Shanah Tovah to those who are celebrating!
TODAY IN HISTORY
September 11, 1714: The Siege of Barcelona ends with the French-Bourbon besiegers victorious over the city’s Habsburg defenders. The siege was one of the final engagements of the War of the Spanish Succession, which had begun back in 1701 following the death of Habsburg Spanish King Charles II. It pitted Charles’ chosen heir, the Bourbon royal Philip of Anjou, against the Habsburg claimant Archduke Charles of Austria (later Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI) for control of the decaying but still large and wealthy Spanish empire. Barcelona’s surrender brought an effective end to the war and also ended the Principality of Catalonia, a hitherto independent entity joined in dynastic union with the kingdom of Aragon, as new King Philip V reshaped Spain from a loose union of polities into a single, centralized political entity.
September 11, 1973: With the support of the US government and specifically the Central Intelligence Agency, a Chilean military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrows President Salvador Allende, who died (the official story, at least, is that he committed suicide) as soldiers seized the presidential palace in Santiago. Pinochet ruled as a dictator until 1990, becoming Chile’s legal president in 1981 under a newly-promulgated constitution, then continued to exert significant authority as military commander in chief until 1998. His regime is noted for its extensive human rights violations and for overseeing the neoliberalization of the Chilean economy under the Milton Friedman-trained “Chicago Boys,” a process that generated high levels of growth but also high levels of inequality. His legacy is still being felt in Chilean politics to the present day.
September 11, 2001: Al-Qaeda operatives kill nearly 3000 people by flying airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. A fourth plane, probably intended for the US Capitol, was brought down over Pennsylvania. The attacks sparked the “Global War on Terror,” which included US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and during which the United States essentially ran roughshod over the rest of the world and any concept of international law. It’s difficult to assess that conflict in a historical context given that it’s still going over two decades later, but the human toll alone has been nearly unfathomable.
INTERNATIONAL
A new study suggests that climate “feedback loops” are already kicking in to potentially disastrous effect:
Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world’s forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found.
As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening the climate crisis, the paper states.
While scientists have long known of these “feedback loops” that amplify the impact of direct pollution from burning coal, oil and gas, the emissions from natural sources are largely unaccounted for in climate projections.
This additional heating is, however, significant, researchers found, with emissions from natural sources set to amplify global heating by 20% to 30% by the end of this century. This would add an estimated 0.2C to 0.4C to the global average temperature by this time, depending on the overall action taken by countries to combat the climate crisis.
MIDDLE EAST
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
The Israeli military (IDF) claimed on Friday that it had killed “a top Hamas commander” along with “two other commanders” in an airstrike in Gaza the previous day. Hamas has acknowledged the death of Mohammed Abdel Salam al-Yazouri, identifying him as one of the planners of the October 7, 2023 attacks, but hasn’t commented on the other two deaths.
