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sebastianshaw · 3 years

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@sammysdewysensitiveeyes So, you asked me not long ago, how I’d feel about Haven as a mutant on Krakoa. As it happens, I’m on an RP Discord where I write her as such, since they allow characters there to be mutants who aren’t mutants in canon, in order to join the RP, since it’s set on Krakoa. I made her a healer, able to heal herself and others. Super on the nose, but it’s what she would want, and it also fulfills *my* desire for her not to be hurt anymore (I mean, she still can be, she’ll just recover) Anyway, in March I wrote this for her in that setting. Featuring Shaw as usual since he’s one of my other muses there and, well, you know I love writing my faves together and their conversations because self-indulgence. No obligation to read, just I remembered I had written it and was like “Oh that’s like what Sammy asked about”

Shaw’s latest job was to spread the Krakoan medicine throughout the country of India. A considerable task; India was made up of no less than 28 states and 8 union territories, with an immense and diverse population. There were the dilapidated slums and rural villages that Westerners most often imagined, but there were also bustling cosmopolitan cities, centers of business and technology and commerce to rival New York, and it was in the biggest of these that Shaw was starting---

Mumbai.

Accompanying him on the recommendation of Charles Xavier was Radha Dastoor---Haven of the healing gardens, whom he had previously met when she had helped with his back. At first Shaw had thought this was a bit racist of Charles, but it turned out not only was Haven from Mumbai specifically herself, she had wonderful connections for the tasks. Her philanthropy had connected her with doctors, hospitals, shelters, and its hidden communities of those suffering afflictions such as the oft-claimed-eradicated leprosy. But, Shaw could have done most of that himself, aside from the hidden colonies. No, where Haven came in most handy was, shockingly, her knowledge of Mumbai’s criminal underworld. Not because she had ever been involved with it, but because she had done so much work getting people out of it---the women and children she had worked to get out of human trafficking rings, the survival sex workers rescued from abusive pimps, the children enticed away from little “found families” of criminals who used them for their dirty work. . .the list went on. And of course she hadn’t been able to do all that alone, she had been funding an entire network of people to get this done, to keep the rescued parties safe and help them in getting to a new life, to block off or arrest those who tried to take them back or attack the rescuers themselves (Haven had been a target MANY times, but those had been in the days when she’d been kept safe by The Adversary’s powers. . . ) and thus she had an abundance of detectives and double agents on the inside. And because they were on the inside, they could bring in the medicine. . . and bring out the mutants being sold, enslaved, and Heaven wept at what else. Mutants that, for the moment, were staying with them in The Rajmani. Haven’s wealth was originally inherited, but she’d kept it coming---so that she could keep giving it away---through The Rajmani, a luxury heritage hotel on par with the likes of New York’s Ritz or Plaza. In income, anyway. In beauty, it surpassed them both. Well, perhaps that was subjective, but it was built within a restored Mughal Palace, and Shaw had to admit he was impressed with the great domes and slender minarets, the massive vaulted gateways and delicate ornamentation, the elegant water gardens and charbagh walkways through the carefully cultivated yet lush tropical greenery. Most of all, though, he liked learning the fact that the woman earned at least a little of her own money in some kind of sense, even if by her own admission she only owned it, not managed it. Shaw looked down on those who only inherited wealth, just as they had often looked down on him for earning his. Haven, though, did not seem to look down on him. She didn’t seem to have the proverbial stones to look down on anybody, and she certainly was around people who actually deserved it. She seemed to love being around that type, in fact, went out of her way to benefit them, centered her entire life around it. Some people, Shaw had found, were just mad like that. He suspected that it had something to do with growing up with money, taking it front granted and thus not comprehending its worse. But at least she didn’t dare think she was better than him, so she was that sensible at least. Although it was the last word he’d describe her with. No, if he were to describe Radha “Haven” Dastoor, he’d probably start with insipid, senseless, and downright delusional. But she was also. . .not an unengaging conversationalist. The reverse, actually. “The Mughals were constantly trying to invade Mumbai,” Haven explained, while Shaw nodded along. He was interested in architecture, and in martial history. “But as much of India as they had conquered, the native Marathis were just as constantly pushing them back. It was touch and go for decades. It surprises me that a Mughal structure remained without being torn down, though it was taken over.” “The native Marathis, you say---are Mughals not native? Or merely from another part of India?” “Well, that’s a complicated question, and the answer is a controversial one, so I till try to explain it as neutrally as I can,” Haven replied, and she indeed sounded neutral. They were standing together on the jharoka, an elaborately carved balcony with a roof, each with a glass of nimbu pani, though Shaw would have preferred a good Scotch. “The Mughal Empire in South Asia was begun by Babur, who came from Central Asia, specifically what is today Uzbekistan. His tribe was of Mongol origin, and the word Mughal is itself derived from “Mongol”. He actually came to South Asia to escape his fellow Uzbeks---it’s a very long story--but instead of being a refugee, he became a conqueror, starting by burning Lahore for two days and killing the last Sultan of the Lodi dynasty in Delhi, and the Lodi dynasty itself was not Indian, but Afghan. India was colonized by the Middle East long before Europe decided to try its hand. But to answer your question. . .they did not begin as Indian, no, but they were a part of our country for two hundred years and left a deep mark in our culture---clothing, food, language, art, and, of course, the buildings. But, the same could also be said of the British, and you would be hard-pressed to find anyone, including myself, who considers the British Raj to have been “Indian” simply because they were there for a long time and forced their ways upon us. At the same time, my mother is a Parsi, a people who originate from Iran, thousands of years ago---Parsi comes from “Persian”. And how can one tell me my mother, who was born and raised here, whose mother’s mothers and father’s fathers were born and raised here, that she was not Indian? And though Babur came from elsewhere, his sons and successors were born and raised here, and often to Indian mothers, and their descendants dwell here still, with no other homeland, so are they not Indian? Because if they were not, then perhaps I am not either, at least by half. Ultimately. . . it depends which Mughals, at what time period, and whom you ask, I suppose.” “And I suppose there’s also a difference between ethnicity and nationality to be considered,” Shaw said, though Haven was now losing his interest with this topic. He’d been more interest in the invasions and warring. “Ethnically, one can be anything, and still nationally be American if you were born there or otherwise have citizenship. But, I suppose you need not contemplate such matters anymore--” He cracked a wry smile as she, with a questioning look, awaited the rest of his sentence. “---after all, we are all Krakoan now, are we not? We’re all mutants, and that’s the only thing that matters.” Haven smiled back, not wryly but sincerely, “Oh, I am now, yes. But I am also still everything I was before. I have been balancing multiple identities my entire life Mr. Shaw, I believe I shall be able to continue to do so. But I must confess--” A moment of hesitation. “--I do not truly think of myself as a mutant yet.” She was not sure what reaction that she had expected to this confession, but it was not what Shaw said next. “I don’t either, Ms. Dastoor.” She looked at him in surprise. “Or rather,” he elaborated, “I do not consider myself a mutant in any sense other than in the way I consider myself to have black hair. It’s a physical fact, but nothing else. It is not a “culture” or “identity” to me, and in truth I find such attitudes to be foolish and even dangerous, not to mention a sign that an individual lacks their own personality and convictions and thus must merely default to group identity politics. Being a mutant tells you nothing about me, Ms. Dastoor, and so if I were to talk about who I am, that’s not something I’d include any more than my eye color.” “That’s an especially interesting perspective from someone on Krakoa’s Council,” said Haven, sounding very curious, “Could I ask you---” But her voice was cut off by the unmistakable sound of gunshots---and from INSIDE the building. “The children!” Haven exclaimed. It was not just her and Shaw that were lodged at The Rajmani tonight; it was where the mutants they had rescued were staying before the journey to the nearest portal tomorrow. And most were, indeed, children. As quickly as she spoke, she was moving back inside from the jharoka, but Shaw grabbed her by the elbow, easily holding her back despite her not being a small or weak woman despite her gentle demeanor. Haven was large, and could carry a grown man. But Shaw didn’t even need to be rough to halt her. “You stay put,” he said sternly, “The guards will handle this.” “Mr. Shaw---” “They are better equipped than you, Ms. Dastoor, you will only interfere--” Shaw and Haven had, of course, not come alone. Shaw had brought several trained mutants on his own payroll---not everyone needed to be one of the X-Men to be capable of handling a few humans and their toys--and they had been tasked with keeping watch over, as Shaw had earlier referred to them as, the latest flock of Krakoa’s little sheep. A statement Haven had also wondered about, though it was far from her mind now. Haven might have been about to argue with him. She might have been about to admit he was right, and she should hang back. But as with her question, she was cut off by a gunshot as she turned her face back to him and started to speak. A gunshot, and bullet through the back of her head. It exited through her right eye, and bounced off Shaw’s face and fell to the floor. She would have as well, had he not caught her as she crumpled. When her healing factor had repaired her enough that she regained consciousness, she was on Krakoa again, as were all the refugees, safe and sound. And so was Shaw. “Well, Ms. Dastoor,” he said, “You’ve been murdered---or rather, nearly so--by perfect strangers for a quirk of your genetics. Nothing can make you more of a mutant than that, wouldn’t you agree?” Haven smiled slightly, “I feel as much a mutant as perhaps a Mughal might feel Indian, Mr. Shaw. Take that as you will.” He took it ambiguously. Which was indeed how she had meant it. == END==

#fic #writing #out of shirt

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khalilhumam · 3 years

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The mistake of designating the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/the-mistake-of-designating-the-houthis-as-a-foreign-terrorist-organization/

The mistake of designating the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization

By Gregory Johnsen One of Donald Trump’s first foreign policy decisions as president was authorizing a Navy SEAL raid in Yemen. That operation, which he signed off on over dinner, was poorly planned, risky, and rushed. The result: several dead Yemeni civilians, including 10 children, and one dead U.S. soldier. Now, as President Trump prepares to leave office, he looks poised to make another unforced error in Yemen. This time the Trump administration is seeking to designate the Houthis, a local militia group that has seized power in the country’s northern highlands, as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. That would be a mistake. Designating the Houthis would be bad for Yemeni civilians, bad for peace talks, and, ultimately, bad for U.S. national security. It would also box-in President-Elect Biden before he even takes the oath of office, although perhaps that’s part of the attraction for exiting Trump officials. For much of the past six years — under both the Obama and Trump administrations — the United States has been complicit in Saudi Arabia’s brutal and bloody war in Yemen. The U.S. trained Saudi pilots, sold the kingdom billions in weapons, and performed mid-air refueling for Saudi jets on bombing runs to Yemen, a shocking number of which resulted in civilian casualties. The U.S. bears at least some responsibility for those deaths. When Saudi Arabia announced the start of the war — what it called “Operation Decisive Storm” — it did so not from Riyadh, but rather from Washington, D.C., signaling the importance of U.S. support. The U.S. reciprocated that same evening by announcing the formation of a joint intelligence cell in Riyadh. Saudi officials told the Obama administration the war should take about six weeks. It is now in its sixth year. Along the way, the dead have piled up faster than international organizations can count. The United Nations, which gave up all hopes of comprehensive casualty figures years ago, calls Yemen simply “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” The tragedy, of course, is that the crisis is entirely man made. Like the Saudis, the Houthis have bloody hands in Yemen. They have disappeared opponents, tortured prisoners, and used sexual violence as a weapon of intimidation and control. The Houthis are also supported by Iran, which has shipped the group missile components in violation of U.N. sanctions and, just last month, dispatched an ambassador to Houthi-controlled territory, effectively recognizing the group as a nation-state. It is the Houthis’ ties to Iran that is behind the Trump administration’s last-minute push to designate the group as a foreign terrorist organization. President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — encouraged strongly by Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman and Saudi Arabia — believe that a hardline approach from the U.S. will force the Houthis to compromise or capitulate. There are several problems with this approach, most notably, that it won’t work. Designating the Houthis a foreign terrorist organization would ban its members from traveling to the U.S. and freeze the group’s financial assets. But three of the Houthis’ top commanders, including the group’s leader, Abd al-Malik al-Houthi, are already under U.N. sanctions, which include an international travel ban and an asset freeze. I served for two years — from 2016 to 2018 — on the U.N. panel that monitored these sanctions in Yemen. What we found: The Houthi leadership largely doesn’t travel abroad and the group doesn’t have international assets to freeze. Indeed, U.N. sanctions, which targeted the Houthis and former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, actually had the unintended consequence of strengthening the Houthis. The sanctions weakened Saleh, who did have international assets to freeze, depriving him and his networks of much-needed cash, ultimately undermining him to the point that the Houthis could kill him and consolidate their control in the north. In Yemen, sanctions hurt the wrong people. The Houthi leadership is largely insulated from shortages in food and medicine. Yemeni civilians are not. Placing the Houthis on the terrorist list would effectively cut off humanitarian aid to the roughly 16 million people who live under Houthi control, many of whom depend on outside aid to survive. (Several humanitarian organizations wrote a letter to Secretary of State Pompeo on November 16, urging him to reconsider the designation.) If Pompeo presses forward with the designation anyway, the U.S. will be directly responsible for what is likely to be hundreds of thousands of preventable civilian deaths in Yemen. A terrorist designation would also further hamper peace talks. The U.N. has not had much luck — it is on its third special envoy in six years — getting the various sides in Yemen’s multi-faceted war to reach an agreement. But labeling the side that is currently winning on the ground a terrorist group is unlikely to provide a breakthrough.

Ultimately…this move is bad for U.S. national security.

Ultimately, however, this move is bad for U.S. national security. At a time when the U.S. is drawing down troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to end wars, it should not be venturing abroad in search of new enemies. The Houthis are a domestic insurgency not a global terrorist organization, and no one — particularly not the secretary of state — should conflate the two. There is also an element of self-fulfilling prophecy with such a designation. Saudi Arabia went to war in Yemen in early 2015 because it was worried that the Houthis were an Iranian proxy. They weren’t, but after nearly six years of war, the Houthis and Iran are closer than ever, exchanging ambassadors and battlefield lessons. The Houthis haven’t targeted Americans in terrorist attacks, but that could change following a U.S. designation. Already this week, the U.N. and other aid organizations pulled out more than a dozen American workers from Houthi-controlled territory. The U.S. is turning an adversary into an enemy. After nearly two decades of combatting terrorism around the world, the U.S. should be looking to narrow the scope of the groups it targets and designates, not widen it. Yemen doesn’t need another terrorist designation. It needs the sort of creative and proactive diplomacy that went missing in action under the Trump administration.

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alexsmitposts · 5 years

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Epstein and the American Lie Machine Let’s begin with why Jeffrey Epstein is such big news. It was Epstein that introduced Melania to Donald, it is Epstein that is named in the infamous “Jane Doe” lawsuit as sexually assaulting a 12 year old girl with full participation by Donald Trump. This is why the Epstein story dominates American news, it is seen as an opening to bring down Donald Trump. The Epstein story touches everywhere, discredits American justice, American media, reaches into the White House, perhaps through numerous occupants and eventually settles in, a continuing mystery, still protected by a controlled media as it leads us to not one but 20 billionaires, a secret society tied to Epstein, that represents the power of Israel over the governments of the US, Britain and Canada. This makes solving the Epstein mystery key to understanding events that spiral closer and closer toward a war likely to dwarf the conflicts after 9/11. What is the real story? First of all, sex with children is nothing new in America. Child sex was the norm when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 and little changed other than it becoming a convenient tool to smear political opponents. For two centuries, girls as young as 12 were regularly married off, sometimes forcibly, to men as old as 70 while others were sold into slavery to work in the mills or join the endless hordes serving in America’s brothels. Every town and village in America still has brothels, usually rooms or camping trailers behind adult book stores or massage parlors. Similar services are available at the finest hotels in New York, Washington and elsewhere, just ask the concierge. Hypocrisy isn’t uniquely American but it flourishes in America wrapped in the flag and bible as no place else on earth. For those unfamiliar with the Epstein story, it all began in 2003 with a writer for Vanity Fair, Vicky Ward, wrote a story about a mysterious individual who claimed to be a billionaire, name Epstein. Epstein had little formal education but for reasons unknown landed a prestigious teaching job and then moved on to the most corrupt Ponzi scheme operations on Wall Street. Behind all this was Epstein’s ever more colorful history of raping children and doing so allegedly aided by Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the infamous Robert Maxwell, British media mogul and alleged Mossad blackmailer who was murdered in 1991. Our sources say Epstein and Maxwell operated from a fabulous New York brownstone belonging to a top retail clothing industry leader and Israeli proponent. The nature of that relationship, certainly “deeply personal” or more, is banned from the US media. Suffice it to say Epstein was gifted the property in New York rumored to be worth well over $50 million and, moreover, most of Epstein’s public wealth is said to come from investing funds for that same client, the one with whom Epstein had that very personal relationship, a very very close male to male friendship. For two decades, even longer, Epstein, Maxwell and others including but not limited to Donald Trump, attorney Alan Dershowitz and even Prince Andrew were accused of raping children and building a network that enticed school girls into their web to be subjected to every imaginable perversity. All the while, the media reported little or nothing of this despite endless criminal complaints and civil suits. Evidence now shows that witnesses were paid off, police bullied by a large Washington law firm and one foreign intelligence agency actually blocked a 2008 prosecution, which recently led to the resignation of US Secretary of Labor, Andrew Acosta. Acosta claims he ordered a “hand slap” prosecution of Epstein for numerous charges of child rape because Epstein worked for an intelligence agency, albeit not an American intelligence agency. We understand that Acosta made this assumption as Epstein’s probable co-defendant, Ghislaine Maxwell, has long been reputed to be a high-ranking Mossad officer. However, there is no evidence to confirm this or that Epstein and Maxwell had been blackmailing members of congress, Supreme Court justices and “captains of industry” for decades. Even still, these rumors and allegations are repeated endlessly. What is important to note, however, that until days ago, the Epstein story was taboo for the American press. You see, Epstein knew “everyone,” Benjamin Netanyahu, Rupert Murdoch, Mick Jagger, Donald Trump, rumored to be a regular companion, certainly former President Bill Clinton and almost all of Europe’s “trash” nobility. From the Rupert Murdoch owned New York Post, dated July 15, 2015: “Epstein, who was an investor in a Manhattan modeling venture, has been accused by prosecutors of using his connections to the modeling company to ‘audition’ girls to give him massages that often ended up in sexual abuse. ‘Over the years, it seems Epstein relied on … [the] modeling business to source underage girls for sex,’ writes Conchita Sarnoff, an investigative reporter, in her book ‘Trafficking.’ A former Manhattan-based model agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, also alleged an Epstein-Victoria’s Secret pimp pipeline. (Victoria’s Secret is a chain of stores owned by Israeli American billionaire Leslie Wexner, allegedly one of the architects of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. In other court filings, Maxwell and Epstein are accused of raping underage girls at Wexner’s Ohio home, victims who were held prisoner by Wexner’s security personnel, according to written testimony. Wexner heads Mega, a group of 20 Israeli American billionaires who fund Israel’s lobbying effort in support of military action against Muslim nations.) ‘He [Epstein] portrayed himself as the back door to get a girl into Victoria’s Secret. Some of those girls got in,’ he said. Another Manhattan model entrepreneur told The Post that Maxwell (alleged child rapist and Mossad blackmailer) was a constant fixture at Victoria’s Secret events. ‘They were always these really trashy shows full of rich men in the audience,’ he said. ‘Ghislaine acted as the kind of Nazi guard, telling everyone where they were sitting in the audience and that she had new ‘pop tarts,’ which is what she called the young models.’ (Ghislaine Maxwell has been accused of sexually assaulting two children, both female, in court filings.)’” The national security implications for the United States here are endless. First of all, we have a first lady in the White House, or at least there for some public occasions, who has some affiliation with Epstein and may have, herself, been victimized. This could be used to influence American policy in so many ways and yet nothing is asked, indications of a high level coverup. Then we have Acosta, the now disgraced former US Attorney and highly unqualified Secretary of Labor who may have been named to a cabinet post to buy his silence on Epstein. Only now does he tell us that he was threatened personally and gave Epstein a “sweetheart deal” because Epstein was a “spy.” Problem being, Epstein was probably a spy against the US, not “for” the US. Tied to this story, of course, is where we can follow the money, into the biggest names in American business and directly to the highest levels of AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Council) and ADL (Anti-Defamation League), organizations long cited and even investigated for actions damaging to the US, actions done “in agency” for a foreign government. All the while this goes on, the same names, these same billions, this same influence, is pushing the US toward war with Iran. Sadly, while the media looks for a way to embarrass the president or first lady, the real problem may well be a bribery, blackmail and a spy ring that is pushing the world to the brink of destruction.

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newstfionline · 7 years

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A North Korean ship was seized off Egypt with a huge cache of weapons destined for a surprising buyer

By Joby Warrick, Washington Post, October 1, 2017

Last August, a secret message was passed from Washington to Cairo warning about a mysterious vessel steaming toward the Suez Canal. The bulk freighter named Jie Shun was flying Cambodian colors but had sailed from North Korea, the warning said, with a North Korean crew and an unknown cargo shrouded by heavy tarps.

Armed with this tip, customs agents were waiting when the ship entered Egyptian waters. They swarmed the vessel and discovered, concealed under bins of iron ore, a cache of more than 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades. It was, as a United Nations report later concluded, the “largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”

But who were the rockets for? The Jie Shun’s final secret would take months to resolve and would yield perhaps the biggest surprise of all: The buyers were the Egyptians themselves.

A U.N. investigation uncovered a complex arrangement in which Egyptian business executives ordered millions of dollars worth of North Korean rockets for the country’s military while also taking pains to keep the transaction hidden, according to U.S. officials and Western diplomats familiar with the findings. The incident, many details of which were never publicly revealed, prompted the latest in a series of intense, if private, U.S. complaints over Egyptian efforts to obtain banned military hardware from Pyongyang, the officials said.

It also shed light on a little-understood global arms trade that has become an increasingly vital financial lifeline for North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in the wake of unprecedented economic sanctions.

A statement from the Egyptian Embassy in Washington pointed to Egypt’s “transparency” and cooperation with U.N. officials in finding and destroying the contraband.

“Egypt will continue to abide by all Security Council resolutions and will always be in conformity with these resolutions as they restrain military purchases from North Korea,” the statement said.

But U.S. officials confirmed that delivery of the rockets was foiled only when U.S. intelligence agencies spotted the vessel and alerted Egyptian authorities through diplomatic channels--essentially forcing them to take action--said current and former U.S. officials and diplomats briefed on the events. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss U.S. and U.N. findings, said the Jie Shun episode was one of a series of clandestine deals that led the Trump administration to freeze or delay nearly $300 million in military aid to Egypt over the summer.

Whether North Korea was ever paid for the estimated $23 million rocket shipment is unclear. But the episode illustrates one of the key challenges faced by world leaders in seeking to change North Korea’s behavior through economic pressure. Even as the United States and its allies pile on the sanctions, Kim continues to quietly reap profits from selling cheap conventional weapons and military hardware to a list of customers and beneficiaries that has at times included Iran, Burma, Cuba, Syria, Eritrea and at least two terrorist groups, as well as key U.S. allies such as Egypt, analysts said.

Some customers have long-standing military ties with Pyongyang, while others have sought to take advantage of the unique market niche created by North Korea: a kind of global eBay for vintage and refurbished Cold War-era weapons, often at prices far lower than the prevailing rates.

Over time, the small-arms trade has emerged as a reliable source of cash for a regime with considerable expertise in the tactics of running contraband, including the use of “false flag” shipping and the clever concealment of illegal cargo in bulk shipments of legitimate goods such as sugar or--as in the case of the Jie Shun--a giant mound of loose iron ore.

“These cover materials not only act to obfuscate shipments, but really highlights the way that licit North Korean businesses are being used to facilitate North Korean illicit activity,” said David Thompson, a senior analyst and investigator of North Korean financial schemes for the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a nonprofit research organization based in Washington. “It is this nesting which makes this illicit activity so hard to identify.”

With North Korea’s other profitable enterprises being hurt by international sanctions, Thompson said, such exports are now “likely more important than ever.”

North Korea’s booming illicit arms trade is an outgrowth of a legitimate business that began decades ago. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the Soviet Union gave away conventional weapons--and, in some cases, entire factories for producing them--to developing countries as a way of winning allies and creating markets for Soviet military technology. Many of these client states would standardize the use of communist-bloc munitions and weapons systems in their armies, thus ensuring a steady demand for replacement parts and ammunition that would continue well into the future.

Sensing an opportunity, North Korea obtained licenses to manufacture replicas of Soviet and Chinese weapons, ranging from assault rifles and artillery rockets to naval frigates and battle tanks. Arms factories sprouted in the 1960s that soon produced enough weapons to supply North Korea’s vast military, as well as a surplus that could be sold for cash.

By the end of the Cold War, North Korea’s customer base spanned four continents and included dozens of countries, as well as armed insurgencies. The demand for discount North Korean weapons would continue long after the Soviet Union collapsed, and even after North Korea came under international censure and economic isolation because of its nuclear weapons program, said Andrea Berger, a North Korea specialist and senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, Calif.

“North Korea’s assistance created a legacy of dependency,” said Berger, author of “Target Markets,” a 2015 monograph on the history of Pyongyang’s arms exports. “The type of weaponry that these [client] countries still have in service is largely based on communist-bloc designs from the Cold War era. North Korea has started to innovate and move beyond those designs, but it is still willing to provide spare parts and maintenance. As the Russians and Chinese have moved away from this market, the North Koreans have stuck around.”

As a succession of harsh U.N. sanctions threatened to chase away customers, North Korea simply changed tactics. Ships that ferried artillery rockets and tank parts to distant ports changed their names and registry papers so they could sail under a foreign flag. New front companies sprang up in China and Malaysia to handle transactions free of any visible connection to Pyongyang. A mysterious online weapons vendor called Glocom--jokingly dubbed the “Samsung of North Korean proliferators” by some Western investigators--began posting slick videos hawking a variety of wares ranging from military radios to guidance systems for drones, never mentioning North Korea as the source.

The sanctions stigma inevitably scared away some potential buyers, but the trading in the shadows remains brisk, intelligence officials and Western diplomats say.

The list also includes Egypt, a major U.S. aid recipient that still maintains diplomatic ties and has a history of military-to-military ties dating back to the 1970s with Pyongyang, said Berger, the Middlebury researcher. Although Cairo has publicly sworn off dealing with North Korea, she said, incidents such as the Jie Shun show how hard it is to break old habits, especially for military managers seeking to extend the life of costly weapons systems.

Egypt’s army today still has dozens of weapons systems that were originally of Soviet design. Among them are at least six types of antitank weapons, including the RPG-7, the 1960s-era grenade-launcher that uses the same PG-7 warhead as those discovered on the Jie Shun. The number of Egyptian RPG-7 tubes in active service has been estimated at nearly 180,000.

“Egypt was a consistent North Korean customer in the past,” Berger said. “I would call them a ‘resilient’ customer today.”

While U.S. officials have declined to publicly criticize Egypt, the Jie Shun incident--coming on top of other reported weapons deals with North Korea in recent years--contributed to the diplomatic turbulence that defined relations between Cairo and the Obama and Trump administrations. U.S. officials confirmed that the rockets were among the factors leading to the Trump administration’s decision in July to freeze or delay $290 million in military aid to Egypt.

During Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi’s visit to Washington that month, President Trump praised the military strongman before TV cameras for “doing a fantastic job.” But a White House statement released afterward made clear that a warning had been delivered in private.

“President Trump stressed the need for all countries to fully implement U.N. Security Council resolutions on North Korea,” said the official statement, including the need to “stop providing economic or military benefits to North Korea.”

#North Korea #small arms trade #Egypt

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janicecpitts · 5 years

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Only Six Countries Have Equal Rights For Men And Women, World Bank Finds Only 6 Countries Give Women The Same Work Rights As Men. The U.s. Isn’t One Of Them.

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eretzyisrael · 7 years

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10 little known things about Israel’s past

In honor of the Jewish state’s 69th birthday, we present, in no particular order, 10 little-known aspects of modern Israel’s history.

1. El Al used to fly to Tehran.

Iran and Israel enjoyed mostly good relations up until the Islamic revolution that overthrew the shah in 1979. Iran recognized Israel in 1950, becoming the second Muslim-majority country to do so (after Turkey). Iran supplied Israel with oil during the OPEC oil embargo, Israel sold Iran weapons, there was brisk trade between the countries, and El Al flew regular flights between Tel Aviv and Tehran. All that ended a week after the shah’s ouster, when Iran’s new rulers cut ties with Israel and transferred its embassy in Tehran to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Even after 35 years of hostilities, however, Iranians have less antipathy toward Jews than any other Middle Eastern nation. A 2014 global anti-Semitism survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 56 percent of Iranians hold anti-Semitic views — compared to 80 percent of Moroccans and 93 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. For more on Israelis in Iran, check out the 2014 documentary “Before the Revolution.”

2. Israel is home to hundreds of Nazi descendants.

At least 400 descendants of Nazis have converted to Judaism and moved to Israel, according to filmmakers who made a documentary about the phenomenon several years ago. In addition, others converted to Judaism or married Israelis but do not live in the Jewish state – such as Heinrich Himmler’s great-niece, who married an Israeli Jew and lives overseas.

In Israel’s early years, the state was roiled by a debate over whether to accept German reparations for the Holocaust (it did), and Germany remained a controversial subject: From 1956 until 1967, Israel had a ban on all German-produced films.

3. Ben-Gurion invented Israeli couscous (sort of).

The tiny pasta balls known as Israeli couscous – called ptitim in Hebrew – were invented in the 1950s at the behest of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who asked the Osem food company to come up with a wheat-based substitute for rice during a period of austerity in Israel. The invention, which Israelis dubbed “Ben-Gurion’s rice,” was an instant hit.

4. Israel had no TV service till the late ‘60s.

The first Israeli TV transmission did not take place until 1966, and at first was intended only for schools for educational use. Regular public broadcasts began on Israeli Independence Day in May 1968.

This 1958 scene of a family watching television could not have been photographed in Israel, as the Jewish state had no TV until 1966. (Wikimedia Commons/JTA)

For almost two decades more, Israel had only one channel, and broadcasts were limited to specific hours of the day. A second channel debuted in 1986, and cable was introduced in 1990. Today, Israeli TV is a popular source for Hollywood scriptwriters: “Homeland” (Showtime), “In Treatment” (HBO), “Your Family or Mine” (TBS), “Allegiance” (NBC), “Deal With It” (TBS), “Tyrant” and “Boom” (Showtime) all are remakes of Israeli shows.

5. Queen Elizabeth II’s mother-in-law is buried in Jerusalem.

Prince Philip’s mother, born in 1885 as Princess Alice of Battenberg and congenitally deaf, spent much of her life in Greece after marrying Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark (yes, he was simultaneously prince of two different European countries). During the Nazi occupation of Greece, Alice hid a Jewish woman and two of her children from the Nazis, earning her eventual recognition by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as a “Righteous Among the Nations” and by the British government as a “Hero of the Holocaust.”

She moved to London in 1967 to live in Buckingham Palace with her son and daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II. After the princess died two years later, her body was interred in a crypt at Windsor Castle. In 1988, she was transferred to a crypt at the Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives – honoring a wish she had expressed before her death. The Mount of Olives is home to the world’s oldest continuously used cemetery.

6. Alaska Airlines airlifted thousands of Yemenite Jews to Israel.

When anti-Jewish riots broke out in Yemen after Israel’s victory in the 1948 War of Independence, Yemen’s Jewish community decided to move en masse to the Jewish homeland. James Wooten, president of Alaska Airlines, was among those moved by their plight. Between June 1949 and September 1950, Alaska Airlines made approximately 430 flights in twin-engine C-46 and DC-4 aircrafts as part of Operation Magic Carpet, the secret mission that transported nearly 50,000 Jews from Yemen to Israel. Pilots had to contend with fuel shortages, sandstorms and enemy fire, and one plane crash-landed after losing an engine, but not a single life was lost aboard the flights.

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biofunmy · 5 years

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Iran, Hong Kong, Royal Ascot: Your Tuesday Briefing

(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the sign-up.)

Good morning.

We’re covering new penalties against Iran, anger toward Hong Kong’s police force and all the hats at the Royal Ascot.

“We will continue to increase pressure on Tehran,” Mr. Trump said before signing the executive order. “Never can Iran have a nuclear weapon.”

Details: While previous sanctions cut off revenues from Iranian oil exports, this round will bar Iranian leaders from access to financial instruments.

Analysis: The new sanctions are designed to force political change in the country and compel its leaders to reopen negotiations about its nuclear program.

But some analysts said the economic penalties had strengthened local support for hard-line officials in Tehran and might provoke the country to lash out.

Australia’s Catholic Church rejects a feminist nun

Sister Joan Chittister is a well-known figure in America. She rose to prominence in the 1980s with her opposition to nuclear proliferation, and has since given numerous lectures and written more than 50 books calling for women’s equality and social justice.

She was supposed to speak at a Catholic education conference in Australia next year. But a few weeks ago, she received a letter from the Archdiocese of Melbourne effectively disinviting her without providing a reason.

She said she suspected that it had been because church leaders didn’t like her ideas.

Quotable: “I see it as a lot bigger than one conference,” she said in an interview with The Times. “I see it as an attitude of mind that is dangerous to the church.”

Takeaway: The dispute over her invitation, unreported until now, arrives at a time of tension for the Catholic Church in Australia, writes our bureau chief, Damien Cave.

After Cardinal George Pell — a former archbishop of Melbourne who also served as the Vatican’s treasurer — was convicted for molesting two choir boys and subsequently appealed, the church has been facing a backlash from everyday Catholics over its culture of secrecy and conservative values.

DJI, made in America

The large Chinese drone-maker has recently come under scrutiny from the Trump administration over concerns that its machines send sensitive surveillance data back to Beijing.

So to win over American officials, the company announced that it would convert a warehouse in California into an assembly plant to build a new version of its popular model. And the new machine, called Mavic 2 Enterprise Dual, saves data only on the drone itself rather than by transmitting information wirelessly.

The company — the latest Chinese entity to get caught in the cross hairs of the ongoing trade war — hopes these moves will be enough to allow its new product to be sold in the U.S.

By the numbers: About 70 percent of all drones in the U.S. are supplied by DJI, including industrial-grade drones used to survey remote areas, and those used by U.S. government agencies.

Looking ahead: President Trump will meet President Xi Jinping for trade talks at the sidelines of the G-20 summit, which kicks off on Friday.

Hong Kong’s police scramble to salvage reputation

The 30,000-member police force was once considered “Asia’s finest,” in part for being restrained in its responses.

That changed on June 12, when officers tear-gassed and beat largely peaceful demonstrators who had gathered to protest a proposed extradition law. They fired rubber bullets for the first time in decades.

That day has become a focus of ongoing demonstrations in Hong Kong, with protesters demanding an investigation into police conduct. Anger swelled when the police described the largely peaceful demonstrations as riots — a term with legal ramifications for participants.

Background: Cracks in the police force’s reputation first began to show during democracy protests in 2014, known as the Umbrella Movement, when officers used tear gas and pepper spray against peaceful protesters.

What’s next? The police and a government-appointed watchdog that monitors complaints both said they would investigate the tactics used against the protesters.

But many protesters and pro-democratic lawmakers have called for an independent inquiry.

More demonstrations to pressure the government to withdraw the extradition bill are expected on Wednesday.

If you have 15 minutes, this is worth it

Jackie Kennedy’s transformative year

A 20-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier, above, third from left, arrived in France in August 1949 and began a year that would change her life.

Our writer retraced her steps through Paris, seeking a glimpse of the period that the future wife of President John F. Kennedy later called “the high point in my life, my happiest and most carefree year.”

Here’s what else is happening

Winter Olympics: Italy beat out Sweden to host the 2026 Winter Games, amid waning interest and rising costs. The venues will be divided between Milan and a ski resort.

Vietnam: A U.S. citizen was sentenced to 12 years in prison for attempting to overthrow the state by inciting protests and by trying to attack government offices in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City with gasoline bombs and slingshots, according to a state-run newspaper.

Bangladesh: At least five people were killed and dozens injured when part of a train heading for the capital, Dhaka, careened off a railway bridge that had failed, officials said.

Nissan: The company will hold its first annual meeting today since the fall of its former chairman, Carlos Ghosn, focusing on whether to reappoint the chief executive, Hiroto Saikawa, to the board.

Amazon: The company’s domination of the books market offers insight on some of the potential problems under a tech monopoly. Its bookstore is rife with counterfeits, but it does little to rein in the lawlessness, according to publishers, writers and industry groups.

Google: Sidewalk Labs, a sibling company of the search giant, is proposing to remake Toronto’s rundown waterfront, using new technologies, such as automatic awnings to shield pedestrians from rain, sensors to track the speed of people crossing streets, and robots to pick up trash. But critics worry about how much data would be collected and about privacy.

Snapshot: Elaborately dressed spectators arriving at the Royal Ascot on its third day. Our London correspondent, Ellen Barry, went to the horse races — a major event on the British social calendar — in search of answers about class and the state of England today. She quickly realized she was wearing the wrong hat and there was much she didn’t understand about the country.

Women’s World Cup: The U.S. beat Spain for a spot in the quarterfinals. Tomorrow, China will face Italy and Japan will take on the Netherlands.

What we’re reading: This BuzzFeed News article. “Zheng Churan was detained for 37 days for protesting sexual harassment on public transit in China,” writes Jennifer Jett, an editor in our Hong Kong office. “Now she is running around her city, Guangzhou, every day to call attention to the case of her husband, a journalist and activist who disappeared into police custody in March.”

Now, a break from the news

Watch: “Everything in this art form is self-expression,” the dancer José Xtravaganza says. “That’s what vogueing is.” Watch him freestyle.

Listen: From “Rocketman” to “Her Smell,” “Blaze” to “Vox Lux,” the film industry seems to think all musicians have the same ups and downs. Our critics discuss on the new Popcast.

Smarter Living: Are you a driver who doesn’t use your turn signal? There’s evidence that in addition to making the roads safer, the act of signaling provides a cognitive benefit to the driver. “When you turn on the turn signal, you’re turning on your brain,” said Chris Kaufmann, a driving school instructor and former police officer. “It’s the start of a checklist to look left, look right, signal, look left, look right.” That level of mindfulness can reduce the possibility of an accident.

And, no, your coffee habit is not the reason you aren’t a millionaire.

And now for the Back Story on …

The rainbow flag

As Pride Month winds down, we’re looking at one of the most enduring L.G.B.T.Q. symbols.

The artist Gilbert Baker, who described himself as the “gay Betsy Ross,” created the design for the rainbow flag to celebrate the diversity of the gay community. The flag first appeared at a gay pride march in San Francisco on this day in 1978.

The flag originally consisted of eight colored stripes, each with its own significance: pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sun, green for nature, turquoise for magic, blue for peace and purple for spirit. The flag was later streamlined into the current six-color version.

“Our job as gay people was to come out, to be visible,” said Mr. Baker, who died in 2017 at the age of 65. “A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility, or saying, ‘This is who I am!’”

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Alisha

Thank you Chris Stanford helped compile the briefing and wrote today’s Back Story. Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford provided the break from the news. You can reach the team at [email protected].

P.S. • We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about the recent military crackdown in Sudan. • Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: Sing the praises of (5 letters). You can find all our puzzles here. • A scholarship in memory of Robert Pear, who covered health care and other national issues for the Times for 40 years, is being set up at Columbia University, where he received his master’s from the Graduate School of Journalism.

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nishantwap · 6 years

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Egypt’s Sisi Clamped Down on Political Opposition—Next Up Is the Economy

New Post has been published on https://www.hsnews.us/egypts-sisi-clamped-down-on-political-opposition-next-up-is-the-economy/

Egypt’s Sisi Clamped Down on Political Opposition—Next Up Is the Economy

Egypt’s Sisi Clamped Down on Political Opposition—Next Up Is the Economy – WSJ

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi speaks during the inauguration of an agricultural project at a military base. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The military has amassed a growing business empire under the former general-turned-president, leading to renewed popular resentment

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi speaks during the inauguration of an agricultural project at a military base. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

May 21, 2018 11:10 a.m. ET

CAIRO—Three years ago, President

Abdel Fattah Al Sisi’s

government announced that a gleaming new capital city would rise in Egypt’s eastern desert by 2022, featuring tree-lined boulevards, new homes for five million people and the tallest building in Africa.

The project is now well behind schedule, according to its military-controlled developer. The only finished structure is a military-owned hotel in a cream-colored compound. Project spokesman Khaled El Husseiny said just one of three phases is under construction. “We did not plan for anything other than the first phase, I have to be honest,” he said.

President Sisi won re-election in March with 97% of the vote, facing only a token challenger after every credible opposition candidate was jailed or removed from the race. Within the Arab world, Mr. Sisi’s continued rule is an example of the resurgent regimes that increasingly claim victory over the forces unleashed by the 2011 Arab Spring.

Egypt is also an example of how those same forces are bubbling just under the surface. In many ways, Mr. Sisi’s strategy mirrors that of former President Hosni Mubarak, whose nearly three-decade rule here was ended by popular uprising. Like Mr. Mubarak, Mr. Sisi has relied on a vast security state and an economic approach that privileges the military. Many in the business sector complain that Mr. Sisi has gone even farther in sidelining private enterprise, to the detriment of the economy.

“They trust the military first. And the private sector, they accept them,” said

Naguib Sawiris,

a billionaire who says some of his own Egyptian business plans have been thwarted by state intervention. “The security can block any project. They have their own companies now. It’s not a good situation.”

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Egypt’s economy is growing at a modest clip of about 5.4%, according to the central bank. But for the vast majority of Egyptians, living standards have been slipping amid high youth unemployment and rising food prices, fueling some of the same grievances that preceded the revolution—and raising the prospect of a repeat.

Inflation and economic malaise have triggered demonstrations across the wider Middle East in recent months. In Iran in December and January, economic frustration sparked more than a week of protests that left at least 20 people dead. In Tunisia, budget cuts triggered raucous demonstrations and clashes with security forces in 10 cities and towns coinciding with the anniversary of the ouster of long time strongman Zine Al Abedine Ben Ali. In Jordan, sit-ins and other protests took place in January in reaction to the rising price of bread. Spontaneous protests erupted in Egypt earlier this month after the government announced a surprise increase in the price of subway tickets.

In the Gulf, wealthy monarchies count Egypt’s government as a firewall against a repeat of the popular upheaval.

“I prayed to God that Egypt would not collapse,” said Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince

Mohammed bin Salman

during a visit to Cairo in March.

A former commander of the armed forces, Mr. Sisi surged to power after he led the overthrow in 2013 of the elected Islamist President

Mohammed Morsi.

Following the coup, security forces cracked down on Mr. Morsi’s supporters and other political opponents, killing at least a thousand people and jailing tens of thousands of others, according to rights groups.

Mr. Sisi promised Egyptians stability and prosperity, claiming credit for steering Egypt away from the turmoil and war that engulfed other Arab countries such as Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

For a time, Mr Sisi enjoyed cult status. His inspired supporters stamped his likeness on everything from chocolates to women’s underwear.

But the sheen has worn off his presidency. Stability has proved elusive as the government struggles to halt attacks by militant groups, including the Islamic State which has killed hundreds of soldiers and civilians in recent years.

Discontent has even surfaced within the same military establishment that brought Mr. Sisi to power. Since December, the government has detained and sidelined a series of opponents who stepped forward to challenge the president in the election, including three current and former military officers.

Although Mr. Sisi has helped expand the military’s economic profile, would-be opposition candidates from military backgrounds assailed the president’s record on security, the economy, and a lack of political freedoms.

Mr. Sisi’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment. Egypt’s armed forces spokesman declined to comment.

Analysts say Mr. Sisi sees himself as a part of a world-wide cohort of strongman rulers. Prior to Egypt’s vote, he made a point of congratulating Russia’s President

Vladimir Putin

on his victory in a scripted election. He also lauded China’s President

Xi Jinping,

who just became China’s de facto leader for life.

Egypt’s military has played a major role in the economy for decades. Business ventures helped the armed forces offset budget cuts imposed by Mr. Mubarak in the years following the 1978 peace treaty with Israel. By the end of Mr. Mubarak’s 30 years in power, the military owned supermarkets and hotels and also made pasta as well as weapons, taking advantage of its tax-exempt status and access to cheap labor in the form of conscripted soldiers.

But under Mr. Sisi, the military has achieved new heights of economic power. The exact percentage of the economy controlled by the armed forces is impossible to calculate, as military-linked enterprises don’t disclose their profits and the details of the military’s budget aren’t made public. Any accounting by government watchdogs is now even harder, since Egypt’s former chief corruption auditor is on military trial after he joined an opposition presidential campaign and threatened to release incriminating evidence about the military leadership.

In an interview with state TV in March, Mr. Sisi said the military makes up only 2% to 3% of the economy. “If it was 50% I would have been proud,” he said. “The armed forces are part of the government.”

Experts believe the true size of the military’s economic role is much higher than the official figure, based on observations of army-led enterprises.

“He doesn’t trust the private sector. He doesn’t trust businessmen,” said

Andrew Miller,

a former official responsible for Egypt at the U.S. National Security Council.

When Mr. Sisi came to power, he turned to the military to help fix the stumbling economy. He assigned the Armed Forces Engineering Authority to organize an expansion of the Suez Canal, one of his signature megaprojects.

With Mr. Sisi’s blessing, the military soon encroached on civilian enterprises too. The government discarded a civilian-authored plan to parcel out land along the canal to build an industrial zone and port area. He instead awarded a pair of contracts, including one to a partnership between the military and a private developer, according to Ahmed Darwish, the former chairman of the Suez Canal Economic Zone. To date, the planned zone hasn’t materialized, although the government says it is pressing ahead with the project.

Mr. Darwish was later replaced at his post by Admiral Mohab Mamish, a military leader who also heads the Suez Canal Authority. Several other business-oriented civilian officials have departed Mr. Sisi’s government over the years, including two economists who served in previous cabinets, leaving the military even more dominant.

The military also exerts influence through a diffuse network of current and former officers who sit on corporate boards and own stakes in private businesses. Those holdings help the military class gain control and profit even from enterprises it doesn’t directly own.

“They just have a finger in every pie,” said Shana Marshall, an expert on Egyptian political economy at George Washington University.

Military and security officials have orchestrated a takeover of at least three major privately owned television channels in the past two years. A former military spokesman took charge of the satellite channel Al Asema in January 2017. A security company headed by a former military intelligence official took over Al Hayat TV in mid-2017.

The takeover rolled back the influence of some of Egypt’s most powerful civilian businessmen. Mr. Sawiris, the former owner of popular network OnTV, said the government asked him to fire at least three news anchors. When he refused, the network OnTV was taken over by a pro-government steel magnate, before his shares were sold to a company owned by Egypt’s intelligence service in 2017.

Mr. Sawiris said the security forces also have thwarted private-sector business plans. He said his attempt to acquire the investment firm CI Capital was blocked by the security services in 2016. CI Capital didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Objections by Egyptian security services scuttled an attempt last year by

Archer Daniels Midland Co.

to acquire Egypt’s National Company for Maize Products, according to Mr. Sawaris. A person familiar with the matter confirmed that Egyptian regulators blocked the planned acquisition.

The maize company, which couldn’t be reached for comment, later merged with another Egyptian company instead.

During Mr. Sisi’s years in power, the government has ushered in regulatory changes that make it easier for the armed forces to do business. His government expanded their ability to strike real estate deals and authorized the military to form a pharmaceutical company.

When a currency crisis resulted in shortages of staples like sugar in 2016, the army began selling subsidized parcels of food out of the backs of trucks. It also supplied baby formula at a discount through pharmacies, touting the move as a victory over the private sector. “The Armed Forces has landed a blow against the greedy monopoly of traders and companies working in the milk industry,” the military spokesman said in a written statement in September 2016.

The most visible element of the military’s expanding economic empire is a vast array of government construction projects, including roads and apartment buildings, such as a national initiative to build a million housing units across the country. New regulations have allowed military-linked contractors to establish a virtual monopoly over public building contracts, experts say.

The so-called “New Administrative Capital” is the most ambitious of those projects. Announced in 2015, the government hoped it would attract five million residents, alleviating overcrowding in greater Cairo, currently home to an estimated 20 million people. Millions live in slums and other informal housing with unreliable access to government services.

The planned new city has offered the military ample opportunity to flex its economic muscle. When a Chinese state company backed out of a $3 billion deal to build government buildings at the site in 2017, the Armed Forces Engineering Authority offered to complete construction at half the price through subcontracts, according to Mr Husseiny.

In March, the Egyptian government announced the start of construction of a commercial district in the new capital, an area that includes plans for a 1,263-foot skyscraper. The building would be Africa’s tallest if completed. To complete this section of the new capital, the military-backed company overseeing the new capital contracted with China State Construction Engineering Corp.

On the dusty road to the construction site is a billboard for the Talaat Moustafa Group, which is one of the largest known investors in the project. The firm of Hisham Talaat Moustafa, a former senior member of Mr. Mubarak’s party, has poured nearly $2 billion in the new capital.

Mr. Moustafa emerged from an extraordinary bout of legal trouble to contribute to the project.

A Cairo criminal court convicted Mr. Moustafa of hiring the former police officer who stabbed to death a Lebanese pop star Suzanne Tamim in a Dubai hotel in 2008. The trial made Mr. Moustafa into a symbol of what many saw as a culture of excess and cronyism in the twilight years of Mr. Mubarak’s presidency. Mr. Moustafa’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In June 2017, Mr. Sisi pardoned Mr. Moustafa, freeing him from prison and allowing him to resume his position as CEO of his company, TMG Holding. The firm later reported that its revenue more than doubled following Mr. Mousafa’s release and its involvement in the military-led new capital project.

—Amira El Fekki in Cairo and Jacob Bunge in Chicago contributed to this article.

Appeared in the May 22, 2018, print edition as ‘Egypt’s Economy Falls to the Military.’

Egypt’s military is moving fast to gobble up business opportunities, stoking popular resentment.

The military has amassed a growing business empire under the former general-turned-president, leading to renewed popular resentment

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omginstantpaperbouquetblr · 6 years

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By Andrew Levine / Counterpunch.

Photo by ASACP RTA | CC BY 2.0

There is no doubt about it: Stormy Daniels is a formidable woman. Karen McDougal is no slouch either, though she is hard to admire after that riff, in her Anderson Cooper interview, about how religious and Republican she is; she even said that she used to love the Donald. Stormy Daniels is better than that.

How wonderfully appropriate it would be if she were to become the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Even in a world as topsy-turvy as ours has become, there has to be a final straw.

To be sure, evidence of Trump’s vileness, incompetence, and mental instability is accumulating at breakneck speed, and there are polls now that show support for him holding fast or even slightly rising. Trump’s hardcore “base” seems more determined than ever to stand by their man.

But even people as benighted as they are bound to realize eventually that they have been had. Many of them already do, but don’t care; they hate Clinton Democrats that much. This is understandable, but foolish; so foolish, in fact, that they can hardly keep it up indefinitely.

To think otherwise is to despair for the human race.

What, if anything, can bring them to their senses in time for the 2018 election?

Stormy Daniels says she only wants to tell her story, not bring Trump down. But her political instincts seem decent, and she is one shrewd lady. Therefore, I would not be the least surprised if that is not quite true. It hardly matters, though, what her intentions are; I’d put my money on her.

A recession might also do the trick. A recession is long overdue, and Trump’s tax cut for the rich and his tariffs are sure to make its consequences worse when it happens.

To turn significant portions of Trump’s base against him, a major military conflagration might also do — not the kind Barack Obama favored, fought far away and out of public view, but a real war, televised on CNN, and waged against an enemy state like North Korea or Iran. It would have to go quickly and disastrously wrong, though, in ways that even willfully blind, terminally obtuse Trump supporters could not fail to see.

Or the gods could smile upon us, causing Trump’s exercise regimen (sitting in golf carts) and his fat-ridden, cholesterol rich diet to catch up with him, as it would with most other sedentary septuagenarians. The only downside would be that a heart attack or stroke might elicit sympathy for the poor bastard.

No sane person could or should hope for a calamitous economic downturn or for yet another devastating, pointless, and manifestly unjust war, especially one that could become a war to end all wars (along with everything else), on the off-chance that some good might come of it.

And if the best we can do is hope that cheeseburgers with fries will save us, we are grasping at straws.

These are compelling reasons to hope that the accusations made by Daniels and McDougal and Summer Zervos – and other consensual and non-consensual Trump victims and “playmates” – gain traction. If the several defamation lawsuits now in the works can get the president deposed, this is not out of the question.

The problem for Trump is not that his accusers’ revelations will cause his base to defect; no matter how salacious their stories and no matter how believable they may be. Trump’s moral turpitude is taken for granted in their circles; and they do not care about the myriad ways his words and deeds offend the dignity of the office he holds or embarrass the country he purports to put “first.” If any of that mattered to them, they would have jumped ship long ago.

Except perhaps for unreconstructed racists and certifiable sociopaths, white evangelicals are Trump’s strongest supporters. What a despicable bunch of hypocrites they are! As long as Trump delivers on their agendas, his salacious escapades don’t faze them at all. Godly folk have evidently changed a good deal since the Cotton Mather days.

What has not changed is their seemingly limitless ability to believe nonsense.

And in case light somehow does manage to shine through, Trump has shown them how to restore the darkness they crave. When cognitive dissonance threatens, all they need do is scream “fake news.”

The problem for Trump is that what his accusers are saying puts him in legal and political jeopardy. They are claiming, in effect, that he has committed a variety of unlawful and impeachable offenses – from obstruction of justice to violations of campaign finance laws.

In this case as in so many others, it is the cover-up, not the underlying “crime,” that could lead to his undoing – especially if the stories Daniels and the others are telling shed light upon or otherwise connect with or meld into Robert Mueller’s investigation of (alleged) Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election.

Trump could and probably will survive their charges. His base is such a preternaturally obdurate lot that there may ultimately be no last straw for them. We may have no choice, in the end, but to despair for a sizeable chunk of the human race.

Stormy Daniels would not be any less admirable on that account. She took Trump on and came out on top. For all the world (minus the willfully blind) to see, she, the porn star, is a strong woman who has her life together, while he, the president, is a discombobulated sleaze ball who is leading himself and his country to ruin.

***

It was different with Monica Lewinsky, another presidential paramour who, almost two decades ago, also held the world’s attention.

There was nothing sleazy or venal about Lewinsky’s involvement with Bill Clinton; and, for all I know, unless chastity counts, she is as good and virtuous a person as can be. But personal qualities are not what made her affair with our forty-second president as historically significant as it turned out to be.

It would be fair to say that of all the women who have ever had intimate knowledge of that old horn dog’s private parts, there is no one who did more good for her country. If only for that, if there were a heaven, there would be special place in it just for her.

The Clinton-Lewinsky dalliance led to a series of events that prevented Clinton from doing even more harm to our feeble welfare state institutions than he would otherwise have done.

Who knows how much progress he would have turned back had he and Monica never done the deed or at least not been found out. Building on groundwork laid down by Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, he and his wife had already terminated Aid to Families With Dependent Children, one of the main government programs aimed at relieving poverty. This was to be just the first step in “ending welfare as we know it.”

With their “donors” pushing for more austerity, those two neoliberal pioneers were itching to begin privatizing other, more widely supported social programs, including even Social Security, the so-called “third rail” of American politics.

The “Lewinsky matter” put the kybosh on that idea, leaving the American people forever in Monica’s debt.

Back in the Kennedy days, Mel Brook’s two-thousand year old man got it right when he said: presidents “gotta do it,” to which he added – “…because if they don’t do it to their wives and girlfriends, they do it to the nation.”

Stormy Daniels made much the same point ten years ago, while flirting with the idea of running against Louisiana Senator David Vitter. Vitter’s political career had been almost ruined when his name turned up in the phone records of the infamous “DC Madam,” Deborah Jeane Palfrey. Daniels told voters that, unlike Vitter, she would “screw …(them) honestly.”

What then are we to make of the fact that Trump screws both the nation and his wife (maybe) and his girlfriends (or whatever they are)?

Blame it on arrested development, on the fact that despite his more than seventy-one years, Trump still has the mind of a teenage boy, one with money and power enough to live out his fantasies.

The contrast with Bill Clinton is stark. Clinton is a philanderer with eclectic tastes, a charming rascal with a broad and mischievous mind. Honkytonk women from Arkansas appeal to him as much as zaftig MOTs from the 90210 area code.

Trump, on the other hand, goes for super-models, Playboy centerfolds, and aspiring beauty queens — standard teenage fantasy fare.

He seems to have had little trouble living his dreams – not thanks to his magnetic face, form and figure, and certainly not to his refinement, wit or charm, but to his inherited and otherwise ill-gotten wealth.

It is money and the power that follows from it that draws women to his net.

Henry Kissinger understood; recall his musings on the aphrodisiacal properties of power. Even in his prime, that still unindicted war criminal (and later-day Hillary Clinton advisor) was even more repellent than Trump. But that never kept him from having to fight the ladies off.

This fact of life puts a heavy responsibility on the women with whom presidents hook up.

Consider Melania. She made a Faustian bargain when she agreed to become Trump’s trophy bride; in return for riches and a soft life in a gilded tower, she sold her soul. She might have thought better of it had she taken the burdens she would incur as First Lady into account, but why would she? The prospect was too improbable.

She has, it seems, a very practical, old world view of marriage, and is therefore tolerant of her husband’s womanizing. At the same time, as a mother and daughter, she is, like most immigrants, a strong proponent of old world “family values.”

Too much of a proponent perhaps; insofar as her idea was to “chain migrate” her parents out of Slovenia and onto Easy Street, or to raise a kid who would never want for anything, there were less onerous ways of going about it. After all, there are plenty of rich Americans lusting after supermodels out there, and it is a good bet that many of them are less repellent than Trump.

She was irresponsible as well. She ought to have realized that the man she married had already spawned two idiot sons, along with other fruit from the poisonous tree, and that four bad apples in one generation are enough.

And so now she finds herself a single mother – not in theory, of course, but very definitely in practice. Unlike most women in that position, she is not wanting for resources. But it must be a hard slog, even so. To her credit, Melania seems to be handling the burden well. More power to her!

She also deserves credit for her body language when the Donald is around; the contempt she shows for him is wonderful to behold. Best of all is her sense of the absurd. The way she plagiarized from Michelle Obama had obvious comic validity, and making childhood bullying her First Lady cause – all First Ladies have causes — was a stroke of genius.

On balance, therefore, it is hard not to feel sorry for her. Of all the women in Trump’s ambit, she deserves humiliation the least.

The rumor mill has it that with all the publicity about Daniels and the others, she has finally had enough. This may be the case; the old world ethos requires discretion and a concern with appearances. That is not the Donald’s way, however, and now she is paying the price.

What a magnificent humiliation it would be if she and Trump were to split up on that account. This could happen soon. I would expect, though, that through a combination of carrots and sticks, Trump and his fixers will find a way to minimize the political effects. More likely still, they will channel Joe Kennedy and Jackie O, and figure out a way to head the problem off.

Then there is poor forgotten Tiffany. Her Wikipedia entry lists her as both a law student and a “socialite.” I hope her studious side wins out and that, despite the genes from her father’s side, she is at least somewhat decent and smart.

I’d be more confident of that if she would do what Ronald Reagan’s daughter, Patti, did: use her mother’s, not her father’s, name. Unless she is a sleaze ball too, a Trump in the Eric and Don Junior mold, that would be a fine way to make a political point.

It would also pay back over the years. With the Trump administration on its current trajectory, who, in a few years’ time, would take a Tiffany Trump seriously? A Tiffany Maples would stand a better chance.

Her half-sister, the peerless Ivanka, the Great Blonde Hope, is, of course, her father’s sweetie. Let’s not go there, however. Her marriage to Jared Kushner is already enough to process.

What a pair those two make; and what a glorious day it will be when the law finally catches up with Jared, as it did with his Trump-like father, Charles. Perhaps he will take Ivanka down a notch or two with him.

Despite an almost complete lack of qualifications, Trump made his son-in-law his minister of almost everything; a pretty good gig for a feckless, airhead rich kid.

Among other things, Trump enabled him to become Benjamin Netanyahu’s ace in the hole. Netanyahu is a Kushner family friend.

Netanyahu has more than his share of legal troubles too. Let them all go down together!

Ivanka and Jared are well matched – they share a “business model.” It has them exploiting their daddies’ connections and money.

Jared peddles real estate; his efforts have gotten his family into serious debt, while putting him in solid with Russian and Eastern European oligarchs, Gulf state emirs, and Mohammad bin Salman – people in comparison with whom his father-in-law seems almost virtuous.

Ivanka sells trinkets and schmatas to people who think the Trump name is cool. There actually are such people; at two hundred grand a pop, Mar-a-Lago is full of them. Ivanka’s demographic is made up mostly of their younger set.

Two other presidential women bare mention: Hope Hicks and Nikki Haley. Surely, they both have tales to tell, but it looks, for now, as if their stories would be of little or no prurient interest. Neither of them appear to have been propositioned or groped.

Even though Hicks is said to be like a daughter to the Donald – we know what that could mean! – it is a safe bet that there was nothing of a romantic nature going on between them. For one thing, Hicks seems too close to Ivanka; for another, she is known to have dallied with two Trump subordinates, Corey Lewandowski and Rob Porter. The don is hardly the type to let his underlings have at his women.

Haley had to quash a spate of rumors that flared up thanks to some suggestive remarks Michael Wolff made while hawking Fire and Fury. The rumor caught on because people who hadn’t yet fully realized what a piece of work Trump is, imagined that something had to be awry inasmuch as her main qualification for representing the United States at the United Nations was an undergraduate degree in accounting. Abject servility to the Israel lobby also helped.

But the Trump administration is full of ambitious miscreants whose views on Israel and Palestine are as abject and servile as hers, and compared to many others in Trump’s cabinet she is, if anything, over qualified. Think of neurosurgeon Ben Carson heading the Department of Housing and Urban Development. He is qualified because, as a child, he lived in public housing.

With the exception of Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, Summer Zervos and whoever else comes forward with a juicy and credible tale to tell, the women currently in the president’s ambit, though good for gossip and interesting in the ways that characters on reality TV shows can be, are of little or no political consequence.

This could change if any of them decides to “go rogue,” to use an expression from the Sarah Palin days. But, while neither Melania nor Tiffany can yet be judged hopeless, it would be foolish to expect much of anything good to come from either of them.

Stormy, Karen, Summer, and whoever else steps forward are a better bet. They are the only ones with any chance of doing as much for their country and the world as Monica Lewinsky did a generation ago.

Among the president’s women, they are a breed apart. This is plainly the case with Stormy Daniels; it is already clear that she deserves what all Trump’s money can never buy – honor and esteem. To the extent that the others turn out to be similarly courageous, they will too.

ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).

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newstfionline · 5 years

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Iran’s Economic Crisis Drags Down the Middle Class Almost Overnight

By Thomas Erdbrink, NY Times, Dec. 26, 2018

TEHRAN--Less than a year ago, he was running a thriving computer accessories business, driving a new car and renting a comfortable two-bedroom apartment in the center of Tehran. But last month, Kaveh Taymouri found himself riding a rusty motorcycle on his hourlong commute to his family’s new lodgings, a 485-square foot apartment in one of the city’s worst neighborhoods, next to its sprawling cemetery.

When he arrived home one recent night at 10:30 p.m. from his new job at an arcade, there was no food on the stove. The sandwich he had for lunch would have to do.

Nevertheless, his wife and former business partner, Reihaneh, said she thought his mood was improving.

“At least he has stopped screaming in his sleep,” she said.

Before their “downfall,” as they call it, the Taymouris were the model middle-class Iranian family, prosperous college-educated business owners who made enough money to save for a down payment on their own home. Now, they are a model for a different sort: the millions of middle-class Iranians who almost overnight have seen their lives shrink, dragged down by economic forces beyond their control.

Iran’s economy is in a shambles, savaged by years of mismanagement and renewed economic sanctions.

The government has expanded the money supply by more than 30 percent annually for more than a decade, using the extra cash to cover budget deficits and other expenses. In the United States, by comparison, a broad measure of the money supply has increased by an annual average of 6.4 percent over the last decade, according to the Federal Reserve.

As a result of Iran’s rapid expansion of the money supply, says Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, a professor of economics at Virginia Tech University, inflation has exploded and by official figures is now running at an annual rate of 35 percent compared with below 10 percent a year ago.

President Trump’s decision to leave the nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or J.C.P.O.A., and to reimpose harsh economic sanctions prompted the other major economic disaster to befall Iran: a collapse in its currency, Mr. Salehi-Isfahani said. The rial lost about 70 percent against the dollar before strengthening recently, but its rates are still fluctuating heavily.

“The withdrawal busted the expectations for an economic boom created by the J.C.P.O.A. and Iran’s return to the global economy, which was expected to boost oil exports and foreign investment,” he said. “The reversal caused people to convert their rials into other assets, mainly dollars and gold.”

By raising the cost of imports, the currency collapse has reinforced the inflationary surge and decimated small businesses that, like the Taymouris’, rely on imported goods.

Mr. Taymouri, saying it was best to let his money--or lack of it--do the talking, sat down and calculated the financial calamity that had befallen the family in the past year. Their monthly income fell from 50 million rials, or about $1,400, a year ago to 10 million rials, or $90, at the current heavily devalued rate.

“If someone had ever told me I would one day live like this, I would’ve laughed,” Mr. Taymouri said bitterly, before falling silent. Finally, his wife spoke.

“I’m not really that sad, because we are not alone,” she said. “It’s happening to so many people.”

Mr. Taymouri blamed the fall in the currency on speculators as well as the government “for just having stood by.” Others blame Mr. Trump.

“It’s really because of Trump,” said Nasim Marashi, the 29-year-old author of a best-selling book, “Autumn Is the Last Season.” The book, on the lives of three middle-class young women in Tehran, has had 35 print runs in four years. “He left the nuclear agreement, not Iran.”

Iran, with a population of about 80 million, has long had a large and thriving middle-class, covering roughly everyone from bus drivers to lawyers and doctors, and earning an average of $700 a month in local currency, according to government officials. That income was frequently padded by unreported side businesses in the country’s large black market and government subsidies that lowered the cost of utilities, food and gasoline.

Politically quite influential, Iran’s middle class has consistently favored candidates like the current president, Hassan Rouhani, who support better relations with the West. But seldom have they been under as much economic pressure as they are today. Recently at least two people have been hanged after they were convicted in highly publicized trials for manipulating markets.

In a sign that the government is taking the issue seriously, Mr. Rouhani introduced his administration’s budget on Tuesday, and it included more support for state employees and more subsidies on basic goods.

Not all have suffered as much as the Taymouris, whose business was so vulnerable to the currency collapse. But Abbas Torkan, a former adviser to Mr. Rouhani, said recently that the middle class had shrunk by 50 percent.

Even for those in higher income ranges, the difficult times have meant a sudden lifestyle change.

Royalties checks for Ms. Marashi’s book dropped from 120 million rials a month to 20 million rials recently, she said. “Books aren’t a necessity.”

Outwardly, Tehran looks every bit the bustling metropolis it has been. New restaurants are still opening. An Iranian theater version of “Les Misérables” sells out every night for 3,500 people who pay the equivalent of $16 a person. But cracks are appearing.

In supermarkets, where the cost of Red Bull, for example, has quadrupled, people can be seen carefully studying the prices. Some imported products, like Purina pet food, have vanished entirely.

Along Tehran’s high-end shopping district on Jordan Street, stores selling Western brands are shutting down. Rent increases are pushing people out of their longtime neighborhoods, and plane tickets to Europe now often cost two months’ salary.

The pain many people are feeling may just be the start, said Faezeh Forouzan, an Iranian economist. “For the short term, those better off in the middle class will respond by changing their lifestyle, eliminating luxuries and excess,” she said. “But in the future, all will suffer as a result of a lack of investment in creating jobs.”

For the Taymouris, the pain was seemingly instantaneous. They met five years ago at work, and between stealing kisses by the copy machine, they figured out they could make more money with their own business selling computer accessories.

From their shop in the center of Tehran, the couple would buy keyboards, cables and other computer accessories from wholesalers. Ms. Taymouri would then resell them in the provinces, while her husband took care of the shop and short-term financing for the business.

A son was born, and just weeks before everything came crashing down, they happily informed their parents that they were expecting a second child.

But in January, the rial began to slide, and goods like the Taymouris’ accessories that were priced in dollars and euros rapidly became unaffordable for most Iranians. Ms. Taymouri’s phone stopped ringing, and sales orders dried up.

A Western Digital hard disk still costs around the equivalent of $90 in Iran, but in the local currency it soared to 18 million rials from 3 million, Ms. Taymouri said. “When your customers make only twice that a month,” she added, “you can understand how our sales went down to zero.”

At the same time, Mr. Taymouri was getting plenty of calls--from the wholesalers he had bought accessories from on credit.

“They were asking for their money, but clients in the provinces weren’t paying us back and we were not selling anything,” he said.

One night, Ms. Taymouri said, “he just came home, dropped on the couch and said, ‘It’s over.’”

In a country that still puts debtors in jail, the Taymouris had no choice but to make good on their debts. They sold the car, their furniture and the carpets they had been given as wedding presents.

Mr. Taymouri sold the shop to the arcade man on the condition that he could work there. Then they moved to their current apartment, which has a communal shower in the hallway.

“We don’t like it here,” he said, gesturing to the cemetery, one of the largest in the world. “We had been planning to move uptown, not next to the dead.”

Mr. Taymouri brought out his infant daughter, Anita, from the tiny bedroom, and his wife started crying.

“I was just pregnant when everything suddenly turned upside down in our lives,” she said. “I admit that I thought of having an abortion. But despite all of this, I’m so happy we have her now.”

#Iran #iran economy #Iranian middle class

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amicusint-blog · 7 years

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Passports for Sale-CBS

Steve Kroft reports on how cash-starved countries offer citizenship for a price, creating ways to ease travel for foreigners, including those running from the law

If you have been thinking about leaving the United States, moving to another country and changing your nationality, it's never been easier to do. In this era of globalization, citizenship and passports have become just another commodity to be bought and sold on the international market. All you need is money and a willingness to contribute a few hundred thousand dollars to the treasury of a cash-starved country or acquire a piece of real estate there.

It's called citizenship by investment and, as we first reported in January, it's become a $2 billion industry built around people looking for a change of scenery or a change of passport, a new life or maybe a new identity, a getaway from the rat race, or perhaps an escape from an ex-spouse or Interpol. In any event, it's brought in huge amounts of revenue for the sellers and attracted among the buyers a rogue's gallery of scoundrels, fugitives, tax cheats, and possibly much worse.

If you're shopping for another passport, the top of the line right now is Malta. By investing a million dollars in this Mediterranean island, a Russian or Chinese or a Saudi can become a European citizen with a new EU passport that will allow them to travel just about anywhere without a visa. There are also much cheaper, less discriminating alternatives available in the Caribbean, especially on the tiny island of Dominica, where Lennox Linton is a member of Parliament.

Steve Kroft: How much does it cost to get a citizenship?

Lennox Linton: $100,000.

Steve Kroft: Do you have to come and live in Dominica?

Lennox Linton: No. No. You don't even have to come to Dominica to get the citizenship. You pay the money from wherever you are.

Steve Kroft: Sorta just mail order citizenship?

Lennox Linton: Sort of. Something like that.

Our introduction to this world of citizenship by investment came in Dubai – the gleaming, international bazaar – that was hosting the 9th annual global citizenship conference. Gathered here were government officials, lawyers, bankers, and real estate developers who facilitate and profit from the trade of citizenship for cash.

Chris Kalin: Good evening, and a very warm welcome…

This is the man who more or less invented the business: Chris Kalin, chairman of Henley and Partners, a consulting firm with offices, where else, but in Zurich, Switzerland. For a fee and healthy commissions, Kalin helps countries set up their program, rewrite their citizenship laws, and recruit people of means looking for a second, third, or fourth passport, which he sees as just another travel accessory; a passport of convenience.

Chris Kalin: You probably have more than one credit card, I would assume. And, you know, if Visa doesn't work, Mastercard will do. So I think any wealthy person nowadays should have more than one credit card. And likewise, you'd have more than one passport.

Steve Kroft: But you need to have some money to do this?

Chris Kalin: Yes.

Steve Kroft: To be able to do this?

Chris Kalin: Yes, absolutely. It's just for wealthy people, of course, yeah.

Quite often these wealthy customers come from politically problematic countries where their passports don't work very well, making it difficult for them to get where they want to go. Global citizens like international lawyer Sirous Motevassel, a Middle Easterner from Iran who travels on a West Indian passport from St. Kitts and Nevis.

Steve Kroft: And where do you live?

Sirious Motevassel: I'm living in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Steve Kroft: So you're an Iranian living in Dubai with St. Kitts citizenship.

Sirious Motevassel: Yes. Yeah.

Steve Kroft: That's complicated.

Sirious Motevassel: Yeah. It, yeah. This is the life.

It's the life, because Motevassel's St. Kitts passport, available for $250,000 or a $400,000 real estate investment, allows him entry to more than 100 countries without having to get special permission. It's a legal way to circumvent visa controls that nations set up to screen people coming into their country. But it's also an opportunity for shady characters to mask their true identities, and avoid suspicion as they travel around the globe.

The business was born here in St. Kitts when Chris Kalin struck a deal with the government a decade ago following the collapse of the islands' sugar industry.Since then, passports have become its major export, providing hundreds of millions of dollars in income. In fact in 2014, the last year for which there are government statistics available, 40 percent of the government's revenue came from selling passports.

It's provided St. Kitts and Nevis with hundreds of millions of dollars for infrastructure projects, private development, and tourism but a lot of the money is unaccounted for. More than 10,000 people have purchased citizenship here, but it's almost impossible to tell who they are because the information is not public. Chris Kalin doesn't like the words citizenship for cash, or any suggestion that all you need is money to get a passport.

Chris Kalin: You have to go through a process. You have to apply. And you have to answer a million questions. And you have to undergo a background verification. And you have, at least in the properly run programs, you have to be a reputable person. And that's checked.

But evidently, not that carefully. About the only way to identify people who have purchased St. Kitts citizenship is if they've happened to turn up on a list of international fugitives or gotten in trouble with the law, and St. Kitts and Nevis has had more than its share for two sleepy, little islands. Its passport holders have included a Canadian penny stock manipulator… a Russian wanted for bribery… a Kazak wanted for embezzlement… two Ukrainians suspected of bribing a U.N. official… and two Chinese women wanted for financial crimes.

Chris Kalin: I think it's no secret that these islands have made decisions that are not always optimal.

Steve Kroft: They've taken some bozos, as you would call them?

Chris Kalin: Yes, exactly.

Steve Kroft: What about crooks?

Chris Kalin: Yes. It's goes all the way down to crooks, yeah, absolutely. And it tended for some time to attract quite a few people that I would never let into the country. But I'm not the government of St. Kitts and Nevis.

Steve Kroft: But you set up their program.

Chris Kalin: We helped to set up the program. But, you know, as it is, advisers advise, ministers decide.

The island nation drew the ire of the U.S. Treasury Department three years ago after three suspected Iranian operatives were caught using their St. Kitts passports to launder money for banks in Tehran in violation of U.S. sanctions. It also had to recall more than 5,000 passports because they either didn't include a place of birth or were issued to people who had changed their names. Since then a number of reforms have been made, but questions remain.

Peter Vincent: They're not transparent programs. There are not safeguards in place.

Until 2014, Peter Vincent was the top legal adviser for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the department of Homeland Security, which he says is well aware of all the vulnerabilities. In fact, before General John F. Kelly became secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, he expressed concern in a 2015 report that "cash for passport programs could be exploited by criminals, terrorists or other nefarious actors."

Steve Kroft: Does that present a security threat, do you think?

Peter Vincent: It does. In my opinion, the global community has established a very effective global security architecture to prevent terrorist attacks. I see these cash for citizenship programs as a gaping hole in that security architecture.

But it's not stopped the programs from multiplying across the Caribbean…Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, and Antigua are all competing with St. Kitts now for customers and badly needed cash.

Gaston Browne: So what are we supposed to do? Sit back and do nothing? You tell me.

Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, says the revenue from its four-year-old program has kept the government from defaulting on its international loans and has turned the economy around. Antigua also claims to have among the strictest programs in the Caribbean. You actually have to show up here to get citizenship, albeit very briefly.

Gaston Browne: Our law provides them to spend at least five days here.

Steve Kroft: That sounds like a vacation.

Gaston Browne: Yes. I understand. But however, we have made sure that at least there must be some face-to-face contact so we know who these people are.

Steve Kroft: For five days.

Gaston Browne: Minimum.

Steve Kroft: What kinda people are you looking for?

Gaston Browne: We're lookin' for high net worth individuals. People who are established business people. Who are well-known. And to make sure that we get the crème de la crème.

If so, they are recruiting them in some odd places. Last summer, Antigua announced it was opening an embassy in Baghdad hoping to sell passports to Iraqis. It didn't work out. But it's doing better next door in Syria after hiring a relative of President Bashar Al-Assad to represent them.

Steve Kroft: Have you had any applications from Syria?

Gaston Browne: Yes. We have had applications from Syria.

Steve Kroft: And you've approved them.

Gaston Browne: Syria is one of the areas in which we have had some concerns but did not place it on a restricted list.

Prime Minister Browne told us instability breeds opportunity. Besides Syria, Antigua has sold citizenship to Iranians, Libyans, Pakistanis, and the people who brought condos in this half-built complex in the desert outside Dubai, 7,300 miles away from Antigua. Its website advertised, "Buy a villa in the UAE and get citizenship of Antigua."

Steve Kroft: I mean, you said that you were looking for the crème de la crème.

Gaston Browne: Crème de la crème.

Steve Kroft: I mean, there's a developer in Dubai.

Gaston Browne: Yes.

Steve Kroft: Sweet Homes.

Gaston Browne: Yes.

Steve Kroft: Who is advertising that he's giving away passports to anyone who buys a condominium there.

Gaston Browne: You don't believe that, right?

Steve Kroft: Like you open a bank account, you get a free toaster.

Gaston Browne: That is not so.

Browne dismissed the sweet homes ads as advertising hype, saying the citizenship is not free or guaranteed. Somebody has to come up with $250,000 for Antigua and condo buyers must pass a background check.

Gaston Browne: You have to go through all of the due diligence.

Steve Kroft: What kinda due diligence do you do?

Gaston Browne: Well, and that is where the crux of the matter lies.

The prime minister claimed that the names of all applicants for Antiguan citizenship are screened by American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and generally speaking due diligence in the Caribbean has improved substantially since the scandals in St. Kitts. The small island offices with a few people are now backed up by international firms that take the screening to a higher level. But ultimately it's up to each country to decide who gets a passport, and the Caribbean has a rich history of turning a blind eye to official corruption. It's affected the way the way passports are handed out, especially diplomatic passports, that entitle the bearer to all sorts of special privileges, which Peter Vincent says represents a much more serious security threat.

Peter Vincent: The border officials at the receiving country, even without a visa, almost always admit an individual carrying a diplomatic passport. In addition, border forces are not entitled to search the luggage of diplomats like they are for regular tourists. They simply wave them through.

The sale of diplomatic passports is not part of the citizenship by investment program, but it's gone on under the table, according to U.S. authorities, in places like Dominica, which has had a lot of dodgy diplomats.

Lennox Linton: We had a diplomatic passport in the hands of Francesco Corallo, who, at the time, was on INTERPOL's list of most-wanted criminals.

Lennox Linton, who heads the opposition in Parliament, says no one in Dominica had ever heard of Corallo until he was stopped by authorities in Italy.

Lennox Linton: He said, "You can't detain me. I'm a diplomat." They said, "Diplomat? Diplomat of where?" He said, "Dominica."

Then there's Dominican diplomat Alison Madueke, a former Nigerian oil minister charged with bribery and money laundering. And Rudolph King, a Bahamian fugitive from U.S. justice, who presented himself as Dominica's special envoy to Bahrain.

Lennox Linton: What we were doing with an ambassador in Bahrain, I don't quite know. But they seem to think that there was some benefit in there for us.

Steve Kroft: I assume that you've asked the prime minister…

Lennox Linton: Yes.

Steve Kroft: How he ended up appointing these people, diplomats.

Lennox Linton: Yes.

Steve Kroft: And what was the answer?

Lennox Linton: The prime minister doesn't answer those questions.

With vast sums of money flowing into these island nations, and more and more countries selling their citizenship, there is consensus that still more oversight and transparency is needed. But privacy and secrecy have always been a major selling point for people buying multiple passports, including Chris Kalin, the man who invented the business plan.

Steve Kroft: How many do you have?

Chris Kalin: I have multiple.

Steve Kroft: So you don't wanna tell us how many you have?

Chris Kalin: There's a few things in my life that, that I don't talk openly about. And I keep for myself. But I am Swiss originally and many people think I'm very Swiss and so I'll leave it at that.

Our report in January sparked a flurry of reaction in the Caribbean. In Dominica, there were riots demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit for his handling of diplomatic passports. He denies any improprieties. The St. Kitts government deactivated more than 15,000 passports, including 91 diplomatic passports. And Antigua's program -- singled out by the U.S. State Department as "among the most lax in the world" -- has also recalled many of its diplomatic passports.

Produced by Graham Messick and Evie Salomon.

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thecarexpertuk · 7 years

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Ten years ago, the Nissan Qashqai went on sale. A decade on, not even the most optimistic prophet at the Japanese brand could honestly state that they had expected the dramatic way in which this car changed the car market – in the UK, across Europe, even globally.

The concept was simple – Nissan designers noticed how buyers liked SUVs for their dominant road presence, but not so much for their generally coarser road manners, and the complexity and cost of their all-wheel-drive powertrains.

Read more Nissan news, reviews and features at The Car Expert

From family car to SUV

In fact, the Nissan Qashqai was born out of a difficult period in the company’s design office, which had started off penning a replacement for the Almera family car. With Renault and Nissan newly merged, boss Carlos Ghosn insisted that the poor-selling Almera should be replaced by something much better. A 25-strong design team conceived the idea of a larger car, somewhat like SEAT’s Altea, but after nine months of work concluded they were going in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile Nissan had been talking to its customers, concluding that while SUVs were becoming more popular, many motorists considered them too large for using as around-town everyday cars, while poor fuel efficiency and lacklustre interior quality were also turn-offs.

According to Peter Brown, vehicle evaluation manager then and today at the Nissan Technical Centre Europe (NTCE), based in Cranfield, Berkshire, from this conclusion was born the idea of the first ‘crossover’.

“We managed to persuade the business that we could break down some of these barriers by taking the best bits of a family hatchback and adding the elements of SUVs that are most attractive to customers,” Peter said.

The resultant car would “combine the advantages of a compact SUV with the agility and comfort of a hatchback”. It was named the Qashqai – after inhabitants of a mountainous area of southwest Iran and translating to ‘horse with white forehead.’

Three into one

The Nissan Qashqai ended up replacing three cars – the Almera and its larger sister the Primera, and the Terrano II SUV. And while observers naturally compared the imposing newcomer to the Terrano, it was a very different concept. The Terrano was of traditional SUV construction with its body bolted to a ladder frame, the Qashqai was of monocoque construction, like all new family cars.

Nissan emphasised this fact when the Qashqai was unveiled as a concept at the 2004 Geneva motor show. The Ford Focus and Volkswagen Golf hatchbacks were described as the Qashqai’s prime rivals, not any SUVs.

Reaction to the car was guarded. One media commentator dubbed it “the Stannah Stair Lift of concept cars”, and also dismissed the name as ridiculous. Nissan was convinced, however, and less than three years later launched the production Qashqai.

Read more Nissan news, reviews and features at The Car Expert

A decade on, that optimism has been dramatically rewarded. Today Nissan proudly claims to have invented a whole new sector with the crossover, a description now familiar to motorists. Said sector is today the fastest growing in the entire industry – in 2010 crossover/SUVs accounted for less than 1% of the UK market, today it’s close to 9%, and the story is the same across Europe.

Just about every manufacturer today considers it vital to have not just one, but a range of crossovers in its line-up. Nissan claims 21 direct rivals have been launched against the Qashqai in the last decade, while new models are appearing all the time; Vauxhall and Skoda among those revealing new contenders in 2017.

Meanwhile the crossover sector has itself fragmented into sub-sectors based mainly on size, while expanding into the premium and even the luxury arenas – in 2006, who would have imagined buying an SUV-like Bentley, or Maserati, or even Jaguar?

Through it all, the Nissan Qashqai has remained out front. In the last decade, more than 3.3 million Qashqais have been sold in 99 countries across the world, 2.3 million of these in Europe. And almost all of them have come out of Nissan’s UK plant in Sunderland.

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A very British car

In fact the Qashqai is more British than virtually all other cars rolling off the lines in UK plants. It was the first Nissan to be styled by the brand’s European Design Centre in Paddington, London, while in charge of getting the engineering right was the Nissan Technical Centre Europe (NTCE), based in Cranfield, Berkshire.

To celebrate the decade the Qashqai has been with us, The Car Expert spent a week driving two versions of the car – one of the very first, a 1.6 petrol model on sale in 2008, and the current model in 1.5 dCi diesel form. This is an example of the second-generation Qashqai, launched in 2014 and with a facelifted version expected on sale in July.

Slipping into the 2008 model first, it’s difficult to believe that when we attended the launch events a decade ago, the motoring journalist pack had to think long and hard about how to describe this newcomer. It seemed not one thing or another, with SUV height and looks, an MPV interior, and claimed family hatch economy.

Today, even a 2008 Qashqai feels one of the most normal of all cars to drive, simply because we drive so many crossovers these days. Reacquainting ourselves with the old model is a reminder that the Qashqai did not do anything stand-out well, but it did everything to a level that was thoroughly practical and easy to live with – it really did offer that SUV feel without SUV drawbacks.

The interior for example – back in 2007 this gained a few headlines because it was far better than anything we had previously seen from Nissan. Today it immediately looks dated when perhaps unkindly compared to that of the current Qashqai. The new car benefits from all the advances made in technology, digital displays and such like, but there remains an appeal to the simplicity of the original version.

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The Nissan Qashqai grows up

Where the current Nissan Qashqai wins hands down is in interior space. Rear-seat passengers were the least well-served in the original, particularly in terms of headroom, but the new architecture adopted for the second-generation model added 47mm to the length and a whole lot more room inside.

On the road? Well, it’s not really a fair test because our 2008 original is petrol powered, while the current version is a diesel, reflecting the CO2 emissions-induced growth of diesel popularity over the last decade.

It’s a clear demonstration of the march of technology that the diesel not only feels smoother and quieter than its petrol predecessor, but it moves the Qashqai along rather more rapidly. The current car reaches 62mph more than two seconds quicker than the 2008 version, despite the engine having 18 fewer horses and having to cope with more than 120kg of extra weight! That’s progress…

The first Qashqai introduced handling to the SUV market, showing that you could drive such a car without resorting to fear each time a corner loomed ahead. The current one maintains the trend.

It’s more dynamically sorted than its predecessor, but still erring towards comfort rather than grin-producing road holding – which of course is what it was always meant to do. The extra weight helps it feel more planted on the roads.

Yet… the 2008 Nissan Qashqai impressed us. Strip off all the modern tech from the current model, and it’s not that massively different from its pioneering predecessor. The most pertinent conclusion to come out of our week’s testing is just how right Nissan got it ten years ago.

Read more Nissan news, reviews and features at The Car Expert

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Nissan Qashqai – Ten years on Ten years ago, the Nissan Qashqai went on sale. A decade on, not even the most optimistic prophet at the Japanese brand could honestly state that they had expected the dramatic way in which this car changed the car market – in the UK, across Europe, even globally.

#crossover #Nissan #Nissan Qashqai #SUV

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