Yemen War Archives and Reports
The Saudi kingdom and its coalition declared a war against Yemen on March 26, 2015. The coalition members included: Saudi, UAE, USA, UK, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Senegal and Sudan. Other countries provided their support to the coalition through the sale of weapons, logistical and/or intelligence services. These include: France, Malaysia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, Spain, Germany, Canada and Australia.
The Opioid Epidemic is Growing More Deadly, New Data Suggests | Chasing Heroin | FRONTLINE | PBS
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-opioid-epidemic-is-growing-more-deadly-new-data-suggests
Numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics reveal the worsening toll of the opioid epidemic in communities across the country. There were around 20 overdose deaths for every 100,000 people during the third quarter of 2016, according to the data, compared to 16.7 deaths during the same period a year earlier. More than half of all overdose deaths involve an opioid.
Overdose deaths also rose during the first half of 2016, according to government estimates. Figures for the final three months of the year are not yet available, but if trends persist, the total number of drug related deaths are on pace to eclipse the record 52,404 experienced in 2015.
The Bizarre Story Behind the FBI’s Fake Documentary About the Bundy Family
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/05/16/the-bizarre-story-behind-the-fbis-fake-documentary-about-the-bundy-fam
2017-05-16T16:00:22+00:00
Ryan Bundy seemed uneasy as he settled into a white leather chair in a private suite at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. As the eldest son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who had become a national figure for his armed standoff with U.S. government agents in April 2014, Ryan had quite a story to tell.
Eight months had passed since Cliven and hundreds of supporters, including heavily armed militia members, faced off against the federal government in a sandy wash under a highway overpass in the Mojave Desert. Now, here in the comforts of the Bellagio, six documentary filmmakers trained bright lights and high-definition cameras on Ryan. They wanted to ask about the standoff. Wearing a cowboy hat, Ryan fidgeted before the cameras. He had told this story before; that wasn’t the reason for his nerves. After all, the Bundy confrontation made national news after armed agents with the Bureau of Land Management seized the Bundy family’s cattle following a trespassing dispute and the accumulation of more than $1 million in unpaid grazing fees. But the Bundys, aided by their armed supporters, beat back the government, forcing agents to release the cattle and retreat.
Images of armed Bundy supporters with high-powered rifles taking on outgunned BLM agents circulated widely on social media. As a result, the Bundys became a household name, lionized by the right as champions of individual liberty and vilified by the left as anti-government extremists.
But something seemed off to Ryan about this interview in the Bellagio. While the family’s newfound fame had attracted fresh supporters to their cause, it had also inspired suspicion. With a federal investigation looming, who among these new faces could they really trust?
Among the more recent figures in the Bundy orbit was this mysterious documentary film crew. The director, Charles Johnson, was middle-aged, with a silver goatee, slicked-back hair, and a thick southern accent. His assistant, who identified herself as Anna, was tall and blond. A website for their company, Longbow Productions, listed an address in Nashville, Tennessee, but the Bundys could find no previous examples of their work.
American Patriot : Inside the Armed Uprising Against the Federal Government | FRONTLINE | PBS
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/american-patriot-inside-the-armed-uprising-against-the-federal-government
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZzgc5mAE6o
A Class Divided | FRONTLINE | PBS
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/class-divided
The day after Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, a teacher in a small town in Iowa tried a daring classroom experiment. She decided to treat children with blue eyes as superior to children with brown eyes. FRONTLINE explores what those children learned about discrimination and how it still affects them today.
The Secret History of ISIS
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-secret-history-of-isis
The inside story of the the radicals who became the leaders of ISIS, the many missed warning signs and the U.S. failures to stop the terror group’s brutal rise.
(Pas encore vu.)
The Secret Behind the #Yemen War
▻https://consortiumnews.com/2016/05/07/the-secret-behind-the-yemen-war
A recent PBS report about the war in Yemen exposed the secret connection between the U.S.-Saudi alliance and Al Qaeda, a reality that also underscores the jihadist violence in Syria, writes Daniel Lazare.
[...]
PBS Frontline’s “Yemen Under Siege,” which aired on May 3, makes for powerful viewing. A first-hand look at the devastation that the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and other powers have visited on one of the poorest countries in the Middle East, the 35-minute documentary shows families struggling amid the rubble, children dying from mortar attacks, surgeons operating without anesthesia, and other such horrors.
But the most important revelation comes almost as an aside. Interviewing pro-Saudi fighters near the central Yemeni city of Taiz, journalist Safa Al Ahmad suddenly hears shouting. “What’s wrong?” she asks. “Who are they? They don’t want me to be here?”
A soldier explains that the people making a ruckus are Ansar al Sharia, i.e. fighters for shari‘a. “And he just says quite casually, these are #Al_Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” Al Ahmad says later of the local Al Qaeda affiliate often referred to as #AQAP. “And he referred to them by their local name, which is Ansar al Sharia. He revealed what is considered an open secret in the front lines, that they [AQAP] had been fighting with all the different factions, the [pro-Saudi] Yemeni factions and the [U.S.-Saudi] coalition against the Houthis.”
[...]
“But you fight together at the front line?” Al Ahmad asks.
“For sure. At the front, we are together.”
With that, the documentary lifts the lid on perhaps the single most incoherent aspect of U.S. policy in the Middle East. On one hand, the United States claims to be fighting Al Qaeda, and indeed AQAP, regarded as one of Al Qaeda’s most aggressive franchises, has been a prime target of U.S. drone strikes ever since the war on terror began.
At the same time, though, the U.S. provides military backing for forces led by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and other Persian Gulf petro-states that welcome AQAP fighters into their ranks as full and active participants in the anti-Houthi crusade.
The U.S. opposes Al Qaeda, on one hand, but supports elements that ally with it, on the other.
La partie concernée débute à la neuvième minute.
►http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/yemen-under-siege
In Mapping the Holocaust, a Horrifying Lesson in Nazi “Paths to Persecution”
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/in-mapping-the-holocaust-a-horrifying-lesson-in-nazi-paths-to-persecution
“The map below is just a sliver of the reach of Germany’s network of enslavement under the rule of Adolf Hitler from 1933 to 1945. Based on the work of historians at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it shows the locations (in grey) of 1,096 out of 1,150 ghettos they’ve identified in Nazi-occupied Eastern-Europe. The locations in black represent 868 of the 1,094 concentration camps they’ve documented. (Locations in yellow were filmed in Memory of the Camps.)
The true figure of sites is well above the number pictured above. When historians at the Holocaust museum began their research, they suspected they’d uncover somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 sites, said Geoffrey Megargee, the project director and general editor. What they soon found is that the actual number is closer to 42,500. But even that, says Megargee, “is a conservative figure.”
The grim census of enslavement, torture and death is part of a multivolume encyclopedia being published by the Holocaust museum. The above figures from the first two volumes have already been released. Six more are planned by 2025.
The early work, Megargee told FRONTLINE, has helped foster a better understanding of what he described as “paths to persecution” during Nazi Germany.
“People tend to think of camps in isolation — concentration camps or ghettos or POW camps or that sort of thing, but there were lots of ways in which prisoners went from one camp to another,” he said.
Equally important, says Megargee, is that given the sheer size of the numbers, it is nearly impossible to believe that ordinary Germans were unaware of Hitler’s system. As he explained:
After the war you had a lot of Germans who tried to say, “Oh we didn’t know anything about these camps,” and they may have been talking about the concentration camps, the extermination camps, that sort of thing but frankly the concentration camps were publicized. The regime wanted people to know about those. It wanted people to know that if they misbehaved, that’s where they were going to go. So these were no secrets, and beyond that, when you have tens of thousands of camps and millions of forced laborers and POWs and concentration camp prisoners everywhere doing every kind of work imaginable, it’s pretty hard to say that you’re not aware of this system.”
FRONTLINE, Brown Institute to Release “On the Brink of Famine,” a Virtual Reality Documentary Filmed in South Sudan, on Facebook 360 | FRONTLINE | PBS
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/announcement/frontline-brown-institute-to-release-on-the-brink-of-famine-a-virtual-reality-d
Film : ▻https://www.facebook.com/frontline
The PBS investigative series FRONTLINE and the Brown Institute’s exploration of virtual reality (VR) in journalism continues today with the release of the first in a new series of 360-degree Facebook videos. Filmed on the ground in war-torn South Sudan, the series — On the Brink of Famine – transports viewers inside a hunger crisis that few people in the Western world are aware of.
On the Brink of Famine is supported by FRONTLINE and by a “Magic Grant” from The David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation, a collaboration between Columbia and Stanford Universities. The Ford Foundation also supported the development of the project via its funding for FRONTLINE’s Enterprise Journalism Desk, and via a Ford Foundation JustFilms Fellowship at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP.
The project is an immersive, up-close look at life in South Sudan, where more than 2.8 million people are going hungry and at least 40,000 are near starvation as a result of a devastating civil war. The human catastrophe captured by the filmmakers is made even more urgent by a recent report from the United Nations warning that the people of South Sudan are facing unprecedented levels of food insecurity, with the numbers expected to peak this summer.
FRONTLINE, U.S. television’s longest running investigative documentary series, explores the issues of our times through powerful storytelling. FRONTLINE has won every major journalism and broadcasting award, including 75 Emmy Awards and 17 Peabody Awards. Visit pbs.org/frontline and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr and Google+ to learn more. FRONTLINE is produced by WGBH Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Park Foundation, the John and Helen Glessner Family Trust, the Ford Foundation, the Wyncote Foundation, and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation.
How the Heroin Epidemic Differs in Communities of Color | Chasing Heroin | FRONTLINE | PBS
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-the-heroin-epidemic-differs-in-communities-of-color
http://i2.wp.com/www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Arrest_4.jpg?resize=1200%2C630 
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-XKR5jlI7tts/VuBV3D1JWnI/AAAAAAAAAjQ/mA8r3HMk3tw/w426-h304/HeroinRace.gif ost of the media attention in the current nationwide heroin epidemic has focused on the uptick in overdose deaths among suburban, white, middle-class users — many of whom turned to the drug after experimenting with prescription painkillers.
And it’s among whites where the most dramatic effect has been seen — a rise of more than 260 percent in the last five years, according to the Centers for Disease Control."
But the epidemic has also been seeping into communities of color, where heroin overdose death rates have more than doubled among African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans, but gone largely overlooked by the media.
People develop addictions for a variety of reasons, which makes it difficult to gather concrete data on what’s happening in each community, said Dr. Wilson Compton, deputy director at the National Institute of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse. “To a certain extent, these are hidden behaviors, and we only notice people at the end of their lives sometimes,” he said. “So we don’t always know all of the pathways that lead to this.”
Are State-Sanctioned Heroin Shooting Galleries a Good Idea?
▻http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2016/03/11/are-state-sanctioned-heroin-shooting-galleries-a-good-idea
Studies of safe injection sites, largely in Canada and Australia, have found that they help reduce overdoses and don’t increase drug use or trafficking in the communities where they’re located.
Sites in the United States could violate the federal Controlled Substances Act, which prohibits possession of drugs such as heroin or cocaine or operating a place where people use them. But Congress could change the law or the U.S. Justice Department could make exceptions for the sites, said Leo Beletsky, a law and health sciences professor at Northeastern University.
Most state laws mirror the federal act and would also need to be amended to allow injection sites to operate legally, he said. Though if states begin legalizing them, the federal government could choose not to prosecute people who run and use them — just as the Justice Department has decided not to enforce federal laws for possessing, processing or selling marijuana in states that have legalized it.
When Heroin Hits the White Suburbs | The Marshall Project
▻https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/08/12/when-heroin-hits-the-white-suburbs
▻https://d1n0c1ufntxbvh.cloudfront.net/photo/88e254e1/10841/1200x
Clearly policymakers know more today than they did then about the societal costs of waging a war on drugs, and dispatching low-level, nonviolent drug offenders to prison for decades. The contemporary criminal-justice system places more emphasis on treatment and reform than it did, say, during the Reagan years or when New York’s draconian “Rockefeller laws” were passed in the 1970s. But there may be another explanation for the less hysterical reaction, one that few policymakers have been willing to acknowledge: race.
Some experts and researchers see in the different responses to these drug epidemics further proof of America’s racial divide. Are policymakers going easier today on heroin users (white and often affluent) than their elected predecessors did a generation ago when confronted with crack addicts who were largely black, disenfranchised, and economically bereft? Can we explain the disparate response to the “black” heroin epidemic of the 1960s, in which its use and violent crime were commingled in the public consciousness, and the white heroin “epidemic” today, in which its use is considered a disease to be treated or cured, without using race as part of our explanation?
Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a group that targets racial disparities in the criminal-justice system, has been following this issue closely for decades. He agrees there is strong historical precedent for comparing the crises through the prism of race:
The response to the rise in heroin use follows patterns we’ve seen over decades of drug scares. When the perception of the user population is primarily people of color, then the response is to demonize and punish. When it’s white, then we search for answers. Think of the difference between marijuana attitudes in the “reefer madness” days of the 1930s when the drug was perceived to be used in the “racy” parts of town, and then the 1960s (white) college town explosion in use.
A Journey « Inside Assad’s Syria » | FRONTLINE
▻http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/a-journey-inside-assads-syria
Important ?
Un voyage dans la Syrie de Bachar, un docu par un journaliste US qui se rend en Syrie le truc que vous ne verrez pas sur Arte avant quelque temps (quand Fabius aura fini son chapeau, peut-être...).
The film tells the story of our three weeks there this past summer. I don’t want to spoil here what were for us many surprising encounters and events … from the disturbing to the absurd. But, I can say that I was able to walk the streets and talk to whomever I wished. And I was able to visit officials if I so chose. Some special requests were denied but other serendipitous encounters made up for what we didn’t achieve.
And for the most part, people were open about their hopes and fears. As to how the war began, they had a consistent narrative: That the protesters that took to the streets in 2011 had legitimate demands, but that the demonstrations were quickly hijacked by foreign backed jihadists. They reject the idea that Western-backed rebels are “moderates” as they are often termed in the US. There is a tendency to conflate all armed groups opposing the regime as sectarian extremists.
At the same time, not everyone loves Assad. But I had to learn how to listen for that. Their way of expressing this was never to criticize the president directly — that is a line no one dares cross. Instead, people would simply stress their love of Syria. Others might talk about supporting the government, but that “was not because we love the regime” as one man put it, but because “we don’t want the collapse of the state.” They saw what happened in Iraq after Saddam, and in Libya after Qaddafi. They watched as state infrastructure — schools, hospitals, police, water, electricity — crumbled with the fall of central government, and they don’t want to the same to happen to them.