the real world
exposing how greed, corruption, injustice, and imperialism impacts the world
and exposes the leaders who benefit
feb 27, 2020
*Boris Johnson referred to police watchdog over alleged relationship with American businesswoman The prime minister of Great Britain may be facing an investigation as impeachment grips America.
Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men
Mahatma Gandhi
articles
*DELHI PROTESTS: DEATH TOLL CLIMBS AMID WORST RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE FOR DECADES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*UK to close door to non-English speakers and unskilled workers
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*No 10 refuses to comment on PM's views of racial IQ
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Germany Sees Political Fallout From Chancellor Merkel’s Alliance With Far Right
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Vietnam accused of teaching young people that being gay is a ‘disease’
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Canada: thousands of travelers affected as Indigenous-led rail blockade continues
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Illegal Chinese Chef Charged for Caning Black Employee In Kenya
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Abbas blasts Trump’s ‘Swiss cheese’ plan for Palestine in UN speech
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Botswana Selling Licenses To Kill Elephants At $39,000 A Head
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Video: Black Professor Unleashes Flood of White Tears After On-Air Clash Ensues When Guest Says the British Empire ‘Wasn’t All Bad’(ARTICLE BELOW)
*PALESTINIANS CUT ALL TIES WITH US AND ISRAEL OVER “ARROGANCE” OF JARED KUSHNER’S “PEACE” DEAL(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Germany is tackling the green-energy transition — and the world is watching
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Canada's Chinese community faces racist abuse in wake of coronavirus
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Activists Plan Boycott of US Companies Backing India’s Anti-Muslim Policies
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Women Perform 12.5 Billion Hours of Unpaid Labor Every Day
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Global poll: A majority believes that capitalism does more harm than good
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Angola vows to bring back billionaire Isabel dos Santos over graft claims
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Comme des Garçons in row over ‘white models in cornrow wigs’
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Putin critics ask how his PM choice acquired expensive properties
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Russian government resigns as Putin proposes reforms that could extend his grip on power(ARTICLE BELOW)
*World Bank warns of global debt crisis amid borrowing buildup
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Australia is burning — and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is leading the climate coverup: (ARTICLE BELOW)
*Here’s What Workers of the Global South Endure to Create Corporate Wealth
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'Unqualified, dangerous': the oddball officials running Bolsonaro's Brazil
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Cost of UK royals back in spotlight after Queen’s year to forget
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*'It doesn't matter if it's Christmas': Hong Kong pro-democracy activists keep up protests(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Football must do more to tackle racism, says Downing Street
(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
*World Highlights*
*Japan shuts all schools to combat coronavirus
Every school in Japan will shut from Monday in an unprecedented move that will affect 13m pupils and leave parents scrambling to find childcare as the country steps up its fight against the coronavirus. Prime minister Shinzo Abe urged all schools to ... (Financial Times)
*Coronavirus: Saudi Arabia suspends entry for pilgrims visiting holy sites
The Saudi government said it would suspend visas for Muslims seeking to visit Mecca and Medina. Millions of Muslims make the journey each year, especially during the month of Ramadan, which starts in April. Saudi Arabia has also suspended visas for ... (BBC)
*Japanese woman reinfected with Covid-19 weeks after recovery
A woman working as a tour bus guide in Japan tested positive for Covid-19 for a second time, Osaka's prefectural government said on Wednesday (Feb 26), the first person in the country to be reinfected amid growing concerns about the spread of the inf ... (The Star (Malaysia))
Delhi
Delhi protests: death toll climbs amid worst religious violence for decades
Calls for army to be deployed as clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups show no sign of abating
Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi
the guardian
Wed 26 Feb 2020 04.45 EST
Burnt-out vehicles following clashes in New Delhi Photograph: Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images
The death toll from the worst religious violence in Delhi in decades has risen to 21, as Muslims fled from their homes and several mosques in the capital smouldered after being attacked by Hindu mobs.
The deathly clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups that began on Sunday showed no sign of abating on the third consecutive day, with reports of early morning looting on some Muslim homes which had been abandoned out of fear.
More than 200 people were admitted to hospitals for injuries which ranged from gunshot wounds, to acid burns, stabbings and wounds from beatings and stone pelting. Several of those who died had jumped from high buildings to escape the attacking mobs.
On Wednesday, an intelligence bureau officer was declared among the dead in the clashes, after his body was found in a drain in the Chand Bagh area. It followed the death of a police officer on Monday after he was hit in the head with a stone.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal described the situation as “alarming” and said the army should be called to take control of the violence.
“Situation alarming,” he said in a “tweet. “Police, despite all its efforts, unable to control situation and instil confidence Army should be called in and curfew imposed in rest of affected areas immediately.”
On Tuesday afternoon, a violent Hindu mob of around 500 young men descended on to a mosque in Ashok Nagar, broke down the doors and climbed the minaret to fly a Hindu flag. They then set the mosque alight. Later in the evening, another smaller mosque and Muslim shops in the local market were burned.
A local Muslim, who asked not to be named out of fear for his safety, described how the mob had set about destroying the mosque for over three hours, shouting Hindu nationalist slogans as they went. “They came in the afternoon and burned everything inside and then they looted and burned the shop inside the mosque and then two Muslim houses next door,” he told the Guardian.
“I do not even know what to say. In 35 years I have never seen a situation like this, Hindus and Muslims always lived peacefully here. We all celebrated Eid and Diwali together. Hindu women often came into the mosque with their children, so this was not just a building for Muslims but for the whole community. But whatever peace we had is now gone.”
The attacks on Muslim properties continued on Wednesday morning. However, some local Hindus were patrolling the area to protect the mosque and offered to shelter Muslim families to keep them safe.
The riots have continued to spread across northwest Delhi, with Jafrabad, Babarpur, Brahmpuri, Gorakh Park, Maujpur, Bhajanpura, Kabir Nagar, Chand Bagh, Gokulpuri, Karawal Nagar, Khajuri Khas and Kardampuri all affected. Heavy deployment of Delhi police and paramilitary forces were visible in some of the worst hit areas on Wednesday morning.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally broke his silence on the violence, appealing for “peace and brotherhood”.
“Had an extensive review on the situation prevailing in various parts of Delhi,” tweeted Modi “Police and other agencies are working on the ground to ensure peace and normalcy.”
It was one of the bloodiest days of protest in India since Modi’s government passed a new citizenship amendment act, which grants citizenship for refugees of every major South Asian religion except Muslims, in December.
The law sparked a nationwide backlash over fears the law is discriminatory towards Muslims and will undermine the secular foundations of India by making religion the basis of citizenship, and demonstrations have continued across India for the past three months.
The violence in Delhi was sparked after Kapil Mishra, leader from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), incited a Hindu mob to violently remove a group of Muslims who were blocking a road in north-west Delhi in protest against the citizenship act. Groups on both sides began throwing stones and attacking each other, prompting an escalation of violence.
A legal order that prevents gatherings of more than four people, has been imposed across north-west Delhi. Police deployed tear gas but the measures failed to contain the mobs.
The deathly clashes between Hindu and Muslim groups that began on Sunday showed no sign of abating on the third consecutive day, with reports of early morning looting on some Muslim homes which had been abandoned out of fear.
More than 200 people were admitted to hospitals for injuries which ranged from gunshot wounds, to acid burns, stabbings and wounds from beatings and stone pelting. Several of those who died had jumped from high buildings to escape the attacking mobs.
On Wednesday, an intelligence bureau officer was declared among the dead in the clashes, after his body was found in a drain in the Chand Bagh area. It followed the death of a police officer on Monday after he was hit in the head with a stone.
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal described the situation as “alarming” and said the army should be called to take control of the violence.
“Situation alarming,” he said in a “tweet. “Police, despite all its efforts, unable to control situation and instil confidence Army should be called in and curfew imposed in rest of affected areas immediately.”
On Tuesday afternoon, a violent Hindu mob of around 500 young men descended on to a mosque in Ashok Nagar, broke down the doors and climbed the minaret to fly a Hindu flag. They then set the mosque alight. Later in the evening, another smaller mosque and Muslim shops in the local market were burned.
A local Muslim, who asked not to be named out of fear for his safety, described how the mob had set about destroying the mosque for over three hours, shouting Hindu nationalist slogans as they went. “They came in the afternoon and burned everything inside and then they looted and burned the shop inside the mosque and then two Muslim houses next door,” he told the Guardian.
“I do not even know what to say. In 35 years I have never seen a situation like this, Hindus and Muslims always lived peacefully here. We all celebrated Eid and Diwali together. Hindu women often came into the mosque with their children, so this was not just a building for Muslims but for the whole community. But whatever peace we had is now gone.”
The attacks on Muslim properties continued on Wednesday morning. However, some local Hindus were patrolling the area to protect the mosque and offered to shelter Muslim families to keep them safe.
The riots have continued to spread across northwest Delhi, with Jafrabad, Babarpur, Brahmpuri, Gorakh Park, Maujpur, Bhajanpura, Kabir Nagar, Chand Bagh, Gokulpuri, Karawal Nagar, Khajuri Khas and Kardampuri all affected. Heavy deployment of Delhi police and paramilitary forces were visible in some of the worst hit areas on Wednesday morning.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi finally broke his silence on the violence, appealing for “peace and brotherhood”.
“Had an extensive review on the situation prevailing in various parts of Delhi,” tweeted Modi “Police and other agencies are working on the ground to ensure peace and normalcy.”
It was one of the bloodiest days of protest in India since Modi’s government passed a new citizenship amendment act, which grants citizenship for refugees of every major South Asian religion except Muslims, in December.
The law sparked a nationwide backlash over fears the law is discriminatory towards Muslims and will undermine the secular foundations of India by making religion the basis of citizenship, and demonstrations have continued across India for the past three months.
The violence in Delhi was sparked after Kapil Mishra, leader from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), incited a Hindu mob to violently remove a group of Muslims who were blocking a road in north-west Delhi in protest against the citizenship act. Groups on both sides began throwing stones and attacking each other, prompting an escalation of violence.
A legal order that prevents gatherings of more than four people, has been imposed across north-west Delhi. Police deployed tear gas but the measures failed to contain the mobs.
this is what happens when you elect fools to govern!!!
UK to close door to non-English speakers and unskilled workers
Government plans to take ‘full control’ of borders a disaster for economy and jobs, say industry leaders and Labour
Britain is to close its borders to unskilled workers and those who can’t speak English as part of a fundamental overhaul of immigration laws that will end the era of cheap EU labour in factories, warehouses, hotels and restaurants.
Unveiling its Australian-style points system on Wednesday, the government will say it is grasping a unique opportunity to take “full control” of British borders “for the first time in decades” and eliminate the “distortion” caused by EU freedom of movement.
But industry leaders immediately accused the government of an assault on the economy warning of “disastrous” consequences with job losses and closures in factories and the high street.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats also condemned the plans while Unison, which represents health workers said they “spell absolute disaster for the care sector”.
However, ministers argue they are delivering the Brexit demanded by the electorate – and say it is time for businesses to wean themselves off cheap migrant labour.
A 10-page briefing document outlining the new immigration policy states:
•UK borders will be closed to non-skilled workers – and all migrants will have to speak English.
•Anyone wanting to come to the UK to work must have a job offer with a salary threshold of £25,600 – though a salary “floor” of £20,480 will be acceptable in special cases where there might have a skills shortage skills, such as in nursing.
•There will be no route for self-employed people coming into the UK, spelling the end to, for example, Polish plumbers or Romanian builders arriving without a job.
•Border control will no longer accept ID cards from countries such as France and Italy. This, it is understood, is an attempt to clamp down on non-EU workers beating the system with forged or stolen ID cards.
•The skills threshold for foreign nationals wanting to work in the UK will be lowered from degree to A-levels or their equivalent. The cap on the numbers of skilled workers is being scrapped – and a small number of highly skilled workers will be allowed to come in without a job.
•The right of artists, entertainers, sports people and musicians to enter for performances, competitions and auditions will be retained.
The government intends to launch a “comprehensive” campaign to prepare employers for the transformation in January next year when EU citizens will be treated the same as other nationals.
However, the new policy drew immediate criticism from employers, particularly over the addition of waiters, waitresses and “elementary” agriculture and fishery workers to the list of low-skilled workers.
Industry leaders warned the changes would have a huge impact on food processing factories that rely heavily on EU workers to keep the supermarket shelves full with pre-packed chicken, beef and pork cuts.
Tom Hadley, director of policy at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, said: “Jobs the government considers ‘low-skilled’ are vital to wellbeing and business growth. The announcement threatens to shut out the people we need to provide services the public rely on.
“We need access to workers that can help us look after the elderly, build homes and keep the economy strong.”
UKHospitality chief executive, Kate Nicholls, said “ruling out a temporary, low-skilled route for migration in just 10 months’ time would be disastrous for the hospitality sector and the British people” and deter investment in the high street.
The Confederation of British Industry director general Carolyn Fairbairn said the removal of the cap on the number of skilled workers was “welcome”, but she warned that in “some sectors, firms would be left wondering how they would recruit the people needed to run their businesses.
“With already low unemployment, firms in care, construction, hospitality, food and drink could be most affected,” she said.
The hospitality sector will also be hit with no “barista visa” for coffee shops, despite warnings from Pret A Manger two years ago that only one in 50 job applicants were British.
Also vulnerable are hotels that rely on EU workers for cleaning, kitchen and chambermaid staff, and big business and homes who rely on EU workers for cleaning, security and housekeeping.
Labour’s shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said the demand for immigrants to speak English was “dog-whistle stuff”.
“Most people who come here to work can already speak English,” she said. “But are we really going to block maths geniuses whose English isn’t great? It’s inhumane and damaging.”
She continued: “Ultimately, it will also be very difficult to attract the workers we need at all skill levels while the Tories’ hostile environment is in place. It needs to go.”
Partners at the immigration law firm Fragomen urged the government not to close the borders overnight and to reduce the cost of visas for the new era migrant.
“If it comes to a point where it is harder to access labour then don’t turn off the tap overnight. Give people time to adjust. Please make the system cheaper – it is just ridiculously expensive,” said Ian Robinson, a partner at the firm and a former policy official at the Home Office.
But with its 80-strong majority, the government can deliver on its new policy with a immigration bill expected to ease through parliament in the coming months.
“UK businesses will need to adapt and adjust to the end of free movement, and we will not seek to recreate the outcomes from free movement within the points-based system,” said the government in a briefing paper.
It also said that employers would have to work harder to recruit and retain British staff.
“It is important that employers move away from a reliance on the UK’s immigration system and as alternative to investment in staff retention, productivity, and wider investment in technology and automation,” the briefing paper added.
Special arrangements are being made for seasonal workers who harvest the fields but this is only set at 10,000 places, far below the National Farmers’ Union’s (NFU) demands for temporary visas for 70,000 in 2021.
Minette Batters, the head of the NFU, said it was “ironic” that the government was encouraging people to increase the amount of fruit and veg in diets, yet is “making it harder for that fruit and veg to be produced in Britain”.
Unveiling its Australian-style points system on Wednesday, the government will say it is grasping a unique opportunity to take “full control” of British borders “for the first time in decades” and eliminate the “distortion” caused by EU freedom of movement.
But industry leaders immediately accused the government of an assault on the economy warning of “disastrous” consequences with job losses and closures in factories and the high street.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats also condemned the plans while Unison, which represents health workers said they “spell absolute disaster for the care sector”.
However, ministers argue they are delivering the Brexit demanded by the electorate – and say it is time for businesses to wean themselves off cheap migrant labour.
A 10-page briefing document outlining the new immigration policy states:
•UK borders will be closed to non-skilled workers – and all migrants will have to speak English.
•Anyone wanting to come to the UK to work must have a job offer with a salary threshold of £25,600 – though a salary “floor” of £20,480 will be acceptable in special cases where there might have a skills shortage skills, such as in nursing.
•There will be no route for self-employed people coming into the UK, spelling the end to, for example, Polish plumbers or Romanian builders arriving without a job.
•Border control will no longer accept ID cards from countries such as France and Italy. This, it is understood, is an attempt to clamp down on non-EU workers beating the system with forged or stolen ID cards.
•The skills threshold for foreign nationals wanting to work in the UK will be lowered from degree to A-levels or their equivalent. The cap on the numbers of skilled workers is being scrapped – and a small number of highly skilled workers will be allowed to come in without a job.
•The right of artists, entertainers, sports people and musicians to enter for performances, competitions and auditions will be retained.
The government intends to launch a “comprehensive” campaign to prepare employers for the transformation in January next year when EU citizens will be treated the same as other nationals.
However, the new policy drew immediate criticism from employers, particularly over the addition of waiters, waitresses and “elementary” agriculture and fishery workers to the list of low-skilled workers.
Industry leaders warned the changes would have a huge impact on food processing factories that rely heavily on EU workers to keep the supermarket shelves full with pre-packed chicken, beef and pork cuts.
Tom Hadley, director of policy at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, said: “Jobs the government considers ‘low-skilled’ are vital to wellbeing and business growth. The announcement threatens to shut out the people we need to provide services the public rely on.
“We need access to workers that can help us look after the elderly, build homes and keep the economy strong.”
UKHospitality chief executive, Kate Nicholls, said “ruling out a temporary, low-skilled route for migration in just 10 months’ time would be disastrous for the hospitality sector and the British people” and deter investment in the high street.
The Confederation of British Industry director general Carolyn Fairbairn said the removal of the cap on the number of skilled workers was “welcome”, but she warned that in “some sectors, firms would be left wondering how they would recruit the people needed to run their businesses.
“With already low unemployment, firms in care, construction, hospitality, food and drink could be most affected,” she said.
The hospitality sector will also be hit with no “barista visa” for coffee shops, despite warnings from Pret A Manger two years ago that only one in 50 job applicants were British.
Also vulnerable are hotels that rely on EU workers for cleaning, kitchen and chambermaid staff, and big business and homes who rely on EU workers for cleaning, security and housekeeping.
Labour’s shadow home secretary, Diane Abbott, said the demand for immigrants to speak English was “dog-whistle stuff”.
“Most people who come here to work can already speak English,” she said. “But are we really going to block maths geniuses whose English isn’t great? It’s inhumane and damaging.”
She continued: “Ultimately, it will also be very difficult to attract the workers we need at all skill levels while the Tories’ hostile environment is in place. It needs to go.”
Partners at the immigration law firm Fragomen urged the government not to close the borders overnight and to reduce the cost of visas for the new era migrant.
“If it comes to a point where it is harder to access labour then don’t turn off the tap overnight. Give people time to adjust. Please make the system cheaper – it is just ridiculously expensive,” said Ian Robinson, a partner at the firm and a former policy official at the Home Office.
But with its 80-strong majority, the government can deliver on its new policy with a immigration bill expected to ease through parliament in the coming months.
“UK businesses will need to adapt and adjust to the end of free movement, and we will not seek to recreate the outcomes from free movement within the points-based system,” said the government in a briefing paper.
It also said that employers would have to work harder to recruit and retain British staff.
“It is important that employers move away from a reliance on the UK’s immigration system and as alternative to investment in staff retention, productivity, and wider investment in technology and automation,” the briefing paper added.
Special arrangements are being made for seasonal workers who harvest the fields but this is only set at 10,000 places, far below the National Farmers’ Union’s (NFU) demands for temporary visas for 70,000 in 2021.
Minette Batters, the head of the NFU, said it was “ironic” that the government was encouraging people to increase the amount of fruit and veg in diets, yet is “making it harder for that fruit and veg to be produced in Britain”.
a european trumpster!!!
No 10 refuses to comment on PM's views of racial IQ
Move comes after hiring of new adviser who said black people have lower average IQs
Rowena Mason Deputy political editor
the guardian
Mon 17 Feb 2020 07.40 EST
Boris Johnson’s spokesman has refused to say whether the prime minister thinks black people have lower IQs on average, or agrees with eugenics, after No 10 hired an adviser with highly controversial views.
In a tense briefing with the media, the prime minister’s deputy official spokesman declined several times to distance Johnson from the views of his adviser, Andrew Sabisky, who has suggested “enforced contraception” be used to prevent the creation of a “permanent underclass”.
Labour has called on No 10 to sack Sabisky, who is believed to be contracted by Downing Street under Johnson’s de facto chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, to work on special projects.
Johnson’s official spokesman refused to comment on Sabisky, his controversial views, or whether the prime minister agreed with them.
“The prime minister’s views are well publicised and well documented,” the spokesman said more than 10 times, when asked to give Johnson’s views on the intelligence of black people and eugenics, the study of methods to selectively breed people to improve the human race.
Sabisky, 27, has claimed black Americans have a lower than average IQ than white people and are more likely to have an “intellectual disability”. He also tweeted: “I am always straight up in saying that women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s.”
In an interview from 2016, Sabisky said he was interested in the narcolepsy drug modafinil, which also reduces the need for sleep in healthy people by two-thirds and potentially helps brain function, although there is evidence of a higher risk of people getting Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a life-threatening skin condition.
Sabisky said: “From a societal perspective the benefits of giving everyone modafinil once a week are probably worth a dead kid once a year.”
He wrote on Cummings’ website in 2014 that in order to get around unplanned pregnancies in the UK, long-term contraception should be legally enforced.
“One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies, creating a permanent underclass, would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty,” he wrote. “Vaccination laws give it a precedent, I would argue.”
Ian Lavery, the Labour party chairman, said: “It is disgusting that not only has No 10 failed to condemn Andrew Sabisky’s appalling comments but also seems to have endorsed the idea that white people are more intelligent than black people.
“Boris Johnson should have the backbone to make a statement in his own words on why he has made this appointment, whether he stands by it, and his own views on the subject of eugenics.”
Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, tweeted: “These are really not acceptable headlines for any government to be generating (or allowing to be generated). They need to get a grip fast and demonstrate some basic but fundamental values in the terms of our public debate.”
The geneticist Dr Adam Rutherford also criticised the comments. He tweeted: “Like Cummings, he appears to be bewitched by science, without having made the effort to understand the areas he is invoking, nor its history.”
He said the “moral repugnance” of the remarks was “overwhelming”, adding: “I am all for scientifically minded people advising government. In fact I am all for scientists advising government. From this perspective, Sabisky and indeed Cummings look bewitched by science without doing the legwork.
“Instead this resembles the marshalling of misunderstood or specious science into a political ideology. The history here is important, because this process is exactly what happened at the birth of scientific racism and the birth of eugenics.”
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said over the weekend that Sabisky’s comments were “not my views and those are not the views of the government”.
However, the prime minister’s deputy official spokesman said Shapps was speaking only for himself when he made that statement.
In a tense briefing with the media, the prime minister’s deputy official spokesman declined several times to distance Johnson from the views of his adviser, Andrew Sabisky, who has suggested “enforced contraception” be used to prevent the creation of a “permanent underclass”.
Labour has called on No 10 to sack Sabisky, who is believed to be contracted by Downing Street under Johnson’s de facto chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, to work on special projects.
Johnson’s official spokesman refused to comment on Sabisky, his controversial views, or whether the prime minister agreed with them.
“The prime minister’s views are well publicised and well documented,” the spokesman said more than 10 times, when asked to give Johnson’s views on the intelligence of black people and eugenics, the study of methods to selectively breed people to improve the human race.
Sabisky, 27, has claimed black Americans have a lower than average IQ than white people and are more likely to have an “intellectual disability”. He also tweeted: “I am always straight up in saying that women’s sport is more comparable to the Paralympics than it is to men’s.”
In an interview from 2016, Sabisky said he was interested in the narcolepsy drug modafinil, which also reduces the need for sleep in healthy people by two-thirds and potentially helps brain function, although there is evidence of a higher risk of people getting Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a life-threatening skin condition.
Sabisky said: “From a societal perspective the benefits of giving everyone modafinil once a week are probably worth a dead kid once a year.”
He wrote on Cummings’ website in 2014 that in order to get around unplanned pregnancies in the UK, long-term contraception should be legally enforced.
“One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies, creating a permanent underclass, would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty,” he wrote. “Vaccination laws give it a precedent, I would argue.”
Ian Lavery, the Labour party chairman, said: “It is disgusting that not only has No 10 failed to condemn Andrew Sabisky’s appalling comments but also seems to have endorsed the idea that white people are more intelligent than black people.
“Boris Johnson should have the backbone to make a statement in his own words on why he has made this appointment, whether he stands by it, and his own views on the subject of eugenics.”
Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, tweeted: “These are really not acceptable headlines for any government to be generating (or allowing to be generated). They need to get a grip fast and demonstrate some basic but fundamental values in the terms of our public debate.”
The geneticist Dr Adam Rutherford also criticised the comments. He tweeted: “Like Cummings, he appears to be bewitched by science, without having made the effort to understand the areas he is invoking, nor its history.”
He said the “moral repugnance” of the remarks was “overwhelming”, adding: “I am all for scientifically minded people advising government. In fact I am all for scientists advising government. From this perspective, Sabisky and indeed Cummings look bewitched by science without doing the legwork.
“Instead this resembles the marshalling of misunderstood or specious science into a political ideology. The history here is important, because this process is exactly what happened at the birth of scientific racism and the birth of eugenics.”
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, said over the weekend that Sabisky’s comments were “not my views and those are not the views of the government”.
However, the prime minister’s deputy official spokesman said Shapps was speaking only for himself when he made that statement.
Germany Sees Political Fallout From Chancellor Merkel’s Alliance With Far Right
BY Thomas Klikauer, Truthout
PUBLISHED February 15, 2020
Party politics is high on the agenda in Germany. A one-day alliance between Germany’s anti-Semitic, far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) saw the sudden resignation of CDU party boss Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. While the CDU had, very temporarily, violated its very own non-alliance policy with the semi-fascistic AfD, internal party conflicts have opened up again inside Merkel’s party.
The Beginnings of the Controversy
In October, about 2 million people voted in the Eastern German state of Thuringia, and the outcome was rather inconclusive. The CDU received 21.8 percent of the vote; the Rosa-Luxemburg-like progressive socialists, Die Linke, received 31 percent; Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) got an abysmal 8.2 percent; the environmental Greens, 5.2 percent; and the neoliberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) received an extremely narrow 5.0066 percent.
Still, the results were to become highly significant only a few months later. AfD received a whopping 23.4 percent of the vote, reflecting the party’s 20 to 25 percent success rate throughout Eastern Germany. After long, protracted, painful and complicated negotiations under Germany’s proportional representation system, Thuringia’s politicians were unable to come to an agreement on who was going to govern the state.
Traditionally, Germany is governed either through a left-leaning government consisting of SPD, the Greens and, in some cases, Die Linke; or a right-leaning conservative government consisting of CDU and FDP. In the latter case, Germany’s strong-state conservatives from the CDU typically work with the free market conservatives of the FDP. In exceptional cases, however, there might be a grand coalition. For many years, Chancellor Merkel’s federal government has been secured through a grand coalition of CDU and SPD, which together hold a comfortable majority at the federal level. In the state level of Thuringia, however, no such coalition was to be formed.
In a surprise move on February 5, the CDU supported a state premier (equal to a governor in the U.S. system) for Thuringia who came from the rather weak FDP. The party had just managed to scrape into Parliament by the narrowest of margins, receiving 5.0066 percent — just 73 votes above the 5 percent threshold. These 73 votes allowed the FPD to occupy a king-making position, with the party’s sharply anti-environmental and pro-business Thomas Kemmerich as state premier. Still, the center-right CDU and the neoliberal FDP did not have enough votes; it needed the despised AfD for a voting agreement. This gave the AfD the power it always wanted — even though it was, at it turned out, just granted this power on one day.
Within hours, Merkel had sent the (now resigned) CDU party boss Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to the Thuringian capital city of Erfurt. Pressured by Kramp-Karrenbauer, Mike Mohring — who represents the CDU in Thuringia’s state Parliament — withdrew his support, and FDP’s Kemmerich resigned as premier immediately, leaving him with a hefty paycheck of €93,000 (or US$102,000) for day’s work. Barely 24 hours after it started, Germany’s first post-war conservative-neo-fascist arrangement was over.
Meanwhile, there are speculations about a fresh election in the state of Thuringia. In the last public polling, the socialist Die Linke received a previously unseen 39 percent of support, the center-left SPD 10 percent, and the environmental Greens 5 percent in public polling. This is a rather comfortable majority (55 percent) to govern the state of Thuringia. This would mean that Thuringia would return to a left-wing government under the leadership of Die Linke. This is the most progressive state leadership in Germany. It also means that Merkel’s CDU and the neoliberal FDP will be punished for working with the AfD.
February’s political kerfuffle in Erfurt was highly exceptional. But even more devastating is the role the AfD played in the drama.
The AfD: Anti-Democratic and Deeply Authoritarian
Founded in 2013, the anti-migrant, racist and anti-Semitic party entered Germany’s federal Parliament in 2017 and pretends to be just another populist party. In reality, it is radically far right. For instance, 79-year-old Edith Pfeiffer, a member of the Holocaust survivor support organization Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime, said of the AfD in a recent interview that, “The new Nazis are no better than the old Nazis except they are a bit better in pretending to be democrats.”
The conservative bloc’s pure numbers of seats in Thuringia’s Parliament were insufficient to appoint a conservative state premier, so the CDU and FDP sought support from the AfD — a first in the country’s post-war history.
The AfD’s right-wing extremist youth organization, which calls itself “The Wing,” and party member Björn Höcke are currently under surveillance by Germany’s all-powerful domestic secret service, the Verfassungsschutz (BfV). The BfV can render a political party illegal. Despite the fact that the CDU has a policy of not entering into a coalition with the AfD, it did exactly that in early February.
The CDU’s most powerful woman — Chancellor Merkel — publicly despises the AfD. Merkel also loathes the boss of the AfD in Thuringia — Höcke — who is the leader (some say Führer) of the party’s right-wing extremists. In his early days, Höcke used to write under the neo-Nazi pseudonym “Landolf Ladig.” As the parliamentarian leader of the AfD in Thuringia, he was instrumental in getting the FDP’s Kemmerich into position.
In 2018, Höcke was leading a neo-Nazi march of 6,000 supporters in Chemnitz — a two-hour drive to the east from Erfurt. The rally had all the neo-Nazi trimmings one can imagine: the hunting of foreigners, an attack on a Jewish restaurant and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi salute (a criminal offense in Germany). About one-and-a-half hours to the south of Erfurt lies the East German city of Halle, where a local and well-armed neo-Nazi tried to kill Jews on Yom Kippur while they were praying in the local synagogue on October 9. This is the geographical and political context of the AfD-certified appointment of Thuringia’s new state premier.
The neo-Nazi-sponsored appointment of the FDP’s Kemmerich didn’t go well. In the public gallery of Thuringia’s state Parliament, shocked faces jumped from their chairs. “Shame on you!” someone shouted toward the new premier, while protesters rallied outside. For the first time in Germany, Thuringia now has a premier semi-elected by the far right AfD — a long held taboo has been broken.
A Secret Agreement?
Initially, the candidate for the job of state premier was Christoph Kindervater, who was also put forward by the AfD but received zero votes. With 45 votes, Kemmerich ended up receiving just one more vote than the long-serving and much-admired incumbent premier Bodo Ramelow of the progressive Die Linke. Erfurt’s conservative coalition, including the support of the AfD, is now the subject of much debate throughout Germany. There is confusion and a nagging question: Has there been a secret agreement between the CDU, FDP and AfD?
Initially and very publicly, CDU and FDP had ruled out any coalition with the AfD in all bodies and at all levels of German politics. But Germany’s strong-state and free market conservatives broke their own rules. Even worse, FDP candidate Kemmerich portrayed himself as the AfD’s most vigorous opponent during the election campaign.
Merkel’s local representative, the CDU’s Mohring; his local party setup; and Merkel’s federal CDU are feeling the heat. The party’s claim of total shock comes despite the fact that scenarios of an impending FDP state premier had circulated in Thuringia for days. For Mohring, though, Kemmerich’s appointment is ultimately good news for the conservatives. Ever since, the CDU had tried to prevent a red-red-green coalition of Die Linke, the SPD and the Greens, as the German ruling elite has always seen a red government as dangerous and to be avoided at all costs.
Seeking to prevent a progressive alliance, the CDU has favored what Germans call a “Zimbabwe government.”
This does not mean a Zimbabwe-like government. It merely uses the colors of the Zimbabwean flag: black, green, red and yellow. These colors are reflective of the political colors of the CDU (black), SPD (red), FDP (yellow) and the Greens (green). But the CDU’s initial plan of a black-green-red-yellow coalition never materialized. Failing for many weeks in behind-the-scenes politicking while a red-red-green coalition edged closer to reality, CDU apparatchik Mohring has now become a joke, receiving severe condemnations from his own party. Today, Mohring is hoping for a position on the government bench, claiming that he did not collude with AfD extremist Höcke.
Thuringia and Hitler
What renders the entire affair historic are its parallels to January 31, 1933 — the day Hitler became Germany’s reichs-chancellor. Three years before that, in 1930, the state of Thuringia played a crucial role in his rise. On February 2, 1930 — 90 years ago this month, Hitler declared victory in Thuringia, saying, “We achieved the greatest success in Thuringia. That is where we really are the decisive party today. The old parties in Thuringia, which until now formed the government, are not able to raise a majority without our participation.” In fact, just six members of the Nazi Parliament tipped the balance, giving the right-wing conservative coalition a majority of 28 seats.
Thus, on January 23, 1930, the first Nazi government participation in the German Reich came about. Arch-Nazi Wilhelm Frick became minister of Interior and National Education. After World War II, Frick was tried and convicted at the Nuremberg trials and executed by hanging. But it was Hitler’s takeover of the state of Thuringia in 1930 that set the scene of what was to come in 1933.
In the last free elections in November 1932 before Hitler’s appointment, the Nazi party only received 32.3 percent. Hitler’s party had no majority — Hitlerism was failing. In fact, the November 1932 election constituted a 4.18 percent swing against the Nazis. In other words, the Nazis never managed to cross the all important 50+1 barrier. Meanwhile, the communists gained 2.5 percent.
To get Hitler into power, the Nazis needed the support of Germany’s conservatives. By the end of January 1933, the Nazis got it in the form of Germany’s national conservative German National People’s Party, as well as the conservative Catholic Franz von Papen. Support for Hitler also came from Germany’s powerful and deeply chauvinistic military establishment in the form of German General Paul von Hindenburg. This support sealed the country’s fate.
While 2020 is not 1933, and what has just happened in the state of Thuringia is nowhere close to what happened at the federal level in January 1933, the significance of the Erfurt events cannot be overstated. They represent a clear warning to stay away from any coalition government that includes the semi-fascist AfD. German politics draws a very clear line here: no arrangement with the crypto-Nazi AfD. The events of the last few days in Germany have shown that all democratic parties must adhere to the “Never Again!” and “Stop Nazism” dictum.
The Beginnings of the Controversy
In October, about 2 million people voted in the Eastern German state of Thuringia, and the outcome was rather inconclusive. The CDU received 21.8 percent of the vote; the Rosa-Luxemburg-like progressive socialists, Die Linke, received 31 percent; Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) got an abysmal 8.2 percent; the environmental Greens, 5.2 percent; and the neoliberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) received an extremely narrow 5.0066 percent.
Still, the results were to become highly significant only a few months later. AfD received a whopping 23.4 percent of the vote, reflecting the party’s 20 to 25 percent success rate throughout Eastern Germany. After long, protracted, painful and complicated negotiations under Germany’s proportional representation system, Thuringia’s politicians were unable to come to an agreement on who was going to govern the state.
Traditionally, Germany is governed either through a left-leaning government consisting of SPD, the Greens and, in some cases, Die Linke; or a right-leaning conservative government consisting of CDU and FDP. In the latter case, Germany’s strong-state conservatives from the CDU typically work with the free market conservatives of the FDP. In exceptional cases, however, there might be a grand coalition. For many years, Chancellor Merkel’s federal government has been secured through a grand coalition of CDU and SPD, which together hold a comfortable majority at the federal level. In the state level of Thuringia, however, no such coalition was to be formed.
In a surprise move on February 5, the CDU supported a state premier (equal to a governor in the U.S. system) for Thuringia who came from the rather weak FDP. The party had just managed to scrape into Parliament by the narrowest of margins, receiving 5.0066 percent — just 73 votes above the 5 percent threshold. These 73 votes allowed the FPD to occupy a king-making position, with the party’s sharply anti-environmental and pro-business Thomas Kemmerich as state premier. Still, the center-right CDU and the neoliberal FDP did not have enough votes; it needed the despised AfD for a voting agreement. This gave the AfD the power it always wanted — even though it was, at it turned out, just granted this power on one day.
Within hours, Merkel had sent the (now resigned) CDU party boss Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer to the Thuringian capital city of Erfurt. Pressured by Kramp-Karrenbauer, Mike Mohring — who represents the CDU in Thuringia’s state Parliament — withdrew his support, and FDP’s Kemmerich resigned as premier immediately, leaving him with a hefty paycheck of €93,000 (or US$102,000) for day’s work. Barely 24 hours after it started, Germany’s first post-war conservative-neo-fascist arrangement was over.
Meanwhile, there are speculations about a fresh election in the state of Thuringia. In the last public polling, the socialist Die Linke received a previously unseen 39 percent of support, the center-left SPD 10 percent, and the environmental Greens 5 percent in public polling. This is a rather comfortable majority (55 percent) to govern the state of Thuringia. This would mean that Thuringia would return to a left-wing government under the leadership of Die Linke. This is the most progressive state leadership in Germany. It also means that Merkel’s CDU and the neoliberal FDP will be punished for working with the AfD.
February’s political kerfuffle in Erfurt was highly exceptional. But even more devastating is the role the AfD played in the drama.
The AfD: Anti-Democratic and Deeply Authoritarian
Founded in 2013, the anti-migrant, racist and anti-Semitic party entered Germany’s federal Parliament in 2017 and pretends to be just another populist party. In reality, it is radically far right. For instance, 79-year-old Edith Pfeiffer, a member of the Holocaust survivor support organization Union of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime, said of the AfD in a recent interview that, “The new Nazis are no better than the old Nazis except they are a bit better in pretending to be democrats.”
The conservative bloc’s pure numbers of seats in Thuringia’s Parliament were insufficient to appoint a conservative state premier, so the CDU and FDP sought support from the AfD — a first in the country’s post-war history.
The AfD’s right-wing extremist youth organization, which calls itself “The Wing,” and party member Björn Höcke are currently under surveillance by Germany’s all-powerful domestic secret service, the Verfassungsschutz (BfV). The BfV can render a political party illegal. Despite the fact that the CDU has a policy of not entering into a coalition with the AfD, it did exactly that in early February.
The CDU’s most powerful woman — Chancellor Merkel — publicly despises the AfD. Merkel also loathes the boss of the AfD in Thuringia — Höcke — who is the leader (some say Führer) of the party’s right-wing extremists. In his early days, Höcke used to write under the neo-Nazi pseudonym “Landolf Ladig.” As the parliamentarian leader of the AfD in Thuringia, he was instrumental in getting the FDP’s Kemmerich into position.
In 2018, Höcke was leading a neo-Nazi march of 6,000 supporters in Chemnitz — a two-hour drive to the east from Erfurt. The rally had all the neo-Nazi trimmings one can imagine: the hunting of foreigners, an attack on a Jewish restaurant and Adolf Hitler’s Nazi salute (a criminal offense in Germany). About one-and-a-half hours to the south of Erfurt lies the East German city of Halle, where a local and well-armed neo-Nazi tried to kill Jews on Yom Kippur while they were praying in the local synagogue on October 9. This is the geographical and political context of the AfD-certified appointment of Thuringia’s new state premier.
The neo-Nazi-sponsored appointment of the FDP’s Kemmerich didn’t go well. In the public gallery of Thuringia’s state Parliament, shocked faces jumped from their chairs. “Shame on you!” someone shouted toward the new premier, while protesters rallied outside. For the first time in Germany, Thuringia now has a premier semi-elected by the far right AfD — a long held taboo has been broken.
A Secret Agreement?
Initially, the candidate for the job of state premier was Christoph Kindervater, who was also put forward by the AfD but received zero votes. With 45 votes, Kemmerich ended up receiving just one more vote than the long-serving and much-admired incumbent premier Bodo Ramelow of the progressive Die Linke. Erfurt’s conservative coalition, including the support of the AfD, is now the subject of much debate throughout Germany. There is confusion and a nagging question: Has there been a secret agreement between the CDU, FDP and AfD?
Initially and very publicly, CDU and FDP had ruled out any coalition with the AfD in all bodies and at all levels of German politics. But Germany’s strong-state and free market conservatives broke their own rules. Even worse, FDP candidate Kemmerich portrayed himself as the AfD’s most vigorous opponent during the election campaign.
Merkel’s local representative, the CDU’s Mohring; his local party setup; and Merkel’s federal CDU are feeling the heat. The party’s claim of total shock comes despite the fact that scenarios of an impending FDP state premier had circulated in Thuringia for days. For Mohring, though, Kemmerich’s appointment is ultimately good news for the conservatives. Ever since, the CDU had tried to prevent a red-red-green coalition of Die Linke, the SPD and the Greens, as the German ruling elite has always seen a red government as dangerous and to be avoided at all costs.
Seeking to prevent a progressive alliance, the CDU has favored what Germans call a “Zimbabwe government.”
This does not mean a Zimbabwe-like government. It merely uses the colors of the Zimbabwean flag: black, green, red and yellow. These colors are reflective of the political colors of the CDU (black), SPD (red), FDP (yellow) and the Greens (green). But the CDU’s initial plan of a black-green-red-yellow coalition never materialized. Failing for many weeks in behind-the-scenes politicking while a red-red-green coalition edged closer to reality, CDU apparatchik Mohring has now become a joke, receiving severe condemnations from his own party. Today, Mohring is hoping for a position on the government bench, claiming that he did not collude with AfD extremist Höcke.
Thuringia and Hitler
What renders the entire affair historic are its parallels to January 31, 1933 — the day Hitler became Germany’s reichs-chancellor. Three years before that, in 1930, the state of Thuringia played a crucial role in his rise. On February 2, 1930 — 90 years ago this month, Hitler declared victory in Thuringia, saying, “We achieved the greatest success in Thuringia. That is where we really are the decisive party today. The old parties in Thuringia, which until now formed the government, are not able to raise a majority without our participation.” In fact, just six members of the Nazi Parliament tipped the balance, giving the right-wing conservative coalition a majority of 28 seats.
Thus, on January 23, 1930, the first Nazi government participation in the German Reich came about. Arch-Nazi Wilhelm Frick became minister of Interior and National Education. After World War II, Frick was tried and convicted at the Nuremberg trials and executed by hanging. But it was Hitler’s takeover of the state of Thuringia in 1930 that set the scene of what was to come in 1933.
In the last free elections in November 1932 before Hitler’s appointment, the Nazi party only received 32.3 percent. Hitler’s party had no majority — Hitlerism was failing. In fact, the November 1932 election constituted a 4.18 percent swing against the Nazis. In other words, the Nazis never managed to cross the all important 50+1 barrier. Meanwhile, the communists gained 2.5 percent.
To get Hitler into power, the Nazis needed the support of Germany’s conservatives. By the end of January 1933, the Nazis got it in the form of Germany’s national conservative German National People’s Party, as well as the conservative Catholic Franz von Papen. Support for Hitler also came from Germany’s powerful and deeply chauvinistic military establishment in the form of German General Paul von Hindenburg. This support sealed the country’s fate.
While 2020 is not 1933, and what has just happened in the state of Thuringia is nowhere close to what happened at the federal level in January 1933, the significance of the Erfurt events cannot be overstated. They represent a clear warning to stay away from any coalition government that includes the semi-fascist AfD. German politics draws a very clear line here: no arrangement with the crypto-Nazi AfD. The events of the last few days in Germany have shown that all democratic parties must adhere to the “Never Again!” and “Stop Nazism” dictum.
Global development
Vietnam accused of teaching young people that being gay is a ‘disease’
Government has ignored laws intended to prevent stigma, discrimination and bullying, Human Rights Watch claims
Kate Hodal
the guardian
Thu 13 Feb 2020 07.55 ESt
Young people in Vietnam continue to be taught at home and at school that same-sex attraction is a “disease” and a “mental illness” that can be cured and treated, despite legislation designed to support and protect LGBTQ+ rights.
Stigma and discrimination about sexual orientation and gender identity contribute to the verbal harassment and bullying of LGBTQ+ young people, which in some cases leads to physical violence, according to a report published on Thursday by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Activists have called on the Vietnamese government to fulfil its pledges to protect LGBTQ+ rights.
“Largely thanks to a vibrant civil society-led LGBT rights movement, social awareness and acceptance of sexual orientation and gender identity has increased greatly in recent years in Vietnam. The government’s actions, however, have so far not officially reflected these changes,” said Graeme Reid of HRW.
“One result of the sluggish policy change is that social perceptions in many cases remain mired in outdated and incorrect frameworks – such as the widespread belief that same-sex attraction is a diagnosable mental health condition.”
Verbal harassment of LGBTQ+ students is common in public and private schools, both rural and urban, the report claims. Students and teachers commonly use derogatory words, with teachers frequently referring to homosexuality as “mental illness”, and parents threatening violence, expulsion, or medical treatment if children are gay, according to in-depth interviews with 52 LGBTQ youth, teachers and other school staff in Vietnam.
Quân, a gay 18-year-old, told interviewers that his high school biology teacher described “being LGBT [a]s a disease”, while Tuyết, also 18, said: “During a class to educate us about family and marriage, the teacher said: ‘Homosexuality is an illness and it’s very bad.’”
“There’s a lot of pressure on kids to be straight,” one school counsellor told HRW. “It’s constantly referenced that being attracted to someone of the same sex is something that can, and should be, changed and fixed.”
In 2015 Vietnam made international headlines when it voted to allow individuals who have undergone gender reassignment surgery to register under their new gender. Although the nation was heralded as one of the most progressive in south-east Asian , Vietnam has still not passed the bill required to enforce that law, which means discrimination against LGBTQ+ people largely goes unchecked, activists claim.
Last year, Vietnam’s education ministry produced guidelines for an LGBTQ+ inclusive sex education curriculum, but it has not yet been implemented in schools. Cambodia, Japan and the Philippines have all recently rolled out legislation to protect LGBTQ+ youth.
“We need stronger steps from the government to tackle discrimination and create a safe and inclusive educational environment for our youth,” said director Ngo Le Phuong Linh of the ICS Centre, an advocacy rights group in Vietnam.
Stigma and discrimination about sexual orientation and gender identity contribute to the verbal harassment and bullying of LGBTQ+ young people, which in some cases leads to physical violence, according to a report published on Thursday by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
Activists have called on the Vietnamese government to fulfil its pledges to protect LGBTQ+ rights.
“Largely thanks to a vibrant civil society-led LGBT rights movement, social awareness and acceptance of sexual orientation and gender identity has increased greatly in recent years in Vietnam. The government’s actions, however, have so far not officially reflected these changes,” said Graeme Reid of HRW.
“One result of the sluggish policy change is that social perceptions in many cases remain mired in outdated and incorrect frameworks – such as the widespread belief that same-sex attraction is a diagnosable mental health condition.”
Verbal harassment of LGBTQ+ students is common in public and private schools, both rural and urban, the report claims. Students and teachers commonly use derogatory words, with teachers frequently referring to homosexuality as “mental illness”, and parents threatening violence, expulsion, or medical treatment if children are gay, according to in-depth interviews with 52 LGBTQ youth, teachers and other school staff in Vietnam.
Quân, a gay 18-year-old, told interviewers that his high school biology teacher described “being LGBT [a]s a disease”, while Tuyết, also 18, said: “During a class to educate us about family and marriage, the teacher said: ‘Homosexuality is an illness and it’s very bad.’”
“There’s a lot of pressure on kids to be straight,” one school counsellor told HRW. “It’s constantly referenced that being attracted to someone of the same sex is something that can, and should be, changed and fixed.”
In 2015 Vietnam made international headlines when it voted to allow individuals who have undergone gender reassignment surgery to register under their new gender. Although the nation was heralded as one of the most progressive in south-east Asian , Vietnam has still not passed the bill required to enforce that law, which means discrimination against LGBTQ+ people largely goes unchecked, activists claim.
Last year, Vietnam’s education ministry produced guidelines for an LGBTQ+ inclusive sex education curriculum, but it has not yet been implemented in schools. Cambodia, Japan and the Philippines have all recently rolled out legislation to protect LGBTQ+ youth.
“We need stronger steps from the government to tackle discrimination and create a safe and inclusive educational environment for our youth,” said director Ngo Le Phuong Linh of the ICS Centre, an advocacy rights group in Vietnam.
Canada: thousands of travelers affected as Indigenous-led rail blockade continues
Protesters defy court order to block rail tracks in support of Wet’suwet’en, locked in battle over controversial gas pipeline
Leyland Cecco in Toronto
the guardian
Wed 12 Feb 2020 12.18 EST
Thousands of travelers in Canada have been affected and billions of dollars worth of freight traffic delayed as an Indigenous-led blockade of critical rail lines continues to cripple the country’s train network.
Via Rail, the crown corporation that operates much of Canada’s commuter rail service, announced on Wednesday that trains on the Toronto-Montreal and Toronto-Ottawa routes would be halted until at least Friday. More than 150 passenger trains have been cancelled since the blockade began, forcing an estimated 24,000 people to find alternate travel routes.
Canadian National Railway, which owns the tracks, warned it “will be forced to shut down significant parts” of its vast Canadian network, which moves oil, grain and forestry products to markets in Asia and the United States, unless a resolution is reached.
For the past week, Tyendinaga Mohawk protesters in Ontario have defied a court injunction and blocked railway tracks in support Wet’suwet’en activists in British Columbia who are locked in a standoff over a multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline that would cross through their traditional territory.
CN moves billions of dollars in freight each year, and Canada’s transport minister Marc Garneau warned that the rail blockade could have grave economic consequences.
“It is illegal. It infringes on the Railway Safety Act. It’s dangerous to block the rails so we’re very concerned about it from that point of view,” said Garneau.
While the federal government has expressed growing concern at the protracted rail blockade, enforcement of injunctions is a provincial issue, meaning Ontario and Quebec must each negotiate with residents of Mohawk territory.
Tyendinaga Mohawk have told media they will not end their protest until the Royal Canadian Mounted police withdraw from Wet’suwet’en territory where a group of activists has been blocking the construction of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline.
Despite a court order demanding construction workers be granted access to the land, the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have nonetheless withheld consent for the project. In a string of raids this month, the RCMP have dismantled four camps and arrested 28 people.
But solidarity protests have sprung up across Canada this week, with activists also blocking railway tracks in British Columbia and briefly barricading British Columbia’s legislative assembly.
On Monday, police arrested more than 50 people blocking access to Vancouver’s ports. The group behind that protest plans to challenge the injunction on Wednesday, contending they never had a chance to challenge the document in court.
Speaking while on a visit to Senegal, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said: “We recognize the important democratic right – and will always defend it – of peaceful protest. But we are also a country of the rule of law, and we need to make sure those laws are respected.”
Via Rail, the crown corporation that operates much of Canada’s commuter rail service, announced on Wednesday that trains on the Toronto-Montreal and Toronto-Ottawa routes would be halted until at least Friday. More than 150 passenger trains have been cancelled since the blockade began, forcing an estimated 24,000 people to find alternate travel routes.
Canadian National Railway, which owns the tracks, warned it “will be forced to shut down significant parts” of its vast Canadian network, which moves oil, grain and forestry products to markets in Asia and the United States, unless a resolution is reached.
For the past week, Tyendinaga Mohawk protesters in Ontario have defied a court injunction and blocked railway tracks in support Wet’suwet’en activists in British Columbia who are locked in a standoff over a multibillion-dollar natural gas pipeline that would cross through their traditional territory.
CN moves billions of dollars in freight each year, and Canada’s transport minister Marc Garneau warned that the rail blockade could have grave economic consequences.
“It is illegal. It infringes on the Railway Safety Act. It’s dangerous to block the rails so we’re very concerned about it from that point of view,” said Garneau.
While the federal government has expressed growing concern at the protracted rail blockade, enforcement of injunctions is a provincial issue, meaning Ontario and Quebec must each negotiate with residents of Mohawk territory.
Tyendinaga Mohawk have told media they will not end their protest until the Royal Canadian Mounted police withdraw from Wet’suwet’en territory where a group of activists has been blocking the construction of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline.
Despite a court order demanding construction workers be granted access to the land, the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have nonetheless withheld consent for the project. In a string of raids this month, the RCMP have dismantled four camps and arrested 28 people.
But solidarity protests have sprung up across Canada this week, with activists also blocking railway tracks in British Columbia and briefly barricading British Columbia’s legislative assembly.
On Monday, police arrested more than 50 people blocking access to Vancouver’s ports. The group behind that protest plans to challenge the injunction on Wednesday, contending they never had a chance to challenge the document in court.
Speaking while on a visit to Senegal, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said: “We recognize the important democratic right – and will always defend it – of peaceful protest. But we are also a country of the rule of law, and we need to make sure those laws are respected.”
Illegal Chinese Chef Charged for Caning Black Employee In Kenya
By Kia Morgan Smith - atlanta black star
February 10, 2020
A Chinese chef is under fire and has been arrested after a disturbing video surfaced of him brutally caning one of his Kenyan workers at a restaurant in Nairobi.
A video on K24 TV that went viral apparently depicts chef Deng Hailan handing down back lashes on Kenyan man Simon Oseko, a waiter at Chez Wou restaurant, for being late to work. The worker was allegedly given an option to pay up for being late or take the beating.
The alleged mistreatment sheds light on what some say is a deep-rooted trend of mistreatment of Kenyan citizens by Chinese bosses that mirrors the slave experience.
After an investigation, three other Chinese nationals were arrested on Feb. 9 for illegally working at the restaurant, according to statement by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.
“They managed to arrest the perpetrator, one Deng Hailan, a Chinese National who works at the hotel as a chef but doesn’t have a work permit. Also arrested were two other chefs Chang Yueping & Ou Qiang who hold expired Visas. Chang holds a work permit but his compatriot doesn’t,” said DCI in a statement on Sunday.
Additionally, a cashier, also without a work permit but holding a visitor visa, was arrested as well.
Hailan was set to be arraigned on Monday, according to his attorney Dennis Onyango. The Chinese nationals will be charged with assault causing bodily harm, according to the outlet.
According to reports, the incident occurred in the Kileleshwa area in Nairobi at the Chez Wou restaurant and the victim, Oseko, also does not have a work permit. He was fired from his job before the video surfaced but said in the video that the beating practice was commonplace.
In another video, the owner of the restaurant alluded to blaming the victim for his beating.
Oseko gave a statement to police, and the Chinese Embassy in Kenya urged a full investigation into the matter.
The caught-on-camera beating also opened a broader investigation into the inhumane treatment of other African workers. In fact, eight other Kenyans who work at the restaurant gave statements to the Kilimani Police, Pulse live reports.
Racist vitriol against Kenyans by Chinese has found its way into the headlines previously.
In September 2018, Liu Jiaqi, a Chinese man doing business in Kenya, called Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta a monkey in a video filmed by a coworker. He was arrested and deported after his racist remarks were shared widely on social media.
“Everyone, every Kenyan… like a monkey, even [Kenyan President] Uhuru Kenyatta. All of them,” the video depicts him saying.
A video on K24 TV that went viral apparently depicts chef Deng Hailan handing down back lashes on Kenyan man Simon Oseko, a waiter at Chez Wou restaurant, for being late to work. The worker was allegedly given an option to pay up for being late or take the beating.
The alleged mistreatment sheds light on what some say is a deep-rooted trend of mistreatment of Kenyan citizens by Chinese bosses that mirrors the slave experience.
After an investigation, three other Chinese nationals were arrested on Feb. 9 for illegally working at the restaurant, according to statement by the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.
“They managed to arrest the perpetrator, one Deng Hailan, a Chinese National who works at the hotel as a chef but doesn’t have a work permit. Also arrested were two other chefs Chang Yueping & Ou Qiang who hold expired Visas. Chang holds a work permit but his compatriot doesn’t,” said DCI in a statement on Sunday.
Additionally, a cashier, also without a work permit but holding a visitor visa, was arrested as well.
Hailan was set to be arraigned on Monday, according to his attorney Dennis Onyango. The Chinese nationals will be charged with assault causing bodily harm, according to the outlet.
According to reports, the incident occurred in the Kileleshwa area in Nairobi at the Chez Wou restaurant and the victim, Oseko, also does not have a work permit. He was fired from his job before the video surfaced but said in the video that the beating practice was commonplace.
In another video, the owner of the restaurant alluded to blaming the victim for his beating.
Oseko gave a statement to police, and the Chinese Embassy in Kenya urged a full investigation into the matter.
The caught-on-camera beating also opened a broader investigation into the inhumane treatment of other African workers. In fact, eight other Kenyans who work at the restaurant gave statements to the Kilimani Police, Pulse live reports.
Racist vitriol against Kenyans by Chinese has found its way into the headlines previously.
In September 2018, Liu Jiaqi, a Chinese man doing business in Kenya, called Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta a monkey in a video filmed by a coworker. He was arrested and deported after his racist remarks were shared widely on social media.
“Everyone, every Kenyan… like a monkey, even [Kenyan President] Uhuru Kenyatta. All of them,” the video depicts him saying.
Abbas blasts Trump’s ‘Swiss cheese’ plan for Palestine in UN speech
france 24
11/02/2020
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday told the UN Security Council that the world should reject President Donald Trump's Middle East plan, which he said would limit Palestinian sovereignty in a "Swiss cheese" deal.
Brandishing a large map of Israel and Palestine as laid out by Trump's long-awaited January 28 announcement, Abbas called it a "Swiss cheese" deal that would limit Palestinian sovereignty.
“This is the summary of the project that was presented to us. This is the state they will give us. It’s like a Swiss cheese, really. Who among you will accept a similar state?” asked Abbas.
The Palestinians have sought to rally international support against the plan, which Trump unveiled alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has since moved forward on plans to annex vast parts of the West Bank.
Addressing members of the UN Security Council in New York, Abbas said he was speaking “on behalf of 13 million Palestinians to call for a just peace”.
The deal would bring neither peace nor stability to the region, said Abbas. “I would like to say to Mr. Donald Trump that his plan cannot achieve peace and security as it cancels international legitimacy. It cancels all the rights of the Palestinians. This does not meet the aspirations of a two-state solution," he said.
"If you impose peace it will not last, it cannot last," he said, asking: "What gives you the right to annex these lands?"
Abbas said that peace with Israel remained "achievable" and said: "I have come to build a just partnership."
"This deal is not an international partnership. This proposal was from one state, supported by another state to be imposed."
UN speech, but no vote
The speech came a day after the Palestinians abandoned their plans for a UN Security Council vote following pressure from the Trump administration on critics of the peace plan.
Introduced by Indonesia and Tunisia, the resolution risked not having nine out of 15 votes in its favour, the minimum required for adoption provided there is no veto by a permanent member.
While details of the diplomatic pressure have not been officially released, John Lyndon of the Alliance for Middle East Peace noted that the vote plan was shelved for two reasons. “The first related to a call for an international conference to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian issue based upon UN Security Council resolutions rather than the details of the Trump initiative, as well as, I think, an unprecedented call for Chapter 7 of the UN charter to be implemented, which would call on the UN to somehow try and implement previous UN Security Council resolutions in Israel and Palestine,” explained Lyndon in an interview with FRANCE 24.
Pressure, divisions in international response to Trump plan
The Palestinian leadership has enjoyed the backing of the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and, most recently, the African Union, which have all rejected the Trump plan.
But individual countries' positions are more complicated. In the midst of pushing for the UN resolution, Tunisia abruptly withdrew its UN ambassador, raising speculation that the Arab state had come under pressure from Washington.
Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and adviser who has spearheaded his Middle East push, last week said there was a "ton of cracks" in opposition to the plan.
He pointed to divisions within the European Union, particularly from a handful of countries such as Hungary, led by the right-wing populist Viktor Orban.
Of the four EU members that hold seats on the Security Council, two of them – Germany and Estonia – looked ready to abstain from a vote criticising the US plan, diplomats said.
The other two members are France and Belgium. A fifth EU member that was on the Security Council, Britain, left the bloc at the end of last month.
The European Union issued a statement last week reiterating its support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines. The Palestinians want to establish a state in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories Israel seized in a war with Arab countries a half-century ago.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the US initiative “departs from these internationally agreed parameters".
Israel and the US have been optimistic of winning at least muted backing from Arab states traditionally supportive of the Palestinians, with Gulf monarchies united with Israel in their hostility to Iran.
The ambassadors of Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates attended Trump's unveiling of the plan alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who later held a breakthrough meeting with Sudan's top general.
Netanyahu has hailed Trump's plan, under which Israel would maintain sovereignty up to the Jordanian border even if there is a Palestinian state.
'Trump is part of the problem,' say protesting Palestinians
Meanwhile thousands of Palestinians rallied Tuesday in the West Bank to reject Trump's Mideast initiative and to express support for the Palestinian leadership bid to win UN opposition to the plan.
Protesters packed Al-Manara Square in Ramallah, the West Bank headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. They waved Palestinian flags and held banners condemning the plan.
An English-language banner read “Trump is part of the problem not the solution,” while another condemned the “theft of the century". Arab officials and media refer to the plan sarcastically as the “deal of the century".
"All Palestinian people and all the factions, national and Islamic, are standing behind President Mahmoud Abbas,” Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh told the crowd.
“All the streets are full," he said. "This is the Palestinian response."
Brandishing a large map of Israel and Palestine as laid out by Trump's long-awaited January 28 announcement, Abbas called it a "Swiss cheese" deal that would limit Palestinian sovereignty.
“This is the summary of the project that was presented to us. This is the state they will give us. It’s like a Swiss cheese, really. Who among you will accept a similar state?” asked Abbas.
The Palestinians have sought to rally international support against the plan, which Trump unveiled alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has since moved forward on plans to annex vast parts of the West Bank.
Addressing members of the UN Security Council in New York, Abbas said he was speaking “on behalf of 13 million Palestinians to call for a just peace”.
The deal would bring neither peace nor stability to the region, said Abbas. “I would like to say to Mr. Donald Trump that his plan cannot achieve peace and security as it cancels international legitimacy. It cancels all the rights of the Palestinians. This does not meet the aspirations of a two-state solution," he said.
"If you impose peace it will not last, it cannot last," he said, asking: "What gives you the right to annex these lands?"
Abbas said that peace with Israel remained "achievable" and said: "I have come to build a just partnership."
"This deal is not an international partnership. This proposal was from one state, supported by another state to be imposed."
UN speech, but no vote
The speech came a day after the Palestinians abandoned their plans for a UN Security Council vote following pressure from the Trump administration on critics of the peace plan.
Introduced by Indonesia and Tunisia, the resolution risked not having nine out of 15 votes in its favour, the minimum required for adoption provided there is no veto by a permanent member.
While details of the diplomatic pressure have not been officially released, John Lyndon of the Alliance for Middle East Peace noted that the vote plan was shelved for two reasons. “The first related to a call for an international conference to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian issue based upon UN Security Council resolutions rather than the details of the Trump initiative, as well as, I think, an unprecedented call for Chapter 7 of the UN charter to be implemented, which would call on the UN to somehow try and implement previous UN Security Council resolutions in Israel and Palestine,” explained Lyndon in an interview with FRANCE 24.
Pressure, divisions in international response to Trump plan
The Palestinian leadership has enjoyed the backing of the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and, most recently, the African Union, which have all rejected the Trump plan.
But individual countries' positions are more complicated. In the midst of pushing for the UN resolution, Tunisia abruptly withdrew its UN ambassador, raising speculation that the Arab state had come under pressure from Washington.
Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and adviser who has spearheaded his Middle East push, last week said there was a "ton of cracks" in opposition to the plan.
He pointed to divisions within the European Union, particularly from a handful of countries such as Hungary, led by the right-wing populist Viktor Orban.
Of the four EU members that hold seats on the Security Council, two of them – Germany and Estonia – looked ready to abstain from a vote criticising the US plan, diplomats said.
The other two members are France and Belgium. A fifth EU member that was on the Security Council, Britain, left the bloc at the end of last month.
The European Union issued a statement last week reiterating its support for a two-state solution based on the 1967 lines. The Palestinians want to establish a state in east Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, territories Israel seized in a war with Arab countries a half-century ago.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the US initiative “departs from these internationally agreed parameters".
Israel and the US have been optimistic of winning at least muted backing from Arab states traditionally supportive of the Palestinians, with Gulf monarchies united with Israel in their hostility to Iran.
The ambassadors of Bahrain, Oman, the United Arab Emirates attended Trump's unveiling of the plan alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who later held a breakthrough meeting with Sudan's top general.
Netanyahu has hailed Trump's plan, under which Israel would maintain sovereignty up to the Jordanian border even if there is a Palestinian state.
'Trump is part of the problem,' say protesting Palestinians
Meanwhile thousands of Palestinians rallied Tuesday in the West Bank to reject Trump's Mideast initiative and to express support for the Palestinian leadership bid to win UN opposition to the plan.
Protesters packed Al-Manara Square in Ramallah, the West Bank headquarters of the Palestinian Authority. They waved Palestinian flags and held banners condemning the plan.
An English-language banner read “Trump is part of the problem not the solution,” while another condemned the “theft of the century". Arab officials and media refer to the plan sarcastically as the “deal of the century".
"All Palestinian people and all the factions, national and Islamic, are standing behind President Mahmoud Abbas,” Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh told the crowd.
“All the streets are full," he said. "This is the Palestinian response."
Botswana Selling Licenses To Kill Elephants At $39,000 A Head
Conservationists are outraged after the end of a long-standing ban in the nation on trophy hunting.
By Mary Papenfuss - huffpost
02/09/2020 04:52 am ET
Botswana has auctioned off permits that will allow hunters to kill elephants for some $39,000 a head, infuriating environmentalists and animal lovers around the globe.
The pricey permit system will allow hunters to kill 70 elephants in all.
The permit auction was arranged by Auction It Ltd. on behalf of the government on Friday in packages of 10 elephants, according to a document viewed by Bloomberg. The packages are purchased by expedition operators who sell them to trophy hunters at a profit. Most trophy hunters in southern Africa come from the U.S., according to Bloomberg.
All but one of the packages have been sold, Bloomberg reported.
African conservationist organizations that wanted to bid on the permits and not shoot the elephants were banned from participating, The Independent reported.
The EMS Foundation in Africa, which battles to protect elephants among its many projects, tweeted afterward: “Shame on you, President Masisi – we will not forget.”
The government has set a quota for killing a total of 272 of the animals this year. Foreign hunters will be allowed to shoot 202 of those, and export trophies.
Poaching also takes a major toll on elephants. Conservationists warn that hunting is particularly devastating because trophy hunters are after the largest, often healthiest, animals.
“Trophy hunting is artificial selection. By targeting the biggest and strongest animals, it leaves the weaker, smaller animals behind,” Eduardo Goncalves, founder of the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting, told The Independent.
“This means the best genes are being lost, so the species will be less able to adapt to accelerating climate change, it will be more prone to disease, and the risk of extinction is greater.”
Botswana instituted a ban on elephant trophy hunting in 2014. But that ban has been revoked, and President Mokgweetsi Masisi promoted elephant hunting last year. Farmers have complained about an increase in dangerous encounters with elephants.
Besides concerns about the loss of the animals, and their suffering, conservationists have argued that Botswana’s important tourist industry could be devastated by the change, which will likely outrage visitors. Tourism accounts for a fifth of the African nation’s economy.
Botswana is home to some 130,000 elephants, the world’s largest population. But Africa’s total elephant population has plummeted by more than two-thirds in 40 years, from 1.3 million in 1979 to 415,000 in 2015, according to official figures.
The pricey permit system will allow hunters to kill 70 elephants in all.
The permit auction was arranged by Auction It Ltd. on behalf of the government on Friday in packages of 10 elephants, according to a document viewed by Bloomberg. The packages are purchased by expedition operators who sell them to trophy hunters at a profit. Most trophy hunters in southern Africa come from the U.S., according to Bloomberg.
All but one of the packages have been sold, Bloomberg reported.
African conservationist organizations that wanted to bid on the permits and not shoot the elephants were banned from participating, The Independent reported.
The EMS Foundation in Africa, which battles to protect elephants among its many projects, tweeted afterward: “Shame on you, President Masisi – we will not forget.”
The government has set a quota for killing a total of 272 of the animals this year. Foreign hunters will be allowed to shoot 202 of those, and export trophies.
Poaching also takes a major toll on elephants. Conservationists warn that hunting is particularly devastating because trophy hunters are after the largest, often healthiest, animals.
“Trophy hunting is artificial selection. By targeting the biggest and strongest animals, it leaves the weaker, smaller animals behind,” Eduardo Goncalves, founder of the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting, told The Independent.
“This means the best genes are being lost, so the species will be less able to adapt to accelerating climate change, it will be more prone to disease, and the risk of extinction is greater.”
Botswana instituted a ban on elephant trophy hunting in 2014. But that ban has been revoked, and President Mokgweetsi Masisi promoted elephant hunting last year. Farmers have complained about an increase in dangerous encounters with elephants.
Besides concerns about the loss of the animals, and their suffering, conservationists have argued that Botswana’s important tourist industry could be devastated by the change, which will likely outrage visitors. Tourism accounts for a fifth of the African nation’s economy.
Botswana is home to some 130,000 elephants, the world’s largest population. But Africa’s total elephant population has plummeted by more than two-thirds in 40 years, from 1.3 million in 1979 to 415,000 in 2015, according to official figures.
Black Professor Unleashes Flood of White Tears After On-Air Clash Ensues When Guest Says the British Empire ‘Wasn’t All Bad’
By Ashleigh Atwell - atlanta black star
February 5, 2020
Dr. Kehinde Andrews argues whiteness is “a psychosis” while discussing the British Empire. (Photo: Screenshot/Good Morning Britain YouTube)
A Black British academic ruffled some feathers when he deemed whiteness “a psychosis” and took Britain to task for its oppressive history.
Birmingham City University professor Dr. Kehinde Andrews made the comments on Sunday during a “Good Morning Britain” panel discussion about the use of “Empire” when referring to Britain and its territories. The talk was prompted by commentary from British Labour Party candidate Lisa Nandy, who argued the “Order of the British Empire” should be changed to the “Order of British Excellence,” per The Guardian.
Andrews was the only Black person on the panel aside from break dancer Jonzi D, who refused to accept an honor designating him as a member of the British empire, as reported by Metro.
Andrews made the comment after the white panelists tried to convince him and another Black man that the British Empire “wasn’t all bad.”
“The way we remember this history is so bad, that we actually think we can find comfort in this system which killed tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions of people, rape, murder, torture, famine,” Andrews said.
“Whiteness is a psychosis – you can’t have a reasonable explanation.”
Andrews’ bold statement unleashed a downpour of white tears from co-panelists Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid, who accused him of being a racist. Their critiques didn’t deter him.
“Whiteness is not just for white people. There are black people, Asian people, who also purport the psychosis of whiteness,” Andrews continued.
“It’s about the idea,” he added. “It’s about the fact that in the 21st century, 60% of British people believe that empire was a force for good. That’s like saying the Nazis built motorways, so we should celebrate them. It’s literally an irrational view.”
When an obviously incensed Morgan asked Andrews if he was, “comparing the British empire to Nazi Germany” the professor clarified his point.
“You’re right, there is no comparison,” Andrews responded. “The British Empire did far more harm to the world for a far more sustained period of time.”
Reid and Morgan were not the only ones upset by Andrews’ comments. Twitter was flooded with people who missed his point.[...]
Birmingham City University professor Dr. Kehinde Andrews made the comments on Sunday during a “Good Morning Britain” panel discussion about the use of “Empire” when referring to Britain and its territories. The talk was prompted by commentary from British Labour Party candidate Lisa Nandy, who argued the “Order of the British Empire” should be changed to the “Order of British Excellence,” per The Guardian.
Andrews was the only Black person on the panel aside from break dancer Jonzi D, who refused to accept an honor designating him as a member of the British empire, as reported by Metro.
Andrews made the comment after the white panelists tried to convince him and another Black man that the British Empire “wasn’t all bad.”
“The way we remember this history is so bad, that we actually think we can find comfort in this system which killed tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions of people, rape, murder, torture, famine,” Andrews said.
“Whiteness is a psychosis – you can’t have a reasonable explanation.”
Andrews’ bold statement unleashed a downpour of white tears from co-panelists Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid, who accused him of being a racist. Their critiques didn’t deter him.
“Whiteness is not just for white people. There are black people, Asian people, who also purport the psychosis of whiteness,” Andrews continued.
“It’s about the idea,” he added. “It’s about the fact that in the 21st century, 60% of British people believe that empire was a force for good. That’s like saying the Nazis built motorways, so we should celebrate them. It’s literally an irrational view.”
When an obviously incensed Morgan asked Andrews if he was, “comparing the British empire to Nazi Germany” the professor clarified his point.
“You’re right, there is no comparison,” Andrews responded. “The British Empire did far more harm to the world for a far more sustained period of time.”
Reid and Morgan were not the only ones upset by Andrews’ comments. Twitter was flooded with people who missed his point.[...]
Palestinians cut all ties with US and Israel over “arrogance” of Jared Kushner’s “peace” deal
"There will be no relations at all," Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said after rejecting Kushner's proposal
IGOR DERYSH - salon
FEBRUARY 3, 2020 7:48PM (UTC)
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced Saturday that the Palestinian Authority would cut all ties with the U.S. and Israel after rejecting the "peace" plan spearheaded by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner.
President Donald Trump outlined the heavily pro-Israel proposal while standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House last week with no Palestinian representatives present. The plan would create a demilitarized Palestinian state while establishing Jerusalem as Israel's undivided capital and allowing illegally built Israeli settlements in the West Bank to remain in place.
Abbas, who immediately rejected the proposal, went further while addressing an emergency meeting of the Arab League called in response to the plan.
"We've informed the Israeli side . . . that there will be no relations at all with them and the United States, including security ties," Abbas said Saturday, according to Reuters.
The Palestinians have long cooperated with Israeli forces in policing occupied areas of the West Bank and shared intelligence with the CIA.
Abbas said he refused multiple attempts by Trump to discuss the proposal.
"Trump asked that I speak to him by phone, but I said, 'No.' And that he wants to send me a letter . . . but I refused it," he said, explaining that he did not want Trump to be able to say he consulted the Palestinians in announcing the plan.
The Palestinians ended talks with the Trump administration in 2017 after Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and were not involved in crafting Kushner's plan.
Abbas reiterated his "complete" rejection of the Kushner peace plan Saturday.
"I will not have it recorded in my history that I sold Jerusalem," he said.
Dozens of Middle Eastern nations joined Abbas in condemning the plan.
The Trump administration had hoped that Arab counties close to the U.S. would back the deal. However, the Arab League unanimously voted to reject Trump's proposal Saturday, because it "does not satisfy the minimum of the rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people."
The organization said that the Trump plan contradicted the principles of the peace process and United Nations resolutions, according to Axios, arguing that any peace deal must include a Palestinian state under the borders approved in 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital. The statement also warned Israel against annexing the West Bank.
The 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation similarly rejected the plan as "biased" Monday, according to The Associated Press.
The OIC said in a statement that Trump's plan "lacks the minimum requirements of justice and destroys the foundations of peace."
The statement came after Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki urged members not to engage in Trump's plan in any way.
"Anything less than that will give the illegitimate Israeli occupation more time to use the imaginary peace process as an excuse to create their colonies," he said.
Kushner, who has touted the benefits of his plan by trashing Palestinian leaders in television interviews, appeared to threaten Palestinians with permanent Israeli rule in an interview Sunday with CNN.
"For the Palestinians, if they want their people to live better lives, we now have a framework to do it," Kushner said. "If they don't think that they can uphold these standards, then I don't think we can get Israel to take the risk to recognize them as a state -- to allow them to take control of themselves -- because the only thing more dangerous than what we have now is a failed state."
Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat told CNN that there was nothing to negotiate, since Kushner took it upon himself to unilaterally dictate the terms of a peace proposal.
"What is left to negotiate? When I said these issues must be negotiated between us and Israel directly, Kushner responded by calling me a failed negotiator, unable to negotiate," he said. "He negotiated on my behalf, because he knows better than I do what is best for me. This is the art of dictation, arrogance and blackmail."
President Donald Trump outlined the heavily pro-Israel proposal while standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House last week with no Palestinian representatives present. The plan would create a demilitarized Palestinian state while establishing Jerusalem as Israel's undivided capital and allowing illegally built Israeli settlements in the West Bank to remain in place.
Abbas, who immediately rejected the proposal, went further while addressing an emergency meeting of the Arab League called in response to the plan.
"We've informed the Israeli side . . . that there will be no relations at all with them and the United States, including security ties," Abbas said Saturday, according to Reuters.
The Palestinians have long cooperated with Israeli forces in policing occupied areas of the West Bank and shared intelligence with the CIA.
Abbas said he refused multiple attempts by Trump to discuss the proposal.
"Trump asked that I speak to him by phone, but I said, 'No.' And that he wants to send me a letter . . . but I refused it," he said, explaining that he did not want Trump to be able to say he consulted the Palestinians in announcing the plan.
The Palestinians ended talks with the Trump administration in 2017 after Trump moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and were not involved in crafting Kushner's plan.
Abbas reiterated his "complete" rejection of the Kushner peace plan Saturday.
"I will not have it recorded in my history that I sold Jerusalem," he said.
Dozens of Middle Eastern nations joined Abbas in condemning the plan.
The Trump administration had hoped that Arab counties close to the U.S. would back the deal. However, the Arab League unanimously voted to reject Trump's proposal Saturday, because it "does not satisfy the minimum of the rights and aspirations of the Palestinian people."
The organization said that the Trump plan contradicted the principles of the peace process and United Nations resolutions, according to Axios, arguing that any peace deal must include a Palestinian state under the borders approved in 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital. The statement also warned Israel against annexing the West Bank.
The 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation similarly rejected the plan as "biased" Monday, according to The Associated Press.
The OIC said in a statement that Trump's plan "lacks the minimum requirements of justice and destroys the foundations of peace."
The statement came after Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad al-Malki urged members not to engage in Trump's plan in any way.
"Anything less than that will give the illegitimate Israeli occupation more time to use the imaginary peace process as an excuse to create their colonies," he said.
Kushner, who has touted the benefits of his plan by trashing Palestinian leaders in television interviews, appeared to threaten Palestinians with permanent Israeli rule in an interview Sunday with CNN.
"For the Palestinians, if they want their people to live better lives, we now have a framework to do it," Kushner said. "If they don't think that they can uphold these standards, then I don't think we can get Israel to take the risk to recognize them as a state -- to allow them to take control of themselves -- because the only thing more dangerous than what we have now is a failed state."
Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat told CNN that there was nothing to negotiate, since Kushner took it upon himself to unilaterally dictate the terms of a peace proposal.
"What is left to negotiate? When I said these issues must be negotiated between us and Israel directly, Kushner responded by calling me a failed negotiator, unable to negotiate," he said. "He negotiated on my behalf, because he knows better than I do what is best for me. This is the art of dictation, arrogance and blackmail."
Germany is tackling the green-energy transition — and the world is watching
Germany is finding that the cost of renewables is not the problem — moving away from a fossil-fuel economy is
CARL POPE - salom
JANUARY 30, 2020 10:00AM (UTC)
First, the German government announced that moving beyond coal would cost the nation $44 billion in out-of-pocket expenses, and would take 18 years.
Second, German policy makers were reported in a quandary. Should they take their lead from the U.S. and reject engagement with the Chinese telecom firm Huawei for Germany's 5G mobile network? That would be a defensible decision for reasons of security and European competitiveness, but would risk Chinese ire and loss of access to the world's largest auto market.
Both of these episodes, depending on how they come out, could significantly hamper decarbonization of the German economy, and even global climate progress — but they illustrate the complexity of the energy transition. Combined, they capture both halves of the challenge facing countries trying to accelerate the transition to clean energy. They must somehow overcome the interests — and dependence — of the fossil-fuel-invested sectors of their current economies. They must simultaneously make themselves competitive in the quite different future world of clean and renewable energy.
Revealingly, neither of Germany's dilemmas result from clean, decarbonized energy costing too much — so neither would be significantly resolved by, say, robust carbon taxes.
Let's begin with Germany's power sector transition. Germany needs to pour $44 billion into retiring its remaining coal fleet, not to pay for wind and solar, which will be cheaper than retiring coal, but on "compensating workers, companies and the four coal producing states" that will be left behind. That challenge is also why Germany is planning to take 18 years to finish the transition — which will seriously undermine the EU's ability to meet its climate goals. Renewables are cheap and available, but they strand too many workers and communities.
The Huawei dilemma is the flipside. Alienating Beijing could lead it to squeeze German automakers out of their valuable niche in the Chinese auto market, which is the world's largest, especially for the low-carbon, electric vehicles of the future on which companies like VW and BMW are betting billions.
The question of how a capitalist system should manage the hard truth that rapid innovation means accelerated depreciation of capital investments has barely received notice from the world's economists.
The recent history of wind, solar and batteries suggests that the winners are not the technology pioneers, but those who get access to the first big markets. China, not the U.S., now dominates solar-panel manufacturing because when Germany first scaled solar, it was the Chinese who created the biggest market while the U.S. dithered.
Capturing the electric auto markets of the future is key if Germany is to avoid a costly and divisive shrinking of its auto industry in the wake of pending coal retirements. For nations to replace the jobs lost as yesterday's fossil industry shrinks, they must capture the new jobs and economic growth of the low carbon future — but doing so means accelerating market change and writing coal, oil and gas assets off more quickly.
The Huawei dilemma is rooted in the truth that the Chinese currently have the world's biggest national auto market — and focused it on vehicle electrification. But Europe and North America combined have an even bigger regional market. If they were vigorously collaborating to electrify that market, they could drive the world away from Huawei — if that is in our collective interest, as seems likely.
But thanks to Donald Trump, not only is the U.S. not collaborating with Canada and Europe to leverage the world's biggest auto market, we are splintering our own domestic market in a fight between the Trump administration and the state of California, thus rendering Detroit steadily less competitive. Our government is actually trying to lag, not lead, when it comes to the automotive technologies of the future.
We need new thinking about how to manage a future of more rapid technological innovation. This unavoidably means that more and more of yesterday's investments become outmoded faster than regions, communities, companies and workers are used to adjusting. As a new innovation emerges it makes money replacing an old one. But in doing so it strands not just the companies invested in the now outmoded incumbent, but also their entire supply chains: workers, communities, companies and shareholders. This can affect entire regions: Imagine North Dakota if there were suddenly no market for Bakken oil!
And imagine also the political reality, that the incumbent technology has enough political clout to obstruct and slow down the market growth of the newcomer — say, by preventing regulatory changes which allow for the differences between renewables and coal and gas.
Finally, consider the existential urgency to speed up the transition from old fossil to new renewable energy. Why not use a share of the profits of the new renewable option to compensate the fossil supply chain for its lost market share and more rapid capital stock retirement? Effectively, that would provide insurance against too rapid technological change.
But this is not how we usually think about economic change. Rapid technological change as a socially insured risk hasn't been part of our concept of capitalism. Nor is the vision of government as a nurturer and creator of the markets for innovative new products whose profits will pay for the premiums on that insurance. Joseph Schumpeter warned of capitalism's "creative destruction," but even he didn't imagine that the security of human civilization might depend on speeding up that destruction, and doing that might require compensating the stakeholders in the old order which is being replaced.
Germany, whose political dialogue is unencumbered by climate denialism, is thus testing new ground which will be vital for all of us. Remember, the problem is not the cost of clean energy, but the embedded investment in fossil fuels. How we bring negatively impacted communities along as we accelerate toward clean, low-carbon energy is perhaps the biggest question that faces us in the climate-changed future.
Second, German policy makers were reported in a quandary. Should they take their lead from the U.S. and reject engagement with the Chinese telecom firm Huawei for Germany's 5G mobile network? That would be a defensible decision for reasons of security and European competitiveness, but would risk Chinese ire and loss of access to the world's largest auto market.
Both of these episodes, depending on how they come out, could significantly hamper decarbonization of the German economy, and even global climate progress — but they illustrate the complexity of the energy transition. Combined, they capture both halves of the challenge facing countries trying to accelerate the transition to clean energy. They must somehow overcome the interests — and dependence — of the fossil-fuel-invested sectors of their current economies. They must simultaneously make themselves competitive in the quite different future world of clean and renewable energy.
Revealingly, neither of Germany's dilemmas result from clean, decarbonized energy costing too much — so neither would be significantly resolved by, say, robust carbon taxes.
Let's begin with Germany's power sector transition. Germany needs to pour $44 billion into retiring its remaining coal fleet, not to pay for wind and solar, which will be cheaper than retiring coal, but on "compensating workers, companies and the four coal producing states" that will be left behind. That challenge is also why Germany is planning to take 18 years to finish the transition — which will seriously undermine the EU's ability to meet its climate goals. Renewables are cheap and available, but they strand too many workers and communities.
The Huawei dilemma is the flipside. Alienating Beijing could lead it to squeeze German automakers out of their valuable niche in the Chinese auto market, which is the world's largest, especially for the low-carbon, electric vehicles of the future on which companies like VW and BMW are betting billions.
The question of how a capitalist system should manage the hard truth that rapid innovation means accelerated depreciation of capital investments has barely received notice from the world's economists.
The recent history of wind, solar and batteries suggests that the winners are not the technology pioneers, but those who get access to the first big markets. China, not the U.S., now dominates solar-panel manufacturing because when Germany first scaled solar, it was the Chinese who created the biggest market while the U.S. dithered.
Capturing the electric auto markets of the future is key if Germany is to avoid a costly and divisive shrinking of its auto industry in the wake of pending coal retirements. For nations to replace the jobs lost as yesterday's fossil industry shrinks, they must capture the new jobs and economic growth of the low carbon future — but doing so means accelerating market change and writing coal, oil and gas assets off more quickly.
The Huawei dilemma is rooted in the truth that the Chinese currently have the world's biggest national auto market — and focused it on vehicle electrification. But Europe and North America combined have an even bigger regional market. If they were vigorously collaborating to electrify that market, they could drive the world away from Huawei — if that is in our collective interest, as seems likely.
But thanks to Donald Trump, not only is the U.S. not collaborating with Canada and Europe to leverage the world's biggest auto market, we are splintering our own domestic market in a fight between the Trump administration and the state of California, thus rendering Detroit steadily less competitive. Our government is actually trying to lag, not lead, when it comes to the automotive technologies of the future.
We need new thinking about how to manage a future of more rapid technological innovation. This unavoidably means that more and more of yesterday's investments become outmoded faster than regions, communities, companies and workers are used to adjusting. As a new innovation emerges it makes money replacing an old one. But in doing so it strands not just the companies invested in the now outmoded incumbent, but also their entire supply chains: workers, communities, companies and shareholders. This can affect entire regions: Imagine North Dakota if there were suddenly no market for Bakken oil!
And imagine also the political reality, that the incumbent technology has enough political clout to obstruct and slow down the market growth of the newcomer — say, by preventing regulatory changes which allow for the differences between renewables and coal and gas.
Finally, consider the existential urgency to speed up the transition from old fossil to new renewable energy. Why not use a share of the profits of the new renewable option to compensate the fossil supply chain for its lost market share and more rapid capital stock retirement? Effectively, that would provide insurance against too rapid technological change.
But this is not how we usually think about economic change. Rapid technological change as a socially insured risk hasn't been part of our concept of capitalism. Nor is the vision of government as a nurturer and creator of the markets for innovative new products whose profits will pay for the premiums on that insurance. Joseph Schumpeter warned of capitalism's "creative destruction," but even he didn't imagine that the security of human civilization might depend on speeding up that destruction, and doing that might require compensating the stakeholders in the old order which is being replaced.
Germany, whose political dialogue is unencumbered by climate denialism, is thus testing new ground which will be vital for all of us. Remember, the problem is not the cost of clean energy, but the embedded investment in fossil fuels. How we bring negatively impacted communities along as we accelerate toward clean, low-carbon energy is perhaps the biggest question that faces us in the climate-changed future.
Canada
Canada's Chinese community faces racist abuse in wake of coronavirus
Country has seen just three confirmed cases of the virus but panic is already spreading, causing an uptick in racist incidents
Leyland Cecco in Toronto
the guardian
Tue 28 Jan 2020 13.51 EST
When Toronto resident Terri Chu tweeted that she and other Chinese mothers feared the “inevitable wave of racism” that would accompany the spread of coronavirus around the world, she didn’t realize how visceral the reactions would be.
“My Twitter has just exploded with vitriol since this morning,” she said on Tuesday. “But it’s just par for the course, growing up as a minority when you’re not part of a dominant class.”
Canada has so far seen three confirmed cases of the virus, which originated in China, but members of the country’s Chinese community have already become the target of racism.
The country saw a similar wave of xenophobia during 2003 Sars outbreak, which also started in China.
During that panic, many Chinese-run businesses in Canada took steep losses as fear overrode public health advice: Toronto lost an estimated C$1bn as residents and tourists avoided the city, especially areas with a high concentration of Chinese businesses.
The irrational public worry that paralyzed much of the city seems to be returning, said Amy Go, the interim president of the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice.
“I was hopeful it wasn’t going to be like 2003. But it’s is. It’s happening now and it’s just going to be amplified [by social media].”
When a popular Toronto blog, reviewed a new Chinese restaurant on Instagram on Monday, the post quickly received a torrent of racist comments.
And nearly 9,000 parents in the York school district – an area north of Toronto – signed a petition demanding students who had traveled to China in the last 17 days be prevented from attending school.
“This has to stop. Stop eating wild animals and then infecting everyone around you,” wrote one petition signer. “Stop the spread and quarantine yourselves or go back.”
On Monday, the board – which represents 208 schools – condemned the petition amid fears students will be targeted based on their ethnicity.
“We are aware of an escalated level of concern and anxiety among families of Chinese heritage,” wrote York board chair Juanita Nathan and education director Louise Sirisko. “Individuals who make assumptions, even with positive intentions of safety, about the risk of others, request or demand quarantine can be seen as demonstrating bias and racism.”
Chu said fears about the coronavirus were disproportionate.
“Air pollution and the proliferation of SUVs are far greater public health risk to my kids than the coronavirus right now – it’s being completely blown out of proportion,” she said. The total death toll of Sars in Canada was 44, she said. “Last year in Toronto, 41 people got hit by cars.”
Racist responses have also been seen in other countries with Chinese diaspora communities. In Australia, Queensland MP Duncan Pegg warned residents of false health bulletins circulating online that stoked fear of communities with high proportions Asian residents.
But Go also said that the reactions in Canada – which includes some of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world – expose a current of everyday racism which is always present.
“Two or three months from now, the coronavirus will likely be gone. But this is not just a public health issue. This is an issue of racism in Canada. “The best thing to come from this – the best impact – would be people collectively learning that we can do better.”
“My Twitter has just exploded with vitriol since this morning,” she said on Tuesday. “But it’s just par for the course, growing up as a minority when you’re not part of a dominant class.”
Canada has so far seen three confirmed cases of the virus, which originated in China, but members of the country’s Chinese community have already become the target of racism.
The country saw a similar wave of xenophobia during 2003 Sars outbreak, which also started in China.
During that panic, many Chinese-run businesses in Canada took steep losses as fear overrode public health advice: Toronto lost an estimated C$1bn as residents and tourists avoided the city, especially areas with a high concentration of Chinese businesses.
The irrational public worry that paralyzed much of the city seems to be returning, said Amy Go, the interim president of the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice.
“I was hopeful it wasn’t going to be like 2003. But it’s is. It’s happening now and it’s just going to be amplified [by social media].”
When a popular Toronto blog, reviewed a new Chinese restaurant on Instagram on Monday, the post quickly received a torrent of racist comments.
And nearly 9,000 parents in the York school district – an area north of Toronto – signed a petition demanding students who had traveled to China in the last 17 days be prevented from attending school.
“This has to stop. Stop eating wild animals and then infecting everyone around you,” wrote one petition signer. “Stop the spread and quarantine yourselves or go back.”
On Monday, the board – which represents 208 schools – condemned the petition amid fears students will be targeted based on their ethnicity.
“We are aware of an escalated level of concern and anxiety among families of Chinese heritage,” wrote York board chair Juanita Nathan and education director Louise Sirisko. “Individuals who make assumptions, even with positive intentions of safety, about the risk of others, request or demand quarantine can be seen as demonstrating bias and racism.”
Chu said fears about the coronavirus were disproportionate.
“Air pollution and the proliferation of SUVs are far greater public health risk to my kids than the coronavirus right now – it’s being completely blown out of proportion,” she said. The total death toll of Sars in Canada was 44, she said. “Last year in Toronto, 41 people got hit by cars.”
Racist responses have also been seen in other countries with Chinese diaspora communities. In Australia, Queensland MP Duncan Pegg warned residents of false health bulletins circulating online that stoked fear of communities with high proportions Asian residents.
But Go also said that the reactions in Canada – which includes some of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world – expose a current of everyday racism which is always present.
“Two or three months from now, the coronavirus will likely be gone. But this is not just a public health issue. This is an issue of racism in Canada. “The best thing to come from this – the best impact – would be people collectively learning that we can do better.”
Animals farmed
‘Floating feedlots’: animals spending weeks at sea on ships not fit for purpose
Animal welfare put at risk on old and ‘inferior’ converted car carriers and cargo ships that are not built to transport livestock
Naomi Larsson and Tom Levitt
the guardian
Sun 26 Jan 2020 05.00 EST
Animals may spend weeks on board vessels en route to another country for slaughter. Photograph: Trevor Collens/AAP
The live export trade carrying millions of sheep and cattle across the seas each year is plagued by “old” and “inferior” ships that are a threat to animal welfare, claims a leading shipping company.
Livestock carriers are a key part of the multibillion dollar live export industry, dominated by Australia, South America and Europe. In 2017, almost 2 billion animals were exported in a trade worth $21bn (£15bn), with a significant proportion travelling by sea.
But most of the ships are old car carriers or other former cargo ships, rather than purpose-built vessels that can meet higher standards of animal welfare, said Wellard, one of the world’s largest livestock exporters, based in Australia.
A spokesperson for the company, which shipped nearly 400,000 cattle in 2019, said: “The old converted vessels bring the standard of the whole industry down. If you’re using a ship that was originally built for another purpose, you’re compromising on your animal services when you convert it to a livestock vessel.
“The biggest threat to the global live export industry is old ships. They have inferior standards and livestock services and they are more prone to accidents and breakdowns. Those ships give a bad name to a legitimate industry.”
More than half of the 129 livestock carriers listed as active with a working automated tracking system on at least one marine website were built before the 1980s. “The livestock carrier fleet is one of the oldest sectors in the globally trading fleet with an average vessel age of 38 years old,” said Adam Kent, managing director of market analysts Maritime Strategies International (MSI). In comparison, the average age of a container ship is 13.
“Only the Laker fleet, trading on the freshwater Great Lakes, has an older average age,” he said.
“Given that around 80% of all livestock carriers are converted vessels, which were originally designed for another cargo, the relative investment in the sector is significantly below other ship types,” he added. Most ships were converted from general cargo or “roll on roll off” (RoRo) vessels, meaning ships that have been designed to carry wheeled cargo.
The Dutch company Vroon, which owns the subsidiary Livestock Express, is known as the “world’s biggest independent seaborne livestock carrier”, with a fleet of 13 purpose-built vessels. Around half its ships have a gross tonnage of 10,241 and can carry more than 4,600 heads of cattle.
Livestock Express managing director Paul Pistorius warned that converting old vessels into livestock carriers means making “compromises”.
“When converting a vessel, you must live with the original hull and machinery and furthermore you always need to make compromises during the conversion phase. History has shown that these compromises may lead to poor animal welfare outcomes.
“There are indeed a lot of old conversions and also recent conversions of old hulls. Unfortunately, many of these vessels don’t always meet the standards to which we believe livestock carriers should adhere,” he said.
Animal health and welfare concerns
The practice of transporting thousands of live animals (some ships carry more than 10,000 animals) across the sea for weeks at a time means attention must be paid to the welfare of animals. Older ships were not built for this purpose, which raises concerns.
The most common health risks for animals on ships are fatigue, heat stress, overcrowding and related injuries, and the spread of disease. Lynn Simpson, a former veterinarian on livestock export ships, has been a vocal critic of the long-distance ship trade. She’s witnessed cattle forced to stand on hard floors for weeks on end, sick, injured animals left to die, and sheep literally cooking from the inside with their “fat melted and like a translucent jelly”.
“Some animals are held on decks for as long as 40 days, living on hard decking of concrete and metal. They [the animals] are not built to cope with these environments,” said Simpson. She points out that the long time spent at sea makes it even more critical for ships to be well-adapted for animals to protect their health and welfare. “A truck is transporting from A to B, but a ship is really a floating feedlot. They are at sea for up to six weeks so it’s not just a small period of time. They [the animals] have to eat, sleep, drink and recover.”
“The live animal trade is not one where great fortunes are made. The unsuitability of the ships has created a lot of issues for the welfare of the animals. There has been a lot of concern about converted ships, which have a checkered history of inspection failings,” said Andrew Linington, former editor for the maritime trade union, Nautilus International.
In November the Queen Hind, a 40-year-old vessel owned by Romanian company MGM Marine, was carrying more than 14,000 sheep when it capsized en route from Romania. The 22 crew members were rescued but just 180 sheep survived.
Campaign groups said at the time that a major problem was that often vessels were not built for the journey. “They are old vessels that are converted to transport animals,” Francesca Porta from Eurogroup for Animals in Brussels told the New York Times.
That incident prompted Nautilus International to call for an investigation into converted livestock carriers, saying the industry must “learn safety lessons for keeping seafarers safe and improving animal welfare”.
“There’s a risk that in these long-distance transport there are major problems with animals overheating in highly humid, dirty conditions … where a vessel has been converted it will be less able to control bad conditions,” said a spokesperson from Compassion in World Farming.
Mortality figures in the export of livestock are largely unavailable as the majority of countries, aside from Australia and New Zealand, do not require them to be publicly reported. The International Maritime Organization only requires an investigation of casualties at sea if they led to the death or serious injury of a person, or serious damage to the ship or the marine environment. In Australia the government reports on any shipments where the mortality rate exceeds 1%. In August 2017, around 2,400 sheep died from heat stress on a ship sent from Australia to the Middle East.
For Europe, the only available mortality figures are from media reports on major incidents. In 2015, Jordan rejected a shipment of 13,000 sheep from Romania because 40% of the animals were dead. A veterinary inspection at port found that it was not disease that caused the high mortality rate, but a failure to provide adequate food or water on the eight-day trip.
Simpson said the mortality rates were likely to be higher in other regions not reporting figures. “The ships I was on 10 years ago carried 10,000 cattle for 20-day voyages and if you lost 15 animals I would say that was average. When they were travelling out of South America, the crew told me the same ships would have 14,000 cattle and would lose 300–500 animals in a voyage.
“They don’t care about animal welfare. It is just about numbers, which would be fine if we were talking about cans of soup.”
A large number of livestock-carrying ships are also sailing under flags of convenience with poor reputations for ship safety. Out of the 129 ships listed as active, 52 are flying flags from countries currently blacklisted by the port inspection body the Paris MOU, which conducts more than 17,000 inspections on ships every year in ports around the world.
In addition, 10 of the companies that own or manage converted vessels built before 1975 are listed as “low or very low-performing” by the European Maritime Shipping Agency.
Livestock carriers are a key part of the multibillion dollar live export industry, dominated by Australia, South America and Europe. In 2017, almost 2 billion animals were exported in a trade worth $21bn (£15bn), with a significant proportion travelling by sea.
But most of the ships are old car carriers or other former cargo ships, rather than purpose-built vessels that can meet higher standards of animal welfare, said Wellard, one of the world’s largest livestock exporters, based in Australia.
A spokesperson for the company, which shipped nearly 400,000 cattle in 2019, said: “The old converted vessels bring the standard of the whole industry down. If you’re using a ship that was originally built for another purpose, you’re compromising on your animal services when you convert it to a livestock vessel.
“The biggest threat to the global live export industry is old ships. They have inferior standards and livestock services and they are more prone to accidents and breakdowns. Those ships give a bad name to a legitimate industry.”
More than half of the 129 livestock carriers listed as active with a working automated tracking system on at least one marine website were built before the 1980s. “The livestock carrier fleet is one of the oldest sectors in the globally trading fleet with an average vessel age of 38 years old,” said Adam Kent, managing director of market analysts Maritime Strategies International (MSI). In comparison, the average age of a container ship is 13.
“Only the Laker fleet, trading on the freshwater Great Lakes, has an older average age,” he said.
“Given that around 80% of all livestock carriers are converted vessels, which were originally designed for another cargo, the relative investment in the sector is significantly below other ship types,” he added. Most ships were converted from general cargo or “roll on roll off” (RoRo) vessels, meaning ships that have been designed to carry wheeled cargo.
The Dutch company Vroon, which owns the subsidiary Livestock Express, is known as the “world’s biggest independent seaborne livestock carrier”, with a fleet of 13 purpose-built vessels. Around half its ships have a gross tonnage of 10,241 and can carry more than 4,600 heads of cattle.
Livestock Express managing director Paul Pistorius warned that converting old vessels into livestock carriers means making “compromises”.
“When converting a vessel, you must live with the original hull and machinery and furthermore you always need to make compromises during the conversion phase. History has shown that these compromises may lead to poor animal welfare outcomes.
“There are indeed a lot of old conversions and also recent conversions of old hulls. Unfortunately, many of these vessels don’t always meet the standards to which we believe livestock carriers should adhere,” he said.
Animal health and welfare concerns
The practice of transporting thousands of live animals (some ships carry more than 10,000 animals) across the sea for weeks at a time means attention must be paid to the welfare of animals. Older ships were not built for this purpose, which raises concerns.
The most common health risks for animals on ships are fatigue, heat stress, overcrowding and related injuries, and the spread of disease. Lynn Simpson, a former veterinarian on livestock export ships, has been a vocal critic of the long-distance ship trade. She’s witnessed cattle forced to stand on hard floors for weeks on end, sick, injured animals left to die, and sheep literally cooking from the inside with their “fat melted and like a translucent jelly”.
“Some animals are held on decks for as long as 40 days, living on hard decking of concrete and metal. They [the animals] are not built to cope with these environments,” said Simpson. She points out that the long time spent at sea makes it even more critical for ships to be well-adapted for animals to protect their health and welfare. “A truck is transporting from A to B, but a ship is really a floating feedlot. They are at sea for up to six weeks so it’s not just a small period of time. They [the animals] have to eat, sleep, drink and recover.”
“The live animal trade is not one where great fortunes are made. The unsuitability of the ships has created a lot of issues for the welfare of the animals. There has been a lot of concern about converted ships, which have a checkered history of inspection failings,” said Andrew Linington, former editor for the maritime trade union, Nautilus International.
In November the Queen Hind, a 40-year-old vessel owned by Romanian company MGM Marine, was carrying more than 14,000 sheep when it capsized en route from Romania. The 22 crew members were rescued but just 180 sheep survived.
Campaign groups said at the time that a major problem was that often vessels were not built for the journey. “They are old vessels that are converted to transport animals,” Francesca Porta from Eurogroup for Animals in Brussels told the New York Times.
That incident prompted Nautilus International to call for an investigation into converted livestock carriers, saying the industry must “learn safety lessons for keeping seafarers safe and improving animal welfare”.
“There’s a risk that in these long-distance transport there are major problems with animals overheating in highly humid, dirty conditions … where a vessel has been converted it will be less able to control bad conditions,” said a spokesperson from Compassion in World Farming.
Mortality figures in the export of livestock are largely unavailable as the majority of countries, aside from Australia and New Zealand, do not require them to be publicly reported. The International Maritime Organization only requires an investigation of casualties at sea if they led to the death or serious injury of a person, or serious damage to the ship or the marine environment. In Australia the government reports on any shipments where the mortality rate exceeds 1%. In August 2017, around 2,400 sheep died from heat stress on a ship sent from Australia to the Middle East.
For Europe, the only available mortality figures are from media reports on major incidents. In 2015, Jordan rejected a shipment of 13,000 sheep from Romania because 40% of the animals were dead. A veterinary inspection at port found that it was not disease that caused the high mortality rate, but a failure to provide adequate food or water on the eight-day trip.
Simpson said the mortality rates were likely to be higher in other regions not reporting figures. “The ships I was on 10 years ago carried 10,000 cattle for 20-day voyages and if you lost 15 animals I would say that was average. When they were travelling out of South America, the crew told me the same ships would have 14,000 cattle and would lose 300–500 animals in a voyage.
“They don’t care about animal welfare. It is just about numbers, which would be fine if we were talking about cans of soup.”
A large number of livestock-carrying ships are also sailing under flags of convenience with poor reputations for ship safety. Out of the 129 ships listed as active, 52 are flying flags from countries currently blacklisted by the port inspection body the Paris MOU, which conducts more than 17,000 inspections on ships every year in ports around the world.
In addition, 10 of the companies that own or manage converted vessels built before 1975 are listed as “low or very low-performing” by the European Maritime Shipping Agency.
genocide in the name of religion, again!!!
Activists Plan Boycott of US Companies Backing India’s Anti-Muslim Policies
BY Skanda Kadirgamar, Truthout
PUBLISHED January 25, 2020
Activists from South Asian caste and religious minority communities are coming together to organize against Indian American businesses that support India’s move to strip its 200 million Muslims of their citizenship.
On January 19, around 50 protesters gathered in Jersey City, New Jersey, where they marched against India’s polarizing Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which extends citizenship to non-Muslim refugees exclusively. New Jersey is home to many supporters of India’s ruling party, the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The action helped mark the beginning of the “Stop Funding Genocide” protests, which are pushing back against Indian American support for the BJP. The actions have been co-organized by a number of groups advocating for marginalized South Asians, including Equality Labs, the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) and Stand With Kashmir.
Jersey City is home to Fatima, an organizer with SASI, but they were completely taken aback by the local support for the BJP and Hindu supremacy.
“It was a shock to me because I grew up here,” Fatima explained. “My friends are Indian Americans and they’re cool about Muslims obviously. I’ve been to my friends’ parents’ house and no one has said anything outlandishly Islamophobic to me as a visibly Muslim person who wears a hijab.”
The CAA is the latest development in a crisis that could massively increase statelessness among South Asia’s Muslims. The legislation has sparked protests across India that have been met with violent responses from the government and allied paramilitaries. It follows two other measures, the National Population Register (NPR), which critics have said harms Muslims by making religion a test for citizenship, and the Assam-based National Register of Citizens (NRC), which excluded nearly 2 million individuals from citizenship.
These measures are part of an initiative to identify and even detain individuals deemed to be “undocumented” or “illegal migrants.” Anyone falling under those designations is liable to be sent to one of the detention centers being built alongside these population and citizenship databases.
The uproar over the CAA, NRC and NPR coincides with ongoing activism against New Delhi’s de facto annexation of Muslim majority Jammu and Kashmir last August. This helped create a basis for Dalit-Bahujan (an umbrella term for marginalized caste identities), Indian Muslim and Kashmiri organizers to collaborate.
“The CAA is an integral part of the Modi government’s process of creating a stateless Muslim population — who can be profiled, treated as second-class citizens and imprisoned in massive detention centers,” said Dalit organizer Thenmozhi Soundarajan. “Without the pipeline of support they receive from networks of upper-caste Hindus in the diaspora … the Modi government would lack the financial support they need to distribute their fascist ideologies. Their relationship lies at the nexus of wealth inequality and nationalistic fervor that are both typical of the South Asian diaspora.”
Soundarajan runs an advocacy group centering marginalized South Asian communities called Equality Labs. The organization has surveyed the significant impact of caste within Indian diaspora communities and how it enables upper-caste communities to exclude and discriminate against Dalit-Bahujans across the world.
“Caste is not limited to the Subcontinent; caste has been found wherever South Asian migrants go,” according to the Equality Labs survey. “In the United States many caste-oppressed migrant communities who come from caste and religious backgrounds impacted by caste discrimination are finding that caste has replicated itself in in South Asian community, religious, and business institutions.”
The survey also reported that one in three Dalit students in the U.S. report being discriminated during their education. Twenty-five percent of Dalits have faced physical or verbal assault due to their caste. One in two Dalits fear of having their caste “outed.”
These impacts are compounded by the BJP’s commitment to suppressing activists who combat casteism within India, which is mirrored by upper-caste organizing in the diaspora.
Thus, organizers and activists have urgently taken to the streets of Los Angeles; Decatur, Georgia; Chicago and Jersey City to confront Indian American casteism and Islamophobia head on.
As the protesters traveled along Jersey City’s Newark Avenue, they passed Rajbhog Cafe, which exemplifies the type of business that is an asset to the BJP’s quest for a state based on the supremacy of upper-caste Hindus. The local branch of the franchise displays a picture of Narendra Modi, India’s anti-Muslim strongman prime minister, above its white, orange and green striped walls, painted to look like the Indian flag.
Sharmin Hossain, who hails from Queens, New York, and works as a digital security trainer for Equality Labs, also commented on the presence of Hindu supremacy in the South Asian diaspora.
Hossain recalled how the Jackson Heights branch of Patel Brothers, the largest Indian grocery chain in the U.S., commemorated Modi’s bids for the office of prime minister in 2014 and 2019.
“During Modi’s election, all across Patel Brothers, you saw posters supporting Modi,” she said.
Patel Brothers has over 50 stores in 19 states.
The Hindu right has many other friends in the business world. FedEx executive Raj Subraminiam, for instance, reportedly attended the 2018 World Hindu Congress, which became infamous after an outbreak of fascist violence during its keynote event. Dan Bryant, senior vice president at Walmart, was another notable attendee.
The claim that upper-caste members of the Indian diaspora, their businesses and other institutions are supporting Modi’s most recent attacks on Muslims rests on a strong precedent.
BJP supporters have strongholds throughout New Jersey where they blatantly display their esteem for the far right. For instance, back in 2016, the Republican Hindu Coalition put on a Bollywood themed fundraiser for then-nominee Donald Trump. That night Trump praised Modi and said he “looked forward to working with him.”
Before becoming prime minister, Modi was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat. In 2002, he presided over an infamous massacre of Muslims by Hindu supremacist forces. An undercover investigation strongly indicated Modi’s administration did nothing to stop the violence and, despite widespread reporting that Modi has been cleared of genocide allegations, Manoj Mitta, a senior editor at the Times of India, has written that the head of state may still be culpable for thousands of deaths.
Modi was denied entry to the U.S. for nearly 10 years as a result of the Gujarat violence. This changed when he became prime minister. When Modi first came to power in 2014, his U.S.-based devotees were ecstatic. A visit to New York’s Madison Square Garden drew a crowd of 22,000.
During Modi’s second bid for prime minister, some 300 “Non-Resident Indians” from over 20 countries — including the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — arrived in Gujarat. They went on to approach prospective voters and instruct them to vote for the Hindu supremacist icon.
Furthermore, Foreign Policy reported that wealthy Indian expats who tended to skew liberal in terms of U.S. politics were Modi’s “biggest fans” during that election. They organized flash mobs, photo ops and other events at sites like the Golden Gate Bridge and Times Square. One dedicated techie spent $2,000 in order to fly back to Bangalore so he could vote for Modi.
One of the most recent displays of diaspora adoration for Modi was September 2019’s infamous “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas. Honoring both Modi and Trump, the event drew around 40,000 people and was organized through a series of nonprofits such as the Texas India Forum and the educational organization known as the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of the USA. Both of these are run by individuals with ties to the BJP’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, making them yet another channel for Hindu supremacist capital.
Supporters of the BJP are well resourced. They have access to thousands of dollars for political projects both in the U.S. and India. For instance, the Hindu American PAC, whose leadership is in line with the BJP’s agenda, have routinely given money to members of Congress; many of them are friends of Modi. These include the Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee subcommittee on Asia Brad Sherman.
Another striking example of the links between the BJP and the far right in the U.S: Back in June, former Trump adviser and transnational supporter of neo-Nazi and authoritarian causes Steve Bannon was named honorary co-chair of the Republican Hindu Coalition.
“These connections are making it clear, for the first time in American politics, Hindu nationalism has taken the front stage in the American imagination,” Sharmin Hossain said.
While organizers like Hossain say the links between the U.S. far right and the threat of displacement and detention facing Indian Muslims are evident, they acknowledge these links need to be explored more comprehensively to illuminate a course of action. The last comprehensive account of Modi and the BJP’s machinations was compiled in 2013, when a report by the Coalition Against Genocide illustrated how Modi, funding from diaspora Hindu supremacists and the Gujarat massacre are all connected. Hossain says that information is due for an update.
Fatima discussed the direction such an effort could take.
“We’re strategizing a boycott-divestment sort of initiative to target Indian organizations,” they explained. “What are economic targets for Indian people? Where can we also do a cultural and academic boycott? That information is forthcoming from Equality Labs, Stand With Kashmir and South Asia Solidarity Initiative within the next few months.”
In the meantime, more Stop Funding Genocide protests have been planned for January 26. This time, mobilizations will take place in Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver and Minneapolis.
“These mass demonstrations are really important for us to wield our power, our financial power and the voices that we get to have as people in the diaspora to say no to CAA, no NRC, no to the occupation of Kashmir,” said Fatima.
On January 19, around 50 protesters gathered in Jersey City, New Jersey, where they marched against India’s polarizing Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which extends citizenship to non-Muslim refugees exclusively. New Jersey is home to many supporters of India’s ruling party, the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The action helped mark the beginning of the “Stop Funding Genocide” protests, which are pushing back against Indian American support for the BJP. The actions have been co-organized by a number of groups advocating for marginalized South Asians, including Equality Labs, the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) and Stand With Kashmir.
Jersey City is home to Fatima, an organizer with SASI, but they were completely taken aback by the local support for the BJP and Hindu supremacy.
“It was a shock to me because I grew up here,” Fatima explained. “My friends are Indian Americans and they’re cool about Muslims obviously. I’ve been to my friends’ parents’ house and no one has said anything outlandishly Islamophobic to me as a visibly Muslim person who wears a hijab.”
The CAA is the latest development in a crisis that could massively increase statelessness among South Asia’s Muslims. The legislation has sparked protests across India that have been met with violent responses from the government and allied paramilitaries. It follows two other measures, the National Population Register (NPR), which critics have said harms Muslims by making religion a test for citizenship, and the Assam-based National Register of Citizens (NRC), which excluded nearly 2 million individuals from citizenship.
These measures are part of an initiative to identify and even detain individuals deemed to be “undocumented” or “illegal migrants.” Anyone falling under those designations is liable to be sent to one of the detention centers being built alongside these population and citizenship databases.
The uproar over the CAA, NRC and NPR coincides with ongoing activism against New Delhi’s de facto annexation of Muslim majority Jammu and Kashmir last August. This helped create a basis for Dalit-Bahujan (an umbrella term for marginalized caste identities), Indian Muslim and Kashmiri organizers to collaborate.
“The CAA is an integral part of the Modi government’s process of creating a stateless Muslim population — who can be profiled, treated as second-class citizens and imprisoned in massive detention centers,” said Dalit organizer Thenmozhi Soundarajan. “Without the pipeline of support they receive from networks of upper-caste Hindus in the diaspora … the Modi government would lack the financial support they need to distribute their fascist ideologies. Their relationship lies at the nexus of wealth inequality and nationalistic fervor that are both typical of the South Asian diaspora.”
Soundarajan runs an advocacy group centering marginalized South Asian communities called Equality Labs. The organization has surveyed the significant impact of caste within Indian diaspora communities and how it enables upper-caste communities to exclude and discriminate against Dalit-Bahujans across the world.
“Caste is not limited to the Subcontinent; caste has been found wherever South Asian migrants go,” according to the Equality Labs survey. “In the United States many caste-oppressed migrant communities who come from caste and religious backgrounds impacted by caste discrimination are finding that caste has replicated itself in in South Asian community, religious, and business institutions.”
The survey also reported that one in three Dalit students in the U.S. report being discriminated during their education. Twenty-five percent of Dalits have faced physical or verbal assault due to their caste. One in two Dalits fear of having their caste “outed.”
These impacts are compounded by the BJP’s commitment to suppressing activists who combat casteism within India, which is mirrored by upper-caste organizing in the diaspora.
Thus, organizers and activists have urgently taken to the streets of Los Angeles; Decatur, Georgia; Chicago and Jersey City to confront Indian American casteism and Islamophobia head on.
As the protesters traveled along Jersey City’s Newark Avenue, they passed Rajbhog Cafe, which exemplifies the type of business that is an asset to the BJP’s quest for a state based on the supremacy of upper-caste Hindus. The local branch of the franchise displays a picture of Narendra Modi, India’s anti-Muslim strongman prime minister, above its white, orange and green striped walls, painted to look like the Indian flag.
Sharmin Hossain, who hails from Queens, New York, and works as a digital security trainer for Equality Labs, also commented on the presence of Hindu supremacy in the South Asian diaspora.
Hossain recalled how the Jackson Heights branch of Patel Brothers, the largest Indian grocery chain in the U.S., commemorated Modi’s bids for the office of prime minister in 2014 and 2019.
“During Modi’s election, all across Patel Brothers, you saw posters supporting Modi,” she said.
Patel Brothers has over 50 stores in 19 states.
The Hindu right has many other friends in the business world. FedEx executive Raj Subraminiam, for instance, reportedly attended the 2018 World Hindu Congress, which became infamous after an outbreak of fascist violence during its keynote event. Dan Bryant, senior vice president at Walmart, was another notable attendee.
The claim that upper-caste members of the Indian diaspora, their businesses and other institutions are supporting Modi’s most recent attacks on Muslims rests on a strong precedent.
BJP supporters have strongholds throughout New Jersey where they blatantly display their esteem for the far right. For instance, back in 2016, the Republican Hindu Coalition put on a Bollywood themed fundraiser for then-nominee Donald Trump. That night Trump praised Modi and said he “looked forward to working with him.”
Before becoming prime minister, Modi was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat. In 2002, he presided over an infamous massacre of Muslims by Hindu supremacist forces. An undercover investigation strongly indicated Modi’s administration did nothing to stop the violence and, despite widespread reporting that Modi has been cleared of genocide allegations, Manoj Mitta, a senior editor at the Times of India, has written that the head of state may still be culpable for thousands of deaths.
Modi was denied entry to the U.S. for nearly 10 years as a result of the Gujarat violence. This changed when he became prime minister. When Modi first came to power in 2014, his U.S.-based devotees were ecstatic. A visit to New York’s Madison Square Garden drew a crowd of 22,000.
During Modi’s second bid for prime minister, some 300 “Non-Resident Indians” from over 20 countries — including the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — arrived in Gujarat. They went on to approach prospective voters and instruct them to vote for the Hindu supremacist icon.
Furthermore, Foreign Policy reported that wealthy Indian expats who tended to skew liberal in terms of U.S. politics were Modi’s “biggest fans” during that election. They organized flash mobs, photo ops and other events at sites like the Golden Gate Bridge and Times Square. One dedicated techie spent $2,000 in order to fly back to Bangalore so he could vote for Modi.
One of the most recent displays of diaspora adoration for Modi was September 2019’s infamous “Howdy Modi” rally in Texas. Honoring both Modi and Trump, the event drew around 40,000 people and was organized through a series of nonprofits such as the Texas India Forum and the educational organization known as the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation of the USA. Both of these are run by individuals with ties to the BJP’s parent organization, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, making them yet another channel for Hindu supremacist capital.
Supporters of the BJP are well resourced. They have access to thousands of dollars for political projects both in the U.S. and India. For instance, the Hindu American PAC, whose leadership is in line with the BJP’s agenda, have routinely given money to members of Congress; many of them are friends of Modi. These include the Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee subcommittee on Asia Brad Sherman.
Another striking example of the links between the BJP and the far right in the U.S: Back in June, former Trump adviser and transnational supporter of neo-Nazi and authoritarian causes Steve Bannon was named honorary co-chair of the Republican Hindu Coalition.
“These connections are making it clear, for the first time in American politics, Hindu nationalism has taken the front stage in the American imagination,” Sharmin Hossain said.
While organizers like Hossain say the links between the U.S. far right and the threat of displacement and detention facing Indian Muslims are evident, they acknowledge these links need to be explored more comprehensively to illuminate a course of action. The last comprehensive account of Modi and the BJP’s machinations was compiled in 2013, when a report by the Coalition Against Genocide illustrated how Modi, funding from diaspora Hindu supremacists and the Gujarat massacre are all connected. Hossain says that information is due for an update.
Fatima discussed the direction such an effort could take.
“We’re strategizing a boycott-divestment sort of initiative to target Indian organizations,” they explained. “What are economic targets for Indian people? Where can we also do a cultural and academic boycott? That information is forthcoming from Equality Labs, Stand With Kashmir and South Asia Solidarity Initiative within the next few months.”
In the meantime, more Stop Funding Genocide protests have been planned for January 26. This time, mobilizations will take place in Washington, D.C., New York City, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver and Minneapolis.
“These mass demonstrations are really important for us to wield our power, our financial power and the voices that we get to have as people in the diaspora to say no to CAA, no NRC, no to the occupation of Kashmir,” said Fatima.
Women Perform 12.5 Billion Hours of Unpaid Labor Every Day
BY Michelle Chen, Truthout
PUBLISHED January 24, 2020
The global economy is polarized on multiple dimensions. Even as the gap widens between the extremely poor and ultra-rich, a chronic economic divide persists between men and women. Millions of people subsist on an income of a few dollars a day, and billions of women work for nothing at all.
Oxfam’s new report on global inequality — which was released to coincide with the gathering of the ultra-wealthy at the World Economic Forum January 21-24 in Davos, Switzerland — lays out devastating but familiar, statistics: The world has 2,153 billionaires who collectively possess more wealth than 4.6 billion people at the bottom of the income scale. More than half the world’s population is estimated to survive on less than $5.50 a day, while the rate of poverty reduction slowed by half since 2013.
The latest analysis highlights how poverty is both gendered and also socially entrenched. According to the report, men collectively own 50 percent more wealth than women do, and at the top of that wealth gap, “the richest 22 men in the world own more wealth than all the women in Africa.”
The gender wealth gap isn’t entirely surprising — sexism predates industrial capitalism, after all. But the systematic economic subjugation of women reflects how patriarchy and poverty are mutually reinforcing. Due to social as well as cultural pressure, women perform vast amounts of unpaid labor — about 12.5 billion hours every day.
Women’s unwaged labor — which occupies up to 14 hours a day in rural and low-income regions — involves domestic duties, primarily the “care work” of looking after children or elders, cooking, cleaning and mending. It could also involve procuring water or gathering firewood, or tending subsistence crops on a family farm — tasks that will become increasingly challenging as climate change and other environmental stresses intensify.
One woman in rural India, who said she worked around the clock and would be beaten by her husband if she slipped up, told Oxfam researchers, “I have no time, not even time to die for they will all curse…. Who will look after them and bring money to the family when I’m gone?”
If women like her were paid the real value of their economic contributions to their families, they would be owed at least $10.8 trillion (more than half of the U.S. annual gross domestic product) — the estimated collective value of women’s unpaid care work worldwide.
“The care economy is very neglected,” said Gawain Kripke, director of policy and research at Oxfam America. “Most of it is unpaid. And what we pay [for] is treated very poorly. And this provides a subsidy to the more formal economy. All this work that gets done, society and the economy wouldn’t function without this work…. Businesses rely on it, families rely on it, society as a whole relies on it. And yet we don’t recognize it, and don’t compensate it, and don’t support it.”
This is not an accidental oversight, but institutionalized oppression. “This is what patriarchy is,” he added. “It ignores and makes invisible women, and exalts and elevates rich men.”
In the United States, the care gap for children and the elderly falls disproportionately on women, whether they are caring for their own, or paid as hired care workers. In 2018, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, about 16.2 million people, the majority of them women, provided unpaid informal care for individuals with dementia, contributing about 18.5 billion hours of feeding, bathing, providing medication and other tasks. If the unpaid care work in the U.S. was provided through government services instead, taxpayers would have paid an estimated $234 billion. Meanwhile, professional home health care aides who care for seniors — aides who are also mostly women — typically earn poverty wages, and about half receive public benefits.
Child care faces a similar crisis: it’s both extremely expensive for families — well over $1,000 per month in many areas — and chronically underpaid for child care providers. Across the country, the Center for American Progress reports that roughly half of families with children under the age of six (about 6.3 million households) face difficulty finding suitable child care, often because of cost barriers or a lack of open slots. Roughly 4 in 10 mothers (and an even higher percentage of Black and Latinx women) are especially vulnerable because they are the primary or sole income-earners for their families. Women who could not find a decent child care program were generally less likely to be employed (fathers’ workforce participation, unsurprisingly, did not change according to child care availability), indicating that many women opt out of work rather than have their earnings eaten up by daycare fees.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) Chief Operating Officer Cynthia Hess says that, since women tend to earn lower wages, “it often makes economic sense for the family for the woman to be the one to do that…. And without access to that affordable quality child care, a lot of working parents, particularly mothers, really don’t have a real choice about whether to participate in the paid labor force or not.”
According to Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director of advocacy group Family Values @ Work, the marginalization of care work can drag down women’s lifetime economic prospects. “Devaluing women means care work is under-valued and unseen. That leads to lower pay and to job loss, which then cements women in jobs that pay less and have less opportunity for advancement, or boots women out of the workforce and labels them as ‘unreliable’ and ‘dependent’,” Chun-Hoon told Truthout via email.
Despite steady growth in women’s workforce participation over the past 50 years, the care gap between working men and women has barely budged. According to the Pew Research Center’s time-survey analysis from 1965 to 2011, “American mothers still spend about twice as much time with their children as fathers” — with women most recently clocking around 13.5 hours a week, compared to men’s 7.3 hours. According to a briefing paper co-authored by Oxfam America and IWPR, the care gap is wider among young people than older ones: Women aged 25 to 34 spend about twice as much time on unpaid household and care work (8 hours to 3.9 hours) than their male peers, compared to a gap of 5.6 hours per week versus 4.1 hours per week between women and men aged 45 to 54. The care gap is also wider between Black, Latinx and Asian men and women than between white ones.
The gender gap in wealth is undergirded by a gender gap in political power. The inequality report points out that fewer than one in four government ministers around the world is a woman, which might explain why the social welfare policies most crucial to women and families are often targeted by austerity measures. “Cutting these services is done as a budget savings,” Kripke said, “but they don’t see that the costs will be borne mainly by women, and many women will have to leave the paid workforce in order to pick up the care burdens.”
Although the intersection of gender and economic inequality is built into most modern social structures today, Oxfam and IWPR researchers note that both gender and economic justice can be tackled in tandem through the structural redistribution of wealth. For the U.S., gender-equality advocates recommend measures like paid family leave and paid sick days to allow working parents to meet their care needs without endangering their jobs. The gender wage gap, which hovers at roughly 19 percent between women’s and men’s weekly earnings, could be narrowed by boosting wages and working conditions and supporting collective bargaining. To help counter gender stereotypes, paid family leave policies should be structured to encourage men to use their leave time to spend more time caring for their kids.
In the U.S., child care has become a central issue for both liberal and conservative lawmakers. Democratic presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have advocated for universal early childhood education funded through a wealth tax. Warren has proposed making child care free for households earning less than double the federal poverty line and cap overall costs at 7 percent of income; Sanders has not released a detailed plan, but has called for universal preschool, in line with legislation he previously sponsored. Sanders also commented broadly on the Oxfam report, stating that the global wealth gap had pointed to the need to “develop an international movement that takes on the greed of the billionaire class.”
In response to the Oxfam report, Mary Ignatius, statewide organizer of the California-based advocacy group Parent Voices, stated, “Fully funding a robust and comprehensive child care system that meets the needs of today’s working women will dramatically and immediately close the income inequality crisis in this country and liberate women to take greater control of their lives.”
At the same time, a robust national family care program would engage women both as beneficiaries and workers. Although care jobs are hugely in demand, they remain notoriously low-paying and underregulated. A sustainable care infrastructure — expanding on the model family welfare policies of Scandinavian countries — would guarantee living wage jobs in gender-segregated sectors of the economy — particularly child care and home care jobs that relegate millions of women to the lowest wage tiers of the education and health care systems. An analysis by the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment shows that aligning preschool teachers’ salaries with those of typical elementary and middle school teachers would more than double their pay, from $25,218 to $60,602 annually, which, multiplied by the early childhood education workforce nationwide, would boost their collective earnings by more than $80 billion. Similarly, the home health care workforce, with annual median wages stuck at just $13,000, would be massively boosted by raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which would in turn raise their income by roughly 50 percent, and generate an economic ripple effect that would average $2,000 per worker.
The Oxfam report estimates that taxing just an additional half of 1 percent of the wealth of the richest people in the U.S. would, over a decade, generate the funds “needed to create 117 million care jobs in education, health and elderly care and other sectors, and to close care deficits.” Those jobs could form the foundation of a comprehensive care-labor infrastructure, providing working parents with universal access to child, elder and disability care, as well as the flexibility to take time off from work to tend to an ailing parent or bond with a newborn, without risking their families’ economic security.
Global inequality, of course, is not just a gender issue. But the current inequities in wealth around the world could not exist if patriarchy were not subordinating half the population to a hierarchy within a hierarchy. And to end inequality, a political transformation that dismantles sexism as a tool of economic oppression is a critical step toward total social emancipation.
Oxfam’s new report on global inequality — which was released to coincide with the gathering of the ultra-wealthy at the World Economic Forum January 21-24 in Davos, Switzerland — lays out devastating but familiar, statistics: The world has 2,153 billionaires who collectively possess more wealth than 4.6 billion people at the bottom of the income scale. More than half the world’s population is estimated to survive on less than $5.50 a day, while the rate of poverty reduction slowed by half since 2013.
The latest analysis highlights how poverty is both gendered and also socially entrenched. According to the report, men collectively own 50 percent more wealth than women do, and at the top of that wealth gap, “the richest 22 men in the world own more wealth than all the women in Africa.”
The gender wealth gap isn’t entirely surprising — sexism predates industrial capitalism, after all. But the systematic economic subjugation of women reflects how patriarchy and poverty are mutually reinforcing. Due to social as well as cultural pressure, women perform vast amounts of unpaid labor — about 12.5 billion hours every day.
Women’s unwaged labor — which occupies up to 14 hours a day in rural and low-income regions — involves domestic duties, primarily the “care work” of looking after children or elders, cooking, cleaning and mending. It could also involve procuring water or gathering firewood, or tending subsistence crops on a family farm — tasks that will become increasingly challenging as climate change and other environmental stresses intensify.
One woman in rural India, who said she worked around the clock and would be beaten by her husband if she slipped up, told Oxfam researchers, “I have no time, not even time to die for they will all curse…. Who will look after them and bring money to the family when I’m gone?”
If women like her were paid the real value of their economic contributions to their families, they would be owed at least $10.8 trillion (more than half of the U.S. annual gross domestic product) — the estimated collective value of women’s unpaid care work worldwide.
“The care economy is very neglected,” said Gawain Kripke, director of policy and research at Oxfam America. “Most of it is unpaid. And what we pay [for] is treated very poorly. And this provides a subsidy to the more formal economy. All this work that gets done, society and the economy wouldn’t function without this work…. Businesses rely on it, families rely on it, society as a whole relies on it. And yet we don’t recognize it, and don’t compensate it, and don’t support it.”
This is not an accidental oversight, but institutionalized oppression. “This is what patriarchy is,” he added. “It ignores and makes invisible women, and exalts and elevates rich men.”
In the United States, the care gap for children and the elderly falls disproportionately on women, whether they are caring for their own, or paid as hired care workers. In 2018, according to the Alzheimer’s Association, about 16.2 million people, the majority of them women, provided unpaid informal care for individuals with dementia, contributing about 18.5 billion hours of feeding, bathing, providing medication and other tasks. If the unpaid care work in the U.S. was provided through government services instead, taxpayers would have paid an estimated $234 billion. Meanwhile, professional home health care aides who care for seniors — aides who are also mostly women — typically earn poverty wages, and about half receive public benefits.
Child care faces a similar crisis: it’s both extremely expensive for families — well over $1,000 per month in many areas — and chronically underpaid for child care providers. Across the country, the Center for American Progress reports that roughly half of families with children under the age of six (about 6.3 million households) face difficulty finding suitable child care, often because of cost barriers or a lack of open slots. Roughly 4 in 10 mothers (and an even higher percentage of Black and Latinx women) are especially vulnerable because they are the primary or sole income-earners for their families. Women who could not find a decent child care program were generally less likely to be employed (fathers’ workforce participation, unsurprisingly, did not change according to child care availability), indicating that many women opt out of work rather than have their earnings eaten up by daycare fees.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) Chief Operating Officer Cynthia Hess says that, since women tend to earn lower wages, “it often makes economic sense for the family for the woman to be the one to do that…. And without access to that affordable quality child care, a lot of working parents, particularly mothers, really don’t have a real choice about whether to participate in the paid labor force or not.”
According to Wendy Chun-Hoon, executive director of advocacy group Family Values @ Work, the marginalization of care work can drag down women’s lifetime economic prospects. “Devaluing women means care work is under-valued and unseen. That leads to lower pay and to job loss, which then cements women in jobs that pay less and have less opportunity for advancement, or boots women out of the workforce and labels them as ‘unreliable’ and ‘dependent’,” Chun-Hoon told Truthout via email.
Despite steady growth in women’s workforce participation over the past 50 years, the care gap between working men and women has barely budged. According to the Pew Research Center’s time-survey analysis from 1965 to 2011, “American mothers still spend about twice as much time with their children as fathers” — with women most recently clocking around 13.5 hours a week, compared to men’s 7.3 hours. According to a briefing paper co-authored by Oxfam America and IWPR, the care gap is wider among young people than older ones: Women aged 25 to 34 spend about twice as much time on unpaid household and care work (8 hours to 3.9 hours) than their male peers, compared to a gap of 5.6 hours per week versus 4.1 hours per week between women and men aged 45 to 54. The care gap is also wider between Black, Latinx and Asian men and women than between white ones.
The gender gap in wealth is undergirded by a gender gap in political power. The inequality report points out that fewer than one in four government ministers around the world is a woman, which might explain why the social welfare policies most crucial to women and families are often targeted by austerity measures. “Cutting these services is done as a budget savings,” Kripke said, “but they don’t see that the costs will be borne mainly by women, and many women will have to leave the paid workforce in order to pick up the care burdens.”
Although the intersection of gender and economic inequality is built into most modern social structures today, Oxfam and IWPR researchers note that both gender and economic justice can be tackled in tandem through the structural redistribution of wealth. For the U.S., gender-equality advocates recommend measures like paid family leave and paid sick days to allow working parents to meet their care needs without endangering their jobs. The gender wage gap, which hovers at roughly 19 percent between women’s and men’s weekly earnings, could be narrowed by boosting wages and working conditions and supporting collective bargaining. To help counter gender stereotypes, paid family leave policies should be structured to encourage men to use their leave time to spend more time caring for their kids.
In the U.S., child care has become a central issue for both liberal and conservative lawmakers. Democratic presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have advocated for universal early childhood education funded through a wealth tax. Warren has proposed making child care free for households earning less than double the federal poverty line and cap overall costs at 7 percent of income; Sanders has not released a detailed plan, but has called for universal preschool, in line with legislation he previously sponsored. Sanders also commented broadly on the Oxfam report, stating that the global wealth gap had pointed to the need to “develop an international movement that takes on the greed of the billionaire class.”
In response to the Oxfam report, Mary Ignatius, statewide organizer of the California-based advocacy group Parent Voices, stated, “Fully funding a robust and comprehensive child care system that meets the needs of today’s working women will dramatically and immediately close the income inequality crisis in this country and liberate women to take greater control of their lives.”
At the same time, a robust national family care program would engage women both as beneficiaries and workers. Although care jobs are hugely in demand, they remain notoriously low-paying and underregulated. A sustainable care infrastructure — expanding on the model family welfare policies of Scandinavian countries — would guarantee living wage jobs in gender-segregated sectors of the economy — particularly child care and home care jobs that relegate millions of women to the lowest wage tiers of the education and health care systems. An analysis by the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment shows that aligning preschool teachers’ salaries with those of typical elementary and middle school teachers would more than double their pay, from $25,218 to $60,602 annually, which, multiplied by the early childhood education workforce nationwide, would boost their collective earnings by more than $80 billion. Similarly, the home health care workforce, with annual median wages stuck at just $13,000, would be massively boosted by raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which would in turn raise their income by roughly 50 percent, and generate an economic ripple effect that would average $2,000 per worker.
The Oxfam report estimates that taxing just an additional half of 1 percent of the wealth of the richest people in the U.S. would, over a decade, generate the funds “needed to create 117 million care jobs in education, health and elderly care and other sectors, and to close care deficits.” Those jobs could form the foundation of a comprehensive care-labor infrastructure, providing working parents with universal access to child, elder and disability care, as well as the flexibility to take time off from work to tend to an ailing parent or bond with a newborn, without risking their families’ economic security.
Global inequality, of course, is not just a gender issue. But the current inequities in wealth around the world could not exist if patriarchy were not subordinating half the population to a hierarchy within a hierarchy. And to end inequality, a political transformation that dismantles sexism as a tool of economic oppression is a critical step toward total social emancipation.
Global poll: A majority believes that capitalism does more harm than good
On the eve of Davos summit, global poll finds 56 percent of people worldwide take dark view of capitalism
ANDREA GERMANOS - salon
JANUARY 21, 2020 11:00AM (UTC)
A global survey out Monday ahead of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos shows that more than half of respondents believe that capitalism in its current form does "more harm than good."
"Welp, glad that's settled then," mused one Twitter user.
The findings are from the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, which polled more than 34,000 respondents in 28 markets to measure trust in government, business, NGOs and media.
Fifty-six percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement, "Capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world." That belief was expressed by a majority across age group, gender and income level divides. In fact, there were just six markets where the majority of respondents did not agree — Australia, Canada, the U.S., South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan.
Strongest support for the statement was found in Thailand (75 percent) and the lowest level in Japan (35 percent). In the U.S., 47 percent agreed with the statement.
The survey also found that 48 percent of respondents believe the system is failing them, while just 18 percent believe it is working for them.
The executive summary adds:
Seventy-eight percent agree that "elites are getting richer while regular people struggle to pay their bills." And in 15 of 28 markets, the majority are pessimistic about their financial future, with most believing they will not be better off in five years' time than they are today. In the U.S., this represents a seven-point drop in optimism since 2019.
None of the four institutions the survey measured were deemed both competent and ethical.
Business ranks highest in competence, holding a massive 54-point edge over government as an institution that is good at what it does (64 percent vs. 10 percent). NGOs lead on ethical behavior over government (a 31-point gap) and business (a 25-point gap). Government is perceived as both incompetent and unethical but is trusted more than twice as much as business to protect the environment and close the income inequality gap.
The findings were rolled out the same day as an Oxfam International report warned of "out of control" economic inequality and said that the world's billionaires — a group of roughly 2,100 people — possess more wealth than the planet's 4.6 billion poorest residents.
They also come as the U.S. marked Martin Luther King Jr. Day, with progressives issuing reminders of King's 1967 warning that the "evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism."
"Welp, glad that's settled then," mused one Twitter user.
The findings are from the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, which polled more than 34,000 respondents in 28 markets to measure trust in government, business, NGOs and media.
Fifty-six percent of respondents said they agreed with the statement, "Capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world." That belief was expressed by a majority across age group, gender and income level divides. In fact, there were just six markets where the majority of respondents did not agree — Australia, Canada, the U.S., South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan.
Strongest support for the statement was found in Thailand (75 percent) and the lowest level in Japan (35 percent). In the U.S., 47 percent agreed with the statement.
The survey also found that 48 percent of respondents believe the system is failing them, while just 18 percent believe it is working for them.
The executive summary adds:
Seventy-eight percent agree that "elites are getting richer while regular people struggle to pay their bills." And in 15 of 28 markets, the majority are pessimistic about their financial future, with most believing they will not be better off in five years' time than they are today. In the U.S., this represents a seven-point drop in optimism since 2019.
None of the four institutions the survey measured were deemed both competent and ethical.
Business ranks highest in competence, holding a massive 54-point edge over government as an institution that is good at what it does (64 percent vs. 10 percent). NGOs lead on ethical behavior over government (a 31-point gap) and business (a 25-point gap). Government is perceived as both incompetent and unethical but is trusted more than twice as much as business to protect the environment and close the income inequality gap.
The findings were rolled out the same day as an Oxfam International report warned of "out of control" economic inequality and said that the world's billionaires — a group of roughly 2,100 people — possess more wealth than the planet's 4.6 billion poorest residents.
They also come as the U.S. marked Martin Luther King Jr. Day, with progressives issuing reminders of King's 1967 warning that the "evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism."
Angola vows to bring back billionaire Isabel dos Santos over graft claims
January 20, 2020
By Agence France-Presse - raw story
PUBLICO/AFP/File / FERNANDO VELUDO Prosecutors have already frozen the bank accounts and holdings owned by dos Santos and her Congolese husband Sindika Dokolo
Angolan prosecutors vowed on Monday to use “all possible” means to bring back Isabel dos Santos, the former president’s billionaire daughter, after thousands of leaked documents revealed new allegations she siphoned off hundreds of millions in public money.
Dubbed Africa’s richest woman, dos Santos is accused of using her father’s backing to plunder state funds from the oil-rich but impoverished southern African country and — with the help of Western consulting firms — move the money offshore.
She stopped living in Angola after her authoritarian father Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled the country for nearly 40 years, stepped down in 2017 for his anointed successor Joao Lourenco.
She now spends her time between London and Dubai.
“We will use all possible means and activate international mechanisms to bring Isabel dos Santos back to the country,” prosecutor general Helder Pitra Gros told public radio.
“We have asked for international support from Portugal, Dubai and other countries,” he added.
The 46-year-old dos Santos is already being investigated as part of an anti-graft campaign launched by Lourenco, who has vowed to root out corruption.
Prosecutors last month froze bank accounts and holdings owned by the businesswoman and her Congolese-Danish husband Sindika Dokolo, a move dos Santos described as motivated by a groundless political vendetta.
Gros’ remarks came after a trove of 715,000 files dubbed the “Luanda Leaks” on Sunday revealed how the eldest daughter of the former president allegedly moved the vast sums into overseas assets.
The award-winning New York-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) behind the release alleged the international system has allowed powerful individuals like her to move assets around the world, without questions.
“Based on a trove of more than 715,000 files, our investigation highlights a broken international regulatory system that allows professional services firms to serve the powerful with almost no questions asked,” the ICIJ wrote.
The group said its team of 120 reporters in 20 countries was able to trace “how an army of Western financial firms, lawyers, accountants, government officials and management companies helped (dos Santos and Dokolo) hide assets from tax authorities”.
– ‘Highly coordinated attack’ –
Dos Santos took to Twitter to refute the claims, launching a salvo of around 30 tweets in Portuguese and English, accusing journalists involved in the investigation of telling “lies”.
“My fortune is built on my character, my intelligence, education, capacity for work, perseverance,” she wrote.
Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and educated in Britain, dos Santos — scornfully nicknamed “the princess” — was named Africa’s first female billionaire in 2013 by Forbes, which estimates her current wealth at $2.1 billion.
Her lawyer dismissed the ICIJ findings as a “highly coordinated attack” orchestrated by Angola’s current rulers, in a statement quoted by The Guardian newspaper.
Dos Santos herself told BBC Africa the file dump was part of a “witch hunt” meant to discredit her and her father.
She headed Angola’s national oil company Sonangol until her father’s successor forced her out after becoming president in 2017.
“Red flags really went up when she was appointed head of the state oil company at a time when her father still had significant influence,” said Daniel Bruce, who heads the UK branch of anti-corruption campaign group Transparency International.
“You could see there were major conflicts of interest starting to emerge,” he added.
Dos Santos said on Wednesday that she would consider running for president in the next election in 2022.
– Western consultants –
The ICIJ investigation said Western consulting firms such as PwC and Boston Consulting Group were “apparently ignoring red flags” while helping her stash away public assets.
“Regulators around the globe have virtually ignored the key role Western professionals play in maintaining an offshore industry that drives money laundering and drains trillions from public coffers,” the report said.
Its document trove included redacted letters allegedly showing how consultants sought out ways to open non-transparent bank accounts.
London-based firm PwC was among those advising her businesses.
The consultancy said it had “immediately initiated an investigation” in the wake of the “very serious and concerning allegations.”
“We have also taken action to terminate any ongoing work for entities controlled by members of the dos Santos family,” it added in a statement.
The Boston Consulting Group did not immediately respond to an attempt to get comment by AFP.
One confidential document allegedly drafted by Boston Consulting in September 2015 outlined a complex scheme for the oil company to move its money offshore.
The investigation also published a similar 99-page presentation from KPMG.
“UK firms… have played a role both in helping her to amass this fortune but also to invest the proceeds of these suspicious deals,” said Bruce.
“There are questions to answer,” he added. “Particularly for those who helped her acquire property.”
Dos Santos and Dokolo have invested in several luxurious London houses and amassed an impressive collection of valuable artwork.
Her husband, a well-known collector of African arts, developed that passion from his billionaire banker father Augustin Dokolo Sanu.
Dubbed Africa’s richest woman, dos Santos is accused of using her father’s backing to plunder state funds from the oil-rich but impoverished southern African country and — with the help of Western consulting firms — move the money offshore.
She stopped living in Angola after her authoritarian father Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who ruled the country for nearly 40 years, stepped down in 2017 for his anointed successor Joao Lourenco.
She now spends her time between London and Dubai.
“We will use all possible means and activate international mechanisms to bring Isabel dos Santos back to the country,” prosecutor general Helder Pitra Gros told public radio.
“We have asked for international support from Portugal, Dubai and other countries,” he added.
The 46-year-old dos Santos is already being investigated as part of an anti-graft campaign launched by Lourenco, who has vowed to root out corruption.
Prosecutors last month froze bank accounts and holdings owned by the businesswoman and her Congolese-Danish husband Sindika Dokolo, a move dos Santos described as motivated by a groundless political vendetta.
Gros’ remarks came after a trove of 715,000 files dubbed the “Luanda Leaks” on Sunday revealed how the eldest daughter of the former president allegedly moved the vast sums into overseas assets.
The award-winning New York-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) behind the release alleged the international system has allowed powerful individuals like her to move assets around the world, without questions.
“Based on a trove of more than 715,000 files, our investigation highlights a broken international regulatory system that allows professional services firms to serve the powerful with almost no questions asked,” the ICIJ wrote.
The group said its team of 120 reporters in 20 countries was able to trace “how an army of Western financial firms, lawyers, accountants, government officials and management companies helped (dos Santos and Dokolo) hide assets from tax authorities”.
– ‘Highly coordinated attack’ –
Dos Santos took to Twitter to refute the claims, launching a salvo of around 30 tweets in Portuguese and English, accusing journalists involved in the investigation of telling “lies”.
“My fortune is built on my character, my intelligence, education, capacity for work, perseverance,” she wrote.
Born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and educated in Britain, dos Santos — scornfully nicknamed “the princess” — was named Africa’s first female billionaire in 2013 by Forbes, which estimates her current wealth at $2.1 billion.
Her lawyer dismissed the ICIJ findings as a “highly coordinated attack” orchestrated by Angola’s current rulers, in a statement quoted by The Guardian newspaper.
Dos Santos herself told BBC Africa the file dump was part of a “witch hunt” meant to discredit her and her father.
She headed Angola’s national oil company Sonangol until her father’s successor forced her out after becoming president in 2017.
“Red flags really went up when she was appointed head of the state oil company at a time when her father still had significant influence,” said Daniel Bruce, who heads the UK branch of anti-corruption campaign group Transparency International.
“You could see there were major conflicts of interest starting to emerge,” he added.
Dos Santos said on Wednesday that she would consider running for president in the next election in 2022.
– Western consultants –
The ICIJ investigation said Western consulting firms such as PwC and Boston Consulting Group were “apparently ignoring red flags” while helping her stash away public assets.
“Regulators around the globe have virtually ignored the key role Western professionals play in maintaining an offshore industry that drives money laundering and drains trillions from public coffers,” the report said.
Its document trove included redacted letters allegedly showing how consultants sought out ways to open non-transparent bank accounts.
London-based firm PwC was among those advising her businesses.
The consultancy said it had “immediately initiated an investigation” in the wake of the “very serious and concerning allegations.”
“We have also taken action to terminate any ongoing work for entities controlled by members of the dos Santos family,” it added in a statement.
The Boston Consulting Group did not immediately respond to an attempt to get comment by AFP.
One confidential document allegedly drafted by Boston Consulting in September 2015 outlined a complex scheme for the oil company to move its money offshore.
The investigation also published a similar 99-page presentation from KPMG.
“UK firms… have played a role both in helping her to amass this fortune but also to invest the proceeds of these suspicious deals,” said Bruce.
“There are questions to answer,” he added. “Particularly for those who helped her acquire property.”
Dos Santos and Dokolo have invested in several luxurious London houses and amassed an impressive collection of valuable artwork.
Her husband, a well-known collector of African arts, developed that passion from his billionaire banker father Augustin Dokolo Sanu.
france - Comme des Garçons
Comme des Garçons in row over ‘white models in cornrow wigs’
Fashion house accused of cultural appropriation over wigs used in men’s show
Priya Elan in Paris
the guardian
on Sun 19 Jan 2020 08.40 EST
Comme des Garcon models wearing the controversial wigs during its men’s autumn/winter 2020 show. Photograph: Rex Features
The fashion house Comme des Garçons has been accused of cultural appropriation after white models wore wigs of what appeared to be traditional black people’s hairstyles during its men’s autumn/winter 2020 show.
In a post on Instagram, the industry watchdog Diet Prada said the label had put “white models in cornrow wigs”.
Social media users expressed concern, with Aja Barber commenting: “Too busy laughing to be offended. This is a mess.” The model Adwoa Aboah commented: “Are we surprised?”
Three black models also took part in the show, with one wearing the wigs. The other two wore their hair naturally.
The hairstylist Julien D’ys, who styled the wigs for the collection, shared a sketch on his Instagram page that seemed to indicate the wigs were intended to reference Egyptian pharaoh hair and not cornrows, with some users asking why Egyptian models were not used for the show.
In a later post, D’ys said he found the “Egyptian prince” look “truly beautiful and inspirational”. He added: “Never was it my intention to hurt or offend anyone ever … if I did I deeply apologise.” He got supportive messages from Daphne Guinness, Carine Roitfeld and Steven Klein.
it is not the first time fashion has courted controversy for hair appropriation; in 2015, Valentino used cornrows on its models.
The latest row follows a series of race-related controversies to have hit the fashion industry, including Gucci’s blackface jumper and turban and a Dolce & Gabbana advert featuring a Chinese woman struggling to eat pizza and spaghetti with chopsticks that was accused of cultural insensitivity and racism.
Meanwhile, on Sunday night, there was a protest by members of the French union CGT outside the Mobilier National, which is used to stock furniture for members of cabinet, where a Hermès show was taking place.
Criticising governmental changes to workers’ pensions, the protesters waved red flags, sang protest songs and at one point threw eggs at arriving guests.
“We have nothing against Hermès but we will defend this organisation from outrage,” said one of the demonstrators who was handing out leaflets.
In a post on Instagram, the industry watchdog Diet Prada said the label had put “white models in cornrow wigs”.
Social media users expressed concern, with Aja Barber commenting: “Too busy laughing to be offended. This is a mess.” The model Adwoa Aboah commented: “Are we surprised?”
Three black models also took part in the show, with one wearing the wigs. The other two wore their hair naturally.
The hairstylist Julien D’ys, who styled the wigs for the collection, shared a sketch on his Instagram page that seemed to indicate the wigs were intended to reference Egyptian pharaoh hair and not cornrows, with some users asking why Egyptian models were not used for the show.
In a later post, D’ys said he found the “Egyptian prince” look “truly beautiful and inspirational”. He added: “Never was it my intention to hurt or offend anyone ever … if I did I deeply apologise.” He got supportive messages from Daphne Guinness, Carine Roitfeld and Steven Klein.
it is not the first time fashion has courted controversy for hair appropriation; in 2015, Valentino used cornrows on its models.
The latest row follows a series of race-related controversies to have hit the fashion industry, including Gucci’s blackface jumper and turban and a Dolce & Gabbana advert featuring a Chinese woman struggling to eat pizza and spaghetti with chopsticks that was accused of cultural insensitivity and racism.
Meanwhile, on Sunday night, there was a protest by members of the French union CGT outside the Mobilier National, which is used to stock furniture for members of cabinet, where a Hermès show was taking place.
Criticising governmental changes to workers’ pensions, the protesters waved red flags, sang protest songs and at one point threw eggs at arriving guests.
“We have nothing against Hermès but we will defend this organisation from outrage,” said one of the demonstrators who was handing out leaflets.
Russia
Putin critics ask how his PM choice acquired expensive properties
Russian president’s supporters praise Mikhail Mishustin as technocrat and self-made man
Andrew Roth in Moscow
the guardian
Thu 16 Jan 2020 07.54 EST
Russian opposition figures have raised questions about how Vladimir Putin’s surprise choice for new prime minister has acquired properties worth millions of dollars.
Meanwhile, the Russian president’s allies have rushed to support Mikhail Mishustin, the former head of Russia’s tax service, who claimed to have been stunned and “not [to have] slept all night” after Putin named him as the replacement for Dmitry Medvedev.
Supporters have praised Mishustin’s credentials as a technocrat and a “self-made man”. Mishustin was confirmed in the post by Russia’s parliament on Thursday and is the country’s first new prime minister since 2012.
Mishustin’s appointment is part of a sweeping reorganisation of Russian government that will help enable Putin to maintain power after his expected exit from the presidency in 2024 under term limits. Analysts said Mishustin may play a role as a “caretaker” figure but was unlikely to be Putin’s long-term successor.
Opponents of Putin have begun digging into Mishustin’s record. Shortly after his nomination, the investigative site Proekt reported, state property registers began hiding Mishustin’s name in connection with a house in Moscow’s fashionable Rublyovka suburb as well an apartment in downtown Moscow. Proekt estimated the value of the properties at nearly $10m (£7.6m). The owner is now listed as the Russian government, common for properties denoted as secret.
Researchers for Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician and anti-corruption researcher, noted that Mishustin’s wife had earned nearly 790m rubles (nearly £10m) in the past nine years, according to government declarations. Little is known about her business and there are no companies listed in her name, the investigative group said.
“Mishustin has been a ‘servant of the people’ for 20 of the past 22 years,” Navalny wrote in the investigation. “So why is he so damn rich?”
Corruption scandals hounded Medvedev in recent years, helping to spark protests by young Muscovites in 2017, and the Kremlin hopes that Mishustin’s record as a technocrat will protect him from similar attacks. Strict laws limit the official earnings of Russian government officials, but less so their families.
Mishustin served as the head of the Russian investment company UFG from 2008-10 and as the laboratory head for a non-profit in the early 1990s. He first joined Russia’s tax service in 1998 and was appointed its head in 2010.
Allies of Putin, including those considered his potential successor, also fell in behind Mishustin. He “knows how to balance the interest of both business and the state”, said Alexei Kudrin, a former finance minister seen as a liberal ally of Putin.
“The school of life has been tough for this man, and he is capable of big missions,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, the hard-nosed chairman of Russia’s parliament, adding that Mishustin was a “self-made man”.
Meanwhile, the Russian president’s allies have rushed to support Mikhail Mishustin, the former head of Russia’s tax service, who claimed to have been stunned and “not [to have] slept all night” after Putin named him as the replacement for Dmitry Medvedev.
Supporters have praised Mishustin’s credentials as a technocrat and a “self-made man”. Mishustin was confirmed in the post by Russia’s parliament on Thursday and is the country’s first new prime minister since 2012.
Mishustin’s appointment is part of a sweeping reorganisation of Russian government that will help enable Putin to maintain power after his expected exit from the presidency in 2024 under term limits. Analysts said Mishustin may play a role as a “caretaker” figure but was unlikely to be Putin’s long-term successor.
Opponents of Putin have begun digging into Mishustin’s record. Shortly after his nomination, the investigative site Proekt reported, state property registers began hiding Mishustin’s name in connection with a house in Moscow’s fashionable Rublyovka suburb as well an apartment in downtown Moscow. Proekt estimated the value of the properties at nearly $10m (£7.6m). The owner is now listed as the Russian government, common for properties denoted as secret.
Researchers for Alexei Navalny, the opposition politician and anti-corruption researcher, noted that Mishustin’s wife had earned nearly 790m rubles (nearly £10m) in the past nine years, according to government declarations. Little is known about her business and there are no companies listed in her name, the investigative group said.
“Mishustin has been a ‘servant of the people’ for 20 of the past 22 years,” Navalny wrote in the investigation. “So why is he so damn rich?”
Corruption scandals hounded Medvedev in recent years, helping to spark protests by young Muscovites in 2017, and the Kremlin hopes that Mishustin’s record as a technocrat will protect him from similar attacks. Strict laws limit the official earnings of Russian government officials, but less so their families.
Mishustin served as the head of the Russian investment company UFG from 2008-10 and as the laboratory head for a non-profit in the early 1990s. He first joined Russia’s tax service in 1998 and was appointed its head in 2010.
Allies of Putin, including those considered his potential successor, also fell in behind Mishustin. He “knows how to balance the interest of both business and the state”, said Alexei Kudrin, a former finance minister seen as a liberal ally of Putin.
“The school of life has been tough for this man, and he is capable of big missions,” said Vyacheslav Volodin, the hard-nosed chairman of Russia’s parliament, adding that Mishustin was a “self-made man”.
Russian government resigns as Putin proposes reforms that could extend his grip on power
By Mary Ilyushina and Sheena McKenzie, CNN
Updated 10:56 AM ET, Wed January 15, 2020
Moscow, Russia (CNN)The entire Russian government is resigning, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced Wednesday, after Vladimir Putin proposed sweeping reforms that could extend his decades-long grip on power beyond the end of his presidency.
Putin thanked members of the government for their work but added that "not everything worked out." Putin added that in the near future he would meet with each member of the cabinet. The mass resignation includes Medvedev.
The surprise announcement came after Putin proposed constitutional amendments that would strengthen the powers of the prime minister and parliament at the expense of the presidency.
Taking power from the presidency and handing it to parliament could signal a power shift that has been long speculated about in Russia.Putin's critics have suggested that he is considering various scenarios to retain control of the country after his presidential term ends in 2024, including the option of becoming prime minister with extended powers. Similarly, in 2008 Putin swapped places with the prime minister to circumvent the constitutional provision banning the same person from serving two consecutive terms.
In his statement, Medvedev indicated that the government was resigning to clear the way for Putin's proposed reforms.
Putin "outlined a number of fundamental changes to the constitution, significant changes not only to a number of articles of the constitution, but also to the balance of power as a whole," Medvedev said in his statement, which was aired on Russian state television.
"In this context, it's obvious that we, as the government ... should provide the president of our country with the opportunity to make all the decisions necessary for this. And in these conditions, I believe that it would be right, in accordance with Section 117 of the constitution," for the government to resign, Medvedev added.
In his annual address to the Federal Assembly earlier Wednesday, Putin said he agreed that no one should serve as president for more than two consecutive terms, and proposed several constitutional amendments.
His key proposal is to transfer the power to select the prime minister and cabinet from the president to the parliament.
"I know that a constitutional provision is being discussed in our society that the same person should not be president for more than two consecutive terms," Putin said. "I don't think this is a fundamental issue, but I agree with that," he said.
"I propose ... entrusting the State Duma with the power to approve the candidacy of the prime minister, and then, per the prime minister's proposal, [appoint] all deputy prime ministers and federal ministers," Putin said. "In this case, the president will be obliged to appoint them, that is, he will not have the right to reject parliament-approved candidacies."
According to the current constitution, the president needs to secure approval from the lower house of parliament to appoint the head of the government, and it is within presidential rights to then appoint all deputies and ministers.
In a televised statement, Putin asked current members of government to fulfill their duties until a new one is formed.
"I want to express satisfaction with the results that have been achieved," Putin said. "Of course not everything worked out, but nothing ever works out in full."
Medvedev is expected to become deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council. Putin is the chairman.
Putin thanked members of the government for their work but added that "not everything worked out." Putin added that in the near future he would meet with each member of the cabinet. The mass resignation includes Medvedev.
The surprise announcement came after Putin proposed constitutional amendments that would strengthen the powers of the prime minister and parliament at the expense of the presidency.
Taking power from the presidency and handing it to parliament could signal a power shift that has been long speculated about in Russia.Putin's critics have suggested that he is considering various scenarios to retain control of the country after his presidential term ends in 2024, including the option of becoming prime minister with extended powers. Similarly, in 2008 Putin swapped places with the prime minister to circumvent the constitutional provision banning the same person from serving two consecutive terms.
In his statement, Medvedev indicated that the government was resigning to clear the way for Putin's proposed reforms.
Putin "outlined a number of fundamental changes to the constitution, significant changes not only to a number of articles of the constitution, but also to the balance of power as a whole," Medvedev said in his statement, which was aired on Russian state television.
"In this context, it's obvious that we, as the government ... should provide the president of our country with the opportunity to make all the decisions necessary for this. And in these conditions, I believe that it would be right, in accordance with Section 117 of the constitution," for the government to resign, Medvedev added.
In his annual address to the Federal Assembly earlier Wednesday, Putin said he agreed that no one should serve as president for more than two consecutive terms, and proposed several constitutional amendments.
His key proposal is to transfer the power to select the prime minister and cabinet from the president to the parliament.
"I know that a constitutional provision is being discussed in our society that the same person should not be president for more than two consecutive terms," Putin said. "I don't think this is a fundamental issue, but I agree with that," he said.
"I propose ... entrusting the State Duma with the power to approve the candidacy of the prime minister, and then, per the prime minister's proposal, [appoint] all deputy prime ministers and federal ministers," Putin said. "In this case, the president will be obliged to appoint them, that is, he will not have the right to reject parliament-approved candidacies."
According to the current constitution, the president needs to secure approval from the lower house of parliament to appoint the head of the government, and it is within presidential rights to then appoint all deputies and ministers.
In a televised statement, Putin asked current members of government to fulfill their duties until a new one is formed.
"I want to express satisfaction with the results that have been achieved," Putin said. "Of course not everything worked out, but nothing ever works out in full."
Medvedev is expected to become deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council. Putin is the chairman.
World Bank
World Bank warns of global debt crisis amid borrowing buildup
Current debt wave is largest, fastest and most broad-based since 1970s, say economists
Larry Elliott Economics editor
the guardian
Wed 8 Jan 2020 16.00 EST
The World Bank has highlighted the risk of a fresh global debt crisis after warning of the biggest buildup in borrowing in the past 50 years.
In its half-yearly Global Economic Prospects (GEP), the Washington-based organisation said of the four waves of debt accumulation since the 1970s, the latest was the largest, fastest and most broad-based.
The World Bank, which provides loans and grants to developing and emerging economies to help tackle poverty, said there could still be a financial crisis even though historically low interest rates were making debts more manageable.
“Low global interest rates provide only a precarious protection against financial crises,” said Ayhan Kose, a World Bank official. “The history of past waves of debt accumulation shows that these waves tend to have unhappy endings. In a fragile global environment, policy improvements are critical to minimise the risks associated with the current debt wave.”
Total emerging and developing economy debt reached almost 170% of gross domestic product in 2018 – or $55tn (£42tn) – an increase of 54 percentage points of GDP since 2010. China accounted for the bulk of the increase – in part due to its size – but the build-up was broad-based, and included other big emerging economies such as Brazil.
The World Bank said financial turmoil in emerging and developing economies was one of the threats to its forecast of a slight strengthening of global growth this year, from 2.4% to 2.5%.
The modest pick-up in activity would depend, the GEP said, on a better year for some of the large emerging economies – such as Argentina, Mexico and Turkey – that struggled in 2019. But the World Bank stressed there were downside risks to its forecast.
“This rebound is not broad-based; instead it assumes improved performance of a small number of large economies, some of which are emerging from a period of substantial weakness. About a third of emerging market and developing economies are projected to decelerate this year due to weaker-than-expected exports and investment.”
The World Bank’s concerns that countries could be borrowing excessively stem from the recent history of financial distress, with each crash preceded by an accumulation of debt. The build-up since 2010 had been concentrated in emerging and developing countries rather than in advanced nations.
In about 80% of emerging and developing economies total debt was higher in 2018 than in 2010 and the World Bank said they had been “navigating dangerous waters” because the current wave of borrowing had coincided with a decade of repeated growth disappointments. Heavily indebted countries were now confronted by weaker growth prospects in a fragile global economy.
The GEP said debt was rising among emerging countries, in contrast with previous episodes – such as the 1980s Latin American debt crisis – when the debt build-up was region specific. More than a third of emerging and developing economies had experienced an increase in debt of at least 20 percentage points of GDP. In addition, debt accumulation had been in both the public and private sectors, which contrasted with past waves when the build-up was either by the government or private firms.
The World Bank said countries should seek to reduce the likelihood of crises and lessen their impact should they materialise by building resilient monetary and fiscal frameworks, instituting robust supervisory and regulatory regimes, and following transparent debt management practices.
“However, high debt carries significant risks for emerging and developing economies, as it makes them more vulnerable to external shocks. The rollover of existing debt can become increasingly difficult during periods of financial stress, potentially leading to a crisis,” it said.
In its half-yearly Global Economic Prospects (GEP), the Washington-based organisation said of the four waves of debt accumulation since the 1970s, the latest was the largest, fastest and most broad-based.
The World Bank, which provides loans and grants to developing and emerging economies to help tackle poverty, said there could still be a financial crisis even though historically low interest rates were making debts more manageable.
“Low global interest rates provide only a precarious protection against financial crises,” said Ayhan Kose, a World Bank official. “The history of past waves of debt accumulation shows that these waves tend to have unhappy endings. In a fragile global environment, policy improvements are critical to minimise the risks associated with the current debt wave.”
Total emerging and developing economy debt reached almost 170% of gross domestic product in 2018 – or $55tn (£42tn) – an increase of 54 percentage points of GDP since 2010. China accounted for the bulk of the increase – in part due to its size – but the build-up was broad-based, and included other big emerging economies such as Brazil.
The World Bank said financial turmoil in emerging and developing economies was one of the threats to its forecast of a slight strengthening of global growth this year, from 2.4% to 2.5%.
The modest pick-up in activity would depend, the GEP said, on a better year for some of the large emerging economies – such as Argentina, Mexico and Turkey – that struggled in 2019. But the World Bank stressed there were downside risks to its forecast.
“This rebound is not broad-based; instead it assumes improved performance of a small number of large economies, some of which are emerging from a period of substantial weakness. About a third of emerging market and developing economies are projected to decelerate this year due to weaker-than-expected exports and investment.”
The World Bank’s concerns that countries could be borrowing excessively stem from the recent history of financial distress, with each crash preceded by an accumulation of debt. The build-up since 2010 had been concentrated in emerging and developing countries rather than in advanced nations.
In about 80% of emerging and developing economies total debt was higher in 2018 than in 2010 and the World Bank said they had been “navigating dangerous waters” because the current wave of borrowing had coincided with a decade of repeated growth disappointments. Heavily indebted countries were now confronted by weaker growth prospects in a fragile global economy.
The GEP said debt was rising among emerging countries, in contrast with previous episodes – such as the 1980s Latin American debt crisis – when the debt build-up was region specific. More than a third of emerging and developing economies had experienced an increase in debt of at least 20 percentage points of GDP. In addition, debt accumulation had been in both the public and private sectors, which contrasted with past waves when the build-up was either by the government or private firms.
The World Bank said countries should seek to reduce the likelihood of crises and lessen their impact should they materialise by building resilient monetary and fiscal frameworks, instituting robust supervisory and regulatory regimes, and following transparent debt management practices.
“However, high debt carries significant risks for emerging and developing economies, as it makes them more vulnerable to external shocks. The rollover of existing debt can become increasingly difficult during periods of financial stress, potentially leading to a crisis,” it said.
Australia is burning — and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is leading the climate coverup: NYT
January 8, 2020
By Brad Reed - raw story
Even as news of massive forest fires in Australia put the world’s focus on dealing with the climate change crisis, the right-wing media empire run by Rupert Murdoch has been leading the charge to deny, deflect, and distract.
The New York Times reports that Murdoch-owned media outlets have pushed out multiple stories that downplay the role of climate change in the intensity of the fires, while also pinning the blame on groups ranging from environmentalists to arsonists.
“On Wednesday, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp., the largest media company in Australia, was found to be part of another wave of misinformation,” the Times reports. “An independent study found online bots and trolls exaggerating the role of arson in the fires, at the same time that an article in The Australian making similar assertions became the most popular offering on the newspaper’s website.”
Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist at the Australian National University, tells the Times that the Murdoch papers are being “reckless and extremely harmful” in their efforts to obfuscate about the real reasons that fires in the country have grown more intense as the planet has warmed.
“It’s insidious because it grows,” he said. “Once you plant those seeds of doubt, it stops an important conversation from taking place.”
In addition to casting about false blame for the fires, Murdoch’s papers have also tried denying that the fires are really that much of a problem.
“Not true, scientists say, noting that 12 million acres have burned so far, with 2019 alone scorching more of New South Wales than the previous 15 years combined,” the Times reports.
Read the whole story here.
The New York Times reports that Murdoch-owned media outlets have pushed out multiple stories that downplay the role of climate change in the intensity of the fires, while also pinning the blame on groups ranging from environmentalists to arsonists.
“On Wednesday, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp., the largest media company in Australia, was found to be part of another wave of misinformation,” the Times reports. “An independent study found online bots and trolls exaggerating the role of arson in the fires, at the same time that an article in The Australian making similar assertions became the most popular offering on the newspaper’s website.”
Joëlle Gergis, a climate scientist at the Australian National University, tells the Times that the Murdoch papers are being “reckless and extremely harmful” in their efforts to obfuscate about the real reasons that fires in the country have grown more intense as the planet has warmed.
“It’s insidious because it grows,” he said. “Once you plant those seeds of doubt, it stops an important conversation from taking place.”
In addition to casting about false blame for the fires, Murdoch’s papers have also tried denying that the fires are really that much of a problem.
“Not true, scientists say, noting that 12 million acres have burned so far, with 2019 alone scorching more of New South Wales than the previous 15 years combined,” the Times reports.
Read the whole story here.
review
Here’s What Workers of the Global South Endure to Create Corporate Wealth
BY Eve Ottenberg, Truthout
PUBLISHED January 5, 2020
In recent decades, as U.S. corporations shipped millions of jobs overseas to save money on wages, GM, H&M, Apple and dozens of other companies established elaborate supply chains in Asia, Mexico and Latin America, where workers earn pennies per hour. These chains are geographically expansive networks organized by foreign companies to produce semi-finished goods in different places before final assembly for huge global corporations.
Abuses abound. One typical example: An Indonesian factory that supplied the Japanese multinational behind the clothing brand Uniqlo abruptly closed, leaving workers with unpaid wages and unpaid severance. Intan Suwandi, the author of the recently published book Value Chains, told Truthout that there have been similar cases involving Nike, Adidas, H&M and Walmart in Cambodia and Honduras. A Chinese factory that supplied PUMA abused its workers and paid starvation wages, while workers in India’s home garment sector are as young as 10 years old, working for companies that supply the U.S. and European Union.
Suwandi also cites, in an email, a Chinese factory that produces computer products, such as keyboards and printer cases, for Hewlitt-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM. The factory applied a “long list of draconian disciplinary measures, and fines were used to control every movement and almost every second of the workers’ lives.” She also mentions a Chinese factory that produces parts for Ford, where, among many violations, seriously injured workers were “fired after a year or two.”
And then there’s Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones for Apple and products for Dell, Nokia, Hewlitt-Packard and Sony. It employs roughly 400,000 people at its Shenzhen factory, paying 83 cents an hour, under conditions so deplorable that in one six-month period in 2010, 13 workers jumped from the factory building, at least 10 to their deaths, while later, 150 threatened to kill themselves thus. Meanwhile, in 2012, a fire in a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that supplied Walmart and Sears, killed 112 workers.
Value Chains argues that economic imperialism is alive and well and being practiced in the Global South by corporations from the North. Although in recent years some leftists have argued that with the hollowing out of the Global North’s manufacturing base, economic imperialism ended, Suwandi disputes this. Her book mentions the GM commodity chain, which, as former GM director of sustainability David Tulauskas told Suwandi, includes “20,000 suppliers that provide us parts that go onto our vehicles. We buy from them approximately 200,000 individual items, spending about $100 billion. We operate in 30 countries. We sell those products in 125 countries.” Those suppliers, Suwandi explains, are scattered in Brazil, China and Mexico. Wages are kept low through direct investments and “arm’s lengths contracts.”
Value Chains devotes many pages to these contracts, which are a form of subcontracting without equity involvement. In these contracts, multinationals outsource production to suppliers mostly in the global South through contract relationships. As a result, the complex network of labor-value chains conceals how profits are extracted from workers by making it almost impossible to trace profits back to those workers. This is largely due to the arm’s length contracts.
Suwandi cites John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century in order to demonstrate how much wealth transnational western corporations extract from workers in the Global South: “Apple subcontracts the production of the component parts of its iPhones to a number of countries, with Foxconn subcontracting the final assembly in China. Due … to low-end wages … Apple’s gross profit margin on its iPhone 4 in 2010 was found to be 59 percent of the final sales price.” For each iPhone 4, retailing at $549, Smith writes, only $10 went to labor costs in China.
Cheap labor in the Global South means that multinational capital only has to pay a few cents an hour for work which creates much more value than that, Suwandi explains. Corporations disguise this value capture by attributing it to marketing, distribution and design activities in the Global North. Of course, it helps that that’s where the products are sold, with high markups on production cost. This obfuscates GDP. Take Apple’s iPhones:
Only 1.8 percent goes to labor costs in China, only that amount is recorded in China’s GDP, while a large percentage is recorded in the GDP of the country where Apple is headquartered — the United States — even when none of the production processes happened here…. The country where the iPhone was produced receives in its GDP only a small proportion of the final sales price. Meanwhile the larger part shows up in the GDP of the country where it is consumed…. So that’s why the profits that multinationals get are very difficult to trace back to the workers in the Global South.
Suwandi emails that global labor value chains (or “global commodity chains,” “global value chains,” or “global supply chains”) link people, tools and activities to deliver goods and services to the market. Her book argues that multinational corporations headquartered in the Global North control these chains completely, in every detail, even though they don’t own them. She explains that each chain consists of various nodes (each node signifies a specific production process) with different businesses involved in these different production processes. Take a pair of Nike sneakers: Several nodes are involved where semi-finished parts of the final product are made in various factories located in different countries. The raw materials are also acquired from different countries. If final assembly occurs in a factory in Vietnam, the sneakers will be labeled “made in Vietnam.”
The top three countries participating in labor value chains are China, India and Indonesia, where, according to Value Chains, wages are low and productivity is high. These labor value chains “are imperialistic in their characteristics,” because “capital accumulation processes are inseparable from the unequal relations among nation states.” The global labor force is concentrated in the South: With 541 million industrial workers there in 2010, compared to 145 million in the North, the idea that the commodity chain system is imperialist in nature makes sense. Indeed, Value Chains argues that globalized production is a new form of economic imperialism that transfers wealth from South to North. This does not preclude, however, the creation of local billionaires in China and India, who reap immense profits from their own transnational corporations. And where does all that profit go? “Huge quantities of this loot,” Value Chains reports, “captured from peripheral economies in the global South end up in the ‘treasure islands’ of the Caribbean, where trillions of dollars of money capital are now deposited.”
All this pelf, of course, comes directly out of workers’ hides. The cheaper the wages of the workers in the Global South, the greater the gross profit margins. Moreover, Suwandi explains, “Multinationals exercise a high degree of control within these labor-value chains, even when they only engage in contractual relationships with their suppliers.”
Value Chains examines two Indonesian firms, pseudonymously labeled Java Film and Star Inc., which often have the same customers for the plastic wrappers they produce. These firms do not use sweatshops, partly because they do not identify as “labor intensive.” But that’s one of Suwandi’s points: Exploitation does not necessarily involve blatantly abusive practices. She observes that multinationals control their suppliers’ production to the smallest detail, determining their suppliers’ profit margins, by increasing exploitation of the suppliers’ workers, usually through increased productivity, but also sometimes by depriving workers of their rights, or through violence, abuse and law-breaking.
Making production more economical and increasing productivity involve two processes, according to Value Chains – “systemic rationalization and flexible production.” Suwandi explains that capital wants production to be flexible enough to accommodate market fluctuations, “without paying the price … this burden is in the end placed upon workers through enhancing exploitation.” Engaging in arm’s length contracts itself exemplifies both processes. Systemic rationalization, according to Value Chains, refers “to the technological and organizational changes by corporations that began in the 1970s … [with] its focus on the rise of decentralized production throughout the globe.” (The ‘70s was the decade when neoliberalism and the union busting it entailed really got going. It’s when corporations “modernized.”) Flexible production — according to Lean and Mean by Bennett Harrison, which Value Chains quotes — involves “lean production, downsizing, outsourcing and the growing importance of spatially extensive production networks governed by powerful core firms and their strategic allies.”
Abuses abound. One typical example: An Indonesian factory that supplied the Japanese multinational behind the clothing brand Uniqlo abruptly closed, leaving workers with unpaid wages and unpaid severance. Intan Suwandi, the author of the recently published book Value Chains, told Truthout that there have been similar cases involving Nike, Adidas, H&M and Walmart in Cambodia and Honduras. A Chinese factory that supplied PUMA abused its workers and paid starvation wages, while workers in India’s home garment sector are as young as 10 years old, working for companies that supply the U.S. and European Union.
Suwandi also cites, in an email, a Chinese factory that produces computer products, such as keyboards and printer cases, for Hewlitt-Packard, Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and IBM. The factory applied a “long list of draconian disciplinary measures, and fines were used to control every movement and almost every second of the workers’ lives.” She also mentions a Chinese factory that produces parts for Ford, where, among many violations, seriously injured workers were “fired after a year or two.”
And then there’s Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that assembles iPhones for Apple and products for Dell, Nokia, Hewlitt-Packard and Sony. It employs roughly 400,000 people at its Shenzhen factory, paying 83 cents an hour, under conditions so deplorable that in one six-month period in 2010, 13 workers jumped from the factory building, at least 10 to their deaths, while later, 150 threatened to kill themselves thus. Meanwhile, in 2012, a fire in a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that supplied Walmart and Sears, killed 112 workers.
Value Chains argues that economic imperialism is alive and well and being practiced in the Global South by corporations from the North. Although in recent years some leftists have argued that with the hollowing out of the Global North’s manufacturing base, economic imperialism ended, Suwandi disputes this. Her book mentions the GM commodity chain, which, as former GM director of sustainability David Tulauskas told Suwandi, includes “20,000 suppliers that provide us parts that go onto our vehicles. We buy from them approximately 200,000 individual items, spending about $100 billion. We operate in 30 countries. We sell those products in 125 countries.” Those suppliers, Suwandi explains, are scattered in Brazil, China and Mexico. Wages are kept low through direct investments and “arm’s lengths contracts.”
Value Chains devotes many pages to these contracts, which are a form of subcontracting without equity involvement. In these contracts, multinationals outsource production to suppliers mostly in the global South through contract relationships. As a result, the complex network of labor-value chains conceals how profits are extracted from workers by making it almost impossible to trace profits back to those workers. This is largely due to the arm’s length contracts.
Suwandi cites John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century in order to demonstrate how much wealth transnational western corporations extract from workers in the Global South: “Apple subcontracts the production of the component parts of its iPhones to a number of countries, with Foxconn subcontracting the final assembly in China. Due … to low-end wages … Apple’s gross profit margin on its iPhone 4 in 2010 was found to be 59 percent of the final sales price.” For each iPhone 4, retailing at $549, Smith writes, only $10 went to labor costs in China.
Cheap labor in the Global South means that multinational capital only has to pay a few cents an hour for work which creates much more value than that, Suwandi explains. Corporations disguise this value capture by attributing it to marketing, distribution and design activities in the Global North. Of course, it helps that that’s where the products are sold, with high markups on production cost. This obfuscates GDP. Take Apple’s iPhones:
Only 1.8 percent goes to labor costs in China, only that amount is recorded in China’s GDP, while a large percentage is recorded in the GDP of the country where Apple is headquartered — the United States — even when none of the production processes happened here…. The country where the iPhone was produced receives in its GDP only a small proportion of the final sales price. Meanwhile the larger part shows up in the GDP of the country where it is consumed…. So that’s why the profits that multinationals get are very difficult to trace back to the workers in the Global South.
Suwandi emails that global labor value chains (or “global commodity chains,” “global value chains,” or “global supply chains”) link people, tools and activities to deliver goods and services to the market. Her book argues that multinational corporations headquartered in the Global North control these chains completely, in every detail, even though they don’t own them. She explains that each chain consists of various nodes (each node signifies a specific production process) with different businesses involved in these different production processes. Take a pair of Nike sneakers: Several nodes are involved where semi-finished parts of the final product are made in various factories located in different countries. The raw materials are also acquired from different countries. If final assembly occurs in a factory in Vietnam, the sneakers will be labeled “made in Vietnam.”
The top three countries participating in labor value chains are China, India and Indonesia, where, according to Value Chains, wages are low and productivity is high. These labor value chains “are imperialistic in their characteristics,” because “capital accumulation processes are inseparable from the unequal relations among nation states.” The global labor force is concentrated in the South: With 541 million industrial workers there in 2010, compared to 145 million in the North, the idea that the commodity chain system is imperialist in nature makes sense. Indeed, Value Chains argues that globalized production is a new form of economic imperialism that transfers wealth from South to North. This does not preclude, however, the creation of local billionaires in China and India, who reap immense profits from their own transnational corporations. And where does all that profit go? “Huge quantities of this loot,” Value Chains reports, “captured from peripheral economies in the global South end up in the ‘treasure islands’ of the Caribbean, where trillions of dollars of money capital are now deposited.”
All this pelf, of course, comes directly out of workers’ hides. The cheaper the wages of the workers in the Global South, the greater the gross profit margins. Moreover, Suwandi explains, “Multinationals exercise a high degree of control within these labor-value chains, even when they only engage in contractual relationships with their suppliers.”
Value Chains examines two Indonesian firms, pseudonymously labeled Java Film and Star Inc., which often have the same customers for the plastic wrappers they produce. These firms do not use sweatshops, partly because they do not identify as “labor intensive.” But that’s one of Suwandi’s points: Exploitation does not necessarily involve blatantly abusive practices. She observes that multinationals control their suppliers’ production to the smallest detail, determining their suppliers’ profit margins, by increasing exploitation of the suppliers’ workers, usually through increased productivity, but also sometimes by depriving workers of their rights, or through violence, abuse and law-breaking.
Making production more economical and increasing productivity involve two processes, according to Value Chains – “systemic rationalization and flexible production.” Suwandi explains that capital wants production to be flexible enough to accommodate market fluctuations, “without paying the price … this burden is in the end placed upon workers through enhancing exploitation.” Engaging in arm’s length contracts itself exemplifies both processes. Systemic rationalization, according to Value Chains, refers “to the technological and organizational changes by corporations that began in the 1970s … [with] its focus on the rise of decentralized production throughout the globe.” (The ‘70s was the decade when neoliberalism and the union busting it entailed really got going. It’s when corporations “modernized.”) Flexible production — according to Lean and Mean by Bennett Harrison, which Value Chains quotes — involves “lean production, downsizing, outsourcing and the growing importance of spatially extensive production networks governed by powerful core firms and their strategic allies.”
sounds like the usa's administration!!!
Brazil
'Unqualified, dangerous': the oddball officials running Bolsonaro's Brazil
While the far-right president has trashed norms the lower ranks of his administration have shown jaw-dropping offensiveness
Tom Phillips and Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
the guardian
Thu 2 Jan 2020 05.05 EST
Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his gun-loving sons have hogged the headlines during his first year in power with their incendiary declarations, social media meltdowns and scandal-hit lives.
Endless column inches have also been devoted to the eccentricities and extremist ideas of his top lieutenants, including the foreign minister who insists climate change is a Marxist plot and the education minister who enjoys tweeting about his dog’s habit of defecating on Brazil’s top newspapers.
But the lower ranks of Brazil’s government apparatus are also being populated with less well-known characters who trumpet white supremacist slogans and rage against the left.
“Say whatever you like about Bolsonaro, one has to recognize his rare talent of … choosing the most unqualified, lunatic and/or dangerous people for jobs,” the journalist Mauro Ventura wrote earlier this month.
“As someone said, they seem to have been picked for their IQ: that’s to say their quotient of imbecility, inability, idiocy, incompetence, ineptitude or impiety.”
Brazil specialist Monica de Bolle said the hiring of such figures reflected the “totally nuts” nature of Bolsonaro’s “fundamentalist” administration.
“They are not looking for people who have knowledge but people who are loyal,” said De Bolle, from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“I hate the Trump comparisons because Brazil is Brazil and the US is the US. But it’s just like Trump has surrounded himself with yes men. They are all yes men - and for the most part they are all men.”
Here are four Bolsonaro underlings you may never have heard of:
Filipe Martins - Foreign policy adviser to the president
Before this year Martins, 31, had almost no foreign policy experience. Yet his close ties to two of Bolsonaro’s sons have helped transform him into one of Brazil’s most influential men and landed him an office just metres from Bolsonaro’s.
Like Bolsonaro’s sons, Martins is a disciple of the US-based writer and conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho and revels in bashing leftists, feminists, “globalists” and journalists on social media. He is also a Steve Bannon fan, nicknamed “Sorocabannon” thanks to his origins in the Brazilian city of Sorocaba and admiration for Trump’s ex-strategist.
As with many Bolsonaristas, Martins basks in controversy, using alt-right catchphrases such as “Deus Vult” and General Franco-era slogans to bait critics. After Brazil’s footballers lost to Belgium in the 2018 World Cup, the man who now helps run Brazilian foreign policy branded the European country “a modern-day Babel”.
Martins also enjoys conspiracy, last year accusing CNN and the New York Times of complicity in a “social engineering” campaign to promote paedophilia.
Roberto Alvim - Special secretary for culture
A dramatist by trade, Alvim once received an award for a production of Harold Pinter’s The Room. But before being named culture secretary in November the 46-year-old director was best known for insulting the grande dame of Brazilian theatre, the Oscar-nominated actor Fernanda Montenegro, as a “sordid” leftist.
That attack enraged Brazilian thespians but earned him Bolsonaro’s affections – and a job as Brazil’s culture chief.
An online biography makes unusual reading. Aged 22, Alvim ditched a budding directing career to undergo “a process of inner discovery through meditation practices”. He ended up in a hut in north-eastern Brazil and depriving himself of food, water and human contact for 21 days.
Alvim returned to theatre before reportedly finding God in 2017 after a supposedly miraculous cure for near-fatal cancer. “It was a direct intervention from our Lord Jesus Christ,” he recently claimed.
Alvim has said his newfound faith converted him into a hardcore Bolsonarista. In recent Facebook posts he has savaged his leader’s opponents as lefty “cockroaches”, railed against the “bastards” from Greenpeace and accused Brazil’s “rotten” and “demonic” art world of unfairly demonizing Bolsonaro.
Sérgio Nascimento de Camargo - Fundação Cultural Palmares
The man chosen to run the government foundation promoting black culture has called for Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day to be scrapped and has branded many of Brazil’s best-known black celebrities and artists “parasites of the black race”.
Most notoriously, he once called one of Brazil’s most celebrated samba composers, Martinho da Vila, a “bum” who should “be sent to the Congo”.
Camargo, who is himself black, has also found targets for his insults beyond Brazil’s borders, including the American civil rights activist Angela Davis, whom he called a “minger” and “hag”.
On social media, Camargo describes himself as a “rightwing black” who opposes “victimhood and the politically correct”. “Slavery was terrible, but beneficial for the descendants”, he recently claimed.
After public outrage and a legal challenge, Camargo’s appointment was suspended. But Bolsonaro has said he hopes that decision can be overturned, calling Camargo an “excellent” person.
Dante Mantovani - Head of the National Arts Foundation
The hard-right classical conductor and YouTuber presiding over the government body in charge of policy for visual arts, music and dance has claimed the Soviet Union infiltrated the CIA to distribute LSD at Woodstock. “Rock activates drugs which activate sex which activates the abortion industry,” Mantovani alleged, noting that John Lennon had said he made a pact with the devil.
Mantovani has said Metallica was good for keeping drivers awake but called Brazilian greats Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and pop star Anitta “aberrations” for depicting Brazil as a “type of brothel”. Taking office, he claimed Brazil owed its culture to Portugal which “civilised” rather than “colonised” his homeland.
Endless column inches have also been devoted to the eccentricities and extremist ideas of his top lieutenants, including the foreign minister who insists climate change is a Marxist plot and the education minister who enjoys tweeting about his dog’s habit of defecating on Brazil’s top newspapers.
But the lower ranks of Brazil’s government apparatus are also being populated with less well-known characters who trumpet white supremacist slogans and rage against the left.
“Say whatever you like about Bolsonaro, one has to recognize his rare talent of … choosing the most unqualified, lunatic and/or dangerous people for jobs,” the journalist Mauro Ventura wrote earlier this month.
“As someone said, they seem to have been picked for their IQ: that’s to say their quotient of imbecility, inability, idiocy, incompetence, ineptitude or impiety.”
Brazil specialist Monica de Bolle said the hiring of such figures reflected the “totally nuts” nature of Bolsonaro’s “fundamentalist” administration.
“They are not looking for people who have knowledge but people who are loyal,” said De Bolle, from the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“I hate the Trump comparisons because Brazil is Brazil and the US is the US. But it’s just like Trump has surrounded himself with yes men. They are all yes men - and for the most part they are all men.”
Here are four Bolsonaro underlings you may never have heard of:
Filipe Martins - Foreign policy adviser to the president
Before this year Martins, 31, had almost no foreign policy experience. Yet his close ties to two of Bolsonaro’s sons have helped transform him into one of Brazil’s most influential men and landed him an office just metres from Bolsonaro’s.
Like Bolsonaro’s sons, Martins is a disciple of the US-based writer and conspiracy theorist Olavo de Carvalho and revels in bashing leftists, feminists, “globalists” and journalists on social media. He is also a Steve Bannon fan, nicknamed “Sorocabannon” thanks to his origins in the Brazilian city of Sorocaba and admiration for Trump’s ex-strategist.
As with many Bolsonaristas, Martins basks in controversy, using alt-right catchphrases such as “Deus Vult” and General Franco-era slogans to bait critics. After Brazil’s footballers lost to Belgium in the 2018 World Cup, the man who now helps run Brazilian foreign policy branded the European country “a modern-day Babel”.
Martins also enjoys conspiracy, last year accusing CNN and the New York Times of complicity in a “social engineering” campaign to promote paedophilia.
Roberto Alvim - Special secretary for culture
A dramatist by trade, Alvim once received an award for a production of Harold Pinter’s The Room. But before being named culture secretary in November the 46-year-old director was best known for insulting the grande dame of Brazilian theatre, the Oscar-nominated actor Fernanda Montenegro, as a “sordid” leftist.
That attack enraged Brazilian thespians but earned him Bolsonaro’s affections – and a job as Brazil’s culture chief.
An online biography makes unusual reading. Aged 22, Alvim ditched a budding directing career to undergo “a process of inner discovery through meditation practices”. He ended up in a hut in north-eastern Brazil and depriving himself of food, water and human contact for 21 days.
Alvim returned to theatre before reportedly finding God in 2017 after a supposedly miraculous cure for near-fatal cancer. “It was a direct intervention from our Lord Jesus Christ,” he recently claimed.
Alvim has said his newfound faith converted him into a hardcore Bolsonarista. In recent Facebook posts he has savaged his leader’s opponents as lefty “cockroaches”, railed against the “bastards” from Greenpeace and accused Brazil’s “rotten” and “demonic” art world of unfairly demonizing Bolsonaro.
Sérgio Nascimento de Camargo - Fundação Cultural Palmares
The man chosen to run the government foundation promoting black culture has called for Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day to be scrapped and has branded many of Brazil’s best-known black celebrities and artists “parasites of the black race”.
Most notoriously, he once called one of Brazil’s most celebrated samba composers, Martinho da Vila, a “bum” who should “be sent to the Congo”.
Camargo, who is himself black, has also found targets for his insults beyond Brazil’s borders, including the American civil rights activist Angela Davis, whom he called a “minger” and “hag”.
On social media, Camargo describes himself as a “rightwing black” who opposes “victimhood and the politically correct”. “Slavery was terrible, but beneficial for the descendants”, he recently claimed.
After public outrage and a legal challenge, Camargo’s appointment was suspended. But Bolsonaro has said he hopes that decision can be overturned, calling Camargo an “excellent” person.
Dante Mantovani - Head of the National Arts Foundation
The hard-right classical conductor and YouTuber presiding over the government body in charge of policy for visual arts, music and dance has claimed the Soviet Union infiltrated the CIA to distribute LSD at Woodstock. “Rock activates drugs which activate sex which activates the abortion industry,” Mantovani alleged, noting that John Lennon had said he made a pact with the devil.
Mantovani has said Metallica was good for keeping drivers awake but called Brazilian greats Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil and pop star Anitta “aberrations” for depicting Brazil as a “type of brothel”. Taking office, he claimed Brazil owed its culture to Portugal which “civilised” rather than “colonised” his homeland.
a waste of money!!!
Cost of UK royals back in spotlight after Queen’s year to forget
December 25, 2019
By Agence France-Presse - raw story
POOL/AFP / Andrew Matthews Britain’s Prince Charles (C), Prince of Wales is reportedly keen on reforming the Monarchy
After a torrid 2019 in which the queen’s son Prince Andrew was implicated in an underage sex abuse scandal, many in Britain are again asking if the monarchy has gotten too big — and rich — for its own good.
The family’s year to forget may encourage Prince Charles, set to eventually take over from his mother Queen Elizabeth II, 93, in his purported belief that the centuries-old institution needs reform, according to royal experts.
“He wants to slim it down to a hard core of senior family members who work full-time,” said author Penny Junor, who has written several books on the royals including “The Firm” — the nickname sometimes given to the family.
“Andrew shooting himself in the foot has certainly made that an easier task,” she told AFP.
The 59-year-old prince, dubbed the queen’s “favourite son” by the UK press, has been dogged by allegations that he had sex with one of American convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.
Andrew, who strenuously denies the accusations, gave a calamitous BBC interview last month in which he unsuccessfully tried to distance himself from the late US financier.
The furious media backlash saw him subsequently promise to “step back from public duties”.
It was a grim year as well for Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, the former US actress.
The celebrity couple sued several British newspapers over intrusions into their private lives, while his relationship with brother Prince William has reportedly soured — creating more tabloid gossip fodder.
The family’s tribulations led The Guardian to proclaim the firm had “lost its grip”, with royal observers predicting change will inevitably result.
– ‘Ministry of good feelings’ –
The size and cost of Britain’s royal family has long been contentious, with the latest controversies renewing calls for a “rationalised structure of Windsor plc,” as The Daily Telegraph wrote.
“Bloated royal families are fine when you run a quarter of the world… not so good when you are in charge of a diminished, austere Britain, grappling with recession in the early 21st century,” the newspaper added.
Jonny Dymond, who covers the royal family for the BBC, said how much to finance the family “has been a big deal for a long time”.
“It’s the attack point for republicans,” he told AFP.
Dymond noted Britain’s royals have been adept at periodically reinventing the brand, acting as a kind of “ministry of good feelings” for the nation to justify its expenses.
“And that’s the problem with what you have at the moment, which is you’re certainly not getting your money’s worth,” he said.
“You’re not getting that when you have Prince Andrew accused of what he’s accused of, you’re not getting that when Harry and Meghan are busy suing the newspapers.”
– ‘Cost to the taxpayer’ –
The queen receives an allowance — a so-called “sovereign grant” — from the government each year, which reached £82 million ($106 million, 96 million euros) for the financial year 2018-2019.
That is intended to pay for the family members’ functional roles as figureheads, as well as the salaries of employees and maintaining places like Buckingham Palace.
The monarch also benefits from a “privy purse” which stems from the revenues of half a billion pounds in assets grown by the Duchy of Lancaster estate since the Middle Ages.
The portfolio of lands, properties and assets held in trust generated almost £20 million last year, which the queen partly shares across the family.
Buckingham Palace does not disclose how exactly these funds are distributed to family members like Andrew.
The British press reports that he has received an annual royal allowance of £250,000 which his mother would give him each year, in addition to a yearly military pension of around £25,000.
The Duke of York, known for his “jet set” lifestyle, lives free of charge, as does his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, in a royal residence.
He reportedly sold a property in Sunninghill, southwest London, which the queen had donated to him, for around £15 million in 2007, and owns a luxurious chalet in Switzerland.
“One of the common complaints about the monarchy is the cost to the taxpayer,” said Junor.
“There is a perception that many members of the family are free-loaders who don’t do much work.”
The family’s year to forget may encourage Prince Charles, set to eventually take over from his mother Queen Elizabeth II, 93, in his purported belief that the centuries-old institution needs reform, according to royal experts.
“He wants to slim it down to a hard core of senior family members who work full-time,” said author Penny Junor, who has written several books on the royals including “The Firm” — the nickname sometimes given to the family.
“Andrew shooting himself in the foot has certainly made that an easier task,” she told AFP.
The 59-year-old prince, dubbed the queen’s “favourite son” by the UK press, has been dogged by allegations that he had sex with one of American convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.
Andrew, who strenuously denies the accusations, gave a calamitous BBC interview last month in which he unsuccessfully tried to distance himself from the late US financier.
The furious media backlash saw him subsequently promise to “step back from public duties”.
It was a grim year as well for Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle, the former US actress.
The celebrity couple sued several British newspapers over intrusions into their private lives, while his relationship with brother Prince William has reportedly soured — creating more tabloid gossip fodder.
The family’s tribulations led The Guardian to proclaim the firm had “lost its grip”, with royal observers predicting change will inevitably result.
– ‘Ministry of good feelings’ –
The size and cost of Britain’s royal family has long been contentious, with the latest controversies renewing calls for a “rationalised structure of Windsor plc,” as The Daily Telegraph wrote.
“Bloated royal families are fine when you run a quarter of the world… not so good when you are in charge of a diminished, austere Britain, grappling with recession in the early 21st century,” the newspaper added.
Jonny Dymond, who covers the royal family for the BBC, said how much to finance the family “has been a big deal for a long time”.
“It’s the attack point for republicans,” he told AFP.
Dymond noted Britain’s royals have been adept at periodically reinventing the brand, acting as a kind of “ministry of good feelings” for the nation to justify its expenses.
“And that’s the problem with what you have at the moment, which is you’re certainly not getting your money’s worth,” he said.
“You’re not getting that when you have Prince Andrew accused of what he’s accused of, you’re not getting that when Harry and Meghan are busy suing the newspapers.”
– ‘Cost to the taxpayer’ –
The queen receives an allowance — a so-called “sovereign grant” — from the government each year, which reached £82 million ($106 million, 96 million euros) for the financial year 2018-2019.
That is intended to pay for the family members’ functional roles as figureheads, as well as the salaries of employees and maintaining places like Buckingham Palace.
The monarch also benefits from a “privy purse” which stems from the revenues of half a billion pounds in assets grown by the Duchy of Lancaster estate since the Middle Ages.
The portfolio of lands, properties and assets held in trust generated almost £20 million last year, which the queen partly shares across the family.
Buckingham Palace does not disclose how exactly these funds are distributed to family members like Andrew.
The British press reports that he has received an annual royal allowance of £250,000 which his mother would give him each year, in addition to a yearly military pension of around £25,000.
The Duke of York, known for his “jet set” lifestyle, lives free of charge, as does his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, in a royal residence.
He reportedly sold a property in Sunninghill, southwest London, which the queen had donated to him, for around £15 million in 2007, and owns a luxurious chalet in Switzerland.
“One of the common complaints about the monarchy is the cost to the taxpayer,” said Junor.
“There is a perception that many members of the family are free-loaders who don’t do much work.”
'It doesn't matter if it's Christmas': Hong Kong pro-democracy activists keep up protests
Donny Kwok, Mari Saito - reuters
12/25/19
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Hong Kong anti-government protesters marched through Christmas-decorated shopping centers on Wednesday, chanting pro-democracy slogans and forcing one mall to close early, as police fired tear gas to disperse crowds gathering on nearby streets.
The protests have turned more confrontational over the festive season, though earlier in December they had been largely peaceful after pro-democracy candidates overwhelmingly won district council elections.
Despite the embarrassing results, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing leaders have made no new concessions.
“Confrontation is expected, it doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas,” said Chan, a 28-year-old restaurant worker who was part of a crowd which exchanged insults with police outside a shopping center in the Mong Kok district.
“I’m disappointed the government still didn’t respond to any of our ... demands. We continue to come out even if we don’t have much hope,” said Chan, who only gave his surname.
Riot police patrolled several neighborhoods while tourists and shoppers, many wearing Santa hats or reindeer antlers, strolled past.
There were no major clashes, but with impromptu crowds forming to shout expletives at the unpopular officers, who have been accused of using excessive force, police briefly fired tear gas in Mong Kok, a popular protest area.
Police describe their reaction to the unrest as restrained.
Hundreds of protesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks, descended on shopping malls around the Chinese-ruled city, shouting popular slogans such as “Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times!”
Police arrested several people in a shopping mall in the Sha Tin district after pepper-spraying them. The mall closed early.
CHRISTMAS ‘RUINED’
Baton-wielding police fired tear gas on Tuesday at thousands of protesters who barricaded roads and trashed a Starbucks cafe and an HSBC branch.
The city’s leader Carrie Lam said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that many Hong Kongers and tourists were disappointed that their “Christmas Eve celebrations have been ruined”.
“Such illegal acts have not only dampened the festive mood but also adversely affected local businesses.”
The Hospital Authority said 25 people had been injured overnight, including one man who fell from the second to first floor of a shopping mall as he tried to escape the police.
HSBC has become embroiled in a controversy involving a recent police crackdown on a fund-raising platform supporting protesters. HSBC denied any connection between the crackdown and its closure of an account linked to the group, but remains the target of protester rage.
Starbucks has been targeted after the daughter of the founder of Maxim’s Caterers, which owns the local franchise, publicly condemned the protesters.
DINNER WITH STRANGERS
The protests started more than six months ago against a now-withdrawn bill which would have allowed extraditions to mainland China where courts are controlled by the Communist Party.
They have since evolved into a broader pro-democracy movement, with demonstrators angry at what they perceive as increased meddling by Beijing in the freedoms promised to the former British colony when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
China denies interfering, saying it is committed to the “one country, two systems” formula put in place at that time and blaming foreign forces for fomenting unrest.
While protesters have repeatedly vandalized businesses they believed to have ties with pro-Beijing figures, they deliberately supported those which have offered them shelter from tear gas or free water during hot summer marches.
One eatery in the Tsim Sha Tsui tourist area organized a Christmas dinner for protesters, with hundreds queuing outside for a free plate of noodles or fried chicken.
“It’s my first time going to a buffet with strangers, but we share the same goals ... so it feels like a meaningful way to spend Christmas,” said private tutor Kenny, 46, who was eating outside the diner.
The protests have turned more confrontational over the festive season, though earlier in December they had been largely peaceful after pro-democracy candidates overwhelmingly won district council elections.
Despite the embarrassing results, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing leaders have made no new concessions.
“Confrontation is expected, it doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas,” said Chan, a 28-year-old restaurant worker who was part of a crowd which exchanged insults with police outside a shopping center in the Mong Kok district.
“I’m disappointed the government still didn’t respond to any of our ... demands. We continue to come out even if we don’t have much hope,” said Chan, who only gave his surname.
Riot police patrolled several neighborhoods while tourists and shoppers, many wearing Santa hats or reindeer antlers, strolled past.
There were no major clashes, but with impromptu crowds forming to shout expletives at the unpopular officers, who have been accused of using excessive force, police briefly fired tear gas in Mong Kok, a popular protest area.
Police describe their reaction to the unrest as restrained.
Hundreds of protesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks, descended on shopping malls around the Chinese-ruled city, shouting popular slogans such as “Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times!”
Police arrested several people in a shopping mall in the Sha Tin district after pepper-spraying them. The mall closed early.
CHRISTMAS ‘RUINED’
Baton-wielding police fired tear gas on Tuesday at thousands of protesters who barricaded roads and trashed a Starbucks cafe and an HSBC branch.
The city’s leader Carrie Lam said in a Facebook post on Wednesday that many Hong Kongers and tourists were disappointed that their “Christmas Eve celebrations have been ruined”.
“Such illegal acts have not only dampened the festive mood but also adversely affected local businesses.”
The Hospital Authority said 25 people had been injured overnight, including one man who fell from the second to first floor of a shopping mall as he tried to escape the police.
HSBC has become embroiled in a controversy involving a recent police crackdown on a fund-raising platform supporting protesters. HSBC denied any connection between the crackdown and its closure of an account linked to the group, but remains the target of protester rage.
Starbucks has been targeted after the daughter of the founder of Maxim’s Caterers, which owns the local franchise, publicly condemned the protesters.
DINNER WITH STRANGERS
The protests started more than six months ago against a now-withdrawn bill which would have allowed extraditions to mainland China where courts are controlled by the Communist Party.
They have since evolved into a broader pro-democracy movement, with demonstrators angry at what they perceive as increased meddling by Beijing in the freedoms promised to the former British colony when it returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
China denies interfering, saying it is committed to the “one country, two systems” formula put in place at that time and blaming foreign forces for fomenting unrest.
While protesters have repeatedly vandalized businesses they believed to have ties with pro-Beijing figures, they deliberately supported those which have offered them shelter from tear gas or free water during hot summer marches.
One eatery in the Tsim Sha Tsui tourist area organized a Christmas dinner for protesters, with hundreds queuing outside for a free plate of noodles or fried chicken.
“It’s my first time going to a buffet with strangers, but we share the same goals ... so it feels like a meaningful way to spend Christmas,” said private tutor Kenny, 46, who was eating outside the diner.
Race
Football must do more to tackle racism, says Downing Street
Government ready to act ‘if required’ after calls for inquiry in wake of incident at Spurs
Aamna Mohdin
the guardian
Mon 23 Dec 2019 07.01 EST
Downing Street has said the football authorities need to do more to tackle racism in the game after calls for a government inquiry and more comprehensive sanctions in response to an alleged racist incident during a match between Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea on Sunday.
Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said the government was monitoring the authorities’ response and was ready to take further steps “if required”.
“Racism of any kind has no place in football or anywhere else and we must confront this vile behaviour,” he said. “Clearly there remains more work to be done by the football authorities in tackling this issue and we are committed to working with them on this to stamp it out.
The spokesman added: “The FA, Premier League and English Football League have significantly stepped up their efforts, but we expect them to continue to prioritise this issue and to consult with both players and supporter groups, and we will be monitoring how the football authorities implement their plans through the season.”
No 10’s comments were echoed by Priti Patel, the home secretary, who said: “Those found guilty of a racially aggravated offence under the Public Order Act can face a sentence of both six months in prison and a 10-year ban from attending all football matches.
“We fully expect the entire football community to work with the authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice so we can stamp this evil out of our national game.”
Earlier, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) said: “Once again, a Premier League fixture has been tainted by abuse from the stands towards players. We believe that the time has come for all governing bodies to unite collectively to end this abuse.
“The PFA calls for a government inquiry into racism and the rise in hate crime within football and immediate and urgent action from an all-party group at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to address this urgent issue.”
It was reported that the sports minister, Nigel Adams, would speak to Tottenham Hotspur about the abuse on Monday.
The game on Sunday was paused after the Chelsea defender Antonio Rüdiger was allegedly targeted with racist abuse by a section of the crowd.
The referee Anthony Taylor stopped the game during the second half when an object was thrown at Chelsea’s goalkeeper, Kepa Arrizabalaga, and Rüdiger indicated that a supporter had shouted a monkey chant at him.
César Azipilicueta, the Chelsea captain, brought the incident to the referee’s attention, who asked for an announcement to be broadcast to the crowd. The announcement over the PA system at the Tottenham stadium told the crowd that “racist behaviour is interfering with the game”. It was repeated twice, though it is understood that only one allegation of racism was made.
Damian Collins MP, who chaired parliament’s culture, media and sport committee, said players must be made aware of their right to walk off the pitch if they face racist abuse. He said: “I think players [should be be made] well aware of what their rights are - that if they’re unhappy with the behaviour of people in the crowd and unhappy that behaviour has not been stopped, that if they choose to come off then they will be backed up by the football authorities in doing so.”
The incident at the Tottenham ground was the latest of several racist incidents to mar English football over the past 12 months. The Manchester derby sparked a furore after a City fan appeared to make a monkey gesture at United’s player Fred, while on the same day a League Two game between Scunthorpe and Forest Green Rovers was halted after allegations of racist abuse. In October an FA Cup tie between Haringey Borough and Yeovil was replayed after racist abuse from the crowd.
Kick It Out’s George Starkey-Midha echoed the PFA’s call for the government to take action. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s imperative on everyone involved in football, on the government, or anyone in any kind of position of authority, to begin to take this far more seriously and look at how we can begin to make inroads, because clearly you’ve now got a situation where every single week there seems to be another incident and it’s a serious, serious problem.”
Starkey-Midha said there needed to be “far more robust” reporting procedures and “far more comprehensive sanctions”, including within football, to respond to racism. When asked if the PFA was accurate when warning of the “blatant racism that is currently rife in the UK”, Starkey-Midha replied: “Yes, absolutely. I think it’s undeniable that racism is still a very serious problem in this country.”
He added: ““I think people like to look abroad to Italy, Russia and Bulgaria when incidents happen there and I think we’re right to criticise when we see it, but there are serious levels of racism in this country still too. Unless we wake up to that fact, we won’t tackle it properly.”
The former cabinet minister David Mellor called for fans to do more to root out racism at football matches in Britain. Mellor told PA Media: “Fans cannot escape responsibility for clearing racism out of the game. Somebody must know who this idiot or these idiots are.
“Fans cannot just pass by on the other side of the road, they must stand up and be counted otherwise we will be on a slippery slope and it will lead to matches being abandoned, stadiums being closed and games being played behind closed doors.”
Mellor, who presented BBC radio’s 606 football phone-in programme for nine years, added: “What we cannot do is take issue with racism when British teams play in eastern Europe and then ignore incidents over here. Fans cannot be morally neutral about this.”
Boris Johnson’s official spokesman said the government was monitoring the authorities’ response and was ready to take further steps “if required”.
“Racism of any kind has no place in football or anywhere else and we must confront this vile behaviour,” he said. “Clearly there remains more work to be done by the football authorities in tackling this issue and we are committed to working with them on this to stamp it out.
The spokesman added: “The FA, Premier League and English Football League have significantly stepped up their efforts, but we expect them to continue to prioritise this issue and to consult with both players and supporter groups, and we will be monitoring how the football authorities implement their plans through the season.”
No 10’s comments were echoed by Priti Patel, the home secretary, who said: “Those found guilty of a racially aggravated offence under the Public Order Act can face a sentence of both six months in prison and a 10-year ban from attending all football matches.
“We fully expect the entire football community to work with the authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice so we can stamp this evil out of our national game.”
Earlier, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) said: “Once again, a Premier League fixture has been tainted by abuse from the stands towards players. We believe that the time has come for all governing bodies to unite collectively to end this abuse.
“The PFA calls for a government inquiry into racism and the rise in hate crime within football and immediate and urgent action from an all-party group at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to address this urgent issue.”
It was reported that the sports minister, Nigel Adams, would speak to Tottenham Hotspur about the abuse on Monday.
The game on Sunday was paused after the Chelsea defender Antonio Rüdiger was allegedly targeted with racist abuse by a section of the crowd.
The referee Anthony Taylor stopped the game during the second half when an object was thrown at Chelsea’s goalkeeper, Kepa Arrizabalaga, and Rüdiger indicated that a supporter had shouted a monkey chant at him.
César Azipilicueta, the Chelsea captain, brought the incident to the referee’s attention, who asked for an announcement to be broadcast to the crowd. The announcement over the PA system at the Tottenham stadium told the crowd that “racist behaviour is interfering with the game”. It was repeated twice, though it is understood that only one allegation of racism was made.
Damian Collins MP, who chaired parliament’s culture, media and sport committee, said players must be made aware of their right to walk off the pitch if they face racist abuse. He said: “I think players [should be be made] well aware of what their rights are - that if they’re unhappy with the behaviour of people in the crowd and unhappy that behaviour has not been stopped, that if they choose to come off then they will be backed up by the football authorities in doing so.”
The incident at the Tottenham ground was the latest of several racist incidents to mar English football over the past 12 months. The Manchester derby sparked a furore after a City fan appeared to make a monkey gesture at United’s player Fred, while on the same day a League Two game between Scunthorpe and Forest Green Rovers was halted after allegations of racist abuse. In October an FA Cup tie between Haringey Borough and Yeovil was replayed after racist abuse from the crowd.
Kick It Out’s George Starkey-Midha echoed the PFA’s call for the government to take action. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It’s imperative on everyone involved in football, on the government, or anyone in any kind of position of authority, to begin to take this far more seriously and look at how we can begin to make inroads, because clearly you’ve now got a situation where every single week there seems to be another incident and it’s a serious, serious problem.”
Starkey-Midha said there needed to be “far more robust” reporting procedures and “far more comprehensive sanctions”, including within football, to respond to racism. When asked if the PFA was accurate when warning of the “blatant racism that is currently rife in the UK”, Starkey-Midha replied: “Yes, absolutely. I think it’s undeniable that racism is still a very serious problem in this country.”
He added: ““I think people like to look abroad to Italy, Russia and Bulgaria when incidents happen there and I think we’re right to criticise when we see it, but there are serious levels of racism in this country still too. Unless we wake up to that fact, we won’t tackle it properly.”
The former cabinet minister David Mellor called for fans to do more to root out racism at football matches in Britain. Mellor told PA Media: “Fans cannot escape responsibility for clearing racism out of the game. Somebody must know who this idiot or these idiots are.
“Fans cannot just pass by on the other side of the road, they must stand up and be counted otherwise we will be on a slippery slope and it will lead to matches being abandoned, stadiums being closed and games being played behind closed doors.”
Mellor, who presented BBC radio’s 606 football phone-in programme for nine years, added: “What we cannot do is take issue with racism when British teams play in eastern Europe and then ignore incidents over here. Fans cannot be morally neutral about this.”
funnies
ESPECIALLY THE U.S.!!!
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