Al Jazeera: Will Hamas survive the Gulf crisis?

Over the past few years, Hamas has been able to adapt to the Arab region's reality, in light of the popular uprisings that swept the region, and it survived - albeit with many losses - the sharp turning points that exhausted the movement and affected its alliances and capabilities. The current crisis, however, seems to be the most difficult in the movement's history. [...]

Internally, Hamas is facing mounting pressure with the deteriorating living situation in the besieged Gaza Strip, compounded by the Palestinian Authority's recent decisions to cut electricity supply and medicine as a result of the stalled political crisis between Hamas and the PA. [...]

But the movement was taken aback by the Gulf crisis that has placed the expulsion of its leaders from Qatar on the top of the agenda for solving the crisis. Hamas officials were also shocked by the recent Saudi foreign minister's statements which characterised it as a "terrorist movement". [...]

Hamas has lost its Islamist allies, which formed the backbone of its future hopes and aims; the movement lost its Iranian ally when the Syrian uprising broke out and Hamas chose to ally with the anti-government camp, leaving the movement with its Qatari ally. [...]

As for the second scenario - which is the most likely one - is that Hamas will lean towards political accommodation and reach a compromise deal with Abbas and Fatah that will allow the return of PA power in Gaza again. This option will not mean a disintegration of Hamas' alliance with Iran.

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The Atlantic: The Dangers of Arming Autocrats

These sales, often buoyed by U.S. subsidies known as foreign military financing, have continued despite many of the recipients’ dark records of serious human-rights abuses—such as the torture, enforced disappearances, and extrajudicial killings carried out by the Egyptian military in its campaign against the Islamic State in the Sinai Peninsula, or the many possible war crimes committed by the Saudi-led coalition in its ongoing bombing of Houthi-Saleh forces in Yemen.

Supporters of these sales argue that while these governments may be ugly, if they don’t buy from us, they will buy from the Russians or the Chinese (or the French), and selling them our weapons gives us greater say in how those weapons are used, and greater insight into how their militaries operate. If war breaks out, we’ll be able to work closely with our clients because they’ll be using our technology. [...]

But arms sales don’t bring home the jobs that supposedly make these deals worth the angst. The Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs has found that “clean energy and health care spending create 50 percent more jobs than the equivalent amount of spending on the military,” while education spending creates more than twice as many jobs. Boeing’s deal to sell 30 passenger jets to Iran will reportedly support 18,000 U.S. jobs, the same number Lockheed Martin touted for the air and missile defense systems, combat ships, and tactical aircraft it may sell to Saudi Arabia. But passenger jets won’t be bombing civilians in Yemen. Nor were Boeing, Raytheon, or Lockheed Martin even willing to hazard a guess as to the number of jobs Trump’s Riyadh proposals might actually create, when asked by The Washington Post.

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Haaretz: In Israel, Democracy Dies in Daylight

The would-be destroyers of Israeli democracy don’t need a cover of darkness. They are carrying out their mission in broad daylight. They’re not going to liquidate democracy in on fell swoop, which could spark a rebellion, but patiently, in stages, as they lull public opinion into complacency. They are injecting Israeli democracy with small amounts of poison, which they then portray as vital medication. They continue to swear allegiance to democracy until they can safely announce its demise.

Their task is made easier because Israel never had the chance to develop into a healthy and immune democracy. In its first 19 years, it suffered from discriminating and doctrinaire one-party rule that kept the Arab minority under military control. Israel started to develop openness and transparency and to experience a healthy change of government in the first decades after the Six Day War, but it was hobbled by the denial of basic rights to millions of Palestinians that were now living in the territories it conquered. The combination of increasingly harsh security measures and political oppression of the Palestinians, together with the transfer of hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers who now lived in the same place but in a starkly different reality, made Israeli democracy bleed, infecting it with dangerous viruses with long incubation periods but deadly effects nonetheless. [...]

The feebleness of the gatekeepers encouraged democracy’s enemies to expand and accelerate their assaults. The justice minister took aim at the High Court of Justice while her colleagues in the Knesset diminished its authority. The education minister deters teachers and cows academics as he elevates Judaism in curricula at the expense of civic studies, and promotes theocracy instead of democracy. The culture minister anointed herself as a political commissar who withholds funds from those who don’t adhere to her guidelines. And overseeing all is the prime minister who is waging a personal vendetta against the media while inciting against human rights organizations, portraying them to the Israeli public not as vital cornerstones of a vibrant democracy, but as internal enemies of a state under siege.

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Vintage Everyday: North Sea Flood of 1962: The Biggest Catastrophe Since World War II in Germany

The North Sea flood of 1962 was a natural disaster affecting mainly the coastal regions of Germany and in particular the city of Hamburg in the night from 16 February to 17 February 1962. In total, the homes of about 60,000 people were destroyed, and the death toll amounted to 315 in Hamburg.In addition, three people were killed in the United Kingdom by high winds, which damaged around 175,000 houses in the worst affected city, Sheffield.

The flood was caused by the Vincinette low-pressure system, approaching the German Bight from the southern Polar Sea. A European windstorm with peak wind speeds of 200 km/h pushed water into the German Bight, leading to a water surge the dykes could not withstand. Breaches along the coast and the rivers Elbe and Weser led to widespread flooding of huge areas. In Hamburg, on the river Elbe, but a full 100 km away from the coast, the residential areas of Wilhelmsburg was most affected.

120 square kilometres or a sixth of the city of Hamburg were flooded, destroying 6000 buildings. Streets were unusable and railway operation was suspended, leaving Hamburg unsupplied for an indetermined period of time.

These photos will show you a small part of this terrible disaster.

The New York Times: Losing a Father and Husband to AIDS, and Finding Him Again

My second child was born two days after Father’s Day in 1990. Three weeks later, my husband collapsed, disoriented and feverish, in a restaurant. Soon, he was lying in a hospital bed with full-blown AIDS. [...]

Before he got sick, John was an attentive lover to me, a doting dad to our 2-year-old, a gracious son-in-law to my aging parents and a successful journalist. He was home for dinner every night like clockwork. He was someone it was hard to believe could get AIDS.

In the months before our son was born, John had been experiencing a string of nagging illnesses, including intestinal distress and a persistent cough. The many doctors he consulted, because he was “straight,” married and overworked, did not even consider AIDS. They diagnosed stress. [...]

Relieving John of his ghostly status after he died of AIDS has been a long and, at times, painful process. Some family members and friends have viewed my talking and writing about John truthfully as a form of “outing.” “Why now, after so long?” they ask. Can’t I just get over it? Mostly heterosexual and married, virtually none had walked in my — or his — shoes. They failed to grasp the weight of John’s closeted lifestyle, and how crippling it was, first for him, and then for me, to keep it closeted.

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