Turkey condemns violence against Rohingya, offers help via 1k tonnes of aid

Turkey will send 1,000 tonnes of aid to Myanmar to help Rohingya Muslims after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke with the Asian country's civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a spokesman said.

Erdogan had condemned escalating human rights violations against the Rohingya minority during the phone call earlier in the day, Turkish presidential sources said.

"After the president's conversation with his Myanmar counterpart... Permission was given for 1,000 tonnes of aid to be sent initially," Erdogan spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said in a statement.

The United Nations said 123,600 Rohingya had crossed into neighbouring Bangladesh in the past 11 days following a spike in fighting between militants and Myanmar's military in strife-torn western Rakhine state, which raised fears of a humanitarian disaster.

The latest violence, which began last October when a small Rohingya militant group ambushed border posts, is the worst Rakhine has witnessed in years, with Erdogan last week accusing Myanmar of "genocide" against the Rohingya Muslim minority.

Unverifiable testimony from those who have fled Myanmar has alleged tit-for-tat mass killings and villages being torched by the army, Buddhist mobs and Rohingya militants.
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Workers' lives be damned as Trump seeks to milk Papua New Guinea gold mines

The Grasberg Mine is a massive scar 14,000 feet atop West Papua’s part of New Guinea’s Central Cordillera. It’s is the world’s biggest, most profitable gold mine and the world’s third biggest copper mine, with estimated reserves of $100 billion.

Some 20,000 people work there, making it the largest employer on the divided island and the largest source of revenue in all of Indonesia. Many of those engaged in the dangerous work of mining come from the 40,000-year-old indigenous community of New Guinea, a people the Indonesian authorities are slowly pushing into non-existence.

In 1962, the Indonesians, with the connivance of the US, grabbed the western half of New Guinea. Since then, the destruction of the environment and the local communities has advanced as Indonesians displace the indigenous population and scramble over valuable resources. Although Indonesia has barred a full accounting, there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths—many in the most brutal and deliberate fashion.

Responsibility for the destruction and slow genocide now rests securely with the Indonesian government. But the US continues to defer to its ally in the same way it does to, say, Saudi Arabia: in short, weak complaints and no action.

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An internet firm serving hate on web has just tweaked its complaint policy

Cloudflare, a major content delivery network that has a variety of white supremacist websites as clients, has said it will change its policies to allow people to more safely lodge complaints about the material on the hate sites.

Cloudflare’s announcement comes on the heels of a ProPublica article detailing the company’s dealings with sites such as The Daily Stormer, a virulently racist neo-Nazi operation whose owner has promised to strike back at critics. The article revealed that Cloudflare’s standard arrangement with clients included passing along personal information of people who had complained to the company about The Daily Stormer and other sites.

In an interview, Cloudflare’s CEO, Matthew Prince, said the company would soon permit people in certain instances to complain anonymously and would be more selective in its decisions to share with its clients the personal information — names and email addresses, for instance — of people who reported objections.

“We have to have ways for people to report that abuse and not have people feel they are being bullied or threatened,” he said.

Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, operates more than 100 data centers spread across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites — speeding up delivery of a site’s content and protecting it from several kinds of attacks. Cloudflare says that some 10 percent of web requests flow through its network.

In the interview this week, Prince said Cloudflare would continue to have the racist sites as paying customers. Prince said Cloudflare does not regulate content and will not bar a customer unless they are determined to be a technical threat — like a site serving malware — or if his company is served with a court order.
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