Month: February 2014

Joshua Hersh details it:

For foreign journalists, who were tolerated under the Brotherhood but have never been viewed with great affection in Cairo, the steep decline in working conditions hit bottom in December, when the police busted down the door of an upscale hotel suite that served as the offices for Al Jazeera’s English-language channel and dragged away the staff. The detained reporters, including the Egyptian-Canadian bureau chief, Mohamed Fahmy, and Peter Greste, an Australian correspondent, were swiftly dubbed “the Marriott terror cell”—a moniker adopted by both the state and private media, which have overwhelmingly supported the military since Morsi’s overthrow. The sweeping litany of charges against the Al Jazeera employees—“disturbing public peace, instilling terror, harming the general interests of the country, possessing broadcast equipment without permit, possessing and disseminating images contrary to the truth”—leave the impression that just about any act of journalism, particularly if it involves speaking to members of the Brotherhood, could be considered a crime.

Dan Murphy fears this could be the beginning of a larger crackdown:

Egypt’s State Information Service (SIS) sent an explanatory note to the foreign press last week that claimed freedom of expression is guaranteed in Egypt, but the note is littered with caveats and get-out clauses. It reads, “Egyptian law ensures (press) freedoms completely and does not penalize for thought and opinion unless this thought turns really to a materialistic behavior that the Egyptian Penal code forbids. And this falls within the crimes that threaten the country’s national security and its benefits.”

Everything that follows “unless” in that sentence means that press freedoms aren’t guaranteed at all. …

The government may be leading the charge against reporters, but the effort for now is a popular one. Minor assaults of reporters, once unthinkable there, have become frequent occurrences when covering protests. Although Al Jazeera is a particular target for the government since the network is owned by Qatar, a supporter of the Brotherhood, that’s no guarantee that spurious charges of “false news” won’t be used to target other reporters.

Judis outlines it:

The agreement would permit between 75 and 80 percent of Israeli settlers in the West Bank through land swaps. What settlements would remain, and what Israel would cede was not discussed in the briefings, but it’s likely that large settlements like Maale Adumim, where the controversial Soda Stream is produced, will become part of Israel under the agreement. …

Palestinian refugees would receive some kind of compensation, but so would Jewish refugees who fled, and in many cases were forced to flee, places like Iraq Syria, and Egypt after 1947. (Estimates are that about 500,000 of these refugees settled in Israel between 1947 and 1972.) That provision, one of the Jewish leaders commented, was meant as a “sweetener” to the Israelis. The Palestinians would recognize Israel as the nation of the Jewish people, and the Israelis would recognize Palestine as the nation of the Palestinian people. But one critical issue was left vague and unresolved. The framework will not propose a way of dealing with the future of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and Palestine. “That’s the biggie,” one person involved in the calls commented.

Adam Garfinkle doubts this effort will produce an agreement:

I hope this works, but I’m skeptical. My sense is that the sides are still about as far apart as ever on all the key issues. I’m disappointed to hear that Kerry buys into the recent Israeli demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which strikes me as a gratuitous and costly addition to the negotiating burden. I’m happy in theory that the Palestinian side has apparently agreed to allow discussion of compensation for Jews who left Arab countries after 1947-48, but in practice this is liable to raise an enormous can of worms given the diversity of the historical cases, and, like the “Jewish” state business, raise the cost to Israel in other ways of getting a deal that is sound on security grounds.

Stephen Cook expects the settlement issue to get in the way:

Based on Judis’ reporting, 75 percent of the settlers would remain under Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank through land swaps along with a residual military presence in the Jordan Valley for anywhere from 3 to 10 years and a host of other security guarantees.  What will become of the remaining settlers is left open to question. Still, that is a lot of people no matter what method is used to count the settlers. The Palestinians would be hard-pressed to like this deal, but their views do not actually matter much. The Israelis hold virtually every card, and given the configuration of Israeli politics where the right has brought down successive prime ministers, it is highly unlikely that the issue of continued settlements will hinge on whether Scarlett Johansson is hawking SodaStream or not.

Bob Dreyfuss doubts AIPAC has the strength to fight the plan:

First, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee tried, and utterly failed, to destroy President Obama’s critical diplomatic dialogue with Iran by pushing for a new economic sanctions bill that would have ended the US-Iran talks. Now, AIPAC will have to face a real, existential challenge, namely, the about-to-be-released “framework agreement” for the Israel-Palestine conflict, a framework developed by Secretary of State John Kerry over months of shuttle diplomacy into the region. If AIPAC hadn’t confronted the White House over Iran—and lost—it might have more muscle now to fight the Obama-Kerry plan for Israel-Palestine. Instead, AIPAC has alienated the White House and, no doubt, lost credibility with some members of Congress, especially in the Democratic Party, who’ve traditionally followed AIPAC’s lead on the Middle East.

Hassan Barari sees it as a lose-lose for Abbas:

Now, it is obvious that the Palestinian leader is in a dilemma. If he accepts that framework, he will face enormous Palestinian opposition and he will go down to history as a “sell out.” Nevertheless, if he turns down the framework deal, he will be blamed for the failure of Kerry’s effort. What makes matter worse for the Palestinian side is that even accepting the framework deal will not automatically lead to an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. It can only be a means for extracting enormous concessions from the Palestinians without real quid pro quo. Long time observers of the Arab-Israeli conflict argue that the framework can only keep the negotiations on for yet another year without real success.

The State Department’s Environmental Impact Report on the Keystone XL pipeline, released on Friday, concludes that the project won’t have any significant effect on carbon emissions:

The pipeline, which would carry 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the Gulf coast, has been attacked as the release valve for the more carbon-intensive bitumen that is fueling Canada’s energy boom. While the heavy crude coming from the Alberta fields would release roughly 17 percent more carbon than the heavy crude it would displace from U.S. refineries, the report claims that Keystone “remains unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands, or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the United States.” In short, the oil is coming out one way or another — it’s only a matter of how it travels.

Plumer digs into the report:

More specifically: The 830,000 barrels of oil that the pipeline would transport each day would add an extra 1.3 million to 27.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year. That’s a whole lot of carbon — it’s like putting an extra 250,000 to 5.5 million cars on the road. But the key question is how much of that oil would get burned anyway, even if the pipeline is blocked. And the State Department believes most of it will get produced regardless.

Joshua Green notices that the much-touted job creating effect of the pipeline isn’t expected to last long:

The State Department concluded that the project would create 42,100 temporary jobs during the two-year construction period. But the report says once the pipeline enters service, it will support only 50 U.S. jobs—35 permanent employees and 15 temporary contractors.

And Heather Smith points out that this report isn’t necessarily the final word:

The State Department, which prepared the EIR, is also due to release the results of an investigation by the Inspector General into the review’s first draft, which turned out to be written by a contractor who had also done work in the not-too-distant-past for TransCanada, the company that wants to build KXL. If the investigation finds a conflict of interest, the State Department may be forced to do an entirely new EIR.

The politics make approving or rejecting the pipeline a tricky call for Obama:

A group of big Democratic donors, including Esprit co-founder Susie Tompkins Buell and Taco Bell heir and Democracy Alliance head Rob McKay, have publicly pressured Obama to reject the pipeline. Billionaire Tom Steyer, who poured money to help Terry McAuliffe win the Virginia governor’s race last year, ran an anti-Keystone ad during the State of the Union and is expected to spend millions of dollars more.

But Obama isn’t running again and several moderate Senate Democrats, including Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich, Mark Pryor and Kay Hagan, already support building the pipeline. It’d take an anti-Obama talking point off the table and avoid the possibility of an international spat with Canada.

Greens also realistically have nowhere to go — even if disappointed on one issue, a Democratic president and Senate is far better than anything the GOP can offer them.

Chait sees blocking Keystone as a losing issue for environmentalists:

[Ryan] Cooper mockingly asks readers to envision a protest where organizers shout,“What do we want?” “More stringent carbon dioxide emission regulations on extant coal-fired power plants!” “When do we want it?’ “After the extraordinarily complicated rule-writing process over which the president has no direct control!” It certainly may be easier to get people excited about opposing a pipeline. It may also be hard to get people excited about favoring new regulations.

But if your goal is to limit greenhouse-gas emissions, you need to have a strategy designed to advance policies that limit greenhouse-gas emissions. Stopping Keystone doesn’t do that. EPA regulations would. Would blocking the Keystone pipeline make it easier for Obama to issue tough regulations on existing power plants, and to negotiate an international climate treaty in 2015 after such regulations bring us into compliance with our reduction targets? I don’t see how.

Ryan Cooper counters:

Now, it is true that fighting individual pipelines one by one is a pretty dumb strategy if one’s goal is stopping climate change by that method alone. Oil companies will always win in the end at that game. Of course, that has never ever been the long-term strategy for Bill McKibben (who knows all about EPA regulations, even mentioning them before Keystone in this piece) and the other Keystone activists. The point is to use Keystone as a coordination point to create political pressure on the administration to take more drastic action. In that, they’ve already succeeded.

Exciting news for all you classicists out there:

Fragments of two previously unknown poems by seventh-century Greek lyric poetess Sappho have been discovered on an ancient papyrus. An anonymous private collector owned the papyrus, which dates back to the 3rd century A.D. He showed the tattered fragments to Dr. Dirk Obbink, a classicist at Oxford University, who recognized its significance and asked for permission to publish it. Dr. Obbink’s article will appear in a scholarly journal this spring, but an online version of one of the poems is already available via the Guardian. The first of the two poems mentions “Charazos” and “Larichos,” the names given to Sappho’s brothers in the ancient tradition. The second poem is a fragment of a piece about unrequited love.

Tom Payne, who provides a translation of the first poem, marvels at its integrity:

What we have of Sappho has often survived because ancient critics and philologists quoted her, so that we have a word here and a line there. (This has a musical quality of its own: Hugh Kenner called it “the poesis of loss,” and Anne Carson evoked these beguiling gaps in her 2003 edition of Sappho: If Not, Winter.) This poem comes with nine lines of another one, which would have been exciting enough on their own – they show Sappho using words typical of her other poems such as longing and desire, and addressing Aphrodite.

It’s also exciting to have something like a story.

It is a formula of sorts, and its wish that her brother sail back safely from his mission is a frequent trope in the verse of the stormy ancient Mediterranean. But it has an urgency that makes us sense the real Sappho. … And that’s why new glimpses of Sappho will always be thrilling. It’s not just that it’s new ancient poetry; it’s poetry that the ancients loved because it felt so new.

Laura Swift, elated by the discovery, wonders what else is out there:

There are thousands of unpublished papyrus fragments in university collections. Many of them come from Greco-Roman settlements in Egypt, where the dry sands preserved discarded books and papers that would have rotted in the damp soil of Europe. Still, it’s rare to find something as substantial and as well preserved as this new discovery, and papyrologists often have to satisfy themselves with a few tattered lines. Undergraduates studying classical literature are often told the depressing statistic that at least 90 percent of it has been lost.

The thread that connects us to the ancient past is incredibly fragile, and it could be broken each time a medieval monk decided not to copy a text, a fire or flood destroyed a precious manuscript collection, or a book failed to make it onto a school syllabus. But if this papyrus survived, who knows what other lost gems may be waiting in libraries, archives, or tucked away in basements or attics?

(Image of “Saphhos’ poem “An Old Age” (lines 9-20). Papyrus from 3 cent. B.C.” – not one of the newly discovered texts – via Wikimedia Commons)