SIMON WOLFE: World has been silent while African prize falls to pieces

Could it be that a policy of even-handedness had gone too far?

08 NOVEMBER 2021 - SIMON WOLFEBUSINESS DAY SOUTH AFRICA

At the time of writing last Monday, rebel forces were steadily advancing on Addis Ababa and nine factions have reportedly formed a political alliance to “push for a political transition in Ethiopia”. It looks like the game is up for Nobel peace prize laureate and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

Abiy launched a full-scale military assault on the Tigray region in response to an attack by the Tigray People Liberation’s Front (TPLF) on army headquarters in November 2020. With military support from Eritrea, a long-time foe of the TPLF, he promised a swift victory. A year later, Abiy stands on a precipice. He declared a state of emergency on Wednesday and called on former soldiers to defend the capital against a possible attack.

The humanitarian situation in Tigray is overwhelming. There are credible reports of thousands of deaths and more than 1-million people displaced. The UN says aid supplies have not entered the region since mid-October. It is facing widespread famine.

This week a joint investigation by the UN and an Ethiopian state-appointed human rights commission found “serious abuses and violations of human rights, humanitarian and refugee law” by all sides, and said it “has reasonable grounds to believe that a number of these violations may amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes”.

The attack on Tigray in 2020 was a major miscalculation by the federal forces. The TPLF, which ran the country for 27 years, had no intention of folding. “PM Abiy threw an ill-trained peasant army against a battle-hardened, formidable army with an iron will to fight and expected to win,” said Rashid Abdi, a Horn of Africa expert. Last week’s takeover of Dessie and Kombolcha by TPLF forces, which gives them access to an airport, and the alliance with the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) is likely to change the balance of power.

With 100-million people and two decades of double-digit economic growth, Ethiopia plays a central role in the stability and security of the Horn of Africa. Its unravelling threatens a region that has already seen a military coup in Sudan in October and flailing regimes in South Sudan and Somalia.

Early on in his administration, US President Joe Biden addressed the AU summit of African presidents and reaffirmed his commitment to the continent. US support for Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as the head of the World Trade Organization, the interest in the African Continental Free Trade Area, and the strongly worded statements by US secretary of state Antony Blinken against human rights abuses, indicated that America was truly “back”.

Events last week suggest the US dropped the ball. Up to now, the US deployed diplomacy and gentle threats to ease the tensions between the two sides. It refrained from singling out responsibility in an attempt to stay neutral. On Tuesday, the US finally made a move. Biden announced a suspension of Ethiopia’s special duty-free access in January 2022 under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), telling the US Congress that “Ethiopia’s “gross violations of internationally recognised human rights” made it ineligible for Agoa under the law.

If this suspension is enforced it would affect Ethiopia’s exports to the US of up to $200m each year. In response, and as a result of the TPLF’s march towards the capital, Ethiopia’s sovereign dollar bond and its Eurobonds plunged on Wednesday.

Other world leaders have finally woken up. The AU has been conspicuously absent to date, but the threat of Addis Ababa falling to the rebels has sent shock waves through the region, especially in Kenya where the fear is that the conflict will spill over the border.

The AU said on Thursday that commission chair Moussa Faki Mahamat had met the US special envoy, Jeffrey Feltman, “to discuss efforts towards dialogue and political solutions to the conflict”. The UN Security Council reiterated calls for calm. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni called for an East African Intergovernmental Authority on Development  meeting on November 16. It may be too little, too late.

Could it be that a policy of even-handedness went too far, even when reports from Tigray of aid blockages, famine, deaths, rapes and other human right violations made it clear the situation was unbearable? Could it be that the international community could not stomach the idea that a Nobel peace prize laureate had taken the country down the wrong path?

Even Facebook staked out a position — much to the anger of the Ethiopian government. It removed Abiy’s post on Wednesday that called on his fellow countrymen to “organise and march through [any] legal manner with every weapon and power ... to prevent, reverse and bury the terrorist TPLF”. A Meta spokesperson said it violated “our policies against inciting and supporting violence”. Social media has stoked ethnic tensions throughout the year.

What happens next is unclear. The ideal scenario would be for the two sides to lay down arms and reach agreement. That does not seem likely. There is talk of Abiy being deposed by his own government. He is seen as an increasing liability. The TPLF and OLA could capture Addis Ababa, but they would not have legitimacy to rule. They lost the seat of power in 2018 for good reason. The possibility of a broad political alliance to prepare for a post-Abiy transition may be the most promising option of stopping the bloodshed — if the more than 80 ethnic groups in Ethiopia can agree. 

Peaceful transitions are hard. Zambia is one of the few recent examples of a successful transfer of power with the election of Hakainde Hichilema in August 2021. Even then, it was far from certain that the incumbent, Edgar Lungu, would step down without a fight. Sudan, once feted for toppling Omar al-Bashir in 2019, is now in crisis. South Sudan fell into civil war just two years after independence. Most transitions in the region end in tragedy.

As the TPLF circles and Abiy entrenches his position, the world must act. It needs to use its diplomatic, financial and military powers to avert disaster. The fate of Ethiopia hangs in the balance.

• Wolfe, an international lawyer based in the UK, is MD of Marlow Strategy.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk faces probe for insulting Turkey’s founder

Following an Istanbul court’s decision to launch an investigation into “Nights of Plague,” the recent novel by Orhan Pamuk, many writers and activists are rallying to support the Nobel laureate.

Turkish author and Nobel Prize in literature winner Orhan Pamuk attends the Vargas Llosa: Cultura, Ideas Y Libertad seminar at Casa de America on March 30, 2016, in Madrid, Spain. - Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images

Nazlan Ertan
@NazlanEr

November 9, 2021

Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s only Nobel Prize laureate in literature, faces judicial investigation once again after an Istanbul court decided to follow up on charges that Pamuk’s most recent novel, “Nights of Plague,” insults Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk.

The charges are being brought by Tarcan Uluk, a lawyer from the Aegean port city of Izmir, who says that Kolagasi Kamil, one of the main characters in the historical fiction, is a thinly veiled avatar of Turkey’s founder. “Nights of Plague” is set in Minger, an imaginary, multiethnic and multifaith Ottoman island on the Aegean Sea in 1901, as a pandemic hits the island and quarantine measures are imposed.

“The figure of Kamil (an ambitious and single-minded military officer whose meteoric rise makes him the president of the island) mocks the figure of Ataturk,” Uluk told Al-Monitor, explaining that he filed a criminal complaint to Izmir’s chief prosecutor’s office shortly after the novel came out based on penal code articles that protect Ataturk and national symbols of Turkey. “We demanded that this novel, which insults Ataturk and the Turkish flag … [be] pulled off the shelves immediately.”

Izmir prosecutors have passed the file to Istanbul on the grounds that the publisher of the novel was based there. Following the testimony of the author, the prosecutors decided on nonprosecution.

“We then appealed the nonprosecution, and a night court ruled earlier this week after studying the file that the investigation would be reopened," said Uluk, who defines himself as a staunch Turkish nationalist and an unyielding Kemalist. “I have to see the official verdict of the court yet, but I assure you that we will pursue the case till the end.”

Many activists, lawyers, artists and writers came out to extend their support to Pamuk and express their anger at the reversal of the nonprosecution decision, calling it a “disgrace.” The first reaction came from pianist Fazil Say. “The decision of nonprosecution given against him is reversed and an investigation is launched,” he tweeted, posting a photo of himself with Pamuk in 2005. “It is a disgrace for the country; it is total ignorance and archaism. What has been done to one of the world's most well-known authors is back to the dark ages.”

Zeynep Oral, the chair of PEN Turkey, expressed disbelief that the investigation was reopened. “Investigation on Orhan Pamuk? Wow. It is the jurists who do not read, who fail to understand what they read and cannot understand the basics of fiction that cause all the harm to this country,” she tweeted.

Oral’s words refer to other Turkish authors who had to face a judge to defend fictional characters. In 2006, writer Elif Shafak had to appear before a court to defend herself against charges of “insulting Turkishness” due to a comment made by one of the characters in her novel, “The Bastard of Istanbul.” Kemal Kerincsiz, a nationalist lawyer, had taken on Shafak for the remarks of a minor character, who said, “My father is Barsam Tchakhmakhchian, my great-uncle is Dikran Stamboulian … all my family tree has been Something Somethingian, and I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives in the hands of Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustapha!”

Kerincsiz was also the name behind the 2005 trial of Pamuk for “insulting Turkishness” by telling a Swiss journal that “a million Armenians had been killed in these lands.” The case against Pamuk had been dropped on the first hearing.

When Pamuk’s “Night of Plague” was released in March, many nationalist and Islamist pundits rapped him for what they called the likeness between Kamil and Kemal Ataturk, accusing Pamuk of trying to curry favor with the West by attacking Turkey and Ataturk. Finally, Yapi Kredi Yayincilik (YKY), Orhan Pamuk’s publisher, issued a press release in April denying that the book belittled Ataturk, saying that Kamil was “a heroic figure for the people of the fictional island of Minger.”

The YKY release also included a statement that quoted Pamuk as saying that the novel, on which he worked for five years, “shows no disrespect to Ataturk and the heroic founders of the nation-states established from the ashes of Empire.”

“On the contrary, the novel was written with respect and admiration for these libertarian and heroic leaders. As those who read the book will see, Kamil is a hero of many virtues who is loved by the public,” Pamuk said in the release. According to the Turkish press reports, this was very much in line with the statement made to the prosecutor on charges brought by Uluk.

“It is tragicomic to invite a Nobel laureate to elaborate on the characters in his novel, to get him to comment, shed light or dismiss any resemblance to figures in power now or in the past. Such actions are in contradiction on freedom of expression, which … I believe should much more concern us than giving so-called protection to the people in power,” said Orhan Kemal Cengiz, a human rights lawyer and commentator for Al-Monitor.

In an interview with independent news outlet Bianet in August, Pamuk said, “Kamil opposes the sultan, feudalism and the old regime when he says ‘long live freedom.’ The biggest, most magical, most powerful ideological concept is freedom. We understand that when Kamil calls out to the crowd in the square saying ‘long live freedom.’ This, of course, refers to lack of freedoms in today’s Turkey.”

Read more: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2021/11/nobel-laureate-orhan-pamuk-faces-probe-insulting-turkeys-founder#ixzz7Bnlp5PK0

Myanmar charges US journalist with terrorism, sedition



Fenster was detained in May as he attempted to board a plane in Yangon (AFP/-)

Tue, November 9, 2021, 9:50 PM·3 min read

Myanmar's junta has charged a US journalist detained since May with sedition and terrorism, which carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, his lawyer said Wednesday.

The military has squeezed the press since taking power in a February coup, arresting dozens of journalists critical of its crackdown on dissent that has killed over 1,200 people, according to a local monitoring group.

Danny Fenster, who had been working for local outlet Frontier Myanmar for around a year, was arrested as he was heading home to see his family in May and has been held in Yangon's Insein prison since.

The 37-year-old is already on trial for allegedly encouraging dissent against the military, unlawful association and breaching immigration law.

The additional charges under Myanmar's anti-terror and sedition laws open Fenster up to a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The trial is scheduled to begin on November 16.

"He has become quite thin," Than Zaw Aung said.

Fenster was "disappointed" at being hit with the new charges, which were filed on Tuesday, the lawyer added.

They come days after former US diplomat and hostage negotiator Bill Richardson met junta chief Min Aung Hlaing in the capital Naypyidaw, handing the increasingly isolated junta some rare publicity.

Richardson has previously negotiated the release of prisoners and US servicemen in North Korea, Cuba, Iraq and Sudan and has recently sought to free US-affiliated inmates in Venezuela.

The former UN ambassador said he was hopeful he had brokered a deal for a resumption of visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross to prisons -- which have been filled with political prisoners.

Richardson, declining to give further details, said the US State Department asked him not to raise Fenster's case during his visit.

"Danny's case has become emblematic of the utter contempt Myanmar's military has for independent media," Emerlynne Gil, Amnesty International's deputy regional director for research, said in a statement.

"These harsh new charges only further highlight the clumsy attempt to prosecute an independent journalist who should be freed immediately and unconditionally so he can be reunited with his family and friends."

- Press clampdown -

Fenster is believed to have contracted Covid-19 during his detention, family members said during a conference call with American journalists in August.

He last spoke with US consular officials by phone on October 31, State Department spokesman Ned Price said Monday, adding Washington remained "deeply concerned over his continued detention".

The Southeast Asian country has been mired in chaos since the military ousted Aung San Suu Kyi's elected government, with the junta trying to crush widespread democracy protests and stamp out dissent.

The military has tightened control over the flow of information, throttling internet access and revoking the licences of local media outlets.

Several journalists critical of the military government were among those released last month in a junta amnesty to mark a Buddhist festival.

More than 100 journalists have been arrested since the putsch, according to Reporting ASEAN, a monitoring group.

It says 31 are still in detention.

The coup snuffed out the country's short-lived experiment with democracy, with civilian leader Suu Kyi now facing a raft of charges in a junta court that could see her jailed for decades.

bur-rma/pdw/axn

COP26 has ‘mountain to climb’ to curb warming as talks intensify

By Kate Abnett and William JamesPosted on November 9, 2021

FILE PHOTO: Women carry sacks on their heads as they walk through water, after heavy rains and floods forced hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes, in the town of Pibor, Boma stat

GLASGOW, Scotland (Reuters) -The president of the U.N. climate talks https://www.reuters.com/business/cop said on Tuesday there was still a mountain to climb towards a goal of capping the global temperature rise at 1.5 Celsius, as a research group said existing pledges would allow the Earth to warm far beyond that.

Britain’s Alok Sharma told reporters that COP26 officials would soon publish the first draft of the so-called cover decision, which summarises the commitments of more than 190 countries, in a bid to focus minds in the three days remaining.

Climate activists and experts will pore over the document looking for items such as timelines to phase out public subsidies of fossil fuels, or provide long-promised funds to help poor countries tackle climate change.

These and a raft of other complex issues to be hammered out will determine whether the two-week Glasgow summit can succeed in keeping within reach the 1.5C ceiling considered vital to avoid catastrophic climate consequences.

“We are making progress at COP26 but we still have a mountain to climb over the next few days,” said Sharma.

The European Union’s climate policy chief, Frans Timmermans, delivered a similarly blunt message, telling reporters, “the honest truth is we’re not where we want to be, not even close.”

The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) research group put a sobering number on the size of the task at hand, saying that all the national pledges submitted so far to cut greenhouse gases by 2030 would allow the Earth’s temperature to rise 2.4C from pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Scientists say 1.5C – the aspirational goal set down in the 2015 Paris Agreement – is the most the Earth can afford to avoid an acceleration of the intense heat waves, droughts, storms, floods and crop failures it is already experiencing.

RISING SEAS

Underscoring the stakes for vulnerable nations, the tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu said it was looking at legal ways to keep ownership of its maritime zones and recognition as a state even if it is engulfed by rising seas.

“We’re actually imagining a worst-case scenario where we are forced to relocate or our lands are submerged,” its foreign minister, Simon Kofe, told Reuters.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who opened the COP26 eight days ago and attended the first two days, will return to the conference on Wednesday, his spokesperson said.

To meet the 1.5C goal, the United Nations wants to achieve “net zero” – where no more greenhouse gases are emitted than can simultaneously be absorbed – by 2050.

And it says that will be impossible unless emissions – mostly of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and gas – are cut 45% from 2010 levels by 2030.

“Even with all new Glasgow pledges for 2030, we will emit roughly twice as much in 2030 as required for 1.5°C,” CAT said.

China, the world’s largest emitter, says it will achieve net zero only in 2060, the same year as major oil and gas producer Russia. India, another large-scale polluter, has a target date ten years later.

Moreover, CAT explicitly warned against assuming that longer-term “net zero” pledges would even be met, since most countries have not yet implemented the short-term policies or legislation needed.

“It’s all very well for leaders to claim they have a net zero target, but if they have no plans as to how to get there, and their 2030 targets are as low as so many of them are, then frankly, these ‘net zero’ targets are just lip service to real climate action,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, one of the organisations behind the CAT.

Sharma acknowledged as much, saying: “The world needs confidence that we will shift immediately into implementation, that the pledges made here will be delivered, and that the policies and investment will swiftly follow.”

WEAK DEAL OR NO DEAL?

A key pillar of climate action is carbon pricing and trading – mechanisms that force polluters to pay a market price for their emissions, or pay others to offset them, by planting trees that bind carbon or investing in cleaner power.

COP26 is supposed to create a global framework for carbon pricing, but the problem has defeated the last two climate summits, and is in danger of proving insurmountable in Glasgow too.

“There’s a higher chance of getting a deal this time, but it could be very weak,” said Gilles Dufrasne, a policy officer with Carbon Market Watch. “Having no deal might hence be an acceptable outcome.”

Many campaigners including Greenpeace oppose the use of carbon offsets under any circumstances, saying they lessen the incentives for polluters to change their habits, and risk paying for changes elsewhere that would have happened anyway.

“Net zero does not mean zero,” warned Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator for ActionAid International. “In the majority of cases, these corporations … are planning to carry on business as usual ” for long periods, she added.

https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/more-net-than-zero-do-carbon-cutting-promises-add-up-climate-2021-11-09

But some say things could be worse, noting how U.S. President Joe Biden had promptly returned the world’s second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter to the Paris Agreement, from which his predecessor Donald Trump had withdrawn, and pushed a $555 billion climate package through Congress.

Democratic U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez underlined the more constructive U.S. approach at the Glasgow conference on Tuesday.

“We’re just here to say that we’re not just back. We’re different and we’re more just. And we are more open-minded to questioning prior assumptions of what is politically possible,” she said.

(Reporting by Kate Abnett and William James in GlasgowAdditional reporting by Shadia Nasralla and Stefica Nicol BikesWriting by Kevin Liffey, Gavin Jones and Richard ValdmanisEditing by Philippa Fletcher, Alexander Smith and Matthew Lewis)

New report warns COP26 negotiators that new pledges are inadequate

Andrew Freedman

AXIOS


Climate change activists dressed as world leaders, pose for a photograph during a demonstration in the Forth and Clyde Canal in Glasgow on November 9, 2021, during the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference. (Andy Buchanan/AFP via Getty Images)

GLASGOW, Scotland -- A new analysis released during the COP26 climate summit finds that despite additional countries' pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050, nations are still on a course to be emitting twice the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 than would be consistent with the Paris Agreement's more ambitious temperature target.

Why it matters: As negotiators work this week to hammer out the text of a climate agreement, they are now more aware of the large gap that exists between commitments to date and what is needed to avert far worse climate change impacts.

Driving the news: The new analysis comes from the Climate Action Tracker, a nonprofit group that keeps tabs on nations' pledges to cut emissions and calculates the climate change that would result if those voluntary commitments are met.

The group found that the world is now on a path to warm by 2.4°C (4.32°F), when looking only at 2030 targets. However, based on a continuation of current policies (i.e. what's happening in the real world), the group found the globe will likely warm by about 2.7°C (4.86°F) compared to preindustrial levels by 2100.

Such warming would be inconsistent with the Paris Agreement's target of keeping warming to "well below" 2°C, with the stretch goal of limiting it to 1.5°C.

The negotiations in Glasgow are aimed in large part at keeping the 1.5-degree goal viable, with officials speaking of keeping "1.5 alive."

"Even with all new Glasgow pledges for 2030, we will emit roughly twice as much in 2030 as required for 1.5 [degrees]," the Tracker's analysis states.

The intrigue: The new numbers are already being discussed in Glasgow, adding additional urgency to the work of negotiators from nearly 200 countries.

"There have been obviously a number of reports that have come out over the past few days and I suspect there will be further reports that come out," COP President Alok Sharma said at a press conference Tuesday. "What I think they will be demonstrating is that there's been some progress but clearly not enough."

The bottom line: The net zero targets, which more than 140 countries have announced, are subjected to particular scrutiny in the Tracker's analysis, since most countries have not offered plans to get from where they are today to net zero.

“It’s all very well for leaders to claim they have a net zero target, but if they have no plans as to how to get there, and their 2030 targets are as low as so many of them are, then frankly, these net zero targets are just lip service to real climate action, said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, a Climate Action Tracker partner organization, in a statement.

 
"Glasgow has a serious credibility gap."

Gavin Newsom Skips U.N. Conference and Attends Oil Heiress' Wedding, Faces Backlash

BY JUSTIN KLAWANS ON 11/9/21

California Governor Gavin Newsom has received some backlash after being spotted at the wedding of oil heiress Ivy Getty in San Francisco over the weekend, despite canceling a trip to a recent climate change summit.

Getty, 26, is the great-granddaughter of oil baron J. Paul Getty and heiress to one of the wealthiest fortunes in California history.

Newsom attended the wedding after having not been seen at a public event in the 13 previous days. He had been scheduled to appear at the United Nations' COP26 Climate Conference in Scotland, but scratched it off his agenda at the end of October.

Some criticism was angled towards Newsom after various outlets documented the opulent nature of the wedding compared to the message being sent by COP26. The wedding included a number of high-society engagements at the Getty Mansion, a DJ party with Earth, Wind and Fire, and a lavish ceremony at San Francisco City Hall.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has come under fire for attending an opulent wedding for a member of the Getty family. Here, Newsom can be seen giving a speech in California.

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY

A number of other politicians attended, including San Francisco Mayor London Breed and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who presided over the ceremony. Numerous high-profile celebrities were also spotted, including singer Olivia Rodrigo and The Queen's Gambit star Anya Taylor-Joy, who served as Getty's maid of honor.

While Newsom's office did not officially confirm that the governor was in attendance, a picture was snapped of a figure that appeared to be Newsom watching the ceremony.

Washington Post national correspondent Philip Bump tweeted that the wedding was a "powerful editorial in support of a wealth tax."

Critics were quick to point out that, given the Getty's wealth from oil profits, Newsom's attendance at the lavish wedding seemingly went against the Democratic Party's green platform, specifically President Joe Biden's climate change initiatives seen in his reconciliation bill.

Some outlets speculated that Newsom's absence at COP26 could have been due to a negative reaction to the COVID-19 booster shot he received before the trip. His office, however, told Newsweek that this was not the case, and that Newsom had simply canceled the trip to spend time with his children over Halloween.

COP26 took place from November 1 to November 3, meaning that Newsom would have theoretically had time to fly to Scotland for the conference and attend the wedding.

READ MORE
Newsom's Wife Tells Critics 'Get a Life' After Governor Cancels U.N. Trip
Newsom to Make First Public Appearance in Weeks Amid Questions Over Absence
Gavin Newsom Says He Canceled U.N. Trip After Family 'Intervention'

Despite not being physically present, Newsom did participate in COP26, with his office issuing a statement that "[Newsom] will instead be participating virtually, focusing on California's landmark climate change policies."

Newsom likely attended the wedding due to his history with the Getty family. The Sacramento Bee documented how Newsom grew up around the family, and was by their side for a large portion of his political career. Speaker Pelosi, a representative for California, also has a close relationship with the Getty family.

Newsweek has reached out to Governor Newsom's office for comment.

Eternals Character Causes A 250% Increase In People Wanting To Learn Sign Language

Stewart Perrie 10 November.2021

Makkari is the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first ever deaf superhero and her presence in Eternals has been praised.

Fans have gone wild for the super fast immortal because it provides visibility to the deaf community and shows how they can be included in huge blockbuster movies.

Her inclusion in Marvel's latest film has caused a huge spike in people wanting to learn sign language.

Preply claims there has been a 250 per cent increase in online searchers for 'learn sign language for beginners' ever since Makkari's character was announced.

Lauren Ridloff played Makkari in the film and is deaf in real life. She was overwhelmed to see how big her impact is on the world.

She wrote on Twitter: "This is great. Do learn sign language from Deaf/HoH teachers/content creators."

The actor added: "What would be even more amazing is to see Google offer up courses by Deaf teachers!! Best to learn straight from the source-people who sign daily!"

She was praised by fellow Eternals star Kumail Nanjiani, who is also Marvel's first ever Pakistani superhero.

"This is amazing. Look what you did Lauren Ridloff!" he wrote on social media.

Ridloff's co-stars all learned American sign language so that they could communicate and understand her on set as well as accurately portray their lines to her in the movie.

She also explained how she 'cried tears of joy' watching her co-stars use sign language on the big screen knowing that it was going to be seen by millions of people around the world.

Credit: Marvel

The actor told Variety: "It was definitely life changing. And I hope that this has the same impact on different communities, people who have been marginalized or are underrepresented in this industry."

Ridloff also revealed that an entirely new set of sign language hand movements were created for the Eternals script.

There aren't any ASL (American Sign Language) movements for some of the characters names, so Ridloff worked alongside her husband, Douglas, who was used as an ASL consultant for the film, to address this shortfall, according to Tech Radar.

She told the outlet: "[Our director] Chloé Zhao doesn't know American Sign Language. So we had to work out how we'd be able to direct the cast and what they [signing each Eternal's name] would look like on screen.

"Our ASL consultant happened to be my husband, who also worked on A Quiet Place and its sequel.

"He and I worked with Chloé to give those nuances of what looked good on screen and to come up with specific signs for each character, which the entire cast and Chloé could use."

Featured Image Credit: Marvel

Topics: Entertainment, TV and Film

EVEN FAUX ARISTOCRATS GET IT 
Duchess of Sussex calls paid family leave a 'humanitarian issue'

The Duchess of Sussex wants all Americans to receive paid family leave.


9 November 2021

The Duchess of Sussex considers paid family leave to be a "humanitarian issue".


The Duchess of Sussex AKA MEGAN MARKLE  has called for change

The 40-year-old Duchess - who has Archie, two, and Lilibet, five months, with her husband Prince Harry - discussed the subject during the New York Times DealBook summit, insisting that campaigning for paid family leave for all Americans wasn't a political issue.

Speaking to Andrew Sorkin in New York City, she explained: "I don't see this as a political issue, frankly. There is a precedent among my husband's family, the royal family, of not having any involvement in politics. From my standpoint, this is a humanitarian issue.

"My husband has always said with great privilege comes great responsibility and before I had any kind of privilege, I always stood up for what was right. I've been gone from the US for a really long time, I was in Canada for seven years then I went to the UK. I've come back and I'm a mother of two.

"The US is one of only six countries in the world that didn't offer any kind of paid national level. I said, 'let me put pen to paper and make some calls.' To me it seems like a really logical and obvious thing to do."

The former 'Suits' actress - who married Prince Harry in 2018 - noted that lawmakers are often "surprised" to hear from her.

However, she also thinks they've been receptive towards her.

The Duchess said: "I introduce myself - these calls are not planned calls, right - I just get the phone number and I call. Yes, people are pretty surprised, I think. This is one of those issues that's not red or blue, we can all agree that people need support."

She also insisted that fame and success hasn't altered her outlook.

She shared: "I still see myself as the same as I have always been. I've always been a hard worker, people that know me well some of whom are here today know that, I've just always been the same.

"If you are grounded in who you are ... I show up in the same way that I always have

THE NEW P3

Call it the new world of "spooky finance"

In Silicon Valley, a new breed of investors is seeking closer ties to America’s military and spy agencies


Zach Dorfman
·National Security Correspondent
Thu, November 4, 2021

The Eye of Providence, or all-seeing eye, on a one-dollar bill. (Getty Images)

A budding group of venture capital firms and investors are working with the CIA and other U.S. intelligence and military agencies in an attempt to help shape the future of Silicon Valley, ensuring companies produce innovations useful for national security while avoiding funding from potential adversaries like China.

Call it the new world of "spooky finance."

These firms — like New North Ventures, Harpoon, Scout Ventures, and Razor's Edge — are often themselves staffed by former U.S. intelligence and military officials, and sometimes work together to cofund national-security-related startups in areas such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and next-generation communications.

The new world of "spooky finance" reveals an increasingly tight relationship between venture capital firms and U.S. spy and military agencies, which have long sought to tap into Silicon Valley’s technology base.

“What you’re seeing, and it’s basically been developing over time, is an ‘intelligence-industrial base,’” says Ronald Marks, a visiting professor at George Mason University and a former CIA officer.

“You had a military-industrial base before — now, you’ve got an intelligence-industrial base,” says Marks. “Why? Because, let’s face it: All the intel stuff together now is, like, 86 billion dollars. It’s the third-largest part of the discretionary budget of the United States. That’s a lot of money; that’s a Fortune 100 company.”

Greater coordination between Silicon Valley and Washington’s national security bureaucracies is much needed, according to Heather Richman, founder of the Defense Investor Network, a Silicon Valley-based group that connects senior officials from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies with venture capital firms and startups doing work with national security applications.

The Defense Investor Network is focused on “educating investors to stop taking Chinese money and be more transparent about who their LPs [limited partners] are,” says Richman. “We’re trying to get to investors and the companies before this becomes an issue.”

Colleagues discussing their financial plans. (Getty Images)

Richman has also pulled together a network of private investors who work together to try to weed out any “nefarious or adversarial ownership” from foreign countries — particularly hidden Chinese investment — before providing financial backing to the startups, she says.

“We call it ‘cap [capitalization] table exorcism’ — we’re actually going in there and removing people on boards and buying them out,” says Richman.

Inevitably, investors have followed the money. The Defense Investor Network has members from all the countries within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance — the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, and New Zealand — and includes a former Australian prime minister, as well as behemoths from the Silicon Valley venture capital world, Including Greylock Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, as well as smaller dual-use venture firms and family offices, according to Richman.

“I feel like it’s every week I hear about two more [dual-use-focused venture capital funds] being launched, which is awesome,” Richman says.

A military service member at a computer in a control center. (Getty Images)

In some instances, the dual-use-focused firms leverage their connections within the U.S. intelligence community to procure contracts for the companies they fund, since the firms’ employees have an insider’s understanding of the technology gaps that the agencies are racing to close.

“The side door or the back door” to the intelligence agencies “is where all the big stuff, and the stuff that’s most important, really happens” when it comes to technology, says Brett Davis, a partner at New North Ventures, a national security-focused venture capital fund, who spent 34 years in the CIA and special operations world.

If it’s a technology priority for them, intelligence agencies are willing to cut through the red tape. “CIA totally gets it and is comfortable working with private industry and has a lot of authorities to do fast contracting, small teams, due diligence, and get contracts in place,” says Davis.

While the startups are receiving contracts within the classified realm, intelligence and military agencies understand that the companies will convert some of the lessons they've learned within the government into their commercial technologies, according to Davis. Intelligence and military agencies will also co-locate personnel and other resources with employees from these startups, which can give the tech companies a leg up.

“You’re able to outpace the commercial competition, because you’re working on the hardest issues that CIA and JSOC are working on,” says Davis, referring to the military's Joint Special Operations Command. "So the company is benefiting along the way, and the CIA and JSOC, they want to be able to defray some of their costs by these companies doing stuff in the commercial world.”

Sometimes, the dual-use-oriented firms will identify military or intelligence applications for a startup’s products, of which the company didn’t even conceive, according to Larsen Jensen, a co-founder of Harpoon and a former Navy SEAL.

“We help to educate founders and their boards in terms of the scope and opportunity in the federal market, and not just in the national security setting,” says Jensen, whose firm has helped secure contracts for companies it funds at Special Operations Command, the Air Force, Space Force, and Veterans Affairs.

A stock market price ticker board. (Getty Images)

The big data analytics firm Palantir serves as a model for some in the "spooky finance" world. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s own venture fund for emerging technologies, was an early investor in Palantir, a software firm founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. In-Q-Tel has long sought to market its products to spy and military agencies and big business alike. Palantir went public in 2020 with an initial valuation of about $22 billion, although it continues to face scrutiny over its appraisal.

“Palantir is the 800-pound gorilla,” says Davis. “That’s the company that opened everybody’s eyes” to the potential value of dual-use-oriented startups.

“Those of us on the intel side, we were like, ‘This is completely intuitive and obvious.’” says Davis. “People said, ‘This came out of nowhere,’ and we were like, ‘No, it didn’t.”

Relations between Silicon Valley and U.S. spy agencies have come a long way since the 2013 Snowden disclosures, when many tech firms tried to create as much distance as possible — at least publicly — from Washington, according to Marks, the former CIA official.

“As they’ve grown older, they see [government] as an opportunity; it’s ‘We gotta work with these guys,’” says Marks. Tech firms realized, he says, “‘F*** you’ is not a policy, it’s the start of a barroom fight.”

U.S. spy agencies have coveted new technologies for decades. But many intelligence officials now believe advances in technology are fundamentally altering the practice of spying.

The push to give the U.S. a tech-generated espionage edge has become a key CIA priority under the directorship of Bill Burns. In October, Burns announced that the agency was creating a “Transnational and Technology Mission Center” to “address global issues critical to U.S. competitiveness — including new and emerging technologies, economic security, climate change, and global health.”

Burns’s announcement follows the standing up in 2020 of CIA Labs, which created an “in-house research and development arm” within CIA, designed to encourage agency employees to collaborate with academics and private sector researchers on emerging technologies.

A woman looks at financial graphs on a computer. (Getty Images)

The CIA has long kept a finger in Silicon Valley with In-Q-Tel, but in 2015, the Pentagon founded the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which also tries to identify and fund technologies with uses in the national security space. Since then, roughly half a dozen other specialized units within the Pentagon have sprung up to ostensibly circumvent bureaucracy and fund technological innovation.

But the national security-focused venture capital firms — with their access to greater, unconstrained resources — may be able to leapfrog even these government-backed attempts to slash red tape, according to its boosters.

And this symbiotic relationship between the U.S. national security apparatus and finance may evolve into a de facto sort of industrial policy, something traditionally considered anathema to U.S. free-market principles but garnering increasing bipartisan support because of China’s perceived advantages in government-backed research and development.

This was a driving force behind the creation of the Defense Investor Network, according to Richman. The network “​​brings together a trusted community — these two worlds [of U.S. national security agencies and venture capital] have to start working in lockstep together,” says Richman, or the U.S. will risk being overtaken by China in the technological arms race.

“The metrics are saying that within the last 8 to 10 years there are over 3,000 companies within the top five areas of national security that have significant Chinese investment, because that’s what they’ve targeted,” says Richman. “Can I remove Chinese capital from 3,000 companies? No. Can I take out the top five [companies] and [focus on them] over the next six months? Yes I can.”

Some national security-focused tech startups are keenly aware of the great power dynamics surrounding their work.

“In the U.S., we’re kind of evolving toward a whole-of-nation approach to economics and national security, which is something I would argue the Chinese and Israelis have aggressively embraced in the last decade and are significantly ahead of us,” says Steven Witt, the co-founder of Anno.Ai, an artificial intelligence startup, and a former CIA official. (Anno.Ai has received funding from New North Ventures and Scout Ventures, among other firms.)

A CIA employee works at a computer. (Getty Images)

Anno.Ai’s “genesis was a CIA program about four or five years ago,” says Witt. A group of former agency officials realized that, contrary to conventional wisdom, they had leapfrogged private industry on some artificial-intelligence-related capabilities while they were at the CIA, and believed they could take these insights and apply them commercially, according to Witt.

Startups like Anno.Ai market their products to the national security bureaucracy and businesses alike. The same AI programs that can help filter and interpret data for Pentagon agencies can be used to, say, analyze economic activity at a granular level within urban areas for real estate firms, according to Witt, who says the company currently has clients in this space. (On the government side, Anno.Ai is under contract with the Air Force; Witt declined to discuss the company’s other federal clients.)

“With the war on terror and investments we made over the last 20 years, we deployed so many sensors all over the world that are collecting tremendous amounts of data. If we hired every single U.S. citizen, we still wouldn’t be able to process all that data in a timely manner,” says Witt. “So building these machine learning algorithms out is helping identify things of interest while they’re still relevant.”

Anno.Ai is working on something called “multi-modal sensor fusion” — essentially, the development of machine learning programs that can collect and interpret data across a wide range of platforms simultaneously, with the different sensors teaching each other to recognize patterns and objects.

“In the machine learning space today there’s a lot of focus on video camera data, but [that’s a] really a human-centric view of the world,” says Witt. “In reality there are so many kinds of sensor types that can take advantage of machine learning capabilities, like acoustic, radar, lidar, hyperspectral, biological” and others. Anno.Ai is currently experimenting with roughly three dozen sensor types, according to Witt.

So the same technology that may be used to understand anomalies in foot traffic in a city’s downtown for real estate valuation purposes could, in theory, also be contracted out by a three-letter government agency to analyze patterns of activity in another country that point to an illicit nuclear program.

The U.S. Pentagon building. (Getty Images)

The focus of startups like Anno.Ai on appealing both to government and private businesses underscores a fundamental dynamic within the "spooky finance" sector: These startups, and the venture firms and investors who fund them, are designed to make money. Supporters see it as part of a larger wave of “impact investing” — in areas like climate change and energy — that evangelizes the idea that investors can do well while doing good.

“It’s a low bar” for investors, says Richman. “I'm asking them not to do bad for their country” by directing their funding away from companies with sketchy, and often hidden, foreign investment, and toward startups with a clean bill of health, she says. “I’m trying to shame them into acting appropriately.”

Richman believes that coordinating or nudging private investment toward the Pentagon's or intelligence agencies' priorities represents a necessary evolution in the relationship between the private sector and government.

“We need to be building defense capabilities outside the Department of Defense,” says Richman. “So if there’s a situation where it should be something solved by the private capital markets, let's do that; let’s enable that.”

US Literary star Viet Thanh Nguyen on the roots of identity politics

Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling 'The Sympathizer'

 (AFP/Martin BUREAU)


Alexandra DEL PERAL
Tue, November 9, 2021, 11:11 PM·3 min read


By offering up a new perspective on US and French imperialism, Viet Thanh Nguyen has become a literary star.

But the Pulitzer-winning author insists that reducing everything to identity politics misses the point about the horrors of the past, and how to move forward.

"I'm often called a Vietnamese-American writer, which I don't have a problem with," Nguyen told AFP.


"But I do have a problem with it when other writers are just called 'writers'.

"My books are not only speaking about Vietnamese issues. They are speaking about France, the US, and global issues like colonialism, racism and imperialism."

Nguyen won international acclaim for his million-selling 2015 novel "The Sympathizer" about a half-Vietnamese, half-French double agent during the Vietnam War, who later remains embedded among exiles in the United States.

He has followed it with a sequel, "The Committed", which follows the same character to France where he confronts discrimination and his own guilt over the violence in his past.

"The identity crises in France and the US are only symptoms, and if we focus on symptoms we don't understand the actual problems," Nguyen said.

"We wouldn't have these identity crises if it hadn't been for colonisation and conquest that brought these people to these countries."

- 'Painful memories' -

Nguyen was speaking to AFP ahead of the release of the French translation of "The Committed".

The novels have particular resonance in France -- the former colonial power in Vietnam, and a nation that has often seemed reluctant to question its imperial past.

"The French still have a really hard time dealing with not only the Algerian past but the Indo-Chinese past," Nguyen said.

He is sympathetic to these historical blind spots, however -- having suffered some of his own.

Born in Vietnam, Nguyen arrived in the US at the age of five.

He remembers little of his native country or the war, though the memory of being separated from his parents when he arrived at a refugee centre in the US has stayed with him.

"Sometimes painful memories can scar you forever," he said.

Nguyen blanked out his experience in the refugee camp for many years -- "as a survival mechanism".

"I'm fully aware that memory is very unreliable whether we're talking about personal or national memory, and every nation is deeply reluctant to recognise the crimes it has committed in the past."

- Doomed approaches -

Growing up in California, Nguyen found refuge in books and his own tentative steps at writing, though literature could also be a dangerous pastime.

"As a very precocious young reader, I would venture outside the children's section -- for instance reading books about the Vietnam War by American soldiers where the Vietnamese were depicted very negatively."

Those painful early encounters fuelled his later studies, and he has ended up specialising in postcolonial memory at the University of Southern California.

France's official approach to race is often contrasted with the US -- promoting the idea of universal liberal values rather than multi-culturalism.

For Nguyen, both systems are lacking.

"The French and American systems are doomed because they are both racist in their own way," he said.

"They cannot solve the problems unless they are able to address their history of slavery and colonialism."

adm/er/ah

 PATRIARCHY IS MISOGYNY & FEMICIDE

Azerbaijan activists sound alarm over wave of killings of women

Azerbaijani Dilara Bagiyeva says her husband abused her for years (AFP/Tofik BABAYEV)

Elman MAMEDOV
Tue, November 9, 2021, 11:20 PM·4 min read

Dilara Bagiyeva's face grew pale as she recounted how, after suffering abuse from her husband for a decade, he turned on their eight-year-old daughter in a drunken fit last year.

That evening in November, he returned home intoxicated to their 13th-floor apartment in Azerbaijan's capital Baku, beating Bagiyeva first in the bedroom, then the hallway and finally the kitchen, where he tried to throw her from the balcony.

Before the 41-year-old English teacher lost consciousness, she remembered her daughter Farah pleading: "Daddy, don't hit my mom."


When she came to, Farah was nowhere to be seen. Police who arrived at the scene shortly after refused to let Bagiyeva see the body.

"He dragged me out onto the balcony that night to throw me off. Instead, he threw my baby out the window," Bagiyeva said.

"She was my everything," she added, looking at a picture of her daughter on her phone.

Bagiyeva is among thousands of women subjected to domestic violence in Azerbaijan, where activists are sounding the alarm over femicide despite considerable barriers in the conservative Caspian Sea country.

Seventy-one women were killed in the ex-Soviet republic by husbands or male relatives last year and 48 more in the first eight months of 2021, the office of Azerbaijan's prosecutor general told AFP in an email.

The first Muslim nation to introduce universal suffrage in 1919, Azerbaijan is one of the most secular countries in the Islamic world.

But wives and daughters are often limited to carrying out family duties in its male-dominated society, which tolerates abuse against women.

- 'Fear of retribution' -

Officials said the approximately 2,000 cases of domestic violence against women that are reported annually are just the tip of the iceberg, as most victims remain silent.

"Many women don't phone the police for fear of retribution from family members," said Taliya Ibrahimova of the state committee for women's affairs.

The government last year adopted a four-year action plan to combat domestic violence that included setting up a hotline and a state-run shelter for victims.

Ibrahimova said a 2010 law to tackle domestic violence was being updated, and the violation would soon become a separate category of offence in the penal code.

But activists say the measures are not enough, and accuse the authoritarian government of President Ilham Aliyev of failing to protect women.

"Femicide is a political issue because tackling the problem requires political will," said Gulnara Mehdiyeva, a prominent women's rights activist.

She described Azerbaijan's political system as "despotic", and said the authorities "don't want citizens to know their rights".

Mehdiyeva said activists had come under pressure from conservative groups since March 8 last year, when they held their first rally to raise awareness of violence against women.

She said a pro-government website had even leaked recordings of her conversations with a friend "to portray me as a whore and to shame me".

There is a prevalent "negative attitude in society that accuses us of eroding family values", Mehdiyeva said.

The US embassy this year raised concerns over the killings of women, while the British embassy urged Azerbaijan to join the 2011 Istanbul Convention on combating violence against women and domestic violence.

Azerbaijan is among just a handful of countries that have not ratified the first legally binding international treaty to address the issue.

Azerbaijan activists sound alarm over wave of killings of womenDilara Bagiyeva says she will fight 'until my last breath' for justice for her daughter (AFP/Tofik BABAYEV)

- 'Until my last breath' -

The United Nations says Azerbaijan lacks the statistics to accurately track trends on women's rights, including on the pay gap and physical and sexual harassment.

But it noted that, as of February this year, women held only 18 percent of seats in parliament.

"Women lack the foundational representation in public office that would ensure that others hear their voices," the Borgen Project, a US-based women's rights group said last year.

Lawyer Zibeyda Sadikova said police "don't take seriously" women who report domestic abuse, but instead "shame and subject them to psychological pressure".

"Many women I try to convince to report (abuse) to the police say they already did, and the police told them to reconcile with their husbands, who have since continued beating them," she said.

"Most people in society think a woman must be locked up at home and her husband has the right to beat her."

She said the flawed implementation of government policies and gaps in legislation added to the problem.

"The government must fill such legal gaps, initiate an awareness-raising campaign, and ensure women's access to psychological and judicial assistance," she said.

Bagiyeva said her husband was at first only charged for beating her and not for murdering her child, whose death was ruled a suicide.

But she said a murder probe was now underway, and she had appealed to the prosecutor general and even to strongman Aliyev for justice.

"I will fight until my last breath, until my strength expires, to restore justice, so the truth comes out," she said.

eg-im/jbr/mbx/ah