Does Pyongyang have such clout that a US-made film can actually be pulled from official release? That is normally the province reserved for local censors, certainly not hackers given a political mission. Those behind The Interview, including Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, must have found it all a touch bemusing. But even more significantly, the tables were turned on a film that featured an assassination plot directed at a living leader, the very much in office Kim Jong-un, albeit dressed up in the form of a comedy.

The saga began when it became clear that Sony Pictures had been the object of a cyber attack by the so-called Guardians of Peace. A trove of emails was made available, featuring, as screenwriter and novelist Clancy Sigal explained, “a marvellous study in how pictures actually get made, with plenty of bile, frustration, cross purposes, doublecrosses, misunderstandings and second thoughts” (CounterPunch, Dec 22). It was ego triumphant.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was less enthusiastic, seeing such material as evidence of how media has given “material aid to criminals.” Pity the small army of Sony employees caught in this crossfire. “Wouldn’t it be a movie moment if the other studios invoked the NATO rule and denounced the attack on Sony as an attack on all of us, and our bedrock belief in free expression?” Unlikely – Hollywood behaviour is not governed by provisions of collective self-defence, however much Sorkin wished it were so.

Then came the flurry of accusations. On Friday, the US President decided that enough was enough. The trail, Obama suggested, led to needling emissaries of the DPRK – or at least, that is what his security advisors were telling him. North Korean authorities deemed the accusation that it has initiated the attacks as “groundless slander” and suggested, rather cheekily, that a joint investigation be made. In the words of a North Korean spokesman, “We propose to conduct a joint investigation with the US in response to groundless slander being perpetrated by the US by mobilising public opinion.”

Sony’s own explanations for its conduct have been something to behold. They did not “cave in”, and in any case, even if they did, they did so tactically. Chief Executive Michael Lynton has suggested alternative platforms for releasing the film.

What has tended to be under-emphasised in this unfolding off screen drama is the political feed that has gone into The Interview. An exaggerated rage over the issue of free speech has also featured. Take Amy Nicholson in the LA Weekly (Dec 17): “Let’s be clear: Cancelling the Christmas Day opening of The Interview is cowardly.” Blame the theatre chains – AMC, Regal, Cinemark, Carmike and Cineplex – all of whom got cold feet at threats that the opening night would see a terror storm. As a result, “we’ve hobbled our nation’s commitment to free speech in ways we may never see”.

Interferences with the internal affairs of a state can take on various forms, even if it is framed as a “free speech” matter that sees the head of a sitting leader explode. (Advocates of this line point to a range of films, often in the Frederick Forsyth line, which feature a string of assassination plots, ignoring the contemporaneous nature of the current subject.)

A closer look at the response to the DPRK’s attack suggests that Pyongyang may well have had good reason to be peeved. After all, a film from the other side of the fence featuring the assassination of President Obama, however humorous, might have seen every good office in the US used to frustrate its release.

The political stake in the film was never in doubt. Sony chief Michael Lynton went so far as to get a Rand Corporation senior analyst to cast his eyes over The Interview, a somewhat serious gesture despite the comedic thrust of the script. Given Lynton’s presence on the Rand board of trusties, Bennett proved to be a convenient consultant. So much, then, for the purity of the free speech matter.

Bennett was happy to speculate that the film would have had internal political consequences. “I think it should be released. Once [Kim Jong-un’s] elites see it, it’s going to have some effect and it’s not going to be good for him. I think that’s what, in the end, they were really trying to stop by stopping the release of the film” (Deadline, Dec 19).

Bennett’s conclusion on seeing the film? “I told [Lynton] I thought it was coarse, that it was over the top in some areas, but that I thought the depiction of Kim Jong-un was a picture that needed to get into North Korea.” Bennett skirts over the obvious point that such “information operations” have fared poorly in the hermit state.

While the accusations at this point remain mired in uncertain certainties countering other forms of certainty, the legal analysts have been heading for the books to see what form of provocation the attack could be deemed. The general sense: not quite one of war, though cyber attacks have assumed importance in military manuals as potentially destructive acts.

For all of that, it is the North Koreans who are racking up the points, despite Obama’s rather flailing attempt to identify a “proportional response”. Pyongyang has shown that it can pack quite an asymmetric punch if its interests are impugned. The United States, in contrast, has a greater spread of targets, a huge underbelly awaiting to be slit. This has put something of a dampener on prospective retaliation against the comparatively cyber poor country.

As David Sanger, Nicole Perlroth and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times (Dec 20) note, there is “concern over the risk of escalation with North Korea since the United States has far more vulnerable targets, from its power grid to its financial markets than North Korea.”

There is also the Chinese dimension. Beijing’s help is being sought, as much of the DPRK’s telecommunications runs through China. Such help from Beijing will invariably be qualified, given Washington’s own concerns about previous Chinese attacks on its cyber infrastructure. Five Chinese hackers working for the PLA were indicted by the US Justice Department in May on charges of industrial espionage. Any formed pact is bound to be Mephistophelean in nature. The empire has been ambushed, and the regime in Pyongyang may have some moment, if only briefly, to gloat.

The post Looking Beyond ‘The Interview’ And Sony Hack – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Just hours ahead of the formal opening of the construction works on the Great Inter-Oceanic Canal of Nicaragua, which aims to compete with the Panama Canal, farmers of the El Tule community and San Juan River area stepped up their protest, blocking traffic along the main roads taking to the site, reports MISNA.

Tensions are high as the work on the mega-canal begins, ad which is wanted by President Daniel who granted rights over the canal to the Chinese Hknd Group corporation for 50 years, renewable for another 50 years.

According to ‘La Prensa’, the aim of the protest is to pressure the government to derogate Law 840, which approved the canal project. “We are ready to go to battle”, said a protest leader of the San Juan River area, Antonio Orozco.

Tension remains high also in the town of Nueva Guinea, where hundreds of local small producers joined the farmers mobilization. Serious concern was also expressed by the Bishops Conference, which has repeatedly urged dialogue between the government and demonstrators, pushing for a religious panel to mediate a solution.

Critics of the government, including Carlos Fernando Chamorro, a journalist and editor of the Confidencial magazine, insist on the impact the project will have on the local communities and environment, as the ‘first stone’ ceremony set for today is due to mark the start of the numerous sub-projects including two deep sea ports, a free trade zone, an airport, cement and explosive factories and an electricity plant.

“It is only a symbolic act imposed by Ortega’s authoritarianism to create the illusion that the canal construction has begun”, commented Chamorro. “How could the international community believe in the feasibility of the project when there are no investors and no studies to show that it is profitable on a financial level? In Nicaragua all are aware that no one has assumed any type of responsibility on the project and will therefore represent a boundless source of corruption”, he added.

The 278-kilometer (172 mile) waterway will comprise six routes across Lake Nicaragua or Lake Cocibolca, at a cost of $50 billion. Of the six initially studied, the route chosen travels from the mouth of the Brito River on the Pacific Coast south of Rivas city, into Lake Nicaragua all the way to the Tule and Punta Gorda Rivers, which joins central Nicaragua to the southern Caribbean region in the Bluefields Bay.

The post Nicaragua: Protests Mount Against Mega-Canal Project appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani says Tehran will continue to fully support the Syrian government in its battle against terrorism and efforts aimed at helping the success of national dialog in the Arab country.

“The Iranian government and nation are standing by the Syrian people and are prepared to expand all-out cooperation with the Syrian government in order to establish regional stability and security,” Larijani said

He added that the Syrian government’s efforts to safeguard the country’s territorial integrity and counter terrorists should be appreciated.

Since the outset of the crisis in Syria, Iran believed that the developments in Syria were aimed at spreading terrorism, violence and instability in the region, the Majlis speaker said.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker also said Syria is paying the price for its resistance against the Israeli regime, vowing Tehran’s full support for a political solution to the ongoing crisis in the Arab country.

Larijani said the Syrian government and nation should be supported in their resistance against the Israeli regime.

“Many countries whose officials are presently speaking about terrorism and Syria, have stood by the Zionist regime (Israel) in [its] wars against Lebanon and Palestine,” the Iranian Majlis speaker added.

He noted that terrorists have been fighting the Syrian government over the past four years under the pretext of establishing democracy in the country but they suddenly occupied parts of Iraq.

This indicates that the terrorists’ fight has nothing to do with democracy, he added.

The Iranian official further criticized the US and its Western and Arab allies for the way they are countering terrorism, adding that they would finally realize the kind of trouble they have put themselves in.

Larijani emphasized that the US pursues a “tactical” approach to the fight against terrorism, calling it a “strategic mistake.”

He further warned that the crisis in Syria and other woes in the region are only beneficial to the Israeli regime.

Iran’s parliament speaker also said the US-led coalition’s battle against the ISIL Takfiri militants is nothing more than a charade.

Larijani said the fight against terrorist groups would bear fruits only through the “effort and resistance” of nations.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran supports a political solution that will prevent the continuation of the massacre in Syria by terrorists and will be based on democracy and public demand,” he said.

He reiterated that Iran would back any solution based on the Syrian people’s decision.

The post Iran Says Still Supports Syria In Fight Against Terrorism appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Anti-nuclear activists have launched a cyber attack on Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP), releasing employee information and various technical documents.

From 15 December a group calling itself ‘Who am I = No nuclear power’ began releasing information it obtained from KHNP’s computer system. The group claimed to be based in the US state of Hawaii, but South Korean media reports say officials have determined the group’s location as within the country.

First to be posted online was personal information on 10,799 KHNP employees, and this was followed by technical documents. One was the MCNP5 Manual, which relates to the ‘Monte Carlo’ computer code used worldwide to model the transport of particles within a nuclear reactor core and which is neither proprietary or secret. Another was a technical document on the Candu reactor design, four of which operate at Wolsong. Candu Energy told World Nuclear News in an emailed statement that “while this incident is regrettable we see no basis for any threat to the Wolsong reactors as a result of this document being made public.” WNN has not yet been able to confirm whether any of the other documents are secret or sensitive in terms of nuclear safety.

Hackers released their information on a blog on the Naver internet portal, which has since been removed by administrators. Details of the attack were first released by South Korean website Security News.

KHNP admitted the security breach today, asserting that hackers could never affect safety at a nuclear power plant. It said that nuclear safety would be maintained in any scenario by analog reactor protection systems capable of independently shutting the reactor down and maintaining safety.

According to Security News reports, the activist group has threatened to cause more damage to KHNP computer systems unless three reactors – Kori 1, Kori 3 and Wolsong 1 – are taken offline before 25 December.

KHNP said it was training staff using simulations of cyber attacks.

The post South Korea: Anti-Nuclear Activists Hack KHNP’s Computer Systems appeared first on Eurasia Review.

When including the number of inbound tourists who visited Spain in November 2014, Spain has already surpassed the figure posted for 2013 as a whole – a year when Spain received an all-time record 60.6 million inbound tourists.

According to the Inbound Tourism Survey (FRONTUR) drafted by Spain’s General Sub-directorate of Tourism Information and Studies of the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism, a total of 61.7 million inbound tourists visited Spain in the first 11 months of the year – up 7.2% on the same period last year.

The United Kingdom (with 14.4 million tourists), France (with 10 million) and Germany (with 9.9 million) maintained their leading positions as the most important emitting markets in the first 11 months of the year. Belgium (with growth of 15.8%) and Italy (with growth of 14.7%) were the emitting markets posting the highest year-on-year growth rates.

All tourist destination regions in Spain posted growth in the period, with the Canary Islands posting the highest at 9.2%. This was followed by the Region of Madrid at 8.3% and Andalusia at 8%.

In November, Spain was visited by 3.4 million inbound tourists (a new high since records began) and saw year-on-year growth in the sector of 2.9%. In absolute terms, this equates to 96,000 more arrivals. The United Kingdom, France and Germany accounted for 50.9% of all inbound tourists.

Main emitting markets

With 14,387,632 inbound tourists between January and November, and 615,640 in November, the United Kingdom once again maintained its leading position, accounting for 23.3% and 18% of the respective total numbers of inbound tourists visiting Spain in those periods. The Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands and Catalonia were the main destinations in November.

With 10,051,457 inbound tourists in the first 11 months of the year, and 569,580 in November, France climbed to second place in both periods, accounting for 16.3% and 16.6% of the respective totals for the two periods. From among the figures posted this year, it is worth noting the 11.6% growth from January to November, as this is the highest of all the emitting markets. A figure of 7.7% growth was posted in November itself, reflected most noticeably in the growth in the Canary Islands, Catalonia, Andalusia and the Region of Valencia.

A total of 9,948,128 German tourists visited Spain to November, an increase of 6% on the same period last year. 561,888 German tourists visited the country in November, accounting for 16.4% of the total. The most popular destination regions for German tourists were the Balearic Islands, the Region of Madrid and the Region of Valencia.

With 4,691,491 inbound tourists between January and November, and 379,025 in November, the Nordic markets consolidated their position as the fourth emitting market to Spain, accounting for 7.6% and 11.1% of the respective totals for these periods. Although this market grew by 4.3% in the year as a whole, it posted a downturn of 4.9% in November.

Posting one of the highest increases in the period (14.7%), and the highest in November (20.2%), Italy helped guarantee the good results for the year with 3,499,858 inbound tourists between January and November, and 213,964 in November. This market accounted for 5.7% of the total in the period and 6.2% in the month, maintaining its fifth position.

The post Spain Posts Record Number Of Inbound Tourists appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa is claiming that the opposition candidate’s 100 day program is “a mere copy” of the government’s 2015 Budget.

Rajapaksa said the value of the promises rests purely on how the parties concerned were able to deliver on their promises in the past.

The President added that the entire country had to wait for 60 years until he became the President to create a new Sri Lanka.

President Rajapaksa stressed that the opposition candidate’s manifesto is a copy of the Government’s 2015 budget and everything the opposition candidate said in the manifesto have already been implemented.

The President added that the opposition candidate had mentioned in the manifesto that employees in the public sector who had completed over 180 days would be absorbed into permanent service.

“The opposition candidate has nothing to do since I have already granted them permanency,” he said.

President Rajapaksa added that such employees who were working in the Ceylon Electricity Board were also granted permanency though there is a delay in issuing the letter to each and every such employee.

“I have directed the authorities to issue the letters to them soon,” he said.

President Rajapaksa added that the opposition has come to an agreement with separatist forces to divide the country and these agreements are not divulged to the people.

“What the opposition wants is to stir the flames of communalism and racism to destroy this country and the policy paper has been designed to meet the requirement of the separatist forces,” he said.

Rajapaksa made the comments when addressing a rally at Weerasinghe stadium in Ampara on Saturday (Dec. 20).

The post Sri Lanka: Rajapaksa Claims Opposition Platform Is Copy Of Government’s Budget appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Gordana Andric

Serbia’s parliament started discussing a draft budget for 2015 which contains plans to reduce the number of workers in state-owned companies and the public sector by five percent.

As parliament started talking about the draft budget on Monday, Pavle Petrovic from the Serbian Fiscal Council, an independent state body charged with assessing monetary policy, said it envisages that the number of people working in publicly-owned companies and the state administration will be reduced by five percent, or around 27,000 people.

Petrovic said on Monday that the government was hoping to achieve some of this through natural wastage.

“[The government] relies on natural outflow, meaning retirement, and so far this has been from 15,000 to 20,000 people annually,” Petrovic said.

But he said that some of those who retired would be need to be replaced by new employees, meaning that layoffs would also be necessary, although the government has not set out any plans for redundancies yet.

The 2015 draft budget sets revenues at 924 billion dinars [€7.6 billion], expenditures at 1,083 billion dinars [€8.9 billion] and the deficit at 158 billion dinars [€1.3 billion].

Budget expenditures will be reduced by 2.8 per cent compared to the amount spent in 2014, while the state expects that revenues will increase by three per cent on last year.

Petrovic said that the draft budget also envisages a permanent reduction in expenditures of about 600-650 million euro. He explained that the state will save about 400 million euro through the cuts to public sector salaries and pensions which were introduced in November, and from cutting the number of employees in state enterprises and the administration and restructuring publicly-owned companies.

By law, the government must adopt a budget for the following year by November 1, while the bill needs to be approved by parliament by December 15.

However, Serbia postponed the adoption of the budget while talks were ongoing on a new loan with the International Monetary Fund.

After two weeks of negotiations, the IMF announced on November 20 that it had reached a deal with Serbia on a three-year standby loan of one billion euro.

The IMF suspended its last precautionary loan programme with Serbia in February 2012 when Belgrade stopped meeting agreed targets on spending and public debt.

The post Serbia: Budget Could Slash 27,000 Public Sector Jobs appeared first on Eurasia Review.

When the earthquake struck, Irwandi Yusuf, a leader in the armed separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM), was startled in his prison bunk. He began to pack his possessions into a plastic bag. “The earthquake was strong, I thought there might be a tsunami,” he said. “I knew many people would run toward the main door, and the prison guard would shut the gate to stop the crowd because he didn’t know the tsunami was coming.”

Irwandi, then 44, climbed a metal pole and punched through the asbestos ceiling and tin roof. “I don’t know where I got my strength,” he told IRIN. He emerged to find a city overtaken by the sea: “It looked like people were on flying carpets, riding mattresses.” He sat on the roof for three hours, smoking to kill time as the water receded. A few years earlier, one popular GAM saying was “independence is only a cigarette away.”

At that point Aceh had been under a “military emergency” (following a period of full martial law) for more than a year as Jakarta responded to an increasingly violent separatist conflict that had pitted GAM against the Indonesian army (TNI) since the 1970s. When the ocean swallowed much of the province’s coastline, it did more than liberate Irwandi, who had been captured by Indonesian intelligence months earlier in Jakarta: the disaster halted the violence to give space for humanitarian response and unprecedented cooperation between Jakarta and the rebels.

As aid money and agencies poured in, humanitarian actors had to make delicate decisions about how to allocate disaster relief funds and re-build a province already ravaged by war.Fresh rounds of peace negotiations started months after the disaster, and within a year of the tsunami, GAM was disarmed, TNI operations ratcheted back, and post-conflict programming after three decades of fighting was under way.

“During martial law, Jakarta kept Aceh closed and isolated. But the tsunami opened up the gate completely. All of a sudden the eyes of the world were on Aceh so the government had to engage with us,” Iqbal Farabi, an Acehnese human rights lawyer who worked at the Legal Aid Foundation and the government reconstruction agency (BRR), told IRIN. “Jakarta knew that if they didn’t lift military emergency law, reconstruction was going to be impossible,” he said, referring to what then World Bank researcher Patrick Barron called “a face-saving opportunity for both sides”.

Legacies of suffering

Aceh’s history is riddled with spats of conflict. In 1950 when Jakarta diluted Aceh’s then de facto autonomy by declaring it a part of Sumatra Province, violent resistance led the Indonesian capital to restore provincial status and cultural and religious decision-making. But by the late 1970s, secessionist sentiments had peaked again, in part due to oil and gas extraction in Aceh further fuelling resentment of Jakarta when little of the profits benefited Acehnese people.

GAM took shape in the 1970s, and waged a violent independence fight that had significant humanitarian impact on civilians.

Between 1999 and 2001, for example, an estimated 200,000 people were displaced due to violence; in 2003, when Jakarta declared martial law in Aceh, an estimated 125,000 people were displaced in less than one year. Explained a researcher at a May 2004 workshop at Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre: “Martial law signalled a new round of armed conflict in Aceh during which internal, indeed forced, displacement of civilian populations emerged as a deliberate strategy of war.”

Humanitarians responding to the natural disaster were operating in a complex environment with multiple types of beneficiaries. Explained Barron: “there was a perception among donor nations that it was difficult to make a case for significant funding for post-war reconstruction when Aceh was already receiving such high levels of tsunami aid.”

Rina Meutia, who worked for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the World Bank on the tsunami response, explained: “The response created two categories of Acehnese that hadn’t existed before: affected by the disaster, and not. The conflict victims fell into the ‘not’ category much of the time.”

Farabi, the human rights lawyer and former BRR staffer, argued: “BRR tried to anticipate the social problems that would come by distributing aid to disaster victims and not conflict victims and they tried to be a little flexible where they could, but the BRA [the GAM reintegration agency created after the 2005 peace agreement] had the conflict mandate so there were competing offices and personalities.”

Iskander (one name only), who works for the local government in Lhokseumawe on Aceh’s east coast, explained that as certain communities were selected as recipients, visible changes fomented local tensions.

“There was social jealousy between tsunami victims and conflict victims,” he said. “We could see it clearly in that some villages refused to accept aid from agencies seen as worse than others, and because everyone in local communities became really suspicious of each other.”

Contracts, combatants, and competency

Like many theatres of civil war across the world, Aceh’s war-time economy featured widespread corruption among and collusion between the government and rebels. Edward Aspinall, a politics professor at Australia National University, explained: “On the surface, GAM and state officials fought each other in a deadly conflict; below the surface, they were locked in an intimate embrace, seeking mutual economic advantage.”

On 15 August 2005, less than eight months after the disaster, a peace deal (MOU) was signed between GAM and Jakarta, including provisions to disarm the rebels, and that Aceh would not be independent but “self-governed,” including being allowed to form local political parties there, which Jakarta had previously outlawed.

GAM retained substantial political clout in peace time, including by what Aspinall called “predatory exploitation of post-tsunami and post-conflict reconstruction” to win contracts and dole out jobs and money to ex-combatant networks.

Irwandi, who had initially fled Aceh so as not to be apprehended again, won Aceh’s governorship in December 2006, largely thanks to young GAM-aligned voters. He took a hard line against corruption and even banned logging (a major income source for GAM and TNI during the war).

According to the International Crisis Group (ICG) in 2007, Irwandi was “popular and free from any taint of corruption or abuse of power but is coming under fire for… having no idea of how to make or implement policy.” Divisions within GAM’s political operations were quickly deepening, and public dissatisfaction with former rebels governing was growing.

Peace dividend rotting?

Political squabbling (including GAM supporters splitting into two parties in 2012) and weak governance has meant Aceh continues to be tormented by sluggish development, low-level violence and intimidation, and growing popular dissatisfaction.

The main GAM party retains what the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), a Jakarta-based think tank, called “a grassroots-based political structure that no party could rival… far more resources than other parties… [and] no hesitation about using intimidation and violence”. However, despite these attributes, May 2014 elections showed a slump in support. IPAC noted that “five years in power have not brought much tangible improvement to the lives of ordinary Acehnese, poverty remains endemic, and corruption is rife, as is extortion by former GAM commanders of local businesses and public works projects.”

Beginning in 2008 Aceh received a Special Autonomy Fund (SAF) from the central Indonesian government, pegged as a percentage of oil revenues worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and “intended to fund the development and maintenance of infrastructure, people economic empowerment, poverty eradication, and finance the education, social, and health sectors.” In 2012 a researcher at the Institute of Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies (ICAIOS) found, however, that ineffective planning for SAF funds in its first two years had increased the Human Development Index gap between Aceh and the rest of Indonesia.

According to Farabi, even with Jakarta delivering this special autonomy budget to Banda Aceh for the province’s discretionary use, “the mentality among politicians now is that this – all of this – is our money. We can take it and do what we please with it because it’s our compensation for our own suffering.”

Farabi told IRIN that while GAM members had shown political competence during peace negotiations, their leaders have not been able to work as effectively when in government. “There’s no commitment to using [state funds] for development – that is our emergency today.”

Dissatisfaction continues to fester among former combatants as well. In recent months, some ex-GAM factions have threatened to take up arms due to their disappointment with the government.

A former GAM soldier living in the eastern coastal city of Biruen showed IRIN a video clip on his phone from the late 1990s with TNI soldiers beating Acehnese men in public.

“We did not win this war, we settled for peace. And then all the money came to recover this place and was wasted.”

The post Aceh Redux: The Tsunami That Helped Stop A War appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Terri Moon Cronk

Now a 59-year tradition, the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado, will follow Santa Claus’s Christmas Eve travels using radar, satellites, jet fighters and special cameras, said Air Force Master Sgt. Chuck Marsh, spokesman for the NORAD Tracks Santa program.

First, the northern warning radar system covers nearly 50 installations across northern Canada and Alaska to closely monitor signs of when Santa leaves the North Pole in his flying-reindeer-powered sleigh, Marsh explained.

Next, the geosynchronous orbit satellite system begins tracking Santa’s route, 22,000 miles above earth, using infrared systems that detect heat to pick up the warmth generated by Rudolph the reindeer’s red nose, he said.

Finally, Canadian NORAD CF-18 fighter pilots take off from Newfoundland and welcome Santa and his reindeer to North America, where American NORAD jet pilots escort him in F-15s, -16s or -22s, Marsh said.

Santa Cams Keep Kids on Course

That’s when the high-speed, digital Santa cameras positioned around the world pick up St. Nick at about 3 a.m., MST and 5 a.m., EST Christmas Eve, Marsh said. Pictures and videos from the cams are loaded onto the Santa tracker at http://www.noradsanta.org/.

That’s when the fun begins.

Volunteers take their positions at 4 a.m., MST, and 6 a.m., EST at the NORAD operations center to field children’s phone calls at 1-877-446-6723 or 1-877-HI-NORAD in eight languages — English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Chinese.

Children can then watch as Santa starts his trek from the International Date Line in the Pacific Ocean, travels west, and moves up and down the Eastern and Western hemispheres. Weather conditions may cause Santa to vary his course.

Volunteers Get Caught in Excitement

The volunteers work two-hour shifts but usually stay longer out of excitement, said Marsh, adding, “We couldn’t do this without them.”

Volunteers also talk to children all around the world from NORAD all around the world by email at noradtrackssanta@outlook.com, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google-Plus and even via OnStar operators.

“We’re expecting more than 1,250 American and Canadian uniformed personnel, [Defense Department] civilians, family members and members of the local community to volunteer their time Dec. 24 to answer the thousands of phone calls and emails that flood in,” Marsh said.

Last year, the NORAD Tracks Santa operations center had nearly 20 million website visits from people in 234 countries, 1.45 million Facebook “likes,” and more than 146,000 Twitter followers, Marsh said.

Volunteers received more than 117,000 phone calls during the 23-hour timeframe, he said, and responded to more than 9,606 emails and some 800 inquiries through OnStar.

Kids Ask Everything

Children ask volunteers lots of questions about Santa’s whereabouts, whether he goes to every house in the world, and how he gets all the presents delivered in one night.

“NORAD intelligence reports indicate that Santa doesn’t experience time the way we do … but in his own space-time continuum,” Marsh said. “It seems like 24 hours to us, but it’s days, weeks and even months to Santa, because he wouldn’t want to rush the important job of delivering gifts and spreading joy.”

Some children want to know Santa’s age, Marsh said.

“It’s hard to know for sure,” he said. “But he’s at least 16 centuries old.”

The volunteers also advise children that Santa delivers presents between 9 p.m. and midnight, so it’s important for them to be asleep when he arrives, Marsh said.

No Need to Wait for the Fun

As Christmas nears, children and their families can take part in new age-appropriate games every day on the website, watch movies, listen to holiday tunes by the Air Force Academy Band and read about Santa, the history of his ancient sleigh and the holiday traditions of other countries.

NORAD’s Track Santa program is DoD’s largest community outreach program, and this year about 60 organizations’ contributions will make the program possible, Marsh said.

“We’re very proud of our mission [at NORAD and NORTHCOM] and we’re good at it all-year long,” Marsh said. “But we love the opportunity this time of year to be able to say to everyone, ‘Sleep tight. We have the watch.’”

The post NORAD To Track Santa’s Christmas Eve Journey appeared first on Eurasia Review.

US Secretary of State John Kerry congratulated Monday President-elect Beji Caid Essebsi, (88), on his victory and the Tunisian people on the successful completion of their process to elect a new government under the constitution adopted last January.

Essebsi, a veteran anti-Islamist politician was declared Monday the winner of Tunisia’s presidential elections run-off that were held on Sunday after garnering 55.68 percent of the votes to defeat incumbent Moncef Marzouki.

According to Kerry, “Tunisia has provided a shining example to the region and the world of what can be achieved through dedication to democracy, consensus, and an inclusive political process.”

Kerry also offered his congratulations to the Independent Election Commission, for “successfully managed a very complex and challenging process this year to democratically elect a parliament and president.”

According to Kerry, Tunisia’s achievements this year lay the groundwork for a more stable, prosperous, and democratic future for the country.

“I look forward to working with President-elect Caid Essebsi and Tunisia’s new parliament and government to strengthen and expand our countries’ enduring friendship and strategic partnership,” Kerry said, adding that, “The United States will continue to support Tunisia as it joins the ranks of the world’s democracies, and we call on other members of the international community to do the same.”

The post Kerry Congratulates Essebsi On Winning Tunisia Presidential Run-Off appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Joel Veldkamp*

The Facebook page of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party’s Homs branch recently boasted: “The families of Homs return to their homes and thank the Party for providing security for them.”

According to reports I’ve received from colleagues in Syria, this boast is not empty. Following the retaking of Homs’ Old City from the rebels in May of this year, the regime has turned over responsibility for security and administration in the Old City to the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and its militia.

Indeed, this Facebook post from September 18 is accompanied by a photo album of Homs’ Old City that resembles a victory parade: photo after photo of Old City homes and alleyways decorated with the flags and slogans of the SSNP—the red “hurricane,” posters of the party’s martyrs, and the phrases “Eagles of the Hurricane” and “Long live [Greater] Syria.”

“Go back only two years, and we would not see the party’s symbol or slogan except on the inside of houses and in secret,” the post says. “Ask the people of Homs about the Nationalists, and one of them will answer you, laughing, ‘I asked them for a flag of the party to hang in my house but there were none left, so I painted the “hurricane” on the entrance to my house myself.’”

The SSNP, which recently celebrated its 82nd anniversary to much positive coverage from Syrian state media, has a long and tortured relationship with Damascus. Founded by the Lebanese Greek Orthodox intellectual Antoine Saada in 1932, when the postcolonial future of the region was still up for grabs, the SSNP was devoted to secularism and a particular version of pan-Syrian nationalism that saw the area now covered by the nation-states of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, and even Cyprus, as a single historical nation, which should be united as such.

As it happened, after the European evacuation, residents of the French Mandate area were divided between supporters of an independent Lebanon and the pan-Arabists, leaving little oxygen for Saada’s pan-Syrianism. While the SSNP proved very influential for its small size, its several coup attempts in Lebanon and Syria failed and earned it great enmity on the part of those governments. Saada himself was executed by Lebanese police after the Syrian strongman Husni al-Zaim delivered him into their custody. But in the Second Lebanese Civil War, Hafiz al-Assad nurtured the Party as a tool of Damascus’ interests. It entered the war with Syrian sponsorship and under considerable Syrian influence. An SSNP member was arrested for the assassination of Bashir Gemayel in 1982 and was later released by the Syrians after they took control of Lebanon. Nevertheless, the Party remained officially banned in Syria until 2005 when it was integrated into the Baath Party’s “National Progressive Front.”

Interestingly, in its public social media statements, the Party does not gloss over this history of strife. While strongly endorsing Bashar al-Assad’s reelection bid, including his image in most of their public events, and toeing the regime’s line on the war (sample SANA headline: “What is happening in Syria is an American-Israeli scheme funded by the Gulf”), the Party’s social media outlets recount the struggle with the Ba’ath and their predecessors in dramatic tones:

“The words ‘Long Live [Greater] Syria’ would bring trouble to the one who uttered them publicly, from one branch of security or another.  The ‘Nationalist’ party, as it is termed today, was stricken from Syria in the 1950s, prohibited from political work, and its members put in prison. These prosecutions diminished in the 70s but didn’t end. Even in the recent period, the party was not a member of the National Progressive Front [It was, in fact, from 2005 to 2012], and its principles intellectually contradict the Front’s principle of complete Arab unity. Because of this, it was legally not licensed and its members were not permitted to practice overt political work.”

If this rhetoric is representative, the SSNP is keen to retain its ideological independence from the regime—perhaps more so now, in the space created by the crisis, than before. “This has never been the party in power or the party of interests. …This is the party of the people, of the defenders of the people.”

Martyrdom narratives notwithstanding, the SSNP benefitted tremendously from legalization in 2005. A Greek Catholic friend from the Qalamoun region (like most young Syrian professionals, himself a member of the Ba’ath party) writes, “The SSNP is very popular, especially in Christian areas like Wadi al-Nasara. They are very organized and active. In the last ten years, they showed a lot of interest in people. In my town, they were always organizing youth activities—museum trips, pool outings.” A widely-cited (but probably unverifiable) figure puts the total membership of the SSNP in Syria at 100,000.

With the onset of the crisis, as the SSNP Homs’ Facebook page puts it, “the party’s status has changed radically—what it was before the Syrian crisis is not what it is after.” My friend writes that as the violence began, “The SSNP started training people in Wadi Nasara, in self-defense, in using weapons, in first aid.” When the regime began organizing the National Defense Forces in various towns, “they went to the church leaders, to the local Ba’ath Party and to the SSNP.” In some areas of Syria, the SSNP fighters form merely a part of the NDF; in other areas, “they are the leaders:” “They don’t just hold guns and stand at the entrance. They are law enforcement in some of these towns. Their support and guns come from the government.”

Another Syrian Greek Catholic friend, only 14 when the uprising started, regularly posts photos to Facebook of himself holding machine guns and wearing the SSNP patch. In October, he posted photos of himself in Dukhaniyah, near Qunaytrah, after fighting to retake the city for the regime.

Non-Maronite Christians’ attraction to the Party is natural. Writing in 1988, Pipes argued:

“Pure Pan-Syrianism held up as an ideal a geographic unit in which non-Sunnis constitute about half the population; in contrast, they almost disappear in larger Arab units. By bridging the historic gap between Muslims and Christians, Pan-Syrianism promised full citizenship and equality for the latter; by glorifying pre-Islamic antiquity – the civilization that Islam vanquished – it celebrated the common past; and it offered a state that would include nearly all Orthodox Christians within its confines.”

My Greek Catholic friend notes, “It’s convincing even for me. I feel closer to a Palestinian or a Lebanese person than to an Emirati or an Egyptian or a Bedouin.” Jihad el-Zein writes in al-Monitor that today “the SSNP is appearing as the ‘fighting Christians’ party on the side of the Syrian regime.”

In February of this year, al-Akhbar reported that:

“SSNP fighters are primarily deployed in the governorates of Homs and Damascus. …SSNP fighters stood out in the battles of Saddad and Mahin a few months ago, and in Nabek, Fallita, and Maaloula. Currently, they are working to repel attacks by opposition militants against the towns of Sednaya…The SSNP is the most formidable military force in Suweida other than the Syrian army…”

The killing of an SSNP leader from Homs named Subhi al-Eid in the battle for the Christian town of Saddad last November is commemorated on the SSNP Homs’ website and the first anniversary of his martyrdom was marked in a public ceremony this year. SSNP Homs’ Facebook page boasts:

“You ask about the Party’s martyrs in the alleys of Homs and you will receive a good answer, for they are known to the people: this one was martyred here and that one wounded there, at the battles of Saddad and al-Husn and Zara and Kassab and Saydnaya and Maleeha and Maherda and not ending in the Old City of Homs.”

While the SSNP does not spout sectarian rhetoric, it goes without saying that Syrian Christians perceived the rebel attacks on the Christian towns of Saddad, Maaloula, Sednaya and Kassab as attacks on their faith group.  One possible interpretation of the SSNP’s vigorous fight against the Syrian opposition is that of a Christian resistance against Sunni Muslim attack.

But there may be an ideological precedent for the SSNP’s role in the Syrian Civil War as well. In Lebanon’s first civil war, the SSNP took up arms on the side of the Chamoun government, in defense of a nation-state it believed should not exist, because other forces were threatening to drag Lebanon into a political union with non-Syrian Egypt. Today, in the face of a rebel movement rife with Islamists and supported by Turkey and the non-Syrian Arab states, the SSNP has again thrown in their lot with a regime they are fundamentally ideologically opposed to. From the 1950s until now, it seems, the SSNP will fight to keep any part of Greater Syria from being absorbed into a pan-Arab or pan-Islamic grouping.

The resurgence of the SSNP deserves much more attention. A wealth of information can be gleaned from the SSNP’s social media outlets alone.

Here I will suggest two possible implications of this resurgence:

1)  For decades, the SSNP’s pan-Syrian ideology was hamstrung by a division of its potential supporters between Lebanese nationalism and Arab nationalism (and later, Islamism). Could it be that the upheaval seen in the Syrian civil war is so great that it will allow for a resuscitation of the SSNP’s program as an ideology of influence in the region?

2)  The Syrian regime’s delegation of responsibility to the SSNP at the battlefront and in administration of “liberated” areas like Homs’ Old City suggest that the “militiafication” of Syria, ably described by Aron Lund on Syria Comment last year, continues apace. The regime is pushing back the opposition using a fragmentary coalition of parties with disparate ideologies and interests—parties that will be in a position to make demands when and if victory ever comes. To the long list of parties in this coalition—including Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Iskanderoun, the Abul-Fadl al-Abbas Brigade, and the Jaysh al-Muwahhideen—we must add the SSNP.

About the author:
Joel Veldkamp is an MA candidate at the University of Chicago’s Center for Middle East Studies. He lived in Damascus, Syria from September 2010 until May 2011. Follow Joel on Twitter: @joelman42

Source:
This article was published at Syria Comment.

The post Resurgence Of SSNP In Syria: Ideological Opponent Of Regime Gets Boost – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Michael Lelyveld

The past year may mark a turning point for China’s economy, or merely a downturn after decades of higher growth rates.

In November, President Xi Jinping told leaders of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit that China’s lower growth rates are now the “new normal,” using a label he first applied to the decelerating economy in May.

“We must boost our confidence, adapt to the new normal condition based on the characteristics of China’s economic growth in the current phase, and stay cool-minded,” Xi said during a tour of central Henan province seven months ago.

Since then, economic activity has continued toward its third consecutive year of below 8-percent growth, posting an expansion of 7.3 percent in the third quarter after 7.7- percent increases in 2012 and 2013, the slowest annual pace since 1999.

Although much of the past year has been marked by expectations of a return to major stimulus policies, the government has largely stuck to its guns with smaller steps and targeted measures aimed at assuring more sustainable “medium-to-high” growth.

The leadership that took office in March 2013 has been grappling with the expansionary excesses of the previous government’s 4-trillion yuan (U.S. $646-billion) stimulus package from 2008-2009, now blamed for a binge of construction, pollution, energy consumption, and debt.

GDP ‘obsession’

The new government has been working from a reform blueprint laid out at the Communist Party Central Committee’s Third Plenary Session in November 2013, seeking to end China’s obsession with high gross domestic product (GDP).

While keeping the GDP target at 7.5 percent for 2014, Premier Li Keqiang announced a more flexible policy in March, tolerating somewhat lower rates as long as job growth and inflation stayed within a “reasonable” range.

“Whether the final reading is at a touch more or less than the 7.5-percent target is not that important. Employment is the key,” Finance Minister Lou Jiwei said nine months ago.

But China’s performance within the job and inflation parameters did little to assure markets that the government was dealing with deeper concerns over rising debt levels, weak industrial growth, stalled property sales, and lackluster trade.

“The downward pressure is still considerable. We should not ignore the challenges and risks,” Premier Li told provincial governors in June, putting markets on watch for a loosening of the liquidity floodgates.

But it would be five months before the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) responded with its first interest rate cut in over two years after smaller liquidity injections failed to spark the stagnating economy.

Dimmed hopes

The drop in the one-year benchmark lending rate by 0.4 percent on Nov. 21 raised hopes that 2014 would close on a high note as markets jumped at the prospect of more rate cuts, faster home sales, and eased financing for debt-laden industries.

But hopes dimmed on Dec. 9 as stocks plunged 5.4 percent in the biggest dip since 2009, ending an 18-percent rise for the Shanghai Composite Index in the previous month.

Reports blamed a regulatory tightening on lower-grade securities that could be offered for municipal finance, but the sudden reversal suggested the rally was on thin ice as an economic indicator.

By last week, shares had recovered again as the Shanghai index reached a four-year high.

Yukon Huang, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said investors may be reading too much into the market’s ups and downs.

“Some of that is unwarranted faith that the government can turn around economic activity through monetary easing. I think that portion of it is unrealistic,” said Huang, a former World Bank country director for China.

A rocky year

At the close of its annual Central Economic Work Conference on Dec. 11, the government said it would largely stick with its recent policies, while acknowledging “something of a rocky year” and “relatively big” downward pressures, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

“I don’t think the economy is going to improve significantly for at least a year or two,” Huang said in an interview.

Even so, Huang argued in recent studies that some concerns with China’s debt levels and other economic risks have been overstated.

Although debt has now climbed to an estimated 250 percent of GDP, Huang sees the legacy from the “big bang” stimulus as “serious but manageable” and unlikely to presage a crisis, in part because credit is fully funded by bank deposits.

In its official summary, the work conference said nothing about debt levels or credit risks, focusing instead on structural reforms to investment access, pricing and other Third Plenum goals.

“The proactive fiscal policy should be stronger and the prudent monetary policy should be more pragmatic,” the conference said in one of its few hints of policy change.

Drop in growth

Huang said GDP growth may drop to 6-6.5 percent for the next two years as construction slows to reduce surplus housing, but China can snap back if it pursues the agenda of the Third Plenum reforms with some adjustments.

“China can sustain an annual growth rate of 7 percent in the second half of this decade if it puts into effect three major reform initiatives flagged at last year’s Third Plenum: more efficient urbanization, realigned roles for the private and state sectors, and a better targeted regional development strategy,” Huang said in a paper for China Economic Quarterly this month.

Huang said the government should reconsider its policy of restricting moves of rural dwellers to China’s largest cities as it liberalizes its “hukou” household registration rules.

The urbanization program announced in March would open the doors for some 100 million migrants by 2020, but only for moves to second and third-tier cities, stopping short of giving citizens full freedom of movement.

By keeping population curbs on the “megacities” of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, the plan would miss out on program’s potential for bigger economic and efficiency gains, said Huang.

“That’s where the productivity gains are. That’s where the money is. That’s where financially sustainable investments can be achieved,” he said.

Mixed ownership

In another difference with the government’s reform plan, Huang believes the push for “mixed ownership” to encourage private investment in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is “unlikely to work.”

“Essentially, it doesn’t change the control structure,” said Huang.

Instead, the state should just get out of some sectors altogether, although the process of transition to private enterprise may take years.

Dale Jorgenson, a Harvard University economics professor, said he remains encouraged by the agenda of the Third Plenum plans for structural reforms.

“I think that the Chinese economy is on track,” said Jorgenson, who expects GDP growth next year of a “little less” than 7 percent.

Last week, a PBOC working paper forecast a 7.1-percent growth rate for 2015, down from 7.4 percent this year, according to Xinhua.

The right direction

Despite the recent lowering of interest rates, China’s monetary policy remains tightly controlled. But regulators are “moving in the right direction” toward a more market-based system, said Jorgenson.

The central bank’s recent plan to provide deposit insurance covering losses of up to 500,000 yuan (U.S. $81,500) is a “positive move,” he said.

“The big ticket items are still ahead,” said Jorgenson, pointing to urbanization and development of the private sector. “But at least, they’re on the agenda,” he added.

Changes in fiscal policy that would reduce the reliance of local governments on land sales by imposing property taxes are still expected to come only gradually.

On Monday, the State Council, or cabinet, announced a draft of new rules for real estate registration to take effect in March, marking a step toward financing through property taxes.

Resistance from SOEs

Privatization also remains a serious challenge for China, as the heavily-indebted SOEs have been slow to reduce industrial overcapacity and pollution.

“The SOEs are very eager to maintain control,” said Jorgenson. “They are, by and large, a loss-making sector and they depend very heavily on being insulated from competition,’ he said.

China’s agenda has so far excluded a “big bang” privatization, similar to those in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, which led to an explosion of free market activity but also sharp dislocations and long readjustment periods.

Instead, China has opted for gradual increases of private investment in SOEs, which could eventually make them market-driven.

The approach suggests years of structural adjustment that may exert a drag on economic growth, but China’s alternatives for the politically powerful and bloated state sector are limited.

“You can’t have privatization without a market for the securities of the state-owned enterprises,” Jorgenson argued.

“It’s going to be a very gradual process,” he said.

The post China: Economic Pace Slowed In 2014 – Analysis appeared first on Eurasia Review.

US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregong), has praised the Interior Department announcement that it will close loopholes that have allowed mining companies to dodge royalties when federal coal is exported overseas.

Wyden called for an investigation of questionable royalty practice in January 2013, after a series of Reuters articles detailed how some companies were using financial arrangements – often selling coal to their own subsidiaries at a low price – to avoid paying full royalties on coal that was mined on federal and tribal lands and then shipped abroad.

“I said from the beginning that taxpayers must receive every penny they are owed when coal companies sell resources extracted from public lands,” Wyden said. “I applaud Interior Secretary Sally Jewell beginning to take common-sense steps to make sure that happens.”

The Department of the Interior also announced it will update 25-year-old guidelines that may have allowed coal mining companies to pay below-market rates to lease Bureau of Land Management lands, another issue Wyden raised earlier this year. The new guidelines are expected to bring more consistency to the leasing process, and require BLM offices to take into account the potential that coal mined on federal land could be exported.

The Interior Department took a number of steps in response to Wyden’s inquiry, including audits of past royalty payments, which are ongoing.

The post US Senator Wyden Says Coal Companies Must Stop Shortchanging Taxpayers appeared first on Eurasia Review.

The Saudi economy and its industries are strong enough to withstand the impact of oil price fluctuations, the country’s Council of Ministers said on Monday, pledging to continue its “balanced policy” commitments as contained in its budgets over the past few years.

The Cabinet, chaired by Crown Prince Salman, deputy premier and minister of defense, made these comments in a statement issued after its weekly meeting. It said it had reviewed international oil market developments and determined that price fluctuations were quite “natural.”

“We are confident that our efforts will have the best results for the Kingdom. We’ll continue our balanced policy in a strong and firm manner relying on the Almighty and then the wise leadership, as well as the strong economy and strong global petroleum industry,” the statement said.

The Cabinet congratulated Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah on the success of his initiative to end the conflict between Egypt and Qatar, while commending his efforts to strengthen Arab unity. It welcomed the response of Egypt and Qatar toward the king’s initiative.

Culture and Information Minister Abdul Aziz Al-Khodairy said the Cabinet condemned the terrorist attack on a school in northwest Pakistan, which killed 148 people, mostly children. It expressed heartfelt condolences to the government and people of Pakistan and the families of the victims, and wished the injured a speedy recovery.

Earlier, the crown prince briefed the Cabinet on his talks with Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, while Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Naif spoke about the ongoing efforts to defeat terrorists.

The Cabinet commended in this regard the great achievements of the security forces. It also praised citizens for their cooperation, which contributed to the speedy detection and arrests of terrorists in Awamiya. The Cabinet reiterated that those who tamper with the Kingdom’s security would be brought to justice.

Al-Khodairy said the Cabinet approved the establishment of private consumer protection bodies. However, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry should provide licenses for these organizations, he said.

The Cabinet approved a memorandum of understanding between King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology and China’s National Space Administration on cooperation in space sciences and technologies, which was signed in Beijing on March 14, 2014.

The agreement ensures cooperation in various fields, including designing, developing and manufacturing satellites for scientific experiments, earth and remote communications monitoring, satellite launching services and space sciences and exploration.

The Cabinet backed the statement issued by the Conference of the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to protect civilians, and its emphasis on implementing international law in the occupied Palestinian territories for a just and lasting peace.

Al-Khodairy said the Cabinet authorized the minister of foreign affairs to discuss with the Djiboutian side a draft agreement on political bilateral consultations between the two foreign ministries.

It endorsed a similar agreement signed with Belgium.

The Cabinet approved the appointment of the following as members of the board of directors of the Electricity and Cogeneration Regulatory Authority for a period of three years: Yusuf bin Abdul Sattar Maimani, Abdullah bin Saeed Al-Mubti, Ihsan Buhulaiga and Othman Al-Khuwaiter. It also renewed the board membership of Ibrahim bin Saleh Almuetaz.

Regarding the collection of Zakat, the Cabinet authorized the finance minister to implement the royal decree to make these collections from companies, institutions and individuals required to pay this tax.

The post Saudi Arabia Insists It Is Insulated From Oil Price Volatility appeared first on Eurasia Review.

On the news talk shows, everyone is talking about torture—mostly defending the Bush administration’s hysterical actions after the 9/11 attacks. Granted, 9/11 was a searing experience for the general public, which wanted action in retaliation. However, it is the duty of wise political leaders to reason with the public to dampen the desire for any rash, counterproductive actions. Instead, Bush administration officials used such public fear and anger from 9/11 to fuel public support for their own unrelated policy agenda that made the Islamist terrorism problem worse. Torture was one aspect of that policy agenda. Even after 9/11, terrorism was a rare event, as it was before, and government terrorism experts should have known that the resources of a small group, such as al Qaeda, were not great enough to necessitate excesses in response, such as torture and other government usurpation of American constitutionally-guaranteed civil liberties.

When prisoner abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were exposed, guerrilla violence following in the wake of Bush’s trumped-up post-9/11 invasion and occupation of Iraq worsened. Now torture at CIA secret prisons around the world after 9/11, already well-known but highlighted and detailed by the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, could similarly fan the flames of anti-American Islamism. Yet news programs gave more air time to the defenders of Bush’s clearly illegal and counterproductive policy than they did to opponents of torture—such as committee members and human rights organizations. The reason is that the media is in the habit of focusing in on executive branch officials as authoritative sources on policy (because the executive branch, contrary to the country’s founders’ vision, now is by far the most powerful arm of government). Also, the media likes to fan controversy and ex-officials defending lurid, outrageous, and frankly “un-American” policy is well… great television. I say un-American because secret imprisonment and torture clearly violate U.S. law, official U.S. policy prior to the Bush administration, the international convention on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment signed by Ronald Reagan and ratified by Congress, and long-standing international standards of human rights. Finally, Obama administration officials, who discontinued torture when Obama came into office, have been ducking the issue, because they don’t want to adversely affect the morale of the CIA bureaucracy.

However, maybe if some CIA personnel who tortured people or destroyed videos of it were prosecuted, the agency would learn to avoid such illegalities in the future. People going to jail would have a more searing effect than apparently the Church Committee hearings in the mid-1970s had on illegal and unconstitutional practices by intelligence agencies. In fact, perhaps Congress should pass a law that prohibits the CIA (and the NSA) from doing any activities other than lawful intelligence collecting on foreigners. Both agencies would be much better off and have better morale in the long-term if they stuck to this vital mission. Yet, since its inception, the CIA has been distracted by more glamorous missions than the drudgery of painstaking intelligence collection—first covert action against unfriendly countries and more recently the management of the secret prisons where the torture occurred.

As well as being un-American—we should be better than our adversaries, such as ISIS or al Qaeda, who kidnap people and mistreat and gruesomely kill prisoners, but were not—torture theretofore had been clearly regarded as counterproductive, even by the U.S. government itself. The FBI and U.S. military initially blanched at the idea of U.S. personnel torturing people, because bad information is usually produced by the victim just to get the pain to stop. The CIA during the Bush administration forgot its own report concluding the same in 1989. Moreover, the U.S. military—especially its lawyers—has never been keen on the practice because it gives future enemies an excuse to torture American service personnel in retaliation and makes it more likely that any enemy will fight to the death rather than be taken prisoner by the Americans. Both effects can result in more deaths to U.S. military personnel in any war.

But in the wake of 9/11, did Bush and Cheney listen to the experts in the military and the FBI on the counterproductivity of torture? No, instead these avoiders of combat during the Vietnam era had to pose as macho and pretend to do something to vanquish evil everywhere in lieu of focusing on capturing al Qaeda members that perpetrated the 9/11 attacks (not on overthrowing and capturing Saddam Hussein), interrogating them with FBI and military interrogators using legal tried-and-true methods, and trying them as criminals in perfectly capable civilian courts.

Instead, Bush and Cheney thought it would be really cool to let the CIA hire bozo contractors, who had no interrogation experience, to run a keystone cops program to kidnap and manhandle captives in CIA secret prisons. According to CIA admission, either implicitly or explicitly in CIA documents, this policy led to a shocking outcome: Almost a quarter (at least) of detainees in CIA prisons weren’t guilty of anything at all, were held for years in dungeon-style prisons, and some were tortured.

It is amazing that in an America that is becoming politically correct on everything else, so many defenders of a heinous and clearly illegal practice can be found. They are mostly Republicans defending what was an outlaw Bush administration—the exception being John McCain,who represents the military’s view on the subject. Since Dick Cheney, the most dangerous American politician in recent times, has publicly declared that he would support torture if he had it to do over again, maybe this blatant in-your-face attitude will cause some country overseas that has signed the torture convention, or has had American torture done on its territory, will prosecute him; certainly the Obama administration, which overall has not been that much better than the Bush administration in safeguarding American civil liberties, will not. At minimum, maybe former Bush administration officials will fear to travel overseas for fear of being shanghaied for prosecution and jailing. Alberto Gonzalez, Bush’s Attorney General, recently expressed some personal fear of this outcome on a news program.

Since Bush started all of the U.S. government torture rolling by his “wink and nudge” declaration in February 2002 that al Qaeda fighters would not be held under the safeguards of the Geneva Conventions and has crowed about the necessity of using torture during his tenure, maybe he should just stay at home on the Texas ranch too.

This article was published at The Huffington Post and is reprinted with permission.

The post Doing The Indefensible: Defending Torture – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Last week we learned that the key to a strong economy is not increased production, lower unemployment, or a sound monetary unit. Rather, economic prosperity depends on the type of language used by the central bank in its monetary policy statements. All it took was one word in the Federal Reserve Bank’s press release — that the Fed would be “patient” in raising interest rates to normal levels — and stock markets went wild. The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average had their best gains in years, with the Dow gaining nearly 800 points from Wednesday to Friday and the S&P gaining almost 100 points to close within a few points of its all-time high.

Just think of how many trillions of dollars of financial activity occurred solely because of that one new phrase in the Fed’s statement. That so much in our economy hangs on one word uttered by one institution demonstrates not only that far too much power is given to the Federal Reserve, but also how unbalanced the American economy really is.

While the real economy continues to sputter, financial markets reach record highs, thanks in no small part to the Fed’s easy money policies. After six years of zero interest rates, Wall Street has become addicted to easy money. Even the slightest mention of tightening monetary policy, and Wall Street reacts like a heroin addict forced to sober up cold turkey.

While much of the media paid attention to how long interest rates would remain at zero, what they largely ignored is that the Fed 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.” Look at the Fed’s balance sheet and you’ll see that it has purchased $25 billion in mortgage-backed securities since the end of QE3. Annualized, that is $200 billion a year. That may not be as large as QE2 or QE3, but quantitative easing, or as the Fed likes to say “accommodative monetary policy” is far from over.

What gets lost in all the reporting about stock market numbers, unemployment rate figures, and other economic data is the understanding that real wealth results from production of real goods, not from the creation of money out of thin air. The Fed can rig the numbers for a while by turning the monetary spigot on full blast, but the reality is that this is only papering over severe economic problems. Six years after the crisis of 2008, the economy still has not fully recovered, and in many respects is not much better than it was at the turn of the century.

Since 2001, the United States has grown by 38 million people and the working-age population has grown by 23 million people. Yet the economy has only added eight million jobs. Millions of Americans are still unemployed or underemployed, living from paycheck to paycheck, and having to rely on food stamps and other government aid. The Fed’s easy money has produced great profits for Wall Street, but it has not helped — and cannot help — Main Street.

An economy that holds its breath every six weeks, looking to parse every single word coming out of Fed Chairman Janet Yellen’s mouth for indications of whether to buy or sell, is an economy that is fundamentally unsound. The Fed needs to stop creating trillions of dollars out of thin air, let Wall Street take its medicine, and allow the corrections that should have taken place in 2001 and 2008 to liquidate the bad debts and malinvestments that permeate the economy. Only then will we see a real economic recovery.

This article was published by The RonPaul Institute.

The post Ron Paul: Janet Yellen’s Christmas Gift To Wall Street – OpEd appeared first on Eurasia Review.

Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union have written to US Attorney General Eric Holder urging him to order a criminal investigation into torture and other serious abuses relating to the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation and detention program.

In a letter sent to Holder, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU said the summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA program released on December 9, 2014, revealed significant new information that points to the commission of serious federal crimes. A special prosecutor should investigate such crimes, including torture, conspiracy, sexual assault, and homicide, and prosecute where appropriate.

“The Senate torture report shows that CIA officials knew their methods were illegal and tried hard to cover them up,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “A full investigation is necessary to show that torture in the name of national security is still a criminal offense.”

The post Calls For Holder To Investigate, Prosecute CIA Torture appeared first on Eurasia Review.

By Jeffrey Michels*

We are living in an era of revolutions gone awry. Powerful protests have proven effective at toppling statues of leaders but helpless at tearing out their foundations and building something better.

This latter step is the daunting challenge facing Ukraine today after parliamentary elections in late October.

If this feels like déjà vu, that’s because it is.

Ten years ago, Ukraine was in a similar position — hoping to reform itself after kicking the very same man, Viktor Yanukovych, out of the presidency — in the so-called Orange revolution of 2004. Yet after a few years of disappointing “reformist” government, Ukraine found itself back where it started. To break the cycle, the newly elected officials will need to learn from the past and devolve power from themselves and their corporate allies.

Yet it’s a particularly challenging time to do so: Ukraine’s economy is disintegrating. Its foreign debt is growing as its currency’s value shrinks. Russia continues to embed itself in Crimea as it pushes separatists forth over Ukraine’s industrial heartland. And winter accentuates the need to keep energy flowing from Ukraine’s hostile neighbor in the east.

Ukraine’s new government thus has to find a way to overcome these immediate challenges while undergoing fundamental reform. Now that its new parliament — the Verkhovna Rada — has been officially minted with its ceremonial first brawl, it is time to ask: Are the new leaders up to the task?

The Officials

Pro-Western parties won a strong majority of seats in the elections — a predictable result, given that the country’s separatist pro-Russian strongholds did not participate — and commenced the painfully slow process of forming a government.

At the helm of this coalition are President Petro Poroshenko and Prime Minister Arsiniy Yatsenyuk — the leaders of the election’s two best-performing parties (with over 20 percent of the vote each).

Both Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk support the consolidation and modernization of Ukraine’s splintered military and reform of the country’s corrupt and convoluted judiciary system. Outside observers have expressed optimism that the two men possess the administrative capability to see these reforms through.

But there have also been causes for concern. Poroshenko, for instance — a billionaire who made his fortune selling sweets — is a business behemoth in a country whose post-Soviet economic and political development has been stunted by the outsized influence of a handful of oligarchs. Yatsenyuk, for his part, has already served in Ukraine’s previous failed and corrupt governments. Ambitious and sensing opportunity, the two men often appear preoccupied with scrapping for pieces of each other’s power.

Their political rivalry was expected to play out in the selection of ministers, at the expense of laying the foundation for change. For the most part, this has not been the case.  Much of the recently installed cabinet — notable for the presence of those born outside Ukraine — is avowedly committed to quickly making the tough decisions necessary to yank Ukraine from its rut.  The American-born, Harvard-educated Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, for example, seeks to slash waste in the budget before Christmas.

Poroshenko insisted on confirming all of the members together, however, and this allowed into office officials with a less clear sense of purpose and more incriminating pasts. Other potential red flags include the issuance of a coalition platform that calls for change but hardly explains how to achieve it, as well as the creation of a Ministry of Information to combat propaganda from Russia — and potentially criticism from within Ukraine’s own borders.

The Outsiders

Even if Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk cooperate to reinvigorate Ukraine’s rotten institutions, they won’t be able to go it alone.

In order to gather the seats necessary to push constitutional amendments through the legislature — 300 out of 450 — the eponymous Petro Poroshenko Bloc and Yatsenyuk’s People’s Front formed a potentially shaky coalition with three Western-leaning parties.

Two of those parties — the Fatherland Party, which won 19 seats, and the Radical Party, which took 22 — are wild cards, owing to their strong dependence on the direction their leaders take them.

Heading the Fatherland Party is Yulia Tymoshenko, who was appointed prime minister after Yanukovych was first kicked from the podium in 2004, imprisoned upon Yanukovych’s return, and released earlier this year as events came full circle. She then rushed to the Maidan protests to establish herself as a champion of the revolution. But with the dismal results of the last “revolution” firmly entrenched in Ukrainians’ memories, she hardly won anything at all: Her party surpassed the vote threshold to earn a presence in parliament by less than a percentage point.

While ideologically not so distant from Poroshenko, Tymoshenko has already turned down the chance to compromise with the president. “They thought I’d step aside to let an oligarch take over,” she said of Poroshenko’s previous offer to let Tymoshenko become the transitional government’s prime minister in exchange for her bowing out of the presidential race. “Never!” Tymoshenko is renowned for her competitive, populist, and opportunistic tendencies — and no doubt slighted by her fall from prominence — and so expecting her to tow the coalition line through potentially unpopular reforms is certainly a leap of faith.

The Radical Party’s leader, Oleh Lyashko, bears many of the same qualities. Described by Foreign Policy as “a practiced populist with no ideology,” he once ran for office with Tymoshenko’s party before splitting off to boost his own political celebrity. Trumpeting his tougher-than-Poroshenko stances against oligarchs, Russian-backed separatists, and non-Ukrainian cheese , Lyashko too might be tempted to abandon the coalition if its popularity should stumble.

Another coalition member, the reformist Samopomich party — translated as either “Self-Help” or “Self-Reliance” — won 33 seats running as the most direct heir to the Maidan protests. Its numbers swelled as activists-cum-politicians grew disillusioned with the traditional political tack of running alongside more experienced figures — in this case established politicians looking to survive the revolution by claiming to tout its values. Upon entering the governing coalition, however, the party’s opposition to politics as usual will surely be tested.

The Oligarchs

Among the strongest unifiers for these five parties is their goal to loosen the grasp of a handful of oligarchs on Ukraine’s politics. However, the influence of these oligarchs remains in the new government — and may not be going anywhere soon.

Take Yevhen Bakulin, for example. The former director of Ukraine’s largest gas supplier — the notoriously poorly managed Naftogaz — Bakulin drew the ire of anti-corruption activists for his suspiciously grandiose dwelling and was detained by police for questioning on corruption charges earlier this year. Winning big in eastern Ukraine as a candidate of the Opposition Party,  he also now has a seat in parliament.

According to Ukrainian constitution, members of parliament are protected from prosecution.

A few weeks before the election, Poroshenko’s government issued a lustration law aimed at changing this, so that politicians tainted by corruption from the Yanukovych years would be barred from office . The law’s effect, however, has been merely to make the process of indictment and removal complicated and difficult. Potentially corrupt politicians will continue heading into office (albeit at the risk of literally being thrown in the trash, as frustrated citizens did to one) and Bakulin will continue returning home to his mansion.

Bakulin’s link to Naftogaz illustrates why the continued influence of oligarchs will likely hamper the country’s drive to reform. Naftogaz offers heavily subsidized gas to Ukrainian households while lining its owners’ pockets with cash from government coffers. It has largely failed to function as an independent and sustainable energy provider, opting to rely on the inflow of gas from Russia instead of building up its own infrastructure. Now Ukraine is beholden to the Kremlin’s politically charged decisions on how much gas to supply and how much to hike its cost.

Significant reform of Naftogaz is necessary to secure Ukraine’s security, but any attempt to overhaul Naftogaz’s practices will face fierce opposition from its politically connected stakeholders.

The Opposition

The Opposition Party exceeded expectations in the elections is led by the former Minister of Fuel and Energy under Yatsenyuk’s government, Yuriy Boyko.

Disputing the elections as laden with fraud and decrying the selection of ministers as a tyrannical power grab, the Opposition Party is the only bloc within parliament to reject Western-inspired reforms, seeing Ukraine’s interests as aligning more closely with those of Russia. Many of its members in fact voted for the so-called “dictatorial laws” that authorized a violent crackdown on the Maidan protesters.

With 40 seats — a far cry from those won by Yanukovych’s Party of Regions before the revolution —  the party poses a small threat to the legislative priorities of the new coalition. But it won those seats with significant support from a rump southeast, which had been Yanukovych’s base. With the party coming out on top in five eastern districts, its success drives home that there is a great number of Ukrainians who strongly associate with Russia, even outside of Crimea and separatist-controlled regions.

That means that Western-leaning reforms will not solve Ukraine’s deep divisions. More than turning to face Europe or Russia, the government in Kiev needs to look out its own windows. Engaging the entire population is vital. While this may involve measures that will likely be seen as concessions to Moscow — like the decentralization of power, greater regional autonomy, and protections for Russian speakers — they will be necessary to create the kind of strong state that can free itself from the Kremlin’s machinations.

Ukraine faces an almost impossible task: carefully balancing its internal contradictions while initiating monumental reforms. Neglecting either will lead to a dysfunctional state.

This is when revolutions go awry. Ensuring that this one doesn’t will require a balancing act of Western governments’ own: to encourage deep reforms within the Ukrainian government but to be patient and generous in allowing them to be feasibly carried out; to foster the democratic process even as it produces challenging results; and to help Ukraine overcome its immediate concerns without jeopardizing its long-term health.

Understanding the unique make-up of the Ukrainian government is an important step to proceed with the requisite care. Revolutions might start with shots fired, but they end — for better or for worse — with bills passed.

*Jeffrey Michels is a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

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South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma has arrived in Kampala, Uganda, for the continuation of talks on the South Sudan peace process.

The President is scheduled to meet with President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda.

The first leg of the working visit started in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, where President Zuma met with President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania earlier today.

The consultations and discussions with the two Heads of State follow the recent visit to South Africa by President Salva Kiir Mayardit of South Sudan and are aimed at taking forward the peace process.

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(Civil.Ge) — After meeting non-parliamentary opposition parties last week, President Giorgi Margvelashvili met separately leaders of parliamentary opposition parties United National Movement (UNM) and Free Democrats (FD) on December 22.

Series of meetings with political parties are part of President’s initiative announced on November 24 amid Russia’s treaty on “alliance and strategic partnership” with breakaway Abkhazia, to build a broad consensus on “concrete anti-annexation steps” of Russia. The President also plans a meeting with ruling GD coalition representatives.

President Margvelashvili said on December 22 that these meetings will continue and involve civil society representatives as well. He said that it “is a process of searching for consensus.”

Deputy secretary of the National Security Council, Ivliane Khaindrava, said that exchange of views is underway, which will be analyzed and then reflected in a vision president plans to outline.

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