'Isolated incidents': The legal absurdity of UK arms sales for Saudi war in Yemen

The British government will use the ostensible stamp of legal approval to continue selling arms to Saudi Arabia for its brutal campaign in Yemen

Stop The War Coalition stages a protest against the war in Yemen and UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia outside the Saudi Arabian Embassy in London on 25 October 2018 (Reuters)

Anna Stavriankis
23 July 2020 

The UK government’s announcement of the resumption of arms export licensing to Saudi Arabia and its allies may well prove to be the nail in the coffin for thousands more Yemenis, as the war in their country extends into its sixth year.

Declaring that potential breaches of international humanitarian law by the Saudi-led coalition amounted only to "isolated incidents", Secretary of State for International Trade Liz Truss announced herself to be satisfied that Saudi Arabia has a "genuine intent and capacity" to comply with international law and that there is therefore no clear risk of the misuse of weapons.


It is unclear how the government got from a starting point that treats all potential breaches as breaches, to a conclusion that there is only a 'small number' of possible breaches

How did the government reach this conclusion in the face of ongoing attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure in the war?

In June last year the Court of Appeal found the government’s arms export policy to be unlawful, as it failed to assess whether the Saudi-led coalition had committed violations of international humanitarian law in Yemen. The court ordered the government to re-take its decisions, this time lawfully.

After more than a year of silence on the matter, the government announced that its revised methodology now takes into account past allegations of violations and treats all potential breaches as actual breaches for the purposes of assessment.

So far so good: UK policy is based on the risk that weapons might be misused, and risk-based analysis is supposed to be preventive, so a position that treats potential breaches as breaches is a welcome start. However, the government engaged in two steps of legal and political manoeuvring to reach a conclusion that there is no pattern of potential breaches, and therefore no clear risk, meaning that arms licences could resume.

First, it is unclear how the government got from a starting point that treats all potential breaches as breaches, to a conclusion that there is only a "small number" of possible breaches.
What's a possible breach?

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says that on 4 July 2020 it holds details of more than 500 "alleged instances of breaches or violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in Yemen". If the MoD has knowledge of more than 500 alleged breaches, and the government treats all potential breaches as actual breaches, then that means that the vast majority of these 500-plus alleged instances of violations have not been "assessed as a possible breach".


The government has constructed a position that allows it to both facilitate ongoing arms exports and claim adherence to international law

Significant definitional work has gone into narrowing the category of what constitutes a "possible breach" and putting distance between "allegations that are assessed as likely to have occurred" and those that are "assessed as a possible breach". If this sounds like pedantic wordplay, that’s because it is, albeit wordplay with deadly serious ramifications for the population of Yemen.

The government has constructed a position that allows it to both facilitate ongoing arms exports and claim adherence to international law. Second, it is unclear how the government reached the conclusion that these potential breaches constitute "isolated incidents". The government was required by the Court of Appeal to assess whether past incidents were part of a pattern.
Qaboul Mabkhout Marzouq, 11, lies on a stretcher at a hospital in Sanaa after she was injured in an air strike in the northern province of al-Jawf, Yemen on 15 July (Reuters)

On the basis that the possible violations "occurred at different times, in different circumstances and for different reasons" the government has concluded they were isolated. But one can just as easily – in fact, much more persuasively – conclude that this is evidence of widespread and systematic attacks over a long time period.
Ample evidence

There is a wide range of evidence in the public domain that indicates widespread and sustained attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure. One of the most recent reports is a collaborative effort between Mwatana for Human Rights, a Yemeni human rights organisation, and the Global Legal Action Network intended to “give the government everything it needed to accurately assess the risk of future violations".

See no evil: How the UK government tries not to know about bombing civilians in YemenRead More »

Yet the government has routinely failed to engage in any meaningful way with the evidence provided by civil society actors. There are challenges to identifying patterns and making decisions about whether attacks are systematic or indiscriminate – and the myriad organisations working on civilian harm could have provided lessons in how to identify patterns if the government was so minded.

The point is, the government did not want to find a pattern – because that would mean they had to suspend arms sales – and so they didn’t. Instead, they have declared themselves satisfied “that there is not a clear risk that the export of arms and military equipment to Saudi Arabia might be used in the commission of a serious violation of international humanitarian law” and issued a seemingly blanket statement about the resumption of licensing, which itself flies in the face of the commitment to undertake a case-by-case assessment of every licence application.

These machinations are all compounded by the ongoing reliance on secrecy. The secretary of state apparently considered "the full range of information", some of which is "necessarily sensitive and confidential". This is old ground and it served as a staple of the government’s defence in the legal proceedings.
Whitewashing Saudi Arabia

It was not persuasive then, and it is not persuasive now. The government’s policy is based on risk assessment, which is supposed to be preventive – so if there is evidence indicating a potential breach, it should be factored in in a preventive manner.

The government has refused to engage with, let alone refute, the wide range of credible allegations in the public domain that indicate violations of international law, instead relying on ostensibly superior secret information that the public is not entitled to engage with.

Why the UK must rethink its support for Saudi ArabiaRead More »

And it is now refusing to publish the information on which it has based its revised methodology – stating that it has published the criteria for decision-making and the quarterly lists of licences granted.

However, what is missing is any substantive explanation of the rationale for decisions actually taken: there is frequently a glaring gap between the government’s publicly stated position and its actual licensing practice, a gap that the stock repetition that the UK has "one of the most robust control regimes in the world" does not address.

And while the quarterly lists provide data on licences granted, the codes do not match those used by HM Revenue and Customs to report on actual deliveries, reports that anyway only cover a subset of all weapons exports. This makes it impossible to know what was actually transferred and when, especially in the case of so-called open licences that allow repeat transfers to multiple destinations.

The government’s announcement means that arms licensing to the Saudi-led coalition can resume and the legal case falls away. The government will undoubtedly use the ostensible stamp of legal approval to continue whitewashing Saudi Arabia’s reputation and attempt to deflect continued criticism.

It was recently announced that the Committees on Arms Export Controls will be re-established, with MP Mark Garnier in the Chair. The Committees' role is to scrutinise government policy and practice. They have not published a report in the past two years; and with the merger of the Department for International Development into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, development actors' voices are even less likely to be heard at the table.

The new Committee members will have their work cut out for them.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Anna Stavriankis

Anna Stavrianakis is professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK. Her research focuses on UK arms export policy, the international arms trade and arms transfer control, militarism and security.

Hagia Sophia: Ataturk and the rich Americans who changed icon's fate

Even 86 year later, debate still swirls around the decision taken in 1934, and has echoes in Erdogan's decision to revert it to a mosque

People fly the Turkish flag outside the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul on 15 July (AFP)

As expected, Turkey’s Council of State earlier this month repealed the 1934 cabinet decision that turned the Hagia Sophia into a museum.

In doing so, it overturned a decision by the founding fathers of the republic, including Mustafa Kemal Ataturk; Ismet Inonu, a Turkish general and statesman who served as the second president of Turkey from 1938 to 1950; and Celal Bayar, third president of Turkey who served from 1950-60.

In an hour, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a decree, and the Hagia Sophia was transferred to the Islamic affairs directorate and opened to prayers, more than eight decades later. On Friday, the first Jumma prayers will be held there in 86 years.


It was a great achievement for Whittemore to convince rich Americans to save Byzantine artefacts in Istanbul

But how did the Hagia Sophia become a museum in the first place? On 12 June 1929, eight rich and famous Americans met at the Tokatliyan Hotel on Istanbul’s Istiklal Street. The Byzantine Institute of America, which changed the Hagia Sophia’s destiny, was established during a dinner that night. The real mastermind was Thomas Whittemore, a socialite and academic with a passion for Byzantine art.

Whittemore had a social network ranging from American riches to Russian princes, including painter Henri Matisse and literary critic Gertrude Stein. Whittemore was known for his oversize scarfs and his love for hats. He was religious, gay and vegetarian.

The world was progressing towards the Great Depression, and it was a great achievement for Whittemore to convince rich Americans to save Byzantine artefacts in Istanbul. The greater achievement, two years later, was to get permission from Ankara to uncover the plastered Byzantine mosaics at the Hagia Sophia.

The Turkish cabinet issued a decision on 7 June 1931 for the work, signed by Ataturk and Inonu. According to the Byzantine Institute’s archives, Joseph Grew, then the US ambassador to Ankara, played a central role in obtaining the authorisation. Grew and Ataturk knew each other well; in now-famous footage, they jointly addressed the American public in 1927 to present the "new Turkey".

It was also a time when former enemies, such as Greece’s former prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, were getting closer to Turkey. Ankara and Athens signed a peace and cooperation deal in 1930 after Venizelos paid a visit to Turkey. He later nominated Ataturk for the Nobel Peace Prize. Turkey was looking to join the League of Nations in an attempt to balance its foreign relations against rising fascism.
Secretive decision

Ankara's permission to uncover the mosaics was welcomed in the West with fanfare, but Turkish people were clueless. The decision was taken in such secrecy that Turkish newspapers only learned of it two months later, thanks to a New York Times report.

Was Erdogan right to declare the Hagia Sophia a mosque?

Read More »

The same day, Turkish newspapers ran reports of two American airmen flying from New York to Istanbul, and of a letter sent by Ataturk to the US president. There were remarks by relevant local officials underlining that the work on the mosaics wouldn’t change the features of the mosque.

That first year, Whittemore and his staff uncovered the mosaics in the halls. But the mosque was still open for prayers, and next was the real issue: how would they uncover the mosaics with icons inside the mosque?

Coincidentally, Ataturk invited Whittemore to a historical congress in Ankara. He was welcomed by Ataturk’s adopted daughter, Zehra, who later died after studying in Britain by committing suicide or “falling from a train” while en route to France.

Ataturk met Whittemore in a publicised meeting, where he listened to the American scholar about the Byzantine mosaics and took his advice to send Zehra to Britain for English language education. But the picture of Ataturk with Whittemore wasn’t enough to subdue the public.

Gossip about the excavation was rampant, triggering another public attempt by politician Halil Ethem, a co-founder of the Byzantine Institute, to calm the masses. Appearing with Whittemore at the Hagia Sophia, Ethem said that nothing was harmed in the mosque and that the icons had not originally been banned in Islam.
Bombshell lands

The first official document to start the conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a museum was a letter dated 25 August 1934, written by then-Education Minister Abidin Ozmen to the prime minister's office.

“Upon the great verbal order I received, I hereby present one copy of the order that requires planning to put Hagia Sophia mosque into a museum,” Ozmen wrote. The prime ministry immediately created a commission and drafted a to-do list within two days.

Ozmen revealed the details of the oral order after his retirement in 1949, while he was paying a visit to the Hagia Sophia museum’s general manager, Muzaffer Ramazanoglu: “It was said in an academic way, chiefly by Ataturk, that instead of keeping it as something [that] only belongs to one religion and class, that turning Hagia Sophia into a museum that is open to visitors from all nations and religions would be suitable.”
The Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is pictured on 2 July (AFP)

The news of the conversion decision landed like a bombshell. Everyone was surprised. The manager of museums mentioned in the news reports didn’t even know what was happening.

The sudden decision was even criticised by pro-Ataturk Cumhuriyet daily newspaper in a front-page article: “We have to confess that we are continuing to get astonished as we read the newspapers, which report that Hagia Sophia will be organised as a museum. We constantly ask ourselves this question: what museum? Hagia Sophia itself is the most beautiful museum, and even alone is a better historical monument. We cannot comprehend the conversion of this monument into a museum.”
A message to the West

The cabinet decision followed. On 24 November 1934, the cabinet decreed that turning the Hagia Sophia into a museum would make all of the eastern world happy, giving another educational institute to humanity.

There have been many theories on what motivations led to the conversion. Some said it was a message to the US, and in general to the West, that the new regime in Turkey was secular and peaceful. Others claimed it was a gesture to the Balkan Pact, signed that year with Greece, Yugoslavia and Romania.

The public and newspapers weren't able to raise their voices, and the state, without questioning anything, used all its resources to make it happen

Whittemore, meanwhile, continued his work until the end of the 1940s, uncovering the mesmerising mosaics at the Chora Church in Istanbul after completing his task at the Hagia Sophia. He died in Washington in 1950 on his way to the State Department to meet Allan Dulles, the first civilian CIA director. Some claimed that Whittemore was also an intelligence source. He was holding an album of Hagia Sophia mosaics when he passed away.

Whatever the reason, the decision to turn a building essential to Istanbul’s religious and social life, which had served as a mosque for more than four centuries, without any outside input came as a surprise, and caused trauma among the religious segments of society.

That’s why it has long been an exciting dream for religious conservatives to reopen the Hagia Sophia as a mosque.

Just because the leader of the country deemed it appropriate, Istanbul’s largest mosque was turned into a museum overnight. The public and newspapers weren’t able to raise their voices, and the state, without questioning anything, used all its resources to make it happen.
Debate continues

Even 86 year later, debate still swirls around the decision taken in 1934. And however tragic it may be, Turkey’s decision-making mechanisms still work with 1934 technology, as evidenced by the latest move to again change the status of the Hagia Sophia.

The president had not taken a single step on the Hagia Sophia for two decades, responding to requests by saying people should first fill the mosque next door, and denouncing calls to turn the Hagia Sophia into a mosque as provocation.

Then, he suddenly he gave a green light to the conversion. The Council of State, whose chief justice was appointed to the position after voting to cancel Istanbul’s local elections last year, and which has rejected similar requests three times since 2005, unanimously repealed the previous cabinet decision and turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

Some believe the goal was to distract from Turkey’s economic problems or to stop electoral bleeding; others say it aimed to send a message abroad.

With this decision-making mechanism reminiscent of the 1930s, and amid the applause of the same people who are grateful to lift the curse of Mehmed II cited in the Hagia Sophia’s endowment charter, a university belonging to a 40-year-old conservative foundation has been closed; people have been put in prison by political orders; and elected mayors have lost office.

Turkey in 1934, when the Hagia Sophia’s status was changed, and Turkey in 2020 look very alike.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.



Yildiray Ogur

Yildiray Ogur is a columnist for Karar, a Turkish daily newspaper. He previously worked as an editor and columnist for various newspapers and TV channels.

Israel prefers a one-state solution that protects its colonial privileges

Joseph Massad
29 July 2020
As there are three different arrangements for the 'one-state solution', which one of them does Israel have in mind for the Palestinian people?

Protesters gather in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square to denounce Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, on 23 June (AFP)
Talk of a "one-state solution" for the colonial situation in Palestine and Israel has intensified in recent weeks.

People from different mainstream national and political contexts, who had always supported the "two-state solution", have begun to voice support for one state. They do so due to their realisation that the "two-state solution" has become untenable.

But as there are three different arrangements for the "one-state solution", which one of them do they have in mind for the Palestinian people?
Three 'one-state solutions'

The failure of "the two-state solution", which was initially proposed by colonial Britain’s Peel commission in 1937 and formalised a decade later by the Western imperialist powers and the Soviet Union through the 1947 UN Partition Plan, has had drastic effects on the future of the Zionist settler-colony in Palestine.


The failure of 'the two-state solution' has had drastic effects on the future of the Zionist settler-colony in Palestine

The failure of the Zionist movement to entice the majority of European and American Jews to come to Palestine between 1897 and 1947 (or since) and its failure to acquire more than 6.5 percent of the land during that time necessitated an arrangement to establish a Jewish settler-colony on at least parts of Palestine, if not all of it.

Since 1967, billions of dollars have been spent to impose this "two-state solution" on the Palestinian people - which, it is important to point out, is only a solution to the Zionist failure to successfully colonise the whole country.

The capitulation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) with the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993 was, according to the PLO, the crowning efforts of realising the "two-state solution" that legitimises Israel while granting a consolation prize to the PLO in the form of an ever-deferred mini-state.

For the Israelis, who essentially authored the accords, the Oslo deal was no more than a public relations stunt for the "two-state solution", while they secretly and not-so-secretly sounded the death knell for it, in preparation for the final "one-state solution".
 

US President Bill Clinton stands between PLO leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as they shake hands in September 1993 in Washington after signing the first Oslo accord (AFP)

What the Israelis have in mind is a one state, not unlike what European white colonists had achieved across the Americas, Africa and Oceania, since the late 18th century, namely domination of the natives through land theft and a series of draconian security arrangements legitimised by the signing of a series of treaties.

This is coupled with a PR campaign marketing the white supremacist states the colonists established as "democracies". These arrangements worked relatively well in the United States until the 1960s, when they had to be updated to be more effective in selling white supremacy to white Americans and to the rest of the world as the best form of "democracy".

This is, with some variations, what had transpired in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
The white-supremacist state

However, the white-supremacist one-state solution which worked well because of the effectiveness of genocide and slavery in establishing white demographic supremacy in the Americas and Oceania was less successful elsewhere, least of all in Africa.


The liberation struggles in three former settler-colonies (Algeria, Kenya and Rhodesia) established a state that is decolonised and deracialised and wherein white colonists would be equal citizens

The white-supremacist one state that French colonists of Algeria established in 1830 ultimately failed in 1962, as did the white-supremacist one state in Kenya and Rhodesia, in 1963 and 1980 respectively.

In Algeria, the white colonists numbered one million to nine million indigenous Algerians, while in Kenya, they numbered 23,000 to more than five million indigenous Kenyans, and in Rhodesia, whites numbered around 277,000 colonists to six million indigenous Zimbabweans.

In its place, the liberation struggles in all three former settler-colonies established a new version of the one-state solution - a state that is decolonised and deracialised and wherein white colonists would be equal citizens (although in Zimbabwe, the western imperialist countries insisted on guaranteeing the ill-gotten economic privileges for the white colonists for a couple of decades longer).

In all three cases, the colonists refused to live as equals and opted to repatriate to Europe or other white-supremacist settler-colonies, where their white racial privilege could be maintained and safeguarded.

A Palestinian boy rides a bicycle past Palestinian Bedouin huts in the occupied West Bank on 28 January, with the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim in the background (AFP)

The longest surviving white-supremacist one-state solution in Africa was in South Africa, whose white colonists opted for a white supremacist one-state solution while presenting their apartheid regime as an eleven-homeland solution (10 homelands for the indigenous Blacks and the rest of South Africa for the white colonists).

This would serve as the inspiration to the Israelis in authoring the Oslo accords, by which they established the Palestinian bantustans.
Israel annexation plan: A catastrophe begotten by a larger catastrophe
Azzam TamimiRead More »

But this arrangement also failed in South Africa and was finally transformed into a new colonial version of the one-state solution. The African National Congress accepted this in 1994, namely, a state where no decolonisation whatsoever would be effected and where the safeguarding of partial racialisation through the maintenance of economic white supremacy would be the price for overthrowing political white supremacy.

The difference between the white supremacist settler colonies in the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia versus South Africa is demographic. Through genocide and slavery, white colonists established their demographic supremacy in their settler-colonies, which helped with the claim their rule was/is the rule of the democratic majority.

Opting out of the mass genocide strategy in South Africa meant that the one-state solution there was one wherein whites could only remain the economic, but not the political, rulers of the country, as they numbered 4.5 million people to about 36 million Blacks, Coloureds, and Indians, at the end of the apartheid regime.
The Palestinian dilemma

In Palestine, the dilemma of the Jewish colonists who constituted 10 percent of Palestine’s population after World War One and 30 percent after World War Two was how to establish a demographic majority short of genocide.

Nakba: The forgotten 19th century origins of the Palestinian catastrophe

Read More »

They opted for mass expulsion, a plan they had drawn up as early as the late 1920s and more formally after the mid-1930s. By the time they finished conquering Palestine in late 1948, they had expelled 90 percent of the Palestinian population in the Palestinian areas they conquered and established a Jewish-supremacist one state, in the American, Canadian, and Australian style.

After the 1967 Israeli conquest of the rest of Palestine, the demographics changed, which created a new set of problems.

Today, indigenous Palestinians (seven million-5.1 million in the West Bank and Gaza and 1.9 million in Israel) have again outnumbered their colonisers (6.7 million), not counting the eight million expelled Palestinian refugees living in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon within a 100-mile radius around their homeland.

This new situation necessitated the abandoning of the American-style, white-supremacist one state, replacing it with the apartheid South African-Bantustan-one-state style of rule, dubbed the “two-state solution”, formalised at Oslo.

But with the untenability of the two-state solution, some of its supporters outside Israel have been pushing for a post-apartheid, South-African-style one-state solution. Jordan’s Prime Minister Omar Razzaz, whose country recognised Israel’s right to be a Jewish settler-colony in the peace agreement signed in 1994, explained last week that Jordan could view positively a "one-state democratic solution" provided it gave equal rights to both peoples.
Zionists' one state solution

Meanwhile, liberal American Jewish Zionist pundit Peter Beinart has abandoned his support for the Jewish-supremacist two-state solution, and opted for one state.

Why Peter Beinart's call for a one-state solution misses the markRead More »

Beinart, however, wants to reassure the Jewish colonists and their supporters that what he is calling for is not a decolonised and deracialised one state with equal political and economic rights for everyone, as independent Algeria, Kenya, and Zimbabwe had established but rather a post-apartheid, South Africa-style one state.

In a recent article, Beinart wrote "democratic binationalism in Israel-Palestine would be … enormously messy and complex. But Jews would be well positioned to defend their interests - perhaps so well positioned as to inhibit fundamental transformation. Compared to white South Africans, Israeli Jews boast much stronger transnational ties to a much stronger diaspora.

They’re also a far larger share of the population. When apartheid ended, South Africa was 12 percent white. Israel-Palestine is roughly 50 percent Jewish. And even if the Jewish share of the population fell as the result of emigration, [Palestinian] refugee return, and a lower birth rate, the experience of South Africa and the US-where political equality has only marginally remedied the economic chasm between the historically privileged and the historically oppressed - suggests that Jewish economic privilege would endure."

Palestinian protesters shout slogans as they take part in a demonstration against Israel's plans to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on 23 June (AFP)

Beinart understands well that Jewish colonists in Palestine/Israel, like white colonists elsewhere, would leave the country if they lost white Jewish privilege and submitted to decolonisation and to equal rights with the natives, which is why he insists that "in an equal country", as in post-apartheid South Africa where whites continue to prosper as economic rulers, "Jews could not merely survive, but prosper".

Yet, and for fear of this eventuality, more than one million Israeli Jews obtained dual nationalities in the last two decades, with the second nationality being invariably European or American.

These are countries that, were Israeli Jews to emigrate back to, would safeguard their white privilege (it is notable that Beinart’s own parents were white South African settlers who moved to that other white supremacist settler-colony across the Atlantic, where he was born).
End of colonial privileges

Supporters of Israel fear all three one-state solutions but not in equal measure. They fear the apartheid one-state solution because it would lose Israel international support and open it up to sanctions; they fear the Algeria-Kenya-Zimbabwe solution most of all because it would lose the Jewish colonists all their colonial and racial privileges by making them equal to the natives.


Unless the one-state solution nullifies all Jewish racial and colonial privileges, it would be yet another PR campaign

That some of them now support the post-apartheid South African-style, one-state solution is their new compromise, as it seems to be the only one of the three that can safeguard Jewish supremacist privilege without international sanctions.

Let no one be fooled, unless the one-state solution nullifies all Jewish racial and colonial privileges and decolonises the country in order to grant equal rights to all, it would be yet another PR campaign to cover up the maintenance of Jewish supremacy under a new guise.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye

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Joseph Massad

Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University in New York. He is the author of many books and academic and journalistic articles. His books include Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, Desiring Arabs, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, and most recently Islam in Liberalism. His books and articles have been translated to a dozen languages.

Facebook, Google, and the US government all have their own reasons to make you believe that TikTok is unsafe and scary — and they're all self-serving

Paige Leskin

Reuters File Photo

President Trump and the US government have been considering a ban on TikTok over long-held concerns regarding its ties to China, and its access to user data and influence over content moderation.

The threat of a TikTok ban would mean that the app's massive US userbase, estimated to be near 80 million, is up for grabs, and US tech companies are already capitalizing with new apps and formats borrowing from TikTok's viral short-form video format.

Concerns over national and data security are leveled against TikTok as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other US tech companies ready to face lawmakers' scrutiny over antitrust issues.

In a rare occurrence, the Trump administration and US tech companies have found themselves as allies in the fight against TikTok, as they all come after the China-based app with their own motives.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is coming to Wednesday's antitrust hearing bringing attention to the one issue he and President Donald Trump can actually agree on: China.

Wednesday's hearing will see the CEOs of America's most powerful tech companies — Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google — in front of Congress as they face hours grilling over any potential violations of antitrust regulations. But even as lawmakers and tech executives are poised to face-off, the two sides have otherwise found common ground in their battle against the social network called TikTok.

Zuckerberg's remarks, published Tuesday night, are seemingly catered directly to Trump: The Facebook CEO is preparing to frame Facebook as a story of homegrown American success, whose future is threatened by authoritarian China. While Zuckerberg doesn't harness the same racist and discriminatory rhetoric Trump frequently uses to attack China, the bottom line paints the picture of China as the common enemy.

The Trump administration will be watching Silicon Valley's most notable leaders closely Wednesday, but the government's attention has been otherwise monopolized by the potential threats that an app from China could pose. TikTok's roots in China — where the app's parent company, ByteDance, is located — have long raised questions from US lawmakers and security experts about how much access and influence the Chinese government has over user data and content moderation. TikTok has tried to demonstrate it's distancing itself from its Chinese roots, launching a content advisory council to guide policy changes and appointing a US-based CEO in June.


But TikTok's China ties have attracted more attention when earlier this month, both President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly said they were considering a TikTok ban in the US: Trump said the ban would be a way to punish China over its role in the coronavirus pandemic, while Pompeo cited national security concerns.

Since coming to the US in 2018, TikTok has grown into a social media powerhouse and established itself as a staple of internet culture and social interaction for Generation Z. The app has more than 2 billion global downloads, and an estimated US userbase as high as 80 million. It outperforms US-based apps with younger audiences such as Snapchat and Instagram in both new downloads and time spent.

Although the imminent threat of TikTok disappearing from the US has signaled panic among users and creators, it's been a sign of opportunity for Silicon Valley.

US-based tech companies have already capitalized on the chaos to lure the app's loyal following to their competing platforms. Big names like Snapchat and Google had toyed with creating TikTok competitors in the past, but have only just recently used the app's uncertain future to roll out viable products. Zuckerberg's Facebook, meanwhile, is expected to roll out a new TikTok-like format inside of Instagram Stories called Reel to users in the US in early August.


Although Zuckerberg will surely face questions Wednesday about whether Facebook's acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp have stifled competition, the CEO won't have to worry about facing issues over Reels' attempt to compete with China's TikTok.

Zuckerberg's attempt to channel Trump's patriotic rhetoric comes as the president's political campaign runs ads on Facebook and Instagram accusing TikTok of "spying" on its users. The accusation is based on research from March showing how apps are able to access content stored on the clipboard — the copy-and-paste feature — of users' iPhones and iPads. TikTok was only one of the dozens of the apps (including) LinkedIn and Fox News caught spying on iPhone clipboards, but that didn't stop the Trump campaign from turning the story into anti-TikTok ammunition.

Of the major players who oversee the digital town squares through which Americans interact and disseminate information, TikTok is one of the biggest that won't sit down Wednesday in front of Congress. It won't have to answer lawmakers' questions, but it's sure to be the subject of subtle jabs and implications from the tech CEOs capitalizing on showing off their nationalism in DC.

Ten dead whales found on Indonesian beach, one saved by locals

July 30, 2020 By Agence France-Presse


Ten whales were found dead on an Indonesian beach Thursday, officials said, with images showing locals rushing to push a still-living member of the stricken pod back into the sea.

The marine mammals, ranging from 2-6 meters (6.5-20 feet) in length, were found in the remote province of East Nusa Tenggara, the head of the region’s water conservation agency Ikram Sangadji told AFP.

Footage showed a group of around 10 men struggling to push an eleventh member of the pod across the baking sands and back into the ocean.

They eventually managed to get the creature — which was scarred with deep cuts — into the water, and it appeared to swim off by itself, prompting loud cheers from the group.

Officials had concluded the stricken pod were likely short-finned pilot whales, Sangadji said.

Short-finned pilots are highly social and are often involved in mass strandings, although scientists are still unclear as to why.

Residents helped dig graves to bury the carcasses of the ten dead whales, which were lashed with cuts likely caused by the creatures coming into contact with sharp rocks, Sangadji added.

Cross-currents off beaches pose a danger to whales as they can get caught between reefs close to shore.

Last week, a giant 23-metre blue whale washed up near a beach near East Nusa Tenggara’s capital city Kupang.

Seven pilot whales were found dead near Kupang last October.

© 2020 AFP

Family poisoned after mistaking Hell’s bells for spinachJuly 30, 2020 By Agence France-Presse


French authorities have warned people to beware of confusing New Zealand spinach with a deadly flower after a family of four were poisoned by the plant.

The four women ended up in the intensive care unit of a hospital in eastern France after eating datura leaves, a toxic plant also known as the Devil’s weed and Hell’s bells, said the French food safety agency, Anses.

“Four people from the same family cooked a dish using datura after confusing its leaves with New Zealand spinach they had planted in their garden,” the agency added.

All four showed symptoms of “serious poisoning” which can include fever, hallucinations, psychosis, convulsions and sometimes kidney failure.


They all recovered though one “will need long-term monitoring”, the agency said.

Datura has traditionally been used in witchcraft and sorcery in many cultures, and is commonly planted at the end of rows of potatoes in organic permaculture to kill Colorado beetle larvae.

The women had sown the New Zealand spinach grains in their garden the previous year, an Anses statement said, “but it did not grow when they thought it would.

“A year later they noticed little leaves popping up at the spot where they had planted the seeds” and assumed it was the spinach, it added.

The vegetable, known as tetragon or Cook’s cabbage after the English explorer, prefers warm conditions and doesn’t normally grow until the soil has warmed up.

The agency warned that datura grew widely across France and that “all parts of the plant are toxic and can have serious and sometimes fatal effects.”

Symptoms usually start to appear an hour after the plant is eaten.

Last year, the French supermarket chain Leclerc was forced to recall two consignments of frozen French beans because of the risk that packets also contained datura.


© 2020 AFP

‘Making the court jester the king’: Why Donald Trump truly is ‘the world’s most dangerous man’


By Michael Winship, Common Dreams

on July 29, 2020


Watching the news from Portland, Oregon, where night after night anonymous Federal forces in combat gear and camouflage continued to go after protesters with tear gas, flashbangs, rubber bullets and batons, doing their damnedest to make a tough situation worse, I was again reminded of a simple fact. It will come as a shock to no one other than the most credulous:

Reality TV isn’t real! A pearl-clutching revelation, I realize.


“Honest work was never demanded of him,” Mary Trump writes, “and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable. He continues to be protected from his own disasters in the White House, where a claque of loyalists applauds his every pronouncement or covers up his possible criminal negligence by normalizing it to the point that we’ve become almost numb to the accumulating transgressions. But now the stakes are far higher than they’ve ever been before; they are literally life or death. Unlike any previous time in his life, Donald’s failings cannot be hidden or ignored because they threaten us all.”

Mark Burnett, executive producer of The Apprentice, molded a willing Trump into a realty TV monster from the Planet Television, the place where nothing “real” is real. As per Mary Trump, when the show began in 2004, “Donald’s finances were a mess… and his own ‘empire’ consisted of increasingly desperate branding opportunities such as Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka and Trump University… The Apprentice… despite all evidence to the contrary, presented him as a legitimately successful tycoon.”

An editor on the show said, “Most of us knew he was a fake. He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”

We know from other reporting that the editors often had to “reverse engineer” episodes of the series when Trump impulsively changed his mind in the middle of shooting and a scramble ensued to undo the damage. Katherine Walker, one of the producers, told Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker, in a 2018 profile of Burnett, that they often “struggled to make Trump seem coherent, editing out garbled syntax and malapropisms. ‘We cleaned it up so that he was his best self,’ she said, adding, ‘I’m sure Donald thinks that he was never edited.’

However, she acknowledged, he was a natural for the medium: whereas reality-TV producers generally must amp up personalities and events, to accentuate conflict and conjure intrigue, “we didn’t have to change him—he gave us stuff to work with.”

I’ll bet. His profane gift for manipulation and dissembling was further nurtured and encouraged at The Apprentice and now the nation and world suffer. Lashing out, in fear of losing reelection, he’s used the lessons he learned from reality TV to mean and violent effect in Portland.

“Welcome to the world of performative authoritarianism,” The Atlantic’s estimable Anne Applebaum writes, “a form of politics that reached new heights of sophistication in Russia over the past decade and has now arrived in the United States. Unlike 20th-century authoritarianism, this 21st-century, postmodern influence campaign does not require the creation of a total police state. Nor does it require complete control of information, or mass arrests. It can be carried out, instead, with a few media outlets and a few carefully targeted arrests…

On Fox News, Sean Hannity has already denounced Portland as a “war zone.” Tucker Carlson has spoken of protesters as “mobs” who keep liberal Democrats in power. The next stage will implicate Joe Biden in this same story: The president’s aides have told journalists that Biden, if he wins, will “allow left-wing fascists to destroy America.” Protesters, mobs, chaos, fascists, the left, the “Dems,” Biden—they’re all one narrative. The Trump administration will show people pictures of its uniformed troops pushing back against them, restoring order with a strong hand. And it will use the kind of language that appeals to that part of the population that prizes safety over all else.

This all is meant as talking points for right-wing TV and radio and for Trump’s campaign ads, and as a diversion from 150,000 COVID deaths (although it also may be a dress rehearsal for election trouble in November). Some say he’s trying to scare suburban voters leaning toward Biden as Richard Nixon did in 1968 following urban uprisings after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the police riot in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. Others, including Amy Walter of The Cook Report and the PBS NewsHour, think it’s more about stiffening the spine of his faltering base.

She notes a Kaiser Family Foundation poll that that from May to July, Trump job approval among Republicans has dropped across the board: down 12 points on job approval, ten on the economy and a “whopping” 26 points on coronavirus. Walters tweets, “Is getting his base back enough for him to win the race? Probably not. He’s got to win back independents who’ve also soured on him. BUT, it sure would help GOP SEN candidates in IA, KS and Montana to have R voters come home.”

So now the Trump administration has agreed to begin withdrawing the Feds from Portland on Thursday if state and local law enforcement secure Federal buildings and assuming conditions “significantly improve”—this despite Trump’s claim Thursday morning, “We’re not leaving until they’ve secured their city.”

Regardless, he knows he already has the footage he needs to for what he thinks will help him most. A handful of protesters late at night made noise and trouble with lasers, bottles and fire in a small area around the courthouse even though the vastest majority of ongoing demonstrations in Portland have been peaceful, as moms, dads and veterans march in support of Black Lives Matter and against the Federal presence on Portland’s streets.

On Trump’s behalf, Attorney General Barr and acting Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf will keep haranguing the aforementioned credulous (unfortunately, they have a lot of votes) with bogus claims that the placid streets of Portland were overrun with anarchists—or denying there’s systemic racism among the police. The Federal dollars spent on military gear and personnel for use against American civilians should instead be going to cures for an ailing populace and an economy crippled by virus in which millions are devastated by poverty and a lack of food, housing and education.

“Perhaps most crucially, for Donald, there is no value in empathy, no tangible upside to caring for other people,” Mary Trump observes in Too Much and Never Enough. “… This is another crisis in which it would have been so easy for Donald to triumph, but his ignorance overwhelms his ability to turn to his advantage the third national catastrophe to occur on his watch. An effective response would have entailed a call for unity, but Donald requires division. It is the only way he knows how to survive.”

That’s the reality. There’s many a good reason her book is subtitled “How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

Michael Winship is the Schumann Senior Writing Fellow for Common Dreams. Previously, he was the Emmy Award-winning senior writer for Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, a past senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos, and former president of the Writers Guild of America East. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelWinship

Postal Service may close offices, cut service ahead of election

Manchin, union leader demand explanation from new postmaster, who seeks ‘operational pivot’

Published: July 29, 2020 By Associated Press

The coronavirus pandemic has created further strain on Postal Service finances. GETTY IMAGES

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The U.S. Postal Service is considering closing post offices across the country, sparking concerns ahead of an anticipated surge of mail-in ballots in the 2020 elections, U.S. Sen Joe Manchin and a union leader said Wednesday.

Manchin said he has received numerous reports from post offices and colleagues about service cuts or looming closures in West Virginia and elsewhere, prompting him to send a letter to Postmaster General Louis DeJoy asking for an explanation.


The possible cutbacks come as DeJoy, a major donor to President Donald Trump who took control of the agency last month, moves to eliminate overtime for hundreds of thousands of postal workers, potentially causing a delay in mail deliveries. A recent document from the Postal Service, obtained by The Associated Press, described the need for an “operational pivot” to make the cash-strapped agency financially stable.

“It’s just asinine to think that you can shut something down or throttle it back in terms of the pandemic when basically the lifeline for voting and democracy is going to be in the hands of the Postal Service,” Manchin, a Democrat, told reporters Wednesday.


He said at least two post offices in West Virginia had been scheduled to close next month but that the agency had “slowed” its plans.

A spokesman for the Postal Service referred questions to a prior statement from DeJoy, which said the agency “has experienced over a decade of financial losses, with no end in sight, and we face an impending liquidity crisis.” The statement goes on to say that “it is critical that the Postal Service take a fresh look at our operations and make necessary adjustments.”


Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, which represents more than 200,000 postal workers and retirees, said there’s “definitely buzz” about closures although he said he was not aware of specific details. A representative for the union said rank-and-file postal employees have been told by managers that their offices are being targeted for potential cutbacks.

“The logical conclusion is that he’s going to try to close some post offices,” Dimondstein said of the postmaster general’s belt-tightening strategies.

The coronavirus pandemic has created further strain on Postal Service finances. The service reported a $4.5 billion loss for the quarter ending in March, before the full effects of the shutdown sank in.

Manchin’s letter noted that the coronavirus relief package passed by Congress in March included authorization for the agency to borrow up to $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury. The money was intended to help the Postal Service maintain essential services during the pandemic.

“Unfortunately, not only has little to none of that funding been utilized, you are now proposing the very cuts that we sought to avoid with that emergency line of credit,” Manchin said in his letter.

Later Wednesday, Treasury announced it had reached agreement with the Postal Service on the terms of any future borrowing but also said the service was able to fund its operations at this time without using a loan.

U.S. stock-index futures on Thursday were headed lower, with the market appearing to add to its losses following a tweet from President Donald Trump that suggested that the U.S. should delay the 2020 president election, which takes place on Nov. 3, amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The 45th president of the U.S. tweeted on Thursday: "With universal mail-in voting (not absentee voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most inaccurate & fraudulent election in history. It will be great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

Opinion: Bye, boomer: the coming cull of workers over 50
Employers seize on slumps to purge more expensive, more experienced workers, study warns

DISNEY CHANNEL/COURTESY EVERETT COLLECTION

Uh-oh. Those of us who remember when ’80s music was new had better start bracing ourselves for those big-box-store greeter jobs earlier than we expected.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that the jobs market is probably heading for a massive, rolling shakeout. And that means plenty of employers may be using the cover of COVID-19 to get rid of lots of expensive older workersng

80% of older Americans can't afford to retire - COVID-19 isn't helping

Age discrimination in the jobs market, which is supposedly illegal, goes up in recessions. Some employers take the opportunity to ax experienced workers who are paid a reasonable wage, and replace them with cheap, desperate kids who will put up with anything.

This isn’t just my opinion.

New research from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that, yes, age discrimination rises hand in hand with the unemployment rate. Older workers tend to be the last hired back and the first fired. And while the unemployment rate has been dropping back down for the last two months, after the initial COVID shock, you’re a fool if you think it’s over. (OK, that was the ’70s.)
Economists Gordon Dalh of the University of California, San Diego, and Matthew Knepper of the University of Georgia ran the numbers on age-discrimination complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and compared them with the unemployment rates in the relevant industry and U.S. state at the time.

“For each 1 percentage point increase in a state-industry’s monthly unemployment rate, the volume of age discrimination firing and hiring charges increases by 4.8% and 3.4%, respectively,” they found.

And that was even more true when they eliminated weaker or possibly frivolous complaints, and looked only at those that the EEOC deemed had merit and deserved further investigation. “Even though the incentive to file weaker claims is stronger when unemployment is high, the fraction of meritorious claims also increases significantly when labor market conditions deteriorate,” they write.

Just for good measure, they also ran analyses of a study conducted in 2012 which sent out fake (female) résumés across the country in response to job openings. Their findings? “Each one percentage point increase in the local unemployment rate reduces the callback rate for older women by 1.7 percentage points (off a baseline 10.8% callback rate), relative to younger women,” they conclude. That’s about a 16% relative decline in callback rates for each percentage point added to the unemployment rate. (The younger “applicants” were allegedly aged 35 to 42, the older ones over 50, they say.)

Bottom line: The higher the unemployment rate, the likelier employers are to favor younger women applicants over older women applicants. “All else equal, an older female is 6.8 percentage points less likely to receive a callback when she is competing against two additional younger female applicants, which translates to a 63% reduction relative to the mean.”

They conclude: “Taken together, our two analyses provide compelling evidence that age discrimination rises as labor markets deteriorate. As far as we know, this is the first direct evidence for age discrimination varying with the business cycle, both for the firing and hiring margins.”

Oh, great.

Technically employers aren’t allowed to discriminate against workers over 40 on the basis of age, thanks to the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act. But it’s honored more in the breach than in the observance. In 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that its protections were pretty narrow. “[M]any employer decisions that are intended to cut costs or respond to market forces will likely have a disproportionate effect on older workers,” and that is legal, wrote Justice Sandra Day O’Connor for the majority.

The stock market and some of the economic data may be pointing upward, but the bond market is telling a different tale and forecasting something in the region of catastrophe. The 10-year Treasury yield is back down to March panic levels. Gold is booming. Tensions are rising between China and the U.S.

Also, it slowly seems to be dawning on the world that the virus didn’t just “go away” because we all hid for a couple of months. Cases have surged from here in the U.S. to China. Restarting the world was always going to lead to the virus’s coming straight back, as the scientists at Imperial College, London, warned way back in March. This is causing some reopening plans to be put on pause, or even into reverse. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is reimposing a 14-day quarantine on anyone entering the state.

Good times. Let’s hope when this is all over there are actually some stores left hiring greeters.

Stock buybacks have totaled $5.3 trillion over the past decade — has that contributed to U.S. pandemic failures?Published: July 30, 2020 at 6:26 a.m. ET

‘Companies need to abandon ... maximizing shareholder value and shift to the idea of corporate governance for the common good,’ concludes report

ISTOCKPHOTO

Has the $5.3 trillion that U.S. companies have funneled to their shareholders in the past decade in the form of stock buybacks contributed to the federal government’s failing management of the coronavirus pandemic?

That’s a question raised in an article titled, “The $5.3 trillion Question behind America’s COVID-19 Failure,” that was published on Wednesday in the American Prospect, a progressive public-policy journal, based on a new working paper, “How ‘Maximizing Shareholder Value’ Minimized the Strategic National Stockpile,” published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking.


Authors William Lazonick, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts and the president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, and Matt Hopkins, a Ph.D. student at SOAS University of London and a senior researcher at the Academic-Industry Research Network, argue that share buybacks are a core tenet of “maximizing shareholder value,” which until last year was the Business Roundtable’s definition of the purpose of a corporation.

That changed last August, when 181 senior executives of top companies, led by J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.’s JPM, +2.42% Jamie Dimon, agreed to change the Business Roundtable’s stated purpose for a corporation to one that says companies should serve all of their stakeholders, including customers, employees, suppliers and communities, in addition to generating long-term value for shareholders. The change broke with the idea made famous by the legendary University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman that companies’ primary purpose was to reward shareholders.

‘For government-business collaborations, or GBCs, to be effective, companies need to abandon the ideology of maximizing shareholder value and shift to the idea of corporate governance for the common good.’

“Guided by this new purpose, a corporation could be a partner in a [government-business collaboration] and could respond effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the authors wrote.

To really make that change, however, companies would need to stop distributing almost all their profit via share buybacks and dividends and instead show real commitment to a stakeholder model, they wrote. The main beneficiaries of buybacks are stock sellers, including companies’ own executives and stock-market professionals, both of whom are positioned to know when such transactions will be executed and when to pocket gains.

Companies paid out $3.8 trillion in dividends in the period from 2010 to 2019.

Comparing those enormous numbers with the funds government agencies spent preparing the U.S. for a pandemic makes for grim reading; in that same period, the federal government allocated just $13.2 billion to research-and-development countermeasures, managed by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or Barda, and Project BioShield — and to procurement of countermeasures for the national stockpile.

“These agencies depend on [government-business collaborations] for countermeasure development, production, and delivery. A business contribution to the pandemic preparedness effort of just 1 percent of the $5.3 trillion that the S&P 500 corporations dissipated on buybacks over the same ten years would have represented four times the countermeasure funding provided by the federal government,” said the report.

Lazonick and Hopkins analyzed two BARDA-led government-business collaborations to support their case. The first launched in 2010, the second in 2014 and aimed to develop a new kind of ventilator and deliver 10,000 units to the national stockpile. The former contract went to California-based Newport Medical Instruments, the second to Pennsylvania-based Respironics.

But both of those companies were taken over by bigger, well-funded companies in the medical-device industry. Newport was acquired by Covidien in 2012, which was then acquired by Medtronic PLC MDT, +2.46%, both U.S.-based companies with tax-inversion deals in Ireland.

Respironics was taken out by Royal Philips of the Netherlands in 2008.

“As of mid-July 2020, not a single ventilator from the contracts had been delivered to the [national stockpile],” the authors wrote.

The report notes the sums spent by the leading makers of PPE including N95 masks 3M MMM, +0.59%, Honeywell HON, +1.69% and Kimberly-Clark KMB, +0.83% on shareholder returns. From 2010 to 2019, 3M distributed 121% of its profits to shareholders, Honeywell gave 90% and Kimberly-Clark distributed 129%.

The biggest U.S. PPE distributor, McKesson MCK, +1.17%, paid out 115% of its profits to shareholders in the same period, with 100% of profits distributed as buybacks. The second biggest, Cardinal Health CAH, +1.97%, paid out 101% and 57%, respectively, said the report.

“It’s well past time for these executives and directors to recognize their responsibility for the failure of corporate America to deal with the key social crises of our times: pathogen pandemics, income equity, and climate change,” the authors wrote.

About the Author

Ciara Linnaneis MarketWatch's investing- and corporate-news editor. She is based in