The US decision to arm the Syrian rebels fighting government troops has sparked feuds among various rebel factions dominated by radical Islamist fighters. As internal schisms among the rebels deepen, fighters from the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front have reportedly assassinated a large number of officers of the Free Syrian Army.
The Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front is now said to be targeting Free Syrian Army (FSA), but these two share a common goal – to oust Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The rebel ranks met in Istanbul recently, where they could make no type of agreement between themselves. By all accounts this power struggle has been going on for months.
The decision by President Obama and the NATO powers that they will give weapons to the Free Syrian Army probably mean some of those arms will be used to attack Kurds in the northern part of Syria.
Reports say that many FSA fighters are leaving more modern brigades for hard-line groups.
In neighboring Iraq and Lebanon, the Al-Nusra Front has become the lead faction in the opposition. The so-called ‘moderate rebels’ has no clout against the hundreds or thousands, millions or billions – we don’t know – coming from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the American allies in the Persian Gulf.
The Free Syrian army seems to have deposed some of the initial leaders, but rather like the pre-Iraq-War time, we don’t really know. It isn’t stopping the Americans. They seem to know exactly who the Free Syrian Army is, and they have 2,000 marines over the Jordanian border putting in Patriot missiles and getting ready for war. They were flying F-16s over the past 48 hours.
France does not seem to know who the FSA is either, as Paris is saying “no more arms, no more weapons, until we find out who the personnel really are in this rebel movement.”
The US should be bombing Syria not with weapons, but with airlifts of medicine and urgent medical care for all of these millions of refugees.
Syria already had a refugee crisis in the fallout of the Iraq war, and it has its own one now. have reportedly assassinated a large number of officers of the Free Syrian Army. – RT
It’s not often that Africa sees a visiting American president, much less two. But as President Obama travels across the continent next week, so will his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Mr. Bush, who made fighting AIDS in Africa a top goal of his administration, will take a trip there — his third since leaving office — as part of a program to combat cervical cancer. He will leave late next week for Zambia, where he will help refurbish a clinic, and then head to Tanzania, where his wife, Laura Bush, is organizing a forum for African first ladies.
Mr. Bush will overlap briefly on July 2 with Mr. Obama in Tanzania, the last stop on the current president’s itinerary after Senegal and South Africa. There are no plans for the two to see each other, but Michelle Obama has agreed to attend the first ladies’ forum with Mrs. Bush in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s largest city, to promote women’s education, health and economic empowerment.
“It’s coincidental that we have two American presidents on the continent at the same time – in the same country at the same time – but it’s indicative of a continued commitment, which is great news,” said Hannah Abney, communications director for the George W. Bush Presidential Center. “It wasn’t planned. It really was coincidental. But we’re really excited about it.”
Africa was a personal priority for Mr. Bush during his presidency, overshadowed by Iraq, terrorism and other issues but one of the few areas where he drew praise across party lines. His Millennium Challenge program steered billions of dollars in development aid to countries that committed to reform. His President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar, directed lifesaving drugs and other care to millions with H.I.V. and was called the largest humanitarian health effort ever undertaken by any country.
As a result, Mr. Bush remains more popular in Africa than at home, and he has taken pride in his efforts there. He devoted a substantial part of his newly opened presidential museum, outside Dallas at Southern Methodist University, to an exhibit about Pepfar. And global health has been a top focus of the former president’s public policy institute.
Teaming up with Pepfar, the United Nations and pharmaceutical companies, Mr. Bush helped form Pink Ribbon Red Ribbon, which is devoted to curbing cervical cancer and breast cancer. It started in Zambia in 2011 and expanded to Botswana in 2012.
Last year, Mr. and Mrs. Bush helped refurbish a clinic in Kabwe, Zambia, where nearly 30,000 women have been treated since, according to his presidential center. They will help renovate and reopen another clinic on July 1, this time in Livingstone, Zambia; a team of four Southern Methodist University students left Friday to work on the reconstruction.
Mr. Bush’s interest in Africa coincides with that of his own predecessor, Bill Clinton, who has spent much of his own time since office on programs to provide help there. “It was a critical part of his administration,” Ms. Abney said of Mr. Bush. “It’s also something he and Mrs. Bush feel personally about. They feel a commitment to the people there.” – NYT
President Obama’s visit to the Group of Eight summit has created a political row in Ireland after an outspoken liberal lawmaker on Wednesday denounced the U.S. president as a “war criminal” for his drone use and his decision to arm the Syrian rebels.
Parliamentarian Clare Daly said her country’s government had showcased the country “as a nation of pimps, prostituting ourselves in return for a pat on the head,” The Irish Times reports.
The “unprecedented slobbering” during Obama’s two-day visit to Northern Ireland, she said, had even led to speculation that “you were going to deck the Cabinet out in leprechaun hats decorated with a bit of stars and stripes to really mark abject humiliation.”
The Irish head of government, Enda Kenny, called the remarks “disgraceful.”
“I think they do down the pride of Irish people all over the world who are more than happy to see this island being host to the G-8,” he said.
“And for you to stand up and criticize the American president for giving a continuation of support for a fragile peace process in Northern Ireland, where over 3,000 people lost their lives in 30 years, is a disgraceful do-down.”
Daly’s pique appears to have been provoked by the White House’s announcement last week that it will provide “military support” for the Syrian rebels after accusing Bashar Assad’s forces of using chemical weapons.
Ireland has remained neutral since shortly after its independence from Great Britain in 1922, and was one of the most vocal critics of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
“This is the man who is in essence stalling the Geneva peace talks [scheduled for next month] by trying to broker enhanced leverage for the Syrian opposition by giving them arms — and to hell with the thousands more who’ll lose their lives, or the tens of thousands who will be displaced,” Daly said.
“This is the man who has facilitated a 200 percent increase in the use of drones which have killed thousands of people, including hundreds of children.” – The Hill
WikiLeaks just threw some gasoline onto the conspiracy fire. On Wednesday night, they Tweeted: “Michael Hastings contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, saying that the FBI was investigating him.”
What exactly are they trying to say?
Michael Hastings was a much admired freelance journalist who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and helped to bring down General Stanley McChrystal. He was tragically killed this week in a car crash in Los Angeles, after his car hit a tree. Hastings is believed to have been alone in the vehicle.
Hastings has certainly been in contact with WikiLeaks before. In 2012 he wrote a profile of Julian Assange for Rolling Stone in which he asked tough questions – but the overall tone is sympathetic. Hastings appeared willing to accept that the US government might have targeted Assange in an effort to discredit him; the interview also highlights the failure of mainstream media outlets to expose mistakes made by the US military and generally permits Assange to push his side of the story. Hastings’ empathy for WikiLeaks ties together the deceased journalist, Julian Assange and (through Assange) the leaker Bradley Manning. You can throw Edward Snowden into that mix because he, too, is an admirer of WikiLeaks. And Hastings’ last article was about the evils of the NSA – which ended with the tantalising line, “Perhaps more information will soon be forthcoming.” Glenn Greenwald Tweeted a link to the piece after Hastings’ death. Of such connections are conspiracy theories made. In the minds of the highly imaginative, that is.
So what is WikiLeaks trying to say with this Tweet? Is it simply priming us for a revelation about why Hastings was being investigated? Or is it trying to imply that there’s some link between Hastings contacting Jennifer Robinson and the journalist’s death? If so, we might have – in the words of Michael Moynihan – a peg for yet another kind of truther. – The Telegraph
Foreign ministers of the “Friends of Syria” group meet in Doha on Saturday to discuss military help and other aid for rebels after an onslaught by government forces who have retaken key areas.
The meeting will address in a “concerted, coordinated and complementary manner” the concerns raised by the opposition’s military chief, Salim Idriss, during a “Friends of Syria” meeting in Ankara last Friday, a French diplomat said.
The rebels had notably asked for anti-tank and anti-air missiles to fight the regime forces. Western aid for them so far has been confined to non-military equipment like sophisticated communications materiel.
The upcoming talks — attended by ministers of Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Egypt — will also discuss a proposed peace meeting between President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime and the opposition to end the 27-month conflict which has claimed some 93,000 lives and shows no sign of abating.
“We will try in Doha to sum up the situation on the ground and to see how we can aid the opposition coalition and arrive at a political solution,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said.
The Doha talks will be held against the backdrop of a string of successes by government troops into rebel territory, backed up by Iranian forces and Lebanon’s Hezbollah group.
They have retaken Qusayr in the central Homs province near Lebanon and trying to recapture the key city of Aleppo.
It also comes days after a summit of G8 leaders issued a non-committal statement for a peace conference on Syria to be held as soon as possible. The group was deeply divided on key issues, especially owing the intransigence of Russia, Assad’s ally.
The G8 also agreed to push for a transitional government in Syria that could include members of Assad’s regime who switched sides.
French President Francois Hollande, who will be in Qatar and Jordan over the weekend in a visit that had been planned earlier, will also discuss the Syrian unrest with Qatar’s ruler Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, officials said.
Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been the two major Middle Eastern states providing aid to the rebels.
Britain and France have recently pushed for providing weapons to them but have underscored that this must be done in a responsible manner to avoid the kind of anarchy that took place in Libya after the fall of dictator Moamer Kadhafi.
United States President Barack Obama has authorised sending small arms to the rebels after confirmation that chemical weapons were being used in the conflict. But he has refused to specify what they will be.
Syrian rebels have asked friendly world powers to give them heavier weapons and to impose a no-fly zone over parts under their control to avert a humanitarian disaster.
“The regime could use Scud missiles with unconventional warheads to shell liberated areas. So we need a safe haven,” Free Syrian Army spokesman Louay Meqdad told AFP.
“It is necessary to establish secure areas and impose no-fly zones in the south or north,” he said.
Calling for anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, he said that “if they do not provide us with arms to protect civilian areas, a humanitarian disaster will occur because regime troops are committing massacres in the areas they are recapturing”. – AFP
The Muslim Lawyers Association (MLA) intends taking the NPA to court for refusing to arrest US President Barack Obama on his South African visit later this month.
“We will ask the court to review the decision neither to investigate or prosecute and to order them to commence a full investigation in terms of the Rome Statute,” MLA attorney Yousha Tayob said.
The MLA said it submitted a complaint to the national director of public prosecutions and the SA Police Service, calling for Obama to be “investigated, charged, arrested, and tried in a South African court for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide”.
The MLA cited the Obama administration’s drone programme as the reason for its action.
The association said the complaint was made in terms of international customary law, as well as the implementation of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, Act 2002 (the ICC Act).
“The [drone] programme is responsible for extra-judicial killings of both innocent civilians as well as US citizens abroad. The drone strike policy has continued unabated with total disregard for territorial sovereignty and this is cited as the primary reason that Obama should be investigated and tried for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide,” the MLA said.
A drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle. In a recent speech Obama said the US used drones to target people it considered a threat to its national security when other measures were not possible.
The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) confirmed receiving the MLA’s documents.
Tayob said the MLA received a letter of reply from the state attorney’s office on Wednesday.
“They have decided they are not commencing an investigation,” said Tayob.
The NPA was also not going to arrest or secure Obama’s attendance in a court room.
Tayob said the application for a review would be made next week, probably in the High Court in Pretoria.
The Media Review Network (MRN) was also opposed to Obama’s visit. Executive director Iqbal Jassat said the MRN planned a series of protests over Obama’s visits, over the US government’s use of drones, its failure to stop the “occupation of Muslim countries”, and its not shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention centre as promised.
The MRN supports the MLA’s planned legal action.
“We have rallied behind these actions. Levels of pressure developed by civil society would force the US government to review the purpose of this visit and possibly lead to the cancellation,” said Jassat.
A row is reportedly also brewing over plans by the University of Johannesburg to award Obama an honorary degree.
According to a report in the Sunday Independent, students were split on this.
But deputy vice chancellor Tinyiko Maluleke said the process was a lengthy one, requiring high levels of consultation and agreement, and had not been finalised.
The process of nominating someone for an honorary degree began with discussions in the honorary degrees committee, where candidates had to receive 100 percent support.
From there, the nomination went to the senate, which consisted of senior academics and representatives of the Students’ Representative Committee. After that it, went to the council, which also consisted of student representatives.
At each stage, a certain amount of support was required.
“So when people say stuff has not been consulted or students have not been included, it’s simply not true. It’s a very lengthy process,” said Maluleke.
The US government’s secret seizure of Associated Press phone records had a “chilling effect” on newsgathering by the agency and other news organizations, AP’s top executive said Wednesday.
“Some longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking with us,” AP president and chief executive Gary Pruitt said in a speech to the National Press Club.
“In some cases, government employees we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone. Others are reluctant to meet in person … This chilling effect on newsgathering is not just limited to AP.
“Journalists from other news organizations have personally told me that it has intimidated both official and nonofficial sources from speaking to them as well.”
Pruitt spoke one month after the US news agency revealed that it had been notified after the fact that the US Justice Department had secret subpoenas of two months of phone records from its news operations.
The AP has said US authorities appeared to have sought out the records as part of a criminal investigation into leaked information contained in a May 2012 AP story about a foiled terror plot.
Pruitt, who previously called the seizure “a massive and unprecedented intrusion” into newsgathering, said the Justice Department “violated its own rules” on how it handles investigations of leaks to news media.
He said the collection of records pertaining to more than 100 journalists was “an overbroad and sloppy fishing expedition” and failed to follow procedures on notification.
Pruitt said that authorities maintained that by notifying the AP ahead of the sweep “it would have tipped off the leaker” but argued “that kind of reasoning would apply in every single case.”
This rationale would mean news organizations would never know when its records are being obtained, news sources would become less willing to speak and “the public will only know what the government wants them to know.”
The Justice Department has told the AP “that our phone records have been and will continue to be walled off, protected and used for no other purpose other than the leak investigation,” Pruitt said.
“We appreciate these assurances. But that does not excuse what they did. We need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The AP chief said the US administration should reaffirm the right of advance notice to news organizations, and use the courts to adjudicate any disputes on whether certain records are needed.
He also called for a “federal shield law with teeth” to ensure that journalists are not prosecuted for doing their jobs.
“We do not dispute that the government has the right to pursue those who leak classified information,” he said.
But he argued that “no one in this country should ever be prosecuted for committing journalism.”
Last month, Attorney General Eric Holder said the leak which prompted the seizure of journalist phone records was a “very serious” matter which “puts the American people at risk.”
Pruitt said Wednesday however that the AP waited five days before publishing the article, until after it had been assured by US officials that “the national security risk had passed.
The US administration under President Barack Obama has been aggressive in pursuing leaks of secret government information.
Authorities have said they had opened a probe into Edward Snowden, the former government contractor who leaked details about a cast US government electronic surveillance program.
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou was sentenced in January to two and a half years in prison for leaking the name of a secret agent implicated in harsh interrogations of Al-Qaeda suspects. – AP
The Catholic media is up in arms over comments President Obama made during a speech while in Northern Ireland for the G8 summit. Obama made what is described as “an alarming call for an end to Catholic education,” in spite of the fact that it is considered “a critical component of the Church.”
In front of an audience of about 2,000 young people, including many Catholics, Obama claimed that Catholic education divides people and blocks peace, according to the Scottish Catholic Observer
“If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation,” Obama said.
Catholic World News noted:
Ironically, President Obama made his comments just as Archbishop Gerhard Müller, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, told a crowd in Scotland that religious education upholds the dignity of the human person. Archbishop Müller said that Catholic schools should promote “all that is good in the philosophies of societies and human culture.”
Fr. John Zuhlsdorf quoted the Observer’s article on Fr. Z’s blog and added:
Another example of what this man wants: total isolation of any religious values in the private sphere alone. Pres. Obama is working either to intimidate or legislate or even TAX religious freedom out of the public square.
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a foreign visit to a Islamic nation where he told people on his arrival that they shouldn’t have madrasas. Can you?
Did he when visiting, say, Israel, say “You Jews shouldn’t have synagogue schools and you muslims shouldn’t have mosque schools.” I can’t remember. Did he?
Each of the articles drew numerous public comments, most suggesting that Obama be more concerned about the public schools in the United States than their parochial schools, which are working just fine. – bizpacreview.com
What a difference 5 years make: Obama braves blistering Berlin heat to make speech before invite-only crowd of 4,500 (that’s 195,500 FEWER than last time he was in Germany)
It was a more muted affair for President Obama in Berlin today as he spoke at Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate before an invite-only crowd of 4,500 guests – a remarkable difference from the rock-star welcome he received five years ago in front of 195,500 cheering supporters.
Then, Obama had it all to play for – the glowing presidential candidate symbolizing America’s revived hope for the future. This time, he arrived back in Berlin under the cloud of NSA surveillance programs which have outraged many Europeans and the ever-growing crisis in Syria.
The President removed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves as he battled the 86F temperature on Wednesday, quipping: ‘People of Berlin, your welcome is so warm I’m going to take off my jacket.’
What a difference five years makes: 200,000 people came out to see then presidential candidate Barack Obama speak in 2008 at the Victory Column, around a mile from his speech today
At times wiping away beads of sweat, the President read from paper because the teleprompter wasn’t working.
He used the bulk of his speech to call for a reduction in the world’s nuclear stockpiles – as he stood behind high walls of bullet-proof glass in the public square. The two-inch thick sheets are routinely used when the President appears before large crowds in public spaces.
Appealing for a new citizen activism, Obama renewed his call for the world to confront climate change, a danger he called ‘the global threat of our time’.
In a wide-ranging speech that enumerated a litany of challenges facing the world, Obama said he wanted to reignite the spirit that Berlin displayed when it fought to reunite itself during the Cold War.
Obama’s Kenyan half-sister made a rare public appearance as she joined Michelle and her daughters for emotional visit to Berlin’s Holocaust memorial
‘Today’s threats are not as stark as they were half a century ago, but the struggle for freedom and security and human dignity, that struggle goes on,’ Obama said at the city’s historic Brandenburg Gate under a bright, hot sun.
‘”And I come here to this city of hope because the test of our time demands the same fighting spirit that defined Berlin a half-century ago.’
The German press had mixed reviews for Obama on Wednesday, a marked difference from five years ago when ‘Obama-mania’ greeted him in the streets.
National newspaper Die Zeit published an article online on the Berlin speech, saying that Obama appeared to be the ‘young, fresh, uninhibited’ political force he was five years ago – but that the time between his speeches has been marked by ‘bitter disappointment’.
The article said Obama’s battles over gun control and equality for same-sex marriage must be remembered, otherwise his speech in Berlin could be seen as just ‘nice words’ in light of his decisions on Guantanamo and the NSA surveillance.
Other than his landmark speech, the President spent Wednesday in talks with German chancellor Angela Merkel and other top politicians including president Joachim Gauck.
He touched down with his family in the German capital on Tuesday night, waving to the crowds gathered at Tegel Airport.
His wife Michelle and daughters Malia and Sasha visited the city’s Holocaust memorial on Wednesday, accompanied by the President’s half-sister Auma, who studied in Germany.
Five years ago, when he was still seeking election as President, Obama received a rapturous reception on a brief tour of Europe where he was greeted as a leader who could give the world a fresh start after the controversial presidency of George W. Bush.
Now he is a much more divisive figure – although his re-election last year was welcomed by most Europeans, recent revelations about his administration’s spying on internet communications have tarnished his record in the eyes of many.
Mr Obama’s speech tomorrow will inevitably be compared with JFK’s, which took place on June 26, 1963 at the Rathaus Schöneberg, a few miles away from the Berlin Wall which had been under construction over the previous two years.
Kennedy’s speech, considered one of his best, held up West Germany as a symbol of freedom on the front line of the battle against communism.
It featured the famous line: ‘All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”‘ – Daily Mail
This morning, Starbucks announced that starting next Tuesday it will post the calorie content of all its coffee drinks and food items in all its company-owned stores in the U.S.
This is big news, and overdue. For many people who don’t want to think about calories, or think they have a good idea of the calories in what they’re eating, Starbucks is the first place they experience sticker shock — the 460-calorie blueberry scone that’s a quarter of the 2000 calories many women aim to eat every day, the seemingly healthful slice of banana-walnut bread that’s 490 calories. But then you can look for and find lower-calorie items on the menu that’s labeled (at Starbucks, for instance, bagels under 300 calories), and start to acquire a sense of the calorie count of what you’re regularly ordering out and eating at home — the real utility of calorie labeling.
The FDA was supposed to release national rules for the national labeling required of all restaurants with at least 20 locations — one of the best, if least-noticed, parts of the Affordable Care Act. Years later, food-industry skirmishes and rumored cold feet by the White House Office of Management and Budget are still holding up those rules, as Marion Nestle recently documented. My home state of Massachusetts passed a statewide calorie-labeling law in 2009; it never got implemented, so restaurants would not need to retool menus once the ACA rules went into national effect. That’s four years of lost opportunity to modify eating behavior. And even after the rules come out, which the FDA says now will be by the end of this year, there’ll be at least another year to wait for them to be implemented.
In the meantime, initial studies of the effects of menu labeling on behavior and weight reduction produced mixed results, to the delight of the food industry. But, as I wrote here, there will always be plenty of people who decide they don’t want the food police telling them what to do, they want to splurge, they’ll order more calories for better bang for the buck. That’s all fine.
The point of public health is not to dictate personal behavior, however many times the soda industry dresses Mayor Bloomberg as a nanny. The point is to make the default food environment more healthful, and mandatory calorie labeling has an important curbing effect on businesses that don’t want to look like they’re only offering high-calorie, unhealthy offerings. Starbucks itself made its own default milk choice 2 percent rather than whole, to get ahead of the sticker shock it knew would come once calorie labeling became the rule in New York City.
One of the less discouraging early studies on consumer behavior, conducted by Stanford researchers at Starbucks stores in New York City, which had calorie labeling, and Boston and Philadelphia, which didn’t yet, showed that people did consciously order lower-calorie items after the information was in their faces every time they made a purchase. Starbucks didn’t take the news as encouragement, though; when I wrote about that and other more-encouraging studies, a spokeswoman implied that the company would wait until national standards were in place before implementing labeling anyplace it didn’t have to.
Starbucks isn’t the first big player to claim good corporate citizenship by not waiting for the FDA. McDonalds itself announced last year that it would post counts on its menu boards. Panera and Au Bon Pain make calorie counts easy to find in all their stores.
But it’s significant. Particularly for the baked-goods-obsessed, like me. Much more important (okay, as important), to my mind, is the fact that the sawdust-seeming baked goods at Starbucks — even if in 2009 the company laudably eliminated artificial flavorings, ingredients, high-fructose corn syrup, and trans fats — are about to improve. Radically.
Last year, Starbucks paid $100 million to buy La Boulange, one of my favorite bakeries, in San Francisco, with the idea of using its skill at scaling up production throughout the Bay Area to produce similar-quality baked goods on a comparatively massive scale. I got to document and taste the Starbucks future when writing a long recent piece on the rollout, which has already begun in hundreds of California stores and will reach thousands of stores by the end of this year. Most of the the new La Boulange baked goods, each and every one of which will be served warm, are vastly better than what Starbucks sells now–and many of them are lower-calorie, too. I suspect that’s part of what’s behind this morning’s Starbucks announcement.
Even better, for the people who value national health over quality baked goods, is that the news on menu labeling has recently gotten better than it ever has been — as many observers predicted would be the case as the data started coming in from longer-term studies than the initial ones that delighted nay-sayers. A just-published large-scale Robert Wood Johnson Foundation review of four years of calorie labeling and the studies done to date shows widespread consumer support for national calorie labeling. Though results on behavior and weight are still mixed, the report finds encouraging changes in certain populations, such as women and people who are overweight; a reduction in the almost universal underestimation of calorie content in fast-food items; possible reduction of overall daily calories people consume once they are exposed to menu labeling in even one restaurant; and — perhaps most encouragingly for the industry that fought and now mostly supports calorie labeling — no reductions in revenue from voluntary labeling.
Even the National Restaurant Association, its president, Dawn Sweeney, said last week in response to a question at a Share Our Strength conference on reducing hunger and teaching people to cook, is eager for the FDA to release its standards — standards it initially opposed, vehemently. There are battles still to be fought: so far movie theaters, grocery stores that sell prepared foods, and bars have wriggled out of labeling requirements.
But everyone’s getting impatient. Canny chains are turning the delay to their public-relations advantage. Today’s announcement by Starbucks is one more message to the FDA: implement national calorie labeling already.
Trying to tamp down concerns about government over-reach, President Barack Obama on Wednesday defended U.S. Internet and phone surveillance programs as narrowly targeted efforts that have saved lives and thwarted at least 50 terror threats.
“This is not a situation in which we are rifling through ordinary emails” of huge numbers of citizens in the United States or elsewhere, the president declared during a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. He called it as a “circumscribed, narrow” surveillance program.
“Lives have been saved,” Obama said, adding that the program has been closely supervised by the courts to ensure that any encroachment of privacy is strictly limited.
Merkel, for her part, said it was important to continue debate about how to strike “an equitable balance” between providing security and protecting personal freedoms.
“There has to be proportionality,” she said. She added that their discussion on the matter Wednesday was “an important first step” over striking a balance.
Merkel appeared to be looking to avoid a public rift with Washington over the surveillance program, particularly since Germans benefit from U.S. intelligence. Much of the German criticism of the program has come from her junior coalition partners, facing the prospect of losses in the September election and looking for an issue.
The two leaders spoke to the media after meeting privately on a range of issues confronting U.S. and European leaders, including the fragile effort to bring peace in Afghanistan, where peace talks with the Taliban are in the offing to find ways to end the nearly 12-year war. Earlier Wednesday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai suspended talks with the United States on a new security deal to protest the way his government was being left out of the initial peace negotiations with the Taliban.
Obama said the U.S. had anticipated “there were going to be some areas of friction, to put it mildly, in getting this thing off the ground. That’s not surprising. They’ve been fighting there for a long time” and mistrust is rampant.
Karzai said Wednesday that peace talks cannot begin amid “fighting and bloodshed.” But Obama said it was important to pursue a parallel track toward reconciliation even as the fighting continues, and it would up to the Afghan people whether that effort ultimately bears fruit.
On another world trouble spot, the 2-year-old Syrian civil war, the president declined to provide details on the type of military support the U.S. will provide to opposition forces. But he said the administration had been consistent in working toward the over-riding goal of a Syria that is “peaceful, non-sectarian, democratic, legitimate, tolerant.”
“I cannot and will not comment on specifics around our programs related to the Syrian opposition,” he said.
The president said while world leaders at the just-completed Group of 8 summit in Northern Ireland could not agree on whether Syrian President Bashar Assad must go, he believes Assad cannot regain legitimacy.
And the president offered reassurances on another issue of particular concern in Germany. In response to a question from a German reporter, Obama said the United States doesn’t use Germany as a launching point for unmanned drones to strike terrorist targets. He said he knows there have been some reports in Germany speculating that was the case, but it’s not so.
Later Wednesday, Obama planned to draw attention to his plan for a one-third reduction in U.S. and Russian arsenals, rekindling a goal that was a centerpiece of his early first-term national security agenda.
His 26-hour whirlwind visit to the German capital caps three days of international summitry for the president and marks his return to a place where he once summoned a throng of 200,000 to share his ambitious vision for American leadership.
Obama will make the case for his nuclear plan during a speech at Berlin’s iconic Brandenburg Gate. His address comes nearly 50 years after John F. Kennedy’s famous Cold War speech in this once-divided city, and five years after Obama spoke in the city during his 2008 run for president.
The president has previously called for reductions to the stockpiles and is not expected to outline a timeline for this renewed push. But by addressing the issue in a major foreign policy speech, Obama is signaling a desire to rekindle an issue that was a centerpiece of his early first-term national security agenda.
Five years later, Obama comes to deliver a highly anticipated speech to a country that’s a bit more sober about his aspirations and the extent of his successes, yet still eager to receive his attention at a time that many here feel that Europe, and Germany in particular, are no longer U.S. priorities. A Pew Research Center poll of Germans found that while their views of the U.S. have slipped since Obama’s first year in office, he has managed to retain his popularity, with 88 percent of those surveyed approving of his foreign policies.
Obama also has an arc of history to fulfill.
Fifty years ago next week, President Kennedy addressed a crowd of 450,000 in that then-divided city to repudiate communism and famously declare “Ich bin ein Berliner,” German for “I am a Berliner.” Since then, presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton have used Berlin speeches to articulate broad themes about freedom and international alliances.
Obama, fresh from a two-day summit of the Group of Eight industrial economies, placed his hand over his heart outside the sunny presidential palace as a German military band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the American national anthem. He and German President Joachim Gauck inspected a lineup of German military troops before entering the palace, stopping to greet children who waved American and German flags.
The visit was attracting widespread attention in Germany. People waved and snapped photos as Obama sped by after his arrival and a thick cluster awaited the motorcade as it passed the Brandenburg Gate. An evening news show in Berlin devoted itself to the president’s visit, highlighting “Das Biest,” or “The Beast,” as the president’s armored limousine is called.
There have been a few small protests, including one directed against the National Security Agency’s surveillance of foreign communications, where about 50 people waved placards taunting, “Yes, we scan.”
Merkel has said she was surprised at the scope of the spying that was revealed and said the U.S. must clarify what information is monitored. But she also said U.S. intelligence was key to foiling a large-scale terror plot and acknowledged her country is “dependent” on cooperating with American spy services.
For Merkel, the visit presents an opportunity to bolster her domestic standing ahead of a general election in September.
The U.S. and the Germans have clashed on economic issues, with Obama pressing for Europe to prime the economy with government stimulus measures, while Merkel has insisted on pressing debt-ridden countries to stabilize their fiscal situations first.
But the two sides have found common ground on a trans-Atlantic trade pact between the European Union and the U.S. At the just-completed G-8 summit, the leaders agreed to hold the first talks next month in the U.S. – AP
A warning issued to tourists by the United States says Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town are “critical crime threat spots”, The New Age reported on Wednesday.
The warning was released in a document by the US state department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
It states: “Violent and confrontational crime is a major concern [in South Africa]. Such crimes include home invasion robberies, burglaries, car-jackings, street muggings, smash-and-grabs, organised attacks on commercial and retail centres, bombings of ATM’s, as well as attacks on cash-in-transit vehicles and personnel.”
The report warns visitors that South African criminals do not hesitate to use lethal weapons and that townships should be avoided.
“Foreigners are not specifically targeted, but several have been the victims of rape,” the report said, according to the newspaper.
US Embassy spokesman Jack Hillmeyer said safety and security reports were standard practice in all countries where the US foreign affairs department provided consular services to its citizens, and were not limited to South Africa.
“The majority of US citizens who travel to South Africa generally make it back without incident,” he told the publication.
US president Barack Obama is due to visit Pretoria and Cape Town at the end of June. – Sapa
Much research and media attention has been devoted to exploring rapidly emerging African countries in recent years. In addition to extraordinarily high GDP growth rates, many African countries have seen their middle classes grow substantially and demand goods and services that were formerly available only to individuals in more developed countries. Cell phone use in Africa has increased substantially in recent years; its nearly 649 million mobile users in 2011 made it the second-largest market for mobile phones in the world after Asia.
Furthermore, the continent has the fastest-growing cell phone market in the world, maintaining an annual growth rate of almost 20% since 2007. This has substantially contributed to economic development within the continent as a result of various innovations and improvements, from mobile banking to faster communications between merchants and customers, as the World Bank notes. In Kenya, the success of the mobile banking system M-pesa has opened the door for a multitude of mobile phone tech startups, prompting some to refer to the country as the “Silicon Savannah.” (It should be noted, however, that mobile phone technology in Africa frequently does not afford robust Internet access, with all its innovation potential.)
The benefits of mobile technology in other regions are widely hailed. The availability of cell phones and use of social media is often credited with playing a key role in the Arab Spring, which toppled dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia, and sparked protest movements throughout the Middle East and North Africa. In Mozambique, cell phones have been shown to improve voter education and political participation, while in Namibia cell phone usage has allowed citizens to hold their government officials more accountable and reduce corruption. Although much research has been done on the rise of technology in the developing world and its positive dimensions for politics, very little research has been done regarding possible negative externalities of increased communications capacity, such as improving the organizational abilities of violent groups to incite more conflict.
A 2013 paper from Duke University and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies published in the American Political Science Review, “Technology and Collective Action: The Effect of Cell Phone Coverage and Political Violence in Africa,” examines the impact that cell phones have had on violent conflict on the continent. The authors, Jan H. Pierskalla and Florian M. Hollenbach, utilize conflict data from the UCDP Georeferenced Event Data Set, which includes data on organized violence from 1989 to 2010, and data on cell phone coverage from the GSM Association, a global association of mobile phone service providers. The authors use various statistical techniques to account for economic, social and geographical factors related to conflict and to determine whether there is indeed an association between cell phone coverage and violent conflict in the context of Africa.
Key findings include:
– Even when confounding variables such as income, inequality, ethnic fractionalization, geography are accounted for, increases in cell phone coverage are associated with higher levels of violence throughout Africa.
– When evaluated on an individual country level, the impact of cell phone coverage on conflict is also significant within each country.
– Greater cell phone coverage leads to more conflict in “areas with structural conditions that favor violence” than those where the conditions do not favor violence; it “enables groups to overcome their collective action and coordination problems more easily, which translates to more organized conflict events.”
– The authors conclude that “cell phones lead to a boost in the capacity of rebels to communicate and monitor in-group behavior, thus increasing in-group cooperation. Furthermore, cell phones allow for coordination of insurgent activity across geographically distant locations.”
“We do not believe,” the researchers caution, “that the spread of cell phone technology has an overall negative effect on the African continent. The increase in violence induced by better communication might represent a short-term technological shock, while the positive effects of better communication networks on growth and political behavior may mitigate root causes of conflict in the long run.” The authors suggest that more research must be done to determine how communication technology, such as cell phones, impacts various forms of collective action, whether violent or non-violent, in Africa. They also note that prior research on the connection between cell phone capacity and violence — namely, the 2012 working paper “Is the Phone Mightier than the Sword? Cell Phones and Insurgent Violence in Iraq” — observed the opposite effect: Mobile technology was associated with decreased insurgent violence in Iraq.
Related research: The World Bank’s 2012 report “eTransform Africa: The Transformational Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Africa” examines a wide variety of areas, including agriculture, health, education and governance. The report discusses the implications of Africa’s so-called “mobile decade.” – journalistresource.org
Everyone is wondering who Mr. Rhodes is. Ben Rhodes, a 30-something who ascended from literally nowhere to be what seems a main driving force behind Obama’s foreign policy. He is credited with convincing the president to embrace the Arab Spring, convincing the president to bomb Libya, and, now, convincing the president to start yet another war, this time against Syria.
[To South Africans his name sounds a lot like that of Cecil John Rhodes (5 July 1853 – 26 March 1902), a ruthless imperialist, therefore not a friendly name.]
Who is he? How did a 24-year old aspiring fiction-writer in 2002 suddenly become one of the drafters of not only the 9/11 Commission report but also the Iraq Study Group Report? Then move on to Obama’s presidential campaign as a speechwriter and then to Deputy National Security Advisor, from which he announced the beginning of a US war on Syria while the president met with supporters in the East Room of the White House? Those familiar with Washington know that such miraculous ascents rarely happen on their own and are equally rarely the result of pure, raw talent.
There might be some clues to his brother David’s also improbable rise — from a lowly production assistant at Fox News at the end of the 1990s to covering presidential elections for Fox News (including the one where his brother was writing Obama’s speeches) to the lofty position of president of CBS news by 2011!
The excellent Russ Baker was wondering about all this way back in March, when he noticed a typical New York Times gloss-over article on Rhodes.
Aside from his quite unbelievable rise, we do know that he was catastrophically wrong on Libya, where a Time Magazine article pointed out at the time that he was the strong counter-weight to those who argued for more caution on the use of force.
Here is how Time put it back in 2011, when the interventionists were on the verge of their triumph:
Obama and his aides know they are taking a big risk. “It’s a huge gamble,” says the senior administration official. The administration knows, for example, that al Qaeda, which has active cells in Libya, will try to exploit the power vacuum that will come with a weak or ousted Gaddafi. They also know that the U.S. will have to rely on other countries for the crucial task of rebuilding Libya and that the region may in fact be further destabilized by intervention. Outweighing that, the National Security Council’s Ben Rhodes says, are the long-term benefits of saving lives, protecting the possibility of democratic change elsewhere in the region and—tellingly—ensuring “the ability of collective action to be a tool in circumstances like this.”
Rhodes carried the day on Libya and he was completely incorrect in his assessment, his analysis, his prediction, and his prescription. Anyone who bothers to look at Libya today, which is run by gangs of roving extremist death squads would see what a fool Ben Rhodes is for his promise of “democratic change” in Libya — and how much more foolish is the president for following the advice of such a person.
Rhodes is named as the source of the White House-altered CIA talking points on Benghazi, where references to the Islamist extremist role in the attack on US Ambassador Chris Stevens were erased. It is understandable why the fiction writer Rhodes would want to toss that reference in the circular file: that particular sub-plot did not fit in with the main theme he had already painstakingly written, namely that the US attack on Libya would end the killing, stabilize the country, and bring about a democratic revolution that would continue to spread through the region. Fiction writers understand that a sub-plot could take your readers too far off the main narrative of the story and cause serious structural problems. That is why there are so many rounds of re-writes. The killing of Stevens and the rise of murderous extremists did not fit the plot, so it had to be deleted.
Being wrong on war when you are on the sending end of death and destruction is less obvious to your countrymen than when you are on the receiving end. But anyone living in Libya after Rhodes’ “life-saving” mission knows full well the kind of liberation that comes at the tip of a US missile. And neighboring countries know as well what happens when a nation armed to the teeth with weapons, including chemical weapons, completely implodes after its infrastructure is destroyed by foreign attack.
In Washington, though, being catastrophically wrong on Libya eminently qualifies Ben Rhodes to take the lead on US Syria policy. – Lew Rockwell Blog
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The US decision to arm the Syrian rebels fighting government troops has sparked feuds among various rebel factions dominated by radical Islamist fighters. As internal schisms among the rebels deepen, fighters from the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front have reportedly assassinated a large number of officers of the Free Syrian Army.
