Labour apparatchiks smear Black activist in “anti-Semitism” witch hunt

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn talking to anti-racist activist Marc Wadsworth, following a speech to launch the Chakrabarti inquiry’s findings in 2016.-

Jonathan BradyPA Images

Asa Winstanley Lobby Watch 16 February 2018

A campaigner against racism is resisting attempts to have him expelled from the UK’s Labour Party over fabricated claims of anti-Semitism.

Marc Wadsworth faces a disciplinary hearing of party bureaucrats on 25 April, he told The Electronic Intifada, and has had to hire a lawyer.

He has launched a crowdfunding campaign to help with legal costs.

The hearing is a high-profile part of what Labour activists say is a “witch hunt” of left-wingers and critics of Israel.

The Jewish anti-Zionist and anti-racist campaigner Tony Greenstein also has a hearing on Sunday about his suspension from Labour.

The attempted expulsions of Wadsworth and Greenstein are thought by campaigners to be the prelude to a new attempt to expel former mayor of London Ken Livingstone from Labour.

In April 2016, Livingstone was suspended from Labour for a year, after having made accurate historical comments about connections between the Zionist movement and the Nazi government of 1930s Germany.

Livingstone’s suspension was then extended for a further 12 months in April 2017.

Wadsworth is a veteran anti-racist campaigner and a journalist for publications including The Voice, a newspaper for the African-Caribbean community in the UK.

Black community support

His case is being supported by prominent Black figures in the UK, including Simon Woolley, the director of Operation Black Vote, King’s College London professor Paul Gilroy and editor-at-large of The Guardian Gary Younge.

Over the last two years, Labour’s internal pro-Israel lobby has led calls for Wadsworth to be expelled, after he publicly criticized a lawmaker at a 2016 launch of a report into anti-Semitism.

Ruth Smeeth, a right-wing Labour politician, staged a walkout during the event, which had been supposed to focus on a report by civil rights lawyer Shami Chakrabarti into allegations of anti-Semitism in Labour.

Smeeth is a former Israel lobby spin doctor who, after entering the UK’s parliament in 2015, continued to be funded by two leading figures from her former employer, BICOM – the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre.

The latest official register of financial interests for members of Parliament shows that Smeeth continues to be funded by the Israel lobby.

Last year, she registered a donation of more than $7,000 from Trevor Chinn, a member of BICOM’s executive committee.

Labour headquarters’ ongoing purge of left-wingers has habitually utilized false allegations of anti-Semitism.

Labour Against the Witch-hunt

Labour Against the Witch-hunt, a group recently set up to combat the purge, is supporting Wadsworth’s case, calling him a “victim of the ongoing civil war in the Labour Party” and the charges against him “ridiculous.”

The filmmaker Ken Loach, a veteran socialist, has called the purge “nonsense” and “part of the right-wing attempt to destabilize the Labour leadership of Jeremy Corbyn and [shadow finance minister] John McDonnell.”

Labour’s internal Israel lobby has dogged Palestine solidarity veteran Jeremy Corbyn with often exaggerated, and sometimes entirely fabricated allegations that “left-wing anti-Semitism” has taken over the party under his leadership.

But Chakrabarti’s report found that the party was “not overrun by anti-Semitism, Islamophobia or other forms of racism.”

At the launch, Wadsworth told the room that the Black voters who overwhelmingly support Labour were not well represented either in that room, or among party staff, and called for the party to “get our house in order.”

He also criticized Smeeth for “working hand in hand” with a journalist from the Conservative Party-supporting newspaper The Telegraph, by giving one of its journalists a press release he had been handing out.

Smeeth’s “media conspiracy”

Although Wadsworth made no comments – either direct or implied – about Smeeth’s Jewish background, Smeeth responded by shouting over Wadsworth, and dramatically walking out of the event in a display apparently targeted at the journalists she was sitting by.

In a demonstrably false press statement, Smeeth later claimed Wadsworth had used “traditional anti-Semitic slurs to attack me for being part of a ‘media conspiracy.’”

But Wadsworth had not done any such thing. He had made no comment about Jewish people, and he did not use the words “media conspiracy.”

Despite how all of this is easily verifiable in the above video, which was widely disseminated online, most of the press coverage of the event – hostile as ever to Jeremy Corbyn – either implied or outright stated that Smeeth had been attacked by an anti-Semitic heckler.

According to Wadsworth, Smeeth then called Labour headquarters demanding he be expelled. Wadsworth says he was initially expelled without even a hearing. But after he hired a lawyer, the penalty was reduced to a suspension.

Wadsworth says he has hired legal representation to fight the Labour bureaucracy’s attempt to expel him for “anti-Semitism.”

On the crowdfunding page, Wadsworth demands “an opportunity to clear my name” in the face of “a blatant breach of the due process and natural justice” called for in the Chakrabarti report.

Guilty of “attempting to defend” himself

In a Labour “charge sheet” seen by The Electronic Intifada, Wadsworth is accused by party apparatchiks of “making an allegation against Ms. Smeeth in terms which were regarded as anti-Semitic by persons present” at the Chakrabarti launch.

A second charge accuses him of subsequent “bullying” and “aggression and intimidatory behavior towards Ms. Smeeth” by having “attempted to defend” the remarks he made at the launch in a small number of articles and social media posts.

Wadsworth told The Electronic Intifada: “The charges against me are false, slanderous and damaging to my reputation as someone who has devoted his life to anti-racist campaigning.”

He said it was “deeply concerning I’ve been tarred with the brush of being ‘aggressive’ and using ‘intimidatory behavior,’ which are widely considered in the Black community to be racist stereotypes.”

“As we know from history,” he explained, “such stereotyping led to Black men being literally lynched in the past.”

Threats

Now-disgraced former chair of the pro-Israel Jewish Labour Movement Jeremy Newmark last month seemed to threaten that his group would sue the Labour Party were Wadsworth and others not expelled.

Newmark told The Observer that the group would “be closely monitoring the outcomes of a number of high-profile cases.”

He added that the cases included those of Wadsworth and Jackie Walker, a Jewish anti-Zionist activist who has also been suspended from Labour.

The paper claimed that “party sources” had told it “that a group of members, including activists and councilors, was preparing legal action against the party for failing to act on complaints about anti-Semitic incidents.”

Wadsworth told a Labour Against the Witch-hunt meeting last month that it is “deeply disturbing that life-long anti-racist campaigners like Jackie [Walker] and Tony [Greenstein], who are Jewish, and myself, a Black man, have been targeted. Yet anti-Black racism and Islamophobia, which are more prevalent than anti-Semitism, have been ignored by the Labour Party.”

All 65 passengers, crew feared dead in Iranian plane crash

FEBRUARY 18, 2018 

DUBAI (Reuters) - All 65 passengers and crew were feared dead in a plane crash in central Iran on Sunday after the domestic flight came down in bad weather in a mountainous region.

A spokesman for Iranian carrier Aseman Airlines had told state television everyone was killed, but the airline then issued a statement saying it could not reach the crash site and could not “accurately and definitely confirm” everyone died.

The airline had also initially said 60 passengers and six crew were on board the twin-engined turboprop ATR 72 that was flying to the southwestern city of Yasuj. But it later said there were a total of 65 people on board, as one passenger had missed the flight.

The Aseman-operated plane crashed near the town of Semirom after taking off from Tehran’s Mehrabad airport, emergency services spokesman Mojtaba Khaledi told ISNA news agency.

As night approached, bad weather prevented helicopters searching the probable crash site but emergency workers were scouring the mountainous area by land, the television said.

“It is getting colder and darker and still no sign of the plane,” said a television reporter accompanying rescue teams searching snow-covered areas in Mount Dena which has more than 40 peaks higher than 4,000 metres (13,000 feet).

Media reports said the plane disappeared from radar screens 50 minutes after taking off from Mehrabad airport in the southwest of the capital. It mainly handles domestic flights.

Worried relatives of passengers gathered at Yasuj airport.

A relative of a passenger who was believed to have been killed in a plane crash reacts near the town of Semirom, Iran, February 18, 2017. REUTERS/Tasnim News Agency

“I kept telephoning all morning but they (the relative) wouldn’t answer. So I called my brother and he said they will get here, it (the plane) is not behind schedule yet,” a young woman told a reporter for state television.

“I told him it is raining here. He said no (meaning, don’t worry). He called later and said the plane had crashed.”

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani issued messages of condolences. The president asked the transport minister to lead an investigation into the crash.

Iran has suffered several plane crashes in the past few decades. Tehran says U.S. sanctions have long prevented it from buying new aircraft or spare parts from the West. The crashed ATR was 25 years old, officials said.

A deal with world powers on Iran’s nuclear programme has lifted some of those sanctions, opening the way for Iranian airlines to update their creaking fleets.

Aseman signed a deal last year to buy at least 30 Boeing 737 MAX jets. National carrier IranAir has ordered 80 planes from Boeing and 100 from Airbus.

Based in the southern French city of Toulouse, ATR is a joint venture between Airbus and Italy’s Leonardo

Earlier air disasters include the crash of a Boeing 727 passenger plane in 2011 which killed 78 people in the northwest of Iran, and the 2009 crash of a Caspian Airlines Tupolev aircraft bound for Armenia which killed all 168 people on board.

One of Iran’s worst air accidents happened in February 2003 when an Iranian Ilyushin-76 troop carrier crashed in southeast Iran, killing all 276 Revolutionary Guard soldiers and crew.

Florida student Emma Gonzalez to lawmakers and gun advocates: 'We call BS'

Florida student to NRA and Trump: 'We call BS' 11:40

Updated 9:14 PM ET, Sat February 17, 2018

(CNN)Emma Gonzalez, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, addressed a gun control rally on Saturday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, days after a gunman entered her school in nearby Parkland and killed 17 people.

Below is a full transcript of her speech:

We haven't already had a moment of silence in the House of Representatives, so I would like to have another one. Thank you.

Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and President can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it's time for victims to be the change that we need to see. Since the time of the Founding Fathers and since they added the Second Amendment to the Constitution, our guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy. The guns have changed but our laws have not.

We certainly do not understand why it should be harder to make plans with friends on weekends than to buy an automatic or semi-automatic weapon. In Florida, to buy a gun you do not need a permit, you do not need a gun license, and once you buy it you do not need to register it. You do not need a permit to carry a concealed rifle or shotgun. You can buy as many guns as you want at one time.

I read something very powerful to me today. It was from the point of view of a teacher. And I quote: When adults tell me I have the right to own a gun, all I can hear is my right to own a gun outweighs your student's right to live. All I hear is mine, mine, mine, mine.

Instead of worrying about our AP Gov chapter 16 test, we have to be studying our notes to make sure that our arguments based on politics and political history are watertight. The students at this school have been having debates on guns for what feels like our entire lives. AP Gov had about three debates this year. Some discussions on the subject even occurred during the shooting while students were hiding in the closets. The people involved right now, those who were there, those posting, those tweeting, those doing interviews and talking to people, are being listened to for what feels like the very first time on this topic that has come up over 1,000 times in the past four years alone.

I found out today there's a website shootingtracker.com. Nothing in the title suggests that it is exclusively tracking the USA's shootings and yet does it need to address that? Because Australia had one mass shooting in 1999 in Port Arthur (and after the) massacre introduced gun safety, and it hasn't had one since. Japan has never had a mass shooting. Canada has had three and the UK had one and they both introduced gun control and yet here we are, with websites dedicated to reporting these tragedies so that they can be formulated into statistics for your convenience.

I watched an interview this morning and noticed that one of the questions was, do you think your children will have to go through other school shooter drills? And our response is that our neighbors will not have to go through other school shooter drills. When we've had our say with the government -- and maybe the adults have gotten used to saying 'it is what it is,' but if us students have learned anything, it's that if you don't study, you will fail. And in this case if you actively do nothing, people continually end up dead, so it's time to start doing something.

We are going to be the kids you read about in textbooks. Not because we're going to be another statistic about mass shooting in America, but because, just as David said, we are going to be the last mass shooting. Just like Tinker v. Des Moines, we are going to change the law. That's going to be Marjory Stoneman Douglas in that textbook and it's going to be due to the tireless effort of the school board, the faculty members, the family members and most of all the students. The students who are dead, the students still in the hospital, the student now suffering PTSD, the students who had panic attacks during the vigil because the helicopters would not leave us alone, hovering over the school for 24 hours a day.

There is one tweet I would like to call attention to. So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities again and again. We did, time and time again. Since he was in middle school, it was no surprise to anyone who knew him to hear that he was the shooter. Those talking about how we should have not ostracized him, you didn't know this kid. OK, we did. We know that they are claiming mental health issues, and I am not a psychologist, but we need to pay attention to the fact that this was not just a mental health issue. He would not have harmed that many students with a knife.

And how about we stop blaming the victims for something that was the student's fault, the fault of the people who let him buy the guns in the first place, those at the gun shows, the people who encouraged him to buy accessories for his guns to make them fully automatic, the people who didn't take them away from him when they knew he expressed homicidal tendencies, and I am not talking about the FBI. I'm talking about the people he lived with. I'm talking about the neighbors who saw him outside holding guns.

If the President wants to come up to me and tell me to my face that it was a terrible tragedy and how it should never have happened and maintain telling us how nothing is going to be done about it, I'm going to happily ask him how much money he received from the National Rifle Association.

You want to know something? It doesn't matter, because I already know. Thirty million dollars. And divided by the number of gunshot victims in the United States in the one and one-half months in 2018 alone, that comes out to being $5,800. Is that how much these people are worth to you, Trump? If you don't do anything to prevent this from continuing to occur, that number of gunshot victims will go up and the number that they are worth will go down. And we will be worthless to you.

To every politician who is taking donations from the NRA, shame on you.

Crowd chants, shame on you.

If your money was as threatened as us, would your first thought be, how is this going to reflect on my campaign? Which should I choose? Or would you choose us, and if you answered us, will you act like it for once? You know what would be a good way to act like it? I have an example of how to not act like it. In February of 2017, one year ago, President Trump repealed an Obama-era regulation that would have made it easier to block the sale of firearms to people with certain mental illnesses.

From the interactions that I had with the shooter before the shooting and from the information that I currently know about him, I don't really know if he was mentally ill. I wrote this before I heard what Delaney said. Delaney said he was diagnosed. I don't need a psychologist and I don't need to be a psychologist to know that repealing that regulation was a really dumb idea.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa was the sole sponsor on this bill that stops the FBI from performing background checks on people adjudicated to be mentally ill and now he's stating for the record, 'Well, it's a shame the FBI isn't doing background checks on these mentally ill people.' Well, duh. You took that opportunity away last year.

The people in the government who were voted into power are lying to us. And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and our parents to call BS.Companies trying to make caricatures of the teenagers these days, saying that all we are self-involved and trend-obsessed and they hush us into submission when our message doesn't reach the ears of the nation, we are prepared to call BS. 

Politicians who sit in their gilded House and Senate seats funded by the NRA telling us nothing could have been done to prevent this, we call BS. They say tougher guns laws do not decrease gun violence. 

We call BS. They say a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun. We call BS. They say guns are just tools like knives and are as dangerous as cars. We call BS. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred. We call BS. That us kids don't know what we're talking about, that we're too young to understand how the government works. We call BS.

If you agree, register to vote. Contact your local congresspeople. Give them a piece of your mind.

(Crowd chants) Throw them out.

Top U.S. officials tell the world to ignore Trump’s tweets

 U.S. national security adviser H.R. McMaster said evidence of Russian tampering in the 2016 presidential campaign is 'incontrovertible' on Feb. 17. (Reuters)

By Michael Birnbaum and Griff Witte February 18 at 7:45 AM

MUNICH — Amid global anxiety about President Trump’s approach to world affairs, U.S. officials had a message to a gathering of Europe’s foreign policy elite this weekend: Pay no attention to the man tweeting behind the curtain.

U.S. lawmakers — both Democrats and Republicans — and top national security officials in the Trump administration offered the same advice publicly and privately, often clashing with Trump’s Twitter stream: The United States remains staunchly committed to its European allies, is furious with the Kremlin about election interference and isn’t contemplating a preemptive strike on North Korea to halt its nuclear program.

But Trump himself engaged in a running counterpoint to the message, taking aim on social media at his own national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, because he “forgot” on Saturday to tell the Munich Security Conference that the results of the 2016 election weren’t affected by Russian interference, a conclusion that is not supported by U.S. intelligence agencies. They say they will probably never be able to determine whether the Russian involvement swung the election toward Trump.

The determination to ignore Trump’s foreign policy tweets has been bipartisan.

“There is a lot more support for continuing our past policies than it might appear from some of the statements,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) told an audience on Sunday that was made up mostly of Europe’s foreign policy elite. “The unanimity comes from those folks who are actually operationalizing policy.”

“The values are the same, the relationships are the same,” said Rep. Michael R. Turner (R-Ohio). “What you do see is this administration willing to put pressure upon the systems.”
The question of whom they should believe — the president or his advisers — has befuddled European officials. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel confessed Saturday that he didn’t know where to look to understand America.

“Is it deeds? Is it words? Is it tweets?” he asked.

He said he was not sure whether he could recognize the United States.

Away from the glare of television cameras, many European diplomats and policymakers echoed the same concerns. One diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid provoking Trump, asked whether policymakers like McMaster who adhere largely to traditional U.S. foreign policy positions were falling into the same trap as Germany’s elite during Hitler’s rise, when they continued to serve in government in the name of protecting their nation.

The answer, the diplomat said, might be found after a “nuclear war,” which he feared could be provoked by the Trump administration’s hawkish approach to North Korea.

Testing those lines, McMaster offered a starkly different view of the world from that of his boss, saying that the “evidence is now incontrovertible” that Russia intervened in the U.S. political system. Trump has downplayed Russian involvement, saying that he believes the reassurances of Russian President Vladimir Putin that the Kremlin was not involved in the election.

McMaster even walked back some of his own previous tough language. Asked about a Wall Street Journal op-ed he co-authored with White House economic adviser Gary Cohn last year that said they embraced a world that was “an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage,” McMaster said it was actually a call for greater cooperation among Western powers.

U.S. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats took a similarly reassuring stance hours later.
The assertions that nothing fundamental has changed about Washington’s commitments to the world do seem to have eased some concerns among some allies, particularly regarding the U.S. commitment to defend NATO allies against the threat of Russian aggression.

In the Baltic nations, which border Russia, Trump’s election had raised concerns about U.S. commitments to NATO. But that doubt is now “gone,” Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid said in an interview, embracing the Pentagon’s stepped-up military commitments to Eastern Europe.

Even hawkish Republicans shrugged on the matter of Trump’s top priorities. While speaking on a panel Friday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) was cued up by a questioner to attack the “failure” of Europe to spend 2 percent of its economic output on defense — a frequent Trump talking point. Graham demurred.

“I want you to get to 2 percent so Trump will be quiet,” he said before swiftly moving on.

Chinese Government Gave Money to Georgetown Chinese Student Group

Growing party influence on campuses nationwide has cast a pall over academic freedom.

A statue of John Carroll, founder of Georgetown University, sits before Healy Hall on the school's campus August 15, 2006 in Washington, DC. Georgetown University was founded in 1789 and it is the oldest Catholic and Jesuit university in the U.S. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images) 

BY BETHANY ALLEN-EBRAHIMIAN

 | FEBRUARY 14, 2018, 4:40 PM

Founded in the early 2000s, the Georgetown University Chinese Students and Scholars Association hosts an annual Chinese New Year gala, organizes occasional academic forums, and helps Chinese students on campus meet and support each other. The group has also accepted funding from the Chinese government amounting to roughly half its total annual budget, according to documents and emails obtained by Foreign Policy.

The total sum may not be large, but the documents confirm a link between the Chinese government and Chinese student organizations on American campuses that is often suspected but difficult to verify.

A budget request submitted by the Georgetown University CSSA to the school’s graduate student government in September 2011 disclosed that the group received $800 each semester that school year from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. The group requested an additional $750 each semester from the university on top of the money it received from the embassy.
The disclosure of Chinese government funding came after a question on the budget request form asking if the club received any outside sources of funding. The group said that the government funding was used to host events, such as the annual Chinese New Year party.

The funding has not been previously made public; copies of the documents were provided to FP by a source concerned about Chinese Communist Party influence on university campuses.

The FBI shares that concern. Yesterday, at an annual open hearing at the Senate intelligence committee, in response to a question about the national security risk posted by Chinese international students, FBI Director Chris Wray said, “The use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting — whether it’s professors, scientists, students — we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country.”

Chinese Students and Scholars Associations first appeared in the United States in the 1980s, as international students from China began attending American universities. Now Chinese students, numbering close to 330,000, comprise the largest group of international students in the United States. There are now around 150 CSSA branches in the United States, and many more around the world; the organizations share a name but no central organization or headquarters. Other Chinese student organizations do exist — the Chinese Student Association at the University of California, Berkeley, for example, was founded in 1951 and is independent — but most have been overshadowed by the proliferation of CSSAs.

The primary function of CSSAs is to help Chinese students adjust to life in a foreign country, to bring Chinese students together on campus, and to showcase Chinese culture. The groups typically host events such as annual galas, holiday celebrations, and academic forums.

But they also serve as a way for the Chinese government to maintain a close eye on Chinese students abroad, according to those familiar with their activities.

“It’s a deliberate strategy to make sure that the Chinese students and scholars living abroad don’t become a problem,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which published Brady’s report last year detailing Chinese Communist Party influence in New Zealand, including the CSSAs at major universities there.

A former Chinese Ministry of State Security official, Li Fengzhi, who later defected to the United States, said that the Chinese government views CSSAs as a means to conduct “information collection” and propaganda.

The Georgetown CSSA did not respond to multiple emailed requests for comment.
“CSSAs are non-profit associations, whose members are students volunteered to provide help to their fellow Chinese students and scholars at the host university,” a Chinese Embassy spokesperson wrote in an email, when asked if the Chinese Embassy continues to provide the CSSAs at Georgetown or other area colleges with funds. “In order to organize such activities, they need to raise funds from the public, such as their host universities, companies, organizations and the Chinese embassy.”
The spokesperson did not provide an answer when asked if the Chinese Embassy ever gives CSSAs political directives.

Georgetown University did not respond to a request for comment.

No other Georgetown University graduate student group included in the 2011-2012 funding request report received money from a foreign government, according to the documents reviewed by FP.
Under President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has vastly expanded its campaign to surveil and control overseas Chinese, including international students. In 2016, the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a directive to Chinese students abroad, urging them to follow the party. The directive also provided instructions to “build a multidimensional contact network linking home and abroad — the motherland, embassies and consulates, overseas student groups, and the broad number of students abroad — so that they fully feel that the motherland cares.”

Amid this campaign, it has become increasingly risky for Chinese students abroad to criticize Chinese government policies, even within the privacy of the classroom. One Australian professor told Inside Higher Ed in January that on two separate occasions, Chinese students have told him that comments they made during his class were reported to authorities back in China — indicating that another student in the class had relayed that information.

Wang Dan, a professor of contemporary Chinese history and a participant in the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, has noted that Chinese students rarely speak up in discussion salons he holds in the United States — but that party sympathizers will show up to take photos and recordings of who attends and what is said at such events. In a 2017 New York Times op-ed, Wang called it a “campaign of fear and intimidation.”

Chinese students themselves have also challenged academic freedom at American universities with growing frequency. Chinese student organizations are often directly involved in these efforts, mobilizing their members to express anger at speech that goes the against Chinese Communist Party line.

For example, in February 2017, the University of California, San Diego, announced that the commencement speaker that June would be the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader whom the Chinese Communist Party considers a dangerous separatist. The UC San Diego CSSA soon posted a response on Facebook expressing strong opposition to the invitation — and saying that they had consulted with the Chinese Consulate on the matter. The CSSA asked to meet with university administration and demanded that the Dalai Lama’s speech exclude any political content.

The UC San Diego administration allowed the Tibetan leader’s speech to proceed uninhibited.
In May 2017, Yang Shuping, an undergraduate at the University of Maryland, praisedAmerican democracy in a commencement address, saying that she enjoyed America’s “fresh air of free speech” compared to the repressive environment back in China. Her remarks went viral on the Chinese internet, and she faced a massive online backlash, including the posting of her family’s home address in China.

The University of Maryland CSSA created a video directly criticizing Yang’s remarks and calling them “rumor.” Zhu Lihan, a former president of the association, told a Chinese newspaper, “Insulting the motherland to grab attention is intolerable. The university’s support for such slandering speech is not only ill-considered, but also raises suspicion about other motives.”
Yang later apologized for her remarks.

When it comes to democracy, the DR Congo is Thailand’s role model

Pro-democracy activists hold up placards during protest against junta near Democracy Monument in Bangkok, Thailand February 10, 2018. The placard reads, "Stop Junta". Source: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun

By Alistair Denness | 14th February 2018

WHILST the public may be clamouring for an election date to be set, Thailand’s ruling junta seems unimpressed. Invoking the need to pass a new slate of election laws, junta leader Prayuth Chan-o-cha is employing a strategy that few would have ever expected to see in what was once a shining beacon of democracy in the region: glissement.

A staple of sub-Saharan politics, perfected by autocratic leaders like Joseph Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo, glissement neatly captures the erosion of democratic norms in Thailand and its growing resemblance to an African banana republic. Taken from the French ‘sliding’, glissement means to keep coasting along indefinitely. To kick it into the long grass. To ensure that, even if you can’t beat’em, they won’t have the chance to beat you because the contest isn’t going to take place.

Shortly after the 2014 military coup in Thailand, the Thai public was assured the country would return to democracy the following year. However, after almost four years and countless election postponements, Prayuth is now among the longest serving leaders in Thailand’s history. Critical reactions from the international community, human rights groups and Thailand’s embattled opposition have all been met with a new excuse not to hold elections each year.

SEE ALSO: Thai Deputy PM Prawit’s luxury watch scandal deepens

The latest announcement came last month, when the National Legislative Assembly (NLA) decided to change Section 2 of the MP election bill. The move requires the election be further postponed, making it unlikely there will be a vote before February 2019.

Demonstrators chant slogans during a protest against President Joseph Kabila, organised by the Catholic church in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo January 21, 2018. Source: Reuters/Kenny Katombe

Thai democracy, DRC-style

The comparison to the DRC’s glissement is anything but glib. Delays in hosting elections in Thailand have rightfully raised suspicions behind the motive of the current military government, especially after Prayuth asserted he was no longer a soldier but was now a politician. The ongoing delay give the junta time to form a political party, not to mention the opportunity to woo MPs from other parties.

In the DRC, President Joseph Kabila has engineered a similar series of events. His presidential mandate technically ended in December 2016, but elections have yet to be held due to alleged problems with voter registration. One opposition leader commented that the electoral commission’s announced timeline “is not an electoral calendar but an election-killing agenda”.  Before the end of Kabila’s second and final term, officials suggested elections would be held in November 2016. Instead, hopes for a smooth democratic transition were quashed that September when the national electoral authority (CENI) announced the election would not be held until the end of 2017. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen.

Kabila claims that CENI is an independent body. However, the picture that comes to light is a president desperately trying to cling to power by postponing elections until he can find a way to remove term limits that prevent him from standing for re-election. The CENI’s most recent update has been to say an election will not take place before December 2018. Their reasons have included an unknown number of voters, a lack of money, the need to organise polls once voter registration is completed, and difficulties in enrolling voters and mobilising finances. Sound familiar?

SEE ALSO: Asia does not have a single ‘fully democratic’ state

Democratic Republic of Congo’s President Joseph Kabila addresses a news conferen

e at the State House in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo January 26, 2018. Source: Reuters/Kenny Katombe

The Shinawatra-Katumbi connection

Kabila and Prayuth share a favourite political manoeuvre: going after popular political opponents using politically-motivated legal means. Thailand’s Shinawatra clan has been long attacked by the justice system, and are living in self-imposed exile abroad on what are widely seen as political charges. Former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra was spotted in London, after failing to attend a show trial where she was charged with failing to stop ‘false and corrupt government-to-government sales of rice from the rice programme’. Her brother, former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has taken shelter in Dubai.

Similarly, the DRC’s main opposition figure has also been forced to seek refuge on foreign soil. Moise Katumbi, the man tipped as most likely to replace Kabila, has sought asylum in Belgium after first being accused of hiring foreign mercenaries and then being convicted in absentia of selling a house that isn’t his. From Brussels, Katumbi has been calling on the Congolese people to resist Kabila’s state capture and has applied for UN protection to return to his country.

Ousted former Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra arrives at the criminal court in Bangkok, Thailand, September 29, 2015. Source: Reuters/Chaiwat Subprasom/File Picture

Reining in the religious establishment

Another striking similarity is that in both countries, the religious establishment forms a key part of the story. The Catholic Church of Congo has repeatedly criticised Kabila’s machinations, gaining the support of opposition figures like Katumbi. It has urged Kabila to relinquish power and even organised protests when he failed to stick to the agreement to step down. Of course, there has been an inevitable backlash against the Church, with seminaries and churches razed, priests beaten and ‘terror’ sown among Carmelite sisters.

In Thailand, the story is slightly different but also troubling. Buddhism is one of the main pillars of power in Thai society, and the junta has tried a number of ways to make sure it obtains its support. In 2016, the junta rejected the candidate supported by the Council to take up the role of Supreme Patriarch of Buddhism, instead granting the King the power to pick the monk himself. The following year, the junta sought to ‘regulate Buddhism’ by passing a law that would have given more political oversight over the Sangha Supreme Council, Buddhism’s governing body in Thailand.

A Buddhist monk buys flowers at a market in Bangkok, Thailand, February 13, 2018. Source: Reuters/Athit Perawongmetha

SEE ALSO: Militant Buddhism is on the march in Southeast Asia – where did it come from?

The 2017 constitution states that the state need only direct its assistance to the Theravada school of Buddhism. The stipulation that the government guard Buddhism against all forms of desecration speaks to an increasing intolerance of pluralism, an about-turn on previous constitutions which actively promoted religious harmony. The result is a religious order sufficiently integrated with the regime to no longer pose too much of a problem.

This is a worry for several reasons.  For example, Thailand’s Muslim ‘deep south’ – Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and Songkhla – has a long history of insurrection. The junta’s predilection for pushing religious hegemony, as well as its heavy-handed approach to democratic freedoms could stoke tensions again, much like the DRC’s fractured Kasai region. Thailand may not be at risk of rivalling the Rohingya crisis, but the state’s religious militancy will do nothing to calm tensions.

For better or worse, the decisions Thailand’s unelected leaders make now will continue to define the country’s politics for years to come. Glissement, after all, is a tactic that can be applied far beyond Africa.

Thousands march in Kiev calling for Ukraine's president to quit

A protester holds a portrait of Mikheil Saakashvil during the rally in central Kiev. Photograph: Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA

Agence France-Presse Sun 18 Feb 2018 16.11 GM

Supporters of deported former Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili demand impeachment of Petro Poroshenko

Thousands of supporters of the deported former Georgian leader Mikheil Saakashvili have marched through the streets of Kiev, demanding the impeachment of the Ukrainian president.

Journalists said an estimated 10,000 people took part in the rally on Sunday, though the ministry of internal affairs put the number at about 3,000.

Protesters carried banners portraying President Petro Poroshenko with a red line drawn over his face. The demonstrators chanted “impeachment”, “resignation” and “Poroshenko is a thief”.

Saakashvili, 50, who had been living in exile in Ukraine, was detained by masked men at a restaurant in central Kiev and deported to Poland on Monday.

The state border guard service said he had been residing in Ukraine “illegally” and was sent to the country from where he initially came.

On Tuesday, Saakashvili gave a press conference in Warsaw and said he had been blindfolded and rushed first by van, then by helicopter, to Kiev international airport.

On Wednesday, the opposition leader, who is married to a Dutch woman, arrived in the Netherlands.
Kiev resident Galina Zagoruiko, one of the protesters on Sunday, said: “People can’t stand it any more – that nothing changes and everything just gets worse.” Like many others, she had come to support a political party founded by Saakashvili.

Saakashvili, a former governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region, was once an ally of Poroshenko but then became one of his greatest critics. Kiev accuses Saakashvili of trying to stage a coup sponsored by allies of former Kremlin-backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych – a charge he strongly denies.


Ukraine stripped Saakashvili of his passport, but he continued to challenge the government, organising frequent protests demanding Poroshenko steps down.

With the help of supporters, he crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border in September last year, and was briefly detained in December in Kiev.

Saakashvili is wanted by the Georgian government on multiple criminal charges, which he says are politically motivated.

You Will Probably Be Surprised After Calculating the Impact of Your Meat Consumption on the Environment and Yourself

One person's meat-eating can make a bigger difference than you think.

Photo Credit: Africa Studio/Shutterstock

By Robin Scher / AlterNet-February 14, 2018, 8:45 PM GMT

One of my resolutions this year is to eat less meat. As a lifelong carnivore, this task has already proven to be easier said than done. The major challenge comes down to changing my habits. After years of enjoying bacon with my eggs for breakfast, I now associate its comforting greasy taste with the feeling of fullness. So how do I—and others like me—overcome this obstacle? One big challenge is finding a way to stay motivated.

Enter the Meat Blitz-Calculator.

Major reasons for cutting down on meat have to do with the health, environmental and animal welfare impact of this dietary choice. It may be easy to understand the negative consequences meat-eating has for your heart, the climate or animals on factory farms, but it's another matter when it comes to relating these impacts directly to your own consumption habits. This is where the calculator comes in.

The first question the calculator asks is whether you eat meat. If you answer yes, the calculator displays three predetermined average values for the amount of poultry, pork and beef in ounces you consume in a week. These figures—based on information taken from a USDA database—represent the national average for Americans and can be adjusted accordingly. The calculator then asks you to fill in what percentage of meat you would be willing to replace with vegetarian food in your diet.

This is where things get interesting. Based on further USDA statistics, the calculator displays the direct impact your dietary decision could have over the course of a decade. This information comes in two parts. The first set of figures shows how much water, CO2 and antibiotics would be spared by committing to your change in diet. The calculator also displays an infographic that represents the number of pigs, cows and chickens you would save from the slaughtering block.

What difference can this make to your habits, you may wonder? It comes down to shifting perspectives. Using the averages of the calculator, I committed to a 60 percent reduction over the next decade. By crunching the numbers, the calculator revealed the full impact my dietary decision could have on both my own wellbeing as well as the environment and animals (the latter two often require an imaginative leap that our stomachs—and cognitive dissonance—help us overlook).

Now the next time I'm tempted to eat a burger or a steak, I will be able to picture the cumulative impact of my decision. It's easy enough to dismiss the choices we make on a daily basis, but it becomes a lot harder when you start to consider the difference your decisions alone can make over a long period of time.

In order to do something I don’t want to do, I need a good incentive. Ignorance might be bliss, but knowledge is power. Now that I understand the full impact of what I decide to eat for every meal, it has become a lot easier to avoid temptation. This change in behavior may not seem significant at first, but as the calculator helped me to realize, every little bit counts.

Cleaning products linked to poorer lung function

16 February 2018

Regular exposure to cleaning products significantly affects lung function, research has suggested.

The study of 6,000 people by a team from Norway's University of Bergen, found women appeared to be more badly affected than men.

They said cleaning chemicals were "unnecessary" and microfiber cloths and water were "enough for most purposes".

UK experts said people should keep their homes well ventilated and use liquid cleaners instead of sprays.

The team looked at data from the European Community Respiratory Health Survey.

Previous studies have looked at the short-term effect of cleaning chemicals on asthma, but this work looked at the longer term.

Prof Cecile Svanes, who led the Bergen team, said: "We feared that such chemicals, by steadily causing a little damage to the airways day after day, year after year, might accelerate the rate of lung function decline that occurs with age."

Microfiber cloths and water 'enough'

Adults in the study, published in the American Thoracic Society's American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, were followed for more than 20 years.

Their lung function was measured by looking at how much air people could forcibly breath out - and the amount declined more over the years in women who cleaned.

The authors suggest the chemicals in cleaning products irritate the mucous membranes that line the airways of the lungs, causing long-term damage.

No difference was seen between men who cleaned and those who did not.

The researchers said that could partly be explained by there being far fewer men working as cleaners, but also suggested women might be more susceptible to the chemicals' effects.

Oistein Svanes, who also worked on the study, said: "The take-home message is that in the long run cleaning chemicals very likely cause rather substantial damage to your lungs.

"These chemicals are usually unnecessary; microfiber cloths and water are more than enough for most purposes."

Sarah MacFadyen, from the British Lung Foundation said: "Breathing in any kind of air pollution can have an impact on our health, especially for those living with a lung condition.

"This study further confirms that air pollution can come from a range of sources, including from paints, adhesives and cleaning products we use indoors.

"Ensuring we keep our homes well ventilated, using liquid cleaners instead of sprays and checking that our cookers and heaters are in good working order will help protect us and prevent everyday products impacting on our lungs."