SURINAME: The Wrath of “BOSS” and State-Enemies

Posted on | mei 14, 2012 | No Comments

fayalobi.jpg (389×384) The irony of history is its prophetic quality, its repetitiveness, a characteristic often forgotten, ignored by those who want to bury their not so squeaky clean past. Let me explain the aforementioned position by placing it against the backdrop of the Surinamese contemporary, before continuing my argumentation. After the presidential elections in Suriname in the summer of 2010, many people felt that the new president deserved a chance, that his intents to forge change Obama style were sincere. The boyish, ‘waka-man’ stirred the emotions of people, because his language that diametrically opposed that of the incumbency, who struggled to find the right tone during the campaign. People continued to give the Bouterse administration the benefit of the doubt, even after the first signs of bad governance, self-aggrandizing and corruption came to light. For example many people were repulsed by the fact that the President through special provision awarded his wife, the First Lady a substantial salary for ‘merely’ standing behind her man, they however did not voice their discontent.
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Politician’s disappearance fuels Bangladesh crisis

Posted on | mei 14, 2012 | No Comments

The night watchman was dozing in a wooden chair just after midnight on a deserted Bangladeshi street when he was startled by a scream. A group of men were pulling two people from a car and forcing them into a black microbus; “The two guys were shouting, ‘Save us,’” before the car pulled away, Lutfar Rahman said.

The abductions of an opposition politician and his driver last month have sparked Bangladesh’s biggest crisis in years, raised hostilities between the most prominent leaders of its fragile democracy and highlighted a series of seemingly political disappearances.

The opposition has blamed the government, launched nationwide strikes and fought with police in street clashes that have killed five people and injured scores. Homemade bombs have exploded on the streets of Dhaka, including one inside a compound housing government ministries. The government has charged 44 top opposition leaders in connection with the violence.
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Category: energy, South Asia
Tags: Bangladesh > Fuel > Lutfar Rahman > Parliament

The MOD sit-in: Sometimes with the Islamists, Never with the State…

Posted on | mei 14, 2012 | No Comments

During the Monday march in solidarity with the Abbassiya detainees, a young comrade I know from Cairo University, a medical student who was among the field hospital doctors during the MOD sit-in, approached me, and told me the story of a Salafi woman in niqab, who kept on kissing the Revolutionary Socialists red flag during the sit-in, while shouting: “Forgive me I didn’t know about you before!”

I replied back with the story of another comrade, who was entering the MOD sit-in and was being searched by a Salafi sheikh. When the latter found in the student’s bag the flag of the Revolutionary Socialists, Marxist books, as well as issues from The Socialist newspaper, he told the young student: “Come in son, May God be with you!”
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Category: Northern Africa, revolt
Tags: Egypt > MOD > Muslim Brotherhood > revolutionary > SCAF > socialist > tortured

Geoengineering Policies and Africa

Posted on | mei 13, 2012 | No Comments

As current weather patterns around the world increasingly get shifty and links with global warming is established, pursuing geoengineering as a means to stop or reduce global warming will remain. Geoengineering (or climate remediation) describes an array of technologies that aim, through large-scale and deliberate modifications of Earth’s energy balance, to reduce temperatures and counteract anthropogenic climate change.

Geoengineering is mostly considered as a come-before solution to climate change while the world hale to the ‘most appropriate’ time to adopt a deal to curb Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Geoengineering and some of its methods are still developing, but are also considered at the same / reduced level with policy and governance issue surrounding it.

There are so many questions around geoengineering that require convincing answers before it can court further support and there are also issue about governance that needs to be clear before the first ever major deployment, if any will come, now or in future.
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Category: environment, Sub-Saharan Africa
Tags: climate > climate remediation > Geoengineering > GHG > Green House Gas

Palestinian, Dutch groups tell The Hague: don’t give contract to Israel settlement profiteer Veolia

Posted on | mei 13, 2012 | No Comments

Veolia subsidiary Connex operates bus lines to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank (Photo: Anne Paq/ActiveStills)

Dutch and Palestinian human rights organizations are calling for the Dutch regional administrative council of Haaglanden — whose major city is The Hague — to exclude Veolia Transport from bidding for a bus contract, because of the firm’s role in projects that strengthen Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank such as the Jerusalem Light Rail and the Tovlan landfill.

Call on Haaglanden to end its business with Veolia
Dutch rights organizations A Different Jewish Voice and United Civilians for Peace (UCP) sent a joint letter, a fact file and a legal opinion to Haaglanden about Veolia’s activities in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. The organizations argued that Veolia should be excluded from the public tender, and that under no circumstances should it be awarded the contract to operate the public transport in Haaglanden. Yet so far, Haaglanden officials are refusing to change their policy, claiming that the information presented to them is “one-sided.”
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