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In Syria, the Middle Course Is Our Worst Possible Option

Mother Jones

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In the LA Times today, Ken Dilanian writes that plenty of foreign policy experts are skeptical about the effectiveness of lobbing a few cruise missiles against Syria:

Punitive strikes ineffective, even counterproductive, analysts say

In two major episodes in 1998, the U.S. government unleashed a combination of bombs and cruise missiles against its foes — Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. In a more distant third case, in 1986, the U.S. bombed Moammar Kadafi’s Libya.

The bombs and missiles mostly hit their targets, and the U.S. military at the time declared the attacks successful. But in the end, they achieved little. Two years after the U.S. bombed Tripoli, Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 passengers and crew. Investigators later concluded that the U.S. attack was a primary motive for Kadafi to support the Lockerbie bombing. Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 people in attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. Hussein kicked out international weapons inspectors and survived despite sanctions until a U.S.-led invasion deposed him in 2003.

….“If the U.S. does something and Assad is left standing at the end of it without having suffered real serious, painful enough damage, the U.S. looks weak and foolish,” said Eliot Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a former State Department official in the Bush administration, who has long been skeptical about reliance on air power.

This is the fundamental problem. All the evidence suggests that Obama is considering the worst possible option in Syria: a very limited air campaign with no real goal and no real chance of influencing the course of the war. You can make a defensible argument for staying out of the fight entirely, and you can make a defensible argument for a large-scale action that actually accomplishes something (wiping out Assad’s air force, for example), but what’s the argument for the middle course? I simply don’t see one. It’s the act of a president who’s under pressure to “do something” from the know-nothings and settles on a bit of fireworks to buy them off and show that he has indeed done something. But it’s useless. The strike itself won’t damage Assad much and it won’t satisfy the yahoos, who will continue to bray for ever more escalation.

If Obama wants to intervene in Syria, then he needs to make the case that we should intervene in Syria. But if he does, I hope he listens to this short video first:

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In Syria, the Middle Course Is Our Worst Possible Option

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Everything You Wanted to Know about US Aid to Egypt

Mother Jones

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This story, which first appeared on the ProPublica website, has been updated to reflect new developments. It was first published on Jan. 31, 2011.

Questions about the United States’ aid to Egypt have intensified in the wake of last month’s military coup. More than 1,000 Egyptians have been killed in the last week, most apparently supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi. A few members of Congress have called for cutting off aid to Egypt, which the White House says is under review.

We’ve taken a step back and tried to answer some basic questions about the aid, including how much the US is giving Egypt, what’s changed in the years since the Arab Spring and what all the money buys.

How much does the US spend on Egypt?

Egypt receives more US aid than any country except for Israel, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.

The exact amount varies from year to year and there are many different funding streams, but US foreign assistance to Egypt has averaged about $2 billion a year since 1979, when Egypt struck a peace treaty with Israel. Most of that goes toward military aid. President Obama’s 2014 budget tentatively includes $1.55 billion in aid, about the same amount the US has sent in recent years.

Has any of the aid been cut off?

Actually, yes, but only economic aid, and only some of that. State Department has put a hold on some programs financed by the $250 million in annual economic aid to Egypt, including training programs in the US for Egyptian hospital administrators, teachers, and other government workers.

What about the military aid?

The administration delayed a scheduled delivery of four F-16 fighters to Egypt last month, and it is considering a similar delay for a shipment of Apache attack helicopters and repair kits for tanks. But the White House has not actually cut-off military aid, which has held steady at about $1.3 billion since 1987. (Economic aid, meanwhile, has fallen by more than two-thirds since 1998.)

American officials say that military aid doesn’t just promote peace between Egypt and Israel, it also gives the US benefits such as “expedited processing” for US Navy warships when they pass through the Suez Canal. A 2009 US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks makes essentially the same point:

President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the USD 1.3 billion in annual FMF as “untouchable compensation” for making and maintaining peace with Israel. The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez Canal and Egyptian airspace.

According to the State Department, the military aid has included tanks, armored personnel carriers, antiaircraft missile batteries, and surveillance aircraft in addition to the F-16 fighters and Apache attack helicopters. In the past, the Egyptian government has bought some of the weapons on credit.

How important is the aid to Egypt?

Pretty important. Saudi Arabia, which along with other Persian Gulf countries pledged $12 billion in aid to Egypt after the coup, promised this week to make up the difference in any aid cut by the US or other Western nations. But much of the aid can’t easily be replaced, in particular fancy US weapons and replacements parts for them.

Does the aid require Egypt to meet any specific conditions regarding human rights?

Not really. When an exiled Egyptian dissident called on the US to attach conditions to aid to Egypt in 2008, Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., who had recently stepped down as the US ambassador to Egypt, told the Washington Post the idea was “admirable but not realistic.” And then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in 2009 that military aid “should be without conditions” at a Cairo press conference.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, led Congress in adding language to a spending bill in 2011 to make aid to Egypt conditional on the secretary of state certifying that Egypt is supporting human rights and being a good neighbor. The language requires that Egypt abide by the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, support “the transition to civilian government including holding free and fair elections,” and put in place policies to protect freedom of expression, association, and religion, and due process of law.” It sounds pretty tough, but it’s not.

Has American aid to Egypt ever been cut off?

No. Congress threatened to block aid last year when Egypt began a crackdown on a number of American pro-democracy groups. A senior Obama administration official said that then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had no way to certify the conditions set out in the spending bill were being met.

But Clinton waived the certification requirement (yes, the secretary of state can do that) and approved the aid, despite concerns about Egypt’s human rights record. The reason? “A delay or cut in $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt risked breaking existing contracts with American arms manufacturers that could have shut down production lines in the middle of President Obama’s re-election campaign,” the New York Times reported. Breaking the contracts could have left the Pentagon on the hook for $2 billion.

Doesn’t the US have to cut off foreign aid after a coup?

The Foreign Assistance Act mandates that the US cut aid to any country “whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup or decree.” But last month the White House decided that it was not legally required to decide whether Morsi, who was democratically elected last year, was the victim of a coup — which allowed the aid to keep flowing. “We will not say it was a coup, we will not say it was not a coup, we will just not say,” an anonymous senior official told the New York Times.

As the Washington Post’s Max Fisher points out, Obama and his predecessors have dealt this kind of thing before. The president cut some aid to Honduras after a coup in 2009 and to Mali and the Central African Republic after coups there in 2012, but not all of it. And those countries aren’t nearly as important to US foreign policy as Egypt. President Bill Clinton cut some aid to Pakistan after a coup there in 1999, but President George W. Bush reinstated all of it after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Obama’s refusal to call it a coup infuriated Morsi supporters. “What is a coup?” Wael Haddara, a senior adviser to Morsi, told the New York Times. “We’re going to get into some really Orwellian stuff here.”

What about economic aid and efforts to promote democracy?

The various economic aid efforts have had mixed results. The State Department has described the Commodity Import Program, which gave Egypt millions of dollars between 1986 and 2008 to import American goods, as “one of the largest and most popular USAID programs.” But an audit of the four-year, $57 million effort to create agricultural jobs and boost rural incomes in 2007 found that the program “has not increased the number of jobs as planned.” And an audit of a $151 million program to modernize Egypt’s real estate finance market in 2009 found that, while the market had improved since the program began, the growth was “not clearly measureable or attributable” to the aid efforts.

The US has also funded programs to promote democracy and good government in Egypt—again with few results. It has sent about $24 million a year between 1999 and 2009 to a variety of NGOs in the country. According to a 2009 inspector general’s audit, the efforts didn’t add much due to “a lack of support” from the Egyptian government, which “suspended the activities of many U.S. NGOs because Egyptian officials thought these organizations were too aggressive.”

A recent audit of the European Union’s €1 billion—about $1.35 billion—aid program found that it had been “well-intentioned but ineffective” in promoting good governance and human rights. And a WikiLeaks cable revealed the Egyptian government had asked USAID in 2008 to stop financing NGOs that weren’t properly registered.

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Everything You Wanted to Know about US Aid to Egypt

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Why Air Strikes Against Syria Probably Won’t Work

Mother Jones

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Over at WorldViews, Max Fisher provides the nickel arguments for and against air strikes against Syria. The case against is pretty straightforward: Air strikes won’t change much of anything; there will be civilian casualties; and it’s almost certain to lead to escalation. That’s a pretty good case! So what’s the case for strikes? Here it is:

1) A “punishment” strike against Assad’s forces for this month’s suspected chemical weapons attack would make him think twice before doing it again….2) The international norm against chemical weapons matters for more than just Syria….When the next civilian or military leader locked in a difficult war looks back on what happened in Syria, we want him to conclude that using chemical weapons would not be worth the risk. 3) Even just the (apparently earnest) threat of U.S. strikes could change Assad’s behavior.

This is basically a single argument dressed up three different ways: air strikes will deter future chemical attacks. The problem is that I don’t believe it unless the strikes are absolutely devastating. Assad is plainly in a fight for his existence, and under circumstances like that nothing is likely to stop him except the certain knowledge that US retaliation would make his position worse than if he had done nothing in the first place. Air strikes might be defensible if we’re willing to act on a scale that large, but make no mistake: we’d basically be committing ourselves to full-scale war against Assad.

It’s possible that enforcing international norms against chemical attacks is important enough to make that worth it. But that’s the question we should be asking ourselves. A “punishment” air strike is a joke, little more than a symbol of helplessness to be laughed off as the nuisance it is. If we want to change Assad’s behavior, we’ll have to declare war against him.

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Why Air Strikes Against Syria Probably Won’t Work

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Report Says Russians Knew Edward Snowden Was Headed for Moscow

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post passes along a report that the arrival of NSA leaker Edward Snowden in Moscow a couple of months ago didn’t come as a surprise to Russian officials, as they claimed at the time. In fact, they helped set up his travel while Snowden was still in Hong Kong, expecting that he’d quickly catch a connecting flight to Havana:

The article in Kommersant, based on accounts from several unnamed sources, did not state clearly when Snowden decided to seek Russian help in leaving Hong Kong, where he was in hiding in order to evade arrest by U.S. authorities on charges that he leaked top-secret documents about U.S. surveillance programs.

….Kommersant reported Monday that Snowden purchased a ticket June 21 to travel on Aeroflot, Russia’s national airline, from Hong Kong to Havana, through Moscow. He planned to fly onward from Havana to Ecuador or some other Latin American country….Kommersant quoted unnamed Russian officials as saying the Cubans decided to refuse Snowden entry under U.S. pressure, leaving him stranded. That version stands in contrast to widespread speculation that the Russians never intended to let the former CIA employee travel onward.

The article implies that Snowden’s decision to seek Russian help came after he was joined in Hong Kong by Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks staffer who became his adviser and later flew to Moscow with him. Harrison, the article suggests, had a role in the making the plans. The article noted a statement released by WikiLeaks on June 23, shortly after the Aeroflot flight left Chinese airspace, which said Snowden was heading to a destination where his safety could be guaranteed.

This may or may not be true, so keep an open mind about it for now. It’s just the latest in Snowden gossip.

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Report Says Russians Knew Edward Snowden Was Headed for Moscow

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How Keeping Abortions Underground Makes Health Care Worse for Everyone

Mother Jones

Like many African nations, Kenya’s health care system faces many challenges, including severe rates of malaria and HIV/AIDS. But according to a new report published by the Kenyan Ministry of Health, one change could go a long way toward reducing stress on a hugely overburdened system: allowing more women to have an abortion.

Though Kenyans reconsidered an existing abortion ban when writing their 2010 constitution, the nation’s top legal document still virtually forbids the procedure. Exceptions are only allowed during health emergencies, as determined by a trained health professional (although at least one US congressman was outraged that even these exceptions made it into the final constitution). Yet outlawing abortion has done little, if anything, to reduce the number of procedures. In 2012, the period of the study’s analysis, researchers estimated that Kenyan women underwent nearly 465,000 induced abortions—about 48 for every 1,000 women of reproductive age, well above the estimated rates for both Africa (29 per 1,000) and the world (28 per 1,000).

But keeping abortions underground has led to an incredible rate of complications, putting a strain on an already overburdened health care system. In 2012, almost 120,000 Kenyan women, or more than a third of all women who underwent the procedure, experienced complications. The vast majority of these complications, the researchers found, followed “unsafe abortions” carried out by untrained people or “in an environment that does not conform to minimal medical standards.”

Most of these unintended side effects were quite serious: 77 percent of these 120,000 women suffered complications that were “moderately severe” or “severe,” according to the study. Out of 100,000 unsafe abortions in Kenya today, the researchers estimated, 266 women die. That rate is lower than the World Health Organization’s estimate for all of sub-Saharan Africa (520 deaths per 100,000 unsafe abortions), but far higher than in developed regions, where the rate is estimated to be 30 per 100,000.

Loosening the virtual abortion ban may not end Kenya’s flood of post-abortion complications overnight, but it could save innumerable lives. Kenya’s northern neighbor shows why: In 2004, following an outcry over abortion-related deaths, the Ethiopian legislature decriminalized abortion under certain conditions, such as rape, incest, or when the mother is a minor or has a physical or mental disability. About 27 percent of abortions in Ethiopia are now performed in clinical conditions, and despite lower life expectancy and a lower doctor-patient ratio than Kenya (both measures of overall health care quality), as of 2008, the rate of abortion-related complications in Ethiopia was only 20 percent—still high, but far lower than in Kenya.

But the real takeaway from this study, and why US states pondering their own supercharged abortion restrictions should pay attention, is how unsafe abortions harm more than just the women on whom they are performed. The researchers estimated that in 2012, more than 119,000 women in Kenya were treated for abortion-related complications. “The treatment of abortion complications uses a large amount of scarce health systems resources,” they write. In other words, unsafe abortions reduce everyone’s access to health care.

“Improved access to high-quality comprehensive abortion care,” the researchers state, “will not only save lives, but also reduce costs to the health system.”

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How Keeping Abortions Underground Makes Health Care Worse for Everyone

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Here’s How Europe’s Woes Are Continuing to Haunt America

Mother Jones

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The great and good are all gathered this week at Jackson Hole, sort of a Davos for powerful nerds that’s run by the Kansas City Federal Reserve. Neil Irwin reports that Robert Hall of Stanford presented an assessment of “why the housing crash and financial crisis caused such sharp and prolonged economic pain,” which prompted a comment from Hyun Song Shin of Princeton. You may recall Shin as the ideal median economist, but in this case he’s pointing out that one big problem with the economy is that bank credit has been anemic for the past few years. As the chart on the right shows, banks normally lend at about 2.5 percentage points above the Fed’s target interest rate, but ever since 2009 they’ve been lending at about 4 points above the Fed’s target. This isn’t a huge problem for big companies, which mostly rely on bonds to finance themselves, but it is a big problem for small companies, which rely more on mortgages and bank loans.

This reminded me of something Shin predicted a couple of years ago. During the housing bubble years, he said, European banks were indirectly providing about $5 trillion in credit to U.S. borrowers, nearly as much as American banks provided. But after the financial crisis, as European banks were forced to delever, that funding dried up. This is one way that America is suffering from Europe’s woes: Credit remains very tight, and as a result, interest rates on ordinary bank loans remain stubbornly high. Shin’s latest set of charts seem to suggest that he was right—or at least partly right—two years ago when he wrote about the malign effect of European delevering on American finance. We’re not immune just because we’re an ocean away.

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Here’s How Europe’s Woes Are Continuing to Haunt America

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6 Mind-Boggling Facts About Farms in China

Mother Jones

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Ever since May, when a Chinese company agreed to buy US pork giant Smithfield, reportedly with an eye toward ramping up US pork imports to China, I’ve been looking into the simultaneously impressive and vexed state of China’s food production system. In short, I’ve found that in the process of emerging as the globe’s manufacturing center—the place that provides us with everything from the simplest of brooms to the smartest of phones—China has severely damaged its land and water resources, compromising its ability to increase food production even as its economy thunders along (though it’s been a bit less thunderous lately), its population grows (albeit slowly), and its people gain wealth, move up the food chain, and demand ever-more meat.

Now, none of that should detract from the food miracle that China has enacted since it began its transformation into an industrial powerhouse in the late 1970s. This 2013 report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) brims with data on this feat. The nation slashed its hunger rate—from 20 percent of its population in 1990 to 12 percent today —by quietly turbocharging its farms. China’s total farm output, a broad measure of food churned out, has tripled since 1978. The ramp-up in livestock production in particular is even more dizzying—it rose by a factor of five. Overall, China’s food system represents a magnificent achievement: It feeds nearly a quarter of the globe’s people on just 7 percent of its arable land.

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6 Mind-Boggling Facts About Farms in China

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60 Years Later, CIA Admits Role in Iran Coup Everyone Knows It Orchestrated

Mother Jones

The Central Intelligence Agency, via declassified documents, has acknowledged its central role in the subversion of democracy in Iran. The coup took places six decades ago, so better late than never:

The newly declassified material is believed to contain the CIA’s first public acknowledgment of its role in deposing democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalized the country’s oil industry. The move—and Iran’s broader lurch to the left under Mossadegh—infuriated Great Britain and the United States, which pressed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to depose him in 1953.

Mossadegh was sentenced to three years of solitary confinement in 1953 and remained under house arrest until his death in 1967. The U.S.-British plot to overthrow him served as a rallying point for the 1979 revolution that ousted the Shah, and Mossadegh remains a popular figure in Iran today despite his secularist politics.

For decades, it’s been no secret—nor has it been at all ambiguous—that the CIA helped orchestrate the coup d’état. In fact, President Obama talked publicly about the CIA-backed coup during his widely covered 2009 speech in Cairo, Egypt: “For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to my country, and there is indeed a tumultuous history between us,” Obama said. “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution, Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S. troops and civilians. This history is well known.”

Part of this well-known history includes CIA operatives bribing Iranian street thugs to riot against the elected government. Following the victory of coup leaders, a lot of pro-Mossadegh citizens were detained, tortured, and/or murdered. This was merely one episode in the long-running series of “CIA Does Messed-Up Thing Around The World.”

The declassified material (you can read key excerpts here) were made available thanks to the efforts of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. The Archive also recently published, as a result of their public records request, CIA history on Area 51.

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60 Years Later, CIA Admits Role in Iran Coup Everyone Knows It Orchestrated

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How Russia’s Anti-Gay Law Could Affect the 2014 Olympics, Explained

Mother Jones

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Saddled with allegations of forced evictions, labor rights abuses, graft, and corruption—along with an estimated record price tag of $50 billion—the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, have been the source of international outrage for some time now. But when Russia’s Interior Ministry announced last week that the country’s so-called anti-gay law—which allows for fining and detaining gay and pro-gay people—would apply during the Games, gay rights and human rights activists around the world turned their focus to the small city on the coast of the Black Sea, one of the warmest corners of Russia.

We put together this backgrounder to help catch you up to speed on all things Sochi:

What’s the deal with Russia’s anti-gay law? Since President Vladimir Putin signed the new legislation—which passed the Duma with a 436-0 vote—on June 30, there’s been a steady stream of reporting on what this law means for the Russian people. In short, Article 6.21 of the Code of the Russian Federation on Administrative Offenses allows the government to fine people accused of spreading “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations amongst minors” between 4,000 and 1 million rubles ($120 to $30,000). A law passed in 2012 also bans gay-pride events in Moscow for the next 100 years.

Recent attempts at gay-pride events have deteriorated into violence:

Gay rights protesters after being attacked at a June rally in St. Petersburg Ruslan Shamukov/ITAR-TASS/ZUMA

Protesters attack an LGBT activist during a St. Petersburg event in June. Roman Yandolin/Russian Look/ZUMA

Last weekend, Russian American journalist Masha Gessen—who started Russia’s pink-triangle campaign for LGBT acceptance—published a gut-wrenching account in the Guardian of her own decision to move her girlfriend and children back to the United States after years living in Russia. “In June, the ‘homosexual propaganda’ bill became federal law,” she wrote. “The head of the parliamentary committee on the family pledged to create a mechanism for removing children from same-sex families.

“Two things happened to me the same month: I was beaten up in front of parliament for the first time and I realized that in all my interactions, including professional ones, I no longer felt I was perceived as a journalist first: I am now a person with a pink triangle.”

What are some other tactics anti-gay activists are using in Russia? Though anti-gay actions and sentiment have been brewing for years—this federal rule comes on the heels of several similar regional laws, which have been enacted in St. Petersburg and other cities since 2006—this law has taken it to new heights: In July, the Spectrum Human Rights Alliance (SHRA), a US-based organization that advocates LGBT rights in Eastern Europe, helped bring international attention to a Russian group called Occupy Pedophilia. Led by notorious Russian neo-Nazi Maksim “Tesak” (“the Hatchet”) Martsinkevich, the group has been using social media, primarily VKontakte (Russia’s Facebook spinoff), to place fake dating ads to lure gay men. Once face-to-face with the men, group members interrogate and torture them, and a video of the encounter is put on YouTube. Here’s one such video from late July. (Warning: The content of the video is disturbing.)

Some of the videos are also placed on the group’s website, where victims are categorized by sexual orientation and users can rate the videos. As of this writing, Occupy Pedophilia has nearly 450 regional chapters listed on VKontakte.

Screenshot from VKontakte

Larry Poltavtsev, president and founder of SHRA, explains that months ago, Martsinkevich released a video declaring his own special plan for ending gay-pride events in Russia. Though it disappeared for a while, Poltavtsev says, it recently reappeared on YouTube (see below). In it, a shirtless Martsinkevich says this is his first time directly addressing the Moscow government. He explains that it’s a shame the government must sink so many resources into its gay-pride ban—dealing with civil rights lawsuits, paying out compensation, and the like. Instead, he suggests, why not simply make gay-pride events legal—but leave them without security or police presence? “This will be the first and last time,” Martsinkevich concludes, “that homosexuals will try to hold their parade in Russia.”

Poltavtsev also mounted a petition on Change.org to add Russian lawmakers Vitaly Milonov and Elena Mizulina, both of whom have sponsored anti-gay legislation, to the US Congress’ Magnitsky list of human rights violators. It currently has more than 11,000 signatures.

Meanwhile, an April 2012 TV appearance by Dmitri Kiselev—TV anchor and deputy director of VGTRK, Russia’s state-owned television and radio holding company—surfaced last week, showing Kiselev, a state employee, saying the following to a round of applause: “I think that just imposing fines on gays for homosexual propaganda among teenagers is not enough. They should be banned from donating blood, sperm. And their hearts, in case of the automobile accident, should be buried in the ground or burned as unsuitable for the continuation of life.”

In an interview this week on Moscow radio station Echo of Moscow, Kiselev defended his remarks, explaining that, to his knowledge, these practices are already employed in other Western countries, including the United States. (He cited the US Food and Drug Administration as a source.)

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How Russia’s Anti-Gay Law Could Affect the 2014 Olympics, Explained

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‘Liberated Carbon, It’ll Turn Your Night to Day’

Andy Revkin performs his song about humanity’s love affair with fossil fuels for a room full of climate scientists and communicators. View post:   ‘Liberated Carbon, It’ll Turn Your Night to Day’ ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: ‘Liberated Carbon, It’ll Turn Your Night to Day’Is the Internet Good for the Climate?From the Fire Hose: Arctic Methane, Scientists as Advocates, Vanishing Vaquita ;

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‘Liberated Carbon, It’ll Turn Your Night to Day’

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