'Disqualifies himself': Veterans blast Trump for 'disrespectful' remarks about war heroes

Travis Gettys
August 16, 2024

Then-President Donald Trump hugs the flag at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center February 29, 2020 in National Harbor, Md. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Donald Trump sparked an outcry from military veterans and many others by proclaiming that the civilian Presidential Medal of Freedom as "better" than the Medal of Honor for military valor.

The Republican presidential nominee praised Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson, during a speech Thursday evening at his New Jersey golf resort, where he recalled awarding her the civilian honor after the couple had poured millions of dollars into his first campaign.

“I watched Sheldon sitting so proud in the White House when we gave Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom," Trump said. "That’s the highest award you can get as a civilian, it’s the equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor."
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The Medal of Honor is the highest military honor bestowed for valor in combat, and it's often mistakenly called, as Trump did, the Congressional Medal of Honor.

"But civilian version, it’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they're soldiers," Trump continued. "They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman, and they’re rated equal, but she got the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and she got it for — and that’s through committees and everything else.”

Trump had been feuding with Adelson, who introduced him at this speech, up into this week, when he reportedly ordered one of his aides to bombard the eighth-richest woman in the world with abusive texts accusing her of hiring insufficiently loyal Republicans at the super PAC she funds, but he met privately with her before the event.

The Republican presidential nominee has previously slurred service members killed in combat as "suckers" and "losers," according to reports, and questioned what anyone got out of serving their country in the military, and many observers found his remarks about the Medal of Honor just as offensive.

"General Kelly and Jeffrey Goldberg reported of Trump’s contempt for American heroes who sacrificed in war," said MSNBC's Joe Scarborough. "Here he denigrates their sacrifice again, saying civilian medals are better than war honors because its recipients aren’t 'hit so many times by bullets or dead.'"

"This submoronic s---heel gave the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh and Devin Nunes," added TV producer David Simon. "And because he's utterly ignorant, ahistorical and terrified to read anything longer than his own tweets, it's certain that he hasn't bothered to read the combat accounts of recipients of the Medal of Honor. To him, soldiers and sailors and Marines are 'suckers' and never asked the question on his mind: 'What was in it for them?' Those are his quotes. This is his mind. This man is unfit to be an American citizen, let alone govern."

"Trump [dishonors] Medal of Honor recipients, our nations highest military award for distinguished acts of valor," said Alexander Vindman, a former Army lieutenant colonel who testified in the first impeachment inquiry. "He deserves nothing but disdain and disqualifies himself from public office."

"Did not have 'denigrate Medal of Honor recipients' on my Trump’s Terrible Week bingo card, but here we are," saidUSA Today columnist Rex Huppke. "My god, this is beyond disrespectful."

"Trump just said the medal he gave to a rich donor is 'better' than the Medal of Honor," said Marine Corps veteran Amy McGrath, who ran for U.S. Senate in Kentucky. "This man really doesn’t have a clue."

One Trump supporter and Marine Corps veteran, Josiah Lippincott, tried to clean up the former president's remarks.

"As a Marine, I can say that Trump is exactly right about the Medal of Honor," Lippincott said. "Getting that award means that either you or your friends and comrades came back in body bags or f----- up for life. No one should want that award."

Dario DiBattista chimed in:

"Part of my first day as a combat replacement in Iraq, was the memorial ceremony for Cpl Jason Dunham. He leaped on a grenade to absorb its blast and save his fellow Marines. He made the Ultimate Sacrifice. Not even close to the same award Rush Limbaugh got. F all the way off."

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Love for cats lures students into this course, which uses feline research to teach science

NOT A COURSE JD VANCE WILL TAKE
The Conversation
August 16, 2024 

Cat (Shutterstock)



Uncommon Courses is an occasional series from The Conversation U.S. highlighting unconventional approaches to teaching.

Title of course:

“The Science of Cats”

What prompted the idea for the course?

I’m an evolutionary biologist who has spent my career studying the evolution of small lizards in the Caribbean. I’m also a lifelong cat lover, but it never occurred to me to do anything scientific with house cats. They’re hard to study – ever tried to follow your cat around to see what they’re doing? And in contrast to amply studied lions, tigers and other wild felines, I was under the impression that there wasn’t any interesting research being conducted on the domestic representative of the cat clan, Felis catus.

Twelve years ago, I learned that I was completely wrong. Thanks to John Bradshaw’s book “Cat Sense” and the BBC’s “The Secret Life of the Cat,” I discovered that ailurologists were using the same cutting-edge methods – GPS tracking, genome sequencing, isotopic analysis – to study domestic cats that I use to study lizards and other researchers use with all manner of other creatures.

Thus was born my class on the science of cats. I’d lure students in with their love of felines and then, when they weren’t looking, I’d teach them how scientists study biodiversity – ecology, evolution, genetics and behavior.

What does the course explore?

In essence, the course is about the past, present and future of cats: where they came from, why they do what they do, what the future may hold. And, critically, how we know what we know – that is, how scientists address these sorts of questions.

The course concludes with students writing an original paper or making a mini-documentary. These projects have spanned a vast range of topics in biology and beyond, such as the impact of cats on bird populations, sexism and the crazy cat lady trope, the health effects pro and con of living with felines, the role of hybridization as a creative or constraining force in evolution, the top-down role of larger predators like coyotes and dingoes in controlling cat numbers, and the prospects for new genetic technologies to create allergen-free cats or to curb free-roaming cat populations.

Unexpectedly, the students weren’t the only ones who ended up writing about cats: The class and its themes inspired me to write my own book, “The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa.”



Cats’ fur patterns can illustrate a genetics lesson. Sabina Ja/500px via Getty Images

Why is this course relevant now?

Society needs more biodiversity scientists to understand our rapidly changing world. Cats pose scientific questions of broad interest, and they may serve as a gateway introduction to the world of biological research.
What’s a critical lesson from the course?

Important research on the natural world does not require traveling to remote corners of the world. Research on common animals in local surroundings – even household pets – can make important advances in basic and applied knowledge.

What materials does the course feature?

In addition to reading research papers, we took field trips that were both eye-opening and fun. We went out at the crack of dawn to join a homeless-cat advocate feeding unowned felines in a rundown part of town. We also learned about cats in ancient times from an Egyptologist, traveled to a cat show to marvel at the diversity of cat breeds, observed wild felines at the Saint Louis Zoo and examined cats in art at university museums.

What will the course prepare students to do?

Cat research is the vehicle for students to see the applicability of scientific ideas to animals they know and care for greatly. The course not only requires students to synthesize knowledge from many different fields, but also gets them to think about real-world contemporary debates, such as what to do about outdoor cats and the ethics of breeding.

Jonathan Losos, William H. Danforth Distinguished University Professor, Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Could dinosaurs still exist somewhere in the world? A paleontologist explains

The Conversation
August 16, 2024 

A boy inspects the teeth of a dinosaur at an exhibition in Melbourne on May 29,2008.-AFP



Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Do dinosaurs still exist in some parts of the world today? – Ruben M., age 5


Did all dinosaurs become extinct, killed when an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago? Or could a few of them, somehow, have survived that mass extinction event – with their descendants living even today?

It is exciting to imagine that gigantic dinosaurs are still rumbling and lumbering around in some remote part of the world. But no evidence of this exists. There are no cousins of Tyrannosaurus rex stomping through the vast woods of Siberia, no Apatosaurus ambling through the Congo rainforest.

As a paleontologist, I have spent much of my life studying ancient animals, particularly dinosaurs. But I have seen only fossils of these creatures, nothing living – with one exception. One group of dinosaurs is still around. To find them, just go outside and look up.



Ankylosaurus was a plant-eating dinosaur with body armor and a tail club that could kill any attacker. Daniel Eskridge/iStock via Getty Images Plus

The killer asteroid

In 1977, American geologist Walter Alvarez was working in the Apennine mountains in Italy. There, he found a thin layer of clay with an unusual amount of a metal called iridium in it. The clay was in between rocks from the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods and dates from the time the dinosaurs disappeared.

Iridium is rare on Earth but more common in some meteorites. Working with his father, Luis, who was a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, Walter Alvarez developed the theory that a giant space rock – an asteroid – collided with Earth 66 million years ago. This impact left iridium traces around the world and triggered the unimaginable disaster that killed the dinosaurs and countless other species of animals and plants on land and in the sea.

At first, many scientists rejected the theory. But then, in 1991, geologists discovered a huge crater buried under the sea floor off the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. This spot was where an asteroid, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) across, crashed into our planet 66 million years ago.

The collision was so powerful it sent trillions of tons of dust and molten rock into the sky. Many pieces of molten rock fell back to Earth, causing huge wildfires everywhere. A thick blanket of dust in the atmosphere blocked most sunlight, leading to freezing temperatures worldwide. Earth turned into a cold, desolate place for many years, even centuries.

The loss of sunlight killed many plants. With no food available for them, big plant-eating dinosaurs like Triceratops quickly went extinct. That left big predators like Tyrannosaurus rex without prey animals to eat, so they died, too.

But smaller animals like mammals, lizards and turtles could adapt. They could hide in burrows and live on a wide variety of foods. Fish lived in rivers and lakes and were protected by their watery homes. And surviving with them: birds, the only remaining dinosaurs.



The adult Deinonychus weighed up to 220 pounds (100 kilograms). SCIEPRO/Science Photo library via Getty Images

The bird connection

Fast-forward about 66 million years: Scientists noticed in the 19th century how the skeletons of modern birds and fossilized dinosaurs were alike in many ways. The similarities in the legs and feet were especially striking. However, most scientists then thought dinosaurs and birds were too different to be closely related.

Then, in 1964, dinosaur expert John Ostrom discovered fossils of the dinosaur Deinonychus. It had a mouth full of sharp teeth with serrated edges like steak knives, long slender hands with three fingers ending with large, curved claws, and a huge claw on the second toe of each foot. A fast hunter that did not fit the traditional ideas about dinosaurs as slow and not very active, Deinonychus lived in North America during the Cretaceous period, about 110 million years ago.

For another research project in the early 1970s, Ostrom examined the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, which lived 150 million years ago in what is now Germany. It had feathered wings and a wishbone, along with reptilelike traits, including jaws with sharp teeth, hands with three fingers each, and a long tail.

Comparing this ancient bird with Deinonychus, Ostrom realized their skeletons shared many special features. For example, both had unusually long arms and hands, a very flexible wrist, hollow bones and an S-shaped neck.

Based on these and many other similarities, Ostrom showed that birds descended from small, predatory, birdlike dinosaurs.




With sharp teeth and a long, bony tail, Archaeopteryx is a link to dinosaurs and modern-day birds. Leonello Calvetti/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

In the past three decades, paleontologists have discovered many skeletons of ancient birds and birdlike dinosaurs in Jurassic and Cretaceous rocks in China. Surprisingly, the birdlike dinosaurs, including close relatives of Deinonychus, were covered in feathers, just like the birds living with them. Paleontologists now agree that many if not all dinosaurs maintained constant high body temperatures, just like birds and mammals do today. Feathers kept them warm.


Birdlike dinosaurs did not make it through the extinction event 66 million years ago – but some of the early birds who had lived alongside them did. And they evolved into the birds alive today.

Think of that: to see a dinosaur, all you need do is glance skyward. And as someone who has studied dinosaurs for a long time, I’m happy to know I share the world with dinosaurs.

Hans Sues, Senior Research Geologist and Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Smithsonian Institution

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Lost World (1925) [Silent Movie] [Adventure]

  

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Mediterranean Sea reaches highest surface temperature ever recorded

Agence France-Presse
August 16, 2024 

A woman accompanied by children stares at the Mediterranean sea in Israel's northern coastal city of Haifa on August 14, 2024. (MENAHEM KAHANA / AFP)

The Mediterranean Sea reached its highest surface temperature with a daily median of 28.9 degrees Celsius on Thursday, according to Spanish researchers, topping a previous record set last month. For two successive summers, the Mediterranean has been warmer than it was during the exceptional 2003 heatwave, when temperatures hit record highs that went unchallenged for 20 years.

The Mediterranean Sea reached its highest temperature on record Thursday, Spanish researchers told AFP on Friday, breaking the record from July 2023.

"The maximum sea surface temperature record was broken in the Mediterranean Sea yesterday... with a daily median of 28.90C," Spain's leading institute of marine sciences said.

The previous record occurred on July 24, 2023, with a median value of 28.71C, said Justino Martinez, researcher at the Institut de Ciencies del Mar in Barcelona and the Catalan Institute of Research for the Governance of the Sea.

"The maximum temperature on August 15 was attained on the Egyptian coast at El-Arish (31.96C)," but this value is preliminary until further human checks can be carried out, he added.

The preliminary readings for 2024 come from satellite data from the European Copernicus Observatory, with records dating back to 1982.

"What is remarkable is not so much to reach a maximum on a given day, but to observe a long period of high temperatures, even without breaking a record," Martinez told AFP earlier this week.

At its core, life is all about play − just look at the animal kingdom

The Conversation
August 16, 2024

Cute Dog (Shutterstock)

At Cambridge University Library, along with all the books, maps and manuscripts, there’s a child’s drawing that curators have titled “The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers.”


The drawing depicts a turbaned cavalry soldier facing off against an English dragoon. It’s a bit trippy: The British soldier sits astride a carrot, and the turbaned soldier rides a grape. Both carrot and grape are fitted with horses’ heads and stick appendages.



‘The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers,’ a drawing on the back of a manuscript page from Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species,’ attributed to Darwin’s young son Francis. Cambridge University Library, CC BY-ND

It’s thought to be the work of Francis Darwin, the seventh child of British naturalist Charles Darwin and his wife, Emma, and appears to have been made in 1857, when Frank would have been 10 or 11. And it’s drawn on the back of a page of a draft of “On the Origin of Species,” Darwin’s masterwork and the foundational text of evolutionary biology. The few sheets of the draft that survive are pages Darwin gave to his children to use for drawing paper.

Darwin’s biographers have long recognized that play was important in his personal and familial life. The Georgian manor in which he and Emma raised their 10 children was furnished with a rope swing hung over the first-floor landing and a portable wooden slide that could be laid over the main stairway. The gardens and surrounding countryside served as an open-air laboratory and playground.

Play also has a role in Darwin’s theory of natural selection. As I explain in my new book, “Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself,” there are many similarities – so many that if you could distill the processes of natural selection into a single behavior, that behavior would be play.

No goal, no direction

Natural selection is the process by which organisms that are best adapted to their environments are more likely to survive, and so able to pass on the characteristics that helped them thrive to their offspring. It is undirected: In Darwin’s words, it “includes no necessary and universal law of advancement or development.”

Through natural selection, the rock pocket mouse has evolved a coat color that hides it from predators in the desert Southwest.

In contrast to foraging and hunting – behaviors with clearly defined goals – play is likewise undirected. When a pony frolics in a field, a dog wrestles with a stick or chimpanzees chase each other, they act with no goal in mind.

Natural selection is utterly provisional: The evolution of any organism responds to whatever conditions are present at a given place and time. Likewise, animals at play are acting provisionally. They constantly adjust their movements in response to changes in circumstances. Playing squirrels, faced with obstacles such as falling branches or other squirrels, nimbly alter their tactics and routes.

Natural selection is open-ended. The forms of life are not fixed, but continually evolving. Play, too, is open-ended. Animals begin a play session with no plan of when to end it. Two dogs play-fighting, for instance, cease playing only when one is injured, exhausted or simply loses interest.

Natural selection also is wasteful, as Darwin acknowledged. “Many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive,” he wrote. But in the long term, he allowed, such profligacy could produce adaptations that enable an evolutionary line to become “more fit.”

Keepers noticed that Shanthi, a 36-year-old elephant at the Smithsonian national zoo, liked to make noise with objects, so they gave her horns, harmonicas and other noisemakers.

Play is likewise profligate. It requires an animal to expend time and energy that perhaps would be better devoted to behaviors such as foraging and hunting that could aid survival.

And that profligacy is also advantageous. Animals forage and hunt in specific ways that don’t typically change. But an animal at play is far more likely to innovate – and some of its innovations may in time be adapted into new ways to forage and hunt.

Competing and cooperating

As Darwin first framed it, the “struggle for existence” was by and large a competition. But in the 1860s, Russian naturalist Pyotr Kropotkin’s observations of birds and fallow deer led him to conclude that many species were “the most numerous and the most prosperous” because natural selection also selects for cooperation.

Scientists confirmed Kroptokin’s hypothesis in the 20th century, discovering all manner of cooperation, not only between members of the same species but between members of different species. For example, clown fish are immune to anemone stings; they nestle in anemone tentacles for protection and, in return, keep the anemones free of parasites, provide nutrients and drive away predators.

Play likewise utilizes both competition and cooperation. Two dogs play-fighting are certainly competing, yet to sustain their play, they must cooperate. They often reverse roles: A dog with the advantage of position might suddenly surrender that advantage and roll over on its back. If one bites harder than intended, it is likely to retreat and perform a play bow – saying, in effect, “My bad. I hope we can keep playing.”

River otters at the Oregon Zoo repeatedly separate and reunite while playing in a tub of ice.

Natural selection and play also may both employ deception. From butterflies colored to resemble toxic species to wild cats that squeal like distressed baby monkeys, many organisms use mimicry to deceive their prey, predators and rivals. Play – specifically, play-fighting – similarly offers animals opportunities to learn about and practice deception.

To live is to play

Darwin wrote that natural selection creates “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful.” Play also creates beauty in countless ways, from the aerial acrobatics of birds of prey to the arcing, twisting leaps of dolphins.

In 1973, Ukrainian-American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky published an essay with the take-no-prisoners title “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” Many biologists would agree. Perhaps the most satisfying definition of life attends not to what it is but to what it does – which is to say, life is what evolves by natural selection.

And since natural selection shares so many features with play, we may with some justification maintain that life, in a most fundamental sense, is playful.


David Toomey, Professor of English, UMass Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'Chilling': Ex-Trump insider issues warning about new Project 2025 revelations

Brad Reed
August 16, 2024 

Olivia Troye in a new ad by Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform (screengrab).

Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser in the Trump White House, warned on Friday that the plans outlined in a secret recording by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought would likely come to pass should former President Donald Trump win another term.

Reacting to the recording of Vought — in which he talked about stripping away government agencies' independence and putting them more directly under control of the president — Troye wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that American voters should take what he says very seriously.

"Having known and worked alongside Russ Vought in the Trump White House, I can attest firsthand to his unwavering commitment to these dangerous Project 2025 ideologies with Trump's support," she revealed. "They attempted this the first time around. The recent revelations from the Centre for Climate Reporting are not just words caught on tape — they're a chilling preview of what's to come."

She then added, "P.S. I was in the meeting when they talked about firing the scientists who wrote the report on climate change..."

ALSO READ: Donald Trump deep in debt while foreign money keeps coming: disclosure

In his meeting with undercover left-wing activists, Vought discussed his dedication to ensuring that Trump would have far more direct control over agencies such as the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Homeland Security in his second term.

"Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said at one point in the recording. “And we are working doggedly on that, whether it’s destroying their agencies’ notion of independence."

In addition to talking about plans to take away agencies' independence, Vought also boasted of plans to execute the largest mass deportation operation in American history.

'Did you actually watch the movie?' JD Vance's reference to 'Gangs of New York' backfires

Kathleen Culliton
August 16, 2024 

Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) speaks during a campaign rally at Middletown High School on July 22, 2024 in Middletown, Ohio. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Sen. J.D. Vance's (R-OH) attempts to justify past comments linking rising crime waves to Irish immigrants raised eyebrows from film buffs who said he used the wrong Martin Scorsese movie to defend himself.

Donald Trump's running mate addressed questions about his 2021 comment on immigration and crime during a campaign address to the Milwaukee Police Association in Wisconsin on Friday.

"Has anybody seen the movie 'Gangs of New York?'" Vance said in response. "That is what I'm talking about; we know that when you have these ethnic enclaves in our country, it can lead to higher crime rates."

Vance was attempting to contextualize a recently resurfaced Skype interview in which he made a similar claim.

"You had this massive wave of Italian, Irish and German immigration, and that had its problems, its consequence," Vance said during the interview. "You had higher crime rates, you had these ethnic enclaves, you had inter-ethnic conflict in the country where you really hadn't had that before."

Washington Post analyst Philip Bump took issue with Vance's characterization of the 2002 film starring Daniel Day Lewis as the notorious anti-Irish gang leader William Poole, or Bill the Butcher.

"The irony here being that the most brutal, vicious killer in that movie is the nativist who loathes immigrants," Bump replied.

"Poole was a thug, a thief and a celebrity, leader of a Christopher Street gang which morphed and coalesced with others to become one of the most terrifying group of criminals in New York — the Bowery Boys," according to the New York City history podcast that draws its name from the group. "The Bowery Boys were an instrument of the Know Nothings, a nativist movement which violently rejected the Irish newcomers."

In 1846, as the Irish potato famine blighted the Emerald Isle's primary crop in a catastrophe that would claim up to 1.5 million lives — and send another 1.5 million fleeing the starving nation — the New York Daily Herald reported Poole was gouging out a foe's eye in the street.

This led national security attorney Bradley Moss to question whether Vance had ever seen the film.

"Did you actually watch the movie?" asked Moss. "Did Bill the Butcher strike you as a nonviolent person?"


Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow with the Media Matters watchdog group, added, "'Bill the Butcher was correct' is a very interesting take on that film."

Political analyst Drew Savicki struck a satirical note by mimicking Vance's comment but changing the movie.

"Has anybody seen the movie 'Toy Story?'" Savicki wrote. "This is what I'm talking about, with these dangerous toys, it can lead to higher crime rates."

Moss was quick with a response.

"Has anybody seen the movie 'Despicable Me?'" Moss replied. "This is what I'm talking about, with people speaking languages no one has ever heard of, it can lead to someone trying to steal the moon!"

PRIVATIZED FIRE FIGHTERS BATTLE OVER WHO PUTS OUT FIRE

India to hold first assembly elections in Kashmir in 10 years

KASHMIR IS INDIA'S GAZA



Indian Border Security Force soldiers stand guard along a street in Srinagar on Friday. AFP

India on Friday announced three-phased assembly elections in Kashmir, the first in a decade and in a new political environment after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in 2019 stripped the Muslim-majority region of its semi-autonomy and downgraded it to a federally controlled territory.

Since those changes the region has remained on edge, governed by a New Delhi appointed administrator and run by bureaucrats with no democratic credentials.

The new polls will be held between Sept.18 and Oct.1, India's Election Commission said at a news conference in the capital, New Delhi. The vote will take place in a staggered process that allows the government to deploy tens of thousands of troops to prevent any outbreak of violence. Votes will be counted on Oct.4.

The multi-stage voting will elect a local government — a chief minister who will serve as the region's top official with a council of ministers — from pro-India parties participating in the elections.

However, contrary to the past, the local assembly will barely have any legislative powers with only nominal control over education and culture. Legislating laws for the region will continue to be with India’s parliament while policy decisions will be made in the capital.

Local politicians have demanded the earliest restoration of statehood so that full legislative powers could be returned to the local assembly.

Public reaction to the announcement was mixed.

"We are happy that we will finally have our election,” said Haya Javaid, a resident of Srinagar, the region’s main city. "It would have been great if they (authorities) had also announced the restoration of statehood” for the region, said another resident Malik Zahoor.

Mohit Bhan, a spokesman for Kashmir's People’s Democratic Party, said the announcement was "like too little, too late.” He wrote on social platform X that the region "has been reduced to a municipality” that was "once a powerful state with special status.”

"This isn’t democracy, it’s a mockery. Restoring full statehood should be the first step,” he added.

The 2024 elections will be held for 90 constituencies, excluding Ladakh. In 2022, the Indian government redrew assembly constituencies and added four seats to the Hindu-dominated Jammu and three to the overwhelmingly Muslim-majority Kashmir valley.

The former state assembly had 87 members including four from Ladakh.

The last assembly election was held in 2014 after which Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party for the first time ruled the region in a coalition with the Peoples Democratic Party. In 2018, the BJP withdrew its support to the government following which the assembly was dissolved.

A year later, New Delhi divided the region into Ladakh and Jammu-Kashmir while scrapping its statehood amid a massive security and communications lockdown for months.

Associated Press

FROM THE RIGHT

Turkey is committed to undermining NATO

Ankara is blowing past established norms and boundaries



August 15, 2024 | Global Voices

Sinan Ciddi
Non-Resident Senior Fellow

Sophia Epley
Intern



President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s attendance at NATO’s 75th annual summit in Washington once again underlined the fundamental ways in which Ankara seeks to undermine the alliance’s vital security interests. NATO is a military alliance, consisting of 32 countries, which came into existence in 1950, with the premier mission to counter the threat posed by the Soviet Union. While this alliance has historically been fairly unified, Ankara is pursuing a strategy of hedging against NATO, thereby endangering the group’s efforts to mitigate the security challenges of great power competition, specifically against the threats posed by Russia and China. Whether it’s countering Russia’s efforts to seize Ukraine or defining the term “terrorism,” there is seemingly nothing that the vast majority of NATO members and Turkey can agree on.

The divide between Ankara and NATO’s interests seemed to become even wider when, on July 28th, Erdoğan threatened to invade Israel over its conflict with Palestine. Such comments are not only inflammatory and aggressive, but they are representative of Turkey’s increasing antagonism of Israel, which has been designated a major non-member ally of the alliance for decades.

As a collective, NATO consistently fails to hold Ankara to account, not because it does not want to but because it does not know how. This must change, and strategies to coerce one of NATO’s oldest members back on the right path must be found. Failure to rein in Turkey will continue to bring us closer to an irreparable split between the alliance and Ankara.

Preparing for a Trump presidency

On July 18th a week after the NATO summit concluded in Washington, Erdoğan spoke with former U.S. President Donald Trump on the phone. Erdoğan praised Trump, stating that his “bravery following the heinous attack is admirable” — in reference to the attempted assassination of the former president — and that the continuation of the Trump campaign was strengthening American democracy. The phone call, one of very few between Trump and world leaders since the incident, indicates Ankara’s growing assumption that the former president will win the election in November and will radically reconfigure NATO.

Trump has consistently told his American base that NATO members “rip us off” and has promised to downsize America’s security commitments to its allies in Europe. Erdoğan is hyper-aware of the fact that NATO will become less beneficial to Turkey if Trump rolls back American funding and security guarantees. His calculus that this reality may come to fruition after the November US election, is emboldening him to act brazenly and make unpopular demands, a pattern that has continued since Turkey’s outsize role in delaying Sweden’s membership bid. Between 2022 and 2023, Turkey slowed the addition of Finland and Sweden to the NATO alliance, mainly because of Erdoğan’s imposition of a quid pro quo: Unless Washington approved the sale of F-16 fighter jets to Turkey, Turkey would indefinitely delay NATO’s expansion. Erdoğan’s demand disrupted the alliance’s plans, which directly benefited Russia. Erdoğan’s crass treatment of NATO demonstrated to friends and adversaries of NATO, that the alliance was plagued by discord.

Alliances beyond NATO

Erdoğan has branded Ankara’s increasing proximity to NATO’s rivals, particularly Russia and China, as an asset for the alliance and a way to negotiate toward peace in several key regions. While Turkey and Russia often find themselves on opposite sides of conflicts, such as in Ukraine, the Caucuses, Syria, and Libya, Erdoğan has gone out of his way to maintain a cordial relationship with President Vladimir Putin and position himself as a potential mediator.

Beyond conflict resolution, Turkey has sought deeper ties with the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the economic alliance BRICS, both considered growing rivals of NATO and the G7 countries. Only days before arriving in Washington for the NATO summit, Erdoğan was in Kazakhstan for the SCO summit, signaling Turkey’s desire to be upgraded to a permanent member. On the margins of the summit, Erdoğan met with both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Putin.

The juxtaposition of Erdoğan’s maneuvering in Kazakhstan versus his brazen and undermining behavior at the NATO summit is stark. Turkey’s accelerated pursuit of membership in these blocs may, in part, be an emotional reaction to ongoing stalled EU accession talks, but it is also representative of Erdoğan’s changing worldview. He has publicly stated that the world’s economic center of gravity is shifting East and criticized the West’s limited perception of Russia and China as enemies. Turkey seeks to be a major player in a multipolar world rather than a state confined and defined by the political and economic demands of Western powers.

Turkey may rely on NATO now for its security, but it is also investing in its future by creating contingency plans if the West and NATO’s strength is dwarfed by Russia, China, and the emerging global South.

Undermining NATO’s security

Ankara’s hedging gives alliance members plenty of reasons to worry, but there are also even more stark examples of Turkish behavior that NATO simply cannot tolerate. Turkey’s hardened anti-Israeli stance is not simply a policy issue that Turkey and the rest of NATO disagree on. Erdoğan has made it Turkey’s mission to materially support Hamas, an organization that the other NATO members widely classify as a terrorist organization.

Turkey’s explicit support of Hamas is not a new issue. In 2011, Erdoğan invited the organization to open offices in Turkey. Since Hamas’ October 7 terror attack in Israel, which killed over 1,200 Israeli civilians, Erdoğan has only elevated his rhetorical praise of the group and escalated the scale of support.

Turkey is complicit in escalating violence against Israel. On July 21, Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet, thwarted a terrorist attack that it identified as being directed by Turkey. Five students at Birzeit University in the West Bank, affiliated with a student group “Kutla Islamia,” acquired weapons and cash with the intent of murdering Israeli citizens. Although Israel’s foreign minister drew attention to and condemned the attack and Turkey’s role in it, no other Israeli ally followed suit.

In September 2023, Israeli customs authorities revealed that they had intercepted 16 tons of explosive material on its way from Turkey to the Gaza Strip two months previously. In December 2023, Israeli customs officials foiled another attempt by Turkish affiliates to smuggle thousands of weapons parts into the West Bank.

Turkey’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be spoken about as an ideological rift with NATO members; instead, it is an egregious example of a NATO member championing and furthering the violent interests of a terrorist entity.

A similar pattern can be found in Syria, where Turkey has purposefully undermined the objectives of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), a mission spearheaded by the United States and its coalition partners to degrade and eliminate the Islamic State (ISIS). Ankara targets and carries out military strikes against the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), accusing them of being “terrorists” intent on attacking Turkey. On several occasions, Turkish military strikes have come close to hitting US military personnel assisting the SDF.

Instead of participating in OIR’s counterterrorism mission to eliminate ISIS, Erdoğan has chosen to admonish its treaty allies. He has bashed the mission and stated that it is “not consistent with the spirit of the alliance for the ringleaders of terrorist organizations that pose a threat to Türkiye’s national security to be accepted as legitimate actors.” It should be noted that the SDF has been critical in thwarting the inhumane violence and expansion carried out by ISIS, and there is no evidence that they are affiliated with terrorism.

In private, many NATO leaders are not just concerned with Turkey’s stance on the major security challenges facing the alliance; they are outraged. This, however, is not helpful. It seems that the alliance has chosen to prioritize avoiding a public spectacle over confronting Ankara.

Hesitation to hold Turkey accountable is partially understandable. NATO was created to counter the systemic threat posed by the Soviet Union. It has no developed mechanisms to counter internal threats caused by member states. From acquiring Russian missiles to delaying NATO expansion, Ankara is operating in uncharted territory by constantly blowing past established norms and boundaries. This trajectory must be interrupted.

In the face of a multiplicity of threats facing the alliance, it is now more important than ever to ensure that members are on the same page. What this means in practice is that the alliance must nail down what is collectively understood as strategic threats, how we define terrorist actors, and what the responsibilities of membership entail. NATO’s operational cohesivity and capability, as the most effective military alliance, cannot and should not be hamstrung by the actions of one member. It is past time to stand up to Erdoğan.

Sinan Ciddi is a non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Turkey Program and Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). Sophia Epley is an intern at FDD and a student at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. For more analysis from Sinan and Sophia, please subscribe HERE. Follow Sinan on X @SinanCiddi. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

WHENEVER 'THEY' SAY THEY ARE NON PARTISAN MEANS THEY ARE RIGHT WING

WAR IN KURDISTAN

Turkey, Iraq sign accord on military, security, counter-terrorism cooperation amid anti-PKK operations

The signing of the accord comes after the two countries spent years in dispute over Turkey's military operations against the PKK in northern Iraq.

The New Arab Staff & Agencies
15 August, 2024

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan spoke alongside his counterpart Fuad Hussein [Photo by Arda Kucukkaya/Anadolu via Getty Images]

Turkey and Iraq have signed a memorandum of understanding on military, security and counter-terrorism cooperation, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said on Thursday, after two days of high-level security talks in Ankara.

The neighbouring countries have in recent years been at loggerheads over Ankara's cross-border military operations against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants based in northern Iraq's mountainous region.

Iraq has said the operations violate its sovereignty, but Ankara says they are needed to protect itself.

Ties have improved since last year, when they agreed to hold high-level talks on security matters, and after a visit in April by Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to Baghdad, where he said relations had entered a new phase.

Ankara and Baghdad held a fourth round of meetings this week as part of the dialogue mechanism. In March, Iraq labelled the PKK a "banned organisation in Iraq" - a move welcomed by Turkey.

Fidan, speaking alongside his Iraqi counterpart Fuad Hussein following their talks in Ankara, said the accord signed by the defence ministers of either side carried "historic importance", while Hussein said it was "the first in the history of Iraq and Turkey" in this field.

"Through the joint coordination and training centres planned in this agreement, we believe we can take our cooperation to the next level," Fidan said.

"We want to advance the understanding we are developing with Iraq on counter-terrorism through concrete steps on the ground," he added.

A Turkish diplomatic source said that, with the agreement, a Joint Security Coordination Centre would be established in Baghdad along with a Joint Training and Cooperation Centre in Bashiqa. Hussein, speaking about the Bashiqa training camp, said "the onus will lie on the Iraqi armed forces", without elaborating.

On Monday, Turkish Defence Minister Yasar Guler told Reuters that recent steps taken by Turkey and Iraq on counter-terrorism marked a turning point in ties, adding Ankara wanted Baghdad to go a step further and label the PKK a terrorist organisation as soon as possible.

The PKK, which has been waging an insurgency against the Turkish state since 1984, is designated a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the conflict.