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Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight, due in part to climate change

by Opal04Epbqih Posted on January 23, 2020

Humanity is now the closest it has ever been to total annihilation. That might sound like something a character in an Avengers movie would say, but it’s actually a statement made by a group of 19 scientific experts and backed by 13 Nobel laureates. The Doomsday Clock, a symbol created in 1947 to represent humankind’s proximity to global catastrophe, is now just 100 seconds to midnight for the first time ever.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the group that manages the metaphorical clock, said the dual threats of nuclear war and climate change, compounded by the threat of “cyber-enabled information warfare” — which undermines society’s capacity to address these threats — has forced the globe mere seconds from midnight. “We now face a true emergency — an absolutely unacceptable state of world affairs that has eliminated any margin for error or further delay,” Atomic Scientists president and CEO Rachel Bronson said in a statement.

The experts at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists did not make this deliberation alone. For the first time, the group’s scientists were joined by members of The Elders, a network of global leaders assembled by Nelson Mandela in 2007. The hands of the Doomsday Clock have inched forward in three of the last four years thanks to a combination of nuclear proliferation, climate change, and civil unrest around the globe.

The clock was originally set at seven minutes to midnight in 1947, and has shifted forward and backward 23 times since then. In 1991, the clock was at 17 minutes to midnight — the furthest from apocalypse ever. In the past, scientists have moved the clock closer to midnight in response to developments like hydrogen bomb testing in the Soviet Union in 1953 and Cold War escalations in 1984.

There are ways to keep midnight at bay, scientists say. The U.S. and Russia could come back to the arms control negotiating table and reduce the risk of a nuclear arms race. The signatories of the Iran Deal could come together to limit nuclear development in the Middle East. The world’s nations could commit in earnest to the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement. Perhaps most important for long-term stability, the Bulletin says the international community should work to penalize the misuse of science, a trend that is on the rise thanks in part to the efforts of the Trump administration.

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Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight, due in part to climate change

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How Did an Alleged Russian Mobster End Up on Trump’s Red Carpet?

by ThelmaPenman Posted on September 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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How did an alleged and notorious Russian mobster connected to an illegal international gambling ring run out of Trump Tower end up as a special guest at a Donald Trump event in Moscow in 2013? This may be one of the odder questions of the already-odd 2016 presidential campaign.

On April 16, 2013, federal agents burst into a swanky apartment at Trump Tower in New York City as part of a larger raid that rounded up 29 suspected members of two global gambling rings with operations allegedly overseen by an alleged Russian mob boss named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The Russian was not nabbed by US law enforcement. Since being indicted in the United States a decade earlier for allegedly rigging an ice skating competition at the 2002 Olympics, he had been living in Russia, beyond the reach of Western authorities. And this new gambling indictment did not appear to inconvenience Tokhtakhounov. Seven months after the bust, he was a VIP attendee at Donald Trump’s Miss Universe 2013 contest held in Moscow. In fact, Tokhtakhounov hit the red carpet within minutes of Trump. An alleged crime lord who was a fugitive from American justice was apparently a celebrity guest at Trump’s event.

During the 2016 race, Trump’s associations with Russia have sparked assorted controversies. He has praised Russian leader Vladimir Putin and made a series of contradictory remarks regarding his relationship with the autocrat. (In July, Trump said he had never spoken to Putin, but in a 2014 video, he claimed he had.) Trump has insisted on the campaign trail, “I have nothing to do with Russia.” Yet he has a long history of attempting—and generally failing—to forge deals in that country. And Trump has been surrounded by campaign aides—including onetime campaign chairman Paul Manafort—with close and lucrative business ties to Russia and Putin allies.

Contrary to his claim of having nothing to do with Russia, Trump did pull off one major deal there: staging the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in the nation’s capital. At the time, Trump co-owned the contest with NBC. The event landed him in the company of Tokhtakhounov and other high-profile Russians. And Trump hoped it would also bring him close to Putin. Months before the contest, he tweeted, “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow – if so, will he become my new best friend?”

Putin didn’t show up, but, according to Russian media accounts and photos of the event, Tokhtakhounov did. He was part of a crew of wealthy and powerful Russians who, according to a press report, were treated as VIPs. Also present were Vladimir Kozhin, a top government official and member of Putin’s inner circle (who the following year would be hit with US sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) and Aras Agalarov, a Russian billionaire oligarch close to Putin with whom Trump wanted to develop a high-rise in Moscow. (Agalarov played a role in drawing the beauty contest to Moscow; it was held in a glitzy concert hall owned by his family business empire, and his son, a middling pop star, performed at the pageant.) After the event, Trump boasted to the New York Post, “Almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.”

Asked how Tokhtakhounov came to be part of the red-carpet crowd at the event, a spokeswoman for Miss Universe, which Trump sold in 2015, said she was not familiar with his name.

In a phone interview with Mother Jones, Tokhtakhounov initially said he had not attended the beauty pageant. After being told that there were photos and media reports showing that he had been there, he acknowledged that he had been present at the glitzy gathering. But he denied that he had been a VIP and said he had purchased his own ticket. Tokhtakhounov also said he had no interaction with Trump at the event.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov’s tale is an intriguing story of sports, Hollywood stars, poker, and alleged crime. The indictment filed by Preet Bharara, the US attorney in Manhattan, which triggered the 2013 raid, identified Tokhtakhounov as a vory v zakone—or a vor—a Russian term for a select group of the highest-level Russian crime bosses. A vor receives tributes from other criminals, offers protection, and adjudicates conflicts among other crooks. The indictment charged that Tokhtakhounov used his “substantial influence in the criminal underworld” to protect a high-stakes illegal gambling ring operating out of Trump Tower. He sometimes deployed “explicit threats of violence and economic harm” to handle disputes arising from this gambling operation. The indictment noted that in one two-month period he was paid $10 million by this outfit for his services.

The operations of the gambling scheme were handled by two other men: Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik. The indictment alleged that they and others ran “an international gambling business that catered to oligarchs residing in the former Soviet Union and throughout the world,” used “threats of violence to obtain unpaid gambling debts,” and “employed a sophisticated money laundering scheme to move tens of millions of dollars…from the former Soviet Union through shell companies in Cyprus into various investments and other shell companies in the United States.” According to the US attorney, their enterprise “booked sports bets that reached into the millions of dollars” and laundered approximately $100 million.

Trincher, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, was a championship professional poker player who had purchased a Trump Tower apartment located directly below an apartment owned by Donald Trump. In 2009, Trincher had paid $5 million for the posh pad. Two years later, he and his wife had reportedly hoped to hold a fundraiser in the apartment for Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign, but they had to cancel the event because of the presence of mold caused by a water leak. During one court hearing, the US attorney’s office said that Trincher, then 52 years old, directed much of the racketeering enterprise from this Trump Tower apartment. “From his apartment, he oversaw what must have been the world’s largest sports book,” Assistant US Attorney Harris Fischman remarked. “He catered to millionaires and billionaires.”

The indictment also targeted an associated gambling ring operated by Trincher’s son Illya, Hillel Nahmad, the son of a billionaire art dealer, and others. (Nahmad also reportedly owned the entire 51st floor of Trump Tower.) This crew managed a high-stakes betting operation and money-laundering shop. The indictment charged another Trincher son named Eugene and several others with running illegal high-stakes poker rooms in and around New York City. This group included Molly Bloom, who had previously earned a reputation as an organizer of private poker games for celebrities, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire. Following the raid, the New York Daily News reported that a witness told the paper that “games held by the crew in a Trump Tower apartment…were poker ‘on steroids,’ with cameos by movie and sports stars, including A-Rod.”

Shortly after the indictment was issued, Tokhtakhounov told a Russian television channel that the case against him was “yet another fairy tale from the Americans.” He claimed the prosecutors had included him in the indictment “to give the situation significance.” He acknowledged that he knew two of the defendants and had placed bets with them. “Of course, in conversation,” he added, “I might have given them advice on how to do things better.”

Tokhtakhounov was trying to depict himself as a victim unfairly targeted by the United States. In 2002, he was indicted for allegedly fixing skating matches at the Salt Lake City Olympics. (The feds believed he had rigged events so that Russians would take home a gold and a French pair would win another gold—and he would pocket a French visa.) He was arrested in Italy, but soon Tokhtakhounov, who denied the charges, was let go and made his way back to Russia.

Something of a celebrity in Russia, Tokhtakhounov has engaged in various enterprises. He once owned casinos in Moscow. He claimed to be an organizer of pop concerts and fashion shows. He represented a modeling association, and he wrote novels. He lived in a high-end apartment building in Moscow and kept a palatial country house outside the city. He is currently wanted by Interpol for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, bribery conspiracy, wire fraud, and “bribery in sport contests.”

A year following the Trump Tower raid, Trincher and Golubchik, after pleading guilty, were each sentenced to five years in prison. Each man was ordered to forfeit more than $20 million in cash, investments, and property. (Trincher’s sons, Nahmad, and Bloom also pled guilty.) Tokhtakhounov, the US attorney’s office noted, remained a fugitive.

Trump has cited the 2013 Miss Universe contest as proof he possesses serious foreign policy experience. In May, he told Fox News, “I know Russia well. I had a major event in Russia two or three years ago, which was a big, big incredible event.” And it provided the reality television mogul the opportunity to hobnob with a Putin crony who is now under US sanctions, various oligarchs who are chums with the Russian leader, and an alleged Russian mafioso accused by the US government of protecting a global criminal enterprise that operated directly below one of Trump’s own apartments in Trump Tower. What a small world.

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How Did an Alleged Russian Mobster End Up on Trump’s Red Carpet?

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The Roosevelt Dime Celebrated Its 70th Birthday This Year

by KlausCoolidge79 Posted on June 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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There’s no reason to post this today in particular, but 2016 is the 70th anniversary of the Roosevelt dime. Huzzah! It holds the US record for longevity in design: aside from dates and mint marks, it’s remained unchanged for its entire 70 years.1

There’s an interesting story about that design. Obviously Franklin Roosevelt is on the obverse and the symbol for the March of Dimes, which was closely associated with Roosevelt, is on the reverse. But there’s more. At the time of Roosevelt’s death in 1945, the Soviet Union was still an ally against the Axis powers in World War II, and there was a strong pro-communist clique within the US Mint’s Bureau of Engraving that wanted to memorialize our alliance with “Uncle Joe” Stalin. They settled for quietly engraving his initials right below Roosevelt’s bust. Unfortunately for the clique, by the time the dime was released to the public in 1946 the Soviet Union was no longer an ally and the red scare was well underway. When Stalin’s initials were discovered, conservatives went ballistic and the Mint had to quickly come up with some kind of plausible cover story. Luckily, the artist who drew Roosevelt’s bust was named John Sinnock, so that was the story they settled on. The initials had nothing to do with Stalin. It was just an unfortunate coincidence that Sinnock shared Stalin’s initials.

But it really is Stalin’s initials on the dime, and they’re there to this day. You can see them pretty easily with a magnifying glass. In fact—

What’s that? You don’t believe this? Well, of course not. That’s because everyone reading this blog has at least a room-temperature IQ. Modern US coins all feature their designers’ initials, which is why you can see VDB on the Lincoln Cent, GR on the Kennedy half dollar, and so forth. But in the right-wing fever swamps of the 1940s, a lot of people really did believe that these were Stalin’s initials.

So you see? Americans have always been a little bit crazy. Or even a lot crazy sometimes. We should all just feel lucky that Donald Trump wasn’t president at the time. He would have insisted on the dime featuring his initials, not some loser artist’s. And initials probably wouldn’t have been enough. He would most likely have directed the Mint to engrave TRUMP on every coin issued during his tenure. No conspiracy theory would have been necessary to know where that came from.

1The Washington quarter lasted 67 years, 1932 to 1999, before it was changed for the state quarter series. The record holder for a single side of a coin is the Lincoln cent. Its obverse hasn’t changed in the 107 years since its introduction in 1909.

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The Roosevelt Dime Celebrated Its 70th Birthday This Year

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9/11 Commissioner Says Saudi Government Members Supported the Attack

by goopwppvt Posted on May 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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A former member of the 9/11 Commission says Saudi government officials offered support to the hijackers, and he joined the growing chorus calling for the government to release 28 classified pages of the commission’s report that may detail the roles those Saudi officials played.

John Lehman, a former Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, told the Guardian, “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government.” Details of their involvement are found in the 28 classified pages of the 9/11 Commission report, he said. The Obama administration says it may release those pages soon.

The original report found “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization,” and the commission’s leaders wrote an op-ed last month saying that the 28 classified pages should not be released. Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the 9/11 Commission’s chairman and vice-chairman, argued that “the 28 pages were based almost entirely on raw, unvetted material that came to the FBI” and were more akin to “preliminary law enforcement notes,” not solid evidence.

But Lehman says the report was too lenient on the Saudis, and that the commission saw “an awful lot of circumstantial evidence” that Saudi officials, likely members of the kingdom’s Islamic affairs ministry, were involved. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia,” he said during his Guardian interview.

Saudi Arabian officials have a long history of backing armed fundamentalist movements, from anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan during the 1980s to Islamist rebel groups in the Syrian civil war. The kingdom is also a frequent target of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, who believe the US government helped cover up high-level Saudi complicity in the attacks. Presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump has suggested the same thing on the campaign trail. “Who blew up the World Trade Center?” he said during an appearance on Fox News in February. “It wasn’t the Iraqis, it was Saudi—take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents.”

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9/11 Commissioner Says Saudi Government Members Supported the Attack

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How Texaco Helped Franco Win the Spanish Civil War

by BrittDunhill149 Posted on March 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

“Merchants have no country,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1814. “The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains.” The former president was ruing the way New England traders and shipowners, fearing the loss of lucrative transatlantic commerce, failed to rally to their country in the War of 1812.

Today, with the places from which “merchants” draw their gains spread across the planet, corporations are even less likely to feel loyalty to any country in particular. Some of them have found it profitable to reincorporate in tax havens overseas. Giant multinationals, sometimes with annual earnings greater than the combined total gross national products of several dozen of the world’s poorer countries, are often more powerful than national governments, while their CEOs wield the kind of political clout many prime ministers and presidents only dream of.

No corporations have been more aggressive in forging their own foreign policies than the big oil companies. With operations spanning the world, they—and not the governments who weakly try to tax or regulate them—largely decide whom they do business with and how. In its quest for oil in the anarchic Niger Delta, according to journalist Steve Coll, ExxonMobil, for example, gave boats to the Nigerian navy, and recruited and supplied part of the country’s army, while local police sported the company’s red flying horse logo on their uniforms. Jane Mayer’s new book, Dark Money, on how the brothers and oil magnates Charles and David Koch spent hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the Republican Party and America’s democratic politics, offers a vivid account of the way their father Fred launched the energy business they would inherit. It was a classic case of not letting “attachments” stand in the way of gain. Fred happily set up oil installations for Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin before the United States recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, and then helped Adolf Hitler build one of Nazi Germany’s largest oil refineries that would later supply fuel to its air force, the Luftwaffe.

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How Texaco Helped Franco Win the Spanish Civil War

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Russia Is Pretending to Be Angry Over Montenegro Joining NATO

by VickeyLavoie228 Posted on December 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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After seven years of work, Montenegro has finally been invited to join NATO:

NATO announced plans on Wednesday to enlarge its membership, a move that brought an angry response from Moscow….In Moscow, a Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry S. Peskov, said that NATO’s expansion would be met with retaliatory measures from Russia, Reuters reported, and Russia was also reportedly planning to halt joint projects with Montenegro.

In case you’re geographically challenged, the map on the right shows NATO’s current members (in dark blue) as well as the location of Montenegro. As you can see, Montenegro is across the Adriatic from Italy, about 500 miles from Ukraine and a thousand miles from Russia. Joining NATO is not exactly a threat either to Russia’s borders or to its sphere of influence.

But it used to be part of Yugoslavia, which was a Soviet ally back in the day. So this requires Vladimir Putin to stamp his feet and claim that Russia’s heritage is being attacked by the West, blah blah blah. You may safely ignore it. This hardly came as a surprise to the Russians, and it hardly represents a threat to them. It’s just an opportunity for a bit of jingoism to shore up the home market.

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Russia Is Pretending to Be Angry Over Montenegro Joining NATO

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Ben Carson’s Love Affair With a "Nutjob" Conspiracy Theorist

by DouglasMcHale Posted on September 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and political novice near the top of the GOP presidential polls, does not spend much time and energy promoting specific policy stances. He has soared to a statistical tie with Donald Trump by emphasizing his outsider status and calling to revive America, deploying general right-wing rhetoric that resonates with social conservatives. At the recent Republican debate, he said, “The thing that is probably most important is having a brain.” But he has provided one important clue as to his fundamental political worldview, by repeatedly endorsing a far-right conspiracy theorist named W. Cleon Skousen, who was characterized in 2007 by the conservative National Review as an “all-around nutjob.” Skousen came to prominence in the 1950s as a virulent anti-Communist crusader; he later claimed that a global cabal of bankers controlled the world from behind the scenes, and he once wrote a book that referred to the “blessings of slavery.”

Carson swears by Skousen, who died in 2006. In a July 2014 interview, Carson contended that Marxist forces had been using liberals and the mainstream media to undermine the United States. His source: Skousen. “There is a book called The Naked Communist,” he said. “It was written in 1958. Cleon Skousen lays out the whole agenda, including the importance of getting people into important positions in the mainstream media so they can help drive the agenda. Well, that’s what’s going on now.” Four months later, while being interviewed by Megyn Kelly on Fox News, Carson denounced unnamed Marxists who were presently seeking to destroy American society: “There was a guy who was a former CIA agent by the name of Cleon Skousen who wrote a book in 1958 called The Naked Communist, and it laid out the whole agenda. You would think by reading it that it was written last year—showing what they’re trying to do to American families, what they’re trying to do to our Judeo-Christian faith, what they’re doing to morality.” (Skousen had been an FBI employee—not a CIA officer—and mainly engaged in administrative and clerical duties; later he was a professor at Brigham Young University and police chief of Salt Lake City.) And the most recent edition of this Skousen book boasts Carson’s endorsement on the front cover: “The Naked Communist lays out the whole progressive plan. It is unbelievable how fast it has been achieved.”

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Ben Carson’s Love Affair With a "Nutjob" Conspiracy Theorist

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Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

by CharityMullens Posted on September 21, 2015

Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

By on 21 Sep 2015 4:20 pmcommentsShare

It’s always irksome when tech companies talk about their latest “moonshot.” The actual moonshot was one of the most incredible accomplishments of humankind. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged NASA to put someone on the moon by the end of the decade, and NASA, which hadn’t even put someone in orbit yet, was like, “On it, boss,” and then had three people on the moon eight years later. So sorry, Google, even if Google Glass hadn’t flopped, it wouldn’t have been a moonshot, and neither will anything else that comes out of the “moonshot factory.”

So it’s a real bummer to find out that the agency that today’s most powerful engineers and entrepreneurs so desperately want to emulate had a mind-blowingly awesome plan for a space-based solar factory back in the ’70s that never came to fruition. Here’s the scoop from Motherboard:

At the height of the oil crisis in the 1970s, the US government considered building a network of 60 orbiting solar power stations that would beam energy down to Earth. Each geosynchronous satellite, according to this 1981 NASA memo, was to weigh around 35,000 to 50,000 metric tons. The Satellite Power System (SPS) project envisaged building two satellites a year for 30 years.

To get said power stations into orbit, the once-powerful aerospace manufacturing company Rockwell International designed something called a Star-Raker, which, in addition to sounding like something from a sci-fi movie, also would have acted like one:

The proposed Star-Raker would load its cargo at a regular airport, fly to a spaceport near the equator, fuel up on liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and take off horizontally using its ten supersonic ramjet engines. A 1979 technical paper lays out its potential flight plan: At a cruising altitude of 45,000 feet, the craft would then dive to 37,000 feet to break the sound barrier. At speeds of up to Mach 6, the Star-Raker would jet to an altitude of 29km before the rockets kicked in, propelling it into orbit.

Just to recap: The Star-Raker would have broken the speed of sound by diving seven miles. And the spacecraft would have been making so many regular trips to orbit that it would have essentially been a 747 for space, Motherboard reports.

In terms of feasibility, here’s how one scientist put it at the time:

“The SPS is an attractive, challenging, worthy project, which the aerospace community is well prepared and able to address,” physicist Robert G. Jahn wrote in the foreword to a 1980 SPS feasibility report. “The mature confidence and authority of [the working groups] left the clear impression that if some persuasive constellation of purposes … should assign this particular energy strategy a high priority, it could be accomplished.”

Putting solar plants in space would’ve been hard, sure, but this proposal came just 10 years after NASA landed Apollo 11 on the moon, so doing seemingly impossible things was kind of their thing. Even if SPS hadn’t happened as planned (and for more details on what exactly that plan was, check out this in-depth look from Wired), there’s no doubt that with the right amount of support and funding, NASA could’ve done something incredible in the cleantech arena.

Today, NASA remains an indispensable source of climate change research. Unfortunately, politicians aren’t as eager to throw money at the agency now that we’re no longer trying to show up the Soviet Union (in fact, the U.S. government is now relying on Russia to take U.S. astronauts up to the International Space Station). And some members of Congress (lookin’ at you, Ted Cruz) have it in their heads that NASA shouldn’t even be doing Earth sciences research in the first place.

We know from the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars back in 2012 that NASA still has the ability to inspire and astonish. People geeked out hard over those “seven minutes of terror” and for good reason. Getting that same kind of support behind something that addresses climate change would be exactly what this world needs. If only the one organization proven capable of doing moonshots wasn’t beholden to a bunch of science-hating idiots.

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The Space Plane NASA Wanted to Use to Build Solar Power Plants in Orbit

, Motherboard.

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Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

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How US Cluster Bombs Banned by Most Countries Ended Up in Yemen

by Bernard6504 Posted on June 9, 2015

Mother Jones

On April 29, three adults and a child came across some fist-sized canisters on the ground outside of Baqim, a Yemeni town controlled by Houthi rebels. To the 10-year-old boy among them, they “looked like toys.” Out of curiosity, they picked up the cannisters, which then exploded. All four were injured; a nurse told Human Rights Watch that the child was wounded in the stomach, and one of the adults received injuries to his face, torso, thigh, and crotch. Considering the kind of damage that cluster-bomb submunitions can cause, they’re lucky to still be alive.

Fighter jets from the Saudi Arabia-led coalition have been carrying out strikes against Houthi rebels since late March, when Yemeni President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi fled the country. Now, according to two recent Human Rights Watch investigations, they are also using cluster munitions, some supplied by the United States. The first HRW report was published on the heels of mounting concern over the growing toll of civilian casualties from the air campaign—more than 1,800 people have been killed as of late May; at least 135 of them were children. The second report found evidence that US-supplied cluster munitions deployed near populated areas are harming civilians.

Here’s a look at why American cluster bombs, which have been banned by more than 100 countries, are being used in Yemen.

How cluster bombs work: Cluster bombs can be dropped from aircraft or fired from rockets, mortars, and artillery. When they open in mid-air, as many as several hundred submunitions, or bomblets, spread out over a wide area and explode. While the weapons are designed to target military installations and convoys, anyone nearby can be struck. Bomblets that fail to detonate or self-destruct can become de facto land mines. Bombs like those found in Baquim, explains Megan Burke, director of the Cluster Munition Coalition “remain on the ground until someone or something comes along and triggers that explosion.”

Why they’ve been banned: Cluster munitions were first deployed in 1943, when Soviet forces dropped them on German tanks. Due to the danger they pose to noncombatants, they were banned by the Convention on Cluster Munitions, a 2008 treaty signed by 116 nations. Tens of thousands of civilians—a third of them children—have been maimed or killed after encountering the unexploded ordnances in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Kosovo, Iraq, and beyond.

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How US Cluster Bombs Banned by Most Countries Ended Up in Yemen

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This Anti-Gay Candidate’s Message Is Bigger in Moscow Than Massachusetts

by Beau96Refnvx Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Even though he’s running to be the governor of Massachusetts, Scott Lively makes no secret of his extreme anti-gay views. The evangelical pastor, who’s being sued by gay-rights groups for his involvement in Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill, has gotten flack on the campaign trail for his beliefs, even encountering some raucous booing at a gubernatorial forum earlier in the year.

Read more: Meet the American pastor behind Uganda’s anti-gay crackdown

Lively knows that his focus on traditional values makes him an unpopular choice in the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. “The only way Scott Lively is going to become governor of Massachusetts is by a miracle of God,” he told MassLive last month.

While Lively’s views can’t find much domestic audience, they play well in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Lively’s anti-gay zeal is on display in Sodom, a new documentary that aired on Russian television last month, to much acclaim. The film was produced by famously anti-gay TV host Arkady Mamontov, who once implied that the Chelyabinsk meteorite explosion was caused by the gay rights movement. The film aired on Rossiya-1, Russia’s main government-funded TV channel.

“For American homosexuals, this man, Scott Lively, is public enemy number one,” intones the film’s narrator. On camera, Lively speaks about the gay “agenda,” which seeks “anti-discrimination policy” in the name of ultimate “societal conquest.” Lively insists that “The average American is not in favor of homosexuality. But they are afraid to speak publicly about it, because the gays have so much power and they can do harm to those people.”

Lively brings the film’s producers to the headquarters of the Human Rights Campaign in Washington, DC. Set against a dramatic soundtrack, Lively paces outside. “This organization, instead of focusing on the true needs of people around the world, they are trying to declare that homosexuality is a human right,” Lively says. “They spend vast amounts of money to promote this agenda around the world instead of defending genuine human rights.”

This is just the latest entry on Lively’s anti-gay résumé, as my colleague Mariah Blake has reported. In 1995, Lively coauthored The Pink Swastika, a book that argues that gay Nazis inspired the Holocaust because Judaism forbids homosexuality. In 2007, Lively went on a 50-city tour of Russia and other ex-Soviet republics to warn of the “homosexual agenda.” In 2009, he gave a five-hour presentation on Ugandan national television calling homosexuality a disease and claiming that gays aggressively recruit children.

It’s unclear if Lively’s segment in this film was shot before he declared his candidacy for governor in September 2013. Yet it’s a revealing comment on the state of American (and Russian) politics that a candidate can find more traction for his extreme anti-gay views in Moscow than Mattapan.

Take a look at the video below. (The Lively segment starts at 8:17; he arrives at HRC at 12:00.)

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This Anti-Gay Candidate’s Message Is Bigger in Moscow Than Massachusetts

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