49 Acts of Powerline Sabotage, 19 Acts of Oil Pipeline Sabotage in Last Six Months

by Russ McSpadden / Earth First! News

Smoke rises over a recent pipeline attack in Marib governorate, a tribal region in Yemen.

According to compiled reports from the Yemen Times  over 60 acts of industrial sabotage have taken place since January within the tribal area of the Marib governorate in Yemen, cutting power to Sana’a, the nation’s capital 170 miles to the east, and crippling the government’s oil and gas infrastructure. Oil and gas revenue provides 70 percent of the state’s budget.    

Saudi Arabia Says Hackers Sabotage Government Websites

from Reuters

RIYADH – Several government websites in Saudi Arabia were sabotaged in a series of heavy cyber attacks from abroad in recent days, disabling them briefly until the attacks were repelled, the government said.

An investigation traced the “coordinated and simultaneous attacks” to hundreds of Internet protocol addresses in a number of countries, an unnamed source at the Saudi Interior Ministry told state news agency SPA.

The interior ministry website crashed on Wednesday after it received a “huge amount” of service requests, but was back online less than two hours later after the “necessary technical drills” were performed to counter the attack, the source said.

The report made no mention of a possible motive.

Saboteurs Cut Undersea Internet Cable Near Egypt

IDG News Service – Egypt said it has arrested three men suspected of slicing a crucial undersea Internet cable on Wednesday, causing widespread problems from Kenya to Pakistan.

The South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) cable runs 12,500 miles from France to Singapore, with branches connecting telecommunication companies in Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia and Algeria.

Egypt published photos of three men in a boat with their hands tied along with scuba diving tanks. The men were apprehended just offshore where SEA-ME-WE 4 reaches land, according to a Facebook posting purportedly by Egypt’s military.

Egypt’s Facebook account could not be immediately verified with the social networking company, but Telecom Egypt also wrote about the arrests on its Twitter feed.

14 Religious Leaders Arrested at Climate Action in DC

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Dear friends,

Yesterday, along with 14 other religious folk, clergy and committed “laity,” I was arrested for standing at the White House with signs and songs, reciting the names of more than 100 people who had been killed by one result of the climate crisis: Superstorm Sandy.

The action was organized by Interfaith Moral Action on Climate, of which The Shalom Center is a vigorously active member. We were calling on the president to act swiftly to heal our Mother Earth from the climate crisis, from the plagues that modern Pharaohs — Big Oil, Big Coal, Unnatural Gas — have brought upon us.

NASA: Alarming water loss in Middle East

By MICHAEL CASEY, AP Environmental Writer

One of the biggest challenges to improving water conservation is often competing demands which has worsened the problem in the Tigris and Euphrates river basins.Turkey controls the Tigris and Euphrates headwaters, as well as the reservoirs and infrastructure of Turkey’s Greater Anatolia Project, which dictates how much water flows downstream into Syria and Iraq, the researchers said. With no coordinated water management between the three countries, tensions have intensified since the 2007 drought because Turkey continues to divert water to irrigate farmland.

“That decline in stream flow put a lot of pressure on northern Iraq,” Kate Voss, lead author of the study and a water policy fellow with the University of California‘s Center for Hydrological Modeling in Irvine, said. “Both the UN and anecdotal reports from area residents note that once stream flow declined, this northern region of Iraq had to switch to groundwater. In an already fragile social, economic and political environment, this did not help the situation.”

Keren Kayemet Le Yisrael and Environmental Racism in Palestine

by Ben Lorber / article from the Lughnasadh 2012 issue of the Earth First! Journal

Since the idea of Zionism first gripped the minds of a few intellectuals and the limbs of many agrarian pioneers in the early 20th century, the state of Israel has represented its settlement of Palestine, and its uprooting of the Palestinian people, as a rejuvenation of the Earth. Determined to “make the desert bloom,” an international organization named the Jewish National Fund, or Keren Kayemet LeYisrael, planted forests, recreational parks, and nature reserves to cover over the ruins of Palestinian villages, as refugees were scattered far from the land upon which they and their ancestors had based their lives and livelihoods.

Today, while Israel portrays itself as a “green democracy,” an eco-friendly pioneer in agricultural techniques, desert ecology, water management and solar energy, Israeli factories drain toxic waste from occupied West Bank hilltops into Palestinian villages. Israeli overpumping of aquifers increases water scarcity and pollution, denying Palestinians access to vital water sources. By greenwashing the occupation, Israel hides its apartheid behind an environmentalist mirage and distracts public attention, not only from its brutal oppression of the Palestinian people,but  from its large-scale degradation of the Earth upon which these tragedies unfold.

We Are Now One Year Away From Global Riots, Complex Systems Theorists Say

By Brian Merchant / Motherboard

What’s the number one reason we riot? The plausible, justifiable motivations of trampled-upon humanfolk to fight back are many—poverty, oppression, disenfranchisement, etc—but the big one is more primal than any of the above. It’s hunger, plain and simple. If there’s a single factor that reliably sparks social unrest, it’s food becoming too scarce or too expensive. So argues a group of complex systems theorists in Cambridge, and it makes sense.

In a 2011 paper, researchers at the Complex Systems Institute unveiled a model that accurately explained why the waves of unrest that swept the world in 2008 and 2011 crashed when they did. The number one determinant was soaring food prices. Their model identified a precise threshold for global food prices that, if breached, would lead to worldwide unrest.