#600: Peace & International Relations: The Pacific Realm Era and World Affairs (Six hundred)
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Feb 21, 2015, 6:56:50 PM2/21/15
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50 years after his death, Malcolm X’s work is unfinished
By Krissah Thompson
February 19
After a life filled with
transformation, Malcolm X found himself in February 1965 in the throes of yet
another.
He had been a fringe figure, known
mostly to a small circle of black Muslims and big-city sophisticates, but now
he was branching out — seeking allies at home and abroad to help him become a
part of the Southern civil rights movement. He had plans to take the cause to
the United Nations, charging the U.S. government with failure to protect its
black citizens from racist white terrorism.
He was fashioning himself as an
internationalist. A political player.
It was a transformation thwarted.
History ended up casting Malcolm X as radical foil to the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr., the nonviolent martyr. He was boiled down to his aphorisms: “By any
means necessary.” “The ballot or the bullet.”
But 50 years after he was gunned
down by an assassin in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm X is getting another
look. His issues — particularly those that occupied the last year of his life —
and his tactics speak to the current conversation.
Police brutality? Malcolm would have been on point amid the protests in
Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island. “Whenever something happens, 20 police cars
swarm on one neighborhood,” Malcolm told
an interviewer during his crusade against anti-crime bills. “This
force . . . creates a spirit of resentment in every Negro. They think they are
living in a police state and they become hostile toward the policeman.”
Voting rights? Once again in the spotlight, as activists challenge photo ID
laws that they say hinder minority voters, and definitely a preoccupation for
Malcolm. “When white people are evenly divided, and black people have a bloc of
votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who’s going to sit in
the White House and who’s going to be in the doghouse,” he said in 1964.
So now scholars are holding forums on Malcolm’s legacy. His associates are
drawing attention to the work he left unfinished. The Oscar-nominated film
“Selma” features a cameo from Malcolm, dramatizing his efforts to reach out.
“He was on a committed campaign to internationalize the movement,” recalled
Peter Bailey, who worked for the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU),
the political group that Malcolm founded less than a year before his death.
Malcolm changed the conversation about the civil rights movement — and the way
activists think of themselves — in ways that resonate today
“We called ourselves a human rights organization, not a civil rights
organization,” Bailey added, “because human rights is an international term.”
Putting differences aside
Today’s civil rights movement has
struggled with public rifts — younger protesters chafing against older
activists over tactics. You can imagine Malcolm shaking his head and sighing.
Once the rebel, toward the end of
his life he was seeking allies.
He had differences with King and
other black leaders, but he wanted those differences to remain “in the closet,”
Malcolm said in 1964. “When we come out in front, let us not have anything to
argue about until we get finished arguing with the man.”
It was a dramatic shift. Malcolm had
more than once implied that nonviolence was cowardly. He suggested that the
peaceful Southern protesters should meet the violence of white lawmen with
self-defense. But he respected the grass-roots sentiment there — and over time,
his respect for King increased.
They’ve been compared so often, but
the men met only once, a grip-and-grin for cameras as they passed in a Capitol
Hill hallway in March 1964 after observing a filibuster over the proposed Civil
Rights Act.
“Malcolm was pushed out awkwardly by
an associate from behind a pillar,” said Garrett Felber, a researcher who
worked with the scholar Manning Marable on his Pulitzer Prize-winning
Malcolm X biography. “Standing in front of King, whom he had described as an
‘Uncle Tom,’ Malcolm shook hands with King before the press.”
In later years, their commonalities
were clear.
Malcolm “wanted to be an
inspirational force offering a different
perspective than King,” said Clayborne
Carson, a Stanford University historian who was selected by Coretta Scott King
to edit her husband’s papers. “Both of them were internationalists. Both agreed
that the African American struggle had to join ties with the struggle against
colonialism and that they both saw the civil rights struggle as the struggle
for human rights.”
Malcolm saw reason for them to work together. He wrote letters to King. He
began to invite members of the Student-Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to
Harlem to speak to his followers. Fannie Lou Hamer, the Mississippi voting
rights activist, came, too.
Three weeks before he was killed, students at the Tuskegee Institute invited
him to speak there, and he went to Selma, Ala., a couple of days later.
“It was an overture,” said Peniel Joseph, professor of history at Tufts
University and the author of “Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative
History of Black Power.” “He gave a speech and he told the press that Dr. King
is right. He was presenting himself as an alternative and trying to help the
movement.”
Local authorities wouldn’t allow Malcolm to meet with King, who was in jail,
but Malcolm did have a conversation that afternoon with Coretta Scott King.
She was nervous, not knowing what to expect.
“He leaned over and said to me, ‘Mrs. King, I want you to tell your husband
that I had planned to visit him in jail here in Selma but I won't be able to do
it now. . . . I didn’t come to Selma to make his job more difficult, but I
thought that if the white people understood what the alternative was that they
would be more inclined to listen to your husband,’ ” she recalled in the
“Eyes on the Prize” documentary series.
She thanked him, she said — and later wondered how much he could have
achieved had he lived.
Determination
By late February 1965, Malcolm was
back in Harlem. He was planning for the future and thought he could do that by
building up his organization.
“He was an organizer,” Bailey said.
“He believed in structure.”
Malcolm was under threat after leaving
the Nation of Islam and being surveilled by law enforcement, but he was
determined to keep working, his nephew Rodnell Collins said.
“He did not want his children to see
their father not fighting for a cause,” said Collins, who was 20 when his uncle
was killed. He believed in “dying with your boots on, fighting for a cause.”
In a meeting with followers, Malcolm
put to a vote whether he should speak at an upcoming event, recalled Lez
Edmond, a friend who urged him to stay in the background for a while.
“The other side prevailed,” said Edmond, an associate professor at St.
John’s University. “He put his arm around me and said, ‘Brother, you seem to be
very upset.’ I said, ‘I am.’ But I didn’t see any fear in his eyes.”
On Feb. 21, Bailey was among the four or five people backstage to talk
with Malcolm before he took the stage of the Audubon Ballroom.
“He told us he was going down to Jackson, Mississippi, to speak,” Bailey
recalled. “Then he was going to spend six months building up OAAU.”
As Malcolm took the stage, someone in the audience called out, “Get your
hand out of my pocket!” Before Malcolm’s bodyguards could calm the crowd, a man
charged forward and shot him in the chest with a sawed-off shotgun. Two other
men ran to the stage firing handguns. He was pronounced dead at 3:30 p.m. at
Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.
Changing portrait
Alex Haley’s “The
Autobiography of Malcolm X,” published later in 1965, turned him
into a martyr. It was an all-American narrative of transformation and
redemption: a criminal turned devoutly religious man, who traded Nation of
Islam’s “white devil” rhetoric for a spirit of brotherhood. It recast the
radical as the kind of man who would be commemorated on a U.S. postage stamp in
1999.
“I don’t know if he’d appreciate that,’’ the activist and black studies
scholar Richard Newman said at the time. “It’s
ironic to see him honored by the government he despised.’’
A less gauzy picture came into focus four years ago when Marable’s
unflinching biography of Malcolm was published, revealing exaggerations and narrative
liberties in the Haley-penned biography. But the portrait remained of a strong
and formidable leader, said Mark Anthony Neal, professor of African and African
American Studies at Duke University. He’s one of the organizers of “The Legacy
of Malcolm X: Afro-American Visionary, Muslim Activist” conference being held
at Duke this weekend. There he wants to talk about the forgotten Malcolm.
“The thing we forget is that Malcolm X, when all was said and done, he really
was an incredible political strategist — and really a visionary,” Neal said.
“He was someone who was constantly revising his views of the world, the way he
would present his public persona, his ideas about radicalism and movements —
civil rights movements, black power movements.”
A look at civil rights throughout history
View Photos
Civil rights images and figures throughout
history.
As for today’s young activists, Malcolm’s influence continues. Taurean K.
Brown, a 27-year-old based in North Carolina who writes and speaks about social
justice, has found direction in Malcolm’s life and political positions.
Brown fashions himself as a Malcolm-type revolutionary — pushing for radical
change instead of King’s gradual reforms. And in the rumbling protests
following the deaths of Eric Garner in New York, Michael Brown in Ferguson and
12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, he sees an awakening the black nationalist
leader would have admired.
“Malcolm’s legacy is fully entrenched in the uprising that is going on
today,” said Brown, who was headed to a social-justice conference this weekend
at the University of Texas at Arlington. “There is a heavy appreciation for
black consciousness and black pride. His influence will always be powerful for
youth because he connected with black youth in the ’hood, the disadvantaged. He
understood.”
Ellen McCarthy contributed to this report.
Thousands take part in 'Anti-Maidan' protest in Moscow against uprising in Ukraine
Anti-Western protest in Moscow held as sporadic fighting continues in eastern Ukraine, and US and UK plan fresh sanctions
By Tom Parfitt, Moscow and Roland
Oliphant near Shirokino
5:32PM GMT 21 Feb 2015
Thousands of people gathered in Moscow on Saturday for an anti-Western
protest against the ousting of Ukraine’s pro-Russian
president one year ago this weekend.
The rally was held as sporadic fighting continued in eastern Ukraine,
testing a 10-day old ceasefire agreed by the leaders of France, Germany, Russia
and Ukraine alongside representatives of pro-Russian separatists.
Speaking on a visit to London, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, said
that Moscow was being "extraordinarily craven" for supporting the
rebels in fighting that threatened the peace deal in recent days. He said he
was planning to discuss fresh Western sanctions against Russia with Philip Hammond,
the Foreign Secretary.
"We are talking about additional sanctions, about additional efforts,
and I'm confident over the next days people will make it clear that we are not
going to play this game," Mr Kerry added.
Meanwhile, demonstrators in the Russian capital gathered near the Kremlin
for an “Anti-Maidan” event; a reference to the square in central Kiev where
months of demonstrations led to Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s then president,
fleeing in February last year.
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Some 35,000 taking part in Anti-Maidan march in Moscow
17:32 February 21, 2015 Interfax
The members of the Anti-Maidan movement held a march in central Moscow on
Saturday.
The main motto of the event is 'One Year of Maidan. Won't Forget and Won't
Forgive!'. Moscow police estimated the number of participants at 35,000.
"About 35,000 people are taking part in a procession from Petrovka
Street toward Revolution Square within the framework of the Anti-Maidan
action," the Moscow city police department said on its website on
Saturday.
The number of participants in the procession is significantly larger than
that indicated in the application previously agreed upon with the city hall,
but the organizers will not be sanctioned, as the participants are not
violating public order, Alexei Mayorov, the chief of the Moscow city hall's
regional security and anti-corruption department, told Interfax.
"According to the organizers and the law enforcement agencies, the
number of participants in the action exceeds that stated in the
application," he said.
"We have an explanation by the Supreme Court, which ruled that
sanctions can be applied if the number of participants in an event is higher
than that previously agreed upon and this poses a threat to people's lives or
health or causes damage to city infrastructure. We haven't had any incidents or
excesses during the event so far. There is no reason so far to talk about
any penalties," Mayorov said.
An Interfax correspondent reported from the scene that a column of marchers
moved toward the planned venue of a rally.
The Anti-Maidan movement was set up at the beginning of 2015. Its founders
and supporters have declared their determination to prevent the replay of the
Ukrainian events in Russia.
Read more: Kiev mourns Maidan protest victims
Over 1 million people take part in rally protesting cartoons of Prophet Muhammad held in Grozny - Chechen Interior Ministry
17:37 January 19, 2015 Interfax
Chechen
Muslims gather in downtown regional capital of Grozny to take part in a protest
rally on Monday, Jan. 19, 2015. Protesters have gathered in the Russian region
of Chechnya to rally against the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, where
12 people were killed by gunmen this month. Chechen central Mosque is at background.
Source: AP
Over 1 million people have taken part in a rally protesting the cartoons of
Prophet Muhammad, General Ruslan Alkhanov, Russian interior affairs minister
for the Chechen Republic, told Interfax on Monday.
All central squares and avenues were full of people and people marched into
the center of the city after the rally began. Among the protesters were people
from the neighboring regions, from Moscow and from abroad.
Among the people who spoke at the rally were Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of
Chechnya, Ravil Gainutdin, chairman of the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of
Russia, Bishop of Makhachkala and Grozny Varlaam, and officials
Among the people who spoke at the rally was Sheikh Ali Jifri, a descendant
of Prophet Muhammad. He condemned the cartoonists' actions and reiterated
that they were caused by their ignorance and lack of knowledge of the
foundations of Islam.
Bishop Varlaam also strongly criticized the cartoonists, reiterating
that "the entire Russian Orthodox Church categorically denies these
cartoons." We strongly condemn the evil that they are trying to
spread between our religious. It's never going to happen," he said.
The republic's Interior Ministry told Interfax no incidents were registered
at the rally.
The press center for the Russian Interior Ministry earlier told Interfax the
rally had over 800,000 participants.
Police use water cannons, tear gas to break up
anti-brutality protests in France
Published time: February 21, 2015
20:17
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of
Nantes and Toulouse in demonstrations against police violence.Both rallies were
marred by violence,as protesters threw stones at security forces, who responded
by deploying water cannons and tear gas.
About 800 protesters gathered for a demo in
the western city of Nantes on Saturday, local media reported, citing police.
The people marched along the streets carrying a banner which read “Against police [brutality], social, economic violence...
Resistance. "
The event was organized to mark the
one-year anniversary of the 22 February protests, which attracted tens of
thousands opposing the Notre-Dame-des-Landes airport project. Local residents
said the airport would damage the environment and be too expensive for the
region. The protests that followed brought together farmers, ecologists, and
anarchists calling themselves ZADists – the French acronym for "development zone".
In October, a ZAD member, Remi Fraisse, was
taking part in a protest over a dam project in the Testet wetlands, near the
southwestern town of Lisle-sur-Tarn. After a tense standoff between security
forces and protesters, he was discovered dead with a wound to his back. The
blame was put on a police grenade. Massive anti-police brutality protests gripped
the country following the death; the first such mortality to hit mainland
France since 1986.
The anti-airport demos in 2014 turned
violent, with police regularly deploying tear gas, water cannons and rubber
bullets. Several protesters and policemen were injured. Both Nantes and the
southern French city of Toulouse became the sites of frequent rallies.
Toulouse, for its part, saw nearly
500 people – according to police figures – gather for a demo on Saturday.
The protesters held a black banner
with white letters commemorating the young environmentalist Remi Fraisse :
"I am Remi and all the other victims of the police…We do not forget, we
do not forgive."
Some protesters carried flags for a
far left group which has served to co-organize of the movement, and others
shouted anti-police slogans.
Protesters – mostly young and masked
– reportedly used paintball guns and threw stones at local shops. Clashes also
broke out at the Toulose courthouse. Local media has reported numerous arrests.
Medical Breakthroughs 1 minute ago
If only that many police were there
for Charlie Hebdo... they might have actually caught the guys in the act
instead of letting them get away only to have mass media tell us instantly that
they know who did it.
Franco De Plusworlds 9 minutes ago
2nd Revolution!
nobody 16 minutes ago
French Democracy tho... on 9:41 AM -
21 Feb 2015 video - there is NOT immediate threat to Police 100 meters from
them and they giving free "Hollande" shower to public on the public
street... Ha ha ha - Viva Europa Democracy...
jack 22 minutes ago
whats the deal? cops trying to jail
holocaust deniers?
Varkov Ukunt 1 hour ago
This is the part where Bibi oust's
out Hollande"
Mark Hayden 1 hour ago
I've seen this play before when the
"masked rock throwers" are unmasked as police agents...
5
Fantomas Fantomas 1 hour ago
ANTI white agenda in france
communist marxist ANTifA UAF DC CIA mossad operation
2
anthony 2 hours ago
I can't imagine what it will be like
when we go through a total global economical collapse, I bet NATO, FEMA, CIA
and every other agency in NATO countries are making there blueprints for the
near future based on the number of protests that have occurred in the last
year, divide and conquer!
1
Christopher J Walters 2 hours ago
Anarchists organize "peaceful
protest" Page 666 "Encyclopedia of Monumental Hypocrisy"
Srinivas Injeti 2 hours ago
So much for the so called "Free
World"!
2
Ian Parry 2 hours ago
Soap dodging left wing tramps
causing trouble just like UAF and Antifa.
1
Gaetan A Cincire 2 hours ago
Suur Kurat
Meaningless protest.
Only 800 protesters showed up? This is insignificant to the millions who protested islamic terror a few weeksmore...
Only 800 protesters showed up? This is insignificant to the millions who protested islamic terror a few weeksmore...
No one has seen those so-called
millions people.
Suur Kurat 2 hours ago
Meaningless protest.
Only 800 protesters showed up? This is insignificant to the millions who protested islamic terror a few weeks ago without concealing their faces.
Only 800 protesters showed up? This is insignificant to the millions who protested islamic terror a few weeks ago without concealing their faces.
Gaetan A Cincire 2 hours ago
The more violent it is, the more
masked people involved, the most ' organised' they are the more MAIDAN like it
will be ! There are some very trained and dangerous people in France lately and
they have nothing to do with daesh or Remi Fraisse!
1
JeremyJHines 2 hours ago
Paul Tootall
Ah... the usual "masked
protesters" who generally turn out to be planted by the scecurity forces
to attack the policemore...
Finally, my paycheck is $ 8,500? A
working 10 hours per week online. My brother’s friend had an average of 12K for
several months, he work about 22 hours a week. I can not believe how easy it
is, once I try to do so. This is what I do,
..........www．JOBSYELP．com
..........www．JOBSYELP．com
Paul Tootall 2 hours ago
Ah... the usual "masked
protesters" who generally turn out to be planted by the scecurity forces
to attack the police to "get things going"... wake up to the
establishments tactics, and fast, the "Police State" of Europe is
upon us.. makes you wonder what these Police and security services people will
say to their children and grandchildren when the EUSSR decloaks properly.....
2
Recommended
U.S., allies discuss new sanctions,
Obama weighs next steps on Ukraine: Kerry
Credit: Reuters/Neil Hall
(Reuters) - The United States and
its European allies are in talks about harsher sanctions against Moscow, while
U.S. President Barack Obama will evaluate
next steps in dealing with the conflict in eastern Ukraine in coming days, U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry said on Saturday.
Kerry was speaking after meetings
with his British counterpart Philip Hammond in London. He said among options
being considered by Obama was whether to arm Ukrainian forces and to impose
deeper sanctions against the Kremlin for breaches of a Feb. 12
European-brokered truce.
"In the next few days I
anticipate that President Obama will evaluate the choices that are in front of
him and will make his decision as to what the next step will be," Kerry
told a news conference after meetings with Hammond.
"There are serious discussions
taking place between us and our European allies as to what those next sanctions
steps ought to be and when they ought to be implemented," Kerry said.
"I am confident some additional
steps will be taken in response to the breaches of the ceasefire."
The Kiev military on Friday accused
Russia of sending more tanks and troops towards the rebel-held town of
Novoazovsk, further east along the Sea of Azov coast from Mariupol, expanding
their presence on what it fears could be the next battlefront.
The Kremlin did not immediately
respond to the allegation but has always denied accusations that its forces are
fighting in Ukraine.
Kerry said the most "egregious
violation" of the ceasefire was the assault on the city of Debaltseve and
military supplies sent by Moscow to separatists.
"We know to a certainty what
Russia has been providing and no amount of propaganda is capable of hiding
these actions," Kerry said. "For anyone wanting to make gray areas
out of black, let's get very real, the Minsk agreement is not open to
interpretation, it is not vague, it is not optional."
He said Russia and the rebels were
only complying with the ceasefire accords in a few areas.
"If this failure continues,
make no mistake, there will be further consequences, including consequences
that will put added strains on Russia's already troubled economy," Kerry
said, "We are not going to sit back and allow this kind of cynical, craven
behavior to continue at the expensive of the sovereignty of another
nation."
POSSIBLE ATTACK
Pro-Russian separatists are building
up forces and weapons in Ukraine's southeast and the Ukrainian military said on
Saturday it was braced for a possible rebel attack on the port city of
Mariupol.
An attack on Mariupol, a city of
half a million people and potentially a gateway to Crimea, which Russia annexed last March, would almost
certainly kill off the ceasefire that aimed to end the 10-month-old conflict.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told
Echo Moskvy radio station that Russia was focused on supporting the ceasefire
deal, according to TASS news agency.
"An obsessive idea to force
someone to pay the cost ... is not conducive to the resolution of the situation
in southeast Ukraine," Peskov was quoted as saying, in response to Kerry's
remarks on the possibility of further sanctions against Russia.
The ceasefire has already been
shaken by the rebel capture on Wednesday of Debaltseve, a railway junction in
eastern Ukraine, forcing a retreat by thousands of Ukrainian troops in which at
least 20 Ukrainian soldiers were killed.
Hammond said the ceasefire had been
"systematically breached" and he would discuss with Kerry how Europe
and the United States could remain united in tackling the challenge in Ukraine.
The Secretary of State travels to
Geneva on Sunday for two days of talks with senior Iranian officials on
Tehran's disputed nuclear program, as the sides try to resolve differences
before a March 31 deadline for a basic framework agreement.
U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz
will also attend the talks, the first time he has participated in the Iran
negotiations, a U.S. official said.
Kerry said because of the nature of
the nuclear talks it was deemed necessary and appropriate to have technical
experts, including Moniz, present.
"I would not read into it any
indication whatsoever that something is about to be decided as a result of
that," he said, "There are still significant gaps, there is still a
distance to travel."
(Additional
reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin; Editing by David
Holmes)
The Plot to Kill Health Care
FEB. 20, 2015
Republicans hate activist judges — those black-robed
elites who are willing to upset the lives of millions of people just to further
a political cause. Ditto trial lawyers trolling for clients, the
ambulance-chasing, “Better Call Saul” guys. They hate them, until they need
them.
And in the raw power play that is behind the attempt
to kick millions of people off health care gained through the Affordable Care
Act, Republicans are attempting one of the most brazen manipulations of the
legal system in modern times. To pull it off, they’re relying on a toxically
politicized judiciary to make law, and to make a mockery of everything that
conservative legal scholars profess to believe.
In less than two weeks’ time, the Supreme Court
will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell — the net result of a
well-orchestrated, well-financed, five-year campaign to kill President Obama’s
signature achievement by legal assassination. It’s
a remarkably flimsy case, the plaintiffs may lack standing, and a
host of business and health care professionals have said the consequences of
backing the right-wing consortium behind this case could be catastrophic.
But none of that matters to at least four justices on
the court who would rule in favor of a ham sandwich, if it meant overturning
the health
care law. If
they get a fifth vote, more than eight million people in 34 states
could lose their health coverage. Premiums for several million more would rise
enough to make insurance impossible. Thousands of people, lacking basic care,
may even die prematurely.
“The Supreme Court is going to render a body blow to
Obamacare from which I don’t think it will ever recover,” said Senate Majority
Whip John Cornyn of Texas last month. He was licking his chops in anticipation.
This comes at a time when Republicans have recently
discovered the working poor. For those holding to the last, slippery rung of
middle-class dignity, nothing is harder than having no health insurance. And
there is no bigger knockout blow, forcing a family into bankruptcy, than a
massive medical bill.
So, consider just who stands to lose most if the
health care subsidies for people in two-thirds of the states are denied — as
the plaintiffs are demanding of the Supreme Court. More than 80 percent of them
are lower- or middle-income people, working part time or full. Most of them are
white. And majority of them are in the South. So much for helping your base.
Enrollment for private coverage under Obamacare is
surging this year, particularly in red states. In Texas alone, more than a
million people have signed up. All the dire predictions — that enough young
people wouldn’t join the exchanges, that health care expansion would be a job
killer, that premiums would soar — have turned out to be bogus.
And so it comes down to this: a legal challenge based
on a technicality — specifically, four words. Should subsidies be available
only to exchanges “established by the states”? Or were they designed to cover
the entire nation, as is obvious in the intent of the law?
The Supreme Court case, to be decided by June, grew
out of a gathering in 2010 of far-right attorneys looking for a way to destroy
Obamacare.
“This bastard has to be killed as a matter of
political hygiene,” said Michael S. Greve, a former chairman of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute, during a panel discussion. “I don’t care how this is
done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart,
whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle
it.”
Recent Comments
al miller
Yesterday
The GOP better be careful what they wish for.First, if
they take affordable healthcare away, a significant majoirty of Americans are
finally...
Paula C.
Yesterday
Another insightful column, Mr Egan. Thanks.So, listen..
Tim... here's the thing... since Jon Stewart is eventually leaving the
national...
Barack
Yesterday
Killing this unconstitutional law would be RECTIFYING the
judicial activism that allowed it to survive in the first place. As for those
who...
- See All Comments
The first attempt to strangle it failed by one vote in
a 2012 Supreme Court ruling. The next assault is this case, organized by the
same Competitive Enterprise Institute, an advocacy group with long ties to
climate change denial and tobacco distortion campaigns.
They found four plaintiffs right out of a Rush
Limbaugh ditto-headfest, all of whom have come under withering press scrutiny
of late. One is just a half-year shy of eligibility for Medicare.
Two others are military veterans who appear to qualify for premium-free federal
care. Somehow, they claim to be “harmed” by a technicality in the health care
law that allows the federal government to subsidize people who don’t get help
from the states that did not set up their own markets.
“You are asking us to kick millions of Americans off
health insurance just to save four people a few dollars,” said Judge Andre M.
Davis, in oral arguments before a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va. That
court ruled unanimously to throw out the challenge. But the hyperpartisan
Supreme Court took up the case on appeal.
One of many ironies here is that at least three of
those plaintiffs appear to qualify for the great socialist, single-payer system
used by Medicare or by Veterans Affairs. So, they don’t really have to worry if
their legal assault kills the health care of millions of people who don’t have
access to the cheaper federal plans.
So long as judges do their dirty work, Republicans
don’t have a problem with politicizing the judiciary. This week, in a move that
dramatically changes the lives of millions of people, a Texas federal judge with
a history of animus toward the Obama administration’s immigration policy
brought a halt to plans to bring people out of the shadows. Before ruling
against the president’s decision to defer deportation of certain immigrants,
Judge Andrew Hanen, an appointee of George W. Bush, had left a trail of
comments that could have come out of the mouth of any garden-variety
Republican. With a swift blow this week, he did exactly what Republicans in
Congress have been trying, but so far failed, to do.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. once used a
memorable phrase to describe this kind of activism. “My job is to call balls
and strikes, and not to pitch or bat,” he said during his confirmation
hearings. By June of this year, we’ll see which side of the plate he’s on.
Hundreds evacuated after fire at Dubai skyscraper
By David French
DUBAI Sat Feb 21, 2015 5:42am EST
(Reuters) - Hundreds of people in
Dubai were evacuated from one of the world's tallest residential buildings on
Saturday when fire swept through The Torch, a 79-story skyscraper, residents
said.
Dubai's police chief, General Khamis
Mattar, said the fire appeared to be the result of an accident and did not
suspect it was caused by any deliberate criminal act, in comments carried by
state news agency WAM.
He added that an investigation had
started to determine the cause of the blaze, WAM reported.
A witness said flames shot out from
two sides of the building as glass and metal rained down from near the summit
of the structure, which stands more than 330 meters (1,082 feet) tall.
Mattar said four people had suffered
minor injuries. At least a dozen fire trucks extinguished the blaze several
hours after the fire alarm went off around 2 a.m. (2200 GMT Friday).
Residents said the fire had been
fanned by high winds, dislodging chunks of metal and glass onto the area below,
including a nearby road more than 100 meters (330 feet) away.
Traffic in the area was diverted and
residents of two other nearby buildings in the emirate's Marina district, home
to thousands of expatriate professionals, were also evacuated, the witness
said.
Many of those standing outside the
building were dressed in pyjamas, with others in evening dress as they returned
from the city's many bars and restaurants on a weekend.
One woman, who did not give her
name, stood on the street crying, saying she had rushed back fearing for her
belongings after a friend contacted her about the fire. The lower floors where
she lived were not affected.
Residents of neighboring towers were
returning to their homes around 4:30 a.m., but residents of The Torch were told
they would not be allowed back into the building until the fire officials gave
approval later on Saturday.
Residents of upper floors that were
most affected were told it would be days before they could return.
Dubai is one of seven emirates that
make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a Gulf Arab trade and investment hub.
(Writing
by William
Maclean and Noah Browning; Editing by Alison
Williams)
France in 'final stage' of talks to sell Rafale jets to Qatar
By Cyril Altmeyer and Tim
Hepher
PARIS Tue Feb 17, 2015 2:02pm EST
(Reuters) - France is in the "final stage" of
negotiations to sell up to 36 Rafale warplanes to Qatar, a senior French source
involved in the discussions said on Tuesday.
Manufacturer Dassault Aviation is
also in talks aimed at supplying 16 of the multi-role combat jets to Malaysia
and has resumed discussions over potential fighter sales to the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), the source said.
"The discussions (with Qatar)
are at the final stage," the source said, asking not to be identified
because of the sensitivity of the discussions.
Dassault Aviation declined to
comment.
Analysts say the French company was
boosted this week by a long-awaited first export deal for the Rafale with
Egypt, but is likely to face intense competition for further sales as European,
U.S. and Russian rivals step up export campaigns.
It was not immediately clear at what
level talks with UAE were taking place, nor which side had initiated them.
The UAE publicly rebuffed an offer
to supply 60 Rafale jets in 2011, calling the proposal "uncompetitive and
unworkable".
Western defence contractors
including Dassault, the four-nation Eurofighter consortium and U.S aerospace
group Boeing are chasing overseas sales to prevent their production lines
halting due to cuts in domestic defence budgets.
Tensions in the Middle East,
instability in eastern Europe and concerns in parts of Asia about regional
border threats and the rise of China have
further fuelled the arms race, but shifts and sudden reversals in the various
industry talks are common.
France said last June it was
confident of winning a deal soon to supply fighter jets to Qatar, which is
shopping initially for 24 jets plus 12 options to expand its air force.
Competitors include Boeing's F-15
fighter jet, while the U.S. manufacturer is also seeking sales for its
declining F-18 model, which is reportedly in consideration in Malaysia.
Elsewhere in the Gulf, the
Eurofighter and F-18 are competing for a possible Kuwaiti deal for 28 jets but
the Rafale is not a leading contender there, according to French media.
The latest upbeat French comments
come ahead of arms fairs in India, UAE and Malaysia within the next month
starting with the biennial Aero India exhibition in Bengaluru from Wednesday.
India picked the Rafale three years
ago over the Eurofighter Typhoon -- built by Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain
-- for a contract to supply 126 planes, but a deal has not been signed.
India's Business Standard newspaper
reported this week the contract was "effectively dead" due to
disagreements over price.
But the French source indicated that
Paris was optimistic that this week's sudden and unexpected deal with Egypt could speed up several other sets of
talks, including those in India.
"The contract with Egypt could
unblock three or four other ones," the source said.
Bilateral negotiations between Egypt
and France took only five months, taking competitors and most industry experts
off guard. Three jets a year are expected to be delivered to Egypt in 2015,
2016 and 2017 with the remaining 15 sent by mid-2019.
There was no formal competition,
though one defence source said there had been exploratory contacts between
Egypt and the Eurofighter consortium but that questions had arisen over the
availability of rapid export licences from Britain and Germany.
Eurofighter said it was confident of
winning other orders. A spokesman said it had also submitted an offer to
Malaysia.
Egypt, which has been drawn into
open military action in Libya after the beheading of Egyptian Christians this
week, is also said to be interested in military transport aircraft.
It currently operates the Lockheed
Martin C-130 and is the largest customer for the Airbus Group C-295, while it
has long been a target for the Airbus A400M airlifter.
(Editing
by Geert de Clercq and Mark
Potter)
China to crank up oil product exports, add to supply glut
By Jessica Jaganathan and Seng Li Peng
SINGAPORE Wed Feb 18, 2015 5:41am EST
(Reuters) - Beijing has raised the
initial volume of oil products that Chinese refiners can export this year,
potentially adding to a supply glut just as new processing capacity in the
Middle East is expected to pressure fuel prices and depress margins.
China
controls oil product exports through quotas to state-run refiners after
assessing domestic needs. This year Sinopec Corp, CNOOC Ltd and PetroChina were
given an oil product export quota of 9.75 million tonnes, up about 20 percent
from the initial limit set for 2014, industry sources with knowledge of the
matter said.
The refiners will likely apply for
more allowances once they exhaust the initial quotas as they run cheaper crude
through the capacity added last year, and the final annual exports are expected
to far exceed the opening levels.
The first quota limit given to oil
refiners in 2014 was for about 8 million tonnes, but by the end of the year
China had exported 19.6 million tonnes of gasoline, jet fuel, diesel and
naphtha, according to customs data.
"With supply running ahead of
domestic products consumption, increased exports from China is expected to
exert some pressure on the regional cracks," said Wendy Yong a senior
analyst at oil consultancy FGE, referring to the profit margins for processing
a barrel of crude into fuel.
China added more than 600,000
barrels a day (bpd) in refining capacity last year, bringing the nation's total
to near 14 million bpd.
The jump in Chinese exports is also
coming just after new export-focused refineries have added 800,000 bpd of
capacity at Yanbu and Jubail in Saudi Arabia, putting further pressure on
Asia's cracking profits.
Still, refining margins in Singapore
- the benchmark for Asia - have risen more than 20 percent since December to
their highest level in over a year, mainly on the halving in crude values since
mid-June. <REF/MARGIN1>
But the margins are not expected to
stand as regional demand growth slows and product supplies rise.
PetroChina, CNOOC and Sinopec
spokesmen could not be reached for comment on the quota increase or outlook for
exports.
GROWTH IN JET, GASOLINE EXPORTS
China's demand growth is slowing,
and with its big jump in processing capacity, that would typically mean a boost
in diesel exports. But Chinese refiners have started producing more jet fuel
and gasoline at the expense of diesel.
"Demand (for jet fuel and
gasoline) continues to be supported by the rapid expansion of China's emerging
middle class population," said Benjamin Tang, a senior research analyst
with energy advisory Wood Mackenzie.
Domestic demand growth for the two
fuels is forecast to be down this year from recent peaks with the general
slowing of China's economy, however,
resulting in more supply for outbound sales than expected.
More than half of the initial export
quotas for 2015 are for jet fuel and a third are for gasoline, according to the
sources with knowledge of the matter.
China's average monthly gasoline
exports this year could easily surpass last year's monthly exports of 415,000
tonnes, traders said.
Gasoil or diesel exports, on the
other hand, are expected to remain steady or fall. China's top diesel exporter
Sinopec received a quota to ship just 350,000 tonnes of the fuel in the first
half of 2015, down from 2 million tonnes for the same period last year.
China's diesel demand is expected to
be flat in 2015, compared with average annual growth rates of 7.1 percent from
2007 to 2011, due to the country's move towards a more consumption-based
economy, according to Woodmac's Tang.
China's shift in focus from industrial
and infrastructure development towards consumers and services has meant less
demand for diesel from the construction sector and for trucks.
Gasoline demand growth is expected
to slow this year to an average rate of 7 percent, the least since 2010 and
down from about 9 percent last year, according to estimates by FGE and Woodmac.
Jet fuel demand growth is expected
to be stable at about 11 percent this year, Woodmac said.
(Additional
reporting by Florence Tan in SINGAPORE and Chen Aizhu in BEIJING; Editing by
Tom Hogue)
Pro-Russia rebel build-up near port city alarms Ukraine military
By Natalia Zinets and Anton Zverev
KIEV/SAKHANKA, Ukraine Sat Feb 21, 2015 11:17am EST
(Reuters) - Pro-Russian separatists
are building up forces and weapons in Ukraine's south east and the Ukrainian
military said on Saturday it was braced for the possibility of a rebel attack
on the port city of Mariupol.
The Kiev military accused Russia on Friday of sending more tanks and
troops towards the rebel-held town of Novoazovsk, further east along the Sea of
Azov coast from Mariupol, expanding their presence on what it fears could be
the next battlefront.
A rebel attack on Mariupol, a city
of half a million people and potentially a gateway to Crimea, which Russia
annexed last March, would almost certainly kill off a European-brokered
ceasefire.
The ceasefire, which came into force
last Sunday, has already been badly shaken by the rebel capture on Wednesday of
Debaltseve, a railway junction in eastern Ukraine, forcing a retreat by
thousands of Ukrainian troops in which at least 20 Ukrainian soldiers were
killed.
In London on Saturday, U.S.
Secretary of State John Kerry accused Moscow of "extraordinarily craven
behavior" at the expense of Ukraine's sovereignty and said Washington and
its allies were discussing imposing more sanctions on Russia for undermining
the ceasefire agreed in Minsk, Belarus, on Feb. 12.
Mariupol is the biggest city still
under government control in the two rebellious eastern provinces. Novoazovsk,
where Kiev said Russia was reinforcing, lies 40 km (25 miles) to the east along
the coast near the Russian border.
Military spokesman Andriy Lysenko
did not refer specifically to the movement of Russian tanks and troops but said
the separatists, who Kiev says are supported by Russian weapons and fighters,
were conducting sabotage and intelligence operations round the clock to test
government defenses.
"The adversary is carrying out
a build-up of military equipment, weapons and fighters in the Mariupol area
with the aim of a possible offensive on it," Lysenko told journalists.
"They are sending out small
sabotage groups out almost every night. We can see the activities of the enemy
around Novoazovsk where military hardware, fighters and ammunition are being
amassed," he said.
One Ukrainian soldier had been
killed and 40 others had been wounded in attacks in eastern Ukraine by the separatists in the past 24
hours, he said.
REBEL BASE
A Reuters media team in Sakhanka,
half-way between Mariupol and Novoazovsk, were told by rebels that one of the
local roads had been closed "because of fighting" though no shooting
or shelling could be heard.
Some rebels had formed a base in a
complex of houses in Bezimenne further up the coast and there were dozens of
well-armed fighters milling around, some of whom looked like Russian military
special forces wearing Russian army patches and insignia on their uniforms.
There were no signs of a new influx
of tanks and troops in the region as mentioned by Kiev on Friday. A couple of
military trucks could be seen on the road from Novoazovsk to Mariupol and an
armored personnel carrier was parked in a forest near Shyrokine also on the
coastal road.
In Bezimenne, one rebel fighter who
gave his nom de guerre as Boxer denied the Kiev reports of more Russian tanks
and fighters being sent to the area.
"It's all a lie. The only
people fighting here are miners, tractor drivers and farm workers," he
said.
He said rebel fighters were
observing the ceasefire agreement worked out by Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France in the Belarussian capital
and had pulled back heavy artillery from the Mariupol area
The United States, which is
considering tightening sanctions against Russia and arming Kiev, also says it
has sighted Russian reinforcements in the south east.
Kerry, meeting his British
counterpart Philip Hammond in London, said the United States was certain that
Russia was involved in the conflict and was supporting the separatists.
"Russia has engaged in an
absolutely brazen and cynical process over these last days," he said.
"We are talking about additional sanctions, about additional efforts, and
I'm confident over the next days people will make it clear that we are not
going to play this game."
Western nations have held out hope
they can revive the Minsk peace deal, even though the rebels ignored it by
seizing Debaltseve in one of the worst defeats for Kiev in the 10-month-old
war.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told
Echo Moskvy radio station that Russia was focused on supporting the Minsk deal,
according to TASS news agency.
"An obsessive idea to force
someone to pay the cost ... is not conducive to the resolution of the situation
in south-east Ukraine," Peskov was quoted as saying in response to Kerry's
remarks on the possibility of further sanctions against Russia.
The heightened tension in Ukraine's
south east came on the first anniversary of the overthrow of the Moscow-backed
Viktor Yanukovich, which triggered Russia's annexation of Crimea and the
outbreak of pro-Russia rebellions. More than 5,000 people have been killed in
the ensuing conflict.
More than 100 people were shot dead
in Kiev in protests before Yanukovich fled for Russia, exactly a year ago.
While Poroshenko used the solemn
occasion on Friday night to re-affirm Ukraine's commitment to a future in
Europe, pro-Kremlin organizations staged a rally in Moscow to condemn
Yanukovich's ousting.
Organizers said around 20,000 took
to the streets in a march to show their support for the rebels in eastern
Ukraine and condemn Yanukovich's overthrow as illegal.
(Additional
reporting by Lesley
Wroughton in London and Vladimir Soldatkin in Moscow; Writing by Richard
Balmforth; Editing by Angus
MacSwan)
No, Russia isn’t building a giant new aircraft carrier
By David Axe
February 18, 2015
The Kremlin is preparing blueprints
for a huge new aircraft carrier, Russian media reported
in early February, to replace its navy’s current flattop, the relatively small
and aged Admiral Kuznetsov.
Moscow’s new carrier, however, is
likely to remain a paper concept. A quarter-century after the Soviet Union’s
collapse, Russia lacks
the money, expertise and industrial capacity to build aircraft carriers.
A new flattop could boost Moscow’s
military power by providing air cover to warships sailing far from Russian
shores and giving the Kremlin another option for launching air strikes on
distant enemies. Both are now particular concerns for the West because
President Vladimir Putin’s Russia has become far more aggressive along its
borders.
But the Kremlin has failed to
maintain its expensive shipyard facilities and perishable worker skills. So it
can’t actually complete the new vessel any time soon.
The Krylov State Research Center in
St. Petersburg, which brainstorms most of Moscow’s warships, is doing the
design work for the carrier, according to Russia’s TV Zvezda. The TV network featured
a scale model of the new flattop earlier this month.
“Admiral Kuznetsov” aircraft
carrier, October 29, 2011. WIKIMEDIA/Commons
The model is revealing, however. It
underscores the Kremlin’s narrow chance of ever building the warship. Based on
the model planes on the scale ship’s deck, the proposed flattop appears to be huge
— at least as big as the U.S. Navy’s nuclear-powered supercarriers, which
can exceed 1,000 feet in length.
The United States operates 10 such
nuclear carriers, each with an air wing of 60 or more planes, plus 10 smaller,
non-nuclear amphibious assault ships that can launch small numbers of
vertical-landing Harrier attack planes.
Russia’s Kuznetsov is bigger
than the U.S. assault ships but smaller than the nuclear flattops. When jets
take off from the deck of Kuznetsov, which isn’t often, they rarely
number more than a dozen. The new carrier that Krylov is reportedly developing
would represent a significant upgrade. That’s why Moscow probably can’t build
this new ship.
When the Soviet Union launched Kuznetsov
in 1985, it was a major technical accomplishment for the then-superpower.
Moscow began assembling Varyag, a sister ship of Kuznetsov,
around the same time. It also started work on a true full-size carrier, as big
as anything the United States builds.
But the Soviet Union’s collapse in
1991 abruptly halted the carrier program. One emerging problem was logistics.
The Krylov design agency is in Russia, but the Soviet Union’s main
carrier-building shipyard was on the Black Sea in Ukraine, which became an
independent country that year. (It has not been subjected to the recent
fighting.)
Ukraine scrapped the big carrier
then under construction and, in 1998, sold the half-completed Varyag to
China. Beijing spent 13 years finishing and upgrading Varyag to turn it
into China’s first-ever flattop. The rechristened Lianoning now conducts
sea trials to help the Chinese navy prepare for future homebuilt carriers and
to train a cadre of naval aviators.
Russia was left with Kuznetsov
as its sole flattop and, deprived of funds and Ukraine’s assistance, has
struggled to keep the vessel in working condition. Since the ship was
commissioned into frontline service in the early 1990s, Kuznetsov has
deployed just five times. Each deployment, lasting between three and six
months, saw the flattop sail from its home port in northern Russia around
Europe and into the Mediterranean as a show of force and to demonstrate support
for Russia’s allies in the region, including Syria.
The aircraft carriers USS “George
H.W. Bush” (front) and USS “Harry S. Truman” conduct an ordnance transfer in
the Atlantic Ocean, February 17, 2011. REUTERS/U.S. Navy/Mass Communication
Specialist 2nd Class Matthew D. Williams/Handout
By contrast, the U.S. Navy deploys
its carriers once every two years for cruises lasting between six and nine
months. At any given time, the United States has two or three big carriers and
an equal number of small carriers on station in the world’s hot spots.
Russia, however, is lucky if its
flattop is available for combat for a few months every few years.
U.S. aircraft carriers have engaged
in almost all America’s conflicts since World War Two. Kuznetsov hasn’t
launched a single combat sortie.
The carrier is clearly inadequate as
a reliable instrument of Russian foreign policy. This says as much about the
poor state of Russia’s arms industry, military planning and overall economy as
it does about the ship itself. Eager to improve its ability to build reliable
flattops, in recent years Moscow undertook two parallel initiatives. Neither
worked out as the Kremlin had hoped it would.
Building the Indian Navy’s
Vikramaditya at Sevmash Shipyard in Russia. WIKIMEDIA/Indian Navy handout
First, in 2004, Russia and India
struck a deal whereby Moscow would pull a small, Soviet-era carrier — the Admiral
Gorshkov — out of mothballs, rebuild it to enhance its ability to support
jet fighters and sell it to India to replace one of New Delhi’s aged
British-built carriers or flattops.
The roughly $1-billion deal was
supposed to be a win-win. India would get a reasonably up-to-date carrier for a
fraction of the cost of building a new one. (Today, a new large U.S. carrier
costs as much as $14 billion.) Meanwhile, Russia’s defense industry would gain
fresh experience in carrier construction that should prove useful when it came
time to replace Kuznetsov.
But the carrier sale quickly turned
into a disaster for both countries. Moscow had underestimated the deficiencies
of its main Sevmash shipyard on the White Sea. Costs more than doubled when
workers fell behind schedule. Sevmash finally finished the refurbished flattop
in late 2013 — five years late.
Then on its maiden voyage from
Russia to India, the carrier’s engines broke down, an unsurprising development
considering Kuznetsov‘s tarnished record. The Indian deal was supposed
to reinvigorate Russian shipbuilding. Instead it only underscored the
industry’s weakness. Russia inked a similar deal with France in 2010 to acquire
two French-made assault ships for $2 billion. Russian companies would
contribute to the vessels’ construction and, at some later date, might build a
few more of the ships on their own.
The Mistral-class helicopter carrier
“Vladivostok” at the STX Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique shipyard in
Saint-Nazaire, western France, April 24, 2014. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe
The Mistral-class vessels can
carry only helicopters, not fixed-wing planes. Still, Russian officials hoped
that co-producing the ships
with France would do what the Indian deal was supposed to — help restore
Russia’s ability to construct big warships.
“The purchase of Mistral
shipbuilding technology will help Russia to grasp large-capacity shipbuilding,”
Russian Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky said. “It is important for construction of
ships like the future ocean-going class destroyer and later an aircraft
carrier.”
But the French program failed in
even more dramatic fashion than the Indian effort. Paris suspended the Mistral
deal after Russian troops invaded Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in early 2014.
Notably, when Russia annexed Crimea, it failed to seize Kiev’s main shipyards
just north of the peninsula — the same yards that had assembled the Soviet
carriers, including Kuznetsov.
For at least 11 years, Moscow has
been trying to restore its ability to build aircraft carriers but has made
little progress. And with the Russian economy in free fall, owing in large part
to sanctions that other countries have imposed over the war in eastern Ukraine,
even that modest progress could grind to a halt.
Major General Igor Kozhin, the
Russian navy’s chief of naval aviation, said a carrier could be ready before
2025. But one expert doubts if even that is possible. “The earliest that Russia
could
build a new aircraft carrier is 2027,” estimated Dmitry Gorenburg, a
research scientist who is an associate at the Davis Center for Russian and
Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.
So
any concept for a new Russian flattop will, for now, remain just that — a
concept.
Sysco not in talks to settle U.S.
lawsuit to stop merger: lawyer
By Diane
Bartz
WASHINGTON Fri Feb 20, 2015 3:32pm
EST
(Reuters) - Sysco Corp (SYY.N)
is not holding settlement talks with the U.S. government to resolve a lawsuit
aimed at stopping a $3.5 billion merger of the food distributor and its largest
rival, a lawyer for Sysco said on Friday.
The Federal Trade Commission has
filed a complaint aimed at blocking Sysco's purchase of U.S. Foods Inc. The FTC
said the deal would give the two companies too much market power, with control
of 75 percent of the national market to supply restaurants, hotels and hospital
chains with food and other supplies.
Sysco said it would fight the FTC in
court, and that no settlement talks were underway.
"Our door is always open if the
FTC wants to talk. No, I don't know if there is a basis for settlement or
not," said Richard Parker, who represents Sysco, on a conference call.
In federal court in Washington, the
FTC will ask for a preliminary injunction aimed at preventing the deal from
closing, while a slower, internal FTC court tries to determine if the deal
complies with antitrust law.
The FTC's complaint said a combined
Sysco-US Foods would have more than 50 percent of sales in 32 local markets.
Sysco had agreed to sell assets in eight of those markets, as well as three
others, but the FTC rejected this offer as inadequate.
Sysco said the FTC was wrong in its
assessment of the local and national markets. "There is no national
market. It is pure mythology," said Parker. "This case will be tried
local market by local market. The evidence is going to show that those markets,
every one of them, is fiercely competitive."
The FTC complaint also quoted from
heavily redacted documents indicating that Sysco and US Foods watched each
other's prices carefully.
But Sysco's attorneys dismissed them
as irrelevant. "The fact that Sysco and US Foods are head-to-head
competitors is no secret and is not the basis for an antitrust challenge,"
said Joseph Tringali.
The federal court hearing will
likely be set in 60 to 90 days, said Parker, putting it in April or May.
(Reporting
by Diane Bartz; Editing by Kevin
Drawbaugh and David
Gregorio)
Nigerian forces retake border town
of Baga from Boko Haram
By Lanre Ola and Abdoulaye Massalaki
BAUCHI, Nigeria/NIAMEY, Niger Sat
Feb 21, 2015 4:29pm EST
- inShare5
- Share this
(Reuters) - Nigerian forces backed
by air strikes seized the northeastern border town of Baga from Islamist group
Boko Haram on Saturday, the military said, a significant victory in an
offensive against an insurgency affecting four African states.
Retaking the town - at Nigeria's
border with Chad, Niger and Cameroon - was one of several in the past two
weeks, and particularly important as Baga was the headquarters of a
multinational force of troops from all four countries.
The militants had claimed a Jan. 3
attack that killed scores, possibly hundreds, and left the jihadists in
control.
"We have secured Baga. We are
now in full control. There are only mopping up exercises left to do,"
Defense Spokesman Major-General Chris Olukolade said by telephone.
In a statement minutes earlier
Olukolade had said that "a large number of terrorists had drowned in Lake
Chad" as troops advanced on Baga.
The Islamist fighters appear to be
on the run in many parts of Nigeria and regions near its borders, after being
subjected to a major offensive on all sides, although they have seemed defeated
in the past only to bounce back deadlier than ever.
"Not even the strategy of
mining over 1,500 spots with land mines on the routes leading to the town could
save the terrorists from the aggressive move of advancing troops,"
Olukolade had said in a statement earlier in the day.
Successes in pushing back Boko Haram
are welcome news for Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan as he faces an
election on March 28 that was delayed by six weeks on the grounds that more
time was needed to fight the insurgency.
The poll, however, also provides a
strong motive for the government and military to talk up successes.
LAKE CHAD FIGHTING
The Sunni Islamist militants have
killed thousands of people and kidnapped hundreds in a six-year insurgency and
have gained strength in the past year, carving out a territory the size of
Belgium and intensifying cross-border raids.
To counter that threat, neighboring
states, where Boko Haram fighters habitually flee after hit-and-run attacks,
are pursuing a strategy of pushing them back into Nigeria.
A spokesman for Chad's army said his
troops did not participate in the Baga offensive. Niger and Cameroonian militaries
were not immediately available for comment.
But in a sign of their ability to
strike at neighbors, at least 23 people were killed in fighting overnight in an
attack on the island of Karamga, on the Niger side of Lake Chad, held by
Niger's army.
Niger's President Mahamadou Issoufou
reiterated a pledge to defeat the group in a speech in the southern border town
of Diffa, the scene of a wave of attacks this month.
"We are going to win this war
because we are not alone," he said on Saturday outside an army barracks.
"We will come out from this test more experienced and
battle-hardened."
In a visit to Chad and Cameroon on
Saturday, French defense minister Laurent Fabius expressed his solidarity and
said international allies needed to give more financial support.
"We are working to get the
force off the ground and contribute financially so that the burden is not heavy
on the countries concerned," he said, referring to an 8,700-strong force
from the four countries plus Benin that military chiefs plan to agree on next
week in Chad's capital N'Djamena.
"We want a donor conference
which could help with the financial charges," he said.
France
already provides intelligence and logistical support to regional armies but has
stopped short of direct intervention, despite a strong military presence across
the region.
(Additional
reporting by Daniel
Flynn in Mao and Bate
Felix in Yaounde; Writing by Tim
Cocks and Emma
Farge; Editing by Louise
Ireland)
The Reality of Quantum Weirdness
IN Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon,” a samurai has
been murdered, but it’s not clear why or by whom. Various characters involved
tell their versions of the events, but their accounts contradict one another.
You can’t help wondering: Which story is true?
But the film also makes you consider a deeper
question: Is there a true story, or is our belief in a definite,
objective, observer-independent reality an illusion?
This very question, brought into sharper, scientific
focus, has long been the subject of debate in quantum physics. Is there a fixed
reality apart from our various observations of it? Or is reality nothing more
than a kaleidoscope of infinite possibilities?
This month, a
paper published online in the journal Nature Physics presents
experimental research that supports the latter scenario — that there is a
“Rashomon effect” not just in our descriptions of nature, but in
nature itself.
Over the past hundred years, numerous experiments on
elementary particles have upended the classical paradigm of a causal,
deterministic universe. Consider, for example, the so-called double-slit
experiment. We shoot a bunch of elementary particles — say, electrons — at a
screen that can register their impact. But in front of the screen, we place a
partial obstruction: a wall with two thin parallel vertical slits. We look at
the resulting pattern of electrons on the screen. What do we see?
If the electrons were like little pellets (which is
what classical physics would lead us to believe), then each of them would go
through one slit or the other, and we would see a pattern of two distinct lumps
on the screen, one lump behind each slit. But in fact we observe something
entirely different: an interference pattern, as if two waves are colliding,
creating ripples.
Astonishingly, this happens even if we shoot the
electrons one by one, meaning that each electron somehow acts like a wave
interfering with itself, as if it is simultaneously passing through both slits
at once.
So an electron is a wave, not a particle? Not so fast.
For if we place devices at the slits that “tag” the electrons according to
which slit they go through (thus allowing us to know their whereabouts), there
is no interference pattern. Instead, we see two lumps on the screen, as if the
electrons, suddenly aware of being observed, decided to act like little
pellets.
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To test their commitment to being particles, we can
tag them as they pass through the slits — but then, using another device, erase
the tags before they hit the screen. If we do that, the electrons go back to
their wavelike behavior, and the interference pattern miraculously reappears.
There is no end to the practical jokes we can pull on
the poor electron! But with a weary smile, it always shows that the joke is on
us. The electron appears to be a strange hybrid of a wave and a particle that’s
neither here and there nor here or there. Like a well-trained
actor, it plays the role it’s been called to perform. It’s as though it has
resolved to prove the famous Bishop Berkeley maxim “to be is to be perceived.”
Is nature really this weird? Or is this apparent
weirdness just a reflection of our imperfect knowledge of nature?
The answer depends on how you interpret the equations
of quantum mechanics, the mathematical theory that has been developed to
describe the interactions of elementary particles. The success of this theory
is unparalleled: Its predictions, no matter how “spooky,” have been observed
and verified with stunning precision. It has also been the basis of remarkable
technological advances. So it is a powerful tool. But is it also a picture of
reality?
Here, one of the biggest issues is the interpretation
of the so-called wave function, which describes the state of a quantum system.
For an individual particle like an electron, for example, the wave function
provides information about the probabilities that the particle can be observed
at particular locations, as well as the probabilities of the results of other
measurements of the particle that you can make, such as measuring its momentum.
Does the wave function directly correspond to an
objective, observer-independent physical reality, or does it simply represent
an observer’s partial knowledge of it?
If the wave function is merely knowledge-based, then
you can explain away odd quantum phenomena by saying that things appear to us
this way only because our knowledge of the real state of affairs is
insufficient. But the new paper in Nature Physics gives strong indications (as
a result of experiments using beams of specially prepared photons to test
certain statistical properties of quantum measurements) that this is not the
case. If there is an objective reality at all, the paper demonstrates, then the
wave function is in fact reality-based.
What this research implies is that we are not just
hearing different “stories” about the electron, one of which may be true.
Rather, there is one true story, but it has many facets, seemingly in
contradiction, just like in “Rashomon.” There is really no escape from the
mysterious — some might say, mystical — nature of the quantum world.
But what, if anything, does all this mean for us in
our own lives? We should be careful to recognize that the weirdness of the
quantum world does not directly imply the same kind of weirdness in the world
of everyday experience. That’s because the nebulous quantum essence of
individual elementary particles is known to quickly dissipate in large
ensembles of particles (a phenomenon often referred to as “decoherence”). This
is why, in fact, we are able to describe the objects around us in the language
of classical physics.
Rather, I suggest that we regard the paradoxes of
quantum physics as a metaphor for the unknown infinite possibilities of our own
existence. This is poignantly and elegantly expressed in the Vedas: “As is the
atom, so is the universe; as is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm; as is the
human body, so is the cosmic body; as is the human mind, so is the cosmic
mind.”
Edward Frenkel,
a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, is the
author of “Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality.”
A version of this op-ed appears
in print on February 22, 2015, on page SR9 of the New York edition with the
headline: The Reality of Quantum Weirdness. Order Reprints| Today's
Paper|Subscribe
Muslim Scholar, Looking to ‘Speak the Truth,’ Teaches the Holocaust and Islam
FEB. 20, 2015
Early in the summer of 2007, a doctoral student named
Mehnaz M. Afridi traveled from her California home to a conference in southern
Germany. Her official role was to deliver a paper on anti-Semitism in Egyptian
literature, a rather loaded subject for a Muslim scholar. Seventy miles away,
she had another appointment, and an even riskier agenda.
After the conference concluded, Ms. Afridi drove to
the former concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. As she stood before the dun
bricks of a crematorium, she prayed. “Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un,” she
said in Arabic, meaning, “Surely we belong to God and to him shall we return.”
“I didn’t know that moment would be defining my role,”
Dr. Afridi, 44, said a few weeks ago. “I didn’t even realize then that I was at
a crossroads. People see the Holocaust and Islam as two separate things, but
these stories of faith and catastrophe are not opposites. They are companions.”
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Dr. Afridi has made these seeming irreconcilables into
companions in her life’s work. An assistant professor of religion at Manhattan College,
she teaches courses about both Islam and the Holocaust, and she is director of
the college’s Holocaust, Genocide and Interfaith
Education Center. Her book “Shoah Through Muslim Eyes,” referring to
an alternative term for the Holocaust, will be published in July, and she is a
member of the ethics and religion committee of the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
Such roles have made Dr. Afridi both a valued
intermediary and a visible target in the troubled relations between Muslims and
Jews. As her research unflinchingly shows, a strain of Holocaust denial runs
deep in the Arab-Muslim world. Holocaust recognition among Arabs and Muslims,
less noticed but equally divisive, has also served as a means of delegitimizing
Israel and Zionism. By this line of reasoning, which ignores the historical
ties of Jews to Israel, the Holocaust was a crime inflicted by Europeans for
which Palestinians
paid the price.
While Dr. Afridi is an observant Muslim, praying daily
and fasting during Ramadan, she is seen by Muslim critics as disloyal or naïve
for putting her scholarly work at least partly in the service of chronicling a
Jewish tragedy, rather than the defeat and dispossession that Palestinians
call the Nakba. Moreover, she has studied in Israel and expressed support in
her writings for a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians.
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“When I think about Mehnaz Afridi, I go back to the
first generation of Christians who really engaged with the Holocaust, when the
feelings were so fresh and deeply wounded,” said Michael Berenbaum, a prominent
Holocaust historian who has been a mentor to Dr. Afridi. “Now there’s an even
deeper, double-edged wound of Jews and Muslims seeing themselves as victims of
the other. You only have two ultimate protections in the field: the quality of
your scholarship and your ability to take a punch.”
Dr. Afridi’s resilience received a thorough field test
after she joined Manhattan College
in 2011. With her appointment, the college — a Catholic institution in the
Bronx — expanded the mandate of its Holocaust center to cover other genocides,
including those in Armenia and Cambodia.
“Six million dead Jews are weeping and screaming from
their graves,” the blogger Pamela Geller
wrote at the time. “And the Islamic supremacists are howling and rubbing their
hooves together in anticipation. Such stupidity is without equal.”
Dov Hikind, a state assemblyman from a heavily
Orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn, told
The Jewish Week of New York at the time that “the addition of Dr. Afridi and
the expansion of the center’s mission diminish the magnitude of the Holocaust
as a defining Jewish event.”
In the subsequent months, Dr. Afridi said, some
Muslims called her a “Jew lover.” More troubling to her are the persistent
rumors in Muslim circles that her scholarly work is being secretly funded by
Jews.
Raked by those hostile crosswinds, Dr. Afridi keeps
her address and the names of her family members confidential. Nothing, however,
had led to self-censorship in her role as a public intellectual, she said.
“I have the empirical, existential understanding of my
subject matter,” she said. “And I have the belief that if you speak for
another, it means more than if you speak for yourself, for your own people. And
when there’s so much daily tension between Muslims and Jews, it’s momentous for
us to do this work, whether it’s me with the Shoah, or it’s a Jewish scholar speaking
out about the Muslims in Bosnia or about Palestinian suffering. We are
commanded by God to speak the truth.”
However divinely directed, Dr. Afridi had to make her
own, idiosyncratic way. The child of a relatively secular banker and his more
religious wife, she was raised in Pakistan, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates,
England and Switzerland before coming to the United States in 1984 for her last
two years of high school. She attended a school in Scarsdale, a suburb of New
York with a large Jewish population. She was one of few Muslims in the area,
and her introduction to interfaith relations involved being roughed up by her
soccer teammates and hearing her parents being insulted.
Nearly a decade later, while pursuing a master’s
degree in religious studies at Syracuse University, she served as a teaching
assistant to Alan L. Berger, a professor specializing in Holocaust literature.
Sensing her curiosity, he urged her to visit Israel, and she spent five weeks
there in 1995, ostensibly to study biblical archaeology.
Under that guise, she threaded her way through
Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank.
The experience magnified her interest in both Islam and Judaism. Along one
axis, she earned a doctorate in Islam and religious studies from the University
of South Africa. Along the other, as a visiting professor of theological
studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles from 2003 to 2005, she
began recording oral histories of Holocaust survivors.
“At the end of the interviews, I’d explain that I’m
Muslim,” she recalled, “and one woman said to me: ‘There’s Holocaust denial.
What are you going to do about it?’ ”
Three months after that encounter, Dr. Afridi made her
pilgrimage to Dachau, answering the survivor’s question by changing the
direction of her academic career. Manhattan College’s search in 2011 for a
professor who could teach about the Holocaust as well as Islam was almost
providentially suited to her résumé.
For her course on “Religion and the Holocaust,” she
faces one set of challenges — teaching about that terrible time in history to
young people who often barely know it, and discussing Christian anti-Semitism’s
role in the Shoah with students who are predominantly Christian. In her role as
author, lecturer and director of a genocide center, she encounters Jews and
Muslims, some supportive and others antagonistic, yet all, in her view,
reachable.
“If a Muslim asks me why I’m not teaching about the
Nakba, then I’ll say we already know about it, and what we need to learn about
is the Holocaust,” she said. “And if a Jew tells me, ‘Muslims are Nazis,’ I’ll
say, ‘Can we have lunch?’ These are the people we have to engage.”
Email: sg...@columbia.edu;
Twitter: @SamuelGFreedman
Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings in University of North Carolina System
By RICHARD FAUSSETFEB. 19, 2015
An advisory panel of the University
of North Carolina’s Board of Governors has recommended closing three
academic centers, including a poverty center and one dedicated to social
change, inciting outrage among liberals who believe that conservatives in
control of state government are targeting ideological opponents in academia.
Conservatives are cheering the move, seeing it as a
corrective to a higher education system they believe has lent its imprimatur to
groups that engage in partisan activism.
“They’re moving in the right direction, though I don’t
think they went far enough,” said Francis X. De Luca, president of the Civitas
Institute, a conservative think tank based in Raleigh. “A lot of these centers
were started up with a specific advocacy role in mind, as opposed to an
educational role.”
But critics say the moves by a panel whose members
were appointed by a Republican-dominated Legislature reflect the rightward tilt
of state government.
“It’s clearly not about cost-saving; it’s about political
philosophy and the right-wing takeover of North Carolina state government,”
said Chris Fitzsimon, director of NC Policy Watch, a liberal group. “And this
is one of the biggest remaining pieces that they’re trying to exert their
control over.”
The impassioned response is the latest manifestation
of a deep ideological rift in North Carolina that was exacerbated by the 2010
elections, when Republicans took control of both houses of the Legislature for
the first time since Reconstruction. They soon enacted an ambitious
conservative agenda in what had been one of the South’s more moderate states.
The fate of the 17-campus public university system was
bound to be affected: While many here take pride in its carefully cultivated
rise to the top tier of American public education, conservatives have long
groused about some campuses, particularly the flagship school at Chapel Hill,
as out-of-touch havens of liberalism.
Since the recession began, the state government has
also subjected the system to budget cuts leading to the loss of hundreds of
positions.
Twenty-nine of the 32 university board members were
appointed by the Legislature after the Republicans’ 2010 gains. Last year,
lawmakers instructed the board to consider redirecting some of the funding that
goes to the system’s 240 centers and institutes, which focus on topics ranging
from child development to African studies.
The advisory group’s report, which is likely to be
considered by the full Board of Governors next Friday, recommends closing the
Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at Chapel Hill; North Carolina Central
University’s Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change; and East
Carolina University’s Center for Biodiversity.
Jim Holmes, the chairman of the advisory group, said
the three centers were not doing much work and were not encouraging
multidisciplinary efforts as intended. “This is not a political issue or a
political report,” he said. “Everybody wants to make it that.”
Representatives of the civic engagement institute and
the poverty center defended their work as substantive; officials at the
biodiversity center did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
Recent Comments
ms yu
20 hours ago
I it is deplorable for politicians to engage in
ideological battles, or even worse, petty vendettas, using as their pawn state
universities...
E. Rodriguez
21 hours ago
Just keep on believing that ISIS is the true threat to
American democracy.
rick
21 hours ago
Universities, especially taxpayer funded ones, should be
places for scholarship, not advocacy of "social justice" or other
political ideas....
- See All Comments
The report urges all of the centers to include in
their regulations references to an existing university policy that prohibits
employees from engaging in political activity on duty.
It also recommends a review of the Center for Civil
Rights, affiliated with the University of North Carolina School of Law, to
“define center policies around advocacy.”
Steven B. Long, a member of the advisory group and a
former Civitas board member, said that the center had engaged in
“inappropriate” activism. He also criticized it for filing costly lawsuits
against local governments.
The head of the poverty center, Gene R. Nichol, a law
professor, said that Republican lawmakers had made it known to him, through
university officials, that they would shut the center if he did not stop
criticizing them and Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican, in his columns for The
News & Observer of Raleigh.
Mr. Nichol said the center’s only agenda was to raise
the profile of poverty in the state through research, teaching and advocacy. He
added that the center did not receive any money directly from the Legislature,
relying solely on private donations for its $120,000 annual operating budget.
The problem was not the center’s work, Mr. Nichol
said, but the focus of its work. “The poverty center is an immensely productive
operation,” he said. “They just don’t like what we produce.”
A version of this article
appears in print on February 20, 2015, on page A13 of the New York edition with
the headline: Ideology Seen as Factor in Closings at University. Order Reprints| Today's
Paper|Subscribe
Longtime USAID contractor embroiled in scandal fires top managers, others
By Scott Higham
February 20
International
Relief and Development Inc., once one of the largest nonprofit contractors
working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, has dismissed its
board of directors and laid off 21 employees in an effort to stabilize the
struggling organization, senior managers said Friday.
The
managers are trying to lift a Jan. 26 suspension issued by USAID, preventing
the nonprofit group from receiving federal work. The agency reported that it
had found evidence of “serious misconduct” at IRD, including allegations of
unchecked spending and mismanagement in humanitarian and stabilization
programs, many of them in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since
2007, IRD has received nearly $2.4 billion to administer USAID-funded programs.
IRD President Roger Ervin has been reorganizing the nonprofit since his
arrival in December.
Earlier this month, Ervin accepted the resignations of seven longtime
managers of the organization, including its chief financial officer, chief
administrative officer and general counsel. On Thursday, he dismissed nine
members of IRD’s board. On Friday, he announced that 21 people had been laid
off at headquarters, bringing to 100 the number of people working in Arlington,
down from a peak of 150.
“We have decided to
take a new direction,” Ervin said Friday. “We want to do things differently.”
After years of
being one of the federal government’s go-to nonprofit contractors in war
zones, IRD is fighting for survival. USAID suspended IRD after internal
reviews of the nonprofit’s performance in the field and spending at
headquarters. IRD also has been criticized for providing generous salaries and
bonuses to its employees, including the husband-and-wife team who ran the
organization, as well as their family members.
Many of the
allegations were contained in a Washington Post investigation published last
May.
Federal
investigators are now examining the expenses of IRD’s founder and former
president, Arthur B. Keys, and his wife, Jasna Basaric-Keys, IRD’s director of
operations, according to people familiar with the case, who declined to be
identified because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The couple, who
retired from IRD last summer, received $5.9 million in total compensation
between 2008 and 2012. IRD allegedly used tax dollars to cover an array of
questionable overhead expenses, including Redskins season tickets, personal
travel and meals, and alcohol at company receptions and retreats, according to
current and former government and nonprofit officials.
Several
agencies are examining IRD’s spending and past performance on contracts,
including the inspectors general for USAID and the State Department. Attorneys
for the Keys have denied any wrongdoing. They said an auditing firm they had
retained examined personal charges by the Keys and determined that they were
“properly reimbursable.”
How to make ecommerce work for Southeast Asia tomorrow
(report)
Leighton
Cosseboom
6:27 pm on Feb 20, 2015
6:27 pm on Feb 20, 2015
Global management consulting firm AT
Kearney and the CIMB
ASEAN Research Institute recently published a report
about removing barriers in Southeast Asia’s ecommerce space. The firms argue that
with the ASEAN
Economic Community set to come into effect by the end of this year,
online retail companies are poised to make a significant impact of the region’s
economic development.
Currently, ecommerce accounts for less than one percent of the total retail
sales in Southeast Asia, according to the report. This is still quite low when
compared to the six to eight percent ratio in places like Europe, China, and
the US. But with the steadily rising spending power of Southeast Asia’s
consuming middle-classes, increased internet penetrations, and a growing number
of ecommerce players, online retail in the region could grow by as much as 25
percent annually in coming years.
The online retail market in the “big six” ASEAN nations – Singapore,
Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand – is currently
worth around US$7 billion. Singapore accounts for US$1.7 billion, while
Malaysia and Indonesia follow at roughly US$1.3 billion. To spur this growth,
the ASEAN Business Club
Forum highlights five specific actions that emerging markets in
Southeast Asia should take to boost ecommerce to the next level.
1. Increase internet access
In Southeast Asia, the share of internet users varies by country. In
Indonesia, only around 16 percent of the population (39 million) use the
internet. Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam also have penetration rates of
less than 50 percent. Singapore and Malaysia, however, have rates that surpass
two thirds of the population, bringing them close to “advanced internet
economies.” In five out of the six countries, 60 to 80 percent of the people
who are online also shop online. Indonesia is the exception, however, as only
12 percent of its users have shopped online to date.
Excluding Singapore, less than half of the population in every ASEAN country
has broadband and mobile internet access. The reasons vary. In Indonesia,
connecting more than 18,000 islands is a logistical challenge in and of itself.
Furthermore, the lack of access has created a noticeable “urban-rural divide”
in Indonesian culture. The same phenomenon occurs in Vietnam, where Ho Chi Minh
City and Hanoi are extremely different from the rest of the country. Slow
internet speeds, high costs, and even limited awareness remain problematic in
terms of internet penetration across Southeast Asia.
ASEAN has created an ICT
Masterplan for 2015 to address these issues. Local investors have already
begun to take a vested interest in broadband and mobile infrastructure. But the
report says Southeast Asian countries should also receive government aid to
increase internet coverage. The masterplan also talks about enhancing
cross-border connectivity via a Pan-Asian
Terrestrial Fiber Optic Network and raising internet awareness at a
grassroots level, starting with school children.
2. Support the new guys
Although some local ecommerce players have emerged as champions, consumers
appear to be more attracted to foreign online retailers that don’t necessarily
have local footprints. US-based Amazon, Groupon, and eBay remain some of the
most popular ecommerce sites in all six nations.
Some the root causes of this include public skepticism about online offerings
from local companies. Another big one is how the lack of resources – including
finances, the right talent, and general know-how – hampers local players’
ecommerce capabilities.
Currently, several ASEAN administrations are working to address these
problems, including Malaysia’s government-sponsored Multimedia Development Corporation,
which hands out prizes of up to US$25,000 to the top 25 small-medium businesses
with ecommerce sites.
The report also says marketplaces
like Rakuten or Lazada should be promoted to small companies that have a lack
of finances and talent, as these sites will enable them to sell online without
the need for additional resources.
US to base four warships in Singapore as China flexes military muscles
The four combat ships are designed to fight in coastal areas and represent
further signs of America’s military tilt to Asia
The USS Fort Worth (LCS 3) sits docked at Sembawang Wharves
during a port of call in Singapore on February 17, 2015. Photograph: Roslan
Rahman/AFP/Getty Images
Agence France-Presse
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247
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Four US warships designed to fight in coastal areas similar to south-east
Asian waters will operate out of Singapore
by 2018, a senior US Navy official said Tuesday, further underscoring
Washington’s military tilt to Asia.
The “rotational deployment” of the vessels, called littoral combat ships
(LCS), comes as China continues to flex its muscles in the South China Sea and tensions remain
on the Korean Peninsula.
“We will soon see up to four LCS here in Singapore as we rotationally deploy
Seventh Fleet ships,” said Rear Admiral Charles Williams.
“We envision four ships here by May 2017 to sometime in 2018... but I think
what you have is that by 2018, four LCS ships will be rotationally deployed
here to Singapore.”
Williams, commander of the Seventh Fleet’s Task Force 73, was speaking to
reporters aboard the USS Fort Worth, an LCS on a 16-month deployment to
south-east Asia.
It replaced another LCS, the USS Freedom, which recently ended an
eight-month tour of duty.
The USS Fort Worth is set to take part in exercise Foal Eagle, a joint
military drill with South Korea from 24 February - 6 March.
It will also join regional navies in the annual Cooperation Afloat Readiness
and Training exercises and the International Maritime Defence Exhibition.
“The role of the US navy in both south-east Asia and north-east Asia is
about presence. It’s about being where it matters when it matters,” Williams
said.
Fast and agile, LCS vessels can be adapted for specific missions through a
system of interchangeable modules and crew.
The US Navy plans to build 52 LCS vessels at a total cost of $37 billion but
the programme has become controversial due to cost inflation, design and
construction issues.
In 2012 the then-US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that Washington
would shift the bulk of its naval fleet to the Pacific by 2020 as part of a new
strategic focus on Asia.
China is embroiled in a maritime dispute with four south-east Asian
countries - Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam - as well as with
Taiwan over territorial claims in the South China Sea.
While not a claimant, the United States has said it has an interest to
ensure freedom of navigation in the area.
3. Beef up online security
ASEAN consumers remain reluctant to believe their online transactions are
safe. Online shoppers in the region are more hesitant to give out their credit
card information than the global average. Some reasons for this include
regulation gaps, the absence of cross-border jurisdiction, and a heightened
threat of cyberattacks.
Currently, improvement of the regulatory framework is being done on the
local level only. There has been very little region-wide sharing of best
practices for cybersecurity. Basically, the report recommends that
intergovernmental agencies share more information with each other. It also says
that legal frameworks in the six countries should be harmonized so that cyber
criminals suffer the same consequences no matter where they are.
4. Fix epayments
Even as ecommerce spreads throughout ASEAN, the vast majority of payments
are still conducted offline. Methods like ATM transfers and cash-on-delivery
remain the most popular. One of the root causes is the fact that between 70 and
80 percent of citizens in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia don’t have
bank accounts. Another is the region’s extensive know-your-customer processes
that exist. As PayPal explained in its own report
last year:
[Consumers] have to scan copies of their national ID and send them to the
payment provider facilitating the transaction and wait a couple days for their
review before the payment instruction is carried out. In the meantime, the
merchant they purchased the product from will be chasing them up on payments
and wondering if they have got cold feet.
Some of the proposed solutions include revamping epayments regulations, and
again, making the regulations harmonize across country borders.
5. Make logistics a pleasant thought
Logistics processes do not seem to meet the expectations of eshoppers in
ASEAN countries. The geography of the region poses an inherent challenge for
logistics, but other bottlenecks exacerbate the issue. These include poor
transportation infrastructure, a lack of warehouse readiness, inefficient
last-mile delivery, and nightmarish customs processes.
To address these, most ASEAN countries have decided to invest in transport
infrastructure projects, while other major players also plan on putting money
in. DHL is one, and is set to invest US$180 million in its regional warehouse
capacity and double its supply chain.
One of the key recommendations for the future is to accelerate the
integration of logistics systems across the region. This will again require the
six nations to further cooperate in terms of their national supply chains.
See the full
report here; third image from bfishadow.
Editing
by David Corbin
US to base four warships in Singapore as China flexes military muscles
The four combat ships are designed to fight in coastal areas and represent
further signs of America’s military tilt to Asia
The USS Fort Worth (LCS 3) sits docked at Sembawang Wharves
during a port of call in Singapore on February 17, 2015. Photograph: Roslan
Rahman/AFP/Getty Images
Agence
France-Presse
Shares
247
Comments
Four US warships designed to fight in coastal areas similar to south-east
Asian waters will operate out of Singapore
by 2018, a senior US Navy official said Tuesday, further underscoring
Washington’s military tilt to Asia.
The “rotational deployment” of the vessels, called littoral combat ships
(LCS), comes as China continues to flex its muscles in the South China Sea and tensions remain
on the Korean Peninsula.
“We will soon see up to four LCS here in Singapore as we rotationally deploy
Seventh Fleet ships,” said Rear Admiral Charles Williams.
“We envision four ships here by May 2017 to sometime in 2018... but I think
what you have is that by 2018, four LCS ships will be rotationally deployed
here to Singapore.”
Williams, commander of the Seventh Fleet’s Task Force 73, was speaking to
reporters aboard the USS Fort Worth, an LCS on a 16-month deployment to
south-east Asia.
It replaced another LCS, the USS Freedom, which recently ended an
eight-month tour of duty.
The USS Fort Worth is set to take part in exercise Foal Eagle, a joint
military drill with South Korea from 24 February - 6 March.
It will also join regional navies in the annual Cooperation Afloat Readiness
and Training exercises and the International Maritime Defence Exhibition.
“The role of the US navy in both south-east Asia and north-east Asia is
about presence. It’s about being where it matters when it matters,” Williams
said.
Fast and agile, LCS vessels can be adapted for specific missions through a
system of interchangeable modules and crew.
The US Navy plans to build 52 LCS vessels at a total cost of $37 billion but
the programme has become controversial due to cost inflation, design and
construction issues.
In 2012 the then-US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that Washington
would shift the bulk of its naval fleet to the Pacific by 2020 as part of a new
strategic focus on Asia.
China is embroiled in a maritime dispute with four south-east Asian
countries - Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam - as well as with
Taiwan over territorial claims in the South China Sea.
While not a claimant, the United
States has said it has an interest to ensure freedom of navigation in the area.
2015
02
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