Despite recent warnings from seismology experts about activity at a nearby volcano, local officials in Japan have approved the first restart of a nuclear power plant since the Fukushima disaster and meltdown in 2011.
According to Reuters:
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And Newsweek reports:
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Three-time F1 world champion Sir Jackie Stewart has reacted to Lewis Hamilton’s claim that some older drivers are persistently “knocking” his merits.
Last weekend at the Eifel Grand Prix, Hamilton equaled the outstanding record of 91 wins in F1 held by Michael Schumacher.
The milestone achievement logically reignited the debate over the greatest F1 driver of all-time, a deliberation that Hamilton claims is of no interest to him given the challenges in comparing drivers from different generations.
However, the six-time world champion said he took exception with the opinions of some of his contemporaries, whom he claims, “have a bee in their bonnet and I don’t know why”.
The Mercedes driver’s remark likely alluded to recent comments from Stewart who said that he could noy justify putting Hamilton on the same level as Juan Manuel Fangio or Jim Clark, the Scot’s picks as F1’s GOATs.
“I am not trying to diminish Lewis Hamilton and I hold his performances with incredible respect. He is the best driver of the present time,” reacted Stewart, speaking to news agency PA.
“I am not knocking him down and I am disappointed he thinks that way. What do I have to gain from that? I am 81 years of age.
“I was asked what did I think about Lewis becoming the most winning driver of all time and if that made him the greatest there has been. I said it is very difficult to say that.
©Mercedes
“The greatest I believe there has been is Juan Manuel Fangio, followed by Jim Clark. But even then, is it correct to say someone is the best?
“Is Lionel Messi better than Pele or Sir Stanley Matthews, who was the greatest of all time when I was a child? Is Roger Federer better than Rod Laver?
“They are different eras. You can say Lewis is the best of his time and that is not in any way demeaning towards him.
“He is doing one hell of a job, and he is his own man, which is different to Niki Lauda, different to Jackie Stewart, different to Jim Clark and different to Graham Hill.”
Hamilton’s remarkable success in Formula 1 has taken place during a period of hegemonic domination by the mighty Mercedes team, a fact underscored by Stewart.
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But team boss Toto Wolff believes it’s unfair to justify the Briton’s track record by him simply having the best car on the grid, year in and year out.
“In my opinion that’s not quite fair,” said Wolff. “Winning races and winning championships is always in this sport a team exercise.
“But you need to put yourself in a position that you end up in the best car. There you can see lots of talents and skilled drivers took the wrong decisions, not well-advised decisions.
“And in that respect it was him who joined us in 2013, and it is him that sits in the car and is able to execute on track with a tool that we provide to him.
“But it’s always the two that are that are part of this.”
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The primary challenge of Zephyr Teachout against Gov. Andrew Cuomo ended in a rather sound defeat on Tuesday, her supporters and progressive observers are treating her run for New York governor as a victory for the growing populist surge that is taking place both inside and outside the Democratic Party.
According to the New York Times on Wednesday, results showed that with “85 percent of precincts reporting, Mr. Cuomo had 60.7 percent of the vote, compared with 35.5 percent for Ms. Teachout.”
Despite the quite clear victory for the incumbent Gov. Cuomo, the rise of Teachout—a law professor at Fordham University and political organizer who ran on an anti-corruption platform while railing against the power of Wall Street banks and a “rigged” political system—has many progressives arguing that her populist message is the key to future victories at the ballot box.
As the New York Daily News reports:
And The Nation‘s Sarah Jaffe writes:
During her concession speech in front of supporters late on Tuesday, Teachout said: “This campaign demonstrates the rise of a new force in New York politics and American politics.”
Later, she tweeted:
Independent journalist Matt Stoller—who both covered the Teachout campaign and volunteered for it—argues that given the inequities in name recongition, powerful endorsements, and campaign money-spent, the results make clear that Teachout’s message alone was enough to earn the challenger many more votes than expected while cutting deeply into Cuomo’s base of support. Stoller argues:
What’s possibly more important about the Teachout-Wu challenge to the more centrist and elite-controlled Democratic leaderhsip that Cuomo exemplifies, writes Stoller, is that their insurgent campaign was the first this campaign season to show “that there’s real dissent within the party, over big stuff. “
As the New Yorker‘s John Cassidy describes, the final primary outcome was both an embarrassment to Cuomo, a darling of the liberal-elite establishment, but equally telling about the strength of the message put forth by Teachout and Wu:
Expressing his assessment that Teachout’s bid for governor should be considered at least a symbolic victory for the message , Peter Rothberg of The Nation, who endorsed the campaign, tweeted:
As Jaffe concluded, the implications go far beyond New York politics:
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Turning their backs on the prevailing austerity government, Swedish voters on Sunday elected the Social Democrat Party and its head Stefan Löfven to lead the country, allowing the center-left parties to reclaim power in the historically socialist state.
The Social Democrat Party, along with the Green Party and the Left Party, won 43.7 percent of the vote and 159 parliamentary seats forcing current Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt—who championed lower taxes for the wealthy and the privatization of public services, such as education— to declare his resignation. The left-leaning parties have yet to establish a formal bloc.
“The Swedish people have turned their backs against tax cuts and privatizations. The Swedish people demanded change,” said Löfven, a former welder and union organizer, during his victory speech. Though Sweden has fared better than others in the wake of the global economic collapse, the wealthy, Nordic state has mounting unemployment and complaints of failing standards of public services under increased privatization.
“We are in [a] serious situation. We have thousands of people unemployed, [w]e have school results that are declining more than in any other OECD country,” Löfven continued. “There is something that is breaking. Now Sweden has answered that we need a change.”
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According to Reuters, under Reinfeldt, Sweden “lost much of its image as a socialist welfare state.”
Reuters reports: “The country’s tax burden fell four percentage points, to 45 percent of GDP, under France’s. Taxes on inheritance and wealth were lowered or abolished. More Michelin star restaurants than ever opened in Stockholm.”
However, while the policies of the left had clearly won the day, the country’s far-right, anti-immigration party the Sweden Democrats (which reportedly had early ties to the Swedish Nazi movement) also gained 48 parliamentary seats and won 13 percent of the vote, causing many to question the future efficacy of the new leadership over such a divided body. The Social Democrats have already refused to cooperate with the Sweden Democrats and so will be heading a fractured minority government.
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As world leaders gather in New York to discuss the Ebola epidemic, Sierra Leone put more than a million of its citizens under an indefinite quarantine “with immediate effect” on Thursday, in a desperate effort to curb the crisis.
President Ernest Bai Koroma announced Wednesday that the northern districts of Port Loko and Bombali, as well as the southern area of Moyamba, would be closed down, cutting off roughly 1.2 million people from leaving the region. The move comes as residents in Kenema and Kailahu, the country’s eastern districts, continue grappling with their own curfews, leaving almost a third of the country’s population of six million under strict quarantine.
The deadliest Ebola epidemic in history has infected more than 6,000 people in West Africa and killed nearly half of them, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Guinea has managed to wrangle control over its outbreak, but the situation has worsened in Sierra Leone, where 1,940 are infected and almost 600 dead, WHO said on Thursday.
“The situation in Guinea, although still of grave concern, appears to have stabilised: between 75 and 100 new confirmed cases have been reported in each of the past five weeks,” WHO said in a statement.
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But WHO’s statistics for the outbreak in Sierra Leone come from the country’s Ministry of Health, which international health officials say are inaccurate. The real death toll may be much higher, the Western diplomat in Sierra Leone told the New York Times.
“The W.H.O. added a veiled caveat to the statistics in its latest report as in the preceding one, saying that they were ‘subject to change’ because of ‘ongoing reclassification,'” the Times writes. “Indeed cemetery workers here in the capital report that Ebola deaths far exceed what the government has so far acknowledged.”
Forced quarantines and lockdowns of sick communities have been criticized by health organizations like Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who said earlier this month that those measures “end up driving people underground and jeopardizing the trust between people and health providers.”
MSF issued that statement in response to a planned, three-day nationwide lockdown that took place last week; at the time, presidential adviser Ibrahim Ben Kargbo told Reuters that the “aggressive approach is necessary to deal with the spread of Ebola once and for all.”
On Wednesday, after announcing his plan to impose the new, indefinite quarantine, President Koroma told reporters that “The isolation of districts and chiefdoms will definitely pose great difficulty, but the lives of everyone and the survival of our country takes precedence over these difficulties.”
WHO has warned that the number of cases in the area could soar in the coming months without an immediate response by world leaders. At the UN meeting on Thursday, President Barack Obama likewise stressed the urgency of a coordinated international effort to address the crisis.
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“If unchecked, this epidemic could kill hundreds of thousands of people in the coming months,” Obama said. “Ebola is a horrific disease… If ever there were a public health emergency deserving a strong and coordinated international response, this is it.”
Obama’s call to action comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new estimates that Ebola may infect 1.4 million people in Liberia and Sierra Leone by the end of January.
“This disease could cause a humanitarian catastrophe across the region,” Obama said. “Stopping Ebola is in the interest of all of us.”
The President’s contribution to fighting the disease was military-based, as he announced last week that the U.S. would send 3,000 troops to West Africa to “support” doctors and scientists in containing and finding new treatments for the outbreak. It remains unclear what the role of the military will be in the public health crisis. As Foreign Policy in Focus writes:
On Thursday, Joanne Liu, president of MSF, planned to appear at the UN conference to tell delegates that “the promised surge has not yet delivered,” according to her prepared remarks, the Washington Post reports.
“Pledges of aid and unprecedented U.N. resolutions are very welcome. But they will mean little, unless they are translated into immediate action,” Liu planned to say. “Fear and panic have set in, as infection rates double every three weeks. Mounting numbers are dying of other diseases, like malaria, because health systems have collapsed…Today, Ebola is winning.”
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California Governor Jerry Brown on Sunday signed a law requiring all state colleges to adopt a ‘yes means yes’ policy of unambiguous, affirmative consent by students engaged in sexual activity, marking a paradigm shift in how colleges and universities deal with sexual assaults. The law would apply to all public colleges and other institutions that receive state funds for student aid.
The bill, which California lawmakers approved last month, also requires training for faculty reviewing complaints so that victims are not asked inappropriate questions during the investigation process, and it mandates access to counseling, health care services and other resources for victims. In addition, schools will now be required to give consent and sexual assault awareness trainings at orientation.
The legislation says silence or lack of resistance does not constitute consent (though non-verbal consent, such as a head nod, can be given); under the bill, someone who is drunk, drugged, unconscious or asleep cannot grant consent. It specifies that “the existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.” Supporters say the law shifts the burden of proof from the alleged victim to the accused.
“Every student deserves a learning environment that is safe and healthy,” State Senator Kevin de León, who authored the bill, said in a statement Sunday night. “The state of California will not allow schools to sweep rape cases under the rug. We’ve shifted the conversation regarding sexual assault to one of prevention, justice, and healing.”
At a time when rape and sexual assault on campus has been called a national “epidemic,” many women’s advocacy and college sexual assault survivor groups endorsed the new law. Additionally, the University of California and California State University systems supported the legislation. More than 50 colleges and universities nationwide, including a handful in California, are under federal investigation for their handling of sexual assault allegations, and the White House recently launched “It’s On Us,” an initiative aimed at combating rape and domestic violence at universities. Studies suggest that one in five women is sexually assaulted in college.
But not everyone thinks ‘yes means yes’ is the best approach to solving campus rape. For one thing, critics ranging from the Los Angeles Times editorial board to the campus civil liberties group known as FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) have raised questions about whether the law is “enforceable” or legally workable—not to mention the potentially troubling implications of having the government, and college tribunals, regulate sexual interaction.
“[I]nstead of recognizing that college administrators are unqualified to serve as investigators, finders of fact, and sentencing authorities in campus sexual assault cases, SB 967 entrusts them with still greater responsibility,” FIRE said in a statement earlier this year. “Injustice will inevitably be the result.”
The statement added:
On a more academic level, the bill and policies like it could introduce a problematic double-standard, Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote at the New Republic earlier this month. “This recent legislation reflects a growing trend to criticize our current sexual culture as one which condones sexual assault, a crisis often referred to as ‘rape culture,'” she said. “Some of the criticism is valid, but, by and large, this new discourse renders women as either receivers of, or victims in, the phallic pursuit of sexual satisfaction. These measures and the discourse which invigorates them ratify a double standard into law and have the potential to pervert justice.”
She continued:
Still, the landmark legislation has spurred an important public conversation about the concept of consent, said Jessica Valenti, Guardian columnist and a co-author of Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, published in 2008.
In a Guardian column on September 2, Valenti wrote: “[T]his is what makes the legislation so important for colleges: mandating ‘yes means yes’ in sexual assault policy puts the onus on colleges to give comprehensive consent education. If students are to abide by that standard, they need to know what it means.”
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A day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told police chiefs and the Shin Bet security service to crack down on Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem, clashes were reported outside that city’s Al-Aqsa Mosque compound.
Dozens were said to be injured as Palestinian worshipers on Wednesday morning were stopped from entering a mosque by Israeli police, who then escorted a right-wing Jewish group inside to observe the holiday of Sukkot.
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According to the Ma’an news agency, security guards witnessed officers “forcibly” removing worshipers, “attacking some of them with clubs,” which led to a violent scuffle:
Luba Samri, an Israeli police spokeswoman, told Al Jazeera that police “chased the demonstrators towards the mosque, where they barricaded themselves inside and continued hurling objects… There was no immediate information on whether anyone was hurt among the Palestinian protesters.”
Al-Asqa mosque is a contentious area, as it is considered the holiest site in Judaism and the third-holiest in Islam. Its status often finds the mosque as the backdrop for demonstrations in the occupied territory.
Tensions have been high in Jerusalem since Israel’s 50-day-long offensive against Gaza, which saw more than 2,000 Palestinian and 72 Israeli deaths, came to an uneasy ceasefire in late August.
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Edward Snowden should have been the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, according to readers of the UK’s Guardian.
According to results of a poll taken by the newspaper, 48 percent of readers thought that the NSA whistleblower—who was among the possible winners of the official prize—should be given the award.
Chelsea Manning, who is currently serving a 35-year term for releasing a trove of classified documents to WikiLeaks, received 15 percent of readers’ votes.
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Pakistani eduction rights activist Malala Yousafzai garnered 37 percent of the votes.
Yousafzai was jointly awarded along with Indian children’s rights advocate Kailash Satyarthi the official Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. At 17, Yousafzai, known widely as simply Malala, becomes the youngest Laureate. Though Satyarthi’s name may be less familiar to many, his decades of peaceful work in the tradition of Gandhi caused him to be nominated several times in the past decade, the Times of India reports.
In their nomination of Snowden for the official prize, Norwegian lawmakers Bård Vegar Solhjell and Snorre Valen stated that his “actions have in effect led to the reintroduction of trust and transparency as a leading principle in global security policies. Its value can’t be overestimated.”
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A contentious surveillance provision of the Patriot Act, which allows law enforcement to conduct searches while delaying informing the suspect, is broadly used, but almost never in terrorism cases—despite Justice Department officials arguments to the contrary, according to an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
“Yet again, terrorism concerns appear to be trampling our civil liberties,” writes EFF’s Mark Jaycox.
The rights group analyzed federal reports from 2011, 2012, and 2013, released after an unexplained three-year delay, on warrants that were issued under Section 213, known colloquially as “Sneak and Peek.”
Out of more than 11,000 requests for those delayed-notification searches in 2013, a grand total of 51 were used for terrorism cases, EFF found. Almost all of the other Sneak and Peek warrants went to drug investigations.
Notifications of searches were routinely delayed by at least a month, and often by several. The average (pdf) delay nationwide in 2013 was 64 days.
Fraud, theft, and immigration investigations all garnered more Sneak and Peek warrants than terrorism cases.
“Yet again, terrorism concerns appear to be trampling our civil liberties”
—Mark Jaycox.
“Exactly what privacy advocates argued in 2001 is happening: sneak and peak warrants are not just being used in exceptional circumstances—which was their original intent—but as an everyday investigative tool,” Jaycox writes.
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Jaycox continues:
In addition to their egregious use, the number of warrants issued has skyrocketed, with requests nearly tripling in just three years. By contrast, police made 47 sneak-and-peek searches nationwide from September 2001 to April 2003.
Section 213 was enacted over protests by civil rights groups who noted that the FBI already had the power to conduct delayed-notification searches in terrorism investigations through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
“Section 213 authorizes sneak-and-peek searches in run-of-the-mill criminal investigations, not just in foreign-intelligence investigations involving terrorists,” the ACLU warned in 2003. Likewise, even as the Supreme Court ruled in Wilson v. Arkansas and Richards v. Wisconsin that the Fourth Amendment required police to “knock and announce” their entry into property when conducting a search, the decision allowed for police to skirt that rule in situations where evidence or their safety was under threat.
“Section 213 codified this practice into statute, taking delayed notice from a relatively rare occurrence into standard operating law enforcement procedure,” Jaycox writes.
As Radley Balko notes, “this was all immediately after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and there was little patience for civil libertarians. The massive Patriot Act of course passed overwhelmingly…. sneak-and-peek is increasingly ubiquitous while the justification for granting the government this power in the first place—terrorism—is not only irrelevant to the tactic’s increasing pervasiveness, it gets more irrelevant every year.”
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When democracy becomes numb to the desires of its citizens and political campaigns become sporting events for television pundits, the ballot box becomes a sad (if necessary) expression of populist will.
That’s the argument put forth on Tuesday by one progressive candidate who challenged the political status quo this election season.
“If we don’t have a responsive democracy, all the debates [on progressive issues we care about] aren’t real debates. When elections are not democratic, even the most populist discussions become superficial, disconnected from real power; they are theatre.”
In Guardian op-ed on Tuesday, Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham Law School professor who this year took on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a primary challenge from the Left, says that amidst many other valid theories about the source of the “disgust and apathy” so many feel toward this year’s election, the simplest explanation may be this: “people don’t like being told falsely they have power when they don’t.”
What’s essential for Americans to recognize this Election Day—set to be the most expensive mid-term in U.S. history—says Teachout, is that confronting this reality of disempowerment is not something to avoid, but the key to achieving the real progressive change so many desperately desire.
“There is one issue that subsumes all other issues, upon which all other issues depend,” she writes, “and that is restoring democracy itself.”
“If we don’t have a responsive democracy, all the debates about charter schools, and fracking, and high-stakes testing, and the militarization of police forces – all of which are issues I care about – they aren’t real debates. When elections are not democratic, even the most populist discussions become superficial, disconnected from real power; they are theatre.”
The key reason for this disconnection and disempowerment, argues Teachout, is clear: the massive amounts of money flooding U.S. elections. “The key to fixing public financing is to free politics from big money,” she writes and offers state-level public financing schemes—as seen in Maine, Connecticut and elsewhere—as the most readily available solutions.
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And as pollsters and pundits have focused like laser beams on whether the Republican Party will increase its majority in the House of Representatives or take majority-control of the U.S. Senate and watchdogs have reported on the astronomical levels of campaign spending, Teachout points out that the fundamental nature of the democracy is largely not part of the debate, especially in the mainstream and corporate media.
“We need a populist movement made of candidates and protests and clear demands.”
For Teachout, the key reasons for this are twofold. First, in a post-Citizens United world, private campaign spending has given nearly unprecedented power to the large corporations (and the wealthy individuals who control them) to sway policies and control the debate. Second, because so much of the campaign spending is driven by advertising dollars, the media system itself has a large financial incentive to maintain the status quo.
“In banking, energy, gas, cable, agriculture and search, we have a limited number of companies that have accumulated so much power they are acting as a kind of shadow government, controlling policy, vetoing laws before they can even be presented,” she writes. “Candidates refuse to stump about a cable-TV merger because they’re afraid to get shut out of MSNBC. They don’t take on big banks because big banks have become too big to fail, to jail and even to debate about policy.”
And the solution? Fight back, urges Teachout.
“We need a populist movement made of candidates and protests and clear demands,” she writes.
Even as voting remains essential, she argues, it’s clear that these battles cannot be adequately fought or won at the ballot box. Like so many other progressive voices have stated recently, the key to reforming the state of American democracy is an effort that will have to take place, not within the confined boundaries of the current system, but one that challenges these institutions and policies from outside and from below.
“We can keep protesting our own democracy, despite the facts, or we can actually deal with the root cause: concentrated wealth taking over our politics,” Teachout concludes. “Like the best generations of American reformers before us, we can change the basic structures. We can actually build something – and the people will get the power back.”
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