Author Archives: News Sources

Egypt is starting to take sexual harassment seriously

Baher Ibrahim writes: Sexual harassment of women is not new to Egypt. Almost every woman in the country has experienced some form of harassment, whether verbal or physical.

What is new, though, is a slow but steady change in the tide of public opinion. It began with Eid in 2006, where a crowd of women fell prey to sexual predators, some having their clothes ripped off.

Until recently, the Arabic word for harassment (tahharush) was not used in this context. It was previously known as muakssa – implying playful behaviour by young men having a good time. It was simply accepted as part of a “boys will be boys” attitude, with women and girls having to embrace it because that’s just how boys are.

Finally, this social cancer has come to be referred to as “harassment” and the media have begun to pay attention rather than turn a blind eye. [Continue reading…]

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French judges investigating Arafat’s death seek exhumation

Reuters reports: Three French judges are preparing to travel to Ramallah to seek the exhumation Yasser Arafat’s body as part of an investigation into whether he was murdered by poison, a judicial source told Reuters on Wednesday.

The investigating magistrates will need approval from both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has already expressed his government’s willingness to exhume the body from a limestone sepulchre in Ramallah.

Arafat’s widow, Suha, said in a statement sent to Reuters that the judges told her lawyer they had begun the necessary steps to travel to Ramallah, where police experts would carry out tests under their authority.

“I respectfully ask the Palestinian Authority and the Arab League to suspend all initiatives while the French justice system is looking into the case, other than to act together with them,” Suha Arafat wrote.

The French murder investigation “should take precedence over all other procedures, because it is the incontestable guarantee of independence and neutrality”, she added.

The court launched the murder inquiry last month into the 2004 death of Arafat in a Paris military hospital after his widow said he may have been poisoned.

No autopsy was carried out after Arafat died, aged 75, a month after being flown to France, seriously ill, from his headquarters in Ramallah.

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Still separate and unequal

Rhena Catherine Jasey writes: Legal segregation is no more in the United States, but the de facto segregation of far too many American schools and whole school districts continues to this day. And yes, educational outcomes depend on more than what happens in schools, but nonetheless, the struggle for equity and fairness in public education is the preeminent civil rights issue of our time.

We face a basic question of justice and equity when it comes to the first building blocks of the educational process. The most vulnerable members of our society, children in our neediest areas, face a gross injustice when they go to school each day. The Campaign for Educational Equity, which is now studying New York City public schools, has identified several gaps in “availability of basic educational resources.” (These resources are those listed by Justice Leland DeGrasse in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York court case as necessary in order to “provide all students the opportunity for a sound basic education under the New York State Constitution.”) The Campaign’s research confirms what I have seen firsthand. The schools serving our poor urban populations face a chronic and pervasive lack of resources to support teacher development, to provide a safe learning environment for children, to support curriculum development and to provide basic technology. These problems are not isolated, but systemic.

Given all the variables at work in education, it is a real challenge to guarantee equal educational outcomes, and yet we must insist on a level playing field for all our children regardless of the circumstances of their birth. The fact is that many of our urban students require more support to have a fair opportunity to excel academically, and it is their basic civil right to expect that level of investment from society.

It is disappointing and surprising that so many people seem blind to the current state of affairs in public education. Many deny that the inequalities that exist between the children of middle and upper-middle class parents and their poorer counterparts is an issue of justice. Some claim that the issue is “cultural”, a capacious word used in this case to mean “futile.” Whatever the silent assumptions lurking in the background, the fact is that few not already engaged in addressing the problem feel much motivation to do anything about it. There is certainly no sense of urgency among the general public, or in our political class as a whole, about addressing the current state of public education in our cities.

It is instructive to compare this widespread apathy with the dramatic activism that in past decades overcame other societal injustices. We have seen, for example, remarkable shifts in public opinion, and in the application of our concepts of justice and equity, with respect to the handicapped. Our society and government have also reacted vigorously to the perils of second-hand smoke. We have come a long way in a short time, and spent billions and passed many laws, when it came to creating and enforcing new behavioral norms to protect the environment. The sense of the public welfare has been so strong in these areas that the public will has developed to pursue initiatives that benefit society notwithstanding the fact that the benefits may not correlate with the population making the bulk of the sacrifice. What has applied in those cases applies as much as, if not more, to the task of providing a more equitable educational experience for poor urban and rural children: Everyone would gain. This is not charity but self-interested social investment. How do we explain the lack of public ardor for fixing our educational inequalities? [Continue reading…]

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We can’t grow ourselves out of debt, no matter what the Federal Reserve does

Charles Eisenstein writes: Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke’s pledge at Jackson Hole last Friday to “promote a stronger economic recovery” through “additional policy accommodation” has drawn criticism from economists, liberal and conservative, who question whether the Fed has the wherewithal to stimulate economic growth. What we actually need is more spending, say the liberals. No, less spending, say the conservatives. But underneath these disagreements lies an unexamined agreement, a common assumption that no mainstream economist or policy-maker ever questions: that the purpose of economic policy is to stimulate growth.

So ubiquitous is the equation of growth with prosperity that few people ever pause to consider it. What does economic growth actually mean? It means more consumption – and consumption of a specific kind: more consumption of goods and services that are exchanged for money. That means that if people stop caring for their own children and instead pay for childcare, the economy grows. The same if people stop cooking for themselves and purchase restaurant takeaways instead.

Economists say this is a good thing. After all, you wouldn’t pay for childcare or takeaway food if it weren’t of benefit to you, right? So, the more things people are paying for, the more benefits are being had. Besides, it is more efficient for one daycare centre to handle 30 children than for each family to do it themselves. That’s why we are all so much richer, happier and less busy than we were a generation ago. Right?

Obviously, it isn’t true that the more we buy, the happier we are. Endless growth means endlessly increasing production and endlessly increasing consumption. Social critics have for a long time pointed out the resulting hollowness carried by that thesis. Furthermore, it is becoming increasingly apparent that infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. Why, then, are liberals and conservatives alike so fervent in their pursuit of growth? [Continue reading…]

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All-American terrorists and the jihadist threat that never materialized

Kelley B. Vlahos writes: In what papers are calling “one of the most startling and potentially serious cases of an anti-government militia to be brought before the courts in recent years,” three U.S. soldiers have been arraigned for murder and may get the death penalty, stemming from charges they amassed an arsenal, plotted several domestic terror attacks, and killed two friends who had become “loose ends” in their diabolic plans.

You haven’t heard of this? Not surprising, since this story doesn’t square with the narrative that homegrown Muslim radicals are not only infiltrating the government, and the military, but plotting the next big domestic terror assault on American soil. These militiamen, arrested in Georgia where they were stationed at Fort Stewart, are white. They don’t pray in a mosque and certainly don’t want to build one. According to reports, however, they were members of FEAR — Forever Enduring Always Ready — which has been loosely described as an anarchist group set on overthrowing the government and killing President Obama.

These aren’t the first white militia types to be arrested in recent years. Indeed, they join a string of supposed Muslim plotters arrested since 2001. The difference between the recent Georgia case and many of the others is the FBI wasn’t involved from the beginning to set them up and lead them by the nose (the Muslim community is quite familiar with these tactics). These FEAR guys were apparently the real deal. They bought real weapons, and a lot of them, and in the case of the Fort Stewart gang, they committed real murder, killing the guy who allegedly helped to get them the weapons and his girlfriend, execution style, after luring them into the woods. [Continue reading…]

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We’re one crucial step closer to seeing Tony Blair at The Hague

George Monbiot writes: For years it seems impregnable, then suddenly the citadel collapses. An ideology, a fact, a regime appears fixed, unshakeable, almost geological. Then an inch of mortar falls, and the stonework begins to slide. Something of this kind happened over the weekend.

When Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair should be treading the path to The Hague, he de-normalised what Blair has done. Tutu broke the protocol of power – the implicit accord between those who flit from one grand meeting to another – and named his crime. I expect that Blair will never recover from it.

The offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and a crime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg principles as the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression”. This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter.

That the invasion of Iraq falls into this category looks indisputable. Blair’s cabinet ministers knew it, and told him so. His attorney general warned that there were just three ways in which it could be legally justified: “self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN security council authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.” Blair tried and failed to obtain the third.

His foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told Blair that for the war to be legal, “i) there must be an armed attack upon a state or such an attack must be imminent; ii) the use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) the acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack.” None of these conditions were met. The Cabinet Office told him: “A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to law officers’ advice, none currently exists.”

Without legal justification, the attack on Iraq was an act of mass murder. It caused the deaths of between 100,000 and a million people, and ranks among the greatest crimes the world has ever seen. That Blair and his ministers still saunter among us, gathering money wherever they go, is a withering indictment of a one-sided system of international justice: a system whose hypocrisies Tutu has exposed. [Continue reading…]

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U.N. says 100,000 refugees fled Syria in August

The Associated Press reports: Some 100,000 refugees fled Syria during August making it by far the highest monthly total since hostilities began, the U.N. refugee agency said Tuesday.

The tide in people fleeing the civil war, a figure that includes both refugees who are registered and those awaiting registration with the Geneva-based U.N. refugee agency, underscores the intensifying violence between the regime of Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, and the armed anti-government groups.

The August total represents more than 40 percent of the 234,368 Syrian refugees who, as of the last count on September 2, had fled for surrounding countries since the uprising began 17 months ago.

“If you do the math, it’s quite an astonishing number,” U.N. refugee agency spokesman Melissa Fleming told reporters Tuesday at the U.N.’s European headquarters in Geneva. “And it points to a significant escalation in refugee movement and people seeking asylum, and probably points to a very precarious and violent situation inside the country.”

The refugee agency and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent are continuing to expand their operations to support displaced Syrians and appealing to all nations to take in Syrians who need asylum. There are now more than 80,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey, where the borders remain open, and there is a backlog of some 8,000 Syrians waiting to be processed at the border, Fleming said. Jordan has more than 77,000 Syrian refugees; Lebanon has more than 59,000; and Iraq nearly 18,700, according to the agency.

The U.N.’s World Food Program spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told reporters that her agency is scaling up operations to provide food urgently needed by 1.5 million people this month, mainly in areas where there has been fighting and people made at least temporarily homeless.

Activists say some 5,000 people were killed in August, the highest toll in the 17-month-old uprising and more than three times the monthly average. The U.N. children’s agency says 1,600 were killed last week alone, also the highest figure for the entire revolt.

The two major activist groups, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Local Coordination Committees, have raised their total death toll to between 23,000 and 26,000. [Continue reading…]

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Iran could strike at U.S. bases in region if Israel attacks: Hezbollah

The Daily Star reports: Hezbollah said Monday it would never resort to the use of chemical weapons in any future war with Israel but said its present arsenal was enough to deal a severe blow to the Jewish state.

The head of the Lebanese resistance group also warned that U.S. military bases in the region could be targeted by Iran if Israel launched an attack on the Islamic Republic.

“We don’t have chemical weapons and we don’t need to use them … because [Israel] has factories and locations that are in the reach of our rockets,” Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary general, said in a rare face-to-face interview with Almayadeen television.

He said it was religiously unacceptable for his group to use chemical weapons.

Several reports emerged over the past year of U.S. and Israeli concerns of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile falling in to the hands of the Lebanese resistance group.

Nasrallah, who said in August his group could wrack havoc should Israel launch an assault of Lebanon, reiterated his threat, saying even a first strike that wiped out many of the group’s missile sites would still leave enough rockets to harm hundreds of thousands of Israelis.

“We don’t have a mighty power but we have a power that is effective. The available power today can represent a powerful deterrent force,” the leader of Hezbollah said.

He also reiterated how the missiles his group enjoyed possessed advanced targeting and range capabilities.

“The rockets of the Islamic resistance can strike at any target in occupied Palestine [Israel] that you can think of,” Nasrallah said.

He also said the capabilities of his group should not be undermined and that the resistance remained on alert for any possible confrontation.

“Since 2000 until today, there is a perception that Hezbollah is preoccupied and there are a thousand issues that it has to deal with. However, we have a big team, the resistance’s team, which is not involved in domestic affairs but works day and night on training, arming, planning, and is concerned with keeping itself prepared [for any eventuality],” he said.

Asked about repercussions on the party as a result of the Syria crisis, Nasrallah said: “We are comfortable, reassured and confident, based on an objective view of what is going on in the world in terms of economic conditions, the changes … in Syria, Lebanon and North Africa.”

“We have a very optimistic view of the future,” he added.

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In 2012, some American workers don’t even have access to clean drinking water

Rose Aguilar writes: Today is Labour Day in the United States, and in the year 2012, people doing backbreaking work in the heat don’t have access to clean drinking water. That’s right, in the land of the free, where corporate profits continue to reach all-time highs, workers doing actual labour, either drink brown water or have no water at all in temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 Celsius).

Since the state of California – the country’s breadbasket – issued the first heat regulations in the country in 2005, 16 farm workers have died from heat related illnesses. The Farm Worker Safety Act, which is currently on Governor Jerry Brown’s desk, will allow the 400,000 workers who pick our fruits and vegetables in unbearable heat to sue employers who repeatedly fail to comply with mandatory requirements for shade and drinking water. These are basic human rights that most of us take for granted. Governor Brown should sign this bill immediately.

In July, Southern California warehouse workers who move goods for Walmart, the world’s largest corporation, filed a complaint with the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) detailing more than a dozen violations, including no access to clean water, wage abuses, broken equipment, and unreasonable and unsafe moving quotas. Workers say they are denied access to medical care, are told they will be laid off if they can’t work while injured, and are often blocked inside the trailers they are loading for up to 30 minutes with no exit. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu’s Kennedy moment

Trita Parsi and Roi Ben-Yehuda write: Watching the conflict between Iran and Israel escalate, it’s hard not to draw analogies and lessons from history. Indeed, Netanyahu’s thinking in this regard is very much anchored in the past: “The year is 1938 and Iran is Germany”, time and again he has warned. Such analogs provide leaders with a quick and handy “user manual”: a way to sell a desired policy path and provide a platform for action.

Yet as mental shortcuts, analogs could easily lead to unwanted outcomes. Crucial decisions, like going to war, could be based on paying attention to the wrong lessons, or making a false comparison between two different situations. Indeed, it is neither 1938 (Iran is far from having a bomb or a delivery system) nor is Iran Nazi Germany (Iran’s military budget is fraction of that of Israel and the US). Claiming so, however, leaves no room for any response save military force.

Recently, another historical episode, the Cuban Missile Crisis, has been gaining traction. Just as the US, the analogy goes, faced the intolerable choice of either attacking Cuba or allowing Soviet nuclear weapons in its own backyard, so too Israel/US must decide between attacking Iran or allowing it to become nuclear.

General Eitan Ben-Eliyahu, former Israeli Air Force Chief, has stated that the current situation is following the Cuban Missile Crisis model in at least two respects: sanction imposed on Iran are similar to the naval blockade imposed on Cuba, and military threats by Israel (and the US) are akin to the Kennedy administration flexing its muscles and putting the armed forces on high alert.

Ben-Eliyahu also noted that the successful resolution of the conflict rested on a third pillar: a secret channel of communication between the parties that allowed the Russians to back down. It’s unknown, albeit doubtful, if Israel and Iran have established such channels of communications. [Continue reading…]

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The fall of the COINdinistas

Kelley Beaucar Vlahos writes: Lt. Col. John Nagl was at his peak.

It was 2007, the shimmery dawn of the group think experiment we now call the mass COIN (counterinsurgency) delusion. Nagl’s boss, Gen. David Petraeus, Washington’s newest demigod, had convinced everyone that his Surge Strategy could tame the wild disaster that had become the Iraq War. Nagl, who had positioned himself at Petraeus’s elbow to sell that formula, was now sitting in full dress uniform, his hair in regulation “high and tight,” whacking nimbly at the pathetic softballs lobbed by Jon Stewart who was being embarrassingly — and uncharacteristically — deferential to his decorated guest.

“It’s a very difficult kind of war, it’s a thinking person’s war, and it’s a kind of war we’re learning and adapting and getting better at fighting in the course of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Nagl pronounced in response to a question about FM-24, otherwise known as the “Counterinsurgency Manual,” which was written by committee led by Petreaus, “a remarkable man,” according to Nagl. FM-24 became the bible of COIN and the vehicle by which several of its authors, Nagl included, advanced their careers amid some very heady times — from 2007 through 2010 — in the Washington security world (I began sensing the decline as early as January 2010).

Iraq veteran and writer Carl Prine takes credit for calling them the COINdinistas first. They are the post-Bush civilian and military “crusaders” (as pegged by arch-COIN critic and TAC contributor Andrew Bacevich) dominating the Washington security establishment. Having gobbled down the fairy dust about the Iraq Surge signifying a new “graduate level,” “population-centric” counterinsurgency strategy (and ignoring our overwhelming firepower over Baghdad and Sunni strongholds and the complicated ethnic dynamics on the ground), they attempted to apply the same hocus-pocus to our war in Afghanistan under President Obama. FM-24 became more than a bible, but code for who was in and who was clearly out of the loop, infecting not only the think tank and beltway banditry, but the military agenda, too.

Then Tom Ricks, Washington Post correspondent-court scribe, conducted a full-blown high school popularity contest, literally ranking the “brains behind counterinsurgency’s rise from forgotten doctrine to the centerpiece of the world’s most powerful military.” In this cringe-worthy “top ten” published in Foreign Policy in December 2009, Ricks places “King David” Petraeus at Number 1, and then Nagl, whose Oxford dissertation-turned-Barnes-and-Noble-bestseller Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife made him a counterinsurgency “scholar,” among other bright lights of the time. Nagl, Ricks predicted, would be “in a top Pentagon slot within a year or two.”

That was just three years ago. Today, there is no better symbol for the dramatic failure of COIN, the fading of the COINdinistas and the loss that is U.S war policy in Afghanistan than this week’s news that Nagl is leaving Washington to be the headmaster of The Haverford School, a rich preparatory school (grades k-12) for boys on Philadelphia’s Main Line.

That’s right — Nagl, once called the Johnny Appleseed of COIN, who reveled in his role as face man, tutoring reporters with practiced bookish charm on the “the new way of war,” and burnishing his personal story to convince everyone that he was a counter-insurgent before his time — a modern T.E. Lawrence — is packing up for good. [Continue reading…]

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Why is Iraq now immune from criticism over appalling human rights record?

Haifa Zangana writes: Three women were among the 21 people executed within one day in Iraq, last Monday. It was followed, two days later, by the reported execution of five more people. The number of people executed since the start of this year is now at least 96 and they are not the only ones. The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Christof Heyns, said: “I am appalled about the level of executions in Iraq. I deeply deplore the executions carried out this week, and am particularly alarmed about continuing reports of individuals who remain at risk of execution.”

There is also news of another 196 people on death row. According to Iraqi officials, they have all been convicted on charges “related to terrorism,” but there is little information about their names, what crimes they committed or whether they have access to lawyers or not. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have previously documented the prevalence of unfair trials and torture in detention in Iraq. Confessions under torture are often the only evidence against a person who has been arrested following a secret informant’s report. Parading the accused with their tortured, empty looks on Al Iraqiya, the official TV channel, is the norm. It took a court in Baghdad only 15 minutes to sentence Ramze Shihab Ahmed, a dual Iraqi-UK national, to 15 years’ imprisonment after being found guilty of “funding terrorist groups”.

Amnesty has obtained and examined court documents and said it believes the trial proceedings were “grossly unfair”. Ahmed was held in a secret prison near Baghdad, during which time his whereabouts were completely unknown to his family. During this period Ahmed alleges he was tortured – with electric shocks to his genitals and suffocation by plastic bags – into making a false “confession” to terrorist offences.

So what kind of human rights are observed in the “new Iraq”? Hardly any. The list of abuses is long and the tip of the iceberg is waves of arbitrary arrests (over 1,000 monthly), torture and executions. All are barely noticed by the world media and the US and British official silence is rather convenient to cover up the crimes and chaos they created. From time to time, they break their silence but only to justify their act of aggression. Recently, when Archbishop Desmond Tutu pulled out of a seminar in protest over the presence of Tony Blair, a statement was issued by Blair’s office to justify the morality of his decision to support the United States’ military invasion of Iraq.

The statement reiterated the plight of Iraqis under Saddam’s regime with no mention whatsoever of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the war and endemic abuses of human rights since 2003. [Continue reading…]

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Scandal of Mubarak regime millions in U.K.

The Guardian reports: Britain has allowed key members of Egypt’s toppled dictatorship to retain millions of pounds of suspected property and business assets in the UK, potentially violating a globally-agreed set of sanctions.

The situation has led to accusations that ministers are more interested in preserving the City of London’s cosy relationship with the Arab financial sector than in securing justice.

Hosni Mubarak, the ousted former president, was sentenced to life in jail in June. A six-month investigation, conducted by BBC Arabic and released in conjunction with the Guardian and al-Hayat, a pan-Arab newspaper, has identified many valuable assets linked to his family and their associates that have not been frozen.

These include luxury houses in Chelsea and Knightsbridge and companies registered in central London. One member of Mubarak’s inner circle has even been permitted to set up a UK-based business in recent months, despite being named on a British Treasury sanctions list (pdf) of Egyptians who are linked to misappropriated assets and subject to an asset-freeze.

In response to the investigation, the Foreign Office said it was working closely with its Egyptian counterparts to hunt down Mubarak regime assets. The Treasury, which has a dedicated unit tasked with implementing financial sanctions, said it was confident it had acted properly. Both departments said they could not comment on individual cases.

The revelations will embarrass British ministers, who have previously expressed support for the Arab uprisings and vowed to take “decisive action” to track down and return illicit funds taken out of Egypt.

Yet 18 months on from the downfall of Mubarak, publicly-accessible records from Companies House and Land Registry indicate that the fortunes of regime figures convicted of embezzling money from Egypt remain at least partially on UK soil and untouched by British authorities. [Continue reading…]

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Violence dims hope of solution to Turkish Kurd conflict

Reuters reports: Images of smiling Kurdish MPs hugging rebels, rifles slung over their shoulders, at a remote roadblock in Turkey’s mountainous southeast hit a raw nerve.

The embrace, depicted in Turkish newspapers as battles raged with government troops, fed a climate of animosity which is undermining hopes of a revival of secret talks to end a 28-year-old separatist conflict.

Escalating violence could instead now entrench a primarily military response from Ankara to an insurgency that has killed more than 40,000 people. Nine Turkish police and soldiers were killed over the weekend in clashes with Kurdish rebels.

The roadside meeting came as Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels, inspired by the growing influence of an allied Kurdish group in Syria, laid siege to Turkey’s mountainous district of Semdinli bordering Iraq and Iran.

“It is a vicious cycle,” said Soner Cagaptay from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Whenever there is a spike in violence, Turkey’s willingness to consider a political solution becomes weaker.”

Ankara sees the hand of Damascus in the PKK’s new found energy, accusing it of arming the rebels and allowing a PKK-linked party to control parts of Syria to prevent locals joining the 17-month uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

“The PKK has been excited by the developments in Syria and is trying to prove its worth and credibility by trying to take parts of Turkish territory, however temporarily,” Cagaptay said.

In a show of strength, the PKK has set up roadblocks and kidnapped Turkish officials and is believed to be behind recent deadly bomb attacks on the western coast of Turkey and in the city of Gaziantep, near the Syrian border.

“The aim of these acts is to show that no place in Turkey is safe, that they are capable of spreading terrorism to every region…and prove their control and influence,” said retired major general Armagan Kuloglu, an analyst at a think-tank in Ankara.

He said the attacks were aimed to sow discord between Kurds and Turks. The PKK, listed as a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and European Union, had little prospect of drawing Ankara back to the negotiating table with such a strategy.

Talking to the PKK was long unpalatable to Turkish public opinion. While recordings leaked last year from secret meetings in Oslo between the intelligence service and the outlawed group suggested times may have changed, that window for negotiations may be closing. [Continue reading…]

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20% of all world’s species under threat of extinction

BBC News reports: A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.

Almost 80% of the world’s species are invertebrates, meaning they lack a spinal column.

Reviewing over 12,000 species known to be threatened, biologists found that freshwater ones are most at risk.

Researchers urged for comprehensive studies of those vulnerable, to help inform conservation and protect species.

Human pressures, ranging from habitat disruption to increased temperatures, were key concerns according to the report published by the Zoological Society of London.

“We knew that roughly one fifth of vertebrates and plants were threatened with extinction, but it was not clear if this was representative of the small spineless creatures that make up the majority of life on the planet,” said Professor Jonathan Baillie, ZSL’s director of conservation.

“The initial findings in this report indicate that 20% of all species may be threatened.

“This is particularly concerning as we are dependent on these spineless creatures for our very survival,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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