Getting vaccinated is not just a matter of personal choice

The demand by some states and companies that people must be vaccinated in certain situations is playing out in an interesting manner in the National Basketball League. Two prominent players Andrew Wiggins and Kyrie Irving had both refused to say whether they were vaccinated and had told people to respect their personal choice. That could have resulted in them not being allowed to play in states that require vaccinations and this would mean that Irving would be prohibited from playing in all home games in New York and Wiggins in San Francisco.
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Is going to the extreme a winning strategy?

I have been wondering whether taking ever more extreme stands on major issues was a winning strategy for Republicans. There is no doubt that it fires up the most passionate and Trump-supporting faction in the party and also seeks a petty goal of ‘triggering the libs’, as the kids say. But against that is the possibility that it alienates everyone else, including other Republicans. While such a strategy would likely be a plus in the primaries where more loyal party members tend to vote, it would succeed in a general election only if the electorate is so solidly Republican that there are enough people for whom just the identifier (R) after a candidate’s name is sufficient to make their voting decision.
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Sri Lankan power couple named in Pandora Papers

Among the kleptocrats revealed in the recent Pandora Papers leak is a Sri Lankan couple, the wife of whom is a cousin to the president and prime minister (who are brothers) who have managed to amass a huge amount of wealth and sent it overseas.

In early 2018, workers in a London warehouse carefully loaded an oil painting of Lakshmi, the Hindu deity of wealth, onto a van bound for Switzerland.

The painting, by 19th-century Indian master Raja Ravi Varma, depicts the four-armed goddess clad in a red sari with gold ornaments and standing atop a lotus flower. It was one of 31 works of art, altogether worth nearly $1 million, that were being shipped to the Geneva Freeport in Switzerland. That vast, ultra-secure warehouse complex, larger than 20 soccer fields, stores among its many treasures what the BBC once called “the greatest art collection no one can see.”

The owner of “Goddess Lakshmi,” and the artworks in transit with it, as recorded on the packing slip, was a Samoan-registered shell company with an unremarkable name, Pacific Commodities Ltd. But a cache of leaked documents from Asiaciti Trust, a Singapore-based financial services provider, indicates that a politically connected Sri Lankan, Thirukumar Nadesan, secretly controls the company and thus is the true owner of the 31 pieces of art. His wife, Nirupama Rajapaksa, is a former member of Sri Lanka’s Parliament and a scion of the powerful Rajapaksa clan, which has dominated the Indian Ocean island nation’s politics for decades.
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Torturers ‘R US

The Taliban gave a tour to reporters of an abandoned US base that they claim was used by the CIA to plan their attacks and torture prisoners.

The cars, minibuses and armoured vehicles that the CIA used to run its shadow war in Afghanistan had been lined up and incinerated beyond identification before the Americans left. Below their ashy grey remains, pools of molten metal had solidified into permanent shiny puddles as the blaze cooled.

The faux Afghan village where they trained paramilitary forces linked to some of the worst human rights abuses of the war had been brought down on itself.
…

All formed part of the CIA compound that for 20 years was the dark, secret heart of America’s “war on terror”, a place were some of the worst abuses to sour the mission in Afghanistan would fester.

The sprawling hillside compound, spread over two square miles north-east of the airport, became infamous early on in the conflict for torture and murder at its “Salt Pit” prison, codenamed Cobalt by the CIA. The men held there called it the “dark prison”, because there was no light in their cells, the only occasional illumination coming from the headlamps of their guards.

It was here that Gul Rahman died of hypothermia in 2002 after he was chained to a wall half-naked and left overnight in freezing temperatures. His death prompted the first formal CIA guidelines on interrogation under a new regime of torture, eviscerated in a 2014 report that found that the abuse did not provide useful intelligence.

The base has for two decades been a closely guarded secret, visible only in satellite photos, navigated by the testimony of survivors. Now the Taliban’s special forces have moved in and recently, briefly, opened up the secret compound to journalists.

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The ‘Havana Syndrome’ was most likely due to crickets

One of the weirdest news stories in recent years has been the so-called ‘Havana Syndrome’ when US embassy personnel in various parts of world, starting in Havana, reported hearing buzzing, having headaches and nausea, and other medical complaints. Aided by US government sources and egged on by anti-Cuban forces, the media quickly assumed that this was caused by a new kind of weapon developed by Cuba or possibly Russia or China.

While this was always far-fetched, Branko Marcetic writes that a secret government study concluded back in 2018 supported one theory that it was psychosomatic and caused by crickets. The cricket theory was postulated by some scientists two years ago but dismissed as preposterous. The new government study was classified and only released this week.
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A transnational kleptocratic class

Thanks to whistleblowers who released a trove of documents, a team of journalists led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has released the first reports of what it calls the Pandora Papers. (Readers may recall an earlier expose called the Panama Papers.)

It reveals how vast sums of money are spirited away by politicians and wealthy people all over the world into tax-havens. Over 330 politicians from 90 countries are named. The US has become one of the biggest locations for tax dodging because of its laws involving the use of trusts. (This may be why the Panama Papers revealed few US names as using off-shore tax havens. It is not that they are more scrupulous but that they don’t have to. All the tax dodges they need are within the US.) News reports are careful to point out that these transactions may not be illegal but that is not the point. The global oligarchy makes the laws and we should not be surprised that they then use those laws to benefit themselves. But key questions that can and should be raised is how they amassed such wealth in the first place and why governments are allowed to connive in these schemes.
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John Oliver on voting rights

He explains what is going on in the effort to suppress the votes of poor and minority groups. He says that the Democratic party leadership and Joe Biden are avoiding taking the step of abolishing the filibuster and passing stronger voting rights laws, thinking that they can out-organize the Republicans and get out a large vote like they did in 2020. But that is not a given.

Taliban promise to revive barbaric punishments

A leader in the new Taliban government is promising a return to barbaric punishments.

The Taliban will resume executions and the amputation of hands for criminals they convict, in a return to their harsh version of Islamic justice.

According to a senior official – a veteran leader of the hardline Islamist group who was in charge of justice during its previous period in power – executions would not necessarily take place in public as they did before.

The Taliban’s first period ruling Afghanistan during the 1990s, before they were toppled by a US-led invasion in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks, was marked by the grisly excesses of its perfunctory justice system, which included public executions in the football stadium in Kabul.

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Which hapless nation is going to be the next Grenada?

The secretary of defense Lloyd Austin, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff of the US military general Mark Milley, and the head of the US Central Command general Frank McKenzie have all been trying to explain the reasons for the debacle in Afghanistan, not just the final chaotic withdrawal but the failure of the entire two-decade long nation building enterprise and the inability to defeat the Taliban despite pouring vast amounts of money into the Afghan military and providing all manner of material, training, and air support. When the USSR was the occupier of that country, the US government was providing covert support to the then-Mujahideen to undermine the Soviet-backed government but there is no evidence that any outside power, Russia or any other country, was providing anything like significant support for the Taliban in its fight against the US.
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