Berlin terror attack suspect was well known to German intelligence agencies

Johannes Stern

One and a half weeks after the devastating attack on a Christmas market in Berlin, more information has emerged regarding the close links between German security authorities and the alleged perpetrator. Press reports allege that Anis Amri, who was shot while on the run in Italy, carried out the attack literally under the noses of the secret services. He was intensively monitored and officially classified as unusually dangerous just a few days before he drove a truck into a market on December 19.

According to the latest report by Hans Leyendecker and Georg Mascolo in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, on 14 December, five days before the attack, security authorities issued “the latest version of a personal profile containing everything they knew about Amri.” The document describes “a man whose résumé is very similar to that of former assassins in the service of the terrorist group Islamic State,” according to the two investigatory journalists, who have close links to sources in secret service circles.

According to Leyendecker and Mascolo, the secret services knew virtually all there was to know. The profile describes “the career of a petty criminal who was already in prison in Italy as a youth, and committed a theft in a German asylum shelter. It contains language skills: German, Arabic, Italian, Spanish and French…. It contains the eight identities that Amri used. There are constantly changing domiciles and places of residence. There are several pictures of him.”

The journalists note that Amri may have shared many of these factors with other potential offenders under the surveillance of the intelligence services, but in his case, “the evidence is even more concrete.” For instance, the state police agency in Duisburg described Amri as “a Salafist and radical fundamentalist.” The police department in Dortmund assessed him to be a sympathizer of the Islamic State.

The authorities were also aware that “Amri has searched the Internet for instructions on the construction of pipe bombs [and] had shown interest in the chemical processes that can be used to produce explosives.” There was allegedly at least one Chat in February this year in which Amri “presumably offered himself as a suicide bomber…most likely in conversation with an Islamic State member.”

Amri was not only on the radar of the local security authorities in Berlin and North Rhine-Westphalia. He was also repeatedly “on the watch list of the Joint federal and state Counter-Terrorism Center (GTAZ) in Berlin.” Leyendecker and Mascolo report that the “profile of 14 December” was drawn up by the GTAZ. The report notes that Amri showed “experience with police” and a level of “conspiratorial behavior, which is unusual even among Islamists.”

Now the security authorities have begun a debate about “what went wrong” in the run-up to the attack. In essence, there are two interpretations. According to one reading, the attack in Berlin “simply could not have been prevented,” since there are “too many radical Islamists in Germany.” According to the second reading, as Leyendecker and Mascolo put it, “there was a clear mishap in the Amri case. A perpetrator, who had been talking about attacks for ten months, should not have gone dark.”

Both “readings,” repeated endlessly by political circles and the media, are aimed at obscuring the obvious and decisive question: how could someone “go dark” under the noses of the authorities, which were monitoring him so closely, and who was active in a milieu teeming with undercover agents with whom Amri maintained direct contact?

All of the facts known about Amri and the manner in which the attack is being politically exploited indicate that there are forces in sections of the security apparatus that were more closely informed of the attack plans, allowed the attack to go ahead or even provided indirect support for it in order to destabilize the Merkel government and effect a political lurch to the right in Germany.

Since the attack, right-wingers in the media and political establishment have been drumming ceaselessly for an expansion of police-state measures and have been denouncing the refugee policy of Angela Merkel. Despite the fact that the chancellor adopted right-wing anti-refugee measures at the last CDU party congress, she is under relentless attack, especially from one of her coalition partners, the Christian Social Union.

A few days before the traditional CSU meeting at the beginning of January, the Bavarian Minister of Finance, Markus Söder, declared the “uncontrolled opening of the borders” to be a serious mistake. Now “Germans [...] anticipate that their state is defenseless. Terrorists and criminals must know that they cannot expect the good life with us, they must be made aware that it does not pay to attack Germany.”

Söder demanded mass deportations next year. “We will have several hundred thousand people with a rejected asylum application in 2017 - so we need a deportation plan for the coming year to ensure that a large percentage of them can be returned,” he said. “This must be done quickly and consistently.”

A large share of political responsibility for the aggressive stance of the right wing rests with the SPD, the Left Party and the Greens. Their response to the rise of the far-right AfD and the right-wing elements in the CDU and CSU is to adopt the right-wing parties’ policies and wage their own campaign for police-state measures and tougher action against refugees.

On Tuesday, the chairman of the SPD in Schleswig-Holstein, Ralf Stegner, who is also deputy chairman of the German Bundestag, called for so-called “potential offenders” to be permanently detained in deportation prisons. “If their applications for asylum have already been rejected, they must be imprisoned.” In an interview with Die Welt, he attacked CDU Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière from the right, declaring that “the SPD provides many more police in federal and state governments and better equipment. Precisely in these areas the Interior Minister has put on the brakes.”

The same tone is to be heard from the Left Party and Greens. Green Party deputy faction leader Konstantin von Notz declared, “The CSU is trying once again to pull the wool over our eyes: for more than ten years it has been part of the federal government, but acts as if it has been in the opposition for years and therefore not responsible for internal security.” What is necessary is “more video surveillance for sensitive points.”

The chairman of the Left Party, Dietmar Bartsch, is campaigning for a strengthening of the security forces and police. He told the newspaper Deutschlandfunk, “We need police, of course,” adding, “this is not a new demand by the left for more policemen and good equipment, we have been demanding this for many years.”

Russia and Turkey broker ceasefire in Syria

Bill Van Auken

A ceasefire brokered by the governments of Russia and Turkey went into effect at the beginning of Friday, December 30, with the Syrian army announcing that it had “declared a comprehensive cessation of hostilities across all the territories of the Syrian Arab Republic.”

The ceasefire deal comes just one week after the Syrian army and allied militias restored government control over all of Aleppo, depriving militias led by the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate, formerly known as the Al Nusra Front, of their last urban stronghold, the eastern sector of the city, which they had held since 2012.

The retaking of Aleppo was a strategic defeat for the United States and its regional allies, which orchestrated, armed and supported the Islamist militias that served as their proxy forces in a nearly six-year-old war aimed at regime change.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the agreement Thursday in a meeting with the Russian foreign and defense ministers. He said that three documents had been accepted by the government of President Bashar al-Assad and seven armed opposition groups. The first was an agreement to cease hostilities; the second to develop means of monitoring and enforcing the ceasefire; and the third to prepare for peace talks to be held in Kazakhstan early in the new year.

While the deal may lead to an end to hostilities in some areas of Syria, it hardly signals a full halt to the violence that has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands and driven some 11 million people, half the country’s population, from their homes.

Like earlier abortive ceasefire deals brokered between Washington and Moscow, the latest agreement excludes those organizations classified by the United Nations as “terrorist,” including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Fateh al-Sham Front (formerly the Al Nusra Front, Syria’s Al Qaeda affiliate). These two groups have been the most active fighting forces in the war against the Assad government, with the latter having fought in close alliance with weaker so-called “moderate rebels” backed by the CIA, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf oil monarchies.

This means that fighting will certainly continue in the areas controlled by ISIS, which are under siege by not only the Syrian government, but also US-backed Kurdish fighters as well as Turkey and militias that it is backing.

The Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), is apparently not a party to the agreements. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu acknowledged Thursday that there was not an agreement on Ankara’s labeling of the YPG as a “terrorist” organization. He insisted, however, that the Kurdish group and its political arm, the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), would be excluded from the peace talks in Astana. Ankara considers the Syrian Kurdish groups to be an extension of Turkey’s Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, against which it has waged a protracted counterinsurgency campaign.

The status of the YPG is a subject of substantial friction between Washington and Ankara. The Pentagon has funneled arms and aid to the Syrian Kurdish militia and has deployed US special operations troops to support it, even as the Turkish government has vowed to carry out military action to prevent the YPG from consolidating control over a de facto Kurdish state on its border.

The possibility that the ceasefire has been reached at the expense of the Kurdish factions appeared likely with the report by Turkey’s Dogan news agency that Russian warplanes had launched airstrikes for the first time against ISIS positions around the Syrian town of Al-Bab. Turkish forces have launched an offensive aimed at preventing the Kurdish militia from taking the town and thereby furthering their aim of linking up two separate Kurdish-held zones.

A rapprochement began earlier this year between Turkey and Russia. This followed a sharp deterioration of relations after Turkish warplanes shot down a Russian jet carrying out airstrikes on the Syrian-Turkish border in November 2015, raising the specter of war between the NATO member and Russia. Relations grew closer after an abortive military coup last July which Turkish officials blamed on Washington.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Thursday that seven separate “rebel” groups comprising 60,000 fighters had signed onto the ceasefire deal. Later in the day, however, one of these groups, Ahrar al-Sham, a hardline Islamist faction that had been closely aligned with Al Qaeda, denied it had accepted the agreement stating unspecified reservations.

The exclusion of the Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate from the ceasefire also raises serious questions as to its future. Strikes against it are likely to also affect so-called “moderates” who are allied with and fight closely alongside it. This was a continuous subject of conflict in previous ceasefire deals between Moscow and Washington. Russia demanded that the US carry through on its promise to separate its “moderates” from Al Nusra, while the State Department claimed this was nearly impossible because these US-backed factions had become “marbleized” with the Al Qaeda affiliate.

The Syrian government Thursday said that the truce agreement excluded ISIS, the Al Nusra Front and “groups linked to them.” It also stressed the obligation of groups that had signed the deal to separate themselves from these two Islamist factions.

Çavuşoğlu, meanwhile, said that his government would refuse to negotiate with representatives of Syria’s Assad government in any peace talks and that it had reached an agreement with Russia to “leave aside for now” the future of the Syrian president. Previously, Ankara has insisted that any settlement must include Assad’s removal from the Syrian presidency.

Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem, meanwhile, told the state news agency Sana that while Damascus accepted Moscow as a guarantor of the ceasefire, “We don’t trust the Turkish role,” because of Ankara’s backing for the Islamist militias.

A State Department official Thursday described the ceasefire as a “positive development,” but clearly the exclusion of Washington from the deal--Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov said that the incoming Trump administration could participate--reflects the failure of the US policy of regime change in Syria and a reversal in its drive for hegemony over the entire region.

The US ruling establishment will continue to be racked by recriminations over who lost Syria even after the change of administration, laying the foundations for a new upsurge of US militarism in the Middle East.

Obama escalates anti-Russian campaign with new sanctions and threats

Patrick Martin

In an executive order accompanied by a series of official statements, US President Barack Obama has sharply escalated the campaign against Russia, based on unsubstantiated claims of Russian government hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Hillary Clinton campaign in the presidential election.

Obama has imposed sanctions on top Russian government officials, blacklisted several Russian IT companies and expelled 35 Russian diplomats stationed in the US, giving them only 72 hours to leave the country. Two Russian-owned facilities, in San Francisco and Maryland, are being shut down with less than 24 hours’ notice.

“These actions are not the sum total of our response to Russia’s aggressive activities,” Obama declared. “We will continue to take a variety of actions at a time and place of our choosing, some of which will not be publicized.” This indicates that secret retaliatory measures, possibly including cyber-warfare actions to disrupt Russia’s economy, finances or infrastructure, are being taken.

The text of the executive order, as posted on the White House web site, contains vague, sweeping language that has ominous implications for the democratic rights of the American people. Any political activist opposed to the official two-party system could face sanctions or even criminal charges for actions “with the purpose or effect of interfering with or undermining election processes or institutions.”

Is uncovering internal documents of the Democratic National Committee or the emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta “interfering with or undermining election processes or institutions”? Evidently so, since that is the principal crime alleged against the Russian government.

It is quite possible, however, that the documents were made public thanks to leaks by disgruntled DNC staff, perhaps angry about the content of the emails, which showed a deliberate effort by the DNC leadership to block the campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and insure Clinton’s nomination. Would such leaks now be criminalized?

What about making those documents widely available, as the WikiLeaks organization did? What about publishing excerpts or the full texts of those documents, as virtually the entire American media did? Where do “interfering with or undermining” end and freedom of speech and freedom of the press begin? Obama’s executive order makes no distinction.

The corporate-controlled media, ever compliant with the dictates of the US military-intelligence apparatus, has made no challenge to the legality or constitutionality of Obama’s order. It has not criticized the refusal of the White House to provide a single fact to substantiate its claims of Russian hacking directed against the Democrats.

Obama’s executive order takes the form of an amendment to a previous executive order, issued in April 2015, in response to alleged North Korean hacking of Sony Corporation offices in Los Angeles, after the company made a film whose plot revolved around a CIA assassination attempt against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

With little publicity, Obama declared a “national emergency with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities” on April 1, 2015. Under the terms of Executive Order 13694, the secretary of the treasury, in consultation with the attorney general and the secretary of state, may designate for economic sanctions, including freezing of all property and bank accounts in the United States, any person they designate as a target.

Anyone “responsible for or complicit in, or... engaged in, directly or indirectly, cyber-enabled activities” directed or originating “from outside the United States,” whose purpose, in the judgment of these officials, would harm the US infrastructure, disrupt computer networks, cause misappropriation of funds or affect the US elections, is a potential target for US government retaliation.

Given that virtually all human interaction in economically developed countries is “cyber-enabled,” and that the World Wide Web is by definition a global entity “outside the United States,” this language is a mandate for the exercise of essentially unlimited, arbitrary power.

While the executive order details a series of measures that US officials are empowered to impose on anyone they see fit to target, Obama provided no evidence of the Russian hacking which is the supposed cause of this “national emergency.”

Instead, he refers to the finding of the US intelligence agencies, issued October 7, declaring they were “confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations.”

Obama’s statement is an exercise in circumlocution, aimed at disguising the fact that he is demanding that the American people and the world accept the premise of his executive order—extensive Russian hacking of the Democratic Party—on faith. The charges made by the US intelligence agencies, known worldwide for their brazen lies, fabrications, provocations and attacks on democratic rights, are to be received as gospel truth.

Responding to demands that he provide actual evidence of the Russian hacking, Obama announced before he left Washington for his two-week holiday in Hawaii that the intelligence agencies would deliver a report to Congress and the public by the time he leaves office on January 20.

But the punishment for the alleged crime, imposing sanctions and expelling diplomats, is announced three weeks earlier.

If the US government were in possession of actual evidence of Russian hacking into the Democratic National Committee, it could present this to a grand jury, indict the perpetrators, and pursue them through Interpol and other global police agencies.

Nothing of the kind is being proposed. Instead, the presumption of Russian guilt is taken up by the entire corporate media in the United States to pummel public opinion with the necessity for unspecified retaliatory action against Moscow and prepare the political climate for direct military conflict with Russia, whether in the Middle East, Ukraine or Eastern Europe.

Congressional Democrats and Republicans immediately issued statements to that effect. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, who will be the top Democrat in Washington after Obama leaves the White House, declared, “We need to punch back against Russia, and punch back hard.”

Along with Obama’s statements and modified executive order, the FBI and the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center released a joint document on Thursday that purported to give “technical details regarding the tools and infrastructure used by the Russian civilian and military intelligence service” to interfere in the election.

The 13-page report, given the title “Grizzly Steppe,” consists of unsupported allegations that two groups of hackers, allegedly with ties to the Russian government, penetrated the email server of the Democratic National Committee. There follows a general list of precautions to be taken by cyber-security managers at businesses and organizations that could be taken from any security bulletin board on the Internet. There are no names, no dates, no locations, no actual facts about the alleged hacking, still less any evidence connecting the hackers to the Russian government.

The Russian Foreign Ministry responded with a blunt dismissal of Obama’s claims. “Frankly speaking, we are tired of lies about Russian hackers that continue to be spread in the United States from the very top,” spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement. She called the accusations “a provocation directed by the White House” that contained “not a single piece of evidence.”

She noted that Obama had only three weeks left in the White House and appeared to be seeking to poison US-Russian relations to block any shift in policy by the incoming Trump administration. “History is unlikely to forgive its behavior according to the principle ‘after us the deluge,’” the Russian spokeswoman added.

Israel-Palestine and the “two-state solution”

Nick Beams

The speech by US Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday, reaffirming US support for a “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, was more than a defence of a useful political fiction. It was a warning that abandonment of the policy will have explosive consequences for the United States in the entire Middle East region and, not least, for Israel itself.

The incoming US administration of Donald Trump, together with the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, has denounced the Obama administration for not using its veto and instead abstaining in the vote on last week’s UN Security Council resolution criticising the expansion of Israeli settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. They have been joined by a large section of Congressional Democrats.

The US decision was not made out of concern for the future of the Palestinian people. As Kerry made clear in his speech, the US has always been Israel’s chief supporter. It was motivated by the necessity to maintain the “two-state solution” as part of “advancing United States interests in the region.”

Kerry was giving voice to concerns that under conditions where the position of the US has been significantly weakened—most notably by the debacle of its attempted regime-change operation in Syria—it will suffer further major setbacks if the “two-state solution” is officially abandoned.

The concern of Kerry and the Obama administration is that the chimera of peace with the Palestinians through the establishment of their own state must be maintained because it allows the US allies in the Arab bourgeois regimes to suppress social and political opposition, thereby enabling Washington to utilise those regimes to ensure its domination over the oil-rich Middle East.

Emphasising that his task was above all to “defend the United States”, Kerry said the alternative to a “two-state solution”, that is, complete Israeli colonial domination of the West Bank, was “fast becoming the reality on the ground”. He warned that if “we were to stand idly by knowing that in doing so we are allowing a dangerous dynamic to take hold, which promises greater conflict and instability to a region where we have vital interests, we would be derelict in our responsibilities.”

For its part, the Israeli government could have simply ignored the toothless UN resolution, which has no enforcement mechanisms and is broadly in line with similar resolutions going back decades on which the US had also abstained, as Kerry noted in his speech.

But it decided not to do so because of the shift in policy expected from the incoming Trump administration, which could abandon the two-state policy. Trump has indicated the direction of his administration with the appointment as ambassador to Israel of his personal bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman.

Friedman is a long-time fundraiser for West Bank Jewish settlements who has supported moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—an action that would be a de facto abandonment of the two-state policy.

Kerry warned that any such move would not only endanger the interests of the United States, but the state of Israel itself. He held out the prospect that Arab leaders were prepared to have a new relationship with Israel and that together with Tel Aviv had “common interests in countering Iran’s destabilizing activities”, but that prospects for such cooperation depended on “meaningful progress towards the two-state solution.”

However, the Israeli coalition government, Kerry said, is the “most right-wing in Israeli history with an agenda driven by the most extreme elements” and was “more committed to settlements than any in Israel’s history”, leading in the opposite direction.

The establishment of such a single state over all of “Greater Israel” would pose enormous problems for Israel itself, Kerry warned. If occupation were officially established as permanent, then the Palestinian Authority would simply dissolve, posing the question of how Israel would respond to widespread protests and civil unrest. There would be increasing violence and growing despair among the Palestinians that “would create very fertile ground for extremists.”

The rupture between the Israeli government and the outgoing Obama administration is another expression of the breakdown of the post-war order of which the establishment of the state of Israel, backed by the United States, was an essential component.

Kerry’s speech constituted a warning that the breakdown of this order and the political relations that have been so vital to its maintenance—of which the “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict has been one—could have potentially catastrophic consequences.

But like every conflict and crisis, it serves a valuable educative role in burning away political fictions and laying bare the underlying and essential reality.

Two myths now stand exposed.

First, there is the claim that the establishment of the state of Israel could secure peace and security for the Jewish people after the horrors of the Holocaust. The expansionist and colonialist policy of Zionism has pitted the population of Israel against the other peoples of the region, constantly living under the danger of war, while the price of expansionism has been paid for through the creation of one of the most unequal societies in the world. The creation of the Zionist state has, as Leon Trotsky warned, proven to be a “bloody trap” for the Jewish people.

Second, the disintegration of the so-called “two-state solution” has revealed the utter bankruptcy of the claim that peace and security for the Palestinian masses and an end to their oppression by the Zionist state could be obtained through a series of deals and manoeuvres between imperialism and the bourgeois Arab regimes.

The exposure of these two fictions, however, points the way to the solution for the Jewish, Palestinian and working masses across the Middle East: the development of a unified struggle of the Arab and Jewish workers, not for the creation of unviable national bourgeois regimes, based on religious or ethnic divisions, but the establishment of a socialist federation of the Middle East as part of the fight for a socialist world order.

Government of Flanders Priority Country Scholarship Programme for African/International Students 2017/2018 – Belgium

Application Deadline: 31st March 2017

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: Brazil, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, South Africa, Turkey and the United States of America.

To be taken at (country): Various universities in Belgium

• KU Leuven / University of Leuven
• University of Antwerp
• Ghent University
• Hasselt University
• Vrije Universiteit Brussel

University colleges (Arts and Nautical Sciences)

• Antwerp Maritime Academy
• Artesis Plantijn University College Antwerp
• Artevelde University College Ghent
• Erasmus University College Brussels
• Howest, University College West Flanders
• Karel de Grote University College
• LUCA School of Arts
• Odisee University College
• PXL University College
• Thomas More University College
• UC Leuven-Limburg
• VIVES University College
• University College Ghent

Eligible Field of Study: The program holds for all study areas.

About the Award: The Priority Country Programme 2017-2018 is preferably for exchange projects, which will start from August 2017 and end before September 2018 to avoid duplication of implementation period of exchange projects selected by the Transition Fellowship Programme 2016-2017.

The selection for the Priority Country Programme is made only once a year. In this respect, those who are planning to exchange in the Spring Semester of 2018 (January-August 2018) shall apply for 2017-2018. It is estimated that 80 to 120 students can benefit from the program on a yearly basis.

Many forms of mobility are accepted under the Priority Country Programme: both short mobility of one, two or three months, or long mobility of one semester up to a period of maximum one year, both for study or internship:

• Brazil, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, South Africa, or the United States of America: fellowships for students in both directions, both short and long mobility.
• Turkey: fellowships for students in both directions, short mobility only: duration of mobility is restricted to one month for internship and two months for study.

Type: Masters

Eligibility: Due to the unique nature of this program, in order to be eligible, the exchange project needs to fulfill all five requirements below:

1. A higher education institution in Belgium/Flanders (home institution) and an educational institution in Brazil, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, South Africa, Turkey or the United States of America (host institution) have established an academic cooperation agreement or have the intention to set up a new cooperation agreement.
2. The Flemish higher education institution, as well as the partner from Brazil, Chile, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Russia, South Africa, Turkey or the United States of America cannot ask tuition fees to the students for the exchanges.
3. The Flemish home institution has selected a Flemish student enrolled at the home institution to send to the host institution, and such selection has been accepted by the host institution. A Flemish student is defined as a student from any nationality, subscribed full-time in a Flemish Higher Education Institution.
4. In case of a duo-project, the same host institution has selected a student enrolled at the host institution to send to the Flemish home institution, and such selection has been accepted by the same Flemish home institution.
5. If the Flemish student has already started the exchange, or the international student has already stayed in Belgium/Flanders before the application period of the Priority Country Programme 2017-2018, the application is not accepted.

Value and Duration of Scholarship: The duration of the exchange can range from one month up to one year.

• For short exchanges, the fellowship amounts to €650,- per month for the Flemish and €800,- per month for the international student.
• The students receive a supplementary reimbursement for travel expenses, according to the following rules in the link below.

How to Apply: The application needs to be submitted through Mobility-Online Flanders: https://www.service4mobility.com/europe/LoginServlet

Documents to be uploaded: 1. Motivation letter of the applicant (maximum two A4 pages). 2. Applicant Learning or Training agreement. 3. Official Transcript of records. 4. Letter of recommendation from a professor or lecturer of your home institution. 5. Copy of Cooperation Agreement (or Memorandum of Understanding for cooperation) between paired institutions, by e-mail with scanned files OR declaration of intention to set up new cooperation agreement, signed by Head of Flemish higher education institution, signed by both parties. 6. Copy of international passport of (paired) applicants by e-mail with scanned files.

All documents are to be written in English, with exception of the official Transcript of records. If the Transcript of Records written in another language than Dutch, French or English, enclose a certified translation.

International students meet all academic entrance criteria, including relevant language req uirements, for entering the study programme in the Flemish host institution.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: Flemish Government

Adelaide Scholarships International (ASI) Australia for Masters & Doctoral Studies 2017/2018

Application Deadlines:

• Round 1: 31st of August 2016 (Passed)
• Round 2: 31st January 2017
• Round 3: 30th April 2017

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Field of Study: Courses offered at the university.

About Scholarship: The University of Adelaide offers a scholarships scheme for international students undertaking postgraduate research study for Master’s and Doctoral degrees. The purpose of the financial award programme is to attract high quality overseas postgraduate students to areas of research strength in the University of Adelaide to support its research effort.

Type: Masters & Doctoral

Selection Criteria : The selection and ranking of applicants within the University of Adelaide is undertaken by the Graduate Scholarships Committee, using the criteria of academic merit and research potential.

Eligibility

• In order to be eligible applicants are required to have successfully completed at least the equivalent of an Australian First Class Honours degree (this is a four year degree with a major research project in the final year). All qualifying programs of study must be successfully completed.
• Scholarships will be awarded on academic merit and research potential. Extra-curricular achievements are not considered.
• International applicants must not hold a research qualification regarded by the University of Adelaide to be equivalent to an Australian Research Doctorate degree or, if undertaking a Research Masters degree, not hold a research qualification regarded by the University of Adelaide to be equivalent to or higher than an Australian Research Masters degree.
• International applicants who have not provided evidence of their meeting the minimum English language proficiency requirements for direct entry by the scholarship closing date, or who have completed a Pre-Enrolment English Program to meet the entry requirements for the intended program of study, are not eligible.
• Candidates are required to enrol in the University of Adelaide as ‘international students’ and must maintain ‘international student’ status for the duration of their enrolment in the University.
• International applicants are not eligible if they have already commenced the degree for which they are seeking an award, unless they can establish that they were unable to apply in the previous round.
• Scholarships holders must commence study at the University of Adelaide in the semester the scholarship is offered.
• Applicants who applied and were eligible for consideration in an international scholarship round, and were unsuccessful, will automatically be reconsidered in the following international scholarship round, assuming they hold a valid offer of candidature for that intake. An applicant who has been considered in 2 rounds cannot be reconsidered in any future scholarship rounds.

Number of Scholarships: Not specified

Value of Scholarship:

• Course tuition fees for two years for a Masters degree by Research and three years for a Doctoral research degree (an extension is possible for doctoral programs only),
• An annual living allowance ($26,288 in 2016) for two years for a Masters degree by Research and three years for a Doctoral research degree (an extension is possible for doctoral programs only), and
• For Postgraduate Research (Subclass 574) visa holders the award provides compulsory standard Overseas Student Health Cover (OSHC) Worldcare policy for the student and their spouse and dependents (if any) for the standard duration of the student visa.  It does not cover the additional 6 month extended student visa period post thesis submission. If the award holder does not hold a subclass 574 visa then he/she is responsible for the cost of health insurance.

Duration of Scholarship: 2 years for Masters; 3 years for Doctoral

Eligible Countries: All countries except Australia and New Zealand

To be taken at (country): University of Adelaide, Australia

How to Apply

To apply, you have to submit a formal application for Admission and a Scholarship via an online application system. There is no application fee.

Visit scholarship webpage for details

Sponsors: University of Adelaide, Australia

Important Notes: The offer of a scholarship is contingent upon a student not being offered another award by the Commonwealth of Australia, the University of Adelaide, or an overseas sponsor. The University reserves the right to withdraw an offer of a scholarship at any time prior to enrolment if it is advised that an awardee has been offered a scholarship equal to or in excess of the financial value of the award offered by the University.

Grand Challenges Africa Grants 2017 to Fund Innovative and Bold Ideas

Application Deadline: 17th February 2017

Eligible Countries: African countries

About the Award: The African Academy of Sciences – Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AAS-AESA) is launching two new Grand Challenges:

1) Providing new impetus and solutions and strategies to help Africa meet the SDG 3 target for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (MNCH). These cover key areas of:

• New technologies to enable rapid identification of exposures that lead to poor outcomes in pregnancy, birth and in the first month of life — these could be exposures to communicable and non-communicable diseases.
• Precision medicine approaches and techniques to identify microbes and other exposures in Africa that may increase susceptibility to non-communicable diseases (cancer, cardiovascular diseases, etc.) in mothers and children under 5 years of age.

2) Creative approaches to engage the public, and inspire policy and decision makers to increase investment in African Research & Development.

These new grand challenge innovation grants will be issued and administered under the banner of Grand Challenges Africa (GC Africa), a program implemented in partnership with theNew Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD Agency) and theBill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). Round 1 is a joint initiative of the GC Africa partners and Institut Pasteur of Paris (IP).

Type: Entrepreneurship

Eligibility: 

• The call will be open to African investigators working in African based, domestic organizations, including non-profit organizations, international organizations, government agencies, research and academic institutions.
• The call is also open to non-African investigators with an appointment/affiliation with any of the nine Institute Pasteur institutes in Africa, who are resident in Africa, with at least 18 months left on their tenure of service/affiliation by the time of receiving the award.

Value of Programme: 

Phase I Funding: Funded up to $100,000 USD per two-year project. These awards are meant to provide an opportunity to test particularly bold, proof of concept ideas, including applying approaches from outside the fields indicated for this call. New approaches could be piloted as additions to ongoing projects.

Phase II funding: Winners of Phase I grants will have an opportunity to apply for follow-on, phase II funding in future but please note that support for phase II funding is NOT part of this call. We expect that successful projects funded at Phase I by GC Africa, and by our partners BMGF and Grand Challenges Canada (GCC), and which demonstrate promising results, will have the opportunity to apply for Phase II funding either to GC Africa or directly to the other partners.

GC Africa will also provide a platform for partnering with other funders through the Grand Challenges Innovation Network (GCAiN).

How to Apply: Applications MUST be submitted through the African Academy of Sciences Ishango Online Application Portal. Grants will go to investigators in African countries, but we encourage partnerships with investigators in other countries, especially where the opportunity exists to build new or strengthen existing collaborations.

Before embarking on your application, make sure you have read and understood the Rules and Guidelines governing the application process. Please also read the detailed Request for Proposals.

Visit Programme Webpage for details

Award Provider:  African Academy of Sciences – Alliance for Accelerating Excellence in Science in Africa (AAS-AESA)

Important Notes: Please note that this call is NOT OPEN to – for profit making organizations.

Sweden: University of Gothenburg Full Scholarships for International Students 2017/2018

Application Deadline: 2nd February, 2017 at midnight CET (annual).

Offered annually? Yes

Eligible Countries: International. You can apply for all four scholarships, however it is only citizens in a country on the OECD/DAC list that can apply for the fourth scholarship option.

To be taken at (country): Sweden

About the Award: The Admissions Office at the University of Gothenburg administers four types of scholarships:

• The University of Gothenburg Study Scholarship, which is funded by the Swedish Council for Higher Education, and covers the complete tuition fee for a study programme at the University of Gothenburg.

• A scholarship funded by Adlerbert Foundations, which contributes to accommodation expenses for all the applicants who have been granted the University of Gothenburg Study Scholarship.

• A scholarship funded by Adlerbert Foundations, which covers the complete tuition fee for a study programme at the University of Gothenburg and contributes to accommodation expenses.

• A scholarship funded by Adlerbert Foundations, which is specifically intended for applicants who are citizens of an annual prioritized country from the OECD/DAC list, that and covers the complete tuition fee for a study programme at the University of Gothenburg and contributes to living and accommodation expenses.

Type: Masters

Eligibility: 

1. To be eligible for the scholarship selection process, you must meet the entry requirements and be admitted in the first selection to a two-year Master’s Programme at the University of Gothenburg which you have applied for, in the first admission round with application deadline 16 January 2017.
2. Scholarships are offered to applicants demonstrating a high level of academic performance. The selection process consists of an assessment made by academic and administrative staff at the University of Gothenburg. Priority is given to those who apply to the University of Gothenburg as their first choice.
3. You can apply for all four scholarships, however it is only citizens in a country on the OECD/DAC list that can apply for the fourth scholarship option.

Selection: The selection process takes place in early spring, i.e. during the same period of time that the applications for programme studies are processed. Scholarship notifications are sent out via e-mail around the same time as the Second Notification of Selection Results is published.

Number of Awardees: Not specified

Value of Scholarship: Fully-funded

How to Apply: The scholarship application will be open between 17 January 2017 (9 a.m. GMT 1) and 2 February 2017 (9 a.m. GMT 1).  Access to the scholarship application form will be enabled as soon as the scholarship application period opens.

Please note that you must first apply via universityadmissions.se for one or several two-year Master’s Programmes, with application deadline 16 January 2017, before applying for the scholarships. Once you have applied for studies you will receive an application number which is required in the scholarship application. Deadline for scholarship applications is 2 February 2017.

Visit Scholarship Webpage for details

Award Provider: University of Gothenburg

The Pentagon’s $125 Billion Cover-Up

MIRIAM PEMBERTON

Let’s say you ask somebody a question. They give you an answer you don’t like, so you pretend you didn’t hear it. Probably all of us would cop to something like this at some time in our imperfect pasts.

For most of us though, that pretending hasn’t included trying to hide $125 billion.

The Pentagon has a little image problem: Google “Pentagon waste” and you get more than 500,000 hits, including stories about $600 toilet seats and $7,600 coffee makers. The finances of the largest agency in the federal government are so screwed up, it’s the only one that still can’t pass an audit.

So a couple of years ago the Pentagon paid some consultants to find ways to cut down on this waste. If some good ideas came out of this, Pentagon officials figured, they could show how concerned with efficiency they were and apply the savings to their wish lists of pet military projects.

It didn’t turn out quite that way.

In three months the Pentagon brass had on their desks a report outlining $125 billion in proposed cuts — nearly a quarter of the total budget — mostly to the workforce that manages things like accounting, human resources, and property management for this enormous operation. This workforce has ballooned in the last decade, even as the ranks of soldiers, sailors, and airmen and women have shrunk.

The report didn’t even get to the real waste in the Pentagon budget, like the $1 trillion it’s planning to spend to replace our entire nuclear arsenal, or the $1.4 trillion it’s shelling out on the F-35, a plane that after 19 years in development still can’t reliably beat the models we already have.

But it still made the Pentagon leadership nervous. They’re in the midst of pleading poverty. They go around talking about a “gutted” military, even as that military sits on more money than the Reagan administration ever gave it.

OMG, they thought: What if this blueprint for cutting waste resulted in actual cuts to their budget?

What if, instead of being plowed back into other military projects, that $125 billion were freed up for roads or schools or green energy, or applied to the deficit?

They couldn’t let that happen. So they pretended not to hear this news and buried the report.

It blew up on them when a recent Washington Post story exposed this act of suppression. Now it’s generating exactly the sort of media attention they were trying to avoid.

Members of Congress have vowed to get to the bottom of this cover-up of billions in wasted taxpayer money. “If this is true, the Pentagon played Congress and the American public for fools,” Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill said.

In a way, this $125 billion is funding a big federal jobs program — more than a million people doing jobs that a fraction of them could handle just fine. But this is the kind of make-work program conservatives have been complaining about for years.

Why not use the savings outlined in the report — and billions more, by saying no to budget-busting weapon systems we don’t need — and put people to work doing things our country actually needs? Like educating our children, making the transition to clean energy, and building the transit systems we need to boost the economy and avoid the worst effects of climate change.

The country is in a no-more-business-as-usual mood right now. Let’s make sure that applies to the Pentagon.

The Long, Slow Death of Religion

James Haught

By now, it’s clear that religion is fading in America, as it has done in most advanced Western democracies.

Dozens of surveys find identical evidence: Fewer American adults, especially those under 30, attend church — or even belong to a church.  They tell interviewers their religion is “none.” They ignore faith.

Since 1990, the “nones” have exploded rapidly as a sociological phenomenon — from 10 percent of U.S. adults, to 15 percent, to 20 percent. Now they’ve climbed to 25 percent, according to a 2016 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.

That makes them the nation’s largest faith category, outstripping Catholics (21 percent) and white evangelicals (16 percent).  They seem on a trajectory to become an outright majority.   America is following the secular path of Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and other modern places.  The Secular Age is snowballing.

Various explanations for the social transformation are postulated:  That the Internet exposes young people to a wide array of ideas and practices that undercut old-time beliefs.  That family breakdown severs traditional participation in congregations.  That the young have grown cynical about authority of all types.  That fundamentalist hostility to gays and abortion has soured tolerant-minded Americans.  That clergy child-molesting scandals have scuttled church claims to moral superiority. That faith-based suicide bombings and other religious murders horrify normal folks.

All those factors undoubtedly play a role.  But I want to offer a simpler explanation:  In the scientific 21st century, it’s less plausible to believe in invisible gods, devils, heavens, hells, angels, demons — plus virgin births, resurrections, miracles, messiahs, prophecies, faith-healings, visions, incarnations, divine visitations and other supernatural claims.  Magical thinking is suspect, ludicrous.  It’s not for intelligent, educated people.

Significantly, the PRRI study found that the foremost reason young people gave for leaving religion is this clincher: They stopped believing miraculous church dogmas.

For decades, tall-steeple mainline Protestant denominations with university-educated ministers tried to downplay supernaturalism — to preach just the compassion of Jesus and the social gospel.  It was a noble effort, but disastrous.  The mainline collapsed so badly it is dubbed “flatline Protestantism.”  It has faded to small fringe of American life.

Now Catholicism and evangelicalism are in the same death spiral.  One-tenth of U.S. adults today are ex-Catholics.  The Southern Baptist Convention lost 200,000 members in 2014 and 200,000 more in 2015.

I’m a longtime newspaperman in Appalachia’s Bible Belt.  I’ve watched the retreat of religion for six decades.  Back in the 1950s, church-based laws were powerful:

It was a crime for stores to open on the Sabbath.  All public school classes began with mandatory prayer. It was a crime to buy a cocktail, or look at nude photos in magazines, or buy a lottery ticket.  It was a crime for an unwed couple to share a bedroom.  If a single girl became pregnant, both she and her family were disgraced.  Birth control was unmentionable. Evolution was unmentionable.

It was a felony to terminate a pregnancy.  It was a felony to be gay.  One homosexual in our town killed himself after police filed charges.  Even writing about sex was illegal.  In 1956, our Republican mayor sent police to raid bookstores selling “Peyton Place.”

Gradually, all those faith-based taboos vanished from society. Religion lost its power — even before the upsurge of “nones.”

Perhaps honesty is a factor in the disappearance of religion.  Maybe young people discern that it’s dishonest to claim to know supernatural things that are unknowable.

When I was a cub reporter, my city editor was an H.L. Mencken clone who laughed at Bible-thumping hillbilly preachers.  One day, as a young truth-seeker, I asked him:  You’re correct that their explanations are fairy tales — but what answer can an honest person give about the deep questions:  Why are we here?  Why is the universe here?  Why do we die?  Is there any purpose to life?

He eyed me and replied:  “You can say:  I don’t know.”  That rang a bell in my head that still echoes.  It’s honest to admit that you cannot explain the unexplainable.

The church explanation — that Planet Earth is a testing place to screen humans for a future heaven or hell — is a silly conjecture with no evidence of any sort, except ancient scriptures.  No wonder that today’s Americans, raised in a scientific-minded era, cannot swallow it.

Occam’s Razor says the simplest explanation is most accurate.  Why is religion dying?  Because thinking people finally see that it’s untrue, false, dishonest.

White evangelicals tipped the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, giving an astounding 81 percent of their votes to the crass vulgarian who contradicts church values.  But white evangelicals, like most religious groups, face a shrinking future. Their power will dwindle.

It took humanity several millennia to reach the Secular Age.  Now it’s blossoming spectacularly.