ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Secret cable and Dutch government official confirm that Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen is partly motivated by an ambitious US-backed pipeline fantasy By Nafeez Ahmed Nearly 3,000 civilians have been slaughtered and a million displaced in Saudi Arabia’s noble aerial bombardment of Yemen, which is backed by the United States and Britain. Over 14 million Yemenis face food insecurity – a jump of 12 percent since June 2015. Out of these, three million children are malnourished. And across the country, an estimated 20 million people cannot safely access clean water. The Saudi air force has systematically bombed Yemen’s civilian infrastructure in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. An official UN report to the Security Council leaked last month found that the Saudis have “conducted airstrikes targeting civilians and civilian objects … including camps for internally displaced persons and refugees; civilian gatherings, including weddings; civilian vehicles, including buses; civ

After pouring billions into rebuilding the country following successive Israeli invasions and air raids, the Saudis find that they cannot prevent the Shia from expressing their fury at Riyadh By Robert Fisk If you drive from Sunni Muslim Sidon to Shia Muslim southern Lebanon, you can travel from Saudi Arabia to Iran in 10 minutes. Sidon – like Lebanon’s other great Sunni majority city, Tripoli – has always basked in the favour of the Saudi monarchy. The south, with its mass of Hezbollah fighters – armed and paid for by Tehran, its “martyr” photographs plastered across the walls of every village – has long been a lung through which Saudi Arabia’s Iranian enemies breathe. But now Saudi Arabia, blundering into the civil war in Yemen and threatening to send its overpaid but poorly trained soldiers into Syria, has turned with a vengeance on Lebanon for its unfaithfulness and lack of gratitude after decades of Saudi largesse. After repeatedly promising to spend £3.2bn on new French weapons f

When Arab streets exploded with fury, from Tunis to Sanaa, pan-Arabism seemed, then, like a nominal notion. Neither did the so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’ use slogans that affirmed its Arab identity, nor did angry Egyptian youth raise the banner proclaiming Arab unity atop the high buildings adjacent to Tahrir Square. Oddly, the Arabism of the ‘Arab Spring’ was almost as if a result of convenience. It was politically convenient for western governments to stereotype Arab nations as if they are exact duplicates of one another, and that national sentiments, identities, expectations and popular revolts are all rooted in the same past and correspond with a precise reality in the present. Thus, many in the west expected that the fall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, especially since it was followed by the abdication of Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, would lead to a domino effect. “Who’s next?’ was a pretentious question that many asked, some with no understanding of the region and its complex

by JOHN WIGHT When future historians sit down to write the history of the Syrian conflict there is a simple test that will determine whether their objective is to mine and reveal the truth, or whether it is merely to shovel more dirt onto the mountain of the stuff that’s been erected over the course of its five long years as a monument to propaganda. The test will be their depiction of the Syrian Arab Army and its role in the conflict. If said historians credit it with holding the line against the forces of hell that were committed to the country’s destruction as a secular, non sectarian, multi-religious and ethnic state, enduring the kind of losses and casualties placing it among the most courageous, resilient, and heroic of any army of any nation that has ever existed, then people will know that truth rather than propaganda has prevailed. The glorification of war and conflict is difficult to resist for those living safely many miles away from its horrors and brutality. Those who do g

The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do. By Robert Epstein Over the past century, more than a few great writers have expressed concern about humanity’s future. In The Iron Heel (1908), the American writer Jack London pictured a world in which a handful of wealthy corporate titans – the ‘oligarchs’ – kept the masses at bay with a brutal combination of rewards and punishments. Much of humanity lived in virtual slavery, while the fortunate ones were bought off with decent wages that allowed them to live comfortably – but without any real control over their lives. In We (1924), the brilliant Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, anticipating the excesses of the emerging Soviet Union, envisioned a world in which people were kept in check through pervasive monitoring. The walls of their homes were made of clear glass, so everything they did could be observed. They were allowed to lower their shades an hour a

By Ulson Gunnar The news has been abuzz before and during the ceasefire announced amid Syria’s conflict about Saudi Arabia’s possible intervention. Saudi Arabia has threatened to intervene amid incomprehensible, contradicting rhetoric, claiming that it would enter Syrian territory to “fight” IS (the Islamic State), but would do so only now because the Syrian government has refused to step down. Of course, the only coherent forces on the ground fighting IS now are the Syrian government’s troops and Kurdish fighters who now appear to be working with Damascus. Saudi Arabia’s intervention to remove President Bashar al Assad from power would seem to work in IS’ favor, not against it. To give Saudi Arabia’s confusing threats some teeth, Riyadh announced its “Northern Thunder” military exercises which it claimed would be one of the largest military exercises ever held. The United Arab Emirates’ “The National,” would report in an article titled, “ Saudi Arabia hosts joint military exercise ,”

Most people think that DNA damage is what causes a cell to be cancerous. While it is true that cancer cells may have DNA damage, it is highly unlikely that DNA damage can cause any cell to become cancerous. In fact, the DNA damage is a result of the true cause cancer.  So let us discuss what really causes cancer.  There have been many discoveries about cancer in the past 125 years.  For example, William Russell (1852-1940), in 1890, discovered that there are microbes inside and outside of cancer cells. Later it was discovered that the microbes inside cancer cells were “pleomorphic,” that is, they changed shapes and sizes depending on the pH inside the cancer cells. In 1931, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Otto Warburg for his discovery in determining that the defining characteristic of cancer cells was low “ATP energy” (ATP is made inside the mitochondria of cells and is called “adenosine triphosphate”).  But Not Healthy Cells In 1930, it was proven that if th