position:member

  • UK: Johnson ordered to face accusations that he lied to the public ...
    https://diasp.eu/p/9129729

    UK: Johnson ordered to face accusations that he lied to the public

    Source: National Public Radio [US state media]

    “A British court is ordering Boris Johnson to face accusations that while holding public office, he lied in order to sway voter opinion on Brexit. The case was brought by a ‘private prosecutor’ who says Johnson abused the public’s trust while holding official posts. Johnson has quickly emerged as a front-runner to replace Prime Minister Theresa May, who is resigning next month. But with today’s ruling, he must also face charges of misconduct in public office. The case was brought by Marcus Ball — who has raised more than $300,000 to fund his effort. Ball says Johnson is guilty of ‘misleading the public by endorsing and making statements about the cost of European Union (...)

    • – lien propre :

      http://rationalreview.com/archives/337859

      – article relié :
      https://www.npr.org/2019/05/29/727832275/boris-johnson-is-ordered-to-face-accusations-that-he-lied-to-the-public

      #UK #EU #UE #Europe #Brexit

      A British court is ordering Boris Johnson to face accusations that while holding on Brexit. The case was brought by a “private prosecutor” who says Johnson abused the public’s trust while holding official posts.

      Johnson has quickly emerged as a front-runner to replace Prime Minister Theresa May, who is resigning next month. But with today’s ruling, he must also face charges of misconduct in public office. The case was brought by Marcus Ball — who has raised more than $300,000 to fund his effort.

      Ball says Johnson is guilty of “misleading the public by endorsing and making statements about the cost of European Union Membership, which he knew to be false.”

      Johnson is currently a member of Parliament. He resigned as the U.K’s foreign secretary last summer, in a protest against May’s plans to leave the European Union. He has also served as London’s mayor.

      Johnson has repeatedly made the false claim that Britain paid £350 million each week to be in the European Union. The claim was famously touted on a Vote Leave campaign bus during the run-up to the Brexit vote.

      In 2017, the head of the U.K.’s Statistics Authority sent Johnson a letter expressing his disappointment and telling Johnson it was “a clear misuse of official statistics” to say leaving the EU would free up £350 million (more than $440 million) weekly to spend on national healthcare.

      In 2018, Johnson acknowledged that the figure was inaccurate — but he said it was “grossly underestimated.”

      On his crowdfunding page, Ball stresses that he’s not trying to stop Brexit from happening. Instead, he’s targeting what he sees as the real threat facing society: lying, particularly the falsehoods that flow from those in power.

      “Lying in politics is the biggest problem. It is far more important than Brexit and certainly a great deal older,” Ball wrote. “Historically speaking, lying in politics has assisted in starting wars, misleading voters and destroying public trust in the systems of democracy and government.”

      He added, “When politicians lie, democracy dies.”

      Ball says he wants to set a precedent by making it illegal for an elected official to lie about financial matters. If he’s successful, he says, the case could have a wide ripple effect.

      “Because of how the English common law works, it’s possible that such a precedent could be internationally persuasive by influencing the law in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Canada and India.”

      In Britain’s legal system, private prosecutions can be started by any person or company with the time and money to do so.

      As the London-based law firm Edmonds Marshall McMahon (which was once involved in Ball’s case) states, “Other than the fact the prosecution is brought by a private individual or company, for all other purposes they proceed in exactly the same way as if the prosecution had been brought by the Crown.”

  • The Rosa Luxemburg & Karl Liebknecht papers | IISH
    https://socialhistory.org/en/news/rosa-luxemburg-karl-liebknecht-papers
    https://socialhistory.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/liebknecht_luxemburg.jpg?itok=KttX4-U_
    At the IISH, the papers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are made available:
    http://hdl.handle.net/10622/ARCH00842
    http://hdl.handle.net/10622/ARCH00822

    Today marks the passing of 100 years since the murders of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) and Karl Liebknecht (1871-1919). Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed in the middle of the Spartacist uprising, a series of strikes and demonstrations that began on 4 January 1919, when the Independent Socialist Emil Eichhorn was dismissed as Police Chief of Berlin. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were the main leaders of the uprising and therefore prime targets for the paramilitary Freikorps units. The provisional government, led by social-democrat Friedrich Ebert, had ordered these units to put down the uprising.

    Prior to their deaths, both Luxemburg and Liebknecht had been important figures in the German socialist movement. Liebknecht was the son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, the co-founder of the German social-democratic party (SPD) and had been working as a defence attorney for party members, while also being an active member of several international socialist organizations and a member of parliament for the SPD.

    Although Luxemburg did not have a family history of party membership like Liebknecht, she was active in socialist organizations from the age of fifteen: first in Russian-controlled Poland, where she was born, later in Switzerland and finally in Germany, where she moved to in 1898. Luxemburg became an active member of the SPD and a strong critic of the party’s parliamentary course, proposing a revolutionary way to power instead. She contributed many important works to Marxist theory, such as The Accumulation of Capital on economics and Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organization on political philosophy.

    In 1914, at the advent of the First World War, the matter of supporting the war heavily divided the German socialists. The majority of the SPD supported the war, while those against it formed the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD). Luxemburg and Liebknecht, as strong advocates for international solidarity among workers, founded the Spartakus League, together with some other German socialists, to protest the war and spread antimilitarist pamphlets.

    With Germany’s defeat in the war becoming inevitable after the summer of 1918, unrest spread throughout the country. Starting with a sailors’ mutiny in the northern port city of Kiel in the last days of October, the revolution had soon reached all major German cities, where worker- and soldier councils began to take control of local government. The social democrats, led by Ebert, managed to gain control of the national government and tried to consolidate power. Soldiers were returning home, food was in short supply and the political unrest led to riots and brawls in the streets. Germany was in turmoil.

  • Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG
    http://www.transatlanticperspectives.org/entry.php?rec=133
    Des fois que vous nauriez jamais compris pourquoi l’Allemagne est le meilleur ami des USA en Europe voici le résumé de la thèse d’Anne Zetsche

    Transatlantic institutions organizing German-American elite networking since the early 1950s

    Author » Anne Zetsche, Northumbria University Published: November 28, 2012 Updated: February 28, 2013

    The Cold War era witnessed an increasing transnational interconnectedness of individuals and organizations in the cultural, economic and political sphere. In this period, two organizations, the Atlantik-Brücke and the American Council on Germany, established themselves as influential facilitators, enabling German-American elite networking throughout the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. The two organizations brought together influential politicians and businesspeople, as well as representatives of the media and the academic world.

    Efforts in this regard commenced in the early days of the Cold War, only a few years after the end of World War II. In 1949, two American citizens and two Germans began developing the plan to found the Atlantik-Brücke in West Germany and a sister organization, the American Council on Germany (ACG), in the United States. Their plan was to use these two organizations as vehicles to foster amicable relations between the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany and the United States of America. Only a few years prior, Americans and Germans had faced each other as enemies during World War II and many segments of German society, including West German elites, held strong, long-standing anti-American sentiments. The U.S. public in turn was skeptical as to whether Germans could indeed be denazified and convinced to develop a democratic system. Thus, in order to forge a strong Western alliance against Soviet Communism that included West Germany it was critical to overcome mutual prejudices and counter anti-Americanism in Western Europe. It was to be one of the central tasks of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG to achieve this in West Germany.

    Individuals at the Founding of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG

    One of the founders of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG was Eric M. Warburg. He was a Jewish-American banker originally from Hamburg where his ancestors had founded the family’s banking house in 1798. Due to Nazi Aryanisation and expropriation policies, the Warburg family lost the company in 1938 and immigrated to the United States, settling in New York. In spite of the terror of the Nazi regime, Eric Warburg was very attached to Hamburg. He became a vibrant transatlantic commuter after World War II, living both in Hamburg and in New York. In the intertwined histories of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG, Warburg played a special role, becoming their leading facilitator and mediator.

    Not long after his escape from the Nazis, Warburg met Christopher Emmet, a wealthy publicist and political activist who shared Warburg’s strong anti-communist stance and attachment to pre-Nazi Germany. On the German side of this transatlantic relationship, Warburg and Emmet were joined by Marion Countess Dönhoff, a journalist at the liberal West German weekly Die Zeit, and by Erik Blumenfeld, a Christian Democratic politician and businessmen. There were two main characteristics shared by the original core founders of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG: firstly, each one of the founding quartet belonged to an elite – economic, social or political – and was therefore well-connected with political, diplomatic, business and media circles in both the United States and Germany. Secondly, there was a congruence of basic dispositions among them, namely a staunch anti-communist stance, a transatlantic orientation, and an endorsement of Germany’s integration into the West.

    The Western powers sought the economic and political integration of Western Europe to overcome the devastation of Europe, to revive the world economy, and to thwart nationalism and militarism in Europe after World War II. Germany was considered Europe’s economic powerhouse and thus pivotal in the reconstruction process. West Germany also needed to be on board with security and defense policies in order to face the formidable opponent of Soviet Communism. Since the Federal Republic shared a border with the communist bloc, the young state was extremely vulnerable to potential Soviet aggression and was at the same time strategically important within the Western bloc. Elite organizations like the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG were valuable vehicles to bring West Germany on board for this ambitious Cold War project.

    Thus, in 1952 and 1954 respectively, the ACG and the Atlantik-Brücke were incorporated and granted non-profit status with the approval of John J. McCloy, U.S. High Commissioner to Germany (1949-1952). His wife Ellen McCloy was one of signatories of the ACG’s certificate of incorporation and served as its director for a number of years. The Atlantik-Brücke (originally Transatlantik-Brücke) was incorporated and registered in Hamburg.

    Transatlantic Networking

    The main purpose of both organizations was to inform Germans and Americans about the respective other country, to counter mutual prejudices, and thus contributing to the development of amicable relations between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States in the postwar era. This was to be achieved by all means deemed appropriate, but with a special focus on arranging personal meetings and talks between representatives of both countries’ business, political, academic, and media elites. One way was to sponsor lectures and provide speakers on issues relating to Germany and the United States. Another method was organizing visiting tours of German politicians, academics, and journalists to the United States and of American representatives to West Germany. Among the Germans who came to the U.S. under the sponsorship of the ACG were Max Brauer, a former Social Democratic mayor of Hamburg, Willy Brandt, the first Social Democratic Chancellor and former mayor of West Berlin, and Franz Josef Strauss, a member of the West German federal government in the 1950s and 1960s and later minister president of the German federal state of Bavaria. American visitors to the Federal Republic were less prominent. Annual reports of the Atlantik-Brücke explicitly mention George Nebolsine of the New York law firm Coudert Brothers and member of the International Chamber of Commerce, and the diplomats Henry J. Tasca, William C. Trimble, and Nedville E. Nordness.

    In the late 1950s the officers of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG sought ways of institutionalizing personal encounters between key Americans and Germans. Thus they established the German-American Conferences modeled on the British-German Königswinter Conferences and the Bilderberg Conferences. The former brought together English and German elites and were organized by the German-English Society (later German-British Society). The latter were organized by the Bilderberg Group, founded by Joseph Retinger, Paul van Zeeland and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Those conferences began in 1954 and were informal, off-the-record meetings of American and West European representatives of business, media, academia and politics. Each of these conference series was important for the coordination of Western elites during the Cold War era. Bilderberg was critical in paving the way for continental European integration and the German-British effort was important for reconciling the European wartime enemies.

    From 1959 onwards, the German-American Conferences took place biennially, alternating between venues in West Germany and the United States. At the first conference in Bonn, 24 Americans came together with 27 Germans, among them such prominent individuals as Dean Acheson, Henry Kissinger, and John J. McCloy on the American side, and Willy Brandt, Arnold Bergstraesser (considered to be one of the founding fathers of postwar political science in Germany), and Kurt Georg Kiesinger (third Christian Democratic Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany and former minister president of the federal state Baden-Württemberg) on the German side. By 1974 the size of the delegations had increased continuously, reaching 73 American and 63 German participants.

    A central goal in selecting the delegations was to arrange for a balanced, bipartisan group of politicians, always including representatives of the Social and Christian Democrats (e.g. Fritz Erler, Kurt Birrenbach) on the German side and both Democratic and Republican senators and representatives (e.g. Henry S. Reuss, Jacob Javits) on the American side, along with academics, journalists, and businessmen. Prominent American academics attending several of the German-American conferences included Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Representatives of major media outlets were Marion Countess Dönhoff of Germany’s major liberal weekly Die Zeit, Kurt Becker, editor of the conservative daily newspaper Die Welt, and Hellmut Jaesrich, editor of the anticommunist cultural magazine Der Monat. The business community was prominently represented by John J. McCloy, the president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Herman Georg Kaiser, an oil producer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. From Germany, Gotthard von Falkenhausen and Eric Warburg represented the financial sector and Alexander Menne, a member of the executive board of Farbwerke Hoechst, represented German industry.

    Officers of the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG were mainly in charge of selecting the delegates for the conferences. However, Shepard Stone of the Ford Foundation also had an influential say in this process. In the late 1950s and 1960s he was director of the foundation’s international program and thus responsible for allocating funds to the ACG to facilitate the German-American conferences. Shepard Stone was deeply attached to Germany as he had pursued graduate studies in Berlin in the Weimar period, earning a doctoral degree in history. After World War II he returned to Germany as a public affairs officer of the U.S. High Commission. Stone’s continuing interest in German affairs and friendship with Eric Warburg and Marion Dönhoff regularly brought him to Germany, and he was a frequent participant in the German-American conferences.

    The German-American Conferences and Cold War Politics

    All matters discussed during the conferences stood under the headline “East-West tensions” in the earlier period and later “East-West issues” signaling the beginning of détente, but always maintaining a special focus on U.S.-German relations. The debates from the late 1950s to the early/mid-1970s can be categorized as follows: firstly, bilateral relations between the U.S. and the FRG; secondly, Germany’s relation with the Western alliance; thirdly, Europe and the United States in the Atlantic Alliance; and last but not least, relations between the West, the East, and the developing world. The conferences served three central purposes: firstly, developing a German-American network of elites; secondly, building consensus on key issues of the Cold War period; and thirdly, forming a common Western, transatlantic identity among West Germans and Americans.

    Another emphasis of both groups’ activities in the United States and Germany was the production of studies and other publications (among others, The Vanishing Swastika, the Bridge, Meet Germany, a Newsletter, Hans Wallenberg’s report Democratic Institutions, and the reports on the German-American Conferences). Studies aimed at informing Germans about developments in the United States and American international policies on the one hand, and at informing the American people about West Germany’s progress in denazification, democratization, and re-education on the other. The overall aim of these activities was first and foremost improving each country’s and people’s image in the eyes of the counterpart’s elites and wider public.

    The sources and amounts of available funds to the ACG and the Atlantik-Brücke differed considerably. Whereas the latter selected its members very carefully by way of cooptation especially among businessmen and CEOs to secure sound funding of its enterprise, the former opened membership or affiliation to basically anyone who had an interest in Germany. As a result, the ACG depended heavily, at least for its everyday business, on the fortune of the organization’s executive vice president Christopher Emmet. Emmet personally provided the salaries of ACG secretaries and set up the organization’s offices in his private apartment in New York’s upper Westside. In addition, the ACG relied on funds granted by the Ford Foundation especially for the biannual German-American conferences as well as for the publication of a number of studies. The Atlantik-Brücke in turn benefitted immensely from public funds for its publications and the realization of the German-American conferences. The Federal Press and Information Agency (Bundespresse- und Informationsamt, BPA) supported mainly publication efforts of the organization and the Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) regularly granted funds for the conferences.

    Politics, Business and Membership Growth

    Membership of the Atlantik-Brücke grew from 12 in 1954 to 65 in 1974. Among them were representatives of companies like Mannesmann, Esso, Farbwerke Hoechst, Daimler Benz, Deutsche Bank, and Schering. Those members were expected to be willing and able to pay annual membership fees of 3000 to 5000 DM (approx. $750 to $1,250 in 1955, equivalent to approx. $6,475 to $10,793 today). Since the business community always accounted for the majority of Atlantik-Brücke membership compared to members from academia, media and politics, the organization operated on secure financial footing compared to its American counterpart. The ACG had not even established formal membership like its German sister organization. The people affiliated with the ACG in the 1950s up to the mid-1970s were mostly academics, intellectuals, and journalists. It posed a great difficulty for ACG officers to attract business people willing and able to contribute financially to the organization at least until the mid-1970s. When Christopher Emmet, the ACG’s “heart and soul,” passed away in 1974, the group’s affiliates and directors were mostly comprised of Emmet’s circle of friends and acquaintances who shared an interest in U.S.-German relations and Germany itself. Emmet had enlisted most of them during his frequent visits to the meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations. Another group of prominent members represented the military. Several leading figures of the U.S. occupying forces and U.S. High Commission personnel joined the ACG, in addition to ranking politicians and U.S. diplomats. The ACG’s long term president, George N. Shuster had served as Land Commissioner for Bavaria during 1950-51. In 1963, Lucius D. Clay, former military governor of the U.S. zone in Germany, 1947-49, joined the ACG as honorary chairman. George McGhee, the former ambassador to Germany prominently represented U.S. diplomacy when he became director of the organization in 1969.

    Although the Atlantik-Brücke had initially ruled out board membership for active politicians, they were prominently represented. Erik Blumenfeld, for example, was an influential Christian Democratic leader in Hamburg. In 1958 he was elected CDU chairman of the federal city state of Hamburg and three years later he became a member of the Bundestag.In the course of the 1960s and 1970s more politicians joined the Atlantik-Brücke and became active members of the board: Kurt Birrenbach (CDU), Fritz Erler (SPD), W. Alexander Menne (FDP), and Helmut Schmidt (SPD). Thus, through their members and affiliates both organizations have been very well-connected with political, diplomatic, and business elites.

    Besides individual and corporate contributions, both organizations relied on funding from public and private institutions and agencies. On the German side federal agencies like the Foreign Office, the Press and Information Agency, and the Chancellery provided funding for publications and supported the German-American conferences. On the American side additional funds were provided almost exclusively by the Ford Foundation.

    Although both groups were incorporated as private associations with the objective of furthering German-American relations in the postwar era, their membership profile and sources of funding clearly illustrate that they were not operating at great distance from either public politics or official diplomacy. On the contrary, the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG represent two prominent actors in a transnational elite networking project with the aim of forging a strong anti-communist Atlantic Alliance among the Western European states and the United States of America. In this endeavor to back up public with private authority, the Atlantik-Brücke and the ACG functioned as major conduits of both transnational and transcultural exchange and transfer processes.

    #Europe #Allemagne #USA #politique #guerre #impérialisme #élites

  • How an Internet Impostor Exposed the Underbelly of the Czech Media – Foreign Policy
    https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/03/how-an-internet-impostor-exposed-the-underbelly-of-the-czech-media

    When politicians own the press, trolls have the last laugh.

    Tatiana Horakova has an impressive résumé: As head of a Czech medical nonprofit that sends doctors to conflict zones, she negotiated the release of five Bulgarian nurses held by Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya, traveled to Colombia with former French President Nicolas Sarkozy to secure a hostage’s freedom from FARC guerrillas, and turned down three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.

    Not bad for someone who might not even exist.

    Horakova has never been photographed. She does not appear to have a medical license. Her nonprofit, which she has claimed employs 200 doctors, appears to be a sham. Her exploits, so far as anyone can tell, are entirely fabricated.

    None of this has stopped the press from taking her claims at face value time and again over the course of more than a decade. When it comes to a good story, incredulity is scant and memories run short.

    Earlier this year, she again emerged from the shadows, this time to troll Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis—and expose just how easily disinformation can slip into the mainstream press, especially when politicians control it.

    In September, the Czech broadsheet Lidove Noviny published an op-ed by Horakova expressing support for Babis’s refusal to offer asylum to 50 Syrian orphans, as was proposed by an opposition member of parliament. Playing up to his populist pledge not to allow “a single refugee” into the Czech Republic, the prime minister said the country had its own orphans to care for.

    That crossed the line and provoked widespread criticism. But Horakova’s op-ed seemed to offer a way out: an expert offering the opinion that the orphans would be better off at home in Syria. 

    Horakova originally sent the piece to the prime minister’s office, which forwarded it to the paper. A brief Google search would have raised plenty of red flags about the author, but the newspaper leaped without looking.

    Lidove Noviny pulled the piece within hours, but not quickly enough to stop several high-profile journalists from quitting. The editors, they complained, could no longer protect the newspaper from its owner—the billionaire prime minister.

    Desperate to deflect criticism, Babis’s office appears to have passed the article to the paper without doing due diligence, and the paper took what it was spoon-fed.

    The debate over the Syrian orphans had created “a highly charged political moment,” Babis’s spokesperson, Lucie Kubovicova, told Foreign Policy. She said she did not know “who exactly” sent the article to the paper.

    #fake_news #medias #presse #république_tchèque

  • A Letter to #Brazil, From a Friend Living Under Duterte | The Nation
    https://www.thenation.com/article/brazil-bolsonaro-duterte-fascism-resistance

    Dear friends:

    I’m writing to you on the eve of your going to the polls to determine the future of your wonderful country.

    I think it’s no exaggeration to say that the fate of Brazil hangs in the balance. It’s also hardly hyperbole to assert that the election will have massive geopolitical significance, since if Brazil votes for Jair Bolsonaro, the extreme right will have come to power in the Western Hemisphere’s two biggest countries. Like many of you, I’m hoping for a miracle that will prevent Bolsonaro from coming to power.

    When I visited Rio and São Paulo in 2015, I observed that the political rallies mounted by the opposition to then-President Dilma Rousseff contained a small but vocal fringe element calling for a return to military rule. Little did I suspect then that that fringe would expand into a massive electoral movement in support of a self-proclaimed advocate of strongman rule.
    The Amazing Twins

    It’s amazing to many of us here in the Philippines how similar Bolsonaro is to our president, Rodrigo Duterte.

    Duterte has spoken about how he wished he’d raped a dead female missionary. Bolsonaro told a fellow member of parliament that she didn’t deserve to be raped by him. Duterte has spoken in admiration of our dead dictator Ferdinand Marcos and decreed his burial at our heroes’ cemetery. Bolsonaro has depicted the military rule in Brazil over three decades ago as a golden age.

    A friend asked me a few days ago, only partly in jest, “Is there a virus going around that produces horrible boils like Bolsonaro and Duterte?” I thought about her metaphor and thought there was something to it, but rather than being the result of a communicable disease, I think that authoritarian figures emerge from internal suppuration in the body politic.

  • #Brésil, la responsabilité du #centre...

    Centrists paved the way for the far right in Brazil

    To understand Jair Bolsonaro’s rise, we need to look at centrists’ reckless efforts to exploit institutional meltdown.

    Barring an unprecedented upset, the far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro will be elected president of Brazil this Sunday with a comfortable margin over his runoff opponent, the Workers’ Party’s (PT) Fernando Haddad. This will crown a stunning run by the first-time candidate that saw his party, the formerly minuscule Social Liberal Party (PSL), jump from one to 52 federal representatives, propel a number of unknowns to success in the gubernatorial elections and place allies and relatives of Bolsonaro among the most voted across the country.

    So how did a candidate with a well-documented history of openly anti-democratic, racist, misogynistic, homophobic remarks, with very little by way of specified policies other than the promise of being a law-and-order hardman who will “banish the reds” and stop the country’s “moral degradation”, come to sweep the board like that?

    These were always going to be the most anti-systemic elections in Brazilian history. Since 2013, the country’s political system has been haemorrhaging legitimacy owing to widely perceived lack of accountability, a crippling economic crisis and an endlessly ramifying corruption scandal involving all major parties. A series of desperate attempts have been made to protect the establishment and steady the boat, not least throwing former president Dilma Rousseff overboard in a highly dubious impeachment. They have only managed to create more instability and fragilise institutions even further - not least the judiciary, whose erratic interventions have made it look partisan and weak at once.

    It is ironic that Bolsonaro, a member of parliament for 27 years, who has been named in corruption investigations and is supported by some of the shiftiest sectors of Brazilian politics, could successfully present himself as the anti-systemic candidate. In order to understand his rise, we need to look beyond PT’s undeniable mistakes to how the centre right, in its reckless efforts to create instability and exploit institutional meltdown, has endangered the country’s democracy and paved the way for the far right.

    In 1994, the Brazilian party system hit upon a formula. While the bulk of it remained an amorphous mass of less than public interests, low on ideological commitment but with very expensive habits, two parties had the cadre, ideas and prestige to marshal this gelatinous blob into opposing blocs: the Workers’ Party on the centre left and the Social Democrats (PSDB) on the centre right. Elections were fought between the armies regimented by the two; whoever won took most of the other’s side as spoil.

    The seeds of the far right’s rise started to be sown in the early 2000s, when PT rode the global commodity boom to promote an economic bonanza that raised the standards of living for the poorest while also benefiting the rich. Lula’s success made it impossible for opponents to claim that PT wasn’t working; the country was unequivocally better off than it had been under PSDB. The only available route of attack lay in exploiting moral concerns around elements of PT’s agenda, like women’s and LGBT rights, and reheated Cold War “red scares”. In this, the centre right had support from major media groups and political leaders from the growing Brazilian Pentecostal community, whose electoral profile is essentially tied to moral issues. The more immoderate elements of this tacit alliance were increasingly brought into an echo chamber in which paranoid claims and bogus accusations would be dignified with comments by opposition politicians and media pundits, and thus fed back into a few news cycles until everyone moved on to the next fabricated outrage. An editorial market for anachronistic anti-communist propaganda boomed. Inevitably, this opened the door of mainstream debate, and of centre right parties themselves, to the far right.

    PT, in turn, invariably chose negotiation over conflict, trusting that its popular support would always allow it to buy adversaries off and prevent PSDB from reconstituting its bloc. This meant avoiding direct confrontation with the media, a highly unregulated sector that PT had always vowed to democratise, and building an alliance with the Pentecostal right, which included watering down its own progressive agenda. This, of course, only furthered the far right’s mainstream penetration.

    Things changed in 2005, when a scheme of parliamentary bribes opened a new line of attack: the message now was that PT was “the most corrupt party of all times” - a tough bar to clear in Brazilian politics. Centre-right leaders believed that letting the scandal run its course would return them to office in 2006, but they were wrong. Lula recovered, won re-election and elected his successor, Rousseff, twice.

    After the Petrobras scandal broke in 2014, however, with the economy already in a tailspin and dissatisfaction with the political class as a whole on the rise, PT was against the ropes like never before. This is why, in 2016, PSDB decided not to run the risk of allowing another comeback. Rather than wait for the elections, they joined a rising hard right and PT’s coalition partner, MDB, in a parliamentary manoeuvre to oust president Rousseff. Among those in the political, business and media establishment who supported the move, the calculation was obvious: having led the opposition for 13 years, and having come close to winning in 2014, PSDB was a shoo-in for the 2018 race.

    Except they were wrong again. First, they mistook the rising anti-systemic sentiment for a rejection of PT only. Secondly, they failed to consider how much that sentiment would be compounded by the sorry spectacle of the impeachment itself, and the nature of the government it put in place - which passed a number of draconian austerity measures and had a cabinet like a corruption all-star team. So unpopular was it, in fact, that it ended up being a boost to PT, which recovered some of its support in the comparison. This was, in fact, the reason why Lula’s trial was fast-tracked - the establishment’s assumption again being that, with the former president out of the race, the PSDB candidate would have an easy ride. Fatefully, it was also what triggered PT’s decision to field a candidate rather than support one from a less rejected centre-left party.

    What the centre right did not realise was that they were no longer driving in the right lane on their own: they were now competing with a force much better positioned to not only ride the anti-systemic tide, but to reap a number of seeds that they had sown.

    The anti-corruption campaign that led to Rousseff’s downfall had turned against key MDB and PSDB figures; both parties have lost almost half their seats in parliament. The style of agitation fostered in the early 2000s, based on moral panics and “red scares”, had developed a life on its own on the internet and on WhatsApp groups. Whereas the procedure in the past was for media pundits and politicians to lend these stories a measure of respectability, these figures of authority themselves had now become targets. It is not uncommon to see people justify their vote for Bolsonaro with the fear of a communist dictatorship or that public schools are turning children gay, and to accuse the whole establishment of being in on the plot. Meanwhile, the Pentecostal right has rallied behind Bolsonaro, and Record, a media conglomerate owned by one of the country’s biggest evangelical churches, is angling to be to him what Fox is to Donald Trump. Ironic, no doubt, when one remembers how much Globo, the country’s biggest media corporation since the 1960s, actively supported Rousseff’s impeachment and minimised the anti-Bolsonaro protests that swept the country before the first round of the elections.

    In the end, no amount of judicial interventions and open support from financial markets could do the trick: PSDB’s Geraldo Alckmin took less than five percent of the vote. The party, whose founders came out of the struggle against the military dictatorship, has declared neutrality in the runoff, as have most others, despite the many worrying antidemocratic signs coming from Bolsonaro and his camp.

    A Bolsonaro government will be a recomposition of the country’s elite, bringing formerly bit-part players centre stage, but certainly not the clean break his voters imagine. It will continue the socially regressive policies of the outgoing Temer government, hitting the poor hard and stifling social mobility for a generation. The realities of building a parliamentary majority will no doubt contradict his anti-corruption discourse. It is unclear how long Bolsonaro will manage to be all things to all people, which raises fears that he might amplify the more belligerent and autocratic elements of his persona as compensation. There have been several cases of violence against journalists, LGBT people and left-wing supporters since the election’s first round, and Bolsonaro’s discourse continues to court political violence explicitly.

    As for the political and economic establishment, which until now had in PSDB their natural representatives, it has largely signalled that it is prepared to roll with the new times. Markets have been elated since Bolsonaro took the lead; industrialists have started flocking to him. When a case of electoral fraud with the potential to annul the elections emerged - businessmen had been paying for bulk “fake news” messages supporting Bolsonaro on WhatsApp - most of the media and the electoral court dealt with the case in cool, muted terms. This only strengthened the impression that the same forces that moved to impeach Rousseff have made already made their choice.

    The assumption is clearly that Bolsonaro will be willing to outsource key areas of policy to them and that his antidemocratic tendencies can be controlled; that trying to tame his disruption is better than risking another centre-left comeback. A dangerous gamble, no doubt, considering both who the candidate is and the fact that it was exactly that kind of logic that brought them, and the country, to this situation.

    https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/centrists-paved-brazil-181023095033241.html
    #Bolsonaro #extrême_droite
    via @isskein

  • Activist Arrests in India Are Part of a Dangerous Global Trend to Stifle Dissent | Alternet
    https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/activist-arrests-india-are-part-dangerous-global-trend-stifle-dissent

    On Tuesday morning, the police from the Indian city of Pune (in the state of Maharashtra) raided the homes of lawyers and social activists across India and arrested five of them. Many of them are not household names around the world, since they are people who work silently on behalf of the poor and oppressed in a country where half the population does not eat sufficiently. Their names are Gautam Navlakha, Sudha Bharadwaj, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira and Varavara Rao. What unites these people is their commitment to the working class and peasantry, to those who are treated as marginal to India’s state. They are also united by their opposition, which they share with millions of Indians, to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

    The “raw numbers of this terror” are best counted from Turkey. Since the failed coup of July 15, 2016, the government has arrested, detained or dismissed about 160,000 government officials, dismissing 12,000 Kurdish teachers, destroying the livelihood of thousands of people. The editor of Cumhuriyet, Can Dündar, called this the “biggest witch-hunt in Turkey’s history.” In the name of the war on terror and in the name of sedition, the government has arrested and intimidated its political opponents. The normality of this is astounding—leaders of the opposition HDP party remain in prison on the flimsiest of charges, with little international condemnation. They suffer a fate comparable to Brazil’s Lula, also incarcerated with no evidence.

    Governments do not typically like dissent. In Bangladesh, the photographer Shahidul Alam remains in detention for his views on the massive protests in Dhaka for traffic reform and against government corruption. Condemnation of the arrest has come from all quarters, including a British Member of Parliament—Tulip Siddiq—who is the niece of Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The avalanche of criticism has not moved the government. Alam is accused of inciting violence, a charge that is equal parts of ridiculous and absurd.

    Incitement to violence is a common charge. It is what has taken the Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour to an Israeli prison. Tatour’s poem, “Resist, my people, resist them” (Qawim ya sha’abi, qawimhum), was the reason given by the Israeli government to lock her up. The Egyptian government has taken in the poet Galal El-Behairy for the lyrics he wrote for the song “Balaha”—the name a reference to a character in a 1980s film who sees the world in a topsy-turvy manner, a name now used colloquially in Egypt for President Sisi. The Ugandan government has arrested the radio show host Samuel Kyambadde, who merely allowed his talk show to become a forum for a conversation that included items labeled by the government as seditious—such as the arrest of journalists and the arrest of the opposition MP Robert Kyagulanyi (also known as Bobi Wine).

    All of them—photographers, poets, radio show hosts—are treated as voices of sedition, dangerous people who can be locked up under regulations that would make any fair-minded person wince. But there is not even any public debate in most of our societies about such measures, no genuine discussion about the slide into the worst kind of authoritarianism, little public outcry.

    #Néo_fascisme #Inde #Turquie #Liberté_expression

  • In Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/28/world/europe/uk-austerity-poverty.html


    #austérité #pauvreté

    Britain’s Big Squeeze
    In Britain, Austerity Is Changing Everything

    After eight years of budget cutting, Britain is looking less like the rest of Europe and more like the United States, with a shrinking welfare state and spreading poverty.

    Raised in the Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, Emma Wilde has lost the welfare benefits she depended on to support herself and her two children.CreditAndrea Bruce for The New York Times

    By Peter S. Goodman

    May 28, 2018

    PRESCOT, England — A walk through this modest town in the northwest of England amounts to a tour of the casualties of Britain’s age of austerity.

    The old library building has been sold and refashioned into a glass-fronted luxury home. The leisure center has been razed, eliminating the public swimming pool. The local museum has receded into town history. The police station has been shuttered.

    Now, as the local government desperately seeks to turn assets into cash, Browns Field, a lush park in the center of town, may be doomed, too. At a meeting in November, the council included it on a list of 17 parks to sell to developers.

    “Everybody uses this park,” says Jackie Lewis, who raised two children in a red brick house a block away. “This is probably our last piece of community space. It’s been one after the other. You just end up despondent.”

    In the eight years since London began sharply curtailing support for local governments, the borough of Knowsley, a bedroom community of Liverpool, has seen its budget cut roughly in half. Liverpool itself has suffered a nearly two-thirds cut in funding from the national government — its largest source of discretionary revenue. Communities in much of Britain have seen similar losses.

    For a nation with a storied history of public largess, the protracted campaign of budget cutting, started in 2010 by a government led by the Conservative Party, has delivered a monumental shift in British life. A wave of austerity has yielded a country that has grown accustomed to living with less, even as many measures of social well-being — crime rates, opioid addiction, infant mortality, childhood poverty and homelessness — point to a deteriorating quality of life.

    When Ms. Lewis and her husband bought their home a quarter-century ago, Prescot had a comforting village feel. Now, core government relief programs are being cut and public facilities eliminated, adding pressure to public services like police and fire departments, just as they, too, grapple with diminished funding.

    By 2020, reductions already set in motion will produce cuts to British social welfare programs exceeding $36 billion a year compared with a decade earlier, or more than $900 annually for every working-age person in the country, according to a report from the Center for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University. In Liverpool, the losses will reach $1,200 a year per working-age person, the study says.

    “The government has created destitution,” says Barry Kushner, a Labour Party councilman in Liverpool and the cabinet member for children’s services. “Austerity has had nothing to do with economics. It was about getting out from under welfare. It’s about politics abandoning vulnerable people.”

    Conservative Party leaders say that austerity has been driven by nothing more grandiose than arithmetic.

    “It’s the ideology of two plus two equals four,” says Daniel Finkelstein, a Conservative member of the upper chamber of Parliament, the House of Lords, and a columnist for The Times of London. “It wasn’t driven by a desire to reduce spending on public services. It was driven by the fact that we had a vast deficit problem, and the debt was going to keep growing.”

    Whatever the operative thinking, austerity’s manifestations are palpable and omnipresent. It has refashioned British society, making it less like the rest of Western Europe, with its generous social safety nets and egalitarian ethos, and more like the United States, where millions lack health care and job loss can set off a precipitous plunge in fortunes.

    Much as the United States took the Great Depression of the 1930s as impetus to construct a national pension system while eventually delivering health care for the elderly and the poor, Britain reacted to the trauma of World War II by forging its own welfare state. The United States has steadily reduced benefits since the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. Britain rolled back its programs in the same era, under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Still, its safety net remained robust by world standards.

    Then came the global financial panic of 2008 — the most crippling economic downturn since the Great Depression. Britain’s turn from its welfare state in the face of yawning budget deficits is a conspicuous indicator that the world has been refashioned by the crisis.

    As the global economy now negotiates a wrenching transition — with itinerant jobs replacing full-time positions and robots substituting for human labor — Britain’s experience provokes doubts about the durability of the traditional welfare model. As Western-style capitalism confronts profound questions about economic justice, vulnerable people appear to be growing more so.

    Conservative Party leaders initially sold budget cuts as a virtue, ushering in what they called the Big Society. Diminish the role of a bloated government bureaucracy, they contended, and grass-roots organizations, charities and private companies would step to the fore, reviving communities and delivering public services more efficiently.

    To a degree, a spirit of voluntarism materialized. At public libraries, volunteers now outnumber paid staff. In struggling communities, residents have formed food banks while distributing hand-me-down school uniforms. But to many in Britain, this is akin to setting your house on fire and then reveling in the community spirit as neighbors come running to help extinguish the blaze.

    Most view the Big Society as another piece of political sloganeering — long since ditched by the Conservatives — that served as justification for an austerity program that has advanced the refashioning unleashed in the 1980s by Mrs. Thatcher.

    “We are making cuts that I think Margaret Thatcher, back in the 1980s, could only have dreamt of,” Greg Barker said in a speech in 2011, when he was a Conservative member of Parliament.

    A backlash ensued, with public recognition that budget cuts came with tax relief for corporations, and that the extensive ranks of the wealthy were little disturbed.

    Britain hasn’t endured austerity to the same degree as Greece, where cutbacks were swift and draconian. Instead, British austerity has been a slow bleed, though the cumulative toll has been substantial.

    Local governments have suffered a roughly one-fifth plunge in revenue since 2010, after adding taxes they collect, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London.

    Nationally, spending on police forces has dropped 17 percent since 2010, while the number of police officers has dropped 14 percent, according to an analysis by the Institute for Government. Spending on road maintenance has shrunk more than one-fourth, while support for libraries has fallen nearly a third.

    The national court system has eliminated nearly a third of its staff. Spending on prisons has plunged more than a fifth, with violent assaults on prison guards more than doubling. The number of elderly people receiving government-furnished care that enables them to remain in their homes has fallen by roughly a quarter.

    In an alternate reality, this nasty stretch of history might now be ending. Austerity measures were imposed in the name of eliminating budget deficits, and last year Britain finally produced a modest budget surplus.

    But the reality at hand is dominated by worries that Britain’s pending departure from the European Union — Brexit, as it is known — will depress growth for years to come. Though every major economy on earth has been expanding lately, Britain’s barely grew during the first three months of 2018. The unemployment rate sits just above 4 percent — its lowest level since 1975 — yet most wages remain lower than a decade ago, after accounting for rising prices.

    In the blue-collar reaches of northern England, in places like Liverpool, modern history tends to be told in the cadence of lamentation, as the story of one indignity after another. In these communities, Mrs. Thatcher’s name is an epithet, and austerity is the latest villain: London bankers concocted a financial crisis, multiplying their wealth through reckless gambling; then London politicians used budget deficits as an excuse to cut spending on the poor while handing tax cuts to corporations. Robin Hood, reversed.

    “It’s clearly an attack on our class,” says Dave Kelly, a retired bricklayer in the town of Kirkby, on the outskirts of Liverpool, where many factories sit empty, broken monuments to another age. “It’s an attack on who we are. The whole fabric of society is breaking down.”

    As much as any city, Liverpool has seen sweeping changes in its economic fortunes.

    In the 17th century, the city enriched itself on human misery. Local shipping companies sent vessels to West Africa, transporting slaves to the American colonies and returning bearing the fruits of bondage — cotton and tobacco, principally.

    The cotton fed the mills of Manchester nearby, yielding textiles destined for multiple continents. By the late 19th century, Liverpool’s port had become the gateway to the British Empire, its status underscored by the shipping company headquarters lining the River Mersey.

    By the next century — through the Great Depression and the German bombardment of World War II — Liverpool had descended into seemingly terminal decline. Its hard luck, blue-collar station was central to the identity of its most famous export, the Beatles, whose star power seemed enhanced by the fact such talent could emerge from such a place.

    Today, more than a quarter of Liverpool’s roughly 460,000 residents are officially poor, making austerity traumatic: Public institutions charged with aiding vulnerable people are themselves straining from cutbacks.

    Over the past eight years, the Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, which serves greater Liverpool, has closed five fire stations while cutting the force to 620 firefighters from about 1,000.

    “I’ve had to preside over the systematic dismantling of the system,” says the fire chief, Dan Stephens.

    His department recently analyzed the 83 deaths that occurred in accidental house fires from 2007 to 2017. The majority of the victims — 51 people — lived alone and were alone at the time of the deadly fire. Nineteen of those 51 were in need of some form of home care.

    The loss of home care — a casualty of austerity — has meant that more older people are being left alone unattended.

    Virtually every public agency now struggles to do more with less while attending to additional problems once handled by some other outfit whose budget is also in tatters.

    Chief Stephens said people losing cash benefits are falling behind on their electric bills and losing service, resorting to candles for light — a major fire risk.

    The city has cut mental health services, so fewer staff members are visiting people prone to hoarding newspapers, for instance, leaving veritable bonfires piling up behind doors, unseen.

    “There are knock-on effects all the way through the system,” says Chief Stephens, who recently announced plans to resign and move to Australia.

    The National Health Service has supposedly been spared from budget cuts. But spending has been frozen in many areas, resulting in cuts per patient. At public hospitals, people have grown resigned to waiting for hours for emergency care, and weeks for referrals to specialists.

    “I think the government wants to run it down so the whole thing crumbles and they don’t have to worry about it anymore,” says Kenneth Buckle, a retired postal worker who has been waiting three months for a referral for a double knee replacement. “Everything takes forever now.”

    At Fulwood Green Medical Center in Liverpool, Dr. Simon Bowers, a general practitioner, points to austerity as an aggravating factor in the flow of stress-related maladies he encounters — high blood pressure, heart problems, sleeplessness, anxiety.

    He argues that the cuts, and the deterioration of the National Health Service, represent a renouncement of Britain’s historical debts. He rattles off the lowlights — the slave trave, colonial barbarity.

    “We as a country said, ‘We have been cruel. Let’s be nice now and look after everyone,’” Dr. Bowers says. “The N.H.S. has everyone’s back. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor you are. It’s written into the psyche of this country.”

    “Austerity isn’t a necessity,” he continued. “It’s a political choice, to move Britain in a different way. I can’t see a rationale beyond further enriching the rich while making the lives of the poor more miserable.”

    Wealthy Britons remain among the world’s most comfortable people, enjoying lavish homes, private medical care, top-notch schools and restaurants run by chefs from Paris and Tokyo. The poor, the elderly, the disabled and the jobless are increasingly prone to Kafka-esque tangles with the bureaucracy to keep public support.

    For Emma Wilde, a 31-year-old single mother, the misadventure began with an inscrutable piece of correspondence.

    Raised in the Liverpool neighborhood of Croxteth, Ms. Wilde has depended on welfare benefits to support herself and her two children. Her father, a retired window washer, is disabled. She has been taking care of him full time, relying on a so-called caregiver’s allowance, which amounts to about $85 a week, and income support reaching about $145 a month.

    The letter put this money in jeopardy.

    Sent by a private firm contracted to manage part of the government’s welfare programs, it informed Ms. Wilde that she was being investigated for fraud, accused of living with a partner — a development she is obliged to have reported.

    Ms. Wilde lives only with her children, she insists. But while the investigation proceeds, her benefits are suspended.

    Eight weeks after the money ceased, Ms. Wilde’s electricity was shut off for nonpayment. During the late winter, she and her children went to bed before 7 p.m. to save on heat. She has swallowed her pride and visited a food bank at a local church, bringing home bread and hamburger patties.

    “I felt a bit ashamed, like I had done something wrong, ” Ms. Wilde says. “But then you’ve got to feed the kids.”

    She has been corresponding with the Department for Work and Pensions, mailing bank statements to try to prove her limited income and to restore her funds.

    The experience has given her a perverse sense of community. At the local center where she brings her children for free meals, she has met people who lost their unemployment benefits after their bus was late and they missed an appointment with a caseworker. She and her friends exchange tips on where to secure hand-me-down clothes.

    “Everyone is in the same situation now,” Ms. Wilde says. “You just don’t have enough to live on.”

    From its inception, austerity carried a whiff of moral righteousness, as if those who delivered it were sober-minded grown-ups. Belt tightening was sold as a shared undertaking, an unpleasant yet unavoidable reckoning with dangerous budget deficits.

    “The truth is that the country was living beyond its means,” the then-chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, declared in outlining his budget to Parliament in 2010. “Today, we have paid the debts of a failed past, and laid the foundations for a more prosperous future.”

    “Prosperity for all,” he added.

    Eight years later, housing subsidies have been restricted, along with tax credits for poor families. The government has frozen unemployment and disability benefits even as costs of food and other necessities have climbed. Over the last five years, the government has begun transitioning to so-called Universal Credit, giving those who receive benefits lump sum payments in place of funds from individual programs. Many have lost support for weeks or months while their cases have shifted to the new system.

    All of which is unfortunate yet inescapable, assert Conservative lawmakers. The government was borrowing roughly one-fourth of what it was spending. To put off cuts was to risk turning Britain into the next Greece.

    “The hard left has never been very clear about what their alternative to the program was,” says Neil O’Brien, a Conservative lawmaker who was previously a Treasury adviser to Mr. Osborne. “Presumably, it would be some enormous increase in taxation, but they are a bit shy about what that would mean.”

    He rejects the notion that austerity is a means of class warfare, noting that wealthy people have been hit with higher taxes on investment and expanded fees when buying luxury properties.

    Britain spends roughly the same portion of its national income on public spending today as it did a decade ago, said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

    But those dependent on state support express a sense that the system has been rigged to discard them.

    Glendys Perry, 61, was born with cerebral palsy, making it difficult for her to walk. For three decades, she answered the phones at an auto parts company. After she lost that job in 2010, she lived on a disability check.

    Last summer, a letter came, summoning her to “an assessment.” The first question dispatched any notion that this was a sincere exploration.

    “How long have you had cerebral palsy?” (From birth.) “Will it get better?” (No.)

    In fact, her bones were weakening, and she fell often. Her hands were not quick enough to catch her body, resulting in bruises to her face.

    The man handling the assessment seemed uninterested.

    “Can you walk from here to there?” he asked her.

    He dropped a pen on the floor and commanded her to pick it up — a test of her dexterity.

    “How did you come here?” he asked her.

    “By bus,” she replied.

    Can you make a cup of tea? Can you get dressed?

    “I thought, ‘I’m physically disabled,’” she says. “‘Not mentally.’”

    When the letter came informing her that she was no longer entitled to her disability payment — that she had been deemed fit for work — she was not surprised.

    “They want you to be off of benefits,” she says. “I think they were just ticking boxes.”

    The political architecture of Britain insulates those imposing austerity from the wrath of those on the receiving end. London makes the aggregate cuts, while leaving to local politicians the messy work of allocating the pain.

    Spend a morning with the aggrieved residents of Prescot and one hears scant mention of London, or even austerity. People train their fury on the Knowsley Council, and especially on the man who was until recently its leader, Andy Moorhead. They accuse him of hastily concocting plans to sell Browns Field without community consultation.

    Mr. Moorhead, 62, seems an unlikely figure for the role of austerity villain. A career member of the Labour Party, he has the everyday bearing of a genial denizen of the corner pub.

    “I didn’t become a politician to take things off of people,” he says. “But you’ve got the reality to deal with.”

    The reality is that London is phasing out grants to local governments, forcing councils to live on housing and business taxes.

    “Austerity is here to stay,” says Jonathan Davies, director of the Center for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University in Leicester, England. “What we might now see over the next two years is a wave of bankruptcies, like Detroit.”

    Indeed, the council of Northamptonshire, in the center of England, recently became the first local government in nearly two decades to meet that fate.

    Knowsley expects to spend $192 million in the next budget year, Mr. Moorhead says, with 60 percent of that absorbed by care for the elderly and services for children with health and developmental needs. An additional 18 percent will be spent on services the council must provide by law, such as garbage collection and highway maintenance.

    To Mr. Moorhead, the equation ends with the imperative to sell valuable land, yielding an endowment to protect remaining parks and services.

    “We’ve got to pursue development,” Mr. Moorhead says. “Locally, I’m the bad guy.”

    The real malefactors are the same as ever, he says.

    He points at a picture of Mrs. Thatcher on the wall behind him. He vents about London bankers, who left his people to clean up their mess.

    “No one should be doing this,” he says. “Not in the fifth-wealthiest country in the whole world. Sacking people, making people redundant, reducing our services for the vulnerable in our society. It’s the worst job in the world.”

    Now, it is someone else’s job. In early May, the local Labour Party ousted Mr. Moorhead as council leader amid mounting anger over the planned sale of parks.

  • The Secret Language of Ships | Hakai Magazine
    https://www.hakaimagazine.com/videos-visuals/the-secret-language-of-ships

    The Secret Language of Ships

    Signs and symbols on the sides of ships tell stories about an industry few outsiders understand.

    Entre autres

    These marks, called #load_lines, show the maximum load a ship can carry.

    Load lines owe much to a British member of Parliament named Samuel Plimsoll. Worried about the loss of ships and crew members due to overloading, he sponsored a bill in 1876 that made it mandatory to have marks on both sides of a ship. If a ship is overloaded, the marks disappear underwater. The original “#Plimsoll_line” was a circle with a horizontal line through it. The symbol spread around the world; additional marks were added over the years.

    The letters on either side of the circle stand for the ship’s registration authority. AB is the American Bureau of Shipping, one of 12 members of the International Association of Classification Societies, which sets and maintains safety standards for more than 90 percent of the world’s cargo ships.

    The marks and letters to the right of the circle indicate maximum loads under different climatic conditions. Salt water is denser than fresh, cold water denser than warm. Since water density affects ship buoyancy, different conditions call for different load lines.

    W marks the maximum load in winter temperate seawater, S in summer temperate seawater, T in tropical seawater, F in fresh water, and TF in tropical fresh water, like that of the Amazon River.

    Traditionnellement, en France, c’est #ligne_de_franc_bord et le bureau de classification est le Bureau Veritas (BV).

    ou encore (mais ça se comprend presque tout seul…)

  • Conservative Lawmaker Who Attacked Corbyn over Yemen Received Luxury Paid Trip from Saudi Arabia
    http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=21329

    When the United Kingdom’s leftist opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn criticized the government for supporting a catastrophic Saudi war on Yemen and welcoming the Saudi crown prince to London, he was attacked by a pro-Saudi Conservative member of Parliament, who claimed the Labour Party chief is "so poorly informed on Saudi and Yemen."

    What this right-wing lawmaker failed to mention is that she previously received thousands of dollars in hospitality expenses from the Saudi regime, while on a luxury junket to meet the Saudi king.

    #vendu.e.s

  • The Follower Factory - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/01/27/technology/social-media-bots.html

    #Devumi sells Twitter followers and retweets to celebrities, businesses and anyone who wants to appear more popular or exert influence online. Drawing on an estimated stock of at least 3.5 million automated accounts, each sold many times over, the company has provided customers with more than 200 million #Twitter followers, a New York Times investigation found.

    #robots #abonnés

  • Human rights advisor to President Kh.Battulga defends proposal to reinstate death penalty | The UB Post
    http://theubpost.mn/2017/12/10/human-rights-advisor-to-president-kh-battulga-defends-proposal-to-reinstat

    G.Uyanga, former Member of Parliament and Civil Society and Human Rights advisor to President Kh.Battulga, sat down with Unuudur to defend Kh.Battulga’s proposal to reinstate capital punishment.

    The President’s wish to reinstate the death penalty has been the subject of much debate and division in Mongolia. As an advisor to the President, what is your stance on the death penalty?

    People expressing their opinions on a controversial topic and taking sides is one thing. For us, finding a solution is what’s important. The President has proposed his solution.

    First of all, President Kh.Battulga has made it clear that at no point during his term as President will he pardon any individuals convicted of heinous crimes against children. There are many convicted criminals who ask for pardons from the President. From 2014 until November 2017, the President’s Office received more than 400 requests for pardons, 22 of which were granted. Starting from now, those who have committed horrible crimes will not be considered for pardons. This is one solution.

    Second, the President has proposed to reinstate the death penalty. In order to reinstate capital punishment, Parliament needs to legislate it. Whether it does or not is up to Parliament.

    Pour cette « conseillère sur les droits humains »,
    – la #peine_de_mort n’est de toutes façons pas abolie légalement,
    – elle n’est que suspendue sur décision – inconstitutionnelle, d’après elle – du précédent président
    – le fait que la #Mongolie ait adhéré au Deuxième protocole facultatif se rapportant au Pacte international relatif aux droits civils et politiques, visant à abolir la peine de mort de l’ONU n’est pas vraiment gênant
    – les sondages sont pour le recours à la peine de mort, voire massivement pour chez les juristes
    – la principale – et unique motivation – est la punition de crimes sexuels sur des enfants

    In 2016 alone, more than 298 children aged two to seven had become victims of sexual abuse. We do not know how many similar cases go unreported. This is a horrific statistic for Mongolians. The most recent decision by the President was based on research and designed to reverse what the previous President enacted based on emotion. It would be irrational to conclude that President Kh.Battulga’s decision was driven by emotion or overreaction. The reality of the situation demands this type of action.

    NB : la population de la Mongolie est de 3 millions d’habitants en 2016. Le chiffre comparable pour la France semble être autour de 5500 par an, soit, pour une population 20 fois plus nombreuse, un taux comparable. Et il est, bien sûr, difficile de comparer les sous-déclarations dans les deux pays…

    données (assez anciennes)
    rapport ONED 2004
    http://www.protection-enfance.org/Agressions.php

    Universalis, données 2000
    https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/pedophilie/5-donnees-statistiques-du-phenomene-en-france

  • Spotify Hit With Two Lawsuits Claiming “Staggering” Copyright Infringement
    The plaintiffs, including a founding member of the group Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, call the streaming giant’s recent $43 million settlement with publishers and songwriters an “empty gesture.”
    http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/spotify-hit-two-lawsuits-claiming-staggering-copyright-infringeme
    #spotify #musique #rémunération #copyright

  • 13 PLC members held by Israel after Khalida Jarrar detained in overnight raidsJuly 2, 2017 10:49 A.M. (Updated: July 2, 2017 5:07 P.M.)
    http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=777878

    BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Israeli forces detained Palestinian parliamentarian Khalida Jarrar during predawn military raids carried out across the occupied West Bank on Sunday — just over a year after she was released from Israeli prison — bringing the number of Palestinian lawmakers imprisoned by Israel to 13.

    At least 11 other Palestinians were detained in the raids, included the chairwoman of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.

    Israeli forces detained Jarrar, a deputy at the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) for the leftist faction the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), after raiding her home in Ramallah in the central occupied West Bank.

    She was released from Israeli prison on June 3, 2016 on a suspended sentence of 12 months within a five-year period.

    Following her detention 14 months prior, she was initially sentenced to six months of administrative detention — internment without trial or charge — though international pressure forced Israeli authorities to bring charges against her, all 12 of which focused on her political activism.

    Jarrar was charged with security-related offenses related to her membership and activities with the PFLP — a Palestinian political party Israel considers a “terrorist” organization, along with the majority of other Palestinian political factions — and accused of inciting violence.

    At the time, Jarrar accused the Israeli military prosecution of working to keep her in jail as long as possible, adding that she “did not expect anything from military courts. They are a joke, it’s like a big theater, I do not trust them and my detention has been political since the beginning.”

    Jarrar also said that she refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court, stating that all charges pressed against her were “ridiculous” and related to completely legal activities, including social and political work as a member of parliament.

    A statement released by the Israeli army Sunday morning claimed that Jarrar was detained for activities within PFLP and that her detention was not related to her post as member of the PLC.

    Jarrar is also the head of the Prisoners’ Commission in the PLC, and vice-chairperson of the board of directors of Palestinian prisoners’ rights group Addameer.

    Addameer said in a statement Sunday morning that “the arrest of Khalida Jarrar constitutes an attack against Palestinian political leaders and Palestinian civil society as a whole. It also constitutes one arrest in the context of continuous arrest campaigns against Palestinians.”

    #Khalida_Jarrar

    • Israël arrête de nouveau une députée palestinienne
      18h03, le 02 juillet 2017 | Par Rédaction Europe1.fr avec AFP
      http://www.europe1.fr/international/israel-arrete-de-nouveau-une-deputee-palestinienne-3377807

      Khalida Jarrar, figure du Front populaire de libération de la Palestine (FPLP), a de nouveau été arrêtée par l’armée israélienne. Elle était sortie des prisons israéliennes il y a tout juste un peu plus d’un an.

      L’armée israélienne a annoncé avoir de nouveau arrêté la députée palestinienne Khalida Jarrar, accusée d’activités au sein d’une organisation considérée comme « terroriste » par Israël. Une arrestation qui intervient 13 mois après la sortie de prison de la députée.

      La députée arrêtée 13 mois après sa sortie de prison. Khalida Jarrar (54 ans), une des figures les plus connues du Front populaire de libération de la Palestine (FPLP), avait été libérée en juin 2016 après avoir passé 14 mois dans une prison israélienne pour avoir, selon l’Etat hébreu, encouragé des attaques contre des Israéliens. Elle a été arrêtée dans la région de Ramallah en Cisjordanie.

      Le FPLP est une formation de la gauche historique palestinienne considérée comme terroriste par Israël. De nombreux responsables de cette organisation d’inspiration marxiste ont été arrêtés à de multiples reprises.

      Khalida Jarrar arrêtée pour avoir « repris ses activités au FPLP ». Selon l’armée israélienne, « après sa libération, Khalida Jarrar a repris ses activités au sein de l’organisation terroriste du FPLP » dont elle serait une des dirigeantes en Cisjordanie. « Elle a été appréhendée parce qu’elle a repris ses activités au FPLP et non en raison de son statut de membre » du Conseil législatif palestinien (Parlement), a ajouté l’armée israélienne.

      Khalida Jarrar est membre du Parlement palestinien élu en 2007. Plusieurs députés palestiniens sont actuellement détenus par Israël.

      Une dizaine d’autres arrestations. L’ONG palestinienne Addameer a précisé qu’au cours du même raid, une dizaine d’autres personnes avaient été arrêtées par les forces israéliennes, dont Khitam Saafin, présidente de l’Union des comités pour les femmes palestiniennes.

  • Who profits from Turkey’s ’Sarajevo moment’?
    RT Op-Edge –
    Pepe Escobar | Published time: 20 Dec, 2016 15:40
    https://www.rt.com/op-edge/370997-turkey-ambassador-russian-assassination-syria

    (...) The Big Picture

    On the bilateral front, Moscow and Ankara are now working close together on counter-terrorism. Turkey’s defense minister was invited to Russia for anti-air defense system negotiations. Bilateral trade is booming again, including the creation of a joint investment fund. On the all-important energy front, Turkish Stream, despite the Obama administration’s obsession about its derailment, became the subject of state law in Ankara earlier this month.

    Atlanticists are appalled that Moscow, Ankara and Tehran are now fully engaged in designing a post-Battle of Aleppo Syrian future, to the graphic exclusion of the NATO-GCC combo.

    It’s under this context that the recent alleged capture of a bunch of NATO-GCC operatives – deployed under the US-led-from-behind “coalition” - by Syrian Special Forces in Aleppo must be interpreted.

    Syrian member of Parliament Fares Shehabi, the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Aleppo, published the names of the apprehended coalition officers; most are Saudi; there’s one Qatari; the presence of one Moroccan and one Jordanian is explained by the fact Morocco and Jordan are “unofficial” GCC members.

    And then there’s one Turk, one American (David Scott Winer) and one Israeli. So NATO shows up only via two operatives, but the NATO-GCC link is more than established. If this information proceeds – and that’s still a big “if” - these may well be coalition military personnel and field commanders, formerly advising “moderate rebels” and now a formidable bargaining chip in the hands of Damascus.

    Both NATO and GCC remain absolutely mum; not even non-denial denials have materialized. That might imply a made in the shade deal for the release of the high-value prisoners, further strengthening Damascus’ grip.

    It was President Putin who all but established a de facto Russia-Iran-Turkey axis dealing with facts on the Syrian ground – in parallel to the rhetoric-heavy, zero-solution UN charade going on in Geneva. Moscow diplomatically emphasizes that the work of the axis complement Geneva. In fact, it’s the only reality-based work. And it’s supposed to sign and seal definitive parameters on the ground before Donald Trump enters the White House.

    In a nutshell; the five-year (and running) NATO-GCC combo’s multi-billion dollar regime change project in Syria all but miserably failed. Wily Erdogan seems to have learned his realpolitik lesson. On the Atlanticist front nevertheless, that opens myriad avenues to channel geopolitical resentment.

    The Big Picture couldn’t be more absolutely unbearable for neocon/neoliberalcon Atlanticists. Ankara slowly but surely is veering the Eurasianist way; bye bye to the EU, and eventually NATO; welcome to the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. the China-driven One Belt, One Road (OBOR); the Russia-driven Eurasia Economic Union (EEU); the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); the Russia-China strategic partnership; and Turkey as a key hub in Eurasia integration.

    For all that to happen, Erdogan has concluded Ankara must be on board the Russia-China-Iran long-term strategy to pacify and rebuild Syria and make it a key hub as well of the New Silk Roads. Between that and an “alliance” of fleeting interests with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the US, it’s certainly a no-brainer.

    But make no mistake. There will be blood.

    #Alep-Est #Capture_officiers

  • Would You Have Any Cosmetic Neurology Done? - Facts So Romantic
    http://nautil.us/blog/would-you-have-any-cosmetic-neurology-done

    Like some other futurists, Ray Kurzweil thinks the best way to avoid aging is to avoid biology altogether. With a sufficient understanding of the brain, he says, we’ll be able to upload our minds to (presumably non-organic) structures and become digitally immortal. This might sound plausible enough, if a bit speculative, since the pace of technological advancement can seem surreal. Who’s going to rule out such an idea so early in the game?Susan SchneiderPhotograph by Laura Latimer Answer: Susan Schneider, philosopher and cognitive scientist at the University of Connecticut and member of the Technology and Ethics study group at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics. “It would be silly to claim you can ‘upload’ your consciousness to a computer, the way futurists like Ray (...)

  • What a Palestinian Parliament Member Learned in an Israeli Prison

    Khalida Jarrar knew a lot about prisoner issues, but her 14 months behind bars offered plenty of surprises.
    Amira Hass Jun 19, 2016 5:18 PM
    http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.725721

    Palestinian lawmaker Khalida Jarar after her release from prison.Majdi Mohammed/AP

    In her first few days after being released from prison on June 2, Khalida Jarrar still described things in the present tense.

    “We go to the yard twice a day, from 10:30 A.M. to 1 P.M. and from 2:30 to 5 P.M.,” she told friends. Or: “We are 61 women and girls, minors, in prison — 41 in Hasharon Prison and 20 in Damun Prison.”

    The women who are still awaiting trial are in Damun Prison, while those who have been sentenced, the minors and the wounded — usually by Israeli bullets while they were waving a knife or trying to stab a soldier (one was seriously burned by a gas-cylinder explosion) — are in Hasharon.

    Ten wounded prisoners were with Jarrar in the wing, five adults and five minors. At the press conference immediately after her release she didn’t explain what that meant — to live with the shooting victims in the same room or wing.

    In personal conversations she said a little more, always careful not to infringe on the privacy of the women. And she constantly praised the longtime prisoner Lena Jerboni, who took on the difficult and sensitive jobs such as washing the wounded, accompanying them to the infirmary and to physiotherapy, and cooking.

    Jarrar, a Palestinian member of parliament, also spoke in the plural. She didn’t speak of her own difficulties during her 14 months in prison. The cameras and journalists focused on her, the “famous” one, but she spoke in the name of the collective, where the intensive living gave her the chance to use her abilities, political experience and status as a public figure.

    As part of this status, for example, she and Jerboni demanded from a prisoner who was an Israeli citizen and who supported the Islamic State organization to keep her dangerous opinions and thoughts to herself and not share them with the other women.

    After she was convicted on two of 12 charges (relating to incitement and providing services to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), Jarrar used the last five months of her term to conduct a field study of her fellow inmates, from the perspective of gender.

    Palestinian society, which estimates that some 800,000 of its sons and daughters have been imprisoned in Israel since 1957, doesn’t lack research on and testimonies from prison. But mostly this research describes the experience from the perspective of the prison majority: men.

    Jarrar focused on gender in the process of arrest and imprisonment from two perspectives: the prisoner’s and the jailer’s. She interviewed 36 women at length and about many aspects: the period before the imprisonment, the arrest (and injury), the investigation, the trial and the imprisonment. Some told her she was the first to ask them about their lives and listen so attentively.

    She can suggest some generalizations because of the dramatic rise in the number of Palestinian women who entered Israeli prisons during her own term. This is the rise of the phenomenon of women who were pushed into being arrested for “social reasons.” This is also what brought a delegation of four representatives of Israel’s Justice Ministry to Hasharon Prison, Jarrar told Haaretz.

    “They asked what could be done for those women,” she said. “I told them their place wasn’t in prison; they should be freed, and our role in Palestinian society was to treat and take care of them and the issues that motivated them.”

    Women activists are certain that if these women are not sent to prison, the “social reasons” phenomenon would be reduced.

    An example of “social reasons” could be heard last week at the military court in Ofer, near Ramallah. A woman we will identify only by her initials, A.B., was arrested early in the week near a checkpoint in Hebron. She had a 15-centimeter-long knife in her bag and did not resist arrest.

    In her interrogation and at two detention hearings (on Monday and Tuesday), the circumstances were brought up: She quarreled with her husband, who does not help to provide for their children.

    Nitza Aminov, a left-wing activist who monitors the Ofer military court, reported that the prosecutor, Capt. Elhanan Dreyfus, said the prosecution knows that many women come to the checkpoints with knives because of problems at home. Nonetheless, he requested that A.B. remain in custody.

    The judge, Maj. Naftali Shmulevich, agreed and wrote in his ruling that the understanding in the region was that “possessing a knife outside the home is for purposes of carrying out a crime.”

    Rocky ride in the bosta

    Even before her arrest, Jarrar devoted a great deal of time to political and social activities relating to Palestinian prisoners. She ran Addameer, a human rights group supporting Palestinian prisoners. She was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006 as a member of the left-wing slate of Abu Ali Mustafa, the Popular Front’s secretary-general assassinated by Israel in August 2001. And she heads the monitoring committee on prisoners.

    Asked whether anything surprised her in prison, Jarrar told Haaretz: “I was surprised there were things that various [prisoners’ rights] institutions hadn’t managed to solve,” she said, emphasizing the transportation of detainees to court, hospitals and other prisons.

    “Why is it impossible to solve this problem? After all, all the prisoners complain about it — Jewish and Palestinian, criminal and security [prisoners] — and Israeli institutions have criticized it too.”

    Unequivocally, prisoner transport was the most difficult experience for Jarrar during her arrest and imprisonment, and the only one for which she occasionally mixes an “I” into the description.

    For the eight months of her trial she was transported in a bosta, as the prison vehicles are known, about 40 times. She joked that she knew all the members of Nahshon, the security unit that accompanies prisoners.

    But with serious tone she said, switching from “I” to the collective: “If we, the healthy ones, were sick for two or three days after every transport, what can we say about those wounded by gunfire?”

    The medical treatment for the wounded and sick women prisoners is good, said Jarrar, as opposed to the initial treatment in Israeli hospitals immediately after their arrest. One of the seriously injured women fell ill one night, was rushed from her cell to a civilian hospital and the next day was brought to a court hearing. And all of it in the bosta.

    The bosta is a kind of bus or truck whose passenger cabin is divided into several two-person compartments. They leave the prison at about 2 A.M. The iron benches are not padded, and every rock, pothole and bend in the road sends waves of pain through the bouncing body of each passenger.

    A guards cuff the prisoners’ hands and feet before they enter the vehicle, so they must hop carefully up the steps. When they also have baggage, such as when being transferred between prisons, this maneuvering becomes an art.

    After a few trips, Jarrar stopped reminding the guards that the prison doctor had instructed that she not be placed in restraints because of her chronic blood-vessel disease.

    Jews, Arabs, common criminals, religious people, women and men, all may ride together in the bosta. Jerboni has filed a number of complaints with the prison service on behalf of women who complained of sexual harassment and racist abuse during these rides, Jarrar said.

    After the prisoners are placed in the iron cells, they are driven to the prison in Ramle, where the “transfer center” is located, the place where inmates are gathered from various detention facilities on their way to the military courts, hospitals and other prisons. They wait three, four, five hours, which feel like 50. They are kept shackled in the bosta, without being able to go to the bathroom. As a result, many women prefer not to eat or drink before the transport.

    One can decide to spend the waiting time at Ramle Prison, in a room divided into iron cells, instead of in the boosta. The humiliating search before entering a waiting “cage” in Ramle prison, instead of waiting in the bosta, discourages many women from choosing this option.

    Time in the ‘refrigerator’

    At the Ofer military court, southeast of Ramallah, the detainees are kept for hours in a sort of cell they call the zinzana or the “refrigerator,” until they are taken to the prefab building that serves as the military courtroom. It’s cold there even in summer. In the winter it’s freezing and “we all shiver,” Jarrar said. It’s also filthy.

    After the court session, the detainees are returned to the “refrigerator” and wait for the return trip, first via Ramle, where the shackled human cargo waits again in the bosta for hours. Then they are returned to the prison — sometimes at midnight, sometimes at 2 A.M.

    Jarrar began to learn Hebrew in prison, so she could understand the guards and communicate her requests and protests.

    In the “refrigerator” she met other Palestinian women who were detained in Ashkelon or Ramle prisons, for lack of space in the women’s prisons.

    It was clear they had not been allowed to shower for days or change out of the clothes they were wearing at the time of their arrest. Some had bloodstained pants, as they were not provided with menstrual products.

    “I was shocked. I didn’t expect to witness such prison conditions in the 21st century,” Jarrar said. Jerboni informed the prison authorities that the Hasharon prisoners were willing to sleep on mattresses on the floor if they would only transfer the other prisoners there, said Jarrar.

    Later the wing in Damun was opened, with its own problems — over 10 prisoners in a cell, with a single toilet, and for a long time, until a female deputy was assigned, a male warden. The overcrowding problem was partially solved, and in March the women at Hasharon were moved to a different wing.

    It was in an old building and it was filthy, crawling with roaches, dripping with water and lacking essentials such as shelves and wardrobes. There were also bees, and everyone was stung.

    Jarrar said that when the women complained that the place was unfit for human habitation, they were told “everything is fine.” They returned their lunches in protest, and workers were sent immediately to fix the situation.

    “All told, the time in prison wasn’t particularly difficult,” Jarrar said. She got the impression that the administration at Hasharon didn’t want to increase tensions, and some problems could be solved through negotiation. Jerboni was the main negotiator for the prisoners.

    The administration also allowed a Palestinian teacher from Israel to teach the minors for a few hours, three days a week. Jarrar taught them English and instructed the adults on how to prepare youths for the matriculation exams. They were also busy cataloguing the books they had.

    Near the end of her sentence, Jarrar met with one of the senior wardens. Jarrar said she told her that the problem was the occupation, and will end with its end. Her impression was that the warden agreed.

  • Mother of the World, against the world and outside of it | Mada Masr
    http://www.madamasr.com/opinion/mother-world-against-world-and-outside-it
    Mohamed Naeem

    Une effrayante vision du chauvinisme égyptien à travers l’histoire récente

    I have long known that the contemporary Egypt in which I was raised could easily produce a figure like General Ibrahim Abd al-Ati and his ill-famed sham device for vanquishing AIDS and hepatitis C. I knew that Egypt’s security doctrine could enable the killing of a young man like Giulio Regeni under torture, without the slightest trace of guilt. I also knew that Egypt’s strategic experts could believe that Freemasons actually rule the world. I was aware that the mentality of education officials in Giza would let them burn books deemed insulting to the nation. I was not surprised that a former chair of the Federation of Industries and a member of the board of trustees at a foreign university could say under the dome of that university that intellectuals are the greatest threat to society; or that state antiquities officials could destroy archeological inscriptions on a temple wall thinking that a foreign archeological mission had carved them.

  • Greek cruise operators fret over strikes sparked by port sale | Reuters
    http://www.reuters.com/article/eurozone-greece-privatisation-port-idUSL8N18Z29R

    Greek cruise ship operators are worried of a lasting impact on the sector from an ongoing strike by port workers protesting against the sale of the country’s biggest port Piraeus to Chinese shipping giant COSCO.

    Greece in April agreed the sale of a 67 percent stake in Piraeus Port to COSCO for 368.5 million euros under a third international bailout.

    Port workers have held 48-hour rolling strikes since late May, disrupting cargo operations and services provided to cruise ships docking at Piraeus over fears their jobs are at risk.

    We are very worried,” said Theodoros Kontes, head of the Greek cruise ship owners association. “If they keep striking, we are expecting a 10 million euro impact on our business in Piraeus only for June.

    Greece had revenue of 560 million euros from about 2.5 million cruise ship passengers last year and the sector has been growing since May after cruise lines shunned Turkey and Egypt for Greece, due to safety concerns.

    But Kontes said he was concerned that this positive trend could be reversed after two cruise ships left Piraeus over the weekend to dock at other ports in Greece and Italy due to the port workers’ labour action.

    If the strike continues and many companies perceive the situation unpredictable, there is a risk that they dock elsewhere, or even make more permanent changes to their schedule,” said Giorgios Paliouras, a member of the board of the Greek travel agents association.

    Port workers want COSCO to safeguard jobs for a minimum number of people, with current labour contracts, as part of a concession agreement to be signed later this year.

    Renewing the 48-hour strikes is what we have in mind,” said George Georgakopoulos, the dock workers union director. “We recognise there is an inconvenience for passengers and that is why we ask the government to resolve the matter the soonest.

  • Victoire électorale d’Ashraf Rifi à Tripoli (Liban). Les éléments de langage sont déjà en place depuis un moment : « grassroot », « fils d’un meunier », « issu d’un quartier populaire »… et pour Gulfnews, il serait carrément : « le nouveau leader des sunnites au Liban » :

    The hugely popular Rifi has unquestionably emerged as the new leader of Sunnis in Lebanon.

    Les milices ? Les investissements immobiliers sur le littoral ? Les enjeux saoudiens dans le Nord du Liban ? Meeeehh…

  • NOAH Internet Conference 2016 | Berlin 08 - 09 June
    https://www.noah-conference.com
    Une rencontre des protagonistes de la disruption à l’européenne se tiendra le 8 et 9 juin à Berlin. Si vous avez envie de découvrir un nid de crabes de casseurs d’aquis sociaux suivez les infos sur cette rencontre digne d’un Bilderberg des économies dites « nouvelles » . On y rencontrera les acteurs représentant les commanditaires principales des nouveaux lois du travail en Europe. La plupart des participants actifs sont des jeunes à la recherche de capital pour leurs startups déjà bien vus par les investisseurs.

    The preeminent European event where Internet CEOs, executives and investors gain deep insights into the latest proven concepts, network with senior executives and establish new business relationships.

    Now in our 8th year, we are delighted to be hosting two upcoming events with very different underlying themes. NOAH Berlin (8-9 Jun 2016) presents a unique discussion platform for CEOs and founders from established champions and disruptive challengers across a number of key industry verticals. NOAH London (10-11 Nov 2016) is focused on connecting capital with great companies and helping service providers to find relevant customers.

    Day 1

    Welcome Note
    Marco Rodzynek CEO NOAH Advisors Ltd
    Jens Mueffelmann CEO Axel Springer Digital Ventures
    Keynote
    Klaus Hommels CEO Lakestar
    Keynote
    Carlos Watson Founder & CEO OZY

    Home Automation & IoT
    Niall Murphy Founder & CEO Evrythng
    Ludovic Le Moan CEO Sigfox
    Christian Deilmann CEO tado
    Andreas Rudyk CEO Smartfrog
    Philipp Pausder Managing Director Thermondo

    Keynote
    Thomas Ebeling CEO ProSiebenSat.1

    B2B
    Karim Jalbout Head of the European Digital Practice Egon Zehnder
    Thomas Bergen Co-Founder & CEO getAbstract
    Steve Oriola CEO Pipedrive
    Peter F. Schmid CEO Wer Liefert Was
    Or Offer CEO SimilarWeb
    Andreas Koenig CEO TeamViewer
    Torben Majgaard Founder & CEO Ciklum
    Mark Schwerzel Deputy CEO Bureau van Dijk

    Fintech
    Roelant Prins CCO Adyen
    Antonio Gagliardi Co-Founder and Managing Director CompareEuropeGroup
    Jacob de Geer CEO iZettle
    Phil Lojacono CEO Advanon
    Jeremias Meier CEO & Co-Founder Bexio
    Yoni Assia CEO & Founder Etoro
    Oren Levy CEO Zooz
    Raffael Johnen Co-Founder & CEO auxmoney

    Fintech - Banking Deep Dive
    Markus Pertlwieser CDO Private, Wealth & Commercial Clients Deutsche BankAlexander Graubner-Müller CEO & Co-Founder Kreditech
    Valentin Stalf Founder & CEO Number26

    Who Will Win the Banking Client of the Future? - 2:2
    Markus Pertlwieser CDO Private, Wealth & Commercial Clients Deutsche Bank
    Dr. Tim Sievers CEO & Founder Deposit Solutions
    Alexander Graubner-Müller CEO & Co-Founder Kreditech
    alentin Stalf Founder & CEO Number26
    Christin Martens Editor-in-Chief Business Insider

    VC Panel
    Rainer Maerkle General Partner Holtzbrinck Ventures
    Yann de Vries Partner, Investments Atomico
    Yaron Valler General Partner Target Global
    Christian Leybold Managing Director E.ventures
    Timm Schipporeit Principal Index Ventures
    Luciana Lixandru Vice President Accel Partners
    Ankur Kamalia Managing Director – Head of Venture Portfolio Management & DB1 Ventures Deutsche Börse AG
    Bo Ilsoe Managing Partner Nokia Growth Partners (NGP)

    Fireside Chat
    Oliver Samwer Founder & CEO Rocket Internet
    Marco Rodzynek CEO NOAH Advisors Ltd

    NOAH Top Picks
    Dr. Holger Klärner VP Fast Growing Tech McKinsey & Company

    Mobility
    Hakan Koç Founder & Managing Director Auto1 Group
    Harold Goddijn CEO TomTom
    Christian Vollmann Patron of smart urban pioneers smart
    Nir Erez CEO Moovit
    Daniel Ishag Founder & CEO Karhoo
    Nicolas Brusson COO & Co-Founder BlaBlaCar
    Shahar Waiser Founder & CEO Gett
    Simone Menne CFO Lufthansa Group

    Keynote
    Greg Ellis CEO Scout24

    NOAH Top Picks
    Rudolph W. Giuliani Former Mayor of New York City Chair Cybersecurity and Crisis Management Practice, Greenberg Traurig LLP Greenberg Traurig

    1:1
    Peter Terium CEO RWE
    Rainer Sternfeld Founder & CEO Planet OS
    Marco Rodzynek CEO NOAH Advisors Ltd

    1:1
    Dr. Mathias Döpfner CEO Axel Springer SE
    Henry Blodget CEO, Editor-In-Chief Business Insider

    Mobility - 1:1
    Travis Kalanick CEO UBER
    Dr. Dieter Zetsche Chairman of the Board of Management of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes-Benz Cars Daimler

    Music
    Thomas Hampson Baritone | Ambassador IDAGIO
    Wolfram Rieger Pianist IDAGIO

    Day 2

    Day 1 Summary
    Marco Rodzynek CEO NOAH Advisors Ltd

    Company Presentation
    Michael Gross Vice Chairman WeWork

    Winners Make Winners - The Strong Performance of Interhyp with ING - 1:1
    Ralph Hamers CEO ING Group
    Michiel Goris CEO Interhyp

    Consumer Goods
    Olaf Koch Chairman of the Management Board Metro Group
    Olivier Marcheteau COO Vestiaire Collective
    Jeff Lipkin CFO Harry’s
    Robyn Ward Founder Mahtay
    Fabian Siegel Co-Founder & CEO Marley Spoon
    Daniel Sobhani CEO Freeletics
    Luke Waite Co-Founder Titan Black

    Consumer Goods - 1:1
    Herbert Hainer CEO adidas Group
    Florian Gschwandtner CEO & Co-Founder Runtastic
    Marco Rodzynek CEO NOAH Advisors Ltd

    NOAH Top Picks
    Euan Davis Senior Director Cognizant

    Credit Suisse: Corporate Private Banking `connecting your wealth
    Henrik Herr Head Germany & Austria International Wealth Management Credit Suisse
    Florian Gschwandtner CEO & Co-Founder Runtastic

    Retail
    Tim Stracke Co-CEO Chrono24
    Rubin Ritter Member of the Management Board Zalando SE
    Dr. Oliver Lederle Founder & CEO MYTOYS GROUP
    Niklas Östberg CEO Delivery Hero
    Alexander Frolov General Partner Target Global
    Dr. Philipp Kreibohm Co-Founder Home24
    Thierry Petit Co-Founder & Co-CEO Showroomprive.com
    Philip Rooke CEO Spreadshirt
    Susanne Zacke Member of the Board Auctionata

    Travel & Tourism
    Johannes Reck CEO GetYourGuide
    Bo Ilsoe Managing Partner Nokia Growth Partners (NGP)
    Glenn Fogel Head of Worldwide Strategy and Planning Priceline Group
    Hugo Burge CEO Momondo Group
    Joachim Hunold Founder Air Berlin
    Jochen Engert Founder & Managing Director FlixBus

    7 Steps Needed for the Internet Economy in Europe
    Clark Parsons CEO Internet Economy Foundation

    Advertising
    Ragnar Kruse CEO Smaato
    Zvika Netter CEO & Co-Founder Innovid
    Jürgen Galler Co-Founder and CEO 1plusX
    Tim Schumacher Chairman Eyeo
    Carl Erik Kjærsgaard Chairman and Co-Founder Blackwood Seven

    Healthcare, Science & Education
    Mariusz Gralewski Founder & CEO Docplanner
    Markus Witte Founder and CEO Babbel
    Dr. Torsten Oelke Executive Chairman CUBE
    Jessica Federer Chief Digital Officer Bayer
    Friedrich Schwandt Founder & CEO Statista
    Stanislas Niox-Chateau CEO Doctolib

    Fintech - 1:1
    Christian Mylius Managing Partner Innovalue Management Advisors
    Julian Teicke Founder & CEO FinanceFox

    Technology, Media & Gaming
    Polina Montano Co-founder and COO JobToday
    Klaas Kersting Founder & CEO flaregames
    Hermione Mckee Head of Finance Wooga
    Hanna Aase CEO Wonderloop
    Christian Sauer CEO Webtrekk
    Nora-Vanessa Wohlert
    Founder and Managing Director EDITION F
    Susann Hoffmann Founder and Managing Director EDITION F
    Peter Würtenberger CEO upday
    Eric Léandri President and Co-Founder Qwant
    Lucas von Cranach Founder & CEO Onefootball

    What We’re Working on at NOAH: An Outlook for the Next 3 Years
    Marco Rodzynek CEO NOAH Advisors Ltd

    Les organisateurs se comportent comme une secte extrémiste - même les musiciens du « get together » font partie d’une startup potentiellement disruptive. Comme ca on est sûr de toujours communiquer sur la même longueur d’ondes bien à l’abri des critiques et contestations.

    Les conditions générales de vente le disent explicitement :

    The event is invitation only and generally tickets are not transferable. However, please contact us with your request and we can review.
    ...
    The ticket price for NOAH16 Berlin is EUR 690 for Internet companies and corporates, EUR 850 for service providers; EUR 990 for small investors, EUR 1,490 for large investors and EUR 3,000 for investment bankers. All mentioned prices are excluding VAT. This price includes two full days including breakfast, lunch, and drinks and cocktail party.

    Effectivement.

    #Berlin #disruption #startup #économie #politique #capitalisme

  • Édifiant. Quand un nazi devient un tueur du Mossad

    The Strange Case of a Nazi Who Became an Israeli Hitman
    Otto Skorzeny, one of the Mossad’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s favorites.

    http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.711115

    On September 11, 1962, a German scientist vanished. The basic facts were simple: Heinz Krug had been at his office, and he never came home.

    The only other salient detail known to police in Munich was that Krug commuted to Cairo frequently. He was one of dozens of Nazi rocket experts who had been hired by Egypt to develop advanced weapons for that country.

    HaBoker, a now defunct Israeli newspaper, surprisingly claimed to have the explanation: The Egyptians kidnapped Krug to prevent him from doing business with Israel.

    But that somewhat clumsy leak was an attempt by Israel to divert investigators from digging too deeply into the case — not that they ever would have found the 49-year-old scientist.

    We can now report — based on interviews with former Mossad officers and with Israelis who have access to the Mossad’s archived secrets from half a century ago — that Krug was murdered as part of an Israeli espionage plot to intimidate the German scientists working for Egypt.
    Moreover, the most astounding revelation is the Mossad agent who fired the fatal gunshots: Otto Skorzeny, one of the Israeli spy agency’s most valuable assets, was a former lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS and one of Adolf Hitler’s personal favorites among the party’s commando leaders. The Führer, in fact, awarded Skorzeny the army’s most prestigious medal, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, for leading the rescue operation that plucked his friend Benito Mussolini out from the hands of his captors.
    But that was then. By 1962, according to our sources — who spoke only on the promise that they not be identified — Skorzeny had a different employer. The story of how that came to be is one of the most important untold tales in the archives of the Mossad, the agency whose full name, translated from Hebrew, is “The Institute for Intelligence and Special Missions.”
    Key to understanding the story is that the Mossad had made stopping German scientists then working on Egypt’s rocket program one of its top priorities. For several months before his death, in fact, Krug, along with other Germans who were working in Egypt’s rocket-building industry, had received threatening messages. When in Germany, they got phone calls in the middle of the night, telling them to quit the Egyptian program. When in Egypt, some were sent letter bombs — and several people were injured by the explosions.

    Krug, as it happens, was near the top of the Mossad’s target list.

    During the war that ended 17 years earlier, Krug was part of a team of superstars at Peenemünde, the military test range on the coast of the Baltic Sea, where top German scientists toiled in the service of Hitler and the Third Reich. The team, led by Wernher von Braun, was proud to have engineered the rockets for the Blitz that nearly defeated England. Its wider ambitions included missiles that could fly a lot farther, with greater accuracy and more destructive power.

    According to Mossad research, a decade after the war ended, von Braun invited Krug and other former colleagues to join him in America. Von Braun, his war record practically expunged, was leading a missile development program for the United States. He even became one of the fathers of the NASA space exploration program. Krug opted for another, seemingly more lucrative option: joining other scientists from the Peenemünde group — led by the German professor Wolfgang Pilz, whom he greatly admired — in Egypt. They would set up a secret strategic missile program for that Arab country.

    In the Israelis’ view, Krug had to know that Israel, the country where so many Holocaust survivors had found refuge, was the intended target of his new masters’ military capabilities. A committed Nazi would see this as an opportunity to continue the ghastly mission of exterminating the Jewish people.

    The threatening notes and phone calls, however, were driving Krug crazy. He and his colleagues knew that the threats were from Israelis. It was obvious. In 1960, Israeli agents had kidnapped Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief administrators of the Holocaust, in far-off Argentina. The Israelis astonishingly smuggled the Nazi to Jerusalem, where he was put on trial. Eichmann was hanged on May 31, 1962.

    It was reasonable for Krug to feel that a Mossad noose might be tightening around his neck, too. That was why he summoned help: a Nazi hero who was considered the best of the best in Hitler’s heyday.
    On the day he vanished, according to our new information from reliable sources, Krug left his office to meet Skorzeny, the man he felt would be his savior.

    Skorzeny, then 54 years old, was quite simply a legend. A dashing, innovative military man who grew up in Austria — famous for a long scar on the left side of his face, the result of his overly exuberant swordplay while fencing as a youth— he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Nazi Germany’s Waffen-SS. Thanks to Skorzeny’s exploits as a guerrilla commander, Hitler recognized that he had a man who would go above and beyond, and stop at nothing, to complete a mission.

    The colonel’s feats during the war inspired Germans and the grudging respect of Germany’s enemies. American and British military intelligence labeled Skorzeny “the most dangerous man in Europe.”

    Krug contacted Skorzeny in the hope that the great hero — then living in Spain — could create a strategy to keep the scientists safe.

    The two men were in Krug’s white Mercedes, driving north out of Munich, and Skorzeny said that as a first step he had arranged for three bodyguards. He said they were in a car directly behind and would accompany them to a safe place in a forest for a chat. Krug was murdered, then and there, without so much as a formal indictment or death sentence. The man who pulled the trigger was none other than the famous Nazi war hero. Israel’s espionage agency had managed to turn Otto Skorzeny into a secret agent for the Jewish state.

    After Krug was shot, the three Israelis poured acid on his body, waited awhile and then buried what was left in a hole they had dug beforehand. They covered the makeshift grave with lime, so that search dogs — and wild animals — would never pick up the scent of human remains.

    The troika that coordinated this extrajudicial execution was led by a future prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who was then head of the Mossad’s special operations unit. One of the others was Zvi “Peter” Malkin, who had tackled Eichmann in Argentina and in later life would enter the art world as a New York-based painter. Supervising from a distance was Yosef “Joe” Raanan, who was the secret agency’s senior officer in Germany. All three had lost large numbers of family members among the 6 million Jews murdered by the cruel, continent-wide genocide that Eichmann had managed.
    Israel’s motivation in working with a man such as Skorzeny was clear: to get as close as possible to Nazis who were helping Egypt plot a new Holocaust.

    The Mossad’s playbook for protecting Israel and the Jewish people has no preordained rules or limits. The agency’s spies have evaded the legal systems in a host of countries for the purpose of liquidating Israel’s enemies: Palestinian terrorists, Iranian scientists, and even a Canadian arms inventor named Gerald Bull, who worked for Saddam Hussein until bullets ended his career in Brussels in 1990. Mossad agents in Lillehammer, Norway, even killed a Moroccan waiter in the mistaken belief that he was the mastermind behind the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the terrorist group known as Black September. Ahmed Bouchikhi was shot down in 1973 as he left a movie theatre with his pregnant wife. The Israeli government later paid compensation to her without officially admitting wrongdoing. The botched mission delayed further Mossad assassinations, but it did not end them.

    To get to unexpected places on these improbable missions, the Mossad has sometimes found itself working with unsavory partners. When short-term alliances could help, the Israelis were willing to dance with the proverbial devil, if that is what seemed necessary.

    But why did Skorzeny work with the Mossad?

    He was born in Vienna in June 1908, to a middle-class family proud of its military service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From an early age he seemed fearless, bold and talented at weaving false, complex tales that deceived people in myriad ways. These were essential requirements for a commando officer at war, and certainly valuable qualities for the Mossad.

    He joined Austria’s branch of the Nazi Party in 1931, when he was 23, served in its armed militia, the SA, and enthusiastically worshipped Hitler. The führer was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933 and then seized Austria in 1938. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and World War II broke out, Skorzeny left his construction firm and volunteered — not for the regular army, the Wehrmacht, but for the Leibstandarte SS Panzer division that served as Hitler’s personal bodyguard force.

    Skorzeny, in a memoir written after the war was over, told of his years of SS service as though they were almost bloodless travels in occupied Poland, Holland and France. His activities could not have been as innocuous as his book made them seem. He took part in battles in Russia and Poland, and certainly the Israelis believed it was very likely that he was involved in exterminating Jews. The Waffen-SS, after all, was not the regular army; it was the military arm of the Nazi Party and its genocidal plan.
    His most famous and daring mission was in September 1943: leading commandos who flew engineless gliders to reach an Italian mountaintop resort to rescue Hitler’s friend and ally, the recently ousted Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and spirit him away under harrowing conditions.

    This was the escapade that earned Skorzeny his promotion to lieutenant colonel — and operational control of Hitler’s SS Special Forces. Hitler also rewarded him with several hours of face-to-face conversation, along with the coveted Knight’s Cross. But it was far from his only coup.

    In September 1944, when Hungary’s dictator, Admiral Miklos Horthy, a Nazi ally, was on the verge of suing for peace with Russia as Axis fortunes plunged, Skorzeny led a contingent of Special Forces into Budapest to kidnap Horthy and replace his government with the more hard-line Fascist Arrow Cross regime. That regime, in turn, went on to kill or to deport to concentration camps tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews who had managed to survive the war up to that point.

    Also in 1944, Skorzeny handpicked 150 soldiers, including some who spoke fair to excellent English in a bold plan to fend off the Allies after they landed in Normandy on D-Day in June. With the Allies advancing through France, Skorzeny dressed his men in captured U.S. uniforms, and procured captured American tanks for them to use in attacking and confusing Allied troops from behind their own lines.

    The bold deception — including the act of stealing U.S. soldiers’ property — plunged Skorzeny into two years of interrogation, imprisonment and trial after the war ended. Eventually, Allied military judges acquitted him in 1947. Once again, the world’s newspapers headlined him as Europe’s most dangerous man. He enjoyed the fame, and published his memoirs in various editions and many languages, including the 1957 book “Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Autobiography of Hitler’s Commando Ace,” published by Greenhill Books. He spun some tall-tale hyperbole in the books, and definitely downplayed his contacts with the most bloodthirsty Nazi leaders. When telling of his many conversations with Hitler, he described the dictator as a caring and attentive military strategist.

    There was much that Skorzeny did not reveal, including how he escaped from the American military authorities who held him for a third year after his acquittal. Prosecutors were considering more charges against him in the Nuremberg tribunals, but during one transfer he was able to escape — reputedly with the help of former SS soldiers wearing American military police uniforms.

    Skorzeny’s escape was also rumored to have been assisted by the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Office of Special Services, for which he did some work after the war. It is certainly notable that he was allowed to settle in Spain — a paradise for Nazi war veterans, with protection from the pro-Western Fascist, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In the years that followed he did some advisory work for President Juan Peron in Argentina and for Egypt’s government. It was during this period that Skorzeny became friendly with the Egyptian officers who were running the missile program and employing German experts.
    In Israel, a Mossad planning team started to work on where it could be best to find and kill Skorzeny. But the head of the agency, Isser Harel, had a bolder plan: Instead of killing him, snare him.

    Mossad officials had known for some time that to target the German scientists, they needed an inside man in the target group. In effect, the Mossad needed a Nazi.

    The Israelis would never find a Nazi they could trust, but they saw a Nazi they could count on: someone thorough and determined, with a record of success in executing innovative plans, and skilled at keeping secrets. The seemingly bizarre decision to recruit Skorzeny came with some personal pain, because the task was entrusted to Raanan, who was also born in Vienna and had barely escaped the Holocaust. As an Austrian Jew, his name was originally Kurt Weisman. After the Nazis took over in 1938, he was sent — at age 16 — to British-ruled Palestine. His mother and younger brother stayed in Europe and perished.

    Like many Jews in Palestine, Kurt Weisman joined the British military looking for a chance to strike back at Germany. He served in the Royal Air Force. After the creation of Israel in 1948, he followed the trend of taking on a Hebrew name, and as Joe Raanan he was among the first pilots in the new nation’s tiny air force. The young man rapidly became an airbase commander and later the air force’s intelligence chief.

    Raanan’s unique résumé, including some work he did for the RAF in psychological warfare, attracted the attention of Harel, who signed him up for the Mossad in 1957. A few years later, Raanan was sent to Germany to direct the secret agency’s operations there — with a special focus on the German scientists in Egypt. Thus it was Raanan who had to devise and command an operation to establish contact with Skorzeny, the famous Nazi commando.

    The Israeli spy found it difficult to get over his reluctance, but when ordered, he assembled a team that traveled to Spain for “pre-action intelligence.” Its members observed Skorzeny, his home, his workplace and his daily routines. The team included a German woman in her late 20s who was not a trained, full-time Mossad agent but a “helper.” Known by the Hebrew label “saayanit” (or “saayan” if a male), this team member was like an extra in a grandly theatrical movie, playing whatever role might be required. A saayanit would often pose as the girlfriend of an undercover Mossad combatant.

    Internal Mossad reports later gave her name as Anke and described her as pretty, vivacious and truly flirtatious. That would be perfect for the job at hand — a couples game.

    One evening in the early months of 1962, the affluent and ruggedly handsome — though scarred — Skorzeny was in a luxurious bar in Madrid with his significantly younger wife, Ilse von Finckenstein. Her own Nazi credentials were impeccable; she was the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s talented finance minister.

    They had a few cocktails and were relaxing, when the bartender introduced them to a German-speaking couple he had been serving. The woman was pretty and in her late 20s, and her escort was a well-dressed man of around 40. They were German tourists, they said, but they also told a distressing story: that they had just survived a harrowing street robbery.

    They spoke perfect German, of course, the man with a bit of an Austrian accent, like Skorzeny’s. They gave their false names, but in reality they were, respectively, a Mossad agent whose name must still be kept secret and his “helper,” Anke.

    There were more drinks, then somewhat flamboyant flirting, and soon Skorzeny’s wife invited the young couple, who had lost everything — money, passports and luggage — to stay the night at their sumptuous villa. There was just something irresistible about the newcomers. A sense of sexual intimacy between the two couples was in the air. After the four entered the house, however, at a crucial moment when the playful flirting reached the point where it seemed time to pair off, Skorzeny — the charming host — pulled a gun on the young couple and declared: “I know who you are, and I know why you’re here. You are Mossad, and you’ve come to kill me.”

    The young couple did not even flinch. The man said: “You are half-right. We are from Mossad, but if we had come to kill you, you would have been dead weeks ago.”

    “Or maybe,” Skorzeny said, “I would rather just kill you.”

    Anke spoke up. “If you kill us, the ones who come next won’t bother to have a drink with you, You won’t even see their faces before they blow out your brains. Our offer to you is just for you to help us.”

    After a long minute that felt like an hour, Skorzeny did not lower his gun, but he asked: “What kind of help? You need something done?” The Mossad officer — who even now is not being named by colleagues — told Skorzeny that Israel needed information and would pay him handsomely.

    Hitler’s favorite commando paused for a few moments to think, and then surprised the Israeli by saying: “Money doesn’t interest me. I have enough.”

    The Mossad man was further surprised to hear Skorzeny name something that he did want: “I need for Wiesenthal to remove my name from his list.” Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Vienna-based Nazi-hunter, had Skorzeny listed as a war criminal, but now the accused was insisting he had not committed any crimes.

    The Israeli did not believe any senior Nazi officer’s claim of innocence, but recruiting an agent for an espionage mission calls for well-timed lies and deception. “Okay,” he said, “that will be done. We’ll take care of that.”

    Skorzeny finally lowered his weapon, and the two men shook hands. The Mossad man concealed his disgust.

    “I knew that the whole story about you being robbed was bogus,” Skorzeny said, with the boastful smile of a fellow intelligence professional. “Just a cover story.”

    The next step to draw him in was to bring him to Israel. His Mossad handler, Raanan, secretly arranged a flight to Tel Aviv, where Skorzeny was introduced to Harel. The Nazi was questioned and also received more specific instructions and guidelines. During this visit, Skorzeny was taken to Yad Vashem, the museum in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Nazi was silent and seemed respectful. There was a strange moment there when a war survivor pointed to Skorzeny and singled him out by name as “a war criminal.”

    Raanan, as skilled an actor as any spy must be, smiled at the Jewish man and softly said: “No, you’re mistaken. He’s a relative of mine and himself is a Holocaust survivor.”

    Naturally, many in Israeli intelligence wondered if the famous soldier for Germany had genuinely — and so easily — been recruited. Did he really care so much about his image that he demanded to be removed from a list of war criminals? Skorzeny indicated that being on the list meant he was a target for assassination. By cooperating with the Mossad, he was buying life insurance.

    The new agent seemed to prove his full reliability. As requested by the Israelis, he flew to Egypt and compiled a detailed list of German scientists and their addresses.

    Skorzeny also provided the names of many front companies in Europe that were procuring and shipping components for Egypt’s military projects. These included Heinz Krug’s company, Intra, in Munich.

    Raanan continued to be the project manager of the whole operation aimed against the German scientists. But he assigned the task of staying in contact with Skorzeny to two of his most effective operatives: Rafi Eitan and Avraham Ahituv.

    Eitan was one of the most amazing characters in Israeli intelligence. He earned the nickname “Mr. Kidnap” for his role in abducting Eichmann and other men wanted by Israeli security agencies. Eitan also helped Israel acquire materials for its secret nuclear program. He would go on to earn infamy in the 1980s by running Jonathan Pollard as an American Jewish spy in the United States government.

    Surprisingly flamboyant after a life in the shadows, in 2006, at age 79, Eitan became a Member of Parliament as head of a political party representing senior citizens.

    “Yes, I met and ran Skorzeny,” Eitan confirmed to us recently. Like other Mossad veterans, he refused to go on the record with more details.

    Ahituv, who was born in Germany in 1930, was similarly involved in a wide array of Israeli clandestine operations all around the globe. From 1974 to 1980 he was head of the domestic security service, Shin Bet, which also guarded many secrets and often conducted joint projects with the Mossad.

    The Mossad agents did try to persuade Wiesenthal to remove Skorzeny from his list of war criminals, but the Nazi hunter refused. The Mossad, with typical chutzpah, instead forged a letter — supposedly to Skorzeny from Wiesenthal— declaring that his name had been cleared.

    Skorzeny continued to surprise the Israelis with his level of cooperation. During a trip to Egypt, he even mailed exploding packages; one Israeli-made bomb killed five Egyptians in the military rocket site Factory 333, where German scientists worked.

    The campaign of intimidation was largely successful, with most of the Germans leaving Egypt. Israel stopped the violence and threats, however, when one team was arrested in Switzerland while putting verbal pressure on a scientist’s family. A Mossad man and an Austrian scientist who was working for Israel were put on trial. Luckily, the Swiss judge sympathized with Israel’s fear of Egypt’s rocket program. The two men were convicted of making threats, but they were immediately set free.

    Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, however, concluded that all of this being out in public was disastrous to Israel’s image — and specifically could upset a deal he had arranged with West Germany to sell weapons to Israel.

    Harel submitted a letter of resignation, and to his shock, Ben-Gurion accepted it. The new Mossad director, commander of military intelligence Gen. Meir Amit, moved the agency away from chasing or intimidating Nazis.

    Amit did activate Skorzeny at least once more, however. The spymaster wanted to explore the possibility of secret peace negotiations, so he asked Israel’s on-the-payroll Nazi to arrange a meeting with a senior Egyptian official. Nothing ever came of it.

    Skorzeny never explained his precise reasons for helping Israel. His autobiography does not contain the word “Israel,” or even “Jew.” It is true that he sought and got the life insurance. The Mossad did not assassinate him.

    He also had a very strong streak of adventurism, and the notion of doing secret work with fascinating spies — even if they were Jewish — must have been a magnet for the man whose innovative escapades had earned him the Iron Cross medal from Hitler. Skorzeny was the kind of man who would feel most youthful and alive through killing and fear.

    It is possible that regret and atonement also played a role. The Mossad’s psychological analysts doubted it, but Skorzeny may have genuinely felt sorry for his actions during World War II.

    He may have been motivated by a combination of all these factors, and perhaps even others. But Otto Skorzeny took this secret to his grave. He died of cancer, at age 67, in Madrid in July 1975.

    He had two funerals, one in a chapel in Spain’s capital and the other to bury his cremated remains in the Skorzeny family plot in Vienna. Both services were attended by dozens of German military veterans and wives, who did not hesitate to give the one-armed Nazi salute and sing some of Hitler’s favorite songs. Fourteen of Skorzeny’s medals, many featuring a boldly black swastika, were prominently paraded in the funeral processions.

    There was one man at the service in Madrid who was known to no one in the crowd, but out of habit he still made sure to hide his face as much as he could. That was Joe Raanan, who by then had become a successful businessman in Israel.

    The Mossad did not send Raanan to Skorzeny’s funeral; he decided to attend on his own, and at his own expense. This was a personal tribute from one Austrian-born warrior to another, and from an old spy handler to the best, but most loathsome, agent he ever ran.

    Dan Raviv, a CBS News correspondent based in Washington, and Israeli journalist Yossi Melman are co-authors of five books about Israel’s espionage and security agencies, including “Spies Against Armageddon: Inside Israel’s Secret Wars” (Levant Books, 2014). Contact them at feedback@forward.com

    For more stories, go to www.forward.com. Sign up for the Forward’s daily newsletter at http://forward.com/newsletter/signup

    The Forward

    Haaretz Contributor

    #Israel #Mossad #Nazi #Egypte #Histoire #Allemagne #Hitman

  • Two Pakistani clerics fight at meeting over status of Ahmadi sect
    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/29/pakistan-council-of-islamic-ideology-clerics-fight-over-ahmadi-sect?CMP

    Two Pakistani clerics have come to blows at a meeting of the religious establishment over the fraught issue of the status of Ahmadis, a Muslim sect that hardliners want declared apostates.

    A scuffle broke out on Tuesday between the two at a gathering of Pakistan’s Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) when the chairman, Mohammad Khan Sherani, called on the group to consider whether Ahmadis, who are declared non-Muslims by the constitution, should be considered murtads that have rejected Islam.

    A declaration of apostasy by the constitutional body charged with advising parliament on lawmaking would likely put Ahmadis in even greater peril, given that many interpretations of Islamic law prescribe death for people who quit the religion.

    Tahir Ashrafi, a liberal-minded voice on the CII, strongly opposed any discussion of the incendiary issue, prompting a furious confrontation with Sherani, who is also an elected member of parliament.

    Ashrafi, who is obese and has limited mobility, said he was unable to move from his chair when Sherani lunged at his throat, ripping his shirt and scratching his neck.

    La #catastrophe, en bonne voie…

  • Que fait l’armée mongole ? Elle va construire une voie ferrée (à l’écartement standard et non à voie large (russe) comme dans le reste du pays) pour relier la mine de charbon de Tavan Tolgoi (propriété de la compagnie minière publique) à la frontière chinoise.

    10,000 soldiers to be trained to build railroads | The UB Post
    http://ubpost.mongolnews.mn/?p=17380

    The Speaker of Parliament, Z.Enkhbold, and Member of Parliament Kh.Battulga proposed training 10,000 soldiers for the construction of railroads for the Tavan Tolgoi-Gashuun Sukhait and Sainshand-Bichigt Khuut routes.
    The state has allocated 24 billion MNT for the project in next year’s state budget. The project’s initiators are planning to enlist 10,000 soldiers for a special railway military unit, train them at a vocational training center, and hire them for railway construction.
    Initially, the Mongolian Railway Company needs 3,300 workers for the projects, including 700 highly trained experts. The authorities are planning to train around 2,600 soldiers at vocational training centers in the first stage of the project. Minister of Labor G.Bayarsaikhan encouraged the public to look at this project as education for young people and the provision of jobs rather than exploitation of labor, as the soldiers will receive wages.
    The soldiers will be prepared in five professions, including heavy machinery operator, concrete mixer, and excavator operator.
    “If the Japanese government settles the investment agreement concerning the railroad construction for the Sainshand route, training for soldiers will start on January 1,” said Minister G.Bayarsaikhan.
    He added that the soldiers will train for four months and start working in spring.
    Experts say railroads must be built by professionals after meticulous calculations and studies by engineers, not by young soldiers. The project’s initiators believe that when the soldiers finish their services, they will have paid social insurance and accumulated a decent amount of savings from their salaries.

  • The Farce Is Complete : Joe Biden’s Son Joins Board Of Largest Ukraine Gas Producer | Zero Hedge
    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-13/farce-complete-joe-bidens-son-joins-board-largest-ukraine-gas-producer

    R. Hunter Biden will be in charge of the Holdings’ legal unit and will provide support for the Company among international organizations. On his new appointment, he commented: “Burisma’s track record of innovations and industry leadership in the field of natural gas means that it can be a strong driver of a strong economy in Ukraine. As a new member of the Board, I believe that my assistance in consulting the Company on matters of transparency, corporate governance and responsibility, international expansion and other priorities will contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”

    The Chairman of the Board of Directors of Burisma Holdings, Mr. Alan Apter, noted: “The company’s strategy is aimed at the strongest concentration of professional staff and the introduction of best corporate practices, and we’re delighted that Mr. Biden is joining us to help us achieve these goals.”