Crimean militias storm bases, arrest Ukraine navy chief

n13-iconAFP reports: Pro-Russian forces seized two Crimean navy bases and captured Ukraine’s naval chief on Wednesday as Moscow tightened its grip on the flashpoint peninsula despite Western warnings its “annexation” would not go unpunished.

Dozens of despondent Ukrainian soldiers — one of them in tears — filed out of the Ukraine’s main navy headquarters in the historic Black Sea port city of Sevastopol after it was stormed by hundreds of pro-Kremlin protesters and masked Russian troops.

“We have been temporarily disbanded,” a Ukrainian lieutenant who identified himself only as Vlad told AFP.

“I was born here and I grew up here and I have been serving for 20 years,” he said as a Russian flag went up over the base without a single shot being fired in its defence. “Where am I going to go?”

A Russian forces’ representative said that Ukraine’s navy commander Sergiy Gayduk — appointed after his predecessor switched allegiance in favour of Crimea’s pro-Kremlin authorities at the start of the month — had been detained.

A regional prosecutor’s statement said Gayduk was suspected of “ordering Ukrainian military units… to open fire on peaceful civilians”.

Defence ministry officials said Russian forces also seized a military base in Crimea’s western port town of Novoozerne after using a tractor to ram open its main gate.

An AFP reporter saw about 50 Ukrainian servicemen file out of the base under the watchful eye of Russian soldiers while pro-Moscow militias lowered the Ukrainian flag. [Continue reading…]

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Hamas’ ‘unfortunate’ disagreement on Syria is on the road to being resolved

n13-icon“I salute all people of the Arab Spring, or Islamic winter, and I salute the heroic people of Syria who are striving for freedom, democracy and reform,” head of the Hamas government in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, told worshippers at a mosque in Cairo on February 24, 2012.

Two days later Abu Marzouk, Hamas’ deputy political leader, told the Associated Press: “Our position on Syria is that we are not with the regime in its security solution, and we respect the will of the people.”

In an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News in May 2013, the leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, said: “After the start of the crisis I said to all Syrian political, security and military leaders in very clear words, the demands of your people for freedom, democracy and reform are legitimate. The military approach is wrong. It makes the crisis worse.”

Ali Hashem, a columnist for Al-Monitor, now writes that Hamas appears ready to patch up its differences with the Assad regime, and Meshaal will soon be visiting Syria’s closest ally, Iran.

A senior Hamas official who met with Al-Monitor in Tehran last week confirmed that the visit is indeed on the agenda. He asserted, “Our relationship with Iran is back as it was, and maybe better. Enemies who are betting on the end of the resistance bloc should know that this bloc is getting bigger and stronger, from North Africa to Tehran.”

Osama Hamdan, Hamas’ international relations officer, explained that the “unfortunate” disagreement on Syria is on the road to being resolved and that positive options are on the table with respect to his organization’s relations with Damascus. Hamdan added that ties with Hezbollah are good and that he continues to carry out his work from his office in Beirut’s southern suburbs, a Hezbollah stronghold.

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Fueled by Syrian war, hostilities surge in Lebanon

a13-iconThe Associated Press reports: Sunni Muslim demonstrators used burning tires to close key roads across Lebanon Tuesday to protest a blockade of their brethren by Shiite gunmen, officials said, as the country struggles to keep a lid on simmering sectarian tensions enflamed by the civil war in neighboring Syria.

In one of the most ominous signs, an AP reporter saw protesters marching among cars stopped at a Beirut roadblock and warning drivers with Shiite emblems on their vehicles that Sunnis would not be cowed by the powerful Shiite militant Hezbollah group. There was no violence, and all of the cars eventually moved on unscathed.

Lebanon, which is still haunted by its own 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, has been deeply polarized by the current conflict in Syria. Lebanese Sunnis largely support the predominantly Sunni opposition in Syria, while Shiites have backed President Bashar Assad’s government.

That dynamic has sent sectarian hatreds soaring in Lebanon, particularly since the country’s most powerful political and military force, Hezbollah, dispatched its fighters last year to Syria to bolster Assad’s forces. Many Sunnis also resent Hezbollah’s unmatched political and military position in Lebanon. [Continue reading…]

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If history is a guide, Crimea’s enthusiasm might not last

a13-iconThe New York Times reports: As Crimeans danced in the streets this week, giddy at the prospect of being gathered into Russia, few were watching as closely as the residents of the tiny mountainous enclave of South Ossetia, who, five and a half years ago, were similarly ecstatic.

On the day in 2008 when Russia formally recognized the enclave as independent of Georgia, young men hung out of their car windows, waving Russian flags and spraying pedestrians with champagne. Officials daydreamed about building an economy based on tourism, like those of Monaco or Andorra.

That has not happened. These days South Ossetia’s economy is entirely dependent on budgetary funds from Russia. Unemployment is high, and so are prices, since goods must now be shuttled in through the tunnel, as long and thin as a drinking straw, that cuts through the Caucasus ridge from Russia.

Its political system is controlled by elites loyal to Moscow, suddenly wealthy enough to drive glossy black cars, though the roads are pitted or unpaved. Dozens of homes damaged in the 2008 war with Georgia have never been repaired. Dina Alborova, who heads a nonprofit organization in the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, said her early hopes “all got corrected, step by step.” [Continue reading…]

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Putin signs Crimea treaty, will not seize other regions of Ukraine

n13-iconThe Guardian reports: It was hard to avoid Vladimir Putin at the rally in Red Square on Tuesday celebrating the joining of Crimea to Russia. As the president’s defiant speech from earlier in the day was replayed on speakers, supporters waved giant white flags with Putin’s face and the words “We’re together!”, and signs reading “Putin is right” and “We believe Putin”.

Finally, the man himself appeared on a huge stage in front of the Kremlin. Speaking against a backdrop reading “Crimea is in my heart!” while officials from the Ukrainian breakaway region looked on, Putin was briefly interrupted by chants of “Putin!” and “Russia!” as he thanked Crimeans for their “courage and perseverance”.

“Today is a very bright, happy holiday. After a long, difficult, exhausting voyage, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their native harbour, to their native shores, to their port of permanent registration – to Russia!” Putin began.

“Russia! Crimea! Putin!” chanted people with the red-and-yellow ribbons of St George, typically worn to commemorate military victories.

US and European leaders have decried the accession treaty Putin signed on Tuesday with Crimean politicians, but at home the move was met with an outpouring of patriotic fervour at rallies organised with the help of pro-Kremlin civic groups and political parties.

Police reports, which are often accused of exaggerating the size of pro-government rallies, said 120,000 people were assembled on Red Square. The state television channel Rossiya 24 reported that similar demonstrations took place in all of Russia’s 81 regions.

Attendees in Red Square said they felt pride in their resurgent country and in Putin for his decisive actions on the world stage. Frequent references to the US and signs reading “Obama! Look after Alaska!” gave the gathering a cold war feel, and it was clear who was seen to be winning this time.

Reuters reports: Putin thanked China for what he called its support, even though Beijing abstained on a U.N. resolution on Crimea that Moscow had to veto on its own. He said he was sure Germans would understand the Russian people’s quest for reunification, just as Russia had supported German reunification in 1990.

And he sought to reassure Ukrainians that Moscow did not seek any further division of their country. Fears have been expressed in Kiev that Russia might move on the Russian-speaking eastern parts of Ukraine, where there has been tension between some Russian-speakers and the new authorities.

“Don’t believe those who try to frighten you with Russia and who scream that other regions will follow after Crimea,” Putin said. “We do not want a partition of Ukraine.”

The Los Angeles Times reports: Ukraine will never recognize the results of the weekend referendum that favored Crimea’s secession and it will never accept the annexation of the peninsula by Russia, acting President Oleksandr Turchynov said Tuesday.

“Our land will never be torn away,” Turchynov said Tuesday, according to the UNIAN news agency. “The Ukrainian people and the entire civilized world will never recognize the annexation of Ukrainian land.”

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Despite initial euphoria, many Russians less certain Putin’s Crimea ploy benefits them

a13-iconPaul Goble writes: Despite the initial euphoria promoted by the Kremlin’s propaganda effort, ever more Russians appear to be concerned that what Vladimir Putin has done in Crimea, however good it made them feel in the short term, may have bad consequences for themselves, their country, and even for those who have backed this annexation.

On RBCDaily.ru, Vladislav Inozemtsev, the director of the Center for Research on Post-Industral Society, says that Russia “will pay dearly” for its Crimean action. Not only will it have to spend 4-5 billion US dollars a year on the peninsula, but it will face expanded capital flight, declining reserves, and increased inflation.

Because of these threats and to protect its own power, he continues, “the Kremlin, not waiting for US and EU sanctions has begun on its own to erect around itself ‘an iron curtain,’” a move that Inozemtsev says will only “accelerate the fall of the Putin model of administration” by adding to the woes of the Russian people.

Domestic investment will decline at an accelerating rate as a result of Putin’s “protectionist” policies, and consequently, there is no reason to hope for the revival of domestic industrial production. And the more steps the Kremlin takes which isolate it from the world, the faster the decline will be.

“The rest of the world is dangerous [for Russians] by its successes rather than by its threats. If anyone has forgotten, the Soviet Union collapsed when no one was threatening it but when the lack of any prospects for its authoritarian model became obvious” to everyone, Inozemtsev says.

According to the researcher, for the Kremlin, “Crimea is more important than economic success, but that isn’t necessarily true for the Russian population or a guarantee for the regime’s stability and survival. “In the Kremlin, they are convinced that it is, [but] the leaders of the USSR in the middle of March 1991were certain of the same thing.” [Continue reading…]

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NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

n13-iconThe Washington Post reports: The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary. [Continue reading…]

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Afghanistan: As China forges new alliances, a new Great Game has begun

a13-iconWilliam Dalrymple writes: As the disappearance of flight MH370 dominated the headlines across China, a party of senior US officials and AfPak experts arrived in Beijing last week for discreet talks with their Chinese counterparts. They were there as part of a little reported but crucial new Sino-American dialogue on Afghanistan, discussing the role China could play there after the US withdrawal. It is an important development in the new Great Game that is already realigning the delicate geopolitical balance of the region.

The public standoff between the world’s two greatest military powers in the South China Sea over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands has disguised a growing detente between them both over central Asia. “The Chinese are very much aware that we are now on the same page in Afghanistan,” I was told by a senior state department official with the delegation. “Our interests are now in almost complete alignment there.”

The fledgling dialogue received a huge boost earlier this month when China suffered what one newspaper affiliated with the party described as “China’s 9/11“. A knife attack by a group of eight militants at Kunming station in Yunan province left 29 dead and 140 injured. The authorities stated that the assailants were Uighurs, the Turkic-speaking Muslim minority, many of whom want independence for the northwest region of Xinjiang – or East Turkestan, as Uighurs call it.

Tensions between Uighurs and Han Chinese have been simmering for years. The Chinese have bulldozed great swaths of Kashgar, the historic Uighur capital, and drafted hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese into the sensitive border region. Like the Tibetans, the Uighurs now find themselves a minority in their own homeland. [Continue reading…]

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Three years of strife and cruelty put Syria in free fall

f13-iconThe New York Times reports: Day after day, the Syrian civil war has ground down a cultural and political center of the Middle East, turning it into a stage for disaster and cruelty on a nearly incomprehensible scale. Families are brutalized by their government and by jihadists claiming to be their saviors as nearly half of Syrians — many of them children — have been driven from their homes.

At the start of the fourth year since Syrians rose up in a peaceful movement that turned to arms after violent repression, a snapshot of the country presents the harsh truth that Syria’s descent is only accelerating, with nothing to check it.

The government bombards neighborhoods with explosive barrels, missiles, heavy artillery and, the United States says, chemical weapons, then it sends in its allies in Hezbollah and other militias to wage street warfare. It jails and tortures peaceful activists, and uses starvation as a weapon, blockading opposition areas where trapped children shrivel and die.

The opposition is now functionally dominated by foreign-led jihadists who commit their own abuses in the name of their extremist ideology, just last week shooting a 7-year-old boy for what they claimed was apostasy. And some of those fighters, too, have targeted civilians and used siege tactics.

It is not as if the world has no evidence of Syria’s ordeal, which has killed an estimated 150,000 people. Syrians have issued a sustained, collective cry for help from what is now probably history’s most-documented manmade disaster. They capture appalling suffering on video and beam the images out to the world: skeletal infants, body parts pulled from the rubble of homes, faces stretched by despair, over and over.

Despite that, to the bitterness of Syrians, the world’s diplomatic attention is drifting. Even as Syria’s epic suffering is remaking the human geography of the Middle East and beyond, initiatives to ease the crisis have sputtered and failed to offer effective help. Already tenuous hopes for an internationally brokered peace settlement have further faded as Russian-American relations worsen.

António Guterres, the head of the United Nations refugee agency, said that is in part because there is no obvious path to a coherent global response. Given the world’s growing unpredictability, and competing priorities, “crises are multiplying and more and more difficult to solve,” he said. “Afghanistan is not finished. Somalia is not finished. It’s overwhelming.”

All the while, Syria is falling apart.

Last weekend, another vital center of opposition life — the city of Yabrud, near the Lebanese border — fell to pro-government forces. As each such haven has been shattered, like Homs and Qusayr, it has become a watchword for civilian suffering, and more are displaced.

The country is threatened with de facto partition among the government, Kurdish militias and a patchwork of insurgent groups, some seeking to impose extremist Islamist rule. Criminal gangs profit from chaos, and pro-government militias increasingly threaten to slip from state control. A regional proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran further polarizes the conflict and fuels its sectarian dimension.

Adding to the urgency is the growing scale of regional destabilization. With nine million Syrians driven from their homes, according to the United Nations, 2.5 million of them into nearby countries, the Syrian displacement dwarfs the exodus from British-mandate Palestine during the war over Israel’s founding in 1948, a flight of 750,000 people that fuels conflict and hardship to this day. [Continue reading…]

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Ordinary Russians and Ukrainians have been betrayed by their leaders

o13-iconMikhail Shishkin has been acclaimed as Russia’s greatest living author. He writes: The internet has brought the war into every home. Thanks to live broadcasts, you are now a witness to and participant in the street battles in Kiev, the rallies in Crimea, and the arrests in Moscow.

As I write these words, a red-headed 18-year-old girl unfurls her banner – “No to war” – on Manezh Square near the Kremlin. A policeman walks up to her with a megaphone: “Disperse! Your action is unsanctioned.” She shouts back: “This war of yours is unsanctioned!”

The criminals in power have pulled off an unforgivable and base trick. They have set Russians and Ukrainians against one another, and made language not a means of understanding but a weapon of hate.

We truly are brother nations. My mother is Ukrainian, and my father is Russian. There are millions of such mixed families in both Ukraine and Russia. Where are you going to draw the line between one and the other? How are you going to cut the ties that bind?

How are going to divide up Gogol? Is he a Russian or a Ukrainian classic? We share him. We share our pride in him.

How are we going to divide up our shared shame and our shared grief – our appalling history? The annihilation of the peasantry in Russia and the Holodomor in Ukraine? There were Russians and Ukrainians among the victims and executioners. We have common enemies: ourselves.

Our terrible common past has a death grip on both nations and is not letting us move into the future.

The Maidan protests were stunning for the daring and courage of the people who came out on the square “for our freedom and yours.” Most striking of all was the solidarity. I was gripped by admiration and envy. Here the Ukrainians were able to rise up and resist; they were not about to be brought to their knees.

The Putin TV anchors used their propaganda news in every possible way to create an image of Maidan’s defender as the Ukrainian bumpkin from the joke: crafty, greedy, stupid, and prepared to sell himself to the devil or the west; it didn’t matter which, just so he’d have his lard. A country with state television of that calibre should die of shame.

This kind of condescending attitude toward Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language has been accepted in Russia from time immemorial. The “younger brother” was loved for his cheerfulness, humour, and self-deprecation, but he remained the younger brother, and that meant he had to obey his older brother, learn from him, and try to be like him. The last few months have changed the course of history and revealed entirely different Ukrainians to Russians. The “younger brother” has turned out to be more mature than the older. Ukrainians were able to tell their embezzling government, “Gang, get out!” But we weren’t. Naturally, I’m envious. [Continue reading…]

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Freedom in Russian exists only in Ukraine

o13-iconTimothy Snyder writes: Last weekend Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the most famous of Russia’s political prisoners, spoke to tens of thousands of Ukrainians on the main square in Kiev, the Maidan. Khodorkovsky told them what they already knew: that Ukrainian citiznes from all walks of life, of all ethnicities, had suffered for and won their freedom in a revolution for dignity and decency.

What language did Khodorkovsky speak in Kiev? Russian, of course, his native language, and a language most Ukrainians speak. Most Ukrainians are bilingual and many Ukrainians in Kiev speak Russian rather than Ukrainian at home. Ukrainians are cosmopolitan in a way that most of us are not. Unfortunately, we reward them for it by not noticing that they are bilingual, dividing them into groups of Russian- and Ukrainian-speakers, drawing the conclusion that there are two nations instead of one — and thereby preparing ourselves for Putin’s war propaganda. [Continue reading…]

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Can we trust an Internet that’s become a weapon of governments?

f13-iconMIT Technology Review: Security experts have been warning for some time that computer networks are not secure from intruders. But in 2013, we learned that the mayhem has become strategic. Governments now write computer viruses. And if they can’t, they can purchase them. A half-dozen boutique R&D houses, like Italy’s Hacking Team, develop computer vulnerabilities and openly market them to government attackers.

Criminals use common computer weaknesses to infect as many machines as possible. But governments assemble large research teams and spend millions patiently pursuing narrow objectives. ­Costin Raiu, who investigates such “advanced persistent threats” as director of research and analysis for anti-virus company Kaspersky Lab, says he logs on to his computer assuming he is not alone. “I operate under the principle that my computer is owned by at least three governments,” he says.

That is a threat mainstream technology companies are grappling with. The U.S. government circumvented Google’s security measures and secretly collected customer data. British spies scooped up millions of webcam images from Yahoo. In December, on Microsoft’s official blog, the company’s top lawyer, Brad Smith, said he had reason to view surreptitious “government snooping” as no different from criminal malware. Microsoft, along with Google and Yahoo, has responded by greatly widening its use of encryption (see “The Year of Encryption”).

“We’re living in a very interesting time, where companies are becoming unwilling pawns in cyberwarfare,” says Menny Barzilay, a former Israeli intelligence officer now working in IT security for the Bank Hapoalim Group, in Tel Aviv. In this new context, nobody can say where the responsibilities of a company may end and those of a nation might begin. Should a commercial bank be expected to expend resources to defend itself when its attacker is a country? “This is not a ‘maybe’ situation. This is happening right now,” says Barzilay. “And this is just the beginning.” [Continue reading…]

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The beginning of everything — when our universe expanded faster than the speed of light

Space.com: Astronomers announced Monday (March 17) that they have discovered a telltale signature of gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the light left over from the universe’s birth 13.8 billion years ago.

The new results suggest that space-time really did expand at many times the speed of light in the first few tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang, as predicted by the theory of cosmic inflation, researchers say.

That may seem impossible, since Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity holds that nothing can travel faster than light. That rule, however, applies only to matter and information moving through space, not to the expansion of space-time itself. [Continue reading…]

Space.com: The new research also lends credence to the idea of a multiverse. This theory posits that, when the universe grew exponentially in the first tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, some parts of space-time expanded more quickly than others. This could have created “bubbles” of space-time that then developed into other universes. The known universe has its own laws of physics, while other universes could have different laws, according to the multiverse concept.

“It’s hard to build models of inflation that don’t lead to a multiverse,” Alan Guth, an MIT theoretical physicist unaffiliated with the new study, said during a news conference Monday. “It’s not impossible, so I think there’s still certainly research that needs to be done. But most models of inflation do lead to a multiverse, and evidence for inflation will be pushing us in the direction of taking [the idea of a] multiverse seriously.” [Continue reading…]

Click “Read more” link to see a “Cosmic Inflation” infographic.
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In unseen worlds, science invariably crosses paths with fantasy

f13-iconPhilip Ball writes: For centuries, scientists studied light to comprehend the visible world. Why are things colored? What is a rainbow? How do our eyes work? And what is light itself? These are questions that preoccupied scientists and philosophers since the time of Aristotle, including Roger Bacon, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Thomas Young, and James Clerk Maxwell.

But in the late 19th century all that changed, and it was largely Maxwell’s doing. This was the period in which the whole focus of physics — then still emerging as a distinct scientific discipline — shifted from the visible to the invisible. Light itself was instrumental to that change. Not only were the components of light invisible “fields,” but light was revealed as merely a small slice of a rainbow extending far into the unseen.

Physics has never looked back. Today its theories and concepts are concerned largely with invisible entities: not only unseen force fields and insensible rays but particles too small to see even with the most advanced microscopes. We now know that our everyday perception grants us access to only a tiny fraction of reality. Telescopes responding to radio waves, infrared radiation, and X-rays have vastly expanded our view of the universe, while electron microscopes, X-ray beams, and other fine probes of nature’s granularity have unveiled the microworld hidden beyond our visual acuity. Theories at the speculative forefront of physics flesh out this unseen universe with parallel worlds and with mysterious entities named for their very invisibility: dark matter and dark energy.

This move beyond the visible has become a fundamental part of science’s narrative. But it’s a more complicated shift than we often appreciate. Making sense of what is unseen — of what lies “beyond the light” — has a much longer history in human experience. Before science had the means to explore that realm, we had to make do with stories that became enshrined in myth and folklore. Those stories aren’t banished as science advances; they are simply reinvented. Scientists working at the forefront of the invisible will always be confronted with gaps in knowledge, understanding, and experimental capability. In the face of those limits, they draw unconsciously on the imagery of the old stories. This is a necessary part of science, and these stories can sometimes suggest genuinely productive scientific ideas. But the danger is that we will start to believe them at face value, mistaking them for theories.

A backward glance at the history of the invisible shows how the narratives and tropes of myth and folklore can stimulate science, while showing that the truth will probably turn out to be far stranger and more unexpected than these old stories can accommodate. [Continue reading…]

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Industrial society heading for ‘irreversible collapse’

a13-iconAt The Guardian, Nafeez Ahmed writes: A new study sponsored by Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution.

Noting that warnings of ‘collapse’ are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that “the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history.” Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to “precipitous collapse – often lasting centuries – have been quite common.”

The research project is based on a new cross-disciplinary ‘Human And Nature DYnamical’ (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharri of the US National Science Foundation-supported National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics.

It finds that according to the historical record even advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about the sustainability of modern civilisation:

“The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent.”

By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population, Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social features: “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity”; and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor]” These social phenomena have played “a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse,” in all such cases over “the last five thousand years.” [Continue reading…]

The research paper, which is quite technical, can be read here: “A Minimal Model for Human and Nature Interaction.”

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Former Church Committee members see need for new group to investigate NSA

n13-iconThreatpost: In a letter sent to President Obama and members of Congress, former members and staff of the Church Committee on intelligence said that the revelations of the NSA activities have caused “a crisis of public confidence” and encouraged the formation of a new committee to undertake “significant and public reexamination of intelligence community practices”.

Although it may seem like the NSA’s activities have only recently come under public scrutiny, the agency first was dragged into the light in 1975 when reports surfaced that for decades it had had secret agreements with telegram companies to get copies of Americans’ international communications. The Church committee, formally known as the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, was formed to investigate the NSA’s methods and produced a report that took the agency to task for overstepping its bounds and expanding programs well beyond their initial scope.

“We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as ‘vacuum cleaners,’ sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens. The tendency of intelligence activities to expand beyond their initial scope is a theme, which runs through every aspect of our investigative findings,” the committee’s final report said.

In the letter sent Monday to Obama and Congress, several former advisers to and members of the Church committee, including the former chief counsel, said that the current situation involving the NSA bears striking resemblances to the one in 1975 and that the scope of what the NSA is doing today is orders of magnitude larger than what was happening nearly 40 years ago.

“The need for another thorough, independent, and public congressional investigation of intelligence activity practices that affect the rights of Americans is apparent. There is a crisis of public confidence. Misleading statements by agency officials to Congress, the courts, and the public have undermined public trust in the intelligence community and in the capacity for the branches of government to provide meaningful oversight,” the letter says.

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The ties that bind the U.S. and Russian oil and gas industries together

a13-iconSteve Horn reports: In a long-awaited moment in a hotly contested zone currently occupied by the Russian military, Ukraine’s citizens living in the peninsula of Crimea voted overwhelmingly to become part of Russia.

Responding to the referendum, President Barack Obama and numerous U.S. officials rejected the results out of hand and the Obama Administration has confirmed he will authorize economic sanctions against high-ranking Russian officials.

“As I told President Putin yesterday, the referendum in Crimea was a clear violation of Ukrainian constitutions and international law and it will not be recognized by the international community,” Obama said in a press briefing. “Today I am announcing a series of measures that will continue to increase the cost on Russia and those responsible for what is happening in Ukraine.”

But even before the vote and issuing of sanctions, numerous key U.S. officials hyped the need to expedite U.S. oil and gas exports to fend off Europe’s reliance on importing Russia’s gas bounty. In short, gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) is increasingly seen as a “geopolitical tool” for U.S. power-brokers, as The New York Times explained.

Perhaps responding to the repeated calls to use gas as a “diplomatic tool,” the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced it will sell 5 million barrels of oil from the seldom-tapped Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Both the White House and DOE deny the decision had anything to do with the situation in Ukraine.

Yet even as some say we are witnessing the beginning of a “new cold war,” few have discussed the ties binding major U.S. oil and gas companies with Russian state oil and gas companies.

The ties that bind, as well as other real logistical and economic issues complicate the narrative of exports as an “energy weapon.”

The situation in Ukraine is a simple one at face value, at least from an energy perspective.

“Control of resources and dependence on other countries is a central theme connecting the longstanding tension between Russia and Ukraine and potential actions taken by the rest of the world as the crisis escalates,” ThinkProgress explained in a recent article. “Ukraine is overwhelmingly dependent on Russia for natural gas, relying on its neighbor for 60 to 70 percent of its natural gas needs.”

At the same time, Europe also largely depends on Ukraine as a key thoroughfare for imports of Russian gas via pipelines.

“The country is crossed by a network of Soviet-era pipelines that carry Russian natural gas to many European Union member states and beyond; more than a quarter of the EU’s total gas needs were met by Russian gas, and some 80% of it came via Ukrainian pipelines,” explained The Guardian.

Given the circumstances, weaning EU countries off Russian gas seems a no-brainer at face value. Which is why it’s important to use the brain and look beneath the surface.

The U.S. and Russian oil and gas industries can best be described as “frenemies.” Case in point: the tight-knit relationship between U.S. multinational petrochemical giant ExxonMobil and Russian state-owned multinational petrochemical giant Rosneft. [Continue reading…]

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