France must drop makeshift approach to public broadcast media funding

AFP
ORGANISATION: RSF_en

Replacing the licence fee that funds France’s public broadcast media with a levy on VAT is not an adequate solution because it would have to be transitory, says Reporters Without Borders (RSF), calling on the government and parliament to create a funding method appropriate to the role the public broadcast media play in France’s democracy.

“Eliminating the public broadcast media’s main source of funding without offering an alternative worthy of their role in our democracy is a makeshift approach,” RSF secretary-general Christophe said. “Such improvisation is unacceptable given the importance of what is at stake, namely independent and pluralist news coverage. We urge the government to find a permanent funding solution that protects the public broadcast media from political pressure, and we ask parliamentarians to quickly enshrine it in legislation.”

Despite calls from many quarters including RSF, a levy on VAT as the public broadcast media funding mechanism was adopted as part of the 2022 budget amendment bill in a vote 27 July in the National Assembly. It was due to go before the Senate on 28 July.

The government had proposed replacing the Public Broadcasting Contribution (CAP) – a tax levied annually on every household with a TV set – by an “ad hoc budgetary assignment” allocating funding for the public broadcast media directly from the state budget.

The very different mechanism adopted by the National Assembly maintains an earmarked tax system, isolating the resources allocated to public broadcasting from the rest of the state budget, thereby ensuring that they do not depend on the government’s goodwill and helping to protect public broadcast media independence.

Unfortunately, this VAT-based solution can only be a short-term one. Under a public finances modernisation law adopted in December 2021, any allocation of tax to a public service will, from 2025 onwards, have to be justified by a link between the tax and the service funded. As there is no such link between VAT and public broadcasting, this funding method cannot last more than two years and the issue will have to be addressed again in 2024.

The future of public media funding was thrown into doubt in the autumn of 2019 when it was decided to gradually end the household tax, on which the CAP was based, and to abolish the mechanism for collecting this tax and the CAP from 2023. Scrapping the CAP without a permanent replacement, and the last-minute proposal of an alternative mechanism, via VAT, have only prolonged this worrying improvisation.

Several methods have been proposed for safeguarding the independence and predictability of public broadcasting funding. They include funding from the public finance programming law with the involvement of an independent commission that issues its opinion; a universal and progressive fee based on household income; and a levy on state revenue, a mechanism proposed by the parliamentarian Bruno Studer.

But none of these proposals has been backed by the government or National Assembly. And if parliament fails to adopt a funding mechanism with adequate protection for public broadcast media independence, the CAP’s abolition is liable to be condemned by the Constitutional Council, as made clear in a recent report by the general inspectorates of finance and cultural affairs. The Constitutional Council has ruled in the past that public broadcasting independence is essential to the constitution and that its independence depends on guaranteed funding.

Growing uncertainty therefore surrounds French public broadcasting at a time when the European Commission is preparing to adopt media freedom legislation whose aims include strengthening the independence of Europe’s public service media.

France is ranked 26th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2022 World Press Freedom Index.

After the constitution, Kais Saied's next target: The unions

The stage is set for an almighty clash between Tunisia’s new Sultan and the unions, which after Ennahda is the only other organised mass movement

Tunisian President Kais Saied leaves after voting in a referendum on his draft constitution at a polling station in the capital Tunis, on 25 July, 2022 (AFP)

David Hearst
26 July 2022 

There can be no serious dispute that Kais Saied’s seizure of power in Tunisia a year ago was a coup; that the document MEE published outlining what would happen two months before Saied's move was a genuine plan that he indeed carried out, and that Tunisia is now hurtling towards dictatorship.

Saied wants absolute power. Now. He regards himself as Sultan, a man who can see beyond the needs of the present, a ruler anointed by God himself

Not even the politicians who supported Saied a year ago, and have subsequently been burnt by him, would dispute that. Still less the unions who backed him, or indeed the impoverished Tunisians. His popularity has plummeted from over 80 percent to 22.3 percent.

Even the youth, who last year were so convinced that Saied would prove a new broom, are split.

Opposition to his attempts to gather all powers of the state in his hands without any checks or balances is widespread, and goes well beyond his main target, the moderate Islamist movement Ennahda, which remains the single largest political movement.

A year on, Saied is taking a significant step to setting his grip on power in concrete by forcing through a constitution which destroys all checks and balances on his rule by decree. Monday's referendum results, according to preliminary figures from the electoral commission, showed a low turnout of just 27.5 percent.
Significant steps

Saied appears to be the sole author of the constitution he has put to the vote. It had other authors, but Saied has bulldozed through his own text. Sadeq Belaid, the head of the advisory committee appointed by Saied to write the new constitution, rejected the final draft.

Tunisia: Kais Saied's coup does not have a happy ending

David Hearst 

Read More »

Belaid revealed that Saied made fundamental changes to the version submitted to him by the committee. Belaid was one of Saied’s closest associates.

The new constitution eradicates the 2014 constitution of Tunisia, which took two years and extensive consultation both locally and nationally to produce. It concentrates all powers in the hands of the presidency over the government, the judiciary, and the executive, thus destroying the principle of the separation of powers deemed essential to any other democracy.

To pass it, Saied has had to dismiss Tunisia’s election commission which did a good job in seven previous elections and put yes men in charge. Even to the last minute, Saied broke the rules which he himself set, rather like former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Saied was accused of violating election law by broadcasting a video on an official channel on voting day.

All but one party boycotted the referendum and there were no observers.

The results of such a sham are, therefore, going to be irrelevant. No doubt Saied himself will feign surprise at the result. But this will be a throwback to the worst years of post-colonial dictatorship in Africa and Latin America.

The Nation, the mouthpiece of the presidency in Kenya, feigned surprise when Jomo Kenyatta, a notorious authoritarian, was re-elected president . "Its Mzee!", the splash headline read as if the ruling party, Kenya African National Union (KANU), had not won every seat in every election from 1969 to 1988.

So it will be in Tunisia today.

The moment the official results come through, the constitution is confirmed. No minimum turnout is stipulated, such as the usual requirement that 55 percent of the population has to vote in favour.

Saied, a constitutional lawyer by training, does not care about details. He wants absolute power. Now. He regards himself as sultan, a man who can see beyond the needs of the present. A ruler anointed by God himself. There have been many of those in the past, and such messianic missions almost always end badly.
No free pass

The frontline of the resistance to dictatorship is being manned by Tunisia’s brave judges. This is a surprise, but it represents progress of sorts. It was not so under Habib Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, where the courts were an all too subservient arm of the presidency. But Saied’s former colleagues in the legal profession are having none of it.

Tunisia: Kais Saied's row with the judiciary explained Read More »

Not all of them. Some are prepared to accept what in Soviet times became known as "telephone justice", when judgments were phoned into the judges by the unseen hands of the party.

The judges' union staged a month-long strike in protest at the sacking of 57 of their number. Saied had accused them of corruption and protecting terrorists, but his criterion for anyone who protects terrorists is notoriously loose; it's any judge who disobeys his orders.

A new list of the disobedient - or independently minded - judges is being drawn up, on which will be included the judge who dismissed the trumped-up money laundering case against Rached Ghannouchi, the former speaker of parliament and head of the Ennahda party.

The claim that Ghannouchi accepted money from foreign governments and laundered them through another organisation acting as a front originates with a British journalist, whose fame was widespread in the Middle East but whose reporting could prove as flawed as it was brilliant.

The late Robert Fisk published the claim that Ghannouchi had been offered significant sums of money from the emir of Qatar on the eve of elections. His source was then Syrian foreign minister, Walid Muallem, who was next in line in the queue for the emir’s audience.

Rached Ghannouchi greets his supporters as he leaves the office of Tunisia's counter-terrorism prosecutor in Tunis on 19 July 2022 (AFP)

Ennahda sued and won. The Independent had to pay up and issue a fulsome apology. "We wish to make it clear that Mr Ghannouchi and his party have not accepted any donation from a foreign state in breach of Tunisian party funding laws. We apologise to Mr Ghannouchi."

Ghannouchi’s imprisonment would be a message to all political parties that there is no room for political pluralism

Other Arab newspapers that repeated the claim were sued, lost and dodged the fines, one by reformulating its company in London.

Last week, the investigating judge would have none of it. The prosecution alleged that Ghannouchi had links with the Namaa Tunisia Association, which has been accused of money laundering.

The judges refused to accept the prosecution’s demand to arrest Ghannouchi while he was still under investigation, but the case itself continues. After a nine-hour hearing, the judge let Ghannouchi go free, although he continues to be investigated for other claims.

There were other disturbing features to the case. Why was it heard in an anti-terrorist court rather than one that deals with financial misdeeds? Even if the case were proved, it has nothing to do with terrorism.

If the prosecution had succeeded this time round, the story would have been easy to sell to Tunisians. It goes like this: "The shortage of basic foodstuffs has nothing to do with me. There is a conspiracy in the country to create these shortages and these dark forces are plotting against good people like you and me."

This is how Saied thinks and talks to the people who elected him. It's delusional, deeply mendacious, and criminally irresponsible given the depth of poverty and unemployment in the country.

Fewer and fewer Tunisians believe him.

The next target

Ennahda is growing stronger. Members are rejoining, and Ghannouchi himself is quite prepared to do what would be for him a third stint in prison. He was imprisoned under late presidents Bourguiba and Ben Ali.

Once again, Tunisia is showing by example how unfit their European neighbours are. They really do want to crush the Arab Spring

Ghannouchi’s imprisonment would be a message to all political parties that there is no room for political pluralism. Ghannouchi’s close aides say it would strengthen Ennahda, not crush it.

The sky would also not fall in on the National Salvation Front which the Islamists have formed with nine other parties and civil society groups. Its leader Ahmed Nejib Chebbi is no Islamist, but he can distinguish between political differences and democracy itself.

With the leader of Ennahda cleared out the way, Saied’s next target would be the unions.

With a gross national income of $45bn in 2021 and a 36bn dinar (almost $12bn) shortage in basic commodities, Tunisia’s public finances are going to hit the buffers very soon. Dribbles of cash are arriving from the Gulf and the EU, but Saied’s only hope is reaching a deal with the IMF, which will surely demand a high price for its bailout, as it did in Egypt.

The IMF will demand subsidy cuts and redundancies of public sector workers.

Noureddine Taboubi, the secretary general of the UGTT, has already had one clash in the courts over attempts to rule his third term in office illegal, and has had one attempt at a general strike. In the referendum, the UGTT was careful to walk a tightrope of condemning the constitution, but allowing members to vote with their conscience.

Already it will be impossible to tell how many Tunisians followed the calls for a boycott and how many simply stayed away from the polling booths. The stage is set for an almighty clash between Tunisia’s new sultan and the unions, which after Ennahda is the only other organised mass movement.

Tunisia’s hard-pressed democrats will not expect a word of help from the self-declared bastions of democratic behaviour - the US and the EU. They have mouthed deep concern over what Saied is doing, while straining every sinew to avoid calling it a coup.

They followed the same playbook in Egypt and would have done the same in Turkey had the coup attempt there succeeded. But once again, Tunisia is showing by example how unfit their European neighbours are.

They really do want to crush the Arab Spring and Tunisia’s democrats are its last withered shoots.

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


This article is available in French on Middle East Eye French edition.

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was The Guardian's foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

Digital nightmare: The Arab dissidents ruined by phone hacking



Dania Akkad
28 July 2022

Legal action in the UK reveals the emotional burden that digital surveillance tools such as Pegasus have had on their targets

We arrive at the location where Ghanem al-Masarir told us to go. But there is no sign of him. A tree-lined trail leading into dark woods? Yes. A field of green grass? Yes. Ghanem? No.

When we agreed to meet at the edge of this country park, on the outskirts of north-west London, it was an unusual plan - but for al-Masarir it made sense.

Back in 2018, the 42-year-old, living in the UK for the past 19 years, was at the peak of his self-made career. That month The Ghanem Show, his YouTube channel which pointedly - and at times wackily - criticised the Saudi royal family hit 300m viewers.

One of al-Masarir's nicknames for Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman - the kingdom’s de facto ruler - was Al-dub Al-dasher, the Arabic for stray, fat bear. It had been picked up on social media across the Arab world and even written about in The Economist.

In one episode about the Saudi king and his son he joked: “Now, in the age of Salmanco and his stray bear, also known as double underpants, someone will spend years and years in jail for a tweet.”

Then early one Friday evening that August, while walking in the upscale Knightsbridge neighbourhood of London, al-Masarir was jumped by two men across the street from Harrods. A third man filmed the incident: footage of the attack soon appeared on social media accounts linked to the Saudi government. Al-Masarir was sure the incident was ordered by the crown prince.

Three months later, and within weeks of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the Metropolitan Police came to al-Masarir’s London home. There was a credible threat to his life, they told him. A panic button was quickly installed.

Ghanem al-Masarir: "It has affected me in my work life, my personal life, everything, that hacking" (MEE)

Amid all this, Al-Masarir noticed something odd about his iPhones. Their batteries were dying quickly. They refused to update with the latest software. Puzzled, Al-Masarir contacted Citizen Lab, a group of academics at the University of Toronto who focus on communication technology, human rights and global security. It conducted a forensic investigation and discovered that the phones had been hacked with Pegasus, the spyware made by the Israeli company NSO Group that turns phones into military-grade surveillance devices.

Al-Masarir’s movements, his conversations, his photos and his messages, investigators found, had all been fed back to a Saudi server.

It’s now four years later. A cameraman and I are meeting with al-Masarir at a dot he’s marked on a map in this country park. These days, he tells me over an encrypted app, it’s better not to film at his house. I’ve watched clips of his show and an interview he gave to Channel 4 in January 2020, when he’s so chatty that the presenter is forced to cut him off. I’m half expecting Ghanem to jump out of a bush. Or climb out of the white van idling nearby.

But where is he?

Then a figure walks straight towards me. He introduces himself: it’s only then I realise that the man, wrapped in a thick scarf and heavy suede jacket on this hot June day, is the host of The Ghanem Show - or, at least, he was. Al-Masarir tells me, after we find a gnarly log to sit on, that he stopped filming after the events of 2018. “I couldn’t do my show, I couldn’t do anything,” he explains, carefully eyeballing in turn a dog walker, a family and two men passing by.

There had been earlier attempts to silence him. YouTube, says al-Masarir, shut down his channel twice at the request of the Saudi Broadcasting Agency. He had received death threats and threatening phone calls.

Under police protection, and scared to travel anywhere in central London, al-Masarir's life closed in on him. “It has affected me in my work life, my personal life, everything, that hacking," he says. "It has destroyed my appetite to do anything to be honest."
Pegasus in the UK

During the past year, story after story has emerged from nearly every continent of activists, journalists, politicians and others who have been the alleged targets of state-sponsored spyware attacks. Most relate to Pegasus and the leak of list containing more than 50,000 phone numbers. They include Middle East Eye staff.

But the sheer scale of the Pegasus Papers - which were just one leak, about one type of spyware - doesn’t begin to capture the impact that hacking has on the lives of its targets.

Among these are Arab dissidents who for decades have moved to the UK to flee repressive governments in the belief that they could live and speak freely. Now they find themselves questioning whether their adopted home is as safe as they once believed - or, perhaps, wanted to believe.

Their fear, they say, has been compounded by the British government’s muted response to their attacks and a lack of follow up from any UK law enforcement agency. What’s to stop them, the dissidents ask, from being targeted again, given that Citizen Lab now says that even Downing Street and the Foreign Office were infected with Pegasus, likely by the UAE?

Pegasus: How it hacks phones+ Show



Like al-Masarir, all the dissidents MEE interviewed for this story had an inkling before they were hacked that the UK might not be fail-safe. One survived an early morning arson attempt on his family home. Another found a large knife outside his kitchen window the same day he received messages with knife emojis that read “Soon.”

Two others had their British bank accounts - and those of their family members - closed after the UAE designated the British-based organisations that they run and lead as terrorist organisations.

But the hacking, the dissidents say, has been disturbing in another way. There is something incredibly distressing, they say, about how their private lives were infiltrated in virtual space, and without their knowledge and with no other witnesses, in real time.

It’s an invisible, yet very real and potent trauma that digital rights expert Marwa Fatafta, MENA policy manager for Access Now, instantly recognises when I tell her the stories I’m hearing. “Surveillance is a form of violence,” she jumps in. “It violates your privacy, it violates your dignity, it violates your agency. You are always in a perpetual state of fear and anxiety, not only about yourself but also about others.”

The six men I spoke to have taken legal action in the UK against Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who are all accused of targeting them on separate occasions. Their hope is that British courts will act where they feel the British government and law enforcement has failed.

A judgement is imminent in the case al-Masarir has brought against Saudi Arabia over the spyware allegations as well as the August 2018 street attack. But it won’t be a final ruling: rather, the court will decide whether al-Masarir’s case for injuries and damages against the kingdom can proceed further. Usually a state would be shielded from most litigation in the UK, thanks to the State Immunity Act of 1978, enacted before spyware existed.

But al-Masarir’s lawyers at the UK law firm Leigh Day argue that what happened to him is an exception to that act. His case will be the first ruling from a UK court involving spyware and a foreign country, and could set precedent for other dissidents in the UK who have been targeted. It may also, say lawyers and surveillance experts, serve as inspiration for future litigation around the world.

MEE asked the Saudi, Emirati and Bahraini governments to comment on the legal action in the UK, but none replied.

Anas Altikriti, 53, is British-Iraqi. His father was a prominent opposition figure against the Ba’ath regime. The family left Iraq for the UK when Altikriti was a toddler. Spending much of his teenage years and his early 20s in the UAE where he attended school, Altikriti returned to the UK where he has campaigned against war and for democracy in the Middle East, run a foundation promoting dialogue between Islam and the West, and served as a hostage negotiator.

His typical poised, articulate self, Altikriti continues to speak fluently even as rain falls on us. But I’m struck that this is the first time in several interviews, over several years, that I’ve ever heard him discuss feelings when he explains what digital surveillance has done to him.

“It’s the unseen, the creeping up on you in your most safe and secure and sanctified place.”

Altikriti founded the Cordoba Foundation in 2005. It promotes dialogue between the West and Islam, as well as advising politicians on strategy and security in the Middle East. In 2014, it was designated as a terrorist organisation by the UAE - but the UK government said nothing, to the surprise of Altikriti. “At least clear your own name,” he said of the British government, “never mind me or Cordoba.”

Anas Altikriti: "It’s the unseen, the creeping up on you in your most safe and secure and sanctified place." (MEE)

“That left a mark on my impression of how valuable or otherwise it was to be a British citizen. But this is probably the final nail in the coffin.”

Altikriti learned last summer that forensic investigators believe the UAE hacked his Iphone with Pegasus. Since then he has told people not to tell him their secrets, which is a bit tricky when you offer political advice to leaders and conduct hostage negotiations for a living.

His appetite for handling information that is even remotely off the record is now gone. “I say: ‘Look, I’d rather you didn’t [tell me something private] unless you have to because I don’t know if I’m the only one listening to this.”

Before the events of last summer, Altikriti’s phone was practically appended to his body, ready to be answered at any moment. Now he’s not sure when - or if - he wants it near him again. Those closest to him also feel the same. “I was with a group of friends and they laughed: ‘We need to be careful. Anas is carrying his phone’.” He shrugs.

“It’s deeply uncomfortable.”

Who hacked the phones?

Mohammed Kozbar, 56, is the chairman of Finsbury Park Mosque in north London. Two days after Ramadan has ended, we sit in the mosque’s emptied prayer hall which is quiet and soft underfoot as a breeze blows in from an open window. Kozbar too has an air of calmness, his tall frame gently perched on a folded chair. Yet he’s clearly uncomfortable speaking about himself.

He arrived in Britain in 1990 from Lebanon, which had been devastated by the drawn-out civil war. Since then he has focused on building the Muslim community in Britain: he is among those credited with turning the Finsbury Park Mosque around after it was dominated by Egyptian cleric Abu Hamza. As the mosque's iman, Hamza encouraged his followers to fight overseas, and was later convicted by a UK court for inciting violence before he was extradited to the US where he was found guilty of terrorism charges and jailed for life.

Kozbar regularly brings international law enforcement delegations to visit the mosque and observe how the they put Hamza's influence behind them.

Last July, Kozbar too discovered that his number was on the leaked list and had likely been targeted by the UAE. Citizen Lab analysed his phone and confirmed it had been infiltrated by Pegasus. He’s not sure why - only that he had previously spoken out against the UAE’s human rights record. Like Tikriti, he had had his British bank accounts shut down when the UAE named the Muslim Association of Britain, in which he and Altikriti have held leadership roles, as a terrorist entity.

Mohammed Kozbar: "I asked: ‘Are you 100 percent sure?' He confirmed: ‘Yes, I’m 100 percent sure.” (MEE)

Kozbar recalls the moment, while sat in the mosque, when a reporter told him what had happened to his phone. “I asked: ‘Are you 100 percent sure?' He confirmed: ‘Yes, I’m 100 percent sure.'”

Hours later, Kozbar explained to his wife and his children that photos and conversations they had shared hadn’t been private. And it is the thought of his family’s privacy being violated that has particularly disturbed him.

“What did you do, Baba?” his 13-year-old son asked. "I didn’t have an answer,” Kozbar says, his voice breaking. “I said: ‘I didn’t do anything.’” Kozbar now wonders where and if a file of his family’s messages and images may be sitting.

In contrast, Tikriti says he has no doubt that information collected when his phone was infected has already been used. At the time investigators say he was hacked, Tikriti was involved in four hostage negotiations, none of which involved the UAE.

One effort in particular, to secure the release of a young woman, had reached its final stages. But, Tikriti said, all communication stopped before the deal could be made and the hostage freed. He pauses. “I have negotiated probably 31 or 32 cases and never - never - has what I’ve just described to you happened.”

'If it can be deployed against you once, then what’s the guarantee that it isn’t being deployed against you now?'
- Monika Sobiecki, Bindmans lawyers

That was two years ago. To this day, Altikriti has no idea where or how the woman is - or what happened to the people in the region who tried to free her. “What kind of danger have they been put in as a result? Only God knows.”

Altikriti has struggled as to whether to tell the woman’s family that his phone was hacked. He feels burdened by the knowledge of how the deal went wrong - but decided that knowing the details wouldn’t benefit them. He coughs and seems uncharacteristically lost for words.

“The person who they were hanging a lot of hope on was not as secure as they were hoping. It’s nothing that I could have done. I didn’t realise it at the time. I didn’t realise it even after it went cold.”

It’s this not knowing that the lawyers involved in the legal action now underway say has been one of the harshest blows to their clients, and is fuelling their anxiety even now.

Monika Sobiecki, a partner at the UK law firm Bindmans which is representing Kozbar and Altikriti, says: “If it can be deployed against you once, then what’s the guarantee that it isn’t being deployed against you now?

“Effectively, what this creates is a panopticon - the world as a prison - and there is nowhere you can be safe from your persecutors because even if you’ve moved to what’s considered a safe, stable Western democracy, you can still be pursued and persecuted.”

Yahya Assiri is certainly not relaxed. “Honestly, I don’t feel safe in this country,” he tells me from the London office of ALQST, the human rights organisation he started in 2014 after he left his double life in Saudi Arabia.

On the surface, Assiri was a Saudi air force officer charged with weapons purchases. But he was also using the online pseudonym Abu Fares to raise concerns about issues including poverty, unemployment and repression. Eventually, he was going to be caught.

In 2014, he was studying human rights at Kingston University in south-west London when he heard from friends in Saudi Arabia that security forces were asking after him. It was then that Assiri realised that he could not return home.

Yahya Assiri: "The most painful thing is there were a large number of human rights advocates and dissidents targeted." (MEE)

For eight busy years now, Assiri has been criticising the kingdom’s policies and leaders from the UK. In addition to ALQST, he launched Diwan London, an online platform promoting freedom and justice in the Arab world. He also serves as the secretary-general of the National Assembly Party (NAAS), Saudi Arabia’s only opposition party, which is largely run by exiles.

But his work, particularly the networks he’s built, has made Assiri and his family a target. They have been threatened in public. They had their car broken into. It was outside their kitchen window that a knife was found.

Assiri himself is in the unenviable position, Citizen Lab investigators believe, of having been targeted by Pegasus not once, but twice. Both times, they suspect, were at the hands of Saudi Arabia. “The most painful thing is there were a large number of human rights advocates and dissidents targeted throughout this period, people I consider patriots, people working for the benefit of these countries."

In a pre-action letter sent in February to Khalid bin Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, Saudi Arabia’s UK ambassador, Assiri’s lawyers say the amount of data that may have been exfiltrated from their client’s phone when it was infected “is nothing short of catastrophic” for their client and his contacts in the kingdom.

Those contacts include Loujain al-Hathloul, the prominent Saudi Arabian human rights activist who was among at least 10 Saudi Arabian women arrested in May 2018, weeks before the driving ban that they had long protested against was to be lifted. Al-Hathloul was held for 10 months and physically tortured before she was officially indicted. Her charge sheet is replete with references to her communications with “the renegade Yahya Assiri”.

Assiri says it’s hard to know for sure whether information from his phone or other devices was critical in the case of Hathloul or any of the other cases. Hathoul’s phones, too, have been hacked twice since 2017.

But Assiri suggests that to attempt to sort out which infiltration of what device led to which arrest is to miss the bigger picture. “It’s painful to know that the work we were doing was being spied on. But the most important thing isn’t necessarily that these authorities are trying to find out our secrets.

“It’s that they are trying to stop anyone speaking out against them or anyone challenging them.”

Bahraini dissidents tracked

Saeed Shehabi thought he had found the way to avoid being hacked. A veteran pro-democracy activist and journalist, as well as a leading figure in the Bahraini opposition movement, he is a trustee of the Abrar Islamic Foundation, a registered charity focused on Muslim education in the UK.

But when I call the foundation, the man on the other end of the phone apologises. Dr Shehabi is not in, he explains.

I ask if he can take a message to give to Shehabi.

“No, sorry,” he says. “He doesn’t have a mobile.”

When we eventually meet, Shehabi, 67, explains that he’s never had a phone. “I took precautions. I knew that I was targeted by our government because I have been a life-long opponent.” The not-having-a-phone strategy fits in with Shehabi’s old school, real-world methods.

Each Wednesday afternoon, he can be found protesting outside the Saudi embassy in London where he and others began demonstrating in March 2011 after the kingdom invaded Bahrain during pro-democracy protests. On Saturdays, he's at Downing Street, calling on the UK government to stop supporting Bahrain and training its security forces.

'I’m getting older, and these years are just gone for nothing, and it’s a result of the Saudis'
- Ghanem al-Masirir

He is also, he tells me, an old hand when it comes to being surveilled. During the 1980s, he received at least three suspicious phone calls at his home in London from Bahrain that he believes were meant to catch him out.

One time, during a government crackdown, a fellow dissident called to arrange military training, despite Shehabi’s shock and insistence that this was not how the Bahraini opposition should operate. It later transpired that the friend was calling from a Bahraini prison. “They wanted to catch me with it,” Shehabi says of the call and others that followed. “The surveillance has always been there.”

In 2014, a leak revealed that Bahrain had allegedly hacked Shehabi’s computer using FinSpy surveillance software and potentially gained access to his email. The authorities could even control Shehabi’s laptop camera and microphones to watch and listen to him.

But Shehabi blamed himself.

“‘Are you so naive, Saeed?” he recalls he asked himself. “How can you allow your enemies to infiltrate you so easily?’" He turns back to me. “It’s not so easily. It has been paid for. It is an expensive procedure. But they managed to do it.”

Shehabi says the hacking revelation hit him especially hard because it came after his family escaped an early morning fire at their home in 2009. That in turn came two days after a pair of Bahraini dissidents were attacked in an alleyway near London’s Euston Station.

According to evidence Shehabi and other Bahrainis gave to the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee in November 2012, they had been warned of “an imminent attack” before both incidents. After they were attacked on the street, the two dissidents say they were told by a caller that if they went near the Bahraini Embassy then “next time they would receive harsher punishment”.

It’s clear to Shehabi that these were attacks meant to silence them. “So when this [the hacking] happens, in light of these experiences, you say: ‘What is next?’”

Back in the woods on the outskirts of London, Ghanem al-Masirir seems more relaxed. During the past four years, he’s recounted the details of his life for dozens of journalists. He admits, once we are done filming, that it’s tiring.

“I’m getting older, and these years are just gone for nothing, and it’s a result of the Saudis,” he says. “I can’t get these years back, but hopefully I will stand up on my feet one day.”

Why don’t we have a coffee, he suggests. We’ve come a long way to see him and he wants to show us the neighbourhood where he lives. We pass by the white van and I tell him I thought he was going to jump out of it when we were looking for him earlier.

He pauses, and I worry I’ve said something wrong. Then he smiles and I see a familiar face. “Did you think I was being chopped up in there?” he laughs.

And we walk towards a busy suburb, Ghanem tucked between me and a cameraman, the sun momentarily on his face.

Illustration by Mohamed Elaasar / Hossam Sarhan, Middle East Eye

The problem is men: Muslim women speak out against abuse in the US

A woman can do everything right and still be murdered, experts say

Muslim women leave after morning prayer to start their Eid al-Adha celebrations at Bush Terminal Piers Park in Brooklyn, New York, on 9 July 2022 (AFP)
By
Zainab Iqbal
Published date: 28 July 2022

Khadija* was making pancakes. She had just poured the batter into the skillet when she got a phone call from her friend.

"Are you ok?" was the first thing her friend asked her.

Khadija was confused. There was no salaam, no 'How are you?'

"Uh yes. Why?" she asked.

And that's when she found out about Sania Khan.

Khan was a 29-year-old South Asian Muslim photographer. Earlier this year, she had gotten a divorce from her husband and documented it all on TikTok.

'It could have been me. It could still be me'

- Domestic violence survivor

In one of her videos, she wrote: "The first few months of any divorce journey is the darkest. It's full of anxiety, sleepless nights, wondering if you’re doing the right thing, thinking Allah abandoned you, and feeling hopeless. You are not a failure because your marriage did not work out. Be gentle with your heart during this stage. Time does heal all things and it will get better."

But for Khan, things failed to get better. On 18 July, her ex-husband Raheel Ahmad drove 11 hours from Georgia to Chicago where Khan had an apartment. When his family found out he was missing, they called the police for a wellness check-in at Khan's house, where they believed he might have gone.

When the police arrived, they found both of them unresponsive with gunshot wounds to their heads. Both were dead. According to reports, Ahmad had shot and killed Khan before killing himself.

Not even 24 hours later, 20-year-old Alwiya Mohamed in Milwaukee was shot and killed by her husband who then killed himself. Their one-year-old son was home with them at the time.

Khajida would later find out that a couple of weeks before Khan's murder, Sadia Manzoor’s estranged husband came to her apartment in Houston and shot and killed Manzoor, their four-year-old daughter and her mother before turning the gun on himself.

When Khadija found out, she had a panic attack. She hadn’t had one of those in ages. Her breathing was restricted, she began to sweat and it felt like her heart was going to thump right out of her chest, she said. For her, it all felt too real.
Holding the culprits accountable

In 2015, Khadija escaped an abusive marriage. It had begun with small things: her husband wouldn’t allow her to see her family, he would take the money she earned, he would sell her jewellery. And then he began to punch the walls.

If he was upset, he'd begin to yell at her until she backed up into a wall that he would punch. She remembers the first time it was near her left ear. Sometimes he'd throw stuff, but it wouldn't touch her. Not yet, at least. Until one day, he punched her. It was right in the stomach as she stood in the middle of their bedroom in their tiny apartment in New York.

From then on, his fists always landed on her body - her neck, her chest, her shoulders.

The night before she left him, she and her husband had had a fight. She told him he was cruel and the marriage was over. He punched her. But little did he know, it would be the last punch. She told him she wanted a divorce. He didn’t want to give it to her. So early in the morning, she packed her bags and never looked back.

Roe v Wade: Muslim women say overturning of decision will hurt everyone

Read More »

While Khadija thought she could find strength in those close to her, most of her family didn't believe her. Her ex-husband's family blamed her for their marital breakdown and the community was silent.

Khadija said she didn't go to the police because she was undocumented and afraid. She didn’t go to court because she didn’t have any money. She had her little sister though, who believed her and took her far away to a different state.

So years later, when she heard the story of Khan, Mohamed and Manzoor, her heart could not take it.

"It could have been me," she told Middle East Eye, her voice barely a whisper. "It could still be me."

Domestic violence is rife in the US. One in four women are victims of intimate partner violence, according to the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS). In the Muslim community, where there is the stigma that comes with both domestic violence and divorce, the rates are also high.

In a study of 190 Muslims seeking mental health counselling in Northern Virginia in 2011, 41 percent experienced domestic violence in the form of verbal, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse.

But despite these statistics, community members are often hesitant to become involved in domestic violence cases.
Is divorce worse than murder?

Denise Berte, the director of Peaceful Families Project, a national NGO focusing on and documenting domestic violence in Muslim communities, said someone recently asked her what she would have done if Khan had come into her office. To which she answered: "I would not have done anything differently."

'This is the cultural manifestation and twisting of our religious traditions'

- Denis Berte, Peaceful Families Project

Khan did everything right, she said. She left an abusive marriage. She got a divorce. She informed her family and friends. She moved 700 miles away. The problem was not her, she said. The problem was the man.

"We really need to look at what we are teaching Muslim men about what their role is and what is both accepted and not accepted in Islam. All of these were practising Muslim men. All of these were Muslim men who went out and got a firearm. All of these were men who not only killed their partners but killed themselves. We need to look at what these men are doing and prevent it," she said. "What are our mother-in-laws telling their sons? What is his sister saying?"

According to Berte, the community needs to come together and talk about why it seems like the idea of divorce is worse than the act of murder and suicide.

"This is not a religious tradition at all. This is the cultural manifestation and twisting of our religious traditions. There is this twisted narrative of what it means to be the head of your household. And it seems abuse and control are adapted within that role, which is not at all what our faith teaches."

She explained that the problem right now is not the victims, but the perpetrators.

"The victims are of a wide variety of experiences of education, of action, of protection of all of these kinds of things,” she said. “Our job is always to protect victims when they seek help. And we continue to do that in the best way that we can. But we do all of that and it doesn't make a difference."

"What we need to focus on is what is wrong with potential perpetrators. What is wrong with this role of male household leaders. Why does anyone think this is ok?"
Whose responsibility is it?

When it comes to men abusing their wives or, in cases like these, murdering them, the key is prevention, and prevention begins from a young age.

Mona Kafeel is the executive director at the Texas Muslim Women’s Foundation, an organisation that caters to Muslim women (though they take women and men from all faiths) who have gone through domestic violence and other forms of abuse. The organisation offers crisis shelters, transitional housing, imam training, and provides community education.

When Kafeel heard about Khan, she said she sort of blamed herself for not doing enough. She said she wishes she had educated more people. That she could have met Khan somehow. That she could have done more. But the truth is, she realised, that it is not only up to her to create change - it’s up to everyone in the community.

She explained that when there is a man in the community or in someone's family that has been accused of being an abuser, then he needs to be held accountable by whoever has heard about it.

"The responsibility can't be placed just on women. It's too big of a problem for all of us to ignore or say that only this group should take care of it. Each one of us has a responsibility to make a cultural change,” she said. “It is up to the man’s family to hold him responsible. How are we raising our boys? It is up to imams to be educated. It is up to us to raise awareness.”

According to Ustadha Zainab bint Younus, a community activist based in Canada, preventing something horrific like this from happening is a multi-prong solution that requires every person in society to be involved. Which is one of the reasons why she, and other women from the Female Scholarship Network - a group of over 100 female Islamic scholars and teachers across the world - got together and wrote a statement to condemn the “disease of domestic violence that has permeated the Muslim ummah for far too long”.

'There's a massive disconnect between what Islamic ethics calls for and unfortunately what our reality is'

- Zainab bint Younus, community activist

According to Younus, women's families should be the first source of support. Once they find out their daughter or sister is being abused, they need to come to their defence; they need to hold the abuser accountable.

Next, the community should be alerted to the abuse. Younus explained that the abuser should not be able to move on and remarry and hurt someone else. She said that imams and community leaders need to warn women and the families of men who have been involved in abuse.

She explained a hadith- a story of the Prophet Muhammad - when a woman came to him asking about who to marry between two men. The Prophet told her one was rich but his stick never left his shoulder, meaning he was abusive. And one was poor and had no wealth. He told her to marry another man altogether.

"A lot of people think 'You don't know if he'll do it again' or 'it's not our business; or 'what a man does in his marriage is his private business'. But that's absolutely not true," she said.

She said people often step back from warning other people about an abusive man because they fear they are committing a sin by backbiting. But that is also not true, she explained.

“There are actually several exceptions and one of the major exceptions is protecting other Muslims from the harm of another person. And that's especially important in matters of marriage. If you know a guy is abusive, and you know that a woman would like to marry him and she doesn't know that, then you are actually obliged to inform her and her family so that she doesn't go into that marriage.”

It’s the responsibility of the entire community, she said. Families need to protect their women and humans need to protect each other.

“There's a massive disconnect between what Islamic ethics calls for and unfortunately what our reality is, and it really requires all of us to work together to be able to stop these men from reoffending.”

DINOSAURS

British researchers find fossils showing Loch Ness monster-type creature 'plausible'

New fossils shed light on dinosaur habitat

By Andrew Mark Miller | Fox News

The discovery of new fossils is leading British scientists to conclude that the past existence of a Loch Ness monster was "plausible."

The development came when a group of researchers found the remains of small long-necked marine reptiles known as plesiosaurs in a 100 million-year-old river system in the Sahara Desert, the Telegraph reported.

Believers in the Loch Ness monster have long believed that the lake-dwelling creature could be a prehistoric reptile similar to the plesiosaur, but critics have maintained that the monster could not live in freshwater.

The new finding, made by researchers at the University of Bath, suggests otherwise.

LOCH NESS MONSTER: A HISTORY OF THE LEGENDARY BEAST

Scientist Thayne Smith Lowrance with a sonar device during one of his many attempts to find the legendary Loch Ness Monster, Scotland, February 1999. (Tom Stoddart Archive / Contributor)

The discovery, published in the journal Cretaceous Research, compares the creatures to river dolphins and the fossils found include bones and teeth from ten-foot long adults.

"What amazes me is that the ancient Moroccan river contained so many carnivores all living alongside each other," David Martill, co-author of the paper, said.

LOCH NESS MONSTER 'GIANT EEL' THEORY SUPPORTED BY NEWLY SURFACED VIDEO

Another one of the authors, Dr. Nick Longrich, said the scientists "don’t really know why the plesiosaurs are in freshwater."

Pilot Tom Dinsdale displays a model he made of the storied Loch Ness "Monster." Dinsdale claims he saw the "monster" and even made movies of it when he was at Loch Ness, Scotland (Getty Images)

"It’s a bit controversial, but who’s to say that because we paleontologists have always called them ‘marine reptiles’, they had to live in the sea?" Longirch said. "Lots of marine lineages invaded freshwater."

LOCH NESS MONSTER MYSTERY SOLVED? STUDY CLAIMS ANCIENT DINOSAUR DISCOVERY INFLUENCED DELUSION

A press release from the university stated that the findings show the Loch Ness Monster was "on one level, plausible."

"Plesiosaurs weren’t confined to the seas, they did inhabit freshwater," the press release explained. "But the fossil record also suggests that after almost a hundred and fifty million years, the last plesiosaurs finally died out at the same time as the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago."

A tourist boat passes Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness in Drumnadrochit, Scotland, on September 5, 2019. (Photo by Andy Buchanan / AFP)

The legend of the Loch Ness monster has commonly been attributed to a plesiosaur that somehow managed to survive the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs.

Reports that a creature was living in the Loch Ness lake date as far back as the 6th century.

The first written account was recorded in 565 A.D. in a biography of St. Columba. According to the text, the creature bit a swimmer and was prepared to attack another man when Columba intervened. He ordered the beast to "go back" and it obeyed.

Hundreds of years later, the legend started to grow. After the construction of a road adjacent to Loch Ness was finished in 1933, giving onlookers an unobstructed view of the lake, a couple allegedly saw an enormous animal they compared to a "dragon or prehistoric monster" cross in front of their car and disappear into the water. The incident was reported in a Scottish newspaper and numerous sightings followed.

Alleged sightings continued throughout the 1900s, including a search by the so-called the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau that conducted a 10-year observational survey recording an average of 20 sightings per year and in the 1970s underwater photographs of what appeared to be a "flipper" were made public.

Additionally, several sonar explorations, most notably in 1987 and 2003, were undertaken to find the elusive beast — to no avail.

Over the years, more photographs have been taken, but most were discredited as fakes. In 1994, it was revealed that the famed "surgeon photograph" that alleged to be a photo of the monster was a hoax masterminded by a revenge seeker. The image was actually a plastic-and-wooden head attached to a toy submarine.

Fox News' Julia Musto contributed to this report

Andrew Mark Miller is a writer at Fox News. Find him on Twitter @andymarkmiller and email tips to AndrewMark.Miller@Fox.com.

Erdoğan’s approval rating drops to 41.5 pct as Turkey grapples with inflation



Jul 28 2022 


President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s approval rating took a hit in the month of July, with 41.5 percent in Turkey saying they approve of the leader’s performance as president, according to leading pollster MetroPoll’s monthly “The Pulse of Turkey” survey.

The figure is down 2.7 percentage points from June, according to the survey, which found Erdoğan’s disapproval rating for the same month measured at 53.7 percent, up from 51 percent compared to the previous month.


The survey arrives as Turkey is reeling from the effects of runaway inflation, which accelerated to 78.6 percent in, marking a 24-year high and the fastest rate in major emerging markets and developed economies globally.

As part of his unorthodox economic policy, President Erdoğan has refused to hike interest rates in a timely manner to cool inflation and ordered the central bank to cut borrowing costs late last year, prompting the lira to plummet. That has translated into considerably less spending power for the average citizen.

Over 7 percent of voters who back Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and 31 percent of the AKP’s junior coalition partner, the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) voters, said they disapproved of Erdoğan’s performance, the MetroPoll survey found.

This figure measured at 88.2 percent among main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) voters and 84.5 percent among opposition pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), supporters.

Soaring consumer prices have hit Turkey’s 84 million population hard, with little hope for improvement in the near future as citizens are faced with high energy and food prices and a sharply depreciated lira, which has lost 44 percent of its value in 2021 and around 24 percent this year.

Erdoğan’s disapproval rating dropped from 53.6 percent in April to 47.3 percent in May, as Turkey stood against Sweden and Finland joining NATO, according to MetroPoll’s “The Pulse of Turkey’’ survey.

Two simple charts show why green energy is all about mining

Frik Els | July 26, 2022 | 

Image: JACLOU-DL, Pixabay

Lots of ink has been spilled on the green energy transition on these pages.


In 2019 MINING.COM called Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez mining’s unlikely heroines as they were saying that the “exponential expansion of global mining is the dirty little secret – and glaring blind spot – of Green New Deal evangelists and zero-carbon climate warriors.”

Fast forward three years, and there’s still little or no acknowledgement from climate crisis actors for the need for rapidly growing metal and mineral extraction. The nescience of climateers when it comes to mining remains striking and helps explain the applause for Secretary General António Guterres at the opening of the COP26 summit for these words:

“It is time to say enough! […] enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”

Fitch Ratings: Metals, Mining Faces Diverse Impact from Energy Transition May 2022

A recent report by Fitch Ratings assessing the risks of climate change to various sectors featured two graphs that vividly illustrates just how central metals and mining is to decarbonization.


The latest UN Forecast Policy Scenario anticipates a substantial increase in electricity generation from renewables – comprising hydro, wind and solar – across all regions.

Renewables are set to be the largest source of power globally by 2050, at 73% of the total compared to 25% in 2020. Wind and solar will increase their share of global renewables generation to 85% by 2050 from 34% in 2020.

Couple this with the metal intensity of renewable energy resources and it is clear that even if the installation of renewable energy capacity falls far short of expectations, the impact on metals and mining would be immense.

Fitch Ratings: Metals, Mining Faces Diverse Impact from Energy Transition May 2022

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

JPMorgan’s gold ‘boss’ led group plot to spoof prices, jury told

Bloomberg News | July 28, 2022 | 

File image.

Michael Nowak was “the boss” of a plot at JPMorgan Chase & Co. to manipulate gold and silver prices and worked with the top trader and salesman on the bank’s precious metals desk to “spoof” markets with bogus buy and sell orders, a federal prosecutor told jurors in Chicago.


“For years, executives at one of the world’s largest banks conspired to manipulate the markets for precious metals,” Matthew Sullivan, an attorney in the US Department of Justice, said Thursday during closing arguments in the trial of Nowak, Gregg Smith and Jeffrey Ruffo. “All three worked together toward the same goal: earning profits for the precious-metals desk by spoofing.”


Prosecutors are wrapping up the biggest criminal case by the US in its crackdown on market manipulation following the global financial crisis. Nowak and Smith are charged with racketeering conspiracy as well as conspiring to commit price manipulation, wire fraud, commodities fraud and spoofing from 2008 to 2016. Ruffo is charged with racketeering and conspiracy. They face years in prison if convicted.

Over the past three weeks, government witnesses described how Nowak, who ran the desk, and Smith, its chief gold trader, routinely placed huge buy and sell orders they never intended to execute. It was part of their strategy to push prices in the direction that would profit the bank, said two former JPMorgan traders who agreed to cooperate after pleading guilty. Ruffo encouraged the practice to benefit his hedge fund clients, they said.

JPMorgan, one of the most influential banks in the precious-metals market, already has paid $920 million to settle Justice Department spoofing allegations against it.
‘Power and influence’

“The defendants had power and influence, and together they abused their positions and rigged the precious metals markets for their own gain,” Sullivan said. “They did it by spoofing, which put simply is a lie to make money by tricking other people in the market.”

Defense lawyers are scheduled to make their case to jurors later Thursday and on Friday, after which the case will go to the jury. Over the course of the trial, they’ve argued that all the alleged spoof orders were legitimate. They say there are other explanations for entering large orders to buy and sell futures contracts at the same time on behalf of clients or to provide market pricing, not to fool rivals with bogus spoof trades.

Sullivan described Nowak as “the boss” of the operation as managing director of the precious-metals business, overseeing JPMorgan’s trading and vaults around the world. The prosecutor cited several examples of Nowak’s trading records showing he placed big buy or sell orders that were quickly canceled after he executed smaller orders on the opposite side of the market.

Two junior members of the JPMorgan team, Christian Trunz and John Edmonds, testified for the government that this pattern was part of a trading strategy they learned from Nowak and Smith and was a routine way they all operated for years.

“Mr. Trunz and Mr. Edmonds gave you an insider’s account of the criminal activity that took place while they worked side by side with the defendants on the desk, watching and learning from them,” Sullivan told the jury. “They described what they saw and what they heard on the desk.”

Nowak lied to regulators about his trading because he knew his spoofing was wrong, and encouraged Trunz to do the same by not cooperating with prosecutors after Edmonds had agreed to plead guilty, Sullivan said.

“The heat was on,” Sullivan said. “The conspiracy’s secrets were now in the open.”

Trunz had described an encounter with Nowak, who he considered a close friend and mentor, in which the executive “pressured Mr. Trunz” to stick with the false narrative that all their orders were placed with the intent to trade, Sullivan said. Nowak told him, “You’re not going to turn around and plea now, are you?” according to Trunz, who said he interpreted that as a directive to lie.

The government also presented trading records for Smith, who was relied upon to handle most of the big buy and sell orders from JPMorgan clients Ruffo dealt with, including Moore Capital Management and Tudor Capital Corp. Trunz had described Smith as an expert spoofer, and that Ruffo encouraged him to use the tactic to keep his clients happy.

“They did this to get better prices for Jeff Ruffo’s big hedge fund clients,” Sullivan said. “Better prices meant more money for the desk and for themselves.”

The case is US v. Smith et al, 19-cr-00669, US District Court, Northern District of Illinois (Chicago)

(By Joe Deaux and Tom Schoenberg)

How a lake and a volcano produced a rare mineral on Mars

Staff Writer | July 27, 2022 |

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover snapped a selfie at the site where it drilled into a rock producing a powder that was later confirmed to contain tridymite. (Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS).

Planetary scientists from Rice University, NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the California Institute of Technology have figured out how tridymite formed in Mars’ Gale Crater, a question that kept researchers wondering since a chunk of the mineral was discovered there in 2016.


In a paper published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, the group explains that tridymite is a high-temperature, low-pressure form of quartz that is extremely rare on earth, and it wasn’t immediately clear how a concentrated chunk of it ended up in the crater.

The Gale Crater was chosen as Curiosity’s landing site due to the likelihood that it once held liquid water and, indeed, the rover found evidence that confirmed it was actually a lake as recently as 1 billion years ago.

This meant that finding tridymite in mudstone in the crater was surprising because the mineral is usually associated with explosive, evolved volcanic systems on earth, which are different from Mars’ primitive volcanoes.

In their search for answers, the researchers reevaluated data from every reported find of tridymite on earth. They also reviewed volcanic materials from models of Mars volcanism and reexamined sedimentary evidence from the Gale Crater lake.

They then came up with a new scenario that matched all the evidence: Martian magma sat for longer than usual in a chamber below a volcano, undergoing a process of partial cooling called fractional crystallization that concentrated silicon. In a massive eruption, the volcano spewed ash containing the extra silicon in the form of tridymite into the Gale Crater lake and surrounding rivers. The water helped break down the ash through natural processes of chemical weathering, and water also helped sort the minerals produced by weathering.

The scenario would have concentrated tridymite, producing minerals consistent with the 2016 find. It would also explain other geochemical evidence Curiosity found in the sample, including opaline silicates and reduced concentrations of aluminum oxide.

“It’s actually a straightforward evolution of other volcanic rocks we found in the crater,” study co-author Kirsten Siebach said in a media statement. “We argue that because we only saw this mineral once, and it was highly concentrated in a single layer, the volcano probably erupted at the same time the lake was there. Although the specific sample we analyzed was not exclusively volcanic ash, it was ash that had been weathered and sorted by water.”

If a volcanic eruption like the one in the scenario did occur when the Gale Crater contained a lake, it would mean explosive volcanism occurred more than 3 billion years ago, while Mars was transitioning from a wetter and perhaps warmer world to the dry and barren planet it is today.

“There’s ample evidence of basaltic volcanic eruptions on Mars, but this is a more evolved chemistry,” Siebach said. “This work suggests that Mars may have a more complex and intriguing volcanic history than we would have imagined before Curiosity.”

U.S. Congress passage of subsidies prompts chip makers to move on projects

STATE CAPITALI$M WITH AMERICAN CHARACTERISTICS

Thu, July 28, 2022 

FILE PHOTO: Clean room of SkyWater Technology Inc where computer chips

 are made, in Bloomington

By Jane Lanhee Lee

(Reuters) - Major semiconductor makers on Thursday hailed passage in the U.S. Congress of a pot of federal government money for new chip factories in the United States, and said they were moving ahead on various projects that had been stalled awaiting funding.

The “Chips and Science Act” authorizes about $52 billion in government subsidies for U.S. semiconductor production and research, and an investment tax credit for chip plants estimated to be worth $24 billion. Passed by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday and the House of Representatives on Thursday, it was headed to President Joe Biden's desk for signing.

U.S. semiconductor manufacturer SkyWater Technology Inc, which last week announced $1.8 billion investment plans for a chip research and production facility in Indiana, in partnership with the state and Purdue University, immediately committed to move forward.

“Now the chips act has passed, we will work with the State and Purdue (University) to seek the CHIPS grant funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce that is necessary for us to move forward with ground breaking,” said SkyWater CEO Thomas Sonderman.

Thomas Caulfield, CEO of GlobalFoundries Inc, who last week told Reuters expansion plans in its New York factory could be delayed without the chips bill, also immediately committed to building out more capacity.

"GF is already spending more than a billion dollars to expand manufacturing capacity at its campus and headquarters in Malta and is ready to accelerate its expansion plans there," Caulfield said in a statement, adding that the expansion would create roughly a thousand high-tech jobs.

In January, Intel Corp announced a $20 billion investment to build a new mega chip factory in Ohio but the ground breaking of that had been delayed to wait for the chips bills passage, Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger told Reuters on Thursday.

"We are we were originally going to do that in the middle of July, and we said, 'hey, we're not going to do that until we have firmness of CHIPS Act'," said Gelsinger. "Now ... we will get a firm date for groundbreaking A.S.A.P."

Gelsinger also said the latest down cycle in semiconductors would not delay plans for the Ohio investment.

"These are long-term capital investments. It takes us four to five years to build one of these facilities and get it up and operational," he said.

Intel on Thursday posted second quarter earnings that missed estimates and lowered its annual revenue forecast.

Chip companies are counting on the funding for research, not just manufacturing.

Dutch NXP Semiconductors NV CEO Kurt Sievers told Reuters this week that the company would apply for grants to expand research and development in the United States, pointing out automotive and communications infrastructure as areas of interest. NXP has labs in Austin, Texas, Chandler, Arizona, and San Jose, California.

(Reporting By Jane Lanhee Lee; Editing by David Gregorio)