labi siffre - news into the light

How my cellphone (and I) kill in the Congo

^{Source:  Scott Baldauf at: The Christian Science Monitor}

Given its immense natural resources, the Congo should be one of the richest countries on earth, with an estimated $300 billion worth of timber, gold, diamonds, cobalt, copper, tin, and coltan. Nearly 80 percent of the world's known reserves of coltan – a key metal used in cellphones and video games – come from Congo. Yet instead of a blessing, Congo's riches have become a bane.

The crisis – funded by the world's insatiable need for mineral resources – is not an easy conundrum to solve. US sanctions forbid high-tech companies from buying Congolese coltan, for instance, but sanctions don't affect coltan purchased in neighboring Rwanda. Rwanda is not a coltan-producing country, so its coltan mainly comes from Congo, illegally.

more ...

Bloody feminists - always complaining!

Equal pay for women managers not until 2195, survey suggests

John Carvel, social affairs editor
The Guardian, Friday September 19 2008

Women managers will have to wait 187 years to achieve equal pay with men at current rates of progress towards closing the earnings gap, the Chartered Management Institute said yesterday.

Its annual salary survey showed the average woman in British management earned £32,614 in the 12 months to March, compared with £46,269 for their male counterparts.

The survey of more than 40,000 managers at all grades from trainee to director found women's pay increased by 6.8% over the year, compared with 6.6% for the men. The institute said: "At the current level of annual pay increases, this means it will not be until 2195 before female pay outstrips men." It would take even longer for women to achieve equal pay in the IT sector and, on current trends, female managers at board level in Scotland would not gain parity until 2366.

The highest paid managers were men in London, who averaged £67,256. The lowest paid were women in Wales, who averaged £27,115.

Jo Causon, the institute's marketing director, said: "At least with a glass ceiling it is possible to see through to the next level. However, when it comes to equal pay, it seems that the glass is now opaque. To have to wait several generations is inexcusable and it is time that the lip service of the three decades since sex discrimination was first outlawed is transformed into action."

The survey found the biggest gender pay gap was in the insurance industry, where male managers earned 45.2% more than women. The gap was smallest in the pharmaceutical industry (14.9%).

       

The "Free Market" is free for Bankers

but the rest of us have to pay:

"don’t expect any help. There is bail-out money – borrowed from China – but only for banks, along with golden parachutes for their executives who created this train wreck. The rest of us are on our own".

from "Elders and the Wall Street Mess" @ "Time Goes By"

Oh Yoko

As Dan Leihgeber, a smelter in a Youngstown USA steel plant, says in today's Wall Street Journal, "People don't want to speak out against Obama because of the fear of being seen as racist. It's easier to say you want to keep a woman barefoot and pregnant....You can call a woman anything."

As Yoko Ono rightly said, "Woman is the nigger of the world".

Seems to me not much has changed - So wee men can be more, she must be less. Just what is it with us men? I don't know but I confess, the thought of millions of white American men struggling to choose between sexism and racism is prime time funny and full time tragic - but don't laugh too hard, it's a choice few countries are advanced enough to have to make. Still it makes the gut quiver and the bowels shake.

Afghan Troops Killed in Bus Bomb – Truth Annihilated in Government Response:

At least 31 people have now died after a bomb tore through a bus carrying Afghan soldiers in the country's capital, Kabul. The Taliban said it carried out the attack, and told Al Jazeera it was carried out by a 28-year-old suicide bomber. Hamid Karzai, the president, said: "It was an act of extreme cowardice on the part of those that committed it. The person who did this was against humanity, and against Islam."

We will have to re-write the dictionaries, specifically the definition of “coward” when a 28 year old man is designated a coward because he is so sincere in his religious beliefs that he gives his life, uses himself as a weapon, blows himself up as a suicide bomber in his fight against what he perceives to be the enemy of his God.

Will those fighting the War Against Terror never have courage to admit and accept that people can be, and are, inspired to total sincerity and stupendous acts of courage by philosophy based entirely upon a lie; and that lie is ... that we know God / Allah / Jehovah exists.

Ironically, suicide bombers show themselves to be more sincere and more physically courageous in their misguided beliefs, in this war of religion, than the religious George Bush and Tony Blair and their equally religious followers (at least half of “secular” America and probably the same percentage in “secular” Britain).

The likes of Bush and Blair, and now President Karzai of Afghanistan, do not even have the courage to admit that this is a religious war, a war of religion. They farcically, and conveniently, insist that no suicide bomber, no “terrorist”, could be Islamic, nor even religious, because Islamic people are peaceful. History is indeed, and oh so conveniently, dead.

Apart from America’s understandable but misguided determination to be the behind the scenes controller of the oil rich middle east, this war continues, not because of what divides both sides, but because of what both sides have so much in common: an equally cowardly denial of the dishonesty that lies at the heart of their religious “beliefs”.

The International Sanctions Lottery

World powers delay Iran sanctions action
Friday, 28 Sep 2007 11:59pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The world's major powers agreed on Friday to delay a vote on tougher sanctions on Iran until late November at the earliest, depending on reports by the U.N. nuclear watchdog and a European Union negotiator:

Besides, it would be embarrassing to be employing tougher sanctions against Iran for allegedly attempting to develop a nuclear weapons capability [something that Israel, India and Pakistan (the latter a recruiting, rest and recuperation centre for international terrorism) have been allowed to do with impunity] while the citizens of most democratic countries want tougher action against the brutal dictatorship in Myanmar / Burma.

At the same time, apart from minimally and  laughably inconveniencing a few Myanmar officials planning foreign holidays to America ...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29 The Bush administration, tightening its pressure on Myanmar's military junta, will no longer allow several senior junta officials to enter the United States.

... Japan has ruled out sanctions, it is unlikely that the EU, China, Russia or India will approve sanctions against a trading partner with such oil, gas and timber resources and many  respected advisers lobby against sanctions for practical and humanitarian reasons while suggesting that "giving aid to fight poverty and disease would not be a concession to power - but steps towards democracy and prosperity".

It does strike me as odd that we should give aid to a very rich country whose leaders are interested only in spending the nation's riches on themselves while their people rot. Is there a better way?  Should those who trumpet their religious beliefs ignore the cross-denominational, "am I my brother's keeper" and just let their international brothers and sisters be trampled into the dirt.  It's a simple matter of great complexity and so far the answer seems to be a very narrow definition of the word "brother".

I remember sanctions having some effect against the evil, murderous, brutal, dictatorship (choose your own adjectives) in Apartheid South Africa - but I suspect the active force was the level of embarrassment felt by western business interests named and shamed (by the street level anti-apartheid movement) as traders in Black South African blood.

It appears that the good will of the international community can contribute little more than the usual, "Something must be done" rhetoric while steadfastly doing nothing of substance and continuing "business as usual" with brutal tyrants (unless they happen to be Cuban and internationally powerless or like Saddam Hussein, middle eastern and threatening the USA's Dollar Hegemony Over the Global Oil Market).

I must think more about this. In the meantime, the innocent continue to suffer. What else is new?

Calls for Restraint (not quite as they seem)

China urges restraint on all sides in Myanmar

Regarding national and international conflicts: when the world community call for “both sides to exercise restraint”, it would be more honest if they called for the powerful to exercise much more restraint than the much less powerful or powerless.

Myanmar (Burma) : Israelis - Palestinians : Yes

Good Words From A Bad Man

In UN Speech, Zimbabwe's Mugabe Lashes Into US, Britain

So Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe and semi-international pariah (rightly so) says, at the 62nd UN General Assembly Debate, what most of the world thinks of President George W. Bush but hasn’t had the testicles to say. For the international community to be shown as craven weaklings in this way by a freedom fighter gone bad is shameful.

But don’t worry, the international media will ignore his accurate observations on US and European hypocrisy in regard to Africa. The international media will ignore his accurate observations on US hypocrisy in regard to human rights, international law, Iraq, Afghanistan (implicitly Israel, Iran and Palestine) the UN and it’s treatment of it’s own people.

Instead, if they report his speech at all (while insisting that history is dead and we should "move forward") they will concentrate on his own hypocrisy as regards the shameful treatment of his own people while studiously ignoring the hypocrisy of a much more powerful and dangerous man. As ever, the messenger is considered more important than the message.

Excerpt from Mugabe’s speech at the 62nd UN General Assembly Debate:
“Let Mr. Bush read history correctly. Let him realise that both personally and in his representative capacity as the current President of the United States, he stands for this "civilisation" which occupied, which colonised, which incarcerated, which killed. He has much to atone for and very little to lecture us on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. His hands drip with innocent blood of many nationalities.

He still kills. He kills in Iraq. He kills in Afghanistan. And this is supposed to be our master on human rights?

He imprisons. He imprisons and tortures at Guantanamo. He imprisoned and tortured at Abu Ghraib. He has secret torture chambers in Europe. Yes, he imprisons even here in the United States, with his jails carrying more blacks than his universities can ever enroll. He even suspends the provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Take Guantanamo for example; at that concentration camp international law does not apply. The national laws of the people there do not apply. Laws of the United States of America do not apply. Only Bush's law applies. Can the international community accept being lectured by this man on the provisions of the universal declaration of human rights? Definitely not!

Mr President, We are alarmed that under his leadership, basic rights of his own people and those of the rest of the world have summarily been rolled back. America is primarily responsible for rewriting core tenets of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We seem all guilty for 9/11. Mr. Bush thinks he stands above all structures of governance, whether national or international.

At home, he apparently does not need the Congress. Abroad, he does not need the UN, international law and opinion. This forum did not sanction Blair and Bush's misadventures in Iraq. The two rode roughshod over the UN and international opinion. Almighty Bush is now coming back to the UN for a rescue package because his nose is bloodied! Yet he dares lecture us on tyranny. Indeed, he wants us to praise him! We say No to him and encourage him to get out of Iraq. Indeed he should mend his ways before he clambers up the pulpit to deliver pieties of democracy.”

Full text HERE

Celibate Has Offspring!!

(Parthenogenesis Rules?)

Kate Nash revealed
as a child of Morrissey

More to follow
indubitably

electrically correct

In the land of the free, for being non-violent but irritating verbally, the police  taser a guy. By that standard, being "fair & balanced", they should taser George W. Bush every time he opens his mouth to protest that the US intervention in Iraq is a success.

The Daily Daily

Here is the news: there is none.
The undiscovered country is the same
as the discovered one

News is new but on this planet here
we slop the same beans minute
after hour after day after
month after year

The World Today (1)

In America a speaker Reignites Violence > Federal Agencies advise Americans not to speak
*
In Sierra Leone, mortgage woes 'exceed forecasts' > Government bans forecasts > Forecasts march in non-violent protest > "Protest" the new fragrance from Laurie Elle withdrawn after line dancing GOP moderates sync the definition of "demonstration"
*
Iranian officer 'seized in Iraq' > US claims fall in Baghdad attacks > "Baghdad a tax on US" claims Iranian officer (he smiley face that).
*
USA over > France approves > Cyber bullies share Arctic seabed > Polar Bear alliance fails to ignite human response
*
Alcohol tragedy kills 22 as Euro hits Burma > Afghan convoy hits China > dollar hits business > Cancer age link hits Suicide bombers > Nigerian MPs brawl over speaker > Speaker crushed and (advised not to speak) feels almost American.
*
In line with a Condoleezza Rice peace initiative > Five dead “To avoid violence” > our politicians, patriots all, would never do anything to harm America > Bumper Sticker Populaire: "To die for a politician is to die for your country" .
*
UN diplomats advised, Pakistan 'belongs to Russia’.

Madeleine McCann - who done it?

from the BBC:
The parents of missing Madeleine McCann are consulting UK lawyers after returning from Portugal:

From the beginning, my gut feeling has been that the parents did whatever was done that resulted in the disappearance of their daughter Madeleine.

1) The family is the primary suspect in such cases.
2) The parents public persona has been, from the beginning, disturbingly cold and detached. It is primarily this that has made me suspect them. I feel there is something seriously wrong with their attitude and behaviour.

So, my gut feeling is that the parents did it. But, I am experienced enough to know that my gut feelings can be Wrong. In this case I hope they are.

Playing the Game

From: Security Focus
China on hot seat over alleged hacks
Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus 2007-09-04

Fresh allegations surfaced on Monday that China's military has hacked other nation's networks to nab sensitive data, charges that the country denied for the second time in two weeks.

Mid indignant accusations by the USA, Germany and the UK that China has hacked into those nations military computers, I can only hope that the general public's response is:

1) The responsibility for the breach is firmly with the USA, Germany and the UK for not having stronger cyber-defense and
2) The USA, Germany and the UK  should have similarly hacked into the Chinese system and if not ... why not?

I'm probably reacting to this story in an old fashioned, negative, dinosaur manner. Perhaps we should be positive and rely on that long established, good old international sense of fair play. Hmmn?

A Step Too Far For Solidarity?

from the BBC: Israeli 'neo-Nazi gang' arrested
Israeli police say they have broken up a gang of neo-Nazis who are accused of carrying out attacks on foreigners, gay people and religious Jews.

The eight suspects, aged 16-21, are all Israeli citizens from the former Soviet Union. They were arrested a month ago, but the news only emerged on Saturday. Police say searches of their homes yielded Nazi uniforms, portraits of Adolf Hitler, knives, guns and TNT.

I wonder, as neo-Nazis are targeting homosexuals, jews, immigrants and drug addicts - could homosexuals, jews, immigrants and drug addicts form an alliance in opposition to Neo-nazis? On the other hand, I could be completely out of my head.

At the same time, considering the global regard in which homosexuals, jews, immigrants and drug addicts are held, perhaps the Neo-Nazis could form an alliance with the Vatican, Islam, US evangelicals and ... well, make up your own list. I have some Ginger buscuits in need of munching.

The GOP Senator, sex, and the (over eager?) cop

Is US Senator, Larry E. Craig, left handed or right handed? That simple anatomical “choice” or “preference” (to use republican-speak) is certainly relevant in the case of this heterosexist, republican senator arrested in a men’s room on June 11th at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in an undercover sex sting.

According to the report filed by the arresting officer:
“From my position I could observe the shoes and ankles of Craig seated to the left of me.”
“Craig … moved his right foot so that is touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.”
“I saw Craig swipe his hands under the stall divider for a few seconds.”
“I was only able to see the tips of his fingers on my side of the stall divider.”
“Craig then swiped his hand in the same motion a third time for a few seconds. I could see that it was Craig's left hand due to the position of his thumb. I could also see Craig had a gold ring on his ring finger as his hand was on my side of the stall divider.”

And in the unedited transcript of an interview between the arresting police officer Sgt. Dave Karsnia and police Detective Noel Nelson with Sen. Larry Craig:

DK: And I know it's hard to describe here on tape but actually what I saw was your fingers come underneath the stalls, you're actually ta touching the bottom of the stall divider.
LC: I don't recall that.
DK: You don't recall
LC: I don't believe I did that. I don't.
DK: I saw, I saw
LC: I don't do those things.
DK: I saw your left hand and I could see the gold wedding ring when it when it went across. I could see that. On your left hand, I could see that.
LC: Wait a moment, my left hand was over here.
DK: I saw there's a...
LC: My right hand was next to you.
DK: I could tell it with my ah, I could tell it was your left hand because your thumb was positioned in a faceward motion. Your thumb was on this side, not on this side.
LC: Well, we can dispute that. I'm not going to fight you in court and I, I reached down with my right hand to pick up the paper.
DK: But I'm telling you that I could see that so I know that's your left hand. Also I could see a gold ring on this finger, so that's obvious it was the left hand.
LC: Yeah, okay. My left hand was in the direct opposite of the stall from you.

So, is Senator Craig left handed or right handed? Or (if seated on the toilet) is he a contortionist? Or was he on his hands and knees? In which case, both hands (one palm down on the floor, one waving under the stall divider) would have been visible to the police officer though the officer did not mention this. Or was he kneeling and supporting himself with his right hand against the stall divider, in which case he could have got his forearm under the divider rather than just his fingers and his knees rather than his feet would have been visible.

If he remained seated, did Senator Craig swivel to the right on the toilet in order to reach down with his left hand and signal under the stall divider; in which case his feet would have moved to the right, his shoes still visible to the officer (though the officer did not mention swivelling feet in his otherwise detailed report).

The natural thing for someone in Craig’s position, relative to the police officer in the stall on his right, would have been to reach under the stall divider on his right with his right hand, not with his left hand (the hand with the wedding ring) as the police officer maintains.

Perry Mason where are you? I think your skills are needed here.

Let me add that I wouldn’t even piss on a republican if he or she was on fire, but there seems to be something not right about this arrest. Regardless of his politics and heterosexist attitudes, I am not convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Senator Larry Craig is guilty.

Sources:
Full transcript of Craig’s police interview HERE
The report (titled “Lewd Conduct”) filed by airport police HERE