city:london

  • Pan Am Flight 103 : Robert Mueller’s 30-Year Search for Justice | WIRED
    https://www.wired.com/story/robert-muellers-search-for-justice-for-pan-am-103

    Cet article décrit le rôle de Robert Mueller dans l’enquête historique qui a permis de dissimuler ou de justifier la plupart des batailles de la guerre non déclarée des États Unis contre l’OLP et les pays arabes qui soutenaient la lutte pour un état palestinien.

    Aux États-Unis, en Allemagne et en France le grand public ignore les actes de guerre commis par les États Unis dans cette guerre. Vu dans ce contexte on ne peut que classer le récit de cet article dans la catégorie idéologie et propagande même si les intentions et faits qu’on y apprend sont bien documentés et plausibles.

    Cette perspective transforme le contenu de cet article d’une variation sur un thème connu dans un reportage sur l’état d’âme des dirigeants étatsuniens moins fanatiques que l’équipe du président actuel.

    THIRTY YEARS AGO last Friday, on the darkest day of the year, 31,000 feet above one of the most remote parts of Europe, America suffered its first major terror attack.

    TEN YEARS AGO last Friday, then FBI director Robert Mueller bundled himself in his tan trench coat against the cold December air in Washington, his scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. Sitting on a small stage at Arlington National Cemetery, he scanned the faces arrayed before him—the victims he’d come to know over years, relatives and friends of husbands and wives who would never grow old, college students who would never graduate, business travelers and flight attendants who would never come home.

    Burned into Mueller’s memory were the small items those victims had left behind, items that he’d seen on the shelves of a small wooden warehouse outside Lockerbie, Scotland, a visit he would never forget: A teenager’s single white sneaker, an unworn Syracuse University sweatshirt, the wrapped Christmas gifts that would never be opened, a lonely teddy bear.

    A decade before the attacks of 9/11—attacks that came during Mueller’s second week as FBI director, and that awoke the rest of America to the threats of terrorism—the bombing of Pan Am 103 had impressed upon Mueller a new global threat.

    It had taught him the complexity of responding to international terror attacks, how unprepared the government was to respond to the needs of victims’ families, and how on the global stage justice would always be intertwined with geopolitics. In the intervening years, he had never lost sight of the Lockerbie bombing—known to the FBI by the codename Scotbom—and he had watched the orphaned children from the bombing grow up over the years.

    Nearby in the cemetery stood a memorial cairn made of pink sandstone—a single brick representing each of the victims, the stone mined from a Scottish quarry that the doomed flight passed over just seconds before the bomb ripped its baggage hold apart. The crowd that day had gathered near the cairn in the cold to mark the 20th anniversary of the bombing.

    For a man with an affinity for speaking in prose, not poetry, a man whose staff was accustomed to orders given in crisp sentences as if they were Marines on the battlefield or under cross-examination from a prosecutor in a courtroom, Mueller’s remarks that day soared in a way unlike almost any other speech he’d deliver.

    “There are those who say that time heals all wounds. But you know that not to be true. At its best, time may dull the deepest wounds; it cannot make them disappear,” Mueller told the assembled mourners. “Yet out of the darkness of this day comes a ray of light. The light of unity, of friendship, and of comfort from those who once were strangers and who are now bonded together by a terrible moment in time. The light of shared memories that bring smiles instead of sadness. And the light of hope for better days to come.”

    He talked of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and of inspiration drawn from Lockerbie’s town crest, with its simple motto, “Forward.” He spoke of what was then a two-decade-long quest for justice, of how on windswept Scottish mores and frigid lochs a generation of FBI agents, investigators, and prosecutors had redoubled their dedication to fighting terrorism.

    Mueller closed with a promise: “Today, as we stand here together on this, the darkest of days, we renew that bond. We remember the light these individuals brought to each of you here today. We renew our efforts to bring justice down on those who seek to harm us. We renew our efforts to keep our people safe, and to rid the world of terrorism. We will continue to move forward. But we will never forget.”

    Hand bells tolled for each of the victims as their names were read aloud, 270 names, 270 sets of bells.

    The investigation, though, was not yet closed. Mueller, although he didn’t know it then, wasn’t done with Pan Am 103. Just months after that speech, the case would test his innate sense of justice and morality in a way that few other cases in his career ever have.

    ROBERT S. MUELLER III had returned from a combat tour in Vietnam in the late 1960s and eventually headed to law school at the University of Virginia, part of a path that he hoped would lead him to being an FBI agent. Unable after graduation to get a job in government, he entered private practice in San Francisco, where he found he loved being a lawyer—just not a defense attorney.

    Then—as his wife Ann, a teacher, recounted to me years ago—one morning at their small home, while the two of them made the bed, Mueller complained, “Don’t I deserve to be doing something that makes me happy?” He finally landed a job as an assistant US attorney in San Francisco and stood, for the first time, in court and announced, “Good morning your Honor, I am Robert Mueller appearing on behalf of the United States of America.” It is a moment that young prosecutors often practice beforehand, and for Mueller those words carried enormous weight. He had found the thing that made him happy.

    His family remembers that time in San Francisco as some of their happiest years; the Muellers’ two daughters were young, they loved the Bay Area—and have returned there on annual vacations almost every year since relocating to the East Coast—and Mueller found himself at home as a prosecutor.

    On Friday nights, their routine was that Ann and the two girls would pick Mueller up at Harrington’s Bar & Grill, the city’s oldest Irish pub, not far from the Ferry Building in the Financial District, where he hung out each week with a group of prosecutors, defense attorneys, cops, and agents. (One Christmas, his daughter Cynthia gave him a model of the bar made out of Popsicle sticks.) He balanced that family time against weekends and trainings with the Marines Corps Reserves, where he served for more than a decade, until 1980, eventually rising to be a captain.

    Over the next 15 years, he rose through the ranks of the San Francisco US attorney’s office—an office he would return to lead during the Clinton administration—and then decamped to Massachusetts to work for US attorney William Weld in the 1980s. There, too, he shined and eventually became acting US attorney when Weld departed at the end of the Reagan administration. “You cannot get the words straight arrow out of your head,” Weld told me, speaking of Mueller a decade ago. “The agencies loved him because he knew his stuff. He didn’t try to be elegant or fancy, he just put the cards on the table.”

    In 1989, an old high school classmate, Robert Ross, who was chief of staff to then attorney general Richard Thornburgh, asked Mueller to come down to Washington to help advise Thornburgh. The offer intrigued Mueller. Ann protested the move—their younger daughter Melissa wanted to finish high school in Massachusetts. Ann told her husband, “We can’t possibly do this.” He replied, his eyes twinkling, “You’re right, it’s a terrible time. Well, why don’t we just go down and look at a few houses?” As she told me, “When he wants to do something, he just revisits it again and again.”

    For his first two years at so-called Main Justice in Washington, working under President George H.W. Bush, the family commuted back and forth from Boston to Washington, alternating weekends in each city, to allow Melissa to finish school.

    Washington gave Mueller his first exposure to national politics and cases with geopolitical implications; in September 1990, President Bush nominated him to be assistant attorney general, overseeing the Justice Department’s entire criminal division, which at that time handled all the nation’s terrorism cases as well. Mueller would oversee the prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, mob boss John Gotti, and the controversial investigation into a vast money laundering scheme run through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals

    None of his cases in Washington, though, would affect him as much as the bombing of Pan Am 103.

    THE TIME ON the clocks in Lockerbie, Scotland, read 7:04 pm, on December 21, 1988, when the first emergency call came into the local fire brigade, reporting what sounded like a massive boiler explosion. It was technically early evening, but it had been dark for hours already; that far north, on the shortest day of the year, daylight barely stretched to eight hours.

    Soon it became clear something much worse than a boiler explosion had unfolded: Fiery debris pounded the landscape, plunging from the sky and killing 11 Lockerbie residents. As Mike Carnahan told a local TV reporter, “The whole sky was lit up with flames. It was actually raining, liquid fire. You could see several houses on the skyline with the roofs totally off and all you could see was flaming timbers.”

    At 8:45 pm, a farmer found in his field the cockpit of Pan Am 103, a Boeing 747 known as Clipper Maid of the Seas, lying on its side, 15 of its crew dead inside, just some of the 259 passengers and crew killed when a bomb had exploded inside the plane’s cargo hold. The scheduled London to New York flight never even made it out of the UK.

    It had taken just three seconds for the plane to disintegrate in the air, though the wreckage took three long minutes to fall the five miles from the sky to the earth; court testimony later would examine how passengers had still been alive as they fell. Nearly 200 of the passengers were American, including 35 students from Syracuse University returning home from a semester abroad. The attack horrified America, which until then had seen terror touch its shores only occasionally as a hijacking went awry; while the US had weathered the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, attacks almost never targeted civilians.

    The Pan Am 103 bombing seemed squarely aimed at the US, hitting one of its most iconic brands. Pan Am then represented America’s global reach in a way few companies did; the world’s most powerful airline shuttled 19 million passengers a year to more than 160 countries and had ferried the Beatles to their US tour and James Bond around the globe on his cinematic missions. In a moment of hubris a generation before Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, the airline had even opened a “waiting list” for the first tourists to travel to outer space. Its New York headquarters, the Pan Am building, was the world’s largest commercial building and its terminal at JFK Airport the biggest in the world.

    The investigation into the bombing of Pan Am 103 began immediately, as police and investigators streamed north from London by the hundreds; chief constable John Boyd, the head of the local police, arrived at the Lockerbie police station by 8:15 pm, and within an hour the first victim had been brought in: A farmer arrived in town with the body of a baby girl who had fallen from the sky. He’d carefully placed her in the front seat of his pickup truck.

    An FBI agent posted in London had raced north too, with the US ambassador, aboard a special US Air Force flight, and at 2 am, when Boyd convened his first senior leadership meeting, he announced, “The FBI is here, and they are fully operational.” By that point, FBI explosives experts were already en route to Scotland aboard an FAA plane; agents would install special secure communications equipment in Lockerbie and remain on site for months.

    Although it quickly became clear that a bomb had targeted Pan Am 103—wreckage showed signs of an explosion and tested positive for PETN and RDX, two key ingredients of the explosive Semtex—the investigation proceeded with frustrating slowness. Pan Am’s records were incomplete, and it took days to even determine the full list of passengers. At the same time, it was the largest crime scene ever investigated—a fact that remains true today.

    Investigators walked 845 square miles, an area 12 times the size of Washington, DC, and searched so thoroughly that they recovered more than 70 packages of airline crackers and ultimately could reconstruct about 85 percent of the fuselage. (Today, the wreckage remains in an English scrapyard.) Constable Boyd, at his first press conference, told the media, “This is a mammoth inquiry.”

    On Christmas Eve, a searcher found a piece of a luggage pallet with signs of obvious scorching, which would indicate the bomb had been in the luggage compartment below the passenger cabin. The evidence was rushed to a special British military lab—one originally created to investigate the Guy Fawkes’ Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and kill King James I in 1605.

    When the explosive tests came back a day later, the British government called the State Department’s ambassador-at-large for combating terrorism, L. Paul Bremer III (who would go on to be President George W. Bush’s viceroy in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion of Iraq), and officially delivered the news that everyone had anticipated: Pan Am 103 had been downed by a bomb.

    Meanwhile, FBI agents fanned out across the country. In New York, special agent Neil Herman—who would later lead the FBI’s counterterrorism office in New York in the run up to 9/11—was tasked with interviewing some of the victims’ families; many of the Syracuse students on board had been from the New York region. One of the mothers he interviewed hadn’t heard from the government in the 10 days since the attack. “It really struck me how ill-equipped we were to deal with this,” Herman told me, years later. “Multiply her by 270 victims and families.” The bombing underscored that the FBI and the US government had a lot to learn in responding and aiding victims in a terror attack.

    INVESTIGATORS MOVED TOWARD piecing together how a bomb could have been placed on board; years before the 9/11 attack, they discounted the idea of a suicide bomber aboard—there had never been a suicide attack on civil aviation at that point—and so focused on one of two theories: The possibility of a “mule,” an innocent passenger duped into carrying a bomb aboard, or an “inside man,” a trusted airport or airline employee who had smuggled the fatal cargo aboard. The initial suspect list stretched to 1,200 names.

    Yet even reconstructing what was on board took an eternity: Evidence pointed to a Japanese manufactured Toshiba cassette recorder as the likely delivery device for the bomb, and then, by the end of January, investigators located pieces of the suitcase that had held the bomb. After determining that it was a Samsonite bag, police and the FBI flew to the company’s headquarters in the United States and narrowed the search further: The bag, they found, was a System 4 Silhouette 4000 model, color “antique-copper,” a case and color made for only three years, 1985 to 1988, and sold only in the Middle East. There were a total of 3,500 such suitcases in circulation.

    By late spring, investigators had identified 14 pieces of luggage inside the target cargo container, known as AVE4041; each bore tell-tale signs of the explosion. Through careful retracing of how luggage moved through the London airport, investigators determined that the bags on the container’s bottom row came from passengers transferring in London. The bags on the second and third row of AVE4041 had been the last bags loaded onto the leg of the flight that began in Frankfurt, before the plane took off for London. None of the baggage had been X-rayed or matched with passengers on board.

    The British lab traced clothing fragments from the wreckage that bore signs of the explosion and thus likely originated in the bomb-carrying suitcase. It was an odd mix: Two herring-bone skirts, men’s pajamas, tartan trousers, and so on. The most promising fragment was a blue infant’s onesie that, after fiber analysis, was conclusively determined to have been inside the explosive case, and had a label saying “Malta Trading Company.” In March, two detectives took off for Malta, where the manufacturer told them that 500 such articles of clothing had been made and most sent to Ireland, while the rest went locally to Maltese outlets and others to continental Europe.

    As they dug deeper, they focused on bag B8849, which appeared to have come off Air Malta Flight 180—Malta to Frankfurt—on December 21, even though there was no record of one of that flight’s 47 passengers transferring to Pan Am 103.

    Investigators located the store in Malta where the suspect clothing had been sold; the British inspector later recorded in his statement, “[Store owner] Anthony Gauci interjected and stated that he could recall selling a pair of the checked trousers, size 34, and three pairs of the pajamas to a male person.” The investigators snapped to attention—after nine months did they finally have a suspect in their sights? “[Gauci] informed me that the man had also purchased the following items: one imitation Harris Tweed jacket; one woolen cardigan; one black umbrella; one blue colored ‘Baby Gro’ with a motif described by the witness as a ‘sheep’s face’ on the front; and one pair of gents’ brown herring-bone material trousers, size 36.”

    Game, set, match. Gauci had perfectly described the clothing fragments found by RARDE technicians to contain traces of explosive. The purchase, Gauci went on to explain, stood out in his mind because the customer—whom Gauci tellingly identified as speaking the “Libyan language”—had entered the store on November 23, 1988, and gathered items without seeming to care about the size, gender, or color of any of it.

    As the investigation painstakingly proceeded into 1989 and 1990, Robert Mueller arrived at Main Justice; the final objects of the Lockerbie search wouldn’t be found until the spring of 1990, just months before Mueller took over as assistant attorney general of the criminal division in September.

    The Justice Department that year was undergoing a series of leadership changes; the deputy attorney general, William Barr, became acting attorney general midyear as Richard Thornburgh stepped down to run for Senate back in his native Pennsylvania. President Bush then nominated Barr to take over as attorney general officially. (Earlier this month Barr was nominated by President Trump to become attorney general once again.)

    The bombing soon became one of the top cases on Mueller’s desk. He met regularly with Richard Marquise, the FBI special agent heading Scotbom. For Mueller, the case became personal; he met with victims’ families and toured the Lockerbie crash site and the investigation’s headquarters. He traveled repeatedly to the United Kingdom for meetings and walked the fields of Lockerbie himself. “The Scots just did a phenomenal job with the crime scene,” he told me, years ago.

    Mueller pushed the investigators forward constantly, getting involved in the investigation at a level that a high-ranking Justice Department official almost never does. Marquise turned to him in one meeting, after yet another set of directions, and sighed, “Geez, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you want to be FBI director.”

    The investigation gradually, carefully, zeroed in on Libya. Agents traced a circuit board used in the bomb to a similar device seized in Africa a couple of years earlier used by Libyan intelligence. An FBI-created database of Maltese immigration records even showed that a man using the same alias as one of those Libyan intelligence officers had departed from Malta on October 19, 1988—just two months before the bombing.

    The circuit board also helped makes sense of an important aspect of the bombing: It controlled a timer, meaning that the bomb was not set off by a barometric trigger that registers altitude. This, in turn, explained why the explosive baggage had lain peacefully in the jet’s hold as it took off and landed repeatedly.

    Tiny letters on the suspect timer said “MEBO.” What was MEBO? In the days before Google, searching for something called “Mebo” required going country to country, company to company. There were no shortcuts. The FBI, MI5, and CIA were, after months of work, able to trace MEBO back to a Swiss company, Meister et Bollier, adding a fifth country to the ever-expanding investigative circle.

    From Meister et Bollier, they learned that the company had provided 20 prototype timers to the Libyan government and the company helped ID their contact as a Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who looked like the sketch of the Maltese clothing shopper. Then, when the FBI looked at its database of Maltese immigration records, they found that Al Megrahi had been present in Malta the day the clothing was purchased.

    Marquise sat down with Robert Mueller and the rest of the prosecutorial team and laid out the latest evidence. Mueller’s orders were clear—he wanted specific suspects and he wanted to bring charges. As he said, “Proceed toward indictment.” Let’s get this case moving.

    IN NOVEMBER 1990, Marquise was placed in charge of all aspects of the investigation and assigned on special duty to the Washington Field Office and moved to a new Scotbom task force. The field offce was located far from the Hoover building, in a run-down neighborhood known by the thoroughly unromantic moniker of Buzzard Point.

    The Scotbom task force had been allotted three tiny windowless rooms with dark wood paneling, which were soon covered floor-to-ceiling with 747 diagrams, crime scene photographs, maps, and other clues. By the door of the office, the team kept two photographs to remind themselves of the stakes: One, a tiny baby shoe recovered from the fields of Lockerbie; the other, a picture of the American flag on the tail of Pan Am 103. This was the first major attack on the US and its civilians. Whoever was responsible couldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

    With representatives from a half-dozen countries—the US, Britain, Scotland, Sweden, Germany, France, and Malta—now sitting around the table, putting together a case that met everyone’s evidentiary standards was difficult. “We talked through everything, and everything was always done to the higher standard,” Marquise says. In the US, for instance, the legal standard for a photo array was six photos; in Scotland, though, it was 12. So every photo array in the investigation had 12 photos to ensure that the IDs could be used in a British court.

    The trail of evidence so far was pretty clear, and it all pointed toward Libya. Yet there was still much work to do prior to an indictment. A solid hunch was one thing. Having evidence that would stand up in court and under cross-examination was something else entirely.

    As the case neared an indictment, the international investigators and prosecutors found themselves focusing at their gatherings on the fine print of their respective legal code and engaging in deep, philosophical-seeming debates: “What does murder mean in your statute? Huh? I know what murder means: I kill you. Well, then you start going through the details and the standards are just a little different. It may entail five factors in one country, three in another. Was Megrahi guilty of murder? Depends on the country.”

    At every meeting, the international team danced around the question of where a prosecution would ultimately take place. “Jurisdiction was an eggshell problem,” Marquise says. “It was always there, but no one wanted to talk about it. It was always the elephant in the room.”

    Mueller tried to deflect the debate for as long as possible, arguing there was more investigation to do first. Eventually, though, he argued forcefully that the case should be tried in the US. “I recognize that Scotland has significant equities which support trial of the case in your country,” he said in one meeting. “However, the primary target of this act of terrorism was the United States. The majority of the victims were Americans, and the Pan American aircraft was targeted precisely because it was of United States registry.”

    After one meeting, where the Scots and Americans debated jurisdiction for more than two hours, the group migrated over to the Peasant, a restaurant near the Justice Department, where, in an attempt to foster good spirits, it paid for the visiting Scots. Mueller and the other American officials each had to pay for their own meals.

    Mueller was getting ready to move forward; the federal grand jury would begin work in early September. Prosecutors and other investigators were already preparing background, readying evidence, and piecing together information like the names and nationalities of all the Lockerbie victims so that they could be included in the forthcoming indictment.

    There had never been any doubt in the US that the Pan Am 103 bombing would be handled as a criminal matter, but the case was still closely monitored by the White House and the National Security Council.

    The Reagan administration had been surprised in February 1988 by the indictment on drug charges of its close ally Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, and a rule of thumb had been developed: Give the White House a heads up anytime you’re going to indict a foreign agent. “If you tag Libya with Pan Am 103, that’s fair to say it’s going to disrupt our relationship with Libya,” Mueller deadpans. So Mueller would head up to the Cabinet Room at the White House, charts and pictures in hand, to explain to President Bush and his team what Justice had in mind.

    To Mueller, the investigation underscored why such complex investigations needed a law enforcement eye. A few months after the attack, he sat through a CIA briefing pointing toward Syria as the culprit behind the attack. “That’s always struck with me as a lesson in the difference between intelligence and evidence. I always try to remember that,” he told me, back when he was FBI director. “It’s a very good object lesson about hasty action based on intelligence. What if we had gone and attacked Syria based on that initial intelligence? Then, after the attack, it came out that Libya had been behind it? What could we have done?”

    Marquise was the last witness for the federal grand jury on Friday, November 8, 1991. Only in the days leading up to that testimony had prosecutors zeroed in on Megrahi and another Libyan officer, Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah; as late as the week of the testimony, they had hoped to pursue additional indictments, yet the evidence wasn’t there to get to a conviction.

    Mueller traveled to London to meet with the Peter Fraser, the lord advocate—Scotland’s top prosecutor—and they agreed to announce indictments simultaneously on November 15, 1991. Who got their hands on the suspects first, well, that was a question for later. The joint indictment, Mueller believed, would benefit both countries. “It adds credibility to both our investigations,” he says.

    That coordinated joint, multi-nation statement and indictment would become a model that the US would deploy more regularly in the years to come, as the US and other western nations have tried to coordinate cyber investigations and indictments against hackers from countries like North Korea, Russia, and Iran.

    To make the stunning announcement against Libya, Mueller joined FBI director William Sessions, DC US attorney Jay Stephens, and attorney general William Barr.

    “We charge that two Libyan officials, acting as operatives of the Libyan intelligence agency, along with other co-conspirators, planted and detonated the bomb that destroyed Pan Am 103,” Barr said. “I have just telephoned some of the families of those murdered on Pan Am 103 to inform them and the organizations of the survivors that this indictment has been returned. Their loss has been ever present in our minds.”

    At the same time, in Scotland, investigators there were announcing the same indictments.

    At the press conference, Barr listed a long set of names to thank—the first one he singled out was Mueller’s. Then, he continued, “This investigation is by no means over. It continues unabated. We will not rest until all those responsible are brought to justice. We have no higher priority.”

    From there, the case would drag on for years. ABC News interviewed the two suspects in Libya later that month; both denied any responsibility for the bombing. Marquise was reassigned within six months; the other investigators moved along too.

    Mueller himself left the administration when Bill Clinton became president, spending an unhappy year in private practice before rejoining the Justice Department to work as a junior homicide prosecutor in DC under then US attorney Eric Holder; Mueller, who had led the nation’s entire criminal division was now working side by side with prosecutors just a few years out of law school, the equivalent of a three-star military general retiring and reenlisting as a second lieutenant. Clinton eventually named Mueller the US attorney in San Francisco, the office where he’d worked as a young attorney in the 1970s.

    THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY of the bombing came and went without any justice. Then, in April 1999, prolonged international negotiations led to Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi turning over the two suspects; the international economic sanctions imposed on Libya in the wake of the bombing were taking a toll on his country, and the leader wanted to put the incident behind him.

    The final negotiated agreement said that the two men would be tried by a Scottish court, under Scottish law, in The Hague in the Netherlands. Distinct from the international court there, the three-judge Scottish court would ensure that the men faced justice under the laws of the country where their accused crime had been committed.

    Allowing the Scots to move forward meant some concessions by the US. The big one was taking the death penalty, prohibited in Scotland, off the table. Mueller badly wanted the death penalty. Mueller, like many prosecutors and law enforcement officials, is a strong proponent of capital punishment, but he believes it should be reserved for only egregious crimes. “It has to be especially heinous, and you have to be 100 percent sure he’s guilty,” he says. This case met that criteria. “There’s never closure. If there can’t be closure, there should be justice—both for the victims as well as the society at large,” he says.

    An old US military facility, Kamp Van Zeist, was converted to an elaborate jail and courtroom in The Hague, and the Dutch formally surrendered the two Libyans to Scottish police. The trial began in May 2000. For nine months, the court heard testimony from around the world. In what many observers saw as a political verdict, Al Megrahi was found guilty and Fhimah was found not guilty.

    With barely 24 hours notice, Marquise and victim family members raced from the United States to be in the courtroom to hear the verdict. The morning of the verdict in 2001, Mueller was just days into his tenure as acting deputy US attorney general—filling in for the start of the George W. Bush administration in the department’s No. 2 role as attorney general John Ashcroft got himself situated.

    That day, Mueller awoke early and joined with victims’ families and other officials in Washington, who watched the verdict announcement via a satellite hookup. To him, it was a chance for some closure—but the investigation would go on. As he told the media, “The United States remains vigilant in its pursuit to bring to justice any other individuals who may have been involved in the conspiracy to bring down Pan Am Flight 103.”

    The Scotbom case would leave a deep imprint on Mueller; one of his first actions as FBI director was to recruit Kathryn Turman, who had served as the liaison to the Pan Am 103 victim families during the trial, to head the FBI’s Victim Services Division, helping to elevate the role and responsibility of the FBI in dealing with crime victims.

    JUST MONTHS AFTER that 20th anniversary ceremony with Mueller at Arlington National Cemetery, in the summer of 2009, Scotland released a terminally ill Megrahi from prison after a lengthy appeals process, and sent him back to Libya. The decision was made, the Scottish minister of justice reported, on “compassionate grounds.” Few involved on the US side believed the terrorist deserved compassion. Megrahi was greeted as a hero on the tarmac in Libya—rose petals, cheering crowds. The US consensus remained that he should rot in prison.

    The idea that Megrahi could walk out of prison on “compassionate” ground made a mockery of everything that Mueller had dedicated his life to fighting and doing. Amid a series of tepid official condemnations—President Obama labeled it “highly objectionable”—Mueller fired off a letter to Scottish minister Kenny MacAskill that stood out for its raw pain, anger, and deep sorrow.

    “Over the years I have been a prosecutor, and recently as the Director of the FBI, I have made it a practice not to comment on the actions of other prosecutors, since only the prosecutor handling the case has all the facts and the law before him in reaching the appropriate decision,” Mueller began. “Your decision to release Megrahi causes me to abandon that practice in this case. I do so because I am familiar with the facts, and the law, having been the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991. And I do so because I am outraged at your decision, blithely defended on the grounds of ‘compassion.’”

    That nine months after the 20th anniversary of the bombing, the only person behind bars for the bombing would walk back onto Libyan soil a free man and be greeted with rose petals left Mueller seething.

    “Your action in releasing Megrahi is as inexplicable as it is detrimental to the cause of justice. Indeed your action makes a mockery of the rule of law. Your action gives comfort to terrorists around the world,” Mueller wrote. “You could not have spent much time with the families, certainly not as much time as others involved in the investigation and prosecution. You could not have visited the small wooden warehouse where the personal items of those who perished were gathered for identification—the single sneaker belonging to a teenager; the Syracuse sweatshirt never again to be worn by a college student returning home for the holidays; the toys in a suitcase of a businessman looking forward to spending Christmas with his wife and children.”

    For Mueller, walking the fields of Lockerbie had been walking on hallowed ground. The Scottish decision pained him especially deeply, because of the mission and dedication he and his Scottish counterparts had shared 20 years before. “If all civilized nations join together to apply the rules of law to international terrorists, certainly we will be successful in ridding the world of the scourge of terrorism,” he had written in a perhaps too hopeful private note to the Scottish Lord Advocate in 1990.

    Some 20 years later, in an era when counterterrorism would be a massive, multibillion dollar industry and a buzzword for politicians everywhere, Mueller—betrayed—concluded his letter with a decidedly un-Mueller-like plea, shouted plaintively and hopelessly across the Atlantic: “Where, I ask, is the justice?”

    #USA #Libye #impérialisme #terrorisme #histoire #CIA #idéologie #propagande

  • Amid an Export Boom, the U.S. Is Still Importing #Natural_Gas - Bloomberg
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-27/amid-an-export-boom-the-u-s-is-still-importing-natural-gas

    The U.S. may be exporting natural gas at a record clip, but that hasn’t stopped it from accepting new imports. A tanker with fuel from Nigeria has berthed at the Cove Point import terminal in Maryland, while a second ship with Russian gas is idling outside Boston Harbor.

    Pipeline constraints, depleted stockpiles and a 98-year-old law barring foreign ships from moving goods between U.S. ports is opening the way for liquefied natural gas to be shipped from overseas with prices expected to spike as the East Coast winter sets in.

    The two tankers are carrying about 6 billion cubic feet of #LNG, enough to power 150,000 homes for a year. At one point Thursday, the ship carrying Nigerian fuel to Cove Point passed another tanker in the Chesapeake Bay filled with U.S. gas that was headed abroad.

    It is ironic,’” said John Kilduff, a partner at Again Capital LLC in New York. But the “super cheap gas” produced in the nation’s shale fields “is trapped down west of the Mississippi unable to serve its own market,” he said by phone. “The gas is where the people aren’t.

    bout the money. The companies shipping the gas into Maryland — BP Plc and Royal Dutch Shell Plc — will likely have it stored until freezing East Coast temperatures push prices higher as local suppliers struggle to meet demand, according to Trevor Sikorski, head of natural gas, coal and carbon with the London-based industry consultant Energy Aspects Ltd. in a note to clients on Wednesday.

    Meanwhile, the gas being exported out will likely fetch higher prices right now in Europe and Asia. Dominion Energy Inc., which owns the Cove Point terminal, didn’t respond to emailed and telephone requests seeking comment.

    Other factors are at play as well. For instance, American providers can’t just ship LNG from shale fields in the south because the giant ships that transport the super-chilled fuel sail under foreign flags. Under the 1920 #Jones_Act, that means none can legally transport LNG to the Northeast from existing export terminals in Louisiana and Texas.

    At the same time, even the vast pipeline network feeding the region can quickly develop bottlenecks at a time when stockpiles are sitting at their lowest levels for this time of year since 2002. While production is soaring, strong demand from more and more U.S. power plants using the fuel, along with new export terminals, soaks up much of that new supply.

    There’s still some logistics and pipelines that need to be built to match out to where the demand is,” Kilduff said.

    #GNL

  • (20+) Jack l’Eventreur, viscéralement misogyne - Libération
    https://www.liberation.fr/planete/2016/08/19/jack-l-eventreur-visceralement-misogyne_1473479

    En 2015, de nombreux habitants de l’East End ont très mal vécu l’érection d’un musée entièrement consacré à l’œuvre de Jack l’Eventreur - en l’occurrence le massacre, à l’automne 1888, de cinq prostituées et le vol de certains de leurs organes. Surtout qu’à l’origine, l’homme derrière le projet, Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe, ancien chef de la diversité chez Google, avait promis qu’on érigerait là « le premier musée dédié aux femmes » du Royaume-Uni - ce qui devait théoriquement inclure l’histoire des premières suffragettes. Cela doit être de l’humour anglais : en lieu et place de cartels sur des militantes féministes, les Londoniens se sont retrouvés avec des mannequins ensanglantés sur le sol, un large couteau, de l’hémoglobine factice, des ambiances brumeuses qui rappellent le fog local, ainsi que des répliques de missives écrites à l’encre rouge sang, alors même que la majorité des lettres attribuées à Jack l’Eventreur sont, rappelons-le, de notoires fumisteries écrites par des rigolos pathologiques en mal d’attention médiatique (déjà). Bref, le tout ressemble à un mauvais épisode de Faites entrer l’accusé, mais sans Christophe Hondelatte qui relève son col de manteau à la fin. Résumons ainsi cette mascarade ironico-sexiste : à un musée célébrant les femmes et leurs combats politiques, on a préféré ouvrir un lieu mettant en scène les forfaits d’un meurtrier en série, qui les tuait précisément parce qu’elles étaient des femmes.
    Un « folklore » macabre et navrant

    Cette grotesque histoire démontre une fois de plus que Jack l’Eventreur est, depuis son apparition sur les registres de Scotland Yard, l’objet d’une inépuisable fascination macabre en Angleterre - en témoignent les objets qu’on peut acquérir à la boutique de souvenirs du « musée » : tee-shirt blanc avec silhouette en haut-de-forme et traces de sang, sifflet estampillé « Jack the Ripper » (pour prévenir la police ?). Imaginerait-on, en France, l’ouverture d’un musée « Emile Louis », avec une réplique grandeur nature de son car de ramassage scolaire ?

    Les crimes de Jack l’Eventreur étaient-ils misogynes ? Indéniablement. C’est même l’une des seules choses dont on soit à peu près sûr. Les cinq victimes canoniques sont des femmes, toutes des prostituées ; certains de leurs organes sexuels, comme l’utérus ou le vagin, ont été prélevés par le tueur. C’est pourtant l’élément qui est le moins mis en avant dans la foultitude de publications qu’experts en criminologie et autre « ripperologues » autoproclamés publient chaque année dans toutes les maisons d’édition de la planète. On préfère se concentrer sur « l’enquête », pourtant lacunaire, mais surtout sur les théories autour de l’identité du meurtrier, alimentant ainsi la machine à fantasmes. Ne serait-il pas un barbier juif de Whitechapel (suspect idéal : Aaron Kosminski, qu’un Anglais richissime du nom de Russell Edwards a cru récemment confondre à l’aide de son ADN, ayant acheté pour une somme faramineuse un châle censément attribué à l’une de ses victimes) ? Le prince Albert Victor de Galles, petit-fils de la reine Victoria ? Le chef du département d’enquêtes criminelles de Scotland Yard ? Ou, mieux, le peintre impressionniste Walter Sickert, qui - attention, preuve à l’horizon - peignait des prostituées dans leur chambre, qui tiraient la gueule ? La polardeuse Patricia Cornwell a passé des années à zigzaguer sur cette piste, déboursant 6 millions de dollars (soit 5,3 millions d’euros) en achats de toiles et analyses ADN, et en a tiré en 2002 un pavé de 800 pages aussi indigeste qu’une tourte à la viande (tant qu’on y est, pourquoi ne pas accuser Egon Schiele ou Otto Dix ?). Lewis Carroll a été, lui aussi, suspecté un temps, par deux ou trois zozos pressés de pouvoir clamer « J’ai trouvé ».

    Les femmes semblent être les grandes absentes de cette histoire, qui les concerne pourtant au premier chef. Sophie Herfort est une « ripperologue » française. Elle a publié un ouvrage sur le sujet, Jack l’Eventreur démasqué, où elle dévoile « son » suspect : un policier de Scotland Yard du nom de Melville Macnaghten. Elle explique avoir peu abordé la question de la misogynie du tueur dans son livre, notamment parce que l’éditeur « préférait que je me concentre sur l’enquête ». Elle reconnaît pourtant que le contexte, dans cette affaire, est loin d’être une simple toile de fond : en 1888, les mutilations féminines étaient courantes à Londres. Les hystérectomies étaient un moyen de contrôler les naissances. Et on pratiquait volontiers l’excision, pour prévenir les femmes de cette maladie censément féminine qu’était l’hystérie ou pour les « soulager » de règles douloureuses. Dépression ? Langueur ? Appétit sexuel jugé démesuré ? Une seule réponse : l’ablation du clitoris.
    L’effrayante sexualité des femmes

    Sophie Herfort évoque le cas du docteur Isaac Baker Brown. Cofondateur du prestigieux Saint Mary’s Hospital (où les journalistes ont récemment fait le pied de grue lors des naissances de George et de Charlotte de Cambridge), ce chirurgien opérait à tour de bras les femmes de la haute bourgeoisie dans sa clinique privée, la London Surgical Home. Il y pratiquait avec enthousiasme l’ablation des ovaires, ainsi que l’hystérectomie. En 1866, il publie un livre où il prône la pratique de l’excision « préventive », afin de lutter contre les dangers de la masturbation. Il y explique avoir excisé une femme « malade » (en vérité, elle avait demandé le divorce à son mari, la loi l’y autorisant depuis 1857). Il décrit : « Il y avait la preuve d’une excitation périphérique [entendre masturbation, ndlr]. J’ai pratiqué mon opération comme à l’accoutumée et ma patiente s’est bien remise. Elle est devenue ensuite à tous égards une bonne épouse. » Il a également pratiqué l’ablation du clitoris sur une jeune femme de 20 ans car « elle ne répondait pas aux aspirations de sa mère, envoyait des cartes de visite à des hommes, et passait beaucoup de temps à lire ». Notons qu’en France, en 1882, le docteur Démétrius Zambaco, chef de clinique à la faculté de médecine de Paris, venait de décrire avec force détails, dans la revue scientifique l’Encéphale, comment il avait brûlé au fer rouge le clitoris de deux petites filles de 6 et 10 ans pour leur passer l’envie de se masturber.

    La sexualité des femmes terrorisait l’Albion de la reine Victoria, où l’on conseillait aux jeunes épouses effrayées par les futurs assauts du mari de « fermer les yeux et penser à l’Angleterre ». Les héroïnes de fiction du XIXe siècle avec un passé sexuel, celles des romans de Dickens par exemple, comme Nancy la prostituée d’Oliver Twist, mouraient immanquablement dans d’atroces souffrances. Tout cela n’empêchait pas (au contraire) Londres d’être un lupanar géant, propice aux trafics en tout genre : en 1885, un journaliste de la Pall Mall Gazette dévoila, dans un impressionnant reportage, un monumental trafic d’enfants, dans lequel les élites victoriennes étaient impliquées, ce qui poussa le législateur à relever l’âge de la majorité sexuelle à 16 ans (elle était fixée auparavant à 13). Londres était surnommé « the whoreshop of the world » (« le bordel du monde ») : en 1888, dans le simple quartier de Whitechapel, qui ne compte que quelques rues, Scotland Yard avait évalué le nombre de prostituées à 1 200. Les victimes furent faciles à trouver pour le tueur : elles étaient pauvres, alcooliques, sans famille, sans toit, à la merci des hommes qui sollicitaient leurs faveurs pour quelques shillings, vivant la nuit dans des quartiers mal famés et sans éclairage public.
    Un retour de bâton patriarcal

    Et pourtant, aussi, à l’époque de Jack l’Eventreur, l’on réforme - timidement - le divorce (en 1857) ; le médecin anglais Joseph Mortimer Granville invente le vibromasseur (en 1883) ; l’on pose enfin la question de l’égalité entre garçons et filles dans l’accès à l’éducation (en 1870) ; et puis celle de leur droit de vote (en 1867, avec John Stuart Mill). Dans son livre The Age of Sexcrime, l’historienne Jane Caputi interprète les meurtres de l’Eventreur comme une sorte de « backlash » misogyne, un retour de bâton anti-femmes, une résurgence de l’ordre patriarcal face à une condition féminine qui, très lentement, avance vers le chemin de l’émancipation. Les victimes massacrées sont les boucs émissaires, dit-elle, d’une société en train de changer, inéluctablement. D’où l’intense médiatisation des crimes, aussi atroces que spectaculaires. Le corps de la prostituée, considéré de son vivant comme un simple bien de consommation et désormais réduit en charpie, est, à sa mort, exposé au regard forcément horrifié du public. D’abord le cadavre est trouvé dans la rue. Puis il est photographié, et ces images sont abondamment diffusées par la presse - qui se délecte d’informer ses lecteurs de certains détails insoutenables, comme les intestins de Mary Jane Kelly, la cinquième victime de l’Eventreur, déposés par le tueur sur sa table de nuit. On peut encore contempler aujourd’hui, en un simple clic sur Wikipédia, les clichés mortuaires de Mary Jane Kelly, Annie Chapman, Catherine Eddowes, Elizabeth Stride, Mary Ann Nichols. On frissonne, on s’inquiète, on s’affole, et puis les crimes s’arrêtent, la vie reprend.

    Dans leur ouvrage Sex Crimes in History (1963), les historiens Robert E. L. Masters et Eduard Lea avaient évoqué une « infestation », entre 1885 et 1895, de ce type de criminels s’attaquant à des femmes dans le monde entier, avec sensiblement le même mode opératoire. L’Encyclopédie des serial killers, de Michael Newton (1999), en recense plusieurs : l’Eventreur de Moscou (1885), une affaire jamais élucidée, où plusieurs prostituées ont été éventrées ; l’Eventreur du Texas (1885, lire ci-contre) qui, lui, tuait des prostituées noires ; l’Eventreur du Nicaragua (1889) ; « Jack the Strangler » qui tuait des prostituées à Denver, dans le Colorado, en 1894 ; et en France, Joseph Vacher (« l’Eventreur du Sud-Est ») qui a sévi de 1894 à 1897, au gré de ses mortels vagabondages, non pas sur des prostituées, mais sur des jeunes femmes et des bergers isolés.

    Jack l’Eventreur est peut-être le premier serial killer « moderne », utilisant la presse à grand tirage pour médiatiser ses actes, se riant de la population effrayée, jouant à cache-cache avec Scotland Yard ; mais, avant tout, et c’est l’irréfutable point commun qu’on peut lui trouver avec la liste des tueurs énoncée plus haut : il haïssait les femmes, dont l’émancipation était pourtant, bien malgré lui, en marche.

    Bibliographie :

    The Age of Sexcrime, de Jane Caputi, UW Press (2000).

    Jack l’Eventreur démasqué, l’enquête définitive, de Sophie Herfort, éd. Points (2008), 320 pp., 7 €.

    Jack l’Eventreur démasqué, de Russell Edwards, éd. de l’Archipel (2016), 21 €.

    A Comparison of 19th Century and Current Attitudes to Female Sexuality, de John Studd, paru dans la revue Gynecological Endocrinology (2007).

    Pucelles à vendre, Londres 1885, de William Thomas Stead, éd. Alma (2013), 292 pp., 16 €.

    Vacher l’Eventreur , de Régis Descott, Grasset (2016), 288 pp., 19 €.

    #historicisation #excision #violence_masculine #misogynie #backlash #féminicide #violence_médicale #hystérie

    • @simplicissimus super désespérant, quand à la photo d’illustration d’une femme à terre la jupe relevée, ça permet à libé un double racolage de raclures de journalistes : montrer l’entrejambe d’une femme et se #divertir avec les crimes de ce tueur mysogine.

    • L’article est interessant pour l’histoire d’un certain nombre de violences faites aux femmes à cette époque en citant quelques noms de #grand_homme et sur le fait qu’il pointe la misogynie des crimes. Pour l’illustration je ne l’ai pas remise, je suis d’accord avec toi @touti et c’est vrai que le titre est un peu macabre mais je trouve que la mention de la misogynie est pertinente car c’est plutot de ca que parle le texte. Vicéralement misogyne ca me choque pas mais j’ai un gout prononcé pour le morbide.

  • #métaliste de liens sur des projets qui visent à intégrer les #réfugiés dans les universités

    En général, sur l’accès aux études universitaires des réfugiés :
    https://seenthis.net/messages/746028

    Les Hautes écoles face à l’accueil des réfugiés, dans le #monde :
    https://seenthis.net/messages/593418

    Refugees Welcome Map
    https://seenthis.net/messages/475877
    #cartographie #visualisation

    #Science_for_refugees
    https://seenthis.net/messages/474982#message474983
    #science4refugees

    Universities are failing refugees. They must do more to prevent a ’lost generation’ :
    https://seenthis.net/messages/813004

    #études_universitaires #université #asile #migrations #intégration_professionnelle #éducation #accès_aux_études #solidarité #universités-refuge

  • Asylum seeker to sue UK for funding Libyan detention centres

    Ethiopian teenager says he experienced physical abuse, extortion and forced labour in centres part-funded by UK.

    A teenage asylum seeker from Ethiopia is planning to sue the government for its role in funding detention centres in Libya, where he says he experienced physical abuse, extortion and forced labour.

    The teenager, who turned 18 a few weeks ago, cannot be named. He lives in London and is waiting for the Home Office to determine his asylum claim. His legal action against the government’s Department for International Development (DfID) for its contribution to funding these overseas centres is thought to be the first of its kind.

    The Guardian previously revealed the terrible conditions in a network of 26 detention centres across Libya. The EU’s Emergency Trust Fund for Africa provides some funding for the centres. DfID says that the funding it provides is used to improve conditions in the camps.

    Children have described being starved, beaten and abused by Libyan police and camp guards. One said the conditions were like “hell on Earth”.

    The government insists the funding is necessary as part of a humane effort to dissuade people from making the dangerous Mediterranean crossing. Arguing that migrant detention centres are the responsibility of the Libyan authorities, it is understood to have raised concerns over the treatment of detainees with the Libyan government.

    A spokeswoman previously told the Guardian: “We continue to help fund the European Union Trust Fund’s work to improve conditions for migrants in detention centres.”

    But critics see the Libyan camps as a way for European countries to prevent asylum seekers and other migrants from reaching Europe, and the UK’s involvement as another plank of the so called “hostile environment” to keep people out.

    Last year the UK government spent £10m in Libya on various initiatives, including the detention centres.

    The teenager who has begun the legal action against the government claims that officials are acting unlawfully in funding the detention centres and should stop doing so. He is also asking for compensation for the suffering he endured there.

    The boy’s legal team is calling on DfID to facilitate the relocation of the detention centres to the UK or other safe countries so that asylum claims can be safely processed. His lawyers have asked DfID to disclose the funding agreements between the UK and Libyan governments and any internal documents concerning the destination of UK funding in Libya as well as any untoward incidents in the centres.

    The teenager fled persecution in Ethiopia because of his father’s political allegiances and finally reached the UK after a dangerous journey through Libya and across the Mediterranean.

    In Libya he suffered both at the hands of traffickers and in the detention centres, some of which are controlled by local militias.

    “The period I was detained and enslaved in Libya was a living hell,” he said. An expert medical report conducted in London identified 31 different lesions, including 10 on his face, which the doctor who examined him found provided “significant corroboration” of his account of repeated ill treatment.

    Many of those in the camps are from Eritrea but there are also asylum seekers from Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Syria.

    James Elliott of Wilsons Solicitors, who is bringing the legal action on the teenager’s behalf, said: “DfID acknowledges that conditions in the camps are appalling. We are bringing this legal challenge because it is vital that UK taxpayers’ money is not used to allow places where men, women and children are subjected to torture, rape and slavery to continue to exist.”

    DfID has been approached for comment.

    https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/20/asylum-seeker-to-sue-uk-for-funding-libyan-detention-centres?CMP=Sh
    #Libye #justice #asile #migrations #réfugiés #externalisation #poursuites_judiciaires #violence #abus #UK #Angleterre

  • The Arthur Sackler Family’s Ties to OxyContin Money - The Atlantic
    https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/04/sacklers-oxycontin-opioids/557525

    Much as the role of the addictive multibillion-dollar painkiller OxyContin in the opioid crisis has stirred controversy and rancor nationwide, so it has divided members of the wealthy and philanthropic Sackler family, some of whom own the company that makes the drug.

    In recent months, as protesters have begun pressuring the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and other cultural institutions to spurn donations from the Sacklers, one branch of the family has moved aggressively to distance itself from OxyContin and its manufacturer, Purdue Pharma. The widow and one daughter of Arthur Sackler, who owned a related Purdue company with his two brothers, maintain that none of his heirs have profited from sales of the drug. The daughter, Elizabeth Sackler, told The New York Times in January that Purdue Pharma’s involvement in the opioid epidemic was “morally abhorrent to me.”

    But an obscure court document sheds a different light on family history—and on the campaign by Arthur’s relatives to preserve their image and legacy. It shows that the Purdue family of companies made a nearly $20 million payment to the estate of Arthur Sackler in 1997—two year after OxyContin was approved, and just as the pill was becoming a big seller. As a result, though they do not profit from present-day sales, Arthur’s heirs appear to have benefited at least indirectly from OxyContin.

    The 1997 payment to the estate of Arthur Sackler is disclosed in the combined, audited financial statements of Purdue and its associated companies and subsidiaries. Those documents were filed among hundreds of pages of exhibits in the U.S. District Court in Abingdon, Virginia, as part of a 2007 settlement in which a company associated with Purdue and three company executives pleaded guilty to charges that OxyContin was illegally marketed. The company paid $600 million in penalties while admitting it falsely promoted OxyContin as less addictive and less likely to be abused than other pain medications.

    Arthur’s heirs include his widow and grandchildren. His children, including Elizabeth, do not inherit because they are not beneficiaries of a trust that was set up as part of a settlement of his estate, according to court records. Jillian receives an income from the trust. Elizabeth’s two children are heirs and would receive bequests upon Jillian’s death. A spokesman for Elizabeth Sackler declined to comment on the Purdue payment.

    Long before OxyContin was introduced, the Sackler brothers already were notable philanthropists. Arthur was one of the world’s biggest art collectors and a generous benefactor to cultural and educational institutions across the world. There is the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, the Arthur M. Sackler Museum at Harvard, and the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

    His brothers were similarly generous. They joined with their older brother to fund the Sackler Wing at the Met, which features the Temple of Dendur exhibit. The Mortimer and Theresa Sackler Foundation was the principal donor of the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London; the Sackler name is affiliated with prestigious colleges from Yale to the University of Oxford, as well as world-famous cultural organizations, including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There is even a Sackler Rose—so christened after Mortimer Sackler’s wife purchased the naming rights in her husband’s honor.

    Now the goodwill gained from this philanthropy may be waning as the Sackler family has found itself in an uncomfortable spotlight over the past six months. Two national magazines recently examined the intersection of the family’s wealth from OxyContin and its philanthropy, as have other media outlets across the world. The family has also been targeted in a campaign by the photographer Nan Goldin to “hold the Sacklers accountable” for OxyContin’s role in the opioid crisis. Goldin, who says she became addicted to OxyContin after it was prescribed for surgical pain, led a protest last month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which demonstrators tossed pill bottles labeled as OxyContin into the reflecting pool of its Sackler Wing.

    While it doesn’t appear that any recipients of Sackler charitable contributions have returned gifts or pledged to reject future ones, pressure and scrutiny on many of those institutions is intensifying. In London, the National Portrait Gallery said it is reviewing a current pledge from the Sackler Trust.

    #Opioides #Sackler

  • Tear the fascists down - Woody Guthrie
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKVnur5DkdI


    Woody Guthrie – Tear the Fascists Down Lyrics | Genius Lyrics
    https://genius.com/Woody-guthrie-tear-the-fascists-down-lyrics

    There’s a great and a bloody fight
    ’round this whole world tonight
    And the battle, the bombs and shrapnel reign
    Hitler told the world around he would tear our union down
    But our union’s gonna break them slavery chains
    Our union’s gonna break them slavery chains

    I walked up on a mountain in the middle of the sky
    Could see every farm and every town
    I could see all the people in this whole wide world
    That’s the union that’ll tear the fascists down, down, down
    That’s the union that’ll tear the fascists down

    When I think of the men and the ships going down
    While the Russians fight on across the Don
    There’s London in ruins and Paris in chains
    Good people, what are we waiting on?
    Good people, what are we waiting on?

    So, I thank the Soviets and the mighty Chinese vets
    The Allies the whole wide world around
    To the battling British, thanks, you can have ten million Yanks
    If it takes ’em to tear the fascists down, down, down
    If it takes ’em to tear the fascists down

    But when I think of the ships and the men going down
    And the Russians fight on across the Don
    There’s London in ruins and Paris in chains
    Good people, what are we waiting on?
    Good people, what are we waiting on?

    So I thank the Soviets and the mighty Chinese vets
    The Allies the whole wide world around
    To the battling British, thanks, you can have ten million Yanks
    If it takes ’em to tear the fascists down, down, down
    If it takes ’em to tear the fascists down

    #USA #antifascisme #musique

  • Google Launches #flutter 1.0 Which Goes Beyond Mobile App Development
    https://hackernoon.com/google-launches-flutter-1-0-which-goes-beyond-mobile-app-development-750

    Google finally released Flutter version 1.0 on December 5th 2018 at its Live event in London.It is a fast, powerful cross-platform app UI framework that helps developers create attractive, native mobile app user experiences from a single codebase.Ever since its first announcement in March 2017, Flutter has been talk of the town among most developer communities. Though few said that Flutter is just a Google’s small product of experiment that the company is not even serious about.But, after the latest Flutter live event in London, Google demonstrated how serious they’re with Flutter, proving all naysayers wrong!In fact, a considerable number of developers have established Flutter as their ideal cross-platform mobile application development tool. Plus, the adoption rate of Flutter is (...)

    #android-app-development #hybrid-app-development #ios-app-development #mobile-app-development

  • [Essay] Machine Politics by Fred Turner | Harper’s Magazine
    https://harpers.org/archive/2019/01/machine-politics-facebook-political-polarization

    The rise of the internet and a new age of authoritarianism

    par Fred Turner

    “The Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip,” Ronald Reagan said in 1989. He was speaking to a thousand British notables in London’s historic Guildhall, several months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Reagan proclaimed that the world was on the precipice of “a new era in human history,” one that would bring “peace and freedom for all.” Communism was crumbling, just as fascism had before it. Liberal democracies would soon encircle the globe, thanks to the innovations of Silicon Valley. “I believe,” he said, “that more than armies, more than diplomacy, more than the best intentions of democratic nations, the communications revolution will be the greatest force for the advancement of human freedom the world has ever seen.”

    At the time, most everyone thought Reagan was right. The twentieth century had been dominated by media that delivered the same material to millions of people at the same time—radio and newspapers, movies and television. These were the kinds of one-to-many, top-down mass media that Orwell’s Big Brother had used to stay in power. Now, however, Americans were catching sight of the internet. They believed that it would do what earlier media could not: it would allow people to speak for themselves, directly to one another, around the world. “True personalization is now upon us,” wrote MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in his 1995 bestseller Being Digital. Corporations, industries, and even whole nations would soon be transformed as centralized authorities were demolished. Hierarchies would dissolve and peer-to-peer collaborations would take their place. “Like a force of nature,” wrote Negroponte, “the digital age cannot be denied or stopped.”

    One of the deepest ironies of our current situation is that the modes of communication that enable today’s authoritarians were first dreamed up to defeat them. The same technologies that were meant to level the political playing field have brought troll farms and Russian bots to corrupt our elections. The same platforms of self-expression that we thought would let us empathize with one another and build a more harmonious society have been co-opted by figures such as Milo Yiannopoulos and, for that matter, Donald Trump, to turn white supremacy into a topic of dinner-­table conversation. And the same networked methods of organizing that so many thought would bring down malevolent states have not only failed to do so—think of the Arab Spring—but have instead empowered autocrats to more closely monitor protest and dissent.

    If we’re going to resist the rise of despotism, we need to understand how this happened and why we didn’t see it coming. We especially need to grapple with the fact that today’s right wing has taken advantage of a decades-long liberal effort to decentralize our media. That effort began at the start of the Second World War, came down to us through the counterculture of the 1960s, and flourishes today in the high-tech hothouse of Silicon Valley. It is animated by a deep faith that when engineering replaces politics, the alienation of mass society and the threat of totalitarianism will melt away. As Trump fumes on Twitter, and Facebook posts are linked to genocide in Myanmar, we are beginning to see just how misplaced that faith has been. Even as they grant us the power to communicate with others around the globe, our social-­media networks have spawned a new form of authoritarianism.

    #Fred_Turner #Autoritarisme #Médias_sociaux #Mobilisation #Extrême_droite

  • Advancing Women in Product Launches New Chapters in London, Paris and Berlin
    https://hackernoon.com/advancing-women-in-product-launches-new-chapters-in-london-paris-and-ber

    AWIP has surpassed 4,000 members in 2018Strong demand for equality and professional opportunities for female product leaders across EuropeLondon chapter kickoff event co-hosted with European Python communityLONDON — December 13, 2018 — Advancing Women in Product (AWIP), the organization empowering high-potential female product and tech leaders around the globe through equality of opportunity, announced its #international #expansion to three major European cities: London, Paris and Berlin.“Strong collaboration between product leaders across geographical backgrounds is key to addressing equal educational and professional opportunities for females in the industry,” said Nancy Wang, CEO and co-founder of #awip. “By expanding our community into Europe, AWIP hopes to drive change for women in tech around (...)

    #womenpms #startup

  • Mapping Society
    https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/mapping-society

    From a rare map of yellow fever in eighteenth-century New York, to Charles Booth’s famous maps of poverty in nineteenth-century London, an Italian racial zoning map of early twentieth century Asmara, to a map of wealth disparities in the banlieues of twenty-first-century Paris, Mapping Society traces the evolution of social cartography over the past two centuries. In this richly illustrated book, Laura Vaughan examines maps of ethnic or religious difference, poverty, and health inequalities, demonstrating how they not only serve as historical records of social enquiry, but also constitute inscriptions of social patterns that have been etched deeply on the surface of cities.

    Le pdf here
    http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/10056449/2/Mapping-Society.pdf

    #cartographie #société #urban_matter

  • Behind the Scenes on 11.11: A Night in the Life of an Alibaba Engineer
    https://hackernoon.com/behind-the-scenes-on-11-11-a-night-in-the-life-of-an-alibaba-engineer-3b

    Diligent technicians are rarely under the lime light. In this article, we look at what it is like to work at Alibaba during the 11.11 Global Shopping Festival for O&M engineer Ren Ruxian.Alibaba’s annual 11.11 Global Shopping Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2018Alibaba’s 11.11 Global Shopping Festival, set each year on China’s November 11 Singles’ Day, has garnered widespread global attention in recent years. On the eve of this year’s festival, which grossed a record-breaking 30.8 billion dollars, announcements declaring it could be seen in renowned public spaces from New York’s Times Square to the lawn of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and even reflected in London’s Thames River.As it gains recognition, some may wonder what it is like to work behind the scenes of such a massive (...)

    #alibaba-engineer #ecommerce #devops #engineering #data-center

  • Et le « bloomer » libéra le corps des sportives - Libération
    https://www.liberation.fr/sports/2018/12/08/et-le-bloomer-libera-le-corps-des-sportives_1696434

    Au XIXe siècle, la militante féministe Amelia Bloomer affronte les moqueries lorsqu’elle encourage le port d’une tenue révolutionnaire : le « bloomer », une culotte bouffante qui deviendra un vêtement sportif accompagnant l’essor de la bicyclette.

    Chaque samedi avec RétroNews, le site de presse de la BNF, retour sur un épisode de l’histoire du sport tel que l’a raconté la presse française. Aujourd’hui, comment un vêtement a permis l’émancipation sportive des femmes.

    Au milieu du XIXe siècle, un nouveau vêtement féminin fait son apparition : le bloomer, un pantalon court surmonté d’une jupe, qui donnera les shorts-culottes aujourd’hui portés par diverses sportives, en athlétisme, au volley ou au tennis. Il tient son nom de la militante féministe Amelia Bloomer qui en fut la plus grande avocate, dès 1851. Mais faire accepter ce vêtement dans les sociétés corsetées du XIXe ne fut pas sans obstacles, comme le racontent les journaux de l’époque.

    Le Constitutionnel du 2 octobre 1851 fait ainsi état d’une soirée de présentation à Londres du « nouveau costume américain pour dames » plutôt mouvementée : « Jusqu’à l’arrivée des bloomers en costume, on ne saurait décrire le désordre ni rapporter le feu roulant des plaisanteries. » Organisée par une certaine Mme Dexter, la présentation de ces bloomers n’aura pas lieu face aux railleries du public pourtant venu en nombre.

    « Le tyran : c’est la mode »

    « Encore les bloomers ! », titre le Constitutionnel quelques jours plus tard. A l’occasion d’un nouveau défilé, « les dispositions avaient été prises pour que l’ordre ne fût point troublé », précise le journal. Une Américaine de 26 ans vient présenter ces tenues : « Huit dames accoutrées d’une manière assez bizarre entrent dans la salle. […] Il est impossible au public de garder plus longtemps son sérieux. » Une nouvelle fois, les bloomers ne sont pas pris au sérieux, alors que l’Américaine se lance dans une plaidoirie féministe pour ce nouveau vêtement : « Les dames américaines ont réfléchi qu’il y avait un autre esclavage à abolir, esclavage contre lequel la religion, la morale, la loi sont impuissantes. Vous avez déjà nommé le tyran : c’est la mode. […] La toilette actuelle des dames exerce sur elles une torture physique, spirituelle et morale. » Puis, l’oratrice fait applaudir Amelia Jenks Bloomer, « l’auteur de cette innovation ».

    A cette époque, l’idée du bloomer apparaît tellement saugrenue à certains qu’une pièce comique, les Blooméristes ou la Réforme des jupes*, est mise en scène au Théâtre du Vaudeville, comme le raconte le Siècle, le 2 février 1982. Pour le journaliste du Siècle, Amelia Bloomer est même une « excentrique insulaire qui a attaché son nom à l’idée la plus saugrenue qui ait pu poindre dans une cervelle humaine, celle de masculiniser les femmes par le costume d’abord, par les habitudes ensuite ». Dans les Blooméristes ou la Réforme des Jupes, l’héroïne, Mlle Césarine, « a été élevée à la façon bloomerienne ; elle fume comme un Turc, tire le pistolet comme Lepage, manie le fleuret comme le professeur italien Raimondi ».

    Répression du bloomer

    Finalement, c’est en Californie que le bloomer se démocratise d’abord, fin XIXe : dans le Petit Parisien du 24 janvier 1898, on raconte ainsi qu’il « s’est fondé à San Francisco un club de jeunes femmes et de jeunes filles qui ont décidé d’adopter d’une façon permanente le port de la culotte bouffante américaine ». Ces centaines de « miss appartenant aux meilleures familles » s’exercent par ailleurs « à tous les sports athlétiques généralement réservés au sexe fort. La course à pied, le canotage, le cricket, le football n’ont plus de secret pour elles. […] Ajouterons-nous que ces dames font beaucoup d’équitation et montent à cheval comme les hommes, – à califourchon… N’est-ce pas un peu cavalier tout de même ? »

    Le bloomer est adopté massivement par les femmes cyclistes. Le journal parisien Gil Blas relate un fait divers survenu à Washington et lié au port du bloomer, « objet de réprobation des puritains aux Etats-Unis ». « Une maîtresse correction infligée à deux dames de Washington par le mari de l’une d’elles, M. Redman » : aperçue à bicyclette vêtue d’un bloomer dans les rues de la capitale américaine, Mme Redman reçut des « coups de cravache » de son mari, tandis que son amie se voit administrer une paire de claques. L’auteur de ces violences fut exempté de l’amende de 50 francs qu’il encourait. Pire : « Il a été hautement félicité par le juge, comme ayant bien mérité de la société en s’élevant publiquement contre une coutume déplorable. Ce magistrat a même exprimé le regret de ne pouvoir appliquer l’amende à Mme Redman pour la corriger de la mauvaise habitude de s’habiller en homme. »

    A Chicago, la répression va loin également : le port du bloomer est interdit. La bicyclette est partout aux Etats-Unis, comme le relate la Petite Gironde du 16 juin 1895 : « Rien ne manque à la gloire de la bicyclette en Amérique, pas même la persécution ! […] Ce projet est ainsi rédigé : […] il sera illégal pour toute personne de sexe féminin […] de se promener ou d’essayer de se promener en bicycle ou de se montrer dans les rues, avenues ou voies publiques habillée ou déguisée en costume à jupe courte, vulgairement connu sous le nom de bloomers. » « Il est clair qu’interdire à une femme la culotte et le jupon court pour aller à bicyclette cela équivaut à lui interdire la bicyclette », conclut le journal : « On ne peut songer pédaler avec une robe à traîne. »

    « La femme nous a pris la culotte ! »

    Le débat sur les femmes cyclistes et leur accoutrement traversera l’Atlantique : en France, le docteur Léon Petit donne une conférence pour évoquer les bienfaits de la bicyclette pour les femmes. Elle est retranscrite dans la Presse du 19 janvier 1896 : « Mères, fillettes, grands-mères, enfants, petites bourgeoises, grandes dames, accourez au sport nouveau ! » Lui aussi voit dans le vêtement qui accompagne la pratique un mélange des genres, tout en s’en accommodant : « Le costume rationnel ? La culotte, emblème de l’égalité avec l’homme, la culotte ; symbole de la force et du pouvoir, la culotte depuis si longtemps désirée et enfin conquise ! Ah ! messieurs, c’est un coup terrible porté à notre prestige ! La femme nous a pris la culotte, et il faut bien reconnaître qu’elle la porte mieux que nous ! »

    Suite et fin de l’histoire. Un siècle et quelques plus tard, les débats sur le vêtement sportif féminin ne se sont pas arrêtés, bien au contraire. Pour preuve : la polémique, fin août, autour de la combinaison noire de Serena Williams lors du dernier Roland-Garros, jugée trop excentrique, et qui a entraîné la mise en place d’un « code vestimentaire », effectif à l’occasion des prochains Internationaux de France.

    https://www.liberation.fr/sports/2018/12/08/et-le-bloomer-libera-le-corps-des-sportives_1696434

    #femmes #sexisme #mode #culotte #misogynie #histoire

    * texte complet de la pièce : https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62636114.texteImage

    • Fiche Wikipédia sur Amélia Bloomer
      https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Bloomer

      Histoire du port du pantalon par les femmes
      https://lemundemfinue2013.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/le-port-du-pantalon

      C’est en Perse que l’on voit les premiers pantalons féminins. Jusqu’au XVIIIème siècle les femmes ont essayé de l’adopter mais sans succès. Souvent les gouvernements leur en ont interdit l’usage, surtout pour les femmes qui travaillent. Dans certaines entreprises, les employées en contact avec la clientèle n’ont pas le droit de porter le pantalon. Par exemple les hôtesses de l’air d’Air France devaient porter des jupes jusqu’en 2005, signe d’élégance.

      –-----
      Bloomers – A Fashion Revolution
      http://www.victoriana.com/bloomer-costume

      No description of 19th century women’s fashions would be complete without some mention of the notorious lady, Amelia Jenks Bloomer, who had the courage to attempt to introduce reform in the conventional dress for women. It is said that the first man who carried an umbrella was mobbed through the streets of London because of its oddity; therefore, it is not surprising that the first woman who took on “pantalettes” as part of her public dress became at once the object of vulgar curiosity and idle gossip.


      Hand-colored lithograph of the music cover for the “Bloomer Waltz, (costume for summer)” published in 1851 showing a woman in the notorious bloomer costume walking along a path in a wooded area.

      Amelia Bloomer was an American women’s rights advocate who proclaimed her strong views regarding reform in feminine attire in her publication The Lily. In 1849 she took up the idea, previously originated by Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Miller, of wearing a short skirt and loose trousers gathered round the ankles.


      A Currier & Ives rendition of the bloomer costume, c1851.

      Reportedly, Elizabeth Smith Miller began wearing the outfit of Turkish pantaloons and a knee length skirt after seeing this type of clothing on a trip to Europe. This design was an attempt to preserve a Victorian woman’s modesty while providing freedom of movement in household activities. The name of “bloomers” gradually became popularly attached to any divided skirt or knickerbocker dress for women because of Amelia Bloomer’s strong advocacy.

      Clipping of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) wearing the controversial bloomer costume in 1851. Stanton’s cousin Elizabeth Smith Miller introduced the outfit and editor Amelia Bloomer publicized its healthful and liberating benefits in her newspaper The Lily.

      The costume that Bloomer advocated was sometimes referred to as the Camilla, consisting of short skirts reaching just below the knees, and long pantalettes. The bloomer costume was popular for some time by most of the leaders in the women’s rights movement.


      Glass negative portrait photograph circa 1855-1865.


      bloomer costume

      The bloomer outfit was changed numerous times but eventually discarded because of the amount of attention given to its criticism in the press. Nevertheless, the name “bloomers” survived in women’s fashion as a generic term for Turkish-style pantaloons, divided skirts, and for the knickerbockers worn by women when riding bicycles in the 1890s.

      #pantalon #bloomer #femmes #mode #histoire #historicisation

      Amelia Bloomer
      https://lacasavictoriana.com/2010/08/12/amelia-bloomer

      Aunque hoy en día muchos sólo recuerdan a Amelia Bloomer como la creadora de una moda revolucionaria en su época, los bloomers – conocidos en español como pantalones bombachos -, Bloomer fue también una incansable defensora de los derechos de la mujer en una sociedad para la que una mujer era sólo el pilar de la familia, y trataba de dejar en un segundo plano sus facetas culturales, creativas, políticas o trabajadoras.

      Merece la pena conocer un poco más sobre esta sobresaliente mujer, que no sólo luchó por las mujeres desde un punto de vista social, sino que incluso intentó cambiar la rígida moda victoriana por prendas más cómodas y apropiadas para las diferentes actividades a las que la mujer se estaba incorporando.


      La activista por los derechos de las mujeres, Amelia Jenks Bloomer nació en Homer, New York en 1818. Cuando tenía 22 años se casó con el abogado norteamericano Dexter Bloomer, quien la animó a defender sus ideas a través de su periódico The Seneca Falls Courier y a colaborar activamente en la defensa del sufragio femenino y los derechos de las mujeres a través de oranizaciones femeninas del área de Seneca Falls, llegando a participar en la famosa Seneca Falls Convention en 1848 (esta convención paso a la posteridad por ser la primera en la que se defendieron los derechos de la mujer en todos los ámbitos sociales y de la que salió el documento Declaration of Sentiments, donde se recogían los puntos fundamentales acordados en esa reunión)

      En Enero de 1849, animada por Elizabeth Cady Stanton y Susan B. Anthony – otras defensores de los derechos de la mujer, comenzó a publicar su propio periódico The Lily, una publicación completamente dedicada a la mujer y a sus intereses y desde donde intentaba enfocar los temas femeninos – educación, disciplina, moda y sufragio – desde un punto de vista reformista, reclamando un papel más destacable e igualitario de la mujer en la sociedad.

      En 1850. a través de su periódico, presentó un nuevo estilo de vestuario para las mujeres “activas” inspirado en los trajes tradicionales turcos. La presentación de sus pantalones para mujeres provocaron una oleada de indignación entre la sociedad e insultos de la prensa – de hecho existe la expresión “making a bloomer “ que podría traducirse como meter la pata, cuyo origen fue la presentación de los citados pantalones y que toma el apellido de Amelia como parte de la expresión.

      Estos pantalones eran como unas enaguas largas, flojas y ligeramente hinchadas que se estrechaban en el tobillo; sobre ellas iba una falda más corta que las habituales faldas victorianas. Aunque el diseño desde el punto de vista estético puede resultar discutible, lo cierto es que resultaban cómodos y fueron la antesala de los pantalones para uso femenino.

      Fueron muchas las mujeres que se atrevieron a usarlos, a pesar de ser ridiculizadas y de las burlas que tuvieron que soportar; algunas los usaban por el convencimiento de que representaban un avance para la comodidad de las mujeres lejos del encorsetamiento que imponía la moda victoriana; otras lo hicieron por reivindicación, usando los “bloomers” como un símbolo de la igualdad de derechos de la mujer.

      Pero fueron las feministas las primeras en dejar de usarlos, ya que pensaron que los bloomers estaban desviando la atención de sus reivindicaciones y tenían miedo no ser tomadas en serio por sus ideas.


      Así, el bloomerismo – termino acuñado en la época para denominar esta moda – fue perdiendo adeptos, pero sorprendentemente volvió para convertirse en todo un fenómeno representante de lo moderno, en 1890, con la llegada de la “fiebre de la bicicleta”, ya que era mucho más cómodo montar en bici con bloomers y no con faldas. Eso sí, su renacer trajo consigo alguna variación estética, como un tejido más adecuado, como el tweed, y la supresión de la falda superpuesta.

      Después del revuelo causado por los revolucionarios pantalones, Amelia y su marido se mudaron a Ohio, donde él publicó Western Home Visitor y ella vendió su The Lily. Un par de años después se mudaron a Iowa; pero en ambos lugares y a pesar de no tener ya su propia publicación Amelia Bloomer siguió participando activamente a favor de los derechos de la mujer y colaborando con grupos y asociaciones sufragistas. Murió el 31 de Diciembre de 1894 en Council Bluffs, Iowa.

    • J’avais pas joint l’image d’illustration que fournis libé et qui contiens une autre manifestation de la continuité de la misogynie


      Sur la droite de l’image
      « Le trottin de modiste ne pourra plus se troussé hélas ! »
      qui rappel le « troussage de domestique » et « droit d’importuné » dans lequel nous croupissons toujours.
      #culture_du_viol #humour

      Ca rappel l’importance du pantalon pour les femmes, c’est pour elle une protection contre le viol et les agressions sexuelles et ceci interdit par les hommes et les femmes de droite.

    • Je note ce paragraphe sur le #vélo et l’entrave faite aux #femmes de pratiquer la #bicyclette.

      A Chicago, la répression va loin également : le port du bloomer est interdit. La bicyclette est partout aux Etats-Unis, comme le relate la Petite Gironde du 16 juin 1895 : « Rien ne manque à la gloire de la bicyclette en Amérique, pas même la persécution ! […] Ce projet est ainsi rédigé : […] il sera illégal pour toute personne de sexe féminin […] de se promener ou d’essayer de se promener en bicycle ou de se montrer dans les rues, avenues ou voies publiques habillée ou déguisée en costume à jupe courte, vulgairement connu sous le nom de bloomers. » « Il est clair qu’interdire à une femme la culotte et le jupon court pour aller à bicyclette cela équivaut à lui interdire la bicyclette », conclut le journal : « On ne peut songer pédaler avec une robe à traîne. »

  • C Powers
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/mix-delivery/c-powers-

    The American underground is full of DJs, producers and promoters (often the same person) pushing distinct regional styles outside of the spotlight of the dance music media. These artists are often located outside of Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, situating them even further from the ever-churning hype cycle, although it’s not outlandish to say that America’s regional scenes are the driving force behind dance music’s upsurge in this country. Savannah, Georgia’s Chris Powers aka C Powershas existed on both sides of the conversation, a seasoned practitioner of kinetic American rave sounds who has also spent time in London as No Pain In Pop‘s in-house DJ, contributed to the Houndstooth-signed 18+ project and thrown parties with a range of international talent. Powers’ personal output is as (...)

    #electro #house #idm #letfield #strange #electro,house,idm,letfield,strange
    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/mix-delivery/c-powers-_05826__1.mp3

  • JOHNNY MAFIA have long been high rollers in the burgeoning post-garage punk rackets gripping the country of France over the last few years.
    With their signature reverb-soaked slap-backed fuzzed out sonic attack, Johnny Mafia is ready to conquer the wider world of #rock'n'roll
    Next album produced by Jim Diamond and will release “Princes de l’Amour” Nov 9 2018 on London’s Dirty Water Records

    https://johnnymafia.bandcamp.com/track/crystal-clear


    https://johnnymafia.bandcamp.com/track/bad-michel-3

    https://johnnymafia.bandcamp.com/track/say-yeah

    #bandcamp

  • Info prise chez Nova dont je ne suis pas sur du rapport à l’underground.

    « Underground Radio Directory, et recense des radios underground de 28 différents pays, de Tokyo a Glasgow en passant par Kansas City mais aussi Marrakech et São Paulo, il y en a pour tous les goûts et on y fait de très belles découvertes. »

    Underground Radio Directory.
    http://www.undergroundradiodirectory.com/stations

    Number of stations : 86

    10TwentyRadio

    Bristol, England

    more info...

    199Radio

    London, England

    more info...

    20ft Radio

    Kiev, Ukraine

    more info...

    2Day Radio

    Aberdeen, Scotland

    more info...

    8 Ball Radio

    New York City, USA

    more info...

    8K.NZ

    Christchurch, New Zealand

    more info...

    Automat Radio

    Worldwide

    more info...

    Balamii

    London, England

    more info...

    Basso Radio

    Helsinki, Finland

    more info...

    BBC Radio 6 Music

    London, England

    more info...

    Berlin Community Radio

    Berlin, Germany

    more info...

    Bloop

    London, England

    more info...

  • Israeli cyber firm negotiated advanced attack capabilities sale with Saudis, Haaretz reveals

    Just months before crown prince launched a purge against his opponents, NSO offered Saudi intelligence officials a system to hack into cellular phones ■ NSO: We abide the law, our products are used to combat crime and terrorism

    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israeli-company-negotiated-to-sell-advanced-cybertech-to-the-saudi

    The Israeli company NSO Group Technologies offered Saudi Arabia a system that hacks cellphones, a few months before Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman began his purge of regime opponents, according to a complaint to the Israel Police now under investigation.
    But NSO, whose development headquarters is in Herzliya, says that it has acted according to the law and its products are used in the fight against crime and terror.
    To really understand Israel and the Middle East - subscribe to Haaretz
    Either way, a Haaretz investigation based on testimony and photos, as well as travel and legal documents, reveals the Saudis’ behind-the-scenes attempts to buy Israeli technology.
    In June 2017, a diverse group gathered in a hotel room in Vienna, a city between East and West that for decades has been a center for espionage, defense-procurement contacts and unofficial diplomatic meetings.
    Keep updated: Sign up to our newsletter
    Email* Sign up

    Arriving at the hotel were Abdullah al-Malihi, a close associate of Prince Turki al-Faisal – a former head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services – and another senior Saudi official, Nasser al-Qahtani, who presented himself as the deputy of the current intelligence chief. Their interlocutors were two Israeli businessmen, representatives of NSO, who presented to the Saudis highly advanced technology.

    >> Israel’s cyber-spy industry helps world dictators hunt dissidents and gays | Revealed
    In 2017, NSO was avidly promoting its new technology, its Pegasus 3 software, an espionage tool so sophisticated that it does not depend on the victim clicking on a link before the phone is breached.
    During the June 2017 meeting, NSO officials showed a PowerPoint presentation of the system’s capabilities. To demonstrate it, they asked Qahtani to go to a nearby mall, buy an iPhone and give them its number. During that meeting they showed how this was enough to hack into the new phone and record and photograph the participants in the meeting.
    The meeting in Vienna wasn’t the first one between the two sides. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has recently expressed pride in the tightening ties with Gulf states, with Israel’s strength its technology. The message is clear: Israel is willing to sell these countries security-related technologies, and they forge closer ties with Israel in the strategic battle against Iran.
    >> $6 billion of Iranian money: Why Israeli firm Black Cube really went after Obama’s team
    According to the complaint, the affair began with a phone call received by a man identified as a European businessman with connections in the Gulf states. On the line was W., an Israeli dealing in defense-related technologies and who operates through Cyprus-based companies. (Many defense-related companies do business in Cyprus because of its favorable tax laws.) W. asked his European interlocutor to help him do business in the Gulf.

    FILE Photo: Two of the founders of NSO, Shalev Julio and Omri Lavi.
    Among the European businessman’s acquaintances were the two senior Saudi officials, Malihi and Qahtani.
    On February 1, 2017, W. and the businessman met for the first time. The main topic was the marketing of cyberattack software. Unlike ordinary weapons systems, the price depends only on a customer’s eagerness to buy the system.
    The following month, the European businessman traveled to a weapons exhibition in the United Arab Emirates, where a friend introduced him to Malihi, the Saudi businessman.
    In April 2017, a meeting was arranged in Vienna between Malihi, Qahtani and representatives of Israeli companies. Two more meetings subsequently took place with officials of Israeli companies in which other Israelis were present. These meetings took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Limassol, Cyprus, where Israeli cybercompanies often meet with foreign clients.
    >> Snowden: Israeli firm’s spyware was used to track Khashoggi
    The meetings were attended by W. and his son. They were apparently friendly: In photographs documenting one of them, W. and Qahtani are shown after a hunting trip, with the Saudi aiming a rifle at a dead animal.
    In the Vienna meeting of April 2017, the Saudis presented a list of 23 systems they sought to acquire. Their main interest was cybersystems. For a few dozens of millions of dollars, they would be able to hack into the phones of regime opponents in Saudi Arabia and around the world and collect classified information about them.
    According to the European businessman, the Saudis, already at the first meeting, passed along to the representatives of one of the companies details of a Twitter account of a person who had tweeted against the regime. They wanted to know who was behind the account, but the Israeli company refused to say.

    Offices of Israeli NSO Group company in Herzliya, Israel, Aug. 25, 2016Daniella Cheslow/AP
    In the June 2017 meeting, the Saudis expressed interest in NSO’s technology.
    According to the European businessman, in July 2017 another meeting was held between the parties, the first at W.’s home in Cyprus. W. proposed selling Pegasus 3 software to the Saudis for $208 million.
    Malihi subsequently contacted W. and invited him to Riyadh to present the software to members of the royal family. The department that oversees defense exports in Israel’s Defense Ministry and the ministry’s department for defense assistance, responsible for encouraging exports, refused to approve W.’s trip.
    Using the initials for the defense assistance department, W. reportedly said “screw the D.A.” and chartered a small plane, taking with him NSO’s founder, Shalev Hulio, to the meetings in the Gulf. According to the European businessman, the pair were there for three days, beginning on July 18, 2017.
    At these meetings, the European businessman said, an agreement was made to sell the Pegasus 3 to the Saudis for $55 million.
    According to the European businessman, the details of the deal became known to him only through his contacts in the defense assistance department. He said he had agreed orally with W. that his commission in the deal would be 5 percent – $2.75 million.
    But W. and his son stopped answering the European businessman’s phone calls. Later, the businessman told the police, he received an email from W.’s lawyer that contained a fake contract in which the company would agree to pay only his expenses and to consider whether to pay him a bonus if the deal went through.
    The European businessman, assisted by an Israeli lawyer, filed a complaint in April 2018. He was questioned by the police’s national fraud squad and was told that the affair had been transferred to another unit specializing in such matters. Since then he has been contacted by the income tax authorities, who are apparently checking whether there has been any unreported income from the deal.
    The European businessman’s claims seem to be substantiated by correspondence Haaretz has obtained between Cem Koksal, a Turkish businessman living in the UAE, and W.’s lawyers in Israel. The European businessman said in his complaint that Koksal was involved in mediating the deal.
    In a letter sent by Koksal’s lawyer in February of this year, he demanded his portion from W. In a response letter, sent in early March, W.’s attorney denied the existence of the deal. The deal had not been signed, the letter claimed, due to Koksal’s negligence, therefore he was due no commission or compensation of any kind.
    These issues have a wider context. From the claims by the European businessman and Koksal’s letter, it emerges that the deal was signed in the summer of 2017, a few months before Crown Prince Mohammed began his purge of regime opponents. During that purge, the Saudi regime arrested and tortured members of the royal family and Saudi businessmen accused of corruption. The Saudis also held Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri for a few days in a Riyadh hotel.
    In the following months the Saudis continued their hunt for regime opponents living abroad, which raised international attention only when the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul came to light in October.
    It has recently been claimed that NSO helped the Saudi regime surveil its opponents. According to an article in Forbes magazine and reports from the Canadian cyber-related think tank Citizen Lab, among the surveillance targets were the satirist Ghanem Almasrir and human rights activist Yahya Asiri, who live in London, and Omar Abdulaziz, who lives in exile in Canada.
    These three men were in contact with Khashoggi. Last month, Edward Snowden, who uncovered the classified surveillance program of the U.S. National Security Agency, claimed that Pegasus had been used by the Saudi authorities to surveil Khashoggi.
    “They are the worst of the worst,” Snowden said of NSO, whose people he accused of aiding and abetting human rights violations.
    NSO’s founders and chief executives are Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulio. The company is registered in Cyprus but its development headquarters is in Herzliya. In 2014 the company was sold to private equity firm Francisco Partners based on a valuation of $250 million.
    Francisco Partners did not respond to Haaretz’s request for comment.
    In May, Verint Systems offered to buy NSO for $1 billion, but the offer was rejected. The company is awash in cash. Earlier this month all its employees went on vacation in Phuket, Thailand. Netta Barzilai, Lior Suchard, the Ma Kashur Trio and the band Infected Mushroom were also flown there to entertain them.
    The Pegasus system developed by NSO was a “one-click system,” meaning that the victim had to press on a link sent to him through phishing. The new system no longer requires this. Only the number of the SIM card is needed to hack into the phone. It’s unknown how Pegasus does this.
    Technology sources believe that the technology either exploits breaches in the cellphone’s modem, the part that receives messages from the antenna, or security breaches in the apps installed on a phone. As soon as a phone is hacked, the speaker and camera can be used for recording conversations. Even encoded apps such as WhatsApp can be monitored.
    NSO’s operations are extremely profitable.
    The company, which conceals its client list, has been linked to countries that violate human rights. NSO says its products are used in the fight against crime and terror, but in certain countries the authorities identify anti-regime activists and journalists as terrorists and subject them to surveillance.
    In 2012, NSO sold an earlier version of Pegasus to Mexico to help it combat the drug cartel in that country. According to the company, all its contracts include a clause specifically permitting the use of its software only to “investigate and prevent crime or acts of terror.” But The New York Times reported in 2016 that the Mexican authorities also surveilled journalists and lawyers.
    Following that report, Mexican victims of the surveillance filed a lawsuit in Israel against NSO last September. This year, The New York Times reported that the software had been sold to the UAE, where it helped the authorities track leaders of neighboring countries as well as a London newspaper editor.
    In response to these reports, NSO said it “operated and operates solely in compliance with defense export laws and under the guidelines and close oversight of all elements of the defense establishment, including all matters relating to export policies and licenses.
    “The information presented by Haaretz about the company and its products and their use is wrong, based on partial rumors and gossip. The presentation distorts reality.
    “The company has an independent, external ethics committee such as no other company like it has. It includes experts in legal affairs and international relations. The committee examines every deal so that the use of the system will take place only according to permitted objectives of investigating and preventing terror and crime.
    “The company’s products assist law enforcement agencies in protecting people around the world from terror attacks, drug cartels, child kidnappers for ransom, pedophiles, and other criminals and terrorists.
    “In contrast to newspaper reports, the company does not sell its products or allow their use in many countries. Moreover, the company greatly limits the extent to which its customers use its products and is not involved in the operation of the systems by customers.”
    A statement on W.’s behalf said: “This is a false and completely baseless complaint, leverage for an act of extortion by the complainants, knowing that there is no basis for their claims and that if they would turn to the relevant courts they would be immediately rejected.”

  • Is the World Ready for #self-driving cars?
    https://hackernoon.com/is-the-world-ready-for-self-driving-cars-bf41523f993a?source=rss----3a81

    The self-driving Audi R8 is a car model produced by Audi and owned by Tony Stark. It first appeared in Avengers: Age of UltronSelf-driving cars are prowling the streets of California, Paris, London, Singapore and Beijing. Intel says, that the driverless tech will add $7 trillion to the global economy and save hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few decades. Also, it will devastate the car industry and its associated gas stations, drive-thrus, taxi drivers, and truckers.Some people will benefit. Many will damage.This article takes a look at the #future of self-driving cars. But first, let’s look at exactly what a driverless car is.What is a Self-driving Car? And How Does It Work?A self-driving car, also known as a robot car, autonomous car, or driverless car, is a vehicle that is (...)

    #self-driving-cars #automotive-industry #automotive

  • Communisme, Stalinisme, Socialisme, Fascisme, Collectivisme, Anarchisme

    Une fois n’est pas coûtume, je vais reproduire l’essentiel d’un débat qui s’est déroulé sur l’excellente liste de diffusion de géographie critique (dite liste des « crits »).

    From Dr Hillary J. Shaw
    Visiting Fellow - Centre for Urban Research on Austerity
    Department of Politics and Public Policy
    De Montfort University

    The problem with books is once you read them you can’t un-read them.

    European politics and history in the 20 C starts to look a little different once you read Hayek, F A (1971) The Road To Serfdom, Routledge, London UK From the first few pages of this book, "...Stalinism was described even by a friend of Lenin as ‘superfascist’, ‘more ruthless than fascism’, with similar opinions being expressed by British politician Chamberlain, and by British writer Mr F A Vogt (Hayek, 1971: 20-1). The vicious fighting in 1920s Europe between Fascists and Communists was precisely because ‘they competed for the support of the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic’ (Hayek, 1971: 22). One thing that all Collectivists share is intolerance for any dissenting, therefore threatening, opinions, rather like the strong religious factions of 16 century Europe..."

    Communism - http://fooddeserts.org/images/000Russia.htm
    WW2 - http://fooddeserts.org/images/050FraGermany.htm

    Un certain Reed (pas d’autres infos) répond :

    One thing that all Collectivists share is intolerance for any dissenting, therefore threatening, opinions... Then, One thing that all vulgar individualists share is a perfectly immoral disregard for mutual obligations... I’d say capitalism — marked as it is by market imperatives rather than opportunities — `is “collectivist” in the extreme, which is probably related to its tendency to decay into fascism.

    I also find it interesting that the anti-fascism of partisans is, in your formulation, pitched as a Bad Thing. Meanwhile, the inertia (or complicity) of liberals goes unmentioned.

    But, sure, the uses of Hayek are endless, as every anti-democratic and reactionary movement in the U.S. has thoroughly demonstrated, especially the anarcho-capitalist types who (surprise!) fly their black and yellow flags at the same rallies where the Klansmen and neo-nazis gather to cheerlead genocide.

    Hillary J. Shaw again en réponse :

    1) yes, capitalism, especially when globalised, can easily become ’Collectivist’, Totalitarian, even., Renarkably, even Adam Smith, way back in 1755, spoke of this tendency. And look now at the oligopolies we have in e.g. supermarkets, banking.

    2) Collectivism, generally, DOES demand uniformity of opinion - that’s almost a circular tautology. Can you give any major examples where it hasn’t - I’d love to know. And it was Hayek who used the term ’Collectivist’ for both Stalinism and 1940s fascism, by the way, not me.

    3) I said nothing about anti-fascism of partisans here, such ’partisans’ are often Communist in ideology, but may be ’anarchist’ leaning (although anarchism has often evolved into a very Collectivist socialism, ironically). As fighters against Naziism in the 1940s, they wree a great thing, as was anything that helped end Hitler’s tyranny and WW2.

    4) On this Hayekian analysis, the Klansmen, as neo-nazis, would be portrayed as Collectivist too - so if you percieve me as anti-Collectivist 9and I am no admirer of Stalin), then I must be (and indeed am) anti Klansmen too.

    Yes Hayek can be ’used for many things’ - but doesn’t that apply to almost all significant researchers, academics, in the social sciences and indeed beyond? Including for sure Marx, and probably Aadam Smith too. Does that mean we should ditch them, and the rest of these thinkers too?

    Noel Cass, de l’université de Lancaster :

    “anarchism has often evolved into a very Collectivist socialism, ironically”

    – just, no, Hilary.

    After socialist revolutions, anarchism has been crushed by authoritarian socialists. Please desist from sweeping political generalisations that just get up people’s noses.

    Hillary J. Shaw répond :

    Well yes and no. Only Wikipedia but seems to be broadly correct here

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism

    While opposition to the state is central,[16] anarchism specifically entails opposing authority or hierarchical organisation in the conduct of all human relations.[17][18][19] Anarchism is usually considered a far-left ideology[20][21][22] and much of anarchist economics and anarchist legal philosophy reflects anti-authoritarian interpretations of communism, collectivism, syndicalism, mutualism, or participatory economics.

    However....
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism#Spanish_Revolution

    In response to the army rebellion, an anarchist-inspired movement of peasants and workers, supported by armed militias, took control of Barcelona and of large areas of rural Spain where they collectivised the land.[128] However, the anarchists were losing ground even before the fascist victory in 1939 in a bitter struggle with the Stalinists, who controlled much of the distribution of military aid to the Republicans cause from the Soviet Union. According to Noam Chomsky, "the communists were mainly responsible for the destruction of the Spanish anarchists. Not just in Catalonia—the communist armies mainly destroyed the collectives elsewhere. The communists basically acted as the police force of the security system of the Republic and were very much opposed to the anarchists, partially because Stalin still hoped at that time to have some kind of pact with Western countries against Adolf Hitler

    My point in the whole of this is that the Left is a very complex concept that can range from being as totalitarian as some fascist regimes (e.g in the case of Stalin) right through to more idealistic schemes that promote individual flourishing (e.g. some anarchists) - however those who create the latter such schemes, however well-meaning, must beware they do not lapse/evolve into/get taken over by the more collectivist / dictatorial ones.

    Antony Ince, géographe de l’université de Cardiff :

    First of all, Hillary, you are very nearly correct when you point out the Spanish Civil War. There was a faction among the anarchists who believed that it would be strategically useful to participate in the Republican government in order to enhance their influence, especially in the anti-fascist regions where they were less powerful.

    However, this did not necessarily involve a change of ideology; it was an effort - a flawed one, admittedly, spurred on by concerns of war - to instrumentally use state institutions to further the anarchist cause. As it happened, it didn’t end well.

    Second, I would like to emphasise that “collectivism” is not a singular term and is not owned by totalitarianisms such as Stalinism et al. To begin, fascism’s conception of collectivism is one of national unity, a cross-class alliance in the supposed interest of national ’renewal’ or ’renaissance’ that is only collective in the sense that a powerful central state is in control of the polity, and which often features some very crude forms of nationalisation. Soviet collectivism operates functionally in a similar way (as predicted by the anarchists long before 1917!), although its goal is oriented towards the elimination of class relations.

    Of course, in practice, it simply created a new class structure by occupying the same state institutions and relations of production as the old order and failing to eliminate capital when it had the chance.

    With regards to anarchism and collectivism, the story is different again. Aside from some streams of exclusively individualist anarchism influenced by the likes of Max Stirner, anarchism is more accurately described as “anarchist-communism”. It is a left-libertarian form of collectivism that seeks to respect individual agency while also promoting the virtues of co-operation (sometimes referred to as ’free association’).

    There are many examples of this, such as the regions controlled by the CNT in civil war Spain, the vast regions of Ukraine voluntarily collectivised along anarchist lines by the Makhnovists during the Russian revolution, and more recently the principles on which the Rojava region in Syria is managed. (Of course, there are the Zapatistas too, but interestingly it turns out that their form of agrarian anarchism emerged from libertarian Marxist ideas in the early 1980s). Anyway, for the most part, anarchist experiments have tended to end not by a drift towards authoritarianism but by annihilation at the hands of authoritarians.

    In Spain, of course the fascists were largely to blame, but also the USSR-backed Communist Party saw the anarchists as a greater threat to their prospects than Franco; for the Makhnovists, it was Trotsky’s Red Armies who ended their voluntary collectivism in the Ukrainian countryside. In Rojava, if their Bookchin-inspired libertarian municipalism doesn’t survive (which I sincerely hope it does!), it is likely to be at the hands of the proto-fascist Turkish state.

    So, let’s be a little more nuanced with the notion of ’collectivism’, what it means, and what values and organisational logics it embodies. There are multiple collectivisms, and they operate along as much an axis of authoritarian-libertarian as left-right.

    Noel Cass dans un dernier élan :

    I was tempted to shout “Remember Kronstadt!”, lob a grenade, and duck !!

  • Mall Grab
    http://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/mix-delivery/mall-grab--2

    Dance music is supposed to be about fun,” 23-year-old Jordan Alexander tells us. “It’s such an issue these days. A lot of people aren’t willing to just enjoy themselves and focus on the moment – instead, they’re Snapchatting the whole night.”

    This no-nonsense approach, alongside killer releases and a busy schedule, has seen Mall Grab become the poster boy of the blossoming lo-fi house sound in 2016. Hailing from New South Wales, the 23-year-old Australian has been impossible to miss, and has relocated to London due to high European demand for his fun-filled, on-point DJ sets. Ready for a #jungle Special Retrospective selection (...)

    #jungle
    http://www.radiopanik.org/media/sounds/mix-delivery/mall-grab--2_05739__1.mp3

  • British academic accused of spying jailed for life in UAE | World news | The Guardian

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/21/british-academic-matthew-hedges-accused-of-spying-jailed-for-life-in-ua

    Les terrains de thèse les plus risqués au monde : les Etats du Golfe.

    A British academic who has been accused of spying for the UK government in the United Arab Emirates after travelling to Dubai to conduct research has been sentenced to life in jail.

    Matthew Hedges, 31, has been in a UAE prison for more than six months. The Durham University student who went to the country to research his PhD thesis, was handed the sentence at an Abu Dhabi court in a hearing that lasted less than five minutes, and with no lawyer present.

    Hedges was detained in May at Dubai airport as he was leaving the country following a research trip, and was held in solitary confinement for five months.

    The UAE attorney general, Hamad al-Shamsi, said Hedges was accused of “spying for a foreign country, jeopardising the military, political and economic security of the state”.

    Hedges has denied the charges, and maintains that he was in the country to research the impact of the Arab spring on the UAE’s foreign policy.