Trump off base on Clinton and Iran payment

The Associated Press reports: The $400 million payment [to Iran reported by the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday] — plus $1.3 billion in interest to be paid later — is a separate issue from the Iran nuclear deal that Clinton initiated. The process that resulted in the payout started decades before she became secretary of state.

In the late 1970s the Iranian government, under the U.S.-backed shah, paid the United States $400 million for military equipment. The equipment was never delivered because in 1979, his government was overthrown, revolutionaries took American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran were severed.

In 1981, the United States and Iran agreed to set up a commission at The Hague that would rule on claims by each country for property and assets held by the other. Iran’s claim for return of the equipment payment was among many that had been tied up in litigation before the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, and interest the U.S. owed for holding the money for so long was growing.

Litigation over these claims has continued intermittently for 35 years, with some being settled and others going to the tribunal for judgment. All private U.S. claims before the tribunal have been resolved, with Iran paying more than $2.5 billion to American people and businesses. Some claims remain unresolved.

As secretary of state, Clinton did initiate secret talks with Iran over its nuclear program. After John Kerry succeeded her on Feb. 1, 2013, those secret contacts grew into 18 months of formal negotiations that culminated in the July 2015 nuclear deal.

U.S. officials had expected a ruling on the Iranian claim from the tribunal any time, and feared a ruling that would have made the interest payments much higher. As the nuclear talks progressed, the separate, intermittent talks on the military-equipment claim continued.

On Jan. 17, a day after the nuclear deal was implemented, the United States and Iran announced they had settled the claim, with the U.S. agreeing to pay the $400 million principal along with $1.3 billion in interest. Administration statements at the time made clear that the principal and the interest would be paid separately, but did not specify how the money would be delivered.

Trump is correct that the $400 million was paid in cash and flown to Tehran on a cargo plane. But litigation on the Iranian claim preceded Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state by decades and heated up only after she left the job. [Continue reading…]

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Israel’s imprisonment of Palestinian children decried

Al Jazeera reports: Human rights groups have condemned Israel’s approval of a new law allowing the imprisonment of children as young as 12 for “terrorist offences”, and which is expected to apply mostly to Palestinian children in occupied East Jerusalem.

The “Youth Bill” allows authorities to imprison minors convicted of serious crimes such as murder, attempted murder or manslaughter, even if he or she is under the age of 14, the Israeli government said in a statement on Wednesday.

Attacks in recent months “demands a more aggressive approach, including toward minors”, the government said in the statement.

Israeli rights group B’Tselem criticised the law and Israel’s treatment of Palestinian youth in general.

“Rather than sending them to prison, Israel would be better off sending them to school where they could grow up in dignity and freedom, not under occupation,” the group said in a statement. [Continue reading…]

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The climate crisis is already here — but no one’s telling us

George Monbiot writes: What is salient is not important. What is important is not salient. The media turns us away from the issues that will determine the course of our lives, and towards topics of brain-melting irrelevance.

This, on current trends, will be the hottest year ever measured. The previous record was set in 2015; the one before in 2014. Fifteen of the 16 warmest years have occurred in the 21st century. Each of the past 14 months has beaten the global monthly temperature record. But you can still hear people repeating the old claim, first proposed by fossil fuel lobbyists, that global warming stopped in 1998.

Arctic sea ice covered a smaller area last winter than in any winter since records began. In Siberia, an anthrax outbreak is raging through the human and reindeer populations because infected corpses locked in permafrost since the last epidemic in 1941 have thawed. India has been hammered by cycles of drought and flood, as withering heat parches the soil and torches glaciers in the Himalayas. Southern and eastern Africa have been pitched into humanitarian emergencies by drought. Wildfires storm across America; coral reefs around the world are bleaching and dying.

Throughout the media, these tragedies are reported as impacts of El Niño: a natural weather oscillation caused by blocks of warm water forming in the Pacific. But the figures show that it accounts for only one-fifth of the global temperature rise. The El Niño phase has now passed, but still the records fall.

Eight months ago in Paris, 177 nations promised to try to ensure the world’s average temperature did not rise by more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial level. Already it has climbed by 1.3C – faster and further than almost anyone predicted. In one respect, the scientists were wrong. They told us to expect a climate crisis in the second half of this century. But it’s already here. [Continue reading…]

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There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ microbes

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Ed Yong writes: In the 1870s, German physician Robert Koch was trying to curtail an epidemic of anthrax that was sweeping local farm animals. Other scientists had seen a bacterium, Bacillus anthracis, in the victims’ tis­sues. Koch injected this microbe into a mouse – which died. He recovered it from the dead rodent and injected it into another one – which also died. Doggedly, he repeated this grim process for over 20 generations and the same thing happened every time. Koch had unequivocally shown that Bacillus anthracis caused anthrax.

This experiment, and those of contemporaries like Louis Pasteur, confirmed that many diseases are caused by microscopic organisms. Microbes, which had been largely neglected for a couple of centuries, were quickly cast as avatars of death. They were germs, pathogens, bringers of pestilence. Within two decades of Koch’s work on anthrax, he and many others had discovered that bacteria were also associated with leprosy, gonorrhoea, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, tetanus, and plague. Microbes became synonymous with squalor and sickness. They became foes for us to annihilate and repel.

Today, we know this view is wrong – as I explain in my new book I Contain Multitudes. Sure, some bacteria can cause disease, but they are in the minority. Most are harmless, and many are even beneficial. We now know that the trillions of microbes that share our bodies – the so-called microbiome – are an essential part of our lives. Far from making us sick, they can protect us from disease; they also help digest our food, train our immune system, and perhaps even influence our behaviour. These discoveries have shifted the narrative. Many people now see microbes as allies to be protected. Magazines regularly warn that antibiotics and sanitisers might be harming our health by destroying our microscopic support system. Slowly, the view that ‘all bacteria must be killed’ is giving ground to ‘bacteria are our friends and want to help us’.

The problem is that the latter view is just as wrong as the former. We cannot simply assume that a particular microbe is ‘good’ just because it lives inside us. There’s really no such thing as a ‘good microbe’ or a ‘bad microbe’. These broad-brush terms belong in children’s stories. They are ill-suited for describing the messy, fractious, contextual relationships of the natural world. [Continue reading…]

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Your Olympic team may be an illusion

Niko Besnier and Susan Brownell write: The parade of athletes in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games often evokes strong feelings of national pride. After the 2012 Summer Games in London, the Armenian National Committee of America sent a letter of protest to NBC’s CEO and president, Stephen Burke, to complain about the short shrift Armenia received from the commentator, who only said four words about their country: “Armenia, now walking in.” Their grievance paled, however, in comparison to the Olympics-related protest that took place in 1996. Thousands of Chinese people and organizations in the U.S. and elsewhere collected US$21,000 to buy advertisements in prominent newspapers protesting the fact that NBC commentator Bob Costas mentioned human rights abuses, doping allegations, and property rights disputes as the Chinese delegation entered the stadium for the parade.

About a billion people are expected to watch the opening ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games on television on August 5. For most people, the highlight will be watching their country’s athletes walk proudly into the stadium behind their national flag.

The parade of athletes displays a neat world order filled with proud, loyal citizens. But nations are not really the clear political units presented in this happy family portrait. Beneath the surface is a mess of transnational wheeling and dealing by power brokers as well as athletes seeking to get the most reward for their hard work and talent—for themselves and for their families and friends.

In the last few years, well-heeled Persian Gulf states have attracted athletes from other countries by offering them money, training facilities, and the possibility of qualifying for the Olympics more easily than in their home countries. The diminutive but oil-rich emirate of Qatar, for example, has until now played a very modest role in world sports. But in recent years the country has made huge investments in sports and adopted a liberal citizenship policy for athletes. The Qatari national handball team, which reached the finals at the men’s 2015 Handball World Championship, had only four players originating from Qatar on their 17-person squad — the rest had been recruited from overseas. By our calculation, more than half of the 38 athletes who will represent Qatar in Rio were born elsewhere. [Continue reading…]

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Trump on nuclear weapons: If we have them, why can’t we use them?

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CNBC News reports: Donald Trump asked a foreign policy expert advising him why the U.S. can’t use nuclear weapons, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said on the air Wednesday, citing an unnamed source who claimed he had spoken with the GOP presidential nominee.

“Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump. And three times [Trump] asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point if we had them why can’t we use them,” Scarborough said on his “Morning Joe” program.

Scarborough made the Trump comments 52 seconds into an interview with former Director of Central Intelligence and ex-National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden. [Continue reading…]

NBC News reports: Key Republicans close to Donald Trump’s orbit are plotting an intervention with the candidate after a disastrous 48 hours led some influential voices in the party to question whether Trump can stay at the top of the Republican ticket without catastrophic consequences for his campaign and the GOP at large.

Republican National Committee head Reince Priebus, former Republican New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are among the Trump endorsers hoping to talk the real estate mogul into a dramatic reset of his campaign in the coming days, sources tell NBC News.

The group of GOP heavyweights hopes to enlist the help of Trump’s children – who comprise much of his innermost circle of influential advisers – to aid in the attempt to rescue his candidacy. Trump’s family is considered to have by far the most influence over the candidate’s thinking at what could be a make-or-break moment for his campaign. [Continue reading…]

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A Trump victory is scary. A disputed loss might be scarier

Jamelle Bouie writes: Trump has no use for norms. He violates them at will, from relatively trivial transgressions such as his personal attacks on other presidential candidates (“Little Marco,” “low-energy” Jeb), to the worrying ones such as his habit of spreading conspiracy theories (e.g., the charge that Ted Cruz’s father helped assassinate John F. Kennedy), to the serious ones such as his calls for religious tests, his tolerance of white supremacists, and his exploitation (and occasional use) of explicit racism.

Trump’s contempt for norms has only gotten worse in the past few days, as he reacts to the Democratic National Convention — and his subsequent collapse in the polls — with rage and anger. And on Monday, he crossed one of the brightest lines in American politics, the one that deals directly with our tradition of peaceful transfer of power.

“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” he said to a crowd in Columbus, Ohio. He followed up on this in an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “I’m telling you, November 8th, we’d better be careful because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us.”

This was in line with comments from Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump. In a recent interview with Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, Stone said that Trump should start talking “constantly” about the chance of voter fraud and a rigged election. “He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud.’ ” Stone continued in this vein. “ ‘If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’ ”

From here, Stone’s language gets ominous. “If you can’t have an honest election, nothing else counts,” he said. “The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it,” Stone said, promising a “bloodbath” of “civil disobedience.” [Continue reading…]

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What makes Trump an exceptional draft dodger

Ted Gup writes: On the evening of Dec. 1, 1969, I was sitting on the floor of a crowded Brandeis University dorm room while on the TV the birth dates of men across the nation, contained in small blue capsules, were drawn out of a container. This lottery would largely determine who among some 850,000 of the draft-eligible would go to Vietnam and who would be left to carry on with their careers, free from the threat of enemy fire.

That evening came back to me on Tuesday as I read about Donald Trump’s multiple student deferments and the bone spurs he said exempted him from service. I am no fan of Mr. Trump’s, but on this issue, I am in no position to stand in judgment. I had the dubious honor of being picked first in that 1969 lottery, along with all the eligible men who shared my birthday, Sept. 14. But I did not go into service. Just before I graduated, I instead availed myself of a psychiatrist who, for a fee, swore that I suffered from delusions of grandeur because I wanted to be a writer and travel the world. Funny how the truth can be twisted into something so dishonorable.

Mr. Trump and I were among those favored sons who could find a relatively easy exit from the draft. But Mr. Trump still stands out. Reading of his comments questioning Senator John McCain’s status as a hero, his equating the risks of contracting sexual diseases with the perils of combat, his attack on the family of a fallen Muslim officer, and his claim of sacrifice in pursuit of wealth and self-aggrandizement, I realized just how isolated and self-absorbed he was during that turbulent period, and how completely out of sync he is with most of his generation, veterans and evaders alike. He seems to have escaped the turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s not merely unscathed, but untouched by humanity. [Continue reading…]

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Putin sees in Trump a grand opportunity

David Remnick writes: Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Donald J. Trump are locked in a humid political embrace, which seems, at first glance, unlikely. Putin grew up in postwar Leningrad. In the dismal courtyard of his building on Baskov Lane, a hangout for local thugs and drunks, he and his childhood friends pursued their favorite pastime: chasing rats with sticks. His father, a wounded veteran, beat him with a belt. Putin’s way up, his dream, was to volunteer for the K.G.B. Donald Trump encountered few rats on his lawn in Jamaica Estates. Soft, surly, and academically uninterested, Donald was disruptive in class — so much so that his father, a real-estate tycoon of the outer boroughs, shipped him off to military school when he was thirteen. He did not set out to serve his country; he set out to multiply his father’s fortune. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” Trump has said. “The temperament is not that different.”

Decades later, Trump has praised Putin as a forceful leader, a “better leader” than Barack Obama; Putin hardly conceals his hope that Trump will win election to the White House. What would be more advantageous for Putin than to see the United States elect an incompetent leader who just so happens to be content to leave the Russian regime to its own devices, particularly in Europe? Even as non-Democrats have variously described their own nominee as a “con,” a “bully,” and a “borderline” 9/11 conspiracy theorist, Putin has acted as a surrogate from afar, dropping clear hints at his preference, slyly declaring Trump “bright” and “talented without doubt.”

The Times has reported that hackers who broke into the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail trove — a cyber version of the Watergate burglary — were likely agents of the Russian Federation. We shall see if that suspicion holds up. But what’s undisputed is that the gathering of kompromat — compromising material — is a familiar tactic in Putin’s arsenal. For years, the Russian intelligence services have filmed political enemies in stages of sexual and/or narcotic indulgence, and have distributed the grainy images online. Last April, state TV broadcast a black-and-white film of Mikhail Kasyanov, Putin’s former Prime Minister but now a potential opposition leader, exchanging carnal favors and playing “Name That Tune” with his political assistant, Natalya.

Even if the Russian government is not responsible for the hack on the D.N.C., Putin’s affinity for Trump is clear. Some part of it may be a matter of kindred temperament. Just as Trump talks ominously about Mexican “rapists” and tens of thousands of “illegal immigrants … roaming free” in the land, Putin won early popularity by vowing to dispense with terrorists from the Caucasus: “We will ice them in their shithouses.” Trump is, after all, a kind of parody of Putin: the bluster, the palaces. As the historian Timothy Snyder puts it, “Putin is the real world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.” [Continue reading…]

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FBI said to have taken months to warn Democrats of suspected Russian role in hack

Reuters reports: The FBI did not tell the Democratic National Committee that U.S officials suspected it was the target of a Russian government-backed cyber attack when agents first contacted the party last fall, three people with knowledge of the discussions told Reuters.

And in months of follow-up conversations about the DNC’s network security, the FBI did not warn party officials that the attack was being investigated as Russian espionage, the sources said.

The lack of full disclosure by the FBI prevented DNC staffers from taking steps that could have reduced the number of confidential emails and documents stolen, one of the sources said. Instead, Russian hackers whom security experts believe are affiliated with the Russian government continued to have access to Democratic Party computers for months during a crucial phase in the U.S. presidential campaign, the source said.

As late as June, hackers had access to DNC systems and the network used by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a group that raises money for Democratic candidates and shares an office with the DNC in Washington, people with knowledge of the cases have said. [Continue reading…]

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Conspiracy theory consensus: Turks agree U.S. was behind failed coup

The New York Times reports: A Turkish newspaper reported that an American academic and former State Department official had helped orchestrate a violent conspiracy to topple the Turkish government from a fancy hotel on an island in the Sea of Marmara, near Istanbul. The same newspaper, in a front-page headline, flat-out said the United States had tried to assassinate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the night of the failed coup.

When another pro-government newspaper asked Turks in a recent poll conducted on Twitter which part of the United States government had supported the coup plotters, the C.I.A. came in first, with 69 percent, and the White House was a distant second, with 20 percent.

These conspiracy theories are not the product of a few cranks on the fringes of Turkish society. Turkey may be a deeply polarized country, but one thing Turks across all segments of society — Islamists, secular people, liberals, nationalists — seem to have come together on is that the United States was somehow wrapped up in the failed coup, either directly or simply because the man widely suspected to be the leader of the conspiracy, the Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, lives in self-exile in the United States.

“Whenever something shocking and horrific happens in Turkey, the reflex is conspiracy,” said Akin Unver, an assistant professor of international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. [Continue reading…]

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Fethullah Gulen exercises full control inside his cult

Mustafa Akyol writes: After the AKP and Gulenists parted ways in December 2013, the Gulenists led a corruption investigation of prominent AKP members. That was a watershed event that initiated incredible enmity between the AKP and Gulenists, as both sides believed the other’s ugly face had been exposed. For me, however, both sides were exposed. The corruption within the AKP proved to be massive, and the scope of Gulenist infiltration and espionage also proved substantial.

A key point among the exposures was Gulen’s full control over his organization. In a wiretapped conversation between Gulen and one of his followers, posted on YouTube in early 2014, the latter was asking Gulen what to do about a refinery in Africa, planned gifts to Turkish businessmen and even campaigns on Twitter. Gulen, it turned out, was really not the ascetic Sufi we were told about, but a micro-manager of a global organization based on secrecy and hierarchy. “He really controls everything,” I was told in June 2014 by Huseyin Gulerce, the man who introduced me to Gulen himself 10 years ago in Pennsylvania, but who had defected by that point.

In the next two years, I kept arguing that the AKP should indeed disestablish the Gulenist “parallel state” within the state, but not attack the schools, companies or charities of the Gulenists. The latter must engage in “self-criticism” about their misdeeds, I added, while the AKP must be honest about corruption. Surely, neither side liked these arguments. [Continue reading…]

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Libya, U.S. face entrenched ISIS

The Wall Street Journal reports: Even with the U.S. launching airstrikes on an Islamic State stronghold in Libya, the battle to uproot the extremists from the oil-rich North African nation is expected to be long and difficult.

The U.S. began the attacks on Monday and struck again on Tuesday in support of a ground offensive to retake Sirte, a strategic port on the Mediterranean coast. But Islamic State is also entrenched in other pockets across the country, including parts of the eastern city of Benghazi, Libya’s second largest; Derna, another eastern city; and the western town of Sabratha, near the Tunisian border.

The competing militias and centers of power that have stoked Libya’s civil war complicate the fight against Islamic State. The chaos has given the group an opening to gain its first territorial foothold outside its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Libya has two rival governments — one that is internationally recognized in the capital, Tripoli, and another based in the east. The competing governments so far have refused to work together to defeat Islamic State or toward national unity, despite international efforts. [Continue reading…]

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The refugee Olympians in Rio

Robin Wright writes: Samia Yusuf Omar, who was lithe to the point of frailty, sprinted her way to momentary fame at the Beijing Olympics, in 2008. She was one of two athletes on the team from war-torn Somalia. Only seventeen, she’d had no professional coaching, and had dropped out of school in the eighth grade, after her father died, to help care for five younger siblings while her mother peddled produce. She practiced at a bombed-out stadium in Mogadishu. Female athletes were rare in Somalia, and she faced harassment and intimidation from Islamist militias. In Beijing, she dared to run without a hijab. Virtually no one in Somalia was able to watch her compete — no TV station carried the Olympics, and many Somalis had no television or electricity, anyway. Omar’s running shoes had been donated by runners on Sudan’s team.

Omar competed in the women’s two hundred metres, a middle-distance race. Beating her personal record, at 32.16 seconds, she still finished last — so far behind that the camera couldn’t keep her in the frame — but the crowd roared when she completed the race.

“We know that we are different from the other athletes,” Omar said in Beijing. “But we don’t want to show it. We try our best to look like the rest. We understand we are not anywhere near the level of the other competitors here. We understand that very, very well. But, more than anything else, we would like to show the dignity of ourselves and our country.” [Continue reading…]

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Discerning order in randomness

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Kevin Hartnett writes: Standard geometric objects can be described by simple rules — every straight line, for example, is just y = ax + b — and they stand in neat relation to each other: Connect two points to make a line, connect four line segments to make a square, connect six squares to make a cube.

These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield. Sheffield, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies shapes that are constructed by random processes. No two of them are ever exactly alike. Consider the most familiar random shape, the random walk, which shows up everywhere from the movement of financial asset prices to the path of particles in quantum physics. These walks are described as random because no knowledge of the path up to a given point can allow you to predict where it will go next.

Beyond the one-dimensional random walk, there are many other kinds of random shapes. There are varieties of random paths, random two-dimensional surfaces, random growth models that approximate, for example, the way a lichen spreads on a rock. All of these shapes emerge naturally in the physical world, yet until recently they’ve existed beyond the boundaries of rigorous mathematical thought. Given a large collection of random paths or random two-dimensional shapes, mathematicians would have been at a loss to say much about what these random objects shared in common.

Yet in work over the past few years, Sheffield and his frequent collaborator, Jason Miller, a professor at the University of Cambridge, have shown that these random shapes can be categorized into various classes, that these classes have distinct properties of their own, and that some kinds of random objects have surprisingly clear connections with other kinds of random objects. Their work forms the beginning of a unified theory of geometric randomness. [Continue reading…]

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