Fazeelat Bibi, 22 years old wished she was dead.
Violence against women in Pakistan.
Click on the link.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
America got lucky.
A passenger on the Northwest Airline was subdued by other passengers when he failed to detonate the bombs strapped on his body.
This time America got lucky. Click on this link.
http://bit.ly/91ZBze
This time America got lucky. Click on this link.
http://bit.ly/91ZBze
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Events that keeps changing the world
Events that marked the start of the 21st century
Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer, 28 Dec. 2009/
PARIS, France—Stories that defined the first decade of the 21st century:
SEPTEMBER 11 From a lair in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden shook the United States to the core on a clear morning in 2001, setting the stage for a decade of conflict.
Nineteen Al-Qaeda hijackers took over four passenger jets on innocuous domestic flights: two crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York, one into the US Defense Department headquarters in Washington, and one into a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought the gunmen. Altogether 2,973 people and the hijackers were killed; the towers crumbled, leaving New York with deep scars, and the US vision of the world changed immediately.
Bin Laden remains free but 9/11 transformed George W. Bush's presidency and scarred the United States, setting about a security revolution at home and costly wars abroad.
The United States received enormous world sympathy after the attacks. But the US image has been damaged by the Guantanamo “War On Terror” prison camp, the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and other acts in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are still 210 inmates at Guantanamo, many of whom have been held without charge since 2002. Many will eventually be sent home. Some could end up at a jail in Illinois.
CONFLICT Within months of the Twin Towers falling, the United States and other western powers helped an Afghan coalition overthrow the hard-line Taliban government in Afghanistan. On March 19, 2003 US planes fired bombs in a bid to kill Saddam Hussein and within 24 hours had begun an invasion of Iraq with allies such as Britain that badly split the Western world. Whether it was justified remains a topic of bitter debate but the toll has been huge.
There are still 115,000 US troops in Iraq, where tens of thousands of civilians have died, along with nearly 4,400 US troops and about 320 from other nations. US numbers should fall to 50,000 by the end of August 2010 ahead of a promised withdrawal by 2011.
More than 500 foreign troops have been killed in Taliban and Al-Qaeda attacks this year in Afghanistan, which has become the top geo-strategic priority. There are currently more than 100,000 foreign troops—more than 70,000 of them US—battling the resurgent Taliban and US President Barack Obama has ordered 30,000 more to go there.
TSUNAMI A huge “mega-thrust” earthquake off the coast of Indonesia on December 26, 2004, set off a tidal wave up to 30 meters (100 feet) high around the Indian Ocean that killed around 220,000 people.
The event still haunts the beaches and coastal villages of the countries devastated by one of the worst natural disasters of the past 100 years.
Poor villagers in Indonesia—which suffered three quarters of the deaths—Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand were worst hit, but supermodels, sports heroes, and business tycoons lapping up the winter sunshine all told of their narrow escape clambering up palm trees or onto hotel roofs.
There were unlikely tales of heroism, such as 10-year-old British girl, Tilly Smith, who saved 100 lives when she used her knowledge of tsunamis from a recent geography lesson to clear a beach at Phuket in Thailand. Billions of dollars were donated in humanitarian aid, but on top of the huge damage caused to mangroves, coral reefs, forests, coastal wetlands, and vegetation, for most of the communities it is an event that will take more than a lifetime to get over.
CHINA QUAKE The earthquake that tore apart China's Sichuan province on May 12, 2008 was a once-every-4,000-year event, experts say.
The tremor rippled along a fault line below the cities of Yingxiu, Beichuan, and Nanba, killing 88,000 people who were trapped in buildings or caught in landslides and floods sparked by the 7.9-magnitude event. Millions were left homeless.
Seismologists say the strong seismic wave, unusual geology, and the failure of three subterranean "barriers" against the shock added to the potency, making the quake so rare.
But the collapse of schools, hospitals, and factories in several areas raised questions about how rigorously new building codes have been enforced since China's 1974 Tangshan quake which killed hundreds of thousands.
In the latest fallout, Huang Qi, a dissident who campaigned for the parents of children killed in the quake, was sentenced to three years in jail on a state secrets charge in November.
GLOBAL WARMING The world was late to recognize the dangers of rising temperatures and the leaders of the main world powers and the rising economies took it down to the wire to make a vague accord on how to battle climate change when they met at a summit in Copenhagen this month.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that most of the temperature rise over the past 60 years has been caused by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases generated by human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation. Scientists have warned the world now faces severe flooding, drought, storms, and other phenomena because of global warming. The polar ice sheets are already retreating.
There is still much disagreement over how to act. The US Congress rejected the Kyoto Protocol which was a first attempt to limit emissions. The question now is how to make the United States and China (the world's top two polluters), Europe, India, Brazil, and South Africa reconcile their different visions and economic needs to work together on the climate crisis.
A new attempt on a global accord is to be made before a new summit in Mexico in
December 2010.
ECONOMIC CRISIS Ignoring repeated alarm bells, the US carried on living off international credit until the "sub-prime" crisis erupted and brought down iconic US investment bank Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008.
Stock markets plunged, international credit markets froze, and high-profile banks that had bought or repackaged bad-risk US mortgage accounts fell like skittles—Merrill Lynch had to be taken over, while American Insurance Group needed a $170-billion injection.
The credit crisis quickly engulfed every corner of an increasingly globalized financial and economic system and triggered a worldwide recession. Emergency summits were held and a wholesale collapse of the banking system was narrowly avoided.
Major powers jump-started their economies with giant stimulus packages. But poverty and unemployment levels have risen and there has been widespread outrage over bankers' bonuses and scandals such as the $21 billion that New York financier Bernard Madoff lost.
As the decade draws to a close most developed countries have returned to modest levels of growth, but new powerhouses are emerging economies such as Brazil and China, heralding a new era for international economic affairs.
OBAMA At the start of the decade, Barack Obama was just a senator in Illinois state's legislature, plotting ways to get a seat in the US senate. After a heady rise, he has become the first black president of the world superpower, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and one of the most recognizable faces on the planet.
Obama and the US Democrats won a crushing presidential and legislative victory on November 4, 2008, capping his sensational ascension.
Most put the start of Obama-mania at the 2004 Democratic convention, when the little-known Chicago politician with a ready smile wowed leaders with a dazzling appeal for American unity and the need to overcome entrenched political divides.
He beat Hillary Clinton to the Democratic nomination and hammered Republican John McCain in the presidential vote. But many experts were astounded when the young leader won the Nobel prize only nine months after taking office. The Afghanistan war, economic crisis, and the challenge of reforming America's dysfunctional health care system have all eaten into his domestic popularity. The wars and the deadlocked Middle East peace process have hit his standing abroad. But Barack and Michelle Obama are still style leaders and his "Yes We Can" message still reverberates around the world.
POPE JOHN PAUL II The Venerable Pope John Paul II, who died in 2005, was the second longest serving Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church in Vatican history—his 27-year-tenure beaten only by Pope Pius IX.
A Polish national, John Paul II broke many Vatican molds. He was the first non-Italian pope since the 16th century, he is credited with playing a key role in the downfall of communism in Europe, and used the mass media and travel to get his message across in a way that would have made predecessors shudder.
There was no wavering in the Vatican's conservative position on contentious social issues such as birth control, abortion, and divorce. But he attracted a mass following among the young and tried to promote social justice.
He was the most traveled pope in history, but Parkinson's Disease left him increasingly frail during the last five years of his life. #Saturday, December 12, 2009
Voters Education 1
This is an opinion posted by Tony Abaya. Read on. AL Leonidas
Chiz Bombs Out
By Antonio C. Abaya
Written on Nov. 25, 2009
For the Standard Today,
November 26 issue
It is getting harder and harder to take Sen. Francis `Chiz' Escudero seriously, if you ever did so in the first place.
Months before his birthday on October 10, when he reached the minimum age (40) for presidential aspirants, his people had been cultivating the hype that Chiz represented "change" in Philippine politics, in an obvious attempt to project him as the Obama of the Philippines.
But aside from the fact that both were young and ambitious, the only thing Chiz had in common with Obama was the shape of their craniums..
Obama sought to end Bush's war in Iraq, stitch together a health care system for all Americans, and extricate an economy that is deeply mired in recession.
I do not know what exactly it was that Chiz wanted to change in the Philippines other than, predictably, endemic graft and corruption under President Arroyo, with the equally predictable promise to bring about prosperity for all Filipinos.
But Chiz gave no details on how he was to combat graft and corruption, nor did he have any economic master plan to bring about the prosperity that he says he will create. In this sense, he was no different from nor better than the other presidential contenders and their usual motherhood statements: Noynoy Aquino, Manny Villar, Joseph Estrada and Gilbert Teodoro.
Noynoy, at least, had the clean reputation of his late parents to set as an example for him to emulate, and Villar, as a self-made billionaire, has had some first hand experience in creating wealth.
But Chiz, in his more than ten years in the Lower House and the Senate, has not really distinguished himself as either a relentless graft-buster or an innovative wealth-creator in his career as opposition legislator, only as a vocal critic of the Arroyo administration.
Nevertheless, he created waves as potential presidential contender in 2010, a young man in a hurry, in the mold – so said his spin masters – of Barack Obama, scoring high in public opinion surveys and capturing the attention of his audiences, especially the young, with his trademark monotone.
All of which came crashing down barely 18 days after his landmark 40th birthday, when he unexpectedly announced his sudden resignation from the Nationalist People's Coalition (NPC) of Danding Cojuangco, which had been his political home for the past 11 years and under whose patronage he was to launch his presidential bid for 2010.
Said he: "In my belief, whoever is planning to run for president of the country should not belong to any party. His only party should be the Philippines and his party mates are the entire Filipino people."
This is a lot of horse manure, and Chiz knows it. Manuel L. Quezon, first president of the Philippine Commonwealth, belonged to the Nacionalista Party when he first ran for president in 1935 and remained a party member until he died in 1944. The only Filipino president who did not belong to a party was Emilio Aguinaldo, who however took sides in the Magdalo-Magdiwang quasi-party squabbling during the Revolution.
Even the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin headed the Bolshevik faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in parliament in the 1900s. He recognized the need for "a small band of revolutionaries" to accelerate the allegedly historically inevitable evolution of society towards socialism and thence towards Communism. The Bolshevik Party eventually became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
If Chiz believes he can lead and run a political movement without a political party, then he is more naïve and politically immature than I thought.
Continued Chiz: "Political parties had become obstacles to genuine and meaningful change. If a presidential candidate is beholden to his party, how can he make crooked government officials accountable if he belongs to the same party? I want to prove to you and to myself that I am doing this for the right reason, not for any interest. Not for just anyone, but for you, and for the motherland…"
More horse manure. His hero, President Barack Obama, had no problem going after the crooked governor of his home state of Illinois, even though both of them were/are Democrats, after the governor (Blagojovich) tried to sell Obama's former seat in the Illinois legislature to the highest bidder.
Chiz' problem with the NPC was neither political nor ideological. It was purely financial. For years, Chiz played along with the NPC Godfather, Don-ding Corleone Cojuangco, as the party's fair-haired Golden Boy for 2010, with no apparent complaints from Chiz about not being free to make decisions for himself.
But with the sudden prominence of Cojuangco's nephew, Noynoy Aquino, as a viable presidential contender and possible winner in 2010, Cojuangco apparently had second thoughts about supporting Chiz, who was coming in as a fading third or fourth placer in public opinion polls.
I can believe the story in the October 29 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer that Chiz could get only P100 to P200 million from the NPC, instead of the P5 billion that his handlers needed for a successful presidential campaign. Which compelled Chiz to suddenly resign from the NPC. It is all about money, not about high-minded political altruism.
Which is why his valedictory at Club Filipino dripped with spiteful and rancorous asides towards the rich. I am surprised that neither the Inquirer nor the Standard Today – the only newspapers that I see on a daily basis – carried a full translation of Chiz' bitter parting words in Pilipino.
His populist anti-rich rhetoric was music to the ears of Communist party-list congressmen. His advocacy of a mandated raise in the minimum wage endeared him to the Communist KMU labor federation, but showed his ignorance of how wages in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore reached First World levels without the crutch of a minimum wage law.
Which led me to conclude in my column of October 28, titled Looking for Mr. Goodbar, that Chiz was "intoning an atypical class war against his erstwhile billionaire backer….and that he may postpone his run for the presidency to 2016."
Which is what he actually did yesterday, Nov. 24, when he announced that he was withdrawing from the 2010 presidential and vice-presidential elections. Having lost the financial support of Danding, which forced him to resign from the NPC, and having nowhere else to go, Chiz had no choice but to bomb out...
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. He is still very young. He will be only 47 in 2016.
He has enough time to bone up on political science and development economics, and involve himself in two or three major advocacies where he can develop a more mature and realistic economic-political line and grow into a more knowledgeable presidential contender in 2016. *****
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OO
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Chiz Bombs Out
By Antonio C. Abaya
Written on Nov. 25, 2009
For the Standard Today,
November 26 issue
It is getting harder and harder to take Sen. Francis `Chiz' Escudero seriously, if you ever did so in the first place.
Months before his birthday on October 10, when he reached the minimum age (40) for presidential aspirants, his people had been cultivating the hype that Chiz represented "change" in Philippine politics, in an obvious attempt to project him as the Obama of the Philippines.
But aside from the fact that both were young and ambitious, the only thing Chiz had in common with Obama was the shape of their craniums..
Obama sought to end Bush's war in Iraq, stitch together a health care system for all Americans, and extricate an economy that is deeply mired in recession.
I do not know what exactly it was that Chiz wanted to change in the Philippines other than, predictably, endemic graft and corruption under President Arroyo, with the equally predictable promise to bring about prosperity for all Filipinos.
But Chiz gave no details on how he was to combat graft and corruption, nor did he have any economic master plan to bring about the prosperity that he says he will create. In this sense, he was no different from nor better than the other presidential contenders and their usual motherhood statements: Noynoy Aquino, Manny Villar, Joseph Estrada and Gilbert Teodoro.
Noynoy, at least, had the clean reputation of his late parents to set as an example for him to emulate, and Villar, as a self-made billionaire, has had some first hand experience in creating wealth.
But Chiz, in his more than ten years in the Lower House and the Senate, has not really distinguished himself as either a relentless graft-buster or an innovative wealth-creator in his career as opposition legislator, only as a vocal critic of the Arroyo administration.
Nevertheless, he created waves as potential presidential contender in 2010, a young man in a hurry, in the mold – so said his spin masters – of Barack Obama, scoring high in public opinion surveys and capturing the attention of his audiences, especially the young, with his trademark monotone.
All of which came crashing down barely 18 days after his landmark 40th birthday, when he unexpectedly announced his sudden resignation from the Nationalist People's Coalition (NPC) of Danding Cojuangco, which had been his political home for the past 11 years and under whose patronage he was to launch his presidential bid for 2010.
Said he: "In my belief, whoever is planning to run for president of the country should not belong to any party. His only party should be the Philippines and his party mates are the entire Filipino people."
This is a lot of horse manure, and Chiz knows it. Manuel L. Quezon, first president of the Philippine Commonwealth, belonged to the Nacionalista Party when he first ran for president in 1935 and remained a party member until he died in 1944. The only Filipino president who did not belong to a party was Emilio Aguinaldo, who however took sides in the Magdalo-Magdiwang quasi-party squabbling during the Revolution.
Even the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin headed the Bolshevik faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in parliament in the 1900s. He recognized the need for "a small band of revolutionaries" to accelerate the allegedly historically inevitable evolution of society towards socialism and thence towards Communism. The Bolshevik Party eventually became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
If Chiz believes he can lead and run a political movement without a political party, then he is more naïve and politically immature than I thought.
Continued Chiz: "Political parties had become obstacles to genuine and meaningful change. If a presidential candidate is beholden to his party, how can he make crooked government officials accountable if he belongs to the same party? I want to prove to you and to myself that I am doing this for the right reason, not for any interest. Not for just anyone, but for you, and for the motherland…"
More horse manure. His hero, President Barack Obama, had no problem going after the crooked governor of his home state of Illinois, even though both of them were/are Democrats, after the governor (Blagojovich) tried to sell Obama's former seat in the Illinois legislature to the highest bidder.
Chiz' problem with the NPC was neither political nor ideological. It was purely financial. For years, Chiz played along with the NPC Godfather, Don-ding Corleone Cojuangco, as the party's fair-haired Golden Boy for 2010, with no apparent complaints from Chiz about not being free to make decisions for himself.
But with the sudden prominence of Cojuangco's nephew, Noynoy Aquino, as a viable presidential contender and possible winner in 2010, Cojuangco apparently had second thoughts about supporting Chiz, who was coming in as a fading third or fourth placer in public opinion polls.
I can believe the story in the October 29 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer that Chiz could get only P100 to P200 million from the NPC, instead of the P5 billion that his handlers needed for a successful presidential campaign. Which compelled Chiz to suddenly resign from the NPC. It is all about money, not about high-minded political altruism.
Which is why his valedictory at Club Filipino dripped with spiteful and rancorous asides towards the rich. I am surprised that neither the Inquirer nor the Standard Today – the only newspapers that I see on a daily basis – carried a full translation of Chiz' bitter parting words in Pilipino.
His populist anti-rich rhetoric was music to the ears of Communist party-list congressmen. His advocacy of a mandated raise in the minimum wage endeared him to the Communist KMU labor federation, but showed his ignorance of how wages in South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore reached First World levels without the crutch of a minimum wage law.
Which led me to conclude in my column of October 28, titled Looking for Mr. Goodbar, that Chiz was "intoning an atypical class war against his erstwhile billionaire backer….and that he may postpone his run for the presidency to 2016."
Which is what he actually did yesterday, Nov. 24, when he announced that he was withdrawing from the 2010 presidential and vice-presidential elections. Having lost the financial support of Danding, which forced him to resign from the NPC, and having nowhere else to go, Chiz had no choice but to bomb out...
Which is not necessarily a bad thing. He is still very young. He will be only 47 in 2016.
He has enough time to bone up on political science and development economics, and involve himself in two or three major advocacies where he can develop a more mature and realistic economic-political line and grow into a more knowledgeable presidential contender in 2016. *****
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OO
Reactions to tonyabaya@gmail. com or tony_abaya@yahoo. com.
Other articles in www.tapatt.net and in acabaya.blogspot. com.
Articles in www.tapatt.net may be forwarded to MySpace, Facebook, etc.
To view Tony Abaya on YouTube, go to www.tapatt.net, then scroll down.
To subscribe, click tonyabaya-subscribe @yahoogroups. com.
To unsubscribe, send a blank email with the subject heading Unsubscribe.
Follow me on twitter.com/ tonyabaya.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Social Control
An interesting article by the New York Times (NYT). It is about activists attending the Copenhagen global conference on climate change.
Police confiscated bolt cutters, makeshift shields, paint-bombs.
Here we see how State instruments are applying pre-emptive controls on group behavior.
Police confiscated bolt cutters, makeshift shields, paint-bombs.
Here we see how State instruments are applying pre-emptive controls on group behavior.
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