Hamilton Nolan | The Democrats Must Become a Real Anti-War Party

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Hamilton Nolan | The Democrats Must Become a Real Anti-War Party
Anti-war activists protest in front of the White House in Washington, D.C., January 4, 2020. (photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)
Hamilton Nolan, Guardian UK
Nolan writes: "Geopolitically speaking, we are the bad guys. The United States government, that is. The extent to which this is true fluctuates somewhat from administration to administration, but in the postwar decades it has been a fairly reliable judgment."
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Protesters rallying against Donald Trump's travel ban policy. (photo: NBC News)
Protesters rallying against Donald Trump's travel ban policy. (photo: NBC News)

The Trump Administration Has Been Preparing to Expand the Travel Ban to Up to Seven More Countries, Documents Reveal
Hamed Aleaziz, BuzzFeed
Aleaziz writes: "The Trump administration has been preparing to expand its travel ban - which bars individuals from seven countries from entering the US - to restrict certain immigrants from several more nations around the world, according to internal government documents obtained by BuzzFeed News."
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Soldiers. (photo: PA)
Soldiers. (photo: PA)

Tom Engelhardt | The Global War of Error: No, That's Not a Typo
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Engelhardt writes: "Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country's a nightmare of inequality, and there's a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn't it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century?"
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A Honduran family stands next to the border fence after they turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)
A Honduran family stands next to the border fence after they turned themselves in to Border Patrol agents. (photo: John Moore/Getty Images)

Lawsuit Alleges Child Abuse and Neglect After Trump Administration Family Separation
Nathaniel Weixel, The Hill
Weixel writes: "Two fathers who were separated from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border as a result of the Trump administration's policies are suing the government for $12 million, claiming the children were subject to abuse and neglect while in federal custody."
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A predator drone. (photo: Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images)
A predator drone. (photo: Veronique de Viguerie/Getty Images)

US Strike on Iranian Commander in Yemen the Night of Suleimani's Assassination Killed the Wrong Man
Alex Emmons, The Intercept
Emmons writes: "On the night the U.S. assassinated Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani by drone strike, the U.S. launched a similar operation to kill a top Iranian commander in Yemen, a U.S. official told The Intercept."

The operation was aimed at killing Abdul Reza Shahlai, the commander of the Yemen division of Iran’s elite Quds Force, near the Yemeni capital Sana’a. Shahlai survived, but a lower-level Quds Force operative was killed, and Shahlai went into hiding, the official said. Shortly thereafter, Iranian state TV reportedly announced the death of a Quds Force operative named Mohammad Mirza in “one of the fields of Resistance Front.”
Shahlai is a senior operator in the Quds Force, the external operations arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. He was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2008 for his role in operations against the United States in Iraq, and the U.S. has accused him of coordinating a 2011 plot to assassinate the former Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Adel al-Jubeir, at a restaurant in Washington, D.C. Shahlai has since been placed in charge of the Quds Force division responsible for aiding the Houthi militia in its war against Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, the official said.
The strike was first reported by the Washington Post. The White House referred The Intercept to the Department of Defense, which did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
The Trump administration had contemplated killing Shahlai for three years, as a means of deterring further Iranian support for the Houthis in Yemen, the U.S. official told The Intercept. But the attempt to assassinate him on the night of January 2 seems to undercut the government’s stated rationale for killing Suleimani, who U.S. officials have repeatedly described as posing “an imminent threat” to U.S. forces in Iraq.
Shahlai is unlikely to have posed a similar threat in Sana’a, where the U.S. evacuated its embassy compound in 2013. The U.S. conducts operations and drone strikes against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen, but does not have personnel in the north of the country, which is controlled by the Houthis and where Sana’a is located.
“Congress needs answers,” tweeted Rep. Ro Khanna, D.-Calif., who has been critical of the U.S. role in the Saudi-led intervention. “What was the full extent of the Trump administration’s plans to kill Iranian officials? How does the attempted killing in Yemen have anything to do with an imminent threat?”
Since the beginning of Yemen’s civil war, a small number of Iranians have provided weapons and training to the Houthis. In March 2014, a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched a U.S.-backed intervention aimed at removing the Houthis from power and restoring the previous Yemeni president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. In the four years since, the situation has devolved into a war of attrition fueled by international proxies that has given rise to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Congress has not authorized U.S. military action against Iran, so members are likely to question the legal basis for a strike against Shahlai. Congress did, however, recently pass a bipartisan resolution directing President Donald Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from “hostilities” in Yemen. Trump vetoed the resolution, but it marked a clear desire on the part of Congress to end American support for Saudi-led operations in the country.
The Trump administration has characterized its strike on Suleimani as an act of self-defense, saying that the commander was planning imminent attacks against dozens and possibly hundreds of Americans. But following classified briefings on Capitol Hill, numerous lawmakers from both parties claimed that the administration had failed to present direct evidence of an “imminent threat,” even when they asked repeatedly and directly.
The strike on Suleimani came in the midst of escalating hostilities between American forces and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. As tensions rose last month, a rocket attack by an Iran-backed group called Kataib Hezbollah killed one American contractor and wounded four American servicemembers. Days later, the U.S. retaliated by bombing five Kataib Hezbollah positions, killing 24 people and wounding 50, according to a Hezbollah spokesperson. In the following days, members of the militia and their supporters stormed the fortified U.S. embassy compound in Baghdad. No one was killed, but the security situation remained tense.
Following the strike on Suleimani, the U.S. sent a letter to the U.N. Security Council, saying that the U.S. had “undertaken certain actions in the exercises of its inherent right of self-defense,” and that the actions “include” the operation to kill Suleimani, leaving open the possibility that the U.S. conducted other strikes that night.

A girl cycles past a home that partially collapsed after an earthquake hit Guanica, Puerto Rico. (photo: Carlos Giusti/AP)
A girl cycles past a home that partially collapsed after an earthquake hit Guanica, Puerto Rico. (photo: Carlos Giusti/AP)

Earthquake of Magnitude 6 Shakes Puerto Rico Again
teleSUR
Excerpt: "A new earthquake of a magnitude of 6 Saturday shook Puerto Rico, a country which since Friday afternoon records aftershocks of different intensity after the 6.4 earthquake that hit the island last Tuesday and caused one death, about 2,000 refugees, and thousands of damaged homes."
EXCERPT:
The RPSR has registered more than a dozen aftershocks so far. The most outstanding of them was recorded at 18.30 local time on Friday, with magnitude 5.2. ​​​​​​​
Although its epicenter was ​​​​​​​located at sea, it was felt strongly throughout the Puerto Rican territory, where panic scenes were recorded again among the population.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A bushfire in Australia. (photo: Getty Images)
A bushfire in Australia. (photo: Getty Images)

Climate Change Fueled the Australia Fires. Now Those Fires Are Fueling Climate Change
Maddie Stone, Grist
Stone writes: "Australia is in the midst of a devastating wildfire season that is being exacerbated by climate change. But the fires, which have been burning for months and could rage on for months to come, are also impacting the earth's climate in several ways. Some of those impacts are well understood, while others lie at the frontiers of scientific research."
The most obvious climatic impact of the fires is that they’re spewing millions of tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to a vicious feedback loop of heat and flame. But the fires are also kicking up lots of soot, creating a smoke plume that’s circling the globe and could hasten the melting of any glaciers it comes in contact with. Preliminary evidence suggests some of that smoke has even made its way into an upper layer of the atmosphere called the stratosphere, buoyed aloft by rare, fire-induced thunderclouds. That, too, could have subtle but far-reaching climate impacts.
The fires, which started burning at the end of Australia’s winter, raged across the eastern half of the country throughout the spring and kicked into high gear in the country’s populous southeast over the last few weeks. They’re a disaster of an unprecedented nature.
Exceptionally hot, dry, gusty weather, brought on by recurring ocean and atmospheric dynamics and amplified by the warming and drying effects of human-caused climate change, has made it all too easy for an errant match or a lightning strike to explode into a raging inferno. Which is exactly what’s been happening. To date, the Guardian estimates that more than 26 million acres of land have burned nationwide — a region larger than Indiana. That includes over 12 million acres in New South Wales alone, a dubious new record for the state.
Much of the land that’s burning is covered in eucalyptus forest, although flames have also razed farmlands, grasslands, heathlands, and even some patches of Queensland’s subtropical rainforests, said Lesley Hughes, an ecologist and climate scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney. Whatever the fuel source, the net effect on the atmosphere is a massive release of ash, dust, and a cocktail of different gases, including carbon dioxide.
From the start of September through early January, the wildfires released around 400 million tons of CO2, which is roughly the same amount the UK emits in an entire year, according to Mark Parrington, a senior scientist with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. That’s not a record, he said, noting that considerably more carbon was emitted in 2011 and 2012, when very large fires raged across Australia’s northern territory and out west. But in New South Wales, this year’s wildfire emissions are off the charts.
By any measure, 400 million tons is a significant chunk of heat-trapping gases that will get mixed into the atmosphere, fueling more global warming. “It’s a great example of a positive feedback of climate change,” Hughes said. “It all comes together, unfortunately.”
In addition to carbon pollution, the fires are producing, well, regular air pollution. Since early November, vast smoke plumes have been wafting from eastern Australia all the way across the Pacific to the shores of South America. Just this week, Parrington said, forecasts from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service showed carbon monoxide from wildfire smoke creeping into the South Atlantic, a “really clear indicator of just how intense those fires have been.”
As the smoke circumnavigates the globe, some of it is passing over New Zealand’s alpine glaciers, turning them an eerie caramel color. Lauren Vargo, a glaciologist at Victoria University of Wellington who recently traveled through New Zealand’s Southern Alps, said that the soot is “really clear and obvious” and that “most of the ice on the South Island” is likely to have been impacted. Vargo is currently studying aerial photographs of New Zealand’s glaciers going back to the 1970s. In 40 years of records, she hasn’t seen anything comparable.
Soot on glaciers does more than spoil hiking photos. It reduces the reflectivity, or albedo, of ice, allowing it to absorb more sunlight, which can hasten its melt, said Marie Dumont, the deputy scientific director of the French Meteorological Service’s Snow Research Center. Exactly how much extra melt New Zealand’s browning glaciers will experience over the coming weeks and months is unclear, but the fact that the color change is occurring during the summer, when the sunlight is fiercer and there’s less chance of fresh snow falling, isn’t a good sign.
“It’s super likely that it will accelerate the melt” of these glaciers, Dumont said, “at least for this year.” She added that she wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar, albeit smaller effect on some Patagonian glaciers, given that the wildfire smoke is passing over South America.
“With ice, when we are seeing a color change, it means the change in albedo is about 10 percent,” Dumont said. “That’s already huge. Even a 2 to 3 percent change is a lot.”
Not all of the wildfire smoke is settling on the earth’s surface. More of it is lingering 3 to 4 miles up in the troposphere, Parrington said, scattering light and resulting in ominous reddish sunsets. Where the smoke is densest, it’s likely impacting the weather, said Robert Field, a climate and atmospheric scientist at Columbia University. Over hard-hit parts of Australia, Field said he wouldn’t be surprised if temperatures are 10 to 20 degrees F lower on dense smoke days as soot blocks incoming sunlight. He emphasized, however, that any such effects will be very temporary.
Where the smoke might have a more far-reaching impact is in the stratosphere, a very dry, very cold part of the atmosphere that starts around 6 miles up and is home to fast-flowing jet stream winds. Pollution from the earth’s surface doesn’t often reach the stratosphere, but recent satellite data shows that Australia’s wildfire smoke has hit this lofty mark, a fact that speaks to “the power and intensity of the fires,” according to Claire Ryder, a research fellow at Reading University’s meteorology department.
The most likely explanation, she said, is fire-induced thunderclouds.
Also known as pyrocumulonimbus clouds, these menacing-looking storms, which form when heat from intense wildfires creates a powerful updraft, can blast particles into the stratosphere in a manner similar to a volcanic eruption. Over the past few weeks, the wildfires in southeastern Australia have spawned a series of pyrocumulonimbus events that Neil Lareau, a fire weather researcher at the University of Nevada Reno, called “really superlative.”
The smoke that’s reached the stratosphere may linger there for weeks to months, Ryder said. But exactly what impact it’ll have is an open scientific question.
Volcanic eruptions, she said, shoot tiny sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere. These particles reflect sunlight and can trigger temporary cooling at the earth’s surface. By contrast, fire smoke contains carbon-rich organic matter, including particles that are brown, gray, and even black in color. Black carbon, in particular, is a potent absorber of sunlight, and whether its presence in stratospheric soot will ultimately have a warming or cooling effect on the planet is unknown.
It will likely be years before scientists have teased out the full impact of this year’s wildfire season on the climate — first, the fires need to end. But it’s clear the effects have rippled far beyond Australia’s borders. As fire seasons become longer and more intense across the world, understanding this complex web of planetary impacts will only become more urgent.











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