Access report warns of 'Eurogeddon'

By Lexi Metherell 

The latest quarterly Business Outlook by Deloitte Access Economics forecasts that Europe will be the key to growth globally and locally this year.

The report, titled "Eurogeddon", warns that 2012 could easily bring a deep recession and widespread bank failures in Europe.

Deloitte Access Economics director Chris Richardson says there is a 50-50 chance that Europe will muddle through the crisis.

"If it doesn't then yes, Australia has something like a rerun of the global financial crisis - unemployment up, profits down, Government budget hit for six," Mr Richardson said.

"Probably not a recession; a technical recession, thanks to magnificent momentum in mining, but a tough time nonetheless."

Mr Richardson says the European Central Bank is containing the situation by pumping money to the banks in the form of discount loans.

"The money that Europe's central bank is pumping out is working very effectively as sticky tape," Mr Richardson said.

"It is going to the banks, but the banks in turn are passing indirectly some of it back to governments and that combination is holding Europe together."

But even if the sticky tape does hold, Deloitte still expects Europe's problems to weigh on parts of the Australian economy.

More finance jobs are likely to go, the unemployment rate is expected to rise to 5.5 per cent, and Mr Richardson, who describes Europe as a "seething cauldron of risk", says the effects already are being seen in workplaces around Australia.

"You're getting employers who are giving employees overtime rather than taking on new people," he said.

For the Australian economy, China is key.

Mr Richardson says it would react quickly to any implosion in Europe, but its coffers are not as full as they were during the global financial crisis.

"Europe is a bigger customer for China than the United States is, and there are risks about that," he said.

"At some stage China will have an ugly year and when they do it will be pretty bad news for Australia."

Westpac chief economist Bill Evans is more confident that China can withstand Europe's problems.

"China's very much a domestically driven economy," Mr Evans said.

"Whilst we're expecting that the growth in China in the first half of the year - mainly because of these domestic tightening policies - to be around about a 6.5 per cent momentum, I think by the second half of the year, it will be more like eight."

While Australian Government debt is relatively low, Mr Richardson is concerned that household debt as a proportion of GDP remains amongst the highest in the world.

"It is not something that I see as an immediate problem but yes, it remains an area of vulnerability for Australia if bank failures in Europe start to happen and credit tightens up once more," he said.

The Federal Government is still committed to achieving a surplus next year, but warns it will be tough.

Mr Richardson believes the Government must be prepared to ditch that ambition given the severity of Europe's debt woes.

"If Europe blows then the surplus is a goner, and so it should be," Mr Richardson said.

"Basically you should use the budget to help defend against the downturn, but even if Europe doesn't blow, it is getting hard to get the surplus."

All thoughts for Treasurer Wayne Swan to consider as he returns to work and begins putting together the budget.

Biometric voting system ready

By EUNICE AU 

Software is said to be able to prevent multiple voting

A BIOMETRIC research and development firm said it has developed a software able to detect identical thumbprints  in a system, thus enabling the Election Commission to clean up the electoral roll and prevent mutilple voting.
  ASAP Bhd chief value provider P. Chakravertty said the system could complement indelible-ink voting.

  "We will be approaching the EC and the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) soon as the system is ready to be deployed."

  The Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) could, for instance, detect and flag two identification cards with matching thumbprints.

  "EC officers can keep only one of these conflicting records," he said, adding that the system worked because thumbprints were unique.

  AFIS, developed by a biometric research and development firm - Dermalog and distributed by ASAP, also had the capability of pre-loading voter data according to different constituencies into a specially made handheld device.

  "This function would be helpful to EC officers armed with such devices on voting day," Chakravertty said.

  He also said the AFIS programme on each handheld device could only be accessed by EC officers in charge.

The officers need to scan their MyKad and thumbprint to verify their identity before the programme can boot.

  "When a voter shows up at a polling station, he or she can insert his or her MyKad into the reader. The system is compatible with both the old and new MyKad."

  Chakravertty said once a MyKad was inserted, the person's photo would be displayed on screen and EC officers would be able to compare it to the person's physical attributes.

He said the system would check whether a person's thumbprint matched their IC number,  whether the registered voters were in the right constituency and whether that person had cast a vote.

  A green icon, depicting a man, will appear on screen if the voter has passed all three checks, while a red icon will pop up if the voter has failed the verification process.

  Only those who have passed all three checks may vote. The system will bar further attempts of voting by the same person, due to their unique thumbprint.

  Chakravertty said the system was immune to hacking because its codings were encrypted and the devices were not linked to each other through a network.

   "Because the data is preloaded into each machine corresponding to voters' registered address, no voters will be able to vote in other areas as the machines there will not carry their details."

   The standalone devices can be used in rural areas without the need to worry about electricity, as the devices have a 12-hour battery life.

   Chakravertty said judging from the recent debates over the proposed electoral reforms, Dermalog had decided to volunteer its independent software solution to the EC.    He said EC officers could learn the user-friendly system in a short period.

   The New Straits Times had reported on Jan 12 that the final hurdle for indelible ink to be used in the 13th general election had been cleared when the National Fatwa Council ruled the substance to be halal.

   The decision was made at a muzakarah (meeting), attended by the council's 22 members, representatives from the EC and the Chemistry Department, at the Islamic Development Department.

   The indelible ink was one of the recommendations of the PSC on electoral reforms.

Christians in Iran, Syria face rising persecution

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT 

Iranian pastor Nardakhani refuses to renounce Christian beliefs in exchange for release from prison.

here has been a wave of violence targeting Iranian and Syrian Christians over the past month, say Christian news reports.

In addition, Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, who has been on death row since 2010 for seeking to register his home-based church, refused to renounce his Christian beliefs in exchange for his release from prison. He was also jailed for questioning the role of Islam as the dominant form of religious instruction in his children’s school.

According to a report on the website of the International Christian news agency BosNewsLife, “Iranian Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani has rejected an offer to be released from prison if he publicly acknowledges Islam’s prophet Mohammed as ‘a messenger sent by God,’ well-informed Christians and rights activists said” earlier this month.

While Iran’s opaque judicial system coupled with the lack of access for most Western media makes it difficult to verify the new coercion against Nadarkhani, the reports are considered reasonable in light of the Iranian regime’s intense crackdown on its Christian population over the years.

In an e-mail to The Jerusalem Post on Sunday, Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and author of the book A New Shoah, wrote “After the ethnic cleansing of Jews in 1948 from the Arab countries, Islamic fundamentalism is now trying to push away the Christians from the region. They want to establish a pure Islamic environment and the mass exodus already began under our noses.”

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Christian Post wrote last week on its website, “The Christian community in Syria has been hit by a series of kidnappings and brutal murders; 100 Christians have now been killed since the anti-government unrest began. A reliable source in the country, who cannot be identified for their own safety, told Barnabas Aid that children were being especially targeted by the kidnappers, who, if they do not receive the ransom demanded, kill the victim.”

The Pakistan Christian Post website noted “Two Christians were killed on January 15 as they waited for bread at a bakery. Another Christian, aged 40 with two young children, was shot dead by three armed attackers while he was driving a vehicle.”

The Post could not independently verify these allegations.

Meotti, the Italian Journalist who has written extensively on Christians in the Mideast region, told the Post “In Syria Christians will be persecuted after Assad’s eventual fall, since they were the most loyal allies of the Baathist regime. Christians will be slaughtered or squeezed. From Cairo to Damascus, Arab Christian era is near to its end everywhere.”

Many critics of Assad’s regime, however, view Assad as exploiting sectarian conflicts in Syria to solidify his repressive security apparatus, which has resulted in the killings of over 5,000 pro-democracy supporters in Syria.

“Of course Assad is using the power of fear to manipulate the Christians. He is directing these bishops and patriarchs to say what suits him,” Pascal Gollnisch, a Catholic priest and director of l’Oeuvre d’Orient, told the French news organization F24 in December.

The Paris-based organization seeks to shield Christians from persecution mainly in the Middle East region and is part of the Archdiocese of Paris.

Christians make up 10 percent of Syria’s 22 million population.

Clifford D. May, the president of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former New York Times reporter, has long argued the persecution of Christians in numerous Muslim-majority countries is the most pressing news story ignored by the mainstream media.

He told the Post “If the situation were reversed, if such a war were being waged against Muslims, it would be the top story in every newspaper, the most urgent item at the UN, the highest priority of all the big-league human-rights groups.”

The US-based media watchdog organization the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) held on Saturday a conference titled “The Persecuted Church: Christian Believers in Peril in the Middle East.”

Dr. Richard Landes, an associate professor of history and director and cofounder of the Center of Millennial Studies at Boston University, who spoke at the CAMERA event, wrote the Post on Sunday: “there’s a bizarre, eery, indeed terrible (a-)symmetry between the nearly hysterical concern of the media and the ‘progressive’ NGOs etc. about Israeli violations of the Palestinian ‘human rights’ and the nearly total silence about the horrendous things happening to Christians in Muslim majority countries, not necessarily at the hands of their neighbors but of Salafists, Jihadis, etc.”

Landes added that “it all illustrates Charles Jacobs’ notion of human rights complex – the thing that gets western ‘human rights’ folk indignant has nothing to do with the victims of their sufferings, but the [perpetrators]. If white, hysteria; if of color, embarrassed silence.

“There’s a racism inherent in this – we don’t expect anything from people of color, we hold whites to a much higher standard – and the result is that truly horrendous stuff gets ignored.”

Palestinians to renew efforts for bid to U.N.

Talks with Israel delayed attempt

By Ben Birnbaum-The Washington Times

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Palestinian officials say that they will resume their effort to gain U.N. membership, and that they could launch a nonviolent third intifada because they see no chance of reaching a peace deal with the current Israeli government.

The Palestinians had put their U.N. bid on hold to participate in informal Jordanian-sponsored talks with Israel that began at the beginning of the year in Amman.

The Middle East “Quartet” — the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia — had urged the parties to submit proposals on borders and security by Jan. 26, with the goal of reaching an agreement by the end of 2012.

But with that proposals deadline approaching, officials here said Thursday that they do not expect any breakthroughs.

“We hear from our Jordanian friends that things are not going well,” said Sabri Saidam, deputy speaker of the Fatah Council and an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.

Mr. Saidam and other Palestinian officials told The Washington Times that, barring a last-minute development Thursday, the U.N. campaign would begin anew.

A return to the U.N. would rile the U.S., which has vowed to veto the Palestinian application for membership in the Security Council. The U.S. was spared the headache of a veto in September because the Palestinians failed to gain a nine-vote majority.

“We got 8 3/4,” Mr. Saidam said.

The entire U.N. campaign has attained great symbolism here. A giant blue chair bearing the words “Palestine’s Right: Full Membership in the United Nations” still sits in Ramallah’s central square.

A wall of Mr. Abbas‘ presidential compound features a giant photo of him holding up the Palestinian application during his speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

The Palestinians began the campaign after bolting short-lived U.S.-sponsored peace talks in September 2010, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government did not extend a 10-month freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Palestinians say they will not restart formal direct talks unless Israel freezes settlement activity and agrees to President Obama’s formulation that any two-state solution be based on Israel’s pre-1967 frontiers — conditions Mr. Netanyahu has refused.

But the U.N. campaign is just one aspect of what many Palestinian officials describe as the “South Africanization” of their struggle — an approach that seeks to isolate Israel diplomatically while engaging in mass nonviolent protests.

“We can learn from the South African struggle against apartheid that international activism works,” said Nabeel Shaath, Fatah’s commissioner for international relations. “You don’t really have to shoot in order to get your rights.”

Mr. Shaath said it was “absolutely” a mistake for Palestinians to militarize the second intifada — the 2000-2005 uprising that claimed about 4,000 Palestinian and 1,000 Israeli lives amid suicide bombings and Israeli military strikes.

“I have no qualms about telling you, yes, it was [a mistake],” Mr. Shaath said. “It was not supposed to have gone military, and it did get out of hand. We are much more careful this time around.”

Mr. Saidam, the Abbas adviser, posited that a third uprising could be “an electronic intifada,” citing this week’s hacking attack on Israel’s stock exchange and national airline, as well as Facebook campaigns calling for the boycott of Israeli goods.

“When I talk about a third intifada, I’m not advocating, nor am I anticipating, a repetition of the scenes of the past,” he said. “It will be a clever, more technology-based approach.”

Mr. Saidam and others said their pessimism about the peace process springs from their belief that Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing government is not as serious about peace as its center-left predecessor.

Many Palestinian officials pine for the days of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister who helped create a framework for peace with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the 1993 Oslo Accords. Rabin was killed by an Israeli extremist three years later.

“We always say, if Rabin was alive, we would have been in a different situation completely,” said Issa Kassissieh, deputy head of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s negotiation affairs department. “He was the only one that was able to strike a deal with the Palestinians. He had a vision.”

Officials said they also think that Mr. Obama will not pressure Mr. Netanyahu as much in an election year as he did at the beginning of his term.

“My great letdown is how rapidly this administration backed down when it came to Israel, whether on the settlements or on anything else,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a longtime Palestinian spokeswoman and lawmaker. “We saw how principle and values were abandoned so quickly in favor of narrow self-interest.”

Ms. Ashrawi said she was “alarmed because we’re seeing the end of the two-state solution.”

“There are already enough Palestinians who are saying it’s too late already — that these settlements have done enough damage to prevent a viable, contiguous Palestinian state,” she said. “I’m getting to the borderline of saying it’s no longer possible. … I think 2012 is the end.”

Air Force’s Top Brain Wants a ‘Social Radar’ to ‘See Into Hearts and Minds’

By Noah Shachtman

Chief Scientists of the Air Force usually spend their time trying to figure out how to build better satellites or make jets go insanely fast. Which makes Dr. Mark Maybury, today’s chief scientist, a bit of an outlier. He’d like to build a set of sensors that peer into people’s souls — and forecast wars before they erupt.

Maybury calls his vision “Social Radar.” And the comparison to traditional sensors is no accident, he tells Danger Room. “The Air Force and the Navy in this and other countries have a history of developing Sonar to see through the water, Radar to see through the air, and IR [infrared] to see through the night. Well, we also want to see into the hearts and the minds of people,” says Maybury, who serves as the top science advisor to the Air Force’s top brass.

But Social Radar won’t be a single sensor to discover your secret yearnings. It’ll be more of a virtual sensor, combining a vast array of technologies and disciplines, all employed to take a society’s pulse and assess its future health. It’s part of a broader Pentagon effort to master the societal and cultural elements of war — and effort that even many in the Defense Department believe is deeply flawed. First step: mine Twitter feeds for indications of upset.

“We’re supposed to provide ISR,” says Maybury, using the military acronym for intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. “But our constituents [say], ‘Don’t just give me a weather forecast, Air Force, give me an enemy movement forecast.’ What’s that about? That’s human behavior. And so [we need to] understand what motivates individuals, how they behave.”

Maybury, dressed in his preferred outfit — a double-breasted black blazer and silver, rectangular glasses — discussed his Social Radar notion as part of a 90-minute interview in his Pentagon office, his native Massachusetts accent growing thicker as the discussion drew on. An artificial intelligence and language processing specialist, he’s been working for the military, on and off, since the mid-1980s. But as the counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan wore on, he found himself drawn further and further into what he calls the “human domain” of combat.

In the last few weeks, the Pentagon may have downgraded counterinsurgency in its strategy revamp. But the need to spot potential troublespots early — and to understand how American actions might impact those restive populations — clearly isn’t going away. U.S. special forces are still training foreign armies (and impacting the people of those countries). The Shadow Wars continue — from Yemen to Pakistan to Mexico. And the geopolitical chess match with China will require deep knowledge of all of the pieces on the board.

Using biometrics, Social Radar will identify individuals, Maybury noted in his original 2010 paper on the topic for the government-funded MITRE Corporation. Using sociometrics, it will pinpoint groups. Facebook timelines, political polls, spy drone feeds, relief workers’ reports, and infectious disease alerts should all pour into the Social Radar, Maybury writes, helping the system keep tabs on everything from carbon monoxide levels to literacy rates to consumer prices. And “just as radar needs to overcome interference, camouflage, spoofing and other occlusion, so too Social Radar needs to overcome denied access, censorship, and deception,” he writes.

It sounds almost laughably ambitious. And Maybury agrees the notion may be more of a long-term “organizing metaphor” than a particular program. But the building blocks are already being set in place, Maybury insists. In his original paper, Maybury notes that there are efforts underway at the MITRE Corporation that could help make a Social Radar real. For instance, there’s the “Forum and Blog Threaded Comment Analysis (FABTAC)” project, which analyzes online discussions “for intelligence and operations.” There’s “Exploring Soft Power in Weblogistan,” which developed “foundational Farsi and Dari language processing tools to enable analysis of large volumes [of] social media content.”

Most importantly, the language processing specialist says, new tools are coming online to perform what’s called “sentiment analysis” — identification of whether a particular status update is positive or negative. Analyze those sentiments in the aggregate, to see if people are generally content, and associate those feelings with particular geographic regions, and Maybury believes you’ve got the start of a Social Radar. He’s even developed a mock-up of a “Social Radar” desktop, complete with a “heat map” for tracking relative happiness.

The Air Force’s chief scientist isn’t alone in this effort. Over three years, the Pentagon has spent more $125 million on dozens of projects meant to better quantify, model — and, eventually, foresee — the human, social, cultural, and behavioral dimensions of conflict. Several of these “HSCB” systems are now in use in U.S. military units across the globe. Darpa’s Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS), for one, is being expanded to cover six of the Defense Department’s geographic commands, covering 175 different countries. Yet within the Pentagon, there are deep divisions over the program’s efficacy.

“Project supporters have marshaled evidence to demonstrate the validity of its approach,” notes one recent internal review of HCSB projects, “while critics have pointed to deficiencies in the scorekeeping method that exaggerate the accuracy of ICEWS forecasts.”

Well-respected retired generals and top military officials have rejected as hopeless the idea that human societies can be effectively modeled, or that human behavior can really be forecasted. “They are smoking something they shouldn’t be,” retired Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper famously quipped to Science magazine when this push began.

“We do better than human estimates, but not by much,” one Pentagon-funded predictioneer admitted.

Maybury is quick to push back on the criticism. “Just like nobody could imagine seeing through the night or seeing through water, nobody can imagine seeing attitudes. And actually, in my view, that’s very much a future reality,” he says.

And Social Radar is only the leading edge of the Air Force’s effort in the area. The service is boosting its foreign language skills. Maybury wants his more traditional sensors to get better at spotting human behavior. “If I’ve got a radar combined with an [standard camera] combined with an IR, maybe I can tell what kind of action a human is performing,” he says.

The Air Force Research Lab is funding a study by San Francisco State University psychology professor (and former U.S. Olympic Judo Team coach) David Matsumoto to find “universal markers of deception.”

And in a presentation about the Air Force’s “contributions” to HCSB efforts, Maybury even lists “Metropolitan Area Persistent Sensing” — city-wide spying — as well as “micro munitions that limit collateral damage” and “non lethal directed energy weapons.” Accompanying the words is a picture of the weapon from the Air Force’s allegedly non lethal arsenal. It’s a ray gun that shoots invisible cousins of microwaves which make people feel like they’re being blasted by an open furnace.

Maybury admits these weapons are not, strictly speaking, part of the Defense Department push to better understand the human aspects of conflict. But “preservation of human life is a premium when one is attempting to generate support of the local population, stability and security while not increasing grievances,” he emails.

Perhaps a fully-functioning Social Radar will be able to gauge the impact of such a weapon on people’s allegiances. But it’s worth noting that, in 2010, when the heat ray was sent to Afghanistan for testing, commanders there shipped it back home without squeezing off a shot.