Author Archives: News Sources

Fighting rages in Aleppo despite global anger at image of injured child

The Guardian reports: Fighting raged across the embattled city of Aleppo on Friday, a day after the harrowing image of a child rescued from the rubble of his house in an opposition-held district sparked global condemnation and outrage over the plight of civilians there.

The renewed violence continued despite assurances from Russia, the primary ally of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, that it was ready to observe 48-hour humanitarian pauses in the fighting to allow aid to trickle into the besieged city.

Moscow said it could begin testing the pauses as early as next week as a “pilot project”.

“More precise date and time will be determined after receiving information about the readiness of the convoys from the UN representatives and receiving confirmation of the security guarantees of their safe travel from our American partners,” a Russian defence ministry spokesman was quoted as saying by the Tass news agency.

The UN special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, proposed the idea of humanitarian pauses last week in an effort to allow aid into Aleppo, which is divided into two halves – an eastern portion controlled by the rebels and a western side held by the Assad government. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. scrambled jets to protect its ‘advisers’ in Syria

AFP reports: The US-led coalition scrambled fighters to protect US advisers working with Kurdish forces after Syrian regime jets bombed the area, in the latest escalation of Syria’s bloody conflict, the Pentagon said.

The air strikes took place on Thursday, conducted by two Syrian SU-24 attack planes targeting Kurdish forces undergoing training with US special operations advisers around the northeastern city of Hasakeh, Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said.

The coalition scrambled its own jets to the area in a bid to intercept the Syrian jets, but the regime planes had left by the time they arrived. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia kills civilians, the U.S. looks the other way

Samuel Oakford writes: In the span of four days earlier this month, the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in Yemen bombed a Doctors Without Borders-supported hospital, killing 19 people; a school, where 10 children, some as young as 8, died; and a vital bridge over which United Nations food supplies traveled, punishing millions.

In a war that has seen reports of human rights violations committed by every side, these three attacks stand out. But the Obama administration says these strikes, like previous ones that killed thousands of civilians since last March, will have no effect on the American support that is crucial for Saudi Arabia’s air war.

On the night of Aug. 11, coalition warplanes bombed the main bridge on the road from Hodeidah, along the Red Sea coast, to Sana, the capital. When it didn’t fully collapse, they returned the next day to destroy the bridge.

More than 14 million Yemenis suffer dangerous levels of food insecurity — a figure that dwarfs that of any other country in conflict, worsened by a Saudi-led and American-supported blockade. One in three children under the age of 5 reportedly suffers from acute malnutrition. An estimated 90 percent of food that the United Nation’s World Food Program transports to Sana traveled across the destroyed bridge. [Continue reading…]

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Aleppo doctor: ‘Shedding tears for the injured children of Syria is not enough’


Dr Zaher Sahloul has worked in Aleppo and seen the horrific affect of airstrikes. He says incidents like that which left Omran Daqneesh stunned and bloodied are all too common in a city under siege.

Zaher Sahloul writes: The pictures of the injured five-year old Omran Daqneesh have shocked the world, but doctors in Aleppo see dozens of desperate children like him every week, often with worse injuries and many entirely beyond help.

Perhaps his individual tragedy will have a small silver lining if it reminds people far beyond Syria of the tragedy that has been unfolding there for years. Every time I work there I treat children, often so terribly wounded and traumatised that I wonder if the ones who survived were unluckier than the ones who died.

I keep a picture from a second-grader in Aleppo, of helicopters bombing the city, blood and destruction below, but what is really shocking for me is that the dead children are smiling while the living ones are crying.

I also keep photos of my first ever patient in Aleppo, a toddler called Hamzeh who had been shot by a government sniper, and brought to the hospital intensive care unit with a bullet in his brain. I had to tell his family he was brain dead, and then turn off the ventilator, which can be particularly hard in Syria because if the heart is beating many people cannot accept their child has no hope of surviving.

Then there was Abdullah, who was 12, and injured by shrapnel from a barrel bomb. He asked me, screaming in pain but still somehow polite, to stop trying to insert a tube into his chest without anaesthetic.

“I kiss your hand uncle, please stop,” he begged me, but we had no painkillers and he would die if I did not drain the blood pooling around his lungs, so I carried on. I also think often of the two young sisters who were brought to another emergency room hugging each other, but already dead.

Omran survived, without losing a limb or an eye, but he will be traumatised forever. And there are bombings every day, so who knows what will happen in coming days or weeks, he could be hit again.

We say this is a powerful picture, but will it translate into meaningful action to protect these children? They are not dolls to cry over and then move on. That is the worst thing, everyone is looking at these pictures, but who will do anything? [Continue reading…]

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To Syrians the world offers sympathy and little help

Uri Friedman writes: You can calculate the number of people who have died in a conflict, the relative strength of various factions, the amount of territory each holds. Hope is much harder to measure. But it’s no less a factor in the arithmetic of war. Hope is a bulwark of humanity. In many cases, hope is all that civilians beset by violence have left.

Consider the Syrian Civil War: Hope — for the most basic international action to ease the suffering of Syrians, let alone efforts to halt hostilities or end the war — is in especially short supply these days. The shortage is evident in the reaction this week to the images and video of a stunned, bloodied five-year-old boy being whisked from a bombed building to an ambulance. The visuals are being widely shared online, but often with dark resignation. There’s little expectation that world leaders will be moved to do what’s necessary to resolve the humanitarian catastrophe in Aleppo, which for months now has been starved of food, water, and medical supplies as Syrian government and rebel forces battle for control of the city.

“Watch this video from Aleppo tonight. And watch it again,” the Australian journalist Sophie McNeill tweeted on Wednesday, in reference to the footage of the Syrian child. “And remind yourself that with #Syria #WeCantSayWeDidntKnow.” This is less a call to action than a challenge to stare straight at collective inaction—and not turn away in disgust. McNeill’s message has been shared thousands of times.

The shortage of hope is also evident in a letter that 15 of the last doctors in rebel-controlled eastern Aleppo recently sent to Barack Obama. The physicians spoke of horrors that haven’t gone viral on the internet: attacks on medical facilities, often by suspected Russian or Syrian government warplanes, occurring roughly every 17 hours; four newborn babies suffocating to death after an explosion cut off oxygen to their incubators. The letter’s signatories urged the U.S. president to exert more pressure on the various parties in the conflict to protect civilians and lift the siege on the city. But a number of doctors declined to sign the letter, believing the plea for international support to be futile. And when the BBC asked one of the signatories about that decision by her colleagues, she admitted that she didn’t expect the United States to actually help either. [Continue reading…]

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Regrets? Trump’s had a few, but too few to mention

The New York Times reports: Donald J. Trump on Thursday expressed regret for making statements that have “caused personal pain,” a rare display of contrition that followed the shake-up of his campaign’s leadership this week.

“Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don’t choose the right words or you say the wrong thing,” Mr. Trump said. “I have done that. And believe it or not, I regret it.”

The crowd gathered at a convention center here responded by chanting Mr. Trump’s name, and he gave them a thumbs-up.

“And I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain,” Mr. Trump added. “Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues.”

Mr. Trump’s statement of regret, in a prepared speech in which he spoke of a “New American Future,” seemed to be a step toward trying to recover from a number of public quarrels and other episodes that have damaged his campaign, including a dispute with the family of an American Muslim soldier who was killed in Iraq.

But in his speech, which he read off a teleprompter, he did not specify what he regretted, offer specific apologies or linger on the subject. In his campaign, Mr. Trump has at times sounded restrained and on-message, only to quickly revert to his more pugilistic nature. [Continue reading…]

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Twitter suspends 235,000 more accounts over extremism

The New York Times reports: Twitter suspended 235,000 accounts that promoted terrorism over the last six months, as part of a continuing effort to keep people from using the social network for extremist causes, the company said Thursday.

“The world has witnessed a further wave of deadly, abhorrent terror attacks across the globe,” Twitter said in a statement. “We strongly condemn these acts and remain committed to eliminating the promotion of violence or terrorism on our platform.”

Twitter’s latest action brings the total number of accounts that the company has suspended to 360,000 since it began cracking down on terrorism and violent extremism in mid-2015. While Twitter has long championed free speech on the web and said that it was a “global town square,” its positioning has drawn bullies, racists and extremist groups to the service to spread their messages. That has drawn criticism from government agencies and the Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, among others. [Continue reading…]

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Liberal democracy is in the midst of an epic struggle for survival

Yascha Mounk writes: There are years, decades even, in which history slows to a crawl. Then there are weeks that are so eventful that they seem to mark the dissolution of a world order that had once seemed solid and to foretell the rise of one as yet unknowable.

The week of July 11, 2016, has every chance of being remembered as one of those rare flurries of jumbled, inchoate, concentrated significance. The centrifugal forces that are threatening to break political systems across the world may have started to register a decade ago; they may have picked up speed over the last 12 months; but never since the fall of the Berlin Wall have they wreaked havoc in so many places in so short a span of time—showcasing the failures of technocratic rule, the terrifying rise of populist strongmen, and the existential threat posed by Islamist terrorism, all in the span of seven short days.

At first glance, a political crisis in London; a terrorist attack in Nice, France; a failed putsch in Ankara, Turkey; and a bloviating orator on his way to becoming the Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States look like the dramatic apex of very different, barely connected screenplays. To my eye, they are garish panes of glass that add up to one unified, striking mosaic. Looked at from the right distance, they tell the story of a political system, liberal democracy, that has long dominated the world — and is now in the midst of an epic struggle for its own survival. [Continue reading…]

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France’s ‘burkini’ bans are about more than religion or clothing

The New York Times reports: There is something inherently head-spinning about the so-called burkini bans that are popping up in coastal France. The obviousness of the contradiction — imposing rules on what women can wear on the grounds that it’s wrong for women to have to obey rules about what women can wear — makes it clear that there must be something deeper going on.

“Burkinis” are, essentially, full-body swimsuits that comply with Islamic modesty standards, and on Wednesday, Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France waded into the raging debate over the bans in some of the country’s beach towns, denouncing the rarely seen garb as part of the “enslavement of women.”

This, of course, is not really about swimwear. Social scientists say it is also not primarily about protecting Muslim women from patriarchy, but about protecting France’s non-Muslim majority from having to confront a changing world: one that requires them to widen their sense of identity when many would prefer to keep it as it was.

“These sorts of statements are a way to police what is French and what is not French,” said Terrence G. Peterson, a professor at Florida International University who studies France’s relationship with Muslim immigrants and the Muslim world.

While this battle over identity is rising now in the wake of terrorist attacks, it has been raging in one form or another in French society for decades, Professor Peterson said. What seems to be a struggle over the narrow issue of Islamic dress is really about what it means to be French. [Continue reading…]

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This is what’s missing from journalism right now

Mother Jones reports: This June, we published a big story — Shane Bauer’s account of his four-month stint as a guard in a private prison. That’s “big,” as in XXL: 35,000 words long, or 5 to 10 times the length of a typical feature, plus charts, graphs, and companion pieces, not to mention six videos and a radio documentary.

It was also big in impact. More than a million people read it, defying everything we’re told about the attention span of online audiences; tens of thousands shared it on social media. The Washington Post, CNN, and NPR’s Weekend Edition picked it up. Montel Williams went on a Twitter tear that ended with him nominating Shane for a Pulitzer Prize (though that’s not quite how it works). People got in touch to tell us about their loved ones’ time in prison or their own experience working as guards. Lawmakers and regulators reached out. (UPDATE: And on August 18, the Justice Department announced that it will no longer contract with private prisons, which currently hold thousands of federal inmates — a massive policy shift.)

In the wake of our investigation, lots of people offered thoughts similar to this, from New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum:


That’s a great sentiment, and we agree! But it also takes us to a deeper story about journalism and today’s media landscape. It starts with this: The most important ingredient in investigative reporting is not brilliance, writing flair, or deep familiarity with the subject (though those all help). It’s something much simpler — time. [Continue reading…]

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Outcome of U.S. election seen as ‘question of national security for Russia’ says Kremlin watcher

NPR reports: Investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov says the [Democratic National Committee] hack wasn’t necessarily the work of Russian intelligence services.

“It’s much more complicated than that,” says Soldatov, co-author of The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries. “We have non-government actors, and they’re really adventurous, really fast and they’re really, really good.”

He says mercenary hackers give the government a way to deny involvement.

Once the material had been stolen, though, [Mark] Galeotti thinks the Kremlin took over.

“The actual leak — the point where they did something with the information they gathered — now there’s no question that that would be regarded as a strategic move, and would need to have had Kremlin sanction,” he says.

Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, repeated this week that Russia doesn’t interfere in the affairs of other countries. Recently he said, “We have witnessed a volley of Russophobic hysteria.”

He called the accusations “ploys to support one candidate and smear another.”

DNC staffers charged that the publication of the emails was a Russian ploy to support the candidacy of Donald Trump. But “I think it’s not about Trump,” says Soldatov. “It’s all about Hillary Clinton.”

What might Russia hope to gain from influencing the American vote?

Soldatov says President Vladimir Putin believes Clinton is a Russia-hater who was behind anti-government demonstrations that took place in Russia in 2011 and 2012.

And Soldatov says this U.S. election is important for Moscow because America’s next leader could determine whether economic sanctions against Russia will be lifted. “And everybody in the Kremlin believes that if Hillary Clinton in the White House, it will be absolutely impossible to get the sanctions against Russia lifted. So in a way, it’s a question of national security for Russia.”

Galeotti thinks the key purpose with the DNC leaks is to divide Clinton’s political base by showing that top party officials worked to freeze out her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders.

The Kremlin’s idea, he says, is to create the impression that politics in the U.S. is manipulated just as much as in Russia. [Continue reading…]

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Putin’s ‘war on terror’ — first he went after Muslims, now he targets Ukrainians

Anna Nemtsova reports: Tatars knew Remzi Memetov as a jovial cook who made the best traditional plov, a dish of rice and lamb, in the little Crimean town of Bakhchysarai. Memetov’s cooking was especially popular among Muslims coming to the local mosque to participate in religious festivals.

Nobody in the town’s sizeable Tatar community would have imagined that their favorite chef would be accused of terrorism.

At 6 a.m. the morning of May 12, the Memetov family heard a knock at the door of their house on Lazurnaya Avenue. The voice outside said: ”Open up, this is the Federal Security Service.”

The visitors were two FSB investigators, two official witnesses, who the FSB invited to be present while they searched the house, a camerawoman, and several people who did not identify themselves.

After a few questions, they looked through all the rooms in the house, confiscating a few religious books and a few CDs. As the investigators were taking Remzi Memetov away, his neighbors gathered around the FSB officers to ask why they were arresting a friendly cook everybody loved. An official said Memetov would just be away a few minutes, just enough to sign a few papers.

“Shame, Shame!” people chanted. And soon their worst expectations came: Memetovs wife and two adult sons learned he was accused of participating in terrorist activities as a part the Islamic movement Hizb ut-Tahrir, which is banned in Russia. He was accused together with three more neighbors, who were arrested the same day. One of them, Enver Mammoth, had seven little children.

Soon after Moscow annexed what had been Ukrainian Crimea in 2014, Russian security agencies began to crack down on Muslims there, and after many arrests they knew only too well what happened when the FSB detained one of them. [Continue reading…]

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Voices of Turkey’s purged

Diego Cupolo reports: The night of July 15, Seda was at home in Erzurum, a town in eastern Turkey, when she got a call from her son, a student at a military academy in Ankara, the nation’s capital. Turkey was under attack, and he was being deployed with his classmates. His unit had been given rifles but no ammunition, he told Seda from the back of an army truck bound for the city center. Then he hung up.

Five days passed before Seda heard from her son again. This time, his message was relayed through a lawyer. Her son, the lawyer told her, was in Sincan high-security prison, just outside the capital, along with hundreds of others who had allegedly attempted to seize power from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in what would turn out to be a failed coup.

Seda told me this story as she stood among dozens of parents in a parking lot near the prison. Like her, they had come to visit their sons, who had been jailed for allegedly participating in the failed attempt to overthrow the government, and were now being held in a facility built for prisoners serving life sentences. “My son wouldn’t participate in a coup,” Seda said. “He was fooled and they are holding him without charge. It’s not right. None of this is right.”

The parents I spoke to at Sincan said they had been granted 30-minute visits with their children. They spoke anonymously — for fear of further endangering their sons — of ongoing interrogations, overcrowding, and abusive conditions like those that independent rights groups such as Amnesty International have also documented. [Continue reading…]

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Ten times worse than hell: A Syrian doctor on the humanitarian catastrophe in Aleppo

 

Middle East Eye reports: Thousands of people have shared the image of a bloodied and dazed boy who was pulled from a building in Syria’s Aleppo following a bombing raid on the besieged city.

Five-year-old Omran Daqneesh was reported by the Telegraph as being one of five children injured in an air strike on a building late on Wednesday in Syria’s second city.

Graphic footage published by the Aleppo Media Centre shows the small child being lifted from rubble and being put on a seat inside an ambulance.

Once inside the ambulance the boy sits motionless on the seat, looking dazed and confused, covered head-to-toe in dust, before raising his left arm to wipe away blood that covered one side of his head. [Continue reading…]

 

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17,723 people have died in custody inside Syria’s prisons

Amnesty International reports: The horrifying experiences of detainees subjected to rampant torture and other abuse in Syrian government prisons are detailed in a damning new report published by Amnesty International today (18 August), which estimates that more than 17,723 people have died in custody in Syria over the past five years – an average of more than 300 people each month, about 10 a day.

The 69-page report, ‘It breaks the human’: Torture, disease and death in Syria’s prisons, documents the cases of 65 torture survivors who’ve described appalling abuse and inhuman conditions in detention centres operated by various Syrian intelligence agencies and in one of Syria’s most notorious jails, Saydnaya Military Prison, on the outskirts of Damascus. Most said they had witnessed prisoners dying in custody – some beaten to death – and several former detainees described being held in cells alongside dead bodies.

The majority of survivors told Amnesty that abuse would begin instantly upon their arrest and during transfers, even before they set foot in a detention centre. Upon arrival detainees described a “welcome party” ritual involving severe beatings, often using silicone or metal bars or electric cables. These were often followed by “security checks”, during which women in particular reported being subjected to rape and sexual assault by male guards. [Continue reading…]

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Alt Right rejoices at Donald Trump’s Steve Bannon hire

The Daily Beast reports: Donald Trump’s campaign is under new management — and his white nationalist fanboys love it.

The campaign’s new chief executive, Stephen Bannon, joins from Breitbart News — where he helped mainstream the ideas of white nationalists and resuscitate the reputations of anti-immigrant fear-mongers.

White nationalists today invest a lot of energy worrying about growing Hispanic and Muslim populations in the U.S. Turns out, Breitbart News spends a lot of time worrying about those things, too. And in Bannon, they see a media-friendly, ethno-nationalist fellow traveler.

“Latterly, Breitbart emerged as a nationalist site and done great stuff on immigration in particular,” VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow told The Daily Beast.

VDare is a white supremacist site. It’s named after Virginia Dare, the first white child born to British colonists in North America. Brimelow said he and Bannon met briefly last month and exchanged pleasantries about each other’s work.

“It’s irritating because VDARE.com is not used to competition,” Brimelow added. “I presume that is due to Bannon, so his appointment is great news.”

Brimelow isn’t the only prominent white nationalist to praise the Bannon hire. Richard Spencer, who heads the white supremacist think tank National Policy Institute, said he was also pleased. Under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart has given favorable coverage to the white supremacist Alt Right movement. And Spencer loves it. [Continue reading…]

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Was it hate? Tulsa murder case shines light on lack of bias crime data

 

McClatchy reports: Stanley Vernon Majors was a neighbor from hell.

For five years, according to witness accounts and court papers, Majors terrorized the Jabara family living next door to him in suburban Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He disrupted their family gatherings. He hassled visitors if they parked in front of his house. He hurled racial slurs at a black friend of the family. He even made false claims to health inspectors, the Jabaras said, sabotaging their lucrative catering contract providing hummus to Whole Foods stores.

Majors often mentioned the family’s Arab roots in his tirades; one police report quoted him as calling them “filthy Lebanese.” He also used “Ay-rabs” and “Mooslems,” recalled the Jabaras, who are Christians.

The harassment took a violent turn last September, when Majors was charged with ramming his car into the Jabara family’s 65-year-old matriarch, Haifa, who suffered a collapsed lung, head trauma and broken bones from her nose to her ankle. Majors was awaiting trial on charges from that incident when, last Friday, according to the authorities, he walked next door and fired four shots at 37-year-old Khalid Jabara, killing him on his front porch.

Among Arab and Muslim Americans, the case immediately was viewed as a hate crime, with Jabara portrayed as the latest victim in a bloody wave of attacks against people perceived as foreigners or Muslims. “Hate was definitely part of it. This guy did hate our family,” said Jabara’s brother, Rami, speaking by phone to McClatchy this week.

Yet despite the well-documented history of Majors’ targeting the family, there’s no guarantee that prosecutors will seek hate crime charges in addition to the murder charge against him. Legal specialists who track hate-crime prosecutions nationwide say the Jabara case is likely to run into the same hurdles that civil rights advocates have warned about in numerous studies: Hate crime laws can be prohibitively difficult to use, narrow as to what offenses are covered, and dependent on police who often have no obligation to report – or lack training in how to respond to – crimes involving bias.

That disconnect – having laws on the books but problems using them – is a source of growing frustration for Arab-American, Muslim and other civil rights activists who have seen numerous attacks that appear to have been motivated by racial or religious hatred, but weren’t considered that way under the law. The result, activists say, is the loss of confidence in the justice system just as a nasty political climate deepens fears of bias-motivated attacks. [Continue reading…]

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Why blacks loathe Trump

Charles Blow writes: So now Donald Trump is campaigning for the black vote. (Long, awkward pause.)

Like so much of what Trump has said and done, this new outreach forces writers like me to conduct scatological studies, framing Trump’s actions in their historical and intellectual absurdity.

But, here we go.

Trump, who got a shocking 1 percent of support among black voters in a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, has been urged to reach out to black voters.

A day after The New York Times published an article pointing out that “the Republican nominee has not held a single event aimed at black voters in their communities, shunning the traditional stops at African-American churches, historically black colleges and barber shops and salons that have long been staples of the presidential campaign trail,” Trump ventured to a suburban town outside Milwaukee that is 95 percent white and 1 percent black to tell the black population of America — a population that has been consumed in recent years by a discussion of police misconduct and extrajudicial killings — that “the problem in our poorest communities is not that there are too many police, the problem is that there are not enough police.”

The speech was tone deaf, facile and nonsensical, much like the man who delivered it. [Continue reading…]

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