Month: September 2019

A large car bomb rocked the Afghan capital Thursday, and smoke rose from a part of eastern Kabul near a neighborhood housing the U.S. Embassy, the NATO Resolute Support mission and other diplomatic missions.

Firdaus Faramarz, a spokesman for Kabul’s police chief, told The Associated Press that the explosion took place in the city’s Ninth Police District. It appeared to target a checkpoint in the heavily guarded Shashdarak area where the Afghan national security authorities have offices.

There was no immediate word on casualties. An Associated Press reporter on the phone with the U.S. Embassy when the blast occurred heard sirens begin there.

Interior Ministry spokesman Nasrat Rahimi said a car bomb had exploded on a main road and police were sealing off the area. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The blast occurred as U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has been in Kabul this week, briefing the Afghan government and others on a deal he says has been reached “in principle” with the Taliban on ending America’s longest war.

A Taliban suicide bombing in eastern Kabul on Monday night, which the insurgents said targeted a foreign compound, killed at least 16 people and wounded more than 100, almost all of them local civilians.

…

Bahamas Prime Minister Hubert Minnis is pledging to do whatever is necessary to carry out rescue and recovery efforts after Hurricane Dorian devastated the Caribbean archipelago.

Thursday will likely bring more grim news as people get a better look at what the storm left behind after spinning over Grand Bahama and Abaco islands for nearly two days with flooding rains and storm surge, as well as winds of up to 195 kilometers per hour.

Minnis said at a Wednesday news conference the confirmed death toll was at 20 on Abaco Island, and that officials expected the number to rise.

“As prime minister, I assure you that no efforts will be spared in rescuing those still in danger, feeding those who are hungry and providing shelter to those who are without homes,” he said at a Wednesday news conference. “Our response will be day and night, day after day, week after week, month after month until the lives of our people return to some degree of normalcy.”

Speaking to the magnitude of the challenge the Bahamas faces, Minnis called it “one of the greatest national crises in our country’s history.”

Entire villages are gone and beaches usually packed with tourists are instead covered with parts of buildings, destroyed cars, and the remains of people’s lives.

“Right now there are just a lot of unknowns,” Bahamian lawmaker Iram Lewis said, adding, “We need help.”

U.S. President Donald Trump has sent the Coast Guard and urban search and rescue teams to help. The British Royal Navy, Red Cross, and United Nations are also rushing in food, medicine and any kind of aid that may be needed.

The White House says Trump spoke to Prime Minister Minnis Wednesday, assuring him the United States will provide “all appropriate support,” and sent American condolences to the Bahamian people for the destruction and loss of life.

U.N. Humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock was in Nassau Wednesday meeting with Minnis. Lowcock says 20% of the Bahamian population has been affected and 70,000 people need food.

“Nothing of this sort has been experienced by the Bahamas before,” Lowcock said, adding that he is immediately releasing $1 million from the U.N. central emergency fund for water, food, shelter and medical services.

Dorian, again a Category 3 storm, is moving up the southeastern coast of the United States with potent strength as it drops heavy rain and threatens coastal areas with what the U.S. National Hurricane Center says is “life-threatening storm surge with significant coastal flooding.” It had maximum sustained winds of 185 kilometers per hour Thursday morning.

Those threats will endure for the next few days with forecasters expecting the center of the storm to move near or over the coast of South Carolina on Thursday and the coast of North Carolina on Friday before accelerating off to the northeast as Dorian weakens.

…

Kenyan farmers hope to benefit from insured loans that will help them purchase farm inputs and seeds. Unlike other commercial bank loans, the Risk Contingent Credit Scheme, which is a brainchild of Washington-based IFPRI, aims to cushion farmers from huge losses accrued from crop failures because of climate change. Sarah Kimani has more from Machakos, Kenya.
 

…

Defense Secretary Mark Esper approved the use of $3.6 billion in funding from military construction projects to build 175 miles (282 kilometers) of President Donald Trump’s wall along the Mexican border.

 Pentagon officials would not say which 127 projects will be affected but said details will be available Wednesday after members of Congress are notified. They said half the money will come from military projects in the U.S. and the rest will come from projects in other countries.
 
Esper’s decision Tuesday fuels what has been a persistent controversy between the Trump administration and Congress over immigration policies and the funding of the border wall. And it sets up a difficult debate for lawmakers who refused earlier this year to approve nearly $6 billion for the wall but now must decide if they will refund the projects that are being used to provide the money.

Elaine McCusker, the Pentagon comptroller, said the now-unfunded projects are not being canceled. Instead, the Pentagon is saying the military projects are being “deferred.”  The Defense Department, however, has no guarantee from Congress that any of the money will be replaced, and a number of lawmakers made it clear during the debate earlier this year that they would not fall for budget trickery and sleight of hand to build the wall.
 
 “It is a slap in the face to the members of the Armed Forces who serve our country that President Trump is willing to cannibalize already allocated military funding to boost his own ego and for a wall he promised Mexico would pay to build,” said Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. He said the funding shift will affect the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
 

Congress approved $1.375 billion for wall construction in this year’s budget, same as the previous year and far less than the $5.7 billion that the White House sought. Trump grudgingly accepted the money to end a 35-day government shutdown in February but simultaneously declared a national emergency to take money from other government accounts, identifying up to $8.1 billion for wall construction.
 
The transferred funds include $600 million from the Treasury Department’s asset forfeiture fund, $2.5 billion from Defense Department counterdrug activities and now the $3.6 billion pot for military housing construction announced Tuesday.
 
The Pentagon reviewed the list of military projects and said none that provided housing or critical infrastructure for troops would be affected, in the wake of recent scandals over poor living quarters for service members in several parts of the country. Defense officials also said they would focus on projects set to begin in 2020 and beyond, with the hope that the money could eventually be restored by Congress.
 

 “Canceling military construction projects at home and abroad will undermine our national security and the quality of life and morale of our troops, making America less secure,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat.
 
The government will spend the military housing money on 11 wall projects in California, Arizona and Texas, the administration said in a filing Tuesday in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The most expensive is for 52 miles (84 kilometers) in Laredo, Texas, at a cost of $1.27 billion.
 
The Laredo project and one in El Centro, California, are on private property, which would require purchase or confiscation, according to the court filing. Two projects in Arizona are on land overseen by the Navy and will be the first to be built, no earlier than Oct. 3. Seven are at least partly on federal land overseen by the Interior Department.
 
The 175 miles (282 kilometers) covered by the Pentagon funding represents just a small fraction of the 1,954-mile (3,145-kilometer) U.S.-Mexico border.
 
Army Lt. Gen. Andrew W. Poppas, director of operations for the Joint Staff, told reporters that shoring up the wall could eventually lead to a reduction in the number of troops who are deployed along the border. About 3,000 active-duty troops and 2,000 members of the National Guard are being used along the border to support Homeland Security and border patrol efforts. About 1,200 of the active-duty troops are conducting surveillance in mobile truck units.
 
 

Pappas and other officials couldn’t say how soon or by how many the troop numbers could go down. Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said the troops would remain at the border for as long as they are needed. It could depend in part on the number of attempted border crossings by migrants and other issues.
 
The ACLU said Tuesday that it would seek a court order to block spending the military money. It sued earlier over the use of Defense Department counterdrug money, but the Supreme Court lifted a spending freeze on that money in July, allowing the first Pentagon-funded wall project to break ground last month in Arizona.
 
ACLU attorney Dror Ladin said, “We’ll be back in court very soon to block Trump’s latest effort to raid military funds for his xenophobic wall.”

…

The lawyer for American rapper A$AP Rocky says his client won’t appeal his assault conviction for a June 30 street brawl in Stockholm.

Slobodan Jovicic told Sweden’s TT news agency Wednesday that the rapper doesn’t have the energy to appeal.
 
A$AP Rocky, whose real name is Rakim Mayers, had pleaded self-defense and said he had tried to avoid a confrontation with two men who he said were persistently following his entourage. One of them picked a fight with a bodyguard, Mayers said during his trial.
 
On Aug. 14, Mayers and the bodyguards were given “conditional sentences” for the assault convictions, meaning they won’t serve prison time unless they commit a similar offense in Sweden again.
 
Last month, the prosecutor said he wouldn’t appeal the verdict either.

…

Nepal’s proposed media and communication laws will have a “chilling effect” on its citizens’ right to free speech, Human Rights Watch warned Wednesday as it called for the bills to be amended.

The government — which is drafting and has tabled bills on media, IT and mass communications — has said the laws are necessary to improve media reporting and discourage disinformation.

But journalists and right activists say they could be used to suppress freedom of expression, with the ruling party showing less and less tolerance for dissent since coming to power in 2017.

In a letter to Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli published online, HRW said the draft laws as well as previous amendments to the penal code criminalised speech in a way that was “extremely broad” and “unacceptably vague”.

“These provisions carry extremely severe penalties, which will have a chilling effect on free speech,” said HRW.

The 10-page letter included a detailed analysis by the rights body on how the amendments and bills “violate international standards on upholding the right to free speech and expression”.

If passed in their current form, the laws would “undermine the freedoms that Nepalis fought so hard to achieve” HRW’s South Asia director Meenakshi Ganguly said in a statement.

One proposed piece of legislation, the Media Council Bill, gives the government regulator the power to fine reporters and editors up to a million rupees ($8,600) for violating its code of conduct.

It was tabled in parliament only after an agreement was reached with Nepal’s journalist federation to amend problematic clauses.

There was no immediate response from the government to the HRW letter.

Several journalists, artists and regular citizens have been arrested for online postings or for expressing their political beliefs.

In June, a comedian was detained after a director filed a case against his film review.

…

A convicted hacker who’s serving 10 years in prison for breaking into computer systems of security firms and law-enforcement agencies has been called to testify to a federal grand jury in Virginia.

Supporters of Jeremy Hammond, part of the Anonymous hacking group, say he’s been summoned to testify against his will to a grand jury in Alexandria on Tuesday. Hammond, who admitted leaking hacked data to WikiLeaks, believes the subpoena is related to the investigation of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. Assange is under indictment in Alexandria and the U.S. is seeking extradition.

Prosecutors declined comment.

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was also called to testify to the WikiLeaks grand jury. She refused and is now serving a jail sentence of up to 18 months for civil contempt.

Hammond’s supports say he’ll also refuse to testify.

Hammond was sentenced in 2013 to 10 years in prison for carrying out cyberattacks that targeted Texas-based Strategic Forecasting Inc., known as Stratfor, as well as the FBI’s Virtual Academy, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, and the Jefferson County, Alabama, Sheriff’s Office.

He argued at his sentencing that the hacks were civil disobedience to expose the pervasiveness of government and private surveillance.

Hammond’s supporters, the Jeremy Hammond Support Committee, say he was scheduled to be released at the end of the year after receiving credit for ongoing participation in a drug-abuse program. That participation has now been disrupted and his supporters worry his incarceration could now be extended by more than two years.

“The government’s effort to try to compel Jeremy to testify is punitive and mean-spirited. Jeremy has spent nearly 10 years in prison because of his commitment to his firmly held beliefs. There is no way that he would ever testify before a grand jury,” the group said in its statement.

…

Five years ago, for her 27th birthday, Lorelei Bandrovschi gave up drinking for a month on a dare. She was a casual drinker and figured it would be easy. It was, but she hadn’t banked on learning so much about herself in the process.

“I realized that going out without drinking was something that I really enjoyed and that I was very well suited for,” she told The Associated Press. “I realized I’m a pretty extroverted, spontaneous, uninhibited person.”

And that’s how Listen Bar was born on Bleecker Street downtown. At just under a year old, the bar Bandrovschi opens once a month is alcohol-free, one of a growing number of sober bars popping up around the country.

Booze-free bars serving elevated “mocktails” are attracting more young people than ever before, especially women. The uptick comes as fewer people overall are drinking away from home and the #MeToo movement has women seeking a more comfortable bar environment, said Amanda Topper, associate director of food-service research for the global market research firm Mintel.

Mocktails aren’t just proliferating at sober bars. Regular bars and restaurants are cluing into the idea that alcohol-free customers want more than a Shirley Temple or a splash of cranberry with a spritz.

Alcohol-free mixed drinks grew 35 percent as a beverage type on the menus of bars and restaurants from 2016 to this year, according to Mintel. Topper said 17 percent of 1,288 people surveyed between the ages of 22 to 24 who drink away from home said they’re interested in mocktails.

The interest, she said, is also driven in part by the health and wellness movement, and higher quality ingredients as bartenders take mocktails more seriously.

“It really started a few years ago with the whole idea of dry January, when consumers cut out alcohol for that month,” Topper said. “It’s shifted to a long-term movement and lifestyle choice.”

Listen Bar recently hosted a mocktail competition for mixologists, who whipped up drinks that included The Holy Would, comprised of citrusy, distilled, non-alcoholic Seedlip Grove 42, palo santo syrup, low-acid apple juice, lemon and lime bitters produced with glycerin, and verjus, the pressed juice of unripened grapes. The drink is the brainchild of Fred Beebe, a bartender at Sunday in Brooklyn. The restaurant isn’t alcohol-free, but Beebe helped create an extensive mocktail menu that goes well beyond the sugary choices of yore, using unique ingredients.

Palo santo, for instance, is a tree native to Peru, Venezuela and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula that loosely translates to “holy wood” and is widely used in folk remedies.

“Everybody should be able to have a delicious drink at a bar,” Beebe said. “Hospitality is making sure everybody has a good time. Alcohol, for me, is not the most important part of a cocktail anymore. The cool juices and syrups and tinctures and mixtures and all that stuff makes a lot of the fun.”

Listen Bar has enjoyed packed houses every month. Photographer Zach Hilty, 40, was a first-time customer on competition night. He said he drinks alcohol occasionally.

“My girlfriend and I are interested in the health benefits of different botanicals and such,” he said.

Cat Tjan, 27, of Jersey City, New Jersey, was also on hand and brought a colleague, Ammar Farooqi, 26, from Williamstown in southern New Jersey. Neither drinks alcohol. Tjan said Listen Bar is the only sober bar she could find in Manhattan, where she works for a drug company.

“I have no interest in it,” she said of booze. “It’s not particularly fun. It’s very expensive. There are better ways to have a good night out.”

Many bartenders will mix up regular cocktails and just leave out the alcohol if you ask, but that’s different than choosing something conceived as virgin from a separate menu, Farooqi said. Mocktails generally cost a few dollars less than cocktails, but separate menus are still hard to find.

At the sober bar Getaway in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, mocktails go for $13 a pop. There’s the Paper Train, with lemon juice, tobacco syrup (from the leaf and containing no nicotine), vanilla and San Pellegrino Chinotto. And there’s A Trip to Ikea, a mix of lingonberry, lemon, vanilla, cardamom and cream. Getaway opened in April in a permanent space.

“Weekends are generally really busy,” said co-owner Regina Dellea. “My business partner’s brother is in recovery, and when he first got sober they missed having a space to hang out in at night, where you can meet up and just talk.”

Mainstream suppliers are catching on. Beer companies are experimenting with alcohol-free selections, and Coca-Cola North America gobbled up the popular Topo Chico premium sparkling mineral water. The U.K.’s Seedlip brand bills itself as the world’s first non-alcoholic spirits. It comes in three flavor profiles with ingredients like hand-picked peas from founder Ben Branson’s farm in the English countryside.

At Listen Bar, Tjan and Farooqi sipped on a mocktail dubbed Me, A Houseplant, a green concoction comprised of Seedlip’s Garden 108 variety (the one with the peas), cucumber, lemon and elderflower. Each glass was garnished with a hefty cucumber slice. It was thought up by Jack McGarry, co-founder of the booze-serving Dead Rabbit bar in lower Manhattan and a well-known mixologist.

McGarry is also three years sober. At Listen Bar’s “Good AF Awards,” he was one of the judges, clipboard in hand.

“Alcohol-free used to be very simplistic with, like, homemade lemonades and ginger ales. People are wanting more diverse offerings,” he said. “I’m intrigued at how it will all shake out. I’ve seen lots of trends come and go. When people come in asking for non-alcoholic drinks, we have a bunch of drinks that have been thought out.”

Chris Marshall in Austin, Texas, has been sober since 2007. He was once a drug and alcohol counselor whose clients often shared their frustration at not having an alcohol-free nightspot to frequent. They were his motivation for founding Sans Bar in Austin, with pop-ups all over the country, including Anchorage, Kansas City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Seattle, New York, Nashville and St. Louis.

“The response is just overwhelming,” he said. “We’re taking out community spaces, coffee shops and places like that. The lack of a social circle is the one thing so many of my clients lacked after treatment.”

Marnie Rae Clark, who lives outside Seattle, is also a recovering alcoholic. She’s experienced the struggle of socializing while sober and started a blog about the sober lifestyle in 2017. She founded National Mocktail Week this year. Part of her mission is to encourage bars and restaurants to up their mocktail games.

“I just want to be able to go out with my friends and have a nice grown-up sophisticated cocktail,” said the 51-year-old Clark. “It’s really about promoting inclusion and connection in the hospitality industry.”

…

Thousands of jihadis are set to seek sanctuary in Turkey with Damascus’ forces laying siege to Idlib, the last Syrian rebel enclave. With Damascus determined to take control of all of Syria, analysts warn it’s only a matter of time before Turkey faces an exodus of not only refugees, but also the arrival of extremist fighters, posing a significant security threat to the country.

Syrian government forces are steadily tightening their grip on Idlib province, the last pocket of the rebel resistance. It’s estimated about 3 million Syrians are holed up in the enclave, of which half have fled fighting in other parts of Syria.

“It poses a huge threat, roughly half-a-million refugees are piled at the border in ramshackle refugee camps,” said analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners.

“If [Syrian President Bashar Hafez al-] Assad moves north and captures Idlib city, these people will flock to Turkey, and there is no way we cannot accept them. In addition to that, maybe 40,000, maybe 60,000 extremely vicious fundamentalists will mix in with them and enter Turkey, adding to the instability in the border region.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, meeting in Moscow last week with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, did buy some time. Following the meeting, Assad forces announced a cease-fire following their latest offensive. Local reports, however, claim Erdogan failed to persuade Putin to agree to a complete end to hostilities in Idlib.

While backing rival sides in the Syrian civil war, Erdogan has developed a close relationship with Putin, built partly by cooperating to end the conflict. That cooperation is leading to growing disillusionment toward Turkey among radical Syrian rebel groups.

Last week, Turkish forces used tear gas and water cannons to break up protests by Syrians on Turkey’s border. Many protesters chanted anti-Erdogan slogans and burned images of the Turkish president.

Fear of force

Analysts say anger toward Turkey may not be confined to demonstrations. “For the last seven years, the Turkish government has been supporting them [Syrian rebels]. But they have come to the feeling they’ve been betrayed,” said former Turkish general Haldun Solmazturk.

“They will use terror to force the Turkish government to support them again, using bombs, suicide bombings, perhaps some other terrorist attacks.”

In 2016, Istanbul suffered a wave of terror attacks by Islamic State, including an assault on the city’s main airport, killing 45, and culminating in a shooter opening fire on New Year’s Eve revelers at a nightclub.

Turkish security forces have successfully thwarted further attacks and arrested hundreds of jihadis across the country. Analyst Yesilada warns, though, a significant exodus from Idlib poses a security nightmare.

“You cut your beard, and you drop your weapon somewhere, how are you going to distinguish them as jihadis?” Yesilada said.

“Turks don’t speak Arabic, none of our officials, police, border control, military, they don’t have Arabic-speaking personnel. Unless our spy agency did outstanding work, I would say maybe more than 50%, maybe 75% will make their way to Turkey.”

With Turkey already hosting more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees in its main cities, tracking down the jihadis is seen as an incredibly difficult feat.

“It’s already difficult, and it will become extremely difficult,” said Solmazturk, who now heads the Ankara-based 21st Century Institute research institution . “The main challenge is the environment; it is so challenging. These radical elements can easily escape into the Syrian population. In certain areas within Turkey, the Syrian nationals represent the majority.”

Gateway to Europe

A western diplomat responsible for security issues, speaking anonymously, said the jihadi threat posed by an exodus from Idlib would not be confined to Turkey, with the country acting as a gateway to Europe. Some jihadis holed up in Idlib are believed to be European nationals.

Solmazturk suggests the creation of a buffer zone in Idlib, along Turkey’s border, to house the refugees. He says that would allow security forces time to process the Syrians.

Analysts point out, however, that Putin insists Ankara must directly negotiate with Damascus on the creation of any buffer or safe zones in Syria. Turkey severed diplomatic relations with Syria at the outset of the civil war.

Turkish security forces are continuing to grapple with the existing Islamic State threat inside Turkey. According to a security source, a major terror attack was recently averted hours before the assault was to be launched.

With analysts warning that Turkey is still paying the economic price of previous attacks, the financial consequences of another wave of terrorism would be severe.

“It would be devastating,” Yesilada said. “Tourism took three years to recover from the 2016 spate of attacks. The numbers have recovered, but revenue never did, so revenue is down in dollar terms 15% or 20% per tourist. So another attack, whether it’s now or winter, would dash any hope of recovery.”

With Syrians continuing to build on the Turkish border and Damascus’ forces expected to resume their Idlib offensive, analysts warn time is not on Ankara’s side.

…

At least five people have died in the Bahamas’ Abaco Islands as Hurricane Dorian continues to pound the area as a Category 4 storm.

Bahamas Prime Minister Hubert Minnis confirmed the deaths and said people in nearby Great Bahama Island also are in serious danger with many homes and buildings damaged or destroyed. Some 13,000 houses are feared damaged or destroyed, according to the International Red Cross.
 
“We are in the midst of a historic tragedy,” he said.
 
And the danger is likely to continue as Hurricane Dorian is in no hurry to go anywhere.

As of late Monday, the storm was stalled over the Bahamas and forecasters say it continue pounding the islands with massive rainfall and powerful winds throughout the night and into Tuesday.

Dorian’s top sustained winds are at 230 kilometers per hour.

Dorian is the strongest Atlantic hurricane to strike land in 84 years and the worst ever to hit the Bahamas.

Those who are able to get through to rescuers say their homes have been destroyed, severely damaged, or are flooded up to the roofs. Most power has been knocked out. The Bahamas Power and Light utility says its office on Great Abaco was destroyed.

Forecasters say Dorian is expected to remain a Category 4 as it moves “dangerously close” to the east coast of Florida late Tuesday and Georgia and South Carolina coasts Wednesday and Thursday.

Hurricane warnings are posted from just north of Miami to the Florida-Georgia border. About one-million people from Florida into South Carolina have been ordered to evacuate.

A National Guard spokesman says there has been almost no resistance from people being told they have to get out.

“People do understand that Dorian is nothing to mess around with,” he said.

Even if Dorian does not make landfall on the Atlantic Coast, the storm’s hurricane-force winds extend 56 kilometers to the west. Towns and cities can still expect up to 25 centimeters of rain, life-threatening flash floods, and some tornadoes.

Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, Jared Moskowitz says “Hurricane Dorian is the strongest storm to ever threaten the state of Florida on the east coast. No matter what path this storm takes, our state will be impacted.

Forecasters predict Dorian will remain a hurricane as it moves up the Atlantic seaboard this week. Forecast maps show the storm reaching an area off Nova Scotia, Canada by Saturday.

…

An environmental spat between France and Brazil, rolling in questions about integrity, colonialism and Bic pens, shows signs of deepening with calls by dozens of French lawmakers and environmental groups to slap trade sanctions on Brazilian beef and soybeans. 

In a petition published Sunday in France’s weekly Le Journal du Dimanche, the group also called on the European Union to suspend a recently agreed Mercosur trade deal with South America and take broader steps barring products issued from deforestation and other environmentally harmful activities from entering the European market.

“What is lacking is political will” in France and elsewhere in Europe in ensuring green commerce, wrote the group of signatories, who included members of French President Emmanuel Macron’s La Republique en Marche (LREM) party.

While opposition to trade pacts is nothing new, the backlash to Mercosur comes at a time when other trade spats, including between the U.S. and China and Japan and South Korea, are also making headlines. And, some analysts say, it reflects growing alarm of ordinary Europeans about the social and environmental impacts of trade deals that is resonating among their leaders. 

“Europeans are very concerned about climate and human rights, and the Bolsonaro administration’s policies are going in all the wrong directions,” said Uri Dadush, senior fellow at Brussels-based economic think-tank Bruegel, referring to Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro. “That’s a different dimension from the trade agreement, but the two are becoming linked.” 

G-7 and wildfires

The citizen pushback adds kindling to a diplomatic dispute that ignited last month when G-7 host Macron added Amazon wildfires to the summit’s agenda, claiming their environmental impact was of global concern. The move, along with Macron’s threat to block the Mercosur trade deal over Amazon inaction, spiraled into trans-Atlantic barbs, ranging from Bolsonaro’s accusations of colonialism and an apparent slur targeting Macron’s wife, to claims the Brazilian leader lied over climate change promises. 

More recently, Bolsonaro — who conditioned accepting some $20 million in G-7 aid to fight Amazon fires to Macron’s apologizing for calling him rude — announced he would stop using French Bics, although the pens sold in Brazil are manufactured locally.

Beyond the mud slinging, however, environmentalists hope the wildfires will nudge European leaders into a bigger rethink of Mercosur. 

“We saw Europe was inclined to sign the treaty,” said Adelie Favrel, forest specialist for NGO France Nature Environnement, one of the signatories of the Amazon petition. “If deforestation had not become center stage, with the media talking about it, these environmental concerns might not have been raised.”

She and others are demanding France enforce a two-year-old law requiring companies to mitigate the environmental and human rights consequences of their actions — such as importing soybeans that may contribute to the Amazon’s deforestation — and that EU countries adopt similar legislation. 

A separate French petition to boycott companies supporting Bolsonaro’s government has recently collected nearly 2,000 signatories. More broadly, a number of U.S. and European countries have paused or reconsidered financial deals with Brazil over the Amazon fires, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reports. 

Mercosur trade agreement 

Still Europe is divided over linking the Mercosur pact to Amazon action. Along with France, Luxembourg and Ireland have similarly threatened to block it. But powerhouse Germany counts among other EU members opposed to such a move. 

“We’re not going to attack the climate challenge by refusing to do trade,” European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom told Le Monde newspaper. 

Macron initially gave a thumbs up to the Mercosur trade agreement signed in June between the EU and four South American nations after years of talks. But the good will vanished with the Amazon fires, as the French leader accused Bolsonaro of “lying” over climate change promises made just weeks before.

The French president has earned kudos overseas for spearheading a green agenda, including his iconic “Make the Planet Great Again” twist to the Trump administration’s America-first agenda. But at home, critics claim Macron has failed to match rhetoric with deeds. His popular environment minister Nicolas Hulot quit a year ago, citing lack of progress on climate and other green goals. 

“Macron’s talked a lot about being an environmental champion, but we haven’t seen any action,” said environmentalist Favrel. “If the EU ultimately signs Mercosur without any concrete changes, it will be the same as what’s happened in France.” 

Dadush of Bruegel thinks Mercosur faces challenges for other reasons. Other powerful interest groups, including European farmers, are against the deal. Brazil has threatened to pull out of Mercosur if Argentina’s opposition wins next month’s presidential elections.  

“The agreement overall is under significant risk,” he said, “and the fires in the Amazon do not help at all.” 

…

The Lebanon-Israel border was mostly calm with U.N. peacekeepers patrolling the border Monday, a day after the Lebanese militant Hezbollah group fired a barrage of anti-tank missiles into Israel in response to earlier attacks, triggering Israeli artillery fire.

The missile attack into Israel on Sunday did not inflict any casualties on the Israeli side. It came after Hezbollah vowed to retaliate for an Israeli airstrike that killed two Hezbollah operatives in Syria and an Israeli drone strike on the group’s stronghold south of Beirut in late August.  

No one was hurt by the Israeli artillery fire, which lasted about two hours and hit fields near the border village of Maroun el-Ras and the nearby village of Yaroun.

“The message is clear. If you launch an aggression, then all your border, soldiers and deep inside [Israel] will be part of our retaliation,” Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a speech Monday night.

He said that in the future the group could strike anywhere along the border, and would shoot down any Israeli drones that enter Lebanese airspace.

Hezbollah has for years limited its cross-border attacks to an area known as Chebaa Farms, which Israel captured from Syria in 1967 and which Lebanon claims. 
 
In 2006, a Hezbollah attack on Israel that targeted an area outside Chebaa Farms ended up triggering a monthlong war that killed hundreds of people. Despite their deep hostility, the two sides have largely refrained from direct fighting for the past 13 years.

Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000, ending an 18-year occupation.

In Maroun el-Ras, residents inspected their tobacco and olive fields early Monday, some of which were burned by the Israeli fire. 
 
Shortly before noon, a foot patrol of U.N. peacekeepers was seen near the border fence, searching the sides of a road with metal detectors apparently to make sure there were no unexploded shells. A U.N. helicopter flew overhead while an armored personnel carrier followed the peacekeepers. 
 
Ahmad Alawiyeh, a 45-year-old merchant, was in the village with his son and daughter standing in an area overlooking his plot of land close to the fence. His field didn’t sustain much damage as he hadn’t planted tobacco or olive trees like the two adjacent, burnt plots. 
 
“This is a victory and pride for us,” he said, referring to Hezbollah’s attack on Israel. Alawiyeh has been living between his hometown and Beirut since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

On the Israeli side of the border, civilian cars were seen from a distance driving through a village. 
 

On Sunday, Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kohavi, met with the commander of the U.N. peacekeeping force, Maj. Gen. Stefano Del Col. 
 
“We will not accept neither attacks on our civilians or soldiers,” Kohavi said, adding that the Lebanese government and the U.N. peacekeepers “must bring Iran and Hezbollah’s precision guided missile manufacturing project to its end.”

The Israeli army believes that Iran and Hezbollah are racing to establish missile-production factories in Lebanon — a claim that Hezbollah denies.

Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, said that he spoke to his German counterpart, Heiko Maas, and asked him to relay a message to Beirut. Katz’s office said he made clear that Israel has no desire to escalate the situation, but that Israel is prepared to respond intensely to any attack, and would hold Lebanon responsible.

“If you don’t block Hezbollah’s activity against Israel, all of Lebanon will be hit and severely harmed,” Katz said.

Maroun el-Ras witnessed some of the most intense battles between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters during the 34-day war they fought in 2006.

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Sunday talked with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and also an adviser to French President Emmanuel Macron, urging the international community to calm the situation.

Israel considers Iran to be its greatest enemy, and Iran-backed Hezbollah to be its most immediate military threat. Hezbollah has a battle-tested army that has been fighting alongside the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria’s civil war, and it is believed to possess an arsenal of some 130,000 missiles and rockets.

Throughout the Syrian war, Israel has acknowledged carrying out scores of airstrikes in Syria aimed at preventing alleged Iranian arms transfers to Hezbollah. But in recent weeks, Israel is believed to have widened its campaign and struck Iranian or Hezbollah targets in Iraq and Lebanon as well.

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