technocrit

... When most of us build or buy a home, we carefully appraise the neighborhood. In Malibu the neighborhood is fire. Fire that revisits the coastal mountains several times a decade. In the past sixty years, ten of these frequent events have turned into all-consuming firestorms. The latest conflagration, the Woolsey Fire, has incinerated 1,500 homes and killed at least three people. It started in dry grasslands just south of Simi Valley, the site of the notorious trial of Rodney King’s assailants, then crossed a freeway to ignite dense coastal sage vegetation on the northern flank of the Santa Monica Mountains. The range’s deep canyons, perfectly aligned with the seasonal Santa Ana Winds, once again as bellows, accelerating the fire’s rush to the coast where it burned beach homes. The large number of residences lost attests not only to the ferocity of the conflagration but also to the amount of new construction since the 1993 firestorm.

Why more mansions in the fire-loving hills? Because of a perverse fact: after every major California blaze, homeowners and their representatives take shelter in the belief that if wildfire can’t be prevented, nonetheless, its destructiveness can be tamed. Thus the recently incorporated City of Malibu and the County of Los Angeles responded to the 1993 disaster with aggressive regulations about brush clearance and fire-resistant roof materials. Creating ‘defensible space’ became the new mantra, and it was soon echoed across California in the aftermath of other great fires, such as those that swept San Diego County in 2003 and 2007, burning 4,500 homes and killing 30 people. So instead of a long-overdue debate about the wisdom of rebuilding and the need to prevent further construction in areas of extreme natural fire danger, public attention was diverted into a discussion of the best methods for clearing vegetation (rototillers or goats?) and making homes fire-resistant. And if edge suburbs and backcountry subdivisions, in fact, could be fire-proofed, then why not add more? Since 1993. almost half of California’s new homes have been built in fire hazard areas. Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say of defensible space, ‘still it burns.’ In the last eighteen months 20,000 homes and perhaps a 1,000 lives have been lost in one super-fire after another.

Such fires are both old and new. Two different causalities are involved. First vegetation and topography, annually orchestrated by our dry hurricanes, define persistent fire patterns and frequencies. Without human intervention, however, lots of small fires ignited by late summer lightning create an intricate patchwork of vegetation of different ages and combustibility. The one-hundred-thousand-acre firestorms that we now experience annually did occur occasionally in the aftermath of epic droughts, but in a ‘natural’ fire regime they were rare. Fire prevention in the twentieth century, however, nurtured large areas of chaparral and forest into old age, creating perfect conditions for great fires. But as long as so many California towns were surrounded by citrus groves and agricultural land, fire even in its new, larger incarnation was usually stopped before it encountered housing. Today our horticultural firebreaks are gone, strawberry fields are now aging suburbs, and the quest for beach fronts, mountain view lots and big trees has created fire hazards that were once unimaginable.

Climate change, meanwhile, is coming to California in the form of drought and extreme summer heat, along with episodes of record torrential rain. Although scientists debate whether or not median annual precipitation averaged over decades will actually decline, more of it will fall as rain not as snow, a serious concern given that our water system depends on the Sierra snowpack to store and modulate the release of the water that irrigates cities and agribusiness. Moreover, rainfall is no longer an accurate predictor of fire risk. The winter of 2016-17 was the wettest in the history of Northern California, and spring brought the most glorious wildflower display in generations. But July was torrid and coastal temperatures, usually in the 70s, broke 100°F for a week. The greenery of spring was punctually baked into a bumper crop of brown fire-starter. When the winds began to blow in October, first Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco, and then Montecito, just south of Santa Barbara, caught fire. Three thousand homes were lost and several dozen people, mostly elderly and unaware of the approaching menace, died. But nature in California saves one last act and when the heavens opened up on Montecito’s bare burnt hills in January another 25 people disappeared in the fast-moving debris flows. This same encore awaits Malibu and the Sierra foothills over the next few months...

China is wide­ly regard­ed as the world’s lead­ing exe­cu­tion­er with thou­sands esti­mat­ed to be exe­cut­ed annu­al­ly, but infor­ma­tion sur­round­ing exe­cu­tions is con­sid­ered a state secret.

This was the week in which America’s ailing death penalty bit back. Such a concentrated glut of judicial killing was last seen more than 20 years ago in the US.

Across the US south and midwest – from Alabama to Missouri, Oklahoma to South Carolina, and of course in the heart of it all, Texas – states fired up their death chambers. Experts said it was a random coincidence that so many capital cases, with their convoluted legal journeys, came to a climax at once.

But there was nothing random or coincidental about the disdain for probable innocence that was on display this week. Nor about the racial animus, or the callous indifference to life animating supposedly “right-to-life” states.

“This week has exposed the reality of the death penalty in America, in all its brutality and injustice,” said Maya Foa, joint executive director of the human rights group Reprieve. “Across the US, executing states are going to ever more extreme lengths to prop up the practice.”

Cairo, Dec 4 (EFE).- Saudi Arabia has carried out 304 executions so far in 2024 – including seven women -, an unprecedented record in the country, a representative of the nonprofit European Saudi Organisation for Human Rights (ESOHR) told EFE on Wednesday.

“Those executed so far are 187 Saudis and 117 foreigners,” said Taha Al Hajji, a legal adviser to the ESOHR, which tracks executions in the kingdom, adding that seven of them were women.

Among the most recent executions, which occurred Tuesday, were those of three Egyptians imprisoned in Tabuk prison, which has another 27 Egyptian nationals on death row, he added.

According to Al Hajji, the number of executions for drug-related cases so far this year is 105, representing over one-third of the total.

In November 2022, Saudi Arabia carried out the first executions for drug-related crimes in nearly three years, reversing a moratorium on executions for such offenses announced by the Saudi Commission on Human Rights in 2021.

Despite repeated promises to limit the use of the death penalty, the Saudi authorities have increased executions while systematically violating international fair trial standards and safeguards for defendants, according to Amnesty International (AI).

The authorities have also used the death penalty to silence political dissent, punishing citizens of the country’s Shia minority who supported the “anti-government” protests between 2011 and 2013, AI underlined.

In 2022, Saudi Arabia executed 196 people, which was then the highest annual number of executions recorded in the country in the last 30 years, according to the nonprofit. EFE

Saudi Arabia’s escalating use of the death penalty has reached horrifying levels in 2024, with at least 309 individuals executed as of 8 December, the highest known figure in Saudi history. This grim milestone illustrates the Saudi authorities’ callous disregard for the right to life, and contradicts their own pledges to limit use of the death penalty.

Of the 309 individuals executed so far in 2024, according to data from the official Saudi Press Agency, 189 (61%) were Saudi nationals. The 120 foreign nationals executed were from 14 Asian and African countries.

106 individuals have been executed for drug-related crimes, 81 of whom were foreign nationals. This marks a sharp rise from 2023, which saw just two drug-related executions, and confirms the reversal of a short-lived moratorium on executions for such offences that lasted from January 2021 until November 2022 but was never consolidated in an official change of policy. This regressive trend raises serious concerns for the lives of hundreds of prisoners sentenced to death for drug-related offences. Such executions are in clear violation of international human rights law, which prohibits use of the death penalty for crimes that do not meet the threshold of the “most serious”.

46 individuals were executed for “terrorism-related” offences, which can include a wide range of non-lethal acts such as taking part in protests. The implausible claim made by the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) that Abdulmajeed Al Nimr, a Shi’a man executed on 17 August, had joined a terrorist cell affiliated to Al-Qaeda – a charge that did not appear anywhere in the court documents relating to his trial and sentencing – represents a flagrant example of the Saudi authorities’ determination to brand legitimate dissent and protest a form of terrorism.

Saudi Arabia has for years been among the countries carrying out the highest number of executions in the world. Despite a pledge in 2018 from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to reduce use of the death penalty, the rate of executions has continued to soar...

The humanitarian situation in Syria remains unstable after the collapse of the Bashar Al-Assad regime, the United Nations has said.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that hospitals across Syria are overwhelmed with many suffering from psychological stress, and children showing signs of shock.

In several cities, such as the capital Damascus, there have been reports of food shortages. Since the beginning of the armed opposition forces’ attack, the price of bread in cities such as Idlib and Aleppo has increased by 900 per cent...