All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Beirut loosing its few green square meters for a parking

Trees more important than parking spaces!

Leelouz Café

Living in Beirut makes you live crazy things, among others wars, rockets, bombings, freaking street fights…and on top of this we have to witness very bad decision taken by municipalities; the removal of the FEW city parks to build a PARKING! I have never heard anything more stupid in my life.

How can concrete be more important than trees, oxygen and common space?

In Denmark, people are obliged to use their bicycles and public transportation, owning a car is a luxury, forget parking in the city, it costs a fortune. Parks are protected, taken care of, worshiped. They offer common space where the citizen from all levels interact, sunbathe, relaxes, walks, runs, gives speeches, create theater venues for kids, not mentioning the loveliest playground one can imagine (where ergonomic meets fun!).

So let’s get back to Beirut.

We have 3-4 public parks. They are not of high standard, they do…

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Show of force in Istanbul | Europe | DW.DE | 16.06.2013

Turkish police have been using tear gas and water cannons to clear protesters from the center of Istanbul ahead of Prime Minister Erdogan’s visit on Sunday. The move has done nothing to quell people’s outrage.

In a full-scale operation on Saturday night (15.06.2013), Turkish riot police in Istanbul moved in to clear both Taksim Square and adjacent Gezi Park, where thousands of demonstrators had been camping out for more than two weeks.

Just hours earlier Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had given a speech to a crowd of tens of thousands of flag-waving supporters in the capital, Ankara, in which he warned the demonstrators that they had to be gone by Sunday. “Taksim Square must be evacuated, or if it isn’t, the security forces of this country know how to evacuate it,” he said.

via Show of force in Istanbul | Europe | DW.DE | 16.06.2013.

Iran to send 4,000 troops to aid President Assad forces in Syria – Middle East – World – The Independent

(Do we really want to be part of a Muslim against Muslim war that could dwarf Iraq and Afghanistan? Not me!)

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.

The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years.  Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for  2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.

America’s alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan – flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle.  Up to 3,000 American ‘advisers’ are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria ‘no-fly zone’ – opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries – will turn a crisis into a ‘hot’ war.  So much for America’s ‘friends’.

Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power.  Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.

via Iran to send 4,000 troops to aid President Assad forces in Syria – Middle East – World – The Independent.

Fox News Host Tells English Extremist: ‘We Got Your Back’ | Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center

Fox News endorses British terrorism against British Muslims…  Brian Kilmeade, one of the wise men of Fox News, recently told Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Lennon, the leader of the immigrant-bashing, Muslim-hating, police-clashing English Defence League (EDL), who recently spent time in jail for using a false passport to illegally enter the United States, that “it’s great what you’re doing.”

“We got your back,” Kilmeade told Robinson when the far-right English activist appeared on the June 10 edition of Kilmeade’s Fox News Radio program, according to Media Matter

Kilmeade promised his support after Robinson finished breathlessly outlining his latest anti-Muslim conspiracy theory: the “silent jihad” that is taking over Great Britain.

via Fox News Host Tells English Extremist: ‘We Got Your Back’ | Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center.

Are all GOP just dumb about sex and women or what? Jeb Bush: Immigrants ‘more fertile,’ create more US businesses than native-born Americans

The brother of former President George W. Bush told religious conservatives Friday that the future of the U.S. economy depends upon immigrants in part because they “are more fertile and create more businesses than native-born Americans.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is thought to be weighing a bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

His remark that immigrants “are more fertile, and they love families” was met with silence by those attending his speech during the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s annual conference.

via Jeb Bush: Immigrants ‘more fertile,’ create more US businesses than native-born Americans.

Istanbul Biennial Protests Foreshadowed Battle for Gezi Park

ArtLeaks

via Ben Davis & Sara Roffino (ArtInfo)

 

The world is watching Turkey’s wave of protests, currently in the news as police storm Taksim Square. The country-wide popular movement began over the development of a park, but has come to channel much larger issues about free speech, the costs of the country’s breakneck development, and the alliance of the government with corporate interests. Many Turkish artists have participated enthusiastically — and, indeed, recent protests in the Turkish art world foreshadowed the turmoil currently roiling the country.

The official opening of the 13th Istanbul Biennial is still three months away, but preliminary programming and performances have been spurring protests for over a month already. Sponsored by Koç Holding — the largest conglomerate in Turkey with businesses in construction and energy among other industries — the biennial has become a target of the same discontent over urbanization and financial inequality that has brought…

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High Statistical Indices / Rebeca Monzo

Spin exists everywhere – folks like Rebeca help sort things out

Through the Eye of the Needle

Talking with some Colombian teachers were sightseeing in “my world,” they mentioned to me the magnificent statistical indices that we had in education and health. I, of course, I clarified that these figures were released by the government, unchallenged by any counterpart within the country, which allowed it to present them as unquestionable.

I explained to them, from my own experience when working in central agencies, how these figures were manipulated and made to respond to politics and not to reality. That despite having honest data issued by the various ministries, they were adjusted according to the guidelines from “above”, a euphemism by which they call the “high command” that is the maximum leader.

With regards to education, I informed them about some fairly common crimes  perpetrated by students and teachers from different schools, such as fraud, extortion, selling tests and even drug possession and distribution, as well someone related by…

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Wendi Deng to divorce Rupert Murdoch after he drops from #98 to #105 on rich list

Makes sense – grin

Pride's Purge

(satire?)

Wendi Deng has filed for divorce from Rupert Murdoch saying their marriage has “irretrievably broken down” after it was revealed the News Corp boss had dropped from #98 to #105 on the Forbes Rich List, her spokesman says.

For his part, Mr Murdoch, 82 – who met his Chinese-born third wife in 1997 at a cocktail party in Hong Kong – said he would not be contesting the divorce after he was shocked to discover that Ms Deng had gained 14 years in age since they were married in 1999.

A spokesperson for News Corp said an aggravating factor was the discovery by Mr Murdoch that unbeknown to him, Ms Deng had been secretly married to an arsehole for the last decade and a half.

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Related articles by Tom Pride:

Rebekah Brooks Received £10.8m in Smokes and Snout from News International

RSPCA – Prime Ministers are for Life, Not…

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