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http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2016/s4572926.htm

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HAYDEN COOPER, REPORTER: Well, the first thing to say about what the Trump victory means for Australia, is that it's very difficult to say and that is because a lot of his policies and statements are either contradictory or they're simply unclear.

But let's look at some of the most obvious areas of relevance for us.

WRITING ON SCREEN: Taxing China.

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT-ELECT: They are the single greatest currency manipulitor that's ever been on this planet and if they don't stop devaluing, we're going to have to charge them a tax on the goods coming in.

SAUL ESLAKE, ECONOMIST: Anything that damages the Chinese economy, as the American tariff increases, which Mr Trump proposes are intended explicitly to do, would have flow-on consequences for us in the form of reduced demand for the things that we sell to China, including coal, iron ore and natural gas, and that in turn would mean slower economic growth here, and probably higher unemployment in Australia.

WRITING ON SCREEN: Free trade.

DONALD TRUMP: The Trans Pacific Partnership is another disaster, done and pushed by special interests, who want to rape our country, just to continuing to rape of our country.

BENJAMIN ISAKHAM, POLITICS AND POLICY STUDIES, DEAKIN UNIVERSITY: The Trump presidency not only could have consequences for the Australia-US free trade agreement but any repealing of any other free trade agreement could have cataclysmic financial consequences and because Australia is so interconnected in the global market, we really could suffer economically to quite a grave extent.

JULIE BISHOP, FOREIGN MINISTER: He's not saying he won't enter into trade deals. He just thinks that the United States has got a raw deal from some of them.

WRITING ON SCREEN: South China Sea.

DONALD TRUMP: You look at China. In the South China Sea, they are building a massive military base with runways, and storage of weapons, and all sorts of things. Now, they don't respect us. They're not supposed to be doing that.

BENJAMIN ISAKHAM: To date America has played a very prominent role as a mediator in this conflict. They've been very assertive and very diplomatic in their effort to keep the South China Sea from descending further into conflict.

If they decide not to play that mediating role, what we could see is a dramatic escalation in the tension between those states.

WRITING ON SCREEN: Military support for Allies.

DONALD TRUMP: The countries we are defending must pay for the cost of this defence, and if not, the US must be prepared to let these countries defend themselves. We have no choice.

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I have no doubt that the commitment of the United States to the, absolutely no doubt, the commitment of the United States to the alliance, its presence in the region, its commitment to its allies, and our neighbours, will continue.

WRITING ON SCREEN: Fighting Islamic State.

DONALD TRUMP: We've got to go, and we're going to knock the shit out of these people. We've got to do it. We've got to do it.

BENJAMIN ISAKHAM: Any posturing by Trump and any dramatic change in US foreign policy when it comes to ISIS will have dramatic consequences for Australia and how we continue to engage with that issue and with the border region.

WRITING ON SCREEN: Tax cuts.

DONALD TRUMP: These reforms will offer the biggest tax revolution since the Reagan tax reform which unleashed years of continued economic growth and job creation.

SAUL ESLAKE: There are good reasons to be sceptical as to whether what Mr Trump's proposing will have the effect of boosting American economic growth in a sustainable way.

If instead, as I suspect, the greater impact is on pushing US interest rates up, because of their impact on the budget deficit, then the consequences are likely to be higher long-term interest rates in Australia, too.

WRITING ON SCREEN: Immigration.

DONALD TRUMP: I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.

BENJAMIN ISAKHAM: The problem with Trump for Australia is really that he enables various movements within Australia, Pauline Hanson would be one, another one would be the Reclaim Australia movement, where really what we've seen is this growing ethnic tension, if you like, this growing idea that multiculturalism has gone too far, political correctness has gone too far, and having someone like Trump in the White House only provides more fuel to that fire.

PAULINE HANSON, ONE NATION LEADER: I think this is a revolution. It's called people power. People are fed up with what, the major political parties have been dishing out to us for years and they're saying, nup, we want change.

WRITING ON SCREEN: Climate change.

DONALD TRUMP: Here is my 100 day action plan. We're going to rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions.

(Crowd cheering)

Including the climate action plan. We're going to save the coal industry. We're going to save that coal industry, believe me. We're going to save it.

I love those people. These are great people.

BENJAMIN ISAKHAM: Having someone who's a climate change denieer in the White House means that there's very little coming from Washington in terms of pressure on other states to do anything about climate change.

HAYDEN COOPER: The vital question now, is how strong are the institutions of democracy in the United States?

Can the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve, even the Pentagon, for example, maintain a check on the power of President Trump, or will he pursue in government everything that he threatened during the election campaign?

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What Trump's policies mean for Australia

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HAYDEN COOPER, REPORTER: Well, the first thing to say about what the Trump victory means for Australia, is that it's very difficult to say and that is because a lot of his policies and statements are either contradictory or they're simply unclear. But let's look at some of the most obvious areas of relevance for us.

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Ben Quilty - International Community, Compassion & Humanity 

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Ben Quilty - International Community, Compassion & Humanity 

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http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2016/s4570716.htm

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LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Earlier this year the celebrated Australian artist Ben Quilty and the equally lauded author, Richard Flanagan, travelled to Europe and the Middle East to witness the refugee crisis in those regions.

They've since returned home and Ben Quilty's new exhibition opening this week at the Art Gallery of South Australia is his interpretation of that experience.

Barbara Miller visited the artist in his studio.

BEN QUILTY, ARTIST: Every one of these vests was worn by person who really confronted their own mortality.

They, for me, are very symbolic of what's happened there, of the great danger and sadness.

They're symbolic of the ocean of humans that have moved across those waters. Some of them not made it the other side.

BARBARA MILLER: Hundreds of life vests imported from the Greek Islands, each with its own story.

BEN QUILTY: I'm guessing a little girl with this one and a little boy with that one. That they have a name and history and grandparents and great-grandparents that we'll never know.

But en masse, as a people, their story their story needs to be heard more.

BARBARA MILLER: Ben Quilty heard some of those stories on a visit to Greece earlier this year. Many of them still haunt him.

BEN QUILTY: We were taken to meet young mother and father whose only son, a little four-year-old boy, had drowned on the crossing in the middle of the night in the freezing waters between Turkey and Lesbos.

And we sat with his mum and his dad and they'd buried that little boy the day before.

That mum and dad, they were hollow. They were beside themselves. I felt that the mother was in danger of doing something to herself.

So some of the lifejackets were filled with crushed grass. They're not flotation devices.

Even the ones that were, this one has written on the back, "This buoyancy aid is designed for swimmers." And the people from Syria, it is landlocked and no-one can swim.

If the boat sinks it's over for you and that level of desperation, I didn't think people, I didn't understand that. I had no idea until I saw it with my own eyes.

BARBARA MILLER: Did you spend time wondering what you would do with your family if you were there?

BEN QUILTY: I found a pair of pyjamas on the shore of Lesbos that were a little girl's pyjamas and my little girl has a pair of pyjamas exactly the same colour and exactly the same size and that broke me that day.

BARBARA MILLER: Ben Quilty and the author, Richard Flanagan, toured Greece, Serbia and Lebanon, as guests of the organisation World Vision.

BEN QUILTY: This term bleeding heart, I was called a bleeding heart as though it was the worst, most offensive thing on the planet.

Are you kidding? Because I care about some little children that I met who were freezing cold in the middle of a transit station in the middle of Serbia and then I'm a bleeding heart?

Well, yeah, okay, I am. Shit yes, I am.

RICHARD FLANAGAN, AUTHOR: It's the middle of winter. There's a blizzard coming in. We've seen things the last few days that would turn a heart of stone to gravel.

BARBARA MILLER: In an overcrowded refugee camp in Lebanon's Beqaa Valley, close to the Syrian border, they met a young man whose time was running out.

BEN QUILTY: We met young Muhammad who was, had kidney failure from I think caused by diabetes.

He was in his 20s and he was dying. He was desperately needing blood transfusion.

RICHARD FLANAGAN: How do they pay for the medication?

TRANSLATOR: $400 every month.

BEN QUILTY: And what a burden he felt he was. He wasn't protecting his family. He failed to protect them. He couldn't protect them in Syria because he was too sick and then had to flee across into Lebanon and to be lying there in that state, so, so sick, with no help, was very, very confronting.

BARBARA MILLER: The exhibition also features specially commissioned dresses made by Raghda Alrawi, a young mother from Raqqa who Quilty met in a refugee camp in Lebanon.

Raghda was studying dress-making in Syria before ISIS came to town.

BEN QUILTY: They made it very clear that using mannequins was illegal and they actually executed young women for using them in front of this community of students.

And at that point her husband took her and her little baby boy and they fled across the border into Lebanon.

BARBARA MILLER: Raghda can't be at the exhibition, like millions of other Syrians she's still living in limbo. Uncertain when or if she can ever return home.

BEN QUILTY: At the heart of it we can remember their humanity and show them compassion.

And even if we don't let them come here, that we collectively understand their story, so that we can then act with integrity and compassion towards them.

And by that act of giving and compassion, I think you start to spread compassion. I think compassion's contagious and it will spread to ISIS at the end with a bit of luck.

BARBARA MILLER: It's a big hope.

BEN QUILTY: Yeah, it's a big call and a big hope. Yep.

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LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: Earlier this year the celebrated Australian artist Ben Quilty and the equally lauded author, Richard Flanagan, travelled to Europe and the Middle East to witness the refugee crisis in those regions. They've since returned home and Ben Quilty's new exhibition opening this week at the Art Gallery of South Australia is his interpretation of that experience.

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https://padlet.com/misserinyoung/globalrevision

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http://www.cfr.org/china/china-north-korea-relationship/p11097

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Introduction

China is North Korea's most important trading partner and main source of food and energy. It has helped sustain Kim Jong-un's regime, and has historically opposed harsh international sanctions on North Korea in the hope of avoiding regime collapse and a refugee influx across their 870-mile border. Pyongyang's nuclear tests and ongoing missile launches have complicated its relationship with Beijing, which has continued to advocate for the resumption of the Six Party Talks, the multilateral framework aimed at denuclearizing North Korea. A purge of top North Korean officials since its young leader came to power and the assassination of Kim Jong-nam, Kim Jong-un's exiled half- brother, in Malaysia also spurred concern from China about the stability and direction of North Korean leadership. Yet China's policies have done little to deter its neighbor's nuclear ambitions.

Alliance Under Stress

China's support for North Korea dates back to the Korean War (1950-1953), when its troops flooded the Korean Peninsula to aid its northern ally. Since the war, China has lent political and economic backing to North Korea's leaders: Kim Il-sung (estimated 1948-1994), Kim Jong-il (roughly 1994-2011), and Kim Jong-un (2011-). But strains in the relationship began to surface when Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon in October 2006 and Beijing supported UN Security Council Resolution 1718, which imposed sanctions on Pyongyang. With this resolution and subsequent ones, Beijing signaled a shift in tone from diplomacy to punishment. After North Korea's latest missile launch in November 2017, China expressed "grave concern and opposition," calling on North Korea to cease actions that have increased tensions on the Korean peninsula.

China's punitive steps have been somewhat restrained though. For example, China backed UN Resolution 2375 in September 2017 after some of the measures in a draft version were dropped, including an oil embargo and the authorization to use force when ships do not comply with mandated inspections. Western officials and experts doubt how committed China is to implementing even limited trade restrictions.

Still, Beijing continues to have sizeable economic ties with Pyongyang. Bilateral trade increased tenfold between 2000 and 2015, peaking in 2014 at $6.86 billion, according to figures from the Seoul-based Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency. With the advent of tougher sanctions, trade growth has dampened, but Pyongyang is still dependent on Beijing for economic activity.

Yet Beijing seems more inclined to uphold some of the international sanctions against Pyongyang and increasingly poised to take some limited measures to squeeze its neighbor economically. For example, China's commerce ministry temporarily suspended coal imports from North Korea in February 2017. State-owned oil giant China National Petroleum Corporation suspended fuel sales to North Korea in June 2017, citing concerns that North Korea would fail to pay the company. In September 2017, media reports cited efforts by Chinese banks, including China Construction Bank, Bank of China, and the Agricultural Bank of China, to restrict the financial activities of North Korean individuals and businesses.

Aid and Trade for Pyongyang

The drop in Chinese imports from North Korea in first three quarters of 2017

Source:

China General Administration of Customs

In recent years, despite Beijing's displeasure at Kim Jong-un's unwavering nuclear ambition, connectivity between China and North Korea has grown. China provides North Korea with most of its food and energy supplies and accounts for more than 90 percent of North Korea's total trade volume. In the first three quarters of 2017, Chinese imports from North Korea actually fell by 16.7 percent, though exports were up by 20.9 percent. Despite announced trade restrictions in textiles, seafood, and oil products, there are reports of North Korean businesses still in operation in China.

In September 2015, the two countries opened a bulk-cargo and container shipping route to boost North Korea's export of coal to China and China established a high-speed rail route between the Chinese border city of Dandong and Shenyang, the provincial capital of China's northeastern Liaoning province. In October 2015, the Guomenwan border trade zone opened in Dandong with the intention of boosting bilateral economic linkages, much like the Rason economic zone and the Sinujiu special administrative zone established in North Korea in the early 1990s and 2002, respectively. Dandong is a hub for trade, investment, and tourism for the two neighbors-exchanges with North Korea made up 40 percent of the city's total trade in 2015 and 70 percent of trade in and out of North Korea was conducted via Dandong and Sinujiu in 2016. However, a new $350 million bridge over the Yalu River to connect the two cities, intended to open in 2014, remains incomplete across the North Korean border, a symbol of cooled relations between Beijing and Pyongyang. Still, North Korea's dependence on China continues to grow. Moreover, established informal trade along the China-North Korea border in items such as fuel, seafood, silkworms, and cell phones signals that despite stricter sanctions, smugglers continue to operate.

Beijing also provides aid [PDF] directly to Pyongyang, primarily in food and energy assistance. China, Japan, South Korea, and the United States have provided more than 75 percent of food aid to North Korea since 1995, but donations from all countries except for China have shrunk significantly since the collapse of the Six Party Talks in 2009. North Korea, whose famine in the 1990s killed between eight hundred thousand and 2.4 million people, has repeatedly faced extensive droughts and severe flooding, which seriously damage harvests, threatening the food supply. UN agencies estimate that up to 70 percent of the population, or eighteen million people, is undernourished and food insecure. There is also concern about the distribution of aid in North Korea, particularly since China has no system [PDF] to monitor shipments.

China's Priorities

China has regarded stability on the Korean peninsula as its primary interest. Its support for North Korea ensures a buffer between China and the democratic South, which is home to around twenty-nine thousand U.S. troops and marines. "While the Chinese certainly would prefer that North Korea not have nuclear weapons, their greatest fear is regime collapse," writes Jennifer Lind, a professor at Dartmouth University.

The specter of hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees flooding into China has been a worry for Beijing. " Instability generated on the peninsula could cascade into China, making China's challenge of providing for its own people that much more difficult," says Mike Mullen, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The refugee issue is already a problem for China: Beijing's promise to repatriate North Koreans escaping across the border has consistently triggered condemnation from human rights groups. Beijing began constructing a barbed-wire fence more than a decade ago to prevent migrants from crossing, and a report in December 2017 indicated China had plans to construct refugee camps along its border as a contingency for a peninsular crisis. The majority of North Korean refugees first make their way to China before moving to other parts of Asia, including South Korea. However, tightened border controls under Kim Jong-un have decreased the outflow of refugees.

[For Beijing,] stability on the Korean Peninsula has always been prioritized over denuclearization.

Though Beijing favors a stable relationship with Pyongyang, it has also bolstered its ties with Seoul. China's Xi Jinping has met with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and his predecessor, Park Geun-hye, on several occasions. China was South Korea's top trading partner in 2017 and the destination for a quarter of the South's exports. Meanwhile, South Korea ranked fourth among China's trade partners. In recent years however, China has taken retaliatory measures against South Korean businesses to oppose the deployment of a U.S. missile defense system in South Korea's eastern province of North Gyeongsang.

Experts say China has also been ambivalent about its commitment to defend North Korea in case of military conflict. The 1961 Sino-North Korean Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, up for renewal in 2021, says China is obliged to intervene against unprovoked aggression. But Bonnie Glaser of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says the Chinese government has tried to persuade North Korean leaders to revoke the clause that would force Beijing to come to Pyongyang's defense.

Although the Brookings Institution's Jeffrey Bader has described the alliance between Beijing and Pyongyang as " a thing of the past," Xi still envisions Beijing as playing an instrumental role in interactions between its neighbor and other international players. Kim and Xi appeared to strike a more amicable chord by holding a secretive meeting in Beijing in late March 2018, marking the North Korean leader's first trip outside of his country since coming to power more than six years earlier. While Xi heralded the tradition of friendship between China and North Korea, Kim reiterated a commitment to denuclearization and a willingness to hold a dialogue with the United States.

Meanwhile, Beijing has urged world powers not to push Pyongyang too hard, for fear of precipitating the leadership's collapse and triggering dangerous military action. It has also intimated that if Pyongyang initiates conflict, it would not abide by its treaty obligation and instead stay neutral. Some experts, such as Oriana Skylar Mastro, have suggested that in the event of conflict, Chinese forces may not be involved in coming to North Korea's defense, but rather would seek to play a significant role in shaping a " post-Kim peninsula to its liking."

Washington's Role

The United States has pushed North Korea to irreversibly give up its nuclear weapons program in return for aid, diplomatic benefits, and normalization of relations. But experts say Washington and Beijing, while sharing the goal of denuclearizing North Korea, have different views on how to reach it. The United States values using pressure to force North Korea to negotiate on its nuclear weapons program, while China advocates for the resumption of multilateral talks and what it has called a "freeze for freeze," a freeze in military exercises by the United States and its allies for a freeze in North Korea's nuclear and missile testing. Ultimately, for Beijing, "stability on the Korean Peninsula has always been prioritized over denuclearization," says CFR's Ely Ratner.

Washington has also tried to pressure Beijing to lean more heavily on Pyongyang. U.S. presidential executive orders [PDF] and congressional moves impose sanctions on countries, firms, or individuals contributing to North Korea's ability to finance nuclear and missile development. Some measures target North Korean funds in Chinese banks, while others focus on its mineral and metal export industries, which make up an important part of trade with China. Washington deployed a missile defense system known as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, in 2017 to boost regional security, though Beijing strongly condemned the move and sees it as a threat to Chinese national security.

If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will.

Donald J. Trump,

The administration of President Donald J. Trump has shaken up U.S. policy toward North Korea. Officials have stated that " all options are on the table," alluding to the possibility of preemptive military strikes to thwart Pyongyang's nuclear tests and development. Trump has also warned that Washington will be prepared to take unilateral action against Pyongyang if Beijing remains unwilling to exert more pressure on its neighbor. "If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will," Trump said in an April 2017 interview with the Financial Times. Going even further, Trump told the UN General Assembly in September 2017 that the United States would "have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea," if it was forced to defend itself or its allies. In January 2018 Trump softened his rhetoric and and that March he accepted an invitation for talks with Kim in Pyongyang. Meanwhile, the U.S. military has stepped up joint exercises with Japan and South Korea and has periodically dispatched U.S. carrier strike groups near North Korea as a show of force.

Still, the United States appears more interested in leveraging China's economic influence over North Korea. Some experts, including David S. Cohen and Anthony Ruggiero, argue that Washington should impose more secondary sanctions that will penalize Chinese banks that help finance North Korean front companies. The U.S. Treasury has done just that, imposing some secondary sanctions on both Chinese and Russian entities. Meanwhile, other analysts worry that such economic pressures and further alienation of Pyongyang could embolden the Kim regime to resort to rash military action. Others question the effectiveness of sanctions in getting China to bring North Korea to the negotiating table. North Korea has vowed that the country's nuclear weapons program will never be up for negotiation.

Looking Forward

"North Korea is in a category all its own," writes the Brookings Institution's Jonathan D. Pollack. "The North Korean leadership has thus convinced itself (if not others) that its existence as an autonomous state derives directly from its possession of nuclear weapons." Though China may be unhappy about North Korea's nuclear brinkmanship, analysts say it seeks to avoid moves that could cause a sudden regime collapse. In a crisis, however, some say it would act swiftly to maximize its influence and protect its national interests.

Even as China signals that it will toughen its stance toward North Korea-though stopping short of challenging its survivability-there is mounting skepticism that China alone can resolve the North Korea problem. Chinese officials have emphasized that they do not " hold the key to the issue." Some analysts say that China's tightening of economic ties are unlikely to deter Kim's nuclear ambitions, while others say the North Korean leader no longer cares what China thinks of its actions.

Whether Chinese pressure can sway Pyongyang to alter its behavior remains to be seen, especially in a climate of mounting distrust in Northeast Asia, but North Korea's nuclear program is becoming increasingly problematic for China's desire to maintain regional stability.

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Understanding the China-North Korea Relationship

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China is North Korea's most important trading partner and main source of food and energy. It has helped sustain Kim Jong-un's regime, and has historically opposed harsh international sanctions on North Korea in the hope of avoiding regime collapse and a refugee influx across their 870-mile border.

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https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/6partytalks

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Contact: Kelsey Davenport, Director for Nonproliferation Policy, (202) 463-8270 x102
Updated: July 2017

The six-party talks were a series of multilateral negotiations held intermittently since 2003 and attended by China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea, and the United States for the purpose of dismantling North Korea's nuclear program. The talks were hosted in Beijing and chaired by China. North Korea decided to no longer participate in the six party process in 2009. In subsequent years, other participants, notably China, have called periodically for a resumption of the process.
Leading up to the Six-Party Talks
The United States and North Korea negotiated the 1994 Agreed Framework amidst rising concerns about Pyongyang's nuclear activities, including North Korea's decision to withdraw from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). The agreement halted that decision and as part of the accord North Korea pledged to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for energy aid, including two proliferation-resistant light-water reactors.

The Agreed Framework collapsed in October 2002 due to alleged violations from both sides. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly claimed that in a bilateral meeting, North Korea had admitted it possessed a uranium-enrichment program, which Pyongyang denied, and which would violate the deal. The United States was slow to deliver the energy aid promised in the agreement. The construction of the future light-water reactors was far behind schedule. The first reactor was initially slated for completion in 2003 but was not likely to be operational until 2008 at the earliest. See the U.S.-North Korean Agreed Framework at a Glance for more information. In January 2003, North Korea declared its withdrawal from the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). For more information, see Chronology of U.S.-North Korean Nuclear and Missile Diplomacy.

In early August 2003, North Korea declared its willingness to attend six-party talks to be held in Beijing. In between periods of stalemate and crisis, the six-party talks arrived at critical breakthroughs in 2005, when North Korea pledged to abandon "all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs" and return to the NPT, and in 2007, when the parties agreed on a series of steps to implement that 2005 agreement. While the steps were never fully realized, and North Korea remains outside of the NPT, Pyongyang did disable the nuclear reactor that produced plutonium for its weapons program.
First Round
The First Round of talks began August 27, 2003 in Beijing. The initial North Korean position called for a normalization of relations and a non-aggression pact with the United States, without which, Pyongyang maintained, a dismantling of its nuclear program would be out of the question. The United States had previously rejected a non-aggression pact proposal earlier that summer and remained firm on that point during the talks; this stumbling block precluded any substantive agreement in the First Round. On the second day of talks, the North Korean delegate, Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Yong Il stated that North Korea would test a nuclear weapon soon to prove that it had acquired that ability.

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi outlined six points of consensus that had been reached by the end of the round. These included a commitment to work to resolve the nuclear issue through peaceful means and dialogue, pursuing a nuclear-free Korean peninsula while bearing in mind the security of North Korea, and avoiding acts that would aggravate the situation further.
Second Round
While China called for a return to the forum, South Korea, Japan and the United States met separately to discuss joint strategies for the next round and possibilities for a verifiable inspection system. In late October 2003, China secured an agreement from North Korean leader Kim Jong Il to return to the six-party talks, after U.S. President George W. Bush expressed an openness to providing informal security assurances short of a non-aggression pact or peace treaty. The United States however, still would not allow its diplomats to hold direct talks with North Korean negotiators and demanded unilateral concessions on the part of Pyongyang. The central U.S. demand was that North Korea declare its willingness to the "complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement" of its nuclear programs, a policy that had come to be known as CVID.

The Second Round of talks began February 25, 2004. On the second day of talks, the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Russian lead negotiator, Vice Foreign Minister Alexander Losiukov, both reported that North Korea had offered to destroy its nuclear weapons program, but would not discontinue its peaceful nuclear activities. This represented a partial reversal from its January offer . While both China and Russia supported an agreement on this new basis, the United States, Japan, and South Korea insisted that the North eliminate all of its nuclear facilities and programs. U.S. officials believed that the North Korean civil nuclear program was impractical for economic use and was likely a front for other activities.

The Chairman's paper that was eventually circulated at the end of the discussions in lieu of a joint statement did not include any initial steps agreements, but reaffirmed all parties' commitment to a nuclear-weapons-free Korean peninsula.
Third Round
On June 23, 2004, the six states reconvened to begin the Third Round of negotiations. Expectations were muted by uncertainties generated by the Presidential election in the United States later that year.

In the run up to the talks, the United States circulated its first set of formal proposals for a step-by-step dismantling of the North Korean nuclear program. The proposal granted North Korea a three month preparatory period to freeze its programs, and also requested the transmittal of a full account of activities. South Korea presented a similar proposal that largely adhered to the base U.S. demand for CVID. At the opening ceremony of the Third Round, North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Gye-gwan reiterated that his country was willing to accept a "freeze for compensation" program that would lead to renunciation of its nuclear weapons program.

Again lacking the consensus necessary for a joint statement, a Chairman's statement was issued instead. In addition to reaffirming commitments made previously, the parties stressed the need for a "words for words" and "action for action" process towards resolution of the crisis.
Fourth Round
Nearly a year of uncertainty divided the Third and Fourth Rounds of the six-party talks. In part, this was due to the Presidential election in the United States, which took place in early November 2004 and resulted in a second term of office for George W. Bush. North Korea stated that it intended to wait for a restatement of the second Bush administration's policies before deciding on whether to attend the next round of talks.

In early February 2005, North Korea declared itself in possession of nuclear weapons and said it would not attend future six-party talks. It accused the United States of attempting to overthrow its government and referred to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's statement in her confirmation hearing that North Korea was an "outpost of tyranny." Finally, following a July 2005 meeting in Beijing with the new U.S. lead negotiator Christopher Hill, North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Gye-gwan announced that his country would be willing to attend a new round of talks during the week of July 25, 2005.

One of the inducements which drew North Korea back to the negotiating table was a U.S. recognition of North Korea as a sovereign state coupled with a statement that it had no intention to invade North Korea. These were reiterated on the first day of negotiations. The resulting talks were considerably longer than previous rounds, lasting a full 13 days. The United States softened its opposition to a North Korean civil energy program, while a joint statement based on resurrection of a 1992 Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula that barred the testing, production, and deployment of nuclear weapons was discussed. The U.S. also engaged in lengthy bilateral discussions with the North Korean delegation, lifting prior restrictions prohibiting U.S. negotiators from engaging the North Koreans directly.

On September 19, 2005, the six parties achieved the first breakthrough in resolving the North Korean nuclear crisis, issuing a joint statement on agreed steps toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula "in a phased manner in line with the principle of commitment for commitment, action for action."

North Korea committed itself to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing programs, returning to the NPT and accepting IAEA inspections. In return, the other parties expressed their respect for North Korea's assertion of a right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy and agreed to discuss the provision of a light water nuclear reactor "at an appropriate time." The United States and South Korea both affirmed that they would not deploy nuclear weapons on the peninsula, and stated, along with Russia, China, and Japan, their willingness to supply North Korea with energy aid. The United States and Japan, further, committed themselves to working to normalizing relations with North Korea.

The day after the Joint Statement was agreed, North Korea's Foreign Ministry declared that the United States should provide a light water reactor "as early as possible." (See ACT, November 2005.) Although Pyongyang appeared to back away from that demand in the following days, disagreements over the timing of discussions on the provision of such a reactor remained.
Fifth Round
The next round of talks began on November 9, 2005 and lasted three days. The Six Parties expressed their views on how the Joint Statement should be implemented, but no new achievements were registered and substantial negotiations were neither attempted nor envisioned. U.S. lead negotiator Christopher Hill said "we were not expecting to make any major breakthroughs." The meeting concluded without setting a date for the next round of talks.

Following the end of the first session, the negotiating climate deteriorated significantly. U.S. sanctions on North Korean trading entities as well as Banco Delta Asia of Macau provoked strong condemnation from Pyongyang. North Korea boycotted the six-party talks once again, and conducted multiple missile tests in July and its first nuclear test on October 9, 2006.

In response, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1718 on October 14, requiring North Korea to refrain from further nuclear or missile testing, abandon its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and missile programs, and immediately rejoin the six-party talks.

Further discussions resumed in February 2007 which concluded in an agreement on initial steps to implement the 2005 Joint Statement. The February 13 agreement called for steps to be taken over the next 60 days in which North Korea committed to shutting down and sealing the Yongbyon nuclear facilities and to discussing a list of its nuclear-related activities with the other parties. The United States and Japan committed to engaging in talks to normalize relations, while all parties would work to provide 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, all within the 60 day period. The United States also agreed to begin the process of removing North Korea from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and terminating the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act with regards to North Korea. The agreement set a March 19, 2007 date for a Sixth Round of talks and outlined a framework for follow-on actions by the six parties to implement the September 2005 Joint Statement.
Sixth Round
The next round of talks began on time but came to no substantive agreement in its initial sessions after the North Korean delegation walked out over delays in the release of funds from the sanctioned Banco Delta Asia. Diplomats had been optimistic that issues surrounding the bank had been temporarily resolved, but a technical delay in the transmittal of funds led to the announcement of another adjournment.

The IAEA confirmed in June 2007 that the 5 megawatt Yongbyon nuclear reactor had been shut down and sealed. When talks resumed in September-October 2007, a second phase implementation plan was agreed upon which called for the disablement of three key nuclear facilities at the Yongbyon complex and the provision of a list of North Korean nuclear activities, both by the end of the year. North Korea further committed to not transferring nuclear materials, technology, or know-how to other parties. The other parties agreed to increase aid to North Korea to a total of 1 million tons of heavy fuel oil or fuel oil equivalents and to a continuation of the diplomatic normalization processes.

Following numerous delays in implementation, U.S. and North Korean negotiators met in Singapore in April 2008 and agreed on three steps through which North Korea would detail or address its nuclear activities: a declaration provided by North Korea regarding its plutonium program, the publication of a U.S. "bill of particulars" detailing Washington's suspicions of a North Korean uranium-enrichment program and Pyongyang's nuclear proliferation to other countries, and a North Korean understanding of the U.S. concerns.

Further six-party talks continued in June 2008, ending with the transmittal of North Korea's declaration of nuclear activities. At the same time, U.S. President Bush announced that he had removed North Korea from the Trading with the Enemy Act and had notified Congress of the country's removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Difficulties in agreeing on a verification system delayed the second action until October 11. The need for a verification system had been reaffirmed in a July 12 joint communiqué issued by the six parties. An August 11 proposal from the U.S. to allow verification inspections at sites throughout North Korea was rejected emphatically. Insisting that inspections be limited to Yongbyon, North Korea announced that it was reversing disablement actions and said it would restart its reprocessing plant. A verbal agreement was established after Hill visited Pyongyang in early October. The agreement allowed for inspections outside of Yongbyon when China, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States agreed by consensus.

Progress again foundered in November when North Korea denied that it had committed in the verbal agreement to allowing the collection of samples at Yongbyon. Another session of six-party talks in December yielded no new consensus. North Korea maintained that if sampling were to take place, it would not be during second phase implementation.

On April 5, 2009, after repeated warnings from the United States, Japan and South Korea, Pyongyang test-fired a modified Taepo Dong-2 three-stage rocket, ostensibly as part of its civilian space program. The UN Security Council issued a presidential statement April 13 calling the test a violation of Resolution 1718, and expanded sanctions on North Korean firms shortly afterwards. North Korea responded on April 14, declaring that it would no longer participate in the six-party talks and that it would no longer be bound by any of the previous agreements reached in the discussions.

Since the last round of talks, each of the parties involved have at times called for their resumption. In December 2010, China, Japan, South Korea and the United States called for an emergency session of the six-party talks. In 2014, a North Korean special envoy told Russian President Vladimir Putin that North Korea would be ready to resume the six-party talks. China has continued to call from their resumption, as recently as February 2017. However, there has been little progress towards continuing the six-party talks recently.
Research by Xiaodon Liang

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The Six-Party Talks at a Glance | Arms Control Association

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Contact: Kelsey Davenport, Director for Nonproliferation Policy, (202) 463-8270 x102 Updated: July 2017 The six-party talks were a series of multilateral negotiations held intermittently since 2003 and attended by China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea, and the United States for the purpose of dismantling North Korea's nuclear program.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKb9GVU8bHE

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Why Russia continues to support the Assad Regime 

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Why Russia continues to support the Assad Regime 

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http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/08/middleeast/syria-aleppo-russia-strategy/

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Regime forces and their allies on the ground, supported by Russian bombers in the air, are tightening the noose around the eastern half of the city, still held by a coalition of rebel groups.

Aleppo is the regime's most prized target and such regime gains would have been unimaginable for before Russia entered the war late last year.

Since Russia came to President Bashar al-Assad's aid at his request, the Syrian battlefield has transformed rapidly.

But what exactly is Russian President Vladimir Putin up to in Syria? What does Russia really want? Here are five key reasons Russia won't be leaving Syria any time soon.

1. Protect Russia's interests in Syria

Russia has significant economic and military interests in Syria, such as a Mediterranean naval base at Tartus, that it is determined to keep. Russia has had a naval facility in Tartus since Soviet times, and although it is has been more of a repair yard and warship supply station, consisting of a "single pier," it is Russia's only base in the Mediterranean. The very real possibility of Assad's regime collapsing is likely to have been the primary reason the Kremlin decided to deploy its powerful air force last September.

Since it entered the war, the strategic center of Russia's military operation has been Hmeymim airbase near Latakia.

2. Maintain strategic interest

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which deposed long-time dictator Saddam Hussein, and the 2011 toppling of Moammar Gadhafi's Libyan regime -- helped by an international coalition bombing campaign -- left Moscow deprived of key allies.

More recently, Western support for the overthrow of Ukraine's pro-Russia leader Viktor Yanukovych prompted Russia to annex the Crimean peninsula and provide support for pro-Russia rebels in battles in Eastern Ukraine, fighting that mushroomed into the bloodiest Europe has seen since the wars over the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

Syria under Assad is seen by the Kremlin as a key pillar of its strategic influence in the Middle East and Moscow is extremely reluctant to let it go.

3. Fight Islamist groups

Kremlin concerns about the spread of Islamist violence are genuine. Russia has been the target of repeated brutal terrorist attacks carried out by jihadist rebels. Islamist rebels from the southern Russian republic of Chechnya have been fighting for independence since the 1990s, although a brutal six-year campaign by Moscow silenced much opposition and the autonomous region is now firmly under the control of Russian-appointed leader Ramzan Kadyrov. But separatist groups do continue to inflict violence on Russia, like the deadly 2014 bombings in Volvograd.

Russia fears an ISIS victory in Syria would have reverberations at home, as some of the top military commanders of ISIS are Russian speakers of Chechen origin.

More recently, the downing of a Russian passenger jet over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula -- for which ISIS claimed responsibility, perhaps in retaliation for Russia's support of the Assad government in Syria -- has only made Moscow more alarmed at the spread of groups such as Islamic State and al Qaeda affiliates.

It has called for an international coalition to destroy them.

4. Bolster Putin's support at home

Low oil prices and Western sanctions over Ukraine have plunged Russia's economy into crisis. It shrank by 3.7% in 2015, making it one of the 10 worst-performing emerging markets in the world, the International Monetary Fund calculated. The value of the Russian ruble fell to a record low against the dollar, and that effectively made millions of Russians poorer than they used to be.

President Putin's domestic popular support has remained strong, but with no end in sight to the economic pain, the Kremlin desperately needs a distraction. A Syrian war, as long as Russian casualties remain low, is a way of rallying support and boosting national pride.

From its top-of-the-range Su-35 air superiority combat jets to its brand-new ship-launched Kalibr cruise missiles, Syria provides Russia with a dramatic backdrop to promote its most high-tech weaponry. Russia is already one of the world's biggest arms producers. Sales to nations like China and India -- which are carefully watching the Russian impact on the Syrian war -- could now see a significant upswing.

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syria: 5 things russia wants in war - cnn

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Syria: 5 things Russia wants in war - CNN

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Regime forces and their allies on the ground, supported by Russian bombers in the air, are tightening the noose around the eastern half of the city, still held by a coalition of rebel groups. Aleppo is the regime's most prized target and such regime gains would have been unimaginable for before Russia entered the war late last year.

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Information regarding Syria and North Korea.
http://www.cfr.org/global/global-conflict-tracker/p32137?cid=soc-twitter-in-gct-101216#!/

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Learn about the world's top hotspots with the Center for Preventive Action's (CPA) interactive Global Conflict Tracker.

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Will North Korea use their nuclear weapons?

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Will North Korea use their nuclear weapons?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TBAWmZIpnE&feature=share

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North Korea constantly uses threatening rhetoric against its enemies. However, would they actually use the weapons they posses? This video was a collaboration with Dark 5. Check out their 5 Darkest Secrets From Inside North Korea here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwgKo1KDuNk Don't forget to Subscribe for more Conspiracies!

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https://news.vice.com/article/north-korea-fifth-nuclear-weapons-test-us-sanctions-kim-jong-un 3�7����%

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The radioactive dust from North Korea's fifth and most powerful nuclear weapons test had barely settled Friday when the calls to slap more sanctions on Kim Jong-un's regime began. Republicans in Congress about the need to punish Pyongyang and crack down on its Chinese allies, and President Barack Obama that the fallout would include "additional significant steps, including new sanctions, to demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to its unlawful and dangerous actions."

But if history is any indication, imposing more sanctions will do virtually nothing to stop North Korea from continuing to detonate nukes and launch missiles. After the regime's last nuclear test in January, the UN Security Council's Panel of Experts on North Korea published a report that found, despite more than a decade of increasingly harsh sanctions, "no indications that the country intends to abandon its nuclear and ballistic missile programs."

The report, which raised "serious questions about the efficacy of the current United Nations sanctions regime," detailed the myriad ways the Kim regime has repeatedly managed to make a mockery of international efforts to prevent money, luxury goods, and weapons components from getting into the country. In the months after the report was published, prior to the latest nuclear test, VICE News spoke with numerous experts who further explained how Pyongyang evades sanctions and why additional restrictions are unlikely to make much difference.

"On the finance side, they've adopted a number of techniques," said Bill Newcomb, a former US State Department official and ex-member of the UN Security Council's Panel of Experts on North Korea. "They're the same sorts of techniques that a narcotics operation would use to launder their profits and so forth, but North Korea has an advantage because it's a state and so it's able to use its embassies abroad with diplomats."

The latest nuclear test, which occurred on the 68th anniversary of the founding of North Korea's government, created a 5.3 magnitude earthquake. Judging from the seismic data, nuclear weapons experts estimated that the blast was roughly equivalent to the 20-kiloton bomb the US dropped on Nagasaki during World War II. The question now is whether the North is capable of putting its nuke on top of a missile. Analysts remain skeptical, but North Korean state media on Friday that the country now has a functional warhead that is "standardized to be able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets."

Kim Jong-un poses with what North Korea claims is a nuclear warhead. (Photo via KCNA/EPA)

After a string of North Korean missile tests earlier this year, South Korea agreed to let the US install an advanced missile defense system in a rugged area about 135 miles southeast of Seoul. The move upset China, North Korea's closest ally and largest trading partner, which feels uneasy about having a powerful American weapon its backyard.

The Chinese have strongly condemned North Korea's nuclear tests, and Beijing promised in January to play ball with the US and its allies by helping enforce the latest round of sanctions. But even before the missile defense system upset the Chinese, the experts who spoke with VICE News were skeptical about whether China would keep its word.

"China will use the sanctions as a convenient justification or rationale for occasionally cracking down on North Korea as it sees fit," said Marcus Noland, a specialist in Korean issues at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "North Korea will do something, the Chinese will be annoyed, they'll crack down and say, 'Hey, look, we're good global citizens.'"
Related: Why a secretive group of Western investors are bullish on business in North Korea
One of the key sanctions issues involves restrictions on exports of North Korean coal and other minerals. While there's evidence that North Korea's state-owned mining companies have funneled money to the country's weapons program, coal shipments are often exempt from sanctions because of rules that are designed to shield the North's civilian population from bearing the brunt of the punishment.

"The sanctions have to be targeted at military and illicit activities, not quote-unquote civilian activities," said Curtis Melvin, a researcher at the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University and a contributor to the website 38 North. "They're specifically designed not to hurt ordinary people. That really kind of limits the kind of entities that can be sanctioned, the breadth of industries that can be sanctioned."

Chinese banks with nothing to lose are another problem. In addition to the UN sanctions, the US has imposed its own slew of restrictions on doing business with North Korea. If banks are caught taking money from blacklisted North Korean entities, the Treasury Department can cut off their access to the dollar system, a crippling blow to institutions that want to do business overseas.
South Korean scientists study a screen that shows seismic activity from North Korea during the country's fifth nuclear test. (Photo by Jeon Heon-kyun/EPA)

According to Joshua Stanton, an attorney who helped US lawmakers craft sanctions on North Korea in 2013, sometimes Chinese banks are "more worried about our Treasury Department than their own government."

"I don't want to say US sanctions are greater than UN sanctions," Stanton said. "I think they need each other, but if you have US sanctions without UN sanctions you get Cuba - no one follows it except us, and there are too many holes in the net."

The problem, according to Noland, is that some Chinese banks don't care about maintaining access to the dollar system. And with the North Koreans desperate for a place to stash their cash, the banks can charge a premium for their services.

"There is going to be a fringe of small Chinese financial institutions, small Chinese trading companies, small Chinese whatevers, who don't do any business in the US, and given North Korea's isolation, they could be a high-margin, highly profitable business," he said. "Some obscure Chinese company is going to step into the breach."

Even if Beijing decided to crack down on North Korea's Chinese partners, it's possible the Kim regime could still find a way to import banned items. The UN Security Council's Panel of Experts report from earlier this year is littered with examples of incidents where North Korea used foreign-flagged ships and front companies to dodge sanctions.

Incredibly, Pyongyang was even able to import a fleet of armored Mercedes-Benz limousines from a US company in New Jersey. The limos, which were obtained via a North Korean shipping agency that disguised itself as a Chinese logistics company, were last spotted cruising through the North Korean capital during a military parade in October 2015.

Newcomb, the former Panel of Experts member, noted that the burden of complying with sanctions and inspecting cargo often falls on unsuspecting businesses and undermanned or poorly trained customs offices at ports around the world.

'They're using the same systems that giant companies or plutocrats are using to hide their money overseas.'

"They don't have the customs officials to inspect the cargo and recognize things that could be parts of a missile system, or analyze a shipment of metal to see if it's military or arms-related goods," Newcomb said, adding that North Korea tends to seek out countries with loosely regulated financial systems or places where bribery is rampant. "Wherever they can operate or there's less oversight, they tend to find it."

North Korea has also been linked to counterfeit currency and cigarettes, methamphetamine production, and the smuggling of ivory, , and other exotic animal parts. These lucrative enterprises are reportedly controlled by Office 39, described by the US Treasury Department as "a secretive branch of the government... that provides critical support to [the] North Korean leadership in part through engaging in illicit economic activities and managing slush funds."

Michael Madden, a visiting scholar at the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the website North Korea Leadership Watch, said the Kim regime is ingenious when it comes to finding ways to earn - and conceal - hard currency.

"They're using the same systems that giant companies or plutocrats are using to hide their money overseas," Madden said. "They're not hiding from taxes, but from international scrutiny."

Of course, the sanctions have had some economic impact on North Korea. While elites in ' Pyongyhattan' live lavishly, people outside the capital still face shortages of food, medicine, and other basic necessities. But it seems clear that the Kim regime has no qualms about letting its citizens suffer while it continues to develop nuclear weapons, and growing recognition of this reality has led to calls to end the sanctions.
Related: UN report details North Korea's exploits in Africa, including training cops in martial arts
On Friday, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for Pyongyang to "reverse its course and commit to a path of denuclearization," but he also stressed the need to "urgently break this accelerating spiral of escalation," perhaps signaling a change of tack. And while Obama promised to impose new sanctions, Secretary of State John Kerry said the US remained open to "credible and authentic" talks with North Korea.

But judging by a issued by North Korean state media on Friday, the Kim regime has no intention of giving up its nukes any time soon. The message blasted the existing sanctions as a "desperate" move by the US to block North Korea's "right to self-defense," and vowed to "take further measures to bolster the state nuclear force in quality and quantity."
Follow Keegan Hamilton on Twitter: Watch: North Korea's Nuclear Threat: VICE News Interviews Victor Cha

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North Korea will probably keep testing nukes no matter what the US does | VICE News

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The radioactive dust from North Korea's fifth and most powerful nuclear weapons test had barely settled Friday when the calls to slap more sanctions on Kim Jong-un's regime began.

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1. North Korea proud of nuclear efforts -  http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/north-korea-congress-kim-jong-hails-nuclear-tests-160506154411161.html

2. Attaining the truth in North Korea - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/insider/reporting-on-north-korea-is-often-risky-and-controversial.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FNorth%20Korea%27s%20Nuclear%20Program

3. North Korea's nuclear programme: How advanced is it?- http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11813699

4. UN Security Council measures against North Korea - https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/UN-Security-Council-Resolutions-on-North-Korea

5. March Security Council Sanctions -  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/world/asia/north-korea-ban-ki-moon.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FNorth%20Korea%27s%20Nuclear%20Program

6. Strong relations between China and North Korea - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/world/asia/north-korea-china-nuclear-sanctions-thaad-america.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FNorth%20Korea%27s%20Nuclear%20Program

7. Response to September missile - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/opinion/north-koreas-nuclear-enabler.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FNorth%20Korea%27s%20Nuclear%20Program

8. About the NPT - http://www.cfr.org/nonproliferation-arms-control-and-disarmament/global-nuclear-nonproliferation-regime/p18984

9. Nuclear Proliferation Treaty - http://www.cfr.org/nonproliferation-arms-control-and-disarmament/nuclear-nonproliferation-treaty/p8437

10. Global Response to September missile launch- http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/09/north-korea-nuclear-test-world-leaders-react-160909055255360.html

11. http://www.nti.org/analysis/articles/north-korea-nuclear-disarmament/

12. http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-age-editorial/north-korea-kim-jonguns-mad-nuclear-obsession-20160914-grfwm0.html

13. http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-age-editorial/north-korea-kim-jonguns-mad-nuclear-obsession-20160914-grfwm0.html

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North Korea, nuclear weapons and global cooperation towards a nuclear free world

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/interactive/2015/05/syria-country-divided-150529144229467.html

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Since March 2011, fighting in Syria has killed an estimated 465,000 people, injured more than one million, and forced about 12 million people - or half the country's pre-war population - from their homes.

Eastern Ghouta, an area east of the capital Damascus, was the focus of a fierce offensive by President Bashar al-Assad's forces in recent weeks, resulting in more than 1,000 deaths, including those of 215 children, and 145 women.

On April 12, all of the rebel-held enclave was taken by the Syrian army and Russian military police patrols after all opposition groups agreed to evacuate.

Elsewhere, in northern Syria, Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels have been deployed to the Kurdish enclave of Afrin to confront a US-backed Kurdish militia.

The allied forces have now taken the main city of Afrin.

ISIL: The presence of ISIL is now limited to al-Hajar al-Aswad, south of Damascus, and Albu Kamal.

Golan Heights: The Israeli army said on Thursday it hit dozens of Iranian military targets in Syria overnight, and accused Iran of launching a rocket-and-missile attack on its forces in the occupied Golan Heights.

This is one of the many attacks by Israel in to Syria targeting regime government buildings and Iranian presence in Syria.

In a map released on Twitter by Israeli military spokesman Jonathan Conricus from it claimed to have hit almost twenty locations.

The IDF has struck dozens of Iranian military targets in Syria in response to the Iranian rocket attack against Israel. Quds force is behind attack and has played the initial price. IDF remains ready for various scenarios but does not seek to escalate the situation. pic.twitter.com/4rC8gHK2LG
- Jonathan Conricus (@LTCJonathan) May 10, 2018

The Israeli military also said that it had destroyed some Syrian military targets.

A Syrian radar installation was destroyed in the attack, Syrian state news agency SANA cited a military source as saying.

"This is the first time that Israel has directly accused Iran of attacking it from within Syrian territory since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011," Al Jazeera's Harry Fawcett, reporting from Jerusalem, said.

"The question is whether that will be a deterrent or whether it could invite further escalation from the other side.

"Accidental escalation towards further conflict is always a possibility."

Who are the key players:

Syrian government

Main cities under government control are: Damascus, Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Latakia, Tartus, Palmyra, Albu Kamal.

Free Syrian Army (FSA)

The Free Syrian Army ( FSA) is a loose conglomeration of armed brigades formed in 2011 by defectors from the Syrian army and civilians aiming to topple President Bashar al-Assad.

Since the battle of Aleppo, the FSA has remained in control of limited areas in northwestern Syria.

Main areas it controls: Idlib province.

Kurdish control

ISIL control

After the battle for Raqqa, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant ( ISIL, also known as ISIS) remains in control of an area near Albu Kamal, surrounded by government forces westward and Kurdish forces in the east.

Other groups

Other groups fighting in Syria include Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, Iran-backed Hezbollah and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) dominated by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG).

Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

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Syrian civil war map: Who's in control where

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Since March 2011, fighting in Syria has killed an estimated 465,000 people, injured more than one million, and forced about 12 million people - or half the country's pre-war population - from their homes.

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Articles that will help you to understand the conflict in Syria 

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Articles that will help you to understand the conflict in Syria 

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1. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/syria-civil-war-explained-160505084119966.html

2. First Ceasefire, Feb 2016 http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/syria-war-ceasefire-160228063752872.html

3. What it is like for those still living in Syria
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-841ebc3a-1be9-493b-8800-2c04890e8fc9

4. Where key countries stand
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-23849587

5. Response to the ceasefire
http://www.smh.com.au/world/assad-vows-to-take-back-every-inch-of-syria-as-frail-ceasefire-begins-20160912-grewo4.html

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Lesson 2 An Inquiry into the Syrian Conflict

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Lesson 2 An Inquiry into the Syrian Conflict

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Lesson 1 What is the International Community?

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Lesson 1 What is the International Community?

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http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/four-corners/NC1604H030S00#playing

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ABC iview : Four Corners - Series 2016 Children On The Frontline

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Four Corners - Series 2016 Children On The Frontline : Children On The Frontline: Escape from Aleppo, one family's extraordinary story of life in the rubble of Syria and their escape to a new life, told through the eyes of four children. #4Corners

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1st 2nd and 3rd speaker

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Articles re: human rights for your debates

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Articles re: human rights for your debates

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1. Think again human rights http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/28/think-again-human-rights/?wp_login_redirect=0

2. Human rights dictators love http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/02/26/the-human-rights-that-dictators-love/

3. UN Human Rights Council is officially a joke http://foreignpolicy.com/2007/03/28/u-n-human-rights-council-is-now-officially-a-joke/

4. Europe turns its back on humanity
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/08/europe-turned-humanity-150810074912377.html

5. Human rights vs national security http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2007/11/human-rights-vs-national-security-004205

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SAC: To write a persuasive essay and compete in a debate.

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Lesson 15

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Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

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Hyeonseo Lee: My escape from North Korea

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https://www.ted.com/talks/hyeonseo_lee_my_escape_from_north_korea?language=en

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As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee thought her country was “the best on the planet.” It wasn’t until the famine of the 90s that she began to wonder. She escaped the country at 14, to begin a life in hiding, as a refugee in China. Hers is a harrowing, personal tale of survival and hope -- and a powerful reminder of those who face constant danger, even when the border is far behind.

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Lesson 14

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Lesson 13

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Class collection of articles being abused globally.

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The UN Declaration Of Human Rights - Human Rights Abuse

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UN Declaration Of Human Rights - 30 Articles 

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UN Declaration Of Human Rights - 30 Articles 

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Commentary regarding political challenges facing Australia and upcoming opportunities for Turnbull to demonstrate real leadership. http://www.theage.com.au/comment/malcolm-to-the-rescue-turnbulls-chance-to-rebuild-himself-as-a-world-leader-20160804-gqld54.html

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Malcolm to the rescue: Turnbull's chance to rebuild himself as a world leader

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Back-to-back summits offer Turnbull an important chance to redefine the tarnished view of him as a leader. Just watch out for Kevin.

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Lesson 12

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Look Beyond Borders - 4 minutes experiment

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Lesson 11

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Lesson 10

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1. Unilever supports sustainable palm oil plantations https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/apr/09/ioi-malaysian-palm-oil-company-unilever-mars-kellogg-rspo-deforestation

2. Unilever's commitment to sustainable palm oil
http://greenpalm.org/DB/sustainable-palm-oil-in-the-news/unilevers-commitment-to-sustainable-palm-oil

3. About palm oil
http://www.wwf.org.au/our_work/saving_the_natural_world/forests/palm_oil/?gclid=Cj0KEQjwztG8BRCJgseTvZLctr8BEiQAA_kBD-IShd6aRHjvwA28lXnKgocJakpq6DG95aLHdsUc7B8aAie38P8HAQ

4. Can palm oil ever be sustainable?
https://www.tfa2020.org/qa-can-palm-oil-ever-be-sustainable/

5.  The other oil spill
http://www.economist.com/node/16423833

6. Unlilever's pledge
https://www.unilever.com/sustainable-living/the-sustainable-living-plan/reducing-environmental-impact/sustainable-sourcing/transforming-the-palm-oil-industry/

7. Unilever's palm oil policy
https://www.unilever.com/Images/uslp-unilever-palm-oil-policy-april-2016_tcm244-479933_1_en.pdf

8. WWF Palm Oil score card http://www.wwf.org.au/our_work/saving_the_natural_world/forests/palm_oil/what_wwf_is_doing/palm_oil_buyers_scorecard/

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Introduction to Indonesia and Palm Oil Production 

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Introduction to Indonesia and Palm Oil Production 

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Lesson 9

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Zulkifli Hasan Ketua MPR RI Klarifikasi Didamprat Harrison Ford

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Years of Living Dangerously : Indonesia Haze and Deforestation (Harrison Ford)

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Harrison Ford travels to Indonesia in 2013 to investigate how the world's appetite for palm oil - an ingredient in everything from candy bars to laundry detergent - has led to massive deforestation and turned Indonesia into one of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

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Lesson 8

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Lesson 7

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Lesson 6

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Lesson 5

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Lesson 4

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Globalisation, nationalism, Brexit + a connected world. 

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Globalisation, nationalism, Brexit + a connected world. 

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On Saturday we vote, and we do so amid the ashes of one of the most seismic political events of the last 35 years. Immediately, as the reality of Brexit urged itself upon us, both of our major parties attempted to riff it into their election pitch: the Coalition urging us to back stability and Labor relying on its record during the Global Financial Crisis to argue it can be trusted to deal with the fallout. But in truth, it points only to their declining power: the declining purchase of mainstream parties on our political imaginations. And on Saturday that will be proven when we return the highest non-major party vote since we've had a solid two-party system. That will be our Brexit, if you like: much, much milder but still an unmistakable mark of disillusionment.

It's not temporary, either. In 2010 we witnessed a spike in informal votes and, ultimately, a hung parliament. In 2013, a huge swing away from Labor and the Greens, but only a relatively small one to the Coalition: a big chunk of that swing went instead to minor parties, which is how we got that bizarre Palmer United odyssey. This time, of course, even Palmer's voters are disillusioned with their choice, but they're unlike to flock neatly back to the Coalition. This isn't a moment; it's a movement. We're looking at a trend.

The unlikely history of roller skating in Australia

This is an age of anti-establishment dissent. That doesn't mean the establishment will always lose: Hillary Clinton might beat Donald Trump in November, and I expect the Coalition to be returned on Saturday. But it does mean the establishment's authority is rapidly eroding. From the time Kevin Rudd swept to power to the time Tony Abbott did, we'd slowly stopped believing elections meant very much. An Australian National University Study tells the story. Back in 2007, 68 per cent of us thought it mattered which party was in government. By 2014, only 43 per cent did.

That's serious. If election results don't mean much, then democracy doesn't either. We're slowly converging upon a cynical centre: convinced politicians are all roughly the same, and that politics itself is of no interest and limited consequence. Politics' crisis then is one of meaning. No longer does it offer us something fundamental.

That's why I think Brexit matters. It's why I think Donald Trump matters. Whatever you make of these movements, there is something vital about them; something deeply energised and alive - meaningful. If they are confronting, it's because they inspire fervour: that is, they mean something. And what they mean, most crudely, is a sharp, direct rejection of the dominant political idea of the 20th century.

That idea is of a global, liberal order. A world built on the free market, moving inexorably towards a borderless ideal. Here, the market is not an economic arrangement, but a political ideology in its own right. It's "the end of history", the final expression of politics. So final it would be post-politics really, where concepts like, say, efficiency or productivity appear completely non-ideological: like natural laws rather than value judgments in their own right. So, for example, to increase productivity is presumed a good thing, even if it means a tilting of work-life balance, or a reduction in wages. This is not merely economics. It's economics as politics.

Whatever the benefits of that, it's ultimately sterile. This is not a politics thick with meaning, solidarity, or any higher purpose. To be a politician in this context is more or less to be a company chairman; to be a citizen is to be an entrepreneur or a consumer. It works as long as the consumers are happy. But in the aftermath of a financial crisis it poses marked problems. Once the economic narrative falls flat, we're searching immediately for something beyond it.

Hence the resurgence in nationalism. It doesn't exist in isolation. This a reactionary force, defining itself only in opposition. "The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country," boomed Trump this week. "Now it's time for American workers to take back their future...on trade, on immigration, on foreign policy, we're going to put America first again". This stuff works because it offers a mythology of intrinsic greatness that is so much more enchanted, so much more evocative than a free-trade bloc. The American exceptionalism in Trump's case is obvious. But we see something similar in the Brexiters' vision of a Britain in no need of Europe. Here the ghost of the British Empire is invoked: a Britain Great enough to be free from the yoke of interdependence.

It's an attractive idea. But globalisation is not a reversible process. National governments can simply no longer control their economies, their wealth, their environmental catastrophes, even their security. These are all now global problems demanding global responses any serious nationalism cannot provide. This leaves nationalism nowhere to go except to amplify pride, bluster and aggression. The wave of anti-immigrant violence in Britain this week, the openly racist soundings of Trump, this is all nationalism can now muster. Our societies have become too globalised, too diverse, too irreversibly cosmopolitan to be homogenised. So we can talk the language of "us and them", but there's no longer a simple, coherent "us" to serve. Thus we make do with a "them" to be despised.

It's cheap, sure. But it's an unmistakable search for meaning, and it will do for now because while the big political ideas of the 20th century are collapsing, no one has yet figured out what can replace them. We're watching upheaval because the fault lines of politics are being remade before our eyes, with no obvious blueprint to guide the process.

Australia's not feeling this so keenly yet. Our economy has not yet succumbed. But our disillusionment with politics, our slow steady retreat from the major parties, our repeated pattern of protest votes show that we're far from immune. Chances are we're only a crisis away from wanting to latch onto a mythology of our own.
Waleed Aly is a Fairfax columnist, the winner of the 2015 Quill award for best columnist, and a lecturer in politics at Monash University.

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We've stopped believing that elections mean anything, but who can blame us?

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On Saturday we vote, and we do so amid the ashes of one of the most seismic political events of the last 35 years. Immediately, as the reality of Brexit urged itself upon us, both of our major parties attempted to riff it into their election pitch: the Coalition urging us to back stability and Labor relying on its record during the Global Financial Crisis to argue it can be trusted to deal with the fallout.

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Lesson 3

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Globalisation Impact On The Environment 

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Globalisation Impact On The Environment 

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http://www.dw.com/en/climate-change-can-affect-all-of-us/a-17529180

http://www.who.int/trade/glossary/story023/en/

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/globalization-and-its-impact-on-the-environment.html

https://littleusgoneglobal.wordpress.com/2015/03/15/globalization-and-the-environment/

http://oilprice.com/Finance/the-Economy/12-Negative-Aspects-of-Globalization.html

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Lesson 2

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Lesson 1

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AFL Can't Complete With The Game Of Globalisation 

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AFL Can't Complete With The Game Of Globalisation 

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Learning Task #1

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AFL can't compete with the game of globalisation

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There's been much debate about the attractiveness of AFL football lately. But the game might have a bigger obstacle in its path. And it's one over which the league has precious little control.

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What is globalisation? What are the advantages and disadvantages of globalisation?

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Globalisation is the process by which the world is becoming increasingly interconnected as a result of massively increased trade and cultural exchange. Globalisation has increased the production of goods and services. The biggest companies are no longer national firms but multinational corporations with subsidiaries in many countries.

Globalisation has been taking place for hundreds of years, but has sped up enormously over the last half-century.

Globalisation has resulted in:

increased international trade

a company operating in more than one country

greater dependence on the global economy

freer movement of capital, goods, and services

recognition of companies such as McDonalds and Starbucks in

Although globalisation is probably helping to create more wealth in developing countries - it is helping to close the gap between the world's poorest countries and the world's richest.

The animation shows how wealth is distributed. Click on the income brackets to see where the richest and poorest countries are located.

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What is globalisation? - Globalisation - GCSE Geography Revision - BBC Bitesize

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Globalisation is the process by which the world is becoming increasingly interconnected as a result of massively increased trade and cultural exchange. Globalisation has increased the production of goods and services. The biggest companies are no longer national firms but multinational corporations with subsidiaries in many countries.

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STEPHEN MCDONELL: The weight of the world is shifting in ways that will surprise and perhaps even shock you. Not so long ago, in many of the world's poorer corners, hunger was the headline health concern. Estimates put the number of malnourished at 700 million, and obese - mainly in rich countries - at 100 million. How the tables have turned.

BARRY POPKIN: "In truth, no country has managed the transition to get rid of hunger without it shifting to obesity, very rapidly. Among low and middle income countries, there's not a single country that I'm involved with or know about or have studied, from sub-Saharan Africa to South Africa to the Middle East to Asia and Latin America that has controlled this problem".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: By 2010 the number of malnourished people had grown only marginally but the number of obese people had exploded to 500 million. It's predicted that by 2030 more than one billion will be obese.

PROFESSOR MARION NESTLE: "So we have exported the burden of obesity into the emerging economies just at a time when we've kind of levelled off. This is a worldwide problem and every country in the world should be concerned about it".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: How will the world cope with its dramatically expanding waistline and the serious, complex, often deadly health risks that can accompany obesity - diabetes, cancer, heart disease.

PROFESSOR CARLOS MONTEIRO: "There are certain types of foods, what I prefer to call 'food products' they are as bad as tobacco and alcohol. It's as simple as that".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Tonight we'll head to some of those globesity hotspots on Fat's New Frontier - India (52 million obese by 2030) - China (teenage diabetes 4 x USA) - Brazil (+50% overweight or obese) - and to the place that's the overweight champion among these large countries - Mexico (30% obese).

MEXICO

BARRY POPKIN: "A country like Mexico moved from literally 1980 no overweight or obesity, by 1999 to a third of the population being overweight, by 2006 to two thirds of the adult population being overweight and obese. Immensely rapid changes".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: On the outskirts of Mexico City, the Bravo family is having a party.

JUAN LUIS BRAVO: "Today we're celebrating the 74th birthday of my grandfather".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: 19 year old Juan Luis and his 16 year old brother Pedro are here, but their father is not.

JUAN LUIS BRAVO: "My father died very young. He was 42. I said to myself, either I take care of myself or I won't have a long life - because the way I was going I wouldn't have died at 42 I would have died when I was 25 or 30 years old".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: The boys' mother Juana says her husband's family loved to eat.

JUANA BRAVO: "At every gathering they had lots of food - lots of food. They would have gatherings every month. Before the party... food! During the party... food - lots of food... all the food you want! When the party finished there was food left over - let's have dinner! Whatever you want to eat. And in the morning when you helped with cleaning up... food. We learnt in my husband's family that this was the way".

PROFESSOR MARION NESTLE: "Everything in the food environment encourages us to eat more. The easiest way to explain it is large proportions. If you are served a large portion of food, you are going to eat more from that portion and you are going to under estimate the amount that you have eaten to a much greater extent than you would if the portion was small. If I had one thing I could teach the world it would be that larger portions have more calories. It's not intuitively obvious and that's been shown by really quite sophisticated research".

JUAN LUIS BRAVO: "My maximum weight was 146.5 kilograms so it was excess fat everywhere".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Their father's death from an obesity related illness influenced both Juan Luis and his brother to undergo surgery to reduce the size of their stomachs.

JUANA BRAVO: "Here's Juan Luis, ready for the operation. (looking at a picture) I can't believe his face, he looks very pleased. Juan Luis was a normal child until he was three and from that time he started to gain weight - but I didn't realise how much. When he went to pre-school his uniforms had to be made specially. All of my husband's family have always been obese but we never thought that obesity was life threatening".

JUAN LUIS BRAVO: "These were my pants three years ago. They're size 56, which was the maximum I wore and I only kept this pair as a souvenir, so I never fill them again.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Three years after his first operation, Juan Luis is getting ready to go back to hospital again.

JUAN LUIS BRAVO: "I didn't look after myself. Everything worked... it was perfect... but what happened was I didn't take care of myself. I drank, so I went right off course with the diet".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: He's facing more radical surgery.

JUANA BRAVO: "Are you sure you haven't forgotten anything?"

JUAN LUIS BRAVO: "No, everything is ready. Are you nervous?"

JUANA BRAVO: (nods) " Yes".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Last year younger brother Pedro almost died from complications after his stomach reduction.

JUAN LUIS BRAVO: "My expectations of this surgery are to prolong my life and have a better physical condition. Also, there is a little bit of vanity because I want to have a good body. The thing I fear most is to die on the operating table, or to fail again".

FACT: Mexicans are getting fatter faster than anyone else in the world.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Medical help and awareness diminishes as you leave the big city. Chiapas is Mexico's poorest state, with a high indigenous population. Families are celebrating mother's day at a community gym attached to the local school. There's free Coca Cola for everyone.

DR ABELARDO AVILA: "The children do not have drinking water in the schools so they drink soft drinks. Babies have Coca Cola in their bottles instead of a formula".

ALEJANDRO CALVILLO: "To understand what's happening in Chiapas and the presence of Coca Cola one has to understand the link between Coca Cola and power. Remember not long ago we had a President who was the Director of Coca Cola. Coca Cola does what the state allows it to do".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Coca Cola managed to establish a major foothold in Chiapas schools in a very short time.

ALEJANDRO CALVILLO: "In many schools we were able to demonstrate that Coca Cola made agreements with the school principal so that he would exclusively sell Coca Cola inside the schools. Coca Cola would pay for this exclusivity with more bottles. And he'd sell those bottles and have that income for himself".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Recently the Mexican Government banned unhealthy products in schools with mixed results, but Coke and other brands remain a major part of life here. Mexicans consume more soft drink per person than anyone else in the world.

FACT: The average Mexican drinks half a litre of carbonated beverage each day, equal to 14 cubes of sugar.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Nutritionist Marisol Vega is visiting a local family. She's trying to eliminate malnutrition in Chiapas at a time when consumption of traditional foods has declined dramatically.

MARISOL VEGA: "We're at Petrona's house in the municipality of Zinacantan. We're visiting her house to talk to her about the family's diet - what they eat... what they don't eat and what's changed all of that. Petrona, introduce us to your family".

PETRONA: "I'm Petrona, this is my daughter Rosita. I have another girl, Lupita... this is my daughter Lupita and my niece Regina. Yes, that's my family.
In the mornings I get up to prepare the tortilla. I put water in my dough to get it nice and soft and afterwards I make my fire.
Ten years ago, the food was simpler - just beans and vegetables - but now it's more varied. I think in other families the children eat too many sweets... chewing gum... and when they don't have breakfast they eat chips... fried bacon rind... everything. They want to buy everything in the shops. They drink all kinds of soft drinks... also, shop bought juice".

PROFESSOR MARION NESTLE: "These products are not very expensive. I mean they may be more expensive than they are relative to a North American income but they're not very expensive. And what you want is you want people to be able to afford these products and to buy them frequently and to consider that those products are a normal part of their diet so that things that used to be treats - a sweetened beverage, a soda - is now considered normal every day fare and never mind the number of calories that it has or the lack of nutritional value".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Malnourished children who consume high amounts of sugar have an increased likelihood of becoming obese adults. That puts them at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.

DR ABELARDO AVILA: "What's extremely serious in Mexico is that most of the adult population were malnourished as children. In that sense, most of the Mexican population is programmed for food scarcity. When the body enters into a time of food abundance especially of sugar and saturated fats the damage to the metabolism is brutal and happens early".

MARISOL VEGA: "Chiapas is one of the states with the highest prevalence of chronic malnutrition in children and stunting under five years. If it's not corrected before two, we can't correct it later. That's why good nutrition is so important at that age. You can see malnutrition in the children we evaluate and the adults in the same family are obese".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: The food and drink companies set the prices according to what they think communities can afford. Here, soft drinks cost only half what they cost in town.

MARISOL VEGA: "So you can go to the communities and ask how much does two litres of soft drink cost and they give it to you for less than ten pesos. That's for the whole family - and they have it for breakfast, lunch and dinner".

FACT: Diabetes is now the primary cause of death in Mexico.

CHINA

BARRY POPKIN: "Obesity has grown rapidly in China and it's now become a bigger problem in the rural and among the poor, than among the higher educated elite. China went from no overweight in 1990 to a third of adults being overweight".

PAN JINGYI: "My name is Pan Jingyi. I am 16. I come from a place where people like to eat chillies - Sichuan, Chengdu. I'm taking a six month course - half a year's training. I want to get thinner because people laugh at me when I go to buy clothes and I don't feel comfortable. So I want to get thinner and become a beautiful girl".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: "The Biggest Loser" is a live-in weight loss camp in Shenzhen, China.

PAN JINGYI: "My mother is very good at cooking. I like eating and eat a lot. I started to get fat when I was a child in grade 5. People in my home town use a lot of oil when cooking spicy food. It's easy to get fat eating so much oily food".

BARRY POPKIN: "The fat story is a very interesting story. Before 1950 all the globe had in the way of fat was butter fat and lard. What happened is because of World War II and the shortages of fat that occurred, Japanese and American scientists developed a series of technologies that ultimately created a way to get from oil seeds, from corn, cotton seed, sunflower seeds, soya beans - any of what we call these oil seed products, fat. We created oils cheaply. That technology did not reach Asia, Africa and Latin America till later. The Chinese when I went there started off consuming a couple of grams a day of oil, 20 calories, now the average Chinese consumes 400 calories a day of vegetable oil in their diet. Because of such an extreme obese young population emerging in China in the last eight or nine years, that population has a diabetes rate higher than that in the US".

ZHANG YIJIE: "My name is Zhang Yije. I am 16. I am from Chengdu, Sichuan. I was 140 kilograms when I came here. I am 117.5 kilograms now. I lost a lot of weight - over 20 kilograms. My aim is to become roughly 80 to 90 kilograms. I don't want to be too thin".

BARRY POPKIN: "When I started working in China and doing my national surveys there in the 1980s, there were on the average two grams of sugar a day consumed. A trivial amount of sugar. The lowest in the globe. Today there's so much sugar consumed in China, they have a sugar reserve to go along with the pork reserve. The government is so worried that sugar prices will go up, it will cause political unrest, that if sugar prices go up, they sell some of their sugar reserve".

ZHANG YIJIE: "I tried to lose weight at home and gave up in two or three days. You lose the motivation and enthusiasm after two or three days. But at this camp, everyone here is fat and we work together. We encourage each other.
I didn't have a routine before. I got up very late in the morning and ate a lot for lunch. I ate everything, especially junk food such as KFC and McDonald's, which makes me fat. I usually stayed up late too, watching TV and playing computer games".

PROFESSOR CARLOS MONTEIRO: "It's interesting to consider that whole foods which is a solution not only for obesity but for health in general, a diet must be based on whole intact food.
In whole foods you don't have fat and sugar together in the same food. You have sugar in fruits, that's why they are appreciated. You have fat for instance in meat, that's why also they are appreciate, but you don't have fat and sugar together.
These two substances together, they give enormous pleasure. Chocolate is the example, okay? Ice creams. They are irresistible by nature".

FACT: More than 380 million people in China are overweight or obese.

BRAZIL

PROFESSOR CARLOS MONTEIRO: "We monitor the prevalence of overweight and obesity in Brazil in 27 Brazilian cities and we observe that each year we have one percentage point more of obese people.
So we now have more than 50% of adults who are obese. We are having in Brazil a change towards a food system that's very similar to the US, to the UK. And we are imitating therefore what happens in these high income countries. In 10 or 15 years we will have the same obesity figures".

FERNANDA KELLER: "My name is Fernanda Keller. I'm a professional athlete since thirty years. I'm one of the pioneers of this sport".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Fernanda Keller is one of Brazil's best athletes. She's a national triathlete champion and an international star as well. Her institute runs programs to help disadvantaged children.

FERNANDA KELLER: "We have 500 kids and they come to the program after school. They have classes... sport classes like swimming, running, biking and we take like 70 kids that need special assistance and we have a nutritionist, we have a physical education teacher to work separate with them.
We try to give them as much information as you can and to prevent them to become like overweight, because this is a really big issue in Brazil now.
The kids in Brazil now they have... when we go to the supermarket we have so many different things they can choose and unfortunately they're not getting the healthy stuff. Most of them are eating a lot of fast food and that is not helping them a lot".

PROFESSOR CARLOS MONTIERO: "Most of calories people are eating they don't come from food directly. They come from food products. They are essentially caloric substances like sugar, like vegetable oils... starches. These products they have an energy density twice as high than the whole food. Of course we can eat food products, let's say we can eat a biscuit or chocolate or ice cream, of course we can - and we did this for many years, but this was just a compliment of a diet that was based on whole foods. Today it's the reverse".

FABIANA GOMES DO NASCIMENTO: My name's Fabiana Gomes do Nascimento. I am 31. I have two kids - Adrian, who is seven years old and Brian, fifteen. I live in Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Adrian is a little overweight. Since he joined the project he seems to be more active... not so lazy. He is more willing to go out. He sometimes says 'Mum, let's go to the beach for a walk'."

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Fabiana's son Adrian participates in Fernanda Keller's program. This program is sponsored by the multi-national food company Nestle which is increasing its market presence in Brazil.

FABIANA GOMES DO NASCIMENTO: "I am going to lose weight. My obesity worries me because it reflects on him. I've noticed that he's gaining weight as well. I don't want him to go through what I did. I am 134 kilograms and my Body Mass Index is 50.5. It's way over morbid obesity.
I was size 8 and had only 63 kilograms before I became pregnant. I got really fat after my first pregnancy. Adrian says my belly is too big and that makes me sad... (crying) I'm sorry... I'm not like this because I want to be.
I've been on diets... taken a lot of medicine... and nothing's worked. Nothing... nothing... nothing. I walk Adrian to school every day. It takes me twenty minutes there and another twenty back. It doesn't help".

BARRY POPKIN: "Starting in the 1980s but accelerating in the 1990s throughout every country in Latin America, even war torn Nicaragua all of a sudden the food system changed. It changed from small farmer's markets, fresh food and little tiny stores to these supermarkets. You won't go to a single country in the Americas where you won't find every city and small town dominated by a supermarket. It's been a boom to consumers with cheap food, healthier - it's more sanitary food and it's been a boom to those selling all the kinds of food that we might call junk foods - the soft drinks, the savoury snacks - all of that has gone with it. It's accelerated the process of the change of the diet across the globe to more and more processed, packaged, high sodium, high fat, high sugar foods".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: In Latin America, supermarkets' share of all retail food sales increased from 15% in 1990 to 60% by 2000.

PROFESSOR MARION NESTLE: "So we are essentially exporting our processed food industry into countries that have never seen it before. The foods that are being exported are extremely high in calories relative to their nutritional value and we are essentially making the world fat".

VANDERLEA RODRIGUES: "My name is Vanderlea Rodrigues. I've worked for Nestle for three years. My job is very good - I love doing it. I like going out of my home and doing this... selling this brand. For me it's an honour".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Vanderlea works in downtown Rio de Janeiro supplying Nestle snack sellers who go out into the suburbs.

VANDERLEA RODRIGUES: "The company gives us new stock every day. We never have anything left over in the depot. I only know the nutritional value from the packaging. And I know that chocolate is a good source of energy".

PROFESSOR CARLOS MONTEIRO: "Almost all the companies, Nestle, Unilever, they have special business model implemented in what they call the 'merging' countries like Brazil, Mexico, India, China and in the case of Nestle it's quite interesting. They create a line of products, it's called 'popularly positioned products', so they are the same junk food but they are come in small packages so they are cheaper. Sometimes they are fortified with micronutrients, with iron so they are promoted as something good for under nutrition and affordable to the people and in the case of Brazil, they are sold by you know, these door to door vendors that are trained by Nestle to provide nutritional education. So that they copy our system of health agents, that's very important for Brazil, for public health. Of course it's not a qualified person, it's just a vendor but he receives some instructions, some beautiful material to teach the low income families how to feed their children".

VANDERLEA RODRIGUES: "Nestle products are market leaders. They sell well all the time. People really need these chocolates and seek them out. Galak's the best seller. It's a white chocolate. Everybody likes it. Everyone buys Galak. We have Alpino - a milk chocolate. As far as I know, it comes from the Swiss Alps".

PROFESSOR CARLOS MONTEIRO: They are doing this very aggressively in Brazil. They have a big boat in Amazonia that has all these products and this boat visits the small villages where they sell this product. They are adapting themselves to the needs of countries like Brazil and they are succeeding. And they project a market of 80 billion dollars for these type of products".

FACT: Nestle Brazil declined requests for an interview.

PROFESSOR MARION NESTLE: "One company after another, Kellogg's, Kraft, Nestle - no relation - McDonalds, Domino Pizza, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola.... all are reporting that their growth in profits is coming from outside North America. They are buying smaller and other companies that have access to distribution systems in developing countries in order to get their products into those countries. And they're reporting that vast amounts of their profits, growth and profits, three quarters of their profits, 20% increase per year, are coming in developing countries".

FACT: Obesity related illness costs the Brazilian health system around $US2.1 billion per year.

INDIA

BARRY POPKIN: "India's a country that has half a billion hungry and malnourished and poor people. On the other hand we've seen obesity emerge in the last 15 years. And only the rich and only those with certain kinds of jobs have access to the medical care and can afford the treatment for the diabetes. There are tens of millions, a disproportion number of Indians, who have diabetes who don't know it".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: "Dr Ranjan Yajnik runs the Diabetes Unit at the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Pune".

DR RANJAN YAJNIK: "This baby was born two days ago and the statistics tells us that that baby will have more than one in two chance of getting diabetes in their lifetime. That's frightening".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Just a few decades ago diabetes was rare in India, but as millions have moved out of poverty, non-infectious diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes have become the number one cause of death.

DR RANJAN YAJNIK: "In the next 20 years, we expect more than 100 million patients with diabetes in India. Obesity is of course the key driver and in the last 20 years it has increased almost four to five times in the cities".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Many babies born in India are underweight due to poor nutrition in the womb. Just like the malnourished babies in Mexico, this makes them particularly vulnerable.

DR RANJAN YAJNIK: "The statistics are now coming in that babies who are born small but grow big during childhood are at a very high risk of diabetes as adults. And if anything, the urban situation in India provides you the background for this to happen".

PROFESSOR MARION NESTLE: "This kind of food marketing as one food industry executive explained to me, is designed to slip below the radar of critical thinking.
(DOMINOS PIZZA ADVERTISEMENT)
Most people don't think critically when they eat. If we're presented with large amounts of delicious food that's really wonderful, we're going to eat it and knowing when to stop is very difficult".

DR RANJAN YAJNIK: "There's a lot of globalisation of food, there's import of all the international brands which are high calorie, high carbohydrate and high fat. So as a child we used to eat local foods that were mostly cooked at home. I mean now we now eat mostly outside the home. We eat in hotels, we eat in fast food joints and the type of food which we eat belongs to the fast food or the junk category".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: The Wadke family are here to see Dr Yajnik. Harishchandra Wadke lost his leg after developing type 2 diabetes more than 10 years ago.

DR RANJAN YAJNIK: (greeting Harishchandra) "Okay, tell me how you are".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: His illness has left him depressed. The former breadwinner is now almost totally dependent on his family.

MRS WADKE: "He says he doesn't want to live anymore".

DR RANJAN YAJNIK: "Yes, anyone could feel like that".

MRS WADKE: "He says, 'Stop giving me food, it's the end of my life".

DR RANJAN YAJNIK: "You have enough time - fifteen years of living at least. (Mr Wadke starts crying - Dr Yajnik pats Mr Wadke and ushers him out). Okay, see you then".

"It's only his family support, which is a very closely knit family, which is taking him through this".

NILESH: "Before my father's diagnosis, we didn't know what diabetes was at all. No-one in our family has had this kind of disease before".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: The epidemic threatens to overwhelm the national health budget and on an individual level, the cost of treatment can bankrupt families like the Wadkes.

SUVARNA: "It's had a huge effect on my mother-in-law. I'd really like to praise her - even at her age she does every single thing. And the main thing is, she never complains".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Like Latin Americans, Indians get type 2 diabetes at a relatively low weight or body mass index.

BARRY POPKIN: "They're very sensitive with small amounts of extra fat. All the fat goes to their heart and liver and the most sensitive area right in the abdomen that creates the problems with insulin sensitivity".

DR RANJAN YAJNIK: "Compared to the Europeans, Indians get diabetes at a much younger age. This means people are affected at the prime of their productive life and therefore can have very serious effects on the economy of the country".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Dr Yajnik's latest research has revealed something even more significant. Babies are already being programmed for diabetes and heart disease even while they're still in the womb. It's all down to the mother's diet and metabolism.

DR RANJAN YAJNIK: "That tells the genes how to function, how to behave, and that remains with the baby for the rest of the life so that in future when the situation becomes more diabetogenic, these babies are at a higher risk of developing diabetes and also heart disease".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Up until now the main focus has been on reducing obesity in adults, but the doctor says programs should be targeting future mothers instead.

DR RANJAN YAJNIK: "If we improve the health of the mothers, the health of the next generation will improve and that will be passed on to the future generations".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Three quarters of the world's economic growth is now coming from countries we used to think of as poor such as India, China and Brazil - and global food and beverage companies see most of their future potential in these emerging economies.

BARRY POPKINS: "They've essentially created a new set of meals called snacks or eating all the time - and they've moved that across the globe. The biggest example to me is China. When I started in China every one of the 25,000 individuals we monitored in 228 communities across the country and we spent three days with each of them, never snacked. Starting at about 2000 we started to see snacking. It tripled between 2000 and 2004, it tripled again between 2004 and '06 and it tripled again in that survey between '06 and '09. It's the new market for all the major food companies and they are creating foods and marketing to create a new demand".

PROFESSOR MARION NESTLE: "The issue here isn't that food companies are evil and plotting to make everybody fat. Food companies are in business. They're not social service agencies. Their job is to get people to eat more, not less. The way I like to explain it is eating less is very bad for business so what food companies have done is they've made food available in places where it never was before, they've made it available in larger portions and they have created a social environment in which it's become socially acceptable to eat in places where it never used to be".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: It's not all one way traffic. Governments are making some effort to tackle the problem.

PROFESSOR CARLOS MONTEIRO: "The important thing in terms of obesity is the visibility of the problem. So everyone sees what is happening, everyone has children that are becoming obese. We could use this pressure of the society to fight obesity.
This means taxation, this means marketing regulation. I think these are the two main things that can change the picture".

BARRY POPKIN: "The question is now getting governments to act and to getting consumer groups and individuals to act in their communities to say we must do something about this. It's only going to come from local population pushing governments is which is what happened with tobacco".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: One successful example is Brazil's national school lunch program which provides 47 million meals every day.
In 2009 the government passed a law requiring that at least 30% of food be fresh and sourced locally. The new rules stem the flow of commercial products into schools, despite pressure from the food industry.

PROFESSOR CARLOS MONTEIRO: "The main argument to convince the politicians to change the law was not the health and the wellbeing of the school children. This was important but the most important was that this program was viewed to be a support to family farmers. And family farmers is a very strong sector of the political arena in Brazil. They are very well organised and they succeeded. The challenge for us is to find other situations where you can have a win-win situation. Many of the measurements needed to control obesity has a negative impact in a very important part of the economic sector, namely the food industry and their allies. So I think that's why this obesity sometimes is a hot potato".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: In Mexico several attempts to tax sugar sweetened beverages have been unsuccessful. There's evidence that even small price increases can have a dramatic effect.

BARRY POPKIN: I've been involved in studies like that in Brazil, Mexico, England, the US and China. In every case it's the same. People are sensitive to those prices and if we price for every gram of sugar that we put in a beverage, one or two cents US... Australia... we would change drastically the consumption of that product.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Globally food and drink companies have also resisted laws on marketing to children, saying they're committed instead to self-regulation.

ALEJANDRO CALVILLO: The superhero Coca Cola campaign was developed in Mexico and also in Central America in February/March this year.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Coca Cola says this advertisement is aimed at nostalgic adults, not children.

ALEJANDRO CALVILLO: "So it's obvious what Coca Cola is doing. It's directing a campaign at children in Mexico under the guise of saying it's a campaign for adults".

TEXT: Coca Cola declined requests for an interview. They directed us instead to ConMexico, an organisation representing Mexico's biggest food and drink companies.

JAIME ZABLUDOVSKY: "I don't think that the problem of obesity is the abundance of food. And I don't... I also don't think there is good or bad food. What I think there is, is good or bad diet and good or bad habits.
But at the end of the day it is the consumer who should be responsible for the diet that he or she selects and conforms. The only way I think to really address the issue is by making consumers responsible of their decisions".

PROFESSOR MARION NESTLE: "The idea that obesity is a result of personal responsibility, weak character and moral disfavour is too simplistic. It's really too simplistic. We live in a food environment in which we're giving people eat more messages hundreds of times a day in every possible way. Most people can't resist those messages".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: At a public hospital in Mexico City, Juan Luis Bravo is minutes away from theatre and his second serious stomach operation. He's put on 20 kilograms since he was last here.

JUAN LUIS BRAVO: "Right now I'm thinking a lot about my father - that he's taking care of me from heaven. If he'd had the operation he'd still be with us now".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: The City government is so concerned about the impact of obesity on the health budget, that it subsidises operations for those who can't pay because it'll be cheaper in the long run.

DR FRANCISCO CAMPOS: "Hi, how are you? How are you today - ready for the surgery? Great, so in a few minutes we're going to take you in".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Dr Francisco Campos performed Juan Luis' first procedure and he runs the public clinic where about 300 similar operations are conducted each year.

DR FRANCISCO CAMPOS: "In Mexico, bypass costs around twenty thousand dollars. So when patients here pay five hundred dollars for a surgery and the ones who pay the most pay three thousand dollars, we believe that really they are very accessible prices for almost everyone.
We just do part of the work. The main part has to be done by the patient. They have this magic thinking - they believe it's very easy. In reality, it's not easy. If it were easy, we wouldn't have about three million obese people in the world".

JUANA BRAVO: (to Juan her son) "Be calm. Remember, you're going to change your inside. I'd also like you to change your outside." (kisses him)

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Since his first operation three years ago Juan Luis hasn't been able to control his diet. This bypass will mean he can only eat very small portions for the rest of his life.

DR FRANCISCO CAMPOS: "We're not the solution - surgery's not the solution. We calculate that thirty per cent of the Mexican population is obese. So we're talking about thirty million who could have surgery. That's not going to be the solution. Not even with all the surgeons in this country, could we get rid of this epidemic".

JUAN LUIS BRAVO: "I'm not afraid, because the truth is that I'm in the hands of a spectacular doctor - and his team is phenomenal. I've already had one surgery with them and they've operated on my brother and I trust them".

PROFESSOR CARLOS MONTEIRO: "I think the increase in obesity everywhere in the world is having a positive effect in a sense. The obesity epidemic is making many people realise that we need a big change in our society, in the economic system".

BARRY POPKIN: "The solutions are out there, we know how we can regulate parts of the food system. We know how we can change labelling, how we can control mass media and marketing. The question is will we do it or will big food industry win out and this is a battle that's going to be fought for the next decade".

STEPHEN MCDONELL: Juana Bravo hopes others can learn from her family's struggle with obesity.

JUANA BRAVO: "Someone said that if you yell out to the whole world and only one person hears you, it's worth yelling. So we mothers have to educate ourselves first in order to help our children".

PROFESSOR MARION NESTLE: "Food is something that everybody understands. It's difficult to explain to people how they as individuals can do something about climate change, can do something about international conflict, can do something about corruption in government, but they can do something about the food they eat and they should".

UPDATE: Two weeks after his operation, Juan Luis is doing well.

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STEPHEN MCDONELL: The weight of the world is shifting in ways that will surprise and perhaps even shock you. Not so long ago, in many of the world's poorer corners, hunger was the headline health concern. Estimates put the number of malnourished at 700 million, and obese - mainly in rich countries - at 100 million.

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1. Poor Nutrition now affects 1/3 of the human race
http://tinyurl.com/jup82hu

2. Targeting developing nations
http://tinyurl.com/zak8rlr

3. Carbonating the world
http://www.cspinet.org/carbonating/

4. Environmental impacts in India
http://tinyurl.com/gmgsqqt

5. Challenging Coca Cola
http://tinyurl.com/owtus64

6. Shifting the obesity blame
http://tinyurl.com/gqk52dh
http://tinyurl.com/q76h52z

7. Chile confronting the fast food industry
http://video.aljazeera.com/channels/eng/videos/chile-declares-war-on-junk-food--/4993640985001

8. War On Want
http://www.waronwant.org/media/coca-cola-drinking-world-dry