the real world
exposing how greed, corruption, and imperialism impacts the world
and exposes the leaders who benefit
october 18, 2018
Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow-men
Mahatma Gandhi
articles
*Amid Protest in Liberia, Its Vice President Gets List of Demands About More Than Me
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Slavery was never abolished – It affects millions, and you may be funding it
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Declassified Documents Show Brit Spy Agency Feared Blacks ‘Had Chip on Their Shoulder, Would Betray Britain If Hired(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Tax evasion: blacklist of 21 countries with 'golden passport' schemes published
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Racism shadows diversity's triumph
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*White People Account for Largest Portion of British Terror Suspects, Report Reveals
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Turkish hydroelectric dam will leave hundreds homeless
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Waiting for Iceland’s Brave Stance Against Neoliberalism, 10 Years Later
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Osaka drops San Francisco as sister city over 'comfort women' statue
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*International court of justice orders US to lift new Iran sanctions
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*North Korean hackers tied to massive global theft
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Palu tsunami: food and water run out as death toll tops 1,200
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Argentines sacrifice vacations, internet and even food as economic crisis intensifies
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Brazil sees black female candidates surge after murder of rising star
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Indonesian quake, tsunami kills hundreds, death toll seen rising
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Central American Women Are Fighting Extractive Industries on their Land—and Winning
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*UNITED NATIONS ACCIDENTALLY EXPOSED PASSWORDS AND SENSITIVE INFORMATION TO THE WHOLE INTERNET
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Electric car batteries’ ‘second life’ could be a clean energy game-changer
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The U.S. Isn’t Just Backing the Yemen War—It’s Helping Trap Those Forced to Flee
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*German Spymaster Ousted for Suggesting Real Video of Far-Right Rampage Was Fake
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Democratically elected leader of first world country announces ‘do it my way or fuck off into oblivion’
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*India’s sodomy ban, now ruled illegal, was a British colonial legacy
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*South African Leader Wants Everyone to ‘Relax’ As He Makes the Case for Land Reform
(ARTICLE BELOW)
funnies(at the end)
Amid Protest in Liberia, Its Vice President Gets List of Demands About More Than Me
Protesters want the government to revoke the American charity’s accreditation and permission to run schools.
by Finlay Young for ProPublica
Oct. 19, 11:45 a.m. ED
Protests in Monrovia on Oct. 18. (Ahmed Jallanzo/European Pressphoto Agency for ProPublica)
A large group of protesters marched on Thursday through Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, delivering a list of demands to top government officials, international organizations and the country’s vice president, including that the government revoke the accreditation of More Than Me and strip the American charity of its ability to run 19 schools in the country.
The Liberian Feminist Forum, in conjunction with other groups, organized the “We Are Unprotected” protest in response to a ProPublica investigation published last week in collaboration with Time magazine. The report revealed how the charity missed opportunities to prevent the rapes of girls by key employee Macintosh Johnson and did not test all of his potential victims for HIV when word got out that he had AIDS.
Protesters dressed in black and carried signs that invoked findings of the investigation, including that when the rapes came to light, the charity deflected blame onto Liberian culture. “Rape is not our culture,” signs read. “Duty of care,” “Down with poverty porn,” “#MoreThanRape.”
A representative of the Liberian Feminist Forum, Caroline Bowah Brown, read a list of demands to Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor, including that the government should request footage shot by independent filmmaker Holden Warren, who told ProPublica that three years before the rapes came to light, he filmed charity founder Katie Meyler confronting Johnson about a rumor that he was “into small girls.” Warren declined to share the footage with ProPublica, saying it was part of an ongoing project and that he asked Meyler, but that she “doesn’t see how it would be in her interest.”
The group also called for documentation to see how involved the charity’s Liberian advisory board was in its operations, as well as what the response of government officials and others was at the time of Johnson’s arrest.
“The same documents you are requesting, we are trying to put it together,” Taylor said. “We’ll do a thorough investigation, and those who are culpable will be punished.”
The group also asked for the resignation of John Gabriel, director of the sex crimes prosecution unit that failed to secure Johnson’s conviction. Jurors told ProPublica they were offered bribes to find Johnson guilty. The charity and prosecution unit have denied any involvement in alleged bribery. It was in the prosecution unit’s office that charity officials cross-examined rape victims and their mothers about what they told a reporter, and asked whether they wanted to take back their statements. The charity also published a letter Gabriel wrote, where he praised the charity and called ProPublica’s investigation “propagandistic.”
After the story and documentary were published, the charity announced it would provide private, schoolwide HIV testing for the students in its academy. The Liberian government announced multiple measures by seven separate agencies. Liberian President George Weah was quoted in local press as expressing deep concern about a “sad and tragic story.” He said the matter was “under investigation by the relevant authority and we must await the findings before drawing any conclusion.”
In response to questions about the protest, board member Amanda Kelso told ProPublica: “No child should ever have to endure such horrific abuse, and it was our responsibility to prevent it from happening. We are so very sorry. When we learned of this in 2014 we immediately reported it to Liberian law enforcement and government ministries and took action to prevent it from happening again.
“We are now taking additional steps: we are having a firm with expertise in education and student safety undertake an external audit of our organization, we are cooperating with investigations being conducted by our Liberian Advisory Board and the Liberian government, our Board Chair has resigned, and our CEO has taken a leave of absence. We are committed to ensuring that these matters are investigated thoroughly, communicating transparently throughout the process, and taking prompt, appropriate actions to be sure this never happens again.”
Liberian newspapers have covered developments in the More Than Me story daily, and they have published editorials calling for the charity to be held to account.
“We hope that the Ministry of Justice will do all to bring to conclusion a logical closure for those girls who became victims of Johnson’s alleged act of rape.
Let this not be just another investigation that many a time, is never looked into thoroughly by state actors, who have oversight,” said an editorial in Front Page Africa.
It added, “Inasmuch as we are a poor and a small nation, we still have dignity to keep.”
The Liberian Feminist Forum, in conjunction with other groups, organized the “We Are Unprotected” protest in response to a ProPublica investigation published last week in collaboration with Time magazine. The report revealed how the charity missed opportunities to prevent the rapes of girls by key employee Macintosh Johnson and did not test all of his potential victims for HIV when word got out that he had AIDS.
Protesters dressed in black and carried signs that invoked findings of the investigation, including that when the rapes came to light, the charity deflected blame onto Liberian culture. “Rape is not our culture,” signs read. “Duty of care,” “Down with poverty porn,” “#MoreThanRape.”
A representative of the Liberian Feminist Forum, Caroline Bowah Brown, read a list of demands to Vice President Jewel Howard-Taylor, including that the government should request footage shot by independent filmmaker Holden Warren, who told ProPublica that three years before the rapes came to light, he filmed charity founder Katie Meyler confronting Johnson about a rumor that he was “into small girls.” Warren declined to share the footage with ProPublica, saying it was part of an ongoing project and that he asked Meyler, but that she “doesn’t see how it would be in her interest.”
The group also called for documentation to see how involved the charity’s Liberian advisory board was in its operations, as well as what the response of government officials and others was at the time of Johnson’s arrest.
“The same documents you are requesting, we are trying to put it together,” Taylor said. “We’ll do a thorough investigation, and those who are culpable will be punished.”
The group also asked for the resignation of John Gabriel, director of the sex crimes prosecution unit that failed to secure Johnson’s conviction. Jurors told ProPublica they were offered bribes to find Johnson guilty. The charity and prosecution unit have denied any involvement in alleged bribery. It was in the prosecution unit’s office that charity officials cross-examined rape victims and their mothers about what they told a reporter, and asked whether they wanted to take back their statements. The charity also published a letter Gabriel wrote, where he praised the charity and called ProPublica’s investigation “propagandistic.”
After the story and documentary were published, the charity announced it would provide private, schoolwide HIV testing for the students in its academy. The Liberian government announced multiple measures by seven separate agencies. Liberian President George Weah was quoted in local press as expressing deep concern about a “sad and tragic story.” He said the matter was “under investigation by the relevant authority and we must await the findings before drawing any conclusion.”
In response to questions about the protest, board member Amanda Kelso told ProPublica: “No child should ever have to endure such horrific abuse, and it was our responsibility to prevent it from happening. We are so very sorry. When we learned of this in 2014 we immediately reported it to Liberian law enforcement and government ministries and took action to prevent it from happening again.
“We are now taking additional steps: we are having a firm with expertise in education and student safety undertake an external audit of our organization, we are cooperating with investigations being conducted by our Liberian Advisory Board and the Liberian government, our Board Chair has resigned, and our CEO has taken a leave of absence. We are committed to ensuring that these matters are investigated thoroughly, communicating transparently throughout the process, and taking prompt, appropriate actions to be sure this never happens again.”
Liberian newspapers have covered developments in the More Than Me story daily, and they have published editorials calling for the charity to be held to account.
“We hope that the Ministry of Justice will do all to bring to conclusion a logical closure for those girls who became victims of Johnson’s alleged act of rape.
Let this not be just another investigation that many a time, is never looked into thoroughly by state actors, who have oversight,” said an editorial in Front Page Africa.
It added, “Inasmuch as we are a poor and a small nation, we still have dignity to keep.”
Slavery was never abolished – It affects millions, and you may be funding it
The Conversation - raw story
18 OCT 2018 AT 06:33 ET
Slavery is a daily reality for 10m children around the world.
Shutterstock
When we think of slavery, many of us think of historical or so-called “traditional forms” of slavery – and of the 12m people ripped from their West African homes and shipped across the Atlantic for a lifetime in the plantations of the Americas.
But slavery is not just something that happened in the past –- the modern day estimate for the number of men, women and children forced into labour worldwide exceeds 40m. Today’s global slave trade is so lucrative that it nets traffickers more than US$150 billion each year.
Slavery affects children as well as adults
Debt bondage often ensnares both children and adults. In Haiti, for example, many children are sent to work by their families as domestic servants under what’s known as the Restavek system – the term comes from the French language rester avec, “to stay with”. These children, numbering as many as 300,000, are often denied an education, forced to work up to 14 hours a day and are sometimes victims of sexual abuse.
Slavery is not always race based
Then, as now, race is not always the main reason for enslaving someone. In the past, those who were living in poverty, who did not have the protection of kinship networks, those displaced by famine, drought or war were often caught up in slavery.
In the UK, nail salons, restaurants, music festivals and farms have all be found to have people working in slavery. Victims of human trafficking come from all parts of the world and all walks of life. There isn’t just one type of modern day slavery, it takes many forms.
Your gadgets could be to blameThe demand for certain types of goods has propelled slavery’s numbers. In the past, the desire for sugar drove the growth in slavery. Now, the global consumption of electronic goods has exacerbated slavery in the Coltan mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many slaves or trafficked victims are often exploited in mining for gold, coltan, molybdenum, niobium, tin – which can be used in electronic goods sold around the world.
According to Save the Children, 5,000 to 6,000 young children work in the Coltan mining industry, surrounded by armed guards to prevent their escape. Much of the profit from this trade goes to fund ongoing militia warfare in Central Africa.
Traditional slavery still exists
Chattel slavery (where one person is the property of another) is illegal but still exists especially in the West African country of Mauritania – where abolitionists’ efforts to stamp out the practice have been in vain.
The organisation Fight Slavery Now says that today at least 90,000 Mauritanians are the property of others, while up to 600,000 men, women and children are in a bonded labour situation – up to 20% of the population.
India has most number of slaves globally
India has the highest number of slaves in the world, with estimates ranging from 14m to 18m people. In India many people work as slave labour in the brick kiln industry – this includes women and children.
Now, as in the past, not all slaves are forced into slavery. Historically, some experienced such severe poverty that they had no choice but to sell themselves to be bound to another person. And similar cases still happen around the world today.
Long distance movement is common in slavery of the past and the present. For West Africans in the pre-modern era, the journey across the Atlantic must have been unimaginable.
Today, labourers move around the world freely looking for work, but some end up caught in slavery-like situations. They are promised a good job with decent conditions and wages, but instead are trapped in a cycle of debt and despair, where they are bound to their employer with no chance of escape.
Many of the workers constructing the stadia for the Qatar World Cup in 2022 come from South Asia. Amnesty International says these workers often have their meagre wages docked unjustly, their passports seized and are forced to work in life-threatening conditions.
Slave soldiers fight in warsOne similarity between historic and modern slavery is the use of enslaved labour, especially children, in armies.
In recent years, at least 30,000 children have been abducted and forced to labour in the Lord’s Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony, in Northern Uganda.
Over four centuries ago, Christian children were valued as soldiers in the army of the Ottoman Empire. The children were taken from their homes, forced to convert to Islam and put to work in the military.
Slavery was never abolished
Today, an active abolition movement still exists. It applies lessons from the earlier abolition movement that ended the transatlantic slave trade – which recognised the importance of victim stories as a powerful tool to raise awareness.
Just as Africans such as Olaudah Equiano became part of the abolition movement in 18th-century London when they talked about their lives as slaves, so today, the benefit of encouraging survivors to share their stories is recognised.
In the 1790s, to persuade the British government to end slavery in the British Empire, female abolitionists organised boycotts of sugar that had been produced using slave labour and instead bought “fair trade” produce. Similarly, today, manufacturers and growers recognise that guaranteeing a product as fair trade – and free from slavery – will help their goods sell.
Slavery still exists in many forms today, and the impacts it has on millions of people are no less devastating than they were in the past.
Yet ordinary people can use their power as consumers to combat modern slavery, simply by paying attention to what they buy, and raising awareness among their friends, family and colleagues.
But slavery is not just something that happened in the past –- the modern day estimate for the number of men, women and children forced into labour worldwide exceeds 40m. Today’s global slave trade is so lucrative that it nets traffickers more than US$150 billion each year.
Slavery affects children as well as adults
Debt bondage often ensnares both children and adults. In Haiti, for example, many children are sent to work by their families as domestic servants under what’s known as the Restavek system – the term comes from the French language rester avec, “to stay with”. These children, numbering as many as 300,000, are often denied an education, forced to work up to 14 hours a day and are sometimes victims of sexual abuse.
Slavery is not always race based
Then, as now, race is not always the main reason for enslaving someone. In the past, those who were living in poverty, who did not have the protection of kinship networks, those displaced by famine, drought or war were often caught up in slavery.
In the UK, nail salons, restaurants, music festivals and farms have all be found to have people working in slavery. Victims of human trafficking come from all parts of the world and all walks of life. There isn’t just one type of modern day slavery, it takes many forms.
Your gadgets could be to blameThe demand for certain types of goods has propelled slavery’s numbers. In the past, the desire for sugar drove the growth in slavery. Now, the global consumption of electronic goods has exacerbated slavery in the Coltan mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many slaves or trafficked victims are often exploited in mining for gold, coltan, molybdenum, niobium, tin – which can be used in electronic goods sold around the world.
According to Save the Children, 5,000 to 6,000 young children work in the Coltan mining industry, surrounded by armed guards to prevent their escape. Much of the profit from this trade goes to fund ongoing militia warfare in Central Africa.
Traditional slavery still exists
Chattel slavery (where one person is the property of another) is illegal but still exists especially in the West African country of Mauritania – where abolitionists’ efforts to stamp out the practice have been in vain.
The organisation Fight Slavery Now says that today at least 90,000 Mauritanians are the property of others, while up to 600,000 men, women and children are in a bonded labour situation – up to 20% of the population.
India has most number of slaves globally
India has the highest number of slaves in the world, with estimates ranging from 14m to 18m people. In India many people work as slave labour in the brick kiln industry – this includes women and children.
Now, as in the past, not all slaves are forced into slavery. Historically, some experienced such severe poverty that they had no choice but to sell themselves to be bound to another person. And similar cases still happen around the world today.
Long distance movement is common in slavery of the past and the present. For West Africans in the pre-modern era, the journey across the Atlantic must have been unimaginable.
Today, labourers move around the world freely looking for work, but some end up caught in slavery-like situations. They are promised a good job with decent conditions and wages, but instead are trapped in a cycle of debt and despair, where they are bound to their employer with no chance of escape.
Many of the workers constructing the stadia for the Qatar World Cup in 2022 come from South Asia. Amnesty International says these workers often have their meagre wages docked unjustly, their passports seized and are forced to work in life-threatening conditions.
Slave soldiers fight in warsOne similarity between historic and modern slavery is the use of enslaved labour, especially children, in armies.
In recent years, at least 30,000 children have been abducted and forced to labour in the Lord’s Resistance Army led by Joseph Kony, in Northern Uganda.
Over four centuries ago, Christian children were valued as soldiers in the army of the Ottoman Empire. The children were taken from their homes, forced to convert to Islam and put to work in the military.
Slavery was never abolished
Today, an active abolition movement still exists. It applies lessons from the earlier abolition movement that ended the transatlantic slave trade – which recognised the importance of victim stories as a powerful tool to raise awareness.
Just as Africans such as Olaudah Equiano became part of the abolition movement in 18th-century London when they talked about their lives as slaves, so today, the benefit of encouraging survivors to share their stories is recognised.
In the 1790s, to persuade the British government to end slavery in the British Empire, female abolitionists organised boycotts of sugar that had been produced using slave labour and instead bought “fair trade” produce. Similarly, today, manufacturers and growers recognise that guaranteeing a product as fair trade – and free from slavery – will help their goods sell.
Slavery still exists in many forms today, and the impacts it has on millions of people are no less devastating than they were in the past.
Yet ordinary people can use their power as consumers to combat modern slavery, simply by paying attention to what they buy, and raising awareness among their friends, family and colleagues.
ignorance is worldwide!!!
Declassified Documents Show Brit Spy Agency Feared Blacks ‘Had Chip on Their Shoulder, Would Betray Britain If Hired
By Tanasia Kenney - atlanta black star
October 17, 2018
New declassified files reveal Black Britons were actively discriminated against in the 1960s, as senior intelligence officials believed they were a “security risk” and couldn’t be trusted in high-level spying roles for the UK government.
The documents, uncovered by University of Salford professor Dan Lomas, exposed intelligence agency MI5‘s deep distrust of Black people during a time when the Labour government was considering introducing racial equality legislation in 1967, according to The Guardian.
Lomas said he was taken aback by the findings, as there was a “surprising omission” of any security concerns about Black people in the agency’s official history.
“Since the 1940s, there were bans on communists and fascists working in government,” he wrote. “Then, in the 1950s, this was extended to what was described as ‘character defects’, such as homosexuality, mental illness and alcoholism, on the grounds that this would make people vulnerable to blackmail — but these papers reveal the officials also saw race as a security issue.”
“The discussions around new legislation on racial discrimination being introduced in the 1960s seem to have presented a threat to the established, but unspoken, rule that Black people risked national security,” Lomas added.
While the government had begun recruiting Black Brits into junior or menial positions, they were rarely, if ever, trusted with top secret documents, files show. Moreover, minutes from a Cabinet meeting attended by the head of the Ministry of Defense, a senior civil Treasury official and then MI5 director general, Martin Furnival Jones, among others, revealed the agency’s concern that Black people were more likely to become disgruntled over strained race relations in the UK and thus were more susceptible to flip and spy for another country.
As reported by The Guardian, “MI5 believed the risks of employing ‘colored staff’ stemmed ‘simply from the colour of a man’s skin, which gave him a chip on his shoulder. It would be a long time before this chip was removed.'”
Among their biggest fears was that Blacks might be recruited by the Kremlin to spy on Britain. However, Lomas noted there was nothing in MI5’s declassified files to suggest that there were ever any Black Britons spying on Britain at the time.
“Their relatively small numbers in Whitehall and junior positions would have made them of limited use to the KGB anyway,” the professor of international history said.
The agency was also concerned that hiring Blacks and other racial/ethnic minorities for secret posts posed a threat to national security, as they lacked the usual information needed for background checks. Lomas says Black folks weren’t the ones intelligence officials needed to be worried about, however.
“Ironically, the real threat had come from elite members of the British establishment, the so-called Cambridge spy ring who had been passing British secrets to the Soviets, or intelligence officials and civil servants who had been blackmailed or passed information for ideological or financial rewards,” he told The Guardian. “Nevertheless, the suggestion here is that MI5 simply did not employ Black people.”
Fast forward to 2018 and MI5 is still severely lacking in melanin. A report published by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee earlier this year showed there was a shortage of Black and Asian senior staff employed by British spy agencies. What’s worse, neither MI6, which handles overseas intelligence gathering, nor MI5 had anyone of Black, Asian or minority ethnic background employed in top positions in 2016-2017.
“To discover that this has been a long-running issue is not surprising considering what the recent report said,” said Jabeer Butt, who heads the Race Equality Foundation. “It shows yet again that things are not changing and haven’t for a very long time.”
Of the papers, Butt told The Guardian, “they show that identity has always been a big part of who has been appointed, yet history shows those who have gone on to betray the country have nearly always been white British men.”
The documents, uncovered by University of Salford professor Dan Lomas, exposed intelligence agency MI5‘s deep distrust of Black people during a time when the Labour government was considering introducing racial equality legislation in 1967, according to The Guardian.
Lomas said he was taken aback by the findings, as there was a “surprising omission” of any security concerns about Black people in the agency’s official history.
“Since the 1940s, there were bans on communists and fascists working in government,” he wrote. “Then, in the 1950s, this was extended to what was described as ‘character defects’, such as homosexuality, mental illness and alcoholism, on the grounds that this would make people vulnerable to blackmail — but these papers reveal the officials also saw race as a security issue.”
“The discussions around new legislation on racial discrimination being introduced in the 1960s seem to have presented a threat to the established, but unspoken, rule that Black people risked national security,” Lomas added.
While the government had begun recruiting Black Brits into junior or menial positions, they were rarely, if ever, trusted with top secret documents, files show. Moreover, minutes from a Cabinet meeting attended by the head of the Ministry of Defense, a senior civil Treasury official and then MI5 director general, Martin Furnival Jones, among others, revealed the agency’s concern that Black people were more likely to become disgruntled over strained race relations in the UK and thus were more susceptible to flip and spy for another country.
As reported by The Guardian, “MI5 believed the risks of employing ‘colored staff’ stemmed ‘simply from the colour of a man’s skin, which gave him a chip on his shoulder. It would be a long time before this chip was removed.'”
Among their biggest fears was that Blacks might be recruited by the Kremlin to spy on Britain. However, Lomas noted there was nothing in MI5’s declassified files to suggest that there were ever any Black Britons spying on Britain at the time.
“Their relatively small numbers in Whitehall and junior positions would have made them of limited use to the KGB anyway,” the professor of international history said.
The agency was also concerned that hiring Blacks and other racial/ethnic minorities for secret posts posed a threat to national security, as they lacked the usual information needed for background checks. Lomas says Black folks weren’t the ones intelligence officials needed to be worried about, however.
“Ironically, the real threat had come from elite members of the British establishment, the so-called Cambridge spy ring who had been passing British secrets to the Soviets, or intelligence officials and civil servants who had been blackmailed or passed information for ideological or financial rewards,” he told The Guardian. “Nevertheless, the suggestion here is that MI5 simply did not employ Black people.”
Fast forward to 2018 and MI5 is still severely lacking in melanin. A report published by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee earlier this year showed there was a shortage of Black and Asian senior staff employed by British spy agencies. What’s worse, neither MI6, which handles overseas intelligence gathering, nor MI5 had anyone of Black, Asian or minority ethnic background employed in top positions in 2016-2017.
“To discover that this has been a long-running issue is not surprising considering what the recent report said,” said Jabeer Butt, who heads the Race Equality Foundation. “It shows yet again that things are not changing and haven’t for a very long time.”
Of the papers, Butt told The Guardian, “they show that identity has always been a big part of who has been appointed, yet history shows those who have gone on to betray the country have nearly always been white British men.”
Tax evasion: blacklist of 21 countries with 'golden passport' schemes published
OECD says schemes selling either residency or citizenship threaten efforts to combat tax evasion
Juliette Garside
the guardian
on Tue 16 Oct 2018 07.25 EDT
A blacklist of 21 countries whose so-called “golden passport” schemes threaten international efforts to combat tax evasion has been published by the west’s leading economic thinktank.
Three European countries – Malta, Monaco and Cyprus – are among those nations flagged as operating high-risk schemes that sell either residency or citizenship in a report released on Tuesday by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The Paris-based body has raised the alarm about the fast-expanding $3bn (£2.3bn) citizenship by investment industry, which has turned nationality into a marketable commodity.
In exchange for donations to a sovereign trust fund, or investments in property or government bonds, foreign nationals can become citizens of countries in which they have never lived. Other schemes, such as that operated by the UK, offer residency in exchange for sizable investments.
The programme operated by Malta is particularly popular because as a European member state its nationals, including those who buy citizenship, can live and work anywhere in the EU. The country has, since 2014, sold citizenship to more than 700 people, most of them from Russia, the former Soviet bloc, China and the Middle East.
But concern is growing among political leaders, law enforcement and intelligence agencies that the schemes are open to abuse by criminals and sanctions-busting business people.
Transparency International and Global Witness, in a joint report published last week, described how the EU had gained nearly 100,000 new residents and 6,000 new citizens in the past decade through poorly managed arrangements that were “shrouded in secrecy”.
Also on the OECD blacklist are a handful of Caribbean nations that pioneered the modern-day methods for the marketing of citizenship. These include Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, and St Kitts and Nevis, which has sold 16,000 passports since relaunching its programme in 2006.
After analysing residence and citizenship schemes operated by 100 countries, the OECD says it is naming those jurisdictions that attract investors by offering low personal tax rates on income from foreign financial assets, while also not requiring an individual to spend a significant amount of time in the country.
Second passports can be misused by those wishing to “hide assets held abroad”, according to the thinktank. Its flagship initiative is a framework for countries to cooperate in the fight against tax evasion by sharing information. Known as the Common Reporting Standard, the framework allows for details of bank accounts an individual might hold abroad to be sent to their home tax office.
The OECD believes the ease with which the wealthiest individuals can obtain another nationality is undermining information sharing. If a UK national declares themselves as Cypriot, for example, information about their offshore bank accounts could be shared with Cyprus instead of Britain’s HM Revenue and Customs.
“Schemes can potentially be abused to misrepresent an individual’s jurisdiction of tax residence,” the OECD warned.
The final names on the list are Bahrain, Colombia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Montserrat, Panama, Qatar, Seychelles, Turks and Caicos Islands, United Arab Emirates and Vanuatu.
Together with the results of the analysis, the OECD is also publishing practical guidance that will enable financial institutions to identify and prevent cases of avoidance through the use of such schemes, by making sure that foreign income is reported to the actual jurisdiction of residence.
RELATED: Citizenship for sale: how tycoons can go shopping for a new passport
Three European countries – Malta, Monaco and Cyprus – are among those nations flagged as operating high-risk schemes that sell either residency or citizenship in a report released on Tuesday by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The Paris-based body has raised the alarm about the fast-expanding $3bn (£2.3bn) citizenship by investment industry, which has turned nationality into a marketable commodity.
In exchange for donations to a sovereign trust fund, or investments in property or government bonds, foreign nationals can become citizens of countries in which they have never lived. Other schemes, such as that operated by the UK, offer residency in exchange for sizable investments.
The programme operated by Malta is particularly popular because as a European member state its nationals, including those who buy citizenship, can live and work anywhere in the EU. The country has, since 2014, sold citizenship to more than 700 people, most of them from Russia, the former Soviet bloc, China and the Middle East.
But concern is growing among political leaders, law enforcement and intelligence agencies that the schemes are open to abuse by criminals and sanctions-busting business people.
Transparency International and Global Witness, in a joint report published last week, described how the EU had gained nearly 100,000 new residents and 6,000 new citizens in the past decade through poorly managed arrangements that were “shrouded in secrecy”.
Also on the OECD blacklist are a handful of Caribbean nations that pioneered the modern-day methods for the marketing of citizenship. These include Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, and St Kitts and Nevis, which has sold 16,000 passports since relaunching its programme in 2006.
After analysing residence and citizenship schemes operated by 100 countries, the OECD says it is naming those jurisdictions that attract investors by offering low personal tax rates on income from foreign financial assets, while also not requiring an individual to spend a significant amount of time in the country.
Second passports can be misused by those wishing to “hide assets held abroad”, according to the thinktank. Its flagship initiative is a framework for countries to cooperate in the fight against tax evasion by sharing information. Known as the Common Reporting Standard, the framework allows for details of bank accounts an individual might hold abroad to be sent to their home tax office.
The OECD believes the ease with which the wealthiest individuals can obtain another nationality is undermining information sharing. If a UK national declares themselves as Cypriot, for example, information about their offshore bank accounts could be shared with Cyprus instead of Britain’s HM Revenue and Customs.
“Schemes can potentially be abused to misrepresent an individual’s jurisdiction of tax residence,” the OECD warned.
The final names on the list are Bahrain, Colombia, Malaysia, Mauritius, Montserrat, Panama, Qatar, Seychelles, Turks and Caicos Islands, United Arab Emirates and Vanuatu.
Together with the results of the analysis, the OECD is also publishing practical guidance that will enable financial institutions to identify and prevent cases of avoidance through the use of such schemes, by making sure that foreign income is reported to the actual jurisdiction of residence.
RELATED: Citizenship for sale: how tycoons can go shopping for a new passport
Racism shadows diversity's triumph
Elian Peltier - philly tribune
10/14/18
STRASBOURG, France — When France won soccer’s World Cup in July, millions of fans crowded the streets and cheered as star players like Paul Pogba and Kylian Mbappé were honored at the presidential palace. As in 1998, when a similarly multicultural team delivered France’s first world title, commentators quickly hailed the triumph of a “new” and more united France, one that would become more open to diversity, at least in sports.
But Kerfalla Sissoko had more troubling thoughts on his mind.
A month before the World Cup, Sissoko, 25, an amateur soccer player from Guinea, had been brutally attacked after a fight broke out during a league match near the northeastern city of Strasbourg. Sissoko and several Black teammates said later that rival players and fans had directed racist insults at them during the game, but the spark of the brawl hardly mattered to him as he ran for his life. Cornered as he tried to leave the field, Sissoko was threatened by rival supporters — including one holding a knife — and beaten by players and fans, who broke his cheekbone.
Then league officials suspended him for 10 games for provoking the melee.
“I was so afraid and so disgusted, that I felt like I would never play soccer again,” Sissoko said.
What happened to Sissoko in May, far from the glittering Stade de France, where the many Black players on the French national team recently celebrated its triumph and where it will face Germany on Tuesday, has shined a light on the racism and discrimination that still mar French soccer at the amateur level, critics say. A survey of 300 amateur sports clubs published in March by the anti-racism organization Licra highlighted 74 cases of racism, but the study’s authors acknowledged that the problem had become so common that episodes are often not reported.
Incidents that do make the news — the attack on Sissoko and his teammates; an assault on three Black players outside a nightclub in Corsica in September; another case of racial insults from supporters in May 2017, in St.-Pierre d’Oléron, in western France — show that it remains a national issue.
To be sure, racism in soccer is not only a French problem. Racist insults against Black players are still routine in many European leagues. In Germany, the federation has tried to contain accusations of discrimination after Mesut Ozil, who is of Turkish origin, resigned from the national team this summer, saying, “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.”
But in France, the victory at the World Cup by a multicultural team of Frenchmen — white, Black, Muslim — has failed to persuade many anti-discrimination advocates that long-standing and deeply contentious issues like race and nationality have been resolved.
“It’s very complicated to bring up the issue of racism in the French society, because in France we pretend to be blind to colors,” said Lilian Thuram, a defender on France’s 1998 World Cup championship team who has closely followed Sissoko’s case.
Critics like Thuram argue that while France’s national and professional teams have made progress in preventing or punishing racism in soccer, local authorities often refuse to recognize the problem or deal with it effectively when problems arise. Officials from the local league in which Sissoko’s assault occurred, for example, rejected not only the racial abuse claims of Sissoko and his teammates but also the premise that the violence had been motivated by race at all.
William Gasparini, a sociology professor at the University of Strasbourg who studies discrimination and sports, said there was a big gap between the ways race is handled at the professional level and in the lower levels of amateur soccer.
“Professional clubs or national teams may now be more aware of racism issues than in the past, but that is the stage, the visible part,” he said.
He added, referring to a mafia-style code of silence, “In amateur soccer throughout France, there is an omertà: Clubs are more reluctant to address racism or discrimination.”
For Thuram, that can be explained by a lack of diversity: The boards of most of France’s soccer institutions, he said, are still populated largely by white men. Four of the 14 members of the French soccer federation’s executive committee are women, and only one member is nonwhite. Its amateur equivalent, an association that oversees hundreds of clubs and dozens of leagues across the country, is governed by a board on which all 12 members are white.
Sissoko was assaulted during the first half of a game in Mackenheim, a village of 800 residents. Sissoko and two of his black A.S. Benfeld teammates said that several Mackenheim supporters and players had targeted them with racial slurs.
As the match grew more tense shortly before halftime, a disagreement on the field turned into a fight. Mackenheim players assaulted the Black players, according to spectators and Sissoko’s teammates. Moudi Laouali, 27, a Benfeld player from Niger, was punched in the face and was later beaten as he lay on the field.
When Sissoko tried to reach the relative safety of the locker room, he said, Mackenheim fans who had invaded the field blocked his way. He said one of them, holding a kitchen knife, told him, “We are not done with you.” Pushed to the ground and kicked in the face and chest, he eventually lost consciousness.
“That day, I saw myself dying on the pitch,” Sissoko said.
Yet the referee ruled that Sissoko, a 6-foot midfielder, had provoked the fight and gave him the first red card of his career as he lay unconscious on the field.
“That is the world of soccer for people of color: You have to be three times better than your adversaries, or fight,” said Francis Mante, 39, a referee and former amateur player in the Strasbourg area. Mante, who is from Ghana, arrived in France in 1998.
“We call it the beautiful game,” he added, “but it’s set up in a very cruel world.”
Laouali, as well as two players from Mackenheim, received the same 10-game ban that Sissoko received. The league also fined Mackenheim 500 euros, or about $575, for failing to control its fans, but its ruling did not address the players’ accusations of racism, arguing that only the Black players had reported hearing the racist insults.
“Whenever Black people say they face racism, we question their legitimacy, we disqualify their claims,” said Thuram, who now heads the Lilian Thuram Foundation, an anti-racism organization. He argued that a similar form of colorblindness had been on display after France’s victory in the World Cup, when many refused to acknowledge that the team’s diversity partly explained its success.
“In the U.S., people highlighted the fact that there were many Black players of African origin in the French team,” Thuram said. “And in France, people say, ‘No, there are only French.'”
What unfolded during that violent game in May, though, on a field squeezed between cornfields and a pine forest, shocked the entire soccer community in eastern France.
With more than 210,000 registered players, the Great East League is one of the country’s biggest amateur organizations, one known for its ethnic and religious diversity — some clubs are made up exclusively of Turkish, Portuguese or Spanish players — but also for instances of violence and racism. A few days before Sissoko was beaten in May, for example, Mante, the referee from Ghana, was walking to his car with his family after a game between two small clubs when he heard the president of one of the teams tell him to “go eat your banana.”
The president received a 10-month suspension, and his club was fined 100 euros for the insult but refused to acknowledge that it was racist. “The federation sanctions those who insult referees, even if it’s a ridiculous sanction,” Mante said. “But if you are victim of racism as a player, you barely have a chance.”
Although the two Mackenheim players who received suspensions for the brawl in May acknowledged that the violence was unacceptable, they denied that racist or xenophobic feelings had motivated their acts, arguing that they were of Turkish origin and thus could not be racist toward black people. Both declined to speak on the record, though, citing fear of reprisals.
“Yes, there is some racism in Mackenheim,” said Victor Gallin, 22, a defender for the team that bears the town’s name. “But our players have never been racist. Never.”
But Cynan Keles, 18, an A.S. Benfeld player of Turkish heritage, suggested that the Black players on his team had been targeted specifically because of their skin color.
“Call it the way you want, but the Turkish players of Mackenheim would have never dared touch us, the other Turks,” he said.
Sissoko filed a complaint with the police in May, and the results of the investigation are expected to be made public by the end of October. Anne Hussenet, the prosecutor in charge of the case, said the police still had to determine what had precipitated the violence, which she said had been caused in part by the tensions during the game and also, potentially, “by another kind of motives.”
In Strasbourg, the regional federation has implemented measures to fight intolerance, including one in which captains of opposing teams meet to socialize before matches that bear some risk of violence or tension. In such games, the federation can also appoint additional delegates to support the referee.
Sissoko, meanwhile, was recently found to have severe post-traumatic stress disorder; he said he still wakes up from nightmares months after the beating. He played with A.S. Benfeld for the first time since the incident on a recent Sunday and said that while he was happy to be back on a field, he worried about physical contact with other players. “I feel like I’m not 100 percent present on the pitch, and as soon as I can pass the ball, I get rid of it,” he said after the game.
With the help of local organizations, he is hoping to put his experience to use by creating a statement against racism and intolerance that amateur clubs in the region will have to sign.
“What happened cannot happen again here,” Sissoko said. “Never.”
But Kerfalla Sissoko had more troubling thoughts on his mind.
A month before the World Cup, Sissoko, 25, an amateur soccer player from Guinea, had been brutally attacked after a fight broke out during a league match near the northeastern city of Strasbourg. Sissoko and several Black teammates said later that rival players and fans had directed racist insults at them during the game, but the spark of the brawl hardly mattered to him as he ran for his life. Cornered as he tried to leave the field, Sissoko was threatened by rival supporters — including one holding a knife — and beaten by players and fans, who broke his cheekbone.
Then league officials suspended him for 10 games for provoking the melee.
“I was so afraid and so disgusted, that I felt like I would never play soccer again,” Sissoko said.
What happened to Sissoko in May, far from the glittering Stade de France, where the many Black players on the French national team recently celebrated its triumph and where it will face Germany on Tuesday, has shined a light on the racism and discrimination that still mar French soccer at the amateur level, critics say. A survey of 300 amateur sports clubs published in March by the anti-racism organization Licra highlighted 74 cases of racism, but the study’s authors acknowledged that the problem had become so common that episodes are often not reported.
Incidents that do make the news — the attack on Sissoko and his teammates; an assault on three Black players outside a nightclub in Corsica in September; another case of racial insults from supporters in May 2017, in St.-Pierre d’Oléron, in western France — show that it remains a national issue.
To be sure, racism in soccer is not only a French problem. Racist insults against Black players are still routine in many European leagues. In Germany, the federation has tried to contain accusations of discrimination after Mesut Ozil, who is of Turkish origin, resigned from the national team this summer, saying, “I am German when we win, but I am an immigrant when we lose.”
But in France, the victory at the World Cup by a multicultural team of Frenchmen — white, Black, Muslim — has failed to persuade many anti-discrimination advocates that long-standing and deeply contentious issues like race and nationality have been resolved.
“It’s very complicated to bring up the issue of racism in the French society, because in France we pretend to be blind to colors,” said Lilian Thuram, a defender on France’s 1998 World Cup championship team who has closely followed Sissoko’s case.
Critics like Thuram argue that while France’s national and professional teams have made progress in preventing or punishing racism in soccer, local authorities often refuse to recognize the problem or deal with it effectively when problems arise. Officials from the local league in which Sissoko’s assault occurred, for example, rejected not only the racial abuse claims of Sissoko and his teammates but also the premise that the violence had been motivated by race at all.
William Gasparini, a sociology professor at the University of Strasbourg who studies discrimination and sports, said there was a big gap between the ways race is handled at the professional level and in the lower levels of amateur soccer.
“Professional clubs or national teams may now be more aware of racism issues than in the past, but that is the stage, the visible part,” he said.
He added, referring to a mafia-style code of silence, “In amateur soccer throughout France, there is an omertà: Clubs are more reluctant to address racism or discrimination.”
For Thuram, that can be explained by a lack of diversity: The boards of most of France’s soccer institutions, he said, are still populated largely by white men. Four of the 14 members of the French soccer federation’s executive committee are women, and only one member is nonwhite. Its amateur equivalent, an association that oversees hundreds of clubs and dozens of leagues across the country, is governed by a board on which all 12 members are white.
Sissoko was assaulted during the first half of a game in Mackenheim, a village of 800 residents. Sissoko and two of his black A.S. Benfeld teammates said that several Mackenheim supporters and players had targeted them with racial slurs.
As the match grew more tense shortly before halftime, a disagreement on the field turned into a fight. Mackenheim players assaulted the Black players, according to spectators and Sissoko’s teammates. Moudi Laouali, 27, a Benfeld player from Niger, was punched in the face and was later beaten as he lay on the field.
When Sissoko tried to reach the relative safety of the locker room, he said, Mackenheim fans who had invaded the field blocked his way. He said one of them, holding a kitchen knife, told him, “We are not done with you.” Pushed to the ground and kicked in the face and chest, he eventually lost consciousness.
“That day, I saw myself dying on the pitch,” Sissoko said.
Yet the referee ruled that Sissoko, a 6-foot midfielder, had provoked the fight and gave him the first red card of his career as he lay unconscious on the field.
“That is the world of soccer for people of color: You have to be three times better than your adversaries, or fight,” said Francis Mante, 39, a referee and former amateur player in the Strasbourg area. Mante, who is from Ghana, arrived in France in 1998.
“We call it the beautiful game,” he added, “but it’s set up in a very cruel world.”
Laouali, as well as two players from Mackenheim, received the same 10-game ban that Sissoko received. The league also fined Mackenheim 500 euros, or about $575, for failing to control its fans, but its ruling did not address the players’ accusations of racism, arguing that only the Black players had reported hearing the racist insults.
“Whenever Black people say they face racism, we question their legitimacy, we disqualify their claims,” said Thuram, who now heads the Lilian Thuram Foundation, an anti-racism organization. He argued that a similar form of colorblindness had been on display after France’s victory in the World Cup, when many refused to acknowledge that the team’s diversity partly explained its success.
“In the U.S., people highlighted the fact that there were many Black players of African origin in the French team,” Thuram said. “And in France, people say, ‘No, there are only French.'”
What unfolded during that violent game in May, though, on a field squeezed between cornfields and a pine forest, shocked the entire soccer community in eastern France.
With more than 210,000 registered players, the Great East League is one of the country’s biggest amateur organizations, one known for its ethnic and religious diversity — some clubs are made up exclusively of Turkish, Portuguese or Spanish players — but also for instances of violence and racism. A few days before Sissoko was beaten in May, for example, Mante, the referee from Ghana, was walking to his car with his family after a game between two small clubs when he heard the president of one of the teams tell him to “go eat your banana.”
The president received a 10-month suspension, and his club was fined 100 euros for the insult but refused to acknowledge that it was racist. “The federation sanctions those who insult referees, even if it’s a ridiculous sanction,” Mante said. “But if you are victim of racism as a player, you barely have a chance.”
Although the two Mackenheim players who received suspensions for the brawl in May acknowledged that the violence was unacceptable, they denied that racist or xenophobic feelings had motivated their acts, arguing that they were of Turkish origin and thus could not be racist toward black people. Both declined to speak on the record, though, citing fear of reprisals.
“Yes, there is some racism in Mackenheim,” said Victor Gallin, 22, a defender for the team that bears the town’s name. “But our players have never been racist. Never.”
But Cynan Keles, 18, an A.S. Benfeld player of Turkish heritage, suggested that the Black players on his team had been targeted specifically because of their skin color.
“Call it the way you want, but the Turkish players of Mackenheim would have never dared touch us, the other Turks,” he said.
Sissoko filed a complaint with the police in May, and the results of the investigation are expected to be made public by the end of October. Anne Hussenet, the prosecutor in charge of the case, said the police still had to determine what had precipitated the violence, which she said had been caused in part by the tensions during the game and also, potentially, “by another kind of motives.”
In Strasbourg, the regional federation has implemented measures to fight intolerance, including one in which captains of opposing teams meet to socialize before matches that bear some risk of violence or tension. In such games, the federation can also appoint additional delegates to support the referee.
Sissoko, meanwhile, was recently found to have severe post-traumatic stress disorder; he said he still wakes up from nightmares months after the beating. He played with A.S. Benfeld for the first time since the incident on a recent Sunday and said that while he was happy to be back on a field, he worried about physical contact with other players. “I feel like I’m not 100 percent present on the pitch, and as soon as I can pass the ball, I get rid of it,” he said after the game.
With the help of local organizations, he is hoping to put his experience to use by creating a statement against racism and intolerance that amateur clubs in the region will have to sign.
“What happened cannot happen again here,” Sissoko said. “Never.”
White People Account for Largest Portion of British Terror Suspects, Report Reveals
By Tanasia Kenney - atlanta black star
October 12, 2018
For the first time in 13 years, white people make up the largest portion of arrested terror suspects in Britain.
Figures released by the U.K.’s Home Office last month show there have been a total of 351 terrorism-related arrests since the start of the year through June, a 22 percent drop from the 449 arrests recorded last year.
“The fall is partly due to a relatively large number of arrests being made following terrorist attacks in London and Manchester last year,” a report said.
When broken down by race, the number of terrorism suspects described by the arresting officer as white jumped four percentage points to 38 percent during this same time frame, while those described as Asian fell seven percentage points, landing at 37 percent. The portion of suspects described as Black dropped by two points to 9 percent, according to the statistics.
This also marks the first time since June 2005 that the bulk of those arrested were white rather than Asian, The Guardian reported. Still, British authorities say Islamist terrorism remains the greatest threat to national security and that the rise of far-right extremism has also become cause for concern.
Since the Westminster attack in March 2017, police said they’ve thwarted 13 Islamist-related and four extreme right-wing terrorism plots. Dean Haydon, the deputy assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police, noted that although there’s been a drop in terror-related arrests overall, the threat level is no lower and the number of active investigations, at around 650, has reached an all-time high.
“Demands upon counter-terrorism policing have increased by about a third since the start of 2017,” said Haydon.
Moreover, Home Office statistics show that 100 people have been brought to trial in England and Wales this year through June, a 39 percent increase from 2017. Of those, 90 were convicted, marking the highest number of persons tried and convicted since the office began collecting data in 2009.
Of the 218 people imprisoned for terror-related offenses, 82 percent were categorized as holding Islamist extremist views, 13 percent as holding far-right extremist ideologies and 6 percent other ideologies.
“The number of Islamist, extremist prisoners saw a slight decrease for the first time,” the Home Office said. “The proportion of prisoners holding far-right ideologies has increased steadily over the past three years, with the number up from 10 to 28 in the latest year.”
Figures released by the U.K.’s Home Office last month show there have been a total of 351 terrorism-related arrests since the start of the year through June, a 22 percent drop from the 449 arrests recorded last year.
“The fall is partly due to a relatively large number of arrests being made following terrorist attacks in London and Manchester last year,” a report said.
When broken down by race, the number of terrorism suspects described by the arresting officer as white jumped four percentage points to 38 percent during this same time frame, while those described as Asian fell seven percentage points, landing at 37 percent. The portion of suspects described as Black dropped by two points to 9 percent, according to the statistics.
This also marks the first time since June 2005 that the bulk of those arrested were white rather than Asian, The Guardian reported. Still, British authorities say Islamist terrorism remains the greatest threat to national security and that the rise of far-right extremism has also become cause for concern.
Since the Westminster attack in March 2017, police said they’ve thwarted 13 Islamist-related and four extreme right-wing terrorism plots. Dean Haydon, the deputy assistant commissioner for the Metropolitan Police, noted that although there’s been a drop in terror-related arrests overall, the threat level is no lower and the number of active investigations, at around 650, has reached an all-time high.
“Demands upon counter-terrorism policing have increased by about a third since the start of 2017,” said Haydon.
Moreover, Home Office statistics show that 100 people have been brought to trial in England and Wales this year through June, a 39 percent increase from 2017. Of those, 90 were convicted, marking the highest number of persons tried and convicted since the office began collecting data in 2009.
Of the 218 people imprisoned for terror-related offenses, 82 percent were categorized as holding Islamist extremist views, 13 percent as holding far-right extremist ideologies and 6 percent other ideologies.
“The number of Islamist, extremist prisoners saw a slight decrease for the first time,” the Home Office said. “The proportion of prisoners holding far-right ideologies has increased steadily over the past three years, with the number up from 10 to 28 in the latest year.”
planning by a fool!!!
Turkish hydroelectric dam will leave hundreds homeless
Julia Harte - reuters
OCTOBER 9, 2018 / 7:27 AM
HASANKEYF, Turkey (Reuters) - Hundreds of people displaced by a huge dam in southeast Turkey fear they could go homeless because resettlement laws prevent them from moving into a new government-built town above the rising Tigris River waters.
The Ilisu dam, which Turkey planned to fill this year, will generate 1,200 megawatts of electricity but has been criticized for water shortages it will create downstream in Iraq and for the tens of thousands of people it will displace in Turkey.
For hundreds of residents of the 12,000-year-old town of Hasankeyf and its neighboring village of Kesmekopru, both of which will be submerged, housing laws may also block them from finding new homes on the nearby mountainside.
Those regulations bar unmarried adults and people with addresses registered elsewhere from claiming home ownership in the new site, residents and town officials told Reuters.
Two Hasankeyf residents affected by the laws, siblings Fatime and Hizrullah Salkan, have filed legal petitions to find new homes when the waters rise and they are forced from their houses - built next door to each other by their parents.
Fatime, 44, is not married and her 47-year-old brother, a father of four, switched his address to a neighboring province while seeking work there five years ago, meaning they both fail to meet requirements for being rehoused.
“They told us everything would be perfect - that everyone would own a house, there wouldn’t be any problems,” Hizrullah said. “But now we are doomed to be migrants.”
Also uprooted by the dam waters will be Hasankeyf’s ancient tombs, minarets and monuments, which are being transferred to a tourist park.
Ahmet Akdeniz, president of the local cultural association, said he supports the dam and the new settlement site, and expects Hasankeyf’s antiquities to be more easily accessible at their new location. But the home ownership restrictions, he said, are a disaster for hundreds of residents in Hasankeyf.
“Whoever wrote these laws is brainless,” he said. “They’ll have to change them. There won’t be anywhere for these people to go.”
Asked whether steps were being taken to address the needs of people deemed ineligible for new housing, the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry, which is overseeing the Ilisu Dam project, said local authorities had planned to make some homes available for sale but “there is no demand”.
Other state bodies, including the Environment and Urbanisation Ministry, which issued the home-ownership laws, declined or did not respond to requests for comment.
“CITY” LIFE
Turkey briefly started filling the dam in June, but officials said it halted temporarily a week later after complaints from Iraq about reduced water flows in summer.
Like Hasankeyf, which it faces across the Tigris River, the village of Kesmekopru will be forced to evacuate once the dam’s reservoir fills properly.
But none of Kesmekopru’s more than 600 residents will be allowed to own homes in the new settlement site because it is not considered a neighborhood of Hasankeyf, according to village headman Metin Dezen.
When Dezen asked provincial authorities why his villagers could not move to the new site, they told him: “‘You’re village people, we can’t give you a city,’” he told Reuters.
Asked about Dezen’s claim, the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry said residents of Kesmekopru had been paid for the loss of their land and had not applied for new housing from the government.
For the approximately 20 families who have already moved from Hasankeyf to the new homes, however, their present living conditions do not resemble a city.
Although authorities have said construction is 94 percent complete, the streets are still full of construction vehicles, the tap water is brownish, the air swirls with dust, and the area is barren. A clump of pine trees planted on a ridge above the site are brown and dead.
Mazlum Cetin, 27, works as a local tour guide in Hasankeyf but moved to the new settlement site in April. He fears the local economy will worsen after the dam because tourists will not be as eager to see Hasankeyf’s artifacts away from their historical location.
“In New Hasankeyf, people will just come and swipe their [museum entry cards] and see everything and leave,” he said.
Mehmet Sait Tunc, 34, sells kebabs in the new settlement. As he stood at his food truck listing his grievances over the dirty water, dusty air and arid ground his seven-year-old son Adem ran past to add one more: the noise from the construction work. “The explosions are going off every day!”
Viewing a photograph taken the previous day of his old house in Hasankeyf, now taken over by local donkeys, Tunc shook his head sadly, comparing the greenery around his old house to the landscape he now inhabits. “If the living conditions here don’t improve, we’ll think about moving,” he said.
The Ilisu dam, which Turkey planned to fill this year, will generate 1,200 megawatts of electricity but has been criticized for water shortages it will create downstream in Iraq and for the tens of thousands of people it will displace in Turkey.
For hundreds of residents of the 12,000-year-old town of Hasankeyf and its neighboring village of Kesmekopru, both of which will be submerged, housing laws may also block them from finding new homes on the nearby mountainside.
Those regulations bar unmarried adults and people with addresses registered elsewhere from claiming home ownership in the new site, residents and town officials told Reuters.
Two Hasankeyf residents affected by the laws, siblings Fatime and Hizrullah Salkan, have filed legal petitions to find new homes when the waters rise and they are forced from their houses - built next door to each other by their parents.
Fatime, 44, is not married and her 47-year-old brother, a father of four, switched his address to a neighboring province while seeking work there five years ago, meaning they both fail to meet requirements for being rehoused.
“They told us everything would be perfect - that everyone would own a house, there wouldn’t be any problems,” Hizrullah said. “But now we are doomed to be migrants.”
Also uprooted by the dam waters will be Hasankeyf’s ancient tombs, minarets and monuments, which are being transferred to a tourist park.
Ahmet Akdeniz, president of the local cultural association, said he supports the dam and the new settlement site, and expects Hasankeyf’s antiquities to be more easily accessible at their new location. But the home ownership restrictions, he said, are a disaster for hundreds of residents in Hasankeyf.
“Whoever wrote these laws is brainless,” he said. “They’ll have to change them. There won’t be anywhere for these people to go.”
Asked whether steps were being taken to address the needs of people deemed ineligible for new housing, the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry, which is overseeing the Ilisu Dam project, said local authorities had planned to make some homes available for sale but “there is no demand”.
Other state bodies, including the Environment and Urbanisation Ministry, which issued the home-ownership laws, declined or did not respond to requests for comment.
“CITY” LIFE
Turkey briefly started filling the dam in June, but officials said it halted temporarily a week later after complaints from Iraq about reduced water flows in summer.
Like Hasankeyf, which it faces across the Tigris River, the village of Kesmekopru will be forced to evacuate once the dam’s reservoir fills properly.
But none of Kesmekopru’s more than 600 residents will be allowed to own homes in the new settlement site because it is not considered a neighborhood of Hasankeyf, according to village headman Metin Dezen.
When Dezen asked provincial authorities why his villagers could not move to the new site, they told him: “‘You’re village people, we can’t give you a city,’” he told Reuters.
Asked about Dezen’s claim, the Agriculture and Forestry Ministry said residents of Kesmekopru had been paid for the loss of their land and had not applied for new housing from the government.
For the approximately 20 families who have already moved from Hasankeyf to the new homes, however, their present living conditions do not resemble a city.
Although authorities have said construction is 94 percent complete, the streets are still full of construction vehicles, the tap water is brownish, the air swirls with dust, and the area is barren. A clump of pine trees planted on a ridge above the site are brown and dead.
Mazlum Cetin, 27, works as a local tour guide in Hasankeyf but moved to the new settlement site in April. He fears the local economy will worsen after the dam because tourists will not be as eager to see Hasankeyf’s artifacts away from their historical location.
“In New Hasankeyf, people will just come and swipe their [museum entry cards] and see everything and leave,” he said.
Mehmet Sait Tunc, 34, sells kebabs in the new settlement. As he stood at his food truck listing his grievances over the dirty water, dusty air and arid ground his seven-year-old son Adem ran past to add one more: the noise from the construction work. “The explosions are going off every day!”
Viewing a photograph taken the previous day of his old house in Hasankeyf, now taken over by local donkeys, Tunc shook his head sadly, comparing the greenery around his old house to the landscape he now inhabits. “If the living conditions here don’t improve, we’ll think about moving,” he said.
the stance was bullshit!!!
Waiting for Iceland’s Brave Stance Against Neoliberalism, 10 Years Later
BY
Sam Knight Truthout
PUBLISHED
October 6, 2018
Iceland is supposed to be the one that got it right. When the global financial crisis battered the country last decade, it was reported that Icelanders reacted by successfully challenging neoliberal convention.
“When everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net,” Paul Krugman wrote for The New York Times in 2011. Vox’s Matt Yglesias offered similar commentary in 2015. “Instead of embracing the orthodoxy of bank bailouts, austerity, and low inflation,” he wrote, “Iceland did just the opposite.”
Admittedly, the narrative of Iceland as a brave, iconoclastic nation is compelling, and it has kernels of truth. Thousands of Icelanders took to the streets immediately after the crash, eventually forcing their right-wing government to resign. Icelandic officials also managed to punish malfeasant bankers, giving 36 of them a total of 96 years in prison for collapse-related misdeeds. But this is where the boldness begins and ends.
The left-wing coalition that came to power after the protest movement ended up governing as a dutiful technocracy. It slashed social spending to mollify international creditors and the International Monetary Fund, while sheepishly claiming to have increased welfare expenditures as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 2007-2011 — a sleight of hand glossing over the sharp decrease in GDP after the crash. By the government’s own measure, calculated in absolute terms, it cut welfare spending by 22 percent, even if it didn’t want to own the policy. If this isn’t austerity, nothing is.
To say that Iceland “let the banks go bust” or that it “rejected the orthodoxy of bailouts” is also a gross oversimplification. The fiscal cost of saving the country’s banks, including its Central Bank, has been estimated to be equal to 36 percent of GDP. And while the government nationalized the country’s main three commercial banks’ domestic operations amid the crisis, it sold off two of them to creditors of the failed firms within months of the crash, with a generous public subsidy, of course.
The third bank that remained nationalized, Landsbanki, served no social purpose, either. As noted in a 2012 ruling by a European trade dispute panel: “the [new] banks from their creation in October 2008 operated as commercial entities without any involvement from the State … in essence, there was business as usual from day one.”
Unsurprisingly, the number of Icelandic families dependent on loans shot up between 2008 and 2010 — by 44 percent. The metric has not declined even as the crash itself has increasingly become a distant memory, suggesting a new generation of Icelanders is growing up mired in a cycle of debt, despite the country’s supposed bravery in the face of neoliberalism. Stagflation-like conditions set the stage for this trend, with wages stagnant and price increases in the double-digits for months after the collapse.
Some of this nuance may have been lost in commentary because Iceland recovered from the 2008 crisis much more rapidly than other European countries. But even this can be attributed to factors that have nothing to do with any sort of bold plan executed by the post-crisis government. Iceland’s Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that a certain class of indexed loans had been made illegally, granting significant debt relief. The country’s longtime refusal to adopt the euro also gave the country’s export sectors a boost after the crisis, thanks to devaluation. Moreover, basic macroeconomic statistics on unemployment and GDP growth fail to adequately convey the damage done by the crisis: Between 2009-2012, Iceland lost about 2.5 percent of its population to net migration, according to government statistics.
Little changed after the collapse. In the first scheduled post-crisis election in 2013, Icelanders voted to return a right-wing coalition to power, even though it consisted of the parties most responsible for the bubble and the collapse. The right had rebranded as “populists,” making hay of the left’s deference to norms.
“Both of the [winning] parties were more outspoken towards creditors of the failed banks than the outgoing government, and their rhetoric harsher,” said an analysis published by one of the Icelandic banks after the 2013 election. The memo noted how one of the losing incumbent parties “frequently testified to the creditors’ constitutional rights.” The right, meanwhile, promised an unrealistic windfall in the form of a 20-percent write-down for all indebted homeowners. This should sound vaguely familiar to anyone who followed US and UK right-wing politics in 2016, and all the fantastic promises they yielded.
As anyone familiar with the Panama Papers might recall, this right-wing coalition didn’t finish its term in office. Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson was forced to resign in April 2016 after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed he and his wife held assets in an offshore tax haven. Rapid-response protests played a role, as they had after the 2008 collapse. But, again, the grip of conservative forces remained strong. Subsequent elections elevated Bjarni Benediktsson, the leader of the junior coalition partner in Gunnlaugsson’s government, to the senior role—despite the fact that he, too, had been caught squirreling assets abroad, as reported in The Panama Papers.
Appropriately, Benediktsson’s time as prime minister was short-lived. His coalition government also collapsed in scandal after his father asked the Interior Ministry to use its pardon power to clear the name of a convicted child abuser. But he still remains in government as finance minister, serving once again as junior partner–this time, to a Left-Green Movement that has seen its support wither after entering into a coalition with Benediktsson’s Independence Party.
Fortunately, not all is lost from the years after the crisis, when it was believed Iceland could forge a path divergent from neoliberalism. After the collapse, there emerged a movement to draft a new constitution with the help of a random cross-section of society and an elected constitutional council. Though it was abandoned by the post-crisis left-wing coalition at a crucial time, the framework still exists. It calls for new labor rights, more public involvement in natural resource ownership and vestiges of direct democracy. The draft amendments are there, published online, for anyone who wishes to attempt to implement them. (Amending the Icelandic Constitution requires parliamentary approval in two consecutive legislative sessions.) Perhaps a critical mass might form behind the initiative once again if, as feared by some, Icelandic investors repeated the mistakes of last decade by staking too much on a single industry: this time, the country’s booming tourism sector. The initial constitutional reform effort was spearheaded in the wake of 2008, after all, and garnered support from the left-wing coalition parties, even if they abandoned the movement when it mattered.
Still, the strength of political inertia in Iceland can’t be overstated, as is the case with the entrenchment of elites everywhere. For example, then-Prime Minister Geir Haarde announced 10 years ago today that the country had gone bankrupt, concluding a televised speech with the declaration, “God bless Iceland.” Panic ensued, as Icelandic commentators noted. A special parliamentary inquiry into the collapse would later recommend that Haarde and other leaders face criminal negligence charges —for failing to act for months as the banking system teetered. Ultimately, Haarde never faced any penalties. Today, he serves in one of the more important roles in the government, as the country’s Ambassador to the United States.
God bless Iceland, indeed.
“When everyone else bailed out the bankers and made the public pay the price, Iceland let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net,” Paul Krugman wrote for The New York Times in 2011. Vox’s Matt Yglesias offered similar commentary in 2015. “Instead of embracing the orthodoxy of bank bailouts, austerity, and low inflation,” he wrote, “Iceland did just the opposite.”
Admittedly, the narrative of Iceland as a brave, iconoclastic nation is compelling, and it has kernels of truth. Thousands of Icelanders took to the streets immediately after the crash, eventually forcing their right-wing government to resign. Icelandic officials also managed to punish malfeasant bankers, giving 36 of them a total of 96 years in prison for collapse-related misdeeds. But this is where the boldness begins and ends.
The left-wing coalition that came to power after the protest movement ended up governing as a dutiful technocracy. It slashed social spending to mollify international creditors and the International Monetary Fund, while sheepishly claiming to have increased welfare expenditures as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 2007-2011 — a sleight of hand glossing over the sharp decrease in GDP after the crash. By the government’s own measure, calculated in absolute terms, it cut welfare spending by 22 percent, even if it didn’t want to own the policy. If this isn’t austerity, nothing is.
To say that Iceland “let the banks go bust” or that it “rejected the orthodoxy of bailouts” is also a gross oversimplification. The fiscal cost of saving the country’s banks, including its Central Bank, has been estimated to be equal to 36 percent of GDP. And while the government nationalized the country’s main three commercial banks’ domestic operations amid the crisis, it sold off two of them to creditors of the failed firms within months of the crash, with a generous public subsidy, of course.
The third bank that remained nationalized, Landsbanki, served no social purpose, either. As noted in a 2012 ruling by a European trade dispute panel: “the [new] banks from their creation in October 2008 operated as commercial entities without any involvement from the State … in essence, there was business as usual from day one.”
Unsurprisingly, the number of Icelandic families dependent on loans shot up between 2008 and 2010 — by 44 percent. The metric has not declined even as the crash itself has increasingly become a distant memory, suggesting a new generation of Icelanders is growing up mired in a cycle of debt, despite the country’s supposed bravery in the face of neoliberalism. Stagflation-like conditions set the stage for this trend, with wages stagnant and price increases in the double-digits for months after the collapse.
Some of this nuance may have been lost in commentary because Iceland recovered from the 2008 crisis much more rapidly than other European countries. But even this can be attributed to factors that have nothing to do with any sort of bold plan executed by the post-crisis government. Iceland’s Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that a certain class of indexed loans had been made illegally, granting significant debt relief. The country’s longtime refusal to adopt the euro also gave the country’s export sectors a boost after the crisis, thanks to devaluation. Moreover, basic macroeconomic statistics on unemployment and GDP growth fail to adequately convey the damage done by the crisis: Between 2009-2012, Iceland lost about 2.5 percent of its population to net migration, according to government statistics.
Little changed after the collapse. In the first scheduled post-crisis election in 2013, Icelanders voted to return a right-wing coalition to power, even though it consisted of the parties most responsible for the bubble and the collapse. The right had rebranded as “populists,” making hay of the left’s deference to norms.
“Both of the [winning] parties were more outspoken towards creditors of the failed banks than the outgoing government, and their rhetoric harsher,” said an analysis published by one of the Icelandic banks after the 2013 election. The memo noted how one of the losing incumbent parties “frequently testified to the creditors’ constitutional rights.” The right, meanwhile, promised an unrealistic windfall in the form of a 20-percent write-down for all indebted homeowners. This should sound vaguely familiar to anyone who followed US and UK right-wing politics in 2016, and all the fantastic promises they yielded.
As anyone familiar with the Panama Papers might recall, this right-wing coalition didn’t finish its term in office. Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson was forced to resign in April 2016 after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists revealed he and his wife held assets in an offshore tax haven. Rapid-response protests played a role, as they had after the 2008 collapse. But, again, the grip of conservative forces remained strong. Subsequent elections elevated Bjarni Benediktsson, the leader of the junior coalition partner in Gunnlaugsson’s government, to the senior role—despite the fact that he, too, had been caught squirreling assets abroad, as reported in The Panama Papers.
Appropriately, Benediktsson’s time as prime minister was short-lived. His coalition government also collapsed in scandal after his father asked the Interior Ministry to use its pardon power to clear the name of a convicted child abuser. But he still remains in government as finance minister, serving once again as junior partner–this time, to a Left-Green Movement that has seen its support wither after entering into a coalition with Benediktsson’s Independence Party.
Fortunately, not all is lost from the years after the crisis, when it was believed Iceland could forge a path divergent from neoliberalism. After the collapse, there emerged a movement to draft a new constitution with the help of a random cross-section of society and an elected constitutional council. Though it was abandoned by the post-crisis left-wing coalition at a crucial time, the framework still exists. It calls for new labor rights, more public involvement in natural resource ownership and vestiges of direct democracy. The draft amendments are there, published online, for anyone who wishes to attempt to implement them. (Amending the Icelandic Constitution requires parliamentary approval in two consecutive legislative sessions.) Perhaps a critical mass might form behind the initiative once again if, as feared by some, Icelandic investors repeated the mistakes of last decade by staking too much on a single industry: this time, the country’s booming tourism sector. The initial constitutional reform effort was spearheaded in the wake of 2008, after all, and garnered support from the left-wing coalition parties, even if they abandoned the movement when it mattered.
Still, the strength of political inertia in Iceland can’t be overstated, as is the case with the entrenchment of elites everywhere. For example, then-Prime Minister Geir Haarde announced 10 years ago today that the country had gone bankrupt, concluding a televised speech with the declaration, “God bless Iceland.” Panic ensued, as Icelandic commentators noted. A special parliamentary inquiry into the collapse would later recommend that Haarde and other leaders face criminal negligence charges —for failing to act for months as the banking system teetered. Ultimately, Haarde never faced any penalties. Today, he serves in one of the more important roles in the government, as the country’s Ambassador to the United States.
God bless Iceland, indeed.
Osaka drops San Francisco as sister city over 'comfort women' statue
Mayor of Japanese city says memorial for women used as sex slaves in Japan is not historically accurate
Justin McCurry in Tokyo
the guardian
Thu 4 Oct 2018 01.56 EDT
The ‘comfort women’ monument was unveiled in San Francisco in 2017. Photograph: Eric Risberg/AP
The city of Osaka has ended its 60-year “sister city” relationship with San Francisco to protest against the presence in the US city of a statue symbolising Japan’s wartime use of sex slaves.
Osaka’s mayor, Hirofumi Yoshimura, terminated official ties this week after the US city agreed to recognise the “comfort women” statue, which was erected by a private group last year in San Francisco’s Chinatown district, as public property.
The statue depicts three women – from China, Korea and the Philippines – who symbolise women and teenage girls forced to work in frontline brothels from the early 1930s until Japan’s wartime defeat in 1945.
Campaigners and some historians say as many as 200,000 women – mostly Koreans, but also Chinese, south-east Asians and a small number of Japanese and Europeans – were forced or tricked into working in military brothels between 1932 and Japan’s defeat in 1945.
In his 10-page letter to San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, Yoshimura noted that historians disagreed about the extent of the Japanese imperial army’s involvement in the running of wartime brothels, and described claims included in the statue’s inscription as lacking historical evidence.
The inscription reads: “This monument bears witness to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of women and girls, euphemistically called ‘Comfort Women,’ who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces in thirteen Asian-Pacific countries from 1931-1945. Most of these women died during their wartime captivity.”
Yoshimura added that the focus on Japan’s wartime conduct ignored the widespread sexual abuse of women by other countries during the second world war and other conflicts.
“I am in favour of activities to protect the dignity and human rights of women,” he said. “However, if the purpose is to protect the human rights of women, I would suggest that some of the special attention currently being given to Japan’s ‘comfort women’ issue should be broadened to memorialise all the women who have been sexually assaulted and abused by soldiers of countries in the world.”
Breed’s predecessor, Edwin Lee, accepted the statue in 2017, prompting Yoshimura to complain the move had destroyed the spirit of mutual trust built up over six decades. However he postponed the formal severing of ties following Lee’s death last December.
In a statement Breed’s office said it was “unfortunate” that Yoshimura had decided to end the port cities’ relationship, which began in October 1957.
The statue in San Francisco is one of dozens erected in South Korea and overseas in recent years but the first to appear in a major US city.
The city of Glendale, which has one of the biggest Korean American populations in California, erected a similar statue in 2013, triggering an unsuccessful legal attempt to have it taken down by local residents Michiko Gingery and Koichi Mera, who were hoping its removal would “defend the honour of Japan”.
Campaigners accused Yoshimura of attempting to rewrite history. “Breaking the relationship over a memorial is outrageous and absurd,” said Lillian Sing, co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition. “It shows how afraid the Osaka mayor and Japanese prime minister are of truth and are trying to deny history.”
The use of public spaces to memorialise the comfort women has sparked criticism in Japan, which claims that it contravenes the spirit of a 2015 agreement between Tokyo and Seoul that was supposed to settle the controversy “finally and irreversibly”.
The agreement included an apology from Japan for the women’s ordeal, but it refused to accept legal responsibility, maintaining that all compensation claims had been settled by a bilateral peace treaty in 1965.
In addition Japan set up the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation, a 1 billion yen fund to care for the dwindling number of surviving women. South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, last month described the fund as “dysfunctional” since it was not widely supported by South Koreans and warned that the money could be returned to Japan.
Osaka’s mayor, Hirofumi Yoshimura, terminated official ties this week after the US city agreed to recognise the “comfort women” statue, which was erected by a private group last year in San Francisco’s Chinatown district, as public property.
The statue depicts three women – from China, Korea and the Philippines – who symbolise women and teenage girls forced to work in frontline brothels from the early 1930s until Japan’s wartime defeat in 1945.
Campaigners and some historians say as many as 200,000 women – mostly Koreans, but also Chinese, south-east Asians and a small number of Japanese and Europeans – were forced or tricked into working in military brothels between 1932 and Japan’s defeat in 1945.
In his 10-page letter to San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, Yoshimura noted that historians disagreed about the extent of the Japanese imperial army’s involvement in the running of wartime brothels, and described claims included in the statue’s inscription as lacking historical evidence.
The inscription reads: “This monument bears witness to the suffering of hundreds of thousands of women and girls, euphemistically called ‘Comfort Women,’ who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Armed Forces in thirteen Asian-Pacific countries from 1931-1945. Most of these women died during their wartime captivity.”
Yoshimura added that the focus on Japan’s wartime conduct ignored the widespread sexual abuse of women by other countries during the second world war and other conflicts.
“I am in favour of activities to protect the dignity and human rights of women,” he said. “However, if the purpose is to protect the human rights of women, I would suggest that some of the special attention currently being given to Japan’s ‘comfort women’ issue should be broadened to memorialise all the women who have been sexually assaulted and abused by soldiers of countries in the world.”
Breed’s predecessor, Edwin Lee, accepted the statue in 2017, prompting Yoshimura to complain the move had destroyed the spirit of mutual trust built up over six decades. However he postponed the formal severing of ties following Lee’s death last December.
In a statement Breed’s office said it was “unfortunate” that Yoshimura had decided to end the port cities’ relationship, which began in October 1957.
The statue in San Francisco is one of dozens erected in South Korea and overseas in recent years but the first to appear in a major US city.
The city of Glendale, which has one of the biggest Korean American populations in California, erected a similar statue in 2013, triggering an unsuccessful legal attempt to have it taken down by local residents Michiko Gingery and Koichi Mera, who were hoping its removal would “defend the honour of Japan”.
Campaigners accused Yoshimura of attempting to rewrite history. “Breaking the relationship over a memorial is outrageous and absurd,” said Lillian Sing, co-chair of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition. “It shows how afraid the Osaka mayor and Japanese prime minister are of truth and are trying to deny history.”
The use of public spaces to memorialise the comfort women has sparked criticism in Japan, which claims that it contravenes the spirit of a 2015 agreement between Tokyo and Seoul that was supposed to settle the controversy “finally and irreversibly”.
The agreement included an apology from Japan for the women’s ordeal, but it refused to accept legal responsibility, maintaining that all compensation claims had been settled by a bilateral peace treaty in 1965.
In addition Japan set up the Reconciliation and Healing Foundation, a 1 billion yen fund to care for the dwindling number of surviving women. South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, last month described the fund as “dysfunctional” since it was not widely supported by South Koreans and warned that the money could be returned to Japan.
International court of justice orders US to lift new Iran sanctions
Judges in The Hague find unanimously in favour of Iran but court has no way to enforce ruling
Saeed Kamali Dehghan Iran correspondent
the guardian
Wed 3 Oct 2018 06.51 EDT
The UN’s international court of justice has reprimanded the US over its re-imposition of sanctions on Iran, ordering Washington to lift restrictive measures linked to humanitarian trade, food, medicine and civil aviation.
The Hague ruling, delivered on Wednesday morning, is a victory for Iran after it complained to the ICJ in July that the return to sanctions imposed by Donald Trump following the US withdrawal from the 2015 landmark nuclear agreement was in violation of the Treaty of Amity, a 1955 pre-revolutionary friendship treaty.
Iran also argued that the US had violated the terms of the nuclear accord, endorsed by a UN security council resolution, by unilaterally pulling itself out of that agreement. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has verified 12 times that Iran has abided by the terms of that agreement.
Iran’s lawyers said at the court hearing in August that the US sanctions were blanket measures that had strangled the Iranian economy, affecting ordinary citizens in all aspects of their lives. Wednesday’s ruling, classified as a so-called “provisional measure” before a final verdict that could take years to be issued, was given unanimously. It is binding and cannot be appealed but the ICJ has no means of enforcing it. Washington has argued that the issue is a matter of national security for the US.
It is too early to assess what the ruling’s impact will be in practical terms, given the EU’s backing for the nuclear accord. But the ruling puts on the record that the reimposition of sanctions is viewed as illegal by the international community.
Reacing to the ICJ ruling, the US ambassador to the Netherlands, Pete Hoekstra, said in a statement that “this is a meritless case over which the court has no jurisdiction”.
“The court considers that the United States, in accordance with its obligations under the 1955 treaty, must remove, by means of its choosing, any impediments arising from the measures” relating to humanitarian needs, medicines, foodstuff and agricultural commodities and civil aviation, the ruling said.
“To this end, the United States must ensure that licences and necessary authorisations are granted and that payments and other transfers of funds are not subject to any restriction in so far as they relate to the goods and services referred to above.”
The court ordered both parties to refrain from any action that might aggravate or extend the dispute.
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, tweeted after the court’s ruling that it was “another failure for sanctions-addicted USG [US government] and victory for rule of law. Imperative for int’l community to collectively counter malign US unilateralism.”
Zarif said in a BBC interview ahead of the court ruling that the US was driven by a policy of regime change and listened to the wrong people, which he said was leading Washington to make mistakes and have “delusional views” of the situation in Iran.
“The economic warfare that the United States and some of its regional clients are conducting against Iran is psychological warfare more than real economic warfare,” the Iranian foreign minister said.
Unlike the US, other parties to the nuclear deal including the EU, China and Russia have remained adamant that they want to keep the deal. Trump’s first set of sanctions was re-imposed in August. Those measures affected Iran’s access to dollars, gold and precious metals and the car-making sector, and sparked street protests.
They are to be followed by a set of additional and more stringent measures on 4 November, including an embargo on the imports of Iranian oil and sanctions on its banking sector.
The EU, Iran, China and Russia have set out a plan to sidestep these. European diplomats hope the proposed plan, known as a special purpose vehicle (SPV), will help persuade an increasingly reluctant Iran to stay inside the deal in the hope of rescuing its economy.
Asked about this, Zarif said: “Prime Minister May as well as President Macron and everybody else said that we are committed to see that Iran enjoys the economic dividends of the deal and the Europeans probably made better commitments than anybody expected. Then it was to translate those political commitment[s] into mechanisms and I believe those mechanisms are going to be in place.”
He said the next step, which is “the most difficult and important”, is to see whether those mechanisms work. “We are going to be a little bit more patient but it doesn’t mean that our patience will never run out,” he said.
Asked about Trump’s offer to hold a summit with his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, Zarif did not rule out a possibility.
“Nothing is impossible. The outcome … would be a photo opportunity and a two-page document,” he said, referring the document signed in the summer by Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. “We have a 150-page document, which is the deal, which was negotiated word by word not only by Iran and the United States, but by six other powers. Having negotiated that deal and having been involved in this process for a very long time, I can assure President Trump that the US will not get a better deal.”
The Hague ruling, delivered on Wednesday morning, is a victory for Iran after it complained to the ICJ in July that the return to sanctions imposed by Donald Trump following the US withdrawal from the 2015 landmark nuclear agreement was in violation of the Treaty of Amity, a 1955 pre-revolutionary friendship treaty.
Iran also argued that the US had violated the terms of the nuclear accord, endorsed by a UN security council resolution, by unilaterally pulling itself out of that agreement. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has verified 12 times that Iran has abided by the terms of that agreement.
Iran’s lawyers said at the court hearing in August that the US sanctions were blanket measures that had strangled the Iranian economy, affecting ordinary citizens in all aspects of their lives. Wednesday’s ruling, classified as a so-called “provisional measure” before a final verdict that could take years to be issued, was given unanimously. It is binding and cannot be appealed but the ICJ has no means of enforcing it. Washington has argued that the issue is a matter of national security for the US.
It is too early to assess what the ruling’s impact will be in practical terms, given the EU’s backing for the nuclear accord. But the ruling puts on the record that the reimposition of sanctions is viewed as illegal by the international community.
Reacing to the ICJ ruling, the US ambassador to the Netherlands, Pete Hoekstra, said in a statement that “this is a meritless case over which the court has no jurisdiction”.
“The court considers that the United States, in accordance with its obligations under the 1955 treaty, must remove, by means of its choosing, any impediments arising from the measures” relating to humanitarian needs, medicines, foodstuff and agricultural commodities and civil aviation, the ruling said.
“To this end, the United States must ensure that licences and necessary authorisations are granted and that payments and other transfers of funds are not subject to any restriction in so far as they relate to the goods and services referred to above.”
The court ordered both parties to refrain from any action that might aggravate or extend the dispute.
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, tweeted after the court’s ruling that it was “another failure for sanctions-addicted USG [US government] and victory for rule of law. Imperative for int’l community to collectively counter malign US unilateralism.”
Zarif said in a BBC interview ahead of the court ruling that the US was driven by a policy of regime change and listened to the wrong people, which he said was leading Washington to make mistakes and have “delusional views” of the situation in Iran.
“The economic warfare that the United States and some of its regional clients are conducting against Iran is psychological warfare more than real economic warfare,” the Iranian foreign minister said.
Unlike the US, other parties to the nuclear deal including the EU, China and Russia have remained adamant that they want to keep the deal. Trump’s first set of sanctions was re-imposed in August. Those measures affected Iran’s access to dollars, gold and precious metals and the car-making sector, and sparked street protests.
They are to be followed by a set of additional and more stringent measures on 4 November, including an embargo on the imports of Iranian oil and sanctions on its banking sector.
The EU, Iran, China and Russia have set out a plan to sidestep these. European diplomats hope the proposed plan, known as a special purpose vehicle (SPV), will help persuade an increasingly reluctant Iran to stay inside the deal in the hope of rescuing its economy.
Asked about this, Zarif said: “Prime Minister May as well as President Macron and everybody else said that we are committed to see that Iran enjoys the economic dividends of the deal and the Europeans probably made better commitments than anybody expected. Then it was to translate those political commitment[s] into mechanisms and I believe those mechanisms are going to be in place.”
He said the next step, which is “the most difficult and important”, is to see whether those mechanisms work. “We are going to be a little bit more patient but it doesn’t mean that our patience will never run out,” he said.
Asked about Trump’s offer to hold a summit with his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, Zarif did not rule out a possibility.
“Nothing is impossible. The outcome … would be a photo opportunity and a two-page document,” he said, referring the document signed in the summer by Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. “We have a 150-page document, which is the deal, which was negotiated word by word not only by Iran and the United States, but by six other powers. Having negotiated that deal and having been involved in this process for a very long time, I can assure President Trump that the US will not get a better deal.”
North Korean hackers tied to massive global theft
By TIM STARKS - politico
10/03/2018 08:00 AM EDT
North Korean government hackers have made off with hundreds of millions of dollars by targeting financial institutions globally, then hiding their tracks with destructive cyberattacks, a cybersecurity firm said Wednesday.
The group dubbed APT38 by the company FireEye is also believed to have had a hand in the largest cyber-heist in history, the 2016 Bangladesh Bank theft of $81 million. In total, the hackers have been connected with attempts to steal more than $1 billion in 11 countries.
Over the past several years, North Korea has continued to perfect its hacker armies that have carried out some of the most devastating digital attacks around the world. Last month, the Justice Department unsealed charges against Park Jin Hyok for his part in the 2014 Sony Pictures hack as well as for aiding in the Bangladesh theft and the damaging WannaCry malware outbreak.
And despite signs of a break in the historically tense relations between Washington and Pyongyang, the charges against Park represent the first time U.S. authorities have publicly pointed the finger at North Korea as the culprits behind some of the most infamous cyberattacks ever.
The group FireEye identified appears to be one of North Korea's most dangerous — and effective — hacker assets that remains active. It has conducted attacks before, during and since the Trump administration's diplomatic outreach to Pyongyang.
"This is a very insidious group," said Sandra Joyce, vice president of global intelligence for FireEye. "It will destroy networks and steal millions and millions of dollars."
In one case, the hackers rendered 10,000 workstations and servers completely inoperable, according to the firm.
APT38 is part of the Lazarus Group, a broader North Korean-linked hacking group, that focuses on financial gain, according to FireEye. It's known for its cunning and ability to escape detection until it can escape a victim's network with a payload. It hid in victims' networks for an average 115 days.
FireEye has spoken with law enforcement officials around the globe about the group.
The group dubbed APT38 by the company FireEye is also believed to have had a hand in the largest cyber-heist in history, the 2016 Bangladesh Bank theft of $81 million. In total, the hackers have been connected with attempts to steal more than $1 billion in 11 countries.
Over the past several years, North Korea has continued to perfect its hacker armies that have carried out some of the most devastating digital attacks around the world. Last month, the Justice Department unsealed charges against Park Jin Hyok for his part in the 2014 Sony Pictures hack as well as for aiding in the Bangladesh theft and the damaging WannaCry malware outbreak.
And despite signs of a break in the historically tense relations between Washington and Pyongyang, the charges against Park represent the first time U.S. authorities have publicly pointed the finger at North Korea as the culprits behind some of the most infamous cyberattacks ever.
The group FireEye identified appears to be one of North Korea's most dangerous — and effective — hacker assets that remains active. It has conducted attacks before, during and since the Trump administration's diplomatic outreach to Pyongyang.
"This is a very insidious group," said Sandra Joyce, vice president of global intelligence for FireEye. "It will destroy networks and steal millions and millions of dollars."
In one case, the hackers rendered 10,000 workstations and servers completely inoperable, according to the firm.
APT38 is part of the Lazarus Group, a broader North Korean-linked hacking group, that focuses on financial gain, according to FireEye. It's known for its cunning and ability to escape detection until it can escape a victim's network with a payload. It hid in victims' networks for an average 115 days.
FireEye has spoken with law enforcement officials around the globe about the group.
Palu tsunami: food and water run out as death toll tops 1,200
Residents block roads to intercept aid deliveries as police and troops guard fuel and shops in stricken Indonesian city.
Hannah Ellis-Petersen
the guardian
Tue 2 Oct 2018 03.50 EDT
A policeman guards a delivery of food and aid at Palu port on Tuesday. Photograph: Antara Foto/Reuters
Anger and desperation are growing in parts of Sulawesi as residents faced a fourth day without food and drinking water after the Indonesian island was devastated by an earthquake and a tsunami.
On Tuesday the official death toll from the disaster rose to 1,234, according to disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho. It is still expected to climb steeply in the coming days.
Signs propped along roads in Sulawesi read “We Need Food” and “We Need Support”, while children begged for cash in the streets. Queues for fuel, which has almost run out in the area, were miles long and the national police and hundreds of troops were deployed to guard petrol stations and food shops.
Around 62,000 people have been displaced by the twin disaster, with many still trying to escape the devastated region. Over 3,000 people flocked to Palu’s airport on Monday, trying to board military aircraft or one of the few commercial flights leaving the airport, which has suffered severe damage. Video footage showed crowds screaming in anger because they were not able to get on a military plane.
“We have not eaten for three days,” one woman yelled. “We just want to be safe.”
Sabtarina Dwi Febriyanti, a programme manager with charity World Vision on the ground in Palu, described how security was becoming an increasing concern.
“There is chaos because there is not enough supplies of food and clean water and medicine and people are getting more and more frustrated,” she said.
“People have begun robbing the shops just to survive and people keep hijacking the trucks bringing in the aid. I keep seeing people screaming: ‘I need to survive, I need to survive.’ So it makes the situation here uncomfortable and security is a big problem, especially because there over 500 prisoners on the loose. Things are just getting worse; it is worrying.”
Desperation exploded into anger in Donggala, the town closest to the epicentre of the massive earthquake and tsunami, with residents begging Indonesia’s president to help them as hungry survivors crawled into stores and grabbed boxes of food.
“Pay attention to Donggala, Mr Jokowi. Pay attention to Donggala,” yelled one resident in footage broadcast on local television, referring to president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo. “There are still a lot of unattended villages here.”
Most of the attention so far has focused on the biggest affected city, Palu. Donggala and other outlying areas have received little assistance largely due to impassable roads and many have been forced to take food from stores.
“Everyone is hungry and they want to eat after several days of not eating,” said Donggala’s administration head Kasman Lassa. “We have anticipated it by providing food, rice, but it was not enough. There are many people here. So, on this issue, we cannot pressure them to hold much longer.”
On Monday, in Ulujadi district in western Palu, residents deprived of food and water blocked roads to intercept trucks carrying food supplies, with police officers reportedly unable to restrain the crowds. In Tawaeli district in central Palu, crowds gathered at the port to intercept government aid arriving on boats.
The process began on Monday of burying the bodies, which had begun piling up in the local army hospital, in a mass grave measuring 100m long. Photos were taken of the corpses before they were buried so they could be identified by relatives.
Sutopo admitted that search teams were still struggling to reach and evacuate the worst hit areas in Sulawesi. Many in Palu complained bitterly at the failure of rescue teams, overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis, to make it to their neighborhood in time.
A major problem is that the earthquake fractured and destroyed many of the roads, leaving some areas isolated and inaccessible. Heavy equipment needed for the rescue operations only began arriving on Monday.
Many people are also believed to still be trapped under shattered houses in Palu’s Balaroa neighborhood, where the earthquake caused the ground to heave up and down violently “I and about 50 other people in Balaroa were able to save ourselves by riding on a mound of soil which was getting higher and higher,” resident Siti Hajat told MetroTV, adding her house was destroyed.
President Joko Widodo urged survivors to be patient as they wait for aid to be distributed upon arriving in Palu.
On Tuesday the official death toll from the disaster rose to 1,234, according to disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho. It is still expected to climb steeply in the coming days.
Signs propped along roads in Sulawesi read “We Need Food” and “We Need Support”, while children begged for cash in the streets. Queues for fuel, which has almost run out in the area, were miles long and the national police and hundreds of troops were deployed to guard petrol stations and food shops.
Around 62,000 people have been displaced by the twin disaster, with many still trying to escape the devastated region. Over 3,000 people flocked to Palu’s airport on Monday, trying to board military aircraft or one of the few commercial flights leaving the airport, which has suffered severe damage. Video footage showed crowds screaming in anger because they were not able to get on a military plane.
“We have not eaten for three days,” one woman yelled. “We just want to be safe.”
Sabtarina Dwi Febriyanti, a programme manager with charity World Vision on the ground in Palu, described how security was becoming an increasing concern.
“There is chaos because there is not enough supplies of food and clean water and medicine and people are getting more and more frustrated,” she said.
“People have begun robbing the shops just to survive and people keep hijacking the trucks bringing in the aid. I keep seeing people screaming: ‘I need to survive, I need to survive.’ So it makes the situation here uncomfortable and security is a big problem, especially because there over 500 prisoners on the loose. Things are just getting worse; it is worrying.”
Desperation exploded into anger in Donggala, the town closest to the epicentre of the massive earthquake and tsunami, with residents begging Indonesia’s president to help them as hungry survivors crawled into stores and grabbed boxes of food.
“Pay attention to Donggala, Mr Jokowi. Pay attention to Donggala,” yelled one resident in footage broadcast on local television, referring to president Joko “Jokowi” Widodo. “There are still a lot of unattended villages here.”
Most of the attention so far has focused on the biggest affected city, Palu. Donggala and other outlying areas have received little assistance largely due to impassable roads and many have been forced to take food from stores.
“Everyone is hungry and they want to eat after several days of not eating,” said Donggala’s administration head Kasman Lassa. “We have anticipated it by providing food, rice, but it was not enough. There are many people here. So, on this issue, we cannot pressure them to hold much longer.”
On Monday, in Ulujadi district in western Palu, residents deprived of food and water blocked roads to intercept trucks carrying food supplies, with police officers reportedly unable to restrain the crowds. In Tawaeli district in central Palu, crowds gathered at the port to intercept government aid arriving on boats.
The process began on Monday of burying the bodies, which had begun piling up in the local army hospital, in a mass grave measuring 100m long. Photos were taken of the corpses before they were buried so they could be identified by relatives.
Sutopo admitted that search teams were still struggling to reach and evacuate the worst hit areas in Sulawesi. Many in Palu complained bitterly at the failure of rescue teams, overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis, to make it to their neighborhood in time.
A major problem is that the earthquake fractured and destroyed many of the roads, leaving some areas isolated and inaccessible. Heavy equipment needed for the rescue operations only began arriving on Monday.
Many people are also believed to still be trapped under shattered houses in Palu’s Balaroa neighborhood, where the earthquake caused the ground to heave up and down violently “I and about 50 other people in Balaroa were able to save ourselves by riding on a mound of soil which was getting higher and higher,” resident Siti Hajat told MetroTV, adding her house was destroyed.
President Joko Widodo urged survivors to be patient as they wait for aid to be distributed upon arriving in Palu.
Argentines sacrifice vacations, internet and even food as economic crisis intensifies
sandensea - demo underground
10/1/18
Argentina, Latin America’s third-largest economy is being whipsawed by rising inflation and a plunge in its currency, the peso - hurting everyone from laborers who are getting less work to professionals facing credit card bills with soaring interest rates.
The turbulence is the result of several factors: unclear policies, a foreign debt crisis, and an increase in U.S. interest rates have led investors to pull out of Argentina and into safer U.S. bonds.
President Mauricio Macri came to power in 2015 promising to reverse 12 years of protectionist, free-spending policies enacted by the leftist governments of Néstor Kirchner and his widow, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
But cuts to subsidies have instead led to sharply higher utility bills and fares, feeding inflation which under Macri has averaged 35% - 10 points higher than under his predecessor - and may reach 50% this year.
Wages are meanwhile rising by just 20%.
Critics consider the utility hikes effectively a tax increase amounting to 6% or more from average incomes - while $4 billion a year were granted in corporate and high-end tax cuts.
The economy grew last year by 2.9%; but GDP fell 4.2% in the second quarter of 2018 compared with a year earlier. Unemployment rose in June to 9.6% - the highest in 12 years - and another 60,000 jobs were lost in July.
The peso has lost over half its value so far this year, from 19 to 42 per dollar.
This has pushed up gasoline prices by over 60% - which impacts the price of many products, especially food. Argentina also suffered its worst drought since 2009 earlier this year, crippling soy exports and putting further pressure on food prices.
Stuck in the middle
The drop in purchasing power has also hit the middle class, which represents about 40% of the country’s population and were until recently strongly supportive of Macri.
The shrinking peso has made it more expensive to buy imported goods such as smartphones, or to travel abroad. Foreign spending by Argentine nationals fell abruptly in June by 28% - a $300 million monthly savings for the central bank dwarfed by $3 billion in capital flight a month.
Some have coped by dropping their internet service or sharing it with neighbors, while others have postponed buying a new home or car and have opted for public transport.
Over 130,000 borrowers with adjustable-rate (UVA) mortages promoted by Macri in 2016, are now facing steep negative amortization (loss of equity) or outright foreclosure as both their installments and principal rise - a situation similar to the 1981-82 Circular 1050 mortgage crisis during the last dictatorship.
From plaudits to bailout
Macri's image as a market-friendly businessman meant that early in his administration there was an inflow of cash from foreign lenders, which helped cover rising budget and external deficits.
Argentina sold $133 billion in bonds in Macri's first two years - more than any emerging market except South Korea. Foreign investors stopped buying in January however, popping last year's carry-trade debt bubble - known locally as the financial bicycle - and leading to wave of capital flight.
The crisis forced Argentina to request a $50 billion IMF credit line in June - a bailout conditioned on steep budget cuts. These cuts, plus an interest rate hike to 60% in a bid to shore up the peso, have exacerbated the recession.
And the crisis is unlikely to ease in the near future: The new central bank head, Guido Sandleris, announced he would "restrict the monetary base to reduce demand for dollars to a minimum."
Similar scorched-earth monetary policies during past financial crises in Argentina have failed to tame the dollar.
Nora Pastrana, 45, says she voted for Macri and his right-wing coalition — known as Cambiemos, or “Let's Change.”
“He promised change,” Pastrana said, “but change failed.”
Normally hectic Ninth of July Avenue at a near-standstill during a September 24th general strike - the fourth since Macri took office in 2015.
Macri has already spent the $15 billion IMF loan from June 22, mostly to cover capital flight by speculators.
"Our future is not in speculation and financial rackets," CTA labor federation head Pablo Micheli said. "That's for the loafers in the administration."
At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/argentines-sacrifice-vacations-internet-and-even-food-as-economic-crisis-intensifies/2018/09/27/2fc10082-c01e-11e8-9f4f-a1b7af255aa5_story.html
The turbulence is the result of several factors: unclear policies, a foreign debt crisis, and an increase in U.S. interest rates have led investors to pull out of Argentina and into safer U.S. bonds.
President Mauricio Macri came to power in 2015 promising to reverse 12 years of protectionist, free-spending policies enacted by the leftist governments of Néstor Kirchner and his widow, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.
But cuts to subsidies have instead led to sharply higher utility bills and fares, feeding inflation which under Macri has averaged 35% - 10 points higher than under his predecessor - and may reach 50% this year.
Wages are meanwhile rising by just 20%.
Critics consider the utility hikes effectively a tax increase amounting to 6% or more from average incomes - while $4 billion a year were granted in corporate and high-end tax cuts.
The economy grew last year by 2.9%; but GDP fell 4.2% in the second quarter of 2018 compared with a year earlier. Unemployment rose in June to 9.6% - the highest in 12 years - and another 60,000 jobs were lost in July.
The peso has lost over half its value so far this year, from 19 to 42 per dollar.
This has pushed up gasoline prices by over 60% - which impacts the price of many products, especially food. Argentina also suffered its worst drought since 2009 earlier this year, crippling soy exports and putting further pressure on food prices.
Stuck in the middle
The drop in purchasing power has also hit the middle class, which represents about 40% of the country’s population and were until recently strongly supportive of Macri.
The shrinking peso has made it more expensive to buy imported goods such as smartphones, or to travel abroad. Foreign spending by Argentine nationals fell abruptly in June by 28% - a $300 million monthly savings for the central bank dwarfed by $3 billion in capital flight a month.
Some have coped by dropping their internet service or sharing it with neighbors, while others have postponed buying a new home or car and have opted for public transport.
Over 130,000 borrowers with adjustable-rate (UVA) mortages promoted by Macri in 2016, are now facing steep negative amortization (loss of equity) or outright foreclosure as both their installments and principal rise - a situation similar to the 1981-82 Circular 1050 mortgage crisis during the last dictatorship.
From plaudits to bailout
Macri's image as a market-friendly businessman meant that early in his administration there was an inflow of cash from foreign lenders, which helped cover rising budget and external deficits.
Argentina sold $133 billion in bonds in Macri's first two years - more than any emerging market except South Korea. Foreign investors stopped buying in January however, popping last year's carry-trade debt bubble - known locally as the financial bicycle - and leading to wave of capital flight.
The crisis forced Argentina to request a $50 billion IMF credit line in June - a bailout conditioned on steep budget cuts. These cuts, plus an interest rate hike to 60% in a bid to shore up the peso, have exacerbated the recession.
And the crisis is unlikely to ease in the near future: The new central bank head, Guido Sandleris, announced he would "restrict the monetary base to reduce demand for dollars to a minimum."
Similar scorched-earth monetary policies during past financial crises in Argentina have failed to tame the dollar.
Nora Pastrana, 45, says she voted for Macri and his right-wing coalition — known as Cambiemos, or “Let's Change.”
“He promised change,” Pastrana said, “but change failed.”
Normally hectic Ninth of July Avenue at a near-standstill during a September 24th general strike - the fourth since Macri took office in 2015.
Macri has already spent the $15 billion IMF loan from June 22, mostly to cover capital flight by speculators.
"Our future is not in speculation and financial rackets," CTA labor federation head Pablo Micheli said. "That's for the loafers in the administration."
At: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/argentines-sacrifice-vacations-internet-and-even-food-as-economic-crisis-intensifies/2018/09/27/2fc10082-c01e-11e8-9f4f-a1b7af255aa5_story.html
Brazil sees black female candidates surge after murder of rising star
Anna Jean Kaiser in Rio de Janeiro
the guardian
Sun 30 Sep 2018 05.00 EDT
A picture of the Rio de Janeiro city councillor Marielle Franco is seen where she was shot dead. Photograph: Ricardo Moraes/Reuters
Marielle Franco set an example in a country where black women make up 28% of population but hold 2% of congressional seats
The last time Renata Souza saw her friend and colleague Marielle Franco, they hugged and kissed and said they’d see each other the following morning.
They were scheduled to meet with higher-ups from their political party to finalize Franco as a vice-gubernatorial candidate for the state of Rio de Janeiro.
But minutes after they parted, a reporter called Souza to tell her that Franco had been murdered.
A breakout star on Rio’s political scene, Franco was a black woman from one of the city’s poorest favelas who defied the odds to become the fifth most voted-for councilor in 2016.
She was an outspoken critic of Rio’s heavy-handed police and had recently become the chair of the committee overseeing the city’s federally mandated military intervention.
Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes died instantly when two men opened fire on their car on 14 March in what police believe was a targeted assassination.
No arrests have been made, but as Brazil prepares for legislative elections, Franco’s legacy can be seen across the country: an unprecedented number of black women have registered to run for office – and many invoke her example on the campaign trail.
As well as choosing a new president next Sunday, 7 October, Brazilians will also elect 513 congresspeople, 54 senators and more than 1,000 state legislators.
Although she was a local politician, Franco’s murder fuelled an urgent conversation about racial and gender representation among Brazil’s elected officials.
While black women are 28% of the population – Brazil’s largest demographic group – they only hold 2% of seats in congress. This new generation of politicians – often campaigning with the slogan “Marielle presente” – hopes to start levelling the playing field.
Souza is now running for a seat as a state legislator. “I always thought about being on the frontline myself, but Marielle’s murder brought a sense of urgency. I hesitated for months, but knew I had to run,” she said.
“Now I feel her every single moment – in every flyer I hand out, every speech I give, every conversation, every joke.”
Souza and Franco met as teenagers in a college prep course in Maré, the Rio favela where they both grew up. They both won scholarships to one of Rio’s best private universities and went on to pursue graduate degrees. They became outspoken human rights activists and became involved with a newly founded leftwing party, the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). After Franco was elected in 2016, Souza became her chief of staff.
“I feel a responsibility to continue what we’d been building for the 18 years we were activists together,” Souza explained. If elected, she will focus on legislation related to reducing the number of homicides of poor, black residents in Rio’s periphery.
The first bill she hopes to pass would ban police operations during the hours when children are going and coming from school.
Ahead of next month’s election, a group of women launched Black Women Decide, a collective aiming to raise black female candidates’ profiles and present data about the challenges confronting black women in politics.
Brazil’s current congress includes only 10 black women. In the 2014 election, 2.5% of total campaign spending for congressional candidates went towards black women, even though they represented 12.6% of candidacies
Juliana Marques, a member of the collective, says the dynamics of funding create a vicious cycle, as parties tend to invest most money in incumbent candidates.
“The rules of the game are rigged. But we’re the largest portion of the population – for the sake of democracy, we should have lawmakers that are at least somewhat similar to the demographic makeup of the population.”
Many voters agree.
“Marielle was our voice. It was such a blow to lose her, but I never expected in my lifetime to see so many black women running,” said Martilde Guilhermina, 59, at a rally in Rio, where Souza and other black female candidates were speaking. “Politics is a space where we black women have always been denied access.”
Igor Soares, a high school teacher, said: “You don’t need to look far in Brazil to see how diverse it is … I’d like to see politics reflect that more, in order to make Brazil less racist and less machista.”
After a recent rally in Rio, Dani Monteiro, a 27-year-old from a Rio favela also running for a seat in the state legislature, said: “Most of the representatives in the state legislature are white men. They can’t even imagine living the reality we live – they don’t live with constant shootings, having to protect your kids from stray bullets.
“We don’t yet know the scale of what we’re doing: we’re in the eye of the storm now — but I really think we’re a part of a historic moment in Brazil,” Monteiro said.
Franco’s legacy has reached far beyond Rio: hundreds of kilometers north in the Amazon region, Vivi Reis, who is running to be a deputy in the lower house, also cites Franco as a political inspiration.
“Her murder was a way of trying to shut us up, in the most brutal way, but it’s done the opposite of that. Now we’re screaming louder.”
The last time Renata Souza saw her friend and colleague Marielle Franco, they hugged and kissed and said they’d see each other the following morning.
They were scheduled to meet with higher-ups from their political party to finalize Franco as a vice-gubernatorial candidate for the state of Rio de Janeiro.
But minutes after they parted, a reporter called Souza to tell her that Franco had been murdered.
A breakout star on Rio’s political scene, Franco was a black woman from one of the city’s poorest favelas who defied the odds to become the fifth most voted-for councilor in 2016.
She was an outspoken critic of Rio’s heavy-handed police and had recently become the chair of the committee overseeing the city’s federally mandated military intervention.
Franco and her driver Anderson Gomes died instantly when two men opened fire on their car on 14 March in what police believe was a targeted assassination.
No arrests have been made, but as Brazil prepares for legislative elections, Franco’s legacy can be seen across the country: an unprecedented number of black women have registered to run for office – and many invoke her example on the campaign trail.
As well as choosing a new president next Sunday, 7 October, Brazilians will also elect 513 congresspeople, 54 senators and more than 1,000 state legislators.
Although she was a local politician, Franco’s murder fuelled an urgent conversation about racial and gender representation among Brazil’s elected officials.
While black women are 28% of the population – Brazil’s largest demographic group – they only hold 2% of seats in congress. This new generation of politicians – often campaigning with the slogan “Marielle presente” – hopes to start levelling the playing field.
Souza is now running for a seat as a state legislator. “I always thought about being on the frontline myself, but Marielle’s murder brought a sense of urgency. I hesitated for months, but knew I had to run,” she said.
“Now I feel her every single moment – in every flyer I hand out, every speech I give, every conversation, every joke.”
Souza and Franco met as teenagers in a college prep course in Maré, the Rio favela where they both grew up. They both won scholarships to one of Rio’s best private universities and went on to pursue graduate degrees. They became outspoken human rights activists and became involved with a newly founded leftwing party, the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). After Franco was elected in 2016, Souza became her chief of staff.
“I feel a responsibility to continue what we’d been building for the 18 years we were activists together,” Souza explained. If elected, she will focus on legislation related to reducing the number of homicides of poor, black residents in Rio’s periphery.
The first bill she hopes to pass would ban police operations during the hours when children are going and coming from school.
Ahead of next month’s election, a group of women launched Black Women Decide, a collective aiming to raise black female candidates’ profiles and present data about the challenges confronting black women in politics.
Brazil’s current congress includes only 10 black women. In the 2014 election, 2.5% of total campaign spending for congressional candidates went towards black women, even though they represented 12.6% of candidacies
Juliana Marques, a member of the collective, says the dynamics of funding create a vicious cycle, as parties tend to invest most money in incumbent candidates.
“The rules of the game are rigged. But we’re the largest portion of the population – for the sake of democracy, we should have lawmakers that are at least somewhat similar to the demographic makeup of the population.”
Many voters agree.
“Marielle was our voice. It was such a blow to lose her, but I never expected in my lifetime to see so many black women running,” said Martilde Guilhermina, 59, at a rally in Rio, where Souza and other black female candidates were speaking. “Politics is a space where we black women have always been denied access.”
Igor Soares, a high school teacher, said: “You don’t need to look far in Brazil to see how diverse it is … I’d like to see politics reflect that more, in order to make Brazil less racist and less machista.”
After a recent rally in Rio, Dani Monteiro, a 27-year-old from a Rio favela also running for a seat in the state legislature, said: “Most of the representatives in the state legislature are white men. They can’t even imagine living the reality we live – they don’t live with constant shootings, having to protect your kids from stray bullets.
“We don’t yet know the scale of what we’re doing: we’re in the eye of the storm now — but I really think we’re a part of a historic moment in Brazil,” Monteiro said.
Franco’s legacy has reached far beyond Rio: hundreds of kilometers north in the Amazon region, Vivi Reis, who is running to be a deputy in the lower house, also cites Franco as a political inspiration.
“Her murder was a way of trying to shut us up, in the most brutal way, but it’s done the opposite of that. Now we’re screaming louder.”
Indonesian quake, tsunami kills hundreds, death toll seen rising
SEPTEMBER 28, 2018 / 6:14 PM
PALU, Indonesia (Reuters) - At least 384 people were killed, many swept away as giant waves crashed onto beaches, when a major earthquake and tsunami hit the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, authorities said on Saturday.
Hundreds had gathered for a festival on the beach in the city of Palu on Friday when waves as high as six meters (18 feet) smashed onshore at dusk, sweeping many to their death and destroying anything in their path, following a 7.5 magnitude earthquake.
“When the (tsunami) threat arose yesterday, people were still doing their activities on the beach and did not immediately run and they became victims,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency BNPB said in a briefing in Jakarta.
“The tsunami didn’t come by itself, it dragged cars, logs, houses, it hit everything on land,” Nugroho said, adding that the tsunami had traveled across the open sea at speeds of 800 kph (497 mph) before striking the shoreline.
Some people climbed six meter trees to escape the tsunami and survived, he said.
Amateur footage shown by local TV stations showed waves crashing into houses along Palu’s shoreline, scattering shipping containers and flooding into a mosque in the city.
Around 16,700 people were evacuating to 24 centers in Palu.
DEATH TOLL SEEN RISING
Aftershocks rocked the coastal city until Saturday afternoon following the massive earthquake on Friday, which triggered the tsunami. The series of earthquakes were felt in an area with 2.4 million people.
Nugroho described the damage as “extensive” and said thousands of houses, hospitals, shopping malls and hotels had collapsed. A bridge washed away and the main highway to Palu was cut off due to a landslide.
Bodies of some victims were found trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings, he said, adding 540 people were injured and 29 were missing. Dozens of injured people were being treated in makeshift medical tents set up outdoors, TV images showed.
Photos confirmed by authorities showed bodies being lined up along the street on Saturday, some in bags and some with their faces covered with clothes.
Nugroho said the casualties and the damage could be greater along the coastline 300 km (190 miles) north of Palu, an area called Donggala, which is closer to the epicenter of the quake.
Communications “were totally crippled with no information” from Donggala, Nugroho said. More than 600,000 people live in Donggala and Palu.
“We’re now getting limited communications about the destruction in Palu city, but we have heard nothing from Donggala and this is extremely worrying. There are more than 300,000 people living there,” the Red Cross said in a statement, adding that its staff and volunteers were heading to the affected areas.
“This is already a tragedy, but it could get much worse,” it said.
Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the death toll could rise to thousands.
PRESIDENT TO VISIT DISASTER AREA
Indonesia’s meteorological and geophysics agency BMKG issued a tsunami warning after the quake, but lifted it 34 minutes later.
The agency on Saturday was widely criticized for not informing that a tsunami had hit Palu, though officials said waves had come within the time the warning was issued.
The quake and tsunami caused a major power outage that cut communications around Palu making it difficult for authorities to coordinate rescue efforts.
The military has started sending in cargo planes with aid, authorities said, from Jakarta and other cities, but evacuees still badly need food and other basic necessities.
The city’s airport has been reopened only for relief efforts and will remain closed until Oct. 4 for commercial flights, Nugroho said. The airport’s runway and air traffic control tower were damaged in the quake, authorities said.
President Joko Widodo is scheduled to visit evacuation centers in Palu on Sunday.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire and is regularly hit by earthquakes.
In August, a series of major quakes killed over 500 people in the tourist island of Lombok and destroyed dozens of villages along its northern coast.
Palu was hit by tsunami in 1927 and 1968, according to BNPB.
Hundreds had gathered for a festival on the beach in the city of Palu on Friday when waves as high as six meters (18 feet) smashed onshore at dusk, sweeping many to their death and destroying anything in their path, following a 7.5 magnitude earthquake.
“When the (tsunami) threat arose yesterday, people were still doing their activities on the beach and did not immediately run and they became victims,” Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, the spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster mitigation agency BNPB said in a briefing in Jakarta.
“The tsunami didn’t come by itself, it dragged cars, logs, houses, it hit everything on land,” Nugroho said, adding that the tsunami had traveled across the open sea at speeds of 800 kph (497 mph) before striking the shoreline.
Some people climbed six meter trees to escape the tsunami and survived, he said.
Amateur footage shown by local TV stations showed waves crashing into houses along Palu’s shoreline, scattering shipping containers and flooding into a mosque in the city.
Around 16,700 people were evacuating to 24 centers in Palu.
DEATH TOLL SEEN RISING
Aftershocks rocked the coastal city until Saturday afternoon following the massive earthquake on Friday, which triggered the tsunami. The series of earthquakes were felt in an area with 2.4 million people.
Nugroho described the damage as “extensive” and said thousands of houses, hospitals, shopping malls and hotels had collapsed. A bridge washed away and the main highway to Palu was cut off due to a landslide.
Bodies of some victims were found trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings, he said, adding 540 people were injured and 29 were missing. Dozens of injured people were being treated in makeshift medical tents set up outdoors, TV images showed.
Photos confirmed by authorities showed bodies being lined up along the street on Saturday, some in bags and some with their faces covered with clothes.
Nugroho said the casualties and the damage could be greater along the coastline 300 km (190 miles) north of Palu, an area called Donggala, which is closer to the epicenter of the quake.
Communications “were totally crippled with no information” from Donggala, Nugroho said. More than 600,000 people live in Donggala and Palu.
“We’re now getting limited communications about the destruction in Palu city, but we have heard nothing from Donggala and this is extremely worrying. There are more than 300,000 people living there,” the Red Cross said in a statement, adding that its staff and volunteers were heading to the affected areas.
“This is already a tragedy, but it could get much worse,” it said.
Vice President Jusuf Kalla said the death toll could rise to thousands.
PRESIDENT TO VISIT DISASTER AREA
Indonesia’s meteorological and geophysics agency BMKG issued a tsunami warning after the quake, but lifted it 34 minutes later.
The agency on Saturday was widely criticized for not informing that a tsunami had hit Palu, though officials said waves had come within the time the warning was issued.
The quake and tsunami caused a major power outage that cut communications around Palu making it difficult for authorities to coordinate rescue efforts.
The military has started sending in cargo planes with aid, authorities said, from Jakarta and other cities, but evacuees still badly need food and other basic necessities.
The city’s airport has been reopened only for relief efforts and will remain closed until Oct. 4 for commercial flights, Nugroho said. The airport’s runway and air traffic control tower were damaged in the quake, authorities said.
President Joko Widodo is scheduled to visit evacuation centers in Palu on Sunday.
Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire and is regularly hit by earthquakes.
In August, a series of major quakes killed over 500 people in the tourist island of Lombok and destroyed dozens of villages along its northern coast.
Palu was hit by tsunami in 1927 and 1968, according to BNPB.
opinion: Central American Women Are Fighting Extractive Industries on their Land—and Winning
by Laura Carlsen | the smirking chimp
September 24, 2018 - 6:23am
“They’re diverting the rivers that water our food crops into mining, hydroelectric plants and mono-cropping. They break up our communities, and stealing our happiness, because when we work with Mother Earth and with our plants, that connection makes us happy, but they come in with their plans and strategies and separate us from our land and each other.”
A group of Central American women land defenders listened closely as Maria Guadalupe, Mayan feminist and land defender, described the impact of extractive industries on indigenous and peasant women and their families. Many heads nodded in agreement. They all confront—and resist—land and resource grabs that transfer whole territories into the hands of transnational corporations, with the complicity of local and national governments.
The battle to stop the spread of extractive industries pits indigenous and peasant communities against powerful business interests, backed up by politicians who encourage the foreign investments that convert millennial ways of life into cash—for them. These communities employ a broad definition of extractivisim. It’s not only the extraction of minerals, but corporate plantations that occupy huge tracts of land for cash crops, megaprojects that take resources and displace the local people, extraction of traditional knowledge to market it. For the women land defenders, the battle isn’t just over who controls resources for what use. Their culture, future, happiness and life itself are at stake.
Central American women land defenders recently sat down to share their experiences and hear from experts and activists in Antigua, Guatemala. They talked about feeling isolated, being afraid (Latin America is the most dangerous place in the world for land defenders), the risk of exhaustion and despair, but they also talked nuts-and-bolts about how to win.
Tools for Defending Land and Life
The meeting of women from Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala, Panama and Nicaragua sought “to deepen our joint understanding and analysis of how extractive companies operate and how they impact different aspects of life, particularly for women”, according to the convener, Just Associates, an international feminist movement-building organization.
It’s a critical objective because in the battle between communities and extractive industries the odds are so uneven and the stakes are so high. Two ways of viewing nature and humanity’s relationship to it clash on this battlefield. The profound difference shows in the language employed. Women defenders reject the term “natural resources”, saying “resource” refers to an asset and land and water and minerals are gifts, indispensable for life on earth. “Extracting” private capital gain from the planet’s vital elements, while destroying or polluting them, is a basic characteristic of the modern capitalist model that violates a code for sustaining life that their peoples have lived by for centuries. The clash in worldviews sparks conflicts, and often extractive projects use violence to impose new forms of corporate land use.
This effects women’s daily lives, especially for those who stand up to defend their territory and way of life. Dalila, of Madre Tierra, said the seven communities of the southern coast of Guatemala where they live and work have become "tiny islands in a sea of monocultures". She states that crop dusters routinely drop poisons on their subsistence food gardens and their bodies, causing serious health problems.
Concentration has eliminated many small farms already. “The businessmen have a lot of land in a few hands, but peasant farmers have no land to work,” Lilian from Honduras complained. Where she lives, vast tracts have been taken over by “the monster industry” of sugar cane plantations. “For us, there are no laws; there are no rights."
The landscape of these women’s lives has changed dramatically since their governments laid out the welcome mat to transnational extractive industries. Mining is classic extractivisim, with nearly a third of national territory in some countries granted in concessions to mining companies, but mono-crops and energy projects also affect hundreds of communities. They have the same impacts of loss of access to land and water, pollution and violence.
Despite the odds, the Guatemalan group “La Puya Peaceful Resistance” shines as an example of how women can halt the spread of these projects. La Puya has, for now, completely stopped mining operations in its community. Although they await final notice of cancelation of the project, women who literally laid their bodies on the line to block the entrance of mining equipment became an inspiration--and learned some important lessons along the way.
Community leaders Ana Sandoval and Miriam Pixtun listed the keys to their success: 1) include everyone--women and men, people of different ages and religions, etc.--in all planning and activities; 2) no direct dialogue with the company—insist that public institutions enforce the laws fairly and impartially; 3) develop collective processes with no single leader, to avoid setting up an easy target for repression or stifling grassroots democracy; 4) fight simultaneously in the courts and in the streets, and 5) strengthen local culture to strengthen unity, identity and resistance.
Other women defenders contributed to an expanding toolbox for defense: Build networks with universities and NGOs, train defenders in leadership and organizing skills, find out the facts (what is open-pit mining? How does the technology work? Who benefits from the wealth created? What are the major companies involved? What public policies apply?), document and share what works, make self-care and caring for each other a priority, and link up with groups in countries where the companies are based to build campaigns to expose and pressure their management and shareholders.
The group agreed on the importance—and the difficulty—of measuring the impact of extractivisim in their communities. “Everything is related to everything, everywhere”, noted the ecologist Magaly Rey. A chemical spill, say, in one community will be felt far downstream, among scores of human and animal populations. “Rivers are connectors of life, not engineering pipelines, “she warned. The same with the air that circulates around the planet and the vast network of underground aquifers and mineral and oil reservoirs.
This interconnectedness makes the task at hand overwhelming and increases the risks. But it also provides women defenders with more allies and greater scope of vision. African palm plantations, gold mining and sugar cane production pose the same threats to communities in Honduras, Guatemala and South Africa.
The conclusion arose both from the world view of the women and the reality they face: “It’s all one issue—the defense of life.”
A group of Central American women land defenders listened closely as Maria Guadalupe, Mayan feminist and land defender, described the impact of extractive industries on indigenous and peasant women and their families. Many heads nodded in agreement. They all confront—and resist—land and resource grabs that transfer whole territories into the hands of transnational corporations, with the complicity of local and national governments.
The battle to stop the spread of extractive industries pits indigenous and peasant communities against powerful business interests, backed up by politicians who encourage the foreign investments that convert millennial ways of life into cash—for them. These communities employ a broad definition of extractivisim. It’s not only the extraction of minerals, but corporate plantations that occupy huge tracts of land for cash crops, megaprojects that take resources and displace the local people, extraction of traditional knowledge to market it. For the women land defenders, the battle isn’t just over who controls resources for what use. Their culture, future, happiness and life itself are at stake.
Central American women land defenders recently sat down to share their experiences and hear from experts and activists in Antigua, Guatemala. They talked about feeling isolated, being afraid (Latin America is the most dangerous place in the world for land defenders), the risk of exhaustion and despair, but they also talked nuts-and-bolts about how to win.
Tools for Defending Land and Life
The meeting of women from Honduras, Mexico, Guatemala, Panama and Nicaragua sought “to deepen our joint understanding and analysis of how extractive companies operate and how they impact different aspects of life, particularly for women”, according to the convener, Just Associates, an international feminist movement-building organization.
It’s a critical objective because in the battle between communities and extractive industries the odds are so uneven and the stakes are so high. Two ways of viewing nature and humanity’s relationship to it clash on this battlefield. The profound difference shows in the language employed. Women defenders reject the term “natural resources”, saying “resource” refers to an asset and land and water and minerals are gifts, indispensable for life on earth. “Extracting” private capital gain from the planet’s vital elements, while destroying or polluting them, is a basic characteristic of the modern capitalist model that violates a code for sustaining life that their peoples have lived by for centuries. The clash in worldviews sparks conflicts, and often extractive projects use violence to impose new forms of corporate land use.
This effects women’s daily lives, especially for those who stand up to defend their territory and way of life. Dalila, of Madre Tierra, said the seven communities of the southern coast of Guatemala where they live and work have become "tiny islands in a sea of monocultures". She states that crop dusters routinely drop poisons on their subsistence food gardens and their bodies, causing serious health problems.
Concentration has eliminated many small farms already. “The businessmen have a lot of land in a few hands, but peasant farmers have no land to work,” Lilian from Honduras complained. Where she lives, vast tracts have been taken over by “the monster industry” of sugar cane plantations. “For us, there are no laws; there are no rights."
The landscape of these women’s lives has changed dramatically since their governments laid out the welcome mat to transnational extractive industries. Mining is classic extractivisim, with nearly a third of national territory in some countries granted in concessions to mining companies, but mono-crops and energy projects also affect hundreds of communities. They have the same impacts of loss of access to land and water, pollution and violence.
Despite the odds, the Guatemalan group “La Puya Peaceful Resistance” shines as an example of how women can halt the spread of these projects. La Puya has, for now, completely stopped mining operations in its community. Although they await final notice of cancelation of the project, women who literally laid their bodies on the line to block the entrance of mining equipment became an inspiration--and learned some important lessons along the way.
Community leaders Ana Sandoval and Miriam Pixtun listed the keys to their success: 1) include everyone--women and men, people of different ages and religions, etc.--in all planning and activities; 2) no direct dialogue with the company—insist that public institutions enforce the laws fairly and impartially; 3) develop collective processes with no single leader, to avoid setting up an easy target for repression or stifling grassroots democracy; 4) fight simultaneously in the courts and in the streets, and 5) strengthen local culture to strengthen unity, identity and resistance.
Other women defenders contributed to an expanding toolbox for defense: Build networks with universities and NGOs, train defenders in leadership and organizing skills, find out the facts (what is open-pit mining? How does the technology work? Who benefits from the wealth created? What are the major companies involved? What public policies apply?), document and share what works, make self-care and caring for each other a priority, and link up with groups in countries where the companies are based to build campaigns to expose and pressure their management and shareholders.
The group agreed on the importance—and the difficulty—of measuring the impact of extractivisim in their communities. “Everything is related to everything, everywhere”, noted the ecologist Magaly Rey. A chemical spill, say, in one community will be felt far downstream, among scores of human and animal populations. “Rivers are connectors of life, not engineering pipelines, “she warned. The same with the air that circulates around the planet and the vast network of underground aquifers and mineral and oil reservoirs.
This interconnectedness makes the task at hand overwhelming and increases the risks. But it also provides women defenders with more allies and greater scope of vision. African palm plantations, gold mining and sugar cane production pose the same threats to communities in Honduras, Guatemala and South Africa.
The conclusion arose both from the world view of the women and the reality they face: “It’s all one issue—the defense of life.”
UNITED NATIONS ACCIDENTALLY EXPOSED PASSWORDS AND SENSITIVE INFORMATION TO THE WHOLE INTERNET
Micah Leev - the intercept
September 24 2018, 6:57 a.m.
THE UNITED NATIONS accidentally published passwords, internal documents, and technical details about websites when it misconfigured popular project management service Trello, issue tracking app Jira, and office suite Google Docs.
The mistakes made sensitive material available online to anyone with the proper link, rather than only to specific users who should have access. Affected data included credentials for a U.N. file server, the video conferencing system at the U.N.’s language school, and a web development environment for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Security researcher Kushagra Pathak discovered the accidental leak and notified the U.N. about what he found a little over a month ago. As of today, much of the material appears to have been taken down.
In an online chat, Pathak said he found the sensitive information by running searches on Google. The searches, in turn, produced public Trello pages, some of which contained links to the public Google Docs and Jira pages.
Trello projects are organized into “boards” that contain lists of tasks called “cards.” Boards can be public or private. After finding one public Trello board run by the U.N., Pathak found additional public U.N. boards by using “tricks like by checking if the users of one Trello board are also active on some other boards and so on.” One U.N. Trello board contained links to an issue tracker hosted on Jira, which itself contained even more sensitive information. Pathak also discovered links to documents hosted on Google Docs and Google Drive that were configured to be accessible to anyone who knew their web addresses. Some of these documents contained passwords.
Pathak has become something of a specialist in finding private information on public Trello boards. Earlier this year, he discovered a range of private data, including passwords and security plans, belonging to the governments of the United Kingdom and Canada on 50 unprotected boards. Before that, he uncovered a large swath of sensitive data on Trello belonging to dozens of other organizations, including a “well-known ride-sharing company.” Some of the companies used publicly visible Trello boards as a way to internally share passwords for logging into their websites and contact databases, as well as accounts for email, social media, and credit card processing.
Pathak’s research has served to highlight just how often organizations completely fail when trying to handle the passwords and myriad other secrets needed to work and publish online. Here is just some of the sensitive information that the U.N. accidentally made accessible to anyone who Googled for it:
On August 20, Pathak reported exposed data to the U.N.’s information security team. On September 4, the U.N. replied to say it would review his findings. On September 12, another U.N. email stated, “We were not able to reproduce ths[sic] reported vulnerability. May we request you to provide the exact Google search criteria that was used?” Also on September 12, The Intercept contacted the U.N.
During this period, Pathak continued to report more sensitive information to the U.N. In all, he reported 44 Trello boards, several Google Drive and Google Docs links that contained sensitive information, and sensitive information from a public U.N. account on Jira.
The U.N. began taking down the exposed information on September 13, after The Intercept contacted the organization for comment. “Trello is one of various tools that U.N. staff use to share materials both internally and externally with partners,” U.N. spokesperson Florencia Soto Nino-Martinez said in an email. “Some of the boards listed have communications materials which are not sensitive, while some have outdated information. However, we are reviewing all boards on the list to ensure that no passwords or credentials are shared through this medium.”
“We take security very seriously and have reached out to all staff reminding them of the risks of using a third-party platform to share content and to take the necessary precautions to ensure no sensitive content is public,” she added.
Trello boards, as well as documents hosted on Google Drive and Google Docs, are private by default. The user must manually change settings to make this information public for anyone on the internet to view. Pathak previously suggested that Trello add new safeguards to discourage the exposure of sensitive data. At the time, Trello’s CEO stated that “we strive to make sure public boards are being created intentionally and have built in safeguards to confirm the intention of a user before they make a board publicly visible. Additionally, visibility settings are displayed persistently on the top of every board.”
Pathak believes that people often make their organizations’ sensitive data public simply because it’s more convenient. This way they can “share the details present on the board with their team members just by sharing the URL of the board with them without adding them to the board,” Pathak said.
“Adding people to the board seems to be huge task for these people, but in fact it is really easy,” he added.
The mistakes made sensitive material available online to anyone with the proper link, rather than only to specific users who should have access. Affected data included credentials for a U.N. file server, the video conferencing system at the U.N.’s language school, and a web development environment for the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Security researcher Kushagra Pathak discovered the accidental leak and notified the U.N. about what he found a little over a month ago. As of today, much of the material appears to have been taken down.
In an online chat, Pathak said he found the sensitive information by running searches on Google. The searches, in turn, produced public Trello pages, some of which contained links to the public Google Docs and Jira pages.
Trello projects are organized into “boards” that contain lists of tasks called “cards.” Boards can be public or private. After finding one public Trello board run by the U.N., Pathak found additional public U.N. boards by using “tricks like by checking if the users of one Trello board are also active on some other boards and so on.” One U.N. Trello board contained links to an issue tracker hosted on Jira, which itself contained even more sensitive information. Pathak also discovered links to documents hosted on Google Docs and Google Drive that were configured to be accessible to anyone who knew their web addresses. Some of these documents contained passwords.
Pathak has become something of a specialist in finding private information on public Trello boards. Earlier this year, he discovered a range of private data, including passwords and security plans, belonging to the governments of the United Kingdom and Canada on 50 unprotected boards. Before that, he uncovered a large swath of sensitive data on Trello belonging to dozens of other organizations, including a “well-known ride-sharing company.” Some of the companies used publicly visible Trello boards as a way to internally share passwords for logging into their websites and contact databases, as well as accounts for email, social media, and credit card processing.
Pathak’s research has served to highlight just how often organizations completely fail when trying to handle the passwords and myriad other secrets needed to work and publish online. Here is just some of the sensitive information that the U.N. accidentally made accessible to anyone who Googled for it:
- A social media team promoting the U.N.’s “peace and security” efforts published credentials to access a U.N. remote file access, or FTP, server in a Trello card coordinating promotion of the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers. It is not clear what information was on the server; Pathak said he did not connect to it.
- The U.N.’s Language and Communication Programme, which offers language courses at U.N. Headquarters in New York City, published credentials for a Google account and a Vimeo account. The program also exposed, on a publicly visible Trello board, credentials for a test environment for a human resources web app. It also made public a Google Docs spreadsheet, linked from a public Trello board, that included a detailed meeting schedule for 2018, along with passwords to remotely access the program’s video conference system to join these meetings.
- One public Trello board used by the developers of Humanitarian Response and ReliefWeb, both websites run by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, included sensitive information like internal task lists and meeting notes. One public card from the board had a PDF, marked “for internal use only,” that contained a map of all U.N. buildings in New York City. Another card had an attached PDF that included a phone tree with names and phones numbers of people working for a division of U.N.’s human resources department. Some cards contained links to internal documents hosted on Google Docs that, in turn, contained sensitive information about web development projects, including a web address and password to access a staging environment to test early features of the website.
- The U.N. website developers also used a public Jira bug tracker that contained detailed technical information about how the sites were developed and what issues they were having.
On August 20, Pathak reported exposed data to the U.N.’s information security team. On September 4, the U.N. replied to say it would review his findings. On September 12, another U.N. email stated, “We were not able to reproduce ths[sic] reported vulnerability. May we request you to provide the exact Google search criteria that was used?” Also on September 12, The Intercept contacted the U.N.
During this period, Pathak continued to report more sensitive information to the U.N. In all, he reported 44 Trello boards, several Google Drive and Google Docs links that contained sensitive information, and sensitive information from a public U.N. account on Jira.
The U.N. began taking down the exposed information on September 13, after The Intercept contacted the organization for comment. “Trello is one of various tools that U.N. staff use to share materials both internally and externally with partners,” U.N. spokesperson Florencia Soto Nino-Martinez said in an email. “Some of the boards listed have communications materials which are not sensitive, while some have outdated information. However, we are reviewing all boards on the list to ensure that no passwords or credentials are shared through this medium.”
“We take security very seriously and have reached out to all staff reminding them of the risks of using a third-party platform to share content and to take the necessary precautions to ensure no sensitive content is public,” she added.
Trello boards, as well as documents hosted on Google Drive and Google Docs, are private by default. The user must manually change settings to make this information public for anyone on the internet to view. Pathak previously suggested that Trello add new safeguards to discourage the exposure of sensitive data. At the time, Trello’s CEO stated that “we strive to make sure public boards are being created intentionally and have built in safeguards to confirm the intention of a user before they make a board publicly visible. Additionally, visibility settings are displayed persistently on the top of every board.”
Pathak believes that people often make their organizations’ sensitive data public simply because it’s more convenient. This way they can “share the details present on the board with their team members just by sharing the URL of the board with them without adding them to the board,” Pathak said.
“Adding people to the board seems to be huge task for these people, but in fact it is really easy,” he added.
Electric car batteries’ ‘second life’ could be a clean energy game-changer
China plans to dominate the $550 billion battery market through a recycling monopoly.
JOE ROMM - thinkprogress
SEP 21, 2018, 8:00 AM
Plummeting battery costs have made electric vehicles (EVs) a truly disruptive technology.
In fact, EVs now use more lithium ion batteries than consumer electronics. But Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) projects EV-battery demand will rise another 25-fold by 2030 — and EVs will represent more than half of all new car sales by 2040.
This means that millions of used EV batteries will eventually be flooding the market — batteries that may have as much as 70 percent of their original power capacity, even though it can no longer meet the strict requirements for powering its car.
No wonder every major car company in the world is exploring how much value their EV battery has in its “second life.” After all, BNEF projects that over the next three decades, companies will spend some $550 billion “in home, industrial and grid-scale battery storage.”
This potential second life for EV batteries is a clean energy game changer for two reasons.
Firstly, these used EV batteries can deliver much cheaper electricity storage for renewables than is available today.
And secondly, if used EV batteries have value, then EV makers can charge less for their cars — because they can make up the difference reselling the battery later — making them even more affordable.
Together, these two factors make EVs even more disruptive than most people realize, particularly for enabling deep and rapid penetration of renewables in the 2020s.
We already knew electric cars hold the prospect of providing low-cost storage directly : by making use of the 95 percent of the time that a parked car battery isn’t being used.
Now imagine what the potential flood of millions of second-life EV batteries into the electricity storage market will mean. Already, BNEF calculates that “repurposing a battery will cost as little as $49 per usable kilowatt-hour in 2018, compared to $300 for a new battery.”
That is a game-changer.
Here are some of the companies working on repurposing old EV batteries — from Chevrolet in Michigan and Eaton in South Africa, along with Nissan in Amsterdam and Japan, and BYD in China.
In fact, EVs now use more lithium ion batteries than consumer electronics. But Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) projects EV-battery demand will rise another 25-fold by 2030 — and EVs will represent more than half of all new car sales by 2040.
This means that millions of used EV batteries will eventually be flooding the market — batteries that may have as much as 70 percent of their original power capacity, even though it can no longer meet the strict requirements for powering its car.
No wonder every major car company in the world is exploring how much value their EV battery has in its “second life.” After all, BNEF projects that over the next three decades, companies will spend some $550 billion “in home, industrial and grid-scale battery storage.”
This potential second life for EV batteries is a clean energy game changer for two reasons.
Firstly, these used EV batteries can deliver much cheaper electricity storage for renewables than is available today.
And secondly, if used EV batteries have value, then EV makers can charge less for their cars — because they can make up the difference reselling the battery later — making them even more affordable.
Together, these two factors make EVs even more disruptive than most people realize, particularly for enabling deep and rapid penetration of renewables in the 2020s.
We already knew electric cars hold the prospect of providing low-cost storage directly : by making use of the 95 percent of the time that a parked car battery isn’t being used.
Now imagine what the potential flood of millions of second-life EV batteries into the electricity storage market will mean. Already, BNEF calculates that “repurposing a battery will cost as little as $49 per usable kilowatt-hour in 2018, compared to $300 for a new battery.”
That is a game-changer.
Here are some of the companies working on repurposing old EV batteries — from Chevrolet in Michigan and Eaton in South Africa, along with Nissan in Amsterdam and Japan, and BYD in China.
The companies are testing used EV batteries for stationary storage. BMW, for instance, has completed over 18 months of testing that demonstrates its used batteries can deal with “demand response” requests from California’s Pacific Gas & Electric utility. Demand response is rewarding consumers and businesses for adjusting their electricity use during peak hours (or during times when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing).
In the more than 200 tests conducted, PG&E would alert BMW that the grid was short of electricity, and BMW would then signal vehicles to stop charging (thereby reducing the load). If a vehicle wasn’t plugged in or the customer wasn’t participating, then the array of second-life batteries would be used.
The test proved that used EV batteries could provide monetizable value. More than 90 percent of consumers participating in the test said they would probably participate again.
As with all other aspects of electric cars are batteries, it’s no surprise which country is leading the way on battery reuse and recycling: China.
The country has 60 percent of all global lithium ion cell production. At the same time, electric cars and buses in China alone use more Li-ion batteries than all electronic devices worldwide.
A report last November from Circular Energy Storage Research and Consulting finds that China dominates the global battery reuse market — and that near-monopoly is poised to grow in the years ahead.
So, as with manufacturing solar cells and wind turbines, the United States is poised to lose out on another rapidly growing job-creating clean energy sector.
But the good news for the entire world is that when the trickle of second-life batteries turns into a flood, the business of electricity storage and demand response — both of which enable far deeper penetration of renewable power — will never be the same.
In the more than 200 tests conducted, PG&E would alert BMW that the grid was short of electricity, and BMW would then signal vehicles to stop charging (thereby reducing the load). If a vehicle wasn’t plugged in or the customer wasn’t participating, then the array of second-life batteries would be used.
The test proved that used EV batteries could provide monetizable value. More than 90 percent of consumers participating in the test said they would probably participate again.
As with all other aspects of electric cars are batteries, it’s no surprise which country is leading the way on battery reuse and recycling: China.
The country has 60 percent of all global lithium ion cell production. At the same time, electric cars and buses in China alone use more Li-ion batteries than all electronic devices worldwide.
A report last November from Circular Energy Storage Research and Consulting finds that China dominates the global battery reuse market — and that near-monopoly is poised to grow in the years ahead.
So, as with manufacturing solar cells and wind turbines, the United States is poised to lose out on another rapidly growing job-creating clean energy sector.
But the good news for the entire world is that when the trickle of second-life batteries turns into a flood, the business of electricity storage and demand response — both of which enable far deeper penetration of renewable power — will never be the same.
The U.S. Isn’t Just Backing the Yemen War—It’s Helping Trap Those Forced to Flee
How the United States is helping Oman militarize its border with Yemen.
BY KHURY PETERSON-SMITH - in these times
SEPTEMBER 20, 2018
By now, the images are infamous: stunned, bloodied Yemeni children arriving at the hospital after their summer camp bus was bombed by Saudi aircraft. The United States is deeply implicated in that August 9 attack, which killed 54 people — most of them children
Fragments from the bomb bear the labels of U.S. weapons manufacturers. The indefensible nature of the bombing — there were no combatants anywhere in sight — has garnered headlines and even attention on Capitol Hill, opening a new conversation about U.S. involvement in the years-long siege of Yemen by a coalition headed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The coalition frames its war as an intervention on behalf of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, the man they recognize as the legitimate president of Yemen. Saudi Arabia and the UAE claim to be targeting the Houthis, the opposition group on the other side of Yemen’s civil war that controls the country's capital, and that has alleged ties with Iran. The images from the school bus attack, however, reveal the actual targets of the coalition’s air power.
While both the Houthis and the coalition take actions with destructive consequences for Yemen’s population, the overwhelming blame for the devastation and the humanitarian crisis lies with the United States, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The United States is supplying the aircraft to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the precision munitions they’re dropping, intelligence and mid-air refueling of the coalition war planes. The United States also continues to carry out military operations in Yemen directly, with its own special forces and air strikes. But even when American personnel are not personally dropping the bombs, they seem to be involved in all of the other steps of the coalition’s operations.
On the same day of the attack on the school bus, and not far away, U.S. personnel were finishing up another, quieter activity that has received far less attention.
From August 5 through 9, a unit of the Wisconsin National Guard that was assigned to U.S. Army Central conducted a week-long training with members of the Royal Army of Oman's Border Guard Brigade in Haima, Oman. The exercises were part of Oman’s militarization of its border with Yemen — with funding and other assistance from the United States.
In other words, not only is the United States. helping the coalition bomb Yemeni civilians. It's helping trap the refugees fleeing that bombing.
Walls around the world
Before, it was clear that the American government wanted no Yemeni refugees in the United States. Yemen has been listed in all three iterations of the Trump administration's anti-Muslim travel ban. That was unjust enough. In Oman, the United States is helping to prevent Yemenis from leaving their country at all.
In August, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) — its military budget — for the fiscal year of 2019. The Act calls on the Secretary of State to certify that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are taking steps to minimize civilian casualties, among other measures to assuage qualms that Congress may have about continuing the U.S. mid-air refueling program.
The restrictions laid out in the Act have come into the spotlight as Trump has signaled his refusal to abide by them, sparking a dispute between members of Congress and the White House about who has the authority to make decisions about foreign affairs — a fight that has been fueled by the horrendous school bus bombing.
But the same Act also quietly expands the list of countries that the United States supplies aid to for the purpose of militarizing their borders. A provision was added to the military budget in 2016 that appropriates such funding to “certain foreign countries for border security operations.” The list of countries — each of which is eligible for up to $150 million in the program — includes Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. The 2019 budget includes Pakistan and Oman.
What do these states have in common? They share borders with countries from which millions of refugees emerge or flow through. Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon and Jordan neighbor Libya, Syria and Iraq. Pakistan borders Afghanistan.
Oman’s steps to “secure its border” sound familiar. In a trend taken up by states around the world — and championed by the White House — Oman is building a wall. Construction began five years ago and is slated to continue for another three years.
The U.S. has promised $2.5 million in aid to Oman for 2019 in a package under the heading “Peace and Security.” And a flurry of meetings between U.S. and Omani officials suggest deeper coordination could be underway.
In March, Defense Secretary Mattis met with Omani Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said and Defense Minister Badr bin Saud al Busaidi in Muscat to discuss enhancing military cooperation. At the end of July, Omani Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi traveled to Washington and met with Mattis at the Pentagon, Secretary of State Pompeo, and members of Congress. Conversations focused on the bilateral relationship in regard to the ongoing crisis in Yemen.
And then there was the joint training in Haima.
Beyond the Bombings
Migration is difficult for Yemenis. Yemen was the poorest country in the Middle East before the war began in 2015. While there are more than 2 million internally displaced people in Yemen, poverty prevents Yemenis from leaving the country.
Despite the many obstacles, more than 190,000 Yemenis have fled to neighboring countries according the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. Many of those who have left are in Oman, so the measures the country is taking with its U.S. ally will put up new obstacles to would-be refugees.
Remarkably, despite the nightmarish conditions that the United States, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have made in Yemen, it's also the case that more than 280,000 people—mostly from the Horn of Africa—have sought refuge in Yemen. The measures that the United States is supporting with its allies, then, are not only devastating Yemenis. The cruelty of those actions extends to refugees from outside of Yemen who are now effectively stuck in the same conditions that are displacing — but imprisoning — Yemenis.
The wars that the United States is carrying out and supporting include wars on the freedom of movement and those who seek to exercise it. From the caging of children and adults at the border with Mexico to the bombing of children in Yemen with American weapons, this summer has demonstrated to the world that the United States isn't only driving people from their homes — it's preventing them from escaping to safety.
It is significant that U.S. support for the Saudi bombing is getting more critical attention. But from walls to travel bans, our government's disastrous activities extend beyond the bombings alone. We need to identify and expose Washington’s many attacks on people around the world—and resist them all.
Fragments from the bomb bear the labels of U.S. weapons manufacturers. The indefensible nature of the bombing — there were no combatants anywhere in sight — has garnered headlines and even attention on Capitol Hill, opening a new conversation about U.S. involvement in the years-long siege of Yemen by a coalition headed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The coalition frames its war as an intervention on behalf of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, the man they recognize as the legitimate president of Yemen. Saudi Arabia and the UAE claim to be targeting the Houthis, the opposition group on the other side of Yemen’s civil war that controls the country's capital, and that has alleged ties with Iran. The images from the school bus attack, however, reveal the actual targets of the coalition’s air power.
While both the Houthis and the coalition take actions with destructive consequences for Yemen’s population, the overwhelming blame for the devastation and the humanitarian crisis lies with the United States, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
The United States is supplying the aircraft to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the precision munitions they’re dropping, intelligence and mid-air refueling of the coalition war planes. The United States also continues to carry out military operations in Yemen directly, with its own special forces and air strikes. But even when American personnel are not personally dropping the bombs, they seem to be involved in all of the other steps of the coalition’s operations.
On the same day of the attack on the school bus, and not far away, U.S. personnel were finishing up another, quieter activity that has received far less attention.
From August 5 through 9, a unit of the Wisconsin National Guard that was assigned to U.S. Army Central conducted a week-long training with members of the Royal Army of Oman's Border Guard Brigade in Haima, Oman. The exercises were part of Oman’s militarization of its border with Yemen — with funding and other assistance from the United States.
In other words, not only is the United States. helping the coalition bomb Yemeni civilians. It's helping trap the refugees fleeing that bombing.
Walls around the world
Before, it was clear that the American government wanted no Yemeni refugees in the United States. Yemen has been listed in all three iterations of the Trump administration's anti-Muslim travel ban. That was unjust enough. In Oman, the United States is helping to prevent Yemenis from leaving their country at all.
In August, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) — its military budget — for the fiscal year of 2019. The Act calls on the Secretary of State to certify that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are taking steps to minimize civilian casualties, among other measures to assuage qualms that Congress may have about continuing the U.S. mid-air refueling program.
The restrictions laid out in the Act have come into the spotlight as Trump has signaled his refusal to abide by them, sparking a dispute between members of Congress and the White House about who has the authority to make decisions about foreign affairs — a fight that has been fueled by the horrendous school bus bombing.
But the same Act also quietly expands the list of countries that the United States supplies aid to for the purpose of militarizing their borders. A provision was added to the military budget in 2016 that appropriates such funding to “certain foreign countries for border security operations.” The list of countries — each of which is eligible for up to $150 million in the program — includes Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. The 2019 budget includes Pakistan and Oman.
What do these states have in common? They share borders with countries from which millions of refugees emerge or flow through. Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon and Jordan neighbor Libya, Syria and Iraq. Pakistan borders Afghanistan.
Oman’s steps to “secure its border” sound familiar. In a trend taken up by states around the world — and championed by the White House — Oman is building a wall. Construction began five years ago and is slated to continue for another three years.
The U.S. has promised $2.5 million in aid to Oman for 2019 in a package under the heading “Peace and Security.” And a flurry of meetings between U.S. and Omani officials suggest deeper coordination could be underway.
In March, Defense Secretary Mattis met with Omani Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said and Defense Minister Badr bin Saud al Busaidi in Muscat to discuss enhancing military cooperation. At the end of July, Omani Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi traveled to Washington and met with Mattis at the Pentagon, Secretary of State Pompeo, and members of Congress. Conversations focused on the bilateral relationship in regard to the ongoing crisis in Yemen.
And then there was the joint training in Haima.
Beyond the Bombings
Migration is difficult for Yemenis. Yemen was the poorest country in the Middle East before the war began in 2015. While there are more than 2 million internally displaced people in Yemen, poverty prevents Yemenis from leaving the country.
Despite the many obstacles, more than 190,000 Yemenis have fled to neighboring countries according the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. Many of those who have left are in Oman, so the measures the country is taking with its U.S. ally will put up new obstacles to would-be refugees.
Remarkably, despite the nightmarish conditions that the United States, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have made in Yemen, it's also the case that more than 280,000 people—mostly from the Horn of Africa—have sought refuge in Yemen. The measures that the United States is supporting with its allies, then, are not only devastating Yemenis. The cruelty of those actions extends to refugees from outside of Yemen who are now effectively stuck in the same conditions that are displacing — but imprisoning — Yemenis.
The wars that the United States is carrying out and supporting include wars on the freedom of movement and those who seek to exercise it. From the caging of children and adults at the border with Mexico to the bombing of children in Yemen with American weapons, this summer has demonstrated to the world that the United States isn't only driving people from their homes — it's preventing them from escaping to safety.
It is significant that U.S. support for the Saudi bombing is getting more critical attention. But from walls to travel bans, our government's disastrous activities extend beyond the bombings alone. We need to identify and expose Washington’s many attacks on people around the world—and resist them all.
trump will hire him!!!
German Spymaster Ousted for Suggesting Real Video of Far-Right Rampage Was Fake
Robert Mackey - the intercept
September 18 2018, 1:27 p.m.
THE MAN IN CHARGE of protecting German democracy from far-right extremism, domestic intelligence chief Hans-Georg Maassen, was removed from his position on Tuesday for suggesting that a left-wing group might have faked video evidence of an attack on foreigners.
To keep her coalition government intact, Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to reassign Maassen, rather than fire him. Even though his new position, as a deputy minister, is technically a promotion, the compromise prevents Merkel’s conservative interior minister, Horst Seehofer, from quitting, while apparently satisfying a demand from the Social Democrat leader, Andrea Nahles, that a conspiracy theorist not oversee the monitoring of far-right extremists.
The video in question was recorded in the eastern German city of Chemnitz last month, when anti-immigrant protests spiraled into violence, following the fatal stabbing of a German man of Cuban heritage, and the arrest of two suspects from Iraq and Syria. (The Iraqi man was released on Tuesday, for lack of evidence linking him to the killing, but the Syrian remains in custody.)
It remains unclear who recorded the video — which has been viewed more than half a million times on social networks and was widely used in television reports — but it was posted on Facebook and Twitter by an anti-fascist group, Antifa Zeckenbiss, which added a caption describing it as foreigners being “hunted” by neo-Nazi hooligans.
Chancellor Merkel told reporters that those images of nationalists chasing Afghan refugees in Chemnitz showed hatred from the the anti-immigrant protesters and that they had persecuted innocent people. Two days later, Maassen contradicted her, telling Bild, Germany’s best-selling tabloid newspaper, that there was “no evidence to suggest that the video of this alleged incident circulating online is authentic.”
“The skepticism towards the media reports on right-wing extremist hunts in Chemnitz are shared by me,” Maassen told the newspaper. “Based on my cautious assessment,” he added, “there are good reasons to believe that this was intentional false information, possibly to detract attention from the murder in Chemnitz.”
The spy chief cited no evidence for his claim, which echoed far-right conspiracy theories, but it seemed to be in keeping with the current trend, from Berkeley to Berlin, in which those charged with protecting the public from extremists appear far more concerned with perceived threats from the far-left than violence by the far-right.
Within hours of the interview being published, Maassen’s conspiratorial musings were comprehensively debunked by German journalists who established that the video was indeed authentic.
Reporters for Zeit Online and its partner site Ze.tt used geolocation to find the precise spot in Chemnitz where the footage had been recorded; tracked down the two Afghan refugees seen in the footage, Alihassan Sarfaraz and Barin Afshar, and obtained footage shot by them which showed one of the men from the group that attacked them — a bald man in a florescent green shirt with a blue jacket around his waist — minutes before the assault.
The reporters then found another video clip, posted on Twitter within the same hour of the same evening, which showed some of the same far-right protesters — including the man in the green shirt — chasing other people from the same street.
Sarfaraz and Afshar told Till Eckert of Ze.tt that the video was recorded just after the German men had first attacked them, knocking one man’s phone from his hands, and punching a female friend of theirs in the face. The woman, who asked not to be identified, was hospitalized for 11 days after the attack. (The far-right riot had been prompted, in part, by a false rumor that the German man who was killed had been protecting a woman from harassment by foreigners.)
Four days later, the public broadcaster ZDF’s investigative news show Frontal 21 identified one of the attackers seen in the video as a security guard at a refugee camp in Chemnitz. Unlike Maassen, the guard was fired the same day by his employer, the private security company Securitas.
Frontal 21 also revealed that internal documents from the local police force in Chemnitz detailed multiple attempts by far-right extremists to attack foreigners and anti-fascist counter-demonstrators, further undermining Maassen’s claim that there had been no hounding of non-Germans.
At 9:42 pm that night, the police report obtained by Frontal 21 stated, “100 hooded persons” were “looking for foreigners.” Five minutes later, the police noted the advance of “20 to 30 masked persons armed with stones in the direction of Brühl, restaurant ‘Shalom.'” The attack on the Jewish restaurant by masked neo-Nazis — who pelted it with stones and bottles, injuring its owner, and shouted, “Get out of Germany, you Jewish swine” — horrified many Germans.
The far-right riot, which was accompanied by banned Hitler salutes and Nazi chants, also prompted demonstrations across Germany in favor of multicultural living and against the neo-Nazis.
While Merkel’s decision not to simply fire Maassen was criticized by opposition leaders, the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known by the German acronym AfD, expressed relief that the intelligence chief would stay in government. An AfD leader, Alice Weide, praised Maassenas an internal critic of the chancellor’s decision to accept hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslim asylum-seekers in 2015. Maassen, a longtime member of Merkel’s conservative party, has made no secret of his opposition to the chancellor’s immigration policy, and has recently been accused of secretly advising the extremist AfD.
As the German weekly Spiegel reported, “Maassen has always been a hardliner when it comes to migration and laws pertaining to foreigners in the country.” The magazine noted that his 1997 Ph.D. dissertation, on the “Legal Status of Asylum-Seekers in International Law,” includes phrases and opinions commonly found on the far right. The study warned of “uncontrolled immigration” and “so-called asylum tourism,” and a possible increase in crime in multicultural societies. “The right of asylum in Europe these days,” Maassen wrote, “is primarily characterized by its abuse.”
The agency Maassen has led for six years, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, known as the Verfassungsschutz, has long been accused of failing to properly monitor far-right extremism. Maassen’s predecessor, Heinz Fromm, was forced to resign in 2012 after it was revealed that the federal agency had destroyed documents on a neo-Nazi terror cell calling itself the National Socialist Underground, or NSU, which killed nine ethnic minorities, detonated two bombs in immigrant communities, killed a police officer, and carried out 15 armed robberies between 2000 and 2011 without being caught.
As The Intercept reported last year, the agency has never offered a convincing explanation for why one of those neo-Nazi murders, the killing of a son of Turkish immigrants in an internet cafe in the city of Kassel, took place despite the apparent presence of an agent from the state of Hesse’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
To keep her coalition government intact, Chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to reassign Maassen, rather than fire him. Even though his new position, as a deputy minister, is technically a promotion, the compromise prevents Merkel’s conservative interior minister, Horst Seehofer, from quitting, while apparently satisfying a demand from the Social Democrat leader, Andrea Nahles, that a conspiracy theorist not oversee the monitoring of far-right extremists.
The video in question was recorded in the eastern German city of Chemnitz last month, when anti-immigrant protests spiraled into violence, following the fatal stabbing of a German man of Cuban heritage, and the arrest of two suspects from Iraq and Syria. (The Iraqi man was released on Tuesday, for lack of evidence linking him to the killing, but the Syrian remains in custody.)
It remains unclear who recorded the video — which has been viewed more than half a million times on social networks and was widely used in television reports — but it was posted on Facebook and Twitter by an anti-fascist group, Antifa Zeckenbiss, which added a caption describing it as foreigners being “hunted” by neo-Nazi hooligans.
Chancellor Merkel told reporters that those images of nationalists chasing Afghan refugees in Chemnitz showed hatred from the the anti-immigrant protesters and that they had persecuted innocent people. Two days later, Maassen contradicted her, telling Bild, Germany’s best-selling tabloid newspaper, that there was “no evidence to suggest that the video of this alleged incident circulating online is authentic.”
“The skepticism towards the media reports on right-wing extremist hunts in Chemnitz are shared by me,” Maassen told the newspaper. “Based on my cautious assessment,” he added, “there are good reasons to believe that this was intentional false information, possibly to detract attention from the murder in Chemnitz.”
The spy chief cited no evidence for his claim, which echoed far-right conspiracy theories, but it seemed to be in keeping with the current trend, from Berkeley to Berlin, in which those charged with protecting the public from extremists appear far more concerned with perceived threats from the far-left than violence by the far-right.
Within hours of the interview being published, Maassen’s conspiratorial musings were comprehensively debunked by German journalists who established that the video was indeed authentic.
Reporters for Zeit Online and its partner site Ze.tt used geolocation to find the precise spot in Chemnitz where the footage had been recorded; tracked down the two Afghan refugees seen in the footage, Alihassan Sarfaraz and Barin Afshar, and obtained footage shot by them which showed one of the men from the group that attacked them — a bald man in a florescent green shirt with a blue jacket around his waist — minutes before the assault.
The reporters then found another video clip, posted on Twitter within the same hour of the same evening, which showed some of the same far-right protesters — including the man in the green shirt — chasing other people from the same street.
Sarfaraz and Afshar told Till Eckert of Ze.tt that the video was recorded just after the German men had first attacked them, knocking one man’s phone from his hands, and punching a female friend of theirs in the face. The woman, who asked not to be identified, was hospitalized for 11 days after the attack. (The far-right riot had been prompted, in part, by a false rumor that the German man who was killed had been protecting a woman from harassment by foreigners.)
Four days later, the public broadcaster ZDF’s investigative news show Frontal 21 identified one of the attackers seen in the video as a security guard at a refugee camp in Chemnitz. Unlike Maassen, the guard was fired the same day by his employer, the private security company Securitas.
Frontal 21 also revealed that internal documents from the local police force in Chemnitz detailed multiple attempts by far-right extremists to attack foreigners and anti-fascist counter-demonstrators, further undermining Maassen’s claim that there had been no hounding of non-Germans.
At 9:42 pm that night, the police report obtained by Frontal 21 stated, “100 hooded persons” were “looking for foreigners.” Five minutes later, the police noted the advance of “20 to 30 masked persons armed with stones in the direction of Brühl, restaurant ‘Shalom.'” The attack on the Jewish restaurant by masked neo-Nazis — who pelted it with stones and bottles, injuring its owner, and shouted, “Get out of Germany, you Jewish swine” — horrified many Germans.
The far-right riot, which was accompanied by banned Hitler salutes and Nazi chants, also prompted demonstrations across Germany in favor of multicultural living and against the neo-Nazis.
While Merkel’s decision not to simply fire Maassen was criticized by opposition leaders, the far-right Alternative for Germany party, known by the German acronym AfD, expressed relief that the intelligence chief would stay in government. An AfD leader, Alice Weide, praised Maassenas an internal critic of the chancellor’s decision to accept hundreds of thousands of mainly Muslim asylum-seekers in 2015. Maassen, a longtime member of Merkel’s conservative party, has made no secret of his opposition to the chancellor’s immigration policy, and has recently been accused of secretly advising the extremist AfD.
As the German weekly Spiegel reported, “Maassen has always been a hardliner when it comes to migration and laws pertaining to foreigners in the country.” The magazine noted that his 1997 Ph.D. dissertation, on the “Legal Status of Asylum-Seekers in International Law,” includes phrases and opinions commonly found on the far right. The study warned of “uncontrolled immigration” and “so-called asylum tourism,” and a possible increase in crime in multicultural societies. “The right of asylum in Europe these days,” Maassen wrote, “is primarily characterized by its abuse.”
The agency Maassen has led for six years, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, known as the Verfassungsschutz, has long been accused of failing to properly monitor far-right extremism. Maassen’s predecessor, Heinz Fromm, was forced to resign in 2012 after it was revealed that the federal agency had destroyed documents on a neo-Nazi terror cell calling itself the National Socialist Underground, or NSU, which killed nine ethnic minorities, detonated two bombs in immigrant communities, killed a police officer, and carried out 15 armed robberies between 2000 and 2011 without being caught.
As The Intercept reported last year, the agency has never offered a convincing explanation for why one of those neo-Nazi murders, the killing of a son of Turkish immigrants in an internet cafe in the city of Kassel, took place despite the apparent presence of an agent from the state of Hesse’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
humor: Democratically elected leader of first world country announces ‘do it my way or fuck off into oblivion’
Monday 17 September 2018
by EssBee - news thump
Theresa May has today announced that she has decided how Brexit will pan out and that if anyone tries to sway her, she will turn the UK into a starving wasteland of spite.
Claiming to have the full backing of the spirits of Saddam Hussein, Colonel Gadaffi, Pol Pot and Margaret Thatcher, the PM has stated that if Parliament does not ratify the Chequers plan, she will cast the country into the fires of hell and it will serve them right.
Despite having a number of options available to her, including looking at a Customs Partnership, which would rectify many of the issues that she seems to be concerned about, Mrs May is determined to do it “her way or the highway”.
Speaking to us today, a source close to the Prime Minister has cast some light onto why she might have taken such a hard stance.
“Fundamentally, the PM has realised that Dominic Raab is essentially a waste of a pair of underpants and hasn’t got anyone of any substance to replace him. So she has just thought ‘sod it, we’re buggered anyway, so we might as well be buggered my way, and quickly.”
However, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has criticised the timing of her decision, saying, ‘Theresa May has wasted the last two years of negotiations.
“The offer for us to be completely and utterly buggered was on the table from the very beginning of this process, and only now is she accepting it. If we had been in charge, we would have acted much more quickly and we would have been well into the post-buggering recovery stage by now. It’s a disgrace.”
Claiming to have the full backing of the spirits of Saddam Hussein, Colonel Gadaffi, Pol Pot and Margaret Thatcher, the PM has stated that if Parliament does not ratify the Chequers plan, she will cast the country into the fires of hell and it will serve them right.
Despite having a number of options available to her, including looking at a Customs Partnership, which would rectify many of the issues that she seems to be concerned about, Mrs May is determined to do it “her way or the highway”.
Speaking to us today, a source close to the Prime Minister has cast some light onto why she might have taken such a hard stance.
“Fundamentally, the PM has realised that Dominic Raab is essentially a waste of a pair of underpants and hasn’t got anyone of any substance to replace him. So she has just thought ‘sod it, we’re buggered anyway, so we might as well be buggered my way, and quickly.”
However, Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn has criticised the timing of her decision, saying, ‘Theresa May has wasted the last two years of negotiations.
“The offer for us to be completely and utterly buggered was on the table from the very beginning of this process, and only now is she accepting it. If we had been in charge, we would have acted much more quickly and we would have been well into the post-buggering recovery stage by now. It’s a disgrace.”
India’s sodomy ban, now ruled illegal, was a British colonial legacy
the conversation
September 12, 2018 3.09pm EDT
The Indian Supreme Court has legalized homosexuality, overturning a 157-year ban on consensual gay sex.
In a nearly 500-page unanimous decision issued on Sept. 6, India’s highest court affirmed that “whenever the constitutional courts come across a situation of transgression or dereliction in the sphere of fundamental rights which are also the basic human rights of a section, howsoever small part of the society, then it is for the constitutional courts to ensure that constitutional morality prevails over social morality.”
Gay rights advocates worldwide celebrated the legal victory, which came after nearly a decade of contentious court battles against a British colonial law criminalizing homosexual acts.
“Our court, our justice system, really believes in the rights of the people,” said Kalyani Subramanyam, program director for the Naz Foundation, the primary petitioner in the court case, which could open the door to gay marriage.
And the ruling is more than a human rights win. It is also a restoration of ancient Indian sexual norms.
India, homosexuality and the ‘third gender'
In that way, India’s ruling differs from recent court decisions legalizing gay marriage in Colombia, Taiwan and Germany – though for LGBTQ Indians, the impacts may be similarly life-changing.
Sexual and gender minorities in India are regularly harassed, assaulted and jailed.
Yet many gender researchers who study India – myself included – argue that India’s religious and cultural heritage has long been more accommodating to multiple gender and sexual expressions than Western societies.
According to scholars Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s groundbreaking 2000 essay collection on same-sex love in India, Hindus embraced a range of thinking on gender and sexuality as far back as the Vedic period, around 4000 B.C.
Hinduism’s first sacred texts tell stories of same-sex love and gender-morphing figures. The Hindu deity Shiva is sometimes worshipped as a multi-gendered figure composed of Shiva and his wife Parvati together, in what’s known as his Ardhanarishvara form.
Hindu texts from around 1500 B.C. likewise show that the “third gender” – individuals sometimes called “hijras,” who do not fit into the categories of man or woman – were integrated into India’s political and social life.
In the Kama Sutra, India’s famed erotic guidebook, the character Svairini is described as as a liberated woman who lives either alone or in union with another woman.
“Male-male attraction” is also “one of the themes of pre-colonial Urdu poetry” writes Vanita in her book about Indian Islamic literature from the 18th and 19th centuries.
India’s Khajuraho temples, built in Madhaya Pradesh state between 950 and 1050, even include depictions of homosexual orgies and fellatio, among other erotic sculptures and scenes.
Some scholars of Islam, India’s second-largest religion, also find acceptance of gender fluidity in the Koran, which says that Allah “shapes you in the wombs as He pleases.”
Indeed, in India’s 16th-century Mughal courts, hijras and eunuchs often held positions of high esteem as advisers or emissaries between men and women.
The British preferred the binary
India’s fluid gender and sexual norms did not fit into Britain’s strict Victorian conceptions of appropriate sexual behavior.
As the British empire grew more powerful in the Indian subcontinent in the early 19th century, so did their ideas about culture, society and law. Viewing local notions of sexuality as barbaric, British officials imposed Western, Judeo-Christian sexual norms on colonial subjects.
Before the British, homosexuality was not illegal in India.
But by 1861 the British had consolidated their rule over India and were enforcing Section 377 of their penal code, which could punish those who committed sodomy or other homosexual acts with life in prison.
When India gained its independence in 1947, this statute remained, becoming Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.
Britain’s anti-gay colonial legacy
India was not the only British colony where formerly acceptable sexual behaviors and identities became criminalized.
Section 377, or a similar statute, was imposed in 42 former colonies, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Nepal, which was never formally colonized by Great Britain, also adopted anti-sodomy laws based on India’s British-influenced penal code.
In 2007, the Nepali government became the first in South Asia to re-recognize a third gender category. Today, Nepal’s Constitution specifically protects LGBTQ people from discrimination and abuse.
Neighboring Pakistan, like former British colonies Bhutan, Uganda and Singapore, still criminalizes homosexuality under Section 377. This “unnatural offense” is punishable with up to 10 years in prison.
But in 2018, Pakistan, a Muslim-majority country, passed the historic Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, allowing Pakistanis to choose their gender on government documents and prohibits discrimination in employment and public accommodations on the basis of gender identity.
The future of gay rights in IndiaDespite India’s legalization of gay sex, the path toward full acceptance of LGBTQ rights is complicated.
For more than a decade, India’s right-wing Hindu nationalists – who espouse a fundamentalist interpretation of Hinduism called Hindutva – have worked to portray homosexuality as a reprehensible Western import.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist elected in 2014, is himself a follower of Hindutva.
In July, as India’s Supreme Court was preparing to hear arguments on the gay sex ban, Subramanian Swamy, a high-ranking member of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, retorted that homosexuality “is not a normal thing.”
It’s “against Hindutva,” he said.
After the ruling against Section 377, an armed Hindu nationalist group called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh declared that “same-sex marriages and relations are not in consonance with nature.”
Traditionally,“ read the Sept. 8 public statement, "Indian society has not supported such relations.”
Historic evidence says otherwise.
“India’s pre-colonial sexual history is important,” Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, a Texas A&M professor who was involved in the fight to end Section 377, told me.
Yet, she reflects, “This is not just about hearkening back in time.”
For Lakkimsetti, the legal victory shows that “the Indian constitution is a living document that protects minorities.” In legalizing gay sex, then, the Supreme Court is not just recognizing India’s rich past – it’s also “looking forward.”
In a nearly 500-page unanimous decision issued on Sept. 6, India’s highest court affirmed that “whenever the constitutional courts come across a situation of transgression or dereliction in the sphere of fundamental rights which are also the basic human rights of a section, howsoever small part of the society, then it is for the constitutional courts to ensure that constitutional morality prevails over social morality.”
Gay rights advocates worldwide celebrated the legal victory, which came after nearly a decade of contentious court battles against a British colonial law criminalizing homosexual acts.
“Our court, our justice system, really believes in the rights of the people,” said Kalyani Subramanyam, program director for the Naz Foundation, the primary petitioner in the court case, which could open the door to gay marriage.
And the ruling is more than a human rights win. It is also a restoration of ancient Indian sexual norms.
India, homosexuality and the ‘third gender'
In that way, India’s ruling differs from recent court decisions legalizing gay marriage in Colombia, Taiwan and Germany – though for LGBTQ Indians, the impacts may be similarly life-changing.
Sexual and gender minorities in India are regularly harassed, assaulted and jailed.
Yet many gender researchers who study India – myself included – argue that India’s religious and cultural heritage has long been more accommodating to multiple gender and sexual expressions than Western societies.
According to scholars Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s groundbreaking 2000 essay collection on same-sex love in India, Hindus embraced a range of thinking on gender and sexuality as far back as the Vedic period, around 4000 B.C.
Hinduism’s first sacred texts tell stories of same-sex love and gender-morphing figures. The Hindu deity Shiva is sometimes worshipped as a multi-gendered figure composed of Shiva and his wife Parvati together, in what’s known as his Ardhanarishvara form.
Hindu texts from around 1500 B.C. likewise show that the “third gender” – individuals sometimes called “hijras,” who do not fit into the categories of man or woman – were integrated into India’s political and social life.
In the Kama Sutra, India’s famed erotic guidebook, the character Svairini is described as as a liberated woman who lives either alone or in union with another woman.
“Male-male attraction” is also “one of the themes of pre-colonial Urdu poetry” writes Vanita in her book about Indian Islamic literature from the 18th and 19th centuries.
India’s Khajuraho temples, built in Madhaya Pradesh state between 950 and 1050, even include depictions of homosexual orgies and fellatio, among other erotic sculptures and scenes.
Some scholars of Islam, India’s second-largest religion, also find acceptance of gender fluidity in the Koran, which says that Allah “shapes you in the wombs as He pleases.”
Indeed, in India’s 16th-century Mughal courts, hijras and eunuchs often held positions of high esteem as advisers or emissaries between men and women.
The British preferred the binary
India’s fluid gender and sexual norms did not fit into Britain’s strict Victorian conceptions of appropriate sexual behavior.
As the British empire grew more powerful in the Indian subcontinent in the early 19th century, so did their ideas about culture, society and law. Viewing local notions of sexuality as barbaric, British officials imposed Western, Judeo-Christian sexual norms on colonial subjects.
Before the British, homosexuality was not illegal in India.
But by 1861 the British had consolidated their rule over India and were enforcing Section 377 of their penal code, which could punish those who committed sodomy or other homosexual acts with life in prison.
When India gained its independence in 1947, this statute remained, becoming Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.
Britain’s anti-gay colonial legacy
India was not the only British colony where formerly acceptable sexual behaviors and identities became criminalized.
Section 377, or a similar statute, was imposed in 42 former colonies, including Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Nepal, which was never formally colonized by Great Britain, also adopted anti-sodomy laws based on India’s British-influenced penal code.
In 2007, the Nepali government became the first in South Asia to re-recognize a third gender category. Today, Nepal’s Constitution specifically protects LGBTQ people from discrimination and abuse.
Neighboring Pakistan, like former British colonies Bhutan, Uganda and Singapore, still criminalizes homosexuality under Section 377. This “unnatural offense” is punishable with up to 10 years in prison.
But in 2018, Pakistan, a Muslim-majority country, passed the historic Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, allowing Pakistanis to choose their gender on government documents and prohibits discrimination in employment and public accommodations on the basis of gender identity.
The future of gay rights in IndiaDespite India’s legalization of gay sex, the path toward full acceptance of LGBTQ rights is complicated.
For more than a decade, India’s right-wing Hindu nationalists – who espouse a fundamentalist interpretation of Hinduism called Hindutva – have worked to portray homosexuality as a reprehensible Western import.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist elected in 2014, is himself a follower of Hindutva.
In July, as India’s Supreme Court was preparing to hear arguments on the gay sex ban, Subramanian Swamy, a high-ranking member of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, retorted that homosexuality “is not a normal thing.”
It’s “against Hindutva,” he said.
After the ruling against Section 377, an armed Hindu nationalist group called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh declared that “same-sex marriages and relations are not in consonance with nature.”
Traditionally,“ read the Sept. 8 public statement, "Indian society has not supported such relations.”
Historic evidence says otherwise.
“India’s pre-colonial sexual history is important,” Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, a Texas A&M professor who was involved in the fight to end Section 377, told me.
Yet, she reflects, “This is not just about hearkening back in time.”
For Lakkimsetti, the legal victory shows that “the Indian constitution is a living document that protects minorities.” In legalizing gay sex, then, the Supreme Court is not just recognizing India’s rich past – it’s also “looking forward.”
South African Leader Wants Everyone to ‘Relax’ As He Makes the Case for Land Reform
By Associated Press - atlanta black star
September 12, 2018
That’s the message South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has for anyone fretting about the nation’s plans for land reform, which drew a critical tweet from President Donald Trump last month.
The government won’t allow “land grabs,” and land redistribution designed to address racial inequities will be orderly, Ramaphosa said Tuesday in remarks to Parliament.
He also said he doesn’t expect South Africa to be targeted by sanctions as it legally pursues land reform. Some South Africans have speculated that the United States might impose sanctions similar to those against neighboring Zimbabwe, where violent land seizures occurred years ago.
“Just relax,” Ramaphosa said. “This process will end up very well.”
Some groups in South Africa, however, worry about economic damage from plans for the expropriation of land without compensation.
The economy, one of Africa’s biggest, is already in recession and struggling with problems including a weak currency and fallout from state corruption under former President Jacob Zuma.
Ramaphosa has said the ruling African National Congress party will push for a constitutional amendment to clarify the land reform process, a move that some critics believe is unnecessary and designed to drum up voter support ahead of elections next year.
Last month, Trump claimed South Africa is seizing farms and that high numbers of farmers are being killed. In fact, the South African government has not authorized land seizures and says it is still deliberating on the best way to implement land reform.
There have been some invasions of privately owned land, but these have been stopped by police.
White South Africans, who comprise about 8 percent of the population, own more than 70 percent of the country’s private agricultural land even though white minority rule ended in 1994.
The problem is more than a century old: A 1913 law allowed South Africa’s black majority to own just a small portion of land, formalizing a race-based system of dispossession that had been in place for decades.
When people learn about the history, “everybody gets a shock and they wonder: ‘How could this have been allowed?'” said Ramaphosa, who took office after Zuma resigned early this year. The president acknowledged that “fears” remain about how land reform will unfold, though he said some concerns are dissipating.
People can’t “just wake up in the morning and go and do what they like and say, ‘This is my piece of estate. I’m taking over,'” Ramaphosa said. “That is not going to be allowed.”
The government won’t allow “land grabs,” and land redistribution designed to address racial inequities will be orderly, Ramaphosa said Tuesday in remarks to Parliament.
He also said he doesn’t expect South Africa to be targeted by sanctions as it legally pursues land reform. Some South Africans have speculated that the United States might impose sanctions similar to those against neighboring Zimbabwe, where violent land seizures occurred years ago.
“Just relax,” Ramaphosa said. “This process will end up very well.”
Some groups in South Africa, however, worry about economic damage from plans for the expropriation of land without compensation.
The economy, one of Africa’s biggest, is already in recession and struggling with problems including a weak currency and fallout from state corruption under former President Jacob Zuma.
Ramaphosa has said the ruling African National Congress party will push for a constitutional amendment to clarify the land reform process, a move that some critics believe is unnecessary and designed to drum up voter support ahead of elections next year.
Last month, Trump claimed South Africa is seizing farms and that high numbers of farmers are being killed. In fact, the South African government has not authorized land seizures and says it is still deliberating on the best way to implement land reform.
There have been some invasions of privately owned land, but these have been stopped by police.
White South Africans, who comprise about 8 percent of the population, own more than 70 percent of the country’s private agricultural land even though white minority rule ended in 1994.
The problem is more than a century old: A 1913 law allowed South Africa’s black majority to own just a small portion of land, formalizing a race-based system of dispossession that had been in place for decades.
When people learn about the history, “everybody gets a shock and they wonder: ‘How could this have been allowed?'” said Ramaphosa, who took office after Zuma resigned early this year. The president acknowledged that “fears” remain about how land reform will unfold, though he said some concerns are dissipating.
People can’t “just wake up in the morning and go and do what they like and say, ‘This is my piece of estate. I’m taking over,'” Ramaphosa said. “That is not going to be allowed.”
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