Trump administration education budget proposes $10.6 billion in cuts

Shelley Connor 

Documents obtained earlier this week by the Washington Post outline the Trump administration’s first Department of Education (DoED) budget detail plans to dramatically slash federal funding for public education.

Among the most egregious measures included in the proposal is the complete elimination of a student loan forgiveness program designed to help teachers, social workers, and other public servants with their student debts.

The proposed budget takes aim at student borrowers in other ways, as well. For example, it would eliminate over $700 million in Perkins Loans for disadvantaged students. The budget would also reduce funding for the work-study program, which allows students to work their way through college, by $490 million. And it would put an end to subsidized federal loans, in which the government pays the interest on the loan while the student is still attending school.

Another cut affecting low income college students would eliminate a $15 million program that provides childcare for low-income parents attending college. Funding for Pell Grants, based upon student need, would be maintained—but it would not be increased to meet the needs left by cuts to the Perkins Loan program. An estimated 12 million Americans depend upon financial aid to help with college; these cuts will affect them profoundly.

In K-12 education funding, 22 programs would be eliminated. Among these are a $1.2 billion program for after school programs. These programs serve almost two million children, most of whom are from poor families. Other cuts include $2.1 billion for teacher training and class-size reduction, a $12 million program for gifted students, $12 million allocated for Special Olympics programs, a $27 million arts program, $72 million allocated for foreign language and international studies programs, and $65 million allocated to programs for Alaskan and Hawaiian Native populations.

While other programs will continue, their funds will be cut significantly. Promise Neighborhoods, an initiative designed to support children in impoverished communities, would lose $13 million. An adult literacy program would lose $96 million. Grants for career and technical education would be cut by $168 million; paired with the cuts to college financial aid, such cuts will drastically reduce options for a significant number of students who wish to pursue either a university degree or a career in the skilled trades.

The Trump administration budget also dedicates no money to a fund earmarked for student enrichment and support. This fund assists schools with mental health services, physical education, Advanced Placement courses and Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) instruction. While Congress authorized up to $1.65 billion for the fund, the Trump administration has budgeted zero dollars for the fund in the next fiscal year.

Title I funds, which help poor children, and special education funding will neither be increased nor cut by the budget. Yet while the budget does not explicitly cut these programs, impoverished schools will likely still see a reduction in Title I funding; new laws allow states to spend up to 7 percent of their Title I funding upon school improvements before they disburse the funds to qualifying districts.

In addition, the budget would channel $1 billion of Title I funding to a new grant program. FOCUS, or Furthering Options for Children to Unlock Success, would channel these grants to school districts that allow families to choose which public schools their children attend—the federal, state, and local funds set aside for those children would travel with them to the new school they choose. In such a way, Title I money, along with other school funds, will migrate into wealthier districts at the expense of the districts for which the program was designed.

As the budget makes brutal cuts to public education spending, it allocates $500 million for charter schools—this represents an increase of 50 percent over the current charter school spending by the federal government. Another $250 million will be spent on “Education Innovation and Research Grants,” which would be dedicated for expanding school vouchers for private schools and for studying the impacts of these vouchers. Thus far, the budget does not clarify how much of the $250 million would go towards the studies as opposed to the actual vouchers.

Altogether, the proposed budget cuts $10.6 billion from public education. At the same time, $158 million is proposed for salaries and expenses at the DoED; among these expenses are expanded student loan “servicing” (i.e., collections) and increased security for education secretary Betsy DeVos, who spurned the in-house security team, contracting instead with the US Marshals.

In the meantime, the entire DoED will see workforce reductions of about 4 percent; about 150 positions will be scrapped by the proposed budget.

This budget demonstrates Trump and DeVos’ well-documented disdain for public education. DeVos has previously characterized federally-funded public education as “arcane” and ineffective; she has also headed an organization, the Acton Institute, that advocated for the repeal of child labor laws. The Trump administration’s budget proposal is but a first, coordinated attack upon public education while benefiting the privatized school companies, for whom George W. Bush and Barack Obama opened the door, at the expense of quality education for working class children—and most especially for impoverished children.

French government prepared coup if Le Pen won presidential election

Alex Lantier

According to an extraordinary report published yesterday in L’Obs magazine, top members of France’s Socialist Party (PS) government prepared to launch a coup d’état if Marine Le Pen of the neo-fascist National Front (FN) won the May 7 presidential run-off.

The purpose of the coup was not to keep Le Pen from taking office. Rather, it was designed to crush left-wing protests against Le Pen’s victory, impose martial law, and install Le Pen in power in an enforced alliance with a PS-led government.

“No one dared imagine what would happen the day after the run-off if Marine Le Pen won. A social explosion could be expected,” wrote L’Obs. It explained, “The strategists who conceived this plan B supposed that after the National Front victory, the country would be on the verge of chaos: state of shock, Republican demonstrations, but above all extreme violence, especially coming from the ultra left.”

“The plan was never written down black on white, but everything was really ready,” L’Obs wrote. “Its execution was so precisely planned that a handful of members of the government, chiefs of staff, and top state officials can still describe it from memory, step by step. … To be sure of the details, L’Obs verified its report with three different sources in the outgoing government and in institutions of the state.”

The plan reportedly entailed launching massive police operations to put France on lockdown, and a PS power grab set into motion by a refusal of Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to step down. A top state official involved in the plan told L’Obs, “The country would have been totally shut down. The government would have had only one priority: ensuring the security of the state.”

To be clear, this signifies the imposition of a police-military dictatorship in France. Basic democratic rights are already suspended under the terms of the PS government’s state of emergency, which has been perpetually extended since it was first imposed after the November 13, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. Police are authorized to arbitrarily detain individuals, ban protests and consign individuals to house arrest. The plan clearly entailed the full use of these powers to impose martial law and permanently suspend the normal functioning of the state.

Police authorities in each of France’s 100 departments had been in contact with the Interior Ministry to prepare for a post-election crisis. These discussions indicated that police were “afraid” of the situation after a Le Pen victory, L’Obs writes, citing a domestic intelligence memo already reported in Le Parisien: “Far-left movements that are more or less rooted in the population will doubtless try to organize protests, some of which could lead to serious disturbances.”

As these discussions were unfolding, L’Obs reports, police officials and police trade unions were demanding total freedom to use potentially deadly weapons against protesters, apparently including stun grenades and rubber bullets. “The instructions given not to use one or another weapon have become intolerable,” wrote one police trade union official.

Within the state machine itself, Cazeneuve’s refusal to step down was intended to “freeze the political situation,” according to one of the sources of L’Obs and, exploiting a loophole in the French constitution, launch a constitutional coup against the newly elected president.

“At first,” L’Obs writes, “it was planned that the head of government would not submit his resignation. Of course, for a prime minister to remain in his position is contrary to Republican tradition, but his resignation is not in fact imposed by the constitution. In the next step, the parliament would be assembled in extraordinary session. A date was even chosen: May 11. The agenda would have been the national crisis provoked by the violence that followed the elections. The deputies would have been asked to give the government a vote of confidence.”

In short, the National Assembly would have been told to give a pseudo-legal stamp of approval to a coup hatched by the police and intelligence services behind the backs of the French people. This transitional government was to last as least as far as the legislative elections of June 11 and 18, assuming that the new authorities would have allowed those to proceed.

What L’Obs is describing would have been the most serious suspension of normal democratic procedures in France by the security forces since the Algerian war, when officers loyal to the Algerian colonial lobby seized power in Algiers in May 1958. They then launched a coup, Operation Resurrection, to topple the government in Paris. General Charles de Gaulle stepped in, seized emergency powers and ordered his supporters to hastily rewrite the French constitution, laying the basis for France’s current Fifth Republic.

The media silence on this report in L’Obs yesterday evening was deafening, even though the magazine is a well-respected publication, and there is little reason to doubt its reporting. However, the report has the most far-reaching political implications and immediately raises serious questions about the administration of incoming President Emmanuel Macron.

Are there other scenarios besides the election of Le Pen in which the police and intelligence agencies would suspend constitutional rule and impose martial law?

If the Interior Ministry now treats as existential threats all left-wing protests at which violence might occur—whether by protesters or by police provocateurs—are similar plans being made to repress protests that will erupt against Macron’s policies, whether on war or social austerity? Will police react to constitutionally protected rights to strike and protest with attempts to suspend constitutional rule and install a dictatorship?

The quarter century of relentless austerity in France and across the European Union (EU) since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union has profoundly transformed European capitalism. As economic inequality and social anger reach unprecedented levels, the old political and social relations are breaking down. The brutal repression of protests against the unpopular PS labour law, imposed without a parliamentary vote amid the longest-running state of emergency in France’s history, is a sign that French democracy is in an advanced state of collapse.

Under these conditions, the attempts to downplay the significance of the L’Obs story by PS officials contacted by the magazine, as well as by L’Obs itself, are complacent and false. Their assurances that the planned operation was constitutional and would have rapidly led to a restoration of the normal functioning of the Fifth Republic are not worth the paper they are printed on.

Outgoing PS Prime Minister Bernard Cazeneuve himself has given credibility to the L’Obs story of a coup plot by the PS, as he said he had “no intention to desert the front at Matignon [Palace, the prime minister’s residence] if Marine Le Pen won the presidential election.” Contacted by L’Obs about the coup plot, his staff said he had “never ever mentioned such a plan” to them.

As for L’Obs itself, it insisted that the coup plan was constitutional. Taking as good coin the coup plotters’ assurances that they would have handed over power, the magazine concludes that it would have led to a “brief interim period without precedent in the history of the Republic.”

In fact, if the police-intelligence apparatus attempted to put such plans into effect, they would be openly breaking with the constitutional order and paving the way for an even more extended break of the ruling class with democratic forms of rule. It would be a prelude to a violent confrontation with the working class, where there is still a profound commitment to democratic rights.

Fund managers earned billions in 2016 even as hedge funds underperformed

Shelley Connor

A report published this week in Institutional Investors’ Alpha Magazine reveals that hedge funds in 2016 hemorrhaged investors, who took with them an estimated $70 billion from the $3 trillion hedge fund industry. Despite this multi-billion dollar exit, hedge fund managers continued to enjoy extraordinary compensation; the 25 top earning hedge fund managers pocketed a combined total of $11 billion last year.

James Simons, a former National Security Agency (NSA) code cracker and the head of Renaissance Technologies, made about $1.6 billion. Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio brought in $1.4 billion. Robert Mercer, Renaissance Technologies’ co-chief executive and one of the biggest contributors to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, earned $120 million.

Hedge funds have consistently yielded disappointing returns over the past eight years, even as the stock market as a whole has thrived. Some managers only brought in single-digit returns for their investors last year; some lost billions of dollars. Many investors shut down and offloaded their funds at the fastest rate since the 2008 financial crisis.

Hedge fund managers’ compensation, however, has continued to soar over the past decade. Even though the top 25 hedge fund managers earned less in 2016 than they did in 2015 (when they collectively earned $13 billion), the total is still more than double what the top earners in 2000 made, the first year that Institutional Investors published its list.

The lowest ranking manager among top-50 richest managers made more money in 2016 than any bank executive, including the executives of J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

Many of the hedge fund managers on Alpha’s top 25 and top 50 lists actually posted subpar returns. Among these is Kenneth C. Griffin, a major Republican donor, who netted his investors returns of just 5 percent in 2016. He earned $600 million. Daniel Loeb of Third Point finished the year with an income of $260 million, even though he made his investors just 6 percent.

Hedge fund managers are able to make such exorbitant paychecks, regardless of whether their investors make money or lose it, because of what is known as the 2-and-20 fee system. Hedge funds generally charge their investors 2 percent of their investments annually, irrespective of the investments’ performance. In this way, whether their investors lose, break even, or make a profit, managers have an enormous guaranteed income. When an investment makes a profit, the hedge fund manager typically commands 20 percent of the earnings.

John Paulson, the hedge fund manager who reaped a windfall by betting on the collapse of the housing market in 2008, called 2016 “the most challenging year.” Paulson has earned $15.45 billion since 2000, yet he was bumped off of Institutional Investors’ top hedge fund managers’ list because of double digit losses last year. Other hedge fund managers, citing “industry headwinds,” closed their doors last year. Wild swings on the stock market, such as occurred after Donald Trump’s election and Britain’s vote to exit the European Union, caused other wary hedge fund managers to withdraw from the business.

Many of the managers who persisted in 2016, including some of those on Institutional Investors’ list, were able to continue bringing home their outrageous earnings by negotiating fees and percentages with nervous investors. Despite this, they earn significantly more in a year than the average American ever will, even after a lifetime of work.

The hedge funds that managed to make a profit last year are worth noting. Renaissance Technologies, worth about $42 billion, employs cryptographers, physicists, and even astronomers to analyze massive amounts of data that the company uses to inform investment choices. Founded by the former military and NSA codebreaker Simons, the firm jealously guards the precise details of its investment analysis and strategy. The company was able to maintain profits for its investors, in both domestic and foreign equities, even as other hedge funds teetered in the wake of Brexit.

Hedge funds have garnered distaste, wariness, and outrage amongst the public, which politicians have leveraged to their advantage. Scott M. Stringer, the New York City comptroller, accused hedge fund managers of collecting fees “without adding value.”

New York City pension funds were, in many cases, withdrawn from hedge funds last year, although Stringer added about $170 million in police and firefighter pension funds to hedge funds. The comptroller’s office requested that the remaining hedge fund managers lower their cut of the investments and waive their management fees.

President Trump played upon the public’s outrage at hedge fund managers in his presidential campaign. Trump accused hedge fund managers of “getting away with murder” and vowed to close the loopholes that allow them to pay lower taxes. His proposed tax plan, however, does nothing of the sort. To the contrary, while it closes the “carried interest” loophole, it lowers the income tax rate on profits earned by investment managers.

The contradictions rife in any serious look at hedge funds--underperforming investments coupled with outrageously high earnings for managers--highlight the seething ferment of the global capitalist crisis.

Workers worldwide face greater and greater uncertainty about wages, food security, and health care access. The stock market remains highly volatile, subject to upheavals in the face of geopolitical tensions. Yet hedge fund managers continue to “earn” exorbitant fees, betting on risky ventures with workers’ retirement accounts.

The disgruntlement among investors concerning hedge funds further reveals the tensions amongst the numerous parasitic layers of the bourgeoisie and the upper middle class, who fight, not for the responsible spending of workers’ 401ks and pensions, but for their own cut of profits in the face of diminishing returns.

Stringer rightly accuses the top-earning managers of earning massive profit without adding value, but he fails to recognize that the only real value rests in what workers produce--and when workers have been reduced to poverty by declining wages and by unemployment, the ever rising value of the stock market is illusory.

Both the lackluster performance of hedge funds and the obscene wealth of their managers underscore the illusory nature of the stock market’s performance. They also signify the need, greater, perhaps, than at any time in history, for workers to unite internationally to wrest the value produced by their labor away from the Wall Street gamblers and the politicians who cater to them.

Macron names government to implement social counterrevolution in France

Francis Dubois

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, named May 15 by newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron, made public his cabinet choices yesterday. It is a government in which all the dominant factions of the political establishment, particularly the so-called moderate wings of the Socialist Party (PS) and The Republicans (LR), come together to prepare a social counterrevolution.

The presentation of the cabinet had been delayed 24 hours to make certain that none of the nominations would embarrass Macron, who has pledged to “moralise” public life and end tax evasion by officials. He wants to give a veneer of legitimacy to his policies, which continue and intensify those of his discredited Socialist Party predecessor, François Hollande: austerity, war and attacks on democratic rights.

The strategic ministries (the interior, foreign affairs, defence, justice and economy) will be occupied by longstanding pillars of the political establishment and proponents of the policies implemented in France under right-wing President Nicolas Sarkozy of LR or Hollande and the PS.

In the second round of the presidential elections, a race between Macron and neo-fascist Marine Le Pen, the Parti de l’égalité socialiste (PES) stressed that workers could not stop the rise of militarism and police state rule by voting for Macron, whose programme was profoundly reactionary. The PES proposed instead an active boycott to arm workers with an independent, revolutionary and socialist perspective for the struggles against Macron that were to come.

The team presented by Macron and Philippe confirms this analysis of Macron’s presidency against all those, like Jean-Luc Mélenchon or the New Anti-capitalist Party, who signaled their sympathy for arguments that voters should pick Macron to block Le Pen. The new government is preparing imperialist war abroad and class war against the workers at home.

At the beginning of the week, Macron announced that Patrice Strzoda, the former chief of staff of PS Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, would be his own chief of staff.

Strzoda organised the brutal police repression of protests against Hollande, including the systematic and deadly use of “flash-ball” rubber bullets. As prefect in Brittany from 2013 to 2016, he oversaw the police operations and the use of assault grenades that in 2014 cost the life of ecological protester Rémi Fraisse. His nomination is a sign that Macron and Philippe will stop at nothing to repress the explosive opposition that their policies will provoke.

Jean-Yves Le Drian (PS) is France’s new minister of foreign affairs. As defence minister under Hollande, he played a critical role in French imperialism’s aggressive policy in Syria and Africa, and against Russia as part of the NATO alliance. He also supervised the deployment of the army on French soil in the context of the prolonged state of emergency, which suspends basic democratic rights.

According to press reports, Le Drian worked closely with Hollande to identify and approve targets of the PS’s “homicide operations.” These extra-judicial murders, “targeted assassinations,” including of citizens, were carried out by the French state abroad in flagrant violation of the French constitution, which forbids the death penalty. His chief role in a new government will be to carry out the reorganisation and remilitarisation of European foreign policy, carried out in close collaboration with Berlin.

Gérard Collomb, the PS mayor of Lyon, is now interior minister. He is a founding member of the PS. According to Luc Rosenzweig, a former journalist at Le Monde and Libération, Lyon under Collomb—due to the close collaboration between the PS and business circles—was “a laboratory of Macronism even before Macron tried to play in the big leagues of the political arena.” After the November 13, 2015, attacks in Paris, Collomb decreed the arming of Lyon’s municipal police.

Another pillar of the political establishment, right-wing politician François Bayrou of the Democratic Movement (MoDem), is now justice minister. Bayrou has regularly been a minister of reactionary governments since the 1980s. A practising Catholic, he tried as education minister to introduce a law that would allow stepped-up financing of private schools. In 1994, nearly a million protesters marched to oppose this plan.

He will be tasked with implementing Macron’s “zero tolerance” plan, which includes 15,000 more prison berths, increasing the number of youth detention centres and toughening sentences for petty crime, including with the introduction of so-called immediate fines levied by police.

The defence ministry has been given to Sylvie Goulard of Bayrou’s MoDem, who has close ties to the European Union after advising European Commission chief Romano Prodi between 2001 and 2004. She is charged with implementing Macron’s militarist programme, including increasing military spending to 2 percent of GDP and reintroducing the draft.

Macron has done everything to indicate that preparing for war and supporting the army are among his highest priorities, traveling down the Champs-Élysées on his inauguration day on a military vehicle. He will participate in the NATO summit in Brussels on May 25 and visit, either today or tomorrow, French troops deployed in Mali and the broader Sahel zone in Africa.

The new labour minister, Muriel Pénicaud, is close to Macron. She was the CEO of many major public and private French enterprises. The Voix du Nord daily called her “the salesman of France to foreign investment.” She has the job of coordinating Macron’s attempts to attract foreign investment via historic attacks on wages, employment and social spending based on massive deregulation.

Pénicaud will supervise the destruction of the Labour Code announced by Macron, based on Hollande’s deeply unpopular labour law, imposed without a vote in parliament and after the harsh repression of protests against it.

India-Sri Lanka: A Grim Tale of Economic Cooperation

Husanjot Chahal


On 11 May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Sri Lanka to attend the International ‘Vesak Day’ celebrations, just two weeks after Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s five-day visit to New Delhi. PM Modi’s visit marked the 7th interaction between the Indian and Sri Lankan heads of state since 2015, which is suggestive of vigorous high-level political engagement. This political activism has mostly aimed at enhancing bilateral relations through increased economic, investment, and development cooperation. Even though the need for engagement has remained strong, in practice, very little has been achieved on the economic front. Given the current trajectory, even less is expected to materialise on the ground. 

Cumulatively, the only significant economic arrangement realised by India and Sri Lanka in the past two years is the ‘Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for cooperation in economic projects’, signed recently during PM Wickremesinghe’s visit to India. Media reports and official interviews, prior to his visit, highlighted the likelihood of an India-Sri Lanka deal for the development of the Trincomalee area as a regional hydrocarbon hub in the Bay of Bengal and eastern Indian Ocean. What ensued instead was the MoU – essentially in the nature of a “roadmap for the future.”

Apart from outlining a few broader agendas (on the development of the transportation sector, agriculture and livestock, etc), the roadmap sketched out agreements in the power sector (a 50MW Solar Power Plant in Sampur, a regasified 500MW LNG Power Plant, an LNG Terminal/Floating Storage Regasification Unit in Colombo/Kerawalapitiya). With Sri Lanka facing an acute power crisis, the emphasis on energy projects is no surprise. The spotlight on the proposed joint venture to develop the World War II-era oil storage facility in Trincomalee remains. While listing agendas, however, the roadmap remains oblivious to past trends and current realities.

The history of Indian involvement in Sri Lanka’s power sector provides a grim picture held back by domestic political concerns and a sluggish bureaucracy. For instance, the Sampur power plant, originally proposed as a coal-based project, has been in the pipeline since 2006 and still awaits execution. It has witnessed a series of delays for various reasons, including repeated requests by Colombo to change the location of the project due to changes in local socioeconomic conditions, mainly related to resettlement of Tamil families displaced by war. With most of the resettlement work still remaining, any new venture in Sampur will have a guaranteed pool of opposition from at least one section of the Lankan population. 

A major roadblock for Indian economic engagement in Sri Lanka is, and has been, the prevailing trust deficit amongst its people vis-à-vis India. There have been negative perceptions about India’s role on the island; for instance, with regard to tying “their only supply of cooking gas or petroleum” to New Delhi’s geopolitical games. The April 2017 strikes by the workers of the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) against the joint development of the Trincomalee oil farms serves as another instance indicating entrenched resistance to economic cooperation with India. The fact that it practically prevented PM Wickremesinghe from signing the Trincomalee deal during his India visit, followed by President Sirisena’s official assurance that no deals would be signed during PM Modi’s visit to Sri Lanka, indicates the political strength of such resistance.

With particular reference to Trincomalee, besides tackling apprehensions, there is a serious need to address stakeholder concerns about project ownership and operation. In 2003, as part of an MoU signed by the CPC and the Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), India’s oil subsidiary in Sri Lanka - Lanka IOC (LIOC) - obtained a 35-year lease to develop the China Bay (Trincomalee) tank farm, with a total of 99 tanks. However, implementation of the MoU was marred with reservations expressed by the CPC on the procedural aspects of implementation and against providing exclusive right to LIOC to run the installation. Due to internal political reasons, the lease agreement was not implemented in totality, such that LIOC has been able to use only 14 tanks in the lower farm area, and the remaining 84 are unused. 

The Common Workers Union (CWU) of the CPC alleges that since the lease agreement had to be signed within a period of six months, and was not signed, it is not legal. On the other hand, while speaking about the recently signed MoU, India’s Ministry of External Affairs has been clear in stating that Lanka IOC has had the rights to develop the tank farm since 2003, and the agreement to now develop the upper tank farm as a joint venture comes in light of “our spirit of partnership.” These differences in the narrative could be a recipe for conflict, and needs to be addressed sensitively if a fruitful partnership is intended.

The India-Sri Lanka roadmap for cooperation in economic projects is, at best, a good first step since 2015 that has come after significant initial delays. Implementing its agenda will be a complex process. Nothing short of a serious attempt to pace the process of concluding agreements, learning from past lessons, reaching out to bridge the trust deficit, and addressing stakeholder concerns in various projects, will enable forward movement.

IDB Scholarships for Muslim Communities in Non-Member Countries 2017/2018

Application Deadlines: 

• May-July: Deadline for submission to the IDB (for abroad studies)
• June to December: Deadline for submission of applications to the IDB  (for in-country studies)

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Field of Study

• Medicine
• Engineering
• Agriculture
• Other fields related to above disciplines

About Scholarship: The objective of the Programme is to improve the socio-economic conditions and to preserve the cultural and religious identities of Muslim Communities in Non-member Countries through developing their human capital resources. The Programme provides scholarship to the academically meritorious but financially needy young Muslim students to pursue undergraduate or first-degree study in professional courses.

The concept of the Programme is to build a team of professional and committed Muslims as a tool for the improvement of the socio-economic conditions of their communities. Under this Programme, the scholarships are given as interest-free loan to the students but grants to the communities to which they belong. After graduation and gainful employment, all graduates are obliged to repay their loan amount to the community (IDB Local Trusts) for recycling and awarding additional scholarships to the local needy students.

Offered Since: 1983

Type: Undergraduate studies

Selection Criteria: Each year, the Programme follows the following selection procedures:

• The Counterpart Organization announces the Programme in the country and invites applications from potential candidates who fulfill the criteria of the Programme.
• The Scholarship Selection Committee (SSC) conducts the interviews of eligible candidates and recommends them through the Counterpart Organization to the IDB.
• The IDB makes the final selection and informs the Counterpart Organizations.

Eligibility: To be eligible for this scholarship, the student/applicant must be able to meet the following basic criteria:

• Age not over 24 years.
• Completed senior secondary / pre-university education with good grades in major science subjects and language of instruction.
• Secured admission in one of the disciplines covered under the Programme at a recognized college or university in their own countries (for in-country study).
• Not in receipt of any other scholarship.
• Committed and needy Muslim.
• Recommended by the Counterpart Organization.

Number of Scholarships: Several

Value of Scholarship: The Programme covers all relevant expenses during students’ study period, including tuition fees, health and living costs as determined by the IDB.

Duration of Scholarship: for the period of study

Eligible Countries: developing countries

To be taken at (country): Consistent with the concept of the Programme, students must get admission or be in the first year in their own countries.
On exceptional basis and where admissions in professional courses are not possible or not available in any particular country, the IDB assists to place students from these countries in IDB member countries, which have been generous enough to provide places for the IDB students in their universities.

How to Apply

In countries, where the Programme is being implemented, inquiries can be made and application form obtained from Counterpart Organization in the country.

In a country, where the Programme has not yet been implemented, inquiries may be directed to the Scholarship Division, Department of Communities in Non-Member Countries, IDB.

Visit scholarship webpage for more details

Sponsors: Islamic Development Bank

Important Notes: To help students prepare themselves for their future leading role in the development of their communities and countries, the IDB also provides them with extra-curricular activities under a special programme called Community Development Programme comprising the following three components: Guidance and Counselling Activities, Post Study Activities and Capacity Building Activities.

OSISA Scholarships for African Women Media Leaders at Rhodes University 2017

Application Deadline:  Wednesday, 1st November. 2017

Offered Annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

To be taken at (country): Rhodes University, South Africa

About the Award: OSISA is an African institution committed to the creation of open societies through support for democracy, human rights and good governance and it works in Angola, Botswana, the DRC, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The PGDip in Media Management, popularly known as the PDMM, equips participants with critical knowledge, understandings and work competencies that emerging media leaders need to perform more effectively, strategically and ethically in their organizations and to fast-track their careers to management positions.

The programme combines rigorous theoretical and practical grounding. It has a mid-year practical media management internship and a comprehensive reflective academic portfolio at the end of the year.  It is composed of eight compulsory modules covering media management contexts, policy and institutions; financial management and media economics; management of media markets, audiences and advertising; management of media content; management of circulation and distribution; media management and leadership; human resources management for media; and management of digital and social media and media convergence.

Type: Postgraduate

Eligibility: Applicants should be women who are already practising journalists or are working in various fields of the media industry in Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Successful applicants will register for the SPI’s intensive, one-year-long fulltime Postgraduate Diploma in Media Management (PGDip in Media Management), the only formal qualification in media management in Africa and the developing world. The PGDip in Media Management is pegged at the honours degree level.

Candidates must already possess an undergraduate degree from a recognised university in order to pursue postgraduate study.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Program: The OSISA scholarships cover:

• The full cost of tuition
• Accommodation and meals in one of Rhodes University’s residences
• Course materials
• A monthly subsistence allowance
• Medical aid cover
• Mid-year media management internship costs.

Employers of the successful scholarship applicants or the scholarship winners themselves have to cover their travel costs to and from Rhodes University, including during the University’s holidays, to encourage greater ownership and appreciation of the scholarship programme by the beneficiaries and their media organizations.

How to Apply: Only women candidates who are already working in the media industry in the 10 Southern African countries of OSISA listed above are eligible to apply for these scholarships. Candidates should already have an undergraduate degree in any discipline from a recognised university.

Students wishing to apply for these scholarships need to:

• Complete the Rhodes University’s standard Honours Application form (available at www.ru.ac.za/applying/  under the section ‘Postgraduate Studies’  which must be submitted directly to the Registrar’s Division at Rhodes University and a copy emailed to Wendy Dyibishe (w.dyibishe@ru.ac.za)  at the Sol Plaatje Institute.
• Submit a detailed Curriculum Vitae, including contact details, to Wendy Dyibishe.
• Submit certified academic transcripts of ALL tertiary qualifications. These are sent to both Wendy Dyibishe at the SPI and to the Registrar’s Division at Rhodes University; and
• Submit to the SPI — through Wendy Dyibishe at W.dyibishe@ru.ac.za — a 1,000-word letter of motivation which explains why the student is interested in doing the PGDip in Media Management, how the course will assist the student’s career and why the student believes she/he qualifies for the OSISA scholarship.

Visit Program Webpage for details

Award Provider: Sol Plaatje Institute (SPI) for Media Leadership, Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA)

Young Africans Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship (YASEF) Program 2017 Nigeria Cohorts 1 & 2

Application Timeline:

• Application Opens 10th May, 2017
• Application Closes 10th June, 2017
• Applicant Admission Process and Confirmation of Participation June 11th-July 1st 2017
• Commencement of Fellowship July 18, 2017

Eligible Countries: Nigeria

About the Award: This program is looking for participants who are passionate about becoming facilitators for sustainable social change through social entrepreneurship and enterprise initiatives. We are keen on admitting participants who are determined and are seriously committed to oxygenate their social transformation vision and aspirations in their communities and nation. Interested applicants

The duration of this program will be 5 Months at the end of which the successful participants who have met all the requirements of the fellowship will be inducted as Social Entrepreneurship Fellows.

Type: Entrepreneurship, Fellowship

Eligibility: 

• Must be college Graduates
• Between the ages of 20-35 years of age
• Must have good communication skills (written, spoken English)
• Must have a compelling social entrepreneurship story or idea that has or can impact their community
• Must be willing to complete the 6 months program

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Fellowship: This program is a non-residential one and it is partly funded by the partner organizations but each participant will be expected to also contribute a token commitment and counterpart fee which is 20% of the cost of the program to confirm their admission on this program.

Duration of Fellowship: 5 months

How to Apply: In addition to completing the registration form (whose link has been included below) to confirm their interest in becoming a participants on this fellowship, applicants are expected to send a page personal letter of motivation that describes their current social entrepreneurship footprints and the social transformation impact they envisioned,

Applicants who have uploaded evidences of their social entrepreneurial footprints either on instragram, facebook or uploaded videos (you tube) should also include the link for such activities to enhance the possibility of participating in this fellowship.

Register Here https://goo.gl/VWYYJZ

Visit Fellowship Webpage for details

Award Provider: African Sustainable Social Economic Transformation Support (ASSETS)

Security Is Ruining the Internet

Ted Rall

Another major cyberattack, another wave of articles telling you how to protect your data has me thinking about European ruins. Those medieval fortresses and castles had walls ten feet thick made of solid stone; they were guarded by mean, heavily armored, men. The barbarians got in anyway.

At the time, those invasions felt like the end of the world. But life goes on. Today’s Europeans live in houses and apartment buildings that, compared to castles of the Middle Ages, have no security at all. Yet: no raping, no pillaging. People are fine.

Security is overrated.

The ransomware attack that crippled targets as diverse as FedEx and British hospitals reminds me of something that we rarely talk about even though it’s useful wisdom: A possession that is so valuable that you have to spend a lot of money and psychic bandwidth to protect it often feels like more of a burden than a boon.

You hear it all the time: Change your passwords often. Use different passwords for different accounts. Install File Vault. Use encrypted communications apps. At what point do we throw up our hands, change all our passwords to “password” and tell malicious hackers to come on in, do your worse?

I owned a brand-new car once. I loved the look and the smell but hated the anxiety. What if some jerk dented it? Sure enough, within a week and the odometer reading in the low three digits, another motorist scratched the bumper while pulling out of a parallel parking space. I was so determined to restore the newness that I paid $800 for a new bumper. Which got scratched too. That was 13 years, 200,000 miles and a lot of dings ago. Still drive the same car. I don’t care about dents.

I’m liberated.

The Buddha taught that material attachments bring misery. He was right. During the 1980s crack epidemic addicts stole car stereos to finance their fixes. To avoid smashed windows, New Yorkers took to posting “No Radio” signs on their cars.

But the really smart drivers’ signs read “Door unlocked, no radio.” It worked.

Hackers, we’re told, are ruining the Internet. I say our reaction to hack attacks has ruined it. It’s like 9/11. Three thousand people died. But attacking Afghanistan and Iraq killed more than a million. We should have sucked it up instead.

Security often destroys the very thing it’s supposed to protect. Take the TSA — please! Increased airport security measures after 9/11 have made flying so unpleasant that Americans are driving more instead. Meanwhile, “civil aviation” flights out of small airports — which have no or minimal security screenings — are increasingly popular. So are trains — no X-ray machines at the train station, either. Get rid of TSA checkpoints at the airport, let people walk their loved ones to the gate so they can wave goodbye, and I bet more people would fly in spite of the risk.

It’s not just government. Individuals obsess over security to the point that it makes the thing they’re protecting useless.

For my 12th birthday my dad gave me a 10-speed road bicycle. I still have that Azuki. It weighs a ton but it runs great. It’s worth maybe $20.

Bike theft is rife in Berkeley and Manhattan, but I tooled around both places on that banana yellow relic of the Ford Administration without fear of anything but the shame of absorbing insults from kids on the street. I often didn’t bother to lock up my beater. Never had a problem.

In my early 40s and feeling flush, I dropped $2400 on a royal blue Greg LeMond racing bike. Terrified that my prize possession might get stolen, I only ride it to destinations I deem ridiculously safe or where I’ll only have to leave it outside for a few minutes. So I hardly use it.
I’m an idiot.

Nice things are, well, nice to have. But they’re also a pain in the ass. In college one of my girlfriends (who I am not suggesting was a “thing,” obviously, and whom equally obviously I never thought I “had” in any ownership-y sense) had dazzling big blue eyes and golden blonde hair down to her waist and was so striking that guys literally walked into lampposts while gawking at her. Being seen with her was great for my ego. But every outing entailed a risk of violence as dudes catcalled and wolf-whistled; chivalry (and my girlfriend) dictated that I couldn’t ignore all of them. I sometimes suggested the 1980s equivalent of “Netflix and chill” (Channel J and wine coolers?) rather than deal with the stress. (We broke up for other reasons.)

So back to the big ransomware attack. What should you do if your ‘puter locks you out of your files unless you fork over $300? Wipe your hard drive and move on.

Back up regularly, Internet experts say, and this threat is one reason why. With a recent backup you can usually wipe your hard drive and restore your files from a backed-up version that predates the virus. Take that, villains! But no one does.

Meanwhile, our online lives are becoming as hobbled by excessive security as the airlines. Like the countless locks on Gabe Kaplan’s Brooklyn apartment door in “Welcome Back Kotter,” two-step authentication helps — but at what cost? You have to enter your password, wait for a text — if you’re traveling overseas, you have to pay a dollar or more to receive it — and enter it before accessing a site. Tech companies force us to choose a new password each time we forget the old one. Studies show that makes things worse: most users choose simpler passwords because they’re easier to remember.

The only thing to fear, FDR told us, is fear itself. What if we liberated ourselves from the threat of cyberattack — and a ton of work maintaining online security — by not having anything on our Internet-connected devices that we care about?

This would require a mental shift.

First, we should have fewer things online. When you think about it, many devices are connected to the Internet for a tiny bit of convenience but at significant risk to security. Using an app to warm up your house before you come home is nifty, but online thermostats are hardly worth the exposure to hackers who could drive up your utility bills, start a fire or even cause a brownout. Driverless cars could be remotely ordered to kill you — no thanks! I laugh at the Iranian nuclear scientists who set back their nation’s top-secret research program for years because their desire to cybercommute opened their system to the Stuxnet attack. Go to the office, lazybones!

The Internet of Things needs to be seriously rethought — and resisted.

As for your old-fashioned electronic devices — smartphones, tablets and laptops — it might time to start thinking like a New Yorker during the 1980s. Leave the door unlocked. Just don’t leave anything in your glove compartment, or on your hard drive, that you wouldn’t mind losing.

After Middle Eastern Wars End, the Medical Wars Begin

Robert Fisk

The details were horrific. Outside the besieged city of Mosul, 13,000 wounded civilians are today waiting for reconstructive surgery – from just this one seven-month battle. Another 5,000 Iraqi police militiamen are waiting for the same surgery from recent military offensives, in their case to be cared for by the Iraqi ministry of interior. But the health infrastructure that exists in the whole of Iraq cannot look after these wounded. As a result, some are turning up in Damascus – amid the frightfulness of the Syrian war – for the surgery they cannot obtain at home. A new graft in Damascus costs $200.

In the balmy early summer of Beirut this week came these detailed new horrors of Middle East war. For beside the state-of-the-art American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) in the city, doctors from across the region, from Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Palestine – along with the International Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres – came to discuss their fears for the wounded and the sick and their conviction that drug-resistant bacteria are growing in hospitals in the Middle East. Just how to deal with this may be within the knowledge of the military medical authorities – but not within the hands of civilian doctors.

Did this start in Bosnia, as one doctor suspects, where civilian and military casualties merged into each other – it was, after all, a war where a civilian turned into a soldier and then re-emerged as a civilian the moment he entered a hospital? Or do the clues lie much further back, in the vicious sanctions which the UN imposed on Saddam’s Iraq, at America’s urging, in the aftermath of the dictator’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990? The first Global Conflict Medicine Congress, arranged by Glasgow-trained Professor Ghassan Abu-Sittah, head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at AUBMC, raised these questions in stark and painful ways.

Drug resistance, he said, did not exist in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war – when 150 Iraqi soldiers were wounded each day during the Fao peninsula battles alone – so what happened during the post-1990 sanctions period? “Iraqis were allowed to use only three antibiotics for 12 years,” he says. “These were the only ones allowed in by the UN. Heavy metals had been used in the 1991 [liberation of Kuwait] war. You found celinium [present in the smashed concrete of destroyed houses], tungsten and mercury in the casing of penetrating bombs. What are the long-term effects of these metals on the human body?”

A Medecins Sans Frontieres analysis – presented at the conference by Abu-Sitta and Dr Omar Dewachi who co-direct a newly created Conflict Medicine Programme at the AUB supported by Jonathan Whittall of Medecins sans Frontieres – said that multidrug resistant [MDR] bacteria now accounts for most war wound infections across the Middle East, yet most medical facilities in the region do not even have the laboratory capacity to diagnose MDR, leading to significant delays and clinical mismanagement of festering wounds. Beyond the physical damage caused by weaponry, Whittall added, “destroyed or degraded sanitation facilitates the microbiological seeding of wounds. The body, weakened by the wound, is reinjured when it interacts with the harsh, physically degraded environment.”

Iraqi-trained and Harvard-educated Dewachi, the American University of Beirut’s assistant professor of medical anthropology, spoke at length of Iraq’s cavalry of war victims and quotes an Iraqi patient waiting for treatment in Beirut. “Most of the good doctors have left the country,” the man told Dewachi, “and those who remain have lost their humanity”. Dewachi’s forthcoming book, Ungovernable Life: Mandatory Medicine and Statecraft in Iraq, which traces Iraq’s medical history from the First World War to 2003, will reveal that successive post-2003 Iraqi governments have been sending civilians, military and security forces personnel, parliamentarians – and even militia and political party members – to hospitals in Beirut.

So dangerous is life for physicians in Iraq itself – where the families of wounded patients often want revenge for perceived poor treatment by doctors – that the Baghdad government recently allowed doctors to carry guns to their hospitals and surgeries. About half the medical force in Iraq has fled over the past 20 Saddam and post-Saddam years and the British National Health Service, where many Iraqis were trained, “hosts one of the largest populations of Iraqi medical doctors outside Iraq”, according to Dewachi. The post-World War One British mandate created UK medical training and standards in Iraq and this cooperation continued long after independence.

The MSF analysis not only raised questions about the long-term effects of the 1990 UN sanctions regime, but also the reversal of medical advances in the treatment of cancer and diabetes. “This is often due to the inability of healthcare systems and technology to provide the same level of care in harsh and complex war environments. Kidney failure patients can no longer access dialysis units and the delivery of chemotherapy to cancer patients is severely compromised…”

Dewachi is fearful of the way in which the nature of illness has changed in Middle East wars, where “the change in the base line of cancers has become very aggressive”. As he puts it, “when a young woman of 30, with no family history of cancer, has two different primary cancers – in the breast and in the oesophagus – you have to ask what is happening. You have to know what is happening.” Dewachi is overwhelmed by the sheer number of wounded patients in the Middle East. “There was a nine-year old girl with shrapnel wounds to the face. She was wounded in Baghdad in a 2007 car bombing. Her mother who was caring for her had a glass eye from a wound.  Her father had a prosthetic arm after amputation surgery in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.  We found an Iraqi policeman injured in a car bombing who was being looked after by his brother who had lost three fingers in the Iran-Iraq war.”

In Iraq, patients wounded in Saddam’s wars were initially treated as heroes – they had fought for their country against non-Arab Iran. But after the US invasion of 2003, they became an embarrassment. “The value of their wounds’ ‘capital’ changes from hero to zero,” Abu-Sitta says. “And this means that their ability to access medical care also changes. We are now reading the history of the region through the wounds. War’s wounds carry with them the narrative of the wounding which becomes political capital.” Abu Sitta believes that the building – and deconstruction – of medical care goes hand-in-hand with state-building and state-destruction. “Today, it’s about dismembering nations rather than building them.”

For Abu-Sittah, “there is no such thing as wars that end – we call all this in medicine as ‘a chronic condition with acute flare-ups!’” In other words, war wounds continue to cause pain – and kill – long after wars have ended and restarted. “A wounded body ages differently,” he says. In Gaza, for example, a bullet wound effects a patient for decades after the wound is inflicted. “We have found that Israeli snipers fire at the back of the knee of the person they are shooting at – the back of the knee and the lower third of the thigh.  This does not necessarily kill – but it almost always requires amputation. This is the junction of the sciatic nerve, the popliteal artery and the knee joint – with one bullet you manage to do all three. That’s why the IRA used to do knee-capping in Northern Ireland.”

An Italian professor of genetics says that tissue samples from the three-week 2008-2009 Israeli-Hamas Gaza war shows remnants of heavy metals in the wounds of Palestinians, both carcinogenic and teratogenic – which, she said, can lead to cancers and deformed children. Other physicians noted that Hezbollah’s medical corps had transformed the treatment of its wounded in the Syrian war. Speakers in Beirut included even those foreign doctors who witnessed the 1982 Sabra and Chatila Palestinian camps massacre at the hands of Israel’s Lebanese Christian militia allies.

All of the horrific developments in the medical history of the Middle East’s wars has prompted both the American University of Beirut Medical Centre and MSF to create a research and training partnership in conflict medicine – Abu-Sitta, Dewachi and Whittall are on its steering committee – which means that no-one expects the five major wars in the region to end soon. All in all, I guess, a sobering reflection on all the wars on “terror” which the West and Russia and its friendly dictators claim to be fighting in the Middle East – where the cancer of national and international power is just as fatal as the cancers which afflict the bodies of the victims.