Chris Hedges's Blog, page 47

The ‘Immense Disaster’ Facing Climate Refugees

If you are a climate migrant, how urgent is urgent? Slowing, or even stopping, the damage humans are doing to the physical world through profligate use of fossil fuels and casual extermination of other species is urgent. But what we are allowing fellow humans to tolerate is just as urgent, though often less remarked.

Many millions more will be forced to flee their homes in a world experiencing intensifying climate breakdown. Some will move within national borders, and many others will cross them. The UN body that monitors migration is the International Organisation for Migration, whose data portal provides recent estimates of the numbers of migrants globally.

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It says 17.2 million people were forced to flee by disasters, many climate-related, in 2018 alone. The World Bank estimates that by 2050 143 million people across three global regions could be displaced within their countries by climate breakdown.

Their plight is urgent. But there are strenuous efforts to tackle the problem; movements to welcome migrants − and refugees − and offer them hospitality are growing, from the initiative for sanctuary cities in the US to villages in southern Europe.

The initiative is needed more than ever, as President Trump issued an executive order in 2017 seeking to criminalise sanctuary jurisdictions and cut off their funds. Several cities have simply ignored his action.

“The Syrian crisis is simply a dress rehearsal for an immense climate-fuelled disaster”

The Rapid Transition Alliance (RTA), a global initiative which aims to learn from rapid change to address urgent environmental problems, thinks there is mounting urgency, which will result in rapid change for the better for many of the world’s migrants.

It acknowledges that “the real challenge is how to look after the huge numbers of lone young people struggling as migrants without family or community support. Between 2014 and 2018, around 60,000 minors arrived alone in Italy by sea, 90% of whom were between the ages of 15 and 17,” according to a recent report.

But it also instances the proposal to introduce a cross-border tax on financial speculation (the so-called Tobin Tax) as a way of helping to support migrants and refugees and to help to meet the costs associated with relocation.

The Alliance is upbeat. It says: “Despite high levels of hostility in the global North, exaggeration of the problem, and the irony that many wealthy countries are disproportionately responsible for many of the push factors driving human displacement, movement mostly happens within and between poorer countries.

Political blindness

“Where flows do occur from the global South to the North, it is often to where it is needed, and people are generally good at integrating and adapting.”

Others have been more sceptical about the world’s chances of preventing a climate-driven migrant catastrophe. As recently as 2015 the late British peer Lord Ashdown told the BBC: “The numbers we now have of refugees fleeing battle zones are going to be diminished into almost nothing when we see the mass movement of populations caused by global warming.”

Lord Ashdown, a former marine and diplomat, known popularly as Paddy, told the Climate News Network: “I raised the issue of climate refugees then because I’ve been trying for a very long time to get the international community to take some notice of them . . . I raised it to make the problem more obvious – though I do not know why politicians continue to be so blind to it.”

Paddy Ashdown died in December 2018, enough time to see himself proved right. Three years earlier he had said: “The Syrian crisis is simply a dress rehearsal for an immense climate-fuelled disaster, which I think will begin to be felt within the next decade, perhaps within five or six years from now.”

Americans’ Views on Poverty Are as Outdated as ‘Little Women’

With Greta Gerwig’s new take on Luisa May Alcott’s classic 19th century novel, “Little Women,” in theaters, I decided to reread the book.

The novel communicates Alcott’s beliefs about proper morality and gender roles through stories of a family of four sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March, touting the American virtues of hard work, frugality, self-reliance and charity.

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The March family once had wealth, but they no longer do. Their father is serving in the Civil War, so they try to make do with what they have, even going without Christmas gifts.

When any of the sisters are overtaken by vanity or greed for finer things than they can afford, they learn their lessons. Love and hard work are enough to sustain a family, the story goes, and more important for one’s happiness than money.

What intrigues me is the double standard Alcott — and Americans — have for charity. Helping others is portrayed as virtuous. Receiving help, on the other hand, is not.

That poses quite a dilemma: How can any of us practice charity while others practice refusing it?

Alcott’s answer seems to be that only the “truly” destitute may accept help. In the book, the March sisters often help a family even poorer than they are. While the March sisters can stretch what they have to make due, the other family is starving.

This is more or less how means-tested government programs work today. To qualify for the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, in 2019, a family of four could earn no more than $33,475 — a pitiful sum — and could only have a small amount of assets in savings.

When others want to help the March sisters, Alcott does not always approve. She’s comfortable with them receiving help from a wealthy aunt but usually not from anyone outside the family. After one of the sisters, Amy, marries well, her husband disguises his charity to his sister-in-law Jo, so she doesn’t recognize it as such.

Again, giving is noble, but receiving is not.

This ties into Max Weber’s “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which describes a value system in which financial success is considered a mark of moral goodness. If one is rich, that shows they worked hard and practiced virtue. The flipside, by that logic, is the poor are lazy and morally suspect.

For the past four decades in American politics, that’s how our leaders have treated the poor, as well. We’ve altered social safety net programs like welfare to add often impossible, bureaucratically burdensome work requirements, or even drug testing. Recipients are suspected of wanting free handouts without having to work for them.

Studies of welfare recipients, like Jane Collins and Victoria Mayer’s book Both Hands Tied, shows that the working poor are anything but lazy. They are hard-working people trapped in an impossible situation. When drug tested, welfare recipients use drugs at lower rates than the general population.

Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is impossible, but rising out of poverty with a helping hand — or being prevented from falling into it with a safety net — isn’t. That should go for the Marches of the world as well as the “truly destitute.”

We’ve advanced beyond the 19th century gender roles portrayed in “Little Women,” so that women have career options beyond marriage. So let’s also get past the 19th century moralizing that ignores the structural factors that prevent class mobility for those who have done nothing wrong besides being born to poor parents.

The Uber-Rich’s Preferred Means of Fending Off the Masses

I’m guessing that being rich is a comfortable feeling — no money worries, you’re set for life! But is it possible that being too rich can be too much, even discombobulating?

Imagine being Mark Zuckerberg, whose social media monopoly, Facebook, put another $27.3 billion in his pocket last year. Forget fundamental questions about whether he (or anyone) is worthy of such an excessive haul of the world’s wealth — how do you even spend it?

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Mansions, yachts, jets, jewels, a Picasso painting, your personal island, and other trinkets would barely dent your multibillionous windfall. And since the Trumpeteers drastically slashed your taxes, far less of your extraordinarily good fortune is diverted to public need and America’s common good.

Thus, the bulk of your booty goes to making you even richer.

You buy out other corporations and advanced technologies, and you dump billions into Wall Street, artificially jacking up the price of stocks you own. Your wealth expands exponentially, inequality spreads, and the egalitarian ideals that hold our huge, diverse society together are stretched to the breaking point.

Alternately, you can spend your extra wealth on… guarding your extra wealth.

Interestingly, more and more über-rich individuals are comprehending the ultimate consequences of such extreme selfishness — so they’re responding with extreme consumerism.

Specifically, they’ve created a boom in the sale of maximum-security, James Bondish armored vehicles. Priced in the half-million-dollar range, these rolling fortresses can come with 700-horsepower engines, tailpipe-to-grille anti-blast protection, door handles that can electrocute intruders, roof-mounted gun turrets, and room for 10 fully-equipped bodyguards.

With names like “Marauder” and “Black Shark,” these armored beasts have become the preferred ride of gajillionaires – not to flaunt their fortunes, but to fend off the masses they’ve ripped off.

The Saudi Hacking Scandal Is Much Bigger Than Anyone Realizes

This piece originally appeared on Informed Comment. 

We’ve long known that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ phone was hacked. Large amounts of data were taken off of it, including intimate photographs and evidence of a romantic affair, which then showed up in The National Enquirer. The tabloid’s publication of this private material led to Bezos’ divorce and the loss of half of his fabulous wealth. A careful forensic investigation of the hack now shows that Bezos’ phone was compromised when he opened a message on Whatsapp from the personal cellphone of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The message contained malicious software that installed itself as soon as Bezos clicked on it to open it. This according to Stephanie Kirchgaessner, reporting for The Guardian.

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The revelation that Bin Salman himself played a pivotal role in the attempt to ruin Bezos’ life over the Washington Post‘s reporting on Saudi Arabia and Donald Trump should send chills down the spine of everyone who has ever chatted with the prince over Whatsapp. Bin Salman made a public relations trip to the U.S. in spring of 2018. He met with Silicon Valley CEOs, Hollywood producers and New York businessmen. How many phone numbers did he gather up and later use to talk to these movers and shakers over Whatsapp? How much dirt and how many secrets might the prince have by now swept up from the American elite, useful for blackmail and pressure campaigns?

We know that Trump’s son-in-law and high muck-a-muck without portfolio Jared Kushner also has talked to Bin Salman extensively over Whatsapp. This information raises the question of whether Kushner’s phone was similarly compromised by Saudi intelligence, which may be blackmailing Kushner to influence U.S. Middle East policy. Indeed, for all we know, Donald Trump’s own phone may have been hacked in this way by Bin Salman. We can only speculate about such matters, since this White House is the least transparent in history. But just for instance, we know that the Saudis had long wanted Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani dead. Did they have the kind of dirt on Kushner and Trump that would allow them to blackmail the U.S. into taking Soleimani out? Did they almost involve the U.S. in war with Iran (something that Wikileaks shows the Saudis were trying to do way back in 2006)?

This method of hacking phones uses the Pegasus software of the Israeli NSO company, and it is known that NSO sold the program to Saudi Arabia and many other authoritarian Middle Eastern governments. Former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden has said that if the Israeli software firm NSO had not sold its “Pegasus” malware to authoritarian governments like Saudi Arabia, dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi (who worked for Bezos’ Washington Post) would still be alive.

We can now apparently add that if NSO hadn’t sold Pegasus to the Saudis, Jeff Bezos would still be married to his first wife, MacKenzie.

I had written last February:

David Pecker’s attempt to blackmail Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos would not ordinarily attract my eye. Except for this paragraph:

“And sometimes Mr. Pecker mixes it all together:

“After Mr. Trump became president, he rewarded Mr. Pecker’s loyalty with a White House dinner to which the media executive brought a guest with important ties to the royals in Saudi Arabia. At the time, Mr. Pecker was pursuing business there while also hunting for financing for acquisitions. …”

We knew that Pecker had brought the French investment banker and Saudi publicist Kacy Grine to the White House.

Copies of the National Enquirer on display. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

And Spencer Ackerman had reported on Pecker’s strange move to put a pro-Saudi glossy magazine in grocery store check out lanes in spring of 2018. It is as though he thought American housewives would thrill to the soap opera in Riyadh, where the Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman had in summer of 2017 sidelined his rival Mohammed Bin Nayef, dethroning him as crown prince and greedily taking his place, before he kidnapped many in the Saudi elite to shake them down for $100 bn while imprisoning them in the Ritz Carlton. Days of Our Lives had nothing on the Saudis.

In short, there is every reason to believe that Pecker is entangled with the Saudi royal court of King Salman, perhaps, as Bezos alleges, in search of investment opportunities.

One question I have long had is whether investigators looking at the Russian element in the election of Trump are not unduly downplaying a United Arab Emirates and Saudi angle. That is, did those two oil monarchies help put Trump in power in the first place, and is there a prehistory to their entanglements with his circle?

David Pecker, the CEO of American Media. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

”But what Bezos goes on to allege is that he had hired a private investigator to find out how Pecker got hold of his texts and exchanges of smartphone photographs with his lover, Lauren Sanchez.

And the investigator, Gavin de Becker, looked into whether Pecker’s National Inquirer is influence-peddling for Saudi Arabia for some sort of quid pro quo.

Bezos also hints that Pecker was upset about the Washington Post’s quest to get to the bottom of the Saudi government’s murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi on October 2, 2018. Bezos owns the Post, though he maintains he is a hands-off owner.

Bezos alleges that the investigation of the Saudi connection most alarmed Mr. Pecker, and precipitated the attempt to blackmail the Amazon CEO into falling silent and backing off, with the threat of releasing further compromising photographs and text messages of a private nature.

Ronan Farrow said on Twitter that Pecker’s hired gun, Australian Dylan Howard, had also attempted to intimidate him when he was investigating Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassment of all the women in Hollywood.

This charge makes me wonder if Pecker isn’t America’s answer to Rupert Murdoch, whose British tabloids were famous for hacking Britons’ telephone messages and then blackmailing or smearing them with the stolen material. Former prime minister John Major alleged that Murdoch threatened him with bad press unless he bent himself to Murdoch’s will.

I have to say that I never took Pecker or the National Inquirer seriously, but maybe he is secretly one of the more powerful men in the world, holding files on politicians and celebrities and coercing them behind the scenes.

One piece of jeopardy for Mr. Pecker is that he was granted immunity, for cooperating with the Mueller probe, from charges of election fraud for paying off nude model Karen McDougall, Mr. Trump’s lover, to gain her silence during the 2016 election campaign silence. That immunity depends on his avoiding further acts of illegality. It is not clear that the courts would accept Bezos’ claim of extortion. But Pecker wouldn’t be so nervous about Bezos investigating his Saudi ties unless there was something to hide in that regard.

Then last April I added:

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ security team has alleged in The Daily Beast that Saudi Arabian intelligence hacked his phone and passed to the National Enquirer intimate photos that the married Bezos had sent to his lover, Lauren Sanchez. Although the Enquirer’s parent company, AMI, has alleged that it received the material from Sanchez’s brother, this allegation may be a cover story intended to deflect attention from the Saudi role (of which AMI may or may not have been aware). AMI reiterated its denials after the Daily Beast story appeared.

Bezos owns the Washington Post, which has often been critical of Trump, who in turn has viciously attacked the newspaper and its owner.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman established a strong relationship with Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner in 2017, which had been prepared for by the de facto head of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammad Bin Zayed, who secretly flew into the US after the November election to meet with Trump officials.

It has been alleged that the crown prince targeted expatriate Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in part because he had written critically about Trump at the Washington Post, where he was given a column after he fled Bin Salman’s increasingly dictatorial government.

Post columnist David Ignatius, considered close to the CIA, revealed that Khashoggi himself was hacked by a cyber espionage ring run from Riyadh by Saud al-Qahtan, one of Bin Salman’s chief lieutenants. Al-Qahtan had assembled a suite of hacking tools from Italy, Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Here’s another corner to the conspiracy: allegations keep surfacing that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, attempted to get Qatar to take a billion-dollar white elephant, 666 Fifth Avenue, off his hands. He and his father had purchased the building for way too much money, and were not able to get their money back. A balloon payment was coming due, and they were desperate to unload the property. They approached Qatar, but its investment fund knows a pig of an investment when it sees one.

So the allegation is that Kushner conspired with Bin Salman, who had his own reasons to be annoyed with Qatar, to frame Qatari Emir Tamim Bin Hamad for terrorism and Iran ties, and to put his country under blockade or even invade and take it over.

The June 5, 2017, attack on Qatar involved hacking into the state broadcasting facilities and altering the speech Tamim gave. It is also alleged that the Saudis hacked the smartphones of the emir and his circle.

Qatar, under siege and blockade, may have greenlighted an investment company in which it has an interest to lease the Kushner property.

With the Kushners mollified, Trump suddenly began tweeting positively about Qatar, after having branded it a font of terrorism when the blockade was launched.

So Emir Tamim of Qatar was hacked to benefit Trump and his in-laws.

Then Khashoggi turned critical of Trump, and he was hacked by al-Qahtan’s team, and then the order went out to murder him.

Then the Saudi hackers went after Bezos, obtaining photos of him naked, and broke up his marriage, costing him half his fortune, because of the Washington Post’s criticism of Trump and possibly because it wouldn’t let Khashoggi’s murder go.

The Washington Post connection links Bezos and Khashoggi. The Saudi connection links Qatar and Kushner, though it cannot be assumed that he was involved in the Bezos gambit.

Trump dirty tricks and influence-peddling abroad are reshaping the globe.

 

Cases of New Viral Respiratory Illness Rise Sharply in China

BEIJING — Chinese health authorities urged people in the city of Wuhan to avoid crowds and public gatherings, after warning that a new viral illness that has infected more than 400 people and killed at least 17 could spread further.

The appeal came as the World Health Organization convened a group of independent experts to advise whether the outbreak should be declared a global emergency.

The number of new cases has risen sharply in China, the center of the outbreak. Seventeen people have died, all in Hubei province, since the outbreak emerged in its provincial capital of Wuhan late last month, officials announced Wednesday night. They said the province has confirmed 444 cases there.

“There has already been human-to-human transmission and infection of medical workers,” Li Bin, deputy director of the National Health Commission, said at a news conference with health experts. “Evidence has shown that the disease has been transmitted through the respiratory tract and there is the possibility of viral mutation.”

The illness comes from a newly identified type of coronavirus, a family of viruses that can cause the common cold as well as more serious illnesses such as the SARS outbreak that spread from China to more than a dozen countries in 2002-2003 and killed about 800 people. Some experts have drawn parallels between the new coronavirus and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, another coronavirus that does not spread very easily among humans and is thought to be carried by camels.

But WHO’s Asia office tweeted this week that “there may now be sustained human-to-human transmission,” which raises the possibility that the epidemic is spreading more easily and may no longer require an animal source to spark infections, as officials initially reported.

Authorities in Thailand on Wednesday confirmed four cases, a Thai national and three Chinese visitors. Japan, South Korea, the United States and Taiwan have all reported one case each. All of the illnesses were of people from Wuhan or who recently traveled there.

“The situation is under control here,” Thai Public Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul told reporters, saying there are no reports of the infection spreading to others. “We checked all of them: taxi drivers, people who wheeled the wheelchairs for the patients, doctors and nurses who worked around them.”

Macao, a former Portuguese colony that is a semi-autonomous Chinese city, reported one case Wednesday.

Some experts said they believe the threshold for the outbreak to be declared an international emergency had been reached.

Dr. Peter Horby, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at Oxford University, said there were three criteria for such a determination: the outbreak must be an extraordinary event, there must be a risk of international spread and a globally coordinated response is required.

“In my opinion, those three criteria have been met,” he said.

In response to the U.S. case, President Donald Trump said: “We do have a plan, and we think it’s going to be handled very well. We’ve already handled it very well. … we’re in very good shape, and I think China’s in very good shape also.”

In Wuhan, pharmacies limited sales of face masks to one package per customer as people lined up to buy them. Residents said they were not overly concerned as long as they took preventive measures.

“As an adult, I am not too worried about the disease,” Yang Bin, the father of a 7-year-old, said after buying a mask. “I think we are more worried about our kids. … It would be unacceptable to the parents if they got sick.”

Medical workers in protective suits could be seen carrying supplies and stretchers into Wuhan Medical Treatment Center, where some of the patients are being treated.

Travel agencies that organize trips to North Korea said the country has banned foreign tourists because of the outbreak. Most tourists to North Korea are either Chinese or travel to the country through neighboring China. North Korea also closed its borders in 2003 during the SARS scare.

Other countries have stepped up screening measures for travelers from China, especially those arriving from Wuhan. Worries have been heightened by the Lunar New Year holiday rush, when millions of Chinese travel at home and abroad.

Officials said it was too early to compare the new virus with SARS or MERS, or Middle East respiratory syndrome, in terms of how lethal it might be. They attributed the spike in new cases to improvements in detection and monitoring.

“We are still in the process of learning more about this disease,” Gao Fu, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, said at the news conference.

Gao said officials are working on the assumption that the outbreak resulted from human exposure to wild animals being sold illegally at a food market in Wuhan and that the virus is mutating. Mutations can make it spread faster or make people sicker.

Jiao Yahui, a health commission official, said the disease “will continue to develop. It has developed different features compared with the early stage, and the prevention and precautionary measures need to change accordingly.”

One veteran of the SARS outbreak said that while there are some similarities in the new virus — namely its origins in China and the link to animals — the current outbreak appears much milder.

Dr. David Heymann, who headed WHO’s global response to SARS in 2003, said the new virus appears dangerous for older people with other health conditions, but doesn’t seem nearly as infectious as SARS.

“It looks like it doesn’t transmit through the air very easily and probably transmits through close contact,” he said. “That was not the case with SARS.”

Health officials confirmed earlier this week that the disease can be spread between humans after finding two infected people in Guangdong province in southern China who had not been to Wuhan.

Fifteen medical workers also tested positive for the virus, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission has said. Fourteen of them — one doctor and 13 nurses — were infected by a patient who had been hospitalized for neurosurgery but also had the coronavirus.

“This is a very profound lesson, which is that there must not be any cracks in our prevention and control,” Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang said about the infections of the medical workers in an interview with state broadcaster CCTV.

Experts worry in particular when health workers are sickened in outbreaks by new viruses, because it can suggest the disease is becoming more transmissible and because spread in hospitals can often amplify the epidemic.

The Lunar New Year is a time when many Chinese return to their hometowns to visit family. Li, the health commission official, said measures were being taken to monitor and detect infected people from Wuhan, and that people should avoid going to the city, and people from the city should stay put for now.

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Associated Press journalists Dake Kang and Emily Wang in Wuhan, China; Tassanee Vejpongsa in Bangkok, Thailand; Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul, South Korea; Maria Cheng in London; Yanan Wang in Beijing and Alice Fung in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

Tulsi Gabbard Files Defamation Suit Against Hillary Clinton

NEW YORK — Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard filed a defamation lawsuit against Hillary Clinton on Wednesday over an interview in which Clinton appeared to call Gabbard “the favorite of the Russians.”

Gabbard, a Hawaii congresswoman, said in her lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan that Clinton’s comments in a podcast last year in which she suggested that Gabbard was being groomed by Russia to be a third-party candidate were based on either her own imagination or “extremely dubious conspiracy theories” that any reasonable person would know to be “inherently and objectively unreliable.”

During the Oct. 15 Democratic presidential debate, Gabbard criticized a TV commentator she said had called her “an asset of Russia.”

Without naming Gabbard, Clinton appeared to agree with the characterization during a podcast appearance days later on “Campaign HQ with David Plouffe.” Plouffe was campaign manager for President Barack Obama in 2008 and served as served as a senior adviser to the president.

“She’s the favorite of the Russians,” Clinton told Plouffe, who was campaign manager for future President Barack Obama in 2008, referring to a person she had earlier identified as a woman “who’s currently in the Democratic primary. … They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.”

The lawsuit charges that Clinton “reserves a special hatred and animosity for Tulsi” because Gabbard endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders over Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primary campaign and never endorsed Clinton.

Asked to comment on the lawsuit, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said, “That’s ridiculous.”

Gabbard, whose support among Democratic primary voters has averaged around 1% in polls, has said she will not run for president as a third-party candidate.

Saudi Prince Implicated in Bezos’ Phone Hack, U.N. Experts Say

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The phone of Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos was hacked after receiving a file sent from an account used by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, United Nations experts said Wednesday.

The two experts called for an “immediate investigation” by the United States into information that suggests that Bezos’ phone was likely hacked after he received an MP4 video file sent from the Saudi prince’s WhatsApp account in May 2018, after the two exchanged phone numbers at a dinner in California.

The file was sent to Bezos’ phone five months before Saudi critic and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed by Saudi government agents inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey in October. At the time, the crown prince was being widely hailed for ushering in major social reforms to the kingdom, but Khashoggi was writing columns in the Post that highlighted the darker side of the crown prince’s simultaneous clampdown on dissent.

The Post was harshly critical of the Saudi government after Khashoggi’s killing and demanded accountability in a highly public campaign that ran in the paper for weeks after his death.

“The information we have received suggests the possible involvement of the Crown Prince in surveillance of Mr. Bezos, in an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia,” the independent U.N. experts said.

They said that at a time when Saudi Arabia was “supposedly investigating the killing of Mr. Khashoggi, and prosecuting those it deemed responsible, it was clandestinely waging a massive online campaign against Mr. Bezos and Amazon targeting him principally as the owner of The Washington Post.”

The U.N. experts published their statement after reviewing a full report conducted by a team of investigators hired by Bezos. The experts said they reviewed the 2019 digital forensic analysis of Bezos’ iPhone, which was made available to them as U.N. special rapporteurs. The independent experts are appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The digital forensic investigation that was commissioned by Bezos and shared with the U.N. experts assessed with “medium to high confidence” that his phone was infiltrated on May 1, 2018, via the MP4 video file sent from the crown prince’s WhatsApp account.

The experts said that records showed that within hours of receiving the video from the crown prince’s account, there was “an anomalous and extreme change in phone behavior” with enormous amounts of data being transmitted and exfiltrated from the phone, undetected, for several months.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, called the hacking allegations “absolutely illegitimate.”

“There was no information in there that’s relevant. There was no substantiation, there was no evidence,” he told an Associated Press reporter at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “It was purely conjecture, and if there is real evidence, we look forward to seeing it.”

Saudi Arabia is already under investigation in the U.S. for another case involving Twitter. U.S. prosecutors in California allege that the Saudi government, frustrated by growing criticism of its leaders and policies on social media, recruited two Twitter employees to gather confidential personal information on thousands of accounts that included prominent opponents.

Bezos went public last February after allegedly being shaken down by the U.S. tabloid National Enquirer, which he said threatened to expose a “below-the-belt” selfie he’d taken and other private messages and pictures he’d exchanged with a woman he was dating while he was still married.

Bezos wrote in a lengthy piece for the Medium that rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, “I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten.” While he did not accuse Saudi Arabia’s crown prince of being behind the hacking of his phone, he noted that the owner of the National Enquirer had been investigated for various actions taken on behalf of the Saudi government.

Bezos’ chief investigator, Gavin De Becker, went further, saying in a published report last March that the investigation found the Saudis obtained the private data of Bezos. His piece for The Daily Beast outlined in detail what he said was the crown prince’s close relationship with the chairman of AMI, David Pecker, which is the parent company of the National Enquirer.

At the time of his dealings with the crown prince, Bezos had been looking for a site in the Middle East to expand Amazon’s cloud services. The billionaire technology mogul had visited Saudi Arabia in 2016 to meet with the crown prince before meeting with him again during the prince’s tour of the United States in 2018. The company ultimately selected the island nation of Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia, which opened in July.

Amazon has also expanded into the Middle East with its 2017 purchase of e-commerce website Souq.com, which is a competitor of Noon.com, a platform that launched that same year and is heavily funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund that is overseen by the crown prince.

Another senior Saudi official in Riyadh, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told the AP that the kingdom finds it “distressing” that these claims are being made “devoid of evidence or fact.

“The kingdom of Saudi Arabia does not conduct illicit activities of this nature, nor does it condone them,” the official said.

The Financial Times, which has seen the forensic report that was done by FTI Consulting., said the investigation “does not claim to have conclusive evidence,” and “could not ascertain what alleged spyware was used.”

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Associated Press writers David Rising and Jon Gambrell in Dubai and Jamey Keaten in Davos, Switzerland, contributed to this report.

Democrats Should Be Calling Trump to Testify

This piece originally appeared on The Progessive.

Is the Senate impeachment trial of Donald John Trump unfolds, one fundamental issue is whether witnesses will be called to give live testimony. The parties, not surprisingly, are sharply and bitterly divided on that.

There can be little question that justice demands that witnesses be called, and that a Senate trial without them would be a sham—if the goal of a trial is to arrive at the truth, witnesses are essential.

And at the top of any witness list should be the President himself.

Trump should be subpoenaed to raise his right hand in the august arena of the U.S. Senate to give his account of the facts averred in the two articles of impeachment that have been lodged against him, accusing him of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

Senate Republicans led by Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell, the most Machiavellian Majority Leader in recent memory, would doubtless be apoplectic at the suggestion that the President himself should appear and testify. In fact, the Republicans, with some exceptions, are skeptical about allowing any live witnesses to be called. They seek a swift acquittal and know full well that witness testimony is messy, time-consuming, and could be  devastating to the President’s defense. And they have naked power on their side, rooted in their fifty-three-seat majority.

What the Republicans want is not a fair trial but a cover-up. And a cover-up is the last thing the nation needs at this critical juncture in its history.

The articles of impeachment set forth a narrative of extreme malfeasance, stemming from Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch investigations into Joe Biden and the discredited rightwing conspiracy theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, meddled with the 2016 American election. The articles also cite Trump for ordering past and present administration officials not to cooperate with the House’s impeachment inquiry.

Democrats insist, correctly, that live testimony from key witnesses is imperative to ensure a full and fair adjudication of the President’s conduct. And in this, they have long-standing precedent on their side.

As Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, noted in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post : “Only 19 other individuals besides Trump have been impeached by the House of Representatives. The Senate completed a trial in fifteen of those cases, and in every single one of them, it heard testimony from witnesses.”  Most of these impeachment trials involved federal judges.

Although House Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, in November welcomed Trump to testify in the impeachment inquiry (an invitation Trump declined), Senate Democrats thus far have omitted the President’s name from their potential impeachment witness list.

In a December 15 letter to McConnell, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, named four witnesses with direct knowledge of the alleged abuse of power and obstruction: Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney; Senior Advisor to the Chief of Staff Robert Blair; former National Security Advisor John Bolton; and Associate Director of National Security Programs at the Office of Management and Budget Michael Duffy. All had been blocked by Trump from appearing before the House.

During the first day of the impeachment trial, the House managers in charge of prosecuting the case requested subpoenas for the four witnesses. Their motions were tabled by the GOP majority by way of 53-47 votes.

While they are important, none of these witnesses could offer evidence as relevant as the President on his motives in dealing with Zelensky and ordering a hold on American aid. Only he can definitively explain what he meant by the “favor” he asked of Zelensky regarding Biden and the 2016 election in his July 25 phone conversation with the Ukrainian leader. Trump has repeatedly described the conversation as a “perfect call.”

To be sure, testifying before Congress is rare for Presidents, but it is not unprecedented. Abraham Lincoln voluntarily appeared before the House Judiciary Committee in 1862 to answer questions about the premature publication of part of his 1861 State of the Union address. Woodrow Wilson testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1919 on the treaty of peace with Germany and the creation of the League of Nations.

More relevant, Gerald Ford explained his decision to pardon Nixon in testimony before a House Judiciary subcommittee in 1974. And in 1998, Bill Clinton testified under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky before a grand jury run by independent counsel Ken Starr via a television hookup installed at the White House.

Both former acting Solicitor General Neal Kaytal and prominent conservative attorney George Conway, the husband of Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway, have publicly urged Trump to testify at his impeachment trial.

“If you really believed this [your innocence in the Ukraine affair], you’d be trying to clear your name—clamoring for a real trial,” Kaytal tweeted on January 12. “[Y]ou would testify under oath that you did ‘nothing wrong.’ The fact that you don’t speaks volumes.”

Now I don’t believe there is any realistic chance that Trump would honor a Senate subpoena in the event that one is issued. Although testifying would surely play to his unbridled ego and narcissism and offer him an opportunity to execute a prime-time TV takedown of his “deep-state” adversaries, in the end I would expect Trump and his lawyers to claim executive privilege or immunity, or, more telling still, to invoke the Fifth Amendment, allowing Trump to remain silent, even as he continues to fulminate on Twitter.

But that is no reason for the House managers not to go after Trump directly. Nor is it any reason for Senate Democrats not to support a request to subpoena the President.

The President is on trial for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It doesn’t get much more serious than this. It’s time to hold Donald John Trump to account in the most aggressive manner permitted by law.

The Climate Solution That Could Make Poor Countries Richer

Californian scientists have just made a case for geo-engineering as a solution to the climate crisis. One stratospheric technology – the reflection of incoming sunlight back into space – could do more than just lower global average temperatures.

It could also enhance the economic performance of some of the world’s poorest countries and reduce global income inequality by 50%.

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“We find hotter, more populous countries are more sensitive to changes in temperature – whether it is an increase or a decrease,” said Anthony Harding, of Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of California at San Diego.

“With solar geo-engineering, we find that poorer countries benefit more than richer countries from reductions in temperature, reducing inequalities. Together, the overall global economy grows.”

Uneven benefits possible

Harding and his colleagues report in the journal Nature Communications that they simply applied climate models to the consequences of a successful international collaboration to systematically reduce or reflect incoming sunlight, to compensate for the consequences of a steady increase in global average temperatures as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions.

Geo-engineering requires technologies that are not yet proven and that many scientists think may never work in any way that helps all nations evenly.

The authors acknowledge that many climate scientists are “reluctant to pursue one global climate intervention to correct for another” – a tacit recognition that humans have already inadvertently geo-engineered the climate crisis driven by global heating simply by burning fossil fuels and destroying forests. Nor do they specify a preferred version of any technology that puts sulphate aerosols or other reflecting particles into the stratosphere to reduce incoming radiation.

They simply consider the economic impacts of global temperature reductions under four different climate scenarios: if climates stabilised naturally; if temperatures went on soaring; if they were stabilised by geo-engineering; and if geo-engineering worked too well and lowered the planet’s temperature.

“A robust system of global governance will be necessary to ensure any future decisions about solar geo-engineering are made for collective benefit”

They identified historical connections between the heat of the day and the wealth of a nation. Rainfall didn’t seem to matter so much. What was important was the temperature. And in the models, temperature seemed to make all the difference.

If tomorrow’s world, thanks to geo-engineering, cooled by 3.5°C – and right now the planetary temperature seems set to rise by about that much – average incomes in countries such as Niger, Chad and Mali would rise by more than 100% in a century.

In southern Europe and the US, gains would be a more modest 20%. Impacts from country to country might vary according to each scenario. But changes in temperature driven by solar geo-engineering consistently translated, they say, into a 50% cut in global income inequality.

“We find that if temperatures cooled, there would be gains in gross domestic product per capita,” Harding said. “For some models, these gains are up to 1000% over the course of the century and are largest for countries in the tropics, which historically tend to be poorer.”

Poorest hit hardest

Researchers have consistently found that global heating brings yet more economic hardship, and even social conflict, to the world’s least developed nations: these are the countries that have benefited least from the exploitation of oil, coal and natural gas to drive wealth, and therefore contributed least to the creation of a climate crisis.

The latest study suggests that although the best way to confront the challenge is to reduce and eventually reverse greenhouse gas emissions, concerted global action – carefully agreed and executed – might in theory cool the globe and limit the losses of everybody, but especially the poorest.

There is a catch: nobody has yet agreed on the technology that would work best. And nobody knows how to achieve the other prerequisite: international co-operation.

“Our findings underscore that a robust system of global governance will be necessary to ensure any future decisions about solar geo-engineering are made for collective benefit,” the authors write.

Mexico Begins Flying, Busing Migrants Back to Honduras

CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico — Hundreds of Central American migrants who entered southern Mexico in recent days have either been pushed back into Guatemala by Mexican troops, shipped to detention centers or returned to Honduras, officials said Tuesday. An unknown number slipped past Mexican authorities and continued north.

The latest migrant caravan provided a public platform for Mexico to show the U.S. government and migrants thinking of making the trip that it has refined its strategy and produced its desired result: This caravan will not advance past its southern border.

What remained unclear was the treatment of the migrants who already find themselves on their way back to the countries they fled last week.

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The caravan of thousands had set out from Honduras in hopes Mexico would grant them passage, posing a fresh test of U.S. President Donald Trump’s effort to reduce the flow of migrants arriving at the U.S. border by pressuring other governments to stop them.

Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said 2,400 migrants entered Mexico legally over the weekend. About 1,000 of them requested Mexico’s help in returning to their countries. The rest were being held in immigration centers while they start legal processes that would allow them to seek refuge in Mexico or obtain temporary work permits that would confine them to southern Mexico.

On Tuesday afternoon, Jesus, a young father from Honduras who offered only his first name, rested in a shelter in Tecun Uman, Guatemala, with his wife and their baby, unsure of what to do next.

“No country’s policy sustains us,” he said in response to hearing Ebrard’s comments about the situation. “If we don’t work, we don’t eat. (He) doesn’t feed us, doesn’t care for our children.”

Honduran officials said more than 600 of its citizens were expected to arrive in that country Tuesday by plane and bus and more would follow in the coming days.

Of an additional 1,000 who tried to enter Mexico illegally Monday by wading across the Suchiate river, most were either forced back or detained later by immigration agents, according to Mexican officials.

Most of the hundreds stranded in the no-man’s land on the Mexican side of the river Monday night returned to Guatemala in search of water, food and a place to sleep. Mexican authorities distributed no water or food to those who entered illegally, in what appeared to be an attempt by the government to wear out the migrants.

Alejandro Rendón, head of Mexico’s social welfare department, said his colleagues were giving water to those who turned themselves in or were caught by immigration agents, but were not doing the same along the river because it was not safe for workers to do so.

“It isn’t prudent to come here because we can’t put the safety of the colleagues at risk,” he said.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Tuesday that the government is trying to protect the migrants from harm by preventing them from traveling illegally through the country. He said they need to respect Mexican laws.

“If we don’t take care of them, if we don’t know who they are, if we don’t have a register, they pass and get to the north, and the criminal gangs grab them and assault them, because that’s how it was before,” he said. “They disappeared them.”

Mexican Interior Minister Olga Sánchez Cordero commended the National Guard for its restraint, saying: “In no way has there been an act that we could call repression and not even annoyance.”

But Honduras’ ambassador to Mexico said there had been instances of excessive force on the part of the National Guard. “We made a complaint before the Mexican government,” Alden Rivera said in an interview with HCH Noticias without offering details. He also conceded migrants had thrown rocks at Mexican authorities.

An Associated Press photograph of a Mexican National Guardsman holding a migrant in a headlock was sent via Twitter by acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Ken Cuccinelli with the message: “We appreciate Mexico doing more than they did last year to interdict caravans attempting to move illegally north to our southern border.”

On the Guatemala side Tuesday, migrants lined up at a shelter for a breakfast of plantains, beans and coffee. Some asked for dry clothing to replace what was soaked or lost in their dash into Mexico. Others passed the time playing soccer and cards beside the river as they tried to figure out what to do next.

Darlin René Romero and his wife were among the few who spent the night pinned between the river and Mexican authorities.

Rumors had circulated through the night that “anything could happen, that being there was very dangerous,” Romero said. But the couple from Copan, Honduras, spread a blanket on the ground and passed the night 20 yards from a line of National Guard troops forming a wall with their riot shields.

They remained confident that Mexico would allow them to pass through and were trying to make it to the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, where his sister lives.

They said a return home to impoverished and gang-plagued Honduras, where most of the migrants are from, was unthinkable.

“We are in no-man’s land,” said Alan Mejía, whose 2-year-old son was cradled in his arms clad only in a diaper as his wife, Ingrid Vanesa Portillo, and their other son, 12, gazed at the riverbank Monday night. Mejía joined in five previous migrant caravans but never made it farther than the Mexican border city of Tijuana.

“They are planning how to clear us out, and here we are without water or food,” said a desperate Portillo. “There is no more hope for going forward.”

___

Associated Press writer Maria Verza reported this story in Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico, and AP writer Sonia Pérez D. reported from Tecun Uman, Guatemala. AP writer Marlon González in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and AP videojournalist Diego Salgado in Tecun Uman contributed to this report.