Who are the #CharlieHebdo killers?

One of the hallmarks of terrorism is that provokes its audience to prematurely assign meaning.

Today’s brutal attack on the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has swiftly been taken to be an attack on free speech and this meaning seems so obvious, no one pauses to consider whether it is accurate.

The attackers identities remain unknown but there is little reason to doubt that they are Islamic extremists of some description. Exactly who is a detail that is probably of less concern to those whose first need is to condemn violence and to defend free speech.

I neither doubt the sincerity of these condemnations nor the need to defend free speech, but it’s important to try and understand exactly what happened.

A few hours before the attack, the magazine tweeted:

The caption says “Greetings from al-Baghdadi as well” and the ISIS leader is saying, “…and especially health.” The magazine adds, “Best wishes, by the way.”

But Kim Willsher at The Guardian notes this important detail about the timing of the attack:


If the attackers had studied the work schedule of the journalists that carefully, it’s reasonable to infer that this operation was painstakingly planned and its occurrence right after the Baghdadi tweet was either pure coincidence or just a useful pretext.

It’s now reported that the gunmen told a bystander that the attack was carried out by Al-Qaeda in Yemen. The gunmen have been described as wearing military dress and armed with Kalashnikovs and a rocket launcher.


Drawing a distinction between AQAP and ISIS may seem like a distinction without a difference. But the two jihadist groups have different objectives and competing interests.

In late November, NBC News reported:

Escalating a war of words between terrorism’s old and new schools, an Islamic scholar with al Qaeda’s Yemen-based offshoot on Friday accused ISIS of “planting … disunity” among the various Islamic extremist factions fighting to topple the Syrian government and rejcted the authority of the Iraq- and Syria-based group’s self-declared caliphate.

Harith Al-Nadhari, a spiritual leader and Shariah law scholar with the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), said in a videotape released on YouTube and other social media that the infighting among Syrian rebel groups was “the biggest disaster that hit the Ummah (Arabic for the Muslim community) at this stage.”

He blamed ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, for the divisions, saying that it had exported “infighting and fitna (Arabic for strife) to other fronts,” according to a translation of his comments by Flashpoint Partners, which monitors terrorist group’s online communications.

Al-Nadhari also criticized ISIS for what he described as an overreach by calling for Muslims everywhere to “pledge allegiance to the caliph.”

While AQAP acuses ISIS of sowing discord between Muslims, the Charlie Hebdo attack is clearly aimed at sharpening the divisions between Muslims and non-Muslims and between the East and the West.

To the extent that this message resonates with those whose support for ISIS has become shaky, the attack may serve a strategic goal: to present al Qaeda rather than ISIS as the preeminent defender of Muslims.

An ISIS critic, noting the difference in expressions of concern about deaths in Syria versus those in Paris, tweets:


At the same time, there is also apparently an ongoing effort to use the attack to coral support for ISIS:


Naturally, the conspiracy theorists — yet to agree on their narrative — are busy at work:


Meanwhile, Jeffrey Goldberg tweets:


Many have retweeted a 2012 New Yorker cartoon which depicts the price of capitulating to the opponents of free speech.


And in defense of the satirists, it’s worth noting that as much as they were criticized for being provocative, their sharp statements were not lacking in nuance:


And neither was their critical focus reserved for Islam:


Before too many voices get raised in an unreflective and uninformed defense of Western ideals, let’s hope the gunmen are caught and they are carefully questioned.

An eyewitness description of the attack may turn out to be quite significant:

“Everything happened very calmly, without shouting, without insults.”

That the attackers operated with clinical efficiency suggests that their operation was not only planned meticulously but there was probably as much thought put into anticipating its effect.

That’s why I’m inclined to think that this was designed not simply to send a narrow message — this is the price for insulting Islam — but to have a much wider impact, deepening the divide between Muslims and non-Muslims.

It’s largely our choice whether the attack has this effect.

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Saudi Arabia is right to be anxious over its ideological links with ISIS

Brian Whitaker writes: In a pre-dawn raid on Monday, militants attacked a Saudi border post from the Iraqi side of the frontier. The resulting clash left three soldiers and four militants dead, according to the Saudi government news agency.

It later emerged that one of the dead soldiers was no ordinary border guard but the commander of Saudi Arabia’s northern border forces, Brigadier General Awdah al-Balawi. This suggests that the attack, far from being random or opportunistic, had been carefully targeted and perhaps based on inside information regarding the general’s whereabouts.

The attack has been widely attributed to Islamic State, with some reports saying the rebel group has now claimed responsibility for it. This might be viewed simply as a reprisal for Saudi participation in the US-led bombing campaign against Isis, but Isis has also been seeking to extend the current conflict in Syria and Iraq into Saudi territory.

There is no doubt that Isis has both sympathisers and active supporters inside the kingdom – it claimed responsibility for shooting a Danish citizen in Riyadh last November, for example – but whether it will be able to establish a military foothold is another question. Isis tends to flourish militarily in places where central government is weak, but that is not the case in Saudi Arabia. [Continue reading…]

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2014: A year of feminist insurrection against male violence

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.” [Source]

Rebecca Solnit writes:

I have been waiting all my life for what 2014 has brought. It has been a year of feminist insurrection against male violence: a year of mounting refusal to be silent, refusal to let our lives and torments be erased or dismissed. It has not been a harmonious time, but harmony is often purchased by suppressing those with something to say. It was loud, discordant, and maybe transformative, because important things were said – not necessarily new, but said more emphatically, by more of us, and heard as never before.

It was a watershed year for women, and for feminism, as we refused to accept the pandemic of violence against women – the rape, the murder, the beatings, the harassment on the streets and the threats online.

Further into her essay, Solnit says:

Sometimes at big political demonstrations – against the war in Iraq in early 2003, for example – the thousands of placards with handwritten statements, jokes, and facts, for all their brevity, constitute a cumulative critique that covers a lot of angles. Social media can do the same, building arguments comment by comment, challenging, testing, reinforcing and circulating the longer arguments in blogs, essays and reports. It’s like a barn-building for ideas: innumerable people bring their experiences, insights, analysis, new terms and frameworks. These then become part of the fabric of everyday life, and when that happens, the world has changed. Then, down the road, what was once a radical idea becomes so woven into everyday life that people imagine that it is self-evident and what everyone always knew. But it’s not; it’s the result of a struggle – of ideas and voices, not of violence.

Strangely, in a piece that runs close to 5,000 words, the women who have been the targets of ISIS’s violence and the women who have been fighting against ISIS earned not a single mention.

Silence leaves a vacuum that can only be filled with speculation, but the reason for this omission seems to be spelt out in the terms by which Solnit describes effective political activism: it is defined by the absence of violence.

But did this Yazidi girl betray feminism by picking up an AK-47?


Since the battle for Kobane began and due to its convenient location right next to the Turkish border gained several weeks of intense international media attention — the battle continues but the media has mostly lost interest — the heroism of Kurdish women has been highlighted.

Zîlan Diyar, a Kurdish guerrilla fighter, wrote last month:

The whole world is talking about us, Kurdish women. It has become a common phenomenon to come across news about women fighters in magazines, papers, and news outlets. Televisions, news sites, and social media are filled with words of praise. They take photos of these women’s determined, hopeful, and radiant glances. To them, our rooted tradition is a reality that they only recently started to know. They are impressed with everything. The women’s laughter, naturalness, long braids, and the details of their young lives feel like hands extending to those struggling in the waters of despair. There are even some, who are so inspired by the clothes that the women are wearing, that they want to start a new fashion trend! They are amazed by these women, who fight against the men that want to paint the colors of the Middle East black, and wonder where they get their courage from, how they can laugh so sincerely. And I wonder about them. I am surprised at how they noticed us so late, at how they never knew about us. I wonder how they were so late to hear the voices of the many valiant women who expanded the borders of courage, belief, patience, hope, and beauty.

The fact that Solnit is not talking about Kurdish women, seems to imply that for her and perhaps many other activists in the West, the use of violence can never be defended.

If this interpretation is correct, this dedication to the principle of non-violence seems to me less a matter of principle than a luxury only available to those whose own lives are not under immediate threat.

I also have to wonder whether those who have chosen to ignore the Kurds, failed to notice that in Rojava — the Kurdish-controlled part of Syria — a political experiment has been underway for the last three years that deserves the interest and support of anyone who believes in the creation of an egalitarian and truly democratic society.

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ISIS leader in Kobane apparently dished out cocaine to his fighters

With candor you’re unlikely to find from a traditional news outlet, Joakim Medin reports from Kobane: Streets and strategic buildings have been taken over by slow street fighting, which culminated in the important December 22 recapturing of Kobane’s Cultural Center. A few hours earlier, the happy fighters of this YPG unit had managed to make their own successful early morning attack against a house on the southern front, where an IS leader named Emir Abu Zahra was known to reside. They told me that in the firefight he was shot and killed.

“They also found a few things of his, which they took with them,” Dayan told me.

A slightly older fighter who speaks German came back into the room where we drank tea and perused the findings. Among them was a very thick, professional Dell laptop — one of those rugged, military-style Latitude XFRs, which has a ballistic armor protection system and is sold in stores for a few thousand dollars. They are meant to be used in demanding environments by oil workers, the police, and the army. It’s an expensive piece of equipment, but something you can probably easily pick up after having robbed the central bank of Mosul.

There’s also a traditional looking Middle Eastern dagger among the possessions they said they took from the now dead IS leader. Surprisingly, it’s not an authentic one, but a tacky copy with an Egyptian sphinx emblazoned on the case, and a horned goat head on the shaft. There are no blood traces on the blade.

And finally, sitting in front of me, is a large, transparent plastic bag filled with white powder. The YPG fighters told me they are not sure what this could be. So I dipped my index finger into it, and sure enough, it’s a big bag of cocaine. I must admit, I am familiar with the taste of the drug.

“Cocaine? What is that?” they ask.

The other guys have no knowledge of this drug, or how people use it. It’s nothing they have heard of or encountered before. But Dayan suggests that the powder is something Abu Zahra was distributing in smaller portions to his fighters.

There have been persistent rumors and accusations of drug use in the ranks of Islamic State fighters. Leaders in the group have been said to drug their militants to give them greater courage as they go into battle. This has led to both successful, but also reckless and ineffective suicide attacks by fighters who can easily be shot down. Certain IS militants have been described as “drug-crazed,” and Kurds report having found mysterious pills, capsules, and syringes on living and dead IS fighters. [Continue reading…]

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Former CBS News reporter sues U.S. government over computer intrusions

The Washington Post reports: For months and months, former CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson played an agonizing game of brinkmanship regarding her privacy: She strongly suggested that the federal government was behind a series of intrusions into her personal and work computers, though she has consistently hedged her wording to allow some wiggle room. In May 2013, for example, she told a Philadelphia radio host that there could be “some relationship” between her technology intrusions and the government snooping on Fox News reporter James Rosen. And in her book “Stonewalled,” she cites a source as saying that the breaches originated from a “sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the National Security Agency (NSA).”

No more wiggling around. Attkisson has filed a lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court, alleging the U.S. government’s “unauthorized and illegal surveillance of the Plaintiff’s laptop computers and telephones from 2011-2013.” The suit lists as plaintiffs Attkisson, who resigned from CBS last year, her husband, James Attkisson, and daughter Sarah Judith Starr Attkisson. Defendants include Attorney General Eric Holder and Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe as well as “UNKNOWN NAMED AGENTS OF the UNITED STATES, in their individual capacities.” Those folks, the suit alleges, violated several constitutional rights, including freedom of the press, freedom of expression and freedom from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

The complaint lays out a narrative familiar to close readers of “Stonewalled.” It speaks of Attkisson’s work for CBS throughout 2011 in uncovering facts about the U.S. government’s “Fast and Furious” gun-walking operation. Roundabout mid- to late-2011, notes the complaint, the Attkissons “began to notice anomalies” in how various electronic devices were operating in the household. “These anomalies included a work Toshiba laptop computer and a family Apple desktop computer turning on and off at night without input from anyone in the household, the house alarm chirping daily at difference times, often indicating ‘phone line trouble,’ and television problems, including interference,” notes the complaint. [Continue reading…]

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Writers around the world feel censored by surveillance

The New York Times reports: A survey of writers around the world by the PEN American Center has found that a significant majority said they were deeply concerned with government surveillance, with many reporting that they have avoided, or have considered avoiding, controversial topics in their work or in personal communications as a result.

The findings show that writers consider freedom of expression to be under significant threat around the world in democratic and nondemocratic countries. Some 75 percent of respondents in countries classified as “free,” 84 percent in “partly free” countries, and 80 percent in countries that were “not free” said that they were “very” or “somewhat” worried about government surveillance in their countries.

The survey, which will be released Monday, was conducted anonymously online in fall 2014 and yielded 772 responses from fiction and nonfiction writers and related professionals, including translators and editors, in 50 countries.

Smaller numbers said they avoided or considered avoiding writing or speaking on certain subjects, with 34 percent in countries classified as free, 44 percent in partly free countries and 61 percent in not free countries reporting self-censorship. Respondents in similar percentages reported curtailing social media activity, or said they were considering it, because of surveillance. [Continue reading…]

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Hezbollah apparently suffers major infiltration by Israel

The New York Times reports: The admission from Hezbollah’s deputy chief was startling. The group, he said over the weekend, is “battling espionage within its ranks” and has uncovered “some major infiltrations.”

To analysts and even some Hezbollah loyalists, the remarks were immediately taken as confirmation of long-swirling reports that a senior operative had been caught spying for Israel, disrupting a series of assassination plots abroad.

The accounts in the Lebanese and Arab news media, relying on unnamed sources, identify the mole as Mohammad Shawraba, the man charged with exacting revenge for Israel’s assassination of a top operative, Imad Mughniyeh, in 2008. They say Mr. Shawraba fed information to Israel that foiled five planned retaliation attempts. [Continue reading…]

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Jewish self-determination

Michael Steinhardt, one of the founders of Birthright Israel, concedes, “it’s easier to be a Zionist in Manhattan than it is in Tel Aviv.”

Philip Weiss writes: As a liberal, I think this really is a better way to be, tolerating others, worshiping whoever you want to (right now George Eliot), minding your own business. It’s great that Bernard Avishai gets a lot out of Bialik. That’s no reason to insist on a Jewish democracy. Especially when that Jewish democracy breeds people like Moshe Feiglin and Caroline Glick who believe the bible is a title for the Jews to the land of all of Israel. That’s lunacy. When one of our lunatics Sarah Palin sets out to protect Christmas from the cultural war against it, I don’t feel the least bit threatened. But Feiglin and Glick are truly threatening characters, because theirs is a vital belief system: the government is stealing land and forcing Palestinians out of their homes on that basis.

I used to be afraid of my mother’s best friend, who had escaped Berlin to move to the U.S. and then Jerusalem; it took me a while to come out to her as an anti-Zionist, when she started shouting at me about the Holocaust, and one reason I didn’t is that I had assimilated the idea that Jews in Jerusalem were aliyah, higher, than Jews in the Diaspora, yoredim, lower. It was an old religious idea inside my subculture. Without getting into who’s higher or lower, Zionists sure have propagated some backward ideas. Jewish democracy and the Jewish people’s right to self-determination are out of step with the culture that Jews and others have fashioned in my country over the last 30 or 40 years. Whether that identity is assimilationist or areligious or syncretist or idealistic, I leave to others to sort out. I know it’s where I’m happiest and most fully engaged. If the people of Israel gave up the idea of ethnic-religious self-determination, the Palestinians might give up theirs too, and they might get to the same place. I want to encourage them.

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The Pillars of Creation

pillars-of-creation

NBC News: In celebration of its upcoming 25th anniversary in April, the Hubble Space Telescope has returned to the site of what may be its most famous image, the wispy columns of the Eagle Nebula, and produced a stunning new picture. “The Pillars of Creation,” located 6,500 light-years away in area M16 of the distant nebula, were photographed in visible and near-infrared light with the Hubble’s upgraded equipment, and the result is as astonishing now as the original was in 1995. Hubble went online in 1990.

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Friluftsliv, shinrin-yoku, hygge, wabi-sabi, kaizen, gemütlichkeit, and jugaad?

forest

Starre Vartan writes about cultural concepts most of us have never heard of: Friluftsliv translates directly from Norwegian as “free air life,” which doesn’t quite do it justice. Coined relatively recently, in 1859, it is the concept that being outside is good for human beings’ mind and spirit. “It is a term in Norway that is used often to describe a way of life that is spent exploring and appreciating nature,” Anna Stoltenberg, culture coordinator for Sons of Norway, a U.S.-based Norwegian heritage group, told MNN. Other than that, it’s not a strict definition: it can include sleeping outside, hiking, taking photographs or meditating, playing or dancing outside, for adults or kids. It doesn’t require any special equipment, includes all four seasons, and needn’t cost much money. Practicing friluftsliv could be as simple as making a commitment to walking in a natural area five days a week, or doing a day-long hike once a month.

Shinrin-yoku is a Japanese term that means “forest bathing” and unlike the Norwegian translation above, this one seems a perfect language fit (though a pretty similar idea). The idea being that spending time in the forest and natural areas is good preventative medicine, since it lowers stress, which causes or exacerbates some of our most intractable health issues. As MNN’s Catie Leary details, this isn’t just a nice idea — there’s science behind it: “The “magic” behind forest bathing boils down to the naturally produced allelochemic substances known as phytoncides, which are kind of like pheromones for plants. Their job is to help ward off pesky insects and slow the growth of fungi and bacteria. When humans are exposed to phytoncides, these chemicals are scientifically proven to lower blood pressure, relieve stress and boost the growth of cancer-fighting white blood cells. Some common examples of plants that give off phytoncides include garlic, onion, pine, tea tree and oak, which makes sense considering their potent aromas.” [Continue reading…]

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We still don’t know who hacked Sony

Bruce Schneier writes: If anything should disturb you about the Sony hacking incidents and subsequent denial-of-service attack against North Korea, it’s that we still don’t know who’s behind any of it. The FBI said in December that North Korea attacked Sony. I and others have serious doubts. There’s countervailing evidence to suggest that the culprit may have been a Sony insider or perhaps Russian nationals.

No one has admitted taking down North Korea’s Internet. It could have been an act of retaliation by the U.S. government, but it could just as well have been an ordinary DDoS attack. The follow-on attack against Sony PlayStation definitely seems to be the work of hackers unaffiliated with a government.

Not knowing who did what isn’t new. It’s called the “attribution problem,” and it plagues Internet security. But as governments increasingly get involved in cyberspace attacks, it has policy implications as well. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. and Russia in danger of returning to era of nuclear rivalry

Julian Borger writes: A widening rift between Moscow and Washington over cruise missiles and increasingly daring patrols by nuclear-capable Russian submarines threatens to end an era of arms control and bring back a dangerous rivalry between the world’s two dominant nuclear arsenals.

Tensions have been taken to a new level by US threats of retaliatory action for Russian development of a new cruise missile. Washington alleges it violates one of the key arms control treaties of the cold war, and has raised the prospect of redeploying its own cruise missiles in Europe after a 23-year absence.

On Boxing Day, in one of the more visible signs of the unease, the US military launched the first of two experimental “blimps” over Washington. The system, known as JLENS, is designed to detect incoming cruise missiles. The North American Aerospace Command (Norad) did not specify the nature of the threat, but the deployment comes nine months after the Norad commander, General Charles Jacoby, admitted the Pentagon faced “some significant challenges” in countering cruise missiles, referring in particular to the threat of Russian attack submarines.

Those submarines, which have been making forays across the Atlantic, routinely carry nuclear-capable cruise missiles. In the light of aggressive rhetoric from Moscow and the expiry of treaty-based restrictions, there is uncertainty over whether those missiles are now carrying nuclear warheads. [Continue reading…]

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Inside Putin’s information war

Peter Pomerantsev writes: There were more than 20 of us sitting around the long conference table: tanned broadcasters in white silk shirts, politics professors with sweaty beards and heavy breath, ad execs in trainers—and me. There were no women. Everyone was smoking. There was so much smoke it made my skin itch.

It was 2002, and I was just out of university, living in Moscow and working at a think tank meant to be promoting Russian-U.S. political ties. A friendly Russian publisher who wanted me to work for him had invited me to what would be my first meeting in Moscow. And that’s how I ended up surrounded by Russian media gurus tucked away on the top floor of Ostankino, the Soviet-era television center that is the battering ram of Kremlin propaganda—home to the studios of the country’s biggest channels. Here, Moscow’s flashiest minds gathered for a weekly brainstorming session to decide what Ostankino would broadcast.

At one end of the table sat one of the country’s most famous political TV presenters. He was small and spoke fast, with a smoky voice: “We all know there will be no real politics,” he said. “But we still have to give our viewers the sense something is happening. They need to be kept entertained.”

“So what should we play with?” he asked. “Shall we attack oligarchs? Who’s the enemy this week? Politics has got to feel like a movie!”

More than a decade later, that movie is increasingly dark and disturbing. The first thing Russian militias do when they take a town in East Ukraine is seize the television towers and switch them over to Kremlin channels. Soon after, the locals begin to rant about fascists in Kyiv and dark U.S. plots to purge Russian speakers from East Ukraine. It’s not just what they say but how they say it that is so disturbing: irrational spirals of paranoia, theories so elaborate and illogical one can’t possibly argue with them.

This is even before the bombs start falling on them: “Information war is now the main type of war,” says the Kremlin’s chief propagandist Dmitry Kieselev, “preparing the way for military action.” And Putin’s Russia is very good at it, having combined the dirtiest mechanisms of PR, brainwashing techniques pioneered in cults and a rich KGB tradition of psy-ops into a sort of television Frankenstein with which it controls its own population, conquers neighboring countries and attacks the West. [Continue reading…]

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Neil Postman: The man who predicted Fox News, the internet, Stephen Colbert and reality TV

Scott Timberg writes: These days, even the kind of educated person who might have once disdained TV and scorned electronic gadgets debates plot turns from “Game of Thrones” and carries an app-laden iPhone. The few left concerned about the effects of the Internet are dismissed as Luddites or killjoys who are on the wrong side of history. A new kind of consensus has shaped up as Steve Jobs becomes the new John Lennon, Amanda Palmer the new Liz Phair, and Elon Musk’s rebel cool graces magazines covers. Conservatives praise Silicon Valley for its entrepreneurial energy; a Democratic president steers millions of dollars of funding to Amazon.

It seems like a funny era for the work of a cautionary social critic, one often dubious about the wonders of technology – including television — whose most famous book came out three decades ago. But the neoliberal post-industrial world now looks chillingly like the one Neil Postman foresaw in books like “Amusing Ourselves to Death” and “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.” And the people asking the important questions about where American society is going are taking a page from him.

“Amusing Ourselves” didn’t argue that regular TV shows were bad or dangerous. It insisted instead that the medium would reshape every other sphere with which it engaged: By using the methods of entertainment, TV would trivialize what the book jacket calls “politics, education, religion, and journalism.”

“It just blew me away,” says D.C.-based politics writer Matt Bai, who read the 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” while trying to figure out how the press and media became obsessed with superficiality beginning in the ‘80s. “So much of what I’d been thinking about was pioneered so many years before,” says Bai – whose recent book, “All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid,” looks at the 1987 Gary Hart sex scandal that effectively ended the politician’s career. “It struck me as incredibly relevant … And the more I reported the book, the more relevant it became.”

Bai isn’t alone. While he’s hardly a household name, Postman has become an important guide to the world of the Internet though most of his work was written before its advent. Astra Taylor, a documentary filmmaker and Occupy activist, turned to his books while she was plotting out what became “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age.” Douglas Rushkoff — a media theorist whose book “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now,” is one of the most lucid guides to our bewildering age — is indebted to his work. Michael Harris’ recent “The End of Absence” is as well. And Jaron Lanier, the virtual-reality inventor and author (“Who Owns the Future?”) who’s simultaneously critic and tech-world insider, sees Postman as an essential figure whose work becomes more crucial every year.

“There’s this kind of dialogue around technology where people dump on each other for ‘not getting it,’” Lanier says. “Postman does not seem to be vulnerable to that accusation: He was old-fashioned but he really transcended that. I don’t remember him saying, ‘When I was a kid, things were better.’ He called on fundamental arguments in very broad terms – the broad arc of human history and ethics.” [Continue reading…]

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Europe’s fear of Syria’s ‘ghost ships’

James Denselow writes: The story of the Ezadeen, the ship set on autopilot and set towards Europe with 450 fleeing Syrian refugees on board, could be a turning point in the European response to the crisis in Syria. With a conflict that has killed some 200,000 people burning brightly on its doorstep Europe’s prime focus to date has been on ensuring that it stays away from the flames. The emergence of “ghost ships”, the latest gruesome tactic to come out of a conflict that has also put the “barrel bomb” into the popular lexicon, may force a much needed revaluation on the strategy of Europe’s response.

The discovery of the Ezadeen is simply the latest in an increasing number of horror stories emerging from the Mediterranean Sea. The boat, aptly a former livestock carrier, was found in rough seas some 40 nautical miles off the Italian coast – the second vessel in four days to be found sailing abandoned by its crew.

The ghost ships represent both a new tactic – using large cargo ships to move people in winter across longer crossing – and a new trend – that of the refugees coming from Syria. Last year some 230,000 people arrived illegally across the Mediterranean into the EU with Italy receiving the lion’s share of 160,000 whilst 3,500 people died trying to make the crossing. The UNHCR explained that in 2014 for the first time, people mainly from Syria “have become a major component in this tragic flow, accounting for almost 50 per cent of the total”. [Continue reading…]

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The rise and fall of one of the Syrian opposition’s most powerful commanders

The Washington Post reports: In Syria’s chaotic and increasingly radicalized revolution, one man stood out for having resolutely moderate views, a large following and, it was widely whispered, the support of the United States and its allies.

Jamal Maarouf, a former day laborer who until recently was one of northern Syria’s most powerful commanders, had been held up by the Syrian opposition as a model rebel leader who shunned extremism and was among the first to take up arms against the Islamic State.

He had also, however, established a reputation as a warlord, whose fighters exacted tribute at checkpoints and spent more time engaged in the lucrative smuggling businesses he operated than waging war.

When the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra group forced him to flee his headquarters in the picturesque Jabal Zawiya mountains of northern Idlib province in November, Maarouf found himself with few friends. About half of his men remained behind, preferring to accommodate the invaders than fight for their leader. Moderate allied groups declined to respond to his pleas for help. So did the U.S.-led coalition, which failed to answer e-mails sent by the Syrian opposition requesting airstrikes against his attackers. [Continue reading…]

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