Author Archives: News Sources

New York needs the NYPD to stop stop-and-frisk — and stop it now

John Liu writes: The numbers don’t lie: New York City police have conducted 5m “stop-and-frisk” searches since 2002. More than 86% of individuals targeted were black or Hispanic, and 88% were innocent of any crime. The stop-and-frisk tactic is clearly discriminatory, often humiliating, and totally ineffective. It must be abolished.

Just as astonishing as the raw numbers were the stories from my series of stop-and-frisk” town hall meetings last month in Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Young men and less-young men, black and brown, came to church halls and community rooms to tell of how, time and time again, they had been verbally abused by police, pushed up against walls, made to stand spreadeagled, and forced to empty their pockets – all for doing nothing wrong and while passers-by watched.

Rather than making the city safer, stop-and-frisk instils fear and undermines trust. If anything, this tactic is serving to deepen the chasm between communities and police – a relationship that is vital to maintaining a safe and secure city for all New Yorkers.

The policy is also a potential financial issue for the City and its taxpayers. As it is, claim settlements and judgments – including those involving civil rights actions – brought against the New York Police Department have risen from $74.1m in fiscal year 2002 to $185.6m in fiscal year 2011, according to numbers compiled by my office (pdf). Amidst this environment, stop-and-frisk has so angered communities that it is now at the heart of three federal lawsuits, one of them the class action case Floyd v the City of New York. [Continue reading…]

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Iran and world powers should focus on action steps for short-term agreement

Ali Vaez writes: Something changed in the nuclear talks between Iran and world powers last month in Almaty, Kazakhstan. For the first time, the two sides negotiated in earnest.

Gone were the preconditions and meandering lectures of the past. Instead of maximalist upfront demands in return for nebulous future rewards, the envoys discussed explicit quid-pro-quo options. Both sides described the meetings with adjectives ranging from “useful” to “pivotal”.

Yet the follow-up 13.5-hour meeting in Istanbul between the parties’ arms control officials revealed that a great gulf remains in expectations. It was a sobering reminder that the diplomatic process is as fragile as the prospect of an agreement is elusive. Misperception and brinkmanship might yet make this opening another instance of what historian G.M. Tevelyan called “the turning point at which history fails to turn.”

As negotiators prepare for the next meeting in Kazakhstan on April 5-6, their focus should be on what is politically as well as logistically achievable at this stage. [Continue reading…]

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Conflict with North Korea could go nuclear

At Foreign Affairs, Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press write: As North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un issues increasingly over-the-top threats — including intimations that he might launch nuclear strikes against the United States — officials in Washington have sought to reassure the public and U.S. allies. North Korea, they say, may initiate cyberattacks or other limited provocations, but the leaders in Pyongyang wish to survive, so they are highly unlikely to do anything as foolhardy as using nuclear weapons.

Despite those assurances, however, the risk of nuclear war with North Korea is far from remote. Although Pyongyang’s tired threats are probably bluster, the current crisis has substantially increased the risk of a conventional conflict — and any conventional war with North Korea is likely to go nuclear. Washington should continue its efforts to prevent war on the Korean Peninsula. But equally important, it must rapidly take steps — including re-evaluating U.S. war plans — to dampen the risks of nuclear escalation if conventional war erupts.

Ironically, the risk of North Korean nuclear war stems not from weakness on the part of the United States and South Korea but from their strength. If war erupted, the North Korean army, short on training and armed with decrepit equipment, would prove no match for the U.S.–South Korean Combined Forces Command. Make no mistake, Seoul would suffer some damage, but a conventional war would be a rout, and CFC forces would quickly cross the border and head north.

At that point, North Korea’s inner circle would face a grave decision: how to avoid the terrible fates of such defeated leaders as Saddam Hussein and Muammar al-Qaddafi. Kim, his family, and his cronies could try to escape to China and plead for a comfortable, lifelong sanctuary there — an increasingly dim prospect given Beijing’s growing frustration with Kim’s regime. Pyongyang’s only other option would be to try to force a cease-fire by playing its only trump card: nuclear escalation. [Continue reading…]

“Thermonuclear war will be our only option” is the title for this North Korean state television broadcast posted on YouTube on March 27. The English voiceover is barely any louder than the presenter’s Korean, so it’s a bit hard to follow. The second video it titled “Worker-Peasant Red Guards Members Ready for All-out Action” and is partially subtitled and was posted April 2.

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North Korea says it will restart reactor to expand nuclear arsenal

The New York Times reports: North Korea announced plans on Tuesday to restart a mothballed nuclear reactor, the latest in a series of provocations by its leader, Kim Jong-un, to elicit a muted response from American officials, who believe they can wait out Mr. Kim’s threats until he realizes his belligerent behavior will not force South Korea or the United States to make any concessions.

“Right now, they’re testing the proposition that we’ll choose peace and quiet, and put it on our MasterCard,” said a senior American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s internal calculations. “When they get through this cycle, they will have gotten no return on their investment.”

Secretary of State John Kerry, using time-tested diplomatic language, said North Korea’s plan to restart the reactor would be a “provocative act” that is “a direct violation of their international obligations.” Speaking in Washington after his first meeting with South Korea’s foreign minister, Yun Byung-se, Mr. Kerry reaffirmed the determination of the United States to defend its ally.

American officials still worry about the consequences of any miscalculation, given the hair-trigger tensions on the Korean Peninsula and Mr. Kim’s inexperience at this type of brinkmanship. The top American commander in South Korea, Gen. James D. Thurman, described the situation as “tense” and “volatile” in an interview with ABC News.

But the senior official predicted that North Korea would eventually back down, as Mr. Kim’s need for food aid and hard currency outweighed the domestic political gains from his threats to shoot missiles at American cities. [Continue reading…]

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Kim Jong Un is not crazy

Stephan Haggard writes: March brought us a series of what pundits like to call “provocations” by North Korea. On closer inspection, Pyongyang has opted for rhetoric over actual military actions.

While Kim Jong Un’s pursuit of nuclear and missile capability remains worrisome, escalating signals of resolve could suggest nervousness as much as strength.

So, is the regime in trouble?

The first round of saber-rattling came as the U.N. Security Council deliberated on a new sanctions resolution after North Korea’s satellite launch in December and its third nuclear test in February. The Supreme Command of the Korean People’s Army, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a party organ dealing with North-South relations began putting out public statements in an effort to chip away at the institutions of the armistice, such as military hot lines and the stationing of a North Korean military mission in Panmunjom.

North Korea ultimately “withdrew” from the armistice, but it had done so before and it is not clear what its recent statements actually mean. The armistice is not a peace treaty, but merely a cease fire. The armistice is stable not because of verbal commitments but because of the deterrent capability of both sides. [Continue reading…]

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North Korea delays South Koreans entry to Kaesong industrial park

AFP reports: North Korea on Wednesday delayed the entry of South Koreans to a joint industrial complex in a rare move amid high tensions on the Korean peninsula, the South’s Unification Ministry said.

“North Korea has not yet given us the daily permission for the entry of 484 South Koreans into Kaesong today,” a South Korean Unification Ministry spokeswoman told AFP.

The border crossing usually takes place at 8:30 am (2330 GMT), but there has been no word from the North’s officials for almost an hour, she said.

The delay sparked fears the North could carry out its threatened shutdown of the Seoul-invested industrial estate, which has continued to run during previous crises on the peninsula.

Border crossings for Kaesong, which lies 10 kilometres (six miles) inside North Korea, have been functioning normally despite soaring tensions in recent weeks between the North and the South.

The operating stability of the complex is seen as a bellwether of inter-Korean relations, and its closure would mark a clear escalation of tensions beyond all the military rhetoric.

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The treason of the intellectuals

Chris Hedges writes: The rewriting of history by the power elite was painfully evident as the nation marked the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Some claimed they had opposed the war when they had not. Others among “Bush’s useful idiots” argued that they had merely acted in good faith on the information available; if they had known then what they know now, they assured us, they would have acted differently. This, of course, is false. The war boosters, especially the “liberal hawks” — who included Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken and John Kerry, along with academics, writers and journalists such as Bill Keller, Michael Ignatieff, Nicholas Kristof, David Remnick, Fareed Zakaria, Michael Walzer, Paul Berman, Thomas Friedman, George Packer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Kanan Makiya and the late Christopher Hitchens — did what they always have done: engage in acts of self-preservation. To oppose the war would have been a career killer. And they knew it.

These apologists, however, acted not only as cheerleaders for war; in most cases they ridiculed and attempted to discredit anyone who questioned the call to invade Iraq. Kristof, in The New York Times, attacked the filmmaker Michael Moore as a conspiracy theorist and wrote that anti-war voices were only polarizing what he termed “the political cesspool.” Hitchens said that those who opposed the attack on Iraq “do not think that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy at all.” He called the typical anti-war protester a “blithering ex-flower child or ranting neo-Stalinist.” The halfhearted mea culpas by many of these courtiers a decade later always fail to mention the most pernicious and fundamental role they played in the buildup to the war—shutting down public debate. Those of us who spoke out against the war, faced with the onslaught of right-wing “patriots” and their liberal apologists, became pariahs. In my case it did not matter that I was an Arabic speaker. It did not matter that I had spent seven years in the Middle East, including months in Iraq, as a foreign correspondent. It did not matter that I knew the instrument of war. The critique that I and other opponents of war delivered, no matter how well grounded in fact and experience, turned us into objects of scorn by a liberal elite that cravenly wanted to demonstrate its own “patriotism” and “realism” about national security. The liberal class fueled a rabid, irrational hatred of all war critics. Many of us received death threats and lost our jobs, for me one at The New York Times. These liberal warmongers, 10 years later, remain both clueless about their moral bankruptcy and cloyingly sanctimonious. They have the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents on their hands.

The power elite, especially the liberal elite, has always been willing to sacrifice integrity and truth for power, personal advancement, foundation grants, awards, tenured professorships, columns, book contracts, television appearances, generous lecture fees and social status. They know what they need to say. They know which ideology they have to serve. They know what lies must be told—the biggest being that they take moral stances on issues that aren’t safe and anodyne. They have been at this game a long time. And they will, should their careers require it, happily sell us out again. [Continue reading…]

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6,000 people killed in Syria in March

BBC News reports: More than 6,000 people died in Syria in March, the deadliest month since protests against the government began two years ago, activists say.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a UK-based activist group, said it recorded 6,005 deaths last month.

It said victims included at least 291 women, 298 children, 1,486 rebel fighters and army defectors, and 1,464 government troops.

The other casualties were unidentified civilians and fighters, it added.

The anti-government group, which monitors human rights violations on both sides of the conflict via a network of contacts across Syria, said the total toll was much higher than the 62,554 deaths it has documented.

“We estimate it is actually around 120,000 people,” Rami Abdelrahman, the head of the group, told Reuters news agency.

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Portrait of an activist: Razan Ghazzawi, the Syrian blogger turned exile

Time reports: On July 18 Razan Ghazzawi, a Syrian blogger and media activist, was in the city of Douma, 45 minutes outside the capital, when she received a call: Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters, dug-in in the central Damascus neighborhood of Midan, needed someone who could set up a remote Internet connection. So she and two other activists went in a taxi, circumnavigating military checkpoints, to join the fighters.

Days earlier, Syria’s armed opposition launched an unprecedented assault on the government, which they dubbed Damascus Volcano and Syrian Earthquake. The operation peaked with a bombing at the national-security headquarters in the capital, which killed four top officials, including President Bashar Assad’s brother-in-law. The regime was already striking back, sending helicopter gunships, tanks and snipers after roaming bands of lightly armed rebels.

“I went down there with a taxi driver who we trusted but I don’t know why and how,” Ghazzawi says. “FSA revolutionaries secured our entrance, and I was welcomed as a media expert. I explained I’m not. I’m just a blogger with a laptop and 3G,” she says, referring to her wireless Internet link.

Ghazzawi, 32, is a short, trim woman with large brown eyes. At the time of the Damascus battle, she was the only widely known antiregime blogger writing in English under her real name from inside Syria. She had already been detained by the government twice for her activism since the Syrian uprising began, once for two weeks after being held at the Jordanian border and a second time for 22 days after a raid on the office of her employer, the Syrian Center for Media and Freedom of Expression. She left Syria for Sweden in October 2012.

While the majority of news reports from Syria consisted of information stitched together by journalists outside the country and attributed to unnamed “activists,” Ghazzawi was a verified source reporting live from the firing zone, and doing so at great personal risk. “I was the one who uploaded the videos. I was the one who was giving all the information to certain media figures,” she recalled, speaking recently at New York University. [Continue reading…]

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Ratko Mladic on the run: the full story of how the general evaded capture

The Guardian reports: The men and women who helped hide Ratko Mladic through his many years as a fugitive saw him as a Serb hero. But just in case their loyalty should waver, they were presented with a gift: photographs of their children. The implication was clear: if we can shoot them with a camera, we can shoot them by other means as well.

The Bosnian Serb general, now on trial in The Hague for genocide and other crimes against humanity, eluded capture for 14 years, with the help of the Serbian military, then his wartime lieutenants, then his family. But the common factor throughout was fear.

The stocky, ruddy-faced, ex-artillery officer made a career out of terror. He oversaw the three years of the Sarajevo siege and the daily attrition of its residents by shelling and sniping. He was also at the Muslim enclave in Srebrenica in July 1995, reassuring panicked women captives their loved ones would be safe, while his men were rounding up and slaughtering 8,000 men and boys. It was the worst atrocity Europe has witnessed since the Nazi era.

After the war, Mladic withdrew to Han Pijesak in eastern Bosnia, where the communists had built a reinforced bunker to resist invasion. But in 1997 when Nato troops finally began looking for war criminals, he slipped across the river Drina from the separatist Bosnian Serb republic to Serbia proper, where President Slobodan Milosevic, the mastermind behind the “ethnic cleansing” of non-Serbs, was ready to offer shelter. But Mladic’s days as a wanted man had only just begun.

From interviews with relatives, court records as well as the accounts of Serbian and international investigators who ultimately tracked Mladic down in 2011, the Guardian has been able to piece together a detailed picture of the general’s years in hiding.

While the ability to evade his pursuers for so long burnished his folk-hero image among nationalists as a Serbian Scarlet Pimpernel, the reality was more mundane and brutal. He stayed free by trusting fewer and fewer people, living in increasing isolation and squalor, ensuring silence with the threat of force. [Continue reading…]

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The Peace Process was always a process of subjugation

Amira Hass writes: “I didn’t know you were such an empiricist,” a friend told me impatiently, a veteran peace activist with a doctorate, when I insisted at some meeting on specifying the prohibitions on the movement of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

That was in 1995, and he thought I didn’t see the big picture, the positive direction, the vision, the beat of the wings of history, and instead was merely insisting on going into detail, into temporary malfunctions. He wasn’t alone in thinking that. One of my editors at the time told me I lacked perspective because I lived in Gaza, and so my reports looked the way they did. In short, wearisome.

The signs were there right from the start − signs that the so much talked-about Peace Process was a process of subjugation; signs that Israel intended to impose on the other side an agreement whose terms were far from the Palestinian minimum, and far from what many countries in the world envisioned as a two-state solution.

But it was hard for these signs to infiltrate public awareness ‏(as well as the Israeli and international media‏) through the powerful interest in seeing the outward manifestations of something that you believe exists: in Gazans bathing in the sea; in the head of the Israeli Shin Bet security service meeting with the head of the Palestinian security service; in Shimon Peres visiting Gaza; in joint security patrols; and in our soldiers no longer patrolling in the heart of the Palestinian towns.

From the supposedly narrow perspective of the Strip, though, the reality of incarceration was, looked and felt like the complete opposite of a peace process.

The chronology is important here − I’ve repeated it countless times and will repeat it countless more times − because local readers like to think that the blanket prohibitions on Palestinian mobility were a response to the suicide attacks from 1994 on. That is not the case.

It began in January 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War. The Israel Defense Forces GOC Central and Southern Commands then revoked an earlier order, from the 1970s, of a “general exit permit to Israel” − in other words, one that allowed the Palestinian residents of the occupied territory to enter Israel, and move freely within its borders and between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

Initially, the revocation was interpreted as something temporary, a preventive measure during the unclear period of wartime. But after a lengthy curfew, the residents of the Strip woke up to a new reality. If up until 1991 Israel had respected ‏(for reasons of its own‏) the right to freedom of movement for all Palestinians, but withheld it from a few people, after 1991 the situation was reversed: Israel denied all Palestinians ‏(those in the West Bank as well‏) the right to freedom of movement, aside from a few groups and numbers that it determined. [Continue reading…]

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Hamas re-elects Meshaal as leader

AFP reports: Hamas re-elected its veteran exiled leader Khaled Meshaal in Cairo on Monday, said an official of the Palestinian Islamist movement that rules Gaza.

“The leaders of Hamas chose Meshaal,” the high-ranking official told AFP via telephone from the Egyptian capital, requesting anonymity.

Hamas officials said earlier that the movement’s governing shura council was poised to renew Meshaal’s leadership for another four years, with one describing his re-election as “widely known”.

Prior to Monday’s vote, however, there had been speculation that the exiled leader would be forced aside by the movement’s powerful leaders in the Gaza Strip, which it has controlled since 2007.

Meshaal himself had said last year that he would not seek a new term.

But developments in the Middle East since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 “pushed Hamas to choose Meshaal… who has given the movement a national face… and has good relations in the Arab world,” one Hamas official said Monday.

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Video: Interview with Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef

Reuters reports: The United States on Monday accused Egypt of muzzling freedom of speech after prosecutors questioned the most popular Egyptian television satirist over allegations he insulted President Mohamed Mursi and Islam.

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland also suggested the Egyptian authorities were selectively prosecuting those accused of insulting the government while ignoring or playing down attacks on anti-government demonstrators.

Bassem Youssef, who rose to fame with a satirical online show after the uprising that swept autocrat Hosni Mubarak from power in 2011, turned himself in on Sunday after the prosecutor general issued an arrest warrant for the comedian on Saturday.

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Rise in sexual assaults in Egypt sets off clash over blame

The New York Times reports: The sheer number of women sexually abused and gang raped in a single public square had become too big to ignore. Conservative Islamists in Egypt’s new political elite were outraged — at the women.

“Sometimes,” said Adel Abdel Maqsoud Afifi, a police general, lawmaker and ultraconservative Islamist, “a girl contributes 100 percent to her own raping when she puts herself in these conditions.”

The increase in sexual assaults over the last two years has set off a new battle over who is to blame, and the debate has become a stark and painful illustration of the convulsions racking Egypt as it tries to reinvent itself.

Under President Hosni Mubarak, the omnipresent police kept sexual assault out of the public squares and the public eye. But since Mr. Mubarak’s exit in 2011, the withdrawal of the security forces has allowed sexual assault to explode into the open, terrorizing Egyptian women.

Women, though, have also taken advantage of another aspect of the breakdown in authority — by speaking out through the newly aggressive news media, defying social taboos to demand attention for a problem the old government often denied. At the same time, some Islamist elected officials have used their new positions to vent some of the most patriarchal impulses in Egypt’s traditional culture and a deep hostility to women’s participation in politics.

The female victims, these officials declared, had invited the attacks by participating in public protests. “How do they ask the Ministry of Interior to protect a woman when she stands among men?” Reda Saleh Al al-Hefnawi, a lawmaker from the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, asked at a parliamentary meeting on the issue. [Continue reading…]

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How Monsanto is killing off the monarch butterfly

Yale Environment 360: University of Kansas insect ecologist Orley R. “Chip” Taylor has been observing the fragile populations of monarch butterflies for decades, but he says he has never been more concerned about their future.

Monarchs are beloved for their spectacular migration across Canada and the United States to overwintering sites in central Mexico — and back again. But a new census taken at the monarchs’ wintering grounds found their population had declined 59 percent over the previous year and was at the lowest level ever measured.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 contributor Richard Conniff, Taylor — founder and director of Monarch Watch, a conservation and outreach program — talked about the factors that have led to the sharp drop in the monarch population. Among them, Taylor said, is the increased planting of genetically modified corn in the U.S. Midwest, which has led to greater use of herbicides, which in turn kills the milkweed that is a prime food source for the butterflies.

“What we’re seeing here in the United States,” he said, “is a very precipitous decline of monarchs that’s coincident with the adoption of Roundup-ready corn and soybeans.” [Continue reading…]

Meanwhile, thanks to its lackeys in the Senate, just a few days ago Monsanto (the manufacturer of Roundup and Roundup-ready GMO crops) got a legal waiver that effectively bypasses consideration of the safety of its products.

Take Part: When the Senate passed a budget resolution last Wednesday that appears to prevent some of the potential damage from sequestration, the Continuing Resolution included several food- and agriculture-related earmarks.

But one inclusion in particular is especially controversial. The “biotech rider” would require the USDA to approve the harvest and sale of crops from genetically modified seed even if a court has ruled the environmental studies on the crop were inadequate. This aspect of the bill infuriated many sustainable food and agriculture groups, who nicknamed the bill the “Monsanto Protection Act.”

If signed into law by President Obama, here’s what the Monsanto Protection Act would do: It will allow farmers to plant, harvest and sell genetically engineered plants even if the crops have been ruled upon unfavorably in court. A Center for Food Safety statement called the rider “an unprecedented attack on U.S. judicial review of agency actions” and “ a major violation of the separation of powers.”

But perhaps more frightening, other critics say, is that the Monsanto Protection Act threatens the health and wellbeing of the public by undermining the federal courts’ ability to protect farmers and the environment from potentially hazardous genetically engineered (GE) crops.

The Monsanto Protection Act was slipped into the bill while it sat in the Senate Appropriations Committee, chaired by Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski. According to the Center for Food Safety, the committee held no hearings on this controversial biotech rider and many Democrats were unaware of its presence in the larger bill.

To understand why many people regard Monsanto as the corporate embodiment of pure evil, watch “The World According to Monsanto”:

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