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Media Face a Palestinian Kick

FRYKBERG Mel — 2013-05-17T13:45:00Z

In an extraordinary move, a civilian has been sentenced to a year's imprisonment for posting a picture on Facebook of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas dressed in a Real Madrid soccer outfit and kicking a ball. The sentencing is among several instances of a targeting of media in Palestinian areas. Anas Saad Awad, 26, from the northern West Bank village of Awarta near Nablus, was sentenced in the Nablus magistrate's court, that convicted him of “criticising the government.” Awad (...) - Actuality / Palestine, Media

One-man bank keeps German village business running

Samuel BONVOISIN — 2013-04-05T08:49:08Z

Peter Breiter, 41, is an unusual banker. Not for him the big bonuses, complicated financial instruments and multi-million deals. He is happy instead writing transaction slips out by hand for the 500 inhabitants of the tiny southern German village of Gammesfeld.

“Why would I use a cash machine?” said Friedrich Feldmann, a customer sitting in the bank's small waiting room on his once-weekly visit to withdraw cash. “They cost money anyway.”

The Raiffeisen Gammesfeld eG cooperative bank in southern Germany is one of the country's 10 smallest banks by deposits and is the only one to be run by just one member of staff.

Small banks like this dominate the German banking landscape. Rooted in communities, they offer a limited range of accounts and loans to personal and local business customers.

While numbers have shrunk from around 7,000 in the 1970s to around 1,100 now, cooperative banks like Raiffeisen Gammesfeld provide competition for Germany's two largest banks - Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank.

A typical day's work for Breiter involves providing villagers with cash for their day-to-day needs and arranging small loans for local businesses. Not to mention cleaning the one-story building that houses the bank, which is 200 metres from his own front door.

Moving from a bigger bank, where it was all “sell, sell, sell”, Gammesfeld-born Breiter says taking up this job in 2008 was the best decision he ever made.

The advertisement required someone to work by hand, without computers. The typewriter and the adding machine bear the signs of constant use, although Breiter, in his standard work outfit of jeans and jumper, does now have a computer.

“It's so much fun,” Breiter, a keen mathematician, says as he deals with a steady stream of lunchtime customers. He knows his customers by name and regularly offers advice on jobs, relationship and money woes.

“People said I would get bored, but I'm not,” he said.

Breiter doesn't even mind that he gets barely any holiday each year, saying he is happy to settle for weekends skiing in the mountains nearby. “My hobby is my job. What could be finer?”

The cooperatives' existence is entwined closely with that of the Mittelstand, Germany's medium-sized and often family-run firms responsible for much of its export success.

“The Mittelstand is the lifeblood of Germany, and these are often our customers,” Steffen Steudel, a spokesman for the BVR cooperative banking group association told Reuters.

Mittelstand customers served by Gammesfeld include farmers, a maker of solar panels with around 100 employees, and a window firm, which supplied the windows for the bank.

CAN WE HAVE ONE TOO?

While many cooperative banks took a hit from the financial crisis, they fared better than some banks because they had mostly not tried to expand too quickly or take on too much risk-laden business.

The shock of seeing big banks go bust has also sparked renewed interest in the cooperatives, seen as steady and reliable, according to the BVR.

“Just as consumers want to know where their food is coming from, they also want to see what the bank is doing with their money,” Steudel said.

Raiffeisen Gammesfeld restricts its business to traditional retail banking - no credit cards, shares, funds or even online banking. Annual profits are stable at around 40,000 euros and the biggest loan it ever agreed was for 650,000 euros.

Breiter said the financial crisis prompted interest in his bank from all over Germany: “One person rang up five times asking for a 4 million euro loan but I had to refuse because he wasn't from Gammesfeld!”

Breiter also says people have called to ask how they too can recreate Gammesfeld in their own village, although he says that the model is impossible to start from scratch today because of the sums of money that would be needed.

Breiter is also proud that Gammesfeld is there to serve the community and not just make profit. Each customer is offered the same interest rate, whether they earn 1,000 or 10,000 euros a month.

Inge Dill, whose son went to school with Breiter, says the bank offers the best interest rates around. “Why would I go anywhere else?”

The bank, however, almost did not make it this far.

Back in the 1980s, the bank's previous CEO, Fritz Vogt - whose grandfather founded the bank back in 1870 - had to go through the courts to ensure the bank kept its licence because it did not have a permanent second member of staff to act as a “second pair of eyes” to double-check transactions.

Even now, 82-year old Vogt, whose house backs onto the bank, still pops in each week to help out and cast an eye over the books.

Breiter says he too wants to stay working at the bank as long as possible. “Of course I have to be careful not to withdraw completely into my shell. There's a whole world outside Gammesfeld after all.”

Al-Khayal al-Shaaby : developing the possibilities and consciousness using street theatre in the slums of Cairo

Samuel BONVOISIN — 2013-03-29T23:33:56Z

The Theatre Group al-Khayal al-Shaaby (The Popular Imagination)

Al-Khayal al-Shaaby group, which was founded in 2001, relies in its theatrical work on experimentation in an ongoing workshop, which aims at developing the possibilities and consciousness – artistic as well as human – of the actor.

The group directs its work at children and youth; in particular with special social needs, with the perspective to open for them new possible ways of perceiving and acting in the world, by way of helping them find creative and different solutions to their special problems. The group realizes this perspective by two concrete activities:

Performances: a street theatre event that travels to the neighborhoods and villages. The performance keeps an open form, stimulating the direct participation of the audience.

Workshops with children and youth: the group consciously uses their own training experience in order to also develop the skills –technical and methodological– to guide participants in their creative explorations.

Since October 2002, the group is working under the auspices of the Association for the Scientific and Cultural Renaissance, Al-Nahda Association (Jesuit Cairo). In this cooperation, the group participates in the Association's more general development of activities for children and youth, sharing in the view of the pedagogical and developmental capabilities of the arts.

The troupe, founded ten years ago, focus mainly on the poor people, performing in the slums of the capital and getting the people to smile.

"We like to entertain the people, exposing them to the kind of thing they've never been exposed to before. We have been to slums like Hay el-Zabaleen [the Garbage Collectors' District], Ezbet Khairallah, Establ Antar, Abu Rawash and others," he added.

They know how to address these humble people (most of whom are illiterate and have never been to school), appealing to both adults and children.

"For us this is social work, not just artistic work, and we enjoy doing it. We like to make people happy," stressed Said.
The troupe also have a partnership with ‘Clowns sans Frontières' (Clowns without Borders), a project supported by the Association Artistique de Solidarité Internationale in France.

The purpose of this joint project is to develop street plays for disadvantaged children, especially street children.

They have created five different plays, which have been performed at more than 70 locations around Egypt, reaching a total audience of approximately 20,000 people.

Some of their performances are sponsored by Al-Nahdha Association, a Jesuit association located in Cairo. Ruth Jurado, a Spanish actress, who plays the colour red in the play, is delighted to be starring in an Egyptian performance about the January 25 Revolution.

The Europie Festi-Forum 2013 : A Space to Empower Young People

Samuel BONVOISIN — 2013-03-26T11:13:51Z

Why?

In the context of the crisis we all face, social movements exist, but act separately. Moreover, youth generally remain passive, unaware of their potential as social actors. EuroPie comes as a direct response to these issues and carries the message of solidarity, engagement in civil society and youth empowerment, claiming the building of a shared European space.

EuroPie aims at being not just another event, but one of the necessary checking points in the social movements calendar where alternatives are being built and collective actions, at a larger scale are planned.

EuroPie is an open space, co-built, in the spirit of participative democracy, inclusiveness and horizontality where a variety of youth led activities can take place, helping strengthening solidarity in Europe.

Where? When?

The EuroPie Festi Forum will take place in Toulouse, the 23rd -25th of August 2013.

Toulouse is a city where both the cultural and the associative life are well developed and represented. A lot of musicians, art galleries, street events and other festivals very diverse in their thematic find their place in the monthly guide HOT PAPER which is anything but thin! In what concerns the associative side, a defile of different small associations, almost each connected with a festival or another sort of creative initiative, NGOs, politically conscious bars and concert halls, an opening to different non-French cultures.

Target public:

Young people (aprox. age 14-30), the event is open to everybody, but the activities are youth led
1st level of public: unengaged young people- the objective is to stir their interest in the discussed subjects through different non-formal education tools and activities.
2nd level of public: engaged young people, already part of initiatives, movements, the goal being to connect them.
The event is opened to all social groups, intercultural, diverse, non-discriminatory.

The Call for Organisations

We call for all organizations, energies, struggles and experiences, from Europe and all other continents, to meet us at the youth led EuroPie Festival from the 23rd until the 25th of August 2013 in the city of Toulouse France. This event will be an open space to connect thousands of individuals, networks and organizations. This is a space for everyone to share and exchange knowledge, to self empower and to take collective action. There will be workshops, debates and discussions alongside music, celebration and art. This initiative comes as a direct response to the crises of environment, society, economics and politics that we all face.

Why are we doing this?

All around us we can see that the world is on the move. From the Greek Debt Audit campaigns to the growing transition network, from the Occupy movement to the many local and international NGOs; civil societies are rising up across the world to reclaim political power. But as important as it is to act locally where we live, we also cannot forget the importance of becoming visible and acting collectively on a larger scale. Let's come together to design, share and implement the alternatives we envision.

We are seeing the beginning of a Europe where ecological sustainability, solidarity and social justice are fundamental principles. We all recognise the need for an economic and political system that respects planetary boundaries, as well as the need for a safe and just space for humanity to exist on equal terms, both with each other and the Earth as a whole.

The space we envision is open to all, centred upon the concepts of inclusiveness and horizontal democracy. It can only be truly open if a diverse range of social, economic and cultural voices are included and represented. The representation of political parties will not be possible, but we welcome all members of political parties as individuals.

In the spirit of participatory democracy, the festival will be co-built by many organisations and initiatives so bring your ideas in order to become part of this dynamic process.

Join us in strengthening solidarity in Europe!

Acxiom, the Quiet Giant of Consumer Database Marketing

Samuel BONVOISIN — 2013-03-25T18:52:09Z

IT knows who you are. It knows where you live. It knows what you do.

It peers deeper into American life than the F.B.I. or the I.R.S., or those prying digital eyes at Facebook and Google. If you are an American adult, the odds are that it knows things like your age, race, sex, weight, height, marital status, education level, politics, buying habits, household health worries, vacation dreams — and on and on.

Right now in Conway, Ark., north of Little Rock, more than 23,000 computer servers are collecting, collating and analyzing consumer data for a company that, unlike Silicon Valley's marquee names, rarely makes headlines. It's called the Acxiom Corporation, and it's the quiet giant of a multibillion-dollar industry known as database marketing.

Few consumers have ever heard of Acxiom. But analysts say it has amassed the world's largest commercial database on consumers — and that it wants to know much, much more. Its servers process more than 50 trillion data “transactions” a year. Company executives have said its database contains information about 500 million active consumers worldwide, with about 1,500 data points per person. That includes a majority of adults in the United States.

Such large-scale data mining and analytics — based on information available in public records, consumer surveys and the like — are perfectly legal. Acxiom's customers have included big banks like Wells Fargo and HSBC, investment services like E*Trade, automakers like Toyota and Ford, department stores like Macy's — just about any major company looking for insight into its customers.

For Acxiom, based in Little Rock, the setup is lucrative. It posted profit of $77.26 million in its latest fiscal year, on sales of $1.13 billion.

But such profits carry a cost for consumers. Federal authorities say current laws may not be equipped to handle the rapid expansion of an industry whose players often collect and sell sensitive financial and health information yet are nearly invisible to the public. In essence, it's as if the ore of our data-driven lives were being mined, refined and sold to the highest bidder, usually without our knowledge — by companies that most people rarely even know exist.

Julie Brill, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, says she would like data brokers in general to tell the public about the data they collect, how they collect it, whom they share it with and how it is used. “If someone is listed as diabetic or pregnant, what is happening with this information? Where is the information going?” she asks. “We need to figure out what the rules should be as a society.”

Although Acxiom employs a chief privacy officer, Jennifer Barrett Glasgow, she and other executives declined requests to be interviewed for this article, said Ines Rodriguez Gutzmer, director of corporate communications.

In March, however, Ms. Barrett Glasgow endorsed increased industry openness. “It's not an unreasonable request to have more transparency among data brokers,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. In marketing materials, Acxiom promotes itself as “a global thought leader in addressing consumer privacy issues and earning the public trust.”

But, in interviews, security experts and consumer advocates paint a portrait of a company with practices that privilege corporate clients' interests over those of consumers and contradict the company's stance on transparency. Acxiom's marketing materials, for example, promote a special security system for clients and associates to encrypt the data they send. Yet cybersecurity experts who examined Acxiom's Web site for The Times found basic security lapses on an online form for consumers seeking access to their own profiles. (Acxiom says it has fixed the broken link that caused the problem.)

In a fast-changing digital economy, Acxiom is developing even more advanced techniques to mine and refine data. It has recruited talent from Microsoft, Google, Amazon.com and Myspace and is using a powerful, multiplatform approach to predicting consumer behavior that could raise its standing among investors and clients.

Of course, digital marketers already customize pitches to users, based on their past activities. Just think of “cookies,” bits of computer code placed on browsers to keep track of online activity. But Acxiom, analysts say, is pursuing far more comprehensive techniques in an effort to influence consumer decisions. It is integrating what it knows about our offline, online and even mobile selves, creating in-depth behavior portraits in pixilated detail. Its executives have called this approach a “360-degree view” on consumers.

“There's a lot of players in the digital space trying the same thing,” says Mark Zgutowicz, a Piper Jaffray analyst. “But Acxiom's advantage is they have a database of offline information that they have been collecting for 40 years and can leverage that expertise in the digital world.”

Yet some prominent privacy advocates worry that such techniques could lead to a new era of consumer profiling.

Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit group in Washington, says: “It is Big Brother in Arkansas.”

SCOTT HUGHES, an up-and-coming small-business owner and Facebook denizen, is Acxiom's ideal consumer. Indeed, it created him.

Mr. Hughes is a fictional character who appeared in an Acxiom investor presentation in 2010. A frequent shopper, he was designed to show the power of Acxiom's multichannel approach.

In the presentation, he logs on to Facebook and sees that his friend Ella has just become a fan of Bryce Computers, an imaginary electronics retailer and Acxiom client. Ella's update prompts Mr. Hughes to check out Bryce's fan page and do some digital window-shopping for a fast inkjet printer.

Such browsing seems innocuous — hardly data mining. But it cues an Acxiom system designed to recognize consumers, remember their actions, classify their behaviors and influence them with tailored marketing.

When Mr. Hughes follows a link to Bryce's retail site, for example, the system recognizes him from his Facebook activity and shows him a printer to match his interest. He registers on the site, but doesn't buy the printer right away, so the system tracks him online. Lo and behold, the next morning, while he scans baseball news on ESPN.com, an ad for the printer pops up again.

That evening, he returns to the Bryce site where, the presentation says, “he is instantly recognized” as having registered. It then offers a sweeter deal: a $10 rebate and free shipping.

It's not a random offer. Acxiom has its own classification system, PersonicX, which assigns consumers to one of 70 detailed socioeconomic clusters and markets to them accordingly. In this situation, it pegs Mr. Hughes as a “savvy single” — meaning he's in a cluster of mobile, upper-middle-class people who do their banking online, attend pro sports events, are sensitive to prices — and respond to free-shipping offers.

Correctly typecast, Mr. Hughes buys the printer.

But the multichannel system of Acxiom and its online partners is just revving up. Later, it sends him coupons for ink and paper, to be redeemed via his cellphone, and a personalized snail-mail postcard suggesting that he donate his old printer to a nearby school.

Analysts say companies design these sophisticated ecosystems to prompt consumers to volunteer enough personal data — like their names, e-mail addresses and mobile numbers — so that marketers can offer them customized appeals any time, anywhere.

Still, there is a fine line between customization and stalking. While many people welcome the convenience of personalized offers, others may see the surveillance engines behind them as intrusive or even manipulative.

“If you look at it in cold terms, it seems like they are really out to trick the customer,” says Dave Frankland, the research director for customer intelligence at Forrester Research. “But they are actually in the business of helping marketers make sure that the right people are getting offers they are interested in and therefore establish a relationship with the company.”

DECADES before the Internet as we know it, a businessman named Charles Ward planted the seeds of Acxiom. It was 1969, and Mr. Ward started a data processing company in Conway called Demographics Inc., in part to help the Democratic Party reach voters. In a time when Madison Avenue was deploying one-size-fits-all national ad campaigns, Demographics and its lone computer used public phone books to compile lists for direct mailing of campaign material.

Today, Acxiom maintains its own database on about 190 million individuals and 126 million households in the United States. Separately, it manages customer databases for or works with 47 of the Fortune 100 companies. It also worked with the government after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, providing information about 11 of the 19 hijackers.

To beef up its digital services, Acxiom recently mounted an aggressive hiring campaign. Last July, it named Scott E. Howe, a former corporate vice president for Microsoft's advertising business group, as C.E.O. Last month, it hired Phil Mui, formerly group product manager for Google Analytics, as its chief product and engineering officer.

In interviews, Mr. Howe has laid out a vision of Acxiom as a new-millennium “data refinery” rather than a data miner. That description posits Acxiom as a nimble provider of customer analytics services, able to compete with Facebook and Google, rather than as a stealth engine of consumer espionage.

Still, the more that information brokers mine powerful consumer data, the more they become attractive targets for hackers — and draw scrutiny from consumer advocates.

This year, Advertising Age ranked Epsilon, another database marketing firm, as the biggest advertising agency in the United States, with Acxiom second. Most people know Epsilon, if they know it at all, because it experienced a major security breach last year, exposing the e-mail addresses of millions of customers of Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Target, Walgreens and others. In 2003, Acxiom had its own security breaches.

But privacy advocates say they are more troubled by data brokers' ranking systems, which classify some people as high-value prospects, to be offered marketing deals and discounts regularly, while dismissing others as low-value — known in industry slang as “waste.”

Exclusion from a vacation offer may not matter much, says Pam Dixon, the executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit group in San Diego, but if marketing algorithms judge certain people as not worthy of receiving promotions for higher education or health services, they could have a serious impact.

“Over time, that can really turn into a mountain of pathways not offered, not seen and not known about,” Ms. Dixon says.

Until now, database marketers operated largely out of the public eye. Unlike consumer reporting agencies that sell sensitive financial information about people for credit or employment purposes, database marketers aren't required by law to show consumers their own reports and allow them to correct errors. That may be about to change. This year, the F.T.C. published a report calling for greater transparency among data brokers and asking Congress to give consumers the right to access information these firms hold about them.

ACXIOM'S Consumer Data Products Catalog offers hundreds of details — called “elements” — that corporate clients can buy about individuals or households, to augment their own marketing databases. Companies can buy data to pinpoint households that are concerned, say, about allergies, diabetes or “senior needs.” Also for sale is information on sizes of home loans and household incomes.

Clients generally buy this data because they want to hold on to their best customers or find new ones — or both.

A bank that wants to sell its best customers additional services, for example, might buy details about those customers' social media, Web and mobile habits to identify more efficient ways to market to them. Or, says Mr. Frankland at Forrester, a sporting goods chain whose best customers are 25- to 34-year-old men living near mountains or beaches could buy a list of a million other people with the same characteristics. The retailer could hire Acxiom, he says, to manage a campaign aimed at that new group, testing how factors like consumers' locations or sports preferences affect responses.

But the catalog also offers delicate information that has set off alarm bells among some privacy advocates, who worry about the potential for misuse by third parties that could take aim at vulnerable groups. Such information includes consumers' interests — derived, the catalog says, “from actual purchases and self-reported surveys” — like “Christian families,” “Dieting/Weight Loss,” “Gaming-Casino,” “Money Seekers” and “Smoking/Tobacco.” Acxiom also sells data about an individual's race, ethnicity and country of origin. “Our Race model,” the catalog says, “provides information on the major racial category: Caucasians, Hispanics, African-Americans, or Asians.” Competing companies sell similar data.

Acxiom's data about race or ethnicity is “used for engaging those communities for marketing purposes,” said Ms. Barrett Glasgow, the privacy officer, in an e-mail response to questions.

There may be a legitimate commercial need for some businesses, like ethnic restaurants, to know the race or ethnicity of consumers, says Joel R. Reidenberg, a privacy expert and a professor at the Fordham Law School.

“At the same time, this is ethnic profiling,” he says. “The people on this list, they are being sold based on their ethnic stereotypes. There is a very strong citizen's right to have a veto over the commodification of their profile.”

He says the sale of such data is troubling because race coding may be incorrect. And even if a data broker has correct information, a person may not want to be marketed to based on race.

“DO you really know your customers?” Acxiom asks in marketing materials for its shopper recognition system, a program that uses ZIP codes to help retailers confirm consumers' identities — without asking their permission.

“Simply asking for name and address information poses many challenges: transcription errors, increased checkout time and, worse yet, losing customers who feel that you're invading their privacy,” Acxiom's fact sheet explains. In its system, a store clerk need only “capture the shopper's name from a check or third-party credit card at the point of sale and then ask for the shopper's ZIP code or telephone number.” With that data Acxiom can identify shoppers within a 10 percent margin of error, it says, enabling stores to reward their best customers with special offers. Other companies offer similar services.

“This is a direct way of circumventing people's concerns about privacy,” says Mr. Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Ms. Barrett Glasgow of Acxiom says that its program is a “standard practice” among retailers, but that the company encourages its clients to report consumers who wish to opt out.

Acxiom has positioned itself as an industry leader in data privacy, but some of its practices seem to undermine that image. It created the position of chief privacy officer in 1991, well ahead of its rivals. It even offers an online request form, promoted as an easy way for consumers to access information Acxiom collects about them.

But the process turned out to be not so user-friendly for a reporter for The Times.

In early May, the reporter decided to request her record from Acxiom, as any consumer might. Before submitting a Social Security number and other personal information, however, she asked for advice from a cybersecurity expert at The Times. The expert examined Acxiom's Web site and immediately noticed that the online form did not employ a standard encryption protocol — called https — used by sites like Amazon and American Express. When the expert tested the form, using software that captures data sent over the Web, he could clearly see that the sample Social Security number he had submitted had not been encrypted. At that point, the reporter was advised not to request her file, given the risk that the process might expose her personal information.

Later in May, Ashkan Soltani, an independent security researcher and former technologist in identity protection at the F.T.C., also examined Acxiom's site and came to the same conclusion. “Parts of the site for corporate clients are encrypted,” he says. “But for consumers, who this information is about and who stand the most to lose from data collection, they don't provide security.”

Ms. Barrett Glasgow says that the form has always been encrypted with https but that on May 11, its security monitoring system detected a “broken redirect link” that allowed unencrypted access. Since then, she says, Acxiom has fixed the link and determined that no unauthorized person had gained access to information sent using the form.

On May 25, the reporter submitted an online request to Acxiom for her file, along with a personal check, sent by Express Mail, for the $5 processing fee. Three weeks later, no response had arrived.

Regulators at the F.T.C. declined to comment on the practices of individual companies. But Jon Leibowitz, the commission chairman, said consumers should have the right to see and correct personal details about them collected and sold by data aggregators.

After all, he said, “they are the unseen cyberazzi who collect information on all of us.”

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quiet-giant-of-consumer-database-marketing.html?pagewanted=all

Four things you should know about the Fukushima nuclear disaster

KENYON Laura — 2013-03-13T14:56:00Z

The Fukushima nuclear disaster that began on March 11, 2011 was a scary time for the whole world. Some early reports even warned about radiation being carried on the wind as far as the west coasts of the USA and Canada, and many international companies flew their staff out of Japan. In dramatic attempts to cool the reactors, the Japanese military dumped tonnes of seawater from helicopters.

For many of us, the urgency of these moments has long ago faded; a lot of things happened in the intervening two years. But the Fukushima nuclear disaster never really ended. Although there are many things about Fukushima that are unbelievable and unfair, here a few shocking things that you may not be aware of:

1. Former employees of both General Electric and Hitachi became ‘whistleblowers' to expose design and production flaws in parts of the Fukushima reactors.

As early as the 1970s, former General Electric employee Dale Bridenbaugh went public with flaws in the GE reactor designs being used to build Fukushima. Then following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, former Hitachi nuclear engineer Mitsuhiko Tanaka exposed the illegal cover-up of a construction problem in one of the pressure vessels built by Hitachi, "When the stakes are raised to such a height, a company will not choose what is safe and legal."

That is the nature of the nuclear industry and Tanaka's story is yet another, very scary, example of how far nuclear companies will go to put their own profits before safety.

2. The Red Cross calls the Fukushima disaster an “ongoing humanitarian crisis”

Imagine being forced to leave your home so suddenly that you have to leave pets behind. Then imagine being told you may not be able to live in your home again for many decades to come. Even going back to get some belongings may be difficult because it is dangerous for you to be inside your home for long periods of time, you are exposed to too much radiation. You will wait for two years, but during this time you will never receive enough compensation to completely rebuild your life somewhere safe.

That is reality now for some 160,000 people who were forced to evacuate their homes. Two years later many of these people still live in temporary housing, have lost their jobs and are separated from their communities and families.

3. Compensation money for Fukushima evacuees may come with strings attached

Evacuees have been living in limbo for two years already, now to add to this burden their compensation money may have unwelcome conditions. Some evacuees who accepted certain compensation amounts, because they were pregnant or had small children at the time of the nuclear disaster, may have sacrificed their right to sue for further damages by taking the money. The authorities at Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) responsible for setting the terms of compensation said on one occasion that people cannot file future compensation from illnesses caused by the accident, then on another occasion the same authorities said they did not rule out future claims. (Find more details in the Fukushima Fallout report.)

The conditions that come with the compensation money are not clear to the Fukushima evacuees, causing confusion and adding to their stress. While they fill out a 60 page compensation claim form, and wait to see how much their former lives destroyed by the disaster are ‘worth' – the profits of the nuclear companies involved, like General Electric, Hitachi and Toshiba, remain intact.

4. Two of the Fukushima reactor makers: Toshiba and Hitachi, are now making money from the disaster clean up process.

Toshiba and Hitachi are, in effect, being paid to clean up their own nuclear mess. That's right, these companies have now made money from Fukushima twice, first from building and maintaining reactors, and then again for cleaning up after those reactors failed. What an interesting business model.

How do these companies get away with this?

They are protected by dusty, old nuclear liability laws established in the 1950s, which place the burden of paying for nuclear disasters on the operators of nuclear power plants (in this case TEPCO), while companies that design or supply nuclear reactors are protected from paying, no matter what the circumstances of their involvement. After Fukushima TEPCO could not afford the cost of the nuclear disaster and was nationalised, shifting the majority of the costs onto the government, and therefore the Japanese public. This is the situation in Japan and nuclear liability laws are the same in almost all other countries.

When nuclear companies are not liable for the huge costs of nuclear risk, what incentive is there for them to avoid it? None.

This unjust situation can change. India created a strong nuclear liability law in 2010, which can hold nuclear supplier companies liable for the damages of a nuclear disaster. Last week the CEO of General Electric was quoted admitting that as long as this law is in place General Electric will stay out of the nuclear business in India. When they are forced to admit it, most nuclear companies will come to the same conclusion – the cost of nuclear risk is far too high.

An important step towards making nuclear companies liable for nuclear disasters, is that the public knows and understands this unjust situation – you can help.

Freedom of Expression is a Fundamental Human Right

Ritimo — 2013-03-13T10:20:00Z

Résumé en français : Dans cette déclaration à l'occasion de la Conférence mondiale des télécommunications internationales qui s'est tenue à Dubaï du 3 au 14 décembre 2012, l'AMARC rappelle que "la radio doit d'être d'accès universel, gratuit et anonyme, et que l'accès au spectre pour les radios communautaires locales ayant mission de service public doit être renforcé et facilité, pour la diversité culturelle, la liberté de l'information et la sécurité."

Convergence is a technological fact
Neutrality is an economical choice
Regulation is a political choice.

The World Association fo Community radio Broadcasters, AMARC, calls upon States, freedom of expression activists and civil society organizations gathered in Dubai, United Emirates, for the Conference of the International Telecommunications Union, ITU, to preserve broadcast spectrum as a public good of humanity.

Rajendra Singh : Rainwater Harvesting to Replenish Underground Water

Samuel BONVOISIN — 2013-03-01T15:10:01Z

The wells in Rajasthan's Alwar District had dried up, thrusting the people into abject and seemingly inescapable poverty. The revival of traditional earthen dams to capture rainwater for recharging the underground water supply provided a tipping point that brought the wells back to life. And with the water came a better life for the people. It started in the spare, humble village of Gopalpura. Nearly a thousand villages are now following Gopalpura's example.

Rajasthan receives a scant 16 inches of rainfall annually. Most of it falls during the monsoon months from June to September, leaving the soil to parch the rest of the year. Religious rituals have emphasized how precious water is. “When a male child is born, or when a couple marries, the village has a ceremony where they walk around the well in worship of the water,” says Murali Lal Jangid, from the village of Jamdoli. “And when a person dies, the body is cremated, and the remaining bones are brought to a religious site where there is holy water. It shows how water is related to our culture from birth to death.”

Rajasthan has long been known for its underground water supply. Ancient Hindu scriptures mention the key technology: rainwater harvesting. Drawing upon centuries of experience, people built structures to catch and hold the monsoon rains and store them for the dry season to come. Archeologists have dated some rainwater catchments as far back as 1500 B.C. The dominant structure was the johad, a crescent-shaped dam of earth and rocks, built to intercept rainfall runoff. A johad served two functions. On the surface, it held water for livestock. But like an iceberg, its most important parts were below the surface. By holding water in place, it allowed the liquid to percolate down through the soil. It recharged the aquifer below, as far as a kilometer away. Stored underground, the water could not be lost to evaporation. In the midst of the dry season, without pipes or ditches to deliver water, villagers could always count on plenty of water from their wells, and irrigated fields lush with wheat, mustard and beans.

A johad was more than any one family could build. It took a village. But because every villager had a stake in the johads, residents banded together to build and maintain them. The rajas, the kings of small states who gave the region its name, would often finance johad construction, taking a sixth of the crops in return. Community institutions extended to other shared resources. Because forest conservation was bound up with water, villagers regulated the cutting of trees. As late as 1890, 60 percent of the land was covered with forests where villagers gathered firewood and royal families went hunting for tigers.

Nor Any Drop to Drink

After centuries of relative stability, the social contract around water and trees began to fall apart when Great Britain consolidated its control over India late in the 19th century. Crown companies were hungry for timber, and too many princes were willing to provide it. First, they declared the forests off-limits to the villagers who had tended them for generations. Later on, they sold the logging rights. Rajasthan's Alwar District kept its forests until the late 1940s, when India was heading toward independence. Then the local raja, afraid of losing his lands to the new national government, let the loggers in. The venerable trees turned into railroad ties and charcoal.

The deforestation of Alwar set off a slow-motion chain reaction in which the ruin of one resource led to the ruin of others, and the impoverishment of nature led to the impoverishment of the people. The first wave of degradation was the loss of the trees themselves. Their destruction starved out wildlife and exposed the topsoil to erosion. When the rains came, they washed soil down the treeless hillsides, and much of that soil was deposited in johad ponds. Over time, thousands of johads were filling with silt. As silted johad ponds channeled less water underground to recharge the aquifer, the underground water began to retreated deeper below the surface.

In earlier times, villagers would have dug out the silt and rebuilt their crumbling dams. But as the government seized more and more of their common lands, they had less and less incentive to protect what was left. Where farmers had once banded together to manage their resources, now they competed over the dwindling remains. Traditional village councils, called gram sabhas, fell apart, and a tradition of communal labor washed away with the topsoil. “After independence,” recalls Gopalpura village elder Mangu Patel, “village unity collapsed, and the people neglected their johad structures, because johads can only be made by a group, not by individuals. So, one by one, the structures gradually deteriorated and stopped being used.”

In place of johads, the villagers turned to modern technology to keep the water flowing. With government aid in the 1950s, they began drilling “tube wells”– deep wells that brought up the water with diesel-powered pumps. But the new wells ensnared them in a vicious cycle. When the water table dropped, they drilled even deeper; and the deeper they drilled, the more the water dropped.As a villager explained, “Everyone was very enthusiastic when a new tube well came to our village, because there was not much labor necessary to get the water. They just turned on the switch and got as much as they wanted. But they took so much water – they could take it 24 hours a day – and underground water levels dropped so much that eventually it became impossible to get water more than five or six hours a day.” Eventually, the underground water dropped deeper than people could drill, wells began to go dry, and even streams and rivers were drying up.

The advent of tube wells and the consequent spiral of deeper wells and receding underground water was only the first of a series of interconnected and mutually reinforcing vicious cycles that drove depletion of the aquifer. In another vicious cycle, trees and other plants that depended on underground water died because the water was beyond the reach of their roots. Without the plants protecting the soil, erosion increased and johad ponds filled in more rapidly with silt. In addition, less vegetation meant less transpiration (evaporation of water from plant leaves), which resulted in less rain. Monsoon seasons became shorter, from 101 days in 1973 to 55 days in 1987. The result was even less rainwater to replenish the aquifer.

Another vicious cycle was social. Before the decline of the aquifer, wells had provided irrigation water to grow a crop during the dry season. Now wells were drying up and the supply of irrigation water for a dry-season crop was declining. Many farmers were down to a single harvest in the rainy season. The land could no longer support the families who lived on it, and many families had to split up. Able-bodied young men migrated to the shantytowns of cities like Delhi. They sent home cash to support their wives and children. Back in the villages, the wells were dry and village forests, their source of firewood, had perished for lack of water. Women and children had to spend up to 10 hours a day walking to distant locations to fetch firewood and water, hauling the water home in ceramic jugs balanced on their heads. There was no time for children to go to school. Women no longer had time for all their household chores, nor did they have time for extra economic activities to supplement family income. Community institutions became even weaker, and people no longer had time for community obligations such as maintaining johads, a final blow that rendered johads a fading memory of the past.

Logging Alwar's forests had set in motion a chain of events that dried up the aquifer and tore away the people's hopes for the future. The downward spiral seemed irreversible. But events would show that it was not.

Return of the Johad

Water was not on the mind of an idealistic, 28-year-old doctor, when he stepped off the bus in Alwar District in 1985. Rajendra Singh was hoping to start a medical clinic. The son of a well-off landowner in the state of Uttar Pradesh, Singh had earned a degree in Ayurvedic medicine, a traditional Indian system that bolsters the body's ability to heal itself. After graduation, he had moved to Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, and joined Tarun Bharat Sangh, meaning “Young India Organization.” The group followed a Gandhian philosophy of helping the poor to help themselves. But Singh was restless in the city. By day, as he worked at a government job, he felt he was only teaching the needy to rely on a bureaucracy. He formed a more radical plan, to work in the most destitute corner of Rajasthan. He sold his furniture and sent his young wife to live with her parents. With four friends, he boarded a bus and vowed to ride to the end of the line. The end of the line turned out to be a village called Kishori.

Kishori did not welcome the newcomers with open arms. Five strange young men from the city were as likely to be terrorists as social workers. After questioning and searching them, villagers relented and gave them shelter in a local temple. A sympathetic landlord in nearby Bhikhampura eventually offered them a two-room house. Singh opened his clinic, but the villagers seemed uninterested in supporting it. He soon found out that they had more pressing needs.

One day, as Singh was walking home from nearby Gopalpura, he got a ride from the driver of a camel cart. The driver was Mangu Patel. As the two talked, Singh learned that Patel owned 200 bighas of land, about 600 acres, in an area where the average landholding was a mere 3 to 6 acres. By local standards, Patel was a wealthy man. But he could not support his extended family. He had three grandsons running bicycle taxis in the city of Ahmedabad, 430 miles away. Each made 30 rupees a day, about $2.43 in U.S. dollars. It was more than they could earn by farming. Twenty years later, Patel still recalls that first meeting with Rajendra Singh: “I asked him, ‘Why are you here, wandering around? Don't you have any work to do?' and he said, ‘I am here to do some social work.' “He had planned to work for the education of children and health projects, but I was the person who told him ‘No, the immediate need is for water. If you work for water, we will help you.'”

At age 60, Patel was old enough to remember a time when the johads had been full of water instead of dirt. On his suggestion, Singh and two colleagues took up pickaxes and spades and began to dig out one of the johad ponds. At first, the three worked alone. But Patel offered grain to anyone who would help. In a time of water scarcity, food was a powerful enticement to pitch in. After seven months, the johad had been excavated to a depth of 15 feet. Singh and his colleagues set down their shovels and awaited the monsoons.

Rain fell on Rajasthan. As luck would have it, the monsoon of 1986 was the region's first significant precipitation in four years. By the end of the season, the pond was full. And something unexpected had happened. A neighborhood well, one that had long been exhausted, had begun flowing again. Gopalpura had created its EcoTipping Point.

Trickling up

Water was not all that began flowing. The rebirth of rainwater harvesting set loose a cascade of constructive forces, in Gopalpura and beyond. The effects ping-ponged from ecosystem to social system and back, and the momentum got stronger and stronger, as both systems began to heal themselves.

The first wave of effects swept through Gopalpura itself. Successful restoration of the first johad inspired villagers to take on a bigger job: a crumbling irrigation dam. TBS helped with technical advice and the villagers contributed 10,000 person-days of labor. By the next monsoon season, the dam was reconstructed, 20 feet high and 1,400 feet long.

One achievement kept leading to another. By 1996, Gopalpurans had built nine johads, covering 2,381 acres and holding 162 million gallons of water. Underground water had risen from an average level of 45 feet below the surface to only 22 feet, and all the wells had water. The ascending aquifer trickled up through the village economy. Well water was once again available just a few steps from home. Moister subsoil allowed crops to thrive with less irrigation. Because well levels were higher, less fuel was needed to pump water to the surface. The expense of diesel fuel dropped 75 percent. The area of wheat fields jumped from 33 to 108 hectares, and some farmers diversified into sugarcane, potatoes and onions. Many of their fields could now produce two crops, one in the rainy season and an irrigated crop in the dry season. As people ate and drank better, so did their livestock. There were more leftover leaves and stems to serve as fodder for sheep, goats and dairy cows.

As their quality of life improved, Gopalpura's residents realized that their social order depended on the natural one. They had restored one resource: water. They were ready to bring back another: trees. They revived their traditional gram sabha community council, with participation from every family, and decided to reforest 10 hectares along the edge of the village. The trees would help protect the johads, by cutting down on soil erosion. The trees would provide fuel and animal feed, saving villagers another agonizing daily walk. Residents could break off dead branches for firewood, but to protect the forest from overuse, they would be fined 11 rupees for cutting green ones. Any witness who failed to report a violation could also be fined.

To symbolize the villagers' commitment to their newly-planted village forest, TBS adapted an old religious ritual. The rakhi was a brightly-woven bracelet, worn by family members and friends as a promise of mutual protection. As villagers planted trees, they performed ceremonies in which they tied rakhis around the trunks. “The father of water is the tree,” says Singh, “and the mother of water is the forest. So if your father and mother are not healthy, the children will not be healthy either.”

As village society reassembled, so did its basic unit: the family. Young men came home from distant cities to work in the fields year-round. Their wives, freed from long walks for water and firewood, had more time for housekeeping and child care. Their daughters, no longer needed for hours of chores, had time to go to school. “Now, there are two schools,” says female elder Manbhar Devi of nearby Bhaonta-Kolyala village, “for small children and older children as well. At that time [before rainwater harvesting], not a single girl went to school. Their parents did not let them go to school. Now every family sends both boys and girls to school, and at least they can finish their primary education here in this village.”

With the gift of spare time, some women earned extra money through soap making, carpet making, spinning and weaving. If they needed seed money, they could borrow it from samuhs, revolving loan funds started by the women themselves. Phuli Devi belongs to a samuh in nearby Bhikampura village. “They are collecting 100 rupees per month,” she explains. “And whenever we need it, someone in the collective can borrow it at a very small interest rate, say 2 rupees per month. Ten or fifteen women come together and pool their money. “We take the loan from the self-help group whenever we need to. And so because of this, we can solve so many problems, nobody needs to migrate from this place.”

From Vicious to Virtuous

Feedback loops are the key to EcoTipping Points. They explain how a small-scale action can set off large-scale change. The rebirth of rainwater harvesting in Rajasthan was an EcoTipping Point “lever” that reversed the vicious cycles driving decline, transforming them into “virtuous cycles” that propelled restoration. For Golpapura that lever was restoration of the first johad. After years of taking too much water out of the ground, the villagers began to put it back. The same forces that were running the region into ruin changed course and began to rebuild it. The virtuous cycles were mirror images of the vicious cycles that preceded them:

Success breeds success. As their wells filled with water, villagers were encouraged to build more johads, bringing even more wells back to life. They revived the traditional gram sabha village council, which planned, built and maintained more johads. The rewards of united action made village social institutions stronger, inspiring more community action to improve the village in numerous ways.
Trees and underground water. The rise in the water table encouraged villagers to plant trees. The trees and other vegetation protected the soil, reducing erosion and siltation of johads, allowing more rainwater to seep underground and raise the water table even more.
Community manpower. Once there was enough water for a dry season crop, young men moved back from cities to the village, providing more labor to construct and maintain johads.

Ripples in Rajasthan

Multiply Gopalpura by 750 villages, and you can imagine the power of an EcoTipping Point. As visitors carried the news home, other towns constructed their own johads. The practice spread further as jal yodhas, or “water warriors,” went on evangelical walking tours, called padyatras. By 2005, TBS counted 5,000 structures in 750 villages, covering 3,000 square miles over five districts. Alwar's forest had spread 33 percent in fifteen years. A survey of 970 wells in 120 villages found that all were flowing – including 800 that had been dry just six years before.

Gujar Kanhaiyalal, a resident of Bhaonta-Kolyala, recalls the vivid change. “In 1985 to 1988 there was a big drought in Rajasthan. In Bhaonta there were 20 wells, but only two or three had water. But in the next drought, from 1999 to 2002, not a single well dried up.” In Kanhaiyalal's village, johads brought a dead river back to life. In 1990, he and his neighbors built a catchment dam across the dry Arvari riverbed. After the monsoons had filled the new basin, a small stream sprang up, downhill from the dam. It ran a few weeks. As they built more structures to recharge the aquifer, the stream ran for a longer time, until in 1995, it was a river running all year long. After that, other rivers that had gone dry also resumed year-round flows.

The new rivers and watering holes provided sustenance for wild animals. Bhaonta-Kolyala reforested 1,500 acres of the neighboring hills and declared it a people's wildlife sanctuary. Named after the local deity Bhairon Dev, it provided habitat for birds and mammals, such as sambar deer, nilgai antelopes, porcupines and jackals. Villagers caught glimpses of leopards, which they had not seen in twenty years.

So valuable were the resurrected rivers that they drew another predator: state government. Officials had largely ignored the watershed, but now, the fisheries department claimed the Arvari's water and its creatures as state property. It sold fishing contracts to private companies. Realizing their hard-won resource could be lost, 70 villages along the river formed the Arvari Sansad or river parliament. The body had no legal standing. But it organized mass protests and got the contracts revoked. Today, the river parliament meets twice yearly to tackle new challenges.

The Arvari conflict was not an isolated problem. As villagers created new resources, they sometimes stirred up the same social forces that had plundered their old ones. But this time around, their village councils did not collapse into disunity. Instead, they got stronger. The same momentum that had restored their countryside and their communities was also restoring their will to defend them. Two years after Gopalpura had planted trees, government officials cited residents for encroaching on public land. The state flattened the forest and slapped a fine on TBS. But after a two-year struggle, officials reversed themselves. They granted the village an additional 10 hectares, along with 10,000 rupees for tree-planting.

TBS defied the state again in the early 1990s. In the heart of Rajasthan lay a national park called the Sariska Tiger Reserve. Its long-time residents were building johads, but their wells were not filling up. The problem turned out to be illegal marble mines, which were sucking the underground water dry. In spite of threats from the “marble mafia,” TBS sued to close the mines. More than once, Singh and other organizers were beaten by hired thugs. But the group finally won a Supreme Court order, shutting down 471 marble mining pits. Villagers got their underground water back, and more tigers roamed the reserve.

As recently as 2001, the state ordered TBS members to destroy a dam at Lava Ka Baas village or face arrest. The residents, however, would not let the bulldozers near. For two months, they held a vigil over the structure, night and day. In the end, the authorities backed down.

Today, the water warriors of Rajasthan are challenging the government on a national scale. In 2002, the national government announced a plan to help 100,000 villages that lacked a local water supply. The plan would spend up to $125 billion on a centralized network of canals and pipelines, to hook up 37 river basins. Much of the money would come from private companies. Just as Alwar's forests had been snatched from the people, the nation would hand over vast quantities of its water to corporate ownership. Farmers would have no control over its availability or its price.

Singh has a different vision. He maintains it is far cheaper to help villages create and control their own water supplies than to build more gargantuan dams and ditches. TBS and other groups have joined in a National Water Convention and a national walking tour, setting foot in 30 states. Singh compares his peaceful warriors to another independence campaign, 70 years earlier, when Gandhi made spinning wheels and homemade cloth or khadi into symbols of a self-sufficient India. “If Gandhi were alive today, what would he be doing?” says Singh. “Instead of using the khadi as the symbol, he would be making johads, because today the biggest exploitation is underground water mining and the commercialization of water.”

Source : http://www.ecotippingpoints.org/our-stories/indepth/india-rajasthan-rainwater-harvest-restoration-groundwater-johad.html

The Two Sudans : a tour of the neighborhood

2013-02-28T17:29:12Z

Prior to South Sudan's independence in July 2011, Sudan was the largest country in Africa. At over one million square miles, Sudan stretched from the Sahara to Central Africa. As a unified country it bordered on nine other states. Today, after separation, the two Sudans share a diverse and critical geopolitical sub-region that links the Sahara, the Sahel, the Horn, and the Great Lakes.

While negotiations between Sudan and South Sudan are critical [1], the broader regional context is important as well. The two Sudans do not exist in a vacuum; rather, their post-separation negotiations and bilateral relations will be situated within a regional context.
Regional neighbors will impact the ways in which the countries relate to each other as well as the larger complex of geopolitical neighbors. That said, international actors, too, top among them, the United States, the European Union, and China, play a critical role in shaping the political and economic dynamics of the region. These influential international actors must continue to support, both politically and economically, initiatives of regional actors focused on maintaining peace and security between the two Sudans, and beyond, and promoting the development of the region as a whole. In many ways, the two countries are an important fulcrum around which regional political dynamics revolve. The Enough Project examines some of the two countries' most important neighbors and regional relationships.

[1] For a comprehensive analysis of the North-South negotiations process see Enough's December 2011 policy paper, “Negotiations Between the Two Sudans: Where They Have Been, Where They Are Going”

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Reviews Freedom of Speech in Guatemala

Cultural Survival — 2013-02-26T12:08:00Z

On March 15, in Washington D.C., the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) will hold a hearing during its 147th Period of Sessions concerning the freedom of expression of Indigenous Peoples in Guatemala. The hearing will address the status of community radio in Guatemala, which despite being guaranteed to Indigenous Peoples by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the 1996 Peace Accords, and the Guatemalan Constitution, is not legal under the country's current telecommunications law. Cesar Gomez will represent the Guatemalan community radio movement and Cultural Survival, an Indigenous Peoples rights organization based in Cambridge, MA.

For over a decade, Indigenous radio advocates have been lobbying the Guatemalan Congress to legalize community radio. For seven years, Cultural Survival has partnered with a network of over 80 community radio stations across Guatemala, many of which broadcast in one or more of the country's 23 Indigenous languages, in building the stations' capacity and supporting their legalization efforts. The proposed Community Media Bill, Initiative 4087, which would create legal authorizations for nonprofit community radio by allowing Indigenous Peoples equal access to the radio spectrum, has been awaiting congressional approval since 2010.