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‘A chilling warning to others’ in Egypt
In his second letter from Egypt’s Tora Prison, Al Jazeera’s Peter Greste writes: Journalists are never supposed to become the story. Apart from the print reporter’s byline or the broadcaster’s sign-off, we are supposed to remain in the background as witnesses to or agents for the news: never as its subject.
That’s why I find all the attention following our incarceration all very unsettling. This isn’t to suggest I am ungrateful. All of us who were arrested in the interior ministry’s sweep of Al Jazeera’s staff on December 29 are hugely encouraged by and grateful for the overwhelming show of support from across the globe. From the letter signed by 46 of the region’s most respected and influential foreign correspondents calling for our immediate release; to the petition from Australian colleagues; the letter writing and online campaigns and family press conferences – all of it has been both humbling and empowering.
We know we are not alone.
But what is galling is that we are into our fourth week behind bars for what I consider to be some pretty mundane reporting.
I’ve produced work in the past that has involved lots of detailed investigation, considerable risk, and not a small amount of sweat, that I wished the authorities would have been even a little bit offended by. Yet too often it has slipped out with infuriatingly little response.
This assignment to Cairo had been relatively routine – an opportunity to get to know Egyptian politics a little better. But, with only three weeks on the ground, hardly time to do anything other than tread water. So when a squad of plainclothes agents forced their way into my room, I was at first genuinely confused and later even a little annoyed that it wasn’t for some more significant slight.
This is not a trivial point. The fact that we were arrested for what seems to be a set of relatively uncontroversial stories tells us a lot about what counts as “normal” and what is dangerous in post-revolutionary Egypt. [Continue reading…]
Rosetta the comet-chasing spacecraft wakes up
The Guardian reports: In 2004, the European Space Agency launched the Rosetta probe on an audacious mission to chase down a comet and place a robot on its surface. For nearly three years Rosetta had been hurtling through space in a state of hibernation. On Monday, it awoke.
The radio signal from Rosetta came from 800m kilometres away, a distance made hardly more conceivable by its proximity to Jupiter. The signal appeared on a computer screen as a tremulous green spike, but it meant the world – perhaps the solar system – to the scientists and engineers gathered at European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt.
In a time when every spacecraft worth its salt has a Twitter account, the inevitable message followed from @Esa_Rosetta. It was brief and joyful: “Hello, world!”.
Speaking to the assembled crowd at Darmstadt, Matt Taylor, project scientist on the Rosetta mission, said: “Now it’s up to us to do the work we’ve promised to do.”
Just 10 minutes before he’d been facing an uncertain future career. If the spacecraft had not woken up, there would be no science to do and the role of project scientist would have been redundant.
The comet hunter had been woken by an internal alarm clock at 10am UK time but only after several hours of warming up its instruments and orientating towards Earth could it send a message home.
In the event, the missive was late. Taylor had been hiding his nerves well, even joking about the wait on Twitter but when the clock passed 19:00CET, making the signal at least 15 minutes late, the mood changed. ESA scientists and engineers started rocking on their heels, clutching their arms around themselves, and stopping the banter than had helped pass the time. Taylor himself sat down, and seemed to withdraw.
Then the flood of relief when the blip on the graph appeared. “I told you it would work,” said Taylor with a grin.
The successful rousing of the distant probe marks a crucial milestone in a mission that is more spectacular and ambitious than any the European Space Agency has conceived. The €1bn, car-sized spacecraft will now close in on a comet, orbit around it, and send down a lander, called Philae, the first time such a feat has been attempted.
The comet, 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, is 4km wide, or roughly the size of Mont Blanc. That is big enough to study, but too measly to have a gravitational field strong enough to hold the lander in place. Instead, the box of sensors on legs will latch on to the comet by firing an explosive harpoon the moment it lands, and twisting ice screws into its surface.
To my mind, the long-standing belief that comets may have had a role in the origin of life on Earth seems even more speculative than Jeremy England’s idea that it could have arisen as a result of physical processes originating on this planet’s surface.
As much as anything, what seems so extraordinary about a project such as Rosetta is its accomplishment as a feat of navigation (assuming that it does in fact make its planned rendezvous with the comet). It’s like aiming an arrow at a speck of dust on a moving target in the dark.
When cleanliness kills
The Sunday Mail reports: Using mouthwash is a ‘disaster’ for health, increasing the risk of heart attacks and strokes, scientists are warning.
Swilling kills off ‘good’ bacteria that help blood vessels relax – so increasing blood pressure.
When healthy volunteers used Corsodyl, a brand containing a powerful antiseptic, their blood pressure rose within hours.
Professor Amrita Ahluwalia, who led the study, last night condemned the widespread use of antiseptic mouthwash.
She said: ‘Killing off all these bugs each day is a disaster, when small rises in blood pressure have significant impact on morbidity and mortality from heart disease and stroke.’
More than half of British adults regularly use mouthwash, creating a market worth £180 million a year.
The study compared blood pressure levels in 19 healthy volunteers who started using Corsodyl twice daily. Their blood pressure rose by between 2 and 3.5 units (mmgh).
This effect ‘appeared within one day’ of using the mouthwash, researchers wrote in the journal Free Radical Biology And Medicine.
For each two-point rise in blood pressure, the risk of dying from heart disease rises by seven per cent, according to separate research. Such a rise also increases the risk of dying from stroke by ten per cent. [Continue reading…]
Iraq’s battle with Al Qaeda in Anbar leaves 140,000 displaced
The Associated Press reports: More than 140,000 Iraqis have fled parts of Anbar province over clashes between security forces and al-Qaida militants, the worst displacement of civilians in years, a United Nations official said Friday.
The spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, Peter Kessler, described it as “the largest” displacement witnessed in the country since the sectarian violence of 2006-2008. He added that more than 65,000 people fled the conflict just in the past week alone.
Since late December, members of Iraq’s al-Qaida branch — known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — have taken over parts of Ramadi, the capital of the largely Sunni province of Anbar. They also control the center of the nearby city of Fallujah.
Kessler said that many civilians are trapped and suffer from a lack of supplies. [Continue reading…]
Egypt clashes kill 29 on third anniversary of revolution
BBC News reports: At least 29 people have been killed in clashes in Egypt as the country marks the anniversary of the 2011 uprising which overthrew President Hosni Mubarak, the health ministry says.
Rival demonstrations of supporters and opponents of the military-backed government took place in Cairo.
But police broke up anti-government protests, and arrests were reported in Cairo and Alexandria.
Hundreds have died since July when the army deposed President Mohammed Morsi.
Extra security measures were in place for Saturday.
Egyptian Interior Minister Muhammad Ibrahim had urged Egyptians not to be afraid to go to events marking the anniversary of the uprising.
Thousands of supporters of the military and the government gathered in high-profile locations including Tahrir Square – the focal point of the 18-day 2011 popular revolt.
Contrary to Obama’s promises, the U.S. military still permits torture
Jeffrey Kaye writes: The United States Army Field Manual (AFM) on interrogation (pdf) has been sold to the American public and the world as a replacement for the brutal torture tactics used by the CIA and the Department of Defense during the Bush/Cheney administration.
On 22 January 2009, President Obama released an executive order stating that any individual held by any US government agency “shall not be subjected to any interrogation technique or approach, or any treatment related to interrogation, that is not authorized by and listed in Army Field Manual 2 22.3.”
But a close reading of Department of Defense documents and investigations by numerous human rights agencies have shown that the current Army Field Manual itself uses techniques that are abusive and can even amount to torture.
Disturbingly, the latest version of the AFM mimicked the Bush administration in separating out “war on terror” prisoners as not subject to the same protections and rights as regular prisoners of war. Military authorities then added an appendix to the AFM that included techniques that could only be used on such “detainees”, ie, prisoners without POW status.
Labeled Appendix M, and propounding an additional, special “technique” called “Separation”, human rights and legal group have recognized that Appendix M includes numerous abusive techniques, including use of solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation. [Continue reading…]
RNC condemns NSA surveillance
The Hill: The Republican National Committee has formally renounced the “dragnet” surveillance program at the National Security Agency (NSA).
During its winter meeting in Washington, the committee on Friday overwhelmingly approved a measure calling for lawmakers to end the program and create a special committee to investigate domestic surveillance efforts.
The resolution, which declared that “unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights,” among other condemnations, passed the committee on a voice vote with near-unanimous support. Only a small minority of the 168 RNC members dissented.
An open letter from U.S. researchers in cryptography and information security
MassSurveillance.info: Media reports since last June have revealed that the US government conducts domestic and international surveillance on a massive scale, that it engages in deliberate and covert weakening of Internet security standards, and that it pressures US technology companies to deploy backdoors and other data-collection features. As leading members of the US cryptography and information-security research communities, we deplore these practices and urge that they be changed.
Indiscriminate collection, storage, and processing of unprecedented amounts of personal information chill free speech and invite many types of abuse, ranging from mission creep to identity theft. These are not hypothetical problems; they have occurred many times in the past. Inserting backdoors, sabotaging standards, and tapping commercial data-center links provide bad actors, foreign and domestic, opportunities to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities.
The value of society-wide surveillance in preventing terrorism is unclear, but the threat that such surveillance poses to privacy, democracy, and the US technology sector is readily apparent. Because transparency and public consent are at the core of our democracy, we call upon the US government to subject all mass-surveillance activities to public scrutiny and to resist the deployment of mass-surveillance programs in advance of sound technical and social controls. In finding a way forward, the five principles promulgated at http://reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/ provide a good starting point.
The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users. Every country, including our own, must give intelligence and law-enforcement authorities the means to pursue terrorists and criminals, but we can do so without fundamentally undermining the security that enables commerce, entertainment, personal communication, and other aspects of 21st-century life. We urge the US government to reject society-wide surveillance and the subversion of security technology, to adopt state-of-the-art, privacy-preserving technology, and to ensure that new policies, guided by enunciated principles, support human rights, trustworthy commerce, and technical innovation. [See signatories]
White House viewed surveillance report as ‘liberal’
Politico: A member of President Barack Obama’s hand-picked surveillance review group said Friday the White House was swayed by U.S. intelligence officials sympathetic to the National Security Agency and ultimately viewed the group’s findings “as a liberal report.”
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone said that, after receiving the surveillance group’s report, Obama spent a month meeting “with many of the same people we had met with at great length, members of the intelligence community, members of the intelligence committees from Congress largely on one side of the picture.”
“And instead of our report being truly understood as a middle ground, based upon taking into account all of those perspectives on both sides of the spectrum, I think the White House got moved by thinking of our report as a liberal report,” Stone said.
Stone, speaking during a panel discussion at the National Press Club in Washington, said intelligence officials were “pushing [Obama] and the White House generally more to what we can call the right.”
In Egypt as in Syria, al Qaeda seems to serve the interests of secular authoritarianism
BBC News reports: Militants have stepped up their campaign against security forces in Egypt with a series of explosions in the Egyptian capital, Cairo.
Six people were killed and some 100 others wounded, with the biggest blast outside Cairo’s police headquarters.
The attacks come on the eve of the third anniversary of the 2011 uprising against President Hosni Mubarak.
Meanwhile, seven were reported killed in clashes between security forces and Muslim Brotherhood supporters.
The explosion outside Cairo’s police headquarters left four people dead and wounded at least 76.
Hours later, there were three more blasts elsewhere in the city, killing two people and injuring several more.
Local media report that an al-Qaeda-inspired militant group, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis (Champions of Jerusalem), has said it carried out the attack on the police headquarters.
The group previously claimed responsibility for a car bomb attack on a security building in the northern city of Mansoura in December that killed 16 people and injured more than 100 others.
The authorities blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for that attack – something the group strongly denied – and declared it a terrorist group shortly afterwards. [Continue reading…]
Syria’s Assad accused of boosting al-Qaeda with secret oil deals
The Telegraph reports: The Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad has funded and co-operated with al-Qaeda in a complex double game even as the terrorists fight Damascus, according to new allegations by Western intelligence agencies, rebels and al-Qaeda defectors.
Jabhat al-Nusra, and the even more extreme Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS), the two al-Qaeda affiliates operating in Syria, have both been financed by selling oil and gas from wells under their control to and through the regime, intelligence sources have told The Daily Telegraph.
Rebels and defectors say the regime also deliberately released militant prisoners to strengthen jihadist ranks at the expense of moderate rebel forces. The aim was to persuade the West that the uprising was sponsored by Islamist militants including al-Qaeda as a way of stopping Western support for it.
The allegations by Western intelligence sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, are in part a public response to demands by Assad that the focus of peace talks due to begin in Switzerland tomorrow be switched from replacing his government to co-operating against al-Qaeda in the “war on terrorism”.
“Assad’s vow to strike terrorism with an iron fist is nothing more than bare-faced hypocrisy,” an intelligence source said. “At the same time as peddling a triumphant narrative about the fight against terrorism, his regime has made deals to serve its own interests and ensure its survival.”
Intelligence gathered by Western secret services suggested the regime began collaborating actively with these groups again in the spring of 2013. When Jabhat al-Nusra seized control of Syria’s most lucrative oil fields in the eastern province of Deir al-Zour, it began funding its operations in Syria by selling crude oil, with sums raised in the millions of dollars.
“The regime is paying al-Nusra to protect oil and gas pipelines under al-Nusra’s control in the north and east of the country, and is also allowing the transport of oil to regime-held areas,” the source said. “We are also now starting to see evidence of oil and gas facilities under ISIS control.”
The source accepted that the regime and the al-Qaeda affiliates were still hostile to each other and the relationship was opportunistic, but added that the deals confirmed that “despite Assad’s finger-pointing” his regime was to blame for the rise of al-Qaeda in Syria. [Continue reading…]
Syria peace talks near collapse before they begin
Reuters reports: Syria’s first peace talks came close to collapsing before they began on Friday, with the opposition refusing to meet President Bashar al-Assad’s delegation and the government threatening to bring its team home.
Still, figures on both sides later seemed to moderate their positions, expressing a willingness to meet their enemies.
The opposition said early on Friday that it would not meet Assad’s delegation unless it first agreed to sign up to a protocol calling for a transitional administration. The government rejected the demand outright and said its negotiators would return home unless serious talks began within a day.
“If no serious work sessions are held by (Saturday), the official Syrian delegation will leave Geneva due to the other side’s lack of seriousness or preparedness,” Syrian state television quoted Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem as saying.
Friday was meant to be the first time in three years of war that Assad’s government and foes would negotiate face to face.
But plans were ditched at the last minute after the opposition said the government delegation must first sign up to a 2012 protocol, known as Geneva 1, that calls for an interim government to oversee a transition to a new political order.
“We have explicitly demanded a written commitment from the regime delegation to accept Geneva 1. Otherwise there will be no direct negotiations,” opposition delegate Haitham al-Maleh told Reuters. [Continue reading…]
Live Q&A with Edward Snowden
Free Snowden: @mrbass21 Recently several threats have been made on your life by the intelligence community. Are you afraid for your life? Thoughts? #AskSnowden
It’s concerning, to me, but primarily for reasons you might not expect.
That current, serving officials of our government are so comfortable in their authorities that they’re willing to tell reporters on the record that they think the due process protections of the 5th Amendment of our Constitution are outdated concepts. These are the same officials telling us to trust that they’ll honor the 4th and 1st Amendments. This should bother all of us.
The fact that it’s also a direct threat to my life is something I am aware of, but I’m not going to be intimidated. Doing the right thing means having no regrets. [Continue reading…]
Watchdog report says NSA program is illegal and should end
The New York Times reports: An independent federal privacy watchdog has concluded that the National Security Agency’s program to collect bulk phone call records has provided only “minimal” benefits in counterterrorism efforts, is illegal and should be shut down.
The findings are laid out in a 238-page report, scheduled for release by Thursday and obtained by The New York Times, that represent the first major public statement by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which Congress made an independent agency in 2007 and only recently became fully operational.
The report is likely to inject a significant new voice into the debate over surveillance, underscoring that the issue was not settled by a high-profile speech President Obama gave last week. Mr. Obama consulted with the board, along with a separate review group that last month delivered its own report about surveillance policies. But while he said in his speech that he was tightening access to the data and declared his intention to find a way to end government collection of the bulk records, he said the program’s capabilities should be preserved. [Continue reading…]
Al-Qaeda slaughters on Syria’s killing fields
Al Jazeera reports: Al-Qaeda fighters have struck a bloody blow in scenes of medieval violence in Syria’s northern border-town of Jarabulus. Fighting came to a head on January 17, between rebel groups Liwa al-Tawhid Brigade and the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the town, when reinforcements arrived from Raqqa and reclaimed the city in a brutal four-hour battle.
By nightfall, at least 10 men had been beheaded, their heads mounted on spikes, and more than 1,000 refugees fled the 3kms across the border to Turkey.
It’s a shocking turn of events for residents and Free Syrian Army (FSA) fighters alike, who just a week ago believed they were hours away from expelling the al-Qaeda group from their city altogether after surrounding the last 40 fighters in the city’s cultural centre.
But when an ISIL car bomb killed 33 people – all women and children – the FSA brigade called for backup. Instead, what arrived was a 70-car ISIL convoy from Raqqa, an ISIL stronghold 160kms to the south-east. Fighters say half of the militants wore their usual black uniform and half wore camouflage like the FSA, and were uncharacteristically clean-shaven. The disguised fighters tied white bands around their arms to distinguish themselves from the real FSA. [Continue reading…]
Where is Al Qaeda holding its Western hostages in Syria?
The Daily Beast reports: Fears for the safety of dozens of Western captives—among them journalists and aid workers—kidnapped in northern Syria by al Qaeda factions are mounting amid signs they are being moved deeper into territory firmly under jihadist sway. Private security experts and Western intelligence sources say the captives are in the process of being transported closer to the Iraqi border in an operation directed by a Chechen commander.
The movement of the captives appears to be a precaution against them being freed as a consequence of furious rebel infighting that has plunged insurgent-held areas in northern Syria into chaos in the past two weeks.
Speaking on the condition they would not be identified, private security experts working on several abduction cases say a commander called Abu Omar al Chechen, a former Georgian soldier who has sworn allegiance to the emir of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is overseeing the movement of the captives amid heavy security.
“The Westerners are being moved in groups and individually in armored vehicles,” one of the security advisers told the Daily Beast. Foreign fighters, including Saudis, are guarding them, he says. [Continue reading…]
Iran wants full nuclear deal and investment, Rouhani tells Davos
Reuters reports: Iran is determined to negotiate a comprehensive deal on its nuclear programme with major powers so it can develop its battered economy, President Hassan Rouhani said on Thursday, inviting Western companies to seize opportunities now.
Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos, the pragmatic president said Tehran was negotiating with the United States as part of a “constructive engagement” with the world and wanted Washington to back up its words with actions.
However, a day after a chaotic Syria peace conference from which Iran was excluded, he was unbending in his support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Ending “terrorism” backed by some of Syria’s neighbours was a precondition for any settlement of the country’s civil war, he said. [Continue reading…]