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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on September 5th, 2008 UNEP NEWS RELEASE - 2008/31 KYOTO/NAIROBI, 5 September 2008–A plan to list as a World Heritage Site an The initiative, to be supported by funding from the Government of Italy, Dams upstream on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which feed the fabled UNEP estimated then that these wetlands would be completely lost within The World Heritage management support plan, announced at the end of a ***
With the collapse of the Saddam Hussein Government in mid-2003, local The UNEP marshland management project, which commenced in 2004 with funding These include environmentally-friendly methods that are providing safe A Marshland Information Network has been established. Training in During this meeting, the Iraqi Ministry of Environment also requested UNEP MEAs range from the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Montreal Narmin Othman, the Iraqi Environment Minister who is in Japan for the “Because of what Saddam Hussein did, the marshlands were in danger of “Now we have 50 to 60 per cent of the marshlands back we can look forward Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, “The work in the Iraqi marshlands may have been unique and challenging for *** Chizuru Aoki of UNEP’s International Environmental Technology Centre (IETC) This will include pilot projects on community-wide ecosystem management and According to UNESCO, the earliest that Iraq could envisage a submission to “It is essential that we continue to work with the Iraqi partners, UNESCO, *** FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: The Iraqi Marshland Project: http://marshlands.unep.or.jp/ UNEP’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch Iraq Reports: Downloadable maps and images at www.unep.org? For more information, please contact: Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson and Yukio Yoshii, Senior Liaison Officer, UNEP International Environmental Habib El-Habr, Director and Regional Representative, UNEP Regional Office *********************************** ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 28th, 2008
We visited him on his boat right here in New York, then later in Tel Aviv. He was one of a kind. His bringing ice cream to the children of Gaza did not end the will to fight - but showed that it is possible to be humane. If not the Palestinians and the Egyptians - there were hundred of thousands of Israelis that understood him. His spirit continues to be present at the Uri Avneri round table - every Friday night at least. A coincidence - his death was announced on the day Barak Obama assumes the leadership of the Democratic Party of the US. We wonder what he would have said and post also the following tidbit:
And the New York Times correspondent from Jerusalem wrote the following version:
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 20th, 2008
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 19th, 2008 The title of the following article by Roula Khalaf, written for the Financial Times, is: “WHY ARAB STATES MUST EMBRACE IRAQ.” King Abdullah of jordan, the most West-oriented ruler of an Arab State, has broken the ice by going to Baghdad. OK - he did this because of the revealed great financial reserves of the new Iraqi State - and Jordan, as a non-Petroleum Arab State, needs money. But as Roula Khalaf says - there was more to it then simple monetary calculations. With the US disengagement from Iraq in the cards - do the Arab want to see the country move completely to Iran’s sphere of influence? It is clear now that the US will not continue to do the deterrent work for them. Roula Khalaf is an excellent Arab journalist that we met once at a WWF event in Amman, Jordan. She is now the Middle East Editor for the Financial Times, and, as we picked up on the internet, she announced the launch of the the UK newspaper’s ME edition. Khalaf states that twice a week the paper will publish dedicated regional news. http://www.zawya.com/radio/default.cfm/sidDE080428061709359685
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 5th, 2008
MOSCOW, Russia (AP) — Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin’s slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89. Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday in Moscow, but declined further comment. Through unflinching accounts of the eight years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown. And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person’s courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire. Beginning with the 1962 short novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Solzhenitsyn devoted himself to describing what he called the human “meat grinder” that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually. His “Gulag Archipelago” trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under the dictator Josef Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe. See photos from Solzhenitsyn’s life » But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice. The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn’s refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence. After a triumphant return from exile in the U.S. in 1994 that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn’t read his books. During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources cheaply following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view. But under Vladimir Putin’s 2000-2008 presidency, Solzhenitsyn’s vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence. Putin now argues, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilization from the West, one that can’t be reconciled either to Communism or western-style liberal democracy, but requires a system adapted to its history and traditions. “Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking,” Solzhenitsyn said in the Harvard speech. “For 1,000 years Russia has belonged to such a category.” *** That’s where he began to write, memorizing much of his work so it wouldn’t be lost if it were seized. His theme was the suffering and injustice of life in Stalin’s gulag — a Soviet abbreviation for the slave labor camp system, which Solzhenitsyn made part of the lexicon. He continued writing while working as a mathematics teacher in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan. The first fruit of this labor was “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.
Abroad, the book — which went through numerous revisions — was lauded not only for its bravery, but for its spare, unpretentious language. After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn began facing KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred. *** “A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country,” he wrote in “The First Circle,” his next novel, a book about inmates in one of Stalin’s “special camps” for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential. Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps in 1946, soon after his arrest. *** The novel “Cancer Ward”, which appeared in 1967, was another fictional work based on Solzhenitsyn’s life. In this case, the subject was his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin’s death, until June 1956. In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. “A man sprouts a tumor and dies — how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?” He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin’s reign. “Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs — and they believed it? … Or all of Lenin’s old guard were vile renegades — and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people — and they believed it?”
*** He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, an unusual move for the Swedish Academy, which generally makes awards late in an author’s life after decades of work. The academy cited “the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature.” Soviet authorities barred the author from traveling to Stockholm to receive the award and official attacks were intensified in 1973 when the first book in the non-fiction “Gulag” trilogy appeared in Paris. “During all the years until 1961,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in an autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation, “not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known.” The following year, he was arrested on a treason charge and expelled the next day to West Germany in handcuffs. His expulsion inspired worldwide condemnation of the regime of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Solzhenitsyn then made his homeland in America, settling in 1976 in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont, with his wife and sons. Living at a secluded hillside compound he rarely left, he called his 18 years there the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life’s work, a multivolume saga of Russian history titled “The Red Wheel.” *** Although free from repression, Solzhenitsyn longed for his native land. Neither was he enchanted by Western democracy, with its emphasis on individual freedom. To the dismay of his supporters, in his Harvard speech he rejected the West’s faith in “Western pluralistic democracy” as the model for all other nations. It was a mistake, he warned, for Western societies to regard the failure of the rest of the world to adopt the democratic model as a product of “wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension.” Some critics saw “The Red Wheel” books as tedious and hectoring, rather than as sweeping and lit by moral fire. “Exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the gulag, had exposed his major weaknesses,” D.M. Thomas wrote in a 1998 biography, theorizing that the intensity of the earlier works was “a projection of his own repressed violence.” ***
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*** Following the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature. He is survived by his wife, Natalya, who acted as his spokesman, and his three sons, including Stepan, Ignat, a pianist and conductor, and Yermolai. All live in the United States.
———————— Mary Dejevsky: Farewell to the keeper of Russia’s conscience - All that Solzhenitsyn wrote rang true. It was suffused with personal experience of bitter conflicts. Tuesday, 5 August 2008 Related Articles in The Independent http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/com… A champion of freedom and justice: Putin leads the tributes to Solzhenitsyn Moscow; the afternoon of Monday, 18 December, 1989, and the grey day was already fading to dusk. The temperature had fallen to more than 20 degrees below; flakes from the intermittent snow squalls dusted hats and gloves; the powder underfoot had long packed into ice. Yet still they queued: thousands upon thousands of dark-clad Russians, heads bowed, exchanging the merest snatches of conversation. An out-of-towner – who else would have posed such a question at that place and on that day – approached and asked, as a new-arrival habitually asked of any long queue in those days, “What are they selling up there?” To which the answer, borne on the perishing wind from somewhere further up the line, was this: “Conscience, that’s what they are selling. Fragments of our conscience.” This was the day they buried the nuclear physicist, Nobel laureate and Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov; I had just arrived in Moscow as a reporter, and the Soviet Union still had two years of its faltering existence to run. The times now could not be more different: the height of summer, rather than the bitter depths of winter; the colourful chaos of plenty, rather than the grey and white of deprivation; a society that has burst open, compared with one that was still essentially closed. But the announcement of the death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn conveyed me instantly back, as it doubtless conveyed many Russians old enough to remember, to that winter’s day when the country re-discovered its national conscience and brought the end of Soviet power that much closer. His eventual return to Russia in 1994, after 20 years of enforced exile, was intensively negotiated and planned. A progress across the country, east to west, his homeward journey was hailed – as he surely knew it would be – as proof that Russia had finally recovered its soul.
With Khrushchev’s tenure, and the “thaw”, summarily ended two years later in 1964, Solzhenitsyn’s major novels were all published abroad and smuggled back to Russia. There, devotees spent many hours copying them out in minute script, word by word, page by page, for distribution through the burgeoning – and risky – network of Samizdat. The Nobel Prize for Literature followed, along with internal exile in the provincial city of Ryazan. In 1974, the year in which the first volume of his magnum opus on the prison camps appeared, he was summarily expelled from Russia to Switzerland. Solzhenitsyn is not one of those dissenters of whom it can be said that Western exile made him. His reputation in the then Soviet Union was built on his courage in tackling quintessentially Russian subjects that many knew about, either personally or second-hand, but few were prepared to address in print. All he wrote rang true; it was suffused with personal experience of the bitter conflicts that intellectual life demanded in those years, and his utter – some would say, pigheaded – refusal to compromise. As an artist, he addressed universal dilemmas, but he remained a very Russian writer-hero.
And in a Russia where cynicism about Soviet life and its increasingly discredited values was mounting, Solzhenitsyn provided something constant, an alternative standard to which many felt they should aspire, but knew they could never meet. When Gorbachev – another child, incidentally, of the Khrushchev “thaw” – unleashed the cacophony of “glasnost”, and the Soviet Union collapsed under its weight, there was Solzhenitsyn: still as stern, as uncompromising and, in his patriarchal way, as enduring a guardian of the Russian soul. Solzhenitsyn was among those cultural luminaries – Rostropovich was another – who, by what they were rather than what they did, helped Russia re-emerge as a state from the ruins of the Soviet Union. His work, now freely available in every Russian bookshop, fostered not only a sense of continuity, but a sense of conscience. It supplied many of the less edifying chapters edited out of the country’s fractured past. Had Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia even a year before he did, he might have been accompanied across his native land by hundreds of thousands, flocking to him for some sort of absolution. The quieter reception he was accorded in 1994 reflected a country settling into its new life and starting to reconcile itself – albeit fitfully – to its chequered past. Today’s Russia is also more sceptical of the very 19th-century brand of Russian exceptionalism that distinguished his thinking. To this extent, Solzhenitsyn had outlived his age.
Then again, for a writer whose place in history is guaranteed as the keeper of Russia’s conscience through the grimmest of times, the margins are probably where he would most like to be. Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 2nd, 2008 UN DAILY NEWS from the
A combination of political and military efforts has led to continued improvements in security across Iraq in the past three months, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon writes in his latest report to the Security Council on the United Nations Assistance Mission to the country (UNAMI). Mr. Ban cautions that the gains made so far need to be sustained through meaningful political dialogue and national reconciliation. “Time is of the essence, and Iraq can no longer afford continued delays in finding viable political solutions,” the Secretary-General says in the quarterly report, released today. UNAMI will also continue to assist Iraq’s independent electoral commission According to the report, rising levels of oil income offer an opportunity “Although Iraq forecasts around 7 per cent growth for 2008, the new wealth While welcoming new commitments to assist people displaced inside the IRAQI REFUGEES LEARN THE VALUE OF LAUGHTER AT UN-BACKED WORKSHOPS. So far, more than 50 Iraqis have participated in workshops in Damascus, the
One participant said she used to come home from work each day so angry and “But this course has really affected me,” she said. “When I go back home Some participants have been recruited as outreach workers, going house to More than 215,000 Iraqi refugees are registered with the agency in Syria, Cristina Aguirre, the team leader of Clowns Without Borders for the “Normally they are surrounded by noises, screams and people,” she said. Permalink | ### |
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Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on July 27th, 2008 Fareed Zakaria, on his GPS, the new bright star of CNN TV, had two guests from Europe on his program on Sunday, July 27, 2008 - the writers Bernard Henry Levy, known in France simply as BHL, and Josef Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit. GHL said flatly, were Obama to run for President of the EU he would get at least 85% of the vote. The Europeans see in him the joint embodiment of the two best figures in recent American history - MLK and JFK - and propelled by a very reasonable mix of realism and idealism. Bringing his impressions to a closer set of images - he sees in Obama someone who has the potential of leading from a mix of the Neocons with Kissinger. Joe Joffe thought that this week showed Obama as a canvas on which the Europeans projected what they want for America - that is how they want to see it. He also said that McCain, known to the Europeans, has vanished nevertheless from the media in Europe, as he thinks happened also in the US. “He has lost the battle of storytelling’ - he said. GHL added that in France “we would not elect a President from a minority - so we dream of America.” —————–
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07272008/new… OBAMA’S SECRET RESCUE MISSION By GINGER ADAMS OTIS, New York Post, July 27, 2008 Barack Obama carried out a secret assignment during his global tour last week. Obama detailed the plight of Colleen Bargouthi, 36. She says that for the last year, her four daughters have been held in the Palestinian territories, made to wear headdresses and schooled in Islam by their Muslim father, Yasser Shibli. |
