The report “Social Panorama of Latin America 2009″, presented by the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), projected that about 9 million people fall into poverty, the 2009 product of the economic crisis, which means an increase of 1.1% over the 2008. This figure marks a reversal in the trend shown in the period 2002 to 2008, representing 25% of the total population that had escaped poverty.
The current global crisis will cause nine million people in the region to fall in poverty this year, according to the ECLAC report Social Panorama of Latin America 2009, released November 19.
Source: Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), based on special tabulations of national household surveys.
a/ Estimates for 18 countries in the region plus Haiti. The numbers on the top part of the bars represent the percentage and total number of people living in poverty (poor and indigent).
In the study, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean estimates that poverty in the region will increase by 1.1% and indigence by 0.8% with regard to 2008. Thus, people living in poverty will reach 189 million by the end of 2009 (34.1% of the population), compared to 180 million in 2008. Also, indigence will reach 76 million (13.7% of the population), up from the 71 million last year.
These numbers depart from the trend towards poverty reduction until now prevalent in the region. The nine million poor and indigent represent almost a fourth of the population that had already overcome poverty between 2002 and 2008 (41 million people), due to greater economic growth, the expansion of social spending, the demographic bonus and better income distribution.
The study was presented today by ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena, who stressed the urgency that the region develop a new long-term social protection system.
“We can’t say that all that was attained between 2002 and 2008 has been lost. It is not a lost period. However, the rise in poverty calls us to action: we need to rethink social protection programmes with a long-term, strategic perspective and measures that make the most of human capital and protect the income of vulnerable families and groups,” she said.
The projected increase in poverty for 2009 will delay the compliance of the first Millennium Development Goal of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger by 2015: the 85% of progress on this goal in the region in 2008 will drop to 78% by the end of 2009.
Some countries may experiment a greater increase in poverty than the regional average, such as Mexico, due to lower GDP and deteriorating employment and salaries.
The current crisis will nevertheless have less impact on regional poverty than prior crises, such as the “Mexican crisis” in 1995, the “Asian crisis” in 1998-2000 and the Argentinean and “dot.com crisis” in 2001 and 2002. For now, the region has been able to maintain the purchasing power of salaries and low inflation.
Income distribution in the region improved significantly from 2002 to 2008. During that period, inequality improved in seven of the 18 countries included in the study and worsened in only three.
Governments in the region have made great efforts to increase social spending. Between 1990 and 2007, public social expenditures per capita rose from 43% to 60% of average total public expenditures in Latin America.
“This shows that it is possible to grow and redistribute, expand social spending and be fiscally prudent to significantly improve living conditions of the population. Latin America is not condemned to be poor or unjust,” stated Bárcena.
For the future, ECLAC suggests reforming social protection systems and adopting both urgent short-term measures as well as strategic long-term ones. In doing so, governments should avoid fiscal irresponsibility and rigid labour markets, increase taxes progressively, redistribute social spending and extend coverage of social services.
Likewise, ECLAC recommends strengthening government assistance transfer programmes, among them conditional transfer programmes (CTPs). There are CTPs in place in 17 countries in the region, encompassing over 100 million people; that is equivalent to more than half the population living in poverty in Latin America.
ECLAC proposes a set of measures as a guide for countries to offset these results:
The hopes quickly went on smoke at the end of the 12th session marking the official attendance of the United States to the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
When the United States announced their candidacy to the Human Rights Council earlier this year, many had welcomed the decision with the hope that some cases completely blocked under the government of George W. Bush could finally move forward, including those involving Israel, Gaza and the occupied Palestinian Territories. But hope quickly went up in smoke at the end of the twelfth session, which marked the United States official entry to the HR Council. The US administration had sent specially from Washington Michael Posner, Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor. He defines America’s standing in the council:
We see our role as broadly engaged in a range of issues. Our intention is to address all issues and suggest ways to advance the Council over its program to help the greatest number. We are in new relationships, new alliances. For example, we worked with Egypt on a resolution on freedom of expression that resolves disputes that we had. The Council needs this type of exchange. Our intention is to apply universal principles to everyone, including ourselves. We know that the US must lead by example in its own affairs and participate actively in the Council. Our situation of human rights will be reviewed next year with the procedure of Universal Periodic Review, and we encourage other countries to do likewise.[1]
The intentions were initially positive but Americans have widely criticized the Goldstone reporton Gaza and US pressure has resulted to postpone the vote on the resolution at the next session in March 2010. The recommendation of the Goldstone mission to seize the International Criminal Court if no independent investigation is conducted within six months scared off Israel.
In turn, the US, who refused to join the ICC, might be revising its position:
We are currently reviewing our policy regarding the ICC and the ratification of certain conventions, like the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which could pose a challenge for the USA. It’s a fresh start. And we will consider all treaties this way. I think this will be a long process. No doubt, priority will be done to the elimination of discrimination against women. We will create a new dynamic.[1]
But these are all political considerations that have taken hold in the Human Rights Council, although many NGOs have welcomed the opening created by the joint resolution between the US and Egypt on freedom of expression. Other resolutions which have been voted are at least as important as those on the Aboriginal peoples, the right to truth, the effects of toxic chemicals on human rights or access to care.
On the merits, the important thing for Fred Abrahams, senior researcher for HRW on the Middle East, is the implicit message by the reaction of the USA, Israel and the European Union – the latter very discreet on the Goldstone report:
If Europe and the US want to promote justice, for example in Africa, they must apply equally the concept of justice to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Otherwise, there will always be a double standard.
The Human Rights Council is criticised for its too political positions at the expense of serious violations of human rights situations. The United States have disappointed by their position on the report on Gaza. They will be very expected for the next March session of the Human Rights Council.
What if an asteroid hit the Earth and humanity suddenly ceased to exist? How would the Earth survive or thrive without us?
Human bustle is like footsteps in the sand. Everything we do leaves a spot – whether it’s making a cup of tea, switching on a light button, or using a computer. All these apparently ordinary and unexciting duties require energy, which often adds heating gases to our atmosphere and increases our waste. As the human population grows, the Earth is struggling to carry our weight.
In this Earth beat, have a look on Alan Weisman’s site and book The World Without Us and imagine how natural and built environments would look if we disappeared.
People probably won’t be disappearing anytime soon, but possibly there is way we can make ourselves invisible. Take it from Colin Beavan, who calls himself the No Impact Man. He spent an entire year trying not just to lessen his environmental footprint, but erase it all together.
In the catechism of good FC Barcelona supporters, the first commandment is to win Madrid, anywhere, even on the bus.
Not my habit to talk about football on this blog. But if it comes to Barça – and especially of a classic derby with Real Madrid – everything changes. « A Barca-Madrid is the top-ten of pleasure », says La Vanguardia. And that’s quite right.
Beyond the sporting merits of Messi and Guardiola and the undeniable quality of Madrid, there is a fundamental difference between the teams. The Catalans are just that: a team and the meringues ‘just’ a sum of individuals (built-through a mass of money).
That Barça is more than a club, we all know. But we must remember, as the former president of FC Barcelona Agustí Montal does in an meaty interview in La Vanguardia, that the club is a fundamental hallmark all throughout Catalonia and in this globalized world, this team represents, alongside sporting excellence, some way of understanding life getting to unite altogether in the same ideal: Empathy without violence or fanaticism. In front, a proud Madrid, with bright moments, but not much more:
Iniesta vs. Ronaldo, the typology opposes both characters, one silent, hieratic, cautious, almost humble, the other arrogant, spoiled, tough guy, and uploaded in the dollar, as any player had never been shaped.
Iniesta is probably a better player than Ronaldo. Time will tell.
Dubai’s House of Cards
Dubai is the leading exponent of housing bubbles that have occurred worldwide. Eccentricity of management has turned a city in the middle of the desert in a field full of hotels and skyscrapers. It was a time – the golden era – when anything was little for the Emirate.
But the crisis has beaten hard Dubai. Works have stopped and credit flow is dead blocked. Up to the point that, yesterday the state holding announced a moratorium on payment of $ 4 billion debt – the same holding that built the famous Jumeira Palm Island. This did not sit well with international markets.
The problem is that the Emirate owes $ 80 billion and markets begin to have doubts about its solvency. As soon as the moratorium on debt payment was announced markets felt down. The worst financial crisis could recur. But instead of banks’ cessation of payments we may now witness States’ suspension of payments.
Speculative Bubble Emerging
Meanwhile, in another part of the planet – the United States – the policy of the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates near zero is fuelling a wave of speculative capital that can initiate the next crisis. Many warn that a new bubble is brewing, and several specialists see in this quantitative easing an equivalent outcome Japan had for its crisis of the early 90s. Low Japanese interest rates did contribute definitely to the outbreak of the Asian crisis in 1997.
Ben Bernanke, an academic on the Great Depression, monitored the most massive injection of liquidity into the world’s largest economy, committing himself not to make the mistake of the 30s when the Fed officials pursued a strict and rigorous monetary policy that only aggravate the crisis further enough. The lack of available money in 1930 is regularly considered the reason why the crisis lengthened for a decade. The little response to current liquidity injections shows that the situation is all but comforting and that new limits of monetary policy may further alter the global imbalances that the crisis left uncovered.
One of these speculation operations is the so-called carry trade; investors borrow in $ (0%) headed for invest in other currencies that offer higher interest rates such as Australia, Brazil and New Zealand. Much of the flow in the capital markets moves ahead that direction. Hence the importance that Asian and Oceania assets are acquiring versus Europe and US assets. Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore assets are rising to levels that are incompatible with the reality that replicates the real estate bubble of US in the 90s and Japan in the 80s – when the Imperial Palace Gardens in Tokyo came to cost more than the entire US state of Washington.
Despite this, former Fed Governor Frederick Mishkin assumed thatthere is no evidence that a speculative bubble is emerging, since not all bubbles present risks to the economy. Mishkin split good from bad bubbles. The former are instigate by a credit boom, whereas expectations lead to increased demand, generating a rise in asset prices, encouraging lending against those assets and positive feedbacks cycle until it explodes.
The second category of bubbles what Mishkin calls “pure irrational exuberance bubble” is less harmful because there is no credit boom, and if no credit boom occurs the bursting of the bubble can not damage the system – e.g. the bubble in technology in the ’90s and the dotcom’s of 2000, had no global impact. For Myshkin the rise of the credit stirs the bubbles. Now, there is no credit boom in small scale. But bubble is building on the macro scale of speculative capitals, those who move billions of dollars of pension funds, the very same that play in the stock market or speculate on the gold and oil at the expense of the dollar. And at macro levels, everything where bubbles get involved presage awful signs for the economy. Otherwise, it’s like thinking that a bomb may have some positive effect.
Negotiators will try to reach a political compromise on fighting climate change in Copenhagen
Negotiators will try to reach a political compromise on fighting climate change in Copenhagen. Countries including the United States are backing away from commitments made two years ago to fight climate change.
Only globally coordinated international law that is binding and can be enforced through sanctions when violated is capable of possibly preventing Greenland’s ice sheet from significantly melting, semi-arid regions from drying to the point where millions of people are forced to flee and extreme weather conditions from a state of irreversible damage even wealthy countries’ economic powers.
If we continue to build coal-fired power plants and increase our use of gasoline and diesel vehicles, then we will literally be burning up many people’s futures. Approximately half of the carbon dioxide generated by that exhaust will remain in the atmosphere for centuries to come, and will continue to accumulate – unless we reduce output by at least 50 percent – and will raise temperatures in the lower atmosphere, the surface of the Earth and gradually the inner-regions of the ocean to levels which homo-sapiens have never experienced.
Only after a delay of decades will the full level of warming be reached, which will only be complete after centuries. Sea levels will continue to rise for centuries even without further warming of surface temperatures.
Humanity has never had to solve a long-term problem such as this, which is why our present political infrastructure is of little use for this phenomenal task. We need global domestic policies such as those of the European Union that already exist for a small portion of the international community.
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Carry out the polluter-pays principle
Burning coal is like burning people's futures
As yet, every country deals with the external effects of supplying energy in its own ways. Nearly all countries go so far as to promote global warming by reducing the prices of all or some fossil fuels for all or some portions of their populations, and they saddle succeeding generations or the general public – but not the emitters – with external effects such as health costs, air pollution or climate damage. Each year, direct or indirect subsidies account by approximation for 300 billion Euros ($450 billion) worldwide. Nearly all humans pay nothing for the emission of hazardous substances such as illness-causing diesel soot, and fainthearted European emissions trading of carbon dioxide is still far removed from an actual internalization of such external effects.
In Germany a kilowatt hour of electricity generated by a black coal-fired plant should cost 7 euro cents more with adherence to all environmental costs and 8.9 euro cents in the case of brown coal, which means that wind power, with an electricity-compensation price of 8.5 euro cents today, would already be cheaper than energy generated by brown coal. All the same, the large electricity distributors continue to speak of subsidizing renewable energy sources and most citizens parrot what they say.
Energy providers in Europe would only be acceptable choices as suppliers if their portfolios included a portion of renewable energy sources larger than the overall average. At much less than 2 percent, they lie miles beneath today’s average of 11 percent of energy coming from renewable sources.
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What would a Copenhagen Protocol a success?
First of all, when it includes binding and stronger emissions reductions for all industrialized countries by 2020 of at least 25 percent measured against the output of emissions in 1990.
Second, if the integration of countries with emerging markets – which encompass about half of all humans and in several of which the per-capita emission level is rapidly approaching our own – were to succeed along with initial reduction measures through partial financial compensation of their reduction and adaptation measures through global emissions trading amongst industrialized countries.
Third, if industrialized countries give financial support for measures to adapt to the changing climate to particularly affected developing nations.
All of the above was already covered in the declaration of the 13th United Nations Climate Change Conference on Bali.
Industrialized nations should help emerging countries adapt to climate change
But now several countries are hesitating, including the United States. Its new president is being limited by the long-term effects of erroneous politics led by a public and its representatives who are so unwilling to see the facts that the average US citizen will remain the front-runner when it comes to emissions for a long time to come.
Fourth, I would like to see a commitment to a long-term objective of emission equality, recognition of the equal rights of every human to produce emissions, and therefore much stronger emissions reductions for strong emitters such as the United States and the United Arab Emirates as a precondition for global emissions trade – adherence to the polluter-pays principle. Emissions would cost money and the market would initiate a rapid alteration to the energy supply system. We would only need a five-thousandth of the potential energy of the sun, and every country would have the bulk of its energy resources (sun, wind, water) within its borders. The conflicts connected to the appropriation of oil and gas would be things of the past.
But even should this succeed, coming generations will still have to carry the burden because we did not undertake the comparatively marginal effort of emissions reduction as compared to the cost of adaptation. This is in part because we did not initially know about the issue, and then nearly all of us suppressed it, and in part we still do not want to recognize it.
Should nothing be accomplished in Copenhagen, the possibility that in the 22nd century many cities with millions of inhabitants on weakly protected coastlines will further sink rapidly increases. Even before that occurs, millions of people will have been displaced from regions of industrialized nations distressed by water.
Bank secrecy and tax havens have now become a key factor for international transparency. Their linking to corruption and money-laundering has been uncovered by the financial crisis. This is one of the reasons why developed countries must tackle corruption internationally, a curse that uses secrecy to screen dirty money transfers. In this interactive map you can have a look on the transparency level in 180 countries surveyed and here is the index.
While New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore top the list of the most transparent countries in the world according to this survey of « perception of corruption », Spain lost four places in the ranking (28th to 32nd), France gets back from 23rd to 24th position, UK move back one place, same as US – demonstrating that the perception of corruption has risen. In the presentation at its headquarters in Berlin, the organization has emphasized the fight against tax havens noting that « there must be no safe haven for corrupt money ». Like every year, countries at war are perceived as the most corrupt, with Afghanistan and Somalia as the worst two.
In Latin America, Venezuela is one of the world’s most corrupt countries, ranking 162, while Chile and Uruguay are located as the least corrupt sharing 25th place, followed by Costa Rica (43) and Cuba (61). Brazil shares with Colombia and Peru where 75, Mexico shares the 89 with Rwanda and Argentina is 106. China is located in 79th.
Since 1955, the organization publishes annually an index of perceptions of corruption ranging from a score of ‘10’ for a country perceived as « transparent » to ‘0’ for one seen as « corrupt. » Transparency International does not spare criticism of industrialized countries in a time when governments attempt to revive the economy by injecting a huge mass of public capital on growth aid programs.
The first defendant is bank secrecy « affecting efforts to fight corruption and recover stolen assets”. In that sense, IT downplays its own index, indicating that the problem of banking secrecy concerns « many countries that lead the classification », such as Switzerland in fifth place and Luxembourg on the 14th. So, the report points that
« The money derived from corruption should not be able to find refuge areas. It’s time to end the excuses.»
As for the great revival plans launched by the industrialized countries, Transparency International warns its perverse effects.
« When you spend a lot of public money very quickly and the authorities that control programs are being overwhelmed, the risk of corruption increases. It is a major risk factor », said the president of Transparency in Germany, Sylvia Schenck.
One thing is clear under current circumstances: the existence of tax havens made easier the crisis to strengthen; hence, the obligation to besiege these sources of corruption.
As 2009 comes to an end, the clock is ticking for Russia’s constitutional court to reach a decision on capital punishment. The moratorium on the death penalty is currently due to expire with the dawning of the New Year.
A shot to the head was how Russia used to deal with violent crime
It’s a problematic issue, or so the opinion polls would suggest. Recent surveys say that up to 80 percent of Russians are in favor of a return to state-ordered execution, a practice which has been kept at bay for the past decade by a legally-binding document.
The 1999 moratorium on the death penalty was a condition for Russia to become a member of the Council of Europe. And although the Council would have preferred complete abolition, it agreed to the suspension while waiting for Moscow to commit ratifying a protocol which would completely proscribe capital punishment. But this, the Russian Federation has failed to do so far.
What’s more, the constitutional court attached a condition of its own to the moratorium. It stated that no tribunal in Russia would be allowed to hand down a death sentence until such time as jury trial – abolished in 1917 by the Bolsheviks – had been introduced in all regions of the federation.
With Chechnya, which is currently the only remaining republic not to use jurors, on the edge to adopt the practice in a few weeks time, Russia has a decision to make. It can go for extend the moratorium, reintroduce the death penalty or do away with it once and for all.
Mixed opinions
Which way the court will decide is anything but clear. Although many officials and experts addressing the hearings earlier this week spoke out against a resumption of judicial killings, some made cases in favor.
The Ria Novosti news agency reported Communist lawmaker Vadim Solovyav as saying the abolition of capital punishment could “contribute to the growth of criminality in Russia.” And he is not the only one to think that way.
But that line of argument holds little sway with the abolitionists. Friedericke Behr, Amnesty International researcher on Russia said such thinking is poorly-documented: “Research in many countries has shown that having a death penalty makes no difference to crime rates.”
Any decision to reintroduce the death penalty will not go down well in Strasbourg
Even so, President Dmitry Medvedev does not appear to be in a hurry to do away with it. His representative to the constitutional court, Mikhail Krotov, said the Kremlin supported “a stage-by-stage abolition of capital punishment.”
Exactly what that means is unlikely to be revealed before the court rules afresh in the coming weeks. But the pure fact that such masked statements are being thrown about is cause enough for concern, says Allison Gill, Director of Human Rights Watch Russia.
“The signal is that Russia is still holding back from putting itself in with the requirements of the Council of Europe,” Gill says. And that, she believes, stems from a reflex among Russian policy-makers to want to sign up to international and European institutions without wanting to fully commit to them. “I think there is an instinct on the part of certain Russian politicians to maintain a position of Russian exceptionalism,” she said.
Different is not always good
Only being different on this particular issue could have substantial implications for Moscow’s relationship with the Council of Europe. Russia is the only country which has not ratified protocol 6 – the abolition of the death penalty – and has frequently cited public opinion as the reason.
But in a country not renowned for curving to public pressure, such reasoning doesn’t really echo. “If the government has a political will to abolish the death penalty,” Gill said, “they could make a convincing case to the Russian public.”
At present the polls claim one in eight Russians would back the eye-for-an-eye way of thinking. Yet Friederike Behr says surveys on capital punishment are often manipulated from the outset.
“It’s all in the way you ask the questions,” she said, adding that the mention of publicly exposed vicious crime motivates the public to grant pollsters the kind of statistics they have been publishing in the past weeks.
Paradox polls
Russian police fail to inspire a sense of security in the population
Allison Gill agrees that such surveys cannot be taken as gospel, not least because the same public that flies the flag for state-ordered execution is deeply critical of the system which passes the sentences.
“On the one hand, Russians might be in the majority pro-death penalty, but on the other hand they also mistrust their own law enforcement system and their courts,” Gill said. “They don’t think they’re going to get a fair hearing.”
And some clearly don’t. As Behr points out, Russia has got it wrong on many occasions. “People have been sentenced to death and have been executed and then found to be not guilty,” she said. “There are people here who were on death row when the moratorium was introduced and who were then released later on because they were found to be innocent.”
It’s the age-old argument which applies to any state that still sentences its criminals to death, but it seems particularly pertinent in a country where so many people have so little faith in the justice system. As Allison Gill asks “how can that justice system be responsible for handing out the ultimate penalty?”
(Sources: RIA Novosti, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch)
A report published early September 2009 by Maplecroft – a British cabinet expertise on global risks – shows that the most vulnerable countries to global warming are Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone. Twenty-two of the 28 countries exposed to “extreme risk” are located in sub-Saharan Africa.
In the meantime, the Asian Development Bank presented in Manila the results of a conclusive report: melting of Himalayan glaciers threatens the food security and water availability of 1.6 billion inhabitants of South Asia. In New York, Rob Vos, director of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), ruled that ” If we do not reduce significantly GHG emissions, the damage to the [economies of] poor countries as a percentage of GDP[ gross domestic product] will be up more than ten times greater than in the United States and most other developed countries ” [1] . Mr. Vos commented on the report by his department. According to the conclusions, investments should be done every year in climate change mitigation and adaptation to its effects by 1 % of world’s GDP, i.e. more than 500 billion dollars.
A few months earlier, in May 2009, the United Nations had issued a report about the international strategy on risk reduction -launched in 2000. The document operates the first synthesis of knowledge about natural disasters that have occurred between 1975 and 2008. Even if he admits the document is not exhaustive, the text nevertheless represents a unique body of knowledge.
Between 1975 and 2008, 8.866 disasters have killed 2.284.000. Regarding flooding, the risk of death increased by 13% between 1990 and 2007. The picture is not, if we dare say, equally catastrophic. The absolute number of human or economic losses increases throughout the period, but it remains proportionately stable because of demographic and global GDP growth.
But according to UN experts, the situation would deteriorate because of climate change and ecosystems degradation. The latter is a factor too often ignored. Albeit not apple to apples, ecosystems manage to cushion the impact of natural disasters. Regarding climate change, it will increase the risk of disasters. The vulnerability of populations is one of the other factors that accentuate the risks. Action by Governments (earthquake standards, etc.) becomes crucial: Japan and the Philippines suffer roughly the same number of typhoons, but they cause 17 times more deaths in the Philippines than in Japan.
Have a look on Mr. Rob Vos’ press conference here enclosed:
Previousarticles outlined the way to configure cities in order they become sustainable or not. Sustainability depends on the city functionality itself as well – the aim of this third article.
Adam Smith in his invisible hand hypothesis stated that market optimizes the distribution, enabling better allocation of resources without public intervention. It can also operate by creating unwanted situations to market players (cases of monopoly, cartels, lack of coordination, etc.) and then worsening the social scene.
For instance, the decision to travel by private car instead of using public transport can outcome the worst case scenario. In this direction, several investigations have revealed that it would take less to London bus users – as in any other city – than motorists to move from one place to another if there were less cars. Hence the idea of Mayor Livingston of an expensive access to London downtown by private car in order to provide greater flexibility to surface and underground public transport.
Urban planning is therefore absolutely essential for coexistence and progress. Consequently, European citizens from the early nineteenth century claimed to eliminate obstacles (walls down!). They claimed broaden their cities, which became progressively constrained by sea, hills, and old walls – now absolutely unnecessary, with severe communication problems, crowding and hygiene.
In this context, it was clear to Ildefonso Cerdà when designing the Eixample (urban expansion) of Barcelona that the city should be open, cosmopolitan, outside connected by well done road and rail networks… But above all, it had to be habitable for citizens. The city would grow in small islands: city blocks chamfered, with large inner garden patios, thus uniting the best of countryside life with the advantages of the city. Even then, many Barcelonans turned these courtyards into dedicated warehouses, small factories, and even buildings.
The Cerdà’s pioneering urban planning (1860) through areas, gardens and building expansions – quite different from the internal reform of Haussmann (1852) in Paris – is our daily bread. Managements of urban municipalities generally deal with this responsibility. They have to operate with long-term vision – avoiding short-termism that under-sizes capabilities and services with serious further quicken consequences. In this direction, planning must address a number of priority issues on water, air, noise, energy, waste, health, housing, and transportation.
Cleaner Water Human intervention in water availability has quantity and quality implications as water used in cities floods back to environment, thus closing a cycle already enforced. Thus, sewage without any treatment, returning to their natural environment, creates serious pollution of rivers and aquifers. To avoid such an issue, the European Water Charter (1968) marked a series of objectives that have been largely completed in the EU-15 – while it remains outstanding work in some of the new 27 Member States of the Union.
In addition, water consumption has to be rationalized: in most large cities, a cubic meter of clean water is less expensive than a Coke at a bar, then increasing produced waste. Consequently, it is essential to charge water waste, starting with a low prices block about 60 liters a day – subsequently changing basic allowance – and then becoming gradually more expensive.
Air The topic is most evident in cities where sustainability is not shining for its excellence. The most valuable asset – what we breathe 24 hours a day – is consumed in very inadequate conditions. The air of London in the mid 1950s, with frequent smog waves, became suffocating. Following these situations a clean air policy arose, with the first laws, specifically British, in 1955. European Countries came after with further regulation mechanisms.
In summary, the most essential is to ensure clean air, with sensors networking and a very long series of measures that would not exceed the allowable cap, forcing the phasing out of most harmful emission sources.
Noise Everyone agrees – starting with psychologists and psychiatrists – that noise is one of the environmental factors that affect most the quality of life. From small discomforts, more or less anecdotal, to levels of irreversible disorders in the human mind.
Definition of noise is well known:
“The sound, or set of sounds that are perceived by human beings, and that alter the acoustical medium within they normally move.”
…with the additional peculiarity that everything depends on the inevitability of impact also. Regarding the latter, a noise is obliged to be heeded, and even foreseeable at the time – as when a summer storm occurs, or when the passage of a train at a fixed time takes place, or when children voices arise from the playground in the courtyard of a school near you – and then the sound waves seem justified, and the trouble is diluted. Not at all when the roar of an uncontrolled neighbor turntable in its 50 watts comes to you, or when it deals with crying on Friday night in usually quiet streets, on these occasions everything just become the most detestable.
Among the most aggressive acoustic dealings, the continuous traffic of suburban highway (along with hundreds of miles of noise barriers) should be condemned – and what about major arteries within metropolitan area, and even in the formerly quiet streets in ancient downtowns? In these ways, some motorists “do their best” traveling at full speed – as if they were in Silverstone. And it is certainly no less remarkable ambulances, day or night roistering circulating, carrying patients or not, whose sirens wailing penetrate your eardrums at completely unnecessary noise levels.
But most of all, among the most inconvenient and unnecessary noises, the urban cleaning must be pointed: the unpleasant scavenging machines in the vicinity of 100 dB, apart the absurd beep when they reverse or their stressful light pollution – equipments that go together with by “air gun carriers’”, top-mask and earplugs outfitted, raising dust clouds in the din with a volume of noise just about unbelievable – especially when you compare with the very human scavengers who still survive. All these issues must be fought, and there are many resources to do so, starting with the municipalities – now the main causing actors of noise.
Otherwise, cities as microcosm would become unsustainable.
Who does not perceive that the French government, especially the president and his namesake minister on ‘organized evictions’, is engaged in a great manipulation!
Pétain and Hitler meet at Montoire
First recovering (trends and far-right voters, it is not new), then diverting classic emotions through woolly smoker screen approaches, in the absence of the real deal with economic and social problems (crisis, employment deficit, housing, etc..), instead of facing – together with national representants – local and international challenges of all kinds.
No surprise, of course, we never expected anything from them. Not to speak of those – the government and other relatives – who condone the worst. But the opposition Socialists? Opposed so little that they endorse this false debate, a shameful nationalist manoeuvre, symptom of an opportunist and reactionary policy, rather than strengthen Europe and think and act more internationally yet. French leaders not only go on sinking at high speed into the economic wall but they precipitate the disastrous consequences by a nationalist suicidal policy –worthy of their own incompetence. Promising tomorrows, even if we yet know the song.
By dint of whipping the undocumented, this eternally frustrated France says it should be in order, too, and be able therefore to exhibit the evidence of its identity. M. Sarkozy, have you ever heard of egotism, this narcissistic tendency to be analyzed and to talk about oneself?
Being myself son and grand-son of Spaniards, I can say that this debate makes me want to vomit because with such approaches, this dear country sinks deeper into the darkest mess conservatism.
At a recent conference [1], the original and always rightly incisive Noam Chomsky, referred to US military bases installed in Colombia, with the official purpose of assisting the Government of Bogotá in the war on drugs.
Mexico's Federal Police officers escort suspects of working for a drug trafficking gang, as they are shown to the media in Mexico City
He called to consider a similar case but with different actors. Suppose, he said, that Colombia, China or any other country claim their right to establish military bases in Mexico, in order to fumigate and destroy US tobacco plantations in North Carolina or Kentucky, traditional breeders of this plant. The plan would be enhanced by blocking the production areas through the action of air and naval forces, while sending inspectors to verify the overall elimination of such plantations. All this would aim to prevent tobacco trafficking towards countries suffering its effects.
Chomsky points out that smoking has provided evidence to be more lethal than alcohol, which in turn is more harmful than the use of cocaine or heroin, and these are, in turn, more harmful than cannabis. If in addition to the number of deaths caused by harmful products inhaled by smokers, we take account of those caused to “passive” smokers – though their number is difficult to determine – it is quite sure that the overall lethal outcome of nicotiana tabacum will exceed that of the remaining drugs as a whole. It would be quite logical to pursue more actively tobacco growers than coca’s.
Clearly this assumption is not plausible in the reality of today, not only because tobacco in most countries is not a banned substance while many drugs are. However, when facing this relentless logic, what should be asked is why this happens. Why the US, who say they feel adversely affected by drugs that come from south of the Rio Grande, naturally attributed the right to deploy their armies in Colombia to combat coca growers in the area, and it is even conceivable that no other country could do likewise when its interests are affected similarly.
For Chomsky, the answer is simple and it has an unquestionable bottom: the imperial mentality that exists in the US, so deep-seated in North American minds that it pass unnoticed. Should we add here that this frame of mind also exists – on a smaller scale – in many Western countries.
However, the results so far obtained seem to justify the effort committed. The “war on drugs” has lasted more than four decades in Colombia and has intensified over the past ten years, neither the food nor drug trafficking have declined. The reasons offered by Chomsky leaves no doubts. Several studies show that well-funded prevention and treatment of drug addiction are much more effective than coercive measures used in this endless war. And the preventive or curative treatment of drug-consumers in this business-has a performance cost-effectiveness improved over 20 times to the attacks against growers supplier-side-in “chemical warfare” waged to destroy the fields of drugs.
According to Chomsky, only two scenarios would explain the current situation: Either the US leaders have been consistently fools for 40 years, or the purpose of the war on drugs is very different than what is proclaimed. If one excludes no further the hypothesis of insanity, then what may be the real reasons for this alleged war?
Inside the US two main facts are obvious: the cleaning of the socially less useful (which has led the US into the world’s first place on top of prison population rate) and, as with the “war on terror”, dependence and subjugation of a population terrorized by the danger of drugs, to stop showing its angry opposition to economic policies that have led to the largest social imbalance that the US has ever suffered.
Meanwhile, abroad, the war on drugs is a way of hiding in Colombia – and other countries –some of the most iniquitous antisubversive operations. Colombia is the second country in the world (after Sudan) with more population driven out their homes, while local oligarchies and multinationals occupy the land abandoned by farmers and transform them into mining, agro-industrial production, intensive livestock or infrastructure for industry – whose benefits hardly benefit to concerned populations.
Now it’s time to ask whether Obama will follow the winding road – yet partly covered by his predecessors but in opposition to which he has not revealed much indignation as he showed with e.g. Guantanamo – or on the contrary, he has enough support, resources and intentions to leave the swamped problem that Chomsky clearly presents and whose resolution is difficult and complex, since it not only depends on the White House decisions, although they can point the beginning of a new path.
[1] Noam Chomsky, Militarizing Latin America. In chomsky.info. August 30, 2009
The US economy yesterday offered a robust data that, at least temporarily, allowed closing the world’s largest economic downturn since the Second World War.
Budget deficits, 2001-2010, by EU region · Déficit presupuestario 2001-2010 por región UE (Source: Ronan Lyons Economic Analysis, Oct. 16, 2009)
American GDP growth in the third quarter was 3.5% after four consecutive quarters’ drops. The positive data was expected by analysts, but the strength of the US economy stunned – and pleased – the world stock markets and particularly the Dow Jones index, which rose above 2%. The turnaround from the Q2 (-0.4%) suggests that the incentive plans of the U.S. government, an interest rate of 0% practice, the takeoff of the upturn in private consumption and housing are sufficiently solids to undertake corrections in a few months which would put the economy outside the ICU. If so, we would not be far from a very modest increase in interest rates by the Federal Reserve, an assessment that, sooner or later, should be followed by the European Central Bank, especially if consolidating the growth in Germany and France. In the case of Spain, data also released yesterday show the fifth consecutive quarter of economic decline, although it is true that the deterioration has been moderating in the last three quarters we have moved from -1.9% (Q1) and -1.1% (Q2) to -0.4% in Q3. We are, according to the Bank of Spain, in an “incipient recovery” that entails a great deal of risks: the worst unemployment rates, intolerably increasing next to18.2%, deficit escalating close to 10% of GDP and an upward lack of credit to businesses and individuals.According to the latest figures in relation to countries under the Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) of the European Commission, the general government deficit of the euro area lay at 6.1% of GDP in 2009.As a result, the EU-15 public debt the will increase as of 69.3% GDP in 2008 to 78.4% in 2009. By 2010, however, it is expected to further increase on average 6.6% of GDP.At disaggregated level, most euro area countries in 2009 recorded a deficit exceeding the 3% of GDP, while all euro zone countries will infringe the maximum allowable deficit in 2010, according to latest IMF estimates.
Thus deficit cuts jump out over 0.5% per year, mostly in countries with higher deficits.
And what are these countries? Ireland, Greece and Spain showed the highest euro area’s gap budget, both in 2009 and 2010. In particular, Ireland’s public deficit will reach a rate close to 13% of GDP, according to recent estimates. Greece exceeds 12%, while Spain recorded a deficit of 9.5%, along with the IMF.
In 2010, these three countries will continue to be leaders in fiscal imbalance: Ireland (13.3%), Spain (12.5%), while Greece will approach 10%, given its public accounts inaccuracy, only just admonished by the Eurogroup Chairman Jean-Claude Juncker.
Designing a tax for everything that contaminates incites people to preserve environment, the atmosphere in particular, which is in serious danger. The idea is to penalize polluting energy in transport, housing and personal consumption. Every time we consume less fuel but this is not enough to achieve the goals set at the last conference on climate change: hence the idea to programme a compulsory tax (to be paid per tonne of fossil fuel issued). This in order that the world decrease to half the emissions of greenhouse gas (2050) and limit Earth warming to 2 degrees – which causes climate change.
Global warming due to greenhouse gases from the combustion of carbon dioxide is 49,000 million tons of CO2 emissions. Enough is enough, this must be punishable. Its effects could lead to an overall increase of 3% of the temperature within approximately 100 years. The cost of global warming is estimated at 5,500,000 million (Nicholas Stern) [1]. While the concept of a tax on CO2 emissions comes from Arthur Pigou (Economics of Welfare) [2] who, in 1920, first established the polluter pays principle.
Now …
Should we tax the product itself or the energy consumed?
What about taxing imported products?
How do we avoid the risks of inequality?
What can we do with the tax revenue?
The solutions adopted by each country are different. France, with about 50,000 million of environmental taxation laid up, shows a certain delay. The structure of French environmental taxation is so unwise by voluntarism emphasis that it will not generate benefits in the sense of net contribution or revenue – but only more taxes on water, on garbage, on the consumption of hydrocarbons (TIPP) which are not reversed in any improvements (infrastructure, citizen responsibilization); on the contrary, it is the umpteenth patch covering the phenomenal public deficit hole. The pedagogy turns into a demagogic fatalistic verbiage as to mislead the common man – because it ignores the virtues of consensus that in all the surrounding countries is originated in the parliamentary debate, which is where popular sovereignty revives up and where such taxation should be decided, not in the halls of the presidential palace – a very usual symptom in the French Republic whose skin politicians refuse to change. These rates represent 3% of GDP … thrown away. Unless considering France as the cleanest country in Europe thanks to its huge nuclear program, which on the contrary converts this country in less safe by the obvious potential for nuclear incidents due to its atomic central park and may involve in quantity of radioactive wastes concerned – the highest per capita in the world. The rhetoric continues, forward flight, too. The only positive point is that hydroelectricity accounts for 93% of energy resources … with the aggravated disadvantage that the driving force’s the nuclear cell. Who do we kidding? If the decrease in CO2 emissions must involve the breakneck growth of the nuclear beast, then where do we go? Stripped from one mouth to feed another.
Moreover, the tax on CO2 emissions in a country is not really quantifiable to impact CO2 emissions at the global level. Global policies are needed to internalize environmental costs and act on the behaviour of firms and households. That is the healthier principle. France is wrong in the way of carrying it out: confusion over the extent rate itself (cheerfully going from 20 to 32 for up to 100 euros / TN emitted by 2030, then left who can say where?) over the exemptions, over its operation. The increased cost of living is set: estimated at 10% the additional costs of household heating in French homes by 2010, from 5 to 10 cts. for a liter of fuel at the pump now. Another consequence is that the tax, as is, will ruin the remaining local industry (current bleeding is the largest ever seen in France) and as usual, only a few (large) groups will afford to face such additional costs in the midst of an industrial desert. Who will invest in a country that overtaxes 100 euros each emitted CO2 TN? As for the wicked 35h law, nor study or reflection has been implemented and no effort tryed to coordinate with other European countries. The devil is in the details, French say …
The topic of compensation is often talked about, but what about inequality between consumers? What to do with the € 8,000 million that the government is supposed to enter through the concept (e.g. fatten the coffers of the ministry of finance)?
Swedish pedagogy against French demagogy Other countries as Sweden have also established a carbon tax, even more substantial, but with a very different modus operandi: e.g. Swedish tax implies a graduated scale for companies that invest more in technological innovation to improve production processes in CO2 emission – now that is pedagogy. It’s bad times in terms of economic crisis situation but action is credible in Sweden and demagogic in France where nobody knows whether the tax will be redistributed or yet another ‘neutral’ tax – that is, outside of Pigouvian incitement, which has the favour of Prime Minister Fillon.
Because the environment policy can not be summarized to raise the level of taxation or implementing new taxes, unless you’re old tricks again and increase unemployment and public debt. Two years back here it was the bonus / malus tax on car CO2 emissions (an onerous marketing device that ruined much of the automotive industry, with a fall of 40% of French production, forcing car manufacturers to abandon the profitable manufacture of sedans to engage in small cars’ on which the profit margin is zero or nearly zero), last year was the tax on diapers for newborns turn, this year it is the time of a tax on CO2 emissions … a joke (or better yet, a shortsighted policy).
The temptation to tax the super profits of the oil industry (Ségolène Royal) would only have negative repercussions in the pocket of the consumers. Better a tax that changes that behaviour and not simply going to fatten the coffers of the state and its lifestyle. Report and well communicate with citizen, having a little patience not changing everything at a stroke or by decree.
Taxation reforms are essential throughout our countries. We talk about tax incentive and not subsidies e.g. car industries so that they manufacture a kind of cars that they would have made anyway. Let’s face green taxes; it is just and necessary, but mostly to help us getting out from the unending virtual crisis of rampant capitalism, far from the real economy. No green custom duties at European borders, a trend advocated by some, in their eagerness, to lead us into a new protectionism; but rather concentrating on comprehensive policies, at least in Europe, better globally. It is useless to establish national policies not coordinated with the rest of countries, giving way to protectionist policies more or less latent: have a look on the global trade drop of 12%, if you want to add more crisis to crisis just add the perversion of protectionism to all the difficulties we face today. The environment is a global public good. To be honest we do not know how to deal with externalities steadily i.e. when China or Brazil pollute, they do not so in their respective territories only but in the entire world. Enforcing tariffs however is theoretically a nice building, but in practice it is just about regression. Also do not forget that China’s censure is unfair: the PRC is making genuine efforts to drastically reduce pollution in its industries – and it still does not occur in most of developed countries.
One of the biggest questions is to identify what the US attitude will be. So far the US had no concern on the Kyoto Protocol; the position is changing but it all depends on the type of changes that comes about there. Scenarios abroad are in my opinion: the role of the G20, the Doha WTO round re-launch and the climate meeting in Copenhagen. All three turn around the same concern: the need for global economic governance to meet challenges.
Pedagogy missing in the US and UK.
The increasing size of speculative capital flows, mainly in US and UK, is the pending business. I mean speculative capitals and hot money outflows are bigger now than a year ago – in the worst moment of financial-mortgage crisis. Hot money is tossed into the emerging economies as the first symptom relief crops up. Thus, the central bank of China is increasingly doomed to buy huge reserves to support a sick dollar (thus some $ 70,000 million per month, are beyond the circuit of productive investments in order to prevent the US currency to collapse again), deflecting precisely investment in productive economy. That is, in essence, we have not yet altered the global imbalances, and even we are somewhat higher than before the crisis. The issue of executive bonuses and allowances is less significant than the required dismantling of the opacity in the banking investment -something impossible in the most key European financial center, the City of London, since the future PM Cameron opposes to it. This, in US terms, is yet unimaginable. So far the best indicators of the City and NY – queues at the best restaurants – behave well as table reservations vary from 2 to 3 months … bonuses, windfalls, luxury cars, stratospheric contracts are just around the corner again. To pin a button: flows exchanged in the derivatives markets reached a record of vertigo – almost 10 times world’s GDP. So how can David control Goliath?
To be continued …
.
[1] The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change is a report on the impact of climate change and global warming on the world economy. Written by economist Sir Nicholas Stern, commissioned by the UK government, the report was published in October 2006. The report represents a milestone by becoming the first government report commissioned by an economist rather than a climatologist.
[2] Arthur Pigou is considered the founder of welfare economics and the main precursor of the environmental movement to make the distinction between social and private marginal expenses and advocate for state intervention through subsidies and taxes to correct market failures and internalize externalities. Welfare Economics is his most emblematic book.
“My sister Ana Medem was a painter, and she still remains it through her paintings. I’ll enlighten the beginning of this trip without setting the feet on the floor, above enough to suffer as little as possible. On 7 April 2001, my sister celebrated her largest exhibition of paintings at a winery resort in Carignan, south of Zaragoza, Spain. Arriving by car to this wine region I again recognized the reddish hue of the landscapes of Tierra (Earth), my third film that I shot there five years back. My sister should meet us, relatives and friends, at the entrance hall of the exhibition. That is, the people she most wanted were waiting for her, by a closed door that she should open. A few minutes before the fixed opening time, three kilometers away, my sister died in a car accident. We did not enter the exhibition. I have in my mind a full moon in the sky in late afternoon, almost red, and almost over the highway, while driving my car to Zaragoza
The next day, before they closed my sister’s coffin , I decided – and I told her – that one day I would shoot a film on her. “
[My journey with Ana, Julio Medem, El País, 12 August 2007]
Ana is a free spirit who turns her passion for life in painting. Justine, a cosmopolitan patron, invites her to complete her training in Madrid with a group of artists she sponsors. It will be the beginning of a journey, not only physical, which will lead her to discover new continents, past lives and ancient myths. Ana attempts to break the chain of ancestral violence looming on doors painted in a wall, and at the end of the adventure she will choose if she becomes a monster or a princess.
Medem still retains much of what I admire in the storytelling way of a camera movie. Recurrent elements, if you may, always pull on the emotions and sadness that turn into beauty, like Ana´s image at sea, a resource that Medem already used in Sex and Lucia –whereas on this occasion it is brought to mind through young actress Manuela Vallés.
This appeal to aesthetics – and the use of music, wind sound or photographic colors as part of the plot – makes many of us love this film director with the same force as many criticize him for the same reason, turning Medem into the objective of the same worn arguments that were pointed against Kieslowski or the Dogma filmmakers.
We face first and foremost a good artwork – sometimes very close but not yet a masterpiece – that does not achieve the freshness of Sex and Lucia and Lovers of the Arctic Circle. In my opinion, the best films of Medem are those who have delved into the intimate territory and madness of human beings without needing to explore beyond their natural environment for survival. Whatever the case, and after having been attacked by the fascists for the documentary The Basque Ball: Skin against Stone, the come back of this unique psychiatrist, that has become a devoted worshipper of woman’s beauty, is good news.
After the wonderful Lovers of the Arctic Circle and his masterpiece Sex and Lucia, Chaotic Ana is an intense and ambitious film, beautifully acted – though some characters are undeveloped (Charlotte Rampling’s).
It is noteworthy that the British composer and pianist Jocelyn Pook is the person behind the original soundtrack.
For some time, something smells bad in Wall Street, and despite the outright rejection that the greed of the system brings about, fraud is still the order of the day.
This time, the offensive from the authorities did not take long to show up when last Friday 16th October six people were arrested for using illegal inside trading in a financial hedge fund. Among them, investment managers Raj Rajaratnam – a 52 year Sri Lanka billionaire – and the hedge fund guru Mark Kurland, who handled $ 7,000 million dollars assets. Wall Street thriller goes on.
Along with four more people under arrest, they have been charged with profiting from insider information and manipulating assetsthat caused more than $ 20 million illegal profits. According to FBI records, this case has emerged as the largest fraud in hedge funds, investment funds that have been targeted since the beginning of the crisis on its no supervision and facilities open to fraudulent transactions.
The dismantling of this organization – orchestrated by Rajaratnam Galleon Group initiator –was made possible through wiretaps performed by the FBI. With this, the research bureau shows that the office gives to these fraud cases the same treatment than fighting drug trafficking and organized crime. Similar to Bernard Madoff, Rajaratnam enjoyed a great protection net due to be an active donor of resources to political parties.
After accusations of inefficiency and delays in monitoring cases like Bernard Madoff, SEC and the FBI have started up operational plans to clean the large image of corruption surrounding the financial sector. Rajaratnam and Kurland’s fall is just one of many to come. Part of the resolution of conflicts that sparked the current crisis, settles into purge the image of the financial sector and eliminate corporate wrongdoing.
“Dirty Secrets, Dirty War: The Exile of Robert J. Cox (Buenos Aires, Argentina:1976-1983)” by David Cox, Evening Post Publishing, June 2009
David Cox is the Robert Cox’s son, former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald and one of the few journalists courageous enough to report on the many disappearances and horrific violence that took place during Argentina’s Dirty War. David, 13 years old when his father and the rest of the family finally fled Argentina after years of close scrapes and tears, here presents the memoir of his father, writing in the foreword, admits that he still finds too painful to author himself. Punctuating his historical narrative of the escalating conflict with affectionate anecdotes about his large, tight-knit, and literary family, Cox the son wavers between nostalgia for the Buenos Aires of his childhood and flashbacks of the terrifying episodes that ultimately pressed the family to leave. But this book’s true focus is Cox the father, who emerges as an emblem of journalistic courage, suffering anxiety and asthma with silent tenacity while reporting on human-rights violations (and in some cases, causing the disappeared to be freed). An important primary source for Latin American recent history and an inspiring account to prevent future opportunists to take over again.
Robert Cox has risked his life to chronicling the early years of the Dirty War in Argentina (1976-1983), which has caused thousands of deaths. A few decades later he still can not write his own history or describe how he experienced this deadly junta. Now his son David does so, revealing how an editor of a small English-daily in South America, the Buenos Aires Herald, has courageously covered the kidnapping and murder that took place there when most his colleagues were silent.
Evolved into the race leading to the military coup of 1976 and in the chaos that has reigned later in Argentina, the book tells what led David’s father to write about the atrocities that were rampant. “This is the book that I never managed to write,” says the man 75 years in the preface. “Wounds are too deep so that I can write on this dark period.” A plan backed by the military junta indeed encouraged people to silence real or perceived enemies, and caused that thousands of people were left in clandestine torture centers. Official figures set to have 13 000 people disappeared; groups working for human rights relate more 30 000 people killed instead. “Our family lives with this story for years,” said David Cox, 42, who spent his childhood in Argentina. “We all want my father to write his story because it affected us all one way.”
The Herald has been a pioneer in spreading the alarm. The military “issued him a warning to convince him to rally, but he continued to publish lists providing the names of the disappeared,” reminds F. Allen “Tex” Harris, an American diplomat who was in Argentina at that time. The Argentines went to the Herald when the authorities refused to provide information on their missing relatives, as the newspaper tried to lobby the government on them. There were very few people in the country who dared to speak. But the stories of Cox caught the world’s attention after he became a recognized journalist in the New York Times and The Washington Post.
For some time yet, the junta let Cox and The Herald go on practice their valiant journalism. “He printed a newspaper in English and as few Argentines knew that language, the military could not see him as someone threatening,” [...] “If someone criticized the lack of press freedom, he could always point to Cox,” added Harris. Cox was finally shut up in prison for a day after writing editorials urging the government to release imprisoned journalists. In 1979 he found himself forced to leave Argentina because of death threats against his family. David Cox describes, among other things, that he took different ways to get the school and that his family was traveling in an old Peugeot to avoid attracting police attention. “The feeling of terror now seems remote, but it is still in me.”
Despite all the risks he was taking, Robert remained “a very humble man” who simply reported what was happening in Argentina when others have refused to do so. “In his right mind, he did his job as a journalist.”
A concise, objective and engaging report on a very dark period in Argentine history. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in understanding this very complex yet so attractive country. A first class journalistic job, and homage to Robert Cox, an unrelenting and solitary fighter for freedom and the rule of law when people most needed someone like him.
Victims of terrorist acts, such as the DC-10 UTA [1], or Baghdad or Kabul have several nationalities: Congolese, Algerians, Spanish, Chad, French, Iraqis, Americans, Afghans… Some have been compensated, others not; some were able to file a claim for civil damages in a criminal proceeding, while others will never have such a chance. It is this disparity between the nationalities that criticizes professor Ghislaine Doucet [2], a specialist in international humanitarian law. Solutions do exist:
The first alternative would be to set up an international global fund to compensate victims, just like the Fond de Garantie (Guarantee Fund) existing in France. I firmly believe that there are ways for such a fund, so as not to leave the victims in distress. Because too many victims of terrorism, since they are seriously injured, physically as morally, can not find a job – for those who have one – and they are therefore in utter destitution. And then the second option is a universal criminal justice response, because all victims of terrorism have no chance to face the perpetrators of the crimes they have suffered or that their relatives have suffered.
Access to justice is key element but when national justice systems are unable or unwilling to judge the International Criminal Court could take over. However, it has been decided at the ICC’s foundation that it would have jurisdiction to try war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, but not terrorism. However, a crime of terrorism may, in some cases be considered a crime against humanity. Mariana Pena [3], specialist and IFHR/FIDH Liaison Officer with the ICC in The Hague:
These conditions should not be widespread or systematic [...] But an attack should have been instigated against the civilian population – with or without knowledge of the attack, which is often the case when a terrorist hit occurs.
And then the question of defining terrorism has long been an obstacle to further discussions on reparation and justice. According Ghislaine Doucet obstacles to the definition is a false debate [2]:
Terrorism on the international level is clearly defined. In times of armed conflict, acts of terrorism are explicitly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. Beyond the act of terrorism, such as hostage taking, are prohibited. Attacks against civilians are prohibited. So these are prohibited acts and then punishable. Conversely, in peacetime, we have thirteen international instruments [4] which prohibit the use of terrorism. And that furthermore require states that are parties to these instruments to punish these acts. [...]
So if you are able to classify internationally, such as acts of terrorism and therefore these acts were punishable under criminal law, why the phenomenon of terrorism is not defined?
It is however clearly defined because otherwise we would not have all these international instruments. [...] All acts of terrorism in their different facets are almost covered by these international instruments. The crux of the problem is not so much defining but to determine its scope (that is, competency areas). [2]
And that’s what the UN faces for years, seeking to establish an international convention banning terrorism. Some wish that the actions undertaken by the armed forces of a State do not fall within the definition of terrorism. Others would exclude acts of resistance on behalf of the right of peoples to self-determination. These are questions that also face the victims of terrorism and their relatives.
[1] 19 September 1989 a UTA DC10-30 aircraft,crashed near N’Djamena, Chad, as a result of an explosion in flight due to a bomb. All 156 passengers and 15 crew were killed.
[2] Terrorisme, victimes et responsabilité pénale internationale. (Terrorism, Victims and International Criminal Responsibility). Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2003
[3] IFHR (International Federation of Human Rights) special representative at the ICC, The Hague
Judge Garzón said Spain learned that torture doesn't work.
The career of the Spanish star judge –who became famous for having ordered, in November 1998, the arrest in London of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for « genocide, terrorism and torture » – is on the edge now. The Court of criminal appeal of the Spanish High Court is about to charge him for « corruption in the performance of his functions ». If indicted, the « super judge » from the Audiencia Nacional – i.e., the National Criminal Court, the highest criminal court of Spain – would be immediately suspended whereas pending for trial.
What was his crime? Unlocking [October 18, 2008] – and at the request of families – an investigation on the ‘forced’ disappearances of 114 000 Republicans – that the judge reclassified then as ‘crimes against humanity’ – during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and Franco dictatorship. Unsurprisingly, this initiative stirred up the far right troops and brought about a mutiny against « reopening old wounds ». But also a part of the government and the Socialist Party, who saw an attack on the shortcomings of the Ley de memoria histórica (Law on Historical Memory), painfully adopted a year earlier.
The Attorney General, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, has requested the annulment of proceedings as well. He is arguing the incompetence of the Audiencia Nacional on this subject. The prosecution’s appeal was accepted [December 2, 2008]. The case might have ended there if in the meantime Baltasar Garzon did not step down himself |November 18] by returning his jurisdiction to local judges: each of them can therefore arrange the opening of graves and exhumations within their jurisdiction. « He acted as if he was putting aside the atomic bomb – i.e. closing the case –» whereas « he was disseminating a lot of small bombs across the country » [1].
The controversy has shifted from political scope to the judiciary when in January 2009 a criminal complaint was filed by two extreme-right organizations, a ghostly « union of civil servants » called ‘Manos Limpias’ (Clean Hands) and the Association ‘Identidad y Libertad’ (Freedom and identity). [2] The criminal complaint reproaches judge Garzon violating the 1977 amnesty law – based on a tacit « pact of oblivion », supposed to ease the Spanish transition to democracy; and also for his persistent willingness to investigate facts that he was aware they were supposedly prescribed and amnestied by introducing the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ which did not exist at the time of civil war.
Judge Garzon has received cases connected to rights abuses in several countries
Most likely, Baltasar Garzon would not risk his professional future in this business without the excess of zeal of some judicial colleagues. Besides the ideological dimension of the case, there is a suspected game of settling scores – a payback related to Judge Garzon’s personality, whose liking for notoriety and spectacular methods annoys most of his equals [Well, I do not think for that reason his goodwill and performances become worthless... unless they are inversely proportional)
The complaint against judge Garzon was admissible on May 26, by a commission chaired by Judge Adolfo Prego, whose ultraconservative sympathies are notorious. As a member of the Honorary Board of the ‘Foundation for Defense of the Spanish nation’ (Dena), he had signed along with other jurists, a particularly aggressive text in opposition to the Law on Historical Memory, reproving it for « glorifying as martyrs of freedom many of the worst criminals that darkened our history. » [3]
The examining magistrate, who took Garzon’s deposition for nearly four hours [September 9] – and who could make him return to the dock – is on the contrary a man clearly on the left side of the chessboard. He, Luciano Varela, is close to the Vice-President of the Spanish Government, Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega, and has never hidden his dislike for the ‘super judge’ manners. This high figure is a brilliant lawyer, founder of the renowned association ‘Jueces para la Democracia’ (JpD, Judges for Democracy), nicknamed by his colleagues « O Guerrilleiro » (the ‘guerrilla partisan’) because of his radical sentences. According to journalist Julio Lazaro from ‘El Pais’ Varela has « an ego as boundless as that of Garzon. » [3]
The defendant’s counsel pleaded the closing of the complaint [October 1] before the High Court. « The assertion that Judge Baltasar Garzon has acted unfairly does not stand – says Gonzalo Martinez-Fresneda. In truth, abandoning the families who demanded justice would have been unjust. » Most analysts think case dismissal is unlikely, because of the fighting spirit demonstrated by Luciano Varela during the questioning of Judge Garzon. At best, Garzon could benefit from a period proviso the High Court demands further investigation.
Civilian refugees from the Spanish Civil War
Spanish journalists seem to anticipate an unfavorable outcome for what they call the « fallen angel ». The holder of the Fifth Chamber of the National Court, aged 54, is now on its own. As a tireless worker, he has processed about 7 000 cases in twenty years and has imprisoned more than 1 000 ETA activists and supporters –as many enemies.
The rejection of his candidacy for president of the National Court, in March, was a sign of his low popularity in the judiciary. «Whatever the decision of Luciano Varela is, there’s no doubt: the High Court jar has overflowed, and if not this time it will be done the next one.» [2][3] Several other complaints, in further cases are in the waiting room, just in case. The international prestige of Baltasar Garzon, the support of the International Commission of Jurists and the mobilization of Franco victims’ families may not weigh sufficiently. Hopefully not so. Spanish democracy can not (and might not) do without a man as judge Garzon.
The first part of the analysis did consider the cities’ future –an analysis on ancient and current cities in a world becoming increasingly overpopulated.
This time we look after the portfolio of proposals on sustainable ages about the so-called Local Agenda 21. I would stress the importance of the issue, its impact on the social debate: while the 19th century witnessed social debate focused on class struggle, the latter part of the 20th century has been polarized on the ecological risks –which are no longer tied to a specific place of origin but their nature, pose a threat to all forms of life on the planet. That was precisely the widespread thesis at Stockholm-72 by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos in their book ”Only One Earth”. With themes already raised earlier, in 1972, by Philippe Saint Marc in his unforgettable book “Socialisation de la nature” (Socialization of Nature, now exhausted, even in French).
In other words, the ecological risks are above classes, to the point that, even sarcastic tone has been said that “poverty is hierarchic, while smog is democratic”. The ultimate consequence lays on the social dynamics of ecological threats that has overcome the traditional debates on income or social position – fighting the global warming, the Kyoto Protocol and the future Copenhagen Protocol.
In 1993 the Expert Group on the Urban Environment and the European Commission launched the first phase of the Sustainable Cities Project for the period 1993-1996, in order to (1) contribute to further reflection on sustainability, (2) encourage a wide exchange experiences and (3) circulate best practices of local sustainability. In the long term, the idea of making recommendations on local and regional issues of Member States and the European Union itself. This, in line with what was requested in 1991 at a resolution of the Council of Ministers of the EC.
Once constituted, the EGUE worked over three years in developing a European Sustainable Cities Report, with the help of Euronet, who played the role of scientific and technical secretariat. The EGUE was organized in a number of specialized committees on:
Social integration
Mobility and urban access
Planning and public spaces
Dissemination (i.e. Distribution of projects between the public)
Sustainable Social Systems
Leisure, tourism and environment quality
Technical management of cities
Holistic urban management
Urban Regeneration (Rehabilitation of neighborhoods and housing)
With so many nuances in plain view, the Report group focused on the relationship between institutional and environmental aspects in order to estimate the chances of local governments. Somewhat transcendent, against the attitude of state or semi-federal lands, as German Länder, Spanish Autonomous Communities and most of regional governments that hold so much power and sometimes behave as new centralist outbreaks. These bodies take up often resources more than anything needed by cities for multitasking – that anyone but they must assume, mostly in extremis.
The above circumstances require a thorough review of public policies to make them less authoritarian, rational and supportive, bearing that as a result of the ecosystems theory, the city is a complex whole, characterized by continuous change and development processes. In this approach, aspects such as energy consumption, waste generation, traffic and public transport are relevant.
But the EU obviously was not the only to deal with the issue and some experiences deserve to be stressed by far. Beginning with 1987, when eleven European cities (that number has grown to fifty so far) founded the Healthy Cities Programme for the World Health Organization OMS/WHO, intended for improving health conditions and interactive environment.
Furthermore in 1990, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements – Habitat (UNCHS), started its own program of sustainable cities, aiming to provide developing countries with better systems for planning and environmental management.
Also in 1990, representatives from more than 200 local authorities around the world founded the International Council of Initiatives on Local Environment (ICLEI), promoting sustainable future, while counting with the sponsorship of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The ICLEI, which is based on the UN HQ in New York, is a local network for exchanging experiences, disseminating best examples of environmental do. ICLEI also promotes the Model Communities Program of Local Agenda 21 – a matter under discussion shortly below.
In August 1991, 130 cities have signed the Toronto Declaration on World Cities and Environment committed to develop sustainable development plans –incidentally, Canada, with Toronto and Montreal, is one of the most active countries on the issue at hand.
Meanwhile, in May 1992, 45 cities participate in the World Urban Forum – relied to the United Nations Conference on Environment, signed the Commitment of Curitiba (Brazil) in defense of sustainable urban development. A document outlining the guidelines for action to follow when developing plans for sustainable development, always in collaboration with authorities and citizens.
Likewise, the scheme of Urban Management UNDP (United Nations Development based in Nairobi) and the World Bank (1993) should be mentioned.
To complete the list of proposals made on sustainable cities, a mention is necessary conc. the Urban Program OECD (1994), aimed to improve knowledge on ecosystems in urban areas, evaluate examples of good work, and measure the effectiveness of local authorities policies and other public institutions, private or volunteer at various levels of government. Within the Urban Program, the Ecological Cities Project deserves specific mention in this analysis (will shape a further article).
In the same line of initiatives for sustainable cities, the EU Member States committed themselves at the Lisbon European Council in June 1992 to develop national plans of implementation of Local Agenda 21. An action plan born in the United Nations Conference on Environment held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (Earth Summit) and later developed at European level in the Aalborg Charter where the fundamental notes of the process of Local Agenda 21 were adopted:
Sustainability, as an idea of preservation of natural capital. This requires that the consumption of natural resources, water and renewable energy does not exceed the capacity of natural systems to replenish them – and the speed at which we consume nonrenewable resources do not exceed the rate of replacement by sustainable renewable resources. Environmental sustainability also means that the rate of emitted pollutants does not go beyond the regeneration capacity of air, water and soil on which they work. Environmental sustainability also means the maintenance of biodiversity, public health and air quality, water and soil at levels sufficient to sustain human life and welfare, as well as the flora and fauna.
Working within ecosystems, with regards to their capacity, and always linking the systems created by humans with natural ecosystems, and taking them as management models.
Citizen participation. Sustainable development means making important decisions between conflicting objectives and major changes in the way of life of communities and therefore can not be imposed from above.
The collaboration of citizens is a direct consequence of the principles of partnership and shared responsibility in terms of:
Acceptance and social support to the Plan.
Assumption of commitments and responsibilities on the part of society.
Acceptance of certain actions and proceedings which entail some sacrifice in the population, it was an overall context would be difficult to raise and take politically.
Anyhow, the impact of Local Agenda 21 has not reached its potential, which is enormous. In a way, because the municipalities fear citizens who might assume progressive grasp on cities – that is, jeopardizing hierarchies.
A few analysts seem to think it is all over and have cheerfully proclaimed an end to the recession. Far from it. Normality is far off. It will take a very long time for production, employment and unemployment to return to pre-recession levels
The healine above is from the admonition of Mr. Mervyn King. The governor of the Bank of England, stated literally during a press conference:
“It’s the level, stupid — it’s not the growth rates, it’s the levels that matter here”
I got this quote from Mohamed El-Erian’s article in the Financial Times. Dr. El-Erian coined the phrase the “New Normal” for economic growth. While I agree with his conclusion, I don’t entirely agree with his analysis for the “New Normal”.
In his article Mr. El-Erian talks about how we are slipping back to the same analytical framework that encouraged “short-termism” and got us into this jam.
“Investors have not yet accepted his [Mr. Mervyn King] insight that the absolute levels of income, debt, wealth and unemployment, not just the rates of change, are what matters today. They need to, and soon.”
And we see this analytical framework at work everyday in the traditional business news media. Take a look here US Consumer Spending Jumps the Most since 2001, thus pointing an economic rebounding… funny, if you click the link the title of the story changes to something less obvious.
So, let’s take a graphical look at some of the US indicators that Dr. El-Erian mentioned in the above quote. First, income:
Interesting, could it be that the top income brackets are driving this higher? But we still have a way to go to get back to “normal”. How about consumption:
This is a huge problem. We have done nothing to change our economic growth model that relies heavily on consumption. If we maintain the status quo in terms of our economic growth model we have a very long long way back to “normal”.
What about debt levels?
Not a nice-looking picture. If we look at overall levels of debt this is still too high. Then how about the worst limitation on economic growth:
No more words needed…
As Dr. El-Erian said:
“The longer it takes for investors and the policy consensus to shift to the appropriate analytical framework – one that factors in levels rather than just rates of change – the greater the risk of disappointment in 2010.”
I would emphasize that unless we change our framework and realize that we are heading towards a “new normal” with incredibly high structural unemployment and that we are not prepared to deal with it, we are bound to much greater problems than a bear market.
The promise of a new US president with fresh ideas has been eclipsed by developments: a economy more and more ‘contracted’, elevated unemployment and a devastated – and also wicked – financial system. Rigid new financial regulation and economic stimulus plans are at the order of the day but confidence will not be easily restored. After George Bush’s last exhausted years, a new political agenda takes shape. Greater international co-operation on global issues such us climate change have featured president Obama’s strategy. The US military presence in Iraq has also begun to slow down. Despite these ‘warmer’ guidelines, trade policy has definitely become more protectionist.
Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.
The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression …
The web is a great tool for sharing ideas and freedom of expression. However, efforts to try and control the Internet are growing. Internet repression is reported in countries like China, Vietnam, Tunisia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria. People are persecuted and imprisoned simply for criticising their government, calling for democracy and greater press freedom, or exposing human rights abuses, online.
But Internet repression is not just about governments. IT companies have helped build the systems that enable surveillance and censorship to take place. Yahoo! have supplied email users’ private data to the Chinese authorities, helping to facilitate cases of wrongful imprisonment. Microsoft and Google have both complied with government demands to actively censor Chinese users of their services.
Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right. It is one of the most precious of all rights. We should fight to protect it.
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Database of censored material
Amnesty International is working with the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) to help raise awareness of internet censorship around the world.
The ONI is a collaboration among the Citizen Lab, Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, the Advanced Network Research Group at Cambridge University, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School UK, and the Oxford Internet Institute, plus partner non- governmental organizations worldwide.
The aim of the ONI is to document empirically patterns of Internet content filtering and surveillance worldwide behind national firewalls over an extended period of time. The ONI employs a unique methodology that combines in-field investigations by partners and associates within the countries under investigation and a suite of technical interrogation tools that probe the Internet directly for forensic evidence of content filtering and surveillance technologies.
Its 11 country reports have documented the scope, scale and sophistication of numerous filtering regimes worldwide, and have helped verify the use of US commercial filtering technologies, such as Smartfilter and Websense that are used in some ways to underpin these regimes. The ONI’s flash map of global filtering shows the results of these investigations.
The examples of censored material used for Irrepressible.info have been drawn from websites that have been blocked in one of the following countries – China, Iran, Myanmar, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Syria and Vietnam, and are based on latest testing results available from each country.
Newsmap is a well-known application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.
A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.
Newsmap’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.
Google News automatically groups news tories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.
Newsmap also allows to compare the news landscape among several countries, making it possible to differentiate which countries give more coverage to, for example, more national news than international or sports rather than business
Currently, the internet presents a highly disorganized collage of information. Many of us are working in an information-soaked world. There is too much of everything. We are subject everywhere to a sensory overload of images, bombarded with information; in magazines and advertisements, on TV, radio, in the cityscape. The internet is a wonderful communication tool, but day after day we find ourselves constantly dealing with information overload. Today, the internet presents a new challenge, the wide and unregulated distribution of information requires new visual paradigms to organize, simplify and analyze large amounts of data. New user interface challenges are arising to deal with all that overwhelming quantity of information.
My good friend – and not less brother-in-law – Charles Ginvert told me a few days ago about the existence of Worldometers which I did not know.
Worldometers.info is managed by an international team of developers, researchers and volunteers with the aim of making world statistics available to the widest audience in the world in a format that makes you use your brain.
The counters that display the real-time numbers are based on Worldometers’ algorithm that processes the latest statistical data available together with its estimated progression to compute the current millisecond number to be displayed on each counter based on the specific time set on each visitor’s computer clock.
Matters of environment and nature conservation are to be considered when planning and developing construction projects.
The policy approach on sustainable cities is essential because in the process of urban development there can be no operations as often happened in the past, improvised, or at the mercy of powerful real estate groups, without taking into account the most basic in terms of sustainability. Then there is the new context, revealing that in 2008 more than half of the 6,700 million human beings, in a trend of (still) population growth living in cities, so that the quality of life for most inhabitants of the earth depends on whether or not those cities are sustainable. Moreover, in 2050 there will be 9,000 million inhabitants in the planet – 70 percent of them will be urban.
There is no civilization without cities, because since humans became sedentary in the Neolithic, human settlements began to better provide satisfaction to the needs of their communities. And over time, these early settlements became towns, centers of attraction and stimulus for social mobilization as well as for commercial exchange of ideas, and personal relationships. Ultimately, as stated by Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century, the city is not made only of stone but also and above all, human beings organized to co-exist indefinitely.
In this direction, the city is “the place of a particular human group,” according to historian Marc Bloch. As the philosopher Claude Lefort, in an essay on urban civilization in Europe, explained well how, at the end of the Middle Ages – then next to coming into the Renaissance – European cities formed broad areas of trade and freedom.
On that path slowly and around the birth of the market, an emerging social class, the bourgeoisie was creating a new order in Europe that would eventually undermine the feudal power: serfs emancipating from the masters found protection in urban habitat increasingly free. The expression of this change is summarized by Max Weber, “town air makes free.”
That freedom of the city, as Lefort writes, means the dissolution of personal dependence ties of feudalism, and the possibility, therefore, to change one’s condition: promoting work, the capacity of initiative, education and other opportunities. This direction (urban development as a critical element of progress in Europe) explains the significant leap forward, which the Renaissance involved for a great number of issues.
The improvement of former European cities did contrast with what happened elsewhere, e.g. Chinese cities, which became the nucleus of the bureaucracy and the mandarin feudal organization, which of course did not prevent the Celestial Empire becoming the greatest world power for centuries – something often ignored by the prevailing Euro centrism. But the gaps above mentioned prevented China from setting up a large middle class and therefore they avoided the necessary industrial revolution to operate there in the eighteenth century.
From an everyday approach, the city can be qualified as a place to live, grow, work, study and live together in society; thus – according to Roberto Camagni – becoming significant sets, autonomous socio-economic entities. In this regard, management and improvement of quality of life for residents requires a specific spatial planning; on vital issues such as infrastructure, urban planning, public transport, landfill management, solid waste collection and energy management , CO2 emissions, and always transcendental subject of the marginalization of certain social groups.
Prevention through environmental impact assessment (EIA)
In the direction above pointed, the sprawl of cities tends to set conurbations (Giddens dixit) or megalopolis, as happened in the United States firstly with San-San (San Francisco / San Diego), Chipitts (Chicago / Pittsburgh) or BosWash ( Boston / Washington). On the other hand, the provision of advanced services, the concentration of scientific and technical qualifications, and expertise of the workforce and the existence of large consumer markets as well, have a decisive influence on the emergence of new international centers (international hubs) that operate on a continental scale and in some cases even worldwide. Providing distinction between knowledge hubs (knowledgehubs), capital cities (established capitals), or new capitals (re-invented capitals).
From the viewpoint of conceptual development, urban sustainability is based on the definition, widely accepted that it was first built in the Brundtland Report, World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987:
Sustainable development is one that meets current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own problems.
Another complementary definition, offered by the IUCN – World Conservation Union (Environment Program of United Nations and World Wide Fund for Nature, 1991) pointed that:
Sustainable development means improving the quality of life with respect to the limits of ecosystems.
More specifically, sustainability involves a number of essential criteria:
There is no infinite growth with finite resources: it is necessary to acknowledge limits to the expansion in material terms, in order to prevent the destruction of ecosystems and the overall deterioration of the biosphere.
In production, you have to incorporate such damages to the biosphere as costs, treating, at business and government as particularly sensitive part of the profit and loss account, or budgets, respectively.
It requires the systematic use of environmental impact assessment (EIA), for reasons that can be summarized by “prevention is better than cure”.
It is important that government admin and private organizations have their respective environmental budgets, where evaluate annually the ecological balance – to assess whether or not they are generating natural capital reductions.
The development model must be ecological, permeating all sectoral intervals as patterns of respect for nature.
Biblio:
Marc Bloch, La Société féodale (Feudal Society), Albin Michel, Paris, 1998.
Claude Lefort, L’Invention démocratique (The Democratic Invention), Paris, Fayard, 1981.
Claude Lefort, Europe as an urban civilization, Revue ‘Esprit’, Paris, 2004
Max Weber, General Economic History, Cosimo, New York, 1986
Education needs to be made available to more African children
Many development analysts assumed in relation to the last G20 summit in Pittsburgh that it might not forget about Africa in its talks on the financial crisis. Developing nations on the continent are being especially hard hit at a time when things were starting to look up.
Africa’s developing countries are suffering even more from the financial crisis: not only are they having to make do with less development aid funding, but the amount of money that emigrants are able to send back to support their families at home is much smaller.
The economic crisis will make it harder to reach development aid goals
The crisis is threatening the hard-won progress made in Africa’s developing countries at a time when the situation was starting to improve. African national economies were showing an average growth of 5 to 6 percent in recent years. Kenya, for example, has seen the development of a middle class that invests in its own economy. Outside money, including from newly industrialized countries such as China, Brazil and India, had considerably upped the level of foreign investment. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that foreign investment and credit for Africa increased to $53 billion (40 billion Euros) – five times the amount in 2000. But Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank, warns that the crisis could unravel this progress.
“We have to distinguish between the financial crisis and the economic crisis,” Kaberuka said. “Until now, (the financial crisis) has not hit a single African bank, but it has affected national economies. For 2009, we’re expecting an average maximum economic growth rate of 4 to 4.5 percent, no more. And it could well turn out to be smaller. We have to mobilize inner-African capital. We have very rich and very poor countries in Africa. On the regional level, the African Development Bank has already managed to mobilize capital, but not for the continent as a whole.”
Fears of a setback
Ad Melkert is a UN under secretary-general and an associate administrator of the UN Development Program (UNDP). He also fears that Africa will suffer a setback.
“This is all happening after a considerable number of African countries have, over the past few years, experienced significant economic growth and an increase in jobs and investment,” Melkert said. “Now, there’s a reversal. That means when the international community – the G20 – meets in April in London for its financial summit, they have to work out an international agenda there. They have to ensure that they factor in Africa, because this is an international financial crisis that is having effects worldwide.”
Growth rate of 3.4 % expected for sub-Saharan Africa
International institutions such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are calling for multilateral risk management for the financial markets. In Davos, some major actors called for the creation of global economic council. The inclusion of developing countries in such bodies will be decisive, says Melkert. The UNDP representative is hoping for a clear statement from the G20, as otherwise, the UN’s development goals will be in danger of failure.
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“The crisis has created a totally new starting position,” he said. “It really does mean a setback, even for really successful countries like China, for example. We’ll have to really go the extra mile now if we’re to reach our development goals.”
Despite the crisis, some industrialized countries as Spain and Germany have committed themselves to raising development aid bit by bit to reach 0.7 percent of their gross domestic product. Melkert advises other wealthy nations to also maintain their development aid goals.
“There’s no alternative to investing in development goals,” he said. “I hope that the G20 summit will help, I hope that the new American administration under Obama will support the Millennium goals even more. I hope that the Europeans keep their promises and invest more in development policies each year. And I hope that the growing middle classes in Africa, Brazil or in India pay their taxes and use this tax money to fight poverty.”
Poverty remains a major challenge
Although the global fight against poverty has made progress, the percentage of poor people in Africa hasn’t gone down at all, due to the continent’s fast-growing population. With a poverty rate of around 50 percent, the share of extreme poverty in the total population hasn’t changed, and Melkert fears it could even get worse.
“We have to be really ambitious here and take the problem of poverty really seriously,” he said. “With this financial crisis, more people will be forced into poverty than in years past.”
There are worries that more Africans will slip into poverty
The IMF has revised its growth projection downwards and has forecast an economic growth rate of just 3.4 percent for sub-Saharan Africa. But all African governments have to take political responsibility, says Melkert. He points to examples from Latin America, saying Africa should learn to also create effective social security systems and incentives for development.
“Good systems have been established in Latin America,” he says. “There, families get money if they send their children to school or get them vaccinated. Africa should follow this example. The World Bank, the UN or bilateral donors could financially support such a system. That would help the poorest people to have a minimal income to buy food, send their children to school or care for their health.”
He advises the international community to be patient and take a long-term view when it comes to supporting development goals – despite the global financial crisis.
“You don’t make development progress from one year to the next – it’s a question of 10 or 20 years,” Melkert said.
The French-Polish filmmaker was arrested in Switzerland upon a US request due to a sex scandal back in the late 70s.
The legal issueon the case.- Roman Polanski was arrested under an international warrant of arrest issued by a US court. Many international conventions, bilateral or multilateral on judicial cooperation, get involved to require the execution of the warrant by the requested State. These agreements are not signed with any state: e.g. France has no extradition treaty with Iran or North Korea. In this occasion, we witness the execution of the extradition treaty between the United States and the Swiss Confederation, signed in Washington on November 14, 1990 (pdfhere).
The warrant is notified to the country’s authorities where the person comes into (if he is registered in the international database of Interpol). When a person comes to the border the police check on the base. If the answer is positive, the person must be arrested, police officers have no choice. In all Western legal systems the warrant leads to provisionally incarceration, typically a few days, the time for authorities to notify the warrant to the individual, so he is able to identify who ordered his arrest and why. This is crucial for the rights of defense and the non-compliance with this condition leads to prisoner’s immediate release. The detainee has right to a counsel (i.e. a lawyer). He is then presented to a judge who will ask him if he agrees to be returned to the requesting state. If he refuses, the judge decides on possible release supervision – and he can appeal the warrant of arrest.
Finally, there is a fundamental principle: a State never extradites its nationals. This is contrary to the protection it owes to its citizens. That does not mean they are immune from prosecution in their home state. And I think it necessary to add that no law or international convention provides immunity for artists, Oscar-winning or not.
Mr. Polanski is French and Polish. He is the target of an international warrant of arrest issued by a Californian court of justice for an issue dating back to 1977. At that time he had sex with a minor aged 13 after making her drink alcohol and consume drugs. Mr. Polanski presumption of innocence did expire as soon as the illusions of this girl broke down – since Roman Polanski admitted facts by pleading guilty. In the legal sense, Roman Polanski guiltiness is no longer on discussion. After a few days in jail, Mr. Polanski was released in hold of the sentence hearing. He took the opportunity to clear out LA and has carefully avoided the U.S. for thirty years. Initially, the indictment contained five charges, including rape . Following an agreement with prosecutors – as California law allows it – Roman Polanski pleaded guilty to a single chief of “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor” (i.e. child sexual abuse, California Penal Code Section 261.5.), offense punishable by 4 years.
The warrant seeks to summon for sentencing – hence the appearance of the convicted person is required in California law. The victim has been formerly compensated and she withdrew her complaint. This was probably part of the agreement with the prosecution (the victim is not party to the criminal trial in American law). This does not preclude further prosecution. While he resided in France, Mr. Polanski was confident: France does not extradite its nationals. And he could not be prosecuted in France, although being French national, as the facts have already been tried in the United States. This is the rule non bis in idem (no matter can be judged twice).
Vanity catch out our filmmaker: he was invited to Switzerland to receive a reward for all his career, and then he came visit the pleasant federal confederation. Fatality: at the airport, when checking the passport, custom bell gave a loud ‘bang-bang’: “Mmm, this man is the subject of an international warrant of arrest issued in 2005″ thinks the policeman. “Mr.Polanski is not Swiss,so he can be stopped”… and here he tasted the wet straw of Helvetian dungeons, where he is in individual cells, confined 23 hours a day. Does it shock you? Please take note that prisoners in France are treated the same way in jail, except that in addition, they are in an overcrowded cell.
Finally, I found two shocking things in the barrage from the artists’ world.
In spite of Mr. Polanski has long suffered throughout his life – an unhappy childhood in the Cracow ghetto; then as an orphan whose parents were deported and killed by nazis; the awful murder of his wife, actress Sharon Tate, by Manson’s sect – this does not grant him a leeway or carte blanche to commit a crime and escape the law. We must not forget that this is a crime. It is a matter of rape in the person of a minor.
I find it shameful to hear artists – who a few weeks ago vowed to pillory French downloaders (Hadopi law on censorship over Internet) and approved the repressive legislation against constitutional rights to punish the illegal downloading of their works – make now a fuss when it is one of them whom the law applies in its entire rigor. When you know that a lot of downloaders are in the 13, we draw the impression that minors are good for their eyes only to spit their pocket money and serve as sex objects. As if their image needed it. And after that, we treat judges as corporatist.
It makes my blood boil when I hear the French minister of culture Mitterrand pointing “the America that fears.” Oh, how we know America badly. Tocqueville had already identified 170 years ago, the passion for equality in this country. It has not changed. It is inconceivable there to treat an individual differently because he belongs to aristocracy, even THE artisticaristocracy. Even if it permanently weakened the executive, ten years ago, America has seriously considered the possibility of overthrowing the President because he lied under oath before a Grand Jury.
A justice that does not spare the powerful and those protected by the powerful? I understand now why a minister of the French Republic – a republic who has carefully put his president and his ministers safe from justice – finds that America is frightening.
In 2005, just after the urban riots while he was head of the Ethics and Human Rights in Geneva police, a Swiss policeman spent several weeks in a police station located in the ‘93’, the Seine-Saint-Denis county (northern suburbs of Paris, «the most violent county» in France in words of Le Temps, from Geneva; not too far from truth). He looked over the French police and came to the conclusion that it was «an army of occupation. »
Yves Patrick Delachaux, turned a novelist and screenwriter today, just wrote «Grave Panique» (Severe Panic) to put in picture his experience. The title was found one night when a patrol cop from the anti-criminal brigade was about to run over an old lady while he was driving too quickly and he exclaimed: «Je l’ai grave paniquée la mémé» («I seriously terrified the granny. »)
His book speaks volumes about the state of strain existing between young people and police in the French suburbs, says Sylvain Besson, Le Temps correspondent in Paris. As well as the – now admitted without having to spell things out – complete failure of the policy implemented by Nicolas Sarkozy since his arrival at the Ministry of Interior (i.e. Home Office) in 2002.
On the ground, the healing is still far. Two days after his meeting on the theme «learning to live together» between youth and police, the Interior Minister, Brice Hortefeux, filed a complaint for defamation against two young people who accused police of having hit a pizza deliveryman last August 9, in Bagnolet, in the neighborhoods of Paris. Aged 18, he died trying to escape a police check control when he drove a cross motorcycle – prohibited on public roads. In the suburbs, the dialogue of the deaf between youth and police continue to kill.
Yves Patrick Delachaux understood the problem at the first glance at the police station:
«A square blockhouse, everything is barricaded, wired. It is an occupation army. [...] An atmosphere of barracks, toil, suffering, says the Swiss policeman. We feel that it weighs on their shoulders.»
Policemen hide their function. No sooner have they arrived, than they just call for transfer elsewhere, and they never dwell in Seine-Saint-Denis itself. Delachaux declares that policemen reported him that saying hello to a group of young people means « go in search of clash», in the words of French policemen:
The Swiss request to see the 4000 City of La Courneuve, become legendary since Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed he wanted to flush out and get rid of all the trash in the suburbs with a Kärcher [1]. On the way ahead, the tension goes up: it is said to be aware of objects launched from the rooftops, to be ready to call for help … Coming out of their car, policemen deploy themselves in skirmish, «as in Afghanistan. »
When meeting a group of young people of African origin, the atmosphere is icy. Not a word, just dreadful looks. At back of the pack, Yves Patrick Delachaux launches a loud «hello» to the teenagers, which does not receive any reply. Back in the car, the blame rains from policemen: «Never redo it. You’re going to confrontation! »
The culprits in this system are not the policemen themselves, but «the immense organizational immaturity» of a structure where «all the weight and responsibility are placed on 22 years old guys», entangled in a policy of figures imposed by the government (The more they arrest, the better for the government).
The sad thing about this is that this doesn’t happen in France only (a country that proudly proclaims itself «homeland of human rights»). The welcome of customs police in many US airports is really humiliating – I would almost say violent. Not to mention the treatment given to Mexican «wetbacks». Or the discretionary raids by the Spanish police in Basque households.
[1] Kärcher is a well-known German cleaning machine using high pressure water. A Kärcher cleaner is therefore supposed to be powerful for removing dirt. This is quite the reason of the controversy, as Mr. Sarkozy compared some young people to dirt.
No need to search for obscure reasons or ulterior motive when scrutinizing the change in direction introduced by President Obama in the US defense policy after President’s refusal to install the so-called missile shield. The expected partial deployment on European territory was one of the pillars of Bush’s failed strategy against international terrorism.
Obama’s resolution involved several decisions of domestic and foreign policy, all high draft. On the one hand, the strong US defense industry will not feel aggrieved, since this is not about trying to cut off a program that would produce significant benefits, but to transform the land-based missile defense system installed on other naval platforms. The technical explanations do little to the case except to deny the accusation that the US and its allies could be defenseless against a suspected terrorist attack with missiles.
The adopted solution presupposes a more thorough risk assessment, dismissing the idea that Iran is able to hold mid-term long-range missiles and reduce the anticipated missile threat from shorter range. The fact that the current US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who was also in charge during the Bush administration, supports and implement this change in strategy, is a smart move by Obama. The US President skillfully – and to the surprise of many who did not understand his decision– maintained R. Gates at the same position –the very same that had fully supported the failed military strategy of the former president.
Russia expressed rapidly and unambiguously its favorable opinion about this amendment and countries most directly concerned which are Poland and Czech Republic shall cover up that Europe defense is a common issue that affects all countries rather than a result of bilateral agreements of some of them with the American superpower – in order they appease their peculiar and atavistic fears towards Russia, however reasonable their historical reasons may seem.
Nor should it surprise that the new Secretary General of NATO – an alliance that since the Soviet Union collapsed is looking for a suitable place in the global system of supranational military organizations – is enthusiastically pointing to a new strategy that does not see an almost mandatory enemy in Russia but an appropriate and necessary ally, by which NATO can continue to keep alive, despite all previsions – a treaty that was precisely born to fight today’s new ally.
Subsequently, Mr. Rasmussen, in his first public comments of some significance since in August he took over from NATO, suggested combining missile defense systems of US, NATO and Russia into a single one. However, when asked about specifics of the plan he did not know how to respond and referred to further clarification of the military leaders –quite understandable since the NATO HQ itself was surprised by the swift and unexpected decision by the US president.
Obama, therefore, takes firmly the helm of US foreign policy. He will face a tough offensive from his political rivals. Senator McCain already warned the decision as a “serious error” that “potentially undermines US leadership as perceived in Eastern Europe”. The most obsessive US right wing – the very same which identifies traits of socialism and even communism in Obama’s plan to extend health coverage to every citizen – will go on with its campaign of denigration, with the helpful support from the most extreme republicans.
Obama definitely buries the former US policy, which divided Europe with the invasion of Iraq – one might remember the shameful pamphlet to support Bush policy, signed by many conservative European leaders, including Berlusconi, Aznar and Barroso, together with the joint efforts of three Eastern European countries, significantly Poland and the Czech Republic. The ensuing releasing in the Wall Street Journal allowed the most US reactionary forces to contempt the “old Europe” (led by France and Germany), who opposed the war, while praising the “new Europe” – the latter, whilst supporting Bush’s illegal adventure, showed a mixture of servility and excitement to establish a special relationship with the American superpower, that is trying to came closer to develop relationships with influential people (UK), in sum expecting benefits, as Jeb Bush, the dreadful brother of the former US president, who ruled his fiefdom in Florida, decreed when visiting Madrid: “This relationship between the United States and Spain will provide benefits that cannot be imagined today.”
The way Obama has to pass through is easier said than done and he will need all his personality resources to face opposition from the social sectors – within and outside the US –who worshiped Bush and still share his reactionary ideology and highlight his disastrous decisions.
Interesting interview that Josh Ruxin–founder of the new NGO Rwanda Works, Professor at Columbia University, and Director of the Millennium Global Village Project in Rwanda, just had with BigThink.
In the interview, Ruxin describes his current work in Rwanda helping to promote access to healthcare and sustainability, as well as his profound insights into the policies that actually work to advance international development. Among the many current practices that Ruxin explains are simply not working, include the widely-praised spread of microfinance loans, which Ruxin believes are not nearly the “panacea” many believe them to be, and are not actually creating any significant progress in much of the developing world–particularly not sub-Saharan Africa: http://bigthink.com/joshruxin/the-case-against-microfinance-loans
Ruxin also discusses the urgency of developing sustainable agriculture in the developing world as a way to solve an array of problems, and describes some of the creative new approaches to affordably promoting sustainability in Rwanda and surrounding countries that currently being refined to meet these challenges: http://bigthink.com/joshruxin/the-key-to-developing-rwanda
ONGs y microfinanzas en Africa: la experiencia reveladora de ‘Rwanda Works’
Interesante entrevista (en inglés) que Josh Ruxin ha concedido a BigThink. Josh Ruxin es el fundador de la nueva ONG Rwanda Works, Profesor de la Universidad de Columbia, y director del Proyecto de la Aldea Global del Milenio, en Rwanda.
En la entrevista, Ruxin describe su trabajo actual en Rwanda para ayudar a promover el acceso a la asistencia sanitaria y la sostenibilidad, así como sus reflexiones lúcidas sobre las políticas que funcionan realmente para promover el desarrollo internacional. Entre las muchas prácticas actuales que Ruxin considera simplemente inoperantes, incluye la propagación del muy encumbrado sistema de microcréditos. Ruxin los juzga de tal forma que cree que no son ni la “panacea” que muchos quisieran, y no son, puesto que no representan en realidad un avance significativo en la mayor parte de el mundo en desarrollo – en particular, para África subsahariana: http://bigthink.com/joshruxin/the-case-against-microfinance-loans
Ruxin también razona sobre la urgencia en desarrollar la agricultura sostenible en el mundo en desarrollo como una manera de resolver una serie de problemas, y describe algunos de los enfoques nuevos y creativos para promover la sostenibilidad asequible en Rwanda y países vecinos que actualmente se está perfeccionando para enfrentar estos desafíos: http://bigthink.com/joshruxin/the-key-to-developing-rwanda
Asimismo Ruxin examina cómo un aumento en los derechos reproductivos de las mujeres es una de las cuestiones clave en el desarrollo internacional y por qué los funcionarios de la administración que desean invertir en ayuda al desarrollo han de proporcionar muchos más fondos para la planificación familiar: http://bigthink.com/joshruxin/the-link-between-womens-rights-and-economic-success
Best Foreign Language Film at the 2009 Academy Awards.
Plainly and simply, the best film I’ve seen in a while. Without revealing too much, it is the story of how an ordinary man unwittingly becomes a Okuribito – a person who prepares the dead for their ‘departure’, literally the person who “sees off”.
As often is the case of films about death, Okuribito knows much about life. A moving drama, imbued with incredible sadness, but at the same time director Yojiro Takita has far managed to combine humor, without losing sight at the film’s message. I found the film to be “educational” in many ways.
Film strength lies in the ability to keep playing without being too melodramatic or sentimental (some may disagree on this point). Much of the credit should go to surprising (and unfamiliar to Western viewers) casting: each character has a story to tell. Even the secondary characters are plots that probably leave lasting impressions.
Aunque, como dice mi buen amigo Justo Almendros, La Vanguardia es el único periódico que ofrece noticias con 3 dias de retraso, confieso que sigo los artículos de fondo de algunos como J. Antich o E. Juliana (y evito los despropósitos de otros, léase P.Rahola, que, aunque inteligente, me pone de los nervios).
Leo hoy un papel elocuente de Enric Juliana en LV. Y a la luz de su escrito me vienen estos comentarios a modo de escritura automática.
Aznar daba la impresión de determinación y coherencia. Zapatero, muchas veces admirable en su determinación por hacer avanzar la sociedad española y posibilista en su gestión de las diferencias territoriales, da ahora la sensación de improvisación en materia económica.
Da la impresión que, algunos como Aznar, supieron gestionar en su momento la bonanza económica (incluso la descomunal bonanza del ladrillo) y capitalizarla para el futuro. Mientras que otros, léase Zapatero, no saben gestionar la economía en tiempos de crisis, porque no supieron capitalizar los tiempos de bonanza económica.
Algunos amiguetes de Zapatero le susuran al oído de subir los impuestos, lo cual ninguno de sus correligionarios del G20 proyecta ¿Con estas intenciones va a Pittsburg???
La economía no puede ser el atajo ideológico y oportunista de algunos como José Blanco. Faltan sensatez y planteamientos macroeconómicos a medio plazo. Sobran la incoherencia de personajillos de dudoso credo -como Miguel Sebastián- o con los arneses ideológicos como los de la inexperimentada y maximalista talibana económica Elena Salgado.
Sarkozy – y no solo por efecto de recencia – bajó los impuestos a principios de su mandato para el 95% de los franceses, es decir la ingente clase media. Resultado: tasa de paro hoy en el 9%, destrucción de empleo en franca disminución, crecimiento económico de 0,3% en el primer semestre, 0,7% previsto a fin de ejercicio de 2009, poder adquisitivo estabilizado. Quién da más? Las cifras de la economía española, mejor me las callo…
Creo que buena parte de los españoles teníamos la mosca detrás de la oreja durante los años de la bonanza del ladrillo. No había que ser muy listo para darse cuenta de que estábamos construyendo nuestro futuro sobre arena. Luego vino Zapatero y empezamos a darnos cuenta que el pájaro era un tanto inepto en economía, un presidente que gobernaba a bandazos y al que encima le cayó la recesión. Y ahora, ¿qué hacemos?
Por eso, se me ocurre a contrario de Enric Juliana en su artículo (“La tentación bonapartista: el admirado Sarkozy”) lo de Sarkozy capitán de barco, Zapatero marinero de agua dulce…
Aunque, como dice Lluis Bassets hoy en El País, cuán diferente es el caso de los añorables Helmut Kohl y Angela Merkel: no hay trampa ni cartón, valen lo que valen y se les debe valorar por sus acciones y (buenos) resultados.
“[…] Todo lo contrario de lo que representan los prototipos de Sarkozy o Berlusconi, dos variedades, ciertamente de distinta calidad moral, en la fauna contemporánea del poder que comparten narcisismo, vanidad e hinchazón del ego, características ajenas a la sicología de la canciller [Merkel].”
¿Es en el espejo de ésta en que se reconoce Zapatero o en el de aquellos dos?
Countdown to Copenhagen: The global conference on climate change will take place from December 7 to 18 in Denmark. At 100 days of its conclusion, pessimism prevails.
Ban Ki-moon at the ice floe in Svalbard Islands, Norway
Countdown appears critical now: the days between now and December 18, the day of the possible conclusion of a global agreement to fight against global warming. Delegates from 192 countries will meet in Copenhagen under the auspices of the UN. Will they find the resources to overcome their differences? While part of the future of the twenty-first century will be played in the Danish capital, pessimism prevails for now, here’s why.
The ice warming is more important than predicted. According to a WWF report, released September 2, the Arctic is warming twice faster than the Earth as a whole, which could lead to a rise in sea levels of 1.20 m by 2100, more than was expected so far by scientists. And the WWF prevents that “the flooding of coastal areas due to melting ice will affect more than one quarter of the world population.” With the risk that the flow of climate refugees will become an unmanageable threat for the planet.
The Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon launches a cry of alarm. Faced with the increasing dangers, the Secretary General of UN, Ban Ki-moon has decided to shake the conscience by going in early September to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, 1 200 km far from the North Pole. « The Arctic is like a canary in a coal mine: is an alarm for the global climate. I will say in Copenhagen to world leaders they must act before it’s too late », he said on site. And, back from Svalbard, he added, gravely: « The world is rushing toward the abyss. »
Negotiators are worried. Thus, Pierre Radanne, energy consultant and one of the negotiators in Copenhagen said in Terra Eco « By three months to the summit we’re at a deadlock. » This remark is confirmed by Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): «While early this year the G8 leaders had agreed on the objective of maintaining the warming to 2°C, there is no sign of progress or significant progress in the negotiations towards Copenhagen. »
Mobilizing the civil society. In the blogosphere some interesting initiatives as Mediators at COP15 – finding new ways, propose suitable action plans. In France, 11 NGOs (such as Greenpeace, WWF and CRS) have decided to intensify their action. Their petition “We do not negotiate with the climate, we act“, has surpassed the 145 000 signatures. The Way Forward at Copenhagen.
In light of the potentially weakening effects, it is crucial both for African and world leaders and policy makers to discuss the possible responses to diminish the impact of crises on the continent.
One way of responding successfully to the crisis is to give priority to building African markets. In particular, policies to strengthen the African markets and institutions necessary to promote growth and ensure that African economies are more resistant to external shocks. There is also a need for tighter regulation of African financial markets. Moreover, creating a more conducive business environment to reduce costs and limitations associated with doing business in African economies to raise their profile as a business destination less expensive, less risky and more profitable, helping to attract more Foreign capital flows and investment in the context of a capital market has become considerably more risk averse following the onset of the financial crisis. The reforms that encourage foreign direct investment and portfolio flows and the measures that raise the level of confidence in financial systems in Africa can have an equally positive impact.
Sub-Saharan Africa is dropping behind in infrastructure
Source: Preliminary results AICD 2008. African Perspectives and Recommendations to the G20. Committee of African Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors. 21/03/09
.
The expansion of trade with other developing countries represents another potential means to ease the severity of the negative effects of the crisis on African economies. Global trade statistics suggest that trade between developing countries as percentage of total world trade, and therefore world trade has been increasing for quite some time. In fact, trade in goods among developing countries grew at an average annual rate of 13 % between 1995 and 2007 and in 2007, represented a fifth of total world trade flows. It is vital for Africa to increase their share of this link between South-South trade to offset some effects of the anticipated decline in demand for their commodity exports. Along with this is the need to increase intra-regional trade flows and trade in Africa in order to reduce the dependence of African economies in overseas markets. [3]
Similarly, measures to improve South-South economic cooperation, particularly in terms of investment, financial flows and joint efforts to stabilize foreign exchange rates and debt, should be investigated. In particular, South-South several measures to address potentially available for African countries to tackle the worst effects of the global financial crisis. First, the increased funding of regional development banks could offset the anticipated slowdown in international aid and donor funding for African economies. Secondly, regional stimulus packages could be implemented to help sustain the market and sustain economic growth. Similarly, regional agreements could be used that are specifically designed to mitigate the impact of financial shocks through, for example, the provision of international financial liquidity through swaps. Finally, African countries burdened by high debt levels, measures to diversify foreign exchange reserves could be adopted whereby the purchase of other developing countries “that debt.
Globally, according to the World Trade Organization Director General Pascal Lamy said reaching a global trade deal that represent a relatively simple way to alleviate the effects of the crisis. The promise of such a comprehensive agreement “is particularly attractive to African economies, which are perhaps amongst the most threatened by the prospect of increased protectionism arising from the crisis. Specifically, the new national protectionist measures, mainly in the form benign appearance, the political crisis linked to the encouragement of the government and relief campaigns, the exchange rate devaluations, antidumping and countervailing duties and ‘buy local policies that discriminate against foreign firms and workers can suppress the export sectors in Africa even more. It is therefore essential for African politicians to push for a global agreement that keeps opening up markets and prevent a flood of new crisis linked to protectionist measures.
Furthermore, following the emergence of the global financial crisis, it is clear that there is an urgent need to reform the multilateral financial architecture, particularly in terms of ensuring greater representation of African countries in international financial institutions. Despite the financial crisis that originated in Africa, the continent has been excessively exposed to its effects. This has led to strident calls for a more inclusive multilateral governance that provides a greater voice “to African countries in international financial institutions. Countries is important for developing countries, and Africa in particular, to play a role most important of these institutions and the economic crisis management.
Domestic fiscal and monetary policy responses should also be explored by African countries with the capacity to implement them. For example, in African countries with relatively large foreign exchange reserves may be possible to use these reserves to cushion the worst effects of crisis and decline to fund any capital flows. Alternatively, African countries that operate under systems of fixed exchange rate may have some leeway to adopt more flexible exchange rate regimes in order to “allow the nominal exchange rate to absorb some of the impact of external shock and reduce the actual effects in the national economy. “In terms of fiscal stimulus options, the expansionary fiscal policies such as reducing taxes or increasing government spending may help boost demand and employment in African economies. The usual argument against the expansionary fiscal policy – that it crowds out private sector investment – is unlikely to apply, given the climate of reduced appetite for credit and a drastically reduced risk among investors.
Finally, while Africa is certainly feeling the effects of the global economic slowdown, the impact of what is likely to deteriorate further, the credit crunch in the world’s most advanced economies may actually create opportunities in terms movement of capital into emerging economies. For example, sovereign wealth funds before investing in the financial systems of the United States and Europe are now increasingly looking to the developing world to possible locations for investment. However, for this to happen in Africa, the continent’s countries have to implement measures to improve its ratings on investment risk.
Africa is facing a large and growing economic gap
The fact that many African countries are relatively detached from the global financial system has softened the continent from some of the consequences of the global financial crisis. However, the initial view proposed by many commentators that Africa would be “spared” from the effects of the financial crisis that originated in several advanced economies in the world has proven to be unfounded. Prices and demand for African exports of commodities have dropped significantly amid a sharp decline in world industrial output. Moreover, the climate of declining credit arising from the crisis is likely to lead to a substantial decrease in international financial flows to African countries in the form of private investment and capital flows, trade credit, financing donors and remittances from Africans in the diaspora. These factors have led to predictions of sharp fall in growth in sub-Saharan Africa.
It is evident that African countries and their leaders should try to take initiative and economic policy measures and reforms to mitigate the effects of the crisis on African economies. These should include interventions to strengthen the African markets and institutions, expand “South-South trade and economic cooperation, including increase or intra-regional trade to reduce dependence on overseas markets, and implement expansionary monetary and fiscal policies to boost demand and employment. In addition, globally, African leaders must push for reform of global financial architecture to include greater representation of African interests in the forum of the international financial institutions. Furthermore, it is extremely important that the continent supports efforts to conclude a global trade deal that maintains the openness of markets and the safeguards against the proliferation of new crises linked to protectionist measures.
[1] South-South trade could soften impact of financial crisis for vulnerable economies. UNCTAD. 2009.
[2] Impact of the crisis on African Economies. Sustaining growth and poverty reduction, African Perspectives and Recommendations to the G20, by The Committee of African Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors. 21 March 2009
[3] World Bank to Help Mitigate Impact of Global Financial Crisis on Africa’s Development. 19 November 2008
[4] International Monetary Fund. 2009. What the Global Financial Crisis Means for Sub-Saharan Africa. Speech by Takatoshi Kato, Deputy Managing Director, IMF, 12th AU Summt, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 3 February 2009.
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted Hartmann of contempt to the court Monday for disclosing confidential information in a genocide case. She was sentenced to pay a fine of 7,000 Euros.
Florence Hartmann prosecuted to have disclosed the existence of confidential decisions made by the Court of Appeals in the Milosevic case.
Florence Hartmann accused the court of ‘trying to silence the truth’.
Florence Hartmann was found guilty of breaching the court’s rules when she disclosed the contents of two appeals chamber decisions from the Slobodan Milošević case in a 2007 book as well as an article she wrote in 2008. She has been fined 7,000 euros.
Hartmann was spokesperson for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia’s (ICTY) Prosecutor Carla del Ponte between 2000 and 2006.
The court dismissed her argument that the information she realeased had already been put in the public domain by the tribunal.
The court said the fact that Hartmann spent six years in the capacity of the spokesperson of the Prosecutor meant that she was well aware of what the confidentiality of a decision entailed.
The Chamber further argued that Hartmann’s conduct could deter sovereign states from cooperating with the Tribunal in providing evidence in the future.
“This…impacts upon the Tribunal’s ability to exercise its jurisdiction to prosecute and punish serious violations of humanitarian law as prescribed by its mandate,” Judge Bakone Justice Moloto, presiding, said.
“Public confidence in the effectiveness of protective measures, orders and decisions is vital to the success of the work of the Tribunal.”
The French journalist was the first former employee to stand trial for contempt before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
Her case was filed under the same number as that of Slobodan Milosevic. But Hartmann refused to sit on the same chair as the tribunals regular suspects since her case was not about war crimes.
Hartmann had publicly accused the UN war crimes tribunal of “trying to silence the truth”.
The tribunal argued that she “knew that the information was confidential at the time disclosure was made, that the decisions from which the information was drawn were ordered to be filed confidentially, and that by her disclosure she was revealing confidential information to the public.”
Hartmann covered the 1990s Balkan wars as a correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde. She thereafter became spokeswoman for the former chief war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte from 2000 to 2006. She then published a book, “Peace and Punishment: The Secret Wars of Politics and International Justice”.
In 2008, Hartmann wrote an article entitled “Vital Genocide Documents Concealed” that was published by the Bosnian Institute.
In her publications Hartmann wrote that the Hague prosecution was allegedly unhappy with the tribunal’s decision to accept Serbia’s request to have some portions of the state archive documents considered in closed sessions. The judges in the Milosevic case allowed Serbia to censor parts of evidence that was made public. She believes that it was precisely those pieces of evidence that were key in determining Serbia’s responsibility for the genocide in Bosnia.
Hartmann argued that it was thanks to the Tribunal’s collusion with Serbia in the suppression of this crucial piece of evidence, that Bosnia was not able to draw upon the latter in its case against Serbia for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), leading to Serbia’s acquittal.
Far from punishing the perpetrators of genocide in the former Yugoslavia, the Tribunal has helped to shield them, Hartmann said. She accused judges of the Appeals Chamber, headed by former Tribunal President Fausto Pocar, of being “accomplices in manipulation organized by the authorities in Belgrade, so that the International Court of Justice, which heard the Bosnian genocide lawsuit, would be made to make the same mistakes the Hague Tribunal made”.
Her book has received broad coverage, and it kicked off a storm in the Balkans even before translations became available in early November 2007, with local politicians using it to attack the ICTY’s legitimacy. A month after the publication, she received a letter from the tribunal reminding her of her administrative and legal obligations to respect its confidentiality rules.
Henri Cartier Bresson · Cell in Model Prison in the USA, 1975
With 135 death convicted since 1973, it was clear that the evidence would come a day in the United States, that a man has been sentenced to death by mistake and then executed.
That day seems to have happened, if you attend to the opponents of death punishment. Innocence Project co-Director Barry Scheck says:
”There can no longer be any doubt that an innocent person has been executed. The question now turns to how we can stop it from happening again”.
Innocence Project is an NGO dedicated to helping prisoners to use DNA genetic testing.
“As long as our system of justice makes mistakes – including the ultimate mistake – we cannot continue executing people,” Scheck said.
On 23 December 1991, a 2-year-old daughter and 1-year-old twins died by fire at family home in Corsicana, Texas. Cameron Todd Willingham, 23 years, the children’s father, who was the only adult present, has been accused of murder. He was found guilty and then sentenced to death in 1992. After twelve years in death corridor and five appeals, Camron Todd was executed by lethal injection in 2004, although he always protested his innocence.
Five years later, an investigation committee on the death penalty operation in Texas established in its preliminary conclusions that the fire could have been a purely accidental origin – that’s what Innocence Project has argued all the time.
According to the weekly The New Yorker, who spent a long investigation on Cameron Todd Willingham’s case, the Commission should deliver its final report in early 2010. It reports a botched investigation, particularly in terms of scientific expertise to determine the origin of fire. For ten years, several states have imposed a moratorium or initiate discussion, after being confronted with legal errors, but none has yet admitted having executed an innocent man.
An ‘affligeant’ indictment
In a 30 August editorial column, The New York Times considered the Cameron Todd Willingham’s case “shocking”, even for those who have
“no illusions about the brutal injustice of the death penalty after all of the exonerations in recent years from DNA evidence. […] It is outrageous that Texas is conducting its careful, highly skilled investigation after Mr. Willingham has been executed, rather than before”,
…reproves the NYT, emphasizing on the fact that the defendant’s trial ran just two days.
Texas remains the state that executes more: 18 of the 37 executions in 2009. But across the country, capital punishment is declining; it has reached its lowest level for thirty years because of so called “crisis of confidence” in the judiciary –in the opponents’ words. Nearly 3 300 inmates are in death corridor now, whereof 53 are women.
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A report published early September 2009 by 
Adam Smith in his 
“ Dirty Secrets, Dirty War: The Exile of Robert J. Cox (Buenos Aires, Argentina: 1976-1983)” by David Cox, Evening Post Publishing, June 2009
Plainly and simply, the best film I’ve seen in a while. Without revealing too much, it is the story of how an ordinary man unwittingly becomes a Okuribito – a person who prepares the dead for their ‘departure’, literally the person who “sees off”.
![Henri Cartier Bresson · Cell in Model Prison in the USA [1975]](http://zikipediq.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/henri-cartier-bresson-c2b7-cell-in-model-prison-in-the-usa-19751.jpg?w=192&h=300 "Henri Cartier Bresson · Cell in Model Prison in the USA [1975]")
