The Raw Story

Monday, 12 January 2015

BBC reporter faces calls to resign after he tells daughter of Holocaust survivors after Paris attacks: 'Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well'

© BBC

BBC reporter Tim Willcox (pictured) has faced calls to resign after he told the daughter of Holocaust survivors: 'Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well' during a live broadcast from Paris yesterday

A BBC reporter has faced calls to resign after he told the daughter of Holocaust survivors in Paris: 'Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well'.

Journalist Tim Willcox sparked anger during his coverage of yesterday's rally in Paris, held in memory of the 17 victims of last week's terror attacks, including four Jewish people in a siege at a Kosher supermarket.

During a live report from the streets of Paris, Willcox was speaking to a number of participants in the march, including one woman who expressed her fears that Jews were being persecuted, and 'the situation is going back to the days of the 1930s in Europe.'

Video here: Link

To this, Willcox, who was broadcasting on the BBC News channel replied: 'Many critics though of Israel's policy would suggest that the Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well.'

When the woman, shaking her head, responded saying: 'We can't do an amalgam', he told her: 'You understand everything is seen from different perspectives.'

She was identified during the broadcast as 'Chava', and told Willcox when she was introduced on screen that she had lived in France for 20 years, but was originally from Israel.

Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

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© REUTERS/Andy Wong/Pool

Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro (front L) walks with China's President Xi Jinping as they arrive for a welcome ceremony at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, January 7, 2015.

President Maduro announced that China has agreed to invest 20 billion dollars in Venezuela following the China-Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) meeting in Beijing. Venezuelan officials hope that increased Chinese investment will offset some of the shortfalls in the Venezuelan economy due to decade-low oil prices.

Xi Jinping, the Chinese president opened the First China-CELAC Forum by pledging US$250 billion in new investment in Latin America over the next decade. CELAC was formed in 2011 with the goal of consolidating regional integration and reducing the influence of the United States in Latin America.

Speaking to Latin America's shift away from the United States and towards China, President Maduro stated "This is a vital point. I told President [Xi Jinping] over dinner last night: there is unique opportunity in this moment in history we're living through."

Following the meeting in Beijing President Maduro told the Venezuelan News Agency "we rounded up more than $20 billion in investment." But the newspaper reported that "it remains unclear whether the sum represents a fresh arrangement or is part of pre-existing oil-for-loans deals."

China has already awarded US$50 billion of credit to Venezuela since 2007, most of which is paid through oil shipments. Venezuela ships 524,000 barrels of crude oil and derivatives to China per day, nearly half of which goes toward paying existing loans. This amount is expected to increase to one million barrels per day in the next year.

"It can be said that the development of China-Venezuela relations and win-win positive cooperation have been raised to a new level," Xi Jinping stated following the China-CELAC meeting. He added, "I am convinced that this meeting will render fruitful results and promote a shared development."

Speaking to Venezuela´s growing relationship with China, Venezuelan Vice president Jorge Arreaza stated "China is a great potential, and it is not imperialist. It is a great potential that wants for all of us to have a respectable and dignified living standards."

On the independent leftist news site , Jesús Silva R. raises questions about the implications of increasing economic agreements with Venezuela and China "as revolutionaries committed to popular sovereignty and the intransigent defense of the Bolivarian Constitution, we suggest rethinking the process in which agreements with China are made, especially since tens of billions of dollars are at stake, as well as control of our oil for years and future generations."

The Venezuelan President is continuing on his "international tour" to round up more economic support in the face of decade-low oil prices. After a fruitful visit in China, is headed to fellow OPEC nations. Since oil exports make up 95% of Venezuela´s GDP, Wednesday´s drop in oil prices (Brent Crude fell below US$50 per barrel for the first time since 2009), will have a strong impact on the Venezuelan economy.

Greek farmers have lost $46.7 million in fruit and vegetable exports due to the food ban introduced by Russia in August 2014, a report published by Athens News Agency said.

"We have lost significant volumes of exports to Russia - 34,167 tonnes [37,662 tons] or 39.45 million euro [$46.7 million]," the Incofruit-Hellas association of Greek enterprises exporting fruit, vegetables and juices said in a report published Sunday.

Exports of Greek fruit and vegetables to Russia in the period from January-October 2014 dropped by 31.1 percent in volume and 35.1 percent in revenues compared with the same period in 2013, according to the report. Despite the drop, Russia is still the main recipient of Greek fruit and vegetables outside the European Union, the association said.

The Russian food ban has "negatively affected the global trade in vegetables and horticultural crops". Before the ban was introduced, Greek export to Russia was growing at an "impressive pace", the agency stressed in the report.

In August 2014, Moscow introduced a one-year ban on imports of a list of food products from the United States, the European Union and other countries that had earlier imposed economic sanctions against Russia over its alleged involvement in the Ukrainian conflict. The list of banned products includes meat, poultry, fish, seafood, dairy products, fruit and vegetables.

Comment: Greece has been suffering thanks to crippling austerity measures and things are deteriorating to the point that there appears to be a run on Greek banks. Clearly, the West's ill-conceived scheme to sink the Russian economy via sanctions is having deleterious effects on EU nations, however that does not seem to have caused EU rulers to re-think the wisdom of their actions as they seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot at every turn to pacify Washington.

What could be the largest single collection of lemur remains has been discovered in submerged caves in Madagascar.

A team of experts working with the National Science Foundation discovered the bone yard in a remote desert region of the island.

The complete lemur skeletons - all of extinct species - had remained intact for hundreds if not thousands of years, making it a unique site of great significance.

As well as vast numbers of lemur fossils, the remains of other animals were also found, including bats, rodents and carnivores.

[embedded content]

Brooklyn College anthropologist Alfred Rosenberger, who led the project, said: "It's really an enormous number of fossils all in one place. They're very complete which is unusual in palaeontology because you get broken bones frequently or you get different parts of the body separated from one another. Here everything is together in beautiful condition.

"The possibility of making very important and exciting discoveries is phenomenal because nothing like this has ever been found before."

Of the three caves explored, all contained fossils but one was found to have an "unprecedented number of recently extinct lemurs", the NSF said.

One such lemur was the megaladapis, or koala lemur, a giant species that went extinct about 500 years ago.

Experts say the find will help us understand the environment of Madagascar as well as what led to the creatures extinction.

Laurie Godfrey, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said: "When you have a place where two thirds of the animals that live there only 1,000 years ago are gone, and replaced with other animals, what we need to know is what are the implications for the rest of the flora and fauna?"

Rosenberger said it marks a new era in underwater palaeontology and is a "remarkable discovery". "It's going to be wonderful for science and future generations"

© Islamic State Official Media House For Anbar

ISIS circulated photos claiming responsibility for Monday's attack on the Saudi Arabian border with Iraq.

For the first time since the Islamic State group formally announced its desire to conquer Saudi Arabia last month, government officials said terrorist elements had launched an attack on the Saudi border with Iraq. Four militants, one wearing a suicide vest, attacked a border fortification Monday, killing three Saudi border guards.

The militants' official media wing for Iraq's Anbar province published a photo essay taking responsibility for the attack, which is the closest ISIS has come to breaching the coveted Saudi Arabian border since it declared the existence of a caliphate in June. The suicide attack signals a change in the group's strategy to conquer the kingdom. It was both the first direct attack on Saudi armed forces and the first documented attempt by the militant group to infiltrate the country. Despite the government's past efforts to quell extremism, Saudi Arabia has become increasing vulnerable to ISIS advances.

Speaking to Reuters, Iraqi security analyst Mustafa Alani described the border attack as "the first attack by Islamic State itself against Saudi Arabia and is a clear message after Saudi Arabia entered the international coalition against it."

Saudi Arabia is an active member of the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition and a longtime U.S. ally. The kingdom is also the largest producer and exporter of oil and the region's Sunni powerhouse, making it a triple prize for ISIS and an essential part of its plans to expand the so-called caliphate. The government is well aware of the country's susceptibility to militant infiltration and has made various attempts to quell the rising extremism, that varies from a fence on the border to warming diplomatic ties with Iraq's Shiite-dominated government.

Saudi Arabia ramped up security at the border in June and more recently built a nearly 600-mile (1,000 kilometer) fence on the border with Iraq to keep out militants. Monday's attack hit the northern border patrol at al-Suwaif near the city of Arar, the reported. Arar is more than 700 miles (1,200 km) from Riyadh but territory between the two is not densely populated, and militants may face little opposition if they are able to cross the border and advance toward the capital through open desert.

To boost Saudi presence in neighboring Iraq, officials began talks Sunday on reopening the Saudi embassy in Baghdad, which has been closed since 1990, and a consulate in Erbil, the capital of Iraq's Kurdistan region. The diplomatic seats are to open "at the earliest opportunity," the Saudi Press Agency reported.

However, the militant group's ideology already has succeeded in infiltrating Saudi Arabia. Last month, ISIS claimed responsibility for killing a Danish national in the country and, in a separate incident, security forces arrested around 100 suspected ISIS militants accused of carrying out a November attack on the Saudi Shiite community in al-Ahsa. These attacks were likely carried out by ISIS sympathizers already in Saudi Arabia, who were heeding ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's call to attack Saudi citizens, "embitter their lives and make them occupied with themselves instead of us."

Since Baghdadi declared the kingdom to be a new ISIS wilayat (province), the group's strategy has entailed boosting capabilities of those sympathizers and encouraging sporadic, lone-wolf attacks to shift the focus Saudi's security forces' focus away from battling militants in Iraq, Harleen Gambhir, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, recently told .

Whether the recent attack was the result of direct orders from Baghdadi or of a lone-wolf group of ISIS sympathizers, the threat to Saudi Arabia remains strong. Following the attack, the Saudi Interior Ministry released a statement reiterating the kingdom's security forces were "determined to thwart ... plots to undermine the security and stability of the homeland."

[embedded content]

A prominent Saudi Arabian cleric has whipped up controversy by issuing a religious ruling forbidding the building of snowmen, described them as anti-Islamic.

Asked on a religious website if it was permissible for fathers to build snowmen for their children after a snowstorm in the country's north, Sheikh Mohammed Saleh al-Munajjid replied: "It is not permitted to make a statue out of snow, even by way of play and fun."

Quoting from Muslim scholars, Sheikh Munajjid argued that to build a snowman was to create an image of a human being, an action considered sinful under the kingdom's strict interpretation of Sunni Islam.

"God has given people space to make whatever they want which does not have a soul, including trees, ships, fruits, buildings and so on," he wrote in his ruling.

That provoked swift responses from Twitter users writing in Arabic and identifying themselves with Arab names.

"They are afraid for their faith of everything ... sick minds," one Twitter user wrote.

Another posted a photo of a man in formal Arab garb holding the arm of a "snow bride" wearing a bra and lipstick. "The reason for the ban is fear of sedition," he wrote.

A third said the country was plagued by two types of people:

"A people looking for a fatwa (religious ruling) for everything in their lives, and a cleric who wants to interfere in everything in the lives of others through a fatwa," the user wrote.

Sheikh Munajjid had some supporters, however. "It (building snowmen) is imitating the infidels, it promotes lustiness and eroticism," one wrote.

"May God preserve the scholars, for they enjoy sharp vision and recognize matters that even Satan does not think about."

Snow has covered upland areas of Tabuk province near Saudi Arabia's border with Jordan for the third consecutive year as cold weather swept across the Middle East.

The idea that the United States is going through a "manufacturing renaissance," although optimistically touted in the media and by experts, does not reflect reality, write the authors of a new report from a reputable Washington, D.C. think-tank, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).

The authors of the report claim that the highly publicized media narrative of a rebirth in America's manufacturing sector is based on misleading interpretations of data that in fact paint a much bleaker picture of a temporary recovery within the context of the economic cycle, rather than structural growth.

America's unprecedented decline in manufacturing employment in the 2000s, which was caused not by increases in productivity, as was the case in previous decades, but rather outsourcing and decline in output, led to trade deficits in sectors such as high-tech production, which is typically brought up as an example of American manufacturing, write the authors.

"The lion's share of growth that has occurred appears to have been driven by a cyclical, rather than structural, recovery, and as such may represent only a temporary trend," the report states, pointing out that even compared to previous recessions, the recovery has only been partial, with both output and employment below 2009 levels when adjusted for lower costs achieved through outsourcing.

The authors also take a special look at what they believe is a myth of "reshoring" - companies that once outsourced production overseas bringing it back to the United States.

The authors point out is that rising labor costs in China do not mean an end to outsourcing of jobs, as Chinese wages are growing slower than its labor productivity, and that even if official Chinese statistics are to be believed, "the average Chinese laborer would still earn just roughly $4.40 an hour, a scant 12 percent of U.S. wages."

Additionally, the authors point out that the shale gas revolution has not reduced energy prices for U.S. manufacturers, saying that "The benefits are concentrated in oil and gas refining and energy intensive industries." Also, electricity costs are only marginally impacted by shale gas prices, which does not affect reshoring.

Lastly, the authors dispute the idea that U.S. productivity growth is cutting cost differences, as new production methods such as robotics and 3D printing are changing manufacturing and cutting labor costs, pointing out that productivity growth in the U.S. in 2010-2013 only amounted to an annual average of 2.5 percent compared to 8.5 percent in China and 5 percent in Germany.

As a solution, think-tank suggests that the U.S. adopt a comprehensive economic policy that promotes manufacturing and productivity growth.

The Raw Story

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Monday, 12 January 2015

BBC reporter faces calls to resign after he tells daughter of Holocaust survivors after Paris attacks: 'Palestinians suffer hugely at Jewish hands as well'

China commits $20 billion to Venezuela at first China-Latin America forum in Beijing

Greek farmers lose $46.7 million due to Russian food ban

Enormous underwater lemur graveyard discovered dating back 1,000 years in Madagasgar

ISIS signals strategy change: Claims attack on Saudi Arabia border

Saudi cleric condemns snowmen as anti-Islamic

American manufacturing renaissance a complete myth

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