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By Gary Duffy BBC News, Sao Paulo

Brazilian police are investigating after 64 containers with more than 1,400 tonnes of hazardous UK waste were found in three of the country’s ports.

The authorities say that among the material which was brought in illegally they discovered batteries, syringes, condoms and nappies.
Since the initial discovery, another 25 containers with hospital waste were found, also apparently from England.

In a statement the British Embassy in Brazil promised “immediate steps”.

It said the UK was completely opposed to any kind of illegal trade in waste.

Dumping ground

The discovery of the containers has caused widespread anger and comment here with one official saying Brazil was not prepared to be “the world’s rubbish bin”.

BBC for more

Dragon Fighter: One Woman’s Epic Struggle for Peace with China
Published: July 20 2009 06:01 | Last updated: July 20 2009 06:01
By Rebiya Kadeer, with Alexandra Cavelius, translated by Astrid Cerny
Kales Press £22.99, 426 pages FT Bookshop price: £17.99

Rebiya Kadeer is the woman accused by the Chinese leadership of organising the Uighur protest on July 5, which turned violent in Urumchi, capital of Xinjiang province.

Dragon Fighter is her self-portrait. This mother of 11 children from a poor background single-handedly created a trading empire that led her to become China’s wealthiest woman and a member of the People’s Congress. She used her influence and money to promote women’s co-operatives and start schools for her fellow Uighurs, the 10m Turkic Muslims who are the largest ethnic minority in the vast Xinjiang region. But she has also paid the price for her public criticism of Chinese rule.

Rebiya was arrested in 1999 on her way to meet a visiting US congressional delegation. The charge was “betraying state secrets” and the evidence was a bundle of newspaper cuttings she was about to send to her husband in the US. Too prominent to execute, she was sentenced to eight years in jail. Thanks to an international outcry, she was released after five years, at the age of 60, and put on a flight to the US, where she has remained in exile since.

China’s authoritarian bosses will not be pleased by a short, congratulatory foreword to her book written by the Dalai Lama, whom they also accused of masterminding riots in Tibet last year. His signature symbolises the thing they most fear, the emergence of a figurehead to unite the Uighurs in their struggle for equal treatment and political autonomy.

The book gives a ground-level insight into Uighur life: the importance of family, the cultural function of religion, the pride and poverty. She recounts how she cared for her younger siblings when her mother died, took in laundry, and sewed clothes, and later struggled to raise six children by a husband she reluctantly married in her teens.

Her story also recounts the extent of Chinese police and government corruption, the often brutal penal system, and the health service that forces Uighur village women into late-term abortions and kills new-born babies to keep the numbers down.

Rebiya is candid about herself too. She admits being stubborn and obsessed and that her multimillion business was built at the cost of long absences from her family. Her excuse is a higher calling: from early on, she saw herself as “mother of the people”. The children paid again dearly when she ignored the warnings of the Chinese secret police and resumed her political activism in exile, becoming head of the exiles’ World Uighur Congress. The five children who remained in Xinjiang (the others had already flown to America with their father, Sidiq, a dissident professor) suffered retaliatory detention and beatings, and two sons are serving long prison sentences.
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(Submitted by reader)

OVER the past few weeks, the governments, people and stakeholders of Cross River and Akwa Ibom states have been engaged in a riot of media campaign and altercation over 76 disputed off-shore oil wells. Governor Liyel Imoke of Cross River fired the first salvo when, several weeks ago, he raised an alarm over the precarious finances of the state government. The state, ordinarily a marginal oil producer, had zero allocation from the derivation formula, because its 76 oil wells had been reallocated to neighbouring Akwa Ibom.

The ensuing passion, claim and counterclaim underscore the gravity of the problem. Although tempers have been kept in check, there is a high risk of an eruption of conflict between the peoples of the two states who share kinship and other cultural affinities. When the 12-state structure was first created in 1967, the area was known as the South-Eastern State. In 1976, it became Cross River State, which was further split into Akwa Ibom State in September 1987. The commercial and cultural exchanges between the two states go back a long way. That now, is at risk, because of oil revenue.
The primary cause of the raging dispute is as much political as it is legal. Acting on the advice of the National Boundary Commission, the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission had proceeded to credit Akwa Ibom with 76 oil wells which only in 2004 had been allocated to Cross River by the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo. The government had taken the step at the time in response to one of the major consequences of the implementation of the decision of the International Court of Justice directing that Nigeria cede Bakassi to Cameroun.
Guradian for more

Charisse Nixon, Ph.D Developmental Psychologist at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College and Director of Research and Evaluation for The Ophelia Project discusses the phenomenon of learned helplessness. (Shot by Mark Steensland)

By Davidson Iriekpen

Lagos — US President Barack Obama’s visit to Ghana may have come and gone but the significance of the choice of the West African country as against Nigeria and Kenya, is still a subject discourse.
Nobel laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, yesterday in a statement titled: “Obama’s Choice’ faulted what he described as the “resentment and indignation” from government over Obama’s symbolic boycott of Nigeria, wondering how those in power would imagine that a leader like Obama, who ascended to power through respect for the manifested will of a people, would actually lend his presence to dignify any state that demonstrably rejects, and actively ridicules, the very means that brought him (Obama) to power.

Using the expression “blood is thicker than water” to buttress his point, the nobel laureate said Obama’s gesture is intended to inform nations like Kenya and Nigeria that neither blood nor oil courses thicker than equity.

He said anyone who had read Obama’s memoirs, Dreams from my Father, or knows his trajectory through childhood, intellectual and political formation,would understand immediately that he would sooner spend Thanksgiving Day with the genocidal government of Omar Bashir, or the throwback mullahs of Iran than choose either Uganda or Nigeria for a first visit that not only pursues political and economic goals, but is profoundly symbolic.

“Blood, they say, is thicker than water. Obama’s gesture is intended to inform nations like Kenya and Nigeria that neither blood nor oil courses thicker than equity. How sad it makes one – no, not the studied excision by Obama of those two nations from his itinerary – but the lack of objective self-assessment within the rulership circles of such ‘aggrieved’ nations!

All Africa for more

Written by Jackie McVicar

Photo: James Rodriguez/www.mimundo.org
Source: The Dominion

TATAMAGOUCHE, NS–Walking through the streets of Guatemala City, HIJOS slogans are hard to miss: “Justice for Nueva Linda”; “Trial and Punishment for Military Assassins!” Words demanding an end to impunity remind everyone that 36 years of civil war in Guatemala have not ended in justice or peace.

HIJOS Guatemala—Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence—was founded in 1999 by young people who were forced into exile, or who lost family members due to State repression during the war. (The group’s name, HIJOS, is a play on the Spanish word for “children.”) In June 2009, HIJOS Guatemala celebrated 10 years of fighting to preserve historical memory, to end impunity, to memorialize the victims of the war, and to shed light on the human rights violations committed during the conflict.

Using public education events, protests, and political art and murals to articulate and strengthen the movement toward justice, HIJOS is comprised of students, workers and professionals of Ladinos (Guatemalans of mixed Hispanic and Indigenous origin) and Indigenous descent. A new generation of HIJOS is now being born as those who started the group 10 years ago pass on to their hijos the struggle of those before them. HIJOS members—including children of the disappeared and murdered, and Guatemalans who stand in solidarity with the group—work in rural communities as well as in the urban centre of Guatemala City. While many group members hold “day jobs” with other human rights and social justice organizations, they are more than simply volunteers for HIJOS; for many, HIJOS is a way of life, an extended family.
Upside down world for more

Jeff Miller/University of Wisconsin-Madison
Canto, left, a 27-year-old rhesus monkey, is on a restricted diet, while Owen, 29, is not. The two monkeys are part of a study of the links between diet and aging.

By NICHOLAS WADE

A long-awaited study of aging in rhesus monkeys suggests, with some reservations, that people could in principle fend off the usual diseases of old age and considerably extend their life span by following a special diet.

Known as caloric restriction, the diet has all the normal healthy ingredients but contains 30 percent fewer calories than usual. Mice kept on such a diet from birth have long been known to live up to 40 percent longer than comparison mice fed normally.

Would the same be true in people? More than 20 years ago, two studies of rhesus monkeys were begun to see if primates responded to caloric restriction the same way that rodents did. Since rhesus monkeys live an average of 27 years and a maximum of 40, these are experiments that require patience.

New York Times for more

Thunderstorm simulation effects inspired by Kearsney choir ( South Africa ).

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Despite our high expectations, Vice President Joe Biden’s first months in office were disappointing. This, remember, is the man who opened the more recent of his two futile runs for the presidency by saying of Obama that he was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Yes, that Joe Biden. The one who hollered at wheel-bound Missouri State Sen. Chuck Graham, to “stand up.” The one who plagiarized a speech by Neil Kinnock. In other words a man who has flung himself into one rhetorical pratfall after another with the unswerving momentum of a blind rhino.

But then, as Biden and his wife Jill ensconced themselves in the Vice President’s official residence at the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington, came a phase of decorum, irksome to those wagering that the former senator from Delaware is incapable of keeping his foot out of his mouth. There were those who said sadly, “Joe just isn’t Joe any more.”

They were wrong.

Appropriately, it was on the topic of Israel that, as vice president, Biden first tossed aside unmanly prudence. Even given the zeal of almost every member of the US Congress to satisfy the Israel lobby, Biden has always been conspicuous for his slavish posture towards the Holy State. Accepting Obama’s offer of the vice presidential nomination last summer, he announced emphatically that he would not have considered accepting the invitation if he had entertained the slightest suspicion that Obama was not one hundred per cent in Israel’s corner. In fact the Israel lobby did entertain these unworthy suspicions, which is why it pushed strongly for Biden as veep.

Counterpunch for more

By Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON – The Barack Obama administration has given new prominence to a George W Bush administration charge that Iran is providing military training and assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, for which no evidence has ever been produced, and which has been discredited by data obtained by Inter Press Service (IPS) from the Pentagon itself.

The new twist in the charge is that it is being made in the context of serious talks between North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officials and Iran involving possible Iranian cooperation in NATO’s logistical support for the war against the insurgents in Afghanistan.

Since the early to mid-1990s, Iranian policy in Afghanistan has been more consistently and firmly opposed to the Taliban than that of the United States.

The Obama administration thus appears to be pressing that charge as a means of increasing political-diplomatic pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, despite NATO’s need for Iranian help on Afghanistan.

United States Central Command chief General David Petraeus declared in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 1, “In Afghanistan, Iran appears to have hedged its longstanding public support for the [President Hamid] Karzai government by providing opportunistic support to the Taliban.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in Brussels on June 12 that “Iran is playing a double game” in Afghanistan by “sending in a relatively modest level of weapons and capabilities to attack ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] and coalition forces”.

The State Department’s annual report on terrorism, published April 30, 2009, claimed that the Iranian elite Quds Force had “provided training to the Taliban on small unit tactics, small arms, explosives and indirect fire weapons”. It also charged that Iran had “arranged arms shipments including small arms and associated ammunition, rocket propelled grenades, mortar rounds, 107mm rockets, and plastic explosives to select Taliban members”.

The report offered no evidence in support of those charges, however, and Rhonda Shore, public affairs officer in the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, refused to answer questions from IPS about those charges in the report.

Asia Times for more