How dogs helped early modern humans

Pat Shipman writes: We all know the adage that dogs are man’s best friend. And we’ve all heard heartwarming stories about dogs who save their owners—waking them during a fire or summoning help after an accident. Anyone who has ever loved a dog knows the amazing, almost inexpressible warmth of a dog’s companionship and devotion. But it just might be that dogs have done much, much more than that for humankind. They may have saved not only individuals but also our whole species, by “domesticating” us while we domesticated them.

One of the classic conundrums in paleoanthropology is why Neandertals went extinct while modern humans survived in the same habitat at the same time. (The phrase “modern humans,” in this context, refers to humans who were anatomically—if not behaviorally—indistinguishable from ourselves.) The two species overlapped in Europe and the Middle East between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago; at the end of that period, Neandertals were in steep decline and modern humans were thriving. What happened?

A stunning study that illuminates this decisive period was recently published in Science by Paul Mellars and Jennifer French of Cambridge University. They argue, based on a meta-analysis of 164 archaeological sites that date to the period when modern humans and Neandertals overlapped in the Dordogne region of southwest France, that the modern-human population grew so rapidly that it overwhelmed Neandertals with its sheer numbers.

Because not all the archaeological sites in the study contained clearly identifiable remains of modern humans or Neandertals, Mellars and French made a common assumption: that sites containing stone tools of the Mousterian tradition had been created by Neandertals, and those containing more sophisticated and generally later stone tools of the Upper Paleolithic were made by modern humans. This link between tool and toolmaker is well supported by sites that do contain hominin remains, but there is nothing inherent in a stone tool that tells you who made it—not even if you find a skeleton right next to it. Still, stone tools are one of the best available indicators of which species—modern human or Neandertal—inhabited a particular location.

Mellars and French compared the number and sizes of Neandertal and modern-human archaeological sites, as well as the density of tools and the weight per square meter of prey animals, represented by fossils, in those sites. They standardized their results for 1,000-year periods to compensate for the varying amounts of time that the different locations had been occupied. In every respect, modern humans surpassed Neandertals. In fact, the greater success of modern humans was so clear that, according to Mellars and French’s calculations, the human population increased tenfold over the 10,000-year overlap period. Modern humans thrived and Neandertals did not—even though Neandertals had lived in the European habitat for about 250,000 years before modern humans “invaded.” Why weren’t Neandertals better adapted to their environment than the newcomers?

There is no shortage of hypotheses. Some favor climate change, others a modern-human advantage derived from the use of more advanced hunting weapons or greater social cohesion. Now, several important and disparate studies are coming together to suggest another answer, or at least another good hypothesis: The dominance of modern humans could have been in part a consequence of domesticating dogs—possibly combined with a small, but key, change in human anatomy that made people better able to communicate with dogs. [Continue reading…]

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Why Israel needs war

Israel is very attached to its US-funded Qualitative Military Edge. The idea is that Israel is uniquely vulnerable in a uniquely dangerous neighborhood and the only way it can guarantee its survival is by keeping technologically ahead of its enemies. But there’s another dimension to this that gets far less attention: Israel’s need to perpetuate a climate of war in order to sustain a demand for innovation among the customers of its lucrative arms industry. If regional and global peace were to ever break out, it would be a disaster to Israel’s economy.

At Wired, Amir Mizroch writes: Nano drones that an infantryman can pull out of his pocket; helicopters piloted by robots who extract wounded soldiers from the battlefield; micro satellites on demand; large spy balloons in the upper reaches of the stratosphere; virtual training with a helmet from your office; algorithms that resolve pilots’ ethical dilemmas (so they won’t have to deal with those pesky war crimes tribunals); and farming out code to a network of high school kids.

Since mid-2009, some 300 Israel Air Force officers have been brainstorming about the next steps for one of the world’s most advanced air forces, and the main pillar of Israel’s strategic power. This “IAF 2030″ project has just come to an end. Besides a standard press release issued by the military, little has been disclosed about it. Exclusive details are reported here for the first time.

The task of preparing the project was given to Major Nimrod Segev, head of the IAF’s long-term planning department. Segev divided his 300 officers into nine teams: Advanced Information Technology, Vast Data, Space, Cyber, Environment, Intelligence, Human Factor, Organizational Behavior, and a ‘Red Team,’ to challenge the other eight’s assumptions.

The participants were asked to think ahead — far ahead — something that doesn’t come easy in the military culture here, where long-term planning is almost unheard of. What changes would it have to make in weapons systems, platforms, technology, manpower, and organizational behavior to meet potential new threats? What new planes, guidance systems, and technology would they want? Let loose, the officers were told. Don’t worry about the how and the how much; just let your imaginations go. The air force even brought in Israel’s number one dreamer — President Shimon Peres — to fire their imaginations with a pep talk.

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Azerbaijan: Israel’s reluctant friend

Kevjn Lim writes: A new and perhaps surprising country took center stage recently in the ongoing row over Iran’s nuclear program – Azerbaijan. Citing anonymous “high-level sources” from U.S. diplomatic and intelligence circles, a controversial article in Foreign Policy at the end of March suggested the possibility that Israel might have been proffered the use of Azerbaijani airstrips for any strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The article attracted impassioned rebuttals from officials and observers alike. But the question remains: how did Azerbaijan get sucked into the controversy over Tehran’s nuclear plans in the first place?

Azerbaijan’s relations with Israel developed in earnest 20 years ago, and have grown significantly in depth and scope ever since. With bilateral trade currently hovering around $4 billion, Azerbaijan is Israel’s top trading partner among Muslim states, and the second largest source of Israel’s oil after Russia.

Conversely, Israel represents Azerbaijan’s second largest oil customer, and via the Ashkelon-Eilat Trans-Israel Pipeline, a crucial transit point for Azeri oil flowing to Asia’s growing markets. Israeli companies have also made no secret of their stake in the country’s other key, non-energy sectors, including agriculture and communications. However, it’s the military-defense aspect of bilateral cooperation that has kept Iran on its toes of late. [Continue reading…]

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Iran promotes its candidate for next Shiite leader

The New York Times reports: As the top spiritual leader in the Shiite Muslim world, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has instructed his followers on what to eat and how to wash, how to marry and to bury their dead. As a temporal guide, he has championed Iraqi democracy, insisting on direct elections from the earliest days of the occupation, and warned against Iranian-style clerical rule.

Frail at 81, he still greets visitors each morning at his home on a narrow and sooty side street here, only steps from the glimmering gold dome of the Imam Ali Shrine. But the jockeying to succeed him has quietly begun, and Iran is positioning its own candidate for the post, a hard-line cleric who would give Tehran a direct line of influence over the Iraqi people, heightening fears that Iran’s long-term goal is to transplant its Islamic Revolution to Iraq.

The succession, a lengthy and opaque process in which the outcome is by no means assured, could shape the interplay of Islam and democracy not only in Iraq, where Shiites are the majority, but also across a Shiite Muslim world that stretches from India to Iran, Lebanon and beyond. The ayatollah’s prescriptions for daily living are imbued with the force of law among the majority of the world’s 200 million or so Shiites who follow him, his religious teachings are sacrosanct and his political sway is powerful.

For Iraq, the contest adds another element of uncertainty in a fledgling democracy whose politics are in upheaval as its three main factions — the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds — contend for power, a contest that analysts worry could help tilt the country back toward authoritarianism.

“Iraq does not need this now,” said Hussein Mohammad al-Eloum, a cleric from a prominent religious and political family; the ambassador to Kuwait and a former oil minister are his sons. “Sistani, may God protect him.”

Iran’s candidate, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, 63, is an Iraqi-born cleric who led the Iranian judiciary for a decade and remains a top official in the government there. With Iranian financing, his representatives have for months been building a patronage network across Iraq, underwriting scholarships for students at the many seminaries here and distributing information.

“He’s there to prepare himself for after Sistani,” said Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who spent 14 years studying at seminaries in Qum, an Iranian holy city.

The move has raised fears that Iran is trying to extend its already extensive influence in the political and economic life of Iraq. A recent visit by Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to Tehran, where he met with Ayatollah Shahroudi, raised tensions further. Reidar Visser, a historian, wrote in his Iraqi politics blog that Mr. Maliki’s visit “did nothing to kill the rumors about some kind of Iranian design on the holiest center of Iraqi Shiism.”

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Palestinian hunger strikers: fighting ingrained duplicity

Richard Falk and Noura Erakat write: On his seventy-third day of hunger strike, Thaer Halahleh was vomiting blood and bleeding from his lips and gums, while his body weighs in at 121 pounds — a fraction of its pre-hunger strike size. The thirty-three-year-old Palestinian follows the still-palpable footsteps of Adnan Khader and Hana Shalabi, whose hunger strikes resulted in release. He also stands alongside Bilal Diab, who is also entering his seventy-third day of visceral protest. Together, they inspired nearly 2,500 Palestinian political prisoners to go on hunger strike in protest of Israel’s policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial.

Administrative detention has constituted a core of Israel’s 1,500 occupation laws that apply to Palestinians only, and which are not subject to any type of civilian or public review. Derived from British Mandate laws, administrative detention permits Israeli Forces to arrest Palestinians for up to six months without charge or trial, and without any show of incriminating evidence. Such detention orders can be renewed indefinitely, each time for another six-month term.

Ayed Dudeen is one of the longest-serving administrative detainees in Israeli captivity. First arrested in October 2007, Israeli officials renewed his detention thirty times without charge or trial. After languishing in a prison cell for nearly four years without due process, prison authorities released him in August 2011, only to re-arrest him two weeks later. His wife Amal no longer tells their six children that their father is coming home, because, in her words, “I do not want to give them false hope anymore, I just hope that this nightmare will go away.”

Twenty percent of the Palestinian population of the Occupied Palestinian Territories have at one point been held under administrative detention by Israeli forces. Israel argues these policies are necessary to ensure the security of its Jewish citizens, including those unlawfully resident in settlements surrounding Jerusalem, Area C, and the Jordan Valley—in flagrant contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention’s Article 49(6), which explicitly prohibits the transfer of one’s civilian population to the territory it occupies. [Continue reading…]

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As Palestinian hunger strikers starve, a mother waits

NBC News reports: Im Hisham, 65, spends her days sitting in her home in Kufur Raei village near here waiting for news about her 27-year-old son, Bilal Diab.

“I haven’t seen my son since the day Israeli Special Forces raided our home in the middle of the night and arrested him in front of my eyes,” she said of the incident on Aug. 16, 2011. “They gave him administrative detention for six months and when the six months ended they extended his detention for six more without charges or trial.”

Diab has since become one of the faces of a mass hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

On Friday, Diab and Thaer Halahleh, another prisoner, entered their 74th day without food. They are demanding that the Israeli courts either charge them or set them free.
Israel’s practice of administrative detention allows the military to hold prisoners indefinitely based on secret information without charging them or allowing them to stand trial. Israeli officials defend its use as a way to hold Palestinians who pose an immediate threat to the country’s security. Israel says they keep the evidence secret from lawyers and the accused because it would expose their intelligence-gathering networks if released.

Attention to Diab and Halahleh’s protest escalated on April 17 when an estimated 1,600 inmates launched their own mass hunger strike in solidarity, a move that led to Palestinians taking to the streets in the West Bank and Gaza almost daily to rally in support of the prisoners’ protest.

On Friday, a spokesperson for Physicians for Human Rights, a humanitarian organization in Israel, said he fears for Diab and Halahleh’s lives.

Yael Marom complained that the last time the Israeli Prison Service allowed one of their doctors to visit Diab was on April 30. “The Israeli Prison Service is still denying regular access to [Diab] and the other hunger strikers by independent physicians and do not update us or the families, which is a blatant breach of medical ethics,” she said.

Israel says all prisoners receive adequate medical attention, including care civilian hospitals if required. “As of now, I know that those who should be receiving extra care are receiving it,” a spokeswoman, Sivan Weizman, told Reuters.

Mark Regev, the Israeli government’s spokesman, also claimed that Israel was providing adequate medical treatment for the prisoners and said they were free to choose their own doctors.

“But ultimately, this is not about medical facilities,” he said, “this is about hard-core activists, from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who through this protest are trying to instigate violence.”

Meanwhile, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned Israel that the death of one of the prisoners could result in chaos.

“If anybody dies today or tomorrow or after a week it would be a disaster and no one could control the situation,” Abbas said in an interview with Reuters at his office in Ramallah. “I told the Israelis and the Americans if they do not find a solution for this hunger strike immediately, they will be committing a crime.”

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MI5 and MI6 implicated in illegal CIA assassinations

U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI are conducting investigations to find the source of a leak about the use of a double agent in Yemen who had joined al Qaeda but was serving as an informant for both Saudi intelligence and the CIA. The leak is said to have undermined intelligence operations. What the leak also reveals is that British intelligence agents are now implicated in assassinations — operations that are illegal under British law.

The Guardian reports: A British citizen played a central role in foiling the latest “underwear” bomb plot hatched in Yemen to attack a US-bound plane, as well as in the assassination of a top al-Qaida operative at the weekend, according to various sources in Washington on Thursday.

CNN reported that the agent involved was a British citizen of Saudi origin who had been recruited about a year ago by Saudi intelligence.

MSNBC, which also reported that the agent was a British passport holder, said that British intelligence was “heavily involved”. Other US media outlets gave the Saudi intelligence service most of the credit for the successful running of the operation. The Guardian independently confirmed British involvement.

The agent was recruited by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which operates in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and asked to carry a bomb aboard a US-bound plane.

The revelation is politically and legally awkward for MI6 and MI5 whose agents, unlike American ones, are banned from missions that lead to assassinations, such as the US drone attack at the weekend that killed the top al-Qaida operative in the Yemen, Fahd al-Quso. The attack is being attributed to information from the agent.

Such is the sensitivity that America’s National Public Radio reported that the British government asked the Obama administration not to reveal the role of British intelligence in the mission.

James Clapper, the US director of National Intelligence, has opened an “internal review” of US intelligence agencies to determine whether there had been leaks of classified information related to the underwear bomb operation.

The FBI is conducting a separate criminal investigation, a law enforcement official said. The US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, a former CIA director, said: “When these leaks take place, they damage our ability to be able to pursue our intelligence efforts.”

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Yemeni separatists: ‘our hopeless young men are joining al-Qaida’

The intrepid, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, meets Jemajem, young militant leader who belongs to the Hirak group of activists, who have been calling for south Yemen to be allowed to secede from the north for half a decade.

In an old house in Aden, Jemajem gathered a dozen of his followers. His attire, like his politics, was a mix of every militant and revolutionary trend that has swept through the Middle East. The black shirt; black combat trousers and black keffiyeh wrapped around his head is a nod to the Shia fighters of Hezbollah, while his long unkempt beard and the black hair falling to his shoulder is a salute to the jihadis of south Yemen.

“The youth is agitated, militant and demands freedom,” Jemajem told them, “and the only way to get freedom is by grabbing it with your hand. America won’t give us freedom – we have to fight for it.”

Many years before the Arab spring, he and hundreds of other activists in south Yemen started a peaceful movement demanding freedom, the end of Saleh’s autocratic rule and the northern exploitation of the south. The state responded with oppression.

In less than half a decade, Jemajem was jailed six times, beaten up, tortured – including being hanged from the ceiling of his cell for days – and had his hair and beard shaved with a knife. At the end of this experience, he had been transformed from a peaceful demonstrator into a militant leader calling for armed struggle.

The peaceful demonstrators evolved into a separatist movement, Hirak, demanding the “independence” and “restoration of the state of South Yemen”. But Hirak followed the trajectory of other Arab uprisings: a mass popular movement without real leaders degenerated into an array of supreme salvation councils and revolutionary committees, each claiming to be the real representative of the people while bickering over personal slights and antagonisms.

“I tell you my brothers, you have to revolt against not only the oppression of the north but also against those who claim to be our leaders,” Jemajem told his followers. “The Arab world is deposing its dictators and you are bringing your own. These people are nothing but stuffed mummies.”

It was frustration at the Hirak leaders’ ineffectiveness that led the group to Tehran. “We went to Iran with a sense of shame,” said a woman activist, “because all doors were closed in our faces and only the Iranians offered to help.”

What did they say to the Iranians in the end? “We said no,” said Jemajem. The Iranians attached a key condition: that the supply of guns would not be controlled by Hirak but by the Houthi rebels in the north – Shia insurgents who have been fighting the central government for almost a decade and are widely believed to be backed by Iran.

“They told us the Houthis would deliver the weapons and the money,” said Jemajem. “We are trying to liberate our country from the northerners – I am not going to be under the control of another northerner.

“We realised then that the Iranians want us to be pawns,” he said. “I refused to take their money.”

On his return from Tehran, Jemajem turned to the jihadis. He spent a few weeks living with them in the nascent Islamic emirate based in the southern Yemeni city of Ja’ar. Although at heart a secular leftist, the “Guevara of the south” was impressed by the Islamists’ strength.

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How Wall Street killed financial reform

Matt Taibbi writes: Two years ago, when he signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, President Barack Obama bragged that he’d dealt a crushing blow to the extravagant financial corruption that had caused the global economic crash in 2008. “These reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history,” the president told an adoring crowd in downtown D.C. on July 21st, 2010. “In history.”

This was supposed to be the big one. At 2,300 pages, the new law ostensibly rewrote the rules for Wall Street. It was going to put an end to predatory lending in the mortgage markets, crack down on hidden fees and penalties in credit contracts, and create a powerful new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to safeguard ordinary consumers. Big banks would be banned from gambling with taxpayer money, and a new set of rules would limit speculators from making the kind of crazy-ass bets that cause wild spikes in the price of food and energy. There would be no more AIGs, and the world would never again face a financial apocalypse when a bank like Lehman Brothers went bankrupt.

Most importantly, even if any of that fiendish crap ever did happen again, Dodd-Frank guaranteed we wouldn’t be expected to pay for it. “The American people will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes,” Obama promised. “There will be no more taxpayer-funded bailouts. Period.”

Two years later, Dodd-Frank is groaning on its deathbed. The giant reform bill turned out to be like the fish reeled in by Hemingway’s Old Man – no sooner caught than set upon by sharks that strip it to nothing long before it ever reaches the shore. In a furious below-the-radar effort at gutting the law – roundly despised by Washington’s Wall Street paymasters – a troop of water-carrying Eric Cantor Republicans are speeding nine separate bills through the House, all designed to roll back the few genuinely toothy portions left in Dodd-Frank. With the Quislingian covert assistance of Democrats, both in Congress and in the White House, those bills could pass through the House and the Senate with little or no debate, with simple floor votes – by a process usually reserved for things like the renaming of post offices or a nonbinding resolution celebrating Amelia Earhart’s birthday.

The fate of Dodd-Frank over the past two years is an object lesson in the government’s inability to institute even the simplest and most obvious reforms, especially if those reforms happen to clash with powerful financial interests. From the moment it was signed into law, lobbyists and lawyers have fought regulators over every line in the rulemaking process. Congressmen and presidents may be able to get a law passed once in a while – but they can no longer make sure it stays passed. You win the modern financial-regulation game by filing the most motions, attending the most hearings, giving the most money to the most politicians and, above all, by keeping at it, day after day, year after fiscal year, until stealing is legal again. “It’s like a scorched-earth policy,” says Michael Greenberger, a former regulator who was heavily involved with the drafting of Dodd-Frank. “It requires constant combat. And it never, ever ends.” [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s defense of Wall Street

Peter J. Boyer and Peter Schweizer report: With the Occupy protesters resuming battle stations, and Mitt Romney in place as the presumptive Republican nominee, President Obama has begun to fashion his campaign as a crusade for the 99 percent–a fight against, as one Obama ad puts it, “a guy who had a Swiss bank account.” Casting Romney as a plutocrat will be easy enough. But the president’s claim as avenging populist may prove trickier, given his own deeply complicated, even conflicted, relationship with Big Finance.

Obama came into office vowing to end business as usual, and, in the gray post-crash dawn of 2009, nowhere did a reckoning with justice seem more due than in the financial sector. The public was shaken, and angry, and Wall Street seemed oblivious to its own culpability, defending extravagant pay bonuses even while accepting a taxpayer bailout. Obama channeled this anger, and employed its rhetoric, blaming the worldwide economic collapse on “the reckless speculation of bankers.” Two months into his presidency, Obama summoned the titans of finance to the White House, where he told them, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

The bankers may have found the president’s tone unsettling. Candidate Obama had been their guy, accepting vast amounts of Wall Street campaign money for his victories over Hillary Clinton and John McCain (Goldman Sachs executives ponied up $1 million, more than any other private source of funding in 2008). Obama far outraised his Republican rival, John McCain, on Wall Street–around $16 million to $9 million. As it turned out, Obama apparently actually meant what he said at that White House meeting–his administration effectively would stand between Big Finance and anything like a severe accounting. To the dismay of many of Obama’s supporters, nearly four years after the disaster, there has not been a single criminal charge filed by the federal government against any top executive of the elite financial institutions.

“It’s perplexing at best,” says Phil Angelides, the Democratic former California treasurer who chaired the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. “It’s deeply troubling at worst.”

Strikingly, federal prosecutions overall have risen sharply under Obama, increasing dramatically in such areas as civil rights and health-care fraud. But according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-gathering organization at Syracuse University, financial-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows. [Continue reading…]

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Syria opposition chief blames al-Qaida for Damascus suicide blasts, says peace plan in crisis

The Associated Press reports: A Syrian opposition leader said Friday the regime is trying to destroy a U.N.-brokered peace plan for the country. The accusations came as security forces fanned out following twin suicide car bombings that killed 55 people in Damascus.

The bombings fueled fears of a rising Islamic militant element among those seeking to oust President Bashar Assad and dealt a further blow to international efforts to end the bloodshed. Assad’s government blamed the blasts on armed terrorists it says are driving the uprising.

During a new conference in Tokyo, Burhan Ghalioun, chief of the opposition Syrian National Council, said there would be no peaceful solution to the violence in Syria without “a threat of force against those who don’t implement the plan.”

“Assad feels that he can run away from implementing all of his obligations without any consequences,” Ghalioun said.

In Damascus, workers were paving over two massive craters caused by the bombs that struck a Syrian military compound Thursday. The attack, which also wounded more than 370 people, was the deadliest against a regime target since the Syrian uprising began 14 months ago.

The Washington Post reports: Obama administration officials said they could not confirm who carried out the attack, but placed the blame squarely on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for allowing the situation to escalate rather than complying with a United Nations resolution ordering a cease-fire supervised by U.N. monitors.

Russia, whose approval is necessary at the Security Council for any further U.N.-authorized action, accused countries supporting the U.S.-backed Syrian opposition of intentionally instigating heightened violence to justify military intervention.

“Some of our foreign partners are taking steps to ensure, both literally and figuratively, that the situation explodes,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, making clear that he was “referring to the bombings.”

Lavrov made his remarks at a news conference in Beijing, alongside his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, who reiterated his government’s rejection of “outside military intervention in Syria.”

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Though disparate, Syria rebels tenacious against crackdown

The New York Times reports: More than a year into the Syrian uprising, protesters and fighters say, disparate opposition cells inside the country still scramble on their own for money and weapons, creating a risk that different factions will form conflicting loyalties to whoever ends up financing or arming them.

Those who have taken up arms, the fighters, acknowledge that they lack a workable chain of command to coordinate operations and channel arms supplies, even as they plead for international help.

Somehow, this decentralized patchwork of opposition fighters and activists has displayed the tenacity to withstand a withering crackdown that has left thousands dead and neighborhoods reduced to rubble. But it has still not managed to coalesce into a unified force, or identify a national leader, a clear ideology or specific goals — beyond bringing down President Bashar al-Assad. That atomization, many fear, could turn the country into “divided emirates” rather than a viable new system, Abu Omar, an activist in a Damascus suburb, said in a recent interview, complaining that some groups hoard arms and the power they bring.

“Deserving people are not being funded,” he said, “and all the money goes to people who do not deserve it.”

An eclectic mix of fighters and unarmed protesters opposes Mr. Assad. There are pious clerics and people who admit they rarely pray, experienced soldiers and barely trained former conscripts, wealthy doctors and jobless youths. Some say they want Islamic law, while others insist that civil law alone should rule. Their goals are matters of intense curiosity as the United States and others debate whether and how to directly assist the opposition inside Syria. Ask their views, and the answers can be complex.

The Associated Press reports: The woman wearing a blood-red dress stood in the middle of a busy intersection outside Syria’s parliament holding up a red banner: “Stop the killing, we want to build a homeland for all Syrians.” Drivers tooted their horns and supporters clapped.

Rima Dali’s act of defiance last month — which landed the 33-year-old in prison for several days — was a call for the opposition to focus again on peaceful protests to bring down President Bashar Assad. It has inspired other activists who worry that their cause is going astray as more Syrians take up arms in the face of the regime’s withering crackdown.

They say armed resistance costs the opposition the moral high ground and boosts the regime line that it is battling terrorists, not a popular uprising. The spiraling violence has also taken on fearsome sectarian overtones, threatening to push the country into full-blown civil war. Al-Qaida-style suicide bombings have become increasingly common.

“This is what the regime wanted and we fell in the trap,” said Anas, a 28-year-old from the central city of Hama who participated in the first marches against Assad in March 2011.

“People say the regime and the inaction of the international community left us with no choice, but I still think we would have been more effective if it had remained peaceful,” he said, declining to be identified by his full name for fear of retaliation by authorities.

But those favoring nonviolence are pushing back against a very strong tide. Barrages of gunfire by regime forces on peaceful marchers, military sieges of opposition areas and the snatching of activists from their homes over the past 13 months have convinced many that brute force is the only way to topple Assad.

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Game over for the climate

James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, writes: warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.

That is the long-term outlook. But near-term, things will be bad enough. Over the next several decades, the Western United States and the semi-arid region from North Dakota to Texas will develop semi-permanent drought, with rain, when it does come, occurring in extreme events with heavy flooding. Economic losses would be incalculable. More and more of the Midwest would be a dust bowl. California’s Central Valley could no longer be irrigated. Food prices would rise to unprecedented levels.

If this sounds apocalyptic, it is. This is why we need to reduce emissions dramatically. President Obama has the power not only to deny tar sands oil additional access to Gulf Coast refining, which Canada desires in part for export markets, but also to encourage economic incentives to leave tar sands and other dirty fuels in the ground. [Continue reading…]

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