antarchi's blog

List compiled by Geoff Williams

Russia has used their veto TWICE

Year: Resolution Vetoed by the USA

Human Rights Group Concerned Over Journalists’ Arrests at Occupy Wall Street

A human rights office for the Americas on Thursday criticized the arrest and assault of journalists during Occupy Wall Street protests in New York and other U.S. cities in recent weeks...

The office alleged in a statement that at least three journalists have been assaulted since October by police officers, and two others by participants, in demonstrations in Nashville, Tennessee, and Oakland, California.

“In addition, at least a dozen journalists have reportedly been placed under temporary arrest while performing their professional duties,” the statement said.

See this also from RT : Police cracking down on media at OWS?

And finally, here's hopey-changey on World press Freedom Day:

"We rededicate ourselves to the basic principle enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that every person has the right to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

"We recognise the courageous journalists who work every day to give meaning to these rights, often at great risk to their lives, as we have seen most recently with the tragic deaths of journalists in Libya," Obama said.

"As we witnessed in the historic events in Tunisia and Egypt, new media tools can also help empower citizens exercise their freedoms of speech and association, yet these same 21st century tools can be used to filter, block, and restrict free expression.

"That is why we must always stand up for the free flow of information around the world," he said.

"History shows that one of the ingredients of successful, prosperous, and stable societies is a free press where citizens can freely access information and hold their governments accountable," said the US President.

Dozens of countries curbing the press freedom: Obama

Sainsburys had a 5 minute free advert on the Today programme last week. Peak time. Justin Webb was enamoured, mmm-ing and aagh-ing and popping a few dummy questions to the CEO (Justin King), but mostly leaving him to stray over the high quality of sainsbury products, expanding profits, the uniqueness of the Sainsbury service, how they were doing the right thing for customers, responding to their needs, helping them with their weekly budgets. And to plug the new Sainsbury campaign: live well for less (twice).

"It's very interesting talking to you" says Webb, "you get a sense that you are preparing yourelf and your business for a really very different longer term situation when it comes to the decisions that shoppers make..."

A longer term situation where people can't afford to shop. Or eat.

"Keith Harrold of Project 5000 in Loughborough, which runs a hot food service once a week from a local church, agrees. "People are struggling. Supermarket prices are shooting up and they aren't coping."

"[Fairshare] works from 17 sites in the UK and shifts 3,600 tonnes of food a year, worth more than £8m. In the past 12 months the number of people it feeds has risen from 29,000 to 35,500. The number of organisations signed up to receive food has risen from 600 to 700. And 42% of those organisations are recording increases of up to 50% in demand for their services.

John Willetts, a former NHS trust chief executive and now the volunteer project director for FareShare in Leicester, said: "It's a constant ramping up in demand all the time. The volume of food we're distributing has risen from 41 tonnes a year three years ago to 98 tonnes now, and that's to the same number of organisations."

From http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/oct/01/families-queue-for-food-ha...

Listen to Webb at http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9607000/9607794.stm

Postscript to the child's homework. The child decided that our motives in going in to Libya were not as we had stated, but that it had been worth going in anyway - and the intervention was justified.

Further questions to the child:

1. Is it important whether the new govt is likely to be better than the old, given what we know about them. Mustafa Abdul Jalil who now heads the Libyan interim government [National Transition Council] recently said in a public gathering, "We will not accept any extremist ideology, on the right or the left. We are Muslim people, for a moderate Islam, and will stay on this road. We strive for a state of the law, for a state of prosperity, for a state that will have Islamic Sharia law the basis of legislation."

2. The 'rebels' (now the govt) have engaged in large scale looting of weapons. Since many of those who supported the rebel movement were islamic radicals, it's likely these will be used against 'the west' in other wars. This is exactly what happened in Afghanistan: we armed and trained Bin Laden's men to get the Russians out (in the 80s) and this is now being used against us.

3.The 'coalition' (UK, US, France etc) have broken international law in supporting the rebels and in pursuing regime change. What message does it send to the world if some people are allowed to remove leaders they don't like (but not those they do), and others aren't. Imagine Iran or China or Russia sending in the bombs to support a movement to depose a leader and how we would react to that. The law only works if everyone - including those at the top - respect it, and are brought to justice when they fail to do so.

Homework: Ask each member of your family
a) Why are we in Libya?
b) Do you think it's right that we are there?

Some answers

Surely Gadhafi is the new Saddam / Hitler / Stalin and we are stepping in to protect the Libyan people

Unlikely: there are dictators far more evil who treat their people far worse than Gadaffi ever did. Karimov (Uzbekistan) boils people alive. He is our great ally in the war on terror (and we use intelligence from his torture chambers to ‘win’ that war).

Gadhafi is not a nice man. He tortures people (we also used his torture services to gain ‘intelligence’ - rather than doing it ourselves1). But he has done more to raise the living standards of the Libyan people than the leader of any other African state:

• 1. “A Libyan rebel leader who was rendered to Tripoli with the assistance of MI6 said on Monday that he had told British intelligence officers he was being tortured but they did nothing to help him…
  Belhaj was detained by the CIA in Thailand in 2004 following an MI6 tipoff, allegedly tortured, then flown to Tripoli, where he says he suffered years of abuse in one of Muammar Gaddafi's prisons”. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/05/abdul-hakim-belhaj-libya-mi6...