Dear Friend,
Libya is becoming a crucible for would-be regional powers. The intractable civil war that has carved apart the oil-rich North African country is in reality a multisided chess match between a variety of outside actors, from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates, France and Egypt.
Kindly support honest journalism to survive. https://countercurrents.org/subscription/
If you think the contents of this news letter are critical for the dignified living and survival of humanity and other species on earth, please forward it to your friends and spread the word. It's time for humanity to come together as one family! You can subscribe to our news letter here http://www.countercurrents.org/news-letter/.
In Solidarity
Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org
Libya’s war becomes a global scramble for power
by Countercurrents Collective
Libya is becoming a crucible for would-be regional
powers. The intractable civil war that has carved apart the oil-rich North African country is in reality a multisided chess match between a variety of outside actors, from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates, France and Egypt.
Libya is becoming a crucible for would-be regional powers. The intractable civil war that has carved apart the oil-rich North African country is in reality a multisided chess match between a variety of outside actors, from Turkey to the United Arab Emirates, France and Egypt.
The battle involves thousands of Syrian militiamen and Sudanese mercenaries. Countries are deploying drones, fighter jets and missiles.
The Turkish-backed group in Tripoli is in command of Libya’s west and may hope to wrest control of the country’s strategic “oil crescent,” an arc of coastal towns and oil facilities in the interior in between Tripoli, the capital, and the eastern city of Benghazi.
“Erdogan and some of his allies believe that Turkey is restoring its importance in the eyes of its western allies,” Ozlem Kaygusuz, an associate professor of international relations at Ankara University, told the Financial Times. “They believe that the more Turkey plays an assertive role, the more it will become valuable and impossible to ignore for western interests in the region.”
Erdogan has railed against Sissi ever since the latter came to power in a 2013 coup that brought down Egypt’s short-lived Islamist government.
“They are each other’s nemeses,” Soner Cagaptay, a Turkey scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Today’s WorldView. “A secularist general who locked up political Islamists, and a political Islamist who locked up secularist generals.”
As part of its intervention, the Turkish government secured a major agreement with Tripoli over maritime rights and access to drill off Libya’s coast. The deal has provoked Brussels, with EU officials seeking to preserve the interests of Greece and Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkish strategists see an alarming axis of rivals, from old adversary Greece to Egypt and Israel, working in concert against their concerns in the region.
“There’s not a single policymaker in Ankara, including those who hate Erdogan, who is not worried about this idea of being encircled in the eastern Mediterranean,” said Cagaptay.
Moscow had a historic relationship with Libya during the Cold War.
“Proxy forces … have previously had a seat at the negotiating table and have had undue influence on the outcome, but now have almost become the principal interlocutors,” Rear Adm. Heidi Berg, the top intelligence officer at U.S. Africa Command, said in an interview.
Over the weekend, in a joint statement, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte urged “all foreign actors to cease their interference and respect the arms embargo established by the UN Security Council.” But such calls ring hollow when set against France’s own engagement in the conflict, which sees it butting heads with a fellow NATO member state.
Libya conflict: Risk of Turkey-Egypt clash increases
Risk of Turkey-Egypt clash in Libya increases as following Turkey’s military interference in Libya Egypt’s parliament on Monday authorized the deployment of troops outside the country. The size and nature of the Egyptian military deployment was unclear.
The Egyptian move could escalate the spiraling war in Libya after Egypt’s president Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi threatened military action against Turkish-backed forces in the oil-rich country.
A troop deployment in Libya could bring Egypt and Turkey, close U.S. allies that support rival sides in the conflict, into direct confrontation.
Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has called the strategic coastal city of Sirte a “red line” and warned that any attack on the city, which sits near Libya’s main oil-export terminals and fields, would prompt Egypt to intervene to protect its western border.
“Egypt will spare no efforts to support the sister Libya … to overcome the current critical crisis,” the Egyptian presidency said in a statement after a meeting of the National Defense Council on Sunday that was chaired by el-Sissi.
Libya’s east-based parliament, the sole elected body in the country, urged Egypt to send troops.
Last week, el-Sissi hosted dozens of tribal leaders loyal to Marshal Khalifa Hifter in Cairo, where he repeated that Egypt will “not stand idle in the face of moves that pose a direct threat to security.”
Turkish-backed Islamist forces allied with the government in Tripoli are mobilizing on the edges of Sirte and have vowed to retake the Mediterranean city, along with the inland Jufra airbase, from rival forces commanded by Hifter and based in the east.
After a closed-door session in Cairo, Egypt’s House of Representatives approved plans to send troops to “defend Egyptian national security in the strategic western direction against the actions of armed criminal militias and foreign terrorists.”
Libya was plunged into chaos when a NATO-backed uprising in 2011 toppled Moammar Gadhafi, who was later murdered by NATO-backed armed groups.
Drawn by Hifter’s anti-Islamist stance, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and other foreign powers have provided his forces with critical military assistance against western militias. Russia has also emerged as a key supporter of Hifter.
Turkey, a bitter rival of Egypt in a broader regional struggle over political Islam, is the main patron of the Tripoli forces, which are also backed by the wealthy Gulf state Qatar.
Relations between Egypt and Turkey have steadily deteriorated since 2013, when el-Sissi led the military overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, an Islamist who enjoyed Turkey’s support.
Egypt’s state-run Al-Ahram daily reported on Sunday that the vote in parliament was intended to mandate el-Sissi to “intervene militarily in Libya to help defend the western neighbor against Turkish aggression.”
El-Sissi has pushed hard in recent weeks for a cease-fire and political settlement. The Egyptian military, which has for years steered clear of overseas adventures and focused on fighting Islamic militants in the Sinai Peninsula, may be wary of deep involvement in Libya’s chaotic conflict.
New headache for Washington
The “distinct possibility” of direct conflict between Egypt and Turkey, a NATO member, presents a “brand new headache for Washington,” said Jalel Harchaoui, a research fellow specializing in Libyan affairs at the Clingendael Institute, an independent think tank in the Netherlands.
The U.S. has sent mixed signals to the rival sides over the course of the war. Although increasingly concerned about Moscow’s growing influence in Libya, Washington “doesn’t want to articulate a real, coherent Libya policy,” Harchaoui said, leaving a void that has allowed Russia and Turkey to become major players.
In a call on Monday with U.S. President Donald Trump ahead of the Egyptian parliament vote, el-Sissi said Egypt’s aim is to “prevent further deterioration of security in Libya,” according to a statement from the Egyptian presidential spokesman. It said the two leaders agreed on maintaining a cease-fire and avoiding a military escalation in Libya.
Turkey sends Tunisian Daesh to Libya
Turkey is continuing its belligerent campaign in Libya in favor of the Tripoli-based government of Fayez Sarraj, which is facing the Libyan National Army (LNA) of Marshal Hifter.
Reports said Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sent 2,500 members of the Daesh branch in Tunisia to Libya in recent months.
By order of the Government, Turkish intelligence has transferred jihadist groups and Daesh members of different foreign nationalities from Syria to Libya in recent months.
The Ottoman intelligence assigned 2,500 members of the Tunisian Daesh group to Libya, out of the thousands of other Tunisians from the jihadist group operating in Syria, in which another civil war is taking place, involving Turkey, which is reported to be cooperating with paid terrorist elements on their behalf.
The number of troops who arrived in Libya increased to 16,100 Syrian mercenaries, including 340 children under-18, of whom 5,600 returned to Syria after completing their contracts and obtaining their salaries.
Turkey continues to recruit more mercenaries who are brought to Turkish soil for military training.
Commanders of Turkish-backed factions embezzle the emoluments assigned to combatants, which has led to great unrest among the ranks of mercenaries and some defections. In this regard, the monthly salaries assigned to paid soldiers are higher than what they eventually receive.
Meanwhile, the number of Syrian mercenaries backed by Turkey who were killed in military operations in Libya has increased to almost 470, including 33 under-18 years of age, as well as some commanders of the detachment.
Turkey actively participates in the wars in Libya and Syria with the clear objective of obtaining a better geostrategic position and to achieve greater financial resources linked to the exploitation of oil and gas resources in the Mediterranean arc. This intervention makes use of the mercenaries in the pay of various nationalities coming from Syrian territory, some of them linked to former groups linked to jihadist organizations such as Daesh and Al-Qaeda.
Recently, there has also been speculation that Turkey might also send officials from Somalia to Libya to support the Tripoli-based government.
In November 2019 Erdogan and Sarraj signed an agreement guaranteeing Turkish military support to the Tripoli-based government, opposite the LNA led by Hifter, linked to the other eastern executive in Tobruk; a pact by which the distribution of exclusive economic zones in the Mediterranean also took place, which provoked the protest of countries like Greece and Cyprus when they considered that their maritime borders were being violated.
This Sunday’s visit by the Turkish Defense Minister, Hulusi Akar, to Qatar to meet with Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani probably dealt with this issue of the intervention in Libya. Here may lie the key to the possible dispatch of Somali officers to the North African country, since Doha is a base for the military training of Somali commanders and a starting point for the transfer of fighters to conflict zones in the Middle East.
Libya Review has referred to a report that several Somali intelligence officers were receiving training in the Qatari capital with the aim of expanding the influence of the Gulf monarchy on the African continent.
According to this media, Turkey seriously values the sending of officers from Somalia to support the Tripoli group in a war like the Libyan one, which has become an international game board with the participation of foreign powers in favor of the confronted factions to try to make profits from the situation.
The Tripoli group is supported by Turkey, Qatar and Italy; while, the LNA is supported by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Emirates, Russia and France.
This latest information comes just as the Pentagon has recently confirmed that Turkey stationed between 3,500 and 3,800 Syrian mercenaries in Libya in the first three months of the year.
Egypt’s strong military message to Turkey, Tunisia
Last month, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi warned of the readiness of his country’s army to intervene both within and outside its borders, in a clear reference to the conflict in neighboring Libya.
El-Sissi wanted to send strong messages to all: The Egyptian forces are ready to enter any confrontation, and with any party, in order to protect Egypt’s national security.
“Any direct intervention in Libya will be aimed at securing the border,” the Egyptian president said, adding that “any direct intervention by Egypt now has international legitimacy,” and that “some think they can trespass on the Sirte or Al-Jufra front lines. This, for us, is a red line. As long as the neighboring countries are stable, Egypt is stable. This is what the distant and near history has taught us, and so did the Egyptian military doctrine, which only intervenes if asked. This happened in the 1948 war in Palestine against Zionist gangs and in the 1991 war for the liberation of Kuwait.”
The Egyptian military’s strength is ranked ninth in the world according to the Global Firepower Index.
The image of the Egyptian government, people and army standing united sends a very important message of deterrence to anyone who believes that confrontation with Egypt is easy or who wants to exploit a fictitious division of opinions on the nature of the tasks and priorities of the Egyptian state.
Long Overdue For Latin America: A New “Good Neighbor Policy”
Co-Written by Medea Benjamin and Steve Ellner
U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been a fiasco. Try as it might, the Trump regime-change team has been unable to depose President Maduro and finds itself stuck with a self-proclaimed president, Juan Guaidó, who President Trump was reported to have called “a kid” who “doesn’t have what it takes.”
Co-Written by Medea Benjamin and Steve Ellner
U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been a fiasco. Try as it might, the Trump regime-change team has been unable to depose President Maduro and finds itself stuck with a self-proclaimed president, Juan Guaidó, who President Trump was reported to have called “a kid” who “doesn’t have what it takes.” The Venezuelan people have paid a heavy price for Trump’s debacle, which has included crippling economic sanctions and coup attempts. So has U.S. prestige internationally, as both the UN and the EU have urged lifting sanctions during the pandemic but the U.S. has refused.
This is only one example of a string of disastrous policies toward Latin America. The Trump administration has dusted off the 19th century Monroe Doctrine that subjugates the nations of the region to U.S. interests. But as in past centuries, U.S. attempts at domination are confronted at every turn by popular resistance.
Instead of continuing down this imperial path of endless confrontation, U.S. policymakers need to stop, recalibrate, and design an entirely new approach to inter-American relations. This is particularly urgent as the continent is in the throes of a coronavirus crisis and an economic recession that is compounded by low commodity prices, a belly-up tourist industry and the drying up of remittances from outside.
A good reference point for a policy makeover is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” in the 1930s, which represented an abrupt break with the interventionism of that time. FDR abandoned “gunboat diplomacy” in which Marines were sent throughout the region to impose U.S. will. Though his policies were criticized for not going far enough, he did bring back U.S. Marines from Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and scrapped the Platt Amendment that allowed the U.S. to intervene unilaterally in Cuban affairs.
So what would a Good Neighbor Policy for the 21st Century look like? Here are some key planks:
An end to military intervention. The illegal use of military force has been a hallmark of U.S. policy in the region, as we see from the deployment of Marines in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989; involvement in military actions leading to the Guatemalan coup in 1954 and destabilization in Nicaragua in the 1980s; support for coups in Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973 and elsewhere. A Good Neighbor Policy would not only renounce the use of military force, but even the threat of such force (as in “all options are on the table”), particularly because such threats are illegal under international law.
U.S. military intimidation also comes in the form of U.S. bases that dot the continent from Cuba to Colombia to further south. These installations are often resisted by local communities, as was the case of the Manta Base in Ecuador that was shut down in 2008 and the ongoing opposition against the Guantanamo Base in Cuba. U.S. bases in Latin America are a violation of local sovereignty and should be closed, with the lands cleaned up and returned to their rightful owners.
Another form of military intervention is the financing and training of local military and police forces. Most of the U.S. assistance sent to Latin America, particularly Central America, goes towards funding security forces, resulting in the militarization of police and borders, and leading to greater police brutality, extrajudicial killings and repression of migrants. The training school in Ft. Benning, Georgia, formerly called the “School of the Americas,” graduated some of the continent’s worst human rights abusers. Even today, U.S.-trained forces are involved in egregious abuses, including the assassination of activists like Berta Cáceres in Honduras. U.S. programs to confront drugs, from the Merida Initiative in Mexico to Plan Colombia, have not stopped the flow of drugs but have poured massive amounts of weapons into the region and led to more killings, torture and gang violence. Latin American governments need to clean up their own national police forces and link them to communities, a more effective way to combat drug trafficking than the militarization that Washington has promoted. The greatest contribution the U.S. can make to putting an end to the narcotics scourge in Latin America is to take measures to control the U.S. market for those drugs through responsible regulation and reforms,
No more political meddling. While the U.S. public has been shocked by charges of Russian interference in its elections, this kind of meddling is par for the course in Latin America. USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created in 1983 as a neutral sounding alternative to the CIA, spend millions of tax-payer dollars to undermine progressive movements. Following the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, for instance, NED ramped up its assistance to conservative groups in Venezuela (which became the foundation’s number one Latin American recipient) as a leadup to regime change attempts.
Unfortunately, the State Department’s definition of democracy includes free market capitalism, which gets translated into special relations with conservative governments that prioritize the interests of the elite and U.S. corporations. Under Trump, this has meant that Washington’s closest allies are governments on the extreme right of the political spectrum that have been accused of flagrant violations of human rights: Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Ivan Duque in Colombia, Jeanine Añez in Bolivia, Sebastián Piñera in Chile and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. A New Good Neighbor Policy would follow the example of the United Nations in not letting ideology determine relations with other nations.
An end to the use of economic blackmail. The U.S. government uses economic pressure to impose its will. The Trump administration threatened to halt remittances to Mexico to extract concessions from the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador on immigration issues. A similar threat persuaded many voters in El Salvador’s 2004 presidential elections to refrain from voting for the candidate of the left-leaning Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).
The U.S. also uses economic coercion against the socialist governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. For the past 60 years, U.S. administrations have sanctioned Cuba—a policy that has not successfully led to regime change but has made living conditions harder for the Cuban people. The same is true in Venezuela, where one study says that in just 2017-2018, over 40,000 Venezuelans died as a result of sanctions. With coronavirus, these sanctions have become even more deadly. A Good Neighbor Policy would lift the economic sanctions against all three nations and help them recover economically.
Support trade policies that lift people out of poverty and protect the environment. U.S. free trade agreements with Latin America have been good for the elites and U.S. corporations, but have increased economic inequality, eroded labor rights, destroyed the livelihoods of small farmers, furthered the privatization of public services, and compromised national sovereignty. When indebted nations seek loans from international financial institutions, the loans have been conditioned on the imposition of neoliberal policies that exacerbate all of these trends.
In terms of the environment, too often the U.S. government has sided with global oil and mining interests when local communities in Latin America and the Caribbean have challenged resource-extracting projects that threaten their environment and endanger public health. We must launch a new era of energy and natural resource cooperation that prioritizes renewable sources of energy, green jobs, and good environmental stewardship.
With the economic crisis brought on by coronavirus, the protests that rocked Latin America before the pandemic will return with a vengeance unless countries are free to explore alternatives to neoliberal policies. A New Good Neighbor Policy would cease imposing economic conditions on Latin American governments and would call on the International Monetary Fund to do the same. An example of international cooperation is China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” which, even with some downsides, has generated goodwill in the Global South by prioritizing investments in much-needed infrastructure projects without conditioning its funding on any aspect of government policy.
Humane immigration policy. Throughout history, U.S. administrations have refused to take responsibility for the ways the U.S. has spurred mass migration north, including unfair trade agreements, support for dictators, climate change, drug consumption and the export of gangs. Instead, immigrants have been used and abused as a source of cheap labor, and vilified according to the political winds. President Obama was the deporter-in-chief; President Trump has been caging children, building walls, and shutting off avenues for people to seek asylum. A Good Neighbor policy would dismantle ICE and the cruel deportation centers; it would provide the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States a path to citizenship; and it would respect the international right of people to seek asylum.
Recognition of Latin America’s cultural contributions. President Trump’s blatant disrespect towards Latin Americans and immigrants, including his call for building a wall “paid for by Mexico,” has intensified racist attitudes among his base. A new Latin America policy would not only counter racism but would uplift the region’s exceptional cultural richness. The recent controversy surrounding the extensive commercial promotion of the novel “American Dirt,” written by a U.S. author about the Mexican immigration experience, is an example of the underestimation of talent south of the border. The contributions of the continent’s indigenous population should also be appreciated and justly compensated, such as the centuries-old medicinal cures that are often exploited by U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies.
According to the Pew Research Center, in the two years prior to Trump’s assumption of the presidency, the percentage of Latin Americans who viewed the United States favorably dropped from 66% to 47%. These percentages continued their precipitous decline under the Trump presidency. A few economic concessions are not going to turn the trend around.
With the possibility of a change in the White House, CODEPINK, the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR), and other progressive organizations are drafting a letter to presidential candidate Joe Biden that begins: “We hope that your administration will adopt a New Good Neighbor Policy” based on the “principles of non-intervention and non-interference, mutual respect and acceptance of our differences.”
An all-encompassing expression of goodwill in the form of a New Good Neighbor Policy will meet resistance from vested economic and military interests, as well as those persuaded by racist arguments. But the vast majority of people in the United States have nothing to lose by it and, in fact, have much to gain. Universal threats, such as coronavirus and the climate crisis, have taught us the limits of borders and should act as incentives to construct a Good Neighbor Policy for the 21st century based on those principles of non-intervention and mutual respect.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace and the human rights group Global Exchange. She is the author of 10 books, including five books on Latin America.
Steve Ellner is an Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives. His edited Latin American Extractivism: Dependency, Resource Nationalism and Resistance in Broad Perspective (Rowman and Littlefield) will be released later this year.
Financialization of Copper Mining in Chile
by Yanis Iqbal
As Chile gets convulsed by the aggravating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the structural brutality of
copper mining is being starkly outlined. At Codelco or the National Copper Corporation of Chile, approximately 3,000 workers have been infected with Coronavirus and El Teniente and Chuquicamata are the hardest hit regions with 1,044 and 636 cases, respectively.
Hagia Sophia – Babri Masjid And Temple Mount
by Haider Abbas
There hasn’t been any news in the world media as to what Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad Al Makli said on June 16, 2020, about how the purported annexation of Jordan Valley, Northern Dead Sea and parts of Judea and Samaria, by Israel, is actually a ploy to demolish Al Aqsa 1 mosque and raise the Third-Temple of Jews on it, and the world remains totally oblivious to all the dangerous ‘inherent’ implications and also the ‘incumbent’ ramifications on it.
All About Me: The Kanye West Campaign Rally
by Dr Binoy Kampmark
West is his own gravy train, admittedly also stocked up with provisions from his fellow celebrity companion, Kim Kardashian. His articulations are pricks of irritation, rarely credible and almost always reversible. He does his utmost to convince that he is some discount idiot savant, trying to sound profound even as he fumbles. His rally at Charleston, South Carolina left something for everybody, though no one present should have been confused by the “all about me” theme.
“Don’t Need A Weatherman…..
by Philip A Farruggio
It was in February, when the first whistles of this virus reached our shores, the President and his minions in the White House and Congress were calling it a ‘ Hoax’. Remember? They all guaranteed that this was the same as a seasonal flu and dismissed what the Chinese were doing by way of quarantines and
mask wearing. First they blamed it on the Chinese as a biological attack. Then they said the warm weather would dispel it. Trump and his lackey governors did nothing to contain the slow spread ( at that time) and insisted that our economy needed to stay open and vibrant.
Pandemic, AI, and end of Democracy
by Bibin Manuel
Currently, humans risk becoming similar to domesticated animals who produce enormous amounts of data and function as efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but they hardly attain their human potential. Like the inventions of vaccines, artificial insemination, and growth hormones led to the development of factory farming of broiler chicken and industrial dairying, the novel coronavirus can usher in a new era of intensive rearing of domesticated human beings with no trait of natural attributes like libertarian thinking or any thinking at all.
Distancing to Discrimination: Plight
of Domestic Workers during Lockdown
by Dr Nupur Pattanaik
The domestic workers being helpless, there is a need to value the work of domestic workers and frame effective policies for their reconstruction. In post-COVID world, rethinking livelihoods and laws necessary to help informal sector cope with new norm for the domestic workers and uphold their rights.
COVID protocol violation at foundation-laying ceremony for the Ram Temple at Ayodhya
by E A S Sarma
I am surprised that the UP govt has scheduled the foundation-laying ceremony for the Ram Temple at Ayodhya on August 5th and, as per the news reports, the Prime Minister will be attending that function.
In Quest for Peace: The Other Side of the Divide
by Debraj Mookerjee
Journalist Sameer Arshad Khatlani’s maiden book, The Other Side of the Divide – A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan, published end February 2020, seemed to, at the outset, suffer the fate that the India- Pakistan relationship has continually suffered – whatever could go wrong, did!
Decrying vilification of social democrats as novel threat preceding to Corona virus
by K Nidhi
In my view, Rosa Luxemburg remains very significant figure in contemporary Indian political scenario. This is the high time where social democrats like students, civil rights activists, advocate, journalists and even doctors, poets who have continuously harassed and denounced as a traitor for democracy. In this respect, undoubtedly, the political incarceration of the social democrats
such as students and civil rights activists primarily and their continuous detention under pre-trail investigation seems as a warning to India’s vibrant civil society that the state is no longer ready to take criticism anymore
India’s Illegitimate Daughter
by Bijaya Biswal
On 29 September 2006, four members of a Dalit family were murdered in Khairlanji, a village in Bhandara district of Maharashtra, close to Nagpur. Surekha Bhotmange and her seventeen years old daughter Priyanka were stripped,battered, paraded naked, raped several times and killed by a mob led by Hindu men of the Kunabi-Maratha caste in the presence of the entire village.Roshan and Sudhir, Surekha’s sons, were also beaten, tortured and murdered for trying to save their mother and sister. Only Surekha’s husband, Bhaiyalal Bhotmange survived, watching the lynching and rape hiding behind a bush.
The Top Brass is Shattered in Bangladesh:
Aftermath of a Retired General’s Interview
by Taj Hashmi
Although neither the puppet and illegitimate government of Sheikh Hasina nor the pro-Indian Deep State, which has been running Bangladesh for the last twelve years, gathered enough courage to broadcast or publish the transcript of the video interview of Lt General (ret) Chowdhury Hasan Sarwardy with a US-based journalist, Kanak Sarwar, on 14th July, yet the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) department of the armed forces has come up with a ridiculously funny statement on the 20th calling the interview “discomforting” and “embarrassing”.
The Coronavirus-Climate-Air Conditioning Nexus
by Stan Cox
A wave of persistent, intense heat and humidity has enveloped the Midwest, South, and Northeast in this second
half of July. By the time it subsides, more than half of the U.S. population will have been hit with heat indexes above 100; for many, the heat wave will last for several days.
A wave of persistent, intense heat and humidity has enveloped the Midwest, South, and Northeast in this second half of July. By the time it subsides, more than half of the U.S. population will have been hit with heat indexes above 100; for many, the heat wave will last for several days.
The severe heat is driving almost all social gatherings and group activities into enclosed, air-conditioned spaces. That’s been the American way for more than fifty summers now, but this summer is different. Getting together these days in the cool indoor world can dramatically raise the risk of coronavirus infection.
For the duration of this pandemic, it will always be riskier to gather indoors than outdoors. In a paper published by the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases last month, more than 240 scientists warned that in an enclosed space, airborne, virus-laden “microdroplets” exhaled by an infected person can easily travel the length of a room and be inhaled by another person. Social distancing of six feet between people, they wrote, offers little protection in such a situation.
One of the scientists’ chief recommendations was to keep occupied rooms well ventilated with outdoor air, most effectively by keeping windows open. But air-conditioned spaces have to be zipped up tight, allowing airborne droplets to accumulate.
Air conditioning raises the risk further by lowering the indoor relative humidity. Studies show that coronaviruses in general, including those that cause the common cold, SARS, and MERS, remain viable and infective longer when humidity is low, whether they’re in the air or on surfaces.
There’s more. When humidity is high, exhaled virus particles are carried inside bulky droplets that fall to the floor or other surfaces within seconds. But with low humidity, they are in much smaller droplets called aerosols that can stay aloft in an enclosed space for as long as 9 minutes, waiting to be inhaled.
Some types of cooling systems also serve to circulate aerosols very efficiently and infect large numbers of people. A widely cited case study found that in January, one customer at a restaurant in Guangzhou, China infected nine other diners at three different tables with coronavirus. The breeze from an air conditioner near one of the tables had efficiently distributed virus-laden droplets along a twenty-foot-long path.
Air conditioning also can aggravate more routine maladies, including nasal congestion, asthma, and allergies. Studies in North and South America and Europe have found that people employed in air-conditioned workplaces have more health problems than those who work in non-cooled spaces.
Despite such impacts, air conditioning is customarily viewed as a net health benefit, because it can help prevent deaths during heat waves. However, research shows that heat deaths occur predominantly in marginalized, economically stressed urban areas with too much concrete and too little vegetation, often in communities of color who have inadequate access to services, especially health care.
Those who die in heat waves also are often elderly and/or have preexisting health problems, and they may be unable to afford the electricity to run an air conditioner. Not coincidentally, these communities and individuals who are most vulnerable to heat waves are also the most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
To be clear, air conditioning can indeed help keep people alive under harsh conditions, and that is no small thing. Nevertheless, it is important for us to acknowledge that in that role, the air conditioner is an in-case-of-emergency-break-glass tool. It’s not designed to fix the underlying social and economic injustices from which people need to be rescued, whether it’s from extreme heat or a viral pandemic.
Air conditioning is increasingly viewed as a key technology for adaptation to climate change, which is ironic because it also accelerates greenhouse warming. It accounts for 17 percent of year-round home electricity consumption and the resulting emissions; furthermore, the Energy Information Agency predicts that U.S. energy use for air conditioning will grow faster than any other use of energy in buildings of all kinds in coming decades.
The chain of causation forms a perfect circle. Greenhouse emissions from past decades (including billions of tons of carbon dioxide emitted by air conditioning, aircraft, and other technologies that also happen to be implicated in the pandemic) have made summers hotter than ever, prompting even more air conditioning use, which will further increase greenhouse emissions. Those emissions will help ensure that future summers are even hotter and future air-conditioning systems are pushed even harder.
Ending the climate emergency will require the rapid, mandatory reduction of fossil fuel use to zero and a complete overhaul of our built environment—including good, affordable housing and a healthy environment for all.
Meanwhile, we can at least curb the short-term damage. Home air conditioning should be turned off on those many days of the year when shade and fans can provide sufficient comfort. Offices should never be so frigid that workers resort to wearing sweaters or keeping space heaters under their desks in July. Every building should have windows that can be opened and that stay open as much as possible.
And, at least for the rest of this summer, let’s all get together outdoors.
Stan Cox most recent book is The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (City Lights Books, 2020). A slightly different version of this article was originally published by The Hill.
Thank God For The Commune!
by Vidyarthy Chatterjee
Notwithstanding the oppressive anarchy that has crept into its conduct in recent times, MIFF remains an event I still look forward to.
Gulfisha Fatima: 100+ Days of Wrongful Imprisonment
Press Release
19 July 2020 marked 100 days of the wrongful incarceration of Gulfisha Fatima, a young student and community educator from Seelampur, in North-East Delhi who has been falsely charged under the draconian UAPA law for defending constitutional values and peacefully resisting the anti-people CAA-NRC-NPR project.
Scope of Invocation of Anti-defection Law
by Chittarvu Raghu
One-upmanship in Rajasthan political crisis has lead to making a complaint by the congress chief whip to the Speaker alleging that Mr. Sachin Pilot and his supporters abstained from the congress legislature party meetings and are involved in a conspiracy to bring down the government. The Speaker was asked to initiate proceedings for their disqualification.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.