Hi, my name is Sandy Baird and I'm here with Kurt Mehta and we're going to have a discussion about what's happening in the United States and around the world. And Kurt is a lawyer in Burlington and I am also, and we're also citizens of this great United States. And that's how we're talking as citizens and as very concerned citizens most of the time. We're here today to talk a little bit about what's going on with the Biden presidency. And Kurt has a lot of feelings and opinions and facts about the Biden administration and so do I, but I'll let's start the conversation. So what do you think? What's going on? All right. So we're about 10 months into this administration and I'm going to say something that's probably revolutionary for a lot of people that are on the left and on the right. I'm going to say that the Biden administration has continued a lot of the policies that the Trump administration established during his presidency, much the chagrin of a lot of people that are in Biden's base. And in contrast to a lot of the news reporting on the left and the right, I think the two presidents have more in common in terms of policy than one would believe. Candidate Biden spoke out. Can I interrupt you for a minute? So are you referring mainly to foreign policy or also domestic or both? I'm going to point to both. Yeah, examples of foreign policy where the two administrations, there's actually been continuity between the two administrations is on the issue of Cuba. Policy towards Cuba. President Trump during the course of his administration put through about 243 sanctions and that's a fact, 243 additional sanctions on Cuba. On Cuba. Poor little Cuba. Poor little Cuba. Yeah. And candidate Biden ran on the fact that he was going to go back towards the Obama approach of reconciliation and reproach with Cuba and President Biden has not done so to that list of 243 sanctions. President Biden has actually added another two, making it 245. What are sanctions exactly? I don't know if our audience really understands sanctions and what they do to a country. Well, the sanctions regime is specifically in the case of Cuba has to do with an embargo on that country, which the Cubans call a blockade, an economic. What's the difference? Well, a blockade is basically, what the Cubans claim, an embargo can be looked at as a unilateral action on the part of the United States in this example, that we have certain penalties that we've imposed on Cuba because of the type of government, the form of government and the leadership that it's had. So that's an embargo. It's a regime of different sanctions of penalties. What the Cubans claim is that- For trade or what? For everything. For everything. Okay. For life in general. Okay. It affects trade, which affects its economy, which affects its medical care, tourism, a number of different areas, and of course its defense too. What the Cubans have always claimed is that this was not just an embargo, a sanctions regime or penalties imposed by its biggest neighbor, that it's actually a blockade. Now the difference here is when it's a blockade, no other country can come in and actually do business and work with Cuba, which is largely the case in many areas. Most countries have companies that work and do work in Cuba and other countries. However- Let's look at an example. Don't the Italians, for instance, have a hotel chain there? Sure. Yeah. But the premise under that hotel chain that they have to operate by is that if they are going to work with Cuba- Now this is the extraterritoriality principle that the embargo sanctions regime has actually imposed is that if you work with Cuba, I'm going to use very simple terms, you can't work with the United States. Okay. Right. So a company, let's say you and I had a hotel company in a different country or we sold cars. We would have to make a decision whether or not we want to work with Cuba, a country of about 11 million people, mostly kind of on the poor side, or the United States, 320 million people, one of the richest countries in the world. And we would have to forgo that market for Cuba. It doesn't make a whole lot of economic sense to do that unless you have something in your DNA that makes you want to specifically work with Cuba to the exclusion of the United States. So that's the decision one has to make if they're going to do business with Cuba if they're from another country. And that's certainly something that we actually, as the United States, through its sanctions regime have imposed on Cuba and other countries. So that's why Cuba calls it a blockade. Right. So technically, sure, there are a couple of companies that have chosen to work with Cuba, but normally you have to be nuts to give up a market of 320 million affluent people, many affluent people, not all, and to the, you know, and prefer a small island country of 11 million. Okay, right. So the countries that do do business in Cuba can afford to do so, like China. Certainly. Or Russia. But even China and Russia. Yeah. Yeah. And if they make a company in China, let's use as an example, they would be crazy to, you know, think that they're going to succeed and thrive without the U.S. market 90 miles away. But they do do business in Cuba. They do. There are exceptions, yes. Yeah. Yeah. Not many, though. Yeah. Not many. No, big ones. Big countries can do that. They can. Probably. They can afford to do it. If they can afford to do it. And the United States doesn't cut off China. No, they don't. No. However, if a Chinese company did business in Cuba, it is excluded from doing business with the United States. But does China have any private companies in the first place? All their companies are really state-owned or at least majority state-owned, correct? Yeah. Yeah. Not probably very different from Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac. Right. Right. And Russia's the same or not. Russia has always been friendly toward Cuba. Sure. Sure. But that being said, private Russian companies always have one eye on the American market. Sure, of course. Absolutely. Which makes sense because of the population. Right. Because of the American economy. Okay, so but you're arguing that Biden has continued most than of Trump's foreign policy. A lot of foreign policy. And that's an example. So Cuba was an example. Yeah. Another example is Iran. Candidate Biden in 2020 mentioned that it was a terrible act on Trump's part to unilaterally pull out of the Iran deal, which basically allowed Iran to multiply their enriched uranium by tenfold since we've departed from this deal. Candidate Biden said it was a terrible decision to go that route. His current national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, in 2000, I want to say 19, when he was, I think he was in a think tank and he made a comment about the pullout from the Iran deal. Iran deal. Yeah. He called it unilateral, I'm sorry, predatory unilateralism on the part of the Trump administration to do that. However, ten months into the Biden administration, we have a situation where there really isn't any major move towards reentering that deal. And as I mentioned before, in that time frame between Trump pulling out and present, Iran has about ten times the amount of enriched uranium that it had when the deal was being abide by the United States as well as other powers. Okay. I read today, however, I mean, certainly one of our main allies, Israel, doesn't want a reentry into that deal, right? So what's going on there? I mean, are we just going with Israel then? The same way as we've always? Or what's the deal? What have we changed about Iran? Anything? Perhaps. I mean, that's what we are doing. But that was a major departure on the part of the Obama administration to engage in that deal. Right. If folks have a memory of, you know, the beginning stages of that deal, the negotiations, President Netanyahu of Israel at that time went before the General Assembly of the United Nations. Just Obama's wishes. Right. In the General Assembly and held up a picture of a ticking bomb with a fuse that was about to, you know, hit. A bomb that he believed that Iran was going to have. Correct. Right. Yeah. So he opposed the deal, always. He was always opposed to the deal. However, under Secretary of State John Kerry at the time, they worked fairly hard, the Obama administration, to engage in this deal. And they had to get Russia on board, as well as the Germans and the British and the French. And the French, right. Right. And so it was a difficult deal to orchestrate, but it did work out. And there was actual, you know, oversight of the programs that Iran had. The Iran was allowing inspectors to come in to view what they were doing. Now, are these things, you know, without error? Absolutely. Of course they were better than what we have now and what we have before. Well, without saying what was better or what was worse, what your contention is, is that... If the premise is that Iran should not develop a nuclear bomb. But the other premise is that Trump took us out of that deal. Correct? Correct. Okay. And so what you're saying is that Biden has not put us back into the deal. Right.  Yeah. He wasn't opposed to the deal or dealing with Iran. He said he didn't think the deal was good that Obama had struck. He wanted to negotiate a better deal. And interestingly, one of the excuses that the Biden administration now has used for not jumping back into the deal, assuming that the Iranians are even interested... At this point. ... at this point, is that it is now criticizing the Obama administration's deal by saying we need to strike a better deal. Right. Similar to the rhetoric that President Trump had on Iran. Right. Okay. So what about Afghanistan? Afghanistan, the President Biden continued Trump's attempt to withdraw from that country. That was the... Okay. So that's a continuation. That seems to be... That's a clear continuation of policy. In terms of how it was done, who knows if President Trump would have done a better job in terms of the optics. There wasn't a lot of preparation put into the departure prior to the change in administrations. So who knows what would have happened. But the policy in and of itself is a continuation of the Trump policy, which was to depart from that country. Right. Be... This is my thought on Afghanistan.  And I think that Trump... I think it predates this... Yeah, I do, too. I do, too. Eternal admission of defeat predates Trump. There's no admission of defeat. Well, right, right. It's an internal... It's an internal admission of debate. Right. In fact, I think Trump wanted to withdraw to give him some kind of credit because he knew there was going to be a defeat. So let's get out now. And I do think he would have done it probably better because I think once Biden was elected, he was convinced that we could stay. Right. I bet you by the military. And then all of a sudden, the Taliban said, no, you can't stay and this is it. Get out. Yeah. And I think he did the right thing, frankly, by getting out. But the getting out, as you said, it was a catastrophe. The optics... The optics were terrible. Well, there was no preparation. I don't think... Right. Was there? The optics were terrible. It wasn't done well in advance. And the intelligence was bad that the Biden administration... Right. Why was the intelligence bad? Well, the intelligence is always bad in many situations like this. But... How could it have been bad? Since they assumed that the Taliban, in its attempt to recapture the country and its re-entry into Kabul, the capital city, was going to be a more protracted process. Right. But why did they do that? Did they make that mistake? Was it a mistake? Or were they just trying to stay there? That's a good question, Sandy. I don't know. I don't know if it was intentional. I think they were trying to stay there. Okay. That's what I think, but I don't have any real hard evidence of that. Right.  Why would they have missed the fact that American citizens knew that that was going to happen? Yeah. That they were going to take over? The interesting thing is that people on the left that would normally align themselves with Biden for the first time were critical of the Biden administration. I know. I saw that. Yeah. And that they actually were proposing a longer stay. I know. Why? For the first time. Even if that meant they were going to attack their savior, Biden, President Biden. Why? Why did that happen? I don't know, Sandy. Because they didn't want to give any credence to Trump. I think that most of the left has been guilty of Trump's derangement syndrome. Anything that Trump has ever done is bad, and everything to save the Biden administration is okay. Right. However, that's not how, even though the narrative, you may have a correct narrative, it's not playing out from a policy standpoint right now. No, I know it. I know it. As I'm going through a number of these different foreign policy. No, because I think in general that you're right. I think there are key differences, and maybe we'll get to that, but so in terms of foreign policy, your contention or argument is that it's just a continuation of the Trump administration. It takes Saudi Arabia, for example. Okay, what about it? The candidate at Biden took a very harsh stance against the current crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Muhammad bin Salman. He's alleged, yes, bin Salman is alleged to have orchestrated the killing of that journalist, Khashoggi, Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist who had an American green card lived outside of Washington, D.C. And I won't spare you the details, but he was, you know, horrifically mutilated and killed. Chopped up into little pieces, sawed into little pieces. Right, okay, so you've finished my thought. Yeah, right, I don't know why he wouldn't bring that up. It was in a foreign embassy in Turkey where it happened, in an office. And candidate Biden said that sanctions would be imposed against Saudi Arabia as well as the crown prince himself, where the Trump administration largely tried to ignore the involvement of the Saudi prince because of their personal and business dealings that they have in that country, the Trump family has in that country, as well as with the prince. However, President Biden, when he came in and had the opportunity to impose sanctions, impose sanctions on a limited group of people that the crown prince offered as potential killers. And there were no sanctions against the prince himself, because when it came to it, Biden wasn't able to pull that off. Wasn't able to or didn't want to? Didn't want to. Why not? Not sure. Not sure. Because of the relationship that the country has with the Saudis, the Saudis behind the scenes are actually working with the Israelis. And there is this Middle Eastern attempt to isolate Iran, which the Sunni... Right. They're competitors, aren't they, Iran and Saudi Arabia? Right. And from a religious standpoint, religious philosophy standpoint, the Saudis, UAE, and most of the, a good number of the countries in the Middle East are Sunni Muslims and the Iranians are Shiite Muslims. So that's an internal thing between those countries that why they don't like one another. True. But they're also both interested in hegemony in the Middle East. Absolutely. I mean, they're both in a power struggle, too. It's not just a religious difference, religious differences are not only just that. That's for edification for the public. But yeah, behind the scenes, this is a power struggle, absolutely. But I don't really understand, I don't understand those kinds of power struggles because they get so lethal. Yes. And that's, like, for instance, in Yemen, what the heck is going on there? Yeah. You know, I don't really understand that. You essentially have a proxy war between the Saudis and the Iranians. Right, exactly. That's happening there. And we've been involved, too, with respect to the arming of the Saudis. Right. Right. Arming the Saudis. Right. That's one of our oldest allies in the Middle East, the Saudi Arabia, even though it's an absolutely brutal regime. Brutal regime and its connections with September, the September 11th attacks continue to be revealed in declassified memos 20 years ago. So what you're saying is crucial to understand, I think, even the nature of the U.S. federal government is that no matter who's the president, the foreign policy pretty much stays the same. Because it's not controlled by the president, no matter who he is. You can't downplay the role that institutions have. Well, you can't downplay the secret institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency, either. Sure. But even the not-so-secret ones. Yeah, I know. Department of Defense. Yeah. Yeah. A single man or woman is often not enough to recharge or change the acts of an institution that has had a certain policy for a lengthy period of time. I would guess that that's right. Difficult to change the culture as well as the actions and policies of the institution. Right. Well, think of the defense budget, so-called defense budget. Think about the fact that Biden did not favor any cuts in that, did he? No, that's right. No. And that depends on perpetual war, it would appear to me. Right. Which is certainly still going on. The situation in Syria is the same as well, right? Right. There's no changes in Syria. Right. I mean, what was revolutionary, if you want to use the term, drawing a blank, draining the swamp that the prior President Trump mentioned. What was very different about what he was trying to do, not that he did, but it was trying to do, at least in the beginning, is to disengage from a lot of places in the world that have been in this perpetual state of war that we've actively been involved in. And I think, at that time, President Trump's belief and policies that he was proposing was that this was unsustainable. Number one, yes, but, you know, I always was interested in Trump's foreign policy because what I saw from the beginning was crucial that he wanted to make deals with Russia. Right. He did not want Cold War any longer with Russia or Putin. I favored that. Right. And I think that's a lot of reasons why he did get jettisoned by the secret state, by the deep state, whatever you want to call it. The interesting part of that is, and I actually acknowledge that that was an interest on his part, at the very least in terms of working with the Russians on different types of things. However, I don't know who is responsible. You're calling the secret state, I'm not sure. But then bringing people into the fold, like John Bolton, who wound up screwing them later anyway. I know. You got rid of him, though, too. Well, yeah. But to even contemplate having someone with Mr. Bolton's policies in your administration when your role or your attempt is to try to reduce America's footprint in some of these difficult places where, you know, Mr. Bolton never saw a war that he didn't like. He didn't go to Vietnam, the one he was eligible to serve in. No, he didn't go, though, did he? Right. Of course not. Of course not. But so having these people in his administration, it created an odd contrast from the stated policy, which was to disengage. And then you have people, you know, we're talking, I mean, he was a national security advisor, if I'm not mistaken. No, I think so. Pretty big position. Right. But let's, okay, for once, let's put yourself in Trump's head for a bit, okay? Which I honestly tried to do at the time, because he's the President of the United States and I think we needed to figure it out at the time. So he's, I think that the guy put America first. That's a policy that was hotly disputed by everybody, not only the opposition of the Democrats, but also by whatever you want to call the Central Intelligence Agency or the globalists in the economy or much of the Democratic Party, what they, what the economy is tending toward is a globalist economy. Trump didn't like that. Yeah. Okay, he didn't like our relationship with Russia, and he was actually in his own mind putting America first. Now, that, though, brought him into political problems. With people like John Bolton. So I think that Trump was trying to maneuver between two impossible contradictions. Well, you have a situation then where, you know, I mean, I'm sure people on the left aren't going to like my... No, they don't like anything I said for a long time. No, unlike my mention of Trump and Lincoln in the same sentence, but there was a great book that Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote about, you know, Lincoln's cabinet. I read it. I'm drawing a blank as to what the game was. It was that you keep your enemies close, basically. Right, right. So President Lincoln, you know, essentially in that context, if you put him in a modern context, would have brought someone like John Bolton in so he could kind of keep tabs. Not only keep tabs, but prove to the opposition that Trump faced, that he was at least listening or that he was throwing them a bone. Sure. That's what I thought he was doing. And then you remember that, as you said, Bolton left, and he also betrayed Trump in a lot of ways. Sure, sure. I mean, Trump paid for all that. Remember the whole Russia collusion stuff? Right. His friendship or his willingness to consider a decency toward Russia was treated as a Russian hoax. Yeah. I mean, that was, you know, that policy.  Right. You didn't get any credit about it. No, no. You know, I mean, if the mindset of the foreign policy establishment or institutions that are in place. No, they hated it. The foreign policy toward Cuba. I mean, John F. Kennedy got skewered on foreign policy toward Cuba. It's important to somebody. I mean, it's hard to imagine how that island has stuck in people's anger for so many years. It's amazing. It's amazing. And it's just as poor, but it's socialist. Right. And there is a political game that's being waged in the state of Florida because of a large, you know, exile Cuban population. Right. I wouldn't say just in Florida. It's also pretty big in New Jersey, isn't it? Sure, absolutely. Absolutely. But yeah. Okay. But so your contention is that it's basically the same administration, particularly in terms of foreign policy. Largely in terms of foreign policy. Okay. But turning to domestic, the domestic scene, you still think that's the same? On immigration, the issue of immigration. Legal. Legal immigration. Yeah. I'm actually going to say even illegal, where there were supposedly far many more illegal influence in the country during the Trump administration than the Obama administration. Yeah, the Obama. Yes, yes. Obama administration had the reputation. He personally had the reputation of being called the deporter-in-chief. Yeah, I know it. And he did? Right. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Okay. So why do you... I mean, my thing is that I watch this every day and it's reported every day now on all the networks. Yeah. Only at first it was reported, only really on Fox, of this border crisis of people flooding into the country. Haitians all living under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas. Is that the place? I believe so. Yeah, okay. But it appears to me that this is a difference, because Trump wanted to put a wall up. Right. Correct? That's correct. They've already repudiated that. Right. Isn't that a difference? Yeah. Well, Trump wanted to put a physical wall up. Yeah. Yeah. The wall that's still up right now is a red tape wall that exists, and which hasn't really changed. But how are all these people flooding in, though? Aren't they being released with a court date, many of them? Some are. Yeah. But that's always been a system. Yeah. But Trump, I believe, tried to stop that. Tried. Right. Right. And Biden, see, I'm concerned about this, this big difference, because I don't understand it. If you accept the figures of people coming across the border, why is this happening? Is it an attempt to get some kind of a cheap labor market? Why on earth is this happening? Okay. The other thing that I find concerning is that there's so many jobs in this country that are going unfilled. Yeah. There's, I mean, for lack of a better description, people don't want to work. Why not? I mean, they're getting great benefits. Not no, no, no.  Up until recently, they were getting great benefits, and many jobs and industries, the benefits that they were getting for staying home exceeded what they were getting when they actually had to shop. And I understand that. I understand people's desire not to go back to some crummy job that they think is crummy and low-grade. Sure. Those benefits have been cut off. Yeah. So what's going on now? So there's something else happening in the labor market, which I think, you know, I don't have any answer for. Nobody seems to. But it seems to be something that they're trying to study and understand. And it's actually disproportionately affecting, if affecting is the right term, men more than women. It seems like a lot of men are not going back into the labor market. Many jobs, you know, really. I mean, I've worked at crummy jobs a lot in my life. Right now.  But you know, I worked as a nurse's aide. I worked in jobs that were very—I worked on a picking tobacco on a farm in Connecticut when I was a teenager. Why would people want to do that again if they don't have to? Yeah. Besides, which is lousy pay. Right. But all the factors that come into immigration, where you have people from overseas begging to do—to be a nurse's aide or to do pizza or— I know. So that's what I mean. Why then? What is the—why is this happening? Why are people being allowed into the country? I don't—I don't—I like people coming into the country. I like people being here in Burlington, as a matter of fact, because I think it makes Burlington useful and have a lot of young people. But the Biden administration seems to be allowing a lot of illegal—or rather, people coming across the border, and I guess they say they're going to apply for asylum. So they're being released with a court date. Yeah. And Trump tried to stop that. Right. But the approvals, I mean, again, the institutional changes that Trump made within the immigration system with the appointment of judges, however, those have not gone away. So even though Biden may have a certain policy at the border, they're— If he does. Or the policy could be to letting people in. The policy and the courts have not changed. No, I know, but they don't get court dates, as we both know. Well, they— No, they do. They do. It's— Yeah, a year later. I haven't—yeah. They don't get immigration—they don't get work authorization before that. Yeah. I think our time is—we're getting the high sign from the folks here. Okay, great. But anyway, the domestic policy is something we maybe should explore the next time around. The next time, yeah. Yeah, okay. Well, thank you very much, Kurt. We'll see you in a month or so, I hope.


As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh Bismillahir rahmanir raheem, alhamdulillah wa as-salatu wa as-salamu ala Rasulillah wa ala alihi wa as-Habihi wa man wa alaah We praise Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, we send blessings and salutations upon Muhammad sallallahu alayhi wa sallam His household, all his companions, we ask Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to bless them all and to bless every single one of us My brothers and sisters, the days and the nights are not equal when it comes to spirituality, when it comes to the power of the dua that you and I make Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has kept certain days and nights better than others For example, we are all aware that the night of Laylatul Qadr, the most powerful night from amongst the nights of the year And this is towards the end of Ramadan Similarly, when it comes to the days, these 10 days that we are in right now, the first 10 days of Dhul-Hijjah are the most noble, the highest, the loftiest of days And the confusion that some have, they forget that there is a difference between night and day Some people say, well, if these days are very powerful, what about Laylatul Qadr? Well, if you were to pause for a moment, Laylatul Qadr is an evening, it's a night, it's not a day, so that's the difference Regarding the days, these are the most powerful days of the year Regarding the nights, it is definitely Laylatul Qadr closely followed by the eaves of the two eads that we do have May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala bestow upon us His mercy and His blessings Similarly, if we take a look at the plan of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala He has kept its such through His divine wisdom that every single one of us has needs These needs, yes, He has granted us the physical capacity sometimes to fulfill some of them But if you were to look at a lot of these needs, we are incapable of fulfilling these needs Except by the help of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala In fact, every single need is such that if it was not for Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala His mercy and His gifts that He has bestowed upon us, we would never be able to achieve anything It is He who gave us the brains we have, the energy we have, the physical ability, the capacity we have The sustenance, the families and so on It is Allah alone, so none of us should ever think that it is because of a goodness of our own that we have achieved Rather, it is definitely only and solely by the blessing and fuddle of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala His virtue Similarly, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wants to be worshipped in a specific way One of the ways He wants to be worshipped and He has sent messengers to teach us how He wants to be worshipped For this reason it is wrong for us to engage in acts of worship that were not delivered by the messengers who came With the message from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala So, one of them is Salah Salah is the five daily prayers that we have I cannot fulfill this Salah as per my own whims and fancies I need to make sure I fulfill it as per the instruction of the one who brought it to us from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Hence, the number of units, what I should read in every unit What I should say when I bow down, when I prostrate All this is governed and determined by Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam who was given it by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala So ultimately it comes from Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Similarly, regarding some aspects there is a leeway Regarding some aspects there is no leeway I give you an example When it comes to reading, you have to read the Qur'an in Salah When you are standing, you have to What exactly to read? You read Surah al-Fatiha and after that you have a choice There is a leeway What should you read? The hadith says Faqra matayas saramaaka min al-Quran Read whatever is easy for you from the Qur'an You read one long verse, three short verses as a minimum So there is a leeway regarding what to read But I need to read from the Qur'an Similarly, when I am changing positions I am taught to say Allahu Akbar And I am taught to say, for example, This is quite specific When it comes, for example, to sacrificing the animal There is a specific way of doing it I cannot just begin by injuring the animal And waiting for it to die And claim that I said the name of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala That's not good enough If it is a sacrificial animal And not an animal that is hunted There is a specific way of doing it And if it is a hunted animal The way might change slightly But the core remains the same May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala bless us Similarly, one of the ways Allah wants to be worshipped Is that He creates needs within us That we will have to call out to Him regarding I have no option but to call out to Allah To make dua to Him I need to call out to Him to say O Allah grant me goodness, grant me happiness Grant me sustenance, protect my children Grant me offspring, grant me a blessed home Grant me jannah, grant me paradise I need to ask Allah And Allah gets happy when you ask Him So much so that one narration says Ad dua'u hua al ibadah Worship in actual fact is To call out to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Or the other way around By calling out to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala You are in actual fact worshipping Allah Because when I ask Him for something I am acknowledging He is the greatest I am acknowledging He has what I want And this is why when we associate Or when someone associates partners With Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala He becomes very angry because It is an insult to Allah To ask from someone else what Allah owns May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala protect us From all forms of shirk and polytheism Amin So it is important for us to call out For our needs Some of these needs we find ourselves Quite helpless when it comes to Certain matters For example and I am just going to give you an example If the economy begins to For example slide And we start calling out to Allah Nothing seems to be happening People are struggling financially And they call out to Allah Never lose hope in the mercy of Allah Not at all Don't think I have got a brain I have got a mind Don't worry I will make a plan No matter what you have Yes you may make a plan But ask Allah Continue asking Allah Not just for yourself But even for others So we are taught that When you ask for others Then the angels say Amin to the dua Saying Walaka mitluhu And may you have similar To what you are asking for your brother So if I were to say O Allah that man is ill Grant him good health I am automatically making a dua for myself If I were to say O Allah that man is poor Grant him wealth I am automatically Making dua for myself This is why I do not be selfish When it comes to dua You don't know The more powerful dua Even for yourself Is when you supplicate For others May Allah make it easy for us to do that We become selfish sometimes Only asking for ourselves May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Protect us all Similarly when it comes to Calling out to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala It is very very important To go through the blessed words Of Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wasallam He was the best of creation He is the best of creation The most noble of all the Messengers of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala To say his name Without saying Sallallahu alaihi wasallam May blessings and salutations be upon him May the blessings of Allah be upon him That would be an insult If one were to leave that out intentionally So such a noble man Such a great person Such a great creature of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala It is important for us to go through The words that he has uttered When he called out And something very interesting We will find is When we look at these words Some of it We will be wondering Why did he have to call out for this He did not have bad qualities Bad habits But we find him saying O Allah protect me from laziness O Allah protect me for example From being miserly From cowardice for example Let's take a look at Some of these narrations There is a narration of Aisha radiAllahu anha A very important narration Which teaches us How to call out to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala And the reason I make mention Of this is this Is the season of dua At the moment we are In the first ten days of Dhul-Hijjah It is a season of calling out Call out to Allah And continue repeating your dua In our language We would say Like a mad man A mad man meaning You just keep on repeating The same thing Imagine if I were talking to you And I kept repeating The same thing You would be irritated But when it comes to Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala It's an act of worship To repeat things sometimes The reason is You are acknowledging Your desperation O Allah grant me O Allah grant me Two minutes later And you're saying the same thing By the time you repeat it A million times Do you really think That the mercy of Allah Would dictate That you're not supposed to have it Subhanallah A million is not actually a figure It's just something I mentioned So Aisha radiAllahu anha Says one day I was in prayer And the Prophet Sallallahu alaihi wa sallam Wanted something So he called out to me He realized she's in prayer And he said O Aisha Let your dua Meaning the supplication Be the dua Which is very broad in meaning Yet it is short in words So Aisha radiAllahu anha Says when I completed my prayer I turned to him And I asked him Can you tell me Which is it of the prayers Or how should I Supplicate in a way That the wording will be concise And at the same time The meaning will be broad So he gives an example Let's listen to these words He says O Aisha Say O Allah I ask you all goodness I ask you all goodness That which is immediate And that which is to follow later I want the goodness now And later on as well That which I know And that which I don't know Amazing look at this So you're asking for all goodness Sometimes I don't know That this is good for me But because of this dua Allah will give it to me It's amazing And then he continues to say O Allah I seek refuge in you O Allah From all evil That which is immediate And that which is to come later on That which I know And that which I don't know So look at how the balance is struck On one hand She is taught to ask for all goodness Now and later Whether I know it or don't And on the other hand She is taught to seek protection From all evil Because my brothers and sisters All of us As much as we would love goodness We would also love To be protected from harm Amazing What's the point of earning A million dollars And then suffering a loss Of two million May Allah SWT Not do that to us Then he continues to say And I ask you Paradise Now Al-Jannah is Paradise This shows us that You don't only ask for the dunya You're going to be living here For a few more years People have left already Younger than you People have left wealthier And healthier than you and I So we need to make sure We ask regarding What is to follow as well So he says Say O Allah I ask you Jannah And any deed Or statement That will draw me closer To Paradise Make it easy for me To say things And do things That will make it easy For me to gain Paradise What a beautiful wording And then he says Wa A'udubika min annari Wa Maqarraba ilayha min qawlin Awamal And O Allah I seek your protection From hellfire And any statement or deed That will bring me close To hellfire Look at the balance First goodness And then protection from evil Then Paradise And then protection from hellfire And then he continues to say Say I ask you all the goodness In one narration Al Khair Meaning all the goodness That Muhammad peace be upon him Asked of you I'm asking the same SubhanAllah A powerful wording And then he says And I seek protection Or I seek refuge in you From all the evil That Muhammad peace be upon him Sort protection from Throughout his life obviously Then he caps it He ends it by saying Whatever you have decreed For me O Allah Let the end of it be goodness I might not understand Why I'm going through difficulty right now I might not understand The situation I'm in right now Grant me the patience Ya Allah Ensure that the end of all of this Is something really good A person who is sick and ill It is reported when they see The reward that is in store For them in the hereafter They will be so impressed So happy So glad That they may even say Why didn't you keep me sick and ill For long O Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala So that I could achieve such a great reward Through the sabr and the endurance So Allah knows Why you are going through The matters that you may be going through Remember it is Allah Who knows this Therefore continue asking Allah O Allah Whatever you have decreed for me Make the end of it Filled with goodness O Allah This narration is reported by Al-Bukhari In a compilation Known as Al-Adab Al-Mufrad That he has compiled Another hadith of Anas Ibn Malik He says These are beautiful words again Of Rasulullah sallallahu alaihi wa sallam The reason I mentioned them Let's try and call out Using the same blessed words These are powerful words They are not my words, your words They are the words of the most noble Of all prophets The greatest of all creatures of Allah Subhanahu wa ta'ala He asked using these words And he was granted using the same words So it would be considered a sunnah Or a practice of following The example of Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam If we were to use the same words He says the prophet sallallahu alaihi wa sallam Used to say I seek refuge in you From Incapacity Inability Disability Al-Adz When someone is unable Incapable Say for example A disabled person They are totally disabled O Allah protect me from that And protect me from laziness Now Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam Was not disabled in any way He was never unable To do something in any way But at the same time He asks for this So that we Can follow these beautiful words Then he says O Allah protect me from kassal Meaning laziness Subhanallah Something we desperately need With the new generation O Allah protect us from laziness Muhammad sallallahu alaihi wa sallam Was the most energetic He had the power of Between 30 and 300 men Depending on generations Meaning a lot of men But he is still saying O Allah protect me from laziness Amazing Every day he used to call out Using these words And then Wa-l-Jubni Wa-l-Haram O Allah protect me from stinginess Miserliness Let me be generous O Allah And protect me from old age You know in old age When you become dependent on someone else O Allah protect me from that And O Allah I seek your protection Wa-a'udu beka min fitnatil mahiya wal mamat From the tests of life and death And I seek your protection From the tests of the grave We are going to be asked questions in the grave There is going to be Torment in the grave For those who deserve it There is going to be goodness in the grave For those who deserve it We are seeking protection from the evil And asking Allah for the goodness Another narration Of Anas ibn Malik radiallahu an Something really beautiful He says I heard the messenger saying And I heard him saying this more than once Allahumma inni a'udu beka min alhammi wal huzzin O Allah I seek protection in you From worries Imagine worrying Something that overtakes your mind I am worried He was not worried at all But the reason why he uttered these words Is so that we could not only get a reward For uttering the same words But so that we are taught how to ask Allah Whatever my worry is you know Help me I seek refuge in you from the evil Known as alhamm worries And he says alhammi wal hazan O al huzzin There are both narrations If you say al huzzin it refers to sadness And if you say al hazan it refers to difficulty Hardship Hazan is something hard And huzzin is something sad So Allah protect me from sadness Protect me from worry You know make me happy A person who is happy And you handle all my affairs Basically that's what it is When you are asking Allah protection from worry Then he says Wal ajzi Inability Protect me from inability Once again Wal kasal Once again Protect me from laziness Wal jubni Wal bukhil He says O Allah protect me From being miserly Protect me from cowardice And being miserly Wal ghalab ad-daini wa qahrir wijal O Allah Protect me from debts Overtaking me You know a person incurs a debt And that debt overtakes them They cannot pay back So now there is a disaster Because when a person is overtaken by debt It affects everything Their health Their mind Their happiness And their surroundings completely So this is a powerful dua That needs to be repeated every single day O Allah protect us from debt overtaking us And from the men overpowering us Which means the enemy in the case of war Or in any other case Those who intend harm O Allah Never let them overpower us What a beautiful dua And the last dua that I want to mention for today Is in the hadith of Abdullah ibn Mas'ud Where he says The prophet used to make a dua And he used to say Which means he used to supplicate And he used to say O Allah I am asking you What do you think he was asking him He says I asked you to guide me Subhanallah The one who brought the guidance to us Is saying O Allah grant me guidance Amazing It definitely proves that these words were more for us Than anything else He is saying O Allah I ask you Al-Huda Which means to guide me Guidance What tuqaa Tuqaa means I ask you piety The most pious of the lot Is saying O Allah I ask you piety And from this we learn My brothers and sisters Something very important Don't think that because you have something You should not be asking Allah for that same item Thank Allah for it O Allah you've blessed me with eyesight I thank you for eyesight O Allah strengthen my eyesight Grant me good eyesight Even though your eyesight is the best Let's continue asking Allah We learn it from this narration And similar narrations The same applies you have wealth Well when it comes to wealth No matter how much you have You still say O Allah grant me more So that's fine May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala bestow upon us goodness But you have every form of goodness And it's important for us to acknowledge it To thank Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala So he used to say I ask you chastity The most chaste from the whole lot Is asking O Allah I ask you chastity Protect me, safeguard me Don't tempt me O Allah Meaning don't allow temptations To overtake me O Allah That's a proper wording Then O Allah I ask you independence Meaning independence from others From the creatures Don't let me depend on anyone My dependence must be only and solely upon you So these are some of the powerful du'as It's important for us to go through them To listen to them To call out whether it is in the Arabic language Preferably or in any language that you understand There is no restriction when it comes to language When you are supplicating Calling out to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala But remember this is the season of du'a Do good deeds Seek a lot of forgiveness For those who seek forgiveness There is a greater likelihood That their supplications are answered Because they clear their slate With Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Before asking Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Something that is far more deserving Of the response Than a person who is sinning Morning evening Or throughout the day and night And they continue asking Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Through his mercy He may still give them But it is only correct for us To ask Allah's forgiveness May Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala Forgive us all Peace and blessings of Allah be upon our Prophet Muhammad


to the second part, which is entitled characterisation and estimation of the key-ranked distribution in the context of site channel evaluations. It offers, uh, Daniel Martin, whatever. These are what's possible in Martin's stem. Okay, that's cool. Starting from the beginning. Okay, so this is a joint work with my colleagues from Bristol, Dan, Elizabeth, and Martin. And the general theme for this talk is how to do site channel evaluations better. So the claim I want to make is that we're not evaluating the resistance of a device to non-invasive types of site channel attack, such as DPA, as well as we could be. So hopefully I want to convince you why that is and what we can do about it. But first, just to kind of motivate this why this is important. So resistance to these attacks is encoded in several evaluation processes already. If you're manufacturing to a certain level within FIPS 143 or common criteria 3.1, you have to give evidence that you're resistant to these kind of attacks. There are billions of devices out there that have to or should be following these security guidelines. And the reason why an accurate evaluation in particular is important in this case is that SCA is almost always probabilistic in nature. So sometimes the attacker gets lucky. And as evaluators, we need to be able to say with some confidence how lucky that attacker can be. So the underlying motivation for this work was there's been a recent trend in literature which suggests that we need to change how we view the outcome of our attacks. So I'll circle back around to what I mean by that. But the rough plan for this talk would be to explain how we do attacks at the moment, how we evaluate at the moment, and then how we need to change our view to include something that we call the rank of an attack. And then consequently how we should modify our evaluation strategies to include this notion of a rank. Okay, so a very, very like 10,000 foot view of a science attack is this. You have an adversary that needs to gather measurements that we call traces. It needs to be power consumption, EM radiation. And the attacker hopes that those measurements contain some information leakage on the secret key used by the device. Then the attacker has to essentially define their strategy. And that consists of two main things. The first thing is a model for the leakage for the device. And that model can be guessed, derived, estimated. But in general, the adversary hopes it matches well what is going on inside the device. And the second thing the adversary needs is what's called a distinguisher, which is essentially just an overloaded term for a statistical method on algorithm that compares the model leakage with the real leakage inside the measurement. So when the attack is run, you have a key spit out, which is the attack's best guess for what the key is, which the adversary can check using a known plain text or ciph席 pair. And in this current model, if this key is incorrect, then that's failure, the attack's failed, you have to start again. So I quickly want to discuss what affects success for an adversary. So some things are kind of systematic. If the adversary doesn't model the leakage correctly or picks a distinguisher or a technique that doesn't quite capture the dependencies in the leakage, then the attack's not going to do as well as it could do. But there's also random sources of error. There's environmental noise, there's countermeasure noise, and maybe measurement quality also matters. So the way evaluations happen at the moment is what I'd call an attack-based approach. So if you're a manufacturer and you have a device, you'll give an instance of the device with the cryptid deployed on it to some guys in the laboratory, which can be internal or external. And using their kind of best knowledge, their best expertise, they'll define a list of attacks, and they'll run those attacks on the device and see what happens. And if they all fail, if they all don't produce the key, then you're going to complete the device secure. If one succeeds, then you kind of judge its strength quantitatively, which in general, there's a few properties assessed, such as the amount of time the adversary took, how much money they had to spend. But kind of the big one is how many traces, how many measurements the adversary needed to get because these are time-consuming and expensive to acquire. Okay, so back in 2012, some guys at SAC noticed that the adversary doesn't need this attack to be perfect. And they essentially defined a strategy for the adversary in which the adversary does the exact same thing as before, same measurements, same attack configuration. But they essentially, and I don't want to go into the detail as such, but they essentially described a method for the adversary to make use of some auxiliary information contained in the attack result. And the adversary does what we call enumeration work. The adversary is able to essentially assign a score associated with the likelihood of all the key candidates being the correct one. And once you've done this, you're able to check the key candidates in order of their score. So essentially, I think a good way of viewing attacks in this model is essentially an enhanced brute force search. You assume the adversary is going to check keys, and you assume that the sideline information, what it gives you, is a bit of an ability to check keys in a clever order than just randomly. So going a little bit more formally, we say the rank of an attack is the number of keys the adversary has to check before it hits the correct one. So I'll have a kind of really simple illustration on the slide here. You assume we're attacking a block cypher with a 128-bit key. The adversary does this enumeration step and generates the keys in order of likelihood checks. It keeps going until they find the correct one. So in this example, the rank of the attack is 2 to the 57. And the adversary has to enumerate and verify that many keys. I want to point out this is absolutely not the same as doing 2 to the 57 executions of AES. There's a lot more work involved. A kind of rough idea of what happens is an attack produces several lists or several subsets of information that give information on the likelihood of certain portions of a key. And the adversary has to be smart in how it grabs those little bits of information and combines them to give a likelihood for a single candidate key. Okay. So if we circle around to evaluation, and we consider rank now, we have some interesting questions. And an example of one is this. So if you have an attack that requires 10,000 measurements and some rank left over afterwards, and an attack that requires five times more measurements but requires less brute force work afterwards, which is better. And I think the answer actually is it really does depend firstly on how long it takes to get measurements, how difficult it is, and also on how difficult the enumeration is. So at this point, there has been some work done by people to do evaluations on how to make use of rank or how to incorporate rank into evaluations. Where we started with this work was to say, kind of do the obvious thing and say, well, the rank is a random variable defined over the randomness in a fixed number of measurements. If you pick an attack strategy, pick a fixed number of measurements, and run the attack several times using different freshly gathered acquisitions, you'll have different ranks come out. And the interesting question is, well, how different will these ranks be? And then you might ask, well, can we analytically compute this distribution? Because that will be nice, nice and straightforward. But the answer is, unfortunately, no. If you're happy to make a lot of assumptions, then you could do this, although no one has yet. But in practice, if I gave someone a device tomorrow and said, compute this distribution, let's see what it looks like, they wouldn't be able to do it. And a second interesting question is, in science and literature, we normally care about averages or expectations. So success is normally defined as an average. How many times will I succeed on average? And so a good question is how it's looking at the expectation of this rank. A good idea. Okay. So if no analytical approach is available, this essentially collapses to a pure statistics problem. The only option you have left is to estimate the distribution via repeated sampling. So what this means in practice is you have to fix your strategy, fix number of measurements, gather a fresh set of measurements each time when the attack can estimate the rank. And so questions we wanted to kind of answer were what does the distribution of the rank actually look like? And secondly, in science analysis, I don't know if you've ever been to a chess conference, but you'll see hundreds of different ways of constructing attacks ranging from very, very complicated machine learning techniques that only apply in kind of niche scenarios to very, very simple, general attacks that require as little as subtracting the mean as two data sets. And so we wanted to ask, well, does the distribution to rank look the same for attacks that follow wildly different strategies? Okay. But before I go into results, actually the first thing we want as people doing evaluations is a way to... Well, essentially a way to not have to check every single key in turn. As evaluators, you don't want to be doing this every single time you want to work out the rank of an attack. But because we know the key, we can use that information to basically get a fast approximation for the rank actually is. So starting from, I guess, Europe 2013, people have tried to define methods for doing this. The majority provided an interval estimate. And actually Asia Crip last year, one of my colleagues, Dan, described an algorithm that provides a point estimate. And this is one we like. We think it's fast and accurate. And as part of this work, we spend a bit of time trying to make it better. So to quickly describe what we did, we made essentially several observations that reduced the one time of it. And this allowed us to achieve quite a few orders of magnitude more precision and no additional one time. And actually the interesting thing here is that the observations we made didn't actually reduce the algorithmic complexity, asymptotically. So it kind of shows that constants are important. And what this means in practice is that you can get a very accurate point estimate in most a few seconds on a reasonably powerful workstation CPU. Okay, so the first thing we found, the first thing we did was essentially run hundreds of thousands of millions of attacks on our university computing cluster. And we basically varied everything from noise levels, attack strategies, numbers of measurements, and so on. And the kind of interesting thing we found was that the distribution of this rank doesn't really change or is independent of all these things. And essentially, if you take an attack strategy A, which uses a small number of traitors, attack strategy B, which is cleverer, which is less clever but uses more traitors, those attacks will produce a very similar looking distribution if they kind of do equally as well. So good attacks that produce low ranks produce distributions that look the same. And bad attacks that produce high ranks that have high ranks also have distributions that look similar. We don't know why this is, this is where this analytical route might be useful. So in this work, we stuck to trying to improve the evaluation process, but that is definitely something to look into. So this is an example of what the kind of evaluation that you can do. So we took a data set produced by one of my colleagues at Bristol, which was published as Chairs 2015, which is a DPA attack on a fairly difficult target, so a device implementing AES and hardware, and where the attack strategy was for those that are interested is just a straightforward correlation, power analysis using EM measurements. So we had maybe, I think, the order of a few million traces. We took small subsets of those traces randomly, ran the exact same attack that these guys did and estimated the rank, and that's what you can see plotted on this graph. So if I were the kind of hat of an evaluator under the kind of why, except it was the current way of doing things, the interesting part is kind of down here or here, which is where the attacker starts kind of winning perfectly. On average, this is around 80,000 traces, but the adversary starts getting a luckily perfect attack around about 50,000 traces. And in fact, this is what my colleague Jake reports in his paper. Now if you take rank into account and let's assume that, I don't know, we want 80 bits of security in some sense, which is this horizontal line here, the adversary actually starts beating that, starts winning on average here, and I kind of wish I drew on lines now, but that's about 20,000 traces. And actually 10% of the time actually wins somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 traces. So that's kind of, there's quite big gaps in the number of measurements, which may be easy to define success. Another interesting to look at is the kind of distribution side-on. So this is a histogram of repeated attacks where the average rank after the attack was 2 to 16. So obviously that's good for the adversary. I mean, that caused nothing to enumerate. And you can see that the distribution looks kind of normal. You have a little bit of censorship going on on the left-hand side, because obviously you can't do better than rank zero or rank one depending on how you define it. But you can see there's, there is still a fair bit of variance going on. On average, 2 to 16 is really easy. A lot of the time I win perfectly, but sometimes I have to do more on 2 to the 40 work afterwards. And if you make these attacks slightly worse, you can see the distribution starts to spread a bit more. I think this is the most interesting one, where on average, the attacker has to do 2 to 64 enumeration work, which is a lot. I think the most we've ever done in our lab is 2 to the 50, and that took 700 calls for one day. But some of the time, I don't know what the percentages are, but maybe 10% of the time, it's actually quite easy, with even maybe 2 to 45. And, I don't know, 25, 30% of the time, the adversary is totally screwed. It has to do more than 2 to the 80. So this suggests, well, it seems pretty obvious that you perhaps shouldn't look at averages. And essentially, the best thing to do is to define a threshold and look at when your distribution tail crosses that threshold. And if I keep going, you can see how this normal distribution shape continues. Okay, so our proposal for how evaluations should be done now, if you care about rank, is essentially to collapse it to a statistics problem. It's the only kind of way to do things, which requires repeated sampling from the distribution for an attack. In terms of statistics, this large variance, which is, I guess actually I didn't mention this, kind of in the positions, the unfortunate positions in which you're most interested. So, as I'm guessing, as a manufacturer, you're probably going to be interested in when ranks are around 2 to 60, 2 to 70, maybe even 2 to the 80. And this is where the distribution has the most variance. So consequently, we suggest that nonparametric order statistics, such as percentiles, kind of make, let you make a lot more actionable conclusions, such as the one I've kind of said here. One thing I haven't discussed here is, but is in the paper, is how many repeat experiments you should do. And we kind of heuristically arrived at 30. Ideally more. This isn't great, because it does require these evaluators to gather a lot more measurements. You might be able to do something slightly clever with repeated, with reusing some of your measurements, but you also need to be careful. But unfortunately, this is currently the only option we have. So I'd just like to point out, we implemented this estimation algorithm and the improvements we described. And we also have an implementation of the enumeration step for an adversary, which is designed to run on a lot of cores. And that's available at that URL. It's written in C++. It's a header in your library, so you can integrate it fairly easily. It has tests, comments, examples. And it's free to use, so please do. And any questions about it, please talk to me. And so with that, I'll conclude. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Speaker. I'll have any questions or comments. In many cases, you can take both the first subkey and the last subkey by doing encryptions and decryptions inside channel attacks. And you get two different rankings. Now, assuming that they are related, the first and the last key, for example, there are permutations of bit positions. There's only difference between the first and the last key. Could you devise a better algorithm for doing ranking if you have a ranking over the key bits in one order and the ranking over the key bits in another order? You see what I mean? So essentially, the structure that you can exploit given the algorithm you're targeting. For example, in DES, the first subkey and the last subkey are just permutations of each other. Yeah, that would be interesting. But I have a dry idea. Any other questions? So follow up on the question. So I wonder to what extent your analysis would apply and recommendations would apply to offer ciphers? The implementation of the analysis was done for AES, right? So how do you think would apply to offer types of ciphers in a lightweight tone of ciphers? So off the top of my head, I think everything we tried was AES. Given existing non-rank-based research into other ciphers, I would not expect any difference. I would still expect this kind of shape just to shrunk, depending on the key size. And that would literally be all I would expect to see. Let's thank the speaker again. Let's move to the fourth talk, which is entitled...


Thank you very much, Rikki, for that introduction. Yes, the topic that I'm going to speak on is road traffic crashes in Indian cities. It is design, and it has to do a lot with design and planning of cities. And if you look at WHO statistics now, or in fact for the last five years, they have been writing that worldwide, actually the road traffic injury has become a major public health concern. 1.2 million people die in road traffic crashes all over the world. And of course the burden is much higher in low income countries or Asian countries and African countries. And this is where we are going to have the major urbanization taking place now in 21st century. And I'd like to actually focus my, showing some, of course the focus is going to be Indian cities. But I think as this group of experts that we are here, the architects and the planners, it has a lot to do with them. How we have been designing our cities and how we have been dealing with our built environment. So first I'd just like to point out some very stocking figures from India. This is for overall India's number of deaths 1960 to 2010. And I think what is very striking here is that up to mid, early 80s, mid 80s, the traffic crashes were increasing. They were increasing at a pace of 5% per year. And after that now we see beyond 2000. It has in fact not just the absolute numbers but the rate has also increased. And what is striking is if we try to juxtapose few other things what has happened. It is actually mid 80s that our car industry becomes open and we start producing small car, Maruti in great numbers. But 2000 and beyond, in fact mid 90s onwards, there is a heavy investment in improving transport infrastructure. And I think this is what is very something which is pointing us as an expert, what are we doing that the improvement, the expansion program has been accompanied with this increasing growth rates. Fatalities are normally 5% only under reported, not heavy under reporting. But worldwide we have this understanding that injury accidents are heavily under reported. So if you try to understand the burden of road traffic injuries about the estimated numbers are about 160,000 people are dying. Serious injuries you can see are 30 times more than that and minor injuries 50 times more than that. So some estimates, not very detailed studies but there have been some estimates which are showing that. There have been, this is actually accounting to about 3% of our GDP, loss of 3% of our GDP per year. So it's both the health burden and what is also again very striking is that most people who are dying or getting affected by road traffic injury is the most productive age group. It is not the very young and not the very old. And it is the people who have actually overcome all childhood infectious diseases. And it is the environment where this is, they are dying. Now if we focus our urban areas. About 50% of all reported deaths are taking place in urban areas. India is only today 30% urbanized. But again, this graph here is showing the numbers in two time periods, 2001 and 2006. And we've tried to understand that what is happening in these million plus cities, all these cities have million plus population. What actually comes out very striking is leaving out just two or three cities everywhere else from 2001 to 2006, number of accidents have increased sometimes by two times or at least one and a half times. The second striking feature here is that if I look at the end of the graph here, the cities which are named there are these, these are not a mega-police. These are not our congested major big cities. These are small cities, Merat, Agra, Faridabad, Vijaywara. These are not even three, four million cities. So what's going on in these small cities that we are just, you know, the number of deaths have increased two times, three times, four times there. So this is, and again no detailed studies are available but first guess estimates are for many of these cities, the small cities, the medium size cities, they are close to our major national highway system. And since the expansion of our national highway system, undivided roads becoming divided roads, two-lane roads becoming four-lane roads and six-lane roads, that's where we are killing many more people now. Little more details on a few case study cities that we have looked at. What's happening in comparing Mumbai, Delhi and a representative medium-sized city quota where we could have very detailed data. And again, this shows that if you look at all three cities, the majority of course is pedestrian. And for pedestrian, in fact, one interesting number that I have looked at, if we look at London, New York, Mexico City, Johannesburg, all these cities, actually, substantial share in London, 30% people inside the city who are dying are pedestrians. In New York City, the number is about 45%. So overall, we have a large number of pedestrians, are the ones who are getting exposed to traffic crashes and also the burden is being, it is to the people outside the car, not inside the car. Children are underrepresented in fatal crashes. Old people are overrepresented in many of our cities and most crashes are away from the junction. They are mostly at mid-blocks. So these are some of the differences that we observed as compared to the western cities. Now, very quickly, because I have, I guess, only one and a half minutes now. So with 30 seconds each, I would like to show you some typical case studies in terms of what is happening. The first one is more to do with urban planning. This is a map of Delhi and all the little stars are showing our low income settlements, the informal settlements, the slums. So first striking feature that you see here is they are spread all over. These are the people where majority of the people are walking to work. What we have done by policy now in last five to 10 years, more than 70,000 households have been moved out of the city to make way for some development projects, including metro projects but other development projects also. So what has happened? All non-motorized trips get converted to motorized trips. The exposure to high-speed traffic increases. Time poverty of women increases and opportunity for self-employed and business reduces. So I don't have time to get into that, but this kind of planning is contributing to now more traffic crashes. Then I've listed out how actually not just accessibility and a lot of other things have also been affected. Second case study, because in the planner's head, in the experts, congestion is the major thing that we need to solve in many places. And one of the solutions that all world over the traditional traffic engineers, civil engineers have done, let's convert signalized junction to unsignalized junction because that's speed up traffic. So we did a very careful study before and after junction was converted from signalized to unsignalized. We looked at what was happening to pedestrians and what changes it brought to pedestrian risk. So now these are some of the solutions which have been actually implemented in the city, grade separated junctions, and you see how it ends up getting used because the bus stops right there and people start running across on this fast speed roads now. Footover bridges which is five to six meters high always has low usage. So in this study we found that of course in the vehicle speeds increase, 22% people accept high risk and despite footover bridge or subway, they continue to cross on the road. So when you have this situation, obviously it is not surprising that number of accidents also keep getting increased. And then we looked into more details of what we are doing in terms of our junction planning. Obviously very low consideration giving to how long people have to wait. And the correlation we found the longer people are expected to wait, the more risk taking behavior takes place. They start running across, not caring about the red light. Another case study now that a small bus corridor has been constructed and here a lot of interventions went into, looking into specific requirements of bus commuters, of pedestrians and bicycles. So complete restructuring of the street took place. Segregated bicycle lanes, bus stops close to the junction, how people access the bus stops. A lot of detailing on traffic coming, speed slow down the traffic where it is going to mix with bicycle traffic, exclusive bicycle lane. And again, more details went into lighting and signal design. And first when we started monitoring this project, it's been three years now. And I would just show you the final. Initially, all the bicycle deaths disappeared from the section, pedestrian deaths continued, pedestrian and bus accidents. Further interventions done, traffic calming and speed control measures inside the bus lane. And this started giving a major, major impact that in fact now with speed reducing measures inside the bus lane, the bus speeds are under control. Number of deaths in 2009, no fatal death was observed on this small section, which used to observe at least on an average 10 fatal crashes. 2010, again, there have been fatal crashes. And again, it's been monitored. How the corridor is being observed now, some of the speed control features which were in place have been removed so the deaths are back. So overall then I'd like to just conclude with investments in transport infrastructure has resulted in increase in fatal crashes and especially increasing risk to pedestrians, both highways and more disturbingly inside the cities. Regardless of city size and density, fatality rate has increased in the last decade in most cities. And appropriate infrastructure design, which is what I tried to show you very quickly in the third one, pedestrian bicycle facilities, speed control measures can have a major impact on fatal crashes. Thank you.


Hi friends, welcome back to my channel and welcome if you are new here. Today you are in store for a large weekly grocery haul. I went to Trader Joe's Walmart grocery pickup and Fred Meyer, which is also a Kroger store. And I have an amazing, amazing spectacular, phenomenal meal plan and meal prep in store for you. If you wanna see what I picked up for groceries for the upcoming week, take a quick glimpse at not only my meal plan but also what you will be seeing in Meal Prep Monday just stay tuned. So here's my little Trader Joe's haul. I didn't get a whole lot, but I wanted to share what I did pick up with you guys. So first I grabbed the Trader Joe's Halloween gummies. These are more for my husband and then whatever's left over we can give to the trick or treaters. So these are actually little individual packs. There is 20 of them in here and they are just gummies. And on the back, here's your nutritional information. I did figure out the points it is here on the screen. The good part is, is it is the ingredients honestly aren't too bad. So this is like a first snack slash gummy candy. So I thought, how fun would this be for the trick or treaters? So grab that. For my meal prep this week, I needed some dark sweet cherries. Now I count these as zero points. These are unsweetened unsulfur cherries. So literally they are just dried cherries. There's no added sugar. So I count these as zero. You count them as you see fit, but because there's no added sugar and this is just a dried fruit, I counted as zero plus. With dried fruit, I tend not to eat as many. So I think zero points for that is fair. I'm literally obsessed with the pumpkin cream cheese from Trader Joe's. It's so good, literally so good. You can have two tablespoons for three points. It's well worth it, it's so good. I love this on the Western bagel pumpkin bagelettes. The bagelettes are only one point and you really only need one tablespoon of cream cheese. So it's a low point delicious snack. I am loving this. I'm gonna have to stock up before it's gone. I also needed some baby broccoli or broccolini for an upcoming dinner recipe. They don't actually sell this at Fred Meyer, so I picked it up at Trader Joe's. I'm loving these as well. These are the Trader Joe's pumpkin cranberry crisps. You can have 13 of these for three smart points and let me just tell you, these two things together is heaven. It is a little bit higher point snack, but so good together. I love these crisps. They have just that spiciness of the pumpkin sweetness of the cranberry, so good. So I've grabbed another box of those before they're gone. Another thing I'm probably gonna stock up on. And then two bags of Mixed Baby Kale. This is for my upcoming lunch recipe. You guys, wait till you see what I have in store for lunch prep, cannot wait. Also needed some shredded cabbage for a dinner recipe. And lastly, I just grabbed some Trader Joe's cage-free hard-boiled eggs. These are already shelled, peeled. They're nice just to have on hand for a quick easy snack, especially if you're just running out the door and wanna take a snack with you. So that is everything besides some flowers that I picked up at Trader Joe's. Next is my Walmart haul. So I just picked up a few things at Walmart. What isn't pictured is some Diet Coke and some Coke Zero for me, Diet Coke for my husband. So at Walmart, of course, I picked up two packages of the great value, fat-free shredded cheese. Fred Meyer does not carry fat-free cheese. They need to get on the ball, you guys. So I always pick it up at Walmart, plus it's really inexpensive. I wanna say it's less than $2 a package. So I've grabbed two of those. I have been trying every time I place an order to get the sugar-free chocolate fudge brownies and they never have them. So lo and behold, it showed up in today's order. So I have quite the delicious treat coming your way. I was just waiting for this brownie mix to get in. So one pack of the Pillsbury sugar-free brownie mix. Also grabbed another pack of my all-time favorite sausages in the world, you guys. These sausages are so good. Great ingredients, all-natural, they're even Whole30 approved. That's how great of ingredients these have. Two smart points per link, huge link for two smart points. So picked up another pack just to throw in the freezer. Caramel bits by Kraft. So these are really cool, look at these. They're little teeny bits of caramel. These are great to add to desserts and you can add just a little bit and get that nice, caramel-y mix in your dessert. So I'll put these points, of course, here on the screen for you, but I grabbed these because they don't have them at Fred Meyer and with the holidays and fall baking coming down the pipe. I wanted to make sure that I have these on hand. Also picked up quite a few marinades because I have some recipes with marinated chicken coming as well. So I grabbed one of the Gromates, tomato, garlic and basil, brown sugar bourbon and garlic, herb and wine. Oh, this one's really good, but they're actually all really, really good. I like to just have these on hand for quick, easy, fast ways to prepare dinner. So picked the three packs, four cans of cut green beans for my dogs. You know we give them these instead of table scraps. I literally just rinse these and drain these because I don't want to give them the salt. That's in green beans, but these last a long time. They don't know the difference. They look forward to them. So grab four cans just to kind of stock up on that. Another pack of my new favorite chocolate chips. These are the Bake Believe semi-sweet with 40% or 45% cacao. These are all natural, stevia-sweetened baking chips. You guys, these are awesome. Full-size, big chocolate chips. I love them. I have them in my triple threat, triple chocolate muffin in meal prep last week. Oh my gosh, they're delicious. So I grabbed another bag just before Walmart doesn't have them anymore. And again, baking season is upon us. So I grabbed that. Big jar of manzilla olives for my husband. He's obsessed, obsessed with green olives. So this was a great buy at Walmart. And then lastly, just a can of 100% pure pumpkin. Again, baking season is here, my friends. This is the least expensive pumpkin I can find by about half. Tastes delicious. So I grabbed that. So that is everything from Walmart. And now let's move into my Fred Meyer Kroger Hall. So here is my Fred Meyer Kroger Hall. All that is missing is a case of water. So let me show you some non-food items. So Fred Meyer was having a great deal on their home decor.  So I got this really cute give thanks sign. You can see that it's burlap. It is so cute. I'm actually going to be putting this in my spare bathroom. I just love it. I think it's adorable. I also got some new powder. This is the L'Oreal True Match. And I'm in the shade Warm Beige. And I'm sorry, Warm Nude. And this is one of my favorite powders. It's so great. And they actually had a coupon on this as well. So I grabbed that. Underneath here is this beautiful woven circular mat. This is actually for my kitchen table to go under my Halloween decor. I'm obsessed, you guys. And it was like less than $2 with all their coupons. So I definitely had to pick that up. I needed a new razor and they had a great deal. You actually got the razor and all the refills. This is the Chic Quattro for Women for $4.99. That's a great deal. So I grabbed that. And then also I did grab some gum. I guess that's a food item. But they did have their Trident Vibes gum on sale for $1.50. So this is the Tropical Beat Yummy. So I grabbed this just to keep in my car for those times that I'm just craving some gum. And then I got some reduced sugar craisens. These are the Ocean Spray 50% less sugar. This is for my upcoming recipes. You guys, I am making some amazing recipes this week. You're going to see my entire meal plan and meal prep at the end of this video. So stay tuned. So I needed some of the less sugar craisens for that. Turkey pepperoni. We are going to be having pizza Sunday night for dinner. I'm finally going to try that butternut squash pizza crust from Trader Joe's. So I grabbed some turkey pepperoni for my pizza. I'm excited to try that crust. I've heard great things about it. So I'm going to be making a pepperoni pizza. Also they had a steel price on the Laura's Lean Beef. This is 92.8. So basically it's pretty close to 93.7 points wise. The entire pound was 5.99. You can't pass it up. This is awesome ground beef. No hormones ever, no antibiotics, and it's gluten free. It is pretty awesome hamburger. I couldn't pass it up for the price. So I grabbed two pounds of that. I did pick up just some regular shredded mild cheddar cheese. This is mainly for my husband. He wants tacos this week for lunch.  This is the four-cut package for his tacos but I thought I would show you in case you were interested in the points on just regular full fat shredded cheese. Speaking of cheese, I also grabbed some provolone, smoked provolone slices. More for my husband. We're having a Philly cheesesteak bowl. I can't wait for that. That calls for provolone cheese. I will probably use mozzarella or a leaner lesser point cheese but I got the provolone for my husband. This was the free Friday download. This is the Yoplait protein and this is the raspberry. It has 15 grams of protein. The points I thought might be kind of high because there is a decent amount of sugar in here but I will of course have them on the screen and worst case, this can go into my husband's lunch and we'll see how he likes it as far as yogurt goes.  Gotta have every single week so I picked that up. Campbell's beef broth. This is for an upcoming dinner recipe. I only needed a small amount so I just opted for the can instead of the big 32 ounce box. I also needed some salsa for an upcoming recipe and this is the Kroger thick and chunky mild. This is great salsa and I wanna say it was $1.25. So if you're looking for a mild, good salsa the Kroger brand is really, really good.  This also is for an upcoming recipe. I end up throwing a lot of this away because I don't use it other than in the particular recipe. So if you guys know a good use for buttermilk so I'm not wasting it, please let me know. Although this is only 99 cents it's still, it's hard for me to throw food away. So buttermilk for a recipe and of course two more containers of my coffee mate, sugar-free peppermint mocha. You know, this is my all-time favorite creamer for the holidays. Again, I throw this in the freezer. I will stock my freezer with at least a dozen of these and then I have them throughout the entire year. So I generally pick up a few every time I do my grocery shopping. So two more to add to my stash and then I spent a little time in the bulk section. So whenever I'm looking for nuts basically for a recipe or two recipes and I don't wanna buy a $10 bag I go to the bulk section. So I grabbed some roasted and salted pumpkin seeds. This is for a dinner, I believe actually no this is for a lunch recipe and I wanna say this was less than $2. So it's just better to go to the bulk section for spices and nuts that you just don't need a whole lot of. Again, I don't like to waste so that keeps it less wasteful. I also grabbed some walnuts out of the bulk section. Again, this is for my lunch recipe and just some raw all-natural almonds which is again for my lunch. So I spent less on all these nuts than I would have spent on one package of one kind. So definitely check out your store's bulk section. Grab another pack of my bird's eye veggie made mac and cheese. This has been a lifesaver you guys when I am out late showing houses or at, oh my God, almost a body pump at jazzer size and I don't get home till like 530 quarter to six. This has been a lifesaver. I throw this in the microwave.  So I just got another bag to throw into my freezer. Also, I got some thin cut chicken breasts. I have a regular chicken breast but I needed thin cut for a recipe and I didn't wanna have to cut the really thick ones myself. So just some frozen thin cut chicken breasts. I got some hamburger buns because I am making a recipe where we are doing a mock fried chicken sandwich. I can't wait for that you guys. So these buns were the lowest that I could find at my store. Unfortunately, none of my stores have the 80 calorie buttons that I see all over YouTube and Instagram. So I'm stuck with the lowest that I can find as far as what my store carries. So these are the Kroger just white hamburger buns. The rest is veggies and produce. So speaking of veggies, cauliflower medley, frozen rice veggies. This is for a upcoming dinner recipe. These are all for dinners as well. Some mushrooms, the peaches are not for dinner. They were 99 cents a pound. So I grabbed three more of the white peaches. I've been loving these, so good. A couple of the limes, a lemon, three peppers and three colors for the Philly cheese steak bowl and a couple of onions. So this is everything that I picked up at Fred Meyer or Kroger. Now let's get into my meal plan and what I am doing for meal prep. So let's get into this week's meal plan and meal prep. So of course I'm using my Keriel meal planner. I love this meal planner. It is beautiful, comprehensive. It is so nice. It lasts over a year. And this, my friends, is what is going to help you stay on track and plan your meals. So I have the eight and a half by 11. There is a smaller version of the meal planner as well. There is also a digital version. So I'm gonna show you the eight and a half by 11. There are several tabs. There's the resources tab, which is where you can track your favorite recipes and recipe websites, blogs, you name it. You can keep a note of that here. There's also the inventory tab where you can inventory your freezer. You can also inventory your pantry and also your spices. So just a nice way to keep track of what you have and the expiration date. The meal plans tab. We're gonna go ahead and come back to that one. That's where we're gonna be spending some time. And then I also have the gatherings tab. So this is coming in handy this time of year for sure. As the holidays approach, we have several gatherings that we need to plan. Whether it be a Halloween party or Thanksgiving or Christmas, this is where you do that. You plan out what meals you are making and what you're having. And then there is a detachable grocery list here. You detach it and take it with you to the grocery store. So it really just truly makes everything so easy. And lastly, there is the blue tab, which is for your notes. So I generally jot down recipes or things that I want to remember. And before we hit the meal plan tab in the back, double-sided are these cute little pockets. So these are just nice to have to toss your favorite things in. So let's go ahead and go back to the meal plans tab. In the meal plan tab, you're going to see a monthly calendar for every month. You can go ahead and jot down what is on your menu. That way the night before, you can double-check and make sure that you have all of the ingredients, but that you also have everything de-unthought from the freezer, chicken, fish, whatever it is that you're making. So this is a super duper nice feature. And then there is also a weekly menu for every week. So you can jot down dates. You can actually plan all three of your meals if that's what you want to do. I generally plan just my dinners in this section because I do meal prep. So I generally have the same breakfast and lunch each day. And then there is a detachable grocery list as well. And it is always missing because that is my grocery list for the store. So for this week, this is my meal plan. And my week goes Saturday through Friday. So essentially 10, five through 10, 11. So on Saturday, as you know, that is the day that I use my weeklies. So I'm going to be going out to dinner, lunch. I'm not sure what, I actually have two open houses. So whatever my schedule permits. Sunday, I'm going to be making pizza. And again, that is that butternut squash crust from Trader Joe's. I'll definitely report back on that. Monday, I'm gonna be making some vegetarian taco pockets. So you guys will see this in an upcoming video. Tuesday is chicken cobbler comfort food for the family coming up. Wednesday, I am in the air fryer. I am making those fried chicken sandwiches and fries. I cannot wait for this. This is a dupe on the greasy point heavy fried chicken sandwich from the fast food restaurant. And this one is point friendly. So really excited for that. And then those Philly cheese steak bowls that I've been raving about during my grocery haul. And then of course on Friday, I leave for Vegas for my meetup with my Facebook group. Cannot wait. So on the back of the weekly menu is where I will do my meal prep. And then that way I know exactly what I need to prep for the upcoming week. So this next week, I'm so excited. I'm gonna be doing pumpkin chocolate chip baked oatmeal. So this is similar to that banana blueberry strawberry baked oatmeal that I did during the summer. This is fall festive delicious with a spin of chocolate baked oatmeal. So you'll see that in meal prep on Monday. For lunches, I'm really excited about this. I'm gonna be making a copycat Chick-fil-A super food salad. So that is that salad with kale and the nuts and the dried fruit that is so point heavy from Chick-fil-A. I'm gonna be making a point friendly version. So I am stoked about that. And then I'm just going to marinate some chicken, some thin slice chicken breasts that you saw in my haul with one of those cute little marinade packets from McCormick. And then I'm really excited about this. I'm gonna be making sheet pan maple cinnamon trail mix. I have been craving trail mix and trail mix is so high in points. You get such a small amount for the point that this is going to be a great dupe for that. And my other thought for this was I can actually take this with me to Vegas so that it helps me have a snack to stay on track. So stay tuned for all three of these in meal prep Monday. So that is my meal plan. This is my carry on meal planner. If you're interested in picking one up, highly recommend. I do have a 10% off discount code for you. It is here on the screen. That is good for any meal planner, including the digital version.  Thank you for joining me on another weekly WW grocery haul. I had some great finds this week. Definitely use my bulk foods tip you guys. It'll save you a ton of money. And that meal plan and meal prep, let's just talk about that for a minute. I am so excited about all of my meals and I'm really excited about salad for lunch. I've been craving salad again. You know I go in these spurts where I just really want salad. So really excited about that. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you're looking for a fabulous meal planner, definitely check out the carry out. If you're new, subscribe, hit the bell so you're notified every time I upload. Please thumbs up this video, comment down below. Let me know what was your favorite recipe that I have coming up this next week. And here's another thing. If you made it to the end of this video, leave the thumbs up emoji down in the comments. And I'll see you guys all in my next video. Bye guys.


would be bubble gum. Bubble gum. I had a lot of experience with a lot of other bubble gums in the seed line, but this specific clone, I didn't get until a few years ago. I find it phenomenal. It's an amazing breeder. It's mold resistant. This specific cup that CSI and PIP and all those guys use came by a 1995 from the cup. I believe it was bought the same year that it won the cup. So that's what goes around. It's a selection from Seed to Bubble Gum. The bummer for me, it's a great breeder. It's very frosty. It's fairly potent. I wouldn't say it's up there with the best of the best, but it's got a good little punch. The disappointing thing about it to me is that it smells very strongly of bubble gum turps. But the flavor does not translate for me. It's not even a little bit.