Six In The Morning Sunday March 22

Pentagon investigates 'IS online threat' to US military

The US defence department says it is investigating an online threat allegedly made by Islamic State (IS) to about 100 of its military personnel.

A list of names and addresses was posted on a website linked to the group alongside a call for them to be killed.

The group said it obtained the information by hacking servers and databases but US officials said most of the data was in the public domain.

A US security source told the BBC that those on the list were being contacted.

The group, which called itself the Islamic State Hacking Division, said the personnel named had participated in US missions against IS.

A US defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told US media: "I can't confirm the validity of the information, but we are looking into it."

PATRICK COCKBURN

Sunday 22 March 2015

Tony Blair joins a strange and exclusive club of political leaders whose careers have been blighted by the Middle East

World View: A new tomb has just gone up in that graveyard of US and British political reputations

Tony Blair stepping down as a Middle East peace envoy after eight years was greeted almost everywhere with a mixture of harsh criticism, derision and relief. He had reportedly long been allocating three days a month to the job and devoting the rest of his time to his business interests.

Blair is a member of a strange but exclusive club consisting of British and American political leaders whose careers have been blighted or terminated over the past century by calamitous involvement in the Middle East. On the British side members include Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Anthony Eden, and among the Americans are Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George W Bush.

Do the different crises in the Middle East with which these six men failed to cope successfully have anything in common? Were similar mistakes made, and why has the region become such a graveyard for political reputations?

Nazi Extortion: Study Sheds New Light on Forced Greek Loans

By Manfred Ertel, Katrin Kuntz and Walter Mayr

Is Germany liable to Athens for loans the Nazis forced the Greek central bank to provide during World War II? A new study in Greece could increase the pressure on Berlin to pay up.

Loukas Zisis, the deputy mayor of Distomo, a village nestled in the hills about a two hour drive from Athens, says he thinks about the Germans every day. On June 10, 1944, the Germans massacred 218 people in Distomo, including dozens of children. Zisis, who is just 48 years old, wasn't yet born at the time of the attack.

"We can't forget the Germans," Zisis says. They came to Distomo 71 years ago with their guns. "Today they are exerting power over our village with their banks and policies," he adds. He's standing in the wind on a rocky ledge, a small man in a leather jacket, and looking out over the town. Two-thousand people live here.

The massacre, which continues to shape the place today, was one of the most brutal crimes committed by the Nazis in Greece, with the carnage lasting several hours. For decades, a trial over the massacre wound its way through the courts at all levels in Greece and Germany. Greece's highest court, the Areopag, ruled in 2000 that Germany must pay damages to Distomo's bereaved.

Yemeni president Hadi calls on UN

March 22, 2015 - 6:44PM

Fawaz al-Haidari

Yemen's embattled President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi has pledged to fight Iran's influence in his violence-wracked country, accusing the Shiite Houthi militia of importing Tehran's ideology.

Mr Hadi lashed out at the Iran-backed militia on Saturday, a day after multiple suicide bombings at Houthi mosques claimed by the Sunni Islamic State jihadist group killed 142 and wounded 351 others.

The country is on the brink of a civil war with a deepening political impasse and an increasingly explicit territorial division along sectarian lines, amid rising violence pitting Shiite militia against Sunni tribes and al-Qaeda militants.

US troops were evacuating a southern Yemen air base on Saturday after al-Qaeda militants seized a nearby town amid growing violence in the war-torn nation, multiple media outlets reported.

With big growth for the sharing economy, has it become selfish?

The idealism of the sharing economy is coming up against profit-driven tendencies, and firms like Uber and Airbnb are encountering backlash. Now, a discussion is taking place about what the industry’s moral underpinnings should be.

By Gloria Goodale, Staff writer

LOS ANGELES — When it began, the so-called sharing economy was all about the idealistic use of technology to connect people with other people’s underused stuff – everything from cars to spare bedrooms to even LEGOs.

But lately, critics of the industry – not even a decade old but already claiming some 10,000 companies – have begun to frame the peer-to-peer economy in terms much less lofty. They are using words such as the new “selfish,” “stealing,” or – as economist Robert Reich put it in a Salon column – “share-the-scraps” economy.

The controversy over some parking applications illustrates the shift. After it became clear such apps would enable users to profit from auctioning off open parking spaces on city streets, a number of municipalities banned the apps. “They are taking a public asset and effectively privatizing it,” said Los Angeles Council Member Mike Bonin, according to the Los Angeles Times.

WHO Report Links Weed Killer Ingredient to Cancer Risk

The world's most widely used weed killer can "probably" cause cancer, the World Health Organization said on Friday. The WHO's cancer arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, said glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and other herbicides, was "classified as probably carcinogenic to humans." It also said there was "limited evidence" that glyphosate was carcinogenic in humans for non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Monsanto, the world's largest seed company and Roundup's manufacturer, said in a statement that scientific data do not support the agency's conclusions and called on WHO to hold an urgent meeting to explain the findings.

Concerns about glyphosate on food have been a hot topic of debate in the United States recently, and contributed to the passage in Vermont last year of the country's first mandatory labeling law for foods that are genetically modified. The U.S. government says the herbicide is considered safe.