You know...

there's so much trouble in the world. and yet, there is so much good. it's hard to reconcile. since graduating, i've been really fortunate in getting to explore the kind of work that interests me. i've learned a lot, earned some, and have had the space to really think about who i am, what i want and why i'm choosing to travel this path. it's been a gift.

and now, strangely, all this movement is happening after such a long lull. there are issues that are causing me to be unable to sit back and await the outcome without making some sort of statement. work that i am doing that is pulling me to more work. crises in the world that require attention and action. that require me to wake up and live.

1/10/09

Israel tells Gazans to brace for war escalation

By IBRAHIM BARZAK and CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA, Associated Press Writers


GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Israel dropped bombs and leaflets on Gaza Saturday, pounding suspected rocket sites and tunnels used by Hamas militants and warning of a wider offensive despite frantic diplomacy to end the bloodshed.

Egypt hosted talks aimed at defusing the crisis, but war had the momentum on a bloody day on which more than 30 Palestinians, many of them noncombatants, were killed.

At hospitals, distraught relatives — men in jeans and jackets and women in black Islamic robes — sobbed and shrieked at the loss of family. Flames and smoke rose over Gaza City amid heavy fighting.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas predicted a "waterfall of blood" unless all parties adhere to a U.N. call for a cease-fire. But Israel has said the Security Council resolution passed Thursday was unworkable, and Hamas, the Islamic group whose government controls Gaza but is not recognized internationally, was angry that it was not consulted.

A top Hamas leader said the Gaza war has killed the last chance for settlement and negotiations with Israel.

Damascus-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal condemned Israel's attack on the Gaza Strip as a "holocaust" in a fiery speech broadcast on the Arabic news channel Al-Jazeera. Still, Hamas teams were in Cairo to negotiate over an Egyptian-proposed cease-fire.

At least 814 Palestinians, roughly half of them civilians, have died since war broke out on Dec. 27, according to Palestinian medical officials. Thirteen Israelis, including 10 soldiers, have been killed.

Weary Palestinians watched from apartment windows as thousands of leaflets fluttered from aircraft with a blunt warning: Israeli forces will step up operations against Islamic militants who have unleashed a daily barrage of rocket fire on southern Israeli towns.

"The IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) is not working against the people of Gaza but against Hamas and the terrorists only," the leaflets said in Arabic. "Stay safe by following our orders."

The leaflets urged Gaza residents not to help Hamas and to stay away from its members. There was no immediate sign of an escalation, though earlier in the day, witnesses said Israeli troops moved to within one mile of Gaza City before pulling back slightly.

Israeli defense officials say they are prepared for a third stage of their offensive, in which ground troops would push further into Gaza, but are waiting for approval from the government.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were discussing classified information, said the army also has a fourth stage planned that calls for a full reoccupation of Gaza and toppling of Hamas.

The leaflets reflected Israeli efforts to cast Hamas as the source of the conflict that has brought additional misery to Gaza's 1.4 million people, who live in poverty in the densely inhabited shard of land along the Mediterranean. Israel hopes the suffering will erode support for Hamas, which won 2006 elections and engineered a violent takeover of Gaza in June 2007, overrunning the forces of its Palestinian rival Fatah.

For now, though, the fury of the Israeli onslaught has deepened bitterness toward Israel among trapped Gaza residents. Traffic through border crossings with Egypt and Israel is heavily restricted, and many Gazans survive on international handouts or goods smuggled through tunnels that are also used by Hamas to bring in weapons.

Israel launched the offensive on Dec. 27 after years of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, and has attributed many civilian casualties in the past two weeks to Hamas's alleged use of civilian areas as hiding places and staging grounds for attacks.

On Jan. 3, Israeli ground troops moved into Gaza, but they have largely avoided deployment in built-up areas where they would be more vulnerable to hit-and-run assaults. Israel holds elections in one month, and its leaders know staunch support for the military campaign could dwindle if the forces take heavy casualties.

Hamas fighters launched 15 rockets at southern Israel in a daily ritual that has severely disrupted life for hundreds of thousands of civilians. Three Israelis were injured in the city of Ashkelon.

The Israeli military said aircraft attacked more than 40 Hamas targets including 10 rocket-launching sites, weapons-storage facilities, smuggling tunnels, an anti-aircraft missile launcher and gunmen. At least 15 militants were killed, it said.

In the day's bloodiest incident, an Israeli tank shell killed nine people in a garden outside a home in the northern Gaza town of Jebaliya, said Adham el-Hakim, administrator of Kamal Adwan hospital. The nine were from the same clan and included two children and two women.

The Israeli military, however, said its forces did not carry out attacks in that area on Saturday.

Struggling to keep peace efforts alive, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Abbas urged Israel and Hamas to agree to a truce.

After meeting Mubarak, Abbas warned there was no time to waste in ending the bloodshed in Gaza.

"If any party does not accept it (the truce), regrettably it will be the one bearing the responsibility. And if Israel doesn't want to accept, it will take the responsibility of perpetuating a waterfall of blood," Abbas said.

Hamas and Abbas's Fatah party, which dominates the West Bank, are fierce political rivals.

Hamas officials from both Gaza and Syria are also in Cairo for separate talks with Egyptian officials on a truce. Israeli officials were in Cairo earlier this week.

U.S. President George W. Bush spoke by telephone to President Abdullah Gul of Turkey, which is involved in Mideast peace efforts, about the situation in Gaza, said a spokesman for the National Security Council in Washington.

"President Bush emphasized the importance of bringing an end to rocket fire against Israel and preventing arms smuggling into Gaza as the basis for a durable cease-fire," spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, on a peace mission to the region, visited the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt and saw a fireball from a large detonation in Gaza. He felt the pressure from the blast, which caused windows to rattle.

"We are standing here while the fighting is still on back there," said Steinmeier, who later traveled to Israel. "It is right and correct to be concerned about the injured and the dead, but the European foreign ministers must do more so that words can be turned into deeds."

The United Nations estimates two-thirds of Gaza's 1.4 million people now lack electricity, and half don't have running water.

The Israeli military announced a three-hour halt to operations in Gaza on Saturday to let medics use the lull to rescue casualties and aid groups to rush through food distribution.

But for the second straight day, fighting continued even during the lull.

Israel has called for the three-hour breaks in fighting for the past four days. But aid groups say it isn't enough time to do their work.

All deliveries were coming from supplies already in Gaza. U.N. officials said a halt on aid shipments into Gaza through Israeli-controlled border crossings remained in effect.

The ban was imposed Thursday after the U.N. said two of its contractors in a truck were shot and killed by Israel. The Israeli military said Saturday that its own investigation concluded that its soldiers were not involved.

Also Saturday, tens of thousands of people demonstrated in European cities and Lebanon, shouting protests against the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

___

Barzak reported from Gaza City and Torchia from Jerusalem. Associated Press writer Frieder Reimold contributed to this report from Rafah at the Gaza-Egyptian border.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090110/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians

Shock at Senegal gay jail terms

A man walks past a giant Aids symbol at a conference on Aids and sexually transmitted infections in Africa in Senegal in December 2008
The men belonged to a group set up to fight HIV and Aids

The jailing in Senegal of nine gay men for eight years over "indecent conduct and unnatural acts" has been condemned by an international gay rights group.

Homosexual acts are illegal in Senegal but the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) told the BBC it was "shocked by the ruling".

The judge added three years to a five-year sentence, saying the men were also members of a criminal group.

Most of them belonged to an association set up to fight HIV and Aids.

"This is the first time that the Senegalese legal system has handed down such a harsh sentence against gays," said Issa Diop, one of the men's four defence lawyers.


The extremity of this sentence [and] the rapidness of the trial all really shocks us in a country which has been moving so positively towards rule of law
IGLHRC's Cary Alan Johnson

Mr Diop said he would be appealing against the sentences.

The IGLHRC's Cary Alan Johnson said he was "deeply disturbed" by the case.

"There have been pretty consistent human rights violations… in Senegal," he told the BBC's Network Africa programme from Cape Town in South Africa.

"But the extremity of this sentence [and] the rapidness of the trial all really shocks us in a country which has been moving so positively towards rule of law and a progressive human rights regime."

'Schizophrenic'

The head of a gay rights organisation in Senegal told AFP news agency that the situation for gay people in the country was getting worse.

"Many gays are already fleeing to neighbouring countries because of our living conditions," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Senegal is a predominantly Muslim country and gay men and women remain socially marginalised.

Mr Alan Johnson said Senegal was "schizophrenic" in its attitudes.

Religious attacks on gay and lesbian people were on the increase, he said.

While Senegal recently played host to a major conference on Aids and sexually transmitted diseases, where "the needs of men who have sex with men were prominently featured", he said.

"There's both a movement towards progressive and inclusive culture but at the same time very, very strong movements towards oppression, specifically towards sexuality," he added.

In February 2008, a magazine editor received death threats after publishing pictures claiming to depict a wedding ceremony between two men.

Several men were also arrested in connection with the publication but later released.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7817100.stm

everywhere is fucked.

http://www.ktvu.com/video/18406962/index.html

Law enforcement officials urged patience while they investigated details surrounding the fatal New Year’s Day shooting of a 22-year-old man by a transit agency police officer.

Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Chief Gary Gee said on Sunday that the agency is “committed to completing an unbiased, thorough and detailed investigation” of the shooting death of Oscar Grant.

“This case is not even four days cold. We’re in the early stages of the investigation and we will do a very thorough job,” he said.

Several unanswered questions remained after BART officers went to Oakland’s Fruitvale station to investigate reports of a supposed brawl on a train on which Grant was riding around 2 a.m. Thursday.

A friend of Grant’s who was with him on the crowded Oakland train station platform at the time of the shooting said Grant pleaded with officers not to harm him.

“Oscar yelled, ‘You shot me! I got a four-year-old daughter,”‘ said Fernando Anicete. “Oscar was telling us to calm down and we did. We weren’t looking for any trouble.”

Anicete was among more than 50 people attending a tearful news conference in Oakland on Sunday where Grant’s family announced they planned to file a $25 million claim against the Bay Area Rapid Transit agency this week. A claim is the first step in the process of suing the agency.

The family’s attorney John Burris said the shooting was intentional, and that he planned to ask Alameda County prosecutors to seek criminal charges against the officer. Burris said Grant, of Hayward, Calif., posed no threat to officers when a bullet entered his back and ricocheted to his lung area, killing him almost instantly.

and on the matter of Somalian piracy... (big surprise here).

You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
Johann Hari
Columnist, London Independent
Posted January 4, 2009 | 08:53 PM (EST)



Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy - backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China - is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell -- and some justice on their side.


Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy" - from 1650 to 1730 - the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then - plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry - you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.


Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains - and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly - and subversively - that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.


The words of one pirate from that lost age - a young British man called William Scott - should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia - in the Horn of Africa - collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since - and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.


Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention.
"

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters.
"

This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a 'tax' on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.


No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking - and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them.
Is this so different?

Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes - but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause - our crimes - before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia's criminals.


The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.
" Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today - but who is the robber?


Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper. To read more of his articles, click here. or here.


POSTSCRIPT: Some commenters seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place - wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be - without any coastguard or army - to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places - but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html

occupation is a crime

This is a report from Rachel Maddow's show. It gives a good visual perspective of the conflict and the immense injustice of it all.

It's worth taking a look.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

We need to take strong action to show our disapproval of the Israeli actions! Not everyone wants to, or can, protest in the streets, but we can all unite to boycott products and send an economic message (which, sadly, seems to be the only kind that is heard). Just like divestment in apartheid South Africa, we should stop economically supporting this regime. If the U.S. government insists on sending millions or billions of dollars in aid and weaponry, let us stop purchasing products that support Israel.


Here is a website that can tell you what products to boycott:
http://www.inminds.co.uk/boycott-israel.php

And here is an example from Canada, where an academic union is looking at banning professionals that support the Israeli offensive:
http://news.sympatico.msn.ctv.ca/abc/home/contentposting.aspx?isfa=1&feedname=CTV-TOPSTORIES_V3&showbyline=True&date=true&newsitemid=CTVNews%2f20090105%2fcupe_israeli_090105

I hope Obama speaks out on this, as Bush's position in defense of Israel has been made clear.

cultivating beauty

now that i am nearing the end, i can see goodwill in people again; i can make conversations; i can smile with strangers. being so caught up in the production of material for critical review created such a narrowing of my perspective that i could no longer really see or feel beauty. i am happy and relieved that that is changing- happy and relieved...

this process has been a tremendous amount of work, but completing it successfully is enormously rewarding.

now to find work where i am making a difference and being challenged personally and intellectually to continue my growth! only, this time the challenges will be interpersonal and not with books and papers. :)

oh.

went camping recently... here are some good pics.

update

i've been away quite a while. things were hectic, but the pace is slowing. i will be graduated in a week! ha! Richie Spice is doing a concert in Philly soon! yay! my sweet and i are doing well! woohoo! and my homie, the friend of my heart, is in palestine/israel! eek! check out their blog on the experience:

poc-delegation.blogspot.com

ok bbs. that's all.

ok. more songs i love

licky with princess superstar



the best!

------------------------------------------


mash-up of ciara, new order and princess superstar

love

is like honey on my tongue
potatoes and beans in my belly
cloying and heavy
comforting and sweet