Author Archives: News Sources

Egypt ‘growing more unstable by the day’

Middle East Eye reports: After a series of crises over the past few weeks, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s government has come under deep domestic and international criticism for repression and inadequacy.

As widespread flooding in Alexandria has brought pressure upon Sisi domestically, his government has drawn global condemnation for its repression of journalists, so soon after his visit to the UK.

At the same time, and only a few weeks after a group of eight Mexican tourists were killed in the Egyptian desert, a Russian plane crashed in Sharm el-Sheikh killing all 224 passengers on board. The incident, suspected to be the result of a terrorist act, has raised questions about Egypt’s ability to maintain domestic security and provide the West a dependable regional partner.

This series of calamities has led to speculation among observers about whether President Sisi’s time in power may be slowly coming to an end.

Political analysts and observers have commented on the increasing instability in the country, saying that the crises highlight the government’s inability to deal with a wave of issues.

“Egypt, which was already unstable, is growing more unstable by the day,” said Shadi Hamid, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “This isn’t surprising.”

“It’s one crisis after another and the Sisi regime has only one response: maximise state power, deny responsibility, and force the media to stay quiet.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Rouhani says U.S. needs to apologize to the Iranian people before diplomatic relations can be restored

EA Worldview reports: Amid in-fighting among Iran’s regime over US-supported “sedition”, President Rouhani has called on Washington to apologize again to Tehran for past actions.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in Tehran, Rouhani said that the apology was necessary if the US wants to restore diplomatic relations with Iran:

One day these embassies will re-open but what counts is behavior and the Americans hold the key to this.

If they modify their policies, correct errors committed in these 37 years and apologize to the Iranian people, the situation will change and good things can happen.

In 2000, discussing grievances on both sides, Secretary of State Madeline Albright acknowledged the US “significant role” in the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s elected government and the American support of the Shah as he “brutally repressed political dissent”. She continued:

As President Clinton has said, the United States must bear its fair share of responsibility for the problems that have arisen in U.S.-Iranian relations. Even in more recent years, aspects of U.S. policy towards Iraq, during its conflict with Iran appear now to have been regrettably shortsighted, especially in light of our subsequent experiences with Saddam Hussein.

The President said the July 14 nuclear deal between Iran and the 5+1 Powers was a good starting point, but cautioned that the US must adhere to the terms: [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. State Dept: EU product labeling is not a boycott of Israel

The Jerusalem Post reports: The European Union’s guidelines on consumer labels for Israeli products produced over the pre-1967 lines is not tantamount to a boycott of Israel, Edgar Vasquez, a State Department spokesman, told The Jerusalem Post.

“We do not believe that labeling the origin of products is equivalent to a boycott. And as you know, we do not consider settlements to be part of Israel. We do not view labeling the origin of products being from the settlements as a boycott of Israel,” Vasquez said.

The EU has also insisted that the measure is not a boycott of Israel and that their concern is the consumer’s right to know as well as compliance with EU legislation. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Report: Fossil fuel industry benefits from $20 billion in subsidies in the U.S.

Desmog reports: A new joint investigative report by Oil Change International and the Overseas Development Institute reveals that, in the United States alone, the fossil fuel industry has benefited from over $20 billion per year in government subsidies between 2008-2015.

The percentage of subsidies has skyrocketed during the two terms of the Obama Administration, growing by 35 percent since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The findings are part of a broader report on subsidies given to G20 countries ahead of the forthcoming G20 Leaders Summit in Antalya, Turkey, set to take place November 15-16.

“Since the initial G20 commitment in Pittsburgh six years ago, US subsidies have increased dramatically in [the Obama] Administration, in line with the increase in US oil and gas production,” said Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International. “The President can and must do more to eliminate subsidies at home and to keep carbon in the ground in the time he has left.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

How policing in the U.S. is relentlessly being militarized

GQ reports: Last month, the local press in New York confirmed what civil rights advocates had been saying for years: the NYPD has been driving around in unmarked vans chock full of X-ray equipment and scanning for… something.

It was a major story, mostly because not much is known about “Z Backscatter” vans other than that they cost somewhere between $729,000 and $825,000. Yet, there’s no way to know for sure what they’re capable of because the NYPD refuses to talk about them, even though the ACLU won a lawsuit that required the department to reveal records about the vans (including their potential health impacts on people who might be exposed to X-rays without knowing it). “The devices we have, the vehicles if you will, are all used lawfully and if the ACLU and others don’t think that’s the case, we’ll see them in court — where they’ll lose!” Commissioner Bill Bratton told the New York Post.

The X-ray vans bring up all kinds of concerns about privacy, health, and general ickiness — no one wants to walk around New York wondering whether some bored cop in a van is checking out your skivvies — but by today’s police tech standards, the vans are actually relatively low-tech and benign. Departments large and small are using a host of new gadgets — from laser light weapons that can induce vomiting to surveillance systems that can predict crimes before they happen.

And what’s scariest of all is the majority of these technologies are being funneled down from the U.S. Military, down into neighborhoods that are most definitely not war zones. “After 15 years of war, there’s a demand for all these companies to find new markets for all these technologies,” said Joel Pruce a professor of human rights at the University of Dayton who studies police technology. “So it trickles down from the military to police.” The revelations about the backscatter vans were just one more sign that the future of policing is here, and it’s terrifying. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The new protest movements are paying a high price for their anti-institutional ethos

Ivan Krastev writes: Shortly after Louis Napoleon’s 1851 coup in Paris, five of the greatest political minds in Europe hustled to their writing desks to capture the meaning of the events.

The five were very different people. Karl Marx was a Communist. Pierre Joseph Proudhon an anarchist. Victor Hugo, the most popular French poet of his time, a romantic. And Alexis de Tocqueville and Walter Bagehot were liberals. Their interpretations of the coup were as different as their philosophies. But in the manner of the man who mistook his wife for a hat, they all mistook the end of Europe’s three-year revolutionary wave for its beginning.

Has the Western media made the same mistake in recent years? Are its interpretations of the global wave of popular protests — spontaneous, leaderless, nonviolent, which Thomas Friedman memorably described as the rise of the “square people” — similarly off-base? It seems so: Just take the stunning and unexpected victory of the governing Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., in Turkey’s parliamentary elections last week. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Sinai’s stubborn insurgency: Why Egypt can’t win

Omar Ashour writes: The story of the Sinai insurgency goes back to the Israeli withdrawal from the territory in 1982. Since then, Egypt has mostly treated the area as a threat rather than an opportunity; Sinaians are potential informants, potential terrorists, potential spies, and potential smugglers, rather than full Egyptian citizens. According to a cable published by WikiLeaks, a senior Egyptian police official in Sinai once told a visiting American official delegation that “the only good Bedouin in Sinai was the dead Bedouin.”

Cairo’s official policies were designed to control and disempower Sinaians. They included preventing Sinaians from owning land, subjecting them to invasive scrutiny, and limiting any developmental projects. Such policies were ramped up after the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. Back then, several Egyptian security bureaucracies — principally the State Security Investigations (SSI, now renamed the National Security Apparatus) and the General Intelligence Service — believed that northeast Sinai was sending direct logistic support to Palestinian militant groups in Gaza. Since then, repression and attempted co-optation of selected tribal leaders has ruled the day.

Things escalated further after the simultaneous bombings of Taba and Nuweiba, where Israeli tourists used to spend vacation, in October 2004. The SSI had almost no information about the terrorists responsible and therefore conducted a wide crackdown in northeast Sinai. With the help of the Central Security Forces (CSF), the SSI arrested around 3,000 and held women and children hostage until other suspects surrendered. “They electrocuted us in the genitals for hours before asking any questions,” one of the former detainees told me in 2012. “Then the torture continues during and after the interrogations. Many of the young men swore revenge.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

ISIS is not competing in a war of ideas

J.M. Berger writes: “The United States is engaged in a war of ideas — and it’s losing.”

This refrain feels modern, but it has echoed through most of American history. The argument that the U.S. is losing a war of ideas or narratives to ISIS is only the latest iteration. As Scott Atran recently wrote at The Daily Beast, the various military campaigns against the Islamic State obscure “a central and potentially determining fact about the fight” — namely that it “is, fundamentally, a war of ideas that the West has virtually no idea how to wage, and that is a major reason anti-ISIS policies have been such abysmal failures.”

The myth that America’s narrative is losing to ISIS’s persists despite the fact that millions of people are fleeing ISIS territories, while mere thousands have traveled to join the group. It persists despite the fact that the Islamic State’s ideological sympathizers make up less than 1 percent of the world’s population, even using the most hysterically alarmist estimates, and the fact that active, voluntary participants in its caliphate project certainly make up less than a tenth of a percent.

In the United States, the notion of a “war of ideas” dates almost as far back as the Revolutionary War, according to Google Ngrams , which searches the text of English-language books that have been digitized. The phrase appeared during the Civil War, in the context of slavery, and returned during World War I. References soared as the United States entered World War II, and became a fixture of American political discourse during the Cold War. The Korean War was a war of ideas; so was Vietnam.

And in every era, the same alarm bell has sounded. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Russia’s brazen lying about Syrian refugees

Scott Lucas writes: With the approach of a second round of international talks about Syria’s crisis, Russia has stepped up its deceptive propaganda in support of the Assad regime.

Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov brazenly lied on Wednesday with the declaration, “Since the beginning of Russian operations, according to UN structures, more than one million people have returned to their homes in Syria.”

Meshkov gave no support for his claim, which was featured by Russian State outlet Sputnik News.

The UN has reported that more Syrians have fled their homes because of Russian bombing and the Syrian military’s offensives that Moscow is supporting. On October 26, the number was put at more than 120,000 since the start of the month, including at least 80,000 from Idlib and Hama Province and at least 44,000 from southern Aleppo Province.

The UN later revised the southern Aleppo figure to more than 75,000. The Syrian opposition and activists say the number from Aleppo and other areas is far higher than the UN’s totals. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

A Russian dirty bomb? Or more dezinformatsiya?

The Daily Beast reports: A stray camera at a meeting of top Russian military leaders has allegedly captured a glimpse of the Kremlin’s possible plan for a bewildering and frightening new weapon — a radiation-scattering “dirty bomb.” One delivered by a drone submarine, which itself rides piggyback on another submarine.

The problem is: We have no way of knowing for sure if this is in fact an existing weapon or simply a media provocation designed to make us think that Russian President Vladimir Putin has got a dangerous new toy in his arsenal. If it’s real, then Russia is the first country we know about to come into possession of a weapon that, while not nearly as destructive as an atomic bomb, could spread lethal radiation over a wide area, rendering it uninhabitable. If the segment is a fake, it’s the latest in a long list of Kremlin media hoaxes.

“It’s true some secret data got into the shot, and it was subsequently deleted,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday about the mysterious footage. “We hope that this won’t repeat.”

The technical aspects of such a device aren’t all that complicated. A dirty bomb is simply any munition containing conventional explosives wrapped in radioactive material. It explodes like any normal munition, but the fragments it scatters are irradiated and thus more dangerous for far longer periods of time than the debris from any standard bomb.

Compared to nuclear weapons, dirty bombs are easy to make — and their use, while highly provocative, is less likely to spark global Armageddon. But they’re still nasty enough that, back in the 1970s, the United States and Russia came pretty close to banning them. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Saudi Arabia’s manifesto for change in the face of rumours of coup plots

The Telegraph reports: Saudi Arabia has issued a manifesto for change in the face of rumours of coup plots and international pressure, ranging from economic reform to the role of women and allowing human rights groups into the country.

At a time when the country’s internal politics are under more scrutiny than at any time for decades, close advisers to the new King Salman and his powerful son have taken the unprecedented step of outlining a detailed programme of its future government to The Telegraph.

It amounts to a Thatcherite programme of budget cuts, increasing the role of the private sector, and reforms to the way the kingdom is governed.

It obliquely acknowledges that radical changes in the royal family since the king acceded to the throne in January, including the sidelining of a generation of older princes and the former heir to the throne, have met with opposition. There have been claims outside the country that disgruntled princes are attempting to mount a coup to replace the king with one of his brothers.

But the statement of principles shown to the Telegraph says that the way the country has been run since its founding a century ago must give way to “youth”. “These resolute and decisive changes may have annoyed some people but it does not amount to a crisis,” it says. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The UAE’s disappeared: Economist who criticised government disappears after arrest

The Independent reports: When plain-clothes security officers arrested prominent Emirati economist, Dr Naser bin Ghaith, in Abu Dhabi they drove him to his home in Dubai which was then searched. He was bundled back into a car. That was the last time he was seen by his family.

Nearly three months later they still have no idea where he was taken, why he was arrested and what charges he may be facing. They are terrified of speaking to the press or raising his case with the authorities. There has been no official comment about his arrest. The authorities have not even confirmed that he has been arrested. Dr Bin Ghaith has joined the ranks of the UAE’s disappeared.

Speaking in Dubai, the Emirati activist Ahmed Mansoor told The Independent that “there are hundreds of others” who have similarly disappeared. “The authorities tell the family ‘Don’t worry, it will only be a matter of days, he will call you’.” But the days turn into weeks and sometimes months before a call comes. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Leaked UAE emails could threaten peace talks in Libya

The New York Times reports: The United Arab Emirates was shipping weapons to favored belligerents in Libya over the summer in violation of an international arms embargo while simultaneously offering a highly paid job to the United Nations diplomat drafting a peace accord there, leaked Emirati emails show.

The leaked correspondence is threatening to undermine months of Libyan talks by tarring the diplomat with an apparent conflict of interest. The emails also open a new window into the hidden and contradictory machinations of regional players like the United Arab Emirates that have helped inflame the fighting even as their diplomats say they support a peaceful solution.

“The fact of the matter is that the U.A.E. violated the U.N. Security Council Resolution on Libya and continues to do so,” Ahmed al-Qasimi, a senior Emirati diplomat, wrote in an email on Aug. 4 to Lana Nusseibeh, the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United Nations. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Israel: Link between EU labelling and Europe’s ‘dark past’ is tactical and confected

By Yoav Galai, University of St Andrews

The EU’s announcement of new guidelines regarding the labelling of settlement products, has been greeted by Israeli officials as well as members of the opposition with a campaign which presents a uniform position against the document that takes the line: it is a boycott, and it is anti-semitic.

The new EU guidelines require that goods from, say, the Golan Heights should be labelled: “product from the Golan Heights (Israeli settlement)”. For products from Palestine territories that are not from settlements, an indication of origin could be “product from Palestine” or “product from West Bank (Palestinian product)”.

The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, with trade worth about US$30 billion – but exports from settlements represent less than about 1% of overall trade.

The decision to label settlement products is in line with existing EU law since 2004 which requires the places of origin of fruits, vegetables and honey to be labelled, but the document has a strong symbolic meaning: it singles out products from settlements. It is this symbolic gesture that has caused alarm in Israel.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Israeli army unit storms hospital and kills Palestinian

Al Jazeera reports: An elite Israeli military force that operates undercover stormed the al-Ahli Hospital in Hebron and shot dead a 27-year-old Palestinian, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.

Abdullah al-Shalaldeh was killed by five rounds fired early Thursday after 21 members of the elite unit – known as Mustaarabin – barged into the hospital room of his cousin, Azzam al-Shalaldeh, a ministry statement said.

The commandos wanted to question Azzam – who required surgery after earlier being shot by Israeli security forces – and his cousin tried to prevent them from doing so when the Israelis opened fire. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

We have 15 years to halt biodiversity loss, can it be done?

By Richard Pearson, UCL

The UN’s ambitious new Sustainable Development Goals include a target to halt biodiversity loss by 2030. The SDGs have generated a great deal of comment, with questions raised as to whether the lofty aspirations can be turned into realistic policies. An article in The Lancet even dismissed the SDGs as nothing more than “fairy tales”.

So is halting biodiversity loss a fairy tale?

“Biodiversity” refers to the diversity of life on Earth. It includes diversity within species, between species, and of ecosystems. There are any number of statistics that confirm its decline across the globe. For instance, the Red List of threatened species, developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), identifies 22,784 that are at risk of extinction – almost 30% of the species that have been assessed. By other measures, habitats continue to be destroyed and degraded, and population sizes of most wild species are in decline.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Ben Carson’s top national security adviser says America has been ‘infiltrated’ by Muslims

James Bamford writes: When it comes to foreign policy, it’s tempting to grade Carson on a curve. A retired neurosurgeon with no political experience, Carson has promised that, as president, he would be as ready “as anybody else when foreign-policy questions come up” by surrounding himself with experts who would help him craft and, eventually implement, foreign policy.

But Carson’s foreign-policy experts are likely part of his problem. The candidate’s most outrageous statements on national security — including his shocking declaration in September that he believes Muslims are unfit to serve as president — aren’t merely a collection of ill-informed gaffes. They are a reflection of the troubling worldview of the people he has turned to for advice. Chief among them is Robert F. Dees, a retired Army officer who has indulged in anti-Muslim bigotry and advocated for a national security strategy centered on Christian evangelism.

Carson is said to have first met Dees at church last February. A four-hour dinner, and regular “study sessions,” followed that initial encounter. Carson has since called Dees “one of my most regular people” when it comes to foreign-policy briefings, and his campaign manager, Barry Bennett, has said that Carson’s national security team is headed by Dees. Dees, for his part, describes his current job title on LinkedIn as defense and national security advisor for Carson America.

It’s impossible to know the precise content of Dees’s advice to Carson. But Dees’s professional background doesn’t provide much reassurance. In 2013, he told a gathering at Wildfire Weekend, an all-male religious retreat, “My greatest pleasure has been being a private in the Lord’s army.” He also recounted being introduced to Jesus Christ by a math instructor at West Point not long after he enrolled there as a student in 1968. “Then I went off in the military,” he said, “as an ambassador for the Lord Jesus Christ.” Dees spent most of his career in the infantry and in staff positions in the United States, Germany, and Korea, eventually becoming deputy commander of the V Corps in Europe. His resume does not appear to list any combat assignments.

Dees has cited the 9/11 attacks as a personal and professional turning point. Speaking at Wildfire Weekend, Dees described visiting an intelligence center in Virginia sometime after the attacks. “I looked up on the wall … and there were cell-phone calls coming from certain places, and you could see where they would go into other places, and all of a sudden I saw Kandahar, Afghanistan, to Nashville, Tennessee; Dearborn, Michigan; Greensboro, South Carolina,” Dees told the gathering, describing the links between people in Afghanistan, where America was about to go to war, and residents of the United States.

Dees claimed to have an epiphany: When it comes to terrorism, all Muslims — some 23.4 percent of the world’s population — are equally worthy of suspicion. “It’s not about these guys who came from way out, knocked down some buildings, and then have left,” Dees explained at Wildfire Weekend. “We have a serious internal issue. We’ve been infiltrated.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail