Informed Comment: Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion

Syrian Regime Bombards Damascus Suburb, Kills 36, as Rebels close on Air Base

Posted on 01/14/2013 by Juan

The Baath regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad showed its increasing desperation on Sunday when it had fighter jets bombard the eastern Ghouta suburb of Damascus, killing some 36 people (some of them non-combatants). The regime bombed this area because the revolutionaries are using it as a base from which to attack the Muleiha air base, the last major military installation to the east of Damascus that hasn’t already fallen into rebel hands. In the past month, the revolutionaries have concentrated on taking military bases, especially ones with airfields, in hopes of cutting the regime off from resupply by Russia and Iran.

Oppositionists posted (unverified) footage of the bombardment to Youtube (warning, not for the faint of heart):

On Friday, revolutionaries announced that they had captured the key Taftanaz air base in the north of the country. Some alarums were raised, however, in that the best fighters, and the ones who took the lead, at Taftanaz are said to be Jibhat al-Nusra (The Succor Front), an extremist Sunni guerrilla group.

Several other rebel positions in towns around the country were bombarded by the regime on Sunday, including Rastan near Homs.

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Posted in Syria | 5 Comments

Mercury from Coal Plants, Goldmining, a Global Health Crisis: UN Environmental Program

Posted on 01/14/2013 by Juan

A new study has found that 84% of all fish have unhealthy levels of mercury! Richard Gelfond, CEO of IMAX, the film company, has had his health permanently damaged simply from eating a lot of fish.

The message to take away is not never to eat fish. It is that there is too much mercury in our environment. Half of all mercury emissions in the United States come from coal-fired power plants, and a quarter of mercury released into the environment globally is from coal. Some 1200 new coal plants are now planned around the world, and this must not be allowed.

By the way, about 10% of mercury in our environment comes from burning natural gas and petroleum and refining petroleum. So not only are hydrocarbons causing calamitous global warming, but they are responsible for over a third of our present mercury poisoning globally, and for well over half of that in the United States.

The United Nations Environmental Program has just issued its [pdf] 2013 assessment of the mercury threat.

It finds that human-caused

“emissions and releases have doubled the amount of mercury in the top 100 meters [yards] of the world’s oceans in the last 100 years. Concentrations in deeper waters have increased by only 10-25%, because of the slow transfer of mercury from surface waters into the deep oceans. In some species of Arctic marine animals, mercury content has increased by 12 times on average since the pre-industrial period. This increase implies that, on average, over 90% of the mercury in these marine animals today comes from anthropogenic [human] sources.”

And, the United Nations has been meeting in Geneva on a possible new global treaty limiting mercury emissions.

There are some 600 coal plants in the United States, and they should all be shut down on grounds of mercury pollution alone, but they also are the major contributor to global warming. They can now all quickly be replaced by solar and wind installations, with some natural gas if absolutely necessary. People who complain about the ‘extra cost’ of solar and wind seem not to mind, like, neurotoxins all around them, or billions of dollars of climate change damage. Besides, wind and solar are just about at grid parity with coal in many markets,and will be able to undersell it, even ignoring the externalities in the true cost of coal, in this decade.

Aljazeera English reports:

Mining, distributing and burning coal should be illegal.

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Posted in Environment, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

America’s Guns, at Home and Abroad (Engelhardt)

Posted on 01/14/2013 by Juan

Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com

Given these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is? Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted that there are barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates over the Second Amendment, or been struck by the rapid shifts in public opinion on gun control, or checked out the disputes over how effective an assault-rifle ban was the last time around? Who doesn’t know about the NRA’s suggestion to weaponize schools, or about the price poor neighborhoods may be paying in gun deaths for the present expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment? Who hasn’t seen the legions of stories about how, in the wake of the Newtown slaughter, sales of guns, especially AR-15 assault rifles, have soared, ammunition sales have surged, background checks for future gun purchases have risen sharply, and gun shows have been besieged with customers?

If you haven’t stumbled across figures on gun violence in America or on suicide-by-gun, you’ve been hiding under a rock. If you haven’t heard about Chicago’s soaring and Washington D.C.’s plunging gun-death stats (and that both towns have relatively strict gun laws), where have you been?

Has there, in fact, been any aspect of the weaponization of the United States that, since the Newtown massacre, hasn’t been discussed? Are you the only person in the country, for instance, who doesn’t know that Vice President Joe Biden has been assigned the task of coming up with an administration gun-control agenda before Barack Obama is inaugurated for his second term? And can you honestly tell me that you haven’t seen global comparisons of killing rates in countries that have tight gun laws and the U.S., or read at least one discussion about life in countries like Colombia or Guatemala, where armed guards are omnipresent?

After years of mass killings that resulted in next to no national dialogue about the role of guns and how to control them, the subject is back on the American agenda in a significant way and — by all signs — isn’t about to leave town anytime soon. The discussion has been so expansive after years in a well-armed wilderness that it’s easy to miss what still isn’t being discussed, and in some sense just how narrow our focus remains.

Think of it this way: the Obama administration is reportedly going to call on Congress to pass a new ban on assault weapons, as well as one on high-capacity ammunition magazines, and to close the loopholes that allow certain gun purchasers to avoid background checks. But Biden has already conceded, at least implicitly, that facing a Republican-controlled House of Representatives and a filibuster-prone Senate, the administration’s ability to make much of this happen — as on so many domestic issues — is limited.

Keep reading America's Guns, at Home and Abroad (Engelhardt)

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Posted in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Uncategorized, US politics | Leave a Comment

How Long will We let Coal Plants Mercury-Poison Us?

Posted on 01/13/2013 by Juan

Mercury is a nerve poison, steady exposure to which causes all kinds of neurological and mental problems, as well as heart problems. I keep hearing public service announcements that you should not eat fish more than twice a week.

Think about that. In a natural, normal world, didn’t people on the coast eat fish every day? Why avoid fish? It is because fish big enough for us to eat with profit are high on the food chain, and so concentrate toxins like mercury. But why is there so much mercury in the environment, that it is getting concentrated in our salmon?

Coal-fired power plants are responsible for half of all human-caused mercury emissions annually in the US. The plants released 134,365 pounds of mercury in 2006 alone! Only 8% of plants have mercury-scrubbing capabilities in place.

Concerned Scientists note that “Just 1/70th of a teaspoon of mercury deposited on a 25-acre lake can make the fish unsafe to eat.”

A people with any self-respect would insist that all these coal-fired power plants be closed within 5 years:

Not only is burning coal the fastest route to catastrophic climate change, it emits mercury into our lakes and streams, which then gets into our fish– as Sue Sturgis points out, citing Environment America

Here are some statistics she has culled:

There is 10 times more mercury concentration in fish now than in the 1930s

15 % of US women of child-bearing age have enough mercury in their bloodstream to put their offspring at risk from health effects.

In 1999: percentage of women of childbearing age with inorganic mercury in their blood: 2

In 2006: that percentage was 30

I tear my hair out when I hear that people aren’t getting vaccinations for their children because they are afraid of autism. But emitting 134,000 pounds a year of mercury in our environment? That’s not a problem.

The Union of Concerned Scientists adds:

“Coal plants are the nation’s top source of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, the primary cause of global warming. In 2011, utility coal plants in the United States emitted a total of 1.7 billion tons of CO21. A typical coal plant generates 3.5 million tons of CO2 per year2.”

Close them down! Close them down now!

If your electric utility depends on coal, contact your city council and urge it to put in wind turbines and solar and generate its own electricity, getting off the dirty, poisonous grid! Boulder, Co. is now playing hardball that way, Sacramento created large numbers of jobs with its green energy commitments.

We don’t want your dirty coal!

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

France, ECOWAS intervene in Mali to Halt Advance of Radical Fundamentalists

Posted on 01/13/2013 by Juan

The Socialist government of France’s Francois Hollande intervened in Mali on Friday and Saturday to stop the advance of Muslim fundamentalists toward the capital, with operations continuing today (Sunday). The radicals had taken Konna, a few hundred kilometers north of the capital of Bamako, which Hollande’s government appears to have considered a red line.

The intervention was staged by helicopter gunship and Mirage jets, which allegedly killed about 100 of the rebels. Hundreds of troops of the 4th Helicopter Combat Regiment of Pau, which had been prepositioned in Burkina Faso, came over to the capital of Bamako, and some flew up to Konna.

h/t France24

Under a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to support the Mali government, the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) had planned an intervention with some 3000 troops. It will mainly be a Nigerian force, with Senegal, Burkina Faso and Niger also pitching in 500 men each. The idea was to train the Malian army to defend its own country, which meant that no offensive was originally envisaged until September. The advance south of the fundamentalists forced Hollande’s hand. He is likely getting pressure from Algeria and other neighbors of Mali to do something before the radicals march into the capital and then have a whole country from which to launch further attacks. Hollande said he considered Ansar al-Din a threat not only to Mali and its neighbors but to France and Europe. It responded by threatening France. ECOWAS now says that a few hundred troops will be deployed to Mali immediately.

Euronews has a video report:

A coup in the capital last year was taken advantage of by at least two groups in the vast north of the country (an area as big as France itself). One was the relatively secular Tuareg, who proclaimed an independent Berber state, Azawad. The other, however, was Muslim fundamentalists, Ansar al-Din and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (Mujao). They appear to have subordinated the Tuaregs in much of the north, and by Thursday had taken Konna and were heading toward the central town of Mopti. The French intervention stopped their advance toward the capital.

Mali, a country of about 16 million (roughly the demographic size of the Netherlands or a little less populous than Florida), is 5 percent animist, 5 percent Christian, and 90 percent Muslim. But most Malians practice a Sufi and liberal-minded form of the religion, which values music and urbane culture. A small radical group based in the country’s vast north has come under Wahhabi influences from Saudi Arabia and wants to impose their fundamentalism on the whole country, attacking Sufi shrines (the equivalent of saints’ tombs in Catholicism).

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Posted in Africa | 14 Comments

Since 1979, Firearms have Killed 120,000 US Children, Many more than Troops in Vietnam or Iraq & Afghanistan Wars (Graph)

Posted on 01/13/2013 by Juan

h/t [-pdf] children’s Defense Fund

Children’s and teen deaths are 1979-2010; I updated number of troops killed in Iraq & Afghanistan Wars to end of 2012

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Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Top Ten Surprises of the Obama-Karzai Meet on Afghanistan’s Future

Posted on 01/12/2013 by Juan

1. President Obama moved the deadline for the end of US combat missions in Afghanistan up from July 31 to “this spring.” At that point, the Afghanistan National Army will take the lead in all military actions against Taliban and other militants. US troops will mainly be training the ANA or providing close air and logistical support. The troop withdrawal will be accelerated.

2. US forces will be withdrawn from villages.

3. Karzai reversed himself by pledging to at least try to get Afghans to accept immunity from prosecution in Afghan courts for any remaining US troops after December, 2014, the number of which Obama said would be ‘very limited.”

4. The Obama administration pledged to leave behind more military equipment for the Afghanistan National Army than earlier envisaged, including C-130 helicopters and other aircraft, according to Aimal Faizi, spokesman for President Karzai. (Pajhwok Afghan News)

5. The US agreed to turn over to the Afghanistan government the Bagram prison and other prisons, where the US holds large numbers of captured Taliban. These prisoners will be given to the Karzai government.

6. In Thursday discussions with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the US and Karzai agreed to build on so far desultory talks with the Taliban. Likewise, Karzai met with the acting head of the CIA, Michael Morell. It was agreed that the Taliban would be allowed to open a political office in Qatar, so that negotiations could be pursued with them, and that further political bureaus might be opened in Saudi Arabia or Turkey.(Pajhwok Afghan News)

7. The NATO military (ISAF) deputy head for operations and plans, Brig. Gen. Adam Findlay, says that 80 percent of military operations are now led and carried out by the Afghanistan army, while 20 percent of “complex offensives” are still led by ISAF. (Kabul Pajhwok Afghan News)

8. Findlay said that only 17 districts in the country accounted, he said, for half of all operations by Taliban and other militants.

9. Of civilian non-combatants killed in the fighting, Findlay reported, 84 percent were killed by the Taliban and other militants in 2012.

10. Karzai is asking the US to establish branches of American universities in the war-ravaged provinces of Afghanistan. He is confident that this step will improve the situation for his country. (Kabul Pajhwok Afghan News)

ABC News reports: