Sunday, 18 July 2010
Israel Stops Listening to Its Judges
The Israeli government is facing legal action for contempt over its refusal to implement a Supreme Court ruling that it end a policy of awarding preferential budgets to Jewish communities, including settlements, rather than much poorer Palestinian Arab towns and villages inside Israel.
The contempt case on behalf of Israel’s Palestinian minority comes in the wake of growing criticism of the government for ignoring court decisions it does not like -- a trend that has been noted by the Supreme Court justices themselves.
Yehudit Karp, a former deputy attorney general, compiled a list of 12 recent court rulings the government has refused to implement, but legal groups believe there are more examples. Many of the disregarded judgements confer benefits on Palestinians, either in the occupied territories or inside Israel, or penalise the settlers.
Critics have accused the government of violating the rule of law and warned that the defiance has been possible chiefly because right-wing politicians and religious groups have severely eroded the Supreme Court’s authority over the past few years.
Senior members of the current right-wing government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, including the justice minister, Yaakov Neeman, have repeatedly criticized the court for what they call its “judicial activism”, or interference in matters they believe should be decided by the parliament alone.
Legal experts, however, warn that, because Israel lacks a constitution, the court is the only bulwark against a tyrannical Jewish majority abusing the rights of the country’s 1.3 million Palestinian citizens, as well as 4 million Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
Ilan Saban, a law professor at Haifa University, said: “Unlike most -- if not all -- other democracies, Israel lacks a political culture that respects limits on the power of the majority.”
Even the protections offered by Israel’s basic laws, he said, were not deeply entrenched and could easily be re-legislated. The lack of both a formal constitution and a tradition of political tolerance, he added, was “a dangerous cocktail”.
Israel’s liberal Haaretz newspaper went further, warning recently that, in “slandering the judiciary”, government officials had provoked a crisis that could “lead to the destruction of Israeli democracy”.
The country’s highest court is due to rule in the coming weeks on whether the government is in contempt of a ruling the court made four years ago to end a discriminatory scheme, known as National Priority Areas (NPA), that provides extra education funding to eligible communities.
The High Follow-Up Committee, an umbrella political body representing Israel’s large Palestinian minority, launched the case because only four small Palestinian villages were classified in NPAs, against some 550 Jewish communities. The scheme, introduced in 1998, is believed to have deprived Palestinian citizens, a fifth of Israel’s population, of millions of dollars.
Although the court ruled in February 2006 that the scheme must be scrapped, the government has issued a series of extensions until at least 2012.
Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal centre that launched the contempt petition, said: “This case has become a symbol of how the government refuses to implement decisions it does not like, especially ones relating to constitutional protection and minority rights.”
However, she said that punishing the state for its actions would not be easy. “After all, the court is not going to jail the government. The best we can hope for is a fine.”
The NPA case is only one of several that have highlighted a growing trend of law-breaking by the government...
Continue reading
Jonathan Cook @'Counterpunch'
Saturday, 17 July 2010
Little Axe: from blues to hip-hop and back
Skip McDonald was playing a gig in Portugal, billed as just him and guitar. A fair portion of the audience had seen the billing and decided an evening of traditional blues was just what they wanted. They might have wanted traditional blues, but they didn't get it. On entering the venue, they came across a stage upon which stood not a stool, a microphone and a guitar, but a selection of samplers and computers, as well as the setup for a full rock band."The purists were outraged," says McDonald. "About 20 of them started walking out. The rest of them stayed and we got on fine. It was a particularly good gig."
He can laugh about it now, because 17 years after starting his Little Axe project, in which the old Delta blues is reinterpreted with the aid of technology, what was a revolutionary approach to an old music has become the norm. Beck and Moby took McDonald's ideas and placed them in the mainstream. McDonald, who's flattered by his imitators, would be happy with their kind of sales, but more important to him is his mission to redefine what constitutes the blues.
"I don't like the way music is put in little boxes with a label on it," McDonald says. "I hear the blues in a lot of different types of music that no one would ever call the blues. And I don't think the blues has to be about pain. You might have a lyric about going across town where there's a woman who's nice to you. The blues can be joyous. There are two types of music: deep and shallow. For me, the blues is anything that starts with an emotion."
McDonald was born Bernard Alexander in Dayton, Ohio in September 1949. He was taught to play blues guitar when he was eight by his father, a steel worker who played at weekends. McDonald's father drilled home the importance of having a steady job, but the son wanted to chance his arm making it in music. He left home at 17, playing jazz, funk and disco up and down the east coast before he met bassist Doug Wimbish and then, in 1979, drummer Keith LeBlanc. As the house band of Sugarhill records, the trio played on some of the early hits of hip-hop – The Message, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five; White Lines by Grandmaster Melle Mel. Rap's modern take on the blues hit him "like a left hook from nowhere. Those early gigs in Harlem were just completely crazy."
McDonald went from Sugarhill to recording with Afrikaa Bambaataa and James Brown ("a serious man. I learned to call him Mr Brown"), with Sinéad O'Connor and – in another association with a label – the On-U Sound imprint of the English producer Adrian Sherwood, where the McDonald-Wimbish-LeBlanc trio formed the core of Tackhead, the avant-garde funk band that often served as On-U Sound's house band in the 80s.
McDonald first recorded as Little Axe in 1994, and his latest album, Bought for a Dollar, Sold For a Dime, takes McDonald full circle by reuniting the Sugarhill trio for the first time in 17 years. "To be true to yourself sometimes you have to go back to the beginning," he says, echoing the album's lyric about how a man must return to the crossroads to find himself. "I have a chemistry – a telepathy – with those people." But Little Axe remain a broader church. At one gig, the band were joined on stage by superfan Robert Plant.
"He's known for heavy metal, but I hear a blues singer," McDonald says. "I get into trouble for saying this but when I hear Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones they're immersed in blues. It's an endless journey for us all. I feel like I'm just getting started."
Dave Simpson @'The Guardian'
(Thanx Owen!)
Borneo Coal Plant Poses Triple Threat
It's hard to think of a worse place to build a coal-fired power plant than a strip of pristine beach nestled between Borneo's rich rainforests and its Coral Triangle, one of the most biodiverse marine ecosystems in the world. Unfortunately, that's exactly where the Malaysian government is now fast-tracking the construction of a new 300 megawatt facility.
Local villagers, who may be displaced, are unsurprisingly against the project, and a growing number of international organizations are now jumping into the fray. Together, they have formed a collective known as SOS Borneo to call attention to the potentially catastrophic consequences of the planned plant.
It's not only the global warming emissions these groups are concerned about. If the plant is built, transmission lines may cut through the rainforest. Jamie Henn, with 350.org, writes that residents of the rainforest include endangered species such as orangutans, Borneo pygmy elephants, and the last 40 Bornean rhinos in the world. In addition, sulfur dioxide pollution and acid rain also pose threats to the forest, to local fisheries and to the Coral Triangle area, which is home to three-quarters of the world's coral species.
The good news is that Borneo has energy options other than dirty coal. A University of California Berkeley audit found that a combination of energy efficiency improvements, biofuels (from palm plantation waste), hydropower, and geothermal would be better than a fossil-fueled plant. In the long-term, solar and ocean energy could provide enough power for the island and bring needed green jobs to boot.
Interestingly, Jeremy Hance reported for Mongabay that locals in the area are afraid their landscape will end up mimicking the degradation in American coal states, where air and water pollution, deforestation, mining have devastated the ecosystem. It's too bad America has to be the model for how not to generate energy. Let's hope Borneo can be an example of how to do things the right way.
As Henn sums up, "Stopping this coal plant is about more than protecting one strip of beach, it's a symbol of a global fight to protect our increasingly fragile planet against the onslaught of dirty energy -- from the island of Borneo to the Gulf of Mexico."
Sign this petition to issue your SOS, and tell Malaysian officials to stop this destructive coal plant.
Tara Lohan @'Change'
Friday, 16 July 2010
Capturing the Plastic Vortex
Project Kaisei is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco and Hong Kong, established to increase the understanding and the scale of marine debris, its impact on our ocean environment, and how we can introduce solutions for both prevention and clean-up.
Our main focus is on the North Pacific Gyre, which constitutes a large accumulation of debris in one of the largest and most remote ecosystems on the planet. To accomplish these objectives, Project Kaisei is serving as a catalyst to bring together public and private collaborators to design, test and implement break-throughs in science, prevention and remediation.
Kaisei means “Ocean Planet” in Japanese, and is the name of the iconic tall ship that was one of the two research vessels in the August expedition. The other was the New Horizon, a Scripps Oceanography vessel that was arranged via a new collaboration between Project Kaisei and Scripps to provide additional research on the impacts of debris in the gyre. Each vessel obtained a wide variety of samples from this part of the ocean which are now being analyzed. What was evident was the pervasiveness of small plastic debris that was found in every surface sample net that was used for regular sampling over 3,500 miles between the two vessels.
In the summer of 2010, Project Kaisei will launch its second Expedition to the North Pacific Gyre, where it will send multiple vessels to continue marine debris research, and in particular, to test an array of marine debris collection systems. Debris collected will be used to further study the feasibility of converting this to fuel or other useable material. As a collaborative action program, Project Kaisei is seeking sponsors, participants and leaders in their respective industries who can help to make a difference, on land, or at sea, in reducing marine debris.
@'Kaisei'
@'Kaisei'
Thursday, 15 July 2010
For Gas-Drilling Data, There’s a New Place to Dig
Starving for data about natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale? A new website hopes to feed your need. A couple of environmental and public health groups have teamed up to create FracTracker [1], a web tool that brings together different data sets and presents the information on a map.
Launched in late June, FracTracker allows users to upload their own data on all-things-gas-drilling, from lists of drilling permits or incident records to maps of air monitoring stations. Others can then go to the site and either look at the data in map form or download it raw.
The site is run by the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Healthy Environments and Communities [2] (CHEC), which is funded by the Heinz Endowments [3]. It is hosted by the Foundation for Pennsylvania Watersheds [4], an environmental group that funds local projects aimed at protecting the state’s waterways.
The center’s director of operations, Charles Christen, said CHEC came up with the idea while working with communities in western Pennsylvania, which along with much of West Virginia, New York and Ohio sit atop the Marcellus Shale, an extensive rock formation that holds vast quantities of natural gas.
As we’ve been reporting [5] for two years, people in those communities have become increasingly concerned about the environmental impacts of gas drilling. But they’ve often found it difficult to come up with the hard data they need to make informed decisions – or even to know what’s happening on a neighbor’s property. The site is designed to fill that gap, Christen said.
FracTracker allows people to search by topic [6] or select a specific area on a map. It also shows who uploaded the specific data set and whether other people have downloaded it or found it helpful. Since anyone can upload a data set, this transparency is critical to determining whether the information is reliable. CHEC will remove irrelevant data, but it doesn’t vet everything for accuracy. CHEC is counting on users to police the data themselves and to distinguish the good from the bad.
Christen said the site may be difficult for the average person to use, so the center has set up a blog [1] to serve as a forum for learning more about the tool. Over the next couple of months, it plans to reach out to various groups that not only may benefit from the site but also may be able to provide the data that FracTracker relies on.
“The success of this network, this information-sharing tool, really depends on the quality of the data we get,” Christen said. “I think we’re going to see really quality data up on this site and a lot of snapshots being used in a lot of different ways.”
Nicholas Kusnetz @'ProPublica'
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