Annual Northern Ireland regional conference of the Workers Party, Belfast 4th October 2008 - marking the 40th anniversary of the major Derry civil rights march of 5th October 1968.
TRIBUTES were paid on Wednesday to Paddy O’Hanlon, a founder member of the SDLP and the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association who died on Tuesday evening: here.
Some 200 workers have occupied the Visteon car parts plant in Belfast, Northern Ireland, against job cuts.
The workers went into occupation on Tuesday after the bosses summarily announced the closure of the plant with the loss of all jobs.
Davy MacMurray, from the Unite union, said the way the job cuts were announced was “brutal”. He said, “The administrator came in, held a meeting and told the workforce their employment was terminated. These people were going to be put out on the street tonight.”
Visteon took over the plant from Ford in 2000. All the parts the plant makes were for Ford.
One occupying worker told Socialist Worker, “Ford have a commitment and agreement with the unions that there would never be compulsory redundancies. At the very least we should get the same redundancy package as Ford workers.”
In the early evening the 200-strong workforce was holding protests both inside and outside the plant. Supporters were bringing supplies and sleeping bags. The furious workers are fighting to be treated with decency by the company and the administrators. They are planning protests tomorrow at Ford dealerships across the city.
Jon Macquire the Unite union convenor at the plant, spoke to Socialist Worker from the occupation. “Ford and Visteon have manipulated this situation together,” he said.
“We have been treated disgracefully. We are occupying the factory to save our jobs. There was no consultation whatsoever – they simply announced the closure.
“They have put the pension scheme into administration. To make it clear – we are in for the long haul and are committed to get proper redundancy packages and pensions.
“We are determined to continue our occupation and we appeal on workers throughout Ireland, Britain and internationally to support our fight to defend jobs.”
Visteon has also announced the closure of is plants in Basildon and Enfield – threatening another 400 jobs.
This is a video of Afghan refugees demonstrating in The Hague against government plans to deport them to war torn Afghanistan.
Today, at the international Afghanistan conference in The Hague, a Dutch TV journalist team was forcibly ejected, and their press accreditation was withdrawn.
This was because they asked United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: ‘Is it okay if we leave Afghanistan next year?’
Also, a demonstration expressing the majority viewpoint in the Netherlands, that the Afghanistan war should stop, was stopped and turned back by police.
Georgia is prepared to send a military contingent to Afghanistan, Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili said at a press conference with U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman General James Cartwright.
“I have told this to General Cartwright and the U.S. administration earlier,” he said, adding that Georgia is ready to contribute to the war on terrorism.
Georgia has deployed a peacekeeping force in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
Strange types of “peace” indeed which Saakashvili helped George W. Bush to keep. In Kosovo, most Serbs, Roma, Egyptians, etc., and all Croats and Jews, have been ethnically cleansed under the aegis of NATO. The remaining people mainly live in dire poverty. Unless you are an Albanian Kosovara rich Albanian Kosovar a rich Albanian Kosovar with a good relationship with armed nationalist paramilitaries. “National independence” is marred by foreign soldiers and military bases; and by the fact that most countries in the world do not recognize it, only a minority of close United States allies do. Meanwhile, people still die from NATO’s depleted uranium.
Georgia has said it is ready to send 300 soldiers to Afghanistan.
Do you have any feedback? Contact our journalist at: trend@trend.az
How will United States generals in Afghanistan like it, if Saakashvili maybe will withdraw his cannon fodder from Afghanistan as he did from Iraq; as he will prefer to use it in war in South Ossetia or Abkhazia again, with the same disastrous consequences for civilians as in 2008? If Saakashvili will have a fit of playing at being Napoleon Bonaparte in the Caucasus again, maybe to distract by external war attention from the Georgian internal opposition to his autocratic rule?
The Georgian army is a conscript army. So, people justifying using soldiers’ lives as cannon fodder cannot use the bromide “Well, after all they are professional soldiers etc.” here.
It was supposed to be the final frontier, where the petty jealousies of earth and other planetary concerns were left behind. But space is not the haven of international harmony it used to be. Once upon a time, astronauts on the international space station shared resources - food, equipment, facilities. But now, a veteran Russian cosmonaut has complained that he is not even allowed to use his American colleagues’ exercise bike - or his toilet.
According to Gennady Padalka, commercial squabbles on earth are starting to compromise morale in space. For seven glorious years after his first space mission in 1998, Padalka said he and his American astronauts had cooperated brilliantly. All this changed in 2005 when space missions were put on a commercial footing, he said, and Moscow started billing the US for sending its astronauts into orbit.
Padalka told Novaya Gazeta newspaper that officials had rejected his request to work out on the American exercise bike during their pre-training mission. Worse than that, they had also ruled that American and Russian crew members should use their own “national toilets”, with Russian crew banned from using the luxurious American astro-loo.
“What is going on has an adverse effect on our work,” Padalka, 50, was quoted as saying in an interview before he and his crew mates blasted off to the international space station last Thursday. They arrived safely on Saturday.
…
“Cosmonauts are above the ongoing squabble, no matter what officials decide,” said Padalka. He went on: “We are grown-up, well-educated and good-mannered people and can use our own brains to create normal relationship.
“It’s politicians and bureaucrats who can’t reach agreement, not us, cosmonauts and astronauts.”
He said he had inquired before the mission whether he could use an American machine to stay fit.
“They told me: ‘Yes, you can’. Then they said ‘no’. Then they hold consultations and they approve it again. And now, right before the flight, it turns out again that the answer is negative.”
Jerrie Cobb, a woman pilot, was the first woman to pass NASA astronaut training tests. Why she did not become an astronaut is a story that highlights society’s assumptions about women at that time — less than fifty years ago: here.
The G20 summit started to go badly wrong for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown last week when the governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, took the unprecedented step of overruling official government policy: here.
PEACE campaigners and climate-change activists dismissed the latest attempt by the government to scupper the pre-G20 protests on Tuesday: here.
I’m a care worker on less than £7 an hour with no pension – but Brown and the G20 are doing nothing to help millions like me: here.
Afghan Member of Parliament [then, in 2006, still; before she was expelled] Malalai Joya speaks about the troubling and declining status of women’s rights in Afghanistan.
‘Worse than the Taliban’ - new law rolls back rights for Afghan women
* Jon Boone in Kabul
* The Guardian, Tuesday 31 March 2009
Hamid Karzai has been accused of trying to win votes in Afghanistan’s presidential election by backing a law the UN says legalises rape within marriage and bans wives from stepping outside their homes without their husbands’ permission.
The Afghan president signed the law earlier this month, despite condemnation by human rights activists and some MPs that it flouts the constitution’s equal rights provisions.
The final document has not been published, but the law is believed to contain articles that rule women cannot leave the house without their husbands’ permission, that they can only seek work, education or visit the doctor with their husbands’ permission, and that they cannot refuse their husband sex.
A briefing document prepared by the United Nations Development Fund for Women also warns that the law grants custody of children to fathers and grandfathers only.
Senator Humaira Namati, a member of the upper house of the Afghan parliament, said the law was “worse than during the Taliban”. “Anyone who spoke out was accused of being against Islam,” she said.
The Afghan constitution allows for Shias, who are thought to represent about 10% of the population, to have a separate family law based on traditional Shia jurisprudence. But the constitution and various international treaties signed by Afghanistan guarantee equal rights for women.
…
Soraya Sobhrang, the head of women’s affairs at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said western silence had been “disastrous for women’s rights in Afghanistan”.
“What the international community has done is really shameful. If they had got more involved in the process when it was discussed in parliament we could have stopped it. Because of the election I am not sure we can change it now. It’s too late for that.”
FANS of wildlife documentaries could soon catch up with the latest rare animal sightings from their computers.
Cameras equipped with infrared triggers, known as camera traps, are used to identify, count and observe larger mammals in isolated areas. Now researchers from Earthwatch are adding the latest images from their camera traps in Ecuador’s cloud forests to Google Earth.
They hope to raise awareness of endangered species, encouraging donations and attracting tourists to the region to support conservation efforts. “It’s a form of fishing or hunting that doesn’t kill anything,” says Earthwatch scientist Mika Peck of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, who is leading the project.
Mammals currently on camera in the cloud forest include the spectacled bear - or “Paddington Bear” of South America - puma and deer.
The project should also enable researchers to pool sightings and information on animals from different areas, says Peck. “The idea is to expand this into other reserves and eventually inspire the local government to use this to monitor all their forests.” Peck hopes to have the system up and running by July.
Ecologists in Australia have discovered that cane toads are far more susceptible to being killed and eaten by meat ants than native frogs. Their research – published in the British Ecological Society’s journal Functional Ecology – reveals a chink in the cane toad’s armour that could help control the spread of this alien invasive species in tropical Australia.
Professor Rick Shine and his colleagues Georgia Ward-Fear, Matt Greenlees and Greg Brown from the University of Sydney’s Team Bufo (from the Latin name for the toxic toad) compared habitat use and activity patterns in meat ants, metamorph cane toads and seven native Australian frog species. They found that, unlike the native frogs, cane toads are poorly equipped to escape the meat ants.
According to Shine: “The spread of cane toads through tropical Australia has created major ecological problems. The ideal way to control toad numbers would be to find a predator that kills and eats toads but leaves native frogs alone. However, bringing in a predator from overseas might have catastrophic consequences, like those that occurred when cane toads themselves were brought in. So we’ve explored an alternative approach – to see if we could use a native predator. Meat ants are abundant around tropical waterbodies, and we often see them eating small toads, so we suspected that there might be some kind of mismatch between the invader and its newly invaded range, for example something about the toads’ behaviour that makes them vulnerable to a predator that poses little danger to native frogs.”
Through a series of laboratory experiments, Team Bufo looked at when the ants, frogs and toads were most active, where they chose to live, and how good the frogs and toads were at escaping attacking meat ants. They found cane toads opt to live in open microhabitats and are active during the day, patterns that match those of meat ants. By contrast, native frogs are nocturnal and are safely ensconced in vegetation or other shelters during the day, when meat ants are on the hunt.
Cane toads are also less well equipped to escape attacking meat ants, Team Bufo found. Using a specially-built runway, they tested the frogs’ and toads’ sprint speed and endurance. They found that compared with the quick and nimble native frogs, cane toads’ hops are shorter and slower due to their shorter shin bones. Native frogs were also more vigilant for meat ants than cane toads, they discovered.
The results are interesting not only because they reveal the cane toad’s Achilles’ heel – a weakness that could be exploited to help control the spread of the toxic toad – but because the same “evolutionary trap” could be used to snare invasive species elsewhere.
“The end result of this mismatch between traits of metamorph cane toads, which evolved in the Americas, and the ecological interaction between metamorph toads and meat ants in tropical Australia, is an ‘evolutionary trap’. That is, characteristics that increased toad survival where they evolved in the Americas are now a disadvantage, because the toads are facing different challenges in Australia – challenges they have not evolved to deal with. Such evolutionary traps should be especially common for invasive species, because so many aspects of their environment differ from those in which the traits of that species evolved,” says Shine.
###
Georgia Ward-Fear et al (2009). Maladaptive traits in invasive species: in Australia, cane toads are more vulnerable to predatory ants than are native frogs, Functional Ecology, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2435.2009.01556.x, is published online on 31 March 2009.
Despite the attempts to present a picture of responsible world leaders gathering to consult and cooperate on reviving the world economy, the participants in the G-20 summit will arrive in London effectively crippled and deeply at odds: here.
A march by 35,000 people through London was perhaps the largest of a number of protests in Europe directed towards this week’s G-20 summit: here.
Just days before the G-20 summit in London, tens of thousands took to the streets of the German capital Berlin and its main finance centre Frankfurt-Main on Saturday to protest the policies of the German government and political establishment: here.
From AAPSO (Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization):
Sixty Years of NATO
By the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the socialist camp (the countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR), the Warsaw Pact came to its end. It was the big global alliance which stood in the face of NATO. By the fall of the Warsaw Pact, the pretext provided by NATO members as a justification of its existence and continuation became invalid. The West always alleged that NATO was basically an alliance to protect the capitalist west in the face of the communist east.
However, what happened after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact was contrary to what should have been … a similar dissolution of NATO.
NATO instead started to expand eastward and include within its members Eastern European countries, that were a part of the socialist block, in order to besiege Russia again. It further began to give itself powers to intervene in the south under the pretext of countering terrorism like what occurred in Afghanistan. Hence, the role of NATO has exacerbated instead of having declined, and it has become an imminent danger threatening all the peoples of the world.
It is worth mentioning that NATO costs its members billions of dollars annually. Today while the world is going through a severe financial crisis, the peoples need to save every penny in order to survive and get over the crisis. Therefore, this huge military spending must aggravate the crisis and put shame on the peoples whose governments are members in NATO and their ability to bring about development. NATO is an abortive instrument and a danger that threatens the world with economic destruction and ruin.
NATO has now completed sixty years of crimes against humanity and against peoples. On this occasion, many global anti-war and struggling-for-peace organizations including the World Peace Council (WPC), are preparing for launching an anti-NATO campaign. They have already undertaken many activities in this respect and held three conferences - a European conference in Berlin on 14th – 15th March, an American conference in Buenos Aires on 19th – 20th March and an international conference in Belgrade on 23 – 24 March.
Learning that NATO is due to celebrate its 60th anniversary through a summit which is due to be held in Strasbourg, France and Baden-Baden, Germany on 2nd – 5th April 2009, the mentioned peace organizations have announced that they are going to convene an anti-NATO conference in Strasbourg on 3rd April under the title of “Bombing Yugoslavia as a Precedent of NATO’s Future Crimes”.
AAPSO calls for ending the presence of NATO as it lost the justification of its existence. This is in addition to the fact that AAPSO always opposes the military alliances and bases thinking that they represent a threat to the peace and the freedom, independence and sovereignty of peoples.
AAPSO, in addition, announces its strong support for all the world peace forces in that battle which is indeed regarded as a historic and decisive battle in the lives of peoples.
