New Iraqi Leadership is a Sign the Country is Finally Stabilising, by Patrick Cockburn - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/new-iraqi-leadership-is-a-sign-the-country-is-finally-stabilising
The reduction in violence allowed [Iraqi] to focus on the mass theft of state resources under Dawa which has failed to improve, or even maintain, the infrastructure.
Iraqi protesters blame ‘bad government, bad roads, bad people’, by Patrick Cockburn - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/iraqi-protesters-blame-bad-government-bad-roads-bad-people
“2,500,000 barrels daily
Price of each barrel = $70
2,500,000 x $70 = zero !!
Sorry Pythagoras, we are in Basra”
Netanyahu Besieged, by Israel Shamir - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/ishamir/netanyahu-besieged
This apologia for prudent Netanyahu does not mean I have any hopes connected to his rule. I have none, and the Palestinian National Administration has no hopes either. It is rather a sad observation that awful Netanyahu will probably be replaced by an even worse politician, of Jewish religious-ISIS kind or of Jewish secular-fascist kind. This is the terrible logic of apartheid. There is a way out: elimination of apartheid and equality of Jews and non-Jews in the country; but apparently it is not on the table.
Pour l’expression appliquée à un politicien israélien...
The never-ending crisis of Zionism, by Philip Weiss - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/article/the-never-ending-crisis-of-zionism
Contrairement à ce qu’inventent les MSM, les gifles c’était pas de l’esbroufe
The day those women slapped the soldiers, their 14-year-old cousin was shot in the face by Israeli soldiers, blood pouring from his head “like a fountain,” and he had to undergo a lengthy operation.
Peace Now didn’t say anything about that.
Washington’s Wonderful World of #Corruption - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/washingtons-wonderful-world-of-corruption
But the real story about Flynn and Woolsey is the fashion in which senior ex-government employees shamelessly exploit their status to turn money from any and all comers without any regard for either the long- or short- term consequences of what they are doing. The guilt or innocence of Fetullah Gülen was never an issue for them, nor the reputation of the United States judiciary in a case which has all the hallmarks of a political witch hunt. And if a kidnapping actually was contemplated, it begs one to pause and consider what kind of people are in power in this country.
Endtimes in Mosul - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/endtimes-in-mosul
Nobody knows for sure how many civilians were killed in the city as a whole. For long periods, shells, rockets and bombs rained down on houses in which as many as a hundred people might be sheltering. ‘Kurdish intelligence believes that over forty thousand civilians have been killed as a result of massive firepower used against them,’ Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s former foreign minister, told me. People have disputed that figure, but bear in mind the sheer length of the siege – 267 days between 17 October 2016 and 10 July 2017 – and the amount of ordnance fired into a small area full of people. The Iraqi government ludicrously claims that more of its soldiers died than civilians, but refuses to disclose the number of military casualties and has banned the media from west Mosul. On his website Musings on Iraq, Joel Wing gives a figure of 13,106 civilian fatalities based on media and other reports, but adds that ‘the real number of casualties from the fighting in Mosul is much higher.’ The Civil Defence Force, looking only for bodies that relatives have located, is still delivering between thirty and forty of them to the city morgue every day. The UN says that out of 54 residential areas in west Mosul, 15, containing 32,000 houses, were completely destroyed; 23 areas lost half their buildings; and even in the 16 areas that were ‘lightly damaged’ some 16,000 houses are in ruins.
All the people I was in contact with inside the IS-held part of the old city are dead. Ahmed Mohsen was wounded by a drone and then killed by an IS sniper; his mother and sister have disappeared and are presumably dead. I was also in touch with Rayan Mawloud, a 38-year-old businessman with a wife and two children who had a trading company based in a shop in one of Mosul’s markets. He came from a well-off family and his father had a fleet of trucks that used to carry goods to and from Basra and Jordan. When the attack on Mosul began, a friend of Rayan’s says that he spent his savings buying food to give not just to his relatives ‘but also to many people whom he did not know’. Rayan, knowing that his family would probably be shot by IS snipers if they tried to escape, took the opposite decision to Ahmed Mohsen and stayed with his family in their house. It was hit in an airstrike on 23 June, killing his wife and five-year-old son. He remained in the part of the house that was still habitable, but it was hit by another airstrike on 9 July. He was severely injured and died three days later.
This is why Saudi Arabia and its allies suddenly cut ties to #Qatar - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/this-is-why-saudi-arabia-and-its-allies-suddenly-cut-ties-to-qatar
Much more seriously, Mr Trump’s unqualified support for the Sunni monarchies and autocrats during his two-day visit to Riyadh emboldened the kingdom to start a second and, it hopes, final round in its confrontation with Qatar. Mr Trump may not have intended to touch off this latest crisis when he aggressively and inaccurately demonised Iran and by implication the Shia as the source of all terrorism in the Middle East and North Africa. But his words were interpreted by the Saudis as enabling them to move against Qatar though it is home to a major US base.
War with #Iran seems likely as #Trump cosies up with Saudi Arabia - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/war-with-iran-seems-likely-as-trump-cosies-up-with-saudi-arabia
It is absurd to imagine that the four or five Shia countries have the ambition or the ability to take over the fifty or more that are Sunni, though Sunni fundamentalists accuse tiny Shia minorities in countries like Egypt, Tunisia and Indonesia of plotting to do so. Prince Mohammed appears to give credence to the theory of a grand anti-Sunni conspiracy orchestrated by Iran, saying that, since the Iranian revolution in 1979, Iran has been trying to “control Muslims in the Islamic world and spread the Twelver Jaafari [Shia] sect in the Islamic world so Imam Mahdi comes.”
There is more at play here than Prince Mohammed whipping up religious and nationalist feelings in Saudi Arabia to secure his own power base and fend off his rivals within the royal family. None of his foreign ventures have so far achieved their aims: in Syria in the spring of 2015 Saudi Arabia gave support to the so-called Army of Conquest, consisting primarily of the al-Qaeda affiliate the al-Nusra Front and its then ally Ahrar al-Sham. This won a series of victories against pro-Assad forces in Idlib province but their success led to Russian military intervention later the same year that was a turning point in the war. Saudi influence was marginalised, something that he blames on “former American President Barack Obama [who] wasted many significant opportunities he could have seized to achieve great change in Syria.” In practice, Saudi Arabia was hoping for US military intervention to enforce regime change in Syria along the lines of Iraq in 2003 or Libya in 2011. Obama was privately critical of Saudi actions and the tradition of the Washington foreign policy establishment of giving automatic support to Saudi Arabia and its allies.
Big Brother’s Virtual Reality - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/ldinh/big-brothers-virtual-reality
Unlike in Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does not speak to us in one stern voice. Deploying many puppets, Big Brother will humor, cajole and even uplift. Despite apparent divergences of opinions or even contradictions, Big Brother’s essential messages will always come through most clearly and persistently.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, for example, both speak for Big Brother. While Clinton compares Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler, Sanders states, “To temper Russian aggression, we must freeze Russian government assets all over the world, and encourage international corporations with huge investments in Russia to divest from that nation’s increasingly hostile political aims.”
Russia is a threat to world peace, they both agree. In boring reality, however, it is the United States that has surrounded Russia with missiles, staged provocative war games on Russia’s borders and pushed Georgia and Ukraine into wars with Russia.
The #Basque culture is that of the First Farmers - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-basque-culture-is-that-of-the-first-farmers
There’s a new paper in PNAS, Ancient genomes link early farmers from Atapuerca in Spain to modern-day Basques. It is a nice complement to the earlier paper on an earlier Iberian Neolithic sample. These individuals all date to a later period, most ~5,000 years ago, and one ~3,500 years. Despite the media hype, the results of this paper were pretty much expected, and it’s the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the Basque language and culture are relics of Paleolithic Europe. Rather, it confirms the result that the Basque descend in large part from agriculturalists who brought the Neolithic revolution to Europe.
@koldobika je n’ai pas tout lu :) #culture #agriculture #néolithique #paléolithique
the final nail in the coffin of the idea
L’étude se base sur 8 individus. Tirer une telle conclusion sur un tel échantillon c’est un petit peu abusé.
Cette étude fait grand bruit en ce moment en Espagne, et est très instrumentalisée dans la presse notamment dans les milieux nationalistes espagnols.
Dans un contexte pareil difficile de faire de la vulgarisation scientifique. C’est triste.
Syria’s Kurds have little choice but to flee amid the desolution, ruins and danger they face - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/pcockburn/syrias-kurds-have-little-choice-but-to-flee-amid-the-desolution-ruins-and-dange
This summer, Rojava, a fertile wedge of territory full of wheat fields and dotted with oil industry “nodding donkeys”, looked idyllic and peaceful compared with the rest of Syria. But for Syrian Kurds the future is full of menaces in the shape of a hostile Turkey to the north and Isis to the south. Moreover, any potential winner of the civil war in Syria may swiftly move to extinguish the Kurdish independent entity. In the face of these dangers, it is no wonder that Syrian Kurds will take any risk to escape to Europe or anywhere else where they might find safety.
#Gaza: Our Child’s Shattered Face in the Mirror - The Unz Review
▻http://www.unz.com/article/gaza-our-childs-shattered-face-in-the-mirror
The face on the cover is that of a girl—somewhere between 10 and 13, I’d guess. She has a marred, but beautiful face, striking dark eyes, and she almost seems to be smiling, acknowledging, at once, the onlooker, the photographer, and her own resilience, her capacity to survive. It is a haunting picture because her face is pockmarked by shrapnel in dozens of places—perhaps caused by the illegal “flechette” dart-bombs used unsparingly in “Protective Edge”; or glass fragments, or chips of concrete?