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IS Releases Propaganda Video About Kobani

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Islamist militants known as IS have released a video showing British hostage John Cantlie walking around what he says are the ruins of the besieged Syrian Kurdish border town of Kobani.

In an apparently scripted “report” Cantlie says the battle for the town “is nearly over” and the militants are “mopping up now”.

Kobani has witnessed intense fighting between Kurdish militias and IS for more than a month.

The video which is unverified and taken off social media appears to be one of a series featuring the 43-year-oldjournalist, who was seized in late 2012.

Latest verified footage from Kobani shows US-led airstrikes on IS positions.

On Monday there were heavy clashes and sporadic exchanges of mortar fire in the town.

A deployment of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters which Turkey said could cross its border into Syria to help defend Kobani has not yet arrived.

Original article

The post IS Releases Propaganda Video About Kobani appeared first on Eurasia Review.


Risky Business – OpEd

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Here we go again.

Last week, the country’s biggest mortgage lenders scored a couple of key victories that will allow them to ease lending standards, crank out more toxic assets, and inflate another housing bubble.  Here’s what’s going on:

On Monday,  the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), Mel Watt, announced that Fannie and Freddie would slash the minimum down-payment requirement on mortgages from 5 percent to 3 percent while making loans more available to people with spotty credit. If this all sounds hauntingly familiar, it should. It was less than 7 years ago that shoddy lending practices blew up the financial system precipitating the deepest slump since the Great Depression. Now Watt wants to repeat that catastrophe by pumping up another credit bubble. Here’s the story from the Washington Post:

“When it comes to taking out a mortgage, two factors can stand in the way: the price of the mortgage,…and the borrower’s credit profile.”

On Monday, the head of the agency that oversees the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac outlined … how he plans to make it easier for borrowers on both fronts. Mel Watt, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, did not give exact timing on the initiatives. But most of them are designed to encourage the industry to extend mortgages to a broader swath of borrowers.

Here’s what Watt said about his plans in a speech at the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention in Las Vegas:

Saving enough money for a downpayment is often cited as the toughest hurdle for first-time buyers in particular. Watt said that Fannie and Freddie are working to develop “sensible and responsible” guidelines that will allow them to buy mortgages with down payments as low as 3 percent, instead of the 5 percent minimum that both institutions currently require.”

Does Watt really want to “encourage the industry to extend mortgages to a broader swath of borrowers” or is this just another scam to enrich bankers at the expense of the public?  It might be worth noting at this point that Watt’s political history casts doubt on his real objectives.   According to Open Secrets, among the Top 20 contributors to Watt’s 2009-2010 campaign were Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc., Bank of New York Mellon, American bankers Association, US Bancorp, and The National Association of Realtors. (“Top 20 Contributors, 2009-2010“, Open Secrets)

Man oh man,  this guy’s got all of Wall Street rooting for him. Why is that, I wonder? Is it because he’s faithfully executing his office and defending the public’s interests or is it because he’s a reliable stooge who brings home the bacon for fatcat bankers and their brood?

This is such a farce, isn’t it? I mean, c’mon, do you really think that the big banks make political contributions out of the kindness of their heart or because they want something in return?  And do you really think that a guy who is supported by Goldman Sachs has your “best interests” in mind?  Don’t make me laugh.

The reason that Obama picked Watt was because he knew he could be trusted to do whatever Wall Street wanted, and that’s precisely what he’s doing. Smaller down payments and looser underwriting are just the beginning; teaser rates, balloon payments, and liars loans are bound to follow. In fact, there’s a funny story about credit scores in the Washington Post that explains what’s really going on behind the scenes. See if you can figure it out:

 “Most housing advocates agree that a bigger bang for the buck would come from having lenders lower the unusually high credit scores that they’re now demanding from borrowers.

After the housing market tanked, Fannie and Freddie forced the industry to buy back billions of dollars in loans. In a bid to protect themselves from further financial penalties, lenders reacted by imposing credit scores that exceed what Fannie and Freddie require. Housing experts say the push to hold lenders accountable for loose lending practices of the past steered the industry toward the highest-quality borrowers, undermining the mission of Fannie and Freddie to serve the broader population, including low- to moderate- income borrowers.

Today, the average credit score on a loan backed by Fannie and Freddie is close to 745, versus about 710 in the early 2000s, according to Moody’s Analytics. And lenders say they won’t ease up until the government clarifies rules that dictate when Fannie and Freddie can take action against them.” (Washington Post)

Can you see what’s going on? The banks have been requiring higher credit scores than Fannie or Freddie.

But why? After all, the banks are in the lending business, so the more loans they issue the more money they make, right?

Right. But the banks don’t care about the short-term dough. They’d rather withhold credit and slow the economy in order to blackmail the government into doing what they want.

And what do they want?

They want looser regulations and they want to know that Fannie and Freddie aren’t going to demand their money back (“put backs”) when they sell them crappy mortgages that won’t get repaid. You see, the banks figure that once they’ve off-loaded a loan to Fannie and Freddie, their job is done.  So, if the mortgage blows up two months later, they don’t think they should have to pay for it. They want the taxpayer to pay for it. That’s what they’ve been whining about for the last 5 years. And that’s what Watt is trying to fix for them. Here’s the story from Dave Dayen:

“Watt signaled to mortgage bankers that they can loosen their underwriting standards, and that Fannie and Freddie will purchase the loans anyway, without much recourse if they turn sour. The lending industry welcomed the announcement as a way to ease uncertainty and boost home purchases, a key indicator for the economy. But it’s actually a surrender to the incorrect idea that expanding risky lending can create economic growth.

Watt’s remarks come amid a concerted effort by the mortgage industry to roll back regulations meant to prevent the type of housing market that nearly obliterated the economy in 2008. Bankers have complained to the media that the oppressive hand of government prevents them from lending to anyone with less-than-perfect credit. Average borrower credit scores are historically high, and lenders make even eligible borrowers jump through enough hoops to garner publicity. Why, even Ben Bernanke can’t get a refinance done! (Actually, he could, and fairly easily, but the anecdote serves the industry’s argument.)

(“The Mortgage Industry Is Strangling the Housing Market and Blaming the Government“, Dave Dayen, The New Republic)

Can you see what a fraud this is?  6 years have passed since Lehman crashed and the scum-sucking bankers are still  fighting tooth-and-nail to unwind the meager provisions that have been put in place to avoid another system-shattering disaster. It’s crazy. These guys should all be in Gitmo pounding rocks and instead they’re setting the regulatory agenda. Explain that to me? And this whole thing about blackmailing the government because they don’t want to be held responsible for the bad mortgages they sold to the GSE’s is particularly irritating. Here’s more from Dave Dayen:

“After the housing market tanked, Fannie and Freddie forced the industry to buy back billions of dollars in loans. In a bid to protect themselves from further financial penalties, lenders reacted by imposing credit scores that exceed what Fannie and Freddie require. ….And lenders say they won’t ease up until the government clarifies rules that dictate when Fannie and Freddie can take action against them.”

So the industry has engaged in an insidious tactic: tightening lending well beyond required standards, and then claiming the GSEs make it impossible for them to do business. For example, Fannie and Freddie require a minimum 680 credit score to purchase most loans, but lenders are setting their targets at 740. They are rejecting eligible borrowers….so they can profit much more from a regulation-free zone down the line.

So, I ask you, dear reader; is that blackmail or is it blackmail?

And what does Watt mean when he talks about “developing sensible and responsible guidelines’ that will allow them (borrowers) to buy mortgages with down payments as low as 3 percent”?

What a joke.  Using traditional underwriting standards, (the likes of which had been used for  the entire post-war period until we handed the system over to the banks) a lender would require a 10 or 20 percent down, decent credit scores, and a job. The only reason Watt wants to wave those requirements is so the banks can fire-up the old credit engine and dump more crap-ass mortgages on Uncle Sam.  That’s the whole thing in a nutshell. It’s infuriating!

Let me fill you in on a little secret: Down payments matter! In fact, people who put more down on a home (who have “more skin in the game”) are much less likely to default.  According to David Battany, executive vice president of PennyMac, “there is a strong correlation between down payments to mortgage default. The risk of default almost doubles with every 1%.”

Economist Dean Baker says the same thing in a recent blog post:

“The delinquency rate, which closely follows the default rate, is several times higher for people who put 5 percent or less down on a house than for people who put 20 percent or more down.

Contrary to what some folks seem to believe, getting moderate income people into a home that they subsequently lose to foreclosure or a distressed sale is not an effective way for them to build wealth, even if it does help build the wealth of the banks.”

(“Low Down Payment Mortgages Have Much Higher Default Rates“, Dean Baker, CEPR)

Now take a look at this chart from Dr. Housing Bubble which helps to illustrate the dangers of low down payments in terms of increased delinquencies:

whitney1Data on mortgage delinquencies by downpayment. Source:  Felix Salmon 

“When the mortgage industry starts complaining about the 14 million people who would be denied the chance to buy a qualified mortgage if they don’t have a 5% downpayment, it’s worth remembering that qualified mortgages for people who don’t have a 5% downpayment have a delinquency rate of 16% over the course of the whole housing cycle.” (“Why a sizable down payment is important“, Dr. Housing Bubble)

So despite what Watt thinks,  higher down payments mean fewer defaults, fewer foreclosures, fewer shocks to the market, and greater financial stability.

And here’s something else that Watt should mull over:  The housing market isn’t broken and doesn’t need to be fixed.  It’s doing just fine, thank you very much. First of all, sales and prices are already above their historic trend. Check it out from economist Dean Baker:

 “If we compare total sales (new and existing homes) with sales in the pre-bubble years 1993-1995, they would actually be somewhat higher today, even after adjusting for population growth. While there may be an issue of many people being unable to qualify for mortgages because of their credit history, this does not appear to be having a negative effect on the state of market. Prices are already about 20 percent above their trend levels.” (“Total Home Sales Are At or Above Trend“, Dean Baker, CEPR)

Got it? Sales and prices are ALREADY where they should be, so there’s no need to lower down payments and ease credit to start another orgy of speculation. We don’t need that.

Second, the quality of today’s mortgages ARE BETTER THAN EVER, so why mess with success? Take a look at this from Black Knight Financial Services and you’ll see what I mean:

“Today, the Data and Analytics division of Black Knight Financial Services … released its November Mortgage Monitor Report, which found that loans originated in 2013 are proving to be the best-performing mortgages on record…..

“Looking at the most current mortgage origination data, several points become clear,” said Herb Blecher, senior vice president of Black Knight Financial Services’ Data & Analytics division. “First is that heightened credit standards have resulted in this year being the best-performing vintage on record. Even adjusting for some of these changes, such as credit scores and loan-to-values, we are seeing total delinquencies for 2013 loans at extremely low levels across every product category.”

(“Black Knight Financial Services’ Mortgage Performance Data Shows 2013 Loans Best Performing on Record“, LPS)

Okay, so sales and prices are fine and mortgage quality is excellent. So why not leave the bloody system alone? As the saying goes: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But you know why they’re going to keep tinkering with the housing market. Everyone knows why. It’s because the banks can’t inflate another big-honking credit bubble unless they churn out zillions of shi**y mortgages that they offload onto Fannie and Freddie. That’s just the name of the game: Grind out the product (mortgages), pack it into sausages (securities and bonds), leverage up to your eyeballs (borrow as much as humanly possible), and dump the junk-paper on yield-chasing baboons who think they’re buying triple A “risk free” bonds.

Garbage in, garbage out.  Isn’t this how the banks make their money?

You bet it is, and in that regard things have gotten a helluva a lot scarier since last Wednesday’s announcement that the banks are NOT going to be required to hold any capital against the securities they create from bundles of mortgages.

Huh?

You read that right. According to the New York Times:  “there will be no risk retention to speak of, at least on residential mortgage loans that are securitized.”

But how can that be, after all, it wasn’t subprime mortgages that blew up the financial system (subprime mortgages only totaled $1.5 at their peak), but the nearly $10 trillion in subprime infected mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that stopped trading in the secondary market after a French Bank stopped taking redemptions in July 2007. (a full year before the crisis brought down Lehman Brothers) . That’s what brought the whole rattling financial system to a grinding halt. Clearly, if the banks had had a stake in those shabby MBS— that is, if they were required to set aside 5 or 10 percent capital as insurance in the event that some of these toxic assets went south– then the whole financial collapse could have been avoided, right?

Right. It could have been avoided. But the banks don’t want to hold any capital against their stockpile of rancid assets, in fact, they don’t want to use their own freaking money at all, which is why 90 percent of all mortgages are financed by Uncle Sugar. It’s because the banks are just as broke as they were in 2008 when the system went off the cliff. Here’s a summary from the New York Times:

“Once upon a time, those who made loans would profit only if the loan were paid back. If the borrower defaulted, the lender would suffer.

That idea must have seemed quaint in 2005, as the mortgage lending boom reached a peak on the back of mushrooming private securitizations of mortgages, which were intended to transfer the risk away from those who made the loans to investors with no real knowledge of what was going on.

Less well remembered is that there was a raft of real estate securitizations once before, in the 1920s. The securities were not as complicated, but they had the same goal — making it possible for lenders to profit without risking capital.

The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 set out to clean that up. Now, there would be “risk retention.” Lenders would have to have “skin in the game.” Not 100 percent of the risk, as in the old days when banks made mortgage loans and retained them until they were paid back, but enough to make the banks care whether the loans were repaid.

At least that was the idea. The details were left to regulators, and it took more than four years for them to settle on the details, which they did this week.

The result is that there will be no risk retention to speak of, at least on residential mortgage loans that are securitized.

“…..Under Dodd-Frank, the general rule was to be that if a lender wanted to securitize mortgages, that lender had to keep at least 5 percent of the risk…….But when the final rule was adopted this week, that idea was dropped.”  (“Banks Again Avoid Having Any Skin in the Game”, New York Times)

No skin in the game, you say?

That means the taxpayer is accepting 100 percent of the risk. How fair is that?

Let’s review: The banks used to lend money to creditworthy borrowers and keep the loans on their books.

They don’t do that anymore, in fact, they’re not really banks at all, they’re just intermediaries who sell their loans to the USG or investors.

This arrangement has changed the incentives structure. Now the goal is quantity not quality.  “How many loans can I churn-out and dump on Uncle Sam or mutual funds etc.” That’s how bankers think now.  That’s the objective.

Regulations are bad because regulations stipulate that loans must be of a certain quality, which reduces the volume of loans and shrinks profits. (Can’t have that!) Therefore, the banks must use their money to hand-pick their own regulators  (“You’re doin’ a heckuva job, Mel”) and ferociously lobby against any rules that limit their ability to issue credit to anyone who can fog a mirror. Now you understand how modern-day banking works.

It would be hard to imagine a more corrupt system.

 

The post Risky Business – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Empathy Deficit Disorder – OpEd

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Commenting on a recent student suicide at an Alaska high school, Alaska’s Republican Congressman Don Young said suicide didn’t exist in Alaska before “government largesse” gave residents an entitlement mentality.

“When people had to work and had to provide and had to keep warm by putting participation in cutting wood and catching the fish and killing the animals, we didn’t have the suicide problem,” he said. Government handouts tell people “you are not worth anything but you are going to get something for nothing.”

Alaska has the highest rate of suicide per capita in America – almost twice the national average, and a leading cause of death in Alaska for young people ages 15 to 24 — but I doubt it’s because Alaskans lead excessively easy lives.

Every time I visit Alaska I’m struck by how hard people there have to work to make ends meet. The state is the last American frontier, where people seem more self-reliant than anywhere in the lower forty eight.

It’s true that every Alaskan receives an annual dividend from a portion of state oil revenues (this year it will be almost $2,000 per person), but research shows no correlation between the amount of the dividend from year to year and the suicide rate.

Suicide is a terrible tragedy for those driven to it and for their loved ones. What possessed Congressman Young to turn it into a political football?

Young has since apologized for his remark. Or, more accurately, his office has apologized. “Congressman Young did not mean to upset anyone with his well-intentioned message,” says a news release from his congressional office, “and in light of the tragic events affecting the Wasilla High School community, he should have taken a much more sensitive approach.”

Well-intentioned? More sensitive approach?

Young’s comment would be offensive regardless of who uttered it. That he’s a member of the United States Congress — Alaska’s sole representative in the House – makes it downright alarming.

You might expect someone who’s in the business of representing others to have a bit more empathy. In fact, you’d think empathy would be the minimum qualification to hold public office in a democracy.

Sadly, Young is hardly alone. A remarkable number of people who are supposed to be devoting their lives to representing others seem clueless about how their constituents actually live and what they need.

Last week New Jersey Governor Chris Christie groused to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “I’m tired of hearing about the minimum wage.”

No doubt some in the audience shared Christie’s view. It was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, after all.

But many of the Governor’s constituents are not tired of hearing about the minimum wage. They depend on it.

New Jersey has among the largest number of working poor in America. Some 50,000 people work for the state’s minimum wage of $8.25 an hour.

This isn’t nearly enough to lift them out of poverty. The state’s cost of living is one of the five highest of all states.

In any event, doesn’t hearing from constituents about what they need go with the job of representing them?

Christie went on to tell his audience “I don’t think there’s a mother or a father sitting around the kitchen table tonight in America saying, ‘You know, honey, if our son or daughter could just make a higher minimum wage, my God, all of our dreams would be realized.’ Is that what parents aspire to?”

A minimum-wage job is no one’s version of the American dream. But Christie is wrong to suppose most minimum-wage workers are teenagers. Most are adults who are major breadwinners for their families.

Christie seems to suffer the same ailment that afflicts Alaska’s Don Young.

Call it Empathy Deficit Disorder. Some Democrats have it, but the disorder seems especially widespread among Republicans.

These politicians have no idea what people who are hard up in America are going through.

Most Americans aren’t suicidal, and most don’t work at the minimum wage. But many are deeply anxious about their jobs and panicked about how they’re going to pay next month’s bills.

Almost two-thirds of working Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

And they’re worried sick about whether their kids will ever make it.

They need leaders who understand their plight instead of denying it.

They deserve politicians who want to fix it rather than blame it on those who have to depend on public assistance, or who need a higher minimum wage, in order to get by.

At the very least, they need leaders who empathize with what they’re going through, not those with Empathy Deficit Disorder.

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Kazakhstan: UN Review To Highlight Abuses

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United Nations member countries should use an upcoming UN review of Kazakhstan’s rights record to urge its government to adopt overdue reforms. Kazakhstan’s rights record will be in international spotlight during the country’s second Universal Periodic Review (UPR) on October 30, 2014.

“Kazakhstan’s rights record has taken a serious turn for the worse in recent years,” said Mihra Rittmann, Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The UPR is a key opportunity for Kazakhstan’s partners to show concern about this trend, and tell the government that it needs to institute meaningful reforms.”

The human rights situation in Kazakhstan has significantly deteriorated since its previous scrutiny under the UPR procedure in 2010, with authorities cracking down on free speech and peaceful dissent, imprisoning government critics, and tightening controls over freedom of association, religion, and assembly.

At its previous UPR, Kazakhstan accepted key recommendations concerning freedom of speech, including amending legislation criminalizing libel; freedom of assembly, including adopting a new law on public assemblies; freedom of religion, specifically agreeing to allow religious groups to carry out their peaceful activities free from government interference; to uphold fair trial standards; and to apply a zero tolerance approach to torture.

Yet, the record shows that Kazakhstan has fallen far short of these commitments, ignoring some and further backsliding with respect to others.

While Kazakhstan has long limited key civil and political rights, authorities began an overt crackdown on fundamental freedoms following extended, unresolved labor strikes in the oil sector which ended in violent clashes in December 2011, when police killed 12 people.

In a submission ahead of the UPR, Human Rights Watch documented how the Kazakhstan government failed to live up to previous UPR commitments and to international human rights standards more generally, in particular by:

  • Suppressing free speech and dissent through misuse of overly broad laws such as the offense of “inciting social discord”;
  • Limiting peaceful assembly by fining and imprisoning dozens of people who have attempted to stage peaceful protests;
  • Imprisoning several government critics and labor rights activists in trials that did not meet international fair trial standards, in particular opposition leader Vladimir Kozlov, labor activists Rosa Tuletaeva and Maksat Dosmagambetov, and civil society activist Vadim Kuramshin. In addition, authorities are holding Zinaida Mukhortova, a lawyer, in forced psychiatric detention;
  • Failing to investigate serious and credible allegations of ill-treatment and torture, thereby allowing perpetrators to go free and denying victims justice;
  • Ushering in a highly restrictive religion law in October 2011 that resulted in the closure of hundreds of small religious groups unable to meet membership requirements for re-registration.

“Kazakhstan made a number of important human rights pledges during the previous review that it has not fulfilled,” Rittmann said. “The upcoming UN review is a critical moment to flag Kazakhstan’s unfulfilled promises and underscore its need to implement them without further delay.”

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Iraqi Peshmerga Fighters Headed To Fight Islamic State Militants On Syria

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Iraqi Kurdish fighters are one their way to the northern Syrian town of Kobani to help Kurds there battle the Islamic State militants who have been trying for weeks to take control of the area.

A group of the peshmerga forces flew into Turkey early Wednesday, and then proceeded toward the border under escort by Turkish security forces.

A convoy carrying another group with heavy weapons also crossed into Turkey by land Wednesday on its way to Syria.

Turkey’s government has said it will not send it own troops to join the fight in Kobani, but agreed last week to allow 150 fighters from Iraq’s Kurdistan region to pass through its territory.

Turkey has balked at sending its own troops because it says the Syrian Kurds fighting in Kobani are linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has waged a three-decade fight with Turkey for Kurdish cultural and political rights.

The fighting in Kobani continued Tuesday, with the U.S. saying it launched four more aerial attacks on Islamic State positions. The U.S.-led coalition also launched nine other strikes against the Sunni militants in Iraq.

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ISS-Bound NASA Rocket Explodes On Takeoff In Virginia

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An unmanned rocket exploded shortly after takeoff Tuesday evening on Virginia’s eastern shore. Orbital Sciences’ Antares rocket was carrying thousands of pounds of equipment to restock the International Space Station.

The launch was supposed to be the third of eight planned Orbital missions to ferry gear and food to astronauts aboard the ISS. The rocket had some 5,000 pounds of food, supplies and science experiments, which all were engulfed in a fireball just above NASA’s Wallop’s Island facility.

The team on the ground has confirmed there are no injuries, although because of “classified crypto equipment” onboard, it is in the process of securing the surrounding area, chatter on the livestream of the launch said.

Orbital called the enormous blast a “vehicle anomaly” on Twitter.

The Antares was originally supposed to lift off on Monday, but the launch was postponed 10 minutes before take-off because a sailboat ended up in the restricted danger zone south of the Virginia complex, the Associated Press reported. Controllers promptly halted the countdown.

NASA spokesman Jay Bolden said that the investigation into the explosion could take anywhere from six months to a year. The US space agency has called on local residents to report any debris they find to help with the investigation.

Each delivery by Orbital Science’s unmanned Cygnus capsule honors a deceased person linked to the company or a commercial spaceflight. Tuesday’s mission was a tribute to Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton, who led a rocket company until his death in 1993. As a retro-style homage, Orbital Sciences flight controllers wore short-sleeved white shirts and skinny black ties.

While the ISS crew will not get their Halloween presents, they have enough supplies to last until March, NASA’s International Space Station program manager Mike Suffredini said at the press conference. “I think if no other vehicle showed up, we could go to into March,” he said.

However, the explosion gave astronauts some excitement as they watched the rocket launch live from the space station.

The cost of the launch was around $200 million, while the total cost for the cargo is yet to be determined, NASA revealed at the press conference.

Along with 32 mini-research satellites, a meteor tracker and a tank of high-pressure nitrogen to replenish a vestibule used by spacewalking astronauts, the company stowed a post-Halloween surprise for the two Americans, three Russians and one German aboard the ISS, Orbital said at a prelaunch news conference Sunday.

Orbital Sciences, a US-based company designing and manufacturing small- and medium-sized rocket systems, has been contracted by NASA to resupply the ISS.

Also onboard the rocket was Planetary Resources’ Arkyd 3 telescope prototype, which is being developed to explore space and identify natural resources from asteroids. The project was privately funded and raised $1.5 million in a 2013 Kickstarter campaign.

The prototype destroyed in the explosion was only a demonstrator, meant as a stepping stone to the first Arkyd 100 telescope, which the company plans to launch in 2015, Popular Mechanics reported.

Some of the cargo that Antares failed to deliver Tuesday will be taken up to the ISS in December, Suffredini added. It will be delivered via a SpaceX craft, which has already been scheduled to take off in a separate $1.6 billion launch.

SpaceX, a privately owned company headed by technology billionaire Elon Musk, has been working to be the first commercial company to take astronauts to space as early as 2017 via reusable spacecraft. However, its launches have not all gone smoothly too, with an unmanned Falcon 9R rocket exploding mid-air late August during a test flight.

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Kerry: US To Intensify Law Enforcement, Intel Sharing With Canada To Counter Terrorism

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The United States will intesify the security control on the border with Canada, following the recent shooting in the country, Secretary of State John Kerry announced.

“We will intensify our law enforcement, border protection and intel sharing [between the United States and Canada],” Kerry said during a press conference following a meeting with Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird.

Kerry and Baird met to discuss security issues that the countries face after the recent shootings in Canada.

On October 20, Canadian Martin Rouleau hit two soldiers with his car, killing one and injuring the other in St. Jean-sur Richelieu, Quebec. Two days later, a lone gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau killed a Canadian soldier at the country’s Parliament that subsequently shut down the capital.

“We [US and Canada] will work quietly and carefully in the next days and months, both of us together in the same fashion that we work on almost every challenge that we face together,” Kerry said.

John Kerry pledged that both the Obama administration and the US Department of State would work closely with Canada to prevent another terrorist attack from happening.

On Monday, Canadian legislators passed “The Protection of Canada from Terrorist” Act, that allows the Canadian Security Intelligence Service authority to collect information from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand on Canadian terror suspects. The bill also gives the country the ability to easily remove Canadian citizens or dual citizens, convicted of terrorism or those, who left the country to fight for terrorist organizations.

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Tunisia: Terrorists Threaten New Attacks

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By Jamel Arfaoui

Tunisian troops killed six terrorists in a shootout last Friday (October 24th) and now their extremist allies are vowing revenge.

Five female militants were among those killed in the operation in Oued Ellil, outside Tunis.

In response, a statement from al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb urged fellow jihadists in Libya to launch fresh attacks against Tunisia.

The statement, signed by Abou Achbal al-Maghribi, a code name for a Tunisian jihadi, called for sending support to terrorists in Tunisia, saying, “You all should send strict statements that include threats and intimidation to the government of blasphemy and heresy in Tunisia.”

The terror statement went on to ask for weapons and explicitly demanded that followers conduct armed operations in Tunisia. “Go to Tunisia and storm with your lions the dens of infidelity and villainy with rocket launchers and booby traps,” the jihadist said.

Commenting on this statement, Tarek Ayari, an expert on Islamist groups said, “It seems that the Tunisian terrorists, by turning to terrorists who had taken refuge in Libya are playing their last card, after the noose around them was tightened and they have received many blows, most recently in Kebili and Oued Ellil.”

In a statement to Magharebia, the Tunisian defence ministry spokesman said authorities were “taking all threats seriously”.

“We are co-ordinating with the Ministry of Interior and are ready to face all possibilities, especially since we have considered the possibility of a scenario where these groups react to the blows they have received in recent times,” Lieutenant Colonel Belhassen Oueslati continued.

Oueslati said that if terrorists had the ability to carry out any attack, they would have done it on election day.

“Nevertheless we remain vigilant because they entered the desperation phase and desperate people are willing to do anything. We are also afraid of isolated operations carried out by lone individuals and this pushes us toward more vigilance,” he said.

For her part, criminologist Leila Mchichi told Magharebia that there was nothing new in the latest threat. “Extremist groups are not waiting for invitations like this to conduct their terrorist crimes. They already have the green light to conduct them whenever they have a chance,” she said.

“I think that what is required is to intensify security co-ordination with Libya because Libya has turned into a human and logistical reservoir of extremist groups,” Mchichi added.

Mohamed Mahmoud Fazzani, a Libyan academic, said that “The south of Libya has become a haven for militants after the French military campaign in Mali and the fall of the regime in Libya.”

He pointed out that the border between Niger, Libya and Algeria was “difficult to monitor”, adding that: “This vast region is porous and no military force can claim the ability to control it unless they obtain the latest technology.”

A spokesman for the head of the general staff of the Libyan army, Colonel Ahmed Mismari, revealed to AFP last week the existence of militant training camps in the south, outside the state’s authority.

“The army is suffering a lack of resources and capabilities and is unable to provide regular patrols in those areas, especially since it is waging fierce battles in the north in an effort to regain control of the cities of Tripoli and Benghazi,” he explained.

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Morocco Budget Sparks Concern

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By Siham Ali

Moroccans complain that the draft Finance Act does not go far enough.

One point of contention is the number of public-sector jobs it aims to create – just 22,500.

As it stands, the bill presented to parliament on October 20th will not be able to tackle the challenge of unemployment or overcome the shortage of human resources in several public sectors, economist Jalal Bassit said.

He argues that since the Benkirane government took office, it has reduced recruitment to the public sector without considering the required numbers of doctors and nurses at hospitals and healthcare centres, teachers, engineers and so on.

In his view, the state should shoulder its responsibility in this area and boost youth employment.

But according to Employment Minister Abdeslam Seddiki, the government plans to adopt several measures in 2015.

These include the Moubadara scheme, which aims to find jobs for youths in civil society organisations.

The objective is also to improve the performance of initial, basic, technical, vocational and higher training systems, Seddiki said.

A bill was also drawn up to reduce the duration of internships and give trainees social security entitlements during their placements.

According to sociologist Nawal Chaouki, the government should give tax breaks to businesses to encourage them to hire young people.

These businesses must be monitored to ensure that the rights of young trainees are respected and to avoid irregularities, she told Magharebia.

Discussions about the draft budget are also focusing on the provisional growth rate of 4.4%. Experts say this will not achieve the desired level of economic development.

Another concern is the reduction of the subsidy budget to 23 billion dirhams, which could create social tensions, sociologist Zahra Malifi said.

Especially now that tax on several food items will rise in 2015, she added.

Many people claim that the government is reducing people’s spending power directly instead of taking the necessary funds from elsewhere.

Salima Charaf, a teacher, said that instead of overtaxing items such as pasta, rice and tea, the government should first tackle the informal sector in order to boost tax revenues and combat tax evasion, because several companies are not obeying the law in this respect.

For Karim Ouardani, a 21-year-old student, the government’s priority should be education.

“Although the budget allocated in the Finance Law is 55.3 billion dirhams for both education departments, this is not enough,” he commented.

“We need to consider not only the quantity of learners, but also the quality of the education that is provided so that we can avoid problems in terms of access to the job market,” he added.

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How Israel Is Turning Gaza Into A Super-Max Prison – OpEd

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By Jonathan Cook

It is astonishing that the reconstruction of Gaza, bombed into the Stone Age according to the explicit goals of an Israeli military doctrine known as “Dahiya”, has tentatively only just begun two months after the end of the fighting.

According to the United Nations, 100,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged, leaving 600,000 Palestinians – nearly one in three of Gaza’s population – homeless or in urgent need of humanitarian help.

Roads, schools and the electricity plant to power water and sewerage systems are in ruins. The cold and wet of winter are approaching. Aid agency Oxfam warns that at the current rate of progress it may take 50 years to rebuild Gaza.

Where else in the world apart from the Palestinian territories would the international community stand by idly as so many people suffer – and not from a random act of God but willed by fellow humans?

The reason for the hold-up is, as ever, Israel’s “security needs”. Gaza can be rebuilt but only to the precise specifications laid down by Israeli officials.

We have been here before. Twelve years ago, Israeli bulldozers rolled into Jenin camp in the West Bank in the midst of the second intifada. Israel had just lost its largest number of soldiers in a single battle as the army struggled through a warren of narrow alleys. In scenes that shocked the world, Israel turned hundreds of homes to rubble.

With residents living in tents, Israel insisted on the terms of Jenin camp’s rehabilitation. The alleys that assisted the Palestinian resistance in its ambushes had to go. In their place, streets were built wide enough for Israeli tanks to patrol.

In short, both the Palestinians’ humanitarian needs and their right in international law to resist their oppressor were sacrificed to satisfy Israel’s desire to make the enforcement of its occupation more efficient.

It is hard not to view the agreement reached in Cairo this month for Gaza’s reconstruction in similar terms.

Donors pledged $5.4 billion – though, based on past experience, much of it won’t materialise. In addition, half will be immediately redirected to the distant West Bank to pay off the Palestinian Authority’s mounting debts. No one in the international community appears to have suggested that Israel, which has asset-stripped both the West Bank and Gaza in different ways, foot the bill.

The Cairo agreement has been widely welcomed, though the terms on which Gaza will be rebuilt have been only vaguely publicised. Leaks from worried insiders, however, have fleshed out the details.

One Israeli analyst has compared the proposed solution to transforming a third-world prison into a modern US super-max incarceration facility. The more civilised exterior will simply obscure its real purpose: not to make life better for the Palestinian inmates, but to offer greater security to the Israeli guards.

Humanitarian concern is being harnessed to allow Israel to streamline an eight-year blockade that has barred many essential items, including those needed to rebuild Gaza after previous assaults.

The agreement passes nominal control over Gaza’s borders and the transfer of reconstruction materials to the PA and UN in order to bypass and weaken Hamas. But the overseers – and true decision-makers – will be Israel. For example, it will get a veto over who supplies the massive quantities of cement needed. That means much of the donors’ money will end up in the pockets of Israeli cement-makers and middlemen.

But the problem runs deeper than that. The system must satisfy Israel’s desire to know where every bag of cement or steel rod ends up, to prevent Hamas rebuilding its home-made rockets and network of tunnels.

The tunnels, and element of surprise they offered, were the reason Israel lost so many soldiers. Without them, Israel will have a freer hand next time it wants to “mow the grass”, as its commanders call Gaza’s repeated destruction.

Last week Israel’s defence minister Moshe Yaalon warned that rebuilding Gaza would be conditioned on Hamas’s good behaviour. Israel wanted to be sure “the funds and equipment are not used for terrorism, therefore we are closely monitoring all of the developments”.

The PA and UN will have to submit to a database reviewed by Israel the details of every home that needs rebuilding. Indications are that Israeli drones will watch every move on the ground.
Israel will be able to veto anyone it considers a militant – which means anyone with a connection to Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Presumably, Israel hopes this will dissuade most Palestinians from associating with the resistance movements.

Further, it is hard not to assume that the supervision system will provide Israel with the GPS co-ordinates of every home in Gaza, and the details of every family, consolidating its control when it next decides to attack. And Israel can hold the whole process to ransom, pulling the plug at any moment.

Sadly, the UN – desperate to see relief for Gaza’s families – has agreed to conspire in this new version of the blockade, despite its violating international law and Palestinians’ rights.

Washington and its allies, it seems, are only too happy to see Hamas and Islamic Jihad deprived of the materials needed to resist Israel’s next onslaught.

The New York Times summed up the concern: “What is the point of raising and spending many millions of dollars … to rebuild the Gaza Strip just so it can be destroyed in the next war?”
For some donors exasperated by years of sinking money into a bottomless hole, upgrading Gaza to a super-max prison looks like a better return on their investment.

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

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Canada’s Heart Of Darkness – OpEd

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By Jim Miles

Once upon a time, Canada was able to create the illusion that it was the “peaceable kingdom”, an illusion accepted domestically and arguably by most of the rest of the world. This history has been well discredited with newer historical research outlining how Canada’s position as a “peacekeeper,” generally under UN auspices, remained effectively within the realm of U.S. foreign policy, just with a kinder gentler face.

Over the past decade, Canada has made a clear and distinct turn towards its inner ‘heart of darkness’, becoming much more overt about its right wing militarized alignment with the U.S. empire and its demands. It has done so to the extent of front-running – or trying to out do – the hubris and arrogance of the U.S. in its declamations of its self-righteousness concerning international affairs (with similar impacts on domestic affairs).

Much if not all of this is due to Canada’s (neo)Conservative government under Stephen Harper. Harper himself has declared that Canada will be a different nation when he is finished with his reign of office. Harper’s background is of a fundamentalist-dominionist Christian ideology that he himself hides reasonably well but which shows up quite frequently in his supporters and in caucus. He is determined to create a domestic order that is ruled by giving freedom to corporations, in alliance with the banksters, to do as they require to harvest the wealth of the country for their own benefit.

The two recent attacks on uniformed Canadian soldiers by ‘lone wolf’ attackers is well known at least to those attending to western media. It was the latest incident on Parliament Hill with the murder of an Honour Guard at Ottawa’s War Memorial that has created the most significant response.

The government response while rightly denouncing the violence of the actions highlights some of the double standards and the direction that the current government wants to go. Many of the comments used descriptors such as “unexpected,” “shocking,” “senseless,” and “we’ll never be the same.”

What the comments truly highlight is the ignorance of the speakers concerning Canada’s role in global affairs historically and within current events in the Middle East. Some kind of action like this was probably very much expected (otherwise, why a watch list of 90+ individuals?), and while the act of murder is a shock to those witnessing it and suffering from it, it is not a shock in the political usage of the word. Senseless, yes, for those not cognizant of the various psychological combinations of disempowerment, drugs, alienation, and religious dogma. But the ‘senselessness’ goes deeper into Canada’s changing role in world affairs.

When Harper spoke to Parliament the day after the Ottawa killing, he spoke of the support he had received from other countries, mentioning by name the UK, Australia, the U.S. and Israel. An interesting conglomeration – of settler colonial states birthed by the racist empire of the British. Perhaps this is taking it too far, but it is as only as far as Harper has gone with his more militant foreign policy.

Without qualification Harper supports Israel’s ongoing use of warfare against the people of Gaza, supports the ideology of Israel’s foundational myths, and supports its actions in the West Bank and Jerusalem. He supported the U.S. in their role in destroying the government of Libya, to the extent of honouring the jet fighter pilots who bombed army units and infrastructure well beyond the intent of a ‘no fly zone’. He has sided with the other minions of the western powers in demonizing Putin while supporting the neo-Nazis in the Ukraine who overthrew a duly – if corrupt – elected government.

Ironically he has supported the U.S. in Syria by backing the Islamist militants trying to overthrow Assad, who have morphed into ISIS which is supported and supplied by Saudi Arabia and Qatar among other Arab countries who are our supposed allies. And these militants had morphed into shape from the U.S.’ obliteration of the Iraqi state, following its lack of success in Afghanistan. Turkey, a fellow NATO ally member, has until recently allowed ISIS to beat up on the Kurds as it plays out a triple game in the region without too much concern for which militant is the good guy or the bad guy.

These are Canada’s actions in the world today. Backing the U.S. in its increasing desperation to save its global hegemony, supporting autocratic monarchies (FYI – Saudi Arabia beheaded 26 people in August using only the authority of Wahhabi religious law to do so), supporting the attempts to revive the Cold War mythology of the evils of Russia and Putin, accusing them of threatening “NATO’s doorstep” when it is NATO that has advanced 700 km towards the Russian border, and supporting the ongoing colonial-settler apartheid of Israel.

And then we wonder why Canada has suffered these attacks. The ‘senseless’ aspect of it all is Canada’s role in global affairs. Various pundits in Canada are arguing about the significance of these events, in particular because the Harper regime was intending to introduce new legislation to give CSIS (Canada’s security services) and the RCMP (its national police force) and other police more surveillance powers and more powers of pre-emptive interventions.

Current Justice Minister Peter MacKay has defended the idea of new legislation allowing greater surveillance for terrorists, adding that it also allows for more surveillance of undefined criminal acts. With the current governments mind-set that could easily become translated to mean people who are protesting against corporations, for the environment, against government initiatives in general. To the pundits credit on CBC, they agreed that the idea was far too open and intrusive.

One of the pundits argued that Canadians would normalize the surveillance as the U.S. and the UK people had done, without changing the essence of democracy in those countries. It is easily arguable that true democracy does not exist in either of those countries as they are mainly controlled by the corporate-military-political elites. Sure, we all have a vote, but the real deals are made behind closed doors in secret meetings, a distinct lack of surveillance there.

One of the more ironic comments from a pundit returns to the idea of the violence of the people who committed these acts of terror. After mentioning briefly several violent acts by different people in the U.S. and Canada, Muslim and Christian alike, he said it was the “willingness to use violence that unites them.”

That sadly returns the argument back to the countries that gave verbal sympathy to the Canadian government after the second killing. It is these very countries, on a much larger scale, that have an underlying violence that unites them. Violence used domestically during their years of formation, violence ongoing against subjugated racial/religious groups, violence against other countries who are made to appear as the evil ‘other’ and thus to be destroyed or violently contained.

Final picture, of Justice Minister MacKay wearing a t-shirt printed with a high powered automatic rifle at a Conservative fundraiser supported by the National Firearms Association. Ironically, that same association does not want the surveillance bill,C-13, to pass, “We think that this is probably the most draconian step towards police interference in people’s lives since George Orwell revealed the potential for it when he wrote 1984.”

It comes full circle to the vanished illusion of the “peaceable kingdom.” Canada’s democracy and civility is a tarnished and cracked veneer disguising an underlying racial prejudice and fear of the ‘other’, a legacy of colonial-settler violence inherited from the British empire. Stephen Harper and his (neo) Conservative government have exposed these flaws in our supposedly democratic civilizational superiority with his violence towards the people of the world and the violence towards the land and people domestically. Our inner heart of darkness has been revealed.

- Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews for The Palestine Chronicle. Miles’ work is also presented globally through other alternative websites and news publications. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

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12 Nobel Peace Prize Winners Tell President Obama To Reveal Full Details Of US Torture Program And To Close Guantánamo – OpEd

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Yesterday (October 27), 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, sent a powerful and important letter to President Obama – himself a recipient of the prize — calling for him to disclose in full “the extent and use of torture and rendition by American soldiers, operatives, and contractors, as well as the authorization of torture and rendition by American officials,” and to provide “[c]lear planning and implementation for the closure of Guantánamo prison, putting an end to indefinite detention without due process.”

The 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners also called for verification that all “black sites” abroad have been closed, and also called for the “[a]doption of firm policy and oversight restating and upholding international law relating to conflict, including the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention against Torture, realigning the nation to the ideals and beliefs of their founders — the ideals that made the United States a standard to be emulated.”

It is unfortunate that these demands remain necessary — that, as the authors of the letter explain, “In recent decades, by accepting the flagrant use of torture and other violations of international law in the name of combating terrorism, American leaders have eroded the very freedoms and rights that generations of their young gave their lives to defend.”

From the very beginning, the letter, which I am posting below in its entirety, echoes everything that I and other campaigners — for the closure of Guantánamo and for those who authorized and implemented the US torture program to be held accountable — have been saying for many long years. The Nobel Peace Prize winners mention the importance of President Obama’s recent “open admission” that the US engaged in torture — when, in August, he said, with contrived casualness, “We tortured some folks,” and proceed to mention the current elephant in the room in America’s discussion with itself about torture — the 6,300-page Senate Intelligence Committee report into the torture program, commissioned in 2009, which was approved by the committee in December 2012. The intention was for a 480-page executive summary to be released, but it has been caught up in wrangling with the CIA, and it is still not known when it will be released — although the authors of the letter make a point of expressing their hope that it is imminent.

The authors then mention how some of them have experienced torture themselves — a powerful point that should not be lost on President Obama or the American people — and add that they “stand firmly with those Americans who are asking the US to bring its use of torture into the light of day, and for the United States to take the necessary steps to emerge from this dark period of its history, never to return.”

The letter then proceeds to examine how torture harms not just the tortured, but also the torturers — a point that is not made often enough — and then explains why it is so disappointing that America, founded on the rule of law, took a lawless trip to the “dark side” after the 9/11 attacks.

I hope you have time to read the letter, and to share it if you find it useful.

12 Nobel Peace Prize Winners’ Letter to President Obama about Torture, Rendition, Indefinite Detention and the Rule of Law

October 27, 2014

President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President,

The open admission by the President of the United States that the country engaged in torture is a first step in the US coming to terms with a grim chapter in its history. The subsequent release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence summary report will be an opportunity for the country and the world to see, in at least some detail, the extent to which their government and its representatives authorized, ordered and inflicted torture on their fellow human beings.

We are encouraged by Senator Dianne Feinstein’s recognition that “the creation of long-term, clandestine ‘black sites’ and the use of so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were terrible mistakes,” as well as the Senate Committee’s insistence that the report be truthful and not unnecessarily obscure the facts. They are important reminders that the justification of the torture of another human being is not a unanimous opinion in Washington, or among Americans as a whole.

We have reason to feel strongly about torture. Many of us among the Nobel Peace Prize laureates have seen firsthand the effects of the use of torture in our own countries. Some are torture survivors ourselves. Many have also been involved in the process of recovery, of helping to walk our countries and our regions out of the shadows of their own periods of conflict and abuse.

It is with this experience that we stand firmly with those Americans who are asking the US to bring its use of torture into the light of day, and for the United States to take the necessary steps to emerge from this dark period of its history, never to return.

The questions surrounding the use of torture are not as simple as how one should treat a suspected terrorist, or whether the highly dubious claim that torture produces “better” information than standard interrogation can justify its practice. Torture is, and always has been, justified in the minds of those who order it.

But the damage done by inflicting torture on a fellow human being cannot be so simplified. Nor is the harm done one-sided. Yes, the victims experience extreme physical and mental trauma, in some cases even losing their lives. But those inflicting the torture, as well as those ordering it, are nearly irreparably degraded by the practice. As torture continues to haunt the waking hours of its victims long after the conflict has passed, so it will continue to haunt its perpetrators.

When a nation’s leaders condone and even order torture, that nation has lost its way. One need only look to the regimes where torture became a systematic practice — from Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany to the French in Algeria, South Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge and others — to see the ultimate fate of a regime so divorced from their own humanity.

The practices of torture, rendition and imprisonment without due process by the United States have even greater ramifications. The United States, born of the concept of the inherent equality of all before the law, has been since its inception a hallmark that would be emulated by countries and entire regions of the world. For more than two centuries, it has been the enlightened ideals of America’s founders that changed civilization on Earth for the better, and made the US a giant among nations.

The conduct of the United States in the treatment of prisoners through two World Wars, upholding the tenets of the Geneva Convention while its own soldiers suffered greatly from violations at the hands of its enemies, again set a standard of treatment of prisoners that was emulated by other countries and regions. These are the Americans we know. And believing that most Americans still share these ideals, these are the Americans we speak to.

In recent decades, by accepting the flagrant use of torture and other violations of international law in the name of combating terrorism, American leaders have eroded the very freedoms and rights that generations of their young gave their lives to defend. They have again set an example that will be followed by others; only now, it is one that will be used to justify the use of torture by regimes around the world, including against American soldiers in foreign lands. In losing their way, they have made us all vulnerable.

From around the world, we will watch in the coming weeks as the release of the Senate findings on the United States torture program brings the country to a crossroads. It remains to be seen whether the United States will turn a blind eye to the effects of its actions on its own people and on the rest of the world, or if it will take the necessary steps to recover the standards on which the country was founded, and to once again adhere to the international conventions it helped to bring into being.

It is our hope that the United States will take the latter path, and we jointly suggest that the steps include:

a. Full disclosure to the American people of the extent and use of torture and rendition by American soldiers, operatives, and contractors, as well as the authorization of torture and rendition by American officials.

b. Full verification of the closure and dismantling of ‘black sites” abroad for the use of torture and interrogation.

c. Clear planning and implementation for the closure of Guantánamo prison, putting an end to indefinite detention without due process.

d. Adoption of firm policy and oversight restating and upholding international law relating to conflict, including the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention against Torture, realigning the nation to the ideals and beliefs of their founders – the ideals that made the United States a standard to be emulated.

Respectfully,

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1984
President José Ramos-Horta, Timor-Leste, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1996
Mohammad ElBaradei, Egypt, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 2005
Leymah Gbowee, Liberia, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 2011
Muhammad Yunus, Bangladesh, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 2006
Oscar Arias Sanchez, Costa Rica, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1987
John Hume, Northern Ireland, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1998
F.W. De Klerk, South Africa, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1993
Jody Williams, USA, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1997
Bishop Carlos X. Belo, Timor-Leste, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1996
Betty Williams, Northern Ireland, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1976
Adolfo Perez Esquivel, Argentina, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 1980

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ISIS: A Faceless Organization That Stands For Nothing – OpEd

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Icons are inescapable — even for those who make it their business to destroy them.

For Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden was an iconic figure. The American effort to hunt him down had more to do with the need to destroy his image than to thwart a terrorist.

So who or what stands as the central symbol, the image around which ISIS gravitates?

In early July, ISIS released a short video showing the stone-faced Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi preaching in a mosque in Mosul. Even if this man happens to be a brilliant military strategist, he possesses no obvious charisma. He looks somewhat less personable than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.

 

Badhdadi’s brief appearance carried much less significance than the arrival of a new caliph and seemed to have more to do with proving the existence of what was and remains a shadowy figure.

Based on the little he has revealed about himself, his followers have clearly committed themselves through acts of blind allegiance.

The head of ISIS is for all practical purposes invisible.

Moreover, in spite of the fact that ISIS has recruited fighters from dozens of countries, many from the West and many speaking English, from throughout its ranks it appears they have no one competent to serve as a spokesman. Instead they rely on the face and voice of their British hostage, John Cantlie, whose BBC-English offers them credibility they fear they would lack if they dared represent themselves.

ISIS has no face of its own.

Likewise, their media offerings unintentionally pay homage to American cable news and Hollywood, as though there could be no means of communication superior to the crude aesthetic conventions that have been globalized by CNN and Warner Brothers.

On the battlefield, nothing appears to have been a source of greater pride than ISIS’s ability to capture and use American-made military hardware.

ISIS is not American-made in the sense intended by conspiracy theorists, yet in ways its followers would be loath to acknowledge it is in large part an American product — first and foremost as a product of America’s misadventure in Iraq, but also in the multiple ways in which in leans upon American culture.

If there is one image that ISIS has made its own and that serves to symbolize everything ISIS stands for, it is that of grinning men holding aloft freshly severed human heads.

Thanks mostly to Twitter, these are the images we get confronted by with a frequency that would until recently have seemed unimaginable.

Ask anyone in the world about ISIS and the one thing everyone knows is that decapitation is the ISIS signature.

As a symbol of the enemy vanquished, the severed head represents a victory more absolute than unconditional surrender. As such, ISIS presumably engages in these acts of ritual slaughter in order to display its uncompromising, ruthless power.

But the symbolism also cuts another way: the organization with an invisible head and no public face of its own, through decapitation represents its own headlessness.

Furthermore, through its subjugation of women by slavery and rape, ISIS manifests its relationship with the powers of creation: its powers are solely destructive.

What does ISIS ultimately stand for? Death, and little else.

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San Francisco Giants Win Baseball World Series

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The San Francisco Giants have defeated the Kansas City Royals 3-2 in the deciding seventh game to win the Major League Baseball World Series.

Giants ace pitcher Madison Bumgarner threw five scoreless innings in relief Wednesday night to close out the game and cement Most Valuable Player honors for the series. The championship is the third for the Giants in the past five years.

Bumgarner was dominant in his three appearances in the series, starting two earlier games and allowing a total of just one run on nine hits while striking out 17 Kansas City hitters.

Manager Bruce Bochy called Bumgarner’s performance “truly amazing,” as the pitcher set a new record for most innings pitched in a postseason.

The Royals nearly completed another dramatic comeback Wednesday in a playoff run that included four extra-inning wins.

With Bumgarner pitching with two outs in the bottom of the ninth — at a time his manager later said he was “exhausted” — Royals outfielder Alex Gordon smacked a ball toward Giants center fielder Gregor Blanco, who misplayed it, allowing the ball to roll all the way to the wall and Gordon to reach third base.

But Bumgarner quieted the raucous crowd in Kansas City, getting Royals catcher Salvador Perez to pop up a fastball to third baseman Pablo Sandoval, who squeezed it and set off celebrations by San Francisco players on the field and their fans back home.

The series was an unlikely matchup, featuring the two so-called Wild Card teams. Each had to win a special one-game playoff to even make the main draw in the postseason against the league’s division champions.

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Federal Reserve Ends Quantitative Easing Bond-Buying Program

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The Federal Reserve has officially announced an end to its quantitative easing bond-buying program, but economists are split over whether the central bank’s decision will help or hinder post-recession recovery.

As expected, the Fed said Wednesday afternoon that it’s third and most recent round of quantitative easing, QE3, would come to an end.

“The Committee judges that there has been a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labor market since the inception of its current asset purchase program. Moreover, the Committee continues to see sufficient underlying strength in the broader economy to support ongoing progress toward maximum employment in a context of price stability. Accordingly, the Committee decided to conclude its asset purchase program this month,” reads part of a statement released by the Fed on Wednesday. “The Committee is maintaining its existing policy of reinvesting principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in agency mortgage-backed securities and of rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction. This policy, by keeping the Committee’s holdings of longer-term securities at sizable levels, should help maintain accommodative financial conditions.”

The confirmation surprised few since the Fed was largely reported ahead of Wednesday’s decision to be considering making such an announcement. As far as what the result will be, however, is up for debate as economists weigh potential outcomes ranging from outright optimism to doom and gloom.

Combined, the three rounds of QE undertaken by the Fed since 2008 have generated trillions of dollars for the American economy through a process in which the central bank has perpetually pumped money into long-term government bonds and bonds backed by home mortgages. But David Wessel, the director of the Hutchins Center at the Brookings Institution, told NPR recently that the three-and-a-half-trillion dollars’ worth of bonds purchased during that six-year span has been “far more than anybody inside or outside the Fed expected when this all began.”

Indeed, the Fed has twice announced an end to its bond purchasing programs, only to soon after start again when it was realized that the desired effect failed to be achieved. Six years later, though, the end to QE3 might once and for all be the final nail in the program’s coffin.

In 2009, Ben Bernanke, then the chairman of the Fed, said that quantitative easing would only end “when credit markets and the economy have begun to recover,” at which point the central bank would resume business as usual.

“As the size of the balance sheet and the quantity of excess reserves in the system decline, the Federal Reserve will be able to return to its traditional means of making monetary policy–namely, by setting a target for the federal funds rate,” he said. “In considering whether to create or expand its programs, the Federal Reserve will carefully weigh the implications for the exit strategy. And we will take all necessary actions to ensure that the unwinding of our programs is accomplished smoothly and in a timely way, consistent with meeting our obligation to foster full employment and price stability.”

Today, the American economy is statistically sounder than six years ago: not only have three rounds of QE allowed faltering banks to get boost after boost from the government, but, partially as a result, jobless claims are down drastically from post-recession figures.

Nevertheless, optimism isn’t universal when it comes to what ending QE3 means for the world economy.

“Well there are some improvements, but we can’t say that it is recovering as everyone hoped,” Nour Eldeen Al-Hammoury, a chief market strategist at ADS securities in Abu Dhabi, told Euro News recently. “GDP is growing based on the inventories, which doesn’t mean that sales are increasing. The slack in the economy remains and so far there is no clear strategy on how this slack will be resolved. Moreover, the slowing down in Europe and Asia will be something to consider as the US economy is unlikely to grow on its own.”

According to Al-Hammoury, markets the world over may suffer as a result of ending QE3. “It is not the Middle East markets only, it is global markets and especially the emerging markets,” he said. “Let’s say, for example, Dubai — Dubai stock market was one of the best performers in the world. However, we will see some more declines at the end of the year. These markets are again sensitive to any events. However, these Middle East markets may benefit again from what’s happening in Europe. I mean the outflow that is happening in Europe and also don’t forget that this region has also opened its doors to foreign investors so with the Fed ending QE we might see some declines again, and if the global slowdown continues, global markets, including the Middle East, may continue with the current downside correction.”

Even in the west, that pessimism is present: Pedro Nicolaci da Costa wrote for The Wall Street Journal this week that the Fed may deploy another round of quantitative easing if the decision to end the third series proved to be unsuccessful, which, according to his report, may be the case.

“Many of the studies of large-scale asset purchases, known as quantitative easing or QE, agree they worked very well to prevent deflation and stabilize the financial system during the 2008 crisis, but disagree about how effective the programs have been in boosting growth since then,” da Costa wrote.

Although Bernanke has attributed QE with cutting unemployment, da Costa wrote, Fed researchers and academic economists have for years studied the practice and are split with regards to how successful the rounds have been, and what the eventual outcome will be when all is said and done.

“I do think they’re overly optimistic,” Barbara J. Cummings of the Boston Private Bank & Trust Company told CNBC this week. “The market and the Fed are definitely saying two different things. And the market is right. It usually is.”

To some, the outcome is even drearier. “Without another dose of stimulus, the US will likely slide into recession,” Worth Wray, chief strategist at Mauldin Economics, predicted to Equities earlier this month.

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Google Data Collection Worries Americans More Than NSA

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Americans may not like the fact that the National Security Agency is collecting data on their phone calls and emails, but it turns out they are even more concerned over another surveillance threat: Google.

In a survey conducted by the consumer feedback service Survata, the company asked internet users just how angry they would be if they discovered various groups or individuals had gained access to essentially all of their personal data online.

“To evaluate this, we polled over 2,500 respondents with two surveys — one gauging concern with the NSA and a corporation like Google gaining access to personal data, and one with bosses, significant others, and parents,” the company wrote online. “Overall, the results show respondents were most concerned by a company like Google gaining this access, as shown by the average level of concern.”

Survey participants responded to these questions by choosing a number between one to 10, with one meaning they would not care and 10 meaning they would be “extremely upset.”

In response to the idea that Google would gain access to their data, the average score was 7.39. For comparison, the average score regarding the NSA was 7.06.

Meanwhile, in the event that their boss gained access to their data, respondents scored the possibility with a 6.85. The prospect of the participants’ parents snooping on their digital life received a 5.93.

In a statement to CNET, Survata co-founder Chris Kelly said the company did not expect to see the results it did.

“Survata was surprised to see respondents said they’d be more upset with a company like Google seeing their personal data than the NSA,” he said. “We did not ask respondents for the reasons or motivations behind their answers; so we can only conjecture based on our previous research. One guess is that respondents assume the NSA is only looking for ‘guilty’ persons when scouring personal data, whereas a company like Google would use personal data to serve ads or improve their own products.”

Still, CNET’s Chris Matyszczyk noted that most of the survey takers were between the ages of 13 and 44, a group that has typically been the most willing to give up its personal data to social media giants and other digital application developers.

“If these results are to be believed, then humanity is rife with those who speak out of several sides of their mouth,” he wrote. “On the one hand, we claim to fear Google most, yet we allow it, Facebook and the like to crawl over our daily routines and information like summer flies enjoying a rancid grapefruit.”

That sentiment has been echoed by other prominent voices, notably NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Earlier this month, Snowden called networks like Facebook and Google “dangerous” for being hostile to privacy and not allowing encrypted messages.

In September, meanwhile, Assange compared Google to the NSA, saying it generates revenue by gathering and selling individuals’ data.

“Google’s business model is the spy. It makes more than 80 percent of its money by collecting information about people, pooling it together, storing it, indexing it, building profiles of people to predict their interests and behavior, and then selling those profiles principally to advertisers, but also others,” he said.

“So the result is that Google, in terms of how it works, its actual practice, is almost identical to the National Security Agency or GCHQ.”

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Ashin Wirathu: Five Reasons For His Rise – Analysis

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By Aparupa Bhattacherjee

U Ashin Wirathu, the Buddhist monk, is seen as the face of Buddhist extremism in Myanmar by the world. The 969 movement led by him aims to save Myanmar from the perceived threat of the rising number of Muslims within the country. Both Wirathu and the 969 movement have a huge number of followers in Myanmar. Wirathu came into the limelight quite suddenly in 2012, and has become a familiar face in all national and international newspapers and journals. What has led to Wirathu’s sudden popularity?

Wirathu, who has been referred to as the face of the “Buddhist terror” and the “Burmese Bin Laden” in several international newspapers, journals and magazines comes from a humble background and is comparatively young to attain this stature. Wirathu was born in a small town called Kyauke in the Mandalay province on 10 July 1968. Although he was arrested by the former military government in 2003 and sentenced to twenty five years in prison for his anti-Muslim sermons, he was granted amnesty in 2011. He came to the forefront in 2012 by leading a rally in Mandalay to support the current President Thein Sien’s controversial plan to send Rohingya Muslims to another country. In a span of two years he has become the face of Buddhist radicalism in Myanmar.

He has become an abbot, at a very young age, of a huge monastery called Masoyein, with 2500 students under him, where he trains them to fight the so-called Muslim militants. Thus it seems that Wirathu is a strategist as well as an opportunist who has effectively cultivated several factors to attain this popularity.

Backstage Support

The fact that Wirathu is able to openly and freely preach his anti-Muslim ideology all over Myanmar unlike other monks, who had once been arrested by the former military government, suggests that he is being supported by a section of the government especially by the radical wing within it. Wirathu continues his provocative teaching without being arrested. 2012, the year Wirathu came to the limelight, is a significant year as this is the same year that the National League of Democracy (NLD) entered the Myanmarese Parliament with a sweeping victory in the by-election held in the same year. Thus it seems support for Wirathu is a strategy by that section of the government that would prefer to have continuing violence within the country so that attention is diverted from the pro-democracy propaganda of the NLD party and their leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Internal Tensions

Both Wirathu and the 969 movement have built their support on the foundation of pre-existing tensions between the Buddhists and the Muslims, which has been around for centuries. Both have essentially cultivated these fractures to forward their agendas.

Media as a Tool

In 2011, the pro-civilian government of Myanmar partially removed censorship over the media. The freedom to use uncensored media has paved the way for Wirathu to enter the limelight. He has rarely refused journalists and scholars who have asked for his appointment or interview. Time magazine in July 2013 came up with a cover story that claimed Wirathu to be the “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” Although it was vehemently opposed by both Wirathu and the present Myanmarese government, it did not deter Wirathu from giving further interviews. All his sermons are widely available on YouTube. However barely any factual information about his early life is available, except for where and when he was born. It seems Wirathu knows well which aspects of his life to display and which to keep secret.

Force of Personality

Wirathu’s personality also has a role to play in the achievement of his quick success. He is a good orator; this helps him gain a mass following. While preaching he keeps his calm and speaks quietly. Among his numerous followers, some of follow him because they genuinely believe in him and others follow him out of fear. In Myanmar, all Buddhist monks are attributed with respect and authority. Furthermore, being the abbot of a monastery at the heart of Mandalay has also empowered Wirathu with a higher level of blind respect and authority that has benefitted him greatly.

Alliances and International Recognition

Support from and alliances with similar radical Buddhist organisations like Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) in Sri Lanka has further enhanced Wirathu’s image. Recently, both BBS and 969 movement have commenced a joint conference and pledge their allegiance to each other. Such a move has not only concretised the fear that radical Buddhism is growing and might spread to other South Asian and Southeast Asian countries but has also provided Wirathu with international recognition.

All these factors have come together to push Wirathu into the sudden limelight. Although he is portrayed as the face of Buddhist extremism, the problem of religious radicalism in Myanmar is very complex, has several roots, and many faces.

Aparupa Bhattacherjee
Research Officer, SEARP, IPCS
Email: aparupa@ipcs.org

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Bioterrorism, ISIS And Ebola Mania – OpEd

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Does demagoguery have an inventive side? Only if you assume semi-literacy is virtuous, and that imagination lies in the name of the manipulative. The combination of both Ebola and terrorism are the evil twins of the same security dilemma. It is manufactured. It is a confection. And it is, at the end, worthless in what it actually suggests. The effects of it are, however, dangerous. They suggest that politicians can be skimpy with the evidence yet credible in the vote.

Historically, disease and culture share the same bed of significance. Notions of purity prevail in these considerations. Bioterrorism has become, rather appropriately, another mutation in the debate on how foreign fighters arriving in a country might behave. Individuals such as Jim Carafano, vice president of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at the Heritage Foundation, continue insisting on the need for presidential administrations to form a “national bioterrorism watch system”.

“While [Ebola] is a dangerous disease that Washington needs to take seriously,” writes David Inserra of The Daily Signal, “America could face an even greater medical threat in the future: the threat of bioterrorism.” While the language here seems to draw distinctions – that those suffering Ebola pose one set of problems, while the use of a bioterrorist agent is another – the ease of placing the two side by side is virtually irresistible.

In the wake of the Ebola outbreak, that old horse of potential bioterrorism has emerged with a convenient vengeance. This is not surprising, given the spectre of WMD fantasies that captivated the Bush administration in 2003. It is not sufficient that there are terrorists with a low probability of waging actual attacks on home soil, be they returning citizens, or simply foreign fighters wishing to stir up a good deal of fuss. Throwing in the disease component is hard to resist.

Rep. Mike Jelly of Pennsylvania decided to direct the bioterror genie the way of Islamic State fighters, suggesting that returning jihadists might cause Washington a good deal of headaches, not merely by their radicalisation, but by carrying the virus as a strategic weapon of infliction. “Think about the job they could do, the harm they could inflict on the American people by bringing this deadly disease into our cities, into schools, into our towns, and into our homes. Horrible, horrible.”

This exotic lunacy was also appealing to Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who even suggested that Hamas fighters might be daft enough to infect themselves with Ebola and make a journey to freedom land in order to engage in acts of infectious mayhem. Their venue of safe passage would be from the South, where the evils of an open border with Mexico risk allowing a dangerous pathogen into the country. Now that, dear readers, is exactly what such figures think about Mexico.

The moral calculus operating with Wilson is that of irrational, dangerous death – those who “value death more than you value life”. Those with such a creed are bound to get up to any old and lethal mischief. “It would promote their creed. And all of this could be avoided by sealing the border, thoroughly. C’mon, this is the 21st century.”

As to whether the idea of using such an agent would be feasible is quite something else. Weaponising such a pathogen has proven to be a formidable challenge. Such groups as the Aum Shinrikyo cult attempted to collect the virus while ostensibly on a medical mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was a failure of some magnitude. As Dina Fine Maron argues, the “financial and logistical challenges of transforming Ebola into a tool of bioterror makes the concern seem overblown – at least as far as widespread devastation is concerned.” Even the FBI’s James Corney suggests that evidence of Islamic State’s involvement in an Ebola program is highly dubious.

This tends to get away from that old problem that the biggest of trouble makers in the business of death remain states rather than non-state ideologues. States have done more than their fair share of dabbling in the business of rearing microbes of death in the armoury. Be it small pox, botulism, and tularaemia, these have found their way into inventories and laboratories with disturbing normality.

Much of this has also been allowed to get away because of the Obama administration’s open confusion on the subject of how to handle the Ebola problem. The excitement has become feverish (dare one say pathological?) in the US, suggesting the double bind that the Obama administration finds itself. The President did not do himself any favours by on the one hand denying there was a grave threat, and then proceeding to appoint an “Ebola Czar” by the name of Ron Klain. This was classic bureaucracy in action – we create positions of unimportance to supposedly fight the unimportant, while admitting their gravity in creating such positions.

Certainly, the President found himself railroaded by events with the unilateral decisions of Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) to implement mandatory 21-day quarantines for those returning from Ebola “hot zones”. This has always been the federal, and one might even say federalist headache: what is done in the White House and Washington often stays there. The response by states can often have a foreign sense to them. The US Centres for Disease and Control and Prevention has regarded such quarantine measures as unnecessary, but the CDC’s attempt to defuse the situation has not worked.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest had to face the music of disease on Monday, with a reporter suggesting that, if Klain was actually an “Ebola response coordinator”, it seemed “that you have a need for some coordinating here.”

William Schaffner of Vanderbilt University, a long time student of infectious diseases, sees this as a matter of information, in so far as the more one gets, the less anxious one is bound to feel. “I would like not to call it irrational. When people are just learning about something, something that they regard as a threat, and they haven’t integrated all of this information still into their thought process, their sense of anxiety obviously increases.”

Schaffner is unduly wedded to the rather unfashionable belief that knowledge somehow enlightens. But it is not knowledge that is driving this debate, but supposition. Facts are the enemy, and they continue to play the roles of silent, some might even say murdered witnesses.

 

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Occupy Central/Sunflower: Popular Resistance In Greater China – Analysis

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By Tom Gold

Since early October, many of us have been mesmerized by scenes of the student-led “Occupy Central” or “Umbrella Movement” demonstrations in the government compound and throughout Hong Kong. Earlier this year, similar events occurred in Taipei in what became known as the Sunflower Movement. Coincidentally, as the Occupy Central movement was getting underway, the University of California at Berkeley celebrated (not just “acknowledged” or “commemorated”) the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement, which rocked the establishment to its core.  In all of these cases, the immediate targets were seemingly remote authorities making decisions with no transparency or accountability that directly or indirectly affected the lives of students and many members of the larger society.

But I will argue that this was just the tip of the iceberg of a deeper malaise and concern about the future, both personal and societal. Interestingly and fittingly, the demonstrations in Hong Kong and at an earlier protest in Taipei over the death of a young soldier during military training, adopted a song from the musical Les Miserables as their anthem. The original song is a stirring march, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” The point is, this represented a cri de coeur of a generation feeling neglected, alienated, disenfranchised, and, to quote the noted symbol of a generation, Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, “a little worried about my future.” Their suppressed voices are now bursting forth in song and street demonstrations: “now do you hear the people singing?”

Having been young myself once, and in college during the 1960s, I know this sentiment is not unusual. But in the recent cases of Taiwan and Hong Kong, it also expresses the deeper frustrations of many citizens who have never been masters of their own destiny; they have always been part of someone else’s agenda and not consulted about, to say nothing of being included in, decisions that have a major short and long-term impact on their fate.

As with anything related to China, to understand the Sunflower Movement and Occupy Central we need first to look at historical precedents. In a culturally Chinese context, there is a sense of a responsibility of intellectuals, including students, to remonstrate with the emperor to let him know, in case he didn’t already, that his officials are corrupt, there is popular dissatisfaction, and the dynasty is in trouble. And most likely there will also be natural disasters—always a possibility in Hong Kong and Taiwan, given local climate and geology—to seal the deal that heaven has withdrawn its mandate legitimizing the dynasty.

We can think of the 1898 Hundred Days of Reform, the May 4th Movement of 1919, and Tiananmen of 1989 as examples, the latter two coming after the end of dynastic China but redolent with historical significance.  Not surprisingly, the Emperor, or President, or Chairman did not respond well. It ended badly for the students and intellectuals and their supporters in all three cases. But the regime also fell in two of the three cases not long after.

In the recent examples of Taiwan and Hong Kong, the larger issue is the process by which Beijing is inserting itself into the internal affairs of these two societies of Greater China and thereby restructuring them to serve Beijing’s overriding interests in rejuvenation and redressing the hundred-plus years of China’s humiliation at the hands of Western and Japanese imperialism. That is one of the meanings of realizing what Xi Jinping calls the “Chinese Dream,” which ethnic Chinese everywhere, by definition, share in their very DNA.

Let’s turn to Taiwan first. I don’t have space for a detailed review of Taiwan history. Let’s just say that it has never been well and deeply incorporated into the rest of China. It was an outlier and a rambunctious, pestilence-ridden thorn in the side of the Qing dynasty. From 1895 to 1945 it was a colony of Japan. From 1945 to 1949 it was a province of the Republic of China, which was established in 1912 while Taiwan was part of Japan’s colonial domain. Since 1949, it has been the seat of the government of the Kuomintang-led Republic of China which retreated from the mainland after losing to the Communists in the civil war that was raging as the ROC was attempting to incorporate the island back into the Chinese fold.

The Kuomintang (KMT) used sticks and carrots to remold the people of Taiwan from their orientation to Japan toward identification with China, a place few of them had visited or knew much about after decades of Japanese efforts remolding the Taiwanese as “the Emperor’s people.” There was no direct intercourse between the two states or societies on either side of the Taiwan Strait after 1949. “China” was presented as a mystical wonderful place that the people of Taiwan were reengineered to yearn for. “Communist China” was the implacable foe, out to destroy this free “China.” The communist regime needed to be vanquished and any contact with it was seditious. Martial Law, in place from 1949 to 1987, reinforced this separation and the KMT’s ideology. Taiwan’s mission as defined by this émigré regime, was twofold: 1) to revive China’s culture and 2) to serve as a non-communist bastion for eventual recovery of the mainland and reunification of all of China as the Republic of China.

We know that two trends were evolving over the course of the Martial Law period. One was a curiosity about the mainland and, after the post-Mao reforms began in the PRC in late in 1978, a desire to do business, tour, and hold family reunions across the Taiwan Strait. The other was the development of a Taiwanese identity derived from China but also strongly influenced by the island’s unique historical trajectory of half a century under Japan and then a base for U.S. troops and advisers on the front lines of the Cold War.

What we have seen since the termination of Martial Law in Taiwan has been the rapid development of both of these contradictory trends. In all fields of life in Taiwan there is evidence of Chinese—that is, PRC-based—activity. This can be direct – the movement of people, capital, commodities, services – as well as indirect. By this I mean that consciously or unconsciously, people in Taiwan take the imagined response of the PRC government or people from the mainland into consideration when they make decisions about schooling, residence (including moving off the island), business, vacation, political activity, careers, military service, intellectual inquiry, publications, media and even the name used to refer to the country of their citizenship.

China has been pursuing a more nuanced united front approach to Taiwan even though it keeps over 1000 missiles poised across the Strait just in case things get out of hand from Beijing’s perspective. Under the later part of the Lee Teng-Hui and the Chen Shui-bian administrations, there was state-led resistance to China’s insertion into Taiwan’s daily life and support for the elaboration of a Taiwanese identity. There were concerted efforts to avoid dependence on the Chinese economy and to limit its impact on Taiwan’s ability to retain a high degree of autonomy and hard won democratic control over its own fate.

To many people in Taiwan and observers abroad, the current Ma Ying-jeou administration’s pursuit of more formal ties with China, such as the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, is seen as a threat to what little room for maneuver Taiwan still enjoys. Last spring’s Sunflower Movement expressed the concern of many young people and their supporters not only that their futures were being increasingly dictated from Beijing but also that their own government was complicit in  selling them out by secret “black box” negotiations and deals presented as faits accomplis.  Prominent among these was the Cross-Strait Trade in Services Agreement, which critics saw as creating new threats of economic vulnerability and which was rushed through the KMT-dominated legislature, sparking the Sunflower Movement and student occupation of the legislature and, briefly, the offices of the executive branch.

Let’s turn now to Hong Kong.

Its historical experience has been very different from Taiwan’s. It became a British crown colony in 1842 after Qing China’s loss in the First Opium War and expanded to its full size under two later nineteenth century treaties that followed other Qing defeats. Hong Kong stood as the preeminent symbol of China’s humiliation and weakness as “the sick man of Asia” until July 1, 1997 when it was returned to China, now the People’s Republic of China, implementing an agreement made after long negotiations between Beijing and London. The citizens of Hong Kong were not part of the negotiations. Unlike Taiwan (or more formally, the Republic of China) which has its own state apparatus answerable to no higher power and which enjoys some independent international recognition, Hong Kong has always been ruled from afar as someone else’s property. No outside power can give, sell, or bargain Taiwan away in this manner, although if the U.S. withdrew its ambiguous commitment to defend Taiwan as enshrined in the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, Taiwan  might go to China by default.

I happened to be in Hong Kong conducting research in the summer of 1984 when the negotiations over Hong Kong’s future were underway, and the mood was tense and grim. The wealthy, so-called “yacht people,” were emigrating in droves to their villas in Vancouver and Australia. (Of course, many of them have since returned as they quite accurately see the Chinese Communist Party as the best friend the capitalist class in Hong Kong ever had, a notion reinforced by Beijing’s actions during the Occupy  demonstrations when it summoned some of Hong Kong’s wealthiest businessmen to Beijing and encouraged them to denounce the demonstrations.)

In 1995, I was invited to Hong Kong as a Sponsored Visitor by the government. I interviewed officials and people in many fields about their sense of Hong Kong post-1997. I came away with two impressions: 1) they were acutely conscious of taking China’s possible reaction into consideration as they considered policy; and 2) when I raised the issue of competition from Shanghai, whose extremely ambitious Pudong Development Zone was still in the early stages of construction, they shrugged the idea off, saying, “if Shanghai advances one step, Hong Kong will advance two steps. Hong Kong will always be ahead.”  Today, taking China’s possible reaction into account is an even larger consideration in Hong Kong policy.  And confidence in Hong Kong’s ability to stay ahead of Shanghai—which enjoys greater favor from Beijing—has waned.

In Hong Kong this October, much like in Taiwan last March, the proximate cause of the demonstrations was opposition and fear that the local elite, in cahoots with Beijing, was negotiating away too much autonomy—in Hong Kong’s case the autonomy as encapsulated in the Deng Xiaoping-coined slogan, “one country, two systems” and enshrined in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s constitution.

But the deeper cause of the recent protests lies in concerns that closer integration with China has brought about an overall decline in the quality of life and standard of living among the majority of Hong Kong’s population while the super-rich—who rank among the wealthiest people in the world – only get richer, with Beijing’s support and blessing. It is they who Beijing listens to when dealing with Hong Kong, in secretive, non-transparent meetings, disenfranchising the majority. “Universal suffrage” is pretty much a sham in this context. The demonstrators (and many of the “silent majority,” I would argue) also worry that their life chances are being drastically and negatively affected by the flood of mainland people and money gobbling up real estate and inflating prices, taking places in universities, getting plum jobs, occupying hospital beds to have babies (who gain a right of abode in Hong Kong), buying up milk powder to take back across the border (to substitute for  the possibly poisoned product sold in the  mainland),  behaving boorishly , and in other ways marginalizing Hong Kong people in their own increasingly not terribly special Special Administrative Region.

The scale and aggressiveness of the demonstrations in Taiwan and Hong Kong apparently caught authorities in Taipei, Hong Kong and Beijing by surprise, even though the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement already had been a public campaign for some time.

Beijing’s initial public response has been predictable: rather than engaging in self-reflection, it blames foreign conspirators. While there is no doubt that foreign NGOs and governments have had some hand in promoting democracy and civil society, some Hong Kong activists have been in close contact with their Sunflower counterparts, and the foreign media has perhaps too enthusiastically made celebrities of Hong Kong’s young “democracy activists,” the demonstrations are clearly local, indigenous expressions of resistance to Beijing’s increasingly aggressive push to assert itself within its own borders and beyond.

The popular actions in Taipei and Hong Kong need to be seen as part of a larger pushback against China’s rise, which Beijing can no longer promote as “peaceful” or “harmonious.” We see the pushback  domestically in Tibet and Xinjiang, and externally in Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, parts of Africa, even North Korea. Recently several foreign universities have shut down their Confucius Institutes. Beijing’s attempt to exert “soft power” is running into a number of unanticipated roadblocks.

I see Beijing’s actions not as a show of strength but as an expression of the regime’s deep concerns over the risk of widespread popular unrest and its own tenuous legitimacy. Chairman Mao noted that “a single spark can start a prairie fire” and I believe this phrase is very much in the minds of the elite in Zhongnanhai, the central Beijing compound that houses China’s top rulers. Their clumsy though, to date, surprisingly successful efforts to control the internet and the flow of information into the mainland about the demonstrations in Taipei and Hong Kong and many other developments elsewhere, also illustrates this fragility and fear. I see them engaged in a game of whack-a-mole where they are trying frantically to smack down a rapidly increasing number of challenges, many of which they have unleashed themselves, and which are becoming linked together.

While the situations in Taipei and Hong Kong have calmed down, at least for now, the underlying causes have not been solved or seriously addressed. If the Chinese Communist leaders were serious about Marx, they would know that changes in material conditions bring about changes in the superstructure—in the realm of values, laws, institutions, and culture. This is even alluded to in the Basic Law, which allows democratization and other reforms when changing local conditions warrant. I think they need to develop safety valves to allow popular frustrations to be expressed and considered, but I acknowledge that I am a Western sociologist and not a Chinese communist, so this way out is perhaps not terribly likely to appeal to China’s rulers.

Although Beijing seems unwilling to bend, its intransigence will not end the conflict. We have not seen or heard the last verse of the people singing by a long shot.

About the author:
Thomas B. Gold is Professor of Sociology at the University of California. Since 2000, he has also served as Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies (IUP), a consortium of 14 American universities which administers an advanced Chinese language program at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Gold’s forthcoming book, Remaking Taiwan: Society and the State Since the End of Martial Law, traces the changes in Taiwan society since the end of Martial Law in 1987.

This E-note is based upon his lecture of the same name to the FPRI Asia Study Group on October 8, 2014.

Source:
This article was published by FPRI.

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Why Peace In Afghanistan Means Peace In Pakistan – OpEd

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Pakistan’s prime minister adviser on foreign Affairs Mr. Sar Taj Aziz paid a visit to Kabul on Sunday to assure the new government of the support of the Pakistan government. The trip also aimed to repair ties with the new Afghan government led by Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai after many of the setbacks in the relations of these two countries. In his farewell speech, Mr. Karzai said the war was not among Afghans but “for the objectives of foreigners”.

He said a friendly relationship with the United States was possible, but only if their words matched their actions. He strongly criticized Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan also, saying it wanted to control Afghan foreign policy.”If America and Pakistan really want it, peace will come to Afghanistan,” Mr. Karzai said. He further stated that Pakistan asked him to accept the Durand line as a formal border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But sources close to the Presidential Palace state that the trip had no gain for the Pakistani delegation led by Sartaj Aziz. Mr. Sartaj Aziz gave President Ghani a formal invitation from the Pakistani PM Nawaz Sharif to pay a visit in the near future to Pakistan but President Ghani insisted that until Pakistan takes concrete steps in restoring peace talks, visits will not be fruitful. “Until Pakistan shows and takes pragmatic steps towards peace talks, I will not visit Pakistan idly nor will I keep myself indulged in useless talks and meetings”- President Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai to Sartaj Aziz, Adviser to Pakistan PM in foreign Affairs- the source said by condition of anonymity.

It was also reported that before upon his arrival to Kabul, Mr Sartaj Aziz telephoned Mr. Ghani and assured him that a new chapter will embark in the relation between Afghanistan and Pakistan, but according to sources in the National Security council of Afghanistan, Pakistan has played such games with the Karzai Administration in the past eight years and had no pragmatic outcome. This comes after former President Karzai said in his farewell speech, “I had traveled to Pakistan, where much of the Taliban’s leadership is believed to be based, at least 20 times seeking a negotiated end to the war, but my efforts were thwarted.”

Political experts here in Kabul are of the opinion that a third country should guarantee the commitment of the Pakistan government in regards to peace talks with Taliban and taking some concrete steps in bringing peace to this region. They say that it can be Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or Turkey which proportionally have better ties with Pakistan.

According to credible sources near to the National Security Council, Afghanistan’s new strategy is to engage regional countries in fighting against terrorism. Last week Mohammad Hanif Atmar, National Security Adviser to President Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, has said all religious schools (Madrasas), which spread radicalism in South Asia, must be closed.

Atmar said radicalised religious schools have become a key element of the terror infrastructure in the region since they are being misused by certain state and non-state actors. Atmar did not disclose further information regarding the state and non-state actors which are misusing the religious schools, however his remarks were apparently towards Pakistan’s military intelligence – Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI).

President Ghani is trying to adopt a new policy in regards to Taliban. President Ghani says that he will never visit Pakistan until it is result oriented and he will not participate in any dialogue that has no positive outcome. According to sources close to the Presidential Palace, he stated that the time has arrived to prove our words with actions. We should not rely only on conducting peace talks but rather to prove it pragmatically and strengthen it.

Since post 9/11 Pakistan has not been honest with Afghanistan and continued their double faced policy. Military pundit in Pakistan are of the opinion that the presence of Indian influence in Afghanistan is a direct threat to Pakistan national security while Afghanistan has assured the Pakistani authority that it will not let its soil to be home for terrorists and not let Afghan soil to be used against any of its neighboring countries. While on the other hand, Pakistan continued to rain rockets into the eastern province of Kunar, which borders Pakistan.

As Taliban fighters kill a growing number of Afghan soldiers, the country’s leaders are blaming Pakistan, an accusation that has sent the neighbors’ relations to one of the lowest points in more than a decade. Afghan officials say their allegations stem from an influx of foreigners fighting for a resurgent Afghan Taliban, as well as a Pakistani Islamist militant group’s recent announcement that it was abandoning domestic attacks and turning its sights across the border.

The TTP Punjab, commonly known as Punjabi Taliban and headed by Asmatullah Muawiya (a former leader of Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM), a Punjab-based banned Jihadi group) announced on September 13 the cessation of subversive activities in Pakistan, “in the best interest of Islam and the country”. Earlier, in a September 5 statement, the group said it would continue to fight in neighboring Afghanistan.

Way forward

Being a seasonal neighbor, Pakistan contributed a lot to today’s Afghanistan. Pakistan remained a major player of all these conditions in Afghanistan. As Pakistan shares a 2600 km border with Afghanistan, Pakistan has committed many mistakes while interfering in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. They have tried their best to debilitate stable governments in Afghanistan for their own interest. Since Ashraf Ghani was elected as President it is a dire need for both countries to start to forge relations as a new beginning. Pakistan has to make sure that it is not going to interfere in Afghanistan internal affairs by buying loyalties or supporting the terrorist groups operating across Afghansitan. Pakistan shall use their own leverage and influence over some of the Taliban leaders and convince them to come to the table and resolve all issues with the new Afghan government through peace and negotiations.On the other hand, Afghanistan has to make sure that Afghanistan is not used as a breeding ground of actors against Pakistan stability.

Pakistan, with 190 million in population, is in dire need of energy and a market that can help them to sell their products. Therefore, Afghanistan is one of the best markets for their products and by the same token Afghanistan provides them a corridor for Pakistan to  Asian states.

The recent agreements of projects that Pakistan signed include the Central Asia South Asia (CASA)-1000 power transmission and trade project which is likely to be completed by June 2015 at a cost of $997 million. The project would enable the Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan to sell their summer electricity surplus from existing plants in Central Asia-Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan and provide electricity to consumers in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Recently the Indian government approved a plan to develop Iran’s Chabahar port which will cost 81 million$. India has developed close security ties and economic interests in Afghanistan and via their vast investment in different sectors of Afghanistan they succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of the majority of Afghans. Thus, Pakistan has to show the same spirit by investing in Afghanistan rather than supporting few proxies groups which will result in nothing but chaos and political instability in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Afghan government on the other hand has to make sure that its land is not used by any external power against Pakistan. Afghanistan can act as a third party bringing these two countries from being rivals into friends.

Afghanistan and Pakistan are living side by side. They almost share the same religion, culture and language. Both countries know it and the entire world knows all the good that they can accomplish working together to bring peace and stability to this region simply by standing together. Peace in Afghanistan is much glued with peace in Pakistan and vice versa. Until Afghanistan is peaceful, Pakistan will not have peace either. It is time to forget the past and forge new beginnings by cooperating and strengthening economic and political ties.

Aziz Amin Ahmadzai is a writer based in Kabul. He can be reached by email at: talk4right@gmail.com

The post Why Peace In Afghanistan Means Peace In Pakistan – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

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