#the death grip they have over international economy and affairs.

[they-call-me-hippie]

I hope Biden kills himself and if not that I hope he kills every one of his liberal voters so I can stop hearing their vote blue no matter who cult chanting

[newstfionline]

As Aid Dries Up, Gaza Families Pushed Deeper Into Poverty

Associated Press, June 7, 2018

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip--Samia Hassan used to have enough money to feed her two dozen children and grandchildren. Now she spends much of her time worrying about food, scouring Gaza’s vegetable markets for end-of-day discounts or walking miles for a pot of free gruel from a soup kitchen.

Large numbers of Gaza families have been pushed deeper into poverty in recent months by Palestinian political infighting and the freezing of U.S. aid. Life is tougher than ever for most of the 2 million Palestinians locked into tiny, blockaded Gaza, where electricity is off most hours of the day, unemployment approaches 50 percent and the Islamic militant group Hamas rules with a tight grip.

“It’s a perfect storm,” said Hilary DuBose of the Catholic Relief Services, which has had to forego emergency food distributions because the Trump administration is withholding funds. “At the same time that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is worsening, humanitarian aid is disappearing.”

Growing despair in Gaza has helped drive recent Hamas-led protests against the border blockade by Israel and Egypt. The closure was imposed after Hamas, branded a terrorist group by Israel and the West, seized Gaza in 2007, driving out forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The escalating crisis also spotlights the lack of a coherent Gaza policy by the external players trying to shape its future. Israel and Egypt say they need the blockade to contain Hamas, but have not offered a viable plan for Gaza. The international community wants the blockade lifted, but hasn’t said how it would deal with Hamas, which refuses to disarm or renounce violence.

Hassan--who shares her unfinished cinderblock home with seven of her 12 adult children, three daughters-in-law and 16 grandchildren--said she joined the border protests repeatedly, intentionally getting close to the fence in hopes of getting shot and killed by Israeli troops.

“Death is better than this life,” she said to her sons’ astonishment as the family gathered for the meal breaking the dawn-to-dusk fast of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Hassan said she only pulled back because she realized she could end up crippled rather than dead and become a burden. In the past two months, more than 115 Palestinians have been killed and close to 3,800 wounded by Israeli fire in near-weekly border protests, with some facing lifelong disabilities.

In the last war in 2014, the family taxi, an important source of income, was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on a neighbor’s house. After the war’s devastation, her sons only found work sporadically and one--a father of six--is now in jail for being unable to pay his debts.

The family suffered a new blow after Abbas ordered his West Bank autonomy government to curtail its regular support payments to Gaza, in hopes of pressing Hamas to hand over authority.

The Hassans used to get $500 every three months from Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, but haven’t been paid since the beginning of the year, along with tens of thousands of Gaza welfare recipients, said Social Affairs Ministry official Khaled Barghouti.

Meanwhile, some 60,000 former civil servants, paid by Abbas since 2007 to ensure their loyalty, have received only a fraction of their salaries since March.

With barely any money coming in, the Hassans increasingly rely on charity.

During Ramadan, Samia Hassan often walks five kilometers (three miles) to another Gaza City neighborhood to line up for wheat gruel cooked in a large cauldron over an open fire.

Hassan said her sons won’t make the trip, embarrassed to be seen asking for handouts, but that she doesn’t mind because her face is veiled.

On a recent afternoon, dozens of people jostled, pushing their aluminum or plastic food containers to be filled. The huge pot was empty within 10 minutes.

“The situation is difficult for everyone,” said Walid Hattab, 50, who owns a small coffee-and-spice store and cooks the free meals as Ramadan charity. Demand is up from last year, he said, noting that merchants have stopped selling on credit.

Along with the Palestinian Authority, the U.N. has been instrumental in propping up Gaza’s fragile economy. About two-thirds of Gaza’s residents are eligible for health, education or welfare services from UNRWA, the agency that aids descendants of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war over Israel’s creation.

Need has grown exponentially, with some 1 million people in Gaza now receiving U.N. food aid, compared to 80,000 two decades ago, said agency spokesman Chris Gunness.

At the same time, the Trump administration has blown a $305 million hole into the agency’s annual $1.2 billion budget--the result of a decision earlier this year to suspend most aid to the Palestinians until further notice. Washington has said it’s linking future funding to UNRWA reforms.

UNRWA has raised more than $200 million from other donors, but is still struggling. Money for Gaza food distributions could run out in a couple of months, Gunness said.

With the exception of the funds already spent this year, all U.S. assistance to the Palestinians is under review. This includes projects funded by USAID and the State Department, including health, education, good governance and security cooperation programs.

There is no indication the review will be completed any time soon, if ever, and it appears to be driven in part by Abbas’ decision to boycott Washington’s Mideast peace efforts as well as Palestinian moves to assert themselves at the United Nations.

Charities such as Catholic Relief Services rely heavily on U.S. support. In Gaza, its operations have been underwritten by a five-year, $50 million USAID grant. This year, the charity should have received about $10 million, but hasn’t gotten any money so far, said DuBose.

As a result, 20,000 Gaza families aren’t receiving food vouchers and about 2,200 people eligible for job-creation programs are staying home, she said.

On a recent evening, Samia Hassan and two dozen family members sat on the straw mat-covered floor of their home. Salad and leftover gruel from the day before had been laid out. Just before iftar, volunteers from a nearby mosque sent over a tray of rice with one chicken.

“It came at the right time,” said daughter-in-law Samah, holding a toddler in her lap.

Such uncertainty is tough for Samia. “Our situation has never been like this,” she said.

[neethypaksham]

Xi Jinping tightens grip on China Tackling of virus, muscular approach, economic recovery have helped mute critics

A year that began in China with the country’s leadership facing searching questions about its handling of a new pandemic that struck the city of Wuhan ends with President Xi Jinping firming up his political control.

If 2020 started as China’s annus horribilis, the year has, in the eyes of many strategic experts in Beijing, only hastened China’s ascendancy and narrowed the gap with the United States, its great rival.

Beijing, having broadly controlled the coronavirus at home, is now leading a global economic recovery, as well as adopting, as India discovered through this summer’s border crisis, an increasingly muscular posture abroad. In contrast, the U.S. has struggled with both its response to the pandemic as well as unprecedented political divisions at home, manifested in a closely fought election that ended with the defeat of President Donald Trump, whose term in office marked a deterioration in relations with China triggered by a trade war.

A crisis in Wuhan

Few in China would have expected the year to end as it does. China’s initial fumbling of the pneumonia outbreak that began last December, when the leadership in Wuhan delayed action for three weeks, has now become a footnote, with the leadership showcasing China’s recovery as underlining the superiority of its political system.

Back in February, the death of the whistle-blower doctor Li Wenliang had led to an outpouring of criticism, which prompted Beijing to fire the Communist Party leaders in charge of Wuhan and Hubei province. Mr. Xi then acknowledged the pandemic had posed “a major test” of China’s governance.

In March, a prominent former real estate tycoon with close Party links, Ren Zhiqiang, penned a searing essay directly criticising Mr. Xi’s leadership.

Yet by the summer, China’s controlling of the outbreak, thanks to strict lockdowns and a sweeping testing and tracing system, helped the Party weather the storm. Coupled with the failure of the U.S. to tackle the coronavirus effectively— which the Party propaganda has ceaselessly highlighted as a vindication of its leadership — signs are Mr. Xi remains as strong as ever heading into 2021, a sensitive year that will see the Party celebrate its centenary in July.

Heading into the anniversary, the trend of political centralisation under Mr. Xi is only expected to continue, as also the shrinking space for dissent. Mr. Ren, the real estate tycoon, was in September sentenced to 18 years in jail ostensibly on corruption charges, although the real offence was his critical essay.

The previous month, another prominent critic of Mr. Xi’s from inside the Party, Cai Xia, a professor of the Party School, was expelled from the elite institution that Mr. Xi once headed over her criticisms of his leadership style, which included an observation that a growing number of Party officials were opposed to the political direction under him but were afraid of speaking out.

Strong recovery

China’s subsequent recovery from the pandemic helped the leadership mute its critics, with the world’s second-largest economy likely to be the only major country to grow in a pandemic-hit year. China in the first quarter contracted by 6.8%, but has since recovered strongly, growing 3.2% in the second quarter and 4.9% in the third. Shuttered factories have reopened, although the global slump remains a headwind.

That has prompted Mr. Xi to double down on his push for greater self-reliance, which he has called a “dual circulation” model that strikes a better balance between relying on domestic consumption and external trade.

A key Party plenum held in October discussed “a new development pattern” for the 14th five-year plan (2021-2025) and also laid out a “Vision 2035” blueprint that emphasises more sustainable growth.

China is still struggling with rising debt, a problem worsened by this year’s economic relief measures, and is also pushing for cleaner growth, with Mr. Xi this year announcing a target to go carbon neutral by 2060, which will require a reduction of coal in the energy mix from 58% to less than 50% by 2025.

Assertive Posture

If 2020 has reinforced the belief in Beijing of its global ascendancy, it has also been marked by an increasingly muscular approach abroad on all of its frontiers.

China’s homegrown aircraft carrier, the Shandong, sailed across the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea after being inducted into the navy this year and will be combat ready by early 2021. Beijing has made clear to the new administration in Washington it will brook no interference in its “internal affairs”, even as it has pursued increasingly hard-line policies in Hong Kong, where a new national security law has tightened its grip, and in Xinjiang, where it has hit out at any criticism over the internment of more than one million Uighurs in “re-education” centres.

In early May, China appeared to disregard three decades of a carefully built consensus with India as it mobilised two divisions along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), in a move that officials in Delhi saw as aimed at unilaterally redrawing the LAC in Ladakh.

A clash in Galwan Valley in June that led to the loss of 20 Indian soldiers and an unknown number of Chinese soldiers marked the most serious border crisis with India since the 1960s, leading many former Indian officials to describe 2020 as a major inflection point in relations with China.

As the year ends, a sub-zero LAC remains tense with neither side agreeing on a plan to disengage, with the expectation in India of continued hostilities as the snow melts in the spring and tensions on the border to dominate the relationship next year.

[khalilhumam]

Pity the nation: Assessing a half-century of Assadist rule

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/pity-the-nation-assessing-a-half-century-of-assadist-rule/

Pity the nation: Assessing a half-century of Assadist rule

By Steven Heydemann Fifty years ago, on November 13, 1970, Hafez al-Assad seized power from rival factions of the ruling Baath Party. Dubbed the “corrective revolution” by his new regime, Assad’s coup d’état represented the defeat of a leftist faction and the ascent of party moderates. Yet few imagined at the time that this seizure of power by a disgruntled officer—one of a long string of similar coups in a country notorious for its instability—would mark the beginnings of the longest period of continuous family rule in Syria’s modern history. When Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father after Hafez’s death in June 2000, Syria entered an exclusive club. There are fewer than a half-dozen republics in which presidencies have been handed down directly from father to son. Of these, there are only three countries in the world in which father-son duos have held the presidency uninterrupted for a half century or more: Togo, Gabon, and Syria. In all three cases, sons who inherited their presidencies have prevailed in multiple, if highly suspect, elections and, as of this writing, remain in power. The exceptional longevity of the Assad regimes is noteworthy. It also raises a question made all the more relevant by the past decade’s upheaval: what, precisely, have fifty years of Assadist rule accomplished? When Bashar al-Assad ascended to power at the age of thirty-four—his path paved by a docile parliament that hurriedly amended the constitution to lower the minimum age for the presidency—he inherited a stagnant backwater of a country. Though his father was often lauded for his strategic and diplomatic acumen, by the time Hafez al-Assad died in June 2000, he had achieved little more than overseeing his country’s drift into irrelevance. He also failed in his lifelong ambition to assert Syria’s centrality in regional affairs. Henry Kissinger’s well-known dictum, “you can’t make war in the Middle East without Egypt and you can’t make peace without Syria,” was proven wrong with the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1979. That same year, Syria was added to the then newly created US list of state sponsors of terror (it is the only one of the original designees to remain on the list to this day). No longer able to play a decisive role as spoiler and, with the Palestinian cause languishing, Hafez al-Assad’s periodic forays into Arab-Israeli diplomacy made no discernable headway. A wasted decade later, the Soviet Union collapsed and the region’s diplomatic center of gravity had begun shifting eastward to the Arab Gulf, casting Syria even further to the margins of regional politics. At the end of his second term and only months before Hafez died, Bill Clinton was the last American president to invest diplomatic capital in an effort to broker a Syrian-Israeli peace. He too failed. Hafez al-Assad’s much vaunted “strategic patience” exhausted his adversaries yet did nothing to advance Syria’s interests or secure the return of the Golan Heights. This national aspiration has since moved even further out of reach. Bashar’s domestic inheritance was on even shakier ground. While the country had survived a crippling economic crisis in the mid-1980s, it entered the twenty-first century with a moribund economy, an inefficient bureaucracy, a weak and vastly overstaffed public sector, degraded educational and healthcare sectors, and among the highest unemployment levels in the world. The security sector, however, had thrived under Hafez, prospering from Syria’s occupation of Lebanon while ensuring the regime’s survival through its brutal suppression of the 1979-1982 insurgency of the Muslim Brotherhood, culminating in the infamous Hama massacre in February 1982. By all accounts, Hafez al-Assad was largely indifferent to economic matters, allegedly once describing economics as a subject for donkeys. Bashar could not afford to emulate his father’s disinterest. Like many dictators, Hafez viewed Syria’s public budget as an instrument of regime survival. He allocated resources and opportunities—including the opportunity to benefit from rampant corruption—to cultivate loyalist networks that favored regime insiders but extended well beyond them to encompass significant segments of the Damascene Sunni business elite. Hafez’ “corrective revolution” was premised on the partial unwinding of the radical economic policies favored by his predecessor, Salah Jadid. Yet the elder Assad largely preserved Syria’s “authoritarian bargain,” offering Syrians tenuous economic security in exchange for political quiescence—a form of coercive dependence that preserved a precarious social peace. The modest economic reforms initiated during his last decade proved inadequate to pull Syria out of its economic torpor. Instead, reforms merely opened new horizons for the corrupt enrichment of regime insiders and well-connected businessmen. When Bashar stepped into the presidency in July 2000, Syria’s GDP had at long last recovered to the levels achieved in the early 1980s. In the subsequent decade, the economy seemed to thrive. Per capita GDP doubled between 2000 and 2010, as the country transitioned to what officials described as a “social market economy.” Not far below the surface, however, the regime was driving Syria toward a break point. While the world focused on the political arena—Bashar’s short-lived “Damascus Spring” (the brief political opening of 2000-2001), his elimination of internal rivals, his open-door policy for jihadists moving into Iraq, his role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, followed by Syria’s humiliating eviction from Lebanon—the social and economic costs of deep, systemic dysfunctions were growing. Despite Bashar’s efforts to upgrade and modernize authoritarianism in Syria, top-level economic growth left the vast majority of Syrians behind. During his first decade in power, poverty deepened and unemployment grew, especially among youth. In 2006, severe drought gripped Syria’s agricultural zones, its effects amplified by mismanagement and corruption. Over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of small farmers were forced off their land and became environmental refugees who settled on the outskirts of Damascus and provincial capitals, like Deraa in Syria’s south. Regime cronies, led by Assad family members, such as Rami Makhlouf, became increasingly rapacious, preying on and alienating the business community that had previously lent its support to the regime. Makhlouf reportedly ended up controlling some 65 percent of Syria’s economy. For his part, Bashar seemed to think that his fealty to the tenants of Arabism and “resistance,” though far more rhetorical than real, were sufficient to insulate his regime from the wave of protests that swept through the region beginning in late 2010. He was wrong. By March 2011, with the examples of Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya fueling their aspirations, Syrians, too, overcame the “wall of fear,” found their collective voice, and joined in mass protests calling for economic and social justice and an end to the Assad regime. Confronted with an unprecedented challenge—the withdrawal of consent and legitimacy by millions of ordinary Syrians—the regime responded with force, setting the country on the path to civil war. Today, after a decade of conflict, Bashar sits atop the wreckage of a country, his position salvaged but not yet fully secured by Russia and Iran’s intervention. The exigencies of survival have left their own dismal impact on the country: a shattered economy, fractured society, and mass socialization into norms of violence, sectarian intolerance, and extremism. War unleashed the most thuggish of the regime’s appetites, further entrenching its brutality and corruption. Wartime profiteers and warlords now boldly assert their prerogatives as Syria’s new political elite, reaping the rewards of their support for the Assads over the past decade. As Syrians contemplate a fraught transition to post-conflict and the likely imposition of an authoritarian peace, the enduring legacies of Assadist rule are best expressed in what have become dual and utterly separate realities. Images of Bashar triumphant, Makhlouf’s sons with their luxury cars and private jet, and Asma al-Assad comforting widows in her designer jeans, appear alongside starkly different images of long, parallel rows of white shrouds, bread lines, children picking through garbage dumps, and overcrowded boats carrying Syrians into uncertain futures as refugees. The Syrian uprising is a more damning referendum on the Assad family legacy than any judgement that might be rendered by outsiders. Its defeat has come at a terrible price. Generational projects of reconstruction and social repair lie ahead, challenges the regime is singularly ill-equipped to meet and that may yet shake its grip on power. The Assads and their loyal supporters, however, acknowledge no such possibilities. In 2028, Bashar, should he still be in power, will bump up against presidential term limits established in 2012. Perhaps, in anticipation of that moment, the family is grooming his eldest son, Hafez Bashar al-Assad, to ascend to the presidential throne. The Assads are not done with Syria yet. Pity the nation.

[itsfinancethings]

For years, Thailand’s powerful monarchy has been the untouchable third rail of the country’s politics.

A strict lèse-majesté law ostensibly insulates the royal institution from defamation, but in practice stifles discussion of the wealthy sovereign with the threat of up to 15 years in prison. This summer, that deterrent failed.

Grievances once limited to hushed conversations have exploded into the open as a new generation of Thai activists publicly airs frustrations with the existing system of governance — including their ruler’s role in it.

“We dream of a monarchy that coexists with democracy,” Anon Nampa, a human rights lawyer and prominent activist reportedly told crowds on Aug. 16 in Bangkok. In one of the kingdom’s largest demonstrations since the 2014 coup, more than 10,000 people converged around the Democracy Monument built to commemorate the end of absolute monarchy in 1932.

“We must achieve this within our generation,” Anon said to cheers.

‘They believe Thailand needs genuine democracy’

Student-led groups have staged near daily protests across the country since last month, calling for parliament to dissolve, for the military-drafted constitution to be rewritten and for an end to the harassment of activists. They’ve given the government a September deadline to meet their demands, or else say they will fan the protest flames — no small threat in a country that has been hounded by chronic upheaval and putsches.

Read more: Thailand: Coups That Helped Shape the Land of Coups

Partly inspired by the decentralized Hong Kong demonstrations last year, Thailand’s students say they are leaderless, relying on social media to organize.

The movement, which has traversed the country, has brought motley cliques together, from LGBTQ activists to environmentalists to Malay Muslim separatists from the south.

“This is a very mixed group,” says Sunai Phasuk, a senior researcher on Thailand at Human Rights Watch. “But when you dig into what motivates all these different voices, the bottom line is that they believe Thailand needs genuine democracy.”

For some, this line of inquiry means questioning Thailand’s monarchical traditions.

LILLIAN SUWANRUMPHA—AFP/Getty Images Protesters call for the dissolution of the military-backed government during a flash mob in Bangkok, Thailand on Aug. 8, 2020.

“In the past, there have been statements fooling us by saying that people born into the royal family are incarnations of gods and angels,” student activist Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul reportedly said from the stage at an Aug. 10 rally at Thammasat University. “With all due respect, please ask yourselves, are you sure that angels or gods have this kind of personality?”

She read out a 10-point manifesto urging reforms to the royal institution, including revoking the draconian lèse-majesté law, trimming the monarchy’s budget and banning the palace from politics.

“Frustrated by a charade democracy and a military-dominated government endorsed by the monarchy, these protesters have become dangerously bold, risking the strict lèse-majesté laws to make their voices heard,” says Paul Chambers a special adviser on international affairs at the Center of ASEAN Community Studies at Thailand’s Naresuan University.

Still, even those testing the limits of the taboo-laden traditions have taken pains to emphasize they are not trying to dismantle the monarchy. A student group said in a statement that the manifesto aims only to allow the king “to continue to be esteemed by the people within a democracy.”

The king

Thailand’s current sovereign, King Maha Vajiralongkorn, spends much of the year overseas, flying back for the occasional trip like attending his mother’s birthday last week. He arrived on Wednesday and departed Thursday, according to the New York Times.

Since ascending the throne in 2016, following the death of his widely revered father, Vajiralongkorn has consolidated financial and military control. With changes to the constitution, he made it easier to rule from abroad, brought two important army regiments under his command and gained direct oversight over royal assets. The Crown Property Bureau, a vast real estate and investments portfolio, was previously managed by state agencies. While its estimated worth is not made public, its property holdings in the Thai capital alone were valued at $33 billion, according to a semi-official 2011 biography on Vajiralongkorn’s father.

Read more: King Maha Vajiralongkorn

The 68-year-old king cuts a stark contrast with the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, who was the world’s longest-reigning monarch when he died at the age of 88. Thought to be unpopular as a crown prince and embroiled in several scandals, Vajiralongkorn’s private life has served as fodder for international tabloids, including his affairs, disowning of children and, according to leaked diplomatic cables, the promotion of his adored miniature poodle Foo-Foo to the rank of Air Chief Marshal.

Photo by Anusak Laowilas/NurPhoto via Getty Images Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn presides over the annual royal ploughing ceremony at the Sanam Luang park in Bangkok, Thailand, on May 9, 2019.

Ahead of his official coronation and just months after marrying his fourth wife, Queen Suthida, he appointed his mistress a royal consort. (He later stripped her of her rank and titles, accusing the 34-year-old of trying to elevate herself above the queen.)

The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t helped his image. As the king flies in and out, Thailand’s lockdown has exacerbated already deep inequality and bled the tourism-dependent economy dry. Millions are now jobless while the Southeast Asia nation this week reported its worst economic contraction since the 1998 Asian financial crisis.

“I think [COVID-19] and the economic downturn added up a sense of frustration among the protesters. But I think it has more to do with how King Vajiralongkorn has behaved himself,” says Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a self-exiled Thai academic who teaches at Kyoto University. “They see him as irresponsible, and at times intervening in politics.”

While the palace is widely seen as floating above the country’s turbulent political sphere, it has often played an important role as referee. Since 1932, Thailand has experienced a dozen successful coups, with the palace formally approving each takeover. Last year, Vajiralongkorn endorsed junta leader turned prime minister Prayut Chan-ocha‘s cabinet.

The prime minister

Prayut has promised to restore stability after several years of upheaval. But many young people see his administration as failing to revive democracy, and instead enabling the generals to stay in power long after the 2014 coup.

After the 2019 election was dogged by allegations of irregularities, the court dissolved an opposition party that proved popular among young, progressive voters. Feeling thwarted at the ballot box, protesters demanding a say in the country’s future stormed the streets in February. But their momentum was temporarily sapped by COVID-19 restrictions.

Activists say Prayut’s rule has been marked by escalating repression. Since the coup six years ago, legislation like the computer crimes act and the lèse-majesté law has been used to imprison critics. Activists have also been physically attacked by unidentified assailants, while at least nine dissidents who fled overseas have vanished by Human Rights Watch’s count. Two later washed up on a riverbank, their stomachs filled with concrete.

Read more: Thailand’s Leader Promised to Restore Democracy. Instead He’s Tightening His Grip

In a televised address on Aug. 13, Prayut insisted the government has been restrained in handling this summer’s unrest. He called on all citizens “to please say no to the politics of hate and division.”

Previously, he warned that the protesters “went too far” when they broached the topic of the monarchy. But his comments did not stop them.

The increasingly popular Twitter hashtag “WhyDoWeNeedAKing” was projected onto the Democracy Monument Sunday, while photos of the event captured signs that said “we need real democracy” and “Stop pretending that this is still a constitutional monarchy.”

Lauren DeCicca—Getty Images Protesters give a three-finger salute at a rally at the Democracy Monument in Bangkok, Thailand on Aug. 16, 2020.

Fears of a crackdown

Not everyone embraces the more incendiary turn of targeting the monarchy. Some worry the move could jeopardize their wider, pro-democracy goals.

Previous Thai protests have been crushed with force leaving dozens dead, including students. Some observers fear history will repeat itself. Thailand’s powerful army chief General Apirat Kongsompong railed against “nation-haters,” in a speech earlier this month.

“The [corona]virus can be cured, but what is incurable is the nation-hater disease,” he reportedly said. “Those who hate their own country are not recoverable because they keep mocking their own country.”

Three prominent protesters have been arrested and released on bail over their involvement in the recent rallies. Two of them, lawyer Anon and student activist Parit “Penguin” Chiwarak, also face lèse-majesté complaints. Police issued fresh arrest warrants for six protesters Wednesday, including Anon and Panusaya. They will be charged with “sedition, computer crimes act, violating the diseases control act and using loudspeakers”, Pathum Thani provincial police commander Chayut Marayat told Agence France-Presse.

Experts say while authorities appear to be going after figureheads in the hopes that the rest of the movement will taper off organically, the strategy risks backfiring. So far, it has only fueled further defiance.

“To threaten students is to declare war on the future,” Parit wrote on Twitter Aug. 17, three days after he was arrested on sedition charges. “Stop harassing students now if you don’t want things to escalate.”

[ladystylestores]

UN makes largest single appeal amid warnings of unprecedented hunger due to pandemic

The United Nations is warning that 265 million people could be pushed to the point of starvation by the end of 2020 with the first increase in global poverty since 1990 unless urgent action is taken.

Humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock made the single largest appeal in U.N. history Thursday, seeking $10.3 billion to mitigate the coronavirus pandemic and its deadly second-order effects, especially the global recession and the diversion of health resources.

“My message to the G-20 is step up now or pay the price later. For a relatively modest investment, we can prevent the worst, including the exportation of the worst problems from the most fragile countries,” Lowcock told reporters, referencing the group of the world’s largest economies.

The U.N. launched its Global Humanitarian Response Plan in March, but has fallen short of its funding goals since then, generating $1.7 billion so far. The initiative targets 63 countries already facing humanitarian crises where COVID-19 and associated lockdowns are just starting to have a profound impact.

PHOTO: A health worker takes a blood sample for a quick COVID-19 test from man who works selling cookies at the Coche food market in Caracas, Venezuela, June 23, 2020. (Ariana Cubillos/AP)

“Failure to act now will leave the virus free to circle the globe, undo decades of development and create a generation’s worth of tragic and exportable problems,” said Lowcock, who serves as the U.N. Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.

That staggering figure — 265 million people on the brink of starvation — was reached by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and an Oxford University researcher in the first detailed assessment of its kind.

Lowcock told ABC News he’s hoping the U.S. will provide roughly 30% of that $10.3 billion figure. So far, the U.S. has announced $1.5 billion for international assistance, although not all of that has gone to the aid groups and international agencies Lowcock is raising funds for.

MORE: As COVID-19 financial crisis wages on, some economists warn of a divergent ‘K-shaped’ economic recovery

Despite the worsening outbreak in America, which is already leading the world in COVID-19 deaths and cases, Lowcock told ABC News the U.S. “remains the indispensable nation.”

Story continues

“[It’s] only when there is U.S. leadership and mobilization of others that there’s a really effective global response,” he said, adding a warning, “Nobody, including no one in the U.S., will be safe from this virus until everybody’s safe from it.”

But with shortages of personal protective equipment and insufficient testing, some have said the U.S. needs to focus on its own outbreak.

So far, only 0.1% of all U.S. emergency funding has gone to international assistance, but now there is growing momentum in Congress to do more.

PHOTO: A volunteer doctor measures the blood pressure of a woman during a health check-up for the poor families amid the spread of coronavirus, July 8, 20202, at a school in Sanaa, Yemen. (Hani Al-Ansi/DPA via Getty Images)

A bipartisan group of senators wrote to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., urging them to prioritize “significant U.S. investment in the international response” in the next emergency funding package. In the House, at least 125 members have signed on to a similar letter to House leadership, warning, “We cannot afford to under-resource global foreign assistance as it is an essential component of a COVID-19 response.”

While more U.S. assistance may help mitigate the effects worldwide, Lowcock said the world’s richest economies were slow to act and “waited too long to grip this.”

In unusually critical tones, Lowcock has pleaded for greater assistance.

“I don’t have a magic money tree,” he told reporters Thursday, “but the donors do and they’ve used it to protect, I think wisely, their own economies and their own countries, and what I’m saying is it would be a very good idea to use just 1% of that money in your own interests as well as an act of human empathy and generosity to protect the poorer countries.”

MORE: Pandemic could cause famines of ‘biblical proportions’

In particular, the World Food Program warned earlier this week that 10 countries already face deep food crises — Yemen, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Syria, the Sudan, Nigeria and Haiti — totaling 135 million people.

But that could almost double to 265 million people if this urgent appeal isn’t met, the agency estimated.

Over 588,000 people have died globally from the coronavirus, which has infected 13.6 million people in 216 countries, areas or territories.

UN makes largest single appeal amid warnings of unprecedented hunger due to pandemic originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

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Sunday, January 17, 2021

‘Spend as much as you can,’ IMF head urges governments worldwide (Reuters) Policymakers worldwide should embrace more spending to help revive their stuttering economies, the head of the International Monetary Fund said on Friday at Russia’s annual Gaidar economic forum. Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva did not give any specific economic forecasts, but made clear her desire for governments to up their spending and that a synchronised approach internationally was best for growth. “In terms of policies for right now, very unusual for the IMF, starting in March I would go out and I would say: ‘please spend’. Spend as much as you can and then spend a little bit more,” Georgieva said. “I continue to advocate for monetary policy accommodation and fiscal policies that protect the economy from collapse at a time when we are on purpose restricting both production and consumption,” she said.

States Brace for Armed Protests in Wake of U.S. Capitol Attack (NYT) Bracing for the potential of violent protests in the days leading up to the presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, state officials are calling up National Guard troops, erecting imposing fencing and shutting down Capitol grounds in response to the F.B.I.’s warning that armed protesters could target the capital cities across the country. A survey by The New York Times of all 50 states found at least 10 that are activating National Guard troops in their capital cities. The moves by state officials point to the growing fear over continuing violence around the country in the aftermath of the mob attack last week on the U.S. Capitol in which assailants supporting President Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election forced their way inside the building.

Mexico hits another record for COVID-19 cases (AP) Mexico posted a record spike in coronavirus cases on Friday, with 21,366 newly confirmed infections, about double the daily rate of increase just a week ago. The country also recorded 1,106 more deaths. It was unclear if the spike was due to the presence of the U.K. virus variant, of which only one case has so far been confirmed in a visiting British citizen. The country has now seen almost 1.61 million total infections and has registered over 139,000 deaths so far in the pandemic.

Maduro ally presses for dialogue with Biden (AP) A close ally of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said Friday he’s hopeful the Biden administration will roll back a “cruel” sanctions policy and instead give room for diplomacy that could lead to the reopening of the U.S. Embassy and the release of several jailed American citizens. Jorge Rodríguez’s comments came in his first interview since taking the helm of Venezuela’s National Assembly over strong protests from the U.S., European Union and domestic opponents. Rodriguez, extending an olive branch to the incoming U.S. president, said the ruling socialist party is eager for a new start after four years of endless attacks by the Trump administration that he believes not only exacerbated suffering among Venezuelans and failed to unseat Maduro but also punished U.S. investors who historically have been important in the OPEC nation. It’s unclear if the Biden administration will accept the overture or continue with the hardline policy of regime change it inherits. In the meantime, there’s no end in sight to an economic crisis that has sent millions fleeing and those left behind lacking basic goods, including gasoline, in a country sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves.

UK shuts travel corridors and requires negative Covid tests to enter (The Guardian) Boris Johnson has announced a dramatic tightening of the UK’s borders, with all international arrivals to be forced to quarantine as well as demonstrate they have had a negative Covid test. After months of criticism of the government’s lax border policies, which Labour claimed were “costing lives”, the prime minister said he was tightening the rules to prevent new variants of the virus reaching the UK and safeguard the vaccination programme. He also underlined the desperate situation facing England’s hospitals, urging the public to think twice before going out at the weekend. “There are now more than 37,000 Covid patients in hospital across the UK and, in spite of all the efforts of our doctors and nurses and our medical staff, we are now seeing cancer treatments sadly postponed, ambulances queueing, and intensive care units spilling over into adjacent wards,” he said.

Now, really? Italy political chaos sparks dismay (Reuters) Italy faces political turmoil. That after former prime minister Matteo Renzi pulled his small party out of the ruling coalition, stripping it of a majority. Now it’s unclear what will happen, but it’s hardly the best timing. The country is mired in its worst recession since World War II. It’s also battling the second-highest death toll in Europe in the ongoing health crisis. Small businesses in Rome said leaders should be focused on helping them, not squabbling over power.

Undeterred by the pandemic, Hindu pilgrims gather in India (NYT) As India prepares to begin an ambitious coronavirus vaccination program this weekend, more than 700,000 Hindu pilgrims gathered to take a dip in the Ganges River on Thursday, the start of the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious gatherings in the world. The faithful who traveled to Haridwar, the holy town at the foothills of the Himalayas that is the site of this year’s pilgrimage, said a dip in the freezing waters will cleanse them of their sins and provide blessings that extend through several generations. The authorities said that about 1,000 people had been fined for not wearing masks or maintaining social distance, but Sanjay Gunjyal, a police official monitoring the crowd, acknowledged the difficulty of trying to enforce the rules. “In a limited space, crowd management and maintaining social distancing is extremely difficult,” he said. “Their belief system was paramount and not the fear to catch Covid,” said Manoj Singh Negi, a spokesman for the police department monitoring the event. “That they got to touch the holy waters was the overriding sentiment.”

Damaged roads, lack of gear hinder Indonesia quake rescue (AP) Damaged roads and bridges, power blackouts and lack of heavy equipment on Saturday hampered rescuers after a strong earthquake left at least 46 people dead and hundreds injured on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island. Operations were focused on about eight locations in the hardest-hit city of Mamuju, where people were still believed trapped following early Friday’s magnitude 6.2 quake, said Saidar Rahmanjaya, who heads the local search and rescue agency. Cargo planes carrying food, tents, blankets and other supplies from Jakarta landed late Friday for distribution in temporary shelters. Still, thousands of people spent the night in the open fearing aftershocks and a possible tsunami.

Russia to Exit Open Skies Treaty, Escalating Military Rivalry With U.S. (NYT) Russia said on Friday that it was pulling out of a decades-old treaty that allowed countries to make military reconnaissance flights over each other’s territory. The decision by President Vladimir V. Putin to leave the accord, the Open Skies Treaty, matches an action taken by President Trump in May. The treaty, which dates to 1992, is of limited use to the United States, which has a network of spy satellites. But it has been important to European allies as a way of keeping track of Russian troop movements along their borders. When Mr. Trump announced the American withdrawal, which was completed late last year, he predicted Mr. Putin was “going to come back and want to make a deal.” He did not. And Russia’s move signaled that the country did not intend to make it easy for the administration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to reverse Mr. Trump’s rejection of a series of arms-control and military monitoring treaties.

In Uganda, Museveni steamrolls to a sixth term (Washington Post) Longtime Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni won a sixth term as president with about 60 percent of the vote, according to election results Saturday, in an election that highlighted the many tactics used for decades to steamroll Museveni's opponents. While voting Thursday was largely peaceful and orderly, the campaign period displayed the architecture of Museveni’s 35-year grip on power: relentless and violent crackdowns, widespread arrests, and attempts to bar journalists and independent observers. His ability to keep deploying them, election after election, also has been indirectly bolstered by the billion-plus dollars his government receives annually in Western aid money, primarily from the United States and U.S.-backed lending institutions. The State Department’s assistant secretary for African affairs, Tibor Nagy, tweeted Friday that Uganda’s election was “fundamentally flawed” and that the United States was assessing options to respond. But, to many critics of Museveni, such statements are undercut by the U.S. aid money — totaling $936 million in 2019 — that just keeps coming. “The international donors, and particularly the United States, are the biggest enablers of Museveni’s authoritarianism,” said Godber Tumushabe, a Ugandan lawyer and activist. “They underwrite all of Uganda’s public services — health, infrastructure, etcetera — which allows Museveni to spend massively on a security apparatus and a network of patronage.”

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The Case For Obama’s Impeachment  Posted on

The Case For Obama’s Impeachment  Posted on

June 9, 2014

by

Bob Livingston

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There is clear and convincing evidence that President Barack Obama has on numerous occasions willfully committed treason and high crimes and misdemeanors and should be removed from office.

The “crimes” that led to the impeachment of both Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton and the resignation of Richard Nixon pale in comparison to Obama’s. Johnson’s “crimes” were purely political. He favored a policy of benevolent reconciliation with the Southern States following the Civil War. He issued a series of proclamations that directed the Southern States to hold conventions and elections to reform their governments; he attempted to veto a number of bills establishing military districts to oversee the new State governments; he vetoed an incumbent protection act called the Tenure of Office Act; and he fired Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who was working against him at every turn. Those moves were all contrary to the wishes of the Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress in the aftermath of the war. The impeachment vote in the Senate failed by one vote on all three counts to receive the two-thirds majority necessary to remove Johnson from office.

Clinton was impeached for perjury to a grand jury and obstruction of justice in the Paula Jones sexual harassment suit and the related independent counsel’s investigation in the Monica Lewinsky affair and various other Clinton misdeeds. Forty-five Senators—all of them Republican—voted to remove Clinton from office over the perjury charge. Fifty voted to remove him for obstruction of justice. Though Clinton was clearly guilty, not one Democrat in the Senate voted to impeach. And, in fact, the Senate voted 100-0 to not hear any live witnesses in the trial.

Nixon, of course, resigned a couple of weeks after the House opened its impeachment hearings over his role in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in and other allegations of his misuse of office, the facts of which were just coming to light at the time.

The “I-word” hit the mainstream media after war-loving, chicken hawk and John McCain-lapdog Senator Lindsey Graham warned Obama that Republicans would call for his impeachment if he released more prisoners from Guantanamo Bay without Congressional approval. Before that, anyone mentioning impeachment was shouted down and cast by the media and the establishment as nutty, kooky or… wait for it… a conspiracy theorist. Obama responded to Graham’s threat by having his underlings release news that another Gitmo prisoner may soon be sprung.

I am under no illusion that the impeachment proceedings are in the offing, regardless of what Obama does. Neither is Obama. Graham’s threat was as idle as an inattentive parent’s threat to a misbehaving child. When you hear a parent tell his child “No” over and over, and then hear him say, “You do that once more and you’re in trouble,” you know that child is never disciplined — and the child knows it, too. This is Congress and Obama.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats in Washington, D.C., are interested in anything other paying lip service to the Constitution while solidifying their respective grips on power and transferring America’s wealth to their favored crony partners. That is all that matters in D.C. Neither party will intentionally do anything to upset their cushy apple cart.

And the MSM, which long ago abandoned any pretense at objective journalism, are beholden to the elites and in the tank for the regime, drunk as they are on being next to the power structure. You can’t expect real journalism with a lineup like this:

ABC Senior Correspondent Claire Shipman is married to outgoing White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

CNN President Virginia Moseley is married to Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Secretary Tom Nides.

CBS President David Rhodes is the brother of top Obama official Ben Rhodes, who is responsible for rewriting the Benghazi talking points.

ABC President Ben Sherwood is the brother of Obama special adviser Elizabeth Sherwood.

However, six years of this lawless regime is more than any sane person should be expected to endure. Even leftist legal scholar Jonathan Turley called Obama “the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be.”

So here are my articles of impeachment — in no particular order — for the undocumented usurper currently despoiling the People’s House: Barack Hussein Obama.

He provided aid and comfort to the enemy by releasing five suspected terrorists and former members of the Taliban who participated in or orchestrated attacks against Americans.

He violated a law he signed six months prior requiring him to notify Congress 30 days before releasing GITMO detainees.

He has willfully and repeated violated Article I, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution by continuously amending the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.

He knowingly and willfully violated Article I, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution by signing the ACA, knowing full well it was a bill for raising revenue that had originated in the Senate.

He engaged in fraud by repeatedly lying to the American people about the effects of the ACA by claiming that Americans could keep their current coverage and physicians if they chose.

He exercised an abuse of power by instructing, through his proxies, agents of the Internal Revenue Service to target conservative organizations and his critics for extra scrutiny and audits.

He participated in an obstruction of justice and a criminal conspiracy by hindering a Congressional investigation into the Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal and using Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice in that obstruction.

He provided aid and comfort to the enemy by ordering or allowing the sale of arms and ammunition to al-Qaida-linked terrorists in Syria and by dispatching agents of the government to advise and train in the use of the those weapons and in military tactics.

He failed, despite repeated requests by the U.S. Consulate, to provide the security necessary to ensure the safety of U.S. personnel and the Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

He knowingly and willfully denied military assistance to Americans under attack at the Benghazi Consulate, resulting in the trashing of the U.S. Consulate building, the theft of sensitive documents and the deaths of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.

He knowingly and willfully lied and ordered his proxies to lie about the circumstances surrounding the attack on the U.S Consulate in Benghazi, thereby perpetrating a fraud on the American people in order to ensure his re-election and to cover up his illegal gun running operation.

He violated the War Powers Act by failing to gain Congressional approval for the military attack on Libya that resulted in the overthrow of the Libyan regime.

He provided aid and comfort to the enemy by using the American military and intelligence organizations and allowing the sale of arms and ammunition to al-Qaida-linked terrorists in order to assist them in overthrowing a legal regime in Libya that Congress had not declared war upon.

He has repeatedly made war on various Middle Eastern countries with the use of drone attacks without the approval of Congress in violation of the War Powers Act and in violation of Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.

He has ordered the murders of at least three American citizens without due process in violation of Amendments 5, 6, 8 and 14.

He has repeatedly used the Environmental Protection Agency to contravene Congress and pass laws harmful to American businesses and consumers, in violation of Article I, Section 1.

He has repeatedly violated the 4th Amendment by allowing agencies under his direction to continue to spy upon, wiretap and collect personal information of American citizens who are not criminal suspects.

He has repeatedly violated Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution by disregarding laws passed by Congress, including, but not limited to, U.S. immigration laws, civil rights laws and the Defense of Marriage Act.

He knowingly allowed the illegal sale of weapons to Mexican narco-terrorists that were later used to kill Americans, including border agent Brian Terry.

He obstructed justice by participating with Attorney General Holder in a cover-up of the Fast and Furious gun running scheme.

He knowingly and willfully violated Article IV, Section 4 by failing to protect the border States against invasion, and in fact encouraged that invasion through his rhetoric and with the use of executive orders that contravened U.S. immigration law.

He knowingly and willfully violated Article IV, Section 4 (guaranteeing a republican form of government to each State) by strong-arming, intimidating and threatening to withhold funds from the States of Oklahoma, Texas, Montana, Rhode Island and Arizona in order to coerce the people and legislatures of those States and prevent the passage of laws according to the citizen’s wishes.

He instructed his Interior Secretary to ignore the orders of Federal courts to lift a moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, which denied oil workers an opportunity to earn a living and damaged the U.S. economy.

He broke established precedent and contravened established bankruptcy law, to the detriment of the bond holders and the advantage of his campaign contributors (auto unions) in the General Motors bailout.

In the auto bailout, he knowingly and willfully deprived numerous auto dealers of their dealerships for political reasons in violation of Amendments 4 and 14.

He repeatedly transferred funds from the U.S. Treasury to his cronies and campaign contributors for use in failing green energy schemes.

He violated Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution by appointing officers without first obtaining the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.”

In his book Faithless Execution, Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, Andrew C. McCarthy notes: “Impeachment is a grave remedy on the order of a nuclear strike.” Obama’s lawless Presidency has been nothing less than a nuclear strike on the U.S. Constitution, which now lies in tatters.

“Impeachment is a political remedy: even if palpably guilty of profound transgressions, a president will not be ousted without a groundswell of public ire,” McCarthy writes.

In his case for impeachment, McCarthy breaks Obama’s high crimes and misdemeanors into seven articles. They are:

Article I: The President’s willful refusal to execute the laws faithfully and usurpation of the legislative authority of Congress.

Article II: Usurping the Constitutional authority and prerogatives of Congress.

Article III: Dereliction of Duty as President and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces.

Article IV: Fraud on the American People.

Article V: Failure to execute the Immigration Laws faithfully.

Article VI: Failure to execute the laws faithfully: Department of Justice.

Article VII: Willfully undermining the Constitutional rights of the American people that he is sworn to preserve, protect and defend.

Those articles contain many of the charges laid out above. But they also include Obama’s defiance of Congressional law and court orders in obstructing the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, his defiance of Federal law requiring him to address Medicare insolvency, his undermining of and contempt for Congress’ duty to conduct oversight of Federal agencies, his dereliction of duty by imposing unconscionable rules of engagement that endanger American troops, lying about Iran negotiations and assisting that country with its nuclear program, politicization of the DoJ, politically motivated selective prosecution by the DoJ, DoJ investigations and other intimidation of journalists in violation of Amendment 1, systematic stonewalling of Congress, abridgement of Amendment 1 in appeasing Islamic supremacists by adopting repressive sharia blasphemy standards, suppression of information about Islamic terrorism, including its occurrence at Ft. Hood, abridgement of Amendment 1 by vindictively targeting and prosecuting high-profile critics, and his abridgement of Amendment 2 by joining an international treaty despite Congressional opposition.

McCarthy notes that since impeachment is a political rather than a legal remedy, the burden of proof is different. But he also states that as long as there is no groundswell of opposition to the President’s actions from the public, there will be no impeachment.

I’ll go one step further: As long as there is not a two-thirds majority of Republicans in the Senate, there will be no impeachment. But even in the off chance that Republicans were to somehow come up with 66 Senators willing to remove the President, the Republicans would not have the stomach to attempt it because the sycophantic media would gin impeachment up as a racial issue and stir up street riots that would make Watts riots look like a park stroll.

The ensuing carnage would likely result in the removal of the entire power structure in Washington. And the establishment — whether it sides with the Democrats or Republicans — will agree it can’t have that.

Update: In the wake of the growing chorus of calls for Obama’s impeachment, the GOP establishment has publicly announced it cares more for power than the Constitution. 

https://personalliberty.com/case-obamas-impeachment/

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New world news from Time: What a New Sculpture Reveals About Growing Tensions Between China and Taiwan

Artist Aihua Cheng has worked feverishly for the past four months in her scenic Baisha Bay studio on Taiwan’s northern coast. For her latest project, the oil painter and sculptor read the extended works of the late Chinese Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo—while creating a three-part sculpture dedicated to the writer and dissident, who died as a political prisoner last year. “I completed the work just yesterday,” she told TIME, shortly before her creation was shown to the public for the first time outside Taipei’s city hall on July 13.

Titled I Have No Enemies, Cheng’s piece incorporates a line drawing of Liu looking out over a bronze open book inscribed with his writings. “I hope that his books and thoughts can continue impacting China,” she says. Unveiled on the one-year anniversary of Liu’s death, the sculpture was planned by exiled democracy activist Wu’er Kaixi as a tribute to his former mentor. “Taiwanese people joining us in erecting this sculpture are telling China that we have not forgotten our values,” says Wu’er, who was forced to flee China after the Tiananmen Square protests and settled in Taiwan in 1996.

That message will resonate with many on this island, which began to embrace democracy after nearly four decades of martial law ended in 1987. The mainland still views Taiwan, an island of 23 million people that lies 112 miles off China’s coast, as its sovereign territory despite the island’s breakaway in 1949 at the end of the Chinese Civil War.

Supported by Reporters Without Borders, the crowdfunded sculpture project is intended to represent the ideals of freedom and democracy championed by Liu in his co-authored Charter 08 manifesto. Liu encouraged Chinese citizens to envisage a democratic future, “a modern means for achieving government truly ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” That document ultimately led to his arrest in 2009, his Nobel Peace Prize the following year and his imprisonment until he died from late-stage liver cancer.

But the commemoration of a Chinese dissident comes at a time when tensions with Beijing are already running high. Taiwan is struggling for international recognition as China ramps up efforts to isolate the island. The day after the statue was unveiled, the head of China’s Taiwan Affairs office released a statement saying that “the vain separatist attempts for ‘Taiwan independence’ will only lead to a dead end.” Add an unpredictable U.S. President and a snowballing trade war between the world’s two biggest economies into the mix and you have a cross-strait relationship that is more fragile—and perhaps more dangerous—than ever.

When the news of Liu’s death was announced last year, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen tweeted a statement expressing Taiwan’s hopes that Chinese people could one day “enjoy the God-given rights of freedom and democracy.” The statement, issued in both Chinese and English, was seen as an affront to Beijing—much like Tsai’s presidential victory in January 2016.

Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party promised “an era of new politics in Taiwan,” breaking with the Nationalist Party (KMT) government policy, which favored closer ties with China. Under the 1992 Consensus, China and Taiwan agreed that there is one China—allowing each other to disagree about the status of Taiwan. Tsai’s election changed that. Her party supports independence and refuses to acknowledge the Consensus. Since Tsai took office in May 2016, China’s President Xi Jinping has not met with her but has continued relations with the KMT opposition party.

The lack of any diplomatic relations with Beijing does not seem to have deterred Tsai.“She will continue to build on the belief that democracy can be integrated into an ethnically Chinese society and the idea that Taiwan can be an example to China in this sense,” says Sheryn Lee, a lecturer in security studies at Macquarie University.

To some, Taiwan looks like the kind of society that Liu Xiaobo envisioned for China. That makes tributes to him contentious. According to Reuters, supporters of him and his widow Liu Xia were pressured by authorities to not hold any commemoration events. And although Liu Xia was released from eight years of house arrest on July 10, the move came amid a growing crackdown on dissidents in China. A day later, China sentenced prominent democracy activist Qin Yongmin to 13 years of imprison-ment for “subversion of state power.”

As well as quashing dissent at home, Xi’s newly consolidated grip on power has allowed him to increase pressure on Taiwan—just as Tsai is trying to strengthen her position ahead of midterm elections in November. “Beijing probably wants to remind the Taiwanese public that they are paying a price for supporting Tsai and her party,” says Richard C. Bush, former Chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, the island’s de facto U.S. embassy.

A visible reminder of that price is the ratcheting up of military actions in the Taiwan Strait. In April, Chinese state media reported that the navy held its largest ever military display in a spectacular show of force in the South China Sea as well as the first naval military exercises with live fire drills in the strait since 2015.

Analysts say such exercises signal Beijing’s intention to send a message to the U.S. amid rising trade tensions and closer ties to Taiwan. While the U.S. for-mally endorses the “one China” policy, it has had an unofficial relationship with Taiwan since 1979. And President Donald Trump has broken an un-precedented series of protocols since his Inauguration, such as accepting a congratulatory phone call from Tsai; passing the Taiwan Travel Act, which encourages U.S. officials to visit the island; and unveiling a new $250 million de facto embassy building in Taipei. “No one really expected the level of interference that Trump had. He broke all of the rules that have been set down with China-Taiwan relations,” says Lee.

These moves have also been accompanied by gestures of U.S. military support for Taiwan, right under Beijing’s nose. Last year, Trump approved a deal to sell Taiwan $1.42 billion worth of arms in a massive deal that was immediately condemned by China. On July 7, two U.S. warships passed through the Taiwan Strait—merely a day after Washington imposed tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese imports in the last shot fired in the superpower showdown.

Despite Trump’s seemingly strong commitment to Taiwan, the backdrop of a trade war has nevertheless worried local politicians. “We share the same fundamental values as the U.S.,” says Huang Kuo-chang, chairman of the pro-independence New Power Party. “But we are not so naive as to be unable to understand that sometimes we become the bargaining chip between China and the United States.”

China has also accelerated efforts to diplomatically isolate the island. Since taking office, Tsai has lost allies in Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and São Tomé and Príncipe, leaving only 18 others worldwide. “Some say that in a few years, the number of allies Taiwan has could drop to zero,” says Rwei-Ren Wu, a research fellow at Taipei’s Academia Sinica. A prominent advocate for Taiwanese independence, Wu was barred from entering Hong Kong to speak at a conference last year.

Taiwan aspires to be a member of the U.N., but is not officially recognized. In May, for the second year in a row, it was denied access to the World Health Organization’s annual assembly—a move denounced by both Tsai’s government and independent watchdogs as a surrender to pressure from Beijing.

That pressure has started to affect private companies. In recent months, airlines and retailers have clashed with Beijing over references to disputed territories, including Taiwan and Tibet. In January, authorities shut down the Chinese websites of Marriott International after it listed Taiwan as an individual nation; in May, Gap apologized for a T-shirt with a map of China that omitted Taiwan. Beijing has also demanded that foreign airlines edit references to Taiwan to reflect the island as part of the mainland. Dismissed by the White House as “Orwellian nonsense,” U.S. airlines including Delta and American now have a July 25 deadline to comply with Beijing’s line on the issue.

In Taipei, the memorial sculpture is accompanied by an empty chair, symbolizing Liu’s absence at the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony because of his imprisonment. Cheng acknowledges that a sculpture alone is unlikely to impact China. “But I think the words, the thoughts of Liu Xiaobo will,” Cheng says. The sculpture—previewed only briefly on July 13—is still waiting on permanent approval from the city. For Taiwan too, the road ahead looks uncertain. “There is no reason for us to be treated as second-class global citizens,” says Huang. “If our goodwill toward China is unilateral, what do we gain from maintaining the status quo?”

With reporting by Wen-yee Lee/Taipei

July 18, 2018 at 06:00PM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com

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Lehman on stage: making a drama out of the financial crisis

For 10 years, politicians have been grappling with the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Now, it’s the turn of the theatre

In a tiny store in Montgomery, Alabama stands a man surrounded by bolts of cloth. The floor is creaky and the door handle sticks. The stock is plain: wool, flax, hemp, cotton. “Nothing flashy,” he says. “In Alabama, you don’t work to live. You live to work.” This is 1847 and the man is Henry Lehman. He rises at 5am and works all hours, selling cloth by the inch to pay his debts. This shop is his whole world: just three years after leaving his native Bavaria, he’s making his way. The sign on the door reads “Lehman Brothers”. So how did we get from there to the famous scenes of 2008, when Lehman came crashing to the ground, bringing the global economy to the brink of collapse? For 10 years economists and politicians have fought over the answer as capitalism has faltered and populism soared. Now, it’s the turn of the artists. The Lehman Trilogy, by Italian dramatist Stefano Massini, opens next week at London’s National Theatre, under the direction of Sam Mendes. An epic, searching affair, it brings Lehman and his two brothers back to witness the eventual unravelling of their company. “At the end of it you do feel you have gone on this enormous journey,” says Simon Russell Beale, one of the three actors who portray the founding fraternity. “Alabama at the beginning seems very far away. But we never lose sight of the fact that, even when the three central men are dead and it is late on in the story, they are still around. It makes the moral dilemmas in the story clearer. Basically, what would the three founders think of what happened in 2008?” Finance is not an obvious gift to a playwright, particularly in an age of mind-boggling derivatives. Drama usually lies more in bedsheets than spreadsheets. Shakespeare didn’t have to unpick the subprime mortgage crisis or grapple with collateralised debt obligations. Even as a theatre critic for the Financial Times, the news that a play will tackle the 2008 crash doesn’t quicken the pulse. David Hare’s 2009 verbatim play The Power of Yes assembled opinion on stage from dozens of experts. It did an excellent job in covering the ground — but Hare himself admitted it wasn’t rip-roaring drama. 

And the crash is a crowded cultural field. Books, articles, films, documentaries — dozens of them — have charted the end of Lehman’s. A 2009 film, The Last Days of Lehman Brothers, dramatised the boardroom battles that preceded its demise; Adam McKay’s 2015 film, The Big Short, Charles Ferguson’s 2010 documentary Inside Job, JC Chandor’s 2011 film Margin Call and the 2011 HBO television film Too Big to Fail (based on Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book) all lifted the lid on the rickety financial market in which it was embroiled. The Lehman Trilogy has to do something different to succeed. NT deputy artistic director Ben Power, who has written the English version, says the play has the sweep, scope and ambition to do just that. “It does something more complex and interesting than just tell the story of the lead-up to bankruptcy,” says Power. “It asks, in a very, very big way, ‘How did we get here?’ ” Massini’s drama spools back to when the Lehman Brothers were just that: three impoverished Jewish siblings newly arrived on American soil. The play starts in 1844, as Henry Lehman opens that tiny fabric shop in Alabama, grafting to keep his business on the road. From there it spills forward over three hours, three parts and three generations as a one-room family firm evolves into a huge global concern. We watch as the business shifts into cotton, into credit, into banking. We see the arrival of the railways, the creation of the stock exchange, the advent of film. The company weathers grief, the civil war, the Great Depression — only to implode, spectacularly, in 2008. With each iteration, we see the emergence of modern America and with it modern capitalism. “If you want to make money, you need to find the simple things before they become simple things,” says Philip Lehman in 1887. He could be talking about Apple. “Really it’s about how American finance, how the American capitalist mindset, was created,” says Power. “You keep seeing the country reinvent itself and change itself. And what might be unexpected is that the play celebrates that: it’s quite romantic about it. It’s an American Dream story — a story about an immigrant family who contribute in a really positive way for a very long time to the making of America and the making of the western world.”

The trilogy trains a long lens, then, on the question of how we got here. But what’s really striking about it is its style. It feels like an epic poem, studded with refrains, repetitions and patterns. There’s something myth-like, almost scriptural about it — we’re seeing recent history unfold like a parable. And above all, it’s a family saga — a form as old as storytelling itself — and a classic three-part story of creation, consolidation and loss. It’s about fathers and sons, falling in love, family feuds — all the stuff that drives drama from the ancient Greeks to The Godfather.

“We can see ourselves and our families in these people,” says Power. “The play explores where hubris and ambition meet, at what point the wrong decisions are taken and where the build to 2008 begins. But it does it in a really human way. “I don’t think success for The Lehman Trilogy equals ‘do you fully understand all the financial mechanisms now?’ ” he adds. “It’s interested in the people and the ideas behind the financial models, rather than the systems themselves.” Traditionally empathy has helped finance to find a voice on stage. Writers from Ben Jonson to Henrik Ibsen to Arthur Miller have tackled the human cost of financial affairs — as of course did Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice. Miller, that great critic of the American Dream, made plain the terrible impact of corporate cover-up in All My Sons, and his masterpiece Death of a Salesman nailed the cost of failure so movingly that on the play’s first night in 1949 businessmen wept openly in the stalls. But more recently dramatists have ventured more directly into the heart of business. Hare’s play used theatre’s role as a public forum to frame the questions people wanted answering. A 2015 immersive piece, World Factory, at the Young Vic, turned theatregoers into economists and made them battle to keep a factory afloat as the markets wobbled. Children’s company Theatre Rites decided it’s never too early to get to grips with economics and staged Bank on It, an interactive piece for five-year-olds, starring a talking filing cabinet.    The play asks very good questions about when did capitalism become, in the eyes of many, a bad idea? Writing about high finance brings its own hazards, of course: the danger of obfuscation; the threat of over-simplification. But theatre can also bring snap and crackle to the business of explaining finance to the layman. David Mamet’s 1983 drama Glengarry Glen Ross talks about a bunch of desperate real-estate agents with a verve that brilliantly sculpts the story. Caryl Churchill’s ferocious satire Serious Money likewise has terrific velocity and a rat-a-tat script that channels the energy and rhythm of the City in the 1980s. Then in 2009, Lucy Prebble’s Enron applied great panache to unpicking the corruption scandal that engulfed the Texan energy giant. Prebble and her director, Rupert Goold, matched exuberant theatricality and clever stagecraft to Enron’s smoke-and-mirrors tactics. In one scene, a character explained an outrageous plan for debt-swallowing shadow companies by stacking boxes inside boxes. More significantly, perhaps, Enron didn’t just criticise. With its wild energy, it sucked you into the madcap story. It conveyed the buzz of innovation and the euphoria of being on a roll and so went some way to explaining not just the scandal itself, but the impulse that drove it. And so to Lehman’s. In the spirit of the real Lehman’s story, the staging of the play relies heavily on the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the actors. The show opens in 2008, in the deserted Lehman’s building, amid the abandoned detritus of a frantic last-minute meeting. From there on it’s up to the cast to spirit up the original brothers and draw us through 164 years of history.

The actors, like the brothers, have to create something from nothing. Where previous international productions have had casts of 20, at the National the whole epic saga will be carried by just three actors: Russell Beale, Ben Miles and Adam Godley. “We keep waiting for the rest of the cast to turn up,” jokes Godley, when I meet them at the end of a rehearsal. As well as the three brothers — Henry, Emanuel and Mayer, respectively — they’ll play all the other characters, metamorphosing into sons, grandsons, neighbours, wives and even, in Godley’s case, a billiard ball. Over 164 years, it’s quite a roll-call. But it’s a tactic that means the three men are on stage throughout — tangible reminders of the original brothers. As the company shifts further and further from its origins, their physical presence should alert us to the distance travelled and make palpable the contrast between those early days trading bolts of cloth and the grand fiasco of the company’s end. “Basically we tell the whole story with just what is there,” explains Russell Beale. “So if we need a paintbrush, we pick up a marker pen, or, if it’s a glass of brandy, we use the jug of water that you’d have in a board room. That’s become very strict. So we don’t use anything else. We don’t change our costumes either.” “It’s a big exercise in minimalism and stripping away,” says Godley. “It’s a very efficient form of storytelling. That’s the delight and the challenge of it. How can you suggest a new character with something really tiny? Maybe just turn up your lapel, wear what you wear slightly differently. It’s doing the most with the least.”

Sitting in an office in the theatre, the three demonstrate: Godley flicks his collar and becomes another man entirely; Russell Beale shifts the angle of his head and the fold of his hands — suddenly he’s an 18-year-old girl in 19th-century Alabama; Miles illustrates how just the way you sit in a chair — stiff and upright, or more casual and expansive — can tell an audience what century you are in. How did the 2008 financial crisis affect you? Global financial crisis Tell us your story But it’s an unusual piece, they confess, very challenging in its scope and narrative style. “It is nothing like I’ve ever done before and that’s very exciting and intriguing,” says Miles. “It asks very good questions about when did capitalism become, in the eyes of many, a bad idea? When did it turn from a very valid pursuit into something slightly tainted? When did this small family business that grew and grew begin to transform itself into something that none of the original founders had envisaged? And why did it do that?” Will it work out? The show is, appropriately, a bit of a gamble. But if any art form can say something fresh about 2008, surely theatre — live, communal, dialectical — is the one.

[investmart007]

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip  | As aid dries up, Gaza families pushed deeper into poverty

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/RaGvy2

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip  | As aid dries up, Gaza families pushed deeper into poverty

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Samia Hassan used to have enough money to feed her two dozen children and grandchildren. Now she spends much of her time worrying about food, scouring Gaza’s vegetable markets for end-of-day discounts or walking miles for a pot of free gruel from a soup kitchen.

Large numbers of Gaza families have been pushed deeper into poverty in recent months by Palestinian political infighting and the freezing of U.S. aid. Life is tougher than ever for most of the 2 million Palestinians locked into tiny, blockaded Gaza, where electricity is off most hours of the day, unemployment approaches 50 percent and the Islamic militant group Hamas rules with a tight grip.

“It’s a perfect storm,” said Hilary DuBose of the Catholic Relief Services, which has had to forego emergency food distributions because the Trump administration is withholding funds. “At the same time that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is worsening, humanitarian aid is disappearing.”

Growing despair in Gaza has helped drive recent Hamas-led protests against the border blockade by Israel and Egypt. The closure was imposed after Hamas, branded a terrorist group by Israel and the West, seized Gaza in 2007, driving out forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The escalating crisis also spotlights the lack of a coherent Gaza policy by the external players trying to shape its future. Israel and Egypt say they need the blockade to contain Hamas, but have not offered a viable plan for Gaza. The international community wants the blockade lifted, but hasn’t said how it would deal with Hamas, which refuses to disarm or renounce violence.

Hassan — who shares her unfinished cinderblock home with seven of her 12 adult children, three daughters-in-law and 16 grandchildren — said she joined the border protests repeatedly, intentionally getting close to the fence in hopes of getting shot and killed by Israeli troops.

“Death is better than this life,” she said to her sons’ astonishment as the family gathered for the meal breaking the dawn-to-dusk fast of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Hassan said she only pulled back because she realized she could end up crippled rather than dead and become a burden. In the past two months, more than 115 Palestinians have been killed and close to 3,800 wounded by Israeli fire in near-weekly border protests, with some facing lifelong disabilities.

Hassan, who wears the black robe and full face veil of ultra-conservative Muslim women, is angry at Hamas, which has fought three cross-border wars with Israel.

“It’s because of them,” she said of her family’s hard times.

In the last war in 2014, the family taxi, an important source of income, was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike on a neighbor’s house. After the war’s devastation, her sons only found work sporadically and one — a father of six — is now in jail for being unable to pay his debts.

The family suffered a new blow after Abbas ordered his West Bank autonomy government to curtail its regular support payments to Gaza, in hopes of pressing Hamas to hand over authority.

The Hassans used to get $500 every three months from Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, but haven’t been paid since the beginning of the year, along with tens of thousands of Gaza welfare recipients, said Social Affairs Ministry official Khaled Barghouti.

Meanwhile, some 60,000 former civil servants, paid by Abbas since 2007 to ensure their loyalty, have received only a fraction of their salaries since March.

With barely any money coming in, the Hassans increasingly rely on charity.

During Ramadan, Samia Hassan often walks five kilometers (three miles) to another Gaza City neighborhood to line up for wheat gruel cooked in a large cauldron over an open fire.

Hassan said her sons won’t make the trip, embarrassed to be seen asking for handouts, but that she doesn’t mind because her face is veiled.

On a recent afternoon, dozens of people jostled, pushing their aluminum or plastic food containers to be filled. The huge pot was empty within 10 minutes.

“The situation is difficult for everyone,” said Walid Hattab, 50, who owns a small coffee-and-spice store and cooks the free meals as Ramadan charity. Demand is up from last year, he said, noting that merchants have stopped selling on credit.

Along with the Palestinian Authority, the U.N. has been instrumental in propping up Gaza’s fragile economy. About two-thirds of Gaza’s residents are eligible for health, education or welfare services from UNRWA, the agency that aids descendants of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war over Israel’s creation.

Need has grown exponentially, with some 1 million people in Gaza now receiving U.N. food aid, compared to 80,000 two decades ago, said agency spokesman Chris Gunness.

At the same time, the Trump administration has blown a $305 million hole into the agency’s annual $1.2 billion budget — the result of a decision earlier this year to suspend most aid to the Palestinians until further notice. Washington has said it’s linking future funding to UNRWA reforms.

UNRWA has raised more than $200 million from other donors, but is still struggling. Money for Gaza food distributions could run out in a couple of months, Gunness said.

With the exception of the funds already spent this year, all U.S. assistance to the Palestinians is under review. This includes projects funded by USAID and the State Department, including health, education, good governance and security cooperation programs.

There is no indication the review will be completed any time soon, if ever, and it appears to be driven in part by Abbas’ decision to boycott Washington’s Mideast peace efforts as well as Palestinian moves to assert themselves at the United Nations.

Charities such as Catholic Relief Services rely heavily on U.S. support. In Gaza, its operations have been underwritten by a five-year, $50 million USAID grant. This year, the charity should have received about $10 million, but hasn’t gotten any money so far, said DuBose.

As a result, 20,000 Gaza families aren’t receiving food vouchers and about 2,200 people eligible for job-creation programs are staying home, she said.

Muslim countries such as Qatar, Iran, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates have stepped up aid during Ramadan. Qatar is distributing 1 million meals for the month and Iran 11,000 per day.

But it’s not clear if such aid will be sustained after the holy month.

On a recent evening, Samia Hassan and two dozen family members sat on the straw mat-covered floor of their home. Salad and leftover gruel from the day before had been laid out. Just before iftar, volunteers from a nearby mosque sent over a tray of rice with one chicken.

“It came at the right time,” said daughter-in-law Samah, holding a toddler in her lap.

Such uncertainty is tough for Samia.  “Our situation has never been like this,” she said.

__

By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (A.S)

___

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New Post has been published on https://www.stl.news/irans-top-leader-blames-protests-meddling-by-enemie/59979/

Iran's top leader blames protests on meddling by 'enemie

TEHRAN, Iran/January 02, 2018(AP)(STL.News)— Iran’s supreme leader on Tuesday blamed the protests roiling the country on “enemies of Iran” who he said were meddling in its internal affairs, as state television reported that overnight clashes between protesters and security forces killed another nine people.

The demonstrations, the largest seen in Iran since its disputed 2009 presidential election, have brought six days of unrest across the country and resulted in at least 20 deaths.

The protests began Thursday in Mashhad over Iran’s weak economy and a jump in food prices. They have since expanded to several cities, with some protesters chanting against the government and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Hundreds of people have been arrested and a prominent judge on Tuesday warned that some could face the death penalty.

In comments posted to his official website, Khamenei appeared to blame foreign nations for at least exacerbating the unrest gripping Iran.

“In the recent days’ incidents, enemies of Iran utilized various means — including money, weapons, politics and intelligence apparatuses — to create problems for the Islamic system,” he said, in his first public remarks since the demonstrations began.

Khamenei said he would elaborate further in the coming days. Iranian leaders often accuse the United States, Israel and Britain of seeking to overthrow the clerically overseen government.

State TV reported that six people were killed during an attack on a police station in the town of Qahdarijan. It said the clashes were sparked by rioters who tried to steal guns from the police station.

State TV also said an 11-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were killed in the town of Khomeinishahr, while a member of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was killed in the town of Najafabad. It says all three were shot by hunting rifles, which are common in the Iranian countryside.

The towns are all in Iran’s central Isfahan province, some 350 kilometers (215 miles) south of Tehran.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the Revolutionary Guard member was the same fatality reported late Monday night by Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency. Mehr had said an assailant using a hunting rifle killed a policeman and wounded three others in Najafabad.

It appeared to be the first fatality among Iran’s security forces since the protests began.

President Hassan Rouhani has acknowledged the public’s anger over the flagging economy, which has benefited from his signature 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, but not in a way that has brought immediate gains for most Iranians.

Rouhani and others have warned that the government wouldn’t hesitate to crack down on those it considers lawbreakers. None of the protest rallies so far have received prior permission from the Interior Ministry, making them illegal.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday wrote on Twitter that “the people of Iran are finally acting against the brutal and corrupt Iranian regime.”

“All of the money that President Obama so foolishly gave them went into terrorism and into their ‘pockets,'” Trump wrote, apparently referring to the nuclear deal reached under his predecessor. “The people have little food, big inflation and no human rights. The U.S. is watching!”

It is unclear what effect Trump’s string of tweets is having on the protests. Some have shared them online, but many in Iran distrust him because he has refused to re-certify the 2015 nuclear deal and his travel bans have blocked Iranians from getting U.S. visas.

In Tehran alone, 450 protesters have been arrested in the last three days, the semi-official ILNA news agency reported Tuesday. ILNA quoted Ali Asghar Nasserbakht, a deputy governor of Tehran, as saying security forces arrested 200 protesters Saturday, 150 Sunday and 100 Monday. So far, authorities have not released a nationwide figure for arrests.

The head of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court reportedly warned Tuesday that arrested protesters could potentially face the death penalty when they are put on trial.

“Obviously one of their charges can be Moharebeh,” or waging war against God, Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted Mousa Ghazanfarabadi as saying. Moharebeh is punishable by death in Iran. He was also quoted as saying some protesters will come to trial soon on charges of acting against national security and damaging public property.

Iran’s Revolutionary Court handles cases involving alleged attempts to overthrow the government.

The protests began over Iran’s economy, which has improved since the nuclear deal that saw Iran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the end of some international sanctions. Tehran now sells its oil on the global market and has signed deals to purchase tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Western aircraft.

That improvement has not reached the average Iranian, however. Unemployment remains high, and official inflation has crept up to 10 percent again. A recent increase in egg and poultry prices by as much as 40 percent, which the government has blamed on a cull over avian flu fears, appears to have been the spark for the protests.

___ Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Associated Press writer Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.

By Associated Press, published on STL.NEWS by St. Louis Media, LLC (TM)

[melindarowens]

Speaker’s arrest puts Indonesia parliament in graft spotlight, again

Indonesian parliament speaker, Setya Novanto (2nd L), walks as he arrives at the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) building in Jakarta, Indonesia November 21, 2017 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Picture taken November 21, 2017. Antara Foto/Wahyu Putro/ via REUTERS

November 26, 2017

By Tom Allard and Fergus Jensen

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Implicated in five corruption scandals since the 1990s but never convicted, the speaker of Indonesia’s parliament Setya Novanto is a political survivor.

Last week Novanto was detained by anti-corruption investigators over the biggest graft scandal to hit Indonesia’s legislature.

The 62-year-old political powerbroker was defiant, denying any wrongdoing and urging parliament and the political party he leads not to unseat him. His lawyer, Fredrich Yunadi, expressed confidence that Novanto would be cleared.

“In every court we always win,” Yunadi told Reuters.

But the latest allegations against Novanto have reinforced the perception among Indonesians that their parliament, long regarded as riddled with entrenched corruption, is a failing institution.

Politicians and analysts say that is unlikely to change, whatever the outcome of the case.

“Before Setya Novanto, there were many, many MPs who were put in jail and it didn’t have an effect,” said Eva Sundari, a member of parliament from the PDI-P party, which sits in the ruling coalition alongside Novanto’s Golkar.

A Corruption Eradication Commission, known by its Indonesian initials KPK, was established in 2002 after the demise of authoritarian president Suharto. Fiercely independent and able to wiretap suspects without a warrant, it has been a thorn in the side of the country’s establishment.

But Bob Lowry, an Indonesia analyst at the Australian Institute of International Affairs, said that – the KPK aside – there has never been a systemic approach to tackling corruption that he says runs through all layers of government and politics.

“You are not dealing with individuals, you are dealing with an entire structure and culture.” he said.

A BAGMAN, A SUICIDE AND A LUXURY WATCH

Novanto is accused of orchestrating a scheme to plunder $173 million, or almost 40 percent of the entire budget for the project, from a government contract to introduce a national electronic identity card.

Novanto denies any wrongdoing, writing a letter to other parliament leaders after he was detained asking them to “give me an opportunity to prove that I wasn’t involved”.

According to an indictment filed against Novanto’s alleged bagman, businessman Andi Agustinus, they stood to be personally enriched to the tune of $42 million.

Agustinus has not yet commented on the allegations or entered any plea. He is due to appear in court this week to answer the charges.

The rest of the money was funneled to as many as 60 lawmakers, as well as officials, party chiefs, parliamentary staffers and tenderers, according to the KPK, which alleges some of the cash was brazenly divided up in parliamentary meeting rooms.

In August a witness in the probe, a U.S.-based consultant to a company that won a contract to supply biometric technology for the identity cards – ironically aimed, in part, at curbing graft – shot himself after a stand-off with police in Los Angeles.

Before his death, Johannes Marliem told KPK officers about meeting Novanto at his Jakarta home in 2011, according to a declaration to a court in Minnesota by a Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent, at which the parliament speaker negotiated a “discount” under which he and Agustinus would get a 40 percent share of a contract worth more than $50 million.

Marliem is also alleged to have said he had brought Novanto a $135,000 Richard Mille watch and showed the agent a photo of Novanto wearing it.

A consummate political operator, Novanto is a key link between parliament and the government of President Joko Widodo, who is expected to seek re-election in 2019, said Hugo Brennan, Asia analyst at risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft.

He gained a measure of international prominence in September 2015 when Donald Trump, then a U.S. presidential candidate, hailed him as “an amazing man” at a news conference in Trump Tower in New York.

Two months later he resigned from the speaker’s post after a recording of a meeting emerged in which he was alleged to have attempted to extort $4 billion of shares from the U.S. mining giant Freeport McMoRan. The case got blanket media coverage and hearings were televised live.

Within a year, however, Novanto was speaker again after the Constitutional Court ruled the recording inadmissible.

MONEY POLITICS

Novanto’s detention last week came after months of declining to answer summonses for questioning by the KPK.

The allegations have once more gripped Indonesia, with newspaper front pages splashing the story and memes mocking Novanto trending on social media.

Indonesia was ranked last year at 90 out of 176 countries on Transparency International’s corruption perception index.

The watchdog has singled out parliament as Indonesia’s most corrupt institution, and in July called on President Widodo to protect the KPK against attempts by the legislature to weaken the commission’s powers.

Critics inside and outside the parliament say the root problem is money politics, which is underpinned by an open-ticket electoral system and campaign financing laws.

These laws allow only tiny amounts of public funding, and do not require public disclosure of individual donors, which some lawmakers say perpetuates a system of funding from illicit sources and financial patronage for favors.

The open-ticket voting system encourages candidates to spread largesse to voters and community leaders and then recoup the expenditure if they reach parliament, says the PDI-P’s Sundari.

Lawmaker Aryo Djojohadikusumo told Reuters that, with members of parliament holding the power to micromanage and approve the budgets of individual projects, “the temptation to engage in pork-barrel politics is extremely high”.

However, he believes that parliament’s reputation as corrupt has been magnified by the KPK’s zeal in going after politicians, who make more headlines than low-level bureaucrats.

Critics say many members of parliament are so focused on raising money for future campaigns and personal enrichment that the legislature is not doing its job.

According to watchdog Concerned Citizens for the Indonesian Legislature (Formappi), lawmakers in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy have ratified just five of 50 priority bills this year.

“If you want to see Indonesia free of corruption,” Fahri Hamzah, one of parliament’s vice speakers, told Reuters, “you have to start tackling the political financing.”

(Additional reporting and writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Alex Richardson)

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Headlines

Anxious times for Americans (NYT) Five months from a crucial presidential election, the usual political debates, campaign events and policy fights have faded into the background for voters battered by a public health crisis, struggling through an economic recession and boiling over with fury over racial inequities. With tens of millions unemployed, more than 110,000 killed by the coronavirus and thousands of people protesting in the streets, Americans see their personal concerns and political choices through a strikingly existential lens—mourning the past, worried about the present and fearful of the future. In interviews with more than two dozen voters in key political battleground states, Republicans, Democrats and independents of diverse ages, races and social classes expressed worries that their nation had careened off track, with problems no election could easily solve. Fiercely polarized over public health, public safety and, perhaps, truth itself, many people are united only in their collective anxiety.

Rubber Bullets and Beanbag Rounds Can Cause Devastating Injuries (NYT) As protesters filled the streets of downtown San Jose, Calif., recently, the police fired munitions known as rubber bullets into the crowd—a common technique to disperse throngs. Breanna Contreras’s head jerked back from the impact as a black projectile “roughly the size of an extra-jumbo marshmallow” struck her temple, near her eye. “I instantly felt my head just starting to throb, blood poured down my face,” Ms. Contreras, a 21-year-old student, said. A bystander who used her face mask to help stop the bleeding was also struck. The rubber bullets—as well as tear gas, flash-bangs and beanbag rounds—that protesters around the country have faced in marches against racial injustice, have been deemed “nonlethal weapons” by law enforcement officials and the military, who use them regularly around the world. But research increasingly shows they can seriously injure and disable people—and sometimes even kill. A 2017 analysis published in the British Medical Journal of several decades of the use of rubber bullets, beanbag rounds and other projectiles during arrests and protests found that 15 percent of people who were injured were left with permanent disabilities and 3 percent of those who were injured died. Of those who survived, 71 percent had severe injuries, with their extremities most frequently impacted.

Firefighters grapple with triple-digit heat against wildfire (AP) Hundreds of Arizona residents under an evacuation notice were allowed to return home Friday but were told to remain ready to leave at a moment’s notice as a wildfire burns in a national forest near Tucson. Firefighters are trying to keep the blaze in canyons and ridges and prevent it from moving downhill. Most of the western United States is experiencing extreme dryness or drought, creating challenging conditions for wildfire season, Bryan Henry, meteorologist with the National Interagency Fire Center, said in a recent fire season outlook. Authorities have said southern Arizona’s dry, hot weather and the steep, rocky topography have been the main challenges in fighting the fire. Friday was the hottest day yet for crews battling the blaze, with temperatures forecast to reach 107 (41.6 Celsius) in the afternoon.

U.S. passport processing resumes (Washington Post) The State Department has resumed processing U.S. passports to clear a backlog of 1.7 million pending applications before it can start tackling new requests, officials said Friday. Carl Risch, the assistant secretary of state for consular affairs, said 11 of the 29 passport agencies and centers around the United States that reduced services as the coronavirus began to spread have started Phase 1 on the road to normal. About half the agency’s passport workers have returned to their offices. Passport applications will be processed on a “first in, first out” basis. Risch estimated it will take six to eight weeks to clear up the backlog dating from late February.

Coronavirus toll in Brazil (NHK) The death toll from the new coronavirus in Brazil has reached the world’s second highest, overtaking fatalities in Britain. Concerns are rising about a further spread of the virus as businesses reopened this week in many cities. Johns Hopkins University in the United States put Brazilian deaths from the virus as of 2:00 UTC on Saturday at 41,828, and confirmed cases at 828,810. Only the US has higher numbers of deaths and infections. The coronavirus is hitting poor communities especially hard. Daily death tolls are around 1,000 with infections topping 30,000 on some days.

Despite risks, Greek islands keen to reopen to tourists (AP) Mykonos’ newest bar-restaurant, Pelican, seemed to appear from nowhere. Tables, coffee machines, light fittings, music mixers and staff wearing matching black face masks were still being slotted into place as Greek visitors trickled in at the start of a long holiday weekend. Owner Vasilis Theodorou says he’s in a hurry to get back to business. Greece is, too. Heavily reliant on tourism, the country officially opens to foreign arrivals Monday. Its hopes are pinned on prime destinations like the islands of Mykonos, Rhodes, Corfu, Crete and Santorini, where regular ferry services have already resumed and direct international flights will start July 1. Greece has gambled on a decision to relax COVID-19 health inspections at ports and airports to try to avoid another crippling recession, having only recently emerged from a painful financial crisis. “Business will be 80% down (this year). So we’re waiting for the 20%, and we’re happy because we know that’s what it will be,” Theodorou said.

Beijing district in ‘wartime emergency’ after virus cluster at major food market (Reuters) A Beijing district put itself on a “wartime” footing and the capital banned tourism and sports events on Saturday after a cluster of novel coronavirus infections centred around a major wholesale market sparked fears of a new wave of COVID-19.

Hong Kong crackdown (Foreign Policy) Hong Kong police are establishing a new unit that will enforce the territory’s controversial new security law announced by China last month with the intent of crushing dissent in the territory. The new police “action arm” will have investigative and intelligence-gathering capabilities, Hong Kong’s security chief, John Lee Ka-chiu told the South China Morning Post in an interview, hinting that the new service would also work in collaboration with police from mainland China. Activists in Hong Kong have long feared the open intrusion of mainland security services, which previously worked illegally in the city to kidnap and threaten dissidents.

Thousands attend Black Lives Matter protests across Australia (Reuters) Thousands of people across Australia attended Black Lives Matter protests on Saturday wearing masks and practising social distancing amid warnings from state leaders to call off the events on fears of a second wave of coronavirus infections.

New U.S. Sanctions on Syria Take Effect Next Week (Foreign Policy) Syria’s collapsing economy is set to suffer another blow next Wednesday, when new U.S. sanctions imposing penalties come into force against any global actor that does business with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. They will be the most punishing sanctions on the regime since the Syrian civil war began nine years ago. They are intended to pressure the embattled Assad into enacting human rights reforms. While Assad appeared to be emerging victorious from the brutal war and talk had turned to reconstruction, a spiraling economy is now threatening his grip on power. The toll of years of war and corruption has been compounded by the deep economic crisis in neighboring Lebanon, Syria’s main conduit to the outside world. More than half of Syrian citizens struggle with access to food and the value of the Syrian currency has plummeted 70 percent since April. Anti-Assad protests broke out in the southern city of Sweida on Sunday and continued sporadically throughout the week, calling for the president’s resignation. Assad may now face his greatest challenge yet, as the grievances that sparked the 2011 uprising not only persist but have been exacerbated in the intervening years by sanctions, war, and corruption.

Social programs under strain in Nigeria (Foreign Policy) The collapse in global oil prices and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic are straining Nigeria’s economy, and proposals to dramatically cut funding for primary health care and education have sparked outrage. Lawmakers are expected to vote on the measures in the coming weeks. If passed, they would see spending on local primary health care services cut by more than 40 percent, likely affecting maternity care, immunization programs, and family planning services. Funding for universal basic education would be reduced by over 50 percent.

[everettwilkinson]

Speaker’s arrest puts Indonesia parliament in graft spotlight, again

Indonesian parliament speaker, Setya Novanto (2nd L), walks as he arrives at the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) building in Jakarta, Indonesia November 21, 2017 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. Picture taken November 21, 2017. Antara Foto/Wahyu Putro/ via REUTERS

November 26, 2017

By Tom Allard and Fergus Jensen

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Implicated in five corruption scandals since the 1990s but never convicted, the speaker of Indonesia’s parliament Setya Novanto is a political survivor.

Last week Novanto was detained by anti-corruption investigators over the biggest graft scandal to hit Indonesia’s legislature.

The 62-year-old political powerbroker was defiant, denying any wrongdoing and urging parliament and the political party he leads not to unseat him. His lawyer, Fredrich Yunadi, expressed confidence that Novanto would be cleared.

“In every court we always win,” Yunadi told Reuters.

But the latest allegations against Novanto have reinforced the perception among Indonesians that their parliament, long regarded as riddled with entrenched corruption, is a failing institution.

Politicians and analysts say that is unlikely to change, whatever the outcome of the case.

“Before Setya Novanto, there were many, many MPs who were put in jail and it didn’t have an effect,” said Eva Sundari, a member of parliament from the PDI-P party, which sits in the ruling coalition alongside Novanto’s Golkar.

A Corruption Eradication Commission, known by its Indonesian initials KPK, was established in 2002 after the demise of authoritarian president Suharto. Fiercely independent and able to wiretap suspects without a warrant, it has been a thorn in the side of the country’s establishment.

But Bob Lowry, an Indonesia analyst at the Australian Institute of International Affairs, said that – the KPK aside – there has never been a systemic approach to tackling corruption that he says runs through all layers of government and politics.

“You are not dealing with individuals, you are dealing with an entire structure and culture.” he said.

A BAGMAN, A SUICIDE AND A LUXURY WATCH

Novanto is accused of orchestrating a scheme to plunder $173 million, or almost 40 percent of the entire budget for the project, from a government contract to introduce a national electronic identity card.

Novanto denies any wrongdoing, writing a letter to other parliament leaders after he was detained asking them to “give me an opportunity to prove that I wasn’t involved”.

According to an indictment filed against Novanto’s alleged bagman, businessman Andi Agustinus, they stood to be personally enriched to the tune of $42 million.

Agustinus has not yet commented on the allegations or entered any plea. He is due to appear in court this week to answer the charges.

The rest of the money was funneled to as many as 60 lawmakers, as well as officials, party chiefs, parliamentary staffers and tenderers, according to the KPK, which alleges some of the cash was brazenly divided up in parliamentary meeting rooms.

In August a witness in the probe, a U.S.-based consultant to a company that won a contract to supply biometric technology for the identity cards – ironically aimed, in part, at curbing graft – shot himself after a stand-off with police in Los Angeles.

Before his death, Johannes Marliem told KPK officers about meeting Novanto at his Jakarta home in 2011, according to a declaration to a court in Minnesota by a Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent, at which the parliament speaker negotiated a “discount” under which he and Agustinus would get a 40 percent share of a contract worth more than $50 million.

Marliem is also alleged to have said he had brought Novanto a $135,000 Richard Mille watch and showed the agent a photo of Novanto wearing it.

A consummate political operator, Novanto is a key link between parliament and the government of President Joko Widodo, who is expected to seek re-election in 2019, said Hugo Brennan, Asia analyst at risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft.

He gained a measure of international prominence in September 2015 when Donald Trump, then a U.S. presidential candidate, hailed him as “an amazing man” at a news conference in Trump Tower in New York.

Two months later he resigned from the speaker’s post after a recording of a meeting emerged in which he was alleged to have attempted to extort $4 billion of shares from the U.S. mining giant Freeport McMoRan. The case got blanket media coverage and hearings were televised live.

Within a year, however, Novanto was speaker again after the Constitutional Court ruled the recording inadmissible.

MONEY POLITICS

Novanto’s detention last week came after months of declining to answer summonses for questioning by the KPK.

The allegations have once more gripped Indonesia, with newspaper front pages splashing the story and memes mocking Novanto trending on social media.

Indonesia was ranked last year at 90 out of 176 countries on Transparency International’s corruption perception index.

The watchdog has singled out parliament as Indonesia’s most corrupt institution, and in July called on President Widodo to protect the KPK against attempts by the legislature to weaken the commission’s powers.

Critics inside and outside the parliament say the root problem is money politics, which is underpinned by an open-ticket electoral system and campaign financing laws.

These laws allow only tiny amounts of public funding, and do not require public disclosure of individual donors, which some lawmakers say perpetuates a system of funding from illicit sources and financial patronage for favors.

The open-ticket voting system encourages candidates to spread largesse to voters and community leaders and then recoup the expenditure if they reach parliament, says the PDI-P’s Sundari.

Lawmaker Aryo Djojohadikusumo told Reuters that, with members of parliament holding the power to micromanage and approve the budgets of individual projects, “the temptation to engage in pork-barrel politics is extremely high”.

However, he believes that parliament’s reputation as corrupt has been magnified by the KPK’s zeal in going after politicians, who make more headlines than low-level bureaucrats.

Critics say many members of parliament are so focused on raising money for future campaigns and personal enrichment that the legislature is not doing its job.

According to watchdog Concerned Citizens for the Indonesian Legislature (Formappi), lawmakers in Southeast Asia’s biggest economy have ratified just five of 50 priority bills this year.

“If you want to see Indonesia free of corruption,” Fahri Hamzah, one of parliament’s vice speakers, told Reuters, “you have to start tackling the political financing.”

(Additional reporting and writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Alex Richardson)

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[clusterassets]

New world news from Time: Ayatollah Khamenei Blames Protests on ‘Enemies of Iran’ as 9 Are Killed in Latest Unrest

TEHRAN, Iran — Clashes overnight between protesters and security forces in Iran killed nine people, state television reported Tuesday, including some rioters who tried to storm a police station to steal weapons.

The demonstrations, the largest to strike Iran since its disputed 2009 presidential election, have seen six days of unrest across the country and a death toll of at least 20. Offering his first comments since they began, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday accused the “enemies of Iran” of meddling in the country’s affairs.

The protests began Thursday in Mashhad over Iran’s weak economy and a jump in food prices and have expanded to several cities, with some protesters chanting against the government and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Hundreds of people have been arrested and a prominent judge on Tuesday warned that some could face death penalty trials.

State TV reported that six people were killed during an attack on a police station in the town of Qahdarijan. It reported that clashes were sparked by rioters who tried to steal guns from the police station.

State TV also said an 11-year-old boy and a 20-year-old man were killed in the town of Khomeinishahr, while a member of Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard was killed in the town of Najafabad. It says all three were shot by hunting rifles, which are common in the Iranian countryside.

The towns are all in Iran’s central Isfahan province, some 350 kilometers (215 miles) south of Tehran.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the Revolutionary Guard member was the same fatality reported late Monday night by Iran’s semi-official Mehr news agency. Mehr had said an assailant using a hunting rifle killed a policeman and wounded three others in Najafabad.

Monday marked the first night to see a fatality among Iran’s security forces.

President Hassan Rouhani has acknowledged the public’s anger over the Islamic Republic’s flagging economy, though he and others warned that the government wouldn’t hesitate to crack down on those it considers lawbreakers. All the protest rallies so far haven’t received prior permission from the Interior Ministry, making them illegal under Iranian law.

In comments posted to his official website, Khamenei appeared to blame foreign nations for at least exacerbating the unrest gripping Iran.

“In the recent days’ incidents, enemies of Iran utilized various means — including money, weapon, politics and intelligence apparatuses — to create problems for the Islamic system,” he said.

Khamenei said he would elaborate further in the coming days.

In Tehran alone, 450 protesters have been arrested in the last three days, the semi-official ILNA news agency reported Tuesday. ILNA quoted Ali Asghar Nasserbakht, a security deputy governor of Tehran, as saying security forces arrested 200 protesters Saturday, 150 Sunday and 100 Monday. So far, authorities have not released a nationwide figure for arrests.

The head of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court also reportedly warned Tuesday that arrested protesters could potentially face death penalty cases when they come to trial.

Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency quoted Mousa Ghazanfarabadi as saying: “Obviously one of their charges can be Moharebeh,” or waging war against God. That’s a death penalty offense in Iran.

Ghazanfarabadi also was quoted as saying some protesters will come to trial soon on charges of acting against national security and damaging public properties.

Iran’s Revolutionary Court handles cases involving alleged attempts to overthrow the government.

The protests began over Iran’s economy, which has improved since the nuclear deal that saw Iran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the end of some international sanctions. Tehran now sells its oil on the global market and has signed deals to purchase tens of billions of dollars’ worth of Western aircraft.

That improvement has not reached the average Iranian, however. Unemployment remains high, and official inflation has crept up to 10 percent again. A recent increase in egg and poultry prices by as much as 40 percent, which the government has blamed on a cull over avian flu fears, appears to have been the spark for the economic protests.

January 02, 2018 at 05:24PM ClusterAssets Inc., https://ClusterAssets.wordpress.com