5: Here Comes Waitangi Day: Prepare to Cringe
Why the national holiday will never be all backyard cricket and barbecues, no matter how much the silent majority want it to be.
Every year Waitangi Day “cringe” runs on timetable: optimism for breakfast, angst for lunch, anger for dinner, and rinse and repeat next year. In the run-up to this year’s cringe three things are almost certainly going to happen. Someone in the media will plea for a national holiday “like Australia Day.” Someone in the comment section will declare “New Zealand has the best race relations in the world”. And the Prime Minister will invent a reason or reasons for ditching the pōwhiri at Te Tii Marae on February 6.
Vice News
4: Yemen: Jeremy Scahill & Advocates Question “Success” of Trump Raid That Killed 24 Civilians
Questions are mounting about the first covert counterterrorism operation approved by President Donald Trump. Authorities say it was a success. The Pentagon now acknowledges that civilians were killed Sunday when members of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 joined with commandos from the United Arab Emirates to raid a Yemeni village where members of al-Qaeda were said to live. But human rights groups say up to 24 civilians were killed, including a newborn baby and an American 8-year-old girl, Nawar al-Awlaki, the daughter of the U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in Yemen by a U.S. drone strike in 2011. The U.S. suffered one fatality: William “Ryan” Owens, a veteran member of SEAL Team 6. We get response from Jeremy Scahill, co-founder of The Intercept, who has extensively covered Yemen; Pardiss Kebriaei, staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights; and Baraa Shiban, the Yemen project coordinator and caseworker with Reprieve.
Democracy Now
3: US slaps new sanctions on Iran over missile test
The United States has announced new sanctions against Iran following a stream of threats and warnings over a recent missile test.
In a statement on its website on Friday, the US Treasury said it had added 13 Iranian individuals and 12 entities, some of which are based in Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and China, to its sanctions list.
“Iran’s continued support for terrorism and development of its ballistic missile program poses a threat to the region, to our partners worldwide, and to the United States,” said John Smith, acting director of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control.
Among those sanctioned were companies, individuals, and brokers the US Treasury said support a trade network run by Iranian businessman Abdollah Asgharzadeh.
Aljazeera
2: Fukushima nuclear reactor radiation at highest level since 2011 meltdown
Radiation levels inside a damaged reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station are at their highest since the plant suffered a triple meltdown almost six years ago.
The facility’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said atmospheric readings as high as 530 sieverts an hour had been recorded inside the containment vessel of reactor No 2, one of three reactors that experienced a meltdown when the plant was crippled by a huge tsunami that struck the north-east coast of Japan in March 2011.
The extraordinary radiation readings highlight the scale of the task confronting thousands of workers, as pressure builds on Tepco to begin decommissioning the plant – a process that is expected to take about four decades.
The Guardian
1: The CIA’s New Deputy Director Ran a Black Site for Torture
IN MAY, 2013, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller reported that the head of the CIA’s clandestine service was being shifted out of that position as a result of “a management shake-up” by then-Director John Brennan. As Miller documented, this official – whom the paper did not name because she was a covert agent at the time – was centrally involved in the worst abuses of the CIA’s Bush-era torture regime.
As Miller put it, she was “directly involved in its controversial interrogation program” and had an “extensive role” in torturing detainees. Even more troubling, she “had run a secret prison in Thailand” – part of the CIA’s network of “black sites” – “where two detainees were subjected to waterboarding and other harsh techniques.” The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture also detailed the central role she played in the particularly gruesome torture of detainee Abu Zubaydah.
Beyond all that, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. The concealment of those interrogation tapes, which violated both multiple court orders as well the demands of the 9/11 Commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was condemned as “obstruction” by Commission Chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane. A special prosecutor and Grand Jury investigated those actions but ultimately chose not to prosecute.
The Intercept
