Author Archives: News Sources

Hellish Greek refugee camp becomes an inferno

The Daily Beast reports: The Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos is a living hell even during the best of times. Last April, on the eve of Pope Francis’s historic visit, refugees complained to The Daily Beast through the barbed-wire fence that they had no hot water, no toilets and no information about how long they would have to stay. Many aid agencies long ago abandoned the camp to protest the way the refugees were being treated, which only served to make the conditions worse.

On Monday night, around the time diplomats in New York were signing a multi-national declaration to make life better for the world’s 21 million refugees, Moria’s hell became a literal inferno.

More than 4,000 refugees had to flee a fire that swept through the camp and raged late into the night, destroying more than a third of the shelters. The fire allegedly was set during a protest to mark a six-month anniversary of their detention in a camp that was built to house perhaps half the number of people there. Nine migrants and refugees were arrested on suspicion of starting the blaze.

Everything changed drastically on Lesbos and many other Greek islands last March when the European Union signed a deal with Turkey to trade illegal migrants or refugees for vetted ones. Since then, almost no one’s applications has been processed and the only people who have left the island are those deported back to Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Silencing Kurdish voices

Diego Cupolo reports: Earlier this month, as he watched crew workers dismantle his television studio, Barış Barıştıran, chief broadcasting manager at Özgür Gün TV, told me that running a Kurdish news channel has never been easy in Turkey — but it’s never been this hard.

“In the 1990s, they would bomb our building, they would harass us, but they wouldn’t shut down our channel,” he said. “We would get punished and that was it.”

A week earlier, Barıştıran received a text message from the station’s satellite service provider saying they would stop broadcasting Özgür Gün TV, downgrading the channel from a national network to a local station reliant on landlines. With the station’s audience now diminished, advertisers dropped their contracts, and Baristiran, no longer able to afford the rent on the TV studio, was forced to move operations to another location.

“They told us thirty minutes before cutting the satellite service,” he said. “It was purely a political decision coming from above.”

Özgür Gün TV has been broadcasting from Diyarbakır, Turkey’s largest Kurdish-majority city, in one form or another since 1995. As with all other Kurdish media in the country, the station has long confronted obstacles in its coverage. It’s been penalized for broadcasting interviews with Kurdish politicians, and had its websites and social media accounts blocked repeatedly by telecommunications authorities.

In October 2015, a plainclothes police officer put a gun to the head of one of its reporters while he was covering military operations in the southeastern city of Silvan. This too was nothing new for Kurdish journalists. What mattered was that the TV crew was able to continue broadcasting afterwards.

“As you see, that’s not the case anymore,” Barıştıran said, as workers laid down a world map printed on composite board that, moments earlier, had served as the backdrop for the news studio. [Continue reading…]

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Trump praises autocratic Egyptian leader

Politico reports: There’s at least one Muslim country that Donald Trump has “great respect” for.

The Republican presidential nominee Monday showered Egypt’s increasingly autocratic ruler, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, with kind words during a special meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Trump, who has called for a ban on immigration from countries “compromised by terrorism,” which presumably would include Egypt, promised to invite Sisi to visit the White House if he’s elected president. Trump also suggested he’d like to visit Egypt.

In a strikingly praise-filled summary of the meeting released by his campaign, the Republican was said to express to Sisi “his strong support for Egypt’s war on terrorism, and how under a Trump administration, the United States of America will be a loyal friend, not simply an ally, that Egypt can count on in the days and years ahead.” [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump Jr.’s Skittles post on Twitter fits a pattern

The New York Times reports: This month, Donald Trump Jr. invoked the Holocaust when he argued to a Philadelphia radio station that the news media gave Mrs. Clinton a pass on “every indiscrepancy.”

If Republicans had done what she had, he said, “they’d be warming up the gas chamber right now.” (He later claimed this was a reference to capital punishment.)

He recently shared a Twitter post by Kevin MacDonald, a psychologist who has written about “Jewish influence” for a website devoted to “white identity, interests and culture” and who has testified on behalf of a Holocaust denier.

A few days before that, Mr. Trump shared on his Instagram account a picture showing the faces of his father, himself and several Trump supporters with Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character that has been co-opted as a mascot by the “alt-right,” an informal assembly of white nationalists, anti-immigration conservatives and anti-Semitic internet provocateurs.

“A friend sent me this,” Mr. Trump wrote of the image, adding that he was “honored” to have been included in it.

The Trump campaign declined to make Donald Jr. available for comment, instead releasing a statement that echoed his derision of political correctness and applauded him for speaking “the truth.” [Continue reading…]

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With Facebook’s flaws in the spotlight, Mark Zuckerberg’s silence is deafening

Espen Egil Hansen writes: In every TV studio where Facebook’s powerful position is being debated, one chair remains empty. In every newspaper article, every blogpost and every Facebook thread that challenges the company, one participant is missing.

Where is Mark Zuckerberg? A man now more powerful than most state leaders.

When I wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg earlier this month, I had three objectives.

First and foremost, Aftenposten wanted to stop Facebook’s censorship of the documentary photo The Terror of War. We did – but our victory was only symbolic. It just made Facebook see what everybody else is seeing: this picture is a documentation of the horrors of war – not nudity.

My second objective was to encourage debate on Facebook’s ever more powerful role as the world’s most important distributor of news and content. We succeeded in this as well, and I am pleased to see that the debate was international.

Most conspicuous, however, is the deafening silence from Facebook. Yes, they distribute written statements, which are dutifully read out by news anchors at the end of reports, but real participation is more the exception than the rule. Here in Scandinavia, Facebook has even gone so far as to leave it to a Swedish PR company to answer inquiries from the media. This company in turn will tell the press to quote “a spokesperson for Facebook”. [Continue reading…]

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George Soros: Why I’m investing $500 million in migrants

George Soros writes: The world has been unsettled by a surge in forced migration. Tens of millions of people are on the move, fleeing their home countries in search of a better life abroad. Some are escaping civil war or an oppressive regime; others are forced out by extreme poverty, lured by the possibility of economic advancement for themselves and their families.

Our collective failure to develop and implement effective policies to handle the increased flow has contributed greatly to human misery and political instability — both in countries people are fleeing and in the countries that host them, willingly or not. Migrants are often forced into lives of idle despair, while host countries fail to reap the proven benefit that greater integration could bring.

Governments must play the leading role in addressing this crisis by creating and sustaining adequate physical and social infrastructure for migrants and refugees. But harnessing the power of the private sector is also critical.

Recognizing this, the Obama administration recently launched a “Call to Action” asking U.S. companies to play a bigger role in meeting the challenges posed by forced migration. Today, private-sector leaders are assembling at the United Nations to make concrete commitments to help solve the problem.

In response, I have decided to earmark $500 million for investments that specifically address the needs of migrants, refugees and host communities. I will invest in startups, established companies, social-impact initiatives and businesses founded by migrants and refugees themselves. Although my main concern is to help migrants and refugees arriving in Europe, I will be looking for good investment ideas that will benefit migrants all over the world. [Continue reading…]

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Trump used $258,000 from his charity to settle legal problems

The Washington Post reports: Donald Trump spent more than a quarter-million dollars from his charitable foundation to settle lawsuits that involved the billionaire’s for-profit businesses, according to interviews and a review of legal documents.

Those cases, which together used $258,000 from Trump’s charity, were among four newly documented expenditures in which Trump may have violated laws against “self-dealing” — which prohibit nonprofit leaders from using charity money to benefit themselves or their businesses.

In one case, from 2007, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club faced $120,000 in unpaid fines from the town of Palm Beach, Fla., resulting from a dispute over the size of a flagpole.

In a settlement, Palm Beach agreed to waive those fines — if Trump’s club made a $100,000 donation to a specific charity for veterans. Instead, Trump sent a check from the Donald J. Trump Foundation, a charity funded almost entirely by other people’s money, according to tax records. [Continue reading…]

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As Trump tones down his rhetoric, his son amplifies the alt-right bigotry

David A. Graham writes: Donald Trump Jr. isn’t just his father’s namesake or dark-haired doppelganger. He is increasingly emerging as his father’s id — or perhaps simply his father’s emissary to the alt-right.

Over the last few weeks, Trump has made an effort to tone down his rhetoric and try to avoid the most outrageous comments, the ones that endeared him to the racists, misogynists, and xenophobes who gather in darker corners of the internet. Ironically, this switch has come since he installed Stephen Bannon, the CEO of Breitbart, a leading alt-right outlet, as his campaign CEO. It has also produced positive results, with Trump reaching his high point of the campaign with just about 50 days to go.

But it’s still important to maintain the base, and that role seems to have fallen to Donald Trump Jr. Trump fils has been increasingly catering to the fringe right in his social-media statements and interviews. Just take the last 16 hours or so. [Continue reading…]

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Media’s increasing willingness to call out Trump’s lies

Quartz reports: The Huffington Post branded him a serial liar months ago. Now, the most traditional American media outlets have also abandoned journalistic diplomatese in their coverage of Republican candidate Donald Trump, and are reaching for new ways to flag the word “lie.”

In at least five articles in the New York Times on Sept. 17, including the lead story in the print edition, the words “lie,” “false,” “falsely claimed” and “untrue” appeared in headlines, lead paragraphs, and top sections of the paper’s Trump coverage. The day before, CNN’s Jake Tapper called Trump “the most prominent pusher of the birther lie,” the Associated Press reported that Trump “peddled another lie,” and a Washington Post headline declared, “It’s time for TV news to stop playing the stooge for Donald Trump.”

It’s a marked change in language, even for outlets that have aggressively reported on Trump’s appeals to violence and bigotry. And it’s especially startling coming from the ultra-traditional Times, which even in the new digital age remains a north star for much mainstream media coverage.

“I think our investigative work — see [the Sept. 17] story on Trump’s tax breaks — has always been hard hitting,” says Dean Baquet, the New York Times’ executive editor. “But we have decided to be more direct in calling things out when a candidate actually lies.” [Continue reading…]

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Aid convoy hit in Syria as cease-fire ends

The New York Times reports: A humanitarian aid convoy was attacked in Syria on Monday after the Syrian military declared that a seven-day partial cease-fire was over and immediately began intensive bombardments in rebel-held areas of Aleppo, the divided city that has come to symbolize the ravages of the war.

The convoy attack, military declaration and bombings were the strongest signs yet of the gradual unraveling of a broader agreement between Russia and the United States aimed at restarting peace talks to end the conflict in Syria, which has killed an estimated 500,000 people and displaced millions.

Minutes after the Syrian military declared the cease-fire over around sunset, aerial attacks began pummeling insurgent-occupied neighborhoods of Aleppo, residents reported. The few remaining hospitals were back to overflowing, and rescuers struggled to find people in the dark, with the electricity out. By midnight, 34 people were reported killed.

United Nations officials were dumbfounded by the attack on the convoy of 31 trucks, which was escorted by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and was carrying food, medicine and supplies bound for rebel-held areas of western Aleppo Province. The convoy was among the first to try to deliver humanitarian aid to these areas, a relief plan permitted under the cease-fire agreement. [Continue reading…]

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Erdogan plans Syrian ‘safe zone’ as military campaign widens

Bloomberg reports: Turkey announced plans to create a safe zone in Syria the size of the Grand Canyon, a campaign that could be one of the biggest foreign military interventions in its modern history.

The Turkish military, which entered Syria last month to push Islamic State and Kurdish separatists from the border area, will expand its offensive to clear a 5,000-square-kilometer (1,931-square-mile) sanctuary, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday. The operation is liable to escalate its conflict with both of those armed groups and is set to be Turkey’s largest incursion since it poured troops into northern Iraq in the 1990s to attack strongholds of its own autonomy-seeking militants.

Turkey’s goal “is likely to require the deployment of thousands of Turkish soldiers in Syria for years and increase risks of a possible military confrontation with Syrian forces,” Nihat Ali Ozcan, a strategist at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara, said by telephone on Monday. [Continue reading…]

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UN chief blasts leaders in General Assembly for ‘feeding the war machine’ in Syria

The Associated Press reports: Taking the world stage for the last time as secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon unleashed years of pent-up anger at leaders who keep “feeding the war machine” in Syria, violate human rights and prevent aid deliveries to starving people.

The U.N. chief told presidents, prime ministers, monarchs and ministers at the opening of General Assembly’s annual ministerial meeting on Tuesday that “powerful patrons” on both sides in the more than five-year Syrian conflict “have blood on their hands.”

“Present in this hall today are representatives of governments that have ignored, facilitated, funded, participated in or even planned and carried out atrocities inflicted by all sides of the Syria conflict against Syrian civilians,” he said.

“Many groups have killed innocent civilians — none more so than the government of Syria, which continues to barrel bomb neighborhoods and systematically torture thousands of detainees,” he added. [Continue reading…]

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Ahmad Khan Rahami’s father told police in 2014 his son was a terrorist, officials say

The New York Times reports: Two years before Ahmad Khan Rahami went on a bombing rampage in New York and New Jersey, his father told the police that the son was a terrorist, prompting a review by federal agents, according to two senior law enforcement officials.

Separately on Tuesday, another official said that when Mr. Rahami was captured during a shootout with the police, he was carrying a notebook that contained writings sympathetic to jihadist causes.

In one section of the book, which was pierced by a bullethole and covered in blood, Mr. Rahami wrote of “killing the kuffar,” or unbeliever, according to the official, who agreed to speak about the investigation only on the condition of anonymity. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia appears to be using U.S.-supplied white phosphorus in its war in Yemen

The Washington Post reports: Saudi Arabia appears to be using U.S.-supplied white phosphorus munitions in its war in Yemen, based on images and videos posted to social media, raising concerns among human rights groups that the highly incendiary material could be used against civilians.

Under U.S. regulations, white phosphorus sold to other countries is to be used only for signaling to other troops and creating smoke screens. When the munition explodes, it releases white phosphorus that automatically ignites in the air and creates a thick white smoke. When used against soldiers or civilians, it can maim and kill by burning to the bone.

It is unclear exactly how the Saudis are using the munitions, but the government has already received widespread condemnation for its indiscriminate bombing in civilian areas since its campaign against rebel forces in Yemen began in 2015. [Continue reading…]

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The hidden costs of closed borders for migrants stuck in Serbia

By Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, Aston University and Mаrtа Stojić Mitrović, Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences

In Spring 2016, Croatia, Slovenia and Macedonia “closed” their borders to migrants who had been transiting these countries via the “Balkan route” on their way further into the European Union. The closures follow other attempts at shutting EU borders: Hungary built a fence along its border with Serbia, while the so-called “EU-Turkey” deal was intended to prevent people from reaching EU borders by sending those who had crossed the Mediterranean back to Turkey.

Despite the border closures, the Balkan route is still active – a problem recognised at an EU leaders’ meeting in July. Now those refugees not able to get any further are stuck in limbo. Non-governmental organisatons (NGOs) and the UNHCR estimate there are at least 200 arrivals per day in Serbia, with around 5,000 people stuck in Serbia alone.

Even though the number of people stuck in Serbia is comparatively small, our interviews throughout the summer of 2016 showed that a lack of resources and attention is precipitating a secondary humanitarian crisis: a growing refugee population is living in increasingly precarious conditions and is almost wholly reliant on smugglers to leave. The UNHCR believes that border closures divert problems and aggravate living conditions, while Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) told us they see a correlation between the closures and increased levels of violence against refugees – both by smugglers and border authorities.

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Muslim. Black. Women

Engy Abdelkader writes: As anti-Muslim violence persists during a volatile presidential election cycle, at least one Muslim woman recently won our nation’s hearts and minds: Duke grad and Olympian fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad.

By now, everyone knows Ibtihaj as the first American to compete in a headscarf at the Olympics. But, not everyone may realize how incredibly representative this newest spokesperson is for the Muslim American community.

“Muslim” and “Arab” are often used interchangeably, with many mistaking Saudi Arabia as the largest Muslim country; it’s actually Indonesia (the Kingdom doesn’t even make the top ten list). At home, at least one in three Muslims in America are actually African American. And, Muslim American women are the second most educated religious group in the country, exemplified by Ibtihaj’s Ivy League credentials. [Continue reading…]

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The new terror: Even when it fails, it works

Christopher Dickey writes: Police have released the photo of a 28-year-old man originally from Afghanistan, Ahmad Khan Rahami, being sought for questioning in connection with the bombing in New York City on Saturday night. [The suspect has now been arrested.]

According to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, talking to CNN, Rahami should be regarded as “armed and dangerous.”

“Things are moving very quickly,” De Blasio said, but he would not confirm that Rahami was part of an operating cell or that it had connection with jihadists overseas, including al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State.
What to make of all this?

“Terrorists are now doing what we had long expected them to do and wondered why they didn’t do,” former acting CIA director John McLaughlin told an audience in New York last week. “They are going for soft targets.”

He was talking about attacks in Europe.

This week, he could say the same thing — exactly the same thing — about the United States.

It appears all but certain to counterterrorist officials in Europe and the United States that the long-anticipated jihadist strategy of random terror carried out with such devastating social and political consequences in France and Germany over the last year has now begun in America.

The implications in this deeply troubled election year, right as the United Nations General Assembly is convening in New York City, are enormous. [Continue reading…]

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Who are the Russian-backed hackers attacking the U.S. political system?

NBC News reports: Two teams of highly skilled hackers directed and protected by the Russian state are on the offensive.

Cybersecurity experts and intelligence officials tell NBC News the same hackers who broke into the Democratic Party’s computers, the World Anti-Doping Agency’s Administration System and who are implicated in the leaks of the personal emails of former Secretary of State Colin Powell and the health documents of Olympians are executing a Kremlin-backed campaign of cyber-espionage and sabotage.

Their target: Western democratic institutions and Russia’s political opponents.

“They are starting to figure out the way to apply the power they have in terms of technical capabilities into the geopolitical aspect,” Italian cyber security investigator Stefano Maccaglia told NBC News.

At a small square in Rome on a recent summer day, Maccaglia explained how he came to know most of these hackers in the early 2000s, when he was one himself. Having since crossed to the other side, Maccaglia’s job now is to investigate — sometimes for the Italian government — the Russian hackers’ cyber-attacks.

Maccaglia, who is now an advisory consultant for the network security company RSA, explained that the two teams of Russian hackers vary from trained researchers with a mathematical background to “the very funny person” skilled in computer programming languages and are turned into “gangs of cyber-mercenaries” who offer their “brilliance” to the highest bidder.

“They obviously have a very good life now,” Maccaglia said of the privileges they enjoy for their services.

Their relationship to the Russian state, he explained, is a win-win: The cyber gangsters are allowed to keep stealing — their traditional hacking work — as long as they do the bidding of Russian intelligence services.

In exchange, they receive state protection.

“They are above the law and are obviously protected,” Maccaglia said. “That’s why nobody can prosecute them. There is no way to reach them anymore.” [Continue reading…]

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