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Moderate Syrian Rebel Application Form |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Sunday, 29 June 2014 14:23 |
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Borowitz writes: “After announcing, on Thursday, that it would seek $500 million to help ‘train and equip appropriately vetted elements of the moderate Syrian armed opposition,’ the White House today posted the following Moderate Syrian Rebel Application Form.”
President Barack Obama. (photo: Reuters)
Moderate Syrian Rebel Application Form
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
29 June 14
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
 fter announcing, on Thursday, that it would seek $500 million to help “train and equip appropriately vetted elements of the moderate Syrian armed opposition,” the White House today posted the following Moderate Syrian Rebel Application Form:
Welcome to the United States’ Moderate Syrian Rebel Vetting Process. To see if you qualify for $500 million in American weapons, please choose an answer to the following questions:
As a Syrian rebel, I think the word or phrase that best describes me is:
A) Moderate
B) Very moderate
C) Crazy moderate
D) Other
I became a Syrian rebel because I believe in:
A) Truth
B) Justice
C) The American Way
D) Creating an Islamic caliphate
If I were given a highly lethal automatic weapon by the United States, I would:
A) Only kill exactly the people that the United States wanted me to kill
B) Try to kill the right people, with the caveat that I have never used an automatic weapon before
C) Kill people only after submitting them to a rigorous vetting process
D) Immediately let the weapon fall into the wrong hands
I have previously received weapons from:
A) Al Qaeda
B) The Taliban
C) North Korea
D) I did not receive weapons from any of them because after they vetted me I was deemed way too moderate
I consider ISIS:
A) An existential threat to Iraq
B) An existential threat to Syria
C) An existential threat to Iraq and Syria
D) The people who will pick up my American weapon after I drop it and run away
Complete the following sentence. “American weapons are…”
A) Always a good thing to randomly add to any international hot spot
B) Exactly what this raging civil war has been missing for the past three years
C) Best when used moderately
D) Super easy to resell online
Thank you for completing the Moderate Syrian Rebel Application Form. We will process your application in the next one to two business days. Please indicate a current mailing address where you would like your weapons to be sent. If there is no one to sign for them we will leave them outside the front door.
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Baghdad Strikes Back: Al-Maliki Launches Battle for Tikrit |
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Sunday, 29 June 2014 14:22 |
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Cole writes: “Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki is fighting for his political life as well as for the territorial integrity of Iraq. On Saturday he launched a large military operation in an attempt to take back control of Tikrit (the capital of Salahuddin Province) just to the north of the capital, Baghdad.”
A fighter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) stands guard at a checkpoint near Baiji, north of Baghdad. (photo: Reuters)
Baghdad Strikes Back: Al-Maliki Launches Battle for Tikrit
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
29 June 14
 raqi PM Nouri al-Maliki is fighting for his political life as well as for the territorial integrity of Iraq. On Saturday he launched a large military operation in an attempt to take back control of Tikrit (the capital of Salahuddin Province) just to the north of the capital, Baghdad. Al-Maliki has lost control of the areas around Baghdad, even to the south. But his forces kept a position in Samarra, pop. roughly 250,000, a largely Sunni city north of the capital that has a crucial Shiite shrine. The current campaign seems also to involve an army attempt to push ISIS out of the northern suburbs of Samarra.
So why is al-Maliki going north to Tikrit rather than west to Falluja and Ramadi in al-Anbar Province? Or east to Diyala Province? My guess is that the real prize here is Baiji, which has a refinery where much of Iraq’s crude oil is turned into gasoline. Al-Maliki can’t hope to survive if he doesn’t get Baiji back, and Baiji is the next big city north from Tikrit. In other words, it is, as usual, about the oil. (Crude oil is fairly useless and seldom even smuggled because it only gains real value after it is refined into gasoline or kerosene (petrol or paraffin).
Likely, also, the Green Berets sent by Obama to Baghdad have helped the Iraqi army plan out this campaign strategically.
The attacking Iraqi armor (tanks) and thousands of infantry troops are getting good support, according to press reports, by helicopter gunships and fighter jets, the kind of coordination that has been missing as the army was pushed back by during the past two weeks by Sunni forces, many of them organized by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS or ISIL).
ISIS fighters at first were holed up in the palaces of late dictator Saddam Hussein, who was born in Tikrit. Where they had massed in the city, they were subjected to bombing raids during the day on Saturday. There are conflicting reports about how far the Iraqi military was able to go in taking Tikrit on Saturday. The Iraq army is said to have taken the airport and then the local university. Independent reports seem to confirm that ISIS had been pushed out of the center of the city by Sunday morning.
Even Al-Rafidayn TV, which has a Sunni fundamentalist editorial line, reported that the Iraqi army had expelled ISIS from the governor’s offices and killed some 60 of them, including some ISIS commanders. It quoted Ahmad Abdullah al-Juburi, the governor of Salahuddin Province. It also underlined that the army was supported by “Popular Brigades” of irregulars, presumably Sunni tribesmen who prefer Baghdad to the extremists of ISIS (or who have been paid well to so choose).
Despite Sunni alienation from the al-Maliki government, there is a significant Sunni power elite that had been allied with it and benefited from it. Atheel al-Nujayfi, the governor of Nineva Province, is also seeking to raise a force of Sunni irregulars to expel ISIS from his own city, Mosul.
The Iraqi air force also bombed Mosul on Saturday, targeting ISIS positions, and it received the first shipment of used Russian fighter jets.
The political context for this campaign is that many Iraqi political forces blame al-Maliki for losing a third of the country because he did not reach out to the Sunni Arabs. Shiite spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani has hinted broadly that Iraq needs a new government, and is pressuring politicians quickly to settle on who the speaker of parliament, president and prime minister will be before parliament convenes on Tuesday. Sistani is afraid that parliamentary deliberations on filling those key leadership posts will drag on interminably, as they did in 2010, Belgian style. That kind of political paralysis could mean the end of Iraq. Al-Maliki’s people point out that Sistani has not explicitly rejected al-Maliki, which is true. But the hints are pretty broad.
Secretary of State John Kerry, on the other hand, appears to have convinced King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to drop his demand that al-Maliki go as a precondition for the Saudi government to pressure Iraqi Sunnis to turn against ISIS and support the central government in Baghdad. Al-Maliki, a staunch Shiite, has long harbored resentments against Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, the state religion of which takes a hard anti-Shiite line. Kerry is said to have tried to impress on the king that if Iraq breaks up and some fragments bordering on Saudi Arabia are ruled by a wannabe al-Qaeda affiliate, his crown might rest uneasily on his head. Al-Maliki believes that the king was one of the financial backers of ISIS in the first place, and now chickens are coming home to roost. It is more likely that ISIS funding comes from Sunni fundamentalist private businessmen in the Gulf, especially, it is alleged, those in Kuwait.
ALSO SEE: Juan’s new Book, “The New Arabs” Hits the Shelves
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Save the Elephants |
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Sunday, 29 June 2014 14:08 |
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Kolbert writes: “Satao, a bull elephant who lived in the arid plains northwest of Mombasa, had tusks so long that when he walked they nearly scraped the ground.”
(photo: Flickr/DOUG88888)
Save the Elephants
By Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker
29 June 14
 atao, a bull elephant who lived in the arid plains northwest of Mombasa, had tusks so long that when he walked they nearly scraped the ground. Mark Deeble, a filmmaker who spent weeks curled up in a box by a watering hole, waiting to catch a glimpse of Satao, described him as materializing out of the haze, as in “Lawrence of Arabia”—“a magnificent, dusty behemoth.” Satao was born sometime in the late nineteen-sixties, and by the time he reached forty he was one of the largest elephants in Africa. Just the weight of his ivory topped two hundred pounds; all told, he weighed probably more than seven tons. By the logic of the savanna, Satao’s size should have made him immune from predators, but by the logic of the market it made him that much more vulnerable.
In February, Satao was wounded by poisoned arrows. (Poachers have increasingly turned to arrows because gunshots betray their location.) A vet who examined him through a pair of binoculars concluded that trying to treat the elephant would be more dangerous than leaving him alone. Satao recovered, only to be hit again, in May. This time, the arrow pierced his left flank, and he died. Poachers cut off his tusks, leaving his face so mutilated that it took Kenyan authorities ten days to confirm his identity. In June, Deeble, who wrote in his blog about Satao, went to see the body, which he found splayed on the red earth, white with vulture droppings.
Satao was an exceptional elephant; his story is not. Africa, after years of progress in protecting its wildlife, is again in crisis mode. In 2011 alone, an estimated twenty-five thousand African elephants were killed for their ivory; this comes to almost seventy a day, or nearly three an hour. Since then, an additional forty-five thousand African elephants—about ten per cent of the total population—have been slaughtered. Long thought to be one species, African elephants probably belong to two. Forest elephants, which are slightly smaller than bush elephants, live only in West and Central Africa. Their numbers have plunged by more than sixty per cent just since 2002, and if this trend continues they could be gone entirely within a decade.
The plight of elephants is paralleled by an equally gruesome situation for rhinos. Three of the world’s five rhinoceros species are listed as “critically endangered”; one of them, the Javan rhino, is probably down to fewer than fifty individuals. The most numerous rhino, the white rhino, survives primarily in South Africa. Until recently, it was considered a conservation success story; however, poaching has increased to the point that the white rhino, too, is at risk. In the first few months of this year, nearly four hundred rhinos were killed in South Africa for their horns, most of them in national parks. Although rhinos can live without their horns, which are made of keratin, like your fingernails, poachers generally leave them so mangled that they die. In May, a baby rhino from South Africa’s Kapama Private Game Reserve made international news when it was found mourning over its mother’s bloody body.
Driving the slaughter is desire. Ivory, most of which ends up in China, can fetch fifteen hundred dollars a pound on the black market. Rhino horn is sold in Asia for medicinal properties (of which it has none). It has also become a status symbol in Vietnam, where it’s ground up and served in a tea or snorted as a party “drug.” Dearer even than cocaine, it commands upward of twenty-five thousand dollars a pound. The high price of horn and ivory has attracted organized crime and, more deadly still, armed militias. The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, has reportedly profited from elephant poaching, and so, too, has al-Shabaab, the group behind last year’s shopping-mall attack in Nairobi. According to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, there is “growing evidence that the terrorist groups stalking Africa” are funding their activities “to a great extent from ivory trafficking.”
All this news recently prompted the White House to announce a near total ban on the sale of ivory in the U.S. The proposed rules have prompted grumbling, including, predictably enough, from the N.R.A., which is worried about the resale value of guns with ivory components. But such rules are a critical step. The White House has also pledged ten million dollars to train police and park rangers in Africa, a pledge that was matched by the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang. The British have committed an additional seventeen million dollars to anti-poaching efforts, and, in January, Congress, in a rare show of caring, appropriated forty-five million dollars to be used by the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development to combat poaching and trafficking. A couple of weeks ago, lawmakers in Albany also voted to ban nearly all sales in New York of items containing ivory and rhino horn, a move that should make wildlife crime easier to prosecute at a state level.
But, as Satao’s slaying indicates, these pledges haven’t yet translated into change on the ground. Right around the time Kenyan authorities announced Satao’s death, the director of the Garamba National Park, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, reported that sixty-eight elephants had been killed there in the previous two months. “The park is under attack from all fronts,” the director, Jean-Marc Froment, said. Photographs show elephants with their faces hacked off and their rotted brains emerging from the wounds.
Meanwhile, as disturbing as the recent carnage is, the long-term view is, if anything, worse. Elephants and rhinos are among the last survivors of a once rich bestiary of giants. Australia was home to thirteen-foot-long marsupials. North America had mammoths and mastodons, South America glyptodonts and enormous sloths, Madagascar massive elephant birds and giant lemurs. Before people arrived on the scene, these megafauna were protected by their size; afterward their size became a liability. The giant beasts couldn’t reproduce fast enough to make up for the losses to human hunting, and so, one after another, they vanished. In this sense, what’s happening today in Africa is just the final act of a long-running tragedy.
Mike Chase, an American conservation biologist, is currently conducting an aerial census of Africa’s elephants. He started work on the project in February, when, he told the Huffington Post, he hoped to “leave people inspired and motivated with some good news.” But the opposite has happened. At a reserve in Ethiopia, where his team had expected to find three hundred elephants, they counted just thirty-six. Now, Chase said, “I feel as though the only good I’m doing is recording the extinction of one of the most magnificent animals that ever walked the earth.”
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Harnessing Innovation and Cooperation to Create Good Jobs and Growth |
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Saturday, 28 June 2014 15:01 |
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Clinton writes: "The United States passed a major milestone last month, having now regained all 8.7 million of the jobs lost during the Great Recession. But many American families, businesses, and communities are still living with the legacy of the most severe contraction in decades."
Former president Bill Clinton. (photo: AP)
Harnessing Innovation and Cooperation to Create Good Jobs and Growth
By Bill Clinton, Reader Supported News
27 June 14
 he United States passed a major milestone last month, having now regained all 8.7 million of the jobs lost during the Great Recession. But many American families, businesses, and communities are still living with the legacy of the most severe contraction in decades. Wages have stagnated, poverty has increased, social mobility has decreased, and too much human potential is being left untapped.
The good news is that we have the best chance since World War II to align America's challenges with its opportunities -- to harness the positive forces of our interdependence and invest in the kinds of projects that will promote broadly based prosperity. Whether finding new ways to open unserved markets or putting people to work modernizing our nation's infrastructure, there are many ways to create good jobs by solving some of the biggest problems facing our communities. The key is seeing the opportunities beyond the obstacles.
Earlier this week, I heard from some remarkable people who are doing just that. Hillary, Chelsea, and I joined with nearly 1,000 business, government, and civil society leaders for the Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Denver. The gathering demonstrated something I've seen time and again in America and across the world: that wherever people are working together to try to achieve positive goals, good things are happening. In an age where creative cooperation is the foundation for any enduring success, we all have a role to play. Savvy businesses are recognizing the value of investing in the people they employ and the communities they serve. Non-governmental organizations are growing increasingly adept at answering the "how" questions, finding ways to solve problems better, faster, and at lower cost. And, creative state and local officials are proving once again that smart government policies can dramatically improve lives and livelihoods, especially when they partner with businesses and community groups.
For example, I visited Stout Street Health Center in Denver on Monday, a new health and residential facility being constructed by the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless to serve more than 15,000 homeless people each year. About half the cost of this innovative new project is being financed with private funds made available because of the New Markets Tax Credit, which I signed into law with strong bipartisan support in 2000.
The New Markets Credit solves a vexing problem in communities throughout America: how can you convince private investors to finance projects in towns and neighborhoods with unemployment rates above and incomes below the national average? The New Market Tax Credit provides an incentive to invest in those untapped markets. Since its inception, New Markets has been a boon to communities around the country: more than 3,000 projects have utilized the tax credit, and every federal dollar of investment has drawn eight private dollars to underserved communities. Businesses are flourishing, jobs are being created, and entire communities are being lifted up. The Denver project put 75 people to work in construction and when the center opens, it will provide full-time employment for 70 more people.
CGI America has seen many other examples of people working together to make a difference throughout the country. Birmingham, Alabama and its partners made a commitment to renew the community of Collegeville by developing vacant lots into useable green space around Historic Bethel Baptist Church, constructing a pedestrian/vehicular bridge, and creating new affordable housing. This will deliver both environmental and economic benefits to the neighborhood's residents.
In the Twin Cities, Denver, and three additional cities, the Calvert Foundation has pledged to join with local and national partners to raise $30 million in capital from citizen-investors through a city-branded Community Investment Note. The funds will then be distributed in loans to organizations that target neighborhood revitalization or small business development, with the potential to create 750 new jobs.
While in Denver, I also announced progress on one of the most encouraging projects I've seen in years -- one that will create tens of thousands of jobs in communities across the nation. At the inaugural CGI America meeting in 2011, the AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions committed to raising $10 billion over five years from members' pension funds to invest in infrastructure projects and energy-efficient retrofits. Since then, the AFL-CIO has engaged dozens of private and public partners, and has actually exceeded its original goal two years ahead of schedule. So far, just a small percentage of the $10.2 billion that has been allocated has been actively deployed into infrastructure projects, yet they've already created over 33,500 good jobs. This is the kind of effort that is crucial to restoring opportunity for working families and to America's long-term prosperity and competitiveness.
America faces many challenges, but if we can harness the spirit of innovation and cooperation that made our country great in the first place, we can turn each one into an even bigger opportunity for broad-based growth. I'm inspired by the progress and partnerships that came out of CGI America, and I look forward to seeing them in action as we work to build a future of shared prosperity through shared responsibilities.
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ifty years ago this month, more than a thousand predominantly young, predominantly white volunteers arrived in Mississippi to help local blacks register to vote. “Freedom Summer” is remembered as both a high point of interracial democratic activism and a low point in racial violence, most notably in the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, two of whom were white.
