Death in black and white

Michael Eric Dyson writes: We, black America, are a nation of nearly 40 million souls inside a nation of more than 320 million people. And I fear now that it is clearer than ever that you, white America, will always struggle to understand us.

Like you, we don’t all think the same, feel the same, love, learn, live or even die the same.

But there’s one thing most of us agree on: We don’t want cops to be executed at a peaceful protest. We also don’t want cops to kill us without fear that they will ever face a jury, much less go to jail, even as the world watches our death on a homemade video recording. This is a difficult point to make as a racial crisis flares around us.

We close a week of violence that witnessed the tragic deaths of two black men — Alton B. Sterling and Philando Castile — at the hands of the police with a terrible attack in Dallas against police officers, whose names we’re just beginning to learn. It feels as though it has been death leading to more death, nothing anyone would ever hope for.

A nonviolent protest was hijacked by violence and so, too, was the debate about the legitimate grievances that black Americans face. The acts of the gunman in Dallas must be condemned. However, he has nothing to do with the difficult truths we must address if we are to make real racial progress, and the reckoning includes being honest about how black grievance has been ignored, dismissed or discounted. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Justice is indivisible

Gary Younge writes: In a country where it’s easier to obtain a semi-automatic gun than to obtain healthcare, a fragile mind can wreak havoc on a fragile political culture. So it was on Thursday night when a sniper opened fire on police at a Black Lives Matter demonstration killing five officers and wounding at least seven others.

Even as events in Dallas unfold there are three key things one can say. The first is that these murders are vile and should be unequivocally condemned. They can in no way be understood or excused as retaliation for the well-publicised recent incidents of police shootings of African Americans. Indeed the effect of such individual acts of violence is not to support the movement against racism but sabotage it. Its enemies will smear it by association; potential allies will be more wary; those within it will be more cautious. Those believed responsible should be found, charged and prosecuted. This is the appropriate response when people cavalierly and wantonly take the life of another. Anything less would lack justice.

Which brings us to the second point. Justice is indivisible. If it is accorded to some and not others it is not justice but privilege. That is why these horrific assassinations should in no way diminish the urgency or importance of the issue of police killings of African Americans or undermine the Black Lives Matter movement. [Continue reading…]

 

Facebooktwittermail

The bomb Dallas police used to kill alleged shooter

Lily Hay Newman writes: Three suspects have been apprehended after Thursday night’s Dallas shooting, which resulted in the death of five police officers and injured six more, plus one civilian. Following a prolonged standoff and negotiation with police, one suspect was killed by an explosion detonated by a bomb robot.

Robots have been proliferating in local policing over the last few years. The technology was largely developed for military and large-scale disaster response scenarios, but has obvious applications in local policing as well. It is used to diffuse or detonate bombs, scout locations with cameras, work in rubble, and do other jobs that are dangerous for officers. The Dallas shooting appears to be the first time a police robot has been used to kill.

Dallas police chief David Brown explained in a press conference Friday morning:

We cornered one suspect and we tried to negotiate for several hours. Negotiations broke down, we had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect, we saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was. Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb.

The suspect who was killed claimed that he had planted bombs in the area, but the New York Times reports that officials said they swept the area and didn’t find any. The explosive the robot was carrying that killed the suspect was a police explosive. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Trump is wrong about Saddam Hussein

Hayder Al-Shakeri writes: As an Iraqi, I learned about the values on which the United States of America was built during an exchange semester in the US. I admired those values and respected Americans for believing in them. But Donald Trump contradicts some of those very principles. In a speech on Tuesday, I heard him praise the way Saddam killed “terrorists” without reading them rights or even letting them talk. This is not the American system that I was taught – nor these the values I respected.

“Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. Right? He was a bad guy, really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights, they didn’t talk, they were a terrorist, it was over,” Donald Trump said in his speech.

It is true that Saddam killed many people. Saddam killed men and women, kids and minorities and many others who stood up to him. Most of them were not terrorists, though. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been wasted under his leadership/dictatorship. Iraq, in his opinion, might have looked better during his time, but Iraqis back then suffered greatly.

Saddam led Iraq into long wars lasting several years, during which Iraqis had to fight for what he believed in. He committed genocides against his people and eventually Iraq had up to 250 mass graves spread around in the country. Saddam went after anyone who opposed him – he didn’t care about violating basic human rights or democracy.

Through such acts, Saddam was able to instill terror in his people, making them afraid to whisper a word. That is how Saddam dealt with terrorism, by terrorizing everyone so no one would be able to speak or stand up to him. In that way, the state looked orderly and people seemed in a better place than right now. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Would Donald Trump quit if he wins the election? He doesn’t rule it out

trump-bw

The New York Times reports: The traditional goal of a presidential nominee is to win the presidency and then serve as president.

Donald J. Trump is not a traditional candidate for president.

Presented in a recent interview with a scenario, floating around the political ether, in which the presumptive Republican nominee proves all the naysayers wrong, beats Hillary Clinton and wins the presidency, only to forgo the office as the ultimate walk-off winner, Mr. Trump flashed a mischievous smile.

“I’ll let you know how I feel about it after it happens,” he said minutes before leaving his Trump Tower office to fly to a campaign rally in New Hampshire.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Mr. Trump is playing coy to earn more news coverage. But the notion of the intensely competitive Mr. Trump’s being more interested in winning the presidency than serving as president is not exactly a foreign concept to close observers of this presidential race. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Take it from a whistleblower: Chilcot’s jigsaw puzzle is missing a few pieces

Katharine Gun writes: Following the damning Chilcot report, much will be said about the decision to go to war in Iraq. But one thing will be missing: the information I leaked in the runup to the war. It won’t get an airing because I was never questioned or asked to participate in the Chilcot inquiry.

Back in early 2003, Tony Blair was keen to secure UN backing for a resolution that would authorise the use of force against Iraq. I was a linguist and analyst at GCHQ when, on 31 Jan 2003, I, along with dozens of others in GCHQ, received an email from a senior official at the National Security Agency. It said the agency was “mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN security council (UNSC) members”, and that it wanted “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises”.

In other words, the US planned to use intercepted communications of the security council delegates. The focus of the “surge” was principally directed at the six swing nations then on the UNSC: Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria, Guinea and Pakistan. The Chilcot report has eliminated any doubt that the goal of the war was regime change by military means. But that is what many people already suspected in 2003.

I was furious when I read that email and leaked it. Soon afterwards, when the Observer ran a front-page story: “US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war”, I confessed to the leak and was arrested on suspicion of the breach of section 1 of the Official Secrets Act. I pleaded not guilty and, assisted by Liberty and Ben Emmerson QC, offered a defence of necessity – in other words, a breach of the law in order to prevent imminent loss of human life. This defence had not and, to my knowledge, has still not, been tested in a court of law.

I believed that on receiving the email, UK parliamentary members might question the urgency and motives of the war hawks, and demand further deliberations and scrutiny. I thought it might delay or perhaps even halt the march towards a war that would devastate Iraqi lives and infrastructure already crushed by a decade of unrelenting sanctions. A war that would send UK and US service men and women into harm’s way, leaving hundreds of them dead, disfigured and traumatised. Unfortunately, that did not happen. It couldn’t, for now we know via Chilcot that Blair promised George W Bush he would be “with him, whatever”. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Refugee who fled Boko Haram for Italy killed by ‘ultra’ football fan

The Guardian reports: A Nigerian refugee thought to have fled the terrorist group Boko Haram with his wife has died after being attacked by an “ultra” football fan in a small Italian town.

Emmanuel Chidi Namdi, 36, died of injuries he sustained when a local man, who had reportedly been racially abusing Namdi’s wife, attacked him in the town of Fermo, in central Italy.

Amedeo Mancini, 35, allegedly referred to the 24-year-old woman as a “monkey”, and attacked Namdi when he attempted to defend her, according to Italian media reports. Namdi fell into a coma and was pronounced dead on Wednesday.

Namdi and his wife, identified by her first name, Chimiary, were being hosted by Fermo town’s parish while they sought asylum. They are believed to have fled from Boko Haram and travelled through Niger and Libya before boarding a boat to Italy.

Father Vinicio Albanesi, who was hosting the couple, said they had previously lost a two-year-old daughter, and that Namdi’s wife suffered a miscarriage during the journey to Italy.

At an evening vigil on Wednesday, Chimiary cried out to her late husband: “Why do you leave me in this wicked world?” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Death toll from Sunday Baghdad bombing nears 300

The Wall Street Journal reports: The death toll from the deadliest single car bombing in Baghdad since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 has reached at least 292 people, Iraq’s health ministry said Thursday.

The attack by Islamic State, which also wounded more than 200 others, struck the Iraqi capital’s busiest commercial areas early Sunday as shoppers and diners crowded the streets following the daily dawn-to-dusk fasting that marks the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. On Monday, authorities said 151 people had been killed in the blast.

Islamic State said its attack in the Karrada district targeted Shiite Muslims, whom it regards as apostates. It was the Sunni Muslim extremist group’s first major attack on the city since Iraqi forces ousted it from Fallujah in late June. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The U.S. could have destroyed Iran’s entire infrastructure without dropping a single bomb

Tech Insider reports: The United States had a top-secret operation that gave it the ability to shut down much of Iran’s infrastructure ahead of a full-scale war, without a single bomb being dropped.

The incredible insight into a highly-classified cyber operation called Nitro Zeus was first exposed in the film “Zero Days” and later corroborated by The New York Times, which interviewed intelligence and military officials who were involved.

The film, directed by Alex Gibney, premieres on Friday.

“We spent hundreds of millions, maybe billions on it,” an anonymous National Security Agency source says in the film. “We were inside, waiting, watching. Ready to disrupt, degrade, and destroy those systems with cyber attacks. In comparison, Stuxnet was a back alley operation. [Nitro Zeus] was the plan for a full scale cyber war with no attribution.”

The source, whose face and voice are concealed throughout the film, is later revealed to be an actor reciting lines from testimony offered to Director Alex Gibney by CIA and NSA employees.

The focus of the “Zero Days” film is on Stuxnet — the world’s first cyber weapon — that was used against Iran’s nuclear facilities. But in researching for the film, Gibney found that malicious software was just one small piece of a much larger puzzle. [Continue reading…]

 

Facebooktwittermail

‘Brave New World’: Russia’s new anti-terrorism legislation

Anna Borshchevskaya writes: On June 7, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed controversial anti-terrorism legislation known in Russia as the “Yarovaya law,” named after its leading co-author, prominent member of Putin’s United Russia party Irina Yarovaya.

The law is reminiscent of Soviet-era surveillance. It will also likely contribute to crippling the Russian economy. According to Russian and Western sources, it allows for jailing children as young as 14 for a variety of vaguely-worded reasons, and significantly raises the costs of internet and telecommunications. Russia’s human rights activists and opposition politicians described the law as “unconstitutional.” Russia’s Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights urged Putin not to sign the law.

“Hello, brave new world with expensive Internet, with jails for children, with global surveillance and prison terms for non-snitching,” wrote politician Dmitry Gudkov in his Facebook page after Putin signed the law. Gudkov, one of Russia’s few real opposition parliamentarians, was outspoken in June and urged his colleagues to vote against the law last month. The Duma (lower house of parliament) began the discussion of the bill in May of this year and both the upper and lower houses of parliament approved the bill in late June without genuine debate on the issue.

Among other things, reportedly, the law requires Internet and telecom providers to store recordings of all of their customers’ data and communications for six months. In addition, the law requires them to store all metadata for three years. Russia’s Federal Security Services (FSB) would have access to this information and, as Gudkov pointed out in June, it may easily leak into the black market. This requirement, according to Russia’s cellphone providers, for example, will increase costs for consumers at least two- to three-fold.

The law also introduces criminal liability for “failure to report a crime” that someone “has been planning, is perpetrating, or has perpetrated.” Moreover, under the new law, children as young as 14 can face up to a year in prison for such a “failure” and for other reasons related to extremism, terrorism and participation in massive riots (all of which can be virtually anything in Russia, since the law is vague). As Tanya Lokshina, Russia program director Human Rights Watch Russia program director pointed out in June before Putin signed the law, “it’s not clear what ‘planning’ stands for or what level of knowledge needs to be proved to hold a person liable.” Such ambiguity is the hallmark of Russia’s laws in the last several years when Putin began a massive crackdown on Russia’s civil society when he returned to his third presidential term in 2012 amidst the largest protests since the break-up of the Soviet Union. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Goats, sheep and cows could challenge dogs for title of ‘man’s best friend’

By Catherine Douglas, Newcastle University

Since the evolution of dogs from wolves tens of thousands of years ago, they have been selectively bred for various roles as guards, hunters, workers and companions. But dogs are not the only animal humans have domesticated, which suggests that although dogs get all the attention, there’s reason to argue other species could also deserve the title of “man’s best friend”.

Anthrozoology, the study of human-animal relationships, has established that dogs demonstrate complex communication with humans. Charles Darwin thought that dogs experienced love, but it was only in 2015 that Japanese scientists demonstrated what we all intuitively knew. Miho Nagasawa and colleagues sprayed the “love hormone” oxytocin up dogs’ noses, measured the loving gaze between dog and human, and then measured the oxytocin levels in the humans’ urine, finding them to be higher. Rest assured, dog owners, that science has verified your bond with your faithful hound.

Horses also show intentional communicative behaviour with humans, and another recent paper published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters from researchers at Queen Mary University of London has shown that goats also demonstrate an affinity with humans. The experiments tested goats’ intelligence and ability to communicate with humans. What the team found may come as no surprise to anyone who has worked with livestock: goats are highly intelligent, capable of complex communication with humans, and are able to form bonds with us – treating us as potential partners to help in problem-solving situations.

Our attitudes to animals tend to reflect the familiarity we have with them. Dogs score higher in perceived intelligence ratings than cows, for example, yet a study in the 1970s demonstrated that in a test cows could navigate a maze as well as dogs, and only slightly less well than children. The point was made that our perception of an animal’s ability is influenced by how we test them.

Continue reading →

Facebooktwittermail

Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head

Daniel A Gross writes: The word “noise” comes from a Latin root meaning either queasiness or pain. According to the historian Hillel Schwartz, there’s even a Mesopotamian legend in which the gods grow so angry at the clamor of earthly humans that they go on a killing spree. (City-dwellers with loud neighbors may empathize, though hopefully not too closely.)

Dislike of noise has produced some of history’s most eager advocates of silence, as Schwartz explains in his book Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. In 1859, the British nurse and social reformer Florence Nightingale wrote, “Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on sick or well.” Every careless clatter or banal bit of banter, Nightingale argued, can be a source of alarm, distress, and loss of sleep for recovering patients. She even quoted a lecture that identified “sudden noises” as a cause of death among sick children.

Surprisingly, recent research supports some of Nightingale’s zealous claims. In the mid 20th century, epidemiologists discovered correlations between high blood pressure and chronic noise sources like highways and airports. Later research seemed to link noise to increased rates of sleep loss, heart disease, and tinnitus. (It’s this line of research that hatched the 1960s-era notion of “noise pollution,” a name that implicitly refashions transitory noises as toxic and long-lasting.)

Studies of human physiology help explain how an invisible phenomenon can have such a pronounced physical effect. Sound waves vibrate the bones of the ear, which transmit movement to the snail-shaped cochlea. The cochlea converts physical vibrations into electrical signals that the brain receives. The body reacts immediately and powerfully to these signals, even in the middle of deep sleep. Neurophysiological research suggests that noises first activate the amygdalae, clusters of neurons located in the temporal lobes of the brain, associated with memory formation and emotion. The activation prompts an immediate release of stress hormones like cortisol. People who live in consistently loud environments often experience chronically elevated levels of stress hormones.

Just as the whooshing of a hundred individual cars accumulates into an irritating wall of background noise, the physical effects of noise add up. In 2011, the World Health Organization tried to quantify its health burden in Europe. It concluded that the 340 million residents of western Europe—roughly the same population as that of the United States—annually lost a million years of healthy life because of noise. It even argued that 3,000 heart disease deaths were, at their root, the result of excessive noise.

So we like silence for what it doesn’t do—it doesn’t wake, annoy, or kill us—but what does it do? When Florence Nightingale attacked noise as a “cruel absence of care,” she also insisted on the converse: Quiet is a part of care, as essential for patients as medication or sanitation. It’s a strange notion, but one that researchers have begun to bear out as true. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Brexit isn’t Trumpism

Sam Edwards writes: Donald Trump and the politicians who propelled Britain’s campaign to leave the European Union share many characteristics: a loose attachment to the truth, an ability to speak to those who feel disenfranchised by mainstream politics, and a willingness to row back on promises made just days or hours previously.

But while Trump is keen to paint Brexit as a mirror image of America’s disgust for the establishment, the Leave campaign was different from Trumpsim. The Leave campaign was not a personality cult  —  the fact that Michael Gove is even a contender for leadership is proof alone of that  —  but rather the direct beneficiary of regional and class disparities that have been brewing for decades.

Further, while Brexit was fought and won on immigration, the majority of those who voted to leave the E.U. are a long way from employing the openly racist language of Trump. The Leave camp is a ragtag coalition of libertarians, sovereigntists, and the far right, but it is the traditional Labour voters that swung the vote. Increasingly, they share Trump supporters’ antipathy for the political class, certainly, but the anti-immigrant sentiment of these Leave voters is in a comparatively embryonic stage, still largely a stand-in for the wider, less-tangible anger at decades of unemployment and social decay in parts of Britain that have never recovered from deindustrialization under Margaret Thatcher and have seen little benefit from globalization. The success of the right has been to lay the blame of six years of cuts to public services, wage stagnation, and soaring house prices squarely at the feet of immigrants and the E.U. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The era of the angry voter is upon us

Der Spiegel reports: Paula Heap and Joel Coe live 6,400 kilometers apart. They don’t even know each other, but they share the same sense of outrage.

She voted for Brexit and he intends to vote for Donald Trump in November. She hails from Preston, a city in northwest England that never truly recovered from the decline of the textiles industry. He’s an American from the small town of Red Boiling Springs in northern Tennessee. His textiles factory, Racoe Inc., is the last of its kind still in business in the area.

It’s Heap’s view that globalization has created a lot of winners and a lot of losers, and that Preston is among the losers. She describes the EU as an “empire” that regulates her electric water kettle but doesn’t create any prosperity. She’s riled by the many immigrants, saying the pressure on the labor market and the health system is increasing. “We want to retain control over immigration,” she says.

Heap is a career advisor, whose motto could be “Make the UK great again,” to borrow a line from Donald Trump’s US presidential election campaign.

Coe, the Trump backer with bulky upper arms and a bushy, reddish beard, blames the NAFTA free trade agreement for the fact that jobs in his industry have been relocated from Tennessee to Mexico. A little bit more of the America of the clattering sewing machines — which are still standing behind him, operated by around 50 women who sew jackets and pants for the US military — disappears each year.

Coe says he plans to vote for trump because the candidate has “never been a politician.” Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has been “bought by large corporations and is corrupt.” He says if Trump weren’t in the picture, he would probably vote for Bernie Sanders. Both candidates, he says, are running against “the system.”

He says he doesn’t know a lot about Britain, but he has the feeling that the British vote against the EU is somehow related to his own battle. “It’s good that Britain is leaving the EU,” he says. “Each country has its own identity.”

The phenomenon of the angry voter currently appears to be making significant strides toward conquering Western democracies at the moment. The outrage is directed against elites in politics and in the business community, against the established political parties, against the “mainstream media,” against free trade and, of course, against immigration. Many Brexiteers are among these angry voters, as are Trump supporters in the United States or Le Pen voters in France.

“Take back control” was one of the main slogans used by Brexit supporters in the United Kingdom. It could stand is as the cry for help from angry voters all around the world. In an era when increasingly complex free trade agreements or unknown EU commissioners are determining peoples’ own living conditions, voters once again yearn for borders, national legislative control and closed economies.

It’s a phenomenon that didn’t just pop up yesterday. But the rage has reached a boiling point this year, fueled by the financial and euro crises, by destabilization in the Middle East and the refugee flows it has spawned, by the rise of China and by the deindustrialization that has taken place in recent decades in many Western countries. In the Internet, this rage has found a forum where it can thrive. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Syria that Trump and Clinton aren’t talking about

Janine di Giovanni writes: Last month, a convoy of aid trucks reached Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, where an estimated 8,000 residents and 1,000 rebel fighters have been slowly starving for four years. Before the Syrian civil war started, Daraya had a population of almost 80,000. But that was before Bashar Assad’s troops encircled the town and his planes began the daily bombardments that have reduced much of the city to rubble and devastated the wheat fields and farmlands that once sustained it. Many who are left in Daraya subsist on grass and grape leaves, whatever they can forage.

The United Nations has been trying to get food through for a while now, but Assad has blocked it every time. On this occasion, for no stated reason, he waved the U.N. through. When the trucks finally reached the center of Daraya, they were swarmed by desperate people, who quickly became angered when they realized the trucks were packed with mostly inedible things like mosquito nets and anti-lice shampoo.

Ten days later, the U.N. sent another convoy. This one, at least, was carrying food, though it wasn’t sufficient to feed everyone. But it was enough for U.N. officials to claim that they had tried. One senior U.N. official, off the record, told me wearily that it was “impossible to get the numbers right of how many people are actually inside.” This fatalist excuse roughly translates as: People are going to starve, but there’s nothing more to do.

As soon as the aid convoy left the town, the barrel bombs started again. Twenty-eight of them, by the count of Ahmad, a 23-year-old former engineering student, whom I spoke to by Skype Messenger. Ahmad works as a volunteer in the “media center” in Daraya. I asked him if he had gotten any of the 480 rations of food.

“No, I have not eaten today,” he told me. “I don’t understand how the world can watch this,” he said. “We’re starving.”

The truth is that the world, at least much of the United States, is not watching.

For Americans, caught up in a circus-like presidential election driven by fear and anger — about lost jobs, about terrorist attacks, about immigrants — Syria is simply part of an indefinite mass of Middle Eastern chaos and danger. Though Syria has endured five years of war, and suffered more than 400,000 dead, it manages to arouse as much suspicion as pity. And when it has been discussed at all by presidential candidates often it has been to argue over the need for an immigration ban on all Muslims to prevent terrorists from hiding among the trickle of Syrians entering the country. No one talks about Daraya, or the 18 other besieged towns across Syria just like it where starvation is being used as a tool of war. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Van Rompuy: UK must accept free movement to stay in single market

The Guardian interviewed the former EU leader Herman Van Rompuy: Negotiations would be very difficult “because we have conflicting interests”, he said. He stressed that this was “nothing to do with punishment or revenge”, but the UK and the 27 other EU member states had different priorities. “The starting point for each of them is their own interests and the interests are at this stage … rather far away.”

Van Rompuy’s stance reflects the position agreed by 27 EU leaders last week, at a historic summit, where the UK had no place at the table. But other European politicians have raised hopes that compromise on free movement of people is in the offing. Alain Juppé, the frontrunner in France’s presidential elections, told the Financial Times that everything was up for negotiation.

Brussels-based insiders read Juppé’s remarks in a different way. “That doesn’t mean we compromise on basic principles,” said one senior national diplomat, adding that it would be “a mistake” for the UK to rely on talks with small groups of countries.

“It would make the position of the 27 more difficult to formulate and could lead to misunderstandings and illusions on the British side, and would prolong negative consequences,” he said.

Contrary to the claims of leave campaigners, Van Rompuy said Britain had more to lose than the EU from the breakup. “Europe is much more important to the British economy than the British economy is important to the 27,” he said.

Around 45% of British exports go to other EU countries, while the UK buys 16% of the EU27’s exported goods. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

In shadow of Brexit, NATO will sound message of unity against Russia

The New York Times reports: Polish leaders have been waiting for years for a NATO summit meeting that would recognize what, to them, is a self-evident reality: that the proper way to respond to an increasingly pugnacious Russia is to plant more alliance troops and weaponry along the eastern front.

But now that this is actually expected to happen during NATO’s two-day gathering here this week, the question is whether — with Britain’s startling exit from the European Union sucking up all the political oxygen — anyone will even notice.

“Militarily, this summit will be about strengthening forces along the eastern front,” said Michal Baranowski, director of the Warsaw office of the German Marshall Fund. “Politically, it’s a Brexit summit.”

The gathering here on Friday and Saturday — drawing every major leader in the trans-Atlantic alliance, including President Obama, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — will be the largest NATO summit meeting in history, with 28 delegations from European Union countries, 26 from other nations, and representatives from the United Nations and the World Bank.

Much of what is expected to be adopted has already been agreed upon in earlier meetings of foreign and defense ministers — “It is pre-cooked,” as Mr. Baranowski put it — so attention is likely to focus instead on how alliance members, including Britain, make an ostentatious show of Western unity despite the shadow of “Brexit” and the weakening of the European Union. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail