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“Whatever title or office we may be privileged to hold, it is what we do that defines who we are … Each of us must decide what kind of person we want to be—what kind of legacy that we want to pass on.”
– Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan
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They’re Armed And Dangerous, We’re Confused And Curious: Haitian police arrested eight men, including five Americans, Sunday afternoon at a routine roadblock near Haiti’s central bank in the capital of Port-au-Prince. The two vehicles driven by the men contained automatic weapons, ammunition, cell phones, drones and sets of license plates. At least two of the Americans were former Navy SEALS, two served in the US military and one had worked as contractor with the Department of Homeland Security. According to a Miami Herald reporter: “They said that they were here on a ‘government mission’…[and that] their boss was going to call their boss,” implying that someone high up in Haiti’s government would soon be freeing the group. The reporter added: “members of the administration of President Jovenel Moise did try to get these gentlemen released from police custody — but that did not work.”
The two vehicles were later traced to people close to Moise, who, along with a company he headed before taking office in 2017, have been accused of diverting or misusing billions of dollars in development money from Venezuela’s Petrocaribe fund. Deadly anti-corruption protests last week had followed a court report about the accusations, leading to widespread speculation about why the heavily armed men were in Haiti. They face charges of being involved in a criminal conspiracy. Additional news: How the US sent $12bn in cash to Iraq. And watched it vanish: Special flights brought in tonnes of banknotes which disappeared into the war zone (Guardian)
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America Ignores A Real Emergency: According to Alyssa Ayres, a senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, Washington paid next to no attention to the terrorist attack in Kashmir last week in which 40 paramilitary police officers were killed by a militant group based in Pakistan. The attack was the worst in the disputed area in decades and quickly spiraled into a major standoff between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed rivals. Ayres said: “I don’t think I saw any sign that there was any comment about this potential escalation in South Asia, which is directly related to stability in Afghanistan.” (WaPo)
Additional Reads
Retaliation, Regret, Retribution: In 2014, a 20 year old college student in Alabama, Hoda Muthana, fell under the spell of the Islamic State, lied to her parents, and bought a plane ticket to Turkey with her tuition money. Now, after being married to three Islamic State fighters and witnessing executions like those she once cheered on social media, Muthana says she is deeply sorry and wants to come home to the US with her son. Currently she spends her days as a detainee in a refugee camp in Syria, along with another woman holding dual US and Canadian citizenship who had joined the caliphate in 2015 but now wants to return home. The women say they have not been visited by American officials since their capture last month. Nearly all the American men who had joined ISIS and were captured in battle have been repatriated, but a number of American women and their children have not been. On Tuesday a spokesman for the State Department said the situation for Americans in Syria was “extremely complicated” and the department was looking into the women’s cases. But on Wednesday, President Trump said he had directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to let Murtha back into the US. (NYT)
Elephants Never Forget And Neither Do We: A Chinese restaurant operator and business woman, Yang Fenglan, has been sentenced to 15 years in a Tanzanian jail for a reprehensible crime: operating one of Africa’s biggest ivory-smuggling rings. Yang, called the “Ivory Queen”, had been charged with smuggling some 800 pieces of ivory between 2000 and 2014 from Tanzania to the Far East. She had lived and worked in Tanzania since the 1970s, was fluent in Swahili, and had served as vice-president of the China-Africa Business Council of Tanzania. In just the last 10 years ivory poaching has caused a 20 percent decline in the population of African elephants. In 2018, China, which has long been one of the world’s biggest ivory markets, banned all trade in ivory and ivory products in the country.(BBC, CNN)
Additional read: “The War on Elephants.” (BBC)
Warmer War: Russian President Vladimir Putin practiced some saber-rattling in his annual address Wednesday to lawmakers gathered at a historic hall near the Kremlin. Putin said his new missiles would point toward the US if Washington expands its missile network in Europe. The Russian oligarch’s remarks were among the strongest yet on a potential new arms race after both countries pulled out of a Cold War-era nuclear weapons treaty. Part of Putin’s speech was also used to note that testing of a nuclear-capable glider and an underwater drone had been completed and the two missiles would be included in the country’s arsenal this year. (WaPo)
Additional world news:
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War Against #NoMoreHashtags: Russia’s parliament voted Tuesday to ban members of the military from using smartphones, or other smart devices, and social networks. Soldiers can no longer carry anything that can connect to the internet and can save data such as photos, and they cannot publish anything online about their military units, deployments, location or any personal information. Open source investigations had been using soldiers’ social media posts and other data to confirm Russia’s secret participation in Syria, sometimes in real time, and often several weeks before the country’s involvement in the civil war was made public.
Russia had also claimed not to have forces in southeast Ukraine, but journalists were able to use social media to track military units’ activity in that location. Vice News used a video called Selfie Soldiers to locate a Russian soldier who had posted photos from east Ukraine during the conflict. And the investigative site Bellingcat was able to track soldiers transporting a surface-to-air missile system thought to be linked to the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. Additional read: Russians, Feeling Poor and Protesting Garbage, Suffer Winter Blues (NYT, $)
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Bye Bye Miss American Pie, You Can’t Levy For My Chevy Cause My Chevy is Mine: In a decision handed down Wednesday, the Supreme Court unanimously held that states cannot levy “excessive fines” that result in property seizures in the criminal justice system. The ruling interprets the Constitution’s prohibition against the imposition of excessive fines by the federal government as applying to state and local governments as well. Critics of civil asset forfeiture welcomed the ruling as a new weapon against what they term “policing for profit”—the practice of seizing cash, cars and other property from those convicted, or even suspected, of committing a crime. The case involved an Indiana man whose $42,000 Land Rover SUV was seized after his 2015 arrest for selling a couple hundred dollars’ worth of heroin. He sued for the return of his vehicle and initially won his case, but on appeal the Indiana Supreme Court held that the excessive-fines clause did not apply to the states. (WaPo)
The Ehhh-Team: President Trump is initiating a White House study of whether climate change is a national security threat, despite numerous existing reports from his own government detailing the ways in which global warming is a harbinger of looming disaster. A recent White House memo relates that a 12 member committee will be created, and one member will be current Trump adviser William Happer, a Princeton physicist and climate denier who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies. Happer’s views are sharply divergent from established scientific consensus that carbon dioxide pollution is dangerous for the planet. The memo casts doubt on multiple scientific and defense reports concluding that climate change poses a significant threat to national security. The panel’s purpose could simply be the latest step by the administration to question the science of climate change, as Trump continues rolling back Obama-era regulations on planet warming pollution from vehicle tailpipes and power plants. (NYT)
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Despite Climate Change, I am Still Just A Rat in a Cage: On Monday the Australian government confirmed a report first published by the University of Queensland in 2016 that a small brown rat known as the Bramble Cay Melomys, which lived on a tiny island off northern Australia, had gone extinct. The report attributed the cause of its extinction as “almost certainly ocean inundation” from rising sea levels over the past decade, which had led to “dramatic habitat loss.”
The government said it is the world’s first mammal known to have become extinct due to “human-induced climate change.” A 2015 study by the University of Connecticut found that if temperatures continue to rise, nearly 8 percent of all species worldwide could become extinct. (CNN) Additional read: “Florida is drowning. Condos are still being built. Can’t humans see the writing on the wall?: People tend to respond to immediate threats and financial consequences – and Florida’s coastal real estate may be on the cusp of delivering that harsh wake-up call” (Guardian)
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