Month: March 2010

by BENJAMIN DANGL

Thousands of Paraguayan farmers raised their clubs, fists and placards into the air while marching through the streets of Asunción, the capital city, on Thursday, March 25. The farmers demanded that President Fernando Lugo follow through on his campaign promises for agrarian reform, including the distribution of land to poor farmers, and access to health care, education, better homes and roads for rural communities. After a year and a half in office, Lugo’s failures to meet such demands have led various farmer organizations to directly oppose his administration.

“We can’t speak of change if 80% of the fertile land in the country is in the hands of 1% of the population, while 85% of the campesinos [small farmers] have access to only 6% of all the land,” National Campesino Federation (FNC) general secretary Odilón Espínola told Efe.

The situation in rural Paraguay is dire; 38% of the country’s population lives under the poverty line, and most of this sector is based in rural areas. Paraguay has one of the most unequal distributions of land in the world, and the rapidly expanding soy industry is making matters worse.

Toward Freedom for more

THE ECONOMIST

Personal animosity is a mighty force in business, for good as well as il

THE third world war, it seems, has broken out in an unexpected place: Silicon Valley. Apple and Google were once so close that Eric Schmidt, Google’s boss, joked that they should merge and change their name to AppleGoo. Now, however, the two companies are at loggerheads over everything from apps to acquisitions—and Mr Schmidt and Apple’s boss, Steve Jobs, are taking the fight personally.

So personally, in fact, that tech types are lost for superlatives. The New York Times quotes a long list of gobsmacked comments. Meetings have been “heated” and “confrontational”. The sense of rivalry is “intense”. The two men are treating the world to “an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition”. One of the Times’ insiders not only likens the squabble to “world war three” but also dubs it “the biggest ego battle in history”. So much for Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony.

The only surprise in all this is that anybody should be surprised. The business world has always been a cauldron of personal animosity, and those animosities have been particularly intense in Silicon Valley. Few do grudges quite as well as geeks. Steve Jobs is legendary for his grudge matches. He has been feuding with Bill Gates for decades. He has described Microsoft’s products as “third rate” and complained that the company has “absolutely no taste”. (“I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way.”) Apple’s annoying “I’m a Mac” ads are strikingly personal: they pitch a frumpy Bill Gates lookalike against a too-cool-for-school Jobs doppelganger (with added hair).

The Economist for more

(Submitted by reader)

by BRUCE BOWER

A new member of the human evolutionary family has been proposed for the first time based on an ancient genetic sequence, not fossil bones. Even more surprising, this novel and still mysterious hominid, if confirmed, would have lived near Stone Age Neandertals and Homo sapiens.

“It was a shock to find DNA from a new type of ancestor that has not been on our radar screens,” says geneticist Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. These enigmatic hominids left Africa in a previously unsuspected migration around 1 million years ago, a team led by Pääbo and Max Planck graduate student Johannes Krause reports in a paper published online March 24 in Nature.

Wired for more

by CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO

The lead story in last week’s issue of TIME magazine was entitled “10 Ideas For The Next 10 Years”. It got me thinking about what are the 10 Big Ideas for East Africa, or better still, for the next 10 years. There are several, but here are my nine (there’s no space for 10):

1.THE RISE OF PLASTIC SURGERY: The dramatic expansion of the private sector in Africa of the last two decades in Africa has altered the demographics of the retirement market.

Where previously most retirees were worn out teachers, nurses, and civil servants with puny pensions, today there are many former managers and CEOs with generous pensions and golden parachutes.

Apart from their money, they are bringing a greater image consciousness. To succeed in retirement, they will need to look youngish, so they will sink their money into the nascent plastic surgery market that is already fuelled by the increasing number of private hospitals.

The Citizen for more

by DR. SAROJINI SAHOO

The day 23 March has great importance in history and today again proved its importance in Indian History. This day is famous because it is the birthday of great Socialist thinker Ram Monahar Lohia. This day is also famous because in the colonial period, Bhagat Singh, a leftist freedom fighter, was hung by British rulers along with his two other comrades. Today, this day becomes significant because Kanu Sanyal, one of the premier left-wing terrorist (they say revolutionary) thinkers committed suicide by hanging himself in his home.

Twenty-three-March is a symbolic day as it is commonly associated with events having connections with socialism and other leftist activities. The day 23 March is associated with two other hangings; one was imposed and the other was a suicide. But moreover, it made me think about the reason that made the socialist like Kanu Sanyal follow the path of suicide. As per their concept and consciousness, the leftists always act as most optimistic in their ideology and also in their activities. The socialists or communists or Marxists are not like the French Existentialist writer Albert Camus in that they will think the reason why people are not committing suicide even though they face a meaningless lifestyle in their day-to-day lives.
Continue reading “23-March, A Day for Challenging Beliefs and Faith”

by CABRAL PINTO

Kenyans may be a religious people, but this does not mean that they are not aware of reality or reasonable pleas. Our people do not follow the dictates of their faiths without questioning where lines need to be drawn.

It is from this understanding that the abortion debate may irreparably dent the credibility of religion in Kenya.

The dictates of the Catholic Church and Islam on condoms have been disobeyed by their flocks. Statistics show that the burning of condoms by the faiths’ leaders has not diminished their use. It seems likely that mainstream religions will also be disobeyed on the abortion issue.

Will protected abortions not sustain the lives of the mother and the infant? Should religious leaders intimidate Kenyans who are demanding secure abortion? Is the issue simply a matter of faith?

Why are we negating science and humanity, and allowing principally men to decide on the fate of women’s bodies? When will we listen to women on what they feel about their rights to decisions on their lives, bodies, unborn children and those already born and are suffering?

All Africa for more

by KRISTEN STEVENS

For his portrayal of the transsexual son of a southeastern Anatolian family in Güne?i Gördüm” (I Saw the Sun), Cemal Tokta? won the Ye?ilçam award for Best Supporting Actor on March 23. He dedicated his award “to all the people who have ever been a victim of being different.“

The day before, Turkish conservative human rights groups sent a letter of support to Minister of Families Selma Aliye Kavaf for defining homosexuality as a “sickness” earlier this month. One of the groups was Mazlum-der, which takes its name from mazlum, meaning “oppressed”.

Of the hundreds of sign-carrying female members of Mazlum-Der I’ve seen, all of them have worn headscarves. Limiting definitions of human rights to suit one’s kind and throwing other victims of discrimination to the wolves is not self-serving; it’s self-destructive.

Maybe the gay community can do more than call for apologies and resignations. They could back the right of covered women to enter public universities and state institutions. Gasp.

Tipping the point

Same-sex couples started marrying in Mexico City this month. In May couples will likely get married in Portugal. It’s legal in Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain and Sweden; in Washington, D.C. and five U.S. states.

Hurriyet for more

In the 1940s, the grandchildren of slaves began migrating from southern states to Los Angeles in search of a refuge from racism, only to be greeted by more racism. With crosses burning in Inglewood and Culver city as late as the 1960s, and a militant police force led by Chief William Parker that drew support from the FBI and recruited officers from the South, Los Angeles was not the bastion of freedom African Americans had hoped it would be. Enter the Black Panthers. 41st and Central, a new documentary written, produced, and directed by Gregory “G. Bone” Everett, himself son of a black panther, traces the history of the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther party from its inception to its demise. The film explores the Party’s face-offs with the LAPD and the Us Organization, a rival group, as well as the UCLA killings of the charismatic Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins, and the 1969 shootout between the LAPD and the Black Panthers on 41st Street and Central. The film features new interviews with former Black Panther Party members including Ericka Huggins, Ronald Freeman, Wayne Pharr, Jeffrey Everett, Long John Washington, and Muhammad Mubarak, alongside former LAPD Chief Bernard Parks, Us member Wesley Kabaila, and UCLA Prof. Scot Brown.These interviews combined with archival footage, makes “41st and Central” a compelling picture of the often-overlooked issue of racism in Los Angeles, and the revolutionary black movement that tried to fight it.

Uprising Radio for more & to listen

by JOANNE LAURIER

For her performance in The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock won this year’s Oscar for Best Actress. An argument could be mounted in support of Bullock’s accomplishment, but the serious consideration of John Lee Hancock’s banal film by the Academy voters indicates how distant they are from American realities and how wedded, moreover, the Hollywood establishment is to identity politics.

Although not offering so noxious a portrayal of the oppressed African-American population in the US as Precious does, Hancock’s (The Rookie) movie is largely a fantasy about working class life and social relations in general.

The film is based on the true story of Michael Oher—now a member of the Baltimore Ravens professional football team and once a downtrodden homeless black teen from a Memphis housing project—but its real focus is the figure of Leigh Anne Tuohy (Bullock).

World Socialist Web Site for more

Bitter reactions among MKs to planned expulsion of Israeli diplomat from UK.

Israeli officials and MKs sharply criticized the announced intention of the UK government to expel an unnamed Israeli diplomat in response to its passports being used in the Dubai assassination of senior Hamas arms trafficker Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

“I think [the] British are behaving hypocritically and I don’t want to offend dogs on this issue, since some dogs are utterly loyal,” MK Aryeh Eldad (National Union) told Sky News. “Who are they to judge us on the war on terror?”

Eldad added that Israel’s “natural reaction should be to expel one of the senior diplomats in the British Embassy, maybe the military attache or someone on his level.”

Eldad’s party colleague, MK Michael Ben-Ari, responded: “The British may be dogs, but they are not loyal to us, but rather to an anti-Semitic system, and Israeli diplomacy partially plays into their hands. This is anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism”.

In contrast, Foreign Affairs and Defense committee chairman MK Tzahi Hanegbi (Kadima) recommended not to respond to the crisis with Britain. “I believe keeping silent was a good policy at the height of the Dubai crisis, and certainly it is now, when it is nearly behind us.”

Jerusalem Post for more

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)