Chris Hedges's Blog, page 525

Trump Administration Takes ‘Wrecking Ball’ to Endangered Species Act

Gutting the law that has protected the bald eagle, the American crocodile, the gray wolf, and countless other animals from extinction over the past four decades, the Trump administration gave its latest handout to corporate interests on Thursday when it unveiled sweeping changes to the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

“These regulations are the heart of how the Endangered Species Act is implemented. Imperiled species depend on them for their very lives,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, a former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who is now president of Defenders of Wildlife, in a statement. “The signal being sent by the Trump administration is clear: Protecting America’s wildlife and wild lands is simply not on their agenda.”

This is unacceptable. The ESA is a wildly successful piece of legislation that has prevented 99% (!!) of the species it protects from going extinct. Help us stand up to the Trump administrations' attacks on the ESA: https://t.co/4UeRULB0hW https://t.co/XyAhBUcRXZ

— NRDC

Trump Invites Putin to Visit Washington in the Fall

WASHINGTON — Unbowed by swirling criticism of his summit encounter with Vladimir Putin, President Donald Trump swiftly invited the Russian leader to the White House this fall for a second get-together. Cleanup from the first continued with no letup Thursday, as Trump belatedly decided Putin’s “incredible offer” of shared U.S.-Russia investigations was no good after all.

A White House meeting would be a dramatic extension of legitimacy to the Russian leader, who has long been isolated by the West for activities in Ukraine, Syria and beyond and is believed to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election that sent Trump to the presidency. No Russian leader has visited the White House in nearly a decade.

Trump asked National Security Adviser John Bolton to invite Putin, and “those discussions are already underway,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Thursday. Trump earlier had tweeted that he looked forward to “our second meeting” as he defended his performance at Monday’s summit, in which the two leaders conferred on a range of issues including terrorism, Israeli security, nuclear proliferation and North Korea.

“There are many answers, some easy and some hard, to these problems … but they can ALL be solved!” Trump tweeted.

There was no immediate reaction from the Kremlin to the invitation.

News of the invite appeared to catch even the president’s top intelligence official by surprise.

“Say that again,” National Intelligence Director Dan Coats responded, when informed of the invitation during an appearance at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado.

“OK,” he continued, pausing for a deep breath. “That’s going to be special.”

The announcement came as the White House sought to clean up days of confounding post-summit Trump statements on Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump’s public doubting of Russia’s responsibility in a joint news conference with Putin on Monday provoked withering criticism from Republicans as well as Democrats and forced the president to make a rare public admission of error.

Then on Thursday, the White House said Trump “disagrees” with Putin’s offer to allow U.S. questioning of 12 Russians who have been indicted for election interference in exchange for Russian interviews with the former U.S. ambassador to Russia and other Americans the Kremlin accuses of unspecified crimes. Trump initially had described the idea as an “incredible offer.”

The White House backtrack came just before the Senate voted overwhelmingly against the proposal. It was Congress’ first formal rebuke of Trump’s actions from the summit and its aftermath.

Asked about the Putin invitation, Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan said “I wouldn’t do it, that’s for damn sure.”

“If the Russians want a better relationship, trips to the White House aren’t going to help,” he added. “They should stop invading their neighbors. They should stop meddling in our elections.”

Mixed messages from Trump have increased worries in Congress that the White House is not taking seriously the threat that senior officials say Russia now poses to the upcoming 2018 midterm elections.

Democrats in the House sought Thursday to extend a state grant program for election security but were blocked by Republicans. There is $380 million approved in the current budget for the program, which is intended to help states strengthen election systems from hacking and other cyberattacks.

Democratic lawmakers erupted into chants of “USA! USA!” during the debate.

As for Putin’s offer on investigations, Sanders it was “made in sincerity” and the U.S. hopes he will have the indicted Russians “come to the United States to prove their innocence or guilt.”

Just a day earlier, the White House had said the offer was under consideration, even though the State Department called Russia’s allegations against the Americans, including former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, “absurd.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday of the proposed Russian questioning, “That’s not going to happen.”

“The administration is not going to send, force Americans to travel to Russia to be interrogated by Vladimir Putin and his team,” Pompeo said in an interview with The Christian Broadcasting Network.

Senate Republicans joined Democrats in swiftly passing a resolution, 98-0, that put the Senate on record against the questioning of American officials by a foreign government.

Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell hastily arranged the vote as lawmakers unleashed an avalanche of resolutions and other proposed actions expressing alarm over Trump’s meeting with Putin and the White House’s shifting response.

Coats said Thursday he wished the president hadn’t undermined the conclusions of American intelligence agencies while standing next to Putin and felt it was his duty to correct the record. He restated the U.S. intelligence assessment about Russian meddling and Moscow’s “ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy.”

While they had met privately on three occasions in 2017, Trump opened the door to a potential White House meeting with Putin earlier this year. The Kremlin had said in April that the president had invited the Russian leader to the White House when they spoke by telephone in March. At the time, White House officials worked to convince a skeptical president that the Nordic capital would serve as a more effective backdrop — and warned of a firestorm should a West Wing meeting go through.

Still, Trump has expressed a preference for the White House setting for major meetings, including floating an invitation to Washington for North Korea’s Kim Jong Un after their meeting in Singapore last month.

Putin would be setting foot inside the building for the first time in more than a decade.

He last visited the White House in 2005, when he met President George W. Bush, who welcomed the Russian leader in the East Room as “my friend.”

President Barack Obama welcomed then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to the White House in 2010, and took him on a burger run at a joint just outside the capital.

The idea for another summit with Putin comes as Congress struggles with a response to the first, and Thursday brought a flurry of actions as lawmakers tried to uncover details of what happened in Helsinki.

Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said it’s what happens “when you wage war on objective reality for nearly two solid years, calling real things fake and fake things real.”

Putin, in his first public comments about the summit, told Russian diplomats that U.S.-Russian relations are “in some ways worse than during the Cold War,” but that the meeting with Trump allowed a start on “the path to positive change.”

“We will see how things develop further,” Putin said, citing unnamed “forces” in the U.S. trying to prevent any improvement in relations and “putting narrow party interests above the national interest.”

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said she still has not seen evidence that Moscow tried to help elect Trump. She said at the Aspen Forum that Russia is attempting to “cause chaos on both sides.”

___

Associated Press writers Deb Riechmann in Aspen, Colorado, and Mary Clare Jalonick, Matthew Daly, Tami Abdollah, Darlene Superville and Susannah George in Washington contributed to this report.

New Zealand Company Experiments With a Four-Day Workweek

The four-day workweek has been the basis of countless on-the-job daydreams and idle, longing conversations among co-workers stuck late at the office when they’d rather be home.

This year, a New Zealand firm took the idea out of the realm of daydreams and into the reality of a pilot program experiment in which all employees worked four days for the same pay as five. The revised schedule, which was in effect in March and April, was so successful, the New York Times reports, that the company’s board is considering making the change permanent.

The 240 employees of Perpetual Guardian, a company that handles trusts, wills and estates in Wellington, New Zealand, were the enviable recipients of the four-day workweek. This wasn’t an act of corporate benevolence. It was a business decision. Two researchers hired by Perpetual Guardian studied the effects of the shorter workweek and found an increase in employee productivity.

Jarrod Haar, one of the researchers and a human resources professor at Auckland University of Technology, told the Times that “supervisors said staff were more creative, their attendance was better, they were on time, and they didn’t leave early or take long breaks.”

Haar told the Times that overall, “employees reported a 24 percent improvement in work-life balance, and came back to work energized after their days off.” Plus, he continued, “their actual job performance didn’t change when doing it over four days instead of five.”

The idea for the original pilot came from the personal research of the company’s founder, Andrew Barnes. As the Times reports:

Mr. Barnes said he came up with the idea for a four-day workweek after reading a report that suggested people spent less than three hours of their workday productively employed, and another that said distractions at work could have effects on staff akin to losing a night’s sleep or smoking marijuana.

Perpetual Guardian employees told the Times that the new “workweek motivated them to find ways of increasing their productivity while in the office.”

The article does not specify what the company defined as a long break. It does note that for most companies around the world, the option of a shorter workweek meant lower salaries or cramming more work hours into fewer days. France mandated a 35-hour week in 2000, but as the Times remembers, “businesses complained of reduced competitiveness and increased hiring costs.”

Barnes, however, said he believes his “was the first business in the world to pay staff for 40 hours when working 32.”

Another benefit for his employees included cutting the bane of many office workers’ existence: endless meetings. At Perpetual Guardian, “meetings were reduced from two hours to 30 minutes, and employees created signals for their colleagues that they needed time to work without distraction.”

Tammy Barker, a senior client manager at the company, described a situation many of us who have worked in crowded corporate offices have long dreamed of: breaking free of the directive to multitask and actually focus on just one project at a time.

“Because there was a focus on our productivity,” Barker said, “I made a point of doing one thing at a time and turning myself back to it when I felt I was drifting off. At the end of each day, I felt I had got a lot more done.”

In a time when half of Americans aren’t using their paid vacation time, the idea of borrowing from a New Zealand pilot program may feel like a pipe dream—even with the glowing reports. Meanwhile, Barnes is trying to spread the gospel to more businesses in New Zealand.

 

American Conservatives Tied to Pro-Trump Trolls in Macedonia

In November 2016, days before and weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, two stories about the proliferation of fake news went instantly viral. The first, published by BuzzFeed on Nov. 3, explored how teenagers in the Macedonian town of Veles had successfully duped Trump supporters by building websites with domains such as TrumpVision365.com and USConservativeToday.com. The second story, published by The Washington Post on Nov. 20, profiled a pair of 20-something writers who ran a similarly lucrative operation out of Long Beach, Calif.

What neither outlet reported at the time, and what is now becoming clear, is that these professional trolls were working in close coordination with each other for the better part of six months—right through Trump’s stunning upset victory.

A new investigative report from BuzzFeed, in conjunction with the Organized Crime and Reporting Project, finds that the bogus political outlets traced to Veles were “not started spontaneously by apolitical teens,” but by prominent Macedonian media attorney Trajche Arsov, whose American associates include Ben Goldman and Paris Wade. Goldman and Wade are the founders of a conservative website called Liberty Writers News; Wade is currently running for a seat in the Nevada Assembly on the Republican ticket.

The investigation also reveals that Arsov has employed one Alicia Powe, who currently writes for the Gateway Pundit—“a site that frequently traffics in falsehoods and conspiracy theories.” (The Trump administration granted the publication a White House press credential in February 2017).

How a tiny town in the Balkans with a population of less than 50,000 came to be a booming misinformation hub is less confounding than it might appear. As BuzzFeed observes, just under half of Macedonia’s youths face unemployment, and the lure of Google Adsense dollars has proved “transformative.” Publishing flagrantly spurious clickbait, with such headlines as “Obama’s Ex-Boyfriend Reveals Shocking Truth That He Wants to Hide From America,” allowed contributors to “[buy] new cars” and “spend wildly at local clubs.”

In Goldman and Wade, Arsov found two natural partners. After first insisting he only knew of the pair from The Washington Post’s reporting, Arsov admits that their publications shared each other’s stories on Facebook, on pages that have subsequently been deleted. Earlier this year, the social media network announced that it would be improving the integrity of the site by expunging “financially motivated ‘inauthentic’ content,” per BuzzFeed. (What, precisely, Facebook deems inauthentic remains an open question. On Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was forced to clarify remarks about whether he intends to provide a platform for Holocaust denialism).

According to Macedonian officials, none of the Americans tied to these sites is presently under investigation, although the probes are “still in a very early phase.” At least one of the 13 Russians indicted by Mueller in February for alleged interference in the 2016 elections traveled to Macedonia in the months prior to the launch of the country’s first U.S. politics site.

“It’s not clear that anyone involved in the Veles fake news operations broke the law,” note the authors of the report. “But what is clear is that the powerful forces of Facebook, digital advertising revenue, and political partisanship gave rise to an unlikely global alliance that increased the spread of misleading and false news in the critical months before Election Day.”

Read the full report at BuzzFeed.

House GOP Blocks Funding for Election Security

WASHINGTON—The Republican-controlled House on Thursday eliminated new funding for states to strengthen election security, drawing protests from Democrats who said Republicans are not doing enough to prevent Russian meddling.

“The Russians attacked our democracy. They will be back, and we are not ready,” said Rep. Mike Quigley, D-Ill. “The president is unwilling to meet this challenge, but we must be willing to meet the challenge.”

Quigley and other Democrats blasted President Donald Trump for failing to stand up to Russian President Vladimir Putin at this week’s summit in Helsinki and said Republicans were not taking threats against the integrity of U.S. elections seriously enough. Democratic lawmakers erupted into chants of “USA! USA!” during the debate, which came as Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said she has not seen evidence that Moscow had tried to help elect Trump.

“I haven’t seen any evidence that the attempts to interfere in our election infrastructure was to favor a particular political party,” Nielsen said Thursday at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, adding that Russia is attempting to “cause chaos on both sides.”

Trump has made shifting statements on whether he agrees with the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. When asked Wednesday if Russia is still targeting the United States and its midterm elections, Trump responded “no,” but White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders later said Trump was saying “no” to answering more questions.

Quigley’s election security amendment would have extended funding for a state grant program overseen by the federal Election Assistance Commission. Congress approved $380 million in the current budget for the program, which is intended to help states strengthen election systems from hacking and other cyberattacks.

Democrats want to approve a similar amount through 2019, but Republicans say money from the current program is still available to states and new spending is not needed.

House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said Congress has already spent more than $3.5 billion on election security since the contested 2000 election. States still have money left from the current $380 million appropriation, and lawmakers have not been made aware of any new requests for more money as the November midterm elections approach, he said.

Sessions called the Democrats’ argument a “shrewd political shenanigan that has no merit to it.”

The amendment was defeated, 182-232, as the House debated a broader spending bill.

Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said Republicans’ refusal to spend more money on election security “represents nothing less than unilateral disarmament” against Russia, citing the U.S. intelligence community’s finding that Russia intervened in the 2016 election and charges brought by the Justice Department against Russian officials for hacking Democratic groups.

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat, depicted the vote on election security grants as a defense of U.S. democracy, citing a comment by National Intelligence Director Dan Coats that warning lights about cyber threats to the U.S. are “blinking red” in a manner similar to those before the 9/11 attacks.

“The flashing red light calls us to action!” Hoyer thundered. “Surely we can rise above pandering to party and Putin to act on behalf of our freedom and our security.” Democrats broke out in chants of “USA! USA!” as Hoyer spoke.

The House approved the overall spending bill, 217-199. It includes nearly $59 billion for the Interior Department, Environmental Protection Agency and Treasury Department.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., said the bill funds vital programs that make Americans safer, protect environmental resources and create jobs, especially in small businesses. The bill also provides money to fight the opioid epidemic, stop cyberattacks and fight devastating wildfires, he said.

Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., said the bill “fails the American people” and puts the environment and public health at risk. The measure cuts funding for the EPA, the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Endangered Species Act, while limiting federal action on climate change and thwarting EPA efforts to clean up the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways, she said.

The measure now goes to the Senate.

Making Sense of U.S. Moves in the Middle East

My father and I always had a tacit agreement: “We will never speak of That Part of the World.” He’d grown up in an Orthodox Jewish family in Norfolk, Virginia. His own father, a refugee from early-twentieth-century pogroms in what is now Ukraine, had been the president of his local Zionist organization. A liberal in most things (including his ardent opposition to both of the U.S. wars against Iraq), my father remained a Zionist to his dying day. We both knew that if we were ever to have a real conversation about Israel/Palestine, unforgivable things would be said.

As a child in the 1950s, I absorbed the ambient belief that the state of Israel had been created after World War II as an apology gift from the rest of the world to European Jews who had survived the Holocaust. I was raised to think that if the worst were to happen and Jews were once again to become targets of genocidal rage, my family could always emigrate to Israel, where we would be safe. As a young woman, I developed a different (and, in retrospect, silly) line on That Part of the World: there’s entirely too much sun there, and it’s made them all crazy.

It wasn’t until I’d reached my thirties that I began to pay serious attention to the region that is variously known as the Middle East, the Arab world, or the Greater Middle East and North Africa. And when I did, I discovered how deep my ignorance (like that of so many fellow Americans) really was and how much history, geography, and politics there is to try to understand. What follows is my attempt to get a handle on how the Trump presidency has affected U.S. policy and actions in That Part of the World.

Old Alliances …

The United States has a long-standing and deep alliance with Israel. During the Cold War, Washington viewed that country as its bulwark in the oil-rich region against both a rising pan-Arab nationalism and real or imagined Soviet encroachments. In fact, according to the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service, “Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the United States has provided Israel $134.7 billion current, or non-inflation-adjusted, dollars in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding.”

The vast majority of this largesse has been in military aid, which has allowed Israel, a country of a little more than eight million people, to become the 14th or 15th strongest military power on the planet. It is also the only nuclear power in the region with an arsenal of at least 80 weapons (even if its government has never officially acknowledged this reality). By comparison, Iran, its present archenemy, ranks 21st, despite having a population 10 times greater.

The history of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights — territories it captured in the 1967 war — is too long and complex for even a brief recap here. Suffice it to say that the United States has often been Israel’s sole ally as, in direct contravention of international law, that country has used its own settlements to carve Palestinian territory into a jigsaw puzzle of disparate pieces, making a contiguous Palestinian state a near impossibility.

Then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon explained Israel’s plan for the Palestinian people in 1973 when he said, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them.” Promising to insert “a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank,” he insisted that “in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”

Forty-five years later, his strategy has been fully implemented, as Barack Obama reportedly learned to his shock when, in 2015, he saw a State Department map of the shredded remains of the land on which Palestinians are allowed to exist on the West Bank.

The “pastrami sandwich” strategy has effectively killed any hope for a two-state solution. Now, as the number of non-Jews begins to surpass that of Jews in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, that country once again confronts the inherent contradiction of a state that aims to be both democratic and, in some sense, Jewish. If everyone living in Israel/Palestine today had equal political and economic rights, majority rule would no longer be Jewish rule. In effect, as some Israelis argue, Israel can be Jewish or democratic, but not both.

A solution to this demographic dilemma — one supported by present Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — is to legislate permanent inequality through what’s called “the basic law on Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people,” which is now being debated in the country’s parliament, the Knesset. Among other provisions, that “basic” law (which, if passed, would have the equivalent of constitutional status) will allow citizens “to establish ‘pure’ communities on the basis of religion or ethnicity.” In other words, it will put in place an official framework of legalized segregation.

In the Trump era, Washington’s alliance with Israel has only grown tighter. After recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — despite almost universal international objections — Trump sealed the deal in May, traveling to Jerusalem with a coterie of Zionist evangelical Christians and, on Israeli Independence Day, opening a new U.S. embassy there. That day, May 14th, was the eve of the 70th anniversary of what Palestinians call the nakba (the catastrophe of Israel’s seizure of Palestinian homes and lands in 1948).

Donald Trump could not have sent a clearer signal to the world about exactly where the United States stands on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That same day, as Time reported, “cameras captured the chaos as Israeli soldiers methodically cut down some 2,700 Palestinians, 60 fatally, as they marched toward the fence that separates Israel from the Gaza Strip.” Gazans, in case you’ve forgotten, have been subject for years to a vicious blockade, both literal and economic, that has turned their homes into what has been called the world’s largest open-air prison. And keep in mind that Israel also launched major military operations against that tiny territory in 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014, and appears to be ramping up for a new one.

It’s unlikely, to say the least, that the new “peace deal” that the world awaits from President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner will offer Palestinians much more than another bite of that pastrami sandwich.

… And New Ones

Geopolitics (and a common enemy) can make strange bedfellows. In a recent New Yorker article, Adam Entous suggests that a new ménage-à-quatre was formed in the region in the run-up to Donald Trump’s election, bringing Israel, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the United States ever closer. As it happened, there was even an unexpected fifth player lurking in the shadows: Russia. Entous reports that Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and one of UAE’s most powerful men, suggested to an American friend that Russian President Vladimir Putin “might be interested in resolving the conflict in Syria in exchange for the lifting of sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.”

The goal of this new alliance was not so much an end to the brutal Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad as an end to the Iranian military presence in Syria. The unofficial alliance of the Saudis, the UAE, and the Israelis was, above all, meant to push back or even bring an end to the present government of Iran. This seems to have been the genesis of a 2016 meeting in the Seychelles Islands between Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious hire-a-mercenary company, Blackwater, and a confidant of then-Trump adviser Steve Bannon as well as the brother of present Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, and a figure who might serve as a Russian-UAE go-between. Endous indicates that the deal then proved “unworkable,” because Russia had neither the desire nor the capacity to evict Iran from Syria.

Nevertheless, this July 10th, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu flew to Moscow to meet with Putin for a discussion of the Syrian situation in which the Russians are now, of course, deeply enmeshed. At the same time, a top foreign policy adviser to Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was also on his way to Russia to speak with Putin. Netanyahu returned from Moscow with less than he’d hoped for, but at least with “a commitment to keep Iranian forces tens of kilometers from Israel,” according to the New York Times.The fact that these meetings were happening the week before presidents Trump and Putin were to sit down together in Helsinki and discuss Syria, among other topics, is, however, suggestive. Bloomberg News reported that Putin has “stepped up efforts to broker a deal on the pullback of pro-Iranian militias from Syria’s border with Israel” as he prepared for his summit with Trump.

The American president has already backed away from his predecessor’s insistence that the departure of Syrian leader Assad be a precondition for a peace settlement in that country. For his part, Netanyahu has made it clear that Israel can accept Assad in power as long as the Iranian military units in that country are withdrawn. Before leaving for Moscow, he told reporters, “We haven’t had a problem with the Assad regime; for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights.” Presumably, Trump and his feckless son-in-law feel the same way.

In the end, the target of all these machinations remains Iran. The dangers represented by a conflict between the Trump administration and Iran (with the Israelis, the Saudis, and the UAE all potentially involved) threaten to make the invasion of Iraq and ensuing events there look mild by comparison. And it’s hardly out of the question. As University of Michigan history professor and Middle East expert Juan Cole notes, overshadowed by other absurdities in Trump’s bombastic post-NATO-summit news conference was this warning: “I would say there might be an escalation between us and the Iranians.”

Meanwhile, In Syria…

Meanwhile, if it weren’t for Yemen (see below), it might be hard to imagine a more miserable place in 2018 than Syria. Since 2011, when a nonviolent movement to unseat Assad devolved into a vicious civil war, more than half the country’s pre-war population of 22 million has become internally displaced or refugees, according to numbers from the U.N. High Commission on Refugees. Actual casualty figures are impossible to pin down with any exactitude. In April 2018, however, the New York Times reported that the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the number of directly caused deaths at 511,000, including fighters and civilians.

Death and destruction have come from all sides: al-Qaeda-linked terror groups and the Islamic State killing civilians; the Syrian military, which is presently driving opposition forces out of the southern city of Dara’a, where the original uprising began (creating a quarter-million refugees with literally no place to go); and U.S. bombs and other munitions — 20,000 of them — reducing the city of Raqqa to rubble in a campaign to liberate it from ISIS militants. Add it all up and the war, still ongoing, has destroyed millions of homes and businesses, along with crucial infrastructure throughout an increasingly impoverished country.

So many military forces — foreign and domestic — are contending in Syria that it’s difficult to keep track. Wikipedia’s list of those fighting fills screen after screen. On the side of Assad’s government are the Syrian military, elements of the militia of the Iranian-supported Lebanese party Hezbollah (part of the government in that country), some Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces, and of course the Russian military. On the other side are various militant terror groups, including what’s left of the Islamic State, and a wide variety of U.S.-supported anti-Assad groups, including those hailing from the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, a semi-autonomous, multi-ethnic area in the country’s northeast. Throw in Kurdish fighters, including Syrian natives and Kurds from Turkey, and the Turkish military itself (in its bid to tamp down any errant Kurdish nationalism), at least 2,000 U.S. military personnel, and the Israeli air force, striking at Iranian targets in the country, and even with an eventual peace settlement, Syria, the birthplace of the alphabet, will be a desperate nation for decades to come.

Whose fault was all of this? There’s plenty of blame to go around and plenty of actors to shoulder that blame. But when you begin to make that list, make sure to include Washington’s so-called neoconservatives who, as far back as 1996, offered Benjamin Netanyahu (Israel’s prime minister then, too) their “Clean Break” strategy to rebuild the Middle East. That plan started with unseating Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and went on to destabilize Syria. A number of these neocons, including Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, then became top officials in George W. Bush’s administration, invading Iraq themselves to make sure their dream for the Israelis came true. And what a nightmare it proved to be. Nor should we forget that one of that plan’s loudest advocates during the Bush administration — John Bolton — is now Trump’s national security advisor. In other words, there’s plenty of blame to go around and plenty to worry about.

Does Anyone Remember Yemen?

If there is a place in the greater Middle East even more desperate than Syria, it has to be Yemen. With U.S. logistical and financial support, Saudi Arabia has waged a cruel air war against the Houthis, a home-grown movement that in 2015 overthrew the government of president Ali Abdullah Saleh. What is the Saudi interest in Yemen? As in their support for a potential UAE-Israel-Russia-U.S. alliance in Syria, they’re intent on fighting a proxy war — and someday perhaps via the U.S. and Israel, a real war — with Iran.

In this case, however, it seems that the other side in that war hasn’t shown up. Although, like the Iranian government and most Iranians, the Houthi are Shi’a Muslims, there is little evidence of Iranian involvement in Yemen. That hasn’t stopped the Saudis (with American support) from turning that country into “the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” Their destruction of infrastructure in rebel-held areas has collapsed a once-functioning public health system, touching off a cholera epidemic, with the World Health Organization reporting a total of 1,105,371 suspected cases between April 2017 and June 2018. The infection rate now stands at 934 per 10,000 people.

Even worse than the largely unchecked spread of cholera, however, is Yemen’s man-made famine. Photographs from the country display the familiar iconography of widespread hunger: children with stick-like limbs and blank, sunken eyes. As it happens, though, this famine was not caused by drought or any other natural disaster. It’s a direct result of a brutal Saudi air campaign and a naval blockade aimed directly at the country’s economic life.

Before the war, Yemen imported 80% of its food and even today, despite a disastrous ongoing Saudi/UAE campaign to blockade and take the port of Hodeidah, Yemen’s main economic center, there is actually plenty of food in the country. It now simply costs more than most Yemenis can pay. Because the war has destroyed almost all economic activity in Houthi-controlled areas, people there have no money with which to buy food. In other words, the Saudi offensive against Hodeidah is starving people in two ways: directly by preventing the delivery of international food aid and indirectly by making the food in Yemen unaffordable for ordinary people.

We Have to Talk About It

With President Trump and his secretary of state now talking openly about a possible “escalation between us and the Iranians,” there is a real risk that some combination of the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia could initiate a war with Iran. If there’s one lesson to be learned from U.S. wars since 9/11, it’s “don’t start another one.”

For more than 70 years, Americans have largely ignored the effects of U.S. foreign policy in the rest of the world. Rubble in Syria? Famine in Yemen? It’s terribly sad, yes, but what, we still wonder, does it have to do with us?

That Part of the World doesn’t wonder about how U.S. actions and policies affect them. That Part of the World knows — and what it knows is devastating. It’s time that real debate about future U.S. policy there becomes part of our world, too.

Israeli Police Arrest Rabbi Over Wedding Ceremonies

JERUSALEM—Israeli police have briefly detained a liberal rabbi in the city of Haifa over performing “illegal” Jewish weddings without authorization of the country’s chief rabbinate.

Rabbi Dubi Haiyun, who belongs to the Conservative Judaism movement, wrote on Facebook on Thursday that police woke him at 5:30 a.m. and took him in for questioning.

He says Haifa’s Orthodox rabbinical court “filed a complaint against me for performing weddings.”

Police said Haiyun was arrested after not heeding a summons. He was later released but the case wasn’t closed and he needs to appear before police on Monday.

Jewish weddings in Israel can only legally be performed by the Orthodox rabbinate, which other streams of Judaism consider an impingement on religious freedoms.

Opposition lawmakers denounced Haiyun’s arrest as a violation of religious freedom.

Rules for Handling Toxic Coal Ash Eased

DENVER — The Trump administration on Wednesday eased rules for handling toxic coal ash from more than 400 U.S. coal-fired power plants after utilities pushed back against regulations adopted under former President Barack Obama.

Environmental Protection Agency acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the changes would save utilities roughly $30 million annually.

The move represents the latest action by Trump’s EPA to boost the struggling coal industry by rolling back environmental and public health protections enacted under his predecessor.

It pushes back the deadline to close problematic ash dumps and gives state regulators flexibility in how they deal with the massive waste piles that result from burning coal for electricity.

Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, signed the order a week after taking the helm of the agency following the resignation of former administrator Scott Pruitt amid ethics investigations.

Environmentalists argue the administration is endangering the health of people living near power plants and ash storage sites, while industry representatives welcomed the announcement.

U.S. coal plants produce about 100 million tons annually of ash and other waste, much of which ends up in unlined disposal ponds prone to leak. Some have been in use for decades.

Data released by utilities in March under an EPA mandate showed widespread evidence of groundwater contamination at coal plants. Heightened levels of pollutants — including arsenic and radium in some cases — were documented at plants in numerous states, from Virginia to Alaska.

EPA documents show most savings for utilities from the new rules will come from extending by 18 months the deadline to close ash dumps that don’t meet water protection standards. The new deadline is Oct. 31, 2020.

The utility industry said the changes give “regulatory certainty” for ash dump operators. That’s in part because it aligns the closure requirements with upcoming guidelines limiting the levels of toxic metals in wastewater discharged from power plants.

The changes also give state regulators the power to suspend monitoring requirements for dumps that don’t meet water quality standards.

“It’s not like EPA has granted us free pass here. It just gives us additional time to operate those facilities and better synch them up” with the upcoming wastewater guidelines, said James Roewer, executive director of the Utility Solid Waste Advisory Group, an industry organization that had pushed for the changes.

The original, Obama-era rule, adopted in 2015, came in response to a massive 2008 coal ash spill in Kingston, Tennessee. A containment dike burst at a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant and released 5.4 million cubic yards of ash.

The accident dumped waste into two nearby rivers, destroyed homes and brought national attention to the issue.

Attorney Larissa Liebmann with the Waterkeeper Alliance said the costs saved by utilities won’t simply go away. Instead, she said, they’ll be borne by communities that are forced to deal with contaminated water.

“We think it’s fundamentally unfair, Liebmann said. “The rules that were created in 2015 were already very much to the bare minimum.”

The Stories Corporate Media Failed to Cover This Week

Donald Trump’s antics over the past week have sent the world into a tizzy. With his preferential treatment of Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own Justice Department and intelligence agencies fueling calls of “treason,” we’ve all but forgotten the incredible firestorm Trump ignited less than a week ago at the NATO summit in Brussels or the reports of his collusion with retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy to replace Kennedy on the Supreme Court with Judge Brett Kavanaugh. As has been typical of the Trump presidency, each week’s news is so jaw-dropping that we forget the horrors of the week before, while our president tramples like a bull in a china shop over expectations, diplomatic norms and the difference between truth and lies. What important stories and contexts were eclipsed by Trump’s global tantrums over the past week?

Starting with his attendance at the annual NATO summit in Brussels, Trump called for an increase in military spending by NATO members to match the United States’ 4 percent of the national budget. But he didn’t mention the war in Afghanistan, where NATO’s only current military operations are ongoing. That long war, sparked by the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was meant to be on the agenda in Brussels—especially because NATO is expanding its mission with an increased troop presence—from 13,000 to 16,000—and is even starting a new mission in Iraq at the request of the United States. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was at the summit, but, as this Guardian report details, he was asked to leave after Trump singlehandedly transformed the agenda. Since then, as well as before the summit, there has been little discussion of the U.S. and NATO’s goal in the never-ending war, why more NATO troops will make things better when previous troop increases didn’t, and what the Western military operation has achieved so far.

Also largely overlooked in coverage of the summit was the story of the U.S.-EU split over the Iran nuclear deal. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived in Brussels just before the summit expecting to impress upon European allies the importance of abandoning the nuclear deal President Obama’s administration had carefully brokered and to push for harsher sanctions instead. It is not clear whether Pompeo’s meetings actually took place, but Trump himself referred to Iran only briefly during a news conference when asked a question by a reporter. In his answer, Trump may have inadvertently revealed his logic for abandoning the Obama Iran deal, saying, “At a certain point, they’re going to call me and they’re going to say, ‘Let’s make a deal,’ and we’ll make a deal. But they are—they’re feeling a lot of pain right now.” Rather than preserve the deal the U.S. and Europe already made with Iran, Trump appears to want the glory of deal-making for himself. Europeans have not yet capitulated to his demands.

After blowing up the NATO summit, Trump headed to the U.K., where he continued his trail of devastation, starting with an interview he gave to the tabloid paper The Sun ahead of his meeting with Prime Minister Theresa May. During that interview, Trump boasted of how he mansplained to May the best way to conduct her nation’s tricky Brexit negotiations, saying, “I actually told Theresa May how to do it, but she didn’t agree; she didn’t listen to me.” In that same interview, Trump explained that if May opts for a “soft” Brexit process to keep the U.K. tethered to the European Union, a proposed U.S.-U.K. trade deal will be off. “If they do a deal like that, we would be dealing with the European Union instead of dealing with the U.K., so it will probably kill the deal,” Trump said. What has not received much attention is how social justice organizations around the U.K. are opposed to any trade deal between the U.S. and U.K., not because of ties to the EU but because of the pro-corporate bent of the deal. Global Justice Now has urged May to kill any deal because it would be “a massive attack on our food standards, our National Health Service, our environmental protection and much more. It will leave U.S. multinational corporations in the driving seat—able to sue our government whenever they step out of line.”

Which brings us to the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki on Monday. What ought to have taken center stage was the ongoing brutal Syrian war, in which Russia is openly aiding Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in the destruction of his country. Instead, discussions of Syria were overshadowed by Trump’s vacuous defense of Putin against Trump’s own government’s findings on election interference. Still, Putin managed to say a few words during the press conference about helping Syrian refugees return home—words that rang deeply hypocritical, given Russia’s direct bombings of Syria that have led to thousands of civilian casualties. Even as the Helsinki summit was in progress, Russian planes had been dropping bombs near the Syrian border with Israel. Putin dismissed the carnage his bombs have wrought (using words reminiscent of past statements by American elites) in an interview on Fox News: “You know, when there is a warfare going on—and this is the worst thing that can happen for the humankind—victims are inevitable,” he said.

Also overshadowed by the Trump-Putin debacle was the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty, which one journalist was hoping to raise in a question at the Helsinki news conference before being dragged out. Sam Husseini, credentialed by The Nation magazine to cover the story, held a piece of paper in his hand that simply read, “Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty,” but rather than focus on what that treaty is and why the U.S. and Russia have not joined it, media outlets have instead focused on the rough treatment of the journalist. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was passed last year and is a groundbreaking weapons ban that nearly 60 countries have signed. If Trump was really interested in preventing nuclear weapons development by North Korea and Iran, he would sign the treaty and pressure those countries to sign on as well. But neither the U.S. nor Russia are interested in a world free of nuclear weapons—only a world where they alone (and perhaps Israel) remain capable of such mass destruction.

Also entirely missing from the coverage of intelligence agencies’ findings of Russian interference in the 2016 election is the historical context of U.S. interventions in other democracies the world over for many decades now. The CIA and other American agencies have changed the course of world history through interventions that have carried bloody legacies and whose effects are felt today from Iran to Honduras. This history does not excuse Russian efforts to change U.S. election outcomes; it is simply a crucial piece of information to remind us that Russian intelligence officers are taking a page out of the CIA’s handbook.

It is far too easy to get deluged by information, overwhelmed by the endless posturing, backtracking, lying and corruption emanating from Washington, D.C., these days. But the corporate media is still the corporate media, and its framing of current issues remains far too narrow.

White House, State Department Clash Over Putin Offer

WASHINGTON—The White House and the State Department are at odds over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offer to allow the U.S. access to Russians accused of election meddling in return for interviews of Americans accused by the Kremlin of unspecified crimes.

Even as the White House said the offer, made by Putin to President Donald Trump at their summit in Helsinki on Monday, was under consideration, the State Department called Russia’s allegations against the Americans “absurd,” suggesting that any questioning of them would not be countenanced by the U.S. The Russian claims against the Americans, including former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, relate to allegations of fraud and corruption.

“The overall assertions that have come out of the Russian government are absolutely absurd: the fact that they want to question 11 American citizens and the assertions that the Russian government is making about those American citizens,” spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters.

McFaul tweeted Wednesday: “I hope the White House corrects the record and denounces in categorical terms this ridiculous request from Putin. Not doing so creates moral equivalency between a legitimacy US indictment of Russian intelligence officers and a crazy, completely fabricated story invented by Putin.”

Nauert noted that a U.S. federal court had already rejected Russia’s charges regarding British businessman and vocal Kremlin critic Bill Browder. She said Russian authorities already know the U.S. position. Browder was a driving force behind a U.S. law targeting Russian officials over human rights abuses.

“We do not stand by those assertions that the Russian government makes,” Nauert said. “The Prosecutor General in Russia is well aware that the United States has rejected Russian allegations in this regard. … We continue to urge Russian authorities to work with the U.S. Department of Justice to pursue those in Russia who in fact perpetrated the fraudulent scheme that Russia refers to that targeted not only Mr. Browder, but also his company and … the Russian people as a whole.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray was similarly dismissive. Speaking Wednesday at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado, he said Putin’s offer was “not high on our list of investigative techniques.”

Wray and Nauert’s comments stood in sharp contrast to those of White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who held open the possibility that what Trump called “an incredible offer” is being weighed.

“The president’s going to meet with his team, and we’ll let you know when we have an announcement on that,” she said, adding that neither Trump nor anyone else in the administration had committed to accepting the offer.