Sweden imports trash to generate power

Sweden imports trash to generate power - Europe - Al Jazeera English:

Sweden leads the way in keeping its waste out of landfill sites. It recycles what could be reused and burns what can be safely incinerated to provide power for a quarter of a million homes. The only problem is, the environment-conscious Swedes aren't throwing away enough trash to feed the incinerators. As a result the Scandinavian nation imports some rubbish from neighbouring countries to keep up with demand at power plants. Al Jazeera’s Linda Nyberg reports from Uppsala.

Pakistan Lifts YouTube Ban, for 3 Minutes

YouTube Ban Lifted in Pakistan, for 3 Minutes - NYTimes.com:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A ban on YouTube, which Pakistan imposed after an anti-Islam video caused riots in much of the Muslim world, was lifted Saturday, only to be reinstated — after three minutes — when it was discovered that blasphemous material was still available on the site.

After months of criticism of the ban, the government decided to allow Pakistanis to have access to YouTube again, saying steps had been taken to ensure that offensive content would not be visible. But those efforts apparently failed, and the authorities quickly backtracked.

The ban was imposed on Sept. 17 following violent protests in response to the video, which was made in the United States and ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad. The government then ordered all telecommunications companies to block Internet material deemed offensive to Muslims and urged people to report such material.

But the ban on YouTube came to be seen as censorship, and a growing number of the estimated 25 million Internet users in the country complained.

Have US police forces become too militarised?

Have US police forces become too militarised? - Inside Story Americas - Al Jazeera English:

Thailand: Rebels Escalate Killings of Teachers

Thailand: Rebels Escalate Killings of Teachers | Human Rights Watch:

Government Should Consult Educators on Protection Strategy

DECEMBER 17, 2012

Separatist insurgents in Thailand’s southern border provinces should immediately end all attacks on teachers and schools.

In the most recent attack, on December 11, 2012, ethnic Malay Muslim insurgents entered a school in Pattani province at lunch hour and summarily executed two ethnic Thai Buddhist teachers. During the past six weeks, insurgents have killed three other teachers and wounded another three. Suspected insurgents set at least one school on fire.

“Insurgents in southern Thailand who execute teachers show utter depravity and disregard for humanity,” said Brad Adams, Asia director. “These attacks harm not only teachers and schools, but the Muslim students, their families, and the broader Muslim community the insurgents claim to represent.”

In the December 11 attack, five men, some armed with M16 assault rifles and dressed in camouflage, entered Ban Ba Ngo School in Mayo district, Pattani. Three walked into the school canteen where teachers were having lunch and separated five Muslim teachers from two Buddhist teachers. When the school’s Buddhist director, Tiyarat Chuaykaew, tried to hide behind a Muslim teacher, one of the insurgents shot her in the head, execution-style. Somsak Kwanma, the other Buddhist teacher, was similarly shot and killed. The insurgents then escaped.

As a result of this and other attacks, on December 12 the Confederation of Teachers of Southern Border Provinces unilaterally shut down 1,300 government-run schools serving more than 200,000 students in Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat provinces and four districts of Songkhla province until state security agencies could assure better protection for educators. On December 13, as Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and the army commander-in-chief, Gen. Prayuth Chan-ocha, made an official visit to the southern border provinces, the insurgents issued leaflets threatening to continue attacks on teachers.

Ethnic Malay Muslim separatist insurgents calling themselves the Patani Freedom Fighters (Pejuang Kemerdekaan Patani) have been implicated in the deaths of 157 teachers and education personnel from government-run schools since January 2004, when the insurgency escalated. Insurgents have made teachers and state schools, which they consider a symbol of government authority and Thai Buddhist culture, a frequent target of attack. The insurgents have also claimed that the killings of teachers were in retaliation to the alleged assassinations of Muslim religious leaders by elements within the government’s security forces.

The insurgents should immediately cease all attacks against civilians, regardless of their religion, ethnicity, and profession, including against teachers and other education personnel, as well as all attacks against schools.

The Thai government should immediately develop a clear security strategy in consultation with teachers, principals, and other educators. Teachers should be provided with full discretion to decide whether or not to participate in measures such as security escorts or convoy travel. While some teachers favor such strategies, others have expressed concerns to Human Rights Watch that such measures compromise their own efforts to build trust with local communities, and fear that their proximity to soldiers places them in increased danger. Security forces should also assess the effectiveness of security procedures that increase protections for all civilians, such as sweeps of routes to and from schools prior to the beginning and end of the school day.

Teachers in the southern border provinces have demanded the installation of security cameras at schools and increased hazard pay, as well as compensation for families of teachers affected by the violence.
“Teachers are courageously risking their lives to ensure children’s access to education in southern Thailand,” Adams said. “But the government is still stuck in a cycle of ineffectual responses to the deadly threats teachers and students are facing every day.”

The 2012 Abu Aardvark Awards

The 2012 Abu Aardvark Awards | Marc Lynch:

Posted By Marc Lynch  Monday, December 17, 2012 - 11:17 AM   Share

It's time for the 2012 version of my annual list of the Middle East Channel's best books of the year on the Middle East... and, of course, the year's best hip hop albums!  Each year, I read through as many books about the Middle East as I can with an eye towards recommending the most thought-provoking, interesting and useful publications of the year (2010 winners here, 2011 here).  My own book, The Arab Uprising: The Unfinished Revolutions of the Middle East, is of course ineligible (but for those who care, the paperback is now available and here's a bunch of reviews).  Unfortunately for the winners, there's no grandly named award and no cash prize, but at least there's the glory.

A few words on the process. As always, it's just me making the list -- no committee, no free books, nobody screening submissions. That means that the selections tend to follow my own interests, and I probably overlooked or just didn't get into some outstanding books. I made every effort I could to look at as many potential candidates as possible, and ended up reading more than fifty eligible books (here's a mostly complete list, though I may have forgotten some or left off those which I only skimmed; really good late 2012 books which didn't make it onto the pile in time this year will be eligible for next year's).   Reading and rereading them (along with grading) is why I haven't been posting much the last week.

I have a slight bias towards university press books, though I'm entirely open to well-written and serious books from other presses.  I pay more attention to the Arab parts of the Middle East than to Iran, Israel or Turkey, and hope somebody else digs into books on those areas.  And I tend to like books which make me feel that I've actually learned something new --- rich and unique empirical detail, novel theoretical approaches, unexpected comparisons.   I don't agree with everything in every b0ok, and none is without flaws. But all provoked me to think in new ways, taught me new things, held my interest against the allure of Twitter, and challenged my interpretive frames.   

Last year I named two top winners: Stephane Lacroix's Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia and Wendy Pearlman's Violence, Non-Violence and the Palestinian National Movement, along with a few honorable mentions.  There were a lot of really good books this year, but I didn't think any stood head and shoulders above the others like in 2011.   So instead, this year I have decided to list ten books in alphabetical order.  All are impressive in their own ways.   And so, without further ado, the Middle East Channel's Top Ten Middle East Books for 2012:

Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law inModern Egypt (Chicago). At a time when Egypt is consumed with debates about the role of Islam in the constitution and the role of the courts, Agrama's book offers unique and fascinating insight into the actual operation of Islamic laws in Egyptian society.  While at times a bit distracted by the  jargon of his field, the book finds its stride with a deep reading of the Nasir Hamid Abu Zayd hisbatrial and then breaks genuinely new ground with its ethnographic examination of the Fatwa Council al-Azhar and Egypt's personal status courts.   Simply fascinating.

Nathan Brown, When Victory is Not an Option (Cornell).  How did political competition with the certainty of defeat shape the strategies and ideologies of Muslim Brotherhood political parties?   Completed shortly before victory actually became an option for a number of Arab Islamist political parties, Brown's comparative study will stand as one of the very best examinations of an era which has passed.  He places Islamist political parties into an effective comparative and historical perspective, showing well what is unique and what is common among such political parties.   And he shows well how Muslim Brotherhood political parties have adapted to their particular political environments... and anticipates the problems they would face when those political horizons suddenly and dramatically changed.  See Brown give a talk about his book here, and my conversation with him about the Egyptian constitution here;  among his many Middle East Channel articles are "Egypt's State Constitutes Itself" (November 2012), "Cairo's Judicial Coup" (June 2012) and "Egypt's Transition Imbrogliu" (April 2012).

Christopher Davidson, After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies(Columbia/Hurst).  Davidson digs deep into the ruling bargain which sustains the Arab monarchies of the Gulf and shows powerfully the mounting challenges they face.  It would be easy to get distracted by Davidson's provocative prediction of impending turbulence in the states of the Gulf and miss his careful, rigorous dissection of their historical evolution and mounting internal and external challenges.  This book should be widely debated among those interested in the future stability of these wealthy Gulf states.   For Christopher Davidson on the Middle East Channel, see "Gulf Autocracy in Question" (November 2012)

Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation Through Popular Culture(Stanford).   Fahmy's account of the emergence of the Egyptian public sphere from the 1870s through 1919 is richly detailed, theoretically sophisticated, and beautifully written.   While carefully attuned to the broader theoretical and historical literature on the public sphere, Fahmy very effectively shows the contours of a distinctively Egyptian public sphere and its contribution to the emergence of modern Egypt.  This isn't an era of Egyptian cultural history which I knew well, and I roundly appreciated Fahmy's rich and evocative discussion of the changing media landscape and the fields of cultural production. 

Bassam Haddad, Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of AuthoritarianResilience (Stanford).   The uprising of the last two years has exposed the relatively thin state of contemporary scholarship on Syria.  In this useful book, Bassam Haddad carefully traces the political and economic networks which underpinned the regime of Bashar al-Asad, and the changing political economy of that regime in the decade leading up to the uprisings.  He shows effectively the real distributional and political impact of economic reforms, the impact of trust deficits and corruption, and the terrain of competing power centers within Baathist Syria.   See Haddad discuss his book at GW here.

Gregory Johnsen, The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America's War in Arabia (W.W. Norton).   I've read far too many accounts over the years of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and thewar on terror -- some excellent, but too many covering the same familiar ground from a primarily American perspective.  Johnsen has produced one of the few such books to fully incorporate the local into that story by focusing on Yemen without losing sight of Washington.  His Yemeni focus decenters the familiar narratives about al-Qaeda.  He has drawn most attention for his criticism of American reliance on drone strikes, but his book ranges far more broadly to situate what we now call Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula into the history of Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the broader Middle East.  For Gregory Johnsen onForeign Policy, see "Ignoring Yemen at Our Peril" (December 2010) and "Losing Yemen" (November 2012).

Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt's Road to Revolt (Verso).  An entertaining and challenging historical narrative of Egypt from Nasser's revolution to the year following the January 25 revolution.  Kandil gives an often gripping historical narrative which is both theoretically informed and full of fascinating details drawn from a wide range of Egyptian and archival sources.  Some of the historical judgments could be challenged, but the debate would surely be an informative one.  Refreshingly, his account focuses more on the machinations of the officer corps and the political class, and on a changing political economy, than on the Muslim Brotherhood.  The dissection of the institutional battles between the military, security services, state institutions, Presidency and political class offer fascinating perspective on today's tortuous Cairo politics.

Daniel Kurtzer, Scott Lasensky, Steven Spiegel, Shibley Telhami and William Quandt,  The Peace Puzzle: America's Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011 (Cornell).  Close to the final word on the American perspective on the diplomatic history of the peace process, with five deeply experienced authors who conducted hundreds of interviews with nearly all the participants.   The Peace Puzzle corrects the historical record repeatedly, particularly the distortions which have emerged through memoirs and entrenched journalistic narratives.  While it will not satisfy those who would prefer to see more attention to the lived experience of Israelis, Palestinians or other Arabs, it covers its chosen terrain of diplomatic history extremely well.  I only wish I could share the optimistic view of the authors that a record of nearly constant failure over multiple administrations suggests only that different tactics might have succeeded.. or might yet succeed. 

Laurence Louer, Shiism and Politics in the Middle East (Columbia/Hurst).  An extremely useful guide to the politics of Shia networks in today's Middle East.  This slim volume could use a bit more focus and a bit more depth (of the sort found in 2008's Transnational Shia Politics, by the same author).  But its sharp explanation of the role of specific Shia networks across the Middle East offers genuinely eye-opening insights into the nature of political and intellectual influence across these Shia communities.  It helps to make sense not only of Bahrain, but of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Lebanon and beyond. 

Joseph Sassoon, Saddam Hussein's Baath Party: Inside an Authoritarian Regime(Cambridge). Sassoon draws on enormous volumes of Iraqi documents and audiotapes seized after 2003 to reconstruct the organization of Saddam Hussein's Iraq.   The result of this unprecedented archival research is a painstaking, understated but powerful demonstration of the logic of an authoritarian state from the inside.  With this new documentary access into the inner workings of the Iraqi security state, Sassoon' book begins to fill in one of the massive missing pieces in the historiography and analysis of the politics of the Middle East.  

BILLIONAIRES WARN HIGHER TAXES COULD PREVENT THEM FROM BUYING POLITICIANS

Billionaires Warn Higher Taxes Could Prevent Them From Buying Politicians : The New Yorker:

Posted by Andy Borowitz

• 

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Introducing a new wrinkle into the already fraught fiscal cliff showdown, a consortium of billionaires today warned that if their taxes are raised they will no longer have enough money to buy politicians.

The group, led by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, commissioned a new study showing that the cost of an average politician has soared exponentially over the past decade.

While the American family has seen increases in the cost of food, health care and education, Mr. Adelson says, “those costs don’t compare with the cost of buying a politician, which has gone through the roof.”

The casino billionaire points to his group’s study, which puts the cost of purchasing an average House member at two million dollars and an average senator at several times that.

“And let’s say you buy a senator like Jim DeMint and he decides to quit,” Mr. Adelson says. “Good luck trying to get your money back.”

The Vegas magnate complains that the media has ignored billionaires’ essential role in giving jobs to politicians who would otherwise have difficulty finding “honest work of any kind.”

“Billionaires are providing employment for a group of seriously incompetent and marginal people,” Mr. Adelson says. “You raise taxes on us, and who’s going to create those jobs? I really don’t think people have thought this through.”

Adding insult to injury for America’s billionaires, he says, “the simple dream of someday owning a President is slipping out of reach.”

“People think a billion dollars buys you a President, but they’re wrong,” he says. “It barely gets you a lemon like Mitt Romney.”

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/borowitzreport/2012/12/billionaires-warn-higher-taxes-could-prevent-them-from-buying-politicians.html#ixzz2EvJ2Twr8

The Unsilenced Voice of a ‘Long-Distance Revolutionary’

Chris Hedges: The Unsilenced Voice of a ‘Long-Distance Revolutionary’ - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig:

By Chris Hedges

I am sitting in the visiting area of the SCI Mahanoy prison in Frackville, Pa., on a rainy, cold Friday morning with Mumia Abu-Jamal, America’s most famous political prisoner and one of its few authentic revolutionaries. He is hunched forward on the gray plastic table, his dreadlocks cascading down the sides of his face, in a room that looks like a high school cafeteria. He is talking intently about the nature of empire, which he is currently reading voraciously about, and effective forms of resistance to tyranny throughout history. Small children, visiting their fathers or brothers, race around the floor, wail or clamber on the plastic chairs. Abu-Jamal, like the other prisoners in the room, is wearing a brown jumpsuit bearing the letters DOC—for Department of Corrections.

Abu-Jamal was transferred in January to the general prison population after nearly 30 years in solitary confinement on death row and was permitted physical contact with his wife, children and other visitors for the first time in three decades. He had been sentenced to death in 1982 for the Dec. 9, 1981, killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. His sentence was recently amended to life without parole. The misconduct of the judge, flagrant irregularities in his trial and tainted evidence have been criticized by numerous human rights organizations, including Amnesty International.

Abu-Jamal, who was a young activist in the Black Panthers and later one of the most important radical journalists in Philadelphia, a city that a few decades earlier produced I.F. Stone, has long been the bête noire of the state. The FBI opened a file on him when he was 15, when he started working with the local chapter of the Black Panthers. He was suspended from his Philadelphia high school when he campaigned to rename the school for Malcolm X and distributed “black revolutionary student power” literature.

Stephen Vittoria’s new film documentary about Abu-Jamal, “Long Distance Revolutionary,” rather than revisit the case, chronicles his importance and life as an American journalist, radical and intellectual under the harsh realities of Pennsylvania’s death row. Abu-Jamal has published seven books in prison, including his searing and best-selling “Live From Death Row.” The film features the voices of Cornel West, James Cone, Dick Gregory, Angela Davis, Alice Walker and others. It opens in theaters Feb. 1, starting in New York City. In the film Gregory says that Abu-Jamal has single-handedly brought “dignity to the whole death row.”

The late historian Manning Marable says in the film: “The voice of black journalism in the struggle for the liberation of African-American people has always proved to be decisive throughout black history. When you listen to Mumia Abu-Jamal you hear the echoes of David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and the sisters and brothers who kept the faith with struggle, who kept the faith with resistance.”

The authorities, as they did before he was convicted, have attempted to silence him in prison. Pennsylvania banned all recorded interviews with Abu-Jamal after 1996. In response to protests over the singling out of one inmate in the Pennsylvania correction system, the state simply banned recorded access to all its inmates. The ban is nicknamed “the Mumia rule.”

“I was punished for communicating,” Abu-Jamal says.

Cornel West says in the film: “The state is very clever in terms of keeping track, especially [of] the courageous and visionary ones, the ones that are long-distance runners. You can keep track of them, absorb ’em, dilute ’em, or outright kill ’em—you don’t have to worry about opposition to ’em.” 

Prison labor booms in US as low-cost inmates bring billions