UN Report: Sex Exploitations in Haiti

In June of 2004, the United Nations created a Stabilization Mission in Haiti. This was due in part to the armed conflict when Bertrand Aristide departed the country.

In January of 2010, a devastating earthquake struck and an estimated death rate as pegged at 220,000. The UN deployed 96 peacekeepers.

What came next is disgusting.

UN: Sex exploitation by peacekeepers strongly underreported

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Members of a U.N. peacekeeping mission engaged in “transactional sex” with more than 225 Haitian women who said they needed to do so to obtain things like food and medication, a sign that sexual exploitation remains significantly underreported in such missions, according to a new report obtained by The Associated Press.

 

The draft by the Office of Internal Oversight Services looks at the way U.N. peacekeeping, which has about 125,000 people in some of the world’s most troubled areas, deals with the persistent problem of sexual abuse and exploitation.

The report, expected to be released this month, says major challenges remain a decade after a groundbreaking U.N. report first tackled the issue.

Among its findings: About a third of alleged sexual abuse involves minors under 18. Assistance to victims is “severely deficient.” The average investigation by OIOS, which says it prioritizes cases involving minors or rape, takes more than a year.

And widespread confusion remains on the ground about consensual sex and exploitation. To help demonstrate that, investigators headed to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

A year ago, the report says, investigators interviewed 231 people in Haiti who said they’d had transactional sexual relationships with U.N. peacekeepers. “For rural women, hunger, lack of shelter, baby care items, medication and household items were frequently cited as the ‘triggering need,'” the report says. Urban and suburban women received “church shoes,’ cell phones, laptops and perfume, as well as money.

“In cases of non-payment, some women withheld the badges of peacekeepers and threatened to reveal their infidelity via social media,” the report says. “Only seven interviewees knew about the United Nations policy prohibiting sexual exploitation and abuse.” None knew about the mission’s hotline to report it.

Each of those instances of transactional sex, the report says, would be considered prohibited conduct, “thus demonstrating significant underreporting.” It was not clear how many peacekeepers were involved.

For all of last year, the total number of allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation against members of all U.N. peacekeeping missions was 51, down from 66 the year before, according to the secretary-general’s latest annual report on the issue.

The draft report doesn’t say over what time frame the “transactional sex” in Haiti occurred. The peacekeeping mission there was first authorized in 2004 and, as of the end of March, had more than 7,000 uniformed troops. It is one of four peacekeeping missions that have accounted for the most allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation in recent years, along with those in Congo, Liberia and South Sudan.

One of the U.N. staffers who produced the report would not comment Tuesday, saying it was better to wait until it was released publicly. A spokesman for the peacekeeping office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The U.N. doesn’t have a standing army and relies on troops contributed by member states. The states are responsible for investigating alleged misconduct by their troops, though the U.N. can step in if there’s no action.

In their response to the report’s findings, which is included in the draft, U.N. peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous and field support chief Atul Khare point out that while the number of peacekeepers has increased dramatically over the past decade, the number of allegations of sexual abuse and exploitation have gone down.

The U.N. prohibits “exchange of money, employment, goods or services for sex,” and it strongly discourages sexual relationships between U.N. staff and people who receive their assistance, saying they are “based on inherently unequal power dynamics” and undermine the world body’s credibility.

But that has led to some confusion on the ground, the new report says, with some members of peacekeeping missions seeing that guidance as a ban on all sexual relationships with local people. The report says the guidelines need to be clarified.

“Staff with long mission experience states that was a ‘general view that people should have romantic rights’ and raised the issue of sexuality as a human right,” the report says.

Let the investigation begin:

The U.N. has been shaken by revelations that a year after staffers first heard children’s accounts of sexual abuse by French soldiers supporting a U.N. peacekeeping mission, no one has been punished. Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday ordered an external inquiry into how that was handled. French authorities last month opened a formal judicial inquiry into the allegations.

Ban raised the earlier allegations Thursday with Gen. Pierre de Villiers, France’s chief of defense staff, in a meeting that Ban’s spokesman said France had requested. Spokesman Stephane Dujarric told The Associated Press that Ban brought up the issue during a wider conversation about peacekeeping operations and told the general that he hopes “the French investigation will be completed as soon as possible.”

 

Obamacare = O’boondoggle

Everything has a consequence and there are many attached to Obamacare, many not in the mainstream knowledge base. Jobs and innovation in the United States is the latest victim of the law. The Supreme Court will decide the fate of the law under the King vs. Burwell case at the end of the month. A description of the case is found here. There are some key facts on the case that need to be known as noted here. Additional destructive consequences still loom in the future.

ObamaCare’s Anti-Innovation Effect

by Scott W. Atlas

Of the many unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act, perhaps the least noticed is its threat to innovation. Although most discussions center on the law’s more immediate effects on hiring, insurance rates and access to doctors and care, attention should also be paid to its impact on U.S. research and development and health-care technology.

The overwhelming majority of the world’s health-care innovation occurs in the U.S. This includes ground-breaking drug treatments, surgical procedures, medical devices, patents, diagnostics and much more. Most of the funding for that innovation—about 71% of U.S. R&D investment—comes from private industry. A recent R&D Magazine survey of industry leaders in 63 countries ranked the U.S. No. 1 in the world for health-care innovation.

But that environment is changing. According to R&D Magazine and the research firm Battelle, growth of R&D spending in the U.S. from 2012 to 2014 averaged just 2.1%, down from an average of 6% over the previous 15 years. In that same 15-year period, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, India and the European Union saw faster R&D spending growth than the U.S. China’s grew on average 22% per year.

The recent slowdown in R&D spending in the U.S. is in part caused by weak economic growth since the 2008 financial crisis. But the economy’s weakness itself has been exacerbated by the negative impact of new taxes and regulations under ObamaCare. According to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the new health-care law will levy more than $500 billion in new taxes over its first 10 years to help pay for insurance subsidies and Medicaid expansion. These new taxes include significant levies on key health-care industries, such as manufacturers of medical devices and drugs, and their investors.

As a result, small and large U.S. health-care technology companies are moving R&D centers and jobs overseas. The CEO of one of the largest health-care companies in America recently told me that the device tax his company paid last year exceeded his company’s entire R&D budget. Already a long list of companies—including Boston Scientific , Stryker and Cook Medical—have announced job cuts and plans to open new centers for R&D, manufacturing and clinical trials overseas.

The bureaucrats at the Food and Drug Administration are also hindering medical-technology and drug development. According to a 2010 survey of more than 200 medical-device companies by medical professor and entrepreneur Josh Makower and his colleagues at Stanford University, delays of approvals for new medical devices are now far longer in the U.S. than in many other developed countries. In the European Union—not exactly known for cutting through red tape—it takes on average seven months to gain approval for low- to moderate-risk devices. In the U.S., FDA approval for similar devices takes on average 31 months.

The 2011 PricewaterhouseCoopers Medical Technology Innovation Scorecard found that “the gap between innovation leaders and emerging economies is rapidly narrowing.” And that “although the United States will hold its lead, the country will continue to lose ground during the next decade.” It goes on to say that “China, India, and Brazil will experience the strongest gains during the next 10 years.”

Since the signing of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, private-equity investment in new U.S. health-care startups has also diminished. Annual capital investment has decreased to $41 billion in 2013 from $61 billion in 2011, according to quarterly reports by the accounting and audit firm McGladrey LLP. Similarly, the Silicon Valley-based law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati reported in its semiannual Life Sciences Reports decreases from the first half of 2010 through the second half of 2013 in deal closings and capital raised for startups in biopharmaceuticals, medical devices and equipment, and diagnostics, with only a slight uptick in health-information systems investment.

Meanwhile, many of the best and brightest who come to the U.S. to study science, technology, engineering and math—the STEM subjects that are so crucial to innovation—are choosing to return to their home countries upon graduation. In 2008, a survey conducted by Vivek Wadhwa and his team of researchers at Duke, Harvard and the University of California found that only 6% of Indian, 10% of Chinese and 15% of European students expected to make America their permanent home. Much of this is Congress’s fault. Lawmakers have been slow to increase limits on H-1B visas for high-skill foreign workers. Pressure has been brought to bear on Congress to take action, but it may be too late for an increase in the visas to have much effect in health care, given the decline in R&D spending that would make use of their talents.

What can be done to reverse these damaging trends? First, strip back the heavy tax burdens that currently inhibit innovation, starting with repealing the Affordable Care Act’s $29 billion medical-device excise tax and the $80 billion tax on brand-name drugs. Change the tax code to add incentives for investment in early-stage medical technology and life-science companies, as well as for philanthropic gifts to academic institutions that promote tech entrepreneurs.

And finally, simplify processes for new device and drug approvals, so that the FDA becomes a favorable rather than an obstructionist environment for these life-saving and cost-saving discoveries. It’s a tall order, especially in today’s Washington. But America’s health—and wealth—depend on it.

*** Obama’s ‘King v. Burwell’ Speech Displayed The Very Ideological Fervor That Led Him To Break The Law

In a case called King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court will soon decide whether it agrees with two lower courts that President Obama is breaking the law by subjecting 57 million employers and individuals to illegal taxes, and spending the illegal proceeds to hide the cost of HealthCare.gov coverage from 6.5 million enrollees. Today the president delivered a speech designed to cow the Supremes into turning a blind eye to the law. Instead, he offered what for some is the missing piece of the King v. Burwell puzzle. He displayed the very ideological fervor that leads powerful people to break the rules.

“We have an obligation to put ourselves in our neighbor’s shoes, and to see the common humanity in each other,” the president said. Yet the president of the United States has an even more important obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”  It’s right there in Article II, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution, which President Obama swore to uphold. King v. Burwell is about his failure to meet that obligation.

 

ISIS Tactics Include Taxes and Treasures

With a multi-country coalition, air strikes, ground intelligence gathering, surveillance drones and up to 1000 more troops being deployed to Iraq, the White House has no strategy and blames the Pentagon.

The Pentagon has a division that is assigned to war-gaming and planning in all conditions across the globe that is based on human intelligence, information gathered from diplomatic staff in all embassies, use of software, estimations, locations of military assets, threats from the enemy, money, transportation, secret deals, ordnance positioning and more. The Pentagon always has several strategies that are current and nimble that require dynamic alterations as even minor conditions change. For Obama to blame the Pentagon is childish and misguided.

Despite nine months and $2.44 billion in U.S. airstrikes against the fighters and their oil facilities and smuggling networks, the self-proclaimed Islamic State has proven to be as resilient financially as it’s been militarily.

The group that President Barack Obama dismissed in January 2014 as a junior varsity team last year seized an estimated $675 million from banks, plus $145 million in oil sales and ransom payments and tens of millions more from other commercial enterprises, looting and extortion, according to U.S. Treasury and United Nations figures.

“This isn’t your average terrorist group operating from your average safe haven,” said Juan Zarate, a former assistant secretary of Treasury for terrorist financing and financial crimes who spent years targeting al-Qaeda funding. “They have access to oil in Iraq and Syria; access to major population centers; access to banks, antiquities and smuggling groups — all of that allows them to be more agile and have access to more capital and resources than your average terrorist group.”

“The truth is nobody really knows how much they’re making now,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The U.S. government is getting closer to pegging the group’s finances because of things like last month’s raid in eastern Syria. But no one knows how much they’re getting versus their spending.”

Islamic State “is in some ways a proto-state, in some ways a terrorist organization, in some ways an insurgency and in some ways a transnational criminal group,” he said. Like drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico and al-Qaeda offshoots in Somalia, northern Mali and Yemen, the group is extorting taxes, plundering local resources and taking a cut of commercial enterprises, he said. Read much more detail here.

ISIS has published their objectives on the internet for the world to see and yet operates with unhindered. ISIS is fully functional in an estimated 12 countries while the Obama administration is in neutral to lead the coalition in both offensive and defensive measures. The impact of the coalition is inert.

Egypt, a country working to recover from a power revolution is at particular risk.

From Oren Kessler in part: Egypt’s once-foundering economy is slowly rising from the abyss. President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has cut costly fuel and food subsidies, cut red tape on investments, instructed the Central Bank to tackle the black market in foreign currencies and vowed to bring unemployment under 10 percent.

His efforts are beginning to bear fruit. In May, the ratings agency Standard & Poor’s revised Egypt’s country outlook from stable to positive, predicting real GDP growth over the next three years of 4.3 percent – double the average of the four years since the revolution. Meanwhile, the government’s suspension of the capital gains tax sent stocks soaring 6.5 percent in a single day.

Still, no economic turnaround will be complete without a recovery in tourism. The U.S. State Department currently urges citizens to exercise caution in traveling to the country, and advises against any non-essential travel in Sinai, where an insurgency by Islamic State-linked militants has raged since the military ouster of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013. At the same time, shadowy pro-Brotherhood groups calling themselves Ajnad Misr (“Soldiers of Egypt”) and the “Popular Resistance Movement” are increasingly targeting the populous mainland, including Cairo, Alexandria and the cities of the Nile Delta. The government accuses the now-banned Brotherhood of responsibility for virtually every attack, but the extent to which the group is actually orchestrating the violence remains unclear.

What is clear is that continued terrorism, particularly against tourists, has the capacity to set back the fragile gains Cairo has made in restoring stability and reviving its economy. For Egypt, persuading visitors to come soak up the country’s sights and sun will require convincing them beyond a reasonable doubt that traveling to the land of the Pharaohs will not be a one-way ticket. More detail here.

Explaining Relations with Cuba, Prisoners and Debt

Repaying $15 billion in debt default:

The Cuban government has agreed that it owes $15 billion to the exclusive group of nations known as the Paris Club, after Cuba declared itself in default in 1986, according to a report from Reuters quoting diplomatic sources.

The figure agreed to includes principal, service charges, interest and fines that Cuba owes 16 Paris Club nations from its 1986 default, Reuters reported on Monday. However, it does not include compensation fees levied by the United States for private properties confiscated by the Cuban government since 1959.

The Paris Club is an informal group of creditor governments and institutions composed of 20 permanent member countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and the United States.

The agreement reached with the Paris Club advances negotiations on the terms of payment, the first since negotiations failed in 2001, in part due to a $35 billion debt owed to the former Soviet Union, Cuba’s primary benefactor before its collapse in 1991. In July, President Vladimir Putin agreed to forgive nearly all of that debt and pledged to reinvest payments made by the Cuban government toward development projects on the island.

“This agreement is another sign of the political will of the Cuban government to rejoin a reasonable credit system at the normal level of the world economy, in accordance with the norms of international financial standards,” said José Oro, director of research division of Cuba at Thomas J. Herzfeld Advisors Inc. investment firm in Miami Beach.  Read more here.

Criminal illegals that Cuba wont take back:

Havana won’t take them back

Hundreds with ‘Zadvydas cases’ refused by their home countries

Hundreds of Cuban criminals are released onto the streets of the U.S. every year because that nation won’t take them back — even though the Obama administration is trying to broker a more open relationship with the communist island nation.

It’s a quirk of immigration law known as “Zadvydas cases,” after a 2001 Supreme Court ruling that said the government cannot detain immigrants indefinitely if their home countries won’t take them back.

Cuba, China and Vietnam regularly top the list, but even some countries that are supposed to be closer partners, such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, are refusing to quickly accept some of their citizens whom the U.S. is trying to deport.

Cuba refused to take back 878 criminals last year and rejected nearly 400 through the first eight months of the current fiscal year, according to statistics that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement provided to the House Judiciary Committee. Vietnam is second, having refused 331 criminals in 2014, though it has rejected the return of only 44 criminals so far this year.

All told, the government released 2,457 criminals and 461 non-criminal illegal immigrants onto the streets last year because of the Zadvydas strictures, ICE said. This year, the totals through May 9 were 1,107 criminals and 344 noncriminals.

“The Zadvydas problem is an urgent one, considering that a large percentage of the most serious criminal alien releases are Zadvydas,” said Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies. “Given the obvious public safety risks, the administration should be more aggressive in seeking a solution or in using the tools available to them.”

In the Zadvydas ruling, the Supreme Court said immigration detention cannot extend beyond six months unless there is a compelling national security or public safety interest. If home countries won’t cooperate in taking back their citizens, the U.S. government must release them.

Republicans in Congress have proposed a number of fixes and have pushed for tools such as withholding visas from countries that refuse to accept their scofflaws, but the George W. Bush and Obama administrations have been reluctant to take those steps.

The issue is even more acute given that Cuba is the biggest offender and President Obama is trying to normalize relations with that nation. Analysts said it would be the perfect time to raise the issue of Zadvydas refusals.

The State Department didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment, but there is no indication that it has raised the issue as part of the talks.

Ms. Vaughan said that is a missed opportunity.

“It’s the best chance in decades to push Cuba to be more cooperative,” she said.

Beyond Cuba, the government faces problems returning citizens to a number of countries. Twelve nations refused the return of at least 70 of their citizens in 2014, including a number of countries that received generous U.S. aid.

One of those, Liberia, refused 85 criminals’ return, even as the U.S. was providing extensive help to combat an Ebola outbreak.

Three other Central American countries are poised to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in aid among them to try to stem a surge of their citizens entering the U.S. illegally for life in the shadows.  Read more here.

Among them, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador refused 127 criminals and 145 noncriminals in 2014.

The Guatemalan and Honduran embassies didn’t respond to repeated messages requesting comment, but El Salvador’s embassy in Washington said it does what it can while guaranteeing that its citizens go through legal due process.

“We want to make clear that there’s no policy that allows refusing deportations. On the contrary, our consulates give assistance to all Salvadoran prisoners in the United States seeking to facilitate their return to the country, where many of them won’t be in prison,” said Ana Virginia Guardado, an embassy spokeswoman.

She said her country refused return in cases in which the individuals rejected El Salvador’s consular help. She said El Salvador is still working on those cases and that individuals will be given travel documents allowing their deportation once they have exhausted all of their legal avenues in the U.S.

She said El Salvador has worked to accept nearly 8,000 deportees so far this year.

ICE said the Central American countries provide good cooperation and that the relationships have grown stronger with the surge of illegal immigrant children in the U.S. that peaked last summer.

“Through relationship-building, consular pilot programs and regular engagement, timely issuance of travel documents has risen, as has the host governments’ willingness and capacity to accept an increased amount of ICE air charter flights,” spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez said.

Ms. Rodriguez said the number of refusals from the Central American countries is low compared with the total number of deportations. El Salvador’s 2014 refusal rate was less than half of a percent of the total number who were accepted back.

She said the cases that are refused often have special circumstances that make them tougher to complete. Even after they are released, however, the Zadvydas cases are still in the system and ICE is still working to deport them as soon as possible.

 

Meet Bernard Aronson and Venezuela Blackouts

Bernard Aronson, a Goldman Sachs insider with assignments in Latin America. It is especially cool that Barack Obama calls on Aronson to end the rebel fighting in Latin America. Or how about using Bernard to normalize Cuba with Hillary Clinton’s approval? John Kerry uses Aronson to handle matters with Columbia.

The intrigue begins. This is rather convoluted, so be patient as you read on.

Aronson has deep ties to Thomas Pritzker of Hyatt hotels fame same as Penny Pritzker who is Barack Obama’s Secretary of Commerce.

The Pritzker dynasty looks like this:

Family tree: Pritzker is the son of Jay Pritzker, founder of Hyatt Hotels Corporation.
Areas of interest:
nonprofits

College: Pritzker received a B.A. from Claremont Men’s College, and an MBA and J.D. from the University of Chicago.