TBR News May 4, 2017

The Voice of the White House

Washington, D.C. May 4, 2017: “If the pontificators that run the American print and controlled portions of the Internet news sites are so eager to edit out “false news” it would be best if they looked in the mirror first.

The great bulk of deliberately fake news is to be found in the establishment media and their pet Internet poodles whereas far more truthful news can be found on the unencumbered free news sites on the same Internet.

Once the New York Times was a very influential and sophisticated organ but now a simple glance at their Internet front page shows a level of writing that would to a certainty, in older times, be kept out of high school news papers.

New pizza restaurants in Brooklyn are cheek-by-jowl with heart-rending stories about Lesbian dwarves frantically searching for comfortable public lavatories or the terrifying spectacle of a right-wing politician being elected in a foreign country.

And this Moulder of Thought also is larded with glowing reports of the Perfect Excellence of the Wondrous State of Israel’s latest massacre of small Arab children or the Utter Perfidy of a Russia that tortures frogs and dares to hint at the Sacred Hillary’s public epileptic seizures.”

Table of Contents

• NYT Cheers the Rise of Censorship Algorithms
• Study reveals half of young Europeans are skeptical about democracy
• How Much Does a Politician Cost? A Groundbreaking Study Reveals the Influence of Money in Politics.
• UK will not pay 100 billion euro EU exit bill, says Brexit minister
• Korea warns China of ‘grave consequences,’ Beijing still wants ‘friendly relations’
• Number of potential terrorists in Germany on the rise, report says
• America’s Endless Afghan War
• There are diseases hidden in ice, and they are waking up
• Ex-defense minister says IS ‘apologized’ to Israel for November clash
• FBI aids in ‘hate crime’ investigation of bananas hung from nooses at American University
• More vicious racial media insults
• U.S. coaxes Mexico into Trump plan to overhaul Central America

NYT Cheers the Rise of Censorship Algorithms

The New York Times is cheering on the Orwellian future for Western “democracy” in which algorithms quickly hunt down and eliminate information that the Times and other mainstream outlets don’t like

May 2, 2017

by Robert Parry

consotriumnews

Just days after sporting First Amendment pins at the White House Correspondents Dinner – to celebrate freedom of the press – the mainstream U.S. media is back to celebrating a very different idea: how to use algorithms to purge the Internet of what is deemed “fake news,” i.e. what the mainstream judges to be “misinformation.”

The New York Times, one of the top promoters of this new Orwellian model for censorship, devoted two-thirds of a page in its Tuesday editions to a laudatory piece about high-tech entrepreneurs refining artificial intelligence that can hunt down and eradicate supposedly “fake news.”

To justify this draconian strategy, the Times cited only a “fake news” report claiming that the French establishment’s preferred presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron had received funding from Saudi Arabia, a bogus story published by a Web site that mimicked the appearance of the newspaper Le Soir and was traced back to a Delaware phone number.

Yet, while such intentionally fabricated articles as well as baseless conspiracy theories are a bane of the Internet – and do deserve hearty condemnation – the Times gives no thought to the potential downside of having a select group of mainstream journalistic entities feeding their judgment about what is true and what is not into some algorithms that would then scrub the Internet of contrary items.

Since the Times is a member of the Google-funded First Draft Coalition – along with other mainstream outlets such as The Washington Post and the pro-NATO propaganda site Bellingcat – this idea of eliminating information that counters what the group asserts is true may seem quite appealing to the Times and the other insiders. After all, it might seem cool to have some high-tech tool that silences your critics automatically?

But you don’t need a huge amount of imagination to see how this combination of mainstream groupthink and artificial intelligence could create an Orwellian future in which only one side of a story gets told and the other side simply disappears from view.

As much as the Times, the Post, Bellingcat and the others see themselves as the fount of all wisdom, the reality is that they have all made significant journalistic errors, sometimes contributing to horrific international crises.

For instance, in 2002, the Times reported that Iraq’s purchase of aluminum tubes revealed a secret nuclear weapons program (when the tubes were really for artillery); the Post wrote as flat-fact that Saddam Hussein was hiding stockpiles of WMD (which in reality didn’t exist); Bellingcat misrepresented the range of a Syrian rocket that delivered sarin on a neighborhood near Damascus in 2013 (creating the impression that the Syrian government was at fault when the rocket apparently came from rebel-controlled territory).

These false accounts – and many others from the mainstream media – were countered in real time by experts who published contrary information on the Internet. But if the First Draft Coalition and these algorithms were in control, the information scrubbers might have purged the dissident assessments as “fake news” or “misinformation.”

Totalitarian Risks

There also should be the fear – even among these self-appointed guardians of “truth” – that their algorithms might someday be put to use by a totalitarian regime to stomp out the last embers of real democracy. However, if you’re looking for such thoughtfulness, you won’t find it in the Times article by Mark Scott. Instead, the Times glorifies the creators of this Brave New World.

“In the battle against fake news, Andreas Vlachos — a Greek computer scientist living in a northern English town — is on the front lines,” the article reads. “Armed with a decade of machine learning expertise, he is part of a British start-up that will soon release an automated fact-checking tool ahead of the country’s election in early June. He also is advising a global competition that pits computer wizards from the United States to China against each other to use artificial intelligence to combat fake news. …

“As Europe readies for several elections this year after President Trump’s victory in the United States, Mr. Vlachos, 36, is one of a growing number of technology experts worldwide who are harnessing their skills to tackle misinformation online. … Computer scientists, tech giants and start-ups are using sophisticated algorithms and reams of online data to quickly — and automatically — spot fake news faster than traditional fact-checking groups can.”

The Times quotes the promoters of this high-tech censorship effort without any skepticism:

“‘Algorithms will have to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to fighting misinformation,’ said Claire Wardle, head of strategy and research at First Draft News, a nonprofit organization that has teamed up with tech companies and newsrooms to debunk fake reports about elections in the United States and Europe. ‘It’s impossible to do all of this by hand.’”

The article continues: “So far, outright fake news stories have been relatively rare [in Europe]. Instead, false reports have more often come from Europeans on social media taking real news out of context, as well as from fake claims spread by state-backed groups like Sputnik, the Russian news organization.”

Little Evidence Needed

Though providing no details about Sputnik’s alleged guilt, the Times article links to another Times article from April 17 by Andrew Higgins that accuses Russia’s RT network of “fake news” because it detected a surge in opinion polls for Francois Fillon, who stands accused in the mainstream media of having a positive relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Oddly, however, further down in the story, Higgins acknowledges that “lately, Mr. Fillon has seen a bump in real opinion polls.”

(Ultimately, Fillon finished a strong third with 20 percent of the vote, one percentage point behind National Front’s Marine Le Pen and four points behind Emmanuel Macron, the two finalists. It’s also curious that the Times would fault RT for getting poll results wrong when the Times published predictions, with 90 percent or more certainty – and 85 percent on Nov. 8 – that Hillary Clinton would win the U.S. presidential election.)

Beyond failing to offer any evidence of Russian guilt in these “fake news” operations, Tuesday’s Times story turns to the NATO propaganda and psychological warfare operation in Latvia, the Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, with its director Janis Sarts warning about “an increased amount of misinformation out there.”

The Stratcom center, which oversees information warfare against NATO’s perceived adversaries, is conducting “a hackathon” this month in search of coders who can develop technology to hunt down news that NATO considers “fake.”

Sarts, however, makes clear that Stratcom’s goal is not only to expunge contradictory information but to eliminate deviant viewpoints before too many people can get to see and hear them. “State-based actors have been trying to amplify specific views to bring them into the mainstream,” Sarts told the Times.

As the Times reports, much of the pressure for shutting down “fake news” has fallen on American tech giants such as Facebook and Google – and they are responding:

“After criticism of its role in spreading false reports during the United States elections, Facebook introduced a fact-checking tool ahead of the Dutch elections in March and the first round of the French presidential election on April 23. It also removed 30,000 accounts in France that had shared fake news, a small fraction of the approximately 33 million Facebook users in the country.”

A Growing Movement

And, according to the Times, this censorship movement is spreading:

“German lawmakers are mulling potential hefty fines against tech companies if they do not clamp down on fake news and online hate speech. Since last year, Google also has funded almost 20 European projects aimed at fact-checking potentially false reports. That includes its support for two British groups looking to use artificial intelligence to automatically fact-check online claims ahead of the country’s June 8 parliamentary election. …

“David Chavalarias, a French academic, has created a digital tool that has analyzed more than 80 million Twitter messages about the French election, helping journalists and fact-checkers to quickly review claims that are spread on the social network.

“After the presidential election in the United States last year, Dean Pomerleau, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, also challenged his followers on Twitter to come up with an algorithm that could distinguish fake claims from real news.

“Working with Delip Rao, a former Google researcher, he offered a $2,000 prize to anyone who could meet his requirements. By early this year, more than 100 teams from around the world had signed on to Mr. Pomerleau’s Fake News Challenge. Using a database of verified articles and their artificial intelligence expertise, rival groups — a combination of college teams, independent programmers and groups from existing tech companies — already have been able to accurately predict the veracity of certain claims almost 90 percent of the time, Mr. Pomerleau said. He hopes that figure will rise to the mid-90s before his challenge ends in June.”

So, presumably based on what the Times, the Post, Bellingcat and the other esteemed oracles of truth say is true, 90 percent or more of contrary information could soon be vulnerable to the censorship algorithms that can quickly detect and stamp out divergent points of view. Such is the Orwellian future mapped out for Western “democracy,” and The New York Times can’t wait for this tightly regulated – one might say, rigged – “marketplace of ideas” to take over.

Study reveals half of young Europeans are skeptical about democracy

Just half of Europeans aged 16-26 believe democracy is the best form of government. The figure was revealed in a survey that polled 6,000 young Europeans in seven countries.

May 4, 2017

by Matt Zuvela

DW

The results of the YouGov study, commissioned by the TUI Foundation and released Thursday, show that respondents from Germany and Greece were most in favor of democracy (62 and 66 percent), while France, Italy and Poland were the least convinced of its effectiveness (42, 45 and 42 percent).

The study noted that the latter three countries had experienced a growth in populist movements. France sees a runoff vote this weekend to decide if Marine Le Pen, a far-right candidate claiming she will protect France’s national identity, will be its next president. However, polls predict Emmanuel Macron, a centrist candidate, is likely to claim victory.

The YouGov study, which was conducted between February 16 and March 3, surveyed 6,000 people aged 16-26 from Britain, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Spain.

Distanced from the EU

Another finding from the study was that young people see the European Union more as an economic alliance (76 percent) than a grouping of nations with common cultural values (30 percent).

“A Europe whose value is seen, above all, in the advantages of the common market threatens to become interchangeable and arbitrary,” said Thomas Ellerbeck, chair of the board of trustees at the TUI Foundation, in a statement on the foundation’s website. “It is therefore important to discuss the shared values of Europe. Here all social actors are required, not just politicians.”

In the seven countries polled, an average of one in five respondents said they were in favor of their country leaving the EU. This figure was highest in Greece (31 percent for leaving the EU) and lowest in Germany and Spain, where 12 percent would vote for an EU exit.

Greek respondents were most in favor of the EU returning some power to national governments, with 60 percent indicating they supported this idea. The average of those polled was 38 percent, while only 22 percent of Germans indicated they would want the EU to give up some power to national governments.

How Much Does a Politician Cost? A Groundbreaking Study Reveals the Influence of Money in Politics.

May 4 2017

by Jon Schwarz

The Intercept

An ingenious new Roosevelt Institute study on the influence of money on politics begins with an incredible story about how the world actually works:

In the spring of 1987, Paul Volcker’s second term as chair of the Federal Reserve was running out. Volcker had first been appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1979, and was willing to stay for another four years if President Reagan asked. While Volcker had used high interest rates to engineer a crushing recession at the start of Reagan’s first term, he then allowed the economy to expand rapidly just in time to carry Reagan to a landslide reelection in 2004.

Yet Reagan wanted to replace him. Why?

The study’s authors, Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgensen, and Jie Chen, report that they learned the answer from a participant in the key White House meeting on Volcker’s fate.

The main opposition to reappointing Volcker came from Reagan’s treasury secretary James Baker. As the study puts it, Baker did not like Volcker’s “skepticism about financial deregulation,” specifically his opposition to attempts to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act.

Glass-Steagall, passed at the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency in the depths of the Great Depression, separated commercial and investment banking. Allowing banks to combine the two activities had created enormous conflicts of interests and incentivized manic recklessness that helped cause 1929’s financial Armageddon.

But banks had loathed Glass-Steagall ever since, because the fewer economy-destroying risks they could take, the lower their profits. By 1987 they were making progress in their long war to push Congress to repeal it. And while Fed chairs of course can’t vote themselves, many politicians take their cues from them on complex financial issues.

According to the Roosevelt study, that was why Volcker had to go:

Baker’s was startlingly direct: Possible repeal of Glass-Steagall was the signature issue used by investment bankers, led by then-Goldman Sachs executive Robert Rubin, to raise money for the Democratic Party from their cohorts on Wall Street. Getting rid of Glass-Steagall, Baker explained, would alter the balance of power between the two major parties by depriving the Democrats of a central revenue stream.

So Volcker was replaced by Alan Greenspan, who gleefully supported the elimination of Glass-Steagall in 1999 — as did Robert Rubin, who became treasury secretary under Bill Clinton. Coincidentally or not, within a decade Wall Street had inflated the biggest bubble in world history in an attempt at mass suicide, saved only by trillions of dollars of government support. They were too big to fail, while millions of regular Americans turned out to be just the right size to fail.

As horrifying as this tale is, few normal people would be surprised by any of it. A 2015 New York Times poll found that 87 percent of Americans believe the campaign finance system either needs “fundamental changes” or should be “completely rebuilt.” Politicians themselves will tell you that their world is ruled by money. And the super-wealthy obviously believe money translates into power, since they continue pouring it into politics.

Strangely, almost the only human beings who think that money doesn’t warp politics are academic political scientists who study it. The Roosevelt study quotes a previous paper summarizing the “scholarly consensus” as being that “candidate spending has very modest to negligible causal effects on candidate vote shares.”

The Roosevelt authors go to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate to their colleagues that the sky is, in fact, blue. The study uses all the tools of academic scholarship in impressively creative ways, and will convince anyone who can be convinced by rationality and evidence.

First of all, the study explains, “exceptions, additions, and loopholes have proliferated around the rules governing legal contributions and expenditures. Congress has many times enacted rules that appeared to close off gushing torrents of money while in fact opening new ones.” The system is now “worthy of Gogol: a maze of bureaucratic spending and expenditures” that are exceedingly difficult to track.

The Roosevelt authors went to the effort of capturing as much of it as possible — and found that academic examinations of this subject miss as much as 50 percent of the money being spent on elections.

It’s also tough to legitimately measure how money could translate into congressional votes. Legislation often is thwarted by small numbers of politicians in committees, too few to create a good data set. In the Senate, few votes are ever taken, with most of the action going on beneath the surface. And there’s a continuous churn of elected officials, making it hard to find an inflection point in the decisions of any one individual.

The Roosevelt study therefore focuses on an issue where politicians were repeatedly forced to go on the record — House votes on the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill — and Democratic representatives who were representing the same district over several terms and would seemingly have little reason to change their minds.

Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010. After the GOP took control of the House in the midterm elections that year, representatives voted five times from 2013 to 2015 to weaken key provisions of the law in ways that big banks desperately desired.

There would be no discernible legitimate reason for Democratic representatives who’d supported Dodd-Frank to begin with to later defect from their party and vote along with Wall Street. Many did, however.

Why? Well, no one can say what was in their hearts, at least until we hear from someone like James Baker. But what the Roosevelt study demonstrates is that “for every $100,000 that Democratic representatives received from finance, the odds they would break with their party’s majority support for the Dodd-Frank legislation increased by 13.9 percent. Democratic representatives who voted in favor of finance often received $200,000-$300,000 from that sector, which raised the odds of switching by 25-40 percent.”

Intriguingly, Democratic representatives leaving the House after the 2014 elections were particularly likely to support Wall Street against Dodd-Frank. In an interview, Ferguson characterized their votes as “applications for employment.”

The study also looks at any connections between money from the telecom industry and a crucial 2006 House vote on net neutrality. For every $1,000 a representative received from corporations supporting net neutrality, like Google or Netflix, they were 24 percent more likely to vote for it. For every $1,000 from companies opposing it, they were 2.6 percent more likely to vote against.

For most people, the Roosevelt study — which is genuinely fascinating and, unusually for an academic paper, worth reading just for the quality of its writing — will confirm what they already sensed. Ferguson said he hopes it will also help “end the discussion” in academia on whether money matters in politics.

But while it should do that in a rational world, this is likely over-optimistic. Consider the fact that, no matter what the real world evidence has shown, academic economists continue pumping out studies about the desperate importance of cutting the taxes of billionaires. H.L. Menken explained that phenomenon almost 100 years ago:

To what extent is political economy, as professors expound and practice it, a free science, in the sense that mathematics and physiology are free sciences?

… When one comes to the faculty of political economy one finds that freedom as plainly conditioned, though perhaps not as openly, as in the faculty of theology. And for a plain reason. Political economy, so to speak, hits the employers of the professors where they live. It deals, not with ideas that affect those employers only occasionally or only indirectly or only as ideas, but with ideas that have an imminent and continuous influence upon their personal welfare and security, and that affect profoundly the very foundations of that social and economic structure upon which their whole existence is based. It is, in brief, the science of the ways and means whereby they have come to such estate, and maintain themselves in such estate, that they are able to hire and boss professors.

Likewise, those who hire and boss professors of political science love to hear that money makes no difference in politics. And no matter how hard academics like Ferguson, Jorgensen, and Chen work, and how much real world evidence they pile up, many other professors will likely continue making that case indefinitely.

UK will not pay 100 billion euro EU exit bill, says Brexit minister

May 3, 2017

Reuters

Britain will not be paying 100 billion euros ($109.14 billion) to leave the European Union, Brexit minister David Davis said on Wednesday after the Financial Times reported that the EU was preparing to demand that amount.

Citing its own analysis of new stricter demands it said were driven by France and Germany, the newspaper said 100 billion euros was a gross figure.

“We’ll not be paying 100 billion. What we’ve got to do is discuss in detail what the rights and obligations are,” Davis told British channel ITV.

He also said that the British government had not seen a figure from the EU for the exit bill.

The FT said that after requests from member states, EU negotiators had revised their initial calculations to maximise the liabilities Britain would be asked to cover, including post-Brexit farm payments and EU administration fees in 2019 and 2020.

(Reporting by Estelle Shirbon, editing by Guy Faulconbridge)

Korea warns China of ‘grave consequences,’ Beijing still wants ‘friendly relations’

May 4, 2017

RT

North Korea has warned China of “grave consequences” if it “chops down” relations between the two countries. Despite the angry outburst, Beijing says it wants to maintain friendly relations with its neighbor.

In a commentary late Wednesday, North Korean state news agency KCNA took aim at a “string of absurd and reckless remarks” from Chinese media towards Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.

“The DPRK will never beg for the maintenance of friendship with China, risking its nuclear program which is as precious as its own life, no matter how valuable the friendship is,” the editorial said.

“China should no longer try to test the limits of the DPRK’s patience… [and] had better ponder over the grave consequences to be entailed by its reckless act of chopping down the pillar of the DPRK-China relations,” it continued.

The remarks were in response to commentaries published in China’s People’s Daily and Global Times newspapers, which called for tougher sanctions over the North’s nuclear program.

KCNA said that Chinese state media calls for Pyongyang to dismantle its nuclear program were a “wanton violation of the independent and legitimate rights, dignity and supreme interests” of North Korea and constitute “an undisguised threat to an honest-minded neighboring country which has a long history and tradition of friendship.”

The People’s Daily and Global Times both responded to Pyongyang in Thursday commentaries, with the latter accusing North Korea of “irrational logic over its nuclear program.”

However, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang stated on Thursday that while China’s position on North Korea’s nuclear program is “consistent and clear,” so is its desire to maintain a good relationship with Pyongyang.

“China’s position on developing friendly, good-neighborly relations with North Korea is also consistent and clear,” he said, as quoted by Reuters.

He added that China is devoted to the denuclearization of the peninsula, maintaining peace and security, and resolving the issue through talks.

Although Beijing has a good relationship with Pyongyang and is its major economic lifeline, Beijing has become increasingly impatient with North Korea’s nuclear program, which it fears could lead to a regional crisis.

The US has been urging China to put more pressure on Pyongyang, in an effort to stop North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

US President Donald Trump has held calls with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the North Korea issue, and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday said that Washington should test China’s commitment to reining in its neighbor by “leaning in hard” on Xi.

In addition, diplomats cited by Reuters say Washington and Beijing are negotiating a possible strong UN Security Council response – such as new sanctions – to North Korea’s repeated ballistic missile launches in defiance of Council resolutions.

Meanwhile, China has repeatedly urged for the US and all other parties involved in the North Korean standoff to exercise restraint and “stop irritating each other.”

Number of potential terrorists in Germany on the rise, report says

A newspaper report citing federal police statistics has indicated the number of potential terrorists in Germany is increasing. More than 600 people are considered capable of carrying out an attack.

May 4, 2017

by Matt Zuvela

DW

According to a report in the “Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung” newspaper published on Thursday, the number of people in Germany considered by authorities to be at risk of becoming Islamist terrorists is on the rise.

Citing numbers from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), the paper reported that there are currently 657 people believed to be capable of carrying out a terror attack. According to the BKA, this number has quadrupled since the start of the war in Syria.

Many regarded as potential threats are being monitored by police, and around 100 are currently in jail. In addition, there are 388 “relevant persons” who could be considered at risk of lending assistance to perpetrators of terrorist acts.

Part of the reason for the dramatic rise in the number of potential terrorist in Germany is a change in how such evaluations are made , the newspaper said. Following an attack in December that saw a man drive a truck into a crowded Christmas market, authorities across Germany now use the same system for evaluating a person’s potential threat. Previously, states had used varying definitions of what constitutes a threat.

In addition, fewer German citizens are leaving the country to join the so-called Islamic State (IS) in Syria or Iraq and considering attacks closer to home instead. According to authorities, this can be contributed to the fact that IS is being militarily weakened and fighting for them is a less attractive option.

Despite the drop, the BKA also reports that it has registered 920 people who have left Germany for Iraq or Syria. Around 70 are reported to have taken part in fighting or in training camps, with an additional 145 killed.

America’s Endless Afghan War

May 4, 2017

by William J. Astore,

AntiWar

News this week that 300 Marines have returned to Helmand Province in Afghanistan recalls the failed surge of 2009-10, when roughly 20,000 Marines beat back the Taliban in the region, only to see those “fragile” gains quickly turn to “reversible” ones (to cite the infamous terms of General David Petraeus, architect of that surge).

While fragility and reversibility characterize American progress, the Taliban continues to make real progress. According to today’s report at FP: Foreign Policy, “the Taliban controls or contests about 40 percent of the districts in the country, 16 years after the U.S. war there began.” Meanwhile, in January and February more than 800 Afghan troops were killed fighting the Taliban, notes Foreign Policy, citing a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction. That’s a high figure given that fighting abates during the winter.

Besides committing fresh US Marines to more Afghan security forces “training,” the US military has responded with PR spin. For example, when friendly Afghan forces abandoned a district and police headquarters, a US spokesman claimed it had been “repositioned.” According to FP: Foreign Policy, “US forces helped in ferrying [Afghan] government troops and workers out, and American jets came back to destroy the rest of the buildings and vehicles left behind.” Literally, the old district center and its resources had to be destroyed, and a new one created, for the Afghan position to be “saved.”

Destroying things to “save” them: Where have we heard that before? The Vietnam War, of course, a lesson not lost on Aaron O’Connell, a US Marine who edited the book Our Latest Longest War: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan. O’Connell’s recent interview with NPR cites the Vietnam example as he explains the one step forward, two steps back, nature of America’s Afghan War. In his words:

So we’ve spent billions building roads in Afghanistan, but we then turned the roads over to the Afghans in 2013. We trained up a maintenance unit so that it could provide for road maintenance, and nothing has happened since then. Now, today, more than half of the roads are deemed unfit for heavy traffic. And as one taxi driver put it in 2014 – things have gotten so much worse, now if we drive too fast, everyone in the car dies.

So it’s – really, we have to think about the things that are sustainable.

Americans have spent an enormous amount of money in Afghanistan without thinking about how to sustain the improvements we’ve funded. Meanwhile, as O’Connell notes, the security situation (as in lack of security) in Afghanistan undermines those infrastructure efforts.

With respect to US efforts to create a viable Afghan Army, O’Connell doesn’t mince words about its failings:

[T]he massive assembly-line attempt to produce capable, professional national security forces has not worked well, and it’s been at tremendous cost. And for all those who say we should just keep doing what we’re doing in Afghanistan, let me explain why that’s not sustainable. Every year, between a quarter and a third of the Afghan army and the police desert. Now, these are people that we have armed and trained. We’ve given weapons to them. We’ve given them basic military training. And every year, a third of them disappear [with their guns].

Here’s the grim reality: US military efforts to take charge and win the war, as in “winning hearts and minds” (known as WHAM) in 2009-10, proved unsustainable. Follow-on efforts to turn the war over to the Afghan government (analogous to LBJ and Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy in the waning years of the Vietnam War) are also failing. Yet America’s newest commanding general in Afghanistan wants yet more troops for yet more “training,” effectively doubling down on a losing hand.

The logical conclusion – that’s it’s high-time US forces simply left Afghanistan – is never contemplated in Washington. This is why Douglas Wissing’s book, Hopeless But Optimistic: Journeying through America’s Endless War in Afghanistan, is so immensely valuable. Wissing is a journalist who embedded with US forces in Afghanistan in 2013. His book consists of short chapters of sharply drawn vignettes focusing on the street and grunt level. Its collective lesson: Afghanistan, for Americans, doesn’t really exist as a country and a people. It exists only as a wasteful, winless, and endless war.

What is Afghanistan to Americans? It’s an opportunity for profit and exploitation for contractors. It’s a job as well as a personal proving ground for US troops. It’s a chance to test theories and to earn points (and decorations) for promotion for many officers. It’s hardly ever about working closely with the Afghan people to find solutions that will work for them over the long haul.

A telling example Wissing cites is wells. Americans came with lots of money to drill deep water wells for Afghan villagers and farmers (as opposed to relying on traditional Afghan irrigation systems featuring underground channels that carry mountain water to the fields with minimal evaporation). Instead of revolutionizing Afghan agriculture, the wells drove down water tables and exhausted aquifers. As the well-digging frenzy (Wissing’s word) disrupted Afghanistan’s fragile, semiarid ecosystem, powerful Afghans fought to control the new wells, creating new tensions among tribes. The American “solution,” in sum, is exacerbating conflict while exhausting the one resource the Afghan people can’t do without: water.

Then there’s the “poo pond,” a human sewage lagoon at Kandahar Air Field that was to be used as a source for organic fertilizer. I’ll let Wissing take the tale from here:

But instead of enriching Afghan soil, the U.S.-led coalition forces decided to burn the mountains of fertilizer with astronomically expensive imported gasoline. The [US air force] officer reminded me that the Taliban got $1500 in protection money for each US fuel tanker they let through, so in the process the jihadists were also able to skim the American shit [from the poo pond].

Walking back, I spot a green metal dumpster stenciled with a large sign that reads, “General Waste Only.” At that moment, it seems to sum up the whole war.

Wissing’s hard-edged insights demonstrate that America is never going to win in Afghanistan, unless “winning” is measured by money wasted. Again, Americans simply see Afghanistan too narrowly, as a “war” to won, as a problem to be managed, as an environment to be controlled.

Indeed, the longstanding failure of our “answers” is consistent with the military’s idea we’re fighting a generational or “long” war. We may be failing, but that’s OK, since we have a “long” time to get things right.

After sixteen years and a trillion dollars, the answer in Afghanistan is not another sixteen years and another trillion dollars. Yet that’s exactly what America seems prepared to do in the endless war that to us defines Afghanistan.

There are diseases hidden in ice, and they are waking up

Long-dormant bacteria and viruses, trapped in ice and permafrost for centuries, are reviving as Earth’s climate warms

May 4, 2017

by Jasmin Fox-Skelly

BBC News

Throughout history, humans have existed side-by-side with bacteria and viruses. From the bubonic plague to smallpox, we have evolved to resist them, and in response they have developed new ways of infecting us.

We have had antibiotics for over a century, ever since Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. In response, bacteria have responded by evolving antibiotic resistance. The battle is endless: because we spend so much time with pathogens, we sometimes develop a kind of natural stalemate.

However, what would happen if we were suddenly exposed to deadly bacteria and viruses that have been absent for thousands of years, or that we have never met before?

We may be about to find out. Climate change is melting permafrost soils that have been frozen for thousands of years, and as the soils melt they are releasing ancient viruses and bacteria that, having lain dormant, are springing back to life.

In August 2016, in a remote corner of Siberian tundra called the Yamal Peninsula in the Arctic Circle, a 12-year-old boy died and at least twenty people were hospitalised after being infected by anthrax.

The theory is that, over 75 years ago, a reindeer infected with anthrax died and its frozen carcass became trapped under a layer of frozen soil, known as permafrost. There it stayed until a heatwave in the summer of 2016, when the permafrost thawed.

This exposed the reindeer corpse and released infectious anthrax into nearby water and soil, and then into the food supply. More than 2,000 reindeer grazing nearby became infected, which then led to the small number of human cases.

The fear is that this will not be an isolated case.

As the Earth warms, more permafrost will melt. Under normal circumstances, superficial permafrost layers about 50cm deep melt every summer. But now global warming is gradually exposing older permafrost layers.

Frozen permafrost soil is the perfect place for bacteria to remain alive for very long periods of time, perhaps as long as a million years. That means melting ice could potentially open a Pandora’s box of diseases.

The temperature in the Arctic Circle is rising quickly, about three times faster than in the rest of the world. As the ice and permafrost melt, other infectious agents may be released.

“Permafrost is a very good preserver of microbes and viruses, because it is cold, there is no oxygen, and it is dark,” says evolutionary biologist Jean-Michel Claverie at Aix-Marseille University in France. “Pathogenic viruses that can infect humans or animals might be preserved in old permafrost layers, including some that have caused global epidemics in the past.”

In the early 20th Century alone, more than a million reindeer died from anthrax. It is not easy to dig deep graves, so most of these carcasses are buried close to the surface, scattered among 7,000 burial grounds in northern Russia.

However, the big fear is what else is lurking beneath the frozen soil.

People and animals have been buried in permafrost for centuries, so it is conceivable that other infectious agents could be unleashed. For instance, scientists have discovered intact 1918 Spanish flu virus in corpses buried in mass graves in Alaska’s tundra. Smallpox and the bubonic plague are also likely buried in Siberia.

In a 2011 study, Boris Revich and Marina Podolnaya wrote: “As a consequence of permafrost melting, the vectors of deadly infections of the 18th and 19th Centuries may come back, especially near the cemeteries where the victims of these infections were buried.”

For instance, in the 1890s there was a major epidemic of smallpox in Siberia. One town lost up to 40% of its population. Their bodies were buried under the upper layer of permafrost on the banks of the Kolyma River. 120 years later, Kolyma’s floodwaters have started eroding the banks, and the melting of the permafrost has speeded up this erosion process.

In a project that began in the 1990s, scientists from the State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Novosibirsk have tested the remains of Stone Age people that had been found in southern Siberia, in the region of Gorny Altai. They have also tested samples from the corpses of men who had died during viral epidemics in the 19th Century and were buried in the Russian permafrost.

The researchers say they have found bodies with sores characteristic of the marks left by smallpox. While they did not find the smallpox virus itself, they have detected fragments of its DNA.

Certainly it is not the first time that bacteria frozen in ice have come back to life.

In a 2005 study, NASA scientists successfully revived bacteria that had been encased in a frozen pond in Alaska for 32,000 years. The microbes, called Carnobacterium pleistocenium, had been frozen since the Pleistocene period, when woolly mammoths still roamed the Earth. Once the ice melted, they began swimming around, seemingly unaffected.

Two years later, scientists managed to revive an 8-million-year-old bacterium that had been lying dormant in ice, beneath the surface of a glacier in the Beacon and Mullins valleys of Antarctica. In the same study, bacteria were also revived from ice that was over 100,000 years old.

However, not all bacteria can come back to life after being frozen in permafrost. Anthrax bacteria can do so because they form spores, which are extremely hardy and can survive frozen for longer than a century.

Other bacteria that can form spores, and so could survive in permafrost, include tetanus and Clostridium botulinum, the pathogen responsible for botulism: a rare illness that can cause paralysis and even prove fatal. Some fungi can also survive in permafrost for a long time.

Some viruses can also survive for lengthy periods.

In a 2014 study, a team led by Claverie revived two viruses that had been trapped in Siberian permafrost for 30,000 years. Known as Pithovirus sibericum and Mollivirus sibericum, they are both “giant viruses”, because unlike most viruses they are so big they can be seen under a regular microscope. They were discovered 100ft underground in coastal tundra.

Once they were revived, the viruses quickly became infectious. Fortunately for us, these particular viruses only infect single-celled amoebas. Still, the study suggests that other viruses, which really could infect humans, might be revived in the same way.

What’s more, global warming does not have to directly melt permafrost to pose a threat. Because the Arctic sea ice is melting, the north shore of Siberia has become more easily accessible by sea. As a result, industrial exploitation, including mining for gold and minerals, and drilling for oil and natural gas, is now becoming profitable.

“At the moment, these regions are deserted and the deep permafrost layers are left alone,” says Claverie. “However, these ancient layers could be exposed by the digging involved in mining and drilling operations. If viable virions are still there, this could spell disaster.”

Giant viruses may be the most likely culprits for any such viral outbreak.

“Most viruses are rapidly inactivated outside host cells, due to light, desiccation, or spontaneous biochemical degradation,” says Claverie. “For instance, if their DNA is damaged beyond possible repair, the virions will no longer be infectious. However, among known viruses, the giant viruses tend to be very tough and almost impossible to break open.”

Claverie says viruses from the very first humans to populate the Arctic could emerge. We could even see viruses from long-extinct hominin species like Neanderthals and Denisovans, both of which settled in Siberia and were riddled with various viral diseases. Remains of Neanderthals from 30-40,000 years ago have been spotted in Russia. Human populations have lived there, sickened and died for thousands of years.

“The possibility that we could catch a virus from a long-extinct Neanderthal suggests that the idea that a virus could be ‘eradicated’ from the planet is wrong, and gives us a false sense of security,” says Claverie. “This is why stocks of vaccine should be kept, just in case.”

Since 2014, Claverie has been analysing the DNA content of permafrost layers, searching for the genetic signature of viruses and bacteria that could infect humans. He has found evidence of many bacteria that are probably dangerous to humans. The bacteria have DNA that encodes virulence factors: molecules that pathogenic bacteria and viruses produce, which increase their ability to infect a host.

Claverie’s team has also found a few DNA sequences that seem to come from viruses, including herpes. However, they have not as yet found any trace of smallpox. For obvious reasons, they have not attempted to revive any of the pathogens.

It now seems that pathogens cut off from humans will emerge from other places too, not just ice or permafrost.

In February 2017, NASA scientists announced that they had found 10-50,000-year-old microbes inside crystals in a Mexican mine.

The bacteria were located in the Cave of the Crystals, part of a mine in Naica in northern Mexico. The cave contains many milky-white crystals of the mineral selenite, which formed over hundreds of thousands of years.

The bacteria were trapped inside small, fluid pockets of the crystals, but once they were removed they revived and began multiplying. The microbes are genetically unique and may well be new species, but the researchers are yet to publish their work.

Even older bacteria have been found in the Lechuguilla Cave in New Mexico, 1,000ft underground. These microbes have not seen the surface for over 4 million years.

The cave never sees sunlight, and it is so isolated that it takes about 10,000 years for water from the surface to get into the cave.

Despite this, the bacteria have somehow become resistant to 18 types of antibiotics, including drugs considered to be a “last resort” for fighting infections. In a study published in December 2016, researchers found that the bacteria, known as Paenibacillus sp. LC231, was resistant to 70% of antibiotics and was able to totally inactivate many of them.

As the bacteria have remained completely isolated in the cave for four million years, they have not come into contact with people or the antibiotic drugs used to treat human infections. That means its antibiotic resistance must have arisen in some other way.

The scientists involved believe that the bacteria, which does not harm humans, is one of many that have naturally evolved resistance to antibiotics. This suggests that antibiotic resistance has been around for millions or even billions of years.

Obviously, such ancient antibiotic resistance cannot have evolved in the clinic as a result of antibiotic use.

The reason for this is that many types of fungi, and even other bacteria, naturally produce antibiotics to gain a competitive advantage over other microbes. That is how Fleming first discovered penicillin: bacteria in a petri dish died after one became contaminated with an antibiotic-excreting mould.

In caves, where there is little food, organisms must be ruthless if they are to survive. Bacteria like Paenibacillus may have had to evolve antibiotic resistance in order to avoid being killed by rival organisms.

This would explain why the bacteria are only resistance to natural antibiotics, which come from bacteria and fungi, and make up about 99.9% of all the antibiotics we use. The bacteria have never come across man-made antibiotics, so do not have a resistance to them.

“Our work, and the work of others, suggests that antibiotic resistance is not a novel concept,” says microbiologist Hazel Barton of the University of Akron, Ohio, who led the study. “Our organisms have been isolated from surface species from 4-7 million years, yet the resistance that they have is genetically identical to that found in surface species. This means that these genes are at least that old, and didn’t emerge from the human use of antibiotics for treatment.”

Although Paenibacillus itself is not harmful to humans, it could in theory pass on its antibiotic resistance to other pathogens. However, as it is isolated beneath 400m of rock, this seems unlikely.

Nevertheless, natural antibiotic resistance is probably so prevalent that many of the bacteria emerging from melting permafrost may already have it. In line with that, in a 2011 study scientists extracted DNA from bacteria found in 30,000-year-old permafrost in the Beringian region between Russia and Canada. They found genes encoding resistance to beta-lactam, tetracycline and glycopeptide antibiotics.

How much should we be concerned about all this?

One argument is that the risk from permafrost pathogens is inherently unknowable, so they should not overtly concern us. Instead, we should focus on more established threats from climate change. For instance, as Earth warms northern countries will become more susceptible to outbreaks of “southern” diseases like malaria, cholera and dengue fever, as these pathogens thrive at warmer temperatures.

The alternative perspective is that we should not ignore risks just because we cannot quantify them.

“Following our work and that of others, there is now a non-zero probability that pathogenic microbes could be revived, and infect us,” says Claverie. “How likely that is is not known, but it’s a possibility. It could be bacteria that are curable with antibiotics, or resistant bacteria, or a virus. If the pathogen hasn’t been in contact with humans for a long time, then our immune system would not be prepared. So yes, that could be dangerous.”

Ex-defense minister says IS ‘apologized’ to Israel for November clash

Moshe Ya’alon’s office refuses to elaborate after alluding to contact with terror group

April 24, 2017,

by Judah Ari Gross

Times of Israel

Former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon on Saturday said the Islamic State terrorist group in the Syrian Golan Heights “apologized” for attacking an Israeli unit.

“There was one case recently where Daesh opened fire and apologized,” Ya’alon said, using the terror group’s Arabic nickname.

This was an apparent reference to a clash that took place near the Syrian border last November, in which IDF troops exchanged fire with members of the Islamic State affiliate. After a brief gun battle, the Israeli military attacked the terrorist group with airstrikes and tank fire, killing four of them.

Israel and much of the Western world considers the Islamic State affiliate in the Syrian Golan Heights, known as the Khalid ibn al-Walid Army, to be a terrorist group. Communication with them is technically illegal under Israeli law, constituting contact with an enemy agent.

Ya’alon was speaking at an event in the northern city of Afula. He was interviewed on stage by Eli Levi, a Channel 10 news correspondent.

His comment about the Islamic State’s apology was made as part of a broader point about Israel’s policy for Syria, which is largely non-interventionist.

Ya’alon was explaining that Israel carries out strikes against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces in retaliation when spillover fire hits the Israeli Golan Heights.

Ya’alon’s officer refused to elaborate on how exactly the Islamic State expressed its apology to Israel after the attack. The IDF also declined to comment.

Syrian officials have accused Israel of directly aiding the Islamic State and other rebel groups, a claim Jerusalem vociferously denies.

FBI aids in ‘hate crime’ investigation of bananas hung from nooses at American University

May 4, 2017

RT

The FBI is helping an investigation at American University in Washington, DC, where campus police say African American students were targets of a “hate crime” involving bananas for the second time this year.

Bananas were found hanging from “string in the shape of nooses” in three places around the university campus, according to a memorandum from Interim Vice President of Campus Life Fanta Aw.

“These racist, hateful messages have no place in our community. The safety of our students is paramount,” Aw wrote in the memorandum.

The bananas were marked with the letters “AKA,” a reference to Alpha Kappa Alpha, a sorority on campus which is predominantly comprised of African-Americans.

Other bananas were marked with the words “Harambe Bait” referring to the gorilla that was killed at the Cincinnati Zoo last year.

On Tuesday, campus police released two surveillance videos of the suspect in an effort to uncover who was behind the incident. The videos show a figure moving through the campus at 4am. The person’s face was not clear in the footage.

AU campus police are offering a $1,000 reward for information leading to a positive suspect identification, according to a memo that referred to the incident as a “hate crime.”

University officials held a town hall meeting Tuesday to discuss the incident, but students from several campus organizations walked out after 45 minutes, according to the Eagle, the student newspaper.

Students then staged a “mass withdrawal” from the school, with dozens of students marching to the registrar’s office to request withdrawal forms in protest.

Phillip Morse, director of the AU police department, said he has communicated with the FBI and will meet with the meet with a Civil Rights Division officer as part of this investigation, according to the Eagle’s Twitter account.

According to WUSA, the FBI is offering federal resources to aid the investigations, but will not file any charges until they find any federal laws have been broken.

Last month, one of the members of the sorority, Taylor Dumpson, became the first black female president of the student government. The bananas were found the same day Dumpson began her tenure as president.

In her first statement as president, Dumpson called the incident “disheartening and immensely frustrating.”

“This is not what I imagined my first letter to you all would be,” Dumpson wrote. “In my first message to the student body, I would have wanted to talk about accountability, transparency, accessibility, and inclusivity. Now more than ever, we need to make sure that members of our community feel welcomed and above all, safe on this campus.”

University President Neil Kerwin called the incident a “crude and racially insensitive act of bigotry” in a letter to students.

“Know that American University remains committed to principles of diversity, inclusion, common courtesy, and human dignity, and acts of bigotry only strengthen our resolve. Anyone who does not feel similarly does not belong here,” Kerwin wrote in his statement.

In September, two different African American female students reported racially based incidents involving bananas. One student white male students put boxes of rotten bananas outside her door and drew obscene images on her whiteboard, while another student reported having bananas thrown at her, according to the Eagle.

Comment: Oh the horror of it all! What about the innocent, church-going bananas? The ones with loving families? How can the indifferent and uncaring  members of society be so cruel to bananas? There needs to be a good editorial in the New York Times condemning prejudice against bananas and blaming it all on Donald Trump. There need to be committees set up to defend the bananas and encourage them to immigrate to the United States where they can be welcomed to the breakfast tables of many perceptive and kindly Americans with bowls of cereal. ed

More vicious racial media insults

From The Dallas Daily Christian

Ghetto Test

If the statement is true add the points in parenthesis to your score.

Scoring is given at the bottom of the test.

 

1. You’ve ever used an album cover or old envelope for a dustpan. (5 points)
2. You’ve ever put foil on your TV antennas to get better reception. (8 points)
3. You’ve ever had to use pliers to turn your TV on. (7points)
4. You had to come in the house when the street lights came on. (6 points)
5. You had a candy lady in your neighborhood. (5 + 5 extra points if your house was the candy lady)
6. If you can count more than five police cars in your neighborhood on a daily basis. (3 points)
7. If you ever had to pick your own switch or belt. (3 points for each)
8. If you’ve ever been beaten with an extension cord. (15 points)
9. If you have ever had to walk to or home from school. (2 points)
10. If you’ve ever passed someone a note asking “Do you like me?” or “Can I have a chance?” check _yes, _no or _maybe. (7 points)
11. If you have ever used dish washing liquid for bubble bath. (9points)
12. If you have ever mixed up some Kool-Aid and the found that you didn’t have any sugar. (4 points & add 4 if you put the pitcher in the refrigerator until you got some sugar)
13. If you have ever played any of the following games. (2 points each): (hide and go seek, freeze tag, captain or momma may I?, or red light..yellow light..green light 123!)
14. If your neighborhood had an ice cream man. (2 points + 2 if he rang a bell + 5 if he played R&B)
15. If you remember any of the following candies. (1 point each): cherry clans, lemon heads, Alexander the grape, ring pops, Chico sticks, baked beans, candy cigarettes, powder packs with the white dip stick, big league chew, “Wine” Candy (jolly ranchers), jaw breakers, and candy necklaces.
16. If you refer to Now and Laters candies as “Nighladers”. (6 points)
17. If you’ve ever ran from the police on foot. (5 points + 5 if you got away)
18. If you remember underoos or the Wonder Woman bra and panty set. (6 points + 4 if you owned some)
19. If you’ve ever had reusable grease in a container on your stove. (5 points)
20. The batteries in your remote control are held in by a piece of tape. (5 points)
21. If you’ve ever used any of the following for drinking glasses. (3 points each): jelly jars, mayonnaise jars, mason jars, or peanut butter jars.
22. You’ve ever covered your furniture in plastic. (2 points)
23. The heels of your feet have ever looked like you had been kicking flour. (1point)
24. If you have ever worn any of the following fragrances. (1 point each): Brute, Hai Karate, Jean Nate, Old Spice, Chloe, English Leather, Stetson, Charlie, or Faberge’.
25. You’ve ever used Tussy. (9 points)
26. You’ve never been to the dentist. (10 points + 10 if you’ve never been to the doctor.)
27. You’ve ever wore clothes with the tag still on them. (4 points)
28. If you’re acquainted with someone with a name as follows. (3 points): Kay-Kay, Lee-Lee, Ree-Ree, Ray-Ray, etc.
29. You have ever paged yourself for any reason. (3 points)
30. You’ve ever worn house shoes outside of the house. (2 points)
31. You add “ED” or “T” to the end of words already in the past tense (for example, Tooked, Light-Skinneded, kilt, ruint, etc). (3 points)
32. You pronounce words like this (1 point for each example you can think of skrimps or strimps, skreet, axe (ask), member (remember), frigerator, etc.
33. You use nem’ to describe a certain group of people (for example Craig and nem’ or momma and nem’). (6 points)
34. You’ve ever had a crack across your windshield and never bothered to get it fixed. (3 points)
35. You’ve ever driven on a donut more than 2 weeks after your flat. (4 points)
36. You’ve ever asked a perfect stranger to take a picture with you and told your friends it was someone you dated. (3 points)
37. Your child drops his/her pacifier and you sanitize it by sucking it. (7 points)
38. If you’ve ever ran a race barefoot in the middle of the street at approximately 11 at night. (10 points)
39. You’ve ever left a social gathering with a plate. (1 point)
40. You leave a restaurant with silverware, sugar, and/or jelly. (8 points)
41. You think “red” is a flavor of Kool-Aid. (4 points)
42. You can’t hold a glass because of the length of your nails. (3 points)
43. The gold teeth in your mouth spell words. (8 points)
44. You don’t have your own place but your child has a leather coat and a pair of Jordan’s. (5 points)
45. If you’ve ever had to get to the driver’s side of the car through the passenger side door. (8 points)
46. You have ever slept in a chair to avoid messing up your hair. (7 points)
47. You constantly hit *69 and ask, “Did you just call here?” (10 points)
48. You won’t answer the phone if you don’t recognize the number on the caller id box. (7 points)
49. You know a child who can’t speak, but can do the “bank-head bounce.” (15 points)
50. You think Tupac is still alive. (20 points)

 

Scoring

0 – 30 – You have enjoyed a nice sheltered life in the suburbs.

31 – 60 – Hood movies have given you a little exposure.

61 – 100 – You may have visited the hood a few times or on weekends.

101 – 130 – You probably spent a few years in the hood, and moved to the suburbs.

131 – 160 – You’re the genuine article. You are no stranger to hood life.

161 – 200 – You are definitely, without a doubt an expert on life in the hood.

201+ – Congratulations! You are Ghetto Fabulous!

U.S. coaxes Mexico into Trump plan to overhaul Central America

May 4, 2017

by Gabriel Stargardter

Reuters

MEXICO CITY-The United States is plotting an ambitious attempt to shore up Central America, with the administration of President Donald Trump pressing Mexico to do more to stem the flow of migrants fleeing violence and poverty in the region, U.S. and Mexican officials say.

The U.S. vision is being shaped by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary John Kelly, who knows Central America well from his time as chief of the U.S. Southern Command, when he helped the administration of former President Barack Obama design his Alliance for Prosperity.

That $750 million initiative sought to curtail migration from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador through development projects as well as law-and-order funding to crack down on the region’s dominant gangs.

Kelly aims to retool the Obama-era alliance without a large increase in American funding by pressing Mexico to shoulder more responsibility for governance and security in Central America, and by drumming up fresh private investment for the region.

“Partnering with Mexico is critical,” Kelly said at an event in Washington on Thursday. “It’s the economics that we have to improve, and I believe we can help. And we’re not talking huge money – we’re talking about maybe what it cost to run military operations for a day in Iraq.”

Kelly added he was unable to do as much on the economic front as he would have liked when he was Southcom commander, but now had Trump’s blessing to fix the Southwest U.S. border, an effort that necessitated improving Central America’s economies.

William Brownfield, the U.S. assistant secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, told Reuters he expected Mexico to engage more directly with Central American governments in order to re-invigorate the Alliance.

“We’re going to see a strategy that has already been developed, but it is going to be pushed harder and more aggressively in the coming year, and the year after,” he said.

The reshaped alliance stands in contrast to some of the isolationist views jostling for power in the White House. Still, it is consistent with Trump’s foreign policy efforts to pressure China to do more to tackle the North Korea nuclear threat and to persuade European allies to pick up more of the tab for NATO.

The plan also puts Mexico in a delicate spot. President Enrique Pena Nieto has repeatedly expressed his desire to preserve the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has become a pillar of Mexico’s economy.

But he must avoid the appearance of capitulating to Trump, who has enraged the Mexican public with his threats to withdraw from NAFTA and force Mexico to pay for his proposed border wall.

“We want to be on good terms with them, because we’re dealing with a much more important issue,” said a senior Mexican diplomat who was not authorized to speak publicly. “In return, we want a beneficial NAFTA renegotiation.”

Neither Kelly nor the DHS responded to requests for comment for this article.

“The prosperity and security of Central America … represent a priority of Mexico’s foreign policy,” the country’s foreign ministry said in a statement. “The Alliance for Prosperity … is a valuable tool that can be strengthened with the participation of other governments.”

A MAN WITH A PLAN

The new-look Alliance will be firmed up in Miami next month, when U.S., Mexican and Central American officials will meet to negotiate various issues, including Mexico’s role, according to a draft U.S. schedule seen by Reuters.

Mexico’s foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, has said publicly Mexico is willing to work with the United States in stabilizing Central America, without giving much detail.

In private, though, local officials say cash-strapped Mexico lacks the money to invest significantly in the region – a fact that has not eluded the United States.

“We do not have significant expectations of major … financial contributions by the government of Mexico at this time,” Brownfield said.

However, he said it was reasonable to expect Mexico to help train Central American officials, and deepen coordination along its southern border. Mexican government agencies could also work more closely with their southern counterparts, he added, citing the example of Colombia, which is training Central America’s police forces at the United States’ behest.