Has the American dream come to an end? What does the recent McDonald’s minimum wage guide say about the nature of labor in the US? And, is there a way to improve income disparity? CrossTalking with Austin Petersen and Eric Draitser….
Two Swiss trains collide, 35 injured, driver feared dead
GRANGES-PRES-MARNAND, Switzerland | Mon Jul 29, 2013 5:27pm EDT
(Reuters) – Two trains collided head-on in Switzerland on Monday evening, injuring about 35 people, five seriously, police said.
The driver of one of the trains was still unaccounted for and thought to be inside the wreckage, at Granges-près-Marnand in the canton of Vaud, police spokesman Jean-Christophe Sauterel said.
“These are regional trains. The speeds are a little lower and even if one deeply regrets the likely loss of life of one person as well as five serious injuries, the situation could have been much more catastrophic,” Sauterel said.
He said it was too early to try to ascertain the cause of the crash.
One of the injured was taken by helicopter to Lausanne. Others were treated on the spot by paramedics or taken to hospital by ambulance.
About 40 people were on the two trains, one of which was heading to Lausanne, the other was going to Payerne.
Seventy-nine people were killed in a train crash in Spain last week, one of the worst in decades.
(Reporting by Denis Balibouse, additional reporting by Emma Farge; Writing by Tom Miles; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Gunmen kill eight Tunisian troops as political tensions rise
By Tarek Amara and Erika Solomon
TUNIS | Mon Jul 29, 2013 6:35pm EDT
(Reuters) – Gunmen killed at least eight Tunisian soldiers on Monday, staging the biggest attack on the security forces in decades as political tensions rose between supporters and opponents of the Islamist-led government.
President Moncef Marzouki called the ambush on Mount Chaambi, near the Algerian border, a “terrorist attack” and announced three days of mourning. Tunisian troops have been trying to track down Islamist militants in the remote region since December.
Tunisians fear they may be sliding into one of the worst crises in their political transition since autocratic leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was forced to flee during a 2011 uprising that set off revolts across the Arab world.
“We have entered the period of terrorism. We are going to pass through a difficult period but we shall overcome it,” Marzouki said in a televised address. “I call on all politicians at this historic moment to stand for the nation and unite.”
State television cut off normal programming to show pictures of the dead soldiers and wounded comrades, broadcasting Quranic verses and patriotic anthems in the background.
Thousands took to the streets in the town of al-Qasreen, near the site of the attack on the army, many of them demanding the government’s ouster, residents in the area said.
Instability has been rising during the political chaos. Last week, the capital, Tunis, was hit by its first-ever car bomb, though no one was hurt.
Syria says army retakes Homs district from rebels
By Dominic Evans
BEIRUT | Mon Jul 29, 2013 1:35pm EDT
(Reuters) – Syrian troops drove insurgents from a central district of Homs on Monday, tightening their siege on remaining rebel bastions in the city, which links Damascus to the Mediterranean heartland of President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect.
The military’s gains in Khalidiya district follow a counter-offensive by Assad’s forces, which have pushed back rebels around the Syrian capital and retaken several towns and villages near the border with Lebanon in the last few weeks.
“As of this morning the armed forces, in collaboration with the National Defense Force, took full control of Khalidiya,” an army officer said, referring to the NDF militia which has fought in the offensive, along with Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.
The officer was speaking to Syrian television in a live broadcast from Khalidiya.
Shattered, deserted ruins and weeds sprouting a meter (yard) high in the rubble-filled streets around him showed the scale of the destruction and neglect in a city which was once an industrial powerhouse in Syria.
Also badly damaged in the Khalidiya fighting was the distinctive black and white stone mosque housing the shrine of early Islamic military leader Khalid ibn al-Walid.
Some activists disputed the capture of Khalidiya district, saying heavy clashes continued on Monday morning, but conceded that army had control of almost the entire neighborhood.
The army’s progress in Khalidiya comes a month after it launched an offensive in Homs city, building on its capture of the border towns of Qusair and Tel Kalakh, which were both used to bring rebel arms and fighters into Syria from Lebanon.
ALEPPO CLASHES
At least 100,000 people have been killed in the Syrian conflict, which started with peaceful protests against Assad’s rule in March 2011 but gradually descended into civil war after a military crackdown on the demonstrations.
Nearly two million refugees have fled the sectarian-tinged struggle between mainly Sunni Muslim rebels and Assad’s Alawite supporters, whose minority sect is a branch of Shi’ite Islam.
Regional Sunni powers Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey have backed the rebels, while Shi’ite Iran and Hezbollah have given military support to the Syrian authorities.
At the United Nations in New York, Paulo Pinheiro, who chairs a U.N. commission of inquiry on rights abuses in Syria, said countries which armed either side in the conflict were simply helping prolong the suffering.
Civilians “come under such sustained and unlawful attacks” that the international community should be shocked into action, Pinheiro told the U.N. General Assembly.
“Those who supply arms to the various warring parties are not creating the ground for victory but rather the illusion for victory,” Pinheiro said. “This is a dangerous and irresponsible illusion as it allows the war to unfurl endlessly before us.”
Assad has sent reinforcements to the northern city of Aleppo, much of which has been in rebel hands for a year.
A coalition of Islamist rebels announced a campaign dubbed “Amputation of the Infidels” against Assad’s forces in Aleppo’s western districts of Lairamun, Dahr Abed Rebbo and Zahraa.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said an overnight attack by the Islamists had killed eight members of the armed forces. Another five defected, according to the British-based monitoring group which has a network of sources in Syria.
In the town of Tal Hasel, southeast of Aleppo, Kurdish fighters clashed with Islamists from the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front, the Observatory said. A Kurdish commander was killed, as well as three Nusra fighters.
Kurdish and Nusra fighters have also been battling further east, near the Ras al-Ain border crossing with Turkey.
(Additional reporting by Michele Nichols at the United Nations; Editing by Alistair Lyon and Angus MacSwan)
Syrian Kurds Protest in Front of Turkish Consulate in Erbil (Video)
Kurdistan Sacks 45 Islamic Preachers (More mosques in Kurdistan than Schools 4,880 mosques and 2,500 imams)
by SORAN BAHADDIN 27/7/2013
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Religious authorities in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region have banned 45 Islamic preachers for charges ranging from defamation to abusing their leave. But some of the clerics themselves complain they were dismissed without explanation.
One of the sacked preachers told Rudaw he was informed he could no longer preach through a telephone call from the Ministry of Religious Affairs, and that he still did not know why he had been banned.
“I received a phone call two weeks ago telling me that I was banned from delivering Friday sermons, and that I was not allowed to pray in or visit the mosque at all,” said the sacked imam, or preacher, who did not wish to be identified.
The cleric, who had been preaching at a mosque in Erbil for nine years, said he immediately visited the minister of religious affairs and asked for an explanation.
“The minister told me he was unaware of the matter and did not know what it was all about,” he said.
But Mariwan Naqshbandi, spokesman for the religious affairs ministry, said that the errant preachers had breached one of the ministry’s three red lines: defamation, public incitement against national security and declaring fatwas, or Islamic decrees.
“Defamation is causing us a lot of trouble,” he explained. “It was only the way the imams did their jobs that was questionable,” he added.
He said that if a person files a complaint against a preacher and provides evidence of defamation, “the Imam will be called to the ministry for questioning, and he will be stripped of his preaching rights” if proven guilty.
Naqshbandi said some of the imams had been dismissed because they had abused the ministry’s directives on preaching while on holiday leave.
“Some imams get two-year leaves to study abroad, and they are not allowed to deliver sermons while on leave,” he explained. “But some imams had signed up for distance education, and continued to preach while they were technically on leave.”
Hiwa Fahmi, 25, who attends different mosques in Erbil, said that the government was punishing critics, while allowing imams who support them to preach publicly as they please.
“An Imam in the Hawkari neighborhood was removed from his job after criticizing the government for the lack of potable water,” he said. “Imams who are close to Islamic parties are removed from their jobs, while Imams close to the government can freely call people names and no one can touch them.”
With close to 15,000 employees, the Kurdistan Region’s Ministry of Religious Affairs is one of the biggest ministries of the autonomous government. It runs 4,880 mosques and more than 2,500 imams and clerics across the region.
According to Naqshbandi every week more than half-a-million people attend Friday sermons at more than 2,500 mosques in the three-province enclave.
Turkey: Great Kurdistan, a potential nightmare for Erdogan (Erdogan’s strategy to create a ‘Sunni axis’ with Egypt’s Morsi to control the Middle East has failed.)
(by Francesco Cerri).
(ANSAmed) – ANKARA, JULY 29 – Over two years since the beginning of the Syrian crisis, the situation developing in the warn-torn country is looking increasingly like a nightmare for Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who is behind Ankara’s regional ‘neo-Ottoman’ strategy.
Turkey’s ‘sultan’ ahas severed ties with former ally Bashar al-Assad and sided with Sunni rebels, banking on a quick defeat for the Syrian president and a new Islamic government in Damascus led by the Muslim Brotherhood.
But things didn’t go as planned. Assad did not fall and is instead gaining ground, the rebels are divided and have lost international credibility. In areas abandoned by the army, jihadist militants and different armed groups are ruling as the country seems to be dangerously divided – an unpleasant scenario for Ankara as an autonomous Kurdish entity is taking shape in the North along the border with Turkey and Iraq, with Al Qamishli as capital. This would be part of a ‘Great Kurdistan’ embracing parts of Iraq, Iran Syria and Turkey which since the proclamation of the republic in 1923 over the ruins of the Ottoman empire has been a top concern for the Turkish central administration first run by Kemalists and now by Islamists.
Ever since the end of the war in Iraq, a north-Iraqi Kurdish autonomous region has been in place under the government of Massud Barzani, in practice an independent ‘state’ from Baghdad. Militias with PYD, Syria’s Kurdish Democratic Union Party, which is close to Turkey’s PKK have gained control of a good part of the country’s North where Assad’s forces were withdrawn to defend key interests of the ‘Alawite’ country between Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, and Lattakia on the Mediterranean coast.
The Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) have conquered in the past few days the strategic posting of Ras al-Ayn on the border with Turkey, chasing jihadists with al Qaeda’s al Nusra front. Clashes along the border have left three dead in the Turkish town of Ceylanpinar right next to Ras al-Ayn on the border: two young men were hit by stray bullets last week and a man died last night in a mortar attack, probably by al Nusra.
The jihadist group has deployed its men and tanks around Ras al-Ayn to try and re-gain control of the crossing with Turkey where, according to Kurdish sources, men and weapon supplies are crossing the border with Ankara’s consent.
With the likely creation of a Kurdish autonomous region in Syria ‘Turkey has a new neighbour in the south’, analyst Yalcin Dogan wrote on Hurriyet. The risk is a rise in irredentism in the country’s Kurdish south-east while peace talks are ongoing between Erdogan and PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. Davutoglu and Erdogan have warned in the past few days PYD leader Saleh Muslim not to embrace a separatist stance: ‘we will not accept a fait accompli’. Ankara also boosted its military presence on the border – a muscular rhetoric and show of military force also used in the past with Iraqi Kurds which did not prevent the creation of an autonomous region, Milliyet noted.
Erdogan’s and Davutoglu’s strategy proved itself once again wrong, Dogan noted. Erdogan’s strategy to create a ‘Sunni axis’ with Egypt’s ousted President Mohamed Morsi to govern the Middle East has failed. The fall of Cairo’s ‘pharaoh’ leaves Ankara’s ‘sultan’ as lonely as he has ever been. Moreover, his image has been badly damaged by the brutal repression of demonstrations by Turkish youths demanding more democracy and freedom. (ANSAmed)
Armenian psychologists to look into genetic aspects of Genocide
Ahead the 100th commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, psychologists are going to launch a study into the crime’s genetic aspects, Armenpress reported.
The research, expected to target some 2,500 Armenians in Armenia and the Diaspora, is aimed at revealing the forms of the traumatic memory transfer.
Speaking to the agency, the head of the Yerevan State Medical University’s Medical Psychology Chair, Khachatur Gasparyan, has said
the project will be carried out with the assistance of the State Committee of Science (Ministry of Education and Science of Armenia).
“For us, it is interesting to know how the Armenian Genocide trauma is transferred from one generation to another,” he said. “We came up with the idea on the Genocide day as we were heading home from the Genocide complex late in the evening. With the people’s flow being large, we would pause at times. I tried, at that moment, to observe different people’s reaction in the crowd. What interested me was the behavior of a child of five or six who was shouting at his mother, asking her why music was on. I came to realize that the child couldn’t understand why so many people go to the memorial with flowers in hands; he couldn’t understand the trauma of the Massacre. We don’t know at this point what information has reached the child”.
Publisher: those who honor Erdogan simply dishonor themselves
July 29, 2013 – 11:18 AMT
After brutally quelling massive domestic protests against his increasingly despotic rule, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now facing another serious problem: his unexpected ‘success’ in uniting Arabs and Jews against him, The California Courier Publisher Harut Sassounian says.
“The Turkish Prime Minister had already antagonized Israel and Syria with his hostile actions and statements. In recent days, he also managed to offend millions of Egyptians by rejecting their new government after Pres. Morsy was deposed by the military. Despite Erdogan’s professed objection to the overthrow of Egypt’s ‘democratically elected President,’ it is evident that he is far more concerned about saving his own neck, fearing a similar takeover by the historically coup-prone Turkish military,” Sassounian says in an editorial titled “Erdogan Succeeds in Antagonizing.”
Last week, Aleppo University stripped Erdogan of his honorary doctorate in international relations, awarded to him in 2009, when Syria and Turkey were enjoying a short-lived love fest. Khodr Orfaly, President of the University, accused Erdogan of instigating “plots against the Syrian people” and using “arbitrary” violence against protesters in Turkey.
“After losing an Arab award, the Turkish Prime Minister may next be deprived of the “Profiles in Courage” prize given to him by the American Jewish Congress (AJC) in 2004 for “promoting peace between cultures.” In an article published last month in the Jewish “Commentary” magazine, Michael Rubin urged the AJC to revoke its award, describing Erdogan as “Hamas’s leading cheerleader, a promoter of terrorism, and a force for instability in the region. Rubin further asserted that “Erdogan already had a history of embracing rabid anti-Semitism and harboring conspiracy theories during his tenure as Istanbul’s mayor.” Rubin strongly advised the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish organizations to “base awards on lifetime achievement, not only wishful thinking. The risk of bestowing legitimacy on platforms that run contrary to the AJCongress’ mission is otherwise too great. The AJCongress’ award to Erdogan not only did not stop Erdogan’s anti-Semitism, but rather it for too long provided cover for it. Perhaps the organization can now mitigate the damage it has caused — and also deflate Erdogan’s buffoonery — by publicly revoking its award.” Regrettably, Rubin is nine years too late in criticizing AJC’s honoring of Erdogan. Back in 2004, within days of the award ceremony, I wrote a column critical of AJC and its President Jack Rosen who had absurdly announced that his organization was honoring Erdogan as leader of a model Moslem country,” Sassounian says.
He continues: “Now that the whole world has seen Erdogan’s true colors under the façade of leading “a model Moslem country,” many others need to reconsider the awards they had lavishly heaped on this undeserving leader. For example, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) should revoke its prestigious “Courage to Care Award” presented to Erdogan in 2005. On that ‘happy’ occasion, the Prime Minister pointed out to Abraham Foxman, ADL’s National Director, Turkey’s “close relationship with Israel,” and pledged “zero tolerance” for “anti-Semitic diatribes.”
Among honors Erdogan can stripped of Sassounian mentions Russian state medal from Pres. Vladimir Putin (June 1, 2006); Crystal Hermes Award from German Chancellor Angela Merkel (April 15, 2007); Nishan-e-Pakistan, the highest civilian award of Pakistan (Oct. 26, 2009); Muammar Gaddafi’s International Prize for Human Rights (Nov. 29, 2010); Kuwait’s “Outstanding Personality in the Islamic World Award” (Jan. 11, 2011) and others.
All those who have honored Erdogan have simply dishonored themselves. The sooner they revoke their accolades, the sooner they will redeem themselves from their disgraceful acts, Sassounian concludes.
CrossTalk: Class Globalization (Video)
We are witnessing a revolt of the world’s middle classes. How does that bode for global capitalism? Has the system actually reformed itself since the 2008 slump? And, does the world have the resources to accommodate the demands of the rising middle class? CrossTalking with Mark Levine and Richard Wolff.