Hasta La Gadget!

By Steve Scherer and Gabriele Pileri

AMATRICE, Italy (Reuters) – The number of people killed in an earthquake that flattened parts of central Italy rose to 267 on Friday as rescue workers pulled more bodies from mounds of debris and families prepared to hold the first funerals.

The civil protection department in Rome said nearly 400 people were being treated for injuries in hospitals and local media reports said about 40 of them were in critical condition.

The earth continued to tremble, with survivors sleeping for the second night in tents set up by emergency services.

“It was quite a tough night because you have a significant change in temperature here. During the day, it is very, very hot and at night it is very, very cold,” said Anna Maria Ciuccarelli of Arquata del Tronto.

“You can feel the humidity in your bones despite the blankets that the civil protection department has given us. There are still aftershocks preceded by booms and, for those of us who have just lived through an earthquake, it has a great effect, particularly psychologically,” she said.

Some 928 aftershocks have hit the area around Amatrice and the nearby towns of Pescara del Tronto, Arquata del Tronto and Accumoli in the wake of Wednesday’s 6.2 magnitude quake. Nearly 60 of them struck since midnight.

Families prepared to bury their dead, with the first funerals set for Friday morning, including that of two children and their grandparents who died in Pescara del Tronto.

The search for survivors continued during the night in Amatrice as emergency workers with sniffer dogs clambered over piles of debris trying to find anyone still trapped under the rubble. In other towns the rescue operation wound down.

Prime Minister Matteo Renzi promised to rebuild the shattered houses and said he would renew efforts to bolster Italy’s flimsy defenses against earthquakes that regularly batter the country.

“We want those communities to have the chance of a future and not just memories,” he told reporters in Rome on Thursday.

Italy has a poor record of rebuilding after quakes. About 8,300 people who were forced to leave their houses after a deadly earthquake in L’Aquila in 2009 are still living in temporary accommodation.

Renzi declined to predict when the homeless might be rehoused, but said it was his government’s top priority. “This is not about setting challenges and making promises. We need the pace of a marathon runner,” he said.

Most of the buildings in the area were built hundreds of years ago, long before any anti-seismic building norms were introduced, helping to explain the widespread destruction.

Cultural Minister Dario Franceschini said all 293 culturally important sites, many of them churches, had either collapsed or been seriously damaged.

Italy sits on two fault lines, making it one of the most seismically active countries in Europe. Almost 30 people died in earthquakes in northern Italy in 2012 while more than 300 died in a quake in the L’Aquila disaster.

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This duet is just yuge!

Barbra Streisand teamed up with Donald Trump for a good old sing-song Thursday night. Kind of.

Babs joined Jimmy Fallon, who was disguised as the GOP nominee, for their own version of “Anything you can do, I can do better” on “The Tonight Show.”

It quickly got political, though, with Fallon’s Trump character soon switching up the words to suit his own agenda.

“Listen up, Babs. We’re gonna sing this song and it’s gonna be a fantastic song. Together we’re gonna make duets great again,” said Fallon as Trump, before launching into the tune.

Check it out in the clip above.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.

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Some say that good things come in threes and Sony seems to be a fan of that of late. It unveiled the Xperia Z5 line threes and the new Xperia X in threes as well. Going by that pattern, we presumed that the Xperia XA was taking the place of the company’s “Compact” model. Apparently not, at least based on … Continue reading

In the movie Judgment at Nuremberg, a Nazi judge has to answer for sacrificing an innocent man to appease the bloodlust of an angry crowd, swearing he had no idea how it would lead to the Holocaust. America must make a similar decision on whether to send a liberal Muslim cleric to his death abroad to appease an authoritarian “ally” in the war against ISIS. Will our policymakers get it right, or will we bow to realpolitik, sacrificing our soul for political power?

At the conclusion of that classic film, Nazi Judge Ernst Janning begs to meet with the head of the Nuremberg Tribunal, Judge Dan Haywood of America. Janning seems like a good guy with good intentions. He admits that he sentenced a Jewish man, Feldenstein, to death, but that was because there was fear and anger. He hoped it would end with the innocent man’s death.

“Judge Haywood…the reason I asked you to come,” Janning begs in a quivering voice, “those people, those millions of people…I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it, you must believe it.” Haywood sternly rebukes him. “Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

Of course, we believe that we’ve learned our lesson since World War II. We would never allow that to ever happen again, right? Yet we know that history can repeat itself, often because of human nature, and the desire for expediency over ethics.

Moments after the Turkish military coup failed, “ceremonial” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered tens of thousands of judges, police officers, professors, journalists, administrators, to be fired and arrested many. He demanded the United States extradite aged Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen to Turkey to stand trial, alleging that the longtime resident in America led the coup.

So far, there has not been a shred of untainted evidence that Gulen, who has a historically frosty relationship with the secular Turkish military, could order them around from his remote Pennsylvania home.

Of course, that could change, as Amnesty International has reported on the widespread torture, rape and abuse of detainees from the coup plot. The chances that some people will say what Erdogan wants them to say are similar to the ability one has to be held under water, or endure unspeakable pain.

Even those in America, who support having closer ties with Erdogan, recognize that the chances of an impartial judiciary giving Gulen a fair trial are nearly impossible. According to former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey James Jeffrey,

“The challenge that Washington faces in Gulen’s case is that Turkish authorities have been playing fast and loose with the authority of their court system, undermining the legitimacy of extradition requests. And even if the request is legitimate on paper, U.S. courts and administration officials will have to weigh whether Gulen would truly receive a free trial if he is sent to Turkey. From a policy perspective, the administration would likely be better off swallowing its concerns, sending this case to the courts, and letting the judicial system reach a decision. In this delicate phase of relations with such an important ally, realpolitik must guide the handling of such matters.”

Wow…realpolitik will take precedence. It’s okay to send Gulen to his death. What do we care about the execution of a Muslim cleric who paid for full-page ads in the New York Times to condemn 9/11 attacks, the Charlie Hebdo attacks, and ISIS, forged ties between Jews, Christians and Muslims, who came to America because of our freedoms, and will honor our request, putting his fate in God’s hands, and our own. And why do we care that he goes to his death at the hands of a man who had good things to say about Hitler’s system of government.

If Judge Janning got a second chance, knowing how the Holocaust turn out, do you think he would have ordered Feldenstein’s execution? America’s leaders are, amazingly enough, in a similar dilemma. Knowing where we stand in history, and the realpolitik concerns that told us to look the other way on Nazi war crimes in order to stand up to the Communists, how will we choose? And if you want a voice, it’s time to let those leaders know where you stand.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu.

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Image: Viktor Yanukovych. Public Domain

If an American PR whiz had not helped Yanukovych, would Ukraine still be intact?

A British scholar wrote an eye-opening book a decade ago on the tactics that candidates in the former Soviet Union used to win elections.

Andrew Wilson’s “Virtual Politics” became an instant classic in the fields of political science and Russian studies.

His premise was that election-campaign managers in the former Soviet Union used an array of tricks far vaster and dirtier than campaign managers in the West to assure client victories.

A key difference between a campaign manager in the former Soviet Union and the West, he said, was that an easterner had no problem breaking the law to win — anything to achieve victory.

Vladimir Putin’s stooge, Viktor Yanukovych, used many of the dirty and illegal tricks listed in “Virtual Politics” in Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election, but lost.

In what I consider a delicious irony, Yanukovych then used American rather than former Soviet campaign tactics to win the presidency in 2010.

The man who gave him the tactics was Paul Manafort, who became Donald Trump’s campaign manager this year but fizzled spectacularly when questions arose about Manafort’s ties with Ukraine and Russia.

I was thinking about Manafort’s work for Yanukovych the other day, and couldn’t help but wonder: If the American hired gun had not helped Yanukovych, would Ukraine still be intact, without the loss of Crimea and without a devastating war in the east?

I’ll return to that thought, but first let me discuss just a few of the dozens of dirty tricks for winning elections that Wilson listed in “Virtual Politics” — because they’re so much fun to talk about.

One is to create virtual politicians whose role is only to dilute your opponent’s vote.

Let’s say you have 45 percent of the vote in pre-election polls for the presidency, but you have a strong opponent with 40 percent. That’s too close for comfort.

And let’s say you are a conservative and your opponent a liberal.

Your campaign manager finds two people who could pose as liberal politicians, and you secretly put them on your payroll. The two new candidates offer the very same platforms as your main opponent, which means they take votes from that opponent.

In the end, the 40 percent of the vote that your main opponent once had is split among the three liberal candidates, with each having about 13 percent of the vote.

Diluting your main opponent’s vote lets you win the election with ease.

Another way to dilute your main opponent’s vote is to pay people with the same name as your opponent to run against him. Let’s say your opponent is Igor V. Ivanov. You convince guys named Igor D. Ivanov and Igor S. Ivanov to run, too.

When voters who favor your main opponent enter the voting booth, they see three Igor Ivanov’s on the ballot. Confused, many vote for the wrong one — which is exactly what you want.

Using virtual politicians and same-name candidates to dilute your opponent’s vote are dirty, but not illegal. But many campaign tactics in the former Soviet Union are flat-out illegal.

One that Yanukovych used was hiring the same groups of people to take trains or buses on election day to polling places across the country. These mobs, often drinking during their trips, voted every time the trains or buses stopped — clearly breaking the law.

I won’t go in to the other illegal tactics Yanukovych used because it would take up too much space. The bottom line is he got caught stealing the election, a court threw out the results, and Viktor Yushchenko won the new election that the court ordered.

Since his Ukrainian campaign managers had failed, in the 2010 election Yanukovych turned to Manafort, who employed American-style image-makeover tactics.

Many Ukrainians viewed the twice-imprisoned Yanukovych — rightfully — as a poorly educated, crude-talking thug.

Manafort portrayed him as a poor waif who had overcome a difficult childhood as an orphan to make something of himself. This prompted many of those who had once looked down on Yanukovych to feel more sympathetic toward him.

Manafort also worked on Yanukovych’s image by putting him in expensive clothes, changing his gangster-looking hairstyle, having tutors work with him on his poor grammar, and convincing him not to lash out at political opponents in threatening, gangsterish ways.

In the end, Manafort’s image-polishing worked where Ukrainian “Virtual Politics” tactics had failed.

Maybe the leaders of other former Soviet countries ought to take a page from Yanukovych’s book by hiring Western campaign managers. One candidate for a Western handler might be Serzh Sargsyan, president of Armenia, where the opposition has become more strident due to entrenched corruption and other problems.

The problem in Ukraine was that voters elected to the presidency a guy who looked less like a gangster but still was one, and who stole billions from the taxpayers before being thrown out in 2014.

Putin, incensed at Yanukovych’s ouster, retaliated by seizing Crimea. Eastern Ukrainians, angry that non-easterners had ousted a president from their area, began a rebellion that is still tearing the country apart.

I have to wonder: If Manafort hadn’t come along to pull the wool over Ukrainians’ eyes, and help Yanukovych defeat Yuliya Tymoshenko for the presidency, would Ukraine still have Crimea and peace in the east?

My answer is: There’s a good chance it would still be stable.

To me, the supreme irony in what happened in Ukraine is that one hired-gun American was able in a very short period to undo years of U.S. government work to help Ukraine become a viable, independent state.

Armine Sahakyan is a human rights activist based in Armenia. A columnist with the Kyiv Post and a blogger with The Huffington Post, she writes on human rights and democracy in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

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