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AHHHHHH! It’s finally summer, at least in Brooklyn — Thankfully 🙂 Lots of dope events in JUN09 including the NYC Vigil for Laura Ling & Euna Lee, Verbal Lift up in Nyack, NYC Sulu Series APIA Spoken Word Summit Fundraiser, and Brooklyn Honors Spike Lee —

Exciting gigs for JUL09 that’ll take me across the country include the Campus Progress National Conference in DC with Staceyann Chin, Bill Clinton, Van Jones, Nancy Pelosi, John Oliver from “The Daily Show” and more, Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival in Chicago, and Reflection out in Los Angeles!

On the drop list for this month:

-NEW VID “today” originally commissioned/broadcast for MTV Iggy. Directed by Billy Pena. Styling by Elissa French. Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J53cNt6eMFg!

-FAB NEW IN-DEPTH INTERVIEW with Jason Lee of Turtlist Media — Check out the interview here: http://turtlist media.com/spoke nword.html!

-NEW VID’S IN DRUNKEN BOAT’S 10TH ANNIVERSARY ISSUE celebrating 100 poets and 10 years in print. Never released before videos of “Wai-Puo” & “Letter To Lauryn Hill” in DB’s Visual Poetics Folio: http://drunkenboat.com/db10/10vis/tsai.html!

-As always, to book a show/workshop/poetry slam for my 2009-2010 MOVE THIS EARTH SPOKEN WORD TOUR, hit up my manager Jill Aguado at booking@yellowgurl.com!

Enjoying gettin’ even more golden brown-skinn-ded —
Kelly 🙂

YELLOWGURL EVENTS JUL09- For more details, check out: http://www.yellowgurl.com/ category/calendar/

NEW HAVEN, CT: WED. JUL 1: Summer Exploration, Private Performance, (http://www.explo.org).

WASHINGTON DC: WED. JUL 8: Campus Progress National Conference with Van Jones, Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and more, 9:25 AM-9:40 AM, Omni Shoreham Hotel, 2400 Calvert St. NW, Free, (http://www.campusprogress.org).

CHICAGO, IL: WED. JUL 15: Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival, Workshop, 10:15 AM-11:30 AM, 11:45 AM-1:00 PM, Columbia College, 33 E. Congress & 623 S. Wabash. For location and time confirmation, register at BNV Check-In on July 14th, (http://www.bravenewvoices.org).

CHICAGO, IL: WED. JUL 15: Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival, People’s Championship, 10:00 PM-12:00 AM, Location TBA – Check your BNV program guide at Opening Ceremonies! (http://www.bravenewvoices.org).

NEW HAVEN, CT: WED. JUL 22: Summer Exploration, Private Performance, (http://www.explo.org).

SANTA MONICA, CA: WED. JUL 29: Reflection, Zanzibar, 1301 5th St., 9:00 PM, $7, 21+ (http://www.myspace.com/joshuasilverstein).

YELLOWGURL POEM JUL09 — As always feel free to fwd! Blessings, Kells 🙂

princess charming
by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

i ride the white horse
i scale the locked tower
i vanquish the dragon

i am propelled by your love

i dissolve the witch in midspell
i marshall the oddball ragtag rescue team

i am propelled by your love

i set fires to the enemy camp
i expel goblins from their foxholes
i am killed and brought back to life by a magical elixir

i am propelled by your love

you wait for me
anticipating the divide between my lips
you believe my emancipation
will free you completely
you are ready to leave this place
and the demon that guards your door
you send carrier pigeons to find me
bright red string tied to their claws –

in cramped script, your crib sheet reads:

love, love, never forget love

To Book A Show On
Kelly’s 2009-2010 Tour:
booking@yellowgurl.com

Official Website
(Bio, Poems, Online Store, Blog, Calendar & More):
www.yellowgurl.com

Official YouTube:
www.youtube.com/kztsai

Official MySpace:
myspace.com/yellowgurl_poetry

Official Twitter:
@yellowgurlpoet

Official Facebook:
Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai
Submitted by by Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

A victory for tolerance … gay rights activists outside the High Court in New Delhi. Photo: Reuters/Adnan Abidi

By Matt Wade Herald Correspondent in New Delhi
July 3, 2009
INDIAN laws banning gay sex have been overturned in a landmark judgment in New Delhi.

The 150-year-old section 377 of the penal code, introduced when Britain ruled the subcontinent, described gay sex as “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” and imposed a 10-year jail term on offenders.

However, the High Court yesterday declared the laws were a violation of “fundamental rights” and unconstitutional.

The decision means consensual sex between adults over the age of 18 will no longer punishable, although the court ruled that section 377 should still apply to cases of non-consensual sex and pedophilia.

The court recommended the Government amend section 377 in accordance with its ruling. However, the Law Minister, Veerappa Moily, responded cautiously, saying he would study the judgment before commenting.

Last week the Government said it was open to a review of section 377 but warned it would consult widely before making any changes.

The ruling is a huge victory for India’s gay rights movement which has fought hard to decriminalise homosexuality.

A petition, known in India as a public interest litigation, seeking legalisation of homosexuality was first lodged in 2001 by Naz Foundation, an organisation promoting sexual health. One argument put forward for decriminalising homosexuality was that it would help promote the prevention of HIV/AIDS in India. Activists say the outdated laws had driven infected people underground and hampered efforts to curb the spread of the virus.

The petition, opposed by the Government, was rejected by the High Court in 2004 but reopened after the Supreme Court directed the High Court to reconsider the petition.

Sydney Morning Herald for more

AS the world marks the Day Against Illicit Drug Abuse and Trafficking today, NMAMDI IYAMA, CHUKWUMA MUANYA, CHIEMEREM UMENNE and WOLE OYEBADE report that the global financial woes with their attendant psychological stress are pushing many more Nigerians to drug abuse and trafficking.

TWENTY-THREE YEAR-OLD Dom came back from Houston Texas to Nigeria three years ago. A resident of the United States, he was hooked on drugs. Devastated, his father who had spent over 40 years in the United States, could not handle the pain of watching his son succumb to the drug scourge in America, as the boy repeatedly flunked out of college, while his drug-induced behaviour started putting too much strain on the family.

Afraid that his son may commit a serious crime under the influence of drugs and end in jail, the frustrated man shipped him back home to Nigeria into the care of a close family friend, a Catholic priest who had been Dom’s godfather at Baptism.

Come August, Dom goes back to rejoin his family in America, his parents, two sisters and a brother. He is once again ‘normal’, ‘whole’.
Yesterday, he talked about his drug problems, and how he has been able to cope.

” I cannot say exactly when it started,” he said. “But it must have been when I was 17 and we had moved into a new area as Dad’s job took us to another part of the state and we had to move” he added.
‘In my new school, there were these boys whom I smoked cigarettes with and hung out with until one day, one of them brought grass, or cannabis, known here as Indian hemp or wee-wee. At first about three of us would not touch it until after sometime, we started having drags to see how it was. That was it.

The Guardian for more

By Dmitry Shlapentokh

Russians often express their displeasure with a country in a peculiar way. When the problem with Georgia flared in 2008 over the separatist republic of South Ossetia, Russian authorities suddenly discovered a serious problem with Georgian cognac and mineral water. Now, as Russia-Belarus tension grows, problems have been found with milk from Belarus.

The Kremlin can also express its mood in other ways beyond food and drink, as it is doing with the Bushehr nuclear plant it has been building in Iran since 1995. Russia is well aware of the importance of the plant, both for Iran, which needs the nuclear energy, and the United States, which views it as another step in the direction of Tehran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.

Construction of the plant – two 1,300-megawatt pressurized water reactors – started in 1975 by Germany’s KWU. The completion date was planned for 1982, but in 1979 work was suspended following the Iranian revolution.

In 1995, Russian state-run company Atomstroiexport began building the first reactor, with startup scheduled for this year. In March, the head of Russia’s state nuclear power corporation Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko, announced that Russia had completed construction.

Pre-launch tests were then conducted and it is expected to be up to full capacity by the end of March 2010. The International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, of which Iran is a member state, will oversee operation of the plant. Last month, though, Russian state-run RIA-Novosti quoted the head of Atomstroiexport, Dan Belenky, as saying the company was trying to alter the financing of the plant, for which Iran is paying Russia more than US$1 billion, and that the initial start-up would be delayed from August to an unspecified date.
Asia Times for more

by Garry Leech

An article by Juan Forero published last week in the Washington Post reflects the approach commonly used by most mainstream media correspondents covering the war on drugs and the armed conflict in Colombia. This modus operandi involves a journalist briefly visiting a rural region—often on a press junket organized by the Colombian government or U.S. embassy—and being spoon-fed a story by the authorities. Inevitably, the official perspective dominates the resulting article, which ends up being little more than a public relations piece promoting the policies of the U.S. and Colombian governments.

Forero’s article about a recent shift in strategy in the U.S. war on drugs in Colombia clearly fits this pattern. As a result, his findings contrast dramatically to those revealed in my recent investigation of the same counternarcotics project in eastern Colombia.

In his article Colombian Farmers Get Broad Incentives to Forgo Coca Crops, Forero describes how the U.S.-backed Colombian government has launched a pilot project in the department of Meta that seeks to shift efforts to eradicate coca away from failed aerial fumigations and towards manual eradication as part of a more comprehensive approach that includes establishing a permanent state presence in areas long-neglected by the national government. It is an approach that critics of Plan Colombia have been demanding for many years. However, Forero’s portrayal of the new strategy is seriously flawed due to his over-reliance on official sources.

Columbia Journal for more

Written by Patrícia Benvenuti

An ambush on April 16, 2009, carried out by agents of a private security company left seven rural workers wounded on the Espírito Santo Ranch in the municipality of Xinguara, Pará, in the North of Brazil. Armed with high-powered weapons, the private security force shot at members of the MST (Movement of the Landless Rural Workers) who since February have been encamped in the area.

The incident was almost a repeat of another massacre – Eldorado dos Carajás, which by coincidence also occurred in Pará on almost the same day, April 17th (1996). On that day, 19 MST members were killed and dozens more wounded after a conflict with the Military Police who were trying to control the protestors.

The recent assassination attempts in Xinguara demonstrates that the violence, with new characteristics, committed in Eldorado dos Carajás continues. According to the most recent study “Conflicts in the Brazilian Countryside,” released by the CPT (the Catholic Church’s Land Commission) on April 28, conflicts continue to be a constant factor for millions of rural workers, indigenous peoples, quilombolas (descendants of runaway slaves) and other rural populations.
In addition to the recurring violence in rural areas, which already seems to be part of the structural formation of the country, the advancement of big economic conglomerates in the competition for land gives way to new forms of violence.

Brazzil for more

(Agencies)

BEIJING: China will encourage foreign-funded firms to make share offerings in China, a senior Ministry of Commerce official said on Thursday during a wide-ranging briefing where he also flagged that annual declines in exports and imports began to improve in June.
China has talked for at least a decade about allowing foreign firms to list shares domestically, but has made little progress on the initiative.

“We will continue to work with other departments on policies regarding domestic IPOs of foreign firms to actively guide high-quality foreign firms to make IPOs in China,” Chen Jian, a vice-commerce minister, told reporters.

HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, could be in the running to be the first to list.

The bank, with a Shanghai branch office that opened some 150 years ago, has gained a lot of goodwill for promising not to sell its strategic investment in Bank of Communications while other foreign banks rushed to the exits.

China Daily for more

The question of how salamanders regenerate their legs when amputated is an ancient one that dates back to the days of Aristotle. Now scientists have come one step closer to solving the mystery. Contrary to what researchers previously believed, when a salamander’s legs are removed the cells near the amputation site revert to adult stem cells, but do not become pluripotent, or capable of developing into any body part. That explains why a salamander who loses a tail doesn’t regrow a leg in its place.

In the study, published in Nature, scientists explain that when a salamander’s limb is amputated, the muscle, bone, and skin cells at the amputation site change into a clump of adult stem cells called a blastema. Before this experiment, researchers had hypothesized that these undifferentiated blastema cells — which all look identical — are pluripotent and thus able to form many different cells types. But it was not clear how the original cells from adult tissue were reprogrammed, or how the blastema cells went on to form the correct tissue types [Nature News].

To determine how cells give rise to a regrown limb, scientists first inserted a snippet of DNA into the genome of a salamander called an axolotl, which caused it to produce a glowing green protein. From the eggs of these glowing salamanders, they then removed the cells that would eventually develop into legs. Next they removed the future leg-cells of a normal salamander embryo, and implanted in their place the cells that would produce glowing legs–when these formerly normal salamander developed, they had fluorescent limbs. Finally, the researchers amputated their salamanders’ legs, which then regrew. Cells in the new legs also contained the fluorescent protein and glowed under a microscope so the scientists could watch blastemas form and legs regrow in cell-by-cell detail. Contrary to expectation, skin cells that joined the blastema later divided into skin cells. Muscle became muscle. Cartilage became cartilage. Only cells from just beneath the skin could become more than one cell type [Wired.com].

Discover Magazine for more

By DIAA HADID, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
(07-01) 02:52 PDT RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) —

Her back to the camera, a Gaza woman ashamedly unbuttons her dress before a female Israeli soldier, revealing that her breasts were removed in a failed attempt to halt cancer.

In this climactic scene in “Fatenah” — the first serious Palestinian attempt at animation — the heroine flunks the security check and isn’t allowed to enter Israel for treatment.

The 30-minute film is inspired by the story of a Gazan woman whose battle against breast cancer included fighting inept Palestinian doctors and indifferent Israeli soldiers, documented in a report by the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights after she died in 2004.
Filmmakers said they used animation to make their grim subject more appealing — weaving a Mideast tale whose characters crisscross the Arab-Jewish divide. An Israeli human rights activist becomes Fatenah’s close friend and a love story between Fatenah and a Gazan man threads the story together. The film turns the territory into harshly colored scenes: an Israeli checkpoint, crowded buildings and the sea.

“Fatenah” opens Wednesday in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
It is the first animated film for commercial release made in the Palestinian territories, on a budget of $60,000 from the World Health Organization. Producers are sending it to film festivals abroad.

SF Gate for more

Although ethical debates about the use of embryonic stem cells continue to rage, stem cell technology is beginning to make its way into the medical marketplace. Yesterday, General Electric division GE Healthcare announced that it’s teaming up with the biotechnology company Geron in a venture that will use embryonic stem cells to develop products that could give drug developers an early warning of whether new medicines are toxic [Reuters].

The agreement marks the first time that a company of GE’s stature and size has announced a business venture involving the controversial field of embryonic stem cells. That could reflect a more tolerant climate for the technology in the wake of the Obama administration’s recent relaxation of restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research [The Wall Street Journal]. Supporters of embryonic stem cell research say the work will lead to a host of treatments for cancer and other diseases, while opponents believe that the destruction of any human embryo is unacceptable.

GE says the two companies will work with stem cell lines that have been used in medical research since former president George W. Bush set strict research rules in 2001. The companies plan to coax the embryonic stem cells, which can develop into any kind of human tissue, into becoming specialized cells that pharmaceutical companies can test new drugs on. Says GE Healthcare researcher Konstantin Fiedler: “This could replace, to a large extent, animal trials…. Once you have human cells and you can get them in a standardized way, like you get right now your lab rats in a standardized way, you can actually do those experiments on those cells” [Reuters]. The companies plan to first grow the stem cells into batches of heart and liver cells to test drugs that affect those vital organs.

Discover Magazine for more