Category Archives: News

Yemen famine feared as starving children fight for lives in hospital

The Guardian reports: Dozens of emaciated children are fighting for their lives in Yemen’s hospital wards, as fears grow that civil war and a sea blockade that has lasted for months are creating famine conditions in the Arabian peninsula’s poorest country.

The UN’s humanitarian aid chief, Stephen O’Brien, described a visit to meet “very small children affected by malnutrition” in the Red Sea city of Hodeida. “It is of course absolutely devastating when you see such terrible malnutrition,” he said on Tuesday, warning of “very severe needs”.

More than half of Yemen’s 28 million people are already short of food, the UN has said, and children are particularly badly hit, with hundreds of thousands at risk of starvation.

There are 370,000 children enduring severe malnutrition that weakens their immune system, according to Unicef, and 1.5 million are going hungry. Food shortages are a long-term problem, but they have got worse in recent months. Half of children under five are stunted because of chronic malnutrition. [Continue reading…]

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Baghdad bridles at Turkey’s military presence, warns of ‘regional war’

Reuters reports: Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has warned Turkey that it risks triggering a regional war by keeping troops in Iraq, as each summoned the other’s ambassador in a growing row.

Relations between the two regional powers are already broadly strained by the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State militant group.

Turkey’s parliament voted last week to extend its military presence in Iraq for a further year to take on what it called “terrorist organizations” – a likely reference to Kurdish rebels as well as Islamic State.

Iraq’s parliament responded on Tuesday night by condemning the vote and calling for Turkey to pull its estimated 2,000 troops out of areas across northern Iraq.

“We have asked the Turkish side more than once not to intervene in Iraqi matters and I fear the Turkish adventure could turn into a regional war,” Abadi warned in comments broadcast on state TV on Wednesday. [Continue reading…]

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‘Great Pacific garbage patch’ far bigger than imagined, aerial survey shows

The Guardian reports: The vast patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean is far worse than previously thought, with an aerial survey finding a much larger mass of fishing nets, plastic containers and other discarded items than imagined.

A reconnaissance flight taken in a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft found a vast clump of mainly plastic waste at the northern edge of what is known as the “great Pacific garbage patch”, located between Hawaii and California.

The density of rubbish was several times higher than the Ocean Cleanup, a foundation part-funded by the Dutch government to rid the oceans of plastics, expected to find even at the heart of the patch, where most of the waste is concentrated.

“Normally when you do an aerial survey of dolphins or whales, you make a sighting and record it,” said Boyan Slat, the founder of the Ocean Cleanup.

“That was the plan for this survey. But then we opened the door and we saw the debris everywhere. Every half second you see something. So we had to take snapshots – it was impossible to record everything. It was bizarre to see that much garbage in what should be pristine ocean.” [Continue reading…]

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Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence

Reuters reports: Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency’s request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

It is not known what information intelligence officials were looking for, only that they wanted Yahoo to search for a set of characters. That could mean a phrase in an email or an attachment, said the sources, who did not want to be identified.

Reuters was unable to determine what data Yahoo may have handed over, if any, and if intelligence officials had approached other email providers besides Yahoo with this kind of request.

According to two of the former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer’s decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Big technology companies, including Google, Microsoft Corp., Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc. denied scanning incoming user emails on behalf of the U.S. government, following a report that Yahoo Inc. had built such a system. [Continue reading…]

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Battle for ISIS stronghold could trigger a new crisis: A million displaced Iraqis

The Washington Post reports: The battle for the northern city of Mosul could force a million people to flee their homes. But even before it begins, aid agencies are struggling to shelter families displaced by the conflict against the Islamic State.

The United Nations says it is nowhere near ready to deal with the fallout from the U.S.-backed offensive to retake Mosul from the militants, which could begin in less than a month.

The camps in northern Iraq are full. Debaga camp, 40 miles southeast of Mosul on the edges of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, was built a year ago for 700 families. It now houses 10 times as many people, most of whom fled fighting as Iraqi forces retook territory south of the city.

Crowds gather around reporters, hoping they are aid workers bringing humanitarian assistance. “Register me! Register me!” they shout. They complain they don’t have mattresses, medicine, milk for their children or diapers.

Many don’t have tents, with 1,100 families here waiting for shelter. They bed down in the classrooms and yard of the camp’s school and in the hall of a mosque. Some have slung tarpaulins next to walls in an attempt to shield themselves from the sun. [Continue reading…]

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How Donald Trump ditched U.S. steel workers in favor of China

Newsweek reports: Plenty of blue-collar workers believe that, as president, Donald Trump would be ready to fight off U.S. trade adversaries and reinvigorate the country’s manufacturing industries through his commitment to the Rust Belt. What they likely don’t know is that Trump has been stiffing American steel workers on his own construction projects for years, choosing to deprive untold millions of dollars from four key electoral swing states and instead directing it to China — the country whose trade practices have helped decimate the once-powerful industrial center of the United States.

A Newsweek investigation has found that in at least two of Trump’s last three construction projects, Trump opted to purchase his steel and aluminum from Chinese manufacturers rather than United States corporations based in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. In other instances, he abandoned steel altogether, instead choosing the far-less-expensive option of buying concrete from various companies, including some linked to the Luchese and Genovese crime families. Trump has never been accused of engaging in any wrongdoing for his business dealings with those companies, but it’s true that the Mafia has long controlled much of the concrete industry in New York. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey suspends thousands of police, shuts down TV station as crackdown widens

Reuters reports: Turkish authorities suspended nearly 13,000 police officers, detained dozens of air force officers and shut down a TV station on Tuesday, widening a state-ordered clampdown against perceived enemies in the wake of July’s failed coup.

The police headquarters said 12,801 officers, including 2,523 chiefs, had been suspended because of their suspected links to U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of orchestrating the attempt to overthrow the government.

Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, denies any link to the putsch which has shaken the country and led to the deaths of more than 240 people.

The suspensions came hours after deputy prime minister Numan Kurtulmus announced that the cabinet had approved a 90-day extension to a state of emergency, renewing President Tayyip Erdogan’s powers to govern by decree at least until January.

The emergency measures, if approved by parliament, mean Erdogan can take decisions without oversight of the Constitutional Court, Turkey’s highest legal body. [Continue reading…]

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Theresa May walks into a Brexit trap

Gideon Rachman writes: Theresa May has one great advantage as a politician. She looks serious and responsible. But appearances can be deceptive. If you examine how the UK prime minister is handling Brexit, a different sort of politician emerges.

By announcing that she will start the formal negotiations for Britain to leave the EU by March 2017, the prime minister has walked into a trap. She has given away what little leverage Britain has in the negotiations — without receiving any of the assurances that she needs to achieve a successful outcome.

The announcement of the decision about when the UK will trigger Article 50 — the process by which Britain gives formal notice that it intends to leave the EU — was made in a statesmanlike fashion. But the actual content of the decision is reckless and driven by politics, rather than Britain’s national interest.

Once Mrs May triggers Article 50, she has precisely two years to negotiate a new deal with the EU. Senior civil servants have told the prime minister that it is highly unlikely that the UK will be able to negotiate both the terms of its divorce and a new trade deal with the EU within the two-year deadline. As a result, they warned the prime minister that she must have assurances on what an interim trade agreement with the EU would look like in the long period between the UK leaving the bloc and a definitive new deal being put into place.

Mrs May has chosen to ignore this advice. In doing so, she has knowingly placed Britain at a massive disadvantage in the forthcoming negotiations. [Continue reading…]

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Alex Jones: ‘Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug’

Poor Alex Jones. He stayed up all night waiting for Julian Assange — who Jones was hailing as a “true liberal” — to deliver Wikileaks’ long-anticipated “October surprise.” The Hill reports: A Tuesday morning WikiLeaks event in Berlin did not produce an “#OctoberSurprise” to derail the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign that many had expected, but Julian Assange said he would release more documents before Election Day.

“I’ve seen the internet and I understand there is enormous expectation in the United States,” said Assange, the site’s editor, via video conference at the event, celebrating the 10-year anniversary of WikiLeaks held at 10 a.m. Berlin time.

“Some of that expectation will be addressed [when I announce upcoming projects]. But you should understand that if we’re going to make a major publication in relation to the United States at a particular hour, we don’t do it at 3 a.m.”

Many observers believed that Assange had planned to announce a document post with damning evidence of corruption, wrongdoing or other scandal.

On Monday, Trump advisor Roger Stone tweeted “I have total confidence that @wikileaks and my hero Julian Assange will educate the American people soon #LockHerUp.”

Stone has claimed to be in contact with Assange. [Continue reading…]

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Former president who fought Colombia’s peace deal holds key to its future

The Wall Street Journal reports: Álvaro Uribe found the bullet-riddled body of his father at the family’s farm in 1983. Rebels from the Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, had killed him in a kidnapping attempt.

When he became Colombia’s president 19 years later, Mr. Uribe targeted the FARC with a military offensive. Then this weekend, more than anyone else, he helped scuttle the nationwide referendum that would have sealed a peace treaty between his successor, Juan Manuel Santos, and the Marxist rebel group.

The stunning outcome thrusts Mr. Uribe, now 64 years old and a senator, into a central role shaping what will happen next. Some Colombians see him as the only person who can renegotiate the deal in a way to convince skeptics it isn’t too lenient toward rebels who have gripped Colombia in conflict for 52 years.

Late Sunday night, Mr. Santos said all the political players — a pointed reference to Mr. Uribe, a one-time political ally — would need to “decide among us all what is the path we should take.” The rebels, speaking from Havana, said they wouldn’t return to the battlefield and want to pursue peace.

On Monday, the FARC’s leader, Rodrigo Londoño, called on the peace pact to proceed and said it couldn’t be undone despite Sunday’s vote. “Peace with dignity arrived and will remain,” he said.

Mr. Uribe also sounded magnanimous after the results were announced. He said all Colombians “want peace, no one wants violence.” He called for protection for the FARC rebels who have expressed fear of being targeted by right-wing gunmen and he said his Democratic Center party wants “to contribute to a national accord” on the question of resolving the conflict. [Continue reading…]

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How Putin and Assad are promoting extremism

The Daily Beast reports: The U.S. quickly is running out of options to stop the regime and Russia on Syria’s eastern Aleppo, U.S. officials concede, and they fear that abandoned U.S.-backed rebels could increasingly turn to jihadists groups, like al Qaeda, for protection.

In addition, two U.S. officials told the Daily Beast, they fear the defeat of rebels in Syria’s largest city could weaken U.S.-backed groups in other areas around including Idlib, Hama and Latakia.

That is, the collapse of rebel held areas of eastern Aleppo could mean not just a stronger position for Syrian President Bashar al Assad but radical terror groups, the last remaining opposition forces still standing. The fate of Aleppo could be the turning point of the five-year civil war.

“The rebels have been willing to go along with the coalition up until now. But how long can they hold out against a [Russian] assault?” one distraught U.S. official asked.

If that happens, it will validate a long standing Russian narrative that U.S. backed rebels are not moderate as the U.S. claims but radical elements seeking to destroy Syria. And forcing such groups toward more radical elements may be the very intent behind their aggressive assault on eastern Aleppo for the last week, which was launched after the collapse of the latest cease fire. [Continue reading…]

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Two U.S. diplomats drugged in Russia last year, deepening Washington’s concern

RFE/RL reports: Two U.S. officials traveling with diplomatic passports were drugged while attending a conference in Russia last year, and one of them was hospitalized, in what officials have concluded was part of a wider, escalating pattern of harassment of U.S. diplomats by Russia.

The incident at a hotel bar during a UN anticorruption conference in St. Petersburg in November 2015 caused concern in the U.S. State Department, which quietly protested to Moscow, according to a U.S. government official with direct knowledge of what occurred.

But it wasn’t until a dramatic event in June, when an accredited U.S. diplomat was tackled outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, that officials in Washington reexamined the November drugging and concluded they were part of a definite pattern.

The State Department suggested the harassment has become a particular concern in the past two years. [Continue reading…]

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How the Pentagon paid a British PR firm $500 million for top secret Iraq propaganda

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda programme in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal.

Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in the style of Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos which could be used to track the people who watched them, according to a former employee.

The agency’s staff worked alongside high-ranking US military officers in their Baghdad Camp Victory headquarters as the insurgency raged outside.

Bell Pottinger’s former chairman Lord Tim Bell confirmed to the Sunday Times, which worked with the Bureau on this story, that his firm had worked on a “covert” military operation “covered by various secrecy agreements.”

Bell Pottinger reported to the Pentagon, the CIA and the National Security Council on its work in Iraq, he said.

Bell, one of Britain’s most successful public relations executives, is credited with honing Margaret Thatcher’s steely image and helping the Conservative party win three elections. The agency he co-founded has had a roster of clients including repressive regimes and Asma al-Assad, the wife of the Syrian president.

In the first media interview any Bell Pottinger employee has given about the work for the US military in Iraq, video editor Martin Wells – who no longer works for the company – told the Bureau his time in Camp Victory was “shocking, eye-opening, life-changing.”

The firm’s output was signed off by former General David Petraeus – then commander of the coalition forces in Iraq – and on occasion by the White House, Wells said. [Continue reading…]

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Tunisian men detail CIA black site torture involving electric chair and more

The Guardian reports: Two Tunisian men held in secret CIA prisons for more than a year have told a leading human rights organization they were tortured with gruesome and previously unknown techniques.

The men, who were released to Tunisian custody in 2015, described being threatened with placement in an electric chair at a black site prison in Afghanistan in 2002; being beaten with metal batons while their arms were suspended by a bar above their heads; and having their heads pushed into barrels of water.

One of the men, Ridha al-Najjar, was a pivotal detainee for the CIA, which believed him to be a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. Najjar was the first man taken by the CIA to the black site, which was code-named Cobalt and was where at least one detainee is known to have died. His interrogation became a template for others at the site, according to the CIA inspector general. Najjar said the interrogators forcibly inserted something into his anus.

According to a footnote in the 2014 Senate intelligence committee’s investigation into torture, John Brennan, now CIA director, was among the senior CIA officials briefed in the summer of 2002 on the interrogation plan for Najjar. According to the Senate report, the plan included isolation, “‘sound disorientation techniques’, ‘sense of time deprivation’, limited light, cold temperatures, and sleep deprivation”.

“There was a barrel full of water, and they kept submerging [my head] in the water,” the other Tunisian man, Lotfi al-Arabi El Gherissi, told Human Rights Watch, which shared the two men’s accounts with the Guardian. [Continue reading…]

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How Donald Trump turned the tax code into a giant tax shelter

James B Stewart writes: Now we know: Donald J. Trump racked up losses so huge in the early 1990s that he wouldn’t have had to pay federal or New York State income tax on nearly a billion dollars in income.

None of this seems to have made the slightest dent in Mr. Trump’s opulent lifestyle over the years. At the nadir of his personal financial crisis in the early 1990s, his lenders put him on a monthly “budget” of $450,000 in personal expenses — more than enough to sustain his lifestyle of lavish homes, private jets, country clubs and golf courses — even as he was using the tax code to avoid paying any federal income tax.

It’s hard to imagine a starker contrast with the vast number of Americans who struggle to both pay taxes and make ends meet, or a more damning indictment of a tax code that makes that possible.

“If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: The tax code is tilted toward the rich in its statutory framework, its exceptions, and in how it is enforced and administered,” said Steven M. Rosenthal, a real estate tax specialist and senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.

“The American public,” he said, “needs to wake up and send a message that the tax code should be written to generate revenue and enforced to collect it, not to favor wealthy real estate developers and other special interests and their lobbyists.”

If Mr. Trump’s pattern of generating losses and using them to offset other income has continued, as seems likely, it’s obvious why he has not released his tax returns: not because he is being audited, or because the returns are too complicated, but because he hasn’t paid any taxes. [Continue reading…]

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Brexit: What will happen now timescale for article 50 has been revealed?

The Guardian reports: As the man who drafted it has said, the EU’s divorce clause was never meant to be triggered: article 50 was inserted into the Lisbon treaty purely to silence British complaints that there was no official way out of the union.

So there is a certain irony in Britain now becoming the first European Union member state to formally begin the two-year leaving process, after Theresa May said Brexit would finally start by the end of March 2017.

With the start date now known, albeit approximately, British efforts will redouble to open informal talks before official negotiations begin – despite Brussels’s repeated insistence on “no negotiation without notification”.

David Davis’s Brexit ministry, expected soon to number as many as 500 staff, and the government’s legal department will bear the brunt of extracting Britain from the bloc and defining its future relationship. The key question they must resolve – and still a source of conflict within the government – remains whether the UK will push for enhanced access to the single market.

That, Brussels and other EU capitals have repeatedly insisted, can only come at the price of free movement for European migrant workers, an acceptance of the single market’s rules and regulations, and a contribution to Brussels’s budget.

DExEU, Davis’s department, will model different “soft” and “hard” Brexit scenarios and their impact on dozens of sectors of the UK economy, help define the cabinet’s preferred Brexit target, and draw up negotiating priorities: what does Britain want, what can it not do without, what might it be prepared to sacrifice.

Both DExEU and the government’s legal department will also now begin work on the act that will repeal the 1972 European Communities Act – the law that binds EU law to the British statute book – and new legislation to transpose EU legislation into British law in its entirety.

The bill, announced by May on Saturday night, will be brought forward in the next parliamentary session. It will take effect on the day Britain leaves the EU, now set at no later than the end of March 2019, with future governments able to unpick EU-derived laws as desired. [Continue reading…]

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Colombia peace deal is defeated, leaving a nation in shock

The New York Times reports: A Colombian peace deal that the president and the country’s largest rebel group had signed just days before was defeated in a referendum on Sunday, leaving the fate of a 52-year war suddenly uncertain.

A narrow margin divided the yes-or-no vote, with 50.2 percent of Colombians rejecting the peace deal and 49.8 percent voting in favor, the government said.

The result was a deep embarrassment for President Juan Manuel Santos. Just last week, Mr. Santos had joined arms with leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, who apologized on national television during a signing ceremony.

The surprise surge by the “no” vote — nearly all major polls had indicated resounding approval — left the country in a dazed uncertainty not seen since Britain voted in June to leave the European Union. And it left the future of rebels who had planned to rejoin Colombia as civilians — indeed, the future of the war itself, which both sides had declared over — unknown.

Both sides vowed they would not go back to fighting.

Mr. Santos, who appeared humbled by the vote on television on Sunday, said the cease-fire that his government had signed with the FARC would remain in effect. He added that he would soon “convene all political groups,” especially those against the deal, “to open spaces for dialogue and determine how we will go ahead.”

Rodrigo Londoño, the FARC leader, who was preparing to return to Colombia after four years of negotiations in Havana, said he, too, was not interested in more war. [Continue reading…]

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Trump tax records obtained by NYT reveal he could have avoided paying taxes for nearly two decades

The New York Times reports: Donald J. Trump declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, a tax deduction so substantial it could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years, records obtained by The New York Times show.

The 1995 tax records, never before disclosed, reveal the extraordinary tax benefits that Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, derived from the financial wreckage he left behind in the early 1990s through mismanagement of three Atlantic City casinos, his ill-fated foray into the airline business and his ill-timed purchase of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.

Tax experts hired by The Times to analyze Mr. Trump’s 1995 records said that tax rules especially advantageous to wealthy filers would have allowed Mr. Trump to use his $916 million loss to cancel out an equivalent amount of taxable income over an 18-year period. [Continue reading…]

The Washington Post reports: Dean Baquet wasn’t bluffing.

The New York Times executive editor said during a visit to Harvard in September that he would risk jail to publish Donald Trump’s tax returns. He made good on his word Saturday night when the Times published Trump tax documents from 1995, which show the Republican presidential nominee claimed losses of $916 million that year — enough to avoid paying federal income taxes for as many as 18 years afterward.

Federal law makes it illegal to publish an unauthorized tax return: [Continue reading…]

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