Ms sect b 20170226 sunday

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SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2017 Adelle Chua, Editor

Opinion

Joyce Pangco Pañares, Issue Editor

mst.daydesk@gmail.com

EDITORIAL

REVISITING THE HANDMAID’S TALE

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WHAT I had enjoyed as a speculative fiction novel years ago is now, 31 years after its publication, deemed a prophetic insight into the rightist, conservative, religiousfundamentalist political environment that is America today.

Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency and his recent anti-immigrant, anti-transgender, and anti-Muslim executive orders and others that curtail human rights upheld during the Obama administration echo to a degree the political environment of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

The book is enjoying a resurgence in sales, along with other similar novels exploring fascist and authoritarian themes, including Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984.

All these books went into our intellectual hopper decades ago, but as cautionary tales of “what might have been” had dictators all over the world not been overthrown as most of them were after the two world wars when these books were written.

Nowhere in my imaginings did I conceive that these would turn out to be tales of “what will be.”

Atwood, a feminist, posits an antiwoman culture in her dystopian novel, set in a future Massachusetts where the status of women has been reduced to being the property of men, who have installed a Christian fundamentalist state called Gilead, where the word of Bible is the law.

Women are either Wives, Handmaids (bearers of children), Marthas (household servants, those who cannot bear children), and Econowives. They all wear color-coded uniforms and are barred from reading and enjoying many other freedoms.

The women serve the men, who are ranked in strict hierarchy, with the leaders of the state, the Sons of Jacob, called Commanders. Guards are Guardians, soldiers are Angels, and only those men who have served to the satisfaction of the regime are issued their own women.

And because sexual repression has been known to never work—there will always be conduits for pleasure— some women are Jezebels, recruited to dress up in tawdry sequined costumes from before to entertain the Commanders and their cronies.

The Handmaids do not have their own names but are called by a combination of the possessive ‘of’ and the first name of the Commander they are assigned to—such as “Ofwarren” and “Ofglen.”

The protagonist, Offred (we never learn her real name), is torn from her husband Luke and their daughter and assigned to serve a Commander by bearing him a child that he and his Wife will rear as their own. Her attempts to remedy her situation form the basis of the story.

In Gilead, religion is the state and is used as a framework for imposing patriarchal order upon society.

Contradictory thought and action

BETTER THAN BELIEVING O NE of the reason the current head of the Catholic Church is so popular is that he is not afraid to talk about social issues that plague the faithful.

It is arguable whether he or the institution he leads has done enough to challenge that injustices that prevail in the world—clerical abuse, environmental destruction, divorce, same-sex relationships, religious intolerance.

Pope Francis, however, has certainly been bold enough to raise these issues, telling us all that he at least recognizes them and their effects on the way we live.

Most recently he spoke about the scandal of leading a double life—saying one thing and doing another.

“There are those who say ‘I am very Catholic, I always go to Mass, I belong to this or that association,’” he said. They should also admit, however: “My life is not Christian.

I don’t pay my employees proper salaries. I exploit people. I do dirty business. I launder money.”

Earlier on, the Pope had said Christians should see atheists as good people if they do good.

This week, referring to those who lead a double life, he said: “There are many Catholics who are like this and they cause scandal.

How many times have we all heard people say ‘if that person is a Catholic, it is better to be an atheist?’”

Make no mistake about it: The Pope did not say it is better to be an atheist than to be a Catholic.

There are those who will twist

his words for their own purposes.

Perhaps even those less liberal would castigate the pontiff for the mere suggestion. We know what the Pope, leader of a 1.2-billion strong religious force, said, plainly.

Lead truthful lives and do not pretend to be who you are not.

Some people mistake religiosity for spirituality or even humanity.

Secure in their affiliation with a powerful group, and faithful to their nominal obligations therein—hearing Mass, donating money, participating in outreach programs or church activities, keeping close ties with church figures and uttering the right prayers at the right time—they believe they are doing more than enough as members of the church.

They think these would compensate for their duplicity and worse, their propensity to judge others not quite as zealous as they are.

We know too many of these.

Sometimes, we ourselves slip.

That it is the Pope exhorting the faithful to remain true to the life they profess gives us hope.

Faith, after all, is never a state of perfection but a process. It is wanting to become our best versions, failing, and struggling yet again. Ultimately this is better than believing—or putting up appearances of believing—and then smugly declaring we do so.

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LOVING LOVING LONG STORY SHORT ADELLE CHUA

IT IS 1958 in Virginia and a black young woman tells her white boyfriend that she is pregnant with his child. The man, Richard Loving, tells the woman, Mildred, that he would build a house for her. He asks her to marry him.

She says yes. They have to drive out

to Washington, D.C. to get married, however, because Virginia’s laws prevent inter-racial marriages.

They come back to their home state and begin their married life, but the beginning is not so blissful. Law enforcers barge into their bedroom

one night and arrest them for violating state laws. Richard points to their marriage license, framed and hanging on the wall, but the sheriff tells him it is invalid and jails them both.

As part of a bargain, they admit guilt in violating the anti-miscegenation

law. Instead of asking them to serve a one-year prison term, the judge tells them they should not return to Virginia, not together, for 25 years.

The couple lives in exile in Washington but return secretly to Virginia so Mildred can have her child Turn to B2

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TRUMP’S ECONOMIC SUICIDE

By Joe Nocera THERE are a lot of things you can say about the Trump administration’s recently announced deportation plan.

You can say it is cruel, a policy that could only come from a president who lacks a heart. You can say it has more to do with President Donald Trump’s fevered imagination than the reality of the immigrant presence in the US. You can say that it’s counterproductive, likely to uproot the very people this country should embrace—people who have struggled to get to the US with the goal of working hard and making a better life for themselves and their children.

But if Trump is able to get the money from Congress to hire the 10,000 additional immigration cops and 5,000 more border agents he wants, if he gets local sheriff ’s departments to help the federal government round up undocumented immigrants, and if he does indeed begin to deport hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of them, then I think you’ll be able to say something else about his policy: It will be economic suicide.

In 2014, the latest year for which numbers are available, there were 11.1 million undocumented immigrants in the US, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s down from a peak of 12.2 million in 2007. The numbers have shrunk primarily because Mexicans are no longer coming over the border in the numbers that they used to; as of 2014, there were 5.8 million undocumented Mexicans in the US, compared to 6.9 million in 2007.

America doesn’t need fewer undocumented immigrants. It needs more of them. The economy depends on it.

WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH TRAPPIST-1?

By Pecier Decierdo THIS week, scientists at NASA announced the discovery of not 1, or 2, or even 3 but 7 Earth-size planets orbiting another star. And not only that, scientists believe that 3 of those planets can potentially harbor life!

Not surprisingly, the discovery got the internet freaking out with excitement. How does this discovery advance our search for life elsewhere in the universe?

Let’s get back to the news first.

The newly discovered planets that got everyone excited this week were found going around the dwarf star TRAPPIST-1. The star got its name from the Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile.

The system around TRAPPIST-1 is a big deal because this is the most number of Earth-size planets ever found in a single system. It’s even more remarkable because of the 7 planets, 3 are thought to be in the “habitable zone” of their star.

The habitable zone is the region around the star that can have liquid water. If a planet is too close to its star, it can get too hot for water to exist in liquid form. If a planet is too far, it can get too cold and water can only exist as ice.

However, the definition of the habitable zone does not only

depend on distance from the star, but also on the composition of the atmosphere. In the case of the Solar System, the planets Venus, Earth, and Mars are in the Sun’s habitable zone, and so is the Moon. But conditions on Venus are infernal. Meanwhile, it is frigid both on Mars and the Moon.

Venus is too hot because its very thick atmosphere traps too much of the Sun’s radiation. In fact, conditions on Venus can serve as a warning to us here on Earth, where we continue to add more heat-trapping gases into our atmosphere.

Mars, on the other hand, has a very thin atmosphere, and the Moon has practically no atmosphere to speak of. Hence, most of the radiation coming from the Sun that reaches them just bounces back to outer space instead of staying to melt the ice and keep water in liquid form.

Despite its very thin atmosphere, however, Mars still manages to hold a bit of liquid water, so we’re not ruling out the possibility of life on Mars.

We need to know the atmospheres of the planets going around TRAPPIST-1 before we can confidently say which of them can really have oceans and seas of liquid water.

And we might find out soon!

The techniques used in searching for exoplanets (planets going around stars other than the Sun) are becoming more advanced with each passing year. And the longer we look, the more of these exoplanets we will find. We now have found thousands of them, and we’ve only been looking for a little more than two decades. And of the thousands we know are out there, more than three quarters were discovered in the last three years. The rate of discovery is accelerating exponentially.

The TRAPPIST-1 planets were discovered by accurately measuring the brightness of the star. As the planets move around their star, they sometimes pass in front of the star. This causes the star to dim slightly, depending on the size of the planets. By measuring the dimming on TRAPPIST-1, scientists learned than its seven planets are about the same size as the Earth.

More sensitive instruments will soon measure the light from the star even more precisely so that we can figure out what part of that light has bounced off the planet passing in front. This will allow scientists to figure out the composition of the atmosphere of the planet.

Only a few planetary systems

LOVING...

people’s hearts and makes them believe in goodness, justice, and love all over again?

The movie reminds us of our concept of home.

“I don’t care what they do to us, I am delivered by Richard’s midwife mother. They going to raise my family here,” Mildred says. are arrested again, saved only by the lawyer who tells the judge he mistakenly advised them they could return. They leave again.

But Virginia is home and even as the family grows—two more kids are born—the couple yearn to return to their roots. They see hope in the March on Washington where black people rallied for jobs and freedom. Mildred writes to Attorney General Robert Kennedy who refers them to the American Civil Liberties Union. A lawyer, Bernard Cohen, takes on the case, believing it has great potential not only of winning but also being landmark Before they were driven out of Virginia, jurisprudence.

The state of Virginia argues that children of the couple had identified a place where interracial marriages are bastards. The federal they would build their modest house. It Supreme Court, however, agrees to hear the would not be grand, but it was near their case. Increasingly, the case gains attention respective families. It would witness the and support. Legal victory comes in 1967 birth and growth of their kids and their when, through a decision now known as dreams. They wished to return and fought Loving vs. Virginia, the court invalidates state to do so when they could have stayed in Washington and lived in peace. laws prohibiting inter-racial marriages.

It also gives us insight into the minds of simple folk. *** The lawyers tried to convince the Lovings It is perplexing that Loving is not among the nine films nominated for Best Picture in to attend the Supreme Court hearings, but the Academy Awards, to be held Sunday night Richard insisted he did not want to go and (Monday here) even as Ruth Negga, who plays Mildred said she was not going anywhere without her husband. Richard did not see Mildred, is in the running for Best Actress.

Then again, who needs external validation their case for more than what it was and, from award-giving bodies when all you really in fact, seemed to resent the attention want to do is to tell a story that touches they were getting from the press. To him, From A1

There are a lot of reasons for the decline, not least the upsurge of good jobs in Mexico that have resulted from the North American Free Trade Agreement. But that decline has had a pronounced effect on any number of US industries that rely on manual labor: farms, building construction and factories among them.

“We’re really near full employment, and are likely facing a tight labor market for the next decade or so,” said Donald Grimes, a senior research specialist at the University of Michigan.

“The only place firms are going to be able to find workers will be migrants.”

Frank Gasperini, the president and chief executive of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, told me that of the 1.5 million seasonal agricultural workers, somewhere between 50 and 80 percent are immigrants, depending on who’s counting. With the labor market so tight, he said, many farms are as much as 50 percent short of the workforce they need. Farmers have adapted by planting fewer acres with only the most high-margin crops, like grapes and almonds. Less profitable crops, like olives, have been pared back. (The California drought has also influenced these decisions.)

Gasperini insists that farmers don’t purposely hire undocumented workers, but come on. They certainly know that many of their workers are in the US. Illegally—and that a wholesale effort by the government to round them up and send them back would be devastating. Native-born citizens, Gasperini said, simply don’t want to pick crops, so farmers would have to either plant fewer acres or pay significantly higher wages to lure legal immigrants. The result would be twofold: higher prices at the grocery store and an increase in imported fruits and vegetables. Oh, and what country would most likely be exporting those fruits and vegetables to the US? Mexico. Somehow, I don’t think that’s the result Trump has in mind.

The building trades, which also rely on immigrants, have much the same problem: not enough workers for too much work. As David Brooks pointed out in the New York Times, the shortage of workers means that projects aren’t being started, which means “less home-buying, less furniture buying, less economic activity.”

And then there are American factories. “Trump says he wants to bring back manufacturing,” said Dov Charney, “But you can’t manufacture without immigrant labor.” Charney, I realize, is something of a flawed spokesman. in 2014, he was forced

It’s good to be reminded of goodness, justice and love all over again.

out of American Apparel, the clothing company he founded more than two decades earlier, the result of sexual harassment charges and a string of unprofitable quarters. But Charney was one of the few clothing manufacturers to locate his factories in the US, which he insists can be done profitably.

“You are not going to have a ‘Made in America’ manufacturing resurgence with native Americans,” he said. Again, it is not the kind of work most Americanborn citizens want to do—even though Charney offered decent wages and benefits. “It is the motivated immigrant you need,” he added. “I employed thousands of immigrants. The secret of American Apparel was that very few of our workers were Americans.”

For years, Charney hired undocumented workers—but, as Nicole Gelinas noted recently in the New York Post, a federal inspection in 2009 forced him to fire 1,500 workers, making it even more difficult for him to find employees. “The country doesn’t support manufacturing,” Gelinas concluded. Charney would agree. If Trump really hopes to revive manufacturers, kicking out immigrants

is just about the dumbest policy he could devise.

There are other issues, too. In many parts of the country, the population is stagnating—except among immigrants. According to Grimes, between 2006 and 2015, US-born citizens in the prime working ages of 24 to 54 declined to 102.3 million from 104.5 million. During that same nine years, immigrants in the same age group—both legal and illegal – rose to 25.3 million from 22.6 million. The economy is going to need every one of those workers.

Finally, if America gets a reputation for being hostile to immigrants—or if the Trump administration pares back the various routes to legal immigration—it might well scare off the highly educated, highly skilled immigrants who have, for instance, helped make Silicon Valley such a font of innovation. No more Sergey Brins.

No more Andy Groves. No more Elon Musks.

The point is: America doesn’t need fewer undocumented immigrants. It needs more of them. The economy depends on it. Bloomberg

REVISITING...

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are positioned in such a way to allow us to use this technique.

Hence, a vast majority of the exoplanets out there will not be discovered this way. The fact that we have already discovered so many using this technique speaks about the vast multitudes of planets out there.

The TRAPPIST-1 planets, in particular, prove to us that the universe is teeming with planets, many of them possibly Earthlike. So perhaps, the universe is also teeming with life. We’re quite probably not alone in the universe.

But even the nearest Earth-like exoplanets will be beyond our reach in the next few thousand years. Our fastest robotic spacecraft will take close to a million years to get to TRAPPIST-1.

Spacecraft carrying human passengers will take longer— hundreds of millions of years.

The search for Earth-like exoplanets will help us figure out our place in the universe. And for the foreseeable future, that place is here. Our search for other worlds is not a search for replacements. It should be a search that leads us back to our home and makes us see it with fresh eyes.

Decierdo is resident astronomer and physicist for The Mind Museum.

this was their life, their battle. He had no illusions that their case was something bigger than their situation or that they were representing something—even though it resonated across the US in those changing times.

Finally, it tells us that true love makes one fight, defy odds and endure tests.

Before going to the Supreme Court to argue the case, the lawyer asked Richard if he had a message for the justices. Richard did not launch into a big speech about equality or race or justice. He simply said: “Tell them that I love my wife.”

When the decision came out and the couple had to hold a press conference, they were not blinded by the camera lights or distracted by the incessant questions from reporters. They were too busy holding each other, staring into each other’s eyes.

After the 1967 decision, the Lovings were free to live in Virginia as they wished. Richard built the home he had promised Mildred.

Alas, he died in a car accident, hit by a drunk driver, in 1975.

Mildred continued to live in that home. She never remarried. Interviewed shortly before her death in 2008, she said: “I miss him. He took care of me.”

There is no impassioned singing or cute tap dancing here. It’s a historical, racial, legal narration. Without a doubt, though, Loving is one of the most romantic movies I have seen in a long while. adellechua@gmail.com

in her epilogue: ‘Salvaging’ had spread from its origin in the Philippines to become a general term for the elimination of one’s political enemies.)

Gilead clearly models the characteristics of an authoritarian state: the suppression of opposition, the curtailment of human rights and basic freedoms, and the strict regimentation of the economy and society. These are the autocrat’s ploys for gaining and maintaining control over the populace to benefit the few who are in power.

The Handmaid’s Tale is no longer a speculative tale, but one that could very well be reality in our lifetime.

Along with the lessons from the historical past, reading it will help us understand why fascism has never, and will never, work. Any dictatorship must be opposed, lest we once again lose our humanity.

are not tolerated. Under their version of Christian fundamentalism, the state and condition of women suffers.

They are stripped of their identities to curb individual thought and possible protest or uprising. Those below the rank of Wife are not seen as individuals in themselves but as entities with specific service functions. Even Wives have to toe the state line or be summarily executed.

To divert women’s pent-up rage and emotion into different channels, elaborate mandatory rituals are invented, such as Birth Day (when a baby is born), and Prayvaganza (for assemblies, mass weddings).

The Women’s Salvaging is the public execution of women who have committed crimes, while in Particicution—an echo of the secret Dr. Ortuoste is a California-based rites of the Maenead—a male offender writer.

Follow her on Facebook: Jenny is given over to the women to be torn Ortuoste, Twitter: @jennyortuoste, to pieces at their hands.

(Atwood gives a nod to the Philippines Instagram: @jensdecember

World

Turkish President Recep Erdogan

ERDOGAN BIOPIC TO HIT SCREENS AHEAD OF REFERENDUM

FILLON FACES PROBE OVER ‘FAKE JOBS’ P

aris—Francois Fillon, the conservative candidate in France’s presidential election, will face a probe by investigating magistrates into claims he gave members of his family fake jobs, prosecutors said over the weekend.

ANKARA, Turkey—A new film about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is due to hit cinema screens weeks before an April referendum on whether to boost the president’s powers.

“Reis” (“The Chief”) stars well-known Turkish actor Reha Beyoglu as the Turkish strongman and shows his life up to 1999, beginning with the president’s childhood in a poor district of Istanbul to his rise to become the city’s mayor.

Turkish actress Ozlem Balci plays his wife Emine while child actor Batuhan Isik Gurel plays Erdogan as a boy.

The movie, the first-ever feature film about Erdogan, will be released on March 3 across Turkey before the Turkish public vote on whether to approve an executive presidency on April 16.

Beyoglu, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the younger Erdogan, delivers passionate one-liners in the trailer, including “A person dies only once; if we die, let us die like a man!”

The actor told Kanal D broadcaster this week he was “proud” when Erdogan said he could see his younger self in Beyoglu. AFP

TAIWAN REMOVES CHIANG KAI-SHEK SOUVENIRS TAIPEI—A Taiwanese memorial hall named after Chiang Kai-shek has stopped selling souvenirs depicting the former nationalist leader, authorities said Saturday, as the island deals with the “deep scar” left by his rule.

The decision comes as Taiwan prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of a brutal massacre of protesters by troops from his Kuomintang (KMT) party, when the now democratic island was still under martial law.

The massacre was followed by decades of political purges under Chiang and his son, known as the “White Terror.”

“Many of the victims and their families suffered long-term discrimination and pain. It is a deep scar hidden in the hearts of all Taiwanese,” Culture Minister Cheng Li-chun said.

The Chiang Kai-shek memorial hall, which was built after the leader’s death in 1975 and is one of Taipei’s most recognizable landmarks, will stop playing a song dedicated to Chiang at its opening and closing, a statement from the culture ministry added. AFP

SENIOR MYANMAR POLICE JAILED OVER RAKHINE BORDER RAIDS YANGON—Three senior Myanmar police officers have been jailed for failing to block deadly raids on border posts in October that threw northern Rakhine state into crisis, a police spokesman said Saturday.

The attacks left nine officers dead and unleashed a four-month military crackdown as soldiers swooped in to help police hunt for Rohingya militants blamed for the raids.

More than 70,000 of the Muslim minority have fled the area for neighboring Bangladesh, bringing with them harrowing accounts of systematic rape, killings and torture at the hands of security officers.

UN investigators who interviewed escapees said the violence was so severe it “very likely” amounted to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

On Saturday a police spokesman told AFP that three senior officers were handed between two and three years in jail for allowing the raids to happen under their watch. AFP

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SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2017 mst.daydesk@gmail.com

French presidential election candidate for the right-wing Les Republicains party Francois Fillon delivers a speech during a public rally in Maisons-Alfort, near Paris, on February 24. AFP

Fillon, one of the frontrunners in the presidential race, will be investigated for alleged embezzlement of public funds and misappropriation of corporate assets, prosecutors said in a statement.

The 62-year-old former prime minister has not been charged at this point, but under French law investigating magistrates can decide to bring charges.

With the first round of the election just two months away, on April 23, the timing of the decision could have a crucial bearing on the race.

Far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen has been bolstered by the scandal and was leading in polls Friday.

Fillon has been fighting claims first made a month ago by Le Canard Enchaine newspaper that he used allowances to pay his British-born wife Penelope at least 680,000 euros ($720,000) over some 15 years as a parliamentary aide.

She is accused of having barely worked for the salary. Two of Fillon’s children were also put on the parliamentary payroll for brief periods.

The Canard Enchaine also alleged that Penelope Fillon was also paid tens of thousands of euros by a literary review, the Revue des Deux Mondes, owned by billionaire Marc Ladreit de Lacharriere, a friend of her husband.

Magistrates will investigate whether this amounts to misappropriation of corporate assets.

Prosecutors said the three investigating magistrates named to handle the case will also look at whether Fillon failed to declare the necessary information to parliamentary authorities.

Lawyers for the couple said they were confident the magistrates would find them innocent.

The Fillons have argued that Penelope was legitimately employed as a parliamentary aide and their lawyers say they have given investigators proof of the work she did.

But after the allegations emerged, French TV broadcast an interview that Penelope gave to a British journalist in 2007 in which she said she had never been her husband’s assistant.

Fillon has dismissed the claims as politically motivated but he acknowledged last weekend that his presidential bid had become “difficult,” with hecklers often massing at his campaign stops.

He was giving a campaign speech in Maisons-Alfort, to the east of Paris, when it was announced he would face investigation by magistrates.

The claims had taken a toll on Fillon’s standings in the polls, but this week surveys showed he had regained ground and was neck-and-neck with 39-year-old centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron as they fight for second place. AFP

SON OF BOXER MUHAMMAD ALI DETAINED AT AIRPORT FOR ‘ARABIC’ NAME WASHINGTON—A son of boxing legend Muhammad Ali was held for questioning for two hours at a Florida airport upon returning from Jamaica because of his Arabic-sounding name, US media reported over the weekend.

Muhammad Ali Jr., 44, who was born in Philadelphia and has a US passport, was traveling with his mother Khalilah Camacho-Ali, the late sports icon’s second wife, friend and lawyer Chris Mancini told the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Mancini told the newspaper that both were held for questioning on the Fort Lauderdale International Airport on February 7 because of their Arabic-sounding names.

Camacho-Ali however was released after she showed US Customs agents a photo of herself with her ex-husband.

Ali Jr. however had no such photo – and according to Mancini was held for nearly two hours and repeatedly asked: “Where did you get your name from?” and “Are you Muslim?”

When he said that he – like his father – was a Muslim, the agents asked further probing questions.

“To the Ali family, it’s crystal clear that this is directly linked to Mr. Trump’s efforts to ban Muslims from the United States,” Mancini told the Courier-Journal, a reference to President Donald Trump’s late January executive order imposing a 90-day entry ban for citizens of seven Muslim majority countries.

The travel ban has since been halted by a US federal court.

Mancini said that he and the Ali family are trying to find out how many other people were stopped for similar questioning, and are considering a federal lawsuit. AFP

INNER PEACE. Indian founder of the Akshar Power Yoga Foundation Master Akshar speaks to participants as they take part in a yoga and self-defense lesson for women at the foundation in Bangalore on February 25, 2017. AFP

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SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2017 Cesar Barrioquinto, Editor

World

/ Joyce Pangco-Pañares, Issue Editor

mst.daydesk@gmail.com

SUICIDE ATTACKS IN SYRIA’S HOMS KILL 42 B

EIRUT—Suicide attacks on two security service bases in the heart of Syria’s government-held third city of Homs killed 42 people on Saturday, overshadowing peace talks in Geneva, state television and a monitor said.

“There were at least six attackers and several of them blew themselves up near the headquarters of state security and military intelligence,” Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP. He said a senior intelligence officer

was among the dead in the twin attacks in the heavily guarded Ghouta and Mahatta neighbourhoods.

Security forces locked down the city centre.

Homs has been under the full control of the government since May

2014 when rebels withdrew from the centre under a UNbrokered truce deal.

But it has seen repeated bombings since then. Twin attacks killed 64 people early last year.

State television paid tribute to the “martyrs” in the latest bombings.

There was no immediate claim for the bombings but they bore the hallmarks of the Islamic State group, which controls swathes of the largely des-

ert countryside east of Homs.

Government forces retook the oasis city of Palmyra and its Unesco-listed ancient ruins in a much heralded Russianbacked offensive in March last year but were then pushed out

by IS in December.

Since then, the focus of government efforts has been further north, on second city Aleppo, which they fully retook after a rebel withdrawal in December, and areas to its east and west. AFP

PELE’S SON SURRENDERS

SAO PAULO, Brazil—The son of football legend Pele turned himself in late Friday after being ordered by a Brazilian court to begin serving a nearly 13-year prison sentence for money laundering and drug trafficking.

Edson “Edinho” Cholbi do Nascimento, who briefly played for his father’s former club Santos, had so far avoided serving time while his case underwent a lengthy appeals process.

But on Thursday a judge reaffirmed the conviction, reduced Edinho’s original 2014 sentence from 33 years to 12 years and 10 months, and ordered him to begin serving time.

The 46-year-old former goalkeeper spoke to reporters before turning himself in at a police station in the Brazilian port city of Santos.

“There’s great frustration because I am being accused of money laundering, but I never did that,” he said, according to the G1 news portal.

Edinho – who was accused of laundering based on phone tap evidence – has said he will continue to fight the allegations and that his only contact with drug traffickers was as a drug user. AFP

EXTRADITION OF FORMER GUATEMALA VP SOUGHT

TRUMP’S RUSSIA RESET ON HOLD

A BLAZE OF COLOR. A dancer of the Tom Maior samba school performs during the first night of carnival parade at the Sambadrome in Sao Paulo, Brazil. AFP

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump came to the White House promising a radical reset of US-Russia relations after years of rising tensions under his predecessor.

But barely one month into office, that plan appears to be on hold, and Trump’s White House team has taken on an increasingly Russophobic face.

After he repeatedly pledged to reach “a deal” with Vladimir Putin while hinting at downgraded relations with NATO and the European Union, Trump has yet to set a meeting with the Russian leader.

Meanwhile Vice President Mike Pence and top cabinet security and defense officials have gone to great lengths to reassure European leaders that Washington is not giving up on its allies.

While Trump still holds out the idea of striking up an amicable relationship with Putin, the administration took a distinct turn away from that stance last week with the replacement of pro-Moscow national security advisor Michael Flynn with Lieutenant General HR McMaster, a hawkish army veteran who sees Russia as the primary threat to US interests and global stability.

And next week, the Senate is expected to approve the appointment of Senator Dan Coats as Director of National Intelligence,

adding another Putin skeptic to Trump’s defense and national security team.

“There has been a major shift,” said Bruce Jones, vice president and director for foreign policy at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. “My sense is at least we’ve seen an evolution to an approach that is more sensitive to the threat Russia poses to Europe and the US.” Jake Sullivan, the former national security advisor to vice president Joe Biden, said the White House policy situation is “still unsettled.”

However, he said, McMaster’s arrival in Flynn’s place “could tip the balance.”

Trump has long expressed admiration for Putin and other hardas-nails Russian autocrats.

But his hope of launching into the presidency with a new approach to Russia has been set back by scandals that have allowed critics to paint him as suspiciously soft on Moscow: the intelligence conclusion that Russia interfered in the US election to hurt Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton; alleged links between some of his campaign advisors and Russian intelligence; and the need to fire Flynn over his private discussions on sanctions with Russia’s ambassador. AFP

GUATEMALA CITY—The United States said it will seek the extradition of Guatemala’s former vice president Roxana Baldetti and ex-interior minister Mauricio Lopez on drug trafficking charges.

Baldetti and Lopez were indicted in US federal court in Washington on Wednesday on charges of conspiring to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine from January 2010 to May 2015, knowing it would ultimately be imported illegally into the United States.

“The US Department of Justice has not yet forwarded an extradition request to the US embassy,” a statement from the mission in Guatemala City read. AFP

NASA WANTS ASTRONAUTS ON DEEP SPACE TEST FLIGHT

MIAMI, United States—The US space agency said it is considering putting astronauts on an upcoming test flight of the deep space capsule Orion as it aims to orbit the Moon.

Orion is being built with an eye to one day ferrying astronauts to Earth’s neighboring planet, Mars, perhaps by the 2030s.

Until now, the Orion test flight known as Exploration Mission-1 was scheduled for 2018 and was expected to be unmanned.

But NASA’s acting administrator Robert Lightfoot asked for the space agency to study the feasibility of putting people on board, and the findings of that study are expected in the coming months. AFP