debris means that the companion was either a red giant star or similar star that, prior to making its companion go supernova, had shed large amounts of material,” said University of Washington astronomer Melissa Graham, who presented the discovery and is lead author on the accompanying paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

The supernova material smacked into this stellar litter at 10 percent the speed of light, causing it to glow with ultraviolet light that was detected by the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories nearly two years after the initial explosion. By looking for evidence of debris impacts months or years after a supernova in a binary star system, the team believes that astronomers could determine whether the companion had been a messy red giant or a relatively neat and tidy star.

The team made this discovery as part of a wider study of a particular type of supernova known as a Type Ia supernova. These occur when a carbon-oxygen white dwarf star explodes suddenly due to activity of a binary companion. Carbon-oxygen white dwarfs are small, dense and — for stars — quite stable. They form from the collapsed cores of larger stars and, if left undisturbed, can persist for billions of years.

Type Ia supernovae have been used for cosmological studies because their consistent luminosity makes them ideal “cosmic lighthouses,” according to Graham. They’ve been used to estimate the expansion rate of the universe and served as indirect evidence for the existence of dark energy.

Yet scientists are not certain what kinds of companion stars could trigger a Type Ia event. Plenty of evidence indicates that, for most Type Ia supernovae, the companion was likely another carbon-oxygen white dwarf, which would leave no hydrogen-rich debris in the aftermath. Yet theoretical models have shown that stars like red giants could also trigger a Type Ia supernova, which could leave hydrogen-rich debris that would be hit by the explosion. Out of the thousands of Type Ia supernovae studied to date, only a small fraction were later observed impacting hydrogen-rich material shed by a companion star. Prior observations of at least two Type Ia supernovae detected glowing debris months after the explosion. But scientists weren’t sure if those events were isolated occurrences, or signs that Type Ia supernovae could have many different kinds of companion stars.

“All of the science to date that has been done using Type Ia supernovae, including research on dark energy and the expansion of the universe, rests on the assumption that we know reasonably well what these ‘cosmic lighthouses’ are and how they work,” said Graham. “It is very important to understand how these events are triggered, and whether only a subset of Type Ia events should be used for certain cosmology studies.”

The team used Hubble Space Telescope observations to look for ultraviolet emissions from 70 Type Ia supernovae approximately one to three years following the initial explosion.

“By looking years after the initial event, we were searching for signs of shocked material that contained hydrogen, which would indicate that the companion was something other than another carbon-oxygen white dwarf,” said Graham.

In the case of SN 2015cp, a supernova first detected in 2015, the scientists found what they were searching for. In 2017, 686 days after the supernova exploded, Hubble picked up an ultraviolet glow of debris. This debris was far from the supernova source — at least 100 billion kilometers, or 62 billion miles, away. For reference, Pluto’s orbit takes it a maximum of 7.4 billion kilometers from our sun.

By comparing SN 2015cp to the other Type Ia supernovae in their survey, the researchers estimate that no more than 6 percent of Type Ia supernovae have such a litterbug companion. Repeated, detailed observations of other Type Ia events would help cement these estimates, Graham said.

The Hubble Space Telescope was essential for detecting the ultraviolet signature of the companion star’s debris for SN 2015cp. In the fall of 2017, the researchers arranged for additional observations of SN 2015cp by the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, among others. These data proved crucial in confirming the presence of hydrogen and are presented in a companion paper lead by Chelsea Harris, a research associate at Michigan State University.

“The discovery and follow-up of SN 2015cp’s emission really demonstrates how it takes many astronomers, and a wide variety of types of telescopes, working together to understand transient cosmic phenomena,” said Graham. “It is also a perfect example of the role of serendipity in astronomical studies: If Hubble had looked at SN 2015cp just a month or two later, we wouldn’t have seen anything.”

Graham is also a senior fellow with the UW’s DIRAC Institute and a science analyst with the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST.

“In the future, as a part of its regularly scheduled observations, the LSST will automatically detect optical emissions similar to SN 2015cp — from hydrogen impacted by material from Type Ia supernovae,” said Graham said. “It’s going to make my job so much easier!”

Heat trapped by greenhouse gases is raising ocean temperatures faster than previously thought, concludes an analysis of four recent ocean heating observations. The results provide further evidence that earlier claims of a slowdown or “hiatus” in global warming over the past 15 years were unfounded.

“If you want to see where global warming is happening, look in our oceans,” said Zeke Hausfather, a graduate student in the Energy and Resources Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-author of the paper. “Ocean heating is a very important indicator of climate change, and we have robust evidence that it is warming more rapidly than we thought.”

Ocean heating is critical marker of climate change because an estimated 93 percent of the excess solar energy trapped by greenhouse gases accumulates in the world’s oceans. And, unlike surface temperatures, ocean temperatures are not affected by year-to-year variations caused by climate events like El Nino or volcanic eruptions.

The new analysis, published in Science, shows that trends in ocean heat content match those predicted by leading climate change models, and that overall ocean warming is accelerating.

Assuming a “business-as-usual” scenario in which no effort has been made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) models predict that the temperature of the top 2,000 meters of the world’s oceans will rise 0.78 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The thermal expansion caused by this bump in temperature would raise sea levels 30 centimeters, or around 12 inches, on top of the already significant sea level rise caused by melting glaciers and ice sheets. Warmer oceans also contribute to stronger storms, hurricanes and extreme precipitation.

“While 2018 will be the fourth warmest year on record on the surface, it will most certainly be the warmest year on record in the oceans, as was 2017 and 2016 before that,” Hausfather said. “The global warming signal is a lot easier to detect if it is changing in the oceans than on the surface.”

The four studies, published between 2014 and 2017, provide better estimates of past trends in ocean heat content by correcting for discrepancies between different types of ocean temperature measurements and by better accounting for gaps in measurements over time or location.

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2013, showed that leading climate change models seemed to predict a much faster increase in ocean heat content over the last 30 years than was seen in observations,” Hausfather said. “That was a problem, because of all things, that is one thing we really hope the models will get right.”

“The fact that these corrected records now do agree with climate models is encouraging in that is removes an area of big uncertainty that we previously had,” he said.

Deep Divers

A fleet of nearly 4,000 floating robots drift throughout the world’s oceans, every few days diving to a depth of 2000 meters and measuring the ocean’s temperature, pH, salinity and other bits of information as they rise back up. This ocean-monitoring battalion, called Argo, has provided consistent and widespread data on ocean heat content since the mid-2000s.

Prior to Argo, ocean temperature data was sparse at best, relying on devices called expendable bathythermographs that sank to the depths only once, transmitting data on ocean temperature until settling into watery graves.

Three of the new studies included in the Science analysis calculated ocean heat content back to 1970 and before using new methods to correct for calibration errors and biases in the both the Argo and bathythermograph data. The fourth takes a completely different approach, using the fact that a warming ocean releases oxygen to the atmosphere to calculate ocean warming from changes in atmospheric oxygen concentrations, while accounting for other factors, like burning fossil fuels, that also change atmospheric oxygen levels.

“Scientists are continually working to improve how to interpret and analyze what was a fairly imperfect and limited set of data prior to the early 2000s,” Hausfather said. “These four new records that have been published in recent years seem to fix a lot of problems that were plaguing the old records, and now they seem to agree quite well with what the climate models have produced.”

Buoyed by four summit meetings and the formation of a new people-to-people ‘mechanism’ in quick succession, China-India engagement appears to be on a firm track. Despite challenges, this marks an opportune moment to press ahead towards total rapprochement.

By P S Suryanarayana*

China and India have resorted to soft-power diplomacy to undergird  their mutual pursuit of hard-power aims. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have met four times, informally on the first occasion and formally thereafter, in just eight months in 2018.

In a follow-up move on 21 December 2018, Indian and Chinese foreign ministers set up a “high-level mechanism” for people-to-people and cultural exchanges. The “mechanism” provides for sustainable links between think-tanks of the two neighbouring countries.

Focus on New Social Links

A greater frequency of dialogue between their media outlets is envisioned. Other provisions include acceleration of tourist flows in both directions, and collaboration between museums of these two ancient civilisations.

In tune with the current trend among youth, agreement has been reached for “co-production” of films and other forms of entertainment. During one of the Xi-Modi meetings in 2018, the Chinese leader interestingly spoke about the “popularity” of Indian-language films like Dangal (Hindi) and Baahubali (Telugu) in China.

Potential new avenues cover popularisation of the Chinese language in India and of Indian languages, notably Hindi, in China. Also discussed was India’s yoga, an ancient technique for a sound mind in a sound body, which is gaining acceptance in China. Reciprocally, China will try and popularise its martial art-forms in India.

China sees this comprehensive soft-power mechanism as a social foundation to consolidate engagement with India, the two countries having had chequered relations for nearly 70 years now. But paradoxical is the fact that a soft-power outcome is the only concrete result after four cordial Xi-Modi meetings last year.

Sustaining Dialogue

The first Xi-Modi meeting in 2018, at Wuhan, China on 27 and 28 April, was hailed as a rare one-on-one informal summit. It helped the two countries to overcome the bitterness of their prolonged military standoff at Doklam (Dong Lang) in 2017. Indeed, it was decided that a second Sino-Indian informal summit would be held in 2019.

Of the three formal Xi-Modi meetings in 2018, the one held in Qingdao, China in June of that year, coincided with India’s admission to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). China acquiesced to Russia’s initiative for inviting India.

On balance, the Xi-Modi meetings in 2018 marked the most intensive China-India dialogue since 1954, the previous best year in bilateral diplomacy. The balance sheet on these meetings last year is, therefore, relevant to the way ahead.

On the qualitative side, the Xi-Modi meetings led to a flurry of discussions at the political and official levels. Talks on the border dispute have been held again, against a backdrop of expressions of goodwill. The defence ministers have met and the two armies resumed a joint exercise, emphasising coordination for counter-terrorism under the United Nations banner.

Strategic Opportunities

China’s increasingly challenging interactions with the United States have offered Xi a rare strategic opportunity to seek a better engagement with India. His key objective is to ensure that Delhi does not make common cause with Washington against Beijing.

For Modi, too, the same Sino-American tensions provide a different kind of strategic opportunity to capitalise on China’s and perhaps also America’s overtures towards India.

As a result, Xi’s and Modi’s diplomacy may appear to converge on the basis of their current strategic considerations. Additionally, both have agreed to build a solid “social foundation” for China-India engagement. A caveat is that the outcome in this limited sphere will depend on the relative attractiveness of their respective soft-power skills.

India has traditionally prided itself on its rich variety, ranging from yoga and the fine arts to the modern cinema and computer science. China, too, emphasises its uniqueness in such areas as Confucian culture, sciences and the pedigree of the Chinese language. However, both would have to avoid the counter-productive calculation about whose soft-power is more potent as a diplomatic tool.

Time and Space For Rapprochement

The central practical issue, as opposed to a strategic one, in today’s Sino-Indian engagement is how much time and space Beijing and Delhi can find to move towards total rapprochement as Xi concentrates on piloting China’s rise as a global superpower in the face of challenges from the US.

In the near-term, a reset of Sino-American relations, if it does happen, and the political complexion of India’s next government will be critical to the prospects of Delhi-Beijing engagement, especially this year.

Another issue in the near-term is this: India’s erstwhile partnership with China on issues of global commons, such as climate change and world trade, may prove more elusive than before. Why? The international community is gradually veering to the view that China, unlike India, is a developed country for all practical purposes, in regard to these two issues.

Longer Term: Three Steps Forward

For the longer term, China and India must settle not only their boundary dispute but also their huge bilateral trade imbalance. They must also avoid a potential cross-border river dispute over sharing the waters of the Brahmaputra (Yarlung Tsangpo). How can such stability be brought about?

Many see the huge deficit of trust in the relations between India and China, fuelled by history and their 1962 border war, as the real stumbling block. To go forward now, at least three steps are needed.

These are: firstly, meticulous adherence to existing Sino-Indian confidence-building measures; secondly, friendly but purposeful exercises and candid dialogue in the military domain; and thirdly soft-power diplomacy. India and China have projected their latest soft-power diplomacy as an enduring, not exploratory, exercise. They should, therefore, promote its key objective: know your neighbour’s true identity.

*P S Suryanarayana is a Visiting Senior Fellow with the South Asia Programme, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He is the author of ‘Smart Diplomacy: Exploring China-India Synergy’ (2016).

By Akshobh Giridharadas

The idea of the ‘global economic order’ may sound too grandiose but its profound impact cannot be overstated. The order is essential for better trade, investment, and other forms of commercial activity to take place according to agreed-upon rules, and those rules should reflect the principles of the liberal economies in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. It is important to note that ‘liberal’ in this case does not signify a position of partisan political leaning but a set of ideas that encompasses the rule of law, openness to change, and the primacy of the individual as opposed to a state authority.

This current economic order is akin to the foundation stone of the United States’ economy. An economic order that espoused free trade, less government control, allowed the free hand of market forces, an economic system that allowed the innovator to thrive and the entrepreneur to flourish.

However, that economic order has seen multiple erosions. Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union and the growing sense of economic nationalism in the U.S is signaling a retreat from the rules-based economic order in its current form. The overarching political overtones have eviscerated globalization as a phenomenon that has benefitted a few but left many others, especially those at home in a worsened state.

The current international economic system is not perfect, but that does not mean that the U.S. Germany, EU and others so important to the foundation of this framework would advance their interests by withdrawing from it. Jettisoning this order would not be counterproductive.

The Bretton Woods system of international economic institutions such as the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have outlined sacrosanct economic principles that have fostered monetary cooperation, secured financial stability, promoted employment & sustained economic growth and ameliorated poverty. Along with the World Trade Organization, they have governed the rules behind global trade and investments. Some would brazenly state that these are “Made in America” ideas and that’s what truly “Made America Great”.

The U.S. would benefit more from revisiting these guidelines and updating and strengthening these global economic rules that benefit both America and the global economy at large. For the U.S to turn its back on cross-border economic engagement would be akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

There is little need to recreate a seminal Bretton Woods like system but however a new narrative for the role and importance of a rules-based international economy is required. A system that speaks about optimistic prospects but also conversely warns us of consequences if we were to deviate from it. The positives of this economic system can outline new ideas, products, services, and technologies produced by the U.S. and its economic partners and how this will help enhance economic prosperity. Conversely, the message is clear that abandoning this order without a viable alternative would lead to economic uncertainty, market volatility and exacerbate economic woes.

Harvard academic Graham Allison echoes that instead of an order where the United States sits at the top of the totem pole, the U.S should embrace an economically diverse order and accommodate  “the reality that other countries have contrary views about governance and will seek to establish their own international orders governed by their own rules.” 

Instead of the utopian ambitions of remaking the world in America’s image, the U.S must accept the world as it is.

That is leading economic engines with burgeoning growth, such as China and Russia will have their own sphere of influence. Politically this may be a concern (think Ukraine, think Taiwan) but the reality of the Belt and Road initiative or BRICS is here to stay.

The pattern repeats itself – where a new power threatens to dislodge an existing one. For years, the U.S hoped that China’s economic aspirations would lead to espousing the western ideals of democracy, free speech, a vibrant press and an increased attention towards human rights. It didn’t work out that way and instead China created its own economic model that works for it.

It is important to note that China is not the Soviet Union and is not an ideological rival. China must be allowed to rise peacefully. It has already carved out and financed multilateral development institutions –such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank (NDB). The U.S was one of the notable absentees from the existing 56 shareholder countries in the AIIB.

This is par for the course given that the present economic order has long been viewed by many emerging economies as a ruse for American hegemony. The flaws in the system were exacerbated with the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The G8 excluded China, while the G20 came about to expand representation to the global economy. Despite this, the U.S and the European powers possess the maximum clout with regards to the workings of the IMF. China and other Asian powers now see the tectonic shift of economic growth moving eastwards. And with that China sees its turn to add to the global economic discourse.

Even if the U.S is afraid to acknowledge China’s ascendancy, other institutions will. The IMF has already added the renminbi (RMB) to its Special Drawing Right (SDR) basket of currencies along with the dollar, the euro, the yen, and the pound; signalling a sign of Chinese economic potential.  However, the U.S dollar still remains the global reserve currency and is used in over 40% of international trade, while the RMB makes up just 2% of the global trade. So, there is little reason for the U.S to worry about the yuan (RMB) dislodging the dollar.

Speaking of trade, the most vital and understated piece of information is that trade isn’t a zero-sum game and trade is essential to continue to boost the productivity and wealth of the world economy.

A tit-for-tat trade war with China is harmful to the American economy since China owns a significant portion of the U.S national debt. Hurting the Chinese economy would hurt the American economy and when these two behemoths sneeze, the rest of the world will catch a cold.

The Transpacific Partnership (TPP) was seen as an Obama era initiative towards a pivot to Asia. Amidst a growing concern, it was the United States rebalancing a Chinese hegemon in Southeast Asia.  Withdrawing from the TPP has seen the United States score an own goal without having China step on the field.

The TPP will progress without the United States at the table. The seven original members will likely grow to 11 by the time that the TPP takes effect. The benefits of the TPP will see a slash in tariffs on agricultural and industrial products, it will make it easier for foreign investments while protecting intellectual property. The downside – the U.S loses out by backing out of the agreement.

The chagrin by various right-wing policymakers against such trade deals has led to increased protectionism and fervent economic nationalism. While multiple trade deals such as NAFTA, and proposed deals such as the TTIP need to be looked at, moving away from multilateral deals could be counterproductive. The IMF has warned in the absence of multilateral deals, there would be an increase in trade barriers which would disrupt global supply chains and slow the proliferation of new technologies. This would hinder global productivity and welfare.

President Trump claims he is the best dealmaker. The trouble is, we are yet to see the best art of the trade deal.

While most developed countries have reduced the construction of large dams for the production of electricity in recent decades, developing countries, including Brazil, have embarked on even more massive hydropower developments.

These countries have not accounted for the environmental impacts of large dams, which include deforestation and the loss of biodiversity, or the social consequences, such as the displacement of thousands of people and the economic damages they suffer.

These effects should be computed in the total cost of such projects. Worse still, these projects ignore the context of climate change, which will lead to lower amounts of water available for storage and electricity generation.

The warning comes from an article by researchers at Michigan State University in the United States published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

The lead author is Emilio Moran, a visiting professor at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in São Paulo State, Brazil, and the principal investigator of a research project supported by São Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP under the São Paulo Excellence Chair program – SPEC, which is designed to study the social and environmental impact of Belo Monte hydropower development near Altamira, Pará state.

“We argue that if the construction of large dams in developing countries is to continue, it must always be preceded by a painstaking assessment of their real cost, including the environmental and social impact they have,” Moran told.

“When a large dam is built, the result is a downstream loss of a great many fish species that are important to riverine populations. These communities will have to continue somehow making a living despite dwindling fish stocks for 15 or 20 years, for example, and the costs of these projects don’t take such economic and social losses into account.”

According to the authors of the study funded by FAPESP, hydropower is the leading source of renewable energy worldwide, accounting for as much as 71% of the total in 2016.

Developed countries in North America and Europe built thousands of dams between 1920 and 1970 but then ceased to do so because the best sites had already been developed and environmental and social concerns made the costs unacceptable.

Many large hydropower developments in these countries are now at the end of their working lives, and more dams are being removed than built in North America and Europe. In the US alone, 546 dams were dismantled between 2006 and 2014, according to the article.

“The cost of removing a dam once its useful life is over is extremely high and should be taken into account when computing the total cost of a new hydro development,” Moran said.

“If the cost of removal had to be included, many dams wouldn’t be built. It would be far more expensive to produce a kilowatt-hour of electricity via a hydro complex with a useful life of 30-50 years like those under construction in Brazil.”

Local impact

According to Moran, the first dams were also built in North America and Europe to supply power to rural areas and provide water for irrigation systems. “These projects had a social purpose,” he said.

In contrast, the dams now under construction along the rivers of the Amazon basin in South America, on the Congo River in Africa and on the Mekong River in Southeast Asia are mostly designed to supply power to steelmaking companies, for example, without benefiting local communities.

The most emblematic case is the proposed Grand Inga Dam on the Congo River at Inga Falls, the world’s largest waterfall by volume. The dam could increase the total amount of power produced in Africa by over a third and will export electricity to South Africa for use by the mining companies there.

“The people affected by these projects reap no benefits, such as access to electricity or a cheaper power supply. In the case of Belo Monte, the transmission line passes over the heads of the people affected and takes the electricity generated straight to the south and southeast, two of Brazil’s wealthiest regions,” Moran said.

According to the study, in the case of Belo Monte, as well as Santo Antonio and Jirau, which have recently been built on the Madeira in the western Amazon, the electricity bills for the nearby communities have gone up rather than down. Moreover, the jobs promised to locals when construction began went mostly to outsiders and disappeared within five years.

“The inhabitants of Altamira supported the construction of Belo Monte before it began because they thought it would bring the town huge benefits. No one supports it now because hydro development has destroyed their peace and quiet. It has brought only problems for most people,” Moran said.

“Belo Monte has been chaotic and has affected the lives of the inhabitants so profoundly that plans to build more large dams in the Amazon basin are being revisited.”

In addition to the problems they cause downstream communities, serious environmental damage is also being wrought by the new dams under construction in South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

In the Amazon basin, where 147 dams have been planned in a 6 million square kilometer (km²) area, including 65 in Brazil, hydropower developments have affected fish populations and dynamics in a region with some 2,320 species of fish. The number of fish in the Tocantins, which drains into the Atlantic near the mouth of the Amazon, fell 25% after dams were installed along the river, for example.

In the area of the Tucuruí dam, also in the Brazilian Amazon, the fish catch fell 60% almost immediately after the dam was built, and more than 100,000 people living downstream were affected by the loss of fisheries, flood recession agriculture, and other natural resources, according to the article.

“Most fish species in the Amazon basin are endemic [unique to the region]. The disappearance of these species represents a huge loss to world biodiversity,” Moran said.

Impact of climate change

Climate change will strongly affect the dams that have been built in the Amazon basin in recent years, according to the article.

The Jirau and Santo Antonio dams on the Madeira, completed in the last five years, are now expected to produce only a fraction of the 3 gigawatts (GW) they were each designed to generate owing to climate change and the small storage capacity of their run-of-the-river reservoirs.

The article also notes that Belo Monte on Xingu, completed in 2016, will produce less owing to climate variability, a relatively small reservoir and insufficient water levels, generating only 4.46 GW instead of its 11.23 GW design capacity even under the best-case scenario.

To make matters worse, most of the climate models predict higher temperatures and lower rainfall in the Xingu, Tapajós and Madeira basins.

“Depending on water as the main source of power in a future when we’ll have less of this natural resource looks like an unreliable strategy,” Moran said.

“To reduce its vulnerability with regard to energy in the context of global climate change, Brazil must diversify its energy mix. It’s still too dependent on hydroelectricity. It needs to invest more in other renewable sources, such as solar, biomass and wind.”

The authors of the paper stress that, like the effects of climate change, the effects of changing land use on power generation potential are frequently ignored by dam builders.

A study by another research group, they note, showed that the power generated in the Xingu Basin, where Belo Monte is located, could fall below 50% of the installed capacity owing to deforestation in the region. This is because deforestation inhibits rainfall and reduces groundwater in tropical rainforest areas.

Approximately half of the Amazon basin’s rainfall is estimated to be due to internal moisture recycling. Deforestation will, therefore, lead to less precipitation in the region aside from the expected decline due to global climate change, according to the authors.

“Hydro is only one of several solutions to avoid blackouts in Brazil. The best approach is to diversify energy sources and develop innovative solutions that reduce the environmental and social impact of dams,” Moran said.

An alternative to traditional dams recommended by the authors is submerged or in-stream turbine technology, also known as “zero head” because no height differential or damming is required.

This solution could supply steady power to riverine communities at a low cost and is far more environmentally friendly. Moreover, it does not entail the displacement of local inhabitants or the other social costs of dams.

“This technology could be used throughout Brazil wherever there are relatively small watercourses with discharge rates in excess of 1 cubic meter per second,” Moran said.

“Small turbines can also be installed near dams to supplement power generation and eliminate the need to build more dams.”

The ancient people of Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) built their famous ahu monuments near coastal freshwater sources, according to a team of researchers including faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York.

The island of Rapa Nui is well-known for its elaborate ritual architecture, particularly its numerous statues (moai) and the monumental platforms that supported them (ahu.) Researchers have long wondered why ancient people built these monuments in their respective locations around the island, considering how much time and energy was required to construct them. A team of researchers including Binghamton University anthropologist Carl Lipo used quantitative spatial modeling to explore the potential relations between ahu construction locations and subsistence resources, namely, rock mulch agricultural gardens, marine resources, and freshwater sources–the three most critical resources on Rapa Nui. Their results suggest that ahu locations are explained by their proximity to the island’s limited freshwater sources.

“The issue of water availability (or the lack of it) has often been mentioned by researchers who work on Rapa Nui/Easter Island,” said Lipo. “When we started to examine the details of the hydrology, we began to notice that freshwater access and statue location were tightly linked together. It wasn’t obvious when walking around–with the water emerging at the coast during low tide, one doesn’t necessarily see obvious indications of water. But as we started to look at areas around ahu, we found that those locations were exactly tied to spots where the fresh groundwater emerges — largely as a diffuse layer that flows out at the water’s edge. The more we looked, the more consistently we saw this pattern. Places without ahu/moai showed no freshwater. The pattern was striking and surprising in how consistent it was. Even when we find ahu/moai in the interior of the island, we find nearby sources of drinking water. This paper reflects our work to demonstrate that this pattern is statistically sound and not just our perception.”

“Many researchers, ourselves included, have long speculated associations between ahu/moai and different kinds of resources, e.g., water, agricultural land, areas with good marine resources, etc.,” said lead author Robert DiNapoli of the University of Oregon. “However, these associations had never been quantitatively tested or shown to be statistically significant. Our study presents quantitative spatial modeling clearly showing that ahu are associated with freshwater sources in a way that they aren’t associated with other resources.”

According to Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona, the proximity of the monuments to freshwater tells us a great deal about the ancient island society.

“The monuments and statues are located in places with access to a resource critical to islanders on a daily basis–fresh water. In this way, the monuments and statues of the islanders’ deified ancestors reflect generations of sharing, perhaps on a daily basis–centered on water, but also food, family and social ties, as well as cultural lore that reinforced knowledge of the island’s precarious sustainability. And the sharing points to a critical part of explaining the island’s paradox: despite limited resources, the islanders succeeded by sharing in activities, knowledge, and resources for over 500 years until European contact disrupted life with foreign diseases, slave trading, and other misfortunes of colonial interests.”

The researchers currently only have comprehensive freshwater data for the western portion of the island and plan to do a complete survey of the island in order to continue to test their hypothesis of the relation between ahu and freshwater.

By Gjergj Erebara

Albania’s Prime Minister, Edi Rama, has condemned President Ilir Meta’s refusal to decree his choice for a new foreign minister, which is expected to create a constitutional crisis. 

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama on Twitter on Thursday condemned President Ilir Meta’s refusal to endorse his nominee Gent Cakaj as new foreign minister, calling it “not just unconstitutional but also shameful”.

He also issued an apology to Kosovo “about this shame”, as Cakaj has citizenship of both Kosovo and Albania.

Earlier, President Meta refused to approve the new minister, claiming he was not up to the challenge of running diplomacy, in a move that could create a constitutional crisis in the country.

Cakaj, aged 28, was chosen by Prime Minister Rama for this key position after he decided to change about half of his cabinet last December in response to a wave of mass protests.

Meta has accepted all of Rama’s six other nominations for ministerial posts.

In a letter sent to the Prime Minister earlier on Thursday, Meta said Cakaj had neglected his obligation to obtain security clearance for about seven months since he became a deputy minister.

He also raised doubts about the speed of the procedure followed by Albania’s Security Check Commission to award him top-level clearance within one day on January 4.

“Cakaj does not fulfill the criteria, does not have credibility and does not offer the necessary guarantees to exert his duties objectively and with the required stature,” Meta wrote.

Following Meta’s decision, Rama mocked commentators in Albania and Kosovo that had supported Meta’s decision, saying they were “defecating rivers of love for the nation”. A much-repeated slogan of Meta’s claims he works with “serenity and love” for the nation.

Under the constitution, the President cannot refuse to decree the appointment of ministers. However, Albania currently lacks a functioning constitutional court to settle the matter.

Rama chose Cakaj to replace now ex-minister Ditmir Bushati, who was one of the seven ministers that he axed after a year of popular student-led protests against government policies.

Meta was elected President of Albania last year with Socialist Party leader Rama’s support. However, his own Socialist Movement for Integration, currently led by his wife, Monika Kryemadhi, has moved into the opposition since those elections.

Last October, Meta refused to decree another new Interior Minister, Sander Lleshaj, but later relented.