Tuesday, July 11, 2023

From cluster bombs to settler violence, where has the morality in US foreign policy gone?

The inconsistencies cannot be overlooked any longer

JAMES
ZOGBY

US President Joe Biden speaks speaks during a Fourth of July event on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington. Bloomberg

Two recent and seemingly unrelated news stories raise serious questions about whether any consistent values undergird American foreign policy. One involves the US response to attacks by Israeli settlers on the Palestinian village of Turmus Aya. The other is about the Biden administration considering shipping cluster bomb munitions to Ukraine.

Following the armed settler invasion of Turmus Aya, and the burning of homes and cars, killing of one resident and injuring of 12 others, it was reported that many of the Palestinian victims were US citizens or permanent residents.

The State Department quickly condemned the assault, calling on the Israeli government to immediately investigate the crimes committed and bring the perpetrators to justice. In the days that followed, there were more condemnations of escalating settler violence and calls for the Netanyahu government to rein in the “out of control” settlers.

It apparently took the presence of US victims to elicit such a clear response, but several questions were left unaddressed.

In the first place, settler violence is not new. It has been going on for years – spiking annually at harvest time in an effort to deny Palestinians the fruits of their land.

In recent years, these incidents have become more frequent and are now seen as routine, receiving only passing mention in US reports. This raises the first question: is the US only concerned when Palestinian victims are Americans?

Not only is this phenomenon not new, it has an insidious intent – with its roots in the very founding of the Zionist movement – to remove the Palestinians from their land.

Just a week ago, a high-ranking minister in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet stated that the goal behind the violence was to make the lives of Palestinians so difficult and miserable that they would have three choices: “to submit, leave, or die.”

Why has this clearly racist and ongoing genocidal intent not been directly addressed by the US government? Even if we accept that the US should make a special point of speaking out in defence of its own citizens, is calling on the Israeli government to investigate itself the best the US can do? After all, we are still waiting for accountability and justice to be served in the killings of Omar Assad and Shireen Abu Akleh.

Despite clear evidence demonstrated by major American media outlets that Ms Abu Akleh’s death wasn’t accidental and was at the hands of Israeli personnel, the Israeli government continues to “deny, lie, and obfuscate” regarding the facts of case.

And when it comes to Mr Assad, it’s clear, even from the Israeli telling of the story, that at the very least, his death was due to criminal negligence on the part of the soldiers who bound and gagged this 80-year-old man and left him face down on the cold ground where he died.

At the end of an Israeli “review” of the case, they decided to drop charges against the officers involved. And so, is calling on the fox to investigate the maiming or killings in the chicken coop a satisfactory response?

Finally, the question I asked when this story of Turmus Aya first broke: We know that the victims were US citizens, but were some of the rampaging Israeli settlers also US citizens? And what about the Israeli soldiers who shot at Ms Abu Akleh or whose cruelty resulted in the death of Mr Assad?

This information is important. As US citizens, the Palestinian victims and their families ought to be able to pursue legal action in the US against those who attacked them and torched their homes and cars.

If the US is serious about defending their rights to life and property, they owe it to American citizens to assist them in finding this out. And whether or not the victims are Palestinian Americans, shouldn’t the US government take action against its citizens engaged in unlawful violence on behalf of a foreign government or cause?

American intelligence services work with the Israelis to identify Palestinians who are deemed a security threat. They are placed on a “watch list,” even when violence isn’t involved. Visas to visit the US are routinely denied to prominent Palestinian officials and leaders in civil society simply because they are viewed as anti-Israel. And yet there is no such cataloguing of Israelis who have engaged in violent acts or incitement.

How can we even consider admitting Israel into the Visa Waiver Programme if this could give violent extremists or certain Israeli soldiers or police free access to the US? As a victim of Meir Kahane’s violence four decades ago, I demand to know the answer to that question.

James Zogby

Dr James Zogby is the president of the Arab American Institute and a columnist for The National

The Anthropocene: Canadian lake mud 'symbolic of human changes to Earth'

Image caption,
Crawford Lake is a limestone sinkhole that has filled with water

By Jonathan Amos

BBC Science Correspondent

@BBCAmos

Crawford Lake, a small body of water in Ontario, Canada, is being put forward as the location that best records humanity's impacts on Earth.

Scientists are trying to define a new geological time period to recognise the changes we've made to the planet, and Crawford is their model example.

Its sediments have captured fallout from intense fossil fuel burning, and even the plutonium from bomb tests.

The muds would be symbolic of the onset of a proposed Anthropocene Epoch.

Researchers want to acknowledge their significance by making them a "golden spike", or more properly a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point.

Other great transitions in geological time are associated with a GSSP. Often, it's literally a brass nail hammered into some cliff face deemed to be of major scientific importance.

But for Crawford, it would be a brass plaque next to a frozen section of the sediments, kept in a museum in the Canadian capital, Ottawa.

"1950 is right around here": Watch Brock University's Francine McCarthy describe the layers in the "dirty lollipop" (The Anthropocene Project)

"Crawford is just brilliant for this," explained Dr Simon Turner from University College London.

"A core from its bottom muds looks like a massive dirty lollipop, but it contains these beautiful, annually laminated sediments.

"Those annual layers record fossil fuel combustion products, plutonium, changes in geochemistry, changes in micro-ecology - all the sorts of things that chart environmental change," the secretary to the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) told BBC News.

Image caption,
The post-war nuclear tests spread plutonium around the globe

You may have seen the famous Chronostratigraphic Chart featured in textbooks and on school classroom walls, detailing the 4.6-billion-year history of Earth.

Its blocks of time - like Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous - trip off the tongue.

We currently live in the Holocene Epoch, which covers the time from the end of the last ice age, 11,700 years ago.

Image caption,
Drilling through the ice-covered lake to recover its bottom muds

It's been the job of the AWG for the past decade to try to establish whether or not the chart should be updated.

On this question, the AWG is convinced the case has been made. A formal start date has also been identified - the 1950s.

This decade marks the beginning of the "Great Acceleration", when the human population and its consumption patterns suddenly speeded up. It coincides with the spread of ubiquitous "techno materials", such as aluminium, concrete and plastic.

In Crawford's sediments, scientists are able to detect the quickening, year on year.

In warm summer months, the growth of algae prompts the lake water to produce tiny chalk crystals (calcite) that fall to the lake bottom as a white layer; in cold winter months, the algae and other organisms die back and their organic matter settles out as a brown/black layer.

But captured within these light-dark bands are the broader environmental changes around the lake.

It's almost as if the scientists are reading a barcode at a supermarket check-out.

"We see these spheroidal carbonaceous particles - 'fly ash' - that are produced by the very high temperature combustion of fossil fuels, primarily coal," said Prof Francine McCarthy from Brock University in St Catharines, Ontario.

"And the reason, of course, for the increase in these SCPs is that just a few 10s of km up wind from Crawford is the largest industrial city in Canada, Hamilton, where steel mills had been operating through most of the 20th Century and into the present day."

Another key marker - indeed, the primary marker - is plutonium.

Samples of the Crawford muds were sent to the UK earlier this year to try to determine where exactly in the muddy layers the presence of the radioactive element first appears and then ticks upward.

"We see plutonium in sediments and other materials from about 1945 onwards, relating to the atomic weapons testing programme. But really the point at which plutonium deposition went global was following high-yield thermonuclear bomb tests, starting in 1952," said Prof Andrew Cundy.

"One of the plutonium isotopes we're looking at has a half-life of 24,000 years, so it will be visible in the sediments for at least 100,000 years. Beyond that, the SCPs will still be detectable," the University of Southampton scientist told BBC News.

Image caption,
Samples sent to Southampton will show when the plutonium signal first appears

The AWG want to pick a specific year for the start of the Anthropocene Epoch, and the Southampton tests will influence this decision.

It's an extraordinary idea that geologists many millennia from now could be studying today's sediments to understand the profound changes earlier humans had imposed on Planet Earth.

But this is how stratigraphy - the study of layered deposits through time - is done.

Image caption,
The proposed change to the Chronostratigraphic Chart: Epochs are sub-divided into Ages, or Stages. The first Age of the Anthropocene may well be called the Crawfordian after the lake

Take for example Munsley Bog on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England.

There, if you pick the right place in the soggy ground, it's possible to pull up mud layers that record the last great epochal transition - from the Pleistocene into the Holocene.

Traces of pollen track the loss of Arctic-Alpine plants and the invasion of birch and willow, as Northern European glaciers recede and temperatures rise.

"When we look back, what we are learning is that some of these transitions can be really quick, in just 30 or 40 years; so within a generation," explained Prof Sabine Wulf from the University of Portsmouth.

The AWG will present its recommendations on establishing a new epoch to the wider geological community later this year. Ultimately, it will be up to the International Commission on Stratigraphy as to whether it wants to update its famous chart.

Belgium's reaction following the decision of the United States to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine

Last updated on
July 10, 2023

Belgium takes notice of the decision of the United States to supply cluster munitions to Ukraine.

As a State Party to the Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions, Belgium has made a commitment not to produce or use cluster munitions and to discourage their use. Belgium stands by that commitment.

Cluster munitions have an indiscriminate effect: during an attack, an entire area can be contaminated without a distinction made between civilians and military targets. Moreover, cluster munitions continue to cause human suffering long after the end of the conflict.

The fact that 111 States have joined the Oslo Convention demonstrates a growing international understanding on the unacceptability of cluster munitions. Belgium calls on the States that have remained outside the Convention to sign and ratify it.

Belgium calls on all actors, in all conflicts, to refrain from using cluster munitions, to respect their obligations under International Humanitarian Law, to always distinguish between the civilian population and combatants, and to take constant care to spare civilians and civilian objects.

Belgium will continue to support Ukraine in its self-defense against Russia’s illegal and unprovoked aggression.

Video shows new volcanic eruption near Iceland's capital

A volcano erupted on the Reykjanes peninsula in southwest Iceland, near to the capital Reykjavik, following intense earthquake activity in the area.

NBC NEWS

July 11, 2023

Volcano erupts in Iceland after weeks of earthquakes

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/07/volcanic-eruption-begins-in-iceland.html

STATE CENSORSHIP OF ACTIVIST MESSAGES

EU to sanction social media networks that fail to remove posts inciting disobedience, hatred

'Social media platforms have not done enough regarding events in France, and they will need to do more,' says EU commissioner

Esra Taşkın |11.07.2023 -

PARIS

The European Union will impose sanctions on social media platforms that fail to remove content inciting disobedience and hatred, Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for Internal Market, said Monday.

During an interview with French public broadcaster Franceinfo, Breton spoke about the violent incidents that began after the killing of 17-year-old Nahel M. by police gunfire on June 27 in France.

"Social media platforms have not done enough regarding the events in France, and they will need to do more," Breton said.

Reminding that social media platforms will be subject to the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) from Aug. 25, he said these platforms will be obliged to immediately remove content inciting hatred, disobedience, calling for someone's murder, or setting vehicles on fire.

Emphasizing that platforms failing to remove such content will face penalties, he said the penalties could include financial sanctions or actions such as terminating their activities in EU territories.

Digital Services Act

In April, the European Commission announced a list of large digital platforms and search engines operating in Europe that will be subject to stricter rules under the Digital Services Act.

A total of 19 platforms including Facebook and Twitter will be subject to new and stringent obligations under the law.

These platforms will be required to limit disinformation, promptly remove illegal content, better protect minors on the internet, conduct risk assessments, take steps to reduce risks, and be subject to external audits.

Digital platforms that violate the rules may face fines of up to 6% of their global turnover. In case of repeated violations, these platforms may have to cease their activities in the EU.

Protests in France

Protests erupted after a police officer shot dead Nahel M. during a traffic check in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre after he allegedly ignored orders to stop.

The officer who fired the shot faces a formal investigation for voluntary homicide and has been placed under preliminary detention.

After starting in Nanterre, the protests quickly spread to other cities including Lyon, Toulouse, Lille and Marseille.

Tensions rose following clashes between the police and protesters before losing steam this week.

Australia examines foreign social media interference

Online News EditorJuly 11, 2023

Sydney, Australia, Jul 11 (EFE).- An Australian parliamentary commission was examining foreign interference in social media Tuesday through public hearings, in which the directors of Meta, Twitter, TikTok and Google were to appear, though Chinese platform Wechat refused to participate.

Commission chairman James Paterson said during a session, broadcast on the Canberra Legislature channel, that the group would deliver a report to parliament on Aug. 1 with “recommendations to ensure the integrity and transparency of all media platforms organizations operating in Australia and protect the freedoms of Australians online.”

The commission to investigate possible foreign interference in social media was created in November 2022 due to growing concerns about the use of new technological tactics, such as artificial intelligence, in the context of increasing geopolitical tensions.

About Wechat’s refusal to participate in the proceedings, Paterson said it could be interpreted as “contempt,” although adding that authorities in his country cannot force the managers to appear because they do not have representatives in Australia.

Between Tuesday and Wednesday, the commission will hear from directors and representatives of the main social networks, as well as various officials and representatives of Australian official bodies.

The group planned to hear Tuesday the senior representatives of Twitter, TikTok and Google, and to continue Wednesday with public hearings of officials from the interior office, prosecutor’s office and the electronic security commission, among others.

Josh Machin, Public Policies director of Meta – which owns Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp – said the company has the “aspiration” to apply labels to state media and a fact-checking system in its new social network Threads.

He did not specify when these functions would be available on the new platform, seen as a rival to Twitter and which already has some 100 million users since it was created almost a week ago.

“Labels for state media and fact-checking are areas where we see a lot of value and our aspiration is to develop them rapidly,” Machin said.

“In the event that any state-affiliated media outlet violates our policies, we will remove it,” Machin added, addressing Paterson’s question about media labels such as China’s state news agency Xinhua or Russian public network RT.

The commission is also expected to hear Tuesday from three representatives in Australia of Chinese app TikTok, banned in April on government mobile phones and devices for cybersecurity reasons due to fear of possible “foreign interference.”

The move followed in the footsteps of other countries that have imposed restrictions on the use of TikTok, such as the United States, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the European Union, fearing Chinese authorities could violate the right to privacy through the data collected in this application. EFE

wat/lds

Spain Rescues 86 People Near Canary Islands, but Scores of Migrants From Senegal Remain Missing

July 11, 2023
Associated Press

Remnants of a deadly migrant voyage sit on the shore near Crotone, Italy, Feb. 28, 2023. Spanish authorities rescued 86 migrants Monday from a boat near the Canary Islands after an aid group reported that three boats from Senegal went missing with 300 people aboard.

DAKAR, SENEGAL —

Spanish authorities rescued 86 people Monday from a boat near the Canary Islands that appeared to be from Senegal, after an aid group reported that three boats from the African country went missing with 300 people aboard.

Spain's Maritime Rescue Service said it could not confirm that the rescued boat was one of the three reported missing but told The Associated Press that the vessel was a multi-colored, 20-meter-long (65-foot-long) canoe of the type known in Senegal as a pirogue.

Eighty men and six women of sub-Saharan origin were rescued and expected to reach Spanish soil Monday evening, the Spanish agency said. It also said it had alerted boats sailing in Atlantic waters between the Canary Islands and West Africa to be on the lookout for other migrant boats still missing.

Helena Maleno Garzon, coordinator for the aid group Walking Borders, which is known as Caminando Fronteras in Spanish, said earlier Monday that the three missing boats had departed Senegal in late June.

Two boats departed June 23 from Mbour, a coastal city in central Senegal, carrying about 100 people, and a third left the southern town of Kafountine four days later with approximately 200 people, Garzon said.

There has been no contact with the boats since their departures, she said.

"The most important thing is to find those people. There are many people missing in the sea. This isn't normal. We need more planes to look for them," Garzon told The Associated Press.

Deadly route

The Atlantic migration route is one of the deadliest in the world, with nearly 800 people dying or going missing in the first half of 2023, according to Walking Borders.

In recent years, the Canary Islands have become one of the main destinations for people trying to reach Spain, with a peak of more than 23,000 migrants arriving in 2020, according to Spain's Interior Ministry. In the first six months of this year, more than 7,000 migrants and refugees reached the Canaries.

One of the deadliest mass drownings of Europe-bound migrants happened last month on the Mediterranean Sea, where more than 500 people were presumed dead off the coast of Greece. Criticism has mounted over the European Union's yearslong failure to prevent such tragedies.

Boats that go missing often aren't documented. Some are never found or are discovered across the world years later. An AP investigation published this year found that at least seven migrant boats from northwest Africa, likely trying to reach the Canary Islands in 2021, drifted to the Caribbean and Brazil.

The boats mainly travel from Morocco, Western Sahara and Mauritania, with fewer coming from Senegal, the Spanish aid group said. However, at least 19 boats from Senegal have arrived in the Canary Islands since June, the group said.

Factors such as ailing economies, a lack of jobs, extremist violence, political unrest and the impact of climate change push migrants to risk their lives on overcrowded boats to reach the Canaries. Last month in Senegal, at least 23 people were killed during weeks of protests between opposition supporters and police.

'I am still believing'

A woman whose 19- and 24-year-old sons left on one of the boats from Mbour in June told the AP they had a goal of trying to pull the family out of poverty.

Daw Demba, 48, said she discovered her sons' secret plans days before they left and tried to convince them not to. They assured her it would be safe because the captain had made the trip safely multiple times, she said.

"I am desperate to hear the voices of my sons. I am convinced they are still alive," Demba said through tears in a phone interview from her home in Mbour. "Every moment, every second, I am still believing."

Before they departed, she armed her sons, Massou Seck and Serigne Galaye Seck, with traditional spiritual items, including a bottle of water that had been blessed and Quranic paper with their names written on it for protection.

Walking Borders' Maleno said she had been in contact with the Moroccan, Spanish and Mauritanian marines and that more needs to be done to look for the missing boats.

"Imagine if there (were) 300 American people missing at sea. What (would) happen? Many planes will look for them," she said.

Cycle of violence and economic turmoil pushes young Palestinians to take up arms

PBS Jul 10, 2023

TRANSCRIPT Cycle of violence and economic turmoil pushes young Palestinians to take up arms | PBS NewsHour

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Tuesday, July 11, 2023

James Zogby

Australia examines foreign social media interference

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