Northern California wildfire now largest burning in U.S.


BY CHRISTOPHER WEBER AND NOAH BERGER ASSOCIATED PRESS
AUGUST 06, 2021 

This photo shows cars and homes destroyed by the Dixie Fire line central Greenville on Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021, in Plumas County, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) NOAH BERGER AP

GREENVILLE, CALIF.

Officials say Northern California's Dixie Fire grew by 110 square miles (285 square kilometers) between Thursday night and Friday morning, making the blaze the largest wildfire currently raging in the country.

The Dixie Fire has consumed 432,813 acres — an increase of 71,000 acres from the night before. The Bootleg Fire in Oregon had previously been the nation's largest active wildfire, at 413,765 acres.

The Dixie Fire is only 35% contained and is expected to grow. It currently stands as California's third-largest wildfire in history. The Bootleg Fire, which sparked July 6, is 87% contained.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

GREENVILLE, Calif. (AP) — Eva Gorman says the little California mountain town of Greenville was a place of community and strong character, where neighbors volunteered to move furniture, colorful baskets of flowers brightened Main Street, and writers, musicians, mechanics and chicken farmers mingled.

Now, it's ashes.

As hot, bone-dry, gusty weather hit California, the state's largest current wildfire raged through the Gold Rush-era Sierra Nevada community of about 1,000, incinerating much of the downtown that included wooden buildings more than a century old.

The winds were expected to calm and change direction heading into the weekend but that good news came too late for Gorman.

“It’s just completely devastating. We’ve lost our home, my business, our whole downtown area is gone,” said Gorman, who heeded evacuation warnings and left town with her husband a week and-a-half ago as the Dixie Fire approached.

She managed to grab some photos off the wall, her favorite jewelry and important documents but couldn’t help but think of the family treasures left behind

“My grandmother’s dining room chairs, my great-aunt’s bed from Italy. There is a photo I keep visualizing in my mind of my son when he was 2. He’s 37 now,” she said. “At first you think, ‘It’s OK, I have the negatives.’ And then you realize, ‘Oh. No. I don’t.’”

Officials had not yet assessed the number of destroyed buildings, but Plumas County Sheriff Todd Johns estimated on Thursday that “well over” 100 homes had burned in and near the town.

“My heart is crushed by what has occurred there,” said Johns, a lifelong Greenville resident.

About a two-hour drive south, officials said some 100 homes and other buildings burned in the fast-moving River Fire that broke out Wednesday near Colfax, a town of about 2,000. There was no containment and about 6,000 people were ordered to evacuate in Placer and Nevada counties, state fire officials said.

The three-week-old Dixie Fire was one of 100 active, large fires burning in 14 states, most in the West where historic drought has left lands parched and ripe for ignition.

The Dixie Fire had consumed about 432,813 acres, according to an estimate released Friday morning. That's 676 square miles (1,751 square kilometers) — moving the blaze from the state's sixth-largest wildfire ever to its third-largest overnight.

The fire's cause was under investigation, but Pacific Gas & Electric has said it may have been sparked when a tree fell on one of the utility's power lines. No injuries or deaths have been reported.

The blaze exploded on Wednesday and Thursday through timber, grass and brush so dry that one fire official described it as “basically near combustion.” Dozens of homes had already burned before the flames made new runs.

No deaths or injuries were reported but the fire continued to threaten more than 10,000 homes.

On Thursday, the weather and towering smoke clouds produced by the fire's intense, erratic winds kept firefighters struggling to put firefighters at shifting hot spots.

“It’s wreaking havoc. The winds are kind of changing direction on us every few hours,” said Capt. Sergio Arellano, a fire spokesman.

“We're seeing truly frightening fire behavior,” said Chris Carlton, supervisor for Plumas National Forest. “We really are in uncharted territory.”

Heat waves and historic drought tied to climate change have made wildfires harder to fight in the American West. Scientists say climate change has made the region much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive.

The blaze hit Greenville from two angles and firefighters already were in the town trying to save it but first they had to risk their lives to save people who had refused to evacuate by loading people into cars to get them out, fire officials said.

“We have firefighters that are getting guns pulled out on them, because people don’t want to evacuate,” said Jake Cagle, an incident management operations section chief.

The flames also reached the town of Chester, northwest of Greenville, but crews managed to protect homes and businesses there, with only minor damage to one or two structures, officials said.

The fire was not far from the town of Paradise, which was largely destroyed in a 2018 wildfire sparked by PG&E equipment that killed 85 people, making it the nation’s deadliest in at least a century.

California's blazes are not the only wildfires scorching vast areas in the world. Thousands of people fled wildfires burning out of control in Greece and Turkey on Friday, including a major blaze just north of the Greek capital of Athens that left one person dead, as a protracted heat wave turned forests into tinderboxes and flames threatened populated areas, electricity installations and historic sites.





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'We lost Greenville': Wildfire decimates California town (apnews.com)
Flames from the Dixie Fire consume a home on Highway 89 south of Greenville on Thursday, Aug. 5, 2021, in Plumas County, Calif. (AP Photo/Noah Berger) NOAH BERGER AP

Photos: Dixie Fire Destroys Homes, Businesses In Greenville – CBS San Francisco (cbslocal.com)

SPEAKING FASICIST TO FASCIST
Tucker Carlson Suggests Biden Will Hijack Hungary’s Election In Cozy Orbán Interview

(Screenshot: Fox News/Snapstream)
By Cristina Cabrera
|
August 6, 2021 11:06 a.m.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who traveled to Hungary this week to meet with far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, is now floating the notion that President Joe Biden might just meddle in Hungary’s election to prevent Orbán from being reelected.

During a softball interview with Orbán, Carlson noted that Biden called the prime minister, who has touted “illiberal democracy” as his leadership approach, a “thug.”

“Are you worried that there will be international interference in your election in Hungary?” Carlson asked Orbán.

“That will happen,” the Hungarian leader responded. “We’re not worried. We’re prepared for that. Obviously the international left will do everything [that] they can do, probably even more, to change the government here in Hungary. We are aware of that.”

“When the president of the United States describes you as a totalitarian thug — it’s a very serious thing to say about somebody, I would note — that suggests why wouldn’t the Biden State Department work to prevent you from being reelected?” Carlson opined.

“I think sooner or later, the Americans will realize that issues in Hungary must be decided by the Hungarians,” Orbán said.

Carlson’s leading questions echoed the rhetoric flowing from ex-President Donald Trump on the 2020 U.S. elections, which Trump continues to falsely claim was “stolen” from him (a narrative Carlson has boosted on his program).

The interview offered glowing spin to Orbán’s hard-right leadership, which has led to an alarming backsliding of democracy in Hungary.

Watch Carlson and Orbán’s discussion below:

Cristina Cabrera (@crismcabrera) is a newswriter at TPM based in New York. She previously worked for Vocativ, USA Today and NY1 News.

Tucker Carlson Is Actually A Late-Comer To The American Right’s Love Affair With Viktor Orbán

The far-right’s ties to Orbán date back at least a decade, and were cultivated by top strategists and lobbyists in the Republican Party, as well as leading figures on the religious right.

TPM Illustration/Getty Images

By Sarah Posner

August 6, 2021 9:00 a.m.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.

This week Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has been anchoring his prime time program not from his network’s studios, but from the next best place for an aspiring autocrat: Budapest, Hungary. Carlson is there to speak at a far-right conference, glad-hand with its autocratic Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, and convince his Fox News acolytes that patriotic red-blooded Americans should best set their gaze on the Danube instead of woke America.

Carlson is actually a latecomer to the American right’s love affair with Orbán, even though he shares common cause with the demagogue who has claimed Hungarians oppose immigration because they do not want their “own color, traditions and national culture to be mixed by others.” The American right’s love affair with Orbán dates back at least a decade, and was cultivated by top strategists and lobbyists in the Republican Party, as well as leading figures in the religious right.

In 2008, Orbán, who had served one term as prime minister from 1998 to 2002 and was plotting a return to power, retained the Republican political strategist Arthur J. Finkelstein, mentor to such luminaries as Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. In the United States, Finkelstein’s signature advice to clients was to adopt messages that would “polarize the electorate.” Two years later, Orbán was again prime minister. His Fidesz-controlled government promptly undertook a host of anti-democratic measures, including requiring media organizations to register with the government, eroding checks and balances, constitutionally mandating a “right to life” from the moment of conception, and defining marriage as between a man and a woman. The party also redrew parliamentary districts and changed the process for allocating parliamentary seats, further cementing its hold on power, and stacked the courts with loyalists. Along the way Orbán engaged in a relentless anti-Semitic campaign against George Soros, demonized immigrants, and closed Hungary’s borders.

Finkelstein reveled in that kind of divisiveness. In rare public remarks in Prague in 2011, the strategist enthused about strongmen on the rise around the world, exploiting the refugee crisis to manufacture anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim animus. “Anti-Muslim parties become important in developing coalitions for their governments,” he said, with a message of, “they’re taking our jobs. They’re taking away our way of life.” That kind of scapegoating, he said, “is creating an energy source around which these movements take place.” A political consultant’s job, said Finkelstein, is to tell people what they should know because “no one knows anything about anything,”

When Orbán and Fidesz won again in 2014, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe lambasted the party’s “undue advantage,” including “the manner in which a large number of changes to the legal framework were passed, restrictive campaign regulations, biased media coverage, and the blurring of the separation between a ruling party and the state.” But Orbán, now increasingly emboldened to thumb his nose at the criticisms of his corrosion of democracy by the likes of the United States, the European Union, and NATO, openly declared, in 2014, his embrace of an “illiberal democracy.” He then hired another Finkelstein ally, former Florida Republican Congressman Connie Mack IV, as his lobbyist in Washington. Mack’s job, according to his disclosures under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was to craft “political messages” to deliver to the administration, Congress and the media, to “have an influence on political decision making.” By 2015, Mack was one of the top paid foreign agents in Washington.

Orbán became the first foreign leader to endorse Trump; he praised “this resolute American presidential candidate” because he would jettison the American “policy of exporting democracy.” The Trump campaign’s top foreign policy advisor, his future Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, sent the Hungarian Ambassador to the United States, Réka Szemerkényi, a warm letter, describing Hungary as “a global beacon for the power of freedom, democracy, and human rights.” This was a sharp right turn from the administration of George W. Bush, which had been critical of Orbán during his first run as prime minister, and from the position of the late Senator John McCain, who in 2014 called Orbán “a neofascist dictator getting in bed with Vladimir Putin.”

Mack had done his job: to make Orbán appear to American audiences as a run-of-the-mill conservative under attack by liberals — using Orbán’s, and the American right’s, favorite scapegoat, George Soros. In a November 2017 appearance on “Blunt Force Truth,” a podcast hosted by former “Love Connection” host Chuck Woolery, Mack complained that Obama-era holdovers in the State Department were unfairly making life difficult for his client. “I wish our State Department would treat him more like a friend and an ally,” Mack told Woolery, “instead of some of these underlings attacking him for things that George Soros is making up.”

Right-wing media took up the theme of unfair criticism of Orbán. A 2017 Heritage Foundation column complained he had been “vilified in the mainstream media and formally rebuked by the EU” for opposing “the EU’s overly permissive migrant policy” and fighting against Soros’ influence. A Christian Broadcasting Network correspondent claimed Orbán “has been treated like a pariah in the Western media over its position on open borders, but Hungary’s leaders are smart enough to know that their national values will never please the global Left.”

In 2017 Orbán played host to the World Congress of Families, a natalist gathering organized by American religious right figures with their counterparts around the world. In a cover story in the far-right magazine “Chronicles,” Allan Carlson (no relation to Tucker), one of the founders of the World Congress of Families, questioned whether America could still be a “City on a Hill — With Transgender Toilets?” He praised Orbán’s “pro-family” policies, arguing “if we want to make America great again,” America should take a cue from Budapest.

In Orbán’s speech at the gathering, he claimed Hungary was experiencing declining fertility rates, but rejected immigration, because Hungary prefers a “renewal of our own resources.” After his 2018 reelection, Orbán recalibrated “illiberal” democracy to “Christian” democracy, presenting himself as the political and spiritual leader of “a new constitutional order based on national and Christian foundations.”

Tony Perkins, the influential president of the Family Research Council, which is an official partner of the World Congress of Families, has praised Orbán as “a strong conservative that has championed biblical values in Hungary.” His colleague, Peter Sprigg, told me in 2018 that Western media focuses too much “on some of these sort of procedural things” rather than on how Orbán “talks about defending Western civilization rooted in Christianity.” That is where, Sprigg said, “we see we have common cause with him.” It’s no surprise, then, that Tucker Carlson is the latest figure on the American right to embrace Viktor Orbán and the wreckage he has made of Hungary’s democracy.


Sarah Posner is a journalist and author of the book “Unholy: How White Christian Nationalists Powered the Trump Presidency and the Devastating Legacy They Left Behind.” She is currently a reporting fellow with Type Investigations and a journalism fellow at Recovering Truth.

Analysis
Israel's Pegasus spyware: Tested in Palestine, sold to the world
In-depth

Sahar Amer
04 August, 2021

In-depth: Findings from the Pegasus Project have sent shockwaves worldwide, raising privacy and surveillance concerns in autocratic countries where human rights violations and threats to independent media already 

In July, private Israeli firm NSO Group's Pegasus spyware was found to have hacked into 50,000 phone numbers belonging to activists, journalists, and world leaders.

Once installed on phones, the software enables an attacker to have complete access to the device's contacts, messages, emails, photos, microphone, and camera.

Pegasus spyware has been used in 40 countries, but so far only 11 countries have been identified as customers of NSO Group, including Mexico, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Rwanda, India, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Togo.

The leaked list of numbers was connected to many high-profile names where the spyware was used both within and outside of countries, including French President Emmanuel Macron, Pakistan’s Imran Khan, Morocco’s PM Saad-Eddine El Othmani, as well as family members and close connections of murdered Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi.

"Private Israeli firm NSO Group's Pegasus spyware was found to have hacked into 50,000 phone numbers belonging to activists, journalists, and world leaders"

The investigation was led by a Paris-based non-profit media group, Forbidden Stories, along with 16 media organisations in 10 countries, and technical support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab who provided forensic testing on mobile phones to detect traces of the spyware.

The organisations are accusing NSO Group of creating and distributing a tool that impedes on rights to privacy by design and violates international human rights law.

NSO Group issued a statement to The Guardian and other media organisations stating that the company “firmly denies false claims” made in the investigation and that “many of which are uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability of sources”.

NSO Group suggests that the list of numbers has nothing to do with them and could have come from their clients or retrieved from a basic Home Location Register (HLR) Lookup service - a way to check a mobile numbers’ home network and where they are currently roaming.

Israel uses a range of invasive technologies to spy on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. [Getty]

Amnesty has subsequently published their methodology on the investigation and stands by their allegations against NSO Group. Although the technology firm is technically operating within the boundaries of Israeli law as the export of its products requires a license from the Ministry of Defence, there appears no direct mention of upholding human rights in the Defense Export Control Law.

The focus now is on the surveillance technology being sold to abusive regimes and the Israeli government licensing these sales. Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz mentioned that they “are studying the information published on the matter”, after calls for a moratorium on the export, sale, and use of Pegasus spyware.

Threats to democracy and human rights

This is not the first time NSO Group has been under fire for the misuse of its technology, as Israeli Cyberlaw attorney Jonathan J. Klinger tells The New Arab. Between 2016 and 2018, Citizen Lab, a laboratory that researches information and communication technologies, human rights, and global security, have tracked Pegasus spyware operating in 45 countries.

The group investigated a zero-day exploit chain, which they named Trident, that showed how spyware was installed on mobile phones. The case was bought to them by award-winning human rights activist, Ahmed Mansoor, based in the UAE, who received an SMS message in 2016 which said he could access “new secrets” regarding detainees tortured in UAE jails if he clicked an attached link.

RELATED

How Israel is automating the occupation of Palestine

In-depth

Sahar Amer

07 July, 2021

UAE authorities are considered to be behind the assault, considering they detained Mansoor in 2011, added him to a travel ban list, and monitored him using other malicious spyware. Mansoor was imprisoned in 2017 and is currently still in jail.

Recent findings show that the UAE listed 400 UK phone numbers as targets, including contact details of a member of the House of Lords and Princess Latifa, daughter of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE. Latifa had reportedly been a target of UAE authorities after her attempted and unsuccessful escape in early 2018.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia was also accused of using the software to spy on human rights activists and journalists. Most notably, phones of people close to Khashoggi including his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz and the journalist’s son, Abdullah Khashoggi, both before and after his death.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia have been found through the report to have attempted to use Pegasus to monitor the Turkish murder investigation as well as the phone of Istanbul’s chief prosecutor for potential surveillance.

Pegasus spyware has been used in 40 countries, but so far only 11 countries have been identified as customers of NSO Group. [Getty]

These findings further confirm stronger ties between the Gulf and Israel, considering the Abraham Accords - the UAE and Bahrain’s normalisation agreement with Israel in 2020. Where human rights issues and digital repression are already rife within the region, the impact of this all-seeing technology in the wrong hands is detrimental.

“This creates a place where we have nowhere safe to be ourselves, to discuss things with loved ones or to create freely,” said Klinger.

NPR reported that NSO Group has since announced that they have blocked governments over the misuse of its spyware but would not disclose who or how many as prohibited by Israeli defence regulations.


"The abuses of the Israeli state against Palestinians have consequences around the world"

The role of the Israeli state

Although the focus has been on placing pressure on Israel to stop the licensing of surveillance tools like Pegasus, the state has probably had more influence than is being told. Yousef Munayyer, a political analyst for the Arab Centre Washington DC, says, "rather, it [Israel] plays a central role in the development, testing, and perfecting of this technology".

NSO Group founders Omri Lavie, Shalev Hulio, and Niv Carmi are alumni of the Israel Defence Force Unit 8200 - the intelligence and cyber surveillance arm of the IDF. It comes as no coincidence that Israel is a major player in the high-tech surveillance industry.

Neve Gordon, Israeli professor and academic, told The Intercept that there are little to no legal limits on veterans “taking certain research ideas they worked on in the military and developing them”.

Prior to marketing the technology, Unit 8200 have been known to spy on Palestinians living in the West Bank following an open letter in 2014 from 43 soldiers who confessed to conducting invasive surveillance operations and subsequently refused assignment in a “moral duty to act”.

RELATED

Pegasus: How Israel supercharges digital authoritarianism

Perspectives

Marc Owen Jones

23 July, 2021

They also wrote that “a large part of their work was unrelated to Israel’s security or defence, but appeared designed to perpetuate the occupation by “infiltrating” and “controlling” all aspects of Palestinian life”.

Other invasive technologies are also used on Palestinians in Israel including AnyVision’s biometric data collection through checkpoints, facial recognition drone technology, and excessive social media and internet monitoring.

Although it has been reported that Israel has even spied on its own citizens, Palestinians are unique in that they are not protected by basic right laws and recourse to justice, which make them prime candidates to experiment new technology on.

“Israel has great benefit from testing these tools and later offering them outside of the country,” Klinger says. The Pegasus Project is not the first time Israel has profited from dictatorships and authoritarian regimes around the world.

Last year, Israeli firm Cellebrite sold its phone-hacking product to Nicolás Maduro's regime in Venezuela, where over 9,000 people have been subject to extrajudicial killings under his presidency, as well as increasing arbitrary arrests, torture, and brutal repression.

Cellebrite also faced accusations from human rights activists that it sold its technology to Belarus during the 2020 - 2021 protests against the government, and to China during its pro-democracy crackdown in Hong Kong.

Until Israel ceases its occupation in Palestine, the sophistication and expansion of these surveillance technologies will continue to develop. As Munayyer stresses, “the abuses of the Israeli state against Palestinians...have consequences around the world”.

Sahar Amer is a freelance journalist based in London. She holds a master's degree in Human Rights, Culture & Social Justice from Goldsmiths, University of London and her research interests include technology and digital rights

 

Nefarious use of Pegasus spyware exposes governments

By Opinion 

By Shannon Ebrahim, Group Foreign Editor

The extensive use of Pegasus spyware by governments to spy on other heads of state has sent shockwaves round the world, but it has also lifted a lid on what governments like Rwanda are doing covertly.

While Rwanda has denied using Pegasus spyware, the Pegasus Project - a consortium of international media and NGOs - investigated how Pegasus spyware of the Israeli company NSO Group was abused by governments to spy on their perceived enemies.

Pegasus spyware allows the client to record phone calls, read texts and emails, access photographs and passwords, and secretly activate microphones and cameras to make audio and video recordings.

According to The Chronicles, an investigative reporting site in Rwanda, the Rwandan government had identified more than 3 500 phone numbers as targets of such spying, including activists, journalists, exiles, foreign politicians, and diplomats. The site has published a sampling of who the 3 500 phone numbers belong to.

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• President Cyril Ramaphosa among heads of state targeted in leaked Pegasus data

According to The Guardian newspaper, which was part of the Pegasus investigation project, President Cyril Ramaphosa's personal mobile phone seemed to have been selected by Rwanda in 2019.

Given the existence of Rwandan dissidents on South African soil, the use of spyware against our President is hardly surprising, but also outrageous. It has been suggested Kagame may have been seeking more leverage in pursuit of other regime defectors in South Africa.

Relations between Rwanda and South Africa broke down in 2013, when exiled former Rwandan Intelligence Chief Patrick Karegeya, a critic of President Kagame, was assassinated on 31 December in the Michelangelo hotel in Johannesburg. Karegeya had been the Rwandan external spy chief, and a close friend of Kagame, but he fell out with Kagame in 2006, and was imprisoned twice and stripped of his military rank after he had criticised Kagame’s regime.

Evidence cited by the magistrate at the 2019 inquest into Karegeya’s death, stated that the South African Director of Public Prosecutions believed that “close links exist between the suspects and the current Rwandan government.”

There have also been three or four assassination attempts in Johannesburg on the life of Kagame’s former military chief of staff General Kayumba Nyamwasa, who had also fallen out with Kagame. Both Karegeya and Nyamwasa helped found the Rwandan opposition party the Rwandan National Congress (RNC).

Those who had tried to assassinate Nyamwasa in 2010 were positively identified and linked to the government of Rwanda by the South African courts. On the list of those allegedly targeted by Rwanda using Pegasus spyware, Nyamwasa’s brother in-law Frank Ntwali, who is exiled in South Africa, is included, as well as a number of other Rwandan exiles based in South Africa.

In June 2019 was the death of another Rwandan dissident Camir Nkurunziza under mysterious circumstances, who had been Kagame’s bodyguard, but later became one of his critics. Then five months ago, Seif Bamporiki, who was the Chairperson of the RNC, was assassinated in Gugulethu in Cape Town.

According to the Pegasus Project, one of the other phone numbers Rwanda targeted through the Pegasus spyware was that of Carine Kanimba, the daughter of the hero in the movie Hotel Rwanda - Paul Rusesabagina.

He was the former manager of the Hotel des Mille Collines in Kigali, who saved the lives of an estimated 1,200 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during the 1994 genocide, by harbouring them in the hotel. Rusesabagina had also fallen out with Kagame in 1996, and went into exile in the US and formed an opposition party.

Last year he was lured back to Rwanda under the impression he was flying to Burundi, and he is now in a sham trial in Kigali for “terrrorism, murder, and financing rebellion.” In an interview with CNN’s Richard Quest, Kagame had admitted that Rusesabagina was “abducted from Dubai, having been lured by his friend directed by the government of Rwanda.”

This is not the only time Kagame has boasted about extraordinary renditions.

Dr David Himbara, the former private secretary and economic adviser to Kagame for six years, who fell out with Kagame and is now exiled in Canada, is also targeted on the Pegasus spy list.

Himbara says during the Rwandan elections of 2010, the regime became increasingly paranoid and violent, and after criticising Kagame in private, he was fired and later hunted by the regime. Others on the Pegasus list include the current Prime Minister of Burundi and the Ugandan external intelligence chief.

Whether there are consequences for Rwanda’s violations of international law and violations of the privacy of foreign leaders, politicians and dissidents, remains to be seen. But the time for giving Rwanda a free pass must surely come to an end.

* Ebrahim is Independent Media Group Foreign Editor.

IOL ZA

Column: Biden shouldn’t let right-wing Cuban Americans drown out Cuban voices



A man waves a Cuban flag at a protest in Havana against persistent food shortages and the Cuban government on July 11.

(AFP via Getty Images)

BY JEAN GUERRERO

COLUMNIST AUG. 5, 2021

President Biden should not let Cuban American elites — who are not representative of the Cuban people — dictate his policies toward the island.

Republican lawmakers such as Sen. Marco Rubio, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and others have criticized the Biden administration’s continuing review of Trump’s restrictions on remittances to Cuba.

Those leaders are well-fed, well-off and white, compared with the average Cuban. About 86% of Cuban Americans identify as white, but two-thirds of Cubans in Cuba are Afro or mixed — a consequence of the fact that the first Cuban émigrés to the U.S. were mostly affluent whites. Although this historically meant remittances benefited émigrés’ privileged relatives, more recent Afro Cuban immigrants in the U.S. have been helping relatives back home, too.

Biden says he favors letting Cuban Americans financially support relatives again but wants to make sure the Cuban military doesn’t take a cut. Remittances have long been a top source of income in Cuba, totaling $3.7 billion in 2019 and flowing largely through Western Union. Last fall, Western Union closed its 407 offices in Cuba because the Trump administration banned money from going to firms working with Cuban military-controlled companies. Western Union partners with Fincimex, a military-controlled agency, and a small fraction of remittance transaction fees ended up with the Cuban military.

The voices of comfortable Cuban Americans who oppose remittances because they loathe Cuba’s Communist leaders should not drown out the cries for food and medicine from Cubans. In last month’s historic protests, thousands chanted “patria y vida” — homeland and life — a hopeful reclamation of the Communist Party’s slogan, “patria o muerte,” meaning homeland or death.

Afro Cubans were front and center in the protests, and created the viral song, “Patria y Vida,” that inspired the chants. Biden should listen to them more than white Cuban elites in Florida and other parts of the U.S.

Biden was right to condemn the Cuban government’s repressive response, including hundreds of brutal arrests and an internet blackout. But his paralysis on reversing Trump’s cruel sanctions, a campaign promise, is concerning.

The U.S. embargo against Cuba, which dates back to 1962 and prohibits U.S. companies from doing business on the island, has failed to drive political change. We have 60 years of evidence that it has only worsened hunger and misery — and provided Cuba’s government with a perennial excuse for its failures. Trump’s decision to starve Cubans of remittances is more of the same.

“The U.S. has been tightening screws hoping that just one more turn of the screwdriver would somehow break the regime,” Manuel Pastor, a Cuban American professor of sociology at USC, told me. He says lifting sanctions would help the private sector and fuel a countervailing power to the Communist Party.

Many historians believe lifting sanctions, especially Trump’s remittance ban, would empower locals against the Cuban government. When Obama eased restrictions and boosted travel to Cuba, it exposed locals to a different way of life and politics. But, Pastor adds, this angers those Cuban Americans who have a “shared groupthink that you need to be tough on the Castro regime.”

Ada Ferrer, a Cuban American professor of history at New York University and author of the forthcoming “Cuba: An American History,” argues that Biden should expedite the remittance review. “The litmus test should not be that the Cuban government can get no money, because that’s just impossible,” she told me. “The Cuban government owns almost every store on the island.”

I spoke with Emily Mendrala, deputy assistant secretary for the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, about the Biden administration’s remittance review. “There is a plan to work very quickly through the month of August and to have options ready to present in a matter of weeks,” she said.

I asked her if Biden’s hands would be tied by politics, since 58% of Cuban American registered voters lean Republican. (Republican-leaning Cubans are more likely to support harsh policies toward Cuba.) “I’m not going to prejudge the outcome of the working group, but President Biden’s overarching goals are clear,” Mendrala replied, citing Biden’s desire to let families support one another.

But many are losing patience with Biden’s pace given intense suffering in Cuba. Carlos Lazo, a Cuban American activist I spoke with, has been struggling to send money to his aunt. He accused Biden of “pandering to the most conservative sector of the Cuban American community.”

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) are urging Biden to stop hesitating on remittances. “The most important priority at the moment is to respond to the suffering of the Cuban people,” Lee said in an emailed statement, adding that Biden “should quickly lift all restrictions and caps of family and donative remittances,” and a number of other sanctions.

McGovern said it’s hard to reconcile Biden today with the man who once promoted Obama’s loosened restrictions as a way to help the Cuban people. He added: “As of right now, I can’t tell the difference between Trump’s policies on Cuba and Biden’s policies on Cuba, and I hope that changes.”

Conservatives have seized on the Cuban government’s smashing of recent protests to argue for maintaining the six-decade-old status quo. Of course, that won’t bring democracy to the island or help protesters crying out for change. Biden needs to break from the decades-long U.S. cycle of backing right-wing interests on Latin America and Caribbean policy at the expense Afro and Indigenous people. Latino voters who helped elect him — including Cuban Americans outside of Florida — are waiting for him to do the right thing.

@jeanguerre

The abyss of Washington's Cuba embargo

VCG

AUGUST 2, 2021
Bobby Naderi
Editor's note: Bobby Naderi is a London-based journalist, guest contributor in print, radio and television, and documentary filmmaker. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The United States government insists that it has the moral authority to impose sanctions on the Cuban police force and its leaders in response to the Havana government's crackdown on protesters. There always seems to be some reason that makes the next act of targeting Cuba necessary and appropriate. That's because President Joe Biden has promised Cuban-American leaders more actions are coming.

The U.S. Treasury Department says the new sanctions, which appear to be largely political and symbolic, are a reaction to actions to suppress peaceful, pro-democratic protests in Cuba that began on July 11. This is while the continued economic warfare is completely at odds with the principles of the UN Charter which highlights "the right to self-determination."

Furthermore, the protests, social divide and violence have come due to persistent U.S. politics of economic asphyxiation and the fact that Washington wants to choke Havana for challenging its self-declared monopoly over human existence.

The delusion that ban is good

Trade embargo is hardly a new tactic in American geopolitics and it's just as dangerous today. What this means in reality is that it's a lie that sanctions are one set of tools in Washington's broader effort toward Cuba to advance democracy, promote respect for human rights and help the Cuban people exercise fundamental freedoms.

Thanks to the unwarranted embargo, Cuba is still unable to import staple foods and medicines. This goes against UN resolutions that reaffirm non-intervention and non-interference. The UN has identified such measures as adversely affecting Cuban people and blaming the embargo for shortage of life-saving medicines and staple foods.

Biden faces a key Cuba-related decision: to side with the UN and global community in the interests of America or go beyond the bounds of international morality and law, stay in the abyss of embargo and view it as a tool of power and influence, and listen to lobby groups whose stated agenda is to provoke Cuba and escalate toward a costly confrontation.

The U.S. is attempting to isolate the island nation from almost all international trade. This has caused shortages of food, medicines, energy and spare parts for basic infrastructure, including water and power grid. The unintended negative impact the embargo has had through both direct and indirect impacts cannot be ignored.

The most obvious are restrictions on the importation of certain items that are necessary for agricultural production, in particular fuel, machinery and spare parts. The draconian sanctions deliberately target these sectors with devastating impacts. They gravely exacerbate any economic mismanagement, contributing to a catastrophic fall in food production, hyperinflation, economic collapse and rising mortality.

Andres Jimenez, a retired state worker who makes masks to sell in his neighborhood, helps a girl wear face mask as a precaution against the spread of the new coronavirus in Havana, Cuba, March 31, 2020. /AP


A history lesson ignored

The fierce sanctions against Cuba are an outright failure that are harming U.S. economic and geopolitical interests. This should lead Washington to wonder whether its favorite economic power tool has been so overused that it's becoming ineffective and counterproductive.

The colonial policy is in direct contravention of UN resolutions and principles that call on Washington to lift the economic, commercial and financial restrictions in place for several decades. As highlighted by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla, it's about "an economic war of extraterritorial scope against a small country already affected in the recent period by the economic crisis derived from the pandemic."

One might expect that other countries would now sidestep the unilateral sanctions, but the beltway in Washington has threatened to penalize foreign companies that violate them. It has used the dollar's global clout as a bludgeon, threatening to sanction foreign banks that finance trade with Cuba.

Despite the intense economic pain inflicted on Cuban people, Havana has never succumbed to U.S. demands. Sanctions have proved to be no more successful than military occupation and intervention in Guantanamo. The blockade has been implemented by presidential decree, with almost no public debate and no systematic oversight. Biden realizes that he can impose more restrictions with almost no direct costs to American public, and with virtually no political or international accountability in any fashion for any of it.

To be sure, no matter how hard Washington peddles obvious and verifiable lies, breaks or disregards domestic and international laws, and uses intimidation to gain power and profit with impunity, the fierce blockade enacted against Cuba is still subject to international law, including UN oversight. The economic war is similar in function and outcome to military war, with inhumane consequences for civilians.

In this time of troubles for us all, the UN is expected to exercise its power, authority and responsibility to stop the unwarranted, unlawful and immoral behavior of the United States and secure the future of Cubans. The UN will go a long way if it takes up the fierce policy of embargo and weighs it against the requirements of international and humanitarian laws. It's the only way to defend the truth and defeat the lies.

As Progressives Call for End to Blockade, Biden Announces More Sanctions Against Cuba

The move comes after Democratic leadership in the House blocked an amendment to roll back limits on how much money people in the United States can send to family on the island nation.

A Cuban takes part in a rally calling for the end of the U.S. blockade against Cuba, in Santa Clara, Villa Clara Province, on April 25, 2021. (Photo: Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images)


JESSICA CORBETT

July 30, 2021


While President Joe Biden campaigned on a pledge to reverse the "failed" policies of his predecessor that "inflicted harm on Cubans and their families," his administration—already under mounting pressure from progressives to deliver on that promise—announced new sanctions against Cuba on Friday.

Following Cubans' recent protests over shortages of food, medicine, and other essentials during the Covid-19 pandemic, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Cuba's main law enforcement body, Policía Nacional Revolucionaria (PNR), as well as its director and deputy director, Oscar Callejas Valcarce and Eddy Sierra Arias.

The Treasury Department said in a statement announcing the moves that "the Cuban regime deployed the PNR… to suppress and attack protesters." In the midst of these protests, progressives have highlighted the role of the United States' decadeslong blockade, and called out U.S. media for how it has handled that history and its present-day effects.

"Cuba has a population of 11 million people. The protests pale in comparison, both in terms of turnout and in state repression, to mass mobilizations that have rocked Colombia, Haiti, Chile, Ecuador, and other Latin American countries over the past few years—or even Portland, Oregon, or Ferguson, Missouri," Medea Benjamin and Leonardo Flores of the U.S. anti-war group CodePink wrote for Common Dreams this month. "Moreover, U.S. media have paid little attention to the counterprotesters, who have gone out into the streets to express their support for the government and Cuban Revolution."

Benjamin and Flores continued:

The protests should also be understood in the context of a brutal economic war waged by the United States against the island nation for more than 60 years. This was laid out clearly by the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in 1960, when he explicitly called for "denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and overthrow of government." This strategy has failed in its goal of regime change for decades, and it is unlikely to be successful now.

...While the blockade has been in place for over six decades, it was tightened in significant ways under the Trump administration's policy of "maximum pressure." This strategy targeted Cuba's tourism, energy, and other key economic sectors. It even restricted the amounts of money Cuban Americans can send home and closed the Cuban branches of Western Union, the main vehicle for sending remittances. These policies have had a disastrous impact on the Cuban economy, especially when the Covid-induced shutdown of the tourist industry has deprived the island of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. For its part, the Biden administration has been "reviewing" its Cuba policy for six months, all the while continuing Trump's strategy of economic warfare that is designed precisely to create the shortages Cubans are now experiencing.

As Belén Fernández put it in a piece for Al Jazeera on Thursday: "Cuba's dire situation has just about everything to do with United States interference… particularly the six-decades-long blockade that, under international law, technically qualifies as an act of war."

"Although mainstream articles do often mention U.S. sanctions," Fernández wrote of U.S. newspapers, "they almost never convey their comprehensively asphyxiating nature—context without which none of Cuba's contemporary history can begin to be understood."



The Biden administration's new sanctions come after Democratic leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives blocked an amendment from Rep. Jesús G. "Chuy" García to roll back Trump's $1,000-per-quarter limit on remittances that people in the United States can send to family in Cuba.

"The United States has no business preventing Cuban Americans from sending lifesaving remittances to their families, especially while so many lack adequate food, water, and medicine," García told The Nation. "We must end our decadeslong blockade against Cuba, which has led to desperation instead of democracy. Restoring remittances is an important first step."



Noting that Trump not only restricted remittances, but also tightened sanctions and barred most travel to Cuba, The Nation reported Wednesday, before the Treasury Department's latest announcement:


Now, after months of ignoring Cuba, Biden has embraced Trump's approach, slapping on additional sanctions last week and defying the progressive voices in his party calling for relief.

Biden's tougher line on Cuba, and congressional Democrats' complicity, is better understood in the context of domestic politics, not foreign policy. It's largely driven by the desire to placate Cuban Americans in Florida, who weren't planning on voting Democratic in the first place. Most Cuban American voters nationwide identify as Republican, a 2020 Pew Research Center study found. And for years now, Republicans have outperformed Democrats in Florida on things like ground game and voter registration. So Democrats hold relief hostage, inflicting pain on countless ordinary Cubans in the process, for political gain that doesn't actually materialize.

A senior Biden administration official told CNN that along with the new sanctions—on top of those announced last week—the U.S. government is pursuing new "efforts to improve internet connectivity" on the island, and the president was set to discuss both topics in a meeting with Cuban-American leaders.

CodePink's Benjamin, in a Friday tweet about the latest sanctions, nodded to the argument that the Biden administration's policies are intended to appease Democrats in South Florida.

Benjamin is among hundreds of academics, activists, artists, clergy, musicians, politicians, and other public figures who have signed a public appeal to Biden calling on him to immediately lift Trump's 243 unilateral and additional sanctions.

The open letter urging Biden to "Let Cuba Live!" appeared as an advertisement in last Friday's edition of The New York Times and as symbolically represented in Washington, D.C.'s Lafayette Square that same morning.

The letter encourages the U.S. president to "reject the cruel policies put into place by the Trump White House that have created so much suffering among the Cuban people," emphasizing that "while the Covid-19 pandemic has proven challenging for all countries, it has been even more so for a small island under the heavy weight of an economic embargo."

"We find it unconscionable, especially during a pandemic, to intentionally block remittances and Cuba's use of global financial institutions, given that access to dollars is necessary for the importation of food and medicine," the letter says, calling on Biden to "begin the process of ending the embargo and fully normalizing relations between the United States and Cuba."

Last month, continuing a nearly three-decade trend, 184 members of the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution demanding an end to the U.S. blockade on Cuba. Only the United States and Israel voted against it, while Brazil, Colombia, and Ukraine abstained.

"The embargo is not only illegal and inhumane," Progressive International said at the time. "It is incredibly unpopular."

 FEMICIDE, MISOGYNY NOT LIBERATION OR SOCIAL JUSTICE

Thirteen-year-old Nicaraguan Dies in Childbirth

 August 2, 2021

File photo: Nicaragua Investiga

HAVANA TIMES – On Saturday, July 31, Nicaragua’s Ministry of Health (Minsa) reported the death of a young teen from Nicaragua’s South Caribbean Coast. The young girl perished on July 30, after giving birth to a baby girl, reported Nicaragua Investiga.

According to the official statement, the girl was from the community of La Quinta, in the municipality of Pearl Lagoon. She presented “abundant post-partum bleeding”, the medical report said, and “measures were applied to control the hemorrhage.” However, the statement continued, she “went into severe shock, and was pronounced dead at 2:30 pm.”

According to Minsa the teen’s heart stopped (hypovolemic shock) due to a “post-partum hemorrhage for tearing of the uterus, plus uterine atony.” In other words, the uterus didn’t contract after the birth.

The authorities offered no further details, nor is it known if there were complications during the birth itself. They did indicate that the baby was born vaginally, “with healthy crying and a birth weight of 3,000 grams (6.6 lbs.)

High rate of teen pregnancies and a complete abortion ban

The Pan-American Health Organization has classified Nicaragua as one of the countries with the “highest rate of teen pregnancy”. Among regions as a whole, Central America and the Caribbean are in second place “after Africa, with approximately 100 pregnancies for every 1,000 adolescents.”

The Nicaraguan Penal Code establishes that all sexual relations with a child under 14 is classed as a rape and can be sanctioned with a jail sentence of 12 – 15 years, noted Nicaragua Investiga. However, these sanctions have rarely been applied, especially in the impoverished urban and rural communities.

Women’s and feminist movements have long pushed for greater enforcement of the laws against rape, femicide and sexual abuse. Instead, critics say, the police’s time and resources have been taken up in persecuting and jailing members of the opposition and peaceful dissenters.

Further, in the last year harsh laws against receiving money from outside the country have limited the efforts of independent grassroots women’s organizations to reach and educate at-risk teen girls in the poorer communities. Most of these organizations depended on solidarity grants from outside the country to continue their services.

The panorama for young girls who become pregnant is complicated by the fact that all abortions -even in rape cases or when the mother’s life is at risk–, have been banned in Nicaragua since 2006. This was the result of a deal that Daniel Ortega made with Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo [d. 2018]. Essentially, Ortega agreed to sponsor a blanket ban on abortions and in return the Cardinal agreed to support Ortega’s candidacy, something he had consistently opposed.

In 2017, Human Rights Watch printed a special report on the fallout from the prohibition on what are called “therapeutic abortions”. They noted: “Nicaragua’s total ban on abortion is putting women’s and girls’ health and lives at risk.”  The death of the unnamed little girl in Pearl Lagoon is tragic evidence of that fact.