Category Archives: Analysis

Laura Gottesdiener: The king is dead!

On August 5th, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey banded together with 15 other state attorneys general to demand that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suspend the implementation of new rules devised by the Obama administration to slow the pace of climate change.  The regulations, announced just two days earlier, sought to reduce power plant emissions of carbon dioxide — a major cause of global warming — by 32% from 2005 levels by 2030.  Because the rules are likely to fall most heavily on coal-fired power plants, which emit more carbon than other forms of electricity generation, states that produce and burn coal (mostly led by Republicans) are adamantly opposed to them. Because West Virginia is especially dependent on coal production, it has been selected by Republican leaders and industry lobbyists to lead the charge against the new rules.

“These regulations, if allowed to proceed, will do serious harm to West Virginia and the U.S. economy,” Morrisey said. “That is why we are taking quick action to bring this process to a halt.”

Although pleading the case for West Virginia, which has suffered a sharp rise in unemployment due to the closing of many of its coal mines, Morrisey is clearly acting as the mouthpiece for a larger alliance of coal producers, power utilities, and Republican strategists who seek to sabotage any progress on climate change.  As the New York Times revealed recently, this alliance (don’t call it a conspiracy!) originated at a meeting of some 30 corporate lawyers, coal lobbyists, and Republican strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington last year.

“By the time Mr. Obama announced the regulations at the White House on [Aug. 3rd],” theTimes reported, “the small group that had begun its work at the Chamber of Commerce had expanded into a vast network of lawyers and lobbyists ranging from state capitols to Capitol Hill, aided by Republican governors and congressional leaders.  And their plan was to challenge Mr. Obama at every opportunity and take the fight against what, if enacted, would be one of his signature accomplishments to the Supreme Court.”

This process gained further momentum on August 13th, when Morrisey and 14 other state attorneys general petitioned a federal court in Washington to block action on the EPA rules, in the first of several expected legal challenges to the Obama administration measure.

As Laura Gottesdiener demonstrates so graphically in today’s post, many West Virginians are indeed suffering from the decline of the coal industry.  But if they allow themselves to be used as pawns in a struggle by King Coal, corporate lobbyists, and Republican hard-liners to fight progress on climate change, they are doing themselves (and the rest of us) an enormous disservice.  Nothing can save the coal industry in the face of market forces — especially the boom in natural gas extracted from shale deposits via fracking — and the relentless advance of climate change.  If Morrisey and his cohorts had West Virginia’s true interests at heart, they would be petitioning for federal funds to turn the state into an innovation center for clean energy — the only sure path to economic growth in a climate-ravaged world.  In the meantime, let TomDispatch regular Gottesdiener take you on a tour of what’s left of King Coal’s once mighty domain. Michael Klare

Coal dethroned 
In Appalachia, the coal industry is in collapse, but the mountains aren’t coming back 
By Laura Gottesdiener

In Appalachia, explosions have leveled the mountain tops into perfect race tracks for Ryan Hensley’s all-terrain vehicle (ATV). At least, that’s how the 14-year-old sees the barren expanses of dirt that stretch for miles atop the hills surrounding his home in the former coal town of Whitesville, West Virginia.

“They’re going to blast that one next,” he says, pointing to a peak in the distance. He’s referring to a process known as “mountain-top removal,” in which coal companies use explosives to blast away hundreds of feet of rock in order to unearth underground seams of coal.

“And then it’ll be just blank space,” he adds. “Like the Taylor Swift song.”

Skinny and shirtless, Hensley looks no more than 11 or 12. His ribs and collarbones protrude from his taut skin. Dipping tobacco is tucked into his right cheek. He has a head of cropped blond curls that jog some memory of mine, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. He’s pointing at a peak named Coal River Mountain. These days, though, it’s known to activists here as “the Last Mountain,” as it’s the only ridgeline in this area that’s still largely intact.

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Talk of lone wolves misunderstands how Islamic militancy works

Jason Burke writes: A new attack, a young man who would be a killer and a tragedy narrowly averted. The media attention is currently on the identity of the have-a-go heroes who prevented carnage in France. It will shift eventually to the man who tried to open fire with an automatic weapon in a crowded European train.

From what we know already, he fits a classic type: young, of north African origins, with a possible recent visit to Syria and known to security services. This profile is very similar to that of the men who attacked satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January this year, to Mohamed Merah, a 23-year-old who killed 12 in a shooting spree in south-west France in 2012, and to that of Mehdi Nemmouche, who shot at a Jewish Museum in Brussels last year.

The two shocking French attacks underlined the nature of the wave of violence emerging in the country.

This latest attacker too is now being described as a lone wolf, with people asking how he was radicalised. Both terms, however, are deeply misleading. Few lone wolves exist, certainly in the recent history of Islamic militancy, and to insist that they do is to fail to understand how Islamic militancy works.

Furthermore the idea of radicalisation is not particularly useful either.

Of the hundreds of Islamic militants who have been involved in attacks in Europe over recent years, only a tiny minority have acted alone. Most have been involved in broader networks of activism, some violent, some less so.

Many have travelled overseas and spent time with major militant groups. A high proportion – possibly two-thirds, recent research tells us – have told others of their plans to commit violence.

Most importantly perhaps, a very large number of them have been in prison with others who are steeped in extremist thinking, have peer groups who share much of their extremist worldview, know other people who have travelled to Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan, or even grew up in families where casual prejudice against non-believers, Jews or the west in general was part of everyday conversation. [Continue reading…]

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Europe’s insane plan to destroy migrant boats

Barbie Latza Nadeau writes: Human smugglers in Libya have moved more than 38,000 people across the Mediterranean Sea since the beginning of 2015, killing as many as 2,000 along the way. But a new plan by the European Union to target smugglers’ vessels may soon make the journey even deadlier.

Desperate times may call for desperate measures, and the EU’s plan to systematically “identify, capture and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers” is case in point. The plan was hatched in emergency talks after as many as 950 migrants died on April 18, fueling promises by EU leaders to “smash the gangs” of traffickers that operate unchecked in Libya.

The plan was presented to the United Nations Security Council in New York on Monday by Federica Mogherini, an Italian who is the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy. In asking the U.N. Security Council to bless military action against the Libyan-based smuggler rings, she promised that the EU would take full responsibility for “identifying trafficking vessels for destruction before they are filled with migrants.”

But the reality is that such a tactic could become a deadly game of Russian roulette, since the traffickers don’t exactly play by the rules.

At face value, the idea itself could be considered noble—stop the merchants of death by destroying their lethal weapons, in this case unsafe fishing vessels that are packed over capacity with desperate migrants. But everyone from the head of the United Nations to those welcoming migrants on the shores of Italy warn that just one mistake will stain Europe’s hands with the blood of every dead migrant officials say they are trying to save.

In a far-reaching exposé from the epicenter of the trafficking ring in Zuwara, Libya, the Guardian pinpointed the biggest problem with destroying smuggler vessels. “Smuggling boats start life as fishing trawlers. The moment of transition from the latter to the former is informal and almost imperceptible to outsiders,” the author writes after interviewing several smugglers. [Continue reading…]

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How Russia is exporting jihadists to Syria

Michael Weiss writes: Based on extensive fieldwork in one village in the North Caucasus, [Novaya Gazeta] reporter Elena Milashina has concluded that the “Russian special services have controlled” the flow of jihadists into Syria, where they have lately joined up not only with ISIS but other radical Islamist factions. In other words, Russian officials are added to the ranks of terrorists which the Russian government has deemed a collective threat to the security and longevity of its dictatorial ally on the Mediterranean, Bashar al-Assad.

It may sound paradoxical — helping the enemy of your friend — but the logic is actually straightforward: Better the terrorists go abroad and fight in Syria than blow things up in Russia. Penetrating and co-opting terrorism also has a long, well-attested history in the annals of Chekist tradecraft.

Milashina makes her case study the village of Novosasitili in Dagestan’s Khasavyurt district. Since 2011, nearly 1 percent of the total population of Novosasitili has gone to Syria — 22 out of 2,500 residents. Of that figure, five were killed and five have returned home. But they didn’t leave Russia, a country notoriously difficult to enter and exit, without outside help. The FSB [Federal Security Service] established a “green corridor” to allow them to migrate first to Turkey, and then to Syria. (Russians, including those living in the North Caucasus, can catch any of the daily non-stop flights to Istanbul and visit Turkey without a visa.)

“I know someone who has been at war for 15 years,” Akhyad Abdullaev, head of the village, tells Milashina. “He fought in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now in Syria. He surely cannot live peacefully. If such people go off to war, it’s no loss. In our village there is a person, a negotiator. He, together with the FSB, brought several leaders out of the underground and sent them off abroad on jihad. The underground resistance has been weakened, we’re well off. They want to fight—let them fight, just not here.” [Continue reading…]

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Assad is more than happy to play a waiting game

Hassan Hassan writes: During this month, a military escalation by both sides of the Syrian conflict has led to a dramatic increase in bloodshed. For weeks, the Assad regime has been pounding Zabadani, a city near the Lebanese border, and Douma, near Damascus. The rebels have shelled the Shia villages of Foua and Kafraya in Idlib.

The regime’s offensive this year has probably been the worst in terms of human casualties and devastation. An air raid on a marketplace in Douma left more than 100 civilians dead and hundreds injured. The humanitarian situation in Zabadani was similarly catastrophic: Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy for Syria, described “unprecedented levels of destruction” in the city, the last of the rebels’ strongholds in the Qalamoun region.

The escalation prompted speculations that the two sides may be trying to prop up their bargaining positions after Iran and Russia initiated a flurry of diplomatic activities. On Thursday, Reuters quoted a western diplomat as saying that the increased hostilities were the warring sides’ way of preparing for a political solution: “It is still fragile, but it is the most concerted move yet to find a political solution. Everyone needs a political solution. Everyone is exhausted.”

But the statement appears to echo the hopes of the backers of the opposition rather than the thinking inside and outside Syria. [Continue reading…]

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The new face of Jewish terror

Shira Rubin writes: “Jewish terror” is not new to Israel. In one of the most infamous incidents, the Irgun, a militant Zionist group, set off a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946, killing 91 people. But, says Shlomo Fischer, a sociology professor and expert on Jewish extremism, the modern incarnation is younger and more religious, uniting an eclectic group of fringe outcasts around an identity of “romantic religious nationalism.”

The movement dates back to 1967, when Israel captured and occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in a six-day war that many saw as imbued with messianic promise. Today, the loosely organized movement appeals to many marginalized youth and yeshiva dropouts by offering an “authentic” countercultural experience, says Fischer, who compares the recruitment strategy and sense of identity to extremist Islamist groups like the Islamic State. “You feel like you are able to connect with some sort of purpose, some sort of ideology that you’d never heard of,” an anonymous former hilltop youth activist told Israel’s Channel 2. He said that hilltop activists recruit at information booths throughout Israeli cities and are usually able to attract teenagers as young as 14, some 80 or 90 percent of whom come from broken homes. [Continue reading…]

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Hamas caught between Tehran and Riyadh

Ali Hashem writes: A senior Hamas official who spoke to Al-Monitor in Beirut on condition of anonymity said, “We’ve never taken sides, but we have our say on what’s happening. Iran is a friend. It was once a very close friend, and we don’t forget that. But today there are efforts to normalize ties once again. This is facing some hurdles from both sides.”

The official, who visits Iran often, told Al-Monitor, “There were plans for Khaled Meshaal to visit Tehran, [but] on several occasions the visits were canceled because of the uncertainty on our side that it would go as planned.”

Meshaal, head of Hamas’ political bureau, is concerned he won’t be allowed to meet the supreme leader of Iran, Al-Monitor learned, as a trip to Tehran would be useless without a meeting with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. [Continue reading…]

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Ex-intelligence chief: ‘Pakistan is at war against the Afghan people’

Der Spiegel reports: In an interview, former Afghan secret service chief Amrullah Saleh discusses the recent wave of Taliban violence aimed at cementing power for its new leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor. He says the attacks are backed by Pakistan.

SPIEGEL: More than 100 people have been killed in the recent series of attacks in Afghanistan. What are the perpetrators seeking to achieve with this new wave of violence?

Saleh: The Taliban have a reputation for brutality and mercilessness to defend. Their new leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor wants to prove that he can maintain these capabilities. All the major attacks require enormous military and financial resources. They are planned and executed with the aid of ISI, Pakistan’s secret service. The aim of the attacks is to establish Mansoor as the new strong man. The violence is intended to show that the Taliban brand still exists, and the message as the same as before — that the Talban is united and powerful.

SPIEGEL: Why was the death of Mullah Omar, his predecessor, kept secret?

Saleh: We don’t know if he died two years ago or five. The only thing that is certain is that Mullah Omar was living under the patronage of the ISI. Pakistan always denied this, just as the leadership in Islamabad denied that Osama bin Laden lived in the country with their protection. But how can we lead a peace process together with Pakistan when everyone lies — from the army chief right up to the president? [Continue reading…]

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Tropical forests will still exist in 2100 – but they will be a sorry sight

By Simon Lewis, UCL

By the end of the century, the world’s remaining tropical forests will be left in a fragmented, simplified, and degraded state. No patch will remain untouched – most remnants will be overrun by species that disperse well, which often means “weedy” plants like fast-growing pioneer trees and small rodents that thrive in disturbed areas. Most of the rest will be “the living dead” – tiny remnant populations of plants and animals hanging on with no future.

There is no cast-iron law that dictates this scenario – but it appears likely unless we see a series of major policy changes. What could unfold? In research published in the journal Science, colleagues and I outline an all too common chain of events.

The first cut of timber from any natural forest is the most lucrative. The most remote places, in the interior of Amazonia, in central Congo and the heart of Borneo are all coveted by industrial loggers. The logging frontier marches relentlessly on. They selectively take the biggest trees and along with them the habitat of species that rely them.

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Beware the staying power of ISIS

Rajan Menon writes: Despite its losses, IS’s destruction is scarcely imminent. Though damaged, it retains important sources of strength and resilience, even appeal.

To begin with, unlike al-Qaeda, it has by any reasonable definition established a state. With its capital in Raqqa, Syria, and a population of about eight million, the Caliphate extends from northwestern Syria to the western approaches of Baghdad and protrudes northward toward the boundaries of Iraqi Kurdistan. Estimates of its size range from 11,000 square miles (equivalent to Belgium) to an implausible 81,000 square miles (approximating Britain minus Northern Ireland), the variance depending on what’s counted: populated lands in Syria and Iraq, or those plus uninhabited terrain in these two countries and the dozen or so other places further afield where militant Islamist groups have aligned with IS. But even the smaller approximation is impressive given that IS emerged only in 2013 and Baghdadi proclaimed his Caliphate a little more than a year ago.

IS has also created governing institutions, central and provincial, that run the gamut. Shari’a law is interpreted and enforced (aided by blood-chilling forms of punishment). Taxes are collected. Schooling—based on Wahhabi precepts — is provided, as are various social services. Intelligence is gathered, soldiers recruited and trained. An apparatus of horror is tasked with kidnappings, beheadings and forced amputations, mass atrocities, and sexual slavery — all justified by bizarre theological pronouncements.

But the Caliphate would never have achieved what it has were it led by a small band of sociopaths that relied solely on brutality to extract obedience. There’s more to IS than its horrendous cruelties would suggest. In anarchic, violent Syria and Iraq, it has acquired a social base by providing people—more precisely, those who adhere to its draconian theological rules, don’t rebel, and refrain from aiding and abetting its enemies — security, functional institutions, and basic economic necessities. Many of those living under IS rule doubtless have no choice, but others are drawn to its mission of building an Islamic polity and restoring the pieties and glories of old. [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS is winning the propaganda war

The Economist reports: A study of a single week’s output by IS conducted by Aaron Zelin of the Washington Institute for Near East Studies found 123 media releases in six languages, 24 of them videos. The savage imagery that many contain is calculated to shock and grab mainstream media attention.

Yet violence may not be IS’s most potent visual message. In a detailed analysis of its propaganda, Charlie Winter of the Quilliam Foundation, a think-tank, identifies a range of themes that include mercy, victimhood, belonging and Utopianism in addition to war and murder. Rather than the chopping of heads, it is dreams of Sunni brotherhood and of revived Muslim glory that inspire, says Mr Winter.

Whereas previous jihadist narratives were all about “resistance” to imagined enemies, IS propounds what Mr Winter calls “the propaganda of the winner”. Building on well-worn grievances of political Islam, it does not just talk about creating a caliphate but actually does so (sort of). It doesn’t merely speak of eradicating colonial borders but physically bulldozes them. And it does not merely aspire to reintroduce “full sharia”, but imposes the most starkly unrevised and demonstratively cruel version of Islamic law seen in centuries, if not ever.

In Mr Zelin’s research of a week’s propaganda output, more than a third of IS’s messages were not about war. Instead they extolled the caliphate and its Islamic virtues, showing hospitals opening, schoolchildren smiling and citizens eagerly pledging loyalty to the caliph. Charles Lister, a scholar at Brookings, another think-tank, suggests that such positive images explain IS’s staying power: “In both Syria and Iraq, IS presents itself as both an army and an alternative “state” to defend against and replace repressive or failed political systems perceived as oppressive to Sunni Muslims.” This approach has allowed IS to put down roots that could help it survive for a long time, he says. [Continue reading…]

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The Iranian project of regional expansion was from the start based on shaky ground

Basheer Nafi writes: In spite of mounting evidence that the Iranian influence was in decline, many concluded that the nuclear agreement would provide the Iranian expansionist project with what it needs to become an invincible power. So, where is the fault in the reading of the Iranian expansionist project, or in Tehran’s own assessment of its power?

This, first of all, is the Middle East, the post-World War I Middle East, where power equations do not last for long and where the underpinnings of power keep changing just like quick sand. It is true that the Iranian expansion coincided with American failings in the Middle East, followed by a relative American withdrawal, as well as a decline of the regional Egyptian and Saudi influence; but it has also coincided with an active Turkish return to the neighbouring Middle East.

Additionally, it is true that the fall of the Taliban and Saddam regimes was quite swift, but it is also true that the Iraqi resistance to the occupation did not wait long before emerging, and that the Taliban were soon to regroup and lead the resistance against the occupation and its allies in Kabul. The problem with the Iranian expansionist project, right from the start, was that it did not take into consideration the continuously changing nature of the map of power and influence in the region.

Secondly, the Iranians chose in most of their expansionist steps to stand by the minorities, whether political or sectarian, in the face of the majority, not only the majority in every single country but also the majority at the level of the region as a whole.

The peoples of the region were, for several decades, viewing Iran with admiration and sympathy, especially when Iranian policy was characterised with standing by the people and their aspirations. Yet, Iran was changing rapidly, where nationalistic and sectarian ambitions replaced the policies of pan-Islamic solidarity. Iran encouraged the emergence of a sectarian hegemonic regime in Iraq, and put its entire weight behind the continuation of the hegemony of a sectarian and political minority over Syria and its people.

It also supported the foolish Houthi plot to seize control of Yemen. Without a single exception, Iran’s regional policies were to generate civil wars and ethnic and sectarian cleansing, not to mention the tragic destruction of peoples and their resources. [Continue reading…]

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Most of the drivers of regional destruction have little to do with Iranian-Saudi rivalry

Rami G Khouri writes: [Regional] destruction is painfully visible every day in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Bahrain, and Yemen, at the very least. This spectacle of multiple fragmenting states is bad enough; it is made even worse by the latest troubling development — it is too early to call it a trend — which is the spectacle of repeated bomb attacks and killings of government officials and security forces in three of the most important regional powers that should be stabilizing forces in the Middle East: Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Add to this the ongoing war in Yemen, and the erratic battle against “Islamic State” (ISIS) forces in Syria, Iraq and other tiny pockets of ISIS presence around the region, the massive refugee flows and the stresses they cause, and the dangerous sectarian dimensions of some of the confrontations underway, and we end up with a very complex and violent regional picture that cannot possibly be explained primarily as a consequence of Iranian-Saudi rivalries.

A more complete explanation of the battered Arab region today must include accounting for several other mega-tends: the impact of the last twenty-fix years of non-stop American military attacks, threats and sanctions from Libya to Afghanistan; the radicalizing impact of sixty-seven years of non-stop Zionist colonization and militarism against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and other Arabs; the hollowing out of Arab economic and governance systems by three generations of military-led, amateurish and corruption-riddled mismanaged governance that deprived citizens of their civic and political rights and pushed them to assert instead the primacy of their sectarian and tribal identities; and, the catalytic force of the 2003 Anglo-American led war on Iraq that opened the door for all these forces and others yet — like lack of water, jobs, and electricity that make normal daily life increasingly difficult — to combine into the current situation of widespread national polarization and violence.

Most of these drivers of the current regional condition have little to do with Iranian-Saudi sensitivities, and much more to do with decades of frail statehood, sustained and often violent Arab authoritarianism, denied citizenship, distorted development, and continuous regional and global assaults. [Continue reading…]

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Beirut’s youth tell the elite: You stink!

Joyce Karam writes: The absurdity of the scene in downtown Beirut yesterday is in portraying the protests to be just about the trash collection crisis, while in reality they are about everything else that led to the largest waste mismanagement scandal in Lebanon’s history.

Thousands are protesting and vowing to “topple the regime” not just because the garbage collection has run amok, but due to Lebanon’s political stagnation crippling the country in the last four years. Beirut is constantly in a crisis-mode, and right now Lebanon has had no President for over a year, its parliament has casually renewed its own term twice, and its government of “rivals” is excelling in shortsightedness, and promoting narrow interests at the expense of the public good. The country also has over a million Syrian refugee, and Hezbollah is fighting with more than 5000 members in Syria.

Self-infatuation and hubris are allover Lebanese politics. Parliamentarians and policymakers are frequently busy analyzing and commenting on larger global events while turning a blind eye to the day to day problems . Everyone is a nuclear expert when it comes to the Iran deal negotiations, or a counterterrorism one if it’s the rise of ISIS or the fate of the Syrian war, while rubbish consumes the capital, and traffic chaos is allover the country. Even Donald Trump is more likely to come up in a conversation than discussing a plan or a vision to explore Lebanon’s potential gas resources, traffic congestion or tackle the question of armed militias. Hezbollah’s weaponry is now forgotten while the presence of ISIS and Nusra in border towns is being accepted as a fait accompli. [Continue reading…]

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European imperialism grew out of a hunger for pepper

Stephen Kinzer writes: As Europe began awakening into the modern age, people were eager for new sensations. The arrival of exotic spices dazzled them. Pepper is the reason modern imperialism was invented.

For generations after their founding in the early 17th century, two powerful mercantile forces dominated much of the world: the East India Company, based in London, and the Dutch East India Company, based in Amsterdam. They were richer and had greater reach than any government — complete with armies, navies, merchant fleets, fortified ports, plantations, court systems, prisons, currencies, and treaty-making rights. With this authority, granted by the British and Dutch governments, they captured far-flung territories and sowed seeds of conflict in vast areas east of Suez.

Both of these companies were founded to bring pepper to Europe. The first islands they subdued, the Moluccas, are now part of Indonesia but were long known in the West as the Spice Islands. It is a wonderful example of how food can become the lens through which we see foreign lands. Europeans went mad for pepper and other spices. That meant ships had to be sent halfway around the world to claim land and suppress unruly natives. [Continue reading…]

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The search for ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ just got interesting

By Ryan Wilkinson, Durham University

Only about 5% of the universe consists of ordinary matter such as protons and electrons, with the rest being filled with mysterious substances known as dark matter and dark energy. So far, scientists have failed to detect these elusive materials, despite spending decades searching for them. But now, two new studies may be able to turn things around as they have narrowed down the search significantly.

Dark matter was first proposed more than 70 years ago to explain why the force of gravity in galaxy clusters is so much stronger than expected. If the clusters contained only the stars and gas we observe, their gravity should be much weaker, leading scientists to assume there is some sort of matter hidden there that we can’t see. Such dark matter would provide additional mass to these large structures, increasing their gravitational pull. The main contender for the substance is a type of hypothetical particle known as a “weakly interacting massive particle” (WIMP).

To probe the nature of dark matter, physicists look for evidence of its interactions beyond gravity. If the WIMP hypothesis is correct, dark matter particles could be detected through their scattering off atomic nuclei or electrons on Earth. In such “direct” detection experiments, a WIMP collision would cause these charged particles to recoil, producing light that we can observe.

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The world stands by as Assad continues killing his own people

BILD am SONNTAG reports: As coroner Dr. Abed Tawab Shahrour (50) opens the blue rubbish bag, once again he thinks, “Please, not another child”. But contained within this makeshift body bag in the Pathology Department of the University Hospital of Aleppo lies the small body of Hadi Zahrour, lips dark purple, his face contorted in agony. Stuck to the dead boy’s forehead is a Post-It. Someone has written the number 2160 on it by hand. “Brown eyes, fair skin, under ten years old. Death caused by inhalation of toxic substances” will later appear in an eight-line report on number 2160. The dark-haired child’s file offers no further information. Here, on the tables at the morgue, there are too many victims of dictator Bashar al-Assad (49).

At that time, in 2013, Dr. Shahrour was Chief Pathologist at the University Hospital of Aleppo. He secretly took a photo of the dead child with his Nokia 5130. “I kept it so that later I could tell the world what is happening to my people”, says the doctor.

He is one of four witnesses interviewed by BILD am SONNTAG. None of them started out as revolutionaries. The only way to be awarded their posts was to be law-abiding members of Assad’s Baath Party. At the beginning of the Syrian revolution, they worked for the regime until, in the face of the atrocities they were witnessing and at the risk of their own lives, they switched sides. By doing so, they put themselves and their families at risk, lost their livelihoods and were forced to leave their homes.

We meet Dr. Shahrour in Turkey, to where he fled. The doctor tells us about 19th March two years ago, the day when Hadi ceased to be a cheerful schoolboy and became just another number in Assad’s death registers. In Khan al-Assal, a small suburb of Aleppo, a poison gas attack at seven o’ clock in the morning killed at least 13 people in addition to Hadi and injured approximately 120 others. On that spring day, seven months had passed since Barack Obama’s famous “red line” speech. In it, the US president warned of military intervention if Assad continued to use poison gas against his own people.

Five months later still, up to 1,700 people died in Ghouta in Damascus after an attack with the nerve agent sarin, and many more have followed – right up until the present day. U.N. inspectors dispatched to the scene were allegedly not able to find adequate proof of who was responsible for the attacks. Since Khan al-Assal, the delegation has not even travelled to Syria. “For security reasons”, according to the final report.

Three years after Obama’s speech, Syria lies in ruins. Every week, war crimes are still perpetrated: barrel bombs, prohibited under international law of war, continue to fall on schools, neighbourhoods and marketplaces. [Continue reading…]

Peter Bouckaert writes: Last Sunday’s bombing by the Syrian government of a busy marketplace in the town of Douma, killing at least 112 of its own citizens, was one of deadliest attacks in an ever-more-devastating conflict. The four strikes came during the busy midday period, as if to maximise destruction. Once again, we were confronted with haunting images of rooms filled with the bodies of the victims, many of them children, being prepared for burial.

Almost exactly 20 years ago, a similarly brutal bombing of a marketplace during the Bosnian war changed the course of that conflict. On 28 August, 1995, during its siege of the city of Sarajevo, forces of the breakaway Republika Srpska fired 5 mortar shells into the Markale market, killing 43 and wounding 75.

The horror and outrage generated by that attack – the second on the Markale market, following a 5 February, 1994 strike that killed 68 – unified much of the international community into action. Several of the main Serbian officers implicated in the two market shellings, including Generals Stanislav Galic, Dragomir Milosevic, and Momcilo Perisic, were later tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for their role in the market shellings. Galic was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity during the siege of Sarajevo.

Sadly, it seems unlikely that the horror of the latest market attack in Douma will bring about any effective international response. The attack received widespread media coverage, but faded almost immediately. Instead of becoming a game changer like the Markale market killings, Douma seems destined to become yet another grim marker in a conflict drowning in so many grim markers that even those who follow it closely have trouble remembering them all. In the meanwhile, the civilian population of Syria continues to suffer and die, almost bereft of any hope out of this ever-more brutal conflict. [Continue reading…]

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Islamic climate declaration converts religious principles into greener practice

By Adam Khyas, Lancaster University

Muslims have a religious duty to take action against climate change, according to a declaration released by a major group of Islamic scholars, faith leaders and politicians from 20 countries. The Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change, launched in Istanbul, is aimed at the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims and suggests mosques and Islamic schools should immediately take action.

In using religious authority to call for stronger climate change policies at the UN summit in Paris this December, the Islamic declaration follows a similar intervention by the Pope earlier in the year.

There is a solid religious case for this declaration. Muslims around the world take the Qur’an and the prophetic tradition (sunna) as the main two authoritative sources of the Islamic legal system (Sharia). You won’t find any direct references to carbon budgets or biodiversity in the sacred scriptures of course – the global environmental crisis is far too recent.

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