Peter Madsen says Kim Wall was struck by falling hatch cover in a ‘terrible accident’ on board his self-built vessel
Source: Danish inventor faces murder charge over journalist’s submarine death | World news | The Guardian
Peter Madsen says Kim Wall was struck by falling hatch cover in a ‘terrible accident’ on board his self-built vessel
Source: Danish inventor faces murder charge over journalist’s submarine death | World news | The Guardian
Last weekend, the Women’s March threatened to make Trump’s life impossible if he ended DACA. Today, Trump’s Attorney General officially announced the end of the program. The lives of 800,000 young immigrants and their families now hang in the balance. Women’s Marchers, I’m asking all five million of you to keep your promise.
First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about what that’ll mean.
“Making Trump’s life impossible” will not happen by tweeting at the Attorneys General who petitioned Trump to end DACA, or by calling members of Congress to demand that they publicly defend immigrants (as this Twitter thread the Women’s March posted suggests). Sharing a story of “how a DACA recipient has positively contributed to this country” won’t cut it, either. If we’re being honest with ourselves, “breaking the internet with love and support for DACA” won’t even make Trump break a sweat. To borrow from Sister Helen Prejean, “Being kind in an unjust system is not enough.”
The end of DACA calls for less tweeting and more public acts of defiance.
Making Trump’s life impossible means refusing to enforce his agenda on a local level and on an everyday basis. It means allies putting their bodies on the line to defend vulnerable immigrants, including immigrants who don’t fit your image of respectability (i.e., Black, poor, disabled, queer, non-college educated people). It means sustained and collective refusal to comply with his orders to take away DACA, to separate families, to deport parents, and to establish Muslim bans.
In short, making Trump’s life impossible requires nothing short of civil disobedience. Here are a few ways to make it happen:
Teachers and school districts can deny federal immigration agents access to buildings and personnel.
Pilots can refuse to fly airplanes that will deport migrants back to places they fled, or no longer call home.
Ordinary folks can block highways and chain themselves to ICE vehicles to stop inhumane deportations and family separations.
Allies can join community defense and rapid response teams to defend immigrants in emergencies and times of need.
These aren’t hypothetical examples. They’re all actions taken by allies and advocates whose commitment to justice is rooted in an understanding that an unjust law is no law at all.
The Women’s March was the largest demonstration in United States history. If organizers and participants actually want to make Trump’s life hell, they must commit to putting their bodies on the line for the most vulnerable among us. There is no other way.
Header image via Twitter.
Barring that, this action by Trump is further evidence that his administration is now on a very dangerous trajectory towards the full-throated endorsement of white supremacy – the likes of which we haven’t seen in the open from a sitting president for a century.Trump followed up his weak and insincere response to racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia by pardoning notorious convicted racist Joe Arpaio, the former Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff, and condoning Arpaio’s abuse of official power in defiance of federal law and court orders. Trump praised those who marched at the University of Virginia with torches shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and, in July 2015, he launched his campaign by saying Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers.But this action on DACA – to pull the rug out from under almost 800,000 documented immigrants and cast them back into the shadows – is the ugliest act of appeasement so far for the far-right’s white-supremacist goals.It has not gone unnoticed.
Here I am, writing my story for you, still living in Paris. I’m not saying it’s the best place for a woman to live, however it’s somewhat better than Istanbul. I have to admit that it took me a lot of time to understand that the Turkey I knew was just an illusion. I was privileged, as I was raised in a middle class family who provided me with a proper education and were not particularly religious. Most importantly, even though I did rebel a lot during my adolescent years in order to live my life the way I wanted to, at the end of the day, I could. And I was not murdered for it! That was a big privilege. I had no idea that it even was a privilege.Now, I follow what’s happening in Turkey for women, and as a feminist, and as a former activist, my heart breaks into a million pieces. Every other day I read about a woman being attacked on the street because of the way she’s dressed. The last one I read was from my home city: two women were sexually harassed on the street. They asked the policemen who were standing at the corner for help. And what did the police do? They physically attacked the women, saying that they deserved to be harassed because of the way they were dressed. What’s next? Whipping women in public because the way they are dressed is not modest enough? I’ve been saying this for a very long time, but it feels scary to write about it publicly; I think a compulsory hijab law in Turkey is not very far away.
Source: Can I wear this in Turkey? – sister-hood magazine. A Fuuse production by Deeyah Khan.
We live Pakistani nuclear missiles; we can live with North Korean ones too.
This is a re-post of an essay I wrote for the New York Daily News a few weeks ago, at the peak of the summer war-scare.
I argue that we can in fact live with a nuclear missilized North Korea. Yes, that sucks. But all this irresponsible talk that we can’t adapt, that nuclear North Korea is an undeterrable, existential threat is just threat-inflating baloney. We’ve learned to live with nuclear missiles in the hands a Muslim state with a serious jihadi problem. Would America prefer this not to be the case? Yes. But is living with a nuclear Pakistan a better choice than bombing it or sending in US special forces to destroy their nukes? Absolutely. Or we would have done it already.
It’s not clear to me why this is so hard for people to absorb. What is it about North Korea that makes people lose their mind and say bonkers s*** about risking a huge regional war?
The full essay follows the jump.
As the current war-scare with North Korea heats up, it is worth observing that the United States has learned to live with other countries’ nuclear weapons and missiles without a war. As loathsome as North Korea’s domestic politics are, it is not at all clear that North Korea intends to use its nuclear weapons offensively against the United States or American allies in the northeast Asia. As former National Security Advisor Susan Rice put it recently, the United States can “tolerate” a nuclear North Korea.
Language is important here. “Tolerate” does not mean endorse or approve. No one wants North Korea to have nuclear weapons, not even the Chinese, who often abet North Korean bad behavior. But we have little choice. This is teeth-grinding, grudging tolerance, because the other options are so poor. And it does not preclude us from taking actions to defend ourselves and otherwise pressure North Korea.
For convenience, those options might be arrayed along a typical, left-center-right spectrum. Doves on the left would seek engagement and dialogue with the North. They argue that the US and South Korea have demonized North Korea over the years so much, that the North is understandably hostile. George W. Bush famously placed North Korea on an ‘axis of evil’ and said he ‘loathed’ Kim Jong Il, the father of current leader Kim Jong Un. North Korea itself routinely claims that the US pursues a ‘hostile policy’ toward it, and that it needs nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantee against American-led regime change. The Kims have been quite explicit that they do not wish to meet the fate of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Kaddifi. The South Korean left has sought a dovish engagement policy for years, peaking in the so-called ‘Sunshine Policy’ from 1998-2008. The most prominent figure of such thinking is the current liberal South Korean president, Moon Jae In.
Hawks on the right would argue that military action must be contemplated, because North Korea is the most dangerous state in history to possess nuclear weapons. These critics would suggest that engagement is a ruse, that North Korea cheated on the ‘Sunshine Policy,’ and that Pyongyang’s brutal, gangsterish dictatorship cannot be trusted to have the world’s most powerful weapons. Indeed the ruling Kim family may not even be rational. They may use these weapons offensively against the United States, or to coerce Korean unification on Northern terms. The most prominent figure making such arguments in the United States today is probably John Bolton.
Centrists – the position taken here – would argue that engagement with North Korea has traditionally failed, and that military action is too risky. Doves have indeed struggled to show results from engagement or negotiation. Talks with North Korea often seem to drag on forever, with constant trickery and backsliding on the North Korean side. The last serious US-North Korean deal, struck in 2012, began to unravel within weeks because of North Korean noncompliance. Talks in the Bush years also seemed to go nowhere. On the South Korean side, the Sunshine Policy, despite great commitment from Seoul, yielded little, and Moon’s recent, renewed effort at outreach has been batted away by Pyongyang.
Trying to talk to North Korea is always a good idea. As Winston Churchill said, ‘jaw jaw is better than war war.’ But we must go in with deep skepticism. We must not allow talks to become an end in themselves, a play for time by North Korea to continue developing its weapons. Nor must talks degenerate into subsidies to a dictatorship as an effort to ‘buy’ good behavior from North Korea. This is ultimately what undid the Sunshine Policy. So in this current crisis, we should support Secretary of State Tillerson’s efforts. He said to Pyongyang just a few days ago, ‘we are not your enemy,’ in an effort to draw out the North. But after decades of effort, our expectations of engagement should be low.
Hawks have similarly struggled to find an answer to the North Korean conundrum. Force is an attractive option for a superpower. The US has the world’s best military, and it is tempting to use that powerful leverage, as President Trump seems to be hinting. We do this frequently in the Middle East, where we have used invasion, special forces, and drones to pursue our opponents. But that is feasible there, because the US is relatively secure from counter-strikes, other than limited terrorist action. In the Korean case, North Korea has significant capabilities to do great damage to our allies in the region, South Korea and Japan, and perhaps now to the US homeland itself via its emergent intercontinental ballistic missiles. South Korea is especially vulnerable. Its capital, Seoul, lies just twenty miles from the demilitarized zone border. Some twenty million people live in Seoul and its nearby cities. Were the North Koreans to retaliate against an American airstrike, they could do great damage to Seoul, potentially killing tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands if they used nuclear weapons. As North Korea’s missile tests have accelerated, Pyongyang can now range Japan’s cities too, plus, perhaps, American cities. All this means that North Korea could respond devastatingly to an American airstrike.
This knowledge has stayed the hand of American and South Korean planners for decades. North Korea has provoked the US and South Korea plenty. There have been repeated North Korean provocations which could reasonably have warranted South Korean and/or American counterstrikes. In 1968, 1969, 1976, 1987, and 2010 occurred the worst North Korean provocations of the decades-long Korean division. Despite casualties and heated debate in South Korean and American media over the need to ‘finally’ punish North Korea, no action was taken. This was not from reticence – the US has been more than willing to pursue an aggressive drone war in the Middle East – but rather from the exposure of millions of innocent South Koreans and Japanese to North Korean retaliation.
Kinetic options have other downsides the Trump administration would be wise to contemplate before it unleashes the bombers. North Korea has been tunneling since the 1960s to prepare for just such an American air campaign. The US punishingly bombed North Korea during the Korean War, 1950-1953. Over a million died. North Korean planners learned that lesson and have been digging ever since. This means that any airstrike on North Korea would not look like what we have become accustomed to in the Middle East. There could be no limited cruise missile or drone strike which could be wrapped up in a day. Instead, North Korea’s decades-old hardening would require an extensive air campaign, involving hundreds, perhaps thousands, of air sorties, pursuing dozens of targets. We would call it a ‘surgical strike’ before global public opinion, but in practice it would be a war.
Once the bombs started to fall, the North Koreans would move everything underground, requiring yet more airstrikes. They would also use human shields, with grandmothers and infants placed around any targets which could not be moved below ground. Pictures of dead innocents would immediately be broadcast globally.
Finally, the North Koreans have a defensive alliance with China. China would not support North Korean aggression against the South or US, but it would, technically, be required to help North Korea if it were attacked. And an American air campaign would look so much like a war – no matter what we call it – that North Korea would almost certainly call on its ally for help. We do not actually know the redlines of that alliance. Perhaps China would abandon North Korea. But China intervened in 1950 to bail out North Korea as it began to lose the Korean War, and its strategists still refer to North Korea today as a ‘buffer’ between China and the robust democracies of South Korea, Japan, and America. Were China to enter the war on Pyongyang’s side, that could be disastrous. Americans and Chinese shooting at each other could easily spiral into a major regional, or even global, conflict sucking in Russia, whose Siberian backyard extends all the way to east Asia, and Japan as well.
These combined risks are so high that centrists reject the use of force as too risky, at the same time they grasp the general futility of negotiating with North Korea. The answer then is an unsatisfying ‘more of the same.’ For 64 years, deterrence and defense have worked on the peninsula. For all the tension, cable news hysteria, and North Korean provocation, the Korean War has not returned. Deterrence has been stable, however morally unsatisfying we find that, because it allows vicious North Korea to hang on.
North Korean nuclearization does not fundamentally change this. The United States already lives in a permanent nuclear deterrence relationship with Russia and China, and we have for decades. We have adapted ourselves, however grudgingly, to those countries’ nuclear missilization. The Cuban Missile Crisis is remembered as an American victory over the Soviet Union, but within a decade the Soviets had the ability to strike the US homeland without Cuba. We have lived with that, plus later Chinese and Pakistani nuclearization. This was unwanted, but, as with North Korea, the alternatives, particularly the military ones, were simply too risky. We learned to tolerate, just as Rice suggests we now do with North Korea.
This is depressing, but nonetheless the likely outcome of the current crisis. Trump may bluster and threaten, but I have little doubt his national security staff has warned him of the great risks of a strike. Nor should we think that North Korea intends to use these weapons to offensively strike the US. The American retaliation for an out-of-the-blue Northern strike would be devastating. North Korea as a functioning state would be utterly destroyed, and its elite killed. And that elite is not suicidal ideologues. They are not ISIS or Osama bin Laden. If they wanted to go down in a blaze of anti-American glory, they could have done so at any time of the last few decades. They wish to survive.
Sticking to the deterrence posture we have pursued since 1953 is not passivity in the face of threat. We can, and likely will, put resources into missile defense. If the North insists on missilization, then we should respond in kind with a ‘roof.’ And we can continue to pursue ever-tightening sanctions, which even China recently supported, to constrict North Korea’s pipeline to the global economy. North Korea’s gangster elite enjoys a life of privilege which requires that pipeline, as do its nuclear and missile programs. Going after their money and access will hurt.
If this feels unsatisfying or disappointing, it is. There is no silver bullet regarding North Korea. Were there, we would have used it long ago. North Korean nuclear missiles are a fact we can either adapt to, or risk a major war over. The US has, despite all our power, not risked that war to date, and I imagine Donald Trump will not in the end either.
Lately, Russia appears to be coming at the United States from all kinds of contradictory angles. Russian bots amplified Donald Trump during the campaign, but in office, Kremlin-backed media portray him as weak. Vladimir Putin is expelling U.S. diplomats from Russia, limiting options for warmer relations with the administration he wanted in place. As Congress pushes a harder line against Russia, plenty of headlines declare that Putin’s gamble on Trump has failed.
Confused? Only if you don’t understand the Gerasimov Doctrine.
In February 2013, General Valery Gerasimov — Russia’s chief of the General Staff, comparable to the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—published a 2,000-word article, “The Value of Science is in the Foresight,” in the weekly Russian trade paper Military-Industrial Kurier. Gerasimov took tactics developed by the Soviets, blended them with strategic military thinking about total war, and laid out a new theory of modern warfare — one that looks more like hacking an enemy’s society than attacking it head-on. He wrote: “The very ‘rules of war’ have changed. The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness … All this is supplemented by military means of a concealed character.”
They are not aiming to become stronger than us, but to weaken us until we are equivalent.
The article is considered by many to be the most useful articulation of Russia’s modern strategy, a vision of total warfare that places politics and war within the same spectrum of activities—philosophically, but also logistically. The approach is guerrilla, and waged on all fronts with a range of actors and tools — for example, hackers, media, businessmen, leaks and, yes, fake news, as well as conventional and asymmetric military means. Thanks to the internet and social media, the kinds of operations Soviet psy-ops teams once could only fantasize about — upending the domestic affairs of nations with information alone — are now plausible. The Gerasimov Doctrine builds a framework for these new tools, and declares that non-military tactics are not auxiliary to the use of force but the preferred way to win. That they are, in fact, the actual war. Chaos is the strategy the Kremlin pursues: Gerasimov specifies that the objective is to achieve an environment of permanent unrest and conflict within an enemy state.
Does it work? Former captive nations Georgia, Estonia and Lithuania all sounded the alarm in recent years about Russian attempts to influence their domestic politics and security, as the Obama administration downplayed concerns over a new Cold War. But all three countries now have parties with Russian financial connections leading their governments, which softly advocate for a more open approach to Moscow.
In Ukraine, Russia has been deploying the Gerasimov Doctrine for the past several years. During the 2014 protests there, the Kremlin supported extremists on both sides of the fight — pro-Russian forces and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists — fueling conflict that the Kremlin used as a pretext to seize Crimea and launch the war in eastern Ukraine. Add a heavy dose of information warfare, and this confusing environment — in which no one is sure of anybody’s motives, and pretty much no one is a hero — is one in which the Kremlin can readily exert control. This is the Gerasimov Doctrine in the field.
The United States is the latest target. The Russian security state defines America as the primary adversary. The Russians know they can’t compete head-to-head with us — economically, militarily, technologically — so they create new battlefields. They are not aiming to become stronger than us, but to weaken us until we are equivalent.
Russia might not have hacked American voting machines, but by selectively amplifying targeted disinformation and misinformation on social media — sometimes using materials acquired by hacking — and forging de facto information alliances with certain groups in the United States, it arguably won a significant battle without most Americans realizing it ever took place. The U.S. electoral system is the heart of the world’s most powerful democracy, and now — thanks to Russian actions — we’re locked in a national argument over its legitimacy. We’re at war with ourselves, and the enemy never fired a physical shot. “The information space opens wide asymmetrical possibilities for reducing the fighting potential of the enemy,” Gerasimov writes. (He also writes of using “internal opposition to create a permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy state.”)
Not all Russia-watchers agree on the Gerasimov Doctrine’s importance. Some say this is simply a new and well-articulated version of what Russians have always done, or that Putin is inflated as an all-powerful boogeyman, or that competition among the various oligarchic factions within the Kremlin means there is no central strategic purpose to their activities. But there’s no question that Russian intervention is systematic and multi-layered. This structure challenges us, because we don’t necessarily understand how it has been put into practice; like all guerrilla doctrine, it prioritizes conservation of resources and decentralization, which makes it harder to detect and follow. And strategically, its goals aren’t the ones we’re used to talking about. The Kremlin isn’t picking a winner; it’s weakening the enemy and building an environment in which anyone but the Kremlin loses.
Herein lies the real power of the Gerasimov-style shadow war: It’s hard to muster resistance to an enemy you can’t see, or aren’t even sure is there. But it’s not an all-powerful approach; the shadowy puppeteering at the heart of the Gerasimov Doctrine also makes it inherently fragile. Its tactics begin to fail when light is thrown onto how they work and what they aim to achieve. This requires leadership and clarity about the threat — which we saw briefly in France, when the government rallied to warn voters about Russian info ops in advance of the presidential election. For now, though, America is still in the dark — not even on defense, let alone offense.
Molly K. McKew, an expert on information warfare, advises governments and political parties on foreign policy and strategic communications. She advised Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s government from 2009-2013, and former Moldovan Prime Minister Vlad Filat in 2014-2015.
Italy was officially declared free of malaria in 1970, but environmental organization Legambiente warned in 2007 that it could make a comeback due to the effects of climate change.In particular, warmer temperatures have brought mosquito species including the Asian Tiger mosquito, known to transmit several diseases, to Europe. In recent years, the first EU cases of West Nile fever were detected in Italy as well as Romania, while Ravenna in the north of the country experienced an outbreak of Chikungunya fever in 2007. was also detected in Italy. Both diseases are known to be transmitted by Asian Tiger mosquitoes.
Source: Four-year-old girl dies of malaria in northern Italy – The Local
By the time their mission in San Antonio ended Sept. 25, the Mexicans had served 170,000 meals, helped distribute more than 184,000 tons of supplies and conducted more than 500 medical consultations.Mexican sailors also assisted with clearing downed branches and other storm debris in Biloxi, Miss., where they posed for photos with President George W. Bush, who thanked them for their help.Nobody was more surprised by this humanitarian mission than the Mexican military itself. Perhaps pumped up by its unexpected display of competence and compassion, even for a normally haughty northern neighbor, the Mexican army became far less defensive , and more willing to cooperate with its U.S. counterpart.
Source: When Mexicans crossed our border to feed Americans in need – The Washington Post
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