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Saturday, December 9, 2023
Exporting the Surveillance State via Trade in AI | NBER
Exporting the Surveillance State via Trade in AI | NBER: Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
Friday, December 8, 2023
Thursday, December 7, 2023
How the US Has Darkened the Nuclear Cloud Over Humanity - Antiwar.com
How the US Has Darkened the Nuclear Cloud Over Humanity - Antiwar.com: This article was originally published by The Nation. Forty years ago, across a dozen pages of The Nation magazine, I was in a debate with the English - Norman Solomon for Antiwar.com
US takes steps to jump-start overseas SMR deployments : Nuclear Policies - World Nuclear News
US takes steps to jump-start overseas SMR deployments : Nuclear Policies - World Nuclear News: The US Department of State and US Export-Import Bank have announced a suite of financial tools to support the deployment of advanced nuclear energy systems to help reach net-zero goals. They also announced plans to mobilise more than USD4.2 billion of investment in enrichment and conversion capacity through the five-nation Sapporo 5 collaboration.
[Salon] Lebanon in the shadow of the Gaza war - ArabDigest.Org
[Salon] Lebanon in the shadow of the Gaza war - micheletkearney@gmail.com - Gmail: Lebanon in the shadow of the Gaza war
Lebanon in the shadow of the Gaza war
Summary: with a caretaker government and a wrecked economy Lebanon can ill-afford another war between Hezbollah and the IDF but as the Israelis pursue their destruction of Gaza the risk continues to rise.
The death of a Lebanon Armed Forces soldier on 5 December at the hands of an Israeli shelling in southern Lebanon prompted a quick and rare apology from the IDF.
Earlier today, IDF soldiers operated in self defence to eliminate an imminent threat that had been identified from Lebanon. The threat was identified within a known launch area and observation point of the Hezbollah terrorist organization, near al-Awadi. Hezbollah’s activities in Lebanon are in clear violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701. The IDF was notified that soldiers from the Lebanese Armed Forces were harmed during the strike. The Lebanese Armed Forces were not the target of the strike. The IDF expresses regret over the incident. The incident is under review
The statement and the speed with which it was delivered reflects Israeli cognisance of the fragile state of Lebanese governance. The country after a year of political squabbling still has no president to replace Michel Aoun. Ministerial posts, including that of the prime minister, Najib Mikati, are serving in acting positions and Hezbollah continues as the single most cohesive and dominant political force even as it and the IDF continue to trade fire across the border. It was in such a skirmish that the soldier was killed and three of his colleagues wounded.
UNSC Resolution 1701 was passed after the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah which in a little more than a month of fighting did huge damage to South Lebanon. The war also proved damaging to the reputation of the IDF. 1701 was agreed within 48 hours by both the Israelis and Hezbollah and called for:
The full cessation of hostilities, the deployment of Lebanese forces to Southern Lebanon, parallel withdrawal of Israeli forces behind the Blue Line, strengthening the UN force (UNIFIL) to facilitate the entry of Lebanese Forces in the region and the establishment of a demilitarised zone between the Blue Line and the Litani River.
The resolution was never fully implemented and both sides have regularly claimed the other has been in violation but the Gaza war and Hezbollah’s responses are putting new strains on 1701. Israel, allegedly backed by the US and the UAE, is said to be demanding Hezbollah be pushed north of the Litani River while Hezbollah is believed to have taken the position that the resolution should be consigned to the past.
The veteran Lebanese Druze leader Walid Joumblatt, a backer of Hezbollah, in an interview with L’Orient Today argued that now was not the time for Lebanon to turn its back on 1701.
This is not the right time to call Resolution 1701 into question. I am keen to make it clear that we are in favor of implementing this resolution. But that depends on the opposing camp. We cannot simply ask the residents of South Lebanon who are being bombarded daily not to respond (and therefore to respect Resolution 1701), without asking Israel to do the same. We are in favor of implementing the resolution, but the opposing camp must also respect it.
On Wednesday Hezbollah announced four attacks on bases in northern Israel [photo credit: IRNA]
Israel well knows that to keep a lid on Lebanon whilst constraining Hezbollah is a delicate balancing act. Unsurprising then that the expression of regret and promise of review in the wake of the Tuesday incident came so quickly when in virtually every other scenario there would be neither regret nor investigation (and if there was the latter it would be cursory at best.)
Meanwhile the political impasse staggers on, the latest example the draft 2024 budget being challenged by business and civil rights groups. The budget behaves as if the financial implications of the threat of Gaza war spillover into South Lebanon did not exist. It uses May 2023 revenue projections that ignore amendments made by the Finance Committee. And further, according to its critics, it also manages to violate several articles of Lebanon’s constitution.
With the country’s economy remaining in a state of ruin, 80% of the population of 5.3 million have been driven into poverty. Healthcare, education and virtually every other public service are broken. Even the army has seen a collapse in real earnings with a concomitant impact on morale and desertions rising. And nothing has been done to progress the search for justice by the families who are victims of the August 2020 Beirut harbour blast.
Xi seeks to defuse China-EU tensions over trade imbalance - Nikkei Asia
Xi seeks to defuse China-EU tensions over trade imbalance - Nikkei Asia: SHANGHAI -- Chinese President Xi Jinping met leaders of two top European Union institutions on Thursday, aiming to smooth over relations after Brussel
America’s War for the Greater Middle East (Continued) - TomDispatch.com
America’s War for the Greater Middle East (Continued) - TomDispatch.com
Andrew Bacevich, When Wars Converge
December 7, 2023
As I was following the nightmare in Gaza and preparing today's piece by TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author of On Shedding an Obsolete Past: Bidding Farewell to the American Century, I couldn't help wishing that another author I edited and published for years, Chalmers Johnson, was still with us. His classic book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire appeared before the 9/11 attacks and put the word "blowback" into our everyday language. Of it, he wrote, “Officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented [blowback] for their own internal use… [It] refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people." Of course, on September 11, 2001, he got a helping hand from Mr. Blowback himself, Osama bin Laden, someone he had warned about in that very book and whose attack on this country turned it into an instant bestseller.
Anyway, as I was reading Bacevich's piece, I had the sudden urge to show it to Chal (as his friends knew him). In the nightmarish context Bacevich so strikingly sets up, I wanted to ask him what kind of blowback he thought this country's present actions in the Middle East, including its almost blind support for Israel, might produce. After all, as Bacevich makes clear today, the way seems painfully open to extending Washington's never-ending war on terror (itself launched in the wake of 9/11) into the Middle East in a new and potentially calamitous fashion, one that might even lend a hand to Donald Trump's reelection campaign.
Of course, I'm no miracle worker and so have no way of bringing Chal back for his thoughts on Washington's present nightmarish Middle Eastern policy-making, but I suspect that he would have found Bacevich's on the subject of genuine interest. And yes, in this present blowback moment of ours, how apt that, at 100, Henry Kissinger, Mr. Blowback himself and a man responsible for so desperately many deaths, has finally left our world in anything but peace. Tom
Iran, Oman to boost bilateral cooperation, call for using nat’l currencies in mutual trade | The iran project
Iran, Oman to boost bilateral cooperation, call for using nat’l currencies in mutual trade | The iran project: Iran and Oman have signed two memoranda of understanding to boost bilateral cooperation, and emphasized the importance of using their national currencies in mutual trade instead of the dollar.
Gemini - Google DeepMind
Gemini - Google DeepMind: Gemini is built from the ground up for multimodality — reasoning seamlessly across image, video, audio, and code.
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
KISSINGER, ME, AND THE LIES OF THE MASTER
KISSINGER, ME, AND THE LIES OF THE MASTER: ‘Off off the record’ with the man who secretly taped our telephone calls
Anti-China Electric Vehicle Restrictions Risk Slowing Energy Transition
Anti-China Electric Vehicle Restrictions Risk Slowing Energy Transition: New electric vehicle restrictions will end up hurting U.S. interests.
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