Don’t Worry, Bout A Thing | Yemen’s Invisible War | The Cold War Heats Up…For Some Reason

We here at Daily Pnut are making a few changes. We have recently brought on a graphic designer to help revamp the look and format of the newsletter! You may think that we’re beautiful now just as we are, but we’d like to make some changes. So starting today (technically last Friday), we will be including DP original graphics/images to go along with some of our main topics and in a few weeks we will be revamping the visuals for the whole Pnut shebang. We hope you all enjoy…or at least don’t mind.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ― Albert Einstein

“All war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.” ― John Steinbeck

Now You See It: Saudi Arabia’s young crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) took over his country in a power grab, but what he has been doing since has flown largely under the radar. With strong support from the United States, MbS has engineered one foreign policy debacle after another, including the catastrophic war in Yemen that has remained largely invisible. MbS barred foreign journalists from the worst fighting in northern Yemen, so the extent of US military aid in the form of intelligence, bombs, weaponry and refueling is mostly unknown to Americans. The conflict has raged more than three years and created what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. New York Times reporter Declan Walsh risked his life traveling to Yemen’s Red Sea coast to provide a close up look at Saudi Arabia’s invisible war.

Walsh’s efforts are laudable. But what has really captured the world’s attention is the crown prince’s involvement in the death of Saudi journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi. More questions are focusing, not only on potential US complicity in war crimes in Yemen, but on whether the Trump administration is helping to cover up MbS’s direct connection to the journalist’s murder. The White House and its media allies have taken the position that a potential loss of billions of dollars in arms sales to the Saudis should override humanitarian concerns about Khashoggi’s death, or a bloody foreign war for that matter. Even without the sale of more arms to Saudi Arabia, America is deeply involved in inflicting a catastrophic toll on Yemenis, including countless civilian deaths, 14 million people at risk of starvation, and the worst cholera epidemic in history. Viewed in that context, Jamal Khashoggi is apparently just one more casualty of war.

The Cold War Heats Up…For Some Reason: In 1986 world nuclear weapons stockpiles peaked at an astonishing level of 70,300 warheads. The next year President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, ending the Cold War. According to the State Department, the treaty banned the US and Soviet Union from having “ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers,” and required the destruction of the missiles, launchers and “associated support structures and support equipment.” In 1988, the two countries eliminated 2,692 missiles. On October 20, 2018, President Donald Trump told reporters in Nevada that Russia has not been honoring the Nuclear Arms Treaty that had ended the Cold War, “so we’re going to terminate the agreement, we’re going to pull out.” (NPR)

Additional Read: “Russia nuclear treaty: Gorbachev warns Trump plan will undermine disarmament: Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev says US President Trump’s plan to withdraw from a key Cold War nuclear weapons treaty is a reversal of efforts to achieve nuclear disarmament.” (BBC)

The Troll’s Treasurer: The US Justice Department filed a criminal complaint Friday against a Russian woman, Elena Khusyaynova, accusing her of conspiring to defraud the United States; prosecutors say she was the top money manager for Russian disinformation schemes that are targeting next month’s midterm elections. Court documents said Khusyaynova administered the finances for “social media operations, web content, advertising campaigns, infrastructure, salaries, travel, office rent, furniture and supplies, and the registration of legal entities” that were part of the schemes. The project had a budget of tens of millions; funding came through a company controlled by oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Prigozhin was charged in another indictment. (NPR)

The Oregon Trail 2: Thousands of undocumented migrants from Central America continued their journey Sunday in southern Mexico. They are part of a caravan that has been heading toward the US for more than a week in defiance of both Mexican and American governments. Most of the estimated 7,000 people are from Honduras, and are fleeing economic distress and violence back home. The current caravan, the largest on record, has angered President Trump who is using it as a campaign issue to fire up his base for the midterm elections. (NYT)

So, This Awful Thing Exists And Hopefully Soon It Won’t: The World Health Organization, UN Women and UN Human Rights have called for an end to virginity tests that are documented in at least 20 countries around the world. The test is administered for a variety of reasons: to determine whether a woman can go to school, get married, get a job, or whether she is a victim of rape. “This medically unnecessary, and often times painful, humiliating and traumatic practice must end,” the UN announced in a statement at the World Congress of Gynecology and Obstetrics in Rio de Janeiro. Currently some 190 women and girls are jailed in Afghanistan for having failed the test. (NPR)

– “Meet The Jews Of The German Far Right: Just 19 members turned up to its launch event in the city of Wiesbaden last month, but the development has unsettled many in Germany’s Jewish community.” (NPR)

– “C.E.O.s May Avoid Riyadh Conference but Not Saudi Money: The world’s biggest companies might be talking about distancing themselves from Saudi Arabia amid a growing furor over the killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. But as American and European executives pull out of a showcase Saudi investment conference next week to avoid controversy, many companies are so deeply invested that they are unlikely to sever ties or avert future deals with the oil-rich kingdom.” (NYT)

Don’t Worry, Bout A Thing Because According To These Graphs: Much of the news these days is somber, so occasionally it’s beneficial to ponder some good things that have been happening. To that end, the glass-is-half-full folks at Vox have been busy compiling 23 maps and charts demonstrating how the world has actually been improving over the last several decades. It’s meant to be a counterweight to all the negative press, which understandably gets more attention. For example, extreme global poverty has fallen by half since 1990. A 2016 survey found that only eight percent of US residents knew that. The beneficiaries of better times get it—50 percent of Chinese respondents in the 2016 poll said they knew poverty had fallen. Vox wants you to know about that, and more progress that’s being made on a number of fronts.

The huge decline in world-wide poverty in the last 30 years has been led by an extraordinary rate of economic growth in India and China, and a slower but steady growth in other developing countries. The Global Hunger Index shows a reduction in hunger this millennium; the portion of income spent on food costs has plummeted in the US in the last five decades. In this century, child labor is down by about 40 percent, and child mortality has fallen by 50 percent since 1990. Life expectancy is rising, particularly in poor African and Asian countries; teen birth rates are down in the US, less people are smoking, and women dying in childbirth is much rarer. Homicide rates have been declining in the US, along with crime rates generally elsewhere, and since 1987, the world’s nuclear weapons stockpiles have drastically decreased. There is increased access to education and the internet, which in turn has elevated literacy rates. Not to be forgotten or downplayed: more people have access to malaria bed nets, and Guinea-worm disease is practically eradicated.

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10th Grade English Class Finally Pays Off: John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath is the story of one poor family of “climate migrants”, forced to leave their tenant farm in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl of the 1930s and travel west, only to be vilified and mistreated where they’d relocated in California. Now that a UN report has been published forecasting drastic effects of climate change in the next decades, and the World Bank is predicting climate change could create as many as 143 million “climate migrants” by 2050, several university professors are suggesting stories like Steinbeck’s, and other historical events providing smaller snapshots of climate displacement, may help us begin to envision the migration that could occur, and the places those migrants will leave behind. specifically, a recent study from the University of Chicago finds that climate-change-induced migration in the next 50 years is expected to increase population in the West by more than 10 percent, with most of the new migrants arriving from the South and Midwest. As one professor said: “Places like South Florida … Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, these places are going to be drastically compromised. I hope that we’re not talking in historical terms about the place that used to be Florida, or the place that used to be Louisiana.” (NPR)

The Elephants In The House: New York Times opinion columnist David Leonhardt speculates on what it could mean if Republicans were to retain both houses of Congress in the midterm elections. For starters: “The end of Robert Mueller’s investigation. The loss of health insurance for several million people. New laws that make it harder to vote. More tax cuts for the rich. More damage to the environment. A Republican Party molded even more in the image of President Trump.” In other words, a total GOP victory “would mean Trump unleashed.” (NYT)

– “Mueller report PSA: Prepare for disappointment: And be forewarned that the special counsel’s findings may never be made public.” (Politico)

– “The Secret Betrayal That Sealed Nike’s Special Influence Over The University of Oregon: In the mid-1990s, University of Oregon President Dave Frohnmayer needed money to save his school. Alum and Nike chief executive Phil Knight was happy to help—as long as the university could be managed in a way that would maximize the company’s brand and profits. But when Frohnmayer made a key misstep, Knight exacted a brutal punishment.” (Pacific Standard)

– “Are we too broke to stick to our principles?: Would you quit your job on ethical grounds? Last summer, a dozen Google employees did just that.” They Googled their last Google. (BBC)

– “Dick Fosbury Turned His Back On The Bar And Made A Flop A Success: …50 years ago Saturday, Dick Fosbury, a lanky college student from Oregon, won the high jump in Mexico City, and revolutionized his sport.” (BBC)

– “The Bosnians who speak medieval Spanish: When Jews fled Spain during the Inquisition, they carried their language with them. Today, Ladino reflects the trajectories of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora, but can it survive?” (BBC)

– “This is exactly how a nuclear war would kill you: This is how the world ends — not with a bang, but with a lot of really big bombs.” It’s the first self-snuff article! What a time to be a-die! (Vox)

– “Five Artificial Intelligence Insiders in Their Own Words” (NYT)

– “Not the Man They Think He Is at Home: He’s sold 150 million albums and been famous for five decades. But do we really know Elton John?” He hasn’t even been in a rocket. (Vulture)

– “How Economic Inequality Harms the Environment: Power imbalances facilitate environmental degradation—and the poor suffer the consequences” (Scientific American)

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