Salon: U.S.-backed Syrian rebels committing war crimes, torture, abductions; imposing harsh Sharia law: Report

Syrian rebel groups backed by the U.S. and its allies “have committed serious violations of international humanitarian law, including abductions, torture and summary killings,” according to Amnesty International.

A report by the leading human rights organization details how extremist rebel groups have taken over large parts of major Syrian cities, in which they have created repressive theocratic regimes where critics are violently silenced and where religious and ethnic minority groups fear for their lives. [...]

Amnesty documented abuses committed by five armed groups that have controlled parts of Aleppo and Idlib since 2012. These rebels have been supported by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and the U.S. [...]

Armed groups have repressed many Syrians who were themselves once supportive of the rebels.

“I was happy to be free from the Syrian government’s unjust rule but now the situation is worse,” a Syrian lawyer told Amnesty. [...]

The human rights group contacted representatives of Syrian rebel groups, including the Aleppo Conquest coalition and Ahrar al-Sham, asking for responses to its findings. No armed opposition groups answered Amnesty’s questions about specific human rights abuses. [...]

While there has been a lot of attention in the Western media to crimes committed by the Syrian government and its allies, there has been much less attention to the crimes of Western-backed rebels.

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The Atlantic: When Exactly Was America Great?

Nostalgia has been a central theme of the 2016 elections with politicians frequently citing the need to “restore” America to its more stable, prosperous past. But when exactly were the country’s glory days? We interviewed Americans from Texas, Maryland, California, Florida, and other states to find out.

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The Atlantic: Many Americans Want Work, but They Don’t Want to Mow Lawns

Most American homeowners are possessive and protective of their lawns, but they are less picky about who maintains them: One in three Americans who have lawns say they hired landscapers to maintain their yards in the past year. The national obsession with manicured lawns has helped propel landscaping into a $76-billion industry that has grown about 3 percent each year. Whether it means finding the right fertilizer or bagging up stray leaves, Americans are willing to shell out about $600 a year for someone else to handle their outdoor maintenance.

But finding people willing to do yard work is getting harder and harder for professional landscapers. Owners of landscaping businesses are saying that their biggest challenge is finding people who will prune bushes in the middle of the summer, in the heat, for the wages they pay. So it's no wonder, then, that the landscaping industry has become the largest employer of foreign, non-agricultural guest workers. “It's the very nature of the work. The guest workers who come over year after year are willing to put in the hours and difficult labor,” says Paul Mendelsohn, the vice president of government relations for the National Association of Landscape Professionals, a trade group. About 500 or 600 of the association’s roughly 2,500 member businesses use the H-2B visa program, which allows employers seeking seasonal help to bring foreign workers from abroad for up to 10 months at a time (and which is not to be confused with the more well-known H-2A program for agricultural workers). [...]

Because it involves bringing in foreign workers, the H-2B program has drawn the ire of organized labor. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has repeatedly told Congress that there aren’t enough Americans willing to take temporary jobs—at amusement parks, ski resorts, hotels—but unions say that’s just not true, and that companies are trying to save money on labor costs by exploiting cheap foreign workers at the expense of Americans. In June, representatives from North America’s Building Trades Unions said in a Senate hearing that the program is just a tool for roofing companies to pay $8 an hour to a foreigner instead of $22 an hour to a union member. The Southern Poverty Law Center has even gone as far as comparing the guest-worker programs to modern-day slavery. Yet there is hardly any independent research on how temporary workers affect the demand for American labor.

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The Atlantic: Trump Is Whoever You Want Him to Be

Every successful politician succeeds by acting, to some degree, by allowing themselves to look like a blank screen on which a wide range of voters can project their own hopes and dreams. The clumsier politicians risk the appearance of pandering. Smoother ones manage to simply stay vague enough to convince voters they’re with them, although that can cause problems later: Barack Obama campaigned as an inspirational liberal in 2008, only to disappoint many of his more progressive backers with an essentially moderate governing approach.

The Trump candidacy is a more unusual case, though. Seldom has a candidate run on such a clear set of policies, delivered so bluntly: He’s gonna build a wall. He’s gonna rip up trade agreements. He’s gonna stop Muslim immigration. He’s gonna beat China. Yet in spite of the directness of these promises—or perhaps because of them—quite a few of Trump’s supporters in the Republican Party insist that he doesn’t really mean what he says. [...]

There are some signs that Trump himself may not really believe these things, though. He told the editorial board of The New York Times that he uses the wall talk to inject enthusiasm into rallies when energy is flagging: “You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of, maybe thinking about leaving, I can sort of tell the audience, I just say, ‘We will build the wall!’ and they go nuts.” BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith also reported that Trump told the board something that undermined a core tenet of his candidacy, though it wasn’t clear what. Did he say deportation wasn’t feasible? That the wall wouldn’t be built? The truth hasn’t emerged, but Trump did tell Fox News that “everything is negotiable,” not much of an assurance.

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The Guardian: Leaked TTIP energy proposal could 'sabotage' EU climate policy

A leak obtained by the Guardian shows that the EU will propose a rollback of mandatory energy savings measures, and major obstacles to any future pricing schemes designed to encourage the uptake of renewable energies.

Environmental protections against fossil fuel extraction, logging and mining in the developing world would also come under pressure from articles in the proposed energy chapter.

Paul de Clerck, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth Europe, said the leaked document: “is in complete contradiction with Europe’s commitments to tackle climate change. It will flood the EU market with inefficient appliances, and consumers and the climate will foot the bill. The proposal will also discourage measures to promote renewable electricity production from wind and solar.” [...]

The Green MEP Claude Turmes said: “These proposals are completely unacceptable. They would sabotage EU legislators’ ability to privilege renewables and energy efficiency over unsustainable fossil fuels. This is an attempt to undermine democracy in Europe.”

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