London Review of Books

According to Seymour M Hersh,“Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August”. He omitted important intelligence,presented some assumptions as fact and failed to acknowledge that the Syrian army is not the only part in the country’s civil war with access to sarin. In the months before the attack,the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front,a jehadi group affiliated with al-Qaeda,had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. “When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect,but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad,” writes Hersh. One high-level intelligence officer wrote in an email that “the attack was not the result of the current regime”. When Obama decided to walk away from his ‘red-line’ threat to bomb Syria,“it appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan”. Hersh ends by saying that the irony of the situation is that while the Syrian regime continues the “process of eliminating its chemical arsenal”,al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create sarin.

Newsweek

The euthanasia talk

Professor Jutte van den Werff Ten Bosch has had the talk with her son several times. “Not the sex talk,but the euthanasia talk,” writes Elisabeth Braw. The family lives in Belgium,where a law allowing child euthanasia is on track to be passed early next year. Braw says the world is questioning whether a child should be allowed to make such a decision. Belgians,on the other hand,seem to favour the law. Van den Werff Ten Bosch says that “Children are not tiny humans that we can boss around” and that “children with terminal diseases mature much faster and can be more courageous than their parents”. The law raises a number of ethical,moral and legal dilemmas. “Considering the fact that humans,like animals,have an innate instinct to protect their young”,Braw questions,“Have the Belgians gone completely mad in allowing doctors to help children die? Or are they,by contrast,on track to become Earth’s most compassionate society because they’ll end children’s suffering? According to several schools in the country,euthanasia would be better than suffering for a prolonged manner. But several people are asking where the line should be drawn as recently,an elderly couple was euthanised simply because they were ‘tired of living’.” Braw ends by writing that Belgium is “indeed entering a chilling new world. It conjures up a Soylent Green (a 1973 Richard Fleischer film) world where a neatly ordered state routinely euthanises its older population to maintain the right population balance”.

The Huffington Post

‘Sympathise’ button

The long-coveted “dislike” button may never make its way to Facebook. But a Facebook engineer said last week that the social network has informally experimented with an alternative to “like”: specifically,the “sympathise” button. Bianca Bosker says that for years,Facebook’s members have demanded a “less cheery way” to respond to posts about a break-up,death or even just a bad day,as “liking” the post is inappropriate. The button was devised during a Facebook hackathon,an event which offers a chance to staffers to brainstorm new ideas for the site. The social network relies on its hackathons to explore out-of-the-box ideas,many of which never materialise. Yet many of the site’s signature features,like Facebook Chat,the friend suggester and the Timeline profile pages,have emerged from hackathons. The new “sympathise” button would accompany gloomier status updates. If someone selected a negative emotion like “sad” or “depressed” from Facebook’s fixed list of feelings,the “like” button would be relabelled “sympathise”. Bosker writes,“If you’re someone who loves the idea of ‘sympathising’ your way through the News Feed,here’s one reason to be hopeful: The ‘like’ button itself was a hackathon invention.”