The UN Swamp: French troops get away with sexual abuse while on UN duty

January 5, 2017

The UN tried to cover it up and it was only due to the revelations by a UN official which revealed the 90 cases of sexual harassment by French troops on UN duty. The whistle-blower was Anders Kompass who was director of field operations at the UN human rights office in Geneva. He was suspended and hounded by the “swamp” of the rotten UN bureaucracy and though he was exonerated he resigned from the UN last June. The predatory sexual behaviour of the French troops was beyond disgusting.

NYTimes:

For five months, an unknown number of people in the French forces, sent to protect civilians from the violence tearing the country apart, forced boys to perform oral sex on them, according to testimonies collected by the United Nations. The boys, aged 9 to 15, said they had sometimes been lured with the promise of military rations.

Now, nearly a year after the allegations came to light, no one has been charged, let alone punished.

It is now reported by AP that the French who were investigating their own troops have now decided that nobody will be prosecuted.

No charges in inquiry of child sex abuse by French troops

The Paris prosecutor’s office says an investigation into alleged child sexual abuse by French soldiers in Central African Republic has concluded without anyone being charged. Spokeswoman Agnes Thibault-Leroux said Thursday the investigation formally ended last month. She declined to elaborate.

French newspaper Le Monde reported that the decision stemmed from insufficient “elements” to press charges. Several boys told United Nations investigators they were sexually abused by French troops in the Central African Republic capital, Bangui, in May and June 2014. Fourteen French soldiers reportedly were suspected of being involved. The sexual abuse allegedly took place in or near a camp for displaced people near M’Poko airport.

The French defense ministry did not immediately comment.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said he understands that it’s now up to the prosecutor to decide whether to go forward, following the submission of results from the investigative judges. “So obviously we’ll keep an eye on this,” Dujarric said. “But as we’ve said, it is the responsibility of member states to fully investigate and hopefully prosecute crimes. The fight against impunity for these horrendous actions has to be a partnership between the U.N. and member states.”

Under Ban Ki-Moon the swamp at the UN became particularly murky and rotten. Not just the cholera which the UN introduced to Haiti killing almost 10,000 but also financial wrongdoings and sexual predation. In every case the UN – as an institution – has tried to cover up. Probably less than 10% of wrongdoing at the UN ever comes to light.

There isn’t just a swamp in Washington. There is one much larger and much more rotten at the UN.


Toyota will need to revise their Mexico plans as Trump tweets drive news

January 5, 2017

Trump’s tweets are driving the news.

And now he sets his sights on Toyota’s plans to build in Mexico and export to the US.

He tweeted this a few minutes ago:

20170105 -- 1910CET

20170105 — 1910CET

The Hill: 

Incoming White House press secretary Sean Spicer said President-elect Donald Trump’s tweets direct the news cycle.

“[It’s] because that’s what’s going to drive the news,” he said Wednesday during a panel at the University of Chicago, speaking with former President Obama adviser David Axelrod. “Whatever he tweets, he is going to drive the news.”

When Axelrod asked if Spicer feels “a certain sense of dread” about Trump’s posts on Twitter, the former Republican National Committee strategist responded: “No, but I do look there first.”

Spicer cited Trump’s tweet criticizing House Republicans Tuesday as evidence of the president-elect’s power.

“You saw the House vote the other day,” he told Axelrod, who served as chief strategist for Obama’s two presidential campaigns and a senior adviser in his White House.

“[Trump] sends a single tweet out, you know, that the House was not focused on tax reform and healthcare and instead was focused on the Office of [Congressional] Ethics,” Spicer said of the OCE. “Immediately, it’s withdrawn.”

The president-elect on Tuesday criticized House Republicans for prioritizing a plan to weaken the independent ethics panel over other major issues.

“Focus on tax reform, healthcare and so many other things of far greater importance,” he tweeted.

I expect Toyota will modify their plans.


 

Doubtful if NAFTA has been good for US trade or US jobs

January 4, 2017

That NAFTA has provided benefits for Mexico and Canada is evident.

Certainly volume of trade has increased sharply since NAFTA was established in 1994. But for the US the trade deficit has also ballooned. Some US jobs have shifted to Mexico. And whether NAFTA has created any real, net benefits for the US economy is more than a little doubtful.

from Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Spring 2014

from Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies, Spring 2014

When Donald Trump castigates US industry for shifting jobs to Mexico, he has a point.


 

Trump starts governing, by tweet and before assuming office!

January 3, 2017

Donald Trump has found a new tool, a new weapon which seems to be a remarkably effective way of getting a favourable response.

Without debate and without even being in office.

The Tweet.

CBS: House Republicans decide to strip ethics change in emergency meeting

House Republicans agreed Tuesday to withdraw the rules change that would have stripped the chamber’s outside ethics watchdog of its independence and power after heavy public backlash and tweets of disapproval from President-elect Donald Trump.

Republican lawmakers agreed by unanimous consent in a closed-door emergency meeting Monday to strip the rules change from their overall rules package that the lower chamber is scheduled to vote on later in the day, according to a GOP aide.

This came as the new Congress was supposed to gavel in, and just two hours after Mr. Trump tweeted that congressional Republicans shouldn’t be wasting their time with a major ethics change.

trump-ethics-tweets

On Monday night, a majority of Republicans voted to rename the Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE) to the Office of Congressional Complaint Review. The House Ethics Committee–whose members are lawmakers–will now oversee that outside office’s work.

Under the change proposed by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, the outside office would not have been able to investigate anonymous tips, it couldn’t have had a spokesperson and it would have been barred from releasing its findings to the public. Members of the House Ethics Committee would also have been able to stop the office’s investigations.

Two tweets and he got the House Republicans to backtrack. In two tweets he manged to do what Paul Ryan could not. Note that Trump gave the House Republicans who had secretly voted for the rule change, a face saving way to back off by terming the ethics watchdog as possibly “unfair”.

It was a negotiation by twitter and a successful one at that.


 

Noted in passing 2nd January 2017 ( Fake news, fake science and other trivia)

January 2, 2017
  1. White House fails to make case that Russian hackers tampered with election
  2. Evidence of Bias in Studies of Influenza Vaccine Effectiveness in Elderly Patients

  3. Russia denies CNN report on closure of Anglo-American School in Moscow

  4. Why Fake Data When You Can Fake a Scientist?

  5. “Fake News” And How The Washington Post Rewrote Its Story On Russian Hacking Of The Power Grid

  6. Planet Earth II ‘a disaster for world’s wildlife’ says rival nature producer

  7. Cologne Police Screen Hundreds Of North Africans, As Migrants Storm Spanish Enclave In Africa

  8. Aide: When Trump tweets, he gets results

  9. Academia’s Broken, so Why Defend Academic Freedom?
  10. EXXON’S 2040 OUTLOOK: FOSSIL FUELS AREN’T GOING ANYWHERE
Source: Exxon 2017 Outlook for Energy

Source: Exxon 2017 Outlook for Energy


 

Chicago – where lives (mainly black) don’t matter

January 1, 2017

One city, one year, 780 murders.

In 2015 Chicago had 478 murders.

The 780 victims are mainly young and male, mainly black and Hispanic.

The murderers are mainly young and male, mainly black and Hispanic.

Chicago has gun control.

Chicago murders 2016 - Chicago Sun Times

Chicago murders 2016 – Chicago Sun Times

Politically, Chicago is a Democratic stronghold, voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton and it is “home” to Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel among others.

Clinton won more than 83 percent of the city’s vote, just shy of Obama’s 2008 and 2012 results. Of Chicago’s 2,069 precincts, Trump won 51.

Liberalism has become licentiousness.


Once upon a time, a leap-second …..

December 31, 2016

Leap seconds were invented in 1972 (in which year we had 2 leap seconds, one in June and one in December). In 26 of the 44 years since 1972 we have had leap seconds. A year with a leap second happens more often than a year without. Today we add the 27th leap second since its introduction.

A leap second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time, or UT1. Without such a correction, time reckoned by Earth’s rotation drifts away from atomic time because of irregularities in the Earth’s rate of rotation. Since this system of correction was implemented in 1972, 26 leap seconds have been inserted, the most recent on June 30, 2015 at 23:59:60 UTC, and the next leap second will be inserted on December 31, 2016, at 23:59:60 UTC.

Having a leap-second is the new normal.

Deviation of day length from SI based day – Wikipedia


 

Obama suffering from demobilisation blues as he goes through his dead duck quacking routine

December 30, 2016

Of course Barack Obama does not have to live with the consequences of his last few weeks of hectic, rather childish and vindictive flailing around. A not untypical example of demobilisation blues.

This transition is turning out to be particularly graceless with a peevish, petulant Obama intent on “getting his own back”. His legacy, such little as it is, stands to be further tarnished by his dead duck quacking routine. It seems that Obama cannot bear to see Putin succeeding in Syria where he and Kerry so spectacularly failed. The Russian hacking – if you believe the speculation with little evidence by the US intelligence agencies – has apparently been going on for a decade. So exactly why Obama had to wait to the last gasps of his administration to act is difficult to explain as anything other than a childish desire to make trouble for his successor. I put it down to simple, vindictive s**t stirring. (It reminds me during my professional life of how we used to be rather wary of vindictive s**t stirring by unsuccessful CEO’s or project managers as they were being replaced. As a rule such exiting project managers were removed from authority as quickly as possible to avoid “graceless” transitions).

He has 3 more weeks for further s**t stirring.

The Russians reacted to his expulsion of 35 diplomats with this tweet from the Russian Embassy in the UK.

russian-reaction


 

Absence of US, EU and UN allows Russia and Turkey to broker Syrian ceasefire and peace talks

December 29, 2016

It seems to have been the absence of the US, the EU and the UN that has allowed Turkey and Russia to broker a ceasefire and peace talks in the 5 year old conflict in Syria.

kerry

Perhaps it could have come earlier if the false – and eventually futile – strategy of getting rid of Assad had not been followed so intransigently by the US, the EU and the UN as a pre-condition. The  Obama/Kerry (earlier Obama/Clinton) foreign policies are degenerating into fiasco. And in the meantime Obama and Kerry still follow a theoretical, but practically doomed, 2-state solution in Israel. The Israel/ Palestine issues will only – can only – be solved by Israel and Palestine.

Perhaps those talks would also benefit if the US and the UN butt out.

The Guardian:

The Assad government and armed Syrian opposition have signed a ceasefire agreement and agreed to begin a new round of negotiations to find a political solution to the country’s civil war, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, said on Thursday.

“We have just received news that a few hours ago the event we have all been waiting for and working towards has happened,” Putin said during a televised meeting with the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and defence minister, Sergei Shoigu.

Putin said three documents had been signed: a ceasefire agreement between the Syrian government and the armed opposition; a list of control mechanisms to ensure the ceasefire will work; and a statement of intent to begin negotiations on a political end to the conflict.

Putin said the ceasefire, which is due to come into force at midnight on Thursday (10pm GMT), was “fragile and will require a lot of attention”. Turkey and Russiawill act as guarantors, Turkey’s foreign ministry said, adding that the agreement excluded groups deemed as terrorists by the UN security council.

In Damascus, the Syrian army said the ceasefire comes after the “successes achieved by the armed forces,” an apparent reference to the capture of rebel-held neighbourhoods of Aleppo earlier this month.


 

Applied might is always right

December 29, 2016

might-is-right

Right and wrong are relative.

A “just”, but losing, cause is a contradiction in terms.

Having might alone is of little use, and all conflicts are decided by the might applied.

In Syria, the US had by far the most might but applied very little of it and are “now in the wrong”.

Russia applied sufficient might to defend Assad and break the back of the ISIS resistance and their intervention is now “in the right”.

In Aleppo, Assad and Russia and their Hezbollah/Iran supported groups applied sufficient might and they are now “in the right”.

In Mosul, the US/Iraq/Kurd/Shia militia coalition have as yet applied insufficient might and the outcome and the “rightness” are still to be decided.