Daily Archives: August 5, 2013

terrorism

Murder, Menace Stalk Istanbul’s LGBT Community – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East

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I had been researching the murder of Gaye, a 43-year-old trans woman killed in her home in Istanbul’s Beyoglu district on July 26. The neighbors who found her body three days later reported that she had been strangled, but the police are yet to make a public statement on the circumstances of her death. If Gaye’s killing proves to be motivated by hate as the local Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transsexual (LGBT) chapter claims, she will be the tenth known transgender victim of such crimes in Turkey in the last eighteen months.

via Murder, Menace Stalk Istanbul’s LGBT Community – Al-Monitor: the Pulse of the Middle East.

environment, HumanLoving, Urbanfarm

Project Sweetie Pie: Teens get fresh (food) in North Minneapolis | Twin Cities Daily Planet

“We started with five gardens in 2011.” said Chaney. “This year we have 20. We’re trying to replicate the whole food system and get young people involved.” The gardens, he said, offer kids an opportunity to learn skills that may lead to future jobs and to give them something to do that might keep them out of trouble. He also hopes that it can help pull North Minneapolis out of poverty.

“We can’t get a big company to come to North Minneapolis,” he said. “But what we can do is get empty lots and turn them into food production. This is getting the community involved in the free market system. There are 1,800 empty lots in North Minneapolis, some because of the tornado.”

via Project Sweetie Pie: Teens get fresh (food) in North Minneapolis | Twin Cities Daily Planet.

environment

Fukushima Radioactive Leak Is An ‘Emergency,’ Nuclear Body Says | InsideClimate News

Highly radioactive water seeping into the ocean from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is creating an “emergency” that the operator is struggling to contain, an official from the country’s nuclear watchdog said on Monday.

This contaminated groundwater has breached an underground barrier, is rising toward the surface and is exceeding legal limits of radioactive discharge, Shinji Kinjo, head of a Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NRA) task force, told Reuters.

Countermeasures planned by Tokyo Electric Power Co are only a temporary solution, he said.

Tepco’s “sense of crisis is weak,” Kinjo said. “This is why you can’t just leave it up to Tepco alone” to grapple with the ongoing disaster.

via Fukushima Radioactive Leak Is An ‘Emergency,’ Nuclear Body Says | InsideClimate News.

Anti-Humane, environment

Breaking News: Iceland Whalers Want to Hunt Humpbacks

While covering Iceland’s commercial whaling industry over the last two months I have found myself thinking, “alright, this is completely unacceptable and terrible, but I guess it could be worse.”  I regret to inform you that it just got worse.  The nightmare that once was humpback whaling could potentially reemerge, according to a report today from Visir, a national newspaper in Iceland.

In the article (link below), Gunnar Bergmann Jonsson, director of the minke whalers association, seems confident that humpbacks will be hunted again, and expresses his company’s desire to engage in such “fishing”.  But what’s scarier than a powerful whaler expressing his opinion about killing a species that humans once pushed to the brink of extinction?

via Breaking News: Iceland Whalers Want to Hunt Humpbacks.

Uncategorized

A War of Numbers

It was enough people to show that many more than voted for the past elected government had decided that he was wrecking Egypt and had to go.

Egyptian Streets

Numbers, numbers everywhere, but not an accurate statistic in sight

By Peter Schwartz, contributor, EgyptianStreets.com


‘So let me get this straight: how big were the demonstrations?’ an Irish friend recently asked me.

I hummed and hawed, bandied around a few possible statistics, but then embarrassed, was forced to admit I didn’t really know. He was mightily unimpressed. After regaling him with tales of Ittihadeya crammed to the gills and suffocating-room only in Tahrir, I was supposed to have a good grasp of the situation.

I don’t, though, at least not when it comes to providing precise, or even vague figures.

In this, however, I’m far from alone, because Egypt, whose Pharaohs were conducting censuses when most Europeans were just about getting to grips with the wheel, has a problem with numbers.

Take June 30th as a case in point: 33 million people protested against Morsi, many of his opponents say.  It was more like 17…

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