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HomeNew YorkPyramid House Residential Center
Pyramid House Residential Center Inmate Search and Prison Information
Updated on: November 9, 2021
Pyramid House Residential Center offender search: Court, Race, Bond, Court Type, Eye Color, Mugshots, Degree, Address Given, Probate Documents, Statute, Booking #, Cell Location, Booking Date, Release Date, Who's in jail, Arrests, Arrest Date, Charge, Jail Roster, Authority, FileNo, Appeals Court, Bookings.
Pyramid House Residential Center, is part of the New York Department of Criminal Justice. It is located in the downtown area of Bronx, New York, and is able to house 40 male offenders. It is a 1-acre facility.
The Pyramid House Residential Center itself was opened in 1995 to house nonviolent offenders. The entire facility was constructed as a response to prison overcrowding. The Pyramid House Residential Center is meant to house short-term or transient inmates. Most inmates are within 120 days of release.
Pyramid House Residential Center
State Prison
470 East 161st Street, Bronx, NY, 10451
Sunday 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM
Holiday Closed
If you wish to search inmates of Pyramid House Residential Center, you can use the New York Department of Criminal Justice offender search. It can be found here
You can search for inmates using first name, last name, gender, race, DOC number, and/or ID number.
Sending a Mail
Inmates at Pyramid House Residential Center cannot send mail to other offenders, but they can communicate with family and friends. All correspondence can be inspected except for legal mail. Offenders are also prohibited from communicating with victims or the families of victims. Offenders can receive some stationery items, as well.
Inmates at Pyramid House Residential Center can receive 4" x 6" photos, as long as they do not contain nudity. Polaroid photos are not allowed for security reasons. There also cannot be sexually suggestive material or gang-related content in the photographs, as well.
In New York, inmates also have access to electronic messaging. This does cost a fee and is provided through JPAY.
Books can be sent to inmates but they must be paperback books. No binding is allowed whatsoever. No publications are allowed to contain nudity, incite hate, or describe the creation of anything that might put the facility at risk.
Send inmate mail here:
Inmate Name, ID Number
Sending Money
You can send money to Pyramid House Residential Center using various methods. Here are the methods:
Deposit funds at a Moneygram or Western Union location.
Deposit through four companies online. These companies are JPAY, Western Union, ECommDirect, and Touchpay.
Deposit funds through a phone, through either Western Union, Touchpay, or JPAY.
A deposit slip must be obtained from the inmate. Afterwards, send a money order or cashier's check to "Inmate Trust Fund for [Inmate Name, Inmate ID]"
Send to this address:
It should be noted that there are fees associated with all of these methods, and they may vary.
During intake, inmates establish a list of telephone numbers that they will be able to call. A list can be updated periodically.
Offenders at Pyramid House Residential Center can make outgoing calls only. There is a limited time length of twenty minutes on all calls. Three-way calls and call forwarding may lead to the termination of a call.
On most days, inmates have access to the telephone from 7 PM to 10 PM. However, this is not available during a security lockdown.
Visiting Rules
The visiting hours at Pyramid House Residential Center are Saturdays and Sundays from 8 AM to 5 PM. Offenders must remain at the facility for at least 14 days to qualify for contact visits.
Visits may last up to two hours, depending on the circumstances.
Visitors can bring up to twenty dollars in quarters for the vending machines located in the visitor area.
Bronx House of Detention for Men
Fulton Correctional Facility
Edgecombe Residential Treatment Facility
NYC DOC – Vernon C. Bain Correctional Center
Fort Lee City Jail
Cliffside Park City Jail
NYC DOC – Rikers Island – West Facility (WF)
NYC DOC – Rikers Island – Anna M. Kross Center (AMKC)
NYC DOC – Rikers Island – George R. Vierno Center (GRVC)


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Home Featured Featured Articles Column: California's battle over mask wearing began 102 years ago. Stupid then,...
Column: California's battle over mask wearing began 102 years ago. Stupid then, stupid now
An L.A. Times editorial cartoon mocking a pro-mask advocate appears Nov. 9, 1918. (Los Angeles Times archives).
The petition to the City Council was straightforward: Enact a mandatory mask policy to combat the pandemic, or "the disease will come back again and will exact a heavier toll than ever."
Seven hundred residents, doctors and concerned citizens alike, signed the document. But the council members who heard their pleas wouldn't have it.
One said masks left the wearer "breathing in the foul air which they exhale." Another cracked he might be more sympathetic to the issue "if the doctors would come through and agree on some one thing, or if any of them could agree at all." Still another said he would "not propose to take the advice of a lot of outsiders."
And so the petition failed — even as five of nine council members who mulled it over either suffered from the virus or had to quarantine because their family members had it.
Huntington Beach, 2020? Try Los Angeles, 1919.
For over a century, historians and health officials have marveled at how Los Angeles weathered the so-called Spanish flu better than most major American cities. Most of the credit goes to City Health Commissioner Dr. Luther Powers, who ordered business and school shutdowns early on to flatten the curve while other metro areas didn't.
But Powers never implemented a mask ordinance, despite having the power and multiple opportunities to do so.
The non-move might serve as vindication to today's pandejos and maskholes, who use a lot of the same whines that their counterparts did a century ago. But a look back at the face-off between maskers and anti-maskers during the height of the Spanish flu actually offers a cautionary tale that should haunt us today:
A public health official had a chance to help save even more lives – and blew it.
"There are a variety of variables" to explain why Los Angeles suffered less than other towns, said J. Alexander Navarro. He's a medical historian at the University of Michigan who helps edit the school's online Influenza Encyclopedia, the nation's most comprehensive public archive of the 1918 flu. But if Powers had required everyone to wear masks in public, that "would've had an impact."
In 2007, Navarro co-authored a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. that found that cities which instituted multiple "non-pharmaceutical interventions" — quarantines, social distancing, masks and the like — suffered less than those that went with one or none. He compared the strategies to, of all things, slices of Swiss cheese.
"They all have holes," Navarro said. "Alone, they're not effective. But if you stack them together, you start to layer up those slices, and one of those holes don't go the whole way."
This is how Powers dealt Los Angeles a metaphorical bag of shredded cheddar.
The widespread use of masks in Los Angeles seemed imminent when the Spanish flu slammed California in the fall of 1918. San Francisco issued a citywide order for anyone outside their homes; San Diego required them for anyone serving the public, like restaurant employees or bank tellers.
Gov. William D. Stephens, running for reelection, urged Californians to wear masks, opining that the practice offers "but little discomfort and means a service rendered to our fellow-men and to our country."
This quick mainstreaming had an immediate impact on the public. The Times reported on Oct. 23 that masks around Los Angeles "were quite common in large offices … where the general public is coming and going all day in numbers."
Oct. 24, 1918, photo in Los Angeles Times of the city's draft board during a desertion hearing. (Los Angeles Times archives)
The following day, L.A. Mayor Frederick Woodman brought a resolution to the City Council to enforce mask wearing, and even donned one in support of the cause.
But the measure went nowhere, mostly because of Powers.
"The impossibility of educating all at once the mass of the people as to how to use the masks properly is obvious," he told the council. "When care is not exercised, the masks are useless."
The council went on to pass a resolution that merely advised the public to use masks, instead of making them obligatory.
The matter came back two weeks later and was rejected again. By then, Powers had penned a bulletin published in the city's dailies that asked Angelenos "respectfully" to wear a mask so everyone could "benefit by willingly entering into this public duty without being forced."
Nov. 7, 1918, bulletin by Los Angeles City Health Officer published in Los Angeles Times that urged Angelenos to wear masks in public. (Los Angeles Times archives)
This time, the council was now hostile to the idea, with President Bert Farmer stating, "All this talk about making the wearing of masks compulsory sounds to me like bunk."
Cases and deaths were dropping at the time, so that lulled a public and press once receptive to a mask ordinance to now ignore them altogether, if not outright ridicule their use.
"In going the distance six or seven masks might be encountered," The Times wrote about the Thanksgiving Eve scene that year in downtown L.A., "while from fifty to seventy-five people without masks were sneezing and coughing as they hurried along, apparently unmindful of other people's germs and not stingy with their own."
By then, this paper openly referred to masks as "muzzles," published editorial cartoons mocking their advocates, and opined "it is might hard for a man to look like statesman when he goes forth on the thoroughfares with his mush embedded in a gauze nosebag."
In a Dec. 1, 1918, editorial titled "Adios 'Flu' Scare!" the paper's editorial board wrote there was no proof that any preventive measure "averted a single case of the disease or saved a single life. The real sufferers are the men and women whose incomes have been stopped, whose businesses have been all but ruined."
The Times spoke too soon: The city was just about to get walloped by a second wave.
By January, as Los Angeles weathered yet another wave, Powers finally wrote up a mask mandate but decided to hold a public hearing on the matter. That's when a group calling itself the Citizens League to Aid the Suppression of Influenza presented the petition signed by more than 700.
But just before the meeting, the California State Board of Health issued a memo that said mask policies have "no effect whatever" in stopping the flu yet recommended their use due to the "theoretical possibilities" of preventing the spread.
L.A. Police Chief John Butler said he thought it would be hard to enforce any measure "but asserted that the police department would do the Health Department's bidding at any and all times."
At the end, the council — though skeptical — deferred to Powers.
"I shall not recommend the passage of a flu mask ordinance today," he said.
The myth that masks did nothing to stop the flu burrowed itself into the Angeleno ego. The Times published charts that showed how cities that enacted face-cover policies suffered far worse than L.A. And, in a particularly cruel volley in the eternal rivalry between us and San Francisco, this paper labeled the latter "City of Masks" in a Jan. 21 story boasting that their "flu toll is far above ours."
Jan. 21, 1919, Los Angeles Times headline. (Los Angeles Times archives)
A week later, The Times' editorial board pilloried the "many physicians" who had asked for a mask ban, proclaiming that the State Board of Health found "conclusively that the compulsory wearing of masks does not affect the progress of the epidemic."
"Again the people of Southern California," this paper concluded, "can give thanks that they live in an exceptionally favored land."
Powers never fully explained his opposition to mask decrees despite his personal belief that everyone should wear one. But one thing is certain: The debate featured none of the rancor about tyranny and liberties that dominates the conversation right now.
"The big difference, today it's much more partisan and politicized," Navarro said. "It might've come down to personal ideology [during the Spanish flu], but that didn't translate into national politics in the way it has today."
In a Department of Health report to the City Council that addressed the Spanish flu, Powers admitted that his team "was ill prepared to take on any extra work, much less the control of such a severe and rapid epidemic."
He did not mention the debate over face coverings but did say any spikes happened "to a great extent upon the holidays and increased or diminished by contacts or exposure."
Now, imagine if he had mandated masks.
(Los Angeles Times).
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


I'm not going to write about these articles per se, but they're definitely worth a read. Call it my curated online reading list.
*Times ad infinitum*, on [museums putting their collections online](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/arts/design/art-museums-are-increasingly-adding-their-collections-online.html?referrer=), how digital can bring audiences [closer to the art](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/30/arts/design/art-museums-are-increasingly-adding-their-collections-online.html?referrer=&_r=0), and [online sharing of collections](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/arts/design/new-online-openness-lets-museums-share-works-with-the-world.html?_r=0). Okay, this really isn't the same story over and over again?
It's a bit of old news, but the *Times* produced a report on [its own internal culture](http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age/), *vis à vis* digital and print.


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Tag Archives: NATO
The only way to save Turkish democracy is a competent opposition
April 20, 2017 Kevin Lees	Leave a comment
If the opponents of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hope to unlock his increasingly autocratic grip on power, they need to join forces, then work to divide the ruling AKP.
It's a bridge too far to say that the Turkish opposition is responsible for a decade and a half of losses to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
But there's no doubt that his opponents certainly haven't posed an effective brake on Erdoğan's accelerating chokehold on Turkish democracy.
Turkish voters, according to official tallies, narrowly approved sweeping changes to the Turkish constitution on April 16 that bring far more powers to the Turkish presidency with far fewer checks and balances against the newly empowered executive.
This was always Erdoğan's plan.
It was his plan in August 2014, when the longtime prime minister stood for (and won) the presidency, introducing a de facto presidential system in Turkey. Prime minister Binali Yıldırım essentially serves at the pleasure of the Turkish president today.
It was his plan last weekend, when he won (or possibly stole) a victory for a de jure presidential system through 18 separate constitutional amendments, many of which take effect in 2019 with a likely joint parliamentary and presidential election. Most immediately, however, Erdoğan will be able to drop the façade of presidential independence and return to lead the party that he already controls indirectly. (It's a step that apparently won praise, almost alone among Atlantic leaders, from US president Donald Trump and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.)
It was his plan when, after the longtime ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP, the Justice and Development Party) failed to win an outright majority in June 2015, he plotted a crackdown on the Kurdish minority — after years of progress in integrating Kurds by relaxing restrictive and counterproductive restrictions on Kurdish language and culture — to engineer a majority win in a new round of elections five months later. Continue reading The only way to save Turkish democracy is a competent opposition →
abdullah gulAKPbaykalchavismoCHPcoup attemptdemirtaserdogangulenistgulenistsHDPISISjustice and development partykemalistkilicdaroglukurdsmaduroMHPnationalist movement partyNATOpeople's democratic partyPKKpresidential referendumrepublican people's partyturkeyturkish kurdsyildirim
European Union, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, United States
Trump effect: Europe turning toward integration, away from populists
March 6, 2017 Kevin Lees	5 Comments
Across Europe, support for Trump-style populists is falling, even though many European populists were growing long before Trump entered the political scene. (123RF / Evgeny Gromov)
If there's one thing that unites Europeans, it's the concept that they are better — more enlightened, more cultured and more sophisticated — than Americans.
That was especially true during the presidency of George W. Bush, when France, Germany and other leading anchors of the European Union vociferously opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq. In 2002, it sometimes seemed like German chancellor Gerhard Schröder was running against Bush, not against his conservative German challenger, Bavarian premier Edmund Stoiber.
Europeans might be leaning in a similar direction in the Trump era, even though it's hardly been a month since Donald Trump took office. In the days after Trump's surprise election last November (and after the Brexit vote last summer), populists like Geert Wilders in The Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France had reason to believe that Trump's victory would give political tailwinds to their own electoral efforts in 2017.
If anything, however, Europeans are pulling back from populism in the first months of 2017. As four of the founding EU countries gear up for elections in the coming months — the first will be The Netherlands in just nine days — the threat of a Trump-style populist surging to power seems increasingly farfetched.
Maybe Europeans simply outright disdain what they perceive as the vulgar, Jacksonian urges of American voters. Maybe it's shock at the way Trump's inexperienced administration has bumbled through its first 40 days or the troubles of British prime minister Theresa May in navigating her country through the thicket of Brexit and withdrawing from the European Union.
More likely though, it could be that Trump's oft-stated criticism of NATO and praise for Russian president Vladimir Putin have finally shaken Europeans out of the fog that's gathered for 70 years under the penumbra of pax Americana. Even as officials like US vice president Mike Pence and US defense secretary James Mattis reassure European allies that the United States is committed to the trans-Atlantic security alliance, Trump continues to muse about NATO being obsolete (as recently as the week before his inauguration). Furthermore, the America-first nationalism that emerged from Trump's successful campaign has continued into his administration and promises a new, more skeptical approach to prior American obligations not only in Europe, but worldwide. Just ten days into office, Trump trashed the European Union as a 'threat' to the United States, only to back down and call it 'wonderful' in February. Breitbart, the outlet that senior Trump strategist Stephen Bannon headed until last summer, ran a headline in January proclaiming that Trump would make the European Union 'history.'
All of which has left Europeans also rethinking their security position and considering a day when American security guarantees are withdrawn — or simply too unreliable to be trusted.
Arguably, NATO always undermined the European Union, in structural terms, because NATO has been the far more important body for guaranteeing trans-Atlantic security. Though Federica Mogherini is a talented and saavy diplomat, the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy is far less important to trans-Atlantic security than the NATO secretary-general (currently, former Norwegian prime minster Jens Stoltenberg). While the stakes of EU policymaking — trade, consumer and environmental regulation, competition law and other economic regulation and a good deal of European fiscal and monetary policy — aren't low, they would be higher still if the European Union, instead of NATO, were truly responsible for European defense and security. That's perhaps one reason why the European Union has been stuck since the early 2000s in its own 'Articles of Confederation' moment — too far united to pull the entire scheme apart, not yet united enough to pull closer together.
Perhaps, alternatively, it has nothing to do with blowback to Trump or Brexit, and voters in the core western European countries, which are accustomed to a less Schumpeterian form of capitalism, are simply more immune to radical swings than their counterparts subject to the janglier peaks and valleys of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. It's not too much to think that, possibly, in the aftermath of both Brexit and Trump's election, core Europe, unleashed from the toxic dynamic of British euroscepticism and emboldened to forge new relationships from outside the American security aegis, may be finding a new confidence after years of economic ennui.
Nevertheless, populists across Europe who tried to cloak themselves in the warm embrace of Trumpismo throughout 2016 are increasingly struggling in 2017. A dark and uncertain 2016 is giving way rapidly to a European spring in 2017 where centrists, progressives and conservatives alike are finding ways to push back against populist and xenophobic threats. Continue reading Trump effect: Europe turning toward integration, away from populists →
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Russia, United States
Full investigation now the only way to clear Trump White House on Russia quid pro quo
February 15, 2017 Kevin Lees	Leave a comment
The now-famous mural of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Lithuania's capital city of Vilnius.
With national security advisor Michael Flynn's resignation and new reporting from The New York Times that Trump campaign officials had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials, it is time to ask the fundamental question about this administration's underlying weakness over Russia:
Was there a quid pro quo between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign to help Trump win?
No one wants to believe this, of course, and it is an important moment to give Trump as many benefits of the doubt as possible. It is probably true that Trump would have defeated Hillary Clinton without any Russian cyber-shenanigans (though of course Richard Nixon would have easily defeated George McGovern in 1972 without ordering a break-in at the Watergate Hotel). It is also true that the leaks coming from the intelligence community could represent a serious threat to civil liberties, though it is not clear to me whether this information is coming directly from the intelligence community or secondhand from any number of potential investigations. There are many 'known unknowns' here, and there are potentially even more 'unknown unknowns.'
But here is what we think that we know, as of February 15: Continue reading Full investigation now the only way to clear Trump White House on Russia quid pro quo →
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Like it or not, the multipolar era is coming sooner than we thought
November 15, 2016 Kevin Lees	Leave a comment
One of the most important concepts in international relations is polarity, which is just a term that political scientists use to describe power in the international system.
Typically, we think of the global order in three separate modes:
Unipolar, where one overweening global power dominates (such as the United States, more or less, after the Cold War).
Bipolar, where two rivals view for global power (such as the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War).
Multipolar, where several regional powers balance one another (such as Prussia/Germany, Great Britain, France, Russia and the Ottoman Empire in the decades between Napoleon and World War I).
In the view of many scholars, the world has been stuck in American-dominated unipolarity for years, slowly gliding (hopefully peacefully) to a multipolar world, sometime far off in the distance. At some point, most scholars believed, the rise of China, and possibly other powers, such as Russia, India or a united Europe, would allow for a multipolar world gradually to unfold.
Donald Trump's election as the 45th president of the United States means, above all, that we're hurtling even more rapidly to that emerging multipolar world, and you can see it in the global response to his shock election a week ago. Continue reading Like it or not, the multipolar era is coming sooner than we thought →
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NATO comments show why Trump could inadvertently start a global war
July 21, 2016 Kevin Lees	Leave a comment
Donald Trump enters the convention stage on the first night of the Republican gathering in Cleveland.
The theme of this week's convention could have already been 'I Took a Pill in Cleveland,' because it's clearly more Mike Posner than Richard Posner.
All eyes last night were on Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who lost the Republican nomination to Donald Trump and, notably, Cruz's pointed refusal to endorse his rival in a rousing address that is one of the most memorable convention speeches in recent memory. Trump's allies instructed delegates to boo Cruz off the stage, and they spent the rest of the night trashing Cruz for failing to uphold a 'pledge' to support the eventual nominee.
But shortly after Cruz's speech, David Sanger and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times published a new interview with Trump about foreign policy, in which he indicated that he would be willing as president to break a far more serious pledge — the mutual collective defense clause of Article Five of the North Atlantic Treaty that essentially undergirds the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the organization that has been responsible for collective trans-Atlantic security since 1949:
Asked about Russia's threatening activities, which have unnerved the small Baltic States that are among the more recent entrants into NATO, Mr. Trump said that if Russia attacked them, he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing if those nations "have fulfilled their obligations to us."
"If they fulfill their obligations to us," he added, "the answer is yes."
Mr. Trump's statement appeared to be the first time that a major candidate for president had suggested conditioning the United States' defense of its major allies. It was consistent, however, with his previous threat to withdraw American forces from Europe and Asia if those allies fail to pay more for American protection.
The comments caused, with good reason, a foreign policy freakout on both sides of the Atlantic. The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg wrote, 'It's Official: Hillary Clinton is Running Against Vladimir Putin.' In The Financial Times, a plethora of European officials sounded off a 'wave of alarm.'
In successive waves, NATO's core members expanded from the United States and western Europe to Turkey in 1952, to (what was then) West Germany in 1955, Spain in 1982, the new eastern and central European Union states in 1999 and 2004 (which include three former Soviet republics, the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), and Albania and Croatia in 2009. Of course, many of the more recent NATO member states spent the Cold War behind the Iron Curtain subject to Soviet dominance.
Above all, so much of eastern Europe joined NATO to protect themselves from Russian aggression in the future. Article Five provides that an attack on one NATO country is an attack on all NATO countries, entitling the NATO country under attack to invoke the support of all the other NATO members. This has happened exactly once in NATO's decades-long history, when the United States invaded Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 2001 terrorist attacks.
It's not the first time Trump has slammed NATO during the campaign; he called it 'obsolete' in off-the-cuff remarks at a town hall meeting in March:
"Nato has to be changed or we have to do something. It has to be rejiggered or changed for the better," he said in response to a question from an audience member. He said the alternative to an overhaul would be to start an entirely new organisation, though he offered no details on what that would be.
He also reiterated his concern that the US takes too much of the burden within NATO and on the world stage. "The United States cannot afford to be the policeman of the world, folks. We have to rebuild this country and we have to stop this stuff…we are always the first out," he offered.
NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, meeting earlier this year with US president Barack Obama, has challenged Donald Trump's criticisms of NATO. (Facebook)
The latest attack on NATO and, implicitly, the international order since the end of World War II, came just days after NATO's secretary-general, former Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, announced a new plan for NATO cooperation on the international efforts to push back ISIS in eastern Syria and western Iraq. Stoltenberg, it's worth noting, is the first NATO secretary-general to come from a country that shares a land border with mainland Russia. So he, more than anyone, understands the stakes involved. Continue reading NATO comments show why Trump could inadvertently start a global war →
article 5estoniagermanyilveslithuaniamanafortnarvaNATOpolandputinrepublicanrussiastoltenbergted cruztrumpukraineUnited States
What we learned about Turkey from Saturday's coup attempt
Turkish soldiers stand guard in Taksim Square Saturday night. (Sedat Suna / EPA)
Something like tense calm seems to be settling on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara after an attempted military coup in Turkey early Saturday morning.
But the reverberations of the failed ouster will be felt for months and possibly years to come. Though the coup didn't enjoy the full support of the Turkish military, it was something of a shock — and a throwback — to see tanks rolling through major Turkish cities. Amid the chaos, there's still much that we don't and, perhaps, cannot know about the fallout of the July 16 coup.
In other ways, the failed coup gave us quite a glimpse — in at least four ways — into the state of Turkish politics, culture and democracy. Continue reading What we learned about Turkey from Saturday's coup attempt →
abdullah gulAKPCHPcoupdemirtasegyptel-sisierbakanerdogangulenistsHDPISISistanbuljustice and development partykemalistkurdishmorsiNATOPKKrepublican people's partyturkey
Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia
Serbian election kicks off tumultuous year for Balkan politics
Serbian president Tomislav Nikolić met with European Council president Donald Tusk in December as part of ongoing EU accession negotiations. (Facebook / Aydemir Dursun)
This weekend, Serbia's prime minister Aleksandar Vučić finalized a four-year consolidation of power in early parliamentary elections that delivered a landslide victory for his center-right Serbian Progressive Party (SNS, Српска напредна странка), giving him the mandate and the support to advance political and economic reforms that he hopes could one day result in Serbia's accession as a member-state of the European Union.
In results late Sunday night, the SNS a wide lead over its nearest competitor, the center-left Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS, Социјалистичка партија Србије), which currently serves as the government's junior coalition partner. The Socialist leader, Ivica Dačić, a former prime minister, currently serves as Vučić's foreign minister. Several parties of the fragmented center-left and hard-right ultra-nationalist parties trail far behind in single digits. With just under 50% of the total vote on Sunday, the SNS can expect to have an absolute majority in Serbia's unicameral, 250-seat National Assembly (Народна скупштина).
Vučic called the snap elections earlier this year, fully knowing how well his party was doing in the polls. Like it or not, Vučic and the former SNS leader Tomislav Nikolić, currently in his first term as president, will be directing Serbian policy through the end of the decade.
RELATED: Vučić set to consolidate political power in Serbia
with 3rd consecutive win
But Serbia is far from the only country in the Balkans that will vote this year, and Sunday's vote kicks off what could become a season of electoral change across the region.
Unlike Serbia, where voters were happy to deliver Vučic the broad mandate he wanted, voters in the rest of the western Balkans are far less sanguine about their elected officials. Opposition politicians in Montenegro nearly ousted their long-serving prime minister earlier this year, though fresh elections are due before October. The twists and turns of a wiretapping scandal in Macedonia have reached fever pitch this week, with protesters marching against the government in Skopje, and a June 5 parliamentary election date is currently in doubt.
A region that still dreams of EU accession
(Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty)
The western Balkans are the last major region of Europe that has not yet been integrated into the European Union. With the possible exception of Turkey, it's the final frontier of EU accession. Among the six (or seven, if you count Kosovo) countries that emerged out of the former Yugoslavia, only two of them have won EU member-state status, Slovenia and Croatia. They join only Albania in representing the western Balkans in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The remaining Balkan states are in varying stages of their quests for accession:
Macedonia was granted candidate status back in 2005, but democratic and economic backsliding have stalled its membership push, not to mention its long-running spat with Greece over the name, 'Macedonia,' which Greeks consider to be an inaccurate appropriation of Greek culture and history.
Montenegro gained candidate status in December 2010, and negotiations are ongoing, though Montenegro has fully implemented just two of 33 chapters of the acquis communautaire, the body of EU law required for all member-states.
The European Union granted Serbia candidate status in March 2012, negotiations kicked off in 2014 and Vučic is eager to conclude accession by the year 2020, though that remains incredibly optimistic.
Albania won candidate status in June 2014, and though its negotiations have yet to begin, prime minister Edi Rama, a former artist who charged to power in 2013, is an energetic center-left figure who's worked closely with former British prime minister Tony Blair to develop a package of EU-friendly economic and political reforms.
Bosnia and Herzegovina applied for membership status in February 2016, but the European Union hasn't yet granted it candidate status.
Albania's pro-European, pro-reform prime minister Edi Rama met with US president Barack Obama last week. (Facebook)
Given the existential threats that the European Union faces, hardly anyone outside the Balkans seems to have the stomach for what promises to be a difficult round of accession. The June 23 referendum in the United Kingdom on whether to leave the European Union remains too close to call, but its passage would be a major blow to the notion of 'ever closer union.' Much of southern Europe, most especially Greece, have still not recovered from the eurozone crisis that stretched the limits of EU financial, economic and monetary policy and that brought into question the future of the single currency. Meanwhile, the most acute refugee crisis in Europe since World War II has weakened the Schengen agreement by undermining the free movement of people within the European Union and the eradication of internal EU borders.
For current EU members, then, it may look like there's precious little benefit in EU accession. But for the Balkan states, there remains enthusiasm that EU membership will force the kind of reforms that could reduce the crippling corruption that is, on general, worse in the Balkans than in the rest of Europe:
Balkans populations also hope that EU membership will also clear the path not only for reforms, but for the kind of funding that could allow them to catch up to the higher EU standard of living, which, not surprisingly lags far behind:
With eventual EU membership — and the promise it brings of greater incomes and opportunities — dangling as a carrot, it's no surprise that Vučic has amassed so much political power in Serbia and an impressive amount of respect among European leaders. But it's that same dynamic that could lead to massive changes throughout the rest of the region, most notably in Montenegro and Macedonia.
Wiretaps and pardons
Former Macedonian prime minister Nikola Gruevski's government is facing protests on the streets of Skopje after the dismissal of an inquiry into a wiretapping scandal. (Facebook)
Eleven days ago, Macedonia's president Gjorge Ivanov pardoned 56 people, all of whom were implicated in a wide-ranging wiretapping scandal that forced the country's powerful prime minister, Nikola Gruevski, to resign in January. Beginning in the early 2010s, Gruevski and his government were found to have wiretapped illegally up to 20,000 Macedonians, opposition figures, journalists and even diplomats.
Ivanov, who announced a decree that would end all investigations into the wiretapping scandal, set off a constitutional crisis from what had already been a crisis of governance and the rule of law, and his announcements met with sharp disapproval from EU officials and Macedonia's political opposition.
Gruevski's ruling VMRO-DPMNE (Внатрешна македонска револуционерна организација – Демократска партија за македонско национално единство; Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Democratic Party for Macedonian National Unity) has been in power since 2006. It easily won a fourth consecutive term in April 2014, though the election was hardly a fair fight.
Gruevski has spent much of the past decade stoking nationalist sentiment, which has antagonized Greece; for example, he erected an 11-foot high statue of Alexander the Great in Macedonia's capital of Skopje. While the spat with Greece helped Gruevski, in part, to rally domestic support, it has only hardened Greek determination to block Macedonian membership not only in the European Union, but NATO as well. Meanwhile, the VMRO-DPMNE's government has done little to introduce reforms to stem corruption or promote liberalization.
Macedonia opposition leader Zoran Zaev stands an excellent chance of winning power in elections that may still be held on June 5, if he doesn't boycott them. (Facebook)
Macedonians now seem fed up with Gruevski's empty promises and hollow rhetoric, to say nothing of the wiretapping shenanigans and his attempts to persuade Ivanov to pull the plug on the ongoing investigations.
Elections were set for June 5, but the government, fearing a rout, may try to postpone them. A meeting scheduled earlier today in Vienna among EU leaders and Macedonia's political leaders was cancelled, even as the intensity of Macedonia's protesters increases.
Zoran Zaev, Macedonia's opposition leader and the head of the center-left Social Democratic Union of Macedonia (SDSM, Социјалдемократски сојуз на Македонија), was instrumental in revealing the extent of the wiretapping scandal, though only after Gruevski tried to have Zaev jailed for allegedly attempting to illegally toppling the government.
For years, Zaev has opposed Gruevski's nationalist showmanship and denounced the government's flashy development projects as wasteful vanity spending. Now, with Ivanov's announcement to suspend the wiretapping scandal that Zaev himself helped to reveal, the opposition leader has joined the front lines of the protesters. There's a sense that he could soon be leading the country, though he pledged earlier this month to boycott elections without additional reforms to guarantee political freedom and a free and fair electoral process. An original plan to hold elections in April has already been postponed once to June and could well be delayed again.
Negotiations over the conduct and timing of the Macedonian elections are just the beginning of what could become an even more tumultuous year. If Zaev and an opposition coalition forces VMRO-DPMNE from power, no one knows exactly how willingly Gruevski and his allies will concede. Moreover, from day one, a Zaev-led government would be locked in a high-stakes battle with Ivanov to reinstate the wiretapping investigation.
Đukanović's last stand?
Montenegro's prime minister Milo Đukanović has dominated politics for a quarter-century, but his time may soon be running out. (CDM)
Though it officially won its independence from Serbia only in June 2006, Milo Đukanović has controlled Montenegro like a personal fiefdom since 1991, when he was first elected prime minister. Đukanović has held power, on and off, ever since.
Polls show that Đukanović and his Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS, Demokratska Partija Socijalista Crne Gore) hold a wide lead in elections that have to be called within the next six months. But that belies the frustration that's built for a quarter-century with Đukanović and his family, whose opponents argue that they run Montenegro as their own personal duchy of corruption.
As in Serbia, Montenegro's opposition is even more split today than it was in the last election. The conservative opposition Democratic Front (Demokratski front) did poorly in the 2012 parliamentary elections, and its leader Miodrag Lekić narrowly lost the 2013 presidential election. Last year, however, Lekić left the party to form Democratic Alliance (DEMOS, Demokratski savez), a competing center-right party.
In December, however, Đukanović only narrowly survived a vote of no confidence in Montenegro's unicameral, 81-member parliament (Skupština Crne Gore), following widespread protests that began in October over longstanding suspicions of Đukanović's corruption. Protesters demanded his resignation and a transitional government; Đukanović himself spent half of the 2000s fending off a criminal inquiry into corruption from an Italian prosecutor. Đukanović's long-time allies, the Social Democratic Party (Socijaldemokratska Partija Crne Gore), left government for the first time since 1998.
Đukanović has hoped that Montenegro's relatively strong economy and a general trend toward liberalization will distract from his critics' worst allegations. Moreover, Montenegrins will go to the polls as he pursues the country's accession to NATO after formally opening talks in February. It's a step that has appalled Moscow, which still holds plenty of economic and cultural power in the western Balkans, despite the region's aspirations to integrate further with the rest of Europe.
Đukanović, who is only 54 years old, seems unlikely to take the opportunity of 2016 elections to step down. But it's not inconceivable that, despite Montenegro's more successful strides toward NATO and, eventually, EU accession, he too will face the kind of popular wrath that is now greeting Gruevski across Macedonia.
albaniabalkansbosnia and herzegovinabrexitdacicDEMOSDPSdukanoviceu accessionEuropean Uniongjorge ivanovgreecegruevskilekicmacedoniamontenegroNATOnikolicserbiaserbian progressive partySNSsocial democratic unionSPSVMRO-DPMNEvucicwiretappingzaev
United Kingdom, United States
Obama's credibility now on the line with Brexit vote
April 23, 2016 Kevin Lees	1 Comment
US president Barack Obama joined forces with British prime minister David Cameron on Friday to cajole voters in the United Kingdom to stay in the European Union. (Kevin Lamarque / Reuters)
It all seemed so rational, so normal.
When US president Barack Obama took the stage yesterday in London (and on the pages of The Daily Telegraph) to dismantle, with surgical precision, the arguments against the United Kingdom staying in the European Union, it didn't feel like a rupture in international politics.
But it was a radical departure from standard operating procedure.
US presidents, to say nothing of lower officials, have never had qualms intervening in the domestic affairs of foreign countries.
Rarely does an American president so do in such a public forum.
Rarer still that an American president would weigh in on a matter that will be determined by a foreign electorate in eight weeks.
RELATED: How Corbyn can use Brexit to
reinvigorate his Labour leadership
Standing beside the British prime minister, Obama was making the case against Brexit better than anyone else on the British political stage, in part because of the sheer scale of power that comes with the American presidency. Special or no, the body language of Obama and his British counterpart David Cameron spoke everything about the unequal bilateral partnership. Amazingly, Obama managed to shrink and upstage Cameron nearly as much as George W. Bush diminished Tony Blair, oft mocked as Bush's 'poodle,' over the Iraq war in 2003. Continue reading Obama's credibility now on the line with Brexit vote →
borisboris johnsonbrexitCameronconservativeEU referendumEuropean Unionfaragelabourliberal democratlondonNATOobamaspecial relationshiptoryTTIPUKIPUnited Kingdom
Russia, Syria, United Nations, United States
Why the 'brosé summit of 2015' was more about Russia than the United States
September 29, 2015 Kevin Lees	Leave a comment
US president Barack Obama and Russian president Vladimir Putin share a toast Monday at the United Nations. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
The way the US and international media portrayed Monday evening's meeting between US president Barack Obama and Russian president Vladimir Putin, you might think that the diplomatic maneuvering at the United Nations General Assembly over Syria's civil war amounted to a fight-to-the-finish struggle for the two countries, both of which are permanent members on the UN Security Council.
But that's just not true because the stakes in Syria for the United States are far, far lower. It is tempting to view every disagreement between the United States and Russia as a zero-sum game, with a clear winner and a clear loser, but that's false.
Why Syria matters so much to Putin
Consider how important Syria and, in particular, Bashar al-Assad, is to Russia. Assad, these days, doesn't control much of Syria's territory, but he does retain power throughout many of the coastal cities where most of Syria's weary population still resides. That's important to Moscow because the Syrian coast hosts the only warm-water port for the Russian navy at Tartus.
A look at which groups control Syria, as of September 2015. (Wikipedia)
But it's so much more.
While the United States continues to project influence on a global basis and while China has expanded its regional reach into south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and even parts of Latin America, Russia's post-Soviet influence is more limited. The battle lines between Russia and the 'West' are no longer Vietnam or Afghanistan or even Poland or Hungary, it's skirmishes within former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Georgia or fights over influence in central Asia.
RELATED: One chart that explains Obama-era Middle East policy
RELATED: The idea of a nuclear war with Russia is absolutely crazy
Syria, however, retained the strong ties with Moscow that it developed under Assad's father Hafez in the 1970s. Outside the former Soviet republics, there is virtually no other country that you could consider anything like a Russian 'client state,' with the exception of Syria. That's a big deal for a country resentful that it has gone from a truly global player — culturally, technologically, politically and economically — to regional chump with fading commodity exports, crumbling physical and social infrastructure and an economy one-tenth that of the US economy. Continue reading Why the 'brosé summit of 2015' was more about Russia than the United States →
assadbaltic stateschechnyageneral assemblyiraniraqislamic stateNATOpatrushevputinrussiasecurity councilshiitesunnisyriaukraineununited nationsUnited States
Who is Juha Sipilä? The man who wants to become CEO of Finland, Inc.
If the voters of Finland elect challenger Juha Sipilä as its next prime minister, the former telecommunications minister will have the iPhone to thank.
That's because the Finnish economy was in recession in 2012 and 2013, and it registered only tepid growth last year. In part, it's due to Nokia's loss of market share. Once a synonym for state-of-the-art technology in mobile phones, the exponential rise of the iPhone in the past eight years left the Finnish champion reeling for new areas of growth and shedding jobs near the Finnish capital of Helsinki.
Notwithstanding plans for Nokia to merge with French telecoms equipment provider Alcatel announced last week, Nokia's global dominance in mobile smartphones collapsed over the course of the four-year government of the center-right, liberal Kansallinen Kokoomus (National Coalition Party) while Samsung and Apple increasingly pushed Nokia out of the market. Nokia ultimately sold it devices and services business to Microsoft in 2013. Simultaneous woes have afflicted Finland's once-thriving timber market.
So it's not surprising that voters are poised to elect Sipilä as their next prime minister, a former telecommunications executive who aims to run Finland like a private-sector company.
There's a sense that voters also want to punish the National Coalition. Even former prime minister Jyrki Katainen appeared to sense that when he stepped down last spring to take a position at the European Commission, where he currently serves as the Commission's vice president for jobs, growth, investment and competitiveness. Katainen left it to his former European affairs minister, Alexander Stubb, to lead his party into the March 19 elections. Polls suggest that has become increasingly difficult over the course of the past 10 months since Stubb assumed the premiership.
A victory for Sipilä would return the Suomen Keskusta (Centre Party) back to power after a four-year hiatus in opposition. Sipilä came to politics only recently, elected for the first time in 2011 to the Eduskunta, Finland's 200-member unicameral parliament after a successful career in the telecommunications industry. Continue reading Who is Juha Sipilä? The man who wants to become CEO of Finland, Inc. →
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Estonia, Uncategorized
Estonian election results: Reform Party wins third term
March 2, 2015 Kevin Lees	Leave a comment
Estonia's parliamentary election proves what is becoming a nearly iron-clad thesis about Baltic politics: so long as social democratic parties in the Baltic States nurture ties with Moscow and pitch themselves to the narrow pool of ethnic Russian voters, centrist and center-right governments will continue to win elections and govern.
So it was in Estonia on March 1, as it became clear that the center-right Eesti Reformierakond (Estonian Reform Party) would win its third consecutive national election, the first under its 35-year-old prime minister Taavi Rõivas (pictured above in Ukraine last year), who is expected to continue leading Estonia's government.
RELATED: Russian threat dominates Estonian election campaign
Despite polls that showed that the center-left Eesti Keskerakond (Estonian Centre Party), led by former prime minister and Tallinn mayor Edgar Savisaar might emerge as the leading party, Reform bested the Centre Party by nearly 3%.
Nevertheless, both the Reform Party and its junior partner in government, the Sotsiaaldemokraatlik Erakond (Social Democratic Party), lost some ground — the two parties will, in aggregate, lose seven seats and six short of an absolute majority in the Riigikogu, Estonia's 101-member unicameral parliament.
Luckily for Rõivas and the Reform Party, there are two new parties in the Estonian parliament, and one of them is a strong fit for a three-party coalition. The liberal Eesti Vabaerakond (Free Party), founded last September by Andres Herkel, an Estonian intellectual, could easily find common ground with Reform. Continue reading Estonian election results: Reform Party wins third term →
ansipbalticbaltic statescentre partyestoniafree partyNATOputinreform partyriigikoguroivasrussiasavisaarsocial democrats
Russian threat dominates Estonian election campaign
With the world's attention on a political assassination in Moscow, voters in the former Soviet republic of Estonia go to the polls tomorrow, March 1, with the threat of Russian aggression looming on its eastern border.
Three days ago, US troops, as part of NATO exercises, paraded in Narva, one of Estonia's largest cities, resting on the Russian border, and Russian troops reciprocated with a similar show. Though it felt like a Cold War throwback, the demonstration highlights just how seriously Estonia, a member of NATO since 2004, and other NATO allies are taking the possibility of a Russian incursion in the Baltics.
Under that tense penumbra, voters will elect all 101 members of Estonia's parliament, the Riigikogu, where the center-right Eesti Reformierakond (Estonian Reform Party) currently controls the largest bloc of seats and governs in coalition with the centrist Sotsiaaldemokraatlik Erakond (Social Democratic Party).
Some polls show, however, that the center-left Eesti Keskerakond (Estonian Centre Party) narrowly leads the Reform Party, with the Social Democrats and the conservative opposition party, Isamaa ja Res Publica Liit (IRL, Pro Patria and Res Publica Union), trailing close by in third and fourth place.
It's the first time that Estonia's youthful new prime minister Taavi Rõivas (pictured above) will lead the Reform Party into an election. When longtime prime minister Andrus Ansip stepped down in March 2014 after nine years in office, the idea was that he would switch jobs with former Reform Party leader, prime minister and European commissioner Siim Kallas. That worked out for Ansip, who's now Estonia's representative to the European Commission with a 'super-portfolio' for the digital single market.
Kallas, however, was tripped up by a scandal dating to his days as Estonia's central bank president in the 1990s, and he stepped out of consideration for the premiership. Other heavy hitters like former foreign minister Urmas Paet also demurred. That meant that the challenge fell to the 35-year-old Rõivas, whose government experience included just two years as social affairs minister. Married to pop singer Luisa Värk, Rõivas has been a member of the Estonian parliament since 2007 and is generally seen as close to Ansip.
The Centre Party's leader, Tallinn mayor Edgar Savisaar, is nearly three decades older, and he served briefly from 1991 to 1992 as Estonia's first independent prime minister. During the campaign, he's made much of Rõivas's relative inexperience. Continue reading Russian threat dominates Estonian election campaign →
ansipbalticscentre partyestoniaeuropean commissionilvesIRLkallasnarvaNATOputinreform partyriigikoguroivasrussiasavissarsocial democratic partytallinn
Greece, Russia
A Russian bailout may have always been 'Plan B' for Tsipras
February 11, 2015 Kevin Lees	1 Comment
Photo credit to ELTOS/ELTA.
It may have seemed odd that, within hours of taking office, Greece's new prime minister Alexis Tsipras struck out at the European Union to delay and ultimately weaken the bloc's resolution to extend sanctions against Russia and certain actors within the Russian government.
The incident shed light on an under-explored element of policy preferences of Greece's new governing party, the leftist SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left — Συνασπισμός Ριζοσπαστικής Αριστεράς), including its reluctance to embrace NATO and the traditional military and security alliance that links the United States and the European Union. Tspiras, who has visited the Kremlin several times, has forcefully opposed the EU sanctions against Russia stemming from its involvement in the unrest in eastern Ukraine.
Furthermore, Tsipras's choice to form a coalition with the right-wing, anti-austerity Independent Greeks (ANEL, Ανεξάρτητοι Έλληνες), and to appoint ANEL's leader, Panos Kammenos, as defense minister, brought into government a brand of right-wing nationalism with roots in traditional Greek Orthodoxy and plenty of euroscepticism.
Throughout the campaign and, indeed, for years, Tspiras has publicly evoked confidence, if not outright cockiness, that he would be able to negotiate a deal to lighten Greece's debt load if elected to power. Presumably, many commentators believed that meant Tsipras was willing to engage EU elites, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, in a game of 'chicken' over Greece's potential exit from the eurozone. That's probably still true.
But the common view among most economists is that Greece's leverage on this point is growing weaker. Merkel and others have privately briefed that the eurozone is much stronger now than in 2012 when the 'Grexit' issue first became a real concern, and they don't believe that the contagion from a Grexit today would be considerable. Greece's turmoil can be isolated, but caving to the demands of the Tsipras government could embolden radical leftists elsewhere in Europe, especially in Spain, where the leftist Podemos movement now leads polls in advance of elections later this =year. The European Central Bank last week essentially backed Merkel's view by announcing that it would refuse to accept Greek bonds as collateral, pushing the burden of risk on Greek debt exclusively upon the Greek central bank. Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis clashed publicly with German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble last week as well, noting that he didn't even 'agree to disagree' with Schäuble over the Greek debt standoff.
But Kammenos's comments yesterday about Greece's 'Plan B' make it clear that the Tsipras government believes it has another, potentially more explosive card it can play:
"What we want is a deal. But if there is no deal – hopefully (there will be) – and if we see thatGermany remains rigid and wants to blow apart Europe, then we have the obligation to go to Plan B. Plan B is to get funding from another source," he told a Greek television show that ran into early Tuesday. "It could the United States at best, it could be Russia, it could beChina or other countries," he said.
The United States is certainly not going to undermine Merkel and the EU leadership, especially to bail out a far-left government in Greece. Furthermore, China's recent history demonstrates that it very rarely makes splashy political moves in foreign policy outside regional Asian politics (such as in Bhutan or Sri Lanka).
That, of course, leaves Russia, which shares a common form of Christianity with Greece in Orthodoxy, and which also happens to be in the middle of the most high-stakes geopolitical struggle with NATO since the end of the Cold War. Continue reading A Russian bailout may have always been 'Plan B' for Tsipras →
european central bankEuropean Uniongreeceindependent greekskammenoskotziaskremlinmerkelNATOorbanputinrussiaschaubleserbiasouth streamsyrizatsiprasvaroufakis
Bulgaria, Hungary, Russia, Serbia
Beware Putin's southern European, soft-power front
October 15, 2014 Kevin Lees	Leave a comment
Russian president Vladimir Putin travel to Belgrade on Thursday with a warm welcome from Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vučić (pictured above, left, with Putin) with parades and fanfare.
Even as a shaky ceasefire between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian eastern separatists limps forward, US and European policymakers continue to keep a wary eye on the Baltic states and Ukraine. Just over a month ago in Tallinn, US president Barack Obama disabused Putin that NATO would flinch in its response to any Russian attack against any of the Baltic states.
Russian aggression may have nudged Latvian voters into reelecting a center-right government otherwise unpopular after a half-decade of economic malaise and budget austerity, and Russian relations are certain to play a vital role in Ukraine's snap parliamentary elections in less than two weeks.
Nevertheless, Western strategists may be overlooking Putin's ability to undermine both EU and NATO resolve through the Achilles' heel of southeastern Europe by leveraging economic, political and cultural influence in Bulgaria, Hungary and Serbia. While it's hard to believe that Russia would assume the economic burdens of annexing large swaths of eastern Ukraine and even harder to believe that it would risk World War III by invading Russian-majority territory in Estonia, Russia could easily, quietly and gradually maximize its influence within southern Europe, a region that continues to suffer inordinately from the fallout of the global financial and eurozone debt crises.
Earlier this month, Bulgarian voters went to the polls for the second time in just 17 months. They elected a fragmented National Assembly, though the former pro-European, center-right prime minister Boyko Borissov is likely to return to power with a minority government. One of the first decisions he will have to make is whether to proceed with the South Stream natural gas pipeline, which would carry Russian energy through Bulgaria and to Austria, Hungary and elsewhere in southern Europe. The pipeline is one of the reasons, in fact, that the previous center-left coalition government fell earlier this summer. Continue reading Beware Putin's southern European, soft-power front →
balkansbelgradebidentborissovbulgariacold warEuropean UnionhungarykosovomoldovaNATOnavracsicsorbanputinrussiaserbiasouth streamtransatlantictransnitriaukrainevucic
Scotland votes: Should it stay or should it go?
Today, residents of Scotland, a region of 5.3 million people, will vote in referendum that's been scheduled for 19 months, and that will ask one simple question:
The answer could change the economic, social and cultural outcomes of the lives of both English and Scottish residents for generations to come.
With polls set to open shortly, Suffragio looks at ten policy (and other) issues that Scots are considering as they cast their ballots, either to become an independent state or to remain part of the United Kingdom. Continue reading Scotland votes: Should it stay or should it go? →
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About Suffragio
Suffragio attempts to bring thoughtful analysis to the political, economic and other policy issues that are central to countries outside of the US -- to make world politics less foreign to the US audience. Suffragio focuses, in particular, on those countries and regions with upcoming or recent elections.
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William Pearson (c. 1829 – 7 September 1905) was a surveyor in the early days of the colony of South Australia.

History
Pearson arrived in South Australia in 1849, perhaps in September of that year aboard the ship Caroline.

In the 1850s he had a private surveying practice, working out of Angaston.

In December 1857 he was appointed, with W. H. Christie, R. Edmunds and W. Dawson, as surveyor to the Survey and Crown Lands Department.

In 1864 he surveyed the town of Port Mannum, where blocks went on sale in October 1864. (A private town of the same name was laid out on portion of section 114, by W. B. Randell in 1869.)

In March 1864 he was appointed to the Northern Territory
as one of several surveyors in a contingent of 40 under B. T. Finniss who left for Adam Bay, Northern Territory on the barque Henry Ellis with the task of choosing and surveying a site for a principal town to be called Palmerston. The site chosen, Escape Cliffs, had an excellent harbour with the deepest river (the Adelaide) in the Territory. Most of the land however was low-lying salt plains populated with mangroves, boggy and mosquito-infested at high tide and a quagmire in the Wet Season.

On 9 August 1864 Pearson was leader of a party of four (himself, Litchfield, Dyer and Murray) on horseback, sent by Manton to recover stores which had been left unguarded on the river bank and consequently plundered by Aborigines. When approaching their camp, Aborigines armed with spears surrounded the party, injured a horse and several men, Pearson more seriously, one spear piercing his side, another his elbow and a third grazing his head above the ear.
Litchfield and Dyer showed courage in removing Pearson from danger.
Other settlers arrived on foot, ostensibly as a rescue party, several shots were fired at the natives, Alaric Ward killing one of their number.

Once Pearson had largely recovered from his wounds, he and Arthur Hamilton were sent to survey "The Narrows", the site on the Adelaide River selected by Finniss for a port, where one man was taken by a crocodile and another swept away in the swift current. Pearson developed purpura but was accused by Finniss of malingering ("Pooh!, a few mosquito bites"), and not until February 1865 permitted to return to base camp for treatment, sending Hamilton a labourer named Smith as his replacement.
In April 1865 Pearson and King, both on sick leave, and 15 others left Adam Bay on supply ship Bengal for Surabaya, where he and most of the others transshipped to Melbourne by the steamer Douglas.
Pearson was one of many critics of the site chosen for the new town, and of Finniss for refusing to look for alternatives, though this was only one of many criticisms levelled at their leader. Pearson may have been one of the Officers aggrieved that Finniss preferred the company of bright young labourers, such as Auld and Bennett to men of his own social class.
(Although classified as labourers, both Auld and Bennett had been educated at Adelaide Educational Institution, as had G. T. Cottrell.)

From August 1869 to August 1870 he was a senior member under J. Evans, and for much of the time the leader, of a survey party involved in accurately defining the border between South Australia and New South Wales, to the satisfaction of both parties, unlike the boundary with Victoria, the subject of a long and costly (to South Australia) dispute. The work was arduous and demanding, but two incidents are worth recounting: the campsite chosen for one stage, later world-famous as Broken Hill, site of the great silver mines, and  the hospitality shown the party by Alfred T. Dickens, son of the novelist, at Corona Station.

Pearson retired from the Lands Titles Office  on June 30, 1902, and died three years later, survived by his second wife.

Family
Pearson married Elizabeth Tait (c. 1829 – 16 December 1899) in 1851. Elizabeth arrived in South Australia in November 1850 aboard Joseph Somes. Elizabeth died at their home on Wakefield Street. They had one son:
Thomas William Pearson (c. 1854 – 22 September 1892), Posts & Telegraph employee, died at Wakefield Street.
He married again, to Mary Harriet Parrott (1853– ) in 1902. She married again, to Robert Harry Allen, on 7 August 1906

John Thomas Pearson (c. 1841 – 10 July 1921) who married Maria Biggs, lived in Young Street, later in Robsart Street,  Parkside, was a brother, also employed by Posts & Telegraph Department.

References

1829 births
1905 deaths
History of the Northern Territory
Australian surveyors

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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Mike Pence wants creationism taught to your kids in public schools
Donald Trump's vice president is a radical Christian whose belief in "intelligent design" suggests he likely subscribes to the notion of a biblical young earth (around 6,000 years-old according to some, while others will allow for 10,000 years. Other believers in intelligent design will avoid the question of the earth/universe's age altogether), and he wants this form of religious charlatanry taught in public schools.
Mike Pence's belief in a young earth isn't proven without a doubt, but his rhetoric is designed to pander to those who do.
When he was confronted on the subject by MSNBC's Chris Matthews back in 2009, Pence did everything he could to avoid acknowledging the scientific fact of evolution. It was a pathetic display of pandering to the anti-science religious voter.
But during his tenure as a U.S. Congressman, Pence wasn't so evasive.
During an impassioned speech on the House floor in 2002, Pence regurgitated the ignorant 'evolution is only a theory' theme, and declared that "intelligent design" should be taught to children as a scientific alternative with equal weight.
"I believe that God created the known universe, the earth and everything in it, including man," Pence said. "And I also believe that someday scientists will come to see that only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe."
"I would simply and humbly ask, can we teach it as such and can we also consider teaching other theories of the origin of species?" Pence continued. "Like the theory that was believed in by every signer of the Declaration of Independence. Every signer of the Declaration of Independence believed that men and women were created and were endowed by that same Creator with certain unalienable rights. The Bible tells us that God created man in his own image, male and female. He created them."
Writing for Patheos, Michael Stone points out that Pence's false and misleading claim that creationism is a valid scientific alternative to the theory of evolution is a tactic widely used by evangelicals to undermine the way science is taught in the public school system.
Pence, like many advocates for creationism, is uninformed and uneducated as to what the term "theory" means in a scientific context. For the record, the scientific definition of "theory" is quite different from the everyday use of the word.
As the National Academy of Science notes, the "formal scientific definition of theory is quite different from the everyday meaning of the word. It refers to a comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a vast body of evidence.
The idea that Pence wants creationism taught on equal footing with established science is a lie. "Intelligent design," by definition, cannot exist without the presumption that the theory of evolution is false. Christians encroaching on the public sphere want to pull a cloak over the eyes of children, shielding them from the wide array of knowledge that proves the theory of evolution to be an expanding science that's based in fact, and having Mike Pence in the White House is a priceless gift.
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labman57
What Mikey and his fellow theocrats don't understand is that science is not merely a body of knowledge accumulated over the centuries, it is also the process through which this knowledge is attained. And so simply declaring that something is true because it says so in the Bible (or any other literary source) cannot be construed as science if that "fact" or "idea" was not the result of a valid, structured, self-critical scientific process.
The realm of science — with its evidence-based testable theories, evolving species, relativistic measurements, and quantum phenomena — undermines the "absolutism" that is embraced by those whose view of the universe must conform to a literal interpretation of the Bible.
toffer99
Oh America, America, sometimes I don't agree with the things that you do, but in no way do you deserve Trump and Pence.
Republican politicians who deny evolution sometimes believe that themselves, and sometimes are just trying to attract the voter block of people who do. The oil and coal companies that are the party's big corporate sponsors believe in evolution and science – that's where their products come from, and how they find them, after all – but they're willing to fund evolution deniers in return for promoting climate change denial, because that's big money for them, and it's easier to sell the science denialism they care about to people who already don't believe in science.
douglas brule
Simple its call belief.But hold your horses I have a great respect for science and marvel at our universe,like that person said look above you and see the stars million light years away amazing!
J Lock
Oh, please. There is no public school, in all Indiana, that teaches creationism.
If you can't make a proven point without accusatory name calling, the fingers point back at you …
radical, charlatanry, rhetoric designed to pander, a pathetic display, false and misleading tactic to undermine, uninformed and uneducated, extremist
Rufino Cabonce
The Big Bang theory speculates that 15 billion years ago there was a violent explosion in the galaxies that created all the planets including the sun, the moon and the earth, and then later on living beings evolved on earth. Darwin's theory of evolution says that living beings or life originated from water because water produces mutants, The mutant turns into a tadpole, become a frog, become a fish, become a bird, become a monkey and finally it evolves into a man. What a stupid theory from these so-called scholars.
These pin-headed scholars tried to explain that this marvelous Universe just randomly sets in the heavens without a Creator.
Try to look at your watch; do you think that nobody invented it? How about the computer, can you convince yourself to believe that nobody has designed or invented it? If computers and watches are so complex in their mechanism, how much more is the whole Universe?
The earth is circling the sun at an average of 93 million miles. It orbits the sun at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour making one revolution in 365 days 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45.51 second.
While the Earth completes one rotation on its axis every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4.09 second, the Moon revolves around the Earth with the help of the Sun which cause high and low tides otherwise there would be no living things in the sea and the rivers. Just think about it that even second is counted. The Earth will not go faster even in a second or go slower in a second otherwise there will be tidal waves!
The distance between the Earths from the Sun is approximately 93 million miles, just an exact distance that if the Earth goes just a little bit nearer to the Sun the Earth will burn. If it goes a little farther from the Sun the Earth will freeze.
All the planets and the stars in this solar system are circling the Sun with precise speed with precise distance that's the reason why it does not collide with each other. Do you think that nobody designed and created the Universe? Don't tell me that nobody invented your wristwatch and that nobody created the computer?
We are only talking about our solar system which is already mind boggling, then how much more if we think about the entire universe where billions of galaxies that are moving with light years in distance from each other, our human mind can never understand God's creation.
Our universe contains of galaxies; but it is only our planet earth which belongs to Milky Way Galaxy that has the supporting condition for life to exist. Is it by chance? Genesis 1:31, God saw all he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning – the sixth day.
John 1:1-3, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made." (Verse 14), "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us."
Who then became flesh? IT WAS JESUS. Jesus is the Word. So if we are going to translate these verses to make it clearer replacing the word, "Word" to a proper noun "Jesus" and replacing pronouns to proper noun it will read like this: " In the beginning was JESUS, JESUS was with GOD, and JESUS was GOD. JESUS was with GOD in the beginning; through JESUS all things were made. Without JESUS nothing was made that has been made."
Forget grammatical correctness but even if it sounds monotonous, it is very clear that Jesus is God and the Creator of all things.
(Colossians 1:15-17), "He is the image of the invisible God, the first born over all creation. For He created all things: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities, all things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together."
Planets do not collide with each other because Jesus is the one who holds it together. With the vastness of the whole Universe only the earth is green and has life.
The amazing thing is that the Creator himself came down from heaven to seek and to save us.
(Luke 19:10) "For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost."
(Acts 20:28), "Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you over seers, to shepherd the church of God which He purchased with His blood."
(Hebrews9:22), "Without shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin."
(1st Peter 1:18-19), "Knowing that you were not redeemed with perishable things like silver or gold from your futile way of life inherited from your forefathers, but with precious blood as of a lamb unblemished and spotless, the blood of Christ."
One of the reasons why God needed to become a man is to produce an unblemished blood to wash our sins. (Hebrews 9:22) God is a Spirit so to produce blood He must become flesh. Secondly: To pay for our sins in full. To redeem means to pay off. (Galatians 3:13)
(Philippians 2:5-8) "Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to grasped, but made himself nothing taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness, and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death, even death on a cross."
Most of us Christians just take for granted the gift of salvation that has been given to us. It is true that salvation of our soul is free, but it is not cheap. It cost the Lord God His life.
(Philippians 2:8-11), "And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore also God highly exalted Him, and bestowed on Him the Name which is above every Name, that at the name of Jesus EVERY KNEE SHOULD BOW, of those who are in heaven and on earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father."
People who say that there is no God and that no one created the Universe and people who believe in Jesus but don't believe that He is God the day will come that they will confess with their tongue that Jesus is Lord, bowing their knees. But it would be under the earth that means in Hades or Hell. How can you confess Him Lord if you don't believe that He is God?
It is better to confess Him now while there is still a change rather than to confess Him later and to bow your knees while you are burning in hell and there is no other choice.
It takes more faith to believe the Big Bang Theory and the Darwin's Theory of evolution than to simply believe what the Bible says that Jesus created everything. "Without Him nothing was made that has been made."
JESUS IS GOD THE CREATOR.
Continue reading the topic: "The doctrine of trinity"
Sermon by: Pastor Bobby Cabonce
Website: thereisnoothername.com
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The Scientific Method of obtaining a Scientific Theory is not something you can just decide if it is truth or not. Once something has been proven to be a Scientific Theory, using Scientific Method, it has been proven to be true MANY times over and is accepted as such by scientists and learned scholars the world over, the ONLY way it can be changed is if it can be proven false using this same Scientific Method obtaining the same results consistently, over and over. Not just once or twice. If something can be proven to be an Empirical Law, it cannot be changed. Here's the thing, just because you don't believe a Scientific Theory or Empirical Law is true, unless you can prove it scientifically, that's just too bad; You don't have that option.
So many adjectives and not one covers the idiocy of what is Pence….
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Are there any options for upside down car loans? Do you feel stuck? Like you are never going to get out of your loan? There are a few options for your upside down car loan.
Here are three things you should know about upside down car loan.
An upside down car loan is a loan that is worth more than your car.
You can avoid an upside down car loan by having a good down payment and knowing your loan details. The less you borrow, the better the loan. The lessens the possibility of getting into such a situation.
If you find yourself needing options for your upside down car loan, don't worry. You do have options. You just need to find the correct solution for you.
There are several things to do to avoid those types of loans. Make a down payment. A down payment will lower your loan amount. This will save interest. If you can manage a higher payment, take the option with the least amount of payback time. Instead of taking the lower payment longer, make a higher payment in a shorter amount of time. Pay your longer term loan off early. Be careful to read the fine print. Make sure there is no penalty to pay off the loan early.
What Options are there for Upside Down Car Loans?
Pay down the loan quicker. By paying extra on the principal every month, you could save a lot of interest thereby reducing the upside down amount. You could sell the car to another individual and put the entire selling price on the loan. Add the cash that will pay off the rest of the loan and be done with it. You can try to trade the car in and include your balance of your upside down car loan. You would still be upside down, but you will have a new car. Your bank or credit union may refinance you at a lower interest rate.
If you are already in an upside down car loan, you have three good options; keep paying the loan until it is paid off, sell the car to an individual, use it as a trade in and still be upside down. The choice you make needs to fit your personal situation. Upside down car loans are very common with car loans. As long as your car is still running, pay for it and drive it. You have to repay the loan one way or another.
Once you get your upside down car loan taken care of, do what you can to not let that situation happen again. The next time you purchase a car, make sure you make a down payment. Take the higher faster payment option. Stick to purchasing used cars. The do not depreciate quickly like new cars do. It is your finances, don't agree to pay more than you can afford.


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"…the ambitious young artist's future is looking bright. " Women of Country
About Danielle Johnson
Danielle Johnson is a singer-songwriter from the rural town of Warsaw, North Carolina, and now resides in Nashville, Tennessee. Danielle's music teacher discovered she had the God-given talent of singing at the age of eight. From then on, she relentlessly pursued music. She immediately started taking voice lessons to work on her craft while also studying at the North Carolina Theatre Conservatory for many years. In 2012, she was cast as "Annie Who" in the Broadway Equity Production of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" at Madison Square Garden in New York City, and at the Wang Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts. Danielle has also performed "The Star Spangled Banner" for many events including NASCAR races at Charlotte Motor Speedway and the Coco Cola 600 in front of over 200,000 people. As well as being a singer-songwriter, she loves playing guitar and piano. She stays busy collaborating with successful songwriters such as, Mike Dekle, Byron Hill, Phil Galdston, JP Williams, Dave Brainard, Sandy Ramos, and more. Her collaborations and experiences are making Danielle Johnson stand out while writing her truth and being a positive role model for teens and young adults.
That powerful, authentic voice is the hook to get your attention but it is the songs that Danielle Johnson sings that keeps you there." Matt Bjorkle, Roughstock.com
Copyright © 2015 Danielle Johnson