Month: November 2009

By Ashwini Srinivasamohan

Evo Morales

The history of popular struggle in Bolivia took an unexpected turn when Evo Morales, the candidate of the socialist party (MAS), was elected into office on December 18 2005 as the first indigenous president that the nation, with a majority indigenous population, had seen. Morales, a former union leader for cocaleros – farmers of the coca crop – rose to power on the platform of change, defeating the right-wing candidate Jorge Quiroga of the PODEMOS party.

Between Morales’s election and the final months of the Bush administration, US-Bolivian relations- already fragile from a history of failed neoliberal policies, US support of dictators in the region, and a quagmire of fiscal and geopolitical turmoil- were embittered by a series of tit-for-tat policies, that reached a climax with the suspension of Bolivia from the Andean Trade Preferences and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA) in November of 2008, which was estimated to cost some $155 million and tens of thousands of jobs.[i]

Given that the ideological, hemispheric warfare has by and large taken the limelight in the media, namely in the west and the right-wing outlets in Latin America, since the rise of the leftist, indigenous leader, it is essential to reflect upon the policies of the Morales administration, particularly as the 2009 presidential elections approach on the 6th of December. Polls indicate that Morales will be re-elected, but he has also promised that this will be his last — and only- re-election. Morales has taken bold steps to fulfill the promises of his 2005 campaign — a new Constitution, regulations on land ownership, large-scale nationalizations — and if re-elected, the success of the next four years will lie in how effectively his administration can reckon with the goals of a socialist agenda and the realities of a capitalist world order.

United States and Bolivia: Rhetoric and Reconciliation

While Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez has seldom failed to turn an ordinary news program into an explosion of anti-capitalist sound-bites, Morales has attempted to distinguish himself and his vision of Bolivia from Chavezian rhetoric. Martin Sivak, biographer of Morales has described Morales’s assertiveness in private meetings with men like Chávez and Fidel Castro. According to Sivak, there was a certain assertiveness to Morales, a pronounced independence from Chávez or Castro, in spite of his deeply rooted ties and profound respect for the both of them. Sivak explains that Morales is indeed pragmatic, pointing to his zero cocaine policy, which prioritizes curbing growth of coca for cocaine, while maintaining that the crop itself, a main source of economic growth in other aspects, should not be criminalized. Sivak argues that this pragmatism should be given more credence than the anti-capitalist rhetoric studded banner of socialism, which is simply a political device to garner the support of his constituency.[ii]

Upside Down World for more

Nature can be beautiful. Elegant. Graceful.

But not always. Believe it or not, animals don’t do everything they do to impress us. If you doubt it, look no further than the fact that some animals eat their own feces.

This phenomenon, called coprophagy, occurs throughout the animal kingdom. It is particularly well-known among rodents, rabbits and their relatives, and—less often—dogs and apes.

The participation of this last group has caused caused particular shock among human witnesses, not least because apes are supposed to be our close evolutionary relatives.

But two new studies may offer a measure of comfort. At least, such as can be found in such a dismal situation.

The studies suggest that chimps and bonobos—the two species that are our closest ape relatives—eat poop not for its own sake, but in order to retrieve hard, nutritious seeds from it.

Coprophagy may be an “adaptive feeding strategy during periods of food scarcity,” wrote Tetsuya Sakamaki of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, Japan, in a study published in the Oct. 31 advance online issue of the journal Primates.

Sakamaki reported that he spent a total of no less than 1,142 hours (48 days) watching a group of about two dozen wild bonobos at the Luo Scientific Reserve in the Congo. Among them, “at least five females… practiced coprophagy and/or fecal inspection,” he wrote.

Samakaki found most of the episodes hard to see clearly, because they occurred high in trees, but he came away with the impression that the apes were trying to get at seeds. In the most clearly visible case, a young female “used her lips to extract Dialium seeds from the feces in her hand, ate the seeds, and discarded other fibrous parts in the feces,” he wrote.

World Science for more

According to an old English adage, ‘once bitten twice shy.’ This is the position most Tanzanians find themselves in relation to the proposed East African federation.

In fact, many Tanzanians blame the collapse of the defunct EAC in 1977 to what they perceive as marginalisation of their country against Kenya and Uganda whereby Tanzania was reduced to a market for consumables made in the other two partner states, thus pushing Tanzania to the receiving end.

That is why this time around, Tanzania is jittery of the proposed regional integration, especially when it comes to removal of trade barriers at borders, land ownership and free movement of labour, all considered as major benefits of regional integration.

According to the EAC commissioned survey which was confined to the original EAC founder member states, respondents in Tanzania trailed behind those in Kenya and Uganda on the expected benefits of regional integration.

Interestingly, at one point 48 per cent of Tanzanians were categorical that they were not aware of any benefit which their country stands to gain by being a member of the regional bloc now comprising of five states.

That said, Tanzania’s opposition against regional integration could be tressed back to one point. Lack of preparedness on existing economic opportunities within the envisaged bigger regional market.

Indeed, at the moment, Tanzania still lags behind Kenya and Uganda in terms of education, infrastructure development and other comparative advantages, but this is bound to change soon considering a big numbers of universities being opened and huge infrastructural investments being undertaken bt the Government in all sectors including rail network, ports and power generation to attract investments.

Therefore Tanzania needs to work a bit harder to catch up with the rest of the pack to be able to draw benefits from integration.

It makes no sense to fear competition in this era of global village, but to strive hard to catch up with those you compete with.

The Citizen for more

TEHRAN — A team of archaeologists is heading to Jubji next week to demarcate the Elamite site near Ramhormoz in Khuzestan Province.

The demarcation project aims to convince cultural officials to halt construction of an irrigation canal as well as the building of water and gas pipelines projects, which are currently being pursued in the region, the Persian service of CHN reported on Thursday.

The construction of the irrigation canal resulted in discovery of two U-shaped coffins along with a great number of artifacts in May 2007.

In 2007, a 40-hectar perimeter had initially been determined for the Jubji site during the first season of studies carried out after the discovery of the coffins, team director Arman Shishegar said on Thursday.

“The team plans to precisely demarcate the site during the second season that will begin next week” he added.

The U-shaped coffins containing skeletons of a girl and a woman, who are surmised to have been members of an Elamite royal family, were placed in a stone grave.

During the first season of excavations, Shishegar’s team found five rings of power among the artifacts in the coffins.

One of the rings bears the name of Shutur-Nahhunte, who ruled between 585-539 BC.

Based on the large quantity of valuable artifacts found in the coffins, the archaeologists believe that the girl and the woman most likely had been Shutur-Nahhunte’s relatives or family members.

Tehran Times

By B. R. Gowani

I am comely and useful
I drain out the refuse
I give rest to the feet
I lend support
To lower inner/outer coverings
I provide aesthetic pleasure

Yet I am mistreated and maligned!
Jokes are made about me
Vulgarity is heaped upon me
Abuses are showered upon me
Many teachers whip me
So do many parents
For no fault of mine

You call me “seat of learning”
then you blow my brain out by thrashing!

The common angry phrases one hears are:
“I’ll kick your …”
“Move your …”
“Pain in the …”

You make me suffer
You hurt my feelings
You give me black spots
You expose me to protest

But wait a minute!
I will remind you my worth

Imagine beauty without me?
Imagine sitting without me?
Imagine dancing without me?
Imagine my absence during pleasure time?
Imagine covering the most revered parts
without my help?
Imagine holding on to your pants
without my support?

O human race
I plead you with my two moons
Respect me
Handle me with care
Veil me with cotton
Look after my hygiene
(Use water, not paper
for a fresher, cleaner me
and a better environment)
Expose me not to humiliate
But to revere

O humankind!
Be grateful
I exist

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

By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

How can one describe appropriately the act of sitting down to read – if that’s even the proper term for the experience – the New York Post and Daily News, the two remaining big city tabloids in America’s biggest city? I am tempted toward the kind of hyperbole one finds in their pages. Reading the Post/News, I imagine, is like getting your head bashed in by a half-naked drunk on a corner who then apologizes by rubbing the sports section on your belly. It’s like having rats run up your leg to whisper in your ear that the cheese on Page 6 is all the truth ye need to know. It’s like finding a pubic hair in your teeth only to be told, “That’s dinner. Enjoy.” One feels that brain cells have been lost after only a few minutes with the tabloids, that the scope of reality has been reduced to a pinhead somewhere in a pile of New York hay (good luck finding it), that one has entered a funhouse of comic book casuistry where good and evil vie in the best-accoutered spandex for control – the world of the purely reductionist, the world of the line-toeing moral pedant drill sergeant who is at once willfully stupid, resentfully petty, painfully gimmicky, groaningly hamfisted, who tosses anvils from skyscrapers to kill a fly…while at the same time a voice, loud and strong and god-like, announces: “Dear reader, whatever prejudice and misconception you already have about government, Wall Street, the economy, education, race, religion, and your bad health, we will confirm. Just buy the paper!” The tabloids offer a wondrous kind of “news” in that one almost always feels less informed as a result of their reporting, truth per usual being hostage to the braying of headlines and the battle for circulation and the art of reducing complexity, nuance, ambiguity, contradiction – reality! – to column-inches that can be clutched in a child’s hand and are forgotten a day later. (The news never stops – except to drive out truth with the harpies of the “deadline”.)

So, for example, we have the primal scream, the ape-like pounding of chest and head, over the decision by the Obama Administration last Friday to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in Manhattan federal court. The bloodlust of the past week in the Post and the News, taken as artifice and political propaganda, has something leadenly Al Qaeda-like about it in the execution but shows none of the mastery of the language. Osama bin Laden is in fact a mite bit smarter in his message: At least he has the courtesy to explain, in clear and precise words, that the Islamists have good reason to hate the United States government because of its endless meddling in the Middle East. (Such a long list: an embargo that kills half-a-million Iraqi children in the 1990s; invasion and occupation that chalks up an Iraqi death toll now approaching 700,000; the persistent blind-mole blowjobbery via bombs and ammo and aircraft handed over to the Israeli hegemon to keep Palestinians in concentration camps and ensure a regional arms race; the propping up of the oil-deranged criminal caliphates and fat-necked strongmen who would rather their good citizens, along with the Palestinians, be washed down the Nile in a flood of feces…the list running on and on.)

One can only imagine what the proud parochial minds at the Post/News would make of Islamic troops stomping around Brooklyn harassing our women and children, looking up their skirts for bombs and other things, or, worse, interrupting with small-arms fire the dinner hour at Elaine’s. The chief concern of the tabloids is that the 9/11 defendants, after they are slapped down with the guilty verdict about which we are so happily certain, might not be sent to death. If sentenced to death, the further worry is they might not get the full tickertape stoning on Broadway before heading to Golgotha and the deliciousness of crucifixion. As both the Daily News and Post report, presumably citing knowledgeable sources, the 9/11 conspirators are going “straight to hell.” (Nota bene: God, hell, heaven, satan, evil, evil and evil – these make an everyday appearance as editorial compass points at the tabloids, in a witchy redneck amalgam of Irish/Italian Catholic brimstone, with Jewish resentment thrown into the mix over Israel’s not being declared greatest country ever, forever.)

Counterpunch for more

By Frank Bruni

BEFORE millions of television viewers, under the dewy and beneficent gaze of Oprah Winfrey, the two of them traded moony glances. They held hands. They spoke the language of sonnets and torch songs.

“It was like an arrow was shot through my heart,” one said, describing an early meeting. “I felt weak at the knees.”
“I’m going to be with her until the day I die,” responded the other. Then their wedding video was played. It showed them in white — both of these brides.

In what may have been the most public display of gushingly romantic affection between two gay or lesbian celebrities, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi professed their love in the secular chapel of Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talk show on Monday.
The moment came less than a week after voters in Maine, like those in 30 states before it, rejected same-sex marriage, and just a day before New York legislators would again postpone consideration of a bill to legalize such weddings, conceding inadequate support.

And it underscored what a fascinating example Ms. DeGeneres is setting, not to mention how tough it is to figure out precisely where Americans stand on an issue so fiercely contested that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., said last week that it would scale back social service programs if the district legalized same-sex marriage.

In the handful of states where same-sex marriage is legal, legislatures and courts — not voters — have made it so. A few polls in recent months have suggested that while a majority of Americans believe that gay couples should be able to enter into unions with some of the legal protections of marriage, a minority believe that gays and lesbians should be permitted to “marry,” per se. Same-sex marriage doesn’t fit into the kind of family that many Americans believe should be idealized; it offends many others’ deeply felt religious principles.

New York Times for more

By Bilal Maanaki

Dina A. Amin. Alfred Farag and Egyptian Theater: The Poetics of Disguise, With Four Short Plays and a Monologue. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xxx + 321 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8156-3163-7.

This urgently needed book is an investigation of Egyptian theatre through the works of the preeminent Egyptian playwright Alfred Farag (1929-2005), during the turbulent period of the sixties and seventies, when Egyptian society was undergoing great political turmoil and drastic social change. Alfred Farag is regarded among the foremost Egyptian playwrights in the post-1952 revolution period. He played a major role in disseminating and popularizing theatrical performances across urban as well as rural Egypt. In addition to writing more than thirty plays in both classical and colloquial Arabic, Farag was also a theatre practitioner who was involved in theatrical troupe formations, and, unlike his contemporary Arab playwrights, he had a strong sense of the role of the stage in shaping all aspects of his drama, especially the characters’ dialogues and monologues. Dina Amin takes a historiographic turn in her examination of Farag’s works by focusing on the poetics of dramatic texts, especially his use of metadrama as a literary tool to disguise his commentary and criticism of both the Nasser and Sadat eras.

Amin’s book is divided into three parts, not including an introduction and an appendix. The latter includes a chronological reference list of Farag’s plays with the date and place of their productions, in addition to a small photo gallery of various performances. As attested in her introduction, the majority of works published on the playwright focus on his 1960s masterpieces, to the detriment of his work during the 1970s even though this later period reflects Farag’s artistic and literary maturity and a different political and social span of time (albeit a pessimistic one). Amin’s main objective “is to provide a reading of Farag’s plays of the seventies through focusing on his skillful use of metadrama” (p. xxv).

Amin begins her analysis in chapter 1 with a biographical account of the playwright, his education, literary interests, his various governmental and non-governmental jobs, as well as a description of his political views regarding Arab politics in the sixties and seventies. She offers a detailed report on Farag’s imprisonment under Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime and how this detention inspired his famous play Hallaq Baghdad (The Barber of Baghdad, 1964), which he wrote and performed in prison. Even though Farag’s plays were not favored by the political regime of the time, the official attitude began to change after the declaration of the National Charter in 1962. Encouraging reconciliation between leftist intellectuals and artists and the government, many leftists and artists, including Farag, took high official positions in the Ministry of Culture. Besides Nasser, Amin examines Farag’s life and work during the presidencies of Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak.

MRZine for more

By Carole Joffe (Ms. Washington Correspondent)

Here’s the good news: Over the past 30 years, women’s entrance into graduate programs in the sciences and engineering has significantly increased. This is particularly true in the life sciences, where women now receive more than 50 percent of all Ph.Ds.

But here’s the bad news: Women Ph.Ds in these fields are less likely than men to enter academic research positions, where most cutting-edge scientific discovery takes place. And women who attain such positions are more likely to drop out before a tenure decision is made.

The stalled careers of these women scientists have implications beyond the costs to the individuals involved. As the authors of a major new report on attrition among scientists put it, “The loss of these women…means the long-term dependability of a highly trained U.S. workforce and global preeminence in the sciences may be in question.”

The report, Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences, is a collaborative effort between the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., and scholars at the Center on Health, Economic and Family Security at the University of California, Berkeley (Marc Goulden, Karie Frasch and Mary Ann Mason). It draws on several large surveys of more than 8,000 doctoral students and 2,300 postdoctoral students, both men and women. The report examines young scientists’ decision-making at several crucial phases of their career: doctoral training, postdoctoral training and as junior faculty.

Not surprisingly, perceived unfriendliness to a faculty member’s family concerns within a research-intensive university—and especially the difficulty reconciling childrearing with a successful scientific career—was shown to be a major factor in the decision of female doctoral students to “leak out” of the United States’ scientific pipeline. Young male scientists, the report shows, also have concerns about balancing work and family, but women are more likely to lower their career goals or drop out altogether.

The reality of women’s reproductive lives is often on a collision course with the standard timeline for an academic career in science. An aspiring woman scientist will typically graduate college at 22, receive her Ph.D at 27, complete her postdoctoral training at about 30 and then enter a tenure-track position at a research university. There, as the authors put it, “the time pressures are unrelenting,” with demands to apply for research grants, conduct research, publish results, supervise a lab and teach. If all goes well, this hypothetical woman will not get tenure until her mid-to-late 30s (the authors note that the average age of tenure for women in sciences has climbed to 39).

Now assume that this woman wants to have children. If she waits until tenure to have them, she may face problems, as her prime reproductive years are past. And women who have children while pursuing tenure are less likely than either their male colleagues with children or women colleagues without them to be fully or partially supported by all-important federal grants.

Ms for more