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Russia Denounces Sanctions on Syria as “Collective Punishment”

July 10, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Color Revolutions, General, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Global Diplomacy, Russia, World war danger updates

Russia Denounces Sanctions on Syria as “Collective Punishment” —

July 9 (EIRNS)–In a press conference following the Astana format meeting on Syria yesterday, held in Kazakhstan, Russian Special Presidential Envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentyev denounced what he called the “collective punishment” of the Syrian people through Western sanctions. “We believe the consultations that we have held here in Nur-Sultan give hope that our call on the international community [will make it possible] to move the focus from efforts to stabilize the situation in Syria in military terms to humanitarian issues and activities aimed at providing humanitarian assistance to the Syrian people,” he pointed out. “And definitely, the deplorable practice of collective punishment for the Syrian people has to end,” Lavrentyev added.

Humanitarian aid needs to be delivered through the country’s legitimate authorities, and in this regard, Russia calls for the establishment of a mechanism to deliver humanitarian aid to all parts of Syria via Damascus, he said.

About 24 hours after Lavrentyev’s remarks, the UN Security Council passed a compromise resolution, today, on extending the UN mandate for cross-border delivery of humanitarian aid supplies from Turkey to Syria’s Idlib province. The new resolution extends the mandate for six months until Jan. 10, 2022, with an automatic extension for another six months until July 10, 2022, subject to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issuing a report on the “transparency” of the aid operation and progress on delivering aid across conflict lines within Syria as Russia wanted. The resolution also welcomes “all efforts and initiatives to broaden the humanitarian activities in Syria, including water, sanitation, health, education, and shelter” as well as early recovery projects.

American Scientists: No to FBI Anti-China Witch-hunt

March 7, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Counterintelligence, General updates, Geopolitics updates

American Scientists Fight Back Against FBI’s Anti-China, Anti-Science Witch-hunt

March 6 (EIRNS)–Hundreds of America’s leading scientists, including six Nobel Prize recipients in chemistry, physics and medicine, have issued two powerful denunciations of the FBI’s criminal prosecution of hundreds of Chinese scientists in the United States, including American citizens of Chinese dissent, as well as Americans who have collaborated with Chinese institutions for the advancement of human knowledge. These attacks, directed by FBI Director Christopher Wray, in collaboration with the psychotic attacks on China from President Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, were exposed in the EIR Special Report of Nov. 22, 2019, Stop the McCarthyite With-hunt Against China and President Trump. Now, professors from leading US universities have issued two public letters defending targets of this atrocity — one from Harvard, one from MIT — spelling out clearly that the charges are false, are politically motivated, and go far beyond the persecution of these scientists and educators, but are in fact direct attacks on science itself, and on America’s leadership in international scientific research.

The FBI targets in question are Professor Charles Lieber, Chairman of the Harvard chemistry department and a world leader in nanotechnology research, and Professor Gang Chen, the Chairman of the MIT mechanical engineering department, also a leader in nanotechnology. Lieber, described by the 42 signers of the March 1 letter as “one of the great scientists of his generation,” was arrested in January 2020 for infractions regarding his federal reporting of his participation in China’s “Thousand Talents” program, which aims to recruit scientists from around the world to work in China or in cooperation with Chinese scientific research centers. There were no secrets involved, only technical infractions normally simply corrected, but now criminalized, through a “tragically misguided government campaign,” which “reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of modern science,” Lieber’s defenders write. This campaign, they add, “is threatening not only the United States position as a world leader in academic research, but science itself.” While Lieber is the “most notable” scientist targeted by the FBI, they add, “these prosecutions are rampant.” see https://beta.documentcloud.org/documents/20493785-read-the-full-letter-from-harvard-scientists-calling-to-save-professor-charles-lieber-and-scientific-collaboration

Over 170 members of the MIT faculty signed a similar letter defending Prof. Gang Chen, arrested on Jan. 14 of this year. He faces similarly false charges which could sentence him to 30 years in prison and a huge fine. “We are troubled that the complaints against Professor Chen vilifies what would be considered normal academic and research activities, including promoting MIT’s global mission,” the letter reads. It adds: “Because America’s competitiveness depends so heavily on scientific and technological talent from abroad, its national security is harmed by the message that the US government will question the loyalty of foreign scientists.”

UN Warns of ‘High Food Price Hot Spots’ in Africa; Hyperinflation In Many Countries

July 10, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Agriculture, Economic development updates, General, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Healthcare

UN Warns of ‘High Food Price Hot Spots’ in Africa; Hyperinflation In Many Countries—

July 9 (EIRNS)–The UN News office issued a release July 8 on the crisis of rising food prices, quoting Arif Husain, Chief Economist at the UN World Food Program, that, “High food prices are hunger’s new best friend.” Overall, the WFP paid 13 percent more for wheat for food relief, during the first four months of 2021, than it paid in 2020. Individual countries—especially the poor and food-import dependent, are experiencing terrible price shocks. The release gave many examples, from the recent WFP Market Monitor:

Lebanon: The price of wheat flour here from March through May was 50% higher than the previous three months. The year-on-year price rise was 219%.

Syria: The price of cooking oil March through May rose nearly 60% from the prior three months. Cooking oil year-on-year has increased in price by 440%.

Mozambique: The price of cassava March through May shot up by 45% over the prior three-month period. Mozambique is among what the WFP calls the “high food price hot spots” in Africa.

Top Renewable Energy Co. Fails

March 6, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, Environmentalism updates, Finance, General, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Green New Deal, New financial order updates

Leading Renewable Energy Company Abengoa, Once the Cat’s Meow, Fails

March 5 (EIRNS)–A leading renewable energy firm, Abengoa SA, which has been the darling of the City of London and Wall Street financiers, and green Malthusians, filed for bankruptcy, on Feb. 23. The Spanish company has carried out projects in the United States, and in 2010, it received a large United States loan guarantee from the Barrack Obama-Joe Biden administration to build a solar energy plant in Arizona. This is the second largest bankruptcy in Spanish history, according to the El Pais newspaper, and has global implications. This represents a snap shot of the significant vulnerability of a planned $40 trillion green speculative bubble in “renewables,” even before it is built.

This will be the third failure of Abengoa; having cooked its books in 2015—it was later found out—in order to present a picture of functionality, it collapsed in 2016 (wiping out almost all the value of its stockholders). It restructured its debt in 2018, and was in the process of attempting to restructure its current 6 billion euro/US$7.3 billion debt load, when the Spanish regional government of Andalusia unravelled a larger bail-out package by withdrawing its part of the package: an offer of a 20 million euro loan to the failing Abengoa.

The July 5, 2010 GreenTechMedia reported that in 2008, Abengoa ‘negotiated with the Obama-Biden administration, along with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, that the U.S. government would extend to Abengoa a $1.4 billion U.S. federal loan guarantee—a very large sum at that time for renewables—to build a “250 megawatt “Solana solar concentrating power plant near Gila Bend, 70 miles southwest of Phoenix, Arizona. It would be a parabolic trough plant, that would supposedly be able to store some of the solar rays in the form of thermal energy. But the trick was that the plant would generate about 38% of its rated capacity, meaning that it would generate almost two-thirds below what its rated capacity said.

Abengoa also built in Hugoton, Kansas a hybrid biomass plant, which would convert 350,000 tons of biomass/year into 25 million gallons per year of liquid fuel. Abengoa opened this plant in October 2014; the plant shut down operations in December 2015. Abenoga sold the plant, which cost more than $110 billion to build, to another company for $43 billion.

It has not been made known what will happen to the $1.4 billion Obama-Biden loan guarantee that was made to Abengoa.

It should be noted that many solar and wind turbine companies survive only through U.S. government tax breaks and subsidies. According to the America’s Power organization, solar and wind have received $82.1 billion in tax subsidies just between 2010 and 2018.

The failure of Abengoa is a cautionary tale of what may unfold from a $40 trillion geen speculative bubble. That would take down the energy and electricity generating process, and slash agro-manufacturing processes, and human population. It would also, through its insanity, collapse financially.

UN Rapporteur Slams US Sanctions

March 6, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Color Revolutions, General, General updates, Geopolitics updates, World war danger updates

Hypocrisy of “human rights” cries are exposed.

Mar. 5 (EIRNS)–Speaking at the United Nations offices in Geneva on March 4, UN Special Rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan, and Obiora C. Okafor, UN Independent Expert on human rights and international solidarity, said sanctions adopted by the US violate the rights of citizens from many other countries.

“Emergencies declared by the United States often last years, and in some cases decades, and so do the sanctions they authorize,” the experts said in a statement. “Instead of being true emergencies, they seem like excuses to impose sanctions indefinitely.”

“The sanctions authorized by the U.S. on the base of announced states of emergency violate a wide range of human rights in China, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, Nicaragua, the Russian Federation, Syria, Venezuela, Zimbabwe and other countries around the world, including rights to freedom of movement, of association, to due process such as fair trial and the presumption of innocence, as well economic and social rights and the very right to life,” Douhan and Okafor stressed.

They also charged that the sanctions affect the rights of those engaged in providing assistance for the reconstruction of Syria, and slammed the imposition of secondary sanctions.

They called on the US to “fully and completely observe its obligations under the ICCPR to prevent any negative impact on the human rights of persons subject to sanctions authorized under the emergency declarations” — a very weak conclusion, when clearly the sanctions are illegal and should be cancelled.

Winners in New `Global Minimum Corporate Tax: Tech Giants, London `Offshore’

July 8, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Finance, General updates, Geopolitics updates

Winners in the New `Global Minimum Corporate Tax: Tech Giants, London `Offshore’

July 7 (EIRNS) – The Financial Times on July 3 reported that the City of London financial center had succeeded in winning an “exemption” for its banks and other financial firms – and those of Wall Street and Frankfurt – from the new “global minimum corporate tax” agreement ballyhooed by the U.S. Treasury at the time of the G7 finance ministers and heads-of-state meetings. The minimum tax scheme, considered a U.S. priority, is actually being negotiated and planned under OECD auspices.

A ZeroHedge column on July 1 had already noted that “while Washington likes to talk about the new framework as a foregone conclusion, there’s plenty of reason to doubt that it will ever be implemented. One reason is that countries like Ireland, Singapore, Indonesia and island tax havens like Bermuda all oppose the new scheme.” It could be expected that London would play this card.

In what was portrayed in financial media as hard bargaining between “the United States” on one side and “the UK and France” on the other, financial corporations got a “carve out” or safe haven from the minimum tax; and in exchange, the UK agreed to eliminate in stages its “digital services tax”, which has no American counterpart. France agreed to do this as well, on behalf of continental European countries’ tax authorities.

So while some nations may be hurt by the agreement – for example, Ireland and Russia, which currently have corporate tax rates below 15% — the Silicon Valley tech monopolists will come out just as sales tax-free worldwide, as they have always been in the United States; and the City and Wall Street banks will be subject to the 15% minimum corporate tax only in their home bases, and not in all the other places they operate in. That is to say that “London offshore” tax havens will still be tax havens.

WHO Briefers Angry at Lack of Health Infrastructure in the War vs. COVID-19

July 8, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in COVID-19, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Healthcare

WHO Briefers Angry at Lack of Health Infrastructure in the War vs. COVID-19

July 6, 2021 (EIRNS)—The World Health Organization’s Mike Ryan and Maria Von Kerkhove answered questions for the public on Monday and allowed some of their frustration and anger to show. First on Monday: While new cases worldwide have stabilized, they have done so at an uncomfortably high level; this, in fact, reflects a dangerously unstable situation. While new cases in the Americas declined (13%), they raced upwards in Africa (15%) and Europe (28%). This last week had twenty countries undergoing sharp rises. Basically, the point of impact simply shifted. The two WHO specialists cited three interacting factors: uneven vaccination levels, the spread of the Delta variant, and social relaxing.

Then the anger: The WHO teams are fighting on the front lines. We’re really humanitarians, and we won’t give up. But the vaccines aren’t coming as they should, or even as promised. “The cavalry is not coming.” This destroys morale. So, people then give up, go back to work and accept what fate will bring them. What is needed is to build and invest in systems now—don’t wait for the next surge. A system involves: surveillance systems, testing in place, isolation, clinical care, contact tracing or at least cluster investigations and such; so that we can find out where the enemy is and go after it. Those systems need to be built now, and the wealthier West is not even doing it for their own populations. Their admonitions are an echo of Helga Zepp LaRouche’s 2020 call for a new global health platform for each country.

Ryan stressed that there were enough vaccines in the world right now to inoculate all the “at-risk” categories and the medical personnel. Kerkhove stressed that enough is known about the workings of the coronavirus to design a comprehensive war plan against it. It seems that the first 18 months of the battle finds the immaturity of political culture is no match for the reality of the virus.

Mexico Seeks Energy Security

March 4, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Economic development updates, Environmentalism updates, Finance, General updates, Global Diplomacy, Mexico, United States

Mexico Stands Firm: Texas Shows We Are Right To Put Energy Security Before Profit

March 3 (EIRNS)—In the middle of the Texas energy crisis, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador asked leaders of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) to brief the nation on how that crisis proves that his policy to restore national energy self-sufficiency and a national electricity grid regulated by the government, fed by all energy sources, emphatically including fossil fuels, is urgent, and its opponents are dead wrong.

The climate mafia has launched war against AMLO’s “vision of energy sovereignty” and mandate for fossil fuels to be used before subsidized and unreliable wind and solar. “No other G20 country has such abnormal or retrograde energy policies as this government. It’s not going to advance us toward our climate goals,” one leading climate activist told the London Guardian in mid-February. International energy “investors” are preparing lawsuits against AMLO’s new Electricity Law to drive out the speculators, which was passed by the Chamber of Deputies last week and is expected to pass the Senate shortly. Rating agencies are preparing to lower Mexico’s credit rating, if it becomes law.

The CFE team, led by its chairman, Manuel Bartlett, who has been outspoken against the wind and solar energy frauds, detailed how the selling off of Mexico’s public sector electricity generation and distribution to a bunch of unregulated international speculators under the previous two administrations were the cause of the blackouts in Mexico when the cold wave hit, as happened in Texas. The officials pointed to the absurdity that Mexico, an oil producer with plenty of its own natural gas, now found itself with 64% of its national electricity powered by natural gas imported from Texas. Mexico was knocked out when the cold wave hit because the pipelines from Texas froze, and after that Texas stopped all export of natural gas because its wind and solar “renewables” failed, they
reported.

The CFE managed to cover 75% of the gap from the loss of natural gas imports by activating 11 hydroelectric plants, coal plants fed by mines which the López Obrador government had recently reopened, diesel supplied by the state oil company PEMEX at low prices, existing reserves of natural gas and purchase of some shiploads of the latter—at the wildly-high speculative prices on the international markets. Officials stressed that they could only do these things because under the energy sovereignty policy, thermoelectric plants which were under-utilized, nonetheless were maintained, against just such an emergency.

López Obrador then drew the lessons out: What just happened in Texas makes clear that it is not possible to give equal treatment to private foreign companies, he stated. The state needs to control the energy production and national electricity grid as an integrated whole. Under the previous governments, the energy sector was being taken apart, sold off in pieces, and looted. “It is important to recognize that these two public companies [Pemex and the CFE] do not have profit as their purpose, but to guarantee electricity service, and at fair prices, also, because we are going to continue fulfilling our commitment to not increase electricity prices, even with the speculation and increases in gas prices which are occurring in Texas and the United States.”

U.S.-China Diplomacy: Needs to Aim for Unity

March 4, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in China, Finance, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Global Diplomacy, New Silk Road / BRI updates, United States, World Land-Bridge updates, World war danger updates

China to Biden Team: It Is ‘Evil’ To Try and Prevent Any
People’s Right To Pursue a Better Life.

March 3 (EIRNS)—China’s Global Times responded strongly to a report issued March 1 by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which accused China of undermining U.S. national interests through coercive and unfair trade practices and promised to use all available tools to pursue “strengthened enforcement” of China’s existing trade obligations. In other words, as the Global Times yesterday took due note, “the Biden administration has repeatedly said it is reviewing the previous administration’s China policy, but recent messages emanating from Washington suggest that the new administration is keeping the hardline stance against China. The Trump administration’s strategic goal of containing China will be inherited, and only the means of dealing with China may be adjusted.”

It is “understandable” and even “reasonable” that Washington would seek to maintain its leading position in technologies, and to protect its intellectual property rights, the editors of this official daily correctly assert. China does not protest U.S. policies towards China which aim at promoting U.S. development and increasing U.S. strength, but containment smacks of the “barbaric geopolitical games” of the 19th and early 20th century.

“We are in the 21st century…. Be they Americans, Chinese, Latin Americans or Africans, all people have the right to pursue a better life…. [P]olicies targeted at preventing China’s continuous development and even pushing China’s economy backward are evil. They pose a direct harm to the interests of the 1.4 billion Chinese people, depriving the natural right of the Chinese people to seek a better life….

“Restricting China from the perspective of intellectual property rights protection is different from jeopardizing China’s scientific and technological research and development capabilities. The former is part of the intellectual property rights protection regime, while the latter is an evil result of the geopolitical mentality.

“China has 1.4 billion people, more than the West combined, and much more than the population of the major Western countries combined. China’s development is the grandest project of the global human rights cause, and China’s development needs a relatively friendly international environment, including fair conditions for trade and technology exchanges…. It is malicious to take tough measures to suppress the ability of developing countries, and to tell large countries like China that ‘you deserve to be poor’….

“This kind of malicious policy cannot be followed up in a broad and lasting way in the 21st century. We hope the U.S. ruling team can see clearly the general trend, stop talking about human rights when it is trying to deprive the sacred rights of 1.4 billion Chinese people…. At last, we have to say that such evil is doomed to failure in the 21st century.”

{Source: “Policies Containing China’s Development Malicious: Global Times Editorial” https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202103/1217096.shtml }

Yemen: Crime Against Humanity – Change It!

March 3, 2021by Mary Jane Freeman in Finance, General updates, Geopolitics updates, Global Diplomacy, World war danger updates

Yemen Donors Conference Raises Even Less Money for Yemen Humanitarian Relief than Was Provided Last Year

March 2, 2021 (EIRNS)—The UN donors conference which convened yesterday to raise funds for relief efforts in Yemen, cosponsored by Sweden and Switzerland, failed to raise even half of the $3.85 billion that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres appealed for. Pledges amounted to a total of $1.7 billion, even less than the $1.9 billion that was donated in 2020. Guterres called for countries to “consider again what they can do to help stave off the worst famine the world has seen in decades.” Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, who is on a week-long visit to Yemen, also called the outcome of the conference “disappointing,” warning that the lack of funding would cause huge cuts to Yemen aid. “The shortfall in humanitarian aid will be measured in lives lost,” he said.

The Saudis pledged $430 million; the U.S. promised $191 million, reportedly a decrease of $35 million from last year. The reduction in aid is attributed to the pandemic, corruption allegations, and concerns the aid might not be reaching its intended recipients in territories controlled by the rebels.

The Houthi leadership dismissed the conference, saying that such donor meetings only aid the aggressor countries and not the people of Yemen. “Conferences help aggressor states to identify themselves as obliging, not hostile or aggressor states which must end the siege and aggression,” said Houthi spokesman Mohammad Abdul-Salam, reported Iran’s Tasnim News Agency. He stressed in a twitter posting that stopping the aggression and lifting the blockade is the biggest help Yemen can ever receive. “The best services that the Saudi-led coalition provides to Yemen are nothing but daily airstrikes, brutal siege, the blockade of oil products and the closure of Sana’a International Airport, and the human consequences thereof.”

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