TDB Top 5 International Stories: Friday 13th January 2017

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5: Are the 2010s the new 1930s?

Two political scientists talk about why we should panic, at least a little bit.

We live in an age of uncertainty. Russian cyberspies are going hog wild in our .gov inboxes. The old global order is falling to pieces. All conventional wisdom about how the world works has to be thrown out the window. There are wars and rumours of wars. Truth and falsehood are indistinguishable and people now think the CIA is good. Also, there are Nazis everywhere.

Vice News

4: Israel diplomat forced to resign after AJ investigation

An Israeli political officer, who was at the centre of an Al Jazeera investigation, has been forced to resign from Israel’s UK embassy, a senior official in the Israeli foreign ministry has told Al Jazeera.

Shai Masot, a senior political officer working at the Israeli embassy, resigned from his post earlier this week, the spokesman said on Thursday.

The investigation, The Lobby, reveals plots by the Israeli diplomat and a British civil servant to destroy the careers of senior politicians.

Aljazeera

 

3: Rex Tillerson Wants to Provide Saudi Arabia With More Help to Bomb Yemen

FOR 21 MONTHS, a coalition of nations led by Saudi Arabia has been relentlessly bombing Yemen, using U.S.- and U.K.-produced weapons and intelligence in a war that has devastated Yemen and killed well over 10,000 civilians.

There is abundant evidence that the high civilian death toll in Yemen is the result of deliberate — not accidental — strikes by Saudi Arabia. During its air campaign, Saudi Arabia has bombed endless civilian targets — including homes, farms, markets, factories, water infrastructure, hospitals, and children’s schools — and has even gone so far as to use internationally banned cluster weapons, which are designed to inflict damage over a wide area and often remain lethal years after being dropped.

But when secretary of state nominee and former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson was asked about Saudi Arabia’s use of cluster weapons during his confirmation hearing Wednesday, he declined to answer, and suggested that the way to discourage Saudi Arabia from hitting civilians in Yemen is to provide them with additional targeting intelligence.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., asked Tillerson during his confirmation hearing: “Saudi Arabia has been utilizing cluster munitions in Yemen. Much of the world has said these are terrible weapons to use, because they have a range of fuses and they can often go off months or years after they’ve been laid down. These are the cluster bombs, you’re familiar with them. They’ve also been targeting civilians. How should the U.S. respond to those actions?”

Tillerson replied: “Well I would hope that we could work with Saudi Arabia perhaps by providing them better targeting intelligence, better targeting capability to avoid mistakenly identifying targets where civilians are hit, impacted, so that’s an area where I would hope that cooperation with them could minimize this type of collateral damage.”

The Intercept

 

2: Russia says US troops arriving in Poland pose threat to its security

The Kremlin has hit out at the biggest deployment of US troops in Europe since the end of the cold war, branding the arrival of troops and tanks in Poland as a threat to Russia’s national security.

The deployment, intended to counter what Nato portrays as Russian aggression in eastern Europe, will see US troops permanently stationed along Russia’s western border for the first time.

About 1,000 of a promised 4,000 troops arrived in Poland at the start of the week, and a formal ceremony to welcome them is to be held on Saturday. Some people waved and held up American flags as the troops, tanks and heavy armoured vehicles crossed into south-western Poland from Germany, according to Associated Press.

But their arrival was not universally applauded. In Moscow, Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We perceive it as a threat. These actions threaten our interests, our security. Especially as it concerns a third party building up its military presence near our borders. It’s [the US], not even a European state.”

The Guardian 

 

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1: Trump Ignores Ethics Experts Urging Him to Divest from His Businesses & Puts Sons In Charge Instead

At his first press conference since July, President-elect Donald Trump addressed questions about his business interests and asserted that, as president, he would be exempt from possible conflicts of interest. The Trump Organization is an umbrella company for his hundreds of investments in real estate, brands and other businesses. But Trump said he would not follow advice from ethics experts to divest or create a completely blind trust, and instead announced he will hand over management of the Trump Organization to his sons. The head of the Office of Government Ethics slammed President-elect Trump’s plan to separate himself from his business, calling it “wholly inadequate.” We get response from John Wonderlich, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation.

Democracy Now