Reuters reports: Iraqi security forces and Shi’ite militia fighters struggled to advance on Saturday into the two towns of al-Alam and al-Dour near Tikrit, their progress slowed by fierce defense from Islamic State militants.
“We are facing a strong resistance from terrorist groups and we are trying to surround Daesh inside al-Alam and al-Dour and cut all supply routes for them,” said al-Alam mayor Laith al-Jubouri, referring to the Islamic State fighters.
Army and militia fighters entered the southern and eastern parts of al-Dour on Friday. Commanders said at the time that the town had been completely recaptured, but officials said only parts of it had been retaken. [Continue reading…]
McClatchy reports: A North Carolina blogger who became a major propagandist for al Qaida before he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, was a subject of close FBI surveillance for years and a much bigger concern for U.S. authorities than previously known, according to records obtained by McClatchy.
Samir Khan, 25, was a big enough worry while he lived in Charlotte, N.C., that before he disappeared in 2009, federal agents asked the FBI’s special forces unit, Hostage Rescue Team, to help with a likely arrest, the files show. But no arrest was made, and Khan disappeared, reemerging months later in Yemen where he launched an English-language al Qaida magazine, Inspire, that has been influential in radicalizing and recruiting extremists worldwide. He was killed Sept. 30, 2011.
Khan’s case, along with those of the perpetrators of attacks that include the Boston Marathon bombings and the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris, reflects a new reality for those seeking to thwart terrorism: Many of the lone wolf-style attacks authorities fear most are the work of people already known to U.S. and international intelligence agencies.
Experts say future terrorists are becoming radicalized under the very noses of intelligence officials, who struggle to balance civil liberties with stopping potentially dangerous individuals now being referred to as “known wolves.” [Continue reading…]
Climate Central: While the steady disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic has been one of the hallmark effects of global warming, research shows it is not only covering less of the planet, but it’s also getting significantly thinner. That makes it more susceptible to melting, potentially altering local ecosystems, shipping routes and ocean and atmospheric patterns.
New data compiled from a range of sources — from Navy submarines to satellites — suggests that thinning is happening much faster than models have estimated, according to a study aiming to link those disparate data sources for the first time. University of Washington researchers Ron Lindsay and Axel Schweiger calculated that in the central part of the Arctic Ocean basin, sea ice has thinned by 65 percent since 1975. During September, when the ice reaches its annual minimum, ice thickness is down by a stunning 85 percent.
Robin McKie writes: Pledges at this year’s climate summit to cut carbon emissions are likely to fall far short of the targets needed to avoid heating the planet by more than 2C. That is the stark conclusion of a report by a team led by British economist Nicholas Stern.
The group, based at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics, concludes that action planned by countries – in particular the European Union, the US and China – will still leave the world emitting 10bn tonnes of carbon a year in excess of levels needed to prevent global warming from having devastating consequences.
“Intended national contributions will not be consistent with the international goal of limiting the rise in global mean surface temperature to no more than 2C,” states the report, whose publication follows Saturday’s climate action march in London which organisers say was attended by 20,000 people.
Scientists say 2C is the maximum increase in temperature the world can tolerate without risking environmental mayhem – which could include rises in sea level, melting of the ice caps, drought in Africa, America and Asia, storms and ocean acidification. Loss of ice caps would lead to less solar energy being reflected back into space, while thawing tundra would release more methane and other greenhouse gases currently frozen in polar regions . Both processes could lead to even greater temperature rises. [Continue reading…]
Robin McKie writes: Water is the driving force of all nature, Leonardo da Vinci claimed. Unfortunately for our planet, supplies are now running dry – at an alarming rate. The world’s population continues to soar but that rise in numbers has not been matched by an accompanying increase in supplies of fresh water.
The consequences are proving to be profound. Across the globe, reports reveal huge areas in crisis today as reservoirs and aquifers dry up. More than a billion individuals – one in seven people on the planet – now lack access to safe drinking water.
Last week in the Brazilian city of São Paulo, home to 20 million people, and once known as the City of Drizzle,drought got so bad that residents began drilling through basement floors and car parks to try to reach groundwater. City officials warned last week that rationing of supplies was likely soon. Citizens might have access to water for only two days a week, they added.
In California, officials have revealed that the state has entered its fourth year of drought with January this year becoming the driest since meteorological records began. At the same time, per capita water use has continued to rise. [Continue reading…]
Reuters reports: When the handsome young man came courting her, Sunetra could not believe her luck.
Born into a desperately poor family in India’s southern Sundarbans region – one of the parts of the world hardest hit by climate change – the lanky 18-year-old had few prospects. A flood the previous year had destroyed her home and left her family struggling financially.
A new start was what she needed, and her out-of-town suitor’s offer of marriage seemed ideal. He was content to wed without her family providing a dowry, and the pair quickly eloped.
But soon after their marriage, on a visit to Hyderabad, her new husband locked her in an apartment, in preparation for handing her to sex traffickers from Dubai. It quickly became apparent that the marriage had been a ruse.
“I had lost my face having ran away from my family, trusting this man,” she said, weeping at the betrayal of her “husband,” who she had believed was an insurance agent in Baruipur, a town about 30 km from Kolkata.
Sunetra is just one of more than 5,000 people who went missing in 2012 from the state of West Bengal, where the Sundarbans sits on a low, shifting delta where South Asia’s great rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, crime records show.
The forested islands of the Sundarbans are increasingly considered a trafficking hotspot as climate change impacts – such as worsening cyclones, sea level rise and loss of land to erosion and saltwater – mean worsening poverty and living conditions, and more desperation. [Continue reading…]
Alexander J. Motyl writes: Much Western thinking about the causes of the Russo-Ukrainian War is rooted in a myth. It posits that the West — or, more specifically, NATO — attempted to wrest Ukraine from Russia’s sphere of influence, thereby forcing Vladimir Putin to defend Russia’s legitimate strategic interests by going to war with Ukraine.
The logic is impeccable. The only problem is that there isn’t a shred of truth to this claim.
Was the West determined to integrate Ukraine into its institutions? Until the Maidan Revolution broke out in late 2013, Ukraine “fatigue” had characterized Western policy since about 2008, when the government of then-President Viktor Yushchenko lost the reformist zeal it had inherited from the 2004 Orange Revolution. Even before that, Western policymakers never talked of including Ukraine in the European Union. Indeed, the EU’s Eastern Partnership program and its offer of an Association Agreement to Kyiv were supposed to placate Ukraine without promising it even the distant prospect of membership in the EU. The reluctance to offer that prospect remains unchanged.
Was the West determined to transform Ukraine into a pro-Western democracy? The United States and Europe pumped several billions of dollars into Ukrainian civil society projects since 1991, while remaining indifferent to the Leonid Kuchma regime’s slide toward authoritarianism in the late 1990s, the abandonment by Yushchenko’s “Orange government” of its democratic reform agenda, and Viktor Yanukovych’s establishment of a full-fledged authoritarian regime in 2010-2013. Some Western policymakers supported the Maidan Revolution rhetorically and insisted that Yanukovych seek a compromise with the democratic revolutionaries; but most did not. No Western state actually provided any material assistance to the Maidan. And no Western presidents or prime ministers called on Yanukovych to step down during the revolution: quite the contrary, they travelled to Kyiv in late February 2014 with the express purpose of saving him. Once he abandoned his office, many Western policymakers welcomed his move — but that was after, and not before, the fact. [Continue reading…]
Reuters: Russian authorities said on Sunday they were holding five men over the killing of Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov, one of whom served in a police unit in the Russian region of Chechnya, according to a law enforcement official.
The five men were frogmarched into a Moscow courtroom on Sunday, forced by masked security officers gripping their bound arms to walk doubled over, a Reuters reporter at the court said. They stood in metal cages in the courtroom as television crews were ushered in to film them.
A judge ruled that all five should be held in custody and said that one of them, Zaur Dadayev, had admitted his involvement in the killing when questioned by investigators.
Dadayev served for a decade in the “Sever” police battalion, part of the interior ministry in Chechnya, Russian news agencies reported. They cited Albert Barakhayev, a senior security official in the neighboring region of Ingushetia, where several of the men were detained.
AFP reports: The Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – who has become a media phenomenon since Greece’s radical government came to power – has been warned by his own prime minister to talk less and do more.
Alexis Tsipras appeared to confirm reports he had ordered Varoufakis to keep a lower profile in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday.
Asked if he had pulled up his charismatic finance chief for giving too many media interviews, Tsipras said: “I have called for less words and more action from all members of the ministerial council (the official name of the cabinet), not just Mr Varoufakis.”
The ruling Syriza party’s own newspaper, Avgi, complained of his “toxic overexposure” this week after much criticism – and not a little ridicule – of Varoufakis in the Greek media.
Avgi warned that Varoufakis was “going to spend all the profits” of the support he had garnered for Greece since his unexpected elevation to international economics rock star. [Continue reading…]
Douglas Preston writes: The ruins were first identified in May 2012, during an aerial survey of a remote valley in La Mosquitia, a vast region of swamps, rivers, and mountains containing some of the last scientifically unexplored places on earth.
For a hundred years, explorers and prospectors told tales of the white ramparts of a lost city glimpsed above the jungle foliage. Indigenous stories speak of a “white house” or a “place of cacao” where Indians took refuge from Spanish conquistadores — a mystical, Eden-like paradise from which no one ever returned.
Since the 1920s, several expeditions had searched for the White City, or Ciudad Blanca. The eccentric explorer Theodore Morde mounted the most famous of these in 1940, under the aegis of the Museum of the American Indian (now part of the Smithsonian Institution).
Morde returned from Mosquitia with thousands of artifacts, claiming to have entered the City. According to Morde, the indigenous people there said it contained a giant, buried statue of a monkey god. He refused to divulge the location out of fear, he said, that the site would be looted. He later committed suicide and his site—if it existed at all—was never identified.
More recently, documentary filmmakers Steve Elkins and Bill Benenson launched a search for the lost city.
They identified a crater-shaped valley, encircled by steep mountains, as a possible location.
To survey it, in 2012 they enlisted the help of the Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston. A Cessna Skymaster, carrying a million-dollar lidar scanner, flew over the valley, probing the jungle canopy with laser light. lidar — “Light Detection and Ranging” — is able to map the ground even through dense rain forest, delineating any archaeological features that might be present.
When the images were processed, they revealed unnatural features stretching for more than a mile through the valley. When Fisher analyzed the images, he found that the terrain along the river had been almost entirely reshaped by human hands. [Continue reading…]
DER SPIEGEL:Ms. Klein, why aren’t people able to stop climate change?
Naomi Klein: Bad luck. Bad timing. Many unfortunate coincidences.
SPIEGEL: The wrong catastrophe at the wrong moment?
Klein: The worst possible moment. The connection between greenhouse gases and global warming has been a mainstream political issue for humanity since 1988. It was precisely the time that the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama declared the “End of History,” the victory of Western capitalism. Canada and the US signed the first free-trade agreement, which became the prototype for the rest of the world.
SPIEGEL: So you’re saying that a new era of consumption and energy use began precisely at the moment when sustainability and restraint would have been more appropriate?
Klein: Exactly. And it was at precisely this moment that we were also being told that there was no longer any such thing as social responsibility and collective action, that we should leave everything to the market. We privatized our railways and the energy grid, the WTO and the IMF locked in an unregulated capitalism. Unfortunately, this led to an explosion in emissions.
SPIEGEL: You’re an activist, and you’ve blamed capitalism for all kinds of things over the years. Now you’re blaming it for climate change too?
Klein: That’s no reason for irony. The numbers tell the story. During the 1990s, emissions went up by 1 percent per year. Starting in 2000, they started to go up by an average of 3.4 percent. The American Dream was exported globally and consumer goods that we thought of as essential to meet our needs expanded rapidly. We started seeing ourselves exclusively as consumers. When shopping as a way of life is exported to every corner of the globe, that requires energy. A lot of energy. [Continue reading…]
The Turkish parliament has been debating the government’s proposed new security law, generally called the “domestic security package”. So far, the first 16 articles of the proposed law have been passed by the parliament amid fighting between the opposition and the government MPs, and discussion on the remaining articles is expected to resume shortly.
The government has an absolute majority in parliament, and will face little difficulty in passing the law eventually, but the opposition is determined to do all it can to delay the process.
It objects to the way the government is rushing the law through the parliament without proper parliamentary scrutiny, and to the actual measures the new law contains, which they fear will further undermine Turkey’s fraying democracy.
There are concerns that by giving extensive powers to the police to suppress political protests, the law will not just fuel Turkey’s worsening poltical polarisation – it will turn the country into a police state.
Tightening the screws
The law raises the prospect of increased arbitrary detention, excessive use of firearms by police and politically motivated criminal investigations. Amnesty International has called the proposed law a serious threat to human rights, and Human Rights Watch has also voiced its concerns but it is not only the human rights organisations that fear the consequences once parliament passes the law.
Kati Piri, the European parliament’s Turkey rapporteur, described the proposals as a threat to the essential conditions for a democratic state and as another step away from European values – sentiments echoed by American diplomats.
The proposals will allow the police to keep people in detention for up to 48 hours without the need of a judge’s approval, and adds fireworks, hand catapults and metal marbles to the long list of items considered to be weapons. People caught possessing them will face prison sentences of between two-and-a-half to four years.
Similar penalties are proposed for protesters who cover their face during protests in order to protect themselves against the excessively used tear gas, or who wear any clothing resembling a uniform.
And on top of all this, the proposed law closes off avenues of redress and protection against police brutality.
Der Spiegel reports: It was quiet in eastern Ukraine last Wednesday. Indeed, it was another quiet day in an extended stretch of relative calm. The battles between the Ukrainian army and the pro-Russian separatists had largely stopped and heavy weaponry was being withdrawn. The Minsk cease-fire wasn’t holding perfectly, but it was holding.
On that same day, General Philip Breedlove, the top NATO commander in Europe, stepped before the press in Washington. Putin, the 59-year-old said, had once again “upped the ante” in eastern Ukraine — with “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of their most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery” having been sent to the Donbass. “What is clear,” Breedlove said, “is that right now, it is not getting better. It is getting worse every day.”
German leaders in Berlin were stunned. They didn’t understand what Breedlove was talking about. And it wasn’t the first time. Once again, the German government, supported by intelligence gathered by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, did not share the view of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR).
The pattern has become a familiar one. For months, Breedlove has been commenting on Russian activities in eastern Ukraine, speaking of troop advances on the border, the amassing of munitions and alleged columns of Russian tanks. Over and over again, Breedlove’s numbers have been significantly higher than those in the possession of America’s NATO allies in Europe. As such, he is playing directly into the hands of the hardliners in the US Congress and in NATO.
The German government is alarmed. Are the Americans trying to thwart European efforts at mediation led by Chancellor Angela Merkel? Sources in the Chancellery have referred to Breedlove’s comments as “dangerous propaganda.” Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier even found it necessary recently to bring up Breedlove’s comments with NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg. [Continue reading…]
National Journal reports: When his three-car convoy pulled up to a police checkpoint in Baghdad on Friday the 13th of February, Sheikh Qassem al-Janabi had little reason for concern. An influential Sunni moderate who was assisting the Iraqi government’s efforts to draw Sunni tribes away from the orbit of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the charismatic Sheikh Janabi had many friends in high places.
He was in the capital, supposedly far away from any likely ISIS assassins. And he was a longtime friend of the United States, which in the past year had sent military forces back to Iraq to counter the ISIS terrorist group. Sheikh Janabi was riding with seven bodyguards and his son Mohamed, recently returned to Iraq from earning a law degree from the University of Glasgow. They were traveling from their tribal homeland south of Baghdad on the Muslim day of prayer.
The men at the police checkpoint were impostors and suspected Shiite militiamen, and they bundled up Janabi and his entourage at gunpoint, quickly driving them away. Their bodies were later found across town in the ramshackle Shiite slum of Sadr City. Janabi was slumped in the back of one of the cars, his hands tied behind his back with his own belt, a bullet in his head. The bodies of his son Mohamed and seven bodyguards lay nearby, all of them shot execution style. To reach Sadr City, the gunmen would likely have passed through several police checkpoints, raising questions of possible official collusion in the murders.
When the history of the second Iraq civil war is written, the death of Sheikh Qassem al-Janabi may prove notable for what it said about the rapidly closing window for national reconciliation, and for foreshadowing the ominous turn toward outright sectarianism that the fighting in Iraq has taken. Certainly the Sunni lawmakers who walked out of parliament in mass protest on learning of his murder understood his importance, both real and symbolic. Along with other moderate Sunni tribal leaders who first turned against al-Qaida in 2006-07 and took part in the “Anbar Awakening” during Iraq’s first civil war, Janabi rejected the terrorists’ vision of a purifying civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. Instead he continued to embrace the U.S. vision of a unified and democratic Iraq until the day of this death. [Continue reading…]
Matt Cetti-Roberts writes: Gen. Benham, the leader of a new Assyrian Christian militia in northern Iraq, sits in the sparse barracks where his men train to defend their homelands from Islamic State.
In August, the jihadi militants forced Benham from his home in the central Iraqi village of Hamdaniyah, 51 kilometers southeast of Mosul. “ISIS stole everything that I made, what my father made, what my grandfather made,” Benham says.
“They took all of this from me in one minute. I only came here with my shirt and trousers, my son and my daughter.”
Christian villages dotting the Nineveh plains fell to the Islamic State last summer when the Kurdish Peshmerga withdrew. More than 100,000 people fled from the jihadi group.
Now, seven months later, many of the villages are still under Islamic State control. Assyrian Christians have little faith in the Peshmerga — although they’re allies — and have decided to take the fight into their own hands, forming lightly armed bands of politically-aligned militias.
The Nineveh Plain Protection Units, or NPU, of which Benham is a part, is one of the new Assyrian Christian militias.
In the unit’s temporary home near Kirkuk, more than 200 Assyrian Christian men are undergoing training in infantry skills, basic weapon handling and working as a unit — with help from former U.S. soldiers.
Benham served for several decades in the Saddam-era Iraqi army, but most of his men have little or no fighting experience, and some have never even fired a rifle. [Continue reading…]
By contrast, Patrick Cockburn’s The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution is a high-altitude polemic that blames the IS’s rise on U.S. and Saudi support for the anti-Assad rebellion. It has little or nothing to say about IS ideology or composition. Acting more as an advocate than an observer, Cockburn argues for rapprochement with the Assad regime.
But to make his case, Cockburn dispenses with proportion and distinction. Though in successive reports the U.N., Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have indicted the Assad regime as by far the leading perpetrator of violence in the conflict, Cockburn’s account is devoted almost entirely to opposition atrocities. (He reports exclusively from regime-held areas.) Regime repression does receive cursory mention, but Nazi analogies are reserved for the opposition.
Cockburn makes no mention of the divergent interests and active rivalries between IS and Syria’s nationalist opposition. For him, to assist the opposition is to assist the IS.
To support this claim, he quotes “an intelligence officer from a Middle Eastern country neighboring Syria” who told him “ISIS members ‘say they are always pleased when sophisticated weapons are sent to anti-Assad groups of any kind because they can always get the arms off them by threats of force or cash payments.’” (Cockburn quotes many anonymous intelligence officials in the book but on no other occasion does he grant the country anonymity. Might it be because the “country neighboring Syria” is Iraq, a key Assad ally?)
Yet this bias is the least of the problems in Cockburn’s reporting—he also embellishes. On page 76 of his book, he writes about Adra: “I witnessed JAN forces storm a housing complex by advancing through a drainage pipe which came out behind government lines, where they proceeded to kill Alawites and Christians.” This would be the first independent verification of a story that had briefly surfaced before disappearing in a swirl of contradictory claims. The Russian broadcaster RT had even used fake pictures in its report on the incident.
Yet Cockburn was nowhere near Adra. This is confirmed by an unimpeachable source: Patrick Cockburn. He first reported on the incident in his January 28, 2014 column for The Independent. But instead of being personally present, the story about rebels advancing through a drainage pipe is attributed to “a Syrian soldier, who gave his name as Abu Ali.” Cockburn appears to have pulled a Brian Williams. [Continue reading…]
Press TV: A Saudi woman who had fallen victim to a violent gang-rape has been sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail after being found guilty of speaking to the media about the crime and indecency.
The Shia woman, 19 years old back in 2006, was in the car of a student friend when two men got into the vehicle and drove them to a secluded area, where she was raped by seven men, the Middle East Monitor reported on Friday.
She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man, because the Saudi law dictates that a male family member must accompany a woman at all times in public.
The rapists were, surprisingly, sentenced to prison terms up to five years, which were regarded light considering the fact that they could have faced the death penalty.
The Guardian: In a literal application of the sharia law of an eye for an eye, an Iranian man convicted of blinding another man in an acid attack has been blinded in one eye, marking the first time Iran has carried out such a punishment.
The convicted acid attacker, who has not been identified, was rendered unconscious in Rajai-Shahr prison in the city of Karaj on Tuesday as medics gouged out his left eye, according to the state-owned Hamshahri newspaper.
Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, from Iran Human Rights (IHR), an independent NGO based in Norway, condemned the blinding as barbaric. “Medical staff who cooperate with the Iranian authorities in this act have broken the Hippocratic oath and cannot call themselves doctors,” he said.
The man had been found guilty of throwing acid in the face of his unnamed victim five years ago in the city of Qom, blinding and disfiguring him for life. He was subsequently sentenced to be blinded in both eyes, paying a fine and 10 years imprisonment.
Although the convict was sentenced to lose sight in both eyes on Tuesday, the victim – who, under Iranian law, has the final say in the punishment – decided at the last minute to postpone the blinding of his right eye for six months. The attacker will be able to plead with the plaintiff to spare him from being blinded fully.
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