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Sharif’s India Visit: Will It Prove Beneficial Or Costly For Him? – Analysis

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By Mahendra Ved

There are no solo events in South Asia, particularly when it comes to India-Pakistan relations. The brief, high-profile visit to India of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to attend the inauguration of the new government led by Narendra Modi, despite the bonhomie it generated, is no exception.

After the momentary euphoria, misgivings and mistrust are bound to creep back.

On the day Sharif was attending Modi’s inauguration, incidentally covered ‘live’ by TV channels in Pakistan, the Pakistani Rangers fired at Indian troops on the border.

In Islamabad, President Mamnoon Hussain asked envoys of member nations of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to “intensify efforts” for “early and peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute”.

India has a history of being disregarded by, and disregarding the OIC, especially on the Kashmir issue.

Although pre-planned, the event helped the Pakistan leadership to address the domestic constituency that opposed Sharif’s India visit, especially to witness the opening of a government of the “Hindu right wing”.

On the same day, with Sharif present in New Delhi, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, paying his last official visit before quitting on completion of the Afghan presidential election, accused the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT), a Pakistan-based terrorist body, of being behind last week’s attack by gunmen on the Indian consulate in Herat, Afghanistan.

This was the latest in a string of assaults on Indian targets in Afghanistan. India has in the past accused the Pakistan Army’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) of using the Afghan Haqqani network of attacking its missions in Afghanistan. The involvement of the LeT, if true, brings the charge closer to Islamabad than before.

For good measure, talking to India’s Headlines Today television channel, Karzai sourced his information to “a Western intelligence agency”, and called it “a clear terrorist attack”.

Fresh from a long election, India has been too busy to look at forced conversions of the Hindus, especially girls, and desecration of Sikh shrines in Sindh, for which members of the tiny minority took to streets and courted arrest last week.

Asked by The Hindustan Times if he was willing to give an assurance that terrorism would no longer be sponsored from Pakistani soil, Sharif was positive: “We have lost thousands of lives. Our economy has suffered at the hands of terrorists. Who can be more serious than us regarding eliminating terror from the region.”

The figure is 32,000 Pakistanis killed in terror attacks. This is a familiar line that Pakistan’s friends accept. That includes the US, when it is about to dole out huge funds, and China, despite Pakistan sheltering and training over 400 Uighur rebels from the Xinjiang province, since it calls Pakistan its “all weather friend”.

The list of events above illustrates the traditional pitfalls that impact India-Pakistan relations, and these cannot be wished away. They benumb the well-meaning statements of the leaders on both sides.

When the outcome of the Indian elections became known, in a grudging welcome to an India “stereotyped as world’s largest democracy”, Dawn newspaper editorially explored an old idea in the subcontinent: “a centre-right government in Pakistan with genuine legitimacy and political support in the heartland can do business with a right-wing government in India.”

Although the new government has in Sushma Swaraj a very articulate and experience external affairs minister, traditionally, foreign policy is the prime minister’s prerogative in India. Modi will not need to appease state level satraps while dealing with neighbours. He will seek to carry them along, but guard what he perceives as national interests.

This is more so in the context of Pakistan. During the election campaign, Modi has said that Pakistan mattered to him even as the Gujarat chief minister because of the common border. “No terrorist is allowed to work in Gujarat”.

He can be expected to follow what is called the (former prime minister Atal Bihari) “Vajpayee line” on neighbours – in short, of moderation. But another serious attack by any group(s) from Pakistan is bound to provoke him. In such an event, Modi may not emulate Vajpayee (after the attack on Indian Parliament in 2001) or Manmohan Singh (the 2008 Mumbai terror attack).

At his one-on-one meeting with Sharif, Modi reportedly talked tough, enunciating the Indian standpoint on tackling terror through five succinct points. Most of them relate to the 2008 Mumbai terror attack and the need for speedy trial.

Sharif’s response, going by the statement he read out before leaving New Delhi, was moderate. He did not touch upon the five points. He did say that it was necessary to “change confrontation to cooperation”, indicating its need in the face of Modi’s tough talk.

The only concrete thing that emerged was that the foreign secretaries would meet “and decide the way forward”, said Indian Foreign Secretary Sujatha Singh, who however indicated no date.

She also downplayed the Sharif invitation to Modi to visit Pakistan. All SAARC leaders have invited Modi and the same has been accepted. But there was no move to fix a time table, she said.

Was there no takeaway for Sharif from the India visit? If not, he would have problems defending his decision to go to New Delhi ignoring his critics – just the way his old tormentor, Gen. Pervez Musharraf had after the Agra Summit in 2001.

There are reports of confrontation building up between Sharif and the military. He is resisting the closing down of Geo TV channel that the army wants after the channel named the current ISI chief for the attack on its anchor, Hamid Mir. Indeed, the confrontation has been prolonged and the Sharif government seems caught in a pincer: it can neither gag the media, nor defy the army.

The other pincer is between the Sharif government and Imran khan, darling of the influential sections of the military and the middle classes. He is moving to force a mid-term election.

It would be known in the next few weeks if the India visit has proved beneficial or costly for Sharif and his government.

(Mahendra Ved is a New Delhi-based writer and columnist. He can be reached at southasiamonitor1@gmail.com)

This article was published by South Asia Monitor.

The post Sharif’s India Visit: Will It Prove Beneficial Or Costly For Him? – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.


Beyond Modi Touch: Is There More To India’s Sri Lanka Policy? – Analysis

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By N. Sathiya Moorthy

Independent of expectations to the contrary from various stakeholders to the ‘ethnic issue’ in neighbouring Sri Lanka, the personal touch of India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi alone could be a departure, if any, from the well-considered Indian policy from the past.

That India’s Sri Lanka policy can do with a purposeful departure of the Modi kind, on the lines of his personality-driven political administration as the chief minister of Gujarat, is what could make the difference between success, that has eluded the nation in the past, and failure, that can still be a possibility.

Long before Modi made Sushma Swaraj as his external affairs minister, she as his Bharatiya Janata Party’s Leader of the Opposition in the previous Lok Sabha had endorsed the views of then prime minister Manmohan Singh’s government, nearer home and abroad. On Sri Lanka, she reiterated the need for the government to revive the reconciliation process, restore the faith, trust and confidence of the war-ravaged Tamil population, in a ‘united Sri Lanka’. To the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) leadership, which has since won elected power in the nation’s Northern Province, she asked them to join the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC), set up by President Mahinda Rajapaksa to address the ethnic issue in all its dimensions.

As the opposition party, the BJP did not challenge the Manmohan Singh government’s decision to vote against Sri Lanka at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in 2012 and 2013. Despite Tamil Nadu fretting and fuming, the party did not question the Singh government ‘abstaining’ from the UNHRC vote in March 2014, after the US author of the previous resolutions departed from the script to seek an ‘independent inquiry’ into allegations of human rights violations in Sri Lanka.

When the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) partner in the then United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government of Prime Minister Singh wanted the Indian parliament to condemn the Sri Lankan government in March 2012, Sushma Swaraj as the Leader of Opposition did not want then Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar to even consider calling a party leaders’ meeting late at night to consider the proposal. There was no question of any draft being placed before the House, for it to debate and vote upon.

Thirteen-A and beyond

In his first meeting with President Rajapaksa, who honoured Modi’s invitation to attend his inauguration, India’s prime minister was reported to have reiterated the need for the Sri Lankan government to implement the 13th Amendment on power devolution and go beyond. The two leaders discussed other aspects of bilateral relations, too, including the contentious and controversial fishermen’s problems involving the two nations, and also pending Indian projects in Sri Lanka that refuse to move owing to the host government’s lethargy, if not deliberate indifference. But the ‘ethnic issue’ was still at the centre-stage, it would seem.

Without reference to the ethnic issue or others, as prime minister-designate, Modi had tweeted that he wanted ‘strong Sri Lanka relations’. That was after President Rajapaksa had possibly beaten other world leaders to congratulate him on his election victory. That ‘strong’ relations with Sri Lanka was a part of the incoming Modi government’s foreign policy initiative/strategy became clear when he had all South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Heads of Government and/or State invited for his unprecedented swearing-in at the historic forecourt of India’s Rashtrapati Bhavan with over 4,000 invited guests in attendance.

Back home, President Rajapaksa has since caused PSC Leader and senior Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva to clarify that the parliamentary process to resolve the ethnic issue alone will remain. Silva also reportedly said that while they would continue consultations with India, Sri Lanka would not want India to interfere in Sri Lanka’s internal affairs. It’s an extension of President Rajapaksa’s earlier declaration that the government would not heed Western criticism or boycott to celebrate the nation’s ‘victory over terrorism’, coinciding with the end of the anti-LTTE ‘Eelam War IV’ on May 18, 2009.

Two to tango, three to resolve

The success or failure of Modi’s Sri Lanka policy is based on the strength and purpose of his political character. He shares an earthy political upbringing like President Rajapaksa, which can cut either way. It takes two to tango, but three to resolve the ethnic issue. The elected TNA ruler of Sri Lanka’s Tamil-majority Northern Province having declined Rajapaksa’s invitation to join him at Modi’s inaugural, they will now have to wait for a separate meeting with the new Indian prime minister, which also matters the most (for them in particular).

Any meaningful Indian initiative will then have to wait until such a meeting takes place. However, the TNA may have already complicated the scene by seeking a first time meeting ever with Tamil Nadu’s AIADMK Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa. A lot will depend on if and how the popular Dravidian leader would want to get involved, and what kind of role, if any, Prime Minister Modi would want to assign her, in the light of his pre-poll promise and post-poll initiative for addressing the concerns of individual states.

Whether such a commitment is restricted to domestic developmental initiatives or foreign policy issues, as he had indicated before the polls, also remains to be seen.

Pending the Modi dispensation settling down to work all round, the Sri Lankan counterpart can take heart in India’s previous abstention at UNHRC, the new government not having to come under political pressure from Tamil Nadu, and India not continuing as a voting member at Geneva, from the September session this year. These are also the causes for concern for the TNA on the one hand and the Sri Lankan Tamil (SLT) diaspora on the other.

Their continuing diffidence – not entirely unjustified – to work with the Sri Lankan government of the day will be matched by increasing Indian interest to re-assert itself in the regional context. From which will also flow a message, clear though not necessarily as strong, to the TNA, the Sri Lankan government and the international community engaged with the UNHRC process – not necessarily in that order.

(N. Sathiya Moorthy is Director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation. He can be reached at sathiyam54@gmail.com)

This article was published by South Asia Monitor.

The post Beyond Modi Touch: Is There More To India’s Sri Lanka Policy? – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

A New Beginning In India-Sri Lanka Ties? – Analysis

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By Gaurav Dixit

Prime Minister-designate Narendra Modi’s swearing-in ceremony is being held amid the historic presence of leaders of South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) nations. There has been growing opposition from parties in Tamil Nadu, including the MDMK, an ally of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) which is forming government, to the invitation extended to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. President Rajapaksa in turn invited the chief minister of the Northern Province, C.V. Wigneswaran, to join the Sri Lankan delegation in order to resolve the tension over the Sri Lankan Tamil issue. Wigneswaran rejected Rajapaksa’s call, terming it as a tokenism.

The invitation and the political opposition to the visit of President Rajapaksa provide an excellent opportunity to look back at recent developments in the India and Sri Lanka relationship over the Tamil issue.

India has historically shared good relations with its island neighbour. However, there has been an evident decline in the last couple of years after the end of the final Eelam war. India has played an instrumental role in the peace process on the island nation as well as been positively involved in carving out provincial councils in Sri Lanka, especially in the Northern Province, a region largely dominated by the ethnic Tamils.

India’s recent stand on Sri Lanka

India has time and again put at risk its strategic relationship with Sri Lanka for domestic political trade-offs or under international pressures. Stresses in the relations between regional political parties and the central government have been a clogging factor in determining India’s foreign policy and its aims and aspirations as a regional power. Such contradictions have inevitably hampered India’s foreign strategy in South Asia.

An example of such tension and differences of political objectives was the cancellation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Sri Lanka to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in November last year in Colombo. In a very strange manner the Indian prime minister dropped his plan to visit Sri Lanka at the last minute under immense political pressure from Tamil Nadu, both from within the Congress unit and former partner Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).

There were also various civil society groups protesting against India’s participation in this summit citing human rights violation against Tamils and the absence of accountability on the Sri Lankan side. The extraordinary political pressure forced the prime minister to skip the meet. India’s External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid headed the Indian delegation at the CHOGM Summit.

Earlier in March 2013, India supported the successful passage of the US-sponsored resolution against Sri Lanka at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). The resolution called for Sri Lanka to conduct an independent and credible investigation into the alleged war crimes and human rights violations and was opposed by Colombo.

India, a key player in the convention, voted against Sri Lanka in keeping with its 2012 stand under huge regional and international pressure. Sri Lanka’s Foreign Secretary Karunatillaka Amunugama had then said that they had expected a positive stand by India, as a key regional player and long term friend, and anticipated New Delhi’s backing against the US resolution.

India being a member of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) had always opposed country specific resolutions, but had voted twice against Sri Lanka.

Change of approach

In 2014, there has been a gradual shift in policy as India opted out of the UNHRC voting, partially because it did not want the Western nations to initiate an inquiry into the war crimes on its neighbour. India had earlier forced necessary changes in the UNHRC draft in the crucial Paragraph 8, which now will not probe into the allegations of human rights violations in the post-war period. It also eliminates Indian participation during the Indian Peacekeeping Force mission in the late 80s.The move was seen as a welcome step by the ruling party in Sri Lanka but criticized by the chief minister of the Northern Province.

India in the recent past has not been able to elucidate its regional policy of building strong ties with its neighbourhood, and has often found itself in a quandary in understanding its neighbours’ geo-strategical strengths, especially old allies like Colombo. Sri Lanka, a maritime nation, is of immense strategic importance to India in the troubled Indian Ocean.

The politics over the issue of ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka has always been a bone of contention between the two countries. Therefore, much will depend on how the new government deals with the issue of Tamils in Sri Lanka, who share strong ethnic ties with their fellow brethren in Tamil Nadu. However, the new government which has come with an absolute mandate will not be under the same political pressure as the Manmohan Singh government was.

India has made large investments in and provided development assistance to the war torn Northern and Eastern Provinces. This is the right time for India to enlarge its scope beyond the Tamil faction of Sri Lanka, and involve the Sri Lankan government on other fronts too for its own long-term political and strategical benefit. India needs to diversify its engagement in Sri Lanka and expand beyond developing the Northern Province by involving itself in other parts of the country. It has planned to double its bilateral trade with Sri Lanka to $10 billion in the next three years and should work on enhancing its economic cooperation.

The Sri Lankan president, in a reciprocal gesture to the invite, has ordered the release of all Indian fishermen jailed in Sri Lanka. The issues of Kachchativu, an uninhabited island, and the frequent arrest of Indian fishermen by the Sri Lankan navy are among contentious subjects between the two countries. As most of the fishermen are Tamils, by releasing them Rajapaksa has tried to appease his opponents both in India and in Sri Lanka. The contention over Kachchativu Island is again a dispute not recognized by the Indian government, and is mainly raised by the politicians from Tamil Nadu. Therefore, the new government’s future stand would be the key to resolving the dispute.

In this regard invitation and to the Sri Lankan president has come as a ray of hope in the recent distressed relationship with Sri Lanka.

(Gaurav Dixit is an independent strategic analyst based in New Delhi. He can be contacted at southasiamonitor1@gmail.com)

This article was published at South Asia Monitor.

The post A New Beginning In India-Sri Lanka Ties? – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Sgt. Bergdahl Prisoner Exchange: Obama Broke Law Releasing Terrorists‏ – OpEd

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While the news media has discovered something worth applauding in the Obama White House — the prisoner exchange that freed an American soldier — a couple of lawmakers aren’t as joyful about the exchange of five terrorists for a U.S. POW Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl on Saturday.

Two GOP lawmakers are accusing President Barack Obama of breaking federal law by approving the release of five terrorists captured in Afghanistan and held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for the soldier held by Islamist insurgents since 2009.

The Obama minions even agreed that the prisoner exchange may have been illegal, but attorneys working for the White House are claiming the circumstances themselves is sufficient justification.

“Of course, the exchange is questionable from a legal standpoint, but our philosophy of jurisprudence — that we are a nation of laws not men — seems to be frequently kicked to the side of the road with this administration,” claims political strategist Michael Barker.

The 28-year-old Bergdahl was turned over to U.S. special forces by the Afghan Taliban in a trade for five Islamists who were prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention center (Gitmo). The terrorists were given to officials with Qatar’s government, the Arab nation that brokered the prisoner exchange deal, according to the Examiner on Saturday.

The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., and Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that by law Obama had to alert Congress 30 days before any terrorists are transferred from the Gitmo detention center.

The two lawmakers said Obama is by law supposed to explain how the terrorists pose no threat to the United States once given their freedom. But that law was ignored by Obama minions.

In response, White House officials said they had to move as soon as possible since the opportunity arose to secure Bergdahl’s release, as described in an Examiner news story.

While they claim they applaud Bergdahl’s release, McKeon and Inhofe warned that the exchange “may have consequences for the rest of our forces and all Americans.”

“Our terrorist adversaries now have a strong incentive to capture Americans. That incentive will put our forces in Afghanistan and around the world at even greater risk,” they said.

The post Sgt. Bergdahl Prisoner Exchange: Obama Broke Law Releasing Terrorists‏ – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

New Members Of Palestine Unity Government Named

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Seventeen members of a new Palestinian unity government to be announced Monday have been named by well-informed political sources.

They include at least nine new members, while at least eight will remain at their posts from the prior government.

Rami Hamdallah will remain prime minister, according to the sources, and Ziad Abu Amr will be the deputy prime minister and minister of culture.

New members include Mamoun Abu Shahla as minister of labor, Mufeed Hasayneh as minister of public works and housing, and Yusef Idees as minister of endowments and religious affairs.

Nayef Khalaf will be minister of local governance and Riyad al-Maliki will remain the minister of foreign affairs.

Salim al-Saqqa has been named minister of justice, Khawla al-Shakhsheer as minister of education and higher education, and Rula Maaya as minister of tourism.

Allam Moussa will be minister of telecommunication, Shawqu al-Aiysa will be minister of agriculture, and Wael Dweikat will be minister of transportation.

Muhammad Mustafa will remain as deputy prime minister for economic affairs, and Shukri Bishara will stay on as minister of finance.

Furthermore, Jawad Awwad will stay as minister of health, and Adnan al-Husseini is expected to remain minister of Jerusalem affairs.

The unity government will be sworn in on Monday at 1 p.m. in the presidential headquarters in Ramallah, a PLO executive committee member said earlier.

Wasel Abu Yusef told Ma’an that the president’s office sent invitations to PLO executive committee members and ministers to attend the ceremony.

Abu Yusef added that the obstacles that faced the unity government were overcome, as Hamas agreed that al-Malki would stay on as foreign minister, and the issue on the ministry of detainees was resolved.

Hours earlier, a Hamas spokesperson said that no official agreement had been reached to announce the government of national unity, a day after Abbas said it would be formed by Monday.

Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement that news reports about the possible announcement of the unity government this week were “unilateral,” stressing that “there is still disagreement over some points that need to be addressed.”

The Hamas official’s statements highlight ongoing disputes in the effort to form the national reconciliation government that could potentially end seven years of political division between the two largest Palestinian political parties.

Abu Zuhri said that central to the ongoing disputes is that the Hamas movement continues to have strong reservations about Fatah’s insistence on selecting al-Maliki as the minister of foreign affairs.

“Al-Maliki is undesirable from a nationalistic point of view as he used to have very negative stances, especially towards the Gaza Strip,” Abu Zuhri said.

Abu Zuhri did, however, point to Hamas’ willingness to compromise on the issue, saying that the agreement will move forward regardless and the government will be announced even if al-Maliki remains a cabinet minister.

Abu Zuhri also said that Hamas disagrees with Fatah’s suggestion to eliminate the ministry of prisoners’ affairs.

“The prisoners’ issue is a national cause which is not restricted to Hamas, and the calls to eliminate the ministry of prisoners’ affairs came at the wrong time,” he said.

Abu Zuhri highlighted that Hamas would invite all Palestinian parties to a meeting Monday to discuss the prisoners’ issue.

An April 23 agreement between Hamas and the PLO paved the way for the formation of a government of national unity for the first time in seven years, but Israel has strongly opposed the deal on the basis that Hamas rejects its right to exist.

Abbas, however, has repeatedly pointed out that the national unity government will adhere to previous PA and PLO policies which recognize Israel.

Israel, in turn, has never recognized the Palestinians’ right to exist, and has been reluctant in the past to negotiate with the PA because it did not represent all of the Palestinians, only those in the West Bank, since 2006.

The political division between Fatah and Hamas began in 2007, a year after Hamas won legislative elections across the Palestinian territories but was subjected to a boycott by Israel and Western countries that left the economy in a fragile state.

In that year, however, Hamas accused Fatah members in the Gaza Strip of engineering a coup to bring down the government, which led to street clashes and ended with Hamas control over the Gaza Strip and a Fatah-led government in the West Bank.

The post New Members Of Palestine Unity Government Named appeared first on Eurasia Review.

On What The Pope Taught – OpEd

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By Richard Falk

I am not surprised that there are such contradictory reactions to Pope Francis’ recent visit to Palestine and Israel. To begin with, there are sharply divergent views about the Catholic Church, and the papacy itself. Understandably for some, the complicity of the Catholic hierarchy with the shocking prevalence of sexual abuse by priests of young boys seems institutionally discrediting in the extreme. The anti-modern cult of celibacy and a failure to allow women to participate equally in the life of the Catholic Church furthers undermine its moral authority given the changing realities of the 21st century.

Beyond this there are questions raised about Pope Francis’s own past, whether he was far too passive during the time of the ‘dirty war’ in Argentina, and too slow to favor the humane treatment of homosexuality. He has always chosen a simple life for himself, dedicating his pastoral efforts to benefit the poor, and being active as a leader in inter-faith activities. Since becoming Pope these virtues have been the signatures of his leadership, earning him praise and love from around the world, and helping us understand why his acts of devotion have been so widely seen, and an inspirational alternative to what is passed off as ‘global leadership’ in Washington.

Unavoidably, his visit itself has been parsed in many ways and spun in all directions. Some insist that he should never have crossed the line separating religion and politics as he did when he made it clear he was visiting ‘the state of Palestine’ and not the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territories.’ Others complained that in such a situation of oppression and inequality, his carefully orchestrated efforts to acknowledge both sides equally actually gave rise to a false impression. In this respect, it was not acceptable and politically misleading to pay homage at the grave of Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, or to treat Shimon Peres as a man of peace. Still others fault the Pope for not calling attention to the plight of Gaza or the threats confronting Bedouin communities.

In my view, perhaps overstated, such carping misses the point, and manifests a disabling form of blindness. What was worth seeing, and only this, was the Pope bowed in prayer at the Bethlehem apartheid wall. It was this electrifying image, and the related story about how young Palestinian boys dared defy Israeli soldiers by writing welcoming graffiti behind where the Pope stood that makes the visit an unforgettable, even if unintended, affirmation of the Palestinian struggle against multiple forms of injustice. What will allow us to see better in the senses meant here is to appreciate why this image was and is so electrifying, will endure, and why the various commentaries, criticisms, and calumnies will soon to be forgotten.

What we need to realize, whether we like it or not, is that the Catholic Church by its sheer presence, persistence, and resilience occupies a distinctively deep place in the thinking and feeling of people throughout the world, including tens of millions of non-Catholics. And the pope as the leader of Catholicism, in ritual and doctrine, enjoys a spiritual power of pronouncement without needing to utter a single word. And when that power is used charismatically, as at the wall, no cascade of words can suffice to offset the impact of such a potent image and metaphor. The Israeli Prime Minister vainly informed the world that the wall was there to prevent suicide bombing and had contributed to Israeli security since its partial construction more than a decade ago. It is equally irrelevant to refute this claim or to argue in opposition that the World Court had declared a wall built deep in Palestine amounted to an unlawful confiscation of land, imposing hardships, and should be dismantled and compensation paid for harm done.

The Pope is not a lawyer nor is it a time to engage the controversy about the security functions of the wall. What counts, and all that counts, is that the wall has become a devastating image and metaphor of injustice and oppression, with Israelis as the perpetrators and Palestinians as the victims. Hany Abu-Assad’s fine film, Omar, a finalist for best foreign film at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, also used the wall as the dominant wordless metaphor of what it meant for Palestinian lives to endure oppression day by day, showing its reality for all those with eyes that see.

Reacting to injustice is above all a visual and visceral experience. This is what Pope Francis has taught us. But first we must open our eyes, and keep them open. The greatest writers also perform their magic with language mostly by redirecting our line of vision.

- Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. In 2008 he was also appointed by the UN to serve a six-year term as the Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. (This article was originally published in his blog.)

The post On What The Pope Taught – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Tajikistan: ‘Insult’ Ruling Against News Outlet

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A court decision against one of Tajikistan’s leading independent news outlets and its editor harm freedom of expression in the country.

The decision upholds a finding of guilt for committing “insult” and a draconian level of damages against Asia Plus, one of the few independent news sources, over a critical article. The decision could have a chilling effect on free speech and undermine Tajiks’ ability to obtain diverse information, Human Rights Watch said.

“Asia Plus is one of Tajikistan’s most important news outlets and shouldn’t be punished for its independence,” said Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Tajik government should uphold free expression, not intimidate critical journalists and censor legitimate speech by misusing defamation laws and claims for monetary damages.”

On May 30, 2013, Asia Plus published an article by the site’s editor, Olga Tutubalina, “Unintelligent about the Intelligentsia.” Writing on the return to Tajikistan of Bozor Sobir, a well-known poet and former high-profile government opponent, Tutubalina expressed scepticism over Sobir’s public praise for President Emomali Rahmon, which included a call to Tajikistan’s artists and intellectuals to “unite” around the president. The article also criticized Sobir’s statement that he believed there are “too many political parties in Tajikistan.”

Tutubalina began her article quoting an aphorism Lenin used in his criticism of the intelligentsia as a social class: “The intelligentsia is not the nation’s brains, but its shit.”

Three Tajik intellectuals not named in the article and five state-funded bodies – the Unions of Writers, Artists, Composers, and Architects, and the Tajik Academy of Sciences – filed a suit against Tutubalina. The suit accused her of attacking “the honor, dignity and reputation of a large social group,” causing them “physical and mental suffering.”

On February 25, 2014, the Firdausi District Court in Dushanbe ordered Asia Plus and Tutubalina to publish a retraction and pay the plaintiffs approximately US$6,100 (30,000 somoni). The average monthly salary in Tajikistan is approximately $200.

Tutubalina and Asia Plus appealed, but, on April 30, the Dushanbe City Court upheld the decision. On May 19, Tutubalina and Asia Plus filed a further appeal with the chairman of the Dushanbe City Court.

“This case is an all too common example of an effort to intimidate journalists into silence in Tajikistan,” Swerdlow said. “The article discusses a topic of valid public debate, and while some of the language and references may have ruffled feathers, its criticism of the government is more likely to have provoked the lawsuit.”

Along with a weekly newspaper, Asia Plus includes a newswire agency, radio station, television station, and a website. Umed Babakhanov, editor-in-chief of Asia Plus, told Human Rights Watch he believes the current suit is “a striking example of an orchestrated case” that fits a larger pattern of authorities using “contrived claims as an instrument to pressure media outlets.”

In recent years the Tajik government has severely restricted media freedoms by periodically blocking access to independent websites, including Asia Plus, and filing defamation suits against, or otherwise intimidating, critical journalists. Tajik officials have targeted Asia Plus with similar lawsuits in the past.

In February 2010, three Supreme Court judges sued Asia Plus and two other news sites for defamation in response to a series of articles on corruption in the legal system. They sought over $1 million in damages. The plaintiffs only agreed to withdraw their suit after Asia Plus and the other defendants agreed not to publish any articles on the subject for a year. In August 2011, a high-ranking official in the Internal Affairs Ministry demanded over $200,000 for “moral damage” to his “honor and dignity” for an article Asia Plus published investigating police torture, but he later withdrew the suit.

Along with Facebook, Youtube, and Radio Ozodi, the Tajik service of Radio Free Europe, Asia Plus’ website has also been frequently blocked by authorities following critical reports, including on three occasions in the summer of 2012. In February 2014, the authorities revoked a newspaper’s license for covering issues that it had not listed it would cover in its charter.

Both the United States and the European Union have expressed serious concern about the case against Asia Plus, calling on the Tajik authorities to respect and promote freedom of expression. Commenting on the case, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) representative on media freedom, Dunja Mijatovic, stated, “A democratic society must allow for public debate without triggering financial penalties.”

Tajikistan is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which guarantees in article 19 the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds. Restrictions on freedom of expression, through civil defamation laws, for example, are permitted for the purpose of protecting the reputations of others, but under strict conditions. As the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression has emphasized, defamation laws “should never be used to prevent criticism of government,” and “should reflect the principle that public figures are required to tolerate a greater degree of criticism than private citizens.” The use of civil defamation suits and the imposition of damages that bear no proportionality to any actual harm sustained to counter criticism, silence unwelcomed opinions, or inhibit public debate is an abuse of the law and a violation of free speech, not a reasonable restriction.

The Tajik authorities should uphold Tajikistan’s domestic and international commitments to protect free expression and allow Asia Plus and other journalists to carry out their work free of harassment and undue forms of pressure, Human Rights Watch said.

“Those who are behind this case are clearly trying to put pressure on our newspaper for its active civil position,” Babakhanov told Human Rights Watch. “They are sending a signal to all independent media in the country. Regardless of this, we hope that common sense will prevail and that higher courts will reconsider the case in strict compliance with the legislation of Tajikistan.”

The post Tajikistan: ‘Insult’ Ruling Against News Outlet appeared first on Eurasia Review.

How Highly Educated Immigrants Raise Native Wages – Analysis

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Immigrants to the US are drawn from both ends of the education spectrum. This column looks at the effect of highly educated immigrants – in particular, those with degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics – on total factor productivity growth. The authors find that foreign STEM workers can explain 30% to 60% of US TFP growth between 1990 and 2010.

By Giovanni Peri, Kevin Shih and Chad Sparber

Immigration to the US has risen tremendously in recent decades. Though media attention and popular discourse often focus on illegal immigrants or the high foreign-born presence among less-educated workers, the data show that immigrants are drawn from both ends of the education spectrum. At the low end, immigrants grew from 5% of workers with a high school degree or less in 1970 to 20.8% in 2010. At the high end, the figure rose from 7.3% to 18.2% for those with graduate degrees over the same period.1

These trends suggest that it is important for economists and policymakers to understand the effects of highly educated immigrant flows. The canonical economic model, based on demand and supply, holds that, all else equal, an increase in labour supply should cause wages to fall. Thus, immigration should depress wages paid to natives. Evidence for such a downward effect in academic work is mixed. For example, Borjas (2003, 2013) find a negative impact of immigration on wages, while Card (2009) and Ottaviano and Peri (2012) do not. For the canonical model to fail and for immigrants to generate wage gains for natives, it must be the case that all else is not equal in the case of immigration. This is because the labour market is more complex than the market for typical goods. Adjustment mechanisms exist to allow natives and firms to respond to immigration without experiencing lower wages or fewer employment opportunities. Immigrants may also generate positive externalities that benefit native workers. This article provides a brief summary of the recent evidence for these phenomena in the context of the market for workers with a college degree.

Immigrants to the US specialise in STEM

The first step in understanding the peculiarities of the labour market is to recognise that native and foreign labour differ in their underlying characteristics. We do not think that the popular refrain claiming that “the US faces a skills shortage” is a useful way to approach this issue. Rather, we recognise the existence of important differences between natives and immigrants. Figure 1 provides a sense of this by describing the college majors of US bachelor’s degree recipients. Compared to natives, foreign-born workers are disproportionately likely to have obtained a bachelor’s degree in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics (STEM). 45.5% of college-educated immigrants in the labour force have a STEM degree, whereas only 28% of natives do. Conversely, natives are twice as likely as immigrants to have majored in education (12.2% versus 5.6%) or social sciences (9.5% versus 5%).

Figure 1. Primary degree share by nativity – workers with a bachelor’s degree or more education, 2009–2012sparber fig1 29 may

Source: American Community Survey.

These differences are crucial to understanding how natives might respond to college-educated immigrant flows. Figure 1 indicates that immigrants possess a comparative advantage and specialise in STEM. Thus, we might expect that natives respond to inflows of STEM-dominant immigrants by specialising in non-STEM work. Indeed, Peri and Sparber (2011) provide evidence of this phenomenon – inflows of highly educated immigrants cause natives switch to more communication-intensive occupations.

The contribution of STEM to overall productivity

This comparative advantage and specialisation story is not unique to the market for college-educated labour. Peri and Sparber (2009) document similar behaviour among workers with a high school degree or less education. However, the fact that foreign college-educated immigrants tend to specialise in STEM has an additional implication of paramount importance. Economists have long recognised the significance of innovation in generating economic growth, and the role of scientists and engineers in fostering such knowledge production. The process of innovation generates positive spillovers for the economy as a whole. Thus, by increasing the country’s stock of knowledge, foreign-born STEM workers can increase the overall productivity of the economy.

A rather simplistic estimate of the contribution of foreign-born STEM to productivity in the US can be calculated from just two pieces of information. First, Jones (2002) estimates that 50% of US total factor productivity (TFP) growth in recent decades is attributable to scientists and engineers. Second, college-educated STEM workers grew from 2.9% of total employment in 1990 to 3.7% of employment in 2010, and foreign-born workers were responsible for 80% of this growth. By combining immigrants’ contributions to STEM growth with STEM’s contribution to TFP growth, we can deduce that roughly 40% of aggregate productivity growth may be due to foreign-born college-educated STEM workers.

This is an enormous figure and it is based on data at a very high level of aggregation. In Peri, Shih, and Sparber (2014), we assess whether more thorough economic analysis delivers comparable results. Using cross-city panel regressions to estimate wage and employment responses to foreign STEM, we find a rise in foreign STEM by one percentage point of total employment increases real wages of college-educated natives by 7–8 percentage points and those of non-college-educated natives by 3-4 percentage points. We find no statistically significant effects on native employment growth.

Instrumenting for the growth of foreign STEM workers

Causal identification is driven by three regularities. First, the presence of foreign STEM workers varied substantially across US cities in 1980. Second, the H-1B visa program – which has been the method of entry for highly skilled immigrants in the US since its inception in 1990 – produced national level changes in the number of skilled immigrants in the country that can be seen as exogenous from a city-level perspective. Third, new immigrants are attracted to locations where previous immigrant communities have already been established. By interacting 1980 city-level settlements with subsequent national-level policy, we can predict the number of new foreign STEM workers in each city. This H-1B-driven imputation of future foreign STEM workers is a good predictor of the actual increase in both foreign STEM and overall STEM workers in a city over subsequent decades. However it is not correlated, by construction, with the economic conditions in the city during the subsequent decades. It therefore makes an excellent instrument for the actual growth of foreign STEM workers to obtain causal estimates of the impact of STEM growth on the wages and employment of college and non-college-educated native-born workers.2

From the perspective of the canonical supply and demand model, the positive relationship between foreign labour supply and native wages may appear peculiar, but it is reasonable in the context of STEM-driven economic and productivity growth. The analysis in Peri, Shih, and Sparber (2014) uses an aggregate production model at the city level, to derive the productivity effect implied by the estimated wage and employment effects. We find that foreign STEM workers can explain 30% to 60% of US TFP growth between 1990 and 2010 – in line with the simple calculation cited above.

Discussion of results and policy implications

The large and positive wage and productivity effects from foreign-born STEM labour raise two important issues. The first concerns how, in the presence of these gains, studies sometimes find detrimental effects. Borjas (2013), for example, argues that immigration from 1990–2010 may have reduced wages paid to workers with a bachelor’s degree by 3.2%, and for workers with a graduate degree by 4.1%. Similarly, Borjas and Doran (2012) find that the post-1992 inflow of Soviet mathematicians pushed American mathematicians to lower quality institutions and reduced their academic productivity. To understand the conflict between these results and our own, it is important to recognise that our gains arise due to complementarities and positive externalities from innovation. Analyses that ignore occupational adjustment, understate complementarities across skill groups, fail to account for externalities, or analyse markets in which positive spillovers are small, are more likely to miss the gains associated with immigration.

The second is whether foreign STEM workers are truly needed since the US could presumably enact policies to produce its own STEM talent. This is true, but three qualifications are necessary. First, our analysis, as well as that of Kerr and Lincoln (2010), argues that foreign H-1B workers increase innovation and the productivity of US STEM workers without crowding them out. Thus it may be possible to increase both foreign and domestic STEM supply. Second, Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle (2010) argue that immigrants are more entrepreneurial and innovative than natives, and this may add a further productive complementarity for natives. Third, native STEM development might require extensive and expensive investment, whereas immigration policy could be a more cost-effective way of building the country’s STEM workforce.

The comprehensive immigration reform proposed in the US Senate Bill 744 that would increase the annual number of H-1B visas allotted by 50,000 per year. In the light of the results above, it should be obvious that the provision would produce long-run positive effects on US wages and innovation.

About the authors:
Giovanni Peri
Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis

Kevin Shih
PhD candidate in the Department of Economics, University of California at Davis

Chad Sparber
Associate Professor of Economics, Colgate University

References
Borjas, G J (2003), “The labor demand curve is downward sloping: reexamining the impact of immigration on the labor market”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 118(4): 1335–1374.

Borjas, G J (2013), “Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature”, Center for Immigration Studies, April.

Borjas, G J and K B Doran (2012), “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127(3): 1143–1203.

Card, D (2009), “Immigration and Inequality”, The American Economic Review, 99(2): 1–21.

Hunt, J and M Gauthier-Loiselle (2010), “How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation?”, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics: 31–56.

Jones, C I (2002), “Sources of US Economic Growth in a World of Ideas”, The American Economic Review, 92(1): 220–239.

Kerr, W R and W F Lincoln (2010), “The supply side of innovation: H-1B visa reforms and US ethnic invention”, Journal of Labor Economics, 28: 473–508.

Ottaviano, G I P and G Peri (2012), “Rethinking the Effect of Immigration on Wages”, Journal of the European Economic Association, 10(1): 152–197.

Peri, G and C Sparber (2009), “Task Specialization, Immigration, and Wages”, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 1(3): 135–169.

Peri, G and C Sparber (2011), “Highly-Educated Immigrants and Native Occupational Choice”, Industrial Relations, 50(3).

Peri, Giovanni, Kevin Shih, and Chad Sparber (2014), “Foreign STEM Workers and Native Wages and Employment in U.S. Cities“, NBER Working Papers 20093.

1. Summary statistics are based on Census and American Community Survey (ACS) data.
2. This methodology is not immune to criticism. Persistent city-specific shocks affecting immigration, employment, and wage growth, for example, would challenge the validity of our instrumental variable strategy. However, we perform a series of robustness checks that all point to the same result – foreign-born STEM workers increase wages paid to native-born workers, with larger effects for those with a college degree.

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Just Assume We Have A Climate Crisis – OpEd

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Climate modelers and disaster proponents remind me of the four guys who were marooned on an island, after their plane went down. The engineer began drawing plans for a boat; the lumberjack cut trees to build it; the pilot plotted a course to the nearest known civilization. But the economist just sat there. The exasperated workers asked him why he wasn’t helping.

“I don’t see the problem,” he replied. “Why can’t we just assume we have a boat, get on it and leave?”

In the case of climate change, those making the assumptions demand that we act immediately to avert planetary crises based solely on their computer model predictions. It’s like demanding that governments enact laws to safeguard us from velociraptors, after Jurassic Park scientists found that dinosaur DNA could be extracted from fossilized mosquitoes … and brought the carnivores back to special-effects life.

Climate models help improve our conceptual understandings of climate systems and the forces that drive climate change. However, they are terrible at predicting Earth’s temperature and other components of its climate. They should never be used to set or justify policies, laws and regulations – such as what the Environmental Protection Agency is about to impose on CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Even our best climate scientists still have only a limited grasp of Earth’s highly complex and chaotic climate systems, and the many interrelated solar, cosmic, oceanic, atmospheric, terrestrial and other forces that control climate and weather. Even the best models are only as good as that understanding.

Worse, the models and the science behind them have been horribly politicized. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was ostensibly organized in 1988 to examine possible human influences on Earth’s climate. In reality, Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin and environmental activist groups wanted to use global warming to drive an anti-hydrocarbon, limited-growth agenda. That meant they somehow had to find a human influence on the climate – even if the best they could come up with was “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” [emphasis added]

“Discernible” (ie, detectable) soon metamorphosed into “dominant,” which quickly morphed into the absurd notion that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have now replaced natural forces and become the only factors influencing climate change. They are certainly the only factors that climate activists and alarmists want to talk about, while they attempt to silence debate, criticism and skepticism. They use the models to generate scary “scenarios” that are presented as actual predictions of future calamities.

They predict, project or forecast that heat waves will intensify, droughts and floods will be stronger and more frequent, hurricanes will be more frequent and violent, sea levels will rise four feet by 2100 [versus eight inches since 1880], forest fires will worsen, and countless animal species will disappear. Unlikely.

Natural forces obviously caused the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the Pleistocene Ice Ages. (A slab of limestone that I dug up has numerous striations – scratches – left by the last mile-thick glacier that covered what is now my home town in Wisconsin.) After long denying it, the IPCC finally acknowledged that the LIA did occur, and that it was a worldwide agricultural and human disaster.

However, the models and computer algorithms the IPCC and EPA rely on still do not include the proper magnitude of solar cycles and other powerful natural forces that influence climate changes. They assume “positive feedbacks” from GHGs that trap heat, but understate the reflective and thus cooling effects of clouds. They display a global warming bias throughout – bolstered by temperature data contaminated by “urban heat island” effects, due to measuring stations being located too close to human heat sources. They assume Earth’s climate is now controlled almost entirely by rising human CO2/GHG emissions.

It’s no wonder the models, modelers and alarmists totally failed to predict the nearly-18-year absence of global warming – or that the modeled predictions diverge further from actual temperature measurements with every passing year. It’s no wonder modelers cannot tell us which aspects of global warming, global cooling, climate change and “climate disruption” are due to humans, and which are the result of natural forces. It’s hardly surprising that they cannot replicate (“hindcast”) the global temperature record from 1950 to 1995, without “fudging” their data and computer codes– or that they are wrong almost every time.

In 2000, Britain’s Met Office said cold winters would be a thing of the past, and “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” The 2010 and 2012 winters were the coldest and snowiest in centuries. In 2013, Met Office scholars said the coming winter would be extremely dry; the forecast left towns, families and government agencies totally unprepared for the immense rains and floods that followed.

In 2007, Australia’s climate commissioner predicted Brisbane and other cities would never again have sufficient rain to fill their reservoirs. The forecast ignored previous drought and flood cycles, and was demolished by record rains in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Forecasts of Arctic and Antarctic meltdowns have ignored the long history of warmer and colder cycles, and ice buildups and breakups.
The Bonneville Power Administration said manmade warming will cause Columbia River Basin snowpack to melt faster, future precipitation to fall as rain, reservoirs to be overwhelmed – and yet water levels will be well below normal year round. President Obama insists that global temperatures will soar, wildfires will be more frequent and devastating, floods and droughts will be more frequent and disastrous, rising seas will inundate coastal cities as Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves melt and disintegrate, and 97% of scientists agree. Every claim is based on models or bald-faced assertions unsupported by evidence.

And still the IPCC says it has “very high confidence” (the highest level it assigns) to the supposed agreement between computer model forecasts and actual observations. The greater the divergence from reality, the higher its “confidence” climbs. Meanwhile, climate researchers and modelers from Nebraska, Penn State, Great Britain and other “learned institutions” continue to focus on alleged human influences on Earth’s climate. They know they will likely lose their government, foundation and other funding – and will certainly be harassed and vilified by EPA, environmentalists, politicians, and their ideological and pedagogical peers – if they examine natural forces too closely.

Thus they input erroneous data, simplistic assumptions, personal biases, and political and financial calculations, letting models spew out specious scenarios and phony forecasts: garbage in, garbage out.
The modelers owe it to humanity to get it right – so that we can predict, prepare for, mitigate and adapt to whatever future climate conditions nature (or humans) might throw at us. They cannot possibly do that without first understanding, inputting and modeling natural factors along with human influences.

Above all, these supposed modeling experts and climate scientists need to terminate their biases and their evangelism of political agendas that seek to slash fossil fuel use, “transform” our energy and economic systems, redistribute wealth, reduce our standards of living, and “permit” African and other impoverished nations to enter the modern era only in a “sustainable manner,” as defined by callous elitists.

The climate catastrophe camp’s focus on CO2 is based on the fact that it is a byproduct of detested hydrocarbon use. But this trace gas (a mere 0.04% of Earth’s atmosphere) makes life on our planet possible. More carbon dioxide means crops, forests and grasslands grow faster and better. CO2’s role in climate change is speculative – and contradicted by real-world measurements, observations and history.

Computer models, scenarios and predictions of planetary Armageddon are little more than faulty, corrupt, even fraudulent pseudo-science. They have consistently forecast what has not happened on Planet Earth, and failed to forecast what did happen.

They must no longer be allowed to justify EPA’s job-killing, economy-strangling, family-bashing rules for vehicles, power plants, cement kilns, refineries, factories, farms, shopping malls and countless other facilities that are or soon will be regulated by agency fiat.

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Mexico: Both Victim And Victimiser In Cyberespionage

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By Emilio Godoy

A lack of controls, regulation and transparency marks the monitoring and surveillance of electronic communication in Mexico, one year after the revelations of cyberespionage shook the world.

This Latin American country of 118 million people was one of the targets of the massive illegal cyberespionage practiced by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). But no substantial changes have been made in response, to prevent further interception.

“There is no legislation on surveillance and intervention, no good practices for companies,” Jesús Robles, with the non-governmental organisation Propuesta Cívica, told IPS. “There is a legal vacuum. They could be gathering metadata.”

Metadata is information that describes other information – data generated as people use technology, such as the date and time of a phone call, the location where someone last accessed their email, who sent or received an email, or where someone made a phone call and how long it lasted.

The British newspaper The Guardian reported on Jun. 5, 2013 that the NSA had been collecting the telephone metadata of the customers of Verizon Wireless, the biggest U.S. mobile phone provider, both within and outside the United States.

It was just the first of a series of leaks to the press about the secret operations of the agency, made by Edward Snowden, a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contractor, now hiding under guard in Russia, which granted him political asylum.

The NSA used the PRISM internet surveillance programme to spy on a number of countries, including Mexico, in areas like anti-drug efforts, energy and security.

And with BLARNEY, the international version of the PRISM programme, the United States intercepted the communications of several embassies in Washington, including Mexico’s. Using another tool, Boundless Informant, it illegally intercepted phone calls and email that passed through U.S. telecoms networks.

On Sep. 1, 2013, U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed that in 2012 the NSA had spied on the email of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, in the latter case during his presidential campaign.

The United States has ignored Mexico’s protests, including a diplomatic note demanding an investigation and a condemnation by Congress.

Greenwald’s online U.S. publication The Intercept reported on May 19 that a surveillance programme, Mystic, collects metadata on the nearly 100 million cell phones operating in Mexico.

“Not much has been done,” Cédric Laurant, one of the four founders of the Mexican non-governmental group Son Tus Datos (It’s Your Information), dedicated since 2012 to advocating the protection of privacy in communications, told IPS. “If the public knew more, they could pressure local and foreign businesses to exert more pressure on the government.”

Mexico also acquired computer programmes to record voices and track phone calls, emails, chat conversations, visited website addresses and social networks.

Since 2010, Mexico’s Federal Law for the Protection of Personal Information Data guarantees the right to privacy and establishes that, if an institution wants to transfer information to third parties at home or abroad, it must give the owners of the information notice and explain the purpose for which it was authorised.

But the law’s guarantees were undermined when a Law on Geolocalisation entered into force in 2012. This legislation allows the government to gather, without notification and in real time, geographic data from cell-phone users.

Furthermore, the new national penal procedures code in effect since March allows the authorities to access real-time geo-location data without a court order.

In March 2013, the interdisciplinary Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in Canada reported that FinFisher surveillance software command and control servers, made by the U.K.-based company Gamma Group, were hosted on two Mexican Internet service providers: Iusacell, a small provider; and UniNet, one of the largest in Mexico, a subsidiary of Teléfonos Mexicanos (Telmex).

After this was discovered, Propuesta Cívica and the digital rights collective ContingenteMX asked the Federal Institute for Access to Information and Data Protection (IFAI) to investigate the Obses company for the use of the programme.

In March IFAI approved sanctions against Obses for selling FinFisher to the government at more than double the market rate. Obses is a Mexican firm that has received dozens of no-bid governmental projects.

On May 12 a British court ruled that UK Revenue & Customs acted unlawfully in refusing to disclose information on the status of an investigation into the export of British Gamma International’s FinFisher surveillance technology, paving the way for a review of the programme’s sales abroad.

In February, Citizen Lab produced two reports on the use of spy programmes. In one of them, “Mapping Hacking Team’s ‘Untraceable’ Spyware”, it reported that agencies in 21 countries used or use the Remote Control System (RCS), sophisticated computer spyware marketed and sold exclusively to governments by the Milan-based Hacking Team, including Mexico, Colombia and Panama.

The RCS can copy files from a computer’s hard disk, record Skype calls, emails, instant messages, and passwords, and turn on a device’s webcam and microphone to spy on a target.

Citizen Lab reported that it mapped out “covert networks of ‘proxy servers’ used to launder data that RCS exfiltrates from infected computers, through third countries, to an ‘endpoint,’ which we believe represents the spyware’s government operator. This process is designed to obscure the identity of the government conducting the spying.

“For example, data destined for an endpoint in Mexico appears to be routed through four different proxies, each in a different country.”

And in another article, “Hacking Team’s U.S. Nexus”, Citizen Lab said that in at least 12 cases, U.S.-based data centres are part of a “dedicated foreign espionage infrastructure.”

Citizen Lab states that in tracing these “proxy chains,” it found that U.S.-based servers appeared to assist the governments of 10 countries, including Mexico and Colombia, in espionage and/or law enforcement operations.

Citizen Lab found 14 IP addresses, 12 of which are apparently still active.

Mexico’s legislation does not require telecommunications companies to reveal government requests about the activities of Internet users.

“The action taken has not proven to be effective; rights are violated,” Robles said.

“Awareness-raising is needed among users so that a larger number of them exercise mass pressure on companies, in order for users to take privacy into their own hands, using new tools that are available,” Laurant said.

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Roland Garros: Gulbis Beats Federer

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No. 18 Ernests Gulbis upset No. 4 Roger Federer 6-7 (5), 7-6 (3), 6-2, 4-6, 6-3 in the fourth round of the French Open on Sunday.

Gulbis advanced to his second Grand Slam quarterfinal and first since the 2008 French Open. He also halted Federer’s nine-year streak of making the final eight here. Federer lost a five-set match at Roland Garros for the first time.

This is the type of victory missing from Gulbis’ résumé since he started a career resurgence 15 months ago. The 25-year-old Latvian has gone from outside the top 130 to inside the top 20, with his talent eclipsing his equally prodigious combustibility, but during that stretch he lost in the third round or earlier at all four major tournaments he entered. Each defeat came to players ranked outside the top 50.

“It’s the biggest win of my career,” Gulbis said in an on-court interview. “Sorry I had to win. I know how everyone likes Roger. It was a tough match, but this is sport. I’ve been playing very well in France. I won tournaments in Marseille and Nice [this year]. Hopefully, Paris is the next one.”

Before Sunday, Gulbis was 4-23 against top-five players and he had never beaten a player ranked higher than seventh at a major. But he could claim a victory over Federer, having stunned the then-No. 1 at the 2010 Italian Open, and Gulbis said he was “really confident” entering this match against the 17-time major champion.

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Moscow Blocks Military Functions Of US GPS Stations On Russian Soil

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Russia has started to block the military functions of U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) base stations on its territory, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said on Sunday.

The move comes as Moscow is seeking to advance talks over the placement of Glonass stations in the United States.

“We have worked out and implemented measures that exclude the use of these stations for military purposes. Now they are under our full control,” Rogozin wrote in a Twitter post.

The Russian Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos, confirmed that the measures would be implemented from Sunday.

Rogozin also said that Moscow has initiated talks with the United States on the deployment of Glonass stations on the U.S. territory. The talks are expected to last until August 31, and “new decisions will be made” afterwards.

Rogozin warned earlier this week that Russia would stop the operations of these GPS stations on June 1 and might start dismantling them from September 1 as a response to Washington’s anti-Russia sanctions and its refusal to plant Glonass ground base stations on the U.S. territory.

Glonass is the Russian equivalent of GPS, which is designed for both military and civilian use.

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Cynicism Is Toxic – OpEd

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Cynics fool themselves by thinking they can’t be fooled.

The cynic imagines he’s guarding himself against being duped. He’s not naive, he’s worldly wise, so he’s not about to get taken in — but this psychic insulation comes at a price.

The cynic is cautious and mistrustful. Worst of all, the cynic by relying too much on his own counsel, saps the foundation of curiosity, which is the ability to be surprised.

While the ability to develop and sustain an open mind has obvious psychological value, neurologists now say that it’s also necessary for the health of the brain. Cynicism leads towards dementia.

One of the researchers in a new study suggests that the latest findings may offer insights on how to reduce the risks of dementia, yet that seems to imply that people might be less inclined to become cynical simply by knowing that its bad for their health. How are we to reduce the risks of becoming cynical in the first place?

One of the most disturbing findings of a recent Pew Research Center survey, Millenials in Adulthood, was this:

In response to a long-standing social science survey question, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people,” just 19% of Millennials say most people can be trusted, compared with 31% of Gen Xers, 37% of Silents and 40% of Boomers.

While this trust deficit among Millennials no doubt has multiple causes, such as the socially fragmented nature of our digital world, I don’t believe that there has ever before been a generation so thoroughly trained in fear. Beneath cynicism lurks fear.

The fear may have calmed greatly since the days of post-9/11 hysteria, yet it has not gone away. It’s the background noise of American life. It might no longer be focused so strongly on terrorism, since there are plenty of other reasons to fear — some baseless, some over-stated, and some underestimated. But the aggregation of all these fears produces a pervasive mistrust of life.

ScienceDaily: People with high levels of cynical distrust may be more likely to develop dementia, according to a study published in the May 28, 2014, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Cynical distrust, which is defined as the belief that others are mainly motivated by selfish concerns, has been associated with other health problems, such as heart disease. This is the first study to look at the relationship between cynicism and dementia.

“These results add to the evidence that people’s view on life and personality may have an impact on their health,” said study author Anna-Maija Tolppanen, PhD, of the University of Eastern Finland in Kuopio. “Understanding how a personality trait like cynicism affects risk for dementia might provide us with important insights on how to reduce risks for dementia.”

For the study, 1,449 people with an average age of 71 were given tests for dementia and a questionnaire to measure their level of cynicism. The questionnaire has been shown to be reliable, and people’s scores tend to remain stable over periods of several years. People are asked how much they agree with statements such as “I think most people would lie to get ahead,” “It is safer to trust nobody” and “Most people will use somewhat unfair reasons to gain profit or an advantage rather than lose it.” Based on their scores, participants were grouped in low, moderate and high levels of cynical distrust.

A total of 622 people completed two tests for dementia, with the last one an average of eight years after the study started. During that time, 46 people were diagnosed with dementia. Once researchers adjusted for other factors that could affect dementia risk, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol and smoking, people with high levels of cynical distrust were three times more likely to develop dementia than people with low levels of cynicism. Of the 164 people with high levels of cynicism, 14 people developed dementia, compared to nine of the 212 people with low levels of cynicism.

The study also looked at whether people with high levels of cynicism were more likely to die sooner than people with low levels of cynicism. A total of 1,146 people were included in this part of the analysis, and 361 people died during the average of 10 years of follow-up. High cynicism was initially associated with earlier death, but after researchers accounted for factors such as socioeconomic status, behaviors such as smoking and health status, there was no longer any link between cynicism and earlier death.

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Spain’s King Juan Carlos To Abdicate For Son, Prince Felipe

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Spain’s King Juan Carlos said on Monday he would abdicate in favor of his more popular son Prince Felipe in an apparent bid to revive the scandal-hit monarchy at a time of economic hardship and growing discontent with the wider political elite.

“A new generation is quite rightly demanding to take the lead role,” Juan Carlos, 76, said on television, hours after a surprise announcement from Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy that the monarch would step down after almost 40 years on the throne.

The 76-year-old king, who walks with a cane after multiple hip operations and struggled to speak clearly during an important speech earlier this year, is stepping down for personal reasons, Rajoy said.

But a source at the royal palace told Reuters the abdication was for political reasons. The source said the king decided in January to step down, but delayed the announcement until after the European Union election on May 25.

Political analysts said the ruling conservative People’s Party was eager to put the more popular Felipe on the throne to try to combat increasingly anti-monarchist sentiment, after small leftist and anti-establishment parties did surprisingly well in the election.

The country is just pulling out of a difficult and long recession that has seen faith in politicians, the royal family and other institutions all dwindle.

Abdication, succession

It was not immediately clear when the abdication will take place, allowing Felipe’s assumption of power.

Felipe, 46, has had an increasingly important role in ceremonial events in the past year.

Spain does not have a precise law regulating abdication and succession. Rajoy’s cabinet was scheduled to have an extraordinary meeting on Tuesday to set out the steps for Prince Felipe to take over as Felipe VI. The transition will likely be accomplished by passing a law through parliament, where Rajoy’s People’s Party has an absolute majority.

The 76-year-old Juan Carlos oversaw his country’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, coming into power in 1975, just two days after the death of longtime dictator Francisco Franco.

Far from being a mere ceremonial figurehead, Juan Carlos played a determining role in Spanish modern history when he stepped up as the first crowned head of state in 44 years after Franco’s death.

He defied the hopes of the Francoists for an extension of autocratic rule. Instead, he oversaw the creation of a new system of parliamentary monarchy, with a new constitution that was approved by referendum in 1978.

Juan Carlos was credited with helping defuse an attempted coup in February 1981 by soldiers who stormed into parliament shooting and who held lawmakers hostage for several hours.

The king’s appearance on television urging support for the democratic government was instrumental in blocking the attempt.

Family hurt by scandals

However, Juan Carlos’ popularity has been deeply eroded by scandals swirling around him and his family.

He went on a luxury elephant safari to Botswana in the middle of Spain’s financial crisis during which he broke his hip and had to be flown back to Spain for medical treatment aboard a private jet.

Further damaging the royal family’s standing, a judge opened a corruption investigation in 2010 centered on former Olympic handball player Inaki Urdangarin, the husband of the king’s youngest daughter, Cristina, who has also been accused of involvement, according to the French news agency AFP.

Both deny any wrongdoing.

A judge in Palma de Mallorca is expected to decide soon whether to put Urdangarin on trial on charges of embezzling 6 million euros in public funds through his charity.

At the same time, Felipe’s approval rating has risen.

Sixty-two percent of Spaniards were in favor of the king stepping down, according to a January poll by Sigma Dos. That compared with 45 percent a year earlier. Only 41 percent of those polled had a good or very good opinion of the king.

Felipe has a positive rating of 66 percent and most Spaniards believe the monarchy could recover its prestige if he took the throne, according to the poll.

Felipe wed former television presenter Letizia Ortiz, in a glittering ceremony in Madrid’s Almudena Cathedral in 2004 after several previous romantic dalliances, including one with a Norwegian lingerie model.

They have two daughters.

Ortiz, a 41-year-old divorcee, was the first commoner to come in line for the Spanish throne.

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Thai Coup Leaders Warn Against Making ‘Hunger Games’ Sign

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Thailand’s military is threatening to arrest those using a three-fingered salute from “The Hunger Games” movies to express opposition to last month’s coup.

Coup leaders have severely restricted freedom of expression and enforced a ban on gatherings of more than five people since taking power on May 22.

As a quiet symbol of defiance, many coup opponents have begun holding up three fingers, which in “The Hunger Games” symbolizes resistance against totalitarian rule.

An army spokesman said authorities are “monitoring” the campaign, warning those who flash the sign could face arrest if they do so in groups of more than five people.

Small demonstrations have persisted in the capital since army chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha seized power, though there have been only small-scale clashes.

On Sunday, Thailand sent nearly 6,000 troops into the streets of Bangkok in a show of force against protesters who had planned major demonstrations.

Last week, General Prayuth said it would be up to 15 months before elections would be held and a new constitution set to replace the one he invalidated.

Prayuth said the coup was necessary to prevent violence and help advance reconciliation efforts following months of protests that saw nearly 30 people killed.

On Tuesday, the army said it has relaxed a curfew at the major tourist resorts of Pattaya, Koh Samui and Phuket. But a midnight to 4:00 am curfew remains for the rest of the country.

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US Army May Press Charges Against Sgt Bowe Bergdahl

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The United States may still choose to press charges against the American soldier released this week from Taliban custody after five years in captivity, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said Tuesday.

At the center of the debate is whether Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, 28, deserted the US Army before he was captured in Afghanistan in 2009 and held by the Taliban up until Saturday, when the White House agreed to release five prisoners long held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in exchange for his freedom.

Former colleagues of Bergdahl have said in the days since that the soldier talked openly about leaving the Army ahead of his disappearance, and believe he had willingly deserted the service when he was caught in 2009. According to some, no fewer than six US troops died in the days after Bergdahl’s disappearance as a result of search efforts aimed at recovering the missing soldier. As RT reported earlier this week, some of those soldiers who’ve put the blame on Bergdahl are hoping the Pentagon opens a probe into the matter.

“The questions about this particular soldier’s conduct are separate from our effort to recover any US service member in enemy captivity,” Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters on Tuesday. “This was likely the last, best opportunity to free him,” he said, according to Politico.

“As for the circumstances of his capture, when he is able to provide them, we’ll learn the facts,” Gen. Dempsey told the Associated Press. “Like any American, he is innocent until proven guilty. Our Army’s leaders will not look away from misconduct if it occurred.”

Nevertheless, Dempsey did acknowledge that the Pentagon has no plans at this point to promote Bergdahl any further. The Army awarded him the rank of sergeant during his disappearance, and typically continues to promote soldiers held in captivity. During Tuesday’s interview, however, the chairman said “his status has now changed, and therefore the requirements for promotion are more consistent with normal duty status.”

Bergdahl was serving as a private first class in Sharana, Afghanistan when he was reported missing in June 2009.

“He deserted,” former colleague Nathan Bradley Bethea told The Daily Beast this week.“I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon — including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened.”

According to Bethea, the Army asked soldiers familiar with the matter to not discuss Bergdahl’s disappearance during the last half-decade in an effort to avoid bringing additional harm to the soldier. He was released from Taliban custody on Saturday and is currently being evaluated at a medical facility in Germany.

“With respect to the circumstances of Sgt. Bergdahl’s capture by the Taliban, we obviously have not been interrogating Sgt. Bergdahl,” US President Barack Obama said on Monday. “He has been recovering from five years of captivity with the Taliban. He’s having to undergo a whole battery of tests and he is going to have to undergo a significant transition back into life. He has not even met with his family yet, which indicates I think the degree to which we take this transition process seriously.”

“Regardless of the circumstances, whatever those circumstances may turn out to be, we still get an American soldier back if he’s held in captivity. Period. Full stop. We don’t condition that,” Pres. Obama added during an address in Warsaw, Poland on Tuesday.

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Saber Rattling At West Point – OpEd

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On May 28, President Barack Obama delivered his most belligerent and menacing speech to date at the US Military Academy at West Point. Aside from the lofty rhetoric we’ve come to expect in every Obama presentation, the president’s commencement address was a defiant restating of the Bush Doctrine of unilateral intervention, executive authority and endless warfare. The speech contained no new initiatives or surprises, but emphasized Obama’s unwavering support for the policies which have plunged large parts of the Middle East, Africa, and Eurasia into civil conflict, economic collapse and war. Obama defended US aggression on the grounds of “American exceptionalism”, the dubious idea that Americans are special and cannot be held to the same standards as others. The theory implies that Washington’s relentless war-mongering and killing of civilians cannot be prosecuted under international law because the US is a law unto itself.

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” said Obama. “But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”

Obama’s statement is deliberately misleading. As the president knows, the Bush administration notified U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the US would withdraw from the International Criminal Court Treaty in May 2002 just prior to the invasion of Iraq claiming that the ICC treaty put U.S. service members and officials at risk of prosecution by a court that is “unaccountable to the American people.” In retrospect, we can see that Bush and his lieutenants wanted to remove themselves from any accountability for the atrocities and crimes against humanity they planned to perpetrate in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Thus, exceptionalism does not affirm Washington’s willingness to comply with “international norms and the rule of law” as Obama says, but to absolve US leaders from any responsibility for their habitual war-making. As policy analyst Noam Chomsky has said many times, “If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”

Here’s Obama again: “Let me repeat a principle I put forward at the outset of my presidency: The United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it… International opinion matters, but America should never ask permission to protect our people, our homeland or our way of life.”

In other words, the United States will do whatever the hell it wants to and if you don’t like it: “Too bad”. This is the Bush Doctrine verbatim. The West Point oration proves that the new administration has simply modified the Bush credo to suit Obama’s pretentious speaking style. Strip out the visionary formulations, the grandiose bloviating, and the sweeping hand gestures and the ideas are virtually identical; unilateralism, preemption, and exceptionalism, the toxic combo that has spurred 13 years of war, occupation, regime change, black sites, extra-judicial assassinations, drone attacks, and hyperbolic state terror most of which has been directed at civilian populations whose only fault is that they occupy regions where vast petroleum reserves have been discovered or which have some fleeting strategic importance to Washington’s war planners. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the World Socialist Web Site titled “Obama’s West Point speech: A prescription for unending war” by Bill Van Auken:

“Obama is not elaborating here a policy of defensive war to be waged only in response to an attack or the threat of an imminent attack. He is spelling out that the US reserves the right to intervene militarily wherever it believes its “core interests”—i.e., the access of its corporations and banks to markets, raw materials, cheap labor and profits—are involved.

When he speaks of “our livelihoods” and “our way of life,” he is referring not to the ever-declining living standards of the American worker, but to the eight-figure compensation packages of American CEOs, whose fortunes are founded on the exploitation of the working populations and resources of the entire planet…

Everything put forward by Obama is a repudiation of international law and an endorsement of the policy of aggressive war practiced by the Nazis three-quarters of a century ago.” (Obama’s West Point speech: A prescription for unending war, Bill Van Auken, World Socialist Web Site)

Here’s Obama again defending his malignant foreign policy in terms of “leadership”:

“America must always lead on the world stage. If we don’t, no one else will. The military that you have joined is, and always will be, the backbone of that leadership.”

Obama finds it easy to praise the people who fight his wars, even while he stealthily carries out a plan to privatize the Veterans Administration. Check out this blurb from an article titled “VA secretary resigns amid push to privatize US veterans’ health care”:

“Obama and members of Congress have responded to the VHA scandal with a breathtaking level of cynicism and hypocrisy, even by Washington standards … according to many lawmakers, the answer to this crisis is not the appropriation of funds to hire new doctors and other medical professionals, but the dismantling of the government program in order to provide a profit windfall to private insurers and health industry firms. The result of this policy will be less care at greater cost to veterans…

Under the “Veterans Choice Plan” being promoted by Rep. Andy Harris (Republican of Maryland), veterans could either choose to continue receiving care through the VHA or go to a private provider of their choosing. In what amounts to a voucher system, the federal government would cover the cost of insurance premiums and some out-of-pocket costs, depending on a veteran’s priority ranking…

The moves to privatize veterans’ health care underscore the hypocrisy of the bipartisan glorification of soldiers and veterans. It also sets a precedent for privatizing Medicare and Medicaid, the federal-state health care program for the poor.” (VA secretary resigns amid push to privatize US veterans’ health care, World Socialist Web Site)

Is there any doubt that Obama forced General Eric Shinseki to step down so he could start to dismantle the VA? And if Obama cares so much about veterans, then why hasn’t he spoken out before about other veteran-related issues like the epidemic of suicides, rapes, traumatic brain injury or PTSD? Obama’s phony outrage is just a headline-grabbing gimmick to conceal what’s really going on, which is the VA is being handed over to America’s insatiable health care tycoons on a silver platter.

Obama again: “For the foreseeable future, the most direct threat to America, at home and abroad, remains terrorism, but a strategy that involves invading every country that harbors terrorist networks is naïve and unsustainable. I believe we must shift our counterterrorism strategy, drawing on the successes and shortcomings of our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, to more effectively partner with countries where terrorist networks seek a foothold.”

Obama’s comment absurdly implies that the US has learned from its past mistakes and has fine-tuned the art of counterterrorism so it doesn’t involve the squandering of valuable resources. What a joke. It’s like listening to a Mafia hit-man boast that he ‘s learned how to save money on ammo by strangling his victims with his bare hands. This is also a good example of how the Dems think they’re more effective (and discreet) in executing the elitist/corporate agenda than their rivals in the GOP. As if that was the purpose of the party!

Obama also made a few perfunctory remarks about closing Guantanamo, ending indefinite detention and taking steps to address climate change. But clearly these had nothing to do with the main thrust of the speech which was to announce his intention to expand the wars abroad. Citing hotspots in Syria, Ukraine and the South China Sea, Obama promised to “lead” with the military, asserting, by implication, dominion over these regions where the US claims to have “national interests”. Obama is as committed as his predecessor, Bush, to rule by force of arms even though his current adversaries (Russia and China) are not ragtag militias in sandals, but nuclear-armed nation-states who could level the better part of the planet with a flip of the switch. Even so, Obama is determined to pursue the same provocative strategy whatever the risks increasing the probability of a miscalculation that ends in a mushroom cloud.

It’s madness.

 

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Central African Republic: Peacekeepers Tied To Abuse, Says HRW

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African Union peacekeepers from the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) have been implicated in the enforced disappearance on March 24, 2014, of at least 11 people in the Central African Republic.

Approximately 20 soldiers from the African Union peacekeeping force known as MISCA took the group of 11, including four women, from the home of a local militia leader in Boali, a town 80 kilometers north of the capital, Bangui, witnesses told Human Rights Watch.

The peacekeepers detained the men and women after the militia group known as the anti-balaka, who are predominantly Christian and animist rebel fighters, on March 24 killed one Congolese peacekeeper and wounded four others. Those detained have not been heard from since, although their families have inquired about their whereabouts at the MISCA base and local police stations.

“The African Union needs to say what happened to the group that was detained and taken by the Congolese peacekeepers,” said Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. “The peacekeepers are there to protect the civilian population, not to abuse them.”

Human Rights Watch called for an independent and impartial international investigation into the incident and the immediate suspension from peacekeeping duties of the implicated troops.

Human Rights Watch conducted a detailed investigation into the incident and spoke with five witnesses. Many other local residents, including officials and activists, told Human Rights Watch that they were too afraid to investigate or even discuss the incident because the Congolese MISCA troops have been known for intimidation and violence. Confirming this hostile atmosphere, while Human Rights Watch was investigating the March incident on May 25, Congolese MISCA soldiers severely beat a local police officer at a checkpoint following a dispute, and broke a beer bottle over his head, injuring him.

Contacted by Human Rights Watch, MISCA’s leadership announced that an investigation into the incident had been ordered and would be conducted by the human rights section of MISCA. Human Rights Watch is cooperating fully with the investigators.

The anti-balaka are largely Christian and animist fighters engaged in a battle against predominantly Muslim Seleka forces, which overthrew the previous government in a March 2013 military campaign. Both groups have committed massive human rights violations against the local population over the past year. African Union and French peacekeepers were deployed to help stabilize the volatile situation and protect civilians.

This is not the first incident of abuse by Congolese forces Human Rights Watch has investigated. Human Rights Watch has gathered evidence that, in December 2013, Congolese troops in the town of Bossangoa tortured to death two anti-balaka leaders following the brutal lynching of a Congolese MISCA soldier the same day.

An enforced disappearance occurs when someone is deprived of their liberty by state agents, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person. Under customary international law, there is an absolute prohibition on enforced disappearances, and they may be prosecuted as a crime by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although a discrete crime in and of itself, the act of enforced disappearance also simultaneously violates multiple human rights protections, including the prohibition of torture and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention.

“Enforced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings of civilians are serious human rights crimes and make a mockery of MISCA’s mandate,” Bouckaert said. “The African Union needs to investigate and address these crimes immediately. At stake is nothing less than the reputation and legitimacy of the peacekeeping force in a country that desperately needs protection.”

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Saudi Arabia: MERS Death Toll Rises To 282; Deputy Health Minister Fired

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By Mohammed Rasooldeen

The Ministry of Health on Tuesday said the Kingdom’s death toll from the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) is actually 282, or 92 more than the tally recorded as of June 2.

According to the Ministry of Health’s Command & Control Center, which was set up last week by Acting Health Minister Adel Fakeih, the new data came about following a thorough review by the center starting from September 2012 to the present day.

New data also showed that the total number of infections in the Kingdom is actually 688 rather than 575 as reported in the ministry’s website on Monday.

“Following the review, the total number of cases recorded in the Kingdom since 2012 stands at 688 including 282 fatalities; 53 are currently receiving treatment while 353 have recovered,” said the report released by the center on Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, the ministry announced on Twitter that Deputy Health Minister Ziad Memish, who played a frontline role in the campaign against MERS, has been relieved from his post.

Memish was the second top Health Ministry official to lose his post apparently as a result of the coronavirus crisis.

In April, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah replaced then Health Minister Abdullah Al-Rabeeah as the number of MERS infections and deaths spiked, causing panic among the public.

The king named Labor Minister Fakeih as acting health minister in a concurrent capacity.

Last month, Fakeih sacked the top management of King Fahd Hospital in Jeddah after numerous medical staff reportedly got infected, causing some of the hospital’s Saudi doctors to resign.
No reason was given for the dismissal of Memish, who had been the ministry’s point man in the campaign against MERS since the coronavirus was first discovered in September 2012.

A Reuters report said international scientists interviewed for a Reuters Special Report last month have chided Memish for being reluctant to collaborate with some specialist laboratories around the world offering to help investigate the possible source of MERS and explore how it spreads.

“Experts say the rising number of infections and deaths could have been stopped well within the two years since MERS first emerged — and would have been if Saudi authorities had been more open to outside help offered by specialist teams around the world with the technology, know-how and will to conduct scientific studies,” said the report.

It said Memish was asked last month about the criticisms and said he was “surprised” but did not respond to the allegations directly concerning his own role.

Reuters quoted David Heymann, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology, chairman of Public Health England, and head of global health security at Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, as saying “Saudi Arabia needs to make sure it has appropriate infection control practices in hospitals, where cases are being transmitted, and number two, they need to do the case-control study that will hopefully tell them how people are getting infected.”

Acting Health Minister Fakeih wrote last week in a response to the Reuters Special Report that Saudi Arabia was working with international scientific organizations to improve its response to MERS, and pledged to continue that collaboration, said the report.

The rate of infection has slowed since mid-May, which public health officials say may be a result of improved infection control procedures introduced in Saudi hospitals.

New measures

The Health Ministry said it had put in place new measures to make sure data gathering, reporting and transparency were being observed, including standardization of testing and better guidelines for labelling and storing samples.

“While the review has resulted in a higher total number of previously unreported cases, we still see a decline in the number of new cases reported over the past few weeks,” Tariq Madani, head of the ministry’s scientific advisory board, was quoted as saying in an e-mailed statement.

The main objective of the review was to ensure a more complete and accurate understanding of the MERS-CoV outbreak in the Kingdom. The review has already enhanced the Ministry’s policy development process and improved measures taken to address the situation.

Madani added: “This review has informed the Ministry’s policies, which took stringent action to combat MERS-CoV, announcing the establishment of the new Command and Control Center to increase the level of preparedness for future public health challenges, issuing infection control protocols to contain the spread of the virus, and directly engaging the public with an awareness campaign.”

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Japan Prime Minister Signals Assertive Asian Security Role At Shangri-La Dialogue 2014 – Analysis

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By Dr. Subhash Kapila

Japanese Prime Minister Abe in his keynote Address on May 31 2014 at the Shangri-La Dialogue signalled Japan’s intentions to play an assertive role Asian security role. Implicitly, the target was China though not so named.

The all-pervasive theme at Shangri-La Dialogue was strategic concerns over China’s destabilising the South China Sea region and its recent provocative actions against Vietnam and the Philippines.

The Indo Pacific region is at strategic cross-roads with the United States not going beyond rhetoric on South China Sea and East China Sea conflict escalation by China. Similarly, Russia as an equal stakeholder in security of the region is a passive spectator as China goes on an imperial rampage recklessly trampling all international laws, conventions and refusing to submit to conflict resolution processes.

Against this contextual backdrop, one has been recommending in my past Papers that Asian strategic coalitions must emerge to make a beginning in the direction of ensuring peace and stability of the Indo Pacific region. In a recent Paper one had advocated the imperatives for “Japan-India –Vietnam Strategic Trilateral”.

Japanese PM Shinzo Abe’s assertions at Shangri-La Dialogue 2014 therefore are timely and welcome as Japan along with India are ‘pivots’ on which an Asian Coalition’ can emerge.

Japan’s Intentions to Adopt a New and Assertive Security Role to Preserve Peace and Stability in Asia

“The “New Japanese” are Japanese who are determined ultimately to take on the peace, order and stability of the region as their own responsibility” so declared PM Shinzo Abe. It is a pointer towards the imperatives of an indigenous Asian Strategic Coalition which could provide some semblance of countervailing power against China’s hegemonistic designs in Asia conscious of the strategic dithering that the United States and Russia display when it comes to China.

“Japan intends to play an even greater more proactive role than it has until now in making peace in Asia and the world something more certain.” This is an emphatic declaration worth noting as there are many connotations attached to it.

“Proactive Contribution to Peace”- a new banner for such a “New Japan” – is nothing new other than an expression of Japan’s determination to spare no effort or trouble for the sake of peace, security, and prosperity of Asia and the Pacific, at even greater levels than before.” Peace and prosperity cannot come about when there is no security or security and stability are threatened. Evidently, the Japanese PM was signalling that Japan is ready to contribute significantly in the security of Asia so that peace prevails.

Japan will “Reconstruct the legal basis pertinent to the right of collective self-defence and international cooperation.” Japan has a bilateral security alliance with the United States and presumably the Japanese Prime Minister perceives a multilateral Asian security cooperative construct. PM Abe is already engaged in efforts to remove the many shackles that the post -Second World US -imposed Peace Constitution restricts Japan from assuming a rightful and assertive role in Asian security.

Japan Perceives India as a Credible Strategic Partner in Asian Security

In a markedly direct reference to the hopes pinned by PM Shinzo Abe on India and more specifically on new Indian PM Modi stated that “I am absolutely certain that when I welcome Prime Minister Modi to Tokyo, we will successfully confirm that Japan-India cooperation, as well as trilateral cooperation including our two countries will make the “Confluence of the Two Seas” that is the Pacific and Indian Oceans more peaceful and prosperous.

Stressing further on this aspect PM Abe stated that “Today the benefits for each one of us lie in the seas from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean being made thoroughly open as a place for freedom and peace.”

Both of these assertions by PM Shinzo Abe are strategically meaningful. Japan intends to play an assertive role in Asian security and contextually it cannot do so alone. Both Japan and India are emerging powers whose rise China wants to obstruct as it does not wish to share the Asian strategic space driven by its imperial pretentions.

Japan and India share a common perception on the ‘China Threat’ and both are welcome by Asian counties as responsible stakeholders in Asian Security.

India needs to respond positively and substantially to reinforce the Japan-India Strategic Partnership so that it paves the way for a meaningful Asian Strategic Coalition. PM Modi has the political will and courage to do the same.

Regarding the references to the peace and stability in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Japanese Prime Minister had two objectives in mind. The first objective is that Japan perceives the Indo Pacific as an integrated strategic construct and hence Japan and India playing complimentary strategic roles in the security of these two vital Oceans.

The second objective is an implicit reference to China’s destabilising role in both Oceans and particularly in the South China Sea where Japan perceives that in the ambit of India’s Look East Policy, a more assertive role should be played by India in the security and stability of the South China Sea.

Japanese Prime Minister’s Declarations on ASEAN Security and its Regional Role

Japan today stands seriously concerned over China’s provocative brinkmanship in the South China Sea in whose security and stability Japan has a significant national security stake. The ASEAN nations around the South China Sea are disproportionately less powerful than China and therefore vulnerable to China’s political and military coercion.

With the above in mind, Japan’s Prime Minister Abe made a few unambiguous assertions in his Keynote Address, the more significant ones reproduced below:

  • “Japan will offer its utmost support for the efforts of the countries of ASEAN as they work to ensure the security of the seas and skies and thoroughly maintain freedom of navigation and freedom of overflights.”
  • Reiterating once again in the latter part of his Address, the Japanese PM stressed once again for effect that “Japan will offer its support for efforts by ASEAN member states to ensure safety of seas and skies and vigorously maintain freedom of navigation and overflights.”

The references to China are implicit when Japan’s support to ASEAN nations come for special mention in vigorously maintaining the freedom of navigation and overflights both threatened by China’s unilateral measures.

This is the first time one has noticed references to ‘safety of skies’ and’ maintenance of freedom of overflights’. This has arisen from China’s unilateral declaration of ADIZ in the Senkaku Islands area and it is feared that China will declare a similar ADZ in the South China Sea region.

Japan should take the lead with its political and economic clout to bring about ‘ASEAN Unity’ so that it could provide a credible response against South China Sea conflict escalation.

Japan’s Support for Philippines and Vietnam in their Conflicts with China in the South China Sea

The Philippines and Vietnam are located on the two flanks of the South China Sea and which China has embroiled them in sovereignty disputes involving armed clashes. It is but natural that Japan should strongly support both these nations as they battle against Chinese military coercion in the South China Sea.

Referring to both these nations in his Keynote Address, the Japanese Prime Minister stated that:

  • “My Government strongly supports the efforts made by the Philippines calling for the resolution to the dispute on the South China Sea that is truly consistent with the principles”
  • “We likewise support Vietnam in its efforts to resolve issues through dialogue.

Underlying these ostensibly simple statements is the Japanese intention to support both the Philippines and Vietnam in a more comprehensive manner to build up their economic and military capacities to withstand Chinese provocative military actions.

Adding substance to the above was the reference made by Japanese Prime Minister to supply of 10 new patrol vessels to the Philippines, three to Indonesia and many more to Vietnam once it separates and establishes a separate Coast Guard.

The Japanese PM alluded to the enlargement to provide comprehensive security to the South China Sea littoral countries drawn into conflict by China when he asserted that “Japan will combine various options in its menu, including ODA, capacity-building by the SDF, and defence equipment and technology cooperation to support seamlessly the capacity of ASEAN countries to safeguard the seas”

Rules of Laws of the Seas and Imperatives of Upholding Them

The Japanese Prime Minister dwelt on in fair detail on the rules of the Laws of the Sea and the imperatives of upholding them. This was a direct reference to China which is always in default on this count in its disputes with the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea.

The Japanese PM delineated three principles in an apparent reference to China’s heavy-handedness in South China Sea conflicts focussing on the imperatives of their claims as per international laws, avoiding the use of force and coercion and settling disputes through dialogues.

In this connection he implicitly called on China to honour the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of the Seas and desist from unilateral actions.

Concluding Overall Observations

Japan seems to have been strategically pushed into a corner by China by its unremitting conflict escalation both in the South China Sea and the East China Sea.

The assertions made by Japanese PM Abe in his Keynote Address at Singapore while not naming China directly contained implicit references to China’s destabilising provocations in the South China Sea region and reflected the extreme “strategic distrust” of China by the countries of the Indo Pacific region.

Analytically, it can be read that with the Japanese PM pulled no punches on China’s such behaviour and politically signalled that Japan would stand up squarely to face China in its attempts to establish hegemony in the region.

Japan can expect considerable support from Asian nations in this direction. There is a widespread palpable strategic concern in the Indo Pacific of a looming China Threat.

India needs to invest sizeably in its Strategic Partnership with Japan  which stands recommended in an earlier Paper of mine on the imperatives of a Japan-India-Vietnam Strategic Trilateral.

The post Japan Prime Minister Signals Assertive Asian Security Role At Shangri-La Dialogue 2014 – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

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