September 1 – The “You Stink” Movement in Lebanon; The Undeclared Cyberwar Between the US and China and the US and Russia; Egypt’s Jails Are Overflowing

Full Program

Part 1

We begin and go to Beirut. Lebanon and speak with Thanassis Cambanis who writes “The Internationalist” column for The Boston Globe and discuss the growing “You Stink” movement that has occupied the offices of Lebanon’s environment minister whose resignation they are demanding because of the piles of uncollected garbage festering in the streets as a result of a political dispute. A Beirut-based journalist, Thanassis now finds himself living amongst mountains of trash that highlights the country’s gridlock and corruption and its political dysfunction and paralysis.

Part 2

Then we examine the undeclared cyber war underway between the U.S. and China and the U.S. and Russia and speak with August Cole a writer and analyst specializing in national security issues. He is a senior fellow at The Atlantic Council where he directs the Art of Future Warfare project and is the co-author with Peter Singer of “Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War”. We discuss how China’s and Russia’s intelligence services are aggressively aggregating and cross-referencing hacked data from U.S. government databases as well as medical records and other data hacked from private companies like Ashley Madison that allows them to build dossiers on all U.S. spies.

Part 3

Then finally we look back on the Egyptian revolution and the Arab Spring that brought hope for change in the Middle East only to provoke a counterrevolution financed by Saudi Arabia that brought back Egypt’s military ruler who have long-dominated the country and are now jailing so many political opponents and reformers that the jails are overflowing. Noha Radwan, a Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, who participated in the 2011 Tahrir protests, joins us to discuss the current sad realities of life in Egypt today.