Music: David Sylvian — ‘World Citizen (I won’t be disappointed)’
A boycott can jolt Israelis from their somnolence on Palestine
Harriet Sherwood writes: The Rolling Stones have confirmed they will play a gig in Tel Aviv in June as part of their 14 On Fire tour. Inevitably, they are already under pressure to cancel their appearance in “apartheid Israel” by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement,a campaign that has had mixed success. The academic rock star Stephen Hawking and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters are firmly in the boycott camp, while the author Ian McEwan and the musician Alicia Keys have resisted pressure to pull appearances.
But there’s little doubt that the drive for a boycott of Israel in protest at its 47-year occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza is gathering steam. The latest body to back a boycott is Riba, Britain’s leading architectural association, which last month called on the International Union of Architects to suspend Israeli membership on the grounds of “complicity in the construction of illegal settlements and other violations of international law”. The boycott movement was boosted earlier this year by publicity surrounding Scarlett Johansson’s endorsement of SodaStream. How many people before then even knew that SodaStream was based in Israel, let alone that its main manufacturing plant was in a West Bank settlement?
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, performed a similar service when he warned Israeli leaders of the consequences of a failure of current peace talks. “The risks are very high for Israel,” he said. “People are talking about boycott. That will intensify in the case of failure.”
Kerry is right: more people are now talking about boycotting Israel than ever before. The issue is gaining traction even among US academic bodies, previously thought impervious due to the oft cited “unbreakable bond” between the two countries. [Continue reading…]
‘Cuban Twitter’ heads to hearings in Congress
The Associated Press reports: The head of the U.S. government agency that secretly created a “Cuban Twitter” communications network designed to undermine the communist government in Cuba is expected to testify next week before a senator who thinks the whole idea was “dumb, dumb, dumb.” The congressional hearing could resolve key questions around the clandestine program, including whether the Obama administration adequately informed lawmakers about its plans.
Administration officials on Thursday defended the program, saying it had been “debated” by Congress and wasn’t a covert operation that required White House approval. But two senior Democrats on congressional intelligence and judiciary committees said they had known nothing about the effort.
An Associated Press investigation found that the network was built using secret shell companies and financed through a foreign bank. The project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba’s stranglehold on the Internet with a social media platform.
The program aimed first to build a Cuban audience, mostly young people. Then the plan was to push them toward dissent.
But the Cuban users of the network, called ZunZuneo, were not aware it was created by the U.S. Agency for International Development, overseen by the State Department. They also did not know that American contractors running the program were gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes. [Continue reading…]
Mitigating climate change must proceed regardless of cost
Climate News Network reports: Two researchers who tried to work out the economics of reducing global climate change to a tolerable level have come up with a perhaps surprising answer: essentially, we do not and cannot know what it would cost.
Even more surprising, probably, is their conclusion: not knowing is no excuse for not acting. “Mitigating climate change must proceed regardless of long-run economic analyses”, they conclude, “or risk making the world uninhabitable.”
Their report, entitled The economics of mitigating climate change: What can we know?, is published online in Technological Forecasting and Social Change.
The pair are Dr Rich Rosen, who specialises in energy system planning and is a senior fellow of the Tellus Institute, based in Boston, Massachusetts, and Edeltraud Guenther, professor of environmental management and accounting at Dresden University of Technology in Germany.
In a densely-argued analysis of the long-term economics of mitigating climate change they say various kinds of uncertainties raise serious questions about whether or not the net costs and benefits of mitigation over periods as long as 50 years or a century can be known accurately enough to be useful to policymakers and citizens.
Technological change, especially for energy efficiency technologies, is a key factor in making the net economic results of mitigation unknowable over the long term, they argue. So policymakers should not base mitigation policy on the estimated net economic impacts computed by integrated assessment models (IAM – models which combine scientific and economic insights).
Instead, “mitigation policies must be forcefully implemented anyway given the actual physical climate change crisis, in spite of the many uncertainties involved in trying to predict the net economics of doing so”.
This argument directly challenges the many politicians and others who insist that governments should adopt policies designed to limit climate change only if they can make a strong economic case for doing so. Essentially, it shifts the ground of the debate from “what is affordable?” to “what is survivable?” [Continue reading…]
Senate panel finds CIA illegally interrogated terror suspects after 9/11
McClatchy reports: CIA officers subjected some terrorism suspects the agency held after the Sept. 11 attacks to interrogation methods that were not approved by either the Justice Department or their own headquarters and illegally detained 26 of the 119 in CIA custody, the Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded in its still-secret report, McClatchy has learned.
The spy agency program’s reliance on brutal techniques _ much more abusive than previously known _ and its failure to gather valuable information from the detainees harmed the U.S.’s credibility, according to the committee’s findings in its scathing 6,300-page report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention program.
The agency also repeatedly misled the Justice Department while stymieing Congress’ and the White House’s efforts to oversee the secret and now-defunct program, McClatchy has learned.
In all, the committee came to 20 conclusions about the CIA’s harsh interrogation tactics after spending six years and $40 million evaluating the controversial program, which began during the Bush administration.
The committee voted 11-3 Thursday to declassify an executive summary and conclusions. The findings and summary now will go to the White House and CIA for eventual public release. [Continue reading…]
Music: Johann Johannsson – ‘Theme’
New York Times reporters collude in Israeli duplicity
Yesterday Jodi Rudoren, Isabel Kershner, and Michael R. Gordon reported that following Israel’s failure to release a fourth batch of long-serving Palestinian prisoners by March 29, and following the announcement of plans to build more than 700 new housing units in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, the Palestinian leadership submitted applications to join 15 international conventions and treaties, ignoring Israeli and American objections to such a move.
To put that more bluntly, the Israelis reneged on an agreement to release a group of prisoners, pressed ahead with new plans to expand the Judaification of East Jerusalem, and in response the Palestinians said, enough is enough, we’re going to see if we can make some progress at the UN instead of remaining mired in fruitless negotiations with the Israelis.
Today, as though they imagine no one could possibly remember what they wrote yesterday, Michael R. Gordon, Isabel Kershner and Jodi Rudoren, reported:
Israel has called off plans to release a fourth group of Palestinian prisoners, people involved in the threatened peace talks said Thursday, an indication of the severity of the impasse between the two sides despite the pressure from Secretary of State John Kerry to keep the negotiations alive.
The Israeli decision was a response to the announcement on Tuesday by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, that his administration was formally seeking to join 15 international bodies, which the Israelis regarded as an unacceptable move that would subvert the direct negotiations with Israel for Palestinian statehood. Mr. Abbas said he took the step because Israel had not kept what he called its pledge to release the prisoners as part of the negotiations process, which began last summer.
What the Israelis did is like failing to show up for an appointment and then calling back the next day to cancel the appointment you already missed. What the New York Times did is try and make the Israelis seem perfectly reasonable.
The shocking rise of wealth inequality: Is it worse than we thought?
Jordan Weissmann writes: America’s gap between the rich and the rest might be worse than we ever knew.
Economists Emmanuel Saez, of the University of California–Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman, of the London School of Economics, are out with a new set of findings on American wealth inequality, and their numbers are startling. Wealth, for reference, is the value of what you own—assets like housing, stocks, and bonds, minus your debts. And while it certainly comes up from time to time, it has tended to play second fiddle to income in conversations about America’s widening class divide. In part, that’s because it’s a trickier conversation subject. Wealth has always been far more concentrated than income in the United States. Plus, research suggested that the top 1 percent of households had actually lost some of its share since the 1980s.
That might not really have been the case.
Forget the 1 percent. The winners of this race, according to Zucman and Saez, have been the 0.1 percent. [Continue reading…]
U.S. secretly created ‘Cuban Twitter’ to stir unrest
The Associated Press reports: In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a U.S. government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba’s communist government.
McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans. To hide the network from the Cuban government, they would set up a byzantine system of front companies using a Cayman Islands bank account, and recruit unsuspecting executives who would not be told of the company’s ties to the U.S. government.
McSpedon didn’t work for the CIA. This was a program paid for and run by the U.S. Agency for International Development, best known for overseeing billions of dollars in U.S. humanitarian aid.
According to documents obtained by The Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones “Cuban Twitter,” using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba’s strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the Internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo — slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet.
Documents show the U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through “non-controversial content”: news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize “smart mobs” — mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.”
At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the U.S. government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes. [Continue reading…]
Why the Saudis are panicking
Trita Parsi writes: As President Barack Obama must have noticed during his visit, there is a panicky tone to almost everything the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia does these days, whether it’s campaigning for two years to win a coveted seat on the UN Security Council only to give it up immediately after the vote, or its public pronouncements of going it alone in the chaos of Syria, or its break with its fellow Arab state Qatar, or the closing of the Al Jazeera office in Riyadh, or the banning of the books of renowned Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish. Or, of course, its opposition to diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear program and the prospects of a US-Iranian thaw.
Riyadh’s opposition to the Iran nuclear talks has largely been understood in the context of the larger Saudi-Iranian and Sunni-Shia rivalry. Consequently, Saudi’s negative reaction was predictable, the argument goes. The Saudi royal house would undoubtedly not sit idly by as its regional rival negotiated its way out of harsh sanctions and into a potential US-Iranian rapprochement that could pave the way for an American tilt towards Tehran—all at the expense of Saudi interests.
But the intensity of Riyadh’s reaction cannot be explained solely through the kingdom’s displeasure at Tehran’s diplomatic advances. In fact, the unprecedented opening between the US and Iran is arguably only the tip of the iceberg of Saudi Arabia’s growing list of concerns. Numerous geopolitical trends in the last decade have evolved in opposition to Saudi interests. Much indicates that it is the combination of these factors, rather than just Saudi displeasure with US-Iranian diplomacy, that best explain the erratic behavior of the House of Saud. [Continue reading…]
Ukraine implicates ousted president in shooting of protesters
The New York Times reports: The Ukrainian authorities said on Thursday that former President Viktor F. Yanukovych had been involved in plans for elite police units to open fire on antigovernment protesters in February, killing more than 100 people in the days immediately before the downfall of Mr. Yanukovych’s government.
The police have already arrested several members of one elite riot police unit responsible for the killings, said Arsen Avakov, the country’s interim interior minister, but some others under investigation have fled to Crimea, which was annexed by Russia last month.
The findings of the inquiry, which were presented by Mr. Avakov as well as by the country’s new general prosecutor and the head of the security services, are the first attempt by the government in Kiev to give a comprehensive answer to the shootings that caused the overwhelming majority of deaths that took place on the Ukrainian capital’s main square, the Maidan, in mid-February. [Continue reading…]
In Crimea, Russia showcases a rebooted army
The New York Times reports: The soldiers guarding the entrances to the surrounded Ukrainian military base here just south of the capital, Simferopol, had little in common with their predecessors from past Russian military actions.
Lean and fit, few if any seemed to be conscripts. Their uniforms were crisp and neat, and their new helmets were bedecked with tinted safety goggles. They were sober.
And there was another indicator of an army undergoing an upgrade: compact encrypted radio units distributed at the small-unit level, including for soldiers on such routine duty as guard shifts beside machine-gun trucks. The radios are a telltale sign of a sweeping modernization effort undertaken five years ago by Vladimir V. Putin that has revitalized Russia’s conventional military abilities, frightening some of its former vassal states in Eastern Europe and forcing NATO to re-evaluate its longstanding view of post-Soviet Russia as a nuclear power with limited ground muscle.
Across Crimea in the past several weeks, a sleek new vanguard of the Russian military has been on display, with forces whose mobility, equipment and behavior were sharply different from those of the Russian forces seen in the brief war in Georgia in 2008 or throughout the North Caucasus over nearly two decades of conflict with Muslim separatists. [Continue reading…]
Group claims Israel pushing ahead with east Jerusalem construction as talks with Palestinians falter
CBS/AP report: A settlement watchdog group says Israel is pushing forward with plans to build more than 700 homes in a Jewish enclave of east Jerusalem.
The move could present another obstacle in the deeply troubled Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Hagit Ofran from Peace Now says Israel renewed a call for contractor bids to build the homes this week.
Ofran said Wednesday that Israel’s reissuing of 708 tenders was meant to “make problems” in the faltering Israeli-Palestinian talks. [Continue reading…]
Tom Engelhardt: The Bermuda Triangle of national security
Hijacking the American plane of state
By Tom Engelhardt
Isn’t there something strangely reassuring when your eyeballs are gripped by a “mystery” on the news that has no greater meaning and yet sweeps all else away? This, of course, is the essence of the ongoing tale of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Except to the relatives of those on board, it never really mattered what happened in the cockpit that day. To the extent that the plane’s disappearance was solvable, the mystery could only end in one of two ways: it landed somewhere (somehow unnoticed, a deep unlikelihood) or it crashed somewhere, probably in an ocean. End of story. It was, however, a tale with thrilling upsides when it came to filling airtime, especially on cable news. The fact that there was no there there allowed for the raising of every possible disappearance trope — from Star Trekkian black holes to the Bermuda Triangle to Muslim terrorists — and it had the added benefit of instantly evoking a popular TV show. It was a formula too good to waste, and wasted it wasn’t.
The same has been true of the story that, in the U.S., came to vie with it for the top news spot: the devastating mudslide in Washington State. An act of nature, sweeping out of nowhere, buries part of a tiny community, leaving an unknown but possibly large number of people dead. Was anyone still alive under all that mud? (Such potential “miracles” are like manna from heaven for the TV news.) How many died? These questions mattered locally and to desperate relatives of those who had disappeared, but otherwise had little import. Yes, unbridled growth, lack of attention to expected disasters, and even possibly climate change were topics that might have been attached to the mudslide horror. As a gruesome incident, it could have stood in for a lot, but in the end it stood in for nothing except itself and that was undoubtedly its abiding appeal.
Both stories had the added benefit (for TV) of an endless stream of distraught relatives: teary or weeping or stoic or angry faces in desperately tight close-ups making heartfelt pleas for more information. For the media, it was like the weather before climate change came along.
In response, just about anything else that could pass for news was swept aside. Given a media that normally rushes heedlessly from one potential 24/7 story to another, this was striking. In the case of Flight 370, for instance, on the 21st day after its disappearance, it still led NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams (with the mudslide, one week after it happened, the number two story).
In those weeks, only one other story broke their stranglehold on the news. It was the seemingly critical question of what in the world was going on in Ukraine. There was the Russian military move into the Crimea, the referendum on that peninsula, its annexation, the alarm of the U.S. and the European Union, the imposition of (modest) sanctions, and various warnings of a Russian military build-up and possible invasion of eastern Ukraine. Unlike the other two stories, it seemed consequential enough. And yet in some eerie way, it, too, came to resemble them. It was as if with the news on Ukraine we were being sucked back into another era — that of the superpower-run twentieth century.
The question that seemed to loom was this: Are we in a new (i.e., the old) Cold War? It was so front and center that it sent opinion pollsters scrambling and they promptly discovered that half of all Americans thought we were — itself less a testament to American opinion than to the overwhelming media narrative that we were indeed living through the Cold War redux.
Misinformation maligns Syrian uprising
Borzou Daragahi writes: Earlier this week the famous-for-being-famous celebrity Kim Kardashian regurgitated Syrian regime disinformation about a rebel massacre of Armenians in the town of Kasab in the country’s northeast on her Twitter feed after it was captured by rebels.
The Tweet – Please let’s not let history repeat itself!!!!!! Let’s get this trending!!!! #SaveKessab #ArmenianGenocide – went viral, further damaging the reputation of Syria’s opposition, a ragtag rebellion struggling to make inroads against Bashar al-Assad, a dictator who continues to massacre hundreds of people daily in bombing raids and inside his dark dungeons. Unlike in Kasab, these murders have been meticulously documented by independent human rights groups and the UN.
Perhaps no other cause in recent history has been more unjustly, and perhaps fatally, maligned than the Syrian uprising. Still haunted by the Iraq war debacle and the failures of the Libyan uprising, many in the west have unwittingly become Mr Assad’s dupes, spreading mischaracterisation after mischaracterisation about the rebellion. [Continue reading…]
@al_7aleem debunks “The #SaveKessab hoax propaganda pandemic”: On Sunday 23rd March, rebels in Syria launched offensive (of which AlNusra, an AlQaeda affiliated group, was but one of many participants) into Latakia province via Idlib and East Latakia (AlAnfal offensive). Among the towns and villages seized from Assad regime troops in the advance, was Kessab and its Turkey border crossing. Three days later the world was hit by the largest viral social media disinformation campaign in history.
A cacophony of hoax images, misused videos, and Syrian State TV reports (including the 80 killed 12 beheaded story, which was then taken and cited by tens of smaller outlets giving the illusion of a large source basin) spread through social media like wildfire. Once again, Assad is pulling the minorities propaganda card.
A “#SaveKessab” trend riled up a global community of expat Armenians, Twitter teenagers, and Keeping Up With The Kardashians viewers; to arms (i.e. iPhone fingers). Catchy propaganda posters with gory images coupled with lent voices from a certain famous celebrity pair of siblings fed fuel to the Twitter fire. Hoax images are mostly being posted first to Instagram with the ArmenianUnity and SaveKessab instagram pages being so far the most notorious for posting misused and hoax images.
The result thousands of wannabe politically-enlightened good-will “activists” (Who have never heard of Kessab in their lives, don’t know where it is, and utterly blissfully ignorant of the Syrian conflict) ravenously retweeting, tweeting and hashtagging the ongoing “Mass murder and genocide of Armenians in Kessab by the Turkish military and AlQaeda, a continuation of the 1915 genocide” – because as per the rules of Twitter, enough retweets can stop a non-existent genocide from happening. Welcome to the internet. [Continue reading…]
@al_7aleem goes on to document how images that have been used in the #SaveKessab campaign have come sources as wildly unconnected to Syria as “Inner Depravity by Remy Couture” — a video made by “a master of special effects horror” which can be found on YouTube and whose content is so twisted that it landed the director on trial in Canada for “moral corruption through propagation of obscene material.”
Ukraine isn’t worth another Cold War
Pankaj Mishra writes: The Cold War credentialed a kind of “thinker” who cannot think without the help of violently opposed abstractions: good versus evil, freedom versus slavery, liberal democracy versus totalitarianism, and that sort of thing. Forced into premature retirement by the unexpected collapse of Communism in 1989, this thinker re-emerged after Sept. 11, convinced there was another worthy enemy in the crosshairs: Islamic totalitarianism. Unchastened by a decade of expensive, counterproductive and widely despised wars, these laptop generals have been trying to reboot their dated software yet again as Russian President Vladimir Putin formalizes his annexation of Crimea.
As laments about Western weakness and spine-stiffening exhortations fill the air, it’s worth recalling the legacy of the central episode of the Cold War: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
The invasion was promoted by the Soviets’ serious misjudgment of the U.S.’s intentions in the region. As the U.S., along with Saudi Arabia, helped consolidate history’s first global jihadist campaign, it came to be prolonged by actual American actions. Questioned in 1998 about the U.S. role in the making of Islamic extremists, Zbigniew Brzezinski could confidently retort, “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”
Three years later, of course, a handful of stirred-up Muslims launched the most devastating attack ever on U.S. soil, provoking the George W. Bush administration into such hubristic projects as eliminating “terror” worldwide and bringing democracy at gunpoint to the Middle East.
Muslims stirred up and radicalized by these blunders have subsequently ravaged Pakistan and large parts of the Middle East and Africa. U.S. citizens, too, have had to pay a high price — the loss of civil and legal rights — to protect themselves from what was originally a small band of cave-dwelling criminals and fanatics. Meanwhile, as the events of the last month show, the Soviet empire that had allegedly collapsed has returned under a different guise.
It is very likely that Putin’s land grab in Crimea will fail disastrously. As the Russian economy slows down, capital flees the country and domestic unrest grows, Putin’s position will become less than secure. The one thing certain to keep him in power longer, as well as weaken his opponents, would be a Western overreaction like those of the Jimmy Carter and Bush administrations in 1979 and 2001. [Continue reading…]
Methane-producing microbes may have triggered the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history
MIT News Office: Evidence left at the crime scene is abundant and global: Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out — by far the largest of this planet’s five known mass extinctions. But pinpointing the culprit has been difficult, and controversial.
Now, a team of MIT researchers may have found enough evidence to convict the guilty parties — but you’ll need a microscope to see the killers.
The perpetrators, this new work suggests, were not asteroids, volcanoes, or raging coal fires, all of which have been implicated previously. Rather, they were a form of microbes — specifically, methane-producing archaea called Methanosarcina — that suddenly bloomed explosively in the oceans, spewing prodigious amounts of methane into the atmosphere and dramatically changing the climate and the chemistry of the oceans.
Volcanoes are not entirely off the hook, according to this new scenario; they have simply been demoted to accessories to the crime. The reason for the sudden, explosive growth of the microbes, new evidence shows, may have been their novel ability to use a rich source of organic carbon, aided by a sudden influx of a nutrient required for their growth: the element nickel, emitted by massive volcanism at just that time.
The new solution to this mystery is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science by MIT professor of geophysics Daniel Rothman, postdoc Gregory Fournier, and five other researchers at MIT and in China.
The researchers’ case builds upon three independent sets of evidence. First, geochemical evidence shows an exponential (or even faster) increase of carbon dioxide in the oceans at the time of the so-called end-Permian extinction. Second, genetic evidence shows a change in Methanosarcina at that time, allowing it to become a major producer of methane from an accumulation of organic carbon in the water. Finally, sediments show a sudden increase in the amount of nickel deposited at exactly this time. [Continue reading…]
Music: The Cinematic Orchestra — ‘Arrival of the Birds’