viernes, 30 de septiembre de 2016
jueves, 29 de septiembre de 2016
The Butcher of Qana: Shimon Peres Was No Peacemaker
When the world heard that Shimon Peres had died, it shouted “Peacemaker!” But when I heard that Peres was dead, I thought of blood and fire and slaughter.
I saw the results: babies torn apart, shrieking refugees, smouldering bodies. It was a place called Qana and most of the 106 bodies – half of them children – now lie beneath the UN camp where they were torn to pieces by Israeli shells in 1996. I had been on a UN aid convoy just outside the south Lebanese village. Those shells swished right over our heads and into the refugees packed below us. It lasted for 17 minutes.
Shimon Peres, standing for election as Israel’s prime minister – a post he inherited when his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated – decided to increase his military credentials before polling day by assaulting Lebanon. The joint Nobel Peace Prize holder used as an excuse the firing of Katyusha rockets over the Lebanese border by the Hezbollah. In fact, their rockets were retaliation for the killing of a small Lebanese boy by a booby-trap bomb they suspected had been left by an Israeli patrol. It mattered not.
No fracking, drilling or digging: it’s the only way to save life on Earth
The Paris climate change agreement is worthless. Politicians can’t possibly honour it unless we stop developing all new fossil fuel reserves
Do they understand what they have signed? Plainly they do not. Governments such as ours, now ratifying the Paris agreement on climate change, haven’t the faintest idea what it means – either that or they have no intention of honouring it.
For the first time we can see the numbers on which the agreement depends, and their logic is inescapable. Governments can either meet their international commitments or allow the prospecting and development of new fossil fuel reserves. They cannot do both.
The Paris agreement, struck by 200 nations in December, pledged to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels”, and aspired to limit it to 1.5C. So what does this mean? Thanks to a report by Oil Change International, we can now answer this question with a degree of precision.
Using the industry’s own figures, it shows that burning the oil, gas and coal in the fields and mines that is already either in production or being developed, is likely to take the global temperature rise beyond 2C. And even if all coal mining were to be shut down today, the oil and gas lined up so far would take it past 1.5C. The notion that we can open any new reserves, whether by fracking for gas, drilling for oil or digging for coal, without scuppering the Paris commitments is simply untenable.
Even so, to prevent the odds from becoming any worse, a 2C target means that we can use only around 85% of the fossil fuel that’s currently good to go, while a 1.5C target means we can extract little more than a third (the figures are explained by the US environmentalist Bill McKibben in an article in New Republic). So what’s the point of developing new reserves if the Paris agreement precludes the full extraction of those already in production?
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/27/fracking-digging-drilling-paris-agreement-fossil-fuels
domingo, 25 de septiembre de 2016
The process
The process by which
banks create money
is so simple that
the mind is repelled
John Keneth Galbraith
Economist
Permit me to issue
Permit me to issue
and control the money of a nation,
and I care not
who makes its laws.
Mayer Anselm Rothschild Banker
In Greece, the Refugee Crisis Worsens While the World’s Attention Turns Elsewhere
EU’s resettlement plan has failed—tens of thousands are now stranded in dangerous, unsanitary camps.
Nea Kavala, Greece— “We weren’t expecting to be here very long,” Ayhan, a 28-year-old from Afrin, Syria, says, as she sits with her husband, Hozan, on a porch made of wood pallets outside their modest tent in the Nea Kavala refugee camp in northern Greece.
“I only have two changes of clothes,” she continues, pouring coffee into a row of baby-food tins that have been repurposed as coffee cups for impromptu guests. “What I’m wearing right now, and what I wore when I crossed the sea in February.”
Everything was going smoothly until the recently married couple reached the Macedonian border in March, and were told to wait in the Greek town of Idomeni—at the time, a sprawling refugee camp full of people trying to cross the border. Eventually, they were told that the border was closed and were evacuated to Nea Kavala—a former Greek military base outside the small northern town of Polykastro. Now, they are sharing a modest tent with Ayhan’s uncle, Mohammed; his wife, Alaa; and their two daughters. Occasionally they receive visits from a local red-haired stray cat, which they have jokingly named Angela Merkel.
“It was all so chaotic,” Hozan chimes in animatedly, recalling how, immediately after marrying, the couple made a snap decision to try their luck moving to Europe, due to the worsening political climate for Kurds in Turkey—where they had originally sought refugee after fleeing from Afrin, a Kurdish-majority Syrian town. Hozan thought that it was only a matter of time before the escalating violence in Turkey affected them, as Syrian Kurds.
sábado, 24 de septiembre de 2016
viernes, 23 de septiembre de 2016
miércoles, 21 de septiembre de 2016
What’s the Greatest Threat to Action on Climate Change? Nationalism.
It’s going to take global solidarity to avoid a climate-change doomsday.
In a year of record-setting heat on a blistered globe, with fast-warming oceans, fast-melting ice caps, and fast-rising sea levels, ratification of the December 2015 Paris climate-summit agreement—already endorsed by most nations—should be a complete no-brainer. That it isn’t tells you a great deal about our world. Global geopolitics and the possible rightward lurch of many countries (including a potential deal-breaking election in the United States that could put a climate denier in the White House) spell bad news for the fate of the Earth. It’s worth exploring how this might come to be.
The delegates to that 2015 climate summit were in general accord about the science of climate change and the need to cap global warming at 1.5 to 2.0 degrees Celsius (or 2.6 to 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit) before a planetary catastrophe ensues. They disagreed, however, about much else. Some key countries were in outright conflict with other states (Russia with Ukraine, for example) or deeply hostile to each other (as with India and Pakistan or the United States and Iran). In recognition of such tensions and schisms, the assembled countries crafted a final document that replaced legally binding commitments with the obligation of each signatory state to adopt its own unique plan, or “nationally determined contribution” (NDC), for curbing climate-altering greenhouse-gas emissions.
As a result, the fate of the planet rests on the questionable willingness of each of those countries to abide by that obligation, however sour or bellicose its relations with other signatories may be. As it happens, that part of the agreement has already been buffeted by geopolitical headwinds and is likely to face increasing turbulence in the years to come.
That geopolitics will play a decisive role in determining the success or failure of the Paris Agreement has become self-evident in the short time since its promulgation. While some progress has been made toward its formal adoption—the agreement will enter into force only after no fewer than 55 countries, accounting for at least 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, have ratified it—it has also encountered unexpected political hurdles, signaling trouble to come.
lunes, 19 de septiembre de 2016
El roído cielo de la pólvora que brama.
Hay una telaraña que desgarra mi alma. Grita entre castigos de soledad y me abraso entre cristales. Mi corazón, rebelde, vuela tullido otra vez. Se repite el frío y la carne negra paralizada por colmillos, se funde en destierro. Es tiempo nocturno éste. ¿Son mis oídos, mis ojos brasas?. Desconozco la llama delicada, tendida entre sabanas ya olvidadas. Ni siquiera tengo violenta ira. Ni agonía. Simplemente las caricias dan paso a la fuerza. Canta mi corazón pleno pero no crece mi paraíso. Mis fugitivos pensamientos se detienen como estatuas ¡pesada rueda!. La desalentadora alerta, desamparada escondía tormentas:
Esta noche, la hierba vuelve a ser espesa. Lo comprendo. Sucede. Reflexiono. Pienso.
Es extraño comenzar sin respuestas. El humilde veneno me habló una vez más.
Acumulo más frío que se hunde, profundo en mi cama.
Hoy mi mar esta triste. No amo la soledad. La vivo.
La noche se convierte en un nudo. No soy prisionero de mis huellas y no me derrumbo en la senda pero las marchas alcanzan mi aire, y las espinas de frío pasean entre muros y distancias.
No espero a mañana ni celebro rosas de vida. Solo, sentado, hilando, exclamando “otra vez”. Cruel desdén.
Comprendo que las bonanzas se marchitan y las noches transidas acarician mi pecho. Quedaran huellas que encontraran albas yertas o puede que mi sueño muera, ahogándome en este camino homicida y logre zozobrar mi alma.
Aún no estoy preso de cenizas reposadas, pero ya tengo más memoria que sangre.
La razón no es mi puerta, pero mi alma no languidece arrepentida:
Estaré herido, se acumulará el agua en mí, retirare la boca; abatido, aceptaré la soledad, devolveré huérfano, los recuerdos que despiertan mis horizontes, madurará mi carne, se fulminará mi corazón, estremeceré, lento con mi nunca, desierto suspiraré, confundido perderé mi imperceptible mirada, tal vez, atravesara mi cabeza las espuelas de la niebla flamígera, mi aliento reverberante, se aplastará entre acantilados, mis manos llenas de vino viejo ahora, engastaran el abrigo que no canta, mis pulmones helados yacerán en un gélido y profundo mar, las fiebres, sombrías propagaran el luto en mi alma, pero altivo exilio el dolor.
Ignoro, si este silencio acompañara mi tierra, venceré, paso a paso, verso a verso, el roído cielo de la pólvora que brama.Rafael Suárez
domingo, 18 de septiembre de 2016
Assad’s Death Warrant
Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, according to WikiLeaks, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria.”
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Why the Arabs don’t want us in Syria, Politico
The conflict in Syria is not a war in the conventional sense of the word. It is a regime change operation, just like Libya and Iraq were regime change operations.
The main driver of the conflict is the country that’s toppled more than 50 sovereign governments since the end of World War 2. (See: Bill Blum here.) We’re talking about the United States of course.
Read more: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/15/assads-death-warrant/
Read more: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/15/assads-death-warrant/
Getting Fooled on Iraq, Libya, Now Russia
Exclusive: After the British report exposing falsehoods to justify invading Iraq in 2003, a new U.K. inquiry found similar misconduct in the 2011 attack on Libya, but no lessons are learned for the West’s new propaganda about Russia, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
A British parliamentary inquiry into the Libyan fiasco has reported what should have been apparent from the start in 2011 – and was to some of us – that the West’s military intervention to “protect” civilians in Benghazi was a cover for what became another disastrous “regime change” operation.
The report from the U.K.’s Foreign Affairs Committee confirms that the U.S. and other Western governments exaggerated the human rights threat posed by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and then quickly morphed the “humanitarian” mission into a military invasion that overthrew and killed Gaddafi, leaving behind political and social chaos.
sábado, 17 de septiembre de 2016
Marquent ma route et je les pleure
J'ai eu le courage de regarder en arrière
Les cadavres de mes jours
Marquent ma route et je les pleure
Les uns pourrissent dans les églises italiennes
Ou bien dans de petits bois de citronniers
Qui fleurissent et fructifient
En même temps et en toute saison
D'autres jours ont pleuré avant de mourir dans des tavernes
Où d'ardents bouquets rouaient
Aux yeux d'une mulâtresse qui inventait la poésie
Et les roses de l'électricité s'ouvrent encore
Dans le jardin de ma mémoire
Les cadavres de mes jours
Marquent ma route et je les pleure
Les uns pourrissent dans les églises italiennes
Ou bien dans de petits bois de citronniers
Qui fleurissent et fructifient
En même temps et en toute saison
D'autres jours ont pleuré avant de mourir dans des tavernes
Où d'ardents bouquets rouaient
Aux yeux d'une mulâtresse qui inventait la poésie
Et les roses de l'électricité s'ouvrent encore
Dans le jardin de ma mémoire
Guillaume Apollinaire
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