Skip to content
A number of prominent literary figures are publicly protesting the decision by the PEN American Center to honor the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo with its annual Freedom of Expression Courage award, arguing that it is not courageous to ridicule an oppressed minority.
Writers Michael Ondaatje, Peter Carey, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, and Taiye Selasi are among those who have stated that they are withdrawing from serving as “table hosts” during the award ceremony at the PEN Literary Gala to be held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on May 5.
Twelve people were killed in the January 7 attack by alleged Islamic extremists on the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in Paris, sparking international outcry as well a highly-publicized march, which featured a number of world leaders who were there to denounce the terrorists’ assault on the freedom of expression.
In an email exchange published by the Intercept between PEN executive director Suzanne Nossel and award-winning short story writer Deborah Eisenberg, Eisenberg questioned PEN’s decision to uphold the magazine despite its “tasteless and brainless” attacks on Muslims.
Following the official announcement in March, Eisenberg wrote:
Eisenberg also challenged Charlie Hebdo’s alleged commitment to “equal opportunity offense” toward all organized religion, given their editorial record and history of suppressing anti-Semitic jokes.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
In an email exchange with the Associated Press, Rachel Kushner, whose novel The Flamethrowers was nominated for a National Book Award, said that she had joined the protest out of discomfort with what she said was the magazine’s “cultural intolerance” and promotion of “a kind of forced secular view.”
And author Teju Cole, who himself was nominated for a 2015 PEN Literary Award, told the Intercept: “I’m a free-speech fundamentalist, but I don’t think it’s a good use of our headspace or moral commitments to lionize Charlie Hebdo in particular.”
Reporting on the controversy, Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald notes that the argument “highlights how ideals of free speech, and the Charlie Hebdo attack itself, were crassly exploited by governments around the world to promote all sorts of agendas having nothing to do with free expression.”
“Celebrating Charlie Hebdo was largely about glorifying anti-Muslim sentiment; free expression was the pretext,” Greenwald writes.
In blog post on Sunday, PEN American defended its decision saying the organization is committed to upholding “free speech above its contents.”
The post continues: “We do not believe that any of us must endorse the content of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons in order to affirm the importance of the medium of satire, or to applaud the staff’s bravery in holding fast to those values in the face of life and death threats. There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements, an urgent brilliance in saying what you have been told not to say in order to make it sayable.”
However, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey told AP that despite the “hideous crime committed,” PEN American was stepping outside of its commitment to protect freedom-of-speech from government suppression. “All this is complicated by PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population,” Carey wrote.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
At a ceremony on Thursday to mark the 40th anniversary of the end of what the Vietnamese call the War of American Aggression, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung sharply denounced the “barbarous crimes” committed by the United States.
“They [the U.S.] committed countless barbarous crimes, caused immeasurable losses and pain to our people and country,” Dung said to the crowd of state leaders, war veterans, and civilians gathered in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon.
“Our homeland had to undergo extremely serious challenges,” he added.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
At least three million Vietnamese people were killed in the war, which also took the lives of 58,000 U.S. military service members.
The chemical weapon known as Agent Orange, deployed heavily by the U.S. military forces, continues to cause birth defects and take life in Vietnam. According to the Vietnam Association of Victims of Agent Orange/Dioxin, approximately three million Vietnamese people have faced deadly sickness, disability, and disease as a result.
The U.S. has never compensated Vietnamese people for the destruction caused by Agent Orange or the war at large.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
With key provisions of the Patriot Act set to expire at the end of the month and congressional in-fighting over the legality of government surveillance continuing to rage, the National Security Agency (NSA) will reportedly begin “winding down” bulk surveillance operations this weekend.
“After May 22, 2015, the National Security Agency will need to begin taking steps to wind down the bulk telephone metadata program in anticipation of a possible sunset in order to ensure that it does not engage in any unauthorized collection or use of the metadata,” stated a Justice Department memo circulated on Wednesday.
The particular provisions set to expire are Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, as well as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s (FISA) “lone wolf” and “roving wiretap” programs, which enabled the collection of bulk metadata.
The memo states that without action this week there will be a lapse in surveillance which, as The Hill notes, “significantly increases the pressure on the Senate to act before lawmakers leave for their Memorial Day recess.”
“NSA will attempt to ensure that any shutdown of the program occurs as close in time as possible to the expiration of the authority, assuming the program has not been reauthorized in some form prior to the scheduled sunset” on June 1, the memo continues.
Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) introduced fast-track legislation that would extend without changes the full spying authorities of the Patriot Act until July 31 of this year. This follows the House passage last week of the USA Freedom Act, which is billed as a reform measure but critics note it would expand other surveillance mechanisms and renews the controversial Section 215. Both measures are expected to come to a vote in the Senate before the end of this week.
Meanwhile, rights advocates and anti-surveillance groups say they are happy to watch the sun go down on some of the U.S. government’s most egregious spying programs. On Thursday, activists in 50 cities are planning to hold “Sunset Vigils,” calling on their lawmakers to allow the Patriot Act provisions to expire, without renewal via either short-term fix or the USA Freedom Act.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
The actions are being organized by a coalition of groups including Demand Progress, Restore the Fourth, CREDO, MoveOn.org, Free Press, and Fight for the Future.
Government surveillance has faced opposition from both progressive groups as well as the ultra-right, for infringing on privacy rights.
On Wednesday, arch-conservative presidential candidate Rand Paul mounted a more or less symbolic filibuster against Patriot Act renewal.
“There comes to a time in the history of nations when fear and complacency allow power to accumulate and liberty and privacy to suffer,” Paul said on the Senate floor. “That time is now. And I will not let the Patriot Act, the most un-patriotic of acts, go unchallenged.”
Though the debate has largely centered around the Patriot Act, Wednesday’s Justice Department memo makes clear that the Obama administration does not necessarily believe that the expiring provisions are the only laws that grant the government extreme surveillance authority.
The memo states that with the insertion of “relatively simple language” and by amending the dates in certain sections of the USA Patriot Improvements and Reauthorization Act of 2005 and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, “we believe…it would not require reenacting the lapsed provisions in their entirety.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
In a move that is being hailed by civil liberties advocates as a victory for privacy rights, the U.S. Senate on Friday rejected the USA Freedom Act, a bill that sought to rein in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying powers but that would have reauthorized some of the most controversial provisions of the USA Patriot Act.
By a vote of 57-42, the Senate did not pass the bill that would have required 60 votes to move forward, which means that the NSA must start winding down its domestic mass surveillance program this week. The Senate also rejected a two-month extension of the existing program by 54-45, also short of the necessary 60 votes.
The Obama administration had previously warned Congress that if the Senate was unable to extend Section 215 of the Patriot Act by May 31, which the NSA leans on to justify its mass surveillance program, the government would need to launch its shutdown of the phone records collection operation ahead of time. With the U.S. House of Representatives already gone for Memorial Day holiday, the Senate had until this weekend to resolve its gridlock.
Section 215 is set to expire on June 1 absent congressional action.
The House voted in favor of the USA Freedom Act earlier this month.
Calling the vote a historic departure from the Patriot Act, “Sunsetting the Patriot Act is the biggest win for ending mass surveillance programs,” Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder of Fight for the Future, a coalition of civil liberties and privacy rights organizations, said in response to the vote. “We are seeing history in the making and it was because the public stood up for our rights to freedom of expression and freedom of association—and there’s no turning back now.”
This was a “historic tactical win against surveillance,” Cheng added.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the most outspoken supporter of the Patriot Act, who has called for its clean reauthorization, said he would reassemble the Senate on Sunday, May 31 for a last-ditch effort at passing either bill.
But opposition is strong against the idea of allowing government spying to continue, even at a modified pace, as outrage over the NSA’s domestic phone records collection program—exposed in 2013 by whistleblower Edward Snowden—has grown among lawmakers and the public alike. Opposition became stronger after a federal appeals court ruled earlier this month that the NSA’s phone data sweep is illegal.
Some in Congress see the USA Freedom Act as their best bet at reforming the NSA, as it would have enshrined the end of the domestic surveillance program into law, but many civil liberties advocates took issue with what they say as the bill’s numerous concessions to intelligence powers. In a blog post published April 30, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legislative analyst Mark Jaycox and activism director Rainey Reitman called the USA Freedom Act “a small step instead of a giant leap,” particularly in comparison with previous iterations of the bill, introduced in 2013 and 2014, which offered stronger reforms but failed to progress through Congress.
The House “missed an opportunity” to add stronger amendments to the USA Freedom Act when it voted in favor of the bill on May 13, Jaycox wrote in a separate post. “2015 can and should be the year for powerful surveillance reform, and we’re urging the Senate to rise to this opportunity.”
Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a Republican presidential candidate who spent more than 10 hours on Wednesday night filibustering McConnell’s attempts to vote on the Patriot Act, said early Saturday morning that the Senate’s move “is only the beginning.”
“We should never give up our rights for a false sense of security,” Paul said in a statement. “This is only the beginning—the first step of many. I will continue to do all I can until this illegal government spying program is put to an end, once and for all.”
“These bills were an attempt to disregard the abuses revealed by Snowden and cement mass surveillance into law in defiance of the Constitution, the courts, and public sentiment,” said Jeff Lyon, CTO of Fight for the Future. “The failure of these bills to pass shows just how dramatically the politics of surveillance changed once the extent of the government’s surveillance programs became known to the public.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Under the specious claim of delivering “aid to Africa,” western governments are backing an initiative—described by some as another form of “colonialism”—that is effectively enabling the corporate takeover of African nations by some of the world’s biggest food and agriculture companies.
On Wednesday, as corporate executives, politicians, and G7 officials assembled in Cape Town, South Africa for a closed-door meeting of the G7’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a coalition of small scale farmers, unions, workers, and food sovereignty groups released a statement condemning the program.
Though the public-private initiative has been championed by U.S. President Barack Obama, among others, as a means to combat poverty in Africa by bolstering “sustained, inclusive, agriculture-led” growth with the goal of raising “50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years,” its critics say the New Alliance actually undermines the rights and food security of citizens of its partner nations.
In fact, some suggest, the rise of such programs signals a shift in the way the world is governed.
Common Dreams is a not-for-profit organization. We fund our news team by pooling together many small contributions from our readers. No advertising. No selling our readers’ information. No reliance on big donations from the 1%. This allows us to maintain the editorial independence that our readers rely on. But this media model only works if enough readers pitch in.
We urgently need your help today.
If you support Common Dreams and you want us to survive, your gift today is .
|
Under the New Alliance, ten African governments—Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania—have “committed to develop or revise policies that will facilitate responsible private investment in agriculture in support of smallholder farmers.” However, the opposition coalition says, since its inception in 2012, there is little evidence of any positive impact. Instead, the policy changes have paved the way for corporate exploitation of local land and people.
According to the coalition statement, the New Alliance policies “facilitate the grabbing of land and other natural resources, further marginalize small-scale producers, and undermine the right to adequate food and nutrition”—all in the interest of courting large multi-nationals.
For example, at the urging of the New Alliance, a bill often referred to as the “Monsanto law,” which criminalizes the saving and swapping of seeds, is poised for passage by the parliament of Ghana. A recent report put forth by international peasant farmer and food justice groups La Via Campesina and Grain notes that students and union groups who have been fighting the bill say it is a “precondition sought by transnational corporations as a requirement for operating in Africa.”
“Unfortunately G7 governments policies seem to be more about increasing corporate profits through access to African land and labor, and opening markets to sell patented seeds and pesticides rather than realizing the right to food.”
—Doug Hertzler, ActionAid USA
Also, under commitments made by the governments of Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania, a seperate report (pdf) published on Wednesday by the international NGO ActionAid USA found that small farmers are being forced off their property as 1.8 million hectares of the countries’ most desirable farmland has been offered to foreign investors, amounting to little more than what they call a corporate land-grab.
And in Tanzania, a New Alliance initiative threatens (pdf) to displace more than 1,300 people as the government works to recategorize village land to make it available for a Swedish-owned EcoEnergy sugarcane plantation.
While the benefits of such “investment” are tempting at first, many on the ground are now realizing what’s at stake.
Josaphat Mshighati, head of programs and policy for ActionAid Tanzania, told Common Dreams that instead of increasing food security, farmers are losing access to the land in exchange for jobs laboring at an industrial agriculture plantation, whose sole crop is being raised for export.
“It is a form of colonialism,” Mshighati said. “Small holder farmers are turned into labourers serving in big, private agriculture investments and some of them totally lose their access to productive land. Hence, they become much more dependent.”
Further, he added that African governments including Tanzania are “being pushed to change their seed policies to allow for ‘more modern seeds’ that will definitely be supplied by big private companies. Thus, the indigenous seeds will perish in few years and all farmers will have to rely on seeds from the western companies.”
Finally, the government policy changes that are forcing people off their land, he said, will ultimately “create disharmony between citizens and the government.” All of these impacts, Mshighati concluded, “can be related to the previous history between Africa and the west—exploitation of a higher kind.”
Doug Hertzler, senior policy analyst with ActionAid USA, also told Common Dreams: “Unfortunately G7 governments policies seem to be more about increasing corporate profits through access to African land and labor, and opening markets to sell patented seeds and pesticides rather than realizing the right to food.”
On the other side of the New Alliance arrangement, private sector companies—which include some of the world’s biggest food and biotechnology corporations—have described through Letters of Intent how they plan to pursue allegedly “responsible investments in African agriculture and food security through models that maximize benefits to smallholder farmers.”
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
These commitments have been made by food and agriculture giants including Syngenta, Monsanto, Nestle, Bayer CropScience, and Coca-Cola, among many others.
After initially participating in the New Alliance Leadership Council, last year Oxfam International announced it was pulling out.
“The voices of farmer’s organizations, women’s producer groups and civil society organizations and CSO groups have, on the whole, been ad hoc and inadequately integrated into this policy planning,” explained Tim Gore, head of policy, advocacy and research for Oxfam International’s GROW campaign. This has lead to “serious concerns that the priorities of the Alliance reflect the interests of its more powerful members.”
The New Alliance-backed changes in government policy have created an environment that threatens to “‘tip the balance’ of investment towards larger players, rather than small-scale producers and family farmers, and could harm the environment through the industrial, high-input model of agriculture,” Gore said.
Finally, he warned, “this creates an acute risk that the members of the Alliance have created a form of global governance which is exclusive and potentially self-serving.”
As critics note, the New Alliance model adheres to the same neoliberal ideology as ‘trickle-down’ economics, which has been increasingly discredited.
Dan Iles, food sovereignty campaigner with Global Justice Now, described the New Alliance as “a branding exercise,” under which western governments have funneled aid money previously committed to alleviating poverty in Africa and essentially channeled it into the pockets of big, international agriculture corporations.
“In the public imagination, nation states are the main actors, when actually the corporate interests—which are not connected to the public world and whose primary purpose is to maximize profit—are now given equal weight.”
—Martin Kirk, The Rules
The U.S. alone has committed at least $2 billion dollars for the effort.
Similarly, an August 2014 report (pdf) by the Global Policy Forum describes the New Alliance as “a political process designed to reserve corporate actors a seat at the table,” where business is giving a role “almost equal to governments.” The initiative, the report continues, “serves as an excellent example of a form of governance that is increasingly gaining importance on a global scale.”
As writer and activist Martin Kirk explained to Common Dreams, while the New Alliance puts on a “very humanitarian face” it is part of a trend that is “actually shifting how we govern the world.” The model, Kirk says, is also being followed by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum.
“In the public imagination, nation states are the main actors, when actually the corporate interests—which are not connected to the public world and whose primary purpose is to maximize profit—are now given equal weight,” continued Kirk, who is a member of The Rules, a global network dedicated to tackling root causes of inequality and poverty.
The danger, Kirk continues, is that the New Alliance promotes this corporate concept as the only solution to overcoming hunger, when it fact it is “far from the only one.”
While most of the small scale farmers, villagers and other individuals directly impacted by the New Alliance initiative are unaware of upper-level mechanisms behind their forced relocation or intrusive growing restrictions, there are tremors of resistance.
Nearly 100 farmers organizations, social movements, and civil society groups from around the world endorsed the statement on Wednesday. Meanwhile, growing protests against pending policy changes, such as the “Monsanto law” in Ghana, are further spreading the word.
If outside actors want to help strengthen food security in Africa, advocates say that the solution must lift up the local community.
Small-scale farmers are currently producing 70 percent of the food in Africa, according to the coalition statement. “Addressing food and nutrition insecurity on the continent requires the full participation of those who are already producing, and promoting an agricultural system based on human rights and food sovereignty through local control over natural resources, seeds, land, water, forests, knowledge and technology.”
Josaphat Mshighati said that the biggest hurdle for small farmers is a lack of rain, so directing funds to nation-based agricultural development programs, such as small and medium irrigation projects, would provide a huge boost for the local economy.
And Dan Iles added: “What small scale farmers need is investment in infrastructure that links them more locally and regionally…Where control and ownership over the means of farming, buying and selling food and the culture of food is held by farmers (and people)—not outside elites.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
With the marching crowd stretching “as far as the eye can see” in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota on Saturday, thousands of people from across the Midwest came together to protest the construction of new pipelines and other infrastructure projects which they say will deliver only harmful climate impacts for the planet and irreparable destruction to the region, not the jobs and energy security promised by big oil companies and their political backers.
Under the social media tag of #StopTarSands, Saturday’s was sponsored by dozens of groups, including national and local environmental organizations, Indigenous communities, and various social justice groups who all agree it will take a unified front to fight back against the pipeline companies and fossil fuel interests pushing for expanded development of tar sands, shale oil and gas deposits, and other forms of extreme energy in the region.
In a statement, the coaltion behind the march explained that the climate justice movement in the U.S. and Canada has far more targets to fight than just the Keystone XL pipeline.
“It’s not just Keystone XL. Big Oil is trying to build and expand an enormous network of tar sands pipelines — some even bigger than Keystone XL — from Canada into the Great Lakes region. These tar sands pipelines, including the Alberta Clipper, along with crude oil trains and tankers, pose a growing risk to the Great Lakes, our rivers, our communities and our climate,” the statement said.
“The movement promoting clean energy prosperity in place of polluting fossil fuels is growing and being heard in every corner of the country,” said Terry Houle, co-chair of the Sierra Club’s Northstar Chapter, which helped organize the event. The march, said Houle, “picks up where last year’s Peoples’ Climate March in New York left off — people from all walks of life are calling on the Administration to keep dirty fuels in the ground for the sake of clean air, clean water, and a stable climate.”
According to NRDC’s Anthony Swift, “Increasing the amount of toxic tar sands crude flowing into this region is not in keeping with a much needed transition to clean energy. Rejecting tar sands means fighting for clean water, clean energy, and a safer climate. There is simply no place for dirty oil in America’s future.”
Common Dreams is a not-for-profit organization. We fund our news team by pooling together many small contributions from our readers. No advertising. No selling our readers’ information. No reliance on big donations from the 1%. This allows us to maintain the editorial independence that our readers rely on. But this media model only works if enough readers pitch in.
We urgently need your help today.
If you support Common Dreams and you want us to survive, your gift today is .
|
Billed as the biggest anti–tar sands march and rally the Midwest has ever seen, Aaron Mair, board president of Sierra Club, trumpeted the coalition’s diversity and unwavering commitment as essential to its ultimate success against the pending Sandpiper pipeline and similar projects.
“With climate disruption, we face the greatest environmental challenge of all time,” Mair wrote in a blog post ahead of the march. “To meet it, we’ll need to change almost everything about how our country works. And to do that, we’re going to need everyone. It’s a big job, but it’s not impossible. We’re already gaining steam. We’re building a strong, authentic movement to confront climate disruption and to galvanize humanity’s response — and in so doing we can shift the world.”
And Tom Goldtooth, head of the Indigenous Environmental Network, said this week, “The frontline communities are strengthening the resistance. They’re concerned, and we are linking up the pipeline resisters in Canada, northern Minnesota, out east and more.”
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
To help explain why the Mideast region has become such an important battleground for the climate fight both in the U.S. and Canada, the organizers behind the Tar Sands Resistance March offered these reasons:
- The Midwest is a primary import zone for dirty oil from Canada. Refineries in the Midwest get virtually all of their imported oil via pipeline from Canada. The diluted bitumen transported from Canada that arrives in U.S. refineries is more corrosive than conventional crude oils and may lead to increased risk of accidents.These refineries also pose a significant risk to the climate. Refining tar sands oil emits higher levels of greenhouse gases, as such more Imports of tar sands will add to U.S. emissions.
- Various efforts are being made to expand tar sands pipelines in the Midwest to be able to process more tar sands from Canada. Enbridge, the Canadian pipeline company responsible, is using illegal schemes to double the capacity of its Alberta Clipper tar sands (aka line 67), with no public notice and also by bypassing Presidential permit process. This illegal expansion would put Alberta Clipper on par with the Keystone XL pipeline and significantly increase the amount of toxic, highly polluting tar sands crude being moved into the U.S. We must stop this from happening.
- Tar sands spills are also of major concern. In 2010, more than 800,000 gallons of tar sands was spilled into the Kalamazoo River, causing hundreds of residents to be hospitalized from adverse health effects, including cardiovascular, dermal, gastrointestinal, neurological, ocular, renal, and respiratory. Cleanup efforts are still ongoing.
- Petroleum coke, a by-product of tar sands which has resemblances of coal and shares many of coal’s physical qualities, including a similar chemical composition, has been linked to a number of other health problems, including developmental and cardiovascular impacts. This is threatening communities like Chicago and Detroit. In Chicago’s southeast side, massive piles of petroleum coke are found near homes, leading to black dust clouds entering the surrounding air and exposing vulnerable residents to an array of health impacts.
According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
On Twitter:
Follow #StopTarSands:
#StopTarSands Tweets
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
The European Central Bank (ECB) began discussions on Sunday to extend emergency financial support for Greece as the country moves forward with a referendum on a proposed bailout, at the same time as its current bailout speeds to a June 30 expiration.
In a conference call, the ECB considered whether to extend or scrap Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA), which would keep Greek banks running long enough for the country to hold a popular vote on the bailout deal proposed by foreign creditors. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for the referendum on Saturday after high-stakes negotiations over the financial aid package with creditors, known as the Troika—the ECB, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—fell apart in Brussels, Belgium.
Common Dreams is a not-for-profit news service. All of our content is free to you – no subscriptions; no ads. We are funded by donations from our readers.
Our critical Mid-Year fundraiser is going very slowly – only 1,272 readers have contributed so far. We must meet our goal before we can end this fundraising campaign and get back to focusing on what we do best.
If you support Common Dreams and you want us to survive, we need you now.
|
Meanwhile, Greece’s Financial Stability Council announced plans to meet in the afternoon to discuss the country’s banking situation. The council consists of Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, his deputy Dimitris Mardas, Central Bank Governor Yiannis Stournaras, and the heads of several financial commissions.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
On Sunday, the Guardian‘s John Hooper said the ECB was facing “one of the most momentous decisions in its brief history” in the ELA discussions.
And it comes not a moment too soon, as the Greek parliament overwhelmingly authorized Tsipras’ referendum, which is now set for July 5 and will hand over the decision on accepting or rejecting the Troika’s financial aid package—in all its austerity—to the Greek people.
But the most urgent deadline Greece is fast approaching is the possible June 30 expiration of its current bailout. The Guardian reports:
BBC Radio 4 will broadcast a live interview with Varoufakis on Sunday just after 8am EST (3pm in Athens), which is expected to cover the ECB’s decision.
This story is developing. Follow live updates at the Guardian.
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
One of the National Security Agency’s most powerful tools of mass surveillance makes tracking someone’s Internet usage as easy as entering an email address, and provides no built-in technology to prevent abuse. Today, The Intercept is publishing 48 top-secret and other classified documents about XKEYSCORE dated up to 2013, which shed new light on the breadth, depth and functionality of this critical spy system — one of the largest releases yet of documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The NSA’s XKEYSCORE program, first revealed by The Guardian, sweeps up countless people’s Internet searches, emails, documents, usernames and passwords, and other private communications. XKEYSCORE is fed a constant flow of Internet traffic from fiber optic cables that make up the backbone of the world’s communication network, among other sources, for processing. As of 2008, the surveillance system boasted approximately 150 field sites in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, Nigeria, Somalia, Pakistan, Japan, Australia, as well as many other countries, consisting of over 700 servers.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
These servers store “full-take data” at the collection sites — meaning that they captured all of the traffic collected — and, as of 2009, stored content for 3 to 5 days and metadata for 30 to 45 days. NSA documents indicate that tens of billions of records are stored in its database. “It is a fully distributed processing and query system that runs on machines around the world,” an NSA briefing on XKEYSCORE says. “At field sites, XKEYSCORE can run on multiple computers that gives it the ability to scale in both processing power and storage.”
XKEYSCORE also collects and processes Internet traffic from Americans, though NSA analysts are taught to avoid querying the system in ways that might result in spying on U.S. data. Experts and privacy activists, however, have long doubted that such exclusions are effective in preventing large amounts of American data from being swept up. One document The Intercept is publishing today suggests that FISA warrants have authorized “full-take” collection of traffic from at least some U.S. web forums.
© 2020 The Intercept / First Look Media
Bottom line: the Earth is running out of water.
Two new NASA studies led by researchers from the University of California Irvine and published Tuesday show that the depletion of global groundwater resources, due to the dueling impacts of global warming and growing human demand, has caused the world’s water supply to drop to dangerous levels.
The first report compares statistical analysis of water withdrawal to GRACE satellite analysis, which measures variations in gravity on the Earth’s surface, between January 2003 and December 2013. The study compares the difference between the use and availability of these resources to determine the amount of overall renewable groundwater stress, or RGS.
According to the findings, at 21 of the 37 largest aquifers, water is being drained at a greater rate than it is being naturally replenished, 13 of which fell into the most troubled category.
Common Dreams is a not-for-profit news service. All of our content is free to you – no subscriptions; no ads. We are funded by donations from our readers. This media model only works if enough readers pitch in. We have millions of readers every month and, it seems, too many take our survival for granted. It isn’t. Our critical Mid-Year fundraiser is going very slow – only 598 readers have contributed a total of $23,000 so far. We must raise $27,000 more before we can end this fundraising campaign and get back to focusing on what we do best.
If you support Common Dreams and you want us to survive, we need you.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
|
In the United States, the Central Valley aquifer in California—a region known as much for its heavy agriculture as for its ongoing record drought—falls into this group.
“The water table is dropping all over the world,” said Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who took part in the research. “There’s not an infinite supply of water.”
The second study examines total groundwater storage capacity and found that many estimates are outdated and may even be smaller than previously thought.
Whereas previous definitions of water stress do not account for groundwater as a water supply source, the researchers explain that groundwater is now “increasingly relied upon during times of drought as a resilient water supply source.” Further, they state, “Groundwater is currently the primary source of freshwater for approximately two billion people.”
The researchers warn that as water resources are strapped to meet future demands “due to population growth and climate change”—both of which, they note, may alter the distribution of available freshwater— “the global population without access to potable water will likely increase.”
“We need to get our heads together on how we manage groundwater,” Famiglietti added, “because we’re running out of it.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
From across the United Kingdom, tens of thousands of people took to the streets of London Saturday to demand an end to brutal—and deadly—austerity measures.
The mass march, still ongoing at the time of publication, comes just over a month after the Conservative (Tory) Party’s election wins.
The independent anti-austerity forum, the People’s Assembly, declared ahead of the march that protesters aim to send a “clear message to the Tory government; we demand an alternative to austerity and to policies that only benefit those at the top.”
Common Dreams is a not-for-profit news service. All of our content is free to you – no subscriptions; no ads. We are funded by donations from our readers.
Our critical Mid-Year fundraiser is going very slowly – only 819 readers have contributed so far. We must meet our goal before we can end this fundraising campaign and get back to focusing on what we do best.
If you support Common Dreams and you want us to survive, we need you now.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
|
“We’ll be assembling the demonstration in the heart of the City of London right on the doorstep of the very people who created the crisis in the first place, and marching to the doorstep of Parliament,” said the assembly.
Huge numbers heeded this call, with people from diverse backgrounds and numerous families with children taking to the streets with banners and signs that read “Austerity kills” and “No cuts.” Numerous placards urged an end to the scapegoating of immigrants, people of color, and urged investment in common goods that ordinary people depend on, including education, health care, and other public services.
Tobi Seriki, a 28-year-old from Depford, told the Guardian she is marching because “Austerity isn’t working at all and we need to change track.’
Labor unions, environmental groups, and migrant and economic justice organizations could be seen marching through the streets. Celebrities spotted in the crowd include comedian Russell Brand and musician Charlotte Church.
The mass march can be followed on Twitter:
#EndAusterityNow Tweets
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.