Author Archives: News Sources

Amazon rainforest losing ability to regulate climate, scientist warns

The Guardian reports: The Amazon rainforest has degraded to the point where it is losing its ability to benignly regulate weather systems, according to a stark new warning from one of Brazil’s leading scientists.

In a new report, Antonio Nobre, researcher in the government’s space institute, Earth System Science Centre, says the logging and burning of the world’s greatest forest might be connected to worsening droughts – such as the one currently plaguing São Paulo – and is likely to lead eventually to more extreme weather events.

The study, which is a summary drawing from more than 200 existing papers on Amazonian climate and forest science, is intended as a wake-up call.

“I realised the problem is much more serious than we realised, even in academia and the reason is that science has become so fragmented. Atmospheric scientists don’t look at forests as much as they should and vice versa,” said Nobre, who wrote the report for a lay audience. “It’s not written in academic language. I don’t need to preach to the converted. Our community is already very alarmed at what is going on.”

A draft seen by the Guardian warns that the “vegetation-climate equilibrium is teetering on the brink of the abyss.” If it tips, the Amazon will start to become a much drier savanna, which calamitous consequences. [Continue reading…]

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Evidence of Assad’s use of mass murder provokes outrage but nothing more from the U.S.

The New York Times reports: Wearing a blue hood to shield his identity, a former Syrian police photographer briefed a congressional committee over the summer on the photos he had smuggled out of the country to document the deaths of thousands of prisoners killed in President Bashar al-Assad’s jails. At a White House meeting, President Obama’s senior aides welcomed him as a man of uncommon courage who had revealed unspeakable atrocities.

But now the Syrian government’s most celebrated defector, who uses the pseudonym Caesar, is no longer optimistic that the United States has the will to stop the abuses that have shocked the conscience of the world.

His photographs have generated outrage but no fresh action against the Assad government. And instead of intervening militarily to support opponents of Mr. Assad, Mr. Obama is mounting airstrikes to defend Kurds, Yazidis and Turkmen in Syria and Iraq from the Islamic State.

“I completely understand how he came to the defense of two American victims killed by the extremist ISIS terror group,” Caesar said in a message earlier this month from an undisclosed location in Europe that was conveyed by the Coalition for Democratic Syria, a Syrian-American organization that sponsored his trip to Washington. “But I and millions of Syrians feel depressed when we see that the killer of thousands of prisoners is left unchecked,” he added. “I believe my cause demands action and a clear position by the president of the United States.”

Caesar’s complaint reflects a broader discontent within the moderate Syrian opposition that is posing a new challenge for the Obama administration’s strategy to counter the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL. While ruling out United States military intervention against Mr. Assad, the administration has committed to training thousands of opposition fighters in Saudi Arabia and Turkey so they can eventually defend territory in Syria that is wrested from the Islamic State’s control. But those fighters must come from the same constituency that has been increasingly troubled by the American reluctance to act more forcefully against Mr. Assad.

“There is a sense that there is discrimination against them, that the atrocities they are suffering at the hands of Assad are somehow less deserving than what is befalling other communities,” said Emile Hokayem, an expert on Middle East affairs at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “For most of these rebels, Assad is the greatest evil, not ISIL. For the U.S., it is the opposite,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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The U.S. can’t effectively promote democracy abroad unless it works better at home

Larry Diamond writes: In the global democracy promotion community, few actors are paying attention to the growing signs of fragility in the more liberal developing democracies, not to mention the more illiberal ones.

Broadly, we know why democracy and freedom are slipping back. What Francis Fukuyama calls “neo-patrimonial” tendencies are resurgent. Leaders who think they can get away with it are eroding democratic checks and balances, hollowing out accountability institutions, overriding term limits and normative restraints, and accumulating power and wealth for themselves and their families, cronies, clients, and parties.

Space for opposition parties, civil society, and the media is shrinking, and international support for them is drying up. Ethnic, religious, and other identity cleavages polarize many societies that lack well-designed democratic institutions to manage those cleavages. State structures are too often weak and porous, unable to secure order, protect rights, meet the most basic social needs, or rise above corrupt, clientelistic, and predatory impulses. Democratic institutions — parties and parliaments — are often poorly developed, and the bureaucracy lacks the policy expertise, and even more so the independence, neutrality, and authority, to effectively manage the economy. So weak economic performance, and certainly rising inequality, is added to the mix.

It isn’t easy to develop democracy in poor countries and weak states. And there is a significant failure rate even in middle-income countries. But if we don’t become more focused, more creative, more determined, more resourceful, and less apologetic in promoting democracy, the democratic recession is going to mutate into a wave of democratic regression, a bleak period for freedom, political stability, and the American national interest.

So what is to be done?

We need to begin by disaggregating the problem. Let’s start at the top of the hierarchy of democratic development and work down. I used to add at the end of this kind of lecture a reflective caveat,

“Physician, heal thyself.” In other words, we can’t be credible and effective in promoting democracy abroad if we don’t reform and improve its functioning at home. That was usually the last imperative I mentioned. Now it needs to be the first.

Like many of you who travel widely, I am increasingly alarmed by how pervasive and corrosive is the worldwide perception — in both autocracies and democracies — that American democracy has become dysfunctional and is no longer a model worth emulating. Fortunately, there are many possible models, and most American political scientists never recommended that emerging democracies copy our own excessively veto-ridden institutions. Nevertheless the prestige, the desirability, and the momentum of democracy globally are heavily influenced by perceptions of how it is performing in its leading examples. If we do not mobilize institutional reforms and operational innovations to reduce partisan polarization, encourage moderation and compromise, energize executive functioning, and reduce the outsized influence of money and special interests in our own politics, how are we going to be effective in tackling these kinds of challenges abroad? [Continue reading…]

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Afghanistan’s opium industry now employs more people than its military

Business Insider: Afghanistan’s opium economy provides more employment — “up to 411,000 full-time-equivalent jobs” — than even the country’s armed forces, according to a quarterly report released today by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR).

The country’s poppy cultivation is at an all-time high, covering more than 200,000 hectares, another SIGAR report found earlier this month.

Opium and its derivatives are the country’s largest export, worth $3 billion in 2013, an increase from $2 billion in the year before.

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The FBI’s secret House meeting to get access to your iPhone

National Journal reports: The Obama administration is ramping up its campaign to force technology companies to help the government spy on their users.

FBI and Justice Department officials met with House staffers this week for a classified briefing on how encryption is hurting police investigations, according to staffers familiar with the meeting.

The briefing included Democratic and Republican aides for the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees, the staffers said. The meeting was held in a classified room, and aides are forbidden from revealing what was discussed.

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Sunni tribal leaders’ pleas for help were ignored by Iraqi govt. before massacre by ISIS

Reuters reports: Iraqi tribal leader Sheikh Naeem al-Ga’oud and his men once helped U.S. Marines drive al Qaeda out of their Anbar Province stronghold. He doesn’t even put up a brave face when it comes to his current enemy the militants of Islamic State.

This week the al Qaeda offshoot massacred more than 200 members of his Albu Nimr tribe in retaliation for months of resistance.

Ga’oud says he has good reason to fear many more will be rounded up, shot at close range and dumped in mass graves, with little chance that the Iraqi government or United States will come to the rescue of his tribe or any other any time soon.

“A day before the attack we told them (the government) that we will be targeted by the Islamic State. I talked to the commander of the air force, with several commanders,” he told Reuters in an interview.

“We gave them the coordinates of the places where they were, but nobody listened to us,” he said. Asked why he believed the government had not helped, he nearly cried and said: “I don’t know.”

Islamic State fighters have made a practice of executing Shi’ite prisoners when they seize a town, but the shooting of members of the Albu Nimr tribe in the city of Hit on Wednesday appears to be their worst mass killing yet of fellow Sunnis. [Continue reading…]

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Iraq Peshmerga fighters arrive in Kobane

BBC News reports: Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga fighters have crossed the Turkish border to help defend the Syrian town of Kobane from Islamic State.

Sources inside the town told BBC Arabic the unit was heading to the frontline about 4km west of Kobane.

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Western fascination with ‘badass’ Kurdish women

Dilar Dirik writes: A young Kurdish woman called “Rehana” has garnered a great deal of media attention over the past few days, after reports emerged claiming that she had killed more than a hundred ISIL fighters – single-handedly. A picture of the smiling beauty, wearing combat gear and toting a rifle, is still making the rounds of social media. Even as Rehana’s circumstances remain uncorroborated, the overabundance of attention she has received raises several important questions. It adds to the plethora of reports out there glamorising the all-female Kurdish battalions taking on ISIL fighters, with little attention to the politics of these brave women.

Preoccupied with attempts to sensationalise the ways in which these women defy preconceived notions of eastern women as oppressed victims, these mainstream caricaturisations erroneously present Kurdish women fighters as a novel phenomenon. They cheapen a legitimate struggle by projecting their bizarre orientalist fantasies on it – and oversimplify the reasons motivating Kurdish women to join the fight. Nowadays, it seems to be appealing to portray women as sympathetic enemies of ISIL without raising questions about their ideologies and political aims.

At the same time, critics have accused the Kurdish leadership of exploiting these women for PR purposes – in an attempt to win over western public opinion. While there may be an element of truth to such charges in some cases, those same critics fail to appreciate the different political cultures that exist among the Kurdish people as a whole, scattered across Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. They also ignore the fact that Kurdish women have been engaging in armed resistance for decades without anyone’s notice. [Continue reading…]

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Foreign jihadists flocking to Iraq and Syria on ‘unprecedented scale’ says U.N. report

The Guardian reports: The United Nations has warned that foreign jihadists are swarming into the twin conflicts in Iraq and Syria on “an unprecedented scale” and from countries that had not previously contributed combatants to global terrorism.

A report by the UN security council, obtained by the Guardian, finds that 15,000 people have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside the Islamic State (Isis) and similar extremist groups. They come from more than 80 countries, the report states, “including a tail of countries that have not previously faced challenges relating to al-Qaida”.

The UN said it was uncertain whether al-Qaida would benefit from the surge. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaida who booted Isis out of his organisation, “appears to be maneuvering for relevance”, the report says.

The UN’s numbers bolster recent estimates from US intelligence about the scope of the foreign fighter problem, which the UN report finds to have spread despite the Obama administration’s aggressive counter-terrorism strikes and global surveillance dragnets. [Continue reading…]

Before anyone jumps to the conclusion that this surge in jihadists is the result of Obama’s newly-declared war on ISIS, it should be noted that this influx of foreign fighters has occurred post-2010, the magnet being the war in Syria. Those who argue that fighting against ISIS promotes its growth are in denial about the fact that ignoring ISIS has allowed it to grow even faster.

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Peshmerga forces delayed in Turkey en route to fight ISIS in Kobane

The Guardian reports: Dozens of Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters have been held up in Turkey en route to the Syrian border town of Kobani, where they will join the fight against Islamic State (Isis) militants.

The peshmerga command have not commented on the delay, but Turkish media cited an attack by Isis on Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters crossing into Kobani through the Mürsitpinar border gate as a reason for the delay. According to the newspaper Milliyet, three FSA members were wounded by Isis snipers on Wednesday. They are being treated at a Turkish hospital.

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Aleppo ‘at risk’ after FSA fighters were sent to Kobane, says commander

Hurriyet Daily News reports: It was wrong to send Syrian rebel forces to the besieged city of Kobane, a Free Syrian Army (FSA) commander who has been fighting against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Kobane has said.

“I am criticizing this decision because we need these forces in the other fronts in Aleppo. The situation is very critical in Aleppo right now, regime forces have been surrounding the city for some time,” Nizar al-Khatib told a group of journalists at a press conference in Istanbul on Oct. 30.

Around 200 Syrian rebels on Oct. 29 entered the embattled town of Kobane from Turkey in a push to help Kurdish fighters battle ISIL militants there.

FSA fighters have been fighting against ISIL in Kobane alongside Peoples’ Protection Unit (YPG) forces since the beginning of the war, al-Khatib said.

“There have been around 200 FSA fighters fighting against ISIL since the very beginning of the war in Kobane. Now, with the entrance of 200 more FSA fighters, this number has risen to 400. Right now, there are 2,000 fighters, including the YPG and Democratic Union Party’s [PYD] forces fighting against ISIL there,” he added. “However, it was wrong to send more FSA forces to Kobane, we need our forces at the Aleppo front right now.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS kills 220 Iraqis from tribe that opposed them

Reuters reports: Islamic State militants executed at least 220 Iraqis in retaliation against a tribe’s opposition to their takeover of territory west of Baghdad, security sources and witnesses said.

Two mass graves were discovered on Thursday containing some of the 300 members of the Sunni Muslim Albu Nimr tribe that Islamic State had seized this week. The captives, men aged between 18 and 55, had been shot at close range, witnesses said.

The bodies of more than 70 Albu Nimr men were dumped near the town of Hit in the Sunni heartland Anbar province, according to witnesses who said most of the victims were members of the police or an anti-Islamic State militia called Sahwa (Awakening).

“Early this morning we found those corpses and we were told by some Islamic State militants that ‘those people are from Sahwa, who fought your brothers the Islamic State, and this is the punishment of anybody fighting Islamic State’,” a witness said. [Continue reading…]

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Iran: Rafsanjani v. the hardliners — the battlelines are drawn

Scott Lucas writes: While most of the world’s attention to Iran is on nuclear talks and regional maneuvers in Iraq and Syria, an important power struggle is being waged inside the Islamic Republic.

Former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose political career was buried by some analysts amid regime in-fighting after the disputed 2009 Presidential election, resurged to become a leading force behind the Rouhani Government. Vocal on both domestic and foreign policy initiatives — such as “engagement” with the US and Saudi Arabia — Rafsanjani even ventured to press the Supreme Leader for the release of political prisoners, including opposition leaders Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi.

That resurgence has worried hardliners, who still consider Rafsanjani an appeaser — or even collaborator — over the “sedition” of the mass protests from 2009. So, while challenging the Rouhani Government, they have searched for a way to put the former President back in a political box.

The occasion for the showdown will be the election of the head of the Assembly of Experts, due in early 2015, to replace the recently-deceased Ayatollah Mahdavi Kani — the cleric who ended Rafsanjani’s leadership of the body in 2011.

The Assembly selects the Supreme Leader and has the nominal authority to replace him. However, its significance is more in symbolism than a role in policy: the election of its head marks out the factions and individuals who are “winning” the internal political contest. [Continue reading…]

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Where are the West’s female leaders?

Minna Salami writes: A report this week has exposed how progress towards gender equality is slowing down in the west. The Global Gender Gap Report showed that Europe has undergone the smallest change in terms of closing the gender gap. In terms of political empowerment, from Britain to Austria to Spain, in only nine years, women’s rankings have sunk sharply.

By contrast, the region with the largest positive change is Latin America where, just last weekend, Brazil re-elected a woman president, Dilma Rousseff. Also known as the world’s most powerful feminist, Rousseff will lead the world’s seventh-largest economy and fifth-largest nation for another four years. Voters in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Caribbean have also done a better job of electing women presidents and prime ministers. Today, only three of the 22 female heads of government are in the west (Germany, Denmark and Norway).

It’s commonly perceived that the western world is at the forefront of the campaign for women’s rights. State bodies such as the British Department for International Development, organisations such as the Cherie Blair Foundation and celebrities such as Madonna and Angelina Jolie all invest in women’s empowerment in the developing world, which is often seen as lagging well behind. But in truth, as the survey shows, when it comes to having women at the top levels of political leadership, industrialised western countries actually lag behind developing ones. Of 142 countries, Britain came just 63rd for the number of women in parliament and 75th for the number of women in ministerial jobs. The US was 83rd and 25th. [Continue reading…]

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Only top legislators informed of White House computer attack

Reuters reports: An attack by hackers on a White House computer network earlier this month was considered so sensitive that only a small group of senior congressional leaders were initially notified about it, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

The officials said the Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives and the heads of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, collectively known as the “Gang of Eight,” were told last week of the cyber attack, which had occurred several days earlier.

Security experts said this limited group would normally be informed about ultra-secret intelligence operations and notifying them of a computer breach in this way was unusual. [Continue reading…]

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With little warning, Egypt destroys 800 homes displacing 10,000 people in security operation

The New York Times reports: With bulldozers and dynamite, the Egyptian Army on Wednesday began demolishing hundreds of houses, displacing thousands of people, along the border with Gaza in a panicked effort to establish a buffer zone that officials hope will stop the influx of militants and weapons across the frontier.

The demolitions, cutting through crowded neighborhoods in the border town of Rafah, began with orders to evacuate on Tuesday and were part of a sweeping security response by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to months of deadly militant attacks on Egyptian security personnel in the Sinai Peninsula, including the massacre of at least 31 soldiers last Friday.

That assault was the deadliest on the Egyptian military in years, and a blow to the government, which has claimed to be winning the battle against insurgents. The resort to a harsh counterinsurgency tactic — destroying as many as 800 houses and displacing up to 10,000 people to eliminate “terrorist hotbeds,” as Mr. Sisi’s spokesman put it — highlighted the difficulties the military has faced in breaking the militants as well as the anger that operations like Wednesday’s inevitably arouse.

“Our house in Rafah is more than 60 years old,” Hammam Alagha wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, detailing his family’s eviction in a series of widely shared posts. After an army officer told the family to evacuate — and Mr. Alagha said he refused — the officer “said tomorrow we will bomb it with everything in it.”

Mustafa Singer, a journalist based in Sinai who was near the border on Wednesday, said that while residents had met with officials in recent weeks to discuss compensation, the evacuation order on Tuesday — delivered over megaphones — took people by surprise. [Continue reading…]

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Kobane gets reinforcements in fight against ISIS

Masoud Barzani, President of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, explains why they have only sent a small peshmerga force to Kobane:

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Turkish military blocks locals from joining Peshmerga mission to Kobane

Rudaw reports: The Turkish military is holding Kurdish Peshmerga soldiers seven kilometers from the Turkish border to Syria, delaying their mission in the besieged city of Kobane, Peshmerga officials told Rudaw.

A Peshmerga commander says his troops are in the town of Pirsus, guarded by Turkish military to prevent enthusiastic locals from joining the Iraqi Kurdish unit. The Iraqi Kurdish troops will provide artillery support to the Syrian Kurdish militia defending the city.

He declined to provide further details about the location and timing of their passage to Kobane, but confirmed that the Islamic State had intensified attacks in expectation of their arrival and the US-led coalition planned targeted airstrikes to facilitate a safe crossing.

They will be the first foreign soldiers to be dispatched to the Syrian Kurdish border town, which has been under siege by ISIS for more than 40 days. Local Kurdish fighters have held out with backing from US-led airstrikes.

This comes a day after the Free Syrian Army (FSA) said 200 its fighters had entered Kobane at the request of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian-Kurdish force that has been defending the city against an ISIS takeover. [Continue reading…]

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