Passing the Animal Welfare Bill – an urgent need

Our Sri Lankan culture, and in fact most world religions, understand the importance of compassion towards animals for human wellbeing – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

Friday, 1 February 2019

As a veterinary practice, we at Pet Vet Clinic absolutely believe that animal welfare should be at the core and heart of all that we do as veterinarians and para-veterinary professionals. As such, we unequivocally believe that it is of utmost importance that the draft of the Animal Welfare Bill finalised in late 2017 be passed in Parliament in a timely manner. This is an urgent requirement as it has already been delayed for many years.

Veterinarians and veterinary support staff across the world, not only in Sri Lanka, have an important responsibility in recognising and promoting the essential role of animals in society, not only as pets but also working animals, production animals, etc. We veterinarians are their voice – at times their only voice – and their professional representation. It is our duty to ensure they live comfortable lives, free from fear and pain.

The relationship between animals and people is specially highlighted in the role pets play as human companions. Many studies and high-quality research show a variety of benefits, both physiological (reduced blood pressure, etc.) and psychological (stress reduction, etc.). Animals as companions are important for human wellbeing, more so in modern society where interpersonal bonds are often challenging to establish and sustain. Pets fill this space, providing friendship and emotional comfort. This is especially so with the elderly as well as children – special needs children in particular, as pets provide mental stimulation and support.

Our Sri Lankan culture, and in fact most world religions, understand the importance of compassion towards animals for human wellbeing. Many Sri Lankans are fundamentally good to animals or at least won’t purposefully harm them.  Many less obvious forms of animal cruelty in Sri Lanka occur due to lack of knowledge about animal needs. For example, clearly loved pets who are kept in tiny kennels, pets forcibly taken into rivers or the sea for a bath even when they are obviously terrified, lack of correct quality and quantity of food needed based on the animal species. This requires a good balance between education and regulations. The Animal Welfare Authority proposed in the bill can and should address this.

There are clearly exceptions and incidences of absolute cruelty are not as uncommon as we think. The case of Charlie, the Labrador that was set on fire whilst in its outdoor kennel on New Year’s Eve, succumbing to its injuries the next day, that made the news recently is not a one-off incident.

This is just an example of a tendency to take out one’s anger by harming a person’s pet or an animal.  People do this with a clear awareness that this is a more painful and horrendous revenge than directly harming the person concerned. This is the same idea as threatening a person’s family and loved ones.

The cornered leopard that was brutally beaten to death with the attendant victory celebrations filmed last June is another example of obvious cruelty. There is an extensive body of evidence that those who show such cruelty to animals also show similar cruelty towards people.

One leads to another. Both situations are equally unacceptable in society and should be equally punishable. The 2017 draft of the Animal Welfare Bill will render behaviour of this nature illegal, allowing for the investigation, prosecution and adequate punishment that will also act as a deterrent.

Animals are an integral part of a healthy lifestyle and healthy planet. They demonstrate the importance of respecting and coexisting with other species and our environment. There are many examples where animals sacrifice their life for our benefit, from police and service dogs who have died defending their handlers to farm animals we use for food.

Protein malnutrition is a common and serious problem in developing countries. Adequate, affordable, high-quality protein is important to human nutrition. Animals make this ultimate sacrifice – of their lives – for our benefit. Thus it is our duty to ensure their short lives are comfortable and their death is fear and pain free. The Animal Welfare bill provides for the examination of production practices which, taken in consideration with economics and supply, will lead to a fair and balanced compromise.

With the creation of an Animal Welfare Authority, the bill will shift the burden of responsibility that formerly rested solely on the Police who have neither the time nor the knowledge to address matters of animal welfare. Animal welfare officers, trained and working under the authority, will have the knowhow to inspect the situation in question and make an informed and rationally balanced report as to its nature.

The lack of such continues to be a serious concern in attempting litigation of animal welfare cases. The bill also looks at emerging problems in Sri Lanka such as poaching and trading of animals for food, ivory, skins and furs, etc., which have been steadily increasing with the developing tourist trade and globalisation in general.

A lot of input from a variety of quarters, be they activists, veterinarians, livestock producers, or the Department of Animal Production and Health, has gone into the creation of this bill over the past years. It covers the full spectrum of animal welfare, be they wildlife, captive animals, laboratory animals, street animals, livestock or working animals.

There is absolutely no reason to fear this bill as it is a reasonable and moderate document that has taken into account the voices and concerns of anyone and everyone with an interest in animals, with the promise of being effective in the long run. The longer we delay passing this Animal Welfare Bill, the longer the highly ineffectual Cruelty to Animals Ordinance of 1907 and Animals Act No. 29 of 1958 remain in effect.

We are a country with a historical and cultural tradition of animal welfare. The Animal Welfare Bill is clearly aligned with Sri Lanka’s cultural heritage and values. It should be easily passed with the full support of all right-thinking leaders. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “the greatness of a nation can be judged by the way its animals are treated”.


[Dr. Nalinika Obeyesekere has a BSc in Wildlife from University of California, Davis; a BVSc from University of Peradeniya; and an MVS (Distinction) from Murdoch University, Australia. She is also a Fellow of the Ashoka Trust and of the Sri Lanka College of Veterinary Surgeons (FSLCVS). Dr. Obeyesekere has been presented the prestigious awards for One Medicine One Health (2015) and Companion Animal Welfare (2018) by the World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA). She is a Founder and Director of Pet Vet Clinic, a full-service veterinary hospital based on a unique multi-doctor model and an absolute love for animals. Pet Vet continuously strives to learn and improve the quality of veterinary diagnosis, medicine and surgery in a holistic manner and to champion the all-important pet-people bond.]

TripAdvisor among firms profiting from Israeli war crimes

Part of Israel’s Gush Etzion settlement bloc in the southern occupied West Bank, one of hundreds of colonies built on Palestinian land in violation of international law.

 Wisam HashlamounAPA images

Tamara Nassar Rights and Accountability 31 January 2019

Online booking companies Airbnb, TripAdvisor, Booking.com and Expedia are fueling and profiting from war crimes by listing hundreds of destinations in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

TripAdvisor is one of the world’s biggest and most influential travel booking and recommendation websites.

“The Israeli government uses the growing tourism industry in the settlements as a way of legitimizing their existence and expansion, and online booking companies are playing along with this agenda,” said Seema Joshi of Amnesty International, which has published a new report on the companies’ activities.

Listings include accommodations and attractions, and often fail to indicate that they are located in settlements.

“Amnesty International is calling for these four companies to stop doing business in or with the settlements,” Mark Dummett, an Amnesty researcher, stated. “They should suspend, withdraw these listings immediately.”

“We’re also calling on governments around the world to regulate the operations of these companies, to pass laws that prevent them from advertising or providing listings in Israeli settlements,” Dummett added.

Amnesty International

✔@amnesty

Take a trip with us…to the lands of the illegal Israeli settlements. Promise “guns, check points and walls” aren’t too far away! RT to tell @TripAdvisor to pull out of illegal Israeli settlements now.

TripAdvisor

✔@TripAdvisor

Take a trip with us...to the lands beyond okay, promise these other-worldly destinations aren't too far away! https://tripadv.sr/2sIouTj 

255

5:22 AM - Jan 30, 2019

TripAdvisor

✔@TripAdvisor

Been to #Bali? Done #Ibiza? Here's Where You Should Go Next
https://tripadv.sr/2TsYK8C 

163

7:51 AM - Jan 30, 2019

All of Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Syria’s Golan Heights are illegal under international law and are considered a war crime.

In building settlements, Israel perpetuates human rights violations against the occupied Palestinian population, including home demolitions, forced displacement and theft of land.

The increased presence of illegal settlers means a greater “security” presence by the Israeli army, which translates into even more violence by Israeli occupation forces and by the settlers themselves against Palestinians.

Palestinians who live under Israeli military occupation and severe movement restrictions in the occupied West Bank – or as refugees in exile – cannot rent properties in nearby Israeli settlements.

Israel bars exiled Palestinians from returning to their homeland because they are not Jewish.

Expanding settlements

One listing on Airbnb, TripAdvisor and Booking.com is in Kfar Adumim, an Israeli settlement east of Jerusalem near the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar.

Israel’s high court has given the government a green light to demolish Khan al-Ahmar and forcibly displace its residents.

This land east of Jerusalem, in the so-called E1 zone, is where Israel plans to expand its mega-settlement of Maaleh Adumim, completing the isolation of the northern and southern parts of the West Bank from each other and encircling Jerusalem with settlements.

Earlier this month, Israel’s economy minister Eli Cohen toured Khan al-Ahmar escorted by representatives from far-right pro-settlement Israeli organization Regavim.

Cohen called on Israel to demolish the village before upcoming Israeli elections in April.

“Khan al-Ahmar outpost should be evacuated before the elections. But even more important, we must deny the Palestinian Authority territorial contiguity, by coming and annexing, and applying [Israeli] sovereignty over Area C,” Cohen stated.

Area C is a term for 60 percent of the occupied West Bank still fully controlled by Israel under the Oslo accords signed in the 1990s.

The booking sites also drive business to Israeli “archaeological” attractions in Silwan, an occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood whose Palestinian residents Israel is violently displacing for the benefit of Jewish settlers.

Amnesty noted that Silwan and other Palestinian villages located near settlements are close to “lucrative” tourist attractions.

An example is the so-called City of David, which not only reaps profits for the settlers, but is part of Israel’s ongoing effort to erase Jerusalem’s Palestinian, Arab, Christian and Muslim characters and remake and rewrite the city’s past and present as predominantly or exclusively Jewish.

Calls to abide by international law

In a December letter, Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq and three other organizations demanded that Booking.com stop listing properties in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Golan Heights, and cease referring to these areas as parts of Israel.

Airbnb and Booking.com facilitate the “continuation and expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank,” Al-Haq stated.

“By allowing tourists to make reservations in illegal settlements in the [occupied Palestinian territories] Booking.com is supporting and helping to finance illegal activity,” the group added.

Airbnb leaves West Bank

In November, Airbnb announced that it will delist units in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank following a years-long campaign by Palestinian and international human rights activists.

But Airbnb did not extend that commitment to occupied East Jerusalem, where it has more than 100 settlement listings.

“Amnesty International is calling on Airbnb to implement its announcement and remove all its listings in settlements in occupied territory, including East Jerusalem,” the human rights group stated.

Despite months of intense pressure from Israel, lobby groups and US lawmakers to rescind its decision, Airbnb recently reiterated its November announcement and said it would be pulling the rental properties.

In retaliation, Florida’s governor has directed that his state should cease doing business with Airbnb.

The Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah appeared on Al Jazeera English on Wednesday night to discuss Amnesty’s report.

“Promoting and aiding and profiting from the settlements is no different from walking into a store, robbing it at gunpoint, and then going out into the street and selling the stolen goods for your own profit,” Abunimah said.

Abunimah added that states – such as the Netherlands, where Booking.com is based – must hold these companies accountable.

“The Dutch government claims to oppose the occupation but it’s doing nothing to enforce international law or require its companies like Booking.com to respect it.”

Expelling human rights organizations

Israel is already planning to retaliate against Amnesty International over its report.

Israeli public security minister Gilad Erdan ordered officials to “examine the possibility of preventing the entry and stay of Amnesty International in Israel.”

Erdan is also seeking to end the organization’s tax exemption through Israel’s finance ministry.

Israeli tourism minister Yariv Levin also slammed Amnesty’s report.

“No force in the world will change the simple historical truth – the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. We will fight this despicable anti-Semitic decision. No one can boycott Israel or parts of it,” he said, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Any further crackdown on Amnesty would be part of a broader Israeli pattern of restricting the work of human rights defenders.

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he will not renew the mandate of a human rights monitoring group in Hebron.

The mandate of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) was set to be renewed on 31 January, as it is every six months.

TIPH was established in 1994, following the massacre of 29 Palestinian men and boys in Hebron’s Ibrahimi mosque by US-born settler Baruch Goldstein.

Ali Abunimah contributed research.

Lords of the land: Why Israel's victory won't last

Israel has a strategic choice to make: either to continue as a security state or come to terms with the people it has expelled and dominates

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (AFP)

David Hearst-1 February 2019 

If Benjamin Netanyahu ever needs rest and recuperation from the travails of being Israel’s longest serving prime minister, if there is a shed in which he can hide from any one of the five police investigations threatening him, this place of relative comfort must surely be "the pit".

Lords of the land Why Isra... by on Scribd

U.S. to withdraw from nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, raising fears of a new arms race

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Feb. 1 the U.S. will suspend its participation in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. (Reuters)

By Anne Gearan ,Paul Sonne and Carol Morello-February 1 at 2:19 PM

The Trump administration announced Friday that the United States will pull out of a nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, ending a cornerstone Cold War agreement and raising fears of a new nuclear arms race in Europe and Asia.

President Trump said Russia is violating the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a charge Moscow denies, leaving the United States at a disadvantage because of its own compliance at a time when global threats have changed considerably in the more than 30 years since the pact was signed.

“We cannot be the only country in the world unilaterally bound by this treaty, or any other,” Trump said in a statement. “We will move forward with developing our own military response options and will work with NATO and our other allies and partners to deny Russia any military advantage from its unlawful conduct.”

[Trump administration gives Russia an ultimatum on Cold War-era arms treaty]

The treaty has been a central element of Europe’s security strategy for more than three decades and its signing was considered a crucial moment in Cold War arms control, eliminating more than 2,600 missiles and ending a years-long standoff with nuclear missiles in Europe.

But the Trump administration has argued that Russia has not been complying with the pact since 2014 and that it puts the United States at a military disadvantage against China, which is not bound by the treaty.
President Trump said Feb. 1 he wants a "new treaty" to replace the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, from which the U.S. plans to withdraw. (Photo: Oliver Contreras/The Washington Post)

The collapse of the pact highlights the cost of poor relations between Washington and Moscow, which even during the Cold War managed to hammer out mutually agreeable arms control pacts.

The withdrawal also signals the increasing peril treaties face in a Trump administration that emphasizes national sovereignty over international cooperation. In addition to withdrawing from the INF Treaty, Trump has also left the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accord and threatened to pull out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and World Trade Organization. His withdrawal from the INF Treaty has fueled concerns that he will decline to extend the main nuclear arms treaty with Russia and risk a return to the early days of the nuclear arms race.

The demise of the INF Treaty opens the door to the deployment of American intermediate-range missiles in Europe and Asia, potentially increasing the tension in a standoff with Russia and China. 

The United States so far has said none of the intermediate-range missiles it is considering deploying would carry nuclear weapons, an effort to tamp down fears that the treaty’s collapse will presage the proliferation of nuclear missiles across Europe and Asia.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that, effective Saturday, the United States will suspend participation in the agreement, starting a six-month countdown to a final U.S. withdrawal. That leaves a slim chance that Russia could end missile programs widely seen as a violation, salvaging the treaty.

The United States did not announce plans for any new weapons or shifts in missile deployments, but Trump administration officials did not rule it out down the road.

The United States' plan to scrap this Cold War treaty raises fears of another nuclear arms buildup.(William Neff /The Washington Post)

Trump said he would like to see a “new treaty that would be much better” and apply to more nations, although chances of such an agreement are remote. Neither Russia nor China, whose military advances since the treaty was signed have changed the old Cold War calculus, would be likely to agree.

[What the INF Treaty means for the U.S. and Europe]

“The United States is hopeful that we can put our relationship with Russia back on a better footing, but the onus is on Russia to change course from a pattern of destabilizing activity, not just on this issue but on many others as well,” Pompeo said when announcing the decision Friday.

Russia is violating the treaty with the deployment of a banned missile, according to the administration, while China never faced its constraints, deploying what a senior U.S. official said was more than 1,000 intermediate-range missiles banned by the treaty.

Russia has in turn accused the United States of violating the INF Treaty through its missile defense systems in Europe, an allegation that the State Department has rebutted.

The Trump administration faced criticism among arms control experts for not doing enough to save the treaty and engaging in what critics described as a box-ticking exercise to negotiate with the Russians in recent months designed more to satisfy European allies than to save the pact.

“Withdrawing from INF . . . isn’t the best way to punish Russia for its non-compliance,” Ivo Daalder, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, wrote in a Twitter post. “Rather, sticking with it is still the best way to keep a lid on Russian threat.”

Some analysts have also faulted the Obama administration for not doing enough in its final years to induce Moscow into abiding by the treaty.

Russia has said it wants to remain in the INF, and it blames the United States for the breakdown of the treaty. But a senior Trump administration official told reporters that Russia has in fact sought to get out of the treaty for years and began violating it after Washington refused its request to end the pact.

Russian President Vladmir Putin is likely to continue seeking new arms control talks with Washington, in part because negotiating over nuclear arsenals puts Moscow on near-equal diplomatic footing with the much richer and better-armed United States, analysts say. Russia’s far more limited defense budget also incentivizes Moscow to avoid a full-fledged arms race.

There was no immediate response from the Kremlin, although Russian officials had earlier said they expected the U.S. announcement.

“I don’t think we need to take tough countermeasures right now,” Andrei Krasov, deputy head of the defense committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament, told the Interfax news agency after Pompeo’s announcement. “We have a huge military potential anyway that can counter any threat.”

The Trump administration has signaled for months that it wants to end the agreement covering both nuclear and conventional ground-launch missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (311 and 3,418 miles).

Many NATO diplomats have greeted the U.S. moves with resignation, saying they would prefer to preserve the arms control treaty but that they are now focused on limiting a new arms race.

Senior Trump administration officials tried to emphasize that Washington is on the same page as its European allies, even though the White House faced criticism for Trump’s decision to announce the U.S. withdrawal on the fly last fall, before European allies had formally agreed that Washington should pull out.

In Brussels, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg offered alliance backing for the U.S. move, saying that it is Russia’s responsibility to start complying with the treaty again.

“Russia is in material breach of the #INFTreaty & must use next 6 months to return to full & verifiable compliance or bear sole responsibility for its demise. #NATO fully supports the US suspension & notification of withdrawal from the Treaty,” Stoltenberg wrote on Twitter.

The death of the INF Treaty raises questions about the future of other arms control agreements, including the New START pact, which limits Russian and American deployed strategic nuclear warheads and expires in two years.

Russian diplomats have said they are preparing for the potential end of that treaty, for which Moscow warns it would blame Washington.

“I truly fear that the New START treaty may have the same fate as the INF Treaty,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Russian television before Pompeo’s announcement. “It may just expire on February 5th, 2021, and not be prolonged.”

If the White House and the Kremlin do not agree to extend New START, the decision would turn the clock back to an era when Washington and Moscow possessed nuclear arms with practically no agreed restrictions and would risk the return of a full Cold War-style arms race.

The push by the Trump administration to withdraw from the INF Treaty coincided with the arrival of John Bolton as White House national security adviser. Bolton oversaw the Bush administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in 2002, paving the way for the erection of American missile defense systems that Russia long decried.

The INF Treaty has long been a bugbear for the former U.N. ambassador, who is a skeptic of international agreements and organizations he sees as constraining American power.

In a 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal, Bolton and ­co-author Paula DeSutter contended that the INF had outlived its usefulness. They cited a quote from the late French president Charles de Gaulle: “Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: They last while they last.”

Lawmakers broke along party lines over the withdrawal announcement, although both parties called the pact flawed.

“I completely support the Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty due to Russian noncompliance,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement. “It’s a bad deal for America when Russia cheats and the United States complies.”

Democrats, however, warned that ripping up the treaty was the wrong way to steer Russia — or China — back into a treaty order more responsive to modern weapons and threats.

“The Trump Administration is risking an arms race and undermining international security and stability,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “Russia’s brazen noncompliance with this treaty is deeply concerning, but discarding a key pillar of our nonproliferation security framework creates unacceptable risks.”

Trump scoffed at that argument.

“Honestly, I don’t think she has a clue; I really don’t,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “I don’t think Nancy has a clue.”

Anton Troianovsky in Moscow, Michael Birnbaum in Brussels and Karoun Demirjian in Washington contributed to this report.

'This is about saving capitalism': the Dutch historian who savaged Davos elite

Rutger Bregman never intended to take billionaires to task over tax at World Economic Forum


This is not rocket science': Rutger Bregman tells Davos to talk about tax – video

Larry ElliottEconomics editor

Fri 1 Feb 2019 13.35 GMT

Rutger Bregman had not really intended to stick it to the global elite. He never meant to have a pop at the idea that inequality could be solved by philanthropy or inviting Bono to Davos. But when the Dutch historian decided to go off-piste at the World Economic Forum and tell the assembled billionaires they should stop avoiding paying tax, he became an overnight social media sensation.

“It’s been a crazy week and just for stating the obvious,” said Bregman, when asked about a panel discussion at the WEF last month in which he said the issue was “taxes, taxes, taxes, and all the rest is bullshit in my opinion”.

Bregman had not been to Davos before. He was invited on the basis of the book Utopia for Realists,
which argued for a basic income and a shorter working week, ideas that have been taken up by some of the Silicon Valley billionaires who show up for the annual event in the Swiss Alps.

But he grew more irritated as the week wore on. Bregman gave a speech to a dinner of technology chief executives and then spoke at one of Davos’s private sessions, off limits to journalists. There he was surprised and maddened by the pushback when he mentioned tax. “One American looked at me as if I was from another planet,” he said.

As a result, Bregman decided to change his plan for a panel on inequality organised by Time magazine on the final morning of Davos. “I went to my hotel room and memorised what I wanted to say by heart,” he said.

“I more or less ignored the question asked by the moderator and gave my speech instead. It was mainly to ease my own conscience: someone has to say what needs to be said.”

What Bregman said, put simply, was the Davos emperors have no clothes. They talk a lot about how something must be done about inequality and the need to address social unrest, but cavil at the idea they might be a big part of the problem.

He told his audience that people in Davos talked about participation, justice, equality and transparency, but “nobody raises the issue of tax avoidance and the rich not paying their share. It is like going to a firefighters’ conference and not talking about water.”

Nothing happened over the weekend. Bregman went back to Amsterdam wondering whether his colourful language was a mistake, but then a video of the Time panel went viral, and it has received millions of views on Twitter alone.

Bregman, 30, is not entirely surprised at the reaction. He said he is part of a generation not traumatised by the cold war and radicalised by the financial crisis of a decade ago. “When we say what’s needed are higher taxes and the response is ‘that’s communism’, we say ‘whatever’,” he said.

“I am part of a broad social movement. Ten years ago, it would have unimaginable for some random Dutch historian to go viral when talking about taxes. Yet here we are.”

As a historian, Bregman noted the most successful period for capitalism occurred in the years after the second world war, when the top rate of tax in the US was above 90%.

“This is about saving capitalism,” he said. “Most innovation has come about through government spending. During the golden age period [after the second world war], there were way higher taxes on wealth, property, inheritance and top incomes. That’s what we need today if we are going to tame this beast called capitalism.”

Bregman was born in 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall came down. He grew up in the Dutch city of Zoetermeer, studied history at Utrecht University and contemplated doing a PhD before deciding he was not cut out for a career in academia.

“I didn’t want to waste four years on an insignificant subject nobody cares about,” he said. Instead, the global financial crisis pushed him in a different direction.

“I thought that we needed historians to take the stage and explain what’s going on. When I watched the crisis on TV, the only people being interviewed were economists, and these were the guys that didn’t see it coming. I thought that we needed some historians there, so I left academia,” Bregman said.

He spent a year working on a left-of-centre Dutch paper before joining a new journalism platform that paid him a basic income and provided the freedom to write about anything he chose. Utopia for Realists was the result.

Bregman is working on a new book in which he intends to challenge the view that humans are inherently selfish. It is not true, he said, that people revert to their true, nasty selves when the thin veneer of civilisation is stripped away.

Forty years since revolution, Iran taunts 'declining' America

FILE PHOTO: An elderly Iranian man walks past a large poster of Iran's late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in front of Tehran University, at the start of Friday prayers June 4, 2004. REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubazl/Files

FEBRUARY 1, 2019

DUBAI (Reuters) - Forty years after its revolution, Iran has no fear of a “declining” America, a senior cleric said on Friday at the start of official commemorations of the uprising that made the country a permanent enemy of the United States.

Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, a famously hardline cleric who is the secretary of the Guardian Council, a body with huge influence over the way Iran is run, used his speech to mock the leadership of President Donald Trump.

“Even many of America’s allies don’t listen to it anymore and they are not afraid of it,” Jannati said at the mausoleum of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who returned from exile in France to lead the revolution exactly 40 years ago.

“America cannot manage its own affairs now,” Jannati said in remarks carried by state television, adding that “millions of people are hungry there and America’s power is in decline.” He did not say what he was basing that assertion on.

The 1979 uprising deposed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a secular king allied to the West. Later that year, Iranian students stormed the U.S. embassy and held 52 Americans for 444 days - an affront to U.S. pride that still colours how Iran is viewed from Washington.

Trump last year pulled out of an international agreement under which Iran curbed its nuclear work in exchange for a sanctions relief. The re-imposed sanctions caused a currency crash, rampant inflation and added to investors’ hesitancy about doing business there.

Jannati, who opposed President Hassan Rouhani’s decision to negotiate away some of Iran’s nuclear rights, said: “Unfortunately, some of our officials believe that we cannot manage the country without America’s help. May such wrong thoughts be damned!”

Among many programmes on state TV featuring achievements since the revolution, was a short animation showing an Iranian-made Ghadir navy submarine surfacing near a U.S. aircraft carrier and other vessels which then inexplicably sink without any sign of an attack or explosion.

In December, the USS John C. Stennis entered the Gulf, ending a long absence of U.S. aircraft carriers.

Reporting by Dubai newsroom; Editing by Robin Pomeroy

Trump Once Wanted to Negotiate With Russia Over Nukes. Then Mueller Happened.

The U.S. president might be too hemmed in by the Russia probe to attempt a successor to the INF or START treaties.

U.S. President Donald Trump, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands before attending a joint press conference after a meeting at the Presidential Palace in Helsinki on July 16, 2018. (Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty Images)

BY MICHAEL HIRSH

| FEBRUARY 1, 2019, 4:48 PM

More than 30 years ago, when he was still a builder in Manhattan, Donald Trump said he had one great ambition: He wanted then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan to appoint him America’s envoy to Moscow to negotiate a nuclear arms deal. “It’ll take one hour of discussion before the Cold War is over,” Trump was said to have boasted at the time.

Plainly, the Trumpian grandiosity was always there, but what happened to the ambition? Now that he’s president, Trump doesn’t need to wait for an appointment to try his hand at nuclear negotiation. Only last year the president called nuclear weapons “the biggest problem in the world.” And yet Trump has barely mentioned the issue while his administration announced Friday it is pulling out of the three-decade-old Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and is possibly setting its sights on former President Barack Obama’s 2011 New START treaty, the strategic arms reduction pact that will expire about two weeks into the next presidential term if it isn’t extended. Negotiations on such an extension would need to begin soon.

 

Trump has always yearned for the big deal, and he’s demonstrated that he’s not fond of any treaty he didn’t negotiate himself, especially if it was Obama’s doing. Trump pulled out of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, Paris climate pact, and Trans-Pacific Partnership, and he replaced former President Bill Clinton’s NAFTA trade deal with the slightly retooled U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, even though the not-yet-confirmed accord retains most of the provisions of the original one.

But the nuclear arms arena is especially wide open and ripe for fresh presidential negotiation, many nuclear experts say. While some lament the likely demise of the INF pact—having served notice, Washington now has six months to formally withdraw—they also acknowledge that to some extent the treaty was based on outdated threats and technology. And they say Trump could, at long last, put his own stamp on nuclear arms negotiations in this new era.

“I would tell the president that, given the decision on INF, there’s an opportunity here not only to preserve New START but to make your own groundbreaking agreement with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” said Lynn Rusten, who served as senior director for arms control on Obama’s National Security Council. “And you can do it relatively easily and quickly by extending New START. You don’t need new underlying verification and inspection procedures. You can just build on it.”

In contrast to the INF Treaty, which Washington has accused Russia of violating for years, the Trump administration has not questioned whether Putin is adequately observing the New START treaty.
There may be several reasons why Trump is not moving ahead on nuclear weapons negotiations, despite his long-ago ambitions. One, they are notably difficult and abstruse, and Trump is not known as a details person (though the same reputation did not stop Reagan, who signed the INF Treaty in 1987). Second, Trump has purged his administration of moderate internationalists who tend to favor diplomacy—with Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly the most recent departures. His ultra-hawkish national security advisor, John Bolton, has long inveighed against both the INF and New START treaties.

But the main reason may have more to do with the multiple investigations into Trump’s Russia ties, especially special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into the 2016 Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Moscow. Last July, shortly before Trump flew to Helsinki for his first summit with Putin, he was asked by reporters what he hoped to accomplish. “No more nuclear weapons anywhere in the world, no more wars, no more problems, no more conflicts,” he declared. Trump also said he thought he and Putin would have “an extraordinary relationship.”

The summit, however, was widely deemed a political disaster for Trump, and it was perhaps the last time the president spoke in such positive terms of his relationship with the Russian leader. At the summit, Trump fumbled by appearing to accept Putin’s denials of election interference in the 2016 election over the findings of his own U.S. intelligence agencies, and since then the president has been hemmed in by almost constant questions in the media about whether he has been compromised by Putin and Russian intelligence—financially, sexually, or in some other way. The FBI at one point even opened up an investigation into whether Trump was a Russian counterintelligence asset. At the G-20 summit in Argentina in November 2018, Trump felt pressured to cancel his one-on-one with Putin (though he later held an “informal” meeting, the White House said, at which once again no official note-takers were reportedly present).

The oddity of Trump’s furtive relations with Putin under the shadow of the Russia probe is that he had previously said one of his goals as president was to dramatically improve relations with Moscow. And shortly before the Helsinki summit, Trump said he planned to discuss nuclear arms reduction with Putin.

“If we can do something to substantially reduce them, I mean, ideally get rid of them, maybe that’s a dream, but certainly it’s a subject that I’ll be bringing up with him,” Trump said. “The proliferation is a tremendous, I mean, to me, it’s the biggest problem in the world, nuclear weapons, biggest problem in the world.”

Experts say advances in technology—both in the nuclear arms themselves and in the ability to monitor them—justify creative new arms control deals building on the INF and New START treaties, since the older pacts don’t account for many of these changes. The Russians, for example, say they are working on advanced new weapons systems such as an “unlimited range” cruise missile as well as hypersonic weapons, while in his U.S. Nuclear Posture Review, Trump outlined the development of a new nuclear-armed, sea-launched cruise missile.

Meanwhile “we’re still doing verification with technologies from the 1970s,” said Alexandra Bell, a former senior Obama administration official now at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “The technology and tools of the information age haven’t been incorporated.”

New surveillance and verification technology not available during the INF Treaty era could also shift the focus from delivery systems—which are observable from space—to monitoring the number of nuclear warheads themselves. And despite some Russian concern over the possible passing of the INF Treaty—which covered ground-launched intermediate-range nuclear weapons targeted at Europe—Moscow’s own advances in air- and sea-launched weapons have rendered the agreement partly dated from its perspective as well.

Even so, the Kremlin remains concerned over the size of the U.S. arsenal and, with an economy roughly one-tenth the size of America’s, Putin knows he can’t afford another arms race of the kind that once bankrupted the Soviet Union.

“If I were playing the Russian hand, I would say, ‘Let’s have a new treaty, a Donald Trump treaty rather than an Obama treaty,’” said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear arms specialist at Harvard University’s Belfer Center. “If the Russians were clever, they would propose something to Trump attractive enough to get his Nobel Peace Prize juices flowing.” By tweaking the New START pact as he did with NAFTA—and there are ample opportunities, since a slew of new missile systems not currently covered by the treaty could then be accounted for—Trump could call the new accord his own.

Added Bunn: “Then Trump would be able to go out and say: That Obama was so stupid.”

But Trump may need to get past his Putin problem first. “I would rather take a political risk in pursuit of peace than to risk peace in pursuit of politics,” Trump said in Helsinki. He now has an opportunity to prove it.