McGill University Canada – MasterCard Foundation Scholarships for African Students 2018/2019

Application Deadline: 10th December, 2017

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Sub-Saharan African countries

To be taken at (country): McGill University Canada

About Scholarship: McGill University and The MasterCard Foundation are pleased to offer The MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program at McGill University for the academic year. This prestigious scholarship recognizes students who are residents and citizens of Sub-Saharan African countries (including French-speaking students), who come from the most challenged socioeconomic backgrounds and who show outstanding academic and leadership abilities.

Thanks to a $27 million financial commitment from The MasterCard Foundation over the next decade, the Program will provide academically talented, economically disadvantaged young people from Africa with access to quality university education. McGill will welcome 91 Scholars from Africa over the next ten years, some of whom will be coming from French-speaking countries.

In addition to financial support, Scholars are provided with a comprehensive support network that includes an array of mentoring and support services to ensure each student’s academic success, community service engagement and transition to socially relevant employment opportunities, when they return to Africa at the conclusion of their studies.

Eligible Field of Study: Development related courses.

Please note that the following programs are not eligible for funding from the Mastercard Foundation Scholars Program:

• Dentistry,
• Medicine,
• Law,
• Theology,
• Farm Management,
• Physical and Occupational Therapy,
• Music, and
• Programs from the School of Continuing Studies.

Offered Since: 2013

Type: Undergraduate

Eligibility:

• You must qualify academically for admission to McGill University. Please note that admission is competitive.
• You must be a first-time applicant to university (transfer applicants are not eligible).
• You must be a resident and citizen of a Sub-Saharan African country. French-speaking applicants are welcome.
• You must have an exceptional record of service and activity in your school and/or community.
• You must have the potential for meaningful future service to your community as a leader engaged in dynamic local and global social change.
• Your financial status must be in the lowest two quintiles of your country.

Selection Criteria:

Admission to McGill University

• Academic achievement and potential – academic admissibility is determined based on the applicant’s academic record.

Acceptance to The MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program

• You must demonstrate an exceptional record of service and leadership in your school and/or your community. This may include organizing youth programs, assuming leadership roles in school activities, participating in clubs and teams, taking on responsibilities at home, advocacy and/or volunteering in your community.
• You must be committed to returning to Africa after graduation to continue to give back to your community and country.
• You must be from a low-income background. Your financial status will be verified.

To be considered for The MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program at McGill University, you must demonstrate academic potential, exceptional records of service and activity in your schools and communities and/or the potential for meaningful community service through engagement as leaders in dynamic local and global social change efforts.

Number of Scholarships: Over the next ten years, McGill will welcome 67 MasterCard Foundation Scholars at the undergraduate level and another 24 at the Master’s level, for a total of 91.

Value of Scholarship: The MasterCard Foundation Scholars at McGill will receive a holistic set of financial, social, and academic supports throughout their education and during their post-graduate transitions.

Duration of Scholarship: four years duration of the undergraduate degree

How to Apply: Because applicants to The MasterCard Foundation Scholars Program do not have to pay the $107.50 application fee, you must follow a special application procedure.

You will find detailed instructions on this special procedure, and complete information about applying to McGill as a MasterCard Foundation Scholar, from the link below.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for Details

Sponsors: MasterCard Foundation

Danish Government Cultural Agreement Scholarships for International Students 2018/2019

Application Deadline: 1st March 2018

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: 

• China
• Japan
• Egypt
• Russia
• Republic of Korea

To be taken at (country): Denmark

Eligible Field of Study: All

Type: Masters and PhD

Eligibility: Scholarship will only be considered if the student fulfils the following requirements:

• Is a citizen of a country outside the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA)
• Does not have permanent residence in an EU or EEA country
• Is NOT studying in Denmark through an exchange programme or any other study agreement which is tuition fee waiving
• Has shown good academic results previously from former studies or passed exams
• Has passed an English language test, preferably an IELTS test with a score of 6.0 or similar recognised test with a high score provided for academic studies
• Scholarships are only available to master’s and PhD-level students. However, bachelor’s degree students wishing to study Danish language and literature can also apply if they have studied the Danish language for two years.
• scholarships are only offered to students enrolled in full-degree studies at higher education institutions in the countries listed above.
• PhD students must likewise be employed at, or affiliated with, higher education institutions in the above-mentioned countries.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Scholarship: Danish Government scholarships programme covers 30-50% of the tuition fees, which means that the rest must be paid by the student. Students who are awarded a scholarship from UCN may under certain circumstances also receive an additional partial monthly living costs scholarship.

Duration of Scholarship: Danish Government Scholarships may be awarded for the entire duration of a study programme or for single semesters.

How to Apply: To be considered for a scholarship, the applicants must:

• Fill in the scholarship application form including a motivation letter stating the reasons for applying to UCN and the reasons for applying for the specific programme in question
• Apply and be accepted to one of the English-taught study programmes which UCN offers

Furthermore the students must attach:

• Documentation of passed exams (translated into English)
• Documentation of relevant working experience
• References (if any)
• Copy of passport
• Documentation of applying for a programme at UCN
• Please follow this link to the list of Danish institutions offering long-term scholarships in 2017/18

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: The University College of Northern Denmark, Danish Government

EDCTP-AREF Preparatory Fellowships for Early Career Researchers in sub-Saharan Africa 2018

Application Deadlines: 

Stage 1 Closing Date: 13th October 2017, 17:00

Stage 2 Open date: 12th January 2018, 17:00

             Closing date: 14th March 2018, 17:00.

Eligible Countries: sub-Saharan Africa

About the Award: Many aspiring African researchers lack the mentorship, intellectual challenge and rigour that well-funded established institutions in the North can offer to their early postdoctoral researchers. Africa accounts for 15-20% of the world’s population and a disproportionately large share of disease burden, yet scientific publications by African researchers account for less than 2% of the total academic journal output. The challenge is therefore to enable African researchers to enhance their competitiveness for international funding opportunities early in their careers while retaining them in Africa, working on Africa’s health challenges and priorities.

The purpose of the EDCTP-AREF Preparatory Fellowships is to enhance the competitiveness of up and coming post-doctoral African scientists and clinicians aspiring to win international /regional /national fellowships or grant support, such as the EDCTP Career Development Fellowships, through short-term placements at a host organisation in EU Members States, in countries associated to Horizon 2020 or in Sub-Saharan Africa which will be contracted by the home organisation to host the fellow.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: 

1. The applicant must be an organisation with an established legal entity in sub-Saharan Africa (the applicant legal entity).(2)
2. The fellow must be employed or have guaranteed employment by the applicant legal entity (the home organisation) where they intend to remain working for a minimum of two years after the expiration of the grant.(2)
3. Fellows must:

• be a post-doctoral scientist;
• have been awarded their doctorate within 3 years before submission deadline of the AREF-EDCTP Preparatory Fellowship application;
• have been either a PhD student or MD, and have been active researchers for up to three years following award of their doctorate;
• be resident of or be willing to relocate to a sub-Saharan African country;
• not have been funded under this fellowship scheme before.

4. The requested EDCTP contribution per action shall not exceed €70, 000
5. Placements sought shall be for a period of at least 3 and up to 9 months, following which there will be a re-integration period of up to 3 months. The maximum fellowship duration shall be 12 months.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: 

• The call budget is €800,000.
• The requested EDCTP contribution per project should not exceed €70,000.
• The funding level is up to 100% of eligible costs.

Duration of Program: Successful applicants must use the funding for a 3 to 9 months placement at a host organisation legally established in an EU Member State, a country associated to Horizon 2020 or in a Sub-Saharan African country which will be contracted by the home organisation to host the fellow. The fellow will spend a re-entry period of up to 3-months at their home organisation, making a total training period of up to 12 months.(1)

How to Apply: The application must be submitted online via EDCTPgrants

Interested candidates should go through the Submission guidelines on the Program Webpage (See Link below) before applying.

Visit the Program Webpage for Details

Award Providers: European & Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership (EDCTP), The Africa Research Excellence Fund (AREF)

Big Institutions—Immunities, Impunities and Insanities

Ralph Nader

One of the first times I used the phrase “institutional insanity” was in 1973 to describe the behavior of scientist Dixy Lee Ray, chairperson of the presumed regulatory agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). I pointed out that her personal and academic roles were quite normal. But her running of the AEC—pressing for 1,000 nuclear plants in the U.S. by the year 2000 (there are 99 reactors left in operation now), and going easy on a deadly, taxpayer subsidized technology that was privately uninsurable, lacked a place to put its lethal radioactive wastes, a national security risk, replete with vast cost over-runs, immunities and impunities shielding culpable officials and executives, should a meltdown occur and take out a city or region (all to boil water to produce steam to make electricity)—was a case study in “institutional insanity.”

Both the AEC and its successor, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), captured by the atomic energy industry, operate this way to this day, no matter the near misses, the spills, growing corporate welfare outlays, and the inadequate maintenance of aging nuclear power plants.

Our moral and ethical codes and our civil and criminal laws were originally designed to hold individuals accountable. The kings of yore operated under a divine right of being above the laws.

With the rise and proliferation of ever more multi-tiered governmental and corporate bureaucracies, methods of immunity, impunity and secrecy were built into these structures to shield them from moral/ethical codes and laws. Increasingly, we are ruled by no-fault big corporations and their no-fault toady governments.

Some comparisons are in order. If your neighbor entrusted you with her savings and paid you a fee for doing so, you then purchased stocks for her account while you’re selling them for your account, deceiving the cheated neighbor in the process, would you escape the law? That is just some of what the Wall Street Barons did on a massive scale about ten years ago. No one was prosecuted and sent to jail for this corporate crime wave.

Suppose you hired a security person for your defense who, at the same time, wasted your money and couldn’t account for your payments because his books were unauditable. Would you keep doing business with him? Wouldn’t you demand an audit? Well on a hugely larger scale, this is the Pentagon contracting system and your tax dollars. Why not demand that the defense department stop violating federal law, as it has since 1992, and provide Congress with auditable information so that its accounting arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) can audit the notoriously porous Pentagon books.

Suppose the head of your neighborhood association kept sugar coating problems, kept lying to you, kept describing conditions that weren’t so and kept doing things that would enrich himself in conflict with his duties. Would you keep supporting him in that position? Probably not. Well, that is your President, day after day.

What if your neighbor kept dumping polluted water and solid waste pollutants on your lawn and all around your house? Would you demand that your town or city stop this contamination, or sit quietly and accept this abuse because you don’t believe in regulation? Well, Trump’s EPA wrecker, Scott Pruitt, is busily going weakening environmental protections and even taking away environmental crimes investigators and forcing them to be his personal security guard.

Let’s say your farmers’ market vendors sensed that you were very dependent on the food they provide and they proceeded to triple the prices, it’s not difficult to predict your reactions. Yet that is what the drug companies have done with many of your important medicines over the past 10 years. Yet where are the outraged demands for the government to have the power to negotiate volume discounts, facilitate generics, restrain prices for drugs rooted in your taxpayer funded research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and allow imported competition from Canada?

You get into a bus or cab and the driver regularly cheats you into paying several times more than you should pay and then covers it up. When you find out about it, all hell breaks loose next time you confront him. What about Wells Fargo bank—they knowingly created unauthorized, false credit card and auto insurance accounts, wrongly billing customers millions of times. Imagine: no criminal prosecutions yet, no wholesale resignation of the well-paid Board of Directors, and very few customers are leaving the bank. Wells Fargo keeps reporting great profits while hassling victims into settlements. What’s one takeaway? The bigger the crook, the bigger is our surrender. Too big to fail or jail!

The neighbor in charge of the rural, communal drinking water well knows it’s being contaminated by a party that was his previous employer and expects to be hired back by his old boss. Your children as well as their parents are at risk. Well, welcome to Trump’s deregulations of food, drug, auto pollution, and workplace investor safety. They’ve come from the industries’ payroll and expect to come back with a big raise.

There are just a few contrasts between individual and institutional crimes and wrongdoing and our different responses toward them. Facebook, Google and Equifax can misuse your personal information to your perceived disadvantage and they repeatedly get away with it.

The White House under Bush/Cheney can unconstitutionally ignite wars, lie to the people about the reasons, produce millions of casualties and untold destruction of innocent peoples’ homelands, get re-elected and later retire with huge speech fees without being chased by the “sheriffs.”

It is doubtful whether you would allow your hamlet’s political leaders to get away with such violent assaults, even if they wanted to do so.

If our moral/ethical/legal codes cannot reach up to the tops of these institutions on behalf of wronged, injured individuals and communities and societies, we’ll get what we’ve been getting, which is worse and worse immunities/impunities with each passing decade.

Isn’t this a fault/no fault paradox worth thinking about?

World War III With China: How It Might Actually Be Fought

ALFRED W. MCCOY

For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system of global hegemony, backed by the world’s wealthiest economy and finest military, affected. The country was, after all, the planet’s “indispensible nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright proclaimed in 1998 (and other presidents and politicians have insisted ever since). The U.S. enjoyed a greater “disparity of power” over its would-be rivals than any empire ever, Yale historian Paul Kennedy announced in 2002. Certainly, it would remain “the sole superpower for decades to come,” Foreign Affairs magazine assured us just last year. During the 2016 campaign, candidate Donald Trump promised his supporters that “we’re gonna win with military… we are gonna win so much you may even get tired of winning.” In August, while announcing his decision to send more troops to Afghanistan, Trump reassured the nation: “In every generation, we have faced down evil, and we have always prevailed.” In this fast-changing world, only one thing was certain: when it really counted, the United States could never lose.

No longer.

The Trump White House may still be basking in the glow of America’s global supremacy but, just across the Potomac, the Pentagon has formed a more realistic view of its fading military superiority. In June, the Defense Department issued a major report titled on Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World, finding that the U.S. military “no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” and “it no longer can… automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” This sober assessment led the Pentagon’s top strategists to “the jarring realization that ‘we can lose.’” Increasingly, Pentagon planners find, the “self-image of a matchless global leader” provides a “flawed foun­dation for forward-looking defense strategy… under post-primacy conditions.” This Pentagon report also warned that, like Russia, China is “engaged in a deliberate program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority”; hence, Beijing’s bid for “Pacific primacy” and its “campaign to expand its control over the South China Sea.”

China’s Challenge

Indeed, military tensions between the two countries have been rising in the western Pacific since the summer of 2010. Just as Washington once used its wartime alliance with Great Britain to appropriate much of that fading empire’s global power after World War II, so Beijing began using profits from its export trade with the U.S. to fund a military challenge to its dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

Some telltale numbers suggest the nature of the future great power competition between Washington and Beijing that could determine the course of the twenty-first century. In April 2015, for instance, the Department of Agriculture reported that the U.S. economy would grow by nearly 50% over the next 15 years, while China’s would expand by 300%, equaling or surpassing America’s around 2030.

Similarly, in the critical race for worldwide patents, American leadership in technological innovation is clearly on the wane. In 2008, the United States still held the number two spot behind Japan in patent applications with 232,000. China was, however, closing in fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000. By 2014, China actually took the lead in this critical category with 801,000 patents, nearly half the world’s total, compared to just 285,000 for the Americans.

With supercomputing now critical for everything from code breaking to consumer products, China’s Defense Ministry outpaced the Pentagon for the first time in 2010, launching the world’s fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A. For the next six years, Beijing produced the fastest machine and last year finally won in a way that couldn’t be more crucial: with a supercomputer that had microprocessor chips made in China. By then, it also had the most supercomputers with 167 compared to 165 for the United States and only 29 for Japan.

Over the longer term, the American education system, that critical source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. In 2012, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development tested half a million 15-year-olds worldwide. Those in Shanghai came in first in math and science, while those in Massachusetts, “a strong-performing U.S. state,” placed 20th in science and 27th in math. By 2015, America’s standing had declined to 25th in science and 39th in math.

But why, you might ask, should anybody care about a bunch of 15-year-olds with backpacks, braces, and attitude? Because by 2030, they will be the mid-career scientists and engineers determining whose computers survive a cyber attack, whose satellites evade a missile strike, and whose economy has the next best thing.

Rival Superpower Strategies

With its growing resources, Beijing has been laying claim to an arc of islands and waters from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the U.S. Navy. In August 2010, after Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce the claim, Beijing’s Global Times responded angrily that “the U.S.-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Four years later, Beijing escalated its territorial claims to these waters, building a nuclear submarine facility on Hainan Island and accelerating its dredging of seven artificial atolls for military bases in the Spratly Islands. When the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled, in 2016, that these atolls gave China no territorial claim to the surrounding seas, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry dismissed the decision out of hand.

To meet China’s challenge on the high seas, the Pentagon began sending a succession of carrier groups on “freedom of navigation” cruises into the South China Sea. It also started shifting spare air and sea assets to a string of bases from Japan to Australia in a bid to strengthen its strategic position along the Asian littoral. Since the end of World War II, Washington has attempted to control the strategic Eurasian landmass from a network of NATO military bases in Europe and a chain of island bastions in the Pacific. Between the “axial ends” of this vast continent, Washington has, over the past 70 years, built successive layers of military power — air and naval bases during the Cold War and more recently a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to Guam.

Simultaneously, however, China has conducted what the Pentagon in 2010 called “a comprehensive transformation of its military” meant to prepare the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) “for extended-range power projection.” With the world’s “most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile program,” Beijing can target “its nuclear forces throughout… most of the world, including the continental United States.” Meanwhile, accurate missiles now provide the PLA with the ability “to attack ships, including aircraft carriers, in the western Pacific Ocean.” In emerging military domains, China has begun to contest U.S. dominion over cyberspace and space, with plans to dominate “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.”

China’s army has by now developed a sophisticated cyberwarfare capacity through its Unit 61398 and allied contractors that “increasingly focus… on companies involved in the critical infrastructure of the United States — its electrical power grid, gas lines, and waterworks.” After identifying that unit as responsible for a series of intellectual property thefts, Washington took the unprecedented step, in 2013, of filing criminal charges against five active-duty Chinese cyber officers.

China has already made major technological advances that could prove decisive in any future war with Washington. Instead of competing across the board, Beijing, like many late adopters of technology, has strategically chosen key areas to pursue, particularly orbital satellites, which are a fulcrum for the effective weaponization of space. As early as 2012, China had already launched 14 satellites into “three kinds of orbits” with “more satellites in high orbits and… better anti-shielding capabilities than other systems.” Four years later, Beijing announced that it was on track to “cover the whole globe with a constellation of 35 satellites by 2020,” becoming second only to the United States when it comes to operational satellite systems.

Playing catch-up, China has recently achieved a bold breakthrough in secure communications. In August 2016, three years after the Pentagon abandoned its own attempt at full-scale satellite security, Beijing launched the world’s first quantum satellite that transmits photons, believed to be “invulnerable to hacking,” rather than relying on more easily compromised radio waves. According to one scientific report, this new technology will “create a super-secure communications network, potentially linking people anywhere.” China was reportedly planning to launch 20 of the satellites should the technology prove fully successful.

To check China, Washington has been building a new digital defense network of advanced cyberwarfare capabilities and air-space robotics. Between 2010 and 2012, the Pentagon extended drone operations into the exosphere, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before. As early as 2020, if all goes according to plan, the Pentagon will loft a triple-tier shield of unmanned drones reaching from the stratosphere to the exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by an expanded satellite system, and operated through robotic controls.

Weighing this balance of forces, the RAND Corporation recently released a study, War with China, predicting that by 2025 “China will likely have more, better, and longer-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles; advanced air defenses; latest generation aircraft; quieter submarines; more and better sensors; and the digital communications, processing power, and C2 [cyber security] necessary to operate an integrated kill chain.”

In the event of all-out war, RAND suggested, the United States might suffer heavy losses to its carriers, submarines, missiles, and aircraft from Chinese strategic forces, while its computer systems and satellites would be degraded thanks to “improved Chinese cyberwar and ASAT [anti-satellite] capabilities.” Even though American forces would counterattack, their “growing vulnerability” means Washington’s victory would not be assured. In such a conflict, the think tank concluded, there might well be no “clear winner.”

Make no mistake about the weight of those words. For the first time, a top strategic think-tank, closely aligned with the U.S. military and long famous for its influential strategic analyses, was seriously contemplating a major war with China that the United States would not win.

World War III: Scenario 2030

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new, so untested, that even the most outlandish scenarios currently concocted by strategic planners may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. In a 2015 nuclear war exercise, the Air Force Wargaming Institute used sophisticated computer modeling to imagine “a 2030 scenario where the Air Force’s fleet of B-52s… upgraded with… improved standoff weapons” patrol the skies ready to strike. Simultaneously, “shiny new intercontinental ballistic missiles” stand by for launch. Then, in a bold tactical gambit, B-1 bombers with “full Integrated Battle Station (IBS) upgrade” slip through enemy defenses for a devastating nuclear strike.

That scenario was no doubt useful for Air Force planners, but said little about the actual future of U.S. global power. Similarly, the RAND War with China study only compared military capacities, without assessing the particular strategies either side might use to its advantage.

I might not have access to the Wargaming Institute’s computer modeling or RAND’s renowned analytical resources, but I can at least carry their work one step further by imagining a future conflict with an unfavorable outcome for the United States. As the globe’s still-dominant power, Washington must spread its defenses across all military domains, making its strength, paradoxically, a source of potential weakness. As the challenger, China has the asymmetric advantage of identifying and exploiting a few strategic flaws in Washington’s otherwise overwhelming military superiority.

For years, prominent Chinese defense intellectuals like Shen Dingli of Fudan University have rejected the idea of countering the U.S. with a big naval build-up and argued instead for “cyberattacks, space weapons, lasers, pulses, and other directed-energy beams.” Instead of rushing to launch aircraft carriers that “will be burned” by lasers fired from space, China should, Shen argued, develop advanced weapons “to make other command systems fail to work.” Although decades away from matching the full might of Washington’s global military, China could, through a combination of cyberwar, space warfare, and supercomputing, find ways to cripple U.S. military communications and thus blind its strategic forces. With that in mind, here’s one possible scenario for World War III:

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2030. For months, tensions have been mounting between Chinese and U.S. Navy patrols in the South China Sea. Washington’s attempts to use diplomacy to restrain China have proven an embarrassing failure among long-time allies — with NATO crippled by years of diffident American support, Britain now a third-tier power, Japan functionally neutral, and other international leaders cool to Washington’s concerns after suffering its cyber-surveillance for so long. With the American economy diminished, Washington plays the last card in an increasingly weak hand, deploying six of its remaining eight carrier groups to the Western Pacific.

Instead of intimidating China’s leaders, the move makes them more bellicose. Flying from air bases in the Spratly Islands, their jet fighters soon begin buzzing U.S. Navy ships in the South China Sea, while Chinese frigates play chicken with two of the aircraft carriers on patrol, crossing ever closer to their bows.

Then tragedy strikes. At 4:00 a.m. on a foggy October night, the massive carrier USS Gerald Ford slices through aging Frigate-536 Xuchang, sinking the Chinese ship with its entire crew of 165.  Beijing demands an apology and reparations. When Washington refuses, China’s fury comes fast.

At the stroke of midnight on Black Friday, as cyber-shoppers storm the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest consumer electronics from Bangladesh, Navy personnel staffing the Space Surveillance Telescope at Exmouth, Western Australia, choke on their coffees as their panoramic screens of the southern sky suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the U.S. CyberCommand’s operations center in Texas, Air Force technicians detect malicious binaries that, though hacked anonymously into American weapons systems worldwide, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China’s People’s Liberation Army.

In what historians will later call the “Battle of Binaries,” CyberCom’s supercomputers launch their killer counter-codes. While a few of China’s provincial servers do lose routine administrative data, Beijing’s quantum satellite system, equipped with super-secure photon transmission, proves impervious to hacking. Meanwhile, an armada of bigger, faster supercomputers slaved to Shanghai’s cyberwarfare Unit 61398 blasts back with impenetrable logarithms of unprecedented subtlety and sophistication, slipping into the U.S. satellite system through its antiquated microwave signals.

The first overt strike is one nobody at the Pentagon predicted. Flying at 60,000 feet above the South China Sea, several U.S. carrier-based MQ-25 Stingray drones, infected by Chinese “malware,” suddenly fire all the pods beneath their enormous delta wingspans, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the ocean, effectively disarming those formidable weapons.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike. Confident their satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to a flotilla of X-37B space drones, orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, to launch their Triple Terminator missiles at several of China’s communication satellites. There is zero response.

In near panic, the Navy orders its Zumwalt-class destroyers to fire their RIM-174 killer missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby geostationary orbits. The launch codes suddenly prove inoperative.

As Beijing’s viruses spread uncontrollably through the U.S. satellite architecture, the country’s second-rate supercomputers fail to crack the Chinese malware’s devilishly complex code. With stunning speed, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of American ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised.

Across the Pacific, Navy deck officers scramble for their sextants, struggling to recall long-ago navigation classes at Annapolis. Steering by sun and stars, carrier squadrons abandon their stations off the China coast and steam for the safety of Hawaii.

An angry American president orders a retaliatory strike on a secondary Chinese target, Longpo Naval Base on Hainan Island. Within minutes, the commander of Andersen Air Base on Guam launches a battery of super-secret X-51 “Waverider” hypersonic missiles that soar to 70,000 feet and then streak across the Pacific at 4,000 miles per hour — far faster than any Chinese fighter or air-to-air missile. Inside the White House situation room the silence is stifling as everyone counts down the 30 short minutes before the tactical nuclear warheads are to slam into Longpo’s hardened submarine pens, shutting down Chinese naval operations in the South China Sea. Midflight, the missiles suddenly nose-dive into the Pacific.

In a bunker buried deep beneath Tiananmen Square, President Xi Jinping’s handpicked successor, Li Keqiang, even more nationalistic than his mentor, is outraged that Washington would attempt a tactical nuclear strike on Chinese soil. When China’s State Council wavers at the thought of open war, the president quotes the ancient strategist Sun Tzu: “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.” Amid applause and laughter, the vote is unanimous. War it is!

Almost immediately, Beijing escalates from secret cyberattacks to overt acts. Dozens of China’s next-generation SC-19 missiles lift off for strikes on key American communications satellites, scoring a high ratio of kinetic kills on these hulking units. Suddenly, Washington loses secure communications with hundreds of military bases. U.S. fighter squadrons worldwide are grounded. Dozens of F-35 pilots already airborne are blinded as their helmet-mounted avionic displays go black, forcing them down to 10,000 feet for a clear view of the countryside. Without any electronic navigation, they must follow highways and landmarks back to base like bus drivers in the sky.

Midflight on regular patrols around the Eurasian landmass, two-dozen RQ-180 surveillance drones suddenly become unresponsive to satellite-transmitted commands. They fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. With surprising speed, the United States loses control of what its Air Force has long called the “ultimate high ground.”

With intelligence flooding the Kremlin about crippled American capacity, Moscow, still a close Chinese ally, sends a dozen Severodvinsk-class nuclear submarines beyond the Arctic Circle bound for permanent, provocative patrols between New York and Newport News. Simultaneously, a half-dozen Grigorovich-class missile frigates from Russia’s Black Sea fleet, escorted by an undisclosed number of attack submarines, steam for the western Mediterranean to shadow the U.S. Sixth fleet.

Within a matter of hours, Washington’s strategic grip on the axial ends of Eurasia — the keystone to its global dominion for the past 85 years — is broken. In quick succession, the building blocks in the fragile architecture of U.S. global power start to fall.

Every weapon begets its own nemesis. Just as musketeers upended mounted knights, tanks smashed trench works, and dive bombers sank battleships, so China’s superior cyber capability had blinded America’s communication satellites that were the sinews of its once-formidable military apparatus, giving Beijing a stunning victory in this war of robotic militaries. Without a single combat casualty on either side, the superpower that had dominated the planet for nearly a century is defeated in World War III.

Washington’s Iron Curtain on the Euphrates

MIKE WHITNEY

For more than six years, Syrians have made great sacrifices to defend their country in the face of a terrorist war of unprecedented brutality….  The Syrian people have stood their ground, against all odds, because they knew that this was a war that sought to eliminate their country, and with it, their own existence. They are an example to follow by any people who might face, now or in the future, similar attempts to break their will and deny them their freedom and sovereignty.

— Walid Al-Moualem, Syria’s Deputy Prime Minister, Statement at the UN General Assembly

Washington has delayed its project to throw up an iron curtain along the eastern banks of the Euphrates River in order to deploy its Kurdish shock troops deep into Deir Ezzor province.  The Syrian Defense Forces or SDF have been blitzing southward for nearly a week to head off the steady advance of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and their elite Tiger Forces.  The SAA’s stunning triumph in Deir Ezzor has knocked Washington for a loop triggering all manner of erratic behavior including rocket and mortar attacks on SAA troop positions, a US-coordinated stealth attack in Idlib province, and numerous other provocations meant to divert attention from the main strategic objective, the lucrative Euphrates Valley oil fields.

At present, the SDF is in the best position to liberate the oil fields from ISIS’s control. One must ask, however, why the SDF has suddenly diverted its attention from the siege of Raqqa and hastily send its troops south to the oil fields if their intention was not to claim ownership of those fields and to prevent the regime’s forces from retaking them? That, in fact, is the only logical explanation for their behavior.

Clearly, the SDF is not acting on its own behalf, but merely following Washington’s orders putting itself at great risk (of direct aerial bombardment by the Russian Airforce) simply to placate Washington’s insatiable lust for oil.  Here’s more from South Front:

“Tensions are rapidly growing between the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Syrian government forces in the province of Deir Ezzor, north of the provincial capital.

Last week, the SDF used the intense fighting between the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and ISIS and seized Isba and Tabiyeh oil and gas fields located north of Khusham village on the east bank of the Euphrates.” (South Front)

The actions of the SDF confirm that the US-backed militia can no longer be seen as a Syrian ally assisting in the fight against ISIS. The SDF is yet another hostile, insurgent group that is implementing Washington’s imperial agenda. The only question is whether the Syrian Army and their allies will deal with the group as harshly as they have with ISIS. But, of course, the SAA has no choice in the matter since the SDF is trying to seize vital resources that are crucial to the Syria’s survival. In short, US-backed proxies and Russian-backed coalition members are going to clash militarily because Washington has eliminated any other option. Here’s more from South Front:

“On Monday, the (mainly Kurdish) SDF media wing directly accused the Russian Aerospace Forces of bombing its positions near the Conico gas factroy….The SDF Command released a statement accusing Russia of supporting ISIS against the SDF:

“The Russian and regime forces launched an attack on our fighters in Conico Factory… with cannons and warplanes. The bombardment resulted in martyring and wounding a number of the fighters. It is worth noting that we are advancing in coordination with the Global Coalition Forces…

We strongly condemn the Russian aggressive attacks and their allies that serve terrorism, and we assure that we would not stand idly by, and we would use our right in the lawful defense.” (South Front)

The so called “Global Coalition Forces” is a Washington invention that was never invited to fight in Syria and which violates Syria’s sovereignty. Also, the claim that the SDF will ‘lawfully defend’ itself against the forces of the sovereign government is not worthy of a comment. The SDF has no legal right to conduct military operations on Syrian territory.

Also, by its own admission, the SDF is trying to seize the Conico Gas Factory. And, on Monday, they continued their surge southward capturing Ibsah and Taibah oil fields and pushing further towards Jafra fields.

Does Washington think that Assad and Putin are too blind to see what’s going on?

Of course, not. Washington is focused on oil, and its proxies are doing its handiwork. It’s as plain as the nose on your face. But, there’s one glitch: If Washington wants Syria’s oil, it’s going to have to fight for it.

On Sunday, The Russian Ministry of Defense released aerial images showing that US Army special forces are either collaborating or have reached some kind of accommodation with ISIS units in the Deir Ezzor area. It’s an interesting story, but it is hard to draw any clear conclusions based on the photos.  What is undeniable, however, is that the US-backed forces seem much more focused on oil than they are on ISIS. Not surprisingly, ISIS has taken full advantage of the situation by launching a lethal decapitation attack on the Russian high-command.  This is from Moon of Alabama:

“Last night a Russian three-star general and two colonels were killed in a mortar attack while they visited a Syrian army headquarter in Deir Ezzor:

Lieutenant-General Valery Asapov, of the Russian armed forces, has been killed after coming under shelling from Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants near Deir ez-Zor, the Russian Defense Ministry has announced. In its statement, the ministry said that Asapov was at a command outpost manned by Syrian troops, assisting commanders in the liberation of the city of Deir ez-Zor.
…

Lieutenant-General Valery Asapov is the highest-ranking Russian officer to be killed in the Syrian campaign. He was a commander of the 5th Army in Russia’s Eastern Military District.”

For three years ISIS had besieged Syrian troops in Deir Ezzor city and its airport. It had not once managed to successfully attack the Syrian headquarter or to kill high ranking officers. Now, as U.S. proxy forces “advised” by U.S. special forces, have taken position north of Deir Ezzor, “ISIS” suddenly has the intelligence data and precision mortar capabilities to kill a bunch of visiting Russian officers?

That is not plausible. No one in Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran or Moscow will believe that…” (“Syria – U.S. CentCom Declares War On Russia”, Moon of Alabama)

Moscow has already drawn its own conclusions about Washington’s roll in the General’s death. There will be retaliation, that much is certain. More important, the mask of US involvement has been stripped away leaving the two adversaries standing face to face. Lines of communication remain open, but they’re useless when both parties are determined to capture the same scrap of land. Disputes like this, are typically settled on the battlefield which is where this one is headed.

UK government moves to prop up super-rich tax haven operations in British Virgin Islands

Jean Shaoul & Robert Stevens

Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Irma, both category 5 storms, hurtled through the Caribbean causing mass devastation.

The high winds, heavy rains and storm surges devastated many of the islands, destroying the shacks that are home to tens of thousands of islanders, as well as damaging schools, health centres, sanitation and basic infrastructure and ripping up power lines.

The human cost of the hurricane has been made worse by the lack of any serious government preparations and the already inadequate state of the physical and social infrastructure.

With many roads impassable, islanders are in desperate need of food, water and other basic necessities. Thousands are without power and communication, with reports suggesting that it will take several months for electricity and water to be restored.

According to disaster risk experts, the cost of the damage caused by Hurricane Irma across the Caribbean is likely to total a massive $10 billion.

The US, British, Dutch and French governments have all sent officials to visit their territories in the Caribbean, with the Dutch and British dispatching naval vessels and military personnel to protect their territorial possessions.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson visited Barbados, promising to put the island “back on its feet again.” He also went to Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands (BVI). Irma killed at least 37 people in the Caribbean, including four people in the BVI. Irma’s winds were accompanied by flooding resulted in the loss of electricity and critical communications infrastructure throughout the BVI.

Despite their responsibility for these island territories, with a population of 35,000, the British government has promised a miserly £32 million, of which £28 million has already been spent.

Johnson said that Britain had sent more than 1,100 military personnel and 50 police to support the BVI government, which imposed a 6 p.m. to 9 a.m. curfew (still in effect but reduced from Saturday to 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.) following reports of looting.

Last Friday, the dilapidated amphibious HMS Ocean—which is to be soon sold or scrapped—dropped anchor off the British Virgin Islands with 650 personnel on board. Its arrival was the occasion for the British government to trumpet its contribution to a “humanitarian” effort. However, with what was described as just “60 tonnes of aid” on board, the HMS Ocean’s presence was largely for PR purposes.

This was confirmed as the billionaire Sir Richard Branson, who has one of his many luxury homes on the 30-hectare nearby island of Necker—that he owns—made sure to arrange a photo op. The Daily Mail cited Nick Wood, executive officer of HMS Ocean, who reported that “Sir Richard toured the ship on Saturday—taking a look at the engineering spaces, the bridge, the ops room, the hangar and the aid stores—and had time for a word with everybody… Today was him coming on board pressing the flesh with all the sailors and just saying thank you—posing for 150 selfies…”

Although Necker was hit directly by Irma, which devastated everything in its path, Branson escaped unscathed as he was able to take refuge in his own words in the concrete “strong [wine] cellar built into Necker’s Great House…”

While the house above the cellar was largely wrecked, Branson, with a fortune estimated at $5 billion, will be able to rebuild it without any problems.

The BVI is known as a tourist location, but the island’s raison d’être for the ruling elite in Britain and globally is as the site for financial swindling on a vast scale. The BVI government derives 60 percent of its revenues from its financial sector. It is home to more than one million registered companies, according to the Financial Secrecy Index, with assets of more than $1.5 trillion—double their value as estimated by the International Monetary Fund in 2010.

The Financial Times reported in 2012 that the British Virgin Islands were the fifth largest recipient of foreign direct investment globally, “with inflows at $72 billion, higher than those of the UK, which has an economy almost 3,000 times larger.”

These are nothing more than shell companies that have little physical presence and employ few local people. BVI’s protective regime ensures anonymity, secrecy and a complete absence of wealth or corporate taxation.

Two thirds of these companies are used for “corporate structuring,” and tax “planning,” aka tax avoidance. More than 140 stock market-listed companies in London, New York and Hong Kong have at least one subsidiary in the BVI. According to the Action Aid charity, in 2013, 98 of the companies in the FTSE 100 had BVI subsidiaries.

About one-quarter of the companies represent funds and investment vehicles, with property holdings and family wealth accounting for a further 10 percent. Many of the purchases of large commercial properties in central London, accounting for 10 percent of deals by value, are routed through BVI-registered companies.

The release last year of the Panama Papers, detailing over 200,000 offshore companies listed by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, provided a glimpse into the shady world of tax avoidance, with the BVI at its centre, carried out by the world’s elite.

Such are the broader concerns for the City of London’s profit interests that the Foreign Office said it was arranging for the military to assist “eligible” persons to leave the BVI and other affected islands for other offshore locations such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

Those eligible are not, of course, the impoverished islanders without homes, electricity or water. Instead, they are the accountants, lawyers and other professional staff employed by the major international accountancy firms, PwC, KPMG, Deloittes, EY and Grant Thornton, offshore law firms such as Harneys, Conyers Dill & Pearman, and wealth management firms, to the extent that these companies had not organised private planes for their evacuation. They have all closed their offices for the near future.

The concern of the ruling elite at the wellbeing of its Caribbean financial swindling operations were summed up in articles in the Financial Times, headlined respectively on September 10 and 12, “British Virgin Islands financial centre hit hard by Irma,” and “International firms evacuate British Virgin Islands.”

With the evacuations completed, the BVI government moved quickly to restore the tax haven on behalf of the financial aristocracy. In a celebratory article on September 15, headlined “Caribbean Tax Haven Begins to Bounce Back After Irma,” Bloomberg noted, “It took two days after Hurricane Irma ripped through the British Virgin Islands, damaging or destroying an estimated 70 percent of the territory’s buildings, for the Caribbean tax haven to start piecing back together its lucrative corporate-registry business.”

The super-rich could be reassured that their ill-gotten wealth could remain safe from any tax liability. The article continued, “Running off a giant backup generator, the registry’s government buildings, mostly unscathed by the storm, opened shop on Monday, days after the costliest storm in the region’s history, said Lorna Smith, interim executive director of BVI Finance.”

It added, “Some key functions were moved to offices in Hong Kong and London, Smith said. The online system to incorporate new businesses, VIRRGIN, was reopened. And court business will be shifted to a temporary location in nearby Saint Lucia within two weeks due to damage to court buildings…”

While the British government’s aid is a mere drop in the bucket in relation to the billions needed to make good the devastation, it is in marked contrast to the paltry £5 million offered to the survivors of the Grenfell Tower inferno. The disparity stems entirely from the value of these offshore tax havens for London’s financial parasites and swindlers, whose establishment the British government supported for the benefit of the City of London.