Pakistan will attend Heart of Asia conference in India, says Sartaj Aziz

Adviser to Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz on Monday confirmed that Pakistan will be attending the upcoming Heart of Asia conference scheduled to be held in India.

Aziz confirmed Pakistan’s participation while talking to journalists in the federal capital.

The Heart of Asia conference will be held during the first week of December in Amritsar, India.

“We have started an effective campaign for the cause of self-determination of Kashmiri people,” said the foreign affairs adviser.

Aziz added that 56 countries condemned India’s heavy handed tactics in India-held Kashmir during a conference in Tashkent last week.

In comparison, India had pulled out of the Saarc summit in Islamabad which was scheduled to be held in November.

The announcement came amid growing tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours following the attack on an Indian army base in held Kashmir.

The Foreign Office, in its response after India’s withdrawal from the Saarc summit, termed the Indian announcement as unfortunate in an official statement released.

Soaring tensions

The Indian prime minister stepped up a drive to isolate Pakistan diplomatically after the Uri army base attack.

Hours after the attack occurred, Indian Home Minister Rajnath Singh termed Pakistan a 'terrorist state'. India also accused Pakistan of involvement in the attack.

The Uri attack occurred days before Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was set to address the United Nations General Assembly regarding Indian human rights violations in held Kashmir.

Following the attack, India claimed to have conducted a cross-border 'surgical strike' against 'launch pads of terror' in Azad Jammu and Kashmir ─ a claim Pakistan has strongly rejected.

Pakistan maintains India is attempting to divert the world's attention away from 'atrocities' committed by government forces in India-held Kashmir.

Pakistan and India have locked horns over the Kashmir issue since Indian forces stepped up a crackdown against protesters after Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed by government forces in July.

Three questions from Pakistan that India needs to answer

I understand it is not the right time to ask questions in India but since I am at a safe distance from Indian TV anchors, I can afford to unleash my inquisitive self.

So, here are my three questions to India:

Question 1:

Democracy suffered paralysis in Pakistan at young age. Starting with General Ayub’s in 1958, we have had three decade-long military rules.

In between these, political parties tried to resuscitate democracy but hardly ever succeeded in wrenching power from what is now known as the establishment.

We achieved the coveted status of the first-ever democratic transition just three years ago and the elected government is still trying to figure out what powers it really has.

India never experienced military rule.

If you count both the national and the state governments, hundreds of transitions have taken place through elections in the past 70 years. It has a super-efficient Election Commission and election results have rarely been disputed.

The two countries’ democratic trajectory moved in diametrically opposite directions.

But a keen Pakistani student of politics on a voyage to India expects pleasant surprises and not rude shocks. Talk to common people in Indian streets and their rants about governments, governance system, elections and politics are dittos of what I have grown up with in my country.

“All politicians are corrupt. They are thieves and criminals.”

In popular perceptions, politicians are synonymous with corruption and politics is a legitimate form of skulduggery.

There is enough evidence to believe that perceptions are not far away from realities.

• The ruling party in the Indian Punjab is openly accused of being directly involved in drug smuggling.
• The stories of corruption in Karnataka, especially in the mining sector, are just mind blowing.
• A sitting chief minister in Tamil Nadu was sentenced to jail on corruption charges (and later bailed out).

There are dynasties and families ruling provinces since eons in both our countries and then there are leaders with cult-like following.

In reaction to this, the anti-politician politics is as rampant in India as it is in Pakistan. It takes just one negative remark from you to make the feel good coffee table talk about democracy stand on its head.

If you happen to meet an Aam Aadmi Party worker, you can’t resist uttering: Oh my God, not here was I expecting a PTI jiyala.

A routine explanation of all the ills that politics in Pakistan suffers from is simple — lay all the blame at the door of the establishment (or at the gate of the GHQ, if you prefer straight talk) that has been instrumental in scuttling the democratic discourse — and I don’t contest that.

But what went wrong with India?

Why has its impeccable and envious record of uninterrupted democratic transitions through untainted elections not resulted in a clean and efficient polity?

Is it not the democracy’s basic promise to the people?

Is democratic dispensation not supposed to gradually mature polity, strengthen systems and reduce the gap between the government and the governed?

I am desperate for answers to restore my faith in democracy.

Question 2:

The Pakistani state made no bones about its religious orientation from the very beginning or at least from the day its Constituent Assembly passed the Objective Resolution on March 12, 1949 to be exact. It was loud and clear and we never looked back at this decision.

In fact, whenever we came close to realising that this might be the problem — mixing religion with politics — we refused to admit it and instead, tried to treat it by doubling the doze.

Then the recipe mastered by our political actors found global buyers. It became the doctrine to fight back heretic communists. This blew it to the size so big that our own state was dwarfed by them.

We are today fighting a protracted and bloody war to reclaim our own country. But we lost more than just territory to these so-called non-state actors. We lost our culture of tolerance, we lost our vibrant social lives and we lost our right to dissent.

India is losing all that too, if it hasn’t already.

Film-makers are made to eat their words and people suspected of eating beef are killed mercilessly.

Everyone is made to wear patriotism on their sleeves and women are stopped in the street and told what they can and cannot wear.

And the biggest national question is whether one can dare raise hand and ask a question?

‘Religious extremists in India are just a handful’ and that’s what we in Pakistan have been hoping to be true all our lives. RSS has an organisational structure and street presence in its country that the Jamaat-i-Islami or even the Jamaatud Dawa in Pakistan can only envy.

Then the extremists are flanked by a huge army of apologists — comprising regular middle class babus, who coin a new philosophy every day and concoct a conspiracy theory every night in defence of religious extremism.

It is not at all difficult for a common Pakistani to understand how religious extremism works to hold the entire society hostage.

And then the non-state actors make great policy instruments in India in more than one subtle ways. They are the guardians and the guarantors of nationalism. They are a political capital that no party can afford to ignore, come elections. They can choke political discourse, gag dissenters, shape policies and dictate history.

How did India get where it is?

Its constitution is secular. It has been taking pride in its diversity. And they never waged a 'jihad' at their borders.

How did then the religious extremists come to hijack the government and bring the society to its knees?

I could find no answer. I wonder if India can.

Question 3:

A policewala in Indian films is almost always a despicable character you love to hate. He is corrupt to the core, criminal in mind and, in many instances, a desh-drohee(traitor) as well.

In contrast, the other institution in uniform — the army — is considered perfect hero stuff. A military man in Bollywood is always an honest, untiring, thorough professional who is ever-ready to go to any length to protect his country from whomever poses a danger, be they petty street criminals or heartless organised terrorists.

An army man is never corrupt or wrong and publicly questioning the army for any of its acts is regarded as anti-national and treasonous.

The role of military in the nation-building process in Pakistan is no secret. But in India, it has always been under strict control of elected governments. It has no independent public relations machine at its disposal and yet when it comes to glorification of military, India can put Pakistan to shame.

The question here, however, is not how or why the two countries have come to equally revere their armies, as the armies occupy a haloed position in many other countries as well. It is the jingoistic nationalism, the hysteric calls for war and above all, the centrality of militarism within nationalist discourse that needs explaining. The bulk of a middle-class seeking redemption of their nationalist pride in 'success of surgical strikes' is itself a question.

Pakistanis don't think any differently but they can, again, rest the blame on the fact that 'jihad' has been central to our defence strategy.

In the words of no less a person than late Gen Hamid Gul, we have “two things to our defence: nuclear capability as a deterrent and the spirit of jihad. Madrassahs are vital in imparting and keeping this spirit alive.”

The custodians of jihadist narratives pose as medieval warriors in their jalsas, riding horses and brandishing swords. Many of them prophesy that we, as a nation, are destined to conquer the world and hoisting our flag at Delhi’s Red Fort will be just one step. They glorify violence, aggrandise war and inspire militarism and yet their ilks are tasked to write text books for our children.

That’s Pakistan’s story.

But how did militarism become the main pillar of nationalistic faith in democratic-secular India?

India must find an answer and share it with us.

Wikipedia is fixing one of the Internet’s biggest flaws

The Internet is dotted with cesspools, also known as comments sections. Consider, for instance, the Facebook chatter surrounding a recent New York Times article about Donald Trump:

“Of course the general election has been rigged in favor of that lying-cow Hillary and against Trump,” one person wrote.

“She is a treacherous, lying, murderous woman that could care less of our rights and our constitution,” another added.

“NYT A TRASH TAG, not one scintilla of truth not any journalistic integrity this trash papet,” someone else said. (That comment got two likes.)

We might once have dreamed that the miracle of cheap, instant communication would knit society together. The reality has been closer to the opposite.

Thanks to the Web, we are able to cocoon ourselves among like-minded people and like-minded facts. Instead of finding common ground, we shout across the ideological divide — and in nastiest ways possible, because the distance of online discourse dissociates us from the consequences of our own speech.

It’s downright startling, then, to observe what happens behind the scenes at Wikipedia. Go to any article and visit the “talk” tab. More often than not, you'll find a somewhat orderly debate, even on contentious topics like Hillary Clinton's e-mails or Donald Trump's sexual abuse allegations.

Wikipedia is hardly perfect — it’s known for its pedantry, sexism, and epic edit wars. But somehow, despite of all the forces dragging it toward chaos, the site has managed to carve out a space on the Internet where people can have mostly sane, mostly productive conversations that mostly converge to a version of the truth.

Recent research from Harvard Business School suggests that Wikipedia has become increasingly balanced in the course of its 15-year history. An analysis of political articles shows that the site was once heavily biased toward the left, but has steadily drifted toward the center, to the point that many entries are now about as neutral as their counterparts in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

What’s even more interesting is that Wikipedia seems to exert a moderating influence on its contributors. Many places on the Internet exist to inflame partisan tendencies; but it appears that working on Wikipedia might actually de-radicalize people.

In a draft paper published last week, Shane Greenstein and his colleagues Feng Zhu and Yuan Gu found that over the years, individuals who edit political articles on Wikipedia seem to grow less biased — their contributions start to contain noticeably fewer ideologically-charged statements.

“We thought this was quite striking,” said Greenstein, a professor at Harvard Business School. “The most slanted Wikipedia editors tend to become more moderate over time.”

The Harvard researchers adapted a measure of partisanship developed by economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro, who analyzed the speech patterns of people in Congress to identify particularly conservative or liberal phrases. Some of the distinctive phrases favored by Republicans included “illegal aliens,” “death tax,” and “border security.” Democrats, on the other hand, were fond of phrases like “poor people,” “tax breaks,” and “change the rules.”

By looking for these kinds of partisan idioms in Wikipedia articles, the Harvard researchers could determine whether the text sounded more like the product of a Republican or a Democrat. They were also able to document how the articles evolved over time.

This chart, for instance, shows how the Wikipedia page on Afghanistan shifted in tone during 2006. The article started out right-leaning, but became left-leaning after a series of edits that removed sentences describing the country as being full of “turbans and terrorists,” and added a discussion of the nation’s political future. Then, in the subsequent months, the article slowly reverted back to a neutral point of view.


The researchers analyzed over 70,000 different articles related to American politics, tallying the different changes made by each of the 2.9 million people who edited those pages between 2001 and 2011.

As the researchers followed the contributors over time, they realized that contributors were becoming much less partisan — at least, they were sounding a lot less partisan. Many started their Wikipedia careers using a lot of left-leaning or right-leaning language, but after a few years, most of them began to favor more neutral language.

The researchers believe this is evidence that Wikipedia helps break people out of their ideological echo chambers.

In their data, they noticed that people often targeted pages of the opposite political persuasion. Left-leaning contributors were more likely to make changes on right-leaning Wikipedia pages, and vice versa. This likely led to frequent confrontations. But on Wikipedia, the community expects people to engage with opposing viewpoints — to resolve their disputes through reasoned debate, not through shouting.

“This is a long-standing tradition in Wikipedia,” Greenstein said. “They have always aspired to have a neutral point of view, and they’ve developed a set of norms and rules about the appropriate settling of disputes.”

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Unlike, say, the comments section on most websites, Wikipedia has an extensive manual instructing contributors how to behave. One of the key guidelines is to “assume good faith.” The site also insists that every fact must be backed up by a reliable source. When people seek to change a controversial article, they often to have provide a persuasive argument and extensive citations to make their edits stick.

The site doesn’t always live up to its ideals, but it seems that for many people, participating in the community helps them develop the skills to become better citizens.

For instance — right now on the page for Black Lives Matter, there’s an anonymous contributor who is upset that the article doesn’t mention George Soros, who is believed by some on the alt-right to be the movement's ultimate sponsor. (It’s not true.) The contributor accuses the pages editors of conspiring “portray BLM in the most favorable light possible.”

“Easy,” one of the editors responds. “Take a breath and let's see what we can agree on.”

‘India has capacity to produce hundreds of new nuclear bombs’

ISLAMABAD: A new study indicates that India has sufficient material and the technical capacity to produce between 356 and 492 nuclear bombs.

The study titled ‘Indian Unsafeguarded Nuclear Program’ which was published by the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI) and was co-authored by four nuclear scholars, unveils a new and comprehensive assessment of India’s nuclear weapon capacity The launch of the study at the ISSI on Monday was attended by foreign diplomats, scholars, journalists and students.

Speaking at the event, ISSI Board of Governors Chairman Ambassador Khalid Mahmood said the book gives a fresh perspective on India’s unsafeguarded nuclear program, will be read with interest around the world and will benefit scholars and diplomats alike.

An internationally known physicist and a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials Dr A.H Nayyar said the book was a significant addition to the existing material on the size, history and capacity of India’s nuclear program. He also highlighted a number of weaknesses and flaws in the book and suggested the ambiguities be removed in the next edition.

Former Chairman Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission Ansar Pervez said the research breaks new ground by providing officials, researchers, scholars and students with new insight into India’s nuclear weapon making capacity.

Study reveals India has largest, oldest unsafeguarded nuclear programme in developing world

He said that in terms of detail, depth, analysis and the use of information from primary sources, the research is far superior to several studies on the Indian nuclear program and carefully blends social science perspective with technical details.

Mr Pervez added that the book will also expand international awareness, policy discourse and academic debate on this secretive and unsafeguarded program.

ISSI’s Dr Naeem Salik then chaired a discussion between the authors and called the study a “pioneering effort”. The four authors – including Adeela Azam, Ahmed Khan, Mohammad Ali and Sameer Khan- said that the purpose of the study was to provide an understanding of the true history, size, extent and capabilities of the different aspects of the complex Indian nuclear program which New Delhi has kept outside the International Atomic Agency safeguards.

The authors said the study contains evidence that India has the largest and oldest unsafeguarded nuclear programme in the developing world and among the states not party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

They said that member states of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) should consider the large and swiftly expanding Indian nuclear bomb capacity when dealing with India’s NSG membership and ensure that Indian membership of this export control arrangement does not, in any way, help India expand and accelerate its nuclear weapons program.

Women 'nearing equality with men - in alcohol consumption'

omen have all but caught up with men at knocking back alcohol, a global study of drinking habits shows.

The analysis of 4 million people, born between 1891 and 2001, showed that men used to be far more likely to drink and have resulting health problems.

But the current generation have pretty much closed the gap, the BMJ Open report says.

The changing roles of men and women in society partly explain the move towards drinking parity.

The study showed that in people born in the early 1900s, men were:

• More than twice as likely as women to drink alcohol at all (2.2 times)
• Three times as likely to drink to problematic levels
• And 3.6 times as likely to develop health problems from drinking, such as liver cirrhosis

But over the ensuing decades, the gap closed so that for those born at the end of the century men were only:

• 1.1 times as likely as women to drink alcohol at all
• A much lower 1.2 times as likely to drink to problematic levels
• And 1.3 times as likely to develop health problems from drinking

The team at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, analysed data from people all over the world - although it was massively skewed towards North America and Europe.They concluded: "Alcohol use and alcohol-use disorders have historically been viewed as a male phenomenon.

"The present study calls this assumption into question and suggests that young women, in particular, should be the target of concerted efforts to reduce the impact of substance use and related harms."

Prof Mark Petticrew, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: "Men's and women's roles have been changing over the decades, this is likely to account for some of these trends - but not all.

"The increasing availability of alcohol also plays an important part, as does the way that alcohol marketing is often targeted specifically at women and particularly young women.

"Health professionals need to help the public - both men and women - to understand the health risks of alcohol consumption, and how to reduce those risks."

This lab can re-create the sounds of any space

How well does a speaker work in a given space? That question is way more complicated than you might think. Not only do speakers perform differently in settings with different surfaces, shapes and furnishings, but it turns out that humans are pretty bad at comparing those varied acoustic environments. Faced with more than two choices, our brains are simply unable to keep the unique sounds of each in mind. But in the basement of a Danish university, that problem vanishes into thin air — thanks to a new system that can accurately reproduce the sounds of any space. With the help of 43 speakers, a specially designed room and a new method of recording and reproducing sound, researchers can now make their lab echo any environment on Earth, from gigantic concert halls to the claustrophobic interiors of cars.

Watch scientists levitate objects and draw on water with ‘acoustic holograms’

“We wanted to try to bring real life into the lab,” says Neo Kaplanis, an audio researcher and PhD student at Aalborg University, where the lab is located. Kaplanis is a Tonmeister — a sound recording expert — who is also employed by Bang & Olufsen, the high-end speaker manufacturer. (Though the lab was put together along with the company, its work is not proprietary.) For his PhD project, he decided to tackle a problem that has stumped the audio world since speakers were invented.The issue stems from sound waves’ tricky tendency to fill a space three-dimensionally. Since they consist of waves that travel from a specific source into space, they run into plenty of obstacles as they go. As the energy of each wave travels, it hits air, then bumps into reflective and muffling surfaces. That’s why only high-end cars have top-of-the-line speaker systems — it simply costs too much to test speakers inside the cars themselves again and again.

Why you probably hate the sound of your own voice

Despite advances in headphones, these tiny devices are still incapable of reproducing the spatial environment of sounds that come from far away and super close. Similarly, headphones can’t transmit the exact experience of bass frequencies that, when played through normal speakers, reverberate throughout the body.But the Danish lab comes armed with a multi-microphone array and a new type of recording — one that takes a kind of acoustic fingerprint of a space as it records sounds. The recordings don’t just capture sounds but record exactly where sound reflections come from within a space. Kaplanis also designed a computer program that plays back sounds from those precise locations in an anechoic, or sound absorptive, room.

“You can reproduce the sound field in the system,” explains Kaplanis. “The sound quality is so real.” When people visit the lab and enter, they do so without the help of sight or context, so their brains trick them into thinking that they’re in the kind of space re-created by the speaker array and the computer program. “When I recorded rooms I knew already, it felt just like the real thing.”

Music is universal — but the way it makes us feel may not be

It’s hard to imagine, but for listeners, the basement lab can become anything from a massive cathedral to an intimate room. Think of it as sound plus space — an experience that’s immersive and even unsettling at times. You can hear some samples here.

So what’s the point? The commercial applications are clear: Being transported to another place via sound could one day be used to create more realistic gaming experiences, and similar technology is already being deployed in at least one Finnish club that’s an audiophile’s fantasy. And being able to test sound in different acoustic environments without physically going there could cut costs for speaker manufacturers and audio makers in search of great acoustics.

But there’s more to the system, says Kaplanis’s adviser,Søren Bech. (Though 80 percent of his time is spent as a senior research adviser for Bang & Olufsen, he’s a professor at Aalborg University, too.) Both adviser and student are part of the DREAMS ITN project, a multidisciplinary consortium devoted to figuring out ways to control and remove reverb in different applications that help humankind. That can range from making car speakers better (a challenge that can thus far be accurately modeled only through Kaplanis’s system) to making sounds clearer for hearing-impaired people.What might seem like a cool party trick could one day allow researchers to, say, hone the acoustic environments of stadiums or concert halls or create better acoustic testing for people with hearing challenges. “This system could be used to answer really complex research questions,” says Kaplanis, who points out its potential use in helping study how people respond to sound on a psychological and physiological level. Then, he grins. “But it also sounds amazing.”

Tribute left by Prince Charles at Aberfan memorial stolen

A message left by the Prince of Wales when he laid a wreath at the Aberfan Memorial Garden last week has been stolen.

Prince Charles represented the Queen at a ceremony last Friday marking 50 years since 144 people were killed when a slag heap engulfed Pantglas Junior School and nearby homes.

David Davies chairman of trustees at the Aberfan Memorial Charity discovered the theft while walking in the garden on Sunday as he went to lay flowers at graves.

It was intended for the people of Aberfan and is upsetting for these people at a sensitive time like this.

The memorial has otherwise been uplifting for the people of this village. Words can't describe how utterly low this crime is.

– DAVID DAVIES, ABERFAN MEMORIAL CHARITY

South Wales Police says it is aware of the theft and is investigating.

Sheen warns the path into acting is being closed for many young people from poorer backgrounds

Welsh actor Michael Sheen is calling for more support for children from poorer backgrounds to study drama at schools.

The Port Talbot-born actor has warned that the path into acting was being closed for many young people from working class background.

If you want more working class actors you have to support education. There has to be a drama department in schools.

If there's not, you can forget everything else after that. Nothing else matters. You haven't got working class actors suddenly deciding to become actors and suddenly being good at it at 30.

Acting is a craft. You just don't suddenly do it. You can't do it on your own in your bedroom either. It takes ages before you are really good at it.

So you have got to support youth drama groups but also you have got to force youth drama groups to go out and outreach.

– MICHAEL SHEEN

Sheen attended drama classes while at school in Port Talbot and then joined a youth theatre, before receiving a grant to go to drama school. Speaking at an event at the Houses of Parliament, Sheen said those opportunities no longer existed for many young people and called for more support for drama in the state school system and for youth theatre.

He said that failure to ensure working class voices were heard in the theatre, in film and on television would have a wider impact on the whole culture.

Part of what changed our culture in the late 50s and into the 60s is that we stopped doing Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan plays and John Osborne came along and wrote something, and suddenly were heard Albert Finney and Tom Courtney - people who voices and accents had never been heard apart from 'All right guv'nor' in the background.

That's what changed our country and our culture. If we only hear certain stories and certain voices we all lose out.

As brilliant as I think Benedict is, I don't particularly want to see Benedict Cumberbatch playing a kid from Port Talbot because that's just not his real life.

Threatened in Mosul, Islamic State uses alternative tactics

BAGHDAD (AP) — Dozens of Islamic State fighters struck at dawn, storming government and security compounds in and around the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk last week, in a coordinated assault more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the front lines of the Mosul offensive.

Over the last two years, the extremists have adopted innovative tactics and launched diversionary attacks along the amoeba-like frontiers of their self-styled caliphate, and many now fear they have more surprises in store as Iraqi forces close in on Mosul, the militants' last urban bastion in the country.The Kirkuk assault was carried out by more than 50 militants who may have been part of so-called sleeper cells. They struck targets in and around the city, pinning down Kurdish security forces for two days and killing at least 80 people. A similar attack was launched on the western town of Rutba, hundreds of miles from Mosul, over the weekend.

Here is a look at some of the other tactics the group may employ.

ATTACKS ON CIVILIANS

As it has suffered a string of battlefield setbacks over the past year, IS has increasingly returned to its roots as a brutal insurgent group, carrying out suicide bombings against civilians, mainly in and around Baghdad.

The group has sought to reassure its supporters that its long twilight struggle will continue, regardless of whether it loses territory. Vastly outnumbered in Mosul, it may respond with attacks on so-called "soft targets" in Iraq or further afield, perhaps seeking to replicate the devastation of the 2015 Paris attacks.

But Iraq is at the greatest risk.

"What happened in Kirkuk might be an introduction to a series of operations, and we cannot rule out the targeting of Baghdad," said Ahmed al-Sharifi, a Baghdad-based military analyst. "There are sleeper cells all over Iraq, particularly in Baghdad."

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

The choice of Kirkuk likely reflected a strategic calculation on the part of IS to sow tensions within the unlikely alliance arrayed against it. The city has long been at the center of a territorial dispute between the central government and the autonomous Kurdish region, where the Mosul operation has seen federal forces deployed for the first time in 25 years.

The Baghdad government and the Kurds are united against IS, but the Kurds have little interest in Mosul, a potentially ungovernable city with a Sunni Arab majority. The Kurds have long prized Kirkuk, however, and could divert their forces, known as the peshmerga, from Mosul to other fronts in order to defend territory they value more.

CHEMICALS AND DRONES

Closer to the front lines, IS may deploy new and unconventional weapons. IS used a homemade drone carrying C-4 explosives to attack French and Kurdish forces in northern Iraq earlier this month, killing two Kurds.

IS is believed to have used crude chemical weapons in both Syria and Iraq, and Iraqi forces have said they are going into battle with protective gear. Last month, an IS rocket containing sulfur-mustard , a chemical agent that causes skin blistering, struck a military base used by hundreds of U.S. troops near Mosul.

No one was wounded in the attack, but Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called it a "concerning development."

SUICIDE ARTILLERY

Suicide car bombs have featured in Middle East conflicts for decades, but IS might be the first insurgent group to deploy them against conventional forces on the battlefield as a kind of "smart" artillery. The group has already sent more than a dozen armored vehicles loaded with explosives careening toward front-line troops since the Mosul operation began.

Iraqi forces, with the aid of U.S.-led coalition aircraft, have gotten better at blowing them up before they reach their targets, but the weapons still pose a huge risk.

SCORCHED EARTH TACTICS

IS deployed another kind of chemical weapon last week when it torched a sulfur plant south of Kirkuk, sending a cloud of toxic smoke across the Ninevah plain that caused breathing difficulties and nosebleeds up to 30 kilometers (18 miles) away. The fumes mixed with the smoke from oil wells in the region that IS has set alight in recent weeks to try to create a smoke screen.

Many fear that as Iraqi forces converge on Mosul, the extremists could destroy factories, oil installations and other critical infrastructure in a scorched earth campaign. They may also seek to use civilians as human shields. Mosul is still home to more than one million people.

"UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS"

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously warned of "unknown unknowns ," things we don't know that we don't know, which somehow captures the challenge posed by evolving militant groups.

The IS capture of Mosul in 2014 — and the fleeing of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police who were supposed to defend the city in the face of their advance — came as a shock to many people who had never imagined an extremist group could seize a major city. That they have persevered since then, holding onto large swaths of territory despite more than two years of U.S.-led airstrikes and a vast array of forces battling them, also testifies to their dark ingenuity.

"Every time we think we've countered terrorist tactics something new always happens," said David M. Witty, a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel and former adviser to Iraqi special operations forces. "There's no end to it."

U.S. takes aim at cyber attacks from connected devices as recalls mount

Obama administration officials sought on Monday to reassure the public that it was taking steps to counter new types of cyber attacks such as the one Friday that rendered Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and dozens of other major websites unavailable.

The Department of Homeland Security said it had held a conference call with 18 major communication service providers shortly after the attack began and was working to develop a new set of “strategic principles” for securing internet-connected devices.

DHS said its National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center was working with companies, law enforcement and researchers to cope with attacks made possible by the rapidly expanding number of smart gadgets that make up the "internet of Things.

Such devices, including web-connected cameras, appliances and toys, have little in the way of security. More than a million of them have been commandeered by hackers, who can direct them to take down a target site by flooding it with junk traffic.

Several networks of compromised machines were directed to attack big customers of web infrastructure company Dyn last week, Dyn officials and security researchers said.

The disruption had subsided by late Friday night in America, and two of the manufacturers whose devices had been hijacked for the attack pledged Monday to try to fix them.

But security experts said that many of the devices would never be fixed and that the broader security threat posed by the internet of Things would get worse before it gets better.

“If you expect to fix all the internet devices that are out there, force better passwords, install some mechanism for doing updates and add some native security for the operating system, you are going to be working a long time,” said Ed Amoroso, founder of TAG Cyber and former chief security officer at AT&T.

Instead, Amoroso said he hoped that government officials would focus on recommending better software architecture and that business partners would insist on better standards.

In the meantime, fresh responses by two of the companies involved in the attacks illustrated the extent of the problem.

Chinese firm Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co Ltd, which makes components for surveillance cameras, said it would recall some products from the United States.

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Another Chinese company, Dahua Technology, acknowledged that some of its older cameras and video recorders were vulnerable to attacks when users had not changed the default passwords. Like Xiongmai, it said it would offer firmware updates on its website to fix the problem and would give discounts to customers who wanted to exchange their gear.

But neither company has anything like a comprehensive list of their customers, many of whom will never learn of the problems, said Dale Drew, chief security officer with communications provider Level 3.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the only way they are going to reach their consumers is through media reports, Drew said.

Peter Navarro: Trump the Bull vs. Clinton the Bear

Whichever candidate wins the presidential race, there will be a significant stock market correction. The important question for investors is: what comes next?A stock market correction is inevitable because we are in a “paper bull” Obama-Clinton market. With the worst economic recovery since World War II, central banks around the world have continued to print vast quantities of “easy money.”

As interest rates remain at historic lows, desperate bond markets seeking positive returns have shifted assets into equities, propping up stock prices. This paper bull cannot last – we are already starting to move sideways.

What happens once a stock market correction occurs? It is important to go to first principles: Stock prices simply reflect an expectation of a future stream of earnings, and earnings rise with economic growth. To get a new bull market, investors need a president who both understands how growth occurs and who will devise the best policies to stimulate robust growth.

That massive fiscal and monetary stimulus alone can’t fix what ails America has been painfully demonstrated. It took 43 presidents to run up a debt of $10 trillion.  Barack Obama doubled it in eight years.  All we have to show for this is an anemic 1 percent growth rate.

Donald Trump’s economic plan is all about rapid growth. He will cut taxes, reduce regulation, unleash our energy sector, and eliminate our growth-sapping trade deficits. This solid, Reaganesque recipe for growth and a new bull market puts Dow 25,000 within easy reach.

Predictions MapS
Hillary Clinton has promised to hike taxes, increase regulations, put our coal industry out of business, and throttle our oil and gas industries.  She is also directly responsible for many of the bad trade deals swelling our trade deficit. Why any prudent investor would cast a ballot for this Clinton bear market agenda is an enigma wrapped in a mystery.

There is a far deeper difference between Trump versus Clinton that sophisticated investors should be mindful of.  Clinton’s plan Keynesian “tax and spend” stimulus strategy has been proven not to work over the last eight years. Trump focuses directly on the underlying structural imbalances our nation’s GDP equation is now saddled with.

As with any nation, America’s GDP is driven by consumption, government spending, business investment and net exports (exports minus imports).   From 1947 to 2001, America’s real GDP grew in at a balanced 3.5 percent per year.  Since 2002, that average has fallen to 1.9 percent.  This has cost millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in foregone income and tax revenues – one additional GDP point creates 1.2 million jobs.

A pivotal reason why America fell from robust growth grace was President Bill Clinton’s 2001 shoehorning of China into the World Trade Organization. This resulted in a wave of off-shoring of U.S. investment, thereby depressing the domestic business investment driver in America’s growth equation – while lifting China’s economy.Clinton’s China deal also allowed a flood of illegally subsidized imports into U.S. markets and dramatically increased the U.S. trade deficit in goods with China – now at one billion dollars a day and $366 billion a year. This structural hit to the net export driver in the U.S. equation accounts for as much as one lost GDP point a year –- and it’s not just China doing this structural damage.

For example, since Bill Clinton signed NAFTA in 1993, the U.S. has lost 850,000 jobs and seen its trade deficit with Mexico rise from zero to $60 billion. The cumulative Mexican trade deficit will hit a trillion dollars by end of year.  This has been a tremendous drag on U.S. growth.

That Hillary Clinton fails to understand the debilitating effects of bad trade deals is epitomized by her 2012 South Korea agreement.  As Secretary of State, she promised a “cutting edge” deal that would create 70,000 jobs.  Instead, we’ve lost 95,000 jobs while our trade deficit has doubled.  Our auto industry in swing states like Michigan have been particularly hammered.

Of course, investors get nervous when Donald Trump talks about renegotiating bad trade deals like NAFTA and cracking down on trade cheaters like China. Yet unless America comes to grips with the negative impacts that trade has had, it will never escape its current slow growth trap – or experience another sustained and true bull market.

Our current economic malaise is not a “new normal” as some defeatists and Clintonites have phrased it.  It’s a politician-made “new dismal” that can simply be rectified by a strong, pro-growth, pro-trade leader in the White House like Trump.  With Clinton, higher taxes and more regulation do not a bull market make.


Peter Navarro is a UC-Irvine business professor and author of stock market classics like “If It’s Raining in Brazil, Buy Starbucks.” He is a Trump policy adviser.

Dreamworld: Three killed on Australian theme park ride

At least three people have been killed on a ride at the Dreamworld theme park on Australia's Gold Coast, the park has confirmed.

Queensland police said they were attending a "critical incident" at the park.

The incident is believed to have happened on the Thunder River Rapids ride.

Dreamworld bills itself as Australia's biggest theme park with more than 50 rides and attractions.

The theme park issued a statement confirming the three deaths.

"Dreamworld is working as quickly as possible to establish the facts around the incident and is working closely with emergency authorities and police to do this," the statement said.

The Thunder River Rapids ride was opened in 1986.

The theme park's website says it allowed riders to travel at up to "45km/h through the turbulent rapids"