Carpenter nabbed with forex worth Rs.14mn in his rectum

 

2017-07-28 

A 54-year-old Sri Lankan man was arrested at the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) departure lounge this morning while attempting to smuggle out foreign currency worth Rs.14mn concealed in his rectum.

Deputy Director and Customs Spokesman Sunil Jayaratne said the detection was done at 9.30p.m at the BIA Departure Lounge by the customs Narcotic Control Unit officers and found foreign currencies packed in two condoms.

Meanwhile, Speaking to the Daily Mirror BIA Deputy Customs Director Parakrama Basnayake said the suspect was arrested after a tip off to the customs.

He was bound to Singapore via Mumbai by flight 9W251.

During the inquiry the suspect was identified as a carpenter from Negombo area.

“Four customs officers took the suspect into custody for his suspicious behavior and according to the received information. During his body and baggage search the customs officers found nothing. Later, they directed the suspect to the Negombo hospital for an internal body scan. According to the doctors’ report after the scan, it was found two tubes shaped objects were found in the suspect’s rectum. The suspect agreed to take out those two objects by himself,” Mr. Basnayake said.
Later, the customs found two bundles of foreign currency wrapped inside the condoms.

Accordingly, the customs officers found Rs. 14,000,000 worth foreign currencies equaling to 59 notes of 500 Euros, 48 notes of 1000 Swiss Franks and 1000 notes of Norway Krones packed inside the two condoms, he said.

The suspect was earlier arrested by the customs two years before for attempting to smuggle out six gold biscuits, Mr. Basnayake said.

After the Customs inquiry, the foreign currencies were forfeited and the suspect was imposed a penalty of Rs. 300,000.

Detection was made by Assistant Customs Superintendent Nuwan Abeynayake, Rasika Samanjith, Srilal Wijewardena, Nuwan Balage.

The Investigation was carried out by the BIA Deputy Customs Director Parakrama Basnayake. (Chaturanga Pradeep)

China: Police arrest 18 members of ‘female Jesus’ cult

18 members of the Church of Almighty God were arrested in China recently. Source: YouTube screengrab

 27th July 2017

POLICE in China say they have recently arrested 18 suspected members of the “The Church of Almighty God”, a religious cult linked to a widely-publicised murder of a woman at a McDonald’s restaurant in 2014.

According to national news agency Xinhua on Tuesday, China’s Zhejiang Province said they detained the suspects following an investigation into the cult’s activities, seizing laptops and books used to propagate their beliefs.

Known among Chinese as Quannengshen, the cult gained notoriety as viral videos showing five of its members beating a woman to death at a McDonald’s outlet in the eastern city of Zhaoyuan after she refused to provide her contact number to be recruited.

SEE ALSO: China rounds up alleged cult members after McDonald’s attack 

First appearing in the 1990s, the Christian cult claims Jesus was resurrected as a woman in the form of the wife of its founder Zhao Weishan. Zhao, who is also known as Xu Wenshan, fled with his wife to the United States in September 2000.

Xinhua quoted a police officer from Changxing County, Dong Jianfeng, as saying most of the apprehended suspects showed signs of depression.

“Some of them are divorced and do not seem to know how to vent their suppressed emotions,” Dong said.

“Some of their families have experienced bad accidents and caused them to become depressed.”

Initial investigations revealed the cult is bankrolled by donations from members. The group has previously boasted having more than 500,000 adherents in the past although authorities have yet to confirm the figure.

Police said its members were able to rise up the ranks of the cult if they made bigger donations.

“Every member was willing to donate their money and the amounts ranged from  CNY10,000(US$1,481) to tens of thousands of yuan.”

“The cult’s ‘leaders’ imposed spiritual control over the members,” Dong said. “They were told that as long as they gave donations, the Almighty God would keep their illness at bay.”

He added that eight of the detained suspects had denounced their cult beliefs and had been rehabilitated.

Watch: Here’s What Senior U.S. Officials Say About Russian Election Interference

Top intelligence and administration officials answer questions about the 2016 presidential election.

We made a little video.


BY ALEXANDER POTCOVARU, BENJAMIN WITTES-JULY 28, 2017 

No commentary. No opinions. No nothing — except recent senior intelligence and administration officials answering questions about what they believe about the Russian election interference.

The officials all spoke at last week’s Aspen Security Forum. The full videos of their remarks are available here. The other snippets are taken from, well, elsewhere.

As the Romans might say, res ipsa loquitur.

EXCLUSIVE: Saudi investor ploughs millions into liberal icon of UK media

Sultan Mohamed Abuljadayel gains 'significant control' of Independent alongside Russian media mogul Evgeny Lebedev

Independent's newspaper folded in 2016, but fortunes have since improved with digital growth (AFP)

Jamie Merrill-Saturday 29 July 2017

LONDON - A mysterious Saudi-based investor has ploughed millions of dollars into a British news organisation renowned for championing liberal causes, in a move that will enrage human rights and media freedom campaigners. 

Sultan Mohamed Abuljadayel, 42, listed in company records as a Saudi-based Saudi Arabian national, has acquired up to 50 percent of the Independent website, whose newspaper shook Britain's journalism establishment in the 1980s before struggling financially and ditching the printed word in 2016.

According to registers updated on Companies House on Friday, Abuljadayel controls up to 50 percent of voting rights within Independent Digital News and Media, the company that controls the Independent brand.

An informed Saudi source described Abuljadayel to Middle East Eye as coming from an "established business family based in Medina". 

He now sits with Evgeny Lebedev, the son of a Soviet KGB spy turned Russian oligarch, as a "person of significant control" in the company. Justin Byam Shaw, described by close associates as a "serial entrepreneur", is a third.

A source with knowledge of the deal said the investment may be as much as £100m, although MEE was unable to independently confirm the exact amount changing hands.

But such a figure would be an incredible reversal of fortunes for a company that had lost millions of pounds a year for decades and was sold to the Lebedev family in 2010 for the sum of £1.

Evgeny Lebedev, the son of a former Russian KGB agent (AFP)

The paper's enduring left-of-centre coverage had ensured the title remained an editorial force even as it struggled with declining sales and huge losses before eventually closing in what was a blow to British media plurality.

The Independent's fortunes have risen since the presses stopped rolling last year, however, with the company reporting a record profit of £1.7m ($2.2m) as online readership increased by 20 percent and revenue jumped by 75 percent.

But the Saudi purchase of a "significant" chunk of the company has sparked criticism among rights campaigners.

Peter Tatchell told Middle East Eye: "It would not seem consistent with the Independent's record of championing liberal values for a Saudi sultan to have a significant share in the ownership of this media outlet.

"A lot more questions need to be asked, and answered, before the public can be reassured that there is no clash of values between the sultan and the Independent."

Seamus Dooley, acting general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, told MEE that he had major misgivings about the revelation.

"The NUJ is in favour of maximum transparency in terms of media ownership, and we know nothing about this group," he said, referring to the investor.

"Also, there are serious concerns about Saudi and their relationship with the concept of media freedom and the record of anyone from Saudi in terms of human rights is something that would be of concern to us."

Questions need to be answered before the public can be reassured that there is no clash of values

- Peter Tatchell

MEE understands the deal was signed as long as a month ago and that the Saudi move follows previous interest from a separate group of Gulf investors several years ago. 

When asked about the involvement of a Saudi national in a paper that has championed progressive politics, gender equality and LGBT rights and opposed the use of the death penalty, a source close to the deal told MEE: "We really do live in weird times."

Senior journalists at the Independent said they were unaware of the investment, and declined to comment further.

Writing on the website six months after the closure of the print edition, the Independent’s editor, Christian Broughton, said: "Our guiding principles have not changed.

"An absolute rejection of party political ties and spin, a total commitment to honesty, a heartfelt empathy with people of every creed and colour around the world, a deep-set belief in progressive, liberal values, and passion.”

Broughton did not respond to requests for comment from Middle East Eye before publication.

Saudi Arabia and press freedom

Saudi involvement in the media outlet will prove controversial, given the kingdom's use of the death penalty and well-document allegations of torture and mistreatment of prisoners.

According to Freedom House, which monitors press freedom, Saudi Arabia has "one of the most restricted media environments in the world”. 

Writers critical of the Saudi government face “harsh punishment” and the ongoing military offensive in Yemen has seen the Saudi government "shape media coverage" by "cracking down on domestic dissent and restricting access to Yemen by foreign journalists".

Lebedev, who also owns the London Evening Standard newspaper, is a regular on the London social circuit and is regularly pictured in his media outlets, often with members of the royal family. 

He courted controversy earlier this year when he appointed former chancellor George Osborne to edit the Standard.

Lebedev was reported to have made an offer to buy the Daily Telegraph from the Barclay brothers.

Byam Shaw was brought in by former Standard editor Geordie Greig – now editing the Mail on Sunday - who said the "serial entrepreneur" would help negotiate the sale of the majority stake in the Standard from owner Associated Newspapers on behalf of the Lebedevs.

Turkish court frees seven journalists, but others remain behind bars

Trial is seen as attempt to intimidate media in government crackdown after last year’s failed coup

 A protester holds a placard reading Freedom to Cumhuriyet during a demonstration in Istanbul against the trial of the newspaper’s staff. Photograph: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images

Kareem Shaheen and Gözde Hatunoğlu in Istanbul-Friday 28 July 2017

A court in Istanbul has ordered the release of seven journalists from Turkey’s oldest newspaper, Cumhuriyet, after nine months in prison and preliminary hearings in the country’s largest trial of journalists since last year’s coup attempt.

But the court ordered the continued detention of five other journalists – including the newspaper’s top executive and its most senior correspondents – in a partial defeat for press freedom in a country still reeling from the bloody failed putsch.

The decision followed five days of hearings, in which executives, lawyers and correspondents in one of the last big media outlets in the country critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling party were accused of abetting terrorist groups. The next set of hearings is expected in two months.
Several hundred people gathered outside the Çağlayan court in downtown Istanbul to show solidarity with the imprisoned journalists.

Inside, the lawyers defending Cumhuriyet’s staffers delivered closing arguments in a courtroom crowded with families, journalists and international observers.

The lawyers said the indictments against their clients were baseless and that the accusations would inspire fear in journalists working in Turkey, with one comparing it to the McCarthy era in the US in the 1950s, when people suspected of harbouring sympathies to the Communist party were purged from all walks of life based on flimsy evidence.

The landmark trial of the 17 Cumhuriyet staffers is widely seen by human rights and press freedom advocates as an attempt to intimidate journalists with baseless accusations.

Some of the journalists are accused of aiding supporters of Fethullah Gülen , the exiled cleric widely believed to have orchestrated last year’s coup attempt, despite Cumhuriyet’s long-running campaign against the movement.

“We want freedom of thought and the press for our country, we want an impartial and independent judiciary and fair trials for our country,” said Bahri Bayram Belen, one of the top defence lawyers in the case, in an interview with the Guardian during a recess in proceedings. “Without these, we cannot have a democracy.”

Over the previous four days of proceedings, the journalists who took the stand gave powerful testimonials about their incarceration. On Wednesday, Ahmet Șik, a veteran journalist who was imprisoned by the Gülenists for authoring a series of investigations into their abuse of power, laid out how Erdoğan’s ruling party had for years collaborated with the movement.

“Criminalisation of journalistic activities is a common feature of totalitarian regimes,” he said. “My experience shows that because of my journalistic activities I have managed to become the offender of the judiciary of every government and of every period. I am proud of this inheritance I will be leaving to my daughter.”

He added: “I was a journalist yesterday. I am a journalist today. And I will continue practising journalism tomorrow. That means the irreconcilable contradiction between us and those who want to strangle the truth will never end. In these dark days what we need is not further loss of the truth. More than anything we need more truth.”

Turkey remains the world’s largest jailer of journalists, with more than 150 behind bars. The authorities have closed down more than 170 media outlets since last year’s coup under the state of emergency, and 800 journalists have had their press cards revoked and passports confiscated.

Most of the local media has been co-opted by the government, and journalists and opposition officials say advertisers have fled from fledgling newspapers that criticise the government, for fear of repercussion. The unrelenting prosecution of journalists and the threat of government takeovers has also had a chilling effect, leaving Cumhuriyet as one of the lone voices critical of Erdoğan and his ruling party.

Cumhuriyet has angered the government by calling its purge of tens of thousands of civil servants, police and military officers, academics and journalists in the aftermath of the coup a “witch hunt”, and for criticising government policy on the conflict with the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK).

It also embarrassed the government by revealing that the national intelligence service was smuggling weapons into Syria destined for rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad’s regime under the guise of humanitarian aid.

Roy’s Novel: Unveiling worlds within our world

The story follows two characters: Anjum, nee Aftab, a hijra who rejects the politically correct term “transgender”, and Tilo, a Delhi-based architect turned graphic designer who kidnaps a baby from Jantar Mantar.

by Malavika Binny- Jul 28, 2017

Jul 28, 2017

( July 28, 2017, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) Wearing two hats at once can be an uncomfortable fit, but it does not seem to bother the author Arundhati Roy, who for most of her life has railed against state excesses and corporate exploitation while also wielding the pen.

Maybe she does not think of these two jobs as different, but rather as extensions of each other.

This, at least, is the impression Roy gives her readers in her latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Hamish Hamilton), which came out in early June. Two decades in the making, the book records the story of India as it transpired over those 20 years.

This contemporary history is told and retold by myriad voices: those of hijras, people who identify themselves as belonging to the third gender or as transgender; of a dalit man (of the lowest castes) who pretends to be Muslim; of Kashmiris, of Indian civil servants, cold-blooded killers and puppet journalists; of adivasis (tribal populations) and of artists, of owls and kittens and of a dung beetle named Guih Kyom.

Roy’s second fiction work was 20 years in the making. Penguin/Amazon, FAL

Locales are similarly wide-ranging. Roy takes readers from a graveyard in Old Delhi to civil war-torn Kashmir and to central Indian forests, where Maoist insurgents fight India’s army. Some of the book transpires too in the 18th-century astronomical site, Jantar Mantar, the only place in Delhi where people are allowed to protest.

Those are just a few of the backdrops in this panoramic novel, which touches on the various Indian social movements that have captured global attention in recent years, from the 2011 anti-corruption Anna Hazare protests to the 2016 Una dalit struggle.

Roy uses the internal contradictions of the movements and the locales to mirror her meandering plotlines, which knit all these skeins together into a kaleidoscopic larger narrative.

It’s an uneasy fit, and the book often feels like it is about to burst at the seams. Still, Roy somehow holds it all together, clumsily yet passionately, leaving no one and nothing out.

Between a graveyard and a valley

Both the margins and the marginalised speak in the Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a feat Roy has also sought to achieve with both her activism and her non-fiction work.

The story follows two characters: Anjum, nee Aftab, a hijra who rejects the politically correct term “transgender”, and Tilo, a Delhi-based architect turned graphic designer who kidnaps a baby from Jantar Mantar.

Anjum’s life is a lens onto an alternate duniya, or world, one where hijras live and learn together, cloistered, following their own rules, regulations and hierarchies.

That changes forever when Anjum travels to Gujarat, a western Indian state that is known for its recent history of religious violence between Hindus and Muslims, and witnesses a massacre. Shortly thereafter, Anjum moves to a graveyard in Old Delhi.

As always, Roy’s brilliance shines most in her choice of locales and the imagery they invoke.

In The God of Small Things (1997), the banks of the Meenachil River in southern Kerala served as the space of deviance for the protagonists, where Ammu and Velutha have their escapades and Estha and Rahel get up to mischief.

In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the author gives us two contrasting, contradictory settings: a graveyard that becomes a place of life and the verdant Kashmir valley, a space of death and misery.

Anjum starts a guesthouse in the old graveyard, with each room enclosing a grave. Holding feasts for festivals, she invites her friends over to dine regularly at the graveyard-guest house. Later, Tilo moves in permanently with the baby.

The reader understands this resplendent graveyard, which features not just living humans but an impressive stock of animals too, as an ode to tolerating (or, more correctly termed, to accommodating) plurality, a blunt contrast to the truth of modern-day India, with its increasing intolerance towards religious and social differences.

For this, for trying to etch out a semblance of hope, for showing broken things and shattered people coming together to carve out a niche of their own, Roy deserves applause.

Disparate and intertwined tales

At times all these voices, places and problems escalate into a dissonant cacophony that leaves the reader perplexed, exhausted and grasping at the multiple threads of the plot. But the novel’s brilliance lies in how it captures subtle moments, with attention to detail and sharp compassion.

For instance, the Ustad (master) Kulsoom Bi takes Anjum and the other newly initiated hijra residents to a light and sound show at the Red Fort in Delhi just so they can hear the fleeting but distinct coquettish giggle of a court eunuch. She explains to them that they, the hijras, were not “commoners, but members of the staff of the Royal Palace in the medieval period.”

These nuggets of everyday history and poetry keep readers hooked, gradually lowering us through each of the story’s many layers and offering moments of clarity in an otherwise tangled mesh.

Some have called Roy’s novel a “fascinating mess”, but frankly when one decides to write a shattered story about all things, the narrative(s) is bound to get fuzzy.

The book may be difficult for those who have not been following Roy and her causes in the long years since God of Small Things. But those who get her intellectual moorings and understand her role as a voice of dissent in today’s climate of “saffronisation” – the spread of extreme-right Hindu values across India, a nation veering hazardously towards authoritarianism, know that the author and her work are one.

Roy’s novel, much like her role as a public intellectual, is a reminder that the world we inhabit is a composite one – a duniyaof duniyas – where invisible people, their unrepresented struggles and their unacknowledged yearnings have the right to exist.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness tells their story, extolling everyone’s right to be heard, even if only fleetingly, in the coquettish giggle of a court eunuch.

---

Malavika Binny, Researcher, Jawaharlal Nehru University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. 

The Unnoticed Demise of Democracy

By Roberto Savio-Friday, July 28, 2017

ROME, Jul 24 2017 (IPS) - Politicians are so busy fighting for their jobs, they hardly seem to notice that they risk going out of business. Democracy is on the wane, yet the problem is nowhere in Parliaments. Common to all is a progressive loss of vision, of long term planning and solutions, with politics used just for power.

Roberto Savio

In English, there are two terms: politics, which is term for the machinery, and politics, that is the vision. In Latin languages, there is only one, politics, and that is now becoming the adequate term also for English-speaking countries, from May’s UK to Trump’s US.

  In a few years, we have seen an astonishing flourishing of authoritarian governments. Turkey’s Erdogan may be the best example. He was elected in 2002, and hailed as proof that you could be a Muslim and also a champion of democracy. At the end of the decade, he started to take a more fundamentalist and authoritarian approach, until in 2013 there was the famous crackdown on thousands of protesters, protecting a Park in Istanbul intended to be razed for a supermarket.

Since then, the tendency to use power has accelerated. In 2014, Erdogan was accused, along with his son, of corruption (three sons of cabinet ministers were also arrested). He blamed it on the Gulenist Movement, a spiritual movement led by an earlier ally, Fethullah Gulen, who now lives in the US.
 And when in 2016 some military factions attempted a coup against him, he used the coup as a reason to get rid of Gulenist and other dissidents. It has put 60,000 people in jail, and he has dismissed from public employment a staggering 100,000 people.

What is reminiscent of Stalin and Hitler’s practices is how those 100,000 have been treated. They have been banned from private employment, and their passports as well the ones of their families have been revoked. When asked how they will survive, the government’s reaction was to scoff that even eating roots would be “too good” for them.

We’re talking of hundreds of judges, tens of thousands of teachers, university professors, who have been dismissed without any hearing and without any formal imputation. Europe’s reaction? Empty declarations, and since then Erdogan has become more authoritarian.

He has built a Presidential Palace of 1,150 rooms, larger than the White House and the Kremlin, where there is a three-room office dedicated to taste his food to avoid poisoning. The palace cost between 500 million euro (the government’s declaration), and 1 billion dollars (opposition’ estimates).

It could be said in Europe’s defence that Turkey is not a member of the European Union, and his actions have made it extremely unlikely that membership in the EU is possible. But Poland and Hungary not only are members of the EU, but also the main beneficiaries of his economic support. Poland joined the EU in 2004, has received more than 100 billion dollars in various subsidies: double the Marshall Plan in current dollars, the largest transfer of money ever done in modern history.

Yet the government has embarked in a firm path to dismantle democratic institutions (the last, the judicial system), and even the sleepy EU has been obliged to warn that it could take away the right of Poland to vote, to the total indifference of the government. Yet nobody has formally proposed to cut the subsidies, which are now in the budget from 2014 to 2020 another 60 billion dollars – half of what the world spends for development aid for nearly 150 countries.

Hungry is run since 2010 by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who campaigns for “an illiberal democracy”, and, like Poland’s PM Szydlo, has refused to accept any immigrants, in spite of EU subsidies. Hungary, despite its small population (less than 10 million, versus Poland’s 38 million) is the third largest recipient of EU’s subsidies, or 450 dollars per person.

One third of the world population lives on less than that. In addition, the European Investment Bank gives a net subsidy of 1 billion euro, and Hungary received 2.4 billion euro from the balance of Payment Assistance Program. The two countries have formed with Slovakia and Czechia, the Visegrad group, which is in a permanent campaign against the EU and its decisions. Needless to say, subsidies to Slovakia and Czechia largely surpass their contributions.

Are Erdogan, Orban, Szydlo and dictators? On the contrary, they are democratically elected, like Duterte in the Philippines, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Maduro in Venezuela and other 30 authoritarian presidents in the world. But in Europe this is new. And it is also new to see an American President, Donald Trump, present an agenda of isolationism and international confrontation, who was also regularly elected.

A poll at the end of his first semester revealed that his voters would re-elect him again, with the Republican support going down only from 98% to 96%. Nationwide, his popularity has declined to 36%. If elections were held today, he would likely get a second term.

Which brings us to wonder why we still consider elections equivalent to democracy? Because this is how the people can express themselves. But people certainly do not like corruption, which in polls anywhere is considered the most prominent problem of modern governments.

However, unless it reaches a totally systematic level, like in Brazil, a studies don’t show a strong correlation between corruption and electoral punishment. Corruption, in politics, has been used by populists, who has promised to get rid of it to the electorate: exactly what Trump did in his campaign, while now his conflict of interest and lack of transparency with his private interests have no precedent in the White House.

That bring us to the next question. If ideologies are gone, and politics have become mainly a question of administrative efficiency and personalities, what is the link between a candidate and his voters, and whose support persists despite everything, like those who voted for Erdogan, Trump, Orban and Szydlo?

Perhaos it is time that we start to look to politics with a new approach. What did we learn from the last few years’ elections?

That people are aligning themselves under a new paradigm, which is not political in the sense we have used until now: it is called IDENTITY. Voters now elect those with whom they identify, and support them because in fact they defend their identity, no matter what. They do not listen to contradictory information, which they dismiss as “fake news.” Let us see on what this identity issue is based: the new four divides.

There is first a new divide: cities against rural areas, small towns, villages, hamlets. In Brexit, people in urban areas voted to stay in Europe. The same goes for those who voted against Erdogan, who is unpopular in Istanbul, but very popular in the rural areas. In the US, those who vote d for Trump were largely from the poor states. The same has happened with Orban and Szydlo. None would be in power if the vote was restricted to the capital and the major towns.

There is a second new divide: young and older voters. Brexit would not have happened if all young people cared to vote. Same with Erdogan, Trump, Orban and Szydlo. The problem is that young people have in serious percentages stopped to be active in politics because they feel left out, and look to parties as self-maintaining machines, ridden with corruption and inefficiency.

Of course, this plays in favour of those who are already in the system, which perpetuates itself, without the generational lift for change. Italy found 20 billion dollars to save four small banks while the total subsidies for young people are 2 billion euro. No wonder they feel left out.

There is the third divide, which is also new, ideologies of the past were basically more inclusive, even if of course the class system played a significant role. The third divide is between those who have finished at least high school, and those who did not. This is going to increase dramatically in the next two decades, when the robotization of industry and services will reach at least 40% of the production.

Tens of millions of people will be left out, and they will be those with less education, unable to fit in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Elites look with disdain at the choices of electors who are considered ignorant and provincial, while the latter in turn consider the elite winners who reap whatever they can, and marginalize them.

Finally, there is a fourth divide, which is very important for the values of peace and cooperation as a basis for a world governance. It is the divide between those who see the return to nationalism as the solution to their problems (and therefore hate immigrants), and those who believe that their country, in an increasing competing world, can be better if it integrates in international or regional organizations.

Two extremely simplified examples: Europe and the US. There was a survey done by the EU among the nine million Erasmus, or the students who with a scholarship from that exchange program went to make lives in other countries. They have had more than 100,000 children by marrying somebody met abroad: the real Europeans.

In the poll, they were at 92% asking for more Europe, not less Europe. And in the US, the classic Trump voters, as white (a demographic group in decline: at every election 2% less of white vote), who did not get beyond secondary education, who do not read newspapers or books, coming from the poorer states. People who lost their jobs, often after closure of factories or mines, strongly believe that they are victims of globalization, which created social and economic injustice.

This is a consequence of the fact that during two decades, only macroeconomic indexes have been used, like the GNP. Social indicators were largely shunned. How the growth that GNP indicated was divided was not a concern for the IMF, World Bank, the EU and most politicians, who blindly believed that market was the only engine for growth and would solve social problems: only now have they tried to brakes on, too late. The world has seen an unprecedented explosion of inequality, which is helping nationalism and xenophobia to become a central part of the political debate.

Nationalism is not confined to Trump, Erdogan, Orban and Szydlo, and to Brexit. China, India, Japan, the Philippines, Israel, Egypt, Russia, and other countries are now run by nationalist and authoritarian governments. This bring us to a very simple conclusion. Either the transition to an unknown new political system, that will certainly replace the present unsustainable system, will be based on the values of social justice, cooperation and peace (probably updating the present international organizations), or it is difficult to see how we will avoid conflicts, wars and bloodshed.

Why the man is the only animal who does not learn from previous experience?

No, Corbyn did not ‘pledge to abolish student debt’

By Martin Williams-26 JUL 2017

Jeremy Corbyn has been accused of U-turning on a pledge to scrap student debt.

But that’s not true. The story comes from a single quote plucked from a longer interview.

When read in context, rather than promising to wipe out all student debts, the Labour leader actually admitted that he didn’t have any simple answers to the issue yet.

So what was said, exactly? And has Labour been misleading students?

How the story emerged

In the run-up to the general election, Jeremy Corbyn made a comment about student debt. Speaking to the NME about the issue, he said: “I will deal with it.”

At the time, this was not widely picked up on by the national media. But – where it was reported – most papers accurately reflected that Corbyn had not explicitly promised to write off all debts. For instance, the Daily Mail said the Labour leader had pledged to “reduce or even write off” student debt.

But then, on Sunday, Corbyn was quizzed about this remark during a BBC interview.

Presenter Andrew Marr put it to him: “If you are a young voter and you heard those words: ‘I will deal with it’, you might have thought Jeremy Corbyn is going to relieve me of my debt.”

Corbyn was forced to defend his position, saying: “We never said we would completely abolish it.”
For some, this constituted a U-turn.

The Mail said: “Labour has backtracked on its promise to write off £100 billion of student debt.” The Telegraph said the party had “retracted its pledge to abolish student debt”. And Alan Sugar called Jeremy Corbyn a “cheat” and said he should resign for having “lied”.

So, did Corbyn really promise to write-off existing student debt?

No.
It’s true that he promised to “deal” with the problem of people who are “burdened with student debt”. But this was just one sentence from a much longer interview.

The full context is important – and has been ignored by many critics.

He told the NME: “There is a block of those that currently have a massive debt, and I’m looking at ways that we could reduce that, ameliorate that, lengthen the period of paying it off, or some other means of reducing that debt burden.”

He added: “I don’t have the simple answer for it at this stage – I don’t think anybody would expect me to, because this election was called unexpectedly; we had two weeks to prepare all of this. But I’m very well aware of that problem.

“And I don’t see why those that had the historical misfortune to be at university during the £9,000 period should be burdened excessively compared to those that went before or those that come after. I will deal with it.”

In context, it is clear that Corbyn stopped short of making any specific pledge about completely writing-off all student debts.

It’s true that he was appealing to young voters by promising to address the issue and trying to reduce the burden of student debt. But at no point did he make any policy commitments. In fact, he explicitly said that he didn’t have an firm answers yet.

What’s more, none of the possible solutions he mentioned included wiping out all debt. Instead, he talked about reducing or ameliorating (which simply means to make the situation easier) the burden of student debts.

And this was not actually a new Labour position. The party had already said it would “look for ways to ameliorate this debt burden in future”.

Indeed, while Labour’s manifesto promised to “abolish university tuition fees” and said that many young people are “held back by debt”, it made no mention of writing off student debts, or anything similar.

Have other Labour MPs pledged to write off the debt?

After Labour denied changing its policy, two main pieces of further evidence of a U-turn have been circulating.

First is a video of shadow justice minister Imran Hussain, filmed during the election campaign. In it, he comments on the fact that Jeremy Corbyn had announced that “every existing student will have all their debt wiped off”.

Some have claimed that Hussain’s comment appears “at odds with Jeremy Corbyn’s insistence that the party never made that specific pledge”.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

The key phrase here is “every existing student“. But it seems that some critics have conflated this with all existing student debt, which would include that held by thousands of graduates. Clearly, however, these are two very different things.

The actual policy announcement Hussain was referring to appears to have been pretty close to what he said it was – a promise to scrap debts for existing students only, rather than historic debts held by graduates.

And this was not a secret pledge consigned to a single YouTube video. It was a major policy announcement that was widely reported in the press.

Labour’s press release explained the proposal in full:

“To discourage students who are planning to start university this September from deferring until after tuition fees are removed, we will guarantee to immediately write off their first year of fees.

“Students part way through their degree will not have to pay fees for the remainder of their course. Part-time students will be covered for the cost of their first undergraduate degree.”

Regarding the debts of people who have already graduated, Labour did not promise to write these off. Echoing Corbyn’s comments, the party simply said they would consider ways to improve the situation for those concerned.

The only aspect of the policy that Hussain appears to have exaggerated or misunderstood concerns debt already racked up by existing students. The official pledge was to only wipe the debt “for the remainder of their course”, whereas Hussain said existing students would have “all their debt wiped off”.

This was clearly wrong and misleading. But Hussain made no comment about the far more costly issue of wiping all debt for all graduates.

The second example that is being cited as proof of a Labour U-turn is a tweet from a shadow minister, Sharon Hodgson, in which she said that Labour “could write off historic student debts”.

It seems that this was actually a headline from a Politics Home article, following up from the NME interview, rather than her own comment. But that doesn’t diminish her responsibility for the tweet, which does appear to confirm a policy commitment that had not been made.

There is no doubt that these words were very misleading.

In fairness to Hodgson, she did say “could” rather than “will”, but that will do little to reconcile any voters who feel misled by her tweet.

The verdict

Corbyn has not U-turned on student debt, because he never made a commitment to do this in the first place. He expressed sympathy with debt-laden graduates and promised to help ease the burden on them. But – as far as we can tell – he never pledged to write off all graduate debts.

For Hussain, it is more complicated. The main accusation against Labour concerns U-turning on an alleged promise to wipe the debts of all students and graduates. Hussain made no promises about the debts of graduates but, regarding existing students, he slipped up by saying all debt would be wiped, rather than just the future debts.


Hodgson, on the other hand, posted a highly misleading tweet. Strictly speaking, it was not entirely inaccurate, but it clearly alluded to a policy that the party had not committed to.

Charlie Gard, "beautiful little boy" at heart of dispute, dies

LONDON (Reuters) - Charlie Gard, a British baby who became the subject of a bitter dispute between his parents and doctors over whether he should be taken to the United States for experimental treatment, has died, local media said on Friday.

William James and Fanny Potkin-JULY 28, 2017

The 11-month-old baby suffered from an extremely rare genetic condition causing progressive brain damage and muscle weakness, and his parents' long struggle to save him drew an international outpouring of sympathy, including from U.S. President Donald Trump and Pope Francis.

"Our beautiful little boy has gone, we are so proud of you Charlie," Connie Yates, the baby's mother, was quoted as saying by the Daily Mail.

Local media said a family spokesman had confirmed the death.

"Everyone at Great Ormond Street Hospital sends their heartfelt condolences to Charlie’s parents and loved-ones at this very sad time," said a spokeswoman for the hospital where Charlie had been receiving treatment.

Pope Francis said on Twitter: "I entrust little Charlie to the Father and pray for his parents and all those who loved him."

The Vatican-owned Bambino Gesu children's hospital had offered to transfer Charlie to Rome for treatment, which the pope said should be provided "until the end", as his parents wished.

Charlie Gard's parents Coonie Yates and Chris Gard arrive at the High Court ahead of a hearing on their baby's future, in London, Britain July 24, 2017.

British Prime Minister Theresa May said she was deeply saddened by the news and her thoughts and prayers were with Charlie's parents.

After a harrowing legal battle that prompted a global debate over who has the moral right to decide the fate of a sick child, a judge on Thursday ordered that Charlie be moved to a hospice where the ventilator that kept him alive would be turned off.

Yates and the baby's father Chris Gard had wanted Charlie to undergo a treatment that has never been tried on anyone with his condition before, against the advice of doctors at his London hospital who said it would not benefit him and would prolong his suffering.

FILE PHOTO Charlie Gard's parents Connie Yates and Chris Gard read a statement at the High Court after a hearing on their baby's future, in London, Britain July 24, 2017.Peter Nicholls/File Photo

Charlie required a ventilator to breathe and was unable to see, hear or swallow.

The case drew comment from Trump, who tweeted on July 3 that "we would be delighted" to help Charlie.

Britain's courts, after hearing a wealth of medical evidence, ruled that it would go against Charlie's best interests to have the experimental nucleoside therapy advocated by a U.S. professor of neurology, Michio Hirano.

The case prompted heated debate on social media and in the press on medical ethics, and staff at the Great Ormond Street Hospital which treated him received abuse and death threats.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence tweeted that he was saddened to hear of Charlie's death. He has previously referred to the case in the context of the U.S. healthcare debate, saying it offered a warning of the risks of state-funded healthcare.

Additional reporting by Estelle Shirbon, David Milliken and Fanny Potkin; Editing by Gareth Jones and John Stonestreet