Category Archives: News

Trump’s new image-maker honed his ‘dark’ arts in Ukraine

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Financial Times reports: The Donald Trump who greeted supporters in the lobby of Trump Tower on Tuesday night bore little resemblance to the Republican frontrunner of yore.

Atypically gracious and restrained, Mr Trump spoke coherently on jobs and the economy, referred respectfully to his Republican opponents as “Senator Cruz” and “Governor Kasich” and stuck to his prepared remarks. Gone were the lewd insults or jabs at the press.

It was a political makeover like few had seen before — and it bore all the trappings of his new campaign chief, Paul Manafort.

A DC veteran political operative who has worked for the likes of Gerald Ford and George H W Bush, Mr Manafort, 67, was hired by Mr Trump last month to bring order to the Trump campaign and cement Mr Trump’s delegate count, a thorny issue ahead of the Republican National Convention.
Yet Mr Manafort’s true gift lies in political resuscitations and re-brandings, say former business associates.
Over a 40-year career in Washington, he has attempted to engineer them for a cast of, sometimes unsavoury, clients that include Angola’s Jonas Savimbi, the Saudi government, and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos.

But it is his work with Ukraine’s former president, Viktor Yanukovich, that stands out as a particular showcase both of Mr Manafort’s talents — and the controversy surrounding their use. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian activist found ‘tortured’ amid wave of pre-protest arrests

Middle East Eye reports: An Egyptian activist was found by the side of a desert road with his body bearing evidence of torture, relatives said, as security forces continued a wave of mass arrests ahead of demonstrations planned for Monday.

Khaled Abdel Rahman, from Alexandria, is in intensive care undergoing surgery after passersby discovered him on the side of a desert road on the outskirts of the capital Cairo, his sister Reem Abdel Rahman said.

“His body is covered in marks of beating and torture – the electric shocks applied to his genitals were so severe that they caused atrophy,” she wrote on Facebook.

Abdel Rahman was found on Friday afternoon, less than a day after he was arrested during a raid on his home by security forces, relatives said.

The raid was part of a wave of arrests undertaken by police in cities across Egypt ahead of Monday’s protests. [Continue reading…]

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Dutch journalist ‘detained in Turkey’ over Erdogan criticism

Deutsche Welle reports: Ebru Umar, a columnist for the Dutch “Metro” newspaper, says she has been detained for publishing tweets critical of the Turkish president. This comes after a diplomatic spat between Turkey and the Netherlands.

The detention occurred at Umar’s home in the western Turkish resort town of Kusadasi late Saturday, according to a post on the journalist’s Twitter account. [Continue reading…]

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Obama counsels Black Lives Matter activists: ‘You can’t just keep on yelling’

The Washington Post reports: President Obama, speaking to young activists and leaders at a town hall meeting here Saturday, offered some unsolicited guidance to those pressing for change back home and had some tough words for the Black Lives Matter movement.

The president was asked about the social movements that made him change his mind about issues in the White House. He credited the campaign for marriage equality for gay Americans for leading him to reverse his position, and then he pivoted to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The young black activists have been “really effective in bringing attention to problems” of the criminal justice system and police violence, Obama said.

But he cautioned that the group’s leaders had been too dismissive of elected officials. “Once you’ve highlighted an issue and brought it to people’s attention … then you can’t just keep on yelling at them. And you can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position,” Obama said. [Continue reading…]

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Google’s new YouTube analysis app crowdsources war reporting

Wired reports: In armed conflicts of the past, the “fog of war” meant a lack of data. In the era of ubiquitous pocket-sized cameras, it often means an information overload.

Four years ago, when analysts at the non-profit Carter Center began using YouTube videos to analyze the escalating conflicts in Syria and Libya, they found that, in contrast to older wars, it was nearly impossible to keep up with the thousands of clips uploaded every month from the smartphones and cameras of both armed groups and bystanders. “The difference with Syria and Libya is that they’re taking place in a truly connected environment. Everyone is online,” says Chris McNaboe, the manager of the Carter Center’s Syria Mapping Project. “The amount of video coming out was overwhelming…There have been more minutes of video from Syria than there have been minutes of real time.”

To handle that flood of digital footage, his team has been testing a tool called Montage. Montage was built by the human rights-focused tech incubator Jigsaw, the subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet that was formerly known as a Google Ideas, to sort, map, and tag video evidence from conflict zones. Over the last few months, it allowed six Carter Center analysts to categorize video coming out of Syria—identifying government forces and each of the slew of armed opposition groups, recording the appearance of different armaments and vehicles, and keeping all of that data carefully marked with time stamps and locations to create a searchable, sortable and mappable catalog of the Syrian conflict. “Some of our Montage investigations have had over 600 videos in them,” says McNaboe. “Even with a small team we’ve been able to go through days worth of video in a relatively short amount of time.” [Continue reading…]

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It took Barack Obama to crush the Brexit fantasy

Jonathan Freedland writes: o wonder they were desperate that he keep his mouth shut. At his podium in Downing Street Barack Obama flattered his hosts, paid lip service to the notion that the referendum on British membership of the European Union on 23 June is a matter for the British people – and then calmly ripped apart the case for Brexit.

It was the Vote Leavers’ worst nightmare. For years – no, decades – the anti-EU camp has suggested that Britain’s natural habitat is not among its continental neighbours but in “the Anglosphere”, that solar system of English-speaking planets which revolves around the United States. Break free from Brussels and we could embrace our kindred spirits in Sydney, Toronto and especially New York, Washington and Los Angeles. The Brexit camp has long been like the man who dreams of leaving his wife for another woman, one who really understands him.

Obama is that other woman. And today he told the outers their fantasies were no more than that. First in print and then, more explicitly, in person he spelled out that America has no intention of forming some new, closer relationship with a Brexited Britain. On the contrary, a post-EU Britain would be at “the back of the queue” if it sought to agree its own, new trade treaty with the US.

America, he told his British audience – hence his use of “queue”, not “line” – likes the fact that Britain is already married: it works out really well for all three parties involved. His message was unambiguous. Don’t rush into a hasty divorce because you think we’re waiting for you with open arms. We’re not. [Continue reading…]

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Obama says loves Churchill in British row over ‘part-Kenyan’ remark

Reuters reports: U.S. President Barack Obama told Britons on Friday he loved Winston Churchill, rebuffing suggestions that he had disrespected the wartime leader because of a grudge against Britain linked to his Kenyan ancestry.

Obama was visiting London to press Britons to vote to stay in the European Union, and the Churchill issue arose after London Mayor Boris Johnson, who is campaigning for an “Out” vote, brought it up in an article criticizing Obama.

“I love Winston Churchill, I love the guy,” Obama said when asked at a news conference about Johnson’s article.

“Right outside the door of the Treaty Room, so that I see it every day, including on weekends when I’m going into that office to watch a basketball game, the primary image I see is a bust of Winston Churchill,” said Obama, referring to his private office on the second floor of the White House.

“It’s there voluntarily because I can do anything on the second floor,” he said, standing alongside Prime Minister David Cameron, who is leading the “In” campaign.

Obama did not name Johnson, but his remarks were a humiliating put-down for a man who is widely touted as a potential successor to Cameron, especially if voters do opt to leave the EU in a June referendum.

Johnson was accused of racist undertones by an opposition Labour politician over the opening paragraphs of an article he wrote in the Sun newspaper criticizing Obama’s stance on the EU.

In the passage, Johnson speculated about the reasons for the removal of a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office in 2009, during the early days of Obama’s presidency.

“Some said it was a snub to Britain. Some said it was a symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire, of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender,” Johnson wrote in the mass-market Sun tabloid. [Continue reading…]

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The problem with rebuilding a Palmyra ruin destroyed by ISIS – does it simply help Assad?

Adam Taylor writes: London Mayor Boris Johnson unveiled a stunning site in his city’s historic Trafalgar Square on Tuesday: a replica of the 2,000-year-old Arch de Triumph from Palmyra, Syria.

The original arch, once part of the internationally famous UNESCO world heritage site in Palmyra, was destroyed in an explosion by the Islamic State after it took control of the city last year. This new 20-foot-tall re-creation of the monument was crafted by the Institute of Digital Archaeology, a joint venture among Harvard University, the University of Oxford and Dubai’s Museum of the Future, which used 3-D imaging technology to map the arch and digital tools to carve it out of Egyptian marble.

During the unveiling ceremony, Johnson told spectators that they were gathered “in defiance of the barbarians” who destroyed the arch, the BBC reports. But despite the triumphant nature of the day and the clear delight that many had in the rebuilding of the historic ruin, some were concerned about what, exactly, Palmyra had come to represent.

Although few would argue that the ancient sites of Palmyra shouldn’t be protected, there are concerns that the city’s ancient wonders could become a propaganda tool for the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Annie Sartre-Fauriat, an expert on Syrian heritage who works with UNESCO, said the Palmyra site should be evaluated and perhaps restored once the conflict is over.

“For the moment, we should not be fooled of the manipulations of opinion by a bloody dictator,” Sartre-Fauriat said.

Syria’s government declared just last month that it had forced the Islamic State from Palmyra after a prolonged campaign. “The liberation of the historic city of Palmyra today is an important achievement and another indication of the success of the strategy pursued by the Syrian army and its allies in the war against terrorism,” Assad said at the time.

For Assad and the Syrian regime, the capture of Palmyra seems to have been not only a symbol of the newfound prowess the Syrian military had on the battlefield with Russian air support, but also a claim that Syrians were the only ones who could protect Syria’s heritage. Palmyra itself had relatively little strategic value for the Islamic State, Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow at the Middle East Forum think tank, told Al Jazeera as the city was liberated. “Palmyra is more important for the regime, symbolically, to present itself as the defender of civilisation against barbarism,” Tamimi said.

This message has an international audience, too. The Islamic State’s destruction of Palmyra had created a global outcry. Now the Syrian regime and its Russian backers were able to portray themselves as the protectors of the ancient cultural site. In the days after their troops took Palmyra, the Syrian regime quickly took Western journalists to the ancient city to show them what the Islamic State had destroyed and what, by extension, Syrian troops had saved.

In doing so, the Syrian regime was ignoring the damage it had caused to Palmyra, Sartre-Fauriat said. Assad’s troops had inflicted their own damage on the site, Sartre-Fauriat explained, firing shells and rockets into ancient sites and also looting graves. [Continue reading…]

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Ex-CIA officer faces extradition from Portugal to Italy for alleged role in cleric’s rendition

The Washington Post reports: More than 13 years after an Egyptian cleric was kidnapped off the streets of Milan by CIA operatives, one former agency officer now living in Portugal faces extradition to Italy, where she was sentenced to four years in prison for the abduction.

Sabrina De Sousa, 60, was one of 26 Americans convicted in absentia by Italian courts for her alleged role in the February 2003 rendition of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar.

Like the other convicted Americans, De Sousa never really faced the threat of Italian imprisonment, because she had moved back to the United States long before the Italian trials began.

But last spring, De Sousa moved to Portugal to be near relatives. In the fall, she was detained by local authorities at the Lisbon airport on a European arrest warrant.

This week, Portugal’s highest court upheld the country’s lower courts’ rulings, declared that they did not violate the constitution, and said De Sousa should be sent to Italy as soon as May 4. Portugal’s Constitutional Court also reiterated a condition set by the lower courts — and guaranteed by Italy in De Sousa’s European arrest warrant — that once she arrives in Italy, she must be given another trial or a chance to appeal with new evidence, and the ability to call Italian and U.S. witnesses, because she had been tried in absentia. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS’s reply to Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s peace message — photo of beheaded man

The Times of India reports: piritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar said on Thursday that he tried to open a dialogue with the Islamic State group but it rebuffed him by sending him a photograph of a beheaded man.

“I tried to initiate peace talks with the ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) recently but they sent me a photograph of a beheaded body of a man. Thus, my effort for a peace dialogue with the ISIS ended,” he said.

“I think the ISIS does not want any peace talks,” he told the media in Agartala. “Hence, they should be dealt with militarily.” [Continue reading…]

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Bangladeshi university professor hacked to death

BBC News reports: A university professor has been hacked to death in Bangladesh, in an attack police say is similar to killings of secular bloggers and atheists by suspected Islamist extremists.

AFM Rezaul Karim Siddique, 58, was a professor of English at Rajshahi University in the country’s north-west.
He was attacked with machetes as he left home to go to work.

So-called Islamic State militants say they killed him for “calling to atheism” in Bangladesh.

The claim was made by IS-linked Amaq Agency, cited by US-based SITE Intelligence Group which monitors jihadist groups.

However, Siddique’s colleagues earlier said that he had not written anything controversial and was not an atheist, unlike previous victims.

Police believe that he may have been targeted by suspected Islamist extremists because he was involved in cultural activities.

The BBC’s Dhaka correspondent Akbar Hossain says hardline Islamist groups dislike anyone involved in the cultural field. [Continue reading…]

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Fate of world’s coastlines rests on melting Antarctic ice

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John Upton writes: Councilmembers of an island town in Georgia met in a police station near sandy beaches last week to mull a plan for coping with worsening floods. The meeting followed unprecedented king tide floods in the fall that inundated the island and nearby Savannah, and shut down the highway that connects them.

“We’ve had more frequent flooding in areas that haven’t flooded before,” said Jason Buelterman, mayor of the beach town on the eastern shore of Tybee Island, where the population of a few thousand residents swells each summer with vacationers. “In November, water was coming into people’s garages and stuff. It had never happened before.”

The meeting was held eight days before world leaders were due to converge in New York this Friday to ratify a United Nations treaty, aiming to avert the worst impacts of climate change. If the treaty succeeds, Tybee Island and other coastal communities may flood terribly in the coming decades, but will most likely remain mostly above sea level, recent Antarctic modeling suggests. Vast scientific uncertainties, however, mean even that cannot be assured.

Mayors from small towns, planners from the world’s largest cities and U.N. diplomats are being guided on the details of a looming coastal crisis by sea level projections compiled by a U.N. science panel. The panel’s work includes warnings about the amount of flooding that could be caused by melting in Antarctica, and those warnings have been growing bleaker.

The barren continent — the planet’s greatest reservoir of ice — remains shrouded in frigid mystery, and a lack of scientific knowledge about its ice sheet means scientists can’t yet predict how much flooding it could cause as temperatures continue to climb. A recent study, though, added to concerns that it could begin disintegrating, inundating coastal neighborhoods around the world, unless the heady goals of the new U.N. climate pact are achieved.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent findings, from three years ago, appear to have underestimated the potential seriousness of the Antarctic problem, with sweeping implications for the urgency of pollution cuts — and for the futures of coastal communities like Tybee Island’s.

Instead of the anticipated several feet of sea level rise this century if current pollution rates continue, the latest modeling-based science warns that melting could lead to twice that amount. That sobering estimate is a rough one. [Continue reading…]

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Failed state: Can a unity government succeed in divided Libya?

Der Spiegel reports: This may be the only thing you need to know about the situation in Libya: For security reasons, the headquarters of the United Nations Special Representative for Libya is situated 500 kilometers (311 miles) away from Tripoli in the Tunisian capital of Tunis. Martin Kobler’s office is located in a non-descript building in the city’s Les Berges du Lac diplomatic quarter.

For trips to Libya, he has an 18-seat propeller plane at his disposal, parked at the nearby airport. He uses it to commute several times each month to Libya. But sometimes, he isn’t given permission to land, for no apparent reason. On such occasions, the plane remains grounded, along with Kobler, in Tunis.

On a recent Sunday in April, Kobler has invited us to a meal in the restaurant Au Bon Vieux Temps in a posh suburb of Tunis. The view of the Mediterranean is spectacular. A slight man with a warm glint in his eyes, Kobler, 63, was once chief of staff to former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. He has also served as German ambassador to Cairo and Iraq and, most recently, as the UN special representative to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Today he has one of the most difficult jobs in the world. His task is to help create a state out of Libya at the behest of the international community. The fact that Libya was never truly a state, even under dictator Muammar Gadhafi, who was toppled in 2011, doesn’t make things any easier. Considering what he’s up against, Kobler is pursuing his mission with astounding optimism.

The situation in Libya is important for Europe for two reasons. First, because Islamic State (IS) is continuing to spread unhindered in the civil war-torn country. Second, because one of the most important routes for migrants making their way to Europe runs through Libya. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: The United States on Tuesday imposed sanctions on a prominent Libyan politician as part of a broader Western effort to force Libya’s warring factions to accept the authority of a unity government backed by the United Nations.

The Treasury Department said it was adding the politician, Khalifa al-Ghweil, the leader of a self-declared government in the capital, Tripoli, to its sanctions list and would freeze any assets he might have in the United States.

The sanctions are a boost to the new unity government, which was formed under the auspices of the United Nations in December, has strong support from Western countries that are desperate to end years of turmoil in Libya. It also enjoys the allegiance of Libya’s national oil company, the central bank and some of the militias that guard the country’s oil fields. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The United Nations envoy to Libya, Martin Kobler, has called for western forces to help combat Islamic State in partnership with the country’s new government.

With Barack Obama due to meet four European leaders in Germany on Monday for a summit that is likely to focus on Libya, Kobler said foreign powers should offer training and military support, combined with an end to the UN arms embargo.

“The Daesh [Isis] expansion can only be stopped militarily,” he said. “There is a consensus that a united Libyan army needs training; the lifting of the weapons embargo is very important. We need the most modern weapons to finish Daesh.”

Isis has been stepping up its offensive against Libya’s oilfields. An assessment circulating in foreign missions reports that in the last two weeks the group has broken out of its base in the coastal town of Sirte in three thrusts. [Continue reading…]

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Think Merkel’s got problems now? Wait until she takes on Libya

Arne Delfs writes: Angela Merkel is pushing the boundaries of her realpolitik.

A leader whose pragmatism trumps ideology every time, the German chancellor faces international criticism, alienated voters and a rift in her coalition because of her choices in combating the refugee crisis.

That might just be the start of her difficulties. With the European Union deal she pushed with Turkey beginning to deter illegal migration, Merkel is shifting her focus to the surge in refugee flows across the central Mediterranean to Italy. And that means engaging with Libya and Egypt.

Merkel will host U.S. President Barack Obama and the leaders of the U.K., France and Italy in Hanover, western Germany, on Monday to discuss Libya and migration, Syria and Islamic State, along with what the White House described as additional steps NATO allies must take to address the “challenges on Europe’s eastern and southern periphery.”

German intelligence suggests some one million refugees are waiting in the Maghreb countries to cross to Europe, causing alarm in the Chancellery in Berlin, according to an official from Merkel’s party who asked not to be named discussing internal deliberations.

German foreign policy is now “driven by the domestic imperative to bring down the number of refugees: this is Merkel’s live-or-die issue,” said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Germany is set to become “much more active” in North Africa, and “for Merkel this is a challenge, because you have to be cautious about doing things that the public doesn’t understand.” [Continue reading…]

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Invasion of Iraq ‘undoubtedly increased the threat’ of terrorist attacks in UK, said then-head of MI5

Richard Norton-Taylor writes: We can confidently make some assumptions about the Chilcot inquiry, whose report has just been delivered to the Cabinet Office for “national security checks”. It will strongly criticise Tony Blair for promising George Bush that the UK would join the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 but keeping parliament and the public in the dark; attack ministers, mandarins and top brass alike for allowing Blair to delay military preparations; and damn the catastrophic failure to prepare for the subsequent occupation of the country.

What has received far less attention is the devastating evidence Chilcot heard about the invasion making Britain more vulnerable to terrorism. Blair has always dismissed suggestions that his foreign policy decisions were in any way responsible for encouraging terrorist attacks and “radicalising” young British Muslims as a charge perpetuated by “the left”.

The evidence to Chilcot contradicts his assertion. Lady Manningham-Buller, head of MI5 at the time, bluntly told the inquiry the invasion “undoubtedly increased the threat” of terrorist attacks in Britain.

She said she communicated her view to Blair via Whitehall’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). “The number of plots, the number of leads, the number of people identified, and statements of people as to why they were involved,” all pointed to the increased terrorist threat to the UK. [Continue reading…]

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FBI director suggests bill for iPhone hacking topped $1.3 million

The New York Times reports: The director of the F.B.I. suggested Thursday that his agency paid at least $1.3 million to an undisclosed group to help hack into the encrypted iPhone used by an attacker in the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif.

At a technology conference in London, a moderator asked James B. Comey Jr., the F.B.I. chief, how much bureau officials had to pay the undisclosed outside group to demonstrate how to bypass the phone’s encryption.

“A lot,” Mr. Comey said, as audience members at the Aspen Institute event laughed.

He continued: “Let’s see, more than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months, for sure.”

The F.B.I. had been unwilling to say anything at all until Thursday about how much it paid for what has become one of the world’s most publicized hacking jobs, so Mr. Comey’s cryptic comments about his own wages and the bounty quickly sent listeners scurrying in search of their calculators.

The F.B.I. director makes about $185,100 a year — so Mr. Comey stands to earn at least $1.35 million at that base rate of pay for the remainder of his 10-year term. [Continue reading…]

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Europe says U.S. regulations keeping it from trade with Iran

The New York Times reports: With the completion of the nuclear deal with Iran and the opening of its market, European businesses expected a trade bonanza.

But three months after the lifting of many sanctions against Iran, there is growing frustration among European politicians, diplomats and businesspeople over the inability to complete dozens of energy, aviation and construction deals with the Iranians.

The main obstacle, the Europeans say, is their ally, and the driving force behind the historic nuclear agreement, the United States. Wary of running afoul of new sanctions imposed by Washington over Iran’s missile program and accusations that Iran sponsors terrorism, European banks are refusing to finance any of the deals, effectively perpetuating Iran’s isolation from the global financial system.

Europeans also point to new American visa regulations that make it more difficult for them to enter the United States if they have traveled to Iran. Those financial and travel restrictions, they say, make it nearly impossible to reach agreements with their Iranian counterparts. [Continue reading…]

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This is why the U.S. still backs Saudi Arabia

Christopher Dickey writes: Long before his visit to Riyadh this week, when President Barack Obama was asked if the Saudis were America’s friends, he said coyly, “It’s complicated.” During his visit, a veteran of the Saudi intelligence services told me, with a similar note of irony, “It’s a special relationship — and there are special differences.”

No kidding.

How are Americans supposed to get behind a government that carries out dozens of beheadings on a single day, that has shown a recent penchant for waging wars it can’t manage to win, that supports the preaching of an extreme version of Islam that helps prepare the way for jihadists being groomed around the world, and has such a screwy relationship with women, giving them strong educations (they are 55 percent of the students in Saudi universities) then refusing to allow them to drive cars or walk the streets without head coverings?

Add to that, the suspicion lingering for the last 15 years that Saudi officials, not just Saudi citizens, were involved in some way with the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. [Continue reading…]

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