Monthly Archives: January 2016

Europe wades into debate over Poland’s constitutional crisis

By Simona Guerra, University of Leicester and Fernando Casal Bértoa, University of Nottingham

Poland’s prime minister Beata Szydło recently found herself summoned to the European Parliament in Strasbourg to defend her government over accusations that its commitment to democratic values is on the slide.

This was an unprecedented meeting. The parliament had called a debate under the auspices of a law introduced in March 2014, giving it the right to question a national government if it thinks a systemic threat to democracy is about to take place in a European country.

In Poland’s case, concerns were raised over government plans to limit the power of the national constitutional court, and change the way the media is governed and civil servants hired.

The aim of a meeting is to have a constructive conversation about concerns but if that fails, Brussels can move to suspend a country from taking part in EU decision making (although this is an unlikely scenario).

Among the post-communist states that joined the EU in 2004, Poland has generally been seen as a success story. While Hungary and Romania, and candidate countries such as Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina seem to be dragging their feet over democratic reform, Poland has blazed the trail.

But in October 2015, the new social national conservative government, led by Szydło (Law and Justice party, PiS) won an outright majority in parliamentary elections and quickly set about making significant changes.

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The inequality problem

Ed Miliband writes: ‘What do I see in our future today you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while … plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99 per cent of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind.’ Who said this? Jeremy Corbyn? Thomas Piketty? In fact it was Nick Hanauer, an American entrepreneur and multibillionaire, who in a TED talk in 2014 confessed to living a life that the rest of us ‘can’t even imagine’. Hanauer doesn’t believe he’s particularly talented or unusually hardworking; he doesn’t believe he has a great technical mind. His success, he says, is a ‘consequence of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance and of timing’. Just as his own extraordinary wealth can’t be explained by his unique talents, neither, he says, can rising inequality in the United States be justified on the grounds that it is a side effect of a broader economic success from which everyone benefits. As Henry Ford recognised, if you don’t pay ordinary workers decent wages, the economy will lack the demand to sustain economic growth.

Hanauer is in the vanguard of the ‘Fight for 15’, the campaign for a $15 minimum wage. Like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, who have also issued loud warnings about inequality, he is heir to a long tradition of social concern among the wealthy in the US. They have reason to be worried. The last time inequality reached comparable levels was shortly before the Wall Street Crash. As Anthony Atkinson shows in Inequality: What Can Be Done?, inequality in the US fell for decades after the crash, before beginning to rise again in the 1970s.​ Since then the gap between the wealthy and the rest has grown steadily wider. The top 1 per cent now has nearly 20 per cent of total US personal income. In the 1980s, inequality in the UK went up even more sharply than in the US. Since then, overall UK inequality has been relatively stable but the income share of the top 1 per cent has increased significantly and now accounts for about 12 per cent of UK personal income. The important factors are rising inequality in wages, a decline in the share of the national income that wages represent as more money goes to corporate profits and dividends, and a reversal of redistribution from the rich to the poor.

The rise in inequality should not, Atkinson insists, be brushed aside as an inevitable effect of irresistible forces such as globalisation or developments in technology. It is driven by political choices. [Continue reading…]

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By 2030, renewables will be the world’s primary power source

Climate Progress reports: In November, the International Energy Agency quietly dropped this bombshell projection: “Driven by continued policy support, renewables account for half of additional global generation, overtaking coal around 2030 to become the largest power source.”

In this post, I’ll dive deeper into this rapidly-approaching role reversal for coal and renewables. In Part Two, I’ll explain why the so-called “intermittency” problem for some renewables is basically solved and thus not a barrier to this reversal.

In releasing its World Energy Outlook 2015 last fall, the IEA published this chart of projected electricity generation in 2040: [Continue reading…]

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‘Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need’

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Pico Iyer writes: The idea of going nowhere is as universal as the law of gravity; that’s why wise souls from every tradition have spoken of it. “All the unhappiness of men,” the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal famously noted, “arises from one simple fact: that they cannot sit quietly in their chamber.” After Admiral Richard E. Byrd spent nearly five months alone in a shack in the Antarctic, in temperatures that sank to 70 degrees below zero, he emerged convinced that “Half the confusion in the world comes from not knowing how little we need.” Or, as they sometimes say around Kyoto, “Don’t just do something. Sit there.”

Yet the days of Pascal and even Admiral Byrd seem positively tranquil by today’s standards. The amount of data humanity will collect while you’re reading The Art of Stillness is five times greater than the amount that exists in the entire Library of Congress. Anyone reading it will take in as much information today as Shakespeare took in over a lifetime. Researchers in the new field of interruption science have found that it takes an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from a phone call. Yet such interruptions come every eleven minutes — which means we’re never caught up with our lives.

And the more facts come streaming in on us, the less time we have to process any one of them. The one thing technology doesn’t provide us with is a sense of how to make the best use of technology. Put another way, the ability to gather information, which used to be so crucial, is now far less important than the ability to sift through it. [Continue reading…]

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How plants rely on friendly fungal bodyguards

By Alan Gange, Royal Holloway

Two plants of the same species grow side by side. One is attacked by insects, one not. On an individual plant, some leaves get eaten, some not. This doesn’t happen at random, but is caused by the fungi that live within the leaves and roots of the plant.

Imagine you are holding a shoot of the dahlia plant, pictured below. How many species do you have in your hand? The answer is most certainly not one, but probably somewhere between 20 and 30. This is because every plant has fungi and bacteria that live on its surface (called epiphytes) and within its tissues (called endophytes).

If the stem is still attached to its roots then the number of species would easily double. The roots contain lots of endophytes and a separate group of fungi, called mycorrhizas. These fungi grow into plant roots and form a symbiotic relationship in which the fungus donates nutrients (principally phosphate and nitrate) to the plant, in return for a supply of carbon.

Dahlia is full of fungi.
Alan Gange, Author provided

There has been a recent surge of interest in these fungi, as their presence can affect the growth of insects that attack plants. Research at Royal Holloway has shown that mycorrhizal fungi reduce the growth of many insects, by increasing the plant’s chemical defences. Our most recent work shows that endophyte fungi, the ones that live within plant tissue, can also cause plants to produce novel chemicals.

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Wall Street declares war on Bernie Sanders

Bill Black writes: Wall Street billionaires are freaking out about the chance that Bernie Sanders could be elected President. Stephen Schwarzman, one of the wealthiest and most odious people in the world, told the Wall Street Journal that one of the three principal causes of the recent global financial trauma was “the market’s” fear that Sanders may be elected President. Schwarzman is infamous for ranting that President Obama’s proposals to end the “carried interest” tax scam that allows private equity billionaires like Schwarzman to pay lower income tax rates than their secretaries was “like when Hitler invaded Poland.”

Schwarzman and Pete Peterson co-founded the private equity firm Blackstone. Peterson leads the effort to destroy the safety net in America. His greatest dream is to privatize Social Security so that Wall Street could increase its revenues by tens of billions of dollars. Blackstone is a major owner of Sea World, and it was in this sphere that Schwarzman went beyond his delusional rants about Hitler and became vile. When an Orca killed its trainer, Schwarzman lied and blamed the death on the trainer, claiming that Sea World “had one safety lapse — interestingly, with a situation where the person involved violated all the safety rules that we had.”

Schwarzman’s claim that the global financial markets are tanking because of Bernie’s increasing support is delusional, but it is revealing that he used the most recent market nightmare as an excuse to attack Bernie. The Wall Street plutocrats, with good reason, fear Bernie – not Hillary. Indeed, it is remarkable how vigorous and open Wall Street has been in signaling through the financial media that it has no problem with Hillary’s Wall Street plan. CNN, CNBC, and the Fiscal Times, under titles such as: “Here’s Why Wall Street Has Little to Fear from Hillary Clinton,” pushed this meme. [Continue reading…]

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In the face of mounting opposition, Angela Merkel holds to her principles on accepting refugees

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Der Spiegel reports: On a Sunday evening in early January, Angela Merkel went to a piano concert by Antonio Acunto in the Konzerthaus on Berlin’s beautiful Gendarmenmarkt. The program included works from Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Schumann, but the chancellor didn’t just come for the music. It was also for a good cause and to show support. The concert was a benefit for the refugees. Her refugees.

Shortly before the concert began, Merkel saw an old acquaintance: Reverend Rainer Eppelmann. In 1990, Eppelmann was head of the Democratic Awakening, a party formed in East Germany soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Merkel was its spokesperson. The party was ultimately folded into the Christian Democratic Union, of which Merkel is now the head.

At the concert, Eppelmann told Merkel how courageous and wonderful he thought her refugee policies were. Given the situation in which Merkel is now in, Eppelmann said, he finds himself thinking often about his favorite quote from the former Czech president and writer Vaclav Havel. “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

The concert began and Merkel listened to a melancholic Chopin ballad in G-minor. When the intermission arrived, she jumped up from her chair and walked directly over to Eppelmann. She asked: “How did that quote about hope go again?”

It is completely unclear how the experiment will end that the German chancellor has forced upon the European Continent, upon her fellow citizens and, not least, upon her party. Her decision late last summer to open the German border to refugees transformed Merkel into a historic figure. It was the most consequential decision of her entire decade in office. [Continue reading…]

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Danish parliament approves plan to seize assets from refugees

The Guardian reports: Denmark has become the latest European state to force refugees to hand over their valuables, with the continent increasingly using scare tactics and physical deterrents to deal with the biggest migration crisis since the second world war.

Following similar moves in Switzerland and southern Germany, Denmark’s parliament voted on Tuesday to allow police to search asylum seekers on arrival in the country and confiscate any non-essential items worth more than 10,000 Danish kroner (about £1,000) that have no sentimental value to their owner.

The bill presented by the centre-right minority government of the prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, was approved after almost four hours of debate by 81 of the 109 lawmakers present, as members of the opposition Social Democrats and two small rightwing parties backed the measures. [Continue reading…]

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Growing concern about EU’s commitment to open borders

The New York Times reports: European Union interior ministers clashed on Monday over how to check the flow of migrants across their countries’ borders amid growing concern that the Continent’s commitment to the free movement of people within the bloc is at risk of collapse.

Some of the wealthy northern nations that are the preferred destinations of many migrants suggested that much of the solution should rest with their neighbors to the south, especially Greece, the main entry point into the European Union for refugees arriving from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan via Turkey. At a meeting here, Germany told Greece to do its “homework” to stop the flow at its borders, and Austria suggested that Greece could be excluded from the Schengen area, which allows border-free travel across much of the European Union.

Ioannis Mouzalas, a Greek minister for immigration policy, criticized the focus on his country, saying that the bloc had not made good on its pledges of more assistance in managing the flow of people — nearly 1.1 million arrived last year in the European Union — and that some European politicians were spreading “lies” about the crisis and the role of the government in Athens.

There is a “blame game against Greece,” Mr. Mouzalas said. [Continue reading…]

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Hardliners disqualify Khomeini’s grandson in Iran power struggle

Hassan-Khomeini

Financial Times reports: Hassan Khomeini may be the grandson of the founder of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, but his religious and political credentials were deemed insufficient to qualify him for membership in the Assembly of Experts, the body that will determine Iran’s next supreme leader.

The Guardian Council, a constitutional watchdog that vets candidates standing for the council, disqualified Mr Khomeini despite “testimony by all those senior clerics” that he had reached a sufficiently high level of religious learning to interpret Islamic law or Ijtihad, Mr Khomeini’s son, Ahmad, said on his Instagram page on Tuesday.

“The reason for the disqualification is clear to all,” he added, implying that Mr Khomeini, whose candidacy outraged hardliners, was disqualified because of his alliance with reformists.

Mr Khomeini’s disqualification is a blow to centrist president Hassan Rouhani and comes amid a tense power struggle between moderate forces and hardliners. The implementation of the landmark nuclear agreement last week was seen as a big victory for pro-reform forces. But their conservative opponents are determined to maintain their hold on key institutions and say they will resist “infiltration” by western governments bent on “undermining the regime” through pro-reform forces. [Continue reading…]

IranWire reports: Reformists and moderates enthusiastically embraced Khomeini when he announced his candidacy, an excitement that Khomeini tried to quell in order to comply with electoral guidelines and to satisfy the Guardian Council — half of which are appointed by the Supreme Leader. Aware of the importance of pleasing the regime, Hassan Khomeini’s brother Ali spoke about his brother’s candidacy in a way that would meet the approval of Iran’s hardliners, particularly those on the Council.

Despite these overtures, the Council rejected Khomeini’s bid to join the Assembly of Experts.

Under Iranian law, disqualified Assembly candidates have the right to appeal the Council’s decision. The deadline for this is January 30. Khomeini has not stated whether he will launch an appeal.

Former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, currently the president of the Expediency Council, and Intelligence Minister Mahmoud Alavi, as well as President Hassan Rouhani, were all successful in their bids to run as candidates for the Assembly. [Continue reading…]

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A visit to the world of segregation where Jews are on top

Philip Weiss writes: On my first night in an Israeli settlement, David served chicken soup left over from Sabbath and told me an unsettling story about the birth of Israel. His great uncle had escaped Europe to come to a Jewish kibbutz called Ein Harod. On the next hill was a Palestinian village. When hostilities broke out between Jews and Palestinians in 1948, the Jews went up to the village and announced that the next day they were bringing bulldozers to level the place, the people should leave. The next day they went back and were surprised to find that the Palestinians had all fled– fearing a massacre like the one that took place in Deir Yassin. The Jews then leveled the village and used the stones to build a stadium in their kibbutz. David said his uncle had told this story “with a twinkle in his eye.”

David was not the only settler to tell me stories of the Nakba. And the meaning was clear: A previous generation of Zionists had done terrible things to Palestinians in order to build the state of Israel. Now David and the other settlers were taking that same project– Zionism, the renewal of the Jewish people in their land—to the next part of the land of Israel. And they were doing so without destroying Palestinian villages, as their socialist predecessors had done.

The settlers told me that the great political development of the last year or two is that the Tel Aviv elite now concede that the settlers are never leaving. The elites give lip service to a Palestinian state because the world wants to hear that. But few in Jewish Israeli society even want that to happen; it would tear the country apart. [Continue reading…]

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Syria’s next election: A practical path forward

Bassam Barabandi and Sasha Ghosh-Siminoff write: Negotiations between the Syrian opposition and governing regime start in just a few days. The challenges are numerous and many analysts are quick to proclaim the process already dead. Despite the momentum of the Vienna process, a myriad of factors continues to make Syria a complicated case: a messy situation on the battlefield, an unwillingness to compromise, political dynamics among the opposition, hostility between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Russia’s backing of Assad — take your pick.

While somewhat less than enthused by the framework set out by the UN Security Council resolution, which leaves Assad in power, Syrian opposition groups are meeting in Riyadh to prepare for negotiations. Apart from selecting members of their negotiation committee, the opposition groups are discussing their negotiation goals, including principles for political reform — reform which cannot include Assad as head of any transitional government. This is a tall order, which was once supported by the international community but apparently abandoned in the face of reality on the ground.

The focus on Assad’s role (or lack thereof) in a transitional government is understandable. Nevertheless, it might be pragmatic to review the timeline of transition as presently framed and propose a slightly different approach. With or without Assad, in the case of successful negotiations and an even somewhat effective ceasefire, a genuine deal will include constitutional reform and elections. [Continue reading…]

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Why Iran backs Syria

Barak Barfi writes: The execution of a Shiite cleric in Saudi Arabia and the burning of Riyadh’s embassy in Iran has one again flamed Sunni-Shiite tensions and set the tiny Arab oil sheikhdoms on edge. Leaders from Lebanon to Yemen are fretting about Iranian machinations in Arab countries. But it is Tehran’s involvement in Syria that worries them the most. Tehran has bolstered its client state by dispatching senior military figures, pressing its Lebanese client Hezbollah to send fighters, providing much-needed petroleum products and extending Syria a hefty line of credit.

Without Iran’s help, the regime would likely have collapsed. Some believe Tehran has backed Syria to the hilt because of their common religious roots. Both ruling cliques claim affinity with the heterodox Shia, who are a minority in an Islamic world populated by orthodox Sunnis.

But Iran’s Syrian strategy derives less from spurious religious ties than it does from geopolitical factors. Surrounded by hostile pro-Western nations, Iran needs all the allies it can find to ensure that its regional interests are protected. [Continue reading…]

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The UN repeats mistakes of the past in Madaya

starving-child-madaya

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: Two weeks before an aid convoy delivered food and medicine to the 42,000 people of Madaya, a representative for the town’s council made an urgent appeal to the UN office responsible for the region. The town had been strangled since July 2015 by Bashar Al Assad’s army and the Lebanese Hizbollah. The condition was precarious: inhabitants were subsisting on grass, cats, dogs, insects, salt and water. At least 28 had died of starvation since the beginning of December. The council representative received an automated reply: the staff were away until January 5.

On New Year’s Eve, when the UN chief Ban Ki-moon wished his Twitter followers a peaceful 2016, he made no mention of the unfolding tragedy.

The inertia was broken when a determined social media campaign forced Madaya on the world’s attention and, eventually, the UN relented. On January 7, the regime agreed to allow a one-off supply of aid. The UN was quick to praise the regime for this concession, but it took another four days before it delivered aid to the town. The delay resulted from the “complexity” of synchronising deliveries to the 12,000 inhabitants of Al Fu’a and Kefraya, two pro-regime villages in Idlib encircled by rebels. On entering the town, aid workers were shocked by the “horrifying” conditions. “There are people in Madaya, but no life,” said Sajjad Malik, the UNHCR chief in Syria. “They are fighting for survival. No food, no electricity, no heating, no medicines. People did not even have the energy to complain.”

The representative for the UN’s Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Syria, Yacoub El Hillo, too was moved: “We saw a people that are desperate; a people that are cold; a people that are hungry; a people that have almost lost hope”.

But in a curious statement, Mr El Hillo added that before entering Madaya, “it was at times difficult to determine whether what we were seeing was actually fabricated or exaggerated”.

It is unclear why Mr El Hillo should’ve faced such difficulty. The conditions in Madaya had been known to the UN for months. This scepticism may be unfounded but it is consistent with the state-centric bias of the UN’s humanitarian practices. UN agencies are required to respect state sovereignty regardless of legitimacy. And in Syria, they have been reluctant to act without the consent of the regime. This has turned the UN into an unwitting agent of the status quo, allowing the regime to politicise aid. [Continue reading…]

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Rebels in north-western Syria buckle under Russian bombardment

Aron Lund writes: Syria news right now is all about the peace process that is set to start on Friday in Geneva, Switzerland, despite its limited chances of success. But even as they talk, the parties continue to fight and the Russian-Iranian military intervention continues to wear down Syrian rebels. On September 30, the Russian Air Force dropped its first bombs in Syria. The government of Iran joined in by raising an expeditionary corps of Iranian, Iraqi, and Afghan Shia Islamists for the front south of Aleppo.

In a recent article for Vice News, the American freelance writer and Syria expert Sam Heller notes a flurry of desperate-sounding calls for outside support from rebels in northwestern Syria. Though most frontlines have held with little or limited change, four months of relentless Russian bombardment and offensives by the Syrian Arab Army and its Shia allies seem to have left the insurgents exhausted.

In early December, I tried to evaluate the extent of government progress in a post on Syria in Crisis. As far as I could tell, it was clear then that Assad stabilized his positions, but overall progress seemed underwhelming and the picture was mixed. We would have to wait and see.

Since then, however, the wind has continued to blow Assad’s way. General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently noted that “the regime is in a better place now” compared to before the intervention. Indeed, after four months, the effects of the concerted Russian-Iranian-Syrian campaign have begun to surface. [Continue reading…]

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Violence of young men diminishes when they have jobs and families

The Economist reports: In August 2014 Boko Haram fighters surged through Madagali, an area in north-east Nigeria. They butchered, burned and stole. They closed schools, because Western education is sinful, and carried off young girls, because holy warriors need wives.

Taru Daniel escaped with his father and ten siblings. His sister was not so lucky: the jihadis kidnapped her and took her to their forest hideout. “Maybe they forced her to marry,” Mr Daniel speculates. Or maybe they killed her; he does not know.

He is 23 and wears a roughed-up white T-shirt and woollen hat, despite the blistering heat in Yola, the town to which he fled. He has struggled to find a job, a big handicap in a culture where a man is not considered an adult unless he can support a family. “If you don’t have money you cannot marry,” he explains. Asked why other young men join Boko Haram, he says: “Food no dey. [There is no food.] Clothes no dey. We have nothing. That is why they join. For some small, small money. For a wife.”

Some terrorists are born rich. Some have good jobs. Most are probably sincere in their desire to build a caliphate or a socialist paradise. But material factors clearly play a role in fostering violence. North-east Nigeria, where Boko Haram operates, is largely Islamic, but it is also poor, despite Nigeria’s oil wealth, and corruptly governed. It has lots of young men, many of them living hand to mouth. It is also polygamous: 40% of married women share a husband. Rich old men have multiple spouses; poor young men are left single, sex-starved and without a stable family life. Small wonder some are tempted to join Boko Haram.

Globally, the people who fight in wars or commit violent crimes are nearly all young men. Henrik Urdal of the Harvard Kennedy School looked at civil wars and insurgencies around the world between 1950 and 2000, controlling for such things as how rich, democratic or recently violent countries were, and found that a “youth bulge” made them more strife-prone. When 15-24-year-olds made up more than 35% of the adult population — as is common in developing countries — the risk of conflict was 150% higher than with a rich-country age profile.

If young men are jobless or broke, they make cheap recruits for rebel armies. And if their rulers are crooked or cruel, they will have cause to rebel. Youth unemployment in Arab states is twice the global norm. The autocrats who were toppled in the Arab Spring were all well past pension age, had been in charge for decades and presided over kleptocracies. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi bombing campaign — supported by Britain — leaves Yemen’s healthcare system in tatters

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The Independent reports: When the men and women who worked at Shiara hospital heard the explosion, there was little surprise. Just half an hour’s drive from the border with Saudi Arabia, in Yemen’s mountainous northern region, they were used to the sound of shelling.

What they did not expect 10 months into the Saudi-led campaign of airstrikes was that it would be their own hospital that had been hit. The bombing on 10 January left six people dead, including three staff members. Many more were injured.

“The wounded were hit by shrapnel from the missile, and also by shards of metal from the fence [around the hospital]. The injuries were brutal,” said Teresa Sancristoval, the head of the emergency desk at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which operates in the hospital.

The attack was among 130 on health facilities hit in Yemen since the Saudi-led coalition began its bombing campaign in March last year. It was the fourth on a facility supported by MSF – which says it gives detailed co-ordinates for its hospitals to both sides of the conflict. [Continue reading…]

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