Spokesperson for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Maj. Paul L. Greenberg, said it was “looking into the circumstances” of the attack.
A report issued last month by Amnesty International found that the U.S. military has failed to provide accountability for the many Afghan civilians killed or wounded by occupying forces.
“Thousands of Afghans have been killed or injured by U.S. forces since the invasion, but the victims and their families have little chance of redress. The U.S. military justice system almost always fails to hold its soldiers accountable for unlawful killings and other abuses,” Richard Bennett, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific Director, said in a statement issued last month.
“None of the cases that we looked into — involving more than 140 civilian deaths — were prosecuted by the US military. Evidence of possible war crimes and unlawful killings has seemingly been ignored,” Bennett’s statement continued.
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has penned a firm rebuke to New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, accusing the head of state of “not telling the truth about mass surveillance” and issuing this plainly worded warning to residents of the country: “If you live in New Zealand, you are being watched.”
Snowden’s comments were published in The Intercept on Monday alongside new reporting by journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher which claims to show how New Zealand’s spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), launched a major digital surveillance program—codenamed Project Speargun—at the very same time the Key government was denying the existence of such programs.
Citing evidence contained in NSA documents leaked by Snowden, Greenwald and Gallagher report that the activities of GCSB—including setting up sophisticated traps on the internet cables that join New Zealand with the global web—”are in direct conflict with the assurances given to the public” by Prime Minister Key.
According to the report:
The controversy over domestic spying in New Zealand takes place just days ahead of national elections. On Sunday, seeming to understand that The Intercept story was on the verge of publication, Key admitted that his government “considered” implementing what he termed a “mass cyber protection system,” but that the scheme was never carried out.
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In his comments, which reads like an open letter to the people of New Zealand, Snowden claimed to have first-hand knowledge of how the nation’s internet traffic was monitored and collected by the GCSB and shared with his employer, the NSA. Concerning government denials about the existence or nature of the program, Snowden stated his desire to be clear:
On Monday, a panel on internet freedom and New Zealand digital surveillance was hosted by Kim Dotcom, a German internet entrepreneur who resides in New Zealand and recently founded the Internet Party. Joining Kim Dotcom on the stage of the event as live panelists were Glenn Greenwald, Internet Party leader Laila Harre, and Dotcom’s lawyer Robert Amsterdam. Joining via live videostream were Edward Snowden, who remains in Russia under asylum protection, and founder of Wikileaks Julian Assange, who dialed in from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he, too, remains under separate protection.
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Watch the livestream of the “Moment of Truth” event here:
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UNITED NATIONS – On the sidelines of the U.N.’s heavily hyped Climate Summit, the newly-launched Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture announced plans to protect some 500 million farmers worldwide from climate change and “help achieve sustainable and equitable increases in agricultural productivity and incomes.”
But the announcement by the Global Alliance, which includes more than 20 governments, 30 organisations and corporations, including Fortune 500 companies McDonald’s and Kelloggs, was greeted with apprehension by a coalition of over 100 civil society organisations (CSOs).
“These companies will do all they can to maintain their market dominance and prevent genuine agroecology agriculture from gaining ground in countries.” — Meenakshi Raman of Third World NetworkIt is a backhanded gesture, warned the coalition, which “rejected” the announcement as “a deceptive and deeply contradictory initiative.”
“The Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture will not deliver the solutions that we so urgently need. Instead, climate-smart agriculture provides a dangerous platform for corporations to implement the very activities we oppose,” the coalition said.
“By endorsing the activities of the planet’s worst climate offenders in agribusiness and industrial agriculture, the Alliance will undermine the very objectives that it claims to aim for.”
The 107 CSOs include ActionAid International, Friends of the Earth International, the International Federation of Organic Agricultural Movements, the South Asia Alliance for Poverty Eradication, the Third World Network, the Bolivian Platform on Climate Change, Biofuel Watch and the National Network on Right to Food.
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who gave his blessing to the Global Alliance, said: “I am glad to see action that will increase agricultural productivity, build resilience for farmers and reduce carbon emissions.”
These efforts, he said, will improve food and nutrition security for billions of people.
With demand for food set to increase 60 per cent by 2050, agricultural practices are transforming to meet the challenge of food security for the world’s 9.0 billion people while reducing emissions, he asserted.
But the coalition said: “Although some organisations have constructively engaged in good faith for several months with the Global Alliance to express serious concerns, these concerns have been ignored.”
Instead, the Alliance “is clearly being structured to serve big business interests, not to address the climate crisis,” the coalition said.
The coalition also pointed out that companies with activities resulting in dire social impacts on farmers and communities, such as those driving land grabbing or promoting genetically modified (GM) seeds, already claim they are climate-smart.
Yara (the world’s largest fertiliser manufacturer), Syngenta (GM seeds), McDonald’s, and Walmart are all at the climate-smart table,
it added. “Climate-smart agriculture will serve as a new promotional space for the planet’s worst social and environmental offenders in agriculture.
“The proposed Global Alliance on Climate-Smart Agriculture seems to be yet another strategy by powerful players to prop up industrial agriculture, which undermines the basic human right to food. It is nothing new, nothing innovative, and not what we need,” the coalition declared.
Meenakshi Raman, coordinator of the Climate Change Programme at the Malaysia-based Third World Network, told IPS the world seed, agrochemical and biotechnology markets are dominated by a few mega companies.
She said these companies have a vested interest in maintaining monoculture farming systems which are carbon intensive and depend on external inputs.
“These companies will do all they can to maintain their market dominance and prevent genuine agroecology agriculture from gaining ground in countries,” she said.
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It is vital that such oligopoly practices are disallowed and regulated, said Raman. “Hence the need for radical overhaul of the current unfair systems in place with real reform at the international level.”
Meanwhile, the Washington-based Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), said the world’s foremost agriculture experts have determined that preventing climate change from damaging food production and destabilising some of the world’s most volatile regions will require reaching out to at least half a billion farmers, fishers, pastoralists, livestock keepers and foresters.
The goal is to help them learn farming techniques and obtain farming technologies that will allow them to adapt to more stressful production conditions and also reduce their own contributions to climate change, said CGIAR.
These researchers are already working with farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia to refine new climate-oriented technologies and techniques via what are essentially outdoor laboratories for innovations called climate-smart villages.
The villages’ approach to crafting climate change solutions is proving extremely popular with all involved, and now the Indian state of Maharashtra (population 112.3 million) plans to set up 1,000 climate smart villages, CGIAR said.
Asked for specifics, Bruce Campbell, director of the CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), told IPS countries in the tropics will be particularly impacted, especially those that are already under-developed because such countries don’t have the resources to adapt and respond to extreme weather conditions.
These include many countries in the Sahel region, Bangladesh, India and Indonesia, plus countries in Latin America.
Asked if these countries are succeeding in coping with the impending crisis, he said there are good cases of isolated successes, but in general they are not coping.
For example, one success is in Niger where five million trees have been planted, that help both adaptation and mitigation, but an enormous number of other activities are needed, he added.
Raman told IPS there are many rules in the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) agriculture agreement that threaten small-scale agriculture and agroecology farming systems in the developing world.
She said developed countries are allowed to provide billions of dollars in subsidies to their agricultural producers whose products are then exported and dumped on developing countries, whose farming systems are then displaced or threatened with artificially cheap products.
Many developing countries, she pointed out, were also forced to remove the protection they had or have for their domestic agriculture, either through the WTO, the World Bank policies under structural adjustment and free trade agreements.
“These policies do not allow developing country governments to protect small farmers and their domestic agriculture,” she said.
Such rules and policies are unfair and unethical and should not be allowed as they undermine small farmers and agroecology systems,
Raman declared.
Edited by Kitty Stapp
© 2019 Inter Press Service
Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are present in many common products including breakfast cereals, chips, and infant formula—including some that carry misleading labels like “natural,” according to a study released Tuesday by the nonprofit Consumer Reports.
Based on its findings, combined with the results of a survey (pdf) by the Consumer Reports National Research Center showing nearly three-quarters of all Americans seek to avoid GMOs when they shop, Consumer Reports is calling for mandatory labeling of GMOs in food and a ban on the meaningless “natural” label.
“Federal law already requires labeling that lets consumers know whether foods have been previously frozen, made from concentrate, pasteurized, or irradiated, and we believe the label should also say if food is genetically engineered,” said Jean Halloran, director of Food Policy Initiatives at Consumers Union, the policy arm of Consumer Reports.
The nonprofit, which is the world’s largest independent product-testing organization, tested more than 80 different processed foods containing corn or soy—the two most widely grown GMO crops in the U.S.—between April and July 2014. It found that nearly all of the samples of products that did not make any non-GMO-related claim on the package did, in fact, contain substantial amounts of genetically modified corn or soy.
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The study also revealed that while the independently certified “Organic” and “Non-GMO Project Verified” labels are reliable, “no-GMO” or “non-GMO” claims made by a manufacturer have no standard definition, don’t require independent verification, and are therefore less trustworthy. In a letter (pdf) to the Federal Trade Commission on Monday, Consumer Reports asked the agency to investigate the non-GMO claims on packages of Xochitl Totopos de Maiz corn chips after finding several instances of genetically engineered corn in the product.
Most notably, although more than 60 percent of people in the Consumer Reports national survey said they believed that “natural” means that a product does not contain controversial ingredients, testing did not bear out that correlation. According to Consumer Reports, “virtually all of the samples we tested of products that made only a ‘natural’ claim did have a substantial amount of GMOs” (though some have since removed the claim or have become Non-GMO Project Verified).
“The confusing nature of this claim is just one reason we are asking the government to ban the use of ‘natural’ labels on food,” says Urvashi Rangan, director of the safety and sustainability center at Consumer Reports.
GMO food labeling requirements are on the ballot this fall in Oregon and Colorado; Consumer Reports is supporting both campaigns.
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Just months away from what President Obama refers to as the “end of the U.S. combat mission” in Afghanistan, the U.S. military escalated its air bombardments on the country.
In response to an information request from the Boston Globe, Central Command revealed that during the month of August, the U.S. carried out 436 “weapons releases” on Afghanistan, referring to air strikes. This is the highest number of air strikes on Afghanistan since August 2012, according to U.S. Central Command’s own data, pictured in the graph below.
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Military officials are still working to compile data for the month of September, officials told the paper.
The data was released just over a week after Afghanistan’s new president, Ashraf Ghani, approved the U.S. Bilateral Security Agreement, which locks in at least another decade of U.S. military presence in the country, far past the formal “end” to the war at the conclusion of this year. The heightened bombings, furthermore, were revealed the same week the “longest war” entered its 14th year.
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