openDemocracy: Normalising torture

Ten years ago Murat Kurnaz, a Turk from Bremen, wrote these words, in his book Five Years of My Life, an innocent man in Guantanamo. “We have to describe how the doctors came only to check whether we were dead or could stand to be tortured for a little longer.” The words shocked at the time, but since then the appalling details of US torture practices as part of the ”war on terror” and the involvement of the medical profession are well known – published by the US Senate as well as by several of the men who were subjected to them. [...]

There are British precedents for such payoffs to prevent a trial. Six years ago the UK government came to a confidential agreement with former Guantanamo prisoners to keep MI5 and MI6 documents and personnel out of a court case concerning complicity in torture and rendition. Similarly they later paid a Libyan couple who had been victims of rendition rather than face them in court. [...]

Yemen today is an example of where we are. For more than two years a Saudi-led coalition, supported by the US, has been bombing and blockading this devastated impoverished country. The uncounted civilian casualties are also suffering from starvation and a rampant cholera epidemic. Thanks to the work of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and Associated Press we know too that in the name of counterterrorism Yemen today has a network of secret prisons run by United Arab Emirates and Yemeni forces. Torture is routine and US advisers participate in interrogations of suspected Al Qaeda/ISIS prisoners. Some of these men and boys are reportedly interrogated on US ships while others are held in the UAE military base at Assab in Eritrea. [...]

The CIA lawyer mentioned above, John Rizzo, is one of 12 Bush administration lawyers and other officials including former president Bush and vice president Cheney named in 2015 by HRW as among those who should be investigated for “conspiracy to torture and other crimes.” Mitchell and Jessen are named as part of the conspiracy.

The powerful lawyers and politicians who should be accountable to the world for normalising torture and deliberately dismantling human rights safeguards for us all have been embraced by the power of the establishment into top jobs in legal firms or academia or government and probably feel themselves protected in their impunity. The precedent of the Mitchell/Jessen case should prove them wrong.

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Politico: Margrethe Vestager’s Intel problem

The European Court of Justice is scheduled to publish its verdict in an appeal by Intel against a once-record €1.06 billion sanction. Though the court hasn’t overturned a Commission judgment in almost 40 years, the U.S. chipmaker has some reason to hope for victory in this case: A senior member of the court last October lambasted the Commission and recommended its appeal be upheld.

A judgment in Intel’s favor will have a direct and immediate impact on Commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s landmark antitrust probes into other American firms Qualcomm and Google, and it carries wider implications for Commission inquiries into dominant firms and cartels across the board. [...]

The verdict, in a case launched by one of Vestager’s predecessors more than 10 years ago, comes as she enters the last two years of her mandate as Europe’s commissioner for competition. Closing two open cases each against Google and Qualcomm will be critical for her legacy.

Vestager has been frustrated at the way competition probes drag out across years, but she is well aware of the importance of winning before the courts. “Fast is always better than slow, but best of all is to be just,” she often says.

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openDemocracy: The very different depictions of Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina

Bush’s disconnection from the region reflected a larger sense that post-Katrina New Orleans resembled a ‘Third World’ disaster zone, a sense that also led to storm survivors being widely referred to as ‘refugees’, despite the fact that only a tiny minority were not US citizens. This feeling that the post-storm city was not quite American has a long history. It relates to the fact that New Orleans is a majority-black city, but is also connected to the city’s distinctive and pronounced relationship to its French and Spanish colonial past, its links to West Africa, and its apparent flouting of the Protestant work ethic as evidenced in its calendar of festivals, its rich parading and performance culture, and an economy dominated by tourism. New Orleans has thus come to stand out as a quaint relic amidst a relentlessly forward-looking national culture that dispenses with the past in favour of the future. [...]

Where New Orleans has long been cast as a disaster waiting to happen, Houston, the coverage seems to be suggesting, will triumph. It is a ‘muscular’, ‘resilient’ city, whereas New Orleans, long cast in literature as weak and effeminate, is imagined in very different terms. While both cities are situated in improbable locations, vulnerable to floods and storms, it is New Orleans and not Houston that is seen as somehow irresponsible for perpetuating its own existence. In the wake of Katrina, there were widespread calls for footprint shrinkage and some commentators went so far as to suggest that the city should not be rebuilt. Despite the rapid growth that has led to Houston becoming synonymous with unsustainable sprawl and concrete, the merits of rebuilding have not been challenged.

Texas stands at the centre of national narratives of rugged individualism and self-reliance, and Houston in many ways represents the neoliberal expression of these values, a playground of unregulated physical and economic growth. So where the story about New Orleans after Katrina was dominated by a narrative about race and class, the racialised poverty that the Hurricane seemingly uncovered, the story about Houston in the wake of Harvey has been dominated by the image of the white, middle-class home owner. Where New Orleanians behaved badly after the storm, or so the grotesquely inaccurate and racist media coverage went, the best is being brought out in Texas. [...]

What the very different characterisations of post-Katrina New Orleans as compared to post-Harvey Houston obscure is the very sizeable minority and low-income communities in Texas who did not own cars with which to evacuate or homes against which to claim insurance. 30% of Houston’s population live below the poverty line and more than 40% do not own their own homes. As the lessons of Katrina have shown, it is renters and those living in public housing who are most vulnerable to homelessness and displacement following a disaster of this kind. And just as poor black Americans in New Orleans were more likely to inhabit lower-lying and thus flood-prone land, communities of colour in Houston are similarly exposed to risk, living in close proximity to the oil refineries and chemical plants that in the wake of the storm are leaking dangerous levels of pollutants into the atmosphere.

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The School of Life: How to Deal With A Crisis of Meaning

Many of us are regularly thrown off course by what we might term ‘crisis of meaning’; periods when what we are up to seems not to connect up with anything purposeful or properly dignified. It’s at such moments that we need to lean on a bigger theory of what meaning is, where it comes from, and how our lives relate to it. 

Al Jazeera: Populism and the fight for the soul of German churches

Dozens of people - Germans, Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and emigres from across Europe - meet here each Wednesday for Meet 'n Eat, a project that brings them together to cook and eat with the aim of fostering a sense of community between newly arrived asylum seekers and other residents of the neighbourhood. [...]

Jens Hanke, a 34-year-old member of the church's council, says that contributing a space to Meet 'n Eat and other projects, such as the establishment of an interfaith preschool, are part of the Christian community's efforts to prevent the rise of the anti-refugee sentiment that has taken root in some parts of German society. [...]

"The middle of society doesn't have answers to all the questions, so it's important that the church creates platforms for a dialogue toward a better understanding between citizens, immigrants and refugees," he explains.

"We especially invite people who have no relation to refugees and who have questions [to participate in such dialogue]," he continues, adding that Meet 'n Eat has been so successful that its weekly participation of around 60 to 80 people is "more people than the church has on some Sundays". [...]

Gesticulating, and pointing the occasional accusatory finger, she decries far-right groups like Alternative for Germany (AfD), an anti-refugee political party expected to enter the German Bundestag later this year.

For Radosh-Hinder, the AfD, which claims to fight for "traditional" Christian values, doesn't believe "that people are equal, [and is] denying the truest values of our faith and Biblical scriptures".

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Architectural Digest: 17 of the Most Beautiful Bridges in the World

In the world of architecture, perhaps nothing is more utilitarian than a bridge. Indeed, not only do these spanning structures allow us to safely pass over a gap, but unlike some skyscrapers and homes, everyone has access to using a bridge. And just because they are functional does not mean they have to be ordinary in design. In fact, it's in bridges that some of the world's biggest architects show what their creative minds are capable of. From the Zaha Hadid–designed bridge in Abu Dhabi, to perhaps the lesser known Khaju Bridge in Isfahan, Iran, AD rounds up 17 of the world's most beautiful bridges. In function, they allow us to reach the other side of the divide. In form, however, they do something else entirely.

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JSTOR Daily: Why does Oklahoma have the Panhandle?

What’s up with Oklahoma’s salient? More popularly known as the Panhandle, the three counties extending in a row west of the rest of the “pan” of the state are one of those geographical quirks of history that really jump off of the map. The Panhandle is also the location of the only county in the country with four states on its borders: Cimarron County, the westernmost part of the state, borders Colorado, Kansas, Texas, and New Mexico.

Today fewer than 1% of Oklahomans live in the 168 x 34 mile-wide strip. It was Spanish territory until 1821, when it became part of independent Mexico. The Republic of Texas claimed it when declaring independence. But then, upon entering the Union as a slave state in 1845, Texas surrendered its claim to the region because slavery was prohibited north of 36°30′ latitude by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. 36°30′ became the Panhandle’s southern boundary. Its northern border at 37° was set in 1854 by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise and allowed Kansas and Nebraska to decide for themselves if they would be slave or free. [...]

Finally, in 1890, this orphan rectangle of land was incorporated into Oklahoma Territory, and in 1907 it became part of the state of Oklahoma, which also included the former Indian Territory. Indian Territory had been the end of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and then the progressively reduced promised homeland for many tribes.

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Al Jazeera: What is fuelling Yemen's cholera epidemic?

More than 20 million Yemenis require humanitarian support, with nearly half of those in acute need of assistance, according to the United Nations. This year, a new wave of cholera cases further devastated the population, infecting hundreds of thousands of people and killing more than 2,000. Aid agencies have warned that without urgent action, the situation will continue to deteriorate.

Analysts have described the Saudi-led offensive in Yemen as a strategic failure, but although Saudi's crown prince recently expressed his desire for an exit strategy, there is no immediate end in sight - and the humanitarian consequences will endure long after the bombs stop falling. [...]

There has been a gradual disintegration of the municipal water infrastructure and systems in a context where few civil servants are being paid, and a relatively small trigger like a period of heavy rain or burst pipes creates a backflow of sewage into water pipes, an overflow of latrines and septic tanks, etcetera. [...]

In a roughly three-month period following the cholera outbreak in October 2010, Haiti had 50 percent more cases on a per population basis and over 200 percent more deaths.

Yemen's current cholera outbreak is the largest in terms of scale of suspected cases at the current time, though not necessarily the largest historically. In any case, these comparisons are not meaningful. Comparing Haiti and Yemen is not helpful in describing either epidemic. What matters is the impact on the country, and we can see this is a heavy burden to bear.

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Politico: Juncker slaps down Orbán over border funding request

In a letter obtained by POLITICO, Juncker wrote that during the migration crisis in 2015 Hungary declined “the possibility to benefit from [the] relocation of up to 54,000 persons and decided to return nearly €4 million of EU funds pre-paid by the Commission to Hungary.”

The Hungarian premier wrote to Juncker on August 31 requesting the Commission reimburse his government for half of its spending in managing its border — some of which is an EU external border — in recent years. [...]

Juncker said three emergency grants totaling €6.26 million were made available to Hungary, which failed to complete the necessary paperwork to access most of the money. [...]

Juncker also bluntly noted that Hungary receives EU subsidies amounting to more than 3 percent of its GDP each year, the highest percentage of any EU member country.

“Solidarity is a two-way street. There are times in which member states may expect to receive support, and times in which they, in turn, should stand ready to contribute,” Juncker said.

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