Arab Spring becoming a Shiite-Sunni war?

The National: The battle of Al Qusair, which has been raging for weeks in Syria between Hizbollah militants and Syrian opposition forces, evokes images of Mohamed Bouazizi’s torched body in Tunisia, which was the first spark of the Arab revolutions, observed columnist Mamoun Fandi in the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al Awsat.

“Al Qusair mirrors the town of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia, in that it signals the start of a new conflict in the Arab region in light of the new strategic direction that Hassan Nasrallah has dictated clearly in his last speech,” the columnist said.

The chief of Hizbollah, the Shiite militant group in Lebanon, gave a televised address on Saturday vowing to fight alongside Syrian president Bashar Al Assad until the bitter end, and promising victory over the rebels.

The strategic implications of his attitude may be the most substantial in the last two years in the changing Arab world, according to the writer.

“Despite his persistent denials of allegations of sectarian alignment, Mr Nasrallah’s speech outlines the nature of the next conflict in the region: a Sunni-Shiite conflict par excellence, and its first combat skirmishes on the ground have begun in Al Qusair,” the writer said.

It is a new manifestation of the Arab Spring where the usual protagonists – autocratic regimes versus pro-democracy oppositions – have taken on a sectarian aspect with the Sunni-Shiite conflicts.

“The Arab region would fall hostage to a religious ideological clash that pits the Shiite camp sponsored by Iran against a Sunni axis of power that is taking shape between Turkey and influential Gulf states,” the writer suggested.

But Hizbollah’s deep involvement in the Syrian war isn’t rooted in ideology alone. It is a real involvement with serious military and operational aspects.

The two-year fight has revealed some real gaps in the Syrian army’s capabilities. It isn’t the fine-tuned combat machine that Iran and Hizbollah thought they could depend on for support.

Hizbollah and Iran’s direct interference in the war is aimed at bridging the gaps of the regular army and reorganising it while also testing the compatibility and the potential for interoperability in their alliance.

Such an advanced level of coordination between the three military forces – Syria, Iran and Hizbollah – creates the exemplary Shiite army that would be tasked with implementing and protecting the new strategic map for the region, the columnist remarked. [Continue reading…]

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The three Islamist trends contesting for power in the Middle East

Rami G Khouri writes: The sudden escalation of fighting in the north Lebanese city of Tripoli is troubling on two fronts and noteworthy on a third. The troubling dimensions are the chronic nature of urban warfare in Lebanon’s streets and the direct linkages between the Tripoli battles and the fighting in the Syrian town of Qusair. The noteworthy element is the growing role of Salafists in the Tripoli fighting, which is part of a remarkable expansion of Salafist groups’ public action in political and military spheres across the Middle East in recent years. Credible reports from Tripoli repeatedly chronicle the increased military role of Salafists in the city, directly reflecting the heightened clashes mirroring the fighting between pro- and anti-Syrian government forces in Syria. Tripoli has long had its own localized confrontation between the Sunni-dominated Bab al-Tabbaneh quarter and the majority Alawite and mostly pro-Bashar Assad quarter of Jabal Mohsen.

Several new elements have transformed this chronic local tension spot into something much more ominous: the direct linkages between the clashes in Syria and in Tripoli, the movement of growing numbers of Salafist fighters into north Lebanon and other parts of the country in recent years, the movement of fighters from north Lebanon into Syria to support anti-Assad rebels, and the Lebanese Salafists’ self-imposed role of countering the influence of Hezbollah in Lebanon and in the fighting in Syria – especially in Qusair this month.

This is not a sudden or unexpected development. Salafists have operated in small numbers in isolated parts of urban or rural Lebanon for some years, often expanding in direct proportion to adjacent conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Pockets of militants battled the Lebanese Army and security forces in the north a few years ago, mainly in the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp. More recently, Lebanese security officials have been quoted in the press as expressing concern about the growing numbers of Salafists moving into Lebanon, anchoring themselves in Salafist-dominated urban neighborhoods such as Bab al-Tabbaneh or in some Palestinian refugee camps outside the control of the Lebanese state, such as Ain al-Hilweh in the south.

The militant nature of the Salafists adds a significant dimension to the nonviolent ways of the majority of Arab Salafists who tend to focus on recreating the “pure” Islamic lifestyles and societies from the earliest decades of the Islamic era, during and immediately after the days of the Prophet Mohammad. Most Salafists across the Arab world in recent years have operated quietly at the neighborhood level, seeking primarily to promote basic Islamic values (faith, modesty, charity, mercy) in the personal and communal behavior of individual men and women. Active political participation in public life was left to the Muslim Brotherhood or its various derivatives, who sought power at a national level, or to jihadists who waged their own battles across their imagined global battlefield.

So today we can witness two important developments occurring simultaneously across parts of the Arab region. Some Salafists have emerged from the shadows to participate in public politics and contest parliamentary and executive power, such as in Egypt and Tunisia most dramatically; and, a few Salafist groups have turned to military means to defend their local, regional or global causes, as we see in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq most clearly.

This means that we now have at least three distinct and identifiable kinds of Islamist movements in the Arab world that are engaged in public political, social or military action: Hezbollah- and Hamas-like resistance groups that are heavily anchored in individual nationalisms; parties like Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Morocco and Jordan that operate within the available channels of political participation and contestation; and, Salafist militants that use violence and intimidation to impose their strict ways on society. [Continue reading…]

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Britain, France urged to show restraint before arming Syrian rebels

The Washington Post reports: A day after halting the European Union’s weapons embargo on Syria, Britain and France are facing criticism from Russia, and pressure at home and abroad, to show restraint before acting to arm the rebels who are trying to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Britain, along with France, scored a diplomatic victory in Paris on Monday, effectively blocking an attempt by other European nations to extend the regional embargo that has prevented them from sending weapons to help the Syrian opposition. Britain said it has no immediate intention to ship arms, and in Paris and London, Monday’s move was portrayed as a precautionary tool aimed at pressuring Assad to negotiate an end to the conflict.

But the dropping of the embargo nevertheless opened a possible route for Britain and France, which have been leading the charge in the West for more support to the Syrian opposition, to act unilaterally should they choose to.

On the heels of French intervention in Mali, the move once again underscored the inability of the E.U. to forge a united front on major foreign policy issues. It was bitterly opposed by a number of European countries, including Austria, that fear any arms sent to the rebels could fall into the hands Islamist extremists within the Syrian opposition and lead to more regional spillover of the conflict.

“We are a peace community, and we would like to stay as a peace community,” Austrian Foreign Minister Michael Spindelegger told journalists in Paris. Spindelegger said Britain and France have agreed not to deliver any weapons until at least August, to give more time to attempts at brokering a peace deal.

Russia denounced the E.U. action, saying it placed Europeans on the brink of supplying arms to a murky rebel force. “You cannot declare the wish to stop the bloodshed, on one hand, and continue to pump armaments into Syria on the other hand,” Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy foreign minister, said at a news conference in Moscow on Tuesday.

At the same time, Russia defended its decision to continue supplying air defense and anti-ship missiles to the Syrian government in accordance with previously signed contracts. [Continue reading…]

The Daily Beast reports: Sen. John McCain Monday became the highest-ranking U.S. official to enter Syria since the bloody civil war there began more than two years ago, The Daily Beast has learned.

McCain, one of the fiercest critics of the Obama administration’s Syria policy, made the unannounced visit across the Turkey-Syria border with Gen. Salem Idris, the leader of the Supreme Military Council of the Free Syrian Army. He stayed in the country for several hours before returning to Turkey. Both in Syria and Turkey, McCain and Idris met with assembled leaders of Free Syrian Army units that traveled from around the country to see the U.S. senator. Inside those meetings, rebel leaders called on the United States to step up its support to the Syrian armed opposition and provide them with heavy weapons, a no-fly zone, and airstrikes on the Syrian regime and the forces of Hezbollah, which is increasingly active in Syria.

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More than 70 killed in wave of Baghdad bombings

Reuters reports: More than 70 people were killed in a wave of bombings in markets in Shi’ite neighborhoods across Baghdad on Monday in worsening sectarian violence in Iraq.

No group claimed responsibility for the blasts. But Sunni Muslim Islamist insurgents and al-Qaeda’ s Iraqi wing have increased attacks since the beginning of the year and often target Shi’ite districts.

More than a dozen blasts tore into markets and shopping areas in districts across the Iraqi capital, including twin bombs just several hundred meters apart that killed at least 13 people in the capital’s Sadr City area, police and hospital officials said.

“A driver hit another car and left pretending to bring traffic police. Another car rushed to take him away and right after his car exploded among people who had gathered to see what was happening,” said bystander Hassan Kadhim. “People were shouting for help and blood covered their faces.”

Tensions between the Shi’ite leadership and the Sunni Muslim minority are at their worst since U.S. troops left in December 2011, and the conflict in Syria is straining Iraq’s fragile communal balance.

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Obama’s witch hunt against whistleblowers

Eyal Press writes: Last week Pfc. Bradley Manning returned to court for his final pretrial hearing in the WikiLeaks case, an appearance that has renewed debate about how to balance the imperatives of national security against the rights of whistle-blowers.

But while Private Manning’s ordeal has received exhaustive news coverage, it may ultimately have a less profound bearing on this tension than a barely noticed memo quietly released by the Obama administration earlier this year.

Issued on Jan. 25, the memo instructs the director of national intelligence and the Office of Personnel Management to establish standards that would give federal agencies the power to fire employees, without appeal, deemed ineligible to hold “noncritical sensitive” jobs. It means giving them immense power to bypass civil service law, which is the foundation for all whistle-blower rights.

The administration claims that the order will simply enable these agencies to determine which jobs qualify as “sensitive.” But the proposed rules are exceptionally vague, defining such jobs as any that could have “a material adverse impact” on national security — including police, customs and immigration positions.

If the new rules are put in place, national security could soon be invoked to deny civil servants like Franz Gayl the right to defend themselves when subjected to retaliation. Back in 2010, Mr. Gayl was accused of engaging in a pattern of “intentional misconduct” and suspended from his job. A Marine Corps adviser who had been deployed to Iraq in 2006, Mr. Gayl claimed he was being punished for publicly disclosing that Pentagon bureaucrats had ignored battlefield requests for mine-resistant armored vehicles, at a time when roadside bombs were killing and maiming soldiers.

Like many whistle-blowers, Mr. Gayl appealed to the Merit System Protections Board, an independent, quasi-judicial agency created in 1978 to safeguard the rights of civil servants, which ordered him to be reinstated. [Continue reading…]

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The reaction to the Woolwich murder denies British Muslims a political voice

Rachel Shabi writes: This debate isn’t just sealed shut, it has round-the-clock protection. In the context of the Woolwich killers, there is to be no connection made to British foreign policy in the Middle East. That, we are told, is because the link is erroneous, an attempt to justify (as opposed to just understand), and an appeasement to terrorists. Oh, and also: those making the link only do so because of a tedious tendency to blame the west for everything.

All that’s bad enough, but British Muslims also say that, for them, making this connection is even harder because of the fear that, despite being just as worried about the issue as anyone else, they will be viewed as having somehow stepped on to a conveyor belt that leads inexorably to violent extremism.

It is no surprise that those policing this closed debate should be politicians and the defenders of a disastrous series of invasions in the Middle East – for who would want to claim that the very policies they deployed or supported are the ones that even partly account for blowback terror? British politicians avoid saying it even as their own security officials warn that foreign policy in places such as Iraq has created a greater risk of terrorism on British soil. And meanwhile, the fact that violent extremists all cite the same thing – occupation and wars in Muslim lands – is hastily dismissed as a crazed coincidence.

Of course, only a really tiny proportion of this anger actually turns violent – but to stifle a discussion over any element of causality is essentially to dismiss the reasons why people might be confused, outraged or frustrated by Britain’s foreign policy in the first place. And the anger over western policy is obvious; its causes both real and palpable. Corrosive, hypocritical western policy is one key subject that is constantly raised in conversations across the Middle East. There’s the long-standing dishonesty in the way the west in effect endorses Israel’s continued military occupation of the Palestinian people. [Continue reading…]

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The adult brain is far more malleable that we thought

David Robson writes: Some 36-year-olds choose to collect vintage wine, vinyl records or sports memorabilia. For Richard Simcott, it is languages. His itch to learn has led him to study more than 30 foreign tongues – and he’s not ready to give up.

During our conversation in a London restaurant, he reels off sentences in Spanish, Turkish and Icelandic as easily as I can name the pizza and pasta on our menu. He has learned Dutch on the streets of Rotterdam, Czech in Prague and Polish during a house share with some architects. At home, he talks to his wife in fluent Macedonian.

What’s remarkable about Simcott isn’t just the number and diversity of languages he has mastered. It’s his age. Long before grey hairs appear and waistlines expand, the mind’s cogs are meant to seize up, making it difficult to pick up any new skill, be it a language, the flute, or archery. Even if Simcott had primed his mind for new languages while at school, he should have faced a steep decline in his abilities as the years went by – yet he still devours unfamiliar grammars and strange vocabularies to a high level. “My linguistic landscape is always changing,” he says. “If you’re school-aged, or middle-aged – I don’t think there’s a big difference.”

A decade ago, few neuroscientists would have agreed that adults can rival the learning talents of children. But we needn’t be so defeatist. The mature brain, it turns out, is more supple than anyone thought. “The idea that there’s a critical period for learning in childhood is overrated,” says Gary Marcus, a psychologist at New York University. What’s more, we now understand the best techniques to accelerate knowledge and skill acquisition in adults, so can perhaps unveil a few tricks of the trade of super-learners like Simcott. Whatever you want to learn, it’s never too late to charge those grey cells.

The idea that the mind fossilises as it ages is culturally entrenched. The phrase “an old dog will learn no tricks” is recorded in an 18th century book of proverbs and is probably hundreds of years older.

When researchers finally began to investigate the adult brain’s malleability in the 1960s, their results appeared to agree with the saying. Most insights came indirectly from studies of perception, which suggested that an individual’s visual abilities were capped at a young age. For example, restricting young animals’ vision for a few weeks after birth means they will never manage to see normally. The same is true for people born with cataracts or a lazy eye – repair too late, and the brain fails to use the eye properly for life. “For a very long time, it seemed that those constraints were set in stone after that critical period,” says Daphne Bavelier at the University of Rochester, New York.

These are extreme circumstances, of course, but the evidence suggested that the same neural fossilisation would stifle other kinds of learning. Many of the studies looked at language development – particularly in families of immigrants. While the children picked up new tongues with ease, their parents were still stuttering broken sentences. But if there is a critical period for foreign language learning, everyone should be affected equally; Simcott’s ability to master a host of languages should be as impossible as a dog playing the piano. [Continue reading…]

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The invisible war: The epidemic of rape inside the U.S. military

Lawrence Downes writes: Does the Pentagon know what “zero tolerance” means?

Military leaders have been claiming for at least 20 years that they have “zero tolerance” for sexual assault in the ranks, during which time the epidemic has raged on, infecting every branch of the service and spurring arrests, convictions, resignations, investigations, Congressional hearings, bills, speeches, reports, recommendations and, recently, a chilling documentary, “The Invisible War,” which will make any parent think twice about encouraging a daughter to serve her country in uniform.

“Zero tolerance” appeared most recently on Wednesday, when Jay Carney, press secretary for the Commander-in-Chief, said that President Obama had “zero tolerance for sexual assault in the military.” The statement was prompted by reports that a West Point sergeant had been videotaping female cadets without their consent, sometimes when they were undressed in the bathroom or in the shower.

Really? Zero? [Continue reading…]

“Zero tolerance” is one of those phrases like “responsibility,” “accountability,” and “transparency,” favored by those who think that fine declarations can function as substitutes for effective action. How many times have we heard a politician or corporate executive solemnly say, “I take full responsibility,” as though the utterance and its meaning were one and the same?

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Geoengineering: Our last hope, or a false promise?

Clive Hamilton writes: The concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere recently surpassed 400 parts per million for the first time in three million years. If you are not frightened by this fact, then you are ignoring or denying science.

Relentlessly rising greenhouse-gas emissions, and the fear that the earth might enter a climate emergency from which there would be no return, have prompted many climate scientists to conclude that we urgently need a Plan B: geoengineering.

Geoengineering — the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the climate system to counter global warming or offset some of its effects — may enable humanity to mobilize its technological power to seize control of the planet’s climate system, and regulate it in perpetuity.

But is it wise to try to play God with the climate? For all its allure, a geoengineered Plan B may lead us into an impossible morass.

While some proposals, like launching a cloud of mirrors into space to deflect some of the sun’s heat, sound like science fiction, the more serious schemes require no insurmountable technical feats. Two or three leading ones rely on technology that is readily available and could be quickly deployed.

Some approaches, like turning biomass into biochar, a charcoal whose carbon resists breakdown, and painting roofs white to increase their reflectivity and reduce air-conditioning demand, are relatively benign, but would have minimal effect on a global scale. Another prominent scheme, extracting carbon dioxide directly from the air, is harmless in itself, as long as we can find somewhere safe to bury enormous volumes of it for centuries.

But to capture from the air the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by, say, a 1,000-megawatt coal power plant, it would require air-sucking machinery about 30 feet in height and 18 miles in length, according to a study by the American Physical Society, as well as huge collection facilities and a network of equipment to transport and store the waste underground.

The idea of building a vast industrial infrastructure to offset the effects of another vast industrial infrastructure (instead of shifting to renewable energy) only highlights our unwillingness to confront the deeper causes of global warming — the power of the fossil-fuel lobby and the reluctance of wealthy consumers to make even small sacrifices. [Continue reading…]

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The decline of human intelligence

Huffington Post reports: Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.

What exactly explains this decline? Study co-author Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.

But this isn’t the first evidence of a possible decline in human intelligence.

“The reduction in human intelligence (if there is any reduction) would have begun at the time that genetic selection became more relaxed,” Dr. Gerald Crabtree, professor of pathology and developmental biology at Stanford University, told The Huffington Post in an email. “I projected this occurred as our ancestors began to live in more supportive high density societies (cities) and had access to a steady supply of food. Both of these might have resulted from the invention of agriculture, which occurred about 5,000 to 12,000 years ago.” [Continue reading…]

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Breeding the nutrition out of our food

Jo Robinson writes: We like the idea that food can be the answer to our ills, that if we eat nutritious foods we won’t need medicine or supplements. We have valued this notion for a long, long time. The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Today, medical experts concur. If we heap our plates with fresh fruits and vegetables, they tell us, we will come closer to optimum health.

This health directive needs to be revised. If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables, we must choose the right varieties. Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

These insights have been made possible by new technology that has allowed researchers to compare the phytonutrient content of wild plants with the produce in our supermarkets. The results are startling.

Wild dandelions, once a springtime treat for Native Americans, have seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider a “superfood.” A purple potato native to Peru has 28 times more cancer-fighting anthocyanins than common russet potatoes. One species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious displayed in our supermarkets.

Were the people who foraged for these wild foods healthier than we are today? They did not live nearly as long as we do, but growing evidence suggests that they were much less likely to die from degenerative diseases, even the minority who lived 70 years and more. The primary cause of death for most adults, according to anthropologists, was injury and infections. [Continue reading…]

Among wild foods, dandelions are probably among the easiest to find and if picking them to eat in a salad or as a cooked vegetable, just pay attention to their habitat — their virtues as a superfood won’t be as great if they’ve been exposed to pollution, pesticides, or pets. And if you’re only used to tasteless salads, be prepared for this plant’s bitter kick.

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The essayification of everything

Christy Wampole writes: Lately, you may have noticed the spate of articles and books that take interest in the essay as a flexible and very human literary form. These include “The Wayward Essay” and Phillip Lopate’s reflections on the relationship between essay and doubt, and books such as “How to Live,” Sarah Bakewell’s elegant portrait of Montaigne, the 16th-century patriarch of the genre, and an edited volume by Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French called “Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time.”

It seems that, even in the proliferation of new forms of writing and communication before us, the essay has become a talisman of our times. What is behind our attraction to it? Is it the essay’s therapeutic properties? Because it brings miniature joys to its writer and its reader? Because it is small enough to fit in our pocket, portable like our own experiences?

I believe that the essay owes its longevity today mainly to this fact: the genre and its spirit provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America. In fact, I would advocate a conscious and more reflective deployment of the essay’s spirit in all aspects of life as a resistance against the zealous closed-endedness of the rigid mind. I’ll call this deployment “the essayification of everything.”

What do I mean with this lofty expression?

Let’s start with form’s beginning. The word Michel de Montaigne chose to describe his prose ruminations published in 1580 was “Essais,” which, at the time, meant merely “Attempts,” as no such genre had yet been codified. This etymology is significant, as it points toward the experimental nature of essayistic writing: it involves the nuanced process of trying something out. Later on, at the end of the 16th century, Francis Bacon imported the French term into English as a title for his more boxy and solemn prose. The deal was thus sealed: essays they were and essays they would stay. There was just one problem: the discrepancy in style and substance between the texts of Michel and Francis was, like the English Channel that separated them, deep enough to drown in. I’ve always been on Team Michel, that guy who would probably show you his rash, tell you some dirty jokes, and ask you what you thought about death. I imagine, perhaps erroneously, that Team Francis tends to attract a more cocksure, buttoned-up fan base, what with all the “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises,” and whatnot. [Continue reading…]

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How wealth of Silicon Valley’s tech elite created a world apart

The Observer reports: Every morning and every evening the fleet glides through the city, hundreds of white buses with tinted windows navigating San Francisco’s rush hour. From the pavement you can see your reflection in the windows, but you can’t see in. The buses have no markings or logos, no advertised destinations or stops.

It doesn’t matter. Everyone knows what they are. “Transport for a breed apart. For a community that is separate but not equal,” said Diamond Dave Whitaker, a self-professed beat poet and rabble-rouser.

The buses ferry workers to and from Apple, Facebook, Google and other companies in Silicon Valley, an hour’s drive south. They hum with air-conditioning and Wi-Fi. They are for the tech elite, and only the tech elite.

This month Whitaker, 75, and a few dozen other activists smashed a model Google bus piñata to pieces. They cheered each blow. The British and US governments may feel the same way, it emerged last week, when politicians in London and Washington accused Google’s Eric Schmidt and Apple’s Tim Cook of dodging corporate taxes.

The internet titans barely flinched. They denied wrongdoing and hit back at what they said were archaic tax codes unfit for the digital era. The defiance startled those unfamiliar with Silicon Valley’s power and confidence.

It did not come as news to San Francisco. The city knows better than anyone that technology companies like having things their way, whether it be taxes, transport or lifestyle. This dominance, critics say, has produced a cossetted caste which lords it over everyone else, a pattern established during the dotcom explosion a decade ago and now repeated amid a roaring boom. [Continue reading…]

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Leak inquiries show how wide a net U.S. govt. cast

The New York Times reports: Even before the F.B.I. conducted 550 interviews of officials and seized the phone records of Associated Press reporters in a leak investigation connected to a 2012 article about a Yemen bomb plot, agents had sought the same reporters’ sources for two other articles about terrorism.

In a separate case last year, F.B.I. agents asked the White House, the Defense Department and intelligence agencies for phone and e-mail logs showing exchanges with a New York Times reporter writing about computer attacks on Iran. Agents grilled officials about their contacts with him, two people familiar with the investigation said.

And agents tracing the leak of a highly classified C.I.A. report on North Korea to a Fox News reporter pulled electronic archives showing which officials had gained access to the report and had contact with the reporter on the day of the leak.

The emerging details of these and other cases show just how wide a net the Obama administration has cast in its investigations into disclosures of government secrets, querying hundreds of officials across the federal government and even some of their foreign counterparts.

The result has been an unprecedented six prosecutions and many more inquiries using aggressive legal and technical tactics. A vast majority of those questioned were cleared of any leaking.

On Thursday, President Obama ordered a review of Justice Department procedures for leak investigations, saying he was concerned that such inquiries chilled journalists’ ability to hold the government accountable. But he made no apology for the scrutiny of the many officials whose records were searched or who had been questioned by the F.B.I.

“He makes the case that we have 18-year-olds out fighting wars and acting like adults, and we have senior administration officials quoted in stories acting like children,” said Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman. Mr. Obama and top administration officials say some leaks put Americans at risk, disrupted intelligence operations and strained alliances.

Some officials are now declining to take calls from certain reporters, concerned that any contact may lead to investigation. Some complain of being taken from their offices to endure uncomfortable questioning. And the government officials typically must pay for lawyers themselves, unlike reporters for large news organizations whose companies provide legal representation. [Continue reading…]

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Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria: Nasrallah promises Assad victory as violence spills into Lebanon

The Los Angeles Times reports: The leader of the militant group Hezbollah on Saturday aligned his powerful movement squarely behind the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad and vowed victory against Syrian rebels, whom he assailed as proxy warriors for the West and Israel.

The televised comments by Hassan Nasrallah were the most definitive to date rallying Hezbollah to the defense of Assad’s government, which has been trying to put down a revolt by rebels supported by the United States and its allies.

The comments came as Syrian government forces, assisted by Hezbollah militiamen, intensified their assault on the strategic Syrian town of Qusair, near the Lebanese border. Both sides reported fierce fighting in Qusair six days after Syrian forces and their Hezbollah allies launched an attack on the longtime rebel stronghold.

“Syria is the backbone of the resistance, and the resistance cannot stand with folded hands while its backbone is being broken,” Nasrallah said in a televised speech, referring to Hezbollah’s signature “resistance” to the state of Israel.

“The battle is ours,” Nasrallah added, “and I promise you victory.”

The Independent reports: Two rockets hit a Beirut neighbourhood earlier today raising fears that the bloody civil war in Syria is increasingly seeping across the border into Lebanon.

AFP reports: Twenty-two Hizbullah members were killed in fighting alongside Syrian government forces against rebels for control of the town of Qusayr, a source close to the Lebanese group said on Sunday.

“There were 22 killed on Saturday. Nine bodies were repatriated the same day and the rest on Sunday,” the source said, declining to be named.

The Syrian army announced that on Saturday its forces had infiltrated Dabaa military airport, a rebel post north of Qusayr, a week into a Hizbullah-backed offensive to recapture the strategic central town near the Lebanese border.

Martin Chulov reports: The workmen had been busy in the room where Hezbollah honours its dead. In one corner of the martyrs’ cemetery in south Beirut, four women shrouded in black sat cross-legged near a new grave, reading from the Qu’ran. Metres away, the yellow flag of the militant group covered a freshly covered hole in a white marble floor. The scent of burning incense wafted across the room.

Another grave, its concrete seal barely dry, had been partly completed nearby. There were seven fresh holes in all; and the grave digger was never far away. More bodies were due on Friday. At this rate, the tiny room – a shrine to Hezbollah’s cause as much as to the men who died fighting for it – would soon be full.

The flurry of activity in the martyrs’ cemetery marks the busiest period for the militant movement since the 2006 war with Israel, in which an estimated 400 of its members died. All the new graves here have been dug in the past 10 days. Many others have been sealed with the familiar yellow and green standard in villages across Lebanon where the rumblings of a very different war have now boiled over into sacrifice and loss.

The newly arrived dead have ushered in a new reality for Hezbollah, one that has taken more than two years of uprising and war in neighbouring Syria to publicly acknowledge: all the fallen have died fighting Arabs in Syria, not Jews in Israel. Such a shift in orientation, for so long denied by the group’s leadership, is now being worn as a badge of honour by the families of the dead.

Many of the next of kin interviewed by the Guardian said that their sons and brothers had been defending Lebanon from foreign plotters – in this case Salafists from the east rather than Zionists from the south. “The threat to us comes from all directions,” said one grieving relative in the Beirut suburb of Chiyah on Friday. “But behind it all is the hidden hand of Israel.”

Oy veh! It’s one thing to be an anti-Zionist, but when people start seeing “the hidden hand of Israel” lurking everywhere, they start to sound more like devotees of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

At this time, instead of obsessing about mischief emanating from the Jewish state, it might be more appropriate to be asking what “resistance” means if its backbone has been provided by Bashar al-Assad.

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Does Israel have a terminal disease?

One of the strange things about a terminal disease is that people often receive a diagnosis that amounts to a death sentence at a time when — as far as they can tell — they are in perfect health. To be told that death is lurking just over the horizon might lead one person to reflect on the meaning of mortality, while another presses forward and lives like there is no tomorrow.

In a strongly secular and death-denying culture, the latter response is less likely to be seen as an expression of denial and more as a life-affirming form of optimism.

You just discovered you have cancer and now you’re about to do a triathlon. Good for you!

Ethan Bronner writes: Israel today offers a set of paradoxes: Jewish Israelis seem in some ways happier and more united than in the past, as if choosing not to solve their most difficult challenge has opened up a space for shalom bayit — peace at home. Yes, all those internal tensions still exist, but the shared belief that there is no solution to their biggest problem has forged an odd kind of solidarity.

Indeed, Israel has never been richer, safer, more culturally productive or more dynamic. Terrorism is on the wane. Yet the occupation grinds on next door with little attention to its consequences. Moreover, as the power balance has shifted from the European elite, Israel has never felt more Middle Eastern in its popular culture, music and public displays of religion. Yet it is increasingly cut off from its region, which despises it perhaps more than ever. Finally, while the secular bourgeoisie, represented by Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party, has forged an unexpected alliance with West Bank settlers, represented by Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi Party, aimed at reducing the political power of the ultra-Orthodox, alarm over the failure to address the Palestinian problem has grown in a surprising place — among some of the former princes of the Zionist right wing.

At a Jerusalem cafe one noon, Dan Meridor, the former Likud minister and son of right-wing Zionist aristocracy, could not stop talking about the Palestinians.

“It is a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads,” he said. “We are living on illusions. We must do everything we can on the ground to increase the separation between us and the Palestinians so that the idea of one state will go away. But we are doing nothing.”

Mr. Meridor, nursing an American coffee at the cafe near the house his parents bought many decades ago in the upscale Rehavia neighborhood, sounded like two other public figures from famous right-wing families — Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister, and Tzipi Livni, the justice minister and chief peace negotiator. Both have made a series of emotional speeches begging Israelis to take the Palestinian issue seriously. They are getting little traction.

The Israeli left is still there, of course, but in increasingly insignificant knots. Two Israeli friends in Jaffa, from which tens of thousands of Palestinians left or were driven out in 1948, have beautifully renovated a house, even preserving a pre-state lemon tree in the courtyard. They are friendly with the Arabs who live nearby. Their children refused military service in protest over the West Bank occupation. And on the outside of their house they have put up a plaque noting that until 1948 the structure was the home of the Khader family, a tiny homage to a destroyed world.

But the family is rare. Mr. Lapid, the rising star of Israeli politics, is a former television host who agrees that something must be done about the Palestinians. But in an interview he offers no specifics other than hoping Mr. Kerry will pressure them to return to the negotiating table under conditions they have long rejected. Mr. Lapid, who spoke in the outdoor section of his neighborhood cafe in north Tel Aviv on a fragrant spring afternoon, was relaxed and buff in his long-sleeved black T-shirt and black jeans. Well-off Tel Avivians at nearby tables argued into their iPhones. Mr. Lapid said Israel should not change its settlement policy to lure the Palestinians to negotiations, nor should any part of Jerusalem become the capital of the Palestinian state he says he longs for. He has not reached out to any Palestinian politicians nor spoken publicly on the issue. As finance minister, he is focused on closing the government’s deficit.

Mr. Lapid may be a political novice but he knows the public mood. A former senior aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed, over a Jerusalem lunch of toasted bagels and salad, that most Israelis considered the peace process irrelevant because they believed that the Palestinians had no interest in a deal, especially in the current Middle Eastern context of rising Islamism. “Debating the peace process to most Israelis is the equivalent of debating the color of the shirt you will wear when landing on Mars,” he said.

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