Blind creature that buries head in sand named after Donald Trump | US news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/18/blind-amphibian-named-after-trumps-climate-change-stance
A newly discovered blind and burrowing amphibian is to be officially named Dermophis donaldtrumpi, in recognition of the US president’s climate change denial.
The nuclear threat in 2017 | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
▻https://thebulletin.org/nuclear-threat-201711381
https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/bombs-dropping.jpg 
https://thebulletin.org/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/Figure-1-Postol-new_4.jpg?itok=yB4RdZMK 
It was a year stained by the epithets “little rocket man” and “dotard” and full of all-too-many nuclear threats. Beyond the confrontation between North Korea and the United States over Pyongyang’s nuclear program, in 2017 the strained US-Russia relationship, the Iran nuclear deal, nuclear modernization programs around the world, the India-Pakistan nuclear arms race, and even the mental state of the US president dominated world headlines. On a positive note (at least as seen by supporters of nuclear disarmament), the UN overwhelmingly adopted a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. But because the countries with nuclear weapons steadfastly refused to support the ban, it received a relatively dismissive reception in the United States—until the leaders of the treaty effort received the Nobel Peace Prize for their work.
Following the Route of the Keystone XL Pipeline Through 3 States
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/following-the-route-of-the-keystone-xl-pipeline-through-3-states
After Trump’s revival of the Keystone XL pipeline project, some communities along its route are getting ready to fight back. Others see a promise kept by the US president to ’make America great...
’Northern Fox’ Theresa May May Be More Dangerous Than ’Southern Wolf’ Donald Trump
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/northern-fox-vs-southern-wolf
Kehinde Andrews argues the British prime minister is a bigger unknown than the US president. As Malcolm X said, we should be more wary of those who are dishonest about their dark intentions than...
Trump threatens Europe’s stability, a top leader warns - The Boston Globe
▻https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/world/2017/01/31/trump-threatens-europe-stability-top-leader-warns/DMe7CwSVWjedUaFlBQswhJ/story.html
“For the first time in our history, in an increasingly multipolar external world, so many are becoming openly anti-European, or Eurosceptic at best,” Tusk wrote. The letter was released ahead of an EU summit meeting in Malta on Friday; Tusk is responsible for setting the agenda for the meetings.
“Particularly the change in Washington puts the European Union in a difficult situation; with the new administration seeming to put into question the last 70 years of American foreign policy,” he wrote.
The EU has been struggling to contend with fractious internal forces. Among them: the vote by Britain to leave the bloc, the organization’s failure to establish a unified response to the arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, and the debt crisis that has driven many Greeks into poverty. And then there are external pressures like Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
Before the election and since taking office, Trump has lauded the vote by Britain, known as Brexit, and said the country would thrive outside the EU. He met with Nigel Farage, a populist leader of the Brexit campaign, before seeing Prime Minister Theresa May. And at one point he went so far as to suggest that May appoint Farage as Britain’s ambassador to the United States.
Trump has also praised President Vladimir Putin of Russia and indicated he would pursue friendlier relations with Moscow, even as Russia encourages chaos on the EU’s eastern border.
Tusk’s letter does not reflect a new policy for the EU, and member states of the 28-nation bloc are not required to act on Tusk’s advice when they meet on Friday. But many European leaders have made their differences with Trump known.
After the United States said it was temporarily blocking refugees from entering the country, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany felt compelled to point out to Trump the obligations of nations under the Geneva Conventions to protect refugees of war on humanitarian grounds. And President François Hollande of France said he had reminded Trump that “the ongoing fight to defend our democracy will be effective only if we sign up to respect to the founding principles and, in particular, the welcoming of refugees.”
May, of Britain, sought in a meeting with Trump last week to confirm his commitment to NATO; he was dismissive of the alliance, the bedrock of European security, during his campaign.
Now, the sentiments expressed in Tusk’s letter are pushing European leaders’ exasperation with the US president further into the public view.
Tusk has sounded the alarm about the existential crises facing the bloc before, but never with the urgency he displayed in the letter. And he has never before included a longstanding ally like the United States in the list of challenges.
“An increasingly, let us call it, assertive China, especially on the seas,” he wrote, “Russia’s aggressive policy toward Ukraine and its neighbors, wars, terror, and anarchy in the Middle East and in Africa, with radical Islam playing a major role, as well as worrying declarations by the new American administration all make our future highly unpredictable.”
Much of the frustration Tusk displayed in his letter stemmed from what Guntram B. Wolff, director of Bruegel, a research organization in Brussels, said was Trump’s “de facto supporting” of populist forces that could further upend the European order.
Far-right populist challengers in France, Germany, and the Netherlands have adopted some of his antiestablishment rhetoric in their own campaigns.
Still, Wolff said it was unwise to enter into a war of words with the Trump administration.
“We need to uphold our values here, but does it mean that we need now a declaration where we put the United States on the same level as ISIS?” he said, using an alternative name for the Islamic State group. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it that would be helpful in any way.”
The trans-Atlantic volley of opprobrium Friday included an accusation by Peter Navarro, the director of Trump’s new National Trade Council, that Germany was manipulating its currency to gain a trade advantage. Navarro told The Financial Times that Germany was using a “grossly undervalued” euro to “exploit” the United States and its partners in Europe.
That did not sit well with Merkel, who defended the European Central Bank’s independent role at a news conference on Friday: “Because of that we will not influence the behavior of the ECB. And as a result, I cannot and do not want to change the situation as it is.”
The value of the euro is near a 13-year low compared with the dollar, allowing German carmakers and other manufacturers to sell their goods more cheaply in the United States. But German firms also employ around 670,000 people in the United States, including many in a BMW factory in Spartanburg, S.C., the carmaker’s largest in the world, and a Mercedes factory in Tuscaloosa, Ala. These are the sort of manufacturing jobs that Trump says he wants to keep in the United States.
Jan Techau, director of the Richard C. Holbrooke Forum in Berlin, a research center dedicated to diplomacy, said Tusk’s letter was less a warning to the US president than it was a message to Europeans not to be lured away from union, or to be tempted away from the bloc by favorable bilateral ties offered by the Trump administration.
“He is encouraging everyone to fall into that trap,” Techau said of the US president.
Tusk, by contrast, is making the case for Europeans to stick together for their own survival.
“_He wants to remind them that there is something bigger at stake than just what they are going to be talking about in Malta,” Techau said.
On appréciera particulièrement la remontrance du président français qui s’y connait quant au traitement des réfugiés …
And President François Hollande of France said he had reminded Trump that “the ongoing fight to defend our democracy will be effective only if we sign up to respect to the founding principles and, in particular, the welcoming of refugees.”
It was bizarre to watch #Samantha_Power at the UN conveniently forget to mention all the massacres done in America’s name
▻http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/samantha-power-un-us-ambassador-america-syria-aleppo-massacres-srebre
So there was Samantha Power doing her “shame” bit in the UN. “Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin, that just creeps you out a little bit?”, America’s ambassador to the UN asked the Russians and Syrians and Iranians. She spoke of Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica “and, now, Aleppo”.
Odd, that. For when Samantha talked about “barbarism against civilians” in Aleppo, I remembered climbing over the dead Palestinian civilians massacred at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, slaughtered by Israel’s Lebanese militia friends while the Israeli army – Washington’s most powerful ally in the Middle East – watched. But Samantha didn’t mention them. Not enough dead Palestinians, perhaps? Only 1,700 killed, including women and children. Halabja was up to 5,000 dead. But Sabra and Chatila certainly “creeped me out” at the time.
And then I recalled the monstrous American invasion of Iraq. Perhaps half a million dead. It’s one of the statistics for Rwanda’s dead. Certainly far more than Srebrenica’s 9,000 dead. And I can tell you that Iraq’s half million dead “creeped me out” rather a lot, not to mention the torture and murders in the CIA’s interrogation centres in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq. It also “creeped me out” to learn that the US president used to send innocent prisoners off to be interrogated in... Assad’s Syria! Yes, they were sent by Washington to be questioned in what Samantha now calls Syria’s “Gulags”.
Chilcot delivers crushing verdict on Blair and the Iraq war
▻https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/chilcot-report-crushing-verdict-tony-blair-iraq-war
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KD5r0MYqN9o
It concludes:
• There was no imminent threat from Saddam Hussein.
• The strategy of containment could have been adopted and continued for some time.
• The judgments about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – WMDs – were presented with a certainty that was not justified.
• Despite explicit warnings, the consequences of the invasion were underestimated. The planning and preparations for Iraq after Saddam were wholly inadequate.
• The government failed to achieve its stated objectives.
It report also sheds fresh light on the private discussions between Blair and the US president, George W Bush, in the run-up to war.
Spy agencies ’produced flawed information on Saddam’s WMDs’
▻https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jul/06/spy-agencies-flawed-information-saddam-wmds-iraq-chilcot
In one of the most damning sections, the report concludes that Tony Blair presented the assessments of the spy agencies to parliament with a “certainty” not justified by the intelligence that had been gathered. Chilcot castigates the intelligence community for failing to make any serious attempt to rein him in.
In addition to this, the intelligence services are criticised over major flaws in their intelligence gathering and assessments, principally their belief that Saddam had WMDs.
Chilcot says the intelligence community worked from the start on the misguided assumption that Saddam had WMDs and made no attempt to consider the possibility that he had got rid of them, which he had.
Opinion: Russian Roulette at the White House as Obama visits Hiroshima
▻http://www.dw.com/en/opinion-russian-roulette-at-the-white-house-as-obama-visits-hiroshima/a-19280279
The facts: Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush reduced the number of strategic nuclear weapons from 6,000 to 2,000. Obama merely phased out 500 warheads. In the meantime, his administration has announced plans to “revive the nuclear weapons program”. Over the next 30 years, the US plans to invest the astronomically high sum of more than $1 trillion (891 billion euros) in the construction of new aircraft carrier systems, long-range aircraft, a dozen nuclear-powered submarines and the development of so-called “mini-nukes” - atomic weapons with a yield of less than five kilotons.
The consequences are far-reaching. In particular the development of small tactical nuclear weapons is bound to change the global security structure. Their destructive force may be weaker than that of the bomb that hit Hiroshima, but, military experts say, they target the enemy on the battlefield more precisely. Inhibitions to use these mini-nukes are waning. The world is becoming a less secure place, researchers at the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scientists think tank say. Obama takes a different view. Essentially, he wants to give his successors “additional options” in the event of a conflict.
So Pandora’s Box is opening bit by bit. Russia, China and other nuclear powers are working on similar weapons. It’s only a matter of time before it becomes impossible to control the multitude of mini-nukes. Terrorists will use that fact for their own purposes - or at least they’ll try. By creating mini-nukes, politicians, including the US president, are playing Russian Roulette.
Now it is official: Cuba re-colonization via US Internet firms – Information Observatory
▻http://informationobservatory.info/2016/03/27/now-it-is-official
Last November, we wrote on how US tech firms with support from the US government, were moving into Cuba, occupying the country’s information sector ahead of any political détente with the US and threatening Cuba’s national sovereignty.[1] This week, US President Barack Obama made a three-day state visit to Cuba, the first US president to visit since President Calvin Coolidge in 1928. On this “historic trip,” the US president didn’t go alone. Along with his family, Obama was accompanied by a phalanx of executives from US firms including Google, Xerox, Airbnb, Priceline Group, PayPal, Xerox, Stripe, and Kiva[2] – as well as nearly 40 members of Congress.[3]
(...) The U.S. strategy, it is evident, is to exploit the promise of modernizing Cuba’s information and communication infrastructure, in order to re-annex chunks of the country’s economy. Under the pretence of freeing the flow of information (obligingly symbolized by the superficially defiant Rolling Stones) it is actually U.S. capital that is to be set free, to work its will upon a small country that has stood up against the full measure of US power since 1959.
#silicon_army #cuba via @cryptome
La requête « Internet + Cuba » sur Seenthis vaut le détour : ▻http://seenthis.net/recherche?recherche=cuba+internet
#Bill #Clinton: #Hamas “forces #Israel to kill civilians”
▻http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/bill-clinton-hamas-forces-israel-kill-civilians
Former US president #Bill_Clinton on Wednesday blamed Hamas for deaths in #Gaza, saying the Islamist group “forces” Israel to kill civilians, and warned Israel that its image was at stake. “Hamas can inflict terrible public relations damage on Israel by forcing it to kill #Palestinian civilians to counter Hamas,” he told Indian NDTV news channel. Hamas had a “strategy designed to force Israel to kill their own (Palestinian) civilians so the rest of the world will condemn them,” while Israel couldn’t “look like fools” by not responding to the heavy missile attacks. read more
A New Non-Violent Palestinian Anti-Israel Movement Emerges - Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East
▻http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/03/palestine-non-violent-movement-emerges.html
Since last week, dozens of activists have grabbed the spotlight on the Palestinian scene, which had been busy with US President Barack Obama’s visit. But after he left, those activists have become an important news item in Arab and Palestinian media. Israeli newspapers revealed that Israeli police were forced to postpone dealing with those activists until Obama left so as not to cause bad press in his presence.
As those young activists were formulating an initiative that breaks the political deadlock, presents alternative Palestinian resistance methods and offers something different than armed struggle and traditional resistance, the US president was speaking about the peace process and the Arab summit was issuing perplexing decisions and proposals that raised many questions about the future.
Those young activists set up a small tent city, with a children’s playground, on a piece of land threatened with being seized by Israel as part of an Israeli plan known as Plan E1. According to that plan, Israeli settlements would reach Jerusalem and cut off the West Bank’s south from its north, thus threatening the establishment of a future Palestinian state.
The activists named their tent city “The Descendants of Younes.” They had previously set up a tent city called Bab al-Shams in January 2013. Bab al-Shams is the title of a story written by Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury. It talks about the Nakba and how the Palestinians were displaced in 1948. It also talks about resistance after the Nakba. The story’s main character is a resistance fighter named Younes. He meets his wife Nahila in a cave inside Palestine. They fall in love and live their love life in secret.
The Israelis dismantled the Bab al-Shams tent city after it started attracting many visitors. But the activists who established that tent city are still active. Their movement uses different methods, has different objectives and involves different activists than traditional Palestinian movements.
The activists come from all the Palestinian factions, especially Fatah and al-Badira movements. The latter is the only Palestinian anti-Israel movement that has never participated in the armed struggle. But despite that, it has significant presence. Along with Fatah and al-Badira, the PFLP and the DFLP were also present.
A large part of the coordinating and preparatory work happens at the level of the activists, not the political parties to whom they belong. Moreover, many of the activists are independents. The movement is the result of several previous experiences, such as the fight against the Israeli separation barrier by the Bil’in, Ni’lin, Walaja and Hebron movements, and others. Those were peaceful grassroots movements with international and Israeli support. The Bab al-Shams movement is based on those previous experiences, except that the foreign presence in it is virtually nonexistent.
In such a movement, the activists are better able to organize. One of the organizers said that they want to rely on their own efforts rather than that of international activists, although the latter’s support is important.
In this kind of organized activism, the activists gather secretly to avoid the Israeli army checkpoints. Maybe in the future that can mobilize at multiple places concurrently. Things seem to be heading in that direction; it would be a different kind of intifada. The first intifada, in 1987, started with stone-throwing and demonstrations, it was not militarized. Weapons were rarely used and only after three years from the uprising’s start. In the second intifada, known as the Al-Aqsa intifada in 2000, many Palestinians regret that Israel was able to drag the movement into an armed struggle when it attacked Palestinian security headquarters with aircraft. But the new movement is very keen to avoid using violence, whether stone-throwing or arms, even though many activists affirm that all kinds of legitimate resistance are guaranteed by international law.
Popular uprisings are not usually planned. They happen when there are tensions and some event comes along to act as a spark. When that happens, activists and politicians are often surprised. Sometimes they are able to lead the popular movement and sometimes new leadership emerges. Therefore, identifying those who will lead the third Palestinian uprising is not easy. But what is certain is that Bab al-Shams and other experiences have presented a new Palestinian resistance model.
Perhaps for the first time in Palestinian history, the idea of a peaceful popular resistance is dominant. Even if this new experience is still in its infancy, all other forces that have proposed other resistance methods are on the decline. Fatah, which led the armed struggle in the past, has stopped using that method. Hamas, as a result of the cease-fire in the Gaza Strip, has also halted military activities and now seems to favor political action.
In the last few days of the Descendants of Younes experience, two parties spoke of a compromise solution. The first party was US President Barack Obama. In his visit to the area he promised that Secretary of State John Kerry would devote time for a peaceful settlement. US aid to the Palestinian authority resumed and Israel resumed paying the Palestinians the owed taxes. The second party was Qatar. It suggested supporting the Palestinians by establishing a billion-dollar fund to support the Arab presence in Jerusalem and to hold an Arab summit to help Palestinian reconciliation, followed by political negotiations that may include an international peace conference.
The Palestinians are wary of a new armed struggle. But they are also suspicious of a political process that does not stop Israel from imposing facts on the ground by building settlements and confiscating land. They also do not trust Arab resolutions.
There is an international push for a peace settlement. At first glance, it may seem a course correction and a means to lower tensions. But the failures of such efforts and the Israeli policy of imposing facts on the ground may create a new anti-Israel grassroots movement. The Bab al-Shams experience may act as a model for such a movement because it includes the traditional forces but has a new approach.
Those new Palestinian forces and approaches are likely to grow stronger, especially if the reconciliation process fails and there are no new elections to rejuvenate Palestinian institutions.
Ahmad Azem is the director of Palestine and Arabic Studies at Birzeit University.
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