News Form World

Earth developed a magnetic field at least four billion years ago, the latest research shows — more than half a billion years earlier than thought.

The work, described in the 31 July issue of Science1, is a major step forward in understanding when and how Earth began to evolve into its modern form. An ancient magnetic field could have made the 500-million-year-old planet more hospitable to life, by preventing the Sun's powerful solar wind from stripping away the atmosphere.
he study helps put Earth in context with its planetary neighbours. “The comparison between Earth and Mars is really striking,” says lead author John Tarduno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester in New York. Mars also had a magnetic field at least 4 billion years ago, but the red planet somehow lost its dense atmosphere and became a barren world. Yet Earth developed into a hotbed of life.
Evidence for the age of Earth’s magnetic field comes from magnetic crystals that are preserved inside ancient rocks. Tarduno and his colleagues had previously found markers dating to 3.45 billion years ago in rocks from South Africa2.
To look deeper into Earth's past, the team went to the Jack Hills region of Western Australia, which is famous for its four-billion-year-old zircon crystals. The scientists used a high-resolution magnetometer to measure faint magnetic signals of iron-bearing minerals trapped inside 25 zircons. These signals indicate the strength and direction of Earth’s magnetic field when the crystals formed.
Portrait of a young planet The Jack Hills zircons show that a magnetic field existed as early as 4 billion years ago, fluctuating in strength from a value similar to today's — around 25 microteslas — to about 12% of that. The two most-ancient zircons in the study suggest that the field could be up to 4.2 billion years old. But these rocks are difficult to analyse because they were re-heated around 2.6 billion years ago, which left a record of magnetic activity then that partially overlaid older evidence.
Whenever it arose, an ancient magnetic field would have been a good, although not perfect, shield against the solar wind. An occasional solar storm might still have been able to blast through the magnetic field and strip Earth's atmosphere of water and volatile compounds that are necessary for life, Tarduno's team says.
But David Grinspoon, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, is not convinced that a planet must have an active magnetic field in order to be habitable. Many experts question the idea that Mars lost its atmosphere simply because its magnetic field switched off, he says. Powerful stellar winds may actually provide energy for yet-unknown life on planets that lack a protective magnetic field.
The presence of an ancient magnetic field on Earth also suggests that plate tectonics could have been operating more than 4 billion years ago, Tarduno adds. Geologists have long debated when and how convection began in the primordial planet, resulting in the loss of heat to space as crustal plates shuffled around. “The discovery has important implications for early Earth,” says Simon Wilde, a geologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
But Tarduno’s team might not be able to look much further into the past. The oldest Australian zircons, which date to 4.4 billion years ago, contain a limited and confusing magnetic record. Instead, researchers may focus on broadening their knowledge of conditions on the ancient Earth, rather than trying to determine whether its magnetic field existed more than 4.2 billion years ago.

An experimental Ebola vaccine seems to confer total protection against infection in people who are at high risk of contracting the virus, according to the preliminary results of a trial in Guinea that were announced today and published1 in The Lancet. They are the first evidence that a vaccine protects humans from Ebola infection.
We believe the world is on the verge of an efficacious Ebola vaccine," Marie-Paule Kieny, the World Health Organization's assistant director-general for health systems and innovation, said during a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland, today.
The results also have implications for outbreak response in general. "This is illustrating that it is feasible to develop vaccines much faster than we’ve been doing," says Adrian Hill, a vaccine scientist at the University of Oxford, UK, who is involved in testing a different Ebola vaccine. “We just need to go on and develop them and get on with them before outbreaks appear.”
An estimated 11,280 people have died during the current West African Ebola epidemic, according to WHO data as of 30 July.
Ring strategy The Guinea trial — called ‘Ebola, ça suffit' in French (‘Ebola, that's enough’) — tested a ring vaccination design, a strategy that was borrowed from successful smallpox eradication efforts in the 1970s. After one patient contracts the disease, their close contacts are vaccinated in the hope of stemming the onward spread of the virus.
The Guinea trial included two arms: one in which adults who had been in contact with someone infected with Ebola and their subsequent contacts were vaccinated shortly after the original patient developed Ebola, and a second in which contacts instead received the vaccine three weeks later2. The trial tested a vaccine called rVSV-ZEBOV, which is composed of an attenuated livestock virus engineered to produce an Ebola protein. The vaccine was developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada and then licensed to the drug companies NewLink Genetics and Merck.
Of the 2,014 people who received the vaccine immediately as part of the first arm, none developed Ebola ten days after getting the vaccine. The 10-day window allows the vaccine to summon an immune response and accounts for any pre-existing Ebola infection. (A few people in the immediate vaccination group, however, did develop the disease between 1 and 10 days after vaccination.) That compares with 16 infections among the 2,380 people in the second arm.
The findings mean that the vaccine provided 100% protection from the virus, though the study's small size means that the vaccine’s true protection rate may be slightly lower, Kieny says. The authors of the paper put its true effectiveness at between 75% and 100%. Hill describes the results as “excellent". "This vaccine works very well for three weeks. That’s good news for an outbreak situation," he says. However, it remains to be seen how long the protection against Ebola lasts. "Will it work at six months? This trial doesn’t tell us that. That’s the next stage," he says.
Immediate vaccination The results come from data up to 20 July, but Kieny said that no new infections have since been detected in people who got the vaccine immediately. On the basis of these results, she said the delayed vaccination arm would be ended, and all contacts would receive the vaccine immediately. Adolescents and children are now also likely to receive it.
Guinea's outbreak is waning — just 4 cases were detected in Guinea during the week of 26 July — but Kieny said that the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine should help to bring the outbreak to an end. “We will continue as long as there are cases,” she said.
Health officials began vaccinating patients in Guinea in April 2015, when dozens of patients there were still being diagnosed each week. At that time, Ebola was all but gone from Liberia and cases were down drastically in Sierra Leone, the two West African nations where different Ebola vaccine trials were being planned.
With case numbers waning, many experts saw the Guinea trial as the best hope of determining whether an effective Ebola vaccine was even a possibility. The ring vaccination design it used was more likely to return a statistically meaningful result, compared with other trial designs now being conducted in Liberia and Sierra Leone, because the patients enrolled in the Guinea trial were at a high risk of infection.
A vaccine that didn’t exist in the clinic a year ago has shown not only to be effective in a phase III trial but to control an outbreak, which is a fantastic result," says Hill. (Phase III is the stage of a clinical trial which determines whether a vaccine works and is generally required for regulatory approval.)
“This trial dared to use a highly innovative and pragmatic design, which allowed the team in Guinea to assess this vaccine in the middle of an epidemic," said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust in London, which helped to fund the trial, in a statement. "Our hope is that this vaccine will now help bring this epidemic to an end and be available for the inevitable future Ebola epidemics," he said.
Stockpile excitement In the wake of the trial results, the WHO has decided that the rVSV-ZEBOV vaccine will continue to be used in the current outbreak in Guinea as part of the clinical trial, Kieny said in the press conference. She also said that the WHO is now considering whether to approve the vaccine for general use. That could set the stage for establishing stockpiles to quell future outbreaks — which have tended to flare up in remote communities — and perhaps even for use in this epidemic, should the case numbers in Sierra Leone or Liberia flare up again.
“From a public health point of view, this is a really, really exciting finding,” says Seth Berkley, chief executive of Gavi, the vaccine alliance in Geneva, Switzerland, which funds vaccine access in low-income countries. His organization previously announced that it would pay for production and roll-out of an Ebola vaccine during the current outbreak, should one become available.
He notes that rVSV-ZEBOV is a 'first-generation' vaccine that is not ideal for stockpiling: it must be stored at –80° C and it protects against a limited number of species of the Ebola virus. He says that Gavi will work with researchers and industry to support the development of second-generation Ebola vaccines that target other Ebola virus species, as well as the closely related Marburg virus, and which do not require storage in expensive, laboratory-grade freezers.

The Philae comet lander has not spoken to Earth since a link-up through its parent spacecraft, Rosetta, on 9 July — and scientists may never hear from it again.
But a haul of seven reports analysing data that Philae collected and sent home over three days in November last year, before it went into hibernation, has revealed further puzzling information about the comet it sits on, which is whirling closer to the Sun. Some scientists say the findings suggest that the comet is not an unaltered time capsule from the dawn of the Solar System, as researchers had presumed.
It seems like the more we know, the less we know,” says Geraint Morgan, a co-investigator on the lander’s Ptolemy instrument and a physical chemist at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK. “The comet is more complicated than we might have imagined.
The hard problem
One puzzle is that the surface of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko is much harder than scientists had expected, according to papers published in Science on 30 July. When Philae landed on 12 November 2014, it bounced, grazed the lip of a crater, and bounced again before coming to rest. Measurements of how its legs compressed as they hit the comet1, as well as data from a hammer on Philae2 that tried unsuccessfully to penetrate the surface, show that the comet has a strong, hard crust, covered in places by a softer layer of dust and ice.
That finding could change future lander design, says Stephan Ulamec, project manager for the lander at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Cologne. Before the mission, some had feared that the lander might sink into several metres of soft dust. “In the future one would have to think about a mechanism that can cope with pretty hard material,” he says.
The hard surface could be the result of ice grains either compacting or crystallizing under solar radiation. Comet simulations in the 1990s showed that these processes were possible, says Karsten Seiferlin, a planetary scientist at the University of Bern and a member of Philae’s hammer team.
That the comet could have changed since its formation has implications for the wider mission, which had assumed that such bodies had existed largely unaltered since the start of the Solar System, says Seiferlin. But both the hard crust and a large variety of surface materials and structures found on the comet could be the result of recent modifications, he says.
For instance, an intriguing polymer found in the dust3 — called polyoxymethylene — may form when sunlight hits the comet’s surface and triggers reactions that link simple formaldehyde molecules into chains, researchers suggest. If the polymer covers much of the comet, it could explain the object’s dark colour, says Andrew Morse, a member of the Ptolemy team and a planetary scientist at the Open University. The polymer may also be masking signals from other interesting compounds formed earlier in the comet's history, he adds.
“It means we have to understand the physics and processes going on if we want to draw conclusions about the history of the Solar System,” says Seiferlin.
Rugged landscape

The bioeconomy is rising up the political agenda. More than 30 countries have announced that they will boost production of renewable resources from biological materials and convert them into products such as food, animal feed and bioenergy. Non-food crops, such as switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), are the main focus, as well as agricultural and forestry residues and waste materials and gases.

It is one thing to write a report; it is another to put a plan into action sustainably. The biggest conundrum is reconciling the conflicting needs of agriculture and industry. In a post-fossil-fuel world, an increasing proportion of chemicals, plastics, textiles, fuels and electricity will have to come from biomass, which takes up land. By 2050, the world will also need to produce 50–70% more food1, increasingly under drought conditions and on poor soils.

There is no consensus on what 'sustainable' means. Biomass assessment is a patchwork of voluntary standards and regulations. With many schemes comes a lack of comparability. Confusion leads to mistrust and protectionism, international disputes and barriers, slow investment and slower growth.
For example, greater use of wood for electricity generation or heating may decrease greenhouse-gas emissions if it displaces coal. But retaining forests also sequesters carbon and protects biodiversity. Increased demand boosts wood-pellet prices, and puts pressure on businesses, such as saw mills, that use wood. The balance of who saves or creates emissions shifts when biomass is exported.
The geopolitical implications mirror those of crude oil. Developed countries that lack fossil fuels are thirsty for renewable energies. Some developing countries may be tempted to meet that demand without accounting for the environmental or social cost. It is in everyone's interests to harmonize sustainability standards and head off disputes before they arise. Governments should agree on criteria and define metrics for assessing biomass sustainability. And they should consider creating a centre for resolving disputes that arise over competition for land and biomass.
No consensus In 2012, the United States and the European Union laid down their intentions to grow their bioeconomies2, 3. Now, the G7 industrialized countries4 and at least 20 others either have a dedicated bioeconomy strategy in place (including Finland, Malaysia and South Africa) or have policies consistent with growing a bioeconomy (including Australia, Brazil, China, India and Russia).
The bioeconomy of Malaysia, for example, is expected to grow 15% per year to 2030. The palm-oil industry is central to that plan, as it is elsewhere in southeast Asia.
Making up 45% of the world's edible oil, palm oil can also be processed into biodiesel. The oil-palm crop is also more effective at sequestering carbon than other major crops. Using genomics in selective breeding offers great potential for improvements to the economics of palm-oil production5.
Land disputes between palm-oil companies and local communities have already begun. Between 2006 and 2010, Indonesia's palm-oil plantation area increased dramatically, from 4.1 million to 7.2 million hectares. The increase has been accompanied by a rise in deforestation, water pollution, soil erosion and air pollution, as well as restrictions on traditional land-use rights and land losses, increasing land scarcity and land prices6.
A situation that arose between Canada and the EU in 2012 illustrates how rational decision-making in different countries can lead to disputes. The EU's Renewable Energy Directive sustainability criteria for biofuels and bioliquids are non-binding for solid biomass. EU biomass sustainability standards also prohibit the use of 'primary forest' materials for bioenergy.
In Canada, forests are deemed sustainable by measures of woodland structure, composition and degree of 'naturalness'. Overall, the area affected by natural disturbances such as insect infestations and wildfire is larger than the total area of logging — and the use of such damaged trees for bioenergy holds potential. But because it stems from primary forest that has not been harvested or regrown, such wood would be excluded from importation into the EU.
A dispute arose in 2012 between an environmental organization and an energy company wishing to ship wood pellets to Europe that had originated from Canadian primary forest infested with the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae). The Dutch government used the case to see whether mediation might work in such circumstances — and it did. The dispute was settled.
Increasing demand for biomass makes it likely that such disputes will recur. Limited land mean that Europe cannot grow enough biomass to meet its own future demand. Depending on bioenergy policies, biomass use is expected to continue to rise to 2030 and imports to Europe are estimated to triple by 2020. Wood-pellet use for large-scale power generation is increasing dramatically in Europe. Some countries including Germany and Denmark have become net importers. Europe may import7 80 million tonnes of solid biomass per year by 2020.
Today's biomass situation bears similarities to that in the 1980s, when a system of national agricultural subsidies in Europe threatened to start trade wars. Policies directed at producing more food combined with rapid technical progress and structural changes led to agricultural trade barriers. Domestic surpluses of farm goods were stocked or exported with subsidies — giving rise to the European 'butter mountains' and 'wine lakes' — by protecting farm producers at the cost of domestic consumers and producers abroad. The costs weighed heavily on government budgets. Consumers in countries with protected markets faced higher food bills, and producers in other countries were penalized by restrictions on access to those markets8.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) helped to resolve that situation by developing standards for agricultural subsidies, which are accepted globally. An analogous, internationally agreed biomass sustainability governance framework is now needed.

LeAnne Rimes wore her heart on her T-shirt during an outing in LA on Thursday. The 32-year-old country singer wore declared 'good girls love bad boys' on her top while grocery shopping in Los Angeles. She certainly played the part with girlish braids in her hair and a sweet smile on her face.


Her outfit was seemingly a nod to her relationship with husband of four years, Eddie Cibrian, 42. The two made headlines after falling for each other on the set of the TV movie, Northern Lights, in 2009. Both LeAnn and Eddie were married at the time, and the affair ended those relationships. LeAnn's look on Thursday featured blonde hair tied into messy braids that reached to just below her shoulders, while the singer covered her eyes with silver-framed sunglasses.

There's no denying that when it comes to age-defying beauty she's got it. Stepping out in Los Angeles on Thursday, Reese Witherspoon put on a very leggy display as she donned a pair of mint green tailored shorts. But it wasn't just her pins she was parading when pictured at the Brentwood Country Mart as the 39-year-old actress was also showing off her new layered haircut


Ditching the heels, Witherspoon wore a pair of nude sandals as she hid her eyes behind a pair of animal print rimmed reflective sunglasses. Rocking a large canvas bag, which featured tan handles, the mother-of-three topped her ensemble with a white shirt as she clutched onto an iced beverage.

For the last few years, Wangda Dorje and Tshering Choden have been the public face of HIV/Aids in Bhutan. They were among a group of five who were the first in the country to come out as HIV-positive - in front of the King, and then on national television.

Wangda Dorje and Tshering Choden have four young children. It's summer in Bhutan, and the sounds of a city under construction, come clattering in through the windows of their two-room flat in the capital, Thimphu. In the kitchen, their 12-year-old daughter is washing up, while the younger children play tag in the tiny living room. The TV is on and the flat is spotless. They seem like a model family, but their lives have been far from ordinary.

It all began in 2006 when Choden was three months pregnant with her second child. She and Dorje were on their way back from hospital, where they had just had a routine pregnancy check-up, when Dorje's phone rang. It was the hospital asking them to return urgently. Not knowing what the matter could be, they quickly made their way back. They were shown into a bare white room with a table and four chairs. Two hospital counsellors, a man and a woman, sat silently looking at Dorje and Choden without uttering a word. "For some time they actually looked at each other, as if they were in too much pain to tell us what they had to say. Then, quite abruptly, the male counsellor asked my wife to go outside," says Dorje. "Then I was really worried. My pulse was racing.
Once Choden had gone outside, the counsellor told Dorje, "The HIV is very active in your body and also your wife's." Dorje looks pale, the shock visible as he recalls this life-changing moment.
"I couldn't speak a word for some time. I was completely lost. Then finally, after some time, the only thought that came to mind was infidelity," he says emphatically, staring at me directly. "I immediately suspected my wife of being unfaithful. Anger rose up so quickly, I felt hurt and furious." But Dorje then asked the counsellor who was infected first, him or Choden, who was then just 18. He replied: "By looking at the body immunity level it looks like you were infected a long time before your wife.
That changed everything. Dorje shakes his head. "I felt really emotional, guilty and sad." He pauses. "Then the counsellor called my wife back into the room. I couldn't bear to look at her face, she was so young.
I was very shocked, I was trembling all over," says Choden. "I couldn't say anything, I was on the verge of crying. And because I was very young, I thought I was going to die. Dorje had been a drug user in his late adolescence, after a failed relationship. It was then that he had contracted the disease through shared needles. He had not even known that this was possible until the doctors explained it to him.

The lion (Panthera leo) is one of the five big cats in the genus Panthera and a member of the family Felidae. The commonly used term African lion collectively denotes the several subspecies found in Africa. With some males exceeding 250 kg (550 lb) in weight,[4] it is the second-largest living cat after the tiger. Wild lions currently exist in sub-Saharan Africa and in Asia (where an endangered remnant population resides in Gir Forest National Park in India) while other types of lions have disappeared from North Africa and Southwest Asia in historic times. Until the late Pleistocene, about 10,000 years ago, the lion was the most widespread large land mammal after humans. They were found in most of Africa, across Eurasia from western Europe to India, and in the Americas from the Yukon to Peru.[5] The lion is a vulnerable species, having seen a major population decline in its African range of 30–50% per two decades during the second half of the 20th century.[2] Lion populations are untenable outside designated reserves and national parks. Although the cause of the decline is not fully understood, habitat loss and conflicts with humans are currently the greatest causes of concern. Within Africa, the West African lion population is particularly endangered.
In the wild, males seldom live longer than 10 to 14 years[citation needed], as injuries sustained from continual fighting with rival males greatly reduce their longevity.[6] In captivity they can live more than 20 years.[citation needed] They typically inhabit savanna and grassland, although they may take to bush and forest. Lions are unusually social compared to other cats. A pride of lions consists of related females and offspring and a small number of adult males. Groups of female lions typically hunt together, preying mostly on large ungulates. Lions are apex and keystone predators, although they are also expert scavengers obtaining over 50 percent of their food by scavenging as opportunity allows. While lions do not typically hunt humans, some have. Sleeping mainly during the day, lions are primarily nocturnal, although bordering on crepuscular in nature.[
Highly distinctive, the male lion is easily recognised by its mane, and its face is one of the most widely recognised animal symbols in human culture. Depictions have existed from the Upper Paleolithic period, with carvings and paintings from the Lascaux and Chauvet Caves, through virtually all ancient and medieval cultures where they once occurred. It has been extensively depicted in sculptures, in paintings, on national flags, and in contemporary films and literature. Lions have been kept in menageries since the time of the Roman Empire, and have been a key species sought for exhibition in zoos over the world since the late eighteenth century. Zoos are cooperating worldwide in breeding programs for the endangered Asiatic subspecies.

Of course it’s easy to sympathize with Israel’s view on Iran. When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says, as he did over the weekend, “Iran must not be armed with nuclear weapons”—well, that’s a nice ringing declaration. When French President François Hollande, on his visit to Israel, says more or less la même chose—“France will not make concessions on nuclear proliferation”—I’m sure we can all empathize with France.

But ringing declarations, empathy, sympathy—what do they have to do with what’s actually going on? With what could be going on, with a bit of negotiation and good fortune? How do they help the world gain concessions from a famously paranoid nation? Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, at first seemingly pliable, has recently done an about-face. After initially sending signals that if sanctions were dropped, he might be amenable to a nuclear enrichment freeze, Rouhani now, after France’s declaration and the suspension of talks, says otherwise. His country, Rouhani now insists, has a right “to enrichment” of uranium, and sanctions imposed by the West, he adds, will do nothing to cause Iran to back down on that enrichment project. This of course is a ringing declaration in its own right. And a dangerous one as well, since Iran may be only months away from being capable of producing a nuclear weapon.
But if you’re an Iranian president who after engaging in a single phone call with Barack Obama, discovers on his return to his home country demonstrators throwing shoes at his limo (in Islamic culture, the sole of a shoe is considered particularly disgusting, a sign of total contempt), you have ample reason to, as it were, tread carefully. And yet, for some reason, neither Israel nor France seems to grasp all that. In fact, France in particular has pretty much shoved Rouhani into the kind of tight corner that practically forces him to lash out. (So did Netanyahu, who called the Iranian leader “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” but I’m betting Rouhani doesn’t worry overmuch about Israel’s character assessment.)
France, for example, is adamant that operations at the nuclear reactor at Arak—not yet online, by the way—be halted. While that, of course, will be an important part of any agreement, how prudent was it for the French to insist on such a measure so early in the negotiations? That the nation of Talleyrand, the country famous for the delicacy and skill of its diplomacy, would abandon these traits at such a crucial moment is not an accident or oversight.
Netanyahu of course has his own reasons for distrust, ones that are close by and existential. Personally, I think Netanyahu sees existential threats around every corner. It is both his strength (with his electorate) and his central, irredeemable weakness in conducting foreign policy, one that France is busy exploiting right now.
No one is suggesting blind trust should be the order of the day in negotiations with Iran. But consider this: In October, Rouhani ordered a nationwide survey to find out if most Iranians support or oppose improved relations with the US. A decade earlier, previous pollsters examining the same question were jailed for conducting just such a survey because the results disturbed the country’s despots. At the time, roughly 70 percent of respondents favored restoring ties between Washington and Tehran.
So the question is this: If Rouhani is as untrustworthy, obdurate, and intransigent as the French and Israelis make him out to be, why would he have ordered a similar poll last month? He knows the likely results. We all do. Given an opportunity, given the chance and encouragement, he might just act on them.

On Monday, while visiting Ethiopia, President Obama qualified his mild criticisms of Ethiopia by saying his observations were made “from a position of respect and regard for the Ethiopian people, and recognizing their history and the challenges that they continue to face.

Ethiopia is a dictatorship. It holds a large number of journalists and dissidents in its jails. In the last election, the ruling party received an absurd 100% of the vote. Nevertheless, in a joint press conference with Prime Minister Hailemariam, President Obama twice referred to Ethiopia’s “democratically- elected government.” Prime Minister Hailemariam chimed right in, saying his country was on “the right track” and was a “constitutional democracy.” According to the prime minister, “two decades of democratization” were not enough to overcome “centuries of undemocratic practices and culture in this country.” The White House claims that a more frank and presumably factual discussion was held behind closed doors. The New York Times’s Peter Baker quoted a senior administration official saying that privately, “Ethiopian leaders ‘expressed some discomfort’ with the ruling party’s sweep of the election because it was ‘not indicative of the kind of competition they want to have.” Setting aside the questions of what margin of victory the Ethiopian ruling party would like to have to disguise their faux democracy–not too high, not too low–the message from the president and his aides is disappointing and revealing. It sounds defensive of the Ethiopian government.

While Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif celebrate their recent nuclear negotiating triumph, neither they nor their Washington-based fans should pop the Zamzam cola just yet. Back in Tehran, Rouhani and Zarif are encountering increasing resistance. With the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in hand, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei no longer needs the duo and is likely to cease shielding them from domestic criticism as he has in their first two years in office. Worse, fearing their popularity, Khamenei may encourage the Islamic Revolutionary Guards to launch a political attack against the president and his allies.

Rouhani is perhaps in a better position to defend himself than his “pragmatic” forerunners. Today, team Rouhani is not a one-man operation that emerged from nowhere but the product of the large “technocratic” and clerical network built by his mentor, former president Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.
Rouhani intends to mobilize the public for his cause. After all, he has come close to delivering his single major campaign pledge — solving the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program and eliminating the international sanctions regime. Seeing some economic promise, the average voter may vote Rouhani’s allies into parliament and the Assembly of Experts in February 2016, and eventually re-elect Rouhani in presidential elections the following year.
That scenario, however, would seem optimistic. In the past, Rafsanjani and Rouhani seldom reciprocated the loyalty of their protégés, and nor can they expect their former allies’ support in troubled times. The two mullahs did not lift a finger to save their friends when opponents, which sometimes included Khamenei, began to attack Rafsanjani’s too-powerful network during his presidency in the 1990s. When Gholamhossein Karbaschi, a reformist mayor of Tehran and a Rafsanjani ally, was targeted by a politically-motivated judiciary in 1998, Rafsanjani and Rouhani (then-secretary of the Supreme National Security Council) remained silent. If Khamenei unleashes the Guards against the president, Rouhani’s network of friends is vastly smaller and weaker than was Rafsanjani’s a decade earlier and, thus, would likely scatter in difficult times.
It is also near certain that Rouhani will be incapable of capitalizing on the sanctions relief to liberalize Iran’s economy and improve living standards for the average Iranian. To date, Rouhani has already repeatedly tried, and failed, to push the Guards (upper or lower case. I’m not sure?) out of the economy. Their intransigence probably received the tacit support of Khamenei, who can’t afford to lose his praetorians’ support. After all, it was the guards who brutally suppressed the pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009. The money from sanctions relief remains more likely to find its way to the companies owned by the IRGC and the semi-public foundations controlled by Khamenei than to state coffers, and the ordinary citizen.
At the street level, the nuclear deal remains immensely popular. But the Islamic Republic isn’t a democracy, and Khamenei has feared competition from the Rouhani-Rafsanjani camp. He has before successfully curtailed the political power of Rafsanjani, once the major domo of revolutionary mullahs, and occasionally tormented his children to remind the cleric of his place. The Supreme Leader will likely ensure that the Guardian Council, which approves candidates for public office, disqualifies candidates favored by the president and his allies. The purging of candidates will be intended to keep Rouhani’s supporters home, and allow anti-Rouhani forces to score huge electoral triumphs, thus checking the popular power of the executive branch.
Simultaneously, ever more belligerent statements by Khamenei and the hardline elite of the IRGC are gradually drowning out Rouhani and Zarif’s charm offensive towards the United States.
The cumulative impact of these efforts could be disastrous for Rouhani and his team.
In Washington the agreement is being sold in part as an effort to bolster the president against more hardline forces. The opposite, however, may well play out. By achieving a nuclear deal with Iran, Washington may have invested the entirety of its agreement and relations with Iran on an expendable politician.

                  

On Sunday, Gloria Steinem, two Nobel Peace laureates, and 27 other women crossed the Demilitarized Zone from North Korea into South Korea in an attempt to bring peace to the long-divided and troubled peninsula.


We have received an enormous amount of support,” said Steinem, the 81-year-old women’s rights activist, on her arrival in the South. It is also true that she and her group, WomenCrossDMZ, also faced a chorus of sharp criticisms.
Much of the criticism centered on Steinem and the others not confronting the North Korean leadership over the horrific plight of women in that miserable state. Yet the group’s activities—both in Pyongyang, where they congregated before the crossing, and during the crossing itself—raised other issues. Among them is the most difficult Korea question faced by countries and international organizations, whether to isolate or engage the regime led by the Kim family.
The international community’s punishment of the North Korean state, in fact, was one of the matters that most interested Steinem. “The example of the isolation of the Soviet Union or other examples of isolation haven’t worked very well in my experience,” she told the Associated Press before heading to the DMZ. “Isolating North Korea clearly hasn’t worked.”
She’s right, of course. The US, after the 1953 armistice in the Korean War, has deterred three generations of Kim leaders from launching another large-scale invasion against the South, but apart from this achievement no American policy has worked to positively influence Pyongyang. Even the North’s longtime allies, Moscow and Beijing, have generally failed in this regard. “No one has found a way to persuade North Korea to move in sensible directions,” Stapleton Roy, the former American diplomat, told me in 2004, and there has been no appreciable success since then.
Steinem, unintentionally, highlighted the utter lack of progress. Her group wanted to walk across the four-kilometer-wide DMZ and enter South Korea at the village of Panmunjom, site of the signing of the 1953 truce, but were prevented from doing so because that activity would have been a violation of the armistice. Instead, the 30 “citizen diplomats” were bused across the zone at another crossing point, and they walked only after clearing the last South Korean checkpoint.
That checkpoint was at Paju, the southern end of the western land crossing. The Paju crossing is the one used by South Koreans to go to the Kaesong industrial zone, just north of the DMZ, where about 120 South Korean businesses employ about 53,000 North Korean workers. Kaesong, launched in 2004, is often held out as an example of the success of Seoul’s attempts to work with Pyongyang.
Ban Ki-moon would have used the Paju crossing to go to Kaesong last week. On Wednesday, the 20th, the North Koreans informed the UN secretary general that they had withdrawn permission for him to tour the industrial zone there, an event scheduled for the following day. “No explanation was given for this last-minute change,” Ban said. “This decision by Pyongyang is deeply regrettable.”
Steinem may be right that isolating North Korea is a bad idea, but as she should have known from the abrupt cancellation of Ban Ki-moon’s planned visit, it is North Korea that is isolating itself.

                  

The Global Times, the newspaper run by China’s Communist Party, ran an editorial this month suggesting that Beijing challenge Japan’s control of Okinawa, part of the Ryukyu island chain.


Why would China want to start a fight over Okinawa? At the moment, China, Taiwan, and Japan are engaged in a particularly nasty sovereignty dispute in the East China Sea over five islands and three barren rocks called the Senkakus by the Japanese and the Diaoyus by the other claimants. The disputed chain is north of the southern end of the Ryukyus and about midway between Taiwan and Okinawa.
The Senkakus are administered by Japan, which appears to have a stronger legal claim to the chain than the other two nations. The United States, which takes no position on the sovereignty issue, returned the islands to Tokyo at the same time it gave back Okinawa in 1972. The People’s Republic of China made no formal claim to the Senkakus until 1971. Until then, Chinese maps showed the islands as Japan’s.
Beijing claims the Senkakus were part of China since Ming dynasty times, at least since the 16th century. Therefore, Japan’s occupation of the chain is, in Chinese eyes, a historical injustice. “For every step that Japan takes forward, we will take one step and a half and even two steps to make Japan realize its provocation will bring serious consequences,” the Global Times editorialized, as it suggested Beijing go after Okinawa as a means of bolstering its Senkaku claim.
“China should not be afraid of engaging with Japan in a mutual undermining of territorial integrity,” the Global Times also stated. That, unfortunately, is a recipe for disaster. “Using the Ryukyu sovereignty issue to resolve the Diaoyu dispute would destroy the basis of China-Japan relations,” Zhou Yongsheng of China Foreign Affairs University told the Financial Times. “If this was considered, it would basically be the prelude to military action.”
And not just in the East China Sea. China’s claim to Okinawa, if raised, would partially rest on the fact Ryukyu’s kings paid tribute to China even after the Japanese conquered the islands in 1609. “Once you start arguing that a tributary relationship at some point in history is the basis for a sovereignty claim in the 20th century, you start worrying a lot of people,” notes the renowned June Teufel Dreyer, of the University of Miami. “Many, many countries had tributary relationships with China.” Moreover, many Chinese believe they have, based on history, the right to take, among other things, Mongolia and the Russian Far East.
So where will China’s expansionism end? Some feeble American analysts want to abandon Taiwan because they believe that will soothe relations with Beijing. That’s hardly a good tactic to use against an aggressive power looking to expand, and it undoubtedly will not work with the People’s Republic. Beijing’s defenders often complain of comparisons of China with other regimes, but we are seeing in that country a dynamic exhibited in the most dangerous states, a growing desire for territory controlled by others.

                  


On Tuesday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said his country and China had agreed to establish a “maritime communication mechanism.” The announcement came the day after he and Chinese President Xi Jinping shook hands at a symbolically powerful public event on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Beijing and then met for about 25 minutes. On the proceeding Friday, China and Japan announced a vague four-point plan that looked like a roadmap to improve ties.


Most analysts see a gradual warming in relations between the two nations. Given political distress in Communist Party circles in China, that’s unlikely, however.
Why the need for a maritime mechanism? The most visible dispute between the two countries involves eight Japanese-administered outcroppings in the East China Sea. Tokyo calls the uninhabited islands the Senkakus, but Beijing, which knows them as the Diaoyus, claims them as well. In recent years, China has attempted to wrest the islets from Japanese control by sending its vessels into Japan’s territorial waters surrounding them and flying its planes through territorial airspace there. Beijing’s aggressive actions are, in the minds of many Chinese, justified by the notion that Japan stole the islands from China. Moreover, there is no shortage of other insults, injustices, and crimes the Communist Party perceives. Pile one incident on top of another, and you can see why many have worried about armed conflict. Therefore, the handshake at the beginning of the week brought relief.

                  


The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the US Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.” That’s Secretary of Defense Bob Gates on his way out of office, back in 2011. Secretary of State John Kerry, too, has called on America’s NATO allies to increase their defense spending to the agreed 2 percent of GDP. Here’s the grim picture: apart from the United States, at 4.4 percent, only Britain (2.4 percent), Greece (2.3 percent), and faithful Estonia (2 percent) meet this target. Needless to say, the European NATO members also remain far from “serious and capable partners in their own defense.


That, Hans-Peter Friedrich tells me, needs to change. “Putin is teaching us the meaning of power politics,” the deputy leader of the German Parliament’s Christian Democrats, who oversees European issues, recently told me. “Agreements [such as national borders] only mean something if they can be backed up by action. Europe must be capable of defending itself.” Friedrich, a veteran parliamentarian and former cabinet minister with a Ph.D. in law, is daring to articulate an uncomfortable reality: though collective defense is the pillar of NATO collaboration, the American public’s “dwindling appetite” for involvement means the European allies will have to step up. “I wish that we’d establish a European pillar of NATO,” he told me.
It’s not that it hasn’t been tried. (Back in 1999, NATO formally endorsed the EU’s European Security and Defense Identity, noting that the United States may not be able to get involved in every European security contingency. ESDI, where art thou?) This spring, Friedrich and fellow center-right parliamentarians in other European countries will informally talk about the matter. But such conversations are leaving the Baltic states alarmed. “Baltic leaders are keeping a bilateral connection with Washington as a backup,” one general in the region told me. One can sympathize with them. Recently, Latvian Defense Minister Raimonds Vejonis told me that, thanks to NATO’s 150 soldiers on Latvian soil, he’s not afraid of Russian aggression. “Who wants to start a war against the US?” he asked. “That’s what Russia would do if it attacked ­Latvia. Putin is not that stupid.” But without US soldiers part of that contingent, what would happen?

                  


Lithuania and our Baltic neighbors of Poland, Latvia, and Estonia are shining examples of the transformative nature of freedom, democracy, and open markets. As for me, personally, I like to say that I am a “kid of the Reagan revolution” since I came of age in Vilnius in the 1980s. I joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1993 and—inspired by American ideals—I have served as Lithuania’s ambassador to the United States since August 2010. It has been an inspiring experience. But one thing has perplexed me: how America seems to exempt its energy policies from its ideals. Let me explain.

During fifty years of illegal and often brutal occupation, the Soviet Union designed an energy infrastructure for Lithuania that made it totally dependent upon Russia for oil and natural gas. After the re-establishment of independence in 1990, we moved from suffering under the status quo to accepting the need for change, and finally to making steady progress toward energy independence.
For the entire duration of Lithuania’s energy “evolution,” Russia abused its position as a monopolistic supplier, forcing us to pay far more than our European neighbors for both oil and natural gas. On numerous occasions, the Kremlin used energy as a political tool.
In 2006, for example, the Druzhba (“Friendship” in Russian) oil pipeline was shut down by Russia for so-called “technical repairs” after Lithuania refused to sell its oil refinery to a Russian-led consortium and after a rousing speech by Vice President Dick Cheney outlining US goals for democratic freedoms, free-market economies, and energy security in Eastern Europe.
Fortunately, Lithuanian leaders had long anticipated just such a disruption and in 1999 completed an oil import-export terminal on the Baltic Sea, which has been used since the shutdown. Today, eight years after Russia’s attempt to re-subordinate Lithuania, the Druzhba pipeline is still shut down despite dozens of offers over the years by both Lithuania and the European Union to make the necessary “technical repairs.”
In the aftermath of the ongoing Druzhba oil pipeline troubles, Lithuania’s political leadership moved deliberately to diversify our sources of natural gas as well, and thereby reduce our complete dependence on Russia.
Our quest led us to lease a floating liquefied natural gas (LNG) storage and regasification vessel—appropriately named Independence. Now docked at the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda on the Baltic shore, this vessel is already fully operational.
Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite summed up the importance of the LNG terminal by noting that “no one ever will blackmail us over gas prices or influence, through energy, our political or economic life.” The president described the Independence as “the most sophisticated vessel that will serve not only Lithuania, but also the entire Baltic region. Lithuania is becoming a stable energy nation.”
In a speech given in Istanbul, US Vice President Joe Biden later described the Lithuanian LNG terminal as a milestone development and stated that “the region that was once almost entirely dependent on Russia has seized the initiative and now is on track to achieve greater energy security and not incidentally greater freedom.” He ended by warning: “But we can’t rest on our laurels.

                  


This blog is called “Transatlantic Connection,” and this week in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, I experienced true transatlantic connections in action. As two colleagues and I jostled for a spot in the crowded Parliament Square for the country’s 25th anniversary celebrations, we found ourselves next to a group of young American soldiers. “Are you just here today or are you staying for a while?” one of my colleagues, a veteran Moscow correspondent from Soviet times, asked them. “We’ll be here for a while, sir,” one of them replied. American soldiers are currently serving in the Baltic states on permanent rotation.

“For a while”: that’s music to Lithuanian and other Baltic ears. The polite young men and women, not yet born when Lithuanians bravely dared to declare independence on March 11, 1990, despite their Parliament being surrounded by Soviet tanks, may just think of their Lithuanian sojourn as another overseas posting—they’re based in Germany, they informed me—but to Baltic leaders and citizens, these young Americans form a security guarantee. European solidarity with the Baltic states notwithstanding, it’s a US commitment that really counts.
Indeed, Lithuania’s belief in its allies was on full show, with the flags of Latvia and Estonia raised alongside the country’s own and the two fellow Baltic states’ military bands marching alongside Lithuania’s. Perhaps most importantly, the NATO and EU flags—along with those of the alliances’ member states—were proudly carried in the military procession at Parliament Square and on to the city’s cathedral. And in a moving tribute to the courage of the small group of democracy activists who stared down both the Kremlin and the Red Army and signed the declaration of independence, it was Vytautas Landsbergis, their leader and post-Soviet Lithuania’s first president, who received the loudest ovations. Rather fittingly, the former music professor waved to Lithuania’s military band as they marched past the podium.
Today the Baltic states seem prescient in having pushed so hard for the memberships that allow them to carry the NATO and EU banners in front of their parliaments. But 15 or 20 years ago many now-allies dismissed their stridency as exaggerated. “They thought we had a psychological problem with Russia,” as Lithuania’s former prime minister, Andrius Kubilius, now the parliamentary leader of the opposition, told me. It’s not that the Lithuanians believe a Russian attack to be imminent or even likely, but having Americans from states like Indiana and Kentucky in their country, dispatched their by the Pentagon, serves as a visible reminder to everyone that today’s Lithuania—unlike the Lithuania of 25 years ago—has strong and loyal friends. (Indeed, Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius had returned from a meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry just the day before.) No wonder Professor Landsbergis was smiling.

Dear Russian military planners: In the Baltic Sea, about 50 miles from Sweden and 80 miles from Latvia, there’s a large island that would perfectly suit the interests of a country like yours. Let’s speak entirely hypothetically. By occupying Gotland, even temporarily, you could prevent NATO from sending reinforcements of troops and equipment to the Baltic states, should you decide to invade them. You’d also prevent NATO air missions in aid of the Baltic states, and the alliance wouldn’t be able to use the island as a base from where to hunt your submarines or interfere with your activities in the air.
Even though Gotland’s strategic importance has increased since the Baltic states joined NATO just over 10 years ago—NATO is now obliged to defend them—Sweden has cut its military presence there. In fact, Gotland no longer has a regiment. “During the Cold War, we had an armoured brigade on Gotland,” notes Bo Hugemark, a Swedish strategist and retired colonel. “Now we only have a Home Guard battalion. At the least, we’d need air defence and tanks. As a matter of fact, there are 14 tanks stored there, but with no crews.” As a non-NATO member, Sweden can, of course, pursue whatever military policy it fancies. But given that it would rely on NATO assistance if attacked, it would do well to go the extra mile in support of NATO’s collective defence.
It’s not that Sweden’s supreme commander, Sverker Goranson, doesn’t want to post a regiment on Gotland. He simply lacks the money to do so, and has instead suggested that forces can be flown in from other regiments in case of an attack. The Swedish Air Force and Navy would also do their best to stave off an attacker, but should that attacker happen to be you, they’d be facing a superior adversary.
Actually, I know you don’t need this information, because you already know every detail about the island where Ingmar Bergman used to retreat for inspiration. What Swedish officers, and an increasing number of concerned citizens and politicians, now worry about is how you’re planning to act on that information.

During these past few days the devious processes where under the political independence and territorial integrity of the three small Baltic Republics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—were to be deliberately annihilated by one of their more powerful neighbors, have been rapidly drawing to their conclusion.” Thus begins a declaration, issued 75 years ago this week, with which the United States government announced that it would not recognize the newly occupied Baltic states as part of the Soviet Union. The declaration, known as the Welles Declaration after Acting Secretary of State Sumner Welles, was joined by 50 other countries and lasted until the Baltic states gained independence five decades later.
Yesterday the Baltic states celebrated the anniversary of their now-formal ally’s principled stand with them with speeches and music. Lithuania’s celebration appropriately enough took place in Vilnius’s Washington Square and featured “American-style refreshments.” And, I have learned from Lithuanian sources, the country is quietly also making the case to its NATO and EU allies for a new Welles-style declaration: one dealing with Crimea. Both government officials and parliamentarians have, I am told, brought up the concept with their counterparts.