Who Are the Crazies on Korea?

by Jacob G. Hornberger

( September 18, 2016 , Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian)  The U.S. military-industrial complex and the U.S. mainstream media often describe the leadership of North Korea, headed by President Kim Jong-un, as crazy and irrational. But what could be more crazy and irrational than doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results?

What better way to describe the actions of the U.S. national-security establishment and its loyal acolytes in the mainstream press whenever North Korea does something that they don’t like, such as engaging in underground nuclear testing?

In response to North Korea’s latest round of underground nuclear testing, the national-security establishment responded with its standard, predictable response by flying two B-1 bombers, flanked by several U.S. fighter planes, right near the South Korea-North Korea border.

What’s that supposed to accomplish? Does the Pentagon really think that that’s going to stop North Korea from engaging in more nuclear testing? If so, one has to ask why Pentagon officials would believe that given that the last time they did the same thing, North Korea responded with another round of nuclear testing.

Notice how the U.S. mainstream press uses North Korea’s underground nuclear tests to show how crazy and irrational the regime is. Well, take a look at this photograph. It shows an above-ground nuclear explosion, with several troops looking on. Those troops are not North Korean troops. They are American troops. And the nuclear explosion too place right here in the United States during the 1950s as part of the U.S. national security establishment’s Exercise Desert Rock.

Now, if you’ll go back and read accounts in the U.S. mainstream press during the 1950s, I’ll guarantee you that not one single one of those articles will describe the officials who carried out those nuclear explosions as crazy and irrational. That’s because they bought the national-security state’s justification for the explosions, hook, line, and sinker.

What was that justification? The Pentagon maintained that the nuclear testing was necessary to deter a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union as part of a supposed international communist conspiracy to take over America. That rationale seemed totally sane and rationale to the U.S. mainstream press, especially those who were serving as assets for the CIA under its infamous Operation Mockingbird, the secret CIA plan to influence and indoctrinate the media.

Of course, that wasn’t the only nuclear test carried out by the Pentagon in the 1950s and 1960s. There were many others, both above ground and below ground. And those tests weren’t carried out only here in the United States. Take a look at this photograph. It shows one of several nuclear explosions that the U.S. national-security establishment carried out in the Pacific Ocean.

The Pentagon, the CIA, and the U.S. mainstream media considered those tests to be perfectly sane and rational. That’s because they were necessary, U.S. national security officials maintained, to protect America from the communist hordes that were supposedly coming to get us.

In fact, let’s not forget the national-security establishment’s initial fierce opposition to President John Kennedy’s proposal to enter into the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the Soviet Union as part of his plan to bring an end to the Cold War. The Pentagon finally dropped its opposition to the treaty, perhaps because it was limited to above ground testing and would still permit the Pentagon to carry out underground nuclear explosions, the same type of underground testing that North Korea has been carrying out. (See FFF’s ebook JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated by Douglas Horne.)

An obvious question arises: Once U.S. officials had dropped two nuclear bombs on the Japanese people in 1945, why was more testing necessary? The bombs had worked. They had killed more than 200,000 people. But if continuous testing was, in fact, necessary for the U.S. national-security to perfect its nuclear program, why doesn’t the same principle apply to North Korea’s nuclear program? Since the Pentagon considered it rational to continuously test its nuclear weapons, why is it considered crazy and irrational for North Korea to do the same?

According to CNN, the U.S. commander in South Korea, Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, called North Korea’s nuclear test “a dangerous escalation” and “an unacceptable threat.”

Really? Does that mean that the U.S. testing in the 1950s and 1960s was “a dangerous escalation” of the Cold War and “an unacceptable threat” to the Soviet Union as well?

Indeed, what does Brooks consider that B-1 flyover near the North Korean border to be — a peaceful and diplomatic outreach in friendship? On the contrary, it’s a childish but extremely dangerous act of provocation that is designed to remind the North Koreans of the mass devastation that B-52 bombers carried out against North Korean cities and villages during the Korean War, which involved a U.S. intervention into another nation’s civil war that was illegal under our form of constitutional government. 

Don’t forget, after all, that the Pentagon was waging war on North Korea and killing multitudes of North Korean people without the congressional declaration of war that the U.S. Constitution requires.

The CNN article also cited an unnamed U.S. intelligence official who said that North Korea is the only country in the world that threatens others with a nuclear attack.

Not so! The United States does that all the time. Whenever U.S. officials declare that “all options are on the table” in disputes with other countries, what they mean by that is that they are reserving the right to employ nuclear weapons, including against countries that don’t have nuclear weapons. Moreover, let’s not forget that U.S. officials still express no regret or remorse for dropping nuclear bombs on two civilian targets during World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and, in fact, are still proud of the fact they did it.

Indeed, let’s also not forget that in the early 1960s, the Pentagon was recommending to President Kennedy that the United States initiate a surprise attack on the Soviet Union using its massive arsenal of nuclear weapons. The rationale? Pentagon officials were convinced that a war with the Soviets was inevitable anyway and so it would be advantageous for the United States to strike first in a surprise nuclear attack. They told Kennedy that with a surprise attack, the United States could win the war because it would suffer only 40 million deaths while everyone in Russia and the rest of the Soviet Union would be wiped out.

Kennedy concluded that those Pentagon officials were nuts. He privately exclaimed to an aide, “And we call ourselves the human race.”

What the Pentagon, the CIA, and the U.S. mainstream press just don’t get is that North Korea’s nuclear program is based on the same purported rationale as the U.S. nuclear program — not to initiate war but to deter a war on North Korea by the United States.

The North Koreans are not dumb. They know that regime change has been a core element of the U.S. national-security establishment since its inception in the 1940s. They saw the U.S. regime change operation in Iraq. They’re familiar with the CIA’s regime change operation in Iran in 1953. They see the current sanctions on Iran as another attempt at regime change. They know that U.S. officials believe that the North Korean regime was part of an axis of evil. They are fully aware of the fact that insofar as North Korea and Cuba (and Russia) are concerned, the Cold War has never ended for the U.S. national-security establishment. They know that U.S. national-security state officials have never given up their Cold War hope of achieving regime change in North Korea and Cuba (and Russia).

So, what’s the only thing that would keep the Pentagon and the CIA from attacking and invading North Korea? Nuclear weapons! The North Koreans are smart enough to know that they could never win a conventional war against the United States. They are also smart enough to know that the prospect of North Korea firing nuclear bombs at Seoul and even at Japan will likely deter the same type of regime-change attack and invasion that the U.S. national-security establishment carried out against Iraq.

After all, don’t forget the Cuban Missile Crisis. While U.S. officials have long maintained that the Soviets installed nuclear missiles in Cuba for offensive purposes, nothing could be further from the truth. They were installed there to deter another U.S. invasion of that Third World country, either by the CIA (as at the Bay of Pigs) or by the Pentagon (as the Joint Chiefs of Staff were recommending during the Missile Crisis). When President Kennedy agreed that the United States would abandon all plans to invade Cuba (over the fierce opposition of the Pentagon and the CIA), the Soviets withdrew their missiles. If nuclear missiles could deter another U.S. invasion of Cuba, why wouldn’t it be logical for the North Koreans to believe that their nuclear weapons will deter a U.S. invasion of North Korea?

What U.S. officials and the U.S. mainstream press just don’t get is that the North Korean communist regime just wants to be left alone, just as many people in the Middle East want to be left alone and, indeed, just as many Americans want to be left alone. The problem is that the U.S. national security establishment won’t leave people alone. Stuck with their Cold War mindsets (except with respect to Vietnam’s communist regime, which they now are embracing), U.S. national security officials have a vested interest in maintaining a crisis environment in Korea. The bigger the crisis, the better, so that they can demonstrate how necessary it is for them to keep us safe from the communists … or the terrorists … or the drug dealers … or the illegal immigrants … or the Muslims … or the Russians … or the Chinese … or the Syrians … or ISIS … or whoever the official enemy de jour happens to be.

Meanwhile , here at home the mainstream press is calling for the same policy prescriptions they always call for in response to North Korea’s latest nuclear test: by calling for more enforcement of sanctions against North Korea, by calling for U.S. officials to exercise leadership, and by calling on China to do something. In other words, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I’ve got a different idea. Just leave North Korea alone. Yankee, come home!

Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Russian ruling party seeks new mandate despite economic slump

 The ruling United Russia party is expected to win even greater dominance over Russia's lower house in a parliamentary election, showing support for President Vladimir Putin is holding up.(Reuters)

By Andrew Roth September 18 at 3:45 PM

MOSCOW — Russians went to the polls Sunday in a parliamentary vote that the Kremlin hopes will maintain its stranglehold on national politics without provoking protests like those that erupted five years ago over widespread fraud.

As expected, exit polls released Sunday evening on state television suggested that United Russia, the ruling party aligned with President Vladimir Putin, is likely to win. Two exit polls showed United Russia taking just under 50 percent of the vote, and Putin said Sunday evening that the party “had achieved a very good result. They have won.”

Critics have pointed to low turnout, which officials said was 39.4 percent several hours before polls closed, as a sign of waning support for United Russia, a party whose strongest attribute is its association with Putin.

“Skeptics may say that [the result] was not as good as it could have been,” Putin said in televised remarks from United Russia’s elections headquarters . “But nobody works better.”

Journalists and activists also posted a number of reports of ballot stuffing, which may mar the clean image the Kremlin wanted to project in Sunday’s vote.

Portraits of candidates are posted at a polling station during parliamentary elections in Moscow on Sunday. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP via Getty Images)

United Russia leads a pack of four parties in parliament that are largely aligned with Putin’s policies and, according to the exit polls, are the only parties that will win seats in the next session of the State Duma. 

Besides United Russia, they are the Communist Party, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and the left-leaning A Just Russia party.

Under Putin, the parliament has largely come to be seen as a rubber stamp, nearly unanimously passing legislation to limit public demonstrations, ban foreign adoptions, and increase surveillance of Russian citizens and religious groups under a counterterrorism law passed in June.

[Putin signs new anti-terror law in Russia. Edward Snowden is upset.]

A troubled economy and a budget hit by falling oil prices, which have prevented the indexation of pensions and has delayed paychecks across the country, would normally spell disaster for a ruling party, and, indeed, United Russia’s popularity has fallen below 50 percent in recent months. But the party is expected to retain a majority of the 450 seats in the State Duma, or lower house, partially by domination of public media and administrative resources, which puts the power of local and regional governments behind the party, and partially by a strong showing in new single-mandate districts, where voters choose individual officeholders, as in the United States, rather than voting for a political party.

But United Russia’s greatest advantage is that in a political arena dominated by Putin, there is not much of an alternative.

“The president’s party, who else would I vote for?” said Nadezhda Osetinskaya, a 67-year-old pensioner and former nurse who lined up before polls opened at 8 a.m. at a school in northwest Moscow.

Osetinskaya had her share of complaints. Prices for food and medicine are increasing, she said, and she required support from her children to live on her $250 monthly pension. She was unhappy with the quality of care at a hospital where she receives treatment for a kidney ailment. The city had carried out years of road work, she said, but the potholes on her neighborhood streets are legion, probably the result of corruption.

But on broader questions, she enthusiastically supported Putin, lauding the recent annexation of Crimea and blaming Russia’s economic difficulties on a Western conspiracy. Voting for United Russia was a way to support Putin, she reiterated.

“Soon, things will turn around, but for now, we need to stand by our president,” she said. “He’ll remember that we did.”

Many of those voting early were pensioners, as well as workers from schools, the local government administration and other jobs paid for by the city. Out of 20 people approached at one polling station, one man, who gave his name as Mikhail, said he would vote for the liberal Yabloko party.

“I’m still voting against the party of crooks and thieves,” he said, a reference to a protest slogan against United Russia from 2011, when viral videos of ballot stuffing brought more than 50,000 Muscovites onto the frigid streets to chant, “Russia without Putin!” The protest movement petered out in 2012 because of internal differences among the protesters and a government crackdown.

The Kremlin’s strategy during this election cycle has been to emphasize legitimacy, installing Ella Pamfilova, a well-regarded former human rights ombudsman, as the elections chief.

At a news conference last week, Pamfilova said that she will resign if the elections are marred by fraud and that the primary culprits in vote-rigging are generally local power-brokers seeking to please the Kremlin.

Sunday’s vote marks the first time that Crimea, the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, will take part in Russian parliamentary elections, eliciting protests from Ukraine and the United States.

Colin Kaepernick Is Lucky He’s Not Japanese

National anthems have always inspired dissenters — but some countries treat their refuseniks better than others.

BY ALEX MARSHALL-SEPTEMBER 15, 2016

If one person should be unimpressed by Colin Kaepernick’s “Star-Spangled Banner” protest — or those of the others now joining him — it is Kimiko Nezu, a slight Japanese woman in her late 60s.

Nezu is the world’s longest-serving anthem refusenik, a retired teacher who has been sitting through her country’s national anthem since her 20s, viewing it as a symbol of militarism. She has been fined, suspended without pay for up to six months at a time, and made to attend endless re-education classes for her stance against the 55-second song, “Kimigayo,” which calls for Japan’s emperor to reign until “the stones turn into boulders lush with moss.” Right-wingers used to occasionally turn up outside her house and chase her around Tokyo in sound trucks, calling for her to “go home” (they were implying she was North Korean). She was even once sent a knife blade in the post, a traditional death threat.

Nezu, in other words, has been through a lot more than Kaepernick. But she actually could not have more sympathy for him. “He’s only 28, and he’s doing something that puts his career at risk,” she says. “I was in my mid-50s when my actions really put me at risk of losing my job. My children had grown up by then, so [they] could look after themselves. But if I’d been in my 20s and had family responsibilities, then maybe I wouldn’t have done it. I’m deeply impressed.”

Kaepernick’s anthem protest may feel novel to some Americans. But national anthems are actually regularly protested around the world, both inside and outside sports. Their symbolic value and idealistic lyrics (“the land of the free and the home of the brave” is a case in point) have always invited listeners to use them to comment about the state of a country.

These protests are not just interesting in themselves: Their emergence, and the reactions they inspire, reveals a lot about the status of nationalism in countries. Take India right now. Over the past two years, several people have been thrown out of cinemas for refusing to stand for the national anthem, “Jana Gana Mana” — a song that seems to be playing an increasingly public role with the resurgence of Hindu nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Playing the anthem before screenings is compulsory in Maharashtra (the state that includes Mumbai) and common in other states like Kerala.

Mahek Vyas, 33, is one of those who has been affected, if by accident. At a cinema in Mumbai in 2014, his South African girlfriend decided not to stand for the Indian anthem and was harassed by people behind them. He decided to shout back and was beaten up for his trouble. Vyas does not see the incident as relating to a new atmosphere in India under Modi. “The party who actually decided to start playing the anthem in Mumbai was the Indian National Congress 15 years ago,” he says. But he does see attitudes around the song growing more strident. “They’ve started playing the anthem before sports events now because people react well to it,” he says. “But that doesn’t make sense. You don’t sing the anthem every day when you get to the office or when you arrive at an airport. I believe in India and the fact a lot of people lost their lives for our freedom, but it doesn’t mean you must have this showy nationalism and force it on people.”

Israel, too, has experienced recent prominent anthem refusals. In 2012, Salim Joubran, a Supreme Court justice, provoked debate by refusing to sing the anthem, “Hatikvah,” at a swearing-in ceremony. Joubran is both Christian and Israeli Arab, so it is somewhat difficult for him to sincerely sing about how his “Jewish soul yearns” for “the land of Zion,” but that did not stop nationalists from heavily criticizing his stance. There have been similar debates in countries including Serbia and France after soccer players have refused to sing their national anthems. (Far-right politician Marine Le Pen has unsurprisingly tried to get political capital out of any French player who has remained silent, whatever their reasoning.)

But it is in Japan where anthem protests have occurred for the longest time. They date to World War II, when the anthem played a prominent part in building a cult of personality around the emperor. After the war, a new teachers’ union was formed with the slogan, “Never send our students to the battlefield again,” and one of its founding aims was to oppose the anthem, prominently played at ceremonies signaling the start and end of school years.

Nezu says she happily sang “Kimigayo” as a child. She couldn’t have felt prouder to be Japanese. “I thought we were luckier than any other people. It was only sung on special occasions, so every time I heard it I felt excited,” she says. But at university she read about Japan’s wartime atrocities in China and Korea and decided she could simply never stand, the people who died in those countries having lost the opportunities she had.

She did not face any issues with her stance for most of her teaching career. But in the 1990s, the government, wanting to foster patriotism and even linking it to economic success, began trying to force teachers to stand. There were several flash points, notably in 1997, when children at a school north of Tokyo walked out en masse when the anthem was played, prompting weeks of nationwide debate about whether they were an example for others or the most appalling teenagers in the nation. Even manga were written about them.

It was in 2003 that things changed for Nezu. That year, the Tokyo city government, led by right-wing firebrand Shintaro Ishihara, said teachers would be punished if they refused to stand at that year’s first day of school and its graduation ceremonies.(Osaka later followed his lead under its own right-wing firebrand, Toru Hashimoto.) Most teachers fell into line, but Nezu and a handful of others kept refusing no matter what. She first had her salary cut for one month and then six. Then she was suspended for one month and then three. And every year she was also moved to a different school, sometimes a two-hour commute from her home, all seemingly in an effort to just get her to retire.

The fact that the Japanese public mostly accepted the harsh new policy perhaps shows the increased shift toward nationalism in the country — although it could also be that few actually understood the point the teachers were trying to make. The war was more than 70 years ago, after all. The anthem, to most modern ears, simply sounds like a call for a much loved emperor’s reign to last for a geologically impossible (stones turning into boulders) length of time.

“My family had no problem with me protesting,” Nezu says. “They knew they had a mother like me. But some teachers and friends tried to exclude me, and that caused a lot of pain. But whenever I was feeling weak, someone supported me, or a new teacher refused to stand, and I felt like I had to keep going.”

The mood in Japan has not changed since Tokyo’s largely successful clampdown. In July, a former prime minister told athletes to sing the anthem with gusto or “be declared unworthy,” according to the Guardian. It’s no surprise that Shinzo Abe has also regularly pushed the anthem, declaring its singing a sign of Japan’s confidence in itself.

Even after retiring in 2011, Nezu has not been able to leave the anthem behind. She’s currently involved in several court cases trying to overturn the punishments she has received and prove that forcing someone to stand for an anthem goes against his or her freedom of thought.

What lessons can Kaepernick learn from Nezu’s example? The realistic answer would be that he has achieved as much as he is going to by raising debate globally about both the state of race relations in the United States and how people treat such symbols as national anthems. Japan’s teachers have never achieved anything like that level of debate about the country’s war guilt, or the suitability of its anthem, in 70 years of protest; Nezu certainly hasn’t in her time. But perhaps the other lesson he should learn is that although people will quickly grow indifferent to his protest, that does not mean he needs to stop.

For Nezu, though, the main lesson for Kaepernick is slightly more prosaic: He should be grateful he’s not Japanese. “If a sportsman did that here, they would be exiled from the team,” she says. “Their career would be over immediately. That’s why I’m so impressed by his determination to do what he believes is right.”

Photo credit: THEARON W. HENDERSON/Getty Images

Merkel party slumps in Berlin vote as anti-migrant AfD gains

Vote marked another milestone for upstart AfD, which has campaigned on xenophobic platform, similar to France's National Front

Georg Pazderski, right, top candidate of populist AfD party and co-leader Joerg Meuthen celebrate during after Berlin's state elections on Sunday at state parliament (AFP)

Sunday 18 September 2016

German Chancellor Angela Merkel's party suffered a bruising loss in Berlin state elections on Sunday while the right-wing populist AfD again gained support, capitalising on anger over her open-door refugee policy. 

The anti-Islam Alternative for Germany party won about 12 percent, according to broadcasters' exit polls in the capital, which prides itself on being a hip, multicultural city - gaining seats in the 10th of Germany's 16 states a year ahead of national elections.

Merkel's Christian Democratic Union won just 18 percent - its worst postwar result in the city, before or after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall - according to the exit polls, likely spelling the end of its term as junior coalition partner to the Social Democrats, who won 23 percent. 

The election in the chronically indebted city-state of 3.5 million people was dominated by many local issues including poor public services, crumbling schools, late trains and a housing shortage, as well as how to cope with the migrant influx.

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The anti-immigrant AfD's results in Berlin state elections today: 15.5% in former East Berlin, 10% in former Westhttps://twitter.com/ZDFheute/status/777549410083430400 …

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Days before the election, Mayor Michael Muller had warned that a double-digit score for the AfD “would be seen around the world as a sign of the return of the rightwing and the Nazis in Germany”, the Guardian reported.

“Berlin is not any old city”, the Social Democrat politician wrote on Facebook on Thursday, according to the Guardian. “Berlin is the city that transformed itself from the capital of Hitler’s Nazi Germany into a beacon of freedom, tolerance, diversity and social cohesion.”

Nonetheless, the vote marked another milestone for the upstart AfD, which has campaigned on a xenophobic platform, similar to France's National Front or far-right populists in Austria and the Netherlands, and gained support especially in Berlin's poor eastern fringe districts.

A strong showing in Germany's biggest city means it "doesn't just benefit from discontent in rural areas but can establish itself ... in a city of millions that is known for its open lifestyle," said the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper.

Germany took in one million asylum seekers last year, and more than 70,000 of them came to Berlin, with many housed in the cavernous hangars of the Nazi-built former Tempelhof airport, once the hub for the Cold War-era Berlin airlift.

Merkel - who was booed this week by right-wing activists shouting "get lost" - before the election conceded it was hard to reach the "protest voters" who have turned their backs on mainstream parties.

'Suicidal'

Merkel's CDU has a national majority - but in Berlin it has served as junior coalition partner to Mueller's SPD, traditionally the strongest party in the city.

As Mueller has rejected a new coalition with the CDU, Merkel's party may be cast out of the Berlin government altogether.

The SPD was seen likely to team up with the ecologist Greens and the far-left Die Linke party, both of which scored more than 16 percent support, according to ARD and ZDF exit polls.

Such a "red-red-green" coalition, its member hope, could one day be replicated at the national level. 

Merkel, meanwhile, will face further pressure "to explain her political strategy", said Gero Neugebauer of Berlin's Free University.

"The more fearful within her party might be increasingly scared of losing power in 2017," he told the Handelsblatt business daily.

Casting his ballot on Sunday, police officer Tobias Ludley, 27,

voiced concern about the AfD, a party he labelled "the wolf in sheep's clothing".

"The AfD is appealing to people who otherwise wouldn't vote, the protest voters," he said, worried about the party gaining ground in a city that was normally "a shining example of multiculturalism".

Muslims rail against Harvard as Suu Kyi named ‘Humanitarian of the Year’

Myanmar leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi was bestowed the Harvard 2016 "Humanitarian of the Year Award" on Saturday. Pic via Facebook.

18th September 2016 

MUSLIM students and groups are protesting Harvard Foundation’s selection of Myanmar (Burma) leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi for the “2016 Humanitarian of the Year” award, saying she has done nothing to address the persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in her country.

Suu Kyi, who received the foundation’s Peter J. Gomes awardduring a ceremony in Cambridge Saturday, first gained international prominence as the General Secretary of the newly-formed National League for Democracy in Myanmar in 1990.

She later became one of the world’s most well-known political prisoners when in 1989 she was sentenced to 15 years’ house arrest due to her participation in anti-government protests. With the support of her country, she was later appointed to the newly-created position of state counselor, a role similar to that of a prime minister.

In 1991, Suu Kyi was honored with a Nobel Peace Prize for her “non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights”.

But since she claimed the reins of government in April, Suu Kyi has been heavily criticized by activists across the globe for failing to aid Myanmar’s Muslim minority – the Rohingya – who the United Nations calls one of the world’s most persecuted minorities.

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Long daytime naps are 'warning sign' for type-2 diabetes

Napping for more than an hour during the day could be a warning sign for type-2 diabetes, Japanese researchers suggest.

15 September 2016

They found the link after analysing observational studies involving more than 300,000 people.

UK experts said people with long-term illnesses and undiagnosed diabetes often felt tired during the day.

But they said there was no evidence that napping caused or increased the risk of diabetes.

The large study, carried out by scientists at the University of Tokyo, is being presented at a meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in Munich.

Their research found there was a link between long daytime naps of more than 60 minutes and a 45% increased risk of type-2 diabetes, compared with no daytime napping - but there was no link with naps of less than 40 minutes.

Sleeping patterns

The researchers said long naps could be a result of disturbed sleep at night, potentially caused by sleep apnoea.

And this sleeping disorder could increase the risk of heart attacks, stroke, cardiovascular problems and other metabolic disorders, including type-2 diabetes.

Sleep deprivation, caused by work or social life patterns, could also lead to increased appetite, which could increase the risk of type-2 diabetes.

But it was also possible that people who were less healthy or in the early stages of diabetes were more likely to nap for longer during the day.

Shorter naps, in contrast, were more likely to increase alertness and motor skills, the authors said.

'Early warning sign'

Naveed Sattar, professor of metabolic medicine at the University of Glasgow, said there was now a lot of evidence of some kind of link between sleep disturbances and diabetes.

"It's likely that risk factors which lead to diabetes also cause napping. This could include slightly high sugar levels, meaning napping may be an early warning sign of diabetes," he said.

But proper trials were needed to determine whether sleeping patterns made a difference to "real health outcomes".

Dr Benjamin Cairns, from the cancer epidemiology unit at the University of Oxford, said the findings should be treated with caution.

"In general, it is not possible to make conclusions about cause and effect based on observational studies alone, because usually they cannot rule out alternative explanations for their findings," he said.

Sri Lanka: NSSP leader campaigns for IMF austerity agenda

By Nanda Wickremasinghe -12 September 2016

Wickremabahu Karunaratne, leader of the pseudo-left Nava Sama Samaja Party (NSSP), is shamelessly promoting the Sri Lankan government’s attacks on the living conditions and democratic rights of workers and the poor.

Functioning as a propagandist for the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration, Karunaratne regularly holds media conferences and writes columns for the Colombo press critical of workers, students and farmers in struggle against the government’s regressive social measures.

Karunaratne has been a close associate of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, leader of the right-wing United National Party for nearly two decades. The NSSP leader campaigned to oust former President Mahinda Rajapakse and install Maithripala Sirisena as president, claiming it to be a “democratic revolution.”

This was a blatant cover up. The “democratic revolution” was a US-sponsored regime-change operation to bring Sirisena to office in the January 8, 2015 presidential election. Having previously supported Rajapakse’s war against separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and his anti-democratic methods, Washington moved against him to end Colombo’s close relations with Beijing and align it with US war preparations against China.

As soon as he became president, Sirisena established the National Executive Council and appointed Karunaratne to the 13-member unelected body. Karunaratne’s function was to provide the government with democratic credentials as it rapidly consolidated its pro-US foreign policy. Other council members included former president Chandrika Kumaratunga, ex-army commander Sarath Fonseka and leaders of the Sinhala chauvinist Jathika Hela Urumaya, the Tamil National Alliance and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP).

Though the NEC no longer exists, Karunaratne remains a cheerleader for the government, justifying all its austerity measures and anti-democratic moves.

In a July 10 column for the weekly Sinhala-language Irida Lakbima, Karunaratne declared was “no future” for Sri Lanka, “without freeing ourselves from the debt burden and unless we tighten our belts for a short period.”

In order to repay debts borrowed at more than 8 percent interest, he continued, it was necessary to secure low-interest loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other institutions. This meant that Sri Lanka “must show savings” and an increase in the value added tax (VAT) introduced by Wickremesinghe “cannot be altered significantly.”

Karunaratne, in fact, simply repeated the phrases uttered by Wickremesinghe and Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake in parliament to justify the government’s measures.

Confronted with a balance of payments deficit, falling exports and huge debts, the government obtained a $US1.5 billion stand-by loan from the IMF, pledging to implement its austerity agenda, including a VAT increase, cuts to education and health and the privatisation of state-owned enterprises. Wickremesinghe and his ministers declared that the IMF demands were the key to Sri Lanka’s future economic development.

Widespread protests erupted among workers, students and farmers against these attacks, as part of an upsurge by the working class internationally. While the Colombo government temporarily withdrew the VAT rise in the face of popular opposition, it is preparing to re-introduce tax increases with some cosmetic changes.

Karunaratne’s call for workers and the poor to “tighten belts” is in line with the efforts of the trade unions and pseudo-lefts to contain and divert workers seeking to fight these measures.

At an August 25 press conference, the NSSP leader attacked students opposing the privatisation of education and, in particular, the establishment of the South Asian Institute of Technology and Medicine, a private medical college that charges exorbitant fees for its courses. He denounced the protests, declaring that it was a “terrible campaign by some people” and that “some of the arguments are ridiculous.”

The private sector had been able to “intervene” in Sri Lankan education for a long time, he said, and currently had “freedom in all the levels. That is the situation today under the capitalist setup.” While cynically paying lip service to socialism—in the future—Karunaratne justified dismantling public education and opening opportunities to private investors.

“We are against capitalism and fight for a socialist setup,” he said, “but at this moment we have to defend democratic rights within capitalism. In medicine there is also a market for education and therefore investors are interested … Even though this is bourgeois investment we are responsible to defend equal rights and equal opportunities within capitalism.”

Although free public education is limited in Sri Lanka, it is an important social gain of the working class and a key target for privatisation by successive governments.

Karunaratne and Citizen’s Power (Purawesi Balaya), another middle-class group that campaigned to bring Sirisena and Wickremesinghe to power, openly attacked the student protests, claiming they are helping the “fascist” Rajapakse return to power. The NSSP, Citizen’s Power and the Trade Union Movement for Social Justice have launched a series of meetings under this banner.

Rajapakse and his chauvinist supporters are attempting to exploit the popular discontent against the government to stir up Sinhala communalism and appeal to Buddhist reaction and the military.

Karunaratne has called for the pseudo-left milieu and the civil society fraternity to re-group, defend democracy and defeat Rajapakse’s “fascist movement.”

Writing in the NSSP’s Haraya, he declared: “The Leftists in Sri Lanka should build a powerful campaign mobilising those who were active in replacing the Mahinda [Rajapakse] regime with the current government. This would be a force that would come into conflict with those who are trying to compromise with the joint opposition [of Rajapakse].”

Karunaratne and the pseudo-lefts use “fascist” as a term of abuse, stripped of any scientific content, in a bid to obscure the anti-democratic character of the current regime. While Rajapakse was certainly an autocrat, Sirisena was a senior minister in his government until just months before the presidential election. Wickremesinghe was a minister in the UNP government in the 1980s that launched the country’s civil war and brutally suppressed any opposition. The Sirisena-Wickremasinghe regime has already mobilised police and soldiers to suppress opposition protests.

The growing struggles of workers, students and the poor sharply pose the necessity for a political fight against the Sirisena-Wickremasinghe administration, which is backed by US imperialism and protected by pseudo-left formations such as the NSSP.

The Socialist Equality Party and its student wing, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality, urges workers, students and the poor to break from every faction of the bourgeoisie and their fake left supporters, and mobilise on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program to fight the government’s austerity attacks.

Never the answer

Sep 12, 2016

For many years, those in a position of authority in Sri Lanka considered themselves to be above the law. The effects of this attitude on the Sri Lankan civil war were catastrophic, resulting in tens of thousands of dead civilians. But the consequences of Sri Lanka’s systemic impunity did not end there, and rarely was this more apparent than in the case of Duminda Silva.

On 8 October 2011 there was a gunfight in the Colombo suburb of Kolonnawa between rival underworld gangs. The leader of one of the gangs, Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra, was shot and killed by the leader of the other, Duminda Silva. Neither were ordinary hoodlums: Lakshman was a former MP who was at the time employed as President Rajapaksa’s advisor on trade union affairs.  Silva was a serving MP who held the important role of “monitoring officer” for the Ministry of Defence, making him in effect the parliamentary eyes and ears of President Rajapaksa’s all-powerful brother Gotabaya.

That this happened at all showed how lawless Sri Lankan politics had become, but the farce then increased to grotesque levels when the police subsequently refused to arrest or even question Silva, claiming that he was not a suspect despite the fact that bullet shrapnel embedded in his skull clearly placed him at the scene of the crime.

Sri Lanka has a new government now, and while attempts to hold perpetrators to account for the various atrocities carried out in the course of the civil war have got off to a rocky start, the government has made some attempt to reestablish respect for the rule of law when it comes to less politically problematic cases such as that of Silva. This was shown last week, when Silva, along with four accomplices, was finally convicted for Lakshman’s murder.

However, while this conviction should have been a welcome sign of Sri Lanka’s return to normalcy, such an interpretation was immediately undermined by the sentence that was passed: death.

It should be pointed out that the chances of Silva or his accomplices ever being executed are slim. No one has been officially executed in Sri Lanka since 1976 and so slight is the chance of an execution ever taking place that when Sri Lanka appointed a new hangman last year it was treated as a jaunty “and finally” news item by much of the western media.

Nevertheless, one must not be complacent. President Sirisena has signalled his support for restarting executions, and the matter has recently been debated in the Sri Lankan Parliament. Furthermore, many experts and groups, including the UN Committee Against Torture, feel that even if no execution ever takes place, the act of placing someone on death row alone constitutes a form of mental torture.

Many of Sri Lanka’s ongoing human rights problems stem from the climate of impunity that took root as a consequence of the failure to prosecute crimes committed by the powerful. But others stem from the fact that the actions taken during the civil war caused the government to lose its sense of morality, and the ability or will to distinguish between right and wrong. The continued passing of death sentences is entirely incompatible with Sri Lanka’s attempts to reassert the importance of human rights and to meet international legal standards.

A willingness to embrace the death penalty undermines the legitimacy of the state and its justice processes, and flies in the face of global human rights standards and norms, along with the direction of history. It is a barbaric practice from a bygone age, and for all that Sri Lanka is eager to show the world that it has changed, the passing of death sentences shows that the state’s fundamental cruelty has not diminished.