TDB Top 5 International Stories: Sunday 11th September 2016

 

5: Who Is Funding the Dakota Access Pipeline? Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo

Food & Water Watch’s Hugh MacMillan talks about his new investigation that reveals the dozens of financial institutions that are bankrolling the Dakota Access pipeline, including Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase. “They are banking on this company and banking on being able to drill and frack for the oil to send through the pipeline over the coming decades,” MacMillan says. “So they’re providing the capital for the construction of this pipeline.”

Democracy Now!

4: Netanyahu slammed over ‘ethnic cleansing’ remark

Israeli PM says Palestinian opposition to Israeli settlements in West Bank is “ethnic cleansing”.

Aljazeera

 

3: Edward Snowden attacks Russia over human rights and hacking

The US whistleblower Edward Snowden has attacked his Russian protectors by criticising the Kremlin’s human rights record and suggesting that its officials have been involved in hacks on US security networks.

His outburst came in an interview in the Financial Times with Alan Rusbridger, the former editor of the Guardian, which published the initial Snowden revelations. Snowden said Moscow had “gone very far, in ways that are completely unnecessary, costly and corrosive to individual and collective rights” in monitoring citizens online.

The Guardian

 

2:  WHO’S LEFT AT GUANTÁNAMO? FATES OF DOZENS OF PRISONERS ARE UNDECIDED

THE LAST GUANTÁNAMO detainee to make the case for his release before a panel of senior administration officials is also the youngest man left at the island prison.

In a hearing Thursday of Guantánamo’s Periodic Review Board, Hassan Ali Bin Attash, a Yemeni who is believed to be about 31 years old, said through representatives that he was working toward a high school GED diploma and hoped to join relatives in Saudi Arabia and find a job as a translator.

Attash’s exact birthdate is uncertain, but he was certainly a young teen in 1997, when the U.S. military alleges that he pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden and began working for senior al Qaeda figures doing everything from bomb-making to logistics. He was captured in Pakistan in 2002 and spent the next two years being moved between CIA black-site prisons and interrogations in Afghanistan and Jordan before landing in Guantánamo in September 2004. While in U.S. custody, according to his own and other prisoners’ accounts, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, hung from a bar by his wrists, and threatened with dogs and electric shocks, among other forms of torture. He was also severely tortured by the Jordanians.

The Intercept

 

1:  Chelsea Manning Begins Hunger Strike, Demanding “Dignity and Respect” in Prison

U.S. ARMY WHISTLEBLOWER Chelsea Manning began a hunger strike in military prison Friday, her attorneys confirmed.

“I need help. I am not getting any,” Manning wrote in a statement. “I was driven to suicide by the lack of care for my gender dysphoria that I have been desperate for. I didn’t get any. I still haven’t gotten any.”

Manning announced her identity as a transgender woman on Aug. 22, 2013, a day after she was sentenced to 35 years in military prison.

After attempting to commit suicide in July, Manning was informed by military officials that she was being investigated for “resisting the force cell move team,” “prohibited property,” and “conduct which threatens.” She is facing indefinite solitary confinement, or a return to maximum-security detention.

Starting on Friday, Manning said, she would not willingly consume any food or drink, except water and prescribed medications.

The Intercept