Nigeria at 50

Yvonne Ndege reports on Africa's most populous country on the 50th anniversary of her independence from Great Britain.

Obama Target Game

The above crude likeness of President Barack Obama was featured in a carnival game called "Alien Attack" at the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Big Time fair in Roseto, Pennsylvania. As the child is doing in this photograph, carnival visitors were rewarded with stuffed animals and other trinkets for their aim in firing a toy plastic gun at the president. The inspiration evidently came from "Tea Party" politics in that the caricature poses the president with a scroll labeled "Health Care Bill" in his right hand.

The original story on this appeared in the Express Times of Easton, Pennsylvania. The story broke nationally through The Morning Call and the British newspaper The Guardian. I first read about it in a piece at The Huffington Post authored by AP Reporter Michael Rubinkam. A company called Goodtime Amusements ran the carnival - 320 Willow Road, Hellertown, PA - goodirv66@yahoo.com - 610-554-7425 - Fax 610-838-2549

ILLER: Obama Zombies Strike Back

R.I.P. Stephen Schneider

Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies at Stanford University and long an active faculty member in the Department of Biology, Schneider apparently suffered a heart attack on an airplane en route to London from Stockholm. Schneider's obituary appeared in today's Washington Post but his death is not yet mentioned on his Stanford University webpage. Schneider was an early member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and was actively working on the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) at the time of his death.

Hat tip to Democracy Now! for alerting me to the news. A eulogy written by Ben Santer has been posted at Real Climate.

France to repay Haiti

Yesterday (July 14th) was Bastille Day, marking a popular uprising which gave birth to the modern French state. According to the website for the Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes, France chose Bastille Day to announce an Outline Agreement for the Rebuilding of Haiti (ACRH). The Agreement calls for cancellation of Haiti's international debt, which has retarded the development of Haiti during recent decades and contributed to the impact of the recent earthquake and other natural disasters. France acknowledges with the announcement of ACRH that the disaster which befell the Haitian people is not simply the result of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake but is partly the result of economic and social policies including the legacy of French colonization.

(The above is my own translation of the text posted on the website for the Ministère des Affaires étrangères et européennes.) Hat-tip to The Independent, Democracy Now!, and The People's Forum for excellent and timely coverage of the story in English.

Training Arizona Police

Kindra Arnesen

A passionate narration of the inept and duplicitous assessment and clean up of BP's Deep Horizon Oil Spill. This woman spits fire!

Kindra's speech at the Gulf Emergency Summit was filmed by FluxRostrum.

Code Pink Protest - BP Station in NYC on May 28, 2010



BP your heart is black! You can have your oil back! - Live video shot by Melissa Ulto intercut with her own creative montage of current news footage.

DREAM activists face deportation

Three young immigrant rights activists speak with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of Democracy Now! on Thursday, May 20th. The three are all facing possible deportation after their arrest in a sit-in on Monday at the offices of Republican Senator John McCain.

Mohammad Abdollahi is an Iranian-born immigrant rights activist and co-founder of a web portal for undocumented students called DreamActivist.org. Yahaira Carrillo is student at Rockhurst University in Kansas and the founder of the Kansas Missouri Dream Alliance. Lizbeth Mateo is an organizer with DREAM Team Los Angeles.

Subcommandante Marcos unmasked!

"The constant obsession on the part of the Mexican government to know or to discover the face of subcommandante Marcos takes the place of any commitment to address the structural causes for the faces of poverty which beset over a million families in Mexico."

Loose translation from an editorial by Jaime Martínez Veloz published April 9, 2010 in La Jornada.

Drug Mule Politician, Zuru Ayortor

Eme Zuru Ayortor, a candidate for the Edo state assembly, was arrested two weeks ago at the Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos, Nigeria. Mr. Ayortor, a pharmacist, was stopped while trying to board a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt after scanning equipment indicated that he had foreign material within his stomach cavity. While undergoing interrogation at the airport, he excreted 100 packets of cocaine weighing a total of 2.120 kilograms (4.4 lbs). According to Mr. Ayortor, the proceeds from his drug mule venture were going to help him finance his campaign for office.

Mr. Ayortor is in good company. The story in Compass by Juliana Francis and Biodun Komolafe reports previous drug smuggling arrests at the same airport have included a doctorate degree holder, an ex-councilor and a couple trying to use their children. The quantity that Ayortor ingested, however, is the record since January.

Yar'Adua, Nigeria's president



Both BBC and CNN as well as African news sources such as Next and AllAfrica reported the death of Umaru Musa Yar'Adua on Wednesday, May 5th. The president of Nigeria has been too ill to govern since last November, as reported in my blog dated January 12th. Vice president Goodluck Jonathan governed as best he could but had not formally succeeded Yar'Adua. According to the story in Next, Jonathan now automatically becomes the substantive president and will be sworn in tonight by Nigeria's chief justice.

The recent vacuum of leadership during Yar'Adua's prolonged illness has perplexed both Nigerian and foreign political analysts. I believe, however, that it can be traced to the regional divisions within Nigeria as a nation. In a post on February 12th, I suggested that Mr. Jonathan's Christian affiliation might have upset the balance between Islamic and Christian leadership in the government. As I now understand the situation, the problem centers on a "gentleman's agreement" of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) to choose a candidate alternately from "northern" and "southern" states. The regional division between north and south is both religious and ethnic, as astutely pointed out in the comment below by Solomonsydelle.

The coming period of transition in leadership in Nigeria promises to be a tense one. Mr. Jonathan is by no means guaranteed to be chosen as PDP candidate or, if chosen, to emerge victorious in the elections of 2011.

P.S. Ndesanjo Macha of Global Voices has aggregated recent blog postings about the president's death. Surprisingly, my comments above and exchange with Solomonsydelle and Imnakoya are prominently featured. Real Nigerians must be either immensely saddened or embarassed at the conclusion of this chapter of their recent history.

The Ban

Jyri Jaakola

DESAPARECIDOS!

Six people are missing, including two Mexican journalists, after a paramilitary ambush on Tuesday, April 27th attacked a caravan carrying food and other aid to a remote village in the state of Oaxaca. The above photograph from an article in The Hindu shows the bullet-riddled car which carried the two journalists, Erika Ramirez and David Cilia. According to a post yesterday by Kristin Bricker, all six of the activists and journalists are safe and have found refuge in the nearby town of Juxtlahuaca.

Paramilitaries continued to blockade San Juan de Copala until Sunday, May 2nd. Articles in mainstream media indicate that all members of the caravan have now been rescued although some injuries are also reported. Hitherto, the only news consisted of victim accounts compiled by Kristin Bricker. By all accounts, at least two activists died during Thursday's raid on the caravan. One of the dead activists, Betty Carino, is remembered by Keegan Smith in a moving post featured both on his own blog at Z Communications and on Bricker's My Word is My Weapon. The other victim of the paramilitary ambush, Jyri Jaakkola, was an observer from Finland. His thoughts on the trip which he was planning to Oaxaca have been captured in a video posted today to YouTube.

Less Ass from Iceland


Iceland’s President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson explains the effects of the Eyjafjallajokull eruption on air traffic in Europe to Neil Cavuto of Fox News. His thick accent leads him to pronounce ash as "ass," leading to some comical remarks about ass falls and ass clouds sent to Europe. Hat tip for the link to Martin Eisenstadt of the Harding Institute.

2010 Harding Prize Awards



Hosted by the Kennedy Political Union at American University in Washington, D.C.

World Cultural Preservation

My former professor, Richard Kurin, has been the Under Secretary for History, Art, and Culture" at the Smithsonian Institution for over 25 years now. An interview with Dr. Kurin posted on the U.S. State Department's propaganda organ America.gov has been making the round among progressive news outlets like Scoop and cultural resources blogs like Saving Antiquities.

I am amazed that Kurin has not only survived but flourished as organizer and recruiter of international acts for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival as well as many of the Silk Road Project events and exhibits at museums in our nation's capitol. The profile advertising his appearance at the Canadian Museum Association conference in St. Johns, Newfoundland, Kurin describes many of his most recent accomplishments:

(Kurin)... has worked with cultural figures ranging from Pete Seeger, Yo-Yo Ma, Mickey Hart, and Bernice Johnson Reagon to the Aga Khan and the Dalai Lama. He helped draft an international treaty on safeguarding the world’s living cultural heritage. He has produced major events for the Smithsonian’s 150th anniversary, the opening of the World War II Memorial, the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian, and programs for numerous presidential inaugurals, including that of President Obama.

I highly recommend the interview with Kurin posted at America.gov.

ClimateGate debunked by UK Parliament

Climate scientist Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom has been completely exonerated of any misconduct in the "ClimateGate" scandal based upon emails stolen from the university's email server. According to results of an inquiry released today by the Science and Technology Committee of the UK Parliament, Dr. Jones' research methods were “in line with common practice in the climate science community." Statistical and mathematical analyses performed by his Climate Research Unit have been repeated and the conclusions have been verified by independent scientific experts.

The DeSmog Blog has a thoughtful summary of this final chapter in the long and messy "ClimateGate" scandal. Comments are just starting to show up at the brief entry on RealClimate.

My entries in this blog about ClimateGate began on November 23rd, 2009. Follow up posts were written on November 24th, November 28th, November 30th, December 4th, and December 5th. ClimateGate was clearly well timed to undermine plans for the Copenhagen Climate Summit as well as Climate Change legislation here in the United States.

HELL YES, WE DID!


The "Party of No" has now become the "Party of Hell, No!" moving farther to the right and more militant as President's Obama legislative agenda rolls on through a corrupt Senate and a divided House of Representatives. Who speaks for the people now?