Author Archives: News Sources

The latest sign that coal is getting killed

Bloomberg Business reports: Coal is having a hard time lately. U.S. power plants are switching to natural gas, environmental restrictions are kicking in, and the industry is being derided as the world’s No. 1 climate criminal. Prices have crashed, sure, but for a real sense of coal’s diminishing prospects, check out what’s happening in the bond market.

Bonds are where coal companies turn to raise money for such things as new mines and environmental cleanups. But investors are increasingly reluctant to lend to them. Coal bond prices tumbled 17 percent in the second quarter, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence. It’s the fourth consecutive quarter of price declines and the worst performance of any industry group by a long shot. [Continue reading…]

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The IMF is telling Europe the euro doesn’t work

Josh Barro writes: It reads like a dry, 1,184-word memorandum about fiscal projections. But the International Monetary Fund’s memo on Greek debt sustainability, explaining why the I.M.F. cannot participate in a new bailout program unless other European countries agree to huge debt relief for Greece, has provided the “Emperor Has No Clothes” moment of the Greek crisis, one that may finally force eurozone members to either move closer to fiscal union or break up.

The I.M.F. memo amounts to an admission that the eurozone cannot work in its current form. It lays out three options for achieving Greek debt sustainability, all of which are tantamount to a fiscal union, an arrangement through which wealthier countries would make payments to support the Greek economy. Not coincidentally, this is the solution many economists have been telling European officials is the only way to save the euro — and which northern European countries have been resisting because it is so costly.

The three options laid out by the I.M.F. would have different operations, but they share an important feature: They involve other European countries giving Greece money without expecting to get it back. These transfers would be additional to the approximately 86 billion euros in new loans contemplated in Monday’s deal. [Continue reading…]

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Scientists discover new kind of particle: the pentaquark

AFP reports: Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have discovered a new kind of particle called the pentaquark, they announced Tuesday.

Physicists had theorised the existence of the pentaquark since the 1960s, but had never been able to prove it until its detection by the LHCb experiment at the LHC, the world’s most powerful particle smasher.

The discovery of the pentaquark comes after the LHC was used in 2012 to prove the existence of another particle, the Higgs Boson, which confers mass.

LHCb spokesman Guy Wilkinson said the pentaquark represented a way to combine quarks — the sub-atomic particles that make up protons and neutrons — “in a pattern that has never been observed before in over 50 years of experimental searches.”

He added: “Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted.”

The LHC cranked back up again in June after a two-year upgrade, with scientists hailing a “new era” in their quest to unravel more mysteries of the Universe. [Continue reading…]

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What the Iran nuclear deal means — and what it doesn’t

By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

Iran and the 5+1/E3+3 Powers (US, Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia) have at last completed a comprehensive nuclear agreement after years of discussions and threats of conflict. The deal sets out requirements for keeping Iran’s nuclear programme from producing nuclear weapons, and establishes a timeline for lifting sanctions that have pushed the country to the brink.

But how can the complexities of the 139-page document be understood, especially amid the already charged argument between those who support and those who oppose the deal? Here are the fundamental points.

This is a good deal for all sides

An excellent agreement is not based on one side “winning” and the other “losing”. It is based on each side compromising but still reaching important objectives.

For the first time, Iran gets international recognition of its enrichment of uranium for civil purposes. That legitimacy also brings the prospect of re-opened trade and investment links, vital for an economy which has been crippled by sanctions and mismanagement over the past decade.

The US, other powers, and the international community get defined limits on that enriched uranium. Put bluntly – and in defiance of the hyperbolic objections of the deal’s critics – Iran has been pushed far back from a militarised program for many years, even if it really was seeking nuclear weapons in the first place.

It no longer has any 20% uranium in a form that can be developed for a bomb, and even its 5% uranium is sharply reduced. Its nuclear facilities, including enrichment plants and a proposed heavy-water nuclear reactor, are under an extensive and tightly defined system of inspections. Some of its military sites will be visited to ensure that no traces of any past quest for nuclear weapons remain. Iran will finally adhere to the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The situation will still be far from “normal” given the years of tension. Nonetheless, for the first time, there is the prospect of Iran becoming part of the global challenge over nuclear proliferation, rather than a pariah.

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Iran nuclear deal: Supreme Leader makes supreme decision

The Guardian reports: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has weathered some critical moments over the last quarter of a century – the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 when Tehran feared it would be the next target, the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which shook the legitimacy of his rule and the acrimonious years that followed as sanctions hit the country’s economy.

Perhaps the biggest decision of his career, however, was the one he had to make this week. The historic deal struck in Vienna could not have happened without Khameni’s blessing. He has the final say in all state matters in Iran and his decision may define his leadership.

On one side of the negotiating table of the 22-month talks sat seven parties struggling to secure a formula that would allow a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Tehran, which will have profound implications for the Middle East. On the other side, there was one man not actually present but whose view was decisive. No one doubted who that person was. [Continue reading…]

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The Iran deal is built to last

Richard Dalton writes: Reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons programme has been a long and arduous process. The deal, announced earlier today, is a tremendous achievement for non-proliferation and regional security – and for the negotiators and their political leaders. There are good reasons to believe it will stick.

First, there are effective provisions to guard against cheating. The agreement will deter Iran from breakout using existing or covert facilities. There are snap-back provisions to restore sanctions in the event of violations. In addition, the military option is still not “off the table” – Iran will not want to risk an attack, which would grow more likely if the deal fell through.

Second, while there will be resistance in the US Congress, there are grounds for optimism that they will not succeed in undermining the deal. There is no viable better agreement available if the US turns down this one. For one thing, there would be no international support for more sanctions if the US were seen to have vetoed the deal. The deal’s opponents are unlikely to muster a veto-proof majority against the agreement; and a hypothetical Republican president in 2017 would hesitate before scuppering a deal that had by then been satisfactorily implemented and increased the security of the US and its allies. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s nuclear deal could allow its people to thrive again

Azadeh Moaveni writes: At the height of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s defiance of the west over Iran’s nuclear programme, his government popularised the slogan, “nuclear energy is our absolute right.” One day I went outside my house in Tehran to find fresh graffiti scrawled on the wall nearby: “Danish pastry is our absolute right.” It referred to the beloved pastries that his government had decreed, in the wake of the Danish Prophet Muhammad cartoon controversy, needed rebranding. That graffiti comes to mind today, as Iran and the west announce their agonisingly awaited nuclear deal.

Back then, as today, Iranians cared more about what enhanced their daily lives than ideology and tough stances. For a decade, and especially the past three years, sanctions have gouged away at people’s quality of life. They have lost jobs as unemployment spiked, lost access to important medications and to software the rest of the world takes for granted. The era of sanctions has been the era of loss of many things: of carefully acquired savings, of dreams of studying abroad, of being able to serve meat once a week. Most painfully for a country that has the Middle East’s most educated, sizeable middle-class, Iranians have lost the ability to be genuinely cosmopolitan; international travel today is outside the reach of everyone but the Maserati-driving elite, buying a book from Amazon is technically impossible, as is registering for hundreds of university courses abroad, online and actual.

It is difficult to enumerate the endless ways – economic, cultural, academic – that sanctions have impacted the lives of ordinary Iranians. That is why, as they witness with such great anticipation the announcement of an agreement that will eventually bring sanctions to an end, it is hard to piece together their vision for what will change. The mood in Tehran is pure fizz, and the talk spans everything from cheaper iPhones to democracy. [Continue reading…]

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Assad: Iran to redouble support following nuclear deal

NOW reports: Syria’s president has hailed the historic nuclear deal inked between Iran and the P5+1 powers, saying that Damascus is “quite assured” that Tehran will further its support for support his regime.

Bashar al-Assad early Tuesday afternoon sent separate cables to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani congratulating Tehran over the deal, calling it a “historic achievement.”

“We are quite assured that the Islamic Republic of Iran will continue, with greater momentum, supporting the just issues of peoples and working for peace and stability to prevail in the region and the world,” Syria’s state SANA news agency quoted Assad as saying in a communiqué to Khamenei hours after the landmark deal was inked in Vienna.

In a separate cable to his Iranian counterpart, Assad called the nuclear agreement a “fundamental turning point in the history of Iran’s relations with the countries of the region and the world,” according to SANA.

The Syrian president’s comments serve as a reference to Iran’s support for its allies, including Damascus, which has reportedly already markedly increased in recent months, most recently last week when Iran granted Syria a $1 billion credit line. [Continue reading…]

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Once again, Fallujah is at the heart of the fight for Iraq

McClatchy reports: Iraqi officials have been candid that the brunt of the fighting about to engulf the city will be borne by an umbrella group of Shiite militia groups formed under the supervision of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite of Shiite Iran. That’s raised dire concerns from American advisers that these sectarian groups – overtly hostile to both Americans and Sunni Muslims – will break the already deeply frayed relationship between the Shiite government in Baghdad and the Sunni tribes that dominate the large swaths of Iraq currently under the Islamic State’s control.

The government claims that Sunni tribal fighters and local policemen from Anbar will join the militia-led assault. But many remain skeptical that Sunnis have joined in sufficient numbers to avoid the impression of a Shiite pogrom against Sunnis in Fallujah.

“The government says that it has trained 5,000 Sunni tribal fighters, but this number is not realistic,” said one Anbar tribal leader currently in Irbil, who asked his name not be used for fear of sectarian reprisals from the government.

“These Iranian gangs are going to take their revenge for Saddam and for Zarqawi on the innocent people of Fallujah and Ramadi,” he said, referring to the provincial capital of Anbar province, whose surprise fall to the Islamic State two months ago triggered the Shiite militias’ zeal to capture Fallujah. [Continue reading…]

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The cold-blooded leaders of ISIS

Christoph Reuter, an investigative journalist for Der Spiegel has been to Syria 19 times and recently published The Black Power: The “Islamic State” and the Strategists of Terror (only available in German), which details the strategy of ISIS, or Daesh, as Reuter prefers to call the organization. He spoke to NOW managing editor Hanin Ghaddar.

Reuter: So the overall idea of the book is about this surface of Daesh which we perceive, but when you see how they operate, when you see who is the inner core of leadership, and when you see what relations the old leadership of the Islamic State and Iraq had with Ali Mamluk and Assef Shawkat in Syria — extremely close relations — you see that Daesh becomes kind of three-dimensional. You see that it’s not just a jihadist outlet; it’s a combination of a very cold-blooded, engineered plan — the old Baathists, the old secret service guys, with real jihadists, with believers. But you have a clear hierarchy of who’s making the plans and decisions.

NOW: Who exactly is making the plans and decisions?

Reuter: The Baathists — the old professionals. They also flip alliances. They had some kind of tactical alliance with the rebels, and I mean on the level that they could always claim ‘we are against Assad.’ But they also have this tactical cooperation with Assad’s regime. It’s not true what the opposition always say that Daesh was created by Assad. We collected 15 cases from early 2014, and new ones from June 2015, where rebels and Daesh would fight. They had clashes in Maara, in Al-Bab, in Aleppo and in Raqqa, and then you would have the regime air force, either during the fighting or immediately after bombing only the rebels, never the Daesh side. Also, when Daesh was removed from Al-Bab by the rebels, the regime pounded Al-Bab 12 hours later and made it easier for Daesh to come back.

Daesh basically borrowed the regime’s air force, and this was the clearest evidence that they are potentially helping each other.

NOW: Do you think there is also communication or only tactical cooperation?

Reuter: Well, there must be communication, but we have no evidence of the communication.

So, you have these two very cynical archenemies, who both believe — rightly — that they can be, for the time being, useful to each other in certain areas. So you have the confirmation that this is not a jihadist outlet of believers. They have no problem to have deals with the KRG, with Barazani’s government, like: ‘we take Mosul and we don’t touch Kirkuk.’ So you had no clashes or conflict from June to August 2014, then suddenly they felt powerful enough and they took a lot of the Kurdish areas.

There’s a very non-religious, tactical and practical element of how they operate. It’s completely different from real believers. They could make deals with the devil if need be. [Continue reading…]

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How a Chechen from Georgia became a feared leader of ISIS

Marcin Mamon writes: “Christ is risen, Christ is risen!” says Temur Batirashvili, father of one of the most notorious leaders of the Islamic State.

Temur welcomes me into his modest house with the phrase that is a common greeting among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Then he takes a drink from a glass of homemade Georgian wine.

“Truly, He is risen,” he continues. “Truly …”

Temur Batirashvili is a Christian, like his ancestors. He has three sons, all of whom converted to Islam, against their father’s wishes. Temur blames himself; when the children grew up he was rarely at home, traveling for work all over Russia. He had to support his family. The children’s mother, an ethnic Chechen Muslim whose family immigrated to Georgia hundreds of years ago, raised the couple’s sons mostly on her own.

“I never thought that my son …” Temur starts, then grows silent and takes a drag from a cigarette. He chains smokes one after another.

Today, Temur lives alone and in poverty in a village hidden from the world in the Pankisi Gorge, located in northeastern Georgia near the border with Chechnya. The Pankisi Gorge is a bucolic valley of shepherds and picturesque mountains. But in recent years, it became better known internationally as a safe haven for Chechen fighters, and now as a recruiting ground for the Islamic State. It’s estimated that dozens of the valley’s youth have left for Syria, and some of the group’s most famous commanders, including Temur’s son, have come from here.

Temur Batirashvili’s 29-year-old son, Tarkhan, better known by his nom de guerre, Omar al Shishani, is one of the most wanted jihadis in the world. His father calls him the minister of war of the Islamic State, and in 2014, the U.S. Treasury Department labeled him a “specially designated global terrorist.” In May 2015, the State Department announced a reward of up to $5 million for information on Tarkhan, who was listed as, among other things, overseeing a prison that possibly held foreign hostages.

Sometimes Temur sees his son on television, in news programs about massacres, executions and beheadings — all of the barbarity associated with the Islamic State. Despite the news, Temur tells himself that his son isn’t capable of killing, because he was always so sensitive to the suffering of others, so merciful. “It was not him, only people under his command are responsible for this evil,” he says.

But Temur is at a loss then to explain how his gentle son got involved with a group that is perhaps best known for its slickly produced videos depicting decapitations and other gruesome executions. “I never got involved in my children’s personal affairs, because they weren’t thieves, hobos or junkies,” he says. “They were good people, very serious, normal people.”

Tarkhan’s story, it turns out, is hardly unique in the region. He joins a growing list of recruits from Georgia who have risen up the ranks of jihadi organizations fighting in Syria, including the Islamic State. Other well-known names from Pankisi include Murad Margoshvili, Fayzullah Margoshvili and Ruslan Machalikashvili.

All have taken the pseudonym “al Shishani,” or “the Chechen,” even though they are ethnic Kists from Georgia, a distant relative of the Chechens from the Northern Caucasus. A Chechen on jihad sounds proud. Individually or by group affiliation, all have been included on the State Department’s list of specially designated global terrorists, and have had great influence on the fate of the war in Syria. Within that narrative, Tarkhan’s path from a mixed Muslim-Orthodox Christian union in Georgia to the front lines of Syria is a larger story about the tremendous inroads the Islamic State has made in recruiting around the world. [Continue reading…]

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Greece put its faith in democracy but Europe has vetoed the result

Paul Mason writes: One of the most touching aspects of Greek life is people’s obsessional respect for parliamentary democracy. Syriza itself is the embodiment of a leftism that always believed you could achieve more in parliament than on the streets. For the leftwing half of Greek society, though, the result is people continually voting for things more radical than they are prepared to fight for.

I asked one of Syriza’s grassroots organisers, a tough party cadre who had been agitating for a “rupture” with lenders for weeks, whether he could put his members onto the streets to keep order outside besieged pharmacies and supermarkets. He shook his head. The police, or more probably the conscript army would have to do it.

When it comes to the now-abandoned Thessaloniki Programme, the radical manifesto on which Alexis Tsipras came to power, there is always talk of implementing it “from below”: that is, demanding so many workers’ rights inside the industries designated for privatisation that it becomes impossible; or implementing the minimum wage through wildcat strikes. But it never happens. When strikes are called, it’s by the communists. When riots happen, it’s the anarchists. The rest of leftwing Greece is mesmerised by parliament.

Little does it understand how scant was the power its ministers actually wielded from their offices. And now the realisation dawns: the Greek parliament has no power inside the eurozone at all. It has the power only to implement what its lenders want. [Continue reading…]

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After Greece’s defeat, we need a new European movement against austerity

Marina Prentoulis writes: After five months of negotiations, Sunday evening brought a moment of painful realisation: democracy has left the EU building. The proposals put forward by the German government and its allies were preposterous – a clear message that any government opposing neoliberalism and austerity should be brought to its knees at all costs.

Their agenda completely ignores the human suffering the proposals will inflict, while also disregarding the political cost of dividing the European community and the economic cost of proposing a “temporary” Grexit. An economic solution to the crisis – a crisis that was inevitable in a monetary and economic union structured to create winners and losers – was never the primary objective. Instead, the deal with Greece has been seen as an opportunity for declaring a two-speed Europe.

Despite 11th-hour attempts by France, Italy and others to keep the eurozone – and effectively the broader EU – united, the damage has already been done, and now we have to deal with the aftermath of that blow. For the Greek government the next few days are critical: it has to explain why it ever made the assumption that the neoliberal eurozone could be reasoned with. Caught between a rock and a hard place, blackmailed and threatened for months, it eventually had to accept a very painful deal and more austerity. With an impossible mandate – to stop austerity and stay within the eurozone – the government could go only as far as the European directorate would let it. For the Greek people, the glimpses of hope to be gleaned from the prospect of some measures of debt restructuring and investment are of little comfort. [Continue reading…]

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No, the Earth is not heading for a ‘mini ice age’

Eric Holthaus writes: A new study and related press release from the Royal Astronomical Society is making the rounds in recent days, claiming that a new statistical analysis of sunspot cycles shows “solar activity will fall by 60 per cent during the 2030s” to a level that last occurred during the so-called Little Ice Age, which ended 300 years ago.

Since climate change deniers have a particular fascination with sunspot cycles, this story has predictably been picked up by all manner of conservative news media, with a post in the Telegraph quickly gathering up tens of thousands of shares. The only problem is, it’s a wildly inaccurate reading of the research.

Sunspots have been observed on a regular basis for at least 400 years, and over that period, there’s a weak correlation between the number of sunspots and global temperature — most notably during a drastic downturn in the number of sunspots from about 1645 to 1715. Known as the Maunder minimum, this phenomenon happened about the same time as a decades-long European cold snap known as the Little Ice Age. That connection led to theory that this variability remains the dominant factor in Earth’s climate. Though that idea is still widely circulated, it’s been disproved. In reality, sunspots fluctuate in an 11-year cycle, and the current cycle is the weakest in 100 years — yet 2014 was the planet’s hottest year in recorded history. [Continue reading…]

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Privacy campaigners win concessions in UK surveillance report

The Guardian reports: Privacy campaigners have secured significant concessions in a key report into surveillance by the British security agencies published on Tuesday.

The 132-page report, A Democratic Licence To Operate, which Nick Clegg commissioned last year in the wake of revelations by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, acknowledges the importance of privacy concerns.

“Privacy is an essential prerequisite to the exercise of individual freedom, and its erosion weakens the constitutional foundations on which democracy and good governance have traditionally been based in this country,” the report says. [Continue reading…]

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Laura Poitras sues U.S. government to find out why she was repeatedly stopped at the border

The Intercept reports: Over six years, filmmaker Laura Poitras was searched, interrogated and detained more than 50 times at U.S. and foreign airports.

When she asked why, U.S. agencies wouldn’t say.

Now, after receiving no response to her Freedom of Information Act requests for documents pertaining to her systemic targeting, Poitras is suing the U.S. government.

In a complaint filed on Monday afternoon, Poitras demanded that the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence release any and all documentation pertaining to her tracking, targeting and questioning while traveling between 2006 and 2012. [Continue reading…]

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Greece’s brutal creditors have demolished the eurozone project

Wolfgang Münchau writes: A few things that many of us took for granted, and that some of us believed in, ended in a single weekend. By forcing Alexis Tsipras into a humiliating defeat, Greece’s creditors have done a lot more than bring about regime change in Greece or endanger its relations with the eurozone. They have destroyed the eurozone as we know it and demolished the idea of a monetary union as a step towards a democratic political union.

In doing so they reverted to the nationalist European power struggles of the 19th and early 20th century. They demoted the eurozone into a toxic fixed exchange-rate system, with a shared single currency, run in the interests of Germany, held together by the threat of absolute destitution for those who challenge the prevailing order. The best thing that can be said of the weekend is the brutal honesty of those perpetrating this regime change.

But it was not just the brutality that stood out, nor even the total capitulation of Greece. The material shift is that Germany has formally proposed an exit mechanism. On Saturday, Wolfgang Schäuble, finance minister, insisted on a time-limited exit — a “timeout” as he called it. I have heard quite a few crazy proposals in my time, and this one is right up there. A member state pushed for the expulsion of another. This was the real coup over the weekend: regime change in the eurozone. [Continue reading…]

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