Category Archives: Issues

Why Syrian refugee passport found at Paris attack scene must be treated with caution

The Guardian reports: there are several reasons why it’s worth waiting until all the facts are known before making too strong a link between the attacks and the refugee crisis. The first is a general one: on at least 12 occasions, Isis has actually criticised refugees for fleeing to Europe. “For those who want to blame the attacks on Paris on refugees, you might want to get your facts straight,” wrote Aaron Zelin, an analyst of jihad, in an online commentary about the 12 outbursts. “The reality is, [Isis] loathes that individuals are fleeing Syria for Europe. It undermines [Isis’s] message that its self-styled caliphate is a refuge.” It’s therefore unlikely that the vast majority of Syrians fleeing to Europe are Isis supporters, since their actions are in obvious contravention of the group’s creed.

The second reason for caution is more specific. Investigators still need to verify the Syrian passport was carried by an attacker rather than a dead bystander (one Egyptian passport-holder initially believed to be an assailant turned out to be an injured victim). They will then need to be certain that the passport’s carrier was the same as the passport’s legitimate owner.

It’s possible that it was stolen. Since the possession of a Syrian passport makes it easier to claim asylum in Europe, there is a busy trade in stolen Syrian documents. Syrians interviewed on Greece’s border with Macedonia have described how they were mugged for their passports after leaving the Greek islands as they tried to make their way north through the Balkans. Such passports can be sold on for as much as several thousand euros, in a trade that the EU’s border agency acknowledges is a growing problem. Forgeries are also common; a Dutch journalist recently had one made in the name of his prime minister. [Continue reading…]

CBS News reports: A U.S. intelligence official told CBS News that a name and picture were recovered from the Syrian passport and the individual was not known to intelligence officials.

However, a U.S. intelligence official told CBS News the Syrian passport might be fake. The official said the passport did not contain the correct numbers for a legitimate Syrian passport and the picture did not match the name. [Continue reading…]

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Can France’s far-right Marine Le Pen use Paris attacks to win power?

The Daily Beast reports: Marine Le Pen, France’s answer to Donald Trump, lost no time cementing her growing power base as leader of the country’s far-right National Front just hours after the Paris attacks when she called for the “annihilation” of Islamist radicals.

Le Pen, whose stump speeches in the depressed cities of northern France include dire warnings of the “giant migratory wave,” told reporters in Paris on Saturday that the country had to clamp down on Islamist fundamentalism, shut down mosques and expel dangerous “foreigners” and “illegal migrants.”

Le Pen is the daughter of notorious xenophone Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front in 1972. She forced him out of the party this past summer after his latest racist remarks. This weekened, she was just one of Europe’s far-right figures attempting to make political capital out of the Paris attacks.

Populist leaders around Europe moved quickly to call for an end to allowing the steady stream of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

The Netherlands’ increasingly popular anti-Islamic far-right leader Geert Wilders demanded Dutch authorities close the borders immediately, accusing them of refusing to face reality about the connection between immigrants and terrorism. Poland’s Europe minister Konrad Szymanski said he would no longer agree to accept un-vetted migrants and refugees. [Continue reading…]

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Paris terror attacks: France now faces fight against fear and exclusion

By Aurelien Mondon, University of Bath

The attacks that took place at a series of venues in Paris on November 13 are already the deadliest on French soil since 1945. At least 127 people have been killed in six different places. Reports say that another 100 are in “absolute” critical condition. Police have reported that eight people believed to have carried out the attacks are also dead – seven by blowing themselves up.

It was not as though France had not prepared itself to face such a tragedy. Anti-terrorist measures have been at their highest level in Paris since January, when two brothers attacked the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12.

This was obvious to any bystander over the past few months. Armed soldiers have become part of the Paris experience. Yet the government’s security plan, the plan vigipirate, was not enough to stop what is so far believed to be the most organised and coordinated attack Islamic State has perpetrated outside its territory. Details are still thin on the ground, but IS has claimed responsibility. President François Hollande has blamed the group and made it clear that he sees this as an act of war.

As scenes that were indeed reminiscent of war spread across the centre of Paris, Hollande declared a state of emergency. He announced a series of radical measures such as re-establishing border controls. Schools and universities have been closed.

Meanwhile, there was the blizzard of unconfirmed information that’s to be expected in such a situation. The climate of fear was reinforced by the 24-hour news media’s tendency to not only relate the facts – as messy and incomplete as they are – but to encourage speculation.

Even as the attacks were still underway, commentators could be heard discussing what could happen next and what type of attacks we could, or indeed should, expect. The sense of panic only intensified with the proliferation of amateur videos on social media.

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Putin’s doomsday machine: A dirty thermonuclear weapon

Jeffrey Lewis writes: On Nov. 9, President Vladimir Putin attended a meeting in Sochi on the state of the Russian defense industry. He gave a pretty boring speech about defeating U.S. missile defenses to some pretty bored-looking generals.

But there was one aspect of the event that was downright terrifying. Russian television cameras caught a page in a briefing book describing the development of a new nuclear weapons system called Status-6.

It’s nothing less than an underwater drone designed to carry a thermonuclear weapon into foreign ports. If detonated, Status-6 would be capable of dousing cities like New York in massive amounts of radioactive fallout.

At the risk of understating things, this project is bat-shit crazy. It harkens back to the most absurd moments of the Cold War, when nuclear strategists followed the logic of deterrence over the cliff and into the abyss. For his part, Putin seems positively nostalgic.

The Russian government reacted to the broadcast of the briefing-book images as if a major security breach had occurred. The offending footage was edited out of future broadcasts, and when asked about the incident, a Russian presidential spokesperson said: “Indeed, some secrets hit the camera lens, so were subsequently removed. We hope that in the future this will not happen again.”

The Russians doth protest too much. As Dr. Strangelove observed of the Soviet doomsday machine, “Of course, the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!” (As an aside, it’s worth noting that Status-6 bears more than a passing resemblance to the weapon in that Stanley Kubrick classic; more on that in a bit.)

This isn’t the first we’re hearing of such a project. Details of a similar Russian nuclear underwater drone, armed with a megaton-class thermonuclear warhead, were reported this fall by Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon. (Whatever you think of Gertz’s right-wing politics, he gets some decent scoops.) Gertz’s sources seemed to be describing the same system revealed this week, though they gave him a different name — Kanyon, rather than Status-6. (That shift in nomenclature shouldn’t come as a surprise: Russian military hardware acquires multiple names and numbers as it goes through research and development.)

The briefing-book slide fills in plenty of details about the project. A Russian attack submarine would be able to carry one or more of the drones, which could be remotely launched into the sea. The specs on the slide seem a little optimistic, but they suggest that once roaming wild, the underwater drone could travel a total distance of 10,000 kilometers, or 5,400 nautical miles. It would be designed in such a way that it could be navigated undetected into a U.S. port where it could then detonate its “combat payload” — a thermonuclear weapon. The system would never come up for air or encounter any pesky American missile defenses.

That’s bad enough, but the slide contains an additional gruesome detail: The purpose of the warhead would be to damage “the important components of the adversary’s economy in a coastal area and [inflict] unacceptable damage to a country’s territory by creating areas of wide radioactive contamination that would be unsuitable for military, economic, or other activity for long periods of time.”

Yes, you’re reading that right. It’s not just a thermonuclear weapon. It’s a dirty thermonuclear weapon. [Continue reading…]

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Inside Sinjar: ‘It is liberated, but how can we come back?’

Mike Giglio reports: The young soldier paused to take a somber selfie on the battered street. Kurdish forces had just cleared ISIS from the town of Sinjar, but unlike some of his comrades who sent bursts of gunfire into the air, 20-year-old Azhar Khalaf Shamo wasn’t celebrating. He was from this town, and he knew this street — he stood in front of what had been a family-run store. But now the entire block, like seemingly every block in Sinjar, was reduced to rubble and metal scraps. “It’s totally destroyed,” he said. “No place looks like before. Yes, it is liberated. But how can we come back?”

Sinjar became famous as the site of ISIS’s worst atrocities — after overrunning the region in August 2014, the group massacred thousands of members of the Yazidi religious sect that calls it home. President Obama cited the need to protect them when announcing the start of U.S. airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq.

Yet as ethnic Kurdish forces, backed by the strikes, rolled triumphantly back into the city on Friday, Shamo seemed to be wondering what was left to save. He had lost seven siblings to ISIS’s rampage; more than 2,500 Yazidis are still believed to remain in control of ISIS as slaves. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The end of Isis rule came surprisingly easily. Fighter jets that had steadily picked off targets in the city over the past year intensified their attacks from Wednesday night. By Friday there was little left in the city to hit. Nearly every home had been damaged, roads had been pockmarked with craters, and power lines criss-crossed rubble like fallen spider webs.

Another Iraqi policeman, Corporal Ismael, also a Yazidi, picked his way through the litter of the war as he outlined how he and his family, who were in a refugee camp near Duhok, would soon try their luck on the migrant route across the Mediterranean. “I have saved all the money and soon I can get them out,” he said. “It is better to die in the ocean near Turkey than to come back to this.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey haunted by its ghosts

Roger Cohen writes: “We don’t want Turkey to become Syria or Diyarbakir to become Aleppo.”

Those were the words of Tahir Elci, the president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association when I spoke to him after the recent Turkish election here in this troubled city of strong Kurdish national sentiment. On the night of the vote tires smoldered and the tear-gas-heavy air stung. In the center of the old city, rubble and walls pockmarked with bullet holes attest to the violence as police confront restive Kurds.

Elci was detained last month for a day and a half after saying in a television interview that the Kurdistan Workers Party, or P.K.K., was not a “terrorist organization” but “an armed political organization which has large local support.” An indictment has been brought against him that seeks a prison sentence of more than seven years. The P.K.K. is designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the European Union and the United States.

“For a few words about the P.K.K., in which I said some of its operations were terrorist but it was not itself a terrorist organization, there is a lynching campaign against me,” Elci told me. “Yet there is no strategy among the Turkish security forces against the Islamic State, no real mobilization. If ISIS were treated like the P.K.K., it would be very different.” [Continue reading…]

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Rouhani says U.S. needs to apologize to the Iranian people before diplomatic relations can be restored

EA Worldview reports: Amid in-fighting among Iran’s regime over US-supported “sedition”, President Rouhani has called on Washington to apologize again to Tehran for past actions.

In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in Tehran, Rouhani said that the apology was necessary if the US wants to restore diplomatic relations with Iran:

One day these embassies will re-open but what counts is behavior and the Americans hold the key to this.

If they modify their policies, correct errors committed in these 37 years and apologize to the Iranian people, the situation will change and good things can happen.

In 2000, discussing grievances on both sides, Secretary of State Madeline Albright acknowledged the US “significant role” in the 1953 overthrow of Iran’s elected government and the American support of the Shah as he “brutally repressed political dissent”. She continued:

As President Clinton has said, the United States must bear its fair share of responsibility for the problems that have arisen in U.S.-Iranian relations. Even in more recent years, aspects of U.S. policy towards Iraq, during its conflict with Iran appear now to have been regrettably shortsighted, especially in light of our subsequent experiences with Saddam Hussein.

The President said the July 14 nuclear deal between Iran and the 5+1 Powers was a good starting point, but cautioned that the US must adhere to the terms: [Continue reading…]

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U.S. State Dept: EU product labeling is not a boycott of Israel

The Jerusalem Post reports: The European Union’s guidelines on consumer labels for Israeli products produced over the pre-1967 lines is not tantamount to a boycott of Israel, Edgar Vasquez, a State Department spokesman, told The Jerusalem Post.

“We do not believe that labeling the origin of products is equivalent to a boycott. And as you know, we do not consider settlements to be part of Israel. We do not view labeling the origin of products being from the settlements as a boycott of Israel,” Vasquez said.

The EU has also insisted that the measure is not a boycott of Israel and that their concern is the consumer’s right to know as well as compliance with EU legislation. [Continue reading…]

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Report: Fossil fuel industry benefits from $20 billion in subsidies in the U.S.

Desmog reports: A new joint investigative report by Oil Change International and the Overseas Development Institute reveals that, in the United States alone, the fossil fuel industry has benefited from over $20 billion per year in government subsidies between 2008-2015.

The percentage of subsidies has skyrocketed during the two terms of the Obama Administration, growing by 35 percent since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. The findings are part of a broader report on subsidies given to G20 countries ahead of the forthcoming G20 Leaders Summit in Antalya, Turkey, set to take place November 15-16.

“Since the initial G20 commitment in Pittsburgh six years ago, US subsidies have increased dramatically in [the Obama] Administration, in line with the increase in US oil and gas production,” said Steve Kretzmann, executive director of Oil Change International. “The President can and must do more to eliminate subsidies at home and to keep carbon in the ground in the time he has left.” [Continue reading…]

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How policing in the U.S. is relentlessly being militarized

GQ reports: Last month, the local press in New York confirmed what civil rights advocates had been saying for years: the NYPD has been driving around in unmarked vans chock full of X-ray equipment and scanning for… something.

It was a major story, mostly because not much is known about “Z Backscatter” vans other than that they cost somewhere between $729,000 and $825,000. Yet, there’s no way to know for sure what they’re capable of because the NYPD refuses to talk about them, even though the ACLU won a lawsuit that required the department to reveal records about the vans (including their potential health impacts on people who might be exposed to X-rays without knowing it). “The devices we have, the vehicles if you will, are all used lawfully and if the ACLU and others don’t think that’s the case, we’ll see them in court — where they’ll lose!” Commissioner Bill Bratton told the New York Post.

The X-ray vans bring up all kinds of concerns about privacy, health, and general ickiness — no one wants to walk around New York wondering whether some bored cop in a van is checking out your skivvies — but by today’s police tech standards, the vans are actually relatively low-tech and benign. Departments large and small are using a host of new gadgets — from laser light weapons that can induce vomiting to surveillance systems that can predict crimes before they happen.

And what’s scariest of all is the majority of these technologies are being funneled down from the U.S. Military, down into neighborhoods that are most definitely not war zones. “After 15 years of war, there’s a demand for all these companies to find new markets for all these technologies,” said Joel Pruce a professor of human rights at the University of Dayton who studies police technology. “So it trickles down from the military to police.” The revelations about the backscatter vans were just one more sign that the future of policing is here, and it’s terrifying. [Continue reading…]

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The new protest movements are paying a high price for their anti-institutional ethos

Ivan Krastev writes: Shortly after Louis Napoleon’s 1851 coup in Paris, five of the greatest political minds in Europe hustled to their writing desks to capture the meaning of the events.

The five were very different people. Karl Marx was a Communist. Pierre Joseph Proudhon an anarchist. Victor Hugo, the most popular French poet of his time, a romantic. And Alexis de Tocqueville and Walter Bagehot were liberals. Their interpretations of the coup were as different as their philosophies. But in the manner of the man who mistook his wife for a hat, they all mistook the end of Europe’s three-year revolutionary wave for its beginning.

Has the Western media made the same mistake in recent years? Are its interpretations of the global wave of popular protests — spontaneous, leaderless, nonviolent, which Thomas Friedman memorably described as the rise of the “square people” — similarly off-base? It seems so: Just take the stunning and unexpected victory of the governing Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., in Turkey’s parliamentary elections last week. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s brazen lying about Syrian refugees

Scott Lucas writes: With the approach of a second round of international talks about Syria’s crisis, Russia has stepped up its deceptive propaganda in support of the Assad regime.

Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Meshkov brazenly lied on Wednesday with the declaration, “Since the beginning of Russian operations, according to UN structures, more than one million people have returned to their homes in Syria.”

Meshkov gave no support for his claim, which was featured by Russian State outlet Sputnik News.

The UN has reported that more Syrians have fled their homes because of Russian bombing and the Syrian military’s offensives that Moscow is supporting. On October 26, the number was put at more than 120,000 since the start of the month, including at least 80,000 from Idlib and Hama Province and at least 44,000 from southern Aleppo Province.

The UN later revised the southern Aleppo figure to more than 75,000. The Syrian opposition and activists say the number from Aleppo and other areas is far higher than the UN’s totals. [Continue reading…]

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A Russian dirty bomb? Or more dezinformatsiya?

The Daily Beast reports: A stray camera at a meeting of top Russian military leaders has allegedly captured a glimpse of the Kremlin’s possible plan for a bewildering and frightening new weapon — a radiation-scattering “dirty bomb.” One delivered by a drone submarine, which itself rides piggyback on another submarine.

The problem is: We have no way of knowing for sure if this is in fact an existing weapon or simply a media provocation designed to make us think that Russian President Vladimir Putin has got a dangerous new toy in his arsenal. If it’s real, then Russia is the first country we know about to come into possession of a weapon that, while not nearly as destructive as an atomic bomb, could spread lethal radiation over a wide area, rendering it uninhabitable. If the segment is a fake, it’s the latest in a long list of Kremlin media hoaxes.

“It’s true some secret data got into the shot, and it was subsequently deleted,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday about the mysterious footage. “We hope that this won’t repeat.”

The technical aspects of such a device aren’t all that complicated. A dirty bomb is simply any munition containing conventional explosives wrapped in radioactive material. It explodes like any normal munition, but the fragments it scatters are irradiated and thus more dangerous for far longer periods of time than the debris from any standard bomb.

Compared to nuclear weapons, dirty bombs are easy to make — and their use, while highly provocative, is less likely to spark global Armageddon. But they’re still nasty enough that, back in the 1970s, the United States and Russia came pretty close to banning them. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia’s manifesto for change in the face of rumours of coup plots

The Telegraph reports: Saudi Arabia has issued a manifesto for change in the face of rumours of coup plots and international pressure, ranging from economic reform to the role of women and allowing human rights groups into the country.

At a time when the country’s internal politics are under more scrutiny than at any time for decades, close advisers to the new King Salman and his powerful son have taken the unprecedented step of outlining a detailed programme of its future government to The Telegraph.

It amounts to a Thatcherite programme of budget cuts, increasing the role of the private sector, and reforms to the way the kingdom is governed.

It obliquely acknowledges that radical changes in the royal family since the king acceded to the throne in January, including the sidelining of a generation of older princes and the former heir to the throne, have met with opposition. There have been claims outside the country that disgruntled princes are attempting to mount a coup to replace the king with one of his brothers.

But the statement of principles shown to the Telegraph says that the way the country has been run since its founding a century ago must give way to “youth”. “These resolute and decisive changes may have annoyed some people but it does not amount to a crisis,” it says. [Continue reading…]

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The UAE’s disappeared: Economist who criticised government disappears after arrest

The Independent reports: When plain-clothes security officers arrested prominent Emirati economist, Dr Naser bin Ghaith, in Abu Dhabi they drove him to his home in Dubai which was then searched. He was bundled back into a car. That was the last time he was seen by his family.

Nearly three months later they still have no idea where he was taken, why he was arrested and what charges he may be facing. They are terrified of speaking to the press or raising his case with the authorities. There has been no official comment about his arrest. The authorities have not even confirmed that he has been arrested. Dr Bin Ghaith has joined the ranks of the UAE’s disappeared.

Speaking in Dubai, the Emirati activist Ahmed Mansoor told The Independent that “there are hundreds of others” who have similarly disappeared. “The authorities tell the family ‘Don’t worry, it will only be a matter of days, he will call you’.” But the days turn into weeks and sometimes months before a call comes. [Continue reading…]

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Israel: Link between EU labelling and Europe’s ‘dark past’ is tactical and confected

By Yoav Galai, University of St Andrews

The EU’s announcement of new guidelines regarding the labelling of settlement products, has been greeted by Israeli officials as well as members of the opposition with a campaign which presents a uniform position against the document that takes the line: it is a boycott, and it is anti-semitic.

The new EU guidelines require that goods from, say, the Golan Heights should be labelled: “product from the Golan Heights (Israeli settlement)”. For products from Palestine territories that are not from settlements, an indication of origin could be “product from Palestine” or “product from West Bank (Palestinian product)”.

The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, with trade worth about US$30 billion – but exports from settlements represent less than about 1% of overall trade.

The decision to label settlement products is in line with existing EU law since 2004 which requires the places of origin of fruits, vegetables and honey to be labelled, but the document has a strong symbolic meaning: it singles out products from settlements. It is this symbolic gesture that has caused alarm in Israel.

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Israeli army unit storms hospital and kills Palestinian

Al Jazeera reports: An elite Israeli military force that operates undercover stormed the al-Ahli Hospital in Hebron and shot dead a 27-year-old Palestinian, the Palestinian Ministry of Health said.

Abdullah al-Shalaldeh was killed by five rounds fired early Thursday after 21 members of the elite unit – known as Mustaarabin – barged into the hospital room of his cousin, Azzam al-Shalaldeh, a ministry statement said.

The commandos wanted to question Azzam – who required surgery after earlier being shot by Israeli security forces – and his cousin tried to prevent them from doing so when the Israelis opened fire. [Continue reading…]

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We have 15 years to halt biodiversity loss, can it be done?

By Richard Pearson, UCL

The UN’s ambitious new Sustainable Development Goals include a target to halt biodiversity loss by 2030. The SDGs have generated a great deal of comment, with questions raised as to whether the lofty aspirations can be turned into realistic policies. An article in The Lancet even dismissed the SDGs as nothing more than “fairy tales”.

So is halting biodiversity loss a fairy tale?

“Biodiversity” refers to the diversity of life on Earth. It includes diversity within species, between species, and of ecosystems. There are any number of statistics that confirm its decline across the globe. For instance, the Red List of threatened species, developed by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), identifies 22,784 that are at risk of extinction – almost 30% of the species that have been assessed. By other measures, habitats continue to be destroyed and degraded, and population sizes of most wild species are in decline.

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