Candida Moss writes: On Thursday morning The New York Timesran a high profile story about the discovery of a new human ancestor species — Homo naledi — in the Rising Star cave in South Africa. The discovery, announced by professor Lee Berger, was monumental because the evidence for Homo naledi were discovered in a burial chamber. Concern for burial is usually seen as distinctive characteristic of humankind, so the possibility that this new non-human hominid species was ”deliberately disposing of its dead” was especially exciting.
To anthropologists the article was not only newsworthy it was also humorous, for the Times illustrated the piece with a photograph of Australopithecus africanus, a species already well-known. This howler of a mistake (at least to self-identified science nerds) was also somewhat understandable because the differences between the two skulls are sufficiently subtle that a lay viewer can indeed easily mistake them for one another. In fact, some have pointed to that similarity and wondered (while acknowledging the importance of the discovery) if it is indeed a “new species.”And that gets to the deeper issue: What and who were our ancestors?
It might seem as if the answer to this question is simply a question of biology, but in his new book Tales of the Ex-Apes: How we think about human evolution anthropologist Jonathan Marks argues that the story we tell about our origins, the study of our evolutionary tree, has cultural roots. Evolution isn’t just a question of biology, he argues, it’s also a question of mythology. Our scientific facts, he says, are the product of bioculture and biopolitics. [Continue reading…]
From at least the time of Hippocrates in ancient Greece, physicians were taught to use their intuition, based on their experience.
“For it is by the same symptoms in all cases that you will know the diseases,” he wrote. “He who would make accurate forecasts as to those who will recover, and those who will die … must understand all the symptoms thoroughly.”
In other words, doctors drew general conclusions from experience to forecast the course of disease in particular patients.
But Hippocratic medicine also incorporated “scientific” theory — the idea that four “humors” (blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm) controlled the body’s health. Excess or deficiency of any of the humors made you sick, so treating patients consisted of trying to put the humors back in balance. Bloodletting, used for centuries to treat everything from fevers to seizures, serves as an example of theory-based medicine in action.
Nowadays medical practice is supposedly (more) scientific. But actually, medical theory seems to have taken a backseat to the lessons-from-experience approach. Today’s catch phrase is “evidence-based medicine,” and that “evidence” typically takes the form of results from clinical trials, in which potential treatments are tested on large groups of people. It’s basically just a more systematic approach to Hippocrates’ advice that doctors base diagnosis, treatments and prognosis on experience with previous patients. But instead of doctors applying their own personal clinical experience, they rely on generalizing the results of large trials to their particular patients.
You should call this approach the “Risk Generalization-Particularization” model of medical prediction, Jonathan Fuller and Luis Flores write in a paper to be published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. (It’s OK to call it ‘Risk GP’ for short, they say.) “Risk GP” they note, is “the model that many practitioners implicitly rely upon when making evidence-based decisions.”
Risk GP as a model for making medical judgments is the outgrowth of demands for evidence-based medicine, write Fuller, on the medicine faculty at the University of Toronto in Canada, and Flores, a philosopher at King’s College London in England. It “advocates applying the results of population studies over mechanistic reasoning … in diagnosis, prognosis and therapy.” Evidence-based medicine has set a new standard for clinical reasoning, Fuller and Flores declare; it “has become dominant in medical research and education, accepted by leading medical schools and all of the major medical journals.”
So it seems like a good idea to ask whether the “evidence” actually justifies this evidence-based approach. In fact, it doesn’t. [Continue reading…]
As a wildlife veterinarian, I often get asked about bats. I like bats, and I am always eager to talk about how interesting they are. Unfortunately the question is often not about biology but instead “what should I do about the ones in my roof?”.
With some unique talents and remarkable sex lives, bats are actually one of the most interesting, diverse and misunderstood groups of animals. Contrary to popular belief, they are beautiful creatures. Not necessarily in the cuddly, human-like sense – although some fruit bats with doey brown eyes and button noses could be considered so – but they are beautifully designed.
This couldn’t be illustrated better than by the discovery of the oldest known complete bat fossil, more than 53 million-years-old yet with a similar wing design to those flying around today. To put it in perspective, 50m years ago our ancestors were still swinging from the trees and would certainly not be recognised as human. But even then bats already had the combination of thin, long forearms and fingers covered by an extremely thin, strong membrane, which allowed them to master the art of powered, agile flight.
A flying fox shows off its 50 million-year-old wing design. Duncan PJ, CC BY-SA
Soon afterwards, fossils record another game-changing adaptation in the evolution of most bats, and that is the ability to accurately locate prey using sound (what we call echolocation). These two adaptations early in their history gave bats an evolutionary edge compared to some other mammals, and allowed them to diversify into almost all habitats, on every continent except Antarctica.
Hisham Melhem writes: Former President George W. Bush bequeathed to Barack Obama a precarious and partially broken Arab World. A spectacularly ambitious imperial attempt at remaking the region, beginning in Mesopotamia, crumbled mightily in the inhospitable desert of Iraq.
The dream of planting a Jeffersonian democracy in the land of the two rivers, metamorphosed into an unprecedented sectarian bloodletting. Bush’s freedom agenda, coming after he admitted – correctly – that for more than fifty years U.S. administrations neglected human rights in the Middle East in the name of maintaining stability, the free flow of oil, and striking alliances against the Soviet Union, was ill-conceived, naively pursued, and badly executed.
Bush’s ‘War on Terrorism’ was equally flawed; Al-Qaeda was cut to pieces, but like the mythical Hydra it metastasized and produced the monstrous ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS). But hard as it is to conceive, President Obama will bequeath to his successor a breathtakingly pulverized – figuratively and, yes, physically – region, where in some states like Syria and Iraq whole communities have been uprooted and once great ancient cities have been ransacked, and precious cultural and religious jewels have been destroyed.
There are no more streets in some Syrian cities; The Assad regime turned them into shallow valleys of broken concrete, twisted metal and shattered personal artifacts indicating that they were once full of life. If hell has streets, they will surely look like the streets of Syria’s cities today. It shall be written, that the words of a sitting American President in the second decade of the 21st century justifying his inaction and his inane silence in the face of the staggering savagery of the Syrian regime – which repeatedly used chemical weapons, barrel bombs, medieval sieges and starvation against his own people – were stunning in their moral vacuity. The President of the United States will be judged as an accomplice in the historic betrayal of the Syrian people – and, to a lesser extent, the Iraqi and Libyan peoples – and in the creation of the worst refugee problem in the Middle East in a century.
Surely, the primary responsibility for the agonies of the peoples of the Middle East lies in the hands of the political and cultural classes that inherited the new political structures erected in modern times by the colonial powers over the remnants of old civilizations.
True, European powers drew artificial boundaries – most countries have such borders – not taking into consideration the wishes of the affected peoples, whose promises were rarely honored. This left behind wounds that have yet to heal. But in subsequent years, the ideologues of Arab Nationalism and Political Islam, the military strongmen who perfected military coups along with some atavistic hereditary rulers maintained the ossified status quo or destroyed nascent and relatively open, diverse societies and representative forms of governance in countries like Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Tunisia.
However, Western meddling and military intervention contributed to the rise of Arab autocracy and despotism. The American invasion of Iraq did not cause sectarianism in that tortured land; that dormant scourge was awakened by years of Ba’athist despotism and Saddam Hussein’s decision to invade Iran in 1980.
But the way the American invasion was conceived and executed accelerated Iraq’s descent into the abyss. Hence America’s partial political and moral responsibility for Iraq’s current torment. President Obama’s eagerness to disengage himself and his administration from Bush’s Iraq burden explains his reticence to push for a residual force after 2011, or to seriously and personally continue to engage Iraqis and help those forces willing to live in a unitary civil state, his deafness to repeated warnings that former Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki’s sectarian policies were deepening the sectarian fissures, makes him a partial owner of Iraq’s chaos. [Continue reading…]
Koert Debeuf writes: The anti-forces of the liberal order, authoritarian nationalism and religious extremism are back with a vengeance. The most obvious example of the return of authoritarian nationalism is Russia. The same trend is also clear in most member-states of supra-national Europe, not the least in Hungary and Greece. Religious extremism is on a scary height in the Arab world, but also in parts of Africa, India and Myanmar.
The US and Europe seem to be too tired and powerless to halt this decline. Even though both liberal powers know what they want, both are deeply divided. It looks like both powers are facing a global system failure and have no idea how to deal with it. Both know that their influence and power is not what it used to be, but they haven’t found a new role yet. It’s not an exclusive Western problem. The entire world is plunging into an identity crisis.
What is an identity crisis?
An identity crisis or existential crisis is a psychological state of mind of — mostly high-achieving individuals who feel depressed, angry and lost and question the very foundations of their lives. It usually occurs after a traumatic experience such as an extreme disappointment, a broken relationship, the death of a loved one or a sudden loss of status. These traumas result in a loss of confidence and self-esteem.
In trying to find a way out of this depressive disorder people tend to take four different paths: anchoring, isolation, distraction and sublimation. Isolation is an attempt to keep all negative feelings outside. Distraction is trying to prevent the mind from turning on itself. Sublimation on the other hand is refocusing on positive energy in order to keep the negative away. However, the path that most people with an identity crisis are taking is the one of anchoring: finding a well-known fixation point such as religion, closed social groups or one particular idea or ideology. People are looking for the security and warmth of a group, or what I call a tribe. In Arabic there is a word for this: qabaleya, or tribalization. It is the choice to go back to the tribe, its warmth and clear-cut identity. What’s interesting is that psychologists have found that in looking for a way out of an identity crisis people often prefer a negative identity rather than a weak identity.
What counts for individuals counts for groups as well. It makes sense to say that societies can suffer from an identity crisis too. The first study of the psychology of the masses was written in 1895, by Gustav Le Bon in his book ‘Psychologie des foules’. Since then many Social Psychology studies have drawn similarities between the psychology of individuals and that of groups. Psychiatrists too have been researching how groups can suffer from a kind of equivalent of the mental disorders usually only attributed to individuals. Psychiatrist and politician John Lord Alderdice even suggested psychologically informed strategies to address such crises in the psychology of large groups including the regressive pattern I am calling tribalization and other phenomena such a fundamentalism, radicalization and the cycle of terrorism.
Societies –just like individuals –can suffer traumatic experiences too. The anthropological study of René Girard shows how traumatic experiences make tribes focus on their core identity, returning to a stronger emphasis on law, culture and the sacred, and how they deal with their fear and aggression by turning against ‘the Other’ — — the scapegoat mechanism. Just like individuals societies often respond to traumatic experiences with an identity crisis by regressing back into what they know best from the past — what I am describing as tribalization. They go back to the tribal (old) ideas and tribal (old) behavior. These tribal ideas are mostly based on myths of a great past as the only way towards a great future. Tribalization is a process that almost always includes the creation of enemies. [Continue reading…]
Mark Boothroyd writes: The Syrian revolt against the Assad regime is now in its fifth year, the death toll from the conflict has surpassed 330,000 with over 1 million wounded, 215,000 are still detained in regime prisons, 200,000 are missing, and between 650,000 and 1,000,000 people are under starvation siege by the regime in rebel towns and cities. Bombings of civilian areas by the regime are a daily occurrence, 4.5 million Syrians are refugees, and 8 million, almost half the remaining population, are internally displaced.
In all this time there was no direct western intervention in Syria against Assad. No bombs were dropped on Syria by Western powers until mid-2014, the fourth year of the revolution, and these were targeted at ISIS, not the regime. Not a single bomb has been dropped on regime military installations by the Coalition air force.
All the hype and warnings notwithstanding, Western aid to the rebels has been very limited. By mid-2013 the Free Syrian Army had received only $12 million of a promised $60 million of aid from the US , and been denied access to weaponry by the EU. The aid they did receive was only non-lethal aid consisting of food, medicine and vehicles. From 2012 onwards the CIA was involved in monitoring weapons shipments to Syria; its role was to stop them receiving the anti-air missiles and heavy weaponry that could have neutralised Assad’s airforce and armour and hastened the downfall of the regime.
When the US did finally begin to arm and train rebels in 2014, it was tightly controlled to a ridiculous extent. In contrast the regime has $3.5 billion worth of contracts for arms from Russia, and loans to pay for it. With Syria’s domestic weapons industry too small to produce enough arms to sustain a protracted conflict, the imperialist intervention which has kept the conflict going and maintains it to this day is from Russia.
The revolutions exposed that for many in the anti-war movement, opposition to imperialist intervention only extended to opposition to imperialist intervention by the UK, US, EU, and their allies. There was no opposition to the imperialist actions of the Russian government, or the crucial support given by the Iranian government to the Assad regime. [Continue reading…]
Two things are especially striking about the massive movement of refugees into Europe: running for their lives from the fear and famine, rape and killing of the wider region, people seeking sanctuary are being greeted by the stinginess of states (“open door” Germany is the exception) and the warm hospitality of European citizens.
People crossing the border from Greece into Macedonia, en route to Hungary through Serbia. AFP
People with children on their backs and bottles of water and lumps of bread in their hands are facing untold episodes of state harassment, and state inaction. At Keleti train station in Budapest, the Hungarian government, lovers of barbed wire, “relocation camps” and border checks, in effect tried to impose martial law on several thousand stateless people hurt by torture, rape and barrel-bombing. That’s an obscenity. “Every state has the right to protect its borders,” tweeted the ill-named Justice Minister of the Orban government. Its spokesman, Zoltan Kovacs, said coldly that Budapest isn’t planning to send any more buses to Austria. Janos Lazar, government chief of staff, weighed in by emphasising that Hungary had to work to complete its new border fence, to stop further “illegal” entry of refugees. Otherwise, he added, many more such people would be encouraged to come the way of the motherland.
The shameless behaviour of governments extends well beyond the front lines from where desperate peoples are fleeing for their lives. Throughout the European Union, most governments are hiding behind the so-called Dublin Regulation, which places the burden of settlement and hospitality on the state in which refugees first arrive. Signed 25 years ago, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Dublin Regulation is now a broken arrangement, even though you wouldn’t think so from the miserly statements and inaction of many heads of government. Saturday’s meeting of European foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg produced no agreement. The group’s foreign policy boss, Federica Mogherini, said the talks were “difficult” and Europe’s refugee crisis is “here to stay”. In Britain, where the government is deeply implicated in the state failure, violence, social chaos and human tragedy in the Middle East region, Prime Minister David Cameron has prevaricated. At first, he suggested Britain should not take refugees currently making their way through Balkan states or across the Mediterranean to Europe because this would help prevent others making the “hazardous journey”. Now he says Britain has a “moral responsibility” to accept up to 20,000 refugees from Syria – but over the next five years.
For several years, on the margins of Europe, Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and other local states have been shouldering the massive refugee burden. You would think that richer states well beyond the region, especially those deeply implicated in Middle East dynamics, would be pitching in, especially given the scale of the developing catastrophe. Think twice. So far, the uncivil war in Syria alone has produced more than four million refugees. Many more people are coming. Yet how many Syrian citizens have so far been accepted as refugees by the United States and its allies at war with the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq? The figures are shocking, and shameful: 4,980 in the United Kingdom; 1,500 in the United States; 1,074 in Stephen Harper’s Canada; and 2,200 in Tony Abbott’s Australia. Up until last year, Australia was still trying to return asylum seekers to Syria. Now the Abbott government, under mounting public pressure, says it “will step up to the plate”. The fine words are fabulations: its talk of an increased intake of Syrians is contradicted by plans to reduce refugees from other parts of the world, to ensure Australia’s overall refugee intake would remain unchanged.
In striking contrast to this hypocrisy and pusillanimity (invade Iraq and Afghanistan, bomb Syria, refuse entry to its fleeing victims), European citizens on the ground have taken the lead in welcoming the homeless. Rising xenophobia throughout Europe has for some time been the only mainstream media story considered newsworthy by journalists. Now we’re seeing a different and more charitable side of Europe: churches, trade unions, mosques, community groups and families are springing into action. Citizens hold welcome signs in English, German and Arabic at train stations. Bystanders clap. There are handshakes, flowers, smiles. Citizen volunteers offer food, hot drinks, toys for children. More than a few are offering their homes to the homeless. Petitions call upon the EU and its member states to act decisively, for instance by setting up a special ferry service from the Turkish cities on the Aegean Sea to Greece and a direct special train service from Thessaloniki to northern Europe. A week ago, 20,000 demonstrators took to the streets of Vienna in support of refugees now on the move; a few days before, a similar march took place in Dresden. And six days ago, a petition directed at the Westminster website hit 100,000 signatures, enough to require a parliamentary debate on increasing the number of people granted refuge in the UK. A few hours later, the number of petitioners had doubled, to nearly 200,000.
The hospitality, the big-hearted openness to the world, the cosmopolitanism of these citizens of the world is remarkable. It’s a reaffirmation of the principle of citizenship famously outlined just over two centuries ago by the English political writer Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809), in an exchange with his friend Benjamin Franklin. “Where liberty is, there is my country,” Franklin reportedly said. “Where liberty is not, there is my country,” Paine quipped in reply. Citizenship of any country implied for him the duty of citizens to take an interest in the fate of others. Continue reading →
The Washington Post reports: Europe is now struggling with the most severe refugee crisis in decades, as millions of people flee violence in Syria and Iraq. Even as German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel outlined a proposal this week to place 160,000 refugees in nearly two dozen countries, he acknowledged that the plan was merely “a drop in the ocean.” Germany alone expects to receive 800,000 applications from asylum seekers this year. The U.S. government announced Thursday it would take in 10,000.
Refugees areoftendescribedasa“burden” for the countries they settle in. The usual thinking is that they are drain on limited government coffers and a weight on sluggish economies, but that countries ought to take them in for moral and legal reasons. Even those in favor of expanding help for refugees, like the former British foreign secretary David Miliband and the executive director of Human Rights Watch for the Middle East and North Africa, have referred to sharing the “burden” of refugees.
However, research that has looked at the effect of refugees around the world suggests that, in the longer run, this view is often wrong. From Denmark to Uganda to Cleveland, studies have found that welcoming refugees has a positive or at least a neutral effect on a host community’s economy and wages. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: Turkey’s ruling AK Party re-elected Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as its chairman at a congress on Saturday where the longest shadow was cast by a politician who, officially at least, is no longer a member: President Tayyip Erdogan.
Although Erdogan did not appear in person – as president he is supposed to refrain from party politics – many of his loyalists were named to executive committees, something Davutoglu had hoped to avoid, according to some party officials.
Turkey’s most popular and divisive politician in recent memory, Erdogan faces budding discontent from inside the movement he founded, officials say. His drive to secure an absolute majority for the AKP has pushed it toward a November snap election that could again leave the party in stalemate. [Continue reading…]
Andrew McFadyen writes: Jeremy Corbyn winning the Labour leadership is like Aberdeen beating Real Madrid in a European final. It really happened, but you have to pinch yourself to believe it is true.
The 66-year-old, bearded left-winger was a 200/1 outsider when the contest began.
He scraped onto the ballot paper with just minutes to spare, only thanks to the charity nominations of MPs who leant him their signatures to “broaden the debate”.
Corbyn is everything that a modern professional politician shouldn’t be: crumpled, scruffy and principled.
He swept to victory promising to end austerity, abolish student tuition fees and scrap nuclear
weapons.
His first act as leader was to attend a rally in support of refugees, at which he implored the government to support people who are desperate and need somewhere safe to live.
Corbyn’s critics deride him as a Trotskyite tribute act and utterly unelectable.
If this is true, they should be asking why he has just trounced his opponents.
The North London MP ran by far the most effective campaign, combining smart use of social media with old-fashioned public meetings and street-corner politics. [Continue reading…]
Given its importance, I want to use the next couple months to explore some alternative perspectives on the unruly aggregate of topics lumped together as “climate change.”
There is an urgent demand for such alternative narratives and it rises, in part, from the ridiculous stalemate we find ourselves in today. But the endless faux “debate” about the state of climate science also obscures a deeper — and more profound — reality: We’ve become a species of enormous capacities with the power to change an entire planet. So, what exactly does this mean?
In service of answering this question and looking for perspectives on climate change beyond the usual focus on controversy, let’s begin by acknowledging a single fact that’s rarely discussed in the media: Climate science is a triumph of human civilization.
Landing on the moon. The development of relativity theory. The discovery of DNA. We rightfully hail these accomplishments as testaments to the creative power of the human imagination. We point to them as the highest achievements of our species, calling them milestones in our collective evolution.
But climate science is no different. It, too, belongs in that short list of epoch making human efforts. [Continue reading…]
Carl Zimmer writes: Recently a team of pathologists at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands carried out an experiment that might seem doomed to failure.
They collected tissue from 26 women who had died during or just after pregnancy. All of them had been carrying sons. The pathologists then stained the samples to check for Y chromosomes.
Essentially, the scientists were looking for male cells in female bodies. And their search was stunningly successful.
As reported last month in the journal Molecular Human Reproduction, the researchers found cells with Y-chromosomes in every tissue sample they examined. These male cells were certainly uncommon — at their most abundant, they only made up about 1 in every 1,000 cells. But male cells were present in every organ that the scientists studied: brains, hearts, kidneys and others.
In the 1990s, scientists found the first clues that cells from both sons and daughters can escape from the uterus and spread through a mother’s body. They dubbed the phenomenon fetal microchimerism, after the chimera, a monster from Greek mythology that was part lion, goat and dragon.
But fetal cells don’t just drift passively. Studies of female mice show that fetal cells that end up in their hearts develop into cardiac tissue. “They’re becoming beating heart cells,” said Dr. J. Lee Nelson, an expert on microchimerism at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
The new study suggests that women almost always acquire fetal cells each time they get pregnant. They have been detected as early as seven weeks into a pregnancy. In later years, the cells may disappear from their bodies, but sometimes the cells settle in for a lifetime. [Continue reading…]
Nicholas Kristof writes: As things stand, we’re on a trajectory for Syria to become even more horrific than it is now. Many experts expect the war to drag on for years, kill hundreds of thousands more people, and lead to an exodus of millions more refugees. We’re likely to see street-to-street fighting soon in Damascus, lifting the suffering and emigration to a new level.
I’m shaken by pleas I’ve seen from women in the besieged Syrian city of Zabadani, which for months has been surrounded by forces supporting the government. They fear that if the government forces take Zabadani, there will be massacres.
So hundreds of women in Zabadani have signed a statement calling for a cease-fire, international protection and evacuation of the wounded. They bravely use their names, despite the risk that they will be murdered or raped if the city falls.
“I’ve never been so depressed,” said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst and author of a book on Syria. “There were options early on. But the options today are all costlier, riskier and come with lower returns.”
Yet as long as we’re talking about Syrian dysfunction, let’s also note European and American dysfunction. The Obama administration has repeatedly miscalculated on Syria and underestimated the problem, even as the crisis has steadily worsened. And some leading Republicans want to send in troops to confront the Islamic State (think Iraq redux).
The least bad option today is to create a no-fly zone in the south of Syria. This could be done on a shoestring, enforced by U.S. Navy ships in the Mediterranean firing missiles, without ground troops.
That would end barrel bombings. Just as important, the no-fly zone would create leverage to pressure the Syrian regime — and its Russian and Iranian backers — to negotiate. [Continue reading…]
Aaron Stein writes: Members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) executed two police officers in Urfa on July 22, purportedly in retaliation for an Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL) inspired suicide bombing of a leftist meeting in the border town of Suruç. In response, Turkey struck PKK bases in Iraqi Kurdistan and southeastern Turkey. This prompted a sharp increase in PKK-Turkish state violence, which has resulted in at least 113 Turkish security personnel deaths and hundreds of PKK fighters killed since July 20. The conflict has escalated in the past week, with the PKK killing thirty-nine Turkish soldiers and police and Ankara sanctioning a cross-border raid into Iraqi Kurdistan.
This violence marks the end of a two-year ceasefire between the PKK and Turkey, prompting both sides to use violence to force the other to return to peace talks. The PKK says it will return to the talks only after the government meets its demands to formalize the negotiations, including political autonomy inside Turkey and freedom for the group’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan. Ankara has said that it will continue striking PKK targets until the group withdraws from Turkish territory.
These events resemble PKK-Turkish clashes between 2009 and 2012, when the breakdown of peace talks resulted in at least 920 casualties, according to the International Crisis Group. However, the spillover from the Syrian conflict has altered the political dynamics that previously pushed the two parties to begin peace negotiations. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: Russian forces have begun participating in military operations in Syria in support of government troops, three Lebanese sources familiar with the political and military situation there said on Wednesday.
The sources, speaking to Reuters on condition they not be identified, gave the most forthright account yet from the region of what the United States fears is a deepening Russian military role in Syria’s civil war, though one of the Lebanese sources said the number of Russians involved so far was small.
U.S. officials said Russia sent two tank landing ships and additional cargo aircraft to Syria in the past day or so and deployed a small number of naval infantry forces.
The U.S. officials, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said the intent of Russia’s military moves in Syria was unclear. One suggested the focus may be on preparing an airfield near the port city of Latakia, a stronghold of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. [Continue reading…]
Josh Rogin writes: The State Department had already begun pushing back against the Russian moves, for example by asking Bulgaria and Greece to deny overflight permissions to Syria-bound Russian transport planes. But the president didn’t know about these moves in advance, two officials said, and when he found out, he was upset with the department for not having a more complete and vetted process to respond to the crisis. A senior administration official said Tuesday evening that the White House, the State Department and other departments had coordinated to oppose actions that would add to Assad’s leverage.
For some in the White House, the priority is to enlist more countries to fight against the Islamic State, and they fear making the relationship with Russia any more heated. They are seriously considering accepting the Russian buildup as a fait accompli, and then working with Moscow to coordinate U.S. and Russian strikes in Northern Syria, where the U.S.-led coalition operates every day.
For many in the Obama administration, especially those who work on Syria, the idea of acquiescing to Russian participation in the fighting is akin to admitting that the drive to oust Assad has failed. Plus, they fear Russia will attack Syrian opposition groups that are fighting against Assad, using the war against the Islamic State as a cover.
“The Russians’ intentions are to keep Assad in power, not to fight ISIL,” one administration official said. “They’ve shown their cards now.” [Continue reading…]
The Economist reports: The start of this month may well come to be seen as the moment that Yemen descended into a prolonged and uncontrollable war. The conflict in the desperately poor nation was already going horribly badly. But the Saudi-led coalition fighting the country’s Houthi rebels has now intensified its campaign, after 60 of its soldiers were killed in a single attack in Maarib on September 4th.
More troops have poured in since the attack. Saudi Arabia dispatched more elite forces to join the 3,000-strong coalition force already on the ground, while Qatar, hitherto only participating in air operations, has sent 1,000 soldiers. Egypt, which has long warned of the folly of putting boots on the ground given its disastrous intervention in the 1960s, this week sent in 800 men. Sudanese troops are reportedly waiting to be shipped out of Khartoum. Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa said his two sons will join the battle.
The coalition has since unleashed an unprecedented flurry of air strikes in both the northern governorate of Saada, the stronghold of the Houthi rebels, and the country’s capital, Sana’a. Residents say as many civilian as military targets are being hit, including houses, restaurants and main streets. “The coalition has gone wacko since the attack,” says Hassan Boucenine, who heads the Yemen office of Médicins sans Frontières, a charity. [Continue reading…]
Der Spiegel reports: A paper sun hangs on the wall, and the dresser is covered with bottles of nail polish in all colors. The woman who used to inhabit this room, who has been in the hands of the government for the past three months, seemed to have a fondness for ladybugs. There is a stuffed animal ladybug on the bed, and a rug in the shape of a ladybug on the floor. “Her friends called her the ladybug of the revolution,” Duaa El-Taweel, 22, says of her sister, who has disappeared.
El-Taweel says her sister Esraa was restless and constantly on the go, taking pictures wherever she went. The walls are covered with patches of dried adhesive. “We took down the pictures,” she says, explaining that anyone depicted in them is in danger. El-Taweel pulls letters from her sister out of a cardboard box. They were folded to make them as small as possible, so that they could be smuggled out of prison. “I was blindfolded for 15 days,” El-Taweel reads from one of the letters. “I felt as if I were in a grave. It was so bad that I prayed to God to allow me to be resurrected. But I couldn’t kneel down. They kidnapped me on the last day of my period. I couldn’t wash myself for 17 days.”
Esraa El-Taweel, 23, a sociology student and freelance photographer, was abducted on June 1 of this year — not by criminals or a terrorist organization, but by the police in her own country.
More than four years after the Egyptian revolution, the government headed by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is cracking down on unwelcome journalists, former revolutionaries and, most of all, Islamists. In the name of fighting terror, laws are enacted that limit freedom of the press and freedom of expression. In some cases, government forces are breaking the country’s laws, in what sometimes feels like a retaliation campaign against those who drove out former dictator Hosni Mubarak and believed in democracy.
Young people are being detained — on the street, at work and at home. They are interrogated without arrest warrants or access to an attorney, and their family members are kept in the dark about their whereabouts. There were occasional cases like these already under Mubarak, but since Interior Minister Magdy Abdul Ghaffar came into office in March, the police are disappearing scores of people, especially members and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the new regime collectively treats as terrorists. Human rights activists believe there are up to around 800 such cases in Egypt today. [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: Officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee knew the odds were against them in the fight to block President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran from surviving a congressional vote. But the influential pro-Israel group threw itself into a nearly $30 million advertising and lobbying effort to kill the accord anyway.
On Thursday, the committee, known as Aipac, was handed a stinging defeat. After Mr. Obama mustered enough Democratic backing in the Senate to halt a vote on a resolution of disapproval against the deal, a group known for its political clout saw its power and reputation in Washington diminished.
“They failed — they couldn’t even get a vote,” said Clifford Kupchan, an Iran expert and the chairman of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm, who noted that Aipac had gone “all in” and tried everything to stop the deal. “It’s among the biggest setbacks for Aipac in recent memory.” [Continue reading…]
The New York Times reports: Senate Democrats delivered a major victory to President Obama when they blocked a Republican resolution to reject a six-nation nuclear accord with Iran on Thursday, ensuring the landmark deal will take effect without a veto showdown between Congress and the White House.
A procedural vote fell two short of the 60 needed to break a Democratic filibuster. It culminated hours of debate in the Senate and capped weeks of discord since the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China announced the agreement with Iran in July.
The debate divided Democrats between their loyalties to the president and to their constituents, animated the antiwar movement on the left and exposed the diminishing power of the Israeli lobbying force that spent tens of millions of dollars to prevent the accord. [Continue reading…]
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