Chinese jets come within 50 feet of US spy plane in South China Sea ‘intercept’

A Chinese Shengyang J-11 fighter jet. Image via Wiki Commons.

19th May 2016

INTERNATIONAL airspace over the South China Sea was the scene of some high-altitude drama on Tuesday when two Chinese fighter jets flew perilously close a U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane.

The Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, said the Chinese fighter jets came within 50 feet of the “spy plane”.

The incident was also characterized as an “unsafe intercept” and is being reviewed, the Pentagon said.

According to a U.S. military official, two Chinese J-11 fighters were scrambled to intercept the U.S. EP-3 Aries aircraft and came so close that they forced the pilot to descend a couple hundred feet in order to avoid a collision.

The U.S. surveillance plane was conducting “routine” operations in the region.

The official says the incident took place in the northern part of the sea, south of Hong Kong. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the incident publicly, so spoke on condition of anonymity.

SEE ALSO: China denies US aircraft carrier’s request to visit Hong Kong

The incident appears to be the latest to indicate rising tensions between the two superpowers in the region.

Last week, China said U.S. Navy patrols in the South China Sea require it to increase the defense capabilities of the islands it controls in the area.

The Chinese Defense Ministry has condemned the latest sail-by by the U.S. Navy last Tuesday to reinforce its position that China’s new man-made islands in the strategically vital water body do not enjoy the legal rights of natural islands.

The destroyer USS William P. Lawrence passed within 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) of Fiery Cross Reef, the limit of what international law regards as an island’s territorial sea. The reef is now an island with an airstrip, harbor and burgeoning above-ground infrastructure.

Chinese authorities monitored and issued warnings to the U.S. destroyer as it passed. The ministry said it may also boost patrols.

Additional reporting by Associated Press

EgyptAir plane made ‘sudden swerves’ before vanishing over Mediterranean

Family members of the passengers gather at the airports.

EgyptAir Flight 804 left Paris late Wednesday night but lost contact with the tracking system at 2:30 a.m. Cairo time on Thursday. Armed forces are searching an area 40 miles north of the Egyptian coastline. (The Washington Post)

By Heba Habib, Sudarsan Raghavan and Brian Murphy May 19 at 6:40 PM

EgyptAir Flight 804 left Paris late Wednesday night but lost contact with the tracking system at 2:30 a.m. Cairo time on Thursday. Armed forces are searching an area 40 miles north of the Egyptian coastline. (The Washington Post)

CAIRO — An EgyptAir plane made abrupt turns and plunged steeply Thursday, shortly before disappearing from radar over the Mediterranean Sea, a Greek official said, as investigators placed terrorism high on the list of possible reasons the Cairo-bound plane fell from the sky with 66 people onboard.

EgyptAir said earlier in the day that bits of wreckage had been found near the Greek island of Karpathos, about 250 miles from the Egyptian coast. But the airline later retracted the statement after a senior Greek air safety official said on state television that the debris did not belong to the aircraft.

Investigators emphasized they were leaving open all possibilities, but a top Egyptian aviation official suggested that terrorism seemed more likely than a technical failure.

[What we know about missing EgyptAir Flight 804]

“The possibility of a terror attack is higher than a malfunction, but again, I don’t want to hypothesize,” Egypt’s civil aviation minister, Sherif Fathy, told reporters without giving further details.

Even as a minute-by-minute account emerged of the plane’s last recorded movements, rescue vessels and aircraft combed the sea between Greece’s southern islands and the Egyptian coast. Greek state television reported that “objects” were spotted about 50 miles south of the plane’s last known location, but it was not immediately clear whether the debris were linked to the aircraft.

Officials in Paris, where the flight began, also opened their own investigations into why the Airbus A320 vanished about 45 minutes from its scheduled landing in Cairo. French President François Hollande said the plane had “crashed,” but he gave no more details on what could have brought it down.

[Trump wastes no time in blaming terrorism for EgyptAir crash]

“No hypothesis is favored or ruled out at this stage,” a statement from the French prosecutor’s office said about its investigation.

But the sudden cut from ground contact raised inevitable parallels with more recent incidents when attacks, bombs or pilot intervention, not technical malfunctions, brought down aircraft.

Secretary of State John Kerry said he would not speculate on whether an act of terrorism caused the crash.

“I just don’t have the information on which to base this, and I don’t think the experts have the information yet on which to base this,” he said, speaking from a NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels. “And nothing does more harm to people or countries than to start speculating ahead of time, so I’m – I don’t want to do that.”

Egypt faces a range of militant threats, including a group affiliated with the Islamic State that is active in the Sinai Peninsula. It claimed responsibility for bringing down a Russian charter flight in October with a possible bomb smuggled onboard, killing all 224 people on a flight from the Red Sea resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh.

[Egypt often slow to recognize cause of plane crashes]

With EgyptAir, the accounts from Greece — the last point that flight controllers were in contact with the cockpit — detailed a baffling deviation from the flight path.

The Airbus made “sudden swerves” and dropped from 37,000 feet to 15,000 feet moments after crossing from the Greek flight-control area into Egypt’s jurisdiction, Greece’s defense minister, Panos Kammenos, said.

The first turn was a sharp, 90-degree veer to the east after passing over the Greek island of Karpathos, Kammenos told reporters in Athens. Then the plane made a full circular loop — a “360 degree turn,” Kammenos said.

“We cannot rule anything out,” Egyptian Prime Minister Sherif Ismail told reporters at Cairo’s airport.

Earlier, there was conflicting information about whether officials received a distress signal from the aircraft. The airline said it received one from the Airbus A320, but the Egyptian armed forces later said they were unaware of such a signal.

[Egypt struggles with multiple security threats]

Airbus expressed regret over the “loss” of the aircraft in a Facebook statement.

Flight 804 had gone as scheduled while it crossed Europe, passing over northern Italy and down the Adriatic coast. As the plane left Greek airspace, the pilot “was in good spirits and thanked the controller in Greek,” according to Greece’s civil aviation agency.

A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Jeff Davis, said a U.S. P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft will join the search teams. Britain also planned to send a plane and ship.

In Washington, President Obama directed U.S. officials “to reach out to their international counterparts to offer support and assistance,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz said.

Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said there was not yet enough evidence to “ draw any conclusions.”

“If terrorism was indeed the cause,” he said in a statement, “it would reveal a whole new level of vulnerability to aircraft — not only from those flights originating in the Middle East, but to those departing from the heart of Europe and with, at least in theory, far better airport defenses.”

Of the 66 people onboard, 56 were passengers, including two infants and one child, seven were crew members, and three were security personnel. French authorities told reporters at a news conference that it is usual practice for EgyptAir to have three security officers onboard.

Among those onboard, according to the airline, were 30 Egyptians, 15 French nationals, two Iraqis, and one passenger each from Algeria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chad, Kuwait, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. No Americans were on the flight.

The pilot had more than 6,000 hours of flight experience, including more than 2,000 hours flying the same model as the vanished aircraft, EgyptAir said. The co-pilot had nearly 3,000 flying hours.

The plane had been in service for more than 17 of the previous 24 hours before the crash, traveling from Asmara, Eritrea, to Cairo, then a round-trip to Tunis, before heading to Paris.

Steven B. Wallace, former director of the Office of Accident Investigation and Prevention at the Federal Aviation Administration, called it “heavy utilization for that kind of aircraft.”

“But I don’t see that as a safety issue as long as the normal flight checks were made,” he added.

Manufactured in 2003, the plane was powered by International Aero Engines and had about 48,000 flight hours, Airbus said.

Relatives of passengers were kept in a lounge with on-site doctors and translators at the Cairo airport. They left after a few hours and were told to await updates by phone. One man with four relatives on the plane said he “knows nothing.”

Amr Sami, a regional EgyptAir spokesman at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, told The Washington Post that EgyptAir flights from the French capital will continue as scheduled.

Meanwhile, family members of those onboard began streaming into a makeshift crisis center at a hotel near the airport. As French police ushered them in, they were tearful and bewildered, some pushing strollers with small children. They did not speak to reporters.

In March, an EgyptAir flight from Alexandria was hijacked and diverted to Cyprus. The suspect, 59-year-old Seif Eldin Mustafa, surrendered and all hostages were released.

In November — just a month after the Russian plane attack in Sinai — the same Islamic State-linked faction posted a video purporting to show one of its members striking an Egyptian navy vessel with a shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile. Defense experts believed the weapon was likely a Russian-built SA-18 Igla, which can hit aircraft flying at a maximum of 11,000 feet.

In March 2015, a Germanwings flight plunged into the French Alps after the co-pilot took control in an apparent suicide dive that also claimed the lives of 149 others onboard. 

Heba Habib reported from Cairo; Sudarsan Raghavan from Sanaa, Yemen; and Brian Murphy from Washington. James McAuley in Paris; Erin Cunningham in Istanbul; and Yanan Wang, Missy Ryan, Sarah Kaplan and Ashley Halsey in Washington contributed to this report.

Clinton calls Trump too unsteady to be president

BY STEVE HOLLAND AND SUSAN CORNWELL-Fri May 20, 2016

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton pivoted to a general election match-up against Republican candidate Donald Trump on Thursday, saying he is dangerously unpredictable and not qualified to be president.

Confident that she is finally close to defeating U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont for the Democratic nomination, Clinton turned heavy fire on Trump, who has been running about even with her in national polls of voters looking ahead to the Nov. 8

presidential election.

On the Republican side, Trump promoted top aide Paul Manafort to serve as campaign manager and chief strategist, the Trump campaign said. Corey Lewandowski, the Trump aide who has been campaign manager, retains that title and will continue to oversee day-to-day operations, the campaign said.

In addition, Trump has hired veteran Republican lawyer A.B. Culvahouse to help vet potential vice presidential running mates, a source close to the campaign said.

In a CNN interview, Clinton used the example of the apparent downing of an EgyptAir plane from Paris to Cairo to say that Trump would lack the skills to bring together U.S. allies to respond to global threats.

"I know how hard this job is and I know we need steadiness, as well as strength and smarts in it, and I have concluded that he is not qualified to be president of the United States," Clinton said.

Trump, the Republicans' presumptive presidential nominee, has been intensifying his criticism of Clinton by lobbing personal attacks at her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state, said she would resolutely refuse to respond to Trump's goading. "He can say whatever he wants," she said.

But she said the EgyptAir crash reinforces the need for American leadership and that Trump's proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States has sent the wrong signal to countries that Washington will need to work with in the fight against Islamic militants.

"He says a lot of things that are provocative, that actually make the important task of building this coalition, bringing everybody to the table and defeating terrorism more difficult," she said. "It sends a message of disrespect and it sends a message that makes the situation inside those countries more difficult."

Trump stepped up efforts to rally Republican loyalists behind his campaign after winning a divisive primary fight that left the party ruptured.

On Capitol Hill, Manafort and other Trump aides met with conservatives in the House of Representatives who are members of the Freedom Caucus group and canvassed them for policy ideas.

“Manafort was reaching out for ideas” on policy, and several Freedom Caucus members made suggestions, said Republican Representative Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee.

"It went very well, it was encouraging. I think the Trump team recognizes the relevance of the Freedom Caucus, and the influence they have. I think actually, despite some early skepticism by some members, I think the (Freedom Caucus) board received Manafort and his representation of Trump very well,” DesJarlais said.

U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who met Trump a week ago to try to resolve differences over their approaches to key issues, said he thought a list of 11 potential Supreme Court nominees, a group of conservative jurists announced by Trump on Wednesday, “was a very good step in the right direction.”

Ryan told reporters that “our teams are meeting” to talk policy, and “we’re making progress, but that’s all I’ve got to say at this point.”

The highest-ranking House Republican woman, Representative Cathy McMorris-Rodgers, said she had cast an absentee ballot for Trump in Washington state's primary next week, leaving Ryan as the only top Republican in Congress who has not backed Trump.

(Additional reporting by Alana Wise; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and James Dalgleish)

This Is Not the Time to Ease Up on Burma

BY MATTHEW SMITH, TOM ANDREWS-MAY 19, 2016

This week the Obama administration maintained some sanctions against Burma while lifting others, reflecting Washington’s internal conflict about how to effectively promote reforms in the country — by the carrot or by the stick.

“The flickers of progress that we have seen must not be extinguished — they must be strengthened.” President Obama delivered these words to a rapt audience at the University of Yangon in Burma in 2012. At the time, this Southeast Asian nation seemed to be emerging from more than 50 years of iron-fisted military rule.

The “flickers of progress” Obama noted in 2012 are brighter flashes today. But they’re not so bright — at least not yet — as to merit the full embrace of the United States.


Last month, the long-oppressed National League for Democracy (NLD) came to power after handily defeating the military’s ruling party in a historic November election. On her second day in office, NLD party leader and Nobel Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi freed more than 200 political prisoners, followed by 83 others less than two weeks later. Laws long used to imprison human rights activists, journalists, and dissidents may soon be repealed. Poets, bloggers, and activists now hold political office, wielding power once enjoyed only by members of the armed forces.

U.S. business leaders were quick to seize on this progress and pressedPresident Obama to lift all remaining sanctions on the country, which would have enabled U.S. firms to do business with Burma’s military — a military that is responsible for grave human rights violations and still controls a significant portion of the national economy. Obama didn’t go quite that far.

The United States’ sanctions regime dates back to 1988, when Burma’s ruling dictatorship crushed nationwide pro-democracy protests, killing and imprisoning thousands. Severe human rights abuses continued, prompting a complex patchwork of executive orders and legislation, spanning five U.S. administrations, that prohibited trade, investment, and extension of financial services to the regime. Arms sales were out of the question. Aid was cut. Dialogue was nonexistent.

Not much changed in U.S. policy until 2009, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. would combine sanctions with engagement — introducing carrots to go along with the sticks.
This made for a convenient fit with the Burmese military’s own efforts to wiggle out from underneath China, which has enjoyed outsized political and economic influence in the country due to the absence of Western competition. Dependence on China worried the generals.

When former Army Gen. Thein Sein became president of a quasi-civilian government in 2011, he made it his business to get sanctions lifted. He eased media censorship and freed some political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi. A year later, by-elections brought her to parliament — startling progress, considering that just two years prior she had been under house arrest.

Naturally, this was music to American ears. The U.S. responded by lifting the investment ban, easing restrictions on financial services, and reestablishing aid after a 23-year hiatus. Select Burmese officials were granted travel visas and readied themselves for White House visits.

This week, the Obama administration went further, lifting sanctions against ten state-owned banks and companies to promote trade and investment. But it maintained a jade import ban and the Specially Designated Nationals(SDN) list — a “blacklist” preventing human rights abusers from doing business with the United States. Arms sales and investments with military-owned firms are still prohibited, and U.S. companies are required to report on investments exceeding $500,000.

In light of the new political landscape in Burma, why not lift all remaining sanctions as business lobbyists wanted?

The answer is simple.In Burma, all is not what it seems.

The same military that ruled the country for decades hasn’t really gone anywhere. It appoints 25 percent of parliamentary seats, providing it with the power to block changes to the constitution. Its control of three key ministries — Defense, Home Affairs, and Border Affairs – spreads its influence to every corner of the country.

Moreover, the army, state security forces, and other authorities continue to commit egregious human rights violations with impunity.

In Rakhine State, two waves of horrific arson attacks on ethnic Rohingya and other Muslims destroyed villages in 13 of 17 townships in 2012, prompting a regional refugee and human trafficking crisis.

The authorities still confine more than 140,000 displaced Muslims, mostly Rohingya, to at least 40 internment camps, where they’re deprived of adequate food, shelter, and health care. At least a million other Rohingya are refused citizenship and confined to ill-equipped, prison-like villages. On top of this, the government imposes marriage and childbirth restrictions against Muslims in Rakhine State.
These abuses have rightly been described as “ethnic cleansing,” apartheid, and genocide, and they show no signs of letting up.

In northern Shan and Kachin states — which boast jade mines worth tens of billions of dollars annually — deadly armed conflict with non-state ethnic armies continues. We’ve documented how soldiers have killed, raped, tortured, and indiscriminately attacked ethnic civilians since 2011. To our knowledge, no one has been held accountable.

The war has displaced more than 100,000 men, women, and children and — as in Rakhine State — the authorities continue to impose needless restrictions on U.N. agencies and aid groups.

For these reasons, it’s not enough that President Obama simply maintained existing sanctions on Burma. His administration should make use of the SDN list and target those responsible for atrocities and ongoing abuses, particularly with regard to the festering situations in Rakhine, Kachin, and Shan states.
The individuals responsible for these abuses shouldn’t benefit from improved bilateral relations with the U.S.
Moreover, when Secretary of State John Kerry visits Burma on May 22, he should set crystal-clear targets for normalizing relations with the government.

For starters, Burma should support the establishment of a U.N.-mandated independent commission to look into the human rights situation facing Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine State. Such a commission would help establish the facts — which are hotly contested in the country — and would make detailed recommendations for the new government to deal with the very difficult realities there.

The authorities should immediately lift restrictions on movement against Muslims and facilitate the right to return for all of the displaced in Rakhine State — Muslims and Buddhists alike.

They should also ensure Rohingya and other Muslims have equal access to full citizenship, and take a firm stand on the right of the Rohingya to self-identify as Rohingya. Suu Kyi has effectively denied them this basic token of dignity, going so far as to ask the U.S. embassy to avoid using the term. Secretary Kerry should not cave to that demand. He should speak directly about ongoing abuses against the Rohingya, and the government of Burma should do the same.

If the Burmese military wants to avoid U.S. sanctions, it should cease attacks and abuses against ethnic civilians, hold perpetrators accountable, and ensure unfettered humanitarian access to the displaced. The military should also work with parliament to amend the constitution and gracefully bow out of the political process.

Lastly, the NLD should ensure that all remaining political prisoners are released and that Burma’s laws are consistent with international human rights standards. A draft law on peaceful assembly already looks to be a misstep that would impose unnecessary restrictions on the rights to peaceful assembly and expression and bring criminal liability and jail time for violations, making it incompatible with human rights law.

This is a critical time for Burma, and the signals the U.S. sends are watched closely. Now, more than ever, those signals need to be clear.

In the photo, a demonstrator demanding labor rights looks out from a police van after being arrested in Tetkone township on May 18.

Photo credit: AUNG HTET/AFP/Getty Images

Second Chibok schoolgirl 'rescued' from Boko Haram, Nigerian army says

Another schoolgirl kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014 was released Thursday, two days after Amina Ali Darsha Nkeki was found by vigilante militant group

Amina Ali Darsha Nkeki, a Chibok schoolgirl who was kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2014, arrives to meeting with Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari. Photograph: Florian Plaucheur/AFP/Getty Images

Ruth Maclean in Dakar-Thursday 19 May 2016

A second schoolgirl kidnapped by Boko Haram from the north-eastern Nigerian town of Chibok in 2014 has been freed, according to the Nigerian military.

An army spokesman said that the girl had been “rescued” on Thursday evening but did not give her name or any other details.

If the claim is true, she would be the second of the Chibok girls to escape a Boko Haram camp in the Sambisa forest in the past two days.

Amina Ali Darsha Nkeki, who met President Muhammadu Buhari yesterday, was found by members of a vigilante group on Tuesday on the edge of a Boko Haramstronghold after fleeing during an attack on the militants’ camp.

On Thursday she was flown to Abuja in the presidential jet to meet Buhari. In a press conference at the presidential villa while waiting for the president to arrive, Nkeki first hid her face from the cameras, then greeted Buhari and handed him her four-month-old baby girl, born in captivity.

The president pledged to continue the search for the remaining Chibok girls who have not been recovered – who number more than 200 – and to fund Nkeki’s education, in a statement released after the meeting.

“Like all Nigerians and many others around the world, I am delighted at the news that Amina Ali Nkeki, one of the missing Chibok girls, has regained her freedom,” Buhari said. “But my feelings are tinged with deep sadness at the horrors the young girl has had to go through at such an early stage in her life.”

He promised Nkeki “the best care” that the Nigerian government could afford. “We will ensure that she gets the best medical, psychological, emotional and whatever other care she requires to make a full recovery and be reintegrated fully into society,” he said.

“Amina must be enabled to go back to school. No girl in Nigeria should be put through the brutality of forced marriage. Every girl has the right to an education and a life choice.”

Buhari said that Nkeki offered his government “a unique opportunity for vital information” that could lead to the release of the rest of the Chibok girls, though he said nothing of the estimated 2,000 other women and girls that have been captured by Boko Haram.

Nkeki’s brother, Inua Ali, who was also at the meeting, confirmed to the Guardian that the president had pledged to look after Nkeki and her family. “We saw and met with the president today,” he said. “He promised to cater for my sister, her daughter and my mother. He promised to put my sister back in school.”

In her first two days of freedom, Nkeki has met dozens of Nigerian dignitaries.

After being briefly allowed home so that her family could identify her, she was airlifted to Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state. She and her baby had medical checks and met trauma specialists before being flown to Abuja.

Nkeki’s age is not known – her brother said she was born in 1995, but according to other reports she was 17 when she was abducted and is now 19.

In what commentators called a “desperate bid to claim credit” for the escape of the first of the Chibok girls since the messy aftermath of the 2014 abductions, the Nigerian army on Wednesday said it had rescued a girl it identified as Falmata Mbalala.

It later admitted that her name was actually Amina Ali and said its troops had rescued her in conjunction with Civilian JTF, the local vigilante force that arms itself with muskets and catapults.

Abdul Amin Mahmud, a Nigerian commentator and lawyer, criticised the government for attempting to claim credit and for parading her at the press conference.

“She was roughly handled by the Nigerian army, and she’s a young girl who’s been in captivity for two years,” he said. “The girl is not a trophy. She’s not the elephant man to be paraded at a circus. She has gone through real psychological trauma. She needs care. They transferred her to the governor’s house and to Abuja to meet the president – for what?

“The issue of the missing Chibok girlshas become a political issue. The previous government did nothing, so if the current government can rescue one, it’s seen as a political victory. I worry about the future of these young girls.”

Analysis Buhari agrees Nigeria is corrupt, but how is he tackling it? The tenacious president was elected with a vow to fight misconduct, but there are questions over how he is dealing with it Read more

In contrast to the government’s claims of rescue, Nkeki’s brother said she had been found trying to hide from the vigilantes after running away from the Boko Haram camp. He said she had been brought back to her family home for a tearful reunion with her elderly, widowed mother, Binta Ali. Onlookers said that Ali shouted “Amina! Amina!” when she saw her, and that they nearly fell over as they hugged each other.

According to activists, Nkeki said the rest of the Chibok girls were in the forest except for six, apparently killed in the same attack she had tried to escape. It is unclear who launched the attack on the Boko Haram camp; the army did not claim responsibility for it.

When she was found, Nkeki was with a man who claimed to be her husband, Mohammed Hayatu, whom the army suspect is a Boko Haram fighter. Hayatu was not at the presidential villa but was being investigated, according to Sani Kukasheka Usman, an army spokesman.

“It should be noted that Mohammed Hayatu is well treated in line with Operation Lafiya Dole’s rules of engagement regarding insurgents who voluntarily surrender to the military,” he said.

Given Buhari’s claim in December thatBoko Haram had “technically” been defeated because they were reduced to suicide missions and controlled no territory, Nkeki’s escape raises questions about the location of her fellow kidnapping victims and the thousands of others taken by Boko Haram.

Yakub Bulus, the father of another of the Chibok girls, said that the news brought him joy and hope that his daughter would be found.

“At least one of them has been found now, hopefully she will reveal where the others are, and with God they will all be found. My hope to see my daughter again has been strengthened,” he said.

Why plain packaging rules set a bad precedent

Tobacco firms' legal challenges to plain packets failed CREDIT: ASH

19 MAY 2016

Idon’t smoke. In fact, I despise cigarettes and their foul stench. Nobody should touch tobacco or for that matter any other addictive drug.

But the decision to enforce plain packaging on the tobacco industry –now confirmed by the courts – is a major mistake which will hurt the economy over time and do little or nothing to discourage smoking.

In fact, it’s time for soft drink, chocolate and alcohol manufacturers to be very, very worried. They and anybody else whose wares fall out of favour will be next – and after that, who knows? The authorities have decided that they can wage war on companies they don’t like, ban them from using their brands on their packaging and thus dispossess them of a crucial asset without compensation.

I agree with the Institute of Economic Affairs’ assessment that the Government has – in effect – abolished trademarks for an entire industry.

Sadly, the next targets don’t see this, just as soft drink manufacturers didn’t really believe that they would be hammered by a discriminatory sugar tax at George Osborne’s most recent Budget. So they will continue to stick their heads in the sand.

Chancellor George Osborne introduced the sugar tax on some drinks in his latest Budget CREDIT: MARK THOMAS/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

But when they eventually do wake up, they will curtail their investment and marketing plans: why bother building a successful sweets or food franchise in this country, with a strong, intangible value, if much of the worth of those assets could eventually be snatched away by diktat?

That is the problem with retrospectively eroding property rights: it injects uncertainty into an economy, undermines the rule of law and makes companies less secure about returns.

Wherever we look, capitalism, free choice and free markets are in retreat, and state control, regulation, central direction and nannyism are on the rise.

The problem with treating adults like children is that they eventually start behaving immaturely. Yet unless we all act like adults, accepting individual responsibility for our actions and the principle of caveat emptor – let the buyer beware – in our choices, a free and prosperous society becomes impossible. Instead, we end up with a decaying and stagnant bureaucracy, governed by an unaccountable technocracy. It’s not good news.

The policy won’t even work on its own terms: in other words, it alone won’t reduce smoking by more than the habit would have declined anyway.

When Australia passed its Tobacco Plain Packaging Act 2011, introduced in December 2012, advocates hoped the policy would deal a body blow to tobacco consumption.

Yet cigarettes sales went up by 0.3pc the following year, and the government’s seizures of illegal tobacco jumped 60pc between 2011-12 and 2012-13: there is now an even larger market for illegal, contraband cigarettes with full branding and packaging.

These can easily be imported by gangsters from abroad, fuelling criminal gangs. Cripplingly high taxes are not the answer: they do reduce demand when raised above a certain level, but they also create uncontrollable, often unsafe black markets.

The reality is that people, quite rightly, are gradually smoking less, largely as a result of a benign cultural shift and an understanding that tobacco is deadly: in Australia, daily smoking prevalence over the past 20 years or so has been declining by 0.4-0.9 per cent per year, as the Institute of Economic Affairs points out.


 Cigarettes are no longer even on public display in shops - so customers cannot easily see the branding anyway CREDIT: PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY

The launch of plain packaging doesn’t seem to have speeded this up and was therefore a policy that has come with costs – an erosion in property rights, a hassle for retailers – but no benefits.

There is a little-noticed parallel between the plain packaging rules and another weakening of property rights, albeit of a more conventional sort.

In a bid to speed up infrastructure projects, compulsory purchase rules for private property – such as land, or a home that is in the way of a new train track – are being shaken up, in the worst possible way.
At the moment, compensation is connected to the expected post-development value of the land.

This encourages property owners to sell out and assuages them. But in future they may only be paid the current value of the property.

This is another terrible mistake. Instead of reducing compensation, we should be doing exactly the opposite and increasing it.

This would be the right thing to do for philosophical as well as economic reasons. Private property should only ever be subject to compulsory purchase orders in extremis; they should be avoided whenever possible.

When one is invoked, it should come with oodles of compensation: the state should pay a massive premium for forcibly dispossessing an individual of their home or asset. In return, the process should be speedy.

In general, the key to successfully reforming our log-jammed planning system is to create a much better way of divvying up the value generated by development.

This would allow bargaining between all concerned parties, rather than encouraging a small group of neighbours to block all change.

The best way of converting nimbies is to buy them out: they may object to disruption or extra congestion, but their opposition almost always come with a price which need not even be that high.

The cost of showering an airport’s neighbours with cash will always be lower than having to suffer years of delays and endless appeals.

Everything revolves around  private property rights. A country that nurtures them will do better than one which rides roughshod over them.

That is one of the most important lessons we can draw from capitalism’s astonishing success in recent centuries. It is a great shame that the Government keeps forgetting this.

Global antibiotics 'revolution' needed

19 May 2016

A global revolution in the use of antimicrobials is needed, according to a government backed report.

Lord Jim O'Neill, who led the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, said a campaign was needed to stop people treating antibiotics like sweets.

It is the first recommendation in the global plan for preventing medicine "being cast back into the dark ages".

The report has received a mixed response with some concerned that it does not go far enough.

Superbugs, resistant to antimicrobials, are estimated to account for 700,000 deaths each year.

But modelling up to the year 2050, by Rand Europe and auditors KPMG, suggests 10 million people could die each year - equivalent to one every three seconds.

The report brings together eight previous interim reports that recommended:

• An urgent and massive global awareness campaign as most people are ignorant of the risks
• Establishing a $2bn ($1.4bn) Global Innovation Fund for early stage research
• Improved access to clean water, sanitation and cleaner hospitals to prevent infections spreading
• Reduce the unnecessary vast antibiotic use in agriculture including a ban on those "highly critical" to human health
• Improved surveillance of the spread of drug resistance
• Paying companies $1bn (£0.7bn) for every new antibiotic discovered
• Financial incentives to develop new tests to prevent antibiotics being given when they will not work
• Promoting the use of vaccines and alternatives to drugs

The review said the economic case for action "was clear" and could be paid for using a small cut of the current health budgets of countries or through extra taxes on pharmaceutical companies not investing in antibiotic research.

Lord Jim O'Neill, the economist who led the global review, said: "We need to inform in different ways, all over the world, why it's crucial we stop treating our antibiotics like sweets.

"If we don't solve the problem we are heading to the dark ages, we will have a lot of people dying.

"We have made some pretty challenging recommendations which require everybody to get out of the comfort zone, because if we don't then we aren't going to be able to solve this problem."

Eight years of hell

It is hoped the measures will prevent more people going through experiences like Emily Morris from Milton Keynes.

She has regular urinary tract infections that do not respond to some antibiotics and could cause kidney damage or even death.

She says: "With every sting and every pain, my heart sinks at the thought of how many antibiotics I have left to use this time.

"I've had the struggle of living with a resistance to antibiotics for nearly eight years of my life...there is a clear need for new antibiotics."

Pharma challenge

Exactly how to encourage the drugs industry to make new antibiotics has been a long running problem - there has not been a new class of antibiotics discovered since the 1980s.

A new antibiotic would be kept on the shelf for use in emergencies so a company could never make back its huge research and development costs.

John Rex, from the antibiotics unit at AstraZeneca, said a new way of paying for drugs, as proposed in the report, was needed.

He argued: "Such models should recognise antibiotics as the healthcare equivalent of the fire extinguisher - they must be available on the wall at all times and have value even when used only infrequently."

Not enough

But Dr Grania Brigden, from the charity Médecins Sans Frontières, said: "This report is an important first step in addressing this broad market failure, it does not go far enough."

MSF said infections resistant to drugs were a threat to their work around the world from the war-wounded in Jordan to newborns in Niger.

Dr Brigden added: "The O'Neill report proposes considerable new funding to overcome the failures of pharmaceutical research and development, but the proposals do not necessarily ensure access to either existing tools or emerging new products.

"Instead, in some cases, the report's solution is simply to subsidise higher prices rather than trying to overcome them."