Interesting bees, strange noises, top hats, and the middle east.

Back dans les bacs

brownbomber — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 05:10:43 +0000

yo! haven’t kept this updated for a bit, but some great articles people have been missing up in here

some top notch reporting on the battle for kirkuk on the NY Times, hmm… this sounds familiar, can’t quite recall where I’ve heard this before

“I left the house, like thousands of Arabs have done, to protect myself from the hatred and aggression of the pesh merga, who are so aggressive against Arabs,” he said. “I went back to Kirkuk 20 days later and found my house had been seized, all my furniture stolen, and there was Kurdish writing in my house. Later on guards wearing Kurdish uniforms came to me and told me, ‘Save yourself and leave the house immediately,’ so I was forced to leave it.”

In his office in the provincial council, Mr. Talabany pointed to the compensation package and said the Arab exodus was “voluntary, not enforced.”

Also, for your daily quotient of being cold as a gangster, check out this report on the future of Arms sales in Africa. Sounds Peachy! I’m so glad that there is an upside to the prospect of future wars!

F.I. admits that overall African spending isn’t expected to suddenly become impressive: 3.5% increases year-on-year from 2007-2011 to $15.9 billion, with under 20% of defense budgets slated for procurement. That isn’t much to write home about, but “African Market Overview” author Matthew Ritchie sees the opportunities in much more specific terms:

“…looking at the confluence of burgeoning security requirements and vast oil and [natural] gas reserves in the context of high energy prices and it becomes readily apparent that there is a collection of Africa nations demonstrating procurement characteristics reminiscent of the Middle East three decades ago.”

Algeria, Libya, and Nigeria are cited as key examples of the energy-wealth driven increases, and their specific increases are both higher and more procurement-driven than other African governments’. Growing oil production around the entire Gulf of Guinea could lift other boats as well, creating other nations with “rentier governments” with a correlated interest in overhauling their military capabilities in order to secure their position against external or internal hostility.

The African arms market has traditionally featured a US/European vs. Russian focus, thanks to the Cold War. Russia’s lack of interest in the uses its weapons are put to will continue to make them somewhat popular, and their Algerian natural gas for arms squeeze play aimed at Europe remains the most significant arms deal on the continent. China is a growing player in this market, however, for reasons that combine their ‘no strings’ policy and growing ties to the region created by China’s resource needs. Nigeria’s 2005 buy of J-7 fighters is a good example of that trend, and the relative low cost of Chinese export offerings is a plus in this market.

Despite all this, Forecast International reports that American and European share of the total value of arms transfer agreements with Africa rose from 34% to 37% between 1999-2002 and 2003-2006. As the oil market drives key military modernizations, will that trend continue?

There has also been comparatively little attention payed to Musa Qala in Afghanistan, which is the scene of a major battle at the moment

Afghan and Nato troops have launched a major offensive on a town in southern Afghanistan.

Musa Qala in Helmand province has been under the Taliban’s control for 10 months.

The country’s defence ministry said troops had surrounded the area and were using heavy fire and air strikes to regain control of the town.

I’ve been following IWPR’s account of Musa Qala, as they were the only reports allowed into the town on Nov 27, it is really fascinating stuff

When the Taleban hoisted their flag over the district centre in February, the population braced for the worst.

Most recalled the years when the Taleban were in power in Afghanistan with fear and a certain amount of distaste – men beaten for having beards too short or hair too long, women restricted to the home, and music, photography, even kite-flying banned.

But this time, the Taleban have not imposed such a strict regime on the population. The main reason for this apparent forbearance was that they saw no need to use harsh measures when most of the population fell right into line without a struggle.

“All of the residents in this district are Taleban,” said one Taleban official, who did not want to be named. “They do not need any reforms. Everybody here wants the Taleban law to be implemented.”

“We are not as strict as we were during the first Taleban regime,” added Abdul Rahman, who leads a group of 50 fighters. “When we came into the district nine months ago, we gave the residents two months to change their lives, grow their beards and cut their hair. We told them they should stop listening to music. All of the residents agreed without our having to force them. Now there are no music parties or other illegal events. People do not play music during their wedding parties. If they do, they may be punished.”

One reason that residents have accepted the restrictions may be that they are still angry and bruised after a series of bombings left large parts of Musa Qala in ruins.

Standing on a pile of rubble that used to be the local mosque, I met a man named Qari Abdul Halim, who seemed very angry.

“We do not want anyone to come in here to do ‘reconstruction’,” he spat. “Look at this mosque. We now have to pray on bare ground, with no shelter. Is this reconstruction, that they should destroy the house of God? We don’t want that kind of reconstruction. It is just another form of war.”

There is a lot of money in Musa Qala now, generated by drugs. The district has an open bazaar where opium is bought and sold. The bitter smell can be sensed from far away.

I saw two men in the middle of the bazaar who were loading their Land Cruiser with four-kilogram bags of opium.

“What can the people of Musa Qala do other than deal in opium?” said one of them, who did not want to be named. “There is nothing else here. The opium trade is the only economic activity that has improved people’s lives a little bit. People are very poor now, but they will become rich after a few years in this business.”

The money being made has attracted merchants eager to sell their wares to the new narco-elite.

One resident of Greshk district, who did not want to be named, said he had shifted his mobile phone business to Musa Qala because he could make a lot more money.

“I make twice as much here,” he said. “In Greshk, I never sold expensive phones that cost more than 5,000 afghani [100 US dollars]. But here in Musa Qala, I can sell phones every day that cost as much as 10,000 afghani.”

peace, off to go dance

English Literature in India

brownbomber — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 01:06:30 +0000

I really recommend that people check out Chowk if they are at all interested in the subcontinent, some very interesting articles by some left leaning voices in the continent.

Interesting article about the future of English Literature in India…

“One of the major issues discussed is that in the interpretation of English literary texts, we should come out of colonial mindset. In the dissection of the text readers, teachers, students and researchers should not employ Western critical tools like catharsis, fancy, imagination, Impressionism, Expressionism, new criticism, formalism, structuralism, neo-historicism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and reader response theory etc. Rather Indian critical theories like Rasa, Alamkara, Dhwani and Vakrokti should be employed for the close analysis of the English texts. The propagators of this logic base their arguments on Post-Colonial thought of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Gauri Vishwanathan. The supporters of Indian response to English Literature, in the manner of Edward Said, emphasize that there is a political subtext of the main stream western writing.”

Fair enough, though simply because those ideas have a basis in notions of western superiority doesn’t mean that they suddenly lose their applicability, we should just view them critically.

“This colonization of the Indian mind began with Macaulay’s celebrated Minute which declared that it was necessary and possible “to make natives of this country good English scholars and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed”. In the same vein Lord Bentick resolved that “the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India and all funds appropriated for the purpose of education would be best employed on English education alone”.

So, it is obvious that European literary ideals were thrust on us and the need of the hour is to decolonise our English Studies by judging English literary texts not by European critical tools, but by Indian critical theories.”

I mean, it wasn’t simply European literary ideals, it was the language itself that was thrust upon India. Still, I follow the argument thus far, and agree with it, in principal.

“Another major task of post-colonialists in India is to remove certain colonial English texts from the syllabi of Indian Universities, because these texts were used by the colonizer to subvert us, alter our thought-process and induce us into believing ‘their’ superiority and ‘our’ inferiority. Some literary texts are completely irrelevant to India. Take for example the licentious Restoration comedies of manners, obscene and vulgar novels of sex-maniac DH Lawrence and the fleshly poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites. These authors do hurt pious sensibility, still they are taught to the impressionable minds of Post-Graduate students of English Literature. The alien authors have no appeal for us; they do not affect our society.”

First off… impressionable minds of Post Graduate students? Secondly… guh…. I understand how conservative India is, but dear lord, this is using post-colonialism as a stick to censor literature and parts of the human experience. I’ll admit, I like DH Lawrence, which may well be why this article got me in a tizzy. There are valid and important reasons to use certain forms of literary criticism, but you need literature to critique thoughts to prod and provoke, not simply eliminate whole ideas under some sort of nationalist guise. De-emphasis I am fully in favour of, willful ignorance I am not.

Tinfoil hat on…

brownbomber — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:48:39 +0000

Any one read this article at Wired?

A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world’s internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it.

Leading House Democrats introduced the so-called RESTORE Act (.pdf) Tuesday that allows the nation’s spies to maintain permanent eavesdropping stations inside United States switching centers. Telecom and internet experts interviewed by Wired News say the bill will give the NSA legal access to a torrent of foreign phone calls and internet traffic that travels through American soil on its way someplace else.

But contrary to recent assertions by Bush administration officials, the proportion of international traffic entering the United States is dropping, not increasing, experts say.

International phone and internet traffic flows through the United States largely because of pricing models established more than 100 years ago in the International Telecommunication Union to handle international phone calls. Under those ITU tariffs, smaller and developing countries charge higher fees to accept calls than the U.S.-based carriers do, which can make it cheaper to route phone calls through the United States than directly to a neighboring country.

“Carriers shop around for the best price for termination,” says Stephan Beckert, the research director at Telegeography, a communications-traffic research firm.

The United States, where the internet was invented, was also home to the first internet backbone. Combine that architectural advantage with the pricing disparity inherited from the phone networks, and the United States quickly became the center of cyberspace as the internet gained international penetration in the 1990s.

In those early days, internet traffic from one Asian country often bounced through the first West Coast internet-exchange point, the San Jose-based MAE West, says Bill Woodcock, the research director for Packet Clearing House, which helps create packet-exchange points around the world.

While nobody outside the intelligence community knows the exact volume of international telephone and internet traffic that crosses U.S. borders, experts agree that it bounces off a handful of key telephone switches and perhaps a dozen IXPs in coastal cities near undersea fiber-optic cable landings, particularly Miami, Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Miami sees most of the internet traffic between South America and the rest of the world, including traffic passing from one South American country to another, says Bill Manning, the managing partner of ep.net. “Basically they backhaul to the United States, do the switch and haul it back down since (it’s) cheaper than crossing their international borders.”

And some internet traffic traveling from Asia to Europe still crosses the entire breadth of the United States, entering in Los Angeles and exiting in New York, says Woodcock.

For voice traffic, the NSA could scoop up an astounding amount of telephone calls by simply choosing the right facilities, according to Beckert, though he says NSA officials “make a big deal out of naming them.”

“There are about three or four buildings you need to tap,” Beckert says. “In L.A. there is 1 Wilshire; in New York, 60 Hudson, and in Miami, the NAP of the Americas.”

This, and this Map that the ACLU put out makes me scared the hell out about what the NSA is up to,

The only comforting factor is that given the amount of information that they are going through must be ridiculous and it would require more computing power than any one government, even the US has

Oh wai….

Give it 10 years and we’ll live in a creepy fucking world (if we don’t already)

Co-op brothel for Victoria prostitutes

brownbomber — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 18:55:56 +0000

Facinating story about a really cool program going on in B.C.

““Initially, I was against prostitution,” said Ms. Paterson, 50, and the mother of three grown children. “I was in favour of eliminating it. I felt it was exploitative of women.”

But after working with women at PEERS she said she discovered many prostitutes are more interested in safe and healthy workplaces than debating putting an end to prostitution, she said.

“I met people who challenged my assumptions and I learned that I was wrong,” Ms. Paterson said.

It was then that she and a colleague at PEERS, Lauren Casey, decided to tackle the brothel project.

“The time has passed for moralizing about why men buy sex and why people sell it,” Ms. Paterson said. “Let’s step forward and into the reality of it and have a safe, fair, good workplace for it.”

She said the brothel opening is at least one year away.

Ms. Paterson said she and Ms. Casey are volunteering their time and effort to develop the brothel project. She said she won’t be paid when it opens.

“Our aim is to listen to the people in the industry and say, ‘what do you want?’ ” she said.

There are several brothels currently operating in Victoria as escort agencies, Ms. Paterson said.

Her brothel will likely be registered as an escort agency, too, she said.

“What’s different about this one is the mandate for the profits is for social good,” Ms. Paterson said.

“It’s a co-op brothel. The women have participated in developing it, participated in the running of it and are empowered to make it a good workplace.”

The profits from the brothel will go to PEERS, which will use the money to help prostitutes with issues ranging from drug detox, counselling to aiding them to leave the sex trade, she said.

At PEERS, support workers Alicia Koorn and Allison Scott say support for the co-op brothel is huge among sex trade workers.

“It’s the oldest profession,” said Ms. Koorn. “Everyone uses it. You’ve got lawyers, you’ve got judges, you’ve got doctors.

“Having the ladies safer and having resources while they’re working is what I believe Jody and Lauren are doing and I stand behind them.”

John McLaren, a member of the Trudeau-era Fraser Committee on prostitution and pornography, said he supports the co-op brothel concept.

“In principle, I would be in favour of such an experiment,” said the retired University of Victoria law professor.

“I found through my historical research and the work I did for the Fraser Committee, that none of the legal solutions to prostitution and its treatment in society that have been used in Canada have been in any way a success.”

Canadian law focuses primarily on the prostitutes, Mr. McLaren said.

Some jurisdictions outside of Canada have moved towards government-controlled prostitution with success, he said. Mr. McLaren cited the licensed brothels in Canberra, Australia as one successful project.

“I can’t guarantee that it would inevitably work in Victoria, but my belief is that it’s worth trying,” said Mr. McLaren. “It can’t be any worse than the situation we have already.”

Victoria Police have said the Criminal Code would have to change for someone to open a brothel.

Ms. Paterson said there are escort agencies in Victoria running what amounts to brothels.

She said she envisions her brothel would be discreetly located in Victoria.

It won’t have a bright marquee advertising sex for sale, but it will likely include some of the traditional trappings of what many would believe a brothel to include, Ms. Paterson said.

“Will there be somebody who’s more or less the hostess, yes,” she said. “Will there be a great, fancy, nice meeting area, yes I think that, too.”

Ms. Paterson said she plans to keep the public informed about the brothel’s progress.

“This is not a story about two flaky women with a crazy idea,” she said. “It’s about something who’s time has come.””

CARE pulls out of US food aid system

brownbomber — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 19:03:55 +0000

Continuing on the USAID food aid story

This one is pretty balanced I found, looking at the pro’s and con’s of USAID’s policies (though the emperical economic evidence is on the side of changing the system)

Charity finds that U.S. food aid for Africa hurts instead of helps

By Celia W. Dugger The New York Times
Wednesday, August 15, 2007

CARE, one of the world’s biggest charities, is walking away from about $45 million a year in federal funding, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.

Its decision, which has deeply divided the world of food aid, is focused on the practice of selling tons of American farm products in African countries that in some cases compete with the crops of struggling local farmers.

“If someone wants to help you, they shouldn’t do it by destroying the very thing that they’re trying to promote,” said George Odo, a CARE official who grew disillusioned with the practice while supervising the sale of American wheat and vegetable oil in Nairobi.

Under the system, the U.S. government buys the goods from American agribusiness, ships them overseas on mostly American-flagged carriers and then donates the goods to the aid groups. The groups sell the products in poor countries and use the money to fund their anti-poverty programs there.

As Congress considers a new farm bill, neither the Bush administration nor representatives are looking to undo the practice, known as “monetization.” In fact, some of the nonprofit groups say it has worked well and are pressing for sharp increases in the tonnage of American food shipped for sale and distribution to support development programs.

The Christian charity World Vision and 14 other groups say that CARE is mistaken, that the system works because it keeps hard currency in poor countries, can help prevent food price spikes in them and does not hurt their farmers.

But criticism of the practice is growing. Former President Jimmy Carter, whose Atlanta-based Carter Center uses private money to help African farmers be more productive, says a flawed food aid system has survived partly because the charities that get money from it defend it.

Agribusiness and shipping interest groups have tremendous political clout, but charitable groups are influential, too, Carter said, because “they speak from the standpoint of angels.”

“The farm bloc is powerful, but when you add these benevolent organizations, the totality of that has blocked change in the system,” said Carter, who is also a Georgia farmer.

Some charities that champion monetization bristle at such suggestions. And their allies in Congress say that maritime and agribusiness interests are essential allies for programs to aid the hungry.

“Sure it’s self-interest if staying in business to help the hungry is self-interested,” said Avram Guroff, a senior vice president at ACDI/VOCA, which ranked sixth in monetization sales last year. “We’re not lining our pockets.”

But Peter Matlon, an agricultural economist based in Nairobi and a managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation, said converting American commodities into cash for development was a case of “the tail wagging the dog,” with domestic farm policies in the United States shaping hunger-fighting methods abroad.

“The NGOs have been ignoring this evidence for years that there’s a negative impact on the prices farmers receive,” said Matlon, who is involved in a $150 million effort financed by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations to increase the productivity of African farmers.

The Government Accountability Office, the non-partisan, investigative arm of Congress, also concluded this year that the system was “inherently inefficient.”

CARE and Catholic Relief – who rank first and second in money raised through monetization – say they recover only 70 to 80 percent of what the United States paid for the commodities and shipping.

But while Catholic Relief Services and Save the Children, which ranked fifth last year in such sales, agree with CARE that the system is inefficient, they also say they will not stop converting American food into money unless Congress replaces the lost revenues with cash. They help a lot of poor people with the money, they say.

The experiences of Walter Otieno, a grizzled Kenyan farmer in mud-stained pants, illustrate the paradoxes of paying for rural development through sales of American farm goods.

Over the years, he had watched four of his 12 children die of measles, wich is more often fatal for the malnourished. He has had difficulty growing enough to feed his family. “My children were skinny and their skin was dull,” he said.

Then last year he began growing a small patch of sunflowers on a hill sloping down to Lake Victoria with help from a program that CARE finances through the sale of American farm goods here.

A CARE extension worker, Rosemary Ogala, has taught him and dozens of farmers in his group where to buy sunflower seed, when to plant it, how to space the rows and when to harvest.

CARE has also connected them to a ready market: the Kenyan company Bidco Oil Refineries, whose managers say they could more than quintuple the amount of sunflower seed they buy from Kenyan farmers to process into vegetable oil.

The profit Otieno earned from the crop rescued his family from dire poverty. Now, with his new earnings, he plays with his sons and daughters, plump on eggs and milk, at the family’s general store, a tiny shack stocked with goods financed by the sunflower sales. “Our lives have changed,” he said.

The question is whether small-scale sunflower farmers like Otieno would have done better if nonprofit groups had not sold tons of American crude soybean oil, a competing product, to the same Kenyan company that purchased Otieno’s meager crop. CARE and some other experts say the answer is a clear yes.

In 2003, Bidco bought almost 9,000 metric tons of crude soybean oil sold to the United States by Bunge, the agribusiness giant. Altogether that year, Bunge sold the United States 15,180 metric tons of oil for resale by the nonprofits in Kenya.

American law requires aid groups to establish that such sales will not discourage production by local farmers, but some critics say it is a conflict of interest to ask nonprofit groups to select experts to make this determination.

In this case, the nonprofit organizations hired a consultant who advised them in 2003 that they could safely sell up to 38,000 metric tons of vegetable oil in Kenya, which mostly depends on imports. That amount, about 10 percent of the country’s consumption, was “negligible,” he said.

But Odo of CARE disagreed, saying in a memo that “the truth is that the subsidized importation from the U.S. reduces the growth in the local market.”

Ultimately, CARE’s decision to phase out such sales evolved from a senior manager’s change of heart. Daniel Maxwell, a professor of nutrition at Tufts University, was a food security adviser for CARE in Nairobi who saw sales of American food as an imperfect, but useful way to raise money.

He knew firsthand, however, how risky it was to manage projects financed in fluctuating commodities markets. When prices sank, CARE had too little money and was sometimes forced to lay off workers.

Maxwell also strongly suspected that buyers offered too little for the farm goods, knowing they were dealing with aid workers who were novices in commodities trading.

As he and Christopher Barrett, an agricultural economist at Cornell University, researched a book, “Food Aid After Fifty Years,” his doubts deepened.

“Not only was it a pain the neck,” he said, “but there were potentially serious knock on effects that would be damaging to farmers and trade.”

In 2004, Maxwell and Barrett made the case against the practice at CARE headquarters in Atlanta. They recalled that the senior vice president, Patrick Carey, who has since died, cautioned them that leaving the system would be like “an act of partial suicide” for the nonprofits.

Nonetheless, by 2009 CARE will end almost all of its participation in such projects across the developing world. It will try to raise money to replace the lost revenues from philanthropies and other donors, and by making its own aid programs profitable.

One of those programs could be seen in action one recent afternoon in the Kenyan village of Poche. CARE has helped local women bypass local middlemen to sell pineapples at better prices in big supermarkets in Nairobi, 10 hours away by road.

One woman, Doreen Amimo, a 52-year-old grandmother, has seen her weekly earnings rise to $18 from $11. She can now afford to feed and clothe an orphaned niece and nephew.

“And I never lack sugar in the house,” she said, “and we can have tea and milk every morning!”

These farmers are selling their fruit to a small company, Vegcare, that CARE and a Kenyan company started with an investment of $170,000 in 2005. Vegcare advises farmers on how to grow pineapples that meet supermarket standards, buys them and trucks them to a wholesaler in Nairobi that supplies Nakumatt, a Kenyan supermarket chain.

CARE’s idea is that a profitable business is more likely than a charitable venture to survive when foreign aid runs out. CARE managers here say they hope its renunciation of most of the money from commodity sales will free it to candidly address the flaws in the American strategy to combat world hunger.

“What’s happened to humanitarian organizations over the years is that a lot of us have become contractors on behalf of the government,” said Odo of CARE. “That’s sad but true. It compromised our ability to speak up when things went wrong.”"

Hamas TV’s Child Star Saraa

brownbomber — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:52:38 +0000

Check out Checkpoint Jerusalem’s excellent post on the use of children of the Arab Israeli war

“Saraa Barhoum fidgets in her swivel chair and plays with the pink lace lining of her frilly top.

When first she speaks, her voice is barely a whisper. She can’t be more than five-feet-tall or weigh 70 pounds.

Her pink bellbottoms cover her feet and drag slightly on the ground. The afternoon sun glints off the sparkly butterflies on her shirt.

She is a bashful and serious 11-year-old who wants to be a doctor when she grows up.

For now, though, she is the first Hamas television Mouseketeer.

Saraa is the young star of “Tomorrow’s Pioneers,” the weekly, hour long Hamas TV kids show that brought the world the militant Mickey Mouse look-alike who was beaten to death by an Israeli interrogator.”

The end part of this story hit me

“On the show, Saraa offers moral lessons to viewers and urges them to do what they can to fight Israeli occupation. After some prodding in an interview, Saraa offered a personal message for Israeli girls her age.

“They have to leave,” she said. “This is our country. They kicked us out and stole our happiness. This is a natural result.”

Within minutes, an explosion hit the building, rattling windows and sending Saraa and the staff rushing outside. At first, no one was sure if it was an accident or an Israeli airstrike. Then, it became clear that the blast was caused by an Israeli missile that missed a car filled with militants and slammed into an empty bedroom on the top floor of a three-story apartment building.

Standing outside the Hamas building with her producer protectively putting his arm around her shoulders, Saraa looked pensive and anxious. Hamas camera crews and an ambulance rushed down the block. Saraa kept quiet and gazed down the street. The coached revolutionary rhetoric disappeared. Instead, she looked like any frightened young girl caught up in events beyond her control.

Then, after it was clear that no one had been killed in the airstrike, Saraa and her producer headed back upstairs to prepare for the next episode of “Tomorrow’s Pioneers.”

If anyone is interested in watching Farfor the mouse being beaten to death by ‘israelis’

also from Hamas TV… a very bizarre video teaching kids to be kind to animals… by abusing animals… Staring Nahool! a very interesting bee.

Finally, a great post by conflict blotter on Hizbullah being nice to Sea Turtles. Kudos to them. Negative points to Amal for being douchebags to Sea Turtles.

” It turns out rare sea turtles nest on a stretch of wildnerness beach between Tyre and Nakoura in south Lebanon. A pair of environmentalists, the owners of the quaint Orange House Bed and Breakfast, have been campaigning to make the beach a protected area, but two different municipalities hold sway over the strip of coast in question. To the south, the Amal Party, headed by Nabih Berri, controls the local council. To the north, Hezbollah runs the show.

The turtles’ leadling local advocates said Amal has refused to protect their half of the beach and the rare turtles that nest there. Berri’s wife, it is said, owns a sea front property and hopes at some point down the road to build a sea front resort on the beach. A campaign to stop local fisherman from using dynamite to fish were met with Amal gunman shooting up the home of the local activists and slashing their dog’s leg. The Hezbollah-controlled municipality, meanwhile, was quick to declare their portion of the beach protected.”

American Hero dies…

brownbomber — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 07:10:31 +0000

It is important to remember that Canada still has not recognized our veterans of the Spanish Civil war (the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion).

still, he sounds like a pretty cool fellow

“Moe Fishman, who as a 21-year-old from Astoria, Queens, fought Fascists in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was severely wounded, then led veterans of that unit in fighting efforts to brand them as Communist subversives, died on Aug. 6 in Manhattan. He was 92.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Peter Carroll, chief of the board of governors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

Mr. Carroll said that about 40 of about 3,000 American veterans of the Spanish Civil War volunteers are living. It had been the job of Mr. Fishman, as executive secretary-treasurer of the veterans, to announce deaths.

…

In 1937, Mr. Fishman was a high-school dropout working in a laundry and driving a truck. He was also a member of the Young Communist League, having joined partly to meet like-minded young women at dances the organization sponsored, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004.

He also liked how the Communists responded when a family behind on the rent was evicted and thrown on the streets with its furniture. He told The Times that party members would use an ax or hammer to break the lock on the door and put the family back in.

Many believe that at least half of the volunteers for the Lincoln Brigade were Communists, but Mr. Fishman’s reasons for joining were more complex, he told The Times in 1969.

“Why did I go?” he said. “That’s hard to say. That’s a key question. I was active in trade union work. I wanted to travel. I belonged to the 92nd Street Y.M.H.A., and we were very anti-Fascist, much opposed to Hitler, Franco.”

…

On July 5, 1937, during the Brunete offensive west of Madrid, a sniper hit Mr. Fishman’s thigh, leaving 32 pieces of bone and metal. He spent a year in Spanish hospitals, and a pin was put into his leg. At one point the leg became infected, he told The Courant. He was then in and out of hospitals in the United States for two years.

…

Other late-life adjustments were harder. In 2001, an article in The Economist recounted how he stumbled over the word “globalization” at a protest against globalization. “It was so much easier to say when we called it imperialism,” he was reported to have said.”

“Bar Association urges Harper to support Khadr trial in Canada”

brownbomber — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:03:34 +0000

This is much over due, but I support the Bar Association entirely. This entire story is a black moment in Canada’s history. What good is Canadian citizenship if a minor can be stripped of his rights, ignored by the country of his birth and imprisoned for years by another country?

I don’t doubt that his father was a nasty sort of person, but that does not change the fact that he was legally a minor when this occurred. If he has committed any crimes he should be tried in Canada, or in a fair international court. Not the military tribunal of another nation. The fact that his brother has already been released and has commented extensively on the awful treatement he received in Guantanamo. Obviously the solution is not to bring him back to suffer the bizarre anti-terrorism laws of this country, but to bring him to a fair and impartial trial in his own country.

I think this also proves the power of a well articulated speech. Kudos to the US appointed defense lawyer Lieutenant-Commander William Kuebler.

“The Canadian Bar Association is urging Prime Minister Stephen Harper to demand the United States release terror suspect Omar Khadr from Guantanamo Bay and return him to Canada to face a fair system of justice.

CBA President J. Parker MacCarthy received a standing ovation from delegates to association’s annual convention this morning after he read a letter to the prime minister drafted overnight and speedily passed into policy by the association’s executive committee.

The letter urges Mr. Harper to consider Mr. Khadr as he would any other underage accused person, and to allow the 20-year-old man — who was arrested five years ago on charges that he killed a U.S. serviceman in Afghanistan — to be tried under Canadian law.

“It would be unimaginable that this could happen to a 15-year-old in Canada,” Mr. MacCarthy said in an interview.

Mr. Khadr, a member of a Toronto family that had strong links to the al-Qaeda movement, has been imprisoned at Guantanamo for the past five years — only one year less than the maximum possible sentence he could get for murder in a Canadian court.

His lawyers maintain that his physical and mental health has steadily deteriorated under what they describe as the horrible conditions in which he is detained.

“The fact that Omar Khadr was a minor at the time of his capture only makes his situation more urgent,” Mr. MacCarthy’s letter to the Prime Minister said.

“As a signatory to the Optional Protocol on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Combat, Canada has an obligation to ensure that the Protocol is being applied to its citizens.”

The letter specifically criticizes U.S. provisions relating to “enemy combatants” — a term used by the Bush administration to deny basic legal rights to many of the prisoners it holds in Cuba. Mr. Khadr has been labelled an “enemy combatant.”

“We remain convinced that the procedures for holding detainees, including denial of due process and the interference with privileged communications with their solicitors, constitute an affront to the rule of law,” it said.

The chain of events leading to the CBA policy began on Saturday afternoon, when Lieutenant-Commander William Kuebler — assigned by the U.S. government to defend Mr. Khadr at his trial before an American military commission — harangued the Canadian government for not coming to the aid of a citizen being subjected to intolerably unfair legal procedures.

To the surprise of Lt.-Com. Kuebler and other two other lawyers acting on behalf of Mr. Khadr — Dennis Edney and Lorne Waldman — about 200 delegates present for the speech heeded his call to action by erupting into a 30-second standing ovation.

Within an hour, Mr. MacCarthy announced that the CBA would consider taking a position on Mr. Khadr’s detention as quickly as possible, but warned that the process could take six months to complete. Instead, CBA officials worked overnight to get the policy approved by the association’s executive.”

77% of India lives on less than 50 cents a day

brownbomber — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:55:51 +0000

Interesting, though this proves that the competition has been for skilled labour (of a certain type). There is an development econ theory (who came up with it I can’t recall) that states that the export of skilled labour from developed to developing countries actually increases inequality in both areas, increasing the value of individuals with skills that can’t be exported (in the developed world), and increasing the separation between skilled and unskilled labour in the developing world. The main issue is if health, social conditions and lack of education limit the prospect for advancement, economic growth, even if it is in IT and highly technical fields, will simply reflect existing class and economic conditions.

“NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Seventy-seven percent of Indians — about 836 million people — live on less than half a dollar a day in one of the world’s hottest economies, a government report said.

The state-run National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (NCEUS) said most of those living on below 20 rupees (50 US cents) per day were from the informal labor sector with no job or social security, living in abject poverty.

“For most of them, conditions of work are utterly deplorable and livelihood options extremely few,” said the report, entitled “Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganized Sector,” seen by Reuters on Friday.

“Such a sordid picture co-exists uneasily with a shining India that has successfully confronted the challenge of globalization powered by economic competition both within the country and across the world.”

Around 26 percent of India’s population lives below the poverty line, which is defined as 12 rupees per day, said officials.

Economic liberalization since the early 1990s has created a 300 million-strong middle class and led to an average annual economic growth of 8.6 percent over the last four years, but millions of the country’s poor remain untouched by the boom.

According to the report, based on data from 2004-2005, 92 percent of India’s total workforce of 457 million were employed as agricultural laborers and farmers, or in jobs such as working in quarries, brick kilns or as street vendors.

The report said the majority of those working and living under “miserable conditions” were lower castes, tribal people and Muslims and the most disadvantaged of these were women, migrant workers and children.

“This is the other world which can be characterized as the India of the Common People, constituting more than three-fourths of the population and consisting of all those whom the growth has, by and large, bypassed,” said the report.

The NCEUS report, which was presented to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Wednesday, recommends the government provide social security benefits such as maternity and medical expenses as well as pensions to people working in the Unorganized sector.”

“Abortion Under Siege in Latin America”

brownbomber — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:35:54 +0000

suprisingly good article from TIME,

“Bolivia is a case in point. As many as 80,000 abortions are performed each year in a country of less than 9 million people, giving it one of the world’s highest abortion rates – but most abortions are clandestine, especially among poorer women who can’t afford the $150 fee to undergo the safe, no-questions-asked abortions available through some medical facilities. Such underground procedures are the third leading cause of maternal mortality in the country. Yet there is no record of any doctors or patients involved being prosecuted. “I was all alone,” says one Bolivian woman who paid about $50 for a back-alley abortion a few years ago. The abortionist “numbed that part of my body and then he did something to make it come out of me right there into the toilet.”

Despite awareness of such horror stories, says Julieta Ojeda of the Bolivian feminist group Women Creating, “if you ask the average person in the street, they will probably say they are against” liberalizing abortion laws. Some abortion-rights activists attribute this to such factors as the moral influence of the Church, which has helped convince leftist parties such as Morales’ Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) to trade away abortion rights proposals for concessions in areas such as economic reform. Others see it as another sign that the “new” Latin American left has not shed the macho attitudes of its forebears and their tendency to relegate women’s issues to the sidelines.

But there are other factors behind the Latin American left’s ambivalence on reproductive rights. One is a widespread tendency in the developing world to associate abortion rights, like gay rights, with an imperialist agenda of the industrialized world. That’s especially true in countries such as Bolivia, whose indigenous majority suffered foreign cultural, political and economic bullying for five centuries before Morales, himself an Aymara Indian, was elected. Western feminism has had a condescending habit of treating Bolivia’s indigenous cultures as backward, without trying to understand the nuances of their outlook on issues like abortion – a word that doesn’t even exist in most of the country’s Indian languages.

Abortion, in fact, is referred to in indigenous Bolivia as “bad birth.” The procedure is, indeed, performed in rural communities, normally with herbal formulas; but it’s frowned upon because it’s believed to create imbalances in nature. Women who do abort, for example, are ritually cleansed afterward. As a result, there is little enthusiasm in the indigenous communities for legally sanctifying abortion with a raised fist and a NOW button.

But pro-choice advocates such as the CDD’s Bustillos hope that indigenous leaders and other pro-Morales forces in Bolivia will agree that the latest anti-abortion proposal goes too far. “Once delegates [to the Constitutional Assembly] realize the implications of the ‘conception’ clause, like outlawing abortions even if a 12-year-old is raped,” says Bustillos, “they’ll come around,” as Colombia‘s high court did last year when it decriminalized abortion in such cases. The stakes are high – over 400 women die each year from botched abortions in Bolivia, and there is concern that the number will rise if the conception clause passes. Still, unless pro-choice advocates come up with fresher, more culturally aware tactics for their work in Latin America, “coming around” will simply mean standing in place.”