Monday, September 25, 2017

Bitter divorce? If you’re in Gaza, call Um Rashid

Ulfat Anbar, known as Um Rashid, has achieved success, and met with some resistance, as a family mediator in the Gaza Strip.
Mohammed Asad

Rami Almeghari-25 September 2017

The Gharibs had a problem. Their son, Rami, 24, was under arrest after a bitter divorce saw a local court demand he pay his ex-wife a monthly allowance he could not afford.

The only way out for the family, from the Jabaliya refugee camp, was to seek mediation between themselves and their erstwhile in-laws. For help, the Gharibs turned to Um Rashid.

“For over three months and with the intervention of various local men of reconciliation, we were not able to bridge our differences. That was until Um Rashid showed up,” Mahdi Gharib, Rami’s eldest brother, told The Electronic Intifada.

Calling her the mukhtara (the feminine form of the masculine mukhtar, or family chief), Mahdi detailed the standoff that Um Rashid – at the suggestion of the police – helped resolve.

“When I contacted the mukhtara, she promptly intervened with Rami’s ex-mother-in-law,” said Mahdi. “In less than one day, the mother-in-law agreed to the divorce, after they agreed that my brother would give back jewelry that had been given as dowry and spend a certain amount of money on their 2-year-old son every month.”

The “social reconciliation lady”

Um Rashid, also known as Ulfat Anbar, is one of a small number of women in the occupied Gaza Strip who are acting as mediators in family disputes, a role that has typically fallen to men.

Though their role is controversial, a dramatic increase in the number of divorces, and subsequently of women fending for themselves, is necessitating a deviation from customary methods of mediation.

Anbar got involved in the resolution of various family disputes across Gaza as a result of her affiliation to the Association of Family Chiefs – a grouping of mukhtars that mediate family arguments – in Gaza City.

Speaking to The Electronic Intifada at her family home in the Nasser neighborhood of northern Gaza City, Anbar, 48, said her role as a “social reconciliation lady” – this is how she prefers to be described – was partly informed by personal experience.

“Back in the 1990s, I was close to divorce. At the time, I was shuttling between Gaza and Saudi Arabia with my then small children. But, though my problems were quite pressing, I decided to maintain my marriage for the sake of my children,” Anbar recalled.

Later political involvement also helped improve her ability to communicate with different people, she said. For over 15 years, Anbar was secretary of the Palestinian People’s Party, the communist party, in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City.

“My work with that committee boosted my social skills and introduced me to many in the local community.”

She began her connection with the Association of Family Chiefs in 2016. And over the past year-and-a-half, Anbar said, she has helped mediate more than 35 family disputes, mainly divorce cases.
Anbar now spends much of her week outside her home helping others solve their problems.
“It is important to me. I thrive on helping people resolve their problems,” Anbar said. “I strongly believe in the blessings I might get from doing so, a conviction based on our Arab and Islamic traditions.”

Her family – husband and four grown children – has no objections, even if they are at times wary when the conflict resolution takes place at home. Reem Anbar, 27, said her mother had the family’s full support.

“We only object sometimes, when individuals come to our home for mediation,” Reem said.

Upending tradition

The role of family mediator is customarily one reserved for men and specifically mukhtars, and the rise of Anbar and women like her has met some resistance in Gaza.

Both Tawfiq Abu Ghraiban of the central Gaza Strip and Mahmoud Thabet of the northern Gaza Strip, leading mukhtars, agree that women have a valuable role to play in family mediation.

“A woman’s role in reconciliation cannot be denied,” said Abu Ghraiban, a Bedouin mukhtar from the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip. He offered the example of his 85-year-old mother, who helps him when women need to give intimate testimony that customarily only another woman can hear.

“In these instances, my mother is the only one who can either listen to these women or understand any possible injuries they have suffered,” Abu Ghraiban said. “Only after that can I, as a judge, pass judgment.”

“I would agree to a certain extent to the role of women in solving some disputes,” Thabet also acknowledged, “a role that is similar to what Um Rashid is doing.”

However, Thabet said that role had to be limited and that some gender separation had to be maintained.

“I would disagree with women participating at public reconciliations in which men are involved,” Thabet said. “A woman like Um Rashid can be summoned in certain cases, to hear a female witness or to investigate certain evidence that pertains only to women.”

Thabet also took issue with the mukhtara designation.

“I totally disagree with the name mukhtara. This implies that a given family has chosen this person to represent them and this does not apply to Um Rashid or women in general,” he added.

Outside mediation

The role of outside mediation, particularly in family disputes, has a long tradition in Palestinian society and is one that is encouraged by officials and police.

Imad al-Amasi, head of the public relations department of the Gaza police, said officers benefit from cooperation with local mukhtars.

“Our main purpose for such an interaction is to solve disputes away from the official legal system. This is helpful in a conservative Arab community,” al-Amasi said.

He also suggested it relieved police of a burden exacerbated by the 10-year-old Israeli economic blockade of the coastal strip. “We receive 20-25 complaints a day across the Gaza Strip, and the majority of those problems are finance related.”

Hasan Nasrallah, a family law attorney, told The Electronic Intifada that existing laws also give some priority to outside reconciliation.

In some family disputes, a court judge will invoke laws that refer parties to outside mediators rather than detain them, at least in the first instance, Nasrallah said. This is a legal practice that goes back a century to the British colonial mandate in Palestine.

The actual practice of familial or tribal reconciliation goes back centuries. Nasir al-Yafawi, a historian, believes that the role of the mukhtar has waned over the past two or three decades.

“Consecutive central governments in Palestine have always honored the process of local reconciliation away from regular legal procedures,” al-Yafawi said. “But with the intervention of political parties, particularly reconciliation committees affiliated to such parties, traditional reconciliation has become less efficient.”

For instance, al-Yafawi said, in Gaza, the Hamas government favors reconciliation committees that belong to the Palestine Islamic Scholars Association and in general a mukhtar’s influence can now be connected more to the particular political party he belongs to rather than his position as head of a family.

Growing role for women

While traditional mukhtars have reservations about the growing role of women in mediating family feuds, some Islamic scholars are more open to the practice.

Ashraf Salama, a preacher from the Nuseirat camp, said Islamic Sharia law allows room for women mediators equally to men.

“I agree with women working in reconciliation and this is something accepted by the Islamic faith,” Salama told The Electronic Intifada.

And more women are training as mediators. Over the past five years the Palestinian Center for Democracy and Conflict Resolution, a human rights organization in Gaza, has been organizing training courses on conflict resolution skills specifically for women.

According to Samar Hamad, a counselor with the center, the courses have been popular. She said the two annual courses the center offers are fully subscribed with 30 women in each.

Candidates are chosen according to very specific criteria: Trainees need to be over 40, educated to university degree level and of general good standing in their communities.

According to Hamad, in addition to Anbar, three other women perform a similar mediating role in the Gaza Strip. But many more are needed, she said, because of the rising rate of divorce in Gaza.
“The existence of these ladies is important these days as the number of family problems, mainly between married couples, has increased.”

In 2016, according to the Supreme Sharia Judicial Council, there were almost 3,200 divorces, up from about 2,600 in 2015, or an increase of a fifth.

It is in part this growing need that spurs Anbar.

“Many divorced women are exposed to violence and harassment,” Anbar told The Electronic Intifada. “I dream of having a special center that provides care for such women: shelter, counseling, medical and social care, as well as some kind of entertainment.”

Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.

Turkey court orders release of top journalist

Istanbul court on Monday ordered the release of leading Turkish journalist Kadri Gursel

A copy of the Cumhuriyet opposition newspaper (AFP)

Monday 25 September 2017

An Istanbul court on Monday ordered the release of leading Turkish journalist Kadri Gursel in the controversial trial of staff from the Cumhuriyet opposition newspaper, but ruled that four other detained suspects must stay in jail.

The judge ruled that Gursel, one of Turkey's most respected journalists, could go free after 11 months in jail though he remains on trial on charges of links to terror groups, an AFP correspondent said.

The trial of the staff from Cumhuriyet, a paper which has been deeply critical of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was adjourned until 31 October.

Gursel, a journalist for three decades, is now expected to be released from the Silivri jail outside Istanbul in the course of Monday night once formalities are completed.

During the trial, Gursel was defiant when he took the stand, claiming he was on trial because of his "journalistic activities".

"Whatever the verdict, I have an untroubled conscience. And if there is even a little bit of justice left in this period where justice has been trampled upon, I know I will be acquitted," he said.

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Turkish court orders 5 reporters for opposition daily to remain in custody

In a case that has caused an international outcry, 17 staff members are charged with supporting through their coverage three groups that Turkey considers terror groups.

Turkish prosecutors accused the reporters who have spent more than eight months in prison of waging "asymmetric war", a charge dubbed by the detained journalists as "illogical".

These are the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the ultra-left Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), and the movement of Fethullah Gulen, the US-based preacher whom Ankara accuses of ordering last year's coup attempt.

The Turkish government calls the movement the Fethullah Terror Group (FETO).

Supporters of the paper say it has always taken a tough line against the three organisations and is being punished for being one of the few opposition voices in the Turkish media.

"I worked with them. I know their past. These colleagues cannot be terrorists, those friends cannot be FETO," defence witness Alev Coskun, a board member of the Cumhuriyet foundation and influential writer, told the court.

He also pointed to tensions at the newspaper under the editorship of Can Dundar, who in 2015 broke an explosive story claiming Turkey was sending arms to Syria, and who now lives in exile in Germany.

"This is a serious newspaper. It is not a newspaper where Can Dundar played games," Coskun said.

Those remaining under arrest include the paper's chairman Akin Atalay and editor-in-chief Murat Sabuncu, who like Gursel have been held behind bars for 330 days.

This is a serious newspaper. It is not a newspaper where Can Dundar played games

- Alev Coskun, Cumhuriyet foundation board member

Investigative reporter Ahmet Sik, who has been held for 269 days, as well as accountant Emre Iper, detained for 173 days, also remain under arrest.

Sik wrote a book exposing the past ties of members of the Turkish elite to the Gulen movement.

"I've said whatever is needed in order to invalidate the unrealistic and baseless allegations," Gursel told the court before the ruling.

"I ask my release first and then my acquittal because there's no justification left to keep me in prison," Gursel, a columnist and an editorial director of Cumhuriyet, told the court.

Also on trial in the case is a teacher, Ahmet Kemal Aydogdu, who maintained a popular Twitter account. He is accused of being a terror group leader, and although his case is unrelated to the one against Cumhuriyet it has been merged into the same trial.

Earlier, about 200 people gathered outside the Istanbul courthouse, carrying portraits of the journalists and banners with slogans including "Freedom for journalists" and "Independent press cannot be silenced".

According to the P24 press freedom group, there are 171 journalists behind bars in Turkey, most of whom were arrested under the state of emergency imposed after the coup attempt on 15 July, 2016.

The country ranks 155 out of 180 on the latest world press freedom index by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Obama tried to give Zuckerberg a wake-up call over fake news on Facebook

Facebook announced on Sept. 21 that it would turn over copies of 3,000 political ads brought by Russian accounts during the 2016 election, after previously showing some to congressional investigators. (The Washington Post)

By Adam Entous, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Craig Timberg September 24 at 8:44 PM

This story has been updated with an additional response from Facebook.

Nine days after Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg dismissed as “crazy” the idea that fake news on his company’s social network played a key role in the U.S. election, President Barack Obama pulled the youthful tech billionaire aside and delivered what he hoped would be a wake-up call.

For months leading up to the vote, Obama and his top aides quietly agonized over how to respond to Russia’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign without making matters worse. Weeks after Trump’s surprise victory, some of Obama’s aides looked back with regret and wished they had done more.

Now huddled in a private room on the sidelines of a meeting of world leaders in Lima, Peru, two months before Trump’s inauguration, Obama made a personal appeal to Zuckerberg to take the threat of fake news and political disinformation seriously, though the president did not single out Russia specifically. Unless Facebook and the government did more to address the threat, Obama warned, it would only get worse in the next presidential race.

[Mark Zuckerberg denies that fake news on Facebook influenced the elections]

Zuckerberg acknowledged the problem posed by fake news. But he told Obama that those messages weren’t widespread on Facebook and that there was no easy remedy, according to people briefed on the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share details of a private conversation.

The conversation on Nov. 19 was a flashpoint in a tumultuous year in which Zuckerberg came to recognize the magnitude of a new threat — a coordinated assault on a U.S. election by a shadowy foreign force that exploited the social network he created.

Like the U.S. government, Facebook didn’t foresee the wave of disinformation that was coming and the political pressure that followed. The company then grappled with a series of hard choices designed to shore up its own systems without impinging on free discourse for its users around the world.

One outcome of those efforts was Zuckerberg’s admission on Thursday that Facebook had indeed been manipulated and that the company would now turn over to Congress more than 3,000 politically themed advertisements that were bought by suspected Russian operatives.

[Facebook to turn over thousands of Russian ads to Congress]

But that highly public moment came after months of maneuvering behind the scenes that has thrust Facebook, one of the world’s most valuable companies — and one that’s used by one-third of the world’s population each month — into a multi-sided Washington power struggle in which the company has much to lose.

Some critics say Facebook dragged its feet and is acting only now because of outside political pressure.

“There’s been a systematic failure of responsibility” on Facebook’s part, said Zeynep Tufekci, as associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies social media companies’ impact on society and governments. “It’s rooted in their overconfidence that they know best, their naivete about how the world works, their extensive effort to avoid oversight, and their business model of having very few employees so that no one is minding the store.”

Facebook says it responded appropriately.

“We believe in the power of democracy, which is why we’re taking this work on elections integrity so seriously, and have come forward at every opportunity to share what we’ve found,” said Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy and communications.

In a statement issued on Monday following publication of the Washington Post report, Schrage said that Obama’s conversation with Zuckerberg was about “misinformation and false news” and “did not include any references to possible foreign interference or suggestions about confronting threats to Facebook.” A spokesperson for Obama declined to comment.

This account — based on interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the government’s investigation and Facebook’s response — provides the first detailed backstory of a 16-month journey in which the company came to terms with an unanticipated foreign attack on the U.S. political system and its search for tools to limit the damage.

Among the revelations is how Facebook detected elements of the Russian information operation in June 2016 and then notified the FBI. Yet in the months that followed, the government and the private sector struggled to work together to diagnose and fix the problem.

The growing political drama over these issues has come at a time of broader reckoning for Facebook, as Zuckerberg has wrestled with whether to take a more active role in combatting an emerging dark side on the social network — including fake news and suicides on live video, and allegations that the company was censoring political speech.

[Facebook wanted ‘visceral’ live video. It’s getting live-streaming killers and suicides.]

These issues have forced Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies to weigh core values, including freedom of speech, against the problems created when malevolent actors use those same freedoms to pump messages of violence, hate and disinformation.

There has been a rising bipartisan clamor, meanwhile, for new regulation of a tech industry that, amid a historic surge in wealth and power over the past decade, has largely had its way in Washington despite concerns raised by critics about its behavior.

In particular, momentum is building in Congress and elsewhere in the federal government for a law requiring tech companies — like newspapers, television stations and other traditional carriers of campaign messages — to disclose who buys political ads and how much they spend on them.

“There is no question that the idea that Silicon Valley is the darling of our markets and of our society — that sentiment is definitely turning,” said Tim O’Reilly, an adviser to tech executives and chief executive of the influential Silicon Valley-based publisher O’Reilly Media.

Thwarting the Islamic State

The encounter in Lima was not the first time Obama had sought Facebook’s help.

In the aftermath of the December 2015 shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., the president dispatched members of his national security team — including Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and top counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco — to huddle with leading Silicon Valley executives over ways to thwart the Islamic State’s practice of using U.S.-based technology platforms to recruit members and inspire attacks.

[One year after the San Bernardino attack]

The result was a summit, on Jan. 8, 2016, which was attended by one of Zuckerberg’s top deputies, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. The outreach effort paid off in the view of the Obama administration when Facebook agreed to set up a special unit to develop tools for finding Islamic State messages and blocking their dissemination.

Facebook’s efforts were aided in part by the relatively transparent ways in which the extremist group sought to build its global brand. Most of its propaganda messages on Facebook incorporated the Islamic State’s distinctive black flag — the kind of image that software programs can be trained to automatically detect.

In contrast, the Russian disinformation effort has proven far harder to track and combat because Russian operatives were taking advantage of Facebook’s core functions, connecting users with shared content and with targeted native ads to shape the political environment in an unusually contentious political season, say people familiar with Facebook’s response.

Unlike the Islamic State, what Russian operatives posted on Facebook was, for the most part, indistinguishable from legitimate political speech. The difference was the accounts that were set up to spread the misinformation and hate were illegitimate.

A Russian operation

It turned out that Facebook, without realizing it, had stumbled into the Russian operation as it was getting underway in June 2016.

At the time, cybersecurity experts at the company were tracking a Russian hacker group known as APT28, or Fancy Bear, which U.S. intelligence officials considered an arm of the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, according to people familiar with Facebook’s activities.

Members of the Russian hacker group were best known for stealing military plans and data from political targets, so the security experts assumed that they were planning some sort of espionage operation — not a far-reaching disinformation campaign designed to shape the outcome of the U.S. presidential race.

Facebook executives shared with the FBI their suspicions that a Russian espionage operation was in the works, a person familiar with the matter said. An FBI spokesperson had no comment.

Soon thereafter, Facebook’s cyber experts found evidence that members of APT28 were setting up a series of shadowy accounts — including a persona known as Guccifer 2.0 and a Facebook page called DCLeaks — to promote stolen emails and other documents during the presidential race. Facebook officials once again contacted the FBI to share what they had seen.

After the November election, Facebook began to look more broadly at the accounts that had been created during the campaign.

A review by the company found that most of the groups behind the problematic pages had clear financial motives, which suggested that they weren’t working for a foreign government.

But amid the mass of data the company was analyzing, the security team did not find clear evidence of Russian disinformation or ad purchases by Russian-linked accounts.

Nor did any U.S. law enforcement or intelligence officials visit the company to lay out what they knew, said people familiar with the effort, even after the nation’s top intelligence official, James R. Clapper Jr., testified on Capitol Hill in January that the Russians had waged a massive propaganda campaign online.

[Top U.S. intelligence official: Russia meddled in election by hacking, spreading of propaganda]

The sophistication of the Russian tactics caught Facebook off-guard. Its highly regarded security team had erected formidable defenses against traditional cyber attacks but failed to anticipate that Facebook users — deploying easily available automated tools such as ad micro-targeting — pumped skillfully crafted propaganda through the social network without setting off any alarm bells.

Political post-mortem

As Facebook struggled to find clear evidence of Russian manipulation, the idea was gaining credence in other influential quarters.

In the electrified aftermath of the election, aides to Hillary Clinton and Obama pored over polling numbers and turnout data, looking for clues to explain what they saw as an unnatural turn of events.
One of the theories to emerge from their post-mortem was that Russian operatives who were directed by the Kremlin to support Trump may have taken advantage of Facebook and other social media platforms to direct their messages to American voters in key demographic areas in order to increase enthusiasm for Trump and suppress support for Clinton.

These former advisers didn’t have hard evidence that Russian trolls were using Facebook to micro-target voters in swing districts — at least not yet — but they shared their theories with the House and Senate intelligence committees, which launched parallel investigations into Russia’s role in the presidential campaign in January.

[Congressional investigations into alleged Russian hacking begin without end in sight]

Sen. Mark R. Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, initially wasn’t sure what to make of Facebook’s role. U.S. intelligence agencies had briefed the Virginia Democrat and other members of the committee about alleged Russian contacts with the Trump campaign and about how the Kremlin leaked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks to undercut Clinton.

But the intelligence agencies had little data on Russia’s use of Facebook and other U.S.-based social media platforms, in part because of rules designed to protect the privacy of communications between Americans.

Facebook’s effort to understand Russia’s multifaceted influence campaign continued as well.
Zuckerberg announced in a 6,000-word blog post in February that Facebook needed to play a greater role in controlling its dark side.

“It is our responsibility,” he wrote, “to amplify the good effects [of the Facebook platform] and mitigate the bad — to continue increasing diversity while strengthening our common understanding so our community can create the greatest positive impact on the world.”

‘A critical juncture’

The extent of Facebook’s internal self-examination became clear in April, when Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos co-authored a 13-page white paper detailing the results of a sprawling research effort that included input from experts from across the company, who in some cases also worked to build new software aimed specifically at detecting foreign propaganda.

“Facebook sits at a critical juncture,” Stamos wrote in the paper, adding that the effort focused on “actions taken by organized actors (governments or non-state actors) to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment, most frequently to achieve a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome.” He described how the company had used a technique known as machine learning to build specialized data-mining software that can detect patterns of behavior — for example, the repeated posting of the same content — that malevolent actors might use.

The software tool was given a secret designation, and Facebook is now deploying it and others in the run-up to elections around the world. It was used in the French election in May, where it helped disable 30,000 fake accounts, the company said. It was put to the test again on Sunday when Germans went to the polls. Facebook declined to share the software tool’s code name. Another recently developed tool shows users when articles have been disputed by third-party fact checkers.

Notably, Stamos’s paper did not raise the topic of political advertising — an omission that was noticed by Capitol Hill investigators. Facebook, worth $495 billion, is the largest online advertising company in the world after Google. Although not mentioned explicitly in the report, Stamos's team had searched extensively for evidence of foreign purchases of political advertising but had come up short.

A few weeks after the French election, Warner flew out to California to visit Facebook in person. It was an opportunity for the senator to press Stamos directly on whether the Russians had used the company’s tools to disseminate anti-Clinton ads to key districts.

Officials said Stamos underlined to Warner the magnitude of the challenge Facebook faced policing political content that looked legitimate.

Stamos told Warner that Facebook had found no accounts that used advertising but agreed with the senator that some probably existed. The difficulty for Facebook was finding them.

Finally, Stamos appealed to Warner for help: If U.S. intelligence agencies had any information about the Russian operation or the troll farms it used to disseminate misinformation, they should share it with Facebook. The company is still waiting, people involved in the matter said.

Breakthrough moment

For months, a team of engineers at Facebook had been searching through accounts, looking for signs that they were set up by operatives working on behalf of the Kremlin. The task was immense.

Warner’s visit spurred the company to make some changes in how it conducted its internal investigation. Instead of searching through impossibly large batches of data, Facebook decided to focus on a subset of political ads.

Technicians then searched for “indicators” that would link those ads to Russia. To narrow down the search further, Facebook zeroed in on a Russian entity known as the Internet Research Agency, which had been publicly identified as a troll farm.

“They worked backwards,” a U.S. official said of the process at Facebook.

The breakthrough moment came just days after a Facebook spokesman on July 20 told CNN that “we have seen no evidence that Russian actors bought ads on Facebook in connection with the election.”
Facebook’s talking points were about to change.

By early August, Facebook had identified more than 3,000 ads addressing social and political issues that ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017 and that appear to have come from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency.

After making the discovery, Facebook reached out to Warner’s staff to share what they had learned.
Congressional investigators say the disclosure only scratches the surface. One called Facebook’s discoveries thus far “the tip of the iceberg.” Nobody really knows how many accounts are out there and how to prevent more of them from being created to shape the next election — and turn American society against itself.

Dwoskin reported from San Francisco. Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

North Korea earthquake spreads fear as Trump again attacks ‘Little Rocket Man’

2017-09-24T015142Z_864692798_RC1BC263FD30_RTRMADP_3_NORTHKOREA-MISSILES-940x580

THE WAR of words between North Korea and the United States has again escalated, as a 3.4 magnitude earthquake hit parts of North Korea on Saturday. Experts remain divided over whether it was the result of a nuclear test by Pyongyang or natural occurrence.

The US government said that the earthquake occurred in the area of previous North Korean nuclear tests, however that it “cannot conclusively confirm” whether it was natural or human-made. South Korea’s weather agency, however, said it was presumed to be natural.

It occurred hours after US Air Force planes flew in international airspace close to North Korea, in what the Pentagon called a show of force to illustrate the military options available to President Donald Trump.

Star indicates the epicentre of 3.4 magnitude earthquake in North Korea on Sept 23, 2017. Source: US Geological Survey

SEE ALSO: Kim Jong Un says he will tame ‘mentally deranged’ Trump with fire

During an address to the UN General Assembly on Saturday, meanwhile, North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said that targeting the US mainland with the country’s rockets was an inevitability because “Mr Evil President” Trump had insulted the rogue state’s regime.

In amongst tweets about NFL stars taking a knee during the US national anthem, Trump again lashed out at the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un by calling him “Little Rocket Man” and threatening that he “won’t be around much longer.”

Last week, Kim personally issued a statement in which he responded to Trump’s threat to “totally destroy” North Korea during his UN General Assembly address. The North Korean leader called Trump a “mentally deranged US dotard” and said he would have to “tame” America with fire.

Top advisers to the US president had repeatedly warned him not to personally attack Kim due to the North Korean leader’s unpredictable nature, but Trump went off-script and used the terms “Rocket Man” and “suicide mission”, reported the Los Angeles Times.

2017-09-20T035417Z_1040230261_RC15FE4DBE80_RTRMADP_3_UN-ASSEMBLY-TRUMP

Trump addresses the 72nd United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York, US on Sept 19, 2017. Source: Reuters/Eduardo Munoz

SEE ALSO: Trump speech reduces hope for peace with North Korea says Chinese media

Over the weekend, thousands of North Koreans attended an anti-American rally in Pyongyang. The country’s state media agency KCNA reported that more than 100,000 people attended on Saturday.

KCNA said that those attending the rally were “full of the stamina not to miss the golden opportunity for giving vent to pent-up wrath of the Korean people but to wipe out the US group of ignorant gangsters letting loose such invectives as ‘total destruction.’”

“We are waiting for the moment of final decisive battle to remove the US empire of evil, from the globe,” said Ri Il-bae, a commander from the Worker-Peasant Red Guards, as quoted by South Korea’s state news agency Yonhap.

“Once respected Supreme Commander Kim Jong-un issues an order, we will annihilate the group of aggressors with the arms of revolution.”

Wrestle Mania at United Nations General Assembly

By Dr.Harinda Vidanage-2017-09-25

President Trump reiterated his willingness to destroy North Korea which was captured by the global media

Trump’s ideas about UN reforms and Guterres sense are very different

Germany is bracing for its general elections and Merkel is the favourite to win

People, Peace and Decent life for all, was the theme of 72nd UN General Assembly (UNGA), yet what stood out from the interventions of some key global leaders was antithetical to the theme. Rather than peace and coexistence the forum was more like a ring for professional wrestlers who punched and kicked each other to the cheering frenzy of their fans. Thus from threats such as wiping out nations, to terrorist branding of nations and leaders the UNGA became less about global governance and more about global fractures.

Pakistan accused India of sponsoring terrorism inside of its borders and called for a

hard response if Indians do not cease interventions in Pakistan. India shot back, naming Pakistan as ‘Terroristan’. President Trump reiterated his willingness to destroy North Korea which was captured by the global media. His longer more nuanced and complex critique was on the Iranian regime. His critique of the ongoing Iranian nuclear deal has already created shock waves among the European partners of the deal.

There were some clear signals from Trumps speech, what the global media has extracted are a few audacious ones, yet if one carefully goes through Trump’s Speech, there are a set of interesting points of departures from American foreign policy of the last 70 years. Trump’s debut at the UNGA was the first real detailed outlining of his foreign policy as well as his world view. Trump’s world view is shared by quite a number of current and emerging global leaders, who argue for a return to nationalism as bedrock of policy making.

Trump seems to be addressing a cohort of like-minded leaders who has emerged within the last five years and even leaders who are drifting towards embracing rigid and strict forms of nationalism. Thus from Poland, India, Russia, to Japan the call for return to emphasis on state sovereignty resonates well with its incumbent leadership. Trump in

his speech declared, ‘As President of the United States, I will always put America first, just like you, as the leaders of your countries will always, and should always, put your countries first.’ And another significant statement was ‘Now we are calling for a great reawakening of nations, for the revival of their spirits, their pride, their people, and their patriotism’

While it is appealing given the current political transformations and the inherent problems of democratic regimes, Trump clearly takes aim at signalling a new era in American foreign policy which will not develop a robust global governance architecture. Instead Trump believes that forums like United Nations is to discuss issues but with strong domestic compulsions. Trump’s United States is looking at a much weaker, less able, less bureaucratic, intergovernmental organization.

The United States has achieved a forceful confession from the United Nations; its new Secretary General António Guterres acknowledged the need for reform. Trump’s ideas about UN reforms and Guterres sense are very different. Many analysts were appalled when Trump called for the ‘destruction of North Korea’, and many blamed Trump for his inexperience and irresponsibility. Yet a deeper discursive analysis would reveal that rather than the intention to wipe out Korea, Trump’s intention was demonstrate that the UN forums can be used to popularize ideas such as war, violence and such acts or initiatives can be normalized backed by rhetoric.

Thus the current United States regime has managed to open spaces for leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu, General Sisi, Tayyip Erdogan to feel comfortable when they drive forceful narratives about the existence of rogue states and the necessity to stop such evil. Trump’s speech had that effect, thus the theme of the UNGA this year is upended when the head of the United States is articulating power in pure military sense by referring to increased military spending of the US to providing a singular option to deal with all adversaries of the United States, the use of force.

The speech was a well devised attack on liberal internationalism which was the guiding ideology and operational theory of global affairs the in the last 30 years. Instead Trump introduces the notion of ‘Principled Realism’. The United Nations that was conceived as a peaceful mechanism of coexistence since the end of the World War II might be going through a period of radical transition. American political scientist Joseph Nye disagrees, he claims in a recent opinion piece the structural dimension of American politics is rooted in such a way that Trump will not be able to change the foundations and pillars of American foreign policy any soon.

While the UNGA is going through such turmoil, Germany is bracing for its general elections. Merkel is the favourite to win the elections. Thus for the German Chancellor who in her address to the congress during her visit to the United States in 2009 passionately disclosed her love and passion for the ‘American Dream’ is now seen by many globalists, institutional liberalists as a the only leader who is capable of facing up to the challenges of rising nationalism. Merkel is endowed with the spirit of defiance; she defied her Eastern roots to be the first woman to be a Chancellor in Germany.

She is perceived as the only leader who has not wavered in front of an aggressive Russia and the Russian President Putin. Accounting for nearly 20% of the European Union’s GDP and with a larger manufacturing base than the United States and possesses one of the world’s largest surpluses in its current accounts, Berlin has for a while been the indispensable heart of the European Project but Merkel is reluctant for any form of German writ large in the name of defending the Project or the Union. She was quick to disagree with Trump mainly on Iran but has not delved into a serious critique about the American leader’s stance on the crucial nuclear deal.

Donald Trump in his speech did not mention a single thing about Russia or Putin, or make any allusions to Russia indirectly. Thus it is becoming evident that Trump is trying hard to define the contours of a global threat that according to him is the primary threat confronting the Unites States in the 21st Century. Out of the great powers in the world no leader came forward to defend the status quo, there was no real defender of the liberal international order.

This led to Javier Solana former NATO Secretary General to quickly come up with a opinion piece titled ‘The Global Leadership vacuum’, questioning the ability of current international order to maintain any order to deal with the crucial global challenges from the North Korean nuclear crisis to the global climate debate. Trump’s comments ignited a no holds barred cage fight, heralding a shrinking and weak role for the United Nations. This relegation is analogous to a referee in wrestle mania who gets to do less while being hit on the head.

The writer is the Director, Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS)

Disequilibrium: manmade or chaotic?

Unpredictability and determinism in human society

The butterfly-like Strange Attractor

by Kumar David-September 23, 2017, 12:00 pm

Unfortunately chaos theory though mathematically well established, is near useless in problem solving since, usually, it is an after the event description of how some condition came about. It may explain how sea surface temperature and rotation of the planet led to a hurricane (‘typhoon’ or ‘cyclone’ in Asia), but you can do as much to stop a typhoon as to switch off a solar flare or fill up a galactic black-hole. Nevertheless it does provide deeper appreciation of the physics and mathematics of complex dynamic non-linear systems. Complex systems are interconnected phenomena where many factors influence each other; examples are the weather, smooth flowing rivers that if disturbed in excess break into turbulent eddies and gushing rapids, fusion reactors whose turbulence has thus far defeated the best engineering efforts to generate electricity from nuclear fusion, and the motion of the ten (including dwarf Pluto) planets and their moons around the sun.

A more complex dynamic phenomenon is human society; social-economic-political. It is difficult to model (write equations) with reliability, data acquisition (getting numbers to plug into equations) is another headache, and the crazy ways of people and leaders is near impenetrable; so how model? Analysts at best work with averages, trends, statistical indicators and cunning insight. But in human affairs, unlike natural or astronomical phenomena where the theory does not give us a lever for intervention, chaos and disequilibrium perceptions provide alarms to foil social catastrophes. I think one can credibly argue that the ethnic imbroglio cum civil war in Sri Lanka was, to a considerable degree, an avoidable calamity. Much is in the abstract domain and overlaps chaos theory; so a bit about that first.

A theoretical appetiser

Let me try to charm you with a few legends of chaos. In Greek mythology Chaos is not a chap, not a god, it is emptiness, nothingness, chasm, the first thing that was – "at first Chaos came to be" (Hesiod). And in Genesis I, 1&2, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep". Likewise modern chaos theory inclines to things not tangible, odd, frightening, formless and catastrophic. The consequences of war and revolution are chaotic; before an aircraft breaks up in mid-air, airflow around it is chaotic and turbulent; a crime passionnel is a story of emotional chaos.

There are two aspects to chaos theory that, though purists may object, I think are separable. The first is the concept of a tipping-point, the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, the final provocation that is just too much and leads to war, revolution or divorce. The second concept says that in certain classes of complex non-linear dynamic systems, a tiny difference in the starting point, or injecting a tiny difference in the middle, can give rise to huge divergences later and lead to vastly different endings. It is the first concept, not second, that I think is important in social phenomena. But let me first say a little about the second concept.

The second concept gained traction in science in 1962 with the experiments of an American MIT and Harvard educated climatologist Edward Lorenz (1917-2000). Edward is not to be confused with the great Hendrik Lorentz (1853-1928) of Lorentz Transformation fame, which transformation was the bedrock of Einstein’s Special Relativity in 1905. Edward had set up a complex climatological mathematical model and was running it on his computer, then something bothered him so he restarted it and went for coffee. On his return in half-an-hour (computers were 100 times slower those days) he was amazed that it was going all over the place somewhere else. I have reproduced Edward’s famous first graph. He ran the program over and over again starting from what he thought were the same initial conditions. The crazy thing, after tracking the same path for a while, wandered off all over the place! Then it hit him. Although he thought he was starting from the same initial conditions each time, actually his inputs had tiny differences way down in the computer’s rounding off. Think of tiny differences far after the decimal point.

The conclusion was that in certain classes of non-linear dynamic systems, tiny differences in initial conditions may not show visible differences for a while, but later, differences grow. Edward justifiably reused the old word chaotic to describe the jig he had found. I don’t think this is significant in social, economic or political matters. One rupee more or less in the budget is not going to bring the economy crashing down. Though economics is non-linear complex and dynamic it does not have the same properties as Edward’s equations; remember I said "certain" classes of dynamic systems.

Edward’s butterflies

Let us take Edward’s system of many variables connected by dynamic equations. Let the computer run, then plot one of the variables on the X-axis and another on the Y-axis. The graphic would cycle on and on, never exactly repeating itself but always keeping the same rough pattern.

The plot which looks like a butterfly is called a Strange Attractor because it never repeats itself exactly, but always retains fractal symmetry. A doe in season runs away but makes sure never to get too far away from the stag. Strange Attractors have an analogy in politics; for seventy years the UNP and SLFP have been attractors for the voting masses; though exposed as corrupt and discredited as vile, the voter still spins around them, never repeating exactly the same pattern but never entirely deserting them. In personal life we are familiar with unhappy loved ones who can’t summon the willpower to break from a callous partner or a family despot; a strange attractor indeed.

There is another butterfly associated with Edward Lorenz’s name which is palpably false. It claims that a tiny action at one place at one time may unleash catastrophic events elsewhere at another time. This Butterfly Effect (not to be confused butterfly shape of the previous para) is false. Certain closed systems of non-linear differential equations may "secretly" build up great differences that become evident much later. A butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil creates a tornado in China years later. This is false because butterflies in Brazil and storms in China do not form a closed system. Millions upon millions of factors, large and small, not included in the equations, intervene in the real world and smooth things out rendering the flapping butterfly an immaterial pest.

The tipping-point

The breaking point, or going beyond the limit when a safe situation tips over into disorder, is a concept people have been familiar with from the beginning of history. A case on our doorstep was when the gritty hand of power-greedy Rajapaksa reached for the Eighteenth Amendment. This was a critical boundary which if not crossed may have allowed the despot to retain power.

A much quoted example is that fabled assassination in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Could one argue that if Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip and his five associates had restrained themselves the world would have been spared the ‘Great War’ and 20 million dead? Tipping-point hypotheses are advanced for revolutions, the Great Depression, Richard III’s defeat on Bosworth Field and July 1983 in Lanka.

The hypotheses go like this; if the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne had not been cut down the Empire would not have invaded Serbia; Germany and Russia would not have mobilised, etc. If the Fed had cut interest rates and boosted the money supply (what Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and President Hoover did not do) there would have been no Great Depression. Shakespeare’s Richard III bellowed "A horse a horse my kingdom for a horse" and if only a blasted mare had been found the outcome at Bosworth Field would have been reversed. And there are those who believe that if the LTTE had not blown up 13 soldiers on 23 July the worst communal carnage in our history would not have occurred. All this I argue is utter rubbish.

The truth to the tipping-point thesis is that the truck was already overloaded, it was hanging over the cliff, the last push simply made the inevitable happen. If it was not tipped on this occasion the next gust of wind would have done it. These were catastrophes waiting to happen. The cause of WW1 was the scramble of European Imperial powers to divide the colonial world, Richard’s defeat was unavoidable in the face of Tudor power, the Great Depression was structured into the architecture of interwar capitalism, and 1983 was a sore in a bigger pathology of communal eczema oozing from our national psyche. The tipping-point is only a tipping point; the reality is the big load that tipped.

The crisis version of chaos theory that describes, after the event, what happened at a volatile tipping-point is interesting as history. It’s not much use in problem solving which is concerned with the dirt-truck which should have been emptied before it tipped.

If a brick fell in September 1917 and conked Lenin, there would still have been revolution in Russia because of hunger, the horrors of war and a poverty stricken landless peasantry. The outcome, I grant, may have been a little less certain. Hmm, now that’s a thought to ponder!

The Many Faces of Angela Merkel

BY BENJAMIN SOLOWAY, EMILY TAMKIN-

At Foreign Policy, we often use Getty Images, a photo agency, to find photographs. While perusing Getty for images of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, about whom FP published three pieces on Monday due to her re-election, we came across a series that left us as confused as a Social Democratic Party member wondering what went wrong after Sunday’s vote, but pleased at the powerful tools now at our disposal to illustrate the election outcome.

Getty’s caption for one of the photos in question reads:

BERLIN, GERMANY – SEPTEMBER 25: (EDITORS NOTE: Multiple exposures were combined in camera to produce this image.) German Chancellor and Christian Democrat (CDU) Angela Merkel speaks to the media at CDU headquarters on the day after the CDU won 32.9% of the vote and a first place finish in yesterdays German federal elections on September 25, 2017 in Berlin, Germany. The CDU win, which guarantees Merkel a fourth term as chancellor, is marred by the third-place finish of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), with 12.6%. The AfD will be represented by 94 parliamentarians, the first time in post-World War II German history that a right-wing, nationalist party has made it to the Bundestag. (Photo by Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images).

We understand the how — multiple exposures and in-camera editing.

A Getty representative did not immediately respond to request for comment. So we at FP are left to come up with our own reasons for what it all means.

Each Merkel here symbolizes one of Merkel’s previous three terms as chancellor of Germany. The pale background bespeaks the unknown future of German politics, and the pale “CDU” watermarks are as hard to read as the path to a coalition government.