Category Archives: News

To avoid a 2016 crash, the major powers need to pull in the same direction

By Anton Muscatelli, University of Glasgow

It looks already as if 2016 will be a pivotal year for the world economy. RBS has advised investors to “sell everything except for high-quality bonds” as turmoil has returned to stock markets. The Dow Jones and S&P indices have fallen by more than 6% since the start of the year, which is the worst ever yearly start. There is a similar story in other major markets, with the FTSE leading companies losing some £72bn of value in the same period.

These declines have come on the back of a major shock to the Chinese stock market. China’s stock exchange is very different from that of other major economies, as Chinese companies don’t rely on it to fund themselves to the same extent, using debt instead. All the same, the repeated suspensions of trading as the Chinese circuit-breakers came into operation (as they do when share prices fall too sharply) spooked investors around the world.

On top of that we are seeing commodity prices continuing to retreat. Oil prices have dropped towards $30 per barrel and don’t look likely to increase soon, with Iranian and Saudi oil production continuing to sustain supply. We are seeing many emerging economies dependent on petroleum revenues suffering (Brazil, Russia), and there is speculation that many oil producers (and perhaps even Saudi Arabia) are having to abandon their currencies’ link with the US dollar.

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U.S. accepted 2,500 Syrian refugees over four years while Canada took in more in just two months

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The New York Times reports: Among the Obamas’ guests at the State of the Union address on Tuesday was Refaai Hamo, a middle-aged widower with sunken eyes, a side-swept mop of silver hair and a harrowing account of losing his wife and his daughter in an air raid over his home in Syria.

His presence in the gallery was meant to send a signal to the world that the United States — or at least this administration, in its last year in the White House — believes that people like Mr. Hamo deserve a chance to restart their lives in this country.

“The world respects us not just for our arsenal,” President Obama said in his address. “It respects us for our diversity and our openness.”

The gesture raised an obvious question: Has the United States lived up to its idea of itself as a haven for those fleeing war and persecution?

The numbers offer a partial answer, and they reflect the acute dilemmas that confront countries worldwide amid a historic global crisis.

The United Nations says that an estimated 20 million people around the world, half of them children, have fled their home countries because of conflict or persecution. The war in Syria is now the single largest source of new refugees, casting about 4.4 million Syrians out of their country since the conflict began nearly five years ago.

But unlike in 1951 — when the international refugee convention was forged in the aftermath of World War II, requiring countries to offer protection to those scattered by war and persecution — the political calculus for world leaders has sharply shifted. The costs of taking in refugees have grown and the payoffs, many feel, have diminished.

First, the numbers.

The United States has taken in around 2,500 Syrian refugees since 2012, shortly after the war began.

Canada took in more than that in the last two months of 2015 alone.

Brazil has offered what it calls “humanitarian visas” to three times as many Syrian refugees as the United States has accepted — 7,380 at last count by the United Nations refugee agency.

Switzerland has issued 4,700 special-category visas for Syrians who have family in the country. And Australia, which has come under international criticism for turning away boats of potential refugees from South and Southeast Asia, has said it will take 12,000 from Syria and Iraq.

Germany is in a category of its own, with Syrians making up the largest single group (428,500) of the 1.1 million people who were registered as refugees and asylum seekers there in 2015. [Continue reading…]

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Fearmongering around Muslim immigrants echoes anti-Asian hysteria of past

Murtaza Hussain writes: On May 6, 1882, U.S. President Chester Arthur signed into law the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first in a series of discriminatory legal measures aimed at curbing immigration from Asia. Speaking at the time of its passage, California Sen. John F. Miller, a leading proponent of the law, declared that the Chinese were “an inferior sort of men” and that “Chinese civilization in its pure essence appears as a rival to American civilization. It is a product of a people alien in every characteristic to our people, and it has never yet produced and can never evolve any form of government other than an imperial despotism. Free government is incompatible with it, and both cannot exist together.”

There are echoes of Miller’s demagoguery, and of contemporaneous warnings about the supposed “Yellow Peril” posed by East Asians, in the warnings politicians and prominent media figures issue today about allegedly unassimilable immigrants and refugees from Muslim countries.

“The type of rhetoric we’re seeing today about Muslims is both very similar and also slightly different from that which was used to describe Asian immigrants in the past,” said University of Minnesota professor Erika Lee. A specialist in immigration studies, Lee is also author of the 2015 book The Making of Asian America, which chronicles in part the anti-Asian sentiment that new arrivals often had to contend with. “Like Muslims, Asian immigrants were characterized as a slowly creeping civilizational threat to the security and integrity of the United States, but today, with Muslims, there is also the additional allegation that they have a violent intent to overthrow the existing order.” [Continue reading…]

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It’s official: Sunnis joining Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units

Mustafa Saadoun reports: Sunnis are saying “sign me up” now that Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has approved the appointment of 40,000 Sunni fighters to the Popular Mobilization Units, a force that was once almost exclusively Shiite.

Samer al-Hamdani, who in 2014 fled from Baiji in northern Iraq to Baghdad, says he is ready to return to his liberated city and join up. He told Al-Monitor, “It is essential for the Popular Mobilization Units to include Iraqis of all spectra for it to become a national institution able to earn everybody’s approval and respect, away from sectarian labels.”

He added, “The presence of 40,000 Sunni fighters creates an important and necessary balance within the Popular Mobilization Units. But we hope the politicians’ positions and statements avoid sectarian incitement, so as not to offend the [group], which must be excluded from interventions and conflicts between the political blocs.” [Continue reading…]

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Russia accused of deliberately targeting civilians in Syria

The Guardian reports: Russia is breaching all the norms of war by deliberately targeting rescue workers, schools and hospitals in Syria, the UK foreign secretary has claimed, accusing the Russians of running return raids on targets inside Syria solely to hit civilian rescue workers.

Philip Hammond levelled his charges after meeting Syrian civil defence workers in Adana, southern Turkey. The rescue workers are being trained by the Turks to extract the injured and dying from the rubble of buildings struck by Syrian regime bombs or Russian raids.

In probably his toughest condemnation of Russian tactics since Vladimir Putin surprised the west by intervening militarily in Syria at the end of September, Hammond said: “The Russians are deliberately attacking civilians, and the evidence points to them deliberately attacking schools and hospitals and deliberately targeting rescue workers.

“If you go back for a second strike you know what you are doing.”

The west has long argued Russia is not targeting Islamic State but instead opponents of the Assad regime, but this is the furthest Hammond has gone in condemning the tactics of Russian pilots. [Continue reading…]

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Istanbul suicide bomber went from dental school to ISIS

BuzzFeed reports: The man who blew himself up in Istanbul on Tuesday, killing 10 people, was a former dental student and member of ISIS who may have initially planned to carry out the attack on New Year’s Eve, sources told BuzzFeed News.

Nabil Fadli went from student at Aleppo University to anti-government rebel before casting his lot with ISIS radicals, people who knew him said.

“We fought for our revolution, but they wanted to build their Islamic state,” said one former rebel who fought alongside Fadli against the brutal government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, requesting anonymity because he feared retaliation from ISIS for speaking to the press. “We thought he was a good guy, but he’s a son of a bitch.”

Turkish authorities are still working to piece together a profile of Fadli, who entered the country as a refugee before attacking the heart of Istanbul, ratcheting up Turkey’s conflict with ISIS. But interviews with those who knew him in Syria provide new details about his path to terror — one that has become all too common over the course of the war.

They were still trying to come to grips with Fadli’s attack, which they saw as not only an act of terror, but also a bid to demonize 2 million of his countrymen who have been forced to take refuge in Turkey. “I was shocked when I heard what he did in Istanbul,” said Mohammed Bakir Hussein, who recalled studying with Fadli at Aleppo University, describing him as a well-liked student, quiet and conscientious. “It’s a very terrible thing.”

“He did it to make problems for the refugees,” the former rebel said. “He killed 10 people, but he put the 2 million Syrians in Turkey at risk.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkish prosecutors to investigate academics over Erdoğan petition

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The Guardian reports: Turkey has launched an investigation into academics who signed a petition criticising the military’s crackdown on Kurdish rebels in the south-east that angered President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

More than 1,200 academics from 90 Turkish universities calling themselves “Academicians for Peace”, as well as foreign scholars, signed the petition last week calling for an end to the months-long violence.

Entitled “We won’t be a party to this crime”, the petition urged Ankara to “abandon its deliberate massacre and deportation of Kurdish and other peoples in the region”.

It was signed by dozens of foreign luminaries and intellectuals, among them the US academic Noam Chomsky and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. [Continue reading…]

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Five years on, Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution continues from the ground up

By Adnan Saif, University of Birmingham

Tunisians are marking five years since the culmination of their “Jasmine Revolution”. Since its longtime authoritarian leader Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced out of office in January 2011, Tunisia has been embarking on a long transition to constitutional democracy – a transation that, although very bumpy at times, has nevertheless led to two successful multi-party elections and a new constitution.

The award of the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize to the Tunisia National Dialogue Quartet, representing Tunisian civil society, was but one of many recognitions by the international community for the progress the country has made on its path to a stable and democratic new order.

During my many visits to Tunisia over the last four years, I witnessed the transition process through its highs and lows. My most recent visit was in August 2015, just after the terrorist attack in the coastal city of Sousse that left 38 people dead, mostly British tourists.

In spite of the tragic loss of life and the damage done to the national economy, Tunisians have developed a remarkable resilience and are able to pick themselves up and move on. That capacity is inspired in no small part by the country’s leaders, especially the two “sheikhs”, as some have now began to call them: president Beji Caid Essebsi and Rashid Al-Ghannoushi, respective leaders of the two largest political parties, Nidaa Tounes and Ennahdah.

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Palestinian citizens in Israel: A fast-shrinking civic space

Nadim Nashif and Raya Naamneh write: Israel still portrays itself as a Jewish and democratic state. Yet in practice, as its Palestinian citizens can attest, it functions as a Jewish ethnocracy, leaving small margins of freedom for its Palestinian citizens that have been steadily shrinking in the past few years. Now the Israeli state has come under the complete control of the far right wing, which sees no need even for such limited margins of freedom. This is evident in the wave of discriminatory legislation and the use of the Emergency Regulations against established non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and movements such as the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel.

The many laws that Israeli Knesset (parliament) and government have passed to constrain Palestinian citizens’ political participation and activism include, in 2011 alone, the “Anti-Boycott” law, which prohibits the public promotion of boycotts; the “Nakba” law, which prevents Palestinian commemoration of their catastrophe due to Israel’s creation in 1948; and the “Foreign Government Funding” law, which places onerous reporting requirements on NGOs. These laws have severely damaged the ability of Palestinian parties, NGOs, and activists to freely express their opinions and protest Israel’s crimes, both within and outside the Green Line.

More recently, a bill proposed by former foreign minister and current Member of Knesset (MK) Avigdor Lieberman would prohibit the Israeli Supreme Court from interfering in the Knesset’s Central Elections Committee decision to disqualify MKs based on their political stances. If approved, this bill would directly target Palestinian MKs, such as Haneen Zoubi and her party, “Balad – the National Democratic Alliance,” who have previously been faced with attempts to disqualify them.

In addition to targeting political participation at the government level, Israel has limited or prohibited the work of several NGOs at the municipal level. It is important to note that the NGOs impacted include both Palestinian and Israeli organizations fighting to expose Israel’s human rights violations and the apartheid regime it maintains in all of historic Palestine. [Continue reading…]

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Happy birthday Wikipedia!

As Wikipedia turns 15 years old, it turns out that there is no richer source of information about Wikipedia than Wikipedia itself.

The circularity of being able to read about Wikipedia on Wikipedia, signals the intricate depth of this wonderful enterprise.

So, here’s a sampling of pages that provide doorways into the labyrinth (follow the links to read the complete articles):

Wikipedia’s description of itself: Wikipedia is a free-access, free-content Internet encyclopedia, supported and hosted by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Those who can access the site can edit most of its articles. Wikipedia is ranked among the ten most popular websites, and constitutes the Internet’s largest and most popular general reference work.

History of Wikipedia

Wikipedia notability: On Wikipedia, notability is a test used by editors to decide whether a given topic warrants its own article.

List of Wikipedias: This is a list of the different language editions of Wikipedia; as of January 2016 there are 291 Wikipedias of which 280 are active.

Wikipedia’s Top 5000 pages: This lists pages accessed during the last week (updated once a week).

Wikipedia’s contents overview: This is a portal that allows readers to explore content through a directory system.

Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia

Gender bias on Wikipedia

What Wikipedia is not

Wikimedia Endowment: “This Endowment will serve as a perpetual source of support for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation. It will empower people around the world to create and contribute free knowledge, and share that knowledge with every single human being.

“With your support, we are only getting started. Help us ensure that Wikipedia lives forever!”

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Humans inhabited Arctic 45,000 years ago

Woolly_mammoth

Science magazine reports: In August of 2012, an 11-year-old boy made a gruesome discovery in a frozen bluff overlooking the Arctic Ocean. While exploring the foggy coast of Yenisei Bay, about 2000 kilometers south of the North Pole, he came upon the leg bones of a woolly mammoth eroding out of frozen sediments. Scientists excavating the well-preserved creature determined that it had been killed by humans: Its eye sockets, ribs, and jaw had been battered, apparently by spears, and one spear-point had left a dent in its cheekbone — perhaps a missed blow aimed at the base of its trunk.

When they dated the remains, the researchers got another surprise: The mammoth died 45,000 years ago. That means that humans lived in the Arctic more than 10,000 years earlier than scientists believed, according to a new study. The find suggests that even at this early stage, humans were traversing the most frigid parts of the globe and had the adaptive ability to migrate almost everywhere.

Most researchers had long thought that big-game hunters, who left a trail of stone tools around the Arctic 12,500 years ago, were the first to reach the Arctic Circle. These cold-adapted hunters apparently traversed Siberia and the Bering Straits at least 15,000 years ago (and new dates suggest humans may have been in the Americas as early as 18,500 years ago).

But in 2004, researchers pushed that date further back in time when they discovered beads and stone and bone tools dated to as much as 35,000 years old at several sites in the Ural Mountains of far northeastern Europe and in northern Siberia; they also found the butchered carcasses of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, reindeer, and other animals.

The Russian boy’s discovery — of the best-preserved mammoth found in a century — pushes back those dates by another 10,000 years. [Continue reading…]

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In Syrian town cut off from the world, glimpses of deprivation

The New York Times reports: Nisrine kept teaching school for months as the siege tightened around the Syrian town of Madaya, but had to give up a few weeks ago when her students got too weak to walk to class. A local medic has been surviving on the rehydration salts he gives patients, while a business school graduate picks grass to make soup for his 70-year-old father, consulting shepherds about which ones their long-since-slaughtered flocks liked best.

A dozen women waited anxiously in their doorways one recent evening as an antigovernment activist named Firas trudged slowly up their street handing out small batches of smuggled bulgur wheat.

Firas, though, was in shock. He had taken a meal to the house of Suleiman Fares, 63 and bone-thin, in hopes of saving his life, only to find him already dead. Frustrated, Firas declared that far to the north, rebels allied with those in Madaya ought to resume shelling two pro-government towns — towns full of civilians who are also suffering, tit for tat, a siege from the other side.

“Better to die fighting,” he said that night in one of a series of recent telephone interviews, “than to starve.”

The people of Madaya and neighboring Zabadani have tried, since the siege by pro-government forces began in July, to keep society functioning and adjust to their surreal new set of dynamics. There is the black market across blockade lines, for instance, and the quiet or unexpected ways this type of warfare can kill: heart attacks, stillbirths, a step on a land mine while foraging for food.

And there is the relentless physical and psychological contraction of their communities, only an hour’s drive from Damascus, Syria, and two from Beirut yet suddenly sealed off from the outside world. [Continue reading…]

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Obama ridiculed for saying conflicts in the Middle East ‘date back millennia’

The Washington Post reports: In his seventh and final State of the Union address, President Obama played up the state of the economy, played down the threat of the Islamic State, and introduced a new effort to beat cancer. He also found time for several not-so-subtle swipes at the Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

But for those versed in international relations, there was one line in particular that jumped out from his hour-long speech.

“The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia,” Obama said.

Thousands of years? Many of the conflicts in the Middle East don’t even date back a decade.

The Twitterati spotted the gaffe, and pounced. Obama was accused of peddling convenient falsehoods while others said he was espousing concepts unworthy of an undergraduate university student. Many said that Obama was not only excusing the conflicts, but in effect was making them seem normal and intractable. [Continue reading…]

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Germany’s right-wing AfD party surges to new high amid concern over refugees

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The Independent reports: Germany’s eurosceptic right-wing party has hit a new all-time high in the opinion polls as concern about migration rises in the country.

Alternative for Germany (AfD) would take 11.5 per cent of the vote is a federal general election were held today, according to a poll for Bild magazine.

The party is in third place after Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU, who are on 35 per cent. The centre-left social democrats are on 21.5 per cent.

The Green Party and the Left Party are on 10 per cent each, while the centre-right liberal FDP would re-enter parliament on 6 per cent after it was wiped out in the most recent Federal elections. [Continue reading…]

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Anti-immigrant ‘Soldiers of Odin’ raise concern in Finland

Reuters reports: Wearing black jackets adorned with a symbol of a Viking and the Finnish flag, the “Soldiers of Odin” have surfaced as self-proclaimed patriots patrolling the streets to protect native Finns from immigrants, worrying the government and police.

On the northern fringes of Europe, Finland has little history of welcoming large numbers of refugees, unlike neighbouring Sweden. But as with other European countries, it is now struggling with a huge increase in asylum seekers and the authorities are wary of any anti-immigrant vigilantism.

A group of young men founded Soldiers of Odin, named after a Norse god, late last year in the northern town of Kemi. This lies near the border community of Tornio, which has become an entry point for migrants arriving from Sweden.

Since then the group has expanded to other towns, with members stating they want to serve as eyes and ears for the police who they say are struggling to fulfil their duties.

Members blame “Islamist intruders” for what they believe is an increase in crime and they have carried placards at demonstrations with slogans such as “Migrants not welcome”.

While most Finns disapprove of the group, its growth signals disquiet in a country strained by the cost of receiving the asylum seekers while mired in a three-year-old recession that has forced state spending and welfare cuts.

Finnish police have also reported harassment of women by “men with a foreign background” at New Year celebrations in Helsinki, as well as at some public events last autumn. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS claims deadly Indonesia attacks

The Wall Street Journal reports: Multiple blasts and gunfire jolted the Indonesian capital Thursday in what officials said were coordinated Islamic State-linked terror attacks, killing seven and shattering a relatively peaceful period.

The dead comprised two civilians — a Canadian national and an Indonesian — and five terrorists, Indonesian police said.

The extremist group claimed responsibility for the attacks in an official Arabic-language statement distributed to its social media accounts, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors global jihadist activity.

“In a unique security operation, a group of Islamic State soldiers targeted a group of Crusader citizens who are fighting the Islamic State in Jakarta,” the statement said. “May the civilians of the Crusader alliance and those who protect them know that there is no safety for them in the lands of Muslims after today, God willing.”

The gun-and-bomb assaults struck in the heart of Jakarta’s downtown, popular with shoppers and tourists, when a suicide bomber entered a Starbucks and detonated a bomb, killing himself but no one else, police said.

Two more suicide bombers detonated blasts as motorists left their cars and joined hundreds fleeing the area. A Canadian citizen was shot near the Starbucks and an Indonesian was killed by shrapnel, police said.

Police shot and killed two other militants, leaving all five attackers dead, and said they found six small bombs after sweeping the area. Twenty civilians were injured, including a Dutch national and a German, officials said. [Continue reading…]

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Q&A: Why did terror hit Jakarta’s streets – and what happens next?

By Noor Huda Ismail, Monash University

Explosions and gunfire on Thursday left seven people dead in Jakarta. The blasts and gunfight between Indonesian police and the suspected attackers took place near the busy Sarinah shopping mall in central Jakarta. Indonesian President Joko Widodo spoke of “acts of terror”.

Five suspected attackers are reportedly among those killed. What affiliation if any they had to a terrorist group is currently unknown.

Since 2000, Islamic hardliners in Indonesia have carried out several high-profile bombing attacks. Notably, the Bali bombings in 2002 killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

The Conversation spoke to Noor Huda Ismail, a counter-terrorism analyst from Monash University, on the landscape of Indonesia’s terror groups and the threat the country faces.

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Al Jazeera to shut down American news channel

The Wall Street Journal reports: When Al Jazeera America was launched to great fanfare in 2013, its then-leader boasted he didn’t have to worry too much about profits.

After all, the cable news channel was backed by the oil-and-gas-rich government of Qatar, and oil was trading around $100 a barrel.

On Wednesday, with oil trading near $30, Al Jazeera made an about-face, announcing it was shutting its American cable channel by April 30 for economic reasons.

“The economic landscape of the media environment has driven its strategic decision to wind down its operations and conclude its service,” wrote Al Anstey, an Al Jazeera executive who took over as chief executive of the American channel in May after its founding CEO was ousted in the wake of discrimination suits.

Charles Herring, president of Herring Broadcasting Co., which runs the conservative One America News Network, said his company is interested in buying the channel because of its valuable affiliation agreements. One America is currently available is about a quarter as many homes as Al Jazeera America and would like to put its channel in this wider footprint, he said. A spokesman for Al Jazeera declined to comment. Trade publication Multichannel News earlier reported Herring’s interest.

Partly as a result of its weak negotiating position, Al Jazeera America was forced to stop streaming Al Jazeera English online in the U.S., which had helped it build influence thanks to its close-up coverage of the Arab Spring. It was a condition of its deals with distributors, who are never fans of paying for channels that also put their content online free.

As part of its announcement on Wednesday, Al Jazeera said it will now “expand its existing international digital services to broaden its multiplatform presence in the United States.” [Continue reading…]

Hopefully this means the return of full online access to Al Jazeera English programming. Stay tuned…

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