Neoliberal Agribusiness causes farmer suicide

Here’s an article by Vandana Shiva, Ph.D., a physicist, environmentalist, feminist, science policy advocate and director of Navdanya and the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology essentially on how monoculture, non-organic, chemical-fertilizer-and-irrigation-dependent, non-renewable, genetically modified, corporate, IP-protected seeds are fucking farmers.
.. and an interview with her.
This is really, seriously, one of the most heinous [...]

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Gaza Activist Arrests in Cairo

I just heard that Salma Said, Khaled AbdelHamid, Malek, Sabri El Sammak and at least 3 journalists have been arrested outside of the Arab League building in  Tahrir.  The activists were protesting in support of Gaza
UPDATE 1:05pm The number i am getting is 13-15 arrests. Apparently they have been shoved into micobuses. The few that [...]

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Police State 2.0

Once Again, Naomi Klein is right on the money. The disaster capitalism complex has found yet another (err.. repeated) field to plough in the Olympics. And somehow, they’ve managed to find a loophole to avoid legislation regulating what’s sold to china (both for security and human rights reasons), turning huge profits and setting up the [...]

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Gov’t shuts down NGO for volunteersim

I received this report from HRInfo. As usual, their translation into English is horrible. But i think it this case the general meaning is preserved. I’ve placed my corrections in square brackets (“[" "]“):

الحكومة المصرية تتجه لإغلاق ثالث جمعية حقوقية
تحت مبرر أن نشاطها تطوعي
القاهرة في 1يونيو 2008م.
قالت الشبكة العربية لمعلومات حقوق الإنسان “anhri.net ” [...]

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AUC food poisoned workers, protest

It’s good to know that even AUC is not immune to the spread of labor strikes. When some 500 workers at the new campus work site got food poisoning, they were apparently supported by hundreds who protested at the campus (Arabic). This led to AUC promising to take action. Naturally, State Security was there to [...]

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Wael account reopened, not “restored”

I’d heard late last week that Wael Abbas’ shut-down YouTube account had been reactivated. Apparently, according to Wael, that’s all that has been done – as opposed to “restored”, as they claim in their statement. Everything on the account has, it seems, disappeared. If that’s the case, then what a lame, meaningless, empty, face-saving gesture!

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Property Tax workers protest

I’m not in really in tune with what’s going on, but it would seem that the property tax employees have become active again. [ap; horeyetna in arabic]

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Radio on Religious Descrimination

Radio program segment on religious freedom in Egypt.

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Rendition to Jordan

The Washington Post about Jordan’s role as a CIA holding prison and proxy interrogator. Nothing you havent previously heard. Some excerpts:
The building is the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan’s powerful spy and security agency. Since 2000, at the CIA’s behest, at least 12 non-Jordanian terrorism suspects have been detained and interrogated here, according [...]

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YouTube bans torture videos, closes Wael’s account

Yep.

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Kareem Amer Tortured in Prison

I just received a statement from the Arab Network for HR Information announcing a communique they (along with Hisham Mubarak) sent to the prosecutor general claiming that prisoner of conscience, blogger Kareem Amer (see FreeKareem for info) has recently been beaten in prison by a guard and inmate under the orders and supervision of an [...]

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Torture and Authoritarianism

Hossam has a long, impassioned (as always) post in light of the recent 3-year prison sentence against the Boulaq officers who tortured and sodomized a microbus driver. The case became a0″ public” issue when bloggers broke the story and published a video of the abuse.
I’m currently in the middle of reading a Saban (Brookings) paper, [...]

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Enigmatic Egypt

I think my title has a better ring than the one for this Rami Khouri article about the odd mix of progress on the economic level despite re-entrenched political authoritarianism.
Efforts to paint this country in a single shade of color are common, but not very useful. Egypt is neither structurally diabolic, nor genetically enlightened. I [...]

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Labor Strikes spread to public sector

It seems there are reports of 3,000 tax officers demonstrating in Nasr City at the Ministry of Finance headquarters and of up to 55,000 possibly joining in a nation-wide strike. I’m too short on time to look into it further. Here’s Hossam’s post on 3arabawy. Also check out his article in the October edition of [...]

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“Human Rights and Non-State Actors”

The October ARB offers another article, i feel deserves some attention. Eric Goldstein writes about non-state actors’ violations of human rights and how HR organizations in the Arab world need to be dealt with. The main issue seems to be with Hizbullah and Hamas. Specifically, the firing of rockets onto civilians in Israel.
While i would [...]

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