Monthly Archives: May 2014

Snowden unlikely to ‘man up’ in face of Espionage Act, legal adviser says

The Guardian reports: An adviser to Edward Snowden said on Wednesday that an unfair legal landscape made it unlikely that the NSA whistleblower would take US secretary of state John Kerry up on his invitation to “man up” and return to the United States.

In a television appearance on Wednesday morning, Kerry said that if Snowden were a “patriot”, he would return to the United States from Russia to face criminal charges. Snowden was charged last June with three felonies under the 1917 Espionage Act.

“This is a man who has betrayed his country,” Kerry told CBS News. “He should man up and come back to the US.”

Kerry’s comments came as NBC News prepared to broadcast an extended interview with Snowden on Wednesday night, beginning at 10pm ET. Snowden revealed his identity almost one year ago, on 9 June 2013.

Responding to Kerry’s comments on Wednesday, Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and a legal adviser to Snowden, said the whistleblower hoped to return to the United States one day, but that he could not do so under the current Espionage Act charges, which make it impossible for him to argue that his disclosures had served the common good.

“The laws under which Snowden is charged don’t distinguish between sharing information with the press in the public interest, and selling secrets to a foreign enemy,” Wizner said. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s foreign puzzle, not a real foreign policy

Carne Ross writes: Even before President Obama spoke to the US military academy at West Point on Wednesday, the White House trumpeted his commencement address as offering a unifying vision of US foreign policy – one that is “both interventionist and internationalist, but not isolationist or unilateral“.

With an introduction like that, it came as a welcome surprise that the speech was merely intelligible. I liked the anti-thoughtless-intervention line – “Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail” – but much of the nearly hour-long speech was a dull checklist of world problems (and the UN Law of the Sea Convention!), most addressed by the routine oversimplifications required on such occasions.

Obama’s “vision” was peppered with confusing vocabulary about “realists” and “interventionists”, both depicted as straw men, and too many predictable bromides about international cooperation, democracy and “human dignity”. And I say this as a former speechwriter who also used to lean on such filler.

There was no over-arching theme to this rhetoric, save Obama’s recommitment to American exceptionalism (“with every fiber of my being”) and his rejection of mindless invasions. Not much to disagree with there, but not much new either. One couldn’t avoid the impression that this speech marked the end of a war-laden chapter for the US – with little clear idea of what the next chapter should really mean, save the repetitious evocation of “American leadership”.

The leitmotif of Obama’s foreign policy – and the first item of his West Point talk – is withdrawal, as Tuesday’s announcement about drawdown in Afghanistan reconfirmed. So what about the rest of Obama’s foreign policy?

Facts, not rhetoric, paint a picture of this administration’s troubling and often counterproductive inconsistency abroad. There is some good, but there is plenty that’s really bad.

From drones and emissions, to the South China Sea to Somalia to the Crimea and back again, it’s not easy connect the many dots of America’s foreign policies. Because aside from tortured rhetoric, unified they are not. [Continue reading…]

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Southeast Ukraine is a war zone, in all but name

Tanya Lokshina writes: Last week, not far from Donetsk in southeastern Ukraine, a man wearing only camouflage underpants, with a stained sleeveless shirt, and brandishing a Kalashnikov assault rifle, demanded to see my passport. Over the past decade, lots of men with all sorts of weapons have asked me for my ID – some of them were far from pleasant, but at least they were all decently wearing trousers. My first impulse was to suggest that he get dressed before asking other people for identification documents. But his Kalashnikov made me reconsider, and I handed over the passport with a bright smile.

Southeast Ukraine, in the days before the May 25 presidential election made one think of those unforgettable documentaries from Darfur or Somali: people dressed in fatigues and swinging their guns out of car windows. In fact, my colleague and I saw one truly impressive vehicle in Slovyansk, the insurgent stronghold in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

The car, a local resident told us, had been ‘confiscated’ from a man who had dared break the curfew, and drive around at night. Anti-Kyiv insurgents spray-painted it in camouflage colours, smashed the windows, cut out a ‘skylight’ in the roof, and drove around at top speed, with their Kalashnikovs sticking out. It would have been funny if the place weren’t increasingly becoming more like a war zone, mortar strikes included. [Continue reading…]

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Reading between the lines: Syria’s shifting dynamics or more of the same?

Charles Lister writes: Syrian opposition forces have won a number of significant military victories in Idlib governorate in recent days. These notable gains have been focused along an area that hugs the strategically important M5 international highway, south of the town of Maarat al-Numan and north of the border with Hama governorate. The village of Kafr Basin was captured on May 23rd; a major army refueling base, known as Hazj (or checkpoint) Khazanat was taken on May 25th; followed shortly thereafter by the seizure of Hajz al-Salaam and the town of Khan Shaykhun on May 26th.

Practically speaking, this string of victories will advance a long-term opposition military strategy aimed at posing an increased threat to the government’s control of Idlib city and Hama governorate. More immediately, the seizure of Khan Shaykhun will have cut off an invaluable government supply line to the large Wadi al-Deif base in Maarat al-Numan, which has allegedly been the source of the several recent chlorine gas attacks reported across Idlib. In fact, shortly after fighters seized Khan Shaykhun, the town itself was struck by an apparent gas-filled barrel bomb attack.

With regards to intra-insurgent dynamics, these latest developments have been equally important. Contrary to suggestions made in some recent analyses that suggested this may no longer be possible, the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, the conservative Islamic Front, mainstream Islamist alliances, and moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups were all involved, many having been engaged in close cooperation and coordination.

As I recently wrote (in Dynamic Stalemate: Surveying Syria’s Military Landscape), the conflict in Syria is intensely complex and the overall strategic-level battle dynamics are consolidating into a state of near-total stalemate. I contend that this state of affairs will continue for some time to come, at least until the Syrian opposition is able to impel the Assad regime onto a negotiating table that better favors genuine dialogue and the chance for a peaceful solution. [Continue reading…]

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The man who wants to save the world and make a little money on the side

Bruce Falconer writes: In July 2012, a commercial fishing charter called Ocean Pearl motored through the frigid waters of the North Pacific. It carried 100 tons of iron dust and a crew of 11, led by a tall and heavyset 62-year-old American named Russ George. Passing beyond Canada’s territorial limit, the vessel arrived at an area of swirling currents known as the Haida eddies. There, in an eddy that had been chosen for the experiment, George and his crew mixed their cargo of iron with seawater and pumped it into the ocean through a hose, turning the waters a cloudy red. In early August, the ship returned to port, where the crew loaded an additional 20 tons of iron. They dumped it near the same Haida eddy a few weeks later, bringing to an end the most audacious and, before long, notorious attempt yet undertaken by man to modify Earth’s climate.

The expedition was grand in its aims and obscure in its patronage. Funding George’s voyage was a village of Haida Indians on Haida Gwaii, a remote Canadian archipelago about 500 miles northwest of Vancouver. George and his business partners had gained the town’s support for a project of dumping iron dust into the ocean to stimulate the growth of a plankton bloom. The plankton would help feed starving salmon, upon which the Haida had traditionally depended for their livelihood, and also remove a million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. (In algae form, plankton, like all plants, absorbs CO2 through photosynthesis.) The intended result: a replenished fish population—and millions of dollars’ worth of “carbon credits” that could be sold on the international market.

Back on land, in Vancouver, George and his associates drafted a report on the expedition. It claimed that Ocean Pearl had seeded more than 3,800 square miles of barren waters, leaving in its wake “a verdant emerald sea lush with the growth of a hundred million tonnes of plankton.” According to the account, fin, sperm, and sei whales, rarely seen in the region, appeared in large numbers, along with killer whales, dolphins, schools of albacore tuna, and armies of night-feeding squid. Albatross, storm petrels, sooty shearwaters, and other seabirds had circled above the ship, while flocks of Brant geese came to rest on the water and drifted with the bloom.

But George did little to publicize these findings. Instead, he set about compiling the data in private, telling people that he intended to produce a precise estimate of the CO2 he had removed from the atmosphere and then invite an independent auditor to certify his claims.

If that was the plan, it quickly fell apart. In October 2012, the Guardian of London broke the news of George’s expedition, saying it “contravenes two UN conventions” against large-scale ocean fertilization experiments. Numerous media outlets followed up with alarmed, often savage, reports, some of which went so far as to label George a “rogue geoengineer” or “eco-terrorist.” Amid the uproar, Canadian environment minister Peter Kent accused George of “rogue science” and promised that any violation of the country’s environmental law would be “prosecuted to the full extent.”

George, for his part, spoke of media misrepresentation, and he stressed that he was engaged in cautious research. Amid the controversy, in an interview with Scientific American, he was asked whether his iron fertilization had worked. “We don’t know,” he answered. “The correct attitude is: ‘Data, speak to me.’ Do the work, get the data, let it speak to you and tell you what the facts might be.” While most commenters seemed to think George had gone too far, some expressed sympathy—or at least puzzled ambivalence. A Salon headline the following summer asked, “Does Russ George Deserve a Nobel Prize or a Prison Sentence?”

George’s efforts place him in the company of a small but growing group of people convinced that global warming can be halted only with the aid of dramatic intervention in our planet’s natural processes, an approach known as geoengineering. The fixes envisioned by geoengineers range from the seemingly trivial, like painting roads and roofs white to reflect solar radiation, to the extraterrestrial, like a proposal by one Indian physicist to use the explosive power of nuclear fusion to elongate Earth’s orbit by one or two percent, thus reducing solar intensity. (It would also add 5.5 days to the year.)

Because its methods tend to be both ambitious and untested, geoengineering is closely tied to the dynamics of alarm—feeding on it and causing it in equal measure. [Continue reading…]

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Google releases employee data, illustrating tech’s diversity challenge

The New York Times reports: Google on Wednesday released statistics on the makeup of its work force, providing numbers that offer a stark glance at how Silicon Valley remains a white man’s world.

Thirty percent of Google’s 46,170 employees worldwide are women, the company said, and 17 percent of its technical employees are women. Comparatively, 47 percent of the total work force in the United States is women and 20 percent of software developers are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Of its United States employees, 61 percent are white, 2 percent are black and 3 percent are Hispanic. About one-third are Asian — well above the national average — and 4 percent are of two or more races. Of Google’s technical staff, 60 percent are white, 1 percent are black, 2 percent are Hispanic, 34 percent are Asian and 3 percent are of two or more races.

In the United States work force over all, 80 percent of employees are white, 12 percent are black and 5 percent are Asian, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Google’s disclosures come amid an escalating debate over the lack of diversity in the tech industry. Although tech is a key driver of the economy and makes products that many Americans use ever yday, it does not come close to reflecting the demographics of the country — in terms of sex, age or race. The lopsided numbers persist among engineers, founders and boards of directors. [Continue reading…]

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Obama prepared to work with Assad

Leslie Gelb writes: This may well surprise experts, but senior administration officials tell me that Obama has been modifying his objective and is now prepared to work with Assad, to some degree, along with the moderate rebels, against what the White House finally has come to see as the real and major threat — the jihadists. These senior officials further say that they expect support in this new policy from previous opponents, i.e. from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.

Reuters reports: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s certain victory in an election next month, derided internationally as a charade, leaves Turkey facing a bitter truth – its assumption of his quick demise was a costly miscalculation.

With al Qaeda-linked armed groups controlling patches of territory across Turkey’s southern border and a registered refugee influx set to top a million within months, Syria’s three-year old war presents Ankara with an increasing financial burden and a growing security threat.

A gun battle in March when special forces raided the suspected Istanbul hide-out of an Islamist militant group active in Syria highlighted the potential threat to Turkey from the thousands of foreign jihadis who have been drawn into the conflict, a portion of them entering Syria over the Turkish border.

The torching of a building housing Syrian refugees in Ankara this month meanwhile pointed to anger at the growing social and economic costs of a humanitarian response which has already cost Turkey close to $3 billion.

With Assad facing no serious challenger in a June 3 election which his Western and Arab foes, as well as the Syrian opposition, have dismissed as a parody of democracy, such tensions are unlikely to dissipate any time soon. [Continue reading…]

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Americans are more worried about ‘global warming’ than they are about ‘climate change’

AlterNet: What’s in a name? According to a recent Yale University Poll, quite a bit. In fact, the poll found that the public greatly prefers the term “global warming” over “climate change” when referring to the world’s epic climate shift.

The pollsters found that the term “global warming” is associated with “greater public understanding, emotional engagement, and support for personal and national action than the term ‘climate change.'”

And not only is the term “global warming” preferential, the term “climate change” appears have been a bad public-relations shift for scientists and environmentalists, at least in the short term.

“[T]he use of the term “climate change” appears to actually reduce issue engagement by Democrats, Independents, liberals, and moderates, as well as a variety of subgroups within American society, including men, women, minorities, different generations, and across political and partisan lines,” the poll found. “Within the Weather category, global warming generates a higher percentage of associations to “extreme weather” than does climate change, which generates more associations to general weather patterns.” [Continue reading…]

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Maya Angelou: American titan who lived as though there were no tomorrow

Following the death of Maya Angelou, Gary Younge writes: By the time she reached 40 she had been a professional dancer, prostitute, madam, lecturer, activist, singer and editor. She had worked with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, lived in Ghana and Egypt, toured Europe with a dance troupe and settled in pretty much every region of the United States. And then she wrote about it, the whole time crafting a path as a poet, epigrammist and performer. “My life has been long,” she wrote in one her last books. “And believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still.”

In a subsequent interview I described her as the “Desiderata in human form” and “a professional hopemonger”. She lived as though there were no tomorrow. And now that there really is no tomorrow, for her, we are left to contemplate – for us as well as her – where daring can get you.

But with her passing, America has not just lost a talented Renaissance woman and gifted raconteur. It has lost a connection to its recent past that had helped it make sense of its present. At a time when so many Americans seek to travel ‘color blind’, and free from the baggage of the nation’s racial history, here she stood, tall, straight and true: a black woman from the south intimately connected to the transformative people and politics who helped shape much of America’s racial landscape.

A woman determined to give voice to both frustration and a militancy without being so consumed by either that she could not connect with those who did not instinctively relate to it. A woman who, in her own words, was determined to go through life with “passion, compassion, humor and some style”, and would use all those attributes and more to remind America of where this frustration and militancy was coming from.

She described the 9/11 attacks as a “hate crime”, and said: “Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s program to prolong the war in Syria

Last August, shortly after the chemical attacks outside Damascus, the military strategist, Edward Luttwak, wrote in the New York Times:

[A] decisive outcome for either side [in Syria] would be unacceptable for the United States. An Iranian-backed restoration of the Assad regime would increase Iran’s power and status across the entire Middle East, while a victory by the extremist-dominated rebels would inaugurate another wave of Al Qaeda terrorism.

There is only one outcome that the United States can possibly favor: an indefinite draw.

By tying down Mr. Assad’s army and its Iranian and Hezbollah allies in a war against Al Qaeda-aligned extremist fighters, four of Washington’s enemies will be engaged in war among themselves and prevented from attacking Americans or America’s allies.

Last night’s edition of Frontline, broadcast on PBS, reported on a covert CIA program to arm the rebels in Syria, giving every indication that President Obama has taken Luttwak’s advice to heart.

A small training program combined with a trickle of weapons and ammunition — none capable of challenging Assad’s air supremacy — seems designed to have no effect other than prolong the war.

A rebel commander interviewed by Frontline said this about the Americans he had been trained by:

“The impression I got from their support is that they don’t actually want us to defeat the regime, but they don’t want the regime to defeat us either.”

“They told us they would train 30 to 40,000 men. I asked them: ‘How can you ever train that many if our training courses are limited to 85 recruits at a time?” In a year you can only train a thousand recruits. You would have to keep training men for 30 or 40 years. Is the revolution going to go on for that long?'”

Watch the complete Frontline report, “Syria: Arming the Rebels.”

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The language of life

vegetables

Within the mechanistic worldview that shapes the way most of us view life, each human being and other living organism is seen as a discrete entity — a form that possesses and is animated by its own life.

Lives come into existence, go out of existence, and between times interact with each other, while all along retaining autonomy in varying degrees.

Human beings, as creatures whose powers have been extended and amplified through technology, supposedly possess the highest degree of autonomy, living lives steered by the exercise of our freewill.

Having become so full of ourselves we have mostly lost the sense of life forming a seamless whole. We fail to see that human being is a conceptual construct fabricated through a leap of imagination.

But this thing called life is unfathomably complex and the more we learn about it, the more we discover its interactive nature.

Just as people talk to each other and those conversations produce societies, it turns out that inside our bodies another kind of conversation — this one through molecular exchanges facilitated by exosomes — allows plant cells to “talk” to our cells and thereby regulate the homeostatic foundations of health.

GreenMedInfo reports: A groundbreaking new study published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research titled, “Interspecies communication between plant and mouse gut host cells through edible plant derived exosome-like nanoparticles,” reveals a new way that food components ‘talk’ to animal cells by regulating gene expression and conferring significant therapeutic effects. With the recent discovery that non-coding microRNA’s in food are capable of directly altering gene expression within human physiology, this new study further concretizes the notion that the age old aphorism ‘you are what you eat’ is now consistent with cutting edge molecular biology.

This is the first study of its kind to look at the role of exosomes, small vesicles secreted by plant and animal cells that participate in intercellular communication, in interspecies (plant-animal) communication.

The study explained the biological properties of exosomes as follows:

“Exosomes are produced by a variety of mammalian cells including immune, epithelial, and tumor cells [11–15]. Exosomes play a role in intercellular communication and can transport mRNA, miRNA, bioactive lipids, and proteins between cells [16–19]. Upon contact, exosomes transfer molecules that can render new properties and/or reprogram their recipient cells.”

While most of the research on exosomes has focused on their role in pathological states such as tumor promotion, they were recently found to play a key role in stimulating regeneration within damaged cardiac tissue, and are known to be found in human breast milk, further underscoring how irreplaceable it is vis-à-vis synthesized infant formula. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt scrambles to raise turnout in presidential vote

The New York Times reports: After Egypt’s revolution three years ago, so many voters eager for democracy turned out for elections that officials had to scramble to accommodate the throngs.

On Tuesday, the military-backed government confronted the opposite problem. Officials extended a scheduled two-day vote for a third day not because of long lines, but because so few people had shown up.

Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former army field marshal who deposed Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s first freely elected president, is still universally expected to win by a landslide. Yet the disappointing turnout has upended his supporters’ hopes that the vote would grant him new legitimacy after the ouster.

When polling places around the nation remained largely empty on the second day of voting, signs of panic swept the government. Officials initially extended voting hours on Tuesday by an hour, to 10 p.m. Then, a holiday was declared for state and private employees, as well as for banks and the stock market. Train and subway fares were suspended. State television said that the police would help the elderly or the sick get to polling stations, and it repeated admonishments from Muslim and Christian leaders about a religious duty to vote.

Officials also said that the government would fine those who did not vote up to $70 — a large sum for most Egyptians — and that unlike in the past, the fines would be enforced.

Analysts said the government’s scramble to increase the turnout undermined the endlessly repeated premise of the new military-backed order: that Mr. Sisi had the passionate support of an overwhelming majority of Egyptians to oust Mr. Morsi and to assume leadership. [Continue reading…]

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Bots were responsible for bitcoin’s stratospheric ascent, anonymous report claims

Gigaom reports: An authoritative-looking report has appeared that suggests bitcoin’s meteoric rise late last year — from $200 to $1,200 in one month — may have at least partly been the work of bots, possibly associated with those running the melted-down MtGox online exchange.

The so-called Willy Report emerged on Sunday, claiming to demonstrate fraudulent activity at MtGox. Is it correct? Hard to tell at this point, though it is based on public logs and it does at least have in its favor an absence of accompanying malware (something that blighted the last bundle of alleged MtGox fraud evidence).

According to the report’s anonymous author, automated bots dubbed Willy and Markus spent much of 2013 repeatedly creating new MtGox accounts and using them to “buy” large amounts of bitcoin without actually spending any real money. In total, the two bots probably bought up a volume that’s “suspiciously close” to the 650,000 bitcoins MtGox CEO Mark Karpeles claims the company lost, the report notes. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s deadly vaccination ruse in Pakistan

An editorial in the New York Times says: The use of a sham vaccination program in the government’s hunt for Osama bin Laden has produced a lethal backlash in Pakistan where dozens of public health workers have been murdered and fearful parents are shunning polio vaccine for their children.

Leaders of a dozen American schools of public health raised an alarm with the Obama administration 16 months ago and finally got a response this month when the White House promised that the C.I.A. will no longer use phony immunization programs in its spying operations.

The fakery — one of an assortment of intelligence stratagems before the successful raid that killed bin Laden — should never have been used in a world where hardworking health care agencies depend on the trust of local communities.

The C.I.A.’s ruse involved phony door-to-door solicitations by a physician promising to deliver hepatitis B immunizations; his real purpose was to confirm bin Laden’s suspected hiding place. The ploy helped fuel a militant backlash against immunization workers, and as many as 60 health workers and police officers have since been killed.

Meanwhile, polio is on the rise, with Pakistan accounting for 66 of the 82 cases reported so far this year by the World Health Organization. Last year, there were 93 cases of polio in Pakistan, where the health organization warns that the disease is endemic, as it is in Afghanistan and Nigeria.

The C.I.A. can no longer seek to “obtain or exploit DNA or other genetic material” gathered this way, according to a promise from the Obama administration. That is small comfort for those suffering the aftereffects of this ruse.

Convincing wary parents to accept polio vaccination — and finding health workers willing to risk violence — has been made more difficult than ever.

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The head of Omidyar Network in India helped elect Narendra Modi

Mark Ames reports: Last weekend, India’s elections swept into power a hardline Hindu supremacist named Narendra Modi. And with that White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Obama administration “look[s] forward to working closely” with a man who has been on a US State Dept “visa blacklist” since 2005 for his role in the gruesome mass-killings and persecution of minority Muslims (and minority Christians).

Modi leads India’s ultranationalist BJP party, which won a landslide majority of seats (though only 31% of the votes), meaning Modi will have the luxury of leading India’s first one-party government in 30 years. This is making a lot of people nervous: The last time the BJP party was in power, in 1998, they launched series of nuclear bomb test explosions, sparking a nuclear crisis with Pakistan and fears of all-out nuclear war. And that was when the BJP was led by a “moderate” ultranationalist — and tied down with meddling coalition partners.

Modi is different. Not only will he rule alone, he’s promised to run India the way he ran the western state of Gujarat since 2001, which Booker Prize-winning author Arandhuti Roy described as “the petri dish in which Hindu fascism has been fomenting an elaborate political experiment.” Under Modi’s watch, an orgy of anti-Muslim violence led to up to 2000 killed and 250,000 internally displaced, and a lingering climate of fear, ghettoization, and extrajudicial executions by Gujarat death squads operating under Modi’s watch.

We can understand the White House being forced to congratulate Modi through gritted diplomatic teeth. What’s harder to stomach is the public cheering of India’s election results by one of the most prominent progressive names in Silicon Valley. [Continue reading…]

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