Farmers yesterday hurled eggs at the head of the pro-government caucus in the Lower House, Deputy Agustín Rossi, as he was leaving a political rally in the Santa Fe provincial district of Venado Tuerto, official sources said today.

Talking to the press this morning, the lawmaker said some 40 people insulted the members of the Justicialst Victory Front and hurled eggs during a rally attended by more than 400 people. The deputy expressed his concerns over the increasing level of violence in political rallies ahead of the June mid-term vote.

“I’m concerned that these despicable actions seem to be spreading,” said Rossi during the interview. He is seeking reelection in the June 28 mid-term elections.

Rossi had already been attacked on a previous occasion earlier this year, when demonstrators threw eggs at him and his brother as both were entering a car in Santa Fe. Rossi also criticized the actions of another group of protesters who were involved in clashes with the police during a political rally led by Buenos Aires province Governor Daniel Scioli in Lobería.

After the incidents, the Scioli administration ousted the police chief of the district, who was in charge of the security of the ceremony. Media reports said the government has tightened controls in all public ceremonies to prevent further incidents from happening.
Scioli blamed the opposition Unión-PRO for the incidents, as the farmers who were involved in the incidents were members of that party. Nevertheless, the head of the Unión-PRO in Buenos Aires province, Francisco de Narváez, denied his party was behind the incidents and telephoned Scioli to express his support and condemn the violent incidents.

Farmers, who are at loggerheads with the government after it announced an increase to soybean export duties last year, are demanding that the government lower export levies and an aid to the agricultural sector, hit by adverse weather conditions and the declining prices of commodities in the international markets.
Buenos Aires Herald for more

Ademola Adeyemo
28 May 2009

Lagos — On May 29, 1999, the then Military Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar handed over the reins of power to former President Olusegun Obasanjo.

Today marks the tenth anniversary of that historic event and uninterrupted democratic rule in Africa’s most populous country. Ademola Adeyemo in this report examines the gains and pains of one decade of civil rule in Nigeria.

In his farewell speech on May 28, 1999, the then Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar declared that it was time for the military to return to its constitutional role of defending the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. According to him, “We must, forever, resist and renounce the seduction and temptation of political power and office. We must subject ourselves completely to civil authority. This is a sacred duty to which we must bind ourselves. It is our best guarantee to earn and retain the respect of our people. It is also your best chance for earning the approbation of the rest of a fast, changing world, in which new political and social values are transcendent.”

With the speech, Abubakar put an end to the long years of military rule from December, 1983, which had exposed Nigeria to coups and counter coups which had also rendered attempted democratic rule abortive.
All Africa for more

(The famous poet Kamala Das, also known as Kamala Suraiya and Madhavikutty, born in 1934, passed away yesterday in India. Her poem In Search of Love and the following description about her appeared in Sarojini Sahoo’s blog Feminine Fragrance on January 21, 2008. Ed.)

The Looking Glass

By Kamala Das

Getting a man to love you is easy
Only be honest about your wants as
Woman, Stand nude before the glass with him
So that he sees himself the stronger one
And believes it so, and you so much more

Softer, younger, lovelier. Admit your
Admiration. Notice the perfection

Of his limbs, his eyes reddening under

The shower, the shy walk across the bathroom floor,

Dropping towels, and the jerky way he

Urinates. All the fond details that make
Him male and your only man! Gift him all,

Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of

Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,

The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your

Endless female hungers. Oh yes, getting
A man to love is easy, but living
Without him afterwards may have to be

Faced. A living without life when you move

Around, meeting strangers, with your eyes that

Gave up their search, with ears that hear only

His last voice calling out your name and your

Body which once under his touch had gleamed
Like burnished brass, now drab and destitute.

Kamala Das was short listed for Nobel Prize for literature in 1984 along with Marguerite Yourcenar, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer. Apart from that she received many awards for her literary contributions like Asian Poetry Prize, Kent Award for English Writing from Asian Countries, Asian World Prize, Sahitya Academy Award and Kerala Sahitya Academy Award etc.

In 1984 in an interview with Shobha Wariyar for Eve’s Weekly, she made the following statement: “Yes, I know, yesterday I might have been against liberation, today I am for it. Tomorrow I do not know what I would say, and how I feel”.

In her autobiography — My Story — she told the story of her sexual life, her relationship with men and her views on the world. My Story gave her the image of being an amoral woman. But it was a huge success and has been published in more than 15 languages. It is now a school textbook in Japan and Canada.

She released her first nude painting in the 1980s, she proclaimed: “I find the nude female body the most beautiful in the world.”

She makes no attempt to hide the sensuality of the human form; her work seems to celebrate its joyous potential while acknowledging its concurrent dangers.

She once said, “I always wanted love, and if you don’t get it within your home, you stray a little”(Warrior interview). Some might label her as “a feminist” for her candor in dealing with women’s needs and desires.
At the age of 67, she converted her self to Muslim to marry a young man. After converting herself to Islam ,she argued that Purdah in Islam is the most wonderful dress for women in the world. And she had always loved to wear the purdah.and it gives women a sense of security. Only Islam gives protection to women.About her conversion to Islam she told that she had been lonely all through her life. At nights, she used to sleep by embracing a pillow. But she was no longer a loner. Islam was her company. According to her Islam is the only religion in the world that gives love and protection to women.

She shifted all the Hindu idols in her home, including her intimate ”friend and love” Lord Krishna to the guestroom, saying namaz five times a day has become a regular feature. Her formal initiation into Islam took place in front of the Muslim clergy at Palayam mosque in Thiruvananthapuram.

But in 2006, she has issued a statement at a book releasing ceremony organized by Kairali Books in Kochi that she deeply regrets converting to Islam and is disillusioned with the treacherous behavior of her Muslim friends. She claims that all her wealth amounting to several lakhs, gold ornaments, books and other valuables have been looted by Muslims.)

Feminine Fragrance
(Submitted by Dr. Sahoo.)

By Rashweat Mukundu

I CANNOT claim to be schooled in economics apart from growing up vending fruit and vegetables in Marondera. However, economic imperatives affect all of us and the Zimbabwean situation is no different.
Everyone agrees that Zimbabwe’s industry is at its lowest ebb ever, if there is any industry to talk about at all. A good example is the fact that Zimbabwe’s famous brands such as the Mazoe drink, available in supermarkets in Windhoek, Namibia, are manufactured in South Africa.

The only product from Zimbabwe I have encountered with a sense of pride in a foreign country is Tanganda’s silver tea on the supermarket shelves. Nothing more demonstrates industrial collapse than the near collapse of Mutare Board and Paper Mills, where machinery that appeared on ZBC news recently looks like relics from the German Krupps factories of the early 1900s. Zimbabwe’s industrial capacity of the 1980s and early 1990s is gone.

This brings us to the current public media push on the subsidies and duties that captains of industry have been asking from government. For some time now industrialists in the food industry, especially millers, have been pushing vigorously for a revision of government policy on food imports, especially maize meal.
The argument goes that the imported maize meal is too cheap hence it is pushing them out of the business or stopping them from coming back into business. The argument goes further that the millers should be protected so that they can have the sole rights to Zimbabwe’s consumers.
And, in my thinking, also raise prices to meet their production costs in an environment in which almost 90% of people are unemployed and five million surviving on donor food and millions surviving on less than a dollar a day.

In this regard the argument being advanced by Zimbabwe’s millers and food producers is very selfish and self-serving.
This argument is not driven by the national interest that people have no food, no money and are poor, but the desire by a few to resuscitate their “industry” and make money.

Granted, industry needs to be supported to get back to reasonable productive capacity. The question is, whose responsibility is it to do so? The second question is what is the Zimbabwe government’s priority under the current circumstances?

The priority should be to feed the people and avert the disaster of people starving. The majority of poor Zimbabweans have benefited from the decreasing food prices. At some point it became impossible to buy anything with US$100 in Zimbabwe.

I am, however, sure that civil servants can now afford to buy maize meal and cooking oil. This is not a justification of their paltry salary but an acknowledgement that US$100 now makes a difference in Zimbabwe. This is largely as a result of the reasonably priced food imports flooding the country.
Zimbabwe Independent for more

By Michael Shermer

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind—the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others—we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness).
Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. Even the belief that government can impose top-down measures to rescue the economy is a form of agenticity, with President Barack Obama being touted as “the one” with almost messianic powers who will save us.

There is now substantial evidence from cognitive neuroscience that humans readily find patterns and impart agency to them, well documented in the new book SuperSense (HarperOne, 2009) by University of Bristol psychologist Bruce Hood. Examples: children believe that the sun can think and follows them around; because of such beliefs, they often add smiley faces on sketched suns. Adults typically refuse to wear a mass murderer’s sweater, believing that “evil” is a supernatural force that imparts its negative agency to the wearer (and, alternatively, that donning Mr. Rogers’s cardigan will make you a better person). A third of transplant patients believe that the donor’s personality is transplanted with the organ. Genital-shaped foods (bananas, oysters) are often believed to enhance sexual potency. Subjects watching geometric shapes with eye spots interacting on a computer screen conclude that they represent agents with moral intentions.
Scientific America for more

Getting punishment instead of empowerment? Photo: Iqbal Ahmed/ Drik News

By Moazzem Hossain

I wish I did not have to write this piece. One must do it since there has been a silence on the part of the commentators and the politicians, except this daily which published a strongly worded editorial on this issue on May 26. Moreover, the incident had taken place next door to the upazila where I come from. Yes, I am talking about the recent incident at a village in Daudkandi, where a girl was whipped with 39 lashes in the presence of a few hundred peoplethe outcome of a decree of a local salish.

This is not the first occasion that such a crime has been committed by the so-called moulanas and their accomplices in this nation. The aim of this piece is to remind the politicians at all levels that, under any circumstances, this kind of atrocity cannot be allowed and must be stopped immediatelyby making new laws if required.
There is no excuse for tolerating such a heinous act in rural Bangladesh during the so- called era of women empowerment and emancipation. Most importantly, it makes one doubly puzzled that no politician has come forward and shown empathy towards that poor injured girl in the hospital. Perhaps they do not want to be stigmatised, and feared a backlash from the bigots.

Some readers may have thought that the village where the incident took place was located in a remote and illiterate part of the country. No, Daudkandi has one of the highest literacy rates, close to 80%, and is located not too great a distance from Dhaka (only 50 km).
Politically, this is certainly one of the violence-ridden areas of the country, although it has a very high level of per capita income. Although the famous Goalmari fight had taken place here during the war of liberation (Pakistan army even lost some its officers in this fight), the post-liberation period has been infested with violence after violence.

The infamous killers of the father of the nation come from this area (Khandakar Mushtaq and Col. Rashid). Since General Zia’s time this locality has been dominated by BNP-Jamaat politics led by Khandakar Musharaf, who lost the last election to AL’s Subed Ali Bhuiyan.
If I am correct, neither the incumbent MP, nor the former MP has visited the victim until now. None of the 45 MPs elected in the women’s quota has visited the poor girl, either. One may ask, what kind of democracy we are heading towardsdemocracy for the elite, or democracy for the masses?

Daily Star for more

By Achara Ashayagachat

Health advocates have urged Asean governments to print the World Health Organisation (WHO)-advised picture warnings on cigarette packs as part of Sunday’s World No Tobacco Day.
The Bangkok-based Southeast Asia Tobacco Control Alliance (Seatca) has called on governments in the region to immediately implement their commitments under the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

So far only Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei have pictorial health warnings on cigarette packs, said Seatca director Bungon Ritthiphakdee.

“We are calling on Asean governments who are lagging behind to follow suit and pass laws requiring strong, prominent pictorial health warnings as required by the WHO framework.

“Pictorial pack warnings are one of the best ways to educate the more than 100 million smokers in the region on the dangers of smoking. It does not cost governments much money to implement this measure,” said Ms Bungon.

• Related content: Showing the truth about tobacco

Under the framework, parties are given a three-year deadline to implement Article 11 of the WHO framework which states warning messages on tobacco product packs should cover at least 50% of the principal display areas of the package. It also requires that multiple health warning messages be rotated, encourages the use of pictures and pictograms and prohibits misleading terms such as light and mild, or low tar.

The Philippines, Cambodia and Vietnam missed their 2008 deadline to introduce prominent health warnings on tobacco packs. Laos has only a few months left to comply.

“Tobacco companies use graphics on their packs to attract established smokers and first-time smokers among teenagers. But when governments want to use graphics on packs to educate smokers, the companies fight these measures as they are in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia,” Ms Bungon said.

Indonesia has not ratified the WHO framework and is lagging far behind other Asean countries in tobacco control measures.
Studies in the region have found that prominent graphic warnings on cigarette packs are far more effective in educating smokers and the public in general.

Bangkok Post for more

By Kripa Krishnan (Press Trust of India)

Manali, May 28 (PTI) Dressed in their deep red robes, monks and nuns of a 800-year-old Buddhist sect have begun a marathon padyatra to propagate environmental conservation and spread awareness about the indiscriminate use of plastics and motor vehicles.

Led by their spiritual leader the Gyalwang Drukpa, 600 monks would travel across the snow-clad Himalayas in a month long ‘padyatra’ that will culminate in the Hemis Festival in Ladakh later next month.

“The yatra is a way of embracing the ‘walking life’, which is beautiful and stress free. Why should we quit walking for cars and helicopters, when they cause so much damage to nature,” the Gyalwang Drukpa told reporters here before commencing the journey on May 25.

The ‘walkathon’ is expected to gather more volunteers and fellow Drukpas along the 400-km stretch.

The Drukpa leader says he is expecting upto 1000 followers to join him en route the journey where they would talk to villagers about the environment and also distribute pamphlets and canvas bags.

“We want to spread the message of environmental protection and are not marching for Buddhism. The aim is to interact with people living in the remotest corners of the Himalayas and get to know nature more intimately,” the spiritual leader said. PTI

PTI

Submitted by Pritam Rohila