person:donald trump

  • GBC - Gibraltar News - GBC TV and Radio Gibraltar
    https://www.gbc.gi/news/gib-authorities-and-royal-marines-board-and-detain-supertanker-en-route-syria

    Gibraltar Port and Law Enforcement agencies, assisted by a detachmentof Royal Marines, boarded and detained a super tanker carrying crude oil to Syria in the early hours of Thursday morning.

    This followed information giving the Gibraltar Government reasonable grounds to believe that the vessel, the Grace 1, was acting in breach of European Union sanctions against Syria.

    The operation took place overnight as the giant vessel sailed into Gibraltar waters.

    The Government says it has reason to believe that the Grace 1 was carrying its shipment of crude oil to the Banyas Refinery in Syria.The refinery is the property of an entity subject to European Union sanctions against Syria.

    #piraterie #gibraltar reste un atout géopolitique

    en arabe : https://www.raialyoum.com/index.php/%d8%b3%d9%84%d8%b7%d8%a7%d8%aa-%d8%ac%d8%a8%d9%84-%d8%b7%d8%a7%d8%b1%d9%8
    où il est précisé que le navire est sous pavillon de Panama et que le pétrole serait iranien.

    • https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1177558/lambassadeur-britannique-en-iran-convoque-apres-la-saisie-dun-petroli

      Dans un communiqué, le gouvernement de Gibraltar, territoire britannique situé à la pointe sud de l’Espagne, dit avoir de bonnes raisons de croire que les cuves du Grace 1 contiennent du pétrole destiné à la raffinerie syrienne de Banyas. Le gouvernement syrien est la cible de sanctions de l’Union européenne depuis mai 2011, date du début de la répression sanglante des manifestations pour la démocratie par le régime de Bachar el-Assad.

      D’après l’outil de données cartographiques Refinitiv Eikon mapping, le Grace 1 a chargé du brut iranien le 17 avril dernier, ce qui constituerait une violation des sanctions américaines sur les exportations de pétrole iranien rétablies l’an dernier après la décision de Donald Trump de retirer les Etats-Unis de l’accord de 2015 sur le nucléaire iranien.

    • https://lloydslist.maritimeintelligence.informa.com/LL1128207/Gibraltar-tanker-seizure-triggers-IranUK-diplomatic-row

      (...)

      The incident triggered debate over the lawfulness of the tanker seizure and detention which will be tested in Gibraltar’s Supreme Court in coming days.

      Local maritime and admiralty lawyers have been instructed for the Captain of the Port, financial secretary and the attorney general, Lloyd’s List understands, ahead of what is expected to be protracted legal debate.

      The acting foreign minister of Spain — which claims the waters as its own and does not recognise British sovereignty — said Britain acted at the behest of the US and the country was assessing the detention’s legal implications.

      The US has not shown the same vigilance for Iran-China crude flows, which have been taking place without action. Iranian- and Chinese-owned or controlled ships have been loading cargoes since the May 1 ending of waivers allowing some countries limited imports. About five cargoes have been discharged in Syria.

      Lloyd’s List understands that the owner of the very large crude carrier is Russian Titan Shipping, a subsidiary of Dubai-based oil and energy shipping company TNC Gulf, which has clear Iranian links.

      While Grace 1 has a complex ownership chain that is not unusual for many internationally trading vessels, its executives listed on LinkedIn have Iranian university and technical qualifications, or list their names in Farsi, the Iranian language.

      The ship’s current class and insurance is unknown according to databases. Lloyd’s Register withdrew class in January, 2019, as did former P&I insurers Swedish Club, at the same time as the vessel arrived to spend a month at the Bandar-e Taheri single buoy mooring area in Iranian waters, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence data.

      The ship’s opaque ownership and operating chain is complicated further by company websites linked to the tanker not operating. The European Commission-operated Equasis website lists the shipmanager as Singapore-based Iships Management. However, the website is under construction and its telephone number is not in service. Websites for Russian Titan Shipping and TNC Gulf are also not working. LinkedIn lists Captain Asadpour as the executive managing director, saying he has also been president of the Georgia-based Russian Shipping Lines for 11 years.

  • View from Nowhere. Is it the press’s job to create a community that transcends borders?

    A few years ago, on a plane somewhere between Singapore and Dubai, I read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983). I was traveling to report on the global market for passports—how the ultrawealthy can legally buy citizenship or residence virtually anywhere they like, even as 10 million stateless people languish, unrecognized by any country. In the process, I was trying to wrap my head around why national identity meant so much to so many, yet so little to my passport-peddling sources. Their world was the very image of Steve Bannon’s globalist nightmare: where you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too many passports.

    Anderson didn’t address the sale of citizenship, which only took off in earnest in the past decade; he did argue that nations, nationalism, and nationality are about as organic as Cheez Whiz. The idea of a nation, he writes, is a capitalist chimera. It is a collective sense of identity processed, shelf-stabilized, and packaged before being disseminated, for a considerable profit, to a mass audience in the form of printed books, news, and stories. He calls this “print-capitalism.”

    Per Anderson, after the printing press was invented, nearly 600 years ago, enterprising booksellers began publishing the Bible in local vernacular languages (as opposed to the elitist Latin), “set[ting] the stage for the modern nation” by allowing ordinary citizens to participate in the same conversations as the upper classes. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the proliferation (and popularity) of daily newspapers further collapsed time and space, creating an “extraordinary mass ceremony” of reading the same things at the same moment.

    “An American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his 240,000,000–odd fellow Americans,” Anderson wrote. “He has no idea of what they are up to at any one time.” But with the knowledge that others are reading the same news, “he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity.”

    Should the press be playing a role in shaping not national identities, but transnational ones—a sense that we’re all in it together?

    Of course, national presses enabled more explicit efforts by the state itself to shape identity. After the US entered World War I, for instance, President Woodrow Wilson set out to make Americans more patriotic through his US Committee on Public Information. Its efforts included roping influential mainstream journalists into advocating American-style democracy by presenting US involvement in the war in a positive light, or simply by referring to Germans as “Huns.” The committee also monitored papers produced by minorities to make sure they supported the war effort not as Indians, Italians, or Greeks, but as Americans. Five Irish-American papers were banned, and the German-American press, reacting to negative stereotypes, encouraged readers to buy US bonds to support the war effort.

    The US media played an analogous role in selling the public on the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But ever since then, in the digital economy, its influence on the national consciousness has waned. Imagined Communities was published seven years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, twenty-two years before Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat, and a couple of decades before the internet upended print-capitalism as the world knew it (one of Anderson’s footnotes is telling, if quaint: “We still have no giant multinationals in the world of publishing”).

    Since Trump—a self-described nationalist—became a real contender for the US presidency, many news organizations have taken to looking inward: consider the running obsession with the president’s tweets, for instance, or the nonstop White House palace intrigue (which the president invites readily).

    Meanwhile, the unprofitability of local and regional papers has contributed to the erosion of civics, which, down the line, makes it easier for billionaires to opt out of old “imagined communities” and join new ones based on class and wealth, not citizenship. And given the challenges humanity faces—climate change, mass migration, corporate hegemony, and our relationships to new technologies—even if national papers did make everyone feel like they shared the same narrative, a renewed sense of national pride would prove impotent in fighting world-historic threats that know no borders.

    Should the press, then, be playing an analogous role in shaping not national identities, but transnational ones—a sense that we’re all in it together? If it was so important in shaping national identity, can it do so on a global scale?

    Like my passport-buying subjects, I am what Theresa May, the former British prime minister, might call a “citizen of nowhere.” I was born in one place to parents from another, grew up in a third, and have lived and traveled all over. That informs my perspective: I want deeply for there to be a truly cosmopolitan press corps, untethered from national allegiances, regional biases, class divisions, and the remnants of colonial exploitation. I know that’s utopian; the international working class is hardly a lucrative demographic against which publishers can sell ads. But we seem to be living in a time of considerable upheaval and opportunity. Just as the decline of religiously and imperially organized societies paved the way for national alternatives, then perhaps today there is a chance to transcend countries’ boundaries, too.

    Does the US media help create a sense of national identity? If nationalism means putting the interests of one nation—and what its citizens are interested in—before more universal concerns, then yes. Most journalists working for American papers, websites, and TV write in English with a national audience (or regional time zone) in mind, which affects how we pitch, source, frame, and illustrate a story—which, in turn, influences our readers, their country’s politics, and, down the line, the world. But a news peg isn’t an ideological form of nationalism so much as a practical or methodological one. The US press feeds off of more pernicious nationalisms, too: Donald Trump’s false theory about Barack Obama being “secretly” Kenyan, disseminated by the likes of Fox and The Daily Caller, comes to mind.

    That isn’t to say that global news outlets don’t exist in the US. When coaxing subscribers, the Financial Times, whose front page often includes references to a dozen different countries, openly appeals to their cosmopolitanism. “Be a global citizen. Become an FT Subscriber,” read a recent banner ad, alongside a collage featuring the American, Chinese, Japanese, Australian, and European Union flags (though stories like the recent “beginner’s guide to buying a private island” might tell us something about what kind of global citizen they’re appealing to).

    “I don’t think we try to shape anyone’s identity at all,” Gillian Tett, the paper’s managing editor for the US, says. “We recognize two things: that the world is more interconnected today than it’s ever been, and that these connections are complex and quite opaque. We think it’s critical to try to illuminate them.”

    For Tett, who has a PhD in social anthropology, money serves as a “neutral, technocratic” starting point through which to understand—and tie together—the world. “Most newspapers today tend to start with an interest in politics or events, and that inevitably leads you to succumb to tribalism, however hard you try [not to],” Tett explains. “If you look at the world through money—how is money going around the world, who’s making and losing it and why?—out of that you lead to political, cultural, foreign-policy stories.”

    Tett’s comments again brought to mind Imagined Communities: Anderson notes that, in 18th-century Caracas, newspapers “began essentially as appendages of the market,” providing commercial news about ships coming in, commodity prices, and colonial appointments, as well as a proto–Vows section for the upper crust to hate-read in their carriages. “The newspaper of Caracas quite naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these ships, brides, bishops, and prices belonged,” he wrote. “In time, of course, it was only to be expected that political elements would enter in.”

    Yesterday’s aristocracy is today’s passport-buying, globe-trotting one percent. The passport brokers I got to know also pitched clients with the very same promise of “global citizenship” (it sounds less louche than “buy a new passport”)—by taking out ads in the Financial Times. Theirs is exactly the kind of neoliberal “globalism” that nationalist politicians like Trump have won elections denouncing (often hypocritically) as wanting “the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much.” Isn’t upper-crust glibness about borders, boundaries, and the value of national citizenship part of what helped give us this reactionary nativism in the first place?

    “I suspect what’s been going on with Brexit and maybe Trump and other populist movements [is that] people. . . see ‘global’ as a threat to local communities and businesses rather than something to be welcomed,” Tett says. “But if you’re an FT reader, you see it as benign or descriptive.”

    Among the largest news organizations in the world is Reuters, with more than 3,000 journalists and photographers in 120 countries. It is part of Thomson Reuters, a truly global firm. Reuters does not take its mandate lightly: a friend who works there recently sent me a job posting for an editor in Gdynia, which, Google clarified for me, is a city in the Pomeranian Voivodeship of Poland.

    Reuters journalists cover everything from club sports to international tax evasion. They’re outsourcing quick hits about corporate earnings to Bangalore, assembling teams on multiple continents to tackle a big investigation, shedding or shuffling staff under corporate reorganizations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, “more than half our business is serving financial customers,” Stephen Adler, the editor in chief, tells me. “That has little to do with what country you’re from. It’s about information: a central-bank action in Europe or Japan may be just as important as everything else.”

    Institutionally, “it’s really important and useful that we don’t have one national HQ,” Adler adds. “That’s the difference between a global news organization and one with a foreign desk. For us, nothing is foreign.” That approach won Reuters this year’s international Pulitzer Prize for uncovering the mass murder of the Rohingya in Myanmar (two of the reporters were imprisoned as a result, and since freed); it also comes through especially sharply in daily financial stories: comprehensive, if dry, compendiums of who-what-where-when-why that recognize the global impact of national stories, and vice versa. A recent roundup of stock movements included references to the US Fed, China trade talks, Brexit, monetary policy around the world, and the price of gold.

    Adler has led the newsroom since 2011, and a lot has changed in the world. (I worked at Reuters between 2011 and 2013, first as Adler’s researcher and later as a reporter; Adler is the chair of CJR’s board.) Shortly after Trump’s election, Adler wrote a memo affirming the organization’s commitment to being fair, honest, and resourceful. He now feels more strongly than ever about judiciously avoiding biases—including national ones. “Our ideology and discipline around putting personal feelings and nationality aside has been really helpful, because when you think about how powerful local feelings are—revolutions, the Arab Spring—we want you writing objectively and dispassionately.”

    The delivery of stories in a casual, illustrated, highly readable form is in some ways more crucial to developing an audience than subject matter.

    Whether global stories can push communities to develop transnationally in a meaningful way is a harder question to answer; it seems to impugn our collective aptitude for reacting to problems of a global nature in a rational way. Reuters’s decision not to fetishize Trump hasn’t led to a drop-off in US coverage—its reporters have been especially strong on immigration and trade policy, not to mention the effects of the new administration on the global economy—but its stories aren’t exactly clickbait, which means ordinary Americans might not encounter them at the top of their feed. In other words, having a global perspective doesn’t necessarily translate to more eyeballs.

    What’s more, Reuters doesn’t solve the audience-class problem: whether readers are getting dispatches in partner newspapers like The New York Times or through the organization’s Eikon terminal, they tend to be the sort of person “who does transnational business, travels a good deal, is connected through work and media, has friends in different places, cares about what’s going on in different places,” Adler says. “That’s a pretty large cohort of people who have reason to care what’s going on in other places.”

    There are ways to unite readers without centering coverage on money or the markets. For a generation of readers around the world, the common ground is technology: the internet. “We didn’t pick our audience,” Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, tells me over the phone. “Our audience picked us.” He defines his readers as a cohort aged 18–35 “who are on the internet and who broadly care about human rights, global politics, and feminism and gay rights in particular.”

    To serve them, BuzzFeed recently published a damning investigative report into the World Wildlife Fund’s arming of militias in natural reserves; a (not uncontroversial) series on Trump’s business dealings abroad; early exposés of China’s detention of Uighur citizens; and reports on child abuse in Australia. Climate—“the central challenge for every newsroom in the world”—has been harder to pin down. “We don’t feel anyone has cracked it. But the shift from abstract scientific [stories] to coverage of fires in California, it’s a huge change—it makes it more concrete,” Smith says. (My husband is a reporter for BuzzFeed.)

    The delivery of these stories in a casual, illustrated, highly readable form is in some ways more crucial to developing an audience than subject matter. “The global political financial elites have had a common language ever since it was French,” Smith says. “There is now a universal language of internet culture, [and] that. . . is how our stuff translates so well between cultures and audiences.” This isn’t a form of digital Esperanto, Smith insists; the point isn’t to flatten the differences between countries or regions so much as to serve as a “container” in which people from different regions, interest groups, and cultures can consume media through references they all understand.

    BuzzFeed might not be setting out to shape its readers’ identities (I certainly can’t claim to feel a special bond with other people who found out they were Phoebes from the quiz “Your Sushi Order Will Reveal Which ‘Friends’ Character You’re Most Like”). An audience defined by its youth and its media consumption habits can be difficult to keep up with: platforms come and go, and young people don’t stay young forever. But if Anderson’s thesis still carries water, there must be something to speaking this language across cultures, space, and time. Call it “Web vernacular.”

    In 2013, during one of the many recent and lengthy US government shutdowns, Joshua Keating, a journalist at Slate, began a series, “If It Happened There,” that imagined how the American media would view the shutdown if it were occurring in another country. “The typical signs of state failure aren’t evident on the streets of this sleepy capital city,” Keating opens. “Beret-wearing colonels have not yet taken to the airwaves to declare martial law. . . .But the pleasant autumn weather disguises a government teetering on the brink.”

    It goes on; you get the idea. Keating’s series, which was inspired by his having to read “many, many headlines from around the world” while working at Foreign Policy, is a clever journalistic illustration of what sociologists call “methodological nationalism”: the bias that gets inadvertently baked into work and words. In the Middle East, it’s sectarian or ethnic strife; in the Midwest, it’s a trigger-happy cop and a kid in a hoodie.

    His send-ups hit a nerve. “It was huge—it was by far the most popular thing I’ve done at Slate,” Keating says. “I don’t think that it was a shocking realization to anyone that this kind of language can be a problem, but sometimes pointing it out can be helpful. If the series did anything, it made people stop and be conscious of how. . . our inherent biases and perspectives will inform how we cover the world.”

    Curiously, living under an openly nationalist administration has changed the way America—or at the very least, a significant part of the American press corps—sees itself. The press is a de facto opposition party, not because it tries to be, but because the administration paints it that way. And that gives reporters the experience of working in a place much more hostile than the US without setting foot outside the country.

    Keating has “semi-retired” the series as a result of the broad awareness among American reporters that it is, in fact, happening here. “It didn’t feel too novel to say [Trump was] acting like a foreign dictator,” he says. “That was what the real news coverage was doing.”

    Keating, who traveled to Somaliland, Kurdistan, and Abkhazia to report his book Invisible Countries (2018), still thinks the fastest and most effective way to form an international perspective is to live abroad. At the same time, not being bound to a strong national identity “can make it hard to understand particular concerns of the people you’re writing about,” he says. It might be obvious, but there is no one perfect way to be internationally minded.

    Alan Rusbridger—the former editor of The Guardian who oversaw the paper’s Edward Snowden coverage and is now the principal at Lady Margaret Hall, a college at Oxford University—recognizes the journalistic and even moral merits of approaching news in a non-national way: “I think of journalism as a public service, and I do think there’s a link between journalism at its best and the betterment of individual lives and societies,” he says. But he doesn’t have an easy formula for how to do that, because truly cosmopolitan journalism requires both top-down editorial philosophies—not using certain phrasings or framings that position foreigners as “others”—and bottom-up efforts by individual writers to read widely and be continuously aware of how their work might be read by people thousands of miles away.

    Yes, the starting point is a nationally defined press, not a decentralized network, but working jointly helps pool scarce resources and challenge national or local biases.

    Rusbridger sees potential in collaborations across newsrooms, countries, and continents. Yes, the starting point is a nationally defined press, not a decentralized network; but working jointly helps pool scarce resources and challenge national or local biases. It also wields power. “One of the reasons we reported Snowden with the Times in New York was to use global protections of human rights and free speech and be able to appeal to a global audience of readers and lawyers,” Rusbridger recalls. “We thought, ‘We’re pretty sure nation-states will come at us over this, and the only way to do it is harness ourselves to the US First Amendment not available to us anywhere else.’”

    In employing these tactics, the press positions itself in opposition to the nation-state. The same strategy could be seen behind the rollout of the Panama and Paradise Papers (not to mention the aggressive tax dodging detailed therein). “I think journalists and activists and citizens on the progressive wing of politics are thinking creatively about how global forces can work to their advantage,” Rusbridger says.

    But he thinks it all starts locally, with correspondents who have fluency in the language, culture, and politics of the places they cover, people who are members of the communities they write about. That isn’t a traditional foreign-correspondent experience (nor indeed that of UN employees, NGO workers, or other expats). The silver lining of publishing companies’ shrinking budgets might be that cost cutting pushes newsrooms to draw from local talent, rather than send established writers around. What you gain—a cosmopolitanism that works from the bottom up—can help dispel accusations of media elitism. That’s the first step to creating new imagined communities.

    Anderson’s work has inspired many an academic, but media executives? Not so much. Rob Wijnberg is an exception: he founded the (now beleaguered) Correspondent in the Netherlands in 2013 with Anderson’s ideas in mind. In fact, when we speak, he brings the name up unprompted.

    “You have to transcend this notion that you can understand the world through the national point of view,” he says. “The question is, What replacement do we have for it? Simply saying we have to transcend borders or have an international view isn’t enough, because you have to replace the imagined community you’re leaving behind with another one.”

    For Wijnberg, who was a philosophy student before he became a journalist, this meant radically reinventing the very structures of the news business: avoiding covering “current events” just because they happened, and thinking instead of what we might call eventful currents—the political, social, and economic developments that affect us all. It meant decoupling reporting from national news cycles, and getting readers to become paying “members” instead of relying on advertisements.

    This, he hoped, would help create a readership not based on wealth, class, nationality, or location, but on borderless, universal concerns. “We try to see our members. . . as part of a group or knowledge community, where the thing they share is the knowledge they have about a specific structural subject matter,” be it climate, inequality, or migration, Wijnberg says. “I think democracy and politics answers more to media than the other way around, so if you change the way media covers the world you change a lot.”

    That approach worked well in the Netherlands: his team raised 1.7 million euros in 2013, and grew to include 60,000 members. A few years later, Wijnberg and his colleagues decided to expand into the US, and with the help of NYU’s Jay Rosen, an early supporter, they made it onto Trevor Noah’s Daily Show to pitch their idea.

    The Correspondent raised more than $2.5 million from nearly 50,000 members—a great success, by any measure. But in March, things started to get hairy, with the publication abruptly pulling the plug on opening a US newsroom and announcing that staff would edit stories reported from the US from the original Amsterdam office instead. Many of the reasons behind this are mundane: visas, high rent, relocation costs. And reporters would still be reporting from, and on, the States. But supporters felt blindsided, calling the operation a scam.

    Today, Wijnberg reflects that he should have controlled the messaging better, and not promised to hire and operate from New York until he was certain that he could. He also wonders why it matters.

    “It’s not saying people who think it matters are wrong,” he explains. “But if the whole idea of this kind of geography and why it’s there is a construct, and you’re trying to think about transcending it, the very notion of Where are you based? is secondary. The whole point is not to be based anywhere.”

    Still: “The view from everywhere—the natural opposite—is just as real,” Wijnberg concedes. “You can’t be everywhere. You have to be somewhere.”

    And that’s the rub: for all of nationalism’s ills, it does instill in its subjects what Anderson calls a “deep, horizontal comradeship” that, while imagined, blossoms thanks to a confluence of forces. It can’t be replicated supranationally overnight. The challenge for a cosmopolitan journalism, then, is to dream up new forms of belonging that look forward, not backward—without discarding the imagined communities we have.

    That’s hard; so hard that it more frequently provokes a retrenchment, not an expansion, of solidarity. But it’s not impossible. And our collective futures almost certainly depend on it.

    https://www.cjr.org/special_report/view-from-nowhere.php
    #journalisme #nationalisme #Etat-nation #communauté_nationale #communauté_internationale #frontières #presse #médias

  • Will California’s New Bot Law Strengthen Democracy ? | The New Yorker
    https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/will-californias-new-bot-law-strengthen-democracy

    Une loi très intéressante en Californie qui va entrer en vigueur aujourd’hui. On va voir comment cela se passe pour la déclaration du caractère robotique d’un compte Twitter ou Facebook...

    California is the first state to try to reduce the power of bots by requiring that they reveal their “artificial identity” when they are used to sell a product or influence a voter.Photograph by Emma Innocenti / Getty
    When you ask experts how bots influence politics—that is, what specifically these bits of computer code that purport to be human can accomplish during an election—they will give you a list: bots can smear the opposition through personal attacks; they can exaggerate voters’ fears and anger by repeating short simple slogans; they can overstate popularity; they can derail conversations and draw attention to symbolic and ultimately meaningless ideas; they can spread false narratives. In other words, they are an especially useful tool, considering how politics is played today.

    On July 1st, California became the first state in the nation to try to reduce the power of bots by requiring that they reveal their “artificial identity” when they are used to sell a product or influence a voter. Violators could face fines under state statutes related to unfair competition. Just as pharmaceutical companies must disclose that the happy people who say a new drug has miraculously improved their lives are paid actors, bots in California—or rather, the people who deploy them—will have to level with their audience.

    We are in new terrain, where the microtargeting of audiences on social networks, the perception of false news stories as genuine, and the bot-led amplification of some voices and drowning-out of others have combined to create angry, ill-informed online communities that are suspicious of one another and of the government.

    Regulating bots should be low-hanging fruit when it comes to improving the Internet. The California law doesn’t even ban them outright but, rather, insists that they identify themselves in a manner that is “clear, conspicuous, and reasonably designed.”

    The point where economic self-interest stops and libertarian ideology begins can be hard to identify. Mark Zuckerberg, of Facebook, speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, appealed to personal freedom to defend his platform’s decision to allow the microtargeting of false, incendiary information. “I do not think we want to go so far towards saying that a private company prevents you from saying something that it thinks is factually incorrect,” he said. “That to me just feels like it’s too far and goes away from the tradition of free expression.”

    In the 2016 Presidential campaign, bots were created to support both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, but pro-Trump bots outnumbered pro-Clinton ones five to one, by one estimate, and many were dispatched by Russian intermediaries. Twitter told a Senate committee that, in the run-up to the 2016 election, fifty thousand bots that it concluded had Russian ties retweeted Trump’s tweets nearly half a million times, which represented 4.25 per cent of all his retweets, roughly ten times the level of Russian bot retweets supporting Clinton.

    Bots also gave Trump victories in quick online polls asking who had won a Presidential debate; they disrupted discussions of Trump’s misdeeds or crude statements; and they relentlessly pushed dubious policy proposals through hashtags like #draintheswamp.

    They have also aided Trump during his Presidency. Suspected bots created by unidentified users drove an estimated forty to sixty per cent of the Twitter discussion of a “caravan” of Central American migrants headed to the U.S., which was pushed by the President and his supporters prior to the 2018 midterm elections. Trump himself has retweeted accounts that praise him and his Presidency, and which appear to be bots. And last week a suspected bot network was discovered to be smearing Senator Kamala Harris, of California, with a form of “birtherism” after her strong showing in the first round of Democratic-primary debates.

    Hertzberg, the state senator who authored the legislation, told me that he was glad that the changes to the bill before passage were related to the implementation of the law, rather than to its central purpose of requiring that bots reveal themselves to the public when used politically or commercially. A lawyer by training, Hertzberg said that he resented the accusation that he didn’t care about First Amendment concerns. “There is no effort in this bill to have a chilling effect on speech—zero,” he said. “The argument you go back to is, Do bots have free speech? People have free speech. Bots are not people.”

    #régulation #Robots #Californie

  • Iran Isn’t Trying to Build a Bomb Tomorrow. It Wants Sanctions Relief. – Foreign Policy

    Iran’s decision to surpass uranium enrichment limits isn’t a dangerous provocation. It’s a calculated effort to get European leaders to reinforce the nuclear deal and halt the drift toward war.
    By Gérard Araud, Ali Vaez | July 2, 2019,

    https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/02/iran-isnt-trying-to-build-a-bomb-tomorrow-it-wants-sanctions-relief-u

    On Monday, for the first time since the nuclear deal with Iran went into effect on Jan. 16, 2016, Iran has deliberately violated its terms by producing more low-enriched uranium than the agreement permits. The threshold of 300 kilograms of uranium hexafluoride—corresponding to 202.8 kilograms of enriched uranium—was designed to keep Iran at a comfortable distance from nearly 1,500 kilograms of 3.67 percent enriched uranium that would be needed for a single nuclear weapon if the uranium were to be further enriched to 90 percent.

    Trump claimed that withdrawal would lead to a better deal—it has not, and chances of that are diminishing if they ever were realistic.It has been a long time coming. A little over a year ago, U.S. President Donald Trump decided to withdraw the United States from the 2015 nuclear agreement that bound Iran to carefully crafted restrictions on its nuclear program and intrusive inspections of its nuclear sites. He claimed that the Iranians were cheating—they were not, as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has consistently reported. He claimed that this action would lead to a better deal—it has not, and chances of that are diminishing if they ever were realistic.

  • Barak Ravid sur Twitter : “WATCH: U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman takes a 10 pounds hammer and breaks open a tunnel which runs under the Palestinian village of #Silwan to the old city of #Jerusalem. This happens at a settlers organisation event with Sara Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson at his side” / Twitter
    https://twitter.com/BarakRavid/status/1145362268022067200

    https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1145362068507430912/pu/vid/640x360/A_akO0XpJxkZ-Rl-.mp4?tag=10

    Des officiels américains à un évènement lié aux colons israéliens à Jérusalem-Est - L’Orient-Le Jour
    https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1176973/des-officiels-americains-a-un-evenement-lie-aux-colons-israeliens-a-j

    Deux responsables américains ont assisté dimanche à l’inauguration à Jérusalem-Est d’un site archéologique organisée par une association ultranationaliste israélienne, une présence qui rompt une nouvelle fois avec la pratique diplomatique s’agissant de la colonisation et du secteur palestinien de la ville occupé par Israël.

    Jason Greenblatt, conseiller du président américain Donald Trump, et David Friedman, ambassadeur en Israël, ont assisté en compagnie de responsables israéliens à une cérémonie dévoilant le résultat de travaux archéologiques à Silwan, quartier palestinien de Jérusalem-Est. Silwan, situé en contrebas des murailles de la Vieille ville, est le théâtre de tensions permanentes entre les résidents palestiniens et des colons juifs de plus en plus nombreux.

    Les travaux archéologiques, portant sur une route souterraine utilisée il y a environ 2.000 ans pour le pèlerinage vers le Second Temple juif, ont été entrepris par l’association Elad, dont le but avoué est de renforcer la présence juive à Jérusalem-Est.

    [...]

    Les Palestiniens accusent Israël et la fondation Elad de chercher à les chasser de Jérusalem.

    [...]

    L’ONG israélienne Emek Shaveh, qui lutte contre l’usage de l’archéologie au service de la colonisation, a également critiqué la présence d’officiels américains à la cérémonie. Elle dénonce un « acte politique qui se rapproche le plus d’une reconnaissance américaine de la souveraineté israélienne » sur toute la Vieille ville de Jérusalem.

    Israël considère Jérusalem comme sa capitale « unifiée et indivisible ». Mais la communauté internationale ne reconnaît pas l’annexion en 1967 de la partie orientale occupée de la ville, dont les Palestiniens veulent faire la capitale de l’Etat auquel ils aspirent.

    Le président Donald Trump a rompu en décembre 2017 avec des décennies de consensus diplomatique en reconnaissant Jérusalem comme la capitale d’Israël, poussant les Palestiniens à couper tout contact formel avec Washington.

    L’ambassadeur américain en Israël David Friedman est un fervent soutien des colonies israéliennes dans les Territoires palestiniens, considérées comme illégales par la communauté internationale.

    #sionisme #etats-unis

    • Editorial Settlers From the White House
      Haaretz Editorial
      Jun 30, 2019 11:20 PM
      https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/settlers-from-the-white-house-1.7424748

      The event held Sunday in a tunnel under the main street of the Silwan neighborhood in East Jerusalem, just outside the Old City walls, would have been impossible only a few years ago. Two of the U.S. administration’s most senior diplomats, Special Envoy to the Middle East Jason Greenblatt and U.S. Ambassador David Friedman, were there alongside Israeli ministers at the inauguration of the Path of the Pilgrims – a tunnel excavated by the right-wing Elad organization with generous help from the state.

      The tunnel, which according to Elad exposed a street from the Second Temple period that brought pilgrims from the Shiloah pool to the Temple Mount, is a central project in the organization’s efforts to Judaize Silwan and its environs by way of archaeology and tourism. When the tunnel opens to the public, presumably in a few months, it will become a major tourist attraction.

      The participation of American diplomats at an event sponsored by a right-wing group in East Jerusalem constitutes de facto recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem’s historic basin. If anyone had any doubts about that, Friedman made clear in an interview with the Jerusalem Post that, “The City of David is an essential component of the national heritage of the State of Israel.” Giving it up, even in the context of a peace agreement, he said, “would be akin to America returning the Statue of Liberty.”

      This recognition doesn’t just put the American administration on the extreme right of the Israeli political map – thus undercutting the claim that American can be an unbiased broker between Israel and the Palestinians – but it also ignores the complicated reality in Silwan, East Jerusalem and the entire region. The tunnel, which was excavated using controversial methods from a scientific standpoint, harnesses archaeology to politics while ignoring the nuances of Jerusalem’s ancient past.

      But the main problem is that excavating under the street blatantly ignores what’s happening at street level. In Silwan alone there are 20,000 Palestinians without citizenship or civil rights, who justifiably feel that this archaeological project is aimed at forcing them out of their neighborhood. Surrounding Silwan are another 300,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, also without rights.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfbMcYhJY6Q


      Anyone having even a passing familiarity with the Palestinian people knows that there’s no chance of arriving at any kind of agreement that will end the occupation so long as Israel continues to control East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Thus, by mere words and an event dripping with sweetness and smiles, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has sentenced Israelis to a life of constant conflict, or to an apartheid state in which there are two types of residents, those with rights and those without them.

  • Trump à Osaka : j’ai 5 stratégies alternatives pour le Venezuela, je peux en changer à tout moment,…

    Trump: Tenemos cinco alternativas diferentes para Venezuela
    http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/politica/trump-tenemos-cinco-alternativas-diferentes-para-venezuela_286867

    El presidente estadounidense, Donald Trump, dijo que no quiere implicarse demasiado en Venezuela, en una aparente referencia a la vía militar, pero aseguró que tiene cinco estrategias diferentes para colaborar en la crisis del país. Indicó que podría cambiar en cualquier momento de táctica.

    En una conferencia de prensa al término de su participación en la cumbre del G20, en Osaka, Trump explicó que ha hablado de Venezuela con cada líder con el que se reunió esta semana, porque nadie quiere que lo que está ocurriendo allí se repita en sus propios países.

    «Demasiada gente está abandonando Venezuela, va a ser un pueblo fantasma», comentó Trump.

    Preguntado por si está pensando en cambiar su estrategia hacia Venezuela, dado que no ha conseguido sacar del poder a Nicolás Maduro, Trump respondió: «Tengo cinco estrategias diferentes, podría cambiar en cualquier momento».

    «Tenemos muchas cosas reservadas si tenemos que llegar a eso. No queremos implicarnos hasta el punto que usted puede estar pensando», afirmó, en una aparente referencia a la vía militar.

    «Pero tenemos muchas alternativas, tenemos cinco alternativas diferentes para Venezuela y veremos qué ocurre. (Venezuela) está yendo muy mal, y Maduro está yendo muy mal», agregó.

    Trump conversó sobre Venezuela durante sus reuniones bilaterales este viernes con el presidente de Rusia, Vladímir Putin, y el de Brasil, Jair Bolsonaro, y afirmó entonces que lograr una transición en ese país «lleva tiempo».

  • Bahrain debacle marks crash of Trump team’s campaign to diss Palestinians into submission

    Kushner’s Peace for Prosperity includes Utopian projects funded by non-existent money as part of peace deal that won’t happen
    Chemi Shalev
    Jun 25, 2019 9:12 AM

    https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-bahrain-debacle-marks-crash-of-trump-team-s-campaign-to-dis-palest

    The unveiling of the U.S. administration’s long-awaited production of Peace for Prosperity, premiering in Bahrain on Tuesday, garnered mixed reviews, to say the least. Barak Ravid of Axios and Israel’s Channel 13 described it as “impressive, detailed and ambitious – perhaps overly ambitious.” Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Egypt Dan Kurtzer offered a slightly different take: “I would give this so-called plan a C- from an undergraduate student. The authors of the plan clearly understand nothing,” he said.

    The plan, released in a colorful pamphlet on the eve of the Bahrain economic summit, is being portrayed by the White House as a vision of the bountiful “fruits of peace” that Palestinians might reap once they reach a peace agreement with Israel. Critics describe it as an amateurish pie-in-the-sky, shoot-for-the-moon, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink hodgepodge that promises projects that cannot be implemented, funded by money that does not exist and contingent on a peace deal that will never happen.

    But the main problem with Peace for Prosperity isn’t its outlandishly unrealistic proposals – such as the $5 billion superhighway between the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel will never agree to; or its occasional condescending and Orientalist attitude towards Palestinian society - their great hummus could attract millions of tourists; or even its offer to manage and foster Palestinian institutions and civil society in a way that can be viewed either as implicit state-building or as imposing foreign control on a future Palestinian government.

    >> Read more: ’There is no purely economic solution to the Palestinian economy’s problems’ ■ Trump’s Bahrain conference - not what you imagined ■ Kushner’s deal holds some surprises, but it’s more vision than blueprint ■ The billion-dollar question in Trump’s peace plan

    The Palestinians would have been suspicious in any case, even if Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama were President. They have always been wary of the term “economic peace”, especially when detached from the real nitty-gritty of resolving their dispute with Israel. Nonetheless, if the President was anyone other than Trump, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas would have more or less emulated Benjamin Netanyahu’s reaction: Somber nodding of the head, then a non-committal reaction to Peace for Prosperity, followed by effusive but general praise for our lord and savior Donald Trump. Israelis and Palestinians would have attended the Bahrain conference, while doing their best to suppress their inner guffaws.

    If it was anyone by Trump and his peace team - which often doubles as Netanyahu’s cheerleading squad – the Palestinians might have allowed themselves to believe that A. A comprehensive peace plan isn’t just a mirage and is indeed forthcoming. B. The deal won’t be tilted so far in favor of Israel that it will be declared stillborn on arrival and C. That it isn’t a ruse meant to cast Palestinians as congenital rejectionists and to pave the way for an Israeli annexation of “parts of the West Bank”, as Ambassador David Friedman put it when he pronounced Trump’s imperial edict conceding territory to Israel, which even Palestinian minimalists claim as their own, in advance of any actual talks.

    But because the plan bears Trump’s signature, it was received in most world capitals with shrugs, as yet another manifestation of the U.S. administration’s preposterous handling of foreign policy – see North Korea, Europe, Mexico, Venezuela et al. Israel, of course, didn’t miss the opportunity to regurgitate the cliché about the Palestinians “never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity”.
    A Palestinian man steps on a painting depicting U.S. President Donald Trump during a protest against U.S.-led Bahrain workshop in Gaza City, June 24, 2019.
    A Palestinian man steps on a painting depicting U.S. President Donald Trump during a protest against U.S.-led Bahrain workshop in Gaza City, June 24, 2019. \ MOHAMMED SALEM/ REUTERS
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    For Palestinians and their supporters, however, Kushner’s bid was but the latest in the Trump team’s never-ending stream of slights, slanders and slaps in their collective faces. In Palestinian eyes, the economic bonanza isn’t a CBM – confidence building measure – but a con job and insult rolled into one. It dangles dollars in front of Palestinian noses, implying they can be bought, and it sets up a chain of events at the end of which Jason Greenblatt will inevitably accuse them on Twitter of being hysterical and dishonest while praising Netanyahu’s bold leadership and pioneering vision. They’ve been there, and done that.

    This has been the Trump approach from the outset: Uncontained admiration for Israel and its leader coupled with unhidden disdain for Palestinian leaders and contempt for their “unrealistic” dreams. Trump’s peace team swears by Israel’s security needs as if they were part of the bible or U.S. Constitution; the ongoing 52-year military occupation of millions of Palestinians, on the other hand, seems to have escaped their attention.

    For the first ten months of Trump’s tenure, the Palestinians put up with his administration’s unequivocal pledges of allegiance to Israel as well as the White House’s departure from past custom and continuing refusal to criticize any of its actions – not to mention the appointment of a peace team comprised exclusively of right-wing Netanyahu groupies, which Palestinians initially thought was surely a practical joke.

    Trump’s announcement in December 2017 that he would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move the U.S. embassy there was both game-changer and deal-breaker as far as the Palestinians were concerned. While Netanyahu and most of Israel were celebrating Donald the Daring and the long-awaited recognition of their eternal capital, Palestinians realized they were facing a President radically different from any of his predecessors - one willing to break the rules in Israel’s favor and to grant his bestie Bibi tangible victories, before, during and after elections - without asking for anything in return.

    The Palestinians have boycotted the Trump administration ever since, embarrassing Friedman, Greenblatt, Kushner and ultimately Trump in the process. They, in response, have increasingly vented their anger and frustrations at the Palestinians, and not just in words and Tweets alone: The administration shut down the PLO’s office in Washington, declared Jerusalem “off the table” and indicated that the refugee issue should follow it, cut aid to UNRWA and is endeavoring to dismantle it altogether and slashed assistance to Palestinian humanitarian organizations.

    In March 2018, in a move strongly supported by Israel and vigorously endorsed by Evangelicals and other right wing supporters, Trump signed the Congressionally approved Taylor Force Act that prohibits U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority as long as it continued to pay monthly stipends to the families of what the Act describes as “terrorists”. Palestinians, who, to many people’s regret, regard such terrorists as heroes and martyrs, noted that the passage of the Taylor Force Act embarrassed Israel and spurred it to legislate its own way to withholding Palestinian tax money for the very same reason.

    Throughout the process, Trump and his peace team have lectured the Palestinians as a teacher reprimands an obstinate child. The Palestinians need to face reality, to lower their expectations, to land back on earth, Kushner and colleagues insist. Not only will they never realize their dreams and aspirations, they should also forget their core demand for an independent state free of outside control and not confide inside Israeli-controlled gates. Israelis are worthy of such independence, the Palestinians are told, but you are not.

    Trump approach is a product, first and foremost, of his own inexperience, arrogance and unwillingness to learn anything from a past in which he wasn’t in charge. It is fed by anti-Palestinian prejudices prevalent in his peace team as well as his advisers and most of his political supporters. Trump and his underlings basically adhere to the arguably racist tenet encapsulated in the Israeli saying “The Arabs understand only force.” The more you pressure them, the greater the chance they will succumb.
    Women protest against the U.S.-led workshop in Bahrain in the Moroccan capital Rabat, June 23, 2019.
    Women protest against the U.S.-led workshop in Bahrain in the Moroccan capital Rabat, June 23, 2019.AFP

    At this point at least, it hasn’t worked out that way. Bahrain, by any measure, is a humiliating bust. As Trump and his aides contemplate the reasons for their abject failure they are likely to blame stubborn Palestinians who don’t know what’s good for them, along with radical Muslims, perfidious Europeans, idiot liberals and all the other usual suspects.

    In a better world, they would take a hard look at themselves in the mirror and possibly have an epiphany. They can make an immediate adjustment that will cost them nothing but possibly achieve dramatic results. Instead of incessantly rebuking, reproaching, reprimanding, threatening and intimidating the Palestinians in a way that garners cheers from Christian messianics and Jewish zealots, they could try and treat them, as Aretha Franklin sang, with just a little respect. And perhaps, if it isn’t asking too much, take down their fawning for Netanyahu a notch or two.

    It might not be enough to reconcile irreconcilable differences or to make peace, but it will signal that Trump is finally getting serious about his claim to be the peacemaker the world has been waiting for. Alternatively, the Palestinians will continue to frustrate his designs and pray to Allah for his quick departure.

  • Saudi intelligence chief lobbies London for strikes against Iran : UK source | Middle East Eye
    https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/saudi-intelligence-chief-lobbied-london-strikes-against-iran-uk-sourc

    Comme les USA ont l’air d’hésiter, les Saoudiens demandent aux Britanniques de commencer une petite guerre contre l’Iran...

    A Saudi intelligence chief pleaded with British authorities to carry out limited strikes against Iranian military targets, just hours after Donald Trump aborted planned US attacks against the Islamic Republic, a senior UK official told Middle East Eye.

    The intelligence chief was accompanied by Saudi diplomat Adel al-Jubeir on his trip to London, the source said.

    Still, the Saudi lobbying efforts fell on deaf ears, according to the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

    “Our people were sceptical,” the source said, adding that the Saudi official was told a plain “no” in response to the request.

    #arabie_saoudite #iran #fous_furieux

  • ’Politicians fear this like fire’ : The rise of the deepfake and the threat to democracy
    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2019/jun/22/the-rise-of-the-deepfake-and-the-threat-to-democracy

    On 4 May 2016, Jimmy Fallon, the host of NBC’s The Tonight Show, appeared in a sketch dressed as Donald Trump, then the Republican presidential nominee. Wearing a blond wig and three coats of bronzer, he pretended to phone Barack Obama – played by Dion Flynn – to brag about his latest primary win in Indiana. Both men appeared side by side in split screen, facing the camera. Flynn’s straight-man impression of Obama, particularly his soothing, expectant voice, was convincing, while Fallon played (...)

    #Facebook #Twitter #DeepFake #manipulation #élections

    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/b9390a8ab1453ce935983e8e499764920e50ebda/0_0_2000_1200/master/2000.jpg

  • The Epoch Times
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times


    Je constate que les membres de Falun Gong sont des personnes apolitiques et paisibles alors que les organisateurs du mouvement dépensent des millions pour soutenir des extrémistes de droite dans le monde entier. Ceci met en question les affirmations de l’organisation qui accuse la Chine d’emprisonner ses disciples afin de les tuer pour vendre leurs d’organes.

    The Epoch Times is a multi-language newspaper headquartered in New York City. The company was founded in 2000 by John Tang and a group of Chinese Americans associated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement. The newspaper covers general interest topics with a focus on news about China and human rights issues there. It draws from a network of sources inside China, as well as Chinese expatriates living in the West. It is also known for coverage favorable to rightist politicians in the West, including Donald Trump in the United States and far-right groups in Germany.

    The Epoch Times is widely distributed in overseas Chinese communities, and has been publishing in Chinese since May 2000. It is either sold or distributed free-of-charge in 35 countries, including various intranational regional editions. It has editions in English, Chinese and nine other languages in print, as well as 21 different languages on the internet.

    #Chine #religion #politique #extrême_droite

  • The “Drunk Pelosi” video shows that cheapfakes can be as damaging as deepfakes.
    https://slate.com/technology/2019/06/drunk-pelosi-deepfakes-cheapfakes-artificial-intelligence-disinformation.html

    The A.I.-generated “deepfake” video implicitly but unmistakably calls for Facebook to make a public statement on its content moderation polices. The platform has long been criticized for permitting the spread of disinformation and harassment, but it became particularly acute recently, when the company said that it would not remove the “Drunk Pelosi” video.

    On Thursday, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence will hold an open hearing on A.I. and the potential threat of deepfake technology to Americans. Many technology researchers believe that deepfakes—realistic-looking content developed using machine learning algorithms—will herald a new era of information warfare. But as the “Drunk Pelosi” video shows, slight edits of original videos may be even more difficult to detect and debunk, creating a cascade of benefits for those willing to use these digital dirty tricks.

    The video, posted to a self-described news Facebook page with a fan base of about 35,000, depicted Nancy Pelosi slurring her words and sounding intoxicated. However, when compared with another video from the same event, it was clear even to nonexperts that it had been slowed down to produce the “drunken” effect. Call it a “cheapfake”—it was modified only very slightly. While the altered video garnered some significant views on Facebook, it was only after it was amplified by President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans on Twitter that it became a newsworthy issue. The heightened drama surrounding this video raises interesting questions not only about platform accountability but also about how to spot disinformation in the wild.

    “Cheapfakes” rely on free software that allows manipulation through easy conventional editing techniques like speeding, slowing, and cutting, as well as nontechnical manipulations like restaging or recontextualizing existing footage that are already causing problems. Cheapfakes already call into question the methods of evidence that scientists, courts, and newsrooms traditionally use to call for accountability

    Many will never know the video was a fake, but the advantages it gave to pundits will echo into the future. It’s a recent example of what legal theorists Bobby Chesney and Danielle Citron call the liar’s dividend . Those wishing to deny the truth can create disinformation to support their lie, while those caught behaving badly can write off the evidence of bad behavior as disinformation. In a new survey from Pew Research Center, 63 percent of respondents said that they believe altered video and images are a significant source of confusion when it comes to interpreting news quality. That loss of trust works in favor of those willing to lie, defame, and harass to gain attention.

    As Daniel Kreiss and others have pointed out, people don’t just share content because they believe it. They do it for a host of reasons, not the least of which is simply because a message speaks to what users see as an implicit truth of the world even as they know it is not factually true. Researchers have found that creating and sharing hateful, false, or faked content is often rewarded on platforms like Facebook.

    The looming threat of the deepfake is worth attention—from politicians, like at the upcoming hearing; from journalists; from researchers; and especially from the public that will ultimately be the audience for these things. But make no mistake: Disinformation doesn’t have to be high tech to cause serious damage.

    #Fake_news #Deep_fake #Cheap_fake #Nancy_Pelosi #Médias_sociaux

  • Oman attack: Iran is the immediate, but unlikely, suspect - Iran - Haaretz.com

    Oman attack: Iran is the immediate, but unlikely, suspect
    U.S. officials rushed to point to Tehran, but somehow the world’s leading intelligence services failed to discover who is actually behind the strike. And even if they knew, what could be done without risking all-out war?
    Zvi Bar’el | Jun. 14, 2019 | 8:36 AM | 3
    https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/iran/.premium-oman-attack-iran-is-the-immediate-but-unlikely-suspect-1.7368134


    A unnamed senior U.S. Defense Department official was quick to tell CBS that Iran was “apparently” behind the Thursday attack on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, followed by State Secretary Mike Pompeo who later told reported that it was his government’s assessment. There’s nothing new about that, but neither is it a decisive proof.

    Who, then, struck the tankers? Whom does this strike serve and what can be done against such attacks?

    In all previous attacks in the Gulf in recent weeks Iran was naturally taken to be the immediate suspect. After all, Iran had threatened that if it could now sell its oil in the Gulf, other countries would not be able to ship oil through it; Tehran threatened to block the Strait of Hormuz, and in any case it’s in the sights of the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel. But this explanation is too easy.

    The Iranian regime is in the thrones of a major diplomatic struggle to persuade Europe and its allies, Russia and China, not to take the path of pulling out of the 2015 nuclear agreement. At the same time, Iran is sure that the United States is only looking for an excuse to attack it. Any violent initiative on Tehran’s part could only make things worse and bring it close to a military conflict, which it must avoid.

    Iran has announced it would scale back its commitments under the nuclear deal by expanding its low-level uranium enrichment and not transferring the remainder of its enriched uranium and heavy water to another country, as the agreement requires. The International Atomic Energy Agency’s reports reveal that it has indeed stepped up enrichment, but not in a way that could support a military nuclear program.

    It seems that alongside its diplomatic efforts, Iran prefers to threaten to harm the nuclear deal itself, responding to Washington with the same token, rather than escalate the situation to a military clash.

    Other possible suspects are the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, who continue to pound Saudi targets with medium-range missiles, as was the case last week with strikes on the Abha and Jizan airports, near the Yemeni border, which wounded 26 people. The Houthis have also fired missiles at Riyadh and hit targets in the Gulf. In response, Saudi Arabia launched a massive missile strike on Houthi-controlled areas in northern Yemen.

    The strike on the oil tankers may have been a response to the response, but if this is the case, it goes against Iran’s policy, which seeks to neutralize any pretexts for a military clash in the Gulf. The question, therefore, is whether Iran has full control over all the actions the Houthis take, and whether the aid it gives them commits them fully to its policies, or whether they see assaults on Saudi targets as a separate, local battle, cut off from Iran’s considerations.

    The Houthis have claimed responsibility for some of their actions in Saudi territory in the past, and at times even took the trouble of explaining the reasons behind this assault or the other. But not this time.

    Yemen also hosts large Al-Qaida cells and Islamic State outposts, with both groups having a running account with Saudi Arabia and apparently the capabilities to carry out strikes on vessels moving through the Gulf.

    In the absence of confirmed and reliable information on the source of the fire, we may meanwhile discount the possibility of a Saudi or American provocation at which Iran has hinted, but such things have happened before. However, we may also wonder why some of the most sophisticated intelligence services in the world are having so much trouble discovering who actually carried out these attacks.

    Thwarting such attacks with no precise intelligence is an almost impossible task, but even if the identity of those responsible for it is known, the question of how to respond to the threat would still arise.

    If it turns out that Iran initiated or even carried out these attacks, American and Saudi military forces could attack its Revolutionary Guards’ marine bases along the Gulf coast, block Iranian shipping in the Gulf and persuade European countries to withdraw from the nuclear deal, claiming that continuing relations with Iran would mean supporting terrorism in general, and maritime terrorism in particular.

    The concern is that such a military response would lead Iran to escalate its own and openly strike American and Saudi targets in the name of self-defense and protecting its sovereignty. In that case, a large-scale war would be inevitable. But there’s no certainty that U.S. President Donald Trump, who wants to extricate his forces from military involvement in the Middle East, truly seeks such a conflict, which could suck more and more American forces into this sensitive arena.

    An escape route from this scenario would require intensive mediation efforts between Iran and the United States, but therein lies one major difficulty – finding an authoritative mediator that could pressure both parties. Russia or China are not suitable candidates, and ties between Washington and the European Union are acrimonious.

    It seems that all sides would be satisfied if they could place responsibility for the attacks on the Houthis or other terror groups. That is not to say that the United States or Saudi Arabia have any magic solutions when it comes to the Houthis; far from it. The war in Yemen has been going on for five years now with no military resolution, and increased bombardment of concentrations of Houthi forces could only expand their efforts to show their strength. But the United States would pay none of the diplomatic or military price for assaults on the Houthis it would for a forceful violent response against Iran itself.

    If sporadic, small-scale attacks raise such complex dilemmas, one can perhaps dream of an all-out war with Iran, but it is enough to look at the chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan to grow extremely cautious of the trajectory in which such dreams become a nightmare that lasts for decades.❞
    #Oman #Iran
    https://seenthis.net/messages/786937

    • UPDATE 1-"Flying objects" damaged Japanese tanker during attack in Gulf of Oman
      Junko Fujita – June 14, 2019
      (Adds comments from company president)
      By Junko Fujita
      https://www.reuters.com/article/mideast-tanker-japan-damage/update-1-flying-objects-damaged-japanese-tanker-during-attack-in-gulf-of-om

      TOKYO, June 14 (Reuters) - Two “flying objects” damaged a Japanese tanker owned by Kokuka Sangyo Co in an attack on Thursday in the Gulf of Oman, but there was no damage to the cargo of methanol, the company president said on Friday.

      The Kokuka Courageous is now sailing toward the port of Khor Fakkan in the United Arab Emirates, with the crew having returned to the ship after evacuating because of the incident, Kokuka President Yutaka Katada told a press conference. It was being escorted by the U.S. Navy, he said.

      “The crew told us something came flying at the ship, and they found a hole,” Katada said. “Then some crew witnessed the second shot.”

      Katada said there was no possibility that the ship, carrying 25,000 tons of methanol, was hit by a torpedo.

      The United States has blamed Iran for attacking the Kokuka Courageous and another tanker, the Norwegian-owned Front Altair, on Thursday, but Tehran has denied the allegations.

      The ship’s crew saw an Iranian military ship in the vicinity on Thursday night Japan time, Katada said.

      Katada said he did not believe Kokuka Courageous was targetted because it was owned by a Japanese firm. The tanker is registered in Panama and was flying a Panamanian flag, he said.

      “Unless very carefully examined, it would be hard to tell the tanker was operated or owned by Japanese,” he said. (...)

  • Condamnés à mort | Making-of
    https://making-of.afp.com/condamnes-mort

    Alors, ils étaient les hommes du « califat ». Certains, membres de la très redoutée « police islamique », avaient pouvoir de vie ou de mort ou presque sur les habitants des environs —jusqu’à sept millions d’Irakiens et de Syriens au plus fort de l’occupation jihadiste.

    Ils maniaient l’anathème à tout-va, incitaient d’autres Français à les rejoindre sur un territoire où l’on décapitait, pendait ou lapidait en place publique. Ils vantaient les mérites d’un Etat où une haleine aux relents d’alcool ou des doigts jaunis par la cigarette pouvaient valoir jusqu’à 80 coups de fouet.

    Certains sont apparus sur des images ou ont aidé au montage de vidéo qui, mêlant rap et anasheed, ces chants religieux musulmans, promettaient la mort à tous.

    Dans l’une d’elles, diffusées par le tribunal au procès de Yassine Sakkam, une voix chante : « C’est la guerre pour l’éternité », menaçant de s’en prendre à tous, « de Bouddha à la Trinité » sur des images des statues monumentales des Bouddhas de Bamiyan détruites par les talibans ou du pape. « Les juifs auront ce qu’ils méritent », poursuit le chanteur sur des images de l’Américain Donald Trump serrant la main de l’Israélien Benjamin Netanyahu.

    #syrie #irak #ei #afp #Sarah_Benhaida

  • Call immigrant detention centers what they really are: concentration camps

    If you were paying close attention last week, you might have spotted a pattern in the news. Peeking out from behind the breathless coverage of the Trump family’s tuxedoed trip to London was a spate of deaths of immigrants in U.S. custody: Johana Medina Léon, a 25-year-old transgender asylum seeker; an unnamed 33-year-old Salvadoran man; and a 40-year-old woman from Honduras.

    Photos from a Border Patrol processing center in El Paso showed people herded so tightly into cells that they had to stand on toilets to breathe. Memos surfaced by journalist Ken Klippenstein revealed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s failure to provide medical care was responsible for suicides and other deaths of detainees. These followed another report that showed that thousands of detainees are being brutally held in isolation cells just for being transgender or mentally ill.

    Also last week, the Trump administration cut funding for classes, recreation and legal aid at detention centers holding minors — which were likened to “summer camps” by a senior ICE official last year. And there was the revelation that months after being torn from their parents’ arms, 37 children were locked in vans for up to 39 hours in the parking lot of a detention center outside Port Isabel, Texas. In the last year, at least seven migrant children have died in federal custody.

    Preventing mass outrage at a system like this takes work. Certainly it helps that the news media covers these horrors intermittently rather than as snowballing proof of a racist, lawless administration. But most of all, authorities prevail when the places where people are being tortured and left to die stay hidden, misleadingly named and far from prying eyes.

    There’s a name for that kind of system. They’re called concentration camps. You might balk at my use of the term. That’s good — it’s something to be balked at.

    The goal of concentration camps has always been to be ignored. The German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt, who was imprisoned by the Gestapo and interned in a French camp, wrote a few years afterward about the different levels of concentration camps. Extermination camps were the most extreme; others were just about getting “undesirable elements … out of the way.” All had one thing in common: “The human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.”

    Euphemisms play a big role in that forgetting. The term “concentration camp” is itself a euphemism. It was invented by a Spanish official to paper over his relocation of millions of rural families into squalid garrison towns where they would starve during Cuba’s 1895 independence war. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered Japanese Americans into prisons during World War II, he initially called them concentration camps. Americans ended up using more benign names, like “Manzanar Relocation Center.”

    Even the Nazis’ camps started out small, housing criminals, Communists and opponents of the regime. It took five years to begin the mass detention of Jews. It took eight, and the outbreak of a world war, for the first extermination camps to open. Even then, the Nazis had to keep lying to distract attention, claiming Jews were merely being resettled to remote work sites. That’s what the famous signs — Arbeit Macht Frei, or “Work Sets You Free” — were about.

    Subterfuge doesn’t always work. A year ago, Americans accidentally became aware that the Trump administration had adopted (and lied about) a policy of ripping families apart at the border. The flurry of attention was thanks to the viral conflation of two separate but related stories: the family-separation order and bureaucrats’ admission that they’d been unable to locate thousands of migrant children who’d been placed with sponsors after crossing the border alone.

    Trump shoved that easily down the memory hole. He dragged his heels a bit, then agreed to a new policy: throwing whole families into camps together. Political reporters posed irrelevant questions, like whether President Obama had been just as bad, and what it meant for the midterms. Then they moved on.

    It is important to note that Trump’s aides have built this system of racist terror on something that has existed for a long time. Several camps opened under Obama, and as president he deported millions of people.

    But Trump’s game is different. It certainly isn’t about negotiating immigration reform with Congress. Trump has made it clear that he wants to stifle all non-white immigration, period. His mass arrests, iceboxes and dog cages are part of an explicitly nationalist project to put the country under the control of the right kind of white people.

    As a Republican National Committee report noted in 2013: “The nation’s demographic changes add to the urgency of recognizing how precarious our position has become.” The Trump administration’s attempt to put a citizenship question on the 2020 census was also just revealed to have been a plot to disadvantage political opponents and boost “Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” all along.

    That’s why this isn’t just a crisis facing immigrants. When a leader puts people in camps to stay in power, history shows that he doesn’t usually stop with the first group he detains.

    There are now at least 48,000 people detained in ICE facilities, which a former official told BuzzFeed News “could swell indefinitely.” Customs and Border Protection officials apprehended more than 144,000 people on the Southwest border last month. (The New York Times dutifully reported this as evidence of a “dramatic surge in border crossings,” rather than what it was: The administration using its own surge of arrests to justify the rest of its policies.)

    If we call them what they are — a growing system of American concentration camps — we will be more likely to give them the attention they deserve. We need to know their names: Port Isabel, Dilley, Adelanto, Hutto and on and on. With constant, unrelenting attention, it is possible we might alleviate the plight of the people inside, and stop the crisis from getting worse. Maybe people won’t be able to disappear so easily into the iceboxes. Maybe it will be harder for authorities to lie about children’s deaths.

    Maybe Trump’s concentration camps will be the first thing we think of when we see him scowling on TV.

    The only other option is to leave it up to those in power to decide what’s next. That’s a calculated risk. As Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night,” one of the most comprehensive books on the history of concentration camps, recently noted: “Every country has said their camps are humane and will be different. Trump is instinctively an authoritarian. He’ll take them as far as he’s allowed to.”

    https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-katz-immigrant-concentration-camps-20190609-story.html
    #terminologie #vocabulaire #mots #camps #camps_de_concentration #centres_de_détention #détention_administrative #rétention #USA #Etats-Unis
    #cpa_camps

    • ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System

      On Monday, New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to US border detention facilities as “concentration camps,” spurring a backlash in which critics accused her of demeaning the memory of those who died in the Holocaust. Debates raged over a label for what is happening along the southern border and grew louder as the week rolled on. But even this back-and-forth over naming the camps has been a recurrent feature in the mass detention of civilians ever since its inception, a history that long predates the Holocaust.

      At the heart of such policy is a question: What does a country owe desperate people whom it does not consider to be its citizens? The twentieth century posed this question to the world just as the shadow of global conflict threatened for the second time in less than three decades. The dominant response was silence, and the doctrine of absolute national sovereignty meant that what a state did to people under its control, within its borders, was nobody else’s business. After the harrowing toll of the Holocaust with the murder of millions, the world revisited its answer, deciding that perhaps something was owed to those in mortal danger. From the Fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians in 1949 to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the international community established humanitarian obligations toward the most vulnerable that apply, at least in theory, to all nations.

      The twenty-first century is unraveling that response. Countries are rejecting existing obligations and meeting asylum seekers with walls and fences, from detainees fleeing persecution who were sent by Australia to third-party detention in the brutal offshore camps of Manus and Nauru to razor-wire barriers blocking Syrian refugees from entering Hungary. While some nations, such as Germany, wrestle with how to integrate refugees into their labor force—more and more have become resistant to letting them in at all. The latest location of this unwinding is along the southern border of the United States.

      So far, American citizens have gotten only glimpses of the conditions in the border camps that have been opened in their name. In the month of May, Customs and Border Protection reported a total of 132,887 migrants who were apprehended or turned themselves in between ports of entry along the southwest border, an increase of 34 percent from April alone. Upon apprehension, these migrants are temporarily detained by Border Patrol, and once their claims are processed, they are either released or handed over to ICE for longer-term detention. Yet Border Patrol itself is currently holding about 15,000 people, nearly four times what government officials consider to be this enforcement arm’s detention capacity.

      On June 12, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that Fort Sill, an Army post that hosted a World War II internment camp for detainees of Japanese descent, will now be repurposed to detain migrant children. In total, HHS reports that it is currently holding some 12,000 minors. Current law limits detention of minors to twenty days, though Senator Lindsey Graham has proposed expanding the court-ordered limit to 100 days. Since the post is on federal land, it will be exempt from state child welfare inspections.

      In addition to the total of detainees held by Border Patrol, an even higher number is detained at centers around the country by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency: on a typical day at the beginning of this month, ICE was detaining more than 52,500 migrants. The family separation policy outraged the public in the 2018, but despite legal challenges, it never fully ended. Less publicized have been the deaths of twenty-four adults in ICE custody since the beginning of the Trump administration; in addition, six children between the ages of two and sixteen have died in federal custody over the last several months. It’s not clear whether there have been other deaths that have gone unreported.

      Conditions for detainees have not been improving. At the end of May, a Department of Homeland Security inspector general found nearly 900 migrants at a Texas shelter built for a capacity of 125 people. On June 11, a university professor spotted at least 100 men behind chain-link fences near the Paso del Norte Bridge in El Paso, Texas. Those detainees reported sitting outside for weeks in temperatures that soared above 100 degrees. Taylor Levy, an El Paso immigration lawyer, described going into one facility and finding “a suicidal four-year-old whose face was covered in bloody, self-inflicted scratches… Another young child had to be restrained by his mother because he kept running full-speed into metal lockers. He was covered in bruises.”

      If deciding what to do about the growing numbers of adults and children seeking refuge in the US relies on complex humanitarian policies and international laws, in which most Americans don’t take a deep interest, a simpler question also presents itself: What exactly are these camps that the Trump administration has opened, and where is this program of mass detention headed?

      Even with incomplete information about what’s happening along the border today and what the government plans for these camps, history points to some conclusions about their future. Mass detention without trial earned a new name and a specific identity at the end of the nineteenth century. The labels then adopted for the practice were “reconcentración” and “concentration camps”—places of forced relocation of civilians into detention on the basis of group identity.

      Other kinds of group detention had appeared much earlier in North American history. The US government drove Native Americans from their homelands into prescribed exile, with death and detention in transit camps along the way. Some Spanish mission systems in the Americas had accomplished similar ends by seizing land and pressing indigenous people into forced labor. During the 245 years when slavery was legal in the US, detention was one of its essential features.

      Concentration camps, however, don’t typically result from the theft of land, as happened with Native Americans, or owning human beings in a system of forced labor, as in the slave trade. Exile, theft, and forced labor can come later, but in the beginning, detention itself is usually the point of concentration camps. By the end of the nineteenth century, the mass production of barbed wire and machines guns made this kind of detention possible and practical in ways it never had been before.

      Under Spanish rule in 1896, the governor-general of Cuba instituted camps in order to clear rebel-held regions during an uprising, despite his predecessor’s written refusal “as the representative of a civilized nation, to be the first to give the example of cruelty and intransigence” that such detention would represent. After women and children began dying in vast numbers behind barbed wire because there had been little planning for shelter and even less for food, US President William McKinley made his call to war before Congress. He spoke against the policy of reconcentración, calling it warfare by uncivilized means. “It was extermination,” McKinley said. “The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.” Without full records, the Cuban death toll can only be estimated, but a consensus puts it in the neighborhood of 150,000, more than 10 percent of the island’s prewar population.

      Today, we remember the sinking of the USS Maine as the spark that ignited the Spanish-American War. But war correspondent George Kennan (cousin of the more famous diplomat) believed that “it was the suffering of the reconcentrados, more, perhaps, than any other one thing that brought about the intervention of the United States.” On April 25, 1898, Congress declared war. Two weeks later, US Marines landed at Fisherman’s Point on the windward side of the entrance to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. After a grim, week-long fight, the Marines took the hill. It became a naval base, and the United States has never left that patch of land.

      As part of the larger victory, the US inherited the Philippines. The world’s newest imperial power also inherited a rebellion. Following a massacre of American troops at Balangiga in September 1901, during the third year of the conflict, the US established its own concentration camp system. Detainees, mostly women and children, were forced into squalid conditions that one American soldier described in a letter to a US senator as “some suburb of hell.” In the space of only four months, more than 11,000 Filipinos are believed to have died in these noxious camps.

      Meanwhile, in southern Africa in 1900, the British had opened their own camps during their battle with descendants of Dutch settlers in the second Boer War. British soldiers filled tent cities with Boer women and children, and the military authorities called them refugee camps. Future Prime Minister David Lloyd George took offense at that name, noting in Parliament: “There is no greater delusion in the mind of any man than to apply the term ‘refugee’ to these camps. They are not refugee camps. They are camps of concentration.” Contemporary observers compared them to the Cuban camps, and criticized their deliberate cruelty. The Bishop of Hereford wrote to The Times of London in 1901, asking: “Are we reduced to such a depth of impotence that our Government can do nothing to stop such a holocaust of child-life?”

      Maggoty meat rations and polluted water supplies joined outbreaks of contagious diseases amid crowded and unhealthy conditions in the Boer camps. More than 27,000 detainees are thought to have died there, nearly 80 percent of them children. The British had opened camps for black Africans as well, in which at least 14,000 detainees died—the real number is probably much higher. Aside from protests made by some missionaries, the deaths of indigenous black Africans did not inspire much public outrage. Much of the history of the suffering in these camps has been lost.

      These early experiments with concentration camps took place on the periphery of imperial power, but accounts of them nevertheless made their way into newspapers and reports in many nations. As a result, the very idea of them came to be seen as barbaric. By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the first camp systems had all been closed, and concentration camps had nearly vanished as an institution. Within months of the outbreak of World War I, though, they would be resurrected—this time rising not at the margins but in the centers of power. Between 1914 and 1918, camps were constructed on an unprecedented scale across six continents. In their time, these camps were commonly called concentration camps, though today they are often referred to by the more anodyne term “internment.”

      Those World War I detainees were, for the most part, foreigners—or, in legalese, aliens—and recent anti-immigration legislation in several countries had deliberately limited their rights. The Daily Mail denounced aliens left at liberty once they had registered with their local police department, demanding, “Does signing his name take the malice out of a man?” The Scottish Field was more direct, asking, “Do Germans have souls?” That these civilian detainees were no threat to Britain did not keep them from being demonized, shouted at, and spat upon as they were paraded past hostile crowds in cities like London.

      Though a small number of people were shot in riots in these camps, and hunger became a serious issue as the conflict dragged on, World War I internment would present a new, non-lethal face for the camps, normalizing detention. Even after the war, new camps sprang up from Spain to Hungary and Cuba, providing an improvised “solution” for everything from vagrancy to anxieties over the presence of Jewish foreigners.

      Some of these camps were clearly not safe for those interned. Local camps appeared in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, after a white mob burned down a black neighborhood and detained African-American survivors. In Bolshevik Russia, the first concentration camps preceded the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922 and planted seeds for the brutal Gulag system that became official near the end of the USSR’s first decade. While some kinds of camps were understood to be harsher, after World War I their proliferation did not initially disturb public opinion. They had yet to take on their worst incarnations.

      In 1933, barely more than a month after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Nazis’ first, impromptu camp opened in the town of Nohra in central Germany to hold political opponents. Detainees at Nohra were allowed to vote at a local precinct in the elections of March 5, 1933, resulting in a surge of Communist ballots in the tiny town. Locking up groups of civilians without trial had become accepted. Only the later realization of the horrors of the Nazi death camps would break the default assumption by governments and the public that concentration camps could and should be a simple way to manage populations seen as a threat.

      However, the staggering death toll of the Nazi extermination camp system—which was created mid-war and stood almost entirely separate from the concentration camps in existence since 1933—led to another result: a strange kind of erasure. In the decades that followed World War II, the term “concentration camp” came to stand only for Auschwitz and other extermination camps. It was no longer applied to the kind of extrajudicial detention it had denoted for generations. The many earlier camps that had made the rise of Auschwitz possible largely vanished from public memory.

      It is not necessary, however, to step back a full century in American history to find camps with links to what is happening on the US border today. Detention at Guantánamo began in the 1990s, when Haitian and Cuban immigrants whom the government wanted to keep out of the United States were housed there in waves over a four-year period—years before the “war on terror” and the US policy of rendition of suspected “enemy combatants” made Camps Delta, X-Ray, and Echo notorious. Tens of thousands of Haitians fleeing instability at home were picked up at sea and diverted to the Cuban base, to limit their legal right to apply for asylum. The court cases and battles over the suffering of those detainees ended up setting the stage for what Guantánamo would become after September 11, 2001.

      In one case, a federal court ruled that it did have jurisdiction over the base, but the government agreed to release the Haitians who were part of the lawsuit in exchange for keeping that ruling off the books. A ruling in a second case would assert that the courts did not have jurisdiction. Absent the prior case, the latter stood on its own as precedent. Leaving Guantánamo in this gray area made it an ideal site for extrajudicial detention and torture after the twin towers fell.

      This process of normalization, when a bad camp becomes much more dangerous, is not unusual. Today’s border camps are a crueler reflection of long-term policies—some challenged in court—that earlier presidents had enacted. Prior administrations own a share of the responsibility for today’s harsh practices, but the policies in place today are also accompanied by a shameless willingness to publicly target a vulnerable population in increasingly dangerous ways.

      I visited Guantánamo twice in 2015, sitting in the courtroom for pretrial hearings and touring the medical facility, the library, and all the old abandoned detention sites, as well as newly built ones, open to the media—from the kennel-style cages of Camp X-Ray rotting to ruin in the damp heat to the modern jailhouse facilities of Camp 6. Seeing all this in person made clear to me how vast the architecture of detention had become, how entrenched it was, and how hard it would be to close.

      Without a significant government effort to reverse direction, conditions in every camp system tend to deteriorate over time. Governments rarely make that kind of effort on behalf of people they are willing to lock up without trial in the first place. And history shows that legislatures do not close camps against the will of an executive.

      Just a few years ago there might have been more potential for change spurred by the judicial branch of our democracy, but this Supreme Court is inclined toward deference to executive power, even, it appears, if that power is abused. It seems unlikely this Court will intervene to end the new border camp system; indeed, the justices are far more likely to institutionalize it by half-measures, as happened with Guantánamo. The Korematsu case, in which the Supreme Court upheld Japanese-American internment (a ruling only rescinded last year), relied on the suppression of evidence by the solicitor general. Americans today can have little confidence that this administration would behave any more scrupulously when defending its detention policy.

      What kind of conditions can we expect to develop in these border camps? The longer a camp system stays open, the more likely it is that vital things will go wrong: detainees will contract contagious diseases and suffer from malnutrition and mental illness. We have already seen that current detention practices have resulted in children and adults succumbing to influenza, staph infections, and sepsis. The US is now poised to inflict harm on tens of thousands more, perhaps hundreds of thousands more.

      Along with such inevitable consequences, every significant camp system has introduced new horrors of its own, crises that were unforeseen when that system was opened. We have yet to discover what those will be for these American border camps. But they will happen. Every country thinks it can do detention better when it starts these projects. But no good way to conduct mass indefinite detention has yet been devised; the system always degrades.

      When, in 1940, Margarete Buber-Neumann was transferred from the Soviet Gulag at Karaganda to the camp for women at Ravensbrück (in an exchange enabled by the Nazi–Soviet Pact), she came from near-starvation conditions in the USSR and was amazed at the cleanliness and order of the Nazi camp. New arrivals were issued clothing, bedding, and silverware, and given fresh porridge, fruit, sausage, and jam to eat. Although the Nazi camps were already punitive, order-obsessed monstrosities, the wartime overcrowding that would soon overtake them had not yet made daily life a thing of constant suffering and squalor. The death camps were still two years away.

      The United States now has a vast and growing camp system. It is starting out with gruesome overcrowding and inadequate healthcare, and because of budget restrictions, has already taken steps to cut services to juvenile detainees. The US Office of Refugee Resettlement says that the mounting number of children arriving unaccompanied is forcing it to use military bases and other sites that it prefers to avoid, and that establishing these camps is a temporary measure. But without oversight from state child welfare inspectors, the possibilities for neglect and abuse are alarming. And without any knowledge of how many asylum-seekers are coming in the future, federal administrators are likely to find themselves boxed in to managing detention on military sites permanently.

      President Trump and senior White House adviser Stephen Miller appear to have purged the Department of Homeland Security of most internal opposition to their anti-immigrant policies. In doing so, that have removed even those sympathetic to the general approach taken by the White House, such as former Chief of Staff John Kelly and former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, in order to escalate the militarization of the border and expand irregular detention in more systematic and punitive ways. This kind of power struggle or purge in the early years of a camp system is typical.

      The disbanding of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police, in February 1922 and the transfer of its commander, Felix Dzerzhinsky, to head up an agency with control over only two prisons offered a hint of an alternate future in which extrajudicial detention would not play a central role in the fledgling Soviet republic. But Dzerzhinsky managed to keep control over the “special camps” in his new position, paving the way for the emergence of a camp-centered police state. In pre-war Germany in the mid-1930s, Himmler’s struggle to consolidate power from rivals eventually led him to make camps central to Nazi strategy. When the hardliners win, as they appear to have in the US, conditions tend to worsen significantly.

      Is it possible this growth in the camp system will be temporary and the improvised border camps will soon close? In theory, yes. But the longer they remain open, the less likely they are to vanish. When I visited the camps for Rohingya Muslims a year before the large-scale campaign of ethnic cleansing began, many observers appeared to be confusing the possible and the probable. It was possible that the party of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi would sweep into office in free elections and begin making changes. It was possible that full democracy would come to all the residents of Myanmar, even though the government had stripped the Rohingya of the last vestiges of their citizenship. These hopes proved to be misplaced. Once there are concentration camps, it is always probable that things will get worse.

      The Philippines, Japanese-American internment, Guantánamo… we can consider the fine points of how the current border camps evoke past US systems, and we can see how the arc of camp history reveals the likelihood that the suffering we’re currently inflicting will be multiplied exponentially. But we can also simply look at what we’re doing right now, shoving bodies into “dog pound”-style detention pens, “iceboxes,” and standing room-only spaces. We can look at young children in custody who have become suicidal. How much more historical awareness do we really need?

      https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/06/21/some-suburb-of-hell-americas-new-concentration-camp-system

    • #Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez engage le bras de fer avec la politique migratoire de Donald Trump

      L’élue de New York a qualifié les camps de rétention pour migrants érigés à la frontière sud des Etats-Unis de « camps de concentration ».

      https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2019/06/19/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-engage-le-bras-de-fer-avec-la-politique-migratoire-

  • Jedediah Britton-Purdy : « Trump est une farce. Mais c’est un bon politicien »
    https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/040619/trump-est-un-bon-politicien-0

    En deux ans et demi, qu’a fait Donald Trump à la Maison Blanche, à part tonner et tempêter ? Il a remporté plus de victoires que l’on ne le croit, prévient Jedediah Britton-Purdy, professeur de droit à l’université Columbia. Politicien « destructeur », Trump remplit les cours fédérales de juges conservateurs, attaque l’environnement, mène une politique identitaire qui satisfait sa base.

    #Entretien #effondrement,_Jedediah_Purdy,_extinction,_catastrophe_climatique,_juges,_Cour_suprême_américaine,_Climat,_Donald_Trump

    • La stratégie politique passe aussi par les cours fédérales et la Cour suprême, des institutions très importantes dans le système politique américain. L’administration Trump a nommé plus de cent juges dans les cours fédérales, un record. En poste à vie, ils vont se prononcer pendant des décennies sur toutes sortes de décisions politiques majeures. Avec deux juges nommés par Trump, les très conservateurs Neil Gorsuch et Brett Kavanaugh, la Cour suprême a désormais une majorité conservatrice. Elle a validé le « muslim ban » et va à l’avenir se prononcer sur des décisions cruciales, comme le recensement, le droit de vote, la politique migratoire, la discrimination positive, le mariage des couples de même sexe. Plusieurs États (la Géorgie, l’Alabama, le Mississippi, l’Ohio, etc.) ont voté récemment des lois interdisant purement et simplement l’avortement, des lois illégales destinées à pousser le contentieux devant la Cour suprême...

      Il n’y a pas de stratégie plus puissante lorsqu’on est minoritaire politiquement que de s’appuyer sur les cours, qui sont les grandes institutions antidémocratiques de notre pays.

      Trump est membre d’un parti qui a depuis longtemps bénéficié de la restriction des prérogatives démocratiques. Avant lui, c’est la Cour suprême qui a amputé la réforme de la santé de Barack Obama d’une part substantielle, celle qui justement avait le plus d’impact pour les travailleurs et les pauvres. C’est elle qui a restreint la loi sur le droit de vote de 1965, elle encore qui a instauré en 2010 le droit de dépenser des sommes illimitées dans les campagnes politiques.

      Les libéraux commencent à comprendre ce que la gauche américaine a compris depuis longtemps : cette idée que les tribunaux opèrent selon de grands principes constitutionnels apolitiques n’a jamais été vraie. Les décisions des juges fédéraux ou de la Cour suprême sont une forme de politique, et même la forme de politique la plus favorable aux élites, la plus antidémocratique.

      Les prochaines décennies seront peut-être marquées par une résistance démocratique à ce gouvernement des cours, qui se placent souvent du côté du pouvoir établi et des riches.

      Le plus troublant est que les cours opèrent une forme de tyrannie politique du passé sur le présent et le futur. Les juges nommés aujourd’hui resteront à leurs postes à vie, à un moment où le niveau de carbone dans l’atmosphère aura peut-être dramatiquement augmenté. Le monde sera différent et ces gens-là, placés par un président minoritaire autour de 2017, décideront encore de la direction du pays. Ces juges sont placés là pour étendre au maximum l’influence de ce qui est, espérons-le, le dernier souffle du nationalisme extractif, cette version ploutocrate, masculiniste, ethnonationaliste et suprémaciste du parti républicain.

      Sa pratique du pouvoir ne risque-t-elle pas de créer un précédent ? Trump n’est-il pas en train d’étendre à un tel point les prérogatives présidentielles qu’il sera difficile de revenir en arrière ?

      Cette question est compliquée parce qu’en réalité, toutes les administrations américaines ont de plus en plus de mal à légiférer. La pression est donc grande de gouverner par le biais de décisions administratives et présidentielles. J’ai fait partie de ceux qui ont applaudi la décision de Barack Obama d’accorder en 2012 un statut aux 700 000 enfants nés de parents étrangers mais ayant grandi sur le sol américain [les fameux « Dreamers », dont Trump a annulé la protection, toutefois temporairement maintenue par les tribunaux – ndlr], et pourtant il faut bien admettre que cette décision a contribué à présidentialiser la politique migratoire.

      Le problème est que de nombreux libéraux continuent de considérer Trump comme un accident, et non comme le symptôme d’une crise plus large. Comme l’ancien vice-président Joe Biden, ils pensent que tout irait bien si l’on pouvait revenir quatre ans en arrière.

      Mais même si le prochain locataire de la Maison Blanche n’est pas Trump, la question de notre capacité à produire des décisions démocratiques se posera tout autant. Trump ne fait pas que pervertir des institutions qui existaient avant lui. Il le fait de façon éhontément partisane, et nomme des juges notoirement incompétents. Qu’il puisse faire tout cela aussi montre que nos institutions ne sont pas démocratiques.

  • Pourquoi il faut signer l’arrêt de mort du néolibéralisme - Joseph E. STIGLITZ The Guardian - 30 Mai 2019
    • Joseph E. Stiglitz est lauréat du prix Nobel d’économie, professeur à l’Université Columbia et économiste en chef à l’Institut Roosevelt.

    Depuis des décennies, les États-Unis et d’autres états mènent une politique de libre échange qui a échoué de façon spectaculaire.
    Quel type de système économique apporte le plus de bien-être au genre humain ? Cette question est devenue centrale aujourd’hui, car après 40 ans de néolibéralisme aux États-Unis et dans d’autres économies avancées, nous savons ce qui ne fonctionne pas.
    L’expérience néolibérale – réduction de l’impôt des riches, déréglementation des marchés du travail et des produits, financiarisation et mondialisation – a été un échec spectaculaire. La croissance est plus faible que pendant le quart de siècle qui a suivi la seconde guerre mondiale et elle n’a favorisé le plus souvent que ceux qui sont tout en haut de l’échelle. Après des décennies de revenus stagnants, ou même en baisse pour ceux qui se trouvent en dessous d’eux, il faut signer le certificat de décès du néolibéralisme et l’enterrer.


    Au moins trois grandes propositions politiques alternatives existent actuellement : le nationalisme d’extrême droite, le réformisme de centre gauche et la gauche progressiste (le centre-droit représentant l’échec néolibéral). Mais, à l’exception de la gauche progressiste, ces alternatives continuent d’adhérer à une forme d’idéologie qui a (ou aurait dû avoir) fait long feu.

    Le centre-gauche, par exemple, représente le néolibéralisme à visage humain. Son objectif est d’adapter au XXIe siècle les politiques de l’ancien président américain Bill Clinton et de l’ancien premier ministre britannique Tony Blair, en n’apportant que de légères modifications au système de financiarisation et de mondialisation actuel. La droite nationaliste, quant à elle, rejette la mondialisation, et accuse les migrants et les étrangers de tous les problèmes. Mais, comme l’a montré la présidence de Donald Trump, elle continue – du moins dans sa version étatsunienne – à réduire, avec zèle, les impôts des riches, à déréglementer et à réduire ou supprimer les programmes sociaux.

    En revanche, le troisième camp défend ce que j’appelle le capitalisme progressiste, qui propose un programme économique radicalement différent, fondé sur quatre priorités. La première consiste à rétablir l’équilibre entre les marchés, l’État et la société civile. La lenteur de la croissance économique, les inégalités croissantes, l’instabilité financière et la dégradation de l’environnement sont des problèmes nés du marché et ne peuvent donc pas être réglés par le marché. Les gouvernements ont le devoir de limiter et d’organiser le marché par le biais de réglementations en matière d’environnement, de santé, de sécurité au travail et autres. Le gouvernement a également pour tâche de faire ce que le marché ne peut ou ne veut pas faire, par exemple investir activement dans la recherche fondamentale, la technologie, l’éducation et la santé de ses électeurs.

    La deuxième priorité est de reconnaître que la « richesse des nations » est le résultat d’une enquête scientifique – l’étude du monde qui nous entoure – et d’une organisation sociale qui permet à de vastes groupes de personnes de travailler ensemble pour le bien commun. Les marchés gardent le rôle crucial de faciliter la coopération sociale, mais ils ne peuvent le faire que si des contrôles démocratiques les contraignent à respecter les lois. Autrement, les individus s’enrichissent en exploitant les autres et en faisant fructifier leurs rentes plutôt qu’en créant de la richesse par leur ingéniosité. Beaucoup de riches d’aujourd’hui ont emprunté la voie de l’exploitation pour arriver là où ils en sont. Les politiques de Trump ont favorisé les rentiers et détruit les sources de la création de richesse. Le capitalisme progressiste veut faire exactement le contraire.

    Cela nous amène à la troisième priorité : résoudre le problème croissant de la concentration du pouvoir du marché. En utilisant les techniques d’information, en achetant des concurrents potentiels et en créant des droits de douane à l’entrée, les entreprises dominantes peuvent maximiser leurs rentes au détriment des populations. L’augmentation du pouvoir des entreprises sur le marché, conjuguée au déclin du pouvoir de négociation des travailleurs, explique en grande partie la hausse des inégalités et la baisse de la croissance. À moins que le gouvernement ne joue un rôle plus actif que ne le préconise le néolibéralisme, ces problèmes vont probablement s’aggraver à cause des progrès de la robotisation et de l’intelligence artificielle.

    Le quatrième point clé du programme progressiste consiste à rompre le lien entre les pouvoirs économique et politique. Les pouvoirs économique et politique se renforcent mutuellement et se cooptent réciproquement, en particulier là où, comme aux États-Unis, des individus et des sociétés fortunés peuvent financer sans limites les élections. Dans le système étatsunien de plus en plus antidémocratique de « un dollar, une voix », il n’y a plus assez de ces freins et contre-pouvoirs si nécessaires à la démocratie : rien ne peut limiter le pouvoir des riches. Le problème n’est pas seulement moral et politique : les économies plus égalitaires sont en réalité plus performantes. Les capitalistes progressistes doivent donc commencer par réduire l’influence de l’argent en politique et par réduire les inégalités.

    On ne peut pas réparer les dégâts causés par des décennies de néolibéralisme d’un coup de baguette magique. Mais on peut y arriver en suivant le programme que je viens d’ébaucher. Il faudra que les réformateurs soient au moins aussi déterminés à lutter contre le pouvoir excessif du marché et les inégalités, que le secteur privé l’a été pour les générer.

    L’éducation, la recherche et les autres véritables sources de richesse doivent être au cœur des réformes. Il faudra protéger de l’environnement et lutter contre le changement climatique avec la même vigilance que les Green New Dealers aux États-Unis et Extinction Rebellion au Royaume-Uni. Et il faudra mettre en place des mesures sociales permettant à tous de mener une vie décente. Cela veut dire bénéficier de la sécurité économique, d’un travail et d’un salaire décent, de soins de santé et d’un logement convenable, d’une retraite garantie et d’une éducation de qualité pour ses enfants.

    Ce programme d’action n’a rien d’irréaliste ; ce qui serait irréaliste serait de ne pas le mettre en œuvre. Les alternatives proposées par les nationalistes et les néolibéraux engendreraient davantage de stagnation, d’inégalités, de dégradation de l’environnement et de colère, et pourraient avoir des conséquences que nous ne pouvons même pas imaginer.

    Le capitalisme progressiste n’est pas un oxymore. C’est au contraire l’alternative la plus viable et la plus dynamique à une idéologie qui a clairement échoué. Il constitue notre meilleure chance de sortir du marasme économique et politique actuel.

    Joseph E. STIGLITZ

    #néolibéralisme #capitalisme #financiarisation #mondialisation #nationalisme #réformisme #progressisme #pouvoirs #marchés #inégalités #Joseph_Stiglitz

    Sources : https://www.legrandsoir.info/pourquoi-il-faut-signer-l-arret-de-mort-du-neoliberalisme-the-guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/30/neoliberalism-must-be-pronouced-dead-and-buried-where-next

  • Washington entre en guerre contre les géants du Net
    https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2019/06/08/washington-entre-en-guerre-contre-les-geants-du-net_5473495_3234.html

    Le département américain de la justice, la Commission fédérale du commerce et certains élus ont engagé des procédures visant les GAFA. Une bataille homérique s’annonce à Washington, mais pas entre démocrates et républicains. En effet, elle va opposer un front inédit d’élus des deux bords, avec le soutien de l’administration de Donald Trump, aux géants du numérique. Ces derniers sont soupçonnés de positions dominantes, voire monopolistiques, qui les placeraient en contravention avec le Clayton Act, la loi (...)

    #Apple #Google #Amazon #Facebook #domination #GAFAM #FTC #US_Department_of_Justice_(DoJ)

    ##US_Department_of_Justice__DoJ_

  • Proche-Orient : Mike Pompeo enterre le plan de paix de Kushner | El Watan
    https://www.elwatan.com/edition/international/proche-orient-mike-pompeo-enterre-le-plan-de-paix-de-kushner-06-06-2019

    Jared Kushner, le conseiller du président Trump, s’est enfoncé davantage lundi en mettant encore en doute l’éventualité d’une solution à deux Etats, estimant que le peuple palestinien souhaitait « des choses différentes » de celles de l’Autorité palestinienne.

    En plus d’être rejeté par les Palestiniens, le plan de paix palestino-israélien élaboré par Jared Kushner, le conseiller du président américain, Donald Trump, et dont le contenu est encore mystérieux n’a visiblement pas la cote aussi au Département d’Etat américain. Le secrétaire d’Etat américain, Mike Pompeo, a affirmé, à ce propos, dimanche, lors d’une rencontre privée avec la Conférence des présidents des principales organisations juives américaines que ce plan est « inexécutable » et « peut être rejeté ».

    « Je comprends pourquoi les gens pensent qu’il s’agit d’un accord que seuls les Israéliens pourront aimer », a-t-il ajouté, selon le Washington Post qui a rapporté, dimanche, l’information. « Je comprends cette perception. J’espère juste qu’on laissera la place à l’écoute et qu’on la laissera s’installer un peu », a-t-il toutefois ajouté.

    Commentant les confidences de Mike Pompeo, l’ancien négociateur américain sur le dossier du Moyen-Orient, Aaron David Miller, a indiqué que ces propos représentent l’évaluation « la plus révélatrice et la plus réelle que j’ai entendue jusqu’à présent ». « Le fait que Pompeo ait si facilement admis la perception et probablement la réalité que le plan était fortement structuré et favorable aux Israéliens est frappant », a ajouté l’ancien négociateur, cité aussi par le Washington Post.

  • Venezuela : qu’y a-t-il derrière les déclarations de M. Pompeo critiquant la désunion de l’opposition ?
    • celle-ci est réelle, mais…
    • les É.-U. ont aussi commis leur lot d’erreurs. Rappel : M. Pompeo avant d’être nommé secrétaire d’état fin avril 2018, s’est occupé du cas du Venezuela au poste précédent, directeur de la CIA depuis janvier 2017
    • Leopoldo López, ne supportant pas la mise en avant de Juan Guaidó, est très probablement à l’origine de la tentative de coup d’état du 30 avril, anticipant sans prévenir personne [et sans doute pas Guaidó lui-même] sur les grands rassemblements prévus pour le lendemain
    • l’opposition commence à craindre que les É.-U. ne fassent affaire directement avec les militaires, la laissant hors du coup.

    ¿Qué hay detrás de la frustración de EE UU con la oposición a Maduro ? – El Nacional / BBC Mundo
    http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/bbc-mundo/que-hay-detras-frustracion-con-oposicion-maduro_284613

    El jefe de la diplomacia de EE UU, Mike Pompeo, indicó en una grabación secreta que mantener unidos a los opositores venezolanos es “diabólicamente difícil”. Pero algunos creen que esto disimula los propios errores de Washington
    […]
    El creciente descontento de EE UU con la oposición venezolana ya era un secreto a voces en Washington. Pero ahora es más evidente que nunca.

    Sin embargo, algunos creen que detrás de esta frustración del gobierno de Donald Trump hay equivocaciones en su propia estrategia hacia Venezuela.

    «Es injusto que Pompeo lance este tipo de críticas a la oposición (venezolana) cuando los mayores errores los cometieron los encargados de formular la política de EE UU», dice Roger Noriega, que fue subsecretario de Estado para América Latina durante el gobierno de George W. Bush, a BBC Mundo.
    […]
    [Pompeo] Apuntó que los intereses en conflicto de los enemigos y rivales de Maduro impidieron su derrocamiento en el fallido levantamiento opositor del 30 de abril.

    «(Maduro) No confía nada en los venezolanos. No lo culpo. No debería. Todos estaban conspirando contra él. Lamentablemente, todos estaban conspirando para sí mismos», indicó Pompeo.

    Aunque dijo confiar en que Maduro se verá obligado a abandonar el poder, aclaró que desconoce cuándo ocurrirá esa partida que calificó como «necesaria pero completamente insuficiente» para lograr un cambio en Venezuela.

    Pompeo dijo que confiaba en que Maduro finalmente se vea obligado a retirarse, pero «no podría decirte el momento».

    En sectores de la administración Trump empieza a cundir la impaciencia porque sus esfuerzos no están generando de momento el cambio de gobierno deseado por Washington.
    […]
    La oposición venezolana ha evitado por ahora responder en público los comentarios de Pompeo, que de hecho suponen un revés de su principal aliado.

    «Las palabras de Pompeo nos dolieron porque parece que la culpa de que Maduro haya resistido es nuestra falta de unidad, y eso no es cierto», dijo al corresponsal de BBC Mundo en Venezuela, Guillermo Olmo, un diputado opositor venezolano que no quiso ser identificado.

    «Nos preocupa que, visto que Maduro resiste, se busque una solución con los militares y se nos deje a nosotros fuera», señala el diputado.

    Desde que en enero Guaidó se proclamara presidente, los líderes opositores han mostrado públicamente su apoyo a la estrategia que lidera el joven político.

    Sin embargo, hay recelos por el papel de Leopoldo López, mentor de Guaidó y protagonista en el intento de levantamiento del 30 de abril.

    Ese día fue liberado por miembros del servicio de inteligencia (Sebin) del arresto domiciliario en el que llevaba varios años tras haber sido condenado en 2014.

    «Lo del 30 de abril fue algo que Leopoldo López hizo por su cuenta y riesgo, sin comunicarlo, y ahora ha hecho que el problema de unidad sea real», afirmó la fuente de la oposición.

    «Estamos unidos en torno a Guaidó. El suyo es el liderazgo del momento, pero Leopoldo sigue tratando de influir y eso está poniendo las cosas más difíciles», agregó.

  • L’idylle insolite de Donald Trump, artisan du « Muslim Ban » avec la dynastie wahhabite : 2/2
    https://www.madaniya.info/2019/06/06/lidylle-insolite-de-donald-trump-artisan-du-muslim-ban-avec-la-dynastie-w

    Un conseiller du prince héritier d’Abou Dhabi incuclpé aux Etats Unis pour détention de matériel pornographique.

    Coup dur pour la stratégie d’endiguement de l’Iran, un des missi dominici américain en direction de l’Arabie saoudite et des Emirats Arabes Unis, Georges Nader, homme d’affaires américain d’origine libanaise, a été inculpé pour détention de matériel pornographique.

    Son arrestation est intervenue le 4 juin 2019 une semaine après l’échec du triple sommet de la Mecque (islamique, arabe et Golfe), fin mai, et la décision de Benyamin Netanyahu d’organiser de nouvelles élections législatives israéliennes en septmebre, faute de pouvoir former un gouvernement. Deux echecs qui ont renvoyé aux calendes grecques le lancement de la transaction du siècle, conconctée sous l’égide de Jared Kusgner, le gendre présidentiel américain.

    Agé de 60 ans, Georges Nader a été conseiller du prince héritier d’Abou Dhabi, Mohamamd Ben Zayed et son chargé de mission auprès de l’équipe de campagne présidentielle de Donald Trump, en vue d’établir un partenariat privilégié entre les Emirats arabes Unis et les Etats Unis.

    L’intermédiaire libano américain avait entrepris des démarches similaires auprès d’Israël, la Russie et l’Arabie saoudite.

    Georges Nader avait été entendu par Robert Mueller chargé de l’enquête sur les interérecnes russes de la campagne présidentielle américaine.

    Objet d’une première interpellation en 1987, il a été arrêté le 4 juin 2019 à son arrivée à l’aéroport John F. Kennedy de New York, en vertu d’un mandat d’arrêt délivré en 2018, en raison du fait que « sur son portable, il conservait des photos de mineurs en position obscène ».

    • Un homme d’affaires américano-libanais arrêté à New York pour possession d’images pédopornographiques
      https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1173549/un-homme-daffaires-americano-libanais-arrete-a-new-york-pour-possessi
      https://s.olj.me/storage/attachments/1174/800_950951.png/r/800

      M. Nader avait aidé à mettre en œuvre une rencontre, aux Seychelles en janvier 2017, entre Erik Prince, un partisan de M. Trump qui avait fondé la société de sécurité privée Blackwater, et un responsable russe proche de Vladimir Poutine, rappelle le Washington Post. « L’objet de cette rencontre a suscité un intérêt particulier de la part des enquêteur du procureur Mueller, et certaines questions restent sans réponse, même après la publication du rapport Mueller », ajoute le quotidien américain.

    • Mars 2018 : Les Emirats accusés d’influencer Trump : un homme d’affaires américano-libanais dans le collimateur
      https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/1102941/les-emirats-accuses-dinfluencer-la-politique-etrangere-de-trump-un-ho

      Selon le quotidien, les enquêteurs de M. Mueller, qui mène l’enquête sur une possible collusion entre l’équipe du président Donald Trump et la Russie pendant la campagne présidentielle de 2016, ont interrogé M. Nader qui aurait tenté d’influencer la politique étrangère des Etats-Unis en faveur des Emirats, notamment en « donnant de l’argent en soutien à Trump durant la dernière campagne présidentielle ».

      L’Arabie saoudite et les Emirats arabes unis, de même que Bahreïn et l’Egypte, ont rompu en juin dernier leurs relations diplomatiques avec le Qatar, qu’ils accusent de promouvoir le terrorisme, ciblant aussi dans cette initiative l’Iran, ennemi juré de Riyad.

      Le New York Times cite le cas d’une relation de M. Nader, Eliott Broidy, un mécène de la campagne de Trump, très proche du Premier ministre israélien Benjamin Netanyahu, qui a des centaines de millions de dollars de contrats avec la famille régnante émirati. M. Broidy a oeuvré ces derniers mois pour pousser l’administration Trump à se rapprocher des Emirats.

    • George Nader (businessman) - Wikipedia
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Nader_(businessman)

      Nader has been charged with multiple crimes involving the sexual exploitation of minors, and convicted of several of them. A 1985 charge of receiving from the Netherlands films and magazines depicting pre and post-pubescent boys engaged in sexual acts, was dismissed due to an invalid search warrant.[18] A federal court in Virginia in 1991 gave him a six-month sentence on a felony charge of transporting from Germany, pornographic videotapes of boys about 13 or 14 years old.[18] Prosecutors agreed to put the case under seal “due to the extremely sensitive nature of Mr. Nader’s work in the Middle East.”[18]

      In 2003, he was convicted in Prague, Czech Republic for sexually abusing 10 boys, for which he served one year in prison.[1][18] A spokesperson of the court told press that the crimes occurred between 1999 and 2002. In one case, at his room in Hilton Prague Hotel, he requested oral sex from a 14-year-old boy and after he refused, Nader masturbated in front of him, paying him 2,000 koruna.[1]

      On June 3, 2019, Nader was arrested by federal agents for possession of child pornography as well as bestiality[19] and, for a second time, transportation of child pornography. These charges stemmed from his January 2018 questioning by FBI agents working on behalf of special counsel Robert Mueller, at which time child pornography was incidentally found on one of his three cell phones as agents inspected it pursuant to a warrant.[20][21] He was ordered to be held pending his extradition to Virginia.[22]

  • Trump, les Rabbins, et le plan top secret pour construire le Troisième Temple (partie 3) ZÉNITH 2016 A-T-IL ÉTÉ ATTEINT ?
    https://www.crashdebug.fr/loisirss/73-livres/16095-trump-les-rabbins-et-le-plan-top-secret-pour-construire-le-troisiem

    Le 3eme Opus de notre nouvelle série sur le 3eme temple et Donald Trump proposée par notre cher Contributeur anonyme dans la ligné d’Exo Vaticana, et de Zenith 2016.

    PARTIE 3 : ZÉNITH 2016 A-T-IL ÉTÉ ATTEINT ?

    Par le Dr Thomas Horn

    Que les circonstances soient suffisantes ou non pour construire le nouveau Temple avant que l’Amérique n’élise (ou réélise) son prochain président en 2020, ce que les rabbins en Israël croient que Donald Trump a commencé en 2016 pourrait bien avoir jeté les bases sur lesquelles l’homme du péché régnera.

    Cela soulève quelques questions sérieuses.

    Dieu, qui travaille toutes choses ensemble pour le bien (voir Romains 8:28), a-t-il ordonné l’élection de Donald Trump pour un but et une mission spécifiques liés au troisième Temple ?

    Si oui, l’année de son (...)

    #En_vedette #Livres #Loisirs

  • China’s Rebel Cartoonist Unmasks – Foreign Policy
    https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/06/04/chinas-rebel-cartoonist-unmasks


    USA Today, 2017: The Statue of Liberty featuring a Nazi salute and a torch with the hair of U.S. President Donald Trump.
    (et quelques autres dans une galerie)

    Badiucao’s work has brought him praise from critics — and threats from Beijing.
    […]
    Badiucao has worked for years to keep his identity a secret out of fear of reprisal from the Chinese government, remaining anonymous and never allowing photos of his face to be published. He also has concealed his art from his family, with whom he has cut off contact. The documentary reveals his face for the first time.

    Foreign Policy spoke with Badiucao about his art, his family, and his hope for the future. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

  • Washington lance un #plan pour garantir l’#approvisionnement en #minéraux_stratégiques

    Les Etats-Unis ont dévoilé mardi un plan pour garantir l’approvisionnement du pays en minéraux stratégiques et notamment en #terres_rares, indispensables à tous les équipements électroniques et auxquels la #Chine a menacé de restreindre l’accès.

    « Ces minéraux critiques sont souvent ignorés mais sans eux la vie moderne serait impossible », a déclaré Wilbur Ross, le secrétaire américain au Commerce, affirmant que le gouvernement fédéral « prend des mesures sans précédent pour s’assurer que les Etats-Unis ne seront pas coupés de ces matériaux vitaux ».

    Le plan d’action identifie 35 éléments stratégiques dont l’#uranium, le #titane et les terres rares, pour lesquels les Etats-Unis sont particulièrement dépendants de l’étranger.

    Le rapport rappelle que pour 14 des 35 matériaux détaillés sur la liste, les importations représentent plus de 50% de la consommation annuelle des Etats-Unis. Pour 14 des minéraux listés, « les Etats-Unis n’ont aucune production nationale et dépendent complètement des importations », note le rapport.

    La Chine produit l’essentiel des terres rares de la planète, un ensemble de 17 métaux indispensables aux technologies de pointe et que l’on retrouve dans les smartphones, les écrans plasma, les véhicules électriques mais aussi dans l’armement.

    – Menace subtile ou pas -

    Et Pékin s’est plu à rappeler cette dépendance —pas seulement des Etats-Unis— le 22 mai quand Xi Jinping est allé visiter une usine de traitement de ces métaux stratégiques. Une manière subtile de laisser planer la menace de bloquer les exportations.

    Ce geste fait suite à l’intensification de la guerre commerciale menée par Donald Trump contre la Chine mais aussi des lourdes sanctions prises contre le géant chinois des télécoms Huawei, que Washington soupçonne de favoriser l’espionnage par le régime.

    Une semaine plus tard, le message était encore plus clair. « Si quelqu’un veut utiliser des produits fabriqués à partir de nos exportations de terres rares pour freiner le développement de la Chine, alors je pense que (...) le peuple chinois sera mécontent », a mis en garde un responsable de la puissante agence de planification économique.

    Mardi la menace s’est faite plus précise. La puissante agence de planification économique chinoise a tenu une réunion sur un possible « contrôle des exportations » de terres rares.

    « Selon les suggestions des spécialistes (...) nous devons renforcer les contrôles à l’exportation et établir un mécanisme de traçabilité et d’examen pour l’ensemble du processus d’exportation des terres rares », a indiqué la NDRC à l’issue de cette réunion.

    En 2010, en représailles à un différend territorial, Pékin avait brutalement interrompu ses exportations de terres rares vers le Japon, mettant les entreprises de hautes technologies nippones en grandes difficultés.

    – Six plans d’action -

    Jusqu’au milieu des années 80, les Etats-Unis dominaient la production mondiale de terres rares, mais une catastrophe écologique dans la seule mine du pays a mené à sa fermeture en 2003, avant sa réouverture en 2011 après une flambée des prix.

    Pour éviter de se retrouver dans la même situation que le Japon, l’administration Trump a bâti sa stratégie sur six plans d’action.

    Washington compte ainsi accélérer la recherche, le développement et le déploiement de méthodes de recyclage et de réutilisation de ces minéraux stratégiques, trouver des alternatives et aussi diversifier l’approvisionnement et améliorer les processus d’extraction, de séparation et de purification.

    De fait pour certains des minéraux concernés, les Etats-Unis disposent bien de la matière première mais pas du savoir-faire pour les rendre utilisables par l’industrie.

    Washington compte aussi renforcer la coopération et améliorer le commerce international de ces minéraux avec ses alliés.

    Le #plan_stratégique prévoit également de faire un recensement précis des #ressources_naturelles disponibles dans le pays pour pouvoir les exploiter. Mais il compte aussi faire la nomenclature de sources d’approvisionnement moins traditionnelles, comme l’extraction à partir de l’eau de mer ou de déchets du charbon.

    Et comme elle l’a fait pour d’autres industries, l’administration veut déréguler pour accélérer les choses.

    Le gouvernement veut enfin s’assurer qu’il disposera de la main-d’oeuvre qualifiée nécessaire pour mener à bien son projet et bâtir une base industrielle nationale solide.


    https://www.courrierinternational.com/depeche/washington-lance-un-plan-pour-garantir-lapprovisionnement-en-
    #Etats-Unis #USA #extractivisme
    ping @albertocampiphoto

  • À qui profite le contenu des pages Facebook tunisiennes liées à Israël ? – Inkyfada
    https://inkyfada.com/fr/2019/06/03/tunisie-facebook-israel

    Le 16 mai 2019, Facebook annonce la désactivation de 265 pages ou comptes liés à une société israélienne dont le but est d’influencer l’opinion publique, principalement dans des pays africains. En Tunisie, 11 pages sont concernées. Inkyfada a eu accès à la quasi-totalité du contenu publié par ces pages. À qui profitent-elles ? Un candidat se dégage en particulier. Enquête.

    Que cette campagne ait été commandée directement par un candidat, des personnes ou des entités qui lui sont favorables, une société en est l’instigatrice, selon Facebook. Il s’agit de la société Israélienne Archimedes Group . Son objectif ? "Changer la réalité" pour "gagner des élections à travers le monde"

    “CHANGER LA RÉALITÉ”

    Archimedes Group opérait principalement en Afrique, mais aussi en Asie du Sud-Est et en Amérique Latine et affichait clairement ses intentions sur son site internet, avant qu’il ne soit lui-même supprimé à la suite de la révélation de ses méthodes par Facebook. 

    “Nos équipes ont joué un rôle significatif dans de nombreuses campagnes politiques ou publiques, comme des élections présidentielles ou d’autres projets sur les réseaux sociaux à travers le monde”, précisait encore Archimedes. 


    Capture d’écran de la page "a propos" du site de la société Archimedes Group avant sa suppression.

    Pour cela, la société israélienne affirmait avoir développé un ensemble d’outils et méthodes “innovantes” afin de “changer la réalité selon les souhaits de ses clients". Parmi ces outils, Archimedes Group propose à ses clients d’acquérir “Archimedes Tarva” , un produit décrit comme un logiciel de gestion de campagne. 

    “Développé par des experts de premier plan dans le domaine des réseaux sociaux et écrit par nos meilleurs développeurs, il inclut des outils d’automatisation et de gestion de campagnes sur les réseaux sociaux, la création de plateformes à grande échelle et des opérations illimitées de comptes en ligne. 

    La licence comprend la formation et la mise en oeuvre sur site, ainsi qu’un service technique 24h/7j”.

    Selon plusieurs sources dont l’AIPAC, puissant lobby américain de soutien à Israël, Elinadav Heymann est désigné comme le PDG d’ Archimedes Group. Il est à ce jour difficilement traçable en ligne, sa biographie ayant été supprimée de nombreux sites qui le référençaient depuis la révélation par Facebook de ses activités. L’un d’eux, negociations.ch, le présentait aussi comme un ancien agent du renseignement de l’armée de l’air israélienne.

    [Rick Gates Sought Online Manipulation Plans From Israeli Intelligence Firm for Trump Campaign](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/politics/rick-gates-psy-group-trump.html)

    Ce n’est pas la première fois qu’une société israélienne gérée par un ancien agent du renseignement est citée pour ce type d’activités. En 2016, Rick Gates, un responsable de la campagne électorale de Donald Trump avait approché la société Psy-Group, alors composée d’anciens agents des services du renseignement israélien, rapporte le New York Times. Un document élaboré par Psy-Group détaillait alors un plan d’action élaboré notamment pour cibler et influencer des milliers de délégué·es républicain·es.

    [L’unité militaire 8200, la face longtemps cachée de la high-tech israélienne](https://www.letemps.ch/economie/lunite-militaire-8200-face-longtemps-cachee-hightech-israelienne)

    Il n’est pas étonnant de trouver des sociétés israéliennes spécialisées dans ces techniques de manipulation de masse, par le biais des réseaux sociaux. Les compétences technologiques développées au sein de l’armée à des fins de cyberdéfense et de contre-espionnage ont dessiné le modèle économique israélien tourné vers le numérique et les nouvelles technologies. Ainsi, confirme Fabrice Epelboin, enseignant au MediaLab de Sciences Po Paris, de nombreuses start-ups y sont créées par des vétérans de l’armée formés au sein des unités du renseignement israélien.

    Des sociétés comme Archimedes Group, spécialisées dans la manipulation des masses sur les réseaux sociaux afin d’influencer l’opinion publique sur des sujets souvent politiques peuvent servir des États, des marques mais aussi des groupes politiques de manière décentralisée.

    #tunisie #facebook #manipulation #manipulation_en_masse #élections #changer_la_réalité #israël #archimedes_group

  • Trump affirme que la Russie a retiré la plupart de son personnel présent au Venezuela

    Donald Trump : Rusia nos informó que removió a su personal de Venezuela
    http://www.el-nacional.com/noticias/mundo/donald-trump-rusia-nos-informo-que-removio-personal-venezuela_284229

    Donald Trump, presidente de Estados Unidos, dijo este lunes que el gobierno de Rusia le comunicó con respecto a la salida de su personal de Venezuela. 

    «Rusia nos ha informado que han removido a la mayoría de su personal de Venezuela», indicó el mandatario en Twitter. 

    Rick Scott, senador de la provincia de Florida en EE UU, también dio declaraciones con respecto al tema, asegurando estar complacido por las medidas tomadas por los dirigentes rusos en territorio venezolano. 

    «Me alegro de que Rusia esté tomando las medidas necesarias para retirarse de Venezuela. Deberían retirarse por completo y deberían hacerlo ahora. El respaldo de Maduro se está resquebrajando y es momento para que se haga a un lado», señaló Scott en la misma red social.

    Sin embargo, la información no ha sido divulgada por los representates rusos durante las últimas horas. En la mañana de este lunes una empresa de armamento ruso aseguró que la información era falsa luego de que el diario estadounidense The Wall Street Journal hiciera una publicación al respecto.

    https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1135603282104213504

    Russia has informed us that they have removed most of their people from Venezuela.