Category Archives: Issues

Yemen hospital hit by Saudi-led air strike: Medecins Sans Frontieres

Reuters reports: A hospital in north Yemen run by medical aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) was bombed in a Saudi-led air strike, wrecking the facility and lightly wounding two staff members, the group said on Tuesday.

A Saudi-led Arab coalition intervened in Yemen’s civil war in March to try to restore its government after its toppling by Iran-allied Houthi forces, but a mounting civilian death toll has alarmed human rights groups.

“Our hospital in the Heedan district of Saada governorate was hit several times. Fortunately, the first hit damaged the operations theater while it was empty and the staff were busy with people in the emergency room. They just had time to run off as another missile hit the maternity ward,” MSF country director Hassan Boucenine told Reuters by telephone from Yemen.

“It could be a mistake, but the fact of the matter is it’s a war crime. There’s no reason to target a hospital. We provided (the coalition) with all of our GPS coordinates about two weeks ago,” he said. [Continue reading…]

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Drone warfare is self-defeating

Musa al-Gharbi writes: The sweeping language in the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) has empowered both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to interpret their counterterrorism mandate broadly, to include targets ranging from the Taliban to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Boko Haram and other Al-Qaeda affiliates around the world.

The U.S. drone program, which aims to eliminate high-value targets from these organizations and disrupt imminent terrorist plots against the United States, has been a key component of their efforts.

However, critics have questioned the program’s effectiveness for some time. For example, U.S. officials didn’t always know whom they were killing or what group the targets belong to — let alone whether or not they committed any grievous crime or posed a meaningful threat to U.S. personnel or interests. Moreover, those killed in the drone strikes were generally not high-value targets, but low-level militants, a term denoting any military-aged male killed in the campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Exxon has known about climate change for decades while spending millions to promote climate denial

Scientific American reports: Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation — an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.

Experts, however, aren’t terribly surprised. “It’s never been remotely plausible that they did not understand the science,” says Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University. But as it turns out, Exxon didn’t just understand the science, the company actively engaged with it. In the 1970s and 1980s it employed top scientists to look into the issue and launched its own ambitious research program that empirically sampled carbon dioxide and built rigorous climate models. Exxon even spent more than $1 million on a tanker project that would tackle how much CO2 is absorbed by the oceans. It was one of the biggest scientific questions of the time, meaning that Exxon was truly conducting unprecedented research.

In their eight-month-long investigation, reporters at InsideClimate News interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists and federal officials and analyzed hundreds of pages of internal documents. They found that the company’s knowledge of climate change dates back to July 1977, when its senior scientist James Black delivered a sobering message on the topic. “In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels,” Black told Exxon’s management committee. A year later he warned Exxon that doubling CO2 gases in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by two or three degrees — a number that is consistent with the scientific consensus today. He continued to warn that “present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical.” In other words, Exxon needed to act. [Continue reading…]

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Everything you need to know about the vast network of undersea cables that makes the Internet global

The Washington Post reports: Russians submarines and spy ships are “aggressively operating” near the undersea cables that are the backbone of the global Internet — worrying some U.S. intelligence and military officials who fear the Russians may sabotage them if a conflict arises, the New York Times reports.

For all the talk about the “cloud,” practically all of the data shooting around the world actually relies on a series of tubes to get around — a massive system of fiber-optic cables lying deep underneath the oceans.

The network connects every continent other than Antarctica, carrying e-mails, photos, videos and emoji around the globe. Here’s what that looks like in the style of a vintage maritime map, courtesy of TeleGeography: [Continue reading…]

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Saving Syria’s ‘lost generation’

The Atlantic reports: It wasn’t long after the onset of the Great Recession that academics and headline writers began referring to recent college graduates as a “lost generation.” Faced with unemployment rates for their cohort higher than at any time since World War II, young Americans seemed doomed to a lifetime of lower earnings and savings. But even at the peak of pessimistic predictions, pundits had to acknowledge: Those with college degrees were relatively well-off compared to those without.

What, then, do you call an entire generation that never even finishes college? That’s the threat facing Syria’s young adults. In the years leading up to the current civil war, enrollment figures for Syrian tertiary education had been climbing steadily upward—from 12 percent of the college-age population in 2002, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, to 26 percent in 2010, on the eve of the Syrian uprising. Now, the estimated 100,000 university-qualified refugees currently scattered throughout the Middle East and Europe must place their hopes in schools outside Syria—and that’s to say nothing of those still inside the country, where few educational institutions remain functional. In neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, all of which have been overwhelmed with refugees since the start of the conflict, only a fraction of students have found ways to continue their studies, despite the number of Syrian students in Turkish universities, for example, reportedly quadrupling in recent years. With professors and researchers displaced as well, Syria’s entire university infrastructure is at risk. [Continue reading…]

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Russian warplanes shatter tenuous truce forcing thousands of Syrians to flee

The New York Times reports: For almost two years, the village in the Syrian countryside north of the city of Homs had been relatively calm, profiting from a tenuous truce between the government and rebel groups that had made it a refuge for thousands of desperate people displaced by the war.

But the peace was shattered earlier this month, when Russian warplanes started attacking the village, Ter Ma’aleh, killing at least a dozen people and sending most of the residents into hurried exile.

The assault on the village was part of a wider escalation of violence across the country that has displaced tens of thousands of people in just weeks and led relief workers to warn that Syria is facing one of its most serious humanitarian crises of the civil war.

The intensity of the fighting, they say, is fueling increased desperation as a growing number of Syrians are fleeing to neighboring countries and, especially, to Europe. More than 9,000 migrants a day crossed into Greece last week, according to the International Organization for Migration, the most since the beginning of the year. [Continue reading…]

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Extreme heatwaves could push Gulf climate beyond human endurance, study shows

The Guardian reports: The Gulf in the Middle East, the heartland of the global oil industry, will suffer heatwaves beyond the limit of human survival if climate change is unchecked, according to a new scientific study.

The extreme heatwaves will affect Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Doha and coastal cities in Iran as well as posing a deadly threat to millions of Hajj pilgrims in Saudi Arabia, when the religious festival falls in the summer. The study shows the extreme heatwaves, more intense than anything ever experienced on Earth, would kick in after 2070 and that the hottest days of today would by then be a near-daily occurrence.

“Our results expose a specific regional hotspot where climate change, in the absence of significant [carbon cuts], is likely to severely impact human habitability in the future,” said Prof Jeremy Pal and Prof Elfatih Eltahir, both at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing in the journal Nature Climate Change.

They said the future climate for many locations in the Gulf would be like today’s extreme climate in the desert of Northern Afar, on the African side of the Red Sea, where there are no permanent human settlements at all. But the research also showed that cutting greenhouse gas emissions now could avoid this fate. [Continue reading…]

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Morocco poised to become a solar superpower with launch of desert mega-project

The Guardian reports: The Moroccan city of Ouarzazate is used to big productions. On the edge of the Sahara desert and the centre of the north African country’s “Ouallywood” film industry it has played host to big-budget location shots in Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, The Living Daylights and even Game of Thrones.

Now the trading city, nicknamed the “door of the desert”, is the centre for another blockbuster – a complex of four linked solar mega-plants that, alongside hydro and wind, will help provide nearly half of Morocco’s electricity from renewables by 2020 with, it is hoped, some spare to export to Europe. The project is a key plank in Morocco’s ambitions to use its untapped deserts to become a global solar superpower.

When the full complex is complete, it will be the largest concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in the world , and the first phase, called Noor 1, will go live next month. The mirror technology it uses is less widespread and more expensive than the photovoltaic panels that are now familiar on roofs the world over, but it will have the advantage of being able to continue producing power even after the sun goes down. [Continue reading…]

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A new generation of Palestinian resistance

Yassmine Saleh writes: Over the past several days, Palestinian youth in the West Bank have been exerting their political power — destroying parts of the Separation Wall surrounding the city of Abu Dis with a large hammer, rallying against the attacks on Jerusalemite Palestinians in the Old City, and clashing with Israeli soldiers at checkpoints.

The current wave of youth protest is not an anomaly in the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation and colonization. Palestinian society is a young society. Youths make up a third of the population, with fully 30 percent of people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. In Jerusalem, 35.2 percent of the population is below the age of fifteen. And young people have been the driving force behind recent uprisings, such as the First Intifada in 1987–93 and the Second Intifada in 2000–05.

The First Intifada was a watershed in the history of resistance to Israeli occupation and featured mass forms of popular resistance. People of all ages and social groups united in that struggle against the occupation.

Neighborhood committees started to watch over the security of every neighborhood. When schools and universities were closed under military orders, teachers in every neighborhood gathered students to continue their classes. Agricultural relief committees, founded in the late 1970s and early 1980s, started writing how-to booklets on home-based agriculture to counter the months and weeklong curfews that the Israeli army sometimes imposed on parts of the West Bank.

“Intifada” would come to English as a synonym for “uprising” in its wake.

The uprising today is taking new forms. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu considers move that might divide ‘united’ Jerusalem

The Times of Israel reports: ime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering revoking the permanent residency status of East Jerusalemite Arabs in a measure aimed at halting an ongoing spate of terror attacks, many of which have emanated from Arab neighborhoods of the city.

Netanyahu raised the idea in a security cabinet meeting two weeks ago, according to a Sunday report from Channel 2 news.

The proposal came as the security cabinet passed a slew of measures designed to prevent further Palestinian attacks in the current wave of unrest.

“We need to examine the possibility of canceling their residency. There needs to be a discussion about it,” Netanyahu reportedly said.

The proposal would affect some 80,000 people, according to the report.

The idea was met with surprise by some in the cabinet who saw the move as a step toward dividing Jerusalem through ceding control over Arab neighborhoods. [Continue reading…]

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Russia is playing the Western media like a fiddle

It’s easy to bemoan the influence of Twitter on how people digest the news these days. How can anything be reflected upon, contextualized, and rendered meaningful when reduced to 140-character bites?

The problem, however, is not new: It’s as old as print journalism. Just as impoverished as tweets — arguably even more so — are news headlines.

Headlines frame stories and much of the time, the news audience delves no deeper after having, in just a split second, registered the latest version of what’s happening.

What’s happening right now?

“Russia says wants Syria elections, ready to help Free Syrian Army,” says Reuters.

“Russia offers to coordinate with rebels and US in Syria,” says Al Jazeera English.

“Russia offers air cover for anti-Assad rebels, urges polls,” says AFP.

What next? Vladamir Putin wins the Nobel Peace Prize?

If he’s successful in ending the war in Syria, setting the country on a path to democracy, and leading an international coalition that eliminates ISIS, who could begrudge the often-maligned Russian president for winning huge praise for his achievements.

But what’s really happening right now?

Russian war planes are bombing the FSA in Syria even while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is requesting the U.S. to provide intelligence on the locations of those very units.

The issue here is not the provision or withholding of intelligence. All the Russians are trying to do is highlight the nebulous ideological status of many of the Syrian opposition militias in order to buttress Russia and Assad’s narrative that they’re all terrorists.

Russia is promising to provide air cover to the forces it is currently bombing if they stop fighting against the Assad regime and instead start fighting alongside their enemy in a war exclusively against ISIS.

When the Obama administration began its Iraq first/ISIS first strategy, it opened the door to the move that Russia is now making: the argument that ISIS can only be defeated by supporting Assad. Washington has now been forced into a reactive corner where it lamely asserts its desire to eliminate ISIS while refusing to join Russia in its self-declared effort and even when Russia’s dedication to that effort is highly questionable.

Russia is promoting political reform in Syria while strengthening its support for the primary opponent of such reform: Bashar al-Assad.

That contradiction will remain obscured for as long as the Russians continue to control the media narrative. Ironically, their ability to do so derives in large part from the willingness of Western journalists to construct news headlines and reporting around statements from government officials even when such statements have little credibility.

Moreover, these distortions are further compounded by the fact that in much of the news audience, mistrust of Western governments and the Western mainstream media is coupled with a naive willingness to trust those who present themselves as a countervailing force to Western power — a force which, on the contrary, shows no evidence of being any more trustworthy or any less cynical than the much despised West.

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Overextension by the Kurds will only benefit ISIS

Hassan Hassan writes: Ever since they expelled ISIL from Tal Abyad in mid-June, Syria’s Kurds have been at the centre of many rumours. In particular, there has been talk of upcoming battles against ISIL in northern Syria, including Kurdish-Russian cooperation.

The idea of a Kurdish-led offensive to capture Raqqa has been widely discussed in policy circles in western capitals in recent weeks. The idea has became more relevant since the Russian intervention, which many thought would include a campaign to retake Palmyra so Moscow could have a public-relations win over the US.

Fighting between ISIL and the Kurdish and Shia militias has become less intense in recent months. ISIL has turned to low-scale attacks in vulnerable or less strategic areas to avoid air attacks, primarily in Syria where the Russian air campaign has targeted groups that fight on two fronts against the Assad regime and ISIL.

This new reality, along with the recent breakthrough between Ankara and Washington about a Kurdish role in the war, spurred talk of a major offensive against ISIL in northern Syria, building on the success in Tal Abyad. The fact that the Kurds control key areas near ISIL heartlands in both Iraq and Syria, and that Syrian rebels have all but vanished from eastern Syria, leaves the Kurds and the regime as the only forces that could potentially provide ground troops for any air campaign. [Continue reading…]

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Germany’s growing hate problem

Der Spiegel reports: Germany has a hate problem — one that is growing.

“You’re as big of an asshole as that idiot Ralf Stegner,” a certain Birgit M. recently wrote in a letter to Thomas Kutschaty, justice minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It was a referrence to the deputy party leader of state chapter of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who recently said the organizers of the weekly Pegida marches in Dresden and elsewhere should be investigated by intelligence services. “You should all be put in a sack and have a hammer taken to you,” Birgit M. wrote in her tirade.

Then there was the man who called Dorothea Moesch, a local SPD politician in Dortmund, late in the evening on June 30. “We’re going to get you,” he threatened. “We’re at your door.”

Another local SPD politician in Hesse, district administrator Erich Pipa, has been similarly threatened. “We can have you taken out at any time,” he was informed in a letter.

And in Bernau in the eastern state of Brandenburg, graffiti scrawled on the wall of a warehouse namechecking the local mayor reads, “First Henriette Reker (the mayoral candidate stabbed in Cologne last weekend), next André Stahl.”

These are but a few examples — four politicians who have taken a stand, and, if the threats are to be taken seriously, may now need to fear for their lives. Kutschaty fell into the crosshairs for saying, “Pegida is not about protecting the Western world, it’s about its demise.” Moesch, for her part, attracted ire because she organized a protest against right-wing extremism. Pipa became the target of hatred because he was recently awarded a Federal Cross of Merit, Germany’s highest civilian honor, for his longtime lobbying work on behalf of refugees. Finally, Stahl was the subject of denigration because of his public declaration that he wants refugees to feel welcome in his city. [Continue reading…]

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We are lifelong Zionists. Here’s why we’ve chosen to boycott Israel

Steven Levitsky and Glen Weyl write: The West Bank is increasingly treated as part of Israel, with the green line demarcating the occupied territories erased from many maps. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin declared recently that control over the West Bank is “not a matter of political debate. It is a basic fact of modern Zionism.”

This “basic fact” poses an ethical dilemma for American Jews: Can we continue to embrace a state that permanently denies basic rights to another people? Yet it also poses a problem from a Zionist perspective: Israel has embarked on a path that threatens its very existence.

As happened in the cases of Rhodesia and South Africa, Israel’s permanent subjugation of Palestinians will inevitably isolate it from Western democracies. Not only is European support for Israel waning, but also U.S. public opinion — once seemingly rock solid — has begun to shift as well, especially among millennials. International pariah status is hardly a recipe for Israel’s survival. [Continue reading…]

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The occupation is destroying Israel, too

Assaf Gavron writes: We seem to be in a fast and alarming downward swirl into a savage, unrepairable society. There is only one way to respond to what’s happening in Israel today: We must stop the occupation. Not for peace with the Palestinians or for their sake (though they have surely suffered at our hands for too long). Not for some vision of an idyllic Middle East — those arguments will never end, because neither side will ever budge, or ever be proved wrong by anything. No, we must stop the occupation for ourselves. So that we can look ourselves in the eyes. So that we can legitimately ask for, and receive, support from the world. So that we can return to being human.

Whatever the consequences are, they can’t be worse than what we are now grappling with. No matter how many soldiers we put in the West Bank, or how many houses of terrorists we blow up, or how many stone-throwers we arrest, we don’t have any sense of security; meanwhile, we have become diplomatically isolated, perceived around the world (sometimes correctly) as executioners, liars, racists. As long as the occupation lasts, we are the more powerful side, so we call the shots, and we cannot go on blaming others. For our own sake, for our sanity — we must stop now. [Continue reading…]

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The Kissingerian view of the Middle East

Responding to a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed by Henry Kissinger, Rami G Khoury describes the following problems: The first is the tendency to see Middle Easterners largely in terms of religious or ethnic groups, like Sunnis, Shiites, Maronites, Alawites, and Kurds, who wage existential battles for control of territory, resources, or power. The Middle East, in the Kissingerian worldview, is an urban wasteland defined by armed gangs.

Non-state actors and ethno-sectarian nationalisms have emerged as important actors of political contestation in the Middle East in the past 15 years, to be sure, but our region is defined by much more than feuding Houthis, Alawites, Shiites, Kurds, Sunnis, Hizbollah, Hamas, the Mahdi Army, and other such groups. Even sovereign and powerful states like Saudi Arabia and Iran are defined in this mindset as Sunni or Shiite powers, rather than the sovereign and powerful states of Saudi Arabia and Iran with their varied populations that they are.

The second problem in that the Kissingerian view of the Middle East seems to have no place for — or it simply is blind to — the nearly half a billion individual men and women, mostly Muslims, who live here and shape these societies and states. They have done so for millennia, in fact, and these people all seek the same thing that Kissinger presumably seeks for Americans: a stable, decent society where citizens can live in peace and enjoy opportunities to develop their full human talents. In the eye of those who only see the Middle East defined by warring gangs, sects and ethnicities, no real human beings enter the picture. The Kissingerian Middle East lacks humans and their rights, because the Middle East he sees is somewhere between a professorial strategic analysis exercise for graduate students and a war game played on a board with dice.

My third problem is with the consistent American official view of Iran as a dangerous and untrustworthy brute that has, “jihadist and imperialist designs” across the region. Even after the United States negotiated with Iran an important agreement on nuclear capabilities and sanctions, this view still sees Iran using its allies Syria, Hizbollah, Iraq and the Houthis of Yemen to one day encircle the Sunni bloc of states comprising Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and the smaller Gulf states. Kissinger sees these as two “rigid and apocalyptic blocs” that face off and threaten each other. This exaggerated and dramatized view cannot be taken seriously by anyone, other than those hundreds of policy-makers and policy-influencers in Washington who believe this intellectual wildness.

My fourth and biggest criticism of this way of seeing U.S. policy challenges in the Middle East is that it ascribes to the United States only noble and peace-loving motives, while totally — I mean totally — ignoring any of the consequences of U.S. military and political policies in the region in the past six decades, or since the U.S. CIA helped to overthrow the Mossadegh regime in Iran. It serves nobody any good to ignore how American and other foreign powers’ policies in our region contributed to the underlying problems that shattered the superficial calm — other than occasional Arab-Israeli wars — that had defined our region from World War Two to the Arab uprisings of 2010-11. [Continue reading…]

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UAE: Where rape victims routinely get jailed

BBC News reports: In the United Arab Emirates, migrant women are routinely jailed for having sex outside marriage. Desperate to leave the country, one Filipina maid who was raped found a dramatic way to escape.

There wasn’t much in the village Monica left behind. No clinic, no school, no street lights – just a crossing of dirt roads and a few concrete houses roofed with tin. What really troubled her, though, was the lack of prospects.

She had three young children and a husband who barely made enough to feed them. If she could work in the Gulf for even a few years, she thought, perhaps she’d be able to give those kids a different kind of life.

It took 10 hours for the bus to reach the capital of the Philippines, Manila. There, Monica signed up to an employment agency and flew to the United Arab Emirates, where she began work as a maid for an Emirati family.

The malls and skyscrapers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi were a world away from the rural poverty of her village, and at first Monica was excited to have a job. Gradually, though, she began to miss her children, and to feel ground down by the drudgery of the work and the meanness of her employers. [Continue reading…]

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