Category Archives: Issues

To beat the terrorists Kenya must break free of Western thinking

Mwenda Kailemia writes: On Wednesday night, life was normal for the close to 800 students of a university college in the remote part of Kenya’s north east, which borders Somalia. And then, at dawn on Thursday, all hell broke lose: Masked gunmen stormed the fortified campus dormitories shooting indiscriminately at the fleeing students before taking several hundred hostages. The dawn-to-dusk siege ended when the four gunmen detonated their suicide vests, with a fifth arrested. The attack left at least 147 people dead, mostly students, with survivors afterward recounting how the militants singled out and executed Christians.

It is the deadliest attack yet by al-Shabab, the al-Qaida-affiliated Somali militant group, which declared war on Kenya after the country sent its troops into Somalia in 2011. In a similar attack in 2013, armed gunmen stormed the Westgate shopping complex in Nairobi, selectively killing Christians and taking many people hostage. By the time the guns fell silent three days later close to 70 people had been killed.

The attacks have raised fundamental questions about Kenya’s security strategy. Recent commentary has emphasised the toxic mix of corruption and the structural alienation of Kenya’s Muslim population. Immigration and police officials, it is argued, can be bought by the highest bidder. Recently there have been widely publicised accounts of how foreigners have managed to acquire Kenyan passports within a few weeks of sneaking into the country. This corruption has played into the hands of both al-Shabaab and the Mombasa Republican Council (MRC), a secessionist outfit in the country’s coastal regions, with both capitalising on popular disenchantment of the Kenyan Muslim minority for their recruitment.

Following yesterday’s attacks, it took security services several hours to arrive at the site of the siege because of bad roads in the area. Neglect by successive administrations has ensured that Garissa, like most of Kenya’s north east, is part of Kenya by name only: before this week’s attack, the local leadership had given the government an ultimatum: either ensure security or allow locals to take up arms to defend themselves from threats that range from al-Shabaab attacks to cattle rustling and inter-clan warfare. Thus, while the story of Kenya’s struggle with terrorism has been dominated by images of urban sieges, the untold story – until yesterday anyway– was the insecurity and neglect that the people of north eastern Kenya have had to endure for decades. The country may have won international acclaim for major investments in infrastructure, but it is not lost on locals that the whole region bordering Somalia has less than 100 miles of tarmacked roads. [Continue reading…]

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Houthi rebels may pose threat in fourth-busiest oil and fuel shipping bottleneck in the world

Bloomberg reports: Houthi rebels in Yemen have strengthened their positions on two islands in the strait of Bab el-Mandeb, deploying weapons that may put commercial and military vessels at risk, Djibouti’s foreign minister said.

The fighters have placed missiles, long-range cannons and “small rapid boats” loaded with heavy weaponry on Perim, the island that divides the strait into two channels between Djibouti and Yemen, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf said in an interview Thursday in Djibouti City. The Houthis are also reinforcing their positions on a smaller island in the area, he said.

“They are preparing themselves, at least to defend themselves if there is a blockade, or to attack vessels in the strait of Bab el-Mandeb if they feel that they are threatened when it comes to the control of the coastal areas of Yemen,” Youssouf said. “The prospect of a war in the strait of Bab al-Mandeb is a real one.”

The Bab el-Mandeb is the fourth-busiest oil and fuel shipping bottleneck in the world by volume. It’s located between Yemen, Djibouti and Eritrea, and gives crude tankers access to the Red Sea as well as the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. The strait is 18 miles wide at its narrowest point, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. [Continue reading…]

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Searching the web creates an illusion of knowledge

Tom Jacobs writes: Surely you have noticed: A lot of people who have no idea what they are talking about are oddly certain of their superior knowledge. While this disconnect has been a problem throughout human history, new research suggests a ubiquitous feature of our high-tech world — the Internet — has made matters much worse.

In a series of studies, a Yale University research team led by psychologist Matthew Fisher shows that people who search for information on the Web emerge from the process with an inflated sense of how much they know — even regarding topics that are unrelated to the ones they Googled.

This illusion of knowledge appears to be “driven by the act of searching itself,” they write in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Apparently conflating seeking information online with racking one’s brain, people consistently mistake “outsourced knowledge for internal knowledge.” [Continue reading…]

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Reactions to the Iran nuclear deal

The U.S. State Department has released the Parameters for a Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Regarding the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Nuclear Program.

The International Crisis Group says:

If finalised by its 30 June deadline and implemented, the nuclear accord could put an end to a prolonged and multidimensional standoff; effectively block overt and clandestine pathways to nuclear militarisation; set a positive precedent for the non-proliferation regime; provide the Iranian people with economic relief; offer a path for normalising Iran’s relationship with the international community; and thus open the door to the possibility of constructive engagement on critical issues of peace and security in the Middle East.

Negotiated outcomes by nature are imperfect. These agreed upon parameters provide Iran with an enrichment capacity higher than the U.S. and its allies preferred, and sanctions relief slower and more circumscribed than Iran desired. But both sides have protected their core interests and rightfully can claim victory – a precondition for any sustainable solution.

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace experts James Acton, George Perkovich, and Karim Sadjadpour discuss the details of the deal and its implications here.

Ariane Tabatabai writes: The coming months will involve a great deal of legal and political wrangling. In the United States especially, due to anxious allies (Saudi Arabia and Israel) and some domestic opposition (especially among Republicans in Congress), negotiations will keep the White House busy.

Nonetheless, this is a good agreement for both sides, as indicated by some of its key components.

First, most of the public discussion about the negotiations has until now been focused on quantifiable elements, such as the number of centrifuges and amount of low-enriched uranium that Iran gets to keep, and the length of the deal’s implementation. But perhaps the most crucial aspect lies in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) access to Iranian facilities. In the framework deal, Tehran has said it will once again voluntarily implement the Additional Protocol to its existing IAEA safeguards agreement, granting the nuclear watchdog more inspections authority. (Iran had previously implemented the Protocol but stopped adhering to it.) This means that IAEA inspectors will be able to regularly monitor Iranian facilities and can conduct unannounced inspections as well. Inspectors will also have access to the supply chain through which Iran obtains materials for its nuclear program. Inspections will likely last for about 25 years, longer than the implementation period of the agreement itself.

Second, Iran’s enrichment program will be limited. It has agreed not to build any new enrichment facilities for 15 years, and will not enrich uranium above 3.7 percent—a level suitable for commercial power plants, but too low to practically be used in a nuclear weapon—for at least that long. It is also reducing its current stockpile of 10,000 kilograms of low-enriched uranium to a small fraction of that amount.

The Fordow nuclear facility will cease enriching any uranium and will be converted into a research center instead—one barred from doing research on enrichment. In fact, Iran will not keep any fissile material at Fordow for 15 years.

Iran will instead make the Natanz facility the focus of all enrichment activities. There, it will use only its first-generation (IR-1) centrifuges to enrich for 10 years. The more advanced IR-2m centrifuges will be stored for that period, under IAEA monitoring. In fact, advanced centrifuge models (the IR-2, IR-4, IR-5, IR-6, and IR-8) will not be used for enrichment for 10 years.

In total, Iran will reduce its current enrichment apparatus by roughly two thirds. It will have only 6,104 installed centrifuges, as opposed to the current 19,000. All of them will be the IR-1 model.

Third, Iran will implement Modified Code 3.1 of the Subsidiary Arrangements to its IAEA Safeguards Agreement, which requires it to give early notification that it is constructing new nuclear facilities.

Fourth, Iran will take steps to address concerns over the Possible Military Dimensions (PMD) of its program.

Fifth, Iran will redesign and rebuild the Arak heavy water reactor. The design will be agreed upon by negotiators from the six world powers, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States. The redesign will mean that the reactor will not be able to produce weapon-grade plutonium. Iran is also recommitting itself to not developing a reprocessing capability. (Reprocessing, the back end of the fuel cycle, is a vital component in developing a plutonium bomb.) The original core of the reactor will be removed and either destroyed or taken out of the country. Additionally, Iran agrees not to build a new heavy water reactor for 15 years.

A number of these steps will, in effect, be irreversible. They will not just limit Iran’s nuclear capability for 10 to 15 years, but will reshape it entirely and indefinitely. [Continue reading…]

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Pragmatism driving Iran’s Supreme Leader toward nuclear deal

AFP reports: A nuclear deal with Iran is finally within sight because its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has chosen pragmatism over hardline rhetoric and possible conflict with the West.

Throughout 18 months of diplomacy between Iran and six world powers led by the United States, the question that has dominated all others is whether Khamenei will ever sign off on an accord.

Iran’s negotiators, led by the wide-smiling, US-educated Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, have often seemed desperately hemmed in at the talks by stringent red lines set by Khamenei.

The supreme leader, who has the final word on all policy matters foreign and domestic, has also previously cast doubt on whether dialogue would produce results, citing his distrust of America.

But the key parameters agreed in Lausanne on Thursday confirm the 75-year-old cleric’s intention to conclude a deal by June 30, analysts say. [Continue reading…]

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Iranians celebrate nuclear deal: ‘This will bring hope to our life’

The Guardian reports: Jubilant Iranians took to the streets on Thursday night to celebrate news of a breakthrough in nuclear negotiations with the West, and to express their hopes that the deal will end years of international isolation and economic hardship – and avert the threat of war.

The news from Switzerland was especially sweet coming as Iranians celebrated the final day of their Nowruz new year holidays. Even though newspapers, bazaars and state institutions were closed, many welcomed the landmark agreement which they believe will have a dramatic effect on the lives of ordinary Iranians.

Drivers in the streets of Tehran honked their car horns as news of the deal started to break. At 1am in the morning, t the capital’s longest street, Val-e-Asr Avenue, was still lined with cars, with men and women waving flags and flashing V-for-victory signs from open windows.

“Whatever the final result of the negotiations, we are winners,” Behrang Alavi told AFP. “Now we will be able to live normally like the rest of the world.” [Continue reading…]

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Iran nuclear talks: the long and winding road to a landmark agreement

Julian Borger reports: When Kerry first met Zarif at the UN general assembly in September 2013, it was a historic rarity for two countries that had not had diplomatic relations for 33 years. By the time the framework deal was agreed, the two men had spent more time in each other’s company than with any other foreign official. The pressure from hardliners back home gave the negotiators common cause. And Kerry took Zarif’s recommendation on the best Persian restaurant in Switzerland. The US energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, bonded with his opposite number, Ali Akbar Salehi, over physics and shared years teaching and studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Salehi became a grandfather for the first time during the Lausanne talks, the New York Times reported, Moniz presented him with baby gifts embossed with the MIT logo.

They worked through weekends and holidays. As the talks approached and passed a deadline in July 2014 in Vienna, Zarif worked through Ramadan, but it was impossible to negotiate and fast at the same time. Shia Islam exempts you from fasting for ten days if you are away from home, but if you want to extend the exemption after that you have to travel just over 25 miles a day (equivalent to 8 farsang, an ancient measure of distance) to justify it. So Zarif would get in a car every day and be driven in and out of the Austrian capital until he had clocked up the requisite mileage.

The foreign ministers came and went, but the technical experts often stayed behind, renting apartments in the host cities. One European non-proliferation expert missed most of the early life of his first child, spending three-quarters of his time on the road. A few of the negotiators received lucrative job offers during the course of the talks but had to defer them until the deal was done. Kerry’s deputy and master-negotiator, Bill Burns, had to put off retirement because both the Obama administration and the Iranians insisted that he stay. At critical points along the way, the technical and legal specialists often had to negotiate through the night.

“A lot of time it is not a matter of who is the smartest person in the room. It is a question of who has the most stamina,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former state department official who worked on the Iran dossier. “And Kerry had an incredible amount of stamina.”

The desired end-state of the negotiation was clear enough: Iran’s programme had to be limited so that it would take the country’s leaders at least a year to make a bomb, if they decided to do so, giving the rest of the world time to react. In return, the stifling sanctions regime buildup over the past nine years would be dismantled.

However, getting to that end-state has been endlessly complex. Fixing Iran’s “breakout” time at a year is a function of numbers of centrifuges, their efficiency and the already low stockpile of enriched uranium. To verify their calculations, American scientists constructed mock-up cascades of Iran’s centrifuges, using machines of the same vintage taken from Libya. Working at a classified site, the centrifuges were spun in an effort to determine how long they would take to produce a bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium. The UK and Israel, and perhaps other western European states, also had smaller-scale centrifuge mock-ups, and made their own calculations of breakout times.

The complexities were not just scientific. The web of interlocking international sanctions posed dense legal challenges when it came to drawing up a timetable for their lifting that was acceptable to all sides. [Continue reading…]

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Iran, U.S. agree on outline of nuclear deal

The Associated Press: Iran and six world powers have agreed on the outlines of an understanding to limit Iran’s nuclear programs, officials told The Associated Press Thursday. Negotiations continued on a dispute over how much of it to make public.

The officials spoke outside weeklong talks that have been twice extended past the March 31 deadline in an effort to formulate both a general statement of what has been accomplished and documents describing what needs to be done to meet a June 30 deadline for a final accord.

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Putin: Try to take Crimea away and I will give you a nuclear war

The Times reports: The Ukraine crisis has brought the world closer to nuclear war than at any point for a generation, according to an account of a secret meeting between Russian and American military and intelligence figures.

As President Putin celebrated the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea on March 18 with an appearance at a concert outside the Kremlin, a group of retired Russian generals sat down in Torgau, Germany, with a group of their American counterparts. The assembled Russians once ran the interior ministry, the military directorate in charge of nuclear weapons, the GRU (Russian military intelligence) and the FSB (the main successor agency to the KGB). The American individuals present had similar backgrounds in the military, CIA and Defence Intelligence Agency.

Behind closed doors, over two days, the Russians delivered a series of blunt warnings from Moscow that reveal just how precarious Europe’s security has become over the past year, and how broad the gulf between the Kremlin and the West now is.

The US party at the Elbe Group talks appears to have been surprised to discover that Russian security experts believe that the US is bent on destroying their country — and that Russia is both entitled and fully prepared to use nuclear force to defend itself. That point of view reflects both Mr Putin’s assessment of Russia’s vulnerability and the KGB background shared by him and his closest advisers, according to Kremlin insiders.

Swaggering nuclear rhetoric has increasingly permeated Russian life. In a recent documentary, Mr Putin said that when he gave the instruction to annex Crimea, he also ordered that Russia’s nuclear forces be placed on full alert.

He has referred to Russia’s nuclear might many times since the Ukraine crisis began, including in remarks to a group of schoolchildren in August, when he reminded them that “Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers”, and “it’s best not to mess with us”. [Continue reading…]

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Why Palestine joining the International Criminal Court could be a total game changer

By Kurt Mills, University of Glasgow

After more than five years and much diplomatic wrangling, Palestine has joined the International Criminal Court (ICC). Now, the prospect of Israel being held accountable for war crimes has greatly increased, and that will have significant repercussions for the peace process and for Palestinian statehood.

ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda opened a preliminary investigation on January 16. This can investigate everything that has happened in Palestinian territories since June 13 2014 – the date that Palestine formally accepted ICC jurisdiction. This is also the date when Israel broke a ceasefire with Hamas leading to Operation Protective Edge, which raged throughout the summer of 2014, leading to the deaths of at least 1,473 civilians in Gaza and bringing widespread international condemnation against Israeli actions.

The story dates back to 2009, when the Palestinian Authority requested that the ICC investigate Israel over Operation Cast Lead, but was rejected for not being a state. It was rejected for full membership in the United Nations in 2011, but was granted the status of non-member observer state the following year.

Palestine then joined numerous international organisations, such as UNESCO, and while the question of its statehood remains controversial, it has now been allowed to join the ICC. In the interim it has periodically indicated it would refer Israel to the ICC, but was held back by pressure from the US, the UK and France – and because using the threat suited Palestinian political interests.

Avenues of enquiry

The prosecutor could investigate the civilian casualties in Operation Protective Edge. She could also investigate whether the Israelis carried out the war crime known as collective punishment. This includes demolishing the homes of suspected Hamas militants, thus rendering their families homeless, as well as killing civilians in these buildings. During Operation Protective Edge alone, Amnesty International reported that “more than 18,000 homes were destroyed or damaged beyond repair”.

Israeli tanks in action during Operation Protective Edge
EPA

The prosecutor would also be likely to investigate Palestinians over the hundreds of rockets Hamas fired indiscriminately into Israel from Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of at least six civilians.

Most substantially, Bensouda could look at the continued occupation of Palestinian territory, including both the West Bank and Gaza. Specifically this might look at Israel’s settlement policy, which appears to contravene Article 8 of the ICC’s founding Rome Statute.

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Iran’s been two years away from a nuclear weapon for three decades

Micah Zenko writes: The April 24, 1984, edition of the British defense publication Jane’s Defence Weekly informed its readers: “Iran is engaged in the production of an atomic bomb, likely to be ready within two years, according to press reports in the Persian Gulf last week.” Subsequent warnings from U.S. and foreign sources about Iran’s imminent acquisition of a nuclear weapon have been offered over the past four decades. These false guesses are worth bearing in mind as news from the nuclear negotiations in Lausanne, Switzerland emerges.

More technical “breakout” estimates — the time it would take Iran to compile enough highly-enriched uranium (HEU) to fuel one nuclear weapon — continue to be published, with slightly varying timelines. Setting aside logic, wisdom, and a huge range of assumptions, if you average these five estimates, Iran would require 89.8 days, or three months, if it made a hypothetical rush for one bombs-worth of HEU.

• 1.9-2.2 months (Institute for Science and International Security, October 24, 2013)

• 6 months (Arms Control, September 29, 2014)

• 1.7 months (Iran Watch, February 24, 2015)

• 45-87 days (Bipartisan Policy Center February 23, 2015)

• 3 months (Washington Institute, March 28, 2015)

It is essential to recognize that Iran does not currently have a nuclear-weapons program, nor does it possess a nuclear weapon. On February 26, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, ended his country’s nuclear weapons program in 2003 and “as far as we know, he’s not made the decision to go for a nuclear weapon.” This repeats the “high-confidence” judgment of the U.S. intelligence community (IC) that was first made in November 2007. Clapper added that Iran “wants to preserve options across the capabilities it would take to build [a nuclear weapon], but right now they don’t have one, and have not made that decision.”

To repeat: Iran does not currently have a nuclear-weapons program, nor does it possess a nuclear weapon. So when a politician, analyst, or pundit mentions an Iranian “nuclear-weapons program,” they are referring to a program that the intelligence community is not aware of. If possible, tell that person to contact the Central Intelligence Agency through its “report threats” website to let the agency’s nonproliferation analysts know about whatever secret information he or she is basing his or her judgment upon. [Continue reading…]

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Steve Fraser: Mongrel firebugs and men of property

“The past is a foreign country.  They do things differently there.” So wrote British playwright Harold Pinter.  How apt that seems when one compares life in our own “second Gilded Age” to the way things were done in the original Gilded Age of a century ago.  True, there are some striking similarities between the two moments, including the rise to power of crony capitalism, the staggering growth of inequality, the exiling of democracy, and the spread of Darwinian rationales to justify and camouflage the embedding of plutocracy at the heights of our world.

What is strikingly different, however, is the way Americans of the nineteenth century reacted to all of this.  They managed to mount a kind of sustained economic, political, and cultural resistance to plutocratic rule that is simply unimaginable today.  Masses of our ancestors refused to accept that tooth-and-claw capitalism was their fate and that they should submit to it without a whimper of protest.  Instead, they imagined new, more civilized ways of living together and then took to the streets in staggering numbers and with remarkable persistence, even in the face of the armed power of corporations and the state, to make their points felt.  We can hardly say the same about our more recent past.

How did they manage that? Novelist William Faulkner viewed the past differently than Pinter. As he famously observed, “The past is not dead; it is not even past.” Those confronted by the iniquities and inequities that ran rampant in the first Gilded Age stood up to exploitation and oppression by reaching into their varied pasts. There they were able to find the moral, intellectual, and even organizational wherewithal to defy the prevailing capitalist order of things. At the same time, with a creativity that would amaze us, they looked far into alternative futures to imagine ways of escaping a fate their overlords insisted was both right and inevitable, envisioning worlds that seemed far more inviting to everyone but the plutocrats.

Today, we are faced with a double dilemma: How do we once again make Pinter’s “foreign country,” that rich world of resistance to capitalism that now seems lost in the mists of time, a familiar part of our lives? And how, in doing so, do we make what now seems, in Faulkner’s terms, so undead — all the brutishness, mayhem, inequality, and injustice that so disfigures the present — finally die? While you’re considering that, here’s a glimpse (from my new book, The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power) of the two worlds of the first Gilded Age and the chasm that lay between them. Steve Fraser

Plutocracy the first time around
Revisiting the great upheaval and the first Gilded Age
By Steve Fraser

[The following passages are excerpted and slightly adapted from The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (Little, Brown and Company).]

Part 1: The Great Upheaval

What came to be known as the Great Upheaval, the movement for the eight-hour day, elicited what one historian has called “a strange enthusiasm.” The normal trade union strike is a finite event joining two parties contesting over limited, if sometimes intractable, issues. The mass strike in 1886 or before that in 1877 — all the many localized mass strikes that erupted in towns and small industrial cities after the Civil War and into the new century — was open-ended and ecumenical in reach.

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Harvard’s intransigence on fossil fuel divestment

Bill McKibben writes: Thirty-five years ago, students began demanding that Harvard sell its stock in companies that supported South Africa’s racist regime. The university said no; it was only after years and years of organizing—everything from building a mock shantytown in Harvard Yard to electing Desmond Tutu (and Al Gore) to the Harvard Board of Overseers on a divestment platform—that the university began selling off its apartheid-tainted stock. When the issue was tobacco, it was years after the American Medical Association recommended that medical schools divest their shares that Harvard sold its holdings—and only after a medical student, Philip Huang, ran a clever radio campaign pointing out that then-President Derek Bok was supporting an industry “that markets death and disease to blacks, women, the poor, and Third World countries.”

Now the issue is merely the fate of the planet’s climate system. With it is the future of our civilizations. At the moment, we’re on track to raise the planet’s temperature 4 degrees Celsius by century’s end, which is the biggest thing we’ve ever done. Ask the folks already abandoning islands in the Pacific, or twiddling the faucet handle in drought-stricken São Paulo.

Climate change threatens not only humans but a huge percentage of the Earth’s other species—the plants and animals carefully cataloged in the endless file cabinets at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology or the Harvard University Herbaria. But as usual, Harvard is sticking by its time-honored playbook. Despite huge majorities of students demanding fossil fuel divestment, despite powerful letters from the faculty, and despite the example of institutions from Stanford to the Rockefeller family beginning to divest, the Corporation has said no. President Drew Gilpin Faust, in fact, has issued a letter explaining that the university should be “very wary of steps intended to instrumentalize our endowment in ways that would appear to position the university as a political actor rather than an academic institution.” Just as it was very wary of letting women take classes or taking a stand against tobacco or apartheid. [Continue reading…]

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Why do memes go viral, and should we care?

Abby Rabinowitz writes: On April 11, 2012, Zeddie Little appeared on Good Morning America, wearing the radiant, slightly perplexed smile of one enjoying instant fame. About a week earlier, Little had been a normal, if handsome, 25-year-old trying to make it in public relations. Then on March 31, he was photographed amid a crowd of runners in a South Carolina race by a stranger, Will King, who posted the image to a social networking website, Reddit. Dubbed “Ridiculously Photogenic Guy,” Little’s picture circulated on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, accruing likes, comments, and captions (“Picture gets put up as employee of the month/for a company he doesn’t work for”). It spawned spinoffs (Ridiculously Photogenic Dog, Prisoner, and Syrian Rebel) and leapt to the mainstream media. At a high point, ABC Morning News reported that a Google search for “Zeddie Little” yielded 59 million hits.

Why the sudden fame? The truth is that Little hadn’t become famous: His meme had. According to website Know Your Meme, which documents viral Internet phenomena, a meme is “a piece of content or an idea that’s passed from person to person, changing and evolving along the way.” Ridiculously Photogenic Guy is a kind of Internet meme represented by LOL cats: that is, a photograph, video, or cartoon, often overlaid with a snarky message, perfect for incubating in the bored, fertile minds of cubicle workers and college students. In an age where politicians campaign through social media and viral marketers ponder the appeal of sneezing baby pandas, memes are more important than ever—however trivial they may seem.

But trawling the Internet, I found a strange paradox: While memes were everywhere, serious meme theory was almost nowhere. Richard Dawkins, the famous evolutionary biologist who coined the word “meme” in his classic 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, seemed bent on disowning the Internet variety, calling it a “hijacking” of the original term. The peer-reviewed Journal of Memetics folded in 2005. “The term has moved away from its theoretical beginnings, and a lot of people don’t know or care about its theoretical use,” philosopher and meme theorist Daniel Dennett told me. What has happened to the idea of the meme, and what does that evolution reveal about its usefulness as a concept? [Continue reading…]

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ISIS seizes most of Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus

AFP reports: Militants from ISIS seized control of most of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in southern Damascus Wednesday, a local Palestinian official told AFP.

“Fighters from ISIS launched an assault this morning on Yarmouk and they took over the majority of the camp,” said Anwar Abdel Hadi, director of political affairs for the Palestine Liberation Organization in Damascus.

Fighting was continuing inside the camp, he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based activist group, said ISIS was in control of a “large part” of the camp after fighting with Palestinian groups also opposed to President Bashar Assad’s regime.

Yarmouk was once a thriving neighborhood home to 160,000 Palestinian refugees and Syrians but has been caught up in the country’s fighting and besieged by regime forces for more than a year.

Only about 18,000 residents are estimated to remain in the camp after many fled the fighting. [Continue reading…]

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Palestine formally joins International Criminal Court

Al Jazeera reports: Palestine has formally attained membership of the International Criminal Court, a move that could open the door to possible war crime indictments against Israeli officials despite uncertainty over its wider ramifications.

The accession on Wednesday is another landmark in the Palestinian diplomatic and legal international campaign, which gained steam in 2014.

The Palestinians moved to join The Hague-based court on January 2, in a process that was finalised on Wednesday, setting the scene for potential legal action.

“Palestine has and will continue to use all legitimate tools within its means in order to defend itself against Israeli colonisation and other violations of international law,” said senior Palestinian official Saeb Erakat. [Continue reading…]

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Yemen: The rise of the Houthis

The Rise of the Houthis was filmed in late 2014 and aired on the BBC last month.

Safa Al Ahmad, the freelance Saudi journalist who made this documentary, talks about her work in the short video below. On March 18, she won the 2015 Freedom of Expression Award for journalism, from the Index on Censorship.

Her 30-minute documentary, Saudi’s Secret Uprising, was broadcast by the BBC in May 2014:

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The deal with Iran: Five arguments to watch out for

Gary Sick writes: As the nuclear talks with Iran enter the final stretch, and as the media coverage reaches the point of hysteria, it is useful to step back a bit and offer a few observations about how to approach the kinds of revelations and arguments that we might expect in the coming days or weeks.

Here are five things to watch out for.

First, pay attention to definitions. People in a hurry–or people with an agenda–tend to speak in shorthand. If you don’t pay attention, that can be misleading.

For example, what is “breakout?” Put simply, for purposes of this agreement, “breakout” exists when Iran masses enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) needed for one nuclear device. Note that “breakout” does not mean Iran will have a nuclear device. It is the starting point to build a nuclear device, which most experts agree would require roughly a year for Iran to do–and probably another two or more years to create a device that could be fit into a workable missile warhead. Plus every other country that has ever built a nuclear weapon considered it essential to run a test before actually using their design. There goes bomb No. 1.

So when officials, pundits, and interested parties talk about a one-year breakout time for Iran, what they are really saying is that if Iran decides to break its word and go for a bomb, it will take approximately one year to accumulate 27 kilograms of HEU. The hard part follows. [Continue reading…]

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