Category Archives: Viva!

Trump to Appoint Anti-Feminist To Key Women’s Rights Position

Trump intends to nominate a woman named Penny Young Nance as ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues. As such, she’d be responsible for managing the State Department’s programs to fight gender-based violence and promote women and girls’ educational and economic achievement.

Here’s the problem: Penny Young Nance has made her career standing in the way of girls’ and women’s rights.

Nance is the President and CEO of Concerned Women For America (CWA), an organization whose mission statement says it “protects and promotes Biblical values and Constitutional principles” in America. The group is as far-right as it gets, and Nance is basically a bargain Phyllis Schlafly — a reactionary zealot getting rich by selling out women and giving the right cover for the right’s openly misogynistic, anti-LGBTQ agenda.

Here’s just a sampling of where Nance and CWA stand:

  • CWA opposed the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, partly because it “creates new protections for homosexuals” and partly because it “encourages the dissolution of marriages.” Of course the only marriages that VAWA helps dissolve are abusive ones, but I guess Nance is more concerned with the nuclear family than the 12 million people abused by intimate partners in the United States every year.
  • Remember Jane Doe, the teenage asylum-seeker who the Trump Administration held in custody and prevented from getting an abortion? Penny Nance applauded the Trump Administration’s choice to hold a pregnant minor in detention, deny her access to healthcare, and force her to battle the Trump Administration in court just to exercise her constitutional right to seek an abortion. Nance suggested that Jane could just go home to her parents to “decide what to do” — in other words, that Jane should be deported back to a country where abortion was illegal and returned to parents who beat Jane’s sister to induce a miscarriage.
  • In 2014, when Uganda passed a law designed to put LGBTQ people in jail for life, then-President Obama spoke out against it. CWA condemned Obama for it, saying it was “cultural imperialism.” Weird how conservatives only seem to care about imperialism when it comes to imprisoning gay people! CWA has also said Uganda’s draconian law was “courageous.”
  • Nance applauded Betsy DeVos’ decision to rescind Title IX guidance outlining transgender students’ rights to go to school free from discrimination, suggesting transgender students’ civil rights were mere “political correctness” that were less important than some people who “felt uncomfortable.”
  • Of course, Nance and CWA don’t seem to care much about the 75% of transgender students who feel “uncomfortable” because they’re harassed in school: CWA has lobbied against anti-bullying legislation to protect LGBTQ students and even opposes programs designed to fight bullying. Apparently, telling kids not to call one another names is part of the “pansexual agenda.”
  • CWA lobbied against ENDA, a federal bill to explicitly ban workplace discrimination against LGBTQ people.

Nance even went on Fox to complain about Disney’s “Frozen,” saying that the charming kids movie about two princess sisters who save their Kingdom was bad for “our little boys” who need “ to know that they’re essential. We want to raise heroes. We want to raise real men.” Here I thought almost every movie made since the invention of the video-camera starred boys and men, but sure, whatever, Penny.

Penny Nance is a walking embodiment of the social conservative movement — a woman trying to turn back the clock to the days when women and girls couldn’t choose when to become parents, control our own bodies and economic futures, or even see positive representations of ourselves on TV. No one who opposes women’s rights has any business running an office that’s supposed to empower young women.

The good news: Republicans only have a one-vote majority on the panel that approves ambassador positions, so if all Democrats oppose her and just one Republican joins them, she’s out.

Call your senators. Tell them to keep Penny Nance out of the State Department.

Image credit via.

WHO Update On Plague In Madagascar: 1554 Suspected Cases & 113 Deaths

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The tally from Madagascar’s outbreak of (primarily pneumonic) plague continues to rise with the WHO regional office for Africa’s weekly bulletin on outbreaks and other emergencies – Week 43: 21 – 27 October 2017 now placing the number at 1554 cases and 113 deaths.

This represents a steep increase (245 cases and 20 deaths) over what was just reported by the WHO on Friday (current thru the 26th), and is considerably higher than anything being reported by the Madagascar MOH.

Given the wide spread of numbers we’re seeing, isn’t entirely clear whether everybody is reading from the same page. 

With the caveat that these numbers continue to shift back and forth, here is today’s update from the WHO.

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The outbreak of plague in Madagascar continues to improve, with the number of new cases of pulmonary plague declining in all active areas across the country. In the past 2 weeks, 16 previously affected districts reported no new confirmed or probable cases of pulmonary plague.

From 1 August to 27 October 2017, a total of 1 554 suspected cases of plague, including 113 deaths (case fatality rate 7%), were reported. Of these, 985 (63%) were clinically classified as pulmonary plague, 230 (15%) were bubonic plague, 1 was septicaemic, and 338 were unspecified (further classification of cases is in process). Since the beginning of the outbreak, 71 healthcare workers (with no deaths) have been affected.


Of the 985 clinical cases of pneumonic plague, 245 (25%) were confirmed, 336 (34%) were probable and 404 (41%) remain suspected (additional laboratory results are in process). Fourteen strains of Yersinia pestis have been isolated and were sensitive to antibiotics recommended by the National Program for the Control of Plague.

Between 1 August and 27 October 2017, 28 districts reported confirmed and probable cases of pulmonary plague. During the last two weeks, the number of districts that reported confirmed and probable cases of pulmonary plague reduced to 12.

About 78% (4 825) of 6 203 contacts identified completed their 7-day follow up and a course of prophylactic antibiotics. A total of nine contacts developed symptoms and became suspected cases. On 27 October 2017, 1 055 out of 1 087 (97%) contacts were followed up and provided with prophylactic antibiotics.

         PUBLIC HEALTH ACTIONS

A high level inter-Ministerial coordination forum, chaired by the Prime Minister, has been established to provide strategic and policy directions to the plague outbreak response. Similarly, the Country Humanitarian Team of the United Nations system established a strategic coordination platform for partners, chaired by the Resident Coordinator.

The health response is coordinated by the Ministry of Public Health, co-led by WHO and supported by agencies and partners directly involved in the health response. The health sector response is organized into four major committees: (i) surveillance, (ii) community engagement and education, (iii) case management, and (v) communication; with the logistics committee crosscutting all committees.

Coordination of partners in the Health cluster has been strengthened to ensure effectiveness, avoid duplication in the field and ensure efficient coverage of the affected areas. The Health cluster is having weekly meetings, with some partners participating in the national coordination platforms.

Cross sectoral non-Health actors (media, transport, defence, education, etc.) are being coordinated by the National Risk and Disaster Management Office (BNGRC).

Nine plague treatment centres have been established, of which six are in Antananarivo. The treatment centres are supported by IFRC, MSF, MdM, UNICEF, and WHO.

USAID provided six mobile clinics to transport patients to hospitals within Antananarivo.

UNICEF supported production of field-tested public awareness/education materials (posters, brochures, radio/television spots). A total of 69 000 posters and brochures have been produced and distributed, including to partners in the Ministries of Transport and Tourism, church groups and other key influencers.

SITUATION INTERPRETATION

While progress has been made in response to the plague outbreak in Madagascar, sustainability of ongoing operations (during the outbreak and through the plague season usually from September to April) remains critical.

Funds for operations are running low, given the fact that only 26% of the multisector response plan has been funded. Additional response logistics such as temperature monitoring equipment (infrared thermometers), rapid diagnostic tests, personal protective equipment, infection prevention and control supplies, and medicines (antibiotics) need to be provided. Efforts to strengthen outbreak control measures should continue. To that effect, partners and the donor community are called upon to provide additional resources (funds, logistics and human capacity) to ensure continuity of the response operations and eventual containment of the outbreak.

How the CIA Funded & Supported Literary Magazines Worldwide While Waging Cultural War Against Communism

Over the course of this tumultuous year, new CIA director Mike Pompeo has repeatedly indicated that he would move the Agency in a “more aggressive direction.” In response, at least one person took on the guise of former Chilean president Salvador Allende and joked, incredulously, “more aggressive”? In 1973, the reactionary forces of General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Allende, the first elected Marxist leader in Latin America. Pinochet then proceeded to institute a brutal 17-year dictatorship characterized by mass torture, imprisonment, and execution. The Agency may not have orchestrated the coup directly but it did at least support it materially and ideologically under the orders of President Richard Nixon, on a day known to many, post-2001, as “the other 9/11.”

The Chilean coup is one of many CIA interventions into the affairs of Latin America and the former European colonies in Africa and Asia after World War II. It is by now well known that the Agency “occasionally undermined democracies for the sake of fighting communism,” as Mary von Aue writes at Vice, throughout the Cold War years. But years before some of its most aggressive initiatives, the CIA “developed several guises to throw money at young, burgeoning writers, creating a cultural propaganda strategy with literary outposts around the world, from Lebanon to Uganda, India to Latin America.” They didn’t invent the burgeoning post-war literary movements that first spread through the pages of magazines like The Partisan Review and The Paris Review in the 1950s. But the Agency funded, organized, and curated them, with the full knowledge of editors like Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, himself a CIA agent.

The Agency waged a cold culture war against international Communism using many of the people who might seem most sympathetic to it. Revealed in 1967 by former agent Tom Braden in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, the strategy involved secretly diverting funds to what the Agency called “civil society” groups. The focal point of the strategy was the CCF, or “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” which recruited liberal and leftist writers and editors, oftentimes unwittingly, to “guarantee that anti-Communist ideas were not voiced only by reactionary speakers,” writes Patrick Iber at The Awl. As Braden contended in his exposé, in “much of Europe in the 1950s, socialists, people who called themselves ‘left’—the very people whom many Americans thought no better than Communists—were about the only people who gave a damn about fighting Communism.”

No doubt some literary scholars would find this claim tendentious, but it became agency doctrine not only because the CIA saw funding and promoting writers like James Baldwin, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway as a convenient means to an end, but also because many of the program’s founders were themselves literary scholars. The CIA began as a World War II spy agency called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). After the war, says Guernica magazine editor Joel Whitney in an interview with Bomb, “some of the OSS guys became professors at Ivy League Universities,” where they recruited people like Matthiessen.

The more liberal guys who were part of the brain trust that formed the CIA saw that the Soviets in Berlin were getting masses of people from other sectors to come over for their symphonies and films. They saw that culture itself was becoming a weapon, and they wanted a kind of Ministry of Culture too. They felt the only way they could get this paid for was through the CIA’s black budget. 

McCarthy-ism reigned at the time, and “the less sophisticated reactionaries,” says Whitney, “who represented small states, small towns, and so on, were very suspicious of culture, of the avant-garde, the little intellectual magazines, and of intellectuals themselves.” But Ivy League agents who fancied themselves tastemakers saw things very differently.

Whitney’s book, Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, documents the Agency’s whirlwind of activity behind literary magazines like the London-based Encounter, French Preuves, Italian Tempo Presente, Austrian Forum, Australian Quadrant, Japanese Jiyu, and Latin American Cuadernos and Mundo Nuevo. Many of the CCF’s founders and participants conceived of the enterprise as “an altruistic funding of culture,” Whitney tells von Aue. “But it was actually a control of journalism, a control of the fourth estate. It was a control of how intellectuals thought about the US.”

While we often look at post-war literature as a bastion of anti-colonial, anti-establishment sentiment, the pose, we learn from researchers like Iber and Whitney, was often carefully cultivated by a number of intermediaries. Does this mean we can no longer enjoy this literature as the artistic creation of singular geniuses? “You want to know the truth about the writers and publications you love,” says Whitney, “but that shouldn’t mean they’re ruined.” Indeed, the Agency’s cultural operations went far beyond the little magazines. The Congress of Cultural Freedoms used jazz musicians like Louie Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Dizzy Gillespie as “goodwill ambassadors” in concerts all over the world, and funded exhibitions of Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollack, and Willem de Kooning.

The motives behind funding and promoting modern art might mystify us unless we include the context in which such cultural warfare developed. After the Cuban Revolution and subsequent Communist fervor in former European colonies, the Agency found that “soft liners,” as Whitney puts it, had more anti-Communist reach than “hard liners.” Additionally, Communist propagandists could easily point to the U.S.’s socio-political backwardness and lack of freedom under Jim Crow. So the CIA co-opted anti-racist writers at home, and could silence artists abroad, as it did in the mid-60s when Louis Armstrong went behind the Iron Curtain and refused to criticize the South, despite his previous strong civil rights statements. The post-war world saw thriving free presses and arts and literary cultures filled with bold experimentalism and philosophical and political debate. Knowing who really controlled these conversations offers us an entirely new way to view the directions they inevitably seemed to take.

via The Awl

Related Content:

Partisan Review Now Free Online: Read All 70 Years of the Preeminent Literary Journal (1934-2003)

How the CIA Secretly Funded Abstract Expressionism During the Cold War

Louis Armstrong Plays Historic Cold War Concerts in East Berlin & Budapest (1965)

Read the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless, Kafkaesque Guide to Subverting Any Organization with “Purposeful Stupidity” (1944)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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This Week in Egypt: Week 44- 2017 (Oct 23-29)

Beginning to wonder who is asking questions whether a new approach is needed to deal with internal terrorism… or is no one asking?

Nervana

Top headlines

  • Egypt’s Sisi orders security reshuffle after attacks
  • Egypt’s Sisi appoints new chief-of-staff of the Armed Forces
  • Pentagon officials announced a $64 million contract New mobile surveillance system for Egypt’s
  • France’s Macron stresses security, not rights, with Egyptian leader Sisi 
  • Copts call for action over church closures in southern Egypt
  • MP drafts homophobic law to jail LGBT people or ‘promoters’ in Egypt

Egypt's new chief of staff

Photo via Mada Maar

Monday 

Tuesday

  • Frane’s Macron stresses security, not rights, with Egyptian leader Sisi
  • Egypt’s Second Field Army killed six high-risk militants in a crackdown on their hideout in North Sinai
  • 12 Hassm members arrested possessing weapons in Fayoum

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Israeli extremist settlers steal Palestinian olive harvest in multiple attacks in the West Bank

No shame just inhumanity

PNN/West Bank/

Extremist Israeli settlers  attacked Palestinian olive harvest and stole it over the past weeks.

Last Sunday, a Palestinian landowner found their olive crops near Qalqilia harvested and stolen, and many mature trees damaged by toxic chemicals. The perpetrators, who came from the illegal settlement of Kidumim, also cut many trees.

The Palestinian farmer also discovered sewerage water had flooded the orchard, pumped from a nearby caravan owned by an illegal settler. The villagers have at least 500 dunums of land for the olive orchards isolated behind the Apartheid wall, to which israel places  extremely restricted access on them.

Extremist Israeli settlers also raided olive trees owned by villagers of Awera, near Nablus, at dawn on Sunday. The orchards lie near the entrance of the illegal Israeli settlement of Itmar . According to a Palestinian Authority official, settlers stole from the 420 olive trees that grow on the land of Ata Darwish.

The violations affect a key source of income to many families in Palestine, thereby forcing them out, and facilitating the annexation of their land by Israel.

The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) reportedly prevented dozens of Palestinian farmers from reaching their land which is located on the Israeli side of the Apartheid Wall in order to pick olives, despite having special Israeli permits to enter the area.

 

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Your Government Wants to Militarize Social Media to Influence Your Beliefs

yikes – late to the party but willing to mess with people – protect the peace? I wonder…

A global conference of senior military and intelligence officials taking place in London this week reveals how governments increasingly view social media as “a new front in warfare” and a tool for the Armed Forces.

The overriding theme of the event is the need to exploit social media as a source of intelligence on civilian populations and enemies; as well as a propaganda medium to influence public opinion.

A report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last month revealed how a CIA-funded tool, Geofeedia, was already being used by police to conduct surveillance of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to monitor activists and protesters.

Although Facebook and Twitter both quickly revoked Geofeedia’s access to their social feeds, the conference proves that social media surveillance remains a rapidly growing industry with no regulatory oversight. And its biggest customers are our own governments.

The event, the Sixth Annual Conference on Social Media Within the Defence and Military Sector, is sponsored by the Thales Group, the tenth largest defense company in the world, which is partially owned by the French government.

Participants in the conference—chaired by Steven Mehringer, Head of Communication Services at NATO—will include military and intelligence leaders from around the world, especially “social media experts from across the armed forces and defense industry.”

Propaganda at home

One panel to be delivered by the Heads of Digital of the British Army, Royal Navy, and Royal Air Force, is titled ‘Maximising Media Support to Armed Forces Activities Within the UK’, and will explore: “How changing perceptions of social media are enhancing media operations at home.”

The panel will also discuss how the UK military can “maintain a wide reach over a valid audience with reduced costs.”

“Social Media is increasingly important to the portrayal of armed forces, at home and abroad on operations; raising awareness of institutional issues; and gaining support through successful recruitment campaigns,” said conference Chairman, NATO’s Steven Mehringer, in an invitation brochure for the event.

Psychological warfare

The military’s goal of using social media to influence the beliefs of populations to win wars is alluded to in the description of other panels. A proposed panel titled ‘NATO’s Digital Outreach: Creating a Global Conversation’, describes NATO’s aim of “cultivating a global audience through social media to support The Alliance.”

Another panel discussion makes direct reference to the role of social media in covert US military ‘psychological warfare’ operations—i.e. propaganda—as well as the use of social media to support mass surveillance.

Titled, ‘Using Social Media in Conjunction with Other Information Warfare Systems to Deliver Desired Effects’, the program description reads:

“Coordination efforts with PsyOps – Manipulation [of] the mind-set of the enemy virtually

Social media as an open source intelligence asset – finding the information hiding in plain sight

A possible gateway for Computer Networks Operations? Opening the web to Cyberwarfare.”

Presenters for the panel are listed as NATO’s Steven Mehringer; Ben Heap, Senior Expert, NATO Strategic Communications (STRATCOM) Centre of Excellence; and Brad Kimberly, the Pentagon’s Director of Social Media and Defense Media Activity.

Image: Maria Elena/Flickr

Real time surveillance

The sole sponsor of the event, Thales, is a major player in the development of new technologies analyzing social media for military and intelligence use.

From 2013 to 2015, Thales partnered with the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada and MediaMiser, an Ottawa-based media monitoring company, to develop tools for security agencies “to automatically process the huge amounts of textual information circulating at any given time, in any number of languages, on blogs, news feeds, social networks and the like.”

The research project, ‘Countering Security Threats using Natural Language Technology’, was funded by the Canadian Safety and Security Program (CSSP), itself funded by the Canadian defense department’s Defense Research and Development Agency.

According to a description of the project on the Thales website, the partners have created a demonstrator tool that is currently being tested with users from security organisations. They said the “Initial feedback is very positive.”

The tool is all about “real-time surveillance”: social media information coming into the system is “immediately analysed” using Big Data algorithms and techniques “to detect changes, trends or anomalies” and “identify potentially dangerous entities”.

The tool is already so powerful, claims Thales, that it takes just 5 to 10 seconds for new information appearing on the web “to show up in the system, so intelligence analysts have up-to-the minute insights into situations as they evolve.”

The current dataset has some 70 million documents, with 25,000 new documents added daily, and search results delivered in less than 5 seconds.

Media Miser extracts and filters data on a particular topic as soon as it is posted online. Tools developed by the NRC process this content in real time by translating and summarising the data. The information is then assigned various ratings and descriptions: a tone rating (positive, negative, neutral); signs of emotion (anger, fear, etc.); the geographic location of the source; and the identities of the individuals or groups involved in the making and distributing the content.

All this metadata is stored, along with the content itself, within a system controlled by Thales, where users from the defense and security sectors can use special visualisation widgets to access and explore the information. Widgets include map views, timelines, and network topologies, which can be used to show connections between “documents, people, events, regions or groups”.

Thales did not respond to a request from Motherboard for information on its current government contracts for social media surveillance technology. But its ‘Countering Security Threats’ project provides insight into the Big Brother vision of social media that will be discussed at the upcoming conference in London.

Winning over the natives

The conference agenda also shows that social media is seen as an effective propaganda tool for the US military even in remote regions, where the use of social media is limited.

Africa, for instance, is the subject of a panel titled ‘Using Social Media to Reach Diverse Audiences: US Africa Command’, to be presented by Nathan Herring, Social Media Manager for US AFRICOM. But only 9% of the population of the entire continent have access to social media.

Nevertheless, the panel summary explains that the US military’s goal is “reaching audiences in areas where social media is still an emerging technology” and “getting the right message to the right audience.”

As far as military forces around the world are concerned, social media is a new battleground that must be monitored to identify actual and potential enemies, collect intelligence, and influence opinions—but the risk is that what we post everyday is increasingly part of a war being fought without our knowledge or consent.

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