26 Jun 2019

Vanier Canadian Graduate Scholarship 2020/2021 for Doctoral Study in Canadian Universities

Application Deadline: 6th November, 2019 20:00 EDT

Offered Annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: All

To be Taken at (country): Canada

About the Award: The Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (Vanier CGS) was created to attract and retain world-class doctoral students and to brand Canada as a global centre of excellence in research and higher learning. VCS supports students who demonstrate both leadership skills and a high standard of scholarly achievement in graduate studies in social sciences and humanities, natural sciences and engineering, and health. The scholarship is worth $50,000 per year for three years and is available to both Canadian and international PhD students studying at Canadian universities.
Information for nominating institutions: Nominating institutions are encouraged to consider diversity in discipline, gender, official language, and citizenship when considering which applicants to nominate for the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships (Vanier CGS) program.

Areas of research:
  • Health research
  • Natural sciences and/or engineering research
  • Social sciences and humanities research
Type: Doctoral (PhD)

Eligibility: Open to Canadian citizens, permanent residents of Canada and foreign students pursuing a doctoral degree at eligible Canadian universities
To be considered for a Vanier CGS, candidate must:
  • be nominated by only one Canadian institution, which must have received a Vanier CGS quota;
  • be pursuing your first doctoral degree (including joint undergraduate/graduate research program such as: MD/PhD, DVM/PhD, JD/PhD – if it has a demonstrated and significant research component). Note that only the PhD portion of a combined degree is eligible for funding;
  • intend to pursue, in the summer semester or the academic year following the announcement of results, full-time doctoral (or a joint graduate program such as: MD/PhD, DVM/PhD, JD/PhD) studies and research at the nominating institution; Note that only the PhD portion of a combined degree is eligible for funding;
  • not have completed more than 20 months of doctoral studies as of May 1, 2020;
  • have achieved a first-class average, as determined by your institution, in each of the last two years of full-time study or equivalent. Candidates are encouraged to contact the institution for its definition of a first-class average; and
  • must not hold, or have held, a doctoral-level scholarship or fellowship from CIHR, NSERC or SSHRC to undertake or complete a doctoral degree.
Eligibility of Degree Programs
  • Doctoral awards are tenable only in degree programs that have a significant research component. The research component must be a requirement for completion of the program, and is considered to be significant original, autonomous research that leads to the completion of a dissertation, major scholarly publication, performance, recital and/or exhibit that is merit reviewed at the institutional level. Clinically-oriented programs of study, including clinical psychology, are also eligible programs if they have a significant research component, as described above.
Selection Criteria:
  • Academic excellence, as demonstrated by past academic results and by transcripts, awards and distinctions.
  • Research potential, as demonstrated by the candidates research history, his/her interest in discovery, the proposed research and its potential contribution to the advancement of knowledge in the field, the potential benefit to Canadians, and any anticipated outcomes.
  • Leadership (potential and demonstrated ability), as defined by the following qualities:
  • Personal Achievement:
  • Involvement in Academic Life:
  • Volunteerism/community outreach:
  • Civic engagement:
  • Other
Value and Duration of Scholarship: $50,000 annually for three years.

Number of  Scholarship: Up to 166 scholarships are awarded annually.

How to Apply: Candidates must be nominated by the university at which they want to study. Candidates cannot apply directly to the Vanier CGS program.
It is important to go through the Application requirements in the Scholarship Webpage before applying.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for Details 

Award Providers: The Vanier’s scholarships are administered by Canada’s three federal funding agencies:
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC)
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)

TED Fellows Programme (Fully-funded to Vancouver, Canada) 2020

Application Deadlines: 27th August, 2019 11:59pm UTC

Eligible Countries: International

To be taken at (country):  Vancouver, Canada

About the Award: The TEDGlobal Fellowships is designed to bring together young trailblazers from a variety of fields who have shown unusual accomplishment and courage. Instead of business people, professionals, policy wonks and government officials, the TED Fellows program focuses on doers, makers, inventors, advocates, filmmakers and photographers, musicians and artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, NGO heads, and human rights activists.
Twenty fellows will be selected to attend the TED Global conference to be held in April 2020. Participants will also have the opportunity to attend pre-conference programs with training by speakers.

Type: Fellowship

Eligibility: 
  • TED looks for different applicants than many other leadership-oriented programs. Instead of business people, professionals, policy wonks and government officials, the TED Fellows program focuses on doers, makers, inventors, advocates, filmmakers and photographers, musicians and artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, NGO heads, and human rights activists.
  • In addition to impressive accomplishment, fine character and a good heart are two very important traits the TED Fellows programme looks for in every potential TED Fellow. More than anything, this focus on character has defined the success of the TED Fellows program.
  • Candidates may apply to attend either TED or TEDGlobal.
  • Anyone over the age of 18 is welcome to apply
Selection Criteria: TED Fellows are selected by the program staff, with extensive reference checking and consultation with experts across all fields. Selections are made by the group as a whole, not by individuals.
There is no algorithm for how we select our TED Fellows. We select Fellows based on their accomplishments in their respective fields, the potential impact of their work and also, most importantly, their character. The ideal applicant is multidisciplinary in their pursuits, and is at a moment in their career to maximize the support of the TED Community.

Number of Awardees: Twenty(20)

Value of Fellowship: 
  • TED pays for round-trip economy airfare, ground transportation to and from the conference location, meals and shared accommodation on site.
  • The TED Fellowship programme has the ability to slingshot candidate’s career forward.
  • As a Fellow, the candidate will be introduced into a powerful network of innovators that can be future collaborators.
  • By attending and speaking at the TED Conference, candidate will not only have the ability to spread their message far and wide, but will also meet people who may be able to help your career.
  • Aside from the conference, Fellows have access to personal mentorship opportunities and speaker coaching following conference participation.
  • Once you are selected as a TED Fellow all flights (or equivalent) to and from the TED conference, any visa needs, room, board + food while at the conference, and a conference pass will be covered.
Duration of Fellowship: A 5 day stage program from April 15 to 19, 2020. . Also, one-year commitment that is centered around a TED Conference. However, “once a Fellow, always a Fellow”

How to Apply: Apply now

Visit Fellowship Webpage for details

Facebook’s Libra Isn’t a “Cryptocurrency”

Thomas L. Knapp

In mid-June, Facebook — in cahoots with 28 partners in the financial and tech sectors — announced plans to introduce Libra, a blockchain-based virtual currency.
The world’s governments and central banks reacted quickly with calls for investigation and regulation. Their concerns are quite understandable, but unfortunately already addressed in Libra’s planned structure.
The problem for governments and central banks:
A new currency with no built-in respect for political borders, and with a preexisting global user base of 2.4 billion Facebook users in nearly every country on Earth, could seriously disrupt the control those institutions exercise over our finances and our lives.
The accommodation Facebook is already making to those concerns:
Libra is envisaged as a “stablecoin,” backed by the currencies and debt instruments of those governments and central banks themselves and administered through a “permissioned” blockchain ledger by equally centralized institutions (Facebook itself, Visa, Mastercard, et al.).
To put it a different way, Libra will not be a true cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ether. Neither its creation nor its transactions will be decentralized and distributed, let alone easily made anonymous. A “blockchain” is just a particular kind of ledger for keeping track of transactions. It does not, in and of itself, a cryptocurrency make.
In simple terms, Libra is just a new brand for old products: Digital gift cards and pre-paid debit cards.
The only real difference between Libra and existing Visa or Mastercard products is that Libra’s value will fluctuate with the “basket” of currencies and bonds it’s backed by, instead of being denominated in one particular (also fluctuating — you experience the fluctuations as changes in the prices of goods) currency like the dollar or the euro.
When it comes to the goal envisaged by cryptocurrency’s creator, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto — to free money from control and manipulation by governments and central banks — Libra is a dead end. Instead of being manipulated by one government or central bank, Libra will be manipulated by all of them.
Cryptocurrency is, to get biblical, new wine in old wine skins — it bursts those skins, by design. Libra isn’t new wine. It isn’t even a new wine skin. It’s a blend of the same old wines, in the same old skins, with a fancy new label. And there’s nothing to suggest that the old wine is getting better with age.
Fortunately, these structural defects also mean that Libra isn’t a threat to real cryptocurrency. Accept no substitutes.

The Hydroponic Threat to Organic Food

Dave Chapman

In the last 7 years there has been a quiet redefinition taking place in the USDA National Organic Program that oversees organic standards. Large scale industrial producers have insinuated themselves into organic certification to transform what the green and white label stands for.
Original organic was based on a simple equation:
Healthy soil = healthy plants = healthy animals = healthy planet.
This equation leaves out the discussion of WHY these things are true, but it is a good roadmap for what organic agriculture is all about. The first given is always “healthy soil.” As we look deeper, we cannot study these parts separately, because plants and animals are integral parts of healthy soil system. No plants means no healthy soil. The same is true with animals. Soil and plants coevolved for 350 million years, and neither can be healthy in isolation from the other. The dance between plants, microbial life, and animal life in the soil is necessary for all.
Western soil science got started with the work of Justus von Liebig (1803-1873). From Liebig’s perspective, soil was a passive storage bin for plant nutrients. However, in Charles Darwin’s 1881 book The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, these ideas were challenged by a vision of the soil as a living ecosystem. But Liebig’s viewpoint dominated Western soil science until the 1980’s when the role of organisms in soil formation became better understood. Liebig himself even turned away from his “storage bin” paradigm in the later part of his life, but our agricultural sciences continued to follow his earlier writings.
If we take away plants, soil can no longer be living. Plants provide the energy via photosynthesis for all animal and microbial life in the soil. These photosynthates are provided first as root exudates that feed the fungi and bacteria in exchange for which they gain the minerals that in turn feed the plants. The visible life forms are as important as the invisible microbial community. Soil animals go from burrowing woodchucks and gophers to snails, slugs and elongate animals such as earthworms, flatworms, nematodes, soil mites, springtails, ants, termites, beetles and flies. All of these species together create a community that is often called the soil food web.
Organic farming is based on protecting and enhancing this web of life. By cultivating the diversity of life, we create a stable ecosystem in the soil. Diseases or pestilence are symptoms of a loss of balance. So the organic farmer’s first job is to enhance the diversity of life in the soil community. This is done by providing materials and techniques to help build a soil carbon sponge.
Conventional agriculture is based on a very different strategy of control and simplification. By making systems that are as simple as possible, it becomes easy to control the inputs and outputs. The inputs are processed offsite to provide plant available nutrients. “Soil” becomes a device for holding roots. It is thus easier to make these systems replicable, much like the model of a McDonald’s restaurant. McDonald’s simplifies their systems as much as possible to serve the same hamburger to every customer around the world. In such a system the expertise is contained in the corporate staff who design the processes and provides the raw materials. The problem is a loss of nutrition in the final product. McDonald’s serves lots of calories that soothe customers’ cravings, but they fail at providing a healthy diet. The end result is the phenomena of customers who are simultaneously malnourished and obese.
Similarly, in a conventional agriculture system, the yields are high per acre, but, as Vandana Shiva has said, the yield of health per acre is low. As it turns out, we are part of that co-evolution of soil and plants and animals. Human nutritional needs are complex and beyond our full understanding at this point. But organic farmers believe that by embracing those natural systems, we can feed ourselves well, even if we never fully understand why.
As Einstein once said, there is a simplicity that comes before complexity that is worthless, but there is a simplicity beyond complexity that is priceless.
These simplified conventional systems have been promoted by an industry that profits by selling remedies to the unintended consequences of such crude simplicity. Their high yields are unsustainable without the liberal use of poisons. Plants grown in a soil devoid of biological complexity are very vulnerable to disease and insect attack. And of course, the more we use such poisons, the less healthy the soil becomes, so more pesticides are needed, and on and on.
In livestock production, the epitome of conventional agriculture is a Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) where animals are isolated from the land. Their food is grown far from where they live, so their manure is lost to the production system. There is no honoring of Albert Howard’s Law Of Return.
In vegetables and berries, the epitome of conventional agriculture is hydroponic production. Hydroponics is a system that relies entirely upon processed inputs to feed the plants. The old organic adage is, “Feed the soil, not the plant.” The guiding principle of conventional agriculture is: “Feed the plant, not the soil.” Obviously, hydroponic production is the most extreme example of this philosophy.
The practices of organic farming are ancient, but not all traditional farming systems could be called organic by the definition of such pioneers as Albert Howard. Some traditional agriculture was not sustainable and ultimately led to the downfall of civilizations. But organic principles have been practiced in the intensive farming of southeast Asia for over 4000 years. They were learned by Howard in India and subsequently taught in the West. Since then, soil science has confirmed Howard’s ideas to an astonishing degree. Every day we learn more and more about how soil communities function and about why such a system need not depend on pesticides to thrive. Every day we learn more about the connections between the soil microbiome and our own microbiome.
From this logic we derive a conclusion that is important to remember: that the absence of pesticides in a successful organic system is the result of how we farm, not the definition of it.
The organic movement has long believed that food grown in a healthy soil is the foundation of human health. In recent years it has become clear that agriculture is also deeply involved in the climate crisis, both as the problem and as the solution. Conventional agriculture contributes directly to the destruction of the living soil, leading to the spread of deserts and the warming of the planet. We have the skills and understanding to farm without chemicals in a way that will build a soil carbon sponge that can cool our warming planet. Our impediment to achieving this is social and political, not technical.
The inclusion of hydroponics in organic certification is thus not an example of innovation and improvement. It is an example of conquest and colonization. It is simply a hostile takeover of organic by economic forces. It has been widely resisted by the organic community, but the USDA continues to embrace hydroponics as organic just as they embrace CAFOs as organic. Their redefinition of organic is in opposition to the law and to international norms. The US once again becomes the rogue nation throwing away our mutual future so somebody can make a buck.
At this time, huge quantities of hydroponic berries, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and greens are being marketed as “Certified Organic” in partnership with the USDA. And there is no way of identifying what is hydroponic in the organic label.
The Real Organic Project was created to challenge this process. Our efforts include the creation of an add-on label so that real organic farmers and eaters might be able to find one another in a deceptive marketplace.

Public decency law puts Saudi reforms in perspective

James M. Dorsey

A newly adopted Saudi law on public decency helps define Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s vague notion of ‘moderate Islam.’
It also lays bare the pitfalls of his social reforms as well as his preference for hyper-nationalism rather than religion as the legitimizing ideology of his rule and his quest for control of every aspect of Saudi life.
In an indication that Prince Mohammed is walking a fine line, Saudi media reported that the government was still weighing how to implement the law almost two months after it was adopted.
“This (law) is an effort to balance the pressure from conservative elements of society that accuse the (government) of allowing things to go ‘out of control’. Effecting social change is an art form — you want to push as fast as possible without provoking a counter reaction. Not easy!” Ali Shihabi, founder of Arabia Foundation, a Washington-based, pro-Saudi think-tank, told Agence France-Presse.
The law comes on the back of a series of reforms in recent years that were designed to facilitate Prince Mohammed’s plans to streamline and diversify the Saudi economy and project the crown prince as a reformer.
The reforms included the lifting of a ban on women’s driving, relaxation of gender segregation, enhancement of women’s professional opportunities, the introduction of modern forms of entertainment and the curbing of the powers of the kingdom’s feared religious police.
Prince Mohammed also vowed to revert the inward-looking, ultra-conservative kingdom to a form of moderate Islam he claimed existed prior to the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Ultimately, Prince Mohammed’s short-lived reformist image was severely tarnished by the kingdom’s devastating war in Yemen; the brutal killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi; the mass arrest of clerics, activists, journalists and academics; his failure to lift the kingdom’s male guardianship system; and the mushrooming number of people fleeing the kingdom, including dissidents as well as women seeking to escape repressive and abusive families.
Sparking ridicule on social media, the new law defines limits of Prince Mohammed’s social reforms and creates one more anchor for his repression of any form of dissent.
The law bans men’s shorts except for on beaches and in sports clubs. It also bans garments with questionable prints that like shorts “offend public tastes.” It forbids the taking of pictures or use of phrases that might offend public decency as well as graffiti that could be interpreted as “harmful.”
The bans packages public decency as representing Saudi “values and principles” in a nod towards Prince Mohammed’s promotion of a hyper-nationalist Saudi identity.
Yet, various of its restrictions are more in line with the kingdom’s long-standing austere interpretation of Islam while others reinforce the crown prince’s repression of anything that does not amount to an endorsement of his rule or policies.
The restrictions on clothing and this month’s closure on opening night of the kingdom’s first-ever alcohol-free ‘Halal’ disco constitute an apparent effort to cater to ultra-conservatives who oppose liberalisation of gender segregation and public religious rituals such as the muted lifting of rules that force businesses to close during prayers times.
The reforms, while significant in and of themselves, stop short of dismantling what politics scholar Brandon Ives terms ‘religious institutionalism’ or the intertwining of religion and state through a “plethora of institutions, policies, and legal codes.”
Religious institutionalism complicates Prince Mohammed’s attempt to replace religious legitimization of his rule with hyper-nationalism because of its success in fusing religion with Saudi culture.
“Religion and culture are now so intertwined in what it means to be Saudi that it is hard to separate the two,” said Eman Alhussein, author of a just published European Council of Foreign Relations report on Saudi hyper-nationalism.
As a result, some nationalists have joined religious conservatives in calling for limitations on what is deemed acceptable entertainment and media content.
Ms. Alhussein noted that some online critics were cautioning that the promotion of hyper-nationalism stripped Saudis of their values in a manner that weakens their loyalty to the regime.
“Nationalism in this increasingly strident form could eventually become a Trojan horse that undermines the state,” Ms. Alhussein warned.
Nationalism’s double edge is enhanced, Ms. Alhussein went on to argue, by the undermining of the buffer function of the kingdom’s traditional religious establishment. “The state will now be more accountable for its credibility, and potentially much more exposed,” she said.
Prince Mohammed’s refusal to tackle religious institutionalism impacts not only his attempts at consolidation of his power but also his effort to project the kingdom as an enlightened 21st century state.
The crown prince, in a bid to alter the kingdom’s image and cut expenditure, has significantly reduced spending on a decades-long, US$100 billion campaign to globally promote anti-Shiite, anti-Iranian strands of ultra-conservative Sunni Islam.
Prince Mohammed has at the same time ordered state-controlled vehicles that once promoted religious ultra-conservativism to preach tolerance, mutual respect and inter-faith dialogue instead.
Mr. Ives’ analysis suggests, however, that the kingdom’s U-turn is unlikely to lead to a clean break with support abroad of ultra-conservatism without the dismantling of religious institutionalism.
He argues that the domestic pressure that persuades states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran to support co-religionist rebel groups beyond their borders is generated not by religious affinity but by religious institutionalism that creates a political role for religious forces.
Mr. Ives’ arguments appear to be borne out by continued Saudi support for Islamist militants in Balochistan, the Pakistani province that borders on Iran, as well as Algeria and Libya and propagation of non-violent expressions of an apolitical, quietist, and loyalist interpretation of Islam in countries like Kazakhstan.
Saudi Arabia’s new public decency law in effect highlights the limitations of Prince Mohammed’s reforms.
In a private conversation last year with the Archbishop of Canterbury during a visit to Britain, Prince Mohammed reportedly put some flesh on the skeleton of his vision of moderate Islam.
When urged by the archbishop to allow non-Muslims to open places of worship in the kingdom, Prince Mohammed responded: “I could never allow that. This is the holy site of Islam, and it should stay as such.”

Violent Voyeurism: Surveillance, Spyware and Human Rights

Binoy Kampmark

Surveillance is merely a variant of violent voyeurism, the human behind the camera or visual apparatus observing behaviour in a setting, often private.  Its premise is privacy’s violation; its working assumption is privacy’s irrelevance; officially tolerated such a concept is unofficially repudiated.  Studies on surveillance do as much to reveal its problems as accommodate them: the great, all seeing commissar of email, letters and conversations remains persuasive.
Those who have put pen to paper on this have not always been very sympathetic.  Judith Jarvis Thomson tended to see matters of privacy as a secondary interest: privacy rights are bundled up, as it were, with others, a second order of concern.  The violation of privacy comes after more salient breaches. But mass market surveillance, much of it manufactured in the private sector, the ubiquity of spyware, and the ease with which such material can be acquired, has eclipsed such quibbles.
The innovations on the market have proven to be devastatingly effective.  Canadian privacy research group Citizen Lab’s work in this field has shed light on a range of manufacturers pushing such products as FinFisher, the Remote Control System (RCS) of Hacking Team, and Israel’s own NSO Group’s Pegasus.  As Sarah McKune and Ron Deibert observed in 2017, “business is booming for a specialized market to facilitate the digital attacks, monitoring, and intelligence-cum-evidence-gathered conducted by government entities and their proxies.”
Pegasus spyware remains one of the NSO Group’s most damnably and dangerously effective products, used to target individuals in 45 countries with impunity.  Human rights activists such as Ahmed Mansoor can testify to its spear-phishing qualities, having been a target of various SMS messages with links intended to infect his iPhone.  Had he actually clicked on those links instead of passing them on to experts at Citizen Lab and the cybersecurity firm Lookout for examination, surveillance software would have been installed.
An even more high profile instance where Pegasus is alleged to have been deployed is the case of slain journalist and occasional Riyadh critic Jamal Khashoggi, who was brutally dismembered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018.  A suit against NSO was subsequently filed in Tel Aviv by fellow dissident critic Omar Abdulaziz, claiming that communications between him and Khashoggi had been monitored by Saudi authorities deploying NSO software.
Much of this is shrugged off as exceptional: the NSO Group, for instance, argues that such technology has been used to legitimately target terrorist groups and criminals; besides, their sale is premised on ethical restrictions.  “It is not a tool to be weaponized against human rights activists or political dissidents,” explains the NSO Group in an email.  Such ethical considerations were little bar in the cases of Khashoggi, at least initially.  But the concern, and publicity, was sufficient to prompt some mild action on the part of NSO Group.  While the firm concluded that its technology did not “directly contribute” to tracking Khashoggi prior to his killing, new requests from Saudi Arabia were frozen over concerns of misuse.
David Kaye, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, has made the latest effort to remind citizens that spyware, commercially and readily available, can be a very dangerous thing.  A good deal of matters in life take place behind the screen of safe privacy.  Dissidents and contrarians need their space to survive; journalists need their room to document abuses and make the powerful account.  In the face of modern surveillance, expansive, beefed up, and developed by global corporations, the task had gotten that much more challenging.
Kaye’s gloomy report, published to the UN Human Rights Council, supplies the disturbing stuffing the world of surveillance provides.  It leaves little room for the fence sitters: surveillance harms and impairs.  It is axiomatic that trust is denuded in that pursuit, and its very nature and intrusive activity eliminates the consensual bridge between citizen and state, and, as by-product, citizen and citizen.
It is, furthermore, generally unsupervised.  “Digital surveillance is no longer the preserve of countries that enjoy the resources to conduct mass and targeted surveillance based on in-house tools.  Private industry has stepped in, unsupervised and with something close to impunity.”  The market itself was “shrouded in secrecy; indeed, our knowledge of the problem exists mainly because of the digital-forensic framework of non-governmental researchers and tenacious reporting by civil society organizations and the media”.
As a function, such spyware is directed against specific individuals, “often journalists, activists, opposition figures, critics”.  This has led to unmistakable consequences: arbitrary detention, torture and extrajudicial killings.  This suggests two parts of the equation: to see, at one end; to then order, at the other, the suppression if not elimination of the individual.
Kaye suggests a reasoned brake on the industry.  “States should impose an immediate moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, use or servicing of privately developed surveillance tools until a human rights-compliant safeguards regime is in place.”
This may be sadly ambitious, given the security establishment’s various addictions to technology in this field.  Such suggestions are the equivalent of banning space technology that might be deployed in weaponry. Spyware is as much a product as a vision, the equivalent of arms manufacturing and efforts to produce the most lethal and insidious creation.  To mention human rights in the same breath is the equivalent of seeking a more honed form of killing, a decent form of surveillance.  Seen in its amoral context, such products are neither wicked nor good, a mere mechanism to monitor and police.  But behind the eye of spyware are its unscrupulous users. Behind the gazing software is a state or corporate employee, the voyeur of the national security state ever keen to peer into the lives of citizenry.

China: From Ethnic Diversity to Ethnic Mingling

Gautam Navlakha

On June 16 China announced that it had reached a “broad consensus” about counter-terror work with United Nations, after UN’s chief for Counter-terrorism, Russian diplomat Vladimir Voronkov made a visit to Xinjiang from June 13-15. China’s handling of so called terror threat posed by Uighur extremists has been much talked about by western media and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres raised the issue about the plight of Muslims in Xinjiang in April when he visited Beijing and met State Councillor Wang Yi. UN Human Rights chief Michelle Bachelet has been pushing China to allow UN access to investigate reports of disappearances and arbitrary detention of Uighur Muslims. Whether China encouraged the UN counter-terror chief to visit to circumvent the pressure it was coming under for its counter-terror measures is difficult to say but the visit certainly helped to ward off, for the time being, investigation by UNHRC team. Except it does not mean that China’s use of counter-terror approach towards Uighur Muslims and measures it has adopted for tackling it are above board.
Infact for years China denied existence of arbitrary detentions and enforced political re-eductaion bases. Then they claimed that these re-education camps were meant only against “minor criminals” and the idea was to “asist and educate” them. Its only since last year that China has begun to accept that “transformation through education” camps do exist in order to eliminate “religious extremism”. Indeed new rules enacted by the ruling Party allows “Governments at county level and above can set up education and trasnformation organisation and supervising departments” such as vocational training centres “to educate and transform people who have been infleunced by extremism” says a new clause in the Xinjiang Uigur Autonomous Region Regulation on Anti-Extremism.
These centres apart from teaching vocational skills are required to provide education on spoken and written Chinese (Mandarin), aspects of law and organise “ideological education to eliminate extremism”. They are also expected to carry out psychological treatment and behaviour correction to “help trainees to transform their thoughts and return to society and their families.”
In March 2017 a law was passed to ban acts deemed manifestation of extremism, including wearing veils, having “abnormal” beard, refusing to watch TV, listen to Radio and preventing children from national education.
Xinjiang situated on ancient silk route is a major logistical hub for China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Xinjiang is also rich in oil and other natural deposits. Starting around turn of the century investments in oil, gas and other mineral extraction industry have resulted in influx of Han Chinese settlers to Xinjiang. In 2009 riots had broken out in capital Urumqi since then repression increased. But it took a new turn in 2014 when in the name of combating terrorism and extremism Chinese authorities cracked down on Uighurs. Observers claim that the new Communist Party leader of Xinjiang Chen Quanguo, who was previously posted in restive Tibet and also a key player in the suppression of Falun Gong sect/religion across China, brought in a new grid system under which authorities divided city into squares of about 500 people with a police outpost to keep tab on people. In rural areas every village got a police outpost. The other change he brought in was banning certain names (such as Imam or Mohammed) and long beards and began targetting certain practices and beliefs of Muslims.
It is worth noting that in China there has been, what the Chinese describe, as two-line struggle within the Party on its stance on ethnic and religious minorities. The two lines, were “themes”, “ethnic mingling” versus “ethnic diversity”. Under cultural revolution, ethnic groups had suffered at the hands of Red Guards zealots, thereafter Party had moderated its stance towards minorities. Indeed as late as in 1999 Chinese Government adopted a policy “to preserve the traditional cultures of the ethnic minorities, the state formulated plans or organised specialists for work invloving the collecting, editing, translating and publishing of their cultural heritage and protecting their famous historical monuments, scenic spots, rare cultural relics and other important items of historical and cultural heritage”. However, this policy did not survive for long. This was the period when many Uigurs chose to migrate to Turkey and Pakistan as well as to Central Asian Republics. In particular, some Uighurs joined Al Qaida in Afghanistan or later joined Al Nusrat front in Syria.
While China’s fear of radicalised Uighurs posing a threat to its security and BRI which passes through Xinjiang can not be dismissed. It is equally, if not more true that the way China has gone about handling this challenge is deplorable. Although at Central Ethnic Workshop in September 2014 President Xi Jinping sought to bring the debate between those espousing end to ethnic autonomy and those espousing its expansion, in reality he lay emphasis on promoting collective belonging through Mandarin language instruction, patriotic education in Frontier region, stressed “equality before law of everyone” rather than group differentiated rights under China’s Constitution. Party began to stress residential integration, joint schooling, inter-ethnic mobility and migration as ways of getting around extremism.In the process there is demographic transformation taking place which, given Xinjiang’s strategic location, is a counter-productive move.
It is significant that ‘transformation through education” was first tried out against Falun Gong members, who were Han Chinese and millions of them spread all across China. The same leadership team which undertook this task is also reportedly engaged in the “transformation through education” project today in Xinjiang. Although westerm media and human rights group cite figures of a million, the exact number of people is difficult to verify. While numbers may be exaggerated the coercive nature of this re-education is not. What is disturbing about them is the fact that unlike draconian laws which target ethnic extremists/militants, or ruthless approach towards those using violence, the “transformation through education” targets ordinary Uighurs, or civilians. Even discounting for western media’s biasesd reportage of China and China related news, one cannot ignore the fact that there is mass detention of Uighurs who spend from several months to years in such camps. And these camps, it appears from reports, are not benign since the very idea of transforming people’s attitude is inherently coercive.
What is unfortunate is not just the fact that Chinese ruling Party has not been able to evolve a approach towards ethnic minorities which is accomodative and allows them elbow room to protect their cultural specifity. Instead the Party perceives cultural and political diversity as being a threat, rather than a source of strength. And as a result shows no scruple in practising suppression of ethnic diversity, unmindful of what damage it causes to the people. What is worse is that they are oblivious of enlightened self-interest because had they been alert to it the Party would realise that they are actually sowing seeds of a long drawn out conflict. Because, just as they are unable to stamp out Falun Gong, despite ban and its criminalisation. Uighurs with their ethnic kin in CAR and Afghanistan and Turkey, can nurture their rage and resentment.
Since Xinjiang shares border with India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kirghistan, Turkmenistan, trouble in Xinjiang is bound to spill over. Just as trouble in Afghanistan and Pakistan can spillover into Xinjiang. In other words, a wiser course would be for the Chinese Party to return to the Constitutional guarantees offered to minorities, and to policy of respect for “ethnic diversity” lest Xinjiang, strategic logistical hub remain turbulent putting a spoke in China’s BRI project, because ideas do not disappear.

2019 ITUC Global Rights Index: Bourgeois democracy exposed again

Farooque Chowdhury

The facts that the recently released 2019 ITUC Global Rights Index by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)  again exposes the bourgeois democracy.
Advanced/matured bourgeois democracies are denying bourgeois democratic rights. Labor is the main victim of this denial.
The 2019 ITUC Global Rights Index (Brussels, Belgium; henceforth Index) presents much significant information on workers’ rights in countries from both the global South and North. Among these countries are Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the US. These are the advanced bourgeois democracies. In the global south, to cite a few, there are Algeria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Chad, Chile, China, Colombia, Eritrea, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Iran, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. The Index has covered all the continents and most of the countries.
All the countries are within the world capitalist system. Global production/extraction and supply/distribution chains connect all the countries with global markets of raw materials, finished products and labor.
The Index ranks 145 countries against 97 internationally recognized indicators to assess where law and practice protects workers’ rights best. The Index rates countries according to the indicators, with an overall score placing countries in rankings of one to five plus.
These include: (1) sporadic violations of rights, (2) repeated violations of rights, (3) regular violations of rights, (4) systematic violations of rights, (5) no guarantee of rights, and (5+) No guarantee of rights due to breakdown of the rule of law.
The Index found 12 countries including Iceland and Sweden violating rights sporadically while 24 countries including Belgium and Republic of Congo violating rights repeatedly and 26 countries including Canada and Rwanda violating rights regularly. It also found 39 countries including Chile and Nigeria violating rights systematically while 35 countries including Brazil and Eritrea not guaranteeing rights, and nine countries including Palestine, Sudan, Syria and Yemen having no guarantee of rights due to breakdown of law.
Other key findings of the report include:
  • Right to strike violated in 85% of countries.
  • Deny some or all workers collective bargaining in 80% of countries.
  • The number of countries excluding workers from the right to establish or join a trade union increased from 92 in 2018 to 107 in 2019.
  • Workers had no or restricted access to justice in 72% of countries.
  • The number of countries workers arrested and detained increased from 59 in 2018 to 64 in 2019.
  • Out of 145 countries surveyed, 54 deny or constrain free speech and freedom of assembly.
  • Authorities impeded the registration of unions in 59% of countries.
  • Workers experienced violence in 52 countries.
On percentage of countries, which have restricted free speech and assembly, the Index informs: It’s 30% of countries in Europe, which is almost one-third of the bourgeois democratic Europe. And, this happens after dismantling of post-revolutionary societies and unfurling of capital’s democracy-flag.
On percentage of countries where workers have experienced arrests and detentions”, the Indexfinds: It’s 25% of countries in Europe. On strikes, the Index reports: “In 2019, strikes have been severely restricted or banned in 123 out of 145 countries. In a significant number of these countries, industrial actions were brutally repressed by the authorities and workers exercising their right to strike often faced criminal prosecution and summary dismissals.” On percentage of countries, which violated the right to strike, according to the Index, it’s 68% of countries in Europe. “In Belgium, 18 FGTB members were charged for blocking the road during a protest. The FGTB president of the Anvers branch was sentenced, but no penalty was imposed. Similarly, in France, 5 CGT and FO members were summoned by the police for distributing flyers at a tollgate. The general secretary of CGT Lot was charged with “illegal occupation of public roads” […]” In 2019, serious restrictions to collective bargaining were recorded in 116 countries. Countries that violated the right to collective bargaining in Europe was 50%. In the Netherlands, Norway and Spain, companies often bypassed collective bargaining with unions and pushed for individual agreements directly with workers.
The Index said: “Under international labor standards, all workers without distinction have the right to freedom of association. In 2019, 107 out of 145 countries surveyed excluded certain categories of workers from this right, often on the basis of their employment status from informal workers to non-standard forms of employment.” On worldwide basis, the percentage is 74, and 50% of countries in Europe exclude workers from the right to establish or join a trade union.
Capital has increased its old tact: “There is a worldwide trend, which is particularly evident in Europe but spreading globally, to seek to exclude workers from employment rights through ‘non-standard’ forms of employment, which reduces the organizational capacity of unions, as many workers are physically or psychologically isolated from permanent workers. Non-standard forms of work include temporary work; part-time, on-call, and contracts with zero- or variable working hours; temporary agency work; and disguised and dependent self-employment, in which many of the workers are found in platform, gig or digital work.” In 104 countries out of 145, the Index said, “workers had no or reduced access to justice, and the due process of law and justice was denied.”
This story is throughout the 62-page report. Facts from the global South have not been mentioned here, as those are not different, rather worse than the advanced bourgeois democracies. All of the ten worst countries for workers’ rights in 2019 are in the global South.  
Hence, the Index said: “The systematic dismantling of the building blocks of freedom and democracy […]”
The reality that stands stark is:
  • The labor is not only as usually under assault by capital, but the assault has also widened and intensified. This means: (a) exploitation has increased; (b) capital has turned desperate as it feels resistance by labor is absent; and (c) workers need spreading of their understanding of the reality and building up of their organization.
  • The advanced bourgeois democracies are shredding off mask that it used to put to hide its brutal face. This unmasking will take away words of optimism regarding the system that the so-called liberals market; but this depends mainly on the words the labor forcefully spreads.
  • The bourgeois democracies themselves are in crisis. That’s one of the reasons behind inability/incapacity of the system – the bourgeois democracy – to give concession to the labor. And, that inability leads the system to denying of minimum rights, executing murder, etc. as the Index The more the inability increases the more capital will brutalize its assault on labor.
The Index tells almost the same. Two of the three global trends for workers’ rights identified by the Index show that
  • democracy is in crisis,
  • governments are attempting to silence the age of anger through brutal repression.
The situation is so desperate – “age of anger” – that the mainstream is failing to deny the dominating system’s crisis and muzzling down – “silence the age of anger through brutal repression” – of the labor.
This practice of capital – silence, repress, etc. – has been told in the Index:
“There was also a growing number of countries where the authorities or employers resorted to court orders to ban strike actions on the dubious pretext that such actions disrupted economic activities.”
Court of law, the seat of justice as the capital propagates, is colluding with capital, is colluding to snatch away the workers’ rights. This is an old fact showed by proletarian theoreticians, but denied by the mainstream scholars. Bourgeois court is not blind; it knows where capital’s interest lies. Therefore, as the Index tells, holy courts don’t discard “dubious pretexts”.
However, the third global trend, as the Index identifies, is “legislative successes for workers’ rights are still being won.”
This means: Workers can challenge the system, can win over space from the system; and that’s possible whenever workers have appropriate organization and leadership – not sold out to capital.
One point needs a brief clarification: The Index by the mainstream labor organization tells: “democracy is in crisis”. The democracy it tells about is bourgeois democracy, which a section in the rank of the people very often fails to differentiate.
One faction of capital, extreme right wing, will try to capitalize this situation by forwarding popular slogan that sounds “sympathetic” to the labor. Even, this extreme right wing, often with fascist characteristics, will raise/is raising slogan that feeds divisive politics in the rank of the people, especially within the labor. Divisive politics is a trap capital sets up for the working class.
However, one part of capital is aware that this situation is a threat to the democracy and stability of capital. But, there’s no urgency from capital to enter into any compromise with the labor as labor is being allured by popular slogan, and labor’s organization and politics are not that strong that can compel capital to give space to the labor.
The figures cited here are not from a radical labor literature. Based on the figures from the mainstream labor literature cited above it can be claimed that no other class faced/faces such denial of rights, justice and democracy in today’s world. It’s worldwide persecution of labor. It’s an old story known to many, but discussed least.
The grave situation appears graver if incidents of the last few years, since the Great Financial Crisis, are taken into account. There’s unemployment, homelessness. There’s the mighty austerity program. There are wars, civil wars initiated by imperialism, imperialist interventions. In addition, there are outsourcing and special economic/export processing zones. In the global South, the reality is much worse. It’s a reality of violence and murder perpetrated by capital against the labor.
No other class but the working class has to tell these facts, find out facts more burning from life of the working class, and interpret these facts in relation to capital, and capital’s politics and democracy. It has to be said that the working class is the most oppressed class today when capital’s profit and politics moves forward without facing much hindrance.

Multiple studies demonstrate global warming is melting glaciers faster

Philip Guelpa

Several recently published scientific studies clearly demonstrate that the melting of glaciers across the globe is accelerating due to human-induced climate change. A world-wide survey by a team based at the University of Zurich, published in the journal Nature (18 April 2019), reports that on average glacial melting is occurring at a rate 18 percent faster than was estimated only six years ago, and five times faster than in the 1960s. Collectively, this currently represents a loss of 369 billion tons of snow and ice per year.
The study was far more comprehensive than any previously conducted, examining ground and satellite data from 19,000 glaciers. It does not include the massive Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
The rate of loss varies by region, with the fastest melting taking place in central Europe, the Caucasus region, western Canada, the lower 48 states of the United States, New Zealand and near the tropics, where the rate is more than 1 percent per year. Of the 19 regions studied, only one—southwestern Asia—showed no significant glacial shrinkage.
Despite this variation, the near planet-wide distribution of this process demonstrates that a global phenomenon, climate change, is to blame, rather than localized factors.
The massive quantities of resulting meltwater from glaciers are a significant contributor to global sea level rise, representing approximately 25 to 30 percent of the annual total. Combined with the increase in volume of the oceans due to higher temperatures (water expands as it warms) and the concurrent melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the substantial input of water from melting glaciers pose a severe threat to billions of people living in coastal areas due to inundation and storm surge.
In addition, as glaciers retreat, the many regions of the world where large populations rely on water from glacially-fed rivers (e.g., the Ganges), the quantities are likely to become less reliable. In the Himalayan region alone, 1.6 million people depend on glacial meltwater.
Corroborating the global review, a specific regional study led by Columbia University graduate student Joshua Maurer, used declassified spy-satellite images to examine the melting of Himalayan glaciers. It found that the rate of melting of the 650 largest glaciers across India, China, Nepal, and Bhutan, representing 55 percent of the region’s ice volume, has doubled over the last two decades compared to that during the last quarter of the 20th century. Using temperature data from ground stations, he found melting to be greatest at the warmest locations, and less correlated with other factors. The study concluded that global warming was the main driver of accelerating melting of glaciers in the Himalayas.
Another recently published study predicted that even if global temperature rise was kept to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the Himalayas would lose one third of their glacial ice, but if current trends continue the loss could double. In either case, there will be dire consequences for downstream populations regarding agriculture, ecology, and hydropower.
The growing effects of global warming are also being seen in the Arctic. The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University reports that the spring thaw on Greenland’s ice sheet as well as sea ice loss are occurring several weeks earlier than normal. The melting is the most extensive that has been observed since satellite measurements began in 1979. Air temperatures as much as 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4.4 Celsius) above normal have been recorded.
In mid-May, the atmospheric temperature in northwest Russia, near the entrance to the Arctic Ocean, rose to 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29 Celsius). The average high temperature in that area at this time of year is 54 F. Similarly unusual high temperatures were recorded at other northern locations in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Finland. Several Alaskan rivers experienced the earliest ice breakup on record.
The effects of climate change in Alaska (credit: NASA)
Overall, the warming of the atmosphere in the Arctic is occurring twice as fast as the global average. Recent studies demonstrate that the Greenland ice sheet is melting at a rate much greater than previously thought. Were it to melt entirely, the resulting water release from Greenland alone would raise sea levels by about 20 feet, inundating extensive coastal areas, including many large cities, around the world.
Arctic sea ice is also melting at a faster rate. The average sea ice extent in May is nearly half a million square miles below the average for 1981-2010. Open ocean is darker than ice and therefore absorbs more sunlight. This creates a positive-feedback loop: the warmer the water, the more rapidly the remaining ice melts, opening more ocean surface, increasing the rate of melting even further, and so on. A warmer ocean also results in a warmer atmosphere, promoting the melting of terrestrial ice. If current trends continue, there will eventually be no more summer sea ice in the Arctic, significantly affecting climate in the northern hemisphere.
One consequence of a warming atmosphere in the Arctic is rapid thawing of permafrost. Field research by a team from the University of Alaska Fairbanks has revealed that permafrost at observed locations in the Canadian Arctic is thawing 70 years earlier than previously predicted.
Permafrost contains huge quantities of organic matter which sequesters carbon, frozen in place for thousands of years. Rapid thawing and consequent decomposition of this organic matter would release vast amounts of methane, contributing significantly to the greenhouse effect warming the atmosphere already resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. This sets up another positive-feedback loop: increasing the greenhouse effect leads to more rapid and extensive permafrost melting, releasing more methane, in turn intensifying the greenhouse effect, thus further accelerating permafrost melting, and so on.
The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a significant greenhouse gas, recently exceeded 415 parts per million, the highest in human history. CO2 levels have risen nearly 50 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and the rate of increase is accelerating, with consequent atmospheric temperature rise. According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, this April was the second warmest on record globally. Even more significantly, 18 of the 19 warmest years on record for the planet have occurred since 2000.
The accelerating rate of ice melting occurring around the world, whether from glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice, or permafrost, is a grave warning that climate change is rapidly reaching the point at which its catastrophic consequences will be felt by billions of people, threatening the very existence of civilization.
A massive, worldwide effort is needed in order to halt this dire outcome. Capitalism, divided into rival nation-states, each dominated by a tiny ruling class driven by its own immediate financial self-interest, and hurtling toward world war, is incapable of marshaling the necessary resources to effectively address the problem. The efforts so far, such as the 2015 Paris Agreement, are pathetically inadequate to the task.
In the United States, the Trump administration is actively reversing even the modest measures to address climate change previously enacted and taking steps to cripple and muzzle agencies such as NASA and the EPA from conducting research and conveying that information to the public. Many Democrats, seeking to exploit genuine concern among the population regarding climate change, have made proposals, such as the Green New Deal, which are totally inadequate even in the highly unlikely event they would be implemented.
Only the socialist reorganization of society, in which the vast scientific, technological, and social resources of humanity are mobilized on a coordinated, global scale to confront this challenge, can avert this pending catastrophe.