Green New Deals

Image via Eurasia Review

BY HOWARD RICHARDS
On February 7, 2019, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York introduced in the United States House of Representatives a Resolution: Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal. It demanded benefits Americans in the twenty first century lack that North West Europeans enjoyed back in the 1960s, and Americans seemed to be on track toward getting during the Roosevelt years. It demanded high wages, paid vacations, increasing life expectancy and universal access to high quality health care. Her Green New Deal put special emphasis on cleaning up pollution and reversing global warming. It called for net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Recently two prominent European movements, T-DEM chaired by Thomas Piketty and DiEM25 chaired by Yanis Varoufakis, have made detailed proposals that are also called Green New Deals. One of the authors of DiEM25, Ulf Clerwall, described it as:

‘…basically an investment boom … And yes, the European Deal will be debt-financed, but by a debt to ourselves and that will rapidly pay back with a high rate of return in financial, economic, social and environmental terms.’

The Green New Deal of the Piketty group — similar, but more tax-financed– describes itself as follows:

‘This Budget, if the European Assembly so desires, will be financed by four major European taxes, the tangible markers of this European solidarity. These will apply to the profits of major firms, the top incomes (over 200,000 Euros per annum), the highest wealth owners (over 1 million Euros) and the carbon emissions (with a minimum price of 30 Euros per tonne). If it is fixed at 4% of GDP, as we propose, this budget could finance research, training and the European universities, an ambitious investment programme to transform our model of economic growth, the financing of the reception and integration of migrants and the support of those involved in operating the transformation.'

‘Green New Deal’ has become a rallying cry around the world. Just this month, Neil Coleman, Co-Director of the Institute of Economic Justice of South Africa, unveiled a platform called Let’s Build a New Economy for the Many not Just the Few. Coleman writes: ‘A Green New Deal. The global climate crisis and the challenges in energy are also acute in South Africa. Just as progressive forces in the US and the UK are proposing the need for a Green New Deal, which addresses climate challenges and ensures a just transition to new forms of energy and technology for workers and communities, South Africa urgently needs to have a similar discussion about strategies to manage the transition….’

In the South African version Pillar I is: A macro-economic stimulus and investment package. Macro-economic stimulus is for the Institute of Economic Justice priority Number One, and the prerequisite of everything else. This is so even though its authors doubt out loud whether the South African government has enough borrowing capacity left to raise funds for a stimulus of the size needed. Economic stimulus and investment being Pillar I, in its South African version The Green New Deal comes in as part 4 of Pillar III.

As Ulf Clerwall, one of its authors, writes in so many words regarding DiEM25, and as advocates of the other Green New Deals have also made clear, Green New Deals are about, to use other common phrases, ‘jump-starting’ or ‘pump-priming.’ For Varoufakis, DiEM25 is ‘stabilising.’ What appears to have been the first Green New Deal Group, one in the UK in 2008, was also about public provision of low-cost capital for massive investment designed to create green jobs.

In sum, Green New Deals remain mainly within the same economic common-sense framework where the world’s governments remained when they tried to cope with the crisis of 2008. It is the framework of the economy we already have, where, as John Maynard Keynes once put it, investment is the causa causans of production. In Keynes’s words, ‘… given the psychology of the public, the level of output and employment as a whole depends on the amount of investment. I put it in this way, not because this is the only factor on which aggregate output depends, but because it is usual in a complex system to regard as the causa causans that factor which is most prone to sudden and wide fluctuation.’

The dominant common sense of the economy we already have runs like this: First there is capital formation. Then there is investment. Then purchase of inputs. As Marx put it, ‘purchase of labour-power’ is a subset of purchase of inputs. Then comes production. Then sale of products. Only out of the revenue generated by sales at the end of this chain does the worker receive a pay check (or the investor a profit) with which to satisfy her or his wants and needs.

Investor confidence is the sine qua non of this system. The solution to a crisis is to restore confidence. In the case of Green New Deals confidence is to be restored with public investments specifically targeted at conversion to green technologies. Their novel selling point is that there is a lot of work to be done to green the economy. Therefore, there is a lot of profit to be made greening it, and in the process a lot of employment to be created. So, this time around, the standard public response to insufficient private investment gains an adjective: Green.

There are some silver linings: Ocasio-Cortez calls for ‘community-defined projects and strategies.’ While T-DEM and DiEM25 suggest new ways to capture wealth and move it to where it is needed. Piketty in Capital in the Twenty-First Century calls for ‘…regaining control over the dynamics of capital accumulation…’ (p. 471). But, still, the thinking of people who propose Green New Deals sounds like the common sense of the left-leaning public. It is a common sense that blames the defeat of social democracy on political victories of the right, and on the lobbyists on mega-corporations. (See e.g. Robert Reich, Joseph Stiglitz).

My co-authors and I suggest, on the contrary, that social democracy (in the USA called ‘liberalism’) was never sustainable. We suggest that yesterday’s progressive change strategies could not possibly work. They were defeated by the causal powers of structural mechanisms working against them. They were and are powers inherent in modern society’s constitutive rules. Today’s Green New Deals may appear to be destined to be defeated for the same reasons inherent in the rules of the economic game that defeated yesterday’s social democracies. They were, notably: capital flight (what Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis call the ‘exit power of capital’), chronic weakness of effective demand, and the fiscal crisis of the state (a combination of too many obligations and too few resources). These mechanisms are, in turn inherent in the structures of private law and their projections in the structures of international trade. (For more details see http://unboundedorganization.org/the-swedish-model-as-programmed-for-failure/)

For some people it may be so obvious that whoever you are –liberal, conservative, or left-leaning—there is only one way to create employment. It is to crank up the old profit machine. For them, if I am going to say there is an alternative, I should say what it is. Since there is no space here to outline an alternative, let me say only that I subscribe to an unbounded, post-colonial and critical realist school of thought. We hold that the number of alternatives, far from being zero, is unlimited.

Indeed, some alternatives are suggested in today’s Green New Deals. I have been looking at them pessimistically as a re-match of social democracy vs. liberalism that social democracy is destined to lose. Now I would like to make a more optimistic historical comparison. We may be seeing a re-match of a confrontation that in Europe happened much earlier. It happened in the 17th and 18th centuries with prior antecedents and later consolidations. It expanded at various times as Europe conquered the rest of the world.

I refer to tendencies in the Green New Deals to contest and to attempt to reverse the establishment of what Joseph Schumpeter called the Steuerstaat (the tax state). The Steuerstaat is part and parcel of modernity’s construction of the rule of law and limited government. Since time immemorial, kings and emperors had seized gold and silver booty in war, minted it and kept it. Coins, Jesus says in the Bible, are to be rendered unto Caesar because they are Caesar’s. Sovereigns had many other ways of extracting surplus and seizing assets. Some are catalogued by Adam Smith in his historical account of how earlier sovereigns had financed themselves in The Wealth of Nations. The past ended and the present began in England in 1689 when William and Mary ascended the throne on terms dictated by Parliament, and in 1694 when the Bank of England was chartered as a private bank authorized to create money. In other places traditional financial privileges of rulers ended at various dates, usually gradually and incompletely.

A modern state is a state that has lost control over money. It lives on taxes granted by its parliaments. Nowadays it competes with 195 other states to attract investments by lowering taxes. As Jürgen Habermas showed in The Legitimation Crisis, the Steuerstaat of late capitalism inevitably loses legitimacy. Its obligations include steering the economy to profitability. They include serving the welfare of the people. Now they include obligations to save the biosphere. The expenses of doing its duties properly far exceed its resources.

Green New Deals include intelligent ideas for making it possible for governments to do their duties, including complying with social human rights like those Ocasio-Cortez invokes in her resolution. In this respect they propose to transform at least some of the causal powers of structural mechanisms inherent in modern society’s constitutive rules that made social democracy unrealizable.

Consider: The European New Deal declares the principle of sharing the returns of capital and wealth. It proposes a public digital payments platform, undermining private monopolies on important banking functions. It declares a right of ‘seigniorage’ on central bank profits. Even the name suggests recovering for democracies rights feudal lords lost at the beginning of modernity. It establishes an entity to be called the European Equity Depositary to receive several kinds of unearned and/or surplus income. Like the Piketty T-DEM proposals it calls for inheritance taxes and for sharing of income derived from intellectual property and other knowledge monopolies. Piketty and his colleagues, for their part, have elaborated proposals to replace tax rate competition among nations with tax collection cooperation. Also, for example doing studies of astronomical executive salaries, they have shown how to identify flows of income that can be transferred to fund meeting social objectives (via the public purse or via other routes) with no economic loss.

On the other side of the Atlantic, it is known that Stephanie Skelton and other advocates of restoring public control over money and banking have been talking with Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and other legislators identified with Green New Deals.

It is possible that we are nearing a point in history when Schumpeter’s forecast that the Steuerstaat would prove to be unworkable and collapse, and Habermas’s forecast that it would cease to appear as legitimate in the eyes of the public, are coming true. And it appears that among the advocates of Green New Deals –among at least some of them—there are scholars and activists designing the technical details of viable ways to achieve the common good post-crash.

Green New Deals can be thought of as bearing new wine in old bottles. The old bottles are demands for social justice. Now they include shock and dismay at threats to the survival of our fragile biosphere. They can easily become just another rationale for tax benefits for investors and for massive public investment financed by public debt even more massive than it already is. The new wine is the creative thinking that is seeking ways to achieve structural changes that will make it possible to succeed where social democracy failed.

SOURCE: EURASIA REVIEW

Ethiopia’s Failed Coup Attempt Almost Pushed The Country To The Edge Of Collapse

Ethiopia Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

BY ANDREW KORYBKO

A coup attempt in the historic Ethiopian core region of Amhara was narrowly thwarted even though the state chief was killed and the country’s top military leader was assassinated in a related incident that later took place in the capital, with the failure of this regional regime change effort saving Africa’s second most populous country from civil war and subsequent collapse, at least for now.

The “Ethiopian Gorbachev”
It’s been less than a year and a half since 42-year-old former intelligence official Abiy Ahmed took the reins of Africa’s second-largest country following what amounted to a de-facto “soft coup” in the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), after which he rapidly implemented radical domestic and international political reforms that saw several opposition groups delisted from their previous “terrorist” designation and the clinching of a peace accord with neighboring Eritrea. Ethiopia was in the news for all the right reasons and it looked like the country was on the path to becoming one of Africa’s rising powers, but the “Ethiopian Gorbachev’s” reforms unwittingly opened up the Pandora’s Box of ethno-regionalist tensions over its internal borders, which became more important of an issue than ever before after many came to believe that PM Abiy was sending signals of his eventual intent to decentralize the state.

Domestic Political Context

Africa’s second most populous country is already legally a federation but the former Tigrayan-led faction (Tigray People’s Liberation Front, TPLF) of the ruling party that had previously run Ethiopia prior to PM Abiy’s “soft coup” never allowed this to enter into practice, thus making it a de-facto centralized state in contravention of the constitution. Even so, while the old state of affairs had serious faults, such as its refusal to meet the regional demands of the Oromo people (the largest plurality in the country at roughly a third of the population and strategically concentrated in its central region) which almost pushed it towards civil war before PM Abiy’s appointment, it nevertheless largely kept the peace in the rest of the country through its heavy-handed leadership style. It eventually became apparent, however, that this was backfiring in the Oromia Region, hence the decision to elevate one of that group’s ethnic representatives — PM Abiy — as the head of state in a bid to placate the increasingly violent protesting masses.

Although Ethiopia has moved past the original Oromo Crisis that almost brought it to the brink of civil war, it’s unwittingly triggered several other ones all across the country following the explosion of ethno-regionalist nationalism that was unleashed as a result of PM Abiy’s Gorbachev-like reforms. The internal administrative borders of the East African giant don’t completely correlate to the actual ethnic distribution in the country despite certain groups being contiguous local majorities between states. For example, several well-known fault lines exist between the Oromia and Somali Regions, as well as between the Amhara and Tigray ones too. Minorities in one region, which constitute the majority in the adjacent one and are contiguous to each other across state lines, are afraid that the de-facto implementation of decentralization will make them victims of nationalist policies by the titular nation of their host region. Naturally, those said titular representatives and their supporters believe that the ethnic minorities in their region (which constitute a majority in the adjacent one) are stealing their people’s land, which has given rise to several local conflicts as state control loosened.

Abiy’s Ethiopia = Gorbachev’s USSR?

In spite of PM Abiy’s well-intended reforms, modern-day Ethiopia has become just as much of an ethno-regionalist tinderbox as the former Soviet Union was in the twilight years of Gorbachev’s leadership, with the only thing missing being the spark to set the whole state ablaze. The TPLF’s home region of Tigray is already largely opposed to PM Abiy’s reformist government as it is, and Ethiopians haven’t forgotten the military finesse of this comparatively minuscule minority (~6% of the total) in being the leading vanguard that made victory against the communist Derg possible during the last civil war. Furthermore, the Amhara — the second-largest plurality at slightly over 25% of the population — have always considered themselves to be the core of the Ethiopian nation and are inclined towards centralization, both de-facto and de-jure (like during the Imperial, Derg, and TPLF-led EPRDF eras). A rebellion in this region could conceivably cut neighboring Tigray off from the central government even more so than it already is, thus laying the ground for another civil war unless the government reversed its radical reforms.

Asaminew’s Coup Attempt In Amhara
The aforementioned context explains some of the strategic reasoning that went into the recent coup attempt, which was led by Amhara security chief Asaminew Tsige, who was released from prison last year after serving nearly a decade behind bars for involvement in a 2009 coup plot. PM Abiy let him and many others free over the past year and a half as a goodwill gesture to promote national reconciliation and signal the seriousness of his reforms, with the idea possibly being that if Asaminew and others were opposed to the TPLF-led EPRDF, then that makes them natural allies of his reformist government. That was a colossal mistake in hindsight because it overlooked the modus operandi of the 2009 coup plot, which Reuters described at the time as “using assassinations and bombings to create enough chaos to get supporters on the streets to topple the government.” In other words, Asaminew planned to wage Hybrid War on Ethiopia by using Unconventional Warfare (terrorism, assassinations, bombings, etc.) to catalyze a Color Revolution that he and his cohorts hoped would lead to the reversal of reforms and/or regime change.

That’s exactly what he attempted to do last weekend, when a team of his operatives assassinated Amhara’s regional leader and then an allied bodyguard killed the country’s top military leader shortly thereafter in the capital of Addis Ababa. Shortly before his coup attempt, Asaminew publicly urged his fellow Amhara to take up arms and form militias to defend their region, and it was actually this simmering security threat that the region’s chief was holding a meeting about when he was killed. Had Asaminew and his ilk successfully seized power in Amhara after decapitating Ethiopia’s military leadership through the chief of staff’s assassination, then both that region and Tigray would have been largely outside the control of federal forces and PM Abiy would have been forced to either reverse his reforms and hope that he’d still have enough support within the EPRDF to remain in office afterwards or fight an imminent civil war to restore the central government’s authority. Suffice to say, Ethiopia was almost pushed to the edge of collapse, and the consequences would been catastrophic for this nation of over 100 million people.

Hybrid War Hell In The Horn Of Africa

Apart from the “Weapons of Mass Migration” that would have swept across the region and possibly as far as Europe, this could have also endangered the country’s unity and possibly even resulted in a Horn of Africa version of Ralph Peters’ “Blood Borders“. The American military strategist infamously declared that “ethnic cleansing works”, which would be the inevitable outcome of an ethno-regional civil war that would either “Balkanize” Ethiopia into several “independent” states or at the very least radically revise its internal administrative borders to make them more closely correlate with the country’s post-war ethnic layout. In any case, Ethiopia is the military and diplomatic lynchpin of regional security, so its destabilization would have a ripple effect across the comparatively more fragile neighboring states of Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan, as well as possibly endangering the peace with Eritrea if the Red Sea state saw a sudden opportunity to finally erase its former Ethiopian overseer from the map once and for all by resuming its support of armed separatist groups in the country.

No Foreign Fingerprints

It should be said at this point that the self-sustaining cycle of Hybrid War unrest that would have been unleashed had Asaminew’s coup attempt in Amhara succeeded wouldn’t have been in the interests of any foreign country. The Gulf States have come to command enormous influence over Ethiopia since PM Abiy’s entrance into office after the UAE helped broker the country’s peace deal with Eritrea, and the Horn of Africa heavyweight is one of China’s closest partners on the continent. Russia and Indiaare looking to invest more in it too, and Addis Ababa has always been very close to Washington when it comes to their shared anti-terrorist security concerns in Somalia. Although the cynical argument can be made that “Balkanizing” Ethiopia would help the US more easily divide and rule this strategic region, the chaotic consequences that it would have produced might have also damaged its own interests by weakening its allies’ “strategic depth”, especially that of the UAE and India vis-a-vis China. It therefore appears that Asaminew’s coup attempt was an entirely indigenous response to PM Abiy’s radical Gorbachev-like reforms and represents the fourth actual or attempted military seizure of power this year after Gabon, Algeria, and Sudan, proving that the “African Spring” continues to roll on.

Concluding Thoughts
Asaminew’s coup attempt in Amhara pushed Ethiopia to the edge of collapse, and although it was ultimately thwarted, it still exposed the country’s main fault lines and showed how vulnerable the Horn of Africa giant is to internal unrest as a result of PM Abiy’s radical Gorbachev-like reforms. The head of state now has to decide whether to reverse them, slow down the pace, or continue full steam ahead, with each choice having their respective benefits and detriments and therefore throwing the young leader on the horns of a massive dilemma. Making matters even more acute is the fact that Ethiopia is supposed to hold its first genuinely free and fair parliamentary elections sometime next year, which will be an historical turning point that will either finally stabilize the country or serve as a trigger event for exacerbating ethno-regionalist tensions. PM Abiy therefore has his hands full with almost as many possibly existential problems as Gorbachev did during the twilight years of the Soviet Union, though that doesn’t necessarily mean that Ethiopia is fated to follow the same path into the dustbin of history.

SOURCE: EURASIA

Dikembe Mutombo Records Ebola Messages For US Officials

In this Aug. 1, 2018, file photo, Dikembe Mutombo speaks during the opening ceremony of Basketball without Borders Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa. U.S. health officials are turning to a basketball hall of famer for help in one of the deadliest Ebola outbreaks in history. Dikembe Mutombo is regarded as one of the greatest defensive players in NBA history and is a well-known philanthropist in his native Congo. He recorded radio and video spots designed to persuade people to take precautions and get care that might stop the disease’s spread. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

BY MIKE STOBBE

NEW YORK (AP) — Unable to send disease fighters to help battle one of the deadliest Ebola outbreaks in history, U.S. health officials are turning to basketball hall of famer Dikembe Mutombo for help.

Mutombo, regarded as one of the greatest defensive players in NBA history and a well-known philanthropist in his native Congo, recorded radio and video spots designed to persuade people to take precautions and get care that might stop the disease’s spread.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began posting the spots Monday on its YouTube channel and on the agency’s website . Officials are trying to get radio and TV stations in the Democratic Republic of Congo to air them.

About 2,100 people have been reported ill — and nearly 1,500 have died — since an Ebola outbreak was declared in August in eastern Congo. It is the second deadliest outbreak of the lethal virus, which jumps from person to person quickly through close contact with bodily fluids.

Rebel attacks and community resistance have hurt Ebola response work in Congo. A World Health Organization doctor was killed in April, health centers have been attacked and armed groups have repeatedly threatened health workers. Because of safety concerns, the U.S. State Department last year ordered CDC disease specialists to stay out of the outbreak areas.

Mutombo, who moved to the U.S. in the 1980s intending to pursue a medical degree, told The Associated Press he understands where the distrust comes from.

“Someone who doesn’t look like you, who doesn’t think like you, who is not from your village, who is from other places, just walk to your village with a nice beautiful white truck and telling you ... ‘inject this chemical into your body to protect you from this deadly virus.’ That’s where there’s a fight. This is where we’re having a conflict,” he said.

“How do you that build trust? That’s the big problem we’re having in the Congo,” he said. “I believe as a son of Congo, I think my voice can be heard. Because everyone in the country knows my commitment to the humanity and the health.”

The idea for the PSA was sparked in February when Mutombo, a member of the CDC Foundation’s governing board who lives in Atlanta, was talking with Dr. Robert Redfield, the CDC’s director.

“We are deeply appreciative of his interest to try to get accurate information to the community,” Redfield said.

Mutombo, who turns 53 on Tuesday, previously did public service announcements focused on polio and yellow fever. A dozen years ago, his foundation established a 300-bed hospital on the outskirts of his hometown of Kinshasa.

The new spots were recorded in Kiswahili, French and Lingala. They talk about recognizing the early signs of Ebola, early treatment and prevention measures.

AP reporter Cody Jackson in Atlanta contributed to this report.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

What’s Going On? Black Children Between The Ages Of 5 And 11 Are Committing Suicide More Than Whites And Experts Don’t Know Why

Image via Urban Intellectuals

BY DAVID LOVE

ATLANTA BLACK STAR

Black children in America are having a hard time of it, as studies point to an increase in suicides. In a community where suicide is not viewed as a “Black thing,” and discussions about mental health are often viewed as taboo or not taken seriously, the statistics suggest that more must be done to stem the tide of a growing epidemic.

With historical adversity, psychological distress and racism impacting their mental health, the Black community is no stranger to suicide in America. Africans committed suicide on slave ships — in the case of the 1806 Igbo Landing mass suicide, Africans took their lives as an act of resistance — and on the plantation out of their suffering in captivity.

Historically, while Black suicide rates have been lower than white rates, Black suicide rates have been growing at a higher rate than those of their white counterparts, particularly from 1965 onward. Further, in recent years suicide rates among Blacks across age groups have been lower than those for whites, Native Americans — who have the highest suicide rates — and comparable to Latinos and Asian Americans. However, research also suggests Black suicides have been more prone to misclassificationand therefore likely underrepresented in the data, which would help explain the paradox of lower Black suicide rates despite the mental health risks Black people face.

Traditionally, Black youths have had a lower suicide rate than white youths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, a study published by the journal JAMA Pediatrics in 2018 revealed that the suicide rate among Black children under 13 years is now double the rate for white children in that age group. This reality applies to both girls and boys, the study says, and white suicide rates surpass Black rates in the teen years.

The study came as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that suicides among black children under 18 increased 71 percent from 2006 to 2016, at a time when suicides among all children rose 64 percent. Some of the possible reasons offered for the increase include the impact of racism placing Black children at a higher risk, and the notion that suicide is not an issue in the Black community, thereby hampering any efforts at suicide prevention. In the Black community, there are false notions that people living with a mental health condition are “crazy” or just need to be stronger, and that one can simply “pray away” depression.

Other potential factors include issues such as easy access to the materials used to commit suicide, a profound feeling of loss or isolation, and bipolar disorder. Further, experts note that the racially disparate rates of children taking their own lives also reflect the general gap in health outcomes among Black people and their white counterparts. While suicides among Black children between 5 and 11 years old have increased substantially since the 1990s, researchers have not identified one particular reason to explain the disparity, and more research is necessary.

Suicide in America is now at its highest level in 50 years. The level of suicides was greater in 1933 during the Great Depression — as is the case in hard economic times — and dropped among all groups, including African-Americans, with the end of World War II.

A number of suicides of Black children, adolescents and young people have received media attention and focused attention on the issue. In 2018, Stormiyah Denson-Jackson, 12, killed herself in her dormitory at SEED Public Charter School in southeast Washington, D.C. Her family sued, accusing the school of not doing enough to prevent her death. Stormiyah, who according to family had previously attempted to take her own life, reportedly died a month after she told school psychologists she “didn’t want to live anymore.” The school allegedly concluded she was a “low-level suicide threat,” and “her grades were suffering and she was getting into trouble frequently.” Also that year, Rylan Thai Hagan, 11, hanged himself from his bunk bed with a belt. A trumpet player and model student, the sixth-grader from Washington, D.C., took his life days before Thanksgiving, and after qualifying for a basketball tournament at Walt Disney World.

Actress Taraji P. Henson, star of “Empire,” “Hidden Figures” and other TV and film projects, recently testified before a Congressional Black Caucus Emergency Taskforce on Black Youth Suicide and Mental Health. “We can’t give up on our kids,” said Henson. “The more we talk about [mental health], the more people will feel like they can talk about it.” Henson, who suffers from anxiety and depression, created the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation — named for her late father — to address suicide, mental health and prisoner recidivism.

“The ages of the children committing suicide are getting younger and younger. It breaks my heart that 5-year-old children are contemplating life and death,” Henson said at the hearing. “In the African-American community, we don’t deal with mental health issues,” she added. “We don’t even talk about it. We’ve been demonized for coming out saying we have issues.”

Other organizations are addressing mental health and suicide in the Black community, whose members are less likely to seek care. For example, the Siwe Project, which was formed to promote mental health awareness among people of African descent and reduce the stigma of mental illness and therapy, was named for Siwe Monsanto, 15, who committed suicide. No More Martyrs is a mental health awareness campaign supporting Black women living with mental health concerns.

I Live For is a nonprofit organization which uses storytelling, including short films, live events and social media to end the stigma of mental health issues such as depression and anxiety among teens and young adults of color. The founder of the organization, Nikki Webber Allen, is an entertainment industry veteran whose nephew Paul, 22, committed suicide in 2013 after struggling with anxiety and depression.

“At the time I wasn’t aware he was struggling from depression and anxiety disorder. His family did know, and he had been in therapy and his parents did everything they could to support him. He was a churchgoing kid, very spiritual had a deep connection to God and the church,” Allen told Atlanta Black Star. She noted that her nephew was an exceptionally bright young man who had a full scholarship to Morehouse College. Allen debunked the myth that people who commit suicide are outliers, nerdy, and the like. “But that’s not the case. The majority of people who die by suicide are your loved ones, your neighbors your friends,” she added.

Lee said she was devastated by Paul’s death because of her own anxiety and depression. “It broke my heart that he didn’t feel comfortable telling me about it, and I didn’t feel comfortable telling him about it,” Lee said. “I didn’t want to let him down and feel weak. And I learned he felt the same way. He didn’t want to share it because he didn’t want to let us down. Families are not being honest about it. Families have to know they can help and support and not be ashamed.”

Responding to her nephew’s suicide, Lee decided she had to do something. “When we lost Paul, I said this cannot be in vain. We are blessed with resources. My dad’s a judge, my mom’s a schoolteacher. It’s a loving supportive family, I’ve been in the television industry for 25 years. God didn’t put me on this earth with a loving family, connections through my television and storytelling not to do anything. I’ve been too blessed not to do anything.” Without having experience in nonprofits, Lee found her calling. With Paul’s parents’ blessing, she shared his story. “I believe that sharing stories about people who look like them is the best way to tackle stigma,” Lee said, noting that she hopes to create awareness. “Stories break stigma, and I started working on a documentary film. … I did a TED talk that has been viewed over 2 million times, I get emails and direct messages from around the world who say thank you for sharing your story.”

According to Lee, while a stigma already exists around mental health issues, that stigma is even more pronounced among Black and Brown communities. “Particularly within the states, when you look at the research, we have a greater stigma around mental health, but we have a greater risk around mental health,” she noted. “When you look at socioeconomic disparities, not being able to have access to health care, you add greater risk and greater stigma, you have a powder keg. That’s why I’m so passionate about speaking out. People you don’t have to suffer in silence. Our ancestors didn’t have access to things we have access to. If they could have they should have,” she added.

“It’s critical because these things can be managed. I still live with depression and anxiety, which ebbs and flows, but it doesn’t define me,” Lee said. “Through therapy I’ve learned self-care rituals such as yoga meditation and diet. Sometimes I fall off the wagon. … We constantly have to be aware and mindful of our mental health, especially if you are prone to anxiety and other mental health disorders.”

When asked about the underlying issues driving suicide among Black children and what is needed to address it, Lee said more research is necessary to understand the causes, of which people are not yet aware. “My first thought is it is across the board. We are experiencing in this country a huge increase in suicide, alcohol abuse and drug abuse, which are interrelated. … You use it to medicate the pain,” she said. “Suicide, depression and anxiety are increasing, and social media has contributed hugely to the increase in depression, suicide and anxiety among young people.

Further, Lee identifies changing family structure and increasing family instability, and the breakdown in some of the institutional foundations that were important in the Black community. “Younger generations are moving away from the church. They are more skeptical and not attending it as much. Whether you’re religious or not, the Black church was a large part of our foundation. And I wonder if that is breaking down a bit, and if that is one of those foundational changes that is hurting the community,” Lee added, also noting that often, people mistakenly believe that people can “pray away” their mental health issues by going to church, as opposed to doing it in tandem with professional treatment.

In addition to issues of racism, Lee also identifies social media and cyberbullying as factors contributing to suicide. “The bullying is so much worse. You have access to it 24/7. And this culture — social media is like a highlight reel of people’s best lives … and it looks like people have a perfect life, and my life sucks. People are putting it on and showing their best selves. Everyone is having a good time,” she said. “Combine that with racism, disparities, everybody has more money. I really think it’s a bad combination.” Studies have shown a link between social media and anxiety in teens, and researchers believe the potential links between social media — including cyberbullying — and suicide as a public health issue.

Suicide among Black youth occurs disproportionately among boys, with males accounting for as much as 80 percent of suicides among all African-Americans, according to Dr. Sean Joe, associate dean for faculty and research at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis. “Anxiety is a very important predictor for suicidal behavior, particularly among Black Americans,” Joe said in a podcast from the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy and Research at NYU. He noted that while suicide risks increase for whites as they age, for Black people the risk is highest for people under 35. Factors such as homelessness, psychiatric disorders, social isolation and trauma elevate the risk for suicide.

Further, Joe noted that Black youth are developing under different circumstances than previous generations of African-Americans, and are more accepting of the notion of taking one’s life. “If you find a Black male exhibiting signs or talking in a self-destructive way — that they don’t think life is worth living, that they feel that the world is against them — and if they are exhibiting any signs that are potentially signs of suicide and their behaviors are starting to change, they are starting to give away things and they’re trying to isolate themselves in a very concerning way, you want to take those signs very seriously and consider getting your child assessed and connect them with a therapist.”

While more work is needed to understand why Black children and young people are taking their lives, acknowledging the problem and coming to terms with Black mental health is a step in the right direction.

SOURCE OF ARTICLE

In Ghana, Russian And Chinese Business Interests Align

Tema Habor. Image via Modern Ghana

BY JOSEPH HAMMOND

TEMA (TSARIZM) -- With Putin announcing a Russia-Africa economic summit set for Sochi in October, there are growing signs of Russia’s influence in Africa. Such forums have proved the venue for major announcements of Russian policy in the past, especially on the continent where Russia’s policy is often aligning with those of China.

Indeed the 2018 St. Petersburg Economic Forum served as a venue to announce an agreement between Rosneft and the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC). Under the terms of the agreement, Rosneft will deliver 1.7 million tons of LNG to Ghana through the port of Tema each year for 12 years. The tonnage aside, the deal marks an important step in the Russian Federation’s growing relationship with Africa.

“It’s very interesting that this deal was announced not in Ghana, but in Russia,” says Barbara M.E. Andoh a research associate at the Imani Center for Policy and Education, “Normally such deals have to be passed by the cabinet and the parliament, so the process is more transparent.” The final status of the agreement is unclear but, Andoh says the deal has attracted a great deal of attention.

At the time of signing, Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin said the agreement was about more than just LNG and would “open up exploration, production and trading possibilities for the company,” in Ghana and West Africa.

Due process aside, the announcement suggested that Rosneft had emerged successfully over competing bids. The previous government of Ghana under President John Mahama signed three LNG import deals with Quantum Power Ghana, West African Gas Limited and Kaheel. However, wether Ghana needs all of this LNG, or indeed the gas volumes that Russia hopes to export to the country, remains unclear

“Ghana is likely to have a ‘gas-glut’ in the mid-term,” says Andoh”; our producing oilfields such as Jubilee, 10, and SGN, all produce gas as well. There is a need to project demand and project supply; there is a fear an oversupply of gas.”

Russia plans to develop Ghana’s own natural gas capacity. “We are looking to develop an IPP, Independent Power Project, which will take gas that would normally be burned as flare gas and recapture and use it on shore for power generation,” said an official from Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund.

Ghana’s first port was developed by British colonial authorities at Takoradi, where favorable geography blessed Ghana with one of the best natural ports in West Africa. An off-dock terminal with a capacity of 17,000 TEU opened in 2017. The GPA also plans to develop a new port in Keta a small isthmus in Eastern Ghana (close to the border with Togo) that will include both a commercial port and a marina for pleasure boats.

However it is Tema, a bustling port to the east of the capital city of Accra, that emerged as the main economic port soon after independence. It is the third busiest in West Africa (After Lagos, Nigeria and the twin ports of Lome, Togo) . Until recently the port was still home to the Meridian Rock, a modest offshore boulder that was marketed to tourists as sitting exactly on Latitude Zero — the Greenwich Meridian.

The rock which sat in front of an aged resort where Queen Elizabeth II once stayed was said to have spiritual and cultural significance for Ghanaians of Ga heritage.

A recent trip to Tema by the author failed to locate the rock, and the resort is long since gone. Instead, four new piers are being added to the harbour in part of a port expansion project that is projected to cost as much as $2 Billion.

China Harbour Engineering Company is working on the Floating Storage Regasification Unit (FSRU) necessary for the LNG project at Tema. The project will reportedly provide 1,600 jobs to Ghana. Last year, another FSRU that had been tapped for installation off Ghana was quietly sent instead to Spain.

When completed, the facility built by the China Harbour Engineering Company will be able to supply LNG sufficient for 30% of Ghana’s energy needs. Rosneft is one of the investors behind the project.

The LNG project is not the only energy infrastructure build in Ghana in recent years. In 2012 Ministry of Energy & Petroleum signed an agreement with ROSATOM for the development of Ghana’s nuclear industry. In June 2015 a similar agreement was signed between Ghana and Russia. However, here again, the Chinese and Russian efforts are supporting one another. This year a new government-owned special purpose vehicle was created to further develop Ghana’s nuclear industry. The new company has already signed cooperation agreements with both China and Russia. Ghana is emerging as yet another example of great power cooperation in the 21st century.

Fighting Ebola Is Hard But In The Congo Mistrust And Fear Is Making iI Harder

A motorcycle taxi driver gets his hands washed with a chlorine solution at a checkpoint between Beni and Butembo in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Temperatures are also checked and possible Ebola isolated. Still, many Ebola victims have travelled far distances and infected new parts of North Kivu and Ituri provinces. Image via CNN

BY DAVID MCKENZIE, BRENT SWALLS

BUTEMBO, NORTH KIVU, DR CONGO (CNN) -- When Ebola first struck this city of more than a 100,000 people last September, many here didn't believe it was real.

As the disease latched onto families and spread through tightly packed neighborhoods, rumors began spreading of organ harvesting and political conspiracies, even as more people got sick and died.
When the ambulances came to take people away - they would never see them again.

"They didn't know where they were taking them. They just thought they were going 'over there' to die," says Sylvestre Zongwe, a Congolese manager of primary healthcare at French NGO The Alliance for International Medical Action (Alima).

So instead of going for treatment, many stayed at home and died, their bodies still highly contagious and deadly for the family members who buried them.

"Fear prevents good management of the epidemic. Fear makes it difficult to break the chain of transmission. What was needed was to break the fear," says Zongwe.

It's this extreme mistrust, along with simmering conflict and what many responders on the ground believe has been a flawed response, that has allowed the world's second-biggest Ebola outbreak on record to continue unabated more than 10 months after the first cases were found.

Despite millions of dollars in funding, and an effective experimental vaccine, Ebola is spreading to new parts of Congo's North Kivu and Ituri provinces and re-infecting areas thought rid of the virus. This month, it also made the long-feared jump across the border to neighboring Uganda, though at this stage those isolated cases appear to be contained.

A conflict the world forgets

Butembo's residents live at the frontier of a conflict that the world often forgets.

Hemmed in by multiple armed groups that commit repeated atrocities and harassed by the national military frequently accused of human rights abuses, they are famously and understandably distrustful of newcomers.

Earlier this year, unknown assailants destroyed Ebola treatment centers in Butembo. In April, a World Health Organization epidemiologist was killed in an attack on the University Hospital. In total there have been 130 attacks on health facilities between January and mid-May, causing four deaths and injuring 38.

Because of these security concerns, the White House barred world-renowned specialists of the US-based Centers for Disease Control from setting up a base in the heart of the epidemic (although it does have staff based in the regional capital Goma.) Similarly, Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) closed its treatment centers in some Ebola-hit areas and retreated to Goma.
Faced with an epidemic that is out of control and continued violence targeted at the response, health authorities are urgently searching for a different strategy to stop Ebola.

"During the first seven months of the epidemic we had more than 1,000 cases, now we have more than more than two thousand cases in a very short time," says Antoine Gauge, a response specialist with Doctor's Without Borders (MSF).

A draft internal World Bank assessment on the response from late May seen by CNN, describes the mounting shock at the rising death toll.

"Alarmed by the huge and unexpected surge in recent months in the number of new cases, a number of aid agencies and implementing partners have expressed concerns over many aspects of the response," it reads.

It describes a response top heavy on operational costs like salaries and hazard pay. More than half of the budget for WHO's strategic response plan during that period was allotted to staff remuneration. At the same time, it also shows that WHO was 40 million dollars short of its requested funding.
"We are absolutely outraged about how this response is going," one senior humanitarian official based in North Kivu told CNN, saying that WHO would be better served by letting more nimble expert teams, that cost far less, do the work. The official refused to be named, citing fear of criticism from the WHO.

Christian Lindmeier, a spokesman for WHO, says the organization is committed to the people of the DRC affected by the disease and that every key aspect of the response was labor-intensive.

"As some partners and NGOs have had to leave due to insecurity or other reasons, WHO has stepped in and absorbed their tasks," he said in an emailed statement.

"We owe a great deal of gratitude to the 700 brave WHO personnel who, working in partnership with the DRC Ministry of Health and hundreds of their national health workers, ensure that the response continues to operate across all vital functions, particularly when support is not immediately available from others."

Community care

Alima, the French NGO, believes it has found a solution to the mistrust that has stopped people seeking treatment. It's both hidden and in plain sight. Perched half-way up a hillside next to a school, their Ebola reception center is right inside a local clinic in the heart of the community.

A thermometer and a quick consult separates incoming suspected Ebola cases from other patients.
Community members were brought in and consulted at the beginning of the construction.
There are no alarming Ebola warning signs and posters. It just looks like part of the existing clinic. And that was the point: It's not a scary place, hidden away. It's in the community, as part of a system that treats all ailments.

"As soon as we fixed our approach, the results were there," says Zongwe.

But to the frustration of Alima, it is the only reception center of its kind in Butembo. Plans to build more have stalled. And, while innovative, it isn't nearly enough to stem the spread.

"This potentially could've been controlled earlier in the outbreak, when it was in a rural area, but letting it go fester underground with unknown chance of transmission, has really prolonged it, and we need to make sure we do everything we can to stamp it out now," says Dr. Ben Dahl, a leader of the CDC response based in Goma.

Innovation in treatment means if Ebola victims are identified quickly and get to treatment centers from reception centers, hospitals, or clinics, they have a much better chance of surviving.
To make treatment easier and less intimidating, Alima has developed what they call "the cube." Separated by a thin layer of transparent plastic, patients are able to interact more directly with doctors -- they can talk to family members who visit. All of it is an attempt to reduce the fear of Ebola and convince people to come in.

Major reset

During and after the devastating Ebola outbreak that spanned several countries in West Africa from 2014 to 2016 and killed more than 11,000, the WHO faced scathing criticism for acting too slowly and warning the world too late.

In response, the global health agency reorganized its emergency response structure and strengthened its operations.

But in this outbreak, at least according to the responders we spoke with on the frontlines of treating Ebola, it hasn't worked as planned.

David Gressly, freshly appointed by the UN as an Ebola Tsar of sorts, says the Ebola emergency response has gone through a major reset in recent weeks in the wake of internal criticism and a mounting death toll.

"If the virus continues to circulate, it remains a constant threat to spread to other provinces in this country and to neighboring countries and one day it will if we don't find a way to bring it to a halt," says Gressly, who previously managed the region's UN peacekeeping operations.

A motorcycle taxi driver gets his hands washed with a chlorine solution at a checkpoint between Beni and Butembo in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Temperatures are also checked and possible Ebola isolated. Still, many Ebola victims have travelled far distances and infected new parts of North Kivu and Ituri provinces.

CDC's Dahl says that the existence of the vaccine, which while experimental has been found to be 97% effective in the Congo, has led to complacency and the legwork of tracing patient contacts and quickly isolating them has not been done thoroughly.

"We were very fortunate to have this vaccine. It has probably reduced some of the cases and without it, we would have a much larger number of cases," he says.

"But they have not been doing the public health fundamentals of quickly following all the contacts, listing all the contacts, and isolating them as soon as it becomes symptomatic," he says.
He says around half of cases are still unknown to the contact lists and a large number of positive cases are deaths in the communities -- from people who wouldn't trust or couldn't get to early treatment.

Contact lists allow epidemiologists to ring-fence an outbreak. When a positive case of Ebola is identified, the victim is interviewed to find out who they were in contact with. All of those people get on a list and, in an effective outbreak response, they are closely monitored.

To get this outbreak under control, the CDC says more than 70% of cases need to seek treatment early and upwards of 80% of cases need to be on the contact lists. Otherwise, it will continue to spread.

Beaten up and stoned for taking temperatures

Samuel Mutahwa was unemployed when the virus hit Butembo, but when the outbreak hit he volunteered to help. Now he plays a critical detective role of tracing contacts that could help break transmission.

Armed only with a thermometer, he leads his contact tracing teams through the neighborhoods of Butembo. Twice a day for 21 days -- the maximum amount of time from time of infection to onset of symptoms -- they follow up with their list of patient contacts.

Mutahwa entered the compound of a grandmother and grandson that visited a sick friend in hospital. 

The friend later died.

"36.8 -- she is fine," says Mutahwa, holding a thermometer up to the smiling woman.

But earning the trust of his own community has been a hard fought and dangerous process. In the early months, Mutahwa says that he was beaten up and stoned.

"They said they were going to kill me. But I said no, I know what I am doing. I have to save the life of my people," he says.

Survivors part of the solution

Ebola is an intimate disease that is highly contagious but only contracted through direct contact.
It attacks families and then spreads through communities -- often through so-called "super-spreaders" the 20% of cases that spread the disease to 80% of the people.

It is often the personal choices of Ebola victims that can have an outsized impact on the transmission chain.

When the sister of Roger Mumbere Wasukundi, 17, got sick earlier this year, he says nobody wanted to believe that she had Ebola. They didn't even believe that Ebola existed.

After they buried his sister, his aunt got sick and quickly died. Roger, his mother, and his father all contracted the virus. Only Roger and his mother survived.

"I was sent to the treatment center because I didn't want to give up. They told me I could survive and I believed them. Everyone prayed for me," he says, sitting in his classroom in Butembo.

He still dreams of being a lawyer, but the virus still affects his health, his eyes clouded by the after effects of Ebola.

He believes that survivors like him can help turn the tide in the fight against Ebola and dispel the mistrust that has made the disease so hard to beat.

"Ebola survivors (need to) go talk to communities. Because this epidemic is very real," he says.

Trump Approved Cyber-Strikes Against Iran’s Missile Systems

President Trump speaks to the media outside the White House on Tuesday. Image: Jim Lo Scalzo

BY ELLEN NAKASHIMA

WASHINGTON (THE WASHINGTON POST) -- President Trump approved an offensive cyber-strike that disabled Iranian c*omputer systems used to control rocket and missile launches, even as he backed away from a conventional military attack in response to its shoot-down Thursday of an unmanned U.S. surveillance drone, according to people familiar with the matter.

The cyber-strikes, launched Thursday night by personnel with U.S. Cyber Command, were in the works for weeks if not months, according to two of these people, who said the Pentagon proposed launching them after Iran’s alleged attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman earlier this month.

The strike against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was coordinated with U.S. Central Command, the military organization with purview of activity throughout the Middle East, these people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the operation remains extremely sensitive.

-Though crippling to Iran’s military command and control systems, the operation did not involve a loss of life or civilian casualties — a contrast to conventional strikes, which the president said he called back Thursday because they would not be “proportionate.”

The administration on Saturday warned industry officials to be alert for cyberattacks originating from Iran.

The White House declined to comment, as did officials at U.S. Cyber Command. Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith said: “As a matter of policy and for operational security, we do not discuss cyberspace operations, intelligence or planning.”

The cyber-strikes were first reported by Yahoo News.

“This operation imposes costs on the growing Iranian cyber threat, but also serves to defend the United States Navy and shipping operations in the Strait of Hormuz,” said Thomas Bossert, a former senior White House cybersecurity official in the Trump administration.

“Our U.S. military has long known that we could sink every IRGC vessel in the strait within 24 hours if necessary. And this is the modern version of what the U.S. Navy has to do to defend itself at sea and keep international shipping lanes free from Iranian disruption.”

Thursday’s strikes against the IRGC represented the first offensive show of force since Cyber Command was elevated to a full combatant command in May. It leveraged new authorities, granted by the president, that have streamlined the approval process for such measures. It is also a reflection of a new Cyber Command strategy — called “defending forward” — that its leader, Gen. Paul Nakasone, has defined as operating “against our enemies on their virtual territory.”

Cybercom launched an operation against Russia last fall to deny Internet “trolls” affiliated with the Internet Research Agency the ability to carry out political influence operations on U.S. social media platforms. But the operation against Iran was more disabling.

“This is not something they can put back together so easily,” said one person, who like others was not authorized to speak on the record.

The digital strike was an example, two people said, of what national security adviser John Bolton meant when he suggested recently that the United States is stepping up offensive cyber activity. “We’re now opening the aperture, broadening the areas we’re prepared to act in,” Bolton said at a Wall Street Journal conference.

The United States in April designated the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organization in response to its destabilizing behavior across the Middle East.

Iranian cyber forces have tried to hack U.S. naval ships and navigation capabilities in the Persian Gulf region for the past few years. The Strait of Hormuz is a strategically important sea lane through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil passes daily.

On Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning to U.S. industry that Iran has stepped up its cyber-targeting of critical industries — to include oil, gas and other energy sectors — and government agencies, and has the potential to disrupt or destroy systems.

“There’s no question that there’s been an increase in Iranian cyber activity,” said Christopher Krebs, director of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “Iranian actors and their proxies are not just your garden variety run-of-the-mill data thieves. These are the guys that come in and they burn the house down.”

Krebs, in an interview, said, “We need everyone to take the current situation very seriously. Look at any potential incidents that you have and treat them as a worst-case scenario. This is not you waiting until you have a data breach . . . This is about losing control of your environment, about losing control of your computer.”

He said the “shift in geopolitical dynamics” factored into the agency’s warning.

The National Security Agency also urged industry to be vigilant. “In these times of heightened tensions, it is appropriate for everyone to be alert to signs of Iranian aggression in cyberspace and ensure appropriate defenses are in place,” NSA spokesman Greg Julian said in a statement Saturday.

Iran has unleashed destructive cyberattacks in the past. In 2012, it launched the Shamoon virus that nearly destroyed more than 30,000 business network computers at Saudi Aramco, a state-owned oil company, and erased backup copies of data. Saudi Arabia and Iran are fierce adversaries.

Private-sector analysts have documented a gradual increase in cyber activity by Iran and its proxies targeting U.S. industry since 2014. It has often come in the form of spearphishing attempts seeking access to computer systems in the energy sector.

“In the last year, the activity has sped up,’’ said Robert M. Lee, co-founder of cybersecurity firm Dragos, who conducted cyber operations for the NSA and Cybercom from 2011 to 2015. “In the last six months, we saw another hike. And last week, we saw additional activity.”

“The reality is we’ve been seeing more and more aggressive activity for quite some time,” he said. “It’s just getting worse.”

ellen.nakashima@washpost.com

Trump Postpones Nationwide Immigration Enforcement Sweep

President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Saturday, June 22, 2019, before boarding Marine One for the trip to Camp David in Maryland. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

BY COLLEEN LONG, LISA MASCARO

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Saturday delayed a nationwide immigration sweep to deport people living the United States illegally, including families, saying he would give lawmakers two weeks to work out solutions for the southern border.

The move came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Trump on Friday asking him to call off the raids. But three administration officials said scrapping the operation was not just about politics. They said Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaders had expressed serious concerns that officers’ safety would be in jeopardy because too many details about the raids had been made public.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to speak about private discussions.

“At the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “If not, Deportations start!”

The operation, which sparked outrage and concern among immigrant advocates, had been expected to begin Sunday and would target people with final orders of removal, including families whose immigration cases had been fast-tracked by judges.

The cancellation was another sign of the Trump administration’s difficulty managing the border crisis. The number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has risen dramatically under Trump, despite his tough rhetoric and hard-line policies. Balancing a White House eager to push major operational changes with the reality on the ground is a constant challenge for the Department of Homeland Security.

Trump gave the first public word of the planned sweep earlier this week, saying in a tweet that an operation was coming up and the agency would begin to remove “millions” of people who were in the United States illegally. Later, leaks to the media included sensitive law enforcement details, such as the day it was to begin, Sunday, plus specific cities and other operational details.

Pelosi called Trump on Friday night and the two spoke for about 12 minutes, according to a person familiar with the situation and not authorized to discuss it publicly. She asked him to call off the raids and he said he would consider the request, the person said.

It’s unclear what else was said during the call. But in a statement Saturday before the president’s decision was announced, Pelosi appealed to the same compassion Trump expressed in declining to strike Iran because of the potential for lost lives.

“The President spoke about the importance of avoiding the collateral damage of 150 lives in Iran. I would hope he would apply that same value to avoiding the collateral damage to tens of thousands of children who are frightened by his actions,” she said.

She called the raids “heartless.”

Pelosi responded to Trump’s announcement with her own tweet, saying: “Mr. President, delay is welcome. Time is needed for comprehensive immigration reform. Families belong together.”

Halting the flow of illegal immigration has been Trump’s signature campaign issue, but Congress has been unable to push his proposals into law with resistance from both Democrats and Republicans. Bipartisan talks over the immigration system have started and stalled but are again underway among some in the Senate.

Lawmakers are considering whether to give $4.6 billion in emergency funding to help border agencies struggling to manage a growing number of migrants crossing the border. The measure passed a Senate committee on a 30-1 vote. But the House is considering its own measure. Funding is running out and Congress is trying to approve legislation before the House and Senate recess next week.

Earlier Saturday, Trump hinted the operation was still on, saying the people ICE was looking for “have already been ordered to be deported.”

“This means that they have run from the law and run from the courts,” Trump said.

Coordinated enforcement operations take months to plan . Surprise is also an important element. ICE officers don’t have a search warrant and are working from files with addresses and must go to people’s home and ask to be let inside. Immigrants are not required to open their doors, and increasingly they don’t. Officers generally capture about 30% to 40% of targets.

The planned operation was heavily criticized by Democratic lawmakers as cruel, and many local mayors said they would refuse to cooperate with ICE. Immigrant advocates stepped up know-your-rights campaigns.

Another complication is that ICE needs travel paperwork from a home country to deport someone, so immigrants often end up detained at least temporarily waiting for a flight. ICE was reserving hotel rooms for families in the event the operation went off as planned Sunday.

The adult population of detainees was 53,141 as of June 8, though the agency is only budgeted for 45,000. There were 1,662 in family detention, also at capacity, and one of the family detention centers is currently housing single adults.

White House Unveils $50 Billion Palestinian Economic Plan

Hamas' chief Ismail Haniyeh attends a meeting with foreign reporters at al-Mat'haf hotel in Gaza City, Thursday, June 20, 2019. Hamas' chief says Israel is ignoring the terms of an indirect cease-fire agreement for the Gaza Strip. (AP Photo/Adel Hana)

BY MATHEW LEE

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Saturday unveiled a $50 billion Palestinian investment and infrastructure proposal intended to be the economic engine to power its much-anticipated but still unreleased “deal of the century” Middle East peace plan.

The scheme, which calls for a mix of public and private financing and intends to create at least a million new jobs for Palestinians, was posted to the White House website ahead of a two-day conference in Bahrain that is being held amid heavy skepticism about its viability and outright opposition from the Palestinians. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday reiterated his rejection of the proposal and the conference.

The “Peace to Prosperity” workshop on Tuesday and Wednesday will also take place amid heightened regional tensions over Iran that threaten to overshadow its goals.

With no official participation from the two main protagonists, Israel and the Palestinians, and scant enthusiasm from others, continued uncertainty and strong doubts over the plan’s political vision and the distraction of potential U.S.-Iran conflict, expectations are decidedly low. President Donald Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner faces high hurdles in building support for the initiative.

The 10-year plan calls for projects worth $27.5 billion in the West Bank and Gaza, and $9.1 billion, $7.4 billion and $6.3 billion for Palestinians in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, respectively. Projects envisioned include those in the health care, education, power, water, high-tech, tourism, and agriculture sectors. It calls for the creation of a “master fund” to administer the finances and implementation of the projects that is says are akin to the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II.

The plan foresees more than doubling the Palestinian gross domestic product, reducing the Palestinian poverty rate by 50 percent and cutting the sky-high Palestinian unemployment rate to nearly single digits, according to the documents, which do not specify exactly how the projects will be funded.

It also calls for linking the West Bank and Gaza with a modern transportation network, including high-speed rail service. Such ideas have been floated in the past in previous peace proposals but have run into Israeli security concerns.

“Generations of Palestinians have lived under adversity and loss, but the next chapter can be defined by freedom and dignity,” the White House said, calling the plan “the most ambitious international effort for the Palestinian people to date.”

But an already tough sell that has vexed U.S. administrations for decades is made tougher not least because Trump and his aides have refused to endorse a two-state solution to the conflict that has long been seen as the only viable path to lasting peace. They have also suggested they are open to unilateral Israeli annexation of occupied territory in the West Bank. And, officials say there is no intention of discussing either issue or the most contentious parts of their proposal to end the long-running conflict.

Thus, the core political issues that are key to resolving the dispute, such as borders, the status of the holy city of Jerusalem, Israel’s security and the fate of Palestinian refugees, will not be raised. Such matters, U.S. officials have said, may have to wait until the fall, after Israeli elections, leaving numerous questions that potential investors almost certainly want answers to before making even tentative financial commitments.

Palestinian leaders, angered by what they and their supporters see as blatant U.S. bias toward Israel, want nothing to do with the workshop and will not participate. The Palestinians have called for mass demonstrations against the conference on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

“The plan cannot pass because it ends the Palestinian cause,” Abbas said on Saturday. “We are not going to attend this workshop, the reason is that the economic situation should not be discussed before a political situation, so long as there is no political situation, we do not deal with any economic situation.”

An economic adviser to Abbas said projects envisaged in the U.S. proposal could be considered, but only after the political question is agreed upon. “Yes, we need to build the infrastructure, the investment, the tourism sector ... but that cannot come before ending the Israeli occupation,” Mohammed Mustafa, head of Palestinian Investment Fund, told The Associated Press.

In Gaza, the rival Hamas militant group has also condemned the conference. “In one voice, we say no to the Manama workshop and the deal of the century,” Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said. He appealed to Bahrain’s king to “take a brave, strong, authentic Arab decision not to host this workshop” and called on Arab countries to cancel their planned participation.

Complicating the Bahrain meeting is the fact that it coincides with a pledging conference in New York for the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees, a 70-year-old institution that the Trump administration has defunded and wants to eliminate entirely. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, already provides health, education and other services to millions of Palestinians.

Its supporters suspect the administration purposely scheduled the Bahrain conference to conflict with its event, noting that Kushner’s peace plan partner Jason Greenblatt has publicly called for UNRWA’s dissolution. Greenblatt argued last month that the agency perpetuates Palestinian victimhood, abets anti-Israel sentiment and is an inefficient drain on funds that could be better directed.

Kushner’s plan includes large sums of money for Jordan and Lebanon, countries with large Palestinian refugee populations, in an apparent attempt to have them absorbed into these nations.

Regardless of American intent, the dueling meetings are likely to leave donors, particularly European nations, in an awkward position: torn between supporting an established international organization or a mystery concept being put together by a U.S. administration that has in two years reversed a half-century of American Middle East policy.

Since Trump took office, he has recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv, downgraded the consulate devoted to Palestinian issues, shut down the Palestinian office in Washington and slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to the West Bank and Gaza.

Such steps have made Kushner’s prospects for success in Bahrain even slimmer, according to experts.

“This is trying to dangle some benefits to the Palestinians to accept terms they already rejected,” said Shibley Telhami, a Mideast scholar and the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and development at the University of Maryland. “A lure to get the Palestinians to accept the unacceptable is not going to work. It’s impossible.”

Although Washington’s Gulf Arab allies are supportive of the plan, Israel’s immediate neighbors have been more reluctant to embrace it.

Jordan and Egypt, the only two Arab countries with peace deals with Israel, are sending mid-ranking officials from their finance ministries and not Cabinet ministers to Bahrain.

Jordanian foreign ministry spokesman Sufian al-Qudah reiterated Amman’s position that a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 borders and a capital in east Jerusalem, “is the only way to resolve the conflict and achieve security, stability and comprehensive peace in the region.”

Egypt supports the same conditions, the state-run news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Hafez as saying.

Mohammed Daraghmeh in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed.

Augustine Nwagbara’s False Comparative History Of Ghana And Nigeria – Part 1

BY KWAME OKOAMPA-AHOOFE, JR.

About three days ago, one of my brothers-in-law, Mr. Eric Kwabena Baning, whatsapped to me a videoclip on which a black funerary jumpers-clad Nigerian “professor” of English – as of this press preparation, I have also learned that our subject is a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lagos – claiming to be a faculty member of the country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, Legon, virulently accused the Ghanaian media of demonizing Nigerians resident in Ghana for heinous crimes – such as rapes, murders and kidnappings – committed by a few Ghanaian resident Nigerians. The “Professor,” Augustine Uzoma Nwagbara, made the foregoing comment at a gathering or rally heavily attended by Nigerians resident in Ghana.

You see, I put his title of “Professor” in quotation marks because Nigerians, generally, are globally notorious for craving for titles they do not have or deserve. For example, nearly every adult male in Nigeria with the equivalent of N 10 (10 Naira) in his wallet wants to be addressed as a “Chief.” Anyway, on the aforesaid videoclip, Prof. Nwagbara made the flagrantly scandalous claim that in nearly every human endeavor, including the continental African Liberation Struggle / Movement, it was the Nigerians who pointed the way to their “younger” relatively wet-eared Ghanaian leadership counterparts.

Maybe somebody ought to have enlightened the obnoxiously patronizing Prof. Nwagbara about the historical fact that when his own country’s flagship academy, the University of Ibadan was established in January 1948, by British colonial default, about 7 months before the University of Ghana was officially established, it was Ghana’s Dr. Robert (Kweku Atta) Gardner (1914-1994) – the maternal uncle of the recently deceased former United Nations’ Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi (Atta) Annan – who was invited to establish the first Adult-Education Department on both the campus of the University of Ibadan and Nigeria at large.

About 22 years ago, a former student of the great Nigerian novelist, Prof. Chinua Achebe, late, who had also been my African Literature professor at the City College of New York of the City University of New York (CCNY of CUNY), by the name of Ezenwa-Ohaeto, published a quite comprehensive biography of his former globally renowned professor, titled “Chinua Achebe: The Author of Things Fall Apart” (Indiana University P., 1997), in which Prof. Robert Gardner was erroneously described as one of the seminal or pioneering European professors of the then University College of Ibadan. I had to promptly rectify this egregious error in a review of the same book that was published in The New York Amsterdam News’ edition of October 1, 1998, during which period I was a freelance writer and the Book Review Editor of this famous and one of the oldest African-American weeklies here in the United States.

I make the foregoing observation to highlight the fact that Nigerian intellectuals and even their most erudite scholars tend to know much less about Ghanaian achievers and the political history of our country than vice-versa. Perhaps this may be the result of the subconscious or unintended arrogance of being the native of a relatively much bigger country. You see, years ago, a very brilliant classmate of mine from the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis by the name of Joseph Hughes – today, he is a bigtime attorney in the Michigan area – quizzed me about the geographical locations of several islands in the Caribbean and other parts of the world. When I could not come up with a single correct answer, Joe jovially accused me of having been severely afflicted with a deadly virus called “The Arrogance of the Denizens of Big Countries and Continents.”

What Mr. Hughes meant was that people who came from relatively big countries and continental landmasses, rather than islands or very small countries, tended to be subconsciously blinded to the fact that the little island nations were equally significant in the scheme of global political affairs and the general affairs of humanity. In his caustic tirade against the Ghanaian people and our media, Nigeria’s Prof. Nwagbara adopted a similar arrogant posture. You see, academically speaking, compared to Nigeria, Ghana is a giant of Shakespearean proportions. And on the latter count, of course, I am thinking of globally renowned and first-class and immortalized intellectuals and scholars like Professors Adum-Kwapong, the erudite classicist, first Ghanaian Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana and former Rector of the Tokyo-based United Nations’ University; Willie Abraham, philosopher, sometime Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, author of the seminal classic “The Mind of Africa,” and the first African to be inducted as a fellow of Oxford University’s All-Souls College; Ephraim Amu, the first African to compose chorale music in the standard four vocal pitches, and composer of “Yen Ara Asaase Ni” fame; Kwabena Nketia, the recently deceased foremost African musicologist of his generation…. The list goes on and on and on.

Indeed, there was a time, not quite 30 years ago, when The New York Times called the University of Ghana “The Harvard [University] of West Africa. The anti-Ghanaian rabble-rouser may need to use his sabbatical leave, or whatever academic status he was undeservedly enjoying prior to him getting, reportedly, fired by the administrators of the University of Education, Winneba (UEW), to study the general academic and cultural history of Ghana in the modern or Euro-Western-dominated era and compare the same with that of Nigeria coevally. Trust me, Prof. Nwagbara would be deeply humbled by the findings that he comes up with.

SOURCE: MODERN GHANA

Mauritania Votes As 1st Peaceful Transfer Of Power Expected

In this Jan. 20, 2019, file photo, Mauritania's President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, center, attends the Arab Economic and Social Development Summit, in Beirut, Lebanon. Mauritanians are going to the polls on Saturday, June 22, 2019, as his preferred successor faces five opposition candidates in the West African nation threatened by Islamic extremism. (AP Photo/Bilal Hussein, File)

BY AHMED MOHAMED

NOUAKCHOTT, MAURITANIA (AP) — Mauritanians on Saturday went to the polls as the outgoing president’s preferred successor faced five opposition candidates in this West African nation threatened by Islamic extremism. It is expected to be the country’s first peaceful transfer of power.

One candidate of sub-Saharan African descent wants to improve race relations in a country where activists estimate tens of thousands of people still live in slavery despite the practice being banned by the government for decades.

Amnesty International has called on the next president to end rampant human rights abuses in this coastal Saharan nation of 4.5 million people.

“Anyone who dares to stand up against slavery, discrimination and other human rights violations and abuses is at risk of arbitrary arrest, unlawful detention and even torture,” said Kine Fatim Diop, a West Africa campaigner for the rights organization.

Mauritania has suffered five coups since independence from France in 1960 and has been led by military rulers for much of that time. President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz himself was head of the presidential guard when he seized power in a 2008 coup. He said he did so to prevent a return to repressive military rule.

He won a landslide election the following year in what opponents called a fraudulent “electoral coup.” Most opposition parties then boycotted the 2014 election in which Aziz won 82 percent of the vote according to official results.

The president is barred by the constitution from seeking another term. In respecting term limits instead of seeking to change the constitution he contrasts with several leaders elsewhere in Africa in recent years.

His successor of choice is former Defense Minister Mohamed Ould El Ghazouani, a retired general who served as chief of staff of Mauritania’s armed forces.

Ghazouani was chosen by the ruling majority as a presidential candidate after his retirement. He has campaigned on his security credentials and the outgoing president’s record on fighting Islamic extremists.

“Mauritania has to choose between Mohamed Ould El Ghazouani — who wants to strive toward security, development and progress — or vote for a return to insecurity, bad management and corruption where there is hate, racism and destruction of national unity,” the outgoing president said at a press conference marking the end of campaigning.

This moderate Islamic republic borders Mali, where jihadist rule forced tens of thousands to flee the country’s north to Mauritania in 2012. While the security situation has deteriorated in Mali even after the extremists were ousted from control, Mauritania has not seen the spillover in violence experienced by Mali’s other neighbors Niger and Burkina Faso.

Mauritania is a member of the G5 Sahel regional counterterrorism force , which was established in 2017 but has been plagued by funding problems.

The opposition candidates in this election include anti-slavery activist Biram Dah Abeid, who was elected to Parliament in September from his prison cell, where he was held on charges his supporters called politically motivated. He was released late last year after serving four months.

Mauritania was the last country to abolish slavery, doing so in 1981, but did not criminalize it until 2007. Late last year the United States ended trade benefits with Mauritania, saying the country is not making sufficient progress toward combating forced labor, including slavery.

The Mauritanian government, however, denies that slavery is widespread.

Candidate Kane Hamidou Baba of the “Living Together” coalition is representing parties backed by Mauritanians of sub-Saharan African descent.

Other candidates include Sidi Mohamed ould Boubacar, a two-time former prime minister who is supported by the opposition Islamist party; Mohamed ould Maouloud, candidate of the Opposition Coalition for Change and Mohamed Lemine El Mourteji Wafi, who hopes to draw the support of younger Mauritanians.

A runoff election will take place next month if no one receives a majority of votes on Saturday.

Associated Press writer Krista Larson in Dakar, Senegal contributed.

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