US: American fighters in Syria pose a security risk
Posted by EMERY P. DALESIO on November 30, 2013
newsobserver.com
RALEIGH — Federal officials say Americans are joining the bloody civil war in Syria, raising the chances they could become radicalized by al-Qaida-linked militant groups and return to the U.S. as battle-hardened security risks.
The State Department says it has no estimates of how many Americans have taken up weapons to fight military units loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad in the conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people over 2 1/2 years. Other estimates – from an arm of the British defense consultant IHS Jane’s and from experts at a nonprofit think tank in London – put the number of Americans at a couple dozen. The IHS group says al-Qaida-linked fighters number about 15,000, with total anti-Assad force at 100,000 or more.
This year, at least three Americans have been charged with planning to fight beside Jabhat al-Nusrah – a radical Islamic organization that the U.S. considers a foreign terrorist group – against Assad. The most recent case involves a Pakistan-born North Carolina man arrested on his way to Lebanon.
At a Senate homeland security committee hearing this month, Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., said: “We know that American citizens as well as Canadian and European nationals have taken up arms in Syria, in Yemen and in Somalia. The threat that these individuals could return home to carry out attacks is real and troubling.”
The hearing came about two weeks after the FBI and other officers arrested Basit Sheikh, 29, at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport on charges he was on his way to join Jabhat al-Nusrah. Sheikh, a legal resident of the United States, had lived quietly, without a criminal record, in a Raleigh suburb for five years before his Nov. 2 arrest.
A similar arrest came in April in Chicago. And in September, authorities in Virginia released an Army veteran accused of fighting alongside the group after a secret plea deal.
In August, outgoing FBI Director Robert Mueller told ABC News that he was concerned about Americans fighting in Syria, specifically “the associations they will make and, secondly, the expertise they will develop, and whether or not they will utilize those associations, utilize that expertise, to undertake an attack on the homeland.”
Current FBI Director James Comey said this month that he worried about Syria becoming a repeat of Afghanistan in the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion, with foreign fighters attracted there to train. The FBI refused to say whether it’s directed agents to increase efforts to stop Americans bound for Syria.
In the case of Sheikh, his North Carolina home isn’t considered a breeding ground for terrorist activity. But Aaron Zelin, who works for both the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes that Sheikh lived about three hours from the hometown of Samir Khan, the editor of an English-language al-Qaida magazine who was killed in a drone attack in Yemen.
Sheikh is charged with planning to assist a group the State Department has declared a terrorist organization. It’s not illegal for Americans who also hold citizenship in another country to fight in that country’s military. But American citizenship can be lost for voluntarily serving in foreign armed forces hostile to the U.S.
For five months this year, Sheikh didn’t know he was being monitored as he posted messages and videos on Facebook expressing support for jihadi militants fighting Assad’s forces, according to a Nov. 2 sworn affidavit by FBI Special Agent Jason Maslow in support of the warrant to arrest Sheikh.
In August, Sheikh commented to an undercover FBI employee’s posts on a Facebook page promoting Islamic extremism. The two struck up an online relationship, the affidavit said. Sheikh told the informant he planned to trek to Syria to join “a brigade in logistics, managing medical supplies.” Days later, Sheikh said he’d bought a one-way ticket to travel to Turkey in hopes of making contact with people who would get him to Syria.
Sheikh said he backed out because “he could not muster the strength to leave his parents,” the affidavit said. Sheikh said he had traveled to Turkey last year hoping to join the fight in Syria, but became dispirited by his experience with people who claimed to be part of the U.S.-backed Free Syrian Army. After Sheikh expressed online support for Jabhat al-Nusrah and interest in traveling to the war zone, the FBI employee suggested Sheikh contact a person with the group – another FBI informant.
Sheikh made contact, describing Jabhat al-Nusrah as the most disciplined group of anti-Assad fighters, the affidavit said. “I’m not scared,” Sheikh wrote, according to the affidavit. “I’m ready.”
Two federal public defenders appointed to represent Sheikh are barred by court practice from discussing their cases, spokeswoman Elizabeth Luck said. Sheikh’s father, Javed Sheikh, said his son was falsely accused but that he trusts U.S. courts to find the truth.
A federal magistrate ruled that Sheikh should be detained until his trial because there was clear evidence that he wouldn’t appear if released on bond and that there was a “serious risk” to the community if he were freed.
Basit Sheikh’s arraignment is scheduled for January. He could face up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/11/30/3420096/us-american-fighters-in-syria.html#storylink=cpy
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
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Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
01122013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
Saturday, November 30, 2013
WORLD_ SYRIA_ Britain could play key role in destroying Syrian chemical weapons
Britain could play key role in destroying Syrian chemical weapons
Ministers have been briefed about the possibility of helping dispose of Bashar al-Assad's chemical arsenal at two British ports
By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
8:20PM GMT 29 Nov 2013
12 Comments
Britain could play a prominent role in the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons after ministers received briefings from officials on the potential use of facilities at two UK ports to dispose of Bashar-al-Assad's arsenal.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is expected to embrace a set of proposals for destroying the Syrian weapons at meetings next week, and it is understood that incinerator facilities at Southampton and Ellesmere Port could be offered as plants to destroy chemicals shipped from the country.
Half of Syria's 1,300 tonne stockpile is believed to be made up of extremely toxic materials used in making Sarin and Vx gases, as well as a small amount of mustard gas. Those more dangerous chemicals are now set to be destroyed at sea by the US Navy, after public backlashes over the risks of the process forced governments in Finland, Austria and elsewhere to withdraw tentative offers to help.
They will be shipped to a massive specialist US vessel, the MV Cape Ray, where they will be rendered harmless by a process known as hydrolysis, probably while sailing through the Mediterranean.
The rest of the arsenal is made up of chemicals that pose risks similar to standard industrial materials routinely destroyed by commercial companies - and it is those that could be shipped to Britain.
Related Articles
_ Five dead as immigrant boat sinks off Turkey - 29 Nov 2013
_ Behind the smiles at school for child victims of Syria conflict - 29 Nov 2013
_ Thousands of Syrian children left to survive alone, says UN - 29 Nov 2013
_ Syrian opposition confirms it will attend Geneva peace talks - 27 Nov 2013
_ Hair gel and iPads : what every Syrian jihadi needs - 26 Nov 2013
_ Syrian children narrowly escape shelling in Damascus - 26 Nov 2013
Whitehall officials are understood to have been looking at the idea and a Foreign Office minister was briefed two days ago.
"Broadly there are two different types of materials involved. We welcome plans for the disposal of those materials that do raise chemical weapons proliferation concerns and know that the remainder can be destroyed by standard commercial services," a Foreign Office official said. "We're keeping an eye on it. Ministers are being constantly briefed on this, particularly as the issue is moving so fast."
The maritime destruction plan that the OPCW has been forced to resort to for the most dangerous materials is laden with risks.
"It's not really a waste stream that can be easily dealt with at sea but we can see that it probably has to be done in this way at this stage," said Paul Johnston, principal scientist at Greenpeace Laboratories at Exeter University. "There will be difficulties with the handling procedures and using sea water for hydrolysis onboard such a large vessel. It would have been preferable to have done this on land at one of the specialist sites in the US and Russia."
Activists said the government must prepare the public if any part of the Syrian weapons arsenal is brought to the UK.
"The threat from Syria's chemical weapons may be being dealt with but we need reassurances that treatment and disposal will be safe," said Paul De Zylva of Friends of the Earth. "Historically, the seas have always been used as a dumping ground – out of sight, out of mind. This shows that they are still vulnerable and we should be concerned about any waste dumping, let alone toxic waste like this."
But OPCW officials are set to tell the public next week that tonnes of the material is "common or garden waste" that can be destroyed under standard commercial contracts.
The Hague-base body said more than two dozen companies have expressed their interest in destroying Syria's chemical weapons stockpile after it asked companies to express interest in destroying nearly 800 tonnes of chemicals and 7.7 million litres of effluent, or liquid waste, from the ship.
Timo Piekkari, chief executive at Finland's state-owned Ekokem, said it was ready to work on the material. "We have expressed our interest to bid on some of the chemicals in the list ... that are pretty similar to what we regularly handle," Mr Piekkari said.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a director of Bio-Secure, a consultancy on chemical weapons, said "needless hysteria" in European countries had tied officials hands, hampering international efforts to dispose of the materials by the end of June. The extremely ambitious deadline was set in a ground breaking US deal with Russia which averted military strikes after an August chemical attack that killed hundreds of people in the suburbs of Damascus, and is supposed to see all such weapons removed from the Syrian civil war.
"Most of this stuff is no different from the materials driven up and down the motorways of Britain every day but there is public anxiety out there that needs to be dispelled," he said. "Europe has shouted loudly for chemical weapon destruction but has collectively sat on its hands, leaving the US to come in and do the heavy lifting."
*** VIEW COMMENTS (12)
Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10485302/Britain-could-play-key-role-in-destroying-Syrian-chemical-weapons.html
________
What do you think?
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
01122013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
Ministers have been briefed about the possibility of helping dispose of Bashar al-Assad's chemical arsenal at two British ports
By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
8:20PM GMT 29 Nov 2013
12 Comments
Britain could play a prominent role in the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons after ministers received briefings from officials on the potential use of facilities at two UK ports to dispose of Bashar-al-Assad's arsenal.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is expected to embrace a set of proposals for destroying the Syrian weapons at meetings next week, and it is understood that incinerator facilities at Southampton and Ellesmere Port could be offered as plants to destroy chemicals shipped from the country.
Half of Syria's 1,300 tonne stockpile is believed to be made up of extremely toxic materials used in making Sarin and Vx gases, as well as a small amount of mustard gas. Those more dangerous chemicals are now set to be destroyed at sea by the US Navy, after public backlashes over the risks of the process forced governments in Finland, Austria and elsewhere to withdraw tentative offers to help.
They will be shipped to a massive specialist US vessel, the MV Cape Ray, where they will be rendered harmless by a process known as hydrolysis, probably while sailing through the Mediterranean.
The rest of the arsenal is made up of chemicals that pose risks similar to standard industrial materials routinely destroyed by commercial companies - and it is those that could be shipped to Britain.
Related Articles
_ Five dead as immigrant boat sinks off Turkey - 29 Nov 2013
_ Behind the smiles at school for child victims of Syria conflict - 29 Nov 2013
_ Thousands of Syrian children left to survive alone, says UN - 29 Nov 2013
_ Syrian opposition confirms it will attend Geneva peace talks - 27 Nov 2013
_ Hair gel and iPads : what every Syrian jihadi needs - 26 Nov 2013
_ Syrian children narrowly escape shelling in Damascus - 26 Nov 2013
Whitehall officials are understood to have been looking at the idea and a Foreign Office minister was briefed two days ago.
"Broadly there are two different types of materials involved. We welcome plans for the disposal of those materials that do raise chemical weapons proliferation concerns and know that the remainder can be destroyed by standard commercial services," a Foreign Office official said. "We're keeping an eye on it. Ministers are being constantly briefed on this, particularly as the issue is moving so fast."
The maritime destruction plan that the OPCW has been forced to resort to for the most dangerous materials is laden with risks.
"It's not really a waste stream that can be easily dealt with at sea but we can see that it probably has to be done in this way at this stage," said Paul Johnston, principal scientist at Greenpeace Laboratories at Exeter University. "There will be difficulties with the handling procedures and using sea water for hydrolysis onboard such a large vessel. It would have been preferable to have done this on land at one of the specialist sites in the US and Russia."
Activists said the government must prepare the public if any part of the Syrian weapons arsenal is brought to the UK.
"The threat from Syria's chemical weapons may be being dealt with but we need reassurances that treatment and disposal will be safe," said Paul De Zylva of Friends of the Earth. "Historically, the seas have always been used as a dumping ground – out of sight, out of mind. This shows that they are still vulnerable and we should be concerned about any waste dumping, let alone toxic waste like this."
But OPCW officials are set to tell the public next week that tonnes of the material is "common or garden waste" that can be destroyed under standard commercial contracts.
The Hague-base body said more than two dozen companies have expressed their interest in destroying Syria's chemical weapons stockpile after it asked companies to express interest in destroying nearly 800 tonnes of chemicals and 7.7 million litres of effluent, or liquid waste, from the ship.
Timo Piekkari, chief executive at Finland's state-owned Ekokem, said it was ready to work on the material. "We have expressed our interest to bid on some of the chemicals in the list ... that are pretty similar to what we regularly handle," Mr Piekkari said.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a director of Bio-Secure, a consultancy on chemical weapons, said "needless hysteria" in European countries had tied officials hands, hampering international efforts to dispose of the materials by the end of June. The extremely ambitious deadline was set in a ground breaking US deal with Russia which averted military strikes after an August chemical attack that killed hundreds of people in the suburbs of Damascus, and is supposed to see all such weapons removed from the Syrian civil war.
"Most of this stuff is no different from the materials driven up and down the motorways of Britain every day but there is public anxiety out there that needs to be dispelled," he said. "Europe has shouted loudly for chemical weapon destruction but has collectively sat on its hands, leaving the US to come in and do the heavy lifting."
*** VIEW COMMENTS (12)
Read more: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10485302/Britain-could-play-key-role-in-destroying-Syrian-chemical-weapons.html
________
"Europe has shouted loudly for chemical weapon destruction but has collectively sat on its hands, leaving the US to come in and do the heavy lifting."
What do you think?
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
01122013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
WORLD_ SYRIA_ 20 dead in air raids on Syria's Aleppo province
20 dead in air raids on Syria's Aleppo province
AFP
By AFP | AFP – 2 hours 39 minutes ago.
AFP/AFP/File - A Syrian man reacts after an air strike by pro-government forces on the city of Aleppo on November 28, 2013
At least 20 people, including seven women and a child, were killed in an aerial bombardment on Saturday of Al-Bab in Syria's Aleppo province, an NGO said.
Regime helicopters dropped explosive-laden barrels on the town in the northern province causing widespread damage, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Footage posted by activists on YouTube showed chaos in the aftermath of the attack.
Clouds of dusts and smoke hung in the air, and rubble from surrounding buildings was strewn on the streets and across vehicles.
Two men tried to open the door of a red pick-up truck that had been completely mangled by the blast, its ceiling caved in and an apparently dead man lying across the front seats.
Another man lay on the ground, still astride his tipped-over motorbike, with his head in a pool of blood.
A third man, seated in the front of a truck, was slumped against the window, with an apparently fatal head wound visible.
The Syrian regime has regularly been accused by the opposition, foreign governments and rights groups of using so-called "barrel bombs" against civilians.
The US State Department has described the weapons as "incendiary bombs which contain flammable material that can be like napalm."
Al-Bab, in northeastern Aleppo, has regularly been targeted by air strikes, including one on a field hospital in September that killed 11 people, according to the Observatory.
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
01122013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
AFP
By AFP | AFP – 2 hours 39 minutes ago.
AFP/AFP/File - A Syrian man reacts after an air strike by pro-government forces on the city of Aleppo on November 28, 2013
At least 20 people, including seven women and a child, were killed in an aerial bombardment on Saturday of Al-Bab in Syria's Aleppo province, an NGO said.
Regime helicopters dropped explosive-laden barrels on the town in the northern province causing widespread damage, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
Footage posted by activists on YouTube showed chaos in the aftermath of the attack.
Clouds of dusts and smoke hung in the air, and rubble from surrounding buildings was strewn on the streets and across vehicles.
Two men tried to open the door of a red pick-up truck that had been completely mangled by the blast, its ceiling caved in and an apparently dead man lying across the front seats.
Another man lay on the ground, still astride his tipped-over motorbike, with his head in a pool of blood.
A third man, seated in the front of a truck, was slumped against the window, with an apparently fatal head wound visible.
The Syrian regime has regularly been accused by the opposition, foreign governments and rights groups of using so-called "barrel bombs" against civilians.
The US State Department has described the weapons as "incendiary bombs which contain flammable material that can be like napalm."
Al-Bab, in northeastern Aleppo, has regularly been targeted by air strikes, including one on a field hospital in September that killed 11 people, according to the Observatory.
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
01122013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
WORLD_ Syrian chemical arms 'to be destroyed on US Navy ship'
30 November 2013 Last updated at 11:48 GMT
Syrian chemical arms 'to be destroyed on US Navy ship'
BBC
Keeping up with the internationally agreed timetable to destroy Syria's stockpiles of chemical weapons is a tough challenge, say correspondents
The body charged with overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons has confirmed some will be "neutralised" aboard a US Navy ship.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the US was contributing technology and financing.
The chemicals will be diluted to safer levels using a process called "hydrolysis".
The OPCW said 35 firms had submitted expressions of interest in destroying Syria's remaining chemical stockpiles.
Their suitability is being evaluated.
Difficult timetable
The OPCW statement confirms an earlier BBC report citing industry sources.
The US naval vessel on which neutralisation will take place has not been officially named but is believed to be the MV Cape Ray. It is undergoing modifications to support the operations.
These should be completed by 31 December, the OPCW said. T
he announcement is another strong sign that the timetable given to destroy all Syria's chemical weapons arsenal and capabilities by the middle of next year could be achieved, despite its many apparent difficulties, says the BBC's Middle East editor Sebastian Usher.
Many countries have been reluctant to volunteer to dispose of the chemicals.
Hydrolysis will produce an estimated 7.7m litres of effluent, which the OPCW says will be packed in 4,000 containers.
This is a far less toxic cargo than many common industrial by-products, but nations still have to be found to volunteer to dispose of it.
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
01122013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
Syrian chemical arms 'to be destroyed on US Navy ship'
BBC
Keeping up with the internationally agreed timetable to destroy Syria's stockpiles of chemical weapons is a tough challenge, say correspondents
The body charged with overseeing the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons has confirmed some will be "neutralised" aboard a US Navy ship.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the US was contributing technology and financing.
The chemicals will be diluted to safer levels using a process called "hydrolysis".
The OPCW said 35 firms had submitted expressions of interest in destroying Syria's remaining chemical stockpiles.
Their suitability is being evaluated.
Difficult timetable
The OPCW statement confirms an earlier BBC report citing industry sources.
The US naval vessel on which neutralisation will take place has not been officially named but is believed to be the MV Cape Ray. It is undergoing modifications to support the operations.
These should be completed by 31 December, the OPCW said. T
he announcement is another strong sign that the timetable given to destroy all Syria's chemical weapons arsenal and capabilities by the middle of next year could be achieved, despite its many apparent difficulties, says the BBC's Middle East editor Sebastian Usher.
Many countries have been reluctant to volunteer to dispose of the chemicals.
Hydrolysis will produce an estimated 7.7m litres of effluent, which the OPCW says will be packed in 4,000 containers.
This is a far less toxic cargo than many common industrial by-products, but nations still have to be found to volunteer to dispose of it.
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
01122013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
Friday, November 29, 2013
WORLD_ SYRIA_ A Rescue at Sea_ The New York Times Video
A Rescue at Sea
By Ben Solomon
November 29th, 2013
A boat packed with Syrian refugees fleeing the war bobbed in the sea about 50 miles off the southeastern coast of Sicily.
Related: Article: Out of Syria, Into a European Maze
VIDEO:
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000002528941/a-rescue-at-sea.html
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
30112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
By Ben Solomon
November 29th, 2013
A boat packed with Syrian refugees fleeing the war bobbed in the sea about 50 miles off the southeastern coast of Sicily.
Related: Article: Out of Syria, Into a European Maze
VIDEO:
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/video/world/europe/100000002528941/a-rescue-at-sea.html
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
30112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
WORLD_ Syria War Creates Generation of 1.1 Million Lost Children
Syria War Creates Generation of 1.1 Million Lost Children
By Sangwon Yoon - Nov 30, 2013 5:06 AM GMT+1100
Bloomberg
The Syrian civil war is creating a generation of traumatized, isolated and under-educated children who are vulnerable to exploitation and recruitment by armed groups, the United Nations said in a report.
About 1.1 million of 2.2 million refugees registered with the UN’s refugee agency are children, and among those who are school-aged fewer than half are in school, according to the report released today the UN High Commissioner for Refugees based on its July-October 2013 survey of refugee children and their families in Lebanon and Jordan.
Several of the 57 boys interviewed for the report expressed a desire to return to Syria to fight and the UN has heard of boys being trained to fight in preparation for return to Syria, the report said.
More than 100,000 Syrians have died since a civil war broke out on the heels of peaceful demonstrations which started in March 2011. The UN has struggled to deliver aid inside Syria, where an increasing number of opposition reports cite the use of starvation and siege tactics by government forces. The Security Council hasn’t been able to agree on a binding resolution that would require Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and about 1,200 armed opposition groups to provide humanitarian-aid corridors.
“Looking back over the last 20 years, the Syria refugee crisis for us is unparalleled since the Rwanda crisis,” Volker Turk, the refugee agency’s director of international protection, told reporters in Geneva, referring to the 1994 genocide in the African country. About 800,000 men, women and children of ethnic Tutsis died in a weeks-long rampage by the Hutus, the ethnic majority.
‘Human Face’
“It is important that this human face of the refugee crisis is not forgotten,” Turk said. “And if you look at what children face, they illustrate very strongly what this crisis is all about.”
In Jordan, fewer than half of the 291,238 children are in school, according to the report. About 200,000 of the 385,007 refugee children in Lebanon could remain out of school by year’s end, the report said.
Instead of going to classes, children work menial jobs on farms or in shops or are selling guns on the street. The children, some as young as seven, are helping support parents injured by the war, who don’t earn enough to support the family, or are unable to work “owing to physical, legal or cultural barriers,” according to the report.
Child Breadwinners
In Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp, the biggest UN-supported camp for fleeing Syrians, most of the 680 small shops employ children, according to the UN survey. Nearly half of refugee households in 11 of Jordan’s 12 governorates rely partly or entirely on a child’s earnings, the report found.
Kilian Kleinschmidt, a German who runs the Zaatari camp for UNHCR, said that his main concern is that “boys could slip into the world of smuggling, where they can be used as decoys, distracting the police, for example, while adults smuggle goods out of the camp.”
The boys are “premature adult men who have dreams about fighting, especially now with the war so present in their lives,” Kleinschmidt said in the report.
Aside from the refugees, half of the 6.5 million people internally displaced in Syria are children, he said.
More than 70,000 Syrian refugee families live without fathers and more than 3,700 refugee children are either unaccompanied by or separated from both parents, according to the report.
The UN’s humanitarian chief Valerie Amos will brief the Security Council on Dec. 3 on the situation in Syria, to follow up on her two previous briefings in October and earlier this month. She has repeatedly expressed alarm at the continued lack of access for humanitarian aid and the need for stronger council measures to pressure the Syrian government to do more.
“There is blood up to people’s knees in Syria,” Hala, a 17-year-old refugee, was quoted as saying in the report.
To contact the reporter on this story: Sangwon Yoon in United Nations at syoon32@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Walcott at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
30112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
By Sangwon Yoon - Nov 30, 2013 5:06 AM GMT+1100
Bloomberg
The Syrian civil war is creating a generation of traumatized, isolated and under-educated children who are vulnerable to exploitation and recruitment by armed groups, the United Nations said in a report.
About 1.1 million of 2.2 million refugees registered with the UN’s refugee agency are children, and among those who are school-aged fewer than half are in school, according to the report released today the UN High Commissioner for Refugees based on its July-October 2013 survey of refugee children and their families in Lebanon and Jordan.
Several of the 57 boys interviewed for the report expressed a desire to return to Syria to fight and the UN has heard of boys being trained to fight in preparation for return to Syria, the report said.
More than 100,000 Syrians have died since a civil war broke out on the heels of peaceful demonstrations which started in March 2011. The UN has struggled to deliver aid inside Syria, where an increasing number of opposition reports cite the use of starvation and siege tactics by government forces. The Security Council hasn’t been able to agree on a binding resolution that would require Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and about 1,200 armed opposition groups to provide humanitarian-aid corridors.
“Looking back over the last 20 years, the Syria refugee crisis for us is unparalleled since the Rwanda crisis,” Volker Turk, the refugee agency’s director of international protection, told reporters in Geneva, referring to the 1994 genocide in the African country. About 800,000 men, women and children of ethnic Tutsis died in a weeks-long rampage by the Hutus, the ethnic majority.
‘Human Face’
“It is important that this human face of the refugee crisis is not forgotten,” Turk said. “And if you look at what children face, they illustrate very strongly what this crisis is all about.”
In Jordan, fewer than half of the 291,238 children are in school, according to the report. About 200,000 of the 385,007 refugee children in Lebanon could remain out of school by year’s end, the report said.
Instead of going to classes, children work menial jobs on farms or in shops or are selling guns on the street. The children, some as young as seven, are helping support parents injured by the war, who don’t earn enough to support the family, or are unable to work “owing to physical, legal or cultural barriers,” according to the report.
Child Breadwinners
In Jordan’s Zaatari refugee camp, the biggest UN-supported camp for fleeing Syrians, most of the 680 small shops employ children, according to the UN survey. Nearly half of refugee households in 11 of Jordan’s 12 governorates rely partly or entirely on a child’s earnings, the report found.
Kilian Kleinschmidt, a German who runs the Zaatari camp for UNHCR, said that his main concern is that “boys could slip into the world of smuggling, where they can be used as decoys, distracting the police, for example, while adults smuggle goods out of the camp.”
The boys are “premature adult men who have dreams about fighting, especially now with the war so present in their lives,” Kleinschmidt said in the report.
Aside from the refugees, half of the 6.5 million people internally displaced in Syria are children, he said.
More than 70,000 Syrian refugee families live without fathers and more than 3,700 refugee children are either unaccompanied by or separated from both parents, according to the report.
The UN’s humanitarian chief Valerie Amos will brief the Security Council on Dec. 3 on the situation in Syria, to follow up on her two previous briefings in October and earlier this month. She has repeatedly expressed alarm at the continued lack of access for humanitarian aid and the need for stronger council measures to pressure the Syrian government to do more.
“There is blood up to people’s knees in Syria,” Hala, a 17-year-old refugee, was quoted as saying in the report.
To contact the reporter on this story: Sangwon Yoon in United Nations at syoon32@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: John Walcott at jwalcott9@bloomberg.net
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
30112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
WORLD_ Syria war 'damaging a generation of children', UN warns
29 November 2013 Last updated at 05:06 GMT
BBC
Syria war 'damaging a generation of children', UN warns
Paul Wood reports on Syria's 'lost generation' of children
The war in Syria is creating a generation of damaged children, a UN report warns.
School-age refugees who have fled to neighbouring countries are increasingly cut off from education and forced to work to survive, the study found.
As many as 300,000 living in Lebanon and Jordan could be without schooling by the end of 2013, the UNHCR says.
Many of those not at school go out to work for long hours and for low pay from as young as seven years old.
More than half of 2.2 million Syrian refugees are children, the UN says, with many facing grave dangers even outside the war zone.
Those perils include threats to their physical and psychological well-being, according to the report's authors.
Launching the report, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said: "If we do not act quickly, a generation of innocents will become lasting casualties of an appalling war."
The study is the latest to attempt to illustrate the heavy toll of Syria's three-year-old civil conflict on children both inside and outside its borders.
It comes shortly after an estimate from a London-based think-tank put the number of children killed during Syria's civil war at more than 11,000.
Abdullah does not attend school in Zaatari, but works collecting dry bread instead. (Video courtesy UNHCR)
Born 'stateless'
The UNHCR carried out a series of interviews with Syrian children and families living in Jordan and Lebanon between July and October 2013.
Researchers interviewed 81 refugee children and held group discussions with 121 others in Jordan and Lebanon, and consulted UN and NGO staff working with those communities.
They found high levels of child recruitment, labour and loneliness among children living in displaced families.
More than 70,000 Syrian refugee families now live without fathers, the UNHCR estimates, with some 3,700 refugee children living unaccompanied or without both parents.
Of the 1.1 million young Syrian refugees, 385,007 now live in Lebanon, 294,304 in Turkey and 291,238 in Jordan, figures show, with sizeable numbers also in Iraq and Egypt.
Those figures are in danger of overwhelming the ability of host nations to cope, the report says.
In Lebanon, the authors note, some 80% of Syrian children are not in school, with the number of Syrian school-age children on course to exceed the numbers enrolled in Lebanese school by the end of 2013.
And there was also evidence of high numbers of children being born "stateless", with host countries failing to register the majority of babies born in refugee camps.
Some 77% of 781 refugee infants sampled in Lebanon had no official birth certificate, the report says. Just 68 birth certificates were issued to babies in Jordan's Zaatari refugee camp between January and mid-October 2013.
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
BBC
Syria war 'damaging a generation of children', UN warns
Paul Wood reports on Syria's 'lost generation' of children
The war in Syria is creating a generation of damaged children, a UN report warns.
School-age refugees who have fled to neighbouring countries are increasingly cut off from education and forced to work to survive, the study found.
As many as 300,000 living in Lebanon and Jordan could be without schooling by the end of 2013, the UNHCR says.
Many of those not at school go out to work for long hours and for low pay from as young as seven years old.
More than half of 2.2 million Syrian refugees are children, the UN says, with many facing grave dangers even outside the war zone.
Those perils include threats to their physical and psychological well-being, according to the report's authors.
Launching the report, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said: "If we do not act quickly, a generation of innocents will become lasting casualties of an appalling war."
The study is the latest to attempt to illustrate the heavy toll of Syria's three-year-old civil conflict on children both inside and outside its borders.
It comes shortly after an estimate from a London-based think-tank put the number of children killed during Syria's civil war at more than 11,000.
Abdullah does not attend school in Zaatari, but works collecting dry bread instead. (Video courtesy UNHCR)
Born 'stateless'
The UNHCR carried out a series of interviews with Syrian children and families living in Jordan and Lebanon between July and October 2013.
Researchers interviewed 81 refugee children and held group discussions with 121 others in Jordan and Lebanon, and consulted UN and NGO staff working with those communities.
They found high levels of child recruitment, labour and loneliness among children living in displaced families.
More than 70,000 Syrian refugee families now live without fathers, the UNHCR estimates, with some 3,700 refugee children living unaccompanied or without both parents.
Of the 1.1 million young Syrian refugees, 385,007 now live in Lebanon, 294,304 in Turkey and 291,238 in Jordan, figures show, with sizeable numbers also in Iraq and Egypt.
Those figures are in danger of overwhelming the ability of host nations to cope, the report says.
In Lebanon, the authors note, some 80% of Syrian children are not in school, with the number of Syrian school-age children on course to exceed the numbers enrolled in Lebanese school by the end of 2013.
And there was also evidence of high numbers of children being born "stateless", with host countries failing to register the majority of babies born in refugee camps.
Some 77% of 781 refugee infants sampled in Lebanon had no official birth certificate, the report says. Just 68 birth certificates were issued to babies in Jordan's Zaatari refugee camp between January and mid-October 2013.
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
WORLD_ SYRIA_ Stop arms deliveries to Syria
- Stop arms deliveries to Syria
Written by Rolleiv Solholm
The Norway Post
Friday, 29 November 2013 08:15
Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende says it is high time that nations of the world now halt the supplies of arms to the two sides in the conflict in Syria.
According to the UN, more than 100,000 people have up to now been killed in the civil war in Syria, while 6.5 million Syrians have fled the country.
In order to find a solution to the Syrian conflict, one depends on the political will to move from acts of war with the supply of arms from the outside, to the support of negotiations, Brende says.
- If all continue supplying the warring sides with arms, the war will last for a very long time, the Norwegian Foreign Minister says.
(Aftenposten)
Written by Rolleiv Solholm
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
Written by Rolleiv Solholm
The Norway Post
Friday, 29 November 2013 08:15
Norwegian Foreign Minister Børge Brende says it is high time that nations of the world now halt the supplies of arms to the two sides in the conflict in Syria.
According to the UN, more than 100,000 people have up to now been killed in the civil war in Syria, while 6.5 million Syrians have fled the country.
In order to find a solution to the Syrian conflict, one depends on the political will to move from acts of war with the supply of arms from the outside, to the support of negotiations, Brende says.
- If all continue supplying the warring sides with arms, the war will last for a very long time, the Norwegian Foreign Minister says.
(Aftenposten)
Written by Rolleiv Solholm
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
Thursday, November 28, 2013
WORLD_ UN_ Security Council strongly condemns deadly shelling of Russian embassy in Damascus
Security Council strongly condemns deadly shelling of Russian embassy in Damascus
UN
28 November 2013
– Strongly condemning the shelling of the Russian Embassy in Damascus today, the Security Council deplored the incident - which left one person dead and 9 others injured - as a “heinous terrorist act,” and reaffirmed the need to combat all manifestations of terrorism “by all means”, in accordance with the United Nations Charter and international law.
“The members of the Security Council are outraged and strongly condemned the mortar shelling on 28 November against the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Damascus, Syria, which killed one and wounded 9 people including among the Embassy security personnel,” the 15-nation body said in statement issued this evening from UN Headquarters in New York.
The Council members extended their condolences to the family of the victim and expressed their sympathy to all those injured “in this heinous terrorist act.” They also underlined the need to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Further to the statement, the Council reaffirmed that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security, and that any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed.
Council members also reaffirmed the need to combat by all means, in accordance with the UN Charter “and all obligations under international law, in particular international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law, threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.”
Finally, the Council recalled the fundamental principle of the inviolability of diplomatic and consular premises, and the obligations on host Governments, including under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to take all appropriate steps to protect diplomatic and consular premises against any intrusion or damage, and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of these missions or impairment of their dignity, and to prevent any attack on diplomatic premises, agents and consular officers.
News Tracker: past stories on this issue
Geneva conference on Syria set for January, UN chief announces
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
UN
28 November 2013
– Strongly condemning the shelling of the Russian Embassy in Damascus today, the Security Council deplored the incident - which left one person dead and 9 others injured - as a “heinous terrorist act,” and reaffirmed the need to combat all manifestations of terrorism “by all means”, in accordance with the United Nations Charter and international law.
“The members of the Security Council are outraged and strongly condemned the mortar shelling on 28 November against the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Damascus, Syria, which killed one and wounded 9 people including among the Embassy security personnel,” the 15-nation body said in statement issued this evening from UN Headquarters in New York.
The Council members extended their condolences to the family of the victim and expressed their sympathy to all those injured “in this heinous terrorist act.” They also underlined the need to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Further to the statement, the Council reaffirmed that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security, and that any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed.
Council members also reaffirmed the need to combat by all means, in accordance with the UN Charter “and all obligations under international law, in particular international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law, threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts.”
Finally, the Council recalled the fundamental principle of the inviolability of diplomatic and consular premises, and the obligations on host Governments, including under the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, to take all appropriate steps to protect diplomatic and consular premises against any intrusion or damage, and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of these missions or impairment of their dignity, and to prevent any attack on diplomatic premises, agents and consular officers.
News Tracker: past stories on this issue
Geneva conference on Syria set for January, UN chief announces
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
WORLD_ FLOATING CITY_ Massive floating city coming to an ocean near you
Massive floating city coming to an ocean near you
1 of 9
Massive floating city coming to an ocean near you
If you suffer seasickness, this is not for you. A Florida-based firm is designing a $10 billion floating city called Freedom Ship that would spend its entire time at sea and is built to house 50,000 people. In the following slides, we give you a tour of this incredible vessel that is coming to reality very soon.
Nov 29, 2013
_______
2 of 9
Massive floating city coming to an ocean near you
Equipped with its own airport, casinos, art galleries and shopping centers, the Freedom Ship is a mile long, 25-storeys-high and has enough room for 50,000 permanent residents.
Nov 29, 2013
________
3 of 9
Massive floating city coming to an ocean near you
New York Daily News has reported that the project was on hold while as the company struggled to find investment funds, but the dream is not dead yet. Photos of the floating city that show a plane taking off from its deck have been circulating through media outlets worldwide.
Nov 29, 2013
Read more: http://au.pfinance.yahoo.com/photos/photo/-/20069167/Massive-floating-city-coming-to-an-ocean-near-you/20069168/
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
1 of 9
Massive floating city coming to an ocean near you
If you suffer seasickness, this is not for you. A Florida-based firm is designing a $10 billion floating city called Freedom Ship that would spend its entire time at sea and is built to house 50,000 people. In the following slides, we give you a tour of this incredible vessel that is coming to reality very soon.
Nov 29, 2013
_______
2 of 9
Massive floating city coming to an ocean near you
Equipped with its own airport, casinos, art galleries and shopping centers, the Freedom Ship is a mile long, 25-storeys-high and has enough room for 50,000 permanent residents.
Nov 29, 2013
________
3 of 9
Massive floating city coming to an ocean near you
New York Daily News has reported that the project was on hold while as the company struggled to find investment funds, but the dream is not dead yet. Photos of the floating city that show a plane taking off from its deck have been circulating through media outlets worldwide.
Nov 29, 2013
Read more: http://au.pfinance.yahoo.com/photos/photo/-/20069167/Massive-floating-city-coming-to-an-ocean-near-you/20069168/
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
POLITICS_ The Hard Charger at Obama’s Side Has His Hands Full
The Hard Charger at Obama’s Side Has His Hands Full
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Denis McDonough, White House chief of staff, is the first aide President Obama sees in the morning and the last he sees at night.
By PETER BAKER
Published: November 27, 2013
The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Denis McDonough was pacing the path on the South Lawn of the White House one day this fall, ruminating on the challenges of a second term for his boss, President Obama. Mr. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, likes to stroll outside from time to time. It helps clear his head when he has a lot on his mind.
On this particular day, he was just hours away from a government shutdown that would test his president’s resolve and a day away from the debut of a new health care program that would test his president’s legacy. “I’m a keep-score guy; I always have been,” Mr. McDonough said in an interview as he circumnavigated the lawn. “So I’m good with the idea that there are scores being kept.”
The scores are now rolling in, and his team is down in the second half. Although the government shutdown proved a political victory as the White House stared down Republicans in Congress, the botched health care rollout erased the momentum and plunged Mr. Obama’s public standing to the lowest of his tenure. Last weekend’s six-month nuclear deal with Iran returned Mr. Obama to a position of leading rather than reacting, but it still drew fire from various directions.
At the center of these challenges is Mr. McDonough, the ramrod-straight scorekeeper from Minnesota with the close-cropped, prematurely graying hair and the bearing of a military man, even though he never served. A fanatically fit, workaholic hard charger who sometimes left bruised feelings across the administration in Mr. Obama’s first term, Mr. McDonough, 43, has become a much-praised right-hand man in Mr. Obama’s troubled second term.
He is the first aide the president sees in the morning, the last he sees at night and the closest to him of the five men who have served as his chief of staff. Unlike his predecessors, Mr. McDonough came from the foreign policy arena, without the same experience in the domestic policy that dominates the White House. He now finds himself fixing the health care debacle he did not see coming, preparing for the next spending showdown with Congress and trying to rescue an imperiled presidency.
“Look, it’s a tough time for the presidency, and Denis is leading,” said Rahm Emanuel, one of his predecessors and now the mayor of Chicago, who spoke recently with Mr. McDonough. “Nobody can feel good when this is going on. My whole thing is don’t beat yourself up. The question is can you see a map and can you see the light forward.”
Tangled in Health Mess
Mr. McDonough’s failure to head off the health care problems surprised those who see him as a man of discipline and attention to detail. But current and former administration officials say that after 10 months on the job, one problem may have been that he stretched himself too thin and tried to do too much himself.
“Denis is playing the role of chief of staff, legislative director, chief strategist and head of the accountability and implementation office,” said a former colleague who asked for anonymity to speak more candidly. “One man can’t play all of the infield.”
In the months before the rollout, Mr. McDonough worked closely with Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, but did not see the warning signs clearly. He expressed confidence in the system only hours before the Oct. 1 kickoff. “There’s hundreds of people who worked all through last weekend as they have now through many, many weekends, to make sure that everything is in place, tested, firm, ready to roll,” he said as he walked the South Lawn.
In hindsight, of course, that confidence was misplaced. “It’s not that they took their eye off the ball — they spent a lot of time on it,” said John D. Podesta, who helped run Mr. Obama’s transition and remains close to the White House. “The question is whether they spent their time on the right things. It wasn’t centralized. You can decide that was Obama’s problem or Denis’s problem or Kathleen’s problem. But it was a problem.”
Mr. McDonough’s defenders say the real mistakes were made before he took over, when the White House put its policy officials rather than outside experts in charge of setting up the major web operation for the health care exchanges. Mr. Obama’s ill-founded promise that any Americans who liked their health plans could keep them likewise preceded Mr. McDonough’s tenure.
But Mr. McDonough was in the corner office when it all went awry. “It’s the age-old thing: Because you’re the chief of staff, you’re responsible for it,” said William M. Daley, another of Mr. McDonough’s predecessors. “Whether it’s legitimate or not, a lot of people would say it happened on your watch, so you’re responsible for it. At some point you’ve got to do a debrief on how did this thing really get screwed up — who was debriefing who, did we just not see this, how did we miss it?”
Colleagues say Mr. McDonough seems determined to figure out how his methodical structure broke down and what could have been done differently, but only after the problems are fixed. On the surface, at least, he exudes the calm of an aide who has been through a lifetime of crises over the past five years.
“When you see Denis, you don’t get the sense that his hair is on fire,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist who has advised the White House. But “he understands if they don’t fix it, it’s unacceptable.”
So far, virtually no one has called for Mr. McDonough’s head, and it is a measure of the credibility he has built up that he has not come under more fire. The political barbs from the outside — and the private recriminations from the inside — are aimed more at Ms. Sebelius. “He’s ready to hear bad news, so people never think he’s part of the problem,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.
Mr. McDonough has also benefited by tending to Republicans and returning phone calls that once went unanswered. “I’ve been in Washington for 14 years, and I saw more of him in the eight weeks of budget and deficit discussions than I saw all the other presidents’ chiefs of staff combined,” said Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia. “And never had one give me his home number.”
Softening Rough Edges
A longtime congressional aide before joining Mr. Obama’s Senate office, Mr. McDonough was deputy national security adviser in the first term. He sometimes clashed with Pentagon officials, reproved reporters who wrote articles he did not like and had tense relations with the first two national security advisers, Gen. James L. Jones and Tom Donilon, according to colleagues.
“He’s a pugnacious guy,” said David Axelrod, the president’s longtime adviser. “But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing in a chief of staff. You kind of want that.”
Mr. Podesta said Mr. McDonough’s tough reputation suits the moment. “Denis is a warrior,” he said. “And it’s a war.”
Still, over time, friends said Mr. McDonough came to realize that being so aggressive was not accomplishing what he wanted, and by most accounts, he has mellowed. In the interview, he said he had learned from figures like former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “Watching how they do their business was really informative and helpful to me,” he said. “So part of that keeping score is making sure I’m learning along the way, too.”
Mr. McDonough brings an advantage his predecessors did not have, an unrivaled relationship with the president born out of years of collaboration and now frequent walks together on the South Lawn. When big decisions are made, it is often only Mr. McDonough at Mr. Obama’s side, as when just the two of them returned from a 45-minute stroll in August to announce to stunned aides that Mr. Obama would suspend plans to strike Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack and ask Congress for permission instead.
Colleagues said they know that if they get instruction from Mr. McDonough, they are more inclined to believe it comes from Mr. Obama. “I don’t know that anybody at a staff level knows the president better than Denis McDonough,” said former Senator Tom Daschle, a mentor to Mr. Obama and a former boss of Mr. McDonough.
Mr. McDonough has made an impression by getting his own lunch from the White House mess, sprinkling the building with handwritten thank-you notes and doubling the size of his conference table so that more aides feel part of the process. His ferocious work habits — bicycling or running to work between 6 and 7 a.m. and staying until 9 p.m. — have exhausted those trying to keep up.
Mr. McDonough’s everywhere-at-once centrality in Mr. Obama’s second term underscores how much he has filled a void left by the departure of the president’s original inner circle: Mr. Axelrod, David Plouffe and Robert Gibbs.
Mr. McDonough, who played safety at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., has imposed his will on the White House through a series of maxims that sound like something out of a football team locker room, including “one team, one fight,” “nothing about you without you” and “measure twice before you cut.”
In other words, unity, inclusiveness and thoroughness. “I am a believer that bad policy gets made by laziness and lack of discipline,” Mr. McDonough said. He and the president made a list of priorities at the start of the year, and Mr. Obama is updated weekly on where they stand. Mr. McDonough, the scorekeeper, also insists on quarterly reviews of those goals, “and we’ll get to the end of the year and we’ll score ourselves against that” initial list.
Eager to Reach Out
One hallmark of Mr. McDonough’s tenure has been reaching out to disaffected quarters of Washington, including the cabinet and Congress, which both felt distant or even alienated from the White House. Representing a reserved president who does not care for glad-handing, Mr. McDonough has taken it upon himself to organize dinners and slog his way through a long call sheet every day that was once ignored.
“Every time I’ve called down there, he’s gotten back to me,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York.
And yet the schism with lawmakers is as deep as ever. “That’s frustrating,” McDonough conceded as he made his third lap around the track. “But do I think the outreach and everything was for naught? Absolutely not.”
Still, for the scorekeeper, it is hard to rack up points in a Congress that wants nothing to do with helping Mr. Obama. The president’s gun control legislation went nowhere, as have his ideas on infrastructure, jobs and early childhood education. Mr. McDonough still hopes the two sides can rewrite immigration laws, and he wants to make use of executive power to advance energy and environmental goals.
He faces another clash in the coming weeks as the spending-and-debt fight delayed by the government shutdown’s resolution comes to a head again, with the chances of a long-term agreement slim.
All of which raises the question: With the troubles of the fifth year and the sagging poll numbers, what score does the scorekeeper give himself so far?
“Incomplete,” he said.
A version of this article appears in print on November 28, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hard Charger At Obama Side Has Hands Full.
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Denis McDonough, White House chief of staff, is the first aide President Obama sees in the morning and the last he sees at night.
By PETER BAKER
Published: November 27, 2013
The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Denis McDonough was pacing the path on the South Lawn of the White House one day this fall, ruminating on the challenges of a second term for his boss, President Obama. Mr. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, likes to stroll outside from time to time. It helps clear his head when he has a lot on his mind.
On this particular day, he was just hours away from a government shutdown that would test his president’s resolve and a day away from the debut of a new health care program that would test his president’s legacy. “I’m a keep-score guy; I always have been,” Mr. McDonough said in an interview as he circumnavigated the lawn. “So I’m good with the idea that there are scores being kept.”
The scores are now rolling in, and his team is down in the second half. Although the government shutdown proved a political victory as the White House stared down Republicans in Congress, the botched health care rollout erased the momentum and plunged Mr. Obama’s public standing to the lowest of his tenure. Last weekend’s six-month nuclear deal with Iran returned Mr. Obama to a position of leading rather than reacting, but it still drew fire from various directions.
At the center of these challenges is Mr. McDonough, the ramrod-straight scorekeeper from Minnesota with the close-cropped, prematurely graying hair and the bearing of a military man, even though he never served. A fanatically fit, workaholic hard charger who sometimes left bruised feelings across the administration in Mr. Obama’s first term, Mr. McDonough, 43, has become a much-praised right-hand man in Mr. Obama’s troubled second term.
He is the first aide the president sees in the morning, the last he sees at night and the closest to him of the five men who have served as his chief of staff. Unlike his predecessors, Mr. McDonough came from the foreign policy arena, without the same experience in the domestic policy that dominates the White House. He now finds himself fixing the health care debacle he did not see coming, preparing for the next spending showdown with Congress and trying to rescue an imperiled presidency.
“Look, it’s a tough time for the presidency, and Denis is leading,” said Rahm Emanuel, one of his predecessors and now the mayor of Chicago, who spoke recently with Mr. McDonough. “Nobody can feel good when this is going on. My whole thing is don’t beat yourself up. The question is can you see a map and can you see the light forward.”
Tangled in Health Mess
Mr. McDonough’s failure to head off the health care problems surprised those who see him as a man of discipline and attention to detail. But current and former administration officials say that after 10 months on the job, one problem may have been that he stretched himself too thin and tried to do too much himself.
“Denis is playing the role of chief of staff, legislative director, chief strategist and head of the accountability and implementation office,” said a former colleague who asked for anonymity to speak more candidly. “One man can’t play all of the infield.”
In the months before the rollout, Mr. McDonough worked closely with Kathleen Sebelius, the health and human services secretary, but did not see the warning signs clearly. He expressed confidence in the system only hours before the Oct. 1 kickoff. “There’s hundreds of people who worked all through last weekend as they have now through many, many weekends, to make sure that everything is in place, tested, firm, ready to roll,” he said as he walked the South Lawn.
In hindsight, of course, that confidence was misplaced. “It’s not that they took their eye off the ball — they spent a lot of time on it,” said John D. Podesta, who helped run Mr. Obama’s transition and remains close to the White House. “The question is whether they spent their time on the right things. It wasn’t centralized. You can decide that was Obama’s problem or Denis’s problem or Kathleen’s problem. But it was a problem.”
Mr. McDonough’s defenders say the real mistakes were made before he took over, when the White House put its policy officials rather than outside experts in charge of setting up the major web operation for the health care exchanges. Mr. Obama’s ill-founded promise that any Americans who liked their health plans could keep them likewise preceded Mr. McDonough’s tenure.
But Mr. McDonough was in the corner office when it all went awry. “It’s the age-old thing: Because you’re the chief of staff, you’re responsible for it,” said William M. Daley, another of Mr. McDonough’s predecessors. “Whether it’s legitimate or not, a lot of people would say it happened on your watch, so you’re responsible for it. At some point you’ve got to do a debrief on how did this thing really get screwed up — who was debriefing who, did we just not see this, how did we miss it?”
Colleagues say Mr. McDonough seems determined to figure out how his methodical structure broke down and what could have been done differently, but only after the problems are fixed. On the surface, at least, he exudes the calm of an aide who has been through a lifetime of crises over the past five years.
“When you see Denis, you don’t get the sense that his hair is on fire,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic strategist who has advised the White House. But “he understands if they don’t fix it, it’s unacceptable.”
So far, virtually no one has called for Mr. McDonough’s head, and it is a measure of the credibility he has built up that he has not come under more fire. The political barbs from the outside — and the private recriminations from the inside — are aimed more at Ms. Sebelius. “He’s ready to hear bad news, so people never think he’s part of the problem,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.
Mr. McDonough has also benefited by tending to Republicans and returning phone calls that once went unanswered. “I’ve been in Washington for 14 years, and I saw more of him in the eight weeks of budget and deficit discussions than I saw all the other presidents’ chiefs of staff combined,” said Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia. “And never had one give me his home number.”
Softening Rough Edges
A longtime congressional aide before joining Mr. Obama’s Senate office, Mr. McDonough was deputy national security adviser in the first term. He sometimes clashed with Pentagon officials, reproved reporters who wrote articles he did not like and had tense relations with the first two national security advisers, Gen. James L. Jones and Tom Donilon, according to colleagues.
“He’s a pugnacious guy,” said David Axelrod, the president’s longtime adviser. “But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing in a chief of staff. You kind of want that.”
Mr. Podesta said Mr. McDonough’s tough reputation suits the moment. “Denis is a warrior,” he said. “And it’s a war.”
Still, over time, friends said Mr. McDonough came to realize that being so aggressive was not accomplishing what he wanted, and by most accounts, he has mellowed. In the interview, he said he had learned from figures like former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “Watching how they do their business was really informative and helpful to me,” he said. “So part of that keeping score is making sure I’m learning along the way, too.”
Mr. McDonough brings an advantage his predecessors did not have, an unrivaled relationship with the president born out of years of collaboration and now frequent walks together on the South Lawn. When big decisions are made, it is often only Mr. McDonough at Mr. Obama’s side, as when just the two of them returned from a 45-minute stroll in August to announce to stunned aides that Mr. Obama would suspend plans to strike Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack and ask Congress for permission instead.
Colleagues said they know that if they get instruction from Mr. McDonough, they are more inclined to believe it comes from Mr. Obama. “I don’t know that anybody at a staff level knows the president better than Denis McDonough,” said former Senator Tom Daschle, a mentor to Mr. Obama and a former boss of Mr. McDonough.
Mr. McDonough has made an impression by getting his own lunch from the White House mess, sprinkling the building with handwritten thank-you notes and doubling the size of his conference table so that more aides feel part of the process. His ferocious work habits — bicycling or running to work between 6 and 7 a.m. and staying until 9 p.m. — have exhausted those trying to keep up.
Mr. McDonough’s everywhere-at-once centrality in Mr. Obama’s second term underscores how much he has filled a void left by the departure of the president’s original inner circle: Mr. Axelrod, David Plouffe and Robert Gibbs.
Mr. McDonough, who played safety at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., has imposed his will on the White House through a series of maxims that sound like something out of a football team locker room, including “one team, one fight,” “nothing about you without you” and “measure twice before you cut.”
In other words, unity, inclusiveness and thoroughness. “I am a believer that bad policy gets made by laziness and lack of discipline,” Mr. McDonough said. He and the president made a list of priorities at the start of the year, and Mr. Obama is updated weekly on where they stand. Mr. McDonough, the scorekeeper, also insists on quarterly reviews of those goals, “and we’ll get to the end of the year and we’ll score ourselves against that” initial list.
Eager to Reach Out
One hallmark of Mr. McDonough’s tenure has been reaching out to disaffected quarters of Washington, including the cabinet and Congress, which both felt distant or even alienated from the White House. Representing a reserved president who does not care for glad-handing, Mr. McDonough has taken it upon himself to organize dinners and slog his way through a long call sheet every day that was once ignored.
“Every time I’ve called down there, he’s gotten back to me,” said Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York.
And yet the schism with lawmakers is as deep as ever. “That’s frustrating,” McDonough conceded as he made his third lap around the track. “But do I think the outreach and everything was for naught? Absolutely not.”
Still, for the scorekeeper, it is hard to rack up points in a Congress that wants nothing to do with helping Mr. Obama. The president’s gun control legislation went nowhere, as have his ideas on infrastructure, jobs and early childhood education. Mr. McDonough still hopes the two sides can rewrite immigration laws, and he wants to make use of executive power to advance energy and environmental goals.
He faces another clash in the coming weeks as the spending-and-debt fight delayed by the government shutdown’s resolution comes to a head again, with the chances of a long-term agreement slim.
All of which raises the question: With the troubles of the fifth year and the sagging poll numbers, what score does the scorekeeper give himself so far?
“Incomplete,” he said.
A version of this article appears in print on November 28, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hard Charger At Obama Side Has Hands Full.
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
WORLD_ SYRIA_ Mortar Attack On Russian Embassy In Syria Kills One, Injures Nine
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Mortar Attack On Russian Embassy In Syria Kills One, Injures Nine
November 28, 2013
RFE
Russia has condemned a mortar attack on the Russian Embassy in Damascus that killed one Syrian and injured nine other local people.
No Russians were reported injured in the shelling on November 28.
In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry denounced the incident as an act of terrorism, and called for the perpetrators to be punished.
The U.S. State Department has also condemned the attack.
Russia, a supporter of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has had its Damascus embassy targeted at least two other times this year by suspected rebel forces seeking to oust the government.
Based on reporting by AFP, Reuters, and ITAR-TASS
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
Mortar Attack On Russian Embassy In Syria Kills One, Injures Nine
November 28, 2013
RFE
Russia has condemned a mortar attack on the Russian Embassy in Damascus that killed one Syrian and injured nine other local people.
No Russians were reported injured in the shelling on November 28.
In a statement, the Russian Foreign Ministry denounced the incident as an act of terrorism, and called for the perpetrators to be punished.
The U.S. State Department has also condemned the attack.
Russia, a supporter of the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has had its Damascus embassy targeted at least two other times this year by suspected rebel forces seeking to oust the government.
Based on reporting by AFP, Reuters, and ITAR-TASS
Chân thành cám ơn Quý Anh Chị ghé thăm "conbenho Nguyễn Hoài Trang Blog".
Xin được lắng nghe ý kiến chia sẻ của Quý Anh Chị trực tiếp tại Diễn Đàn Paltalk: 1Latdo Tapdoan Vietgian CSVN Phanquoc Bannuoc .
Kính chúc Sức Khỏe Quý Anh Chị .
conbenho
Tiểu Muội quantu
Nguyễn Hoài Trang
29112013
___________
Cộng sản Việt Nam là TỘI ÁC
Bao che, dung dưỡng TỘI ÁC là đồng lõa với TỘI ÁC
WORLD_ Syria's chemical weapons: is the UN exceeding its mandate?
Syria's chemical weapons: is the UN exceeding its mandate?
Bob Rigg
28 November 2013
opendemocracy.net
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons should be a technical agency of the UN. But it has arguably become a piece in a geo-political chess game dominated by the US, invited into Syria to act in contravention of its remit.
About ten days before the Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was surprisingly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a Washington Post headline, alluding to its role in verifying and overseeing the destruction of chemical weapons production facilities in Syria, referred to it as an ‘obscure agency’.
The OPCW had led a secluded existence since 2002, when it controversially dismissed its fiercely independent Brazilian director-general, José Bustani. The International Labour Organisation’s Administrative Tribunal subsequently overturned this decision, finding that it violated fundamental principles of law for international organisations.
Bustani had inflamed the US, among other things by encouraging Iraq to accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Bustani’s spirited independence meant that the US could not trust the OPCW under his leadership to legitimise the intervention in Iraq so desperately craved by the neo-conservatives. John Bolton, the then undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, attended the session of the OPCW Executive Council which declined to support the US push to purge Bustani at that stage. Bolton famously said to Bustani: ‘Are you going to resign by midnight? OK, now we will do it my way’—before storming out of Bustani’s office, slamming the door.
US moves encouraging Syria to accede to the CWC now vindicate Bustani’s Iraq initiative of 2002.
Environment transformed
The meeting in Geneva from September 12th to 14th of this year involving the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, and their teams of chemical weapons experts was a remarkable turning point in relations between the US and Russia, initially in relation to chemical weapons in Syria.
Kerry ceased to be a dog of war and became almost a peacenik overnight. The warmth of interaction between the two erstwhile adversaries was remarkable, inspiring even the dour Lavrov to dream aloud of a possible zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the middle east. Under the cover of the CWC the US was able to distance itself from the ill-considered consequences of its own belligerence, and even to present itself as a peace-maker.
Because Syria has acceded to the CWC and has also, so far, fully complied with its exacting declaration, inspection and destruction requirements, the Syrian government’s standing in the international community has been enhanced. The large-scale use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, recently the source of loud condemnation, has already been enveloped in political amnesia.
In the meantime, large numbers of Syrian civilians continue to kill and be killed by conventional weapons used by all sides to the conflict, with Syria’s large displaced and refugee populations living amidst acute misery, insecurity and hardship. However, irreconcilable divisions amongst the rebel groups and the recent weakening of Saudi Arabia’s traditional alliance with the US may well mean that even a united front of Russia and the US will be unable to impose peace on a fractious and impenetrable environment.
Notwithstanding the international community’s public protestations of concern for the humanitarian disaster that is Syria, it has donated remarkably little humanitarian aid to Syria’s battered and bruised civilian population—not merely in Syria, but also in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
A powerful groundswell of public opinion throughout the US and Europe, sustained by weariness with the devastating political, social and economic cost of foreign wars, brought Congress, the UK Parliament and the French National Assembly to heel. Their abject failure to achieve the original stated objectives of successive foreign wars had stimulated the internationalisation of sectarian terrorist activity, alienating broad cross-sections of public opinion across borders and traditional party lines. The US ‘war on terror’ has actively stimulated international terrorism, which is now far stronger, more sophisticated and more menacing than when the war was initiated.
Although the UN Security Council (UNSC) is maintaining a watching brief over OPCW involvement in Syria, in the words of Lavrov the OPCW is the lead organisation. This means that OPCW inspections are spared the customary byzantine infighting of the UNSC and can proceed smoothly, in accordance with the CWC.
Convention departures
The UNSC resolution 2118 on Syria however requires the OPCW to act in violation of the CWC in several important respects. Article XI of the CWC states that only the Conference of the States Parties may, in consultation with the Executive Council, bring cases of particular gravity to the attention of the UNSC, whereas the UNSC resolution authorizes the Executive Council alone to do this. This disenfranchises the Conference of the States Parties, the only OPCW policy-making organ representing the views of all 190 member states.
Furthermore, the UN recently approached Norway, Albania and Belgium, inviting them to destroy large quantities of Syrian chemical weapons on their territory. This was in direct contravention of Article I(a) of the CWC: ‘Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never under any circumstances: (a) to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons, or transfer, directly or indirectly, chemical weapons to anyone.’
Norway has declined this UN invitation. Growing public anxiety in Albania about the risks associated with the destruction of large quantities of chemical agents recently scuppered this second illegal proposal of the UN, which currently lacks the enormous budget that would be required for the destruction of chemical weapons in accordance with the stringent environmental and safety standards prescribed by the CWC.
Leaving aside the question of legality, their secure transfer would also be a hazardous, costly and politically combustible exercise, as has been foreshadowed in Albania. The desperate option of destruction at sea is under consideration, although this would also violate article 1(a). Kerry has already indicated that no OPCW member state would run the risk of guaranteeing the safe and secure passage of chemical weapons from many different locations in war-torn Syria.
Even if funding for the responsible destruction of Syria’s large chemical-weapons arsenal were miraculously to appear, it cannot be destroyed in Syria in the midst of a raging civil war. But if Syria transfers its chemical weapons from its territory or to international waters, it will be in violation of article 1(a). If the Conference of the States Parties was unwilling to punish such a major violation of the CWC, any claim it might have to international credibility would be shattered. The OPCW would have to return its Nobel Peace Prize, with an apology. If the OPCW were formally to renegotiate the relevant parts of the CWC before any such transfer took place, this might however offer a way forward.
Does the UNSC have the legal authority to undo elements of a multilateral disarmament treaty painstakingly negotiated over decades? Is the UNSC, a political body crushingly dominated by the US and the remaining four permanent veto-wielding members, legally empowered to amend, qualify or even nullify the application of international treaties? Does the UNSC have the power arbitrarily to amend the application of any international treaty, in the absence of consultation with the treaty signatories and the UN General Assembly? Has the UNSC seriously overreached itself on this occasion?
And, if the OPCW is acting illegally in complying with its UNSC mandate, what are the implications of this for the OPCW itself?
OPCW's Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel committee’s press release revealed an in-depth awareness of major issues confronting the OPCW. While singling it out for much praise, the committee targeted the US and Russia for pointed criticism: ‘Certain states have not observed the deadline, which was April 2012, for destroying their chemical weapons. This applies especially to the USA and Russia.’ While loudly praising the OPCW’s chemical weapons destruction efforts, the Nobel committee also seized on this opportunity to warn the international community of major unresolved issues regarding the integrity of the CWC.
The drafters of the convention, which was opened for signature in 1993, were absolutely determined to rule out any possible slippage in relation to the destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles on the territory of all States Parties. They included in the CWC a clearly defined deadline for the final destruction of all chemical weapons stockpiles. Once the treaty entered into force in April 1997, the US and Russia knew that they had to complete destruction by April 2012 at the very latest. Yet while they applied remorseless pressure on all other member states to complete destruction by the final deadline, they allowed themselves to slip further and further behind.
The European Union has stated that it ‘attaches great importance to timely destruction of chemical weapons by the possessor states within the deadlines laid down in the Convention’. The UN secretary general’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change ‘reiterated the importance of chemical weapons possessor states destroying their stockpiles by 2012’. Both these statements were made several years before the final deadline.
As recently as January 2013 the US State Department claimed that Russia’s declaration of its own chemical weapons facilities was ‘incomplete’. In 2001 the State Department had gone one step further, alleging that Russia’s declaration was ‘incomplete with respect to chemical weapons production, development facilities and chemical agents and weapons stockpiles’. As was the case during the Cold War, it is at least possible that Russia or the US (or both) is secretly advancing its own chemical-weapons capability. The US and Russian failure to respect the final-destruction deadline fuels this kind of speculative anxiety, undercutting the confidence that was meant to be at the heart of the convention.
The CWC, originally envisaged as a universal instrument, has in practice assumed a discriminatory character—one rule for the major possessors and another for the rest. The CWC emphasises, in part IV (A), paragraph 26, that ‘in no case shall the deadline for a State Party to complete its destruction of all chemical weapons be extended beyond 15 years after the entry into force of this Convention’. Furthermore, article XXII of the CWC, on reservations, states simply: ‘All articles of this Convention shall not be subject to reservations.’
Enduring controversy
In granting the US and Russia leave to continue to destroy their chemical weapons well beyond the final-destruction deadline of April 2012, the decision-making organs of the OPCW were themselves violating a cornerstone requirement of the very convention whose integrity they are called upon to safeguard.
As is the way with UN organisations, the official reports and documents of the OPCW gloss over this controversy of central relevance. Many statements by individual delegations and regional groups in the years before the final-destruction deadline testify, however, to a vigorous internal debate that was ultimately—and heavy-handedly—quashed by the US State Department, with Russia riding on its coat-tails. Since the US power play enforcing the dismissal of Bustani, the State Department has tended to call the shots on questions of importance within the OPCW.
The basic concern was that the OPCW would lose credibility if it was seen not to comply with one of the CWC’s core obligations. There was also concern that, if the US and Russia did not fulfil a key responsibility, how could the OPCW credibly contend that other member states should fulfil each and every convention requirement?
But the dissenting member states and regional groups were unwilling to incur the wrath of the US and, to a lesser extent, Russia, and they ultimately threw in the towel, endorsing reports and formulations disguising the fact that the OPCW had fatally compromised itself. It was fine for the emperor to wear no clothes, provided that this was concealed from the international public. Although the Nobel committee courageously drew attention to this political sleight of hand, its warning has until now gone unnoticed and unheeded.
Issues ahead
At present, Israel has a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the middle east. Once the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons is complete, Israel will enjoy a near regional monopoly over a second weapon of mass destruction—chemical weapons. In addition to Israel, Egypt is the only regional power with a chemical-weapons capability.
The military capability and cohesion of Syria’s army has proved quite remarkable amidst a sectarian civil war—in spite of the fact that, although most of the military leadership is drawn from the ruling Alawite minority, most regular troops are Sunni. Nevertheless, the capacity of the Syrian army to play a major role in any regional conflict involving Israel and Iran, for example, has undoubtedly been seriously degraded.
Even if peace is agreed on, the terrible destruction of Syria’s infrastructure and productive capacities, and the flight into exile of many highly qualified Syrians, mean that, like Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, Syria will be an economic basket-case for decades to come. Syria has effectively ceased to exist as a strong unified state, further contributing to the balkanisation of the Middle East, thereby strengthening the hand of Israel and its allies in the long term. Any weakening of Syria will also be seen by Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies as a significant blow against Iran.
Biological weapons are another elephant in the middle-eastern space. Amidst the cacophony of voices calling for respect for international norms regarding weapons of mass destruction, no one is talking of Syria’s arsenal of biological weapons or those of Israel and Egypt. What will be done to destroy the biological weapons of these three states?
And although the world has become a geopolitical chat room about nuclear weapons which, everyone agrees, Iran does not possess, Israel’s large nuclear arsenal is deemed to be an unsuitable subject of polite conversation in the west. Lofty rhetoric about the need to reaffirm international standards against weapons of mass destruction has temporarily put WMD disarmament back on the regional map.
Israel is for WMD disarmament in Syria and Iran but not in Israel. Russia and the Arab League have tried to revive international interest in a conference on a WMD-free middle east but have seen their efforts to promote this through the IAEA frustrated, as usual, by western opposition. The west’s quiet determination to block any real progress towards a WMD-free zone in the Middle East, a cause that has been strongly supported by the Arab League and Muslim states over many years, has shown no sign of wavering in the context of Syria. The west will continue to insist on confining the doctrine of regional disarmament to Syria and Iran alone, excluding Israel. This partly explains why Saudi Arabia is displaying such intense dissatisfaction with the US and the west at present.
Syria has made visible the increasingly acute tensions hitherto latent in the US-Saudi relationship. Saudi Arabia has been increasingly dissatisfied with US positions on Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Iran and a WMD-free middle east. The Saudis have felt compelled to come out of the closet. They are using their money and influence to openly advance the cause of their radical and intolerant variant of Wahhabism in Syria, throughout the middle east and in countries as far afield as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia. The Saudi government, Saudi intelligence and extremely well-endowed ‘charitable’ organisations work together on this. This is bringing Saudi Arabia into conflict with the US and Iran and ultimately with Israel and the west.
It is conceivable that, once the dust has begun to settle in Syria, the west may begin to call for the destruction of chemical and biological weapons in Egypt, another example of what in western eyes is an unstable Muslim state that is casting off the shackles of the west. Only non-Muslim states such as the US and Israel, it would seem, with their traditions of oppression and surgical use of lethal force, have what it takes to make fair and appropriate use of WMD.
It seems appropriate to recall that, within the past 12 years, UN inspectors have confirmed or overseen the destruction of the chemical-weapons arsenals of two middle-eastern states—Iraq and Libya—and that, notwithstanding western assurances of commitment to democracy, peace, freedom and justice, the governments of both these countries were subsequently violently overthrown by the west, to be replaced by dysfunctional and corrupt political systems, damaged and destroyed infrastructure and endemic conflict and systematic human-rights abuse. While Russia and the US are in agreement about Syria, it is unlikely to share that fate. But if these two states fall out, and are at loggerheads about Syria, what will happen then?
*** About the author
Bob Rigg is former senior editor, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and former chair, NZ National Consultative Committee on Disarmament. He is a freelance researcher and writer specialising in nuclear issues, the Middle East, Central Asia, and US foreign policy.
*** VIEW COMMENTS (1)
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Bob Rigg
28 November 2013
opendemocracy.net
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons should be a technical agency of the UN. But it has arguably become a piece in a geo-political chess game dominated by the US, invited into Syria to act in contravention of its remit.
About ten days before the Hague-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was surprisingly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, a Washington Post headline, alluding to its role in verifying and overseeing the destruction of chemical weapons production facilities in Syria, referred to it as an ‘obscure agency’.
The OPCW had led a secluded existence since 2002, when it controversially dismissed its fiercely independent Brazilian director-general, José Bustani. The International Labour Organisation’s Administrative Tribunal subsequently overturned this decision, finding that it violated fundamental principles of law for international organisations.
Bustani had inflamed the US, among other things by encouraging Iraq to accede to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Bustani’s spirited independence meant that the US could not trust the OPCW under his leadership to legitimise the intervention in Iraq so desperately craved by the neo-conservatives. John Bolton, the then undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, attended the session of the OPCW Executive Council which declined to support the US push to purge Bustani at that stage. Bolton famously said to Bustani: ‘Are you going to resign by midnight? OK, now we will do it my way’—before storming out of Bustani’s office, slamming the door.
US moves encouraging Syria to accede to the CWC now vindicate Bustani’s Iraq initiative of 2002.
Environment transformed
The meeting in Geneva from September 12th to 14th of this year involving the US secretary of state, John Kerry, and Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, and their teams of chemical weapons experts was a remarkable turning point in relations between the US and Russia, initially in relation to chemical weapons in Syria.
Kerry ceased to be a dog of war and became almost a peacenik overnight. The warmth of interaction between the two erstwhile adversaries was remarkable, inspiring even the dour Lavrov to dream aloud of a possible zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the middle east. Under the cover of the CWC the US was able to distance itself from the ill-considered consequences of its own belligerence, and even to present itself as a peace-maker.
Because Syria has acceded to the CWC and has also, so far, fully complied with its exacting declaration, inspection and destruction requirements, the Syrian government’s standing in the international community has been enhanced. The large-scale use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians, recently the source of loud condemnation, has already been enveloped in political amnesia.
In the meantime, large numbers of Syrian civilians continue to kill and be killed by conventional weapons used by all sides to the conflict, with Syria’s large displaced and refugee populations living amidst acute misery, insecurity and hardship. However, irreconcilable divisions amongst the rebel groups and the recent weakening of Saudi Arabia’s traditional alliance with the US may well mean that even a united front of Russia and the US will be unable to impose peace on a fractious and impenetrable environment.
Notwithstanding the international community’s public protestations of concern for the humanitarian disaster that is Syria, it has donated remarkably little humanitarian aid to Syria’s battered and bruised civilian population—not merely in Syria, but also in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
A powerful groundswell of public opinion throughout the US and Europe, sustained by weariness with the devastating political, social and economic cost of foreign wars, brought Congress, the UK Parliament and the French National Assembly to heel. Their abject failure to achieve the original stated objectives of successive foreign wars had stimulated the internationalisation of sectarian terrorist activity, alienating broad cross-sections of public opinion across borders and traditional party lines. The US ‘war on terror’ has actively stimulated international terrorism, which is now far stronger, more sophisticated and more menacing than when the war was initiated.
Although the UN Security Council (UNSC) is maintaining a watching brief over OPCW involvement in Syria, in the words of Lavrov the OPCW is the lead organisation. This means that OPCW inspections are spared the customary byzantine infighting of the UNSC and can proceed smoothly, in accordance with the CWC.
Convention departures
The UNSC resolution 2118 on Syria however requires the OPCW to act in violation of the CWC in several important respects. Article XI of the CWC states that only the Conference of the States Parties may, in consultation with the Executive Council, bring cases of particular gravity to the attention of the UNSC, whereas the UNSC resolution authorizes the Executive Council alone to do this. This disenfranchises the Conference of the States Parties, the only OPCW policy-making organ representing the views of all 190 member states.
Furthermore, the UN recently approached Norway, Albania and Belgium, inviting them to destroy large quantities of Syrian chemical weapons on their territory. This was in direct contravention of Article I(a) of the CWC: ‘Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never under any circumstances: (a) to develop, produce, otherwise acquire, stockpile or retain chemical weapons, or transfer, directly or indirectly, chemical weapons to anyone.’
Norway has declined this UN invitation. Growing public anxiety in Albania about the risks associated with the destruction of large quantities of chemical agents recently scuppered this second illegal proposal of the UN, which currently lacks the enormous budget that would be required for the destruction of chemical weapons in accordance with the stringent environmental and safety standards prescribed by the CWC.
Leaving aside the question of legality, their secure transfer would also be a hazardous, costly and politically combustible exercise, as has been foreshadowed in Albania. The desperate option of destruction at sea is under consideration, although this would also violate article 1(a). Kerry has already indicated that no OPCW member state would run the risk of guaranteeing the safe and secure passage of chemical weapons from many different locations in war-torn Syria.
Even if funding for the responsible destruction of Syria’s large chemical-weapons arsenal were miraculously to appear, it cannot be destroyed in Syria in the midst of a raging civil war. But if Syria transfers its chemical weapons from its territory or to international waters, it will be in violation of article 1(a). If the Conference of the States Parties was unwilling to punish such a major violation of the CWC, any claim it might have to international credibility would be shattered. The OPCW would have to return its Nobel Peace Prize, with an apology. If the OPCW were formally to renegotiate the relevant parts of the CWC before any such transfer took place, this might however offer a way forward.
Does the UNSC have the legal authority to undo elements of a multilateral disarmament treaty painstakingly negotiated over decades? Is the UNSC, a political body crushingly dominated by the US and the remaining four permanent veto-wielding members, legally empowered to amend, qualify or even nullify the application of international treaties? Does the UNSC have the power arbitrarily to amend the application of any international treaty, in the absence of consultation with the treaty signatories and the UN General Assembly? Has the UNSC seriously overreached itself on this occasion?
And, if the OPCW is acting illegally in complying with its UNSC mandate, what are the implications of this for the OPCW itself?
OPCW's Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel committee’s press release revealed an in-depth awareness of major issues confronting the OPCW. While singling it out for much praise, the committee targeted the US and Russia for pointed criticism: ‘Certain states have not observed the deadline, which was April 2012, for destroying their chemical weapons. This applies especially to the USA and Russia.’ While loudly praising the OPCW’s chemical weapons destruction efforts, the Nobel committee also seized on this opportunity to warn the international community of major unresolved issues regarding the integrity of the CWC.
The drafters of the convention, which was opened for signature in 1993, were absolutely determined to rule out any possible slippage in relation to the destruction of chemical weapons stockpiles on the territory of all States Parties. They included in the CWC a clearly defined deadline for the final destruction of all chemical weapons stockpiles. Once the treaty entered into force in April 1997, the US and Russia knew that they had to complete destruction by April 2012 at the very latest. Yet while they applied remorseless pressure on all other member states to complete destruction by the final deadline, they allowed themselves to slip further and further behind.
The European Union has stated that it ‘attaches great importance to timely destruction of chemical weapons by the possessor states within the deadlines laid down in the Convention’. The UN secretary general’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change ‘reiterated the importance of chemical weapons possessor states destroying their stockpiles by 2012’. Both these statements were made several years before the final deadline.
As recently as January 2013 the US State Department claimed that Russia’s declaration of its own chemical weapons facilities was ‘incomplete’. In 2001 the State Department had gone one step further, alleging that Russia’s declaration was ‘incomplete with respect to chemical weapons production, development facilities and chemical agents and weapons stockpiles’. As was the case during the Cold War, it is at least possible that Russia or the US (or both) is secretly advancing its own chemical-weapons capability. The US and Russian failure to respect the final-destruction deadline fuels this kind of speculative anxiety, undercutting the confidence that was meant to be at the heart of the convention.
The CWC, originally envisaged as a universal instrument, has in practice assumed a discriminatory character—one rule for the major possessors and another for the rest. The CWC emphasises, in part IV (A), paragraph 26, that ‘in no case shall the deadline for a State Party to complete its destruction of all chemical weapons be extended beyond 15 years after the entry into force of this Convention’. Furthermore, article XXII of the CWC, on reservations, states simply: ‘All articles of this Convention shall not be subject to reservations.’
Enduring controversy
In granting the US and Russia leave to continue to destroy their chemical weapons well beyond the final-destruction deadline of April 2012, the decision-making organs of the OPCW were themselves violating a cornerstone requirement of the very convention whose integrity they are called upon to safeguard.
As is the way with UN organisations, the official reports and documents of the OPCW gloss over this controversy of central relevance. Many statements by individual delegations and regional groups in the years before the final-destruction deadline testify, however, to a vigorous internal debate that was ultimately—and heavy-handedly—quashed by the US State Department, with Russia riding on its coat-tails. Since the US power play enforcing the dismissal of Bustani, the State Department has tended to call the shots on questions of importance within the OPCW.
The basic concern was that the OPCW would lose credibility if it was seen not to comply with one of the CWC’s core obligations. There was also concern that, if the US and Russia did not fulfil a key responsibility, how could the OPCW credibly contend that other member states should fulfil each and every convention requirement?
But the dissenting member states and regional groups were unwilling to incur the wrath of the US and, to a lesser extent, Russia, and they ultimately threw in the towel, endorsing reports and formulations disguising the fact that the OPCW had fatally compromised itself. It was fine for the emperor to wear no clothes, provided that this was concealed from the international public. Although the Nobel committee courageously drew attention to this political sleight of hand, its warning has until now gone unnoticed and unheeded.
Issues ahead
At present, Israel has a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the middle east. Once the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons is complete, Israel will enjoy a near regional monopoly over a second weapon of mass destruction—chemical weapons. In addition to Israel, Egypt is the only regional power with a chemical-weapons capability.
The military capability and cohesion of Syria’s army has proved quite remarkable amidst a sectarian civil war—in spite of the fact that, although most of the military leadership is drawn from the ruling Alawite minority, most regular troops are Sunni. Nevertheless, the capacity of the Syrian army to play a major role in any regional conflict involving Israel and Iran, for example, has undoubtedly been seriously degraded.
Even if peace is agreed on, the terrible destruction of Syria’s infrastructure and productive capacities, and the flight into exile of many highly qualified Syrians, mean that, like Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, Syria will be an economic basket-case for decades to come. Syria has effectively ceased to exist as a strong unified state, further contributing to the balkanisation of the Middle East, thereby strengthening the hand of Israel and its allies in the long term. Any weakening of Syria will also be seen by Saudi Arabia and its Sunni allies as a significant blow against Iran.
Biological weapons are another elephant in the middle-eastern space. Amidst the cacophony of voices calling for respect for international norms regarding weapons of mass destruction, no one is talking of Syria’s arsenal of biological weapons or those of Israel and Egypt. What will be done to destroy the biological weapons of these three states?
And although the world has become a geopolitical chat room about nuclear weapons which, everyone agrees, Iran does not possess, Israel’s large nuclear arsenal is deemed to be an unsuitable subject of polite conversation in the west. Lofty rhetoric about the need to reaffirm international standards against weapons of mass destruction has temporarily put WMD disarmament back on the regional map.
Israel is for WMD disarmament in Syria and Iran but not in Israel. Russia and the Arab League have tried to revive international interest in a conference on a WMD-free middle east but have seen their efforts to promote this through the IAEA frustrated, as usual, by western opposition. The west’s quiet determination to block any real progress towards a WMD-free zone in the Middle East, a cause that has been strongly supported by the Arab League and Muslim states over many years, has shown no sign of wavering in the context of Syria. The west will continue to insist on confining the doctrine of regional disarmament to Syria and Iran alone, excluding Israel. This partly explains why Saudi Arabia is displaying such intense dissatisfaction with the US and the west at present.
Syria has made visible the increasingly acute tensions hitherto latent in the US-Saudi relationship. Saudi Arabia has been increasingly dissatisfied with US positions on Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Iran and a WMD-free middle east. The Saudis have felt compelled to come out of the closet. They are using their money and influence to openly advance the cause of their radical and intolerant variant of Wahhabism in Syria, throughout the middle east and in countries as far afield as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia. The Saudi government, Saudi intelligence and extremely well-endowed ‘charitable’ organisations work together on this. This is bringing Saudi Arabia into conflict with the US and Iran and ultimately with Israel and the west.
It is conceivable that, once the dust has begun to settle in Syria, the west may begin to call for the destruction of chemical and biological weapons in Egypt, another example of what in western eyes is an unstable Muslim state that is casting off the shackles of the west. Only non-Muslim states such as the US and Israel, it would seem, with their traditions of oppression and surgical use of lethal force, have what it takes to make fair and appropriate use of WMD.
It seems appropriate to recall that, within the past 12 years, UN inspectors have confirmed or overseen the destruction of the chemical-weapons arsenals of two middle-eastern states—Iraq and Libya—and that, notwithstanding western assurances of commitment to democracy, peace, freedom and justice, the governments of both these countries were subsequently violently overthrown by the west, to be replaced by dysfunctional and corrupt political systems, damaged and destroyed infrastructure and endemic conflict and systematic human-rights abuse. While Russia and the US are in agreement about Syria, it is unlikely to share that fate. But if these two states fall out, and are at loggerheads about Syria, what will happen then?
*** About the author
Bob Rigg is former senior editor, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and former chair, NZ National Consultative Committee on Disarmament. He is a freelance researcher and writer specialising in nuclear issues, the Middle East, Central Asia, and US foreign policy.
*** VIEW COMMENTS (1)
Read more: http://www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/bob-rigg/syrias-chemical-weapons-is-un-exceeding-its-mandate
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The New York Times Book Review_ 100 Notable Books of 2013
100 Notable Books of 2013
Published: November 27, 2013
The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
FICTION & POETRY
THE ACCURSED. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Oates’s extravagantly horrifying, funny and prolix postmodern Gothic novel purports to be the definitive account of a curse that infected bucolic Princeton, N.J., in 1905 and 1906.
ALL THAT IS. By James Salter. (Knopf, $26.95.) Salter’s first novel in more than 30 years, which follows the loves and losses of a World War II veteran, is an ambitious departure from his previous work and, at a stroke, demolishes any talk of twilight.
AMERICANAH. By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (Knopf, $26.95.) This witheringly trenchant novel scrutinizes blackness in America, Nigeria and Britain.
BLEEDING EDGE. By Thomas Pynchon. (Penguin Press, $28.95.) Airliners crash not only into the twin towers but into a shaggy-dog tale involving a fraud investigator and a white-collar outlaw in this vital, audacious novel.
CHILDREN ARE DIAMONDS: An African Apocalypse. By Edward Hoagland. (Arcade, $23.95.) The adventure-seeking protagonist of Hoagland’s novel is swept up in the chaos of southern Sudan.
THE CIRCLE. By Dave Eggers. (Knopf/McSweeney’s, $27.95.) In a disturbing not-too-distant future, human existence flows through the portal of a company that gives Eggers’s novel its title.
CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT. By Edwidge Danticat. (Knopf, $25.95.) Danticat’s novel is less about a Haitian girl who disappears on her birthday than about the heart of a magical seaside village.
THE COLOR MASTER: Stories. By Aimee Bender. (Doubleday, $25.95.) Physical objects help Bender’s characters grasp an overwhelming world.
A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA. By Anthony Marra. (Hogarth, $26.) Odds against survival are high for the characters of Marra’s extraordinary first novel, set in war-torn Chechnya.
THE DINNER. By Herman Koch. Translated by Sam Garrett. (Hogarth, $24.) In this clever, dark Dutch novel, two couples dine out under the cloud of a terrible crime committed by their teenage sons.
DIRTY LOVE. By Andre Dubus III. (Norton, $25.95.) Four linked stories expose their characters’ bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses.
DISSIDENT GARDENS. By Jonathan Lethem. (Doubleday, $27.95.) Spanning 80 years and three generations, Lethem’s novel realistically portrays an enchanted — or disenchanted — garden of American leftists in Queens.
DOCTOR SLEEP. By Stephen King. (Scribner, $30.) Now grown up, Danny, the boy with psycho-intuitive powers in “The Shining,” helps another threatened magic child in a novel that shares the virtues of King’s best work.
DUPLEX. By Kathryn Davis. (Graywolf, $24.) A schoolteacher takes an unusual lover in this astonishing, double-hinged novel set in a fantastical suburbia.
THE END OF THE POINT. By Elizabeth Graver. (Harper, $25.99.) A summer house on the Massachusetts coast both shelters and isolates the wealthy family in Graver’s eloquent multigenerational novel.
THE FLAMETHROWERS. By Rachel Kushner. (Scribner, $26.99.) In Kushner’s frequently dazzling second novel, an impressionable artist navigates the volatile worlds of New York and Rome in the 1970s.
THE GOLDFINCH. By Donna Tartt. (Little, Brown, $30.) The “Goldfinch” of the title of Tartt’s smartly written Dickensian novel is a painting smuggled through the early years of a boy’s life — his prize, his guilt and his burden.
THE GOOD LORD BIRD. By James McBride. (Riverhead, $27.95.) McBride’s romp of a novel, the 2013 National Book Award winner, is narrated by a freed slave boy who passes as a girl. It’s a risky portrait of the radical abolitionist John Brown in which irreverence becomes a new form of homage.
A GUIDE TO BEING BORN: Stories. By Ramona Ausubel. (Riverhead, $26.95.) Ausubel’s fantastical collection traces a cycle of transformation: from love to conception to gestation to birth.
HALF THE KINGDOM. By Lore Segal. (Melville House, $23.95.) In Segal’s darkly comic novel, dementia becomes contagious at a Manhattan hospital.
I WANT TO SHOW YOU MORE: Stories. By Jamie Quatro. (Grove, $24.) Quatro’s strange, thrilling and disarmingly honest first collection draws from a pool of resonant themes (Christianity, marital infidelity, cancer, running) in agile recombinations.
THE IMPOSSIBLE LIVES OF GRETA WELLS. By Andrew Sean Greer. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99.) A distraught woman inhabits different selves across the 20th century in Greer’s elegiac novel. T
HE INFATUATIONS. By Javier Marías. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. (Knopf, $26.95.) Amid a proliferation of alternative perspectives, Marías’s novel explores its female narrator’s relationship with the widow and the best friend of a murdered man.
THE INTERESTINGS. By Meg Wolitzer. (Riverhead, $27.95.) Wolitzer’s enveloping novel offers a fresh take on the theme of self-invention, with a heroine who asks herself whether the ambitious men and women in her circle have inaccurately defined success.
LIFE AFTER LIFE. By Kate Atkinson. (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $27.99.) Atkinson’s heroine, born in 1910, keeps dying and dying again, as she experiences the alternate courses her destiny might have taken.
LOCAL SOULS: Novellas. By Allan Gurganus. (Liveright, $25.95.) This triptych, set in Gurganus’s familiar Falls, N.C., showcases the increasing universality of his imaginative powers.
LONGBOURN. By Jo Baker. (Knopf, $25.95.) Baker’s charming novel offers an affecting look at the world of “Pride and Prejudice” from the point of view of the Bennets’ servants’ hall.
LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH. By David Rakoff. (Doubleday, $26.95.) Rakoff completed his novel-in-couplets, whose characters live the title’s verbs, just before his death in 2012.
THE LOWLAND. By Jhumpa Lahiri. (Knopf, $27.95.) After his radical brother is killed, an Indian scientist brings his widow to join him in America in Lahiri’s efficiently written novel.
THE LUMINARIES. By Eleanor Catton. (Little, Brown, $27.) In her Booker Prize winner, a love story and mystery set in New Zealand, Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, while creating something utterly new for the 21st.
MADDADDAM. By Margaret Atwood. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $27.95.) The survivors of “Oryx and Crake” and “The Year of the Flood” await a final showdown, in a trilogy’s concluding entry.
A MARKER TO MEASURE DRIFT. By Alexander Maksik. (Knopf, $24.95.) Maksik’s forceful novel illuminates the life of a Liberian woman who flees her troubled past to seek refuge on an Aegean island.
METAPHYSICAL DOG. By Frank Bidart. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) To immerse oneself in these poems is to enter a crowd of unusual characters: artistic geniuses, violent misfits, dramatic self-accusers (including the poet himself).
OUR ANDROMEDA. By Brenda Shaughnessy. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) In these emotionally charged and gorgeously constructed poems, Shaughnessy imagines a world without a child’s pain.
SCHRODER. By Amity Gaige. (Twelve, $21.99.) In Gaige’s scenic novel, a man with a long-established false identity goes on the run with his 6-year-old daughter.
THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS. By Elizabeth Gilbert. (Viking, $28.95.) In this winning novel by the author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” a botanist’s hunger for explanations carries her through the better part of Darwin’s century, and to Tahiti.
SOMEONE. By Alice McDermott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Through scattered recollections, this novel sifts the significance of an ordinary life.
THE SON. By Philipp Meyer. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Members of a Texas clan grope their way from the ordeals of the frontier to celebrity culture’s absurdities in this masterly multigenerational saga.
THE SOUND OF THINGS FALLING. By Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Translated by Anne McLean. (Riverhead, $27.95.) This gripping Colombian novel, built on the country’s tragic history with the drug trade, meditates on love, fate and death.
SUBMERGENCE. By J. M. Ledgard. (Coffee House, paper, $15.95.) This hard-edged, well-written novel involves a terrorist hostage-taking and a perilous deep-sea dive.
SUBTLE BODIES. By Norman Rush. (Knopf, $26.95.) Amid dark humor both mournful and absurd, former classmates converge on the hilltop estate of a friend who has died in a freak accident.
TENTH OF DECEMBER: Stories. By George Saunders. (Random House, $26.) Saunders’s relentless humor and beatific generosity of spirit keep his highly moral tales from succumbing to life’s darker aspects.
THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE. By Ayana Mathis. (Knopf, $24.95.) Mathis’s deeply felt first novel works at the rough edges of history, within a brutal and poetic allegory of a black family beset by tribulations after the Great Migration to the North.
THE TWO HOTEL FRANCFORTS. By David Leavitt. (Bloomsbury, $25.) In Leavitt’s atmospheric novel of 1940 Lisbon, as two couples await passage to New York, the husbands embark on an affair.
THE VALLEY OF AMAZEMENT. By Amy Tan. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $29.99.) This wrenching novel by the author of “The Joy Luck Club” follows mother and daughter courtesans over four decades.
WANT NOT. By Jonathan Miles. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) Linking disparate characters and story threads, Miles’s novel explores varieties of waste and decay in a consumer world.
WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES. By Karen Joy Fowler. (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95.) This surreptitiously smart novel’s big reveal slyly recalls a tabloid headline: “Girl and Chimp Twinned at Birth in Psychological Experiment.”
WE NEED NEW NAMES. By NoViolet Bulawayo. (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.) A Zimbabwean moves to Detroit in Bulawayo’s striking first novel.
WOKE UP LONELY. By Fiona Maazel. (Graywolf, $26.) Maazel’s restlessly antic novel examines the concurrent urges for solitude and intimacy.
THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS. By Claire Messud. (Knopf, $25.95.) Messud’s ingenious, disquieting novel of outsize conflicts tells the story of a thwarted artist who finds herself bewitched by a boy and his parents.
NONFICTION AFTER THE MUSIC STOPPED: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead. By Alan S. Blinder. (Penguin Press, $29.95.) The former Fed vice chairman says confidence would have returned faster with better government communication about policy.
THE AMERICAN WAY OF POVERTY: How the Other Half Still Lives. By Sasha Abramsky. (Nation Books, $26.99.) This ambitious study, based on Abramsky’s travels around the country meeting the poor, both describes and prescribes.
THE BARBAROUS YEARS. The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675. By Bernard Bailyn. (Knopf, $35.) A noted Harvard historian looks at the chaotic decades between Jamestown and King Philip’s War.
THE BILLIONAIRE’S APPRENTICE: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund. By Anita Raghavan. (Business Plus, $29.) Indian-Americans populate every aspect of this meticulously reported true-life business thriller.
THE BLOOD TELEGRAM: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. By Gary J. Bass. (Knopf, $30.) Bass reveals the sordid White House diplomacy that attended the birth of Bangladesh in 1971.
BOOK OF AGES: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. By Jill Lepore. (Knopf, $27.95.) Ben Franklin’s sister bore 12 children and mostly led a life of hardship, but the two corresponded constantly.
THE BOY DETECTIVE: A New York Childhood. By Roger Rosenblatt. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $19.99.) In his memoir, Rosenblatt recalls being a boy learning to see, and to live, in the city he scrutinizes.
THE BULLY PULPIT: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. By Doris Kearns Goodwin. (Simon & Schuster, $40.) Historical parallels in Goodwin’s latest time machine implicitly ask us to look at our own age.
THE CANCER CHRONICLES: Unlocking Medicine’s Deepest Mystery. By George Johnson. (Knopf, $27.95.) Johnson’s fascinating look at cancer reveals certain profound truths about life itself.
CATASTROPHE 1914: Europe Goes to War. By Max Hastings. (Knopf, $35.) This excellent chronicle of World War I’s first months by a British military historian dispels some popular myths.
COMMAND AND CONTROL: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. By Eric Schlosser. (Penguin Press, $36.) A disquieting but riveting examination of nuclear risk.
COUNTRY GIRL: A Memoir. By Edna O’Brien. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) O’Brien reflects on a fraught and distinguished life, from the restraints of her Irish childhood to literary stardom.
DAYS OF FIRE: Bush and Cheney in the White House. By Peter Baker. (Doubleday, $35.) Baker’s treatment of the George W. Bush administration is haunted by the question of who was in charge.
ECSTATIC NATION: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. By Brenda Wineapple. (Harper, $35.) A masterly Civil War-era history, full of foiled schemes, misfired plans and less-than-happy endings.
EMPRESS DOWAGER CIXI: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China. By Jung Chang. (Knopf, $30.) Chang portrays Cixi as a proto-feminist and reformer in this authoritative account.
THE FARAWAY NEARBY. By Rebecca Solnit. (Viking, $25.95.) Digressive essays, loosely about storytelling, reflect a difficult year in Solnit’s life.
FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. By Sheri Fink. (Crown, $27.) The case of a surgeon suspected of euthanizing patients during the Katrina disaster.
GOING CLEAR: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. By Lawrence Wright. (Knopf, $28.95.) The author of “The Looming Tower” takes a calm and neutral stance toward Scientology, but makes clear it’s like no other church on earth.
THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945. By Rick Atkinson. (Holt, $40.) The final volume of Atkinson’s monumental war trilogy shows that the road to Berlin was far from smooth.
THE HEIR APPARENT: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince. By Jane Ridley. (Random House, $35.) He was vain, gluttonous, promiscuous and none too bright, but “Bertie” emerges as an appealing character in Ridley’s superb book.
A HOUSE IN THE SKY. By Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett. (Scribner, $27.) A searing memoir of a young woman’s brutal kidnapping in Somalia.
JONATHAN SWIFT: His Life and His World. By Leo Damrosch. (Yale University, $35.) A commanding biography by a Harvard professor.
KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR: The Path to a Better Way of Death. By Katy Butler. (Scribner, $25.) Butler’s study of the flaws in end-of-life care mixes personal narrative and tough reporting.
LAWRENCE IN ARABIA: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. By Scott Anderson. (Doubleday, $28.95.) By contextualizing T. E. Lawrence, Anderson is able to address modern themes like oil, jihad and the Arab-Jewish conflict.
LEAN IN: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. By Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell. (Knopf, $24.95.) The lesson conveyed loud and clear by the Facebook executive is that women should step forward and not doubt their ability to combine work and family.
LOST GIRLS: An Unsolved American Mystery. By Robert Kolker. (Harper, $25.99.) Cases of troubled young Internet prostitutes murdered on Long Island add up to a nuanced look at prostitution today.
MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY: Collected Lectures. By Mary Ruefle. (Wave Books, paper, $25.) The poet muses knowingly and merrily on language, writing and speaking sentences that last lifetimes.
MANSON: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. By Jeff Guinn. (Simon & Schuster, $27.50.) Guinn’s tour de force examines Manson’s rise and fall, the 1960s music industry and the decade’s bizarre ambience.
MARGARET FULLER: A New American Life. By Megan Marshall. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) Fuller’s extensive intellectual accomplishments are set in contrast with her romantic disappointments.
MEN WE REAPED: A Memoir. By Jesmyn Ward. (Bloomsbury, $26.) A raw, beautiful elegy for Ward’s brother and four male friends, who died young in Mississippi between 2000 and 2004.
MISS ANNE IN HARLEM: The White Women of the Black Renaissance. By Carla Kaplan. (Harper, $28.99.) A remarkable look at the white women who sought a place in the Harlem Renaissance.
MY BELOVED WORLD. By Sonia Sotomayor.(Knopf, $27.95.) Mostly skirting her legal views, the Supreme Court justice’s memoir reveals much about her family, school and years at Princeton.
MY PROMISED LAND: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. By Ari Shavit. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) Shavit, a columnist for Haaretz, expresses both solidarity with and criticism of his countrymen in this important and powerful book.
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR: An Adventure. By Artemis Cooper. (New York Review Books, $30.) The British wayfarer and travel writer is the subject of Cooper’s affectionate, informed biography.
THE RIDDLE OF THE LABYRINTH: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code. By Margalit Fox. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.)Focusing on an unheralded but heroic Brooklyn classics professor, Fox turns the decipherment of Linear B into a detective story.
THE SKIES BELONG TO US: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking. By Brendan I. Koerner. (Crown, $26.) Refusing to make ’60s avatars of the unlikely couple behind a 1972 skyjacking, Koerner finds a deeper truth about the nature of extremism.
THE SLEEPWALKERS: How Europe Went to War in 1914. By Christopher Clark. (Harper, $29.99.) A Cambridge professor offers a thoroughly comprehensible account of the polarization of a continent, without fixing guilt on one leader or nation.
THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD: And How They Got That Way. By Amanda Ripley. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) A look at countries that are outeducating us — Finland, South Korea, Poland — through the eyes of American high school students abroad.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE. By David Finkel. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Finkel tracks soldiers struggling to navigate postwar life, especially the psychologically wounded.
THE THIRD COAST: When Chicago Built the American Dream. By Thomas Dyja. (Penguin Press, $29.95.) This robust cultural history weaves together the stories of the artists, styles and ideas that developed in Chicago before and after World War II.
THIS TOWN: Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital. By Mark Leibovich. (Blue Rider, $27.95.) An entertaining and deeply troubling view of Washington.
THOSE ANGRY DAYS: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941. By Lynne Olson. (Random House, $30.) The savage political dispute between Roosevelt and the isolationist movement, presented in spellbinding detail.
TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. By Evgeny Morozov. (PublicAffairs, $28.99.) Digital-age transparency may threaten the spirit of democracy, Morozov warns.
TO THE END OF JUNE: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care. By Cris Beam. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) Beam’s wrenching study is a triumph of narrative reporting and storytelling.
UNTHINKABLE: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy. By Kenneth M. Pollack. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) The Mideast expert makes the case for living with a nuclear Iran and trying to contain it.
THE UNWINDING: An Inner History of the New America. By George Packer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) With a nod to John Dos Passos, Packer offers a gripping narrative survey of today’s hard times; the 2013 National Book Award winner for nonfiction.
THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE: The Road to 1914. By Margaret MacMillan. (Random House, $35.) Why did the peace fail, a Canadian historian asks, and she offers superb portraits of the men who took Europe to war in the summer of 1914.
WAVE. By Sonali Deraniyagala. (Knopf, $24.) Deraniyagala’s unforgettable account of her struggle to carry on living after her husband, sons and parents were killed in the 2004 tsunami isn’t only as unsparing as they come, but also defiantly imbued with light.
WILD ONES: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America. By Jon Mooallem. (Penguin Press, $27.95.) Mooallem explores the haphazard nature of our efforts to protect endangered species.
YEAR ZERO: A History of 1945. By Ian Buruma. (Penguin Press, $29.95.) This lively history shows how the Good War turned out badly for many people and splendidly for others less deserving.
A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 2013, on page BR26 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: 100 Notable Books of 2013.
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Published: November 27, 2013
The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
FICTION & POETRY
THE ACCURSED. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Oates’s extravagantly horrifying, funny and prolix postmodern Gothic novel purports to be the definitive account of a curse that infected bucolic Princeton, N.J., in 1905 and 1906.
ALL THAT IS. By James Salter. (Knopf, $26.95.) Salter’s first novel in more than 30 years, which follows the loves and losses of a World War II veteran, is an ambitious departure from his previous work and, at a stroke, demolishes any talk of twilight.
AMERICANAH. By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (Knopf, $26.95.) This witheringly trenchant novel scrutinizes blackness in America, Nigeria and Britain.
BLEEDING EDGE. By Thomas Pynchon. (Penguin Press, $28.95.) Airliners crash not only into the twin towers but into a shaggy-dog tale involving a fraud investigator and a white-collar outlaw in this vital, audacious novel.
CHILDREN ARE DIAMONDS: An African Apocalypse. By Edward Hoagland. (Arcade, $23.95.) The adventure-seeking protagonist of Hoagland’s novel is swept up in the chaos of southern Sudan.
THE CIRCLE. By Dave Eggers. (Knopf/McSweeney’s, $27.95.) In a disturbing not-too-distant future, human existence flows through the portal of a company that gives Eggers’s novel its title.
CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT. By Edwidge Danticat. (Knopf, $25.95.) Danticat’s novel is less about a Haitian girl who disappears on her birthday than about the heart of a magical seaside village.
THE COLOR MASTER: Stories. By Aimee Bender. (Doubleday, $25.95.) Physical objects help Bender’s characters grasp an overwhelming world.
A CONSTELLATION OF VITAL PHENOMENA. By Anthony Marra. (Hogarth, $26.) Odds against survival are high for the characters of Marra’s extraordinary first novel, set in war-torn Chechnya.
THE DINNER. By Herman Koch. Translated by Sam Garrett. (Hogarth, $24.) In this clever, dark Dutch novel, two couples dine out under the cloud of a terrible crime committed by their teenage sons.
DIRTY LOVE. By Andre Dubus III. (Norton, $25.95.) Four linked stories expose their characters’ bottomless needs and stubborn weaknesses.
DISSIDENT GARDENS. By Jonathan Lethem. (Doubleday, $27.95.) Spanning 80 years and three generations, Lethem’s novel realistically portrays an enchanted — or disenchanted — garden of American leftists in Queens.
DOCTOR SLEEP. By Stephen King. (Scribner, $30.) Now grown up, Danny, the boy with psycho-intuitive powers in “The Shining,” helps another threatened magic child in a novel that shares the virtues of King’s best work.
DUPLEX. By Kathryn Davis. (Graywolf, $24.) A schoolteacher takes an unusual lover in this astonishing, double-hinged novel set in a fantastical suburbia.
THE END OF THE POINT. By Elizabeth Graver. (Harper, $25.99.) A summer house on the Massachusetts coast both shelters and isolates the wealthy family in Graver’s eloquent multigenerational novel.
THE FLAMETHROWERS. By Rachel Kushner. (Scribner, $26.99.) In Kushner’s frequently dazzling second novel, an impressionable artist navigates the volatile worlds of New York and Rome in the 1970s.
THE GOLDFINCH. By Donna Tartt. (Little, Brown, $30.) The “Goldfinch” of the title of Tartt’s smartly written Dickensian novel is a painting smuggled through the early years of a boy’s life — his prize, his guilt and his burden.
THE GOOD LORD BIRD. By James McBride. (Riverhead, $27.95.) McBride’s romp of a novel, the 2013 National Book Award winner, is narrated by a freed slave boy who passes as a girl. It’s a risky portrait of the radical abolitionist John Brown in which irreverence becomes a new form of homage.
A GUIDE TO BEING BORN: Stories. By Ramona Ausubel. (Riverhead, $26.95.) Ausubel’s fantastical collection traces a cycle of transformation: from love to conception to gestation to birth.
HALF THE KINGDOM. By Lore Segal. (Melville House, $23.95.) In Segal’s darkly comic novel, dementia becomes contagious at a Manhattan hospital.
I WANT TO SHOW YOU MORE: Stories. By Jamie Quatro. (Grove, $24.) Quatro’s strange, thrilling and disarmingly honest first collection draws from a pool of resonant themes (Christianity, marital infidelity, cancer, running) in agile recombinations.
THE IMPOSSIBLE LIVES OF GRETA WELLS. By Andrew Sean Greer. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.99.) A distraught woman inhabits different selves across the 20th century in Greer’s elegiac novel. T
HE INFATUATIONS. By Javier Marías. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. (Knopf, $26.95.) Amid a proliferation of alternative perspectives, Marías’s novel explores its female narrator’s relationship with the widow and the best friend of a murdered man.
THE INTERESTINGS. By Meg Wolitzer. (Riverhead, $27.95.) Wolitzer’s enveloping novel offers a fresh take on the theme of self-invention, with a heroine who asks herself whether the ambitious men and women in her circle have inaccurately defined success.
LIFE AFTER LIFE. By Kate Atkinson. (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $27.99.) Atkinson’s heroine, born in 1910, keeps dying and dying again, as she experiences the alternate courses her destiny might have taken.
LOCAL SOULS: Novellas. By Allan Gurganus. (Liveright, $25.95.) This triptych, set in Gurganus’s familiar Falls, N.C., showcases the increasing universality of his imaginative powers.
LONGBOURN. By Jo Baker. (Knopf, $25.95.) Baker’s charming novel offers an affecting look at the world of “Pride and Prejudice” from the point of view of the Bennets’ servants’ hall.
LOVE, DISHONOR, MARRY, DIE, CHERISH, PERISH. By David Rakoff. (Doubleday, $26.95.) Rakoff completed his novel-in-couplets, whose characters live the title’s verbs, just before his death in 2012.
THE LOWLAND. By Jhumpa Lahiri. (Knopf, $27.95.) After his radical brother is killed, an Indian scientist brings his widow to join him in America in Lahiri’s efficiently written novel.
THE LUMINARIES. By Eleanor Catton. (Little, Brown, $27.) In her Booker Prize winner, a love story and mystery set in New Zealand, Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, while creating something utterly new for the 21st.
MADDADDAM. By Margaret Atwood. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $27.95.) The survivors of “Oryx and Crake” and “The Year of the Flood” await a final showdown, in a trilogy’s concluding entry.
A MARKER TO MEASURE DRIFT. By Alexander Maksik. (Knopf, $24.95.) Maksik’s forceful novel illuminates the life of a Liberian woman who flees her troubled past to seek refuge on an Aegean island.
METAPHYSICAL DOG. By Frank Bidart. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) To immerse oneself in these poems is to enter a crowd of unusual characters: artistic geniuses, violent misfits, dramatic self-accusers (including the poet himself).
OUR ANDROMEDA. By Brenda Shaughnessy. (Copper Canyon, paper, $16.) In these emotionally charged and gorgeously constructed poems, Shaughnessy imagines a world without a child’s pain.
SCHRODER. By Amity Gaige. (Twelve, $21.99.) In Gaige’s scenic novel, a man with a long-established false identity goes on the run with his 6-year-old daughter.
THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS. By Elizabeth Gilbert. (Viking, $28.95.) In this winning novel by the author of “Eat, Pray, Love,” a botanist’s hunger for explanations carries her through the better part of Darwin’s century, and to Tahiti.
SOMEONE. By Alice McDermott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) Through scattered recollections, this novel sifts the significance of an ordinary life.
THE SON. By Philipp Meyer. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.) Members of a Texas clan grope their way from the ordeals of the frontier to celebrity culture’s absurdities in this masterly multigenerational saga.
THE SOUND OF THINGS FALLING. By Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Translated by Anne McLean. (Riverhead, $27.95.) This gripping Colombian novel, built on the country’s tragic history with the drug trade, meditates on love, fate and death.
SUBMERGENCE. By J. M. Ledgard. (Coffee House, paper, $15.95.) This hard-edged, well-written novel involves a terrorist hostage-taking and a perilous deep-sea dive.
SUBTLE BODIES. By Norman Rush. (Knopf, $26.95.) Amid dark humor both mournful and absurd, former classmates converge on the hilltop estate of a friend who has died in a freak accident.
TENTH OF DECEMBER: Stories. By George Saunders. (Random House, $26.) Saunders’s relentless humor and beatific generosity of spirit keep his highly moral tales from succumbing to life’s darker aspects.
THE TWELVE TRIBES OF HATTIE. By Ayana Mathis. (Knopf, $24.95.) Mathis’s deeply felt first novel works at the rough edges of history, within a brutal and poetic allegory of a black family beset by tribulations after the Great Migration to the North.
THE TWO HOTEL FRANCFORTS. By David Leavitt. (Bloomsbury, $25.) In Leavitt’s atmospheric novel of 1940 Lisbon, as two couples await passage to New York, the husbands embark on an affair.
THE VALLEY OF AMAZEMENT. By Amy Tan. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $29.99.) This wrenching novel by the author of “The Joy Luck Club” follows mother and daughter courtesans over four decades.
WANT NOT. By Jonathan Miles. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) Linking disparate characters and story threads, Miles’s novel explores varieties of waste and decay in a consumer world.
WE ARE ALL COMPLETELY BESIDE OURSELVES. By Karen Joy Fowler. (Marian Wood/Putnam, $26.95.) This surreptitiously smart novel’s big reveal slyly recalls a tabloid headline: “Girl and Chimp Twinned at Birth in Psychological Experiment.”
WE NEED NEW NAMES. By NoViolet Bulawayo. (Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, $25.) A Zimbabwean moves to Detroit in Bulawayo’s striking first novel.
WOKE UP LONELY. By Fiona Maazel. (Graywolf, $26.) Maazel’s restlessly antic novel examines the concurrent urges for solitude and intimacy.
THE WOMAN UPSTAIRS. By Claire Messud. (Knopf, $25.95.) Messud’s ingenious, disquieting novel of outsize conflicts tells the story of a thwarted artist who finds herself bewitched by a boy and his parents.
NONFICTION AFTER THE MUSIC STOPPED: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead. By Alan S. Blinder. (Penguin Press, $29.95.) The former Fed vice chairman says confidence would have returned faster with better government communication about policy.
THE AMERICAN WAY OF POVERTY: How the Other Half Still Lives. By Sasha Abramsky. (Nation Books, $26.99.) This ambitious study, based on Abramsky’s travels around the country meeting the poor, both describes and prescribes.
THE BARBAROUS YEARS. The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675. By Bernard Bailyn. (Knopf, $35.) A noted Harvard historian looks at the chaotic decades between Jamestown and King Philip’s War.
THE BILLIONAIRE’S APPRENTICE: The Rise of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge Fund. By Anita Raghavan. (Business Plus, $29.) Indian-Americans populate every aspect of this meticulously reported true-life business thriller.
THE BLOOD TELEGRAM: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide. By Gary J. Bass. (Knopf, $30.) Bass reveals the sordid White House diplomacy that attended the birth of Bangladesh in 1971.
BOOK OF AGES: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin. By Jill Lepore. (Knopf, $27.95.) Ben Franklin’s sister bore 12 children and mostly led a life of hardship, but the two corresponded constantly.
THE BOY DETECTIVE: A New York Childhood. By Roger Rosenblatt. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $19.99.) In his memoir, Rosenblatt recalls being a boy learning to see, and to live, in the city he scrutinizes.
THE BULLY PULPIT: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. By Doris Kearns Goodwin. (Simon & Schuster, $40.) Historical parallels in Goodwin’s latest time machine implicitly ask us to look at our own age.
THE CANCER CHRONICLES: Unlocking Medicine’s Deepest Mystery. By George Johnson. (Knopf, $27.95.) Johnson’s fascinating look at cancer reveals certain profound truths about life itself.
CATASTROPHE 1914: Europe Goes to War. By Max Hastings. (Knopf, $35.) This excellent chronicle of World War I’s first months by a British military historian dispels some popular myths.
COMMAND AND CONTROL: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. By Eric Schlosser. (Penguin Press, $36.) A disquieting but riveting examination of nuclear risk.
COUNTRY GIRL: A Memoir. By Edna O’Brien. (Little, Brown, $27.99.) O’Brien reflects on a fraught and distinguished life, from the restraints of her Irish childhood to literary stardom.
DAYS OF FIRE: Bush and Cheney in the White House. By Peter Baker. (Doubleday, $35.) Baker’s treatment of the George W. Bush administration is haunted by the question of who was in charge.
ECSTATIC NATION: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. By Brenda Wineapple. (Harper, $35.) A masterly Civil War-era history, full of foiled schemes, misfired plans and less-than-happy endings.
EMPRESS DOWAGER CIXI: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China. By Jung Chang. (Knopf, $30.) Chang portrays Cixi as a proto-feminist and reformer in this authoritative account.
THE FARAWAY NEARBY. By Rebecca Solnit. (Viking, $25.95.) Digressive essays, loosely about storytelling, reflect a difficult year in Solnit’s life.
FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. By Sheri Fink. (Crown, $27.) The case of a surgeon suspected of euthanizing patients during the Katrina disaster.
GOING CLEAR: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. By Lawrence Wright. (Knopf, $28.95.) The author of “The Looming Tower” takes a calm and neutral stance toward Scientology, but makes clear it’s like no other church on earth.
THE GUNS AT LAST LIGHT: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945. By Rick Atkinson. (Holt, $40.) The final volume of Atkinson’s monumental war trilogy shows that the road to Berlin was far from smooth.
THE HEIR APPARENT: A Life of Edward VII, the Playboy Prince. By Jane Ridley. (Random House, $35.) He was vain, gluttonous, promiscuous and none too bright, but “Bertie” emerges as an appealing character in Ridley’s superb book.
A HOUSE IN THE SKY. By Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett. (Scribner, $27.) A searing memoir of a young woman’s brutal kidnapping in Somalia.
JONATHAN SWIFT: His Life and His World. By Leo Damrosch. (Yale University, $35.) A commanding biography by a Harvard professor.
KNOCKING ON HEAVEN’S DOOR: The Path to a Better Way of Death. By Katy Butler. (Scribner, $25.) Butler’s study of the flaws in end-of-life care mixes personal narrative and tough reporting.
LAWRENCE IN ARABIA: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. By Scott Anderson. (Doubleday, $28.95.) By contextualizing T. E. Lawrence, Anderson is able to address modern themes like oil, jihad and the Arab-Jewish conflict.
LEAN IN: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. By Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell. (Knopf, $24.95.) The lesson conveyed loud and clear by the Facebook executive is that women should step forward and not doubt their ability to combine work and family.
LOST GIRLS: An Unsolved American Mystery. By Robert Kolker. (Harper, $25.99.) Cases of troubled young Internet prostitutes murdered on Long Island add up to a nuanced look at prostitution today.
MADNESS, RACK, AND HONEY: Collected Lectures. By Mary Ruefle. (Wave Books, paper, $25.) The poet muses knowingly and merrily on language, writing and speaking sentences that last lifetimes.
MANSON: The Life and Times of Charles Manson. By Jeff Guinn. (Simon & Schuster, $27.50.) Guinn’s tour de force examines Manson’s rise and fall, the 1960s music industry and the decade’s bizarre ambience.
MARGARET FULLER: A New American Life. By Megan Marshall. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $30.) Fuller’s extensive intellectual accomplishments are set in contrast with her romantic disappointments.
MEN WE REAPED: A Memoir. By Jesmyn Ward. (Bloomsbury, $26.) A raw, beautiful elegy for Ward’s brother and four male friends, who died young in Mississippi between 2000 and 2004.
MISS ANNE IN HARLEM: The White Women of the Black Renaissance. By Carla Kaplan. (Harper, $28.99.) A remarkable look at the white women who sought a place in the Harlem Renaissance.
MY BELOVED WORLD. By Sonia Sotomayor.(Knopf, $27.95.) Mostly skirting her legal views, the Supreme Court justice’s memoir reveals much about her family, school and years at Princeton.
MY PROMISED LAND: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel. By Ari Shavit. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) Shavit, a columnist for Haaretz, expresses both solidarity with and criticism of his countrymen in this important and powerful book.
PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR: An Adventure. By Artemis Cooper. (New York Review Books, $30.) The British wayfarer and travel writer is the subject of Cooper’s affectionate, informed biography.
THE RIDDLE OF THE LABYRINTH: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code. By Margalit Fox. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $27.99.)Focusing on an unheralded but heroic Brooklyn classics professor, Fox turns the decipherment of Linear B into a detective story.
THE SKIES BELONG TO US: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking. By Brendan I. Koerner. (Crown, $26.) Refusing to make ’60s avatars of the unlikely couple behind a 1972 skyjacking, Koerner finds a deeper truth about the nature of extremism.
THE SLEEPWALKERS: How Europe Went to War in 1914. By Christopher Clark. (Harper, $29.99.) A Cambridge professor offers a thoroughly comprehensible account of the polarization of a continent, without fixing guilt on one leader or nation.
THE SMARTEST KIDS IN THE WORLD: And How They Got That Way. By Amanda Ripley. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) A look at countries that are outeducating us — Finland, South Korea, Poland — through the eyes of American high school students abroad.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE. By David Finkel. (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Finkel tracks soldiers struggling to navigate postwar life, especially the psychologically wounded.
THE THIRD COAST: When Chicago Built the American Dream. By Thomas Dyja. (Penguin Press, $29.95.) This robust cultural history weaves together the stories of the artists, styles and ideas that developed in Chicago before and after World War II.
THIS TOWN: Two Parties and a Funeral — Plus Plenty of Valet Parking! — in America’s Gilded Capital. By Mark Leibovich. (Blue Rider, $27.95.) An entertaining and deeply troubling view of Washington.
THOSE ANGRY DAYS: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II, 1939-1941. By Lynne Olson. (Random House, $30.) The savage political dispute between Roosevelt and the isolationist movement, presented in spellbinding detail.
TO SAVE EVERYTHING, CLICK HERE: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. By Evgeny Morozov. (PublicAffairs, $28.99.) Digital-age transparency may threaten the spirit of democracy, Morozov warns.
TO THE END OF JUNE: The Intimate Life of American Foster Care. By Cris Beam. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) Beam’s wrenching study is a triumph of narrative reporting and storytelling.
UNTHINKABLE: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy. By Kenneth M. Pollack. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) The Mideast expert makes the case for living with a nuclear Iran and trying to contain it.
THE UNWINDING: An Inner History of the New America. By George Packer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27.) With a nod to John Dos Passos, Packer offers a gripping narrative survey of today’s hard times; the 2013 National Book Award winner for nonfiction.
THE WAR THAT ENDED PEACE: The Road to 1914. By Margaret MacMillan. (Random House, $35.) Why did the peace fail, a Canadian historian asks, and she offers superb portraits of the men who took Europe to war in the summer of 1914.
WAVE. By Sonali Deraniyagala. (Knopf, $24.) Deraniyagala’s unforgettable account of her struggle to carry on living after her husband, sons and parents were killed in the 2004 tsunami isn’t only as unsparing as they come, but also defiantly imbued with light.
WILD ONES: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America. By Jon Mooallem. (Penguin Press, $27.95.) Mooallem explores the haphazard nature of our efforts to protect endangered species.
YEAR ZERO: A History of 1945. By Ian Buruma. (Penguin Press, $29.95.) This lively history shows how the Good War turned out badly for many people and splendidly for others less deserving.
A version of this article appears in print on December 8, 2013, on page BR26 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: 100 Notable Books of 2013.
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