Music: Five Corners Quintet — ‘Easy Diggin’

The Observer: Everybody is a jazz fan, DJ/producer Tuomas Kallio reckons. Only they just don’t know it. After sharpening his dancefloor instincts as one of the founders of Nuspirit Helsinki, he reasoned that danceable grooves need not be the exclusive property of club culture and jazz need not be the preserve of 30 people in the back room of a pub. So he created the Five Corners Quintet.

Taking some of the finest young jazzers in Finland – among them saxophonist Timo Lassy of the U-Street All Stars, drummer Teppo Mäkynen of the Teddy Rok Seven and trumpeter Jukka Eskola, a major young European talent – he wrote original yet catchy themes that were halfway between hard bop and a Stax or Muscle Shoals horn riff. Underpinned by powerful grooves that reflect his interest in club culture, Hot Corner is a potent mix that’s guaranteed to get the most recalcitrant wallflower onto the dancefloor.

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Shakeup in the Saudi royal family

Steve Coll writes: Last January, Salman bin Abdulaziz ascended to the throne of Saudi Arabia and installed his son Mohammed bin Salman as Minister of Defense. The Minister, who is thirty-four, holds an undergraduate degree in law from King Saud University. In late March, the Saudis launched a bombing campaign against neighboring Yemen, to contain a rebel force known as the Houthis, whom the Saudis see as allies of Iran, a rival. Bin Salman oversaw pilots flying advanced U.S.-made jets that, according to Human Rights Watch, dropped U.S.-made cluster bombs. Since the campaign began, Saudi-led strikes have killed hundreds of Yemeni civilians in schools and homes and at a camp for internal refugees. The Houthis have expanded the area under their control since the bombing started.

Bin Salman’s war is an inauspicious start to a new era for the royal family. The kingdom hasn’t experienced this kind of political shakeup since 1975, when Faisal bin Musaid, a failed student and an LSD dealer at the University of Colorado, assassinated King Faisal, his uncle. The King had been an economic modernizer, but, after the shock of his death, the Saudi throne passed laterally among aged half brothers, who ruled cautiously. It was unclear how power would ever pass to a younger generation. King Salman, who is seventy-nine, boldly resolved that question earlier this year by naming a nephew, Mohammed bin Nayef, who is fifty-five and runs the Interior Ministry, as his Crown Prince and successor, and installing bin Salman as second in line. This plan empowers Salman’s branch of the House of Saud, who are known as the Sudairis, after Salman’s mother.

The new princes are rising amid an unusual estrangement between Riyadh and Washington. Last week, at the last minute, the King declined to attend a conference at Camp David, where President Obama gathered potentates from Saudi Arabia and smaller Persian Gulf emirates to discuss security coöperation. (Salman sent his nephew and his son in his stead.) The snub seemed a hollow gesture of passive-aggressiveness, yet it signalled how Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran are unsettling the kingdom. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS threatens to capture massive Iraqi oil refinery

The Washington Post reports: Six months after the government triumphantly announced that Islamic State militants had retreated from Iraq’s largest refinery, the extremist group is again threatening to overrun the facility.

For weeks, soldiers, police officers and Shiite militiamen have struggled to hold their ground inside the Baiji oil complex during a brutal siege by the Islamic State. The militant group’s suicide bombers have relentlessly struck the perimeters of the refinery, about 150 miles north of the capital, and pushed deep inside the massive facility.

The Baiji operation shows how the Islamic State has remained resilient even after suffering setbacks at the hands of pro-government forces and losing fighters and equipment to U.S. airstrikes, according to analysts, Iraqi officials and militiamen. On Friday, the group also pushed into the heart of Ramadi, a city further to the south that has been fending off attacks by the Islamic State for more than a year. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. ground forces in Syria — the first in a series of such missions?

The New York Times reports: American Special Operations forces mounted a rare raid into eastern Syria early Saturday, killing a leader of the Islamic State and about a dozen militant fighters, as well as capturing his wife and freeing an 18-year-old Yazidi woman whom Pentagon officials said had been held as a slave.

In the first successful raid by American ground troops since the military campaign against the Islamic State began last year, two dozen Delta Force commandos entered Syria aboard Black Hawk helicopters and V-22 Ospreys and killed the leader, a man known as Abu Sayyaf. One American military official described him as the Islamic State’s “emir of oil and gas.”

Even so, Abu Sayyaf is a midlevel leader in the organization — one terrorism analyst compared him to Al Capone’s accountant — and likely is replaceable in fairly short order. And the operation, while successful, comes as the Islamic State has been advancing in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, demonstrating that the fight against the Sunni militant group in both Iraq and Syria remains very fluid.

Yet the Pentagon’s description of a nighttime raid that found its intended target deep inside Syria without any American troops being wounded or killed illustrates not only the effectiveness of the Delta Force, but of improving American intelligence on shadowy Islamic State leaders. [Continue reading…]

Foreign Policy adds: the fact that the White House gave the green light for an operation into Syria, combined with reports that the Delta operators removed a substantial trove of intelligence material from the site, might indicate that the raid could be the first in a series of such missions.

Delta has had a task force in Iraqi Kurdistan since at least last year with a mission of trying to find Islamic State leaders to kill or capture. During the war against the Islamic State’s predecessor organization, al Qaeda in Iraq, Delta and the other components of the military’s Joint Special Operations Command developed a system called “F3EAD” — for Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate — in which strike forces would raid objectives such as militant safe houses not only to kill or capture the militants but to gain as much material of intelligence value as possible. By sucking information out of hard drives and cell phones, as well as quickly interrogating anyone taken prisoner, Delta and other JSOC forces were able to launch several missions a night, each based on intelligence gained in the previous raid. That dynamic could repeat itself here. [Continue reading…]

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Tide of Syria civil war turns against Assad as rebels make sweeping gains

The Telegraph reports: The posters of President Bashar al-Assad once hung proud in Syria’s capital. Supporters of the regime would confidently predict the defeat of the “terrorists” – the accepted term for the rebel opposition.

In the last few weeks, however, the the insurgents have turned the tide of the civil war by winning a string of battlefield victories against Mr Assad’s forces.

In the north, a newly unified rebel coalition called the “Army of Conquest” managed to capture Idlib, a provincial capital, and much of the surrounding territory.

They pressed on to Jisr al-Shughour, seizing most of this strategically important city and besieging about 250 regime soldiers inside its hospital. That victory threatens a vital supply line to Latakia, the coastal heartland of Mr Assad’s Alawite sect.

In the south, another insurgent alliance known as the “Southern Front” made steady gains in Deraa province, joining up a patchwork of opposition-held villages into one expanse of rebel-controlled territory. If this advance continues, the rebels could press northwards along the main highway to Damascus itself. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. rushing new weapons to Iraq as ISIS takes control of Ramadi

McClatchy reports: The Islamic State on Friday took control of the provincial government center of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s largest province, and appeared to be in control of most of the city in a major defeat for the Iraqi government.

Islamic State forces also appeared to be closing in on government positions in two other key locations in Anbar province, the towns of Baghdadi and Karmah, in a broad offensive that if successful would end the government presence in all of the province’s major population centers. The capture of Baghdadi also would cut the supply lines to the Iraqi garrison protecting the strategic Haditha Dam.

U.S. officials offered conflicting views of the events, with the State Department and the Pentagon at first downplaying the significance of what had taken place. But a later statement from the White House made clear that the situation was urgent and that the United States was rushing shipments of heavy weapons, ammunition and supplies to Iraq to deal with the Islamic State advance.

The new weapons shipments will include an unspecified number of shoulder-fired rockets especially useful in blasting car bombs, which the Islamic State used particularly effectively in its Ramadi offensive.

The new weapons shipments came after Vice President Joe Biden spoke with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al Abadi, according to the statement, which said Biden thanked Abadi for “his steadfast leadership . . . at a time of significant security challenges, including today’s ISIL attack on Ramadi.”

“The vice president assured the prime minister of continued and expedited U.S. security assistance to confront ISIL,” the statement said, using the government’s preferred acronym for the Islamic State.

At Ramadi, government troops reportedly were still fighting in some isolated areas. But the city was essentially under the control of the Islamic State after a fierce assault that began with a series of car bombs on Iraqi government security facilities overnight. By late afternoon, security forces appeared to be in full flight as militants consolidated control over the area and prevented anyone from leaving. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. ‘deeply concerned’ by Egypt’s death penalty decision for Mohamed Morsi

Reuters: The US is “deeply concerned” about an Egyptian court decision to seek the death penalty for the former president Mohamed Morsi, a State Department official said on Sunday.

The US criticism follows condemnation from Amnesty International and Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, after the court ruling on Saturday against the deposed leader and 106 supporters of his Muslim Brotherhood in connection with a mass jail break in 2011.

The ruling against Morsi is not final until 2 June. All capital sentences are referred to Egypt’s top religious authority, the Grand Mufti, for a non-binding opinion, and are also subject to legal appeal.
Islamists warn of backlash over Mohamed Morsi death sentence
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“We are deeply concerned by yet another mass death sentence handed down by an Egyptian court to more than 100 defendants, including former president Morsi,” the State Department official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

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Village of Bedouins faces eviction as Israel envisions a village of Jews

The New York Times reports: Salim al-Qian settled back on his white faux leather couch strewn with pink cushions and took a sip of tea, clearly comfortable in his tiny home in this ramshackle hamlet in the dusty hills of southern Israel. The sense of permanence suggested by his comfort, however, looks to be short-lived.

Mr. Qian and the other members of some 70 Bedouin families are likely to be evicted soon from their homes in the hamlet of Umm al-Hiran, where they have been living since the 1950s. In their place, the Israeli government plans to build a community with nearly the same name, Hiran — but its expected residents will be religious, Zionist Jews.

The government says Umm al-Hiran is on state-owned land that it would like to develop, and it has fought a long legal battle to have the Bedouin families, about 1,000 people, relocated. This month, the Supreme Court ruled in a 2-1 decision that the families would have to leave. The court gave no date for when evictions could begin, and residents intend to appeal the decision.

The Bedouins say they do not want to leave land on which they have been living for more than half a century after being resettled there by the Israeli military. The government has promised compensation in the form of cash and land elsewhere, but the Bedouins say the decision to move them reflects discriminatory policies.

“It is not possible to order one home demolished because it belongs to an Arab and build another for a Jew,” said Mr. Qian, 57, a trader and community leader. [Continue reading…]

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Marie Alphonsine Ghattas and Mariam Bawardy — two saints from Palestine

BBC News reports: Pope Francis has canonised two 19th Century nuns who lived in Ottoman-ruled Palestine, making them the first Palestinian saints in modern times.

Marie Alphonsine Ghattas and Mariam Bawardy were among four new saints declared in Rome’s St Peter’s Square.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and over 2,000 Christian pilgrims from the region attended the ceremony.

The move is seen as a token of Vatican support for dwindling Christian communities in the Middle East. [Continue reading…]

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New Putin invasion coming this summer

Michael Weiss James Miller write: The war in Ukraine may have faded largely from international headlines, but Vladimir Putin’s drip-drip invasion continues. In the last two weeks, forensic evidence, some of which has been reported by monitor organizations and senior Western diplomats, the rest corroborated by eyewitness photography and video, only confirms what the U.S. fears most: A summer offensive is inevitable.

On May 5, the Ukrainian government released new data which says that they have lost 28 towns to Russian-backed separatists since February 18. That was the day the strategic town of Debaltsevo, which guarded a key highway to separatist-controlled regions, slipped from Ukraine’s control. The map of separatist territory is as alarming as it is illustrative, especially when it is combined with the daily reports of ceasefire violations and fighting coming out of both the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and Kiev.

On May 6, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko addressed the National Security and Defense Council and warned that Russia has 50,000 troops on the border and its proxies have more than 40,000 fighters inside the country. That’s not only a combined 50% increase in possible invaders over July of last year, the month which proceeded the “Russian invasion” on the Ukrainian mainland. It’s more than enough soldiers to invade and gobble up a significant amount of Ukrainian territory. [Continue reading…]

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Outcast: Adrift with Burma’s Rohingya

Jason Motlagh writes: In June 2012, mobs of ethnic Rakhine Buddhists tore through Rohingya Muslim neighbourhoods in the coastal town of Sittwe, attacking anyone in their path. Mohammad Idriss, a member of the persecuted minority, took refuge with relatives indoors. In a moment of panic, his younger brother made the mistake of jumping from a window, only to be caught and beaten to death with sticks and iron rods.

Idriss says that a neighbour dealt the first blow to the head. “All victims deserve justice, but I don’t think it will be possible even in a decade,” he says, reflecting on the massacre that night. “Our situation is hopeless.”

The killings were part of a gathering wave of sectarian violence that has spread to other parts of the country, amid accusations that security forces have turned a blind eye to bloodshed. Two years on, Idriss and most of the 140,000 Rohingya uprooted from their ancestral homes live in what have been likened to concentration camps, trapped between armed guards and the sea. Burma’s government insists it is for their own protection, but aid groups have been kicked out, and food and medical supplies are limited, resulting in a surge of deaths from treatable illnesses. [Continue reading…]

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CO2 trend is up, up, up

Climate Central: Any day now, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will reach their annual peak in a cycle driven by the collective inhale and exhale of the world’s plant life. But because of the extra CO2 pumped into the air by human activities, this year’s peak will be higher than last year’s, which was higher than the year before that — a sign of the unabated emissions that are driving the Earth’s temperature ever upward.

The amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been measured at the observatory atop Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano since 1958, producing a record that shows not only the yearly maximum and minimum driven by the spring bloom and fall dieback of plants, but also the steady climb in CO2 levels every year.

The last few years have seen a spate of atmospheric CO2 milestones in the Mauna Loa record: The first measurement of CO2 above 400 parts per million (ppm) in May 2013, the first month entirely above 400 ppm in April of last year, and this year will likely see several months with an average above that level.

While 400 ppm is something of a symbolic threshold, as the amount of extra heat trapped by it versus 399 ppm is minimal, it serves to show how far carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm. Studies have estimated that CO2 levels on Earth haven’t been this high in at least 800,000 years. [Continue reading…]

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We are ignoring the new machine age at our peril

John Naughton writes: As a species, we don’t seem to be very good at dealing with nonlinearity. We cope moderately well with situations and environments that are changing gradually. But sudden, major discontinuities – what some people call “tipping points” – leave us spooked. That’s why we are so perversely relaxed about climate change, for example: things are changing slowly, imperceptibly almost, but so far there hasn’t been the kind of sharp, catastrophic change that would lead us seriously to recalibrate our behaviour and attitudes.

So it is with information technology. We know – indeed, it has become a cliche – that computing power has been doubling at least every two years since records of these things began. We know that the amount of data now generated by our digital existence is expanding annually at an astonishing rate. We know that our capacity to store digital information has been increasing exponentially. And so on. What we apparently have not sussed, however, is that these various strands of technological progress are not unconnected. Quite the contrary, and therein lies our problem.

The thinker who has done most to explain the consequences of connectedness is a Belfast man named W Brian Arthur, an economist who was the youngest person ever to occupy an endowed chair at Stanford University and who in later years has been associated with the Santa Fe Institute, one of the world’s leading interdisciplinary research institutes. In 2009, he published a remarkable book, The Nature of Technology, in which he formulated a coherent theory of what technology is, how it evolves and how it spurs innovation and industry. Technology, he argued, “builds itself organically from itself” in ways that resemble chemistry or even organic life. And implicit in Arthur’s conception of technology is the idea that innovation is not linear, but what mathematicians call “combinatorial”, ie one driven by a whole bunch of things. And the significant point about combinatorial innovation is that it brings about radical discontinuities that nobody could have anticipated. [Continue reading…]

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The Iranian Kurdish ‘revolution’ the world doesn’t know is happening

IBT reports: Buildings are burning, protesters are bloodied, law enforcement vehicles are destroyed, hundreds of young men and women have been arrested and there is no end in sight. Iranian Kurdistan has been under what Iranian opposition called an “undeclared martial law” for the last week, and the Iranian regime has done all it can to keep it out of the media.

Thousands of Iranian Kurds have been demonstrating in the streets of roughly a dozen Iranian cities almost consistently for the past week. On Friday, protests turned violent as Iranian Kurdish political leaders called for an independent Kurdistan and democracy in Iran. It is one of the biggest Kurdish uprisings against the Iranian regime in years.

Iranian Kurds are “planning to carry out a comprehensive revolution and there are armed Iranian Kurdish political parties positioning themselves for the revolution,” said Sarkawt Kamal Ali, an Iraqi human rights lawyer familiar with the Kurdish situation.

On Friday, a recently formed coalition of Kurdish political parties, Kodar, threatened to deploy protesters and militia fighters to the Iranian capital of Tehran if the regime did not allow them to independently govern Iran’s Kurdish areas, according to Rudaw. [Continue reading…]

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Egyptian court sentences ousted President Morsi to death

The New York Times reports: An Egyptian court sentenced Mohamed Morsi, the country’s deposed president, to death on Saturday over his involvement in a prison break during Egypt’s 2011 popular uprising.

Mr. Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, was the country’s first democratically elected president and came to power following the 2011 revolt that ended the three decades of autocratic rule of Hosni Mubarak. After a divisive and chaotic year in office, Mr. Morsi was ousted from power by the military in July 2013 following another wave of protests.

The jailbreak case was a sign of the sweeping reversal of Egypt’s political tide since the 2011 uprising. The former head of state had been detained in a revolution that many Egyptians hoped would bring about an end to arbitrary detentions and other abuses by the security state. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS leader, Abu Sayyaf, killed in Syria by U.S. special forces

Reuters reports: American special operations forces killed a senior Islamic State leader who helped direct the group’s oil, gas and financial operations during a raid in eastern Syria, U.S. officials said on Saturday.

The White House said President Barack Obama ordered the overnight raid that killed the man identified as Abu Sayyaf. U.S. officials said his wife, Umm Sayyaf, was captured in the raid and was being held in Iraq.

This was the first known U.S. special forces operation inside Syria apart from a failed secret effort to rescue a number of U.S. and other foreign hostages held by Islamic State in northeastern Syria last year.

White House National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said in a statement that U.S. personnel based out of Iraq conducted the operation in al-Amr in eastern Syria.

“During the course of the operation, Abu Sayyaf was killed when he engaged U.S. forces,” Meehan said.

“The president authorized this operation upon the unanimous recommendation of his national security team and as soon as we had developed sufficient intelligence and were confident the mission could be carried out successfully and consistent with the requirements for undertaking such operations,” Meehan said.

Meehan said the operation was conducted “with the full consent of Iraqi authorities” and “consistent with domestic and international law.”

The White House said the U.S. did not inform Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government in advance of the raid, or coordinate with Damascus. Shortly before the U.S. announcement, Syrian state television said the Syrian army killed an Islamic State leader responsible for oil-related affairs, identifying him as Abu al-Taym al-Saudi. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS tightens grip on Ramadi

The Washington Post reports: Islamic State militants are tightening their grip on Ramadi, executing civilians and blowing up homes a day after seizing most of the Iraqi city, government officials and police said Saturday.

On Thursday, the extremist group launched an offensive to take Ramadi, about 80 miles west of Baghdad. They seized government buildings and drove pro-government forces out of most of the city on Friday, police and residents said.

The assault appears to have dealt a significant setback to Iraq’s U.S.-backed government, which is struggling to retake territory that the radical Sunni group seized in sweeping advances last summer. The United States is leading an international coalition that is conducting airstrikes against the extremist group in Iraq as well as Syria. [Continue reading…]

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