By Vincent Bevins

The victory of the party that fought a guerrilla war against Reagan-backed rightists in El Salvador is another step in Latin America’s march leftwards.

His victory speech mentioned change but Mauricio Funes may not be universally welcomed in the US

It was already shaping up to be a tough year for the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Big government is back and faith in the power of the market is deeply shaken. But now, to make matters worse, the Central American nation of El Salvador will be governed by the FMLN, the left-wing guerrillas that fought US-backed military governments in a brutal civil war there from 1980-1992.

They have come to power under quite changed circumstances, of course. Long ago they transformed into a political party, and Mauricio Funes, who won the presidency in Sunday’s vote, was the first candidate they had put forward who didn’t fight in the war.

Funes, a former journalist, has indicated he intends to govern more like the moderate left-of-centre leaders in Latin America, such as like Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva or Chile’s Michelle Bachelet, than Venezula’s Hugo Chavez.

If so it’s a far cry from what the Cuban-trained Marxist guerrillas of his own party fought for in the 80s.

But his win, though by a slim margin of around three percentage points, is another chapter in the seemingly unending tale of leftward movements in Latin America in recent years.

In Central America, the Sandinistas (who also fought the Reagan-backed Contras in the 80s) now govern nearby Nicaragua. Last year Honduras chose to join them in a regional left-wing development alliance with Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia. In South America, only Peru and Colombia remain right of centre.

What Funes’s role would be in the context of the new constellation of left governments in the hemisphere loomed large in the campaign.
The ruling right-wing ARENA party repeatedly linked Funes to Hugo Chavez, to the point that he had to deny that he’d have any influence in El Salvador. “I will not lay a finger on Venezuela, just as Venezuela won’t lay a finger on El Salvador,” he said in one TV ad. They also tried to link him to radical leftism and the violence of the ’80s and early ’90s, a task made more difficult since he himself was never a guerrilla.

When Funes takes office, it will be the first time there has been a peaceful transfer of power since civil conflict ended in 1992. Spanning 12 years, that brutal war took the lives of 75,000 Salvadorans and prominently featured right-wing death squads peddling widespread murder and terror.

These groups were not above assassinating the country’s archbishop as he celebrated Mass after he asked the US to halt massive military aid to the country’s government.

It was a particularly horrific chapter in the closing days of the Cold War and after twenty years of rule by ARENA, a right-wing party founded by a man a former US ambassador called a “pathological killer,” the old divisions are now being played out peacefully at the ballot-box.

For better or worse, El Salvador remains closely tied to the United States. Millions of Salvadorans emigrated to the US during and after the civil war, and there are now three million of them reside there compared to seven million in El Salvador. Last year, remittances from the US to the poor country made up 17 per cent of the country’s GDP.

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March 10, 2009
MELBOURNE : Children fathered by older men are likely to be less intelligent than the offspring of younger dads, Australian and US scientists have found in a report published Tuesday.

The research contrasted sharply with earlier studies showing that older mothers produced children more likely to record above average intelligence scores, the researchers concluded.

Lead scientist John McGrath, from the Brisbane-based Queensland Brain Institute, said the result was a world first and had implications for men in Western societies who have delayed fatherhood until their 40s or older.

“The offspring of older fathers show subtle impairments on tests of neurocognitive ability during infancy and childhood,” he said in the new research.

“In light of secular trends related to delayed fatherhood, the clinical implications and the mechanisms underlying these findings warrant closer scrutiny.”

Researchers examined data collected on 33,000 children in the United States between 1959 and 1965 fathered by men aged from 15 to 65.

They found that the children of older dads performed less well in intelligence tests conducted at age eight months, four years and seven years.

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The city of Seattle is planning to construct a new municipal jail at a cost of more than $200 million. At the same time, five public schools are slated for closure, and budgets for social services, including effective pre-arrest diversion programs, are being slashed.

A coalition of groups spearheaded by the city’s homeless newspaper Real Change and the Real Change Organizing Project are uniting to oppose this decision. Activists are gathering signatures for Initiative 100, which would pose the issue to voters on the November ballot.
Chris Mobley and Leela Yellesetty spoke with Real Change Executive Director Tim Harris about what’s at stake in this struggle
WHY IS the city trying to build a new jail? What is their argument for it, and what do you think are the real reasons behind it?

THE CITY’S talking point is pretty simple. They say they would rather not, but they’re between a rock and a hard place. In 1999, the county told them that by 2012, they’d run out of space, and the city would have to find its own solution.

That changed. The projections for those incarcerated came in significantly lower because of programs that reduced the number of people in jail. But there was already a lot of investment in planning and institutional commitment to going down this path.

There is also potential financial self-interest. Rather than contract beds out to the county, which is a budgetary drain, here’s the possibility for the city to have its own facility, which they could subcontract to Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), for instance. There’s some evidence that there have been discussions about subletting jail space for detaining immigrants, which would be positive cash flow.

There is a pattern of privatization with municipal jails that have been funded through bond issues that is very predictable. There’s a huge interest in filling the beds because, if you don’t, it goes from a positive to a negative cash flow. It’s a “build it, and they will fill it” situation.

IF THEY build it, who will they fill it with?

WHENEVER THEY talk about who is going to be in this jail, they talk about perpetrators of domestic violence and drunk drivers, for which the law mandates incarceration. Those are a couple of fairly unsympathetic groups of people, but this is a classic city of Seattle straw-man argument. They set up this extreme version of what reality is, which is more or less wholly fabricated.

There is this third rail inherent in the issue, of race and class, that the city has studiously avoided. The largest category of crime represented in the daily jail population are drug crimes, and the war on drugs disproportionately targets the African American community and people who are economically marginalized, and turn to street activity as a survival tactic.

Seattle disproportionately incarcerates African Americans at a rate of 10 times their representation in the population at large. You have a population that has been left behind by globalization, left behind by the civil rights movement, and left behind by the education system increasingly targeted for incarceration.
There is also a criminalization of the homeless that the shelter system doesn’t have capacity for. We’ve consistently documented about one-third more homeless people in Seattle than there is capacity for in the emergency shelter system. There literally is no place for these people to go. Yet we have to blame the victim. Those people will also be in this new facility.

DOES THE push to build a jail have anything to do with the discussion lately in city government about cracking down on minor offenses like public urination and panhandling–the so-called quality-of-life argument?

IT ABSOLUTELY has everything to do with the [former New York Mayor Rudolph] Giuliani “broken windows theory” of how to respond to the deepening contradictions brought on by extreme inequality. Cities everywhere are dealing with this problem. The nature of cities has changed in response to globalization.

The nearly complete collapse of manufacturing in this country has had an impact on urban economies, where suddenly, the source of employment for less-skilled, less-educated people has largely been shifted overseas. You have a much more challenging situation for the less advantaged in urban economies and much higher rates of unemployment–and this has hit the African American community harder than ever.

On the other hand, you have cities becoming islands of affluence. Urban living is the option of choice for those who can afford it. The relation between the city and the suburbs has shifted, so that the suburbs are now places for people who can’t afford to live in the city.
There’s been gentrification, a rise in land values and an increase in density of urban areas driven by condo booms in every major city. Cities have become centers of upscale consumption, cultural consumption and employment for the professional middle class who now prefer to live in urban areas.

On the other side of that, you have increased poverty that is a result of a whole class of people being written off. And there’s visible poverty that makes the affluent class uneasy and nervous.

So there’s a contradiction to manage. The broken windows theory identifies those who are visibly poor in the urban environment as an “other,” as a problem on a par with a broken window or graffiti that needs to be removed from public view, because it creates a downward spiral that erodes quality of living, leads to more crime and consequently reduced land values.
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Israeli soldiers and settlers kill and injure with impunity

By Sonja Karkar

17 March 2009

Yesterday, peace activists all over the world remembered the tragic killing of Rachel Corrie in Palestine by an Israeli bulldozer. That was 6 years ago. She became the icon for all peace activists in the Palestine/Israel
conflict, but there have been other internationals too who have been killed or injured by Israeli forces and sometimes the extremist Israeli settlers. Many of them were young like Rachel who came with compassion for humanity
and the courage to defend the defenseless while the rest of world turned its head. Some paid for their fervour with their lives, others have been badly disfigured. The ones listed here are just some of many who come to be human shields for the Palestinians against Israeli bulldozers, tanks, soldiers and the crazed Israeli settlers whom not even Israel’s formidable army can control.

As Israel intensifies its daily attacks on the Palestinian population, the internationals too face very real danger – their passports and their citizenship are no guarantee of a free pass and rarely do they get the support of their own governments when they are deliberately shot by Israeli soldiers. Israel, of course, brushes aside the killings and
injuries and puts them down to collateral damage, accidents, caught in cross fire, ricochet bullets and/or the recklessness of the internationals themselves, despite internationals being trained in safety procedures and
wearing bright orange safety flap-jackets with reflective stripes and the Israeli army knowing that they are there to provide protection for Palestinian civilians. The confrontations usually occur when Israel sends in armed bulldozers to demolish family homes or raze agricultural lands or uproot olive groves. Lest anyone think that the Palestinians are armed to the teeth and fighting these great military machines, we can quickly dissuade anyone of such a notion. The bulldozers do not come alone, but
come with army jeeps, tanks and soldiers: the Palestinian men are usually rounded up, handcuffed and are often taken away for questioning or are imprisoned. The women, children and elderly can only watch in numb silence,
and in most cases, are never given any time to save their belongings or to make a plea for consideration.

It is in just one such incident, that Rachel Corrie lost her life trying to save the house of a Palestinian doctor who had welcomed her into the family home. She was wearing a flap-jacket and carried a megaphone and the bulldozer driver could see her on the dirt mound, but he kept coming.
Rachel fell as the earth moved and the bulldozer ran over her fracturing both of her arms, legs and skull. Other peace activists have been killed or injured trying to protect Palestinian children going to school or coming
home or joining in the weekly non-violent protests the Palestinians stage against the Wall that is cutting through their lands and communities.

It is one thing to face the soldiers and quite another to face the illegal settlers. They are a law unto themselves and their children can only be described as brats. They throw stones at Palestinian children trying to go to and from school, they terrorise the elderly in the same way, constantly taunting and jeering and throwing their rubbish into Palestinian backyards. The teenagers carry rifles emulating the adults and think nothing of firing
at Palestinians to drive them out of their homes and farming lands. It is in this lawless environment that internationals come to provide some protection for the Palestinians, although there is really no authority to
whom they can appeal against the settlers.

If the deaths and injuries of internationals is troubling, then the deaths and injuries of the Palestinians themselves is even more so. Since October 2000, the number of Palestinians deaths to date is in excess of 6,000 (a
conservative estimate) with tens of thousands wounded and or suffering from severe trauma. Every week in the peaceful protests against the Israel’s Apartheid Wall, Palestinians and internationals alike suffer from the effects of tear gas inhalation and injuries caused by rubber-coated metal
bullets and their intensity is increasing. Is it any wonder when no one is calling Israel to account. Until that happens, the internationals are needed more than ever while Israel does everything it can to make their stay as precarious as possible. A few days ago that was borne out when Tristan Anderson from the USA was shot in the head by a new high velocity tear gas canister leaving him in a critical condition. Already Israel’s excuses are coming
thick and fast, but perhaps Israel ought to realise that there is no shortage of people wanting to bring some humanity back to the lives of Palestinians and to see justice done – even if that means putting their own lives on the line. It is such acts that renew our faith in humanity when all around us many have forgotten what this means.

(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

The HRP-4C robot has 42 motion motors and several sensors on its body

TSUKUBA, Japan (AFP) — Japanese researchers on Monday showed off a robot that will soon strut her stuff down a Tokyo catwalk.
The girlie-faced humanoid with slightly oversized eyes, a tiny nose and a shoulder length hair-do boasts 42 motion motors programmed to mimic the movements of flesh-and-blood fashion models.
“Hello everybody, I am cybernetic human HRP-4C,” said the futuristic fashionista, opening her media premiere at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology outside Tokyo.
The fashion-bot is 158 centimetres (five foot two inches) tall, the average height of Japanese women aged 19 to 29, but weighs in at a waif-like 43 kilograms (95 pounds) — including batteries.
She has a manga-inspired human face but a silver metallic body.
“If we had made the robot too similar to a real human, it would have been uncanny,” said one of the inventors, humanoid research leader Shuji Kajita.
“We have deliberately leaned toward an anime style.”
The institute said the robot “has been developed mainly for use in the entertainment industry” but is not for sale at the moment.
Hamming it up before photographers and television crews, the seductive cyborg struck poses, flashed bright smiles and pouted sulkily according to commands transmitted wirelessly from journalists via bluetooth devices.
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By Dr. (Ms) Sarojini Sahoo

At last, Mahatma Gandhi’s personal belongings including his iconic round-rimmed spectacles, sandals and pocket watch, the national heritage of India have been returned back to home. The round metal spectacles were a trademark of Gandhi’s persona and are basic to his illustrations to date. A simple line drawing of Gandhi’s face in profile with the glasses, accompanied by his famous quote — “be the change you want to be” — is recognised the world over. His pocket watch attached to a string attracted comment and is noticeable in the early 1930s photographs of Gandhi. The said belongings were subjected to auction sale by Antiquorum Auctioneers. ‘There was a lot of confusions and controversies because the Indian government was trying to get these items.’

Before the auction began, about 40 bidders had registered, from Australia, Germany, Austria, India, Canada and the US, among other countries. In comparison, there were only six registered bidders in October for a watch belonging to Albert Einstein, which sold for almost $600,000.
The above auction proposal was highly criticized by media houses for trying to make money on ‘the altar of Gandhi’s legacy.’ At the last moment, Los Angeles collector James Otis had decided to pull out the auction, but that was ruled out by the auctioneers’ chairman, Robert Maron.
Inside the auction room was a mix between elite Indian-born businessmen and diehard watch collectors. One of the potential bidders was Sant Singh Chatwal, an Indian-American businessman who is close to former president Bill Clinton.

‘I made up my mind to go up to maybe half a million,’ Chatwal, told the Times in a phone interview before the auction. ‘We’ll see how it goes.’
‘Anything when it comes to Gandhi is emotional, sentimental and patriotic when it comes to Indians,’ said Shyan Gulati, chief executive of the Infopeople Corp, an information technology company based on Wall Street. Describing the scene at the auction house as a Who’s Who of New York’s Indian elite, Gulati said: ‘In the last ten years, Indian professionals are doing extremely well all over the world and they’d like to contribute.’

Bidding began at $20,000 and rose to the final price within seven minutes. Finally, Indian liquor tycoon Vijay Mallya is very pleased with his purchase of a set of Mahatma Gandhi’s personal belongings including his iconic round-rimmed spectacles. Liqour tycoon Mr.Mallya expressed his happiness as he could bring the national heritage home. He purchased the items for $1.8 million.

Mahatma Gandhi was known for his anti alcohol propaganda. During India’s independence struggle against Britain, Mohandas K. Gandhi identified the consumption of alcohol as a major social evil and urged a ban on drinking. To respect his anti-alcohol ideas, the Indian Government wrote a section into the Constitution declaring its intention to enforce prohibition.

Vijay Mallya is an Indian businessman and Rajya Sabha MP and the Chairman of the United Breweries Group and Kingfisher Airlines, which draws its name from United Breweries Group’s flagship beer brand, Kingfisher. Mallya took over as Chairman of the United Breweries Group in 1983. Since then, the group has grown into a multi-national conglomerate of over sixty companies with an annual turnover which has increased by 639% to US $11.2 billion in 1998-1999. The focal business areas of the group encompass alcoholic beverages, life sciences, engineering, agriculture, chemicals, information technology, aviation and leisure. He owned McDowell Crest, which took loans in crores [1 crore = 10 million] of rupees from the general public.

In May 2007, United Breweries Group announced the all-cash acquisition of scotch whisky maker Whyte & Mackay for 595 million pounds (approximately 4,819 crore INR). In 2005 he took over Millennium Breweries Ltd (formerly known as inertia industries ltd), which owned the two premium beer brands named SANDPIPER and ZINGARO.

Besides liquor business, Mallya owned Kingfisher Airlines and F1 racing team Force India (earlier Spyker).He sponsors the East Bengal and Mohun Bagan football clubs in Kolkata and also in cricket he ssponsors the Royal Challengers Bangalore team in the Indian Premier League.
It is an irony that Mahatma Gandhi, who was known for his anti alcoholic views, had to depend upon a liquor tycoon to rescue his belongings.

Professor Sarojini Sahoo is an author and a feminist and can be reached at sarojinisahoo2003@yahoo.co.in.

Read her blog
or

visit her website

by Telesur

The president-elect of El Salvador Mauricio Funes, together with his supporters, celebrated the victory in the elections held this Sunday in this Central American country, giving a speech in which he said that with their vote the people had signed “a new accord on peace and reconciliation.”

Shortly after the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) issued its second bulletin that officially confirmed the FMLN’s lead, Funes addressed the nation, congratulating all the citizens who participated in the elections.
“I want to thank all who voted for me, all who defeated fear, all who chose the path of hope,” he said.

Funes added: “Today, the public who believed in hope and defeated fear have triumphed. This is a victory for all the Salvadoran people.”
Funes made a phone call to congratulate the rival party for their work, emphasizing that “ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance) will become the opposition from now on, and in that capacity, rest assured that the party will be respected and heard.”

He invited various social and political groups to build a new welfare state for the people.
“I want to appeal to the other political forces to work toward unity,” Funes said, as he promised to carry out “preferential actions” to benefit the poor rather than the rich, in order to solidify an efficient and competitive economy and a broad business base.
Funes said that, beginning with his inauguration, he will work to make El Salvador “the most dynamic economy in Central America.”
“I want to be the president of social change and reconstruction. It’s time to move forward to the future and leave behind the revenges of the past,” he added.

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By A. G. Noorani

The book on food does a service to an overlooked part of Indian life.

THIS book fills a gaping void in the literature on India’s food and its food culture and does so most admirably. It has excellent colour photographs reproduced with the high standards that Roli Books maintains. There are some 46 recipes, besides. The text does not suffer by comparison. For, its writing, evidently, has been a labour of love to the author.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1965 to parents who escaped the Holocaust, Sephi Bergerson grew up in Israel and served in the army before moving to New York to become a photographer. He returned to Israel in 1989 and opened his own studio in Tel Aviv, rising to become president of the Professional Photographers’ Association. In 2002, he moved to India to pursue the career of a documentary photographer. He lives in New Delhi with his family.

Street food is even more neglected than the humble restaurant which many food columnists ignore. It is disgusting to find write-ups of the latest concoction by the chef of a five-star hotel. It provides a soft story. Hard work is not required. To whom do they cater?

Digging out the restaurant of old, which has served exquisite food for decades, requires probing inquiries, footwork and good taste. This is not inverted snobbery. Ask M.F. Husain and he will tell you the best such joints in Mumbai alone. On the walls of one he has written out his autograph. It is the only survivor of U.P. restaurants which serves authentic nihari – Noor Mohammadi. Not far, at Pydhoni, is a restaurant right outside a mosque whose mincemeat curry its patrons have enjoyed for decades. The quality has remained constant.
Street food is of a different genre, as its very name suggests. But then it need not be off a cart or on the pavement. The cook who is allowed use of a bench or a plank outside a shop gives the same kind of food.

Delhi – not New Delhi – is a heaven for lovers of street food. One of the most distinguished of them was President Zakir Husain. Air travel was rare then. He travelled often by train and particularly relished snacks served on railway platforms.

The author has written an intelligent introduction to the book. It stands out because it has none of the pretences and silly jargon of the arriviste columnist who holds forth on food week after week.

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By Michael Fox

More than six thousand women from Vía Campesina and the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) participated in protests across Brazil on March 9. The direct actions were in celebration of International Women’s Day, and against the government’s continued support of multinational agribusiness in the country.

The protests took place in more than eight Brazilian states. In Brasília, 800 women marched on the Ministry of Agriculture. In the state of Rio Grande do Sul, another 700 occupied a plantation owned by the Votorantim paper pulp corporation. In Espírito Santo, nearly 1,300 women gathered at an export port of the paper pulp company, Aracruz. And in São Paulo, close to 600 women occupied the Cosan plantation, which holds the largest agro-ethanol factory in the world.
The sweep of actions across the country comes less than two months after the MST’s 25th anniversary. “When the MST began, our pinciple enemy was the large landowners,” says Ana Hanauer, spokesperson for the MST in Brazil’s southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul. “Now our principle enemies are the multinational [agribusiness] corporations, which are taking over land that should be used for agrarian reform.”
The international financial crisis has hit Brazil’s industrial agricultural sector hard, causing over 100,000 lost jobs last December alone. The Brazilian government has earmarked $20 billion dollars in investments for the sector over the next three years. But representatives of Vía Campesina complain that the funds and land should be used to promote agrarian reform and small-scale farming, not to bailout big business.

Members of the MST in southern Brazil are particularly upset over government loans that enabled the Votorantim paper pulp company to buy up a significant stake of its failing rival, Aracruz Celulose. The addition of Aracruz gives Votorantim a total of more than one million hectares of land, with what the company says is a productive capacity of 5.8 million tons of pulp a year.

The MST says that mono-cropping eucalyptus for pulp has led to the destruction of natural habitat, resulting in a loss of topsoil, and desertification. The environmental destruction is one reason 700 women occupied Votorantim’s “Ana Paula” plantation in Rio Grande do Sul.

The MST grew out of a struggle for land in this southern state in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Over the last three decades the movement has grown and developed in 24 of Brazil’s 26 states, acquiring 35 million acres of land on which nearly 400,000 MST families are currently settled.

Rio Grande do Sul has remained a frequent site of MST protests, largely due to the group’s long history in the region and the fact that the state still has many large plantations in the hands of an elite few. The movement scored a big victory in the state last December, when it managed to settle 700 families on land that landowners had defended violently for centuries.

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