ISIS claims responsibility for Ohio State car-and-knife attack

The attack in the state of Ohio “is a soldier of the Islamic State and carried out the operation in response to appeals targeting nationals of coalition countries," a security source told AMAQ, the news agency of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL).

مصدر أمني لوكالة أعماق: منفذ هجوم ولاية #أوهايو الأمريكية هو جندي للدولة الإسلامية ونفذ العملية استجابة لنداءات استهداف رعايا دول التحالف

— خادم الإخوة (@kjuvd9) November 29, 2016

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies investigating Monday morning’s incident have not announced any links between the deceased suspect, identified as OSU student Abdul Razak Ali Artan, and the terrorist group in the Middle East.

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Deceased Ohio State attacker identified as Somali refugee Abdul Razak Ali Artan

Authorities reportedly found Artan’s Facebook profile on Monday, where they say he posted a “declaration” that expressed grievances over attacks on Muslims.

"If you want us Muslims to stop carrying lone wolf attacks, then make peace" with IS, an anonymous law enforcement official described Artan’s post as saying to AP.

"America! Stop interfering with other countries, especially the Muslim Ummah. We are not weak. We are not weak, remember that," Artan wrote, using the Arabic term for the Muslim community.

Monday’s incident began when a car rammed into people outside of Watts Hall around 9:40am local time. The driver got out of the car, armed with a butcher knife and began attacking the group. A cop was on scene within a minute of the start of the attack, and shot and killed the suspect within a minute.

Artan is believed to have left moved to Pakistan from Somalia with his family in 2007. He came to the US in 2014 as a refugee, and was granted legal permanent residency. He transferred from Columbus State at the beginning of this school year.


(RT)

JIMMY CARTER TO BARACK OBAMA: RECOGNIZE THE STATE OF PALESTINE

Of the U.N.’s 193 members, 136—more than 70 percent—recognize the State of Palestine and the Palestinian push for an independent state. But the U.S., Israel and dozens of other nations do not, with many arguing that the recognition of a Palestinian entity can only come about through direct talks and agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The current U.S. government supports a two-state solution but Israeli ministers have suggested that the election of Donald Trump as the next president has dealt a huge blow to hopes of a Palestinian state. On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem and called for continued Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter delivers a lecture on the eradication of the Guinea worm, at the House of Lords, February 3, London. Carter has called for Barack Obama to recognize the State of Palestine.EDDIE MULLHOLLAND-WPA POOL/GETTY

Carter has now stepped into the debate with an op-ed for the New York Times on Monday.

“It has been President Obama’s aim to support a negotiated end to the conflict based on two states, living side by side in peace. That prospect is now in grave doubt,” he wrote. “I am convinced that the United States can still shape the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before a change in presidents, but time is very short.

“The simple but vital step this administration must take before its term expires on Jan. 20 is to grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, as 137 countries have already done, and help it achieve full United Nations membership.”

Carter added that U.S. recognition of Palestinian hopes for a sovereign state, combined with a U.N. Security Council resolution “grounded in international law,” and U.N. membership for the Palestinians would assist future diplomatic efforts toseal a lasting peace agreement.

The former president, who published a book on the conflict entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in 2006, warned that the prospect of peace is slowly slipping away from the Israelis and the Palestinians.

“Israel is building more and more settlements, displacing Palestinians and entrenching its occupation of Palestinian lands,” Carter writes in the New York Times. “Over 4.5 million Palestinians live in these occupied territories, but are not citizens of Israel. Most live largely under Israeli military rule, and do not vote in Israel’s national elections.”He said that Israeli moves in the West Bank, past the armistice lines marked before its capture of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, are bringing both sides ever closer to a “one-state reality” where Israel would preside over more than four million Palestinians living in the two territories, as well as the Gaza Strip.

He continued: “Meanwhile, about 600,000 Israeli settlers in Palestine enjoy the benefits of Israeli citizenship and laws. This process is hastening a one-state reality that could destroy Israeli democracy and will result in intensifying international condemnation of Israel.”

The last U.S.-brokered peace talks collapsed in April 2014 and Israel has rejected international initiatives proposed since, the most recent being the French plan to host an international peace conference in Paris. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that he is open to talking with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas but only bilaterally and without pre-conditions, such as the removal of settlers from the West Bank or the end of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank.

DISPATCHES FROM THE ALTERNATE UNIVERSE WHERE HILLARY CLINTON WON

Thankfully, he never had reason to deliver it. But the speech lives on as a fascinating glimpse into an alternate universe where one small step for man became one traumatic disaster for mankind.

Journalists play a similar game of chance, routinely prepping articles about events before they actually take place. (I once had a co-worker who had a whole draft of an article prepared for when aliens land on Earth.) But now we're living in a dystopian timeline not unlike the one in which Armstrong gets absorbed into the moon's crust. And some publications weren't so well prepared. "I edit most of our immigration content," an editor for a news site tells me, "so not having prepared for the possibility of a Trump presidency was a serious oversight in terms of stacking up the kind of content we needed."

Lots of outlets prepared for the opposite outcome. And so, thanks to Trump's unexpected electoral victory, there is now a massive, unprecedented content graveyard of articles celebrating or analyzing Hillary Clinton's would-be historic victory. (We're just as guilty: A Newsweek partner prepared a whole Clinton commemorative magazine in advance of the election, infuriating Trump supporterswho didn't realize we'd prepped a Trump edition as well.) Most of that content won't be read by anyone. But here is a small sampling. This collection is a tiny glimpse of what the internet would have looked like on November 9 if Clinton beat Trump, as so many pundits forecast.

Related: A poem composed entirely from emails sent by Hillary Clinton

Four quick notes: (1) Each of these excerpts is from an actual piece that was supposed to be published after Clinton claimed victory. (2) These excerpts were all provided to Newsweek via email, except for the Washington Post one, which already ran on the newspaper's site. (The Post's Chris Cillizza took the unusual step of publishing his "How Hillary Clinton Won" piece as a transparency exercise. We've excerpted just a snippet of his analysis.) (3) The Onion declined to share its Clinton-wins-the-presidency headlines. Sorry. "As good as they are," an editor responded, "we're always overly keen on maintaining our shroud of mystery over here." (4) If you're one of the 64,658,130 people who voted for Clinton (a popular vote total that significantly exceeds the president-elect's), this might be wrenching to read.

CADY DRELL (editor for Glamour magazine, formerly Newsweek)

But what we really want to tell you is that this is only the beginning. The glass ceiling isn't shattered until women's success is no longer news in and of itself. The history of feminism in this country has never been for the benefit of the trailblazer in question, just as any women who today voted for Hillary Clinton didn't do it for their own gain. Women like Clinton, and the women who led the fights for racial equality in this country, and the suffragettes before them, and the countless women whose names we don't even know before them endured what they did so that things would be a little bit easier for the women who followed them. We don't celebrate the election of a woman tonight for our own sakes, but because we recognize that the fact of her election means it will be a little less shocking, a little less unlikely, the next time a woman is elected president. Maybe it will be one of you.

JONATHAN CHAIT (writer and columnist, New York magazine)

Sparing the Republic from the whims of a twisted maniac is no small triumph. Clinton’s skeptics have already been denying credit for her expected victory by noting that she benefited from facing the least popular major party nominee in history, and that a normal Republican could have defeated her. This misses the extraordinary nature of the opposition that produced this unpopularity in the first place. Clinton has absorbed 25 years of relentless and frequently crazed hate directed at her husband, compounded by her status as a feminist symbol, which made her the subject of additional loathing. Her very real missteps were compounded by a press corps that treated her guilt as an unexamined background assumption. She is almost certainly the first president to survive simultaneous leak-attacks by both a faction of rogue right-wing FBI agents and Russian intelligence.

KATIE HALPER (freelance writer and host of the Katie Halper radio show and podcast)

Dear Hillary Clinton,

Congrats. You've achieved history. As someone who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary but still fought to defeat Donald Trump, I want to say thank you and you're welcome. Thank you for delivering us from Trump. And you're welcome for the work we did to send you to the White House. Without Sanders's running all over the country campaigning for you, and without the GOTV efforts and votes of Sanders supporters, you wouldn't have won.

I think we have the potential for a mutually beneficial relationship. But let's be real. I'm not that into you, and you're not that into me. And I know the kind of woman you are. You play hard to get; you're fickle; you say one thing and then do the opposite. You like one "position" one week and then hate it the next one. You like to play the field and swing both ways, to the left and to the right. You call yourself a moderate, but I've seen the way you look at Republicans. The way your face lights up when Henry Kissinger walks into a room. You never look at me that way. To be fair, I don't get that hot and bothered by you...or Kissinger. He actually repulses me on physical, moral, ethical and intellectual levels. The good thing is we'll never fight over a man.

As Becky Bond, a former senior organizer for the Sanders campaign and co-author of Rules for Revolutionaries, put it, "from the perspective of progressives who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary, this election is a shotgun wedding." We would vote for Clinton "because we had to." But there was never going to be a honeymoon.

Now, Hillary, you are the president-elect. And as much as a catch as I may be, it would be silly to pretend your being the most powerful person in the entire world doesn't give you a bit of an upper hand.

But before you get too comfortable, just remember that our commitment to each other only lasts for four years. If you want to make this last for eight years, you're going to have to treat us well. I'm going to have to be fired up if you want me to renew our vows in 2020.

Now what does that mean? What will fire me up? I don't expect you to read my mind. That's a mistake too many couples make.

Since Bond is an experienced organizer, dubbed a "secret weapon" by Breitbart, I thought I would ask her for advice. What were the things that I could ask of Clinton that would show me she was going to do the right thing by me and by the country? She suggested four easy ways for you to satisfy and prove your commitment to progressive partners like me. Because a strong foundation is the key to any successful relationship, Bond said this could all be done within the first 100 days of the presidency.

• Use an executive to grant protection from deportation to the family members of the undocumented people Barack Obama's order protects from deportation.
• Use an executive order to say that the international aid won't be subject to Hyde Amendment restrictions around abortion.
• Appoint people to the treasury from the Sanders and Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party.
• Pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

These would be extremely romantic.

Hillary Clinton attends a campaign rally accompanied by vice presidential nominee Senator Tim Kaine, not pictured, in Pittsburgh on October 22.CARLOS BARRIA/REUTERS

MARIN COGAN (contributing editor, New York magazine, but this piece was prepared for Vox.com)

And yet: Hillary Clinton’s victory is historic—a triumph that should not be overlooked. It marks the end of centuries of exclusion of women from the nation’s top job. Even more remarkable was the way she won it: by running as a woman, who championed policies aimed at women, against an avatar of reactionary sexism. She won under politically tainted investigation, in spite of plenty of legitimate criticism, and in the face of an incredible amount of sexism. In voting for her, Americans rejected Donald Trump’s old, macho vision of leadership and embraced a new paradigm, one that values not only a new style of leadership but also a policy outlook that prioritizes women and children.

CHRIS CILLIZZA (writer, "The Fix"—taken from this piece published on theWashington Post's site)

Clinton's path to the presidency—much like her last two-plus decades in public life—was not an easy one, defined more by her relentless drive forward than any sort of soaring movement like the one that propelled Barack Obama into office in 2008. And even in victory, Clinton survived rather than overwhelmed. Expected to cruise to an electoral vote victory, Clinton squeaked by—with Democrats fretting deep into the night about her prospects.

In short: It was a uniquely Clinton campaign—with all the good and bad that connotes.

ALEXANDRA SVOKOS (political writer, Elite Daily)

Clinton was the first First Lady to have had a full-time job outside of her husband's career before moving into the White House. She was the first First Lady to get an office in the West Wing.

Clinton was the first female senator from New York. She was the first First Lady to be elected to a public office.

Clinton was the first woman to clinch a presidential nomination and the first female presidential nominee for a major party.

Now, Clinton is set to become the first female president of the United States.

JORDAN FREIMAN (staff writer, Death and Taxes)

A pre-write of a scenario in which Clinton wins Florida.DEATH AND TAXES

A pre-write of a scenario in which Clinton wins Florida.DEATH AND TAXES

NEWSWEEK/TOPIX STAFF (prepared for a special commemorative edition)

On Election Day, Americans across the country roundly rejected the kind of fear- and hate-based conservatism peddled by Donald Trump and elected the first woman in U.S. history to the presidency. The culminating election of a career in politics spanning three decades and arguably more experience than any other incoming president, 2016's was not an easy race to watch, comment on or be a part of—but when the dust cleared it revealed a priceless moment in American history. The highest glass ceiling in the Western world had finally shattered.

JON SCHWARZ (senior writer, The Intercept)

Okay. Okay. The 2016 election is over, and Donald Trump is not going to be president of the United States of America.

We’ve all hugged our children, husbands and wives, parents, siblings, neighbors, dogs, cats, parakeets, ocelots and so forth. Some of us may have cried with relief.

Now we have to figure out what to do next.

Top Democrats, top Republicans, the corporate media and big business all have overwhelming incentives to pretend, as of this moment, that the last year never happened. Maybe there was a small glitch in the matrix, they’ll say, but the update we just pushed has patched it. The system worked! Thanks for voting. We’ll handle things from here.

For everyone else, all of America’s regular people, it’s a matter of life and death to stop that from happening.

The fact that a Tang-colored monstrosity like Trump came this close to the Zero Halliburton aluminum suitcase is by itself a terrifying catastrophe. The U.S. has had several presidents who might have destroyed humanity on purpose, but Trump is the first serious contender who could easily have done it by accident.

In any functioning democracy Trump’s campaign would have sputtered to a halt in the fall of 2015 because all of the other Republican candidates refused to appear on the same stage as him.

Instead he tore through every barrier except the very very last like it was wet toilet paper. And in the end Trump wasn’t beaten by anyone but himself. Hillary Clinton was backed by two-thirds of the U.S. establishment, and much of the rest stayed out of it, yet Trump could easily have won if he were a tiny bit less stupid, lazy and vile.

If we look back over the last 15 years of American history and its culmination with Trump, we can see that U.S. elites have built a political system that’s like a killer robot that’s malfunctioning to the degree that even they can’t control it anymore. Working normally it murders African Americans and pregnant women and opioid addicts. The Iraq war was a minor hiccup that caused it to obliterate a country, several thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of foreigners. The housing bubble was the result of a more serious bug that liquidated hundreds of thousands more from the poorer half of the rich world.

But with Trump, for perhaps the first time, the robot totally ignored the commands of its creators and put everyone in its crosshairs.

This time it missed. It might miss the next time, too. But if it’s not dismantled, you better believe it’s going to get us all eventually. It’s not trying to kill us because of specific bad people whom we can replace, but because of America's deep, structural problems.

PAUL KRUGMAN (columnist, The New York Times)

This story has been updated.

The Great Plains lost more grassland to agriculture in 2014 than the Brazilian Amazon lost to deforestation, says a recent reportfrom the World Wildlife Fund. And it argues that the continued expansion of cropland in the region may be threatening birds, pollinators and even drinking water, while releasing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

The Great Plains region is a vast expanse of land, mostly covered in grassland and prairie, stretching from northern Texas all the way up through Montana and the Dakotas into Canada. For more than a century, the area has been known chiefly for cattle ranching — but in more recent years, millions of acres have also been converted into farmland for crops like wheat, alfalfa, corn and soybeans.

While deforestation and the expansion of agriculture in places like the Amazon Basin are well-known issues around the world, the decline of grassland and prairie ecosystems may be much less publicized, even in North America which is home to one of the “last great extents of temperate grassland on the planet,” according to Martha Kauffman, managing director of the WWF’s Northern Great Plains program.

“To see the losses occurring here is something generally under the radar, something most Americans aren’t aware of,” she said.

The new report, based on data from the U.S. and Canadian governments, suggests that more than 53 million acres of land in the Great Plains have been converted to cropland since 2009. From 2014 to 2015 alone, approximately 3.7 million acres were lost. Currently, just over half the Great Plains — about 366 million acres in total — remain intact, the report claims.

“Those areas can really provide vital services to our nation’s people and wildlife,” said Tyler Lark, a Ph.D candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment, who was not involved with the new report. Conversion “has big impacts on water and climate and other ecosystem services.” Lark has previously published research on the expansion of cropland in the United States.

The two greatest concerns about grassland conversion in the Great Plains involve reduced water quality and increased greenhouse gas emissions, said Kaufmann.

“When that grassland is plowed up, when the root systems and structures are removed, the water-holding capacity of that landscape goes down significantly,” she said. When that happens, excess water runs off and can introduce extra sediment into the streams and rivers where it ends up, she said.

Land-use changes and conversion to farmland is also a known contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, releasing carbon dioxide that was previously stored in the soil and grass. Referencing a report from the U.S. Geological Survey on carbon storage in the Great Plains, the WWF report charges this is another consequence of converting the Great Plains to croplands.

However, the USGS report also notes that, overall, the Great Plains region is considered a carbon sink, meaning it stores more carbon than it emits. That’s not to say the conversion of grasslands isn’t still worrisome from a climate perspective. If emissions from the Great Plains continue to increase, that means that the region may begin to store carbon at lower and lower rates each year. The USGS report predicts the Great Plains will remain an overall carbon sink at least through the year 2050, but if these trends continue decades down the line, the region could eventually reach a tipping point and become a carbon source.

The WWF report also expresses concern about the impact of conversion on natural habitat for pollinators and grassland bird species. In fact, a recent study indicated that corn and soybean cropland has been increasing in some areas of the Great Plains where beekeepers house their honeybee colonies — a potential problem for the keepers, who generally prefer to avoid those types of crops when selecting suitable locations for their apiaries. But it’s unclear whether the expansion of cropland has actually had an impact on the pollination services provided by bees in the area.

Currently, the majority of the Great Plains is privately owned. There are certain federal programs aimed at protecting or restoring the natural landscape, according to Jeff Nelson, deputy director of the WWF’s Northern Great Plains Program, and some private conservation organizations have also worked on buying easements or acquiring land in the region. But Kauffman noted these efforts “can’t keep up with the pace of conversion that’s happening.”

Lark said some states have introduced what’s known as a “sodsaver” provision, which essentially reduces the economic and financial incentives for farmers to plow land that hasn’t previously been used for growing crops. The idea is to encourage the preservation of uncultivated land. Since the provision only stands in a few states, though, Lark added that a nationwide sodsaver provision could help slow the loss of natural landscapes in the Great Plains.

According to Nelson, one additional strategy for preserving the grasslands could be to improve the sustainability of livestock ranching — which typically doesn’t lead to plowing or converting the land — so that ranchers can more readily compete for land. But there’s a balance to be struck there, as well. The raising of livestock, and particularly cattle, is well-known for its high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, include methane, which has a shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide but is a significantly more potent greenhouse gas.

“[That’s] one of the things we’re looking at, trying to figure out what the trade-off is,” Nelson said.


(The Washington Post)