Trump seeks to revive Dakota Access, Keystone XL oil pipelines

President Trump signs executive orders on the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines saying, "we are going to renegotiate some of the terms." (Reuters)

By Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin January 24 at 1:25 PM

President Trump signed executive orders Tuesday to revive the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines, another step in his effort to dismantle former president Barack Obama’s environmental legacy.

He also signed an executive order to expedite environmental reviews of other infrastructure projects, lamenting the existing “incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible permitting process.”

“The regulatory process in this country has become a tangled-up mess,” he said.

It remained unclear how Trump’s order would expedite those environmental reviews. Many are statutory and the legislation that created them cannot be swept aside by an executive order. Indeed, Trump’s order on the Dakota Access pipeline left some ambiguity. The executive order directs the Army Corps of Engineers to “review and approve in an expedited manner, to the extent permitted by law.”

Trump said that both pipeline projects would be subject to renegotiation. His order for the Keystone XL project “invites” the company to “re-submit its application.”

In an Oval Office signing before reporters, the president hinted at a possible new wrinkle. He said he would want any new projects to make use of American steel, though that requirement is not mentioned in his executive order.

“I am very insistent that if we’re going to build pipelines in the United States, the pipe should be made in the United States,” he told reporters.

The orders will likely have an immediate impact in North Dakota, where the pipeline company Energy Transfer Partners wants to complete the final 1,100-foot piece of the 1,172-mile pipeline route that runs under Lake Oahe. The pipeline would carry oil from the booming shale oil reserves in North Dakota to refineries and pipeline networks in Illinois.

The Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other Native American groups have been protesting the project, which they say would imperil their water supplies and disturb sacred burial and archaeological sites. The Army Corp of Engineers called a halt to the project in December to consider alternative routes.


The protest of an oil pipeline that is being constructed close to the Standing Rock Indian reservation has become a rallying point for Native Americans across the United States. Here's what you need to know. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

The protest of an oil pipeline that is being constructed close to the Standing Rock Indian reservation has become a rallying point for Native Americans across the United States. Here's what you need to know. (Daron Taylor/The Washington Post)

The tribe is expected to return to court in a bid to block the project. Last week the tribe asked remaining protesters — about 500 to 700 of whom were still in the main camp near the pipeline site — to leave and return to their homes. The camp is in a flood plain, and heavy snow could pose dangers when it starts melting.

The executive order from Trump on the Keystone XL pipeline threatens to undo a major decision by Obama, who said the project would contribute to climate change because it would carry tar sands crude oil, which is especially greenhouse gas intensive because of the energy it takes to extract the thick crude. Obama’s announcement followed a similar finding by the State Department, which has reviewed applications for cross-border pipelines.

TransCanada, the Calgary-based project owner, has said it would be interested in reviving the pipeline. But it was unclear what Trump’s caution about renegotiation would mean for TransCanada’s plans. Originally, TransCanada had planned to get about 65 percent of the steel pipe from U.S. manufacturers but other supplies from Canada.

On Tuesday, Trump said: “From now on, we’re going to be making pipeline in the United States. We build the pipelines, we want to build the pipe. We’re going to put a lot of workers, a lot of skilled workers, back to work. We will build our own pipeline, we will build our own pipes, like we used to in the old days.”

[On White House website, Obama climate priorities vanish, replaced by Trump’s focus on energy production]

Speaking to reporters Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the president supported energy projects “like Dakota and the Keystone Pipeline, areas that we can increase jobs, increase economic growth, and tap into America’s energy supply more, that’s something that he has been very clear about.”

Referring to comments Trump has made during the campaign and after the election, Spicer said: “He was talking about that being a big priority. That’s one of those ones where I think that the energy sector and our natural resources are an area where I think the president is very, very keen on making sure that we maximize our use of natural resources to America’s benefit.”

“It’s good for economic growth, it’s good for jobs, and it’s good for American energy,” Spicer added.

President Trump signed executive orders Tuesday to revive the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines. During the daily briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer discussed the timeline for the Keystone XL pipeline project. (Reuters)

President Trump signed executive orders Tuesday to revive the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines. During the daily briefing, White House press secretary Sean Spicer discussed the timeline for the Keystone XL pipeline project. (Reuters)

As news of the move surfaced Tuesday morning, oil industry officials hailed it as overdue.

“Making American energy great again starts with infrastructure projects like these that move resources safely and efficiently,” said Stephen Brown, vice president of federal government affairs at Tesoro Companies.

“We are pleased to see the new direction being taken by this administration to recognize the importance of our nation’s energy infrastructure by restoring the rule of law in the permitting process that’s critical to pipelines and other infrastructure projects,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute.

Many lawmakers, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), backed the president’s bid to revive the pipelines.

Environmentalists, by contrast, vowed to continue to fight the two pipelines.

Greenpeace Executive Director Annie Leonard noted in a statement that a broad coalition of opponents — “indigenous communities, ranchers, farmers, and climate activists” — managed to block the projects in the past and would not give up now.

“We all saw the incredible strength and courage of the water protectors at Standing Rock, and the people around the world who stood with them in solidarity,” she said. “We’ll stand with them again if Trump tries to bring the Dakota Access Pipeline, or any other fossil fuel infrastructure project, back to life.”

“We will resist this with all of our power, and we will continue to build the future the world wants to see,” she added.

Bill McKibben, founder of the activist group 350.org, which has fought both the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, said the decision to allow the projects to move forward ignores the massive opposition expressed both through public protests and in comments to government agencies.

“The world’s climate scientists and its Nobel laureates explained over and over why it was unwise and immoral,” McKibben said in a statement. “In one of his first actions as president, Donald Trump ignores all that in his eagerness to serve the oil industry. It’s a dark day for a reason, but we will continue to fight.”

Americans have tended to favor the Keystone XL project even as Obama rejected it. According to an October 2015 Washington Post-ABC News poll, 55 percent wanted the next president to support building the Keystone oil pipeline, while 34 percent wanted the new leader to oppose it, with majorities of Republicans and independents supportive. Earlier Post-ABC surveys found that Americans widely expected the project to create a significant amount of jobs, but that they were divided on whether it would pose a significant environmental risk.

'Extreme' gag rule on abortion puts $9bn in health aid at risk, activists say

Donald Trump’s executive order prompts fears for groups fighting Aids and Zika and working against child and maternal deaths

Participants hold signs at an anti-abortion rally. Trump’s ‘gag rule’ executive order could put $9.4bn in US health aid at risk, campaigners say. Photograph: Ted S. Warren/AP

Karen McVeigh-Tuesday 24 January 2017

Billions of dollars in US aid to groups combating diseases worldwide could be at risk from Donald’s Trump’s “unprecedented and far-reaching” reversal of abortion-related policy, campaigners warned on Tuesday.

Trump signed an executive order on Monday reinstating the “global gag rule”, which bans funding for groups that offer abortions or abortion advocacy, even if they use their own funds to do so.

Campaigners fear the move could affect a wide range of groups providing lifesaving treatment, such as those working to combat HIV and Zika, as well as those helping prevent child and maternal deaths and unwanted pregnancies worldwide.

What is the ‘global gag rule’, and why does Trump support it?

The policy has been repealed and reinstated several times in the past, but women’s reproductive rights groups said Trump had signed the “most extreme” and sweeping order of its kind.

The policy has been expanded to affect “all global health assistance furnished by all departments or agencies”, according to a White House statement published on Monday.

The US is the most generous bilateral donor to reproductive rights causes worldwide – with current funding at $575m. What is still unclear is to what extent the gag rule will affect the US’s wider global health funding, which the reproductive rights campaigners PAI estimate to be more than $9bn.

Groups are still unpicking what funding “global health assistance” refers to. For example, humanitarian assistance may be exempt because it is funded in a different way.

Suzanne Ehlers, president and CEO of PAI, described the expanded version of the law as “irrational and backward”.

“Our preliminary analysis,” Ehlers said, “based on the presidential memorandum yesterday, is that [the global gag rule] is not only more severe and sweeping, but it’s more expansive than that introduced by previous presidents.

“Family planning assistance funding by USAid is a budget of around $610m. But if our reading of this memorandum is accurate, it will cover all global health assistance. That is in the ball park of $9.4bn.”

The global gag rule, also called the Mexico City policy, denies foreign organisations US family planning funding if they provide abortion information, referrals or services, or if they engage in any abortion rights advocacy with their own funds.

Projects on the ground are faced with a stark choice – to refuse US funding or to take the funding and end abortion advice. First introduced by the Reagan administration, the measure was repealed by Bill Clinton, reinstated by George W Bush and repealed again by Barack Obama.

But Monday’s White House memorandum suggests the rule will apply not just to family planning funding but to “all global health assistance”.

Ehlers said: “We are talking about work on HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, public and child health.

“So let’s say I’m a US organisation involved in global health assistance in Malawi worth $1m. I’m working with 12 or 15 different NGO partners in a malaria programme. All of those partners have to sign a Mexico City policy to say they are not doing anything at all with any of their own private funds to do with abortion.

“What business is it of the US government to determine what groups across the world, working in what might very well be legal in their own countries, do with their own money?

“This is not a pro-life policy,” said Ehlers. “There is already no US-taxpayer assistance going to pay for abortion. This is a policy denying women life-saving services. It will cut off funding for groups providing HIV testing kits to teenagers, it will cut malaria programmes. We are imperilling and endangering global health programmes.”

A spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood said: “This is the most extreme executive order that we have ever seen, in the global health space, under any Republican administration.

“It will not just affect family planning services, but organisations that are working to combat Zika, to combat HIV/Aids. We at Planned Parenthood are very concerned and astonished, coming after a weekend when hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets in a historic show of strength, that this administration would target the world’s most vulnerable women in this way.”

Caroline Crosbie, acting CEO of Pathfinder, a health programme which works globally, said the policy “risks the lives of millions of people around the world”.

“This vastly expanded gag rule jeopardises millions of lives, and will only serve to undercut decades of American global health leadership.

“While we examine what the precise negative effects the expanded policy will have on our partners in the countries where we work, we do know that it will do more than silence organisations from talking about abortion – it will mean these organisations will not be able to provide HIV prevention, care and treatment services, integrated maternal health care and contraceptive services or counselling on the potential risks of Zika infection, among others, if they intend to receive US government funds.”

Amanda Klasing, a senior researcher in women’s rights at Human Rights Watch, said the expanded rule introduced by the Trump administration would have a chilling impact on freedom of speech and would “dramatically increase” the number of groups affected.

“One of our concerns is that it is a dramatic expansion of the US trying to govern free speech abroad,” said Klasing. “What they are trying to do is hold funding captive.”

Klasing said the effect of the rule would be that organisations that operate in countries that restrict women’s rights and women’s access to services, if in receipt of US funding, would no longer be able to speak out.

“They can’t advocate around loosening those restrictions if they want to continue to receive US funding. How far does this go? Can the groups participate in harm reduction models?”

Anu Kumar, chief strategist of Ipas, an organisation working to combat deaths from unsafe abortion, said: “We are not entirely certain what pot of money will be affected. But it if is global, then even HIV funding could be jeopardised.

“We already know is the gag rule results in cuts to services and clinics are forced to close. Every day there are 840 women who die from pregnancy-related cases. We know there are 225 million women in developing countries who don’t want to be pregnant.

“The scale of the problem is enormous.”

Analysis by the Guttmacher Institute found that last year’s US aid budget for family planning gave 27 million women and couples access to contraceptives, prevented more than 2m unsafe abortions and 6 million unintended pregnancies, and helped prevent 11,000 maternal deaths worldwide.

Trump’s Plan for a Massive Deportation Is Cruel, Unjust, and Economic Suicide

BY DOUGLAS MASSEY-JANUARY 24, 2017

It is difficult to know what actions President Donald Trump will take on immigration given his contradictory statements on the issue — but it likely won’t be pretty. Shortly after the election, he said he planned immediately to deport 2 to 3 million undocumented immigrants, but on the day of his inauguration he told Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin that “we don’t want to hurt those kids,” referring to the beneficiaries of former President Barack Obama’s executive order deferring deportation for DREAMers, easily the most readily deportable group. The Republican Party platform on which Trump ran states that “the executive amnesties of 2012 and 2014 are a direct violation of federal law and usurp the powers of Congress … [and] must be immediately rescinded by a Republican president.” Although the 2014 executive order was blocked in federal court and never implemented, the 2012 order was carried out. Known by the acronym DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), it provides relief from deportation for some 1.3 million undocumented immigrants who entered the country as minors.

DACA recipients are a small subset of the total undocumented population. Consider the requirements: They entered the United States before their 16th birthday, were under the age of 31 as of June 15, 2012, physically present in the country on that date, and present also at the time of their application. Under the terms of the executive order, they are all high school graduates, GED holders, or persons honorably discharged from the U.S. Armed Forces. They have lived continuously in the United States since June 15, 2007, and none has ever been convicted of a felony or even a significant misdemeanor. At the time of their receipt of temporary legal status, all were judged to pose no threat to national security or public safety by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Like other children who grew up in the United States at the same time, DACA recipients made their way through U.S. schools, earned a high school degree or equivalent, and stayed out of trouble with the law. Their primary language is English; most are either in college or employed. The only thing that distinguishes these young people from U.S. citizens of the same age is that — for some part of their childhood — DACA recipients were undocumented, which of course constitutes a civil infraction and not a criminal offense.

Moreover, by definition all DACA recipients entered into undocumented status as a result of actions taken by their parents or adult guardians. They did not make the decision to violate U.S. immigration law themselves, and by any reasonable standard of justice they are not to blame for ending up in undocumented status.It is a basic principle of law and ethics that children should not be punished for the transgressions of their elders. Unfortunately, this is exactly what will happen if President Trump rescinds Obama’s DACA order upon assuming office, as he has promised. If he follows through on that pledge, it will instantly render 1.3 million innocent people deportable from the country in which they grew up.

With the loss of deferred action status, DACA recipients revert to being unlawful aliens, a category of persons that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is legally obliged to remove from the United States. Unlike most undocumented immigrants, however, ICE knows exactly who these people are and where they live, making a massive roundup and removal easy. In the process, however, it will unleash a humanitarian tragedy and let loose an unprecedented violation of human rights. Innocent young people and their families will be torn apart, and communities rendered asunder, all to placate a xenophobic fringe of the U.S. population. According to a 2015 national survey fielded by the Pew Research Center, 72 percent of all Americans believe that undocumented immigrants who meet certain requirements should be allowed to stay in the country legally, a figure that stands at 56 percent even among Republicans. The mass deportation of so many eager and blameless young people will seem cruel and heartless to many in the United States and throughout the world.

In addition to immiserating millions of young people and their families, the U.S. economy will be undermined as productive people are removed from jobs, colleges, and universities, making it impossible for U.S. taxpayers to capitalize on the public investments they have made in their health and education. According to estimates by the Cato Institute, the fiscal cost of deporting DACA recipients would exceed $60 billion, and their departure would reduce economic growth by $280 billion over the next decade.

Among those approved for DACA, 96 percent are from Latin America, with 78 percent coming from Mexico alone. South of the border, the arrival of 1.3 million English-speaking people raised in the United States will create widespread disorder. The deportees will arrive with U.S. educations, limited fluency in Spanish, a hazy knowledge of their nations’ history and culture, and a lack of necessary documents — clogging labor markets, straining social services, and leaving few possibilities for integration and advancement in their countries of birth.

In his 10-point plan on immigration reform, Trump promised to “immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties. All immigration laws will be enforced — we will triple the number of ICE agents.” If Trump follows through on this promise, great damage will be done to the fabric of American society and its standing in the world, and an ominous step will be taken toward an intolerant, xenophobic future. The launching of a mass deportation campaign directed at otherwise productive, law-abiding young men and women who grew up as Americans but ended up in violation of civil statues through no fault of their own portends a new darkness descending upon the land. If we can summarily castigate more than 1 million young people who have never committed a criminal act and who have been judged by the Department of Homeland Security to constitute no threat to public safety or national security, what else are we capable of doing to those around us?

Photo credit: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/Getty Images

In Cuba, the post-Fidel era began ten years ago

The Castro brothers in 1996. Reuters--Running small businesses such as barbershops or food stands is considered ‘normal’ in Cuba’s market socialism.Alexandre Meneghini/Retuers

What would Fidel think of Chanel Fashion Week in Cuba? Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters--Leadership and ideology in surviving communist systems in 2016. Created by author. Author provided

January 23, 2017

Ever since Fidel Castro died in November 2016, foreign observers – journalists, political tourists, and the like – have flocked to the streets of Havana. Let’s go and see communist Cuba before it is too late! they reason.

What this reaction misses is that Cuba has already changed: the post-Fidel era is a decade old.

My new research, published in Mexican Law Review, shows major shifts in the governing style and ideology of the country. The charismatic leadership that epitomised Fidel’s time in power is gone, replaced by a collective arrangement. And Cuba’s centrally planned economy has integrated market socialist features.

These changes will likely be accelerated by Barack Obama’s recent repeal of the US policy that gave Cuban migrants favoured immigration status – both by eliminating an escape route for dissatisfied citizens and by reducing potential future remittances.

The end of charismatic leadership

When Fidel fell gravely ill in July 2006, he provisionally delegated his dual posts – president of the Council of State and first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba – to his younger brother Raúl, long-time head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and second secretary of the Communist Party. As Fidel’s health further deteriorated, the National Assembly made Raúl president in February 2008.

This move kept succession within the family, but Raúl has rejected any Kim dynasty-style future for the country. If ten years ago Cuba looked more like North Korea than China, today the opposite is true.

Breaking with Fidel’s decades-old practice, Raúl recommended to the delegates of the sixth Party Congress in April 2011 that they limit public officials to a maximum of two five-year terms; this soon became the official Party line.

In the short term, term limits meant that Raúl Castro’s presidency would end in February 2018, which he has confirmed. In the long term, that raised questions on the post-Castro era. To be sure, in 2013 Miguel Díaz-Canel, a Communist Party insider, was promoted to first vice president of the Council of State – the first time ever that a revolutionary veteran did not hold that position. Technically, according to the Cuban constitution, if the president dies, the first vice-president takes over.

The seventh Party Congress, held in April 2016, nonetheless appointed Raúl Castro to be first secretary. While this does keep a revolutionary veteran in control of a key post after 2018, for the first time the head of the Cuba’s Communist Party will not be the same person as Cuba’s president.

The rise of market socialism

Market socialism can be defined as “an attempt to reconcile the advantages of the market as a system of exchange with social ownership of the means of production.”

As if following this definition from the Oxford Dictionary of Social Sciences, the sixth Party Congress approved that from now on “planning will take the market into account, influencing upon it and considering its characteristics.”

This is a clumsy engagement with the market, treating it as an alien from outer space. And it epitomises the current ideological hardships of the Cuban regime.

Still, Raúl Castro has overseen the largest expansion of non-state socioeconomic activity in socialist Cuba’s 50-year history.

Cuba’s National Office of Statistics reports that in 2015 71% of Cuban workers were state employees, down from 80% in 2007, and the number of (mostly urban) self-employed workers has grown from 141,600 in 2008 to half a million in 2015. In a country with a total workforce of five million, this is not a trivial change.

From 2008 to 2014, more than 1.58 million hectares of idle land has been transferred into private hands. That’s nearly a quarter of Cuba’s 6.2 million hectares of agricultural land, roughly on par with state-owned land (30%).

Cuba’s agricultural land is being handed over to non-state developers. Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters

In sum, the market is no longer the enemy, it’s a junior partner in Cuban central planning. The last Party Congress, Cuba’s seventh, approved the continuity of controlled liberalisation efforts by turning market socialism into Communist Party doctrine, stating that “the State recognises and integrates the market into the functioning of the system of planned direction of the economy.”

The new Cuban polity

The rise of market-socialist ideology emerged, to a substantial extent, from the decline of charismatic authority.

Cuba’s next generation of leaders –- expected to take over in 2018 -– will not enjoy the same unquestionable legitimacy as its founding fathers, much less that of Fidel Castro. So the inevitable passing of the revolutionaries still in power today, most of whom are in their 80s, makes the already difficult process of revamping the regime even tougher.

Raúl Castro’s challenge over the past decade has thus been not only to make his presidency stand on solid ground, but also to make sure that such a ground endures after he leaves. The question of economic performance was clearly central to that task.

Raúl saw market socialism as a way to strengthen Cuba’s economy without abandoning its Castro-era ideals. The revolutionary veterans’ interest in seeing the system they built survive is unsurprising, and it explains their rejection of any capitalist encroachments.

But it remains to be seen how long – and if – this ideological limit will survive them.

Let’s return to the earlier chart presenting a comparison of surviving Communist countries at present. It shows Cuba today, after ten years of Raúl, located somewhere in between North Korea (where an orthodox Soviet-style economy is still firmly entrenched) and countries such as China and Vietnam that have seen capitalism restored, and somewhat closer to the latter.

But the difference between “medium” market acceptance and “high” market acceptance is a substantial one. The latter presupposes a comeback of the bourgeoisie – the social class of owners of the means of production, expropriated by Castro’s revolution – and thus far this key ideological limit remains strong in Cuba.

Since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, many have assumed that the fall of communist Cuba is a matter of when not if. Only by abandoning the focus on “the fall” and understanding how communist rule has survived in Cuba we can grasp that Cuba has already changed mightily.

Welcome to the second decade of the post-Fidel era.

Most Indian firms under-hedged, vulnerable to FX risk - India Ratings

FILE PHOTO - U.S. one hundred dollar bills are seen in this picture illustration, August 2, 2013. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji/Illustration/File Photo

 Tue Jan 24, 2017

Most Indian companies with overseas debt have not hedged enough of their foreign currency risk, making them vulnerable to any sharp movements in the rupee, according to a study by credit ratings agency India Ratings.

The study of 100 companies holding 19.5 trillion rupees ($286.30 billion) of debt abroad as of March 2016, showed 54 of them, with 14.5 trillion exposure, were vulnerable given only 35 percent of their balance sheets were hedged, India Ratings, a unit of Fitch, said on Tuesday.

Of those 54 companies, 42 holding 8.9 trillion rupees in foreign currency debt could see their credit profiles "weaken substantially" should the rupee weaken by 10 percent, the rating agency said.

The high cost of hedging and the range-bound movement in the rupee over the last three years is deterring companies, said Rakesh Valecha, head of credit and market research at India Ratings.

"It is important that corporates don't get complacent with rupee moving in a narrow band because if the rupee weakens sharply then corporates can see their margins hit, borrowing cost rise and even credit matrices moving down," Valecha said in a briefing with reporters.

The rupee has been relatively range-bound since 2013, when it suffered its worst crisis in more than two decades, though it hit a record low of 68.865 to the dollar in November.

The relative stability of the rupee and cheaper overseas rates have led to more Indian companies raising debt abroad, increasing concerns over whether they are prepared to deal with a sudden plunge in the currency or falls in global markets.

($1 = 68.1100 Indian rupees)

(Reporting by Suvashree Dey Choudhury; Editing by Biju Dwarakanath)

Burma: UN Rights official warns of likely retaliation against some in Rakhine State

24th January 2017

THE United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Burma believes there could be possible reprisals against the people she met on her recent official visit to Rakhine State.

Yanghee Lee arrived in Burma on Jan 8 for a 12-day visit, her fifth visit to the country which is currently under the microscope due to the ongoing conflict between the authorities and the Rohingya. Her visit concluded last Friday.

“I am deeply concerned about those with whom I met and spoke, those critical of the Government, those defending and advocating for the rights of others, and those who expressed their thoughts and opinions which did not conform to the narrative of those in the position of power,” Yanghee Lee said in a statement on Facebook.

Lee revealed that there has been a resumption of security forces’ counter operations in villages in the north of Maungdaw, Rakhine despite a brief lull. Raids were conducted in several villages and there have also been allegations of arbitrary arrests and detention.

According to the Bangkok Post, there have been reports of security forces committing atrocities against the Rohingya as the military conducts operations in the area following the attacks on border guard outposts in October last year that left nine police officers dead.

SEE ALSO: Burma: 2 police killed in attacks along Bangladesh border in conflicted Rakhine state

The Special Rapporteur was only allowed to visit Myitkyina and not other areas in Kachin State due to security reasons.

“Whilst I was not able to travel to the areas most severely affected, the situation is now such that even in Myitkyina, the capital of the state and home to over 300,000 people, residents are afraid – and now stay home after dark,” she said.

Last Friday, Lee criticized the Burmese government’s crackdown on the minority. She warned that the Burmese government’s dismissal and denial of allegations by the Rohingya in Rakhine of the atrocities committed towards them are counter-productive.

She added that the government will also lose its credibility if it continues to defend the ongoing human rights violations.

Lee also suggested that recent footage of police beating Rohingya villagers could be “a more common practice” and not just an isolated incident.

SEE ALSO: Watch: Footage shows alleged Rohingya assault by Burmese policemen

The footage, which spread over social media earlier this month, showed police officers hitting a boy on the head as he walked to a group of villagers who were rounded up during a clearance operation in Kotankauk village in Rakhine in November last year.

Burmese authorities insist action will be taken against the policemen who allegedly assaulted the villagers marking the first time authorities pledged to take action despite dozens of videos in recent months showing alleged abuse.

The Special Rapporteur will present her report to the UN Human Rights Council in March, which will include her observations and recommendations to the Burmese government.

Additional reporting by Reuters

Brazil sees sharp rise in yellow fever cases

AFP-Image captionPeople in the worst-affected state of Minas Gerais queued up to receive the vaccine

24 January 2017

Health officials in Brazil say there has been a sharp rise in the cases of yellow fever in the country.

They said there had been 63 confirmed cases of the mosquito-borne illness so far this year, up from seven in the whole of 2016.

Most of the cases have been in rural areas of Minas Gerais state, a Ministry of Health statement said.

The government has sent two million doses of yellow fever vaccines to the state.

The governor of Minas Gerais has declared a 180-day state of emergency.

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What is yellow fever?

AFP-Image captionThe WHO advises that people get a vaccine at least 10 days before travelling to a yellow-fever area

• Caused by a virus that is transmitted to humans by mosquitoes
• Difficult to diagnose and often confused with other diseases or fevers
• Most people recover after the first phase of infection that usually involves fever, muscle and back pain, headache, shivers, loss of appetite, and nausea or vomiting
• About 15% of people face a second, more serious phase involving high fever, jaundice, bleeding and deteriorating kidney function
• Half of those who enter the "toxic" phase usually die within 10 to 14 days

Source: WHO

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Of the 63 confirmed cases in Brazil, 35 have proved fatal, Brazilian Health Ministry figures show.

That is the highest number of deaths since at least 2008, the year to which Ministry of Health records date back.

There have also been three confirmed cases in Sao Paulo, Brazil's most populous state, and one each in Espiritu Santo and Bahia, which both neighbour Minas.

It is not clear what has caused the rise in cases.