Tag: finance

Authored by Denis MacEoin via The Gatestone Institute,

Part 1 here…

• “It seems it was far less politically complicated to keep quiet.” — Baroness Cox, address on grooming gangs to the House of Lords, May 14, 2019.

• “In the context of schooling, it manifests itself as the imposition of an aggressively separatist and intolerant agenda, incompatible with full participation in a plural, secular democracy…. It appears to be a deliberate attempt to convert secular state schools into exclusive faith schools in all but name. (5:2)” — Peter Clarke, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner and head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism branch, in a report for the House of Commons, July 22, 2014.

• Is Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, still hampered by an unwillingness to ask hard questions and a desire to “avoid giving offence”?

Recent protests about supposed LGBT lessons in a school in Birmingham, England, have drawn attention from the media, politicians, the High Court, and the National Secular Society. While the protests may well spread to other cities, for the moment they are contained. When these lessons, which are based on the “No Outsiders” curriculum within the international system of “Diversity Education,” become legally compulsory for almost all schools in 2020, either the protests will die out or become more clamorous in a struggle to rescind the law — an act to which the government might well not agree.

The question of demands placed on Western governments to alter national laws in order to accommodate religious rulings remains an issue that is divisive, notably between secular states and citizens who might not want a secular state but a religious one instead.

In the instance of Birmingham, the current controversy calls to mind another that took place in the city’s educational system several years earlier. This was the so-called “Trojan Horse” affair, in which it was alleged that some school governors and teachers had plotted to undermine the teaching of secular values by placing extremists within staff and management positions. The claims about Operation Trojan Horse started in March 2014 with publication of a letter supposedly written by an Islamist in Birmingham and sent to a contact in Bradford. The letter had apparently been sent to Birmingham City Council some months earlier, in late November 2013.

Pictured: Birmingham, England. (Image source: Brian Clift/Wikimedia Commons)

By March 11, the London Times had declared the letter to be “a crude forgery”, and by June 8, two newspapers, the Independent and the Guardian, had also declared it a hoax and the investigation that had started into it “a witch hunt”. Nevertheless, by July, Birmingham’s Education Commissioner, Sir Mike Tomlinson, stated that it was no hoax but was happening — “without a shadow of doubt”.

In the end, it did not matter greatly whether or not the letter itself was a forgery, or who the agitators had been. As time passed and investigations were carried out into schools in Birmingham and elsewhere, it became clear that something unprecedented had occurred and that there were reasons to look into it.

The situation attracted enormous publicity, and its ramifications are beyond the scope of a short article. However, the Government, the Home Office, the Department of Education, Ofsted (the government’s Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills), the Birmingham Council, and many others were drawn into investigations and the production of reports. In March, Ofsted investigated 21 schools in Birmingham while the Education Funding Authority carried out similar enquiries. Later, Ofsted extended its investigations to schools in East London, Bradford, and Luton — after the publication of reports concerning the schools in Birmingham.

Of those, the most telling was a 129-page report for the House of Commons written by Peter Clarke, the Deputy Assistant Commissioner and head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism branch. In his report he states that, “I most definitely was not approaching my role from the perspective of looking for evidence of terrorist activity, radicalisation or violent extremism.” The emphasis, therefore, fell on extremist doctrine.

One of Clarke’s leading conclusions regarded the failure of the City Council to respond to concerns they already had even before the above-mentioned letter was received. Clarke then goes on to identify the reason why the Council was so slow in responding over a long period:

“Despite this, some eight weeks after the receipt of the ‘Trojan Horse’ letter, in a further Birmingham City Council briefing note sent to the Leader of the Council, there is no suggestion that the central allegation – that headteachers were being systematically undermined and driven from their posts – needed further investigation. The focus of the Council was very much on the potential community cohesion impact that the publication of the ‘Trojan Horse’ letter might have. It was not until the appointment of Ian Kershaw in April 2014 that the Council mounted a full investigation into these serious allegations.”

This unwillingness to offend indicates the same extreme sensitivity to possible Muslim reactions that seems to have led other councils, police and social workers to drag their feet for years despite concerns about grooming gangs in Rotherham, Telford and other cities. Baroness Caroline Cox made this clear in an address to the House of Lords on 14 May 2019:

“It seems it was far less politically complicated to keep quiet. Many victims did not receive support because of the state’s reluctance to interfere in supposed cultural practices. Agencies downplayed ethnic or religiously identified dimensions of abuse. They also applied generic labels such as ‘Asian’ to the perpetrators, which is a source of great concern to Asians who would never indulge in or condone such horrible crimes.”

The Clarke Report, regarding education, listed numerous examples of how, in many schools, a conservative Islamic agenda was imposed. These may be found in section 4 under various rubrics. For example, schools were often packed with Islamic symbols (4:25); conservative religious practices were widespread, with bans on music, severe limits to art, gender segregation, and enforced prayer (through bullying of pupils to do so: “children bullied into prayer” (4:26); prefects called ‘Ambassadors’ were selected from pious families to act as a form of religious police to monitor and report on improprieties committed by other students (“They have been described as the ‘religious police’ by some members of staff.” (4:29); some anti-Western themes were spoken at school assemblies (4:30); there was witness evidence of intolerance in several schools towards those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual (4:32); there was considerable imposition of gender segregation and preference for boys over girls (“There is evidence that women and girls are not treated as equal to men and boys in schools,” “there are classes where boys and girls are required to sit separately. In Park View maths lessons, where all the teachers are men, the girls were separated at the sides and back of the classroom, while the boys sat in the centre, towards the front.” (4:43; 4:49-4:52).

These and similar forms of behaviour are attributed by Clarke to “The ideological agenda in Birmingham schools” (section 5 title.):

“This investigation has revealed a sustained and coordinated agenda to impose upon children in a number of Birmingham schools the segregationist attitudes and practices of a hardline and politicised strand of Sunni Islam. Left unchecked, it would confine school children within an intolerant, inward-looking monoculture that would severely inhibit their participation in the life of modern Britain.” (5:1)

Clarke continued:

“In the context of schooling, it manifests itself as the imposition of an aggressively separatist and intolerant agenda, incompatible with full participation in a plural, secular democracy. Rejecting not only the secular and other religions, but also other strands of Islamic belief, it goes beyond the kind of social conservatism practised in some faith schools which may be consistent with universal human rights and respectful of other communities. It appears to be a deliberate attempt to convert secular state schools into exclusive faith schools in all but name.” (5:2)

He went further, saying:

“This agenda, though not necessarily the tactics involved, appears to stem from an international movement to increase the role of Islam in education. It is supported by bodies such as the Association of Muslim Schools–UK (AMS-UK), the International Board of Educational Research and Resources (IBERR), the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the recently closed Muslim Parents Association (MPA). The movement provides practical advice and religious legitimisation to those who, in the words of the IBERR, seek to ‘Islamise the provision of educational services’. Some of the individuals who have featured in the investigation were associated with, or held positions in, these bodies.” (5:3)

So far so good, but there was something much wider that was never included in either the Clarke Report or the Ofsted inquiry. Omission of earlier important evidence that shows a deep reluctance to carry forward information that might unsettle Muslim communities — the sort of reluctance referred to by Baroness Cox.

As far back as 2008, the present writer was commissioned by Civitas, an influential independent think tank known as the Institute for the Study of Civil Society, to write a full report on Muslim schools in England.

As Clarke reported six years later (4:28), Islamic materials were often removed from schools when Ofsted inspectors were expected (they did not make unannounced visits). As going to schools in person and interviewing staff might not show the true picture of what was happening, it seemed preferable to start by looking at websites: reading them might reveal their thinking on all sorts of issues. The hunch turned out to be right.

My report, Music, Chess and Other Sins, went online in February 2009; its sections looked at:

• Moderates and Extremists

• Social Cohesion

• The Muslim Curriculum and the National Curriculum

• Muslim Schools and Women

• Muslim Schools and Ofsted

• Muslim Schools and Hate

In section 3, there is a reference to items in the Muslim Council of Britain’s 2007 document, Meeting the Needs of Muslim Pupils in State Schools: Information and Guidance for Schools:

“…. the organization articulated several areas where Muslim pupils have to be separated from their non‐Muslim fellows. Although there has always been a right for parents to withdraw their children from acts of collective worship, the MCB’s insistence that Muslim children must not take part in any but Muslim worship (p.44) denies them the opportunity—which so many other children take advantage of— to share a religious experience with the rest of their school. But the self‐seclusion impinges on so much of the curriculum that it places enormous restrictions on young Muslims and their ability to be part of the schools to which they belong. The activities and lessons from which the MCB wants the right to withdraw Muslim pupils include: mixed swimming (p.38); dance (p.39); sex and relationship education (p.47); music (p.52); drama (p.53); figurative drawing (p.53). On farm visits, touching or feeding pigs is prohibited (p.56), and staff are warned that pupils and parents may refuse to shake hands with a member of the opposite sex at prize‐giving ceremonies (p.58)”

This gives some flavour of how Muslim educators were trying to keep Muslim children separate from Christians, Jews, Hindus, and others in their own schools.

The original plan was to publish a much longer 78,000-word report with a massive bibliography, a vast array of footnotes, and numerous quotations directly or indirectly on school websites or other linked material were cited. In a long appendix, all the schools surveyed via those websites were listed, with names of teachers and preachers or radical organizations involved in setting educational standards and curricula. The list also contained links to school websites and links from those sites to extremist material. Not all schools had such links, but a surprising number did.

This full version could not be published for fear that the detailed remarks on schools and individuals might lead to litigation. However, after Civitas presented Ofsted with the “safe” version — probably a valuable enough guide to matters school inspectors were probably unaware of — the present author handed a printout of the unedited version to the Ofsted official to whom we had given the published report.

Even though the contents of that full version might have struck alarm in official circles in and beyond Ofsted, as far as we were aware the reports were buried. Ofsted has never since referred to any of their contents, not even when the Birmingham scandal erupted a few years afterwards.

As a result, a great opportunity was missed that may have forestalled some later developments, especially the clear evidence of extremist schools, some of whose websites had even openly favoured jihad. Nevertheless, although there is a full list of photographs and links, schools have now cleaned up their online sites, removing material of concern.

With many decent schools, there appears to be transparency. But the Darul-Ulooms and other extremist-linked institutions often have direct and indirect links to fundamentalists. It is hard to single out any one school, but the following passage, taken at random, may suffice to sum up why so many of these schools are run on lines contrary to the values and expectations of British society. The Jameah Girls School in Leicester is a Darul-Uloom for female students between the ages of 6 and 16:

“The Jameah Girls Academy in Leicester has a direct link to a fatwa site run by the school’s own patron, Muhammad ibn Adam al-Kawthari. Among his many distasteful rulings are these: He places severe restrictions on male doctors treating female patients; he rules that women may not swim (even for medical reasons) where a male lifeguard is present, or where there are non-Muslim women; using tampons is ‘disliked’ (makruh — a classification in shari’a law); a woman may not travel beyond 48 miles without her husband or a close relative accompanying her; a female is encouraged to remain within the confines of her house as much as possible; polygamy is permissible. If anyone were to ridicule polygamy, he would become an unbeliever; it is a grave sin for a woman to refuse sex to her husband; it is forbidden to have close, intimate relations with or have love for non-Muslims Muslims are not to sit, eat, live or mingle with them; the legal punishment for adultery is stoning.”

In the light of recent protests outside schools in Birmingham, it is likely that many fundamentalists are still working to restrict attempts to bring Muslim children inside the way of life British society offers them. Do the anti-LGBT protests act as a smokescreen for continuing attempts to block integration from the earliest age? If this is happening in some state schools, have things improved in Muslim schools more widely? Is Ofsted, the schools inspectorate, still hampered by an unwillingness to ask hard questions and a desire to “avoid giving offence”?

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2X9Rtft Tyler Durden

Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The moral bankruptcy of Western powers was exposed – inadvertently – with the recent publication of three separate news reports. Taken together the reports out last week illustrate the rank hypocrisy of Western governments.

Also, the way that the reports were prioritized or left disconnected demonstrates how the Western mainstream media serves as a dutiful propaganda service for state and corporate power.

First there was the Dutch-led inquiry into downing of the Malaysian MH17 airliner, which put the finger of blame on Russia for the disaster in 2014 when all 298 people onboard were killed.

That nearly five-year investigation has never provided any credible proof of Russian culpability, yet the Dutch-led investigators known as the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) continually level allegations that Russia supplied an anti-aircraft missile to Ukrainian rebels who purportedly blasted the Boeing 777 out of the sky.

Despite its evident failures of due process, nonetheless Western governments and media have lent the JIT allegations (slanders) undue credibility. The US, Britain and other NATO members last week called on Russia to comply with the JIT “investigation”, smearing Moscow as guilty of causing the MH17 deaths.

However, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad denounced the report as “ridiculous hearsay” aimed at “scapegoating Russia”. Tellingly, his comments were not widely reported in Western media.

For its part, Russia has vehemently rejected allegations of involvement in the MH17 disaster, as have pro-Russian Ukrainian rebels. Russia’s repeated offers of contributing information to the probe have been rebuffed by the Dutch-led JIT. By contrast, Russia’s own investigation has uncovered credible radar and forensic evidence that an anti-aircraft missile fired at the passenger jet actually came from military forces under the Kiev regime’s command. Russia’s evidence has been steadfastly ignored by Western media reports.

The credible suspect party – Kiev political and intelligence authorities – have been allowed to participate in and frame the JIT probe to inculpate Russia. The US, European Union and NATO back the Neo-Nazi dominated regime in Kiev, financially and militarily, since it seized power in a violent coup d’état back in 2014. That should be the real focus of scandal in the MH17 story.

On the back of the MH17 imbroglio, as well as other slanders, Western governments have continued to impose economic sanctions on Russia. These sanctions have cost the Russian economy an estimated $50 billion. On top of that, Western states and their media portray Russia and President Putin as a rogue regime and pariah.

Now contrast the undue priority given to the above dubious JIT claims with two other reports also out last week.

One was on the horrific death toll among civilians in Yemen inflicted by the Western-backed Saudi-led war on that country. It is estimated that over 90,000 people have been killed in violence over the past four years, with most of the civilian victims caused by indiscriminate Saudi air strikes.

It is an indisputable fact that the US, Britain, France, Germany and other NATO powers have been arming the Saudi regime with warplanes, helicopters, missiles and logistics to carry out this slaughter of Yemeni civilians. The Western states are complicit in war crimes.

President Trump continues to defy US lawmakers by ordering multi-billion-dollar arms sales to Saudi Arabia, despite the carnage. The British government and wannabe prime minister Boris Johnson claims that its weapons exports are not involved in killing Yemeni civilians, in blatant denial of the facts.

A British court last week ruled that UK weapons exports were in breach of its own supposed ethical codes protecting civilian lives in conflicts. The British government is set to appeal the court ruling and will likely ignore it anyway given the systematic relationship of Britain arming Saudi Arabia – the UK’s biggest weapons export market – year after year.

Western media last week, as usual, gave only minimal reporting on the shocking human suffering in Yemen. The whole barbarity and Western governments’ culpability is largely hushed-up and omitted by the media.

The third report we refer to was on the conclusions of the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur investigating the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last October. His tortured body is believed to have been cut up and dumped by his killers. Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard made a damning assessment that the Saudi state was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder. And she called on Western states to impose sanctions on the Saudi monarchy.

Despite mounting evidence of Saudi regime guilt in the journalist’s murder and in the deaths of tens of thousands of Yemeni civilians, Western governments have not imposed any sanctions against Riyadh. Indeed, they continue to ply this regime with billions-of-dollars-worth of killing machines.

Admittedly, Western media did give some coverage to the UN report on the Khashoggi murder. But in proportion to the gravity of the crime, the response of media as well as of Western governments is woefully lacking.

Western media do not put the last two mentioned reports in the context of Western state relations with Saudi Arabia. The oversight is for a good reason. Because to delve into the issues would expose criminal complicity.

Meanwhile, the US and its NATO allies impose sanctions on Russia based on unsubstantiated allegations about MH17, Ukraine, Crimea, election meddling, the Skripal spy poisoning affair, among other fabrications. Those sanctions – based on flimsy innuendo – are leading to ever-worsening relations with Russia and international tensions between nuclear powers. Western media do not expose the insanity, they foment it.

Such media are unwilling and incapable of pointing out this gross double standard. They propagate the double standard.

The moral bankruptcy of Western governments must be covered up by a servile media. Because the state, corporate power and media are all complicit.

Truth, justice and democracy, which they pontificate about, have nothing to do with the functioning of Western capitalist power; they’re mere illusions to distract from systematic criminality. Last week was an object lesson for those willing to see it.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XCUnxw Tyler Durden

A new report by Oxford Economics says accelerating technological advances in automation, engineering, energy storage, artificial intelligence, and machine learning have the potential to reshape the world in the 2020s through 2030. The collision of these forces could trigger economic disruption far greater than what was seen in the early 20th century.

Across the world, a new wave of investment in automation could displace 20 million manufacturing jobs by 2030. This coming period of change should be called the great transformation period where job losses due to automation will be on par to the automation of agriculture revolution ( the transition of farm workers into the industrial sector) from 1900 to 1940.

Robots have so far increased three-fold since the Dot Com bust. Momentum in trends suggests the global stock of robots will multiply even quicker through the 2020s, reaching as many as 20 million by 2030, with 14 million in China alone. The collision of automation in the economy will lead to more volatility and economic swings.

The adoption of new automation technologies can significantly boost income inequality and, by extension, wealth inequality. Many countries, including the US, are entering the 2020s with extreme inequalities, and automation will likely accelerate that trend. Oxford Economics estimates that 20 million manufacturing jobs across the world will be displaced by robots by 2030.

By 2030, most of the automation disruption in major manufacturing countries will be centered in China, the EU, and the US:

• China: over 11 million

• European Union: almost 2 million

• United States: nearly 1.7 million

• South Korea: nearly 800,000

• The rest of the world: 3 million

Oxford Economics developed the Robot Vulnerability Index – where specific regions across the US are at the highest risk of labor disruption thanks to automation.

The crosscurrents of these macroeconomic force could dramatically reshape economies around the world. Nevertheless, displacing blue-collar manufacturing jobs with robots will continue to drive income/wealth inequality to such extreme levels that governments will be forced to become more interventionist, using higher taxes, regulation, and policy to control economic imbalances.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RHAxMl Tyler Durden

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Scientists have said that the Steamboat Geyser in Yellowstone National Park keeps erupting erratically and they can’t pinpoint a reason.  This recent activity is a new record for the geyser, which has come back to life in recent years.

According to the Billings Gazette, the Steamboat geysers’ eruptions are historic. This recent activity is the shortest time ever recorded between eruptions. Yellowstone National Park’s Steamboat Geyser blasted steam and water into the air at 12:52 p.m. local time on June 12. Then, three days, 3 hours and 48 minutes later at 4:40 p.m. on June 15, it blasted steam and water into the air again, according to the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS)’s Volcano Hazards Program. That’s a new record for the geyser.

The newspaper also reported that the eruptions were especially dramatic, large and loud, with one ejecting a rock that shattered a wooden post. Researchers don’t have good, tested theories to explain why geysers like one this slip in and out of active periods, according to the Gazette. Which can be translated as: we have no idea what the hell is going on, all we know is don’t panic.  “Geysers are supposed to erupt, and most are erratic, like Steamboat,” the USGS wrote in a statement. Meaning, don’t worry about the supervolcano erupting any time soon. Especially considering  Steamboat’s eruptions records only go back to 1982, the Billings Gazette noted. Of course, Yellowstone’s history is much older than that.

The eruptions suggest that now is a particularly good time to go see Steamboat Geyser erupt if you are interested in doing so. After all, the scientists say its perfectly safe. The geyser set a record for the total number of eruptions back in 2018, with 32 in the calendar year, according to USGS. Already in 2019, there have been 24 eruptions, six of them in June at the time of Billings Gazette’s reporting.

“I wish I could tell you,” said Michael Manga, of the University of California, Berkeley, who studies geysers when asked why Steamboat has been more active.

“I think this is what makes Steamboat, and geysers in general, so fascinating is that there are these questions we can’t answer.”

Manga, however, was a bit more cautious about the geyser’s activity. He stressed that it “should trouble everyone” that scientists can’t better explain geysers since they are similar in many respects to their much more dangerous cousin, the volcano. Steamboat sits atop the Yellowstone supervolcano, a large caldera that has erupted in the past.

Michael Poland, the scientist in charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, said the irregularity of Steamboat is just “a geyser being a geyser.” Poland added: “Steamboat clearly has a mind of its own “and right now it’s putting its independence on display.”

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2YthojX Tyler Durden

Police have finally tracked down and arrested a fugitive who kept an “attack squirrel” caged and hopped up on methamphetamine at his house for protection, according to the NY Post.

The man, identified as 35 year old Mickey Paulk, was arrested on Thursday after authorities caught him leaving a hotel in a stolen ambulance. Paulk eventually rammed into an investigator’s vehicle after a short chase and was arrested.

He was booked on drug and gun charges, as well as charges of attempting to elude, criminal mischief, receiving stolen property and felon in possession of a pistol. 

Police had been looking for Paulk since June 18 after police raided his apartment and rescued the “attack squirrel”. During the bust, they also seized drugs, paraphernalia and body armor. It had been reported to police previously that Paulk was keeping an “attack squirrel” and feeding it drugs to keep it aggressive. 

The squirrel was released to a nearby wooded area. 

According to USA Today, the squirrel’s name was “DeezNuts”. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2KKD5sj Tyler Durden

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

India under Modi, an essential cog in US strategy, gets cozy with China and Russia…

It all started with the Vladimir Putin–Xi Jinping summit in Moscow on June 5. Far from a mere bilateral, this meeting upgraded the Eurasian integration process to another level. The Russian and Chinese presidents discussed everything from the progressive interconnection of the New Silk Roads with the Eurasia Economic Union, especially in and around Central Asia, to their concerted strategy for the Korean Peninsula.

A particular theme stood out: They discussed how the connecting role of Persia in the Ancient Silk Road is about to be replicated by Iran in the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And that is non-negotiable. Especially after the Russia-China strategic partnership, less than a month before the Moscow summit, offered explicit support for Tehran signaling that regime change simply won’t be accepted, diplomatic sources say.

Putin and Xi solidified the roadmap at the St Petersburg Economic Forum. And the Greater Eurasia interconnection continued to be woven immediately after at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek, with two essential interlocutors: India, a fellow BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and SCO member, and SCO observer Iran.

At the SCO summit we had Putin, Xi, Narendra Modi, Imran Khan and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani sitting at the same table. Hanging over the proceedings, like concentric Damocles swords, were the US-China trade war, sanctions on Russia, and the explosive situation in the Persian Gulf.

Rouhani was forceful – and played his cards masterfully – as he described the mechanism and effects of the US economic blockade on Iran, which led Modi and leaders of the Central Asian “stans” to pay closer attention to Russia-China’s Eurasia roadmap. This occurred as Xi made clear that Chinese investments across Central Asia on myriad BRI projects will be significantly increased.

Russia-China diplomatically interpreted what happened in Bishkek as “vital for the reshaping of the world order.” Crucially, RIC – Russia-India-China – not only held a trilateral but also scheduled a replay at the upcoming Group of Twenty summit in Osaka. Diplomats swear the personal chemistry of Putin, Xi and Modi worked wonders.

The RIC format goes back to old strategic Orientalist fox Yevgeny Primakov in the late 1990s. It should be interpreted as the foundation stone of 21st-century multipolarity, and there’s no question how it will be interpreted in Washington.

India, an essential cog in the Indo-Pacific strategy, has been getting cozy with “existential threats” Russia-China, that “peer competitor” – dreaded since geopolitics/geo-strategy founding father Halford Mackinder published his “Geographical Pivot of History” in 1904 –  finally emerging in Eurasia.

RIC was also the basis on which the BRICS grouping was set up. Moscow and Beijing are diplomatically refraining from pronouncing that. But with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro seen as a mere Trump administration tool, it’s no wonder that Brazil has been excluded from the RIC summit in Osaka. There will be a perfunctory BRICS meeting right before the start of the G20 on Friday, but the real deal is RIC.

Pay attention to the go-between

The internal triangulation of RIC is extremely complex. For instance, at the SCO summit Modi said that India could only support connectivity projects based on “respect of sovereignty” and “regional integrity.” That was code for snubbing the Belt and Roads Initiative – especially because of the flagship China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, which New Delhi insists illegally crosses Kashmir. Yet India did not block the final Bishkek declaration.

What matters is that the Xi-Modi bilateral at the SCO was so auspicious that Indian Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale was led to describe it as “the beginning of a process, after the formation of government in India, to now deal with India-China relations from both sides in a larger context of the 21st century and of our role in the Asia-Pacific region.” There will be an informal Xi-Modi summit in India in October. And they meet again at the BRICS summit in Brazil in November.

Putin has excelled as a go-between. He invited Modi to be the guest of honor at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in early September. The thrust of the relationship is to show to Modi the benefits for India to actively join the larger Eurasia integration process instead of playing a supporting role in a Made in USA production.

That may even include a trilateral partnership to develop the Polar Silk Road in the Arctic, which represents, in a nutshell, the meeting of the Belt and Road Initiative with Russia’s Northern Sea Route. China Ocean Shipping (Cosco) is already a partner of the Russian company PAO Sovcomflot, shipping natural gas both east and west from Siberia.

Xi is also beginning to get Modi’s attention on the restarting possibilities for the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCMI) corridor, another major Belt and Road project, as well as improving connectivity from Tibet to Nepal and India.

Impediments, of course, remain plentiful, from disputed Himalayan borders to, for instance, the slow-moving Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the 16-nation theoretical successor of the defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership. Beijing is adamant the RCEP must go into overdrive, and is even prepared to leave New Delhi behind.

One of Modi’s key decisions ahead is on whether to keep importing Iranian oil – considering there are no more US sanctions waivers. Russia is ready to help Iran and weary Asian customers such as India if the EU-3 continue to drag the implementation of their special payment vehicle.

India is a top Iran energy customer. Iran’s port of Chabahar is absolutely essential if India’s mini-Silk Road is to reach Central Asia via Afghanistan. With US President Donald Trump’s administration sanctioning New Delhi over its drive to buy the Russian S-400 air defense system and the loss of preferred trade status with the US, getting closer to Bridge and Road – featuring energy supplier Iran as a key vector – becomes a not-to-be-missed economic opportunity.

With the roadmap ahead for the Russia-China strategic partnership fully solidified after the summits in Moscow, St Petersburg and Bishkek, the emphasis now for RC is to bring India on board a full-fledged RIC. Russia-India is already blossoming as a strategic partnership. And Xi-Modi seemed to be in sync. Osaka may be the geopolitical turning point consolidating RIC for good.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RHuSG5 Tyler Durden

Cyber-criminals have struck for the second week in a row, this time on a small Florida city called Lake City, according to the WSJ. The city has agreed to pay ransom to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars after a ransomware attack crippled its systems. 

Lake City’s council approved the measure during an emergency meeting Monday night and will be paying about $462,000 via Bitcoin, by way of the city’s insurer. This payment follows a similar incident in Riviera Beach, a city of 34,000 near West Palm Beach, where the city’s council authorized a similar $600,000 ransom payment.

The event [in Lake City] began June 10 with what the city described as a “triple threat” malware attack, then escalated with a ransom demand last week, the city said in a news release. The attack knocked out email and hindered city services, and people had to temporarily pay utility bills on terminals at the police station, the city manager said. The attack included a ransomware variant called Ryuk that is known for hefty ransom demands.

Emergency services weren’t affected. But Lake City authorities worried they wouldn’t be able to access encrypted files such as ordinances, public-record requests and utility information.

These are both signs of how increasingly sophisticated hackers are targeting cities with outdated IT infrastructure and holding them ransom for sizeable sums. And suceeding. The Riviera Beach ransom was about 12 times the size of a ransom demand that Atlanta refused to pay last year. These demands are becoming more common and are growing in size. The six figure sums averaged only a couple thousand dollars a few years ago. 

Ironically, the hacking measures appear to come thanks to a hack of the NSA’s own weaponized hacking arsenal, which is now being used against the US.

Larry Ponemon, whose Michigan research company, the Ponemon Institute, focuses on information security said: “There are a lot of copycats out there, and they figure they’re going to ride the gravy train.”

Attackers are going after both companies and cities regularly by exploiting vulnerabilities via malicious email attachments and demanding payments for decryption keys. 

The attacks occur “every day and many are never publicized”. Local governments are especially vulnerable if they lack resources to update infrastructure and invest in security. 

Michael Tanenbaum, head of North America cyber and professional liability at insurance giant Chubb said: “We do see an increased frequency against municipalities.” 

The FBI advises against paying hackers, saying there’s no guarantee they will release data and that it could make victims susceptible to future attacks. But some victims don’t have a choice: for instance, in March, Jackson County, Georgia paid $400,000 after realizing a cyber attack had compromised its backups. 

Joe Helfenberger, city manager in Lake City said: “I thought we had a backup, but obviously we didn’t have a good enough backup for this kind of attack. Fortunately, we had all the financial data backed up properly off-site, so that wasn’t affected, but pretty much everything else was.”

The payouts are emboldening hackers to raise their demands. Ponemon said: “That might explain why the ransom is going up: The bad guys can get away with it.”

At the start of this month, we detailed a similar ransomware attack on the City of Baltimore. Officials have estimated that attack, where Baltimore rejected a $76,000 ransom, will instead cost the city about $18 million in IT costs and lost revenue. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XKVQCh Tyler Durden

Authored by Vijay Prashad via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity,

In 2017, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created a special unit — the Iran Mission Center — to focus attention on the U.S. plans against Iran. The initiative for this unit came from CIA director John Brennan, who left his post as the Trump administration came into office. Brennan believed that the CIA needed to focus attention on what the United States sees as problem areas — North Korea and Iran, for instance. This predated the Trump administration.

Brennan’s successor — Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director for just over a year (until he was appointed U.S. Secretary of State) — continued this policy. The CIA’s Iran-related activity had been conducted in the Iran Operations Division (Persia House). This was a section with Iran specialists who built up knowledge about political and economic developments inside Iran and in the Iranian diaspora.

It bothered the hawks in Washington — as one official told me — that Persia House was filled with Iran specialists who had no special focus on regime change in Iran. Some of them, due to their long concentration on Iran, had developed sensitivity to the country.

Trump’s people wanted a much more focused and belligerent group that would provide the kind of intelligence that tickled the fancy of his National Security Adviser John Bolton.

To head the Iran Mission Center, the CIA appointed Michael D’Andrea. D’Andrea was central to the post-9/11 interrogation program, and he ran the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Assassinations and torture were central to his approach.

It was D’Andrea who expanded the CIA’s drone strike program, in particular the signature strike. The signature strike is a particularly controversial instrument. The CIA was given the allowance to kill anyone who fit a certain profile — a man of a certain age, for instance, with a phone that had been used to call someone on a list. The dark arts of the CIA are precisely those of D’Andrea.

What is germane to his post at the Iran Mission Center is that D’Andrea is close to the Gulf Arabs, a former CIA analyst told me. The Gulf Arabs have been pushing hard for action against Iran, a view shared by D’Andrea and parts of his team. For his hard-nosed attitude toward Iran, D’Andrea is known—ironically—as “Ayatollah Mike.”

D’Andrea and people like Bolton are part of an ecosystem of men who have a visceral hatred for Iran and who are close to the worldview of the Saudi royal family. These are men who are reckless with violence, willing to do anything if it means provoking a war against Iran. Nothing should be put past them.

D’Andrea and the hawks edged out several Iran experts from the Iran Mission Center, people like Margaret Stromecki — who had been head of analysis. Others who want to offer an alternative to the Pompeo-Bolton view of things either have also moved on or remain silent. There is no space in the Trump administration, a former official told me, for dissent on the Iran policy.

Saudi Arabia’s War

D’Andrea’s twin outside the White House is Thomas Kaplan, the billionaire who set up two groups that are blindingly for regime change in Iran. The two groups are United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and Counter Extremism Project. There is nothing subtle here. These groups — and Kaplan himself — promote an agenda of great disparagement of Muslims in general and of Iran in particular.

Kaplan blamed Iran for the creation of ISIS, for it was Iran — Kaplan said — that “used a terrible Sunni movement” to expand its reach from “Persia to the Mediterranean.” Such absurdity followed from a fundamental misreading of Shia concepts such as taqiya, which means prudence and not — as Kaplan and others argue — deceit. Kaplan, bizarrely, shares more with ISIS than Iran does with that group — since both Kaplan and ISIS are driven by their hatred of those who follow the Shia traditions of Islam.

It is fitting that Kaplan’s anti-Iran groups bring together the CIA and money. The head of UANI is Mark Wallace, who is the chief executive of Kaplan’s Tigris Financial Group, a financial firm with investments — which it admits — would benefit from “instability in the Middle East.” Working with UANI and the Counter Extremism Project is Norman Roule, a former national intelligence manager for Iran in the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Roule has offered his support to the efforts of the Arabia Foundation, run by Ali Shihabi — a man with close links to the Saudi monarchy. The Arabia Foundation was set up to do more effective public relations work for the Saudis than the Saudi diplomats are capable of doing. Shihabi is the son of one of Saudi Arabia’s most well-regarded diplomats, Samir al-Shihabi, who played an important role as Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Pakistan during the war that created al-Qaeda.

These men — Kaplan and Bolton, D’Andrea and Shihabi — are eager to use the full force of the U.S. military to further the dangerous goals of the Gulf Arab royals (of both Saudi Arabia and of the UAE). When Pompeo walked before cameras, he carried their water for them. These are men on a mission. They want war against Iran.

Evidence, reason. None of this is important to them. They will not stop until the U.S. bombers deposit their deadly payload on Tehran and Qom, Isfahan and Shiraz. They will do anything to make that our terrible reality.

This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2RIM9Ph Tyler Durden

The issue of Millennial ‘burnout’ has been an especially hot topic in recent years – and not just because the election of President Trump ushered in an epidemic of co-occurring TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) that sent millions of American twenty somethings on a never-ending quest for a post-grad ‘safe space’.

For those who aren’t familiar with the subject, the World Health Organization recently described burnout as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” As birth rates plunge and so-called deaths from despair (suicides and overdoses) climb, sending the US left expectancy lower for multiple consecutive years for the first time since the 1960s, many researchers see solving the problem of burnout as critical to fixing many of our societal issues.

To try and dig deeper into the causes and impact of millennial burnout, Yellowbrick, a national psychiatric organization, surveyed 2,000 millennials to identify what exactly is making a staggering 96% of the generation comprising the largest cohort of the American labor force say they feel “burned out” on a daily basis.

The answer is, unsurprisingly, finances and debt: These are the leading causes of burnout (and one reason why Bernie Sanders latest proposal to wipe out all $1.6 trillion in outstanding student debt might be more popular with millennial voters than many other Americans realize).

Because of this ‘burnout’, a plurality of respondents said they experience mental and physical exhaustion tied to burnout on a daily basis.

Work, finances and socializing (that is, dating) were the top three reasons given for millennial burnout.

When it comes to work, pressure to work long hours coupled with low pay and job insecurity were seen as the primary drivers of burnout.

Amazingly, more than half of respondents said they work more than one job to make ends meet (having a second job has become known as having a “side hustle” in millennial parlance). 

When it comes to coping with burnout, the top strategies listed were watching Netflix/Hulu, sleeping and exercise. And for those who take drugs to cope, roughly 70% said that drug is marijuana.

Fortunately for millennials, popular lifestyle ‘news’ websites like Buzzfeed and Slate.com have plenty of resources to help them improve their lifestyles.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2IXUrjr Tyler Durden

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

California Senator Kamala Harris won the Democratic presidential debate last night. It was not a close contest. She will win every debate she enters during this election cycle. If she becomes the nominee, she will win every debate with Trump.

Night two of the debates was just as vapid and ridiculous as night one. Candidates interrupted and talked over each other a lot, questions about foreign policy were avoided like the plague to prevent NBC viewers from thinking critically about the mechanics of empire, and Eric Swalwell kept talking despite everyone in the universe desperately wanting him not to. Buttigieg and Gillibrand did alright, Bernie played the same note he’s been playing for decades, and everyone was reminded how bad Joe Biden is at talking and thinking.

Biden has been treated kindly by polls and regarded as a “frontrunner” in this race exclusively because for the last decade he hasn’t had to do anything other than be associated with Barack Obama. Now that he’s had to step out of that insulated role and interact with reality again, everyone’s seeing the same old garbage right-wing Democrat who sucks at making himself look appealing just as badly as he did in his last two presidential campaigns. By the end of the night, even Michael Bennet was slapping him around.

The full exchange between Kamala Harris and Joe Biden on Biden’s history with racial issues. pic.twitter.com/sK950pFyvf

— Axios (@axios) June 28, 2019

The moment everyone’s talking about was when Harris created a space for herself to attack Biden on his citing his collaboration with segregationists as an example of his ability to reach across the aisle and “get things done”. Harris had not been called upon to speak, and once given the go-ahead by moderator Rachel Maddow after interjecting went way beyond the 30 seconds she’d been allotted in tearing Biden apart. She skillfully took control of the stage and engineered the entire space for the confrontation by sheer dominance of personality, and Biden had no answer for it.

That’s the moment everyone’s talking about. But Harris had already been owning the debate prior to that.

The goal of a political debate is to make yourself look appealing and electable to your audience. You can do that by having a very good platform, or you can do it with charisma and oratory skills. It turns out that Kamala Harris is really, really good at doing the latter. She made frequent and effective appeals to emotion, she built to applause lines far more skillfully than anyone else on the stage, she kept her voice unwavering and without stammer, she made herself look like a leader by admonishing the other candidates to stop talking over each other, and she hit all the right progressive notes you’re supposed to hit in such a debate.

Unlike night one of the debates, night two had a clear, dominant winner. If you were a casual follower of US politics and didn’t have a favorite coming into the debate, you likely went away feeling that Harris was the best.

This wasn’t a fluke. Harris has been cultivating her debate skills for decades, first in the Howard University debate team where she is said to have “thrived”, then as a prosecutor, then as a politician, and she’ll be able to replicate the same calibre of performance in all subsequent debates. There’s more to getting elected than debate skills, but it matters, and in this area no one will be able to touch her.

Harris won the debate despite fully exposing herself for the corporate imperialist she is in the midst of that very debate. While answering a question about climate change she took the opportunity to attack Trump on foreign policy, not for his insane and dangerous hawkishness but for not being hawkish enough, on both North Korea and Russia.

“You asked what is the greatest national-security threat to the United States. It’s Donald Trump,” Harris said. “You want to talk about North Korea, a real threat in terms of its nuclear arsenal. But what does he do? He embraces Kim Jong Un, a dictator, for the sake of a photo op. Putin. You want to talk about Russia? He takes the word of the Russian president over the word of the American intelligence community when it comes to a threat to our democracy and our elections.”

Harris is everything the US empire’s unelected power establishment wants in a politician: charismatic, commanding, and completely unprincipled. In that sense she’s like Obama, only better.

Harris was one of the 2020 presidential hopefuls who came under fire at the beginning of the year when it was reported that she’d been reaching out to Wall Street executives to find out if they’d support her campaign. Executives named in the report include billionaire Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray, 32 Advisors’ Robert Wolf, and Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly. It was reported two entire years ago that Harris was already courting top Hillary Clinton donors and organizers in the Hamptons. She hasn’t been in politics very long, but her campaign contributions as a senator have come from numerous plutocratic institutions.

Kamala Harris Set to Announce 2020 Run On or Around Martin Luther King Jr. Day. In 2 Years in Senate, majority of her donations have come from financial interests including Wall Street, financial industry lawyers, and real estate industry. https://t.co/0dTBVo7QlC pic.twitter.com/tMwzIehihr

— Jordan (@JordanChariton) January 10, 2019

In the summer of 2017, just half a year into her term as Senator, Harris met with @HillaryClinton‘s top donors in the Hamptons. I do not think they were there strategizing how to pass #MedicareForAll and free public college https://t.co/xqJFXGXqfK

— Jordan (@JordanChariton) January 10, 2019

Trump supporters like to claim that the president is fighting the establishment, citing the open revulsion that so many noxious establishment figures have for him. But the establishment doesn’t hate Trump because he opposes them; he doesn’t oppose existing power structures in any meaningful way at all. The reason the heads of those power structures despise Trump is solely because he sucks at narrative management and puts an ugly face on the ugly things that America’s permanent government is constantly doing. He’s bad at managing their assets.

Kamala Harris is the exact opposite of this. She’d be able to obliterate non-compliant nations and dead-end the left for eight years, and look good while doing it. She’s got the skills to become president, and she’ll have the establishment backing as well. Keep an eye on this one.

*  *  *

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