Train derails in Uttar Pradesh, killing about 20 and injuring scores more

Tommy Wilkes and Sankalp Phartiyal-AUGUST 19, 2017 

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI (Reuters) - A train came off the tracks in northern India on Saturday, killing about 20 people and injuring scores more, as carriages slammed into each other, officials said.

Rescuers and local people worked into the night searching for survivors in the overturned and mangled carriages, some piled on top of each other. The death toll was expected to rise, officials said.

At least eight carriages derailed in the crash close to Muzaffarnagar, in Uttar Pradesh state, about 130 km (80 miles) north of the capital New Delhi, as the train travelled towards the Hindu holy city of Haridwar, police said.

Train crashes are frequent in India, which has the world's fourth biggest rail network. Poor investment in past decades in the vast network and rising demand means overcrowded trains are running on creaking infrastructure.

Saturday's accident is at least the fourth major passenger train derailment this year and the third in Uttar Pradesh in 2017. A crash in November in Uttar Pradesh killed 150 people.

A senior police officer in the state, Anand Kumar, said close to 20 people had been killed and more than 80 injured.

Sanjeev Balyan, a Muzaffarnagar lawmaker, had earlier told Reuters that at least 14 people had been killed.

Derailed carriages of Kalinga-Utkal express train are seen in Khatauli, Uttar Pradesh, India in this still taken from video August 19, 2017. ANI/via REUTERS TV THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. NO ACCESS MEDIACORP/ARD/BBC.

"We are struggling to pull out injured, and are waiting for gas cutters to arrive. It's too dark to launch a full fledged search operation, but our teams are trying their best," said Ajay Pandey, a senior police officer at the site.

The national authorities sent disaster teams to help.

Derailed carriages of Kalinga-Utkal express train are seen in Khatauli, Uttar Pradesh, India in this still taken from video August 19, 2017. ANI/via REUTERS TV THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN SUPPLIED BY A THIRD PARTY. NO RESALES. NO ARCHIVES. NO ACCESS MEDIACORP/ARD/BBC

Prime Minister Narendra Modi sent a message on Twitter saying he was pained by the derailment of the Utkal Express, offering condolences to families of those killed and wishing a speedy recovery to the injured.

In June, Reuters reported that a planned $15 billion safety overhaul of India's rail network was facing delays as the state steel company could not meet demand for new rails.

The network is in the middle of a $130 billion, five-year modernisation. The government launched the additional safety overhaul programme in February to tackle a surge in train accidents in the past two years blamed on defective tracks.

A senior official in the Uttar Pradesh government, Arvind Kumar, told the Hindustan Times the train driver had slammed the brakes on after spotting maintenance work on the tracks that was not properly signalled, the newspaper reported.

Anil Saxena, a spokesman for the railways, said it was too early to speculate about the causes of Saturday's crash.

Additional reporting by Euan Rocha, Rupam Jain and Suvashree Choudhury; Writing by Tommy Wilkes; Editing by Toby Chopra and Edmund Blair

Angola on cusp of change after 40-year journey from Marxism to crony capitalism

José Eduardo dos Santos steps down after elections this week. But an oil price crash and high inflation have loosened his MPLA party’s grip on power

 Supporters of the ruling MPLA at a rally in Lobito, Angola. Photograph: Manuel de Almeida/EPA

 Supporters of Joao Lourenço, presidential candidate of the ruling MPLA. Photograph: Manuel de Almeida/EPA

Jason Burke-Sunday 20 August 2017

It is a contest that will be familiar to many – not just in Angola but in every country across Africa where anyone remembers the cold war.

It pits the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the political party that has ruled the southern African country for more than four decades, against the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), which has been battling to gain control for more than 50 years.

The two are no longer warring over trenches, airstrips and dusty roads through scrubby forests, but fighting for the backing of 9 million voters as Angola goes to the polls on Wednesday to elect a new president.

Angola’s civil war lasted more than 25 years, ending in 2002, leaving the country devastated. Since then more than $100bn has been spent on reconstruction. The stakes are now not quite as high as when MPLA troops, backed by Cuba and the Soviet Union, clashed with Unita forces, supported by South Africa and the US, in the 1980s, but few doubt the importance of the poll.

“It would be extremely surprising if the MPLA loses power, but this is the first time in the past 40 years where there is uncertainty over what happens next,” said Søren Kirk Jensen, an expert on Angola at the independent policy institute Chatham House.

One major change will follow the poll. After 38 years in power, José Eduardo dos Santos is not seeking re-election. The 74-year-old has guided the MPLA from hardline Marxism to a rapacious capitalism that enemies say has been tarnished by cronyism, nepotism and corruption. Now, weakened by illness, he is stepping down.

Dos Santos was Africa’s longest-serving president after Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Unless Unita can win the poll, dos Santos’s place will be taken by 63-year-old João Lourenço, the defence minister.

It is Lourenço’s image that graces almost all the election posters splashed across the capital, Luanda, and other cities in Angola. Far fewer show Unita’s candidate, Isaías Samakuva, and many of these have been defaced.

Even some critics of the MPLA see Lourenço’s likely election as a turning point. “The MPLA has made so many mistakes; there is so much corruption. It will be impossible for [Lourenço] to make as many errors,” said Marcolino Moco, a former prime minister and party official who in now a fierce opponent of dos Santos.

Lourenço joined the MPLA as a teenager and fought in the independence struggle against Portugal and the civil war with Unita that followed. Along with hundreds of other cadres, he later studied in the Soviet Union before rising up the ranks in the military and the party, navigating the MPLA’s swing from leftism to market capitalism with success. He has a reputation for relative probity and is respected by the army.

Dos Santos, who remains president of the party, will retain significant powers and his family is expected to maintain its hold on a huge business empire. Dos Santos’ daughter Isabel runs the enormous state oil company and is reported to be Africa’s richest woman. “There won’t be a revolution,” Jensen said.

In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Lourenço said the MPLA was “working towards a comfortable victory” in the elections. His confidence appears justified. Unita won just 18% in the last election, in 2012, against the MPLA’s 72%.

There is widespread concern about the fairness of the electoral process. The government has deployed state resources on a huge scale and has consistently repressed critics, moving on 12 August to ban protests and demonstrations by groups not running in the polls.

In a document distributed to the media and quoted by Angola Press News Agency, the interior ministry said street protests planned by activists posed a security risk and “may clash with activities of political parties”.

A new law has given regulatory control of all media to a body controlled by the government and the ruling party. The campaign group Human Rights Watch said the election will be “marred by severe restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly, and limited access to information due to government repression and censorship”.

Unita officials say they have already complained about the inconvenient allocation of polling stations to voters, who sometimes live in different provinces, and problems registering Unita representatives to accompany the vote. The European Union has also scrapped plans to observe the elections after Luanda failed to agree to a package of conditions, including access to all parts of the country during the poll. It will send a small team of experts instead.

However, the biggest threat to the MPLA is its failure to manage Angola’s economy. The state, Africa’s second-biggest producer of crude oil, has been hit hard by the global fall in oil prices, with revenues crashing from $60bn three years ago to $27bn in 2016. After years of surging growth,

Angola has slipped into recession. One recent symptom of the poverty that 15 years of inefficient and expensive investment have failed to eradicate was an outbreak of yellow fever, among the world’s worst in decades, though the disease can be prevented by a single inoculation.

Poor people, many of them still living in shanty towns visible from the glittering office blocks and luxury hotels that line Luanda’s corniche, have been hit by inflation that peaked at 42% last year, steeply increasing the cost of rent and basic foodstuffs.

The income of the new middle classes – including vast numbers of civil servants, soldiers and teachers on the state payroll – has dropped steeply in real terms as salaries have remained unchanged. The elite have suffered too. Sales of hugely expensive European-made luxury cars have plummeted, dealers in Luanda say.

In one recent poll, nearly 90% of respondents said the MPLA leadership acts in its own interest, and not in that of the state or the Angolan people.

Unita is campaigning on a broad platform for change, promising to increase spending on education and health, combat corruption and open the economy to more foreign investment. Yet it is unclear where funding for this would come from.

“We need to have an opposition that is capable of stopping certain acts which constitute abuses of power,” Samakuva, Unita’s presidential candidate, said last week, adding that he would welcome working with Angola’s second opposition party, the Broad Convergence for the Salvation of Angola – Electoral Coalition (Casa-Ce), to form a coalition government if necessary.

Casa-Ce won 6% in 2012, at its first appearance on the ballot, but the few polls available suggest it should gain ground this time, attracting younger urban voters disillusioned by the two main parties

The economic crisis also undermines the system of political patronage that underpins MPLA rule, said Francisco Miguel Paulo, an economist at the Catholic University of Angola, because it reduces the government’s ability to invest in projects that “benefit the lives of people and bring it popularity”.

“There was a time when Angola had a lot of money and the government had the chance to make a difference. That opportunity was missed,” Paulo said.

But the crisis has also focused minds. Soren of Chatham House said the political elite has realised “the party is over”.

“Lourenço is coming with a mandate … to do things differently. It is not fair to say this is simply cosmetic,” he said.

Any change is likely to be gradual, said Moco, the former prime minister.


“It will be slow and difficult. But we have to have some hope. We have to try. We have to hope.”

Nuclear sabre rattling with North Korea

2017-08-19

Does President Donald Trump (aka Fire and Fury) know what a nuclear war would be like? I ask the question because President Roland Reagan confessed he did not until he decided to look at some movies (once an actor, he was a cinema man), like “On the Beach” that depicted a nuclear war. The exercise changed his thinking and he became an anti-nuclear weapons militant. Together with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev they cut their nuclear stockpiles sharply. They also came near an agreement to destroy all their nuclear weapons.  

The blasts at the end of the Second World War in Hiroshima and Nagasaki can now be repeated hundreds of thousand times. The remains would not just be the broken arches of the Caesars, the abandoned viaducts and moss-covered temples of the Incas, the desolation of one of the pulsating hearts of Europe, Dresden, but millions of square miles of uninhabitable desolation and a suffering which would incorporate more agony than the sum of past history. It would be a time when the living would envy the dead and it would be a world which might well have destroyed the legacy of law, order and love that successive generations have handed over the centuries to one another.  

The mayor of Nagasaki recalled his memory of the American nuclear attack: “Nagasaki became a city of death where not even the insects could be heard. After a while, countless men, women and children began to gather for a drink of water at the river. Their hair and clothing scorched and their burnt skin hanging in sheets like rags. Begging for help they died one after the other in the water or in heaps on the banks”.  

The chief of the Manhattan project that developed the first American nuclear test, Robert Oppenheimer, wrote, “At that moment there flashed through my mind a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita, the holy book of Hindus, “I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.” Arundhati Roy, the Booker prize-winning Indian novelist, wrote after the first Indian nuclear test in 1968, “If there is a nuclear war our foes will not be Pakistan, China nor America nor even each other. Our foes will be the earth itself. Our cities and forests, our fields and villages will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames. When everything there is to burn has burnt and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. The earth will be enveloped in darkness, there will be no day- only interminable night.”  

General George Lee Butler summed up his view of deterrence as head of the US Strategic Command (the man who is responsible for putting into effect a president’s order to begin a nuclear attack): “Here was an intellectual riddle of the most intricate kind- a puzzle to which there seemed to be no solutions. The wonderful title of Herman Khan’s book, “Thinking the Unthinkable”, captured the dilemma perfectly: that it is unthinkable to imagine the wholesale slaughter of societies, yet at the same time it appears necessary to do so, in the hope that you hit upon some formulation that will preclude the act; but in the process you may wind up amassing forces that engender the very outcome you hope to avoid. Perfect invulnerability would spell perfect vulnerability for your opponent, which of course he cannot accept. Consequently any balance struck is extremely unstable”.  

What Butler has demonstrated is that although deterrence in the Cold War days was the aim, the competitive nuclear arms race effectively turned the doctrine of deterrence on its head. It became a circle that could never be squared. By conveying to the enemy the ability to retaliate massively when attacked your forces are in a state of alert that from the enemy’s point of view looks like you are preparing for a pre-emptive first strike. So he had better get his strike in first.  

North Korea at the moment does not have enough nuclear warheads- around 60 at present- to make a first strike successful. But over the years it can build enough to make one and to obliterate a good part of the US. The Chinese have a nuclear deterrent but with only around 260 missiles. That, China feels, is enough to do the job.  

Threatening North Korea is counterproductive. It will just drive it to step on the gas.  

Negotiating a freeze is the only way out. North Korea must freeze its nuclear program. But that means the US has to do its part: no more military exercises, no more overflights and a withdrawal of its anti-missile batteries. In fact they don’t work very well and are just a provocation both to North Korea and China. Without China’s help there will be no settlement.  

The writer has worked as a foreign affairs columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune/New York Times for 17 years.

Trump Is Going After Legal Protections for Journalists

The Trump administration’s most dangerous attack on media has nothing to do with cries of "fake news."

BY HELEN MURILLO-AUGUST 10, 2017

Last week, the Washington Post published leaked transcripts of President Donald Trump’s January phone calls with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Even with the administration beset by daily embarrassing leaks, this one was shocking, going well beyond the mere embarrassing portrayals of daily White House dysfunction. It is fair to presume that such transcripts are classified, and when asked about them, National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton said only that he “can’t confirm or deny the authenticity of allegedly leaked classified documents.”

So nobody should have been surprised that on Friday morning, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats held a press conference condemning the many leaks and vowing investigation and prosecution of those responsible. Sessions called for “discipline” in executive agencies and Congress to stem leaks. He indicated that since January, the Department of Justice has tripled the number of active leak investigations, and he announced a new FBI counterintelligence unit to manage them.

But then Sessions got to the press: “One of the things we are doing is reviewing policies affecting media subpoenas. We respect the important role that the press plays and will give them respect, but it is not unlimited. They cannot place lives at risk with impunity. We must balance the press’s role with protecting our national security and the lives of those who serve in the intelligence community, the armed forces, and all law-abiding Americans.” Coats reiterated that the administration is “prepared to take all necessary steps to … identify individuals who illegally expose and disclose classified information.”

This marks a serious intervention in a delicate, decades-long balancing actbetween the federal government and professional journalists. A change in the policy about press subpoenas could have grave consequences for the government and press alike.

A subpoena is the legal tool that forces an individual to testify or produce evidence. When subpoenas are issued to journalists (or their communications providers) in leak investigations, it is most often for the purpose of identifying a leaker: Match the relevant reporter’s telephone records to an individual with access to the classified information — or better yet, force the reporter to testify directly as to the source — and you’ve got your leaker. But you’ve also compromised the press’s ability to protect their sources, undermining their ability to do their job.

Reporters who refuse to reveal their sources in compliance with such subpoenas risk contempt charges. To enforce subpoenas, courts and Congress have the authority to bring contempt charges against those who refuse to comply with lawful orders. Contempt charges aim to compel compliance with the order and can include jail time. In 2005, New York Times reporter Judith Miller famously submitted to jail time for contempt rather than reveal a confidential source in the Valerie Plame leak investigation. (After two and a half months in jail, Miller was released earlywhen Scooter Libby gave a waiver authorizing the government to question reporters about his conversations with them and Miller agreed to testify.)

Testimony that may otherwise be required by law might be nevertheless protected by a privilege. Such privileges include the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, marital communications privilege, attorney-client privilege, and executive privileges. The question is whether such a privilege does or should apply to reporters, exempting them from revealing sources.

While the Constitution limits government intrusion on the freedom of speech and of the press, the law does not offer absolute protection for journalists against revealing their sources

While the Constitution limits government intrusion on the freedom of speech and of the press, the law does not offer absolute protection for journalists against revealing their sources. Congress has not enacted robust protections and the Supreme Court has not interpreted the First Amendment as itself embodying such a privilege — nothing approximating a broad “press privilege” relieving reporters from revealing sources.

Such a privilege is protected at the state level in nearly all states. New York’s statutory press privilege, for instance, broadly protects professional journalists against contempt charges “for refusing or failing to disclose news obtained or received in confidence or the identity of the source of such news coming into such person’s possession in the course of gathering or obtaining news for publication.”

But no such privilege has been recognized uniformly at the federal level. In 1972, the Supreme Court rejected a broad First Amendment press privilege in Branzburg v. Hayes. Justice Lewis Powell joined the five-justice majority to reject an unqualified press privilege against revealing confidential sources, but wrote a puzzling separate concurrence suggesting some limited privilege subject to a balancing against the government’s interest in a particular case. The state of the law remains uncertain but what we do know is that there is currently no broad, unqualified First Amendment privilege against revealing confidential news sources. (Importantly here, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the District of Columbia has agreed that even if there is a First Amendment press privilege to not reveal sources, the privilege is not absolute.)

Instead, since 1970, the executive branch has voluntarily restrained itself by limiting the situations in which it will subpoena reporters in investigating leaks. Those self-restraints are codified in federal regulation. Those regulations explicitly recognize the need to “strike the proper balance among several vital interests: Protecting national security, ensuring public safety, promoting effective law enforcement and the fair administration of justice, and safeguarding the essential role of the free press in fostering government accountability and an open society.”

In striking that balance, the Justice Department explains that subpoenas directed to the news media are “extraordinary measures, not standard investigatory practices.” As such, press subpoenas are to be approved by the attorney general (or other high-ranking DOJ officials in certain limited cases) and are to be issued only where the information is “essential” and only “after all reasonable alternative attempts have been made to obtain the information from alternative sources.”

A system of mutual restraint thus governs in the face of indeterminate legal boundaries. Reporters don’t want to go to jail and the government doesn’t want to provoke a sweeping Supreme Court ruling or congressional enactment of an absolute press privilege. So reporters notify the government of stories to be published and often respect government requests to hold stories for some period of time for national security reasons. The government reserves the right to subpoena in extraordinary cases, but agrees to correspondingly extraordinary procedures.

But critical to making this delicate system work is that the government maintains credibility — that the public believes the government pursues leak investigations, particularly those investigations that directly implicate press freedoms, for legitimate national security reasons, not simply because the leak is embarrassing. When the president lambasts leakers for imperiling national security and threatens to subpoena the press over embarrassing leaks, but then retweets news stories he finds favorable even if they are based on highly sensitive classified defense information, he erodes that credibility. He erodes the government’s foothold in that delicate balance with the press.

It is unclear what the attorney general’s statement about press subpoenas portends for Justice Department policy and for the delicate balance that has held for decades. Some legal commentators have noted that the department itself has a lot to lose in upsetting the status quo and potentially forcing an adverse First Amendment ruling. What is likely a more immediate threat to the balance is a president who lacks any regard for its fragility and for the importance of the government’s credibility in its preservation.

Photo credit: Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images

Arnold Schwarzenegger tells Trump what he should have said after Charlottesville

Arnold Schwarzenegger (Thomas Samson/AFP); Donald Trump. (Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images)

By Caitlin Gibson August 18 at 12:43 PM

Arnold Schwarzenegger counts himself among those who were deeply disappointed by President Trump’s statement that “both sides” were to blame for the violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And in a new video, the former Republican governor of California offers a pointed suggestion for what Trump should have said instead.

“The only way to beat the loud and angry voices of hate is to meet them with louder and more reasonable voices. And that includes you, President Trump,” Schwarzenegger says in the video, posted to ATTN’s Facebook page Thursday. “In fact, as president of this great country, you have a moral responsibility to send an unequivocal message that you don’t stand for hate and racism.”

Schwarzenegger then offers an example of what that message might sound like: “‘As President of the United States, and as a Republican, I reject the support of white supremacists,'” he says. “‘The country that defeated Hitler’s armies is no place for Nazi flags. The party of Lincoln won’t stand with those who carry the battle flags of the failed Confederacy.’”

Trump drew widespread criticism for his response to the deadly chaos in Charlottesville, where a car driven by a reported white nationalist plowed into a crowd, killing 32-year-old counterprotester Heather Heyer and injuring 19 others.

Using dozens of clips from President Trump's speeches, The Post Editorial Board reimagines his disastrous Aug. 12 address. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)

“What about the alt-left that came charging at the — as you say, the alt-right?” Trump said at a news conference at Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday. “Do they have any semblance of guilt? What about the fact they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs? Do they have any problem? I think they do.”

[‘They tried to kill my child to shut her up,’ Heather Heyer’s mother mourns at funeral for woman killed during Nazi protest in Charlottesville]

Of course, Trump surely isn’t likely to take advice from the “Terminator” star — the two have been embroiled in a public feud for months, since Schwarzenegger took over Trump’s role as host of NBC’s “Celebrity Apprentice.” Trump blamed Schwarzenegger for the show’s dwindling ratings, going to far as to ask for prayers on Schwarzenegger’s behalf during the National Prayer Breakfast: “I just want to pray for Arnold, if we can, for those ratings,” Trump said at the time. Schwarzenegger fired back when he abruptly quit “Celebrity Apprentice” in March, stating that the reality show’s ratings plummeted because of its continued association with Trump.

6 Jan

Arnold 

 ✔@Schwarzenegger

There's nothing more important than the people's work, @realDonaldTrump. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/817348644647108609 …

 Follow

Arnold 

✔@Schwarzenegger

I wish you the best of luck and I hope you'll work for ALL of the American people as aggressively as you worked for your ratings.

11:03 AM - Jan 6, 2017

•  2,1372,137 Replies
•  31,41931,419 Retweets
  
•  94,18394,183 likes

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[Arnold Schwarzenegger leaves ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ — and blames Trump for ratings drop]

And even in his newest video — clearly intended to offer an earnest message to Trump, and a scathing condemnation of Nazis — Schwarzenegger couldn’t resist taking one more jab at the commander in chief. After delivering his suggested speech into the camera, Schwarzenegger leans down, and a small Donald Trump bobblehead suddenly comes into view.


“Was that difficult?” Schwarzenegger asks the solemn-faced toy. Then he laughs: “See, I told you!”

Cyber warfare among the people: Thailand’s road to digital dystopia



In recent years, prosecutions under Thailand's computer laws have increased significantly. Source: Kirill Makarov/Shutterstock

By John Draper | 20th August 2017

ON AUg 15, a secret military court handed down a sentence of two and a half years in the lèse majesté case of Jatupat ‘Pai’ Boonpattararaksa, a law student from Khon Kaen University in Northeast Thailand.

The military regime is evidently adopting show trials targeting university students, human rights activists, and academics, as well as harassing social media providers.

Essentially, it is engaging in ‘fourth generation’ cyberwarfare against its own people, cementing a surveillance state. This military state mentality presents a clear and present threat to Thailand’s overseas image and economy.

The scale of this dystopia is not just reflected in the adoption by some Thais of the three-fingered salute from the Hunger Games, but by the cold hard facts of foreign direct investment (FDI). FDI stood at US$1.55 billion in 2016 according to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), below Cambodia’s US$1.92 billion and far behind serious regional competitors, with Vietnam achieving US$12.60 billion and Malaysia US$6.06 billion. For Thailand, this is the lowest level since the disastrous US$1.37 billion of 2011, the year after Thailand’s military felled and far behind the country’s peak of US$14.56 billion of 2010.

Moreover, show trials resulting from mass cyber-surveillance cast Thailand in a dim light. Jatupat has now spent over seven months in jail facing a charge of lèse majesté. Jatupat is a key member of the Dao Din group of 14 university students seeking to promote community rights and of the umbrella New Democracy Movement. Jatupat’s continued fight against his alleged crime, that of sharing via social media a BBC biography, led to him winning the 2017 Gwangju Prize for Human Rights.

Thai activist Jatupat ‘Pai’ Boonpattararaksa. Image via @Pai Jatupat

SEE ALSO: Thai junta vexed by awarding of Korean rights award to lese majeste detainee

Jatupat is the first to be charged with lèse majesté under the new reign. Yet, while the BBC biography was shared by at least 2,600 Thai Facebook users, Jatuphat, an already embattled student fighting illegal assembly charges, has been targeted for special treatment. Clearly, equality under the law no longer exists.

Not just students are being show-trialed, but also their lawyers, with Sirikan Charoensiri, a lawyer from Thai Lawyers for Human Rights who is defending the 14 students, facing charges of sedition and illegal assembly for observing the students protesting and for asking police officers to produce a warrant to search her car. Both actions demonstrate the workings of a classic police state waging permanent warfare against its own people via a culture of fear. This helps explain Thailand’s falling score relative to Burma (Myanmar) and the Lao PDR in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.

The bedrock of this growing dystopian nightmare is the 2007 Computer Crime Act, designed to help end the social and ethnic Red versus Yellow cleavages.

A massive public campaign was waged in 2015-2016 against the military’s desire to strengthen the Act by measures such as criminalising the sharing of Facebook posts. This campaign motivated disparate sectors, from Bangkok-based social campaigners to Northeastern community activists, but the revised Act was passed by the National Legislative Assembly in December 2016, the message from the regime being that there is nothing to fear if one is not breaking the law.

The result of the revised Act is that Thailand has become an absolute digital panopticon. In other words, every time a computer is used in Thailand, it is as if one is sitting in a room with a CCTV, at any time a member of the Army Cyber Centre or the Technology Crime Suppression Division viewing your actions.

Further, recently adopted recommendations by the National Reform Steering Assembly’s Social Media Reform Subcommittee target a perceived ‘lack of understanding’ and ‘ethics’ in consuming and producing online media which could negatively affect the economy, society, or the monarchy.

SEE ALSO: Understanding Thailand’s revised Computer Crime Act

The regime is exploiting this normalisation of surveillance to harvest citizens’ biometric data, including finger prints and face scans. This is despite an inability to secure its own websites, as when Anonymous hacked over a dozen police and prison websites in January 2016, stealing databases and obtaining personal data on escaped prison inmates.

Given that credit card, online payment, and encryption companies are moving towards biometric data, and that even Western banks are struggling to secure confidential data, the potential for abuse, including identity theft and industrial espionage, is alarming, especially considering military officers now sit on the boards of most state enterprises.

The formula of targeting online media which could ‘negatively affect’ the economy or society is a ticking time-bomb. This is particularly evident when combined with a state of denial. The prime minister routinely berates the media for disclosing facts, as in Burmese workers pressed into modern-day slavery on fishing boats, of interest to ethical consumers, or in reports on torture and enforced disappearances by human rights groups, of interest to those assessing the security sector.

When the prime minister’s ‘rule by diktat’ Section 44 mechanism is included, it becomes difficult to assess the state of the economy or to predict the business climate. Furthermore, state organs like the Social Media Reform Subcommittee are suggesting a proliferation of centers to monitor any actions which affect ‘peace’, ‘security’ or ‘the state’, even after elections next year.

(File) Thailand’s Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha (C) attends the annual Royal Ploughing Ceremony in Bangkok, Thailand, May 12, 2017. Source: Reuters/Athit Perawongmetha

The risk then is that Thailand’s military, casting around to justify massively inflated defence budgets geared towards acquiring submarines and main battle tanks absolutely useless in Thailand’s main conflict, the Deep South insurgency, will decide that each and every Thai citizen and foreign resident is a potential target.

It will then recruit not hundreds but thousands to staff online surveillance centers, as in China. Also furthering the militarised surveillance state, all complaints against the military are now investigated at military bases under the Defence Ministry.

Thailand’s adoption of the Burmese military’s 20 years of rule approach in the Digital Development Plan for Economy and Society is an embarrassment. Online, it heralds a digital dystopia, threatening to turn Thailand’s last forums for free speech and democracy into a battlefield as the state arbitrarily targets social media users who seek to bring to light abuses of power as well as periodically harasses providers like Facebook.

Concepts such as happiness and morality will continue to be abused to prevent any semblance of civil or political rights being enjoyed in an authoritarian state now tending towards total control.

NASA Detects First Message From Alien Life… “What The Hell, You Guys?”

We now face the dangerous risk of populism, illiberal democracies, autocracy and self-interest around the world.  Socrates is supposed to have said: “to move the world, we must move ourselves”. Another great-  the Mahatma – said “you must be the change that you wish to see in this world”.

by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne-Aug 19, 2017

The first alien says, “The dominant life forms on the earth planet have developed satellite-based nuclear weapons.” The second alien, who looks exactly like the first, asks, “Are they an emerging intelligence?” The first alien says, “I don’t think so, they have them aimed at themselves.”…Anon

( August 19, 2017, Montreal, Sri Lanka Guardian) I must acknowledge with thanks that the title of this article is borrowed verbatim from Andre R’s tweet (@excelPope) which brought a smile to my face and eased my furrowed brow. I have often wondered why we cannot keep our mouths shut and say the least that is needed: like for instance, the white supremacist who killed the innocent female protestor is evil; white supremacy or any discrimination and bigotry is evil; a madman who threatens to fire nuclear missiles at an innocent population is evil and that all of these should be despised and detested.  The fundamental issue behind all these seems to lie in the question: are we, the sum total of humanity, bellicose by nature and eschew peace and harmonious existence or do we constitute a peaceful and generous collective called Homo Sapiens?

Firstly, it is reasonable to say that it would be naïve to think that all 7 billion of us can get along peacefully, considering the various divisive factors that we have faced over centuries ranging from clashes of religions and race; culture and color; and not to mention greed and power.  At the same time, it seems ludicrous to tolerate extremism and division to the extent that we now see around us.  When the European Union won the Nobel Prize for peace in 2012 The Nobel Committee stated that the prize motivation was that the European Union had: “for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”, making an example of the EU for peaceful co-existence among the peoples of the many member States of the Union.

The Nobel Committee went on to say: “[I]n this time of economic and social unrest, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wished to reward the EU’s successful struggle for peace, reconciliation and for democracy and human rights. When the community expanded to include additional countries during the 1970s and 1980s, democracy was a prerequisite for membership. After the fall of European communist regimes around 1990, the union was able to expand to include several countries in Central and Eastern Europe, where democracy had been strengthened and conflict checked. The Nobel Committee also believes that the question of EU membership is bolstering the reconciliation process after the wars in the Balkan States, and that the desire for EU membership has also promoted democracy and human rights in Turkey”.

Sometime ago I wrote in one of my articles that “inasmuch as there would be no peace if normalcy in daily human intercourse were not restored, it is incontrovertible that there will be no lasting peace if the attendant hatred that goes into human conflict is not eradicated and obviated.  In this context, the classic meaning of the word “obviate” (which is to make unnecessary) is intended.  Inherent in any process of racial or national hatred is a certain intellectual abdication of the values instilled in a society, through a democratic process, encompassing legal, philosophical and epistemological principles.  Also endemic to hatred from a national perspective, is the preeminent role played by hate speech.  It is therefore imperative that a peaceful society brings to bear an irrevocable resurgence calculated to apprehend this social phenomenon both in its individual and collective incarnations.  Above all, the issue must as of necessity be addressed with an openness to unforeseen questions which may divide nationalities and races and estrange them from their foundational bases”.

I still stand by this statement.

What is needed as an antidote to social division is leadership that can unify. One of the tools of such a  leadership would be prevention which is based on the legal principle called “the Precautionary Principle”.  This principle   was called the most important idea of 2001 by the New York Times. The Precautionary Principle asserts that the absence of empirical or scientific evidence should not preclude States from taking action to prevent a harm before it occurs. It is   a moral and political principle which stands for the fact that   if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action. The evolution of the principle in international law began in the early 1980s although there is evidence that it was domestically popular in Europe in the 1930s in the German socio-legal tradition, centering on the concept of good household management. In German, the concept is Vorsorgeprinzip, which translates into English as precaution principle.  In today’s political context, the Precautionary Principle enjoys a wide, unprecedented recognition and it has become of such tremendous importance because in many cases, the scientific establishment of cause and effect is a difficult task sometimes approaching a fruitless investigation of infinite series of events.

For the Precautionary Principle to apply, States must take measures according to their capabilities and they must be cost effective.  Also, threats that are responded to must be both serious and irreversible. The Precautionary Principle is usually applied through a structured approach to the analysis of risk, which comprises three elements: risk assessment; risk management; and risk communication and is particularly relevant to the management of risk. It usually applies when potentially dangerous effects from a particular process or phenomenon have been identified and scientific evaluation does not guarantee that the risk could be averted.

We now face the dangerous risk of populism, illiberal democracies, autocracy and self-interest around the world.  Socrates is supposed to have said: “to move the world, we must move ourselves”. Another great-  the Mahatma – said “you must be the change that you wish to see in this world”.

But first things first.  We must move on by taking responsibility and being accountable.

SECOND OPINION | Your life is leaving genetic scars that might show up in your child's genes

Growing evidence that life experience can be passed genetically from one generation to the next

Researchers are discovering how much of the experience we go through, including trauma, disease, or famine, is passed to the next generation. (Shutterstock)

By Kelly Crowe - Aug 19, 2017 8:00 AM ET

Hello and happy Saturday! Here's our summer roundup of eclectic and under-the-radar health and medical science news.

If you haven't subscribed yet, you can do that by clicking here.

Scientists now know that the mere act of living leaves molecular scars on our genes.

But it was long assumed that those marks were wiped clean when the genes were passed on to the next generation.

Not so, according to research in the mysterious field of epigenetics. And a new paper shows some of the first evidence of how offspring are affected.

"It was assumed there was zero transmission of epigenetic information from one generation to another, McGill University pharmacology professor Moshe Szyf told us. "This paper adds to that body of evidence showing that assumption is not true."

Epigenetics is an emerging field of research proving once again that DNA is complicated. It won't work without a second layer of genetic activity called epigenetics, a series of biochemical processes that translate DNA's genetic information into cellular mechanisms in the human body.

And the way those epigenetic programs turn certain genes up or down, on or off can be affected by what we eat, and how we live, how much stress we experience, or what toxic exposures we have.

"The big question is how much the experiences we are going through, including trauma, disease or famine, etc. is passed to the next generation," said Szyf.

The study published in Science shows evidence that fruit fly offspring inherit a specific epigenetic change critical to the embryo's development. But what do humans have in common with fruit flies? A lot.

'We were under the illusion that if we know genetics we understand everything about life.'- Moshe Szyf

"Evolution has taught us that principles that work in one organism usually work in many organisms. And if a basic process appears in a fruit fly, it usually also appears in humans," Szyf said.

The first clues to epigenetic heritability came from curious observations following a series of famine cycles in a northern province of Sweden in the early 1800s. Scientists linked changes in life expectancy to grandparents' exposure to feast or famine.

Other observations made after the Dutch famine during the Second World War showed persistent changes in DNA expression six decades later, adding to evidence that life experiences can leave permanent marks on our genes.

"We were under the illusion that if we know genetics we understand everything about life," Szyf said. "Epigenetic information is much more dynamic and responsive to the environment. And it raises the possibility that experience can be passed from one generation to the next. And that's the allure of this whole thing."

Opening the black box of peer review

The irony of peer review is that the process itself is never peer reviewed. (Shutterstock)

Imagine having all of your colleagues and all of your competitors looking over your shoulder at everything you do. And now imagine them pointing out everything you did wrong and sending you back to do it all over again.

That's the basic premise of scientific peer review. Before a research paper is published in a scientific journal, several scientists examine the work to determine if the methods are sound and the conclusions are supported by the data. It's a much-heralded pillar of the scientific process.

But the irony of peer review is that the process itself is never peer reviewed. David Moher, a senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, called for the "black box" of peer review to be opened, in a commentary he co-authored in Science.

'I don't want to trash journals. I want to make them better.'-  David Moher

"We have very little evidence that peer review works," Moher told us, pointing to the rise of predatory journals as evidence of the urgent need to improve peer review.

Predatory journals disguise themselves as legitimate scientific publications and make money by charging scientists for publishing their papers. There is evidence of these journals accepting scientific gibberish and appointing people who don't even exist to their editorial boards. (Read about Dr. Fraud in our March 26 newsletter.)

"If journals do not get a handle on peer review, then they can't distinguish themselves from these predatory journals," Moher said.

Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus are watchdogs who track retractions of scientific papers on their blog Retraction Watch. They compared the current system of peer review to a toothless guard dog, incapable of spotting fraud or plagiarism, or keeping bad science from polluting the scientific record.

"There's a tremendous movement to open science," Moher said, calling on publishers to open their doors and allow scientists to study their peer review process. "I don't want to trash journals. I want to make them better."

A Canadian moment in medical history

As part of our summer Second Opinion series, we're featuring great Canadian moments in medical history. This week meet Charles Beer and Robert Noble.

Robert Noble and Charles Beer discovered a treatment for leukemia almost 60 years ago. (Canadian Medical Hall of Fame)

Together they discovered a chemotherapy drug in a Jamaican periwinkle plant that arrived in the mail.

It was an accidental discovery. They weren't looking for anti-cancer agents. Instead, the two researchers at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University) were searching for diabetes drugs. And they were curious what magic might be found in the periwinkle sample that had been mailed to Noble's brother.

"The disease of cancer was certainly far from our thoughts when we learned of a tea made from the leaves of a West Indian shrub that was supposedly useful in the control of diabetes mellitus," they wrote in their 1958 paper "Role of Chance Observations in Chemotherapy: Vinca Rosea."

Beer was an expert chemist, and he knew how to extract the plant's key compound. But when those extracts were fed to diabetic rabbits nothing happened. The blood sugar levels didn't change. But when they injected the extract into the rabbits' veins, the animals quickly died from a bacterial infection. "Apparently some natural barrier to infection was being depressed," they wrote.

They soon realized the periwinkle compound lowered the levels of white blood cells and depressed bone marrow. Could this be a possible treatment for leukemia, caused when white blood cells proliferate out of control?

They started growing the plant nearby so they could have a steady supply of the extract, even though in the Canadian climate the plants expressed much less of the active ingredient. Once they could reliably extract the compound they tested it on cancer patients at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. That was almost 60 years ago.

Today vinblastine is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines, used in combination with other drugs on lymphoma and other cancers.

Beer died in 2010 at age 95. Noble died in 1990 at age 80.

These fascinating stories of discovery were selected from the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, a medical history organization that began in 1994. Every year, six Canadians are inducted. There is a small exhibit hall in London, Ont., but executive director Lissa Foster told us the real hall lives online, with video features for the 125 laureates.

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