Offering services, ISIS digs in deeper in seized territories

The New York Times reports: In northern Syria, the jihadists of the Islamic State have fixed power lines, dug sewage systems and painted sidewalks. In Raqqa, they search markets and slaughterhouses for expired food and sick animals. Farther south, in Deir al-Zour, they have imposed taxes on farmers and shopkeepers and fined men for wearing short beards.

The group runs regular buses across the border with Iraq to Mosul, where it publicly kills captives and trains children for guerrilla war. Last month, it reopened a luxury hotel in the city and offered three free nights to newlyweds, meals included.

A year after the Islamic State seized Mosul, and 10 months after the United States and its allies launched a campaign of airstrikes against it, the jihadist group continues to dig in, stitching itself deeper into the fabric of the communities it controls. [Continue reading…]

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The poetry and politics of Pope Francis’ climate encyclical

Ted Scheinman writes: Pope Francis lives modestly, having renounced the Papal Apartments for a small cell in the Vatican guesthouse. In this regard, he honors his namesake, St. Francis of Assisi. But the Pontiff’s relationship with language is far more florid, at times even baroque. In interviews, he plays free-association to grand effect, drawing on art, poetry, and the history of science. In September 2013, Francis gave an expansive interview, disseminated by the Vatican, that attested to his facility at wedding abstract thought to concrete policy. He came off as a pragmatist (“There are ecclesiastical rules and precepts that were once effective, but now have lost value or meaning”), a mystical aesthete (he describes the gospel as having “freshness and fragrance”), and a Jesuit mistrustful of authority (a true Jesuit, Francis said, “must be a person whose thought is incomplete”).

He is a Renaissance man who believes in the theological uses of doubt, an ascetic given to rich, occasionally gnomic pronouncements, and a pope who broadcasts his fallibility (“I am a really, really undisciplined person”) — small wonder Francis has attracted fierce devotion even among the secular American left.

As he prepares to address the United Nations summit on climate change in September, followed by a speech on the same topic at a special joint meeting of Congress the same month, the pope’s secretaries have prepared a document unprecedented in the Vatican’s history: A nearly 200-page encyclical that ambitiously — and persuasively — integrates the problems of global poverty and man-made climate change, proposing collective solutions for both. Still more radical, the encyclical characterizes both problems as unequivocal moral failures on the part of mankind. [Continue reading…]

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Naomi Oreskes: Why climate deniers are their own worst nightmares

When I go out with my not quite three-year-old grandson, his idea of a good time is hide-and-seek. This means suddenly darting behind a bush too small to fully obscure him or into a doorway where he remains in plain sight, while I wander around wondering aloud where in the world he could possibly be. In this, there’s a kind of magical thinking and denial of reality that has great charm. When similar acts of denial are committed by adults, when they refuse to see what’s right before their eyes — the melting sidewalks and roads of India, the emptying reservoirs of parched California, the extreme rain and flooding in parts of Texas and Oklahoma, the news that last year was a global heat record for the planet and this year is already threatening to be another, or that Alaska just experienced its hottest May ever, or that 13 of the 14 hottest years since temperatures began to be recorded took place in this century, or that a supposed post-1998 “pause” in the planetary warming process was a fantasy — the charm fades fast. When you discover that behind this denial of reality lies at least $125 million in dark money, it fades even faster. In just three years, unidentified conservative sources have poured that eye-popping figure into a web of think tanks and activist outfits dedicated to promoting climate denial (and not even included in that amount are the vast sums that Big Energy continues to contribute to the promotion of denialism, as it has done since the 1980s). In other words, some of the most powerful and profitable interests on the planet are determined to deny reality with a ferocity meant to confuse the public and put a damper on any moves or movement to save a planetary environment that has long nurtured humanity. It’s a charmless spectacle.

The well-funded climate deniers and the politicians who support them (and are, in turn, supported by the same set of funders) repeatedly yell “hoax.” In truth, they are the hoax and by now, were we looking, we would see that they are standing in a nearby doorway stark naked and in clear sight. And yet, backed by all that money, they essentially control the Republican Party and the Republican Congress. (Seventy-two percent of the Republican Senate caucus, for instance, now qualify as climate deniers.) This means that, for the party’s increasing horde of presidential candidates, the phrase “I’m not a scientist, but…” followed by doubts about or the rejection of climate science will be a commonplace of election year 2016. It couldn’t be a grimmer vista, even though in the decades to come achieving a relatively speedy changeover to non-greenhouse-gas-releasing fuels seems ever more possible.

This means, of course, that taking on the climate deniers directly couldn’t be more important. That’s why TomDispatch is lucky to have historian of science Naomi Oreskes return — having only recently given testimony before a Republican-controlled congressional committee dotted with climate deniers — to take on their false claims, fantasies, and lies. She co-authored with Erik Conway the now-classic book Merchants of Doubt on how the fossil fuel companies, like the tobacco companies before them, created a public sense of uncertainty about the dangers of their products when a scientific one didn’t exist. More recently, again with Conway, she wrote The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, a look back at the effects of global warming and climate denialism from the point of view of a historian of 2393. Tom Engelhardt

The hoax of climate denial
Why “politically motivated” science is good science
By Naomi Oreskes

Recently, the Washington Post reported new data showing something most of us already sense: that increased polarization on Capitol Hill is due to the way the Republican Party has lurched to the right. The authors of the study use Senator John McCain to illustrate the point. McCain’s political odyssey is, in some dismaying sense, close to my own heart, since it highlights the Republican turn against science.

As unlikely as it might seem today, in the first half of the twentieth century the Republicans were the party that most strongly supported scientific work, as they recognized the diverse ways in which it could undergird economic activity and national security. The Democrats were more dubious, tending to see science as elitist and worrying that new federal agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health would concentrate resources in elite East Coast universities.

In recent decades, of course, the Republicans have lurched rightward on many topics and now regularly attack scientific findings that threaten their political platforms. In the 1980s, they generally questioned evidence of acid rain; in the 1990s, they went after ozone science; and in this century, they have launched fierce attacks not just on climate science, but in the most personal fashion imaginable on climate scientists.

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Fed personnel agency admits history of security problems

The Associated Press reports: An Office of Personnel Management investigative official said Tuesday the agency entrusted with millions of personnel records has a history of failing to meet basic computer network security requirements.

Michael Esser, assistant inspector general for audit, said in testimony prepared for delivery that for years many of the people running the agency’s information technology had no IT background. He also said the agency had not disciplined any employees for the agency’s failure to pass numerous cyber security audits.

Esser and others were testifying Tuesday to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the cyber-theft of private information on millions of former and current federal employees, as well as U.S. security clearance holders, by hackers linked to China.

Officials fear that China will seek to gain leverage over Americans with access to secrets by pressuring their overseas relatives, particularly if they happen to be living in China or another authoritarian country. Over the last decade, U.S. intelligence agencies have sought to hire more people of Asian and Middle Eastern descent, some of whom have relatives living overseas. The compromise of their personal data is likely to place additional burdens on employees who already face onerous security scrutiny.

China denies involvement in the cyberattack that is being called the most damaging U.S. national security loss in more than a decade.

The potential for new avenues of espionage against the U.S. is among the most obvious repercussions of the pair of data breaches by hackers who are believed to have stolen personnel data on millions of current and former federal employees and contractors. [Continue reading…]

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Snowden leak: Governments’ hostile reaction fuelled public’s distrust of spies

The Guardian reports: The hostile reaction of the British and US governments to the Snowden disclosures of mass surveillance only served to heighten public suspicion of the work of the intelligence agencies, according to an international conference of senior intelligence and security figures.

The recently published official account of a Ditchley Foundation conference last month says one of the event’s main conclusions was that greater transparency about the activities and capabilities of the security services would be essential if their credibility was to be preserved and enhanced around the world.

The account of the conference chaired by Sir John Scarlett, the former head of MI6, was published on Friday and makes clear the foundation recognised the widespread public unease following the revelations and that the conditions of data collection about individuals and who has access to it are legitimate areas of concern. [Continue reading…]

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Snowden’s files and the files Snowden took: Is Glenn Greenwald playing dumb?

An article in Britain’s Sunday Times this weekend, claimed: “Russia and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden, forcing MI6 to pull agents out of live operations in hostile countries, according to senior officials in Downing Street, the Home Office and the security services.”

Glenn Greenwald writes:

The government accusers behind this story have a big obstacle to overcome: namely, Snowden has said unequivocally that when he left Hong Kong, he took no files with him, having given them to the journalists with whom he worked, and then destroying his copy precisely so that it wouldn’t be vulnerable as he traveled. How, then, could Russia have obtained Snowden’s files as the story claims — “his documents were encrypted but they weren’t completely secure ” — if he did not even have physical possession of them?

The only way this smear works is if they claim Snowden lied, and that he did in fact have files with him after he left Hong Kong.

In fact, the article says nothing about how the files were allegedly obtained by Russian and China, while Greenwald claims the only way they could have been accessed would be directly from Snowden.

Yet in 2013, Greenwald told the Daily Beast that Snowden “has taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.”

So aside from Snowden himself (who if taken at his word, no longer possesses the files) there many different people (we don’t know how many or who they all are) who also have or had the files.

Are we to assume that each and every one of them is an unfailing master of digital security and these files could never have been obtained by a third party?

In a world where a data security company like Kaspersky can get hacked, I wouldn’t put it outside the realms of possibility that by some means or other, Russia and/or China might have gained access to the files Snowden took.

There are, however, several reasons to question this report — not because it came from anonymous sources, or necessitates believing the Snowden has lied — but because had these sources been able to substantiate their claims with credible evidence, they would most likely have turned to a better newspaper.

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Russia urges U.S. not to deploy weapons to border areas

The New York Times reports: Moscow issued muted warnings on Monday in response to the Pentagon’s possible stationing of battle tanks and other heavy weapons to speed the deployment of American troops if needed in NATO states bordering Russia.

The Russian Foreign Ministry released a statement saying it hoped that Washington would ultimately decide not to deploy the weaponry, while other senior officials and analysts suggested that the deployment would provoke the placement of a more potent Russian arsenal near the frontier or even herald the start of a competitive arms buildup.

“We hope that reason will prevail and the situation in Europe will be prevented from sliding into a new military confrontation which may have dangerous consequences,” the Foreign Ministry said in the statement. [Continue reading…]

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The tabloid king who shapes how Russians sees the world

Christopher Miller reports: Aram Gabrelyanov isn’t a man to mince words.

And what this tabloid king really dislikes are “assholes” and “traitors” who challenge Russian President Vladimir Putin.

As if to dispel any doubts about his allegiance, his office has been decorated as a shrine to the president: On the wall above his desk hangs a portrait of Putin in hockey gear; a collection of photos of the president — as a young man, a KGB agent and as the leader of Russia — is displayed prominently on a bookshelf.

“I believe that the national leader should be beyond criticism,” says Gabrelyanov, in the Moscow offices of LifeNews, the sensationalist and popular 24-hour television channel and website he founded with his son Ashot. (His son served as general director until last year when he quit and moved to Brooklyn to launch a news app named Babo.)

The older Gabrelyanov resembles a boxer out of a 1930s gangster noir — he is jowly, sports dark stubble and his handshake is crushing. But his disposition is gregarious rather than menacing, and he has a ready arsenal of witty anecdotes and scintillating stories.

A constant stream of often salacious stories also underpins the channel’s slogan: “First in breaking news,” and there are rumors Russia’s intelligence community often feeds the channel information.

The channel is owned by the News Media holding company, fifty percent of which in turn is owned by the National Media Group of Yury Kovalchuk and Gennady Timchenko, two of Putin’s billionaire cronies who are on the U.S. government’s sanctions list.

Gabrelyanov denies that Russian security services use the channel to spread stories but freely admits that “doctors, nurses, police officers, politicians, all sorts of people” are on the LifeNews payroll. He calls these leakers “agents” and while he pays his staff salaries nearly five times what other outlets pay, the newsroom understands that a big portion of their wages are meant to buy off sources. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian court upholds death sentence against former president Morsi

The Washington Post reports: An Egyptian court upheld Tuesday a death sentence against former President Mohamed Morsi in sweeping judgments against the ousted leader and dozens of his Muslim Brotherhood allies.

The court decisions mark the latest move by prosecutors to punish and discredit Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose Islamist-inspired government was ousted by military-led pressures in 2013.

It also showed the increasingly tough stance of Egypt’s current government, led by former army chief Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, against political opponents more than four years after the pro-democracy uprisings of the Arab Spring. [Continue reading…]

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How water, paradoxically, creates the land we walk on

Julia Rosen writes: It’s no secret that water shapes the world around us. Rivers etch great canyons into the Earth’s surface, while glaciers reorganize the topography of entire mountain ranges. But water’s influence on the landscape runs much deeper than this: Water explains why we have land in the first place.

You might think of land as the bits of crust that just happen to jut up above sea level, but that’s mostly not the case. Earth’s continents rise above the seas in part because they are actually made of different stuff than the seafloor. Oceanic crust consists of dense, black basalt, which rides low in the mantle — like a wet log in a river — and eventually sinks back into Earth’s interior. But continental crust floats like a cork, thanks to one special rock: granite. If we didn’t have granite to lift the continents up, a vast ocean would cover our entire planet, with barely any land to speak of.

Gritty, gray granite and its rocky relatives dominate the continents. It forms the sheer walls of Yosemite Valley and the chiseled faces of Mount Rushmore (and also gleams from many a kitchen counter and shower stall). If you don’t see granite at the surface, you can bet it’s hiding just a few kilometers below your feet, unless you’re cruising over the middle of the ocean in a boat or plane. But what’s special about granite is that it’s relatively buoyant, for a rock—and that to make it, you need water. [Continue reading…]

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Coal crash: How pension funds face huge risk from climate change

The Guardian reports: The pension funds of millions of people across the world, including teachers, public sector workers, health staff and academics in the UK and US, are heavily exposed to the plummeting coal sector, a Guardian analysis has revealed.

It has also found that just a dozen people, including the owner of Chelsea FC, Roman Abramovich, own coal reserves equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of China, the world’s biggest polluter. The UN, which advocates a shift to clean energy, has more than $100m (£65m) invested in coal through its own pension fund.

The Guardian examined the ownership of the biggest 50 publicly traded coal companies, ranked by the reserves held which in total are equivalent to more than 11 years of global emissions. This alone could push the planet past beyond the 2C of climate change deemed dangerous by the world’s governments.

A fast-growing, global fossil fuel divestment movement, backed by the Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign, is having particular success in persuading investors to dump coal stocks. The world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, held by Norway, decided earlier this month to sell off more than $8bn of coal assets. [Continue reading…]

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CIA torture appears to have broken spy agency rule on human experimentation

The Guardian reports: The Central Intelligence Agency had explicit guidelines for “human experimentation” before, during and after its post-9/11 torture of terrorism detainees, the Guardian has learned, which raise new questions about the limits on internal oversight over the agency’s in-house and contracted medical research.

Sections of a previously classified CIA document, made public by the Guardian on Monday, empower the agency’s director to “approve, modify, or disapprove all proposals pertaining to human subject research”. The leeway provides the director, who has never in the agency’s history been a medical doctor, with significant influence over limitations the US government sets to preserve safe, humane and ethical procedures on people.

CIA director George Tenet approved abusive interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, designed by CIA contractor psychologists. He further instructed the agency’s health personnel to oversee the brutal interrogations – the beginning of years of controversy, still ongoing, about US torture as a violation of medical ethics.

But the revelation of the guidelines has prompted critics of CIA torture to question how the agency could have ever implemented what it calls “enhanced interrogation techniques” – despite apparently having rules against “research on human subjects” without their informed consent. [Continue reading…]

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When secret government talks are hacked it shows no one is secure in the connected age

By Carsten Maple, University of Warwick

Hotel rooms aren’t as private as they used to be. Recent reports suggest luxury hotels may have been targeted by national intelligence services trying to spy on negotiations over Iran’s nuclear programme.

The talks weren’t bugged in the traditional way of hiding microphones in the room. Instead, hackers infected hotel computers with a computer virus that its discoverers say may have been used to gather information from the hotels’ security cameras and phones.

The virus was discovered by cyber-security firm Kaspersky Labs when the company itself was infected by a sophisticated worm known as Duqu2. Kaspersky went about investigating which other systems around the world might have been attacked. Among the huge range of systems they checked, thousands of hotel systems were analysed. Most of these had not been subjected to an attack, but three luxury European hotels had also been hit by Duqu2.

Each was compromised before hosting key negotiations between Iran and world leaders regarding the country’s nuclear programme. Having previously been accused by the US of spying on the talks, Israel – which was not involved in the discussions – is now under suspicion of (and denies) deploying the virus.

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UK under pressure to respond to latest Edward Snowden claims

The Guardian reports: Downing Street and the Home Office are being challenged to answer in public claims that Russia and China have broken into the secret cache of Edward Snowden files and that British agents have had to be withdrawn from live operations as a consequence.

The reports first appeared in the Sunday Times, which quoted anonymous senior officials in No 10, the Home Office and security services. The BBC also quoted an anonymous senior government source, who said agents had to be moved because Moscow gained access to classified information that reveals how they operate.

Privacy campaigners questioned the timing of the report, coming days after a 373-page report by the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, David Anderson QC, which was commissioned by David Cameron. Anderson was highly critical of the existing system of oversight of the surveillance agencies and set out a series of recommendations for reform. [Continue reading…]

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Situation going from bad to worse for the Assad regime

Hassan Hassan writes: The string of military gains by the anti-government forces in Syria since mid-December continues to reveal the Assad regime’s profound weaknesses. The problem for the regime is not that it has lost a series of well-fortified garrisons but that each defeat was swift, taking anywhere between just a few hours and a couple of days.

The fall of Idlib province last month and the rebel takeover of the key Brigade 52 base in Deraa in southwestern Syria last week have revealed the military’s fragility. The Brigade 52 takeover was particularly telling because the attackers were nationalist forces, not radical groups such as Jabhat Al Nusra or ISIL, which usually overcome army defences by means of squads of suicide bombers.

The rebels’ advances in Hama and Idlib and especially the seizure of Jisr Al Shughour city in Idlib province on April 25 are very significant. They leave the regime’s Alawite heartlands in the coastal region exposed to the rebel onslaught for the first time since the start of the conflict.

Unsurprisingly, the regime has downplayed the significance of some of these gains, while Iranian general Qassem Suleimani vowed an imminent “surprise” in Syria two weeks ago. But the situation seems to be going from bad to worse for the regime. Recent losses have come where it hurts most: its support base.

Since the conflict began, Bashar Al Assad astutely ensured that Syria’s religious minorities remained loyal. But with the regime’s consistent and significant losses, protests from sections of these minorities are becoming hard to overlook or downplay. [Continue reading…]

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Central Asia is a sitting duck for ISIS

Deirdre Tynan writes: The appearance of Colonel Gulmurod Khalimov in an Islamic State propaganda video on May 27 sent a chill across Central Asia. The head of Tajikistan’s Special Assignment Police Unit (OMON), a key element in President Emomali Rahmon’s security apparatus, had disappeared shortly before. In the video he promised to return to wage violent jihad.

A veteran of brutal Tajik government operations, Khalimov has the qualifications. And Tajikistan, a desperately poor country ruled by a venal elite, is a vulnerable target. As I drove to its capital, Dushanbe, last summer through the ancient city of Khujand and the rickety, fume-filled, Iranian-built Shariston tunnel, I saw poverty and isolation that eclipses the worst pockets of deprivation in neighboring Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.

Khalimov has been an intimate of that elite, but at 40 years old he is relatively young and forceful, unlike the elderly, usually corrupt figures who have previously promoted themselves as Islamist guerrilla leaders in Tajikistan. His defection is a blow to Rahmon’s regime on many levels. He speaks to the parts of the elite not yet bought off and to the alienation of a substantial segment of society.

His message may be draped in Islamic fundamentalist rhetoric, but it is based on some of the potent, more worldly aspects of the Islamic State’s appeal. “Going out to work every morning, look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself: Are you ready to die for this state or not,” he said directly to the underpaid, overstretched Tajik security forces. “I am ready to die for the Caliphate — are you?” [Continue reading…]

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