Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israel go on hunger strike

Thousands of prisoners expected to join rights protest led by Marwan Barghouti that has significant political backing

Palestinians in Nablus hold pictures of relatives being held in Israeli jails during a rally to mark Palestinian prisoner day on Sunday. Photograph: Xinhua / Barcroft Images

Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem-Monday 17 April 2017

Hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails have gone on hunger strike over conditions of captivity, with more expected to join on Monday, in one of the biggest protests in recent years.

Led by the high-profile Fatah prisoner and leader Marwan Barghouti, seen by some as a potential successor to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, 700 prisoners initially joined the strike, announced on Sunday evening.

The protest includes members of Fatah as well as prisoners from Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

The strike, long planned, is seen as having widespread political support – not least in the year marking the 50th anniversary of the Israel occupation of the Palestinian territories, captured during the six day war in 1967. Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, as well as Hamas leaders in Gaza, have announced their backing.

The Palestinian National Council , the legislative body of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, also expressed its support for the strike on Sunday.

In a statement from Hamas the group said: “We warn the Israel Prison Service against bringing any harm to the hunger strikers. Any delay in answering their just demands will explode the situation inside all prisons. All prisoners will unite in the face of all those who might harm prisoners and their dignity.”

The number of prisoners going on hunger strike was expected to expand to 2,000 of the Palestinian prisoners being held in Israeli jails.

The hunger strike was announced to coincide with Palestinian prisoners’ day which is marked on Monday.

Prisoners’ demands include improved visitation rights from family members and easier access to telephones.

Advertisement

The visitation rights are a case of particular concern. While Israeli Prison Service regulations stipulate that all prisoners are entitled to family visits once every two weeks, in reality Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territories are required to apply for permits to enter Israel in the first place – permits which are often denied.

The announced strike began at Hadarim prison, where Barghouti is serving a prison sentence handed down by an Israeli court for his conviction for five murders.

Barghouti’s key role is seen by both Israelis and some members of his own Fatah party as significant in the midst of efforts by an ageing Abbas to centralise power around himself and a small circle of close associates.

In a comment piece written from prison for the New York Times on Monday, Barghouti said that the hunger strike was “the most peaceful form of resistance available”.

“Decades of experience have proved that Israel’s inhumane system of colonial and military occupation aims to break the spirit of prisoners and the nation to which they belong, by inflicting suffering on their bodies, separating them from their families and communities, using humiliating measures to compel subjugation,” he wrote.

A largescale hunger strike – not least in the year marking the 50th anniversary of the occupation and the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, which is regarded as highly significant by Palestinians – has the potential to raise tensions again. They have only recently subsided after the 2014 Gaza war and a wave of Palestinian attacks that has declined only in recent months.

In a measure of Israeli concern over the strike, the security minister, Gilad Erdan, held meetings with security officials from the prison service, the military and Shin Bet internal security service on Sunday.

In a statement issued by Erdan, the minister accused Barghouti of using the hunger strike for internal Palestinian political aims. “The strike led by Barghouti is motivated by internal Palestinian politics and therefore includes unreasonable demands concerning the conditions in the prisons,” he said. “I have instructed the prison service to act in any way to contain the strike within the walls of the prisons and the Israel police to prepare and provide any help needed to the prison service for any scenario that is likely to develop.”

Barghouti is serving five life sentences after being convicted in an Israeli court of directing lethal attacks during the Second Intifada, in a trial in which he refused to offer a defence, maintaining the court was illegitimate. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2004.

A report issued by Amnesty last week, containing interviews with prisoners’ family members highlighted the difficulties many complain of in seeing imprisoned relatives, with some saying they have been prevented from seeing relatives for many years.

It quoted “Ahmed”, a 32-year-old from Hebron held in administrative detention in Ketziot prison in the Negev desert, whose name has been changed to protect his identity. He said he has had only one family visit despite spending five-and-a-half years in an Israeli prison between 2005 and 2017.

He told Amnesty he was joining the hunger strike in the hope it would pressure the authorities to allow his 70-year-old mother, who has been repeatedly denied a permit, to visit him.

He said he had been arrested seven times in total. His administrative detention order is up for renewal on 29 July.

“I have had one family visit while in jail. In 2006, my mother and father were able to visit me because my father was sick. He was 75 then, it was the last time I saw him. He died while I was in prison,” he said.

Pregnant Canadian woman blocked from leaving Gaza Strip

Bissan Eid has been unable to leave Gaza since December, and her family says Ottawa must step in so she can give birth safely in Canada

Since Bissan Eid travelled to Gaza in June 2016 to get married and visit relatives, she has not been able to leave (Courtesy: Hadi Eid)

Jillian D'Amours-Monday 17 April 2017

TORONTO, Canada – Hadi Eid knows that time is of the essence.

But the Palestinian-Canadian father is no closer to securing his daughter’s departure from the Gaza Strip, despite desperate calls for the Canadian government to intervene on her behalf.

The situation is even more critical because Bissan Eid, 24, is pregnant, and expected to give birth to her first child in early May.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” Eid told Middle East Eye on Monday, explaining that his daughter and his entire family is getting increasingly anxious as the child’s due date fast approaches.

“The doctors told her that it’s preferable for her to give birth outside Gaza because [in] Gaza there is a lack of medical materials, [and] the quality in medical hospitals there is not so high,” he said.

But after Bissan travelled to Gaza last June to get married and visit relatives, she has not been able to leave.

Israeli officials have not granted her the necessary permit to exit through the Erez border crossing, which separates the coastal Palestinian enclave from Israel proper. She had planned to then cross into Jordan and fly back to Canada from there, her father said.

“The answer wasn’t yes, it wasn’t no, I don’t know what happened there, but they [the Israeli authorities] didn’t contact her,” Eid said.

Israel restricts Palestinian movement

The Eids are originally from the Gaza Strip.

Eid said he came to Canada in 2000, and got Canadian citizenship four years later. In 2005, the rest of his family, including Bissan, received Canadian citizenship, as well.

But Israel imposes strict restrictions on freedom of movement for Palestinians, even those holding foreign passports, especially for travel in and out of the Gaza Strip.

Israeli restrictions on travel to and from Gaza were first introduced in the 1990s, according to Gisha, an Israeli legal centre, and Israel required Palestinians to secure individual exit permits to exit the coastal territory.

After Hamas was elected to power in 2006, Israel put in place an even tighter closure policy on Gaza, and Palestinian travel through Erez, the main border crossing separating Israel and northern Gaza, dramatically decreased.

Read more ► Israel denies Gaza access to human rights workers: Report

Today, about 4,000 Palestinians, mainly businesspeople and medical patients, cross through Erez every month, compared to 26,000 Palestinians who entered Israel from Gaza every day in the summer of 2000, Gisha estimates.

 

Egypt also maintains strict control over the border crossing at Rafah, in southern Gaza, and only opens the crossing for a limited period of time every few months.

“It takes one hour from Erez crossing to Jordan, not more. It’s not complicated,” Eid said about what it would take to get his daughter on her way back to Canada.

“Israel every time when you talk with them, they [say] they are doing that under the pretext that this is for security reasons. I don’t think that a pregnant woman, [a] student, will make any security issue for Israel,” he said.

Canada urged to take action

Tadamon, a Montreal-based group working in support of Palestine and human rights issues, called on Canada to work with Israeli and Jordanian officials to secure Bissan’s exit permit.

“Canada’s Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has made very public pronouncements about diversity being Canada’s ‘strength’ and the fundamental humanity of all Canadians despite origin or religious background,” the group said in a statement.

“We are calling on the Liberal government and Trudeau to take action in [Eid’s] case so that she may receive the support she urgently needs.”

The Concordia Student Union also launched a petition, to be delivered to Trudeau and Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, to bring Bissan home. By Monday morning, it had about 450 signatures.

Bissan, who holds a bachelor’s degree in science and civil engineering, had completed the first year of a master’s degree in civil engineering from Concordia University before being barred from returning to start her second year last fall.

The Canadian government said it is aware of reports that a Canadian citizen needs help leaving Gaza.

“Consular officials stand ready to assist and provide updated information on how to leave the region,” John Babcock, a spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada, told MEE in an email.

Babcock added, however, that Canada advises against all travel to Gaza due to the ongoing conflict and the prospect of armed violence there, and Ottawa’s “limited ability to provide consular services to Canadians, including assistance with departure”.

But according to Eid, if Canada does not get involved, it will demonstrate that not all Canadians are treated equally.

“Why are they treating Palestinians, or Canadians who are originally from Gaza, [this way]? This is officially discrimination and the government should tell Israel that Bissan, or any other Canadian originally from Gaza… are Canadian now,” he said.

“If Canada doesn’t do that, it’s like they approve [of] discrimination against Canadians.”

He added that if his daughter is forced to give birth in Gaza, she would then face a new and equally difficult bureaucratic process to get a Canadian passport for her child, and both their exit permits.

That is why he said it is so important for Canada to intervene. “I know that Canada can do it if they want to do it.”

Violence spikes in Kashmir after videos inflame tension

By Fayaz Bukhari and Tommy Wilkes | SRINAGAR, INDIA/NEW DELHI- Mon Apr 17, 2017

Militants have stepped up attacks in contested Indian-ruled Kashmir, including raids on the homes of police officers, amid a spike in violence after the army allegedly tied a man to the front of a jeep as a human shield.

Police have filed a case against an army unit after soldiers in the Himalayan region were accused of seizing a 24-year old shawl weaver on April 9, before strapping him to the front of their vehicle and parading him through villages.

A video of the episode widely circulated on social media exemplifies for many viewers the human rights abuses allegedly committed by Indian security forces battling to contain a separatist insurgency now in its 28th year.

A Kashmiri student throws back a tear-gas canister fired by Indian police during a protest in Srinagar April 17, 2017. REUTERS/Danish Ismail---A Kashmiri student throws a piece of stone during a protest in Srinagar April 17, 2017. REUTERS/Danish Ismail

An Indian policeman throws a tear-gas canister during a protest in Srinagar April 17, 2017. REUTERS/Danish Ismail---A masked Kashmiri demonstrator smokes a cigarette during a protest against the recent killing of a civilian, in Srinagar April 17, 2017. REUTERS/Danish Ismail

Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Rajesh Kalia said the video's authenticity was being ascertained, adding, "Action will be taken against those found guilty of misconduct."

Police fired tear gas on Monday to scatter students in the region's main city of Srinagar, the latest outbreak of protests since demonstrations last week after a botched by-election in which at least eight people were killed.

Some colleges were forced to close.

Over the weekend two more videos circulated on social media showing workers of the ruling political party in Jammu and Kashmir renouncing mainstream politics, one of them beside a man wielding a gun.

Another video, allegedly showing the killing of a 17-year old by paramilitary officers during the April 9 by-election, has also stirred anger. Reuters could not confirm the veracity of the videos.

The clashes in Kashmir, a region divided between India and Pakistan but claimed in full by both, come ahead of the hot summer months, when protests surge.

India accuses Pakistan of backing separatist fighters - a charge Islamabad denies. Kashmir witnessed deadly protests after a well-known separatist militant was killed last year.

Violence has declined since the early 2000s, when thousands died each year, but disillusionment and anger against Indian rule is widespread, and the separatist revolt is now largely homegrown.
HUMAN SHIELD

Soldiers picked up the shawl weaver, Farooq Ahmad Dar, near the home of a relative after he voted, he told media. "Look at the fate of the stone-pelter," a soldier is heard saying over a loudspeaker in the video while Dar is tied to the vehicle.

"This is a phenomenon that has been going on for the last 27 years," Khurram Parvez, a leading Kashmiri human rights activist jailed last year, told Reuters.

"This is not the first human shield case. What is different now is that this case has been documented, thanks to social media."

Dar's treatment was "unlawful and unacceptable" rights group Amnesty International said in a statement.
Police have registered a case against the local army unit, state chief minister Mehbooba Mufti said, urging security forces to exercise restraint.

The state's police chief on Sunday told officers to avoid visiting their own homes in South Kashmir, after militants stormed the houses of at least four officers.

Militants also shot dead a lawyer affiliated with an opposition party and a former counter-insurgency commander, police said. A worker of the ruling party was killed late on Saturday.

(Writing by Tommy Wilkes; Editing by Douglas Busvine and Clarence Fernandez)

Do members of Congress pay for 100 percent of their health insurance?

Congressman Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) faced a backlash from constituents at a town hall April 10 when he said they don't pay his salary. (Congressman Markwayne Mullin)

By Michelle Ye Hee Lee April 17 at 3:00 AM

Question: “Who pays your salary?”

Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.): “I am self-employed, I’ve been self-employed, and I pay more taxes inside my own company personally than I’ll ever receive from being in Congress. I pay my own, and I pay my own insurance. … So don’t mislead and think that you’re paying mine. I do. Also, every member of Congress, they pay for their own insurance, too. We are put into the exchange. We’re not a federal employee. We go into the D.C. exchange and we personally have to pay for 100 percent of it. Not a percentage, all of it.”

— Exchange during a town hall, April 10, 2017

Question: “Where do you get your insurance?”

Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.): “I will say, just because there’s a lot of misinformation on it: I am on Obamacare. So that’s what Congress does.”

— Exchange during a town hall, April 10, 2017

The Fact Checker has been receiving lots of fact-check suggestions from readers who attended district town halls, in response to our new initiative to fact-check what members of Congress tell constituents during the April recess.

Not surprisingly, some of the most heated exchanges at many of the town halls involved health care and the failed GOP replacement bill for the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

These two answers by lawmakers in Oklahoma and Wisconsin provided an interesting look at the way members are framing their own health-care options. It’s actually quite complicated, and neither member captured the nuances. So we dug into it, for the constituents who didn’t get the full story at their town halls. Here’s what’s really going on.

The Facts

The ACA requires members of Congress and many congressional staffers to leave the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program and join the health-care exchanges in the District. Through the federal plan, lawmakers and their staff members had about 70 percent of their insurance premiums covered by the federal government.

But members and their staff members generally make too much money to qualify for subsidies in the exchanges, which were intended for people who previously did not get insurance from employers. So the Obama administration made an exception that allowed them to use the D.C. small-business exchange to receive health-care stipends from their employer (the federal government).

Yes, you read that correctly. The law allows individual congressional offices to be counted as small businesses of 50 or fewer employees.

On the exchanges, members and staff members get an employer (i.e., taxpayer) contribution of 72 percent for their premiums. So this allowed them to receive a similar subsidy as they did under the federal health plan. Some members say they donate to charity an amount equivalent to the taxpayer-funded subsidy.

Not all staffers use the small-business exchange. Staff members on congressional committees may be covered under the Federal Employees Health Benefit Program. (We dug into this in depth here.)

So it’s more complex than how Grothman put it. His spokeswoman, Bernadette Green, explained that he was “referring to the type of insurance that is available for him to purchase” and drawing a distinction between the D.C. small-business exchange and the federal health program.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there about where members receive their health insurance. Many people in our District, and across the U.S., think that members are on the federal health program, when instead they purchase their health care through the D.C. health exchange,” Green said.

When enrollment for Obamacare began, some members decided to go on their spouses’ insurance plans or buy their own in the private market. In December 2013, The Washington Post compiled a list of members of Congress who signed up for Obamacare. The list shows that Mullin bought insurance from the private market and allowed his staff to get insurance from the D.C. exchange.

At the town hall, Mullin repeatedly said that he pays for his own insurance. That may be a reference to his insurance from the private market. But it’s not accurate that members and staff members “go into the D.C. exchange and we personally have to pay for 100 percent of it. Not a percentage, all of it.” And it’s misleading to say that “every member of Congress, they pay for their own insurance, too” — since they can receive a taxpayer-provided subsidy for insurance from the exchanges.

Mullin also repeatedly rebutted claims that taxpayers pay his salary, calling it “bullcrap,” and that he pays enough in taxes to make up for it. His spokeswoman, Amy Lawrence, told a local news outlet: “The congressman is referencing the federal taxes that he and his businesses have paid to the government over the years, prior to his being in office. Like all business owners, Congressman Mullin pays his taxes, which contribute to congressional salaries.”

Of course, unless he’s donating all $174,000 of his congressional salary, this argument doesn’t make much sense. And he has to earn a lot of outside income to personally pay that money back to the U.S. Treasury. In 2014, the House Ethics Committee found Mullin may have violated House ethics rules and federal laws by earning more than $600,000 in outside income. Yet his attorneys argued that the majority of that amount was through distributions from his family’s plumbing business in Oklahoma and that his earned income did not exceed the $26,955 limit on outside income.

Mullin’s spokeswoman did not respond to our requests for comment, and we will update this fact check if she does.

The Pinocchio Test

Given Republicans’ push to repeal and replace Obamacare, it’s only natural for their constituents to ask how their policy decisions will affect their own health insurance. Is their insurance funded by taxpayers? How similar is their insurance to their constituents’? How will they be affected if Obamacare is replaced? Lawmakers owe their constituents an accurate and detailed explanation.

Neither Grothman nor Mullin quite captured the complexities in their answers at their town halls. Grothman’s spokeswoman said he was making a distinction between the federal health insurance program and the D.C. small-business exchange, because many of his constituents believe he’s on the federal program. It would have been better for him to explain that in detail at the town hall, but we’re glad to get a more nuanced explanation from his staff. We won’t rate his claim.

Mullin, however, went too far by claiming that members and staffers pay 100 percent of their insurance from the D.C. exchanges. That’s not accurate: They receive a taxpayer-funded subsidy for two-thirds of their premiums. And he misled his constituents by repeatedly asserting that taxpayers don’t pay for his salary or his insurance, or his staffs’ insurance. We award Mullin three Pinocchios.

A Referendum in Turkey, a Failed Missile Test in North Korea: The Weekend Behind, the Week Ahead

BY EMILY TAMKIN-APRIL 17, 2017

Turkey fell farther into President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s grasp this Sunday, when a referendum designed to increase the powers of the presidency passed.

The opposition has said it will contest at least a third of the votes counted and official results are still to come. But Erdogan has declared victory, and with 99.8 percent of votes counted, over 51 percent were apparently in favor of the referendum.

That referendum turns Turkey from a parliamentary system into a presidential one and allows the president to hold executor powers and publish decrees. It also permits the president to be a member of a political party and makes it such that five of 13 Supreme Court justices are appointed by the president.

“God willing, these results will be the beginning of a new era in our country,” Erdogan said. For many, that is exactly the concern.

Meanwhile, in the United States, U.S. President Donald Trump wondered aloud on Twitter who had paid those protesting for him to release his tax returns on Saturday, America’s tax day.

Elsewhere, in North Korea, a missile test set off early Sunday local time failed. “The president and his military team are aware of North Korea’s most recent unsuccessful missile launch. The president has no further comment,” U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis said.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence arrived in South Korea just hours after the test. After Easter church services at the U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan, Pence said the test was “the the latest reminder of the risks each one of you face every day in the defense of the freedom of the people of South Korea and the defense of America in this part of the world.”

Pence addressed the troops on Sunday, and, early Monday local time, headedto a base in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. He is also expected to meet with South Korea’s acting government during his ten day trip to Asia. Pence will then visit Japan, Indonesia, and Australia.

Whether Pence can cool heads as the United States and North Korea threaten one another — and mend bridges with Australia, a traditional U.S. ally, the government of which Trump argued during his first presidential phone call with that country — will be seen in the week ahead.

Photo credit: OZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images

Like this article? Read an unlimited amount of articles, plus access to our entire 46 year printed archive, the FP App, and the FP Insights Tool when you subscribe to FP Premium for 20% off!

Inside Mark Zuckerberg's controversial decision to turn down Yahoo's $1 billion early offer to buy Facebook

• Mike Hoefflinger-
Apr. 16, 2017

This is an excerpt from the book “Becoming Facebook” by Mike Hoefflinger. It’s the inside story of Facebook told by the former Head of Global Business Marketing, chronicling the 10 major decisions Facebook made that led from their disastrous stock drop in 2012 to one of the biggest companies in the world. This section comes from the chapter “How Facebook Turned Down 1 Billion”, and discusses how what made Mark Zuckerberg turn down what was ( at the time) a substantial buyout. 

In the summer of 2009, Silicon Valley’s (and my) past met its (and my) future.

I had worked at Intel from 1992 to 2008 and directly for former CEO Andy Grove from 1999 to 2001. In January 2009, I had moved to working at Facebook after interviewing with its business and engineering leaders as well as with Sandberg and Zuckerberg. When I had reached out to both Grove and Zuckerberg to see whether they’d be interested in connecting with each other over lunch, both agreed.

We found ourselves sitting at one of the outdoor tables on the small patio behind Facebook’s eclectic building adjacent to a Palo Alto neighborhood at the top of South California Avenue. The 50-year-old landmark, affectionately known inside Facebook simply by its street number—1601—and home to the entire company for a brief period prior to the 2011 move into its much larger and ever growing campus in nearby Menlo Park, has since been leveled to make room for larger buildings, dissociating our memories of navigating privacy crises, building client relationships, achieving unprecedented growth and surviving existential competition with Google from the place where we lived them.

Grove was the 72-year-old Silicon Valley legend. Cofounder, CEO and chairman of Intel, the company that more than any other gave the Valley its name and whose microprocessors were responsible for enabling personal computing and cost-effective servers and, with them, the Internet. When Silicon Valley talks about building on the shoulders of giants, it’s Grove’s shoulders we’re talking about. His passing in March 2016 was the end of a world-altering era.

Zuckerberg was the 25-year-old ascendant newcomer building services at a scale and speed only possible because of Grove’s legacy.

It was a meeting of the veteran who had made possible a billion connected computers and the rookie on his way to connecting the billion people on those computers. In the early stages of the conversation, the two circled slowly and respectfully in shallow waters. Grove trying to determine the legitimacy—his bar was notoriously high—of his lunch companion, something I had seen him do in dozens of one-on-one meetings a decade earlier with the likes of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, eBay’s Meg Whitman and LoudCloud’s Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (now better known as the venture capital firm a16z). Zuckerberg, in turn, was looking to find common ground with Grove, the statesman who had jumped off the pages of the management bible Only the Paranoid Survive—a must-read for self-respecting technology l-eaders—and who now sat in front of him.

A few minutes in, Grove made his move. A direct question meant not to disrespect or trivialize but to penetrate to a more interesting place for both of them: “How did you turn down Yahoo’s $1 billion?”

Yahoo's $1 Billion

Thomson Reuters
Grove’s question deserves a quick refresher of the circumstances to which he was referring. Much has been made of the what-could-have-been acquisition offers for Facebook in its early years. Between 2004 and 2007, a string of suitors including Friendster, Google, The Washington Post, Viacom, MySpace, News Corp, Viacom again, NBC, Viacom a third time, Yahoo, AOL, Yahoo again, Google again and Microsoft were rumored to have made acquisition overtures of one kind or another to Facebook.
The most talked-about was Yahoo’s offer in June 2006, said to have initially been worth $1 billion.

Venture capitalist and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, the earliest outside Facebook investor and formerly key player at PayPal, recalled the July 2006 Facebook board meeting between him, fellow venture capitalist Jim Breyer and the then 22-year-old Zuckerberg, held to discuss the 10-figure offer at a time when Facebook was barely two years old and had only eight to nine million users and $20 million in revenue:

Both Breyer and myself on balance thought we probably should take the money and run. But, Zuckerberg started the meeting like, “This is kind of a formality, just a quick board meeting, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Zuckerberg’s argument was that there were all these things we were going to build at Facebook, and he wanted to have a chance to build those products [Facebook was about to open beyond colleges and launch the News Feed]. [Yahoo] had no definite idea about the future. They did not properly value things that did not yet exist. They were, therefore, undervaluing the business.

With a decade of Facebook success behind us, we can recognize Zuckerberg’s decision as prescient (judging by 2016 levels, Yahoo undervalued Facebook by more than 300 times). At the time, however, the young CEO and his board were widely questioned and publicly derided.

Willpower

It was that very derision that had prompted Grove to ask the question: “How did you turn down Yahoo’s $1 billion?”

Even in 2009, three years after passing up the acquisition, it was still a defining—and possibly touchy—question since Zuckerberg’s decision had not yet been fully vindicated. Facebook’s valuation, which had run up to $15 billion in 2008 with Chinese investor Li Ka-Shing’s $120 million investment, had declined by as much as 80% to $3.1 billion in the lightly traded private secondary exchange earlier in 2009. Facebook had only just crossed 200 million monthly users globally and was still neck-and-neck with MySpace in the United States. Its eventual $100 billion IPO three years later was not yet a gleam in anyone’s eye.

Zuckerberg recognized, however, that Grove was not asking the question in its judgmental form but rather with genuine interest in

Zuckerberg’s process. He answered it in that spirit.

“I just thought we could do it,” he said, referring to growing to a much larger scale and eventually becoming a successful public company with much greater valuation.

While Zuckerberg’s answer may seem arrogant on paper—especially in the context of talking to someone who had done what Zuckerberg was still far from accomplishing—Grove saw there was in Zuckerberg no artifice, no arrogance and no lack of understanding of the difficulties that still lay ahead. In that answer, one visionary CEO with willpower recognized another across a chasm of nearly two generations. There was—at that moment—no difference between the two, as the torch passed viscerally from one Silicon Valley era to another. As a footnote to the moment, Zuckerberg would carry that torch forward to being named Time magazine’s Person of the Year the following year (an honor Grove had received in 1997), and by 2016, Facebook’s valuation would go on to eclipse the highest ever reached by Grove’s Intel in 2000 (not adjusting for inflation).

Curious, Grove followed up: “Where does that willpower come from?”

Zuckerberg considered the question—possibly for the first time—and concluded simply, “Jewish mother.”
From "Becoming Facebook” by Mike Hoefflinger, Copyright © 2017 by Mike Hoefflinger. Reprinted courtesy of AMACOM.

SEE ALSO: How Facebook keeps its employees the happiest, according to a former insider

NOW WATCH: Here's the first thing Mark Zuckerberg does every morning

Malaysia: Opposition figurehead Anwar launches fresh challenge for freedom
 Malaysia's opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim speaks to the media in Kuala Lumpur February 4, 2015. Source: Reuters/Olivia Harris/File Photo

Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan, a former aide to Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, right, walks with his father, Azlan Mohd Lazim as they leave a courthouse in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 2010. Source: AP

 17th April 2017

MALAYSIAN Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim filed a new application to set aside his 2015 conviction for sodomy, claiming the key witness in the case committed perjury and his statement should be considered fraudulent.

According to Channel News Asia, Anwar’s legal team filed the writ action with the Kuala Lumpur High Court on Monday claiming that the main prosecution witness – his former aide Mohd Saiful Bukhari Azlan – gave perjured evidence “which to the knowledge of the defendant was false”.

Lawyer N Surendran told reporters at the court house that as the conviction was obtained through perjured testimony, the conviction was therefore obtained by fraud.

SEE ALSO: Malaysia: Opposition figurehead Anwar Ibrahim loses final bid for freedom

“Under section 44 of the Evidence Act, if you obtain a conviction by fraud or collusion, that conviction can be subsequently set aside. Anwar Ibrahim is an innocent man and in this action we are going to prove his innocence.”

No further details were provided by Surendran as to the nature of the fraudulent evidence, saying this would be revealed during the course of the trial.

Anwar was jailed in February 2015 after his appeal against an earlier 2014 sodomy conviction was rejected by the High Court.

There have been several attempts to free him via the courts and through appealing for a royal pardon, all of which have so far proven unsuccessful.

Anwar has long claimed that the charges against him are politically motivated as the conviction disqualifies him from political office.

SEE ALSO: Malaysia: Anwar Ibrahim returns to court in final bid for freedom

With elections expected soon, the latest being 2018, Anwar’s wife and current opposition leader Wan Azizah Wan Ismail told Channel News Asia she feels that the “forces that be” may not want the charismatic politician to be set free.

“Elections are just pending there is a chance that maybe the forces that be may not want him out but you have to try,” she says.

“And I think the rakyat and the people, the voters are hoping generally for some sort of direction. And Anwar- even though he’s here, his leadership is with us in spirit – we want him to be out and lead us . So I think this is all part of the hope and we all pray that it can be done and it can be one one of the things that can get Anwar out immediately.”

Capital’s Hunger in Abundance

Nicolo Castellini / Flickr

by Andrew Smolski-Apr 17, 2017

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global food production is more than adequate to feed the world. For instance, 2,577 million tons of cereal were forecasted to be produced in 2016, with 13 million tons leftover after demand is met.

Capital’s Hunger in Abundance.docx by Thavam Ratna on Scribd

Artificial Intelligence and the NHS

HELIA EBRAHIMI-12 APR 2017

Artificial Intelligence – once the stuff of science fiction, it’s now becoming a reality across our society.

Healthcare is one area where doctors believe AI could transform the way patients are treated – so could it be a saviour for the cash strapped NHS?

WHO Approves World's First-Ever Dengue Vaccine

Ted Andersen/Geneva-Apr 15, 2016

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday endorsed the world’s first-ever vaccine for dengue fever, a potentially deadly mosquito-borne virus that threatens to infect close to half of the world’s population.

Unlike malaria, there is no established cure for dengue fever, which can cause severe nausea, bone pain, headaches, rashes, bleeding and even death. The virus can last for up to 10 days. About 390 million people are infected by dengue each year in some 120 countries, particularly in Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa.

Dengue fever

Read More: Zika Mutates Extremely Quickly, Which Is Why It's So Scary

Known as Dengvaxia, the vaccine is the product of two decades of research by French-based Sanofi Pasteur. Four countries—Mexico, Brazil, El Salvador and the Philippines—have already licensed Dengvaxia, but Friday’s recommendation will likely spur a host of other developing nations to follow suit at a time when climate change and urbanization is putting increasing numbers of people at risk from the mosquito-borne disease. “In countries where dengue is endemic, it’s one of the most feared diseases,” says Dr. In-Kyu Yoon, director of the Dengue Vaccine Initiative, an international consortium that has partnered with Sanofi. “The trajectory globally is increasing—at this point it’s essentially a pandemic.”

The vaccine is given in three injections spaced out over one year. It is designed for those over the age of nine who have been previously exposed to the virus and is best suited for people living in endemic areas, as opposed to short-term travellers, according to Dr. Alain Bouckanooge, associate vice president of clinical research and development at Sanofi’s division in Thailand. Throughout the past few years the company conducted clinical trials in tens of thousands of children in Southeast Asia and Latin America that revealed the vaccine to be 70 percent effective for those with pre-exposure to dengue and 90-95 percent effective against severe hospitalization.

Scientists have been unable to develop a vaccine for dengue in part because the virus is so complicated. It has four strains, more than other deadly diseases such as polio and smallpox. If a person gets infected with more than one type of dengue, there is a greater chance of the virus of causing hospitalization or death. Yoon said there have historically only been a few places where more than one serotype of dengue circulates at any given time, but urbanization has made it more common to have multiple serotypes in the same area.

Read More: Zika Could Make America’s Contraception Failures Even Worse

Another challenge in testing the vaccine has been the need for expensive and time-consuming human trials. Bouckanooge says there is no good animal model that can be used as a predictor. “For dengue vaccine you don’t have that. Human dengue is quite unique.”

Even a successful vaccine won't eliminate dengue overnight. Sanofi’s production capacity is limited, Yoon says. He estimates that the company could manufacture about 100 million doses of the vaccine annually, compared to an estimated demand of about one billion doses over five years. “So there are potentially some supply and demand issues,” he says. “Clearly there is a need for more than one vaccine and more than one vaccine manufacturer.” Dengvaxia’s side effects include systemic headaches, fatigue and light-grade fevers. No direct fatalities have been reported.

The decision whether or not to implement the vaccine will be the up to individual governments. While WHO does offer information resources to aid countries, setting up a vaccination program will provide its own set of challenges, according to Joachim Hombach, the senior advisor in WHO’s Initiative for Vaccine Research. “You need to buy the vaccine and it costs a lot money,” he says. “And you are in the business for many years — it’s essentially an open-ended commitment. You don’t want to be in a situation where you introduce a vaccine and then two years later you say, oops, sorry, we are running out of money and we have to stop this program.”