Monthly Archives: January 2013

Mali journalists despair over ‘invisible war’

Al Jazeera reports: Since France launched its military intervention in Mali two weeks ago, the combined Malian and French forces have managed to quickly retake much of the country.

They have done so almost exclusively beyond the eyes of the media, an exceptional feat in the age of Twitter and livestreaming. Where journalists have been allowed to “embed” with French troops, they have been kept well away from operations and are restricted to marginal stories about logistics.

“In times of conflict, it is up to journalists and the media, and not the military, to determine the risks that they are willing to take to gather information,” the international media organisation Reporters Without Borders said in a statement denouncing the “media blackout” imposed by French and Malian military.

French officials have organised no press conferences in Bamako. Their press contingent in Bamako consists of a one-man band, whose main function is to refer media queries to Paris.

The Malian army has likewise restricted media access, barring journalists and human rights organisations from areas safely in its hands such as Konna and Sevare for some days. The lack of freedom of movement has also drawn criticism from aid groups, who say people are being blocked from fleeing the conflict.

On top of the roadblocks, communications have been cut wherever operations are underway, making it impossible to independently verify what is taking place.

Destin Gnimadi, a journalist at the daily Malian newspaper Le Prétoire, told Al Jazeera that the Malian defence ministry rarely gives press conferences or shares any information with the national media.

Jean-Paul Marthoz adds: The French army is often called la Grande Muette, or “the Great Silent.” The war in Mali confirms the French military’s well-deserved reputation of being secretive about front-line actions. “Locking the information is more in the culture of the French army than of the U.S. army,” says Maurice Botbol, director of La Lettre du Continent. In the first two weeks of military operations against Islamist militant groups in Mali, the French army has released only a blurry video of an air attack at an undisclosed location.

International journalists who have flown to Mali are kept far from the front lines. No journalist has been embedded with the Special Forces that have carried out the first assaults. Most reporters who receive the authorization to accompany the troops are limited to coverage of marginal stories, such as military preparations on the Bamako airport or the “progress of the troops to the North,” very far from the battlefields.

The roads to the North are blocked by a succession of checkpoints manned by the Malian army. “They are very nervous,” says Gérard Grizbec, a reporter with the public service TV channel France 2. “They have received stern orders from the French forces: ‘Don’t let yourself being overtaken by journalists.’ They usually ask us where we’re going, check our passport, and request an accreditation of the Malian Communications Ministry.”

And then they often turn the media away.

“All the reporters that travel to the North come back frustrated and furious to Bamako,” complains Jean-Paul Mari, special envoy for the newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur. “This is a war without images and without facts.” On January 22, the French channel i>Télé devoted a whole report to the difficulty of reporting. “We try to outwit the Malian army,” says its editor-in- chief, Lucas Menget. “It is like a cat-and-mouse game.” And up to now, it is a losing game for the press.

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What you are is what eats

That might sound like a mangled version of the aphorism: you are what you eat — something surely worth remembering when industrially-produced toxins are now so pervasive they can be found in unborn babies.

What I am alluding to, however, is actually a question of self-identity as illuminated not by the external sources of our food but by our advancing understanding of the human microbiome.

The human body is made up of 10 trillion cells, while our gut hosts 100 trillion bacteria — microscopic organisms performing a vast array of functions far beyond their widely understood role in digestion. They don’t just break down food but also regulate the immune system, produce vitamins and hormones and even appear to affect the way our brain works. When our gut flora thrive, we thrive.

For that reason, one of the most promising recent advances in medicine has been in the use of fecal transplants — the transfer of gut flora from a healthy donor to someone with intestinal disease.

If that’s something you’d rather not visualize, it gets even worse. The most effective way of performing such a transplant is via a nasogastric tube. That’s right: down the nose and through the stomach to the top end of the small intestine.

Treatment of Clostridium difficile, an intestinal disease that kills 14,000 Americans annually, has had over a 90% success rate for patients given a fecal transplant, a procedure whose use was first documented in 1958.

The use of this treatment would likely already be far more commonplace and diverse in its application were it not for two reasons: Firstly, as a treatment that involves no drugs and makes less effective drug treatments redundant, the use of fecal transplants does not serve the interests of the pharmaceutical industry. Secondly, and perhaps just as importantly, the very idea of such a treatment is something that many people will find repulsive. It represents a kind of invasion and defilement of who and what we take ourselves to be. It involves an exchange of bodily fluids that transgresses most people’s notion of what might be desirable, amounting to the filthiest kind of intimacy one could imagine.

If, however, we set aside the taboos that condition our perceptions of the human body and think about this in a more abstract way, gut flora — whether they be native or transplanted — invite us to think about not just what contributes to good health but also what shapes who or what we are.

In as much as we are inclined to view the world as a complex of systems, we tend to view most systems as hierarchies. At the top sits the executive — God, president, CEO, general, brain — and below reside a multitude of individually expendable subordinates — person, citizen, worker, soldier, cell.

Identity becomes glued to the executive yet dissolves in the amorphous mass over which he (it is almost invariably he) rules.

Picture, for instance, the way in which a company like Apple, with over 70,000 employees, became synonymous with Steve Jobs. Or, the way American power is supposedly embodied in the individual of the president — so-called leader of the free world.

In the hierarchical conception of such systems, power extends from the top, downwards and outwards. In reality, power flows the opposite way. It flows up from the bottom, most of the time without question yet always with the possibility of suspension. The workers could walk out; the citizens could rebel. At such moments, the real structure of power becomes manifest.

So, consider again ones body and think of it as New York. It sounds like a fanciful song we might sing in our head where we can be number one, yet the actual city is not its landmarks — standing or fallen — or its skyline, or its shows, or words sung by Frank Sinatra. It is millions of people — a pulsating mass of organisms, moving through vessels underground, walking, driving, riding, endlessly scattering and aggregating in a process that cannot be reduced to any of its parts — a process which constitutes the life of a city, or if you will, the percolation of the gut flora of New York. A few New Yorkers might harbor the conceit that they keep the city running, but however they might aggrandize themselves, none turns out to be indispensable.

Still, as we each tell ourselves who we are, we locate meaning in a larger sphere. For instance, in our noblest moments we rise above our fears and show we have guts — but that expression, it turns out, is much more telling than we could have imagined.

What we take to be our own courage (or lack of it) may actually say less about the narrative construct we call character and more about our physical gut and the activity of trillions of bacteria such as Lactobacillus rhamnosus.

Mice fed a broth rich in this particular microorganism become more adventurous and show fewer signs of stress. The bacteria don’t just give them a healthier gut but also a healthier brain, an indication that who we are is intimately shaped by what lives inside our body. Such findings also suggest that the enteric nervous system, our “second brain,” may have as much influence over our behavior as does the stuff up top.

Given that the human microbiome is at this point a vast yet mostly uncharted territory, the fact that this is territory in which medicine — through the use of antibiotics — has engaged in open warfare for much of the last century, is all the more reason to think about our nature. In a rampage to kill our enemies we have also been destroying our selves.

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How cigarette smuggling fuels Africa’s Islamist violence

The Observer reports: For many years Mokhtar Belmokhtar was little more than a footnote in the intelligence reports analysing the increasingly muscular presence of Islamist groups in Saharan Africa.

The man whose al-Qaida-inspired Signed in Blood Battalion led the attack on the In Amenas gas plant in Algeria, in which at least 38 people were killed, was considered a relatively unimportant figure in the political ecosystem of the vast region. But Belmokhtar, who fought for the mujahideen in Afghanistan and the Islamist GIA in the Algerian civil war before becoming a commander in the Mali-based al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), was ambitious.

In 2003 he masterminded the kidnapping of 32 European tourists whom he successfully ransomed. The money gave him the seed capital he needed to develop a sophisticated trading business throughout Saharan Africa, along the ancient 2,000-mile salt route used by the Tuareg tribesmen to transport goods from the continent’s west coast through to Timbuktu in Mali, then on to Niger before arriving in the Algerian south, gateway to the Mediterranean.

But while the Tuareg made their money in trading salt, gold and silk, Belmokhtar, who secured close links with the tribesmen through marriages to the daughters of several of their most prominent families, made a fortune through a different commodity: smuggled cigarettes. Such was the volume of his trade that he earned himself the sobriquet “Mr Marlboro”.

“He was not an important figure in AQIM, he was quite different from al-Qaida and Bin Laden,” said Morten Bøås, a senior research fellow at Oslo University and editor of African Guerrillas: Raging Against the Machine. “He is generally known as one of the more pragmatic figures, more interested in filling his own pockets than fighting jihad.”

The key role cigarettes play in facilitating terrorism has been inexplicably ignored. But it has become of urgent interest to western intelligence agencies as they seek to check al-Qaida’s diverse factions operating across the Saharan region. [Continue reading…]

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Music is vital to political struggle across Africa — not just in Mali

Ian Birrell writes: At dinner last month after a concert by the Congolese rapper Baloji, I found myself sitting next to his drummer, Saidou Ilboudo. As we chatted over the chicken, he told me the remarkable story of how as a teenager growing up in Burkina Faso he had been recruited one day by Thomas Sankara, the country’s president, to play in a state band.

Sankara is an almost-forgotten figure these days in the west, but in the mid-80s he was one of the most charismatic leaders of his age, a revolutionary known as “Africa’s Che Guevara” who pushed public health, promoted feminism and faced down the global financial institutions causing such damage to the continent.

This was an amazing break for a boy just out of school. For a few years, he enjoyed the privileges and security that went with being part of the president’s circle, while playing in a band that had a dual purpose: to entertain young people while proselytising political messages. Then, in 1987, Sankara was murdered in a French-backed coup and life became trickier.

The idea of publicly funded pop groups might sound strange, but many leading figures of African music served time in such institutions. Given the continent’s oral tradition, there is a proud history of praise singers, and musicians were for centuries vital voices, used and abused by politicians and tribal leaders who understood their power. Think only of Franco, whose liquid guitar-playing made Congolese rumba the heartbeat of Africa while promoting the messages of Mobutu Sese Seko, his thieving president.

After the end of colonialism, musicians were used to fuse countries carved out of often disparate communities. Nowhere was this truer than Mali, a nation on the faultline between the African and Arab worlds in which music is more threaded into the fabric of cultural, social and political life than perhaps any other place on Earth. [Continue reading…]

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Why the Pentagon should pay less attention to Africa

Gordon Adams writes: [A]fter decades of leaving Africa pretty much alone or engaging through health and economic assistance, the United States is now seriously involved, but driven by the mantra American “security.” Mixing these messages (development, health, and security) is proving difficult for the African countries. They have begun to wonder why the United States has suddenly developed an interest in their continent. Uneasy African governments resisted the notion that Africom should actually be based on the continent as the United States wanted, so the headquarters remains in Stuttgart, Germany.

Well, they might have reason to be concerned. A growing “security” focus for U.S. engagement in Africa changes things. So does the growing lead the Pentagon and the Special Operations forces are taking in that engagement. When security takes the lead, too often, governance and development step aside. And, while the security focus is ostensibly intended to strengthen African capacities to provide national and regional stability, they have the consequence, intended or not, of dragging the United States into Africa’s internal politics, at a potential cost to our long-term interests.

In Mali, for example, the appearance of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has led some in the U.S. military to warn that the Maghreb (that is, the Northwestern rim of the continent) is becoming a terrorist haven and to suggest that the U.S. cannot prevent this reality with a light, indirect military footprint. Captain Amadou Haya Sanogo, who overthrew the elected Malian government in 2012, was trained under IMET. In Algeria, the United States has partnered with an authoritarian regime in the pursuit of counterterrorism operations.

This increasing focus on security coincides with a broader trend over the past decade towards giving the Pentagon greater direct authority for security assistance programs overall. Where the State Department was once in the lead, DOD is now directly responsible, funded through its own budget, for a growing share of U.S. security assistance, accentuating the pronounced bias in those programs toward DOD’s needs, requirements, and missions.

The largest DOD programs have trained and equipped the Iraqi and Afghan militaries, at a cost well over $50 billion. They provide considerable budgetary support to the militaries of Jordan and Pakistan. By the time the United States left Iraq, the Pentagon was directly responsible for more than half of total U.S. funding for security assistance worldwide.

African programs are now part of this pattern. Especially in Africa, DOD has put the label of “Building Partner Capacity” on its activities. That the programs surely do. But especially in Africa, these activities support a particular kind of capacity — counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations. These competencies are unhinged, in large part, from broader U.S. foreign policy objectives in Africa, and provide a sneaky way of pulling the United States into security relationships that may not serve our long-run goals for African state building or development.

The major problem is context. Focusing on our security interests in Africa risks ignoring the need for stronger, more capable, more responsive civilian governance and economic development. While DOD likes to argue that security comes first, before governance and development, the risk of militarizing our engagement in Africa is that it will end the development of fledgling accountable governance in Africa (and elsewhere) and increase hostility toward the United States.

Much as Iraq and Afghanistan reproduced the sad lessons of Vietnam, our slide into Africa risks becoming a sequel to a film we have already seen. Two decades of repression and “disappearances” in Latin America followed from a U.S. security and covert assistance program in the 1960s that focused on our fascination with and fear of insurgents and communists — at the cost of democracy and warm and fuzzy feelings about America. Cloaked in the mantra of “Building Partner Capacity,” here we go again, this time in Africa. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. expands aid to French mission in Mali

The Washington Post reports: The United States is significantly expanding its assistance to a French assault on Islamist militants in Mali by offering aerial refueling and planes to transport soldiers from other African nations, the Pentagon announced Saturday night.

The gesture comes amid a debate within the Obama administration about how deeply it should engage in the French effort to prevent Islamists from wresting control of the West African nation. French requests for more robust support from Washington raised a legal dilemma because U.S. law forbids foreign assistance funds to leaders that came to power through a coup. Mali’s military leaders, including some trained by U.S. troops, seized power last year by force.

“The French requested this support, and we believe it was important to move ahead,” a senior defense official said Saturday night, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss policy deliberations. “The U.S. has the most advanced refueling technology in the world, and we wanted to provide this support.”

The United States has concluded that the expanded assistance is legally sound because of France’s notification to the United Nations Security Council that its mission in Mali is being offered at the request of the African country’s government, which is fighting “terrorist elements,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. James Gregory said in a statement.

“Under these circumstances, the U.S. can lawfully provide support to France’s efforts in the armed conflict in Mali,” Gregory said. Gregory said the coup bars “foreign assistance funds,” not military support. [Continue reading…]

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Syria: The creation of an unbridgeable divide

At Open Democracy, Ammar Abdulhamid writes: The transformation of the Syrian Revolution from a nonviolent and inclusive pro-democracy protest movement into a civil war, pitting majority-Sunni and majority-Alawite militias against each other in deadly daily clashes throughout the country, has been a slow and complex process driven in equal measure by domestic as well as external factors. But while much analysis has addressed the role of external factors, there are certain aspects of the domestic dynamics that remain unexamined, in particular the evolving ethos driving Sunni and Alawite fighters.

Indeed, the very nature of the ruling Assad regime that the protesters challenged contributed to the increasing sectarian character of the conflict. The Alawite community, from which the Assads hail, is a minority sect that mixes Shiite doctrine with indigenous tribal beliefs and Christian rituals, representing 10-12% of Syria’s population. The sect has long been considered heretical by the majority Sunni community, and was actively marginalized and persecuted by the Ottomans who never included the Alawites in the famous millet system that regulated the lives of all confessional minorities under their rule. Indeed, for centuries Alawites lived a very sheltered existence in the coastal mountains of northern Lebanon, Syria and southern Turkey (Hatay Province). Their access to state services, including education, was quite limited, rendering the overwhelming majority illiterate. Moreover, in time, Alawite doctrine became secretive and reserved only for male initiates, creating an additional layer of separation between Alawites and their neighbors and adding to the mutual distrust.

In that “splendid isolation,” at least, in the psychological sense, an Alawite culture that is inimical to change and deeply suspicious of otherness evolved. [Continue reading…]

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Stories about Assad’s zombie gas

Jeffrey Lewis writes: Since the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad began to totter, the nonproliferation community has been waiting to see if he will unleash what is believed to be a large stockpile of chemical weapons, including VX, sarin, and mustard gas. The possibility that Assad might use chemical weapons is widely regarded as a possible trigger for U.S. intervention. In December, President Obama warned Assad of “consequences” in the event Syria used its chemical weapons. A few days earlier, Hillary Clinton warned that the United States was “certainly planning to take action” in the event of “credible evidence that the Assad regime has resorted to using chemical weapons against their own people.”

So, what makes for “credible evidence”? Enter Josh Rogin, reporter at Foreign Policy, who published a pair of stories detailing a State Department cable regarding possible chemical weapons use by Syrian forces in Homs. An administration official described the cable as having “made a compelling case that Agent 15 was used in Homs on Dec. 23.”

The implication, obviously, is that the “compelling case” is the “credible evidence” that should prompt Washington to rethink its policy limiting itself to “non-lethal” aid to Syrian opposition forces and take action. A reconsideration might be in order, though not for the reason you think.

For starters, somehow, no one has bothered to mention that Agent 15 doesn’t exist.

Yep. Agent 15 is one of the bogus bits of intelligence that helped make the case for invading Iraq. Like many good fish stories, this one has a kernel of truth. A single document found by U.N. inspectors (at the infamous Chicken Farm, if you must know) mentioned something called “Agent 15.” UNSCOM and others believed Agent 15 was a glycollate, related to laboratory experiments that Iraq admitted to with chemically similar incapacitants usually referred to as BZ or “buzz.” But Iraq never produced BZ, Agent 15, or similar incapacitants.

“Agent 15” entered our collective lexicon in 1998, however, when the British announced they had “received intelligence, believed to be reliable, which indicated that, at the time of the Gulf War, Iraq may have possessed large quantities of a chemical warfare mental incapacitant agent known as “Agent 15.” George Robertson, then defense secretary, described it as “one more filthy uncivilised weapon of war in [Saddam’s] armoury.” He warned that Agent 15 could result in: “dilated pupils, flushed faces, dry mouth, tachycardia, increase in skin and body temperature, weakness, dizziness, disorientation, visual hallucinations, confusions, loss of time sense, loss of co-ordination and stupor.” In other words, it turns you into the stars of Absolutely Fabulous. (I’ve placed a copy of the MOD report on my blog, ArmsControlWonk.com.)

Robertson refused to divulge further details, claiming that the Ministry of Defense had yet to evaluate the report. In fact, he’d done quite enough. The always restrained British press went — and I am going to use the technical term here — apeshit. (My favorite headline: “Iraqi ‘zombie gas’ arsenal revealed.”)

The claim didn’t stand up to scrutiny, even before the war. [Continue reading…]

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Even in Assad’s coastal retreat, the war has come and the bombs are dropping

The Observer reports: Local people describe it as a distant growl, an ever-present rumble, just to the north. A reminder that war is now at their doorstep.

It has been this way for two months in Latakia. The port city had managed to ride out Syria’s civil war, seemingly content in the knowledge that whatever was happening in Hama to the south-east, or Idlib a little further north, an army stood between its gates and its foes. Not any more.

The spectre of war is now a reality here in the staunch core of the regime heartland, as much as it is in the rebellious and ravaged Sunni cities to the east. The shells that crunch most hours into the nearby countryside have not yet arrived. But the fear that pervades the communities on the fringes of Latakia is now spreading around the city known throughout the country as the government’s stronghold, and possibly its last redoubt.

“We are afraid, very, very afraid,” said Loubna, a final-year university student and resident of the city. “For so long the regime has been saying we will be safe here. That nothing will happen to us. Nothing can happen to us. But people are leaving, people are dying. Death is so near.” [Continue reading…]

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Amid clashes of Egypt’s Brotherhood, opposition — the quiet struggle of those in the middle

McClatchy reports: To mark the two-year anniversary of an uprising that led to their ascension, members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood came to the town of Faiyum on Friday with a simple message: The government may not be providing services for you, but the powerful social organization supporting it still can.

They fanned out in this historic, impoverished town and picked up 2-week-old trash thrown between apartment buildings. Brotherhood doctors carried boxes of medicine into makeshift clinics to distribute to the ill. Merchants opened subsidized food, gas and clothing markets.

One hundred miles north down the Nile River and a world away, thousands gathered at Tahrir Square, a now international symbol of its literal name, liberation. The opposition, unable to coalesce around a political platform that can unseat the Brotherhood, was back protesting in the streets, battling police tear gas with rocks, stagnation with chants.

But regular protests in Tahrir have done more to alienate voters than to topple Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. And the Brotherhood’s social campaign no longer buys the votes it once did. There is a patina of disillusionment over millions of Egyptians like Faiyum resident Safa Ramadan, 43, who is too hungry to embrace the luster of revolutionary change, too humiliated to appreciate another handout.

Ramadan’s husband does not make enough money to keep up with rising prices brought by near constant instability. So she pulled her 12-year-old son out of school and made him get a job as a garbage man, or perhaps more aptly, garbage boy. Friday, she stood over baskets of fruit and vegetables, swarmed by flies, and fretted over whether she could afford the extra 10 cents a kilo of tomatoes will cost her this week.

“The prices never go down. They always go up by a lot. What am I supposed to do? Should I pay for school or pay for food?” she asked, draped in a dark headscarf and gown. “Morsi has not done anything for us.” [Continue reading…]

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Watch 62 years of global warming in 13 seconds

NASA’s analysis of Earth’s surface temperature found that 2012 ranked as the ninth-warmest year since 1880. NASA scientists at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) compare the average global temperature each year to the average from 1951 to 1980. This 30-year period provides a baseline from which to measure the warming Earth has experienced due to increasing atmospheric levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. While 2012 was the ninth-warmest year on record, all 10 of the warmest years in the GISS analysis have occurred since 1998, continuing a trend of temperatures well above the mid-20th century average. The record dates back to 1880 because that is when there were enough meteorological stations around the world to provide global temperature data.

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The agricultural fulcrum: better food, better climate

Diana Donlon writes: This past year treated us to a climate change preview in spades: crazy heat waves, prolonged drought, and epic storms like Sandy. To help us stabilize the climate, before we reach the point of no return, we must tap the immense potential of our food system.

Since becoming an agrarian society, we’ve known that growing food successfully depends on climate stability. Not enough water, crops wither and die. Too much, they rot. Beyond this, we know that crops have specific climatic requirements. Wheat, for instance, grows best in a dry, mild climate. Stone fruits like cherries need a minimum number of “chill hours” in order to blossom and later fruit. Intense heat disrupts pollination and can even shut down photosynthesis. These are basic parameters. If we continue to disregard them, food will become more scarce over time and we will go hungry. Indeed, as the National Climate Assessment, the government’s 1,146-page report released earlier this week states: “The rising incidence of weather extremes will have increasingly negative impacts on crop and livestock productivity because critical thresholds are already being exceeded.”

Agriculture, positioned as it is at the intersection of food and climate, presents a unique fulcrum. Pushed in the direction of industrial agriculture, it contributes egregiously to our climate problem: As activist Bill McKibben has noted, industrial agriculture — predominant in the U.S. — “essentially insures that your food is marinated in crude oil before you eat it.” This is because at every step, from the production of fertilizers and pesticides to the harvesting, processing, packaging, and transporting of materials, the industrial food system depends on climate-changing fossil fuels. Indeed, in a new report on climate change and food systems, the agriculture research organization CGIAR concluded that our global food system is responsible for nearly a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

But we can tip the scale in the other direction toward sustainable agriculture, working in concert with natural systems instead of depleting them. This side of the scale presents an elegant, under-recognized opportunity to stabilize the climate. Not only do agro-ecological, organic and other sustainable farming methods emit significantly less greenhouse gas (GHG) overall, they can also sequester or store excess carbon. Given our long list of existing environmental worries — erosion, polluted watersheds, dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico — strengthening our top soil is a lot smarter than loading it up with nitrogen and washing it down the Mississippi. [Continue reading…]

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Will Kerry remember climate change when he decides Keystone’s fate?

Bloomberg reports: As a senator, John Kerry fought for sweeping climate change legislation, called human-induced warming among the top challenges facing the U.S., and pushed for an international accord to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

That track record has emboldened critics of TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL pipeline who want him to scuttle the remaining $5.3 billion portion of the project if he’s confirmed as secretary of State. Appearing yesterday at a hearing on his nomination before the Senate committee he chairs, Kerry was non- committal on the Canada-U.S. pipeline, though called himself a “passionate advocate” for action on climate change.

“He’s made climate leadership a signature issue in his Senate career,” said Erich Pica, president of Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, in a phone interview yesterday. “At the State Department, Kerry has the ability to ensure the analysis that is done gives the president the full flavor of the global warming impacts from the pipeline.”

A rejection of the Keystone XL project would exacerbate a bottleneck of shipments from Alberta’s oil sands that has made Canadian heavy oil among the cheapest in the world. The shortage of pipeline capacity and rising output has widened the gap between heavy Canadian crude and a U.S. benchmark to $36 as of yesterday.

The decision ultimately rests with President Barack Obama, who in his inaugural address this week pledged to act on climate change. Kerry’s influence may come as the State Department updates an environmental assessment originally criticized by green groups as inadequately weighing how the pipeline, which would carry bitumen from tar sands in Canada, may affect climate change.

“There is a statutory process with regards to the review and that is currently ongoing,” Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday. “It will not be long before that comes across my desk, and I will make the appropriate judgments about it.”

Investors appear to be betting on Keystone approval, sending TransCanada shares to a record high this week. TransCanada, the country’s second-largest pipeline operator, has climbed 3.9 percent since Kerry was nominated Dec. 21 and has advanced 4.1 percent this year. [Continue reading…]

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Obama puts fox in charge of hen house at SEC

Matt Taibbi writes: I was shocked when I heard that Mary Jo White, a former U.S. Attorney and a partner for the white-shoe Wall Street defense firm Debevoise and Plimpton, had been named the new head of the SEC.

I thought to myself: Couldn’t they have found someone who wasn’t a key figure in one of the most notorious scandals to hit the SEC in the past two decades? And couldn’t they have found someone who isn’t a perfect symbol of the revolving-door culture under which regulators go soft on suspected Wall Street criminals, knowing they have million-dollar jobs waiting for them at hotshot defense firms as long as they play nice with the banks while still in office?

I’ll leave it to others to chronicle the other highlights and lowlights of Mary Jo White’s career, and focus only on the one incident I know very well: her role in the squelching of then-SEC investigator Gary Aguirre’s investigation into an insider trading incident involving future Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack. While representing Morgan Stanley at Debevoise and Plimpton, White played a key role in this inexcusable episode.

As I explained a few years ago in my story, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail?”: The attorney Aguirre joined the SEC in 2004, and two days into his job was asked to look into reports of suspicious trading activity involving a hedge fund called Pequot Capital, and specifically its megastar trader, Art Samberg. Samberg had made suspiciously prescient trades ahead of the acquisition of a firm called Heller Financial by General Electric, pocketing about $18 million in a period of weeks by buying up Heller shares before the merger, among other things.

“It was as if Art Samberg woke up one morning and a voice from the heavens told him to start buying Heller,” Aguirre recalled. “And he wasn’t just buying shares – there were some days when he was trying to buy three times as many shares as were being traded that day.”

Aguirre did some digging and found that Samberg had been in contact with his old friend John Mack before making those trades. Mack had just stepped down as president of Morgan Stanley and had just flown to Switzerland, where he’d interviewed for a top job at Credit Suisse First Boston, the company that happened to be the investment banker for . . . Heller Financial.

Now, Mack had been on Samberg’s case to cut him in on a deal involving a spinoff of Lucent. “Mack is busting my chops” to let him in on the Lucent deal, Samberg told a co-worker.

So when Mack returned from Switzerland, he called Samberg. Samberg, having done no other research on Heller Financial, suddenly decided to buy every Heller share in sight. Then he cut Mack into the Lucent deal, a favor that was worth $10 million to Mack.

Aguirre thought there was clear reason to investigate the matter further and pressed the SEC for permission to interview Mack. Not arrest the man, mind you, or hand him over to the CIA for rendition to Egypt, but merely to interview the guy. He was denied, his boss telling him that Mack had “powerful political connections” (Mack was a fundraising Ranger for President Bush).

But that wasn’t all. Morgan Stanley, which by then was thinking of bringing Mack back as CEO, started trying to backdoor Aguirre and scuttle his investigation by going over his head. Who was doing that exactly? Mary Jo White. [Continue reading…]

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How academia betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz

Michael Eisen writes: As news spread last week that digital rights activist Aaron Swartz had killed himself ahead of a federal trial on charges that he illegally downloaded a large database of scholarly articles with the intent to freely disseminate its contents, thousands of academics began posting free copies of their work online, coalescing around the Twitter hashtag #pdftribute.

This was a touching tribute: a collective effort to complete the task Swartz had tried – and many people felt died trying – to accomplish himself. But it is a tragic irony that the only reason Swartz had to break the law to fulfill his quest to liberate human knowledge was that the same academic community that rose up to support his cause after he died had routinely betrayed it while he was alive.

The most obvious culprit was MIT, whose computer system Swartz used for his downloads. Their decision to make sharing journal articles a criminal matter is inexcusable. But their real betrayal was allowing these articles to fall into private hands in the first place.

Although most academic research is funded by the public, universities all but force their scholars to publish their results in journals that take ownership of the work and place it behind expensive pay walls.

Centuries ago, when printing and mailing paper journals was the most efficient way to disseminate new knowledge, a symbiotic relationship developed between scholars, who had ideas they wanted to share, and publishers, who had printing presses and the means to convey printed works to a wide audience. Transferring copyright to publishers, which protected their ability to recover costs and profit from their investment, was a reasonable price for authors to pay to further their disseminating mission.

But with the birth of the internet, scholars no longer needed publishers to distribute their work. As NYU’s Clay Shirky has noted, publishing went from being an industry to being a button.

Had the leaders of major research universities reacted to this technological transformation with any kind vision, Swartz’s dream of universal free access to the scholarly literature would now be a reality. But they did not. Rather than seize this opportunity to greatly facilitate research and education, both within and outside the academy, they chose instead to reify the status quo. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian protests over football sentences turn deadly

The Guardian reports: At least 22 people have been killed in the Egyptian city of Port Said amid violent protests that followed a court’s sentencing of 21 people to death on charges related to clashes between rival football fans last year.

Those killed on Saturday morning included two policemen shot dead at a prison in the north-eastern city where demonstrators had gathered to protest against the death sentences of the 21 men held inside. There are reports that more than 200 people have been injured.

The Egyptian army has deployed armoured personnel carriers and military police on the streets of the city.

The death sentences, which were announced live on television, relate to clashes in Port Said on 1 Febraury 2012 after Cairo’s Al Ahly beat the local team, Al Masry. Supporters of Al Masry attacked Al Ahly fans, causing a stampede for the exits. The police did not intervene in the violence except to switch off the stadium lights, and in the confusion the Cairo fans were crushed as crowds pushed against a locked gate which gave way under the pressure. Seventy-four people were killed.

Fans in Cairo cheered the verdict as those in Port Said protested, blocking streets and attacking police.

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Egypt: The revolution will not be celebrated

The Egypt editors at Jadaliyya write: The common, seemingly benign question “where were you during the revolution” leaves most partisans of the January 25 Revolution with a strong sense of unease. While it is obvious that the question, whenever it comes up, is almost always posed in reference to the 2011 eighteen days of national protests that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year rule, this innocent query fails to do justice to the belief that the revolution and the eighteen-day uprising are not one and the same. The phrasing of the question, moreover, proceeds on an assumption that the revolution ended with Mubarak’s departure, and that what followed was “politics as usual.” This assumption happens to coincide with a narrative that successive wielders of power have tried to sell to the Egyptian people over the past two years, namely one that purports that the revolution succeeded (and therefore “ended”) with Mubarak’s departure, and that dissenters need to vacate public squares and factories, and begin deferring to their “elders” among the politicians, the legislators, and the constitution writers. “Where were you during the revolution,” in other words, is a question that evokes our own fears about the counter-revolution and its efforts to build a popular consciousness that reduces the January 25 Revolution to an event of the past—one that warrants commemoration and celebration—and not a living phenomenon and an ongoing struggle that has ways to go. These concerns are heightened at a time when it has become acceptable in international media to call revolutionaries “anti-Morsi protesters” or “the secular opposition,” embracing the distortive view that the struggle for revolutionary change in Egypt has taken a backseat to ideological spats and partisan politics.

This is to say that partisans of the revolution in Egypt confront more than just a battle against the wielders of power as they continue to resist calls for transformative change, demands for social and economic rights, and efforts to create a meaningful social depth for the January 25 Revolution. They also face a serious battle against the hegemonic narrative that the days of revolution in Egypt are over, and that the country has re-entered into a state of normalcy in which contentious political action is no longer deemed socially or legally acceptable. [Continue reading…]

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