Daniel M. KovalikHuman Rights & Labor Lawyer. Archives
October 2020
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As clamor grows for Cuban doctors to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their international work during the pandemic, the US continues to oppose their efforts. It cannot be seen to endorse the idea that the socialist system works.In his book, In Cuba, the late Liberation Catholic priest Father Ernesto Cardinal of Nicaragua relates that, upon visiting Cuba in the mid-1970s, he witnessed an entire country which resembled a Franciscan Christian community – a set of people living in simple, austere circumstances sharing what little they had with each other. And, of course, Cuba has become renowned for sharing the little it has – little, because of a US embargo which has been strangling its economy for nearly 60 years – with the rest of the world. The most significant contribution Cuba has made has been its international medical solidarity, which has benefited scores of countries, mostly, but not solely, in the developing world. Cuba began offering such assistance very shortly after the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro. Echoing Father Cardinal’s reflections about Cuba, Johns Hopkins University Professor Piero Gleijeses describes Cuba’s outreach to Algeria shortly after the Cuban Revolution in the following words: “It was an unusual gesture: an underdeveloped country tendering free aid to another in even more dire straits. It was offered at a time when the exodus of doctors from Cuba following the revolution had forced the government to stretch its resources while launching its domestic programs to increase mass access to health care. ‘It was like a beggar offering his help, but we knew the Algerian people needed it even more than we did and that they deserved it,’ [Cuban minister of public health] Machado Ventura remarked. It was an act of solidarity that brought no tangible benefit and came at real material cost.” Cuba has only increased such solidarity over the years. For example, it sent doctors 4,500 miles to Western Africa to successfully fight the deadly Ebola virus. In addition, as The New York Times begrudgingly acknowledged, Cuban doctors were in the forefront of the recent fight against cholera in Haiti. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Cuba took in thousands of children suffering from the fallout to be treated. Many of those individuals still live in Cuba, years after the collapse of the USSR. Cuba has even sent doctors to help in the United States – specifically, to fight infant mortality in Chicago. Most recently, during the Covid-19 crisis, Cuba has sent doctors to both developing countries, such as Venezuela, Suriname, Jamaica and Grenada, as well as to developed nations, such as Italy, to assist in fighting the pandemic. To acknowledge Cuba’s global efforts to fight Covid-19, there is an international movement afoot lobbying for its medical team, known as the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade, to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. A petition lobbying for this honor has garnered 30,000 signatures from around the world, including from such notables as the former president of Ecuador Rafael Correa, actors Danny Glover and Mark Ruffalo, and writers Alice Walker and Noam Chomsky. However, quite shockingly, the US, standing nearly alone in the world, has opposed the efforts of Cuba to fight the global pandemic from the very beginning. As the Asia Times explains: “The US government has continued attacking Cuban medical internationalism right up to the current pandemic, making wild allegations against the program that disparage the medical workers. Paul Hare, a former British ambassador to Cuba who teaches in the United States, told Reuters recently that the US is “almost totally isolated” when it comes to its Cuba policy. Each year since 1992, the United Nations General Assembly has voted to end the US-imposed embargo on the island. In 2019, 187 countries said the embargo must end, while the US stood with two of its closest allies, Brazil and Israel. Ambassador Hare’s phrase “almost totally isolated” is an understatement.” This begs the question of why the US would oppose such international solidarity. Certainly, part of the animosity to Cuba and its global efforts flows from the fact that it has partnered closely with countries, like China, with which the US is at odds. However, the truth is that Cuba’s close ties with China, just as its prior close ties with the USSR, have largely been necessitated by the US’ aggressive economic blockade of the island nation, as well as its incessant military threats. As Noam Chomsky has oftenpointed out, the US intentionally acts in ways towards fledgling revolutionary nations which push them into the arms of the Communist superpowers, and then points to this as justification for more intensified aggression. In my own view, the real reason the US is pushing against Cuban medical solidarity is its fear of what some, including Oxfam International, have referred to as “the threat of a good example.” That is, countries like Cuba threaten the hegemony of the US and global capitalism by its very successes in building a socialist model which shows that people’s needs, both domestically and abroad, can be fulfilled better in the absence of the profit motive. Such examples must be destroyed, lest they demonstrate to other developing countries that they can do better if they leave the clutches of the predatory capitalist system. Moreover, such examples even threaten to show the people of the US – the country which, despite its unique riches, has one of the worst Covid-19 rates in the world – that there is a better way to organize an economy and a society. At a time when the US electorate’s support for socialism is greater than it has been in decades – in part because of the inequities and failures exposed by the pandemic – Cuba represents an example which the powers-that-be must destroy, and they are acting aggressively to try to do so.
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As Vijay Prashad explains in his book, Red Star Over The Third World, domestic fascism in the West has reflected the West’s pre-existing colonial practices abroad. Citing Martinique communist Aimé Césaire, Prashad explains: “What had come to define fascism inside Europe through the experience of the Nazis – the jackboots and the gas chambers – were familiar already in the colonies. . . . [F]ascism was a political form of bourgeois rule in times when democracy threatened capitalism; colonialism, on the other hand, was naked power justified by racism to seize resources from people who were not willing to hand them over. Their form was different but their manners were identical.” As Prashad and Césaire teach us, the fascist tactics used by our Western governments in the Global South will inevitably be brought home to be used against us. In the case of the US, these tactics have surely been introduced here, and we are now seeing this clearly as our police, sometimes backed by the military itself, are battling protestors in the streets in the same manner that a military force does as a foreign occupying power. Indeed, as a number of commentators have pointed out, the very tactic which killed George Floyd – the knee on the neck – was imported by the Israeli Defense Forces (themselves bankrolled by the US) who use this tactic against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories and who are now training US police units, including the Minneapolis police force, to use it as well. Moreover, the police are using not only the cruel military tactics used to oppress people abroad, they are also using the military’s very equipment to do so. Democratic President Bill Clinton opened the door wide for this police militarization in the 1990s with the National Defense Authorization Act which created a program, the 1033 program, through which police departments are given surplus military equipment. As recently explained by Michael Shank in an article in The New York Review of Books, entitled “How Police Became Paramilitaries,” pursuant to this program, “local law enforcement began to adopt the type of military equipment more frequently used in a war zone: everything from armored personnel carriers and tanks, with 360-degree rotating machine gun turrets, to grenade launchers, drones, assault weapons, and more. Today, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment—most used, some new—has been transferred to civilian police departments.” And, once the police receive this equipment, they must use it. As Shank explains, the 1033 program “requires that law enforcement agencies make use of such equipment within a year of acquisition, effectively mandating that police put it into practice in the public space.” In other words, the police are actually required to turn the military’s high-tech guns against their own people. The militarization of the police, moreover, can be seen as a by-product of the US’s over-reliance on the use of military force and war to solve all of its problems, to the near exclusion of all other alternatives. Indeed, the US has given up on trying to lead the world through economic and technological prowess, or through moral suasion. Instead, our leaders have decided that brute military force alone will allow the US to dominate the planet, and our nation’s coffers are being looted to the tune of over $1 trillion a year to do so. The result is the starving of our educational system, our social safety net and our nation’s vital infrastructure. This, of course, then leads to mass deprivation and despair which then leads to mass unrest. And, just as it deals with the rest of the world, our rulers have decided to deal with the unrest at home, not by solving the social ills plaguing this nation, or by fixing a few bridges or dams, but by beating us down with military-style violence. Military force, indeed, has become the only instrument in our government’s toolbox, as quite starkly illustrated recently by the White House’s decision to give our valuable medical workers military flyovers costing $60,000 an hour instead of providing these workers with the protective equipment they have been desperately demanding. As with all things, our government has money and resources for instruments of violence, but none for human needs. This is literally killing us, just as surely as it is killing hundreds of thousands of people – nearly all people of color, not coincidentally – in foreign lands. The fight against police brutality and racism must therefore be linked to the fight to de-fund our military and to the broader fight to de-militarize our very society and culture. Join the debate on Facebook More articles by:Dan KovalikDan Kovalik teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. His latest book is No More War: How the West Violates International Law by Using ‘Humanitarian’ Intervention to Advance Economic and Strategic Interests.
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As famed Latin American author Eduardo Galeano once wrote, “every time the US ‘saves’ a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery.” Of course, as we look over the wreckage left by the US in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, we see that this statement is demonstrably true. And yet, now that the US is poised for another intervention, this time in Venezuela, the press is right there again to cheer it along. Analyzing 76 total press articles of the “elite” press from January 15 to April 15, 2019, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) could find not one voice that opposed Trump’s regime plans in Venezuela. Meanwhile, 54 percent openly supported these plans. Of course, this should not be all too surprising given the press’s usual complicity in past US war efforts — e.g., by pushing such war lies as the Gulf of Tonkin, the killing of babies in Kuwait, the WMDS of Iraq and the alleged Viagra-fueled rapes in Libya. The current war lies are coming fast and furious from such outlets as CNN which lied about seeing Maduro forces lighting aid containers on fire at the Colombian border (it was in fact opposition forces which did so as the NYT admitted two weeks later), and which claimed that US puppet Juan Guaido actually won the presidential election against Nicolas Maduro when in fact Guaido never even ran for president. What is quite stunning, however, is the total unanimity of the press in uncritically covering and supporting the ongoing coup in Venezuela. This is baffling because the same press outlets which have been rightly critical of Trump for all of his stupidity, lying and meanness, have suddenly found him brilliant, true and benevolent when it comes to Venezuela. This is particularly remarkable given that his partners in this crime are Neo-Con John Bolton; former CIA Director Mike Pompeo who recently joked that the CIA’s true motto is “We lied, We Cheated, We Stole”; and convicted liar Elliott Abrams. As for Abrams, he is infamous for his role in the illegal funding of the Nicaraguan Contras; his covering up of the El Mazote massacre in El Salvador in which around and yet, somehow, we are to believe from our “free” press that this band of rogues is going to deliver democracy and human rights to Venezuela. Never mind the fact that Trump himself is President after losing to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, and that the US, in the words of former President Jimmy Carter, no longer has a functioning democracy. As for Venezuela, on the other hand, Carter has said that its electoral system is “the best in the world.” Meanwhile, this same captive press incessantly tells of us of all the deprivations and travails in Venezuela while refusing to explain how, as UN Expert Dr. Alfred de Zayas has concluded, this state of affairs is largely the result of brutal US sanctions. Recently, respected economist Jeffrey Sachs co-authored a report showing that, since August of 2017, over 40,000 Venezuelans have died due to the US sanctions which have deprived Venezuela of food and life-saving medicines. But few would know any of this because the voices of de Zayas and Sachs are never heard in the mainstream press. Also unheard are any of the 6 million Venezuelans who voted for Nicolas Maduro in May of 2018, many of whom turn out for massive pro-government demonstrations. Instead, the press gives ink and air time only to mostly white, well-off and English-speaking individuals who support the opposition, giving the false impression that Maduro has no support. Moreover, in Orwellian fashion, the press refuses to call the current push for a military uprising in Venezuela a “coup,” while the same time referring to Maduro invariably as “repressive” and as a “dictator,” and his government as a “regime.” In short, instead of giving two sides of the story, the press gives us one, ignores crucial facts and tells us how we should be viewing the situation in Venezuela. This is not journalism at all, but naked propaganda, and it is shameful. The fact that, despite all of the US pressure and threats, and despite all of the lies, the Venezuelan people have not risen up en massein support of Juan Guaido – a man 80 percent of Venezuelans never heard of until he declared himself president with the US’s urging – should tell one that things are not as we are being led to believe. What we are seeing in Venezuela is but another attempted coup made in the USA, and it is the same type as the ones that brought such scoundrels as General Pinochet to power in Chile. But one would never know this from our trusted press which has decided that it is the mouthpiece for the State Department instead of a check on a President and a nation run amok. Feature photo | Pedestrians walk past a stencil graffiti featuring Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chavez and President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas, Venezuela, May 3, 2019. Martin Mejia | AP
Daniel Kovalik teaches International Human Rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and is author of the forthcoming, The Plot to Overthrow Venezuela, How the US is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil, with a Foreword by Oliver Stone. Source | CounterPunch
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Nearly ten years ago, NATO began its “humanitarian bombing” of Libya. While “humanitarian bombing” is an oxymoron, many believe that a country is not truly advancing human rights if it’s not bombing another back to the Stone Age.As an initial matter, it must be said that while the UN had authorized a NATO fly-zone over Libya to protect civilians – all civilians, by the way – there was never authorization for the full-scale invasion which was carried out and which quickly became aimed at regime change. Therefore, the NATO operation which actually took place was illegal. What’s more, the Libyan invasion did more to undermine human rights than it did to protect them. According to Amnesty International’s most recent report on Libya, there are now three rival governments vying for power in the country along with various militias, smugglers and other sundry armed groups. As Amnesty International explains, all participants in the armed conflict in Libya “carried out indiscriminate attacks in heavily populated areas leading to deaths of civilians and unlawful killings. Armed groups arrested and indefinitely detained thousands of people. Torture and other ill-treatment was widespread in prisons under the control of armed groups, militias and state officials.” And, to top it all off, slaves are being sold in public markets in Libya – something not seen in the world for over a century. And this is the aftermath of an intervention which, we were told, was supposed to improve human rights in Libya. Indeed, the intervention was spearheaded by Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and Susan Rice – three self-described warriors for human and women’s rights. Instead, they became three ushers of the Apocalypse. In addition, Italy and France, which also helped lead the charge for invasion, had their own reasons for intervening in Libya. For his part, French President Nicolas Sarkozy appeared to be singularly focused on killing Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who allegedly gave him €50 million for his presidential campaign – a claim which was just coming to light and to which Gaddafi was the chief witness. While Gaddafi certainly was no saint, he was a much better leader for his country than many of those the West supports, such as the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, the death squad state of Colombia or the coup government in Honduras. Indeed, Muammar Gaddafi, at the urging of his son, Saif, was attempting to democratize Libya at the time of the invasion, and the pair were willingly accepting the help of the US’s National Democratic Institute to do so! In addition, Gaddafi had taken Libya from being the least prosperous country in Africa to the being the most prosperous by the time of the NATO operation. Thus, as one commentator explains, before the intervention, “Libya had the highest GDP per capita and life expectancy on the continent. Less people lived below the poverty line than in the Netherlands.” Moreover, one of the main reasons, we were told, that NATO needed to intervene in 2011 was to save Benghazi from imminent harm from the government forces of Gaddafi. However, Hillary Clinton’s own internal emails show that her team recognized that any humanitarian problems confronting Benghazi had passed by the time of the NATO bombing. For example, Clinton’s assistant, Huma Abedin, in an email dated February 21, 2011 – that is, just a mere four days after the initial anti-government protests broke out in Libya – explains that the Gaddafi forces no longer controlled Benghazi and that the mood in the city was indeed “celebratory” by that time. Then, on March 2, just over two weeks before the bombing began, Harriet Spanos of USAID sent an email describing “[s]ecurity reports” which “confirm that Benghazi has been calm over the past couple of days.” Indeed, as explained to me by Khaled Kaim, Gaddafi’s last foreign minister, who I recently met in Venezuela, he personally urged US representatives at the UN Security Council to hold off the planned bombing raid for one hour so that UN observers on the ground could confirm his claim that Benghazi was not under threat. Of course, his pleas were ignored. Kaim’s warnings that the impending invasion of Libya would only unleash more chaos and terror on the world were also disregarded. Meanwhile, Benghazi is now the site of a grave humanitarian crisis and a hotbed for terrorists post-intervention. Again, Amnesty International writes that “[a] number of mass graves were uncovered in Benghazi between February and October [2017]. On at least four occasions, groups of bodies were found in different parts of the city with their hands bound behind their backs, and in some cases blindfolded with signs of torture and execution-style killing.” In addition, during the early part of 2017, one armed faction laid siege to an apartment complex in the Ganfouda area of Benghazi, “cutting off all supplies to the area, including food and water, and had trapped civilians and wounded fighters [of another faction] without access to medical care and other basic services.” And, when the same faction broke the siege by launching an armed assault on this area, it engaged in “indiscriminate” killings, with fighters from the faction posing for photos with the dead bodies. And yet, where are the self-proclaimed defenders of human rights for Libya and Benghazi now? Where are their cries for humanitarian intervention? Of course, all of those responsible for this absolute disaster have moved on and remain silent about the tragedy they have wrought in that country. Of course, the intervention in Libya was not truly about human rights, just as other similar Western interventions in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria have not been about either human rights or even fighting terror. And indeed, these interventions have only undermined human rights and further spread terror. In the case of Libya, the predictable havoc unleashed there has spread to neighboring states such as Niger, Tunisia, Mali, Chad and Cameroon. In addition, the refugee crisis created by the chaos unleashed by the NATO intervention in Libya is undermining the stability of all of Europe. One can only conclude from this that the West, and especially the United States, is hell-bent on spreading instability throughout the world, despite its pretending to accomplish the very opposite. Indeed, the US continues to bomb Libya periodically in an effort to at least contain the very forces of chaos it helped unleash there. In chaos, Western countries and their transnational corporations see opportunity for more domination and more profits. As with Little Finger in Game of Thrones, they see chaos not as a pit, but as a ladder. In the case of countries like Libya, the West goes in and bombs it to oblivion and then brings in companies which charge that country to rebuild it. And the West is not shy about this grisly strategy for money-making. Indeed, as the New York Times explained in an article just after the NATO operation ended with the brutal killing of Gaddafi – an article accompanied by a photo of an oil terminal in Misurata, Libya, on fire and with black smoke billowing out – “Western security, construction and infrastructure companies that see profit-making opportunities receding in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned their sights on Libya… Entrepreneurs are abuzz about the business potential of a country with huge needs and the oil to pay for them, plus the competitive advantage of Libyan gratitude toward the United States and its NATO partners. "A week before Colonel Qaddafi’s death on Oct. 20, a delegation from 80 French companies arrived in Tripoli to meet officials of the Transitional National Council, the interim government. Last week, the new British defense minister, Philip Hammond, urged British companies to “pack their suitcases” and head to Tripoli.” But what is good for such corporations is not good for the rest of us. Simply put, the world cannot afford another war which wreaks havoc on entire regions of the globe, ushering in massive human misery and environmental destruction in its wake. As King Pyrrhus might have said, another “victory” like the one in Libya may be the undoing of us.
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Quite revealingly, the self-proclaimed crusader against genocide, Samantha Power, was awarded the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize in Berlin. That Power would be awarded a prize named after one of the world’s great génocidaires, and that she would happily accept it, proves what many of us have believed all along – that she is more the clever apologist for U.S. crimes than a bona fide human rights advocate. The problem with Power all along has been that her refusal to acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that the U.S., as exemplified by such figures as Henry Kissinger himself, is in reality the world leader in war crimes commission, and an active facilitator of genocide. The U.S. is not, as Power has claimed throughout her career, a force for halting such evils. However, Power has done an impressive job in advancing this myth, and in the process in perpetuating the false belief that the world would be better off if only the U.S. were more active militarily throughout the world. In so doing, Power, who is lauded as some great human rights advocate, probably does more than any other public figure to harm the cause of global human rights. Power’s acceptance speech, entitled, “Remarks on ‘Twenty-First Century Realism’ at the Awarding of the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize,” is very illustrative of the delusions Power promotes in the interest of U.S. power projection and the grave harms done by this projection. [1] First of all, Power, in full agreement with Kissinger, condemns what she refers to as “the rise of extremist and isolationist voices in the U.S.” who dare challenge “the internationalist assumptions that have undergirded U.S. foreign policy across party lines since the Second World War.” This statement is pregnant with meaning and deserves some dissecting. As an initial matter, it is stunning that Power would characterize those who call for the U.S. to stop, or even slow, its aggressive, interventionist policy around the globe as “extremist” when it so clear to any rational observer that it is this interventionist policy itself which is so extremist as to be insane. Indeed, it is hard to point to any great successes, especially in terms of human rights, that the U.S.’s post-WWII “internationalism” (I would prefer to call it imperialist aggression) achieved, and Power in her speech tellingly does not point to even one such success. And, how could she with a straight face? The innumerable U.S. interventionist adventures since WWII have done nothing to advance human rights or even national security, at least if national security means the protection of U.S. citizens like you and me. Rather, the U.S.’s “internationalism” has consisted of overthrowing constitutional democracies in countries like Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), Haiti (2004), Honduras (2009), just to name a few. It has consisted of carrying out mass slaughter in an attempt to put down national liberation struggles, for example in Vietnam and in Southern Africa, costing the lives of millions. And, it has involved sowing instability throughout Northern Africa and the Middle East, in such countries as Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Power’s complete blindness to such realities – though she ironically entitles her speech, “Twenty-first Century Realism” – is hard to fathom. For example, she explains the current rise of ISIL in Iraq as the product of “the deeply sectarian, corrupt, and abusive rule of Prime Minister Maliki . . . . “ There is no mention, however, of the 1991 and 2003 military interventions in Iraq by the U.S., nor of the intervening sanctions regime, which destroyed the social fabric of that country and left hundreds of thousands of civilians, including at least half a million children, dead. No, those acts of “internationalism” apparently do not deserve even a mention in Power’s distorted view. In addition, Power does not mention the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011, though that was an intervention which she and her soulmates Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice played a key role in bringing about. Again, the undisputed result of this intervention has been instability in Libya and surrounding countries, such Mali and Tunisia, and the accompanying rise of armed extremist groups in those countries. But again, this deserves no mention. Instead, Power attempts to explain the “instability roiling the Middle East” as the product of almost mystical forces beyond the purview of the U.S., thus criticizing those who would “presume that the United States had within our control to put the Arab Spring genie back in the bottle . . . .” Power, repeating her long-time refrain which has given her the reputation as a human rights advocate, ends her speech by stating that “we no longer live in an era in which foreign policymakers can claim to serve their nations’ interests treating what happens to people in other countries as an afterthought. . . . What happens to people in other countries matters. It matters to the welfare of our own nations and our own citizens.” Of course, there is nothing particularly profound about this statement, and it would be hard to find many who would admit to disagreeing with it. However, as with all Power says, what is absent is any discussion about how the actions of the U.S., and of even of Power herself, has undermined the welfare of people in other countries. For example, in addition to her role in pushing for the disastrous intervention in Libya, Power has also been active in giving diplomatic cover to the U.S.-backed Saudi slaughter in Yemen which continues to this day. Thus, in an episode quite reminiscent of those she criticizes in her Pulitzer-prize winning book, A Problem From Hell, Power helped the Saudis scuttle a resolution at the United Nations that called for an investigation into the civilian toll of the Saudi coalition war against Yemen [2], in which at least 6,000 civilians have been killed and 14 million civilians find themselves on the brink of starvation. In the end, even for Power, whether “people in other countries matter” inevitably depends upon who the people are, and whether the state impacting their interests is a friend of the U.S. or not. In short, Power is really the perfect exemplar of U.S. foreign policy. She is a hypocrite and a phony idealist who believes her own lies about the role of the U.S., and even herself, in the world, and who does a great job of convincing the public that these lies are truth. But sadly — like Kissinger himself who will never be able to wash the blood of the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Chileans, Argentines and East Timorese off his hands, but who nonetheless is treated as an elder statesman — Power will most likely never be brought to account. She will continue to live out her days watching Boston Red Sox games and hanging out with the rich and powerful, while other, lesser criminals are sent to The Hague. Regrettably, this is what passes for human rights these days . . . Notes |