Donald Trump’s history as a reckless gambler

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Michael Crowley writes: In January 1992, a Japanese one-time billionaire named Akio Kashiwagi was found dead in his palatial home near Mt. Fuji. The scene was gruesome. The house’s white paper screens were spattered with blood. The 54-year-old had been stabbed as many as 150 times. By some reports the weapon of choice was a samurai-style sword.

The crime was never solved, though it bore the hallmarks of a killing by Japan’s criminal yakuza. Ostensibly a real estate investor, Kashiwagi was a mysterious figure reputed to have underworld connections. He was also one of the world’s top five gamblers, a “whale” in casino parlance, willing to wager $10 million in a single gaming bender.

And that is how he crossed paths with Donald J. Trump, then a budding Atlantic City casino mogul. In 1990 the two men had an epic and remarkably personal showdown in which millions of dollars changed hands in a matter of days, before it all ended in a flurry of recriminations. One of the Japanese mogul’s last statements to the U.S. media, through an aide, involved his plans to burn a copy of Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal.

After his murder, the New York Times reported that he owed at least $9 million to casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. One unnamed casino Atlantic City executive told the paper that Kashiwagi had owed the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino $4 million.

Trump is obsessed with winning, a topic he usually brings up in the context of his merciless deal-making style. But a crucial question about any would-be president who may be confronted with questions of war and peace is his attitude toward risk. Some presidents — Barack Obama comes to mind — are highly averse to it. Others roll the dice, as George W. Bush did when he invaded Iraq.

The story of Akio Kashiwagi, drawn from Trump’s memoirs and news accounts from the day, offers a revealing window into Trump’s instincts. It shows that Trump isn’t just a one-time casino owner — he’s also a gambler, prone to impulsive, even reckless action. In The Art of the Comeback, published in 1997, Trump explains that until he met Kashiwagi, he saw himself as an investor who dealt only in facts and reason. But his duel with the great whale in action made him realize “that I had become a gambler, something I never thought I was.”

Perhaps just as important, when gambling failed him, Trump didn’t quit: He doubled down. But he did it shrewdly, summoning a RAND Corporation mathematician to devise a plan that would maximize his chance of fleecing his Japanese guest.

And it worked. Kind of. In Trump’s recollection, which he shared for this story, his showdown with Kashiwagi was another one of his many great wins. Just don’t look too hard at the ledger. [Continue reading…]

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Boycotting Israeli goods to become criminal offence for public bodies and student unions in UK

The Independent reports: Local councils, public bodies and even some university student unions are to be banned by law from boycotting “unethical” companies, as part of a controversial crackdown being announced by the Government.

Under the plan all publicly funded institutions will lose the freedom to refuse to buy goods and services from companies involved in the arms trade, fossil fuels, tobacco products or Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Any public bodies that continue to pursue boycotts will face “severe penalties”, ministers said. [Continue reading…]

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How ex-Communists shaped American conservatism

Sam Tanenhaus writes: A paradox of 20th-century American politics is that its most sustained ideological movement, modern conservatism, was the brainchild of ex-Communists who had been disillusioned by the crimes of the Soviet revolution or caught on the wrong side of factional disputes. Estranged and unhappy, they went in search of a new god and helped create it—in the mirror image, it has often seemed, of the one that failed them the first time. Together they were “Stalin’s gift to the American Right,” John Patrick Diggins wrote in Up From Communism (1975), his account of four writers who exiled themselves from the left and then wandered like restless spirits before finding refuge in the pages of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review in the 1950s and early 1960s.

In Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century, Daniel Oppenheimer, a writer and a director of communications at the University of Texas at Austin who was born the year after Diggins’s book came out, reprises and updates the history of political defectors. To Oppenheimer’s credit, his own politics, which seem somewhere on the left, don’t intrude on the absorbing stories he tells. He begins with the ex-Communists Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, then discusses two renouncers of liberalism, Ronald Reagan and Norman Podhoretz, and closes the circle with two casualties of the ’60s–’70s radical left, David Horowitz and Christopher Hitchens. “The ex-believers—the heretics, the apostates—are the problem children of any politics, in any time,” Oppenheimer writes. But the problem, he suggests, isn’t theirs. It’s ours. So quick to denounce or praise, and to demand to be told which side everyone is on, we forget that politics also offers parables of second thoughts and transformation. Ideological changelings, if we catch them mid-flight, remind us that “belief is complicated, contingent, multi-determined.” They can show us, too, “how hard it is to be a person in the world, period, and how much more confusing that task can become when you take on responsibility for repairing or redeeming it.” [Continue reading…]

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Doing more with less: The economic lesson of Peak Paper

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John Quiggin writes: For most of us, the industrial economy is a thing of the past. In the entire United States, large factories employ fewer than 2 million people. Even adding China to the picture does not change things much. And yet the conceptual categories of the 20th century still dominate our thinking. We remain fixated on the industrial model of economic growth, where ‘growth’ means ‘more of everything’, and we can express our rate of development in a single number. This model leads naturally to the conclusion that economic expansion must eventually run up against constraints on the availability of natural resources, such as trees to make paper.

And yet in 2013, despite positive growth overall, the world reached ‘Peak Paper’: global paper production and consumption reached its maximum, flattened out, and is now falling. A prediction that was over-hyped in the 20th century and then derided in the early 2000s – namely, the Paperless Office – is finally being realised. Growth continues, but paper is in retreat. Why did this seem so unlikely only a decade ago?

The problem is a standard assumption of macroeconomics – namely, that all sectors of the economy expand at a roughly equal rate. If this ‘fixed proportions’ assumption does not hold, the theory used to construct GDP numbers ceases to work, and the concept of a ‘rate of growth’ is no longer meaningful. Until the end of the 20th century, these assumptions did in fact work reasonably well for paper, books and newspapers. The volume of information increased somewhat more rapidly than the economy as a whole, but not so rapidly as to undermine the notion of an overall rate of economic growth. The volume of printed matter grew steadily, to around a million new books every year, and the demand for paper for printing grew in line with demand for books. [Continue reading…]

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Meet the world’s most notorious taxonomist

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Susie Neilson writes: In 2005, the taxonomist Quentin Wheeler named a trio of newly discovered slime-mold beetles after George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. He believed the names could increase public interest in the discovery and classification of new species, and help combat the quickening pace of extinction. (Species go extinct three times faster than we can name them.)

He knew he was onto something when, having received a call from the White House, it was Bush on the other end, thanking him for the honor. Wheeler, now the president of SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, began attributing all sorts of provocative names to his bugs, including Darth Vader, Stephen Colbert, Roy and Barbara Orbison, Pocahontas, Hernan Cortez, and the Aztecs — he has even named 6 species after himself. Youcan call his strategy “shameless self-promotion” — Wheeler already has.

Nautilus spoke with Wheeler about his work.

What’s exciting about taxonomy?

It is the one field with the audacity to create a living inventory of every living thing on the entire planet and reconstruct the history of the diversity of life. Who else would tackle 12 million species in 3.8 billion years on the entire surface of the planet? If that isn’t real science, I don’t know what is. It infuriates me that taxonomy is marginalized as a bookkeeping activity, when in fact it has the most audacious research agenda of any biological science. [Continue reading…]

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The Syrian government, with Russia’s help, is driving its own people into exile

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Roy Gutman reports:  The airstrikes began just after midnight one week ago, as four or more warplanes criss-crossed the skies and unleashed missiles into the small town just northwest of Aleppo. The targets were private residences and apartments on the outskirts of Haritan, and then the town center.

The windows in Salah Hawa’s four-room house had already been shattered by an airstrike nearby last month. The latest blasts blew out the nylon sheets used to cover the gaps.

After two days and nights of attacks — possibly 300 missiles or more — Hawa, a 40-year-old English teacher, and his wife and four children, aged 5 to 16, fled to the nearby countryside in a neighbor’s pickup truck.

During one airstrike, his wife, Hasna, 39, lay down, and for an hour, “she couldn’t stand up out of fear,” Hawa recounted in a Skype conversation from northern Syria. “My children clung to me, crying, and said we are going to die.”

Hawa’s family, multiplied by 10,000, are the face of the latest mass displacement in Syria. They are now living in a village about 30 miles to the west, in Idlib province in a house shared with four other families. Tens of thousands of others displaced by the fighting headed to the closed border with Turkey, where accommodation was even more scarce.

It is the latest evidence of a dramatic shift in the war that began with the Russia air intervention last September 30. Russia claims to be bombing only “terrorists” and has told the Obama administration it is committed to a political settlement. But the real aim of the latest onslaught — which forced the United Nations to suspend peace talks before they even began — could be a lot more menacing.

The airstrikes cleared the way for Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, Iraqi militias, and Afghan Hazara forces, which are officered by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and Syrian security forces, to make critical advances on the ground. Now Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is poised to surround Aleppo and besiege some 250,000 civilians living in the rebel-defended eastern sector.

If the military advances continue, Assad soon will also be able to block all military and humanitarian aid now flowing across the border from Turkey. But Assad is also in a position to drive millions of Syrians out of their country into Turkey, which will be hard pressed to stop them from continuing on to Europe. Mass displacement increasingly appears to be the aim of the military operation, and not just a side effect, humanitarian aid officials say.

“The Syrian government is driving its people into exile and the Russians are playing a major part, forcing civilians to Turkey which, caught between this violent exodus and pressure from Europe, risks being destabilized,” said Rae McGrath, head of the Mercy Corps program in Turkey and north Syria. “How can we talk about protecting civilians in the midst of this cynical disregard for the most basic humanitarian principles?” [Continue reading…]

Zachary Laub spoke to Noah Bonsey, senior Syria analyst for the International Crisis Group:
Do these sieges reflect the strategy of the Assad regime?

The regime’s military strategy, supported and increasingly embraced by its backers, is based heavily on collective punishment, [which is] especially important given the regime’s manpower disadvantage. This is one of the reasons we see such heavy use of bombing that is not indiscriminate so much as it is discriminately targeting civilian areas and civilian infrastructure. This is also why we see the siege tactics, which in some cases bring rebel[-held] areas to the point of starvation.

As civilians leave areas, regime advances can become easier. These tactics are also applied as a means of raising the price of resistance to the communities as a whole, so that communities pressure the fighters in their area to accept what the regime offers as cease-fire terms, but also, effectively, to surrender.

The Feb. 11 meeting of the International Syria Support Group [ISSG] came as fledgling peace talks in Vienna appeared to be at an impasse. Where do these efforts on a political transition stand?

The political process is based on the premise of U.S.-Russian sponsorship in which the U.S. is the point man rallying the opposition and its backers to a serious negotiating process, and Russia is to do that for the regime side. The reason this current round of the political process is surrounded by such skepticism is that while the U.S. appears enthusiastic—almost desperate—to get some sort of political process moving, Russia appears far less interested in making the process viable at this stage. Russia’s decision to escalate dramatically its aerial attacks on Aleppo—areas with heavy civilian populations—the very day the opposition delegation arrived in Geneva for talks was the latest in a series of indications that Russia is happy to see this political process stall or, potentially, even derail. [Continue reading…]

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The Syria ‘ceasefire’ deal is no such thing — it’s cover for the U.S. and Russia

By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

Headlines have been declaring a ceasefire in Syria’s conflict. Announced by US secretary of state John Kerry and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov late on February 11, it was greeted as a ray of hope in the floundering efforts to end this seemingly intractable conflict.

What it isn’t, is a ceasefire. The International Syria Support Group (ISSG) – a coalition of 17 nations, among them Russia and the US, the Arab League, the European Union, and the UN – has not in fact used that term, preferring a “cessation of hostilities”. And it isn’t even that: it’s a proposal for a cessation of hostilities, one that will supposedly start soon, but only after a working group has met with representatives of countries supporting the Assad regime and those backing Syria’s opposition.

Nor is it a viable proposal. Instead, it’s best seen as political cover. It covers Kerry, in his remarkably zealous quest to secure the start of a resolution by the end of March, and Russia, in its mission to prop up the Assad regime by bombing the rebels and civilian areas in concert with both Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iran.

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Over half the world’s population suffers from ‘severe’ water scarcity, scientists say

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The Washington Post reports: Alarming new research has found that 4 billion people around the globe — including close to 2 billion in India and China — live in conditions of extreme water scarcity at least one month during the year. Half a billion, meanwhile, experience it throughout the entire year.

The new study, by Mesfin Mekonnen and Arjen Hoekstra of the University of Twente in the Netherlands, uses a high resolution global model to examine the availability of “blue water” — both surface and underground freshwater — in comparison with the demand for it from agriculture, industry and human household needs. The model — which zoomed in on areas as small as 60 kilometers by 60 kilometers in size at the equator — also took into account climatic factors, ecological ones (how much water is needed to sustain a river ecosystem or lake) and other causes of depletion such simple evaporation.

“We find that 4 billion people live in areas that experience severe water scarcity at least part of the year, which is more than previously thought, based on those earlier studies done on an annual basis,” says Hoekstra, who published the work in Science Advances Friday. “You have to look really month by month, in order to get the scarcity.” [Continue reading…]

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As Europe faces worst crises since World War II, few expect help from Washington

Josh Rogin writes: Europe is facing a convergence of the worst crises since World War II, and the overwhelming consensus among officials and experts here is that the U.S. no longer has the will or the ability to play an influential role in solving them.

At the Munich Security Conference, the prime topics are the refugee crisis, the Syrian conflict, Russian aggression and the potential dissolution of the European Union’s very structure. Top European leaders repeatedly lamented that 2015 saw all of Europe’s problems deepen, and unanimously predicted that in 2016 they would get even worse.

“The question of war and peace has returned to the continent,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the audience, indirectly referring to Russian military interventions. “We had thought that peace had returned to Europe for good.”

What was missing from the conference speeches and even the many private discussions in the hallways, compared to previous years, was the discussion of what Europe wanted or even expected the U.S. to do. [Continue reading…]

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Russia warns of new Cold War as east Ukraine violence surges and the U.S. is outmaneuvered in Syria

The Washington Post reports: Violence in eastern Ukraine is intensifying and Russian-backed rebels have moved heavy weaponry back to the front line, international monitors warned Saturday, as Moscow responded by accusing the West of dragging the world back 50 years.

Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev described East-West relations as having “fallen into a new Cold War” and said NATO was “hostile and closed” toward Russia, in the latest sign that peace efforts have made scant progress almost two years since Moscow annexed Crimea.

“I sometimes wonder — are we in 2016 or 1962?” Medvedev asked in a speech to the Munich Security Conference on Saturday.

Western governments say they have satellite images, video and other evidence to show that Russia is providing weapons to the Ukrainian rebels and that Moscow has troops engaged in the conflict. Russia denies such accusations. [Continue reading…]

The Observer reports: Moscow is back as a big player in the Middle East, while Washington looks humbled, a shadow of the great power that once dominated events in the region. The cold war is back, as the Russian prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, said on Saturday – and for now Russia seems to be in the ascendancy.

Critics warned from the day the ceasefire was announced that Moscow had outmaneuvered Washington and was simply using the negotiations and the deal to consolidate gains, a tactic honed by Russian forces in Ukraine.

The US may have lost more than political capital. The ceasefire risks costing them the trust of the few moderate opposition groups left on the ground, who feel abandoned by a country that promised support.

“The people that the Americans had been trying to sponsor are now targets of an enemy that bombs without mercy or discretion, and the Americans don’t have a problem with that?” said one Free Syrian Army member in Aleppo, who declined to be named. “They never deserved our trust.”

Russia, by contrast, has doubled down on Assad. Around the time Lavrov was handing down his grim prognosis for the ceasefire, a missile cruiser left the naval base in Sevastopol in Crimea. It was heading towards the Mediterranean to join the Russian fleet there, a public shoring up of an already strong military presence. Refugees who had recently fled Isis rule said that the failure to challenge Assad and Russia could even put the west’s main goal in Syria – the routing of Isis – at risk. If other opposition groups are driven out, it will shore up the claim of Isis to be champions of the country’s Sunnis. “You will not find anyone in this camp, especially those who have arrived this month, who supports Isis,” said the man, who gave his name only as Jameel. “But most of them accept that at least they tried to protect us, Syrian Sunnis, who the world has abandoned. It is very dangerous to let them fill this role. And I think the world is blind to the immorality of it.” [Continue reading…]

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The staggering price of Syria’s reconstruction

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Perry Cammack writes: The cataclysmic destruction of Syria challenges human comprehension. The old city of Aleppo, which like Damascus claims to be the oldest settlement on the planet, has been reduced to rubble. Homs was once the country’s third most populous city, but has mostly been depopulated.

With the international Syria peace process teetering on the edge of collapse, a political solution seems distant. But every war must end. The rebirth of Dresden, Berlin, and Stalingrad (later renamed Volgograd) after the unthinkable destruction of World War II is a testament to human resiliency and a symbol of what may eventually be possible in Syria. Regardless of whether Syria can be stitched together as a unitary state or is instead permanently partitioned, rebuilding its infrastructure to even modest pre-war levels will require a generational effort.

Some planning for this future has been done. The most ambitious effort is the “National Agenda for the Future of Syria,” a conceptual platform for reconstruction run out of the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) in Beirut. But such efforts will need profound outside support, especially during the most fragile post-conflict stabilization phase, to ensure that robust mechanisms are in place to allow funds to begin flowing quickly and transparently. Unfortunately, to this point, the reconstruction of Syria has not received sufficient attention, either in Washington or in capitals elsewhere. [Continue reading…]

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Russia’s scorched earth policy in Syria

Lara Nelson writes: “It’s like Stalingrad. They raze entire areas. Then they send in the militias,” Yamen Ahmad, an FSA commander in Latakia, described. He was in Selma, Latakia province, leading his brigade when the regime took back the area from the opposition in January. “There is no way to resist this scorched earth policy the Russians are deploying with their strikes across Syria.”

Since Russia began its strikes in Syria on 30 September, the regime has been able to make some gains across the country. Despite declaring that their military goal was strictly to target ISIS in Syria, studies have clearly documented their strikes have the main purpose of supporting the Assad regime’s military operations on the ground against moderate opposition forces, and have done little to seriously combat ISIS.

“Russia is simply acting as the regime’s air force against our moderate forces now,” said spokesman for the FSA’s Southern Front and defected officer Major Issam Al Reis. In Aleppo, the frontline between the regime and ISIS is a de facto safe zone, while they both focus their weaponry on opposition forces. As one media activist on the ground observed in the recent battle for Aleppo: “During the north Aleppo offensive, not a single Russian bomb hit ISIS – not a single ISIS attack hit Assad’s front.” [Continue reading…]

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ISIS has been thwarted militarily. But now it could seize chance to advance

Hassan Hassan writes: In January 2014 newly organised rebel factions in northern Syria declared war on Islamic State (Isis), and this culminated in the expulsion of the group from all of the city of Idlib and most of Aleppo. Rebel forces in Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor and Hasaka similarly rose up to root out the increasingly overbearing foreign organisation.

The anti-Isis offensive reportedly cost the rebels about 7,000 fighters. The group’s presence in Syria was seriously threatened, receding to Raqqa and pockets in Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor and Hasaka, until the summer of that year, when Isis swiftly took over Deir ez-Zor and consolidated its presence in eastern Aleppo, southern Hasaka and Raqqa. It was helped by momentum and the advanced weapons it seized after it took over Mosul in mid-June and the Iraqi army there collapsed.

But the advancing hordes of Isis still failed to reclaim control in Idlib or the rest of Aleppo. That remains true today. Local rebel factions have resisted the group’s incessant attempts to return. The rebels’ resilience in those areas is remarkable, especially considering Isis’s control of al-Bab and Manbij west of Aleppo, two significant strongholds for, respectively, Isis’s economic activities and its manpower.

But what Isis failed to achieve with advanced weapons and momentum could be achieved with the changing military landscape in Aleppo and northern Syria at large. [Continue reading…]

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Italian student murdered in Cairo showed signs of electrocution and other forms of torture

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Reuters reports: Egypt’s forensics authority handed over to the prosecutor general’s office on Saturday its final autopsy report on the Italian student who was tortured and found dead in Cairo last week.

Giulio Regeni, 28, had been researching independent trade unions in Egypt and had written articles critical of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government – prompting speculation that he was killed at the hands of Egypt’s security forces.

Egypt’s interior and foreign ministers both dismissed the notion of security forces being behind Regeni’s murder.

The prosecutor general’s office said it would not publicly disclose the contents of the report as the investigation was ongoing. Reuters was not able to obtain a copy to verify the contents.

However, a senior source at the forensics authority told Reuters Regeni, a graduate student at Britain’s Cambridge University, had seven broken ribs, signs of electrocution on his penis, traumatic injuries all over his body, and a brain haemorrhage.

His body also bore signs of cuts from a sharp instrument suspected to be a razor, abrasions, and bruises. He was likely assaulted using a stick as well as being punched and kicked, the source added. [Continue reading…]

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Sunni resentment dims prospect of reunifying Iraq after ISIS

The New York Times reports: When Iraqi ground forces and American aircraft began assaulting the city of Ramadi more than a month ago, Ghusoon Muhammed and her family fled to the government’s front line, as did many other Sunni Arab families who had been trapped for months. Soldiers sent her and the children one way, and her husband another, to be interrogated in a detention facility.

She has not seen him or heard from him since. She and her children, who will most likely not be able to go home to Ramadi for months given the destruction, have been left to wait in a ramshackle tent camp here in Anbar Province. She is desperate, and adamant: “The innocent people in jail need to be released!” she said.

Standing nearby on Sunday was another woman, Karima Nouri. Her son, an auto mechanic, was also taken away by the authorities, and she has had no word about him for weeks. Ms. Nouri said the government considered civilians who remained in Ramadi to be sympathizers of the Islamic State. “But we had no ability to leave,” she said. “We are very poor.”

The retaking of Ramadi, the provincial capital, has been held out as a vital victory by Iraqi officials and their American allies, and one of the most crucial first steps in the government’s reclaiming of Anbar Province and other Sunni Arab places.

But even as military goals are being met, Sunni families like those of Ms. Muhammed and Ms. Nouri are still voicing their fear and resentment of the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad, highlighting that the broader goal of political reconciliation is not yet being served. Their grievances today echo those that initially allowed the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, to prosper two years ago as it began seizing territory from the Iraqi government. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: Powerful Iraqi Shi’ite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr said on Saturday the country needed a technocratic government, threatening to quit politics if Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi failed to carry out promised reforms.

The remarks by Sadr, whose Al-Ahrar bloc holds 34 seats in parliament and three cabinet posts, were the first high-level reaction to the premier’s call for politically appointed ministers to be replaced with technocrats.

Struggling to show results from reforms he announced six months ago, Abadi said this week he wanted to make the replacements in a cabinet reshuffle, a shake-up that would alter the delicate balance of government in place since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

Abadi provided few details of the planned reshuffle but he is expected to move forward with changes this week after returning to Iraq from a European trip.

Sadr called for “forming a technocrat government away from partisanship that should include all.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey shells Kurdish-held airbase in Syria’s Aleppo

Al Jazeera reports: Turkish forces have shelled Kurdish-held areas, including an airbase, in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo, sources have told Al Jazeera.

Syrian Kurdish fighters from the People’s Protection Units (YPG) reported on Saturday that Turkish artillery targeted their positions in Menagh airport and a village near Azaz, which were recently captured from the Syrian opposition.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu confirmed on Saturday that Turkish forces had struck Kurdish YPG targets in northern Syria and demanded that the group withdraw from the area it recently captured. [Continue reading…]

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Civilian casualties in Afghanistan hit record high

Reuters reports: Civilian casualties of the war in Afghanistan rose to record levels for the seventh year in row in 2015, as violence spread across the country in the wake of the withdrawal of most international troops, the United Nations reported on Sunday.

At least 3,545 noncombatants died and another 7,457 were injured by fighting last year in a 4-percent increase over 2014, the international organization said in its annual report on civilian casualties.

“The harm done to civilians is totally unacceptable,” Nicholas Haysom, the head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, said in a statement. [Continue reading…]

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