Friday, February 2, 2018

Theft at Trinco Navy Holiday Bungalow

2018-02-02

A group of 19 locals and Sri Lankan Canadians have been stolen of cash and jewellery while on holiday at the heavily fortified - Command Headquarters- Eastern Naval Area, Trincomalee, on Tuesday night, the Daily Mirror learns.

The rogues had broken into the Bungalow located within the premises at which 19 persons including 11 females were staying. Initial observations of the group had revealed stolen cash and jewellery amounting to over 300,000 rupees.

“ We were completely devastated when we found out early next morning,” one of the tour group members told the Daily Mirror. According to the holiday makers which included family and extended family including Canadian citizens they had immediately informed the Naval Police upon discovery early morning on Wednesday.

The holiday makers had been staying at the Forest Side Holiday Resort located within the premises and under the supervision of the Navy when the incident had occurred.

“From the time they ( the naval Police) walked in at 5.45 am they seemed to not want to find out what happened. Instead they checked our entire group and went in circles. Frustrated by this I asked them to secure the location and obtain finger prints to which they said there was no need,” Jayalath Samarakkody told the Daily Mirror.

Navy Spokesperson Commander Dinesh Bandara confirmed the incident and said it was being investigated.

“We don’t take a theft of this nature lightly. A separate investigation into the theft is ongoing by the Navy and the Police have also been informed. The Holiday makers had said they wanted to leave for Canada and decided not to make a complaint to the Police. However, we are taking this incident very seriously and investigations are ongoing” he said.

The group of tourists had arrived had the Eastern Command Naval base on Monday, January 29 as a part of a family outing.

“The entire family included a group of 46 people stayed at 3 different bungalows within the command. 19 of us stayed at the Forest Side Holiday Resort at which the incident occurred” Samarakkody said.

According to those present, they had slept at around 11.30 pm on Tuesday night after securing all entrances to the Bungalow. They had all slept in 3 rooms due to the in operation of one of the Air Conditioners in one of the rooms.

“We woke up between 4.30 and 5 the next morning because we were to leave back to Colombo. Then we realized some of the belongings were missing. Upon further inspection we saw that a window and doors were opened. We immediately informed the Naval Police who arrived at the Bungalow” Lalitha Padmini said.

She said that they were perturbed by the reactions of the officers.

“We were shocked. The main thing they should’ve done was to either immediately call the Police or take over and investigate. Instead they wanted our group checked which they did and found nothing. And thereafter nothing else was done” she said.

Relating the experience, Samarakkody, a Canadian citizen said: “There were 19 of us and none of us woke up. We were staying at a heavily fortified area and they rouges knew the dimensions of it in detail. That’s how they entered. I can’t understand why the scene wasn’t secured and finger prints not taken or the fact that the Police were not called in” he said.

Instead Samarakkody said that they were asked to proceed with a Police complaint by the Naval Police at around 12.00 Noon after the group was searched for 6 hours.

“We had already spent our entire morning and afternoon undergoing this .We just wanted to leave the place. Some of us had flights to catch the next day ( today) so we wanted to leave the place as fast as possible” he said.

However Samarakkody said that the Naval Police had refused to let them leave the premises without signing a statement which said that they did not require further investigation into the issue.

“We were told to sign that our complaint was only made for the purpose of informing and not for the purpose of investigation- which is ridiculous. But we had to abide by it because we wanted to leave” he said.
Samarakkody further said that he was informed by the Officer in Charge of the Naval Police that a bus had left the premises at 5 am that morning.

“I told him to stop the bus or search it. They could have at least found some clue. But they didn’t seem interested” he said. (Hafeel Farisz)

Slow death for Gaza cancer patients cut off from care

Tamara Aburamadan-31 January 2018

News that Augusta Victoria Hospital would no longer receive new patients has been extremely worrying for Khalil Abdullah.

The 21-year-old cancer patient from Jabaliya in the occupied Gaza Strip is the sole breadwinner for a family of six. A painter and decorator, Abdullah had to stop working when he was diagnosed with testicular cancer and underwent surgery.

“My father left us when I was very young,” Abdullah told The Electronic Intifada. “Now my sisters and mother depend on me. I need to find treatment.”

The only hospital in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that can provide the kind of care Abdullah needs is Augusta Victoria, in East Jerusalem, part of the occupied West Bank. But in late October, the hospital stopped receivingpatients from the West Bank beyond East Jerusalem, as well as from Gaza, informing those with previous referrals not to try to make their way to Jerusalem.

Hospital administrators told the Palestinian Center for Human Rights that the decision had been made after the Palestinian Authority health ministry in the West Bank failed to pay monies owed to the private hospital.

According to the hospital’s general manager, Walid Nammour, the PA owes the hospital approximately $35 million in outstanding debt.

A rumbling row

The debt has accumulated over four years and the PA is struggling to keep up. But while acknowledging the debt, the PA’s response to the hospital decision to stop receiving patients has been terse.

In a statement carried by the Palestine News Network in October, the PA’s finance ministry, which allocates funds to individual ministries including the health ministry, said it was engaged in a “unique effort” to support Augusta Victoria.

It announced the transfer of nearly $15 million directly to Augusta Victoria in October in addition to the approximately $2.2 million the health ministry pays monthly.

The finance ministry called on Augusta Victoria’s administration to look at its own practices and scrutinize its operational costs, before decrying how the row has played out in the press and on social media, suggesting hospital administrators had chosen to battle it out in public.

Such mutual recriminations do little for patients like Abdullah, who has had to stop taking painkillers due to a congenital heart defect and now suffers painful sleepless nights.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights has called on both the Palestinian Authority and Augusta Victoria to resolve the problem as quickly as possible.

Mohammed Bseiso, a lawyer with the rights group, told The Electronic Intifada that of the hundreds of patients referred to Augusta Victoria every month from Gaza, no more than “about 50-70 percent” are granted permits.

Indeed, in July 2017, the World Health Organization found there to be 547 referrals from Gaza to Augusta Victoria. The Israeli military – which controls Palestinian movement between the West Bank and Gaza Strip – granted permits to just 57 percent of those referrals to allow them across the Erez checkpoint to travel on for treatment.

The process by which a patient seeks both referral and an Israeli permit to leave Gaza is notoriously long and slow.

First, a doctor has to conclude that the patient cannot receive proper care in Gaza – not an unlikely scenario, as 10 years of an Israeli-imposed blockade, compounded by punitive Palestinian Authority sanctions on the Hamas-administered territory in place since last spring, have conspired to leave the impoverished coastal strip without 223 essential medicines, according to the World Health Organization.

Endless process

The patient’s case is then passed on for approval to the Referral Abroad Department of Gaza’s Ministry of Health – a bitter political impasse has resulted in separate Palestinian governments administering the internal affairs of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Referral department officials determine where the patient would be best served. Should the person need to travel through the Erez checkpoint for treatment in a West Bank or Israeli facility, an urgent request is submitted to the Palestinian Authority District Coordination Office, which in turn applies for a travel permit from its Israeli counterpart, the so-called Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT.

Patients in Gaza died last year after the Palestinian Authority health ministry in the West Bank delayed requests for transfer to Israeli or West Bank medical centers.

The West Bank health ministry must approve such requests before Israel does because it pays the medical bills of any referral cases it approves.

The process is a lengthy one, increasingly likely to end in disappointment. According to the World Health Organization, 2017 was on track through October to see the worst approval rate for patient applicants to leave Gaza since the organization began tracking such data in 2006.

Moreover, in October, Israel’s COGAT published new guidelines for how long it should take to process a permit request, stating that “non-urgent” medical cases should expect to wait 23 working days before receiving an answer.

Abdullah has been through the whole process. He first applied for a travel permit in July 2017. But by the time of his scheduled hospital appointment, on 19 November, the only response he had received, as relayed by the Palestinian District Coordination Office, was: “Pending Security Check.”

“I’m not a part of any armed group,” Abdullah told The Electronic Intifada. “I’m only a cancer patient. What threat do I pose?”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which provides legal aid and communicates with the Israeli side, is “fighting in two directions,” Bseiso told The Electronic Intifada.

It is trying to help Palestinian patients untangle the complex Israeli procedures to reach hospitals outside of Gaza, while also battling Palestinian Authority procrastination in supporting hospitals to provide medical services.

So when Augusta Victoria called patients to ask them not to come to their appointments, the rights group went into overdrive.

“For sure, this has created a crisis for our work. We had to reschedule appointments and to restart the permit application process,” said Bseiso.

All the time, however, Abdullah is worsening. A malignant tumor was also discovered in his lymph nodes, and he is in urgent need of treatment.

“This malignant cancer is swimming in my body. I’m dying slowly,” he said. “All the while just waiting for an Israeli permit.”

A race against time

At her house in Gaza’s Beach refugee camp, Narjiss al-Hasani, 47, who has breast cancer, is also running out of time.

“Five months have passed and only one is left to get treatment,” the mother of two told The Electronic Intifada.

Al-Hasani, a social studies teacher at a school administered by the United Nations in Beach camp, was diagnosed with cancer in January 2016, and had a mastectomy as well as eight chemotherapy sessions at a hospital in Gaza.

Now she needs radiotherapy, which means treatment at Augusta Victoria.

Khalid Thabet, head of the oncology department at al-Rantisi hospital in Gaza where al-Hasani had chemotherapy, told The Electronic Intifada that cancer patients have “a six-month window” to benefit from radiotherapy.

Since ending her chemotherapy, al-Hasani has applied three times for a travel permit. Each time the answer came back: “Pending Security Check.”

“Receiving three deferments, and reading about Augusta Victoria, I feel devastated,” al-Hasani said. “And the whole painful process of treatment I have already gone through might be in vain without radiotherapy.”

Tamara Aburamadan is a human rights activist and writer based in Gaza.

Syria war: Civilians killed in government air strikes across rebel-held areas

Exclusive: European Union Heads of Mission warn ‘touristic settlements’ are being used as a political tool

Oliver Holmes in Jerusalem Thu 1 Feb 2018

Israel is developing archaeological and tourism sites to legitimise illegal settlements in Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, European Uniondiplomats in the city have warned.

A leaked report acquired by the Guardian cited projects in parts of East Jerusalem – occupied by Israel since 1967 – that are being used “as a political tool to modify the historical narrative and to support, legitimise and expand settlements”.

The report identified settler-run excavation sites in the heart of majority-Arab districts, a proposed cable car project with stops on confiscated land and the designation of built-up urban areas as national parks.

“East Jerusalem is the only place where Israeli national parks are declared on populated neighbourhoods,” the report said.

The document, a report written annually by the EU Heads of Mission in Jerusalem, presented a bleak picture, saying the overall situation in the city and the prospects for peace had worsened.

Marginalisation of Palestinians, who comprise about 37% of the city’s residents, continued unabated, with more than 130 building demolitions and the displacement of 228 people, it said.

A record number of Israeli settlement proposals and the physical isolation of Palestinians under a strict Israeli permit scheme meant “the city has largely ceased to be the Palestinian economic, urban and commercial centre it used to be”.

Archaeology and tourism development by government institutions as well as private settler organisations established what it said was a “narrative based on historic continuity of the Jewish presence in the area at the expense of other religions and cultures”. Chief among them, the report warned, was the City of David, a government-funded archeological park in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Silwan that provides tours in the ruins of ancient Jerusalem.

The site is operated by a settler organisation “promoting an exclusively Jewish narrative, while detaching the place from its Palestinian surroundings”.

Approximately 450 settlers live under heavy protection in Silwan, the report said, alongside almost 10,000 Palestinians. Continued evictions of Palestinian families and the increased Israeli security presence have created a particular tension, it warned.

More recently, a cable car project approved by the Israeli cabinet in May plans to connect West Jerusalem with the Old City, part of Jerusalem internationally recognised as occupied.

Expected to be operational in 2020 and aiming to transport more than 3,000 people per hour, the report warned the “highly controversial” plan would contribute to the consolidation of “touristic settlements”. The project also aims, in a second phase not yet approved, to extend further into East Jerusalem.

“Critics have described the project as turning the World Heritage site of Jerusalem into a commercial theme park while local Palestinian residents are absent from the narrative being promoted to the visitors,” it said.

In addition, the diplomats warned, the cable car could lead to a deterioration of the security situation, as it would be located about 130 metres from the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif complex, revered as a holy site by both Muslims and Jews.

This summer, gunmen killed two Israeli police officers at the entrance to the site, and the subsequent installation from authorities of metal detectors led to further clashes.

Syria war: Civilians killed in government air strikes across rebel-held areas

Rescue volunteers helping displaced refugees struck by a Syrian government air strike in West Aleppo countryside (@SyriaCivilDef)

Areeb Ullah-Friday 2 February 2018

Syrian government warplanes killed seven civilians and injured dozens of internally displaced people in Aleppo as air strikes and shelling intensified across rebel-held areas in Syria.

Several air strikes and artillery shelling also took place in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of the capital Damascus, on Friday as concerns mounted over chemical attacks by the Syrian government.

Images posted by the Syrian Civil Defence Force (SCD), also known as the White Helmets, showed rescue volunteers helping refugees who were part of a convoy that was struck by the Syrian government in the village of Telahdiya in the West Aleppo countryside.

The air strike in Telahdiya took place hours after Syrian government warplanes killed three civilians in Arbin city in Eastern Ghouta on Friday afternoon. The SCD dispatched several rescue volunteers to help the wounded after government warplanes struck residential areas across the city.

We are even more concerned about the possibility of sarin use

- US Defence Secretary, John Mattis

The air strikes came minutes after artillery shells hit Douma city in Eastern Ghouta, which injured civilians. The SCD did not report any fatalities but said that its rescue operation inside Douma city was ongoing.

Images posted by the SCD showed volunteers rescuing a child who survived the government shelling in Douma. No fatalities were reported by the SCD but it said on Twitter that its rescue operation inside Douma city was ongoing.

Chemical attack concerns

This represents the third chemical attack reported in Douma, a suburb of Eastern Ghouta since the start of 2018, with two earlier attacks on 13 January and 22 January.

U.S. Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said on Friday that while he does not have evidence of the nerve agent sarin being used by the Syrian government, the United States was looking into reports about its use and was concerned.

Mattis, speaking with reporters, said the Syrian government had repeatedly used chlorine as a weapon.

“We are even more concerned about the possibility of sarin use... I don’t have the evidence, what I am saying is, that other groups on the ground, NGOs, fighters on the ground, have said that sarin has been used, so we are looking for evidence,” Mattis said.

His comments come after the Trump administration on Thursday said it would take military action against Syrian government forces to deter the use of chemical attacks.

Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have continued occasional use of chemical weapons in smaller amounts since a deadly attack last April that drew a US missile strike on a Syrian air base, US officials told reporters.

A global campaign was launched this week to raise awareness about the successive chemical attacks that have taken place in Eastern Ghouta as Syrian government forces continue to fight to take control of the area.

Civil defense teams working to evacuate the injured civilians after artillery shelling and warplanes airstrike on #Arbin city in #Eastern_Ghouta pic.twitter.com/p8n53etPyR
— The White Helmets (@SyriaCivilDef) 2 February 2018

Under the hashtag#DoumaSuffocating, people from across the world have been posting pictures of themselves placing a hand over their mouth to raise awareness about the chemical attacks.

Mohamad Katoub, an advocacy officer from the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), told Middle East Eye that two women and a 16-year-old child displayed symptoms indicative of chlorine from a suspected chemical attack on Thursday morning.

"Thankfully there were no fatalities from yesterday's attack, but medical staff from our facility inside Douma confirmed that two women and a 16-year-old girl displayed symptoms indicative of chlorine," said Katoub.

In late January, rescue workers in a rebel-held enclave east of Damascus said government forces had again used chlorine gas, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 13 people had suffered suffocation.

The White Helmets civil defence rescue force, which operates in rebel-held parts of Syria, said 13 civilians including women and children had been "injured after (the) Assad regime used chlorine gas in Douma city in Eastern Ghouta".

A UN body in October 2017 held the government responsible for a Sarin gas attack on a rebel-held town that killed more than 87 people.

"The panel is confident that the Syrian Arab republic is responsible for the release of sarin at Khan Sheikhun on 4 April 2017," stated the report seen by AFP.

Images from the immediate aftermath of the attack drew global outrage and prompted the US to fire dozens of cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase where the gas was allegedly housed.

Theresa May dodges questions while tensions grow over Brexit phase two

Gary Gibbon-2 Feb 2018

Theresa May hopes she’s neutralised the row over Steve Baker’s attacks on the civil service. But that’s a proxy battle for the bigger row over direction of government policy on Brexit phase two.
Which way is Theresa May going on that?

This morning there were reports swirling that the government was seriously considering staying in something that looks and sounds like the Customs Union. That’s the kind of stuff that is panicking the European Research Group (Steve Baker’s Commons pressure group now run by Jacob Rees-Mogg).
So where is government policy going?

Mrs May doesn’t give many interviews and you have to cross the world to get them. This morning in Shanghai she faced the cameras.

Mrs May is apt to ignore the question. Many politicians do, of course.

But there’s an art to this called “pivoting.” You deftly turn the question to your purpose. Today Mrs May did not pivot, she didn’t come within a 200 mile fishing limit of the questions. There was a water cannon of words fired back at reporters, phrases about getting the best deal, working for trade in China.

We have been told that Theresa May is trying to get agreement to what Brexit supporting critics will see as pretty much a standstill new relationship to follow a standstill transition. As David Davis told the Brexit select Committee 10 days ago, under the current proposals “how far we diverge will be a matter for future governments.”

We’ve just been visiting a land where they plan policy in decades, sometimes centuries. Some Brexiteers believe the “stay aligned for now” approach to the U.K./EU relationship would waste the Brexit opportunity.

So I asked Mrs May if she was in danger of splitting the difference, merely keeping warring factions in the Tory Party apart rather than planning, as her hosts do, decades in advance?

Back came the verbal water cannon. Working for trade, getting the best deal.

Did she disparage what Steve Baker did?

We are working for trade, trying to get the best deal.

I could go on.

Mrs May’s supporters would argue that now more than ever she is engaged in a delicate operation to create a viable Brexit strategy as head of a warring party. Loose words never cost more.
Are these trade missions actually useful?

Some in the delegation said their deals were already happening and “the government just corralled them all together.” Another said: “it’s just something you have to do.”

But one business figure I bumped into in Beijing told me some deals suddenly come to fruition at times like this when you might have thought they were many months off from completion. “What happens is a boss hears that there’s going to be a signing ceremony for lots of deals with a (Chinese government) Minister present. The Minister being there gives them cover. If anything goes wrong with the contract they can say it had Ministerial sign off – their back is covered.”

Building some kind of relationship with someone as powerful as President Xi could bring dividends. The U.K. delegation was struck by the speed of his thought and delivery and the range of topics he had an easy mastery of.

There was no slap down for Mrs May from The Global Times or other sources even though she talked about human rights, Hong Kong and steel dumping. One seasoned summit watcher says the Chinese leadership has got much better at coping with these moments over the years. No doubt their visitors have got better and better at toning down that section of the discussions too.
My favourite headline of the trip is in today’s China Daily: “Innovative Farming Exhibits Catch May’s Eye.”

What she’d give for coverage like that back home.

Asia is set for a difficult year in 2018 – much of it centred around China

January 28, 2018

In 2017 we finally realised that the four decades of geopolitical stability enjoyed by Asian countries and societies had come to an end. In 2018, the major patterns that will come to dominate the region will become increasingly clear.

China and the United States worked out a way to live with one another in the 1970s, and that paved the way for the region’s remarkable economic growth. The US actively sought to engage China in the belief that Chinese economic integration with the world would eventually lead to the liberalisation of China’s political system.

But as Xi Jinping’s first five years in office have made clear, that optimism was misplaced. A more affluent China has become more authoritarian, more nationalistic, and increasingly intent on changing the international environment to one it perceives better reflects its interests.

In his first year in office, US President Donald Trump surprisingly played a gentle hand with China. In contrast to this campaign rhetoric, his administration approached China with moderation, focusing principally on establishing a good personal relationship with Xi and trying to garner Chinese help to manage North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

Read more: At APEC, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping revealed different ideas of Asia's economic future

That is likely to change in 2018. As signalled in the National Security Strategy and the National Defence Strategy, the US sees strategic competition among major powers as the most important feature of the country’s security environment.

The active engagement of China by the US, even one tempered by a degree of containment, is coming to an end. China is viewed now as a country that seeks to mould the international environment in its own image. Expect the US to increasingly contest China’s power and influence, both in the region and globally.

This is likely to take both military and economic forms, as China is increasingly viewed by the US as a full-spectrum adversary. This will mean some kind of action on what the US perceives as China’s predatory trade policy, as well as a ratcheting up of military steps to push back on Chinese activities, particularly at sea.

China will not respond to the likely increase in American pressure with equanimity. Indeed, one real risk in 2018 is that China will overplay its hand. Its lesson from 2017 is that Trump is a paper tiger.

Trump is perceived as being neither able nor willing to match his bombastic words with deeds. China could be emboldened to act provocatively because it miscalculates how the US might respond.

Much attention this year will focus on the power struggle between the US and China. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

The disputed islands in the East China Sea are probably the most likely place for this to happen. The South China Sea disputes have a slightly lower risk in 2018, as China has largely achieved its objectives in that area, and while the US would prefer that this hadn’t occurred, it can live with the consequences for the time being.

While Sino-American competition will increase the regional temperature, it is by no means the only way in which great power rivalry will shape the region.

Last year’s Doklam crisis reminds us that the extensive border between China and India is highly contested. Expect India’s ambitions and China’s confidence to lead to further tensions in the Himalayas.

China was slightly surprised by India’s response in Doklam, and will have learned from that occasion. When, and not if, China next tests India, it will probably involve a higher level of military risk.

In late 2017, senior officials from the US, Japan, India and Australia met, reviving the “quadrilateral initiative” of a decade ago.

The move is publicly framed as efforts to coordinate policies of countries that value an open and free Indo-Pacific. In substance, it is about collaborating to limit Chinese influence and sustain the liberal order. The “new quad” will take further steps in 2018 and China will respond in ways that will further heighten regional tensions.

This year will also see a further decline in the stock of liberalism in Asia. For a period in the early 2000s, liberalism seemed ascendant. China joined the World Trade Organisation, democracy was on the march in Southeast Asia, and economic globalisation was seen as an unalloyed good thing.

Read more: China's ambition burns bright – with Xi Jinping firmly in charge

No longer. There are no democracies in continental Southeast Asia. Rodrigo Duterte is undermining liberalism in the Philippines, shutting down a vibrant news website, and some fear that the martial law he imposed in the restive south may be expanded across the country in 2018.

Cambodia has stripped away its thin democratic veneer, while Myanmar’s democratisation process remains highly limited. Even in Japan and India, liberal ideas are under challenge from thin-skinned nationalists.

In 2018, liberal ideas in Asia will face an increasingly difficult environment, particularly as the geopolitical competition will encourage erstwhile champions of liberal ideas to put interests ahead of values in order to manage that contest.

This year will sadly see the Rohingya crisis linger on, with insufficient political incentives for international actors to help end the crisis. The alignment of interests between the military and the government in Naypidaw will mean the region’s worst humanitarian crisis in decades will continue.
There is also a good chance that in 2018 we will work out how to live with a nuclear North Korea.

The US will ultimately realise that it has no options for managing the crisis – or at least none that carry acceptable costs – and that a nuclear north can be managed. Indeed, a North Korea that feels secure may finally undertake the kind of economic reforms that its populace needs, and which could integrate the isolated country into the regional economy.

Contested Asia has become a geopolitical and geo-economic reality. In 2018 we will see just how sharp the contests will become. The wounded nationalism of China, the erratic and unpredictable US, and the weak political leadership in many regional powers mean the coming year in Asia is going to be even more challenging than 2017.

Why Is China Buying Up Europe’s Ports?

State-owned port operators are the aggressive leading edge of Beijing’s massive Belt and Road project.

The Greek port of Piraeus on Jan. 31, 2015. (Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images)

BY KEITH JOHNSON-

FEBRUARY 2, 2018, 10:27 AM

China’s trillion-dollar signature foreign-policy project, the Belt and Road Initiative, is often lampooned as just a fuzzy concept with little to show for it on the ground.

But in bustling ports from Singapore to the North Sea, state-owned Chinese firms are turning the idea into a reality with a series of aggressive acquisitions that are physically redrawing the map of global trade and political influence.

A pair of deep-pocketed Chinese behemoths, Cosco Shipping Ports and China Merchants Port Holdings, have gone on a buying binge of late, snapping up cargo terminals in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Atlantic rim. Just last month, Cosco finalized the takeover of the terminal in Zeebrugge, Belgium’s second-biggest port, marking the Chinese firm’s first bridgehead in northwestern Europe.

That deal followed a raft of other acquisitions in Spain, Italy, and Greece in just the last couple of years. Chinese state firms, which once kept close to their home market, now control about one-tenth of all European port capacity.

The port deals are one of the clearest manifestations of Beijing’s ambitious plans to physically link China to Europe by sea, road, rail, and pipeline.

The port deals are one of the clearest manifestations of Beijing’s ambitious plans to physically link China to Europe by sea, road, rail, and pipeline.

The ports underpin the maritime half of the Belt and Road Initiative, snaking from the South China Sea across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal and into the soft underbelly of Europe.

“For somebody like Cosco, the deals make sense financially, and they can make their lords and masters in Beijing happy because it fits the Belt and Road narrative,” said Neil Davidson, a senior analyst for ports and terminals at Drewry, the maritime consultancy. “At bottom, there is a geopolitical underpinning to a lot of this.”

For China, still shaking off what it views as a century of humiliation by Western countries — which culminated with the forced opening of Chinese ports by European gunboats — snapping up the sinews of modern commerce is a satisfying way to return to what it sees as the normal state of affairs.
“The fundamental goal seems to be to decrease China’s dependence on foreign elements and increase China’s influence around the world,” said Frans-Paul van der Putten, a China expert at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations.

That rising influence is spooking many in Europe. With Chinese investment skyrocketing, European leaders are growing increasingly leery that Chinese President Xi Jinping is turning China’s economic heft into political pull. Since Cosco dropped $1 billion into buying and upgrading the once-sleepy Greek port of Piraeus, for example, Beijing has been able to count on Greek assistance to scupper European Union condemnations of China’s behavior on issues including human rights and the South China Sea.

Now that Chinese state-owned firms are marching across the Mediterranean — matched with parallel investment drives in Central and Eastern Europe — those worries aren’t going away.

“The scale of the Belt and Road investments in key infrastructure means China’s political influence in these countries will increase,” said Turloch Mooney, who covers global ports for IHS Markit. “That is assured.”

Chinese shipping and ports companies used to be relative minnows in a world dominated by giants such as A.P. Moller-Maersk and Hutchison Ports. But in 2016, Beijing created a mammoth national champion by merging China Ocean Shipping and China Shipping Company to form Cosco, a sprawling group that includes the eponymous shipping line, the port operator, and other shipping businesses.

It didn’t stop there: Last year, it spent more than $6 billion to acquire a smaller rival, Orient Overseas International, further driving consolidation in the shipping business. Now, Cosco wields control over one of the world’s largest shipping companies (and the biggest outside Europe) and one of the world’s busiest port operators.

And when it comes to ports, Cosco isn’t even the biggest state-owned Chinese firm: China Merchants Port Holdings moves even more cargo and has also been busy overseas, snapping up terminals in Sri Lanka, Djibouti, and Brazil, in addition to earlier acquisitions in Europe.

Cosco and China Merchants have a crucial advantage over their mostly European rivals: easy access to bucket loads of cheap money that they can use to aggressively bid on attractive properties around the world. Both firms can get low-interest loans from state banks, and Cosco can even tap into a multibillion-dollar kitty of Belt and Road financing made available by the China Development Bank.

“From a trade and commercial perspective, the availability of cheap money and good diplomatic backing is giving the Chinese terminal operators increased ability to beat rival investors and acquire choice port assets,” Mooney said.

That financial freedom comes in particularly handy when, say, a port is more strategically valuable to Beijing than it may be commercially appealing. Cargo volumes at the China Merchants terminal in Djibouti, for example, fell in the first half of last year even as business elsewhere was booming. But Djibouti remains vital for Beijing because it is China’s only overseas military base and is perched right on the vital Indian Ocean sea lanes.

“In the case of projects where there may be a major strategic value for the government,” Mooney said, Chinese firms can “acquire and continue to invest in assets even when there is little or no obvious commercial value.”

That’s not to say that the acquisition spree is only about geopolitics.

That’s not to say that the acquisition spree is only about geopolitics.

After shipping companies were hammered during the trade downturn in 2016 — Cosco lost $1.4 billion that year — ports simply offer better returns, notes Drewry’s Davidson. “Ports and terminals are profitable, whereas the shipping business is a little like airlines — it’s a low margin business.”

And companies like Cosco hope to turn their investments into money-spinners by transforming once-quiet ports into huge cargo hubs. Cosco turned Piraeus from a backwater to a busy key transshipment terminal right where Europe, the Middle East, and Asia converge. It hopes to do something similar in the western Mediterranean with the Spanish port of Valencia and in northwest Europe with Zeebrugge.

But the pace of Chinese expansion into critical sectors of the European economy, including ports but also the energy business and high-tech sectors, has European leaders increasingly on edge.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker last fall warned specifically about foreign purchases of assets like ports, though without singling out China by name. The commission is working on new ways to screen foreign investment in sensitive areas.

French President Emmanuel Macron went further in his state visit last month to China, pointedly referring to Beijing’s acquisition of key European infrastructure and calling for a united European front. “China won’t respect a continent, a power, when some member states let their doors freely open,” he said, according to Reuters.

While Chinese purchases of local crown jewels can spark a backlash — as the acquisition of German robot-maker Kuka did in 2016 — that is more out of concern Beijing will gobble up the cutting-edge technology that European economies need to keep their edge.

The port deals, and other infrastructure projects associated with the Belt and Road in Central and Eastern Europe, threaten to politically hive off vulnerable members of an already tottering European Union, said van der Putten of the Netherlands Institute.

“There is more debate now about the possible political implications of Chinese investment,” he said. “The big difference now is that there is the assumption that Chinese investment in Mediterranean and Central European countries will influence their position toward China.”

Who’s Lying, Spying and Hiding

Everyone in government takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. How many take it meaningfully and seriously?

by Andrew P. Napolitano- Feb 2, 2018

( February 2, 2018, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) I have argued for a few weeks now that House Intelligence Committee members have committed misconduct in office by concealing evidence of spying abuses by the National Security Agency and the FBI. They did this by sitting on a four-page memo that summarizes the abuse of raw intelligence data while Congress was debating a massive expansion of FISA.

FISA is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which was written to enable the federal government to spy on foreign agents here and abroad. Using absurd and paranoid logic, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which only hears the government’s lawyers, has morphed “foreign intelligence surveillance” into undifferentiated bulk surveillance of all Americans.

Undifferentiated bulk surveillance is the governmental acquisition of fiber-optic data stored and transmitted by nearly everyone in America. This includes all telephone conversations, text messages and emails, as well as all medical, legal and financial records.

Ignorant of the hot potato on which the House Intelligence Committee had been sitting, Congress recently passed and President Donald Trump signed a vast expansion of spying authorities — an expansion that authorizes legislatively the domestic spying that judges were authorizing on everyone in the U.S. without individual suspicion of wrongdoing or probable cause of crime; an expansion that passed in the Senate with no votes to spare; an expansion that evades and avoids the Fourth Amendment; an expansion that the president signed into law the day before we all learned of the House Intelligence Committee memo.

The FISA expansion would never have passed the Senate had the House Intelligence Committee memo and the data on which it is based come to light seven days sooner than it did. Why should 22 members of a House committee keep their 500-plus congressional colleagues in the dark about domestic spying abuses while those colleagues were debating the very subject matter of domestic spying and voting to expand the power of those who have abused it?

The answer to this lies in the nature of the intelligence community today and the influence it has on elected officials in the government. By the judicious, personalized and secret revelation of data, both good and bad — here is what we know about your enemies, and here is what we know about you — the NSA shows its might to the legislators who supposedly regulate it. In reality, the NSA regulates them.

This is but one facet of the deep state — the unseen parts of the government that are not authorized by the Constitution and that never change, no matter which party controls the legislative or executive branch. This time, they almost blew it. If just one conscientious senator had changed her or his vote on the FISA expansion — had that senator known of the NSA and FBI abuses of FISA concealed by the House Intelligence Committee — the expansion would have failed.

Nevertheless, the evidence on which the committee members sat is essentially a Republican-written summary of raw intelligence data. Earlier this week, the Democrats on the committee authored their version — based, they say, on the same raw intelligence data as was used in writing the Republican version. But the House Intelligence Committee, made up of 13 Republicans and nine Democrats, voted to release only the Republican-written memo.

Late last week, when it became apparent that the Republican memo would soon be released, the Department of Justice publicly contradicted President Trump by advising the leadership of the House Intelligence Committee in very strong terms that the memo should not be released to the public.

It soon became apparent that, notwithstanding the DOJ admonition, no one in the DOJ had actually seen the memo. So FBI Director Chris Wray made a secret, hurried trip to the House Intelligence Committee’s vault last Sunday afternoon to view the memo. When asked by the folks who showed it to him whether it contains secret or top-secret material, he couldn’t or wouldn’t say. But he apparently saw in the memo the name of the No. 2 person at the FBI, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, as one of the abusers of spying authority. That triggered McCabe’s summary departure from the FBI the next day, after a career of 30 years.

The abuse summarized in the Republican memo apparently spans the last year of the Obama administration and the first year of the Trump administration. If it comes through as advertised, it will show the deep state using the government’s powers for petty or political or ideological reasons.

The use of raw intelligence data by the NSA or the FBI for political purposes or to manipulate those in government is as serious a threat to popular government — to personal liberty in a free society — as has ever occurred in America since Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which punished speech critical of the government.

What’s going on here?

The government works for us; we should not tolerate its treating us as children. When raw intelligence data is capable of differing interpretations and is relevant to a public dispute — about, for example, whether the NSA and the FBI are trustworthy, whether FISA should even exist, whether spying on everyone all the time keeps us safe and whether the Constitution even permits this — the raw data should be released to the American public.

Where is the personal courage on the House Intelligence Committee? Where is the patriotism? Where is the fidelity to the Constitution? The government exists by our consent. It derives its powers from us. We have a right to know what it has done in our names, who broke our trust, who knew about it, who looked the other way and why and by whom all this was intentionally hidden until after Congress voted to expand FISA.

Everyone in government takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. How many take it meaningfully and seriously?

The Best Practical Examples Of How Blockchain Is Changing Our World

Bernard Marr-January 23, 2018

The potential of blockchain technology to disrupt nearly every industry in some way cannot be dismissed even though there are still several hurdles to overcome before we see its full transformative impact.

Leaders of major financial institutions where security is paramount and change is often resisted see enough upside in blockchain technology that they have been willing to invest millions in resources to learn how to best implement it. And, they are not alone. Any business with valuable digital assets from contacts to contracts they need to protect can find a legitimate use case for blockchain technology.

What makes blockchain powerful?

Blockchains, whether public or private, are a real-time ledger of records stored in a distributed, peer-to-peer fashion independent from any central authority. Since every record is encrypted and time-stamped and users can only access and edit the block they “own” through a private key, it’s very secure. Every block is linked to the one before and the one after it, and whenever a change is made, the entire chain gets updated. Blockchain helps secure and streamline transactions efficiently without requiring intermediaries to manage the process. Blockchain technology is revolutionary in terms of record keeping and can track and document every change in a record or transaction.

What are the practical uses of blockchain?

If you haven’t already realized it, blockchain technology is going to change many systems that you encounter in your day-to-day life. Here are a few of the practical examples:

Contract management and smart contracts

Any industry heavily reliant on contracts, such as insurance, financial institutions, real estate, construction, entertainment and law, would benefit from blockchain’s indisputable way to update, manage, track and secure contracts. Smart contracts, those that are embedded with if/then statements and be executed without the involvement of an intermediary, also use blockchain technology.

Payment processing and currency

Even if you’re not using Bitcoin, the most famous and widely adopted digital currency that runs by blockchain technology, its influence is only expected to expand. Blockchain has the potential to be highly transformative to any company that processes payments. It can eliminate the need for intermediaries that are common in payment processing today.

Supply chain management

Whenever value changes hands or the status of asset changes, blockchain is ideally suited for managing the process. That’s why some experts believe blockchain can become a "supply chain operating system." It’s already being used by Walmart and its Food Safety Collaboration Centre in Beijing to track farm origination details, batch numbers, factory and processing data, expiration dates, storage temperature and shipping details for pork. Blockchain allows for immediate status updates and increases the security and visibility of the supply chain. It provides any industry that needs to track a processor supplies—ultimately that’s most industries—an immediate and indisputable tracking system.

Asset protection

Whether you’re a musician who wants to ensure you get royalties when your music gets played or a property owner, blockchain technology can help you protect your assets by creating an indisputable record of real-time ownership. That’s precisely the service Everledger, a global startup, aims to do by using blockchain and smart contracts. Specifically created to improve anti-counterfeit measures for pharmaceuticals, luxury items, diamonds and electronics, BlockVerify allows companies to register their own products and introduces transparency to supply chains.

Identification, personal record systems and passwords

Governments manage vast amounts of personal data from birth and death records to marriage certificates, passports and census data. Blockchain technology offers a streamlined solution for managing all of it securely. Personal identification is what Onename, a blockchain startup wants to manage. In addition to offering services to register and manage a blockchain ID, the company offers a product called Passcard that they intend as a digital key to replace all passwords and IDs required for individuals, including driver’s licenses. ShoCard is another identity management system in use today that helps individuals and enterprises quickly validate identity.

There are many other practical uses cases for blockchain technology for our everyday life and business operations. As the investments in blockchain solutions start to yield results in the way of innovative blockchain-enabled products and services, we will continue to see the practical applications of the technology exponentially expand. I believe the transformation will be dramatic.

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