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26 thoughts on “Africa”

  • Quelcrime

    Craig, just out of curiosity, are the companies you work for (according to Wikipedia) privately owned?

  • glenn

    You’re missing some cracking weather here – it’s like the middle of Summer again. Ran the London 1/2 marathon last Sunday, it was a scorcher! I was reminded of why you don’t like living in London too.

  • voila

    John Goss,
    you are welcome. I am enhjoying reading the comments to that article. Some pretty well informed and independent thinkers are there in Britain.

  • mary

    The One Show on BBC 1 tonight had an item about Vera Lynn and Dan Snow in the studio commented that she had been in Burma with the troops in 1944 and was very brave.
    .
    The studio guest Harry Connick Jr, an American performer, was asked if he would go to Afghanistan like Cheryl Cole who had been out there ‘entertaining’ the troops. This was obviously a scripted question.
    .
    He said ‘Sure thing. I have a sister in the US Army. God bless them for protecting us and keeping us safe’. !!!!

  • craig Post author

    Quelcrime,

    Private. I have a minority share. Used to own them, but gave them away to Ghanaians. I don’t take a salary but do have a stake. Also have some academic, NGO and agricultural work here on a voluntary basis.

    Voila,

    Thanks. I can speak Russian – about my only measurable talent. Lots of interest now in Russia in Karimov getting back on his anto Russian hobby horse he abandoned in 2005. Russia Today have been trying to interview me, but I am here.

  • mary

    I have just listened to this pretty horrifying report on the World Service about the production of Cassiterite in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
    .
    ‘From warzone to cellphone
    .
    Attempts by the authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo to get tough on smugglers in the east of the country seem to have had little effect. A huge trade in valuable minerals, many of them sought by Western electronics companies, continues to burgeon. Rebel militia groups are heavily involved in the business, and their activities have terrorised people across a wide area for some years.
    .
    Conor Woodman went to the region – and down the mines – to see for himself how transporting the minerals to neighbouring Rwanda is one way the smugglers have found to get around the export rules.’
    .
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00kb8cy/From_Our_Own_Correspondent_DR_Congo_and_Ireland/

  • John Goss

    Glad you’re safely there, Craig. I wouldn’t have known without Voila’s link that Karimov’s fashion-scene daughter was being groomed to take over as dictator.

  • Azra

    Nomad_Ic, Picking Bliar as the ME evnoy was like appointing Hiltler as the head of Israel Government! In some Hitler was a more honest persons, In a way Bliar is worse, his interest is in money and whoever pays him more can be his master.

  • mary

    Bahrain. A monstrous injustice against twenty doctors and nurses.
    .
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/29/bahrain-protester-death-sentence?newsfeed=true

    .
    Bahrain doctors jailed for treating injured protestersDoctors and nurses given up to 15 years in jail for treating people injured during uprising in Gulf kingdom
    .

    Martin Chulov guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 September 2011 15.16 BST
    Doctors and nurses protesting near Salmaniya hospital in Manama, Bahrain, this spring. Twenty medics, who treated protesters during the uprising, have been jailed for up to 15 years each. Photograph: Mazen Mahdi/EPA
    .
    Twenty Bahraini medics who treated activists wounded during anti-government protests were jailed for between five and 15 years in sentences that were immediately denounced by medical bodies and human rights groups around the world.
    .
    The sentences were handed down by a military court set up to handle the trials, which stemmed from an Arab spring-inspired uprising in the country in February and March. It was crushed with the help of armies from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Thirteen of the doctors and nurses received sentences of 15 years in prison, while another seven received terms of five to 10 years.
    .
    All of the accused were charged with committing crimes against the state, during an uprising they insist was peaceful and popularly inspired.
    .
    Most worked at the Salmaniya Medical Centre in Manama, which became a focal point of the tiny Gulf kingdom’s uprising. Government officials claimed it had been transformed into a base for a plot to overthrow the 200-year-old monarchy.
    .
    The formal charges were for stealing medicine, possessing weapons and occupying a government hospital. The medics were also accused of “inciting hatred to the regime and insulting it, instigating hatred against another sect and obstructing the implementation of law, destroying public property and taking part in gatherings aimed at jeopardising the general security and committing crimes.”
    .
    The doctors, all of whom denied the charges, were among dozens arrested for joining protests led by Bahrain’s Shia majority against the government headed by the country’s ruling Sunni minority
    .

    /…..

    Ma Clinton protests about the treatment of the trouble stirrer US Ambassador Cretz in Syria but will not make a peep about this.

  • John Goss

    Azra, thanks for the link.
    .
    “FBI undercover agents now number 15,000, ten times their number during the protests against the Vietnam War, when protesters were suspected of communist sympathies.”
    .
    I’ve noticed recently that MI5 are recruiting on the radio, I think it was Five Live. “Don’t tell anyone that you have applied, apart from your wife”. So no sex-discrimination there!

  • mary

    Glenn Greenwald on what I referred to earlier.
    .
    Friday, Sep 30, 2011 06:31 ET
    The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality
    By Glenn Greenwald
    .
    It was first reported in January of last year that the Obama administration had compiled a hit list of American citizens whom the President had ordered assassinated without any due process, and one of those Americans was Anwar al-Awlaki. No effort was made to indict him for any crimes (despite a report last October that the Obama administration was “considering” indicting him). Despite substantial doubt among Yemen experts about whether he even has any operational role in Al Qaeda, no evidence (as opposed to unverified government accusations) was presented of his guilt. When Awlaki’s father sought a court order barring Obama from killing his son, the DOJ argued, among other things, that such decisions were “state secrets” and thus beyond the scrutiny of the courts. He was simply ordered killed by the President: his judge, jury and executioner. When Awlaki’s inclusion on President Obama’s hit list was confirmed, The New York Times noted that “it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.”
    .
    After several unsuccessful efforts to assassinate its own citizen, the U.S. succeeded today (and it was the U.S.). It almost certainly was able to find and kill Awlaki with the help of its long-time close friend President Saleh, who took a little time off from murdering his own citizens to help the U.S. murder its. The U.S. thus transformed someone who was, at best, a marginal figure into a martyr, and again showed its true face to the world. The government and media search for The Next bin Laden has undoubtedly already commenced.
    /….
    http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/30/awlaki/index.html

  • Suhayl Saadi

    A little off topic, perhaps. Here is a piece on the bahraini doctors being tortured and imprisoned on completely false pretences by the crimial Bahrain junta. It seems the the Bahrain Royal family, apart from being culpable as the apex of the command-and-control structure, were also personally involved in acts of torture on schoolchildren, doctors, nurses. This demonstrates that they are nothing more than hoodlums – nothing new for autocratic Arab regimes. The whole world can see their criminality. Time for them to go. And on day, they will go.
    .
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/i-was-tortured-in-bahrain-police-cell-says-one-of-the-doctors-jailed-for-15-years-2364705.html

  • Suhayl Saadi

    John, how interesting. MI5 are also recruiting weekly for one hour through the ridiculous TV drama, ‘Spooks’.
    .
    Has anyone noticed that many men in the UK mainly now wear their hair in military cuts? That this has become normative? 30-40 years ago, for all their other faults, the police, too, used to sport various hairstyles; now they are all (the men, anyway), have crew-cuts – Bruce Willis – black (no longer ‘boys-in-blue’) gear and calf-boots and so they look more militaristic and uniform than before. Is this the subtle (in part, self)-militarisation of civil society? 10 years of the ‘War on Terror’, yes, but the militarisation of couture really began during the coverage of the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early-to-mid 1990s – that’s when ‘combats’, for example, first became mainstream in the UK (before that, it was just Army and navy Stores and usually hippie-types and others who wore them) and this was a mimicry of the Yugoslav militias. I really dislike this entire tendency towards miliatristic machismo. I think it inspissates and pollutes us all.

  • Roderick Russell

    Suhayl Saadi – Can’t get your piece up about the Bahrain Royals and torture. I am in the Calgary Central Library and each time I open the link the computer I am on freezes – and it won’t shut down so I have to turn it off and re-boot from scratch. All the other links I have tried today seem to be working.

  • Azra

    Mary, at least Ma Clinton does not say what Pa Clinton used to say ” America the greatest nation in the world”.. do you think they have realized that the fire power does equate greatness?? You can see from the list below why they are so desperate to keep status quo for their puppets, and prop up new ones..

    The US is the biggest debtor in the world – owing a colossal $52000000000000 ($52 trillion)*
    2. With the US economy producing $15 trillion worth of goods and services a year, its total debt is equivalent to 350% of GDP
    3. The debt amounts to every single man, woman and child in the US indebted to the tune of over $165,000. However, half of the US population lives on less than $46,000 a year
    4. US debt amounts to 58000 times the $900 billion of actual currency (or hard cash) in circulation
    5. Interest payments on US debt totalled $414000000000 ($414 billion) alone in 2010. This is equivalent to the annual GDP of Norway.
    6. Paradoxically the US borrows to pay back existing debt
    7. The US ‘debt ceiling’ has had to be raised 33 times since 1981
    8. In 2008 the US Government bailed out the financial sector to the tune of at least $13 trillion which is nearly equivalent to total value of goods and services produced in the whole country in a year**

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