The Syrian question

1 September 2013

The Syrian conflict is now in its third year. The battle lines are between the Assad regime and anti-government rebels, mostly from the disparate Free Syrian Army. The fighting has spilled periodically across Syria's borders with Lebanon, Iraq and Turkey, threatening to engulf the region. It has made almost two million refugees and last month the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said it has claimed more than 100,000 lives.

The west sits outside the conflict. It is likely that western nations are trying to bring down the Assad regime; that there is logistical support for the Free Syrian Army. But the Syrian regime has a staunch ally in the Russians; and the Chinese sit happily on the fence. Which leaves it to the USA, Britain and France to determine what, if any, military action they will take.

Evidence of the use of chemical weapons has stepped up calls for western intervention. On Thursday in the UK, MPs debated military intervention, with Prime Minister David Cameron claiming evidence suggests President Assad did use chemical weapons against his own people. Cameron's motion for possible military action was defeated by 285-272, with a strong rebellion by his own MPs and some ministers.

In the USA Obama has back-tracked and says that he will now seek a vote of approval in Congress before he authorises any military action. That vote cannot be held until after September 9th.

Meanwhile Vladimir Putin has dismissed as "utter nonsense" America's claim that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons against its own people. Not unreasonably Putin also called on the Obama administration to present the evidence behind its claims to the UN Security Council. Although maybe Putin should simply watch the BBC. Seems the broadcaster may be providing more reliable information than Russian intelligence.

Syria 21 August attack: Frank Gardner on what we know.

The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, accused pro-Assad forces of killing 1,429 people - including 426 children - with chemical weapons in a Damascus suburb on 21 August. He called the attack an "inconceivable horror".

Pushed beyond his infamous red line President Barack Obama said the US was now considering a "limited narrow act," based on the intelligence.

The Assad regime said the Kerry statement was "full of lies", claiming opposition fighters launched the attack.

After a week of debate Obama has now said that he will seek congressional authorisation for military intervention in Syria.

The reality appears to be that we simply do not want to get involved. The British Parliament clearly reflected public sentiment. Indeed it is possible to be proud of a parliament that said no to the executive on a matter like military action.

But was it the right decision. Or is it rather a shameful hiding from responsibility.

Why the no vote in Britain? The leftover poisons of the Iraq war; the toxic effect of public distrust in our politics. Mishandling by the government that did not have the support it needed. A Labour opposition that used its parliamentary duty to ask questions as an excuse to avoid making decisions. These are reasons why we are where we are. But they are not excuses.

Britain is side-lined. The French may be America's new best friend. As once leaders in international law and engagement Britain continues to move to growing isolationism.

The bottom line is this. Parliament was asked to join an international coalition led by a US Democrat president, whose aim, a firm response to a flagrant breach of international law, was supported by most European nations and many Middle Eastern ones. And parliament said no.

But if that is the line to be taken then why does Britain need the world's fourth most expensive defence forces?

But here is the problem - Parliament needed overwhelming, verified, proof. It did not get that. Cameron released a three-page assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee which said it was "highly likely" the Assad regime launched the chemical weapons attack. But the document failed to ascribe a motive to the regime for the attack.

Downing Street also released a government summary of the legal advice by the attorney general, Dominic Grieve, which said military action would be lawful "under the doctrine of humanitarian intervention". Opening the debate in a packed Commons, the prime minister said the attorney general had delivered a clear judgment. But he acknowledged that the intelligence agencies had not delivered a definitive verdict.

Philippe Sands, a leading expert in international law, said the document failed to provide a "sound or persuasive legal argument" in favour of military action.

Cheryl Gillan, a former Wales secretary under Cameron, said: "I do not have enough accurate or verifiable information to support direct UK military action in Syria." Recalling the vote on Iraq, she said she was cautious because she "cannot sit in this House and be duped again".

But Bernard Jenkin, the chairman of the commons public administration committee, called on the House of Commons to stop "post-Iraq panic paralysing the country".

With hundreds killed with conventional weapons each week in Syria why are chemical weapons different? Why should the west respond to one type of killing when it took no military action to prevent the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Syrians by more conventional but often brutal methods.

“Chemical weapons are genuinely horrible, and they are indiscriminate,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an arms-control expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. “They are a particularly cruel way to kill someone.”

It is true that civilians will die in any conflict — often in excruciating ways. But maybe it is right to draw a line and ban the most inhumane weapons, the things that kill on a mass scale. Disclosure; my grandfather was one of the long term sufferers from poison gas in World War One.

Last Saturday, Obama evoked images of gassed Syrian children.

“What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price?” the president said. “What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?”

It sounds obscene but even war needs to be regulated by a widely shared principle on acceptable conduct. The trouble is that smells of hypocrisy from the US - think napalm in Vietnam.

So where are we?

In a looping debate. Words and not actions. In the UK the people have spoken. The USA looks almost as isolated as Syria. The tragedy is that there are people dieing as you read this and no clear way to stop it. Assad has to go. But he has great longevity and powerful allies.

Emirates to Taipei

29 August 2013

Emirates will launch flights to Taipei from 10 February 2014.

There will be six weekly flights on a 3-class Boeing 777-300ER aircraft.

For some reason the outbound flights from Dubai are all over the place with four separate departure times with the Saturday departure too early to connect with arriving flights from Europe.. There is also a longer than usual (up to 11 hours) time on the ground in Taipei.

EK366 DXB0225 – 1430TPE 77W 3
EK366 DXB0340 – 1525TPE 77W 7
EK366 DXB0425 – 1615TPE 77W 124

EK367 TPE2315 – 0510+1DXB 77W x5

Above schedule is only effective from 10 February 2014 to 29 March 2014.

Emirates speculates on US routes

29 August 2013

I am not sure this even counts as news but for some reason Emirates Airline decided last week that it should make a statement about its commitment to fly to the USA saying that the airline plans to more than double its network of US destinations in the next three to five years to a total of 15 US cities, up from seven currently.

Emirates plans to add as many as three new US city destinations in the next 12 months, Thierry Antinori, chief commercial officer, said in an interview with Reuters.

Honestly - i will believe this when we see it. There has been so much talk for the last four years about new USA routes.

Emirates is set to add new service from New York's John F. Kennedy airport to Milan in October. That route, known as a fifth-freedom route because it goes between two countries other than the carrier's home base, is unusual for Emirates' Dubai-centric, single-hub strategy. It has been attempted before via Hamburg.

The freedoms of the air are a set of commercial aviation rights. The fifth freedom allows an airline to carry traffic between foreign countries as part of services connecting with the airline's own country.

The Dubai-based carrier now flies to Dubai from New York, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas and Washington, D.C.

Chicago, Boston and Miami are on the Emirates radar. Antinori said that in the three to five years, the airline will have 15 routes from the US to Dubai.

TMF - Test Match Farce

26 August 2013

There is a fine in sport that is applied for "bringing the game into disrepute."

After the Oval test, the fifth and final game of this Ashes series, it is hard to know where to start. The umpires, administrators and players were all guilty.

For four days the cricket was turgid and then after a pulsating fifth day, the people that are in charge of the game got it all wrong again.

Just as the match was reaching a climax, with England needing 21 runs from 24 balls, the umpires called it all off. And so what should have been a great moment, the end of the Ashes, the presentation of the urn, was soundtracked by the jeers of thousands of furious fans.

It was bizarre; the floodlights were on; they are supposed to allow play in poor light. The most exciting sporting climax of the year had been set up by both teams to see a great match thrillingly concluded for the benefit of the crowd.

The decision showed total insensitivity to the spirit of a game, to spectators who had paid money to see players play, not umpires umpire.

By tea the Oval was packed. A crowd of 27,000 had come from across the city, as they heard word that, after three dull and dreary days of play and another totally washed out, a game had broken out at The Oval. They wanted to see England win. But more than that they wanted to see the match finish.

Credit to the Australians who set up a possible result. Credit to the England players for taking it on. But what a mess the rules have become. The light was poor; it was worse than when the Australians had been taken off the field at Old Trafford. So the umpires decision was consistent. It was also foolish.

Meanwhile after a few celebratory drinks three England players decided to piss on the Oval pitch. OK it was a poor pitch; it was too dry. But it was the pitch that the management had wanted. Dry and turning.

Hanging your dick out and pissing on the sports field simply lacks class. It is the action of spoiled overpaid brats who have forgotten decent manners and respect.

The incident was seen by Australian journalists who reported a group of players walked out on to the pitch just before midnight on Sunday and relieved themselves to the cheers of team-mates. The incident was witnessed by the groundstaff who prepared the pitch for the Test match as well as cleaners clearing the ground.

The Surrey county authorities were upset. “We are very disappointed,” said Richard Gould, Surrey chief executive. “Nobody wants to put the mockers on any England celebration but that will be viewed by many people and by us as an irresponsible thing to have done. Knockabout stuff is one thing. But it is a very silly thing to do on a pitch at the Oval where there is so much heritage and history.

The Failed Grand Strategy in the Middle East

24 August 2013 Associated Press

In the beginning, the Hebrew Bible tells us, the universe was all "tohu wabohu," chaos and tumult. This month the Middle East seems to be reverting to that primeval state: Iraq continues to unravel, the Syrian War grinds on with violence spreading to Lebanon and allegations of chemical attacks this week, and Egypt stands on the brink of civil war with the generals crushing the Muslim Brotherhood and street mobs torching churches. Turkey's prime minister, once widely hailed as President Obama's best friend in the region, blames Egypt's violence on the Jews; pretty much everyone else blames it on the U.S.

The Obama administration had a grand strategy in the Middle East. It was well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued.

Unfortunately, it failed.

The plan was simple but elegant: The U.S. would work with moderate Islamist groups like Turkey's AK Party and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to make the Middle East more democratic. This would kill three birds with one stone. First, by aligning itself with these parties, the Obama administration would narrow the gap between the 'moderate middle' of the Muslim world and the U.S. Second, by showing Muslims that peaceful, moderate parties could achieve beneficial results, it would isolate the terrorists and radicals, further marginalizing them in the Islamic world. Finally, these groups with American support could bring democracy to more Middle Eastern countries, leading to improved economic and social conditions, gradually eradicating the ills and grievances that drove some people to fanatical and terroristic groups.

President Obama (whom I voted for in 2008) and his team hoped that the success of the new grand strategy would demonstrate once and for all that liberal Democrats were capable stewards of American foreign policy. The bad memories of the Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter presidencies would at last be laid to rest; with the public still unhappy with George W. Bush's foreign policy troubles, Democrats would enjoy a long-term advantage as the party most trusted by voters to steer the country through stormy times.

It is much too early to anticipate history's verdict on the Obama administration's foreign policy; the president has 41 months left in his term, and that is more than enough for the picture in the Middle East to change drastically once again. Nevertheless, to get a better outcome, the president will have to change his approach.

With the advantages of hindsight, it appears that the White House made five big miscalculations about the Middle East. It misread the political maturity and capability of the Islamist groups it supported; it misread the political situation in Egypt; it misread the impact of its strategy on relations with America's two most important regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia); it failed to grasp the new dynamics of terrorist movements in the region; and it underestimated the costs of inaction in Syria.

America's Middle East policy in the past few years depended on the belief that relatively moderate Islamist political movements in the region had the political maturity and administrative capability to run governments wisely and well. That proved to be half-true in the case of Turkey's AK Party: Until fairly recently Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whatever mistakes he might make, seemed to be governing Turkey in a reasonably effective and reasonably democratic way. But over time, the bloom is off that rose. Mr. Erdogan's government has arrested journalists, supported dubious prosecutions against political enemies, threatened hostile media outlets and cracked down crudely on protesters. Prominent members of the party leadership look increasingly unhinged, blaming Jews, telekinesis and other mysterious forces for the growing troubles it faces.

Things have reached such a pass that the man President Obama once listed as one of his five best friends among world leaders and praised as "an outstanding partner and an outstanding friend on a wide range of issues" is now being condemned by the U.S. government for "offensive" anti-Semitic charges that Israel was behind the overthrow of Egypt's President Mohammed Morsi.

Compared with Mr. Morsi, however, Mr. Erdogan is a Bismarck of effective governance and smart policy. Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were quite simply not ready for prime time; they failed to understand the limits of their mandate, fumbled incompetently with a crumbling economy and governed so ineptly and erratically that tens of millions of Egyptians cheered on the bloody coup that threw them out.

Tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists and incompetent bumblers make a poor foundation for American grand strategy. We would have done business with the leaders of Turkey and Egypt under almost any circumstances, but to align ourselves with these movements hasn't turned out to be wise.

The White House, along with much of the rest of the American foreign policy world, made another key error in the Middle East: It fundamentally misread the nature of the political upheaval in Egypt. Just as Thomas Jefferson mistook the French Revolution for a liberal democratic movement like the American Revolution, so Washington thought that what was happening in Egypt was a "transition to democracy." That was never in the cards.

What happened in Egypt was that the military came to believe that an aging President Hosni Mubarak was attempting to engineer the succession of his son, turning Egypt from a military republic to a dynastic state. The generals fought back; when unrest surged, the military stood back and let Mr. Mubarak fall. The military, incomparably more powerful than either the twittering liberals or the bumbling Brotherhood, has now acted to restore the form of government Egypt has had since the 1950s. Now most of the liberals seem to understand that only the military can protect them from the Islamists, and the Islamists are learning that the military is still in charge. During these events, the Americans and Europeans kept themselves endlessly busy and entertained trying to promote a nonexistent democratic transition.

The next problem is that the Obama administration misread the impact that its chosen strategies would have on relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia—and underestimated just how miserable those two countries can make America's life in the Middle East if they are sufficiently annoyed.

The break with Israel came early. In those unforgettable early days when President Obama was being hailed by the press as a new Lincoln and Roosevelt, the White House believed that it could force Israel to declare a total settlement freeze to restart negotiations with the Palestinians. The resulting flop was President Obama's first big public failure in foreign policy. It would not be the last. (For the past couple of years, the administration has been working to repair relations with the Israelis; as one result, the peace talks that could have started in 2009 with better U.S. management are now under way.)

The breach with Saudis came later and this one also seems to have caught the White House by surprise. By aligning itself with Turkey and Mr. Morsi's Egypt, the White House was undercutting Saudi policy in the region and siding with Qatar's attempt to seize the diplomatic initiative from its larger neighbor.

Many Americans don't understand just how much the Saudis dislike the Brotherhood and the Islamists in Turkey. Not all Islamists are in accord; the Saudis have long considered the Muslim Brotherhood a dangerous rival in the world of Sunni Islam. Prime Minister Erdogan's obvious hunger to revive Turkey's glorious Ottoman days when the center of Sunni Islam was in Istanbul is a direct threat to Saudi primacy. That Qatar and its Al Jazeera press poodle enthusiastically backed the Turks and the Egyptians with money, diplomacy and publicity only angered the Saudis more. With America backing this axis—while also failing to heed Saudi warnings about Iran and Syria—Riyadh wanted to undercut rather than support American diplomacy. An alliance with the Egyptian military against Mr. Morsi's weakening government provided an irresistible opportunity to knock Qatar, the Brotherhood, the Turks and the Americans back on their heels.

The fourth problem is that the administration seems to have underestimated the vitality and adaptability of the loose group of terrorist movements and cells. The death of Osama bin Laden was a significant victory, but the effective suppression of the central al Qaeda organization in Afghanistan and Pakistan was anything but a knockout blow. Today a resurgent terrorist movement can point to significant achievements in the Libya-Mali theater, in northern Nigeria, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere. The closure of 20 American diplomatic facilities this month was a major moral victory for the terrorists, demonstrating that they retain the capacity to affect American behavior in a major way. Recruiting is easier, morale is higher, and funding is easier to get for our enemies than President Obama once hoped.

Finally, the administration, rightfully concerned about the costs of intervention in Syria, failed to grasp early enough just how much it would cost to stay out of this ugly situation. As the war has dragged on, the humanitarian toll has grown to obscene proportions (far worse than anything that would have happened in Libya without intervention), communal and sectarian hatreds have become poisonous almost ensuring more bloodletting and ethnic and religious cleansing, and instability has spread from Syria into Iraq, Lebanon and even Turkey. All of these problems grow worse the longer the war goes on—but it is becoming harder and costlier almost day by day to intervene.

But beyond these problems, the failure to intervene early in Syria (when "leading from behind" might well have worked) has handed important victories to both the terrorists and the Russia-Iran axis, and has seriously eroded the Obama administration's standing with important allies. Russia and Iran backed Bashar al-Assad; the president called for his overthrow—and failed to achieve it. To hardened realists in Middle Eastern capitals, this is conclusive proof that the American president is irredeemably weak. His failure to seize the opportunity for what the Russians and Iranians fear would have been an easy win in Syria cannot be explained by them in any other way.

This is dangerous. Just as Nikita Khrushchev concluded that President Kennedy was weak and incompetent after the Bay of Pigs failure and the botched Vienna summit, and then proceeded to test the American president from Cuba to Berlin, so President Vladimir Putin and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei now believe they are dealing with a dithering and indecisive American leader, and are calibrating their policies accordingly. Khrushchev was wrong about Kennedy, and President Obama's enemies are also underestimating him, but those underestimates can create dangerous crises before they are corrected.

If American policy in Syria has been a boon to the Russians and Iranians, it has been a godsend to the terrorists. The prolongation of the war has allowed terrorist and radical groups to establish themselves as leaders in the Sunni fight against the Shiite enemy. A reputation badly tarnished by both their atrocities and their defeat in Iraq has been polished and enhanced by what is seen as their courage and idealism in Syria. The financial links between wealthy sources in the Gulf and jihadi fighter groups, largely sundered in the last 10 years, have been rebuilt and strengthened. Thousands of radicals are being trained and indoctrinated, to return later to their home countries with new skills, new ideas and new contacts. This development in Syria looks much more dangerous than the development of the original mujahedeen in Afghanistan; Afghanistan is a remote and (most Middle Easterners believe) a barbarous place. Syria is in the heart of the region and the jihadi spillover threatens to be catastrophic.

One of the interesting elements of the current situation is that while American foreign policy has encountered one setback after another in the region, America's three most important historical partners—Egypt's military, Saudi Arabia and Israel—have all done pretty well and each has bested the U.S. when policies diverged.

Alliances play a large role in America's foreign policy success; tending the Middle Eastern alliances now in disarray may be the Obama administration's best hope now to regain its footing.

As the Obama administration struggles to regain its footing in this volatile region, it needs to absorb the lessons of the past 4½ years. First, allies matter. Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian military have been America's most important regional allies both because they share strategic interests and because they are effective actors in a way that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and smaller states aren't. If these three forces are working with you, then things often go reasonably well. If one or more of them is trying to undercut you, pain comes. The Obama administration undertook the hard work necessary to rebuild its relationship with Israel; it needs to devote more attention to the concerns of the Egyptian generals and the House of Saud. Such relationships don't mean abandoning core American values; rather they recognize the limits on American power and seek to add allies where our own unaided efforts cannot succeed.

Second, the struggle against terror is going to be harder than we hoped. Our enemies have scattered and multiplied, and the violent jihadi current has renewed its appeal. In the Arab world, in parts of Africa, in Europe and in the U.S., a constellation of revitalized and inventive movements now seeks to wreak havoc. It is delusional to believe that we can eliminate this problem by eliminating poverty, underdevelopment, dictatorship or any other "root causes" of the problem; we cannot eliminate them in a policy-relevant time frame. An ugly fight lies ahead. Instead of minimizing the terror threat in hopes of calming the public, the president must prepare public opinion for a long-term struggle.

Third, the focus must now return to Iran. Concern with Iran's growing power is the thread that unites Israel and Saudi Arabia. Developing and moving on an Iran strategy that both Saudis and Israelis can support will help President Obama rebuild America's position in the shifting sands. That is likely to mean a much tougher policy on Syria. Drawing red lines in the sand and stepping back when they are crossed won't rebuild confidence.

President Obama now faces a moment similar to the one President Carter faced when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The assumptions that shaped key elements of his foreign policy have not held up; times have changed radically and policy must shift. The president is a talented leader; the world will be watching what he does.

Mr. Mead is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and editor-at-large of the American Interest.

Surveillance and the state: this way the debate goes on

24 August 2013 The Guardian editorial

"Spies spy! Who knew?" Thus the world-weary shrug from too many people who ought to know better over the revelations deriving from the material leaked by Edward Snowden about what goes on inside the west's major intelligence agencies in 2013. We have all read our Le Carré, they sigh. We spy on them, they spy on us. Except in fiction, it must remain a secret world. The secrecy has to remain near-absolute because our national security depends on it. The best way for the state to ensure such secrecy is to have an armoury of criminal and civil laws − backed by punitive sanctions − to deter any leakages.

This used to work. But the nature of spying has changed: this much we have learned from Mr Snowden. What was once highly targeted has now become virtually universal. The evident ambition is to put entire populations under some form of surveillance. The faceless intelligence masters may say they are still searching for needles, but first they want the entire haystack. And thus countless millions of entirely innocent (in every sense) citizens are potentially being monitored. Their phone calls, web searches, texts and emails are routinely intercepted, collected, stored and subjected to analysis.

Did the governments involved ever stop to think about the notion of consent? Did any engineer, spy chief, minister, congressman or president ever wonder whether such a dramatic change in the contract between state and citizen required some form of debate?

Thanks to Mr Snowden they have now got a debate − one that is rippling around the world. President Barack Obama says he welcomes that debate. That much is encouraging, even if it seems unlikely to be true because it is not going to be a comfortable debate for any government − nor for those in intelligence, nor for anyone running a major technology or telecommunications company. The world was simpler when the law could be used to prevent any meaningful and informed discussion of what was involved. The laws crafted before and during the first world war (the Espionage Act in the US, the Official Secrets Act in the UK) saw to that.

Secrecy and openness must collide. Governments and spies will place the greater emphasis on security: that is inevitable. Individuals who treasure free speech, an unfettered press, the capacity for dissent, or an individual's rights to privacy or protection against the state, will have equal, or greater, concerns.

It is obvious that virtually anyone with a digital life − any user of Google or Verizon or BT or Facebook or Skype − is entitled to know quite how much privacy they can reasonably expect. This is the coming debate.

Who will hold the debate, and how is it to be informed? To date, there has been a vigorous discussion on these matters in the US and European legislatures and media. In the UK, the number of MPs or peers who have said anything at all is tiny. Much legal oversight of intelligence matters happens in closed courts. Parliamentary oversight is a similarly shadowy affair. In the UK, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who is supposed to be a kind of regulator, too often sounds like a cheerleader. In the US, the same can alas be said of Senator Dianne Feinstein, who heads the Senate intelligence committee.

What role does a free press have in assisting and informing this debate? In late May, Mr Snowden gave this newspaper a volume of documents from his role as one of 850,000 intelligence employees cleared to read and analyse top-secret material. It is difficult to imagine any editor in the free world who would have destroyed this material unread, or handed it back, unanalysed, to the spy agencies or the government. The Guardian did what we hope any news organisation would do − patiently analysed and responsibly reported on some of the material we have read in order to inform the necessary public debate.

Some time after our first disclosures we were contacted by the cabinet secretary, who said he spoke on behalf of the prime minister. He acknowledged that we had behaved responsibly, expressed concerns about the security of the material we held and requested the return or destruction of the documents. We explained that complying with the request would destroy our ability to report. At this stage there was no threat of law, but nevertheless we took the precaution of sharing some of the material with news organisations in America, where we consider there to be more robust protections for serious journalism of public importance.

Some weeks later the tone of these and other discussions changed. There was, by mid-July, an explicit threat that the government would, after all, seek to stop the Guardian's work and prevent publication of further material by legal means. To have resisted such action would have involved handing over ultimate control of the material to a judge and could have meant that no stories could have been published for many months, if at all. The first amendment of the American constitution guarantees its press protections of which British editors can only dream. For more than 40 years − since the publication of the so-called Pentagon papers in 1971 − it has been accepted that the state will not succeed in trying to obtain prior restraint of the press. So we will in future report this story from New York. We have shared some material with, and will collaborate with, the New York Times.

It is, we believe, inconceivable that the US government would try to obtain, or the US court grant, an injunction against publication by the NYT. The US attorney general has recently given an assurance that he will not prosecute any journalist "for doing his or her job". So the debate about the mass collection of data on populations, the links between the state, the intelligence services and large corporations, and the uses and limits of oversight can continue.

Meanwhile in the UK, the police − with the apparent knowledge of the government − misused a law designed to combat terrorism to detain a member of the Guardian's team for nine hours and to confiscate his material. The former lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, has confirmed that there was no intention that the 2000 Terrorism Act should be used against people like David Miranda, the partner of the Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald. "The state may wish that journalists would not publish sensitive material," he wrote in these columns last week, "but it is up to journalists, not the state, to decide where to draw the line."

These are words that should be heeded by the British government official who told us that the Guardian had "had our debate" and that there was no "need" to write any more. It is not the role of politicians or civil servants to determine the limits of public discussion. Nor should the debate be circumscribed by attempting to criminalise the act of journalism − without which, in this instance, there could be no debate.

Citizens of free countries are entitled to protect their privacy against the state. The state has a duty to protect free speech as well as security. Fundamental rights, as we say, collide. Journalists have a duty to inform and facilitate a debate and to help test the consent of people about the nature of any trade-offs between civil liberties and security. A democratic government should seek to protect and nourish that debate, not threaten it or stamp it out.

More than half of humanity lives inside this circle

23 August 2013

From a fascinating article in the Washington Post - 40 maps that explain the world

Skyview gives a public view of the Dubai Airshow

19 August 2013

F&E Aerospace, organisers of the Dubai Airshow are launching a new event alongside this November’s show; giving families and enthusiasts the opportunity to enjoy the show’s world class flying display for the very first time. Skyview at the Dubai Airshow this November will be held in a dedicated area next to the Dubai Airshow trade event from 18 to 21 November 2013 at Dubai World Central (DWC), Jebel Ali, Dubai.

Skyview at the Dubai Airshow will feature a purpose-built grandstand which can seat up to 6,000 visitors each day. F&E Aerospace are fully committed to making Skyview soar to great heights with crowds of over 16,000 expected throughout the 4 days; to watch the world’s top pilots manoeuvre their aircraft in the Dubai skies.

Whilst the exhibitions halls and static display will be accessible to Dubai Airshow attendees only; there will be a range of activities on offer at Skyview to entertain the masses in a fun, informative and interactive way in addition to the flying display. There will also be food and beverage outlets catering to every taste and the organisers are confident that Skyview will offer Dubai front row access to the action.

“The move to our new venue – Dubai World Central has given us the opportunity to develop and grow the show and as a team we couldn’t think of anything better than to build a separate area especially for the local community. We’re putting together a special programme that will give spectators something to remember both on the ground and in the sky. We look forward to welcoming everyone to Skyview in November,” Sharief Fahmy, CEO of F&E Aerospace spoke about the launch of Skyview, said.

A good initiative for enthusiasts - but also a money making venture for the organisers.

British shame

19 August 2013

David Miranda, who lives with Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian newspaper reporter, was returning from a trip to Berlin when he was stopped by officers ay Heathrow Airport today. It was 8.05am, Miranda was in transit to his home in Rio; he was told that he was to be questioned under schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

He was held for almost nine hours and officials confiscated electronics equipment including his mobile phone, laptop, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and games consoles.

It just happens that his partner is the same Guardian journalist who has written a series of stories revealing mass surveillance programmes by the US National Security Agency and who was in communication with Edward Snowden.

The detention at Heathrow is the sort of treatment western politicians love to deplore in Putin's Russia or Ahmadinejad's Iran.

The question is did the Americans ask the British government to detain him, shake him down and take his personal effects. And why would the UK government comply.

Miranda's phone and laptop were confiscated and he was held without access to friends or a lawyer, for the maximum nine hours allowed under law.

Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 applies only at airports, ports and border areas. Controversially it allows officers to stop, search, question and detain individuals.

Over the last two months it has become clear that NSA/GCHQ spying is vastly more extensive than anyone fully comprehended before; there are no effective controls or balances. There is no oversight. Many civilians have had their privacy accidentally violated.

The US President, in defending the indefensible, has damaged himself and his core reputation for honesty and candor. These cumulative revelations have exposed this program as, at a minimum, dangerous to core liberties and vulnerable to rank abuse.

In the NSA's and Obama's favour was the argument that it has helped prevent terror attacks and the lack of clear proof of deliberate (rather than accidental) abuse. 

Think about this. David Miranda was detained under an anti-terrorism law: more than 97 percent of people stopped under the provision are questioned for under an hour, according to the British government.

Miranda was detained for nine hours – the maximum time under the law.

So what could possibly have lead the British security services to suspect Miranda of ties to a terror group?

He was held for three hours before the authorities informed his partner and another six hours thereafter. In a nation that cheers for a free press this is nothing more than brute psychological intimidation of journalists, by attacking their families.

And although Miranda was released, his entire digital library was confiscated – including his laptop and phone. So any journalist passing through London’s Heathrow has now been warned: do not take any documents with you.

So what do we have - The UK government has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that these anti-terror provisions are capable of rank abuse.

Snowden was right. Democracy is under attack. Legislation that has been abused should be repealed.

Last month, the British foreign secretary, William Hague, airily excused the NSA/GCHQ "hoovering" of internet traffic on the grounds that "the innocent have nothing to fear," the motto of police states down the ages.

The hysteria of the "war on terror" is now corrupting every area of democratic government. It extends from the arbitrary selection of drone targets to illegal detention, the search and confiscation of personal data and harassment of journalists' families.

The innocent have nothing to fear? Clearly they do.

Widney Brown, Amnesty International's senior director of international law and policy, said: "It is utterly improbable that David Michael Miranda, a Brazilian national transiting through London, was detained at random, given the role his partner has played in revealing the truth about the unlawful nature of NSA surveillance.

"David's detention was unlawful and inexcusable. He was detained under a law that violates any principle of fairness and his detention shows how the law can be abused for petty, vindictive reasons.

"There is simply no basis for believing that David Michael Miranda presents any threat whatsoever to the UK government. The only possible intent behind this detention was to harass him and his partner, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, for his role in analysing the data released by Edward Snowden."

A spokesperson for the Guardian said: "We were dismayed that the partner of a Guardian journalist who has been writing about the security services was detained for nearly nine hours while passing through Heathrow airport. We are urgently seeking clarification from the British authorities."

How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society

by Judith Shulevitz | December 6, 2012 in The New Republic

This is interesting because of its wider implications in emerging nations where increasingly childbirth is postponed and families are smaller than in previous decades and centuries:

Over the past half century, parenthood has undergone a change so simple yet so profound we are only beginning to grasp the enormity of its implications. It is that we have our children much later than we used to. This has come to seem perfectly unremarkable; indeed, we take note of it only when celebrities push it to extremes—when Tony Randall has his first child at 77; Larry King, his fifth child by his seventh wife at 66; Elizabeth Edwards, her last child at 50. This new gerontological voyeurism—I think of it as doddering-parent porn—was at its maximally gratifying in 2008, when, in almost simultaneous and near-Biblical acts of belated fertility, two 70-year-old women in India gave birth, thanks to donor eggs and disturbingly enthusiastic doctors. One woman’s husband was 72; the other’s was 77.

These, though, are the headlines. The real story is less titillating, but it tells us a great deal more about how we’ll be living in the coming years: what our families and our workforce will look like, how healthy we’ll be, and also—not to be too eugenicist about it—the future well-being of the human race.

That women become mothers later than they used to will surprise no one. All you have to do is study the faces of the women pushing baby strollers, especially on the streets of coastal cities or their suburban counterparts. American first-time mothers have aged about four years since 1970—as of 2010, they were 25.4 as opposed to 21.5. That average, of course, obscures a lot of regional, ethnic, and educational variation. The average new mother from Massachusetts, for instance, was 28; the Mississippian was 22.9. The Asian American first-time mother was 29.1; the African American 23.1. A college-educated woman had a better than one-in-three chance of having her first child at 30 or older; the odds that a woman with less education would wait that long were no better than one in ten.

It badly misstates the phenomenon to associate it only with women: Fathers have been getting older at the same rate as mothers. First-time fathers have been about three years older than first-time mothers for several decades, and they still are. The average American man is between 27 and 28 when he becomes a father. Meanwhile, as the U.S. birth rate slumps due to the recession, only men and women over 40 have kept having more babies than they did in the past.

In short, the growth spurt in American parenthood is not among rich septuagenarians or famous political wives approaching or past menopause, but among roughly middle-aged couples with moderate age gaps between them, like my husband and me. OK, I’ll admit it. We’re on the outer edge of the demographic bulge. My husband was in his mid-forties and I was 37—two years past the age when doctors start scribbling AMA, Advanced Maternal Age, on the charts of mothers-to-be—before we called a fertility doctor. The doctor called back and told us to wait a few more months. We waited, then went in. The office occupied a brownstone basement just off the tonier stretches of New York’s Madison Avenue, though its tan, sleek sofas held a large proportion of Orthodox Jewish women likely to have come from another borough. The doctor, oddly, had a collection of brightly colored porcelain dwarves on the shelf behind his desk. I thought he put them there to let you know that he had a sense of humor about the whole fertility racket.

The steps he told us we’d have to take, though, were distinctly unfunny. We’d start with a test to evaluate my fortysomething husband’s sperm. If it passed muster, we’d move on to “injectables,” such as follicle-stimulating and luteinizing hormones. The most popular fertility drug is clomiphene citrate, marketed as Clomid or Serophene, which would encourage my tired ovaries to push those eggs out into the world. (This was a few years back; nowadays, most people take these as pills, which are increasingly common and available, without prescription and possibly in dangerously adulterated form, over the Internet.) I was to shoot Clomid into my thigh five days a month. Had I ever injected anything, such as insulin, into myself? No, I had not. The very idea gave me the willies. I was being pushed into a world I had read about with intense dislike, in which older women endure ever more harrowing procedures in their desperation to cheat time.

If Clomid didn’t work, we’d move into alphabet-soup mode: IVF (in vitro fertilization), ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection), GIFT (gamete intrafallopian transfer), even ZIFT (zygote intrafallopian transfer). All these scary-sounding reproductive technologies involved taking stuff out of my body and putting it back in. Did these procedures, or the hormones that came with them, pose risks to me or to my fetus? The doctor shrugged. There are always risks, he said, especially when you’re older, but no one is quite sure whether they come from advanced maternal age itself or from the procedures.

My husband passed his test. I started on my routines. With the help of a minor, non–IVF-related surgical intervention and Clomid, which had the mild side effects of making me feel jellyfish-like and blurring my already myopic vision, I got pregnant.

My baby boy seemed perfect. When he was three, though, the pediatrician told me that he had a fine-motor delay; I was skeptical, but after a while began to notice him struggling to grasp pencils and tie his shoes. An investigator from the local board of education confirmed that my son needed occupational therapy. This, I discovered, was another little culture, with its own mystifying vocabulary. My son was diagnosed with a mild case of “sensory-integration disorder,” a condition with symptoms that overlapped with less medical terms like “excitable” and “sensitive.”

Sitting on child-sized chairs outside the little gyms in which he exercised an upper body deemed to have poor muscle tone, I realized that here was a subculture of a subculture: that of mothers who spend hours a week getting services for developmentally challenged children. It seemed to me that an unusually large proportion of these women were older, although I didn’t know whether to make anything of that or dismiss it as the effect of living just outside a city—New York—where many women establish themselves in their professions before they have children.

I also spent those 50-minute sessions wondering: What if my son’s individual experience, meaningless from a statistical point of view, hinted at a collective problem? As my children grew and, happily, thrived (I managed to have my daughter by natural means), I kept meeting children of friends and acquaintances, all roughly my age, who had Asperger’s, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention-deficit disorder, sensory-integration disorder. Curious as to whether there were more developmental disabilities than there used to be, I looked it up and found that, according to the Centers for Disease Control, learning problems, attention-deficit disorders, autism and related disorders, and developmental delays increased about 17 percent between 1997 and 2008. One in six American children was reported as having a developmental disability between 2006 and 2008. That’s about 1.8 million more children than a decade earlier.

Soon, I learned that medical researchers, sociologists, and demographers were more worried about the proliferation of older parents than my friends and I were. They talked to me at length about a vicious cycle of declining fertility, especially in the industrialized world, and also about the damage caused by assisted-reproductive technologies (ART) that are commonly used on people past their peak childbearing years. This past May, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine found that 8.3 percent of children born with the help of ART had defects, whereas, of those born without it, only 5.8 percent had defects.

A phrase I heard repeatedly during these conversations was “natural experiment.” As in, we’re conducting a vast empirical study upon an unthinkably large population: all the babies conceived by older parents, plus those parents, plus their grandparents, who after all have to wait a lot longer than they used to for grandchildren. It was impressed upon me that parents like us, with our aging reproductive systems and avid consumption of fertility treatments, would change the nature of family life. We might even change the course of our evolutionary future. For we are bringing fewer children into the world and producing a generation that will be subtly different—“phenotypically and biochemically different,” as one study I read put it—from previous generations.

What science tells us about the aging parental body should alarm us more than it does. Age diminishes a woman’s fertility; every woman knows that, although several surveys have shown that women—and men—consistently underestimate how sharp the drop-off can be for women after age 35. The effects of maternal age on children aren’t as well-understood. As that age creeps upward, so do the chances that children will carry a chromosomal abnormality, such as a trisomy. In a trisomy, a third chromosome inserts itself into one of the 23 pairs that most of us carry, so that a child’s cells carry 47 instead of 46 chromosomes. The most notorious trisomy is Down syndrome. There are two other common ones: Patau syndrome, which gives children cleft palates, mental retardation, and an 80 percent likelihood of dying in their first year; and Edwards syndrome, which features oddly shaped heads, clenched hands, and slow growth. Half of all Edwards syndrome babies die in the first week of life.

The risk that a pregnancy will yield a trisomy rises from 2–3 percent when a woman is in her twenties to 30 percent when a woman is in her forties. A fetus faces other obstacles on the way to health and well-being when born to an older mother: spontaneous abortion, premature birth, being a twin or triplet, cerebral palsy, and low birth weight. (This last leads to chronic health problems later in children’s lives.)

We have been conditioned to think of reproductive age as a female-only concern, but it isn’t. For decades, neonatologists have known about birth defects linked to older fathers: dwarfism, Apert syndrome (a bone disorder that may result in an elongated head), Marfan syndrome (a disorder of the connective tissue that results in weirdly tall, skinny bodies), and cleft palates. But the associations between parental age and birth defects were largely speculative until this year, when researchers in Iceland, using radically more powerful ways of looking at genomes, established that men pass on more de novo—that is, non-inherited and spontaneously occurring—genetic mutations to their children as they get older. In the scientists’ study, published in Nature, they concluded that the number of genetic mutations that can be acquired from a father increases by two every year of his life, and doubles every 16, so that a 36-year-old man is twice as likely as a 20-year-old to bequeath de novo mutations to his children.

The Nature study ended by saying that the greater number of older dads could help to explain the 78 percent rise in autism cases over the past decade. Researchers have suspected links between autism and parental age for years. One much-cited study from 2006 argued that the risk of bearing an autistic child jumps from six in 10,000 before a man reaches 30 to 32 in 10,000 when he’s 40—a more than fivefold increase. When he reaches 50, it goes up to 52 in 10,000. It should be noted that there are many skeptics when it comes to explaining the increase of autism; one school of thought holds that it’s the result of more doctors making diagnoses, better equipment and information for the doctors to make them with, and a vocal parent lobby that encourages them. But it increasingly looks as if autism cases have risen more than overdiagnosis can account for and that parental age, particularly paternal age, has something to do with that fact.

Why do older men make such unreliable sperm? Well, for one thing, unlike women, who are born with all their eggs, men start making sperm at puberty and keep doing so all their lives. Each time a gonad cell divides to make spermatozoa, that’s another chance for its DNA to make a copy error. The gonads of a man who is 40 will have divided 610 times; at 50, that number goes up to 840. For another thing, as a man ages, his DNA’s self-repair mechanisms work less well.

To the danger of age-related genetic mutations, geneticists are starting to add the danger of age-related epigenetic mutations—that is, changes in the way genes in sperm express themselves. Epigenetics, a newish branch of genetics, studies how molecules latch onto genes or unhitch from them, directing many of the body’s crucial activities. The single most important process orchestrated by epigenetic notations is the stupendously complex unfurling of the fetus. This extra-genetic music is written, in part, by life itself. Epigenetically influenced traits, such as mental functioning and body size, are affected by the food we eat, the cigarettes we smoke, the toxins we ingest—and, of course, our age. Sociologists have devoted many man-hours to demonstrating that older parents are richer, smarter, and more loving, on the whole, than younger ones. And yet the tragic irony of epigenetics is that the same wised-up, more mature parents have had longer to absorb air-borne pollution, endocrine disruptors, pesticides, and herbicides. They may have endured more stress, be it from poverty or overwork or lack of social status. All those assaults on the cells that make sperm DNA can add epimutations to regular mutations.

At the center of research on older fathers, genetics, and neurological dysfunctions is Avi Reichenberg, a tall, wiry psychiatrist from King’s College in London. He jumps up a lot as he talks, and he has an ironic awareness of how nervous his work makes people, especially men. He can identify: He had his children relatively late—mid-thirties—and fretted throughout his wife’s pregnancies. Besides, he tells me, the fungibility of sperm is just plain disturbing. Reichenberg likes to tell people about all the different ways that environmental influences alter epigenetic patterns on sperm DNA. That old wives’ tale about hot baths or tight underwear leading to male infertility? It’s true. “Usually when you give that talk, men sitting like that”—he crossed his legs—“go like this,” he said, opening them back up.

Dolores Malaspina, a short, elegantly coiffed psychiatrist who speaks in long, urgent paragraphs, has also spent her life worrying people about aging men’s effects on their children’s mental state—in fact, she could be said to be the dean of older-father alarmism. In 2001, Malaspina co-authored a ground-breaking study that concluded that men over 50 were three times more likely than men under 25 to father a schizophrenic child. Malaspina and her team derived that figure from a satisfyingly large population sample: 87,907 children born in Jerusalem between 1964 and 1976. (Luckily, the Israeli Ministry of Health recorded the ages of their fathers.) Malaspina argued that the odds of bearing a schizophrenic child moved up in a straight line as a man got older. Other researchers dismissed her findings, arguing that men who waited so long to have children were much more likely to be somewhat schizophrenic themselves. But Malaspina’s conclusions have held up. A 2003 Danish study of 7,704 schizophrenics came up with results similar to Malaspina’s, although it concluded that a man’s chances of having a schizophrenic child jumped sharply at 55, rather than trending steadily upward after 35.

“I often hear from teachers that the children of much older fathers seem more likely to have learning or social issues,” she told me. Now, she said, she’d proved that they can be. Showing that aging men have as much to worry about as aging women, she told me, is a blow for equality between the sexes. “It’s a paradigm shift,” she said.

This paradigm shift may do more than just tip the balance of concern away from older mothers toward older fathers; it may also transform our definition of mental illness itself. “It’s been my hypothesis, though it is only a hypothesis at this point, that most of the disorders that afflict neuropsychiatric patients—depression, schizophrenia, and autism, at least the more extreme cases—have their basis in the early processes of brain maturation,” Dr. Jay Gingrich, a professor of psychobiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute and a former colleague of Malaspina’s, told me. Recent mouse studies have uncovered actual architectural differences between the brains of offspring of older fathers and those of younger fathers. Gingrich and his team looked at the epigenetic markings on the genes in those older-fathered and younger-fathered brains and found disparities between them, too. “So then we said: ‘Wow, that’s amazing. Let’s double down and see whether we can see differences in the sperm DNA of the older and younger fathers,’” Gingrich said. And they didn’t just see it, he continued; they saw it “in spades—with an order of magnitude more prominent in sperm than in the brain.” While more research needs to be done on how older sperm may translate into mental illness, Gingrich is confident that the link exists. “It’s a fascinating smoking gun,” he says.

Epigenetics is also forcing medical researchers to reopen questions about fertility treatments that had been written off as answered and done with. Fertility doctors do a lot of things to sperm and eggs that have not been rigorously tested, including keeping them in liquids (“culture media,” they’re called) teeming with chemicals that may or may not scramble an embryo’s development—no one knows for sure. There just isn’t a lot of data to work with: The fertility industry, which is notoriously under-regulated, does not give the government reports on what happens to the children it produces. As Wendy Chavkin, a professor of obstetrics and population studies at Columbia University’s school of public health, says, “We keep pulling off these technological marvels without the sober tracking of data you’d want to see before these things become widespread all over the world.”

Clomid, or clomiphene citrate, which has become almost as common as aspirin in women undergoing fertility treatments, came out particularly badly in the recent New England Journal of Medicine study that rang alarm bells about ART and birth defects. “I think it’s an absolute time bomb,” Michael Davies, the study’s lead researcher and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Adelaide in Australia, told me. “We estimate that there may be in excess of 500 preventable major birth defects occurring annually across Australia as a direct result of this drug,” he wrote in a fact sheet he sent me. Dr. Jennita Reefhuis, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control, worries that Clomid might build up in women’s bodies when they take it repeatedly, rather than washing out of the body as it is supposed to. If so, the hormonal changes induced by the drug may misdirect early fetal development.

Another popular procedure coming under renewed scrutiny is ICSI (intracytoplasmic sperm injection). In ICSI, sperm or a part of a sperm is injected directly into an extracted egg. In the early ’90s, when doctors first started using ICSI, they added it to in vitro fertilization only when men had low sperm counts, but today doctors perform ICSI almost routinely—procedures more than doubled between 1999 and 2008. And yet, ICSI shows up in the studies as having higher rates of birth defects than any other popular fertility procedure. Among other possible reasons, ICSI allows sperm to bypass a crucial step in the fertilization of the egg—the binding of the head of the sperm with the coat of the egg. Forcing the sperm to penetrate the coat may be nature’s way of maintaining quality control.

A remarkable feature of the new older parenting is how happy women seem to be about it. It’s considered a feminist triumph, in part because it’s the product of feminist breakthroughs: birth control, which gives women the power to pace their own fertility, and access to good jobs, which gives them reason to delay it. Women simply assume that having a serious career means having children later and that failing to follow that schedule condemns them to a lifetime of reduced opportunity—and they’re not wrong about that. So each time an age limit is breached or a new ART procedure is announced, it’s met with celebration. Once again, technology has given us the chance to lead our lives in the proper sequence: education, then work, then financial stability, then children.

As a result, the twenties have turned into a lull in the life cycle, when many young men and women educate themselves and embark on careers or journeys of self-discovery, or whatever it is one does when not surrounded by diapers and toys. This is by no means a bad thing, for children or for adults. Study after study has shown that the children of older parents grow up in wealthier households, lead more stable lives, and do better in school. After all, their parents are grown-ups.

But the experience of being an older parent also has its emotional disadvantages. For one thing, as soon as we procrastinators manage to have kids, we also become members of the “sandwich generation.” That is, we’re caught between our toddlers tugging on one hand and our parents talking on the phone in the other, giving us the latest updates on their ailments. Grandparents well into their senescence provide less of the support younger grandparents offer—the babysitting, the spoiling, the special bonds between children and their elders through which family traditions are passed.

Another downside of bearing children late is that parents may not have all the children they dreamed of having, which can cause considerable pain. Long-term studies have shown that, when people put off having children till their mid-thirties and later, they fail to reach “intended family size”—that is, they produce fewer children than they’d said they’d meant to when interviewed a decade or so earlier. A matter of lesser irritation (but still some annoyance) is the way strangers and even our children’s friends confuse us with our own parents. My husband has twice been mistaken for our daughter’s grandfather; he laughs it off, but when the same thing happened to a woman I know, she was stung.

What haunts me about my children, though, is not the embarrassment they feel when their friends study my wrinkles or my husband’s salt-and-pepper temples. It’s the actuarial risk I run of dying before they’re ready to face the world. At an American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting last year, two psychologists and a gynecologist antagonized a room full of fertility experts by making the unpopular but fairly obvious point that older parents die earlier in their children’s lives. (“We got a lot of blowback in terms of reproductive rights and all that,” the gynecologist told me.) A mother who is 35 when her child is born is more likely than not to have died by the time that child is 46. The one who is 45 may have bowed out of her child’s life when he’s 37. The odds are slightly worse for fathers: The 35-year-old new father can hope to live to see his child turn 42. The 45-year-old one has until the child is 33.

These numbers may sound humdrum, but even under the best scenarios, the death of a parent who had children late, not to mention the long period of decline that precedes it, will befall those daughters and sons when they still need their parents’ help—because, let’s face it, even grown-up children rely on their parents more than they used to. They need them for guidance at the start of their careers, and they could probably also use some extra cash for the rent or the cable bill, if their parents can swing it. “If you don’t have children till your forties, they won’t be launched until you’re in your sixties,” Suzanne Bianchi, a sociologist who studies families, pointed out to me. In today’s bad economy, young people need education, then, if they can afford it, more education, and even internships. They may not go off the parental payroll until their mid- to late-twenties. Children also need their parents not to need them just when they’ve had children of their own.

There’s an entire body of sociological literature on how parents’ deaths affect children, and it suggests that losing a parent distresses young adults more than older adults, low-income young adults more than high-income ones, and daughters more than sons. Curiously, the early death of a mother correlates to a decline in physical health in both sexes, and the early death of a father correlates to increased drinking among young men, perhaps because more men than women have drinking problems and their sons are more likely to copy them.

All these problems will be exacerbated if we aging parents are, in fact, producing a growing subpopulation of children with neurological or other disorders who will require a lifetime of care. Schizophrenia, for instance, usually sets in during a child’s late teens or early twenties. Avi Reichenberg sums up the problem bluntly. “Who is going to take care of that child?” he asked me. “Some seventy-five-year-old demented father?”

This question preys on the mind of every parent whose child suffers a disability, whether that parent is elderly or not. The best answer to it that I’ve ever heard came from a 43-year-old father I met named Patrick Spillman, whose first child, Grace, a four-and-a-half-year-old, has a mild case of cerebral palsy. (Her mother was 46 when Grace was born.) In his last job, Spillman, stocky and blunt, directed FreshDirect’s coffee department. Now, he’s a full-time father and advocate for his daughter. He spends his days taking Grace to doctors and therapists and orthotic-boot-makers, as well as making won’t-take-no-for-an-answer phone calls to state and city agencies that might provide financial or therapeutic assistance. How does he face the prospect of disappearing from her life? A whole lot better than I would. (My lame-joke answer, when my children ask me that question, is that I plan to live forever.) “We’re putting money aside now,” he said. Into a trust, he adds, so that government agencies can’t count it against her when she or a caregiver goes looking for Medicaid or other benefits.

Spillman also prepares Grace for the future by practicing tough love on her, refusing to do for her anything she could possibly do for herself. Her mother, he says, sometimes pleads with him to help Grace more as she stumbles over the tasks of daily life. But he won’t. At her tender age, Grace already dresses and undresses herself; every morning, Spillman explained, they do a little “tag check dance” to make sure nothing’s inside out. When, he says, someone makes fun of her way of walking and chewing and speaking, as he believes someone will inevitably do, “I want her to have years and years of confidence behind her.” He adds, “She’s going to go to college. She will be well-adjusted. She won’t be able to live on a nineteenth-floor walk-up, but she will live a normal life.”

When we look back at this era from some point in the future, I believe we’ll identify the worldwide fertility plunge as the most important legacy of old-age parenting. A half-century ago, demographers were issuing neo-Malthusian manifestoes about the overpeopling of the Earth. Nowadays, they talk about the disappearance of the young. Fertility has fallen below replacement rates in the majority of the 224 countries—developing as well as developed—from which the United Nations collects such information, which means that more people die in those places than are born. Baby-making has slumped by an astonishing 45 percent around the world since 1975. By 2010, the average number of births per woman had dropped from 4.7 to 2.6. No trend that large has a simple explanation, but the biggest factor, according to population experts, is the rising age of parents—mothers, really—at the birth of their first children. That number, above all others, predicts how large a family will ultimately be.

Fewer people, of course, means less demand for food, land, energy, and all the Earth’s other limited resources. But the environmental benefits have to be balanced against the social costs. Countries that can’t replenish their own numbers won’t have younger workers to replace those who retire. Older workers will have to be retrained to cope with the new technologies that have transmogrified the workplace. Retraining the old is more expensive than allowing them to retire to make way for workers comfortable with computers, social media, and cutting-edge modes of production. And who will take care of the older generations if there aren’t enough in the younger ones?

If you’re a doctor, you see clearly what is to be done, and you’re sure it will be. “People are going to change their reproductive habits,” said Alan S. Brown, a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at the Columbia University medical school and the editor of an important anthology on the origins of schizophrenia. They will simply have to “procreate earlier,” he replied. As for men worried about the effects of age on children, they will “bank sperm and freeze it.”

Would-be mothers have been freezing their eggs since the mid-’80s. Potential fathers don’t seem likely to rush out to bank their sperm any time soon, though. Dr. Bruce Gilbert, a urologist and fertility specialist who runs a private sperm bank on Long Island, told me he has heard of few men doing so, if any. Doctors have a hard enough time convincing men to store their sperm when they’re facing cancer treatments that may poison their gonads, Gilbert said. The only time he saw an influx of men coming in to store sperm was during the first Gulf war, when soldiers were being shipped out to battlefields awash in toxic agents. Moreover, sperm banking is too expensive to undertake lightly, up to $850 for processing, then $300 to $500 a year for storage. “There needs to be a lot more at stake than concern about aging and potential for genetic alterations,” Gilbert said. “It has to be something more immediate.”

What else can be done? Partly the same old things that are already being done, though perhaps not passionately enough. Doctors will have to get out the word about how much male and female fertility wanes after 35; make it clear that fertility treatments work less well with age; warn that tinkering with reproductive material at the very earliest stages of a fetus’s growth may have molecular effects we’re only beginning to understand.

But I’m not convinced that medical advice alone will lead people to “procreate earlier.” You don’t buck decades-old, worldwide trends that easily. The problem seems particularly hard to solve in the United States, where it’s difficult to imagine legislators adopting the kinds of policies it will take to stop the fertility collapse.

Demographers and sociologists agree about what those policies are. The main obstacle to be overcome is the unequal division of the opportunity cost of babies. When women enjoy the same access to education and professional advancement as men but face penalties for reproducing, then, unsurprisingly, they don’t. Some experts hold that, to make up for mothers’ lost incomes, we should simply hand over cash for children: direct and indirect subsidies, tax exemptions, mortgage-forgiveness programs. Cash-for-babies programs have been tried all over the world—Hungary and Russia, among other places—with mixed results; the subsidies seem to do little in the short term, but may stem the ebbing tide somewhat over the long term. One optimistic study done in 2003 of 18 European countries that had been giving families economic benefits long enough for them to kick in found a 25 percent increase in women’s fertility for every 10 percent increase in child benefits.

More immediately effective are policies in place in many countries in Western Europe (France, Italy, Sweden) that help women and men juggle work and child rearing. These include subsidized child care, generous parental leaves, and laws that guarantee parents’ jobs when they go back to work. Programs that let parents stay in the workforce instead of dropping out allow them to earn more over the course of their lifetimes.

Sweden and France, the two showcases for such egalitarian family policies, have among the highest rates of fertility in the Western half of Europe. Sweden, however, ties its generous paid parental leaves to how much a parent has been making and how long she has been working, which largely leaves out all the people in their twenties who aren’t working yet because they’re still in school or a training program. In other words, even a country with one of the most liberal family policies in the world gives steeply reduced benefits to its most ambitious and promising citizens at the very moment when they should be starting their families.

It won’t be easy to make the world more baby-friendly, but if we were to try, we’d have to restructure the professions so that the most intensely competitive stage of a career doesn’t occur right at the moment when couples should be lavishing attention on infants. We’d have to stop thinking of work-life balance as a women’s problem, and reframe it as a basic human right. Changes like these are going to be a long time coming, but I can’t help hoping they happen before my children confront the Hobson’s choices that made me wait so long to have them.

LKY on Thaksin and Thailand

18 August 2013 h/t to Political Prisoners in Thailand

This is an excerpt from Lee Kuan Yew’s newly released book One Man’s View of the World.

I am no fan of LKY but his observations, which at times border on the arrogant, are interesting reading from a canny politician:

"THAILAND : AN UNDERCLASS STIRS

The arrival of Thaksin Shinawatra permanently changed Thai politics. Before he came onto the scene, the Bangkok establishment dominated all sides of the political competition and governed largely to the benefit of the nation’s capital. If there had been disagreements among the Bangkok elite, none were quite as ferocious as the ones to come. Nor were any of the quarrels as divisive as those that arose during and after Thaksin’s term. What Thaksin did was to upset the apple cart of the Thai political status quo by diverting to the poorer parts of the country resources that had previously been hogged by Bangkok and its middle and upper-class residents. Thaksin’s was a more inclusive brand of politics that allowed the peasants from the north and the northeast to share in the country’s economic growth. A gulf had already existed before his arrival, created by the Bangkok-centric policies of his predecessors. All he did was to awaken the people to the gulf — and the unfairness of it — and to offer policy solutions to bridge it. If he had not done so, I am convinced that somebody else would have come along to do the same.

When he took over the premiership in 2001, Thaksin was already a successful businessman and a billionaire. But if rich Thais were counting on him to show class solidarity, they would soon be sorely disappointed. He implemented policies that favoured the rural poor to an unprecedented extent. He extended loans to farmers, overseas scholarships to students from rural families and government —subsidised housing to the urban poor, many of whom had migrated to the cities in search of jobs and could only afford to live in slums. His healthcare plan targeted at those who could not pay for their own medical insurance provided coverage at just 30 baht (about US$1) per hospital visit.

To Thaksin’s opponents, he was turning the country upside down. They were not about to let him get away with it. They called him a populist and claimed his policies would bankrupt the state. (Remarkably, this did not stop them from continuing many of these policies and coming up with other similar ones when they held power from December 2008 to August 2011.) They accused him of corruption and favouring his family businesses, charges he denied. They were also unhappy with his firm — some say dictatorial — handling of the media and his controversial war on drugs in the south of the country, during which due process and human rights may sometimes have been overlooked. Nevertheless, the peasants, overwhelming in numbers, ignored the criticisms and re-elected him in 2005. The Bangkok elite ultimately could not tolerate the man. He was overthrown in a military coup in 2006.

Thailand’s capital has since experienced great upheaval. Scenes of chaos have broken out repeatedly on the streets of Bangkok since 2008, with mass protests involving either the Yellow Shirts, who oppose Thaksin and do so in the name of defending the monarchy, or the Red Shirts, made up of Thaksin’s ardent supporters. But the latest general election, held in 2011, which handed Thaksin’s sister Yingluck the premiership, was a clear vindication by the Thai electorate of the new path that Thaksin had chosen for Thailand. The peasants of the north and the northeast of the country, having tasted what it was like to have access to capital, were not going to give that up. Thaksin and his allies have now won five general elections in a row, in 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2011. For Thaksin’s opponents to try to hold back the tide is futile.

Despite the recent ferment in Thai society, there is cause for optimism in the long run. The Red Shirts will continue to outnumber the Yellow Shirts for a long time because the latter group draws from a shrinking constituency. The younger generation already holds a less reverent view of the royal family. Furthermore, even though King Bhumibol Adulyadej is a well-respected figure, much of the prestige and magic associated with him will go when he passes on.

The army has always played a central role in Thai politics. It has made sure that no movement against the monarchy, from which it derives its strength, is allowed to raise its head. It too, however, will have no choice but to accept and to adapt to the changed situation. It is after all untenable to resist the will of the electorate for a protracted period. Given time, its ranks will also be filled by soldiers from a younger generation, less enamoured with the monarchy. The military leaders will continue to insist on privileges and will not be content with being reduced to an ordinary army. But they will also learn to live with a government made up of Thaksin’s allies. It may even be possible for the army to accept Thaksin’s eventual return to Thailand, if he can promise to get along with them and not pursue any vendettas.

There can be no reverting to Thailand’s old politics, to the pre-Thaksin era when the Bangkok elite had a monopoly on power. Thailand will continue moving along the path that Thaksin first steered the country onto. The gap in living standards across the country will narrow. Many peasants will be lifted into the middle class and will help drive the country’s domestic consumption. Thailand will do well.

Q: Some Thai analysts are less optimistic about the changes in Thai politics since the arrival of Thaksin. They speak about how in the 1990s, the prime ministers were able to develop the Thai economy with long-term policies but since Thaksin came to power in 2001, the government has been resorting to short- term populist measures and handouts to the poor.

A: No, that’s a very one-sided view. Thaksin is much shrewder and smarter than his critics. That’s why he tapped the northeast to overcome the resistance from them.

Q: But I think there is a concern about the race to the bottom, to try to win as many ofthe rural votes as possible.

A: Where do you get the money for all the handouts?

Q: That’s the problem.

A: No, before you give a handout, you must have the resources. It can only come from revenue. And if you want to give more, and the revenue is already fully balanced, you’ve got to increase taxation.

Q: Or it can come from borrowing.

A: Who will lend? Against what assets?

Q: So you don’t think it likely that Thailand will experience long-term paralysis from a general descent into populist politics.

A: I doubt it. Why would they pander excessively to the have-nots?

Q: What are your impressions of Thaksin?

A: He is a hands-on leader who works hard to get results quickly. He trusts his business experience and instincts more than economic theories. He once told me he took a trip by coach all the way from Bangkok to Singapore and he decided that he knew what made Singapore tick. So he was going to do it the same way. I don’t know whether one trip gets him to understand our black box, which has to do with education, skills, training and a cohesive society with equal chances for all. You must not forget that in the northeast there are more ethnic Lao than Thais.

Q: There was a time, at least a decade ago, when Singapore leaders were talking about Thailand as a serious competitor to Singapore, as a transport, manufacturing and medical tourism hub. Is that still the case?

A: Look at their geography. You can bypass Bangkok but you cannot bypass Singapore by ship.

Q: What about by air?

A: How high are their skills and education? They have to be better than us.

Q: Do they have the potential to be better than us?

A: First, we have the advantage of the English language. Second, we have an education infrastructure that has been producing high quality graduates, those from the polytechnics and those from the ITEs. Nobody goes without some skill. Can they develop that for 60 million people spread across the rural areas?

Q: Can we discuss the geopolitics of the region? Thailand has been an ally of the US. It was used as a base by the US during the Vietnam War. Will it continue to be an ally?

A: It makes no difference. The real question is: Do their interests coincide? You can have an alliance and it will hold good only when your interests coincide. It’s like Nato. They were united when there was a Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Nato became ineffective.

Q: One view is that the turning point came when Thailand encountered problems with the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the people realised that the US wasn’t there to bail them out. And they have decided since then that China may be a much more dependable friend.

A: Because the value of Thailand to the US had dropped with the end of the Vietnam War.

Q: How do you see the Thais responding to the growing dominance and influence of China in this part of the world?

A: You know the history of the Thais. When the Japanese were strong and about to attack Southeast Asia, they allowed Japanese troops into Thailand, made it easier for them to move on to Malaysia and Singapore. So whoever is the winning side, whoever is the more powerful side, that is the side they will ally themselves with."

Give democracy a chance in Egypt

17 August 2013 Ian Buruma for The Globe and Mail

Egypt and Thailand have little in common, except for one thing. In both countries, at different times, educated people who pride themselves on being democrats have ended up applauding military coups against elected governments. They had resisted oppressive military regimes for many years. But, in Thailand in 2006, as in Egypt last month, they were happy to see their political leaders ousted by force.

This perversity is not without reason. The elected leaders in both countries, Thaksin Shinawatra in Thailand and Mohammed Morsi in Egypt, were good examples of illiberal democrats: they tended to view their electoral success as a mandate to manipulate constitutional norms and behave like autocrats.

They are not alone in this respect. In fact, they are probably typical of leaders in countries with little or no history of democratic government. Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is in the same camp. And if the leaders of Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) had been allowed to take power in 1991, after their early success in a democratic election, they would almost certainly have been illiberal rulers. (Instead, they were crushed by a military coup, before a second round of elections could take place, triggering a brutal eight-year civil war in which an estimated 200,000 people died.)

The aftermath of the 2006 coup in Thailand was not nearly so bloody. But the bitterness lingers among Thaksin Shinawatra’s supporters – even now, when his sister, Yingluck, is Prime Minister. Street violence is a constant threat. Only the frail and ailing 85-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej still functions as a symbol of national cohesion. Without him, fighting between the rural poor and the urban elites could quickly erupt again. This does not bode well for Thai democracy. Another military intervention is the last thing the country needs.

In Egypt, things look far worse at the moment. The leader of the military coup, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, has promised to confront Mr. Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood with maximum force. In two separate incidents in July, security forces opened fire on supporters of the Brotherhood as they peacefully protested against Mr. Morsi’s ouster and arrest, killing almost 200 people. Secret-police units that were active under former president Hosni Mubarak (and known for their frequent use of torture) are being reconstituted for the first time since the 2011 revolution.

None of this is either democratic or liberal. And yet many Egyptians, including some human-rights activists, have endorsed it.

One man, who was savagely stomped by a member of the armed forces in Tahrir Square in 2011, now claims that the Egyptian people should “stand together” with the military, and that all Muslim Brotherhood leaders should be arrested. A prominent democracy activist, Esraa Abdel Fattah, has denounced Mr. Morsi’s party as a gang of foreign-backed terrorists.

The army leadership is saying the same thing: Special measures, maximum force, and revived security units are all necessary to “fight terrorism.”

Some foreign commentators have been as deluded as Egyptians who back the coup. A well-known Dutch novelist voiced a rather typical response, saying that he didn’t care much what happened to Mr. Morsi’s supporters, for they were all “Islamo-fascists” anyway. And foreign governments, including that of the United States, are averting their eyes. President Barack Obama’s administration refuses to describe what happened as a “coup.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry even claimed that the military was “restoring democracy.”

There is no doubt that Mr. Morsi’s government was inexperienced, often incompetent, and showed little interest in listening to views other than those of its supporters, which were often far from liberal. But Mr. Morsi’s people are not foreign-backed terrorists. Nor was Mr. Morsi an Egyptian version of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomaini.

The election that brought Mr. Morsi to power gave a political voice for the first time to millions of people, many of them poor, uneducated, and religious. They may not have been very good democrats, or even particularly tolerant of different views. Many of them had opinions – for example, on the role of women, on sex, and on the place of Islam in public life – that secular liberals find abhorrent. But silencing these people by force, and calling them foreign-backed terrorists, can have only one result: more violence.

If the outcomes of democratic elections are not respected, people will seek other means to make themselves heard. Mr. Morsi’s autocratic inclinations may have damaged democracy; taking him out in a coup deals it a mortal blow.

How to bridge the gap in developing countries between secular, more or less Westernized urban elites and the rural poor is an old question. One solution is to enforce secular modernization by oppressing the poor and their religious organizations. Egypt has already endured the harsh rule of secular police states, of both the right and the left. The other solution is to give democracy a chance.

This is not possible without allowing some form of religious expression in public life. No democracy in the Middle East that fails to take account of Islam will work. But, without the freedom to express other views and beliefs, democracy will remain illiberal.

This is hard for Islamist parties to accept. Many Islamists may in fact prefer an illiberal to a liberal democracy. But liberals who truly favour democracy must accept that Islamists are entitled to play a political role, too. The alternative is to revert to illiberal autocracy. Applauding the military coup against Mohammed Morsi makes this the more likely outcome.

Ian Buruma is a professor of democracy, human rights, and journalism at Bard College.