Israelis again impose Collective punishment on Palestinians of Gaza

Posted on 10/14/2013 by Juan Cole

On finding a tunnel from the Gaza Strip into Israel, the Israeli government has again blockaded the strip from receiving shipments of basic building materials.. Half of Gaza’s 1.7 million people are children, and half the population receives food assistance. Israel invaded Gaza in 1967 and tried to plant Israeli squatters there. In 2006 Hamas, the movement of political Islam, won the Palestinian elections. Israel and the US supported a coup on the West Bank that put the PLO in charge. A coup attempt failed in Gaza, where Hamas remained in power. The Israelis punished the whole population with a crushing economic blockade. Collective punishment of populations under occupation regimes is forbidden in international law. Although Israel has made cosmetic changes to its blockade, it is still a severe interference in the lifeways of occupied local people, which the Geneva convention of 1949 forbids.

The USG Open Source Center translates an item from Gaza radio maintaining that 200 Palestinians were aboard the ship that capsized off Malta 2 days ago. 33 passengers are known dead and dozens are unaccounted for.

FYI — Ship Carrying 375 Syrian, Palestinian Migrants to Europe Sinks Near Libya, 200 People ‘Lost’
OSC Summary
Sunday, October 13, 2013

At 1521 GMT, the HAMAS-run Gaza-based Al-Aqsa TV reports the following “urgent” screen caption: “Initial reports say that a ship carrying Palestinian refugees has drowned after being fired upon opposite the shores of Libya.”

The HAMAS-run Gaza-based Safa website reported on its homepage at 1524 GMT that the ship was carrying 375 migrants and was on its way from the Libyan city of Tripoli to Europe.

At 1546 GMT, Al-Aqsa TV carries the following “urgent” screen caption: “The Palestinian survivors from the ship that sank opposite the shores of Libya say more than 200 of them are lost at sea.”

The desperation of Palestinians made stateless by Israel and now blockaded has driven some to desperate and perhaps fatal misadventures
at sea. (Palestinians in Syria are now often being chased out of their camps, too.)

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Club Dead: EU immigration laws turning Mediterranean into Graveyard- Malta PM

Posted on 10/13/2013 by Juan Cole

Malta’s prime minister Joseph Muscat said Saturday that the European Union’s inaction on immigration reform is turning the Mediterranean into a graveyard.

UPI quotes him as saying:

“I don’t know how many more people need to die at sea before something gets done … rules need to change, whether they are tighter or looser is not the issue, the fact is that this thing is broken and it needs to be fixed… As things stand we are building a cemetery within our Mediterranean Sea.”

On October 11, a ship carrying migrants capsized off Malta, spilling 200 persons into the water. Some 33 drowned but the Italian coastguard rescued the others.

Euronews reports

The week before, 319 migrants died when their vessel capsized near Italy.

In the past 15 years, some 14,000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe. That is nearly 1000 a year

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says that 32,000 migrants have reached southern Italy and Malta so far in 2013, and about two thirds of them have applied for asylum.

Many are from Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, though Syrians have joined the risky trek in some numbers recently.

CSM quotes sources saying Europe needs to attack human trafficking networks to stop the carnage.

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Posted in Africa, Uncategorized | 15 Comments

Snowden: Federal Spying makes us Less Secure

Posted on 10/13/2013 by Juan Cole

Supporters of massive National Security Agency domestic and international electronic surveillance of millions of innocent civilians justify it on the grounds that it makes us safer. It does not.

Edward Snowden makes the opposite point, which is that intense government surveillance harms our security. He revealed the secret warrantless monitoring of Americans (which goes beyond metadata — who you call or email, what websites you visit, how often, and where you are in real time– to actually scooping up email texts and telephone voice calls by TEMPORA, a program of GCHQ & the NSA)

Snowden said this week of surveillance techniques:

“They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships and to associate freely…”

Wikileaks put out the video:

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Posted in Domestic Surveillance, Government surveillance, Uncategorized | 12 Comments

US Drone strikes Continue in Pakistan despite PM Nawaz Sharif’s UN Protest (Serle)

Posted on 10/13/2013 by Juan Cole

Jack Serle writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism

The CIA launched four attacks [on Pakistan in September] – the second most attacks in one month so far this year. At least 16 people were killed in these attacks – none of them reportedly a civilian. This was the ninth consecutive month without a confirmed civilian casualty.

Six killed in the first strike of the month on September 6 were named (Ob322). Among them was Mullah Sangeen Zadran – an alleged commander in the Haqqani Network and reportedly the Afghan Taliban’s ‘shadow governor’ in Afghanistan’s Paktika province.

Analyst Saifullah Mahsud said the US had ‘scored really big’ by killing Zadran. Though he was second-in-command to Haqqani patriarch Sirajuddin Haqqani, he ‘was running the show, practically’.

The final two strikes came less than 24 hours apart. The first, on September 29, hit two days after Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif told the UN General Assembly drone strikes violate his country’s borders. He added that the civilian casualties from the strikes are ‘detrimental to our resolve and efforts to eliminate extremism and terrorism from Pakistan’.

The leading political parties demonstrated that resolve on September 9 by endorsing Sharif’s plan to start peace talks with the Pakistan Taliban, the TTP. But a series of bloody attacks in the following weeks may threaten that unanimity. A week after the announcement Major General Sanaullah Khan, Pakistan Army commander in Swat, was killed by a roadside bomb. The TTP claimed responsibility.

On September 22 an horrific suicide bombing killed more than 80 people. They were worshiping in a church in Peshawar when two bombers detonated inside the building. An armed group, Jundallah, claimed the attack as revenge for US drone strikes. The TTP, an alliance of armed groups, disowned the attack three days later. It declared Jundallah was not a member group.

The church attack was a significant blow to Sharif’s hopes for talks with the Taliban. According to US news wire McClatchy, Sharif said: ‘We had proposed peace talks with the Taliban in good faith but . . . because of this attack, the government is unable to move forward with what it planned and envisaged.’

On September 27 an Ansarul Mujahideen attack killed as many as 20 people on a bus in Peshawar. The group emerged earlier this year with the stated aim of avenging civilians killed in drone strikes, The News reported. And Peshawar was hit for a third time on September 29 when a TTP car bomb detonated in one of the city’s markets. The blast killed as many as 42 men women and children, 17 reportedly from one family.

Pakistan Summary:

Total CIA strikes in September: 4
Total killed in strikes in September: 16-24, of whom 0 were reportedly civilians

—

Mirrored from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

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Posted in Drone, Pakistan, Pakistan Taliban | 11 Comments

Ban Coal: Super Cyclone half the Size of India driven by warming Waters

Posted on 10/12/2013 by Juan Cole

India should rethink plans to build more coal plants. The warming waters of the Indian ocean have thrown up a super-cyclone half the size of the subcontinent that is advancing on the country’s east coast with winds up to 167 miles per hour. Already 200,000 people have been evacuated.

While cyclones are not new in this area, massive and monstrous storms like this one, “Phailin’, are rare. They will become more common as the ocean waters warm up, since hurricanes and cyclones are fed by warm water.

India is planning to build more coal plants, which is national suicide. Much of Indian Bengal is barely above sea level and is under threat of being inundated. Global warming will likely cause seas to rise 3-4 feet in this century.

Humankind is performing a very dangerous experiment on its only planetary home, the equivalent of living in a tree house and sawing off the branch holding it up. We are assured by the saw manufacturers that it will float gently down to the forest floor and not crash. We are dumping over 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually into the atmosphere. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that traps the sun’s heat on earth and prevents it radiating back out into space. We are likely to see an average surface temperature rise of 9 degrees F in the next century if we go on like this. The implications are horrible for our grandchildren. But the real nightmare will hit their grandchildren.

Abandoning coal, oil and gas ASAP is the only hope to avert disaster. We could do it if the political will existed. Certainly, all coal plants could be closed down within 10 years, and that with relatively little economic pain. Coal is especially dirty and dangerous.

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If SCOTUS rules against FEC, Each Politician will represent one Billionaire (Moyers)

Posted on 10/12/2013 by Juan Cole

Bill Moyers interviews Heather Gerken on McCutcheon vs The Federal Election Commission, which he calls “Citizens United: the Sequel”

the blurb:

“This week the Supreme Court began its new term with a case that could further upend campaign finance laws by allowing individual donors to give millions of dollars to candidates and political parties.

McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission has been billed as Citizens United 2.0, referring to the 2010 decision that gave corporations, unions and the rich the opportunity to pour vast and often anonymous amounts of cash into outside groups for political campaigns.

This week on Moyers & Company, Bill talks with Yale Law School election and constitutional law professor Heather Gerken, who warns that McCutcheon will further erode campaign finance regulations and allow more cash and influence to slosh around in the system.

McCutcheon challenges aggregate caps on how much individual donors can give to candidates and political parties. The current overall cap stands at $123,200 per donor for a two-year election cycle, but McCutcheon could raise that amount to more than $3.5 million.

Gerken says if the court rules in favor of McCutcheon, one donor could write a check that might cover a politician’s entire election campaign. “We’re going to start to worry about the bad old days when politicians were beholden to an incredibly small group of wealthy donors … Right now when politicians want to raise money they have to talk to at least middle class voters. They have to talk to a pretty big number of voters to raise money for their campaigns.”

Gerken fears that a small, rich group would not only influence the outcome of elections, but policy decisions as well. “It’s not just a seat at the table on election day, it’s a seat at the table for the next four-to-six years when they’re governing,” Gerken says. “Wall Street is going to be controlling the congressional agenda, Main Street is not.”

Interview Producer: Gail Ablow. Associate Producer: Robert Booth. Editor: Donna Marino.
Intro Producer: Lena Shemel. Intro Editor: Sikay Tang.”

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Posted in Uncategorized, US politics | 3 Comments

It’s Getting Hot in Here: Global Warming Turning Point in only 34 Years (Germanos)

Posted on 10/12/2013 by Juan Cole

Andrea Germanos writes at Commondreams.org:


The "years of climate departure" for various cities across the globe. (Image: University of Hawaii/Abby Frazier)If global warming continues its trajectory, the year average temperatures surpass historical norms is just over a few decades away, bringing huge threats to global biodiversity, a new study shows.

Researchers at the University of Hawaii, Manoa created an index based on 39 climate models used in a dozen countries, and compared that data to the extreme records from 1860 through 2005.

“We looked at the minimum and maximum values that occurred in that 150-year window and that’s how we set our bounds of recent historical variability,” explained Ryan Longman, a doctoral student who worked on the analysis.

The researchers were then able to come up with the "year of climate departure," and found that the worldwide average for that date was 2047, meaning that every year after that point will be as warm or warmer. In other words, it's the date "when the old maximum average temperatures become the new minimum temperatures." 

"The results shocked us," Camilo Mora, the study's lead author, said in a statement. "Regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon. Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past."

In 2047, Washington, DC and New York City will see temperatures exceeding historical norms.  In Mexico City, that date could come as soon as 2031.  For Kingston, Jamaica, it's just 10 years away. (You can see more of the findings in this map.)

While the Arctic and Antarctic have been the subject numerous reports on the effects of climate change, the new study shows how small temperature changes in the Tropics could have massive impacts.

The Smithsonian's Surprising Science blog explains:

Because the tropics have less variability in temperature to start with, it takes less of a shift to push temperatures there beyond the norm. On the other hand, temperatures will indeed surge most in the Arctic and Antarctic, but there’s already more natural climate variability at those locales to begin with.

This is a huge concern, because wildlife biodiversity is consistently highest at the tropics, and most of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are located there (tropical rainforests, for instance, are estimated to cover less than 2 percent of the Earth’s surface area yet contain roughly 50 percent of its plant and animal species). If, historically, these ecosystems evolved in the presence of relatively little climatic biodiversity, it follows that they might be less capable of coping with swings in temperature and adapting to survive.

"Extinctions are likely to result," warned Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science's Department of Global Ecology.  Caldeira, who was not involved in the study, added that "Some ecosystems may be able to adapt, but for others, such as coral reefs, complete loss of not only individual species but their entire integrity is likely."

In addition, the study found that oceans already passed their historical extremes in acidification in 2008.

"Scientists have repeatedly warned about climate change and its likely effects on biodiversity and people," said Mora. "Our study shows that such changes are already upon us."

Still, Mora is hopeful that the findings can be a catalyst for change.

"These results should not be reason to give up. Rather, they should encourage us to reduce emissions and slow the rate of climate change," stated Mora. "This can buy time for species, ecosystems, and ourselves to adapt to the coming changes."

The study found that under an "emissions stabilization scenario," the "year of climate departure" could be pushed back—to 2069.

______________________

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Posted in Energy, Environment | 1 Comment

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