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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

6 Jan - Late News

Guardian
South America: Media has become a political battleground
From Argentina to Venezuela, governments have identified the media as a political obstacle
Television networks, radio stations and newspapers have become political battlegrounds pitting media owners and journalists against governments in South America. 

Charismatic presidents in the Andean states, and in Argentina, have identified the media as a principal obstacle to their efforts to transform the region.
The subjects of clashes range from Caribbean slums, where journalists are accused of exaggerating crime, to icy Patagonian resorts, where they are accused of confecting corruption scandals.
[URL=http://www.closingbigger.net/2009/09/social-media-south-america-latin-america/South America's media war started, and remains most intense, in Venezuela. When Hugo Chávez swept to power a decade ago, promising to oust discredited elites, the media feted him. But they turned with a vengeance and backed a coup that briefly ousted him in 2002.

Chávez struck back: he expanded the state's media empire and cowed private broadcasters. This year he shut dozens of radio stations and said Globovisión, the last critical TV voice, would follow. It promoted his assassination, he said, and hyped murder rates in the slums.

Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, described the media as his "greatest enemy"and denounced journalists as "corrupt, mediocre, shameless". He sent police to seize two TV stations in a debt dispute and promised to shake up the awarding of radio and television frequencies.

Colombia ostensibly has a free press despite insurgencies by narco-trafficking leftist guerrillas. But big private media groups are controlled by a few rich families and muffle criticism of President Álvaro Uribe, an ally of the US.

In Argentina, President Cristina Kirchner won a bitter battle against Grupo Clarín, one of Latin America's biggest media conglomerates, by opening the airwaves to new players. Clarín,which also lost its contract to broadcast championship football, said the president was punishing critical news coverage, including stories about the first couple's alleged dodgy land deals in Patagonia. Analysts said Kirchner had a political agenda but that broadcast reform was overdue.


BBC
How Iran's opposition inverts old slogans
Iranians are marking University Student Day, traditionally an anti-US event
that commemorates the killing of three students in 1953. Opposition
supporters are expected to try to hijack official protests by chanting their
own anti-government slogans.
Olivia Cornes navigates some of the opposition chants heard in Iran
since June's disputed presidential elections, with the help of
BBCPersian.com and protesters themselves.

Iran faces 'significant new sanctions', US warns
Iran is already subject to UN sanctions over its nuclear programme, which the West suspects is for military purposes. ( More GWoT - think : suspicion is grounds for warlike activities. )




Iranian scientist 'held by US'

Iran has accused the US of abducting one of its nuclear scientists who has been missing since June.




Iran 'bars co-operation with foreign groups'


Iran has banned its citizens from co-operating with foreign organisations it says are trying to destabilise the government, state media has reported.The 60 blacklisted groups include human rights groups, Iranian opposition websites and media groups such as the BBC and US broadcasters.

Iran's deputy intelligence minister told Press TV the groups were involved in a "soft war" against the state.

Obama condemns Iran's 'iron fist'

US President Barack Obama has condemned the Iranian government's attempts to quell recent protests, in which eight people have been killed.



Egypt police clash with Gaza aid convoy activists

More than 50 people have been hurt in clashes between Egyptian police and pro-Palestinian activists seeking to take a convoy of supplies to Gaza.
The activists want all the goods to be sent via Egypt's Rafah crossing.


Some 520 people are travelling with the convoy. Reports suggest about 40 of them and 15 Egyptian police were injured in the clashes.
Reuters news agency quoted a security source saying that the police had used water cannon to force the activists to leave Al Arish harbour after they had occupied it in protest.
Mr Galloway, the sole MP for the Respect party in the British parliament, told Reuters: "It is completely unconscionable that 25% of our convoy should go to Israel and never arrive in Gaza."
The convoy of nearly 200 trucks is carrying food and other relief supplies for Palestinians in Gaza.



The Iron Wall by Uri Avnery



SOMETHING ODD, almost bizarre, is going on in Egypt these days.

About 1400 activists from all over the world gathered there on their way to the Gaza Strip. On the anniversary of the “Cast Lead” War, they intended to participate in a non-violent demonstration against the ongoing blockade, which makes the life of 1.5 million inhabitants of the Strip intolerable.
At the same time, protest demonstrations were to take place in many countries. In Tel-Aviv, too, a big protest was planned. The “monitoring committee” of the Arab citizens of Israel was to organize an event on the Gaza border.
When the international activists arrived in Egypt, a surprise awaited them. The Egyptian government forbade their trip to Gaza. Their buses were held up at the outskirts of Cairo and turned back. Individual protesters who succeeded in reaching the Sinai in regular buses were taken off them. The Egyptian security forces conducted a regular hunt for the activists.
The angry activists besieged their embassies in Cairo. On the street in front of the French embassy, a tent camp sprang up which was soon surrounded by the Egyptian police. American protesters gathered in front of their embassy and demanded to see the ambassador. Several protesters who are over 70 years old started a hunger strike. Everywhere, the protesters were held up by Egyptian elite units in full riot gear, while red water cannon trucks were lurking in the background. Protesters who tried to assemble in Cairo’s central Tahrir (liberation) Square were mishandled.
In the end, after a meeting with the wife of the president, a typical Egyptian solution was found: one hundred activists were allowed to reach Gaza. The rest remained in Cairo, bewildered and frustrated.
WHILE THE demonstrators were cooling their heels in the Egyptian capital and trying to find ways to vent their anger, Binyamin Netanyahu was received in the president’s palace in the heart of the city. His hosts went to great lengths to laud and celebrate his contribution to peace, especially the ‘freeze” of settlement activity in the West Bank, a phony gesture that does not include East Jerusalem.
Hosni Mubarak and Netanyahu have met in the past – but not in Cairo. The Egyptian president always insisted that the meetings take place in Sharm-al-Sheikh, as far from the Egyptian population centers as possible. The invitation to Cairo was, therefore, a significant token of increasingly close relations.

As a special gift for Netanyahu, Mubarak agreed to allow hundreds of Israelis to come to Egypt and pray at the grave of Rabbi Yaakov Abu-Hatzeira, who died and was buried in the Egyptian town of Damanhur 130 years ago, on his way from Morocco to the Holy Land.

There is something symbolic about this: the blocking of the pro-Palestinian protesters on their way to Gaza at the same time as the invitation of Israelis to Damanhur.


Bulgaria journalist Boris Tsankov gunned down in Sofia


Boris "Bobbie" Tsankov, a prominent crime journalist who reported on the mafia in Bulgaria, has been killed by gunmen in the capital, Sofia.In 2008, Georgi Stoev, the author of several books on Bulgarian organised crime, was killed in a similar attack.



Somali militants force WFP to halt aid work


The WFP says the suspension is its biggest shut-down in years and will affect about one million people.
The al-Shabab militant group has repeatedly threatened the WFP - who it accuses of ruining local farming by forcing Somalis to rely on imports.
The transitional government, helped by an African Union peacekeeping force, runs only parts of Mogadishu.




Piracy symptom of bigger problem




Somalia is one of the poorest, most violent, least stable countries anywhere on Earth.


It suffers from severe drought and its people face hunger and violence on a daily basis. This is not a new situation,

People who have been forgotten by the world and who hear of toxic waste being dumped on their beaches and foreigners stealing their fish have difficulty being concerned when representatives of that world are held to ransom.


And for many who have grown up surrounded by constant insecurity and bloodshed, violence and the risk of death are unexceptional hazards.
For this reason the current attempts to fight piracy from the sea are only dealing with symptoms. They do not address the reasons why young men are prepared to risk their lives chasing ships around the ocean.  





Piracy is in essence a law and order issue, and in Somalia there is virtually no authority to carry out the kind of policing that could effectively disrupt pirate operations.






What government there is in Somalia has bigger problems.




Boats laden with desperate refugees fleeing the war in Somalia leave almost daily, heading towards Yemen.








The closure of three embassies in Yemen followed local security forces losing track of six trucks full of arms and explosives, say reports from Yemen.






France announced its mission in the capital Sanaa was shut on Monday, a day after the US and UK closed theirs.
 Many acts of violence are not "understandable" in any context, save that of our bestial desire to dominate others in one form or another.






the dispensing culture comes to countenance an ever-widening array of violent acts as worthy, necessary, laudable, even honorable.







 I grew up in a culture that exalted certain forms of violence as cardinal virtues. 
The dispensing culture comes to countenance an ever-widening array of violent acts as worthy, necessary, laudable, even honorable.
Each such act perpetuates the cycle of violence, the horrific dynamic of blowback: a self-perpetuating feedback loop that uses itself to engender more violence, in new and expanding forms. We are living today in the midst of a particularly virulent form of this dynamic, the so-called "War on Terror," which I think has been designed -- more or less deliberately so, although the obscene ignorance and arrogance of the powerful have also played their fateful part in unwittingly exacerbating these evils -- to rage on without chronological end, without geographical, limits, and without any moral, social, legal or financial restraints. In his book 
X Films (reviewed here), Alex Cox uses an apt term borrowed from systems analysis -- POSIWID: The Purpose of a System is What It Does.

The Terror War is not an event, or a campaign, or even a crusade; it is a 
system. Its purpose is not to eliminate "terrorism" (however this infinitely elastic term is defined) but to perpetuate itself, to do what it does: make war. This system can be immensely rewarding, in many different ways, for those who operate or assist it, whether in government, media, academia, or business. This too is a self-sustaining dynamic, a feedback loop that gives money, power and attention to those who serve the system; this elevated position then allows them to accrue even more money, power and attention, until in the end -- as we can plainly see today -- any alternative voices and viewpoints are relegated to the margins. They are "unserious." They are unimportant. They are not allowed to penetrate or alter the operations of the system.



Under a new law, France is to become the first country in the world to ban ' psychological violence' within marriage.

The law would apply to cohabiting couples and to both men and women.
( What about the psychological damage to  a society interfering with private affairs to such an extent that personal relationships are overseen by busybodies ? That's Police State legislation banning demonstrations short of violence! )








Many acts of violence are not "understandable" in any context, save that of our bestial desire to dominate others in one form or another.














January 1 will usher in the last year of the first decade of a new millennium and ten consecutive years of the United States conducting war in the Greater Middle East.



Beginning with the October 7, 2001 missile and bomb attacks on Afghanistan, American combat operations abroad have not ceased for a year, a month, a week or a day in the 21st century.














Within the United Nations mission in Kabul, cumulative blows to morale have caused a disastrous drain on one of the few reservoirs of Afghan expertise available to the international community.



Bitter infighting between the UN Special Representative Kai Eide and his American deputy Peter Galbraith led to a raft of resignations within the mission. An attack in Kabul which killed six UN staff last month compounded that despondency.
One staffer said that 70 per cent of the mission's political experts have now left or are trying find work on other UN missions. Mr Eide has announced that he will leave in March








Simon Fraser University professor Alexander Moens warns in a new paper published by the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute that Canada and its NATO allies face an “existentialist threat”.















 the “existentialist” threat facing NATO members comes from “a fanatical ideology that is willing to use all levels of armed violence to make its points.” This ideology endangers “the values of [NATO's] members, including the rule of law, individual freedom, freedom of religion, and respect for human rights.”




















Kenya 'deports Muslim hate cleric Abdullah al-Faisal'








Solomons quake and tsunami 'leave 1,000 homeless'

Nasa's Kepler planet-hunter detects five worlds


Scientists say dolphins should be treated as 'non-human persons'

( That's a low bar indeed. )
“The neuroanatomy suggests psychological continuity between humans and dolphins and has profound implications for the ethics of human-dolphin interactions,”














Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, showed that bottlenose dolphins could recognise themselves in a mirror and use it to inspect various parts of their bodies, an ability that had been thought limited to humans and great apes.








In another, she found that captive animals also had the ability to learn a rudimentary symbol-based language.



Other research has shown dolphins can solve difficult problems, while those living in the wild co-operate in ways that imply complex social structures and a high level of emotional sophistication.
In one recent case, a dolphin rescued from the wild was taught to tail-walk while recuperating for three weeks in a dolphinarium in Australia.
After she was released, scientists were astonished to see the trick spreading among wild dolphins who had learnt it from the former captive.


Hundreds of geometric monuments unearthed deep in the Amazon may have been left behind by a previously unknown society, say scientists.

Archaeologists have found more than 200 earthworks shaped as perfect circles and squares, many connected by straight roads. They have dated one site to 1283AD but say others could be from as early as 200AD.



Large Oil Spill Reported in China

heavily polluted a tributary of the Yellow River, and threatens to reach one of the country’s longest and most important sources of water.







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