Can #Bitcoin Conquer Argentina?
With its volatile currency and dysfunctional banks, the country is the perfect place to experiment with a new digital currency.
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/magazine/how-bitcoin-is-disrupting-argentinas-economy.html
Campaign Against #Glyphosate Steps Up in Latin America | Inter Press Service
▻http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/04/campaign-against-glyphosate-steps-up-in-latin-america
Carlos Vicente, a leader of the international NGO GRAIN, told IPS that the #herbicide first reached Latin America in the mid-1970s and that its use by U.S. biotech giant #Monsanto spread massively in the Southern Cone countries.
“Its widespread use mainly involves transgenic crops, genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate, such as RR (Roundup Ready) soy, introduced in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and other countries,” said Vicente, a representative of GRAIN, which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity.
There are 50 million hectares of transgenic soy in the region, and 600 million litres a year of the herbicide are used annually, he said.
According to Souza, there are 83 million hectares of transgenic crops in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay alone.
The WHO report “is very important because it shows that despite the pressure from Monsanto, independent science at the service of the common good rather than corporate interests is possible,” Vicente said.
Monsanto sells glyphosate under the trade name Roundup. But it is also sold as Cosmoflux, Baundap, Glyphogan, Panzer, Potenza and Rango. And among small farmers in some countries, it is popularly referred to as “randal”.
It is used not only on transgenic crops but also on vegetables, tobacco, fruit trees and plantation forests of pine or eucalyptus, as well as in urban gardens and flowerbeds and along railways.
But in traditional agriculture it is used after the seeds germinate and before they are planted, while in transgenic crops it is used during planting, when it acts in a non-selective fashion, thus destroying a variety of plants and grass, according to RAP-AL.
Putin Signs Anti-UK Military Pact With Argentina : #Falklands Dispute May Get Complex As Russia Steps Up Support
▻http://au.ibtimes.com/putin-signs-anti-uk-military-pact-argentina-falklands-dispute-may-get-co
With Argentina seeking Russia’s military cooperation, the Falklands dispute with the U.K is set to get more complex. Recently, Argentina’s president Cristina Fernandez and Russian president Valdimir Putin met in Moscow and signed 20 bilateral cooperation agreements related to different fields, including defence, while calling the bilateral ties as “strategic.”
Throwing an indirect challenge to the U.K, Russian president Putin announced that the two countries would be increasing “military collaboration.” The newly signed agreement on military cooperation and data protection speaks about expanding “practical cooperation."
Russia’s Support Hailed
Ms Fernandez, on her part, thanked Russian president for his support to her country’s dispute with the U.K. over Falkland islands, in which both sides have been adamant on their respective claims. The Argentinian president said: “We thank Russia for the support it has historically provided in Malvinas question, in having resolutions of the United Nations observed so the United Kingdom resolves to sit in the table to dialogue."
SUR
▻http://www.tommasobarsali.com/sur
Tommaso Barsali me suit sur twitter, compte que j’ai ouvert il y a quelques années mais sur lequel je ne vais jamais mais je reçois de temps en temps des notifcations, ce qui m’a permis de découvrir ce #photographe qui s’intéresse aux et aux #terres. Je le remercie.
SUR is a documentary project about a Mapuche family reclaiming the right to live on their ancestral land in Patagonia, Argentina, in a major case of post-colonial landgrabbing.
In Argentinian Patagonia, a group of native Mapuche families, namely the one formed by Atílio, Rosa and Franco Curiñanco, are resisting and peacefully battling against the italian Benetton Group, for the right to live in their ancestral land, where they were born and which belongs to them by oral tradition.
The extension of the lands acquired by Benetton in the 90’s is said to be approximately 900.000 hectares, nearly the size of a country like Cyprus (more than 10 times the area of New York city).
The land reclaimed by the Mapuche families is around 500 ha.
The Benetton Group has seen its legal ownership of the land recognized.
The Mapuche community, has been cleared from the accusation of usurpating the land.
The community claims that the right to live there belongs to them by traditional, oral, pre-colonial law.
In addition, the fact that such a vast amount of land is in the hands of one single legal entity is considered not acceptable for them.
Did Argentina’s president have a hand in a prosecutor’s death? We’ll never really know - Quartz
▻http://qz.com/352618/did-argentinas-president-have-a-hand-in-prosecutor-alberto-nismans-death-well-ne
A movie producer did in fact approach me recently with the idea of making a blockbuster about #Nisman. I may have ruined my chance of a #Hollywood career, because I warned him that if the story was the usual media version, we had a problem: It was mostly wrong. And we will probably never know the whole truth.
(...)
... the legend of a heroic prosecutor fighting for truth and justice against villainous conspirators is largely fiction. I have been a journalist in Argentina for decades. I covered the AMIA case for many years. I have interviewed or met many of the characters involved. And it never ceases to amaze me how the void the bomb left behind has been, and is still, filled with lies, exploitation, and misunderstandings.
(...)
... after repeatedly accusing #Iran in international forums and trying to get the suspects extradited, Fernández’s administration reached an unexpected deal with its Iranian counterpart in 2013. This was no secret, but a public memorandum of understanding to be ratified by both parliaments, under which Iran would allow Nisman and an Argentinian judge to question the suspects in Tehran.
The agreement had the support of the victims’ relatives, but it was harshly (and predictably) criticized by Israel, the US, the Argentinian political opposition, and the leaders of the main Jewish organizations in Buenos Aires. Later on, it was also rejected by the Iranian parliament and by an Argentinian court that found it unconstitutional. The trip to Tehran never happened.
More surprisingly, Nisman himself eventually repudiated the agreement too. As it turned out, he had found a more powerful ally in the American State Department. According to diplomatic cables released by #Wikileaks, he consulted with the American embassy in Buenos Aires about every move he made. Santiago O’Donnell, an Argentinian journalist who published a book about Argentina and the Wikileaks exposé, wrote on his blog (link in Spanish ▻http://santiagoodonnell.blogspot.com/2015_01_01_archive.html#5028156492321647353):
“The cables said that Nisman was getting direct orders from the American embassy not to investigate Syrian involvement or the local connection [in the AMIA bombing], and to take the Iranians’ culpability for granted, even though there had been no trial. That Nisman showed the embassy his submissions the rulings of judge Canicoba Corral [the judge in the AMIA case] days in advance of their being filed. That, once, Nisman brought to the embassy a two-page brief, and the embassy sent him home to rewrite it; Nisman came back a few days later with a brief of nine pages that did get the embassy’s approval and that he then filed in court.”
#MSM #manipulations #fabrications #Etats-Unis #Israël #Israel #argentine
Argentina: The Country That Monsanto Poisoned
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/argentina-the-country-that-monsanto-poisoned
American biotechnology has turned Argentina into the world’s third-largest soybean producer, but the chemicals powering the boom aren’t confined to soy and cotton and corn fields. They routinely...
The Economist explains: What happens when a country goes bust
▻http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/11/economist-explains-20?fsrc=scn/fb/wl/bl/ee/happenswhencountrybust
FROM the days when monarchs over-borrowed for their mercantile adventures, to Argentina’s recent failure to pay its creditors, countries have long run into trouble paying back what they have borrowed. Spain’s 16th-century king, Philip II, reigned over four of his country’s defaults. Greece and Argentina have reneged on their commitments to bondholders seven and eight times respectively over the past 200 years. And most countries have defaulted at least once in their history. But what precisely happens when countries stop paying what they owe?
Town in Argentina bans ’sexist’ beauty pageants for reinforcing idea women ’must be valued on physical appearance’
▻http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/town-in-argentina-bans-sexist-beauty-pageants-for-reinforcing-idea-wo
A small town in Argentina has been hailed for becoming the first in the country to ban beauty competitions, after branding them sexist and harmful to women.
Argentine : une ville remplace les concours de beauté par des récompenses citoyennes
▻http://www.liberation.fr/monde/2015/01/06/argentine-une-ville-remplace-les-concours-de-beaute-par-des-recompenses-c
#Chivilcoy, située dans la province de Buenos Aires, ne veut plus que ses citoyennes soient jugées sur leur physique, malgré la grande popularité de ce type de compétition sexiste.
▻http://www.ted.com/talks/pia_mancini_how_to_upgrade_democracy_for_the_internet_era
#democratie #democracyOs #piamancini #democratiedirecte
I have the feeling that we can all agree that we’re moving towards a new model of the state and society. But, we’re absolutely clueless as to what this is or what it should be. It seems like we need to have a conversation about democracy
0:31 in our day and age. Let’s think about it this way: We are 21st-century citizens, doing our very, very best to interact with 19th century-designed institutions that are based on an information technology of the 15th century. Let’s have a look at some of the characteristics of this system. First of all, it’s designed for an information technology that’s over 500 years old. And the best possible system that could be designed for it is one where the few make daily decisions in the name of the many. And the many get to vote once every couple of years. In the second place, the costs of participating in this system are incredibly high. You either have to have a fair bit of money and influence, or you have to devote your entire life to politics. You have to become a party member and slowly start working up the ranks until maybe, one day, you’ll get to sit at a table where a decision is being made. And last but not least, the language of the system — it’s incredibly cryptic. It’s done for lawyers, by lawyers,
1:51 and no one else can understand. So, it’s a system where we can choose our authorities, but we are completely left out on how those authorities reach their decisions. So, in a day where a new information technology allows us to participate globally in any conversation, our barriers of information are completely lowered and we can, more than ever before, express our desires and our concerns. Our political system remains the same for the past 200 years and expects us to be contented with being simply passive recipients
2:37 of a monologue. So, it’s really not surprising that this kind of system is only able to produce two kinds of results: silence or noise. Silence, in terms of citizens not engaging, simply not wanting to participate. There’s this commonplace [idea] that I truly, truly dislike, and it’s this idea that we citizens are naturally apathetic. That we shun commitment. But, can you really blame us for not jumping at the opportunity of going to the middle of the city in the middle of a working day to attend, physically, a public hearing that has no impact whatsoever? Conflict is bound to happen between a system that no longer represents, nor has any dialogue capacity, and citizens that are increasingly used to representing themselves. And, then we find noise: Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico Italy, France, Spain, the United States, they’re all democracies. Their citizens have access to the ballot boxes. But they still feel the need,
3:56 they need to take to the streets in order to be heard. To me, it seems like the 18th-century slogan that was the basis for the formation of our modern democracies, “No taxation without representation,” can now be updated to “No representation without a conversation.” We want our seat at the table.
4:26 And rightly so. But in order to be part of this conversation, we need to know what we want to do next, because political action is being able to move from agitation to construction. My generation has been incredibly good at using new networks and technologies to organize protests, protests that were able to successfully impose agendas, roll back extremely pernicious legislation, and even overthrow authoritarian governments. And we should be immensely proud of this. But, we also must admit that we haven’t been good at using those same networks and technologies to successfully articulate an alternative to what we’re seeing and find the consensus and build the alliances that are needed
5:24 to make it happen. And so the risk that we face is that we can create these huge power vacuums that will very quickly get filled up by de facto powers, like the military or highly motivated and already organized groups
5:42 that generally lie on the extremes. But our democracy is neither just a matter of voting once every couple of years. But it’s not either the ability to bring millions onto the streets. So the question I’d like to raise here, and I do believe it’s the most important question we need to answer, is this one: If Internet is the new printing press, then what is democracy for the Internet era? What institutions do we want to build
6:16 for the 21st-century society? I don’t have the answer, just in case. I don’t think anyone does. But I truly believe we can’t afford to ignore this question anymore. So, I’d like to share our experience and what we’ve learned so far and hopefully contribute two cents
6:36 to this conversation. Two years ago, with a group of friends from Argentina, we started thinking, “how can we get our representatives, our elected representatives, to represent us?” Marshall McLuhan once said that politics is solving today’s problems with yesterday’s tools. So the question that motivated us was, can we try and solve some of today’s problems with the tools that we use every single day of our lives? Our first approach was to design and develop a piece of software called DemocracyOS. DemocracyOS is an open-source web application that is designed to become a bridge between citizens and their elected representatives
7:27 to make it easier for us to participate from our everyday lives. So first of all, you can get informed so every new project that gets introduced in Congress gets immediately translated and explained in plain language on this platform. But we all know that social change is not going to come from just knowing more information, but from doing something with it. So better access to information should lead to a conversation about what we’re going to do next, and DemocracyOS allows for that. Because we believe that democracy is not just a matter of stacking up preferences, one on top of each other, but that our healthy and robust public debate
8:14 should be, once again, one of its fundamental values. So DemocracyOS is about persuading and being persuaded. It’s about reaching a consensus as much as finding a proper way of channeling our disagreement. And finally, you can vote how you would like your elected representative to vote. And if you do not feel comfortable voting on a certain issue, you can always delegate your vote to someone else, allowing
8:44 for a dynamic and emerging social leadership. It suddenly became very easy for us to simply compare these results with how our representatives were voting in Congress. But, it also became very evident that technology was not going to do the trick. What we needed to do to was to find actors that were able to grab this distributed knowledge in society and use it to make better and more fair decisions. So we reached out to traditional political parties and we offered them DemocracyOS. We said, “Look, here you have a platform that you can use to build a two-way conversation with your constituencies.” And yes, we failed. We failed big time. We were sent to play outside like little kids. Amongst other things, we were called naive. And I must be honest: I think, in hindsight, we were. Because the challenges that we face, they’re not technological, they’re cultural. Political parties were never willing to change the way they make their decisions. So it suddenly became a bit obvious that if we wanted to move forward with this idea,
10:04 we needed to do it ourselves. And so we took quite a leap of faith, and in August last year, we founded our own political party, El Partido de la Red, or the Net Party, in the city of Buenos Aires. And taking an even bigger leap of faith, we ran for elections in October last year with this idea: if we want a seat in Congress, our candidate, our representatives were always going to vote according to what citizens decided on DemocracyOS. Every single project that got introduced in Congress, we were going vote according to what citizens decided on an online platform. It was our way of hacking the political system. We understood that if we wanted to become part of the conversation, to have a seat at the table, we needed to become valid stakeholders,
11:02 and the only way of doing it is to play by the system rules. But we were hacking it in the sense that we were radically changing the way a political party makes its decisions. For the first time, we were making our decisions together with those who we were
11:21 affecting directly by those decisions. It was a very, very bold move for a two-month-old party in the city of Buenos Aires. But it got attention. We got 22,000 votes, that’s 1.2 percent of the votes, and we came in second for the local options. So, even if that wasn’t enough to win a seat in Congress, it was enough for us to become part of the conversation, to the extent that next month, Congress, as an institution, is launching for the first time in Argentina’s history, a DemocracyOS to discuss, with the citizens, three pieces of legislation: two on urban transportation and
12:07 one on the use of public space. Of course, our elected representatives are not saying, “Yes, we’re going to vote according to what citizens decide,” but they’re willing to try. They’re willing to open up a new space for citizen engagement and hopefully
12:25 they’ll be willing to listen as well. Our political system can be transformed, and not by subverting it, by destroying it, but by rewiring it with the tools that
12:40 Internet affords us now. But a real challenge is to find, to design to create, to empower those connectors that are able to innovate, to transform noise and silence into signal and finally bring our democracies
12:59 to the 21st century. I’m not saying it’s easy. But in our experience, we actually stand a chance of making it work. And in my heart, it’s most definitely worth trying. Thank you.
Daily chart: Usual suspects | The Economist
▻http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/07/daily-chart-23
Usual suspects
Jul 31st 2014, 13:50 by A.P. and L.P.
Latin American countries are the most likely to default
ON JULY 30th Argentina defaulted for the second time in 13 years, and for the eighth time in its history. That makes it one of the world’s most serial sovereign defaulters, though not the most frequent reoffender. Ecuador and Venezuela have both reneged on their debts ten times; four other countries have defaulted nine times in total, according to data from Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two experts on sovereign debt. Nine of the top ten defaulters are from Latin America, although many have shown no trace of the debt-default disease for decades. That, alas, is plainly not the case for Argentina.
Representations of Crisis in Argentina : Remember the Present | Continental Drift
▻http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/04/28/remember-the-present
Puerto Madero, the former port of Buenos Aires, was renovated in the mid-1990s under the direct influence of Barcelona’s trademark urbanism, within the broader paradigm of the “creative city.” Following the classic neoliberal model, the land was handed over to a private entity charged with seeking out the necessary investments, and granted any profit that might arise from the operation.
A strategic plan was drafted by Catalonian consultants; corporate buyers were sought around the world; architectural commissions were given to national and international firms. Today the construction is almost complete, and the post-industrial docks look as pretty as a postcard. The cranes that used to unload ships have been left standing, carefully repainted to preserve the patina of age, as if to say that work was once done here. The remodeled warehouses offer a mix of residential spaces, offices and urban entertainment destinations, with a private university at one end and a millionaire’s museum at the other, followed by a crown of hi-rise towers whose logos include Microsoft, Bell South and IBM: the perfect recipe for success in the “information economy.”
#exargentina #cartographie_radiacale #crise_économique #argentine
#visualistation
Ex Argentina : mapping the visual and political in Argentina and in other places...
▻http://www.zannybegg.com/article+2.htm
Ça date de 2003, mais c’est un truc de cartographie radicale auquel j’ai participé à Berlin à l’époque et je le référence ici pour pouvoir le retrouver (c’est dire si seenthis est efficace). En même temps ça peut intéresser du monde aussi...
La Normalidad (normalisation) was the theme for the third exhibition component of the Ex Argentina project which opened in Buenos Aries at the Palais de Glace on February 14th 2006. Ex Argentina was initiated by Andreas Siekmann and Alice Creischer after the dramatic economic collapse in Argentina in December 2001. They travelled to Buenos Aries in November 2002 to begin an investigation, through artistic methods, of the global and local power relations which precipitated this collapse and its aftermath. Through the exhibition program, and its associated discussions and publications, they hoped to create a geneology of the crisis in Argentina which would help foster a minoritarian and local critique capable of challenging the production of global knowledge on the collapse in Argentina, situating this within a global context.
Voir aussi :
▻http://grupodeartecallejero.blogspot.no/2009/09/blog-post.html
Andreas Siekmann and Alice Creischer use the analogy of an embedded journalist to describe their approach in Ex Argentina: someone who, in contrast to the investigative journalist, commits to the place and the context from which they are reporting. They arrived during the tumultuous upheavals and street demonstrations of 2002 and through their connection with two local artistic collectives Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) and Etcetera immersed themselves in the political events unfolding at that time. They participated in the defence of the occupied clothing factory Bruckman and in the struggles of the piqueteros, assemblies and other expressions of popular counter-power.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah: I supported Argentina in the World Cup and I am reading about takfiris | Al Akhbar English
►http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/sayyed-hassan-nasrallah-i-supported-argentina-world-cup-and-i-am-
n an exclusive six-hour-long interview with Ibrahim al-Amin, Wafic Qanso, Hassan Ileik, and Maha Zureikat from Al-Akhbar, Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah took the time to discuss issues ranging from Syria, the recent Gaza war, the 2006 war with Israel, domestic Lebanese issues, and his own personal habits.
Al-Akhbar is publishing the interview as a multi-part series over the next two days. In this particular section, the interview focused on his personal habits and tastes.
L’humour - plutôt le sarcasme - à la sauce EIIL :
ISIS fans name Messi jihadist emir of Latin America
►http://english.alarabiya.net/en/variety/2014/06/25/ISIS-invites-Messi-to-join-jihadist-call-after-Iran-defeat-.html
It seems that the Argentineans were not the only ones to celebrate Lionel Messi’s goal last week during a World Cup game against Iran.
Alleged supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have created a Facebook page introducing Messi as an “emir of Latin America” and naming him “Abu Mehaddaf al-Arjantini.”
Earlier, the Washington Post reported that ISIS had congratulated the football star on Twitter for defeating their “enemy.”
The Washington Post report was based on a Tweet from an account it described as an ISIS-affiliate. However, upon examining the account and translating its contents, the account (@Daash_News) appears to be an anti-ISIS account, operated most likely by critics of the Jihadist group.
The group took to social media to praise Messi for his last minute goal on June 21, during the Iran-Argentina game.
ISIS is an extremist Sunni terrorist group, while the Iranian team represents the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Shiite state.
Since the beginning of the World Cup, pro-ISIS tweeters, who are very active on social media, have been hijacking the #WorldCup2014 hashtag to promote news of gains in Iraq, according to Agence France-Presse.
Western Muslims are an important target of ISIS’s social media propaganda. The group ensures most of its media productions are translated into as many Western languages as possible.
Despite their loss against Argentina, the Iranian national team still stands a chance of making it to the second round for the first time in history as they face already-eliminated Bosnia on Wednesday.
#EIIL #Messi #Iran #football #Mondial_2014
Can an African team reach the World Cup semi-finals?
▻http://africasacountry.com/can-an-african-team-reach-the-world-cup-semi-finals
No European nation has won the World Cup when it has been held in South America, and the potential for teams such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay to pose a major challenge should be taken seriously. Although the marketing campaigns of major multinationals sell the event as a stage for brilliant individual players, such as […]
#Football_is_a_Country #General #SPORT #Sports #Algeria #Didier_Drogba #Indomitable_Lions #Kwesi_Appiah #Nigeria #Roger_Milla #Sabri_Lamouchi #Sofiane_Feghouli #Stephen_Keshi #Super_Eagles
Thousands flee floods in World Cup host city | CharlotteObserver.com
▻http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/06/10/4967031/floods-hit-world-cup-host-city.html
SAO PAULO Floods have killed nine people and driven tens of thousands of people from their homes while swelling rivers to record levels in southern Brazil and neighboring Paraguay and Argentina, authorities said Tuesday, but so far they have not affected preparations for soccer’s World Cup.
The civil defense department in Brazil’s Parana state said that 132 cities have been flooded there, including the state capital of #Curitiba that will host four World Cup games.
Mais l’essentiel est sauf !
Curitiba City Hall spokesman Alvaro Borba said the Arena da Baixada stadium, the training center, hotels and tourist sites are nowhere near the Borigui river that overflowed its banks. He said the Spanish national team has been training normally and forecasters said rains are not expected when the stadium hosts its first Cup encounter on June 16, when Iran meets Nigeria.
Other teams playing in the city are Iran, Honduras, Ecuador, Australia, Algeria and Russia.
BBC News - ’Biggest dinosaur ever’ discovered
▻http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27441156
Fossilised bones of a dinosaur believed to be the largest creature ever to walk the Earth have been unearthed in Argentina, palaeontologists say.
Based on its huge thigh bones, it was 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall.
Weighing in at 77 tonnes, it was as heavy as 14 African elephants, and seven tonnes heavier than the previous record holder, Argentinosaurus.
Pauvres vaches...
Argentina’s “#Methane_Backpacks” Turn Cow Farts into Green Energy
Cows farts, albeit stinky, are rich in methane gas, a greenhouse gas and a fuel source. Trapping those cow farts though is like trying to catch a wave upon the sand, but now researchers in Argentina are tapping into this un-utilized potential and capturing the gas with methane collecting backpacks. A tube stuck right into the cow’s rumen collects the gases and stores them in an inflatable sack on their back. Later the methane is purified and compressed so it can be used to generate electricity, run a refrigerator, cook or even run a car, all while keeping the methane out of the atmosphere. While the concept still needs more testing and development, as well as a serious look at the ethics, this is the beginning of #Cowpower, the newest form of renewable energy.
#énergie #Argentine #méthane #vache #élevage #énergie_renouvelable #électricité
▻http://www.ecouterre.com/argentinas-methane-backpacks-turn-cow-farts-into-green-energy
Maintenant les vaches vont littéralement porter le poids de notre incapacité à changer les choses un peu plus en profondeur que des béquilles technologiques ou autres.
@nicolasm exactement, j’aurais pas mieux dit
#administration_du_désastre
Trop pessimistes ! Avec un peu de chance on va voir flotter des vaches dans le ciel, portées par le méthane ;-)
“A cow emits about 300 liters of methane per day, which can be used to operate a fridge capacity of 100 liters at a temperature of between two and six degrees for a full day,” said Ricardo Bualo, a technician involved with the project.
Ailleurs on trouve l’appellation #cow_fart_pack
Deux motivations :
• intercepter les gaz à effet de serre (avec description technique [es]) (rumen = panse)
• énergie verte
▻http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACr3GJVNcrI
Ceci ne devant pas nous faire oublier les fondamentaux, soit #gorafi_encore_plagié
3月6日のツイート
▻http://twilog.org/ChikuwaQ/date-140306
Papier is out! paper.li/ChikuwaQ/13277… Stories via @beache3 @yishioka @ptak posted at 09:16:26
「トップ下のDNA」、そんなものはない。 posted at 08:39:55
RT @stressfm: Video: Rolo Teste, de Nelson Fernandes ift.tt/1e2XQ7p posted at 08:21:18
Top story: WASHINGTON: Probe sought of CIA conduct in Senate study of secret de… www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/04/220…, see more tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ posted at 06:26:48
RT @iarehautjobb: iarehautjobb//art.is.hard is out! paper.li/iarehautjobb/a… Stories via @darkasylumradio @ChikuwaQ posted at 05:57:19
Top story: La Payunia Picture — Argentina Photo — National Geographic Photo o… photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/ph…, see more tweetedtimes.com/ChikuwaQ posted at (...)
New Memo: #Kissinger Gave the “Green Light” for Argentina’s Dirty War
▻http://m.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/01/new-memo-kissinger-gave-green-light-argentina-dirty-war
Only a few months ago, Henry Kissinger was dancing with Stephen Colbert in a funny bit on the latter’s Comedy Central show. But for years, the former secretary of state has sidestepped judgment for his complicity in horrific human rights abuses abroad, and a new memo has emerged that provides clear evidence that in 1976 Kissinger gave Argentina’s neo-fascist military junta the “green light” for the dirty war it was conducting against civilian and militant leftists that resulted in the disappearance—that is, deaths—of an estimated 30,000 people.
In April 1977, Patt Derian, a onetime civil rights activist whom President Jimmy Carter had recently appointed assistant secretary of state for human rights, met with the US ambassador in Buenos Aires, Robert Hill. A memo recording that conversation has been unearthed by Martin Edwin Andersen, who in 1987 first reported that Kissinger had told the Argentine generals to proceed with their terror campaign against leftists (whom the junta routinely referred to as “terrorists”). The memo notes that Hill told Derian about a meeting Kissinger held with Argentine Foreign Minister Cesar Augusto Guzzetti the previous June. What the two men discussed was revealed in 2004 when the National Security Archive obtained and released the secret memorandum of conversation for that get-together. Guzzetti, according to that document, told Kissinger, “our main problem in Argentina is terrorism.” Kissinger replied, “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you must get back quickly to normal procedures.” In other words, go ahead with your killing crusade against the leftists.
The new document shows that Kissinger was even more explicit in encouraging the Argentine junta. The memo recounts Hill describing the Kissinger-Guzzetti discussion this way:
The Argentines were very worried that Kissinger would lecture to them on human rights. Guzzetti and Kissinger had a very long breakfast but the Secretary did not raise the subject. Finally Guzzetti did. Kissinger asked how long will it take you (the Argentines) to clean up the problem. Guzzetti replied that it would be done by the end of the year. Kissinger approved.
In other words, Ambassador Hill explained, Kissinger gave the Argentines the green light.
That’s a damning statement: a US ambassador saying a secretary of state had egged on a repressive regime that was engaged in a killing spree.
#Criminel #Argentine #dictature_militaire #États-Unis “#nos_valeurs”
Samuel Granados
▻http://cargocollective.com/samuelgranados
Journalist born in Spain and educated at the Density Design Lab of Politecnico of Milan in Italy, I work now as the head of print infographics at “La Nación” (the second largest news company in Argentina) supervising a team of six graphics editors and represent the department within the newsroom. I also regularly collaborate with “Il Corriere della Sera” in Italy, “Courrier International,” in France, and “Mongolia” in Spain among others. Previously I worked for Público (Spain) and El Mundo (Spain) as a graphic editor for print and online respectively.
Découvert par l’intermédiaire de @cdb_77 à l’occasion de ▻http://seenthis.net/messages/214341
Sur le site, quelques unes de ses réalisations.
• Durée du mariage par génération
• Liens de #Mubadala, fonds souverain d’Abu Dhabi avec EADS
• Visualisation de la densité de population
• Cartogramme en Lego, pour visualiser émigration et immigration aux Amériques
• et pour terminer, quelques pages de son carnet de voyage…
Infographics as “Cuadernos de viaje”. Published in “Público”,
Spain, in the summer of 2010. I designed the image below during a bicycle trip crossing morocco. About the problem of borders in the south of Spain
Cities & Desire 3
From Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
Comme il le dit (presque) à propos d’une autre de ces créations
The sample [above] is an example that makes us reflect on how thin is the line between numbers and people in statistics visualization.
Former Israeli envoy’s diplomatic gaffe on Buenos Aires bombing -
By Barak Ravid | Jan. 4, 2014
Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/diplomania/.premium-1.567004
They say that a rock tossed by a single fool into a well cannot be retrieved even by a hundred sages. But over the weekend, more than a few diplomats with the Foreign Ministry attempted to salvage the rock tossed by the former ambassador to Argentina, Itzhak Aviran.
Argentina’s Jewish news agency published an interview on Friday with Aviran, in which he spoke about the attacks against the Israel embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and against the city’s Jewish community building (AMIA) in 1994. Israel has placed the blamed on both bombings with Iran and Hezbollah.
Aviran, who served as ambassador at the time of the attacks but retired 15 years ago, said that “a majority of those responsible for the act (the 1994 bombing) are no longer alive, and we took care of this on our own.”
Aviran hinted, it seems, at the assassination of Hezbollah’s chief of operations Imad Mughniyah in 2008, who was suspected of involvement in planning and carrying out the attacks.
Even though Israel never claimed responsibility for Mughniyah’s assassination, Hezbollah has pointed its finger at Israel and threatened revenge.
The comments by the retired ambassador stirred up a storm in Argentina. Alberto Nisman, the Argentinian special prosecutor of the case of the 1994 bombing, hastened to respond and demanded Aviran be summoned for investigation.
“I was very surprised to hear these things,” Nisman said in an interview with a local television station. “We would like to know how he knows these things, who are these people and what evidence he has in his possession.”
Argentinian Foreign Minister Hector Timerman angrily charged Israel with concealing information about the identity of the attack’s perpetrators from Argentina’s justice system.
“Israel prevented the gathering of new evidence that could shed light on the affair,” he said. “If there had been cooperation, as mandated by international agreements, the perpetrators may have now been serving out their sentence.”
Timerman said he plans to summon Israeli ambassador in Buenos Aires Dorit Shavit to reprimand her and demand explanation for Aviran’s remarks. He added that Avrian’s comments explain why Israel opposes the agreement signed a year ago between Iran and Argentina for a joint investigation of the attacks.
The Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office tried at first to disregard Aviran’s interview, hoping the whole affair would blow over. Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor decided on a short response on Friday, calling Aviran’s words “complete nonsense.”
However on Saturday, Jerusalem was forced into a corner and compelled to give a sharp official response that would distance itself from the retired ambassador. The following response was published in Hebrew, Spanish and English and was distributed to international media.
“The statements by former ambassador Aviran, who has been in retirement for some 15 years, are completely disconnected from reality. These remarks, made on no authority nor knowledge, are pure fantasy and do not reflect in any way events or facts such as he pretends to depict. Israel continues to cooperate in full transparency with Argentina in investigating the bombings which took place in Buenos Aires against the Embassy of Israel (1992) and the AMIA Jewish Community Center (1994).”
Revealed from archive: Israel’s secret plan to resettle Arab refugees
Plans drawn up during the 1950s and ’60s had one overriding goal: to preserve the demographic status quo by resettling the 1948 Arab refugees far away from the country.
By Arik Ariel Dec. 19, 2013 | 4:30 PM | 15
▻http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/.premium-1.564422
Au passage et entre autres, pour l’auteur les Palestiniens ont “abandonné” leurs maisons, et le pays “s’est vidé” de ses habitants arabes.
Last month marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Amid the flood of articles dealing with the traumatic impact of the event on American society, a modest place was devoted to Israeli-American relations during the Kennedy presidency − mostly in relation to Washington’s fears about Israel’s nuclear project. Little if anything was written about the deep anxiety that prevailed in Israel at the start of Kennedy’s term because of the president’s initiative to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem.
At the conclusion of the first meeting between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and President Kennedy, held in New York in the autumn of 1961, there was no longer any doubt on the Israeli side that the White House was working on a new initiative concerning the Arab refugees called the “three-pronged approach.” Ben-Gurion did not like (to put it mildly) the idea presented to him by the president, which called for some of the refugees to be settled in Arab states, others overseas and some to return to Israel. However, in deference to the president, the Israeli leader did not reject the idea out of hand.
Since the end of the fighting during the War of Independence in 1948, the question of what would become of the 650,000 to 700,000 refugees who had abandoned their homes and property within Israel’s borders had become a millstone around the country’s neck. Some of the refugees had fled, others had been encouraged to leave, some had been expelled. According to one estimate, the property left behind by the refugees included more than four million dunams of land (one million acres), 73,000 rooms, and 8,000 stores and offices.
Some of the nascent state’s leaders viewed the country’s “voiding” of its Arab inhabitants − and thus the ability to establish a state possessing a Jewish majority − as the greatest achievement of the Zionist movement, transcending even the creation of the Jewish state as such. Accordingly, already in mid-1948, while the fighting raged, Israel formulated a policy under which the return of the refugees to its territory would not be permitted under any circumstances. Jerusalem sought to perpetuate the demographic status quo together with the geographic status quo, which was created upon the cessation of hostilities and the signing of the armistice agreements.
In December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 194 (III), which stipulates, in Article 11, that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” In the wake of this, Israel came under heavy pressure to repatriate some of the refugees.
The refugee issue was raised every year during the deliberations of the General Assembly and in international conferences. Notable in this regard was the Lausanne Conference in May 1949, which was convened to advance a solution to the Middle East conflict. During the conference, Israel came under great pressure from Washington, with President Harry Truman sending a strongly worded message in which he maintained that Israel’s refusal to accept refugees put the peace in danger and ignored UN resolutions.
At Lausanne, Israel stated its willingness to take control of the Gaza Strip, under the mistaken impression that only 150,000 refugees lived there. Afterward, it turned out that the population of the Gaza Strip at that time consisted of between 150,000 and 200,000 refugees, in addition to 80,000 permanent residents. As the pressure mounted, Israel stated that, under certain conditions, it would be ready to accept up to 100,000 refugees. However, the Arab states rejected this offer, and Israel retracted it in July 1950.
International pressure on Israel waned in the early 1950s, as the international community’s efforts to find a solution for the refugee problem turned more toward regional economic possibilities and the integration of the majority of the refugees into the Arab states. Still, the idea that some of the refugees would return to Israel remained a central element of every proposed solution.
Burgeoning aid
In the summer of 1961, the skies above Jerusalem darkened when it emerged that the Kennedy administration was determined to find a solution for the approximately one million refugees who were crowded into camps from Syria and Lebanon in the north, as far as Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the south. (The exact number of refugees, and the question of who should be classified as a refugee, remained a constant subject of controversy.) It would be a mistake, though, to think that the catalyst for Washington’s new initiative was the refugees’ wretched and pitiful condition, the Middle East conflict or the Cold War. It was, in fact, Congress that set the initiative in motion by urging the State Department to find a solution for the problem.
What provoked Congress to become involved was the burgeoning amount of aid provided by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, in the form of food, education and health − and the fact that the American taxpayer was underwriting 70 percent of UNRWA’s budget. Israel understood thoroughly the intricacies of American politics − far more so, indeed, than it understood the developments in the refugee camps adjacent to its borders. Jerusalem thus believed that the refugee problem was gradually disappearing, or, as Ben-Gurion noted, “The Arabs of Israel are out of the game” and “the resolution of November 29 is dead” − a reference to the General Assembly’s partition of Palestine resolution on November 29, 1947. However, at the end of the 1950s, the ball started to roll in the opposite direction.
Not only did the refugees not disappear, and not only did their ambition to return to their homeland not fade, but an accelerated process of heightened national identity set in among them. Their desire to return to their former homes grew more intense, in tandem with the political institutionalization of that wish. Israel failed to discern the emergence of the process, though its ambassador to Rome, Eliyahu Sasson, issued a warning about it in a message to Foreign Minister Golda Meir at the end of 1961. Time was working against Israel, he wrote, for within a few years the refugees will establish an official body to represent them and speak in their name, while pursuing a policy akin to that of the rebels in Algeria.
Jerusalem was perturbed by the Kennedy administration’s new initiative and concerned about the upcoming 16th General Assembly session, particularly in light of the fact that Israel had suffered a setback the previous year in the General Assembly’s deliberations about the refugee question. “Palestinian existence” was dredged up from the recesses of oblivion, but the Foreign Ministry initially thought − wrongly − that this referred to “the refugees’ existing rights to their property.”
The Arab and Muslim states submitted a resolution calling for the appointment of a custodian to protect the refugees’ property rights. Ahmad Shukeiri, the first chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization − dubbed “the savage” by Meir − was, for the first time, allowed to address the General Assembly on behalf of the refugees. As these developments unfolded, concern grew in Jerusalem that this time Israel would have to “pay” in the currency of refugees, whom it would have no choice but to accept. The overriding question was: How many refugees could Israel accept without putting its survival and existence as a Jewish state at risk?
Appearing at a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in June 1961, Golda Meir stated that Israel had been asked to accept elderly refugees. The country’s Arab minority already constituted 10 percent of Israel’s population, Meir noted, and she went on to ask how many refugees would have to be allowed in before the situation resembled that of Algeria.
The senior staff of the Foreign Ministry also considered the question of the price to be paid, in a series of meetings classified as top secret. The ministry’s director general, Dr. Haim Yahil, thought that admitting 30,000 to 40,000 refugees over a period of three or four years would not pose an excessive risk. Others disagreed. Some of the participants averred that an Arab minority constituting 25 percent of the population was a number Israel could live with, but others argued that this was a dangerously high percentage.
In July 1961, the government held two discussions about how Israel would present its position at the General Assembly. Since the status-quo policy was not on the agenda, except for the expressed willingness to make some tactical compromises, the ministers instead discussed the “price” Israel could live with.
Interior Minister Yosef Burg, who liked to sum up things with pithy quips, said, “The return of Arabs is not only an atomic bomb, it is an anatomical bomb.” Striking a somewhat businesslike note, Finance Minister Levi Eshkol asked what constituted a decisive Jewish majority: 51, 61 or 71 percent? He said that the last number certainly constituted a decisive majority. Ben-Gurion said that if there would be 600,000 Arabs in Israel, they would be the majority within two generations. (At the time, Israel’s population stood at 3.1 million, including 252,000 Arabs.) No formal decisions were made.
Encouraging emigration
As the idea that Israel, under international pressure, might have to allow some refugees to return began to sink in, Jerusalem started to look for demographic solutions to “balance out” this prospect. Starting with the premise that the birthrate among the refugees and among the Arabs who had remained in Israel was higher than among the Jews, the question the policymakers asked was how it would be possible to reduce the number of the country’s Arab population.
In the midst of the War of Independence, when more than 400,000 Arabs from then-nascent Israel had already become refugees, a “transfer committee” − i.e., one dealing with population transfer − was established with a mandate from the government to recommend policy on the subject of the refugees.
Yosef Weitz, a Jewish National Fund official who had been the driving force behind the committee’s establishment, was appointed its chairman. One of its recommendations was that the Arabs’ abandonment of their homes should be considered an irrevocable fait accompli and that Israel should support their resettlement elsewhere. The committee also recommended that Arabs who had remained in the country should be encouraged to emigrate and that the state should buy the land of Arabs who were willing to leave. In addition, Arab villages should be destroyed and Arabs should be prevented from working the land, including a ban on harvesting field crops and olive picking − this in the wake of attempts by refugees to cross back into Israel, to the villages and fields they had left behind.
Secretly, the highest levels in Jerusalem realized there would be no option but to take back some of the refugees. With this in mind, Weitz’s committee decreed that the number of Arabs in Israel should not exceed 15 percent of the total population. The recommendations, submitted in written form, were not adopted in a formal government resolution. However, they had the effect of reinforcing the government’s view that Israel had to be assertive in its effort to preserve the demographic status quo.
Ben-Gurion and his adviser on Arab affairs, Yehoshua Palmon, took part in some of the committee’s meetings, in which ways to encourage the
country’s Arabs to leave were discussed. In June 1950 Israel Defense Forces’ GOC Southern Command Moshe Dayan said: “The 170,000 Arabs who remain in the country should be treated as though their fate has not yet been sealed. I hope that, in the years ahead, another possibility might arise to implement a transfer of those Arabs from the Land of Israel.”
In the country’s first decade of existence, the leaders of the ruling Mapai party (the precursor of Labor) and its coalition partner Ahdut Ha’avoda, together with the senior officers of the Military Government (Israel’s Arab citizens were under military rule until 1966), believed that at least some local Arabs would draw the “right conclusions” from the outcome of the War of Independence, and consider emigrating of their own volition. In 1950, Palmon wrote to Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett that the majority of the propertied Arabs aspired to leave if they could also take their assets. The Christians among them would choose to move to Lebanon, he noted, while the Muslims would opt for Egypt. Palmon confirmed that he had examined possibilities of a property exchange between Arabs from Israel and Jews in Egypt and Lebanon. His conclusion was that an arrangement to that effect could be worked out.
For his part, Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon referred to migration among the country’s Arabs in a talk he gave in November 1953. For the Jewish population, he said, “This is a vital matter, even if we do not see emigration as a solution to the basic question. We have to remember that the natural growth rate among the Arabs is approximately 6,000 a year, and emigration could solve that issue.”
The largest and most comprehensive plan, involving the transfer of thousands of Christian Arabs from Galilee to Argentina and Brazil, was given the secret codename “Operation Yohanan,” named for Yohanan from Gush Halav (John of Giscala), a leader of the Jewish revolt against the Romans in the first Jewish-Roman war. The plan was devised in the utmost secrecy in backroom meetings in the Prime Minister’s Office and the Foreign Ministry, with Weitz’s aid. Foreign Ministry documents from the early 1950s show that it was actually Sharett, known for his moderate views, who encouraged the plan, even though he was concerned about the Church’s response when it became apparent that a large portion of the leavers were Christians.
In March 1952, Weitz forwarded to the Foreign Ministry a detailed report about the resettlement of Christian Arabs from Upper Galilee to Argentina and Brazil. The report pointed out that the Argentine authorities were abetting the migration of farmers to the country. He added that 35 families from the Galilee village of Jish (Gush Halav) had evinced an interest in the plan. The overall proposal included the creation of a share-holding company to be held by non-Jews and for which the initial financing would come from Jewish National Fund capital in Argentina. Sharett added that, if necessary, the project could be presented as an initiative of Israel’s Arab community, similar to the migration of Maronite Christians from Lebanon, which was then underway. Should the operation be discovered, the foreign minister made it clear, any connection to the government must be vehemently denied.
In November 1952, Sharett informed Weitz that the prime minister had authorized Operation Yohanan. He added that the details of the plan must be kept strictly confidential. In any event, the project was canceled at the beginning of 1953, apparently because the Argentine authorities balked. The Middle Eastern department in the Foreign Ministry dealt with the subject of resettling the refugees outside Israel from the day the department was created. Its mission was to find places where the refugees could be settled, raise funds and obtain international support for settling the refugees abroad.
In the spring of 1950, the director of the Foreign Ministry’s international institutions department, Yehezkel Gordon, suggested that Israel consider settling Arab refugees in Somalia and Libya, to take the place of the 17,000 to 18,000 Jews who had immigrated to Israel from Cyrenaica and Tripoli. The idea was particularly appealing because the Jews who left Libya had not been allowed to remove their property from the country.
After Libya became independent, in January 1952, Moshe Sasson, from the Foreign Ministry, put forward a secret proposal to settle Arabs from Israel − from among both the refugees and those who had remained in the country − in Libya, with the property of the Libyan Jews to be restored to them within the framework of the exchange. In June 1955, Weitz traveled from Paris to Tunisia and Algeria in order to examine the possibility of settling Arabs from Israel and Arab refugees there, parallel to the immigration to Israel of Jews from those countries.
Palmon was involved in an attempt by Israel to purchase about 100,000 dunams (25,000 acres) of land in the Ras al-Akhdar region of Libya, in order to settle refugees there. The plan went awry when it was leaked to the media and the Libyan ruler came under massive pressure not to allow the refugees to settle there. In 1956-1957, another plan was devised to acquire farms near Tripoli and bring in a core group of 50 to 70 refugee families. Codenamed “Uri,” the plan was to be carried out by a development and construction company which would be registered in Switzerland, with its shares held by a Swiss bank. The elaborate plan was canceled after it, too, was leaked to the press.
Palmon was also sent to Paris to hold talks with the president of Syria, Adib Shishakli (who ruled in 1953-54), about the possibility of resettling refugees in Arab countries. However, no concrete arrangement emerged from these talks. In 1955, Sharett examined the possibility that Brazil would admit 100,000 refugees. He also looked into the possible acquisition of land in Cyprus at a rock-bottom price in order to exchange it for property held in Israel by Arabs wishing to emigrate.
In September 1959, yet another plan was devised, codenamed “Theo,” to settle 2,000 refugee families in Libya and employ them through a commercial development company. It was estimated that $11.5 million (in the terms of that era) would be needed to execute this scheme. The terms of the plan ensured that the refugees’ presence would not be a burden on the Libyan economy and would not reduce the income of local workers. Furthermore, for every outside professional, three local workers would be employed.
In the first half of the 1960s, the Foreign Ministry continued to examine plans to encourage the emigration of Arab refugees from the Middle East to Europe, particularly to France and Germany. One option that was considered was to find them jobs in Germany, which was then in dire need of working hands. During 1962, Israeli officials examined the possibility of finding employment for Palestinian refugee laborers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The initial checks done for this plan, known as “Operation Worker,” and the correspondence involved, were kept completely under wraps. But both Foreign Minister Meir and her director general, Yahil, objected to these ideas. Meir was concerned that Germany would be flooded with Arab refugees, and, in any event, the whole scheme proved fruitless.
In February 1966, the possibility of settling refugees from Jordan in France was also examined.
Israel’s efforts to find overseas locations in which to settle Arab refugees continued even after the Six-Day War of 1967. In the end, though, these efforts failed, as had ideas and proposals raised by others, including Syrian President Husni al-Zaim and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said in 1949. Sharett, for one, objected to the Iraqi leader’s proposal to exchange the refugees for Iraq’s community of 140,000 Jews. Sharett and others were concerned about the lawsuits demanding compensation that Iraqi Jews were liable to file for their property, as other Jewish communities in Arab countries were doing. The refugee issue was thus intertwined with the question of the property of the Jewish immigrants to Israel from the Arab states.
‘Quiet talks’
In late 1961, in the wake of President Kennedy’s initiative, Dr. Joseph Johnson, from the Carnegie Endowment, was appointed a special representative to tackle the problem and to work with the parties involved to come up with a solution. The plan he devised − to distribute questionnaires to the Palestinian refugees and permit those who wished to return to Israel, subject to security considerations − stirred deep fears in Jerusalem.
Meir, who was appalled by the idea, wielded all the influence at her command in Washington in order to ensure that the plan met a quick death.
The “payment” Israel would be required to make in return for the shelving of the plan became apparent in top-secret discussions − known as the “quiet talks’ − held between Jerusalem and Washington in 1962-63. In them, Israel expressed its readiness to absorb up to 10 percent of the refugees as part of a comprehensive settlement. At that time, the refugee population stood at approximately 1,100,000 souls. But this initiative, too, fell by the wayside, because the United States was unable to obtain the Arab states’ agreement to a comprehensive settlement.
Between 1948 and 1967, Israel viewed the refugee problem through the prism of Washington. The refugees appeared on Jerusalem’s agenda when the United States thought that measures should be taken or a new plan devised to resolve the problem. In the absence of external pressure, the status-quo policy prevailed.
The fact that the “political compass” of Jerusalem’s decision makers repeatedly pointed to Washington and New York as the sources dictating their policy on the refugees explains in good measure Israel’s lack of attention to the social and political developments occurring in the refugee camps across the border until 1967. Whereas security and military developments in the camps, such as the founding of Fatah and the establishment of armed units, were followed closely in Israel, the processes by which the refugees consolidated themselves politically was of little if any interest. Thus, as the refugee problem gradually evolved from a humanitarian issue into the Palestinian national issue, Israel found itself reacting to events.
Under American pressure, Israel displayed readiness to absorb a considerable number of refugees on three occasions, even if by doing so it would cross the “15 percent line” − i.e., the agreement of 1949 to absorb 150,000 refugees living in the Gaza Strip (together with the territory of the Strip); a proposal that same year to admit 100,000 refugees; and agreement to take in 10 percent of the refugees within the framework of the “quiet talks.”
Israel was willing to accept refugees at a time when its demographic and geostrategic situation was far worse than it is today. To the extent that one can learn from past experience, it can be said that willingness to take in a small token number of refugees based on Israeli-determined criteria − including age, timetables and family situation (UNRWA now has five million refugees registered, scattered in 58 camps) − could provide an important and symbolic response to the demand for “return,” which still underlies the ethos of the Palestinian refugees. Israel would thus acknowledge its moral share in the creation of the problem.
The establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of a comprehensive settlement will take the edge off the demand for return, as it is illogical that a large proportion of the refugees will demand to return to this country rather than settle in their new state. In retrospect, the effort to preserve the status quo did not benefit Israel (as witnessed by the Yom Kippur War, the first intifada and other events). This is unlikely to change in the future.
Dr. Arik Ariel, an attorney, is a lecturer in intelligence and policy and in law and politics at the Emek Yezreel College. The article is based on his PhD. thesis at the University of Haifa.
Cumbia Drive
▻http://chewbone.rickshide.com/2013/10/29/cumbia-drive
De lo mas kitsch de la cumbia, covers que no se de donde se le ocurren (como al de las TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES), y remakes del mentado EDM como “Rattle” de BINGO PLAYERS, todo esto producido por CUMBIA DRIVE desde Argentina llega con varias de las canciones antes mencionadas gratis, y claro, con lo [...]
Photos from Argentina’s farms, documenting an agrochemical plague
▻http://blogs.denverpost.com/captured/2013/10/21/photos-argentina-agrochemicals/6446
American biotechnology has turned Argentina into the world’s third-largest soybean producer, but the chemicals powering the boom aren’t confined to soy and cotton and corn fields. They routinely contaminate homes and classrooms and drinking water. A growing chorus of doctors and scientists is warning that their uncontrolled use could be responsible for the increasing number of health problems turning up in hospitals across the South American nation. In the heart of Argentina’s soybean business, house-to-house surveys of 65,000 people in farming communities found cancer rates two to four times higher than the national average, as well as higher rates of hypothyroidism and chronic respiratory illnesses. Associated Press photographer Natacha Pisarenko spent months documenting the issue in farming communities across Argentina.
Et, ce qui n’est pas courant, simultanément sur ►http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2013/10/agrochemical_spraying_in_argen.html
