Julian Assange - The Democrats scapegoat?

G Sampath in The Hindu

To blame Donald Trump’s victory on Julian Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal by the Democrats to take responsibility for Hillary’s defeat but is also an insult to the U.S. electorate.

One of the most banal tropes of Hollywood blockbuster trailers is about one man pitted against an all-powerful enemy, and ultimately prevailing. The figure of the lone ranger battling on with his back to the wall is a popular figure of American pop culture. How ironic, then, that this very figure seems to have become the bane of the country’s righteous political establishment.

So one man, holed up in the embassy of a tiny Latin American nation, a man who hasn’t seen much sunlight in four years, who is under round-the-clock surveillance, and is subject to arbitrary denial of Internet access, has managed to swing the presidential election of the most powerful country in the world in a direction it ought not to have gone. Or so we are told by influential sections of the Western press.


From revolutionary to villain
The past week or so has seen a spate of articles on the so-called unravelling of Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks. They suggest that Hillary Clinton lost the U.S. presidential election because of him. Backing this logic is the allegation that WikiLeaks served as a conduit for disseminating documents obtained by hackers working for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The leaked emails and documents of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) published by WikiLeaks were damaging enough to spark the resignation of top Democratic Party officials, including the DNC chair and the communications director. These leaks, the argument goes, ruined Ms. Clinton’s electoral prospects, thereby paving the way for Donald Trump’s triumph.

The Democrats have been saying since July 2016 that their servers were attacked by Russian hackers. Last week, the U.S. intelligence community (USIC) officially confirmed the allegation. Kremlin has dismissed the USIC’s charges as “unfounded”. While President-elect Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge that Russia may have been involved in the cyber-attacks, he has maintained that it had no impact on the elections. Mr. Assange has denied that he got the leaks from Russia, and claims that his source was not a state party. In such a scenario, what one believes boils down to who one believes, which, in turn, depends on one’s political or ideological allegiances — the quintessential “post-truth” situation.

However, the extraordinary spectacle of erstwhile liberal hero Assange and current liberal nightmare Trump on the same side of the American political divide, with each appearing to endorse the other’s claim that Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks, had one immediate outcome: it prompted the American liberal elite to question Mr. Assange’s motives, and cast him as the villain who collaborated with Mr. Putin to interfere in the U.S. elections and ensure a Trump victory. For them, the USIC’s official statements are proof of Mr. Assange’s culpability, attesting to his metamorphosis from idealistic cyber-revolutionary to opportunistic charlatan.

It must, no doubt, be tempting, and rather convenient, for Democrat supporters to pin the responsibility for Ms. Clinton’s defeat on anyone but the Democrats themselves. But there are several problems with this narrative.

Flaws in the ‘trial’

For starters, both the declassified report of the USIC and the “Russian dossier” leaked allegedly by a private firm make claims of Mr. Putin’s involvement in the DNC hacks without presenting supporting evidence. The excerpts from the latter, published by some media outlets, were unverified quotes by anonymous spies. None of the claims has been independently authenticated by a media outlet. And no reason has been given why reports of Western intelligence agencies should carry more credibility than the denials of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

Second, are Mr. Assange’s motives or credibility the issue here? If we assume that they are, then we cannot avoid subjecting his accusers — the American press and intelligence agencies — to the same test.

In the 10 years of its existence, WikiLeaks has published more than 10 million classified documents. Till date, there is not a single instance where its material has been found to be false or inauthentic. On the other hand, sitting in judgment on Mr. Assange today are the same media outlets and the same intelligence community that sold to the public what is arguably the most egregious lie in the history of journalism — about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — which helped justify a needless, destructive war that consumed tens of thousands of civilian lives, dismembered a country, and hatched several terrorist organisations.

Perhaps it is because the authenticity of the DNC leaks is beyond question, and their content raises difficult questions about the Democratic Party establishment — questions easier avoided -- that the response has turned ad hominem, focussing on Mr. Assange instead.

It may or may not be true that Mr. Assange worked with Russia to publish the DNC leaks with the aim of ensuring a Clinton defeat. Let us assume that he did. Does it then constitute an act of villainy or moral trespass?

One could respond, as Mr. Assange has, with two arguments. First, that American interference in the democratic processes of other countries is well documented. Therefore, it is not tenable to hold that other nations do not have the right to pay back in kind.

Second, Mr. Assange believes that it is his moral responsibility to do whatever he can to prevent a Clinton victory. He has said many times that Ms. Clinton is a warmonger, that her victory would lead to greater American military involvement outside its borders, and thereby impose greater misery on the people of the world.
Liberal commentators have dismissed his statements as his “Clinton obsession” and the delusional ranting of a paranoid eccentric. And yet, a recent report in The Guardian cites U.S. Defence Department data to the effect that in 2016 alone, the Obama administration dropped 26,171 bombs, or three bombs an hour. In this context, it is hardly immoral for anyone to want to deploy his resources to steer America’s presidential choice toward a candidate who he thinks might be less of a military interventionist. From this viewpoint, which Mr. Assange appears to hold, undermining the Clinton campaign by sharing secret information that is of public interest constitutes a perfectly legitimate enterprise. Interestingly, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times has acknowledged that the internal DNC emails published by WikiLeaks were newsworthy, and it is quite likely that mainstream publications would have published them had they got hold of them first.


It was about new information

What Mr. Assange did — the act for which he is undergoing trial-by-media — was to supply relevant but new information about an electoral candidate so that the American voter could make an informed choice. One could argue that he did what the mainstream media was supposed to do but wasn’t doing enough of.

In the event, it was the American voter who made the final choice, a choice that may or may not have been influenced by the material published by Mr. Assange. At any rate, thanks to the leaks, it was a choice made with more information than less. No one who believes in the accountability of political parties should have a problem with that. Therefore, to blame Mr. Trump’s victory on Mr. Assange or, for that matter, on Russia, not only amounts to a refusal on the part of the Democrats to take responsibility for the defeat, it is also an insult to the American public that has delivered a mandate from the limited choices it was given.

If Mr. Assange must be criticised, it must be for not giving enough bang for the buck, as it were, for his whistle-blowers. He ought to be doing more to ensure that his data troves are systematically analysed and organised in a user-friendly format, with the significant bits sifted out from the routine ones. But the bulk of the data on WikiLeaks’ servers continues to be inaccessible to the public even as they remain in the public domain. Second, he is yet to match the scale of his U.S.-centric leaks with similar disclosures on its geopolitical rivals such as Russia or China.
However, to blame him for Ms. Clinton’s defeat, or to brand him a Trump supporter, is to wilfully disregard his track record. Mr. Assange’s politics has been clear from the day he founded WikiLeaks, and it hasn’t changed since. He believes that the biggest threats to democracy and freedom are the twin phenomena of mass surveillance for the powerless and secrecy for the powerful. He has made a career out of reversing this paradigm: transparency for the powerful and anonymity for the dissenting citizen. His personal motive for publishing the DNC leaks, whatever it may be, is evidently not one that is inconsistent with his stated mission of making secrecy a losing proposition for governing elites.

Time to hold our lying leaders to account

Nick Cohen in The Guardian


Post-truth politics isn’t a coherent description of the world but a cry of despair. Propositions have not stopped being right or wrong just because of the invention of Facebook. Whatever the authoritarian cults who rage across Twitter say to the contrary, the Earth still goes round the sun and two plus two still equals four.

“Everything is relative. Stories are being made up all the time. There is no such thing as the truth,” cried Anthony Grayling. But unless the professor has abandoned every philosophical principle he has held, what Grayling and millions like him mean is something like this. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and other liars the like of which they cannot remember, have made fantastical promises to their electorates. They said they could build a wall and make Mexico pay for it or make Britain richer by crashing her out of the EU.

But instead of laughing at their transparent falsehoods or being insulted at being taken for fools, blocs of voters have handed them victory. Evidence could not shake them. Common sense could not reach them. Surely, their gullibility shows we have arrived in a new dystopia. You can see why they got that way. Trump is clear that the checks and balances that restrained power in the old world will not apply to him. His refusal to release his tax returns shows it. The Russian dissident Garry Kasparov put the urgent case for transparency best when he said Trump has criticised Republicans, Democrats, the pope, the CIA, FBI, Nato, Meryl Streep… everyone and anyone “except Vladimir Putin”.

What gives here? And more to the point, who’s on the take? I see an ideological affinity between Russian autocracy, the western far left and the western populist right: they band together against the common enemy of liberal democracy. But it has always been reasonable to ask whether the traditional inducements of sex and money have tightened Putin’s grip on Trump.

You could lay this canard to rest by publishing your tax returns, American journalists told their president-elect. You must know the American public wants to see them.

The public doesn’t care, Trump replied. I went into an election refusing to release my tax returns and “I won.” So now I can do what I want.

His spokeswoman, Kellyanne Conway, who could work for a Russian propaganda channel when she’s thrown out of politics, uses the same logic when asked whether it is “presidential” for her master to lie so often and so blatantly. “He’s the president-elect, so that’s presidential behaviour.”
The British are experiencing their own version of Trumpish triumphalism. In our case, too, the answer to every hard question is a brute proclamation of power. Are you seriously going to take us out of the single market? Leave won. And the customs union? Leave won. What about EU citizens here? Leave won. And British citizens there? Leave won.

Fighting back should be easy – if you cannot expose charlatans such as Trump and Johnson, you should step aside a make way for people who can. But a terrible uncertainty grips opposition politics across the English-speaking world. Trump’s victory strikes me as a far greater cause for self-doubt than Brexit. Because we never had to endure invasion by Hitler or Stalin, or government by Greek colonels or Spanish falangists, the British did not have the same emotional attachment to an EU that freed the rest of Europe from a terrible past.

Even if, as I do, you regard the decision to leave as a monumental blunder, it is not, given Britain’s lucky history, inexplicable. Trump’s victory, by contrast, overturns truths that western liberals felt to be self-evident. You cannot abuse women and ethnic minorities. You cannot lie in your every second utterance. If you do, the media will expose and destroy you.

I can’t find a better way of illustrating the demoralising change in the weather than by referring you to Alan Ryan’s history of western political thought, On Politics. I don’t mean to criticise Ryan. He has produced a vast and brilliant book that stands comparison with Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. But unlike Russell, who was gloriously waspish and prejudiced, Ryan is a careful writer and his rare opinionated judgments are all the more authoritative for that.

In 2013 he, like nearly every serious person, could say with absolute certainty that, despite its legion of faults, the 21st century was better than the 20th. For instance, Ryan explained, Governor George Wallace’s infamous battle cry of the 1950s – “I will never be out-niggered”, after he had been beaten by a politician who was even more of a racist than he was – “would today instantly terminate his career”.

Yet in 2016, Trump echoed Wallace and far from seeing his career terminated became president of the United States, an office that Wallace never came near, incidentally. After that, I can understand why the disoriented talk about a post-truth world, but it remains a sign of their trauma rather than a description of our times.

It is as dangerous to overestimate the importance of technological change as to underestimate it. There was no web in 1968, and US broadcasters had to be accurate and impartial. The old world of 20th-century technology did not, however, stop George Wallace winning millions of white, working-class voteswhen he ran for president as an open white supremacist. Wallace was beaten by Richard Nixon, a closet racist and crook.

When his crimes caught up with him, Nixon declared that he could not be prosecuted because “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal”, a line that Conway might have written for him.

Post-truth world or not, a Republican abolition of Obamacare will still leave white, working-class Americans who voted for Trump to rot without decent treatment, a hard Brexit will still hurt the British working class more than their rightwing leaders, the Earth will still go round the sun, and two plus two will still equal four.

To pretend that we are living in a culture without historical precedent is to make modernity an excuse for the abnegation of political responsibility. The question for the Anglo-Saxon opposition is not how to cope with a world where truth has suddenly become as hard to find as Trump’s tax returns. It is the same question that has faced every opposition in the history of democracy: how can we make the powerful pay for the lies they have fed to the masses?

Fateh ka Fatwa 2 - Should the burqah / purdah be permitted?

Main Bhi Kafir, Tu Bhi Kafir by abducted teacher, poet and activist Salman Haider

Salman Haider reciting Main bhi Kafir, Tu bhi Kafir

History of the muzzling of the freedom of expression in Pakistan - by Hamid Bhashani

All those in developing countries please look away now - Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries

Jason Hickel In The Guardian


We have long been told a compelling story about the relationship between rich countries and poor countries. The story holds that the rich nations of the OECD give generously of their wealth to the poorer nation cheats of the global south, to help them eradicate poverty and push them up the development ladder. Yes, during colonialism western powers may have enriched themselves by extracting resources and slave labour from their colonies – but that’s all in the past. These days, they give more than $125bn (£102bn) in aid each year – solid evidence of their benevolent goodwill.

This story is so widely propagated by the aid industry and the governments of the rich world that we have come to take it for granted. But it may not be as simple as it appears.

The US-based Global Financial Integrity (GFI) and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics recently published some fascinating data. They tallied up all of the financial resources that get transferred between rich countries and poor countries each year: not just aid, foreign investment and trade flows (as previous studies have done) but also non-financial transfers such as debt cancellation, unrequited transfers like workers’ remittances, and unrecorded capital flight (more of this later). As far as I am aware, it is the most comprehensive assessment of resource transfers ever undertaken.


The flow of money from rich countries to poor countries pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction

What they discovered is that the flow of money from rich countries to poor countries pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction.

In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received. If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $16.3tn – that’s how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. To get a sense for the scale of this, $16.3tn is roughly the GDP of the United States

What this means is that the usual development narrative has it backwards. Aid is effectively flowing in reverse. Rich countries aren’t developing poor countries; poor countries are developing rich ones.

What do these large outflows consist of? Well, some of it is payments on debt. Developing countries have forked out over $4.2tn in interest payments alone since 1980 – a direct cash transfer to big banks in New York and London, on a scale that dwarfs the aid that they received during the same period. Another big contributor is the income that foreigners make on their investments in developing countries and then repatriate back home. Think of all the profits that BP extracts from Nigeria’s oil reserves, for example, or that Anglo-American pulls out of South Africa’s gold mines.

But by far the biggest chunk of outflows has to do with unrecorded – and usually illicit – capital flight. GFI calculates that developing countries have lost a total of $13.4tn through unrecorded capital flight since 1980.

Most of these unrecorded outflows take place through the international trade system. Basically, corporations – foreign and domestic alike – report false prices on their trade invoices in order to spirit money out of developing countries directly into tax havens and secrecy jurisdictions, a practice known as “trade misinvoicing”. Usually the goal is to evade taxes, but sometimes this practice is used to launder money or circumvent capital controls. In 2012, developing countries lost $700bn through trade misinvoicing, which outstripped aid receipts that year by a factor of five.

Multinational companies also steal money from developing countries through “same-invoice faking”, shifting profits illegally between their own subsidiaries by mutually faking trade invoice prices on both sides. For example, a subsidiary in Nigeria might dodge local taxes by shifting money to a related subsidiary in the British Virgin Islands, where the tax rate is effectively zero and where stolen funds can’t be traced.

GFI doesn’t include same-invoice faking in its headline figures because it is very difficult to detect, but they estimate that it amounts to another $700bn per year. And these figures only cover theft through trade in goods. If we add theft through trade in services to the mix, it brings total net resource outflows to about $3tn per year.

That’s 24 times more than the aid budget. In other words, for every $1 of aid that developing countries receive, they lose $24 in net outflows. These outflows strip developing countries of an important source of revenue and finance for development. The GFI report finds that increasingly large net outflows have caused economic growth rates in developing countries to decline, and are directly responsible for falling living standards.

Who is to blame for this disaster? Since illegal capital flight is such a big chunk of the problem, that’s a good place to start. Companies that lie on their trade invoices are clearly at fault; but why is it so easy for them to get away with it? In the past, customs officials could hold up transactions that looked dodgy, making it nearly impossible for anyone to cheat. But the World Trade Organisation claimed that this made trade inefficient, and since 1994 customs officials have been required to accept invoiced prices at face value except in very suspicious circumstances, making it difficult for them to seize illicit outflows.

FacebookTwitterPinterest Protest about tax havens in London in 2016, organised by charities Oxfam, ActionAid and Christian Aid. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

Still, illegal capital flight wouldn’t be possible without the tax havens. And when it comes to tax havens, the culprits are not hard to identify: there are more than 60 in the world, and the vast majority of them are controlled by a handful of western countries. There are European tax havens such as Luxembourg and Belgium, and US tax havens like Delaware and Manhattan. But by far the biggest network of tax havens is centered around the City of London, which controls secrecy jurisdictions throughout the British Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories.

In other words, some of the very countries that so love to tout their foreign aid contributions are the ones enabling mass theft from developing countries.

The aid narrative begins to seem a bit naïve when we take these reverse flows into account. It becomes clear that aid does little but mask the maldistribution of resources around the world. It makes the takers seem like givers, granting them a kind of moral high ground while preventing those of us who care about global poverty from understanding how the system really works.
Poor countries don’t need charity. They need justice. And justice is not difficult to deliver. We could write off the excess debts of poor countries, freeing them up to spend their money on development instead of interest payments on old loans; we could close down the secrecy jurisdictions, and slap penalties on bankers and accountants who facilitate illicit outflows; and we could impose a global minimum tax on corporate income to eliminate the incentive for corporations to secretly shift their money around the world.

We know how to fix the problem. But doing so would run up against the interests of powerful banks and corporations that extract significant material benefit from the existing system. The question is, do we have the courage?

Sex-for-rent is the hidden danger faced by more and more female tenants

Penny Anderson in The Guardian

The private rented sector is broken and house-hunting is a dreadful task fraught with abject desperation. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, to the list of nasties (the grasping letting agents and truculent and capricious buy-to-let owners) whom tenants confront can now be added creepy, predatory rentiers offering homes in return for sex.

In the weird swamp world of online portals, everything is so much more dangerous. Female tenants are especially vulnerable when flat-hunting, and some landlords are quite open about what they expect, while others hide in plain sight. The basic act of flat-hunting often involves wandering into an unfamiliar neighbourhood, then entering a flat for guided viewings with strangers: a man you have never met before, who could assume or imagine that signing a rental agreement entitles him to sex. Remember, too, that this man might ultimately be in possession of the key to your home, and, if he’s a live-in landlord, could occupy the adjacent bedroom. 
Some ads are overtly soliciting sex, while others are coy. During a bizarre viewing tour of a tiny flat with a friend, the drunken landlord, having first claimed that he was moving out to live with his girlfriend, changed tack. He explained: “She’s not really my girlfriend and would it be OK if I visited?” I left.

An especially odious case involved a friend who moved out after her landlord offered to reduce the rent if she were “nice to him”. He then accused her of prudery and had the effrontery to pursue her for the income he lost after she escaped his lair. (And frankly, it was a lair, wasn’t it?)

Let’s be clear: this isn’t an issue about consensual sex or self-empowered, independent “sex-workers”. It is exposed women seeking a safe place to live, who are then ruthlessly compelled to have sex with their landlords in order to keep a roof over their heads. Many are trying to escape homelessness – and encounter vile men offering to house vulnerable women in return for sex. And by vulnerable, I don’t just mean women who are poor, but also exploited asylum seekers, those fleeing domestic violence, care leavers and victims of “the right to rent”, where potential tenants must show documents proving they have the right to remain in the UK.

I endured some troubling encounters when using a website popular with flat-hunters, having placed a carefully worded flat-wanted ad. One response sounded positive, but when I called, the landlord was evasive about terms, thought my self-description (“professional female”) odd, and then asked if I wanted “male company”. I hung up. To my amazement, a male friend found this hilarious, doubted my story, then checked to unearth a whole new world of abuse of women (and some men) simply looking for a home.

Yet still coercive homes-for-sex is too often seen as bit of a laugh. It isn’t. It’s not merely undermining but hazardous. A friend home-hunting with her toddler was contacted by one man who offered her use of his home, eventually explaining that he didn’t require rent; rather he “enjoyed light, consensual anal intercourse”. She was both terrified and appalled.

The private rental sector in areas of high demand (especially London) is growing sleazier by the day, and many men are brazen about what they expect. A supporter of tenant support group Acorn shared one man’s response to a female flat-hunter: “Can you pay with sex twice per week?” In a moment of dark levity, a male commenter offered to provide the sex, reasoning this probably wasn’t what sleazebag-guy was expecting.

Many platforms seem slow or unwilling to deal with such abusive posts, or else tacitly tolerate them. Shelter has picked up on the situation, noting the power imbalance and the distorted sense of entitlement: man provides home, man deems himself entitled to sex with isolated, scared, sofa-surfing young woman lacking genuine alternative options.

The answer is of course for offenders to cease and desist. But failing a mass changing of ways and renunciation of sordid sexual bullying, it seems women must take steps to ensure our own safety. So, when flat-hunting, do not go alone. Always let somebody know where you are. If possible, arrange a guided viewing with an agent (if an agent is being used to let the property). And if you are being coerced into sex, inform the police.

The internet has opened up a whole new fresh hell of sleaze and importuning. On the plus side, it’s also excellent for naming and shaming. And hopefully those women so desperate that they have felt as if there were no choice but to submit can be empowered to summon enough courage to report these abusers.

Spot the gender of your future child 26 weeks before conception

Sarah Knapton in The Telegraph


Craving sweets, early morning sickness and a watermelon-shaped stomach are all said to indicate that a woman will give birth to a baby girl.

But an intriguing new study suggests that it is possible to determine the sex of a baby months before it is even conceived.

Scientists in Canada discovered that a woman’s blood pressure at around 26 weeks before conception predicts if she will give birth to a boy or a girl. Higher systolic blood pressure signals she will deliver a boy while lower suggests a girl.

Dr Ravi Retnakaran, endocrinologist at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, said: “It suggests that a woman's blood pressure before pregnancy is a previously unrecognised factor that is associated with her likelihood of delivering a boy or a girl.”

The team made the connection while trying to work out what determines the ratio between girls and boys in a population.

The sex ration of a population can change depending on societal change CREDIT:GETTYIMAGES-DV1953025.JPG


Several studies have shown that stressful events such as wars, natural disasters and economic depression can change the proportion of boys and girls in a country.

The difference occurs because in stressful times one gender is more likely than the other to survive through pregnancy. So even though the conception sex ratio remains at 50:50, the birth ratio will alter depending on which sex is stronger.

In the new study the mean systolic blood pressure reading for women who had boys was 106 mm Hg, compared to 103 mm Hg for those who had girls, in the months leading up to conception.

“When a woman becomes pregnant, the sex of a foetus is determined by whether the father’s sperm provides an X or Y chromosome and there is no evidence that this probability varies in humans,” added Dr Retnakaran

“What is believed to vary is the proportion of male or female fetuses that is lost during pregnancy

“This study suggests that either lower blood pressure is indicative of a mother’s physiology that is less conducive to survival of a male foetus or that higher blood pressure before pregnancy is less conducive to survival of a female foetus.

“This novel insight may hold implications for both reproductive planning and our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms underlying the sex ratio in humans."

A simple blood pressure test could give some indication on what sex a baby will beCREDIT: ANTHONY DEVLIN


For the study, 1,411 newly-married Chinese women were recruited all who were trying to become pregnant. Their blood pressure was checked at around 26 weeks before conception and they were followed through pregnancy. Overall the women gave birth to 739 boys and 672 girls.

After adjustment for age, education, smoking, Body Mass Index (BMI) , waist, cholesterol, triglycerides and glucose, mean systolic blood pressure before pregnancy was found to be higher in women who subsequently had a boy than in those who delivered a girl.

Fertility expert Prof Charles Kingsland, of Liverpool Women’s Hospital, said: “We have been aware that more male fetuses miscarry than females and more females are born for obvious biological reasons, namely you need more women in the world to have children.

“There is also some evidence that you are more likely to miscarry a boy when you are compromised either by health or environmental issues. So I suppose, blood pressure changes in these circumstances might affect conception of different sexes.

“This study is therefore very interesting. However it does not take into account the potential physiological aspects of race. Will those changes be the same in the Caucasian or Afro Caribbean populations in the world. And what if you want a girl? Do you just go and live in Syria for a few months?”

However some experts were skeptical about the results.

Geoffrey Trew a consultant in Reproductive Medicine and Surgery at the Hammersmith Hospital in west London said: “I haven't heard anything like this before.

“I would be very surprised that a BP measurement , which is notoriously variable, could dictate sex 26 weeks before, some reptiles can have sex differences due to temperature changes at the time of early fetal growth , but not 26 weeks beforehand.”

The study was published in the American Journal of Hypertension.