Clare Fallon-16 Jun 2018North of England Correspondent
Glasgow’s world-renowned School of Art has been extensively damaged by another fire – in the midst of a multi-million pound restoration after the last blaze four years ago.
120 firefighters were called to tackle the flames – which First Minister Nicola Sturgeon described as ‘heartbreaking’. Our correspondent Clare Fallon is there.
Roger Stone, a close Trump ally, met with a Russian man in May 2016 claiming to have “dirt” that could help Trump be elected.(Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)
MIAMI — One day in late May 2016, Roger Stone — the political dark sorcerer and longtime confidant of Donald Trump — slipped into his Jaguar and headed out to meet a man with a “Make America Great Again” hat and a viscous Russian accent.
The man, who called himself Henry Greenberg, offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton, Trump’s presumptive Democratic opponent in the upcoming presidential election, according to Stone, who spoke about the previously unreported incident in interviews with The Washington Post. Greenberg, who did not reveal the information he claimed to possess, wanted Trump to pay $2 million for the political dirt, Stone said.
“You don’t understand Donald Trump,” Stone recalled saying before rejecting the offer at a restaurant in the Russian-expat magnet of Sunny Isles, Fla. “He doesn’t pay for anything.”
Later, Stone got a text message from Michael Caputo, a Trump campaign communications official who’d arranged the meeting after Greenberg had approached Caputo’s Russian-immigrant business partner.
“How crazy is the Russian?” Caputo wrote, according to a text message reviewed by The Post. Noting that Greenberg wanted “big” money, Stone replied, “waste of time.”
(The Washington Post)
Two years later, the brief sit-down in Florida has resurfaced as part of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s sprawling investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, according to Caputo. Caputo said he was asked about the meeting by prosecutors during a sometimes-heated questioning session last month.
Stone and Caputo, who did not previously disclose the meeting to congressional investigators, now say they believe they were the targets of a setup by U.S. law enforcement officials hostile to Trump.
They cite records — independently examined by The Post — showing that the man who approached Stone is actually a Russian national who has claimed to work as an FBI informant.
Interviews and additional documents show that Greenberg has at times used the name Henry Oknyansky. Under that name, he claimed in a 2015 court filing related to his immigration status that he had provided information to the FBI for 17 years. He attached records showing that the government had granted him special permission to enter the United States because his presence represented a “significant public benefit.”
There is no evidence that Greenberg was working with the FBI in his interactions with Stone, and in his court filing, Greenberg said he had stopped his FBI cooperation sometime after 2013.
Greenberg, in text messages with The Post, denied that he had been acting on the FBI’s behalf when he met with Stone.
Henry Greenberg, who has also called himself Henry Oknyansky, at a Jan. 31 meeting of the Miami Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board at Miami City Hall. (Miami City Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board)
An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Mueller’s office.
The meeting took place two months earlier than federal officials have said a counterintelligence operation was officially opened and before WikiLeaks began releasing hacked Democratic emails.
It came in the same time period as other episodes in which Russian interests approached the Trump campaign. A few weeks earlier, Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos was told in London that the Russians had dirt on Clinton. And it was two weeks before the sit-down at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who he had been told could offer information that would hurt Clinton as part of a Russian government effort to help his father.
Trump and his allies have said that the meetings were inconsequential and that there was no collusion.
Stone and Caputo’s interactions with Greenberg mean that at least 11 Trump associates or campaign officials have acknowledged interactions with a Russian during the election season or presidential transition. Those interactions have become public in the year and a half since a Trump spokeswoman said no one associated with the campaign had communications with Russians or other foreign entities.
It is not clear how seriously investigators are taking the Florida meeting. Caputo said prosecutors during his interview seemed to have intense interest in the interaction, as well as the role of Greenberg.
Reached by phone, Greenberg, 59, initially denied Stone’s account of a meeting.
“This is wrong information,” Greenberg said.
Later, in text messages to a Post reporter, Greenberg changed his story, acknowledging that he’d met with Stone and providing a skeletal account of the encounter that matched Stone’s in some ways. Unprompted, Greenberg used essentially the same language as Stone to describe Stone’s reaction: “Trump will never pay for anything.”
Stone said Greenberg was alone at the meeting. But Greenberg said he was accompanied by a Ukrainian friend he identified only as Alexei, who he said had been fired from a job with the Clinton Foundation, a global charitable organization founded by Hillary Clinton’s husband, former president Bill Clinton. Greenberg provided no evidence the man had worked for the Clinton Foundation, and a foundation spokesman said the group has never employed a man with the first name of Alexei.
“He was very upset, and he wants to tell his story,” Greenberg said in a text. “He told Mr. Stone what he knew and what he want.”
Greenberg denied that he asked for money, saying that it was his friend who spoke with Stone.
President Trump and his allies previously accused the FBI of unfairly targeting his campaign following revelations that another FBI informant, Cambridge University professor Stefan A. Halper, approached Papadopoulos and two other campaign advisers starting in July 2016 to gather information about their possible ties to Russia.
“If you believe that [Greenberg] took time off from his long career as an FBI informant to reach out to us in his spare time, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I want to sell you,” Caputo said in an interview.
In a separate interview, Stone said, “I didn’t realize it was an FBI sting operation at the time, but it sure looks like one now.”
The Florida meeting adds another layer of complexity to Stone’s involvement in the Russia probe. For months, as several of Stone’s employees and associates have been subpoenaed or have appeared before the Mueller grand jury, it has been clear that the special counsel has been scrutinizing repeated claims by Stone that he communicated with WikiLeaks via a back-channel source before the group’s 2016 release of hacked Democratic Party emails.
Stone has said it’s possible he will be indicted, speculating that Mueller might charge him with a crime unrelated to the election to silence him. He said he anticipates that his meeting with Greenberg could be used in an attempt to pressure him to testify against Trump — something he says he would never do.
Last year, in a videotaped interview with The Post, Stone denied having any contacts with Russians during the campaign.
“I’ve never been to Russia. I didn’t talk to anybody who was identifiably Russian during the two-year run-up to this campaign,” he said. “I very definitely can’t think of anybody who might have been a Russian without my knowledge. It’s a canard.”
Stone and Caputo said in separate interviews that they did not disclose the Greenberg meeting during testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence because they had forgotten about an incident that Stone calls unimportant “due diligence” that would have been “political malpractice” not to explore.
Caputo said that he was asked during a session with the committee in July whether he’d ever been offered information about the Clinton campaign by a Russian, and he either answered “no” or that he could not recall.
However, Stone and Caputo said their memories were refreshed by text messages that Caputo said he no longer has in his possession but was shown during a May 2 interview.
Caputo’s attorney on Friday sent a letter amending his House testimony, and he plans to present Caputo’s account of the Greenberg incident to the Office of Inspector General for the Justice Department, which has announced it is examining the FBI’s use of informants during the Russia probe. Stone said his attorney has done the same.
Documents and interviews reveal a quirk-filled story that spans three decades and two continents. It touches down in locales as distinct as a hipster Miami art gallery and a riverfront construction site. But, like so much of the drama swirling around the 2016 election, its roots lie far away from American ballot boxes — in the Russian capital of Moscow.
Michael Caputo arrives at the Hart Senate Office Building to be interviewed by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers on May 1. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Though they never met, both Caputo and Greenberg lived heady existences in Moscow in the years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a period when the city had a frisson of artistic and creative energy that Caputo compares to “Paris of the 1920s, but with Kalashnikovs.” Caputo had moved to Russia to develop a Rock-the-Vote-style campaign for Russian President Boris Yeltsin.
Greenberg was already a familiar figure in the city’s social whirl. He married a Russian actress and moved to Los Angeles. Court records show that, after being charged in 1994 with assault with a deadly weapon, he entered a plea in which he was convicted without accepting guilt.
According to a declaration he filed in court, Greenberg spent almost two years in the custody of the U.S. immigration service. He said he decided in 2000 to return to Russia, where, according to interviews and local media coverage, he resumed a glamorous life.
For a time, he shared an apartment at a fashionable Moscow address with John Daly, a producer of hit films including “The Terminator,” and he was well known by expats from the Moscow club scene.
“He was an up and down kind of guy. Charming. Very ingratiating and personal,” said Edward Bass, a movie producer who knew Greenberg in Moscow in that time.
According to accounts in Russian media, he was arrested in 2002 and charged with a decade-old $2.7 million fraud. The Moscow Times reportedthat authorities found three passports with false names in his apartment and photographs that appeared to show him posing with movie directors Steven Spielberg and Oliver Stone.
The Post was unable to determine the outcome of the case from public records. Greenberg denied wrongdoing, saying that he was not convicted and that the case was closed.
Greenberg returned to the United States, according to immigration records that he submitted as part of his federal court filing in 2015.
He attached to the statement government documents outlining his immigration history.
Between 2008 and 2012, the records show, he repeatedly was extended permission to enter the United States under a “significant public benefit parole.” The documents list an FBI agent as a contact person. The agent declined to comment.
Immigration lawyer David Leopold, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the documents described an immigration history generally consistent with Greenberg’s claims that he had been allowed to enter the United States to assist law enforcement.
In a 2015 court declaration, Greenberg — using the last name Oknyansky — said he’d been giving information to the FBI since returning to Russia from the United States in 2000.
“Wherever I was, from Iran to North Korea, I always send information to” the FBI, he wrote. “I cooperated with the FBI for 17 years, often put my life in danger. Based on my information, there is so many arrests criminal from drugs and human trafficking, money laundering and insurance frauds.”
Greenberg did not respond to questions about his use of multiple names but said in a text that he had worked for the “federal government” for 17 years.
“I risked my life and put myself in danger to do so, as you can imagine,” he said.
By May 2016, Greenberg was in the midst of an eventually unsuccessful zoning fight to open a restaurant on the Miami River, according to public records. He showed up without an invitation at a gallery opening organized by Caputo’s public relations firm, according to Caputo’s business partner, Sergey “George” Petrushin.
Greenberg approached Petrushin and invited him to check out the possible restaurant site the next day, Petrushin said. According to Petrushin, Greenberg eventually said that he knew Petrushin was partners with Caputo and that he had information he wanted to share that would be helpful to Trump’s campaign.
Petrushin called Caputo and handed the phone to Greenberg to make his pitch.
At the time, Caputo said, Russia was not a major campaign issue, and the man’s accent raised no red flags for him.
“I said, ‘Let me get somebody to vet it for you,’ ” Caputo recalls saying.
Caputo knew just the guy: Roger Stone.
Stone had spent decades trying to persuade Trump to run for president. In the spring of 2016, Stone was no longer with the campaign — but he remained in touch with Trump and some in his orbit.
When Stone arrived at the restaurant in Sunny Isles, he said, Greenberg was wearing a “Make America Great Again” T-shirt and hat. On his phone, Greenberg pulled up a photo of himself with Trump at a rally, Stone said.
“We really want to help Trump,” Stone recalled Greenberg saying during the brief encounter.
By Greenberg’s account, he had limited contact with Stone, sitting at a nearby table while his friend Alexei conducted the meeting. “Alexei talk to Mr. Stone, not me,” he wrote. He added that he believes Alexei has moved back to Ukraine and that they are not in contact.
When Caputo followed up with Stone via text to ask if “anything at all interesting” took place, Stone responded with a single word: “No.”
Helderman reported from Washington. Alice Crites and Devlin Barrett in Washington and Natasha Abbakumova in Moscow contributed to this report.
Put America First…Trump blindsided them with talk of dismantling free trade
The Very blue-collar workers who tipped the scales in Donald Trump’s victory
Many now worrying Trump will win re-election in three years’ time
2018-06-16
Politics is a fickle beast. Barack Obama won more votes among blue-collar workers than did his opponent, Senator John McCain. But it was those very blue-collar workers who tipped the scales in Donald Trump’s victory. They weren’t racists or they wouldn’t have voted for Obama in the first place.
But in voting for Trump they voted against their economic interest. Trump hasn’t and won’t help the health of the poorer, nor improve income inequality, nor in the long run give them jobs that now have migrated to China, India and Europe.
What he did give these voters was a sense of pride in being American, as Obama did, but Hilary Clinton couldn’t.
“Put America First”, he shouted again and again. Trump blindsided them with talk of dismantling free trade. Even though events and the long run would show he has shot America in the foot, it sounded convincing.
Obama would have won a third term if allowed to run. He had more appeal across the electorate than Trump. It was Mrs Clinton who lost it.
Obama was the most successful liberal, Democratic, President since Franklin Roosevelt who ushered in the New Deal, a campaign to save the poorest from the Great Depression.
Some would say since Lyndon Johnson with his great civil rights and poverty reforms, but he can’t be called liberal after the carnage he inflicted on Southeast Asia.
Bill Clinton was a centrist cum conservative and he re-organised welfare so that the poor were badly hit- a policy he now says he regrets. Jimmy Carter was more successful than his many critics allow, but still, his great achievements were in foreign, not domestic policy.
Many observers are now worrying that Trump will win re-election in three years’ time. But remember 2006 when a book, “One Party Country “ was published. It was about how George W. Bush and Karl Rove, were “on the cusp of building a permanent Republican Majority that would rule politics till the end of time”.
So writes Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s communications director, in his fascinating new book;
“Yes, We (Still) Can”. He writes that soon after the Bush book was published the Democrats took back the House and the Senate in a landslide. Two years after that Obama won a huge electoral victory, capturing states that no Democrat had won in decades.
The Pfeiffer book is a testament to a great leader. But it is more than that. Pfeiffer, like his ex-boss, believes that there are “reasons to believe hope is right around the corner”- what Obama would call “The Audacity Of Hope.”
There’s no need to believe the Republican rhetoric about Trump being a leader who can keep them in a permanent majority.
Pfeiffer reminds us of a speech Obama made at the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington.
Obama spoke from the very spot where King had made his “I have a Dream” speech. In a masterful sermon Obama slightly re-wrote King:
“The arc of the universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn’t bend on its own.” If the next Democratic candidate can learn from Obama’s experience he or she will win the Presidency.
Above all, it means inspiring young people to vote and persuading the blue-collar workers who defected to Trump to return to the Democratic fold. And, it means, as Pfeiffer explains so well, mastering the media at a time when Fox News dominates an extremely large audience, not as a traditional bipartisan TV channel but as a 100% propagandistic supporter of the Republican philosophy. And it means realizing that the media world is “in the midst of a massive, rapid, disruptive transformation that is re-writing all the rules of politics and presidential communications”.
A major part of the media- apart from Fox, the New York Times and Washington Post- is floundering because of the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, which had the effect of drastically lowering the advertising that was necessary if the media was to be adequately funded. The internet and the smartphone have taken over.
One more book, more cerebral, has also recently been published called, “The Presidency of Barak Obama”.
It’s a series of essays some supportive, some critical. But the overall conclusion is of a great success. “Obama obtained support for the Affordable Care Act (which Trump hasn’t been able to tear up), the Dodd-Frank financial regulation, an economic stimulus bill that pulled the nation out of a very deep recession, and a burst of domestic legislation, unlike the nation, had seen in years. The cumulative effect was to make great progress in diminishing inequality”.
Obama was a light. Trump is of the night. Much of what you need to know for the future is in these two books, in particular where the light switch is. Copyright: Jonathan Power.
I had the resources to survive a campaign of online hate — but other reporters have been far less fortunate.
Kashmiri Muslims carry the coffin of slain journalist Shujaat Bukhari during a funeral procession at Kreeri, India on June 15, (TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/Getty Images)
Two days after I’d written in the New York Times about being the target of an online hate campaign, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights warned the Indian government that it had a duty to protect me.
This came within days of several journalism and human rights organizations bringing my case to the U.N.’s attention. As a journalist, I’m uncomfortable becoming the story, but in this case, after a week of abuse and death threats that had left me traumatized and at fear for my life, I had no choice in the matter.
But what happened to me was relatively light compared to the fate of many journalists who live at a distance from the circles of power in Delhi and Mumbai. Indian journalists are increasingly at risk from fanatics, criminals, and online mobs — and the government is doing barely anything to protect them.
As a journalist and columnist, I write mostly about criminal investigations, atrocities against India’s minority groups, and social justice. I am the author of a book that put forward damning revelations about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his second in command, Amit Shah.
Hate and threats have been a part of my career in investigative journalism, partly because I am a high-profile Muslim journalist who has persistently called out India’s majoritarian politics. But this round was exceptionally virulent. A photoshopped tweet falsely claimed I had written, “I hate India and Indians.” Another falsified image claimed to show that I had tweeted in support of child rapists. Neither, of course, was anywhere close to the truth. I frantically wrote tweets making clear I was being trolled, but to no avail. An online mob hurled abuse at me, threatening rape and death. I was a terrorist sympathizer, a slut, a jihadi, a promiscuous woman. They called on me — a patriotic Indian who happens to be Muslim — to pack my bags for Pakistan.
And while online vitriol and bullying is not uncommon in India, the trolls then went a step further: My face was edited onto a series of pornographic videos and let loose on the internet. Everywhere I looked, I saw the images; I knew everyone who knew me had seen them too. My life was made a living hell. I began suffering from panic attacks. Even when I went to the police station to file a complaint, I sat there wondering if the cops who were watching the morphed videos were forming an opinion of my character.
But I am alive and, to some degree, protected. My colleagues away from the corridors of power are not.
On June 14, the Kashmiri journalist Shujaat Bukhari, one of the most prolific voices from the valley and the editor of the regional newspaper Rising Kashmir, was shot dead in Srinagar by unknown assailants. I last saw him two weeks ago at a media summit in Lisbon. The moment he saw me, with his usual irony, he commented that the U.N. had not intervened in Kashmir despite four decades of violence and impunity, and how fortunate I was to have gotten the group’s support. On the day Bukhari was killed, a U.N. report citing gross human rights violations in Kashmir was released. His last tweet was a link to coverage of the damning report.
In his death, Shujaat reminded me of the privilege I enjoyed as a journalist who had the backing of U.N. special rapporteurs.
There are many others like Shujaat in my country.
In March, Sandeep Sharma, a freelance journalist for the television channel News World, was run over by a truck in the central state of Madhya Pradesh. Sharma had exposed the complicity of police officers in an illegal mining case.
Navin Nischal wrote for the Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar in the eastern state of Bihar. He was riding his bike alongside a friend in March when they were hit by an SUV driven by the husband of a former village head he had been investigating.
Last year, also in Bihar, the Hindustan journalist Vikas Kumar suffered serious head injuries after being beaten up by members of a gang that sold illegal adulterated alcohol.
Gauri Lankesh, a personal friend, was a longtime critic of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Gauri was taken to court for a defamation case by members of the ruling party, but that did not make national headlines. Then, in 2017, she was shot dead by unknown assailants outside her home in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. It was only then, in her death, that her work got national attention, with marches of solidarity in the capital.
The journalist Tongam Rina, a dynamo of an editor at the Arunachal Times in eastern India, was shot point-blank in the stomach in 2012 as she was investigating local corruption. She survived, but it took a near-death experience before she got some of the protection that comes with national prominence.
Sometimes it’s the state itself targeting journalists. In September 2017, the independent Kashmiri photojournalist Kamran Yusuf was arrested by the National Investigation Agency. Kamran, then 23, was accused on flimsy evidence of throwing stones at troops and not released until this March.
As these cases show, beyond the metropolises, the rural Indian journalists doing some of the most critical work are not warned on social media or via phone calls but are instead killed with impunity; they are mowed down by cars or shot dead by assailants who remain at large.
In the Bastar division of Chhattisgarh and in the Gadchiroli division of Nagpur — both violent hotbeds of tribal distress — regional journalists who bring us some of the bravest, most fearless news stories of excesses by the authorities are often under attack from both state and nonstate actors. Most of these journalists don’t have large social media followings.
So, when a policeman slaps a reporter, a female journalist is groped, or a writer is threatened, there are no headlines, reports, or Twitter trends.
These are journalists who do not enjoy the power that comes with being in the political corridors of New Delhi but who deliver some of the most damning — and important — news stories about India.
These brutal assaults on journalists who are doing their job — and their duty to the public — is one reason why India ranks 138th in the world in the latest World Press Freedom Index. Even when we’re not physically assaulted, we’re the targets of campaigns like the one against me designed to smear, discredit, and shame us. One of the most admired voices on Indian television, the Hindi TV journalist Ravish Kumar, has been at the receiving end of a similar hate campaign.
Other prominent journalists such as the NDTV host Nidhi Razdan and the Washington Post columnist Barkha Dutt have also recently revealed they have received threatening messages from trolls and from people in power. But journalists who work in big cities and are well-known figures in India — such as Ravish, Barkha, Nidhi, and I — have the privilege of large platforms and followings that offer us some form of protection, as well as the personal support we need to psychologically survive such campaigns.
I have a liberal father, friends, and colleagues, none of whom batted an eyelid when they heard I was featured in a fake porn video. I have access to a therapist I can call at midnight to calm my nerves after an anxiety attack. But female journalists working in rural, patriarchal parts of India face intense shaming in such cases — even from the police they might try to go to for help.
Little help is forthcoming from the government. In four years in power, Modi has yet to hold a single press conference. In one of his rare interviews with the news agency ANI in 2014, Modi did not mince words in referring to journalists he disagreed with as “newstraders” who sold news, wrote hit jobs, and were not real journalists.
The Indian state has much to answer for in its prosecution of journalists in recent years through concerted, malicious campaigns. A union minister in the present government has a history of berating journalists, calling them jihadis, third-rate thugs, and “presstitutes.” Journalists who are critical of the government are not allowed access to government events or interviews. Reporters and editors who are critical of the government have been forced to resign. Most are now independent journalists writing for news websites like Scroll and The Wire, spaces created in response to self-censorship by mainstream publications.
But for all my personal troubles in the last month and reading of horror stories from fellow journalists, I have found some answers too: Mainstream journalists like me need to signal-boost voices that are far removed from the urban centers. Those of us with a public platform in India must use our position of privilege to embolden the voices of the unsung reporters who are a part of our fight to protect free speech in the country we love and cherish.
JUNE 17, 2018
PRESPES, Greece/BITOLA, Macedonia (Reuters) - Greece and Macedonia set aside three decades of dispute on Sunday as they agreed on a new name for the former Yugoslav republic, paving the way for its possible admission to the European Union and NATO.
The foreign ministers of the two countries signed an accord to rename the former Yugoslav republic the “Republic of North Macedonia”, despite a storm of protest over a deal seen as a national sellout by some on both sides.
In the idyllic setting of Prespes, a lake region that borders Greece, Macedonia and Albania, leaders from the two countries embraced and shook hands in the presence of European and United Nations officials.
The agreement still requires the approval of both parliaments and a referendum in Macedonia. That approval is far from assured, as it faces stiff opposition from the Greek public, and Macedonia’s president has vowed to block the deal.
“Very few believed we would be able to leave behind 26 years of unfruitful dispute,” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said.
“We have a historic responsibility that this deal is not held in abeyance,” Tsipras said as he and his Macedonian counterpart Zoran Zaev received a standing ovation.
Tsipras survived a no-confidence vote mounted by the opposition in parliament on Saturday.
But up to 70 percent of Greeks object to the name compromise, an opinion poll by the Proto Thema newspaper showed on Saturday. In Psarades, the tiny lakeside community where the deal was signed, the church bell tolled in mourning, draped in a Greek flag.
Some 30 km (20 miles) away in the Greek village of Pisoderi, about 3,000 people rallied against the deal and at least six were injured in clashes with police who fired tear gas to disperse an angry crowd on a hillside.
“We don’t accept anything, we don’t recognise anything. For us none of it is valid,” said Costas Venetikidis, a protester. “Macedonia is in our soul, that’s why we’re here.”
Not far from the Greek border in the Macedonian city of Bitola, thousands protested draped in national flags, chanting “This is Macedonia.”
“This shameful deal will not pass. We will defend Macedonia’s name and pride,” said Petre Filipovski, 40.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev gesture before the signing of an accord to settle a long dispute over the former Yugoslav republic's name in the village of Psarades, in Prespes, Greece, June 17, 2018. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis
‘WE HAVE MOVED MOUNTAINS’
Following the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, Greece’s northern neighbour took the name Macedonia. Athens refused to accept it, saying it implied territorial claims over the Greek province of Macedonia and an appropriation of ancient Greek culture and civilisation.
Zaev, who arrived from across the lake on a speedboat, said the two neighbours had “moved mountains” by reaching the accord. It was “a dignified solution acceptable to both sides”, he said.
Veteran UN mediator Matthew Nimetz, who has overseen talks for a quarter-century, described the agreement as a fair and honourable deal. It was, he said, an example of “how neighbours can solve a problem if they really work at it”.
“Today is my birthday,” said Nimetz, 79. “I told my family this year I don’t need any gifts because two prime ministers are going to give me a big gift.”
Athens had blocked Macedonia’s hopes of joining the EU and NATO, objections it must now lift under the deal.
Slideshow (3 Images)
Others might still object.
“One big concern is Russia. Moscow has noticeably refused to endorse the agreement,” said James Ker-Lindsay, professor of politics and policy at St Mary’s University in London. “It knows that this will see Macedonia join NATO,” he said.
“Given recent allegations of Moscow’s involvement in other elections and referendums, this will be a real concern for NATO and the EU.”
Additional reporting by Michele Kambas and Phoebe Fronista; editing by Andrew Roche
Key decider in presidential runoff will be who can win votes that went to centrists defeated in first round Supporters of Colombian presidential candidate Gustavo Petro turn out ahead of Sunday’ election runoff between Petro and Iván Duque.Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images
Joe Parkin Daniels - Colombia goes to the polls on Sunday to choose the country’s first president since a historic peace deal was signed with leftist Farc rebels.
From 8am, voters can choose between Iván Duque, a neophyte conservative who opposes the peace deal, and Bogotá’s former mayor Gustavo Petro, once a leftist rebel himself, who defends it.
That deal, signed in 2016, formally ended five decades of civil war that killed 220,000 people and displaced 7 million. However, the deal was initially rejected in a referendum, with many taking umbrage at the accord’s promises of softer sentencing for rebel leaders and guaranteed seats in congress.
Duque’s mentor, hardline former president Alvaro Uribe, led the campaign to upend the deal, though it was later amended and ratified by lawmakers. Many Colombians feel they have been blindsided by the move and on Sunday will have a chance to take their outrage to the ballot box.
The bruising race has revealed surging polarisation in the Andean nation, with both candidates eliminating moderates in a first round last month, without gaining enough of the vote to win outright.
Polls put Duque as the favourite, though a key decider of the election will be which candidate is able to win the votes that went to defeated centrists in the first round.
Duque, though market-friendly, talks tough on drugs and crime, while Petro wants to wean Colombia off its dependence on fossil fuels. Both men have accused each other of authoritarian tendencies.
Petro has had to defend himself from claims he favours neighbouring Venezuela’s collapsing socialist model. More than a million Venezuelans have fled to Colombia, stoking fears among many voters that their country could face the same fate. Petro is the first leftist candidate to make it this far in the conservative country.
Some worry Duque, a political unknown before being handpicked by Uribe in 2014 to fill a party senate seat, will be his mentor’s puppet if elected. Uribe’s time in office was marked with military successes against the Farc that took huge tolls on civilians. He also weaponised a state intelligence agency to spy on opposition figures.
The insults have been thrown from afar, with Duque breaking tradition by refusing to debate with Petro on live television on the eve of the election.
Experts worry that the spectre of political violence could return to a fiercely divided country, despite a Farc peace deal that has already been partially implemented.
“Polarisation is common in politics around the world,” said Pedro Piedrahita Bustamente, a political science professor at the University of Medellín. “But here, where there is a history of internal armed conflict, it could be a dangerous thing.”
For once the Economist, mouthpiece of the elite, had an intelligent piece on Britain’s Labour Party – The "Great Transformation"( Economist May 15, 2018). I don’t know if finally the intellectual penny has dropped or if the magazine is waking up to the possibility of Corbyn as Britain’s next prime minister. The piece focused on John McDonnell, closet Marxist, shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and brains behind Labour’s reinvigorated economic thinking. In a mealy-mouthed way the piece conceded that the Economist had never understood Labour or its economic outlook and did make a long overdue effort to get to grips. Almost in passing it made an intriguing point: "Corbynomics is not what Labour’s opponents believe it to be. It owes more to little-known 20th century economists than it does to Marx" and singled out a less known Austrian economist Karl Polanyi, whose theories are at odds with the much despised but well-known Austrian School of neo-liberalism, marginal theory and monetarism.
The article motivated me to examine Polanyi’s five-lecture course published by Bennington College, Vermont, USA and his magnum opus The Great Transformation (1944). Readers too lazy to plough through all this will find an easy to read review of his work by Matthew Watson, Christopher Holmes and Ben Clift of the University of Warwick at "Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation and a new political economy": https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/features/polanyi/
Polanyi Thought
Polanyi opines that human economy is submerged in social relationships and he proposes an ethnographic approach called "substantivism", in opposition to formal economics. He argues that the term ‘economics’ has two meanings. The formal meaning, used by economists, construes it as rational decision-making and choosing between alternative uses of resources. Substantivism views humans as beings who interact organically with their social and natural environments. Society’s livelihood activities are/should be adapted to social and cultural settings and the environment. The economy is/should naturally and organically be in consonance with social life and social mores.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Polanyi argued, society was mediated by household production, reciprocity and redistribution. Most people grew the food and made the goods they needed, there were no universal markets; weekly fairs where occasional events where things were exchanged or sold; production was for domestic or local consumption (house-holdism). People supported one another without exact calculation, goods were often shared (reciprocity). Poverty, unemployment and hunger of some in a village while others acquired great wealth was unknown (redistribution). The gigantic wealth and income inequalities of today were unknown in olden times.
The market economy that we now worship is not a natural thing Polanyi says. It was created by classes and forces and co-evolved with the nation state. This was the Great Transformation he wrote about. Its emergence altered human mentality; it changed the way in which we think. We now live by a new normal – market economics. The way people now think and behave conforms to classical and neo-classical economics (pay your mother for breast feeding, demand money for blood donation), but it is not natural or organic. It is the outcome of class and state and is a post Industrial Revolution creation. He argues that market society (capitalism) is unsustainable because it is unnatural and does not correspond to the organic needs of humans living as social creatures.
Polanyi rejects neoclassical economics (the Austrian School in particular) as an abstract model that has lost sight of the organic and the human. His position is in trenchant opposition to Friedrich Hayek’s neo-liberalism though the latter’s Road to Serfdom was actually published in the same year (1944) as The Great Transformation. If Hayek is extreme right-wing and Keynes a middle of the road advocate of state intervention to correct the instabilities of untrammelled market capitalism, Polanyi’s anthropomorphism (substantive-socialism) is by comparison, left.
Polanyi’s model of early capitalism proposed a ‘double movement’ of social transformation on two planes. The Industrial Revolution created misery and hardship, it gave birth to the urban poor in hovels, the huddled masses of Dickensian novels. Preindustrial society was eulogised by Goldsmith and idolised as "Sweet Auburn loveliest village of the plain where health and plenty cheered the labouring swain". Then came the Industrial Revolution which tore people from the land, transformed them into wage labour and formed a depraved proletariat. Goldsmith poetry was Polanyi economics.
However, and at the same time, a reflexive response also created social welfare, charity, the poor laws and the Methodists. Social welfare was the dialectic intertwined into the fabric of capitalist exploitation and misery. This dialectic, the subjugation of man to the market, must now be inverted and market relations used by man as a tool only to the degree needed. The power of economics as the law governing and dominating society to its own rationalities, must to be eradicated and society made redistributive, reciprocal and fair. That is, Polanyi wants to transcend capitalism in morally and ethically humanist ways. I will return to the relation between this and the ethos of the Britain’s Labour Party and the traditions of its working class after a quick theoretical point.
What is the relationship between Polanyi and Marxism? Is his contribution an extension of Marxism, is it a revision, or is Polanyi not a Marxist of any hue at all? Instead of a focussing on technology (forces of production) and class relations Polanyi steered towards a holistic view that gave equal if not more prominence to social mores and culture. Therefore, arguably his insights though valuable, weaken historical materialism. Did Polanyi go too far and lose sight of the materialist woods for the trees of social relations, welfare and culture? Though this would be the response of some, it is no secret that Polanyi was an active member of revolutionary movements in his native Austria and his wife a card-carrying member of the communist party. Therefore there is a school that sees Polanyi’s work as an extension and a filling out of Marx. Personally, I see the point and I concede the value of his contribution, but in the final analysis as a hard Marxist scientist I have my reservations.
One para is enough theory for one day! I now return to my theme; locating the socialism, welfare-economics and humanism of the Corbyn-McDonnell Labour Party programme.
Labour’s ‘Corbynomics’
To grasp Corbynomics - Corbyn-McDonnell economics, Labour’s manifesto ("For the Many not the Few", subtitle for a Better, Fairer Britain) and its sharp leftward turn – you can omit Marx and begin with an appreciation of the legacy of British social-democracy and its working class movement; the road traversed for 200 years.
On the mileposts along this road you will see carved out the names Robert Owen (1771-1858), Keir Hardie (1856-1915), Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960) and Aneurian Bevan (1897-1960). The second great transformation, the one on this road, was the world’s prototype social-democratic welfare state, the post-WW2 Atlee Government. The great treachery on the journey was a false-turn denoted by the signpost ‘Traitor Tony Blair went this way’.
Corbonyomics is not crypto-Marxist, radical-Bolshie or in the mould of great revolutionary events on the European Continent after 1789. No it is autochthonously and quintessentially British. And mark that I say British not English – Keir Hardie was a Scotsman as was Labour’s working class bastion Glasgow; most coal mines were in Wales and Bevan was Welsh. Fairness and reasonableness are as much condiments of British culture as gung-ho pushiness is American. If Labour can persuade the public that its programme is fair and reasonable, that reversing the ruination of National Health started by Thatcher and finalised by Blair is humane, that renationalisation of railways, electricity and water will restore efficiency in the provision of public goods, then it will comfortably win the next election. For that the quintessential message of home-grown fairness must get across.
I doubt if Jeremy Corbyn or John McDonnell are familiar with Polanyi, but the grown-on-native soil, culturally autochthonous socialism that Polanyi preaches, plays the same melody as Labour’s current strategy. Embellished by fairness, as fair and caring socialism, Labour will achieve more than victory, it could be a landslide. Ideology does not sell in Britain, reasonableness, caring and fairness does. Bothersome British! Over here in Lanka we prefer things the other way round; so do the Americans.
Radicalism and a Labour-left vision are needed to motivate the youthful hundreds of thousands who have flooded into the party and the grassroots Momentum organisation which has 170 branches and over 40,000 members. The young need their shot of hard-stuff to sustain enthusiasm and energy, but the whole enterprise must be resolutely directed towards bringing Labour to power.
A postscript on Polanyi
The two big names in Twentieth Century economics who influenced countries and continents are Keynes and Hayek. Keynes reigned supreme from the Great Depression till the 1970s then Keynesian economics collapsed because it was debunked by stagnation, inflation and the flop of welfare within capitalism. Hated neo-liberalism, whose high priest was Hayek, then became gospel first for the IMF and then Pinochet, Regan and Thatcher. Hayek came to an equally melancholy end. The death rattle was first heard in the 1990s in the dot-com bust, then financial instability in the 2000s showed that the end was near; the coffin was finally nailed down in 2008.
Three less known economists – Piero Sraffa, Herman Minsky and Karl Polanyi are much more important than the mainstream. Most economics Nobel winners after Milton Friedman are trash; ideologists and carpetbaggers of an ailing order. Friedman was profoundly reactionary but no denying he was cleaver and his monetary theory has been intellectually productive. Sraffa (value theory of commodities), Minsky (investment and financial risk analysis) and Polanyi are a cut above the Nobel lot and if Labour pulls off an election victory the last named will be the most interesting because of his conceptual originality. This of course says nothing about the success or otherwise of a Corbyn led Labour Government. That depends on many factors, not only the government itself and on Britain and Brexit, but also on global history – Europe, America and the fate of stricken global capitalism.
By the end of 2013, the country's quiet opioid addiction crisis was no longer so quiet. Opioid overdose deaths that year topped 16,000, more than four times the same statistic for 1999. That prompted a number of measures at the state and federal level to rein in opioid prescriptions, including a move by the DEA in October 2014 to tighten its policiesaround some of the most commonly prescribed opioids.
The new DEA policy—aimed at popular opioids such as Vicodin and Lortab—imposed restrictions on doctors' prescribing and made it more difficult for patients to get refills. In one sense, the policy was a success: Prescriptions for those drugs decreased almost immediately. But new research adds to an increasing body of evidence that restricting opioid prescribing has not solved the opioid crisis but instead worsened it.
Since the DEA policy shift, opioid overdose deaths continued to grow with more than 40,000 fatal opioid overdoses in 2016. And while prescription opioid overdose deaths have slightly decreased—there were about 14,000 that year—overdose deaths from heroin and non-prescription synthetic opioids such as fentanyl went through the roof. Heroin and illicit synthetics accounted for nearly two-thirds of all opioid overdose deaths in 2016.
In the new study, published this week in the British Medical Journal, researchers examining the impact of the DEA policy shift found evidence that while the change indeed lowered prescribing rates for the opioids in question, it was also linked to an increase in illicit online sales of those drugs in Dark Web drug markets.
The researchers used software called DATACRYPTO to crawl encrypted Dark Web marketplaces where people can anonymously buy damned near anything, from drugs to guns to credit card numbers. DATACRYPTO harvested data on which drugs were for sale, their country of origin, and the number of customer comments on each seller's comments page. Researchers used that last figure as a proxy for how much of a drug that seller sold. They examined sales of prescription opioids, sedatives, stimulants, and steroids, as well as heroin. It was only with prescription opioids that they found a significant Dark Web sales bump.
Here's what they found: "The sale of prescription opioids through US cryptomarkets increased after the schedule change, with no statistically significant changes in sales of prescription sedatives, prescription steroids, prescription stimulants, or illicit opioids."
According to their data, prescription opioids doubled their market share of U.S. Dark Web drug sales thanks to the DEA policy change. By July 2016, opioids represented 13.7% of all drug sales in U.S. cryptomarkets, compared with a modeled estimate of 6.7% of all sales.
While the researchers were careful to not make claims of causation—only correlation—their conclusion speaks for itself: "The scheduling change in hydrocodone combination products coincided with a statistically significant, sustained increase in illicit trading of opioids through online US cryptomarkets. These changes were not observed for other drug groups or in other countries. A subsequent move was observed towards the purchase of more potent forms of prescription opioids, particularly oxycodone and fentanyl."
Not only is the DEA policy change linked to increased Dark Web opioid sales, it is also linked to a move toward more powerful, and thus more dangerous, opioids. The researchers noted that while fentanyl was the least purchased Dark Web opioid in the summer of 2014, it was the second most frequently purchased by the summer of 2016. Fentanyl killed as many people as prescription opioids that year.
This study—one of the few that examines supply reduction (as opposed to demand reduction) as a means reducing drug use—strongly suggests that supply-side interventions carry unintended consequences, especially the resort to more dangerous and more powerful substitutes. The study's authors refer to this effect as "the iron law of prohibition, whereby interventions to reduce supply, such as increased enforcement and changes to drug scheduling, lead to illicit markets dominated by higher potency products."
Perhaps better than restricting opioid prescriptions, which has deleterious impacts on the tens of millions of Americans suffering chronic pain, or other supply-side interventions, would be increased access to addiction treatment, as well as greatly expanded harm reduction measures to try to get people off opioids and keep them alive in the meantime.
This article was produced by the Drug Reporter, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Clare Fallon-16 Jun 2018
North of England Correspondent
Kashmiri Muslims carry the coffin of slain journalist Shujaat Bukhari during a funeral procession at Kreeri, India on June 15, (TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/Getty Images)
Supporters of Colombian presidential candidate Gustavo Petro turn out ahead of Sunday’ election runoff between Petro and Iván Duque.Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images
Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force