Shakedown: Israeli opposition leader heads to Washington to ‘demand’ more money and weapons

The Jerusalem Post reports: Amid news of the nuclear deal reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers, opposition leader Isaac Herzog (Zionist Union) announced Tuesday that he will be leaving for the US in the coming days to “demand a dramatic package of security measures for Israel.”

Voicing his disappointment over the deal, Herzog noted that a country that “funds, trains and nurtures terrorist organizations,” was both detrimental to Israel and to its future.

“With regard to security, I am more extreme than Netanyahu,” Herzog remarked. “In light of the situation, we must do everything within our power to improve our security,” he said. [Continue reading…]

The Times of Israel reports on the response from another opposition leader: Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid said Wednesday the Iran deal was the country’s biggest foreign policy failure ever.

“We stand today facing the greatest foreign policy failure by any Israeli prime minister since the establishment of the state,” Lapid told the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “Netanyahu] is not [former British prime minister Winston] Churchill before the Second World War, he is [former Israeli prime minister] Golda [Meir] after the Yom Kippur War.”

The 1973 war, in which Israel was surprised by several Arab armies and needed urgent US airlifts of weapons, is considered one of the greatest strategic fiascoes in the history of the country. Then-prime minister Meir resigned in the wake of a commission of inquiry that analyzed Israel’s failure to see the war coming.

Lapid said that he would defend Israel to the world but added that a better agreement could have been reached:

“To the outside world, in English, we will support the government and explain to the whole world how dangerous this agreement is, and I have been doing this since yesterday,” he said. “But inside, in Hebrew, let’s face it – the prime minister failed in reaching a different agreement […] we could have had a deal in which the main issue is that of inspection. Sanctions could have been removed based on milestones [reached] and not according to a schedule, and then the deal would be different,” he said.

Lapid said Netanyahu has decimated Israel’s foreign relations: “Until yesterday the entire world was convinced the US and Israel always walk hand in hand. As of yesterday [the world] learned that the US will no longer listen to the prime minister, the Europeans won’t listen to the prime minister, the Chinese, the Russians, the Democrats [in the US], and he left scorched earth in Israel’s foreign relations. [Netanyahu] needs to go home after a failure of such colossal proportions. The prime minister cannot remain in office.” [Continue reading…]

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Documenting death inside Syria’s secret prisons

NPR reports: A Syrian forensic photographer, who now uses the pseudonym Caesar, documented the death of thousands of detainees in Syria’s brutal prison system. He made more than 55,000 high-resolution images before he fled the country, fearing for his safety, in 2013.

He spoke publicly for the first time in July 2014, when he appeared before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, wearing a blue jacket with a hood to protect his identity.

Dozens of Caesar’s photographs will be displayed again in the halls of Congress on Wednesday.

The exhibition is sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in cooperation with the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee. [Continue reading…]

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ExxonMobil gave millions to climate-denying lawmakers despite pledge

The Guardian reports: ExxonMobil gave more than $2.3m to members of Congress and a corporate lobbying group that deny climate change and block efforts to fight climate change – eight years after pledging to stop its funding of climate denial, the Guardian has learned.

Climate denial – from Republicans in Congress and lobby groups operating at the state level – is seen as a major obstacle to US and global efforts to fight climate change, closing off the possibility of federal and state regulations cutting greenhouse gas emissions and the ability to plan for a future of sea-level rise and extreme weather.

Exxon channeled about $30m to researchers and activist groups promoting disinformation about global warming over the years, according to a tally kept by the campaign group Greenpeace. But the oil company pledged to stop such funding in 2007, in response to pressure from shareholder activists. [Continue reading…]

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The latest sign that coal is getting killed

Bloomberg Business reports: Coal is having a hard time lately. U.S. power plants are switching to natural gas, environmental restrictions are kicking in, and the industry is being derided as the world’s No. 1 climate criminal. Prices have crashed, sure, but for a real sense of coal’s diminishing prospects, check out what’s happening in the bond market.

Bonds are where coal companies turn to raise money for such things as new mines and environmental cleanups. But investors are increasingly reluctant to lend to them. Coal bond prices tumbled 17 percent in the second quarter, according to an analysis by Bloomberg Intelligence. It’s the fourth consecutive quarter of price declines and the worst performance of any industry group by a long shot. [Continue reading…]

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The IMF is telling Europe the euro doesn’t work

Josh Barro writes: It reads like a dry, 1,184-word memorandum about fiscal projections. But the International Monetary Fund’s memo on Greek debt sustainability, explaining why the I.M.F. cannot participate in a new bailout program unless other European countries agree to huge debt relief for Greece, has provided the “Emperor Has No Clothes” moment of the Greek crisis, one that may finally force eurozone members to either move closer to fiscal union or break up.

The I.M.F. memo amounts to an admission that the eurozone cannot work in its current form. It lays out three options for achieving Greek debt sustainability, all of which are tantamount to a fiscal union, an arrangement through which wealthier countries would make payments to support the Greek economy. Not coincidentally, this is the solution many economists have been telling European officials is the only way to save the euro — and which northern European countries have been resisting because it is so costly.

The three options laid out by the I.M.F. would have different operations, but they share an important feature: They involve other European countries giving Greece money without expecting to get it back. These transfers would be additional to the approximately 86 billion euros in new loans contemplated in Monday’s deal. [Continue reading…]

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How whales are struggling to make themselves heard in the world’s increasingly noisy oceans

Peter Brannen writes: At 5:30am I awoke to the sound of the diesel chug-chugging of a lone lobster boat carving into the glassy Atlantic. An audience of shrieking gulls hushed in the engine’s wake as it rumbled through the narrow strait that separates the United States from Canada. After the boat pushed out into the open ocean, the gulls resumed their gossip, and I began preparing for a day on the water, still groggy from the night before, after joining a group of researchers over beer. I had come to Lubec in Maine with a bizarre question: what was 9/11 like for whales?

I sleepwalked to the pier and helped pack a former Coast Guard patrol boat with boxes of underwater audio-visual equipment, as well as a crossbow built for daring, drive-by whale biopsies. A pod of 40 North Atlantic right whales had been spotted south of Nova Scotia the day before and, with only a few hundred of the animals left in existence, any such gathering meant a potential field research coup. ‘They even got a poop sample!’ one scientist excitedly told me. The boat roared to life and we slipped past postcard-ready lighthouses and crumbling, cedar-shingled herring smokehouses. Lisa Conger, a biologist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), manned the wheel of our boat, dodging Canadian islands and fishing weirs. As the Bay of Fundy opened before us, a container ship lumbered by to our stern: a boxy, smoking juggernaut, as unstoppable as the tide.

‘After 9/11, we were the only ones out here,’ Conger said over the wind and waves. While this tucked-away corner of the Atlantic might seem far from the rattle of world affairs, the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington DC of 11 September 2001 changed the marine world of the Bay of Fundy, too.

Conger leads the field team in Lubec for Susan Parks, a biology professor at Syracuse University. As a graduate student, Parks found that right whales were trying to adapt to a gradual crescendo of man-made noise in the oceans. In one study, she compared calls recorded off Martha’s Vineyard in 1956, and off Argentina in the 1977, with those in the North Atlantic in 2000. Christopher Clark, her advisor, had recorded the Argentine whales and, when Parks first played back their calls, she thought there must be some sort of mistake.

‘It was older equipment – reel-to-reel tapes which I’d never used before – so I went to Chris to ask if I had the speed of the tape wrong because the whales sounded so much lower in frequency than the whales I had been working with.’

In fact, Parks discovered, modern North Atlantic right whales have shifted their calls up an entire octave over the past half century or so, in an attempt to be heard over the unending, and steadily growing, low-frequency drone of commercial shipping. Where right-whale song once carried 20 to 100 miles, today those calls travel only five miles before dissolving into the din. [Continue reading…]

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Scientists discover new kind of particle: the pentaquark

AFP reports: Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have discovered a new kind of particle called the pentaquark, they announced Tuesday.

Physicists had theorised the existence of the pentaquark since the 1960s, but had never been able to prove it until its detection by the LHCb experiment at the LHC, the world’s most powerful particle smasher.

The discovery of the pentaquark comes after the LHC was used in 2012 to prove the existence of another particle, the Higgs Boson, which confers mass.

LHCb spokesman Guy Wilkinson said the pentaquark represented a way to combine quarks — the sub-atomic particles that make up protons and neutrons — “in a pattern that has never been observed before in over 50 years of experimental searches.”

He added: “Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted.”

The LHC cranked back up again in June after a two-year upgrade, with scientists hailing a “new era” in their quest to unravel more mysteries of the Universe. [Continue reading…]

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What the Iran nuclear deal means — and what it doesn’t

By Scott Lucas, University of Birmingham

Iran and the 5+1/E3+3 Powers (US, Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia) have at last completed a comprehensive nuclear agreement after years of discussions and threats of conflict. The deal sets out requirements for keeping Iran’s nuclear programme from producing nuclear weapons, and establishes a timeline for lifting sanctions that have pushed the country to the brink.

But how can the complexities of the 139-page document be understood, especially amid the already charged argument between those who support and those who oppose the deal? Here are the fundamental points.

This is a good deal for all sides

An excellent agreement is not based on one side “winning” and the other “losing”. It is based on each side compromising but still reaching important objectives.

For the first time, Iran gets international recognition of its enrichment of uranium for civil purposes. That legitimacy also brings the prospect of re-opened trade and investment links, vital for an economy which has been crippled by sanctions and mismanagement over the past decade.

The US, other powers, and the international community get defined limits on that enriched uranium. Put bluntly – and in defiance of the hyperbolic objections of the deal’s critics – Iran has been pushed far back from a militarised program for many years, even if it really was seeking nuclear weapons in the first place.

It no longer has any 20% uranium in a form that can be developed for a bomb, and even its 5% uranium is sharply reduced. Its nuclear facilities, including enrichment plants and a proposed heavy-water nuclear reactor, are under an extensive and tightly defined system of inspections. Some of its military sites will be visited to ensure that no traces of any past quest for nuclear weapons remain. Iran will finally adhere to the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The situation will still be far from “normal” given the years of tension. Nonetheless, for the first time, there is the prospect of Iran becoming part of the global challenge over nuclear proliferation, rather than a pariah.

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Iran nuclear deal: Supreme Leader makes supreme decision

The Guardian reports: Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has weathered some critical moments over the last quarter of a century – the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 when Tehran feared it would be the next target, the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which shook the legitimacy of his rule and the acrimonious years that followed as sanctions hit the country’s economy.

Perhaps the biggest decision of his career, however, was the one he had to make this week. The historic deal struck in Vienna could not have happened without Khameni’s blessing. He has the final say in all state matters in Iran and his decision may define his leadership.

On one side of the negotiating table of the 22-month talks sat seven parties struggling to secure a formula that would allow a comprehensive nuclear agreement with Tehran, which will have profound implications for the Middle East. On the other side, there was one man not actually present but whose view was decisive. No one doubted who that person was. [Continue reading…]

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The Iran deal is built to last

Richard Dalton writes: Reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons programme has been a long and arduous process. The deal, announced earlier today, is a tremendous achievement for non-proliferation and regional security – and for the negotiators and their political leaders. There are good reasons to believe it will stick.

First, there are effective provisions to guard against cheating. The agreement will deter Iran from breakout using existing or covert facilities. There are snap-back provisions to restore sanctions in the event of violations. In addition, the military option is still not “off the table” – Iran will not want to risk an attack, which would grow more likely if the deal fell through.

Second, while there will be resistance in the US Congress, there are grounds for optimism that they will not succeed in undermining the deal. There is no viable better agreement available if the US turns down this one. For one thing, there would be no international support for more sanctions if the US were seen to have vetoed the deal. The deal’s opponents are unlikely to muster a veto-proof majority against the agreement; and a hypothetical Republican president in 2017 would hesitate before scuppering a deal that had by then been satisfactorily implemented and increased the security of the US and its allies. [Continue reading…]

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Iran’s nuclear deal could allow its people to thrive again

Azadeh Moaveni writes: At the height of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s defiance of the west over Iran’s nuclear programme, his government popularised the slogan, “nuclear energy is our absolute right.” One day I went outside my house in Tehran to find fresh graffiti scrawled on the wall nearby: “Danish pastry is our absolute right.” It referred to the beloved pastries that his government had decreed, in the wake of the Danish Prophet Muhammad cartoon controversy, needed rebranding. That graffiti comes to mind today, as Iran and the west announce their agonisingly awaited nuclear deal.

Back then, as today, Iranians cared more about what enhanced their daily lives than ideology and tough stances. For a decade, and especially the past three years, sanctions have gouged away at people’s quality of life. They have lost jobs as unemployment spiked, lost access to important medications and to software the rest of the world takes for granted. The era of sanctions has been the era of loss of many things: of carefully acquired savings, of dreams of studying abroad, of being able to serve meat once a week. Most painfully for a country that has the Middle East’s most educated, sizeable middle-class, Iranians have lost the ability to be genuinely cosmopolitan; international travel today is outside the reach of everyone but the Maserati-driving elite, buying a book from Amazon is technically impossible, as is registering for hundreds of university courses abroad, online and actual.

It is difficult to enumerate the endless ways – economic, cultural, academic – that sanctions have impacted the lives of ordinary Iranians. That is why, as they witness with such great anticipation the announcement of an agreement that will eventually bring sanctions to an end, it is hard to piece together their vision for what will change. The mood in Tehran is pure fizz, and the talk spans everything from cheaper iPhones to democracy. [Continue reading…]

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Assad: Iran to redouble support following nuclear deal

NOW reports: Syria’s president has hailed the historic nuclear deal inked between Iran and the P5+1 powers, saying that Damascus is “quite assured” that Tehran will further its support for support his regime.

Bashar al-Assad early Tuesday afternoon sent separate cables to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani congratulating Tehran over the deal, calling it a “historic achievement.”

“We are quite assured that the Islamic Republic of Iran will continue, with greater momentum, supporting the just issues of peoples and working for peace and stability to prevail in the region and the world,” Syria’s state SANA news agency quoted Assad as saying in a communiqué to Khamenei hours after the landmark deal was inked in Vienna.

In a separate cable to his Iranian counterpart, Assad called the nuclear agreement a “fundamental turning point in the history of Iran’s relations with the countries of the region and the world,” according to SANA.

The Syrian president’s comments serve as a reference to Iran’s support for its allies, including Damascus, which has reportedly already markedly increased in recent months, most recently last week when Iran granted Syria a $1 billion credit line. [Continue reading…]

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Once again, Fallujah is at the heart of the fight for Iraq

McClatchy reports: Iraqi officials have been candid that the brunt of the fighting about to engulf the city will be borne by an umbrella group of Shiite militia groups formed under the supervision of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite of Shiite Iran. That’s raised dire concerns from American advisers that these sectarian groups – overtly hostile to both Americans and Sunni Muslims – will break the already deeply frayed relationship between the Shiite government in Baghdad and the Sunni tribes that dominate the large swaths of Iraq currently under the Islamic State’s control.

The government claims that Sunni tribal fighters and local policemen from Anbar will join the militia-led assault. But many remain skeptical that Sunnis have joined in sufficient numbers to avoid the impression of a Shiite pogrom against Sunnis in Fallujah.

“The government says that it has trained 5,000 Sunni tribal fighters, but this number is not realistic,” said one Anbar tribal leader currently in Irbil, who asked his name not be used for fear of sectarian reprisals from the government.

“These Iranian gangs are going to take their revenge for Saddam and for Zarqawi on the innocent people of Fallujah and Ramadi,” he said, referring to the provincial capital of Anbar province, whose surprise fall to the Islamic State two months ago triggered the Shiite militias’ zeal to capture Fallujah. [Continue reading…]

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The cold-blooded leaders of ISIS

Christoph Reuter, an investigative journalist for Der Spiegel has been to Syria 19 times and recently published The Black Power: The “Islamic State” and the Strategists of Terror (only available in German), which details the strategy of ISIS, or Daesh, as Reuter prefers to call the organization. He spoke to NOW managing editor Hanin Ghaddar.

Reuter: So the overall idea of the book is about this surface of Daesh which we perceive, but when you see how they operate, when you see who is the inner core of leadership, and when you see what relations the old leadership of the Islamic State and Iraq had with Ali Mamluk and Assef Shawkat in Syria — extremely close relations — you see that Daesh becomes kind of three-dimensional. You see that it’s not just a jihadist outlet; it’s a combination of a very cold-blooded, engineered plan — the old Baathists, the old secret service guys, with real jihadists, with believers. But you have a clear hierarchy of who’s making the plans and decisions.

NOW: Who exactly is making the plans and decisions?

Reuter: The Baathists — the old professionals. They also flip alliances. They had some kind of tactical alliance with the rebels, and I mean on the level that they could always claim ‘we are against Assad.’ But they also have this tactical cooperation with Assad’s regime. It’s not true what the opposition always say that Daesh was created by Assad. We collected 15 cases from early 2014, and new ones from June 2015, where rebels and Daesh would fight. They had clashes in Maara, in Al-Bab, in Aleppo and in Raqqa, and then you would have the regime air force, either during the fighting or immediately after bombing only the rebels, never the Daesh side. Also, when Daesh was removed from Al-Bab by the rebels, the regime pounded Al-Bab 12 hours later and made it easier for Daesh to come back.

Daesh basically borrowed the regime’s air force, and this was the clearest evidence that they are potentially helping each other.

NOW: Do you think there is also communication or only tactical cooperation?

Reuter: Well, there must be communication, but we have no evidence of the communication.

So, you have these two very cynical archenemies, who both believe — rightly — that they can be, for the time being, useful to each other in certain areas. So you have the confirmation that this is not a jihadist outlet of believers. They have no problem to have deals with the KRG, with Barazani’s government, like: ‘we take Mosul and we don’t touch Kirkuk.’ So you had no clashes or conflict from June to August 2014, then suddenly they felt powerful enough and they took a lot of the Kurdish areas.

There’s a very non-religious, tactical and practical element of how they operate. It’s completely different from real believers. They could make deals with the devil if need be. [Continue reading…]

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How a Chechen from Georgia became a feared leader of ISIS

Marcin Mamon writes: “Christ is risen, Christ is risen!” says Temur Batirashvili, father of one of the most notorious leaders of the Islamic State.

Temur welcomes me into his modest house with the phrase that is a common greeting among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Then he takes a drink from a glass of homemade Georgian wine.

“Truly, He is risen,” he continues. “Truly …”

Temur Batirashvili is a Christian, like his ancestors. He has three sons, all of whom converted to Islam, against their father’s wishes. Temur blames himself; when the children grew up he was rarely at home, traveling for work all over Russia. He had to support his family. The children’s mother, an ethnic Chechen Muslim whose family immigrated to Georgia hundreds of years ago, raised the couple’s sons mostly on her own.

“I never thought that my son …” Temur starts, then grows silent and takes a drag from a cigarette. He chains smokes one after another.

Today, Temur lives alone and in poverty in a village hidden from the world in the Pankisi Gorge, located in northeastern Georgia near the border with Chechnya. The Pankisi Gorge is a bucolic valley of shepherds and picturesque mountains. But in recent years, it became better known internationally as a safe haven for Chechen fighters, and now as a recruiting ground for the Islamic State. It’s estimated that dozens of the valley’s youth have left for Syria, and some of the group’s most famous commanders, including Temur’s son, have come from here.

Temur Batirashvili’s 29-year-old son, Tarkhan, better known by his nom de guerre, Omar al Shishani, is one of the most wanted jihadis in the world. His father calls him the minister of war of the Islamic State, and in 2014, the U.S. Treasury Department labeled him a “specially designated global terrorist.” In May 2015, the State Department announced a reward of up to $5 million for information on Tarkhan, who was listed as, among other things, overseeing a prison that possibly held foreign hostages.

Sometimes Temur sees his son on television, in news programs about massacres, executions and beheadings — all of the barbarity associated with the Islamic State. Despite the news, Temur tells himself that his son isn’t capable of killing, because he was always so sensitive to the suffering of others, so merciful. “It was not him, only people under his command are responsible for this evil,” he says.

But Temur is at a loss then to explain how his gentle son got involved with a group that is perhaps best known for its slickly produced videos depicting decapitations and other gruesome executions. “I never got involved in my children’s personal affairs, because they weren’t thieves, hobos or junkies,” he says. “They were good people, very serious, normal people.”

Tarkhan’s story, it turns out, is hardly unique in the region. He joins a growing list of recruits from Georgia who have risen up the ranks of jihadi organizations fighting in Syria, including the Islamic State. Other well-known names from Pankisi include Murad Margoshvili, Fayzullah Margoshvili and Ruslan Machalikashvili.

All have taken the pseudonym “al Shishani,” or “the Chechen,” even though they are ethnic Kists from Georgia, a distant relative of the Chechens from the Northern Caucasus. A Chechen on jihad sounds proud. Individually or by group affiliation, all have been included on the State Department’s list of specially designated global terrorists, and have had great influence on the fate of the war in Syria. Within that narrative, Tarkhan’s path from a mixed Muslim-Orthodox Christian union in Georgia to the front lines of Syria is a larger story about the tremendous inroads the Islamic State has made in recruiting around the world. [Continue reading…]

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Greece put its faith in democracy but Europe has vetoed the result

Paul Mason writes: One of the most touching aspects of Greek life is people’s obsessional respect for parliamentary democracy. Syriza itself is the embodiment of a leftism that always believed you could achieve more in parliament than on the streets. For the leftwing half of Greek society, though, the result is people continually voting for things more radical than they are prepared to fight for.

I asked one of Syriza’s grassroots organisers, a tough party cadre who had been agitating for a “rupture” with lenders for weeks, whether he could put his members onto the streets to keep order outside besieged pharmacies and supermarkets. He shook his head. The police, or more probably the conscript army would have to do it.

When it comes to the now-abandoned Thessaloniki Programme, the radical manifesto on which Alexis Tsipras came to power, there is always talk of implementing it “from below”: that is, demanding so many workers’ rights inside the industries designated for privatisation that it becomes impossible; or implementing the minimum wage through wildcat strikes. But it never happens. When strikes are called, it’s by the communists. When riots happen, it’s the anarchists. The rest of leftwing Greece is mesmerised by parliament.

Little does it understand how scant was the power its ministers actually wielded from their offices. And now the realisation dawns: the Greek parliament has no power inside the eurozone at all. It has the power only to implement what its lenders want. [Continue reading…]

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