Group items tagged

The United States currently provides Israel with at least $3.8 billion in annual military assistance, the most to any country per year, with the recent exception of Ukraine. High levels of assistance date back roughly to the 1970s and reflect a longstanding American bargain with Israel of security for peace — the notion that the more secure Israel feels, the more concessions it will be able to make to the Palestinians.

Since the mid-1990s, the United States has also been a major sponsor of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority Security Forces, providing training and equipment on the theory that as the Palestinians stand up, the Israelis can stand down.

In both cases, the rationale for U.S. security assistance is fatally flawed.

With more than 2 million Syrians already living outside their war-torn country and 1 million more expected to flee in the coming months, there is a growing protection gap. Indeed, a report (PDF) released in November by Harvard University shows that even Canada, which prides itself on being hospitable to refugees, has been systematically closing its borders to asylum seekers. Without a doubt, development-related aid is an important incentive to host countries, and providing sanctuary for vulnerable populations is just as vital, but what refugees need most is a legal status, which can be achieved only through a regional framework of protection and national asylum policies. The Bangkok Principles are a good start because they highlight the commitment among these states to develop a regional framework and national solutions to protect refugees, with the support of the international community. The U.S. must do its part and encourage the Middle East to build on these principles. Syrians deserve an organized and effective framework, and the risk of turning our backs is that Syrians, along with the Palestinians, will be wandering without a homeland. Galya Benarieh Ruffer is the founding director of the Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffett Center for International and Area Studies at Northwestern University and a public voices faculty fellow with the OpEd Project.  The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America's editorial policy. 180401 Join the Conversation Post a new commentLogin   c

Although the cause of Syrians fleeing their homeland today differs fundamentally from the flight of Palestinians in 1948, one crucial similarity is the harsh reception they are experiencing in neighboring countries. The tragedy of the Syrian refugee crisis is palpable in news stories and in the images of those risking their lives in rickety boats on Europe’s shores. More than one-third of Syria’s population has been displaced, and its effects are rippling across the Middle East. For months, more than 1,500 Syrians (including 250 children) have been detained in Egypt. Hundreds of adults are protesting grotesque conditions there with a hunger strike. Lebanon absorbed the most refugees but now charges toward economic collapse, while Turkey will house 1 million Syrians by the year’s end.

The surge of Syrians arriving in urban centers has brought sectarian violence, economic pressure and social tensions. As a result, these bordering countries, having already spent billions of dollars, are feeling less hospitable and are starting to close their borders to Syrians.

The Hamas terror attack has triggered war in Gaza, a geopolitical crisis and now – from Sydney to New York City – outbursts of street-level anti-Semitism in the West. Unless it de-escalates quickly, it looks like a strategic turning point both for Palestinian nationalism and Israel

though I am no expert on the region, I can throw some concreteness into the current battle of abstractions.

But the international community has a right to demand proportionality, restraint, respect for international law, and condemn breaches of it. President Biden last night was right to emphasise the need for lawfulness.

Experts say those books are likely just the tip of a fast-growing iceberg of AI-written content spreading across the web as new language software allows anyone to rapidly generate reams of prose on almost any topic. From product reviews to recipes to blog posts and press releases, human authorship of online material is on track to become the exception rather than the norm.

Semrush, a leading digital marketing firm, recently surveyed its customers about their use of automated tools. Of the 894 who responded, 761 said they’ve at least experimented with some form of generative AI to produce online content, while 370 said they now use it to help generate most if not all of their new content, according to Semrush Chief Strategy Officer Eugene Levin.

What that may mean for consumers is more hyper-specific and personalized articles — but also more misinformation and more manipulation, about politics, products they may want to buy and much more.

The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries. But what is normal for all of us alive today — growing up while the world is growing rapidly — may be a blip in human history.

All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon.

then we shrink. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline.

The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said.

the impacts of global heating are likely to undermine not only basic rights to life, water, food, and housing for hundreds of millions of people, but also democracy and the rule of law.

Alston is critical of the “patently inadequate” steps taken by the UN itself, countries, NGOs and businesses, saying they are “entirely disproportionate to the urgency and magnitude of the threat”

The constitutional right to abortion is under concerted attack by a deeply conservative Supreme Court. Last month, the Supreme Court permitted Texas’ ban on abortion at six weeks to go into effect in a one-paragraph ruling decided without full briefing and oral argument,

On Dec. 1, the court will consider the constitutionality of Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In Dobbs, Mississippi is urging the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade and take away from millions of Americans the fundamental right to control their bodies, choose whether and when to start a family, determine their life course, and participate as equals in American life.

destabilize a central part of the court’s jurisprudence protecting fundamental constitutional rights. As a result, Dobbs also threatens the fundamental rights to use birth control, marry a loved one, and make decisions about sexual intimacy.

the problem of public ignorance and fake crises transcends politics. Profound pessimism about the state of the nation is empowering the radical, revolutionary politics that fuels extremists on the right and left.

now, for parts of MAGA, the Constitution itself is part of the crisis. If it doesn’t permit Trump to take control, then it must be swept aside.

Elements of this argument are now bubbling up across the reactionary, populist right

My guests are author David Wallace-Wells, who wrote the book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” and Genevieve Guenther, climate communication activist and founder of the organization, End Climate Silence.

genevieve guentherAll right, well, let me talk about this point that you shouldn’t have kids or you should have one fewer kid to lower your carbon footprint because it’s misanthropic and it’s just wrong. So there was one study that came up with the top personal carbon footprint actions, and one of them was have one fewer kid. But if you dig down into that study you see that they assume that the consumption of parenthood would remain the same with each subsequent kid. People in the global south generally have large families. And it hasn’t increased their carbon emissions at all. It’s not the kids, it’s the consumption.

genevieve guenther

BRANDON TERRY: Well, there’s this puzzle when we think about somebody like Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s that on the one hand, we have a national holiday devoted to him, an imposing monument on the hallowed space of the National Mall; he’s invoked in all manner of political speeches from across the political spectrum, probably the most famous African American of the 20th century.

But at the same time, if you ask even really well-educated people, they often don’t know that he’d written five major books, that he’s a systematic theologian with sustained interest in political philosophy who’s written lots and lots of things, incisive things, on some of the most pressing political and ethical matters.

King wants to say something different, I think. He wants to say that we are both of these things. We are a society with what he called the congenital deformity of racism — that it’s shot through many of our deepest institutions and structural arrangements, and because it has not been redressed on the scale that it would have to be to achieve true justice, it festers. It’s a rot. It’s a challenge that every generation is called on to pick up and try to do better than their forebears.