Category Archives: News

Second commander of Syrian rebels assassinated in two weeks

McClatchy reports: A key commander of the U.S.-supported Syrian rebel forces was assassinated in a car bomb attack in southern Turkey Wednesday, a sign that the war raging next door is spilling across the border again.

The target of the attack was Col. Jemil Radoon, a defected Syrian Army officer who lives in the ancient city of Antakya. Turkish officials said he had just turned on the ignition of his black Hyundai hatchback when a bomb exploded. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Turkish government officials blamed the Assad regime in Syria and said it was part of a campaign to assassinate rebel officers. Other defected officers are also targeted, a security official said, citing field intelligence. [Continue reading…]

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Two-factor authentication phishing from Iran

The Daily Beast reports: Iranian hackers have now found a way to get around Google’s two-step verification system and infiltrate GMail’s most elaborate consumer security system, according to a new report.

The Citizen Lab’s John Scott-Railton and Katie Kleemola outlined a few new ways that Iranian hackers can compromise the accounts of political dissidents, or even everyday citizens.

“Their targets are political, and include Iranian activists, and even a director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation,” said Scott-Railton in an email, referring to the digital rights organization. “In some cases they even pretend to be Reuters journalists calling to set up interviews.”

The report says attacks on political targets are new. But the methodology of the hack has been going on for years, especially as reliance on so-called “two-factor authentication” — using something in addition to a password to get into your account — has gone up. [Continue reading…]

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Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test

Nature reports: Don’t trust everything you read in the psychology literature. In fact, two thirds of it should probably be distrusted.

In the biggest project of its kind, Brian Nosek, a social psychologist and head of the Center for Open Science in Charlottesville, Virginia, and 269 co-authors repeated work reported in 98 original papers from three psychology journals, to see if they independently came up with the same results.

The studies they took on ranged from whether expressing insecurities perpetuates them to differences in how children and adults respond to fear stimuli, to effective ways to teach arithmetic. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. military officials suspected of covering up the lack of progress in the war against ISIS

The New York Times reports: The Pentagon’s inspector general is investigating allegations that military officials have skewed intelligence assessments about the United States-led campaign in Iraq against the Islamic State to provide a more optimistic account of progress, according to several officials familiar with the inquiry.

The investigation began after at least one civilian Defense Intelligence Agency analyst told the authorities that he had evidence that officials at United States Central Command — the military headquarters overseeing the American bombing campaign and other efforts against the Islamic State — were improperly reworking the conclusions of intelligence assessments prepared for policy makers, including President Obama, the government officials said.

Fuller details of the claims were not available, including when the assessments were said to have been altered and who at Central Command, or Centcom, the analyst said was responsible. The officials, speaking only on the condition of anonymity about classified matters, said that the recently opened investigation focused on whether military officials had changed the conclusions of draft intelligence assessments during a review process and then passed them on. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu’s lackeys storm the airwaves in an ad war against the Iran deal

Bloomberg reports: Nationally, 14 groups have spent an estimated $14 million to run about 24,600 TV spots arguing for and against the Iran agreement in 55 local broadcast markets and national cable, ­according to data compiled by Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks political advertising. The largest buyer has been Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, which was created to oppose the Iran deal by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC. It’s spent about $9 million buying more than 15,500 TV ads in 34 local markets and on national cable. It plans to spend as much as $20 million advertising against the Iran agreement by the time Congress votes in September—far more than the $1.7 million AIPAC has spent this year lobbying Congress, its main activity. “There are still a number of undecided senators and members of Congress,” says Patrick Dorton, a spokesman for Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran. “Our goal is to educate the public and encourage the public to weigh in with their elected representatives.”

Montana saw a spike in Iran-related advertising before Democratic Senator Jon Tester announced Aug. 13 that he’d vote for the deal. More than 1,000 TV spots ran in Billings, Butte, Great Falls, and Missoula through Aug. 24, according to CMAG. Most were paid for by a group called Veterans Against the Deal, which now can shift the focus of its $1 million ad campaign more toward North Dakota. The nonprofit, created in July, has not disclosed its donors. [Continue reading…]

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Germany is the first European country to free Syrian refugees from a draconian bureaucratic ‘trap’

Quartz reports: Germany, which has a better track record than most European countries on sheltering refugees, has made a move to address one of the more lunatic aspects of the European immigration crisis. The country has said (link in German) it will stop sending away refugees of the five-year war in Syria, and instead process their asylum claims in Germany.

Why doesn’t that already happen? It’s the result of a 2003 piece of legislation that human rights organizations have long been describing as a “trap.”

The legislation is called the Dublin Protocol, and was designed to stop migrants traveling through Europe to countries with favorable regimes before claiming asylum. If people need asylum, the argument ran, they should be claiming it straight away — and the state in which they do so should remain responsible for processing it.

There is a huge problem with this logic, however, and many northern European countries have chosen to turn a blind eye to it: geography. Most people fleeing from the wars in Syria or Afghanistan, as well as those trying to get to Europe for economic reasons, come by land or by sea. The land route brings them through Turkey, which is not a member of the EU, to Greece and Bulgaria, which are.

The sea routes, which are much more perilous and have led to thousands of deaths this year alone, lead migrants to Greece, to Italy, or to the islands of Lampedusa and Malta. Without the funds or paperwork necessary, most asylum claimants aren’t able to fly into the airports of northern European countries. [Continue reading…]

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Only three of 116 Guantánamo detainees were captured by U.S. forces

The Guardian reports: Only three of the 116 men still detained at Guantánamo Bay were apprehended by US forces, a Guardian review of military documents has uncovered.

The foundations of the guilt of the remaining 113, whom US politicians often refer to as the “worst of the worst” terrorists, involves a degree of faith in the Pakistani and Afghan spies, warlords and security services who initially captured 98 of the remaining Guantánamo population.

According to an analysis of long-neglected US military capture information, 68 of the residual Guantánamo detainees were captured by Pakistani security forces or apparent informants. Another 30 were sent to the notorious wartime facility by forces from Afghanistan – mostly warlords and affiliates of early US efforts to topple the Taliban after 9/11. [Continue reading…]

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Over 2,000 Russian troops killed during Ukraine invasion

Paul Goble writes: A Moscow newspaper reported that Russia had lost “no fewer than 2,000” dead in the fighting in Ukraine and another 3,200 serious casualties by February 1, 2015, a story that stayed up until Kremlin censors removed those lines from the article lest it call into question Vladimir Putin’s constant refrain that there are no Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

In an article about increased pay for Russian soldiers in 2015, Delovaya zhizn reported these numbers, but they didn’t remain on the site for very long, according to Konstantin Zelfanov of Novy Region-2 yesterday.

But the original uncensored article remained accessible in a cached version, and the key passage of that reads as follows, Zelfanov says. “The government of the Russian Federation has taken an important decision about the monetary compensation of military personnel who have taken part in military actions in the east of Ukraine.”

“For the families of those who have died in the course of military actions in the east of Ukraine, monetary compensation has been set at three million rubles [40,000 US dollars] and for those who have become invalids during the military actions at 1.5 million rubles [20,000 US dollars].”

“In addition,” the original version said, Moscow plans to pay contract soldiers a supplement of 1,800 rubles [25 US dollars] for each day of combat. As of February 1, 2015, Moscow had already paid monetary compensation “for more than 2,000 families of soldiers who had been killed and for 3,200 soldiers who were seriously wounded and recognized as invalids.” [Continue reading…]

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The giant carbon footprint of Burning Man

Grist reports: This year, 70,000 people will land in Black Rock City (that is, if the apocalyptic bug infestation doesn’t change some minds). That’s 70,000 people who are traveling from all over the world, and they ain’t taking sail boats. Plus there’s the actual burning man, a 100-plus-foot sculpture that is doused with gas and lit up while thousands of white people dance around it. So, just how much carbon does Burning Man burn?

Hard to know exactly, but last year LA Weekly unearthed a 2007 website called Cooling Man, where concerned Burners calculated the carbon footprint of the event. According to Cooling Man:

Burning Man 2006 generated an estimated 27,000 tons of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This figure includes emissions from participant and staff travel to and from Black Rock City, as well as on-Playa power generation, art cars, fire art and, of course, burning the man. Dividing ~27,000 tons by ~40,000 people yields an estimated ~0.7 tons per Burning Man participant.

LA Weekly reported that 0.7 tons is actually double the weekly national average per person. And if we assume that the yield per Burner hasn’t changed enormously since 2006 (although it probably has now that Mark Zuckerberg and his buddies get helicoptered in) and update the numbers to reflect the 2015 crowd estimates, this year’s event will spew a minimum of 49,000 tons of greenhouse gases. How much is that? About the same that the nation of Swaziland (population 1.2 million) produces in a week. [Continue reading…]

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As Turkey targets militants, war grips Kurdish lands once again

The New York Times reports: Across the Kurdish lands of southeast Turkey, a bitter war that had long been stilled by a truce has suddenly come roaring back, threatening to undo a hard-won economic turnaround here and adding a new battlefield to a region already consumed by chaos.

Cafes in this city that usually stay open until midnight now close at dusk. Jails are filling, once again, with Kurdish activists and officials accused of supporting terrorism. Residents say they are stocking up on weapons, just in case.

In the mountains, Kurdish guerrillas hastily set up vehicle checkpoints and then dissolve into the rugged terrain in a game of cat and mouse with Turkish soldiers. In the countryside, burned and mangled vehicles blight a landscape blackened by forest fires set by the Turkish Army — a tactic that destroys militant hide-outs but also apple and cherry orchards and stocks of feed for villagers’ cows and goats.

“It shouldn’t be like this,” said Kudbettin Ersoy, 66, who sells watermelons here from a wooden cart. “I was hopeful that peace would come and the blood would stop flowing. We are all citizens of this country.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey jails five mayors in Kurdish southeast over ‘self-rule’ claims

AFP reports: Turkish courts on Sunday remanded in custody five mayors from the Kurdish-dominated southeast on charges of seeking to destroy national unity by allegedly supporting calls for regional self-rule, reports said.

The investigation comes as Turkey carries out its biggest operation in years against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants who have responded by tearing up a 2013 ceasefire and staging daily attacks against the security forces.

A court in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir placed under arrest the co-mayors of the city’s central Sur district, Seyid Narin and Fatma Sik Barut, the official Anatolia news agency reported. [Continue reading…]

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New report of ISIS using poison gas in Syria

The New York Times reports: The Islamic State may have used chemical agents in an attack against civilians and rival insurgents in northern Syria late last week, according to local rebels and an international aid group.

The assault on Friday in the city of Marea involved more than 50 shells and was centered on civilian areas, the Syrian American Medical Society, a humanitarian group, reported.

After the attack, the group’s field hospital received more than 50 patients, 23 of whom, including some children, showed symptoms of chemical exposure, including coughing, vomiting, wheezing and severe itching. Some also had blisters associated with mustard gas, the society said in a statement.

The report was corroborated by local rebel forces, who claimed that shells had been fired from Isnibil, a village east of Marea that is controlled by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

“At least half of the 50 mortar and artillery shells fired by ISIS contained poisonous mustard gas,” said Hussein Nasir, a spokesman for a Syrian rebel group, the Shami Front. [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s president tells West Bank settlers: ‘Our right to land’ is beyond debate

The Times of Israel reports: President Reuven Rivlin told a gathering of settler leaders Monday that Israel’s right to the land is beyond political debate, and that this is a basic fact of Zionism that no one should ever doubt.

At a meeting in the President’s Residence in Jerusalem with chairmen of West Bank regional councils, Rivlin praised the resilience of settlers in the face of recent Palestinian attacks against settlers and soldiers.

“Our right to the land is not a matter of political debate,” he declared. “It is a fundamental fact of modern Zionism. We must not let anyone have the feeling that we doubt our right to the land.

“In the last few months, and especially in the last few days, the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria has been dealing with grave terror attacks,” Rivlin said, using the biblical term for the West Bank regions. “Thus, in these days our meeting is especially important. As always, the pioneers walking ahead of the camp meet the toughest resistance, and pay, together with IDF soldiers, a heavy price.

“We have to cope,” he continued. “We have the ability to cope with the current wave of terror, to fight against it, and not to give anyone the power to disrupt daily life. We must be an iron wall, a strong shield against those who wish to rise against us.” [Continue reading…]

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Europe’s insane plan to destroy migrant boats

Barbie Latza Nadeau writes: Human smugglers in Libya have moved more than 38,000 people across the Mediterranean Sea since the beginning of 2015, killing as many as 2,000 along the way. But a new plan by the European Union to target smugglers’ vessels may soon make the journey even deadlier.

Desperate times may call for desperate measures, and the EU’s plan to systematically “identify, capture and destroy vessels before they are used by traffickers” is case in point. The plan was hatched in emergency talks after as many as 950 migrants died on April 18, fueling promises by EU leaders to “smash the gangs” of traffickers that operate unchecked in Libya.

The plan was presented to the United Nations Security Council in New York on Monday by Federica Mogherini, an Italian who is the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy. In asking the U.N. Security Council to bless military action against the Libyan-based smuggler rings, she promised that the EU would take full responsibility for “identifying trafficking vessels for destruction before they are filled with migrants.”

But the reality is that such a tactic could become a deadly game of Russian roulette, since the traffickers don’t exactly play by the rules.

At face value, the idea itself could be considered noble—stop the merchants of death by destroying their lethal weapons, in this case unsafe fishing vessels that are packed over capacity with desperate migrants. But everyone from the head of the United Nations to those welcoming migrants on the shores of Italy warn that just one mistake will stain Europe’s hands with the blood of every dead migrant officials say they are trying to save.

In a far-reaching exposé from the epicenter of the trafficking ring in Zuwara, Libya, the Guardian pinpointed the biggest problem with destroying smuggler vessels. “Smuggling boats start life as fishing trawlers. The moment of transition from the latter to the former is informal and almost imperceptible to outsiders,” the author writes after interviewing several smugglers. [Continue reading…]

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How Russia is exporting jihadists to Syria

Michael Weiss writes: Based on extensive fieldwork in one village in the North Caucasus, [Novaya Gazeta] reporter Elena Milashina has concluded that the “Russian special services have controlled” the flow of jihadists into Syria, where they have lately joined up not only with ISIS but other radical Islamist factions. In other words, Russian officials are added to the ranks of terrorists which the Russian government has deemed a collective threat to the security and longevity of its dictatorial ally on the Mediterranean, Bashar al-Assad.

It may sound paradoxical — helping the enemy of your friend — but the logic is actually straightforward: Better the terrorists go abroad and fight in Syria than blow things up in Russia. Penetrating and co-opting terrorism also has a long, well-attested history in the annals of Chekist tradecraft.

Milashina makes her case study the village of Novosasitili in Dagestan’s Khasavyurt district. Since 2011, nearly 1 percent of the total population of Novosasitili has gone to Syria — 22 out of 2,500 residents. Of that figure, five were killed and five have returned home. But they didn’t leave Russia, a country notoriously difficult to enter and exit, without outside help. The FSB [Federal Security Service] established a “green corridor” to allow them to migrate first to Turkey, and then to Syria. (Russians, including those living in the North Caucasus, can catch any of the daily non-stop flights to Istanbul and visit Turkey without a visa.)

“I know someone who has been at war for 15 years,” Akhyad Abdullaev, head of the village, tells Milashina. “He fought in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now in Syria. He surely cannot live peacefully. If such people go off to war, it’s no loss. In our village there is a person, a negotiator. He, together with the FSB, brought several leaders out of the underground and sent them off abroad on jihad. The underground resistance has been weakened, we’re well off. They want to fight—let them fight, just not here.” [Continue reading…]

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Beheading of Khaled al-Asaad, keeper of Palmyra, unites Syria in condemnation; ISIS blows up temple

The Guardian reports: Islamic State’s execution of Khaled al-Asaad, the keeper of Palmyra’s extraordinary cultural artefacts, has inspired a rare consensus among Syria’s other political factions.

The archaeologist and historian reportedly opposed the 2011 uprising against the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, but his murder has provoked grief and condemnation from regime loyalists and opposition activists. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Militants from the Islamic State set off explosions at a temple in the ancient ruins of Palmyra in Syria, activists and government officials said on Sunday, continuing a pattern of destruction that they have visited upon historical sites across the territory they control there and in Iraq.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an activist and monitoring group based in Britain, said Sunday in a statement that Islamic State fighters detonated “a large quantity of explosives” that they had arranged around the Temple of Baalshamin, one of the most grand and well-preserved structures in the sprawling complex of ruins. A government official told reporters that it was heavily damaged by the blast.

The temple stood “dozens of meters” away from a Roman amphitheater where the Islamic State held a mass execution, killing 25 prisoners, in a video released last month, the activist group said. The entire ancient city of Palmyra is a Unesco World Heritage site. [Continue reading…]

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Ehud Barak’s Iran bombshell could shake up Israeli politics

The Associated Press reports: Former Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s comments that Israel nearly attacked Iran’s nuclear facilities but the plan was scuttled by military men and cowardly politicians could shake up Israeli politics.

The leaked interview, in which Barak also described Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as indecisive and obsessively pessimistic, was the talk of the town Sunday in an Israel obsessed about Iran. But beyond the hand-wringing, the always calculating Barak may have been focused on the future, perhaps for a final run at the country’s leadership.

Also a former prime minister, Barak enjoys respect as the last leader of the moderate Labor Party to win an election, defeating Netanyahu in 1999. But he also is seen by analysts as having squandered his opportunity, lasting just two years in a term that cemented his reputation as brilliant but arrogant, and prone to overcomplicated analysis and nonstop machinations. [Continue reading…]

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