Category: Uncategorized

Shirkat Gah Overview
Shirkat Gah – Women’s Resource Centre is a leading women’s rights organisation in Pakistan since 1975.

Background
Meaning a place of participation, Shirkat Gah (SG) was formed as a collective to integrate consciousness-raising with a development perspective.

For more than 30 years SG has facilitated women’s empowerment by increasing their access to information, resources, skills and decision making, and helped to bring about positive change to policies, laws and practices.

Viewing rights and development as inherently linked, SG has a multi-dimensional approach, aiming to translate advocacy into actions, engaging with local issues, aligning with international themes and linking the grassroots to the global.

Vision
SG is committed to a progressive and democratic society, where gender equality prevails, human security and opportunities are ensured for all and resources are shared on sustainable basis in a just world order.

Main programme:
Women’s Empowerment and Social Justice Programme (WESJP) is Shirkat Gah’s integrated programme since January 2008. It focuses on good governance, livelihoods, and rights, gender imbalances and adopts an integrated approach to address the complex dimensions of women’s empowerment.

Shirkatgah for more

by James Suggett – Venezuelanalysis.com

President Chavez announced the decision to expropriate in the Miraflores presidential building Wednesday (VTV)
Mérida, March 5th 2009 (Venezuelanalysis.com) — Following a week of inspections of privately owned rice processing facilities aimed at assuring the supply of essential foods at regulated prices, the Venezuelan government initiated expropriation procedures of a plant owned by the multi-national food company Cargill that was found to be modifying all its rice so as to evade price controls on basic food items.

“Initiate the process of expropriation of Cargill, and with that a legal investigation, since what they are doing is a flagrant violation,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez declared on national television Wednesday.

Vice Minister of Agriculture and Land, Richard Canán, reported the results of the investigation, which was carried out by Venezuela’s Institute in Defense of People’s Access to Goods and Services (INDEPABIS) at the request of rice producers in the region around the processing plant in Portugesa state.

“[Cargil] is not even producing one single kilogram of regulated rice, but they do produce 2,400 tons of pre-cooked rice, which is not subject to regulation” said Canán. Also, INDEPABIS found approximately 18,000 tons of non-modified rice stored in the plant’s warehouse.

Venezuela Analysis for more

Responsible development may be the shortcut to a competitive economy.

Sherine Nasr reviews the findings of the latest competitiveness report.

No sooner does Egypt adapt itself to a global economic system than new realities emerge. The race goes on, dictating a necessity to adopt new strategies to deal with these new realities.

“Towards the end of the current economic crisis, the world will be waking up to a new global economic system,” said Minister of Foreign Trade and Industry Rachid Mohamed Rachid upon the launching of the sixth Egyptian Competitiveness Report (ECR) on 30 June. “Where Egypt stands depends largely on its ability to read through the changes in progress and the ability to adapt quickly and efficiently to those changes,” Rachid added.

Issued by the Egyptian National Competitiveness Council (ENCC), the ECR, entitled Beyond the Financial Crisis: Competitiveness and Sustainable Development continues to strive to bring insight and solutions to Egypt’s development discourse.

An alarming fact has been underlined by this year’s report. Although Egypt’s score on the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI) has been relatively stable over the last couple of years, its ranking has fallen from 77 out of 131 countries in 2007-2008 to 81 out of 134 nations in 2008- 2009. “This means that other countries are moving ahead of us. If we’re not making progress, we are in danger of deteriorating,” said Rachid.

Weekly Ahram for more

By SPACE.com staff

The coldest known object out in space has now been announced by scientists. It’s not a frozen comet or even some distant, chilly gas cloud. Rather, it’s a spacecraft.

On July 3, the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft reached this frigid extreme as part of a key step in the satellite’s mission to observe the remnant radiation of the Big Bang.

Since its launch on May 14 (accompanied by its sibling spacecraft Herschel), Planck has been traveling to its final orbit at the second Lagrange point of the sun-Earth system, L2, and cooling its instruments down to their operational temperature of minus 459.49 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.05 Celsius). This temperature is just 0.1 Celsius above absolute zero, the coldest temperature theoretically possible in our universe.

“It is indeed both the coldest spot in any spacecraft that we know about, and also the coldest known object in space, including dust, gas etc.,” Planck project scientist Jan Tauber wrote in an email. “Of course in a laboratory on Earth, colder spots can be made.”

Such low temperatures are necessary for Planck’s detectors to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) — the first light released by the universe, only 380,000 years after the Big Bang — by measuring its temperature across the sky.

Over the next few weeks, mission operators will fine-tune the spacecraft’s instruments. Planck will begin to survey the sky in mid-August.

Space for more

by B. R. Gowani

Bhindi Bazaar, Musafir Khana, Dongri, Kalbadevi, and others …
mostly Muslim populated areas
are a sad sight
they are a world unto themselves, although being part of – Mumbai –
one of the overly romanticized cities …

many people sleep
on broken and dirty footpaths
with dead and live rats in close proximity
each fixed in the territory

honking of horns is continuous and atrocious
everybody is stressed out
no vehicle allows access to its neighbor,
whether another vehicle or human being,
child, woman, or elder
everyone races to reach first
wherever it may be

hawkers are everywhere

the city’s trash dumpster in Imambada
can kill you with its filthy odor
people suffer this every day …

city government is nowhere to be found
except sighted are the police
taking bribes from taxi drivers
who in turn harass ordinary people
by refusing to stop for them

many people suffering this plight find escape,
if one can say that, momentarily,
in the theater watching Bollywood films

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

By Paul Street

Source: The Empire and Inequality Report Paul Street’s ZSpace Page

During a concert at Chicago’s United Center last May 12th, Bruce Springsteen observed that “sometimes it seems like the more things change the more they stay the same.” He was talking about the persistence and indeed the deepening of poverty and inequality in the United States, where financial parasites and perpetrators receive untold billions of taxpayer dollars while millions are pushed further into destitution, their fate worsened by a regressive welfare “reform” (elimination) that “progressive” President Barack Obama has repeatedly praised as a great bipartisan policy triumph.

WORTHY AND UNWORTHY VICTIMS
Among numerous other examples of “things stay[ing] the same,” the Boss (Springsteen, that is) might also have mentioned the deeply ingrained tendency of top U.S. politicians and dominant U.S. media to make unstated but easily discernible distinctions between “worthy” and “unworthy victims” in world affairs.

“Worthy victims” are killed by officially designated enemies of the inherently virtuous United States. Their deaths are reported in ways meant to elicit sympathy and to encourage outrage against their murderers. Some of them can become martyrs.

“Unworthy victims” perish at the hands of the intrinsically honorable United States and/or its officially designated allies and clients. They die anonymously and without fanfare, passing down the memory hole devoid of sympathy in dominant U.S. media and political culture, where their deaths often register little more than those of ants crushed beneath the wheels of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle or (to mention another great weapon of empire) a CNN camera truck.

Pop quiz question #1, fellow American: who is Neda Soltan? Who killed her?

Z Mag for more

By Henry C K Liu

Since 2008, I have been widely recognized on the Internet as the person who changed China’s policy regarding the US dollar by advocating since 2002 that Chinese exports should be denominated in yuan. Chinese readers doing a Google search on my Chinese name will find numerous posts to that effect.

The issue is not whether Asian central banks will continue to have confidence in the dollar, but why Asian central banks should see their mandate as supporting the continuous expansion of the dollar economy through dollar hegemony at the expense of their own non-dollar economies. Why should Asian economies send real wealth in the form of goods to the US for foreign paper of declining value instead of selling their goods in their own economy?

Asia Times for more

By LESLIE KAUFMAN

This month, Edward Reilly, 35, finally let go of the television he had owned since his college days.

Although the Mitsubishi set was technologically outdated, it had sat for years in Mr. Reilly’s home in Portland, Me., because he did not know what else to do with it, given the environmental hazards involved in discarding it.

“It’s pretty well known that if it gets into the landfill, it gets into the groundwater,” he said. “Its chemicals pollute.”

But the day after the nationwide conversion to digital television signals took effect on June 12, Mr. Reilly decided to take advantage of a new wave of laws in Maine and elsewhere that require television and computer manufacturers to recycle their products free of charge. He dropped off his television at an electronic waste collection site near his home and, he said, immediately gained “peace of mind.”
Over the course of that day, 700 other Portland residents did the same.

NY Times for more

by YVKE/TeleSur

The curfew is not the only means of population control — now the de facto government is bent on suppressing the visibly identifiable sectors, in this case the indigenous population of the Central American country.

Antonio Martínez, an indigenous leader, via TeleSur, reported on Wednesday that the international agencies that talk so much about gender freedom have the responsibility to speak out against this coup d’état.

The indigenous leader said that women are being searched in ways that violate their persons, adding that the indigenous are being suppressed indiscriminately.

Martínez also noted that “Honduras is not in peace,” with discontent rising against the de facto government that has been established in Honduras.

MR Zine for more