World – Page 31 – praag.org

Misread telexes on Iran’s nuclear led to fundamental error

When Western intelligence agencies began in the early 1990s to intercept telexes from an Iranian university to foreign high technology firms, intelligence analysts believed they saw the first signs of military involvement in Iran’s nuclear programme. That suspicion led to U.S. intelligence assessments over the next decade that Iran was secretly pursuing nuclear weapons.

The supposed evidence of military efforts to procure uranium enrichment equipment shown in the telexes was also the main premise of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s investigation of Iran’s nuclear programme from 2003 through 2007.

But the interpretation of the intercepted telexes on which later assessments were based turned out to have been a fundamental error. The analysts, eager to find evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, had wrongly assumed that the combination of interest in technologies that could be used in a nuclear programme and the apparent role of a military-related institution meant that the military was behind the procurement requests.

The intercepted telexes that set in train the series of U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran was working on nuclear weapons were sent from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Credit: public domain
The intercepted telexes that set in train the series of U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran was working on nuclear weapons were sent from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Credit: public domain
In 2007-08, Iran provided hard evidence that the technologies had actually been sought by university teachers and researchers.

The intercepted telexes that set in train the series of U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran was working on nuclear weapons were sent from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran beginning in late 1990 and continued through 1992. The dates of the telexes, their specific procurement requests and the telex number of PHRC were all revealed in a February 2012 paper by David Albright, the executive director of the Institute for Science and International Security, and two co-authors.

The telexes that interested intelligence agencies following them all pertained to dual-use technologies, meaning that they were consistent with work on uranium conversion and enrichment but could also be used for non-nuclear applications.

But what raised acute suspicions on the part of intelligence analysts was the fact that those procurement requests bore the telex number of the Physics Research Center (PHRC), which was known to have contracts with the Iranian military.

U.S., British, German and Israeli foreign intelligence agencies were sharing raw intelligence on Iranian efforts to procure technology for its nuclear programme, according to published sources.
The telexes included requests for “high-vacuum” equipment, “ring” magnets, a balancing machine and cylinders of fluorine gas, all of which were viewed as useful for a programme of uranium conversion and enrichment.

The Schenck balancing machine ordered in late 1990 or early 1991 provoked interest among proliferation analysts, because it could be used to balance the rotor assembly parts on the P1 centrifuge for uranium enrichment. The “ring” magnets sought by the university were believed to be appropriate for centrifuge production.

The request for 45 cylinders of fluorine gas was considered suspicious, because fluorine is combined with uranium to produce uranium hexafluoride, the form of uranium that used for enrichment.

The first indirect allusion to evidence from the telexes in the news came in late 1992, when an official of the George H. W. Bush administration told The Washington Post that the administration had pushed for a complete cutoff of all nuclear-related technology to Iran, because of what was called “a suspicious procurement pattern”.[related_articles]

Then the Iranian efforts to obtain those specific technologies from major foreign suppliers were reported, without mentioning the intercepted telexes, in a Public Broadcasting System “Frontline” documentary called “Iran and the Bomb” broadcast in April 1993, which portrayed them as clear indications of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme.

The producer of the documentary, Herbert Krosney, described the Iranian procurement efforts in similar terms in his book “Deadly Business” published the same year.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton’s CIA Director John Deutch declared, “A wide variety of data indicate that Tehran has assigned civilian and military organisations to support the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons.”

For the next decade, the CIA’s non-proliferation specialists continued to rely on their analysis of the telexes to buttress their assessment that Iran was developing nuclear weapons. The top-secret 2001 National Intelligence Estimate bore the title “Iran Nuclear Weapons Program: Multifaceted and Poised to Succeed, but When?”

Former IAEA Deputy Director General for Safeguards Olli Heinonen recalled in a May 2012 article that the IAEA had obtained a “set of procurement information about the PHRC” – an obvious reference to the collection of telexes – which led him to launch an investigation in 2004 of what the IAEA later called the “Procurement activities by the former Head of PHRC”.

But after an August 2007 agreement between Iran and IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei on a timetable for the resolution of “all remaining issues”, Iran provided full information on all the procurement issues the IAEA had raised.

That information revealed that the former PHRC head, Sayyed Abbas Shahmoradi-Zavareh, who had been a professor at Sharif University at the time, had been asked by several faculty departments to help procure equipment or material for teaching and research.

Iran produced voluminous evidence to support its explanation for each of the procurement efforts the IAEA had questioned. It showed that the high vacuum equipment had been requested by the Physics Department for student experiments in evaporation and vacuum techniques for producing thin coatings by providing instruction manuals on the experiments, internal communications and even the shipping documents on the procurement.

The Physics Department had also requested the magnets for students to carry out “Lenz-Faraday experiments”, according to the evidence provided, including the instruction manuals, the original requests for funding and the invoice for cash sales from the supplier. The balancing machine was for the Mechanical Engineering Department, as was supported by similar documentation turned over to the IAEA. IAEA inspectors had also found that the machine was indeed located at the department.

The 45 cylinders of fluorine that Shahmoradi-Zavareh had tried to procure had been requested by the Office of Industrial Relations for research on the chemical stability of polymeric vessels, as shown by the original request letter and communications between the former PHRC head and the president of the university.

The IAEA report on February 2008 recorded the detailed documentation provided by Iran on each of the issues, none of which was challenged by the IAEA. The report declared the issue “no longer outstanding at this stage”, despite U.S. pressure on ElBaradei to avoid closing that or any other issue in the work programme, as reported in diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

The IAEA report showed that the primary intelligence basis for the U.S. charge of an Iranian nuclear weapons programme for more than a decade had been erroneous.

That dramatic development in the Iran nuclear story went unnoticed in news media reporting on the IAEA report, however. By then the U.S. government, the IAEA and the news media had raised other evidence that was more dramatic – a set of documents supposedly purloined from an Iran laptop computer associated with an alleged covert Iranian nuclear weapons programme from 2001 to 2003. And the November 2007 NIE had concluded that Iran had been running such a programme but had halted it in 2003.

Despite the clear acceptance of the Iranian explanation by the IAEA, David Albright of ISIS has continued to argue that the telexes support suspicions that Iran’s Defence Ministry was involved in the nuclear programme.

In his February 2012 paper, Albright discusses the procurement requests documented in the telexes as though the IAEA investigation had been left without any resolution. Albright makes no reference to the detailed documentation provided by Iran in each case or to the IAEA’s determination that the issue was “no longer outstanding”.

Ten days later, the Washington Post published a news article reflecting Albright’s claim that the telexes proved that the PHRC had been guiding Iran’s secret uranium enrichment programme during the 1990s. The writer was evidently unaware that the February 2008 IAEA report had provided convincing evidence that the intelligence analyst’s interpretations had been fundamentally wrong.

Source: IPS

Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy, received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in Afghanistan. His new book “Manufactured Crisis: the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare”, will be published in February 2014.

Goldman Sachs sued for selling worthless trades to Libya

Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street investment bank, is being sued in London for selling Libya worthless derivatives trades in 2008 that the country’s financial managers did not understand. Libya says it lost approximately $1.2 billion on the deals, while Goldman made $350 million.

At the time, the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), which invests profits from the country’s oil and gas exports, had assets worth $60 billion under former dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Goldman Sachs convinced LIA to buy long-term call options on six companies: Allianz, a German insurance and investment company; Banco Santander, a Spanish bank; Citbank, a U.S. bank; Électricité de France, a French state utility; ENI, an Italian oil company; and UniCredit, an Italian bank.

What the Libyans did not understand was that if the stocks in these six companies did not rise, their investments would become worthless. Instead the LIA executives were taken in by a trip to Morocco as well as “small gifts, such as aftershaves and chocolates” and an offer of an internship for Mustafa Mohamed Zarti, the brother of the Libyan fund’s deputy executive director, in Dubai and London.

“The unique circumstances allowed Goldman Sachs to take advantage of the LIA’s extremely limited financial and legal experience to deliberately exploit its position of influence and to take advantage in a way that generated colossal losses for the LIA but substantial profits for Goldman Sachs,” said LIA Chairman AbdulMagid Breish in a statement.

For example, LIA paid $200 million to gamble on the value of 22.3 million Citigroup shares. At the time, these shares were worth $5.7 billion and so long as they rose in value by at least $200 million, LIA stood to get its money back and the full value of the shares. But since Citigroup’s shares did not rise by at least $200 million, LIA lost its wager.

The timing of the bets was particularly bad. Since the deals were struck in early 2008, just before the last financial crisis when most share prices tumbled, the Libyans lost their wagers.

“We think the claims are without merit, and will defend them,” Fiona Laffan, a Goldman Sachs spokeswoman in London, told Bloomberg news service.

However, the bank recently claimed that it had retrained its staff to ensure that customers are no longer blind sided by sales pitches for complex products. “For all of our employees, the experience of initiating, approving and executing a transaction for a client at Goldman Sachs is now fundamentally different,” Goldman claimed at its annual meeting last year.

Goldman Sachs is not the first Wall Street bank to be accused of taking advantage of naive foreign investors. Morgan Stanley was sued for selling bundled sub-prime mortgages to China Development Industrial Bank (CDIB) from Taiwan that they knew would fail. Even Standard & Poors (S&P), Wall Street’s top ratings agency, has been accused of helping banks to sell “collateralized debt obligations” that they knew were likely to go sour.

But this is not the first time that Goldman Sachs has been happy to help governments carry out dodgy deals. Back in 2001, Goldman reportedly charged Greece $300 million to engage on “‘blatant balance sheet cosmetics” to help the country join the European Monetary Union.

Members of the union were required to have government debt under 60 percent of gross domestic product and a budget deficit to gross domestic product ratio of under 3 percent. Unfortunately, Greece debt exceeded 100 percent and deficits were at 3.7 percent

Goldman Sachs took advantage of a loophole that allowed countries to enter the EMU if they could demonstrate that they were lowering their debt and their budget deficit. To do this, Goldman Sachs sold Greece a “cross-currency swap” that gave the government cash up front in return for a big payment at the end of the loan period. The beauty of the arrangement was that since such currency swaps were permitted by the European Statistical Agency (Eurostat), the debt and deficit appeared to shrink.

Source: Corpwatch

Fracking sites show increase in infant birth defects

Although fracking already attracts controversy as an allegedly bio-hazardous industry, a new study takes it up a notch by showing that the practice can badly impact the health of unborn children.

Babies still in their mothers’ wombs living within a 10-mile range of fracking wells are in much greater danger of congenital heart defects (CHD) and neural tube defects (NTD). This was surmised in a recent study correlating birth data with geographical locations of gas wells and congenital conditions.

Hydraulic fracking is a process of fracturing rock with the use of pressurized liquid consisting of water, sand and chemicals. It drills deep underground, forming fractures that force gas and other chemicals to come out of rock and into the hole. Proponents believe it is a much more economical way of getting to the gas and oil. Environmental groups maintain the process can cause small earthquakes and badly contaminate water, leading to a myriad of problems.

The study, called “Birth Outcomes and Maternal Residential Proximity to Natural Gas Development in Rural Colorado” comes from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIH) and Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP), and explores three variations of birth defects, fetal growth and pre-term birth.

Some of the resulting conditions include endocardial cushion defect, pulmonary valve atresia and stenosis. It also turns out that if a pregnant mother lives within a 10-mile radius, the chances of the baby inheriting CHDs go up by 30 percent.

The Colorado study elicited data from sampling nearly 125,000 births in the period between 1996 and 2009.

“Fracking causes babies to be deformed – the more we learn about fracking, the worse it gets,” Gary Wockner, the director of the Clean Water Action program in Colorado, told environmental business portal Ecowatch.com while commenting on the research.

According to Wockner, this is the first serious study in the Colorado area to actually tackle the effects of fracking on people’s health.

“If you live near a fracking site and you want to have a healthy baby, you should consider moving,” he said.

There are a reported 47,000 gas wells in the state of Colorado. A substantial 26 percent of those are located within a 300 – sometimes as little as 30 – meter radius of any type of living structure.

However, numerous studies have been conducted on the chemicals released through the drilling process. According to the study, natural gas development (NGD) has led to emissions of harmful compounds such as nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and others substances. They show up everywhere, from wells to any type of receptacle containing water to pipelines and even home taps – basically, any place associated with the process of drilling.

A particular recent example, although not in Colorado, included a North Dakota man literally setting the water coming out of his tap on fire.

Even the less harmful pollutants, according to the study, have the capacity to increase exposure of the unborn fetus to more harmful mutagens.

And as the study concludes, “taken together, our results and current trends in NGD underscore the importance of conducting more comprehensive and rigorous research on the potential health effects of NGD.”

It remains to be seen how fracking in Colorado will be curtailed when the practice of gas drilling provides the state with nearly 44,000 jobs and brings in hundreds of millions of dollars. However, according to The Gazette, drilling keeps moving closer and closer to populated areas than before.

Source: globalresearch.ca

Swedish special forces deployed in Africa

sof — Swedish operator chasing camel milk

Sweden’s SOF (or Special Operations Forces) are reported to have deployed to Chad, the Central Africa Republic, and the Congo in recent years.

Swedish operators may have also conducted other classified covert operations, including domestically in their home nation, which have gone unreported thus far. SOG (Swedish Operation Group) is reported to have a small number of women in the unit, or attached to it, who work in intelligence roles.

Partnered with indigenous forces, SOG has conducted dozens, if not hundreds, of raids in Afghanistan.

SOG also appears to be a part of Admiral McRaven’s “Global SOF framework,” now called the ISCC under SOCOM. This is a new and unique organization that represents a positive step forward for US and Allied SOF.

“Sweden has two full-time officers in the NATO special forces team in Belgium and another tied to the new U.S. special forces management’s international staff, which opened in October in Florida. The latter is confirmed by Defence Minister Karin Enstrom (M) , who visited headquarters last summer…The U.S. is building a global network of special units that can work together. When the international headquarters opened in October last year included ten countries , Sweden and Australia are the only ones who are not members of NATO.” (Dn.se)

What the future holds for Sweden’s SOG, and for the new Global SOF network, is something that we will be keeping an eye on.

Source: sofrep.com

US Delta Force covertly operating in Southern Libya

US special forces are involved on the ground in the South of Libya against tribes and the US presence worries France.

“Since the end of last year, Delta units disguised as nomads, frame members of the Libyan special forces in their hunt against al-Qaida in the south,” says Le Figaro a French military source. “The United States believes that the threat of disintegration South Libya is such that they can no longer be satisfied with a single aerial application of this threat.” These mixed teams are supported by drones and other means of recognition air, which locate convoys considered suspects. “Then aboard their 4 × 4, the commandos are approaching the target, and most of the time, the Americans leave Libyans treat the goal,” says the source.

Prime Minister Ali Zeidan and his defense minister gave the green light to these operations

These operations involve the use of a disused base in the south. Problem, the Libyan Ministry of Defence has always denied the allegations.

On the French and British participation, the French General Staff has already started to prepare the minds (Figaro: “France evokes an operation in Libya”: “An international operation to put an end to the instability prevailing in the southern Libya would be an ideal scenario, today said the Chief of Staff of the French armed forces, Admiral Edouard Guillaud “)

Note that the threat of disintegration South Libyan operations came from 2011 for which we should all congratulate ourselves. The Director of National Intelligence has made a bleak description at a recent hearing in the U.S. Senate (“incubator” for terrorists, weapons of mass flow, porous borders, jihadists biased against supporting countries in the region to French intervention in Mali …). I would add that the state of emergency was declared in the south on January 19.

The situation has changed since October 2013 when a controversy had arisen because the Americans had conducted a raid on Libyan soil to stop an alleged leader of Al Qaeda. Libyan Prime Minister had sought clarification from the U.S. who responded that they were aware.

We can see the grotesque situation in which we are now, gravely infringing on questions of international law.

Libya has seen intense fighting in several cities; the most intense was in the city of Sebha in the south.

Government has deployed air force and used heavy weapons to quell the uprising of the southern tribes.

Armed militias from different regions including Misrata and Zintan were also supporting government troops in their fight to regain control over the Mehint air base and the city of Sebha. Sources has estimated the number of dead at least 186 people including women and children.

Source: Le Figaro

Three ‘suicides’ and a missing reporter all tied to Wall Street investigations

In a span of four days last week, two current executives and one recently retired top ranking executive of major financial firms were found dead.

Both media and police have been quick to label the deaths as likely suicides. Missing from the reports is the salient fact that all three of the financial firms the executives worked for are under investigation for potentially serious financial fraud.

When a series of tragic events involving one industry occur within an 18-day timeframe, the statistical probability of these events being random is remote.

Given that JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Russell Investments where the three worked, are subjects themselves of investigations, a more serious, independent look at these deaths is called for.

The deaths began on Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis with the knowledge of senior executives. Two other whistleblowers have brought similar charges against Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche Bank is also under investigation by global regulators for potentially rigging the foreign exchange markets – an action similar to the charges it settled in 2013 over its traders’ involvement in the rigging of the interest rate benchmark, Libor.

Just two days after Broeksmit’s death, on Tuesday, January 28, a 39-year old American, Gabriel Magee, a Vice President at JPMorgan in London, plunged to his death from the roof of the 33-story European headquarters of JPMorgan in Canary Wharf. According to Magee’s LinkedIn profile, he was involved in “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives.”

Magee’s parents, Bill and Nell Magee, are not buying the official story according to press reports and are planning to travel from the United States to London to get at the truth. One of their key issues, which should also trouble the police, is how an employee obtains access to the rooftop of one of the mostly highly secure buildings in London.

Nell Magee was quoted in the London Evening Standard saying her son was “a happy person who was happy with his life.” His friends are equally mystified, stating he was in a happy, long-term relationship with a girlfriend.

JPMorgan is under the same global investigation for potential involvement in rigging foreign exchange rates as is Deutsche Bank. The firm is also said to be under an investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for its involvement in potential misconduct in physical commodities markets in the U.S. and London.

One day after Magee’s death, on Wednesday, January 29, 2014, 50-year old Michael (Mike) Dueker, the Chief Economist at Russell Investments, is said to have died from a 50-foot fall from a highway ramp down an embankment in Washington state. Again, suicide is being presented by media as the likely cause. (Do people holding Ph.D.s really attempt suicide by jumping 50 feet?)

According to Dueker’s official bio, prior to joining Russell Investments, he was an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis from 1991 to 2008. His duties there included serving as an associate editor of the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics. He also was editor of Monetary Trends, a monthly publication of the St. Louis Fed.

Bloomberg News quotes William Poole, former President of the St. Louis Fed from 1998 to 2008, saying “Everyone respected his professional skills and good sense.”

According to a report in the New York Times in November of last year, Russell Investments was one of a number of firms that received subpoenas from New York State regulators who are probing the potential for pay-to-play schemes involving pension funds based in New York. No allegations of wrongdoing have been made against Russell Investments in the matter.

The case of David Bird, the oil markets reporter who had worked at the Wall Street Journal for 20 years and vanished without a trace on the afternoon of January 11, has this in common with the other three tragedies: his work involves a commodities market – oil – which is under investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations for possible manipulation. The FBI is involved in the Bird investigation.

Bird left his Long Hill, New Jersey home on that Saturday, telling his wife he was going for a walk. An intentional disappearance is incompatible with the fact that he left the house wearing a bright red jacket and without his life-sustaining medicine he was required to take daily as a result of a liver transplant. Despite a continuous search since his disappearance by hundreds of volunteers, local law enforcement and the FBI, Bird has not been located yet.

Source: Wall Street on Parade

Two-thirds of rape victims in Liberia are children

Julia Duncan Cassell, Liberia's Minister of Gender and Development — Julia Duncan Cassell, Liberia’s Minister of Gender and Development

The Liberian president, Ellen Johnson Shireaf, has appeared on Liberian television on Monday to denounce the country’s epidemic of child rape, calling it one of Liberia’s “biggest challenges” and “a growing concern”.

“It is shameful that this continues to mar the image of our country,” Sirleaf said.

She said current legislation was undermined by “families of victims who are easily compromised, by the lack of evidence, and by sympathetic judges” and called on communities to do more to bring rapists to justice.

“I chaired a meeting of women leaders… who are working on a program that will call on religious, traditional and community leaders, parents, teachers, women and youth groups to become agents of change and commit to take action to prevent sexual violence, as this is everyone’s responsibility,” she said.

“We need your support also, to ensure that our children and our women are safe.”

According to Liberia’s Gender Ministry, ” 65 percent of the 1,002 cases reported in 2013 concerned victims aged between three and 14, yet just 137 cases came to court with only 49 rapists convicted”. In a statement to journalists, the Gender Ministry also said: “As a result of rape 10 children from eight counties between the ages of three and 14 died during the year 2013. In some of the cases the perpetrators are still at large.”

The Gender Ministry deplored the habit of families to coverr up the rape if the attacker is related to the victim. There was also a lack of qualified medical personnel.

“Parents are compromising the cases because mostly the perpetrators are relatives or friends. We can say that the figure could be at least three times this if parents were not compromising,” the ministry said.

However, many people eschew the Western-style court and medical system and prefer “mediation by community elders or village chiefs”.

The website Global Post reported on a recent case, unbeknown to most of the outside world, whereby a 14-year-old girl Olivia Zinnah was buried here on 22 December, “after suffering years of pain and surgeries following a rape when she was 7”.

Olivia Zinnah

Although the country’s Gender Ministry made efforts to draw attention to Zinnah’s death, her passing went unremarked but for a few stories in local media. Zinnah, who died of an infection in a Monrovia hospital a week before Christmas, was the fourth girl this year to succumb to rape-related injuries in this West African nation of four million, the ministry said.

For three years after her 2005 violation in a rural area outside Monrovia, Zinnah received only traditional healing, which can include herbs and sorcery. She was not taken to a doctor. Police were not called. When her uncle Lawrence Samuel came to visit the family in 2008, he was shocked to see Olivia in a terrible state, with poorly treated wounds and a systemic infection.

“She was almost decomposed from the infection,” said Samuel, 70.

Samuel asked women in the family what had happened and they told him Olivia had been raped by a family member, he said. Samuel reported the crime and named the suspect to the police, brought his niece to Monrovia for medical care, and contacted the Ministry of Gender, he said.

Ministry officials took on Olivia’s case, paying for her medical treatment and four surgeries, the last of which left her with a colostomy bag.

“We did everything we could to save her,” said Gender Minister Julia Duncan Cassell.

Doctors Without Borders (DWB) in 2011 reported that 92 percent of females treated for rape in its Liberia facilities were under 18. A DWB study published in November said that of about 1,500 females treated in Monrovia clinics in 2008 and 2009 after rape, four out of 10 were younger than 12 and one in 10 were younger than 5. “Half the survivors were children aged 13 years or younger and included infants and toddlers,” the report said.

Because sexual violence so often goes unreported, it’s impossible to know the true scale of the child-rape problem here. In many cases, families of raped children accept money from the rapist to hush up the crime, Cassell said. In Olivia’s case, it does not appear her family accepted any money, but once the girl’s uncle reported the crime, the rest of the family shunned both Olivia and her mother, Cassell said. That common social penalty imposed on those who break silence around rape cases combines with the payoffs to deter reporting and foster impunity for rapists, the minister said.

“There are a lot of other Olivias out there that we don’t know about,” Cassell said.

Deputy Gender Minister Annette Kiawu played a central role in the ministry’s intervention in Olivia’s case.

“For her it was difficult,” Kiawu said. “She always had an urge to want to play like the other children. You would see her once in a while laughing, or trying to jump around. She used to smile every now and then.”

Although linkages have been drawn between widespread sexual violence during Liberia’s 14 years of civil war and the current levels of sexual violence, Cassell said the causes of Liberia’s epidemic child rape go beyond the fallout from conflict that ended a decade ago. Poverty leads to the settlements and thus to impunity; poor education leads to a lack of understanding among males of the physical and emotional damage caused by rape; high rates of teen pregnancy lead to lots of mothers unequipped to secure girls from predators, Cassell said.

“You’ve got a 16-year-old girl with two children already,” Cassell said. “How does she know how to protect her children?”

The alleged perpetrator of Olivia’s rape was arrested, but released without prosecution. Gender ministry officials are investigating to determine why he went free, and plan to get the case reopened. “He needs to pay for that,” Cassell said.

Her ministry paid for Olivia’s funeral, and ministry officials were on hand to discuss the case with a handful of local media, part of Cassell’s effort to bring attention onto the child-rape issue, and build awareness among the populace about the need to prevent and report sexual violence. So far, there’s been no significant public reaction to the death of Olivia here or abroad. – News agencies and Global Post website

‘Africa needs fertility management’

Stopping overpopulation is one way the dangers of climate change can be mitigated, according to two of the most prominent believers in global warming.

Former Vice President Al Gore and Microsoft founder Bill Gates said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that contraception is a key in controlling the proliferation of unusual weather they say is endangering the world.

“Depressing the rate of child mortality, educating girls, empowering women and making fertility management ubiquitously available … is crucial to the future shape of human civilization,” said Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on global warming.

Gore said Africa’s population is expected to surpass India’s and China’s by the mid-21st century and will be more than both combined by the end of the century.

Source: CNBC

Iraq, Iran to challenge Saudi oil dominance

Iraq is poised to flood the oil market by tripling its capacity to pump crude by 2020 and is collaborating with Iran on strategy in a move that will challenge Saudi Arabia’s grip on the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

Iraq’s intention to challenge Saudi Arabia’s status as the “swing producer” in the OPEC cartel could see a dramatic fall in oil prices if Baghdad decides to break the group’s quotas and sell more of its crude on the open market.

“We feel the world needs to be assured of fuel for economic growth,” Hussain al-Shahristani, Deputy Prime Minister for Energy in Iraq told oil industry delegates attending a Chatham House Middle East energy conference.

Al Shahristani said on Tuesday that Iraq plans to boost its capacity to produce oil to 9m barrels a day (bpd) by the end of the decade as Baghdad rushes to bolster its economy, which is still shattered by war and internal conflict. Iraq was producing 3m bpd in December, according to the International Energy Agency.

“It’s very difficult to predict actual world (oil) demand by 2020 because the world economy is unpredictable,” said Mr al-Shahristani.

British oil giants BP and Royal Dutch Shell are also poised to benefit from Iraq’s ambitious production plans.

Both companies are already managing two huge oil fields in southern Iraq which are vital if Baghdad is to achieve its goal.

However, even if Iraq is able to achieve its target of boost production capacity it is unlikely to be able to put in place sufficient pipeline and port infrastructure to export the additional crude.

Iraq’s main export terminal for loading oil tankers at Al Faw near Basra will require billions of pounds worth of improvements in addition to the refurbishment of its pipeline network.

Iraq’s ambitious plan could see it clash increasingly with the regime in Saudi Arabia, which has used its influence in OPEC over the last decade to keep oil prices above $100 a barrel. Saudi itself is now under pressure to boost output to maintain market share. The kingdom pumped 9.8m bpd in December up by about 100,000 barrels from the previous month.

Experts say that attention within OPEC, which pumps 30pc of the world’s crude, could increasingly focus on compliance with more of the group’s members tempted to pump more barrels to protect their share of the market as the cartel grapples with the rise of US shale oil production.

Combined, Iran and Iraq hold greater reserves of oil than Saudi Arabia and the potential with the help of international investment to match its capacity to produce oil, which currently stands at around 12.5m b/d of crude.

Source: The Telegraph

Eating on camera in South Korea

The job that Americans were destined to do: get paid to eat a lot of food while other people watch on the internet. Reuters is reporting on “gastronomic voyeurism,” a trend growing in popularity in South Korea.

34-year-old Park Seo-yeon used to work for a consulting firm but has left that job. Why? She’s earning more than $9,000 a month to eat on camera.

Going by the name, “The Diva,” she sits down to a table of food and eats for up to three hours. Her viewers chat with her and send her “virtual balloons,” which Reuters says, “translate into cash.”

So, what’s the deal? The Diva thinks it’s about enjoying something through someone else, “People enjoy the vicarious pleasure with my online show when they can’t eat that much, or don’t want to eat food at night, or are on a diet.”

One of The Diva’s fans, 26-year-old Park Sun-Young says it’s about approximating the feeling of having company. “It’s comforting for people who eat alone,” says Park.

Apparently, eating alone is something that is happening more and more in South Korea. Reuters points out that within 15 years, a third of the nation’s population could be comprised of one-person households, the fastest rate amongst developed countries.

Source: Reuters

Rice wars simmer after Thai protest leader’s assassination

Regime gunmen assassinated celebrated Thai protest leader Sutin Taratin Sunday, during a brazen broad-daylight drive by shooting amid a melee between protesters and armed “red shirt” regime enforcers. Protests were held across the country at polling stations in opposition to advance voting.

Forty-five out of fifty polling stations were closed in Bangkok alone.

The assassination of Sutin Taratin came after the regime and its supporters made explicit threats of armed violence against any who opposed upcoming elections.

TIME magazine on January 16 reported in their article, “Bangkok Shutdown: Yingluck Supporters Prepare to Fight for Democracy,” that: “As Thailand’s anti-government protests enter their fourth day, observers say prospects for violent confrontation are increasing, with reports of government supporters stockpiling weapons in case of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s ouster.

“According to the Bangkok Post, radical members of the Red Shirts — diehard champions of Yingluck and her notorious brother Thaksin Shinawatra — are readying a cache of arms in case the 46-year-old premier is forced from office by either military or judicial intervention.”

The paper quoted a Red Shirt source as saying “There are strong anti-coup and anti-court sentiments among the red-shirt mavericks who are familiar and experienced with weapon use.”

The very next day, the attacks began. The first was a grenade attack on peaceful marches lead by protest leader Suthep Thuangsuban, which killed one and injured 39. Suthep Thuangsuban was only 30 meters away from the blast, indicating it was a likely assassination attempt.

Protesters would then storm the abandoned building where the attack originated to uncover what appeared to be a weapons cache and a safehouse, just as TIME described.

Another twin grenade attack took place at Bangkok’s Victory Monument, along with nightly drive-by shootings up until the regime announced a “state of emergency” citing their own terror campaign as justification.

After a conversation with Chareon Laothamatas, president of Thai Rice Exporters Association, reporter Michael Yon notes:

“Many people realize by now that the rice scheme in Thailand, under Yingluck, is ravaging rice farmers and seriously damaging the economy. I had a long talk with Chareon this morning in his office. What he explained was even worse than what appears in the papers. In retrospect I should have requested to set up a video camera; what he said should be more widely heard. The devastation to that sector is long-term and could take years to regain Thai dominance in rice exports.

An important aspect of the devastation is that the quality of rice also has been damaged, reducing its value. For instance, for various reasons related and unrelated to the scheme, fragrant rice has been losing its fragrance.

Meanwhile, Chareon explained that India and Vietnam have taken the lead, but that India has its own rice scheme that could similarly wreck their progress, while Vietnam is the smartest with its plan.

And so now with millions of tons of rice still sitting in Thai warehouses, the first crop of 2014 is now starting to come in. Chareon’s suggestion was not to worry about the rice in the warehouses at this moment, but to move the new crop out the door and then get back to the stored rice, which he suggested should be used in the domestic market.

I asked if the rice farmers will fight the government if they are not paid. He said they will not fight so much right now because they are in their fields working to bring the first harvest in, which will be over in February. He said that if the farmers decide to do something serious, the post-harvest window of March-April is the most likely window.

I call these “farmers wars” – not that this is a war in Thailand. Farmers wars typically revolve around the crop cycles and seasons. Thailand — the world’s number one rice exporter — produces one-third of the world’s supply.

Source: ATN/Michael Yon

Ancient Christian communities are being destroyed

The Arab Spring, and to a lesser extent the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, were touted as the catalysts for a major historic shift in the region. From Egypt to Syria to Iraq, the Middle East’s dictatorships would be succeeded by liberal, democratic regimes. Years later, however, there is very little liberality or democracy to show. Indeed, what these upheavals have bequeathed to history is a baleful, and barely noticed legacy: The near-annihilation of the world’s most ancient communities of Christians.

The persecution of Christians throughout the Middle East, as well as the silence with which it has been met in the West, are the subject of journalist Ed West’s Kindle Single “The Silence of Our Friends.” The booklet is a brisk and chilling litany of horrors: Discriminatory laws, mass graves, unofficial pogroms, and exile. The persecuted are not just Coptic and Nestorian Christians who have relatively few co-communicants in the West, but Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants as well.

Throughout the Middle East the pattern is the same. Christians are murdered in mob violence or by militant groups. Their churches are bombed, their shops destroyed, and their homes looted. Laws are passed making them second-class citizens, and the majority of them eventually leave.

The world’s most ancient Christian communities are being destroyed.

In Egypt, a rumor that a Muslim girl was dating a Christian boy led to the burning of multiple churches, and the imposition of a curfew on a local Christian population. Illiterate children were held in police custody for urinating in a trash heap, because an imam claimed that pages quoting the Koran were in the pile and had been desecrated. Again, the persecution resulted in Christian families leaving their homes behind.

In Syria, the situation is even worse. In June 2013, a cluster of Christian villages was totally destroyed. Friar Pierbattista Pizzaballa reported that “of the 4,000 inhabitants of the village of Ghassanieh… no more than 10 people remain.”

Two Syrian bishops have been kidnapped by rebel groups. Militants expelled 90 percent of the Christians in the city of Homs. Patriarch Gregorios III of Antioch says that out of a population of 1.75 million, 450,000 Syrian Christians have simply fled their homes in fear.

In Iraq, the story is the same but more dramatic. According to West, between 2004 and 2011 the population of Chaldo-Assyrian Christians fell from over a million to as few as 150,000. In 2006, Isoh Majeed, who advocated the creation of a safe haven for Christians around Nineveh, was murdered in his home. The number of churches in Iraq has declined to just 57, from 300 before the invasion. The decline of Iraq’s Christian population since the first Gulf War is roughly 90 percent, with most of the drop occurring since the 2003 invasion.

The U.S. and the U.K. bear the responsibility in this catastrophe, since they oversaw the creation of Iraq’s postwar government and did little to protect minority faiths.

The clueless and callous behavior of Western governments in these episodes are obvious. U.S. reconstruction aid to Iraq is distributed according to Iraqi laws that discriminate against Christian Iraqis. The U.S. pours billions of foreign aid into Egypt, and yet the Christians in that country are not allowed to build churches (or even so much as repair toilets in them) without explicit permission from the head of state, almost never granted. Last September, the U.S and Britain attempted to make their support of Syrian rebel groups explicit and overt, but at the same time some of these militias were executing a pogrom against Christians.

A Christian shopkeeper in Ma’loula summed it up in a quote to the BBC: “Tell the EU and the Americans that we sent you Saint Paul 2,000 years ago to take you from the darkness, and you sent us terrorists to kill us.”

Source: The Week

Bill Gates on developing thinner condoms

Vaccines aren’t dangerous, according to Bill Gates. It’s the belief that they can cause autism that poses a serious threat to the health of children.

The 58-year-old billionaire philanthropist spoke to “AMERICA with Jorge Ramos” in an interview that will air on Tuesday.

“Nothing has saved more lives than vaccines, and nothing has been more disproven than any link between vaccines and negative things like autism,” Gates told Ramos.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released its annual letter on Tuesday, with Gates outlining his vision for eradicating the world’s worst poverty in the next 20 years.

Global health initiatives and vaccines are a major part of achieving that goal. The foundation website says that “vaccines are among the most cost-effective investments in global health, saving about 2.5 million lives each year.”

Gates spoke with Ramos about his foundation’s investment in research to create a thinner, stronger condom. The foundation awarded more than $1 million in grants toward the goal in November.

“The common analogy is that wearing a condom is like taking a shower with a raincoat on,” Dr. Papa Salif Sow, a senior program officer on the HIV team at the Gates Foundation told The New Republic at the time of the announcement. “A redesigned condom that overcomes inconvenience, fumbling, or perceived loss of pleasure would be a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty.”

Ramos asked Gates why he decided to experiment with improving condoms.

“In general, if women want to have contraception, we think it should be available to them,” Gates said on Tuesday. “So whatever new ideas there are to make it more convenient, less side effects…we’re a big funder of innovation in that area, as well.”

Source: fusion.net

Zurich air traffic controllers bring Iran, Israel together

Zurich air traffic controllers may have inadvertently succeeded where diplomats have failed for decades: to bring Israelis and Iranians together.

As the jets of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Switzerland today to take their leaders to the World Economic Forum, their planes were parked side-by-side under cloudy skies.

Rouhani, the first Iranian leader in a decade to visit Davos for the World Economic Forum, will be looking for deals to boost an economy that shrank more than 5 percent in the last fiscal year through March under the weight of international sanctions. He’s due to address the forum in the ski resort tomorrow during a session called “Iran in the World.”

Netanyahu, among the most outspoken critics of the Iranian government, is seeking to keep the sanctions in place. He has called Rouhani a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and urged the world to be wary of his “charm offensive.”

Source: Bloomberg