Google fired me for standing against tech complicity in Gaza genocide. But justice cannot be stopped

Google has fired employees for protesting ties to Israel beginning with Project Nimbus. One such employee, Mohammad Khatami, argues Google cannot stop justice

Mohammad Khatami
29 Apr, 2024

Protestors, including Google workers, gathered in front of Google's San Francisco offices demanding an end to its work with the Israeli government. [Getty]

The software engineering job offer I received from Google came at the perfect time.

I was in my senior year of college, lacking confidence and riddled with anxiety.

The email from Google in my inbox validated all the years I spent studying. The hard work I had put into sharpening my coding skills had paid off, and I felt elated.

When I started working at Google in August 2022, I remember sending my parents photos of the office and cherishing their amazement. I remember bringing friends in to try the food and to experience an office that was famous for feeling like a college campus. I loved seeing their smiles looking at the New York City Financial District skyline from the 14th-floor terrace.

Google is famous for being a 'worker-friendly' workplace combining forward-thinking engineering with free food, massages, and even nap pods. How wrong that all turned out to be.

A few months after I joined the company, my excitement about this job was shattered when I learned about Project Nimbus, Google’s and Amazon’s $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. The details of the agreement were deeply unsettling: massive cloud server clusters of vague purpose would be built within the borders of Israel, where indigenous Palestinians are subject to military occupation and apartheid rule, routinely persecuted, dehumanized, displaced, and killed in an ongoing, state-sponsored process of ethnic cleansing aided by high tech infrastructure.

Security and management of the clusters would be handed over to Palestine's occupier, potentially allowing the Israeli military free reign to use Google's technology however they wanted despite Google's repeated denials that are disputed even by Israel's military.

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Perspectives

Mona Shtaya

October 7 and the Gaza genocide

Worker dissent and public opinion objections to the deal were to be contractually ignored under the deal with Israel, despite clear evidence that the project would serve the goals of the Israeli military. To avoid criticism, Google would continuously deny the military nature of the contract for years even as Israel itself has said otherwise.

When Israel began its medieval siege against Gaza over 200 days ago, my fears about working for Google intensified. It quickly became clear that Israel intended to commit a genocide and was leveraging artificial intelligence to enable it.

To commit a massacre of this scale, data is as important as ammunition. The Israeli occupation boasts about the sophistication of its targeting systems, which are developed by training machine learning models on extensive data collected through invasive surveillance of Palestinians.

Israel prefers striking targets while individuals are in their family homes, tracking Palestinians using automated systems with depraved names like “Where’s Daddy.” Merely returning home exposes Palestinians and their families to risk. When questioned about their preference for using conventional bombs over precision-guided weapons that could minimize civilian casualties, the Israeli military stated that they do not see the value in expending expensive munitions on “unimportant people.”

In response to Israel’s crimes of genocide and collective punishment, Google has doubled down on their relationship with the Israeli military.

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In-depth

Hugo Goodridge

From search engine to the military industrial complex

As recently as a month ago, a Google contract proved direct services to the Israeli military, confirming that company leadership had been misleading workers for years regarding the military applications of Project Nimbus.

In other words, Google workers are expected to develop technology that can be evidently used to streamline Israel’s genocide, and we are expected to remain silent about it.

Once upon a time, Google’s slogan was “Don’t be evil.” They abandoned this motto in the last decade to transition into a glorified military contractor.

What appeared to be an incredible job from the outside now resembles a dystopian adult daycare centre to me. The reality of working at Google is that it is a place where a chipper attitude, a false veneer of liberalism, and a collection of inconsequential, constantly shifting projects, are fervently promoted by Google’s propaganda to obscure the company’s business model that seem to include profiting from no-questions-asked militarisation that can enable genocide.

With just a few public statements about how black lives matter, Google could pretend that it hadn’t - allegedly - made billions off of the destitution of black people in the Congo. With a tweet celebrating Indigenous People’s month, Google could unironically evade criticism for operating an office in Tel Aviv, a city built on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Jaffa. Google mastered the song and dance of wokeness for the public, and internally, it keeps an iron grip on dissent.

For years, I and other Googlers with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign opposed Project Nimbus within the company. We shared petitions, sent internal memos, and submitted ethics reviews. In response, we were doxxed, harassed, silenced, ignored then ultimately fired in order to ensure that Google's profits in occupied Palestine and the global military industry remained unchallenged.

Many workers witnessed this repression, but company culture promotes fear and apathy over integrity. Google is two-faced. The colorful office, scooters, music rooms, and desserts all serve to distract from the backdrop of aggressive retaliation and a culture of fear. Google can only sustain profits from violence if it is able to ensure the complicity of its workers. And it is disheartening how some of the world’s brightest minds can be placated by comfort and used to increase wealth at the expense of human life.

But make no mistake; Google is destined to fail. Workers are waking up to the reality of their exploitation, and our ability to stand against the unethical use of our labour is only growing stronger. Abuse and oppression are unsustainable in the long term.

Today, on Wall Street, Google’s ticker symbol sits next to an upward green arrow—business has been prosperous for the profiteers of genocide. But workers play a critical role in the growing movement for liberation, and we will not forget Google’s complicity.

Justice will prevail.

Mohammad Khatami a former Google software engineer and organizer with NoTechForApartheid movement.

Follow him on TikTok

SOME FOLKS CALL THEM CHEMTRAILS

More Data Needed to Understand Contrails, their Climate Effect and to Develop Mitigation

The report highlights the complexity of contrail science, noting gaps in the understanding of how contrails form, or when they could persist, and how they impact the climate

SME News Service

Published on: 

05 May 2024

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) called for urgent action to deepen the understanding on the formation and climate impact of aviation contrails to develop effective mitigation measures.

The newly released IATA report Aviation Contrails and their Climate Effect: Tackling Uncertainties and Enabling Solutions calls for a strengthening of collaboration between research and technological innovation, coupled with policy frameworks to address aviation’s non-CO2 emissions through more atmospheric data.

The report highlights the complexity of contrail science, noting gaps in the understanding of how contrails form, or when they could persist, and how they impact the climate. The lack of high-resolution, real-time data on atmospheric conditions (particularly humidity and temperature at cruising altitudes) hinders precise contrail forecasting.

Willie Walsh, IATA’s Director General said: "The industry and its stakeholders are working to address the impact of non-CO2 emissions on climate change, particularly contrails. To ensure that this effort is effective and without adverse effects, we must better understand how and where contrails form and shrink the uncertainties related to their climate impact.

"Action now, means more trials, collection of more data, improvement of climate models, and maturing technologies and operations. Formulating and implementing regulations based on insufficient data and limited scientific understanding is foolish and could lead to adverse impacts on the climate.

"That is why the most important conclusion from this report is to urge all stakeholders to work together to resolve current gaps in the science so that we can take effective actions."

Recommendations

With current levels of understanding, the report made the following recommendations:

• In the immediate term (2024-2030), the priority for mitigating aviation’s climate change impact should be on reducing CO2 emissions over the uncertain gains that could stem from contrail detection and their mitigation. Over this time, increasing airline participation in sensor programs, continuing scientific research, and improving humidity and climate models should be the focus of work on contrail mitigation.

• Mid-term actions (2030-2040) should involve establishing standards for data transmission, continuous validation of models, and encouraging aircraft manufacturers to include provisions for meteorological observations, as well as selected avoidance.

• Longer-term actions (2040-2050): Aircraft should be continuously providing data and the models and infrastructure should be there and be reliable. The community will have at this point a more complete understanding of the non-CO2 effects of alternative fuels, with extended mitigation measures. These action items collectively aim to mitigate the climate impact of aviation while advancing scientific understanding and technological capabilities.

Background on Aviation’s Non-CO2 Emissions

Aviation's impact on climate extends beyond CO2 emissions, with non-CO2 effects such as contrails and nitrogen oxides (NOx) also contributing to global warming. Persistent contrails, formed in ice-supersaturated regions, can transform into cirrus clouds which reflect incoming solar radiation (during the day) as well as trap outgoing heat.

On balance, it is understood that contrails have a warming effect on the climate, with diurnal, seasonal, and geographical variations. However, despite extensive studies, significant uncertainties exist with respect to the capacity to predict individual contrail formation and their specific climate impact.

Initiatives and Trials: Recent collaborations among meteorologists, climate researchers, airlines, and aircraft manufacturers have yielded new insights that underscore the need for enhanced data collection and analyses of the likely air traffic network complications regarding any solutions.

Trials with modified flight paths and alternative fuels have shown potential yet limited efficacy due to the variability of atmospheric conditions and the localized nature of where contrails occur.

Technological Advances and Future Directions: Advancements in developing humidity sensors to be placed on aircraft are critical for contrail prediction and avoidance strategies. Current sensor technology on commercial aircraft lacks the required sensitivity and response time, and there are only a handful of such sensors in operation at altitude.

Ongoing research aims to develop more accurate, robust, and scalable solutions, and the use of sensors on a limited population of aircraft would allow the necessary improvement and validation of numerical weather prediction models.

Calif. state Sen. Blakespear says coastal railroad is at a climate crossroads. 'The data is clear and the message more urgent.'

Phil Diehl, The San Diego Union-Tribune
on May 5, 2024

A coordinated, multiagency effort is essential to save Southern California's coastal rail corridor from sea-level rise and erosion, state Sen. Catherine Blakespear warned last week.

"The data is clear and the message more urgent than ever that our coastline near the rail line is at critical risk of failure," said Blakespear, D-Encinitas, at a hearing held by the Subcommittee on LOSSAN Rail Corridor Resiliency that she chairs in Sacramento
Seven different state and regional administrators updated the subcommittee Monday on the status of problem areas along the 351-mile-long Los Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo rail corridor, focusing primarily on trouble spots in San Diego County and San Clemente in neighboring Orange County. The route is San Diego's only passenger and freight train connection to Los Angeles and the rest of the United States.
Sections of the railroad in Del Mar and San Clemente are especially vulnerable.

About 1.7 miles of the track in Del Mar follows the edge of a tall, fragile bluff 60 feet above the ocean. The San Diego Association of Governments, the regional planning agency, has been working for years on plans to reroute the tracks into a tunnel away from the bluff, but that won't happen until at least 2035.

In San Clemente, a seven-mile stretch of the track runs along the shrinking beach below crumbling bluffs.

"The rail is getting attacked from both sides," said San Clemente City Manager Andy Hall. Mother Nature has assaulted the tracks there from the west by scouring the sand from the beach, and from the east by weakening the steep bluff and unleashing landslides.

The Orange County Transportation Authority recently began considering long-term solutions for the seven miles of beachfront track there, including the possibility of a new inland route. However, the relocation there is uncertain and, if chosen, is decades in the future.

Any solution, even a quick one, is expensive. The Orange County Transporation Authority, working with Metrolink, spent $9.2 million on cleanup and construction of a catchment wall finished in March after a landslide at Mariposa Point in San Clemente.

In December 2023, the OCTA identified four new trouble spots that need protection from beach erosion and possible slope failures, said Darrell Johnson, the agency's chief executive officer.

"Potential solutions, in a perfect world ... would need to be in place ... or substantially underway, by the fall of 2024 ahead of the next storm season," Johnson said.

A rough estimate of the cost for the work needed immediately is $210 million to $310 million, he said. A more realistic time frame is that it would take up to four years to plan, engineer, obtain funding and build the projects.


Several presenters at the hearing emphasized the need for a multipronged approach to protect the tracks.

The three basic tactics are: replenishing sand on the beaches, adding and expanding rock revetments west of the tracks and installing barrier-like catchment walls east of the tracks where they are threatened by landslides.

Sand replenishment is widely considered the best answer.

Along with protecting the railroad, wider beaches preserve access to the coast and provide the recreational spaces loved by residents and visitors alike. Also, many people consider sand to be a more nature-based solution to the railroad's problems than building walls or dumping rocks that can contribute to beach erosion.

However, dredging sand from the ocean, harbors and lagoons to widen beaches is costly and time-consuming. Also, eventually the sand washes away again.

"It's probably not realistic to expect a nature-based solution would hold up all by itself," said California Coastal Commission Executive Director Kate Huckelbridge. "We understand the need for sort of a multicomponent, but it (sand) should be a major part of any project."

In Del Mar, the Coastal Commission approved new seawalls in 2022 as part of the ongoing efforts to protect the blufftop tracks until a new route is completed. However, the Coastal Commission also required the installation of stairways and trails as part of the project to preserve public access to the beach.

Overall rail ridership remains down from the pre-pandemic highs of 2019. However, passengers are slowly returning.

Amtrak ridership on a rider-per-mile basis in March of this year, when limited service was restored after the Mariposa Point slide, reached 101% of March 2019, said Los-Angeles-San Diego-San Luis Obispo (LOSSAN) Rail Corridor Agency Managing Director Jason Jewel.

By the end of this March, Amtrak restored service to its previous level of 10 round-trip daily trains between San Diego and Los Angeles. As a result, April ridership is forecast to increase by 8% to 10% over March, Jewel said.


Amtrak expects the upward trend to continue through the summer, when more people tend to choose the train for vacation travel and for special events such as the X-Games in Ventura, the horse races at Del Mar and Comic-Con in San Diego.

Tuesday's hearing was the subcommittee's fourth, the second this year. After its meeting in January, the subcommittee sent a letter to the California State Transportation Agency suggesting a formalized partnership among the agencies using the corridor.

The state agency has a "working group" that helps to identify and respond to issues along the corridor, but so far has taken no steps toward an official partnership.

_____


©2024 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Visit sandiegouniontribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Tories smashed at local elections leaving Rishi Sunak on political death row


ByRob Harris
May 6, 2024 — 

London: Rishi Sunak is on political death row after his party suffered crushing defeats in a series of mayoral contests at the weekend including London and its flagship West Midlands. His fate appears sealed whether his Conservative colleagues mount a challenge to him in the coming weeks or not.

No amount of positive spinning on the horror result can mask the fact that British voters are waiting with cricket bats for a 14-year-old government, with the Conservatives losing close to 500 council seats as well as the Blackpool South parliamentary by-election on a 26 per cent swing to Labour.

Putting on a brave face… British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.CREDIT:GETTY

Analysis of the votes across the country put the Tories a record low 25 per cent projected national vote share, with the party overtaken by Liberal Democrats in the number of council seats for the first time since 1996.

While it remains unclear whether Labour would be able to form a majority in its own right, the Conservatives now seem incapable of avoiding a hammering.

But after weeks of speculation of a move against him, it appears even Sunak’s colleagues have lost hope that changing the leader could do anything ahead of the general election, due by the end of the year.

Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman regrets backing Sunak, she says.CREDIT:GETTY

Speaking to the BBC, Suella Braverman - whom Sunak sacked as home secretary last year - said many of her colleagues are “privately demoralised and incredibly concerned about their prospects”.

“At this rate, we’ll be lucky to have any Conservative MPs at the next election, and we need to fight,” she said.

Asked if she wanted to see a change in leader, Braverman said: “I just don’t think that is a feasible prospect right now, we don’t have enough time and it is impossible for anyone new to come and change our fortunes to be honest.

“Rishi Sunak has been leading us for about 18 months, he has been making these decisions, these are consequences of those decisions. He needs to own this, and therefore he needs to fix it.”

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In the 18 months since he replaced his failed predecessor, Liz Truss, Sunak has lost seven parliamentary by-election elections, tens of MPs, and back-to-back local elections.

A one-time Goldman Sachs banker whose wife, Akshata Murthy, is the daughter of an Indian technology billionaire, Sunak has struggled to come across as a relatable figure.

He has been lampooned for his amateur and cringe-worthy social media attempts and his decisions to wear $900 Prada suede loafers to a construction site.

National polls show the Labour leading the Conservatives by more than 20 percentage points, a stubborn gap that the prime minister has been unable to close.

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In a message to voters ahead of the local elections, Sunak said they would have a choice between “a plan versus no plan, bold principled action versus U-turns and prevarication, a clear record of delivery versus political game playing.”

But asked if she regretted supporting Sunak’s bid for the Conservative leadership, Braverman said: “Honestly, yes I do”.

“The plan is not working and I despair at these terrible results,” she said. “I love my country, I care about my party and I want us to win, and I am urging the prime minister to change course, to, with humility, reflect on what the voters are telling us, and change the plan and the way that he is communicating and leading us.”

The defeat by Labour of Andy Street, the popular Tory mayor of West Midlands, by just 1508 votes has also caused psychological damage to the party, with one Conservative MP calling it “an inflection point”.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer speaks following Labour candidate for West Midlands Mayor Richard Parker’s victory in Birmingham

.CREDIT:GETTY

Street, former CEO of the John Lewis department store chain, had held the post for two terms and during the campaign did everything he could to dissociate himself from the Conservatives.

And despite speculation that the mayoral contest in London could be tight, Labour’s Sadiq Khan won a third term by taking a 43.8 per cent share of the vote, easily seeing off Conservative Susan Hall, who won 32.7 per cent.

There remain some questions for Labour and its leader Sir Keir Starmer, with it clear that the party was punished in parts of the country by Muslim voters, in a sign its stance on the Israel-Gaza war is affecting its support.

In 58 local council wards analysed by the BBC, where more than 1 in 5 residents identify as Muslim, Labour’s share of the vote was 21 per cent down on 2021, the last time most seats were contested.

George Galloway’s strongly pro-Palestinian Workers Party of Britain won four council seats - two in Rochdale, one in Calderdale and one in Manchester, where they ousted the Labour deputy leader of the council Luthfur Rahman.

But, for now, Labour can afford to put its problems aside for another day. It’s Sunak who has to decide if his premiership ends with a bang or a whimper.

Britain: Will Sunak Pay the Price for the Defeat?

Opinion

Jumah Boukleb

Sunday - 5 May 2024

The mayoral and council elections in England and Wales ended last Thursday, and the results aligned with pollsters’ projections that the ruling Conservative Party would suffer a significant defeat. Quickly and confidently, the opposition Labour Party climbed over the Conservatives’ shoulders and took in its victory. If the results are replicated in the upcoming parliamentary elections, Labour has cleared its path to 10 Downing Street. It is worth noting that every party but the Conservatives managed to increase their number of council seats. The Conservatives lost nearly half of their local council seats and suffered a humiliating parliamentary by-election defeat in Blackpool South to the Labour Party by a large margin.

According to commentators, the elections are significant because of the reactions they could stir in Conservative Party circles, especially their implications for the British Prime Minister and Conservative Party Leader Rishi Sunak.

A few days before the election date, I read a statement British Home Secretary James Cleverly had made to the media warning Conservative MPs against the repercussions of ousting and replacing Mr. Sunak after the election results came out. The statement shows that Cleverly had anticipated the striking magnitude of the Conservatives' defeat and that he knew it would concern many Conservative Party officials and MPs, encouraging them to hastily take a risky political gamble.

It's evident from the statement and its timing that Cleverly is well aware of what is happening behind closed doors. He has clearly been briefed on the reported plot by groups of (mostly far-right) Conservative MPs who support former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Losers have nothing to fear from another loss. This is true for life in general, and it is particularly true for politics. None of the Conservative MPs, who are threatened with losing their seats in the upcoming elections, would disagree. Accordingly, many Conservative MPs will not hesitate to seize any opportunity to throw the dice one last time, hoping for good luck and a win, or at least to minimize their electoral defeat. Of course, it will not be too difficult to find opportunists who are ready to lead the plot and volunteer to wield the dagger and stab Prime Minister Sunak in the back. Indeed, conventional wisdom tells us that if the loser has nothing to fear, gamblers have an opportunity to win, if not the parliamentary elections, then the party leadership. After that, all bets are off!

Despite its dazzling lights, the world of politics remains a dark and frightening place that the faint-hearted should avoid. In the hallways of British politics in general, and those of the Conservative Party in particular, this obscurity seems particularly pronounced. The bright lights conceal tense struggles between different parties that represent competing and conflicting interests. Each of them seeks to hold the levers of power and protect their interests, and to all of them, "the end justifies the means.”

If the price of maintaining the current status quo and avoiding electoral defeat demands nothing more than removing the Conservative leader and replacing him, then the problem would seem to have been solved. However, the Conservatives would not solve their problems by getting rid of Mr. Sunak. Their actual problem is that parliamentary elections are not far off. The noose around their neck is becoming tighter every day. They do not have the time to orchestrate and implement a plan to avert a painful electoral fate that could mirror that which they suffered at the hands of New Labour and Sir Tony Blair in 1997.

Rights groups call on Tajikistan to disclose whereabouts of “forcibly disappeared” opposition leader

Suhrob Zafar. / Guruhi24.com, HRW

By bne IntelliNews May 4, 2024

A call for Tajikistan to "immediately confirm the detention and whereabouts of and release" Suhrob Zafar, leader of the opposition Group 24 movement outlawed by Dushanbe, was on May 3 made by Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Norwegian Helsinki Committee and the International Partnership for Human Rights.

Zafar’s whereabouts have been unknown since early March, when he disappeared in Turkey in a suspected case of transnational repression. Group 24 is headquartered in Istanbul.

The human rights groups described Zafar as "forcibly disappeared”, despite his holding of official UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) asylum seeker status in Turkey.

In a statement, they cited unnamed sources as saying the Tajik State Committee for National Security is holding Zafar in its detention centre in Dushanbe, "periodically torturing him, and [denying] him medical assistance".

The Tajik government has not stated whether or not Zafar is in state custody or if it knows of his whereabouts.

"There are devastating reports that Suhrob Zafar may already have lost his ability to walk as a result of torture, so prompt action could be a matter of life and death," said Syinat Sultanalieva, Central Asia researcher at HRW.

"Tajik authorities should immediately verify Zafar’s detention status and whereabouts and urgently investigate allegations that he has been tortured."

Authorities should also ensure and confirm that Zafar's legal rights are respected, the rights groups added, saying he should be given contact with his family, access to a lawyer of his own choosing and necessary medical treatment.

The whereabouts of another Group 24 member, Nasimjon Sharifov, who went missing in late February while residing in Turkey, are also unknown.

In March 2015, the movement's founder, businessman Umarali Quvatov, was assassinated in Istanbul.

Group 24 is an opposition movement seeking political reforms in Tajikistan. It was banned and designated “terrorist” in October 2014, after it called on the Tajik population to publicly protest against the government.

In the last decade, according to HRW, Tajik authorities have cracked down brutally on the group and its members, imprisoning scores at home and driving large numbers into exile. Last month, a Freedom House report, Nations in Transit: A Region Reordered by Autocracy and Democracy, assessed that there is zero tolerance of opposition politics by Tajikistan’s Rahmon regime.

bne IntelliNews has reported on how there are fears that so heavy is the repression in Tajikistan that Tajiks who have lost hope of a better life are targeted by Islamist terrorist groups who radicalise the individuals and assign them to cells that commit terrorist attacks abroad.

Turkey is a member of Europe’s top human rights body Council of Europe and party to the European Convention on Human Rights, and any involvement of, or acquiescence by, Turkish state agents in the forcible disappearance of and potential extrajudicial transfer of Zafar and Sharifov to Tajikistan is a serious violation of the convention, HRW noted.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has warned that “any extra-judicial transfer or extraordinary rendition, by its deliberate circumvention of due process, is an absolute negation of the rule of law and the values protected by the Convention. It therefore amounts to a violation of the most basic rights guaranteed by the Convention.”

“Türkiye should thoroughly investigate the unlawful actions on Turkish territory, which appear to have led to the forced rendition to Tajikistan of Zafar Sukhrob,” said Marius Fossum, regional representative in Central Asia at the Norwegian Helsinki Committee. “Zafar should be released pending a fair trial on any credible charges and provided with redress for the violation of his rights as a result of his forced removal to Tajikistan.”

CLASSIC FORTEAN PHENOMENA

Live fish fall from the sky in Central Iran - video

In what maybe the result of a bizarre weather phenomena, live fish reportedly fell from the sky in a fish farm city in Central Iran, according to a viral video posted on local social media. / bne IntelliNews

By bne Tehran bureau May 5, 2024

In what looks similar to some sort of Biblical miracle or a real life “Sharknado”, large live fish fell from the sky in Yasouj, a city in Central Iran, and were left flapping on the road, a video posted on local social media purportedly shows.

The post swiftly went viral across social media platforms in Iran. The footage, filmed by a local resident, shows fish plummeting from the sky onto a square within the city. The videographer even picked up one of the fish from the ground which was still alive and wiggling.

Comments on social media speculated that some sort of typhoon or a whirlwind over water had sucked up the fish and then dumped them again as rain shortly afterwards.

That theory is not entirely impossible. As bne IntelliNews reported, global warming means the atmosphere is sucking up vast quantities of water this year and releasing it again as torrential rainfall: hotter air can absorb more water and last year was the hottest year on record. Only a week ago Dubai was hit with an entire year’s worth of rainfall in a single day, turning the international airport into a lake and flooding the subway. The rainfall was so extreme that a caravan of camels in the desert outside the city were caught in flash floods after a local river burst its banks.

With the temperature of the seas currently at fresh all-time highs, that is providing the energy for extreme wind events and last year saw tornadoes and tropical storms form over seas that sucked up huge quantities of water in Florida and other places. These events are becoming increasingly common.

Off the coast of North Africa, the Mediterranean was hit by the tropical cyclone Storm Daniel last September that killed over 10,000 people in just a few hours and it left a trail of destruction across the north African coast. Storm Daniel was one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the Mediterranean, fuelled by record bath-like temperatures of the sea. As disaster season gets underway this year, as bne IntelliNews has reported, the sea’s temperatures are already higher than they were last year, setting a fresh all-time record high.

bne IntelliNews has been unable to confirm the veracity of the Iranian fish video, but it is not the first-time fish have reportedly fallen from the sky in Iran.

In a similar incident in 2020 in Golpayegan, also in Central Iran, another video posted on local social media also showed fish that reportedly had fallen from the sky.

And it’s not just fish that come down like manna from heaven in Iran. In what turned out to be a prank, another video showed eggplants falling from the sky in Tehran in 2020 that went viral and sparked widespread comment. The Iranian authorities subsequently detained five individuals in connection with the fabrication of the fake video.

While some commentators have cast doubt on the latest fish rain video, saying it may have been digitally manipulated, no official statements have been issued regarding the authenticity of the fish rain video thus far. The absence of an official response leaves room for speculation and given the extreme weather conditions resulting from the Climate Crisis, it is impossible to completely dismiss the incident as fake.

Adding to the chance that the fish were sucked up into the sky by some freak weather event is the fact that Yasouj is home to a large number of fish farms, with an annual output of approximately 20,000 tonnes a year.

Even more telling, Yasouj has already suffered from extreme weather incidents this year. The town was hit by heavy rainfall and thunderstorms earlier in April and  local authorities reported substantial losses incurred by these fish farms. Preliminary estimates indicated losses amounting to approximately IRR3 trillion ($4.5mn).

 

RAGOZIN: Exhausting Russia, strategies and phantasies

Some Western security experts have pushed for policies to encourage the break up of Russia. / bne IntelliNews

Feedly

By Leonid Ragozin in Riga May 3, 2024

The long-delayed allocation of $61bn by the US Congress gives Ukraine yet another chance to negotiate peace with Russia without losing even more lives and territory, provided it succeeds in stalling the current Russian offensive.

But the political class, both in Ukraine and the West, is too invested in a maximalist vision of Ukraine’s victory, while Putin is confident he can realistically end the conflict on his terms and - as things stand now - he might have a point. All of that means that the war could spill into 2025 or beyond, when Russia may very well be quite worn-out, but Ukraine - completely devastated.

Breaking up is hard to do

As the Russian advance accelerated in recent weeks and the headlines in Western media began exuding doom and gloom, several former US ambassadors manned a panel at a Jamestown Foundation event in DC together with the think tank’s president Peter Mattis.

The conference, called Russia’s Rupture and Western Policy, focused on the possibility (and desirability) of Russia’s eventual breakup. The event’s web page featured a map of Russia divided into dozens of nations, each with its own flag. The co-organiser, Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum, is closely linked to Poland’s former ruling PiS party and fugitive Russian politician Ilya Ponomaryov. He works with the Ukrainian government to recruit Russian nationals into the military units run by Ukraine’s military intelligence.

Participants in Post-Russia forums, previously held in Europe, claim to represent separatist movements in bigger ethnic autonomies, such as Bashkortostan and Buryatia. Others identify themselves with Tolkien-styled imaginary states, such as “Ingria” (area around St Petersburg) or “Smallandia” (Smolensk region). It is safe to say that none of them has any clout in their region and most are entirely unknown to its residents.

The expectation that Russia will break up into many independent states as a result of Ukraine’s military victory is one of the wildest ideas which keeps popping up in the Western discourse. It betrays the shining ignorance of its proponents about the country’s demography, geography and political reality. But it helps a number of crookish personalities to draw funds from think tanks and intelligence services.

To begin with, Russia is not the USSR where the right of republics to separate was written into the constitution. It is a nation state where over 80% of the population are ethnic Russian, while others are heavily Russified. It has ethnic autonomies, but few with indigenous majorities and even these are hardly sustainable as independent nations. Imagine Sakha-Yakutia, with an area equal to nine Germanies and a population of Latvia - maintaining territorial defence if it is threatened by the nearby China.

The ambassadors in question - John Herbst, William Taylor and William Courtney - played important roles in developing American policy with regards to Ukraine and Russia over several decades since the 1990s. Two served in Kyiv.

Back in the March of 2021, Herbst and Taylor appeared among the authors of an Atlantic Council report containing recommendations for the Biden administration on dealing with the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. The other co-author, Swedish economist Anders Aslund, sat on the previous panel. The report argued for a more aggressive approach to steering Putin towards what the authors saw as an acceptable version of peace settlement. That included derailing the Nord Stream 2 gas project and offering Ukraine a roadmap for joining Nato, should Russia display intransigence.

Its publication coincided with president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s abrupt transformation from a dove into a Russia hawk which resulted in Putin beginning to amass troops at the Ukrainian border in preparation for a full-out invasion.

To their credit, the ambassadors who lent their names to the forum as headliners, were relatively cautious about the prospects of independent Buryatia and “Smallandia”. Herbst even stated the obvious - that talking about disintegrating Russia might be helping Putin more than anyone else, which begged the question of why he chose to participate in the first place.

But they spoke about Ukraine’s victory, defined as Russian troops withdrawing to the 1991 borders, and about the subsequent regime change in Russia as a real possibility. It was only a matter of giving Ukraine more weapons and paying less attention to Russia’s red lines and nuclear threats, it followed from their comments.

The story of the demise of the USSR, mechanically extrapolated on today’s Russia, loomed large over the discourse, betraying the speakers’ inability to grasp the abyss which divides the totalitarian communist project from the highly modernised far-right-leaning nation state of today. One of the diplomats indeed repeatedly referred to modern Russians as “the Soviets”.

Hearing their optimistic prognostications against the backdrop of increasingly gloomy analysis provided daily by Ukrainian war monitoring services and blogging active-duty soldiers on Telegram created the impression of two parallel realities existing on the battlefield and inside what is commonly known as the Blob.

The stories of people fleeing or resisting press gangs that are hunting for recruits all over Ukraine seem to have never reached their ears. Neither did the stories of over 8,000 people prosecuted for “collaboration with the enemy” - a number which by far exceeds that of political prisoners in Russia. Or of repressions against Ukraine's largest church organisation, affiliated with Moscow.

It is this culture of making far-reaching decisions and implementing risky policies without really understanding or bothering to study the potential allies and adversaries, which plunged Ukraine into its ongoing catastrophe. This outcome was entirely avoidable should Russia’s reactions and capacities have been predicted more accurately and if there had been a desire to listen to Russia before it degraded into a fascist war machine.

Winning strategies that lose

Biden’s administration may or may not have taken the Atlantic Council report on board, but it was willing to take even more risks than the ambassadors were proposing at the time. In particular, it endorsed Zelenskiy’s clampdown on Putin’s man in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk, who owned several popular TV channels and whose party overcame Zelenskiy’s in a 2020 opinion poll. Medvedchuk’s immunity during the previous six years was clearly a part of an informal agreement that ended the hot phase of war in 2015 and which Putin was right to think was now broken.

A series of seemingly coordinated actions by the Ukrainian and the US governments at the beginning of 2021 resulted in Putin bringing troops to the Ukrainian border in the March of that year. But it took another year of brinkmanship and misguided diplomacy before he launched a brutal full-out invasion of Ukraine. The crime of aggression is entirely on him, but the catastrophe appears to have been avoidable at multiple points at time.

As an example, Putin did give diplomacy the last chance when Russia recognised the two Donbas “republics” but stayed still for another two days before invading Ukraine. It was during this period when Germany pulled out of Nord Stream 2, leaving Russia without a key incentive to maintain peace.

Another chance to mitigate the catastrophe came soon after. The talks which the two sides conducted during the first months of war came close to achieving an agreement, which would allow Ukraine to minimise territorial losses and join the EU. But, as a recent Foreign Policy piece by Sergey Radchenko and Samuel Charap suggested, both the United State and Britain were opposed to the peace deal. Ukrainian negotiator David Arakhamia famously pointed the finger at British prime minister Boris Johnson as the person most responsible for the failure of the talks.

There was another window of opportunity again, famously announced by the top US military commander Gen. Mark Milley, when Ukraine liberated swathes of its territory in the fall of 2022 and had an opportunity to talk with Russia from the position of relative strength. But instead, president Zelenskiy banned himself from talking to Putin by his own decree.

Putin’s strategy is based on punishing Ukraine for the perceived intransigence by claiming more territory and devastating the economy. The pattern is that every time Ukraine declines settlements, it finds itself losing more territory and left with fewer options.

So, what is the likelihood of Ukraine getting a better deal than it could conceivably get now if it keeps fighting for another year or two?

A winning strategy for Ukraine might be developed secretly in some Nato bunker as we speak, but it is hard to imagine what it could entail, especially given the fiasco of the 2023 counter-offensive. Russia has proven capable of adapting to every piece of military technology the West has supplied so far and every type of Western sanctions that has been levied on its economy.

The calculations at the time when the previous talks were derailed by the Ukrainian side in May 2022, were all based on the assumption that both the Russian economy and its military machine would soon collapse because of their inefficiency and technological backwardness. Today, it is the high-tech side of war in which Russia is making the longest strides. That prominently includes drone technology and electronic warfare.

The Western cheerleaders of Ukraine’s war effort seem to suffer from an acute deficit of ideas as to how to defeat Russia. Anne Applebaum suggested in her recent piece for the Atlantic that the West should exhaust the Russians while simultaneously arming military units composed of Russian nationals which fight on the Ukrainian side. But how lifeless will the Ukrainians become when the Russians get sufficiently exhausted?

As for the units in question, one of them, known as Russian Volunteer Corps, is comprised of neo-Nazis who draw inspiration from Russian collaborators that fought on Hitler’s side in WWII. The other unit, Free Russia Legion, is the brainchild of the above-mentioned Ilya Ponomaryov, a former associate of Putin’s spin-doctor-in-chief Vladislav Surkov.

Ponomaryov is a sworn enemy of Russia’s only genuinely popular opposition force, Navalny’s movement, whose key figures typically describe him as a fraudster. Just like the fake separatists, these units achieve much more in discrediting anti-Putin resistance in the eyes of ordinary Russians than in gaining anything tangible for Ukraine or for the Russian opposition.

The truth though is that there has never been a viable winning strategy, except those putting the world at risk of nuclear war. Much is being said about the West acting in Ukraine with one hand behind its back, but the very nature of a proxy war against a nuclear superpower presumes a great deal of self-deterrence.

The West has crossed many red lines and is willing to try even more, but it is impossible to predict how the close-knit group of criminally-inclined individuals which rules Russia will act if their country begins losing. It has always been a tough proposition to play chess with a guy who is holding a hand grenade. And it makes no sense, as Biden’s predecessors knew well at the time of the Cold War.

Russia is clear about its demands. It spelled it out on multiple occasions in recent months: It wants to return to the framework of a peace deal nearly agreed upon two years ago, but it wants to keep the territories it formally annexed in the fall of 2022. The exact shape of this territory might be up for bargain since Russia is still very far from occupying the four annexed regions in their entirety. Russia’s endorsement of China’s recent peace initiative suggests its readiness to freeze the frontline situation as it is now.

But accepting that kind of arrangement is a political suicide for a political class which convinced everyone, especially the Ukrainian public, that Ukraine could get a better deal than envisaged in previous talks by fighting a battle with a far stronger rival.

More broadly, it would be the ultimate fiasco of the three-decade policy of dismissing Russia as a “declining power” that has no real say even when it comes to its own security. But since that fiasco will be impossible to admit, retired hawks will probably keep looking for magic solutions to their Russia problem. Maybe a separatist movement in Putin’s hometown will help, who knows.

 FEMICIDE IS MISOGYNY

Shocking trial of ex-minister has shifted domestic violence attitudes in Kazakhstan, says brother

Kuandyk Bishimbayev and Saltanat Nurkenova at their wedding. / screenshot

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By bne IntelliNews May 2, 2024

The brother of Saltanat Nukenova—allegedly beaten to death by former Kazakh economy minister Kuandyk Bishimbayev in a torture ordeal that lasted several hours—has said that he is in no doubt that the trial of the accused has brought about a shift in public attitudes towards domestic violence in Kazakhstan.

With many Kazakhs stunned by shocking CCTV video footage streamed online from the court showing Bishimbayev punching and kicking Nukenova and dragging her by her hair at a family restaurant, the brother, Aitbek Amangeldy, told The Associated Press: "It changes people's minds when they see directly what it looks like when a person is tortured."

The trial of Bishimbayev, 44, is the first court hearing in the Central Asian country of 19mn to ever be streamed online, making it readily watchable.

Bishimbayev is accused of subjecting Nukenova to a torture ordeal that lasted several hours (Credit: Kazakhstan Supreme Court Press Office).

Nukenova, 31, was found dead in November in the restaurant, owned by one of her husband's relatives. Hours after the harrowing video footage was recorded, she died of brain trauma.

According to a 2018 study backed by UN Women, around 400 women die as a result of domestic violence in Kazakhstan every year, although many cases go unreported.

Following the tragic death of Nukenova, tens of thousands of people in the country signed a petition demanding tougher measures against perpetrators of domestic violence. Last month, senators approved a bill, dubbed "Saltanat's Law", that toughens spousal abuse laws, criminalising the act of domestic violence.

In the trial, Bishimbayev for weeks maintained his innocence. However, last month he admitted in court that he had beaten Nukenova and "unintentionally" caused her death.

Previously, as he attempted to explain his not-guilty plea, Nukenova’s grief-stricken mother shouted in an outburst: "How can you say that? Unintended? You were beating her to death for several hours!"

She had to leave the courtroom when photos of her daughter's injuries were shown in court. The judge banned the circulation of the images outside the courtroom.

Former politician Bishimbayev already had some notoriety. He was jailed for bribery in 2018, but spent less than two years of his 10-year sentence in prison before he was pardoned.

Amangeldy has been vocal about the Bishimbayev’s hearing in the Kazakh media, while also being a key witness in the trial.

Bishimbayev’s lawyers have portrayed Nukenova as psychologically unstable and prone to violence, jealousy and alcohol abuse. 

None of the footage shown to the court shows Nukenova assaulting Bishimbayev.

Relatively early in the trial, Bishimbayev triggered incredulity when he acknowledged that with Nukenova still in a state of shock after the violence, he chose to phone a soothsayer he regularly consulted for advice instead of an ambulance.

Turkey reportedly still loading Azerbaijani oil for Israel despite “total trade ban”

RUSSIAN OIL BY ANY OTHER NAME 

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, left, and Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan may have a decision to make on continued deliveries of Azerbaijani oil to Israel by tankers sailing from Turkey's port of Ceyhan. / President.az, cc-by-4.0

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By bne IntelliNews May 5, 2024

Azerbaijani oil was on May 5 still being loaded on tankers bound for Israel at the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan despite Turkey on May 2 announcing a complete ban on trading with the Israelis, Hebrew evening financial daily Globes has reported, citing Israeli sources.

Azerbaijan is a close ally of fellow Muslim-majority nation Turkey, but it is also seen as having strong relations with Israel. It is an important supplier of oil to the Israelis. Oil from Caspian Sea resources is piped to Ceyhan via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline. Tankers ship the oil from Ceyhan to Haifa.

The oil export operation appears to be continuing despite Turkey’s trade ministry asserting on May 2 that “all products” were covered by the trade boycott announced due to the “worsening humanitarian tragedy in Palestine [amid the war in Gaza]”.

“The second phase of the measures taken at the state level has been started, and export and import transactions related to Israel have been suspended to cover all products,” the ministry said in a statement, adding: “Turkey will firmly and decisively implement these new measures until the government of Israel allows an uninterrupted and sufficient flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza.”

In January, Israel was the top customer for Azerbaijani oil, importing 523,500 tonnes worth $297mn. Other significant suppliers of oil to Israel are Kazakhstan and Nigeria.

Israel—which in the conflict with Palestinian militant group Hamas has refused to allow Turkey to join in international efforts to deliver aid to Gaza civilians—has become a very important supplier of arms to Azerbaijan, with exports including combat drones from Israel Aerospace Industries, long-range artillery and surface-to-air missile systems. Israel also sells satellites to Azerbaijan.

Globes said Israel’s relations with Azerbaijan are the most stable that it has with any Muslim country.

Trade between Israel and Turkey stands at around $6.2bn a year, with Turkish exports making up around $4.6bn of that figure, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. Israel was Turkey's 13th biggest export market in 2023, taking 2.1% of Turkish exports. Turkey was in 2023 Israel's fifth biggest source of imports.

Among Israeli exports to Turkey are petroleum products. Israel exported around 11,000 barrels per day (bpd) of gasoline and diesel to Turkish ports in April, according to data from Kpler.

Taken by surprise by Ankara’s announcement of the freezing of all trade with Israel, Turkish exporters are looking to work around the boycott by sending their goods to Israel via third countries.

The owner of a Turkish food exporter told Reuters on May 3 that the halt in trade also meant blocking goods destined for the Palestinian territories, as they have to pass through Israeli customs.

“The Palestinian people will also suffer,” he said. “We will see if we can send the orders via Egypt, Jordan or Lebanon. I don’t know how we’ll get out of this situation.”

Turkey is the first of Israel’s key trade partners to halt exports and imports in response to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

In 1949, Turkey was the first Muslim country to recognise Israel. However, relations have generally worsened in recent decades despite periods when ties have improved.

On May 5, Turkish daily Hurriyet reported main rival to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in domestic politics, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, as calling on European countries to take a stronger stance against events in Gaza.

"While Europe has positioned itself as the custodian of democratic ideals, can it sincerely claim to have consistently upheld these values?" Imamoglu was cited as saying during a special session of the Party of European Socialists held in Paris on May 3.

He added: "Should we not speak louder and condemn the massacre of tens of thousands of innocent, including women and children [in Gaza]?”