1 Crisis pulls US towards Iraq (Martin Chulov in The
Guardian) Barack Obama has set the stage for renewed US military action in Iraq
after the authorities in Baghdad proved powerless to stop relentless Islamist
insurgents from seizing further swaths of a country in danger of breaking
apart. The US president said his national security chiefs were looking at any
and every way they could help the Iraqi authorities take the fight to thousands
of Sunni jihadists who have seized three of the country's biggest cities and
vowed to march on Baghdad.
US troops withdrew from Iraq in late 2011 after an
eight-year occupation of the country that began with the 2003 invasion. On
Thursday the US began airlifting planeloads of its citizens from Iraq. Kurdish
fighters poured into the disputed northern city of Kirkuk to head off the
militants from Isis, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, whose fighters
have surged through the north in recent days, encountering little or no
resistance from Iraqi army troops who have deserted in their thousands.
The streets of Baghdad were eerie and empty as Isis
members took to social media taunting residents that they were advancing
towards the capital. Local people have been stockpiling food, fearing that a
much talked about enemy is almost at the city's gates. Iraqi officials estimate
the total number of Isis forces in Iraq at around 6,000, spread between Mosul,
Ramadi, Falluja, Tikrit and the surrounding countryside.
Isis has been handing out flyers in the towns it has
seized assuring residents who have remained that it is there to protect their
interests. The campaign for hearts and minds is gaining some traction, with
some residents railing against perceived injustices at the hands of the Shia
majority government. But on Thursday it said it would introduce sharia law in
Mosul and other towns, warning women to stay indoors and threatening to cut off
the hands of thieves. "People, you have tried secular regimes ... This is
now the era of the Islamic State," it proclaimed.
2 Syria slides to Somalia-like future (Khaleej
Times) Over the last four days, the Syrian civil war has taken a dramatic turn.
The first major rebel attack with tanks and artillery has been reported in the
south of the country, and appears to have been staged against an important
Syrian army position in Deraa, which is due south of Damascus. From all
accounts, this is the first time in the more than three-year-old war that the
rebels have fielded a large, well-ordered force armed with tanks and heavy
mortars.
More than 160,000 people have been killed in the
conflict, which grew out of protests against President Bashar Al Assad in March
2011 that are seen as having been inspired by uprisings in the wider Arab
world. Outside the immediate region and the Middle East, several countries that
have sought to foster a peace deal have in fact misjudged the Syrian crisis;
they expected President Assad’s rule to crumble as other leaders’ had done in
the Middle East within the last five years.
The fear now is that Syria is descending into a
Somalia-style territory run partially by warlords, and that such a possible
future poses a grave threat to the Middle East. There is already a humanitarian
crisis caused by the three years of conflict. The number of Syrian refugees
registered in Lebanon exceeded one million this April, in what the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees called a “devastating milestone” for Lebanon, itself
a small country.
3 Tesla releases patents to all (Julie Balise in San
Francisco Chronicle) Tesla Motors will not pursue patent lawsuits against other
automakers that use its electric car technology in good faith, CEO Elon Musk
wrote in a blog post. The company originally patented its technology to prevent
major manufacturers from using their manufacturing, sales, and marketing
resources to overwhelm Tesla. This has not proven to be the case, according to
Musk.
Zero emission cars make up a small part of sales for
major automakers, Musk wrote, with only a few companies producing a limited
volume of models that have limited range. Manufacturers produce almost 100
million new vehicles per year. Tesla can’t make electric vehicles fast enough
to “address the carbon crisis,” Musk wrote.
“Our true competition is not the small trickle of
non-Tesla electric cars being produced, but rather the enormous flood of
gasoline cars pouring out of the world’s factories every day,” Musk wrote.
4 Why women are being hanged in India (Geeta Pandey
on BBC) Four women have been found hanging from trees in remote villages in the
Indian state of Uttar Pradesh in the last fortnight. The families of at least
three of the dead, two of them teenage cousins, have alleged that they were
murdered after being raped. Is this spate of grisly murders new? Such crimes
are not new to Uttar Pradesh, indeed to India.
As a young girl, when I visited my grandparents in
my tiny ancestral village in Pratapgarh district in the state during my annual
summer vacations, I sometimes heard my mother and our neighbours talk about
assaults on women. The perpetrators were almost always men from my community -
high-caste Brahmins. And the victims were almost always lower-caste or Dalit
(formerly untouchable) women. Nobody went to the police because, as my mother
said, they were often considered part of the problem.
Certainly in the years since my childhood, things
have changed - slowly, but surely. Could stricter rape laws actually be part of
the problem? Some campaigners say it could be making women more vulnerable. The
victims are being killed because the rapists want to finish off the main
witness, they say.
Why are the women being hanged? Some say this might
appear the easiest way to attackers to get rid of evidence and pass murder off
as suicide. But police and state administration officials disagree and suggest
in some cases guilty families are trying to pass "honour killings"
off as rape and murder. The head of forensic medicine and toxicology at Delhi's
AIIMS hospital says hanging is "generally a method of suicide" and is
"very rarely" used for murder.
"To hang someone is not easy," Dr Sudhir
Kumar Gupta says, but adds, "unless someone is totally defenceless and
unconscious." I ask him if the group of men who allegedly killed two
teenage cousins last month could have beaten them into submission before
hanging them? "Maybe," he says.
Why Uttar Pradesh? India's most populous state with
more than 200 million people is also one of the poorest states with more than
40% of its population living below the poverty line. Like much of north India,
the state is still largely patriarchal and feudal and women are regarded as
inferior to men. Two weeks ago, when a photograph of the two teenage cousins
hanging from the branches of a mango tree appeared on news websites and social
media, there was outrage across India.
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