France’s National Front on the path to power

On the campaign trail with Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front in France, the Economist reports: Ms Le Pen’s celebrity welcome in the tiny northern French town of Doullens is a mark of how far she has transformed a once-toxic fringe movement, stained by neo-Nazi links and anti-Semitism, into an almost respectable party aspiring to govern. Five years ago voters who felt drawn to her father, Jean-Marie, a gruff former paratrooper who founded the party in 1972, still kept their approval half-hidden until election day. Today, they display no such reserve towards his daughter.

On the campaign trail ahead of departmental elections later this month, the crowd in the Doullens market is thick and Ms Le Pen’s progress through it snail-like. After dropping in on Les Deux Ailes hunting shop, its rifles displayed in the window like fine patisseries, Ms Le Pen stops in the street market for selfies, kisses children and stoops to greet those in wheelchairs. This is a politician who is on the up, and knows it. “We are on a path towards…power!” she declares, with a broad grin.

Polls suggest that the FN will come top in the first round of voting in the elections on March 22nd, grabbing at least 30% of the vote. This would beat its previous best score of 25%, in last year’s elections for the European Parliament. The Front may not go on to win many local assemblies, as voters from centre-left and centre-right will gang up against it in the second round. But to the FN this is not a concern. It is fielding 7,648 candidates, in 95% of constituencies, up from a third in 2011, as part of a longer game: to secure hundreds of seats, even if in opposition, in order to build up an army of elected officials across the country who can help prepare Ms Le Pen for the presidential election in 2017.

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The threat of nuclear war is higher than at any time in the past 25 years

The Economist: In January 2007 Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn — two Republican secretaries of state, a Democratic defence secretary and a Democratic head of the Senate Armed Services Committee — called for a global effort to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons.

The ultimate goal, they wrote in the Wall Street Journal, should be to remove the threat such weapons pose completely.

The article generated an astonishing response. Long seen as drippily Utopian, the idea of getting rid of nuclear weapons was suddenly taken on by think-tankers, academics and all sorts of very serious people in the nuclear-policy business.

The next year a pressure group, Global Zero, was set up to campaign for complete nuclear disarmament. Its aims were endorsed by scores of government leaders, present and past, and hundreds of thousands of citizens.

In April 2009 Barack Obama, speaking in Prague, promised to put weapons reduction back on the table and, by dealing peacefully but firmly with Iran’s nuclear ambitions, to give new momentum to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Processes could now be set in train, he said, that would lead to the worldwide renunciation of nuclear weapons within a generation. This speech, along with his ability not to be George W. Bush, was a key factor in landing Mr Obama the Nobel peace prize a few months later.

The following year he returned to Prague to sign an arms agreement with Russia, New START, which capped the number of deployed strategic warheads allowed to each side at 1,550. His co-signatory, Russia’s then president, Dmitry Medvedev, had endorsed Global Zero’s aims. A month later the NPT’s quinquennial review conference agreed a 64-point plan intended to reinforce the treaty’s three mutually supportive legs: the promise that all countries can share in the non-military benefits of nuclear technology; the agreement by non-weapons states not to become weapons states; and the commitment of the weapons states to pursue nuclear disarmament. There were hopes that, when the parties to the NPT met again in May 2015, there would be substantial progress to report.

Alas, no. Mr Obama’s agreement with Iran remains possible, even likely — but it will hardly be one that energises the cause of a nuclear-free world. [Continue reading…]

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Responding to failure: Reorganizing U.S. policies in the Middle East

In a recent speech, Chas W. Freeman said: I want to speak with you today about the Middle East. This is the region where Africa, Asia, and Europe come together. It is also the part of the world where we have been most compellingly reminded that some struggles cannot be won, but there are no struggles that cannot be lost.

It is often said that human beings learn little useful from success but can learn a great deal from defeat. If so, the Middle East now offers a remarkably rich menu of foreign-policy failures for Americans to study.

• Our four-decade-long diplomatic effort to bring peace to the Holy Land sputtered to an ignominious conclusion a year ago.

• Our unconditional political, economic, and military backing of Israel has earned us the enmity of Israel’s enemies even as it has enabled egregiously contemptuous expressions of ingratitude and disrespect for us from Israel itself.

• Our attempts to contain the Iranian revolution have instead empowered it.

• Our military campaigns to pacify the region have destabilized it, dismantled its states, and ignited ferocious wars of religion among its peoples.

• Our efforts to democratize Arab societies have helped to produce anarchy, terrorism, dictatorship, or an indecisive juxtaposition of all three.

• In Iraq, Libya, and Syria we have shown that war does not decide who’s right so much as determine who’s left.

• Our campaign against terrorism with global reach has multiplied our enemies and continuously expanded their areas of operation.

• Our opposition to nuclear proliferation did not prevent Israel from clandestinely developing nuclear weapons and related delivery systems and may not preclude Iran and others from following suit.

• At the global level, our policies in the Middle East have damaged our prestige, weakened our alliances, and gained us a reputation for militaristic fecklessness in the conduct of our foreign affairs. They have also distracted us from challenges elsewhere of equal or greater importance to our national interests.

That’s quite a record.

One can only measure success or failure by reference to what one is trying achieve. So, in practice, what have U.S. objectives been? Are these objectives still valid? If we’ve failed to advance them, what went wrong? What must we do now to have a better chance of success? [Continue reading…]

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Greenhouse gas emissions are decoupling from economic growth

ClimateProgress: Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions flatlined globally in 2014, while the world economy grew. The International Energy Agency reports that this marks “the first time in 40 years in which there was a halt or reduction in emissions of the greenhouse gas that was not tied to an economic downturn.”

The IEA attributes this remarkable occurrence to “changing patterns of energy consumption in China and OECD countries.” As we reported last month, China cut its coal consumption 2.9 percent in 2014, the first drop this century. China is aggressively embracing energy efficiency, expanding clean energy, and shuttering the dirtiest power plants to meet its planned 2020 (or sooner) peak in coal use. As a result, Chinese CO2 emissions dropped 1 percent in 2014 even as their economy grew by 7.4 percent.

At the same time, the Financial Times points out “In the past five years, OECD countries’ economies grew nearly 7 percent while their emissions fell 4 percent, the IEA has found.” A big part of that is the United States, where fuel economy standards have reversed oil consumption trends — and renewable energy, efficiency, and natural gas have cut U.S. coal consumption.

All this “provides much-needed momentum to negotiators preparing to forge a global climate deal in Paris in December,” explained IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol, who was just named the next IEA Executive Director. “For the first time, greenhouse gas emissions are decoupling from economic growth.” [Continue reading…]

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William deBuys: A global war on nature

In her bestselling book The Sixth Extinction, the New Yorker‘s superb environmental journalist, Elizabeth Kolbert, reports on an event, already unfolding in the present moment, the likes of which may only have been experienced five other times in the distant history of life on this planet. As she writes, “It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys. If you know how to look, you can probably find signs of the current extinction event in your own backyard.”

Scientists believe that this round of mass extinction is accelerating, and one way or another, it all traces back to us, whether thanks to the way we are changing the planet’s atmosphere or to what Kolbert terms a human-induced, often disastrous “intercontinental reshuffling of species.” But of all the ways in which that mass extinction is being pushed forward, none is more straightforwardly obvious than the quite literal slaughter that constitutes the illegal animal trade.  In recent years, environmentalist and TomDispatch regular William deBuys set out to see the results of that aspect of mass extinction for himself, and what a grisly spectacle it proved to be.  In the process, he penetrated deep into the jungles of Laos in search of a deer-like creature you’ve undoubtedly never heard of that may — or may not — still exist.

It was an adventure of the first order, which deBuys depicts in his remarkable new book, The Last Unicorn: A Search for One of Earth’s Rarest Creatures. He captures both the grimness of what’s happening to animals of every sort in the distant forests of a land we’ve paid no attention to since the Vietnam War ended and the glorious beauty of the species we humans are indeed destroying. The result is both a personal adventure story and a missive from a planet undergoing a rare form of destruction. Today at this site, he offers us all a look at one of what could be the final “achievements” of humankind: the ability to devastate this planet in a way no other creature would be capable of.

Kolbert ends her book on a question that any mass extinction on planet Earth would naturally have to bring up sooner or later: What about us?  In extinction terms, could we potentially be just another form of rhinoceros? Are we, in fact, capable not just of creating civilizations but engaging in a kind of species suicide? This is, of course, a question that can’t be answered, but she adds, “The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that ‘Homo Sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.’ A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity [at the American Museum of Natural History in New York] offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: ‘In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.’” Take a moment, then, with deBuys to experience what that sawing-off process is like, up close and personal. Tom Engelhardt

The politics of extinction
An introduction to the most beautiful animal you’ll never see
By William deBuys

Maybe baby steps will help, but the world needs a lot more than either the United States or China is offering to combat the illegal traffic in wildlife, a nearly $20-billion-a-year business that adds up to a global war against nature. As the headlines tell us, the trade has pushed various rhinoceros species to the point of extinction and motivated poachers to kill more than 100,000 elephants since 2010.

Last month China announced that it would ban ivory imports for a year, while it “evaluates” the effectiveness of the ban in reducing internal demand for ivory carvings on the current slaughter of approximately 100 African elephants per day. The promise, however, rings hollow following a report in November (hotly denied by China) that Chinese diplomats used President Xi Jinping’s presidential plane to smuggle thousands of pounds of poached elephant tusks out of Tanzania.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has launched its own well-meaning but distinctly inadequate initiative to curb the trade. Even if you missed the roll-out of that policy, you probably know that current trends are leading us toward a planetary animal dystopia, a most un-Disneyesque world in which the great forests and savannahs of the planet will bid farewell to the species earlier generations referred to as their “royalty.” No more King of the Jungle, while Dorothy’s “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” will truly be over the rainbow. And that’s just for starters.

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How to save jobs and destroy the planet

If I was invested with the powers of a dictator, I’d be especially ruthless in one particular way: I’d show no mercy to those guilty of crimes against language.

No, I wouldn’t be another Bryan Henderson — the Wikipedia editor who has a vendetta against the phrase “comprised of.”

The guilty, in my book, are not those who fail to bow in obeisance to the mythical gods of grammar. What I view as an inexcusable abuse of language is to regard it as nothing more than a tool of deception.

The people who specialize in this corrupt art, work in advertising, public relations, and politics, and they create things like this:

The American Progressive Bag Alliance.

Plastic bags — fluttering down windswept streets, getting caught in branches, blocking drains, choking animals, poisoning groundwater, and colonizing oceans — might seem to have a life of their own. Apparently they are now also demanding political rights and claim they are progressive.

It turns out, however, that APBA is not an alliance of bags, but instead (predictably) it represents the transnational corporate power and interests of the plastics industry:

  • Advance Polybag, Inc. – bag manufacturer
  • The Dow Chemical Company – resin maker
  • ExxonMobil Corporation – HDPE resin maker
  • Hilex Poly Co., LLC. – bag manufacturer, co-founder
  • Inteplast – bag manufacturer
  • NOVA Chemicals, Inc. – polyethylene manufacturer
  • Superbag Corporation – bag manufacturer
  • Total Petrochemicals USA – polyethylene manufacture
  • Unistar Plastics, LLC – bag manufacturer

I imagine that those came up with the name American Progressive Bag Alliance, have to drug themselves to sleep — and probably drug themselves at work, too. Either that, or through a self-administered lobotomization which cuts out principles for the sake of career, the conscience they were born with, withered away a long time ago.

If, like me, you’ve never heard of this alliance before, Bill Raden explains what they have done:

Just when Californians were getting used to the idea of living without getting free, single-use grocery bags at the supermarket checkout, Secretary of State Alex Padilla recently announced that a referendum effort aimed at rescinding the plastic bag ban signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown in September had qualified for the 2016 ballot. Pending the results of next year’s vote, the announcement effectively suspends the July 1 implementation of the measure, Senate Bill 270, which would have been the first statewide bag ban in the nation. (Citywide bans, such as those passed in Los Angeles and San Francisco, will remain in place.)

Padilla’s office says that a random sampling found that the measure’s supporters collected at least 555,236 valid signatures — more than the 504,706 needed. Ironically, Padilla had been a key force behind the passage of SB 270, when he was in the State Senate.

Californians currently use about 11 billion disposable plastic shopping bags annually with a market value that the plastic bag industry estimates at between $100 million to $150 million. Those sales will now be secure for an additional 15 months.

The effort to put the so-called “people’s veto” onto the ballot was mounted by the American Progressive Bag Alliance, the same industry consortium that bitterly fought passage of the ban.

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How armed intruders stormed their way into a South African nuclear plant

The Center for Public Integrity reports: Shortly after midnight on a cold Thursday morning, four armed men sliced through the chain-link fence surrounding this storage site for nuclear explosives on the banks of the Crocodile River, west of the administrative capital, Pretoria.

The raiders slipped under an array of high-voltage wires in the fence, then shut off the electricity and some alarms, stormed the Emergency Operations Center at the 118-acre complex, held a gun to the head of one of the employees there and shot another.

Around the same time, a second group of intruders breached another section of the fence. But both teams wound up fleeing after they unexpectedly stumbled on a fireman at the emergency center who fought them and asked a colleague to summon help.

Whatever the raiders were after that night in November 2007, they didn’t get it. All they left with was a cellphone from one of their victims, which they quickly discarded. Ever since, the government of South Africa has dismissed the incident as a routine burglary by inept thieves who tried but failed to steal computers or civilian nuclear technology.

Many U.S. officials in Washington reached a different view — more closely matching the conclusions of an unpublicized, independent investigation ordered by the chief of the state corporation that manages Pelindaba. That probe produced an alarming report that has never been released — or even acknowledged — in South Africa but was obtained by foreign intelligence agencies and described to the Center for Public Integrity by multiple people familiar with its contents. [Continue reading…]

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Netanyahu views upcoming election as a conspiracy against him

Lisa Goldman writes: Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent Facebook status, posted on Friday in Hebrew, is distinctly odd. It makes him sound like a rambling paranoid who’s off his meds, and local reporters have definitely noticed, with various Israeli journalists exchanging comments in Hebrew and English on social media platforms. In response to popular demand, I’ve translated the status into English.

A couple of explanatory notes: Noni Mozes is the publisher of Yedioth Ahoronoth, a veteran publication that for many years had the biggest share of newspaper readers until Sheldon Adelson launched Israel Hayom about five years ago, which is distributed for free. Israel Hayom is a serious newspaper, but its news and analysis follows an unswervingly pro-Netanyahu editorial line. For this reason it is often referred to as the “Bibiton,” which is a portmanteau of Netanyahu’s popular nickname and “iton,” the Hebrew word for newspaper.

According to the final pre-election polls, with results posted on Friday, Likud is down to 20, an all-time low in the polls this election season, while the Zionist Union (led by Tzipi Livni and Isaac “Buji” Herzog) is at 24. Netanyahu is now under tremendous pressure. He runs the risk of losing the election for Likud. And his party seems to be blaming him for running a disastrous campaign, including the heavily criticized speech to Congress that ended up generating a backlash in Israel.

The translated status: [Continue reading…]

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CIA cash ended up in coffers of Al Qaeda

The New York Times reports: In the spring of 2010, Afghan officials struck a deal to free an Afghan diplomat held hostage by Al Qaeda. But the price was steep — $5 million — and senior security officials were scrambling to come up with the money.

They first turned to a secret fund that the Central Intelligence Agency bankrolled with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul, according to several Afghan officials involved in the episode. The Afghan government, they said, had already squirreled away about $1 million from that fund.

Within weeks, that money and $4 million more provided from other countries was handed over to Al Qaeda, replenishing its coffers after a relentless C.I.A. campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan had decimated the militant network’s upper ranks.

“God blessed us with a good amount of money this month,” Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the group’s general manager, wrote in a letter to Osama bin Laden in June 2010, noting that the cash would be used for weapons and other operational needs. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. exaggerates ISIS casualties

Eli Lake and Josh Rogin write: The war against the Islamic State has killed thousands of fighters and even some mid-level battlefield commanders, but the organization’s senior leadership and nerve center remain largely untouched, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials.

These officials and other experts tracking the terror group tell us that the Islamic State’s Shura and Sharia councils, the advisory bodies that help inform the major decisions of the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, remain intact, notwithstanding one close call in November for Baghdadi. Although airstrikes and military campaigns have killed several regional administrators and designated “governors,” the Islamic State has quickly replaced them and maintains its command-and-control capabilities.

This assessment of progress against the Islamic State differs sharply from public statements by top Obama administration officials as recently as last month, including Secretary of State John Kerry and retired General John Allen, the president’s special coordinator for the coalition against the Islamic State. In February, Allen said that half the group’s leaders in Iraq had been killed.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference also in February, Kerry expanded that claim to account for the group’s leadership in Syria as well.

“We’ve disrupted their command structure, undermined its propaganda, taken out half of their senior leadership, squeezed its financing, damaged its supply networks, dispersed its personnel, and forced them to think twice before they move in an open convoy,” Kerry said.

Kerry and Allen haven’t since repeated that claim about the group’s senior leadership. U.S. military officials tell us no consensus intelligence estimate supports the claim that half the Islamic State’s leadership has been eliminated. [Continue reading…]

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Iraqi Kurds say ISIS used chlorine gas against them

Reuters: Iraqi Kurdish authorities said on Saturday they had evidence that Islamic State had used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon against their peshmerga fighters in northern Iraq in January.

The Security Council of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region said in a statement to Reuters that the peshmerga had taken soil and clothing samples after an Islamic State car bombing attempt on Jan. 23.

It said laboratory analysis showed “the samples contained levels of chlorine that suggested the substance was used in weaponized form.” The Kurdish allegation could not be independently confirmed.

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The United States and Saudi Arabia: Marriage of convenience on the rocks?

In a recent speech, Chas W. Freeman said: Saudi Arabia has done it again! On January 23, it dismayed foreign pundits by failing to sink into the anarchy they speculated might follow the death of its king, ‘Abdullah. Instead, the Kingdom carried off yet another flawless passing of the leadership baton. What’s more, the succession process indicated who the next two or three kings are likely to be. And the new king, Salman bin ‘Abdulaziz Al-Sa’ud, acted promptly and decisively to seize the reins of government and reorganize it.

This rightly attracted global attention. The world has a big stake in Saudi stability. Forget the cartoons about it! The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not a gas station full of oppressed, black-garbed women in the middle of a camel ranch. It is the heartland and focal point of Islam, the faith of at least one in four human beings alive today. It lies athwart transport routes between Asia, Europe, and Africa. The Kingdom is the custodian of a fourth or more of the world’s oil reserves. Rumors that it is no longer relevant to oil markets have just been unambiguously refuted. (Ask any fracker in North Dakota about that!) Saudi Arabia is at the center of a growing concentration of global capital. Its puritanical religious doctrines inspire its — and our — most dangerous enemies.

In short, what happens in Saudi Arabia and between it and its neighbors matters greatly to Americans, American allies and friends, and American adversaries. But Saudi Arabia is little known, even less understood, and frequently caricatured. This is not surprising. The Kingdom is the only society on the planet not to have been penetrated by Western colonialism. No European armies breached its borders; no missionaries; no merchants. Its capital, Riyadh, was long off limits to infidels, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina remain so today. It is said that hubris is the only reliably renewable resource of Western civilization, but when we Westerners finally came to Saudi Arabia, we came not as the vindicators of our presumed cultural superiority, but as hired help.

As a result, some say that Saudis secretly see the world’s peoples as divided into two basic categories: (1) fellow Saudis, and (2) potential employees. Be that as it may, foreigners — Western, Asian, or Arab — who have lived in Saudi Arabia all see it as a very strange society, one that is not easy to understand and that professes values at odds with those of non-Saudis. Some come to love it. Many don’t. [Continue reading…]

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What does it mean to be fully human?

“The problem today, is that many people are filled with fear. They are frightened of people, frightened of losing. And because people are filled with fear they can no longer be open to others. They are protecting themselves, protecting their class, protecting their group, protecting their religion. We’re all in a state of protection. To become fully human is to let down the barriers.” — Jean Vanier

Toronto Globe and Mail: Jean Vanier, the Canadian humanitarian who spent the past half-century working with people with intellectual disabilities, has been awarded the 2015 Templeton Prize in recognition of his advocacy work and his reflections on the importance of helping the vulnerable.

Last year, Maggie Fergusson talked to the former naval officer: [A]s the second world war drew to an end, it became clear to Jean Vanier that the navy was not his ultimate vocation. Shortly after the liberation of Paris, in January 1945, he spent some leave at the Gare d’Orsay helping the Canadian Red Cross receive survivors from Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen and Auschwitz. “I’ll never forget the men and women who arrived off the trains—like skeletons, still in the blue-and-white striped uniforms of the concentration camps, their faces tortured with fear and anguish. That, and the dropping of the atom bombs, strengthened a feeling in me that the navy was no longer the place for me; that I wanted to devote myself to works of peace.” A committed Catholic, he imagined he would probably become a priest.

While many of his contemporaries were getting married and settling down, Vanier resigned his commission and spent a number of years living in a community near Paris, combining a life of prayer with manual work and the study of philosophy. Following this, on the strength of a thesis on Ari­stotelian ethics, he was offered a post at the University of Toronto. He discovered that he had a gift for teaching, a gift that he retains in old age: an ability to hold large audiences rapt as he spoke without notes or hesitation, and with minimal amplification. But still he did not feel he was following his true star.

Then, in 1963, when Jean was 35, a Dominican priest, Père Thomas Philippe, chaplain to Le Val Fleuri, an institution for mentally disabled men, invited him to visit. It was a terrible place—“The men had a little work, but the doors were locked”—yet, despite an atmosphere of noise, depression and violence, Jean found it “beautiful”. “This is my experience of having been in many dark places—prisons, psychiatric wards, slums, leper colonies. There’s something frightening, but also something beautiful, a sense of wonderment. It’s mysterious. Maybe it’s the discovery that amidst all the chaos, these people are human beings. I saw anger and pain in the faces of these men, but also great tenderness. And each one of them, 30 in a constricted space, was saying, ‘Will you come back?’”

“They were literally saying this, or you felt that’s what they wanted?”

“They were literally saying, ‘Veux-tu revenir?’ And behind those words I sensed a great cry: ‘Why have I been abandoned? Why am I not with my brothers and sisters, who are married and living in nice houses? Do you love me?’ A great thirst for friendship.”

For several months, Jean devoted himself to finding out more about the treatment of those with mental disabilities. “I visited psychiatric hospitals and institutions, I spoke with families. And I discovered a whole world of suffering: these were perhaps the most oppressed and humiliated people of the world. They were called stupid, mad, imbeciles, foolish, idiots…All these words were used about them. They were not considered really human—so as long as you gave them food and lodging, you were doing a good act.” In Saint-Jean-les-Deux-Jumeaux, an asylum east of Paris, 80 men lived locked in a building made of cement blocks. They had no work, and spent most of their days walking around in circles. And those who remained with their families were not necessarily treated with more compassion. On a farm, Jean met a teenager who was kept chained in a garage.

Outraged by these discoveries, many people would have thrown themselves into pressing for reform. Jean’s background meant that he was used to mixing with people in positions of influence. Why didn’t he go straight to the top, I ask. Why didn’t he launch a campaign? “It’s good to campaign. But I could only do what I felt. All that I saw made me sad, maybe a bit angry, and all that I felt I could do was to start living with some of these people; to take a risk, and see what happened.” [Continue reading…]

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Koch Industries refuses to comply with U.S. senators’ climate investigation

The Guardian reports: The Koch brothers’ conglomerate Koch Industries has refused to comply with an investigation by three Senate Democrats into whether the company has funded groups or researchers who deny or cast doubt on climate change.

In response to a request from senators Barbara Boxer, Edward Markey and Sheldon Whitehouse for information about Koch Industries’ support for scientific research, Koch general counsel Mark Holden invoked the company’s first amendment rights.

“The activity efforts about which you inquire, and Koch’s involvement, if any, in them, are at the core of the fundamental liberties protected by the first amendment to the United States constitution,” Holden wrote the senators in a letter dated 5 March and posted online by Koch Industries this week.

“I did not see any explanation or justification for an official Senate committee inquiry into activities protected by the first amendment,” he wrote, concluding, “we decline to participate in this endeavor and object to your apparent efforts to infringe upon and potentially stifle fundamental first amendment activities.”

Asked by the Guardian to elaborate on how the first amendment protects such funding and whether Koch Industries would pursue legal action to prevent disclosing information, Holden said: “Our letter speaks for itself.”

In his letter to the senators, Holden suggested that such funding represents part of “Koch’s right to participate in the debate of important public policy issues and its right of free association.”

On 25 February, the three Democratic senators – each a ranking member of committees that oversee environmental affairs – sent letters to 100 fossil fuel companies and thinktanks “to determine whether they are funding scientific studies designed to confuse the public and avoid taking action to cut carbon pollution, and whether the funded scientists fail to disclose the sources of their funding in scientific publications or in testimony to legislators.” [Continue reading…]

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CIA chief says social media ‘greatly amplifies’ terror threat

Reuters: Social media and other technology are making it increasingly difficult to combat militants who are using such modern resources to share information and conduct operations, the head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency said on Friday.

CIA Director John Brennan, in a speech in New York, said such communications heighten the challenge of dealing with diffuse threats and attacks across the world from groups like Islamic State, known also as ISIL, and others.

“New technologies can help groups like ISIL coordinate operations, attract new recruits, disseminate propaganda, and inspire sympathizers across the globe to act in their name,” Brennan said, using an acronym for the militant group that has taken hold in Syria and Iraq.

“The overall threat of terrorism is greatly amplified by today’s interconnected world, where an incident in one corner of the globe can instantly spark a reaction thousands of miles away; and where a lone extremist can go online and learn how to carry out an attack without ever leaving home,” Brennan said.

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Syria’s beleaguered opposition-in-exile is about to collapse

Global Post reports: Four years after Syria’s revolution began, its political opposition-in-exile has little to show for it.

Half-heartedly propped up by foreign governments, the Turkey-based Interim Government is going broke, and on the brink of collapse.

Khaled, a senior opposition official, is tired and depressed. We meet at a Gaziantep restaurant, in one of its three shiny malls popular for out of office meetings. It’s just down the road from the government building, which faces frequent security alerts.

He speaks frankly, seemingly relieved to get his frustrations off his chest. In his mid-30s, he’s the antithesis of the old guard that has taken the reigns of the political opposition, and is sick of pretending.

“We’re fake. We’re a lie — an illusion. We’re not a real government,” he sighs.

“Ministers think that just because someone opens a door for them that they are real… but we have zero legitimacy. We do not represent the people and don’t provide enough services.”

The illusion is convincing — the Turkey-based government has around 500 employees in addition to its teams in Syria. It produces sleek reports, holds press conferences in fancy hotels and capacity-building workshops at seaside resorts. [Continue reading…]

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