fuck politics btw <3

Tuesday, April 20, 2021

Minneapolis Braces for Verdict in Floyd’s Death (NYT) MINNEAPOLIS—Around midday last Monday, Samir Patel received a phone call from his friend, a dentist: Gunshots had rung out, his friend told him, and the contractors who were rebuilding the office he lost in last year’s unrest had fled. He was boarding up, and he told Mr. Patel he should move quickly to protect his own business, a dry cleaning shop. Elite Cleaners, Mr. Patel’s shop, is on a side street, not far from the shell of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct station house, which burned last year in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. The surrounding community of Lake Street, a corridor of immigrant-owned businesses—taquerias, furniture shops, liquor stores and cafes—was devastated by looting in the days of protests and the riots that followed. The city has said that the unrest led to $350 million in losses, with more than a thousand buildings either destroyed or damaged. As the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white former police officer charged with murder in the death of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, draws to a close, the city is on edge, fearing that a not-guilty verdict would bring anger, chaos and destruction once again.

New migrant facilities crop up to ease crowding, again (AP) For the third time in seven years, U.S. officials are scrambling to handle a dramatic spike in children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone, leading to a massive expansion in emergency facilities to house them as more kids arrive than are being released to close relatives in the United States. More than 22,000 migrant children were in government custody as of Thursday, with 10,500 sleeping on cots at convention centers, military bases and other large venues likened to hurricane evacuation shelters with little space to play and no privacy. More than 2,500 are being held by border authorities in substandard facilities. So many children are coming that there’s little room in long-term care facilities, where capacity shrank significantly during the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, minors are packed into Border Patrol facilities not meant to hold them longer than three days or they’re staying for weeks in the mass housing sites that often lack the services they need. Lawyers say some have not seen social workers who can reunite them with family in the U.S. Both Donald Trump and Barack Obama faced similar upticks in Central American children crossing the border alone in 2019 and 2014. The numbers have now reached historic highs amid economic fallout from the pandemic, storms in Central America and the feeling among migrants that Biden is more welcoming than his predecessor.

Students’ struggles pushed Peru teacher to run for president (AP) As schools across Peru closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, Pedro Castillo tried to find a way to keep classes going for his 20 fifth- and sixth-grade students. But in his impoverished rural community deep in the Andes, his efforts were futile. Seventeen of the students didn’t even have access to a cellphone. Tablets promised by the government never arrived. “Where is the state?” Castillo, 51, told The Associated Press after a day of planting sweet potatoes on his own land. It was the last straw for Castillo, who over 25 years had seen his students struggle in crumbling schools where teachers also cook, sweep floors and file paperwork. He’d already dabbled in activism with the local teachers’ union and helped lead a national strike in 2017. But now he went further, tossing his name into a crowd of 18 candidates in Peru’s presidential election. Defying the polls, the elementary school teacher came first in the April 11 voting, albeit with less than 20% of the overall vote. The stunning result gave him a place in June’s presidential runoff against Keiko Fujimori, one of Peru’s most established political figures and the daughter of former president Alberto Fujimori. It is her third attempt to become president. Castillo’s unlikely campaign comes at a turbulent time for the South American nation that has suffered like few others from the COVID-19 pandemic. It recently ran through three presidents in a week after one was removed by congress over corruption allegations. Every president of the past 36 years has been ensnared in corruption allegations, some imprisoned. One died by suicide before police could arrest him.

New direction needed: EU launches website for citizens to discuss its future (Reuters) The European Union launched on Monday a website for citizens to debate the future of the 27-nation bloc as the exit of Britain, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of nationalism force the EU to reflect on how it wants to develop. The website, available for contributions in the EU’s 24 official languages, is part of what EU institutions call the Conference on the Future of Europe—a forum for debate to help identify issues the EU needs to address in the changing global context. “The conclusions of the conference could be the backbone for reforms in the Union in the future,” one of the leaders of the initiative, member of European Parliament and former Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt told a news conference. The website prompts debates on subjects including climate change, the environment, health, the economy, social justice and jobs, the role of the EU in the world, values and rights, the rule of law, security, digital transformation, democracy and migration. Citizens can also launch their own topics.

Cheating at Greek universities (Foreign Policy) Greek universities are experiencing a crisis of confidence in their students as remote learning takes the place of traditional education. Professors have noted surprisingly high marks from previously poor students, raising suspicions that the students may be using underhanded tactics. “Result averages are up, and people we haven’t seen in years are showing up for exams because the system makes it easy to cheat,” Kostas Kosmatos, an assistant professor of criminology at Thrace’s Democritus University told AFP. Sofia, a psychology student, admitted to have taken two exams “on behalf of two of my friends and nobody realized.” Resourceful students have created technological workarounds to boost their chances during exams, crowdsourcing answers in live chats with students at the University of Crete even enlisting a linguistic expert to help them during exams. “But even he got a verse wrong,” Angela Kastrinaki, dean of the University of Crete’s literature department, told AFP. “So I got 50 papers with the same mistake. It was funny.”

Russia Expels 20 Czech Diplomats as Tensions Escalate (NYT) A day after the government of the Czech Republic blamed operatives from Russia’s military intelligence agency for a series of mysterious explosions at an ammunition depot in 2014 and expelled 18 Russian diplomats, the Russian government announced on Sunday that 20 Czech diplomats would be ejected in response. The expulsions signal further escalation of tensions between the Kremlin and western governments, reaching an intensity not seen since the Cold War. The spat between the Czech Republic and Russia comes just days after the United States imposed heavy sanctions on Russian government officials and businesses in response to a large-scale hacking of American government computer systems. In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry called the Czech accusations “absurd” and accused the government of being an American puppet. “In an effort to please the U.S.A. following recent American sanctions against Russia, the Czech government in this instance even exceeded its overseas masters,” the Russian Foreign Ministry statement said.

Montenegro’s billion-dollar dilemma (NYT) Few Europeans thought it was a good idea for Montenegro to take a mammoth loan from China to build a highway. Now the tiny, mountainous country is asking the European Union for help to repay the debt—and the answer, so far, has been no. The situation in Montenegro is the latest skirmish in an escalating global push for influence by China, which has made inroads in economically weak countries by offering loans that demand loyalty to Beijing but otherwise have few strings attached. Montenegro’s first debt payments are due this summer. The $1 billion loan is nearly a fifth the size of the country’s entire economy. Montenegrin leaders say they won’t miss their loan payment this summer even if no E.U. aid is forthcoming. European officials said they wanted to help Montenegro but were searching for a palatable way to do so. Linking the aid to the loan too directly could be politically difficult, since many E.U. officials do not want to be in the position of effectively paying down a Chinese loan that E.U. leaders warned against in the first place. “China has been filling any opening it felt it could,” said Vuk Vuksanovic, a researcher at the Belgrade Center for Security Policy, a Serbian think tank. “Local capitals were hungry for cash, particularly on big development issues like infrastructure. And the Chinese were willing to go places where Western institutions were not.”

Afghan Women Fear the Worst, Whether War or Peace Lies Ahead (NYT) Farzana Ahmadi watched as a neighbor in her village in northern Afghanistan was flogged by Taliban fighters last month. The crime: Her face was uncovered. People silently watched as the beating dragged on. Fear—even more potent than in years past—is gripping Afghans now that U.S. and NATO forces will depart the country in the coming months. They will leave behind a publicly triumphant Taliban, who many expect will seize more territory and reinstitute many of the same oppressive rules they enforced under their regime in the 1990s. The New York Times spoke to many Afghan women about what comes next in their country, and they all said the same thing: Whatever happens will not bode well for them. Whether the Taliban take back power by force or through a political agreement with the Afghan government, their influence will almost inevitably grow. In a country in which an end to nearly 40 years of conflict is nowhere in sight, many Afghans talk of an approaching civil war. “All the time, women are the victims of men’s wars,” said Raihana Azad, a member of Afghanistan’s Parliament. “But they will be the victims of their peace, too.”

Hard-line Islamists take 6 Pakistani security personnel hostage amid deadly clashes (Washington Post) A hard-line Islamist group on Sunday took six Pakistani security personnel hostage after days of deadly clashes in the northeastern city of Lahore over a French satirical newspaper’s publication of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad and the arrest of the group’s leader by Pakistani authorities. A senior police officer and two paramilitary fighters were among those taken after protesters surrounded a police station and stormed the compound, according to Lahore police spokesman Arif Rana. A week of violence across the country has left at least four dead, according to the protesters. Police officials say thousands have been arrested. The tensions driving the protests, led by the Islamist party Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan, have been simmering for months after French President Emmanuel Macron honored a teacher who was beheaded last year in France after he showed a class the cartoons depicting Muhammad. For many Muslims, depictions of the prophet are blasphemous and deeply insulting. Macron’s comments sparked protests across the Muslim world last year.

India’s capital to lock down as nation’s virus cases top 15M (AP) New Delhi was being put under a weeklong lockdown Monday night as an explosive surge in coronavirus cases pushed the India’s capital’s health system to its limit. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said in a news conference the national capital was facing shortages of oxygen and some medicine. “I do not say that the system has collapsed, but it has reached its limits,” Kejriwal said, adding that harsh measures were necessary to “prevent a collapse of the health system.” Similar virus curbs already have been imposed in the worst-hit state of Maharashtra, home to India’s financial capital, Mumbai. The closure of most industries, businesses and public places Wednesday night is to last 15 days.

Pacific Ocean storm intensifies into year’s first super typhoon (Reuters) Strong winds and high waves lashed the eastern Philippines on Monday as the strongest typhoon ever recorded in April barrelled past in the Pacific Ocean, killing one man and triggering flooding in lower-lying communities, disaster officials said. More than 100,000 people were evacuated from coastal areas, according to provincial disaster agencies. The core of Surigae, or Bising as the storm is known locally, is not expected to hit land. But with a diameter of 500 km and winds reaching 195 km per hour, parts of the eastern islands of Samar experienced flooding, while several communities lost power. The first super typhoon of 2021 foreshadows a busy storm season for the region in the year ahead, experts say.

Lebanon’s crumbling capital (AFP) Beirut’s roads are riddled with potholes, many walls are covered in anti-government graffiti and countless street lamps have long since gone dark. At night, car drivers creep cautiously past broken traffic lights and strain their eyes for missing manhole covers, stolen for the value of their metal. Many parking metres have been disabled in protest over an alleged corruption scandal, while cars are parked randomly on sidewalks. To many, the dysfunctional capital has become emblematic of a country mired in its worst crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war after decades of mismanagement and corruption. Much of Beirut’s infrastructure started falling apart long before last August’s massive portside explosion killed more than 200 people, levelled the waterfront and damaged countless buildings. Amid the crisis, the Lebanese currency has collapsed and continues its downward slide at a sickening rate that in itself is deepening the problem. As the currency has dived by more than 85 percent on the black market, wary contractors are steering clear of any municipal repairs that are paid for in Lebanese pounds.

Eleven dead, 98 injured after train derails in Egypt (Reuters) Eleven people were killed and 98 injured on Sunday in a train accident in Egypt’s Qalioubia province north of Cairo, the health ministry said in a statement. The train was heading from Cairo to the Nile Delta city of Mansoura when four carriages derailed at 1:54 p.m. (1154 GMT), about 40 kms (25 miles) north of Cairo. More than 50 ambulances took the injured to three hospitals in the province, the health ministry said. The derailing is the latest of several recent railway crashes in Egypt. At least 20 people were killed and nearly 200 were injured in March when two trains collided near Tahta, about 440 kms (275 miles) south of Cairo.

South Africa wildfire (Washington Post) Cape Town ordered precautionary evacuations of communities living along the edges of city landmark Table Mountain on Monday as firefighters struggled to contain a fire that gutted historical landmarks, including the oldest working windmill in South Africa and a library housing African antiquities at the University of Cape Town. The fire started Sunday morning near the memorial to colonial leader Cecil Rhodes and quickly spread uncontrolled beneath Devil’s Peak in Table Mountain National Park in an area popular with weekend hikers and cyclists. By Monday morning, strong southeasterly winds, which were expected to reach more than 30 miles per hour (50 km/h) later in the day, had pushed the fire toward densely-populated areas above Cape Town city. Well-known tourist sites, such as the Table Mountain aerial cableway, were temporarily closed. Heavy smoke engulfed the city forcing the closure of a major highway and other nearby roads. Hikers, park visitors, visitors to the nearby Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden and hundreds of students from the university campus were evacuated on Sunday.

NASA’s Ingenuity Makes First Powered Flight On Mars (NPR) “Orville and Wilbur would be proud. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter has made the first-ever powered flight on another planet, 117 years after the Wright Brothers’ historic flight on this planet. The flight itself was modest. The 4-pound helicopter rose 10 feet in the air, hovered briefly, and returned to the Martian surface.

Reading Definitely Not Wednesday

Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey. A space opera set in the relatively near future. Humans have colonized Mars and the asteroid belt, and a few scattered populations make due on the moons of planets further out. There is, however, no faster-than-light travel, no contact with any solar system beyond our own, no sentient AIs, and no aliens. A major theme of the book is the culture clash between those who live on Earth or Mars – the superpowers of this future – and those who live in the Belt, where mining is the preeminent economy and life is the hardscrabble sort where even water and oxygen have to be imported, never mind concepts like justice and equality. Different characters move from one place to the other or switch allegiances, but their origins are as baked in as we would regard ethnicity or nationality. As one character puts it, "A childhood spent in gravity shaped the way he saw things forever." Corey (who is actually two separate dudes writing under a penname) does a wonderful job of fleshing out the background worldbuilding. I loved references to fungal-culture whiskey, Bhangra as the default elevator muzak, hand gestures exaggerated to be seen through a spacesuit, and largely unintelligible localized slang (“Bomie vacuate like losing air,” the girl said with a chuckle. “Bang-head hops, kennis tu?” / “Ken,” Miller said. /“Now, all new bladeboys. Overhead. I’m out.”). It feels like a more detailed world than a lot of sci-fi does. Which is good, because the characters are not all that compelling. The two POVs are Jim Holden and Detective Miller. Holden is the second-in-command on an unimportant spaceship that works as a freight hauler, moving ice back and forth between the Belt and Saturn. Things change dramatically when a mysterious someone attacks their ship and kills everyone except for Holden and a few others, and he finds himself centrally involved in the runup to war. He has the most generic action-movie-hero personality I can imagine, with no discernable characteristics except 'idealistic' (and I really only know that because other people keep telling him he is), kinda nervous about being suddenly thrust into command but doing a good job, a womanizer (but see, it's okay because he just keeps genuinely falling in love with so many women!), and earnest. He's fine. He's not even objectionable, just incredibly boring. He comes with a crew of entirely indistinguishable followers that I couldn't keep straight, but that's all right because most of them get killed off so I no longer had to try to remember who was who. He also develops a romance that is 100% unbelievable, but I suppose that's what action-movie-heroes do, so who's even surprised. Miller is a detective on Ceres, the largest city in the Belt, who's been hired by a rich family to track down their anarchist, slumming daughter. Miller is an incredibly cliche noir protagonist - alcoholic, divorced, not as good as he used to be, cynical, a little bit corrupt but underneath it all he still remembers his good intentions – but at least that means he has more of a personality than Jim, even if it's a personality you've seen a thousand times before. On the other hand, Miller becomes obsessed with this dead/missing girl in a way that is painfully stereotypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Two things kept this from ruining Leviathan Wakes for me. One, Miller is at least somewhat self-aware about it: This was why he had searched for her. Julie had become the part of him that was capable of human feeling. The symbol of what he could have been if he hadn’t been this. There was no reason to think his imagined Julie had anything in common with the real woman. Meeting her would have been a disappointment for them both. And two, there's a twist near the end that allows Julie to finally have her own voice in the text, and not exist solely as Miller's imagined dependance on her. It takes almost half the book for Miller and Holden to finally cross paths, at which point the missing-girl mystery and the war plot combine and take a twist for a direction I DID NOT SEE COMING. I am ambivalent on whether to spoil this; on the one hand, I read it unprepared and it was incredibly awesome to experience it that way. On the other hand, I suspect this is information that will be a determining factor for many people on whether they want to read it or not. So: halfway through, Leviathan Wakes takes a wild jump and becomes about a zombie outbreak. I would not have previously thought that 'space opera' and 'zombie apocalypse' are two genres that should be combined, but the tension and excitement skyrocket once the book takes this turn, transforming it from average quality to 'I CANNOT STOP READING, MUST FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT'. So, good choice! The sequence with Miller and Holden trapped on a small space station trying to sneak their way past zombie hordes is one of the most thrilling I've read in ages. Leviathan Wakes is the first book in a series (apparently it was originally supposed to be a trilogy, but there's currently eight books out with at least one more planned, along with a batch of short stories) and has also become a show on the Syfy network that I haven't seen. I feel like I've spent a lot of this review complaining, but honestly I mostly enjoyed the book and am planning to read the sequels. The fact that people seem to like the characters from future books more than these ones certainly doesn't hurt! Pig/Pork: Archaeology, Zoology and Edibility by Pia Spry-Marques. A nonfiction book about everything remotely related to the farming and eating of pigs. I expected from the subtitle and the author's personal background that archaeology would be the main focus, but it turns out that's really only the first two chapters, which cover the Paleolithic hunting of wild boar and the original domestication of pigs. The other chapters turn to topics as diverse as experiments on feeding farmed pigs leftovers from restaurants, the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, a special Spanish ham called ibérico de bellota which can only be fed acorns, genetically modifiying pigs so their manure would contain less phosporus, sunburn in pigs, minature pet pigs, organ donation between humans and pigs, the terrifying tapeworms to be acquired from eating raw pork, why pork is a 'white' meat, how to make sausages, theories on why pork is neither halal nor kosher, the use of an enzyme from pig pancreases in wine production, EU food-safety regulations on traditional pork dishes, Cuba's 'Bay of Pigs', the Pig War between the US and Canada in 1859, and Oliver Cromwell's favorite pig breed. Basically if it has the remotest connection to the title, Spry-Marques has included it. She even includes recipes for each chapter, though some of them are clearly more for amusement than actual consumption – I can't imagine anyone having just finished a chapter on how eating raw pork will give you cysts in your brain is eager to try figatellu, a type of uncooked sausage from France. And it would take a braver foodie than me to taste "Asian-inspired pork uterus with green onion and ginger". In fact, as is probably not surprising for any book which touches on factory farming however briefly, you will probably come away not wanting to eat pork at all for a while. Spry-Marques's writing is breezy and conversational, which kept me turning the pages even when the structure was a bit scattered. I wish it were more focused, but it's a great book for anyone who enjoys popular science, history, or food writing. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. Song of Blood & Stone by L. Penelope. A YA fantasy novel with some unusual elements. Rather than being set in vaguely medieval England or a dystopian sci-fi future, we're in a country where the technology seems to be around 1900: cars and electric lights exist, but they're restricted to rich cities, and someone coming from rural poverty might well have never seen either. Magic exists, but comes from one's heritage; you're either born with it or not. In Elsira, where our story is set, it's rare to the point of nonexistence. Our heroine Jasminda, however, does have magic, due to her father having been a refugee from the neighboring country of Lagrimar, where magic is common. Elsira and Lagrimar have been constantly at war for hundreds of years, but are separated by a magical Barrier which allows no one to pass through, except on rare occasions when a temporary breach happens and violence erupts. Elsirans are light-skinned and Lagrimari are dark-skinned, so Jasminda has dealt with fairly severe racism throughout her life. The story starts when Jasminda runs across Jack, a Elsiran soldier just back from spying in Lagrimar who has super important information that must get back to the capital as soon as possible; unfortunately Jack has just been shot and is closely pursued by a troop of Lagrimari soldiers. Jasminda and Jack team up, fall in love, and try to prevent the coming outbreak of war. The most revealing thing I can say about Song of Blood & Stone is that it's very, very YA. (As you could probably guess, what with its title that fits exactly into the pattern of the 'YA title' meme currently going around tumblr.) Almost everything that happens is easily predictable from the back cover (Jack's long-withheld backstory is clearly supposed to be a shocking twist, but it's obvious from the moment he appears), the prose is mediocre but fine, good and bad guys are clearly signalled, the real world parallels (racism, treatment of refugees, domestic abuse) are good-hearted but extremely Social Justice 101. On the plus side, the beginning was the worst part and it got better and better as it went along; several developments near the very end were so interesting that I'm tempted to read the sequel, despite my initial boredom. Overall it's not a bad book, but I'd only recommend it to people who are extremely affectionate of the most repetitive tropes of the YA genre. I read this as an ARC from a GoodReads giveaway.

[DW link for easier commenting]

Societal Readiness Levels: Ready for a new normal?

Monika Büscher

‘What gets measured gets done’ – a treacherous mantra of our times. As societies bend to a technocratic Gestell of indicators, their compliance feeds its power. In her critique of the New Urban Agenda’s call for urban resilience, Maria Kaika highlights how indicator-based planning can undermine communities. She cites Tracie Washington’s defense of disaster victims:

everytime you say, “Oh, they’re resilient, [it actually] means you can do something else, … We were not born to be resilient; we are conditioned to be resilient. I don’t want to be resilient …. [I want to] fix the things that [create the need for us to] be resilient [in the first place]

Tracie Washington, President of the Louisiana Justice Institute, in Kaika (2017).

Kaika shows how indicators designed to support resilience can end up supporting an ‘immunological’ ideology. A technocratic, managerial, solutionist smart city innovation agenda, she argues, ‘vaccinates citizens and environments so that they can take larger doses of inequality and degradation in the future’ (2017:89). The concept of ‘Technology Readiness Levels’ (TRL) is part of this agenda, as is the emergent concept of Societal Readiness Levels (SRL) (Fig 1). However, an affirmative critique (Braidotti 2011)of SRL may offer a lifeline off this self-destructive juggernaut.

Figure 1 Visualisations of Societal and Technological Readiness (Source: (Allwood et al. 2017)(right), (Schraudner et al. 2018)(left))

Developed by NASA as a ‘systematic metric/measurement system that supports assessments of the maturity of a particular technology’ and comparison between different types of technology (Mankins 1995), the TRL metric has spread to guide multi-trillion global innovation programmes. TRL embody a culture of solutionism (Morozov 2013), where technology is seen as a product designed to fulfill societal or operational needs or ambitions. SRL critique this technocractic focus. The SRL concept originates in debates about a transition towards low carbon futures (Allwood et al 2017, Fig 1 left) and the Danish Innovation Fund’s attempt to find a ‘way of assessing the level of societal adaptation of, for instance, a particular … innovation (whether social or technical) to be integrated into society’ (Fig 1 right). The two approaches are different in aim, one focused on a societal transformation where a socio-technical change of reduced material demand has become ‘normal practice’ at the highest SRL level, the other on measuring successful (profitable) embedding of (desire for) a product.

The Danish Innovation Fund’s SRL framework in particular has received interest from major actors like UK and EU research funding bodies. This indicates that concerns with the social dimension of innovation have become mainstream. The 2050 European Energy Roadmap, for example, recognises that citizens’ active participation in energy management is ‘as critical as technology to making the European energy system more flexible and sustainable’, and smart city innovation is scrambling to become ‘citizen-focused’. However, such citizen-focus all-too-often remains – at best! –at a ‘placating’ level (Cardullo and Kitchin 2019), at worst it constitutes cynical lip-service for moreintrusive commercial and security-driven exploitation of citizen data in ‘Lifeworld.Inc’ (Thrift 2011).

Mainstreaming attention to the social through SRL has failed so far. Why? Does this mean the very idea is ideologically corrupted like the New Urban Agenda’s resilience indicator-based approach? Or is failure down to a lack of societal readiness of the currently dominant SRL concept itself? Measurement and comparison have proved critical to societal transformation before (Mosley 2009). And as rapid societal transformation is needed to avert the collapse of humanity, could societal readiness be conceived differently? Allwood et al’s concern with a new normal as the highest level of societal readiness resonates with social science debates that the Danish Innovation Fund seems oblivious to. The summary below is designed to explore how we might give new direction to SRL.

Christensen’s recognition that innovation is often disruptive of existing socio-economic orders (Christensen 1997; Christensen et al 2015)highlights that technologies are not products to be inserted into a ‘context’ but catalysts for change. The concept of mode-2 science and society (Nowotny et al 2001)addresses this disruptive element and the unintended, un-known and unknow-able consequences of innovation. Mode-2 society and mode-2 science are based on interdisciplinary collaboration, and methods of collective experimentation (Felt and Wynne 2008), where scientists and citizens, organisations, technology developers and those who appropriate technology, bring together and contest social and technological innovation. Opportunities for such collaboration are often clustered at the implementation end of innovation, but calls to create them further upstream are beginning to define methodologies for citizen engagement on higher rungs of the ladder of participation (Arnstein 1969)to conduct Experiment Earth(Stilgoe 2016).

The result of such efforts should be more carefully radical and radically careful design (Latour 2008). Methods for achieving it cluster around experimentation, creative, artistic disruption and the strategic power of ignorance and surprise (Gross 2010). Gross suggests that given our inevitable ignorance in the face of complex systemic disruptions and unintended consequences of innovation it is critical that we generate as much surprise as early as possible. Simulation, play, broad-base dialogue and collaborative learning are essential for this. Introna (2007)adds an ethical dimension with his call for disclosive ethics and a focus on reversibility – it is important to not allow innovations to settle too fast. Recent efforts to define a digital ethics by the European Data Protection Supervisors’ Office address this need to give ethical issues a broader than regulatory exposure, including public consultation (EDPS 2015; 2018)

What is the role of the social scientist in this? Braidotti's (2011)demand to move beyond critique and into constructive endeavours or affirmative critique, require the courage to ‘stick one’s neck out’ and make value-based normative recommendations for how things should be organized in better ways. Failure and being wrong are obvious dangers. But there might be ways of doing it playfully and in safe spaces, experimentally, creatively, and collectively, which resonates strongly calls for an experimental sociology (Thrift 2011), inventive and speculative methods (Lury and Wakeford 2013; Michael 2016). It also sits well with suggestions that it is not necessarily deliberation or consensus that should be sought. Instead participatory designers and action researchers are calling on us to engage in infrastructuring for participation, seeking to include and enable dissent, debate, ongoing experimentation (Ehn 2008; Dantec and DiSalvo 2013)

Levitas’ utopia as method (2013)provides perhaps the most integrative framework for these endeavours. This is a creative appropriation of utopia not as a blueprint of a ‘better’ world designed by experts, but a method to engage diverse stakeholders in making better pockets of the world together, all the while remaining open to experiencing how and for whom this worldly constellation is (not) better and how. Collective narrative methods and visual story-building methods are particularly suited (Porritt 2013; McKay and Dickson 2016; Popan 2018)

None of these contributions have so far made it into definitions of SRL. The Danish Innovation Fund’s focus on validation, testing, deployment supports experimentation, but it is driven by a concern with social acceptance (and not the acceptability) of innovation, based on a deficit model of poor public understanding of science and technology. To ask, with Tsing(2015), and through research and innovation, ‘what if the time was ripe for sensing precarity?’ and ‘what constitutes living with it well?’, SRL need to be co-created, they need to measure how innovations enable a good ‘new normal’, and this needs to be open to contestation.

References

Allwood, Julian M., Timothy G. Gutowski, André C. Serrenho, Alexandra C. H. Skelton, and Ernst Worrell. 2017. ‘Industry 1.61803: The Transition to an Industry with Reduced Material Demand Fit for a Low Carbon Future’. Philosophical Transactions. Series A, Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences375 (2095). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2016.0361.

Arnstein, Sherry R. 1969. ‘A Ladder Of Citizen Participation: : Vol 35, No 4’. Journal of the American Institute of Planners35 (4): 216–24.

Braidotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Nomadic-Theory-Portable-Braidotti-Paperback/dp/0231151918.

Cardullo, Paolo, and Rob Kitchin. 2019. ‘Being a “Citizen” in the Smart City: Up and down the Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation in Dublin, Ireland | SpringerLink’. GeoJournal84 (1): 1–13.

Christensen, Clayton M. 1997. The Innovator’s Dilemma. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business Review Press.

Christensen, Clayton M., Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald. 2015. ‘What Is Disruptive Innovation?’ Harvard Business Review, 1 December 2015. https://hbr.org/2015/12/what-is-disruptive-innovation.

Dantec, Christopher A Le, and Carl DiSalvo. 2013. ‘Infrastructuring and the Formation of Publics in Participatory Design’. Social Studies of Science43 (2): 241–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312712471581.

EDPS. 2015. ‘Opinion 4/2015: Towards a New Digital Ethics. Data, Dignity and Technology’. https://edps.europa.eu/sites/edp/files/publication/15-09-11_data_ethics_en.pdf.

———. 2018. ‘Public Consultation on Digital Ethics’. https://edps.europa.eu/sites/edp/files/publication/18-09-25_edps_publicconsultationdigitalethicssummary_en.pdf.

Ehn, Pelle. 2008. ‘Participation in Design Things’. In Proceedings of the Tenth Anniversary Conference on Participatory Design 2008, 92–101. PDC ’08. Indianapolis, IN, USA: Indiana University. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1795234.1795248.

Felt, U., and B. Wynne, eds. 2008. Taking European Knowledge Society Seriously. Vimodrone, IPOC: IPOC di Pietro Condemi. https://sts.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/i_sts/Ueber_uns/pdfs_Felt/taking_european_knowledge_society_seriously.pdf.

Gross, Matthias. 2010. Ignorance and Surprise | The MIT Press. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ignorance-and-surprise.

Introna, Lucas D. 2007. ‘Maintaining the Reversibility of Foldings: Making the Ethics (Politics) of Information Technology Visible.’ Ethics and Information Technology9 (1): 11–25. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-006-9133-z.

Kaika, Maria. 2017. ‘“Don’t Call Me Resilient Again!”: The New Urban Agenda as Immunology … or … What Happens When Communities Refuse to Be Vaccinated with “Smart Cities” and Indicators’. Environment and Urbanization29 (1): 89–102. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247816684763.

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Links 7/24/19

Digital Elixir Links 7/24/19

For Wolves, Grooming Helps Strengthen Family Bonds Wolf Conservation Center

Study suggests much more water on the moon than thought Phys.org. Great! Maybe now we won’t have to invade Canada!

IMF lowers global growth forecasts amid trade, Brexit uncertainties Reuters

Eurozone manufacturing activity worst in almost seven years — PMI FT

Nissan to post 90% plunge in operating profit Asian Nikkei Review

Is Politics Getting to the Fed? Robert Barro, Project Syndicate

Air pollution may have killed 30,000 people in a single year, study says CNN (original).

Marine heatwaves in a changing climate Nature

Bad governance: How privatization increases corruption in the developing world (PDF) Regulation and Governance

Brexit

Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan shot down by EU within moments of him becoming Tory leader Independent. A hearty welcome from Michel Barnier:

We look forward to working constructively w/ PM @BorisJohnson when he takes office, to facilitate the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement and achieve an orderly #Brexit. We are ready also to rework the agreed Declaration on a new partnership in line with #EUCO guidelines.

— Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier) July 23, 2019

Is this Boris’s first cabinet? As Johnson prepares to meet the Queen and be crowned PM TODAY names emerge of the Brexiteer-heavy, ethnically diverse top team tipped to help him deliver Brexit in 100 days Daily Mail

My Boris Johnson story The Spectator. An amazing anecdote. Read all the way to the end.

What happened to post-Brexit free-trade nirvana? BBC

Ukraine Election – Voters Defeat Second Color Revolution Moon of Alabama

Syraqistan

How The U.S. Lost Its Game Of Chicken With Turkey Lobelog

Docs Show US To Massively Expand Footprint At Jordanian Air Base Amid Spats With Turkey, Iraq The Drive

Iran’s two armies Le Monde Diplomatique

China?

Chinese military can be deployed at Hong Kong’s request to contain protests, Beijing says SCMP

Who are the men in white behind Hong Kong’s mob attack? AP

Hong Kong anti-government protesters warned of risk of further violence in Yuen Long demonstration this weekend at site of mob attacks South China Morning Post. From the story, if true, protesters desecrating village graves could have problems with optics. But the sheer density of local symbolism, like the canes — said to be for “caning children” — used by the white-shirted attackers (“mob”*) in Yuen Long MTR station, is a bit daunting. NOTE * A little constructive ambiguity there from SCMP?

* * *

Former Chinese Premier Li Peng, known for Tiananmen crackdown, dies at 90 Straits Times

China’s $40 Trillion Banking System Learns a Lesson on Risk Bloomberg

China’s credit push to small firms falters in factory heartland Reuters

The painful path to curing Japan of its cash addiction FT. Just because cash is easier, quicker, Jackpot-Ready

, and doesn’t allow tracking, it’s an addiction?

India

India is failing to reap the benefits of China-US trade war FT

Mid-Day Meal Workers Protest in AP; Demand Termination of Contract With Akshaya Patra News Click

Skill India | Govt to spend Rs 5,000 crore to skill unorganised sector workers Money Control

Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico Governor Set to Quit After Protests, Papers Say Bloomberg. “Set to,” but has not yet.

Sens. Warren and Sanders introduce bill that would slash Puerto Rico’s debt CNBC

These journalists exposed the corruption that led to Puerto Rico’s mass protests CNN

Venezuela

Nationwide Blackout in Venezuela, Third since March – VA’s on the Ground Coverage Affected Venezuelanalysis

RussiaGate

‘A lack of urgency’: Democrats frustrated as House investigators struggle to unearth major revelations about Trump WaPo, lol.

Mueller on Trump: Everything the Special Counsel’s Report Says the President Did, Said or Knew Lawfare

Trump Transition

Justice Department Opens Antitrust Review of Big Tech Companies NYT

House passes bill opposing BDS, exposing divide among Democrats The Hill. It’s all about the benjamins

!

House Democrats unveil more ‘realistic’ climate change plan Reuters

Under Trump, 26% of Climate Change References Have Vanished From .Gov Sites Vice

Big Brother Is Watching You Watch

Your Data Were ‘Anonymized’? These Scientists Can Still Identify You NYT

Parents who won’t vaccinate their kids turning to home-schooling in California, data show Los Angeles Times

Search Warrant Alleges Embezzlement, Use of ‘Ghost Students’ by Epic Schools Oklahoma Watch

Redlining in the Lap Lane Longreads

Key findings about U.S. immigrants Pew Researchd

Class Warfare

Brightly Shows How Worker-Owned Cooperatives Can Scale Up Triple Pundit

My 300 Mile Lyft Ride From Chicago to Bradford Whatever

How a data detective exposed suspicious medical trials Nature. Citizen science!

Are we happier when we spend more time with others? Our World In Data. On the Harvard Study of Adult Development.

Antidote du jour (via):

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

Links 7/24/19

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In the wake of Black Lives Matter&#039;s protests, death of black 5-year-old becomes symbol Brazil&#039;s racism and inequality

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In the wake of Black Lives Matter's protests, death of black 5-year-old becomes symbol Brazil's racism and inequality

Miguel plunged from the ninth floor of a building while under the care of his mother’s white employer

A protester holds a sign saying ‘what if it was the employer’ son? Justice for Miguel. Image: Mídia NINJA/CC BY-NC 2.0

On June 2, Mirtes de Souza, a domestic worker at an upper-class family home in the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, brought her 5-year-old son Miguel to her workplace. While nurseries and schools have been shut in Recife since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mirtes wasn't granted time off by her employers.T That day, Mirtes asked her white boss to mind Miguel while she went out to walk the house dog. When she came back, she found her son on the ground floor of the building after an apparent fall. Miguel was taken to the hospital alive, but didn't survive. CCTV images obtained by the police later showed Mirtes’ boss, Sari Côrte Real, placing Miguel into an elevator by himself, and pressing the button to one of the top floors of the building. Images then show Miguel leaving the elevator on the ninth floor where, authorities later deduced, he climbed an unprotected gallery with air-conditioners, and fell. Côrte Real was arrested and charged with manslaughter but released after paying a 20,000 BRL bail (around 4,000 US dollars). Police says it's investigating the possibility that Miguel was pushed from the ninth floor. In the wake of George Floyd's protests in Brazil, the case sparked outrage on social media, with many considering Miguel's death yet another example of the racism Brazil's black citizens endure. When local media avoided releasing Sari's name and photos (social media users eventually uncovered them), Mirtes gave an interview to TV Globo that went viral:

Se fosse eu, meu rosto estaria estampado, como já vi vários casos na TV. Meu nome estaria estampado e meu rosto estaria em todas as mídias. Mas o dela não pode estar na mídia, não pode ser divulgado. (…) Espero que a Justiça seja feita, porque se fosse o contrário, eu acredito que nem teria direito a fiança. Foi uma vida que se foi, por falta de paciência para tirar dali de dentro. Deixar uma criança sozinha dentro de um elevador, isso não se faz. Uma criança que foi confiada a ela.

If it was me, my face would be on the front pages, as I’ve seen happening many times on TV. My name would be on the headlines and my face would be everywhere. But hers can’t be in the media, it can’t be made public. (…) I hope that justice is served, because if it was the other way around, I think I wouldn’t even have the right to post bail. A life is gone, because of a lack of patience. To leave a child on their own, in an elevator, you can’t do that. A child that was entrusted to her.

Brazil's racism

Miguel's story quickly became national news. Many have seen it as a symbol of the worst in Brazil, especially its systemic racism against black citizens. Brazil forcibly brought around 5 million Africans to work as slaves in a period spanning 400 years — over ten times more than the United States. Brazil was also the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery (in 1888). But Miguel's death was also a reminder of Brazil's rampant corruption and inequality, and how both have been exacerbated in the COVID-19 pandemic. Mirtes had no choice but to keep working during the pandemic in order to provide for her family. She wasn't an exception: The first COVID-19 death registered in Rio de Janeiro, in March, was of a domestic worker who was also impeded to quarantine by her employer. In an interview, Mirtes said that she, her mother, and her son Miguel all had tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19's virus), but their symptoms were mild. Brazil registered over one million cases of the new coronavirus as of June 22, and over 50,000 deaths. It's second on both counts only to the United States. Meanwhile, Mirtes’ employer Sari, a white woman living in one of the wealthiest areas of Recife, was a member of a traditional political family in the state of Pernambuco. Sari's husband, Sérgio Hacker, is the mayor of Tamandaré, a small town 100 km away from Recife to where Mirtes says she was frequently brought over by the family. Following Miguel’s death, it was revealed that Mirtes had been hired as a public employee of Tamandaré. According to the registry, Mirtes had a management position in the city hall, earning 1,517 BRL — Brazil’s minimum wage is 1,045 BRL (282 and 194 US dollars respectively). Mirtes said she never worked for the city hall and denied knowing that she was officially hired as such. The case is under investigation.

Protests

QUEREMOS JUSTIÇA POR MIGUEL! Em Recife, manifestantes realizam intervenção em protesto na frete do local onde Miguel morreu, o condomínio de luxo conhecido como Torres Gêmeas. 20 mil é a vida de uma criança negra pobre e a dor de uma mãe. Fotos: Ernesto de Carvalho pic.twitter.com/6CdwWQgEU5 — Mídia NINJA (@MidiaNINJA) June 5, 2020

WE WANT JUSTICE FOR MIGUEL! In Recife, protesters make an intervention in front of the place where Miguel died, the luxury condo known as Twin Towers. 20,000 is the life of a poor black child and a mother's pain.

Miguel’s death sparked protests in the streets of Recife and on social media. The building where it happened made it even more symbolic to activists: its construction has been marred in controversy as it's located in a protected historical area. On June 5, dozens of protesters, alongside Miguel’s family, marched towards the buildings, where Corte Real and her family lives. People laid down on the street to remember how the child died.

“Eu quero minha mãe”, manifestantes protestaram hoje no Recife, em memória e por justiça ao pequeno Miguel, de 5 anos. #justicaparamiguel pic.twitter.com/0fYVW5kKZA — Mídia NINJA (@MidiaNINJA) June 6, 2020

“I want my mother”, protesters today in Recife, in memory and asking for justice to little Miguel, age 5.

Miguel's death was also remembered in Brazil's protests against racism in the wake of the death of George Floyd in the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement. Another case remembered at the protests was of João Pedro, a black 14-year-old killed by the police inside his own home in Rio de Janeiro on May 18. A collective of daughters and sons of domestic workers, created in March to ask for social isolation rights for their parents, published a note reminding that what happened to Miguel could have happened to any of them:

O que aconteceu com Miguel, 5 anos, escancara mais uma vez a DESIGUALDADE, o RACISMO, o CLASSISMO. O direito negado ao isolamento que nossa mães vivem. Quantos de nós morreram na casa grande? Quanto terão que morrer nos prédios para algo ser feito?

What happened with Miguel, 5 years-old, opened wide the INEQUALITY, RACISM, CLASSISM. The denied right for isolation that are mothers are facing. How many of us died in the big house? How many will have to die in the buildings until something is done?

< p class='gv-rss-footer'>Written by Fernanda Canofre · comments (0) Donate · Share this: twitter facebook reddit

Tanzania’s president cracks down on critics

When plain-clothes males had been caught on safety cameras escorting the Tanzanian investigative journalist Erick Kabendera from his dwelling in July, his sister feared the worst.

“Many individuals have been taken in the identical means and, till immediately, now we have not heard from them,” Prisca Kabendera stated by telephone. “These are miracles that he’s nonetheless alive and we all know the place he’s.”

It took 48 hours for the police to substantiate to the household that that they had detained Mr Kabendera and longer nonetheless for him to see a lawyer, his sister stated. Since then the allegations in opposition to him have modified at the very least twice. He stays in detention, charged with cash laundering, organised crime and failure to pay tax, accusations that stop him from getting bail. His case was adjourned for a 3rd time on Friday.

That Ms Kabendera ought to rely herself fortunate to have the ability to go to her brother is a testomony to how far the political and safety local weather in Tanzania, as soon as seen as considered one of Africa’s most steady democracies, has deteriorated since President John Magufuli took energy in 2015.

Mr Magufuli, nicknamed “the bulldozer”, was elected on a promise to assault graft and public mismanagement. He gained widespread assist throughout his first months in workplace for halting wage funds to ghost staff and cancelling doubtful authorities contracts.

Tanzanian investigative journalist Erick Kabendera arrives on the Kisutu Residents Justice of the Peace Courtroom in Dar es Salaam. © Reuters

However he has since spent extra time punishing those that query his strategies than on pursuing corruption, his critics say, stalling Tanzania’s growth.

Funding within the mining sector has all however halted following a two-year tax dispute with Barrick Gold’s Acacia Mining, whereas the negotiation of an settlement with oil majors together with ExxonMobil to develop offshore fuel is inching alongside.

“The restriction of freedoms has been rising for the final three years and the case of Erick Kabendera is a continuation of that sample,” stated Zitto Kabwe, an opposition MP who was arrested in June and prevented from travelling.

“[Mr Kabendera] was writing truth however what we all know is that this authorities doesn’t like criticism. This authorities needs to do issues and to not be questioned about something they’re saying.”

This authorities needs to do issues and to not be questioned about something they’re saying

Mr Kabendera is considered one of many members of the political, enterprise and media communities to have been detained or gone lacking since Mr Magufuli took energy.

Journalist Azory Gwanda disappeared in 2017, whereas final month Leopold Lwabaje, a director at Tanzania’s finance ministry, was discovered useless weeks after his household stated he had been detained by plain-clothes assailants.

The preliminary police investigation blamed suicide however Mr Kabwe is looking for a parliamentary inquiry, given the circumstances previous Mr Lwabaje’s demise and his vital function on the finance ministry the place he managed EU-funded initiatives.

Fatma Karume, president of the Tanzanian bar affiliation, stated the justice system was getting used to focus on anybody who challenges Mr Magufuli’s regime.

“For anyone who the federal government suspects or thinks is in opposition to Magufuli . . . the felony justice system will likely be used to arrest you and detain you with out trial,” Ms Karume stated.

The federal government’s modus operandi is to make use of fees of economic crimes — comparable to these levied in opposition to Mr Kabendera — as a result of the accused can’t be granted bail, she stated. “I might title 50 or 60 individuals, who’ve all been put in [prison] below the Magufuli regime for money-laundering.”

Two Acacia Mining executives and one former worker have been held on cash laundering fees since October. Acacia declined to remark.

When Mr Kabendera, a Tanzanian nationwide, was first detained in July, a police spokesperson stated his citizenship standing was below investigation. The police then instructed the household that he could be charged with sedition. Later the allegations modified to monetary crimes. “It’s too apparent that these individuals simply need to preserve him in jail,” his sister stated.

Hassan Abas, a authorities spokesperson, declined to touch upon Mr Kabendera’s case or every other investigation, citing a need to not prejudice ongoing judicial processes.

Advisable

Wednesday, 28 August, 2019

The UK and the US have each criticised the development in the direction of prolonged pre-trial detentions and shifting fees. However the concern from politicians, activists, donors and traders is just not restricted to the detentions. Since 2015, Mr Magufuli’s authorities has additionally carried out new laws increasing the remit of the intelligence providers and proscribing every little thing from newspapers to the publication of statistics.

The 2015 Cyber Crimes Act gave law enforcement officials the proper to observe residents’ digital communications with out judicial approval, whereas the broad definition of sedition within the 2016 Media Companies Act has made it, broadly, unlawful to criticise the federal government in any means.

Mr Magufuli has stated publicly that he’s monitoring conversations between his ministers. Recordings of personal calls between members of his cupboard have been leaked on the web.

The local weather of worry is miserable financial exercise, traders stated, declining to be recognized for worry of recriminations from the state. Overseas direct funding fell to 2 per cent of GDP in 2017 down from about 5 per cent in 2014, in accordance with the World Financial institution. Overseas trade reserves have dropped by a fifth prior to now 12 months.

“Clearly [Mr Magufuli] is somebody who believes that he has a proper to hearken to different individuals’s non-public conversations and it’s utterly opposite to our structure,” stated Ms Karume.

John Magafuli’s marketing campaign on dissent

October 2015

John Magufuli turns into Tanzanian president, extending the tenure of his social gathering that has been in energy since 1961. Many citizens count on him to institute reforms and crack down on corruption

November 2016

Parliament approves the Media Companies Act that considerably will increase the federal government’s management of the press

March 2017

The federal government enters an ongoing dispute with Barrick Gold’s Acacia Mining, one of many largest international traders. Tanzania accuses the corporate, amongst different issues, of owing the federal government $190bn in unpaid taxes and penalties.

September 2017

Opposition chief Tundu Lissu is attacked in what he says was an assassination try. He later accused Mr Magufuli for attempting to show “the nation right into a dictatorship”. The president denounced the assault as “barbaric”. Petra Diamonds suspends operations at its Tanzania mine after the federal government seizes a consignment of diamonds.

April 2018

The federal government introduced new on-line laws, banning materials that “causes annoyance” or “makes use of unhealthy language”, in addition to requiring a licence for all media shops together with blogs. Critics declare the excessive charges and broad wording can be utilized to silence those that disagree with the administration.

June 2019

Opposition chief Zitto Kabwe is arrested within the newest of detention of a high-profile political, enterprise and media determine. Distinguished investigative journalist Erick Kabendera arrested the next month. Mr Kabwe requires a parliamentary inquiry after a director at Tanzania’s finance ministry is discovered useless.

Yasemin Craggs Mersinoglu

from insurancepolicypro http://insurancepolicypro.com/?p=751

Corruption

Aya Salas                  

                                       Article Text

The corruption of government officials seems to be as old as recorded history. For example, the ancient Roman senate passed laws against such political corruption in the first century, B.C. They defined a corrupt act as “whenever money is taken and a publicly-conferred duty is violated.”Local magistrates in the Roman Empire were permitted to legally receive cash gifts of up to 100 gold pieces a year, but anything beyond this amount was considered “filth.” There was also a separate criminal category against what was called concussio, or the “shakedown” and “extortion.” A Roman official might claim to have a legal order against someone, and demand a bribe not to enforce it against the individual’s person or property.Emperor Constantine issued one of the strongest decrees against corruption during this time in A.D. 331. Those found guilty of such crimes might be exiled to an isolated island or a far-off rural area, while others might even be condemned to death. A judge, for example, might be executed if he had acquitted someone guilty of murder for the right price.Corruption Today in Europe and North AmericaHigh levels of political corruption remain today one of the major problems confronting people around the world. While most of us think of such corruption as primarily impacting the hundreds of millions who live in the underdeveloped and developing parts of the globe, it touches those of us fortunate enough to live in the industrially developed Western democracies.The Berlin-based non-profit organization, Transparency International (TI), annually surveys various forms of corruption around the world by various measures and types. A score of 100 in their 2016 Corruption Perception Index means the absence of any political corruption. A score approaching zero suggests a society in which little happens or gets done without layers of governmentally corrupt processes for people to get through in their daily lives. TI points out that “No country gets close to a perfect score” on the index.However, according to Transparency International many of the least corrupt nations around the world are in the European Union and North America. In fact, Denmark ranks the least corrupt worldwide, followed by New Zealand. Among the remaining top ten of least corrupt countries area: Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Singapore, the Netherlands, Canada and Germany. All of them have scores of 80 or better on TI’s scale of 100 having zero corruption.The United States, however, is only ranked 18 with a score of 74. That placed America just below Belgium, Hong Kong and Austria. But the U.S. did rank above Ireland, Japan and Uruguay. And, happy to report, America is above France, which had a score of only 69.The most corrupt nations of the EU, perhaps not surprisingly, are in Eastern Europe, in those countries that had been part of the former Soviet bloc. Poland only scored 62, followed by Slovenia (61), Lithuania (59), Latvia (57), Czech Republic (55), Slovakia ((51), and Hungary and Romania (58).  On the other hand, Greece, a longtime member of the EU, only earned a score of 44.Former Soviet republics further to the east are far worse. The Russian Federation and Ukraine only scored 29, with the former Soviet republics in central Asia – Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, for instance – barely making it above the low 20s range on the scale.Corruption and Bribery in Africa, Asia and Latin AmericaThe lowest TI scores are generally earned in Africa and parts of the Middle East and Asia, with some other very corrupt countries in Latin America. The most corrupt countries on the planet, according to TI, are Somalia (10), South Sudan (11), North Korea (12), Syria (13), Yemen (14), Sudan (14), Libya (14), and Afghanistan (15). But in corruption depravity, Venezuela, Iraq, and Haiti are not far behind them.In fact, on the Transparency International scale there are hardly any countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa or Latin America that make it even to the 40s mark on their political corruption scale. The vast majority of the countries in these parts of the world are in the 30s and 20s, or less levels under TI’s scale.As part of their annual survey on global corruption a few years ago, TI also asked people the frequency with which they had to pay bribes to government officials of one type or another in attempts to get by in their daily lives. In North America, one percent of Canadians surveyed said they bribed someone in government. In the United States that reply was given by two percent of the people asked.But even in countries that have long been members of the EU bribery was reported. The worst occurred in Greece, where 27 percent of the people said they paid bribes during the preceding year. In most of Western Europe the bribery level was around 2-3 percent of the population, though the number was 6 percent in Luxembourg.Bribery is far more endemic in the rest of the world. Africa suffers from political bribery the most, with 42 percent of all those in the countries surveyed saying they had paid bribes. The most extreme case was found by TI in Cameroon, where 79 percent—almost four out of every five people—admitted paying bribes, with the number being 40 percent of the people in neighboring Nigeria.In Asia, the overall rate of bribe giving was reported to be 22 percent of the population. The highest rates were found in Cambodia (72 percent), Pakistan (44 percent), the Philippines (32 percent), Indonesia (31 percent), India (25 per- cent), and Vietnam (14 percent).Finally, in Latin America, the average bribery rate was recorded at 13 percent of the people. But as in the rest of the world, it varies from country to country. Among the handful of Latin American countries surveyed, the highest rate was in the Dominican Republic with 28 percent. Bolivia followed with 27 percent.Around the globe, the most bribes are paid to the police. In Africa, 47 percent of the respondents said they bribed the police; in Asia, 33 percent; in Latin America, 23 percent; and in Eastern Europe, almost 20 percent. Worldwide, about 17 percent of the people in the survey paid bribes to the members of law enforcement.Bribing people in the judicial system came next, with the global response being about 8 percent of all those surveyed. About the same percentage around the world said they bribed government agents for business licenses and permits, though again the highest rates were in Africa (23 percent) and Asia (17 percent). But even in the United States and Canada around 3 percent admitted paying such bribes.Medical care is also a major area for such corruption. In Africa, 24 percent of the respondents said they paid bribes for access to medical services; in Asia, the response was 10 percent; in Russia and Ukraine, 13 percent; in Eastern Europe, 8 percent; in the EU, almost 5 percent; and in North America, 2 percent.Corruption and Government Intervention in the MarketplacePolitical corruption, clearly, is found everywhere around the world and people, regardless of where they live, do not expect it to go away anytime soon. Yet, in spite of its global dimension, corruption pervades some parts of the world more than others, and permeates certain corners of society to a greater degree. Why?Part of the answer certainly relates to issues surrounding ethics and culture. The higher the degree of personal honesty and allegiance to ethical codes of conduct, the more we might expect people to resist the temptations of offering or taking bribes. However, economic and business analyst, Ian Senior, in his, Corruption—the World’s Big C: Cases, Causes, Consequences, Cures (2006), concluded that there were no significant correlations between high degrees of personal honesty and religious practice and less bribe-taking around the world.A far stronger explanation can be found in the relationship between the level of corruption in society and the degree of government intervention in the marketplace. In a generally free market society, government is limited to the protection of the citizenry’s life, liberty, and honestly acquired property. The rule of law is transparent and assures impartial justice for all. Any other functions taken on by the government are few in number, such as a variety of public works projects.Under these circumstances, government officials have few regulatory or redistributive responsibilities, and therefore they have few special favors, privileges, benefits, or dispensations to “sell” to some in the private sector at the expense of others in society. The smaller the range of government activities, therefore, the less politicians or bureaucrats have to sell to voters and special interest groups. And the smaller the incentive or need for citizens to have to bribe government officials to allow them to peacefully go about their private business and personal affairs.On the other hand, the very nature of the regulated economy in the interventionist state is to short-circuit the free market. The interventionist state goes beyond protecting people’s lives and property. Those in power in the interventionist state intervene by using government authority to influence the outcomes of the market through the application of political force.The government taxes the public and has huge sums of money to disburse to various programs and projects. It imposes licensing and regulatory restrictions on free and open competition. It transfers great amounts of income and wealth to different groups through sundry “redistributive” schemes. It controls how and for what purpose people may use and dispose of their own property. It paternalistically imposes legal standards influencing the ways we may live, learn, associate, and interact with others around us.Those in the government who wield these powers hold the fate of virtually everyone in their decision-making hands. It is inevitable that those drawn to employment in the political arena often will see the potential for personal gain in how and for whose benefit or harm they apply their vast life-determining decrees and decisions. Some will be attracted to such “public service” because they are motivated by ideological visions they dream of imposing for the “good of humanity.”Some will see that bribing those holding this political power is the only means to attain their ends. This may be to restrict or prohibit competition in their own corner of the market or to acquire other people’s money through coercive redistribution. For others, however, bribing those who hold the regulatory reins may be the only way to get around restrictions that prevent them from competing on the market and earning a living.The business of the interventionist state, therefore, is the buying and selling of favors and privileges. It must lead to corruption, because by necessity it uses political power to harm some for the benefit of others, and those expecting to be either harmed or benefited will inevitably try to influence what those holding power do with it.No country in the world is free from some degree of government intervention and regulation. The nineteenth century era of relatively laissez-faire, unfortunately, has been long gone. But the extent to which governments intrude into the economic, social, and personal activities of their citizens does vary significantly around the globe. This includes the extent to which citizens are protected by an impartial enforcement of the rule of law, have the freedoms of association, the press, and religion, and the right to democratically participate in the selection of those who hold political office.Ending global political corruption in its various “petty” and “grand” forms, therefore, will only come with the removal of government from social and economic life. When government is limited to protecting our lives and property, there will be little left to buy and sell politically. Corruption then will be an infrequent annoyance and occasional scandal, rather than an inescapable aspect of today’s social and economic life around the world

Title of the text:

Global corruption and the role of government

Author/s of the text:

Richard M. Belling

Title of the journal/publication:

FFF organization or the future of freedom foundation

URL or Web address:

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/global-corruption-role-government/

Main Idea:

Corruption then will be an infrequent annoyance and occasional scandal rather than an inescapable aspect of today's social and economic life around the world.

Evidence that supports the main idea (provide atleast two):

"Ending global political corruption in its various “petty” and “grand” forms, therefore, will only come with the removal of government from social and economic life."

"When government is limited to protecting our lives and property, there will be little left to buy and sell politically."

Romanian ruling party conjures parallel state fears in legal…

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – When Stelian Ion set aside law for politics he was hoping to fight for Romania’s environment. Instead the opposition lawmaker finds himself in a battle with the ruling party over fundamental changes to criminal law.

Member of the opposition Save Romania Union party, lawyer Stelian Ion, attends a meeting of the parliamentary committee aiming to modify the justice laws, in Bucharest, Romania, June 18, 2018. Inquam Photos/Octav Ganea via REUTERS

This week the tussle came to a head when parliament approved legal changes Ion said could encourage criminals to act with impunity, the latest twist in a regional drama that has exposed the fragility of eastern Europe’s post-communist democracies.

The ruling party’s overhaul of criminal procedures on Monday was part of a legislative campaign to stop what it describes as a conspiracy to bring it down via unfounded corruption charges.

Its intervention in the justice system has prompted the biggest protests since communism fell in 1989 and thrown down a challenge to the European Union, which Romania joined in 2007.

Brussels is already embroiled in a standoff with Poland over court reforms that the EU says threaten the rule of law and Romania’s moves risk broadening a rift between east and west.

The U.S. State Department and the European Commission have criticized the planned legal changes: the Commission keeps Romania’s justice system under special monitoring and has praised magistrates for tackling high-level graft.

Magistrates and other experts told Reuters the bill rushed through parliament would raise the burden of proof for all criminal investigations, not just those alleging corruption. Cases would collapse and many crimes could go unpunished, they said.

“If the bill passes into law as is …. crime will rise in the next year or two, not just corruption-related but on the street as well,” said Ion, one of a few opposition lawmakers on a parliamentary commission which altered hundreds of amendments to the bill hours before it went to a final vote.

Dozens of members of the ruling Social Democrat party (PSD), including leader Liviu Dragnea, are under investigation or on trial on corruption charges. They have denied the charges, and have used their majority to try to shake them off, saying they stem from a plot by their opponents to discredit them.

PSD executive secretary Codrin Stefanescu told reporters Monday’s changes aligned the law with basic human rights. “In its new version, the criminal procedure code guarantees it respects all trial rights in line with European norms and this ends abuses,” he said.

“NOBODY IS SAFE”

Ion’s Save Romania Union and colleagues in the opposition Liberal Party have just days to put objections to the constitutional court, part of a legal fight with the ruling party that began soon after it came to power in January 2017 and has now reached a critical stage.

“I was not expecting such a fierce and open battle over the rule of law,” he said in a telephone interview. “But … I will continue fighting for as long as I can.”

Ion and fellow opposition lawmakers have challenged bill after bill at the Constitutional Court while centrist president Klaus Iohannis and thousands of magistrates have also voiced concerns.

But the Social Democrats are pressing on.

In one of the EU’s most graft-prone states, the ruling coalition is in the process of dismissing the chief anti-corruption prosecutor and giving politicians more control over the judiciary as well as loosening up criminal legislation.

Earlier this month, the government bused hundreds of thousands of supporters to Bucharest for a rally against what it said were judicial abuses. It told the crowd there was a parallel state that illegally wire taps them and encourages neighbors to turn on each other.

“You mustn’t be under the illusion that only high-ranking officials or public servants are targets,” Dragnea told them. “Nobody is safe. Absolutely everyone can be targeted by a tip-off which could lead to a conviction.”

Ion and his opposition colleagues are part of this parallel state, the PSD has said, as are activists, prosecutors, judges, secret services, journalists and foreign companies.

It is an argument with echoes of neighboring Turkey, where President Tayyip Erdogan has cited a nefarious ‘Deep State’ to justify pursuing political opponents across Turkish society.

It chimes too with Viktor Orban’s criticism of foreign-funded civil society groups in Hungary and with Poland, where the government often refers to ‘Poles of the worst kind’.

But while Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski are seen as nationalist ideologues, critics say Dragnea has more pragmatic motives in undoing anti-graft efforts.

Dragnea has been found guilty in a vote-rigging case, barring him from the post of prime minister.

A preliminary verdict in the trial in which he stands accused of inciting other officials to commit abuse of office is due on Thursday. He is also under investigation for allegedly pocketing EU funds. He denies any wrongdoing in all three cases.

“There is no parallel state,” President Klaus Iohannis said. “It is a PSD invention used to explain their anti-judiciary and anti-secret service actions. It is that simple.”

GEEKS FOR DEMOCRACY

The criminal procedure changes include limiting criminal investigations to a year before indictment and restricting the types of evidence and warrants that can be used in prosecutions. They also ban appeal courts from overturning acquittals by lower courts without new evidence.

Anti-corruption prosecutors have seized assets worth $2.3 billion in the past five years and secured 4,751 convictions, including 27 lawmakers and 83 mayors across parties, as well as ministers, county council heads, state firm managers and magistrates.

Romania was the country where the European Anti-Fraud Office OLAF ran most investigations of EU funds misuse last year.

The Social Democrats have said they aim to approve changes to the criminal code by mid-July and critics expect attempts to shorten sentences and target graft offences.

The European Commission has limited options. It can maintain the justice monitoring mechanism and trigger infringement procedures, and it can cut development funds, which Romania is already struggling to tap. It can also continue keeping Bucharest outside the borderless Schengen area.

Asked to comment, a Commission spokesman said it was following the judicial and criminal codes reforms closely. “We take note of the adoption of the criminal procedure code. We will look into it and analyze it,” he said.

Legal challenges to the new judicial overhaul have nearly run their course and the president will soon be obliged to sign it into law. It limits the president’s powers in appointing chief prosecutors and sets up a special unit to prosecute potential crimes committed by magistrates.

Judge Cristi Danilet was part of the team reforming the judiciary in the run-up to EU accession and a member of the judicial watchdog. He said attempts to weaken graft laws were not new but they were more concentrated now.

“There are a lot of them, radical and in an extremely short timespan, that is why we are all so scared. It’s a blitzkrieg.”

Dragnea has said changes to the criminal codes are meant to reflect EU directives and previous court rulings and has denied they are intended to safeguard politicians. “There is not one amendment made for a specific person,” he told Reuters.

Ion is not giving up. “Nothing is forever, the PSD will lose power eventually and judicial legislation will be repaired.”

With the next election due in 2020, IT entrepreneur Catalin Tenita is working to finance opinion surveys, monitor public spending and encourage people to vote by connecting programmers with civil society groups via his Geeks for Democracy platform.

“It is the duty of every generation to make an effort to survive,” he said. “No battle is lost.”

Additional reporting by Matt Robinson and Robin Emmott editing by Philippa Fletcher

The post Romanian ruling party conjures parallel state fears in legal… appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2K9d41K via News of World

Headlines

Space-based telecommunications network (Bloomberg) Elon Musk’s SpaceX ​yesterday ​launched its fifth batch of 60 Starlink satellites, another step toward Musk’s vision of creating a space-based network to provide broadband service around the world. SpaceX is one of a handful of players that wants to build out a space-based internet system that can serve people who struggle to access the web today via fiber optic and cellular connections. Starlink would beam down relatively high-speed data from its network of satellites orbiting the Earth. It’s targeting service in the northern U.S. and Canada this year. Such a service would effectively make SpaceX a telecommunications company that also has a rocket launch business.

Seven killed as military vehicle explodes in southeast Colombia (Reuters) Seven people were killed and 11 more injured when a passenger vehicle exploded while traveling down a highway in southeast Colombia, in a key drug-trafficking region where illegal armed groups vie for control, a high-ranking military official said on Tuesday.

Europe resists anti-Huawei campaign (NYT) The U.S. effort to prevent the use of the Chinese company’s equipment in the next generation of wireless networks has largely failed, as European leaders discount American warnings that Huawei represents a security threat. The U.S. said it will stop sharing intelligence with any country that uses Huawei equipment, but Britain appears to be paying no price for its decision to let the company into parts of its network. Germany looks poised to follow suit. “Many of us in Europe agree that there are significant dangers with Huawei, and the U.S. for at least a year has been telling us, do not use Huawei. Are you offering an alternative?” said Toomas Hendrik Ilves, Estonia’s former president. “What is it that we should do other than not use Huawei?”

Superstorm Dennis brings mass flooding to U.K., while Brits ask, ‘Where’s Boris?’ (Washington Post) At least three have died from the flooding unleashed by the storm, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing a torrent of criticism for his government’s response. When the storm hit, he was spending the weekend at a 115-room mansion in Kent.

Ghost ship washes ashore in Ireland (Foreign Policy) A ghost ship abandoned by its crew for over a year washed ashore on Sunday in County Cork, Ireland, during Storm Dennis, which caused damage in the United Kingdom over the weekend. The cargo vessel, the MV Alta, was traveling from Greece to Haiti in 2018 when it became disabled and was left by its crew. It was then towed to Guyana, hijacked, and left unmanned in the mid-Atlantic before apparently drifting to Ireland.

Spain looks to adopt digital tax that has angered the US (AP) Spain’s government approved Tuesday the introduction of new taxes on digital business and stock market transactions, following similar steps by other European countries. Finance Minister Mara Jesus Montero said the Google tax, which has angered U.S. authorities and brought a threat of tariffs by the Trump administration, will be levied only from the end of the year. The measure is an attempt to get around tax avoidance measures frequently used by multinationals. Big tech firms such as Google and Facebook pay most of their taxes in the European Union country where they are based and often pay very little in countries where they run large and profitable operations.

Russian blogger’s HIV documentary reaches millions, draws Kremlin praise (Reuters) A hard-hitting YouTube documentary about Russia’s HIV epidemic by a popular blogger has attracted more than 13 million views in a week and even drawn praise from the Kremlin. Some pharmacists have also reported a rush to snap up express HIV tests after the film, which is just under two hours long, was released on Feb. 11. There are over a million people in Russia infected with HIV and the epidemic has been growing among the general population, according to health officials.

China May Delay Top Political Meeting (Foreign Policy) State media reported Monday that China’s legislature may postpone its biggest political meeting of the year--its annual congress, set for March 5 in Beijing--due to the coronavirus. The gathering usually lasts at least 10 days, with delegates passing legislation and setting economic targets. One-third of National People’s Congress (NPC) delegates are provincial or city officials working to slow the outbreak. This year’s annual congress is particularly critical, with delegates set to ratify China’s first civil code as part of President Xi Jinping’s legal reforms and expected to discuss the anti-government protests in Hong Kong. The March NPC meeting has not been postponed since 1995. The announcement about the delay came as Chinese authorities reported a decline in new virus cases. So far, China has confirmed over 72,000 cases and 1,870 deaths.

No reduction of violence yet in Afghanistan (Foreign Policy) Militant commanders in Afghanistan say they are waiting for orders from Taliban leadership before stopping their attacks on government targets, days after a U.S. official said that a seven-day reduction of violence had been agreed. Attacks against Afghan government forces continued on Sunday night, despite a Taliban official in Doha confirming the deal.

Netanyahu’s trial to begin on March 17: Israeli Justice Ministry (Reuters) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial will begin on March 17, two weeks after a national election, the Justice Ministry said on Tuesday. In a statement, the ministry said Netanyahu will be required to be present at the session, at which an indictment against him will be read. The right-wing leader has denied any wrongdoing in three corruption cases. He is the first sitting Israeli prime minister to be charged with a crime.

China’s closed: Palestinian traders fear losing a good deal (AP) The West Bank city of Hebron is separated from the epicenter of China’s virus outbreak by more than 4,000 miles and a ring of Israeli checkpoints. But even here the economic symptoms of the outbreak are starting to appear. Palestinian markets have long been flooded by low-cost Chinese goods. Traders in Hebron, the largest Palestinian city and a commercial hub for the territories, fear that if the outbreak and quarantine efforts continue they will have to switch to more expensive alternatives, passing higher prices on to consumers in an already weakened economy. Their concerns point to the potential for wide-ranging ripple effects from the outbreak in China, the world’s largest exporter. The health crisis has already thrown the global travel industry into chaos and threatened to disrupt supply chains around the world that depend on China. That a city deep inside the Israeli-occupied West Bank is so reliant on Chinese goods illustrates the perils of global economic integration.

EU steps up enforcement as arms flow into Libya (Foreign Policy) The European Union reached an agreement on Monday to deploy warships and planes in the Mediterranean to enforce the U.N. arms embargo on Libya. It also decided to end Operation Sophia, the maritime patrols set up to counter human smuggling off the Libyan coast. As weapons continue to flow into Libya, combatants on all sides of the civil war seem to be digging in.

Huge Locust Outbreak in East Africa Reaches South Sudan (AP) The worst locust outbreak that parts of East Africa have seen in 70 years has reached South Sudan, a country where roughly half the population already faces hunger after years of civil war, officials announced Tuesday.

30 April 2021

Open season

Do you think the UK government should be more transparent, accountable and participatory?

Are you interested in health, the environment, justice, data ethics and algorithmic accountability, open contracting, misinformation, freedom of information, democracy building and standards in public life?

Would you like to help shape policy pledges on those issues (and maybe others) that government will commit to?

Then sign up to take part in the development of the latest Open Government National Action Plan - the process kicks off next week. With perfect timing, really. (Full disclosure: I'm on the civil society steering group. Some more info on the whole thing here.)

Please do express your interest, and share as widely as possible - it would be great to have as much of UK civil society and the public involved as possible.

Other bits and pieces:

One of those thematic groups will be on freedom of information. Plenty of links on that this week below, including mySociety's (excellent) new report on the topic. (And something something government making an exhibition of itself.)

Remember we have another great Data Bites for you next week - sign up here, catch up on the previous events here.

And IfG have an event today with the new senior digital figures in the UK government - hopefully we'll hear more than we have so far about the new Central Digital and Data Office, and its relationship with the Government Digital Service.

Trying to find basic information is more complicated than you might think, part whatever we're on now.

My list of data series - newsletters, podcasts, events - is so very nearly at 100 entries, so do add any that we've missed. And thanks to all who've contributed so far. One of those listed is Politico's Digital Bridge, which has a good run down of the G7 digital and technology track this week.

The Alan Turing Institute and the Royal Statistical Society have been working with the Joint Biosecurity Centre on various statistics and machine learning projects during the pandemic. You can hear about some of them at an event this afternoon.

RIP astronaut Michael Collins. This extract from his autobiography is quite a piece of writing.

Have a great weekend

Gavin

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Today's links:

Graphic content

Viral content

India’s catastrophic second covid wave shows no sign of slowing* (The Economist)

COVID-19: The crisis in one of India's worst-hit cities, where someone dies every five minutes (Sky News)

NHS app will be used as Covid ‘vaccine passport’ for foreign travel (The Guardian)

Vax populi

See How the Vaccine Rollout Is Going in Your County and State* (New York Times)

Vaccine diplomacy boosts Russia’s and China’s global standing* (The Economist)

40m Pfizer jabs bought as Covid booster shots* (The Sunday Times)

After a blistering start, Biden’s vaccine rollout faces new hurdles* (FT)

Vaccine uptake rises among England’s ethnic minorities* (FT)

What the ONS can tell you about the COVID-19 Vaccine programme (ONS)

Side effects

How has lockdown changed our relationship with nature? (ONS)

In need of support? Lessons from the Covid-19 crisis for our social security system (Resolution Foundation)

After shocks: Financial resilience before and during the Covid-19 crisis (Resolution Foundation)

‘We are drowning in insecurity’: young people and life after the pandemic* (FT)

More Americans Are Leaving Cities, But Don’t Call It an Urban Exodus* (Bloomberg)

Joe 90 (+10)

Joe Biden’s first 100 days: by the numbers* (FT)

What America thinks* (The Economist)

After 100 days, Joe Biden is polling better than Donald Trump did* (The Economist)

At the 100-day mark, has Biden kept his campaign promises?* (Washington Post)

Prolific yet quiet: Joe Biden’s first 100 days in numbers* (New Statesman)

17 Metrics to Watch in the Biden Era* (Bloomberg)

Taking leave of their...

2020 Census shows U.S. population grew at slowest pace since the 1930s* (Washington Post)

Which States Will Gain or Lose Seats in the Next Congress* (New York Times)

Once-A-Decade Census Numbers to Redraw U.S. Political Landscape* (Bloomberg)

Which States Won — And Lost — Seats In The 2020 Census? (FiveThirtyEight)

US politics

Biden’s $4 Trillion Economic Plan, in One Chart* (The Upshot)

By the numbers: States weighing voting changes (Axios)

Advantage, GOP (FiveThirtyEight)

Americans From Both Parties Want Weed To Be Legal. Why Doesn’t The Federal Government Agree? (FiveThirtyEight)

Derek Chauvin was found guilty – how typical is that of US police who kill? (The Guardian)

Science and nature

Visualised: glaciers then and now (The Guardian)

Siberian fires not an isolated event, EU earth observatory shows* (FT)

The U.S. Will Need a Lot of Land for a Zero-Carbon Economy* (Bloomberg)

The Hidden Science Making Batteries Better, Cheaper and Everywhere* (Bloomberg)

Our Earth in context with other worlds (Axios)

The intricate life of the International Space Station (via Chris Hadfield)

UK politics and government

Will Greensill be a Barnard Castle-sized issue for the Tories? (UK in a Changing Europe)

Boris Johnson’s £200k refurbishment of 11 Downing Street could buy you a whole house in much of the UK* (New Statesman)

Labour’s lost heartlands. Can it win them back?* (FT)

Green gains in red-brick England* (New Statesman - though I'd have put Labour at the base of the bars)

Procuring inequality: Understanding the gender pay gap in government contracting (Spend Network - and summary)

Devolved public services: The NHS, schools, and social care in the four nations (IfG)

Let's get fiscal, fiscal

The fiscal position of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (IfG)

The national balance sheet and capital stocks, preliminary estimates, UK: 2021 (ONS)

Putting a value on the UK – faster than ever before (ONS)

Nominal spending figures understate China’s military might* (The Economist)

Everything else

Inheritances and inequality over the life cycle: what will they mean for younger generations? (IFS)

Exploring the State Papers with Word Embeddings (Networking Archives)

Nomadland, Disney and the drive for Oscars dominance in 2021* (FT)

Survival curves (Max Roser)

Meta data

Open for the best

Registration: Open Government Thematic Groups (UK Open Government Network)

Civil society urged to join groups on government transparency. (UK Open Government Network)

Statement on the UK’s New Global Anti-Corruption Sanctions (UK Anti-Corruption Coalition)

Relight my FOIA

New policy paper: Reforming Freedom of Information (mySociety)

Reforming Freedom of Information: mySociety policy paper launch event (mySociety)

Public information request monitor (mySociety)

Freedom of Information in danger of ‘sliding into obsolescence’, new report finds (openDemocracy)

We are going to court to force the government to release full details about its controversial FOI ‘Clearing House’ – a secretive unit inside the Cabinet Office (openDemocracy)

Press freedom: how governments are using COVID as an excuse to crack down on the public’s right to know (Media@LSE)

A transparent FOI system is vital for good government* (The Times)

Thread (George Greenwood)

Government obfuscation has become 'art form' - MPs and journalists say Freedom of Information not working (Press Gazette)

Viral content

NHS app set to feature vaccine passport (Public Technology)

COVID-19 Update (UK Government)

AI got 'rithm

Ensuring trustworthy algorithmic decision-making (CDEI for OECD.AI)

Error-riddled data sets are warping our sense of how good AI really is* (MIT Technology Review)

Artificial Intelligence in Local Government (Oxford Commission on AI & Good Governance)

Now is the time for a transatlantic dialog on the risk of AI (VentureBeat)

AI at work isn’t always intelligent* (FT)

Artificial Intelligence Is Misreading Human Emotion* (Kate Crawford, The Atlantic)

The Challenges of Animal Translation* (The New Yorker)

We need more bias in artificial intelligence (Bruegel)

Stop talking about AI ethics. It’s time to talk about power.* (MIT Technology Review)

Working for an Algorithm: Shadow Bans, Dopamine Hits, and Viral Videos, All in the Life of TikTok Creators (The Markup)

Home Office algorithm to detect sham marriages may contain built-in discrimination (TBIJ)

Missing data

What's missing? Evaluating social sector data gaps (Commission on Civil Society)

ONS to publish suicide data by ethnicity from June as charities say ‘no excuse’ for gaps in data (The Independent)

///so.very.predictable

App used by emergency services under scrutiny (BBC News)

Why What3Words is not suitable for safety critical applications (Cybergibbons)

*All* English ambulance services use #What3Words, according to health minister (Owen Boswarva)

Government

Proud to be the Government Analysis Function (Government Analysis Function)

ADR UK three years in: Harnessing the power of administrative data three years in (ADR UK)

Supercomputing leap in weather and climate forecasting (Met Office)

Transforming Government: Six key recommendations (Foundry4)

Help us set a new data standard for vulnerable people services (Data in government)

Government gives Verify a stay of execution (UKAuthority)

Texting times

Boris Johnson’s tax texts show perils of government by WhatsApp (Politico)

Lobbying row: Why ministers have two mobile phones (BBC News)

Big tech, trade and competition

UK digital competition - it’s about your data, stupid (diginomica)

UK lobbying questions raised by Big Tech cash for MP interest groups (Politico)

Facebook v Apple: The ad tracking row heats up (BBC News)

The Counterbalance – The European System of Monopoly (Brave New Europe)

Twitter censored tweets critical of India’s handling of the pandemic at its government’s request (The Verge)

Technology wars are becoming the new trade wars* (FT)

Data

techUK on the Future of Data Governance for the UK (techUK)

Ireland stress-tests Europe’s data protection law* (FT)

Data Brokers Are a Threat to Democracy* (Wired)

An airline glitch reveals the dangers of discriminatory data (Tech Monitor)

For public review: The GDB research handbook (Global Data Barometer)

Fact and fiction

The Anti-Vaccine Influencers Who Are Merely Asking Questions* (The Atlantic)

Facts are Pieces of a Puzzle, not the Puzzle Itself (Zeynep)

Everything else

Justice Lost In The Post: How the Post Office wrecked the lives of its own workers (Private Eye)

Unified UK measures of rurality and deprivation (mySociety)

What is going on here? (Hilary Cottam)

Shaping the future of digital technology in health and social care (King's Fund)

Should Tech Make Us Optimistic About Climate Change? (Tony Blair Institute for Global Change)

Scottish Elections 2021: WE’RE TRACKING WHERE THE PARTIES STAND (Open Rights Group Scotland)

Opportunities

EVENT: Turing-RSS Lab webinar #3: using algorithms and AI in the response to COVID-19 (The Alan Turing Institute, Royal Statistical Society)

EVENT: What is the Future of Free Speech on the Internet? Jillian C York (Bristol Festival of Ideas)

EVENT: Rethinking how we regulate Big Tech (Bennett Institute)

JOB: Editor in Chief (openDemocracy - more)

JOBS (Full Fact)

JOB: Data Investigations Advisor (Global Witness)

JOB: Director, Technology and Human Rights (Human Rights Watch)

JOB: Data Scientist - NHS Test & Trace (Grade-G7) (DHSC)

JOB: Head of Digital ID (Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, via Jukesie)

JOB: Lead Data Scientist - Datalab (BBC, via Jukesie)

JOB: Service Manager, WhatDoTheyKnow (mySociety)

JOB: We're hiring - could you be our new Data Analyst? (Data Orchard)

JOBS (Information Commissioner's Office)

TENDER: Evaluating the data assurance market (ODI)

And finally...

When you label a plot the wrong way and suddenly discover a new graph type (João Martins)

How High Airplanes have been Able to Go from INTERNATIONAL PICTURE LANGUAGE by Otto Neurath, 1936 (RJ Andrews)

For the last six years I’ve kept a spreadsheet listing every parking spot I’ve used at the local supermarket in a bid to park in them all (Gareth Wild, via Alice)

Romanian ruling party conjures parallel state fears in legal…

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – When Stelian Ion set aside law for politics he was hoping to fight for Romania’s environment. Instead the opposition lawmaker finds himself in a battle with the ruling party over fundamental changes to criminal law.

Member of the opposition Save Romania Union party, lawyer Stelian Ion, attends a meeting of the parliamentary committee aiming to modify the justice laws, in Bucharest, Romania, June 18, 2018. Inquam Photos/Octav Ganea via REUTERS

This week the tussle came to a head when parliament approved legal changes Ion said could encourage criminals to act with impunity, the latest twist in a regional drama that has exposed the fragility of eastern Europe’s post-communist democracies.

The ruling party’s overhaul of criminal procedures on Monday was part of a legislative campaign to stop what it describes as a conspiracy to bring it down via unfounded corruption charges.

Its intervention in the justice system has prompted the biggest protests since communism fell in 1989 and thrown down a challenge to the European Union, which Romania joined in 2007.

Brussels is already embroiled in a standoff with Poland over court reforms that the EU says threaten the rule of law and Romania’s moves risk broadening a rift between east and west.

The U.S. State Department and the European Commission have criticized the planned legal changes: the Commission keeps Romania’s justice system under special monitoring and has praised magistrates for tackling high-level graft.

Magistrates and other experts told Reuters the bill rushed through parliament would raise the burden of proof for all criminal investigations, not just those alleging corruption. Cases would collapse and many crimes could go unpunished, they said.

“If the bill passes into law as is …. crime will rise in the next year or two, not just corruption-related but on the street as well,” said Ion, one of a few opposition lawmakers on a parliamentary commission which altered hundreds of amendments to the bill hours before it went to a final vote.

Dozens of members of the ruling Social Democrat party (PSD), including leader Liviu Dragnea, are under investigation or on trial on corruption charges. They have denied the charges, and have used their majority to try to shake them off, saying they stem from a plot by their opponents to discredit them.

PSD executive secretary Codrin Stefanescu told reporters Monday’s changes aligned the law with basic human rights. “In its new version, the criminal procedure code guarantees it respects all trial rights in line with European norms and this ends abuses,” he said.

“NOBODY IS SAFE”

Ion’s Save Romania Union and colleagues in the opposition Liberal Party have just days to put objections to the constitutional court, part of a legal fight with the ruling party that began soon after it came to power in January 2017 and has now reached a critical stage.

“I was not expecting such a fierce and open battle over the rule of law,” he said in a telephone interview. “But … I will continue fighting for as long as I can.”

Ion and fellow opposition lawmakers have challenged bill after bill at the Constitutional Court while centrist president Klaus Iohannis and thousands of magistrates have also voiced concerns.

But the Social Democrats are pressing on.

In one of the EU’s most graft-prone states, the ruling coalition is in the process of dismissing the chief anti-corruption prosecutor and giving politicians more control over the judiciary as well as loosening up criminal legislation.

Earlier this month, the government bused hundreds of thousands of supporters to Bucharest for a rally against what it said were judicial abuses. It told the crowd there was a parallel state that illegally wire taps them and encourages neighbors to turn on each other.

“You mustn’t be under the illusion that only high-ranking officials or public servants are targets,” Dragnea told them. “Nobody is safe. Absolutely everyone can be targeted by a tip-off which could lead to a conviction.”

Ion and his opposition colleagues are part of this parallel state, the PSD has said, as are activists, prosecutors, judges, secret services, journalists and foreign companies.

It is an argument with echoes of neighboring Turkey, where President Tayyip Erdogan has cited a nefarious ‘Deep State’ to justify pursuing political opponents across Turkish society.

It chimes too with Viktor Orban’s criticism of foreign-funded civil society groups in Hungary and with Poland, where the government often refers to ‘Poles of the worst kind’.

But while Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski are seen as nationalist ideologues, critics say Dragnea has more pragmatic motives in undoing anti-graft efforts.

Dragnea has been found guilty in a vote-rigging case, barring him from the post of prime minister.

A preliminary verdict in the trial in which he stands accused of inciting other officials to commit abuse of office is due on Thursday. He is also under investigation for allegedly pocketing EU funds. He denies any wrongdoing in all three cases.

“There is no parallel state,” President Klaus Iohannis said. “It is a PSD invention used to explain their anti-judiciary and anti-secret service actions. It is that simple.”

GEEKS FOR DEMOCRACY

The criminal procedure changes include limiting criminal investigations to a year before indictment and restricting the types of evidence and warrants that can be used in prosecutions. They also ban appeal courts from overturning acquittals by lower courts without new evidence.

Anti-corruption prosecutors have seized assets worth $2.3 billion in the past five years and secured 4,751 convictions, including 27 lawmakers and 83 mayors across parties, as well as ministers, county council heads, state firm managers and magistrates.

Romania was the country where the European Anti-Fraud Office OLAF ran most investigations of EU funds misuse last year.

The Social Democrats have said they aim to approve changes to the criminal code by mid-July and critics expect attempts to shorten sentences and target graft offences.

The European Commission has limited options. It can maintain the justice monitoring mechanism and trigger infringement procedures, and it can cut development funds, which Romania is already struggling to tap. It can also continue keeping Bucharest outside the borderless Schengen area.

Asked to comment, a Commission spokesman said it was following the judicial and criminal codes reforms closely. “We take note of the adoption of the criminal procedure code. We will look into it and analyze it,” he said.

Legal challenges to the new judicial overhaul have nearly run their course and the president will soon be obliged to sign it into law. It limits the president’s powers in appointing chief prosecutors and sets up a special unit to prosecute potential crimes committed by magistrates.

Judge Cristi Danilet was part of the team reforming the judiciary in the run-up to EU accession and a member of the judicial watchdog. He said attempts to weaken graft laws were not new but they were more concentrated now.

“There are a lot of them, radical and in an extremely short timespan, that is why we are all so scared. It’s a blitzkrieg.”

Dragnea has said changes to the criminal codes are meant to reflect EU directives and previous court rulings and has denied they are intended to safeguard politicians. “There is not one amendment made for a specific person,” he told Reuters.

Ion is not giving up. “Nothing is forever, the PSD will lose power eventually and judicial legislation will be repaired.”

With the next election due in 2020, IT entrepreneur Catalin Tenita is working to finance opinion surveys, monitor public spending and encourage people to vote by connecting programmers with civil society groups via his Geeks for Democracy platform.

“It is the duty of every generation to make an effort to survive,” he said. “No battle is lost.”

Additional reporting by Matt Robinson and Robin Emmott editing by Philippa Fletcher

The post Romanian ruling party conjures parallel state fears in legal… appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2K9d41K via Today News

Romanian ruling party conjures parallel state fears in legal…

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – When Stelian Ion set aside law for politics he was hoping to fight for Romania’s environment. Instead the opposition lawmaker finds himself in a battle with the ruling party over fundamental changes to criminal law.

Member of the opposition Save Romania Union party, lawyer Stelian Ion, attends a meeting of the parliamentary committee aiming to modify the justice laws, in Bucharest, Romania, June 18, 2018. Inquam Photos/Octav Ganea via REUTERS

This week the tussle came to a head when parliament approved legal changes Ion said could encourage criminals to act with impunity, the latest twist in a regional drama that has exposed the fragility of eastern Europe’s post-communist democracies.

The ruling party’s overhaul of criminal procedures on Monday was part of a legislative campaign to stop what it describes as a conspiracy to bring it down via unfounded corruption charges.

Its intervention in the justice system has prompted the biggest protests since communism fell in 1989 and thrown down a challenge to the European Union, which Romania joined in 2007.

Brussels is already embroiled in a standoff with Poland over court reforms that the EU says threaten the rule of law and Romania’s moves risk broadening a rift between east and west.

The U.S. State Department and the European Commission have criticized the planned legal changes: the Commission keeps Romania’s justice system under special monitoring and has praised magistrates for tackling high-level graft.

Magistrates and other experts told Reuters the bill rushed through parliament would raise the burden of proof for all criminal investigations, not just those alleging corruption. Cases would collapse and many crimes could go unpunished, they said.

“If the bill passes into law as is …. crime will rise in the next year or two, not just corruption-related but on the street as well,” said Ion, one of a few opposition lawmakers on a parliamentary commission which altered hundreds of amendments to the bill hours before it went to a final vote.

Dozens of members of the ruling Social Democrat party (PSD), including leader Liviu Dragnea, are under investigation or on trial on corruption charges. They have denied the charges, and have used their majority to try to shake them off, saying they stem from a plot by their opponents to discredit them.

PSD executive secretary Codrin Stefanescu told reporters Monday’s changes aligned the law with basic human rights. “In its new version, the criminal procedure code guarantees it respects all trial rights in line with European norms and this ends abuses,” he said.

“NOBODY IS SAFE”

Ion’s Save Romania Union and colleagues in the opposition Liberal Party have just days to put objections to the constitutional court, part of a legal fight with the ruling party that began soon after it came to power in January 2017 and has now reached a critical stage.

“I was not expecting such a fierce and open battle over the rule of law,” he said in a telephone interview. “But … I will continue fighting for as long as I can.”

Ion and fellow opposition lawmakers have challenged bill after bill at the Constitutional Court while centrist president Klaus Iohannis and thousands of magistrates have also voiced concerns.

But the Social Democrats are pressing on.

In one of the EU’s most graft-prone states, the ruling coalition is in the process of dismissing the chief anti-corruption prosecutor and giving politicians more control over the judiciary as well as loosening up criminal legislation.

Earlier this month, the government bused hundreds of thousands of supporters to Bucharest for a rally against what it said were judicial abuses. It told the crowd there was a parallel state that illegally wire taps them and encourages neighbors to turn on each other.

“You mustn’t be under the illusion that only high-ranking officials or public servants are targets,” Dragnea told them. “Nobody is safe. Absolutely everyone can be targeted by a tip-off which could lead to a conviction.”

Ion and his opposition colleagues are part of this parallel state, the PSD has said, as are activists, prosecutors, judges, secret services, journalists and foreign companies.

It is an argument with echoes of neighboring Turkey, where President Tayyip Erdogan has cited a nefarious ‘Deep State’ to justify pursuing political opponents across Turkish society.

It chimes too with Viktor Orban’s criticism of foreign-funded civil society groups in Hungary and with Poland, where the government often refers to ‘Poles of the worst kind’.

But while Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski are seen as nationalist ideologues, critics say Dragnea has more pragmatic motives in undoing anti-graft efforts.

Dragnea has been found guilty in a vote-rigging case, barring him from the post of prime minister.

A preliminary verdict in the trial in which he stands accused of inciting other officials to commit abuse of office is due on Thursday. He is also under investigation for allegedly pocketing EU funds. He denies any wrongdoing in all three cases.

“There is no parallel state,” President Klaus Iohannis said. “It is a PSD invention used to explain their anti-judiciary and anti-secret service actions. It is that simple.”

GEEKS FOR DEMOCRACY

The criminal procedure changes include limiting criminal investigations to a year before indictment and restricting the types of evidence and warrants that can be used in prosecutions. They also ban appeal courts from overturning acquittals by lower courts without new evidence.

Anti-corruption prosecutors have seized assets worth $2.3 billion in the past five years and secured 4,751 convictions, including 27 lawmakers and 83 mayors across parties, as well as ministers, county council heads, state firm managers and magistrates.

Romania was the country where the European Anti-Fraud Office OLAF ran most investigations of EU funds misuse last year.

The Social Democrats have said they aim to approve changes to the criminal code by mid-July and critics expect attempts to shorten sentences and target graft offences.

The European Commission has limited options. It can maintain the justice monitoring mechanism and trigger infringement procedures, and it can cut development funds, which Romania is already struggling to tap. It can also continue keeping Bucharest outside the borderless Schengen area.

Asked to comment, a Commission spokesman said it was following the judicial and criminal codes reforms closely. “We take note of the adoption of the criminal procedure code. We will look into it and analyze it,” he said.

Legal challenges to the new judicial overhaul have nearly run their course and the president will soon be obliged to sign it into law. It limits the president’s powers in appointing chief prosecutors and sets up a special unit to prosecute potential crimes committed by magistrates.

Judge Cristi Danilet was part of the team reforming the judiciary in the run-up to EU accession and a member of the judicial watchdog. He said attempts to weaken graft laws were not new but they were more concentrated now.

“There are a lot of them, radical and in an extremely short timespan, that is why we are all so scared. It’s a blitzkrieg.”

Dragnea has said changes to the criminal codes are meant to reflect EU directives and previous court rulings and has denied they are intended to safeguard politicians. “There is not one amendment made for a specific person,” he told Reuters.

Ion is not giving up. “Nothing is forever, the PSD will lose power eventually and judicial legislation will be repaired.”

With the next election due in 2020, IT entrepreneur Catalin Tenita is working to finance opinion surveys, monitor public spending and encourage people to vote by connecting programmers with civil society groups via his Geeks for Democracy platform.

“It is the duty of every generation to make an effort to survive,” he said. “No battle is lost.”

Additional reporting by Matt Robinson and Robin Emmott editing by Philippa Fletcher

The post Romanian ruling party conjures parallel state fears in legal… appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2K9d41K via Breaking News

Romanian ruling party conjures parallel state fears in legal…

BUCHAREST (Reuters) – When Stelian Ion set aside law for politics he was hoping to fight for Romania’s environment. Instead the opposition lawmaker finds himself in a battle with the ruling party over fundamental changes to criminal law.

Member of the opposition Save Romania Union party, lawyer Stelian Ion, attends a meeting of the parliamentary committee aiming to modify the justice laws, in Bucharest, Romania, June 18, 2018. Inquam Photos/Octav Ganea via REUTERS

This week the tussle came to a head when parliament approved legal changes Ion said could encourage criminals to act with impunity, the latest twist in a regional drama that has exposed the fragility of eastern Europe’s post-communist democracies.

The ruling party’s overhaul of criminal procedures on Monday was part of a legislative campaign to stop what it describes as a conspiracy to bring it down via unfounded corruption charges.

Its intervention in the justice system has prompted the biggest protests since communism fell in 1989 and thrown down a challenge to the European Union, which Romania joined in 2007.

Brussels is already embroiled in a standoff with Poland over court reforms that the EU says threaten the rule of law and Romania’s moves risk broadening a rift between east and west.

The U.S. State Department and the European Commission have criticized the planned legal changes: the Commission keeps Romania’s justice system under special monitoring and has praised magistrates for tackling high-level graft.

Magistrates and other experts told Reuters the bill rushed through parliament would raise the burden of proof for all criminal investigations, not just those alleging corruption. Cases would collapse and many crimes could go unpunished, they said.

“If the bill passes into law as is …. crime will rise in the next year or two, not just corruption-related but on the street as well,” said Ion, one of a few opposition lawmakers on a parliamentary commission which altered hundreds of amendments to the bill hours before it went to a final vote.

Dozens of members of the ruling Social Democrat party (PSD), including leader Liviu Dragnea, are under investigation or on trial on corruption charges. They have denied the charges, and have used their majority to try to shake them off, saying they stem from a plot by their opponents to discredit them.

PSD executive secretary Codrin Stefanescu told reporters Monday’s changes aligned the law with basic human rights. “In its new version, the criminal procedure code guarantees it respects all trial rights in line with European norms and this ends abuses,” he said.

“NOBODY IS SAFE”

Ion’s Save Romania Union and colleagues in the opposition Liberal Party have just days to put objections to the constitutional court, part of a legal fight with the ruling party that began soon after it came to power in January 2017 and has now reached a critical stage.

“I was not expecting such a fierce and open battle over the rule of law,” he said in a telephone interview. “But … I will continue fighting for as long as I can.”

Ion and fellow opposition lawmakers have challenged bill after bill at the Constitutional Court while centrist president Klaus Iohannis and thousands of magistrates have also voiced concerns.

But the Social Democrats are pressing on.

In one of the EU’s most graft-prone states, the ruling coalition is in the process of dismissing the chief anti-corruption prosecutor and giving politicians more control over the judiciary as well as loosening up criminal legislation.

Earlier this month, the government bused hundreds of thousands of supporters to Bucharest for a rally against what it said were judicial abuses. It told the crowd there was a parallel state that illegally wire taps them and encourages neighbors to turn on each other.

“You mustn’t be under the illusion that only high-ranking officials or public servants are targets,” Dragnea told them. “Nobody is safe. Absolutely everyone can be targeted by a tip-off which could lead to a conviction.”

Ion and his opposition colleagues are part of this parallel state, the PSD has said, as are activists, prosecutors, judges, secret services, journalists and foreign companies.

It is an argument with echoes of neighboring Turkey, where President Tayyip Erdogan has cited a nefarious ‘Deep State’ to justify pursuing political opponents across Turkish society.

It chimes too with Viktor Orban’s criticism of foreign-funded civil society groups in Hungary and with Poland, where the government often refers to ‘Poles of the worst kind’.

But while Orban and Jaroslaw Kaczynski are seen as nationalist ideologues, critics say Dragnea has more pragmatic motives in undoing anti-graft efforts.

Dragnea has been found guilty in a vote-rigging case, barring him from the post of prime minister.

A preliminary verdict in the trial in which he stands accused of inciting other officials to commit abuse of office is due on Thursday. He is also under investigation for allegedly pocketing EU funds. He denies any wrongdoing in all three cases.

“There is no parallel state,” President Klaus Iohannis said. “It is a PSD invention used to explain their anti-judiciary and anti-secret service actions. It is that simple.”

GEEKS FOR DEMOCRACY

The criminal procedure changes include limiting criminal investigations to a year before indictment and restricting the types of evidence and warrants that can be used in prosecutions. They also ban appeal courts from overturning acquittals by lower courts without new evidence.

Anti-corruption prosecutors have seized assets worth $2.3 billion in the past five years and secured 4,751 convictions, including 27 lawmakers and 83 mayors across parties, as well as ministers, county council heads, state firm managers and magistrates.

Romania was the country where the European Anti-Fraud Office OLAF ran most investigations of EU funds misuse last year.

The Social Democrats have said they aim to approve changes to the criminal code by mid-July and critics expect attempts to shorten sentences and target graft offences.

The European Commission has limited options. It can maintain the justice monitoring mechanism and trigger infringement procedures, and it can cut development funds, which Romania is already struggling to tap. It can also continue keeping Bucharest outside the borderless Schengen area.

Asked to comment, a Commission spokesman said it was following the judicial and criminal codes reforms closely. “We take note of the adoption of the criminal procedure code. We will look into it and analyze it,” he said.

Legal challenges to the new judicial overhaul have nearly run their course and the president will soon be obliged to sign it into law. It limits the president’s powers in appointing chief prosecutors and sets up a special unit to prosecute potential crimes committed by magistrates.

Judge Cristi Danilet was part of the team reforming the judiciary in the run-up to EU accession and a member of the judicial watchdog. He said attempts to weaken graft laws were not new but they were more concentrated now.

“There are a lot of them, radical and in an extremely short timespan, that is why we are all so scared. It’s a blitzkrieg.”

Dragnea has said changes to the criminal codes are meant to reflect EU directives and previous court rulings and has denied they are intended to safeguard politicians. “There is not one amendment made for a specific person,” he told Reuters.

Ion is not giving up. “Nothing is forever, the PSD will lose power eventually and judicial legislation will be repaired.”

With the next election due in 2020, IT entrepreneur Catalin Tenita is working to finance opinion surveys, monitor public spending and encourage people to vote by connecting programmers with civil society groups via his Geeks for Democracy platform.

“It is the duty of every generation to make an effort to survive,” he said. “No battle is lost.”

Additional reporting by Matt Robinson and Robin Emmott editing by Philippa Fletcher

The post Romanian ruling party conjures parallel state fears in legal… appeared first on World The News.

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Expert: Let’s be honest. The only reason anyone in the West, perhaps with the exception of Germans, is interested in the Ukraine is because since the current state was carved out of the Russian Empire, the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Poland following the Great War, it has been the focus of attacks on the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation. The number of states or countries where political instability is aggravated by ethnic, religious or nationality conflicts is great. The number of places that draw attention or better said are targeted for mass media attention is far smaller. This is certainly not a question of just dessert. It would do well to remember that the most notorious interest in the Ukraine as a territory was that of the German Empire under the rule of Adolph Hitler and National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP aka Nazis). Not only did the NSDAP recruit an enormous following during its reign, but the Ukraine also provided division strength Waffen SS units with which war against Jews, Communists, nationalists and the Soviet Union was waged. In fact, the British Empire adopted some 7,000 members of the Ukrainian 14th Volunteer Division SS Galizia who had surrendered in the wake of Soviet victory on 10 May 1945 and shipped them to Britain to become citizens and where they were to wait as silent reserves for the covert war to be fought subsequently against the Soviet Union. When people in Britain became aware of this fact the intervention of the US secret services prevented all but one or two of these war criminals from being indicted or tried as such. I say “war criminals” because one of the outcomes of the Nuremberg trials was to declare inter alia the NSDAP and the SS (Schutzstaffel) criminal organisations. Hence the Waffen SS, the paramilitary part of the SS attached to the German regular army (Wehrmacht), was prima facie a criminal organisation and not treated as a regular military branch of the German armed forces.1 This was so obvious that even the renowned German liberal author, Gunter Grass, felt compelled to conceal his youthful inspiration to join this outfit—not unlike many Americans who for generations have been impressed by the smart uniforms and elite reputation of the US Marine Corps.2 Leaving the individual guilt or innocence of those who spent their “national service” in this esteemed combat formation aside, there can be no doubt that much of the legacy of what we call war crimes, as opposed to simply being on the losing side, is based on the historically unique decisions taken by the International Tribunal constituted in London to dispense what US chief prosecutor Robert Jackson insisted ought not to go down in history as mere victors’ justice.3 So when a coup d’etat in Kiev led to the domination of the Ukraine government by members of parties whose acknowledged hero was the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, anyone who had the least recollection of Ukrainian Nazis was bound to be disturbed—assuming they were of the anti-Nazi or anti-fascist persuasion.4 At the same time given the historical record of Western support for Nazis, the pretence that this event was merely a result of conflicts over potential alliance between the Kiev government and the EU/NATO is absurd on its face. However, instead of this history and continuous policy of the forces that have driven NATO since its founding, the focus of attention to the Ukraine crisis has been the question of whether an independent Ukraine is entitled to combine with the European Union and its armed wing or compelled by history or nature to remain in what 19th century-style geo-politicians (across the entire political spectrum) would call the Russian sphere of influence. The issues are even further clouded by the unstated but deeply held belief—here again across virtually the entire Western political spectrum—that to oppose Russia’s interest in the Ukraine is nothing less than defending freedom itself. The principal domestic issues for the Ukraine—aside from the question of who controls the country and its resources—is not much different from those that plague all countries who were “freed” from the Soviet Union in 1989-90 after its political and economic collapse. These include the targeting of their cheap labour, their agricultural potential, and the overall capacity for super-exploitation by a European Union, especially Germany, in search of higher profit rates. The rapacious investment practices which have plundered the Baltic States, turned the state-owned—albeit bureaucratic fiefdoms—of the former Soviet Union, and more importantly the population of Europe east of the Oder-Neisse border into a freebooter’s paradise, have forced many of the people inhabiting the “East” into paupers beyond what they had experienced in the worst years of the war and the Soviet reconstruction period.5 This has led to massive emigration—where possible—and the creation of islands where those highly skilled professionals remaining provide services to Westerners for pennies.6 The obvious counter-argument to this indictment is that the Russian Federation offers no alternative whether because it is still saturated with the remains of the moribund Soviet system under Vladimir Putin or it is dominated by corrupt oligarchies who are ultimately to blame for this poverty. There is no doubt that neither the Soviet Union nor its successor, the Russian Federation, can defend, either ideologically or practically, claims to being socialist, let alone communist. So to the extent one feels compelled to defend Russia and its policies in comparison to the system the EU/NATO propagates and defends, this defence must be based on real political conditions. Perhaps it is necessary to contemplate—for the sake of argument—some long forgotten Enlightenment philosophy. Let us suppose that the really great and the less great powers compete among each other to offer the best possible conditions of human existence. This competition would be free but amicable. The objective would be to solve all the problems an economy and a polity could face in a manner to produce human happiness. Just for the sake of argument we might take the utilitarian model of the greatest good for the greatest number and given that almost no one pretends to believe in communism this objective is possible under what is called “capitalism”—or to take the US euphemism, “free enterprise”. This is a very generous supposition indeed but let us take its advocates at their word. The NATO founded in 1949 to defend the US regime’s claim to 60+% of the world’s resources is the American “happiness team”. It would like to win the Ukraine to its side because the team has the best solutions for the happiness of the world’s latent Americans, also those Ukrainians who are just waiting to become American, at least in principle. The cause of the Ukrainian crisis is therefore the Russian refusal to let all these Ukrainians manifest their innately American souls. The reader may laugh. However, he, she or they (assuming a gender role has yet to be fixed) will certainly believe that the Western team is ultimately the one to which everyone should belong, if only to avoid disputes between teams. The great inconvenience lies in the residual idea held by many people; e.g., Russians, Chinese or Koreans, that they are satisfied being Russian, Chinese or Korean. This is incomprehensible even to much of the Left in the West since most believe that with all its faults, the US has only been fighting wars for the past century to free a world crying to become American. Big countries with strange alphabets, heretical religions and histories longer than that of the USA insist on obstructing the march to the Promised Land or at least consumption of the fantasy that one has arrived there. The basic conflict therefore is between those who believe that everyone—at least in Europe (and white)– ought to be American in spirit or through membership in the EU vicariously sweat through the nightmare on the Potomac. Now add to this the political-economic reality that the EU’s armed wing in its subordination to the US “happiness team” is anything but benignly competitive. Nor is it in the least interested in human happiness for Ukrainians or its own citizens. Together we have a fundamental environmental condition within which any sane discussion of the Ukraine since 1989 must be conducted. Anything else is simply ridiculous. Chris Kaspar de Ploeg is a journalist, not a historian. That is not a disparagement. It simply means that Ukraine in the Crossfire is an account of current events by someone whose metier is the daily reporting of events, analysis and opinion, as it is presented in mass media. The challenge facing any serious journalist is to render quickly unfolding events intelligible to readers, viewers and listeners. A good journalist not only knows how to produce intelligible reporting but ought to be able to appraise the work of others doing the same job. That is what makes de Ploeg’s book interesting reading. The mass media is, despite its open access, a very opaque institution. There are several reasons for this. One is that there is a fundamental conflict between the witness to events and the organisational structure through which such witness is transmitted. Major mass media in the West is historically private property. Prior to the great fascist era, roughly from the 1840s until the 1930s, there was an important segment of the mass media owned and operated by political movements; e.g., workers’ associations and parties. These were subjected to heavy censorship but were mainly financed by members of those movements and organisations. They competed with the commercially-owned media and the organs of the Church. By the end of the 19th century such media was largely subdued in North America by a combination of repression and professionalization. Pulitzer, the US newspaper magnate, founded the first journalism school in the US and stimulated the idea that the only credible journalism was professional—people trained (and later hired by commercial ventures) to produce “objective” news free from any ostensible political interest. In Europe the State intervened to suppress partisan media. This led to the creation of the dubiously renowned BBC in the British Empire and with the rise of fascism on the Continent the violent persecution of competition with the corporate and State-owned media. The State-owned journalist was slowly endowed with a quasi-civil service status giving job security. Under regimes where the commercial media was viewed by the State as insufficiently reliable, it was subjected to all sorts of restrictions some of which were tantamount to censorship or prior restraint. As a result the independent journalist has actually become quite rare. Either such journalists have developed celebrity status, which insulates them from much official control or they have learned to write in such ways that their product does not directly offend those in power. Throughout the some two hundred years of popular literacy upon which mass print journalism and journalists have been able to thrive there have always been propagandists. These writers or reporters have either officially or unofficially generated product for interest groups who preferred anonymity in order to benefit from the appearance of independence by the journalist. Journalists have worked as spies—and often been treated as such in the countries where they go to report. Journalists have also served as witting and unwitting conduits for official (State and commercial) propaganda. This was the significance of the notorious CIA Operation Mockingbird but also the testimony by CIA director William Colby in which he said the agency maintained close relationships with many in the major media.7 The best a reader and a good and truly independent journalist can do is read multiple outlets and sources, preferably in more than one language. Here it is worth noting that even a common reference source today—Wikipedia—has entries that vary in content from one language to the next on the same subject. This may be a luxury for the average person in search of reliable information but it is one of the tasks that a well-versed and honest journalist can do; namely, analysing the foreign language media when reporting to the target readership/audience. De Ploeg shows that he understands this. Ukraine in the Crossfire does not rely solely upon the English language coverage. Judging by his references he has spent considerable time reading and analysing the Russian and Ukrainian media. Those who know either language will find reference to those sources, too. He also explicitly tackles the conflicting reports of the same events by partisan media, calling attention to discrepancies as well as convergences. Common sense—if that means anything—will tell the reader that where two violent opponents admit the same facts a higher degree of credibility ought to be attached when drawing conclusions. Nevertheless as in all current events in highly charged conflicts it is unlikely that anyone has the whole picture—even of his or her own side. Ukraine in the Crossfire comprises twenty-one chapters, a glossary and an index. The chapters are roughly chronological reflecting the beginning of the crisis as it was reported and continuing through different stages and theatres of conflict. He starts with the perception, widely held and disputed, that the crisis arose from a breach of faith by the West (US/ NATO) when as a condition for the peaceful dissolution of the barriers that created the German Democratic Republic and the subsequent withdrawal of the Red Army from Germany, there would be no advances of NATO to the Soviet (now Russian) border. He then briefly explains the composition of the current Republic of the Ukraine and how the mixture of Russians and Ukrainians posed conflict potential within the Ukrainian polity. Then he moves onto the domestic developments, the decline in the economy and the decision of Ukrainian governments to seek economic aid from the US-dominated Bretton Woods institutions (IMF/World Bank). The foreseeable result (austerity doctrine has been a cornerstone of IMF/World Bank policy since de-colonisation began) aggravated tensions between the ethnically Ukrainian part of the country which is one of Europe’s breadbaskets and the industrialised Russian part with its historical integration into the Soviet/Russian economy. Corruption is then a central theme. With not even the façade of an operating market economy the system of trade and industry was unable to serve the legitimate needs of the people already strained by drastically declining income and living standards. It is at this point that the economic conflict becomes salient. Industry is concentrated in the Russophone Eastern Ukraine. Its production had been directed to supplying Russia. Western Ukraine exported foodstuffs; e.g., grain to the West. Cheap grain from the Ukraine has enabled more expensive agricultural production in the EU (especially Germany to shift to the non-food sector, like tax-subsidised maize for bio-fuel). Ukrainian manufactured goods were undesired competition in the EU. Hence the emerging policy from the new Kiev regime was to turn as much of the economy toward the West as possible, to the disadvantage of East Ukrainian factories. Moreover a long-standing policy to weaken Russia has been to deny it access to markets. By spoiling Ukrainian industry Russia would be deprived of another traditional trading partner. The final third of De Ploeg’s book is devoted to the foreign policy objectives of the West (US/NATO) of which subordinating Russia remains a high priority. The Western policy toward Russia is largely governed by the Anglo-American imperial elite. The Russian Empire was almost entirely agricultural until the 1930s when the Soviet Union completed an industrialisation process in approximately 20 years equivalent to what Britain, Germany and the US had taken over a century to accomplish.8 Thus the Soviet Union had become a virtually autarchic economy by the time Germany invaded in 1940. Like industrialisation in the West, the process of restructuring a huge landmass where some 80% of the population were peasants into the second largest industrial economy in the world was accomplished at tremendous human cost—adding to that a civil war prolonged by Western intervention and a world war in which between 20-30 million of the country’s population were killed and its European half burned to the ground.9 The potential for a country like the Soviet Union—never mind its official ideology—to compete with Britain and the US in the world marketplace was the single greatest fear driving the elite in London, New York and Washington. Unlike the new nations emerging as a result of de-colonisation, the Soviet Union/Russia had all the raw materials they needed and the technical capability to develop on their own. Worse than that they could defend themselves from invasion or colonisation and they were able and within their material limits willing to help with arms and technical support precisely those countries the West hoped to dominate despite reluctant grants of independence. All this went under the euphemism “Cold War”—a term intended to deceive citizens in the West about the real nature of US foreign policy since 1945. The “Cold War” was announced to have ended in 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Hence most of the debate about the NATO–Russia policy is couched in the new euphemism of “a new cold war”.10 De Ploeg did not invent this confusion but it is one serious problem that his book among many have when trying to explain Russia’s role in the world and the position of NATO—which by all rights should have been abolished in 1989 (if the stated policy of the US were the same as the unstated one). There are two problems with De Ploeg’s book. One is the limit of the journalistic format in which it is written. The chapters contain a lot of useful information from a variety of sources and thus the book can be seen as a reference for further study. Yet the book lacks an overall framework in which the reader can interpret what De Ploeg has written. In his professional attempt to keep a kind of neutrality of interpretation he fails to offer sufficient structure for the reader to find either a chronology or lines of argument that tie the separate issues together from beginning to end. Thus one has the impression of reading the daily press clippings without any summary of the important facts as they acquire significance later in the period under examination. He attempts to overcome this by drawing on the theoretical approach of one Associate Professor Gordon M. Hahn.11 Hahn is cited four times in the index but it is not quite clear why De Ploeg considers him an authority. The analyses offered about Russia—at least the US sources, rely much on articles that appeared in the US weekly journal, The Nation, as such they often have the archaic sound of that establishment journal’s liberal “Sovietology”, contributing more heat than light when it comes to understanding the Russian Federation.12 One incident that has caused substantial controversy, even among those who are ostensibly sympathetic to Russia’s legitimate interests, is the Crimea. Many who are willing to accept Russia’s interest in protecting Ukrainians of Russian descent or origin stop abruptly when the referendum on the Black Sea peninsula is discussed. It is asserted that Russia had no right to “annex” the Crimea. Mr Putin challenged this interpretation rhetorically with considerable poignancy when he demanded to know why it was considered perfectly legitimate for Kosovo to declare its independence from Serbia and then affirm this with a referendum but NOT legitimate for the inhabitants of the Crimean peninsula to decide their territory should be governed as Russian13—as it had been before Nikita Khrushchev detached the peninsula and assigned it to Ukrainian rule in February 1954—without asking anyone.14 One might add that the US regime has always been a master of annexation. Russia is accused of using its military presence (the Black Sea naval station) to unduly influence the vote. Yet the fact was that the majority of those living in the Crimea are ethnic Russians. If the US were to be taken seriously, then it would be time to re-examine its Mexican immigrant policy—not from the point of view of permissible migrant labour but from the illegal annexation of Texas by white settlers from the US and the Indian and Mexican wars fought to seize approximately 1/3 of Mexican territory and declare its inhabitants foreigners.15 The seizure of most of the US was accomplished by such settler-colonialism schemes (from whom white South Africans in the NP readily acknowledged their heritage). No Mexicans were allowed to vote to keep Texas in their country. Instead paramilitary brigands together with support from the US regime in Washington helped these invited settlers to overthrow their adopted government and steal nearly a third of the landmass of the continental US. Voting is considered by the UN to be adequate display of the citizens’ will, US opinion not withstanding. The referendum held in Crimea and the reintegration of the peninsula region into the Russian Federation has certainly more legitimacy on its face than the naked use of armed force characteristic of Western practice. The term “annexation” is another case of deliberately deceptive language. It is the same kind of deception that presented the US war against Korea as “an act of unprovoked aggression” when, in fact, Koreans north of the border drawn by the US regime had engaged in a struggle to remove that artificial border and reunite their country.16 Neither Koreans nor Russians were “annexing” themselves. De Ploeg takes a clear position against the US intervention in the Ukraine. He also gives reasons for his position. However, he does not err on the other side by maintaining an uncritical view of Russia’s policies, to the extent they may benefit ordinary Ukrainians. It is fair to say that no understanding can be gained by a blanket apology for Russian policies. But then a book about the Ukraine should try to tell the reader as much about what happens in that country and not be an alibi for dissecting Putin. Ukraine in the Crossfire is an attempt to tell as much as can be learned from the Media in a comprehensive way for those who cannot read all the relevant sources (e.g. for language reasons). He attempts to assess the impact of the new POTUS on US policy toward Russia. For the first time since the frenzies of the 1950s, associated with US Senator Joseph McCarthy, it seems a tenant in the White House is being accused of working with (or for) the Russians or at least with them against the interests of the US regime. More concern has been raised about alleged election manipulation in 2016 than in either Bush election although no reasonable observer doubts that the little Bush—who had much better relations with Mr Putin if photographs say anything—manipulated election results in key southern states—maybe with Saudi help. It is by no means clear that a change in the tenant of No. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will change US regime policy toward Russia, except in its manner of presentation to the public. The struggles within the regime’s corporate and government bureaucracies remain largely invisible to the ordinary citizen while the change of faces creates an illusion of change among people focused on celebrity and not political processes. The US “happiness team” with its armed forces swarming about the globe is on the one hand driven by the insatiability of US capitalism/white supremacy to the extent it is the nation’s business model. On the other hand as long as the affairs of other nations are evaluated primarily in terms of “where we go right or wrong” we will continue to miss the point; namely, the responsibility for the conduct of governments and the survival of the regimes of which they are a part belongs foremost to its own subjects/citizenry. All the handwringing about the Ukraine notwithstanding, the real problem for citizens of the EU and US is their inability to control their own ruling class. That inability is then exacerbated when the wars and political terror are allowed to expand beyond the recognised territorial boundaries of states. It is well and good to critique how Ukrainians with or without foreign allies or support operate their State and economy. However, there is no evidence that anyone in the “West” has the track record of disciplining the ruling class, which might constitute added value in the Ukrainian struggles. It would help enormously if at least the ordinary citizens of the West would learn to apply their common sense respect for neighbours at home to those abroad—by minding their own business. There is no great “freedom machine” and the US/EU does not run a “happiness team”. If Ukraine were in the Congo basin, no one in the West other than military and primary resource bandits, would care who rules the country or by what means. Putting the Ukraine situation in perspective for the non-Ukrainian requires open discussion and knowledge of the facts: facts about the NATO, what it is and does; facts about the relationship between the European and Bretton Woods financial bureaucracy and how this corps of suited felons organises wealth extraction throughout the world; facts about the various forms of overt and covert violence organised to enforce the financial regime; e.g., covert action agencies, military missions and mercenary cut-outs. Mr De Ploeg is not the only journalist trying to make sense out of the traces. The compilation of articles he offers is a reasonable attempt to manage a very difficult and sensitive subject. The reader is left to himself to frame the data presented. The missing structure is certainly based on the author’s wish to stay as objective as possible. As argued above this is a conceptual weakness of all modern journalism. To that extent it would be unfair to fault him for it in particular. Any sequence of events reported involves a construction by the reporter. The reporter helps the reader by explaining why an event is presented in a certain sequence. This is essential to good reporting and good history because our purported knowledge base is already thoroughly corrupted. The dictum “he who controls the past, controls the future” has been enhanced by the corollary, “there is neither a past nor a future” but like the never-aging faces in TV and film—we live in an eternal present, punctuated by orgasms and remote-control assassinations. * An exception to the classification of members of the Nazi apparatus as “criminal” was made for those persons conscripted into the Waffen SS. This finding by the International Military Tribunal arises in part from the doctrine of “criminal conspiracy” in Anglo-American jurisprudence, whereby planning and attempting a crime is deemed punishable and that the offense extends to the corporate forms such planning and attempts may take. Since the planning as well as the prosecution of the invasions commencing WWII were held to be criminal, those entities directly involved—essentially the NSDAP regime—were deemed, per se, criminal organisations. (A British documentary film covers the action to move the members of SS Galizia to Britain.) Thus the SS formations in the Ukraine constituted criminal organisations too. The doctrine of “conspiracy” constitutes an extremely controversial aspect of criminal law since it contradicts the principle that a person may only be punished for a crime actually committed. Nonetheless, conspiracy remains an important weapon of the State. The US regime applies its so-called RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act 18 USC §§ 1961-1968) both for ostensible crime control as well as for political repression. * Günter Grass (1927–2015) reveals “Ich war Mitglied der Waffen-SS”, Interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany, (August 11, 2006). Grass confessed that he had lied about his wartime history. But explained that what drew him to National Socialism was its “anti-bourgeois attitude”. * Judge Robert H. Jackson, US Chief Prosecutor at Nuremberg, opening remarks to the IMT proceedings: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgement of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to reason… We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to do justice.” See also the website of The Jackson Center. * Stepan Andriyovych Bandera (1909-1959). Although there is no doubt that Bandera collaborated with the Nazis, this collaboration is often depicted as patriotic and justifiable since it was anti-Soviet nationalism. After the war Bandera worked with the successor organisation to Nazi foreign intelligence service, the Gehlen Organisation (today the BND), restored by the US CIA. He was assassinated in Munich in 1959. * The so-called Oder – Neisse border is the border between the Federal Republic of Germany and Poland. It was agreed between Poland and the government that became the GDR as the final demarcation between the two countries. For decades the FRG refused to recognise this agreement, maintaining claims to territory in Poland that had been part of Prussia and the German Empire. Recognition of the Oder – Neisse border was tacitly given under FRG chancellor Willy Brandt but only became official with the dissolution of the GDR its absorption into the FRG, also known as reunification. * See the extensive work by economist Michael Hudson on this topic, especially with regard to the Baltics. * References to Operation Mockingbird inevitably imply that since it has been exposed it is no longer a program of other government agencies (e.g. CIA). The concept is analogous to money laundering. Propaganda is released to foreign media for dissemination. These reports are then recycled to the target country as “foreign news”—concealing both the original sources and avoiding suspicions that they constitute official lying or manipulation. In the German Wiki article about Mockingbird it is attributed to the US State Department, but under Frank Wisner (head of the Office of Policy Coordination, not explicitly named in the entry), whose department was, in fact, a part of the CIA. The English Wiki article refers to “allegedly a large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early 1950s…” * In fact, the Soviet Union effectively completed two massive industrialisation processes between 1917 and Stalin’s death. The second was occasioned by the West’s war led by Germany, which destroyed most of the infrastructure built in the European part of Russia. A massive relocation of industrial plant to the country’s Asian interior enabled it to continue to produce up to 80% of its war materiel until Germany’s defeat. After the war, deprived of reparations pledged at Yalta, the Soviet Union rebuilt its entire economy. Together the Soviet Union and China suffered more death and destruction than all the other belligerents in between 1939–1945. It is impossible for anyone to say how the Soviet Union would have developed without 70 years of Western aggression, even allowing for the enormous Tsarist legacy with which the country was burdened. The Ukraine was swept up in these processes. Any attempt to treat Ukraine – Soviet relations as if they were conditioned solely by the cultural, religious or political conflicts of the Russian Empire or “Soviet imperialism” is at best an oversimplification. * For a sober history and analysis of the Soviet system, especially its political-economy from the time of the October Revolution 1917, see Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (2005) and The Making of the Soviet System (1985). V. I. Lenin’s Left-wing Communism—An Infantile Disorder shows just how much Lewin’s history reflects the rational perceptions and critique of those who founded the Soviet Union. One of the principal obstacles to intelligent debate about events in the former COMECON countries is the appalling and wilful ignorance of USSR history in the West. * See “Is a New “Cold War” Coming? You can’t be serious”, Dissident Voice (19 May 2014). * A CV attributed to Gordon M. Hahn identifies him as senior researcher, Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program, and Visiting Assistant Professor, Graduate School of International Policy Studies, Monterey Institute for International Studies. Among his previous appointments were as non-resident academic fellow of the Open Society Institute from 2005–2006 in Russia and numerous visiting scholar and fellowships at the Hoover Institute. * Stephen F. Cohen (1938- ) professor emeritus in politics and Russian studies, advisor to other government agencies in the US and spouse of The Nation publisher and OSS diaper baby Katrina vanden Heuvel, during the so-called Cold War Cohen published a regular column in that journal called Sovietology. * Putin: Crimea similar to Kosovo, West is rewriting its own rule book, RT, (18 March 2014). “Our Western partners created the Kosovo precedent with their own hands. In a situation absolutely the same as the one in Crimea, they recognised Kosovo’s secession from Serbia as legitimate while arguing that no permission from a country’s central authority for a unilateral declaration of independence was necessary.” Putin added that the UN International Court of Justice agreed: “That’s what they wrote, that’s what they trumpeted all over the world, coerced everyone into it—and now they are complaining. Why is that?” * Various reasons are given for this low key decision by the Presidium: one was that Khrushchev was pursuing a policy of slow decentralisation and considered Crimea to be part of the Ukraine geographically. Another argument was the underlying status of disputes within the USSR as a result of the deportation of the Crimean Tartars in the wake of WWII. Nazi occupation reached to the gates of Sevastopol. Stalin took a very dim view of any group that was not unambiguously loyal to the Soviet Union and the implication that Tartar units had collaborated with the Nazi occupation just as Ukrainians did was a plausible motivation—if not a justification for such a policy. As a result, however, the region became dominated by ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians. * In 1845 the Republic of Texas was annexed by the US. Previously the Mexican government had invited people to immigrate and settle in the sparsely populated country. The white settlers from the US declared their independence in 1836, independence (and secret annexation) the Mexican government refused to recognise until the US declared war in 1846 and imposed the Treaty of Guadalupe–Hidalgo in 1848. * For a brief comment on this point see the author’s review of I F Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War. For more detailed information see The Origins of the Korean War, 2 Vols. by Bruce Cumings. http://clubof.info/

Expert: Introduction From their dismal swamps, US academic and financial journal editorialists, the mass media and contemporary ‘Asia experts’, Western progressive and conservative politicians croak in unison about China’s environmental and impending collapse. They have variably proclaimed (1) China’s economy is in decline; (2) the debt is overwhelming; a Chinese real estate bubble is ready to burst; (3) the country is rife with corruption and poisoned with pollution; and (4) Chinese workers are staging paralyzing strikes and protests amid growing repression – the result of exploitation and sharp class inequality. The financial frogs croak about China as an imminent military threat to the security of the US and its Asian partners. Other frogs leap for that fly in the sky – arguing that the Chinese now threatens the entire universe! The ‘China doomsters’ with ‘logs in their own eyes’ have systematically distorted reality, fabricated whimsical tales and paint vision, which, in truth, reflect their own societies. As each false claim is refuted, the frogs alter their tunes: When predictions of imminent collapse fail to materialize, they add a year or even a decade to their crystal ball. When their warnings of negative national social, economic and structural trends instead move in a positive direction, their nimble fingers re-calibrate the scope and depth of the crisis, citing anecdotal ‘revelations’ from some village or town or taxi driver conversation. As long-predicted failures fail to materialize, the experts re-hash the data by questioning the reliability of China’s official statistics. Worst of all, Western ‘Asia’ experts and scholars try ‘role reversal’: While US bases and ships increasingly encircle China, the Chinese become the aggressors and the bellicose US imperialists whine about their victim-hood. Cutting through the swamp of these fabrications, this essay aims to outline an alternative and more objective account of China’s current socio-economic and political realty. China: Fiction and Fact We repeatedly read about China’s ‘cheap wage’ economy and the brutal exploitation of its slaving workers by billionaire oligarchs and corrupt political officials. In fact, the average wage in China’s manufacturing sector has tripled during this decade. China’s labor force receives wages which exceed those of Latin America countries, with one dubious exception. Chinese manufacturing wages now approach those of the downwardly mobile countries in the EU. Meanwhile, the neo-liberal regimes, under EU and US pressure, have halved wages in Greece, and significantly reduced incomes in Brazil, Mexico and Portugal. In China, workers wages now surpass Argentina, Colombia and Thailand. While not high by US-EU standards, China’s 2015 wages stood at $3.60 per hour – improving the living standards of 1.4 billion workers. During the time that China tripled its workers ‘wages, the wages of Indian workers stagnate at $0.70 per hour and South African wages fell from $4.30 to $3.60 per hour. This spectacular increase in Chinese worker’s wages is largely attributed to skyrocketing productivity, resulting from steady improvements in worker health, education and technical training, as well as sustained organized worker pressure and class struggle. President Xi Jinping’s successful campaign for the removal and arrest of hundreds of thousands of corrupt and exploitative officials and factory bosses has boosted worker power. Chinese workers are closing the gap with the US minimum wage. At the current rate of growth, the gap, which had narrowed from one tenth to one half the US wage in ten years, will disappear in the near future. China is no longer merely a low-wage, unskilled, labor intensive, assembly plant and export-oriented economy. Today twenty thousand technical schools graduate millions of skilled workers. High tech factories are incorporating robotics on a massive scale to replace unskilled workers. The service sector is increasing to meet the domestic consumer market. Faced with growing US political and military hostility, China has diversified its export market, turning from the US to Russia, the EU, Asia, Latin America and Africa. Despite these impressive objective advances, the chorus of ‘crooked croakers’ continue to churn out annual predictions of China’s economic decline and decay. Their analyses are not altered by China’s 6.7% GNP growth in 2016; they jump on the 2017 forecast of ‘decline’ to 6.6% as proof of its looming collapse! Not be dissuaded by reality, the chorus of ‘Wall Street croakers’ wildly celebrate when the US announces a GNP increase from 1% to 1.5%! While China has acknowledged its serious environmental problems, it is a leader in committing billions of dollars (2% of GNP) to reduce greenhouse gases – closing factories and mines. Their efforts far exceed those of the US and EU. China, like the rest of Asia, as well as the US, needs to vastly increase investments in rebuilding its decaying or non-existent infrastructure. The Chinese government is alone among nations in keeping up with and even exceeding its growing transportation needs – spending $800 billion a year on high speed railroads, rail lines, seaports, airports subways and bridges. While the US has rejected multi-national trade and investment treaties with eleven Pacific countries, China has promoted and financed global trade and investment treaties with more than fifty Asia-Pacific (minus Japan and the US), as well as African and European states. China’s leadership under President Xi Jinping has launched an effective large-scale anti-corruption campaign leading to the arrest or ouster of over 200,000 business and public officials, including billionaires, and top politburo and Central Committee members. As a result of this national campaign, purchases of luxury items have significantly declined. The practice of using public funds for elaborate 12 course dinners and the ritual of gift giving and taking are on the wane. Meanwhile, despite the political campaigns to ‘drain the swamp’ and successful populist referenda, nothing remotely resembling China’s anti-corruption campaign have taken root in the US and the UK despite daily reports of swindles and fraud involving the hundred leading investment banks in the Anglo-American world. China’s anti-corruption campaign may have succeeded in reducing inequalities. It clearly has earned the overwhelming support of the Chinese workers and farmers. Journalists and academics, who like to parrot the Anglo-American and NATO Generals, warn that China’s military program poses a direct threat to the security of the US, Asia and indeed the rest of world. Historical amnesia infects these most deep diving frogs. Forgotten is how the post WW2 US invaded and destroyed Korea and Indo-China (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) killing over nine million inhabitants, both civilian and defenders. The US invaded, colonized and neo-colonized the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, killing up to one million inhabitants. It continues to build and expand its network of military bases encircling China, It recently moved powerful, nuclear armed THADD missiles to the North Korean border, capable of attacking Chinese and even Russian cities. The US is the world’s largest arms exporter, surpassing the collective production and sale of the next five leading merchants of death. In contrast, China has not unilaterally attacked, invaded or occupied anyone in hundreds of years. It does not place nuclear missiles on the US coast or borders. In fact, it does not have a single overseas military base. Its own military bases, in the South China Sea, are established to protect its vital maritime routes from pirates and the increasingly provocative US naval armada. China’s military budget, scheduled to increase by 7% in 2017, is still less than one-fourth of the US budget. For its part, the US promotes aggressive military alliances, points radar and satellite guided missiles at China, Iran and Russia, and threatens to obliterate North Korea. China’s military program has been and continues to be defensive. Its increase is based on its response to US provocation. China’s foreign imperial thrust is based on a global market strategy while Washington continues to pursue a militarist imperial strategy, designed to impose global domination by force. Conclusion The frogs of the Western intelligentsia have crocked loud and long. They strut and pose as the world’s leading fly catchers – but producing nothing credible in terms of objective analyses. China has serious social, economic and structural problems, but they are systematically confronting them. The Chinese are committed to improving their society, economy and political system on their own terms. They seek to solve immensely challenging problems, while refusing to sacrifice their national sovereignty and the welfare of their people. In confronting China as a world capitalist competitor, the US official policy is to surround China with military bases and threaten to disrupt its economy. As part of this strategy, Western media and so-called ‘experts’ magnify China’s problems and minimize their own. Unlike China, the US is wallowing at less than 2% annual growth. Wages stagnate for decades; real wages and living standards decline. The costs of education and health care skyrocket, while the quality of these vital services decline dramatically. Costs are growing, unemployment is growing and worker suicide and mortality is growing. It is absolutely vital that the West acknowledge China’s impressive advances in order to learn, borrow and foster a similar pattern of positive growth and equity. Co-operation between China and the US is essential for promoting peace and justice in Asia. Unfortunately, the previous US President Obama and the current President Trump have chosen the path of military confrontation and aggression. The two terms of Obama’s administration present a record of failing wars, financial crises, burgeoning prisons and declining domestic living standards. But for all their noise, these frogs, croaking in unison, will not change the real world. http://clubof.info/