Tag: aid
Obama’s Next Move May Be Lifting US Protection Of Israel At UN

Obama’s Next Move May Be Lifting US Protection Of Israel At UN

By Sangwon Yoon, Bloomberg News (TNS)

UNITED NATIONS — While the world remains fixated on the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, the Obama administration is facing another foreign policy showdown in the United Nations Security Council.

The administration has signaled that it might abandon the decades-long U.S. policy of protecting Israel at the U.N. and back a Security Council resolution laying out terms for a two-state solution to the almost 67-year-old dispute between the Jewish state and the Palestinians.

Robert Malley, the Middle East director for President Barack Obama’s National Security Council, told at least one European nation two weeks ago that the administration is more willing than it has ever been to work on a Security Council resolution defining the parameters for a Mideast peace agreement, according to a report on the conversation to superiors by a Washington-based European diplomat. A copy of the report was viewed by Bloomberg News.

The reported comments by Malley are “completely false,” Bernadette Meehan, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said in an email. “Rob has not had any conversation on this topic with any European diplomats then or since.”

Obama, though, has left no doubt that he’s considering whether to bend the U.S. policy of vetoing U.N. resolutions that Israel opposes and, in the process, punish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for pledging that he will ensure that no Palestinian state is created anytime soon. Netanyahu also opposes the talks with Iran, warning Tuesday that the deal the U.S. seeks would “pave the way” for the Islamic Republic to develop nuclear weapons.

“We have to do an evaluation of where we are” on Mideast peace efforts, Obama said at a news conference on March 24.

Past U.S. Security Council vetoes were “predicated on this idea that the two-state solution is the best outcome,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest has said. “Now our ally in these talks has said that they are no longer committed to that solution. That means we need to reevaluate our position.”

Obama said he’ll wait for Netanyahu to form his new coalition government by the preliminary April 22 deadline before announcing the conclusions of his Mideast peace policy reassessment.

While Palestinians and Europeans are excited by the prospect of U.S. support for a two-state solution, they remain wary of how much political and diplomatic latitude Obama has to follow through.

Republican lawmakers are promising to fight back if Obama qualifies U.S. support for Israel at the U.N. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), has warned of a “violent backlash by the Congress, bipartisan in nature,” if Obama lets a Security Council resolution defining the terms of a peace agreement go forward without first getting both sides to agree.

“The last thing I want is to be put in a box where I have to take the U.N. on,” Graham told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on March 23, reminding the audience that as chairman of the Senate appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations, he has the power to suspend America’s $654 million annual contribution to the world body.

U.N. diplomats and Obama’s former Mideast peace negotiators say the president has two realistic options.

First, the U.S. could back a French plan to draft a Security Council resolution that would set a binding timeframe in which to define the parameters of a two-state solution based on Israel’s 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as their shared capital, said two knowledgeable Security Council diplomats.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said on March 27 that in the “coming weeks” France will restart discussions on such a text, which ended in December due to U.S. objections.

Robert Serry, the U.N.’s departing Mideast peace envoy, urged the Security Council last week to update its 1967 Resolution 242, which has been a cornerstone of almost 50 years of diplomatic efforts. It was adopted after Israel captured East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and Gaza from its Arab enemies in the Six-Day War that year. Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt after the two countries signed a peace treaty in 1979.

Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, said “a carefully crafted resolution on parameters” is the most realistic option for the U.S. to take, “provided that it is balanced and doesn’t go into so much detail as to prejudge negotiations.”

The biggest challenges will be whether to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which the Palestinians and the French oppose, and what security arrangements should be included to ensure that a new Palestinian state couldn’t be a launching pad for attacks against Israel, said the two diplomats.

The second U.S. option is to introduce a new draft Security Council resolution that outlines no parameters. It would call on both parties to make progress toward resuming negotiations and condemn activities such as Israel’s settlement building in East Jerusalem and the West Bank for obstructing the path to peace, said an Arab diplomat at the U.N. who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

While such a resolution is unlikely to be adopted, a draft would pressure Israel and Netanyahu to at least freeze settlement construction, said three Security Council diplomats who asked not to be named commenting on sensitive matters.

Such actions also might help deter the Palestinians, at least for a time, from seeking full statehood recognition from the Security Council and membership in international treaties, or from pursuing its request that the International Criminal Court probe alleged Israeli war crimes, said the three diplomats.

Aaron David Miller, a vice president at the Wilson Center in Washington who served as a Middle East negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations, said Obama first must determine his goals for the remainder of his term before exploring the U.S. options at the Security Council.

“The real question is, what is the best option for the administration to pursue in the next two months?” Miller said.

Adopting a U.N. resolution before any agreement is reached between the two parties would be useless unless the administration is ready to try to force Israel to accept a two-state solution by cutting U.S. aid to Israel, recognizing Palestine, or pushing the Europeans to sanction Israel and reduce trade, Miller said.

“But I see no indication whatsoever that this administration is ready to do that,” he said.

Photo: Zack Lee via Flickr

High-Tech Effort Calls Up Smartphones For Ebola Battle

High-Tech Effort Calls Up Smartphones For Ebola Battle

By Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

SEATTLE — The tutued young woman, the court interpreter, and the middle-aged dad wearing a jester’s cap in Seattle Seahawks colors traipsed down to the Living Computer Museum here Saturday morning with a single goal in mind.

They wanted to help stamp out Ebola. Using 10,000 or so smartphones.

Aid groups point to a gaping hole in the effort to battle the terrifying disease in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea: the lack of real-time data. How many new cases are cropping up and where? How many deaths have occurred? Where are the empty hospital beds? What supplies are needed and where?

The phones — programmed Saturday by volunteers here — will allow relief workers to collect data in the field and transmit it back to the United Nations via a specially constructed WiFi network so that aid can be sent where it is needed most. Information will be shared with scientists and humanitarian workers.

This high-tech effort, announced Monday, is part of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation’s $100 million pledge to help eradicate the disease, whose toll last week crested 5,000 in West Africa. On Monday, a Sierra Leone surgeon who had been airlifted to the United States for treatment died in a Nebraska hospital after contracting the disease.

“If we can provide an aid worker with a cellphone, they can communicate back to headquarters about what’s going on in the countryside in real time,” said Andy Hickl, senior director for innovation at Vulcan Inc., Allen’s technology firm.

“We’re taking it from six people (collecting data) in the field to 10,000 reporters from the field,” Hickl said Saturday, as volunteers in the cavernous museum building scrambled to unpack phones and download software. “If we have the data in the right hands, we can make decisions about where the next supply plane or truck should go.”

Hickl traveled to Accra, Ghana, in October to visit the headquarters of the U.N. Mission for Ebola Emergency Response. He had been invited by UNMEER’s chief of mission to help the organization’s information management team.

“We said, ‘What do you know about what’s going on in the three countries?'” Hickl recounted. “The answer was, ‘Not enough.'”

Right now, he said, the “state of the art” for information gathering in the affected nations is the clipboard, and once data is compiled, “someone has to type the information into an Excel spreadsheet and it gets sent via email at some point.”

The hope is that the smartphones and WiFi network being installed to transmit the data will help speed the response to the spreading crisis.

The kind of data that will be logged into forms installed in the smartphones falls into three categories: How good is connectivity? For example, is it even possible for sick people to make a phone call and have someone take them to an Ebola treatment center?

Where and under what circumstances are humanitarian groups operating? And finally, what is life like in the far corners of the countries plagued by the disease? Are families holding up? Who has died? Is there food?

The first phone shipments were scheduled for Monday: 600 were sent to the U.N. mission in Accra, 2,500 went to aid workers in Guinea, and 1,000 were dispatched to an aid group called Mercy Corps.

The WiFi network in the affected countries will be built by NetHope, a consortium of international humanitarian groups that specializes in bringing technology to developing regions.

“We have seen a huge drop in reporting in the last few weeks,” said Lauren Woodman, NetHope chief executive. “We believe it’s because of a lack of connectivity. Our member organizations tell us it takes three to four hours to make a phone call. … The system is just broken.”

At the Living Computer Museum on Saturday morning, Adriana Franco-Erickson, a court interpreter who lives in Kent, Wash., unpacked a steady stream of boxed phones. Her husband and daughter installed software.

They came out, she said, because they were “desperate to find a way to help fight the Ebola.”

“We are citizens of the world,” she said as she worked. “Helping control the disease in Africa will also help us all to be better.”

AFP Photo/Zoom Dosso

Russian Armored Invasion Of Ukraine Confirmed By NATO, Separatists

Russian Armored Invasion Of Ukraine Confirmed By NATO, Separatists

By Victoria Butenko and Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

KIEV, Ukraine — Russian tanks and troops fired their way into eastern Ukraine on Thursday and seized a strategic gateway town on the road to the heavily militarized Crimean peninsula that Moscow annexed in March, Ukrainian and NATO officials reported.

NATO released satellite photos of Russia’s recent troop and armor buildup on its border with Ukraine, and images showing columns of tanks and armored vehicles entering Ukraine from Russia’s Rostov region.

The Western military alliance evidence was bolstered by a pro-Russia separatist leader who told Russian state television that at least 3,000 Russian gunmen, many of them retired military or active-duty Kremlin troops on leave, have been fighting alongside the Ukrainian separatists since their uprising began five months ago.

“They are fighting with us, understanding that it is their duty,” said Alexander Zakharchenko, the self-styled leader of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic, undermining Russian President Vladimir Putin’s insistence that Russia has no role in the Ukrainian conflict.

Ukrainian security officials reported a major expansion of the armored incursion into Novoazovsk that began Wednesday. The report by Col. Andriy Lysenko of the National Security and Defense Council that two armored columns had crossed into Ukraine after firing rockets over the border prompted Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to cancel a trip abroad and summon the government’s security council for an emergency meeting.

“I have made a decision to cancel my working visit to the Republic of Turkey due to sharp aggravation of the situation in Donetsk region,” Poroshenko said. “Today the president’s place is in Kiev.”

A report from the security council said the Russian armored incursion, which has opened up a new front in Kiev’s battle against separatists, was carried out by regular Russian military forces replacing local militants and nationalists who had lost significant territory last month to Ukrainian troops.

Government forces were overwhelmed by the armored columns and ordered to withdraw, the security council statement said, leaving Novoazovsk for the invading Russians to take.

Ukrainian troops were reinforcing their positions on the seaside road leading to Mariupol, a city of nearly 500,000 that is a key shipping terminus and steelmaking venue. The same road leads eventually to the Crimean peninsula, where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and about 25,000 troops are based.

The Russian deployments onto the Sea of Azov road have heightened fears that the Kremlin is planning to seize the corridor to provide a land bridge from the Russian mainland to Crimea.

At NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, a Dutch general in charge of the alliance crisis management center released satellite images captured over the last two weeks and said they confirmed Russia’s military intrusion.

“Over the past two weeks we have noted a significant escalation in both the level and sophistication of Russia’s military interference in Ukraine,” said Brig. Gen. Nico Tak.

“Russia is reinforcing and resupplying separatist forces in a blatant attempt to change the momentum of the fighting, which is currently favoring the Ukrainian military,” Tak told journalists at a news conference.

He also said NATO estimates that there are at least 1,000 Russian military personnel directly engaged in fighting in Ukraine, and that 20,000 battle-ready troops and hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles are amassed in Russia just across the border.

Tak said the Russian action was aimed at freezing the conflict and confronting Ukraine with a permanent security crisis.

“It’s likely that the situation will end in a stalemate,” he said. “The foothold that has been created will be expanded and secured so that the separatists will not suffer a defeat.”

Special correspondent Butenko reported from Kiev and staff writer Williams from Los Angeles. Special correspondent Isabel Gorst in Moscow also contributed to this report.

AFP Photo/Francisco Leong

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Russia Announces Second Aid Convoy For Eastern Ukraine

Russia Announces Second Aid Convoy For Eastern Ukraine

dpa

Moscow (dpa) — Russia is planning to send a second aid convoy to areas in eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatist rebels, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Monday.

Despite widespread international criticism of the first convoy, a second convoy would make the journey this week, Lavrov said.

The Ukrainian government was being informed of the move, he said, and he called on the Ukrainian authorities and the Red Cross to work with Russia.

Russia sent about 200 trucks into eastern Ukraine Friday, and they crossed back over the border into Russia the following day.

Ukraine has said it suspected the trucks were being used to deliver supplies to the pro-Russian rebels.

The Russians sent the first convoy into Ukraine without permission from the Ukrainian government, a move which sparked massive international condemnation of Moscow.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin are to meet Tuesday in Belarus to discuss the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

It will be their second face-to-face meeting since the Ukraine crisis erupted in February after pro-Russian separatists staged a rebellion following the toppling of the Moscow-backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych.

On Saturday, Poroshenko said Ukraine would spend billions of dollars reequipping its armed forces.

He said in a speech in Kiev commemorating Ukraine’s Independence Day that an additional 3 billion dollars would be spent from 2015 to 2017.

AFP Photo/Sergey Venyavksy

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