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Ecuador Family Wins Favors After Donations to Democrats
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/world/americas/ecuador-isaias-obama-campaign-robert-menendez-hillary-clinton.html

The Obama administration overturned a ban preventing a wealthy, politically connected Ecuadorean woman from entering the United States after her family gave tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic campaigns, according to finance records and government officials.

The woman, Estefanía Isaías, had been barred from coming to the United States after being caught fraudulently obtaining visas for her maids. But the ban was lifted at the request of the State Department under former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton so that Ms. Isaías could work for an Obama fund-raiser with close ties to the administration.

It was one of several favorable decisions the Obama administration made in recent years involving the Isaías family, which the government of Ecuador accuses of buying protection from Washington and living comfortably in Miami off the profits of a looted bank in Ecuador.

#Etats-Unis #corruption_légale

A Dangerous Rivalry for the Kurds
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/opinion/a-dangerous-rivalry-for-the-kurds.html

... the Kurds’ security is in jeopardy again — this time because of internal divisions. The historic rivalry between the region’s two ruling parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or P.U.K., and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or K.D.P., has revived since August.

(...)

The fall of Sinjar to the Islamic State changed the situation. It was pesh merga units affiliated with the K.D.P. who were forced to withdraw. Seeing this as an opportunity to reverse its decline, the P.U.K. capitalized on the retreat by calling it a capitulation and pointing out that P.U.K.-aligned forces had suffered no such defeats.

Most Kurds in the region have adopted this perspective. The P.U.K. succeeded in undermining the narrative that the K.D.P. ran the more effective organization.

Then followed the siege of the town of Kobani, close to the Turkish border in Syrian Kurdistan. Once again, the P.U.K. saw a chance to seize the initiative, by suggesting that it, rather than the Kurdistan regional government or the K.D.P., was providing weapons and supplies to the Syrian Kurdish fighters, who belong to a party that has historically been at odds with the K.D.P.

These events dramatically raised tensions between the two Iraqi Kurdish parties. Although K.D.P. officials hold key positions in the regional government of Iraqi Kurdistan, including the posts of both prime minister and president, the pesh merga forces of each party have operational autonomy. Despite more than two decades of self-rule and nation-building, there is no unified military command.

The fact that pesh merga units often act according to political objectives determined by party cliques is clearly a danger to the security of the region. As a senior official in Erbil told me last month, “We talk about independence, but talk counts for little when our pesh merga are more loyal to party than nation.”.