region:southeast asia

On ’World No Tobacco Day’ Egypt’s cigarette black-market booming

http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/72705.aspx

Report raps military propaganda efforts as ineffective
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/05/23/military-propaganda-operations-poorly-coordinated-often-ineffective/2354235

Pentagon propaganda programs are inadequately tracked, their impact is unclear, and the military doesn’t know if it is targeting the right foreign audiences, according to a government report obtained by USA TODAY.

Since 2005, the Pentagon has spent hundreds of million of dollars on Military Information Support Operations (MISO). These propaganda efforts include websites, leaflets and broadcasts intended to change foreigners’ “attitudes and behaviors in support of U.S. Government” objectives, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office. Some of them disclose the U.S. military as the source; others don’t.

Une propagande qui peut être mensongère, comme celle dont « USA Today » avait été victime en 2012 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-04-19/vanden-brook-locker-propaganda/54419654/1 pour avoir fait une série sur justement l’efficacité de la propagande du Pentagone.

Controverse à propos de la venue de Jared Diamond à un énorme congrès de géographie aux Etats-Unis.

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/it55ije6xi4995d/jareddiamond.jpg

La liste de géographie critique s’est enflammée à propos de la venue de Jared Diamond au grand congrès annuel des géographes américains (AAG 2013) qui se tient cette année à Los Angeles.

C’est Jamison Miller, du John Tyler Community College en Virginie (Etats-Unis) qui ouvre le bal :

While I am in the middle of designing the last section of my Intro to Cultural Geography course, I am jollily uploading Jim Blaut’s 1999 article devouring Diamond, and the slew of 2003 articles from the special edition of Antipode on the same lines. I’m still figuring out how to explain how he is welcomed at the AAG to my students.

Is anyone planning to oppose/heckle Diamond’s talk on what we can learn from freaking “traditional societies” at our AAG in LA?

John Paul Catunga, géographe à l’universté de de Totonto poursuit en racontant son expérience (et son dégoût) lorsqu’il a participé au AAG 2007 :

He also gave a keynote talk at the San Francisco AAG (2007) where he talked partly about Papua New Guinea coming into modernity with the arrival of an airport. I was then an MA student and was utterly shocked and livid. It was my first AAG and I was really not sure what avenues there were to voice my displeasure and concern.

It remains one of the ugliest moments of any AAG for me.

Why is he welcomed at the AAG? Probably in no small part because he is appointed to a department of geography and probably because he is well known and therefore “relevant”.

This reminds me of David Harvey’s 1974 piece “What kind of geography for what kind of public policy?” in which he argues that we need to examine what kind of relevance we want geography to play, mentioning of course that Pinochet was a geographer...

With all the commendable focus on geographies of racialization that the AAG has focused on recently, I sure hope we could be more reflexive: why we feature environmental determinist and racist scholarship in marquee events such as AAG keynotes?

Filippo Celata, de l’Université de Rome propose avec une grande sagesse :

...Wouldn’t it be an option to listen to Diamond’s talk and to “oppose” him with critical questions?

I attended to Krugman’s talk at the AAG in 2010 and even if I think his “geographical” theories are limited and dangerous, I have been happy we had the chance to tell him and to listen to his replies....

Lire aussi

Lunch with the FT : Jared Diamond
By David Pilling

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2P1DsRs8b

#géographie-critique #géographie-radicale

Researchers use computer program to reconstruct ancient languages
http://www.slashgear.com/researchers-use-computer-program-to-reconstruct-ancient-languages-1226897

Languages have evolved over the years, and some have ended up dying off completely. However, these extinct languages are still around today thanks to documentation, and researchers are now trying to reconstruct these ancient languages using a modified version Rosetta Stone, a computer program that teaches users how to speak a different language …

Source: SlashGear - Feeding Your Gadget and Tech Obsessions - Craig Lloyd

“So many people died” (Le Monde diplomatique)
http://mondediplo.com/openpage/so-many-people-died

Pham To told me that the planes began their bombing runs in 1965 and that periodic artillery shelling started about the same time. Nobody will ever know just how many civilians were killed in the years after that. “The number is uncountable,” he said one spring day a few years ago in a village in the mountains of rural central Vietnam. “So many people died.” And it only got worse. Chemical defoliants came next, ravaging the land. (...) Source: Le Monde diplomatique

US to expand anti-missile systems in Asia

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/aug2012/miss-a24.shtml

By Peter Symonds
24 August 2012

As part of its build-up in Asia, the US military is planning an extensive ballistic missile defence system that will only exacerbate tensions throughout the region, especially with China. According to the Wall Street Journal yesterday: “The planned build-up is part of a defensive array that could cover large swathes of Asia, with a new radar in southern Japan and possibly another in Southeast Asia tied to missile-defence ships and land-based interceptors.”

#Etats-Unis #armement #asie

Japan Heading for Energy Death Spiral? - Steve Clemons - International - The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/japan-heading-for-energy-death-spiral/255266

Tanaka explained that at current levels, Japan consumes about 5 million barrels of oil a day.  Without domestically produced nuclear energy — for which Japan has stockpiled for decades the world’s largest non-weaponized highly processed plutonium reserves — Japan falls about 10% or half a million barrels of oil short of what it must have.

WHO meeting calls for mutant-flu research to be published ‘in full.’
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/02/who-meeting-calls-for-mutant-flu-research-to-be-published-in-full.html

A two-day meeting of 22 experts convened in Geneva by the World Health Organization (WHO) has concluded that two controversial flu studies should be published in full. The research — in which ferret-transmissible strains of avian H5N1 flu virus were created — will be published after a delay of probably a few months, which the experts argue is needed to explain better the public-health benefits of the research and allay public concerns over the safety of the work

papier du NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/health/details-of-bird-flu-research-will-be-released.html

une video du débat
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/02/video-debating-h5n1-and-dual-use-research.html

calculs des taux de fatalité
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=h5n1-bird-flu-case-fatality-calculations

#h5n1 #recherche #censure #santé #bioarmement

A l’origine de la théorie du " Choc des civilisations ", un article écrit par l’Islamologue Bernard Lewis en 1990 et intitulé « The roots of muslim rage. Why so many muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified »...

« La lutte entre ces deux systèmes rivaux écrit-il dure maintenant depuis 14 siècles. Elle a commencé avec l’avènement de l’islam au 7e siècle et a continué en pratique jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Elle a consisté en une longue série d’attaques et de contre attaques, de jihad, de croisades, de conquêtes et de reconquêtes. Cela n’est rien moins qu’un choc des civilisations, la réaction surement traditionnelle, mais surement historique, d’un ancien rival contre notre héritage judéo chrétien, notre présent séculier et l’expansion mondiale des deux. »

http://hegemonie.blogspot.com/2012/02/roots-of-muslim-rage.html

Let there be ... less light pollution
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/otherviews/136843363.html?page=all

un bel article sur la #pollution lumineuse

Research on “light at night” (LAN) tags it as a cause of sleep disorders linked to disruption of circadian rhythms. In that role, LAN contributes to hypertension, diabetes, obesity, cardiac problems and attention-deficit disorder.

#énergie #santé #sécurité

Dans les features #opentype, il y a les « small caps » et les « petites caps ».
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/features_pt.htm

Tag:’pcap’

Friendly name: Petite Capitals
Registered by: Tiro Typeworks / Emigre
Function: Some fonts contain an additional size of capital letters, shorter than the regular smallcaps and whimsically referred to as petite caps. Such forms are most likely to be found in designs with a small lowercase x-height, where they better harmonise with lowercase text than the taller smallcaps (for examples of petite caps, see the Emigre type families Mrs Eaves and Filosofia). This feature turns lowercase characters into petite capitals. Forms related to petite capitals, such as specially designed figures, may be included.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/pcapprop.gif

J’ignore si c’est activable dans Indesign.

Climate Change and Natural Disasters : Why Women Get Hit Hardest
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/04/climate-change-and-natural-disasters-why-women-get-hit-hardest.html

In the 2004 Southeast Asia tsunami, death rates for women across the region averaged three to four times that of men. (...)
in the 1995 Kobe Japan earthquake, one and a half times more women died than men; in the 1991 floods in Bangladesh, five times as many women as men died.

#femmes #catastrophes

The Other, Forgotten Apocalypse of 2011 | (A)theologies | #Religion Dispatches
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/5035/the_other,_forgotten_apocalypse_of_2011

Earlier this year, Camping captured the intrigue of North American cynics, believers, and the generally curious alike with his end-of-days prediction and the rapture of all repentant Christians on May 21, 2011. Those he managed to convince donated tens of millions of dollars from their emptied bank accounts, dropped out of school, and left their jobs in order to warn others of the impending destruction. On the morning of May 22, the credulity of Camping’s followers left them to be derided or pitied, and Camping himself allowed that he was “flabbergasted.” The apocalypse didn’t come. In the minds of many, they simply had been duped.

But this is only part of the story; specifically, the Western part of the story. On the other side of the world, there were some for whom the Apocalypse not only came, it arrived early.

Living with HIV and Dying Of TB
http://www.weeklyblitz.net/1782/living-with-hiv-and-dying-of-tb

chiffres et stratégies pour #sida #tuberculose #santé

farmlandgrab.org | Asian agri fund eyes Peruvian palm oil as Malaysia exhausts supply of land
http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/19098

Asian Agri Capital, a Singapore private-equity firm that focuses on early-stage plantations, is seeking to raise $100 million to invest in palm oil and other tropical commodities in Southeast Asia and Latin America.

#agrobusiness

Russia Offers Agricultural Land for Southeast Asian Farmers to Grow Crops
http://www.globalpolicy.org/social-and-economic-policy/world-hunger/hunger-and-the-globalized-system-of-trade-and-food-production-/50554-russia-offers-agricultural-land-for-southeast-asian-farmers-to-g

In an effort to foster trade and boost exports, Russia is looking to sell about 24 million hectares of arable land

Accaparement des terres à l’envers... Les Russes offrent des terres aux paysans d’Asie du Sud-Est s’ils n’en ont pas assez !

Russia Offers Agricultural Land for Southeast Asian Farmers to Grow Crops

http://www.globalpolicy.org/social-and-economic-policy/world-hunger/hunger-and-the-globalized-system-of-trade-and-food-production-/50554-russia-offers-agricultural-land-for-southeast-asian-farmers-to-g

In an effort to foster trade and boost exports, Russia is looking to sell about 24 million hectares of arable land, below-market price, to Asian countries seeking to invest in foreign farmland for food security purposes. Currently, a reported 409 million acres of farmland are unused in Russia. The Russian government plans to acquire more land for lending, by annulling ownership rights to land that has not been cultivated for three years. Russia’s focus on Southeast Asia is part of a wider effort to build stronger ties with the fastest growing region in the world.

#agriculture #faim #alimentation #asie #russie #cride alimentaire

Les méchants dans les FPS // Complex Presents : A World Map Of Video Game Villains | Complex.com
http://www.complex.com/video-games/2011/03/video-game-villain-map

http://cdnl.complex.com/assets//CHANNEL_IMAGES/VIDEO_GAMES/2011/03/news/vg_infographic_map3.jpg

#jeux_vidéos

6 Terrifying New Weapons Being Created by the Pentagon | | AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/149750/6_terrifying_new_weapons_being_created_by_the_pentagon?page=entire

#mahem #exacto #lacoste #DARPA

Egyptian protesters fill the streets - latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-egypt-protests,0,3322228.story

“When you end the Mubarak regime, you’ll need a powerful man during the transition, and this is a powerful man. Omar Suleiman is the best option,” Kassem said.

Je ne sais pas ce qui est le plus terrible : le fait que cet article fallacieux sur le génocide rwandais soit écrit par un ancien co-auteur de Noam Chomsky, ou bien que ce soit le site de l’ex-Réseau Voltaire qui s’en fasse le relais...

Paul Kagamé : « Our Kind of Guy » [Voltaire]
http://www.voltairenet.org/article167964.html

#Rwanda #genocide #Kagame

EngageMedia
http://engagemedia.org

Tourne avec Plumi. EngageMedia is a website for video about social justice and environmental issues in Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

#spipbxl2008 #spipmedia2008 #video #archive #media #opensource #activism #news #online #art