Today’s Headlines and Commentary
Day 14. Just about every media outlet in the country is reporting that the bloodshed in Gaza hit a horrific high this weekend, with the Associated Press, for example, reporting that at least 508 Palestinians and 20 Israelis have died in the two-week conflict.
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Day 14. Just about every media outlet in the country is reporting that the bloodshed in Gaza hit a horrific high this weekend, with the Associated Press, for example, reporting that at least 508 Palestinians and 20 Israelis have died in the two-week conflict. President Obama has called for an "immediate cease-fire," writes the Guardian, and Secretary of State John Kerry will be in Cairo to negotiate an end to the crisis.
The Israeli military has distributed video footage of "an offensive tunnel network" leading from the southern Gaza Strip and under Israel's border to explain its ground war, notes Bloomberg. Meanwhile Doctors Without Borders is calling on Israel to "stop bombing civilians trapped in the sealed-off Gaza Strip, and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is calling on Israel to cease its "atrocious" shelling and "exercise maximum restraint," reports Al Jazeera. Nicholas Kristof had an op-ed in the Times on Saturday pushing back against the moral partisanship dominating commentary on the crisis.
No definitive answers have emerged in the aftermath of the shocking downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over rebel-held east Ukraine last Thursday. The crash site itself remained blocked off for most of the weekend. "The victims' remains have been subject to indignities rarely seen in the aftermath of civilian airline crashes," reported the Wall Street Journal yesterday, with bodies left lying out in the summer heat to decompose as the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe struggled to come to terms with rebels on transferring the remains to international investigators.
President Vladimir V. Putin issued a statement Monday, both calling for a "robust" crash investigation and accusing members of the international community of exploiting the disaster for political ends. So reports the New York Times. Kerry declared this weekend that an "enormous amount of evidence" points to Russian responsibility for training and arming the separatists believed to have shot down the commercial airliner. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott put it plainly in an interview with ABC: "Russian-controlled territory, Russian-backed rebels, quite likely a Russian-supplied weapon, Russia cannot wash its hands of this."
Ukraine has released a video of what the government claims are telephone conversations between pro-Russian rebels about the flight's black boxes; the conversations have yet to be authenticated. In a Times op-ed, Maxim Trudolyubov writes that "even if Russia has not directly supplied the insurgents with the missile technology that destroyed the plane, the sheer scale of the Russian propaganda machine effort against the West could not have continued without consequences."
On Saturday, Russia also announced congressman Jim Moran (D-Va) and 12 other people connected with Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib were banned from entering Russia, an an apparent response to the July 2 U.S. travel ban on a Russian parliament member, along with 12 Russians accused of human rights abuses. See more from the Miami Herald.
A suicide bomber targeted a police convoy in southern Afghanistan, reports the AP. No one has claimed responsibility for the attack.
At least 11 civilians were killed and 31 wounded in a Shiite neighborhood south of Baghdad, and a roadside bomb killed five. The AP reports.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is reporting that Iran has met the terms of the six-month nuclear deal brokered by six world powers last year; Iran has begun converting its lower-grade enriched uranium gas into oxide. Here's Reuters. On Friday, the Post reported that Iran and the G6 had agreed to extend nuclear talks through late November in hopes of striking a permanent deal.
China has sent a spy ship into international waters off of Hawaii during a large-scale, international, U.S.-led naval exercise. Beijing is one of 22 countries participating in the drills and is a newcomer; the spy ship maneuver is also an apparent first, though China sent a similar craft to observe last year's exercises, reports Reuters.
Al Jazeera has a film out on the FBI's use of dangerous convicted felons as undercover informants specifically commissioned to target Muslim communities across the United States.
On Saturday, Edward Snowden teleconferenced into the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference in New York City on Saturday and announced his commitment to developing anti-surveillance technologies. Reuters has details.
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Jane Chong is former deputy managing editor of Lawfare. She served as a law clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and is a graduate of Yale Law School and Duke University.
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