Lower House Speaker to Represent HM the King at Inauguration Ceremony of Paraguay’s New President
▻https://www.emouaten.com/Lower-House-Speaker-to-Represent-HM-the-King-at-Inauguration-Ceremony-of-P
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The Archetype of the Warrior – How Films Help Empower Us All
▻https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/the-archetype-of-the-warrior-how-films-help-empower-us-allExploring the Archetype of the Warrior in films, based on Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s King, Warrior, Magician, Lover and Carol S. Pearson’s The Hero Within.
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Saudi Arabia Crucifies Myanmar Man for Theft and Murder - Bloomberg
▻https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-08/saudi-arabia-carries-out-rare-crucifixion-for-murder-theftSaudi Arabia executed and crucified a Myanmar man in the holy city of Mecca on Wednesday in a rare form of punishment reserved for the most egregious crimes.
Elias Abulkalaam Jamaleddeen was accused of breaking into the home of a woman from Myanmar, firing a weapon in it then repeatedly stabbing her, which led to her death, the official Saudi Press Agency reported, citing an Interior Ministry statement. He was also accused of stealing weapons and trying to kill another man whose home he broke into, as well as attempting to rape a woman.
The ruling was supported by the country’s supreme court and endorsed by the king.
#arabie_saoudite #barbarie de nos amis
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Speaker of House of Representatives Represents HM the King in Inauguration Ceremony of New Colombian Pres.
▻https://www.emouaten.com/Speaker-of-House-of-Representatives-Represents-HM-the-King-in-Inauguration...
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How not to run an #ico: a crypto dummy’s Guide
▻https://hackernoon.com/how-not-to-run-an-ico-a-crypto-dummys-guide-310a4bad6fba?source=rss----3So I’ve been doing content and PR in the Wild Wild West of ICOs for quite a while now, and I just gotta let it out. Call it bragging or whatnot, there is this one confession to be made: most of ICO marketing people still got no clue about how crypto industry really works.Respect the crypto meccaCommunity is the king in crypto, and Telegram rules it. The mecca of chat rooms for ICOs is the first channel you wanna be on. But don’t rush, dummy. Before launching a Telegram chat, make sure ‘the final final’ version of your website is up and running smoothly. Otherwise, it either gets overloaded by traffic, or raises a great amount of ambiguity that your community managers who are the first at the fire line probably won’t handle. Have mercy for them: never release a WP, until you’re all set with (...)
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Speaker of House of Representatives to Represent HM the King in Inauguration Ceremony of New Colombian Pres.
▻https://www.emouaten.com/Speaker-of-House-of-Representatives-to-Represent-HM-the-King-in-Inaugurati...
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FM Receives Gambian Peer Bearing Message from Pres. Adama Barrow to HM the King
▻https://www.emouaten.com/FM-Receives-Gambian-Peer-Bearing-Message-from-Pres-Adama-Barrow-to-HM-the-...
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Saudi Arabia Planned to Invade Qatar Last Summer. Rex Tillerson’s Efforts to Stop It May Have Cost Him His Job.
▻https://theintercept.com/2018/08/01/rex-tillerson-qatar-saudi-uaeTHIRTEEN HOURS BEFORE Secretary of State Rex Tillerson learned from the presidential Twitter feed that he was being fired, he did something that President Donald Trump had been unwilling to do. Following a phone call with his British counterpart, Tillerson condemned a deadly nerve agent attack in the U.K., saying that he had “full confidence in the U.K.’s investigation and its assessment that Russia was likely responsible.”
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders had called the attack “reckless, indiscriminate, and irresponsible,” but stopped short of blaming Russia, leading numerous media outlets to speculate that Tillerson was fired for criticizing Russia.
But in the months that followed his departure, press reports strongly suggested that the countries lobbying hardest for Tillerson’s removal were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which were frustrated by Tillerson’s attempts to mediate and end their blockade of Qatar. One report in the New York Times even suggested that the UAE ambassador to Washington knew that Tillerson would be forced out three months before he was fired in March.
The Intercept has learned of a previously unreported episode that stoked the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s anger at Tillerson and that may have played a key role in his removal. In the summer of 2017, several months before the Gulf allies started pushing for his ouster, Tillerson intervened to stop a secret Saudi-led, UAE-backed plan to invade and essentially conquer Qatar, according to one current member of the U.S. intelligence community and two former State Department officials, all of whom declined to be named, citing the sensitivity of the matter.
In the days and weeks after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and closed down their land, sea, and air borders with the country, Tillerson made a series of phone calls urging Saudi officials not to take military action against the country. The flurry of calls in June 2017 has been reported, but State Department and press accounts at the time described them as part of a broad-strokes effort to resolve tensions in the Gulf, not as an attempt by Tillerson to avert a Saudi-led military operation.
In the calls, Tillerson, who dealt extensively with the Qatari government as the CEO of Exxon Mobil, urged Saudi King Salman, then-Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir not to attack Qatar or otherwise escalate hostilities, the sources told The Intercept. Tillerson also encouraged Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to call his counterparts in Saudi Arabia to explain the dangers of such an invasion. Al Udeid Air Base near Doha, Qatar’s capital city, is the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command and home to some 10,000 American troops.
Pressure from Tillerson caused Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country, to back down, concerned that the invasion would damage Saudi Arabia’s long-term relationship with the U.S. But Tillerson’s intervention enraged Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and effective ruler of that country, according to the U.S. intelligence official and a source close to the Emirati royal family, who declined to be identified, citing concerns about his safety.
Later that June, Mohammed bin Salman would be named crown prince, leapfrogging over his cousin to become next in line for the throne after his elderly father. His ascension signaled his growing influence over the kingdom’s affairs.
Qatari intelligence agents working inside Saudi Arabia discovered the plan in the early summer of 2017, according to the U.S. intelligence official. Tillerson acted after the Qatari government notified him and the U.S. embassy in Doha. Several months later, intelligence reporting by the U.S. and U.K. confirmed the existence of the plan.
The plan, which was largely devised by the Saudi and UAE crown princes and was likely some weeks away from being implemented, involved Saudi ground troops crossing the land border into Qatar, and, with military support from the UAE, advancing roughly 70 miles toward Doha. Circumventing the U.S. air base, Saudi forces would then seize the capital.
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Morocco’s King Mohammed sacks minister after urging action on economy
▻https://www.emouaten.com/Morocco-s-King-Mohammed-sacks-minister-after-urging-action-on-economy_a126RABA...
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Morocco’s King Mohammed Sacks Minister After Urging Action on Economy
▻https://www.emouaten.com/Morocco-x27s-King-Mohammed-Sacks-Minister-After-Urging-Action-on-Economy_a
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HM the King’s ‘Effective’ Policy has brought Progress and Prosperity to Moroccan People: Peruvian FM
▻https://www.emouaten.com/HM-the-King-s-Effective-Policy-has-brought-Progress-and-Prosperity-to-Moro...
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Why ’Dancing In The Street’ Gets The People Going : NPR
▻https://www.npr.org/2018/07/28/632661834/american-anthem-dancing-in-the-street-martha-vandellasMark Kurlansky, author of the book Ready For a Brand New Beat: How “Dancing in the Street” Became the Anthem for a Changing America, says that at the time, those campaigning for equal rights were split on strategy — between Dr. King’s nonviolence, and the Black Power movements exemplified by Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture), the Black Panthers and Malcolm X’s Black Muslims. It was on the latter side that “Dancing in the Street” began to show a new potential.
What makes the song an anthem is the ring of authenticity: a cry from the heart of summer in a big city, boiling with energy, turmoil and hope.
“1964 was the year when Malcolm X famously said, ’We will get our rights by any means necessary. It really was the year that the black liberation movement was under a shift from the civil rights movement to the Black Power movement,” he says. “The people in the Black Power movement used this song for rallies because it got people worked up and got them going.”
Mark Kurlansky also notes the litany of cities woven into the song: ’They’re dancing in Chicago, down in New Orleans, up in New York City ... Philadelphia, PA, Baltimore and D.C. now," and ending with, "Can’t forget the Motor City.’ “Every city they list where they were dancing,” he says, “was a city with a militant black neighborhood, and a city where, eventually riots, broke out.”
Martha Reeves wants it to be known, “I had nothing to do with that. I just sang the song and in my heart, I was visualizing people actually dancing in the street. I wasn’t singing, you know, doom and gloom when the sun go down, let’s kill everybody and go steal their property, and break into stores and carry refrigerators home on your back.”
But she also says the song reminds her of the trials she faced as a black teen in Detroit, before the modern civil rights movement began.
“We couldn’t stand on street corners and sing,” she recalls, “because there was a police unit called the Big Four. It was usually four big white men, and they had clubs and guns. And if they caught a group of black people standing on the corner singing doo-wop ... they would jump out of the car and attack you, arrest you, or run to your house, because they didn’t want blacks gathering. So ’Dancing in the Street’ is all of that to me.”
On ’Fanfare For The Common Man,’ An Anthem For The American Century
American Anthem
On ’Fanfare For The Common Man,’ An Anthem For The American CenturyMark Kurlansky believes that “Dancing in the Street” has grown into an American anthem over six decades because its irresistible beat and engaging images let people find their own message in the song. He says that co-writer Mickey Stevenson “saw it as a song about integration: about how young black people and young white people could go out on the street and be together.”
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Saudi King Begins Holiday in Still Unbuilt Mega-City
▻https://www.emouaten.com/Saudi-King-Begins-Holiday-in-Still-Unbuilt-Mega-City_a125881.html
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Fiction generator post-mortem : #mythology generation
▻https://hackernoon.com/fiction-generator-post-mortem-mythology-generation-d7548a08beac?source=rFor JuNoGenMo[1] this year, I wrote a small script to generate work in the style of sumerian mythology.Sumerian mythology, in the form of translated primary sources, has a number of attributes that make it suitable for prose generation. The original sources tend to be extremely repetitive, prone to inserting long lists, and without a strong narrative.Part of this is the use of exhaustive lists of epithets. For instance, here is a portion of an actual myth:Grandiloquent lord of heaven and earth, self-reliant, Father Enki, engendered by a bull, begotten by a wild bull, cherished by Enlil, the Great Mountain, beloved by holy An, king, meš tree planted in the Abzu, rising over all lands; great dragon who stands in Eridug, whose shadow covers heaven and earth, a grove of vines extending over (...)
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Moroccan King Criticizes Social Programs After Protests
▻https://www.emouaten.com/Moroccan-King-Criticizes-Social-Programs-After-Protests_a125879.html
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As U.S. pushes for Mideast peace, Saudi king reassures allies |
Reuters▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-paelestinians-usa-saudi/as-u-s-pushes-for-mideast-peace-saudi-king-reassures-allies-idUSKBN1KJ0F9
RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia has reassured Arab allies it will not endorse any Middle East peace plan that fails to address Jerusalem’s status or refugees’ right of return, easing their concerns that the kingdom might back a nascent U.S. deal which aligns with Israel on key issues.
King Salman’s private guarantees to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his public defense of long-standing Arab positions in recent months have helped reverse perceptions that Saudi Arabia’s stance was changing under his powerful young son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, diplomats and analysts said.
This in turn has called into question whether Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Islam and site of its holiest shrines, can rally Arab support for a new push to end the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, with an eye to closing ranks against mutual enemy Iran.
“In Saudi Arabia, the king is the one who decides on this issue now, not the crown prince,” said a senior Arab diplomat in Riyadh. “The U.S. mistake was they thought one country could pressure the rest to give in, but it’s not about pressure. No Arab leader can concede on Jerusalem or Palestine.”
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Palestinian officials told Reuters in December that Prince Mohammed, known as MbS, had pressed Abbas to support the U.S. plan despite concerns it offered the Palestinians limited self-government inside disconnected patches of the occupied West Bank, with no right of return for refugees displaced by the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967.
Such a plan would diverge from the Arab Peace Initiative drawn up by Saudi Arabia in 2002 in which Arab nations offered Israel normal ties in return for a statehood deal with the Palestinians and full Israeli withdrawal from territory captured in 1967.
Saudi officials have denied any difference between King Salman, who has vocally supported that initiative, and MbS, who has shaken up long-held policies on many issues and told a U.S. magazine in April that Israelis are entitled to live peacefully on their own land - a rare statement for an Arab leader.
The Palestinian ambassador to Riyadh, Basem Al-Agha, told Reuters that King Salman had expressed support for Palestinians in a recent meeting with Abbas, saying: “We will not abandon you ... We accept what you accept and we reject what you reject.”
He said that King Salman naming the 2018 Arab League conference “The Jerusalem Summit” and announcing $200 million in aid for Palestinians were messages that Jerusalem and refugees were back on the table.
FILE PHOTO: Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud attends Riyadh International Humanitarian Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia February 26, 2018. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser
The Saudi authorities did not respond to a request for comment on the current status of diplomatic efforts.RED LINES
Diplomats in the region say Washington’s current thinking, conveyed during a tour last month by top White House officials, does not include Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, a right of return for refugees or a freeze of Israeli settlements in lands claimed by the Palestinians.
Senior adviser Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has not provided concrete details of the U.S. strategy more than 18 months after he was tasked with forging peace.
A diplomat in Riyadh briefed on Kushner’s latest visit to the kingdom said King Salman and MbS had seen him together: “MbS did the talking while the king was in the background.”
Independent analyst Neil Partrick said King Salman appears to have reined in MbS’ “politically reckless approach” because of Jerusalem’s importance to Muslims.
“So MbS won’t oppose Kushner’s ‘deal’, but neither will he, any longer, do much to encourage its one-sided political simplicities,” said Partrick, lead contributor and editor of “Saudi Arabian Foreign Policy: Conflict and Cooperation”.
Kushner and fellow negotiator Jason Greenblatt have not presented a comprehensive proposal but rather disjointed elements, which one diplomat said “crossed too many red lines”.
Instead, they heavily focused on the idea of setting up an economic zone in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula with the adjacent Gaza Strip possibly coming under the control of Cairo, which Arab diplomats described as unacceptable.
In Qatar, Kushner asked Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to pressure the Islamist group Hamas to cede control of Gaza in return for development aid, the diplomats said.
One diplomat briefed on the meeting said Sheikh Tamim just nodded silently. It was unclear if that signaled an agreement or whether Qatar was offered anything in return.
“The problem is there is no cohesive plan presented to all countries,” said the senior Arab diplomat in Riyadh. “Nobody sees what everyone else is being offered.”
Kushner, a 37-year-old real estate developer with little experience of international diplomacy or political negotiation, visited Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Israel in June. He did not meet Abbas, who has refused to see Trump’s team after the U.S. embassy was moved to Jerusalem.
In an interview at the end of his trip, Kushner said Washington would announce its Middle East peace plan soon, and press on with or without Abbas. Yet there has been little to suggest any significant progress towards ending the decades-old conflict, which Trump has said would be “the ultimate deal”.
“There is no new push. Nothing Kushner presented is acceptable to any of the Arab countries,” the Arab diplomat said. “He thinks he is ‘I Dream of Genie’ with a magic wand to make a new solution to the problem.”
A White House official told reporters last week that Trump’s envoys were working on the most detailed set of proposals to date for the long-awaited peace proposal, which would include what the administration is calling a robust economic plan, though there is thus far no release date.
Editing by Giles Elgood
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.-
“In Saudi Arabia, the king is the one who decides on this issue now, not the crown prince,”
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A diplomat in Riyadh briefed on Kushner’s latest visit [in June] to the kingdom said King Salman and MbS had seen him together: “MbS did the talking while the king was in the background.”Euh, question bête : c’est dans la même aile de l’hôpital la gériatrie de king S et la rééducation (il est probablement sorti des soins intensifs, depuis le temps) de Kronprinz bS ?
Ce serait quand même plus commode pour Mr Son in law …
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President Aliyev congratulates King of Morocco
▻https://www.emouaten.com/President-Aliyev-congratulates-King-of-Morocco_a125806.htmlBaku...
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FM Highlights in Washington HM the King’s ‘Leading’ Role in Advancing Religious Freedom
▻https://www.emouaten.com/FM-Highlights-in-Washington-HM-the-King-s-Leading-Role-in-Advancing-Religi...
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Candy Crush Saga revenue spikes 18% in Q2 to over $200m
▻https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-07-23-candy-crush-saga-revenue-for-q2-hits-usd213m-after-18-percKing’s six-year-old game ranked No. 7 for global app spending and No. 6 for games
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Why #cbd Needs to be Part of Your Medical Regimen
▻https://hackernoon.com/why-cbd-needs-to-be-part-of-your-medical-regimen-2ba8c5329b52?source=rssIn a world where prescriptions are king and synthetic pharmaceuticals rule the medical community, finding reliable natural or homeopathic remedies can be a challenge. However for patients who have not found solutions for their conditions from “traditional” treatment, CBD, or Cannabidiol, has been something of a miracle cure. Reacting directly with the serotonin receptors in the body, CBD helps restore these natural neurotransmitters, helping the body to help itself.For individuals who suffer from minor motion sickness, chronic vertigo, and even chemotherapy related nausea, CBD treats these symptoms effectively and safely. One in four cancer patients, traditional treatments to manage nausea and vomiting have little to no effect. In these individuals, doses of CBD have been shown to (...)
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BibliOdyssey : Russian Satirical Journals
▻http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2010/08/russian-satirical-journals.html“On Sunday, January 9th, 1905, Tsar Nicholas II ordered troops to fire on a peaceful procession of workers demonstrating in St. Petersburg, unleashing a storm of strikes, mutinies, violent uprisings, and brutal reprisals that raged across Russia for well over a year.
Known collectively as the Revolution of 1905, these upheavals transformed the political landscape and set the stage for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War that followed. Bloody Sunday also marked an important watershed for Russian graphic artists. With the momentary collapse of censorship, over 300 different satirical magazines were published during the Revolution of 1905, more than had seen the light of day in Russia during the entire nineteenth century. Most of them survived for only a few numbers before the censors caught up. Yet the output was impressive all the same.
Rushing to fill the expressive void, artists and writers captured the events and personalities of the revolution with biting satire and aesthetic sophistication. While styles and subject matter varied, artists often chose to depict nightmarish scenes of bloodshed and repression, drawing on images of the macabre and the mystical that had already been in vogue in Symbolist circles across Europe at the turn of the century.” [source]
“For a few brief months the journals spoke with a great and unprecedented rage that neither arrest nor exile could silence. At first their approach was oblique, their allusions veiled, and they often fell victim to the censor’s pencil. But people had suffered censorship for too long.Satirists constantly expanded their territory and their targets of attack, demolishing one obstacle after another as they went, thriving on censorship.
The workers’ movement grew in boldness, culminating in the birth of the St Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, the people’s government. For fifty days the Tsar and his ministers were confronted by another power, another law. Journalists and printers seized the right to publish without submitting to the censor. The satirical journals then reached their apotheosis, until the revolution died as it had risen, bathed in blood.”
From the introduction to ’Blood and Laughter: Caricatures from the 1905 Revolution’, 1983 by C Porter & D King [Thanks JM!] -
Saudi Arabia Still Detaining Dozens From Corruption Crackdown - WSJ
▻https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-still-detaining-dozens-from-corruption-crackdown-1530734356Those still in custody include some of Saudi Arabia’s richest men, and some who once held powerful government positions until their arrests last November. Among them are Mohammed al-Amoudi, a Saudi-Ethiopian billionaire; Bakr bin Laden, the chairman of the construction giant Saudi Binladin Group; Amr al-Dabbagh, former head of Saudi Arabia’s investment agency; and Adel Fakeih, a former economy minister and once a trusted aide to Prince Mohammed.
Also detained is a senior royal, Prince Turki bin Abdullah, who served as governor of Riyadh and is a son of the previous monarch, King Abdullah.
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Since the Ritz was closed as a detention center and reopened as a hotel in late January, there has been nearly complete official silence on the cases of 56 suspects who didn’t agree to a settlement.
The Saudi government wants to avoid the publicity of the Ritz episode “and will do things more quietly with any new arrests,” a person familiar with the matter said.
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Launching a National Gun-Control Coalition, the Parkland Teens Meet Chicago’s Young Activists | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/launching-a-national-gun-control-coalition-the-parkland-teens-meet-chicag“The Road to Change,” as the tour is called, Parkland students will educate young voters about the March for Our Lives platform and visit politicians who oppose their agenda. The students will also, according to their Web site, “meet fellow survivors and use our voices to amplify theirs.” The Parkland students were leaders, but uncomfortable ones. The kind of attack they experienced, although far too common, is still a rare and extraordinary thing—two-thirds of the firearm deaths in the United States are suicides, and most others are homicides, with only a fraction of those being mass shootings. The students understood that they are examples of America’s gun problem but also outliers. As such, their intention to let other activists speak to their own circumstances was both honest and good. On the other hand, a movement needs leaders. In advertising for the first march of the summer, the former Parkland student Emma González was listed as a headliner, alongside Chance the Rapper, Jennifer Hudson, Gabby Giffords, and will.i.am.
When McDade emerged, he was dressed formally, in a summery pink button-down shirt, black trousers, and velvet loafers. At the March for Our Lives rally this spring, he and another North Lawndale student, Alex King, had walked onstage wearing matching blue sweatshirts and with their fists raised. They wore tape over their mouths, which they then removed to talk about the six hundred and fifty people who died from gun violence in Chicago last year, the seven hundred and seventy-one who died in 2016, and their own experiences of fear and death. It may not have been obvious from their speeches, but McDade and King come from a different tradition of activism than that of the Parkland students, who cleverly troll the National Rifle Association on social media, rattle off statistics, and seek out discussion with politicians. McDade, King, Wright, and their classmates are more likely to quote the speeches of M
artin Luther King, Jr., than a SpongeBob meme or a study from the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Their policy priorities reflect their immediate circumstances—they speak less of gun control than the need for more youth-employment opportunities, mental-health resources, and funding for the public schools they attend. Their experience of gun violence is not of a single traumatic emergency but of a chronic problem that is only one instance of the social inequality around them. McDade told me that, during a school town-hall meeting on violence, when the audience was asked who knew at least thirty people who had been shot, eighty-five per cent of the people in the room had raised their hands. Although they have more reasons to be angry than most people their age, they radiate peace and compassion. As this movement begins to form a national coalition, they are its philosophers, its bodhisattvas.❞
“Democrats can’t listen to the Parkland students supporting the prevention of gun violence but not listen to these children,” a student from the North Side named Juan Reyes told me. “Why does the country only listen when white bodies drop?” one sign read.
A South Side student named Trevon Bosley gave a long list of examples of people who had been killed at home getting ready for school, on a bus coming home from school, in a park after school, playing basketball, celebrating the Fourth of July outside, and, in the case of his own brother, standing on church grounds. “The next time someone else asks you what makes you a possible victim of gun violence in Chicago, you tell them ‘living,’ ” he concluded. Maria Hernandez, an organizer with Chicago Black Lives Matter, criticized local politicians. “These people say they represent us—they don’t talk to us!” she said. Further actions were announced, including a shutdown of the Dan Ryan Expressway, on July 7th, and a hunger strike called Starve for Change.
In interviews leading up to the Peace Rally, Parkland students had insisted on speaking to the media only in tandem with a kid from Chicago. They claimed that the press was biased toward the privileged children of Parkland, paying too much attention to them and to school shootings, instead of focussing on the coalition they were trying to build, in which every gun death was equal in its tragedy and emergency, no matter the cause or context. They were right about the press focus; a local CBS report I watched emphasized the presence of the Parkland students instead of the home-town base, neglecting to mention Saint Sabina, North Lawndale, the local organizers of March for Our Lives, and their respective messages.
“Part of the reason we didn’t speak last night was because we can’t,” Hogg said. “We don’t know what it’s like to go to school and have to worry about being shot at. We have to worry about bullets coming from inside of our school, not outside of it. But across America we have to deal with both issues and reconcile that there’s inner-city gun violence, there’s Native American gun violence in the form of suicides, and there’s suburban gun violence in the form of mass shootings. We have to work together to solve these issues as an American community.” This was a good point, and one that I thought might have been more effective if it had been made in front of national reporters and a large crowd of people from different walks of life. I asked if white people in the suburbs could be trusted to listen to the experiences of black people in the cities, to see them as part of a shared national problem.
“I know they will,” Hogg said. “I have faith that they will.”
“Exactly,” King said. “No matter the color of skin, no matter where you’re from, pain is pain, so I feel like they will listen.”
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BBC - Capital - The cost of changing a country’s name
▻http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180621-the-cost-of-changing-a-countrys-name“African countries, on getting independence, reverted to their ancient names before they were colonised,” His Royal Highness, King Mswati III told those gathered there. At that moment he was still king of Swaziland – but Swaziland was to be no more. “So, from now on the country will be officially known as the Kingdom of eSwatini.”
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“National security” cited as reason Al Jazeera nixed Israel lobby film | The Electronic Intifada
▻https://electronicintifada.net/content/national-security-cited-reason-al-jazeera-nixed-israel-lobby-film/24566Al Jazeera’s investigative documentary into the US Israel lobby was censored by Qatar over “national security” fears, The Electronic Intifada has learned.
These include that broadcast of the film could add to pressure for the US to pull its massive Al Udeid air base out of the Gulf state, or make a Saudi military invasion more likely.
A source has confirmed that broadcast of The Lobby – USA was indefinitely delayed as “a matter of national security” for Qatar. The source has been briefed by a high-level individual in Doha.
One of the Israel lobby groups whose activities are revealed in the film has been mounting a campaign to convince the US to withdraw its military forces from Qatar – which leaders in the emirate would see as a major blow to their security.
The tiny gas-rich monarchy houses and funds satellite channel Al Jazeera.
In April, managers at the channel were forced to deny a claim by a right-wing American Zionist group that the program has been canceled altogether.
In October 2017, the head of Al Jazeera’s investigative unit promised that the film would be aired “very soon.”
Yet eight months later, it has yet to see the light of day.
In March, The Electronic Intifada exclusively published the first concrete details of what is in the film.
The film reportedly identifies a number of lobby groups as working directly with Israel to spy on American citizens using sophisticated data gathering techniques. The documentary is also said to cast light on covert efforts to smear and intimidate Americans seen as too critical of Israel.
Some of the activity revealed in the film could include US organizations acting as front operations for Israel without registering as agents of a foreign state as required by US law.
The latest revelation over the censored film shows how seriously Qatar’s leadership is taking threats of repercussions should it air.
Threats
The Israel lobby groups reported on in the film could be expected to take legal action against Al Jazeera if it is broadcast.However, such threats alone would be unlikely to deter Al Jazeera from broadcasting the film.
The network has a history of vigorously defending its work and it was completely vindicated over complaints about a documentary aired in January 2017 that revealed how Israel lobby groups in Britain collude with the Israeli embassy, and how the embassy interfered in British politics.
Israel’s supporters are also pushing for the US Congress to force the network, which has a large US operation, to register as a “foreign agent” in a similar fashion to Russian channel RT.
But the high-level individual in Doha’s claim that the film is being censored as “a matter of national security” ties the affair to even more serious threats to Qatar and bolsters the conclusion that the censorship is being ordered at the highest level of the state.
A year ago, with the support of US President Donald Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates cut off diplomatic relations with Qatar and imposed a transport and economic blockade on the country.
Saudi rulers and their allies see Qatar as too independent of their influence and too open to relations with their regional rival Iran, and the blockade was an attempt to force it to heel.
The Saudis and Israel accused Qatar of funding “terrorism,” and have taken measures to restrict Al Jazeera or demanded it be shut down altogether over what they perceive as the channel’s anti-Israel and anti-Saudi-monarchy biases.
The blockade and the diplomatic assault sparked existential fears in Qatar that Saudi-led forces could go as far as to invade and install a more pliant regime in Doha.
French newspaper Le Monde reported on Friday that the Saudi king has threatened “military action” against Qatar should it go ahead with a planned purchase of a Russian air defense missile system.
In 2011, Saudi and Emirati forces intervened in Bahrain, another small Gulf nation, at the request of its ruling Khalifa monarchy in order to quell a popular uprising demanding democratic reforms.
For three years, US and British-backed Saudi and Emirati forces have been waging a bloody and devastating war on Yemen to reimpose a Saudi-backed leadership on the country, clear evidence of their unprecedented readiness to directly use military force to impose their will.
And no one in the region will have forgotten how quickly Iraqi forces were able to sweep in and take over Kuwait in August 1990.
Air base
The lesson of the Kuwait invasion for other small Gulf countries is that only the protection of the United States could guarantee their security from bigger neighbors.Qatar implemented that lesson by hosting the largest US military facility in the region, the massive Al Udeid air base.
The Saudi-led bloc has pushed for the US to withdraw from the base and the Saudi foreign minister predicted that should the Americans pull out of Al Udeid, the regime in Doha would fall “in less than a week.”
US warplanes operate from the Al Udeid air base near Doha, Qatar, October 2017. US Air Force Photo
It would be a disaster from the perspective of Doha if the Israel lobby was to put its full weight behind a campaign to pull US forces out of Qatar.Earlier this year, an influential member of Congress and a former US defense secretary publicly discussed moving the US base out of Qatar at a conference hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
FDD is a neoconservative Israel lobby group that happens to be one of the subjects of the undercover Al Jazeera film.
As The Electronic Intifada revealed in March, FDD is one of the groups acting as an agent of the Israeli government even though it is not registered to do so.
In July 2017, FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer testified to Congress that it would be an “insane arrangement” to keep US forces at the Al Udeid air base while Qatar continued to support “terror.”
It will concentrate minds in Doha that FDD was one of the lobby groups most dedicated to destroying the international deal with Iran over its nuclear energy program, a goal effectively achieved when the Trump administration pulled out of it last month.
In a sign of how vulnerable Qatar feels over the issue, Doha has announced plans to upgrade the Al Udeid base in the hope, as the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes put it, “that the strategic military hub will be counted as one of the Pentagon’s permanent overseas installations.”
The final straw?
The cornerstone of Qatar’s effort to win back favor in Washington has been to aggressively compete with its Gulf rivals for the affections of Israel and its Washington lobby.Their belief appears to be that this lobby is so influential that winning its support can result in favorable changes to US policy.
Qatar’s charm offensive has included junkets to Doha for such high-profile Israel supporters as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization of America who publicly took credit for convincing Qatar’s ruler Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to veto broadcast of the documentary.
While an all-out Saudi invasion of Qatar over a film series may seem far fetched, the thinking in Doha seems to be that broadcast of The Lobby – USA could be the final straw that antagonizes Qatar’s enemies and exposes it to further danger – especially over Al Udeid.
With an administration in Washington that is seen as impulsive and unpredictable – it has just launched a trade war against its biggest partners Canada and the European Union – leaders in Doha may see it as foolhardy to take any chances.
If that is the reason Al Jazeera’s film has been suppressed it is not so much a measure of any real and imminent threat Qatar faces, but rather of how successfully the lobby has convinced Arab rulers, including in Doha, that their well-being and longevity rests on cooperating with, or at least not crossing, Israel and its backers.
Asa Winstanley is associate editor and Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.
Qatar Al Jazeera The Lobby—USA Al Udeid air base Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani Donald Trump Jared Kushner Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates Bahrain Iran Kuwait Foundation for the Defense of Democracies Jonathan Schanzer Morton Klein Alan Dershowitz Zionist Organization of America
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