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Despite Attacks by Guards and Thugs, These Factory Workers in the Philippines Remain on Strike · Global Voices
Karlo Mongaya

The banner reads: “Regularize contractual workers!” Photo Credits: ST Exposure
Workers who produce popular alcoholic beverages owned by the Philippines’ second richest man are currently on strike, demanding regular jobs and better working conditions. Despite attacks by security guards and thugs reportedly hired by the employers, the strikers have continued their work stoppage for more than a week now.
The Tanduay Distillers Inc. plant (which is located in Cabuyao, Laguna, 44 kilometers or about 27 miles south of Manila) hires contractual labor through the agencies Global Skills Providers Multi-Purpose Cooperative and HD Manpower Service Cooperative.
Contractuals are temporary workers who are not given standard labor benefits. Many companies in the Philippines engage in contractualization to lower the cost of their operations.
According to the labor union Tanggulan Ugnayan Daluyong ng Lakas-Anakpawis sa Tanduay Distillers Inc (TUDLA), these two agencies engage in labor-only contracting or the hiring of contractuals to do work that is essential to production—an act prohibited by law.
For the past 5-11 years, 90 percent of the total workforce at Tanduay Distillers Inc. (a total of 397 workers) have been contractual workers.
Striking workers hold program at the picket line with their families and supporters. Photo Credits: Kilusang Mayo Uno.
Responding to the contractual-worker issue, Tanduay’s employees formed TUDLA on April 16 and filed a petition for regularization with the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE). However, the contractual workers were suddenly made to sign a one-year service contract when the company has not previously required them to sign any contract.
On May 16, Saturday, hundreds of workers were told that they would not be given any schedule for contract signing. In other words, they were already out of work. On May 18, Monday morning, workers decided on the spot to launch a strike. Daily updates about the work stoppage are available on Kilusang Mayo Uno-Southern Tagalog's Facebook page.
According to TUDLA, Tanduay workers create an estimated 15 million pesos ($336,000) worth of beverage products every day. Company owner Lucio Tan, the man listed as the country’s second richest by Forbes Magazine in 2014, has a net worth of 270 billion pesos ($6.1 billion).
Tanduay workers, meanwhile, earn a measly P315 ($7) a day, and government reforms are expected to lower that figure to P255 ($6) a day. The culprit is the Philippine government’s new Two-Tiered Wage System, a so-called productivity scheme that labor groups say is a legal mechanism to drive down the wages of workers outside of Manila.
Tanduay workers also complain that they cannot avail of paid time off (for sick leave or vacation), medical and other benefits, or even bonuses. Not infrequently, the union says, employees are suddenly and without explanation dismissed from their jobs.
The company reportedly hired local toughs and private security groups to disperse the striking workers and their supporters. The violent dispersal was caught on camera by multimedia group ST Exposure.
From day one of the strike, the company’s security personnel and other muscle reportedly working for cash have harassed and even harmed the striking workers and their supporters. Dozens have suffered injuries from beatings. And yet the extremely exploitative conditions have pushed the workers to persist with the strike and their fight for just wages, benefits, and job security.

author: Karlo Mongaya


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FIFA Elections Are in Progress · Global Voices
Janine Mendes-Franco

Despite the recent arrests of FIFA officials due to indictments laid by the US Department of Justice, the world football governing body has said that its elections, which it calls the 65th FIFA Congress, will continue as scheduled today. Current FIFA president Sepp Blatter, who headed the organisation while the two-decade siege of corruption, bribery and money laundering was allegedly taking place, is seeking a fifth term at today's congress. Blatter has refused to resign amidst the scandal, despite several calls for him to step down.
You can watch the live feed of the FIFA elections here.

source: news-globalvoices

license: Creative Commons - Attribution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

author: Janine Mendes-Franco


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‘FIFA Is Imploding’: Surprise Arrests Hit FIFA Top Officials Ahead of Friday Election · Global Voices
Richard Wanjohi

Photo by Alobos Life, November 9, 2010, CC 2.0.
Swiss police arrested nine senior FIFA officials in Zurich on Wednesday morning, May 27, on suspicion of bribery and money laundering, among other charges, following indictments by the US Department of Justice. The arrests were made at the hotel where officials were staying as they await the FIFA Congress, ahead of this Friday's election for the FIFA presidency.
The US Justice Department is targeting more than a dozen FIFA officials, including these six top figures:
Nine of the defendants were FIFA officials by operation of the FIFA statutes, as well as officials of one or more other bodies:
The Swiss authorities also released a statement of the documents seized (click here) during the arrests and opening of criminal proceedings against the FIFA officials arrested. The statement clarifies the reasons for the arrests as follows;
The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) is conducting a Swiss criminal investigation regarding the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. For inquiries regarding this Swiss criminal investigation, please contact the OAG. In separate proceedings, and independently of the Swiss criminal investigation of the OAG, the US Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York is conducting a criminal investigation into the allocation of media, marketing and sponsoring rights for football tournaments carried out in the United States and Latin America.
The world of sport—particularly among fans of football (or soccer, as it's known North America)—was abuzz about the surprise arrests. On Twitter, leading football figures and sports officials weighed in on the news using the hashtag #FIFAArrests.
This is extraordinary! FIFA is imploding. The best thing that could possibly happen to the beautiful game. https://t.co/l5Hiwp0WxZ
— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) May 27, 2015
Sepp Blatter is a president who presided over institutional fraud and corruption. He must resign #FIFAarrests https://t.co/tHE720kyb4
— Julian Moore (@SponsorshipGuru) May 27, 2015
Others took a rather cynical look at the arrests:
IronyMeter off the scale as #FIFA official accused of laundering hides behind freshly laundered sheet. #FIFAarrests pic.twitter.com/PLH2QHcYOL
— Mark McFadden (@MarkMcFadden) May 27, 2015
Walter De Gregorio: “Sepp Blatter is not dancing in his office… but he is calm” #FIFAarrests #FIFA #FIFAgate https://t.co/IvjgltMU7t
— Giannis Bairaktaris (@g_baira) May 27, 2015
Ah ah ah we see you ! #SeppBlatter #FIFA #FIFAarrests #FIFAgate #FIFAcorruption #Qatar2022 pic.twitter.com/bgIZcf2K8l
— Loredana Panza (@Lopa22) May 27, 2015
These arrests will indeed affect the upcoming 65th FIFA Congress, as well as have implications on the future of FIFA, whatever the outcome of the organization's Friday election for president.
Reactions from across the world have been mixed with national football associations and their officials coming under increased scrutiny. In Africa, the Football Association of Zambia (FAZ) President Kalusha Bwalya is said to be holed up in South Africa. A former national footballer and icon of the game in Africa, his tenure as head of FAZ has made him less popular in his home country. Peter Aduma reports this about his alleged prolonged stay in South Africa:
With the FBI and Swiss authorities bringing down the FIFA house on long standing corruption allegations that have seen seven officials arrested, the scandal is hitting closer to home with FAZ president Kalusha Bwalya reportedly stalling for time in Johannesburg.
Bwalya, who has been previously named as one of the officials that received bribes from former FIFA presidential candidate Mohammed Bin Hammam, allegedly fears that he may join the long list of those arrested with the net cast as wide as South Africa where three officials have also joined the list for their alleged corrupt role in the 2010 World Cup bid.
The article continues indicating that though there has been a local process opened on bribery allegations against Bwalya without much headway, the US judicial process seems to have sent jitters among CAF officials (Bwalya included) some of who have opted to skip the FIFA Congress.
In South Africa, news of the arrests in the Swiss capital saw allegations against South Africa Football Association (SAFA) resurface. This is in relation to the 2010 World Cup it hosted five years ago. No SAFA official was named though as Eyewitness News reported here:
A top South African bid official is being investigated for allegedly offering a bribe of $10 million to a top Fifa official, acting US Attorney General Kelly Currie on Wednesday confirmed. No one has been named yet. Fifa is investigating whether corrupt officials at the world soccer’s governing body took bribes during the process that awarded the 2010 World Cup to South Africa, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch alleged on Wednesday.
In the Middle East, the FIFA arrests have affected the Israeli and Palestine Football Associations, which had sought mediation to resolve the unending disputes on arrests and detainment of Palestinian footballers. In a post titled “Will the FIFA Arrests scuttle the Vote to Suspend Israeli Soccer?” on website Edge of Sports, Dave Zirin notes that the Palestinian Football Association President Jibril Rajoub insisted they will proceed with their bid to have Israeli Football Association suspended (becoming only the second ever FIFA member suspended; South Africa was the first during the apartheid regime).
Zirin continues on how it might affect Israel in its bid to avoid suspension:
The idea that a United States Justice Department that can’t even get its Attorney General approved for six months, could pull off a multi-year, multi-million dollar transatlantic sting operation with the perfect timing to stymy a vote whose existence was in doubt even days ago is to put it mildly, unrealistic. But even more pertinently, the US Justice Department and Swiss authorities just gutted the North American delegation with these arrests, the group most likely to support and lobby for Israel at the FIFA Congress.
Interestingly, sports network ESPN happened to carry a documentary on four-time FIFA President Sepp Blatter's reign titled “Blatteropoly“. The story was carried exactly one week before the FIFA arrests.
Finally, the FourFourTwo blog takes a rather cynical view of the arrests, noting that Blatter was not among those arrested:
FIFA chief Sepp Blatter was absolutely not arrested and is not under any suspicion whatsoever,…”We have uncovered a network of kickbacks and fraud that goes right to the top of FIFA,” said a statement from Swiss prosecutors. “Except for Sepp Blatter, who is not even the tiniest bit involved in any way.”
The statement added that investigations were underway into money laundering in connection with the allocation of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, that Blatter was the furthest thing from their minds and that they had not even thought about him once until just this very moment.
Stay tuned to Global Voices for more reporting on FIFA arrests and related stories as they develop.

author: Richard Wanjohi


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‘Go to Sleep, My Child’ With Lullabies from Around the World · Global Voices
Rising Voices

Rising Voices note: The following post originally written by Yásnaya Aguilar for Este Páis and is republished with permission. Other posts about lullabies on Global Voices can be found here and here.
In some Mixe communities of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, it is believed that newborns arrive with good fortune linguistically: they understand a universal language later refined with the words of adults until they are able to attain a pristine diamond: the Ayuujk language. In our dreams, we can sometimes recall that universal language with which we were born and it is the same we use when we begin to lose our ability to reason or when death approaches. The words of the universal language once again connect us with the world of the dead, which is perhaps similar to the world of the not yet born or to the not conceived.
Every culture has distinct concepts of what constitutes the acquisition of languages and from a scientific point of view there are heated debates among the different approaches to this phenomenon.
Lulllaby in the Otomí language from the Oto-Manguean family:
The interaction between the world's languages and babies begins before birth, as babies can hear the language spoken by the mother and in this sense, even though “mother language” is not synonymous with the “language of the mother,” there is a first linguistic relationship between mother and child.
It is not surprising that words become spells to help stop the crying, help the child go to sleep, or express encouragement or hope. Transmitted mainly through an oral tradition, lullabies reflect the musical and lyrical cultural approaches to what we call childhood. Each culture has different lullabies for different purposes: a lullaby in the Seri language (the video at the top of this post) spoken by Seri people on the coast of Sonora, Mexico, for example, is not sung in order to induce sleep or stop crying, but instead “to instill the fighting spirit in girls, so that when they grow they know how to confront problems in this world,” as the lyrics state.
Lullaby in the Náhuatl language:
A lullaby is an oral text composed especially so that humans can relate to one another linguistically to receive the linguistic heritage of the culture in which the child is born. Lullabies are the building blocks of the language offered to children learning to live in the world. The lullaby lyrics can be directed to babies or may be linguistic formulas to attract attributes or desirable destinations for newborns.
Lullaby in the Toba language:
In 2010, a couple embarked on a project called “La Furgonana,” where they toured Latin America in a van documenting the status of the rights of children and documenting lullabies from the different places they visited, including in languages other than Spanish.
Lullabies can become a path by which babies are exposed to the diversity of languages in the world. The videos in this post are a brief selection of lullabies in different languages that help babies go to sleep or install courage because sleep and bravery know no linguistic boundaries.
Other lullabies found online include in the English, Mixteco, Lakota, and Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino) languages.

author: Rising Voices


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How Argentinian Football Club Boca Juniors Lost Out to Violence · Global Voices
Laura Schneider

Boca Junior's flags during match against River Plate in Mendoza, Argentina, 2013. Photo from user Rogerio Tomaz Jr. (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Argentina's two most famous football clubs and the bitterest of rivals, Boca Juniors and River Plate, squared off in a round of 16 match in the Copa Libertadores, South America's premier club football tournament, on May 14. Despite the intense build-up and millions of viewers, only the first half of the match was played at Boca Juniors's Alberto J. Armando stadium.
At the start of the second half, as River Plate's players were coming back onto the pitch, four of them were attacked with a toxic material used in the manufacturing of pepper spray. This would eventually lead to the abandoning of the most eagerly anticipated match of this year's tournament, organized by CONMEBOL, South American football's governing body.
Within five days of the attack, a group of Boca's supporters were identified as the culprits using the stadium's security camera footage, with the main offender named as lifelong fan Adrián Napolitano. Prosecutor Susana Calleja issued the summons for Napolitano for questioning, but stopped short of requesting his arrest
However, in the hours and days immediately following the match, debate had raged as to whether it was indeed a fan or even if it was the police themselves. Following the match, the hashtag #FueLaPolicia (it was the police) quickly started trending.
Si #FueLaPolicia ¿Berni lo va a admitir? ¿los periodistas van a pedir perdon a los hinchas genuinos de boca? siga,siga la joda….
— Paatsy (@Mypaatsy) Mayo 15, 2015
If it was the police, will [Argentina's security chief Sergio] Berni admit it? Will the journalists apologize to Boca's fans? Let the joke continue…
Siguen llorando los bosteros? Encima que entraron por la ventana a la copa hacen cagadas #SuperVerguenza #FueLaPolicia ? Jajaja — Te Amo River (@Sebaferri13) Mayo 16, 2015
Are the bosteros [negative term for Boca's fans] still crying? On top of getting into the tournament through the back door, they cause shit. Total embarrassment.
It was the police ? Hahaha
#SiempreConVosCABJ Digan lo que digan, siempre el mas grande! #FueLaPolicia dejen de echar la culpa a los hinchas.
— Kenia Moreno (@AsqMoreno) Mayo 16, 2015
Always with you Club Atletico Boca Juniors. Say what they will, always the best! Stop blaming the fans.
Mas alla si #FueLaPolicia o no, lo grave es todo lo que pasó después. Las 2hs para suspender el partido, q los jugadores no puedan irse…
— Fabricio (@fabrisino) Mayo 15, 2015
Whether it was the police or not, the serious part is what happened after. The two hours waiting to abandon the match, where the players couldn't leave…
La Bombonera, as Boca Juniors’ stadium is known, was at full capacity during the match, which was attended only by members and supporters of the home club; visiting fans have been banned from football matches in Argentina since the death of a spectator in 2013.
“La 12″, another name for Boca Juniors’ legion of fans, was chosen as the best following in the world by the French football magazine So Foot. Boca is itself one of the most successful clubs in South American and indeed world football, with six Copa Libertadores, four South American Super Cups, two South American Cups, and three Intercontinental Cups to their name. The club has also given rise to superstars such as Diego Armando Maradona, Carlos Tévez, and Juan Román Riquelme, among others.
During the nearly two hours that passed before the referee finally decided to abandon the match, Boca fans flew a drone carrying a banner with the letter B (making fun of River Plate’s 2011 relegation to Argentina's second tier league, the Primera B) across the stadium:
The majority of spectators had left the stadium, but both teams waited longer to leave the field of play for the locker rooms, since a group of fans repeatedly threw plastic bottles at the River Plate players each time they approached the sleeve leading back into the clubhouse.
As if this wasn't enough, and to further fuel the controversy, the Boca Juniors players stayed on the pitch after their opponents had left, and saluted the fans that were still in the stadium:
#Boca ,te están matando!! Pensar que había gente que decía “El problema es Riquelme”. Ya no tienen a quien culpar. #Orion aplaude a la barra
— Gonza (@Gonzalo_Erguy) Mayo 15, 2015
Boca, they're killing you! To think that people were saying “the problem is Riquelme”. They don't have anyone left to blame. [Boca's goalkeeper] Orion applauds the crowd
Esta imagen pasará a la historia como uno de los actos mas estúpidos del futbol mundial #ParaLaHistoria #Orion pic.twitter.com/KSJfNDgoYl
— Anibal Avendaño (@anibal86co) Mayo 15, 2015
This image will go down as one of the stupidest acts in the history of world football.
The decision from CONMEBOL:
Two days later, the hashtag #LaSancionABoca (the sanction against Boca) quickly began trending after CONMEBOL announced the punishment that would be handed down to Boca Juniors: Boca would be eliminated from the 2015 Copa Libertadores, and River Plate plate would advance to the quarter-finals, where they meet Brazilian club Cruzeiro:
Comunicado oficial caso Boca-River. pic.twitter.com/kPbKLFR3xs
— CONMEBOL.com (@CONMEBOL_CSF) Mayo 17, 2015
Official press release on the Boca-River case
The responses from both sets of fans spread on social media:
Sale más caro una multa por cruzar en rojo un semáforo que #LaSancionABoca
— ├ MǾĻΞŠΤĨЄ ┤ (@molestie) Mayo 17, 2015
The fine for crossing on a red light is more expensive than the sanction against Boca
Che vieron las sanciones de #CONMEBOL? #LaSancionABoca pic.twitter.com/XEkHTUrhF4
— Nicolás de León (@salocinuy) Mayo 17, 2015
Hey, did you guys see the sanctions from #CONMEBOL?
LA SACAMOS RE BARATA, NADA QUE VER LO QUE DECIAN #LaSancionABoca
— roro✨ ¦ boca juniors (@styIesp4radise) Mayo 17, 2015
WE GOT OFF EASY, NOTHING TO DO WITH WHAT THEY WERE SAYING
Nos eliminaron injustamente, el equipo no tiene la culpa y RiBer exagero los síntomas #LaSanciónABoca #Boca
— Roma (@RomaPozzuto) Mayo 17, 2015
They eliminated us unfairly, it's not the team's fault and RiBer [negative term for River Plate] exaggerated the symptoms
Ustedes nos dejaron 5comentarios Y NOSOTROS LOS DEJAMOS 5COPA LIBERTADORES JAJAJAJAJAJAJA #LaSancionABoca #BostaJuniors
— ♛60%73%♥VOT2luz❤ (@Rusher_Gallina_) Mayo 16, 2015
You leave us 5 comments and WE LEAVE YOU 5 COPA LIBERTADORES HAHAHAHA!
Another trending tag among Boca fans was #DisculpaRiver [Sorry River], with many expressing their  disgust with other fans from their own club:
Soy una verdadera hincha de Boca. Repudio la violencia #DisculpaRiver #NoMasViolencia pic.twitter.com/V8ZfF2ppgT
— Mariné Moreno (@MMaruMMoreno) May 15, 2015
I am a true Boca fan. I condemn violence. [Sorry River] [No more violence]
According to CONMEBOL's decision, the Boca Juniors will have to play its next four home games in CONMEBOL tournaments behind closed doors, while its fans will not be able to travel to any of its next four away matches.

author: Laura Schneider


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How Kyrgyzstan’s Favourite Fermented Drink Became a National Symbol · Global Voices
Elita Bakirova

Images by French illustrator Nicolas Journoud. Images belong to Journet. Featured on Kloop.kg.
Kyrgyzstan's largest non-alcoholic beverage retailer has a motto that echoes across communities and generations, translating as “Shoro is Strength”.
After the company's legendary co-founder Tabyldy Egemberdiev passed away aged 64 earlier this month, the slogan now has even more resonance.
Few figures have been as publically mourned in Kyrgyzstan as Egemberdiev, who took part of his country's nomadic cultural heritage — fermented drinks — and turned it into one of the few distinctive commercial brands in the mountainous Central Asian state of nearly six million.
The co-founder of Shoro, Tabyldy Ergamberdiev. Scan of front cover of One Magazine.
While beverages such as the tangy-tasting kumis have always been popular on the country's mountain pastures or jailoo, the success of Shoro was in bringing the countryside to the city.
In the country's capital, Bishkek, Shoro stations staffed by ladies in distinctive uniforms sitting behind barrels of easily affordable, healthy refreshment are part of the summer scenery.
French illustrator Nicolas Journoud, who spent a month in Bishkek, was inspired to immortalise these street corner vendors selling national drinks in a series of comic strips titled Shoro Girls.
Ian Claytor, an expatriate working in Kyrgyzstan's tourism sector, provides some background to the Shoro story:
Here Journoud takes an iconic Soviet-era painting of a Kyrgyz schoolgirl and adds some Shoro. Image belongs to Nicolas Journoud, featured on Kloop.kg.
Exactly why Taalbyldy Egemberdiev decided to call his company “Shoro” is not clear … in Kyrgyz it means something like “salty”. For example, in the South of Kyrgyzstan there is a mineral water spring called Kara Shoro – and the waters from this particular renowned for being salty.
Brought up by his mother, Taalbyldy graduated from the Polytechnic Institute in Bishkek and became an engineer. After Independence he because a popular figure, writing articles for newspapers on a wide range of subjects. He is most well known, however, for establishing and developing the Shoro Company and brand … which produces mineral waters as well as Maksym. He has been invited to lecture in Turkey and the US – and even met President Clinton.
The Shoro company is a family affair, run by Taalbyldy and his relatives. He is on record as saying that they began with working capital of just two hundred US dollars, which he got by selling four of his mother’s sheep – and two goats. He also says that they began with one “pail” of the drink – which they took to the market and the 80 litres sold out in two hours. They gave up their jobs and started the company. Originally, the family produced the traditional Kyrgyz beverage from his grandfather’s house – but eventually demand grew to exceed the supply … the day’s production, all prepared in the traditional manner using large (100 litre) kazans, would be sold out before mid-day … so production was expanded to meet the demand and now there are five factories producing seventy tons a day. Much of the production is exported – especially to the Moscow area of Russia.
Egemberdiev's death on May 15 produced a tumultuous reaction from local Twitter users.
One wrote of the Shoro brand's addictiveness:
@i_liza1629 начал копить на машину,но потом сорвался и купил шоро
— Гайзенберг (@Lfdktn93775) May 21, 2015
I started to save money for a car, but couldn't resist the temptation to buy Shoro
Every Batman needs a Robin, and Tabyldy owes much to his brother Jumadil, who helped him realise the joint project. Backed by ever-growing demand for their drinks, the pair made enormous investments and never stopped innovating, moving into mineral water .
In a touching interview in 2012, Jumadil told #One magazine:
МОЙ СТАРШИЙ БРАТ – генератор идей. Он – человек творческий, немного рассеянный и очень мудрый. Даже в школе он делал за меня задания, писал сочинения, а я выполнял его часть домашних обязанностей: колол дрова, таскал воду.
My older brother is a generator of ideas. He is a creative person, a little bit absent-minded, but very wise. Even at school, he did homework assigments for me, wrote essays. I fulfilled his part of the house work: chopping the wood and carrying the water.
Company sales are not only limited to Kyrgyzstan — Shoro has also appeared in the Kazakh and Russian markets. The company's most popular line of national drink, Maksym, was presented to bypassers outside the Kyrgyz embassy in the capital of the United States of America, Washington, D.C. as part of an Open Doors Day on May 3. For the unseasoned palate it can be an “acquired taste”.
Tilek Mamytov, a Kyrgyz who works as a Technical Program Manager at Google, summed up the feelings of many when he tweeted:
Эгембердиев и Шоро, думаю, это замечательная история успеха для всех. Теперь будет жить только в нашей памяти. Очень грустно. :(
— Тилек Мамутов (@tilekkg) May 18, 2015
Egemberdiev and Shoro, I think, is a wonderful success story for everyone. Now he lives only in our memory. Very sad.

author: Elita Bakirova


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Hungary Lays the Xenophobia on Thick in National Questionnaire About Immigration · Global Voices
Sara Heltai

MigSzol demonstration in Budapest. Photo by Anna Vörös, courtesy of MigSzol Facebook page, used with permission.
As Europe grapples with the stream of people risking their lives on the Mediterranean to reach its borders, Hungarian authorities have stood out for their especially virulent anti-immigration rhetoric in recent weeks.
With Prime Minister Viktor Orbán leading the charge, the government mailed a 12-point questionnaire to over 8 million households at the beginning of May 2015 to gauge attitudes towards immigration. According to the government’s website, the consultation was initiated in order to assess public support for future policy changes, but it doesn't require particularly detailed examination to reveal bias and xenophobic undertones in its leading questions.
Upon receiving the questionnaire, many Hungarians took to social networks to comment that the questions therein set a tone of dread, firmly linking the issue of terrorism with the issue of immigration. In fact, the first question asks about ISIS and the deadly Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, and does not mention immigration or immigrants at all:
Sokféle véleményt lehet hallani az erősödő terrorcselekményekkel kapcsolatban. Ön mennyire tartja fontosnak a terrorizmus térnyerését (a franciaországi vérengzés, az ISIS riasztó cselekményei) a saját élete szempontjából?
We hear different views on increasing levels of terrorism. How relevant do you think the spread of terrorism (the bloodshed in France, the shocking acts of ISIS) is to your own life?
The European Union doesn't get away unscathed either. The consultation laments the “mismanagement” of the EU's immigration policies and proposes that the Hungarian government implement stricter rules on its own:
2) Ön szerint az elkövetkező években lehet-e terrorcselekmény célpontja Magyarország?
3) Vannak, akik szerint a Brüsszel által rosszul kezelt bevándorlás összefüggésben van a terrorizmus térnyerésével. Ön egyetért ezekkel a véleményekkel?
[…]
7) Támogatná-e Ön a magyar kormányt, hogy Brüsszel megengedő politikájával szemben szigorúbb bevándorlási szabályozást vezessen be?
2) Do you think that Hungary could be the target of an act of terror in the next few years?
3) There are some who think that mismanagement of the immigration question by Brussels may have something to do with increased terrorism. Do you agree with this view?
[…]
7) Would you support the Hungarian Government in the introduction of more stringent immigration regulations, in contrast to Brussels’ lenient policy?
Other questions blur the line between documented and undocumented immigration and push the premise that immigration is a threat to Hungarians’ economic opportunities:
4) Tudta-e Ön, hogy a megélhetési bevándorlók törvénytelenül lépik át a magyar határt és az elmúlt időszakban húszszorosára nőt a bevándorlók száma Magyarországon?
5) Sokféle véleményt hallani a bevándorlás kérdésével kapcsolatban. Vannak, akik szerint a megélhetési bevándorlók veszélyeztetik a magyar emberek munkahelyeit és megélhetését! Ön egyetért ezekkel a véleményekkel?
4) Did you know that economic migrants cross the Hungarian border illegally, and that recently the number of immigrants in Hungary has increased twentyfold?
5) We hear different views on the issue of immigration. There are some who think that economic migrants jeopardise the jobs and livelihoods of Hungarians. Do you agree?
Reading a sentence as simple as, “recently the number of immigrants in Hungary has increased twenty-fold,” one can't help but wonder when exactly “recently” was, what kind of “immigrants” the question refers to, and what the “twenty-fold” increase is in comparison to. In fact, the number of asylum seekers has increased from about 19,000 in 2013 to 42,000 in 2014, but according to the UNHCR, only around 4,000 were granted refugee status or have their claims pending.
As seen above, the questionnaire, which cost the government 960 million forints (just over 3 million euros or 3.2 million US dollars), manipulates the respondents in a number of ways. Most glaringly, it presents Hungarians with a false dilemma when it comes to the possible answers they can choose. There are only three options, two-thirds of which are beneficial to the party line: “I fully agree,” “I tend to agree”, and “I do not agree” (or variations of those three, depending on the wording of the question). The option of “I somewhat disagree” is suspiciously absent.
Officials don't appear to be planning to make the results public.
Observers have pointed to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the ruling Fidesz's weakened political position as the reason behind their increased use of hardline right-wing rhetoric. In February 2015, a by-election was held to replace a Fidesz-KDNP coalition member of Parliament from Veszprém, who had taken on an EU commissioner position. In the by-elections, an independent candidate won and, as a result, Fidesz lost its overwhelming two-thirds majority in Parliament.
In addition to emphasizing the detrimental effects that the allegedly growing economic immigration has had for Hungary, Orbán has also called for “keeping the death penalty on the agenda” in response to the murder of a woman last month in the southwestern city of Kaposvár. The death penalty is banned in the EU.
The government's hostile rhetoric towards immigration and the questionnaire in particular have caused backlash among individuals and civil society in Hungary.
Rally in Budapest against Orbán's controversial questionnaire on “immigration and terrorism”: “No to xenophobia!” pic.twitter.com/48IPTB7UxK
— Peter Murphy (@MurphyPeterN) May 19, 2015
On May 19, MigSzol, a Budapest-based NGO working for migrant and refugee rights, organized a protest where participants were encouraged to fold the questionnaires into tiny paper boats and set them sail on the Danube. More than 1,000 people attended and according to the organization’s Facebook update, visits to their website skyrocketed.
Hungarian protesters launch paper boats made out of pages of the biased questionnaire, to represent the lost lives of illegal migrants. Photo by Anna Vörös, courtesy of MigSzol Facebook page, used with permission.
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee started a Tumblr blog to draw attention to the bias within the questionnaire, advising the public on ways to boycott the consultation and protest against its xenophobic tone, as well as offering facts about the real situation of migration in Hungary and Europe. The blog is also a space where Hungarian citizens share their own family histories of migration, persecution, and exile.
tiltakozz a bevándorlásról szóló látszatkonzultáció ellen! #bevandorlóvagyok http://t.co/CQJURlGgih pic.twitter.com/CzlWhQJQbI — Nagashi (@dieNagashi) May 14, 2015
Protest against the mock consultation against immigration! #bevandorlovagyok [I am migrant]
Image: I am Lajos [Lajos Kossuth, a Hungarian revolutionary], a refugee. If you send me home, they will hang me. “National consultation”: Send it back empty.
These initiatives, including the now widely used hashtag #bevandorlovagyok (I am migrant), seek to remind people that Hungarians come from a variety of backgrounds. Alienation and hostility promoted by the political agenda turns a blind eye to ethnic complexities and the peripatetic history of Central and Eastern Europe as well as the world as a whole. Just like MigSzol's protest of the questionnaire, we humans are like those small paper boats, drifting on the wide river of global turmoil towards always safer harbors.
Adelman, Lux, Bene, Kiss szudétavidéki német, felvédéki szász, olasz, kun, zsidó, horvát… #polimultikulti #bevándorlóvagyok — Arató Gergely (@tanbacsi) May 22, 2015
Adelman, Lux, Bene, Kiss [regional family names] German from Sudetenland, Saxon from the Highlands, Italian, Cumanian, Jewish, Croatian… #polimultikulti [“polymulticulti”, an abbreviation indicating a vast multicultural society] #bevándorlóvagyok [I am migrant]

author: Sara Heltai


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In Pakistan’s Peshawar, Where 132 Children Were Slain, a New School Promotes Peace · Global Voices
Anushe Noor

Screenshot from The Peshawar School For Peace's Facebook page
After the Taliban attacked an army public school in Peshawar, Pakistan, in December 2014, killing 148 people including 132 children, there was widespread fear among parents over sending their young ones to school — a place of safety and learning warped into a potential target for violence.
However, schools resumed after one month, defying the threats. Now, one school in particular is spreading hope among the unease.
The Peshawar School for Peace, which was officially inaugurated on 6 May 2015, aims to promote interfaith harmony, girls’ education and social cohesion. It was founded by an Australian social justice activist, Francis Ventura, in collaboration of the Peshawar Youth Organisation. Men and women belonging to all religious communities work under one banner:
Learning in unity today, leading in harmony tomorrow.
Watch an introductory video posted to the organisation's YouTube channel below:
Global Voices spoke with Ventura as well as Maryum Daniyal and Aleina Ali Shah, who work on the project, about their aims, achievements and experiences with the school.
Global Voices (GV): After the traumatic events of December 2014, was it difficult to launch a school that promotes interfaith harmony and girls’ education?
Francis Ventura (FV): The Army Public School massacre sent shockwaves through the entire world. It is a well-known fact that many youth in Peshawar are still suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. So in this long-standing context of extremist threat – particularly after the APS attack – our determination is strengthened and the need for a youth-led peace movement is made more urgent. We stand firmly on the side of humanity. We will always continue with our work in the face of pure evil, because so long as any child anywhere in the world is suffering due to poverty or conflict, all of humanity is weakened as a result.
Mariyum Daniyal and Aleina Ali Shah (MD & AAS): After the heartbreaking event of 16th December, 2014 it was quite challenging for us to practically launch a Peace School in Peshawar. It isn't easy to work on interfaith harmony and girls’ empowerment especially in Peshawar but so far we have achieved good results, and we are looking forward to spreading this message of Peace throughout Pakistan.
GV: The curriculum is designed to promote religious tolerance. Is this challenging, given that Peshawar is considered to be a conservative place?
MD & AAS: Everything; starting from the launch to convincing people on trusting us with a peace-oriented curriculum, was a big challenge, thankfully people have shown their trust in us. The society understands how important it is to build a peace-promoting generation now.
FV: The beauty of what we teach is that it is embraced by the local community. At our inauguration ceremony, we had scholars and community leaders from the Islamic, Christian, Hindu and Sikh communities all publicly speaking about the need to enhance respect among people of different faiths, as well as celebrating commonalities. They also specifically endorsed the Peshawar School for Peace as a model to achieve this. Most importantly, the feedback from parents has been overwhelmingly positive. We promote education for all – before anything else, we are all humans so we just love and appreciate each other.
The inauguration of The Peshawar School for Peace, 6 May 2015. Francis Ventura, cuts the ribbon along with people of all religious communities. From The Peshawar School of Peace's Facebook page
GV: Has the school been threatened by extremists?
FV: As a matter of protocol, we are unable to publicly discuss specific security matters pertaining to the School. However as individuals, we understand that there are those driven by evil, and we are aware of their actions elsewhere. The team is driven by an unflinching passion to build a better future for the children of Pakistan, and nothing will cause that desire to waver.
GV: What is the school's main goal?
FV: Our main goal is to achieve peace in Pakistan. We aim to achieve this through education, based on two critical pillars of development – social cohesion and girls’ empowerment. Additionally, we aim to bring the people of Australia and Pakistan together, the School has already held its first Skype call with a class in Australia, as well as encouraging our students to become global citizens, ready to serve humanity for the better and be ambassadors for peace.
GV: The project aims to build a relationship between Australian and Pakistani youth. Will this promote healthy relations on diplomatic level?
FV: You are correct – we are strengthening the citizen-to-citizen links between Pakistan and Australia. We hope that as a result of the growing links between our countries, diplomatic relations will also expand. Fortunately, Australia and Pakistan already enjoy a very robust friendship. There are regular visits between our countries by senior military personnel, government ministers and business delegations. There are thousands of young Pakistanis working and studying in Australia. In addition, we enjoy strong support from the Pakistani Consul-General in Sydney as well as the Australian High Commission in Islamabad. After the APS massacre, over 1,000 people came together for a vigil in Sydney’s Hyde Park to remember the victims and stand in solidarity with Peshawar. When Australian cricketer Phil Hughes was killed in an accident, candles were lit across Pakistan. This project gives me an opportunity to combine my love for Australia and Pakistan and bring people of each country together.
GV: As a foreigner, what do you think about Peshawar?
FV: Peshawar is my second home. I love everything about it. The incredible culture, rich in tradition and history. The warmth and generosity of its people. Their beautiful smiles. My heart is warmed every time I visit this magnificent place. People are always fascinated by meeting someone from a foreign land. As an Australian, conversations generally turn to cricket. I look forward to the day when delegations of Australian students can have the opportunity to visit Peshawar and experience the pleasures it has to offer.
GV: As women, what is your experience like working in Peshawar?
MD & AAS: Working in Peshawar on a peace project and also being women is not an easy thing to do, we face hardships and difficulties in everyday life, but that doesn't discourage us. What we think is that when you really want to do something, nothing can stop you.
FV: It’s been about one year and a half since my first Skype conversation with the Peshawar Youth Organization, which became the inception of the project. We started with nothing – no money or contacts – just a dream. In that time, we have built a coalition of Partners for Peace across the world, including various United Nations bodies, the Malala Fund, businesses such as NetSol Technologies, Sunrise Marketing and Mark Industries, as well as religious and community groups such as the Australian National Dialogue of Christians, Muslims and Jews – the interfaith body of the respective religions’ peak representative bodies. Nowadays, we have an operational School, inclusive of pre-nursery and class one, as well as the Community Engagement Center. Close to 30% of our students are from the various minority communities, and a majority of the children are girls. Given that harmony between different faiths is severely lacking and that only 35% of girls in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region are literate, this is a significant achievement. We are looking forward to growing and spreading the message of peace and a common humanity throughout Pakistan and the entire globe.
GV: What message do you want to give the world?
FV: We cannot allow the future of humanity to be lost to those who represent evil and seek to impose it through violence and division. A better world is possible; we just have to strive for it. Everyone who believes in justice, peace and a common humanity must continue to strive for this. Social cohesion, while a beautiful phenomenon, is delicate and must be nurtured.
The attacks on the All Saints Church and Army Public School – as well as countless others – are examples of a situation in which evil prevails.
We invite all loving, good natured citizens of the world to stand with us. Become part of the movement for peace, which is already made up of people from many religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. We can only do this with your support. It is not the cause of any particular individual or organization – it is the cause of all humanity. Our Facebook page provides regular updates of the project and anyone is welcome to get in contact with us to pledge their support.
Together, and only together, we can and will achieve a better world. The future of humanity depends on it.

author: Anushe Noor


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Pakistan’s Media is Silent as Hundreds Protest Government Gag on Bol News Group · Global Voices
Sahar Habib Ghazi

Picture tweeted by @SumairMirzaPak. Hundreds of protesters in front of Karachi Press Club, demanding #BOLkoBolnayDo (Let Bol speak).
The government of Pakistan has placed a gag order on the company behind Bol, a brand new, well-financed Pakistani media outlet that gave co-ownership to journalists. Issued by the Ministry of Information, the gag puts in jeopardy the future of two thousand employees of Bol, which was scheduled to launch in just a few weeks.
Employees and journalist organizations have been staging full scale protests outside the Karachi Press Club in response, yet Pakistan's vibrant, largely independent but cutthroat broadcast media industry has been mostly silent on the move.
Protest not covered #BOLkoBolnayDo @nadeemmalik pic.twitter.com/MR3Jl6Y6fy
— Faisal Siddiqui (@faisalsiddiquii) May 28, 2015
The directive from Pakistan's Ministry of Information comes a day after federal agents arrested Bol CEO Shoaib Shiekh, who also heads Axact, a technology firm being investigated for an alleged multi-million dollar scam selling fake university degrees online. Sheikh was taken into custody 10 days after the New York Times published an in-depth exposé on the Karachi-based company, which triggered the investigation.
Bol had promised to change Pakistan's media industry by giving journalists ownership of the company through an “Ownership League”. A statement published on Bol's website declared: “Bol Ownership League will surely open a new chapter in the corporate history of Pakistan which will ‘revolutionize’ the media industry in the true sense of the word.”
Most of Bol's senior staff resigned five days before the gag was issued, including Kamran Khan, the President and Editor-in-Chief of the Bol group who owned shares in the company. Khan tweeted:
Charges against Axact far from proven in court but my conscience not letting me continue.I've decided to disassociate from Bol immediately
— Kamran Khan (@AajKamranKhan) May 23, 2015
Amir Jahangir, a media executive and co-founder of Pakistani Journalism Agahi Awards questioned the gag order on Bol:
How can the #Nawaz Government ask to stop #BOL when it has not done anything. BOL and Axact are two different legal entities #BOLkoBolnayDo — Amir Jahangir (@amirjahangir) May 28, 2015
Amir Zia, a senior journalist with Bol, one of the few organizational leaders to have refrained from resigning, boldly led protesters outside the Karachi Press Club.
Govt notice shows #Bol is being silenced without any evidence, judicial proceedings; Shame on #Sharif #BolKoBolnayDo https://t.co/fzO5gRxRqP
— AmirZia (@AmirZia1) May 28, 2015
#Sharif govt working at the behest of media tycoons to crush #Bol. Trying to control the national narrative, muzzle press. #BOLkoBolnayDo
— AmirZia (@AmirZia1) May 28, 2015
More than 2,000 #Bol employees to lose jobs as #Sharif govt moves fast to stop its transmission thru #PEMRA. #BolKoBolanyDo
— AmirZia (@AmirZia1) May 28, 2015
On Twitter, the hashtag #BolKoBolnayDo started trending and was used over 6K times within 4 hours. Bol literally means “Speak” and the hashtag translates to “Let Bol Speak Up.”
This user expressed disappointment with Prime Minister Sharif and the media regulation authority PEMRA:
No media coverage of protest against govt's decision to suspend BOL. shame on Nawaz Sharif and PEMRA #BOLkoBolnayDo pic.twitter.com/jEtyASCTsk
— allrounder (@alIrounder) May 28, 2015
Another Twitter user expressed frustration with the government order, calling it unconstitutional:
What freedom of expression do v talk in Pakistan? #PEMRA Article 19 of the Constitution be read again #BOLkoBolnayDo pic.twitter.com/aPOpExtYh3 — افضل رحیم خان یوسفزئ (@afzalrahim_pk) May 28, 2015
Many have expressed surprise at the rapid response from Pakistan's government, which is not known to be this efficient. Even the New York Times remarked on how quickly the Axact investigation, courts, arrests and warrants are moving.
I've been impressed by how seriously Pakistan has investigated the Axact scandal, rather than just being defensive http://t.co/33sOTWQa9U
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) May 23, 2015
Most of Pakistan's two dozen private news channels are run by competitive business families or seths, as they are referred to locally in Pakistan. These channels run by media tycoons have a history of censoring news about their competitors or giving them tainted coverage.
The Express media group, which has ties with the Pakistan Tribune and the International New York Times, ran a mocking animated clip showing rats jumping from a sinking ship. Photoshopped onto the rats’ heads were the faces of well-known Bol journalists who had announced they were resigning from Bol following the Axact investigation.
While Bol's model was inspirational for many in the industry, the company's finances were long shrouded in mystery. It was unclear how Bol could afford the lucrative salaries and benefits it was offering its employees. Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani journalist, politician, diplomat and now scholar tweets:
Lesson for journo friends from #Bol #Axact saga: When someone offers way more money than market rates, the money is often shady
— Husain Haqqani (@husainhaqqani) May 23, 2015
Wajahat Khan, a Pakistani broadcast journalist, joined Bol as a senior vice president three months ago and resigned a few days after the New York Times investigation. In yet another interesting twist, the gag order came three days after the Pakistani blog Pak Tea House published a post authored by Khan, entitled “The Article Nobody Will Publish”.
In the story, Wajahat describes 12 years of experience working at seven different companies in Pakistan's temperamental, private and independent broadcast media industry which he likened to a “good, consistent drug deal”:
Sometimes, I got fired. Other times, I left on principle or got recruited by a bigger gun. But every time, there was a toxic cocktail of the same-old-same-old – office politics, curbed editorial freedom, delayed pay-cheques, pandering to sponsors, corporate, political and security bosses who made their presence felt but weren’t technically in control, not enough re-investment in our internal systems and structures to sustain the counter-culture and public service ethos of what journalism must strive to become instead of the ratings-driven, family-owned, suits-and-boots dominated chop shop, a mogul-military mouthpiece, that it is in most newsrooms today around the country.
But like an abused, dependent spouse, I kept coming back to my tormentor. I was in denial. Sometimes, I led myself into believing I didn’t have a choice, and carried on. Other times, I tried to break loose with a fellowship, or a foreign gig, or print work, but those got old, fast. With all due self-respect, as the “revolving door” of the media industry is a scary machine, you learnt to take on the world, except your own, because of that dependency. It was like a good, consistent drug deal: There was nowhere else to go, and I was hooked on the product. We all work like that. We all do.

author: Sahar Habib Ghazi


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Reclaiming The Weeping Time · Global Voices
John Lubbock

A slave auction at the south / from an original sketch by Theodore R. Davis. Image from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
I've just come back from Turkey, where I was doing a project on the 100th anniversary of the genocide of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks carried out by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. When you meet Turkish nationalists who are still stuck in denialist mode, one of the main arguments they use to excuse the massacres is: “what about the genocides done by the British and the Americans?”
This argument has a name: ”. It was common among Soviet spokespeople during the Cold War. “What about British imperialism?!?!” the apologists cry, as if the crimes of my ancestors justify the crimes of your ancestors. I respond that I often criticise the British government, which still tries to avoid the word “sorry” wherever possible, arguing that such an admission of guilt would open up the possibility of legal action for reparations.
Nobody likes others to point out flaws in their character, but sometimes a bit of criticism is useful. This seems to be equally true of political and social problems as personal ones.I was thinking about these things when I came across the story of the Weeping Time.
A few years ago, my parents visited Savannah, Georgia. My father loves researching family history, and some of our ancestors had emigrated there. One of these was a woman called Fanny Kemble. Kemble came from a theatre family, and was travelling and performing around the US in the early 1830s when she met Pierce Mease Butler.
Butler followed Kemble around the country, turning up at her performances in various cities to show he was a man of means, until his somewhat stalkery courtship display paid off and she agreed to marry him in 1834. Butler neglected to tell Fanny that his income came from cotton and rice plantations in Georgia.
Frances “Fanny” Kemble
When she visited his rice plantation on Butler Island in 1838, Kemble was shocked to discover that Butler owned hundreds of slaves. She began to write about her experiences and how badly Butler’s slaves were treated. She tried to persuade Butler to reduce his economic dependence on slave labour, but he refused. Kemble was also embarrassed by Butler’s infidelities, and noted in her writings the hypocrisy of the white men who argued that it was acceptable to enslave black people because they were “less human” than whites, while at the same time regularly fathering children by black women.
Their disagreements eventually became too much, and they separated in 1845. Butler threatened to prevent Fanny from seeing her daughters if she published accounts of what she had seen on Butler island, but she eventually published her memoir, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, in 1863.
Brick chimney and house on Butler Island, Georgia. Image by Doug Kerr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
By 1857, Butler was heavily in debt from gambling and poor investment choices. With creditors after him, he had little option but to sell part of his property. An inventory done in February 1859 assessed the value of his human chattels at over $500,000. Butler decided to sell about half of his 919 slaves, and on March 2-3, 1859, at the Ten Broeck Racetrack in Savannah, Georgia, 429 of his slaves were sold for $303,850—about $700 per person. In the process, families were split up and sold to different plantations in different states. It was the biggest slave auction in US history. A reporter from the New York Tribune went there undercover to record the event. The event came to be called the Weeping Time by the slaves and their descendants, “because of reports that the sky opened up and poured down rain for the full two days of the auction. It was said that the heavens were weeping for the inhumanity that was being committed.”
Part of the former Ten Broeck horse racecourse, Savannah, Georgia, now owned by the Bradley Plywood Corporation. Image courtesy Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson.
Dr Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson, an academic and landscape architect originally from Accra, Ghana, became interested in the Butler plantations through his research on “tabby”, a building material produced and used by enslaved people in construction before concrete was invented. Kwesi read about the Butler plantation and learned that Butler often used slaves from the Gold Coast, many with names indicating that they were Akan, his own ethno-linguistic group.
In 1998 DeGraft-Hanson was invited by the local historical society to talk about the Butler plantations on St Simon's Island, near to Hampton plantation, which is now a wealthy gated residential community. One African-American resident who approached him afterwards said she did not know it was a former plantation, but that she often had daydreams or visions of people walking up and down in her yard.
DeGraft-Hanson began researching the history of the Butler plantations, and found a list of the names of the people sold as slaves during the Weeping Time. Annette Holmes, who put the list online, had been watching a PBS documentary called Africans in America. She connected the Butler family to her maternal grandmother, Henrietta Butler Cox, who was born in 1902. In the 1910 US Federal census she found her grandmother listed as a member of her parents’ household. She then found her great grandfather James listed as a child in the 1870 census. She learned that John and Betsy, the parents of James, had moved to Louisiana from Georgia and had been sold at the Weeping Time.
Neither Fanny Kemble nor Pierce Butler remarried. Butler died of malaria in 1867, having failed to make his plantation a viable economic prospect without the use of slave labour following its abolition.
But for DeGraft-Hanson, the more important story is that of the people sold by Butler in 1859. There are probably thousands of descendants of these people across the US. Now, about 50 people who, like Annette Holmes, are descended from John and Betsy, are trying to raise money to pay for a group visit to the site of the Weeping Time. They plan, along with DeGraft-Hanson, to lobby local politicians to create a memorial for the people sold in 1859 which will recognise not just the victimhood of enslaved people, but their remarkable courage and resilience in the face of terrible social and political oppression.
Annette Holmes and her family. Image courtesy Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson.
“I'd like to see the other aspects of people's lives,” DeGraft-Hanson told me. “This family we're talking about are descendants of two slaves. Two people who were enslaved had enough love, faith, hope, all the good qualities that humans aspire to; they had enough to nurture their families through slavery all the way to freedom.”.
The legacy of slavery has not been really dealt with. There have been apologies, but they have not been effective. For example, Emory University tried to address the fact that some of its past faculty, administrators and students had been slave holders. African-American students and faculty asked the President of the University to issue an apology, and the institution addressed the matter in 2011, saying that they could not apologise for something they did not do. They issued a statement of regret, circumventing the issue and disappointing black students and faculty.
Atoning for slavery and working to remove the shame and guilt associated would be healthy not just for the descendants of enslaved people, but for all Americans. Dealing with its own history would give the US greater moral authority to speak about freedom and justice in other parts of the world.
“Some African-Americans struggle to find a self esteem that isn't solely tied to slavery”, DeGraft-Hanson says. “I think that if you have a memorial, it speaks for those who don't want to speak the words “I apologise”.
“On the flipside, for those who want to hear an apology, the memorial will speak an apology to them. It serves the needs of both sides. It's there for those who want to go there to be reflective, or pensive, or mourn. It speaks to the fact that collectively, this nation feels that this should not have happened, and so we're able to move on. It also speaks to a respect, because all of us have part of our identity tied in with our ancestry. It recovers the humanity of their ancestors, and in so doing helps them with their own self-esteem.”
Dr. Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson. Image courtesy Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson.
“A lot of black people in the USA know that they are the descendants of people who were slaves, used and abused. We have to be able to grieve. When there is a trauma, a death of a loved one, we may not grieve right then, but at some point we need to be able to deal with it. But if we bottle it up, ultimately at some point it hits us. That trauma is passed down from generation to generation.
“I think if we can get something like this memorial, it begins to get the respect, the self-esteem back. When a place is beautiful and inspiring, it does something beneficial to the soul. Keates says ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’. Imagine a beautiful landscape with a beautiful memorial. These places allow us to heal.”
For more information on the crowdfunding campaign for the descendants of enslaved people to visit the site of the Weeping Time this summer, see Enslaved John and Betsy Butler’s Descendants’ Homecoming Crowdfund Campaign.

author: John Lubbock


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Tagline of Zelalem Kiberet’s Blog: ‘Let Freedom Ring’ · Global Voices
Endalkachew Chala

Zelalem Kiberet at 25. Photo from Zelalem's blog.
In April 2014, nine bloggers and journalists were arrested in Ethiopia. Several of these men and women had worked with Zone9, a collective blog that covered social and political issues in Ethiopia and promoted human rights and government accountability. And four of them were Global Voices authors. In July 2014, they were charged under the country’s Anti-Terrorism Proclamation. They have been behind bars ever since, their trial postponed time and again.
This marks the third post in our series – “They Have Names” – that seeks to highlight the individual bloggers who are currently in jail. We wish to humanize them, to tell their particular and peculiar stories. This story comes from Endalk Chala, a founding member of the Zone9 collective who was spared arrest on account of being in the United States, where he is pursuing a PhD.
I met Zelalem Kiberet in 2012. I had come to know him through his blog, where he wrote about curious and inspiring literary pieces, art, politics, history and philosophy.
For me, reading his posts on philosophy and chatting with him occasionally on Facebook was never intimate enough, so I decided to meet him in person. At that time, I always longed to meet my online friends. This is what eventually led to us forming Zone9. That day it was Befeqadu, who is the dynamo of the collective, who organized our meeting. We met in a café called Pizza, at the heart of Addis Ababa.
Befeqadu and I arrived first and then Zelalem joined us. He greeted us warmly. We were sitting at table near the door. He ordered a cup of macchiato and then we had one of our best conversations.
Zelalem was a graduate student at the School of Law of Addis Ababa University, and also taught law at Ambo University. I consider myself very lucky to have worked with Zelalem. Because of his wit, humorous writings and uncompromising digs on religion, his friends tweaked Zelalem’s name into the name of the imminent French writer Zola, whom Zelalem himself read with great enthusiasm. Our Zola’s love for philosophy and art is so visible that he made the banner of his blog the famous painting of Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Socrates”.
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David. Released to public domain. Image via Wikimedia.
Zola’s hit tweets were so illustrious among his peers that I would dare to say that at the time of his arrest, Zola was becoming the most commonly read Ethiopian on Twitter. His humorous and witty tweets established him as a rising literary talent to watch.
Zola can also write longer moving pieces. In one of his blog posts he mocked a subject which mainstream newspapers from inside Ethiopia haven’t dared to acknowledge. In his blog post, titled “How to create your own religion? – An Ethiopian guide”, he wrote a long satire on how state-run outlets broadcast programs in an effort to create a cult personality of the late former president Meles Zenawi. These kinds of his writings put Zola on the radar of the Ethiopian government. Today, after over a year in prison, he is facing trumped-up terrorism charges for being a true intellectual, and one who uses humor to communicate his critiques.
On the banner of his blog, Zola has written ‘Let Freedom Ring’. For as long as he is behind bars, we must carry out this wish on his behalf.

author: Endalkachew Chala


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The Forgotten Massacre of Chinese People in Torreón, Mexico · Global Voices
Gabriela García Calderón Orbe

Main Square of Historical Center of Torreón. Image on Flickr bu user ego2005 (CC BY-SA 2.0).
In May 1911, the town of Torreón, in the Mexican state of Coahuila, was the scene of bloody and almost forgotten events when 303 Chinese citizens, half the Chinese population of the town back then, were killed during the height of the Mexican Revolution.
The web Cultura Colectiva sums up the background of the events:
El odio antichino se afincó en una idea de razas superiores e inferiores, donde el mestizaje mexicano era visto como la imagen ideal de un país donde, la “raza amarilla”, no tenía más cabida que para degenerar.
Con el propósito de liberar al país de este terrible peligro, se creó un movimiento “anti chino” que se desarrolló entre 1911 y 1934. La mayoría de sus logros fueron plasmados en una lista de restricciones publicada bajo el gobierno de Álvaro Obregón en 1923, donde se estipulaba entre muchas cosas que:
-Los chinos no podían vender comestibles.
-Los chinos no podían entrar a restaurantes ni museos.
-Se prohibían los matrimonios entre mexicanos y chinos (en caso de que alguna mexicana se casara, perdería su nacionalidad inmediatamente).
-Se prohibía a los chinos acceder a puestos públicos.
The anti-Chinese sentiment was rooted in an idea of superior and inferior races, where the Mexican blending of races was seen as the ideal image of a country, where the “yellow ethnicity” was to be degenerated.
With the purpose of liberating the country of this terrible threat, an “anti-Chinese” movement was created, developed between 1911 and 1934. Most of their accomplishments were a list of restrictions published under the administration of Álvaro Obregón in 1923, that stated among other things:
– Chinese citizens are not able to sell food.
– Chinese citizens are not allowed in restaurants nor museums.
– Mexican-Chinese marriages were forbidden (in case any Mexican woman married a Chinese, she'd lose her citizenship immediately).
– Chinese citizens are forbidden from having jobs in the government.
The killing of Chinese citizens took place during the Mexican Revolution, an armed struggle that started as an uprising in November 20, 1910, against then President Porfirio Díaz, who had ruled the country as an authoritarian since 1876. The uprising was led by Francisco I. Madero and its initial purpose was to fight against the establishment, but ended up as multi-sided civil war.
In 1911, the Chinese community of Torreón had about 600 people, most of them storekeepers and peasants. There were also wealthy people who founded the main bank in the city.
In the early hours of May 15, 1911, about 2,000 soldiers from the forces loyal to Madero entered Torreón. The events that followed are narrated by website Jornada:
El viernes 13 de mayo de 1911, […] gavillas de rancheros armados, que gritaban vivas a Madero, trataron de tomar la ciudad por el oriente [y fueron recibidas] con fuego nutrido de fusilería y quizá morteros, y les causó muchas bajas. Corría la conseja de que los chinos habían resistido desde sus huertas y edificios altos. El sábado 14 de mayo, algunos grupos de soldados rebeldes empezaron a matar a los chinos que encontraron en las huertas, entre ellos a uno muy estimado, ya mayor, de nombre Juan Maa (Huang Mah). Un ranchero mexicano que se opuso a tales asesinatos, Francisco Almaraz, fue victimado también.
On Friday, May 13, 1911, […] groups of armed ranchers, shouting praise for Madero, tried to occupy the city from the east [and were received] with heavy gunfire and maybe mortars, causing many fatalities. Rumor had it that Chinese people had resisted from their plantations and tall buildings. On Saturday, May 14, different bands of rebel soldiers started to kill Chinese people who were found on their plantations, among them a very well-liked older man by the name of Juan Maa (Huang Mah). A Mexican rancher who opposed those killings, Francisco Almaraz, was also killed.
And the account goes on:
El 15 de mayo, la guarnición federal desalojó sigilosamente la plaza. Hacia las 5 de la mañana, […] entraron en la ciudad y, viéndose dueños de ella, se pusieron a saquear las cantinas. Muy pronto, una parte de los soldados de la rebelión estaban ebrios, exaltados y armados. Se empezó a clamar venganza contra los chinos, que supuestamente los habían combatido. Los buscaban en sus tiendas, el hotel, las fondas, y el restaurante.[…] Una gran turba que se puso a saquear las casas y tiendas de los chinos: la gente se llevaba todo. El saqueo del banco, en la Plaza de Armas de Torreón, después de que se aniquiló a todos sus empleados y al gerente Kang Shai Jack, fue el clímax de la jornada. Eran las 10 de la mañana.
On May 15, the federal garrison silently evacuated the square. By 5 in the morning,  […] they entered the city, and feeling they owned it, started to loot the bars. Very soon, some of the soldiers from the rebellion were drunk, excited and armed. They started to call out for revenge against the Chinese, who allegedly had fought them. They looked for them inside their stores, the hotel, the food stands and the restaurant. […] A big mob started looting houses and stores owned by Chinese: people took everything. The looting of the bank, Torreón Main Square, after all its employees and its manager Kang Shai Jack were killed, was the climax of the day. It was 10 in the morning.
The Chinese government learned of the unfortunate events that happened “to its more well-known and wealthy community in Mexico”:
La respuesta de Pekín fue la publicación en el Pekín Daily News, y en muchos otros periódicos chinos, japoneses, europeos y americanos de un texto que decía: “En la Revolución Mexicana se mata y pilla de la manera más arbitraria. Ayer en T’saiyüan (Torreón) fueron asesinados más de trescientos ciudadanos chinos en circunstancias muy deplorables”.
El emperador chino “Suan Tung” –Pu Yi- mandó entregar a la Legación de México en China una lista de exigencias, que en términos corteses “pero claros”, pedían que el gobierno mexicano expresara sus condolencias por el hecho; que se desagraviara (compensara el perjuicio causado) a la bandera china y que se indemnizara a los deudos de los muertos, a más de proteger su vida y sus propiedades en México.
The response by Beijing was one article in Pekin Daily News, and in many other Chinese, Japanese, European and American newspapers of a text that read: “In the Mexican Revolution, there are the most arbitrary killings and looting. Yesterday in T’saiyüan (Torreón) more than 300 Chinese citizens were killed amidst very regrettable circumstances.”
Chinese emperor “Suan Tung”–Pu Yi–sent the Mexican Legation in China a list of demands, that in polite “but clear” terms asked the Mexican government to express its condolences for the events; to make amends for (to compensate for the damages) the Chinese flag and to indemnify the relatives of the dead individuals, besides protecting their lives and properties in Mexico.
As a conclusion, the blog Algo de aquí, algo de allá reflected:
Sin duda, el racismo es semillero fértil para los baños de sangre. Siendo México un país de mestizos, donde confluyeron personas de distintas etnias para dar origen al mexicano actual, un episodio como el vivido en la ciudad de Torreón resulta indignante, pero sobre todo nos debería poner a pensar en la irracionalidad de las creencias de la superioridad de razas.
Without a doubt, racism is a fertile hotbed for a bloodbath. As Mexico is a country of people of mixed races, where individuals from different ethnicities got together to create the current Mexican individual, events as what happened in the city of Torreón are simply outrageous, but above all, they should make us reflect upon the irrationality of the beliefs in race superiority.
Some Twitter users posted photos and links to websites with more information about the May 1911 violence:
BBC Mundo – La “olvidada” matanza de chinos en #México http://t.co/O5eP31rPzR /// #torreon #mexico #df
— Nicolas R. (@leon338) Mayo 18, 2015
BBC World – The “forgotten” massacre of Chinese people in Mexico.
Recordando la matanza de chinos en Torreón http://t.co/2kONg8p5mV pic.twitter.com/DwADmfBRij
— Noticieros GREM (@NoticierosGREM) Mayo 18, 2015
Remembering the killing of Chinese in Torreón.
Se cumplió un siglo desde la matanza de al menos 303 chinos en Torreón, Coahuila, nos recuerda mi querido Alberto… http://t.co/ovAdGhFyJN — Témoris Grecko (@temoris) Mayo 17, 2015
It's been a century since the massacre of at least 303 Chinese citizens in Torreon, Coahuila, as recalls my dear Alberto…
Between last February and April, an exposition was held as a remembrance of the massacre in Torreón:

author: Gabriela García Calderón Orbe


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Too Soon to Joke About FIFA Arrests? Not in the Caribbean! · Global Voices
Janine Mendes-Franco

Zurich, Switzerland. FIFA promotes fairplay on the banners around a football pitch. On 27 May 2015, FIFA executive members were arrested in the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich. Photo by Roman Beer. Copyright Demotix
The Caribbean is still collectively stunned at the swiftness and surreptitiousness with which Swiss authorities, on behalf of the United States’ Department of Justice, arrested FIFA officials and corporate executives on charges of racketeering, conspiracy, and corruption. But that hasn't stopped the regional blogosphere from having a good belly laugh.
Two high-profile Caribbean citizens — Jack Warner, a Trinidadian who is a former FIFA vice president, and Jeffrey Webb, a Caymanian who took over the post from Warner — were named among the indicted defendants. Webb was arrested in Zurich, while Warner turned himself in to Trinidad and Tobago police after a formal extradition request was made by the US government.
Suspicions of corruption have long plagued the football world governing body and Caribbean netizens are no strangers to the many clandestine practices that take place in regional soccer. Any surprise expressed online about the arrests came not from a lack of awareness about alleged corruption, but from a sense of disbelief that the piper had finally arrived to collect his payment.
In a region that does not have a good track record when it comes to bringing white collar crimes to justice, most people were captivated by the fact that Uncle Sam would see it fit to finally call foul. In a sense, the US government didn't really have a choice — many of the crimes were, after all, carried out on American soil. Just as importantly, the country isn't bogged down by the insane level of soccer fervour that has seemed to stymie other governments from calling out FIFA on its manner of doing business.
Facebook user Natasha Ramnauth explained the overwhelming citizen media reaction this way:
The malicious gleefulness with which our nation greeted the news of Mr. Jack Warner's arrest yesterday was truly indicative of our lack of maturity. Instead of being ashamed that it took an external agency to do what we consistently fail or refuse to do, which is hold people to account, we construct memes and make stupid remarks about ‘party done’. We continue to support politicians who keep election dates in their ‘back pocket’, agencies run by people who fail to conduct due diligence or practice accountability, the list is endless. Shame on all of us Trinidad and Tobago.
Despite her admonishment, however, the memes and clever status updates were unstoppable.
One of the first comments was from blogger Rhoda Bharath, who referred to Jack Warner's infamous face off with investigative reporter Andrew Jennings. When asked about his involvement in a ticket scandal, Warner repeatedly told Jennings to “go fuck [him]self”, physically assaulted him and even suggested that Jennings “go meet [his] mother”, who was already deceased. Bharath cleverly quipped:
Breaking News: Andrew Jennings’ mother has been located and has a response!
Memes in this vein soon followed:
There was also a video featuring a popular local puppet, Santana, as he spent a night in jail with Jack Warner:
Good MorningJack and Santana spends a night in jail togetherView full version of “Just Ah Sip 2″ www.youtube.com/rogera43And Don't Forget To Subscribe
Posted by Lexo TV on Thursday, May 28, 2015
Speaking of jail, where some satirical websites assumed Warner would soon be doing musical collaborations with the likes of Jamaica's Vybz Kartel, there was also this meme, which was widely shared:
Other memes referred to one particular political controversy in Trinidad and Tobago, Section 34, which involved an attempt to pass legislation that could have resulted in two financiers of the prime minister's party, Steve Ferguson and Ishwar Galbaransingh, escaping corruption and money laundering charges. The accused have been fighting extradition to the United States for at least five years.
Of course, no FIFA meme-fest would be complete without a jab at Sepp Blatter, the four-time FIFA president who is currently seeking another term, and who presided over the world football organisation while rampant corruption, bid-rigging, bribery and money laundering allegedly took place. Many are still astonished that Blatter was not among those arrested:
The FIFA election, which still appears set to give Blatter the nod for a fifth term as president, will take place today.


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After 33 years, Cuba Is Off the US List of Countries Sponsoring Terrorism · Global Voices
Elaine Diaz

Plaza de la Revolución. Photo taken from Mark Scott Johnson licensed by CC by 2.0
The United States of America formally dropped Cuba from its state sponsors of terrorism list Friday, a designation reserved for nations that, according to the US government, repeatedly provide support for international acts of premeditated, politically motivated violence against non-combatants.
According to the US State Department:
In December 2014, the President instructed the Secretary of State to immediately launch a review of Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, and provide a report to him within six months regarding Cuba’s support for international terrorism. On April 8, 2015, the Secretary of State completed that review and recommended to the President that Cuba no longer be designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.
Accordingly, on April 14, the President submitted to Congress the statutorily required report indicating the Administration’s intent to rescind Cuba’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, including the certification that Cuba has not provided any support for international terrorism during the previous six-months; and that Cuba has provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future. The 45-day Congressional pre-notification period has expired, and the Secretary of State has made the final decision to rescind Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, effective today, May 29, 2015.
The rescission of Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism reflects our assessment that Cuba meets the statutory criteria for rescission. While the United States has significant concerns and disagreements with a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions, these fall outside the criteria relevant to the rescission of a State Sponsor of Terrorism designation.

author: Elaine Diaz


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Sex, Religion and Politics Collide in ‘Dirty Paki Lingerie’ · Global Voices
PRI/PRX's The World

Playwright Aizzah Fatima plays a character she calls a “hijabi feminist.” Credit: Courtesy Aizzah Fatima. Published with PRI's permission
This article and radio report by Joyce Hackel for The World originally appeared on PRI.org on May 28, 2015, and is republished here as part of a content-sharing agreement.
Aizzah Fatima used to worry that the title of her one-woman play, “Dirty Paki Lingerie,” would offend her fellow South Asians. But after nearly five years of staging the production from Toronto to Turkmenistan, the Pakistani American actress is less concerned when the ethnic slur raises eyebrows.
“It was a big challenge when I first started doing this play to get the Muslim American community to support it,” she says. “That's really changed.”
The monologues in ‘Lingerie’ explore issues of identity, sexuality and religion from the perspective of six Pakistani Americans. In recent weeks, Fatima and director Erica Gould have taken the production to Luton, Bradford, Glasgow and London where they've engaged with local Muslim communities through “talk-backs” after the show.
“I've had theaters book the show, and then drop it because they were worried,” she says. “We were in Bradford, which I think is one of the poorest cities and the largest concentrations of Pakistani people in the UK, and there were definitely people in the audience who had an issue with it. And they were vocal about it, yet they still came.”
The phrase “Paki” is especially derogatory in Britain, where it was first used by tabloids in the 1960s  to refer to all South Asians, including Indians, Afghans and Bangladeshis.
Fatima says she decided to write the show to offer a more nuanced view of the Pakistani-American experience in the US, and because she was frustrated by being told she wasn't “trashy enough” to portray the roles typically offered to South Asian Muslim actresses.
“There was a human side to this experience of being a Muslim American woman that was completely missing in the media, completely missing in the types of characters we see in film, TV, theater,” she says. “I wanted to portray Muslim women, especially women who cover their hair, the way I know them to be, as activists and feminists and very outspoken go-getters.”
Fatima says the South Asian stereotypes will be shattered in coming decades.
“I really hope in my lifetime, 30 years down the road, we're able to look back at this time and say, ‘Hey, now we're beyond it,'” she says. “We've moved on.”

author: PRI/PRX's The World


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The Biggest Source of Plastic Trash You’ve Never Heard of · Global Voices
Ensia

A greenhouse in Torrazza, Lombardy, Italy. Photo by Flickr user Neimon. CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0
This post by Elizabeth Grossman was originally published on Ensia.com, a magazine that highlights international environmental solutions in action, and is republished here as part of a content-sharing agreement.
“Seed trays, drip tape, mulch film, water pipes, hoop house covers, twine, hose, fertilizer bags, totes, tool handles and everything we use to keep ourselves dry.” On a rainy March afternoon, Kara Gilbert, co-owner of Vibrant Valley Farm, rattles off how plastics are used on the farm as she stamps mud off her boots.
On a visit to the four-acre farm on lush Sauvie Island at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers near Portland, Ore., Gilbert gives me a tour de farm plastics. The fields are just being readied for the season, but black plastic is already laid out under a hoop house. PVC water pipes are being set into place and drip irrigation tape is ready to be deployed, as are plastic sacks of fertilizer. Out in the greening field, little orange-pink plastic plant tags on ankle-high stakes flap in the wet breeze to mark rows of just-sprouted peas.
By farming standards, this is a tiny operation. It sells organic produce to 15 or so local restaurants and through community-supported-agriculture shares, and grows flowers it sells wholesale. But even this small farm, Gilbert says, spends between $4,000 and $6,000 on plastic every year. Maybe more. It’s an environmental trade-off, she explains: Using plastic means saving water.
“In our very fickle climate, if we want to have a local food movement and want to compete with California and Mexico, it’s almost imperative that we have the black plastic,” Gilbert says. “Plastic film or road cloth is a weed suppressant,” explains farm co-owner Elaine Walker. “Black plastic can retain heat and moisture so you don’t need to water as much and you can grow things in the off season.”
Plastic buckets, barrels, tubing and more are a huge part of modern agriculture. Photo courtesy of Vibrant Valley Farm.
Whether it’s this small organic farm coaxing an impressive yield out of a few acres in Oregon or a large conventional operation somewhere else in the world, plastic is a huge part of modern agriculture — a multi-billion-dollar worldwide industry, according to Penn State Extension. Billions of pounds are used around the world each year, with much of the plastic designed for one season’s use.
There’s a growing recognition by farmers and others in the agricultural community of the need for environmentally responsible disposal solutions for these materials. The question, though, is how to do that with materials that are designed to not break down in rain, sun and heat, and that can — if burned or left to degrade — pose environmental health hazards.
Really good numbers on the amount of plastic used in agriculture are hard to come by, but experts in the field, including Gene Jones of the Southern Waste Information eXchange, estimate that U.S. agriculture alone uses about a billion pounds annually. This includes films — used for mulch, greenhouse covers, and to wrap bales, tubing and pipes. It also includes nursery containers, pesticide containers, silage bags, storage covers, twine and more.
Specialized products figure into the mix as well. Farmers in cooler regions use plastic to enhance warmth, for example, while in the southern U.S. farmers use plastic to cool soil and plants. “There’s some reflective, some colored plastic, but all deal with the sun at different times of year,” says Jeremy Nipper, sales representative for Kennco Manufacturing, a Florida-based farm machinery company whose products include equipment to deploy agricultural plastics and collect and dispose of used field plastics. Plastic films laid down on planting rows also helps keep fertilizer from running off fields when it rains. And, as Walker explains, plastic mulch films helps suppress weeds.
Worldwide, the agricultural plastic film market alone was estimated to be worth $5.87 billion in 2012. That year’s global demand, according to one market analyst, was more than 9.7 million pounds, with about 40 percent of this being used in mulching. China is estimated to be the world’s largest consumer of agricultural plastic films, using about 60 percent of all such plastic.
“Horticulture and vegetables use an astonishing amount,” says Nate Leonard, field coordinator for Cornell University’s Recycling Agricultural Plastics Program.
What to do with all this plastic when it’s no longer useful is the ongoing challenge.
“There [is] lots of interest in reducing the impacts,” says Scott Coleman, vice president of strategic development for Delta Plastics, an Arkansas-based company that specializes in agricultural irrigation tubing.
Historically, discarded agricultural waste has been taken to landfills or been burned or buried, often on farm property. But most states have now enacted rules against outdoor plastics burning, and this has spurred interest in other options.
One is trying to use less plastic in the first place — often by extending use through more than one growing season. For example, Nipper explains that some growers can get two seasons out of one set of plastic mulch films by reusing with a different crop.
Currently only about 10 percent of farm plastics are recycled.
Walker notes that instead of thin film that’s hard to reuse, Vibrant Valley Farms has been using sturdier road cloth that will last for several seasons for weed suppression and to retain moisture and heat. Similarly, while Florida watermelon growers use thin single-use plastics, strawberry growers get two seasons out of plastic not quite twice as thick.
By far the biggest opportunity to reduce farm plastic waste, however, is through recycling. Currently only about 10 percent of farm plastics are recycled. Increasing that number will depend on making drop-off more convenient and expanding options for giving plastic a second life.
In New York, where a statewide ban on backyard or farm burning of plastics was passed in 2009, the Cornell program worked with the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to pioneer agricultural plastics recycling and do educational outreach about recycling options through extension programs and local soil and water conservation districts.
While collection for recycling is one challenge, preparing and processing agricultural plastics so they can be recycled and finding a market for the many different kinds of agricultural plastics add even more complexity.
Cubes of brightly colored plastic twine dwarf a worker at an Agri-Plas recycling facility in Brooks, Ore. Photo by Elizabeth Grossman.
“The solid waste [management] people thought we were crazy to get involved because there were no markets for this plastic,” says Leonard. “It was an exciting breakthrough when we found someone who would take this,” he says. One of the first companies Cornell’s recycling program found that could use this plastic was a manufacturer of plastic sidewalk and paving materials.
Another big issue in recycling agricultural plastics is dirt and debris. “The problem with high dirt content is that it’s really hard on machinery,” says Coleman. There can also be concerns about transporting contaminants such as pathogens with that debris.
Agri-Plas, an agricultural plastics recycler in Brooks, Ore., handles most kinds of plastics, from bale wrapping and fertilizer bags to hard plastics and drip tape. Enormous piles of sorted plastics stand at the Agri-Plas facility, located in the midst of Willamette Valley farm country: colorful cubes of twine, clusters of black drip tape and seed trays, white mounds of plastic wrap and bags, and, in a special area, blue and white pesticide buckets that have been triple rinsed before collection.
Agri-Plas is also one of the nine or so facilities around the country that are working with Ag-Container Recycling Council a take-back and recycling program for used pesticide containers started by 20 major agricultural chemical manufacturers in 1992. The member companies help support the program financially and designated contractors process the collected material into plastic products the program has approved as safe for “post-pesticide” use. These are typically things people won’t touch on a regular basis, like outdoor drain tile, says Mary Sue Gilliland, vice president of operations and business development. This precaution is taken even though according to ACRC tests, virtually no pesticide residues remain after proper cleaning and processing. The program is considered successful with a recycling rate of about 33 percent, says ACRC executive director Ron Perkins.
As complicated as pesticide container recycling sounds, plastic twine seems to pose even greater challenges. The material, Gilliland says, “is very abrasive and beats the heck out of machinery.” In one outdoor bay at Agri-Plas, workers are busy removing hay from plastic twine, by hand. “There’s no other way to do this,” says Gilliland.
Agri-Plas does some processing on site, shredding and grinding. But that’s the comparatively easy part of plastics recycling, says Gilliland and others in this industry. The real challenge is finding a company that can use the recycled plastic.
A company called Encore in Salinas, Calif., is now making reusable grocery bags from recycled agricultural plastics. Delta Plastics is using ag plastics to make EPA-compliant trash-can liner bags and exploring ways to put used plastics into new drip tape.
“Twenty years ago, as we were producing [agricultural irrigation] pipe and saw the waste created from it, our founder saw there was a need to figure out a solution,” says Coleman. “Finally, we came up with a proprietary method for processing dirty pipe.” Delta Plastics uses much of this material itself, but it also sells it in pellet form to other manufacturers who mainly use it to make new plastic sheets and film.
Another solution some companies have been experimenting with is turning waste agricultural plastic into fuel oil.
Meanwhile, other companies are making products that include plastic pavers, outdoor building materials and other items that are less technically finicky than plastic sheeting.
Finding a company that can process any of this plastic domestically also remains a challenge, says Gilliland. She estimates that about 40 percent or more of the agricultural plastic collected for recycling goes to export, typically to China or elsewhere in Asia.
Another solution some companies — including one called Agilyx, which lists venture capital firms and Richard Branson among its investors — have been experimenting with is turning waste agricultural plastic into fuel oil. But this has proved problematic for a number of reasons, among them how federal and local governments regulate such processes, says Gilliland. Still she thinks this solution, if done properly, might pencil out as an environmentally preferable option given the logistical difficulties of repurposing the vast quantities of soiled, used agricultural plastics.
Out on Sauvie Island, a cloudburst has passed and a bald eagle and several honking geese have flown by. Kara Gilbert kneels down in the muddy spring ground next to a small orange plastic flag and picks a pea sprout. A few yards away, plastic sacks of soil amendments and last season’s black plastic road cloth is waiting to be laid out for 2015 planting — testimony to the complexity of inputs that need to be managed today to produce even the simplest of foods. “You have to taste this,” she says handing over the tiny leafy greens, “they’re awesome.”
.postContent

author: Ensia


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Israeli Chef Cooks Pizza in a Car to Demonstrate Child Safety · Global Voices
Maya Norton

Israeli celebrity chef Haim Cohen demonstrates what happens if you put a pizza in a hot car for 30 minutes. (YouTube: Beterem: Safe Kids Israel)
How hot does it get inside a car in the Middle East in summer? Israeli NGO Beterem: Safe Kids Israel teamed up with celebrity chef Haim Cohen for this light hearted public safety message. But this is no laughing matter. Sixteen children have died in Israel since 2008 as a result of being accidentally left in closed cars, as have countless more across the world.
According to the Times of Israel, 349 children were left alone in cars between 2008 and 2015. They report:
The vast majority (84%) of the children left behind in cars were between the ages of 0 and 4. The kids were most commonly left in private vehicles (84%), but they were also forgotten on school buses, public buses, and even Jerusalem’s light rail.
Beer Sheva, in southern Israel, hit a high of 115 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday, May 27, 2015. (Image credit: Sara Teichholtz)
Since being posted on Wednesday, May 27, 2015 on Chef Cohen's Facebook page, the video has been viewed by over 145,000 people, liked 3,000 times and shared 4,000 times, with more than 200 comments. The post is simply captioned:
(בכל יום !!! (והיום יותר מתמיד
(Every day!!! And today more than ever.)
Temperatures were at a season high on Wednesday, with some locations reaching as high as 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 degrees Celsius).
Titled, “Cooking in the Car with Chef Haim Cohen,” the video begins with Chef Cohen welcoming viewers to his “new cooking show.”
“I'll teach you how to cook… in the car,” he says.
“That's right! In the car! It's simple, it's easy, and it's hot.”
He begins by preparing a pizza, placing the dough on a cooking sheet, spreading the sauce, and adding the toppings: cheese, corn, olives, mushroom and cheese.
Then he places the pizza in a car, telling the audience, “Thirty minutes in the car. Then we'll check.”
When he opens the car after 30 minutes, the pizza is burned from crust to core.
The video concludes:
Dear friends: in the summer, the car is exactly like an oven. Don't leave a child alone in a car, not even for a single minute! Every summer there is a sharp rise in accidents involving children. Share this video and prevent the next tragedy.
Here is the full one-minute video, in Hebrew with English subtitles:
Hat tip: Times of Israel.

author: Maya Norton


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Did Saudi Arabia Bomb Yemen’s Ancient Marib Dam? · Global Voices
Amira Al Hussaini

Unconfirmed reports say that Saudi coalition forces, which have been bombing Yemen for more than two months have targeted the Marib Dam, one of the engineering wonders of the ancient world.
On Twitter, Hussain Albukhaiti claims:
Unconfirmed reports: #Saudi Jets has Just targeted the historic #Marib Dam  NW #Yemenhttp://t.co/rZYWUF2Qe6 pic.twitter.com/XTqHrXMGAk
— Hussain Albukhaiti (@HussainBukhaiti) May 30, 2015
In a follow up tweet, Albukhaiti posts a photograph of ruins, of what he describes as the dam, which dates back to the 8th century BC and is considered the oldest known dam in the world:
Marib Dam NE #Yemen dating from 8th century BCE was targeted yest by #Saudi jetPrev Tweethttps://t.co/c746huac1P pic.twitter.com/D8nj6yA5M1
— Hussain Albukhaiti (@HussainBukhaiti) May 31, 2015
The size of the destruction of Yemeni infrastructure and history is still unaccounted for. We are gathering information and leads here on the damage on Global Voices Checkdesk, a collaboration project between Meedan Checkdesk, an online news verification tool, and Global Voices Online.
Leave a comment here to contribute tips to this story or to join our team.

author: Amira Al Hussaini