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As the city’s once-booming real estate sector has collapsed in the past 12 months, however, business partnerships formed during recent years have splintered. Lawyers speak of speculative property investors being dangled from the windows of unfinished Dubai tower blocks by Russian mobsters whose property deals have gone sour.
He pointed out that the gang phenomenon is not confined to Jamaica, as other Caribbean countries are also facing the same problem, with Trinidad and Tobago having about 86 gangs and Guyana, 40. He said these gangs are well organised and sophisticated, and are involved in activities, such as drug smuggling, human trafficking, gun smuggling and money laundering.
The development challenges African countries face stem from their use of an inappropriate governance structure, the nation-state, writes Amira Kheir. The nation-state is an inherited system that does not match the continent’s needs and potential, says Kheir, arguing instead for a state that functions as an administrative centre for legislation and organisation but that remains free from ‘fictitious affiliations’ to a larger identity.
It is like a commodities business with huge margins,
This Homecoming year – the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns – tributes to the bard resounded across the world as the record was broken for the greatest number of Burns suppers ever held, proving the poet is more popular than ever before. We look back at the history of this annual celebration of Burns and explore its continuing popularity.
The most powerful law in the scientific world is the law of unintended consequences! In 1801, on the fifth anniversary of the death of Robert Burns, nine men who knew him met for dinner in Burns Cottage in Alloway to celebrate his life and works. The Master of Ceremonies was a local minister – a liberal theologian and an equally liberal host. Hamilton Paul and his guests shared Masonic brotherhood with Rabbie and Paul devised an evening which looked a bit like a lodge ceremonial, centred on a fine fat haggis; with recitation and singing of Burns's works and a toast (in verse) to the memory of their friend and hero.
It was such a jolly evening, all agreed to meet again the following January for a Birthday Dinner for the bard, little knowing that they had invented a global phenomenon that we know as the BURNS SUPPER – which still broadly follows the Reverend's original plan.
Burns's popularity grew rapidly after his untimely death and the idea of meeting annually to share his poems and songs in the bonds of friendship caught the public imagination. Some Ayrshire merchants in Greenock followed with the first Burns Club Supper in January 1802 and the West coast towns with strong links to Rabbie reached out and joined in the new festival: Paisley, Irvine, Kilmarnock and Dumfries.
Typically, a dozen or more men sat down to dine – as often working men as the middle classes – sometimes in a bar Rab had frequented. But the real link was his poetry with its message of love, freedom and the essential value of humanity. Many early suppers were organised by Burns Clubs who exist today, but a big boost in participation came with the big literary Burns Suppers, the original organised by Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh in 1815 with Hogg the Ettrick Shepherd giving the Immortal Memory.
Going Global
The first Supper outwith Scotland was at Oxford University in 1806 (hosted by a few Glasgow students) with London seeing its first Bard-day party in 1810. Wherever there were Scots merchants trading in the English county towns, festivals sprung up over the next twenty years.
The format was popular – whether as part of a wider club or an annual combination of party and poetry. In those days many Scots received a good education at home then packed off to foreign climes to seek a fortune (or at least build the empire) and the Burns Supper followed them. Army officers held India's first supper as early as 1812; traders travelled about the same time to Canada and were Addressing the Haggis in a colder January wind than they'd remembered back home; merchants and ministers (and maybe even a few convicts) carried Burns's works to Australia with Festivals from 1823 and the first formal Burns Supper in 1844; while the poet's own nephew helped found the city and Burns Club of Dunedin in New Zealand.
It would be wrong to see the Burns Supper as a purely imperial story. From the early publication of Rabbie's works in Philadelphia, America had warmed to his talent and a philosophy which chimed with the new-born Columbia thus bringing the Burns Supper to a wider range of people than just the Diaspora. Similarly, in the twentieth century, Burns and his supper jumped the wall into the two communist superpowers as China and particularly Russia embraced a herald of the poetical red dawn. Even today, Russian Januaries abound with exuberant Burns Suppers! And in terms of cross cultural fertilisation, the modern invention of Gung Haggis Fat Choy combining the Scots and Chinese heritages of Vancouver would be a party that Burns would certainly smile at!
The Legacy of the Burns Supper
It's a unique legacy. No other poet is fêted across the world on his birthday and it is spontaneous – no central body writes the rules, or organises the speakers, or sets the tone. Like Rabbie, the Burns Supper is totally open to all.
This Homecoming year – his 250th anniversary – sees hundreds of Burns Suppers as an important part of the programme so visitors and residents can join in the fun and festival which is the basis as the First Minister said: 'to honour Burns himself as well as those who keep his legacy alive in Scotland and across the world today'.
So however you celebrate, whether you host a grand banquet, or even just have a few friends around the kitchen table: take your haggis, relish his poems and, of course raise a generous toast to his genius and you're sharing in a gift that Scotland has given the whole world – which started simply with nine men in a cottage and now resounds throughout the globe!
Clark McGinn comes from Ayr but has been speaking at Burns Suppers for what his audience often says is a long, long time. He is the author of the popular 'The Ultimate Burns Supper Book' based on his experiences internationally and has just published 'The Ultimate Guide To Being Scottish'
FAVELA RISING documents a man and a movement, a city divided and a favela (Brazilian squatter settlement) united. Haunted by the murders of his family and many of his friends, Anderson S�is a former drug-trafficker who turns social revolutionary in Rio de Janeiro’s most feared slum. Through hip-hop music, the rhythms of the street, and Afro-Brazilian dance he rallies his community to counteract the violent oppression enforced by teenage drug armies and sustained by corrupt police.
At the dawn of liberation, just as collective mobility is overcoming all odds and Anderson’s grassroots Afro Reggae movement is at the height of its success, a tragic accident threatens to silence the movement forever.
Summary of Report: SIGIR 10-008
Why SIGIR Did this Study
The Department of State (DoS) Bureau of
International Narcotics and Law Enforcement
Affairs (INL) contract with DynCorp
International includes task orders to support the
Department of Defense’s (DoD) Iraqi police
training program. Under the task orders,
DynCorp has provided police advisors and
in-country support for those and other advisors.
INL’s Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan Support
Division is primarily responsible for oversight
of the DynCorp contract. The Special Inspector
General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR)
examined INL’s oversight of the task orders
because they cost over $2.5 billion and INL has
had a history of weak oversight of the task
orders. Specifically, SIGIR examined: (1) the
costs, funding, and award process for the largest
and most recent task orders; (2) DoS oversight
of the task orders; and (3) the status of INL’s
implementation of SIGIR’s prior
recommendations.
What SIGIR Recommends
Because weak contract administration and
oversight have been long-standing issues that
INL has not corrected, SIGIR recommends that
the Deputy Secretary of State for Management
and Resources direct an immediate examination
of the Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan Support (AIJS)
Division’s personnel and operations to
determine if the Division is structured, staffed,
and managed to effectively and efficiently
oversee the contracts under its responsibilities.
Until such an examination can be conducted,
SIGIR recommends that the Assistant Secretary,
INL, direct the Chief of AIJS to develop
detailed guidance for ICORs, assign specific
responsibilities to each ICOR, determine how
many ICORs are needed in Iraq to accomplish
assigned responsibilities, and staff the invoice
reconciliation effort to validate historical
invoices within the next 2 years.
Management Comments and Audit
Response
INL agreed with SIGIR’s recommendations.
It did not agree with SIGIR’s position that
$2.5 billion in U.S. funds are vulnerable to
waste and fraud. Because of the serious
control weaknesses identified in this and prior
audits, SIGIR maintains its position.
Fears are intensifying that the emirate has become a global centre for terror funding, money-laundering, drug money and mafia cash
The 100 top employees at Goldman Sachs in London will have their total pay capped at �1m when the bank reveals its 2009 bonuses this week.
Top Wall Street bankers attending the World Economic Forum this week in the Swiss town of Davos will use the meeting to lobby regulators against Barack Obama’s plan to curb banks’ size and trading activity and break-up big institutions.
Al Shabab, the Somali militant group with ideological links to Al Qaeda, says the threat to attack Kenya – posted on its website this week – is fake.
The pirate stock exchange basically runs on the honor system – investors give pirates money and equipment with the understanding that they will receive a portion of the prize should the pirates successfully capture and ransom a ship. But if the pirates refuse to share the wealth, the whole system falls apart. And with essentially no functioning government in that portion of Somalia, the Puntland pirates and Haradheere locals will have to sort this dispute out themselves.
He essentially advances an economic theory of the mafia: they are entrepreneurs and firms who collude and compete; the good they sell is not violence, or stolen property, but protection. That is, they enforce contracts in places the government can't or won't, like illegal and illicit markets, or areas where the police and courts are weak. They actively compete with the police to provide protection, and this good is in high demand. Every transaction done under the table cannot seek protection from the courts, and the mafia step naturally into this gap.
23 January – 7 February 2010
Rooms 17a & 18a
Free admission
In this display, The Metropolitan Police Service's Art and Antiques Unit will showcase some of the investigative methods involved in detecting and preventing the increasingly sophisticated crime of art forgery. Using historical and contemporary criminal cases, the broader financial and cultural impacts of art forgery on modern society are considered. Exhibits will include the diverse body of work assembled by the forger, Shaun Greenhalgh, who executed such fake "masterpieces" as the Egyptian Amarna princess and paintings purporting to be the work of the English artist, L.S. Lowry.
22 January, 2010 - Facing chronic political instability during the post-civil war period, Guinea-Bissau has been trying to rebuild the pillars of peace, human rights, security, justice and integrity. To support this, the UNODC Regional Office for Brazil and the Southern Cone has facilitated an agreement between the Government of Brazil and the Government of Guinea-Bissau to construct a training centre for the country's security forces.
During the late 1990s, Guinea-Bissau faced a civil war resulting in political instability, which led to the destruction of infrastructure and drastically reduced the local gross domestic product. The civil conflict also resulted in thousands of refugees fleeing Guinea-Bissau to different countries in Africa. The atmosphere of insecurity became an obstacle to the country's economic and social development, discouraged investment by diverting limited resources to unproductive expenditure and fostered crime.
In addition, a recent report by UNODC Drug Trafficking as a Security Threat in West Africa demonstrated how Guinea-Bissau is under siege by drug traffickers. The country has become the hub of a new cocaine trafficking route from South America via West Africa to supply growing demand for illegal drugs in Europe. There is an urgent need to tackle organized crime - in the broader context of security sector reform - and to strengthen administration of justice and the rule of law.
The creation of a police academy will boost the country's police forces and support the Government to implement the National Plan to Fight Drugs and Crime, supported by the UNODC Regional Office for West and Central Africa. With an investment of US$ 3 million from the Brazilian Agency for Cooperation, the project will, over a three year period, build the technical capacity of local police and help regulate the police force according to internationally recognized standards. The Government has designated 30,000 square metres for the academy in Bissau, the capital.
UNODC will be working with the Brazilian Federal Police Department, which will coordinate activities for the new police academy. Since 2008, that Department has been carrying out a training programme for foreign security officials, supported by UNODC. In two years, 158 officers from Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and African Portuguese-speaking countries were trained at the Brazilian Police Academy. Guinea-Bissau sent 66 participants - more than half of its entire judicial police.
According to Bo Mathiasen, UNODC representative for Brazil and the Southern Cone, organized crime operates on several fronts and does not respect borders. "We must then face crime locally and globally through international cooperation," said Mr. Mathiasen during the graduation ceremony for one class of foreign officials.
By strengthening cooperation between Brazil and Guinea-Bissau, UNODC reinforces its commitment to improve South-South cooperation, in which developing countries with common historical and cultural traits help each other to find development solutions and share successful experiences on how to boost the living conditions of their citizens.
The agreement represents a firm consolidation of South-South cooperation and recognizes UNODC as the first United Nations agency in Brazil to implement a cooperation project in this context.
Let us face it; Nairobi is East Africa’s most important commercial city. The whole region depends on it. International agencies depend on it even to reach lawless Somalia. Disrupting its operations and allowing terrorist insurgents to infiltrate it is an act of recklessness of the highest order. It is the kind of negligence that many governments have been punished for over and over in recent history.
However, he stressed that this cannot be done as long as ‘Ndrangheta is seen as a major provider of jobs in a region with one of Italy’s highest unemployment rates.
# Offshoring and outsourcing see dramatic growth. Percent of “value added” by final seller of manufactured goods drops into the 15-25% range for many companies. Virtual supply chains go from vision to reality. It was early in this past decade when companies like Levi’s jettisoned their own plants to become brand companies.
Cuckoo smurfing is a new laundering technique employing functionaries, or 'smurfs', to deposit black money into the bank accounts of unsuspecting individuals or companies.
Wilson Prichard, a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies who has closely followed Ghana's development as an offshore centre, said: 'Aside from the general social costs associated with the operation of tax havens globally, in the absence of a very strong regulatory framework and very strong standards of transparency there's a particularly high risk that a tax haven in west Africa, which is home to major oil wealth and high levels of corruption, could facilitate large-scale corruption and tax evasion, and pose a correspondingly large risk to good governance and economic growth in the region.'"
Frustrated by the ongoing story of Greece's public finance problems, the European Commission has indicated it will seek audit powers for the EU's statistics office, Eurostat, in order to verify elements of national government accounts.
Outgoing Croatian President Stjepan Mesic said he would intervene militarily if Milorad Dodik, the leader of the Bosnian Serb dominated Republika Srpska, made a move to secede from Bosnia, a Croatian daily reported on Tuesday.
Chamil added that drug trafficking hasn’t been confronted as it should and has permeated everything. “The time has come to give the country results or we are going to regret it.”
Many people in Guinea Bissau believe that the arrest of Ms Na Tchuto is a settling of scores that may further complicate the search for a solution to the case of the former Navy Chief of Staff. While some unconfirmed report say the UN has since handed him over to the Bissau government, reports from other quarters say he is still hiding in the United Nations premises and refuses to surrender without a guarantee of safety for himself and his family.
Pirates are making headway off the West African coast – the Gulf of Guinea is second only to Somalia in terms of pirate attacks.
There were only 59 reports of looting on archaeological sites in 2009, a significant fall from 238 in 2008
Niger exports enough uranium to France to generate 80 per cent of the latter’s electricity supply, writes Khadija Sharife. But ordinary Nigeriens reap little benefit from France’s control of their country’s uranium resources, with over three-fifths of the population living below the poverty line and reports of radioactive contamination of water, air and soil by multinational mining operations.
Written up at the behest of EU finance ministers, the document talks of 'deliberate misreporting of figures by the Greek authorities in 2009.'
The reliability of Greek government deficit and debt statistics has been the subject of continuous and unique attention for several years. In 2004, Eurostat produced a comprehensive report on the revision of the Greek government deficit and debt figures, showing how the Greek statistical authorities had misreported figures on deficit and debt in the years between 1997 and 2003. On five occasions since 2004 reservations have been expressed by Eurostat on the Greek data in the biannual press release on deficit and debt data. When the Greek EDP data have been published without reservations, this has been the result of Eurostat interventions before or during the notification period in order to correct mistakes or inappropriate recording, with the result of increasing the notified deficit. Other elements of this continuous attention are a high number of visits, including four methodological visits, and an action plan agreed with the Greek authorities, addressing the statistical problems that could be diagnosed by Eurostat. That action plan was regularly reviewed by Eurostat. Though eventually an overall level of completion was achieved, given that Eurostat is restricted to statistical matters in its work the measures foreseen in the action plan were mainly of a methodological nature, and did not address the issues of institutional settings, accountability, responsibility and political interference.The 2004 events led to amendments of the EU legal framework for fiscal data in order to strengthen that framework and to improve the monitoring by the Commission of data provided by Member States in the context of the EDP notifications exercises. The existing legal framework and the governance system for government deficit and debt data at EU level are in general functioning well and produce fiscal data of a generally high quality. It is important to acknowledge the overall efficient and loyal cooperation between national authorities and the Commission that characterises this governance system.
The events which have occurred in Greece, as described in this report, are therefore not considered as systemic and relate to individual, country-specific problems. The most recent revisions are an illustration of the lack of quality of the Greek fiscal statistics (and of Greek macroeconomic statistics in general) and show that the progress in the compilation of fiscal statistics in the country, and the intense scrutiny by Eurostat since 2004, have not sufficed to bring the quality of Greek fiscal data to the level reached by other EU Member States. Even if the existing governance framework for fiscal statistics at EU level functions satisfactorily and enables improvements of a statistical and methodological nature, it cannot prevent deliberate misreporting of data.
While major international banks have collapsed in these times of economic crisis, small microfinance institutions are still performing well. Poor women - until recently regarded as totally non-creditworthy - are paying back their loans while large companies fail to meet their repayments.
Then there is the informal type. Nigeria, for instance, imposes bans on, well, almost everything that is of interest to someone of power in Nigeria. But that does not stop the importation of those things. Importers simply divert the trade to Benin and then smuggle them from Benin to Nigeria. Rice is a particular case in point. In 2007, for instance, a Nigerian newspaper reports that the total import duty on rice in Nigeria came to about 100%, while in Benin it was 38%. In the same year, it was estimated that about 2,000 tonnes of rice was re-exported (smuggled) from Benin into Nigeria per day. If you are a smart importer you simply divert your rice to Benin, pay the import duty – and those guys are pretty well organised so you WILL pay the duty - and then smuggle it into Nigeria. While I was researching these issues in Cotonou in 2008, someone mentioned that she could almost believe that the Beninese government bribes Nigeria to prohibit the importation of some goods into the country so that Benin can make some money off it.
Investigations have revealed that these super-pirates have turned into transnational poly-criminals. They circumvent and adapt to the naval presence, and in their continued quest to expand their avenues for making money, the pirates are now engaging in vast criminal activities including money laundering, arms and human trafficking, paying bribing, extortion, training terrorist organisations such as the Al-Shabaab and more recently, protecting international drug cartels.
But Marbella is much harder to define. Before going there to film an ITV1 documentary, I assumed it was a rough, tough Costa del Crime kind of town where villains hung out with boozed-up glamour models, hookers and footballers, snorting cocaine and avoiding the police. And to a certain extent it is. But there's another, quite extraordinary side to Marbella - one of staggering wealth and discretion that acts as a fabulously opulent secret haven for super-rich Saudi princes, Hollywood stars, European royalty and billionaire tycoons.
It's hard to think of anywhere on the planet where two such disparate worlds live within the same couple of square miles together.
Last week’s strike by public transport operators was yet another stark reminder of what happens when a country allows corruption to rule the roost in any of its organs.
At some point in time, a nation comes to a moment of reawakening when it must confront the tragedy of its shame.
Matatus went on strike over complaints of “police harassment”, a euphemism for demand of bribes. Without an alternative public transport system, thousands of commuters, including school going children, were stranded and precious man hours lost.
Blame irascible matatu crews and a traffic police brigade with many corrupt faces in its ranks. The two are joined in the hip by their singular lack of public accountability and contempt for ethic duty.
The matatu industry, an avenue for investment and employment for many, represents the best and worst of the true spirit of enterprise. Self-regulated by often competing interests, the industry has largely degenerated into a by-word for disorder and indiscipline – a Kenyan wild west.
German investigators are uncovering the drug-smuggling business of the Syrian-backed Lebanese militant organisation Hezbollah, moving cocaine from Beirut into Europe via Frankfurt airport.
Corruption and the grey economy are among the reasons cited for the continuing decline in foreign investments in Kosovo.
Seems like most everyone is talking - somewhat ominously - about 'parallel' illegal institutions in northern Kosovo. Kosovo's government is calling for international assistance to 'dissolve' them. KEK (the Kosovo power company)- which cut electricity to the north in October in order to bully the Serbs into accepting it as their supplier of electricity - is now asking for international help to stop the Serbian provider, EPS, from 'illegally' collecting bills in the north. And now, most worrisome of all if the press reports are accurate, the NATO Commander for southern Europe, Admiral Fitzgerald is claiming that the Serb municipal councils in the north are illegal and a threat to security because they are in violation of UNSCR 1244. When the Albanians ask for international help to dissolve the so-called parallel institutions in the north and the NATO command agrees they are illegal and a security threat, its seems a good cause for worry.
Central Europe and especially the Czech Republic and Hungary, are used as centers for coordination, communication and conciliation between very powerful international crime syndicates, which have managed to install their HQs of their operations and gain access in the heart of the EU.
Although it has not been a subject of special reporting by the media in Europe, when assessing organized crime activities in Europe, one should take into serious consideration the situation in this region.
The involvement of insurgent and extremist groups in criminal activity is an issue that has been a concern of U.S. administrations for decades. In recent years, some observers have claimed that interactions between international terrorists and criminals are increasing. If true, expanded links between criminal and terrorist networks could increase U.S. vulnerability to attack by terrorist groups with enhanced criminal capabilities and financial resources. An expanded range of combined criminal and terrorist activity could also affect the global economy and U.S. foreign policy goals, undermining licit international commerce and the promotion of good governance and rule of law. Threats posed by a crime-terrorism nexus may be particularly challenging, as the scale and nature of their cooperation are believed to vary widely and limited anecdotal evidence largely serves as the basis for current understanding of the problem.scale and nature of their cooperation are believed to vary widely and limited anecdotal evidence largely serves as the basis for current understanding of the problem.
U.S. efforts to combat the relationship between crime and terrorism are a subset of broader policy
responses to transnational crime and international terrorism individually. While numerous U.S. strategies and programs are designed to combat international terrorism and transnational crime separately, fewer efforts focus specifically on addressing the confluence of the two. Those efforts that do exist focus mainly on (1) human smuggling and clandestine terrorist travel, (2) money laundering and terrorist financing, and (3) narcoterrorism links between drug traffickers and terrorists. Many of these efforts, including the creation of the Human Smuggling and Trafficking
Center, the reorganization of the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, and the expanded extraterritorial jurisdiction authority to investigate and prosecute international narcoterrorism cases, occurred in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Congress played a large role in such efforts, holding at least eight hearings specifically on some aspect of criminal-terrorist interactions between the end of 2000 and 2005. Legislation that has expanded and adjusted agency authorities, resources, and responsibilities related to the crimeterrorism nexus includes the USA PATRIOT Act (P.L. 107-56), the Intelligence Reform Act and Terrorism Prevention Act of2004 (P.L. 107-458), the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 (P.L. 109-177), and appropriations-related legislation through the 111th Congress for various U.S. agencies, including the Departments of State and Defense.
This report provides a primer on the confluence of transnational terrorist and criminal groups and related activities abroad. It evaluates possible motivations and disincentives for cooperation between terrorist and criminal organizations, variations in the scope of crime-terrorism links, and the types of criminal activities—fundraising, material and logistics support, and exploitation of corruption and gaps in the rule of law—used by terrorist organizations to sustain operations. This report also discusses several international case studies to illustrate the range of crime-terrorism convergence and non-convergence, including Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company; the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC); the 2004 Madrid bombers; the Taliban; Hezbollah; Al Qaeda; the 2005 London bombers; Al-Shabaab; as well as known or alleged crime-terrorism facilitators such as Viktor Bout, Monzer Al Kasser, and Abu Ghadiyah. Policy considerations
discussed in this report include possible tensions between counterterrorism and anti-crime policy objectives, implications for U.S. foreign aid, gaps in human intelligence and analysis, the value of
financial intelligence in combating the crime terrorism nexus, impact of digital and physical safe havens and ungoverned spaces, implications for nuclear proliferation, and effects of crimeterrorism links in conflict and post-conflict zones. Unless otherwise noted, this report does not address potential crime-terrorism links in the domestic or border environment.
Police Investigators have suggested that institutional corruption has generated more ‘black’ money than drug trafficking, the country’s second major black market.
Now certain sections of the media have even hinted at possible links between the port and the increasing number of pirate attacks launched from neighbouring Somalia.
The senior official didn’t have any idea then that Figueroa had infiltrated the two agencies to which he belongs, the National Police and the DNCD.
At first he thought the escape was fruit of the criminal’s audacity, but today it appears that he had internal help who tipped him off from the inside.
Supreme Court (SCJ) president Jorge Subero Isa affirmed Tuesday that the judges have never neither received or accept pressure from drug trafficking and the Judicial Branch doesn’t fear it either.
YEMEN'S navy is charging commercial vessels up to $US55,000 ($60,800) each to guarantee transit through the pirate-infested waters of the Gulf of Aden under a deal that has reaped about $US30 million over 18 months.
Del Vecchio said that the top two countries of destination of the illegal drugs was Spain and Italy. However, police also registered drug smugglers from Israel, Britain, South Africa, United States, Guatemala, EL Salvador, Dominican Republic, Lithuania, Belgium, Holland, Portugal and Venezueal, among others.
The pirates are using some of their hijacked merchant ships as mother ships for their operations far from the Somali coast (where the oil tankers head south from the Persian Gulf, some 1,500 kilometers east of Africa.) Foreign warships cannot retake these ships, because the pirates threaten to kill the crew, who are being forced to operate the ship at sea.
The number of pirate attacks and attempted hijackings of oil tankers hit a high in 2009, an industry group reported, highlighting a geopolitical risk in the global oil market that could increase this year and push crude prices higher.
As the Moroccan government comes under heavy pressure from the United States of America, Guinean Junta leader seems to have been placed under serious military protection otherwise known as indirect arrest, to prevent him from returning to Guinea.
Hundreds of mayors and other officials across the country are being investigated for bribery and influence peddling, and police have seized assets worth billions of dollars. The government and the opposition agree that things have to change.
The system that the west touted as superior has failed. Why should developing countries blindly follow its model now?
The land purchase has been done in places like Oromia, Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, Port Sudan, Khartoum and Suwakin in Sudan, and in Nairobi in Kenya.
Rising food prices is one of the main reasons for the rush. Food price inflation rose 19.95% for the week ended December 2 from the previous year, with prices of food products and vegetables reaching record levels due to a combination of hoarding and slow production after the country saw its worst monsoon since 1972.
“The cheap cost of land is the main driver for such a trend,” says Dileep Choksi, a leading tax and accounting consultant, who has been part of several business initiaves in Africa. “While the firm food prices in India and elsewhere are also a reason, the availability of arable land (in Africa) is a major advantage,” he added.
“African agricultural land is cheap relative to similar land elsewhere; it is probably the last frontier,” said Paul Christie, marketing director at Emergent Asset Management in London. The hedge fund manager has farm holdings in South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
Lake Chad was bigger than Israel less than 50 years ago. Today its surface area is less than a tenth of its earlier size, amid forecasts the lake could disappear altogether within 20 years.
Climate change and overuse have put one of Africa's mightiest lakes in mortal danger, and the livelihoods of the 30 million people who depend on its waters is hanging by a thread as a result.
Many deals have little oversight, or regulation; they lack environmental safeguards and they fail to protect smallholder farmers from losing their customary rights to land.
“This is a worrisome trend,” Akinwumi Adesina, of the advocacy group Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, told a science forum in the Netherlands in June. Foreign land acquisitions, he argued, have the potential to hurt domestic efforts to raise food production and could limit broad-based economic growth, he said.
Million of hectares at stake
The sheer size of some of the land agreements has added to the alarm. A deal to allow South Korea’s Daewoo Corporation to lease 1.3 mn hectares was a key factor in the ouster of Madagascar’s President Marc Ravalomanana in March. In Kenya, the government is struggling to overcome local opposition to a proposal to give Qatar rights over some 40,000 hectares in the Tana River Valley in return for building a deep-sea port. Africa is a particular focus because of the notion that plenty of cheap land and labour is available, and that there is a favourable climate. In Mozambique, Tanzania and Zambia, for example, only some 12 per cent of arable land is actually cultivated.
Clashes between farmers and pastoralists over grazing fields - common in northern Nigeria - are on the rise throughout the country as pastureland shrinks, according to environmental consultant Kabiru Yammama.
The Czech Republic now joins Portugal as a European country that has decriminalized drug possession. Drug possession is also decriminalized de facto if not de jure in the Netherlands, and actual charging and prosecution practices in some other European countries already approach decriminalization in practice, if not as a matter of law.
That dismissive attitude is reflected in force structure. The Navy continues to invest its money in a relatively small number of multi-billion-dollar warships tailored for high-end warfare, rather than a larger number of cheaper vessels (such as Swift, pictured) that might allow round-the-clock coverage of vast swaths of ocean. Numbers matter.
"He's a citizen who was outside of the country and decided to come back. What's the problem?" said Malam Bacai Sanhá upon his arrival at Bissau's international airport after 21 days of medical treatment abroad, adding that he had followed the process and had been in permanent contact with Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Jr.
'What this case demonstrates is that these three associates had very clear connections with AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb),' Russ Benson, the DEA regional director for Europe and Africa, told The Blotter. The three men allegedly provided protection for the large loads of cocaine that had to be transshipped through the desert to Morocco with Spain as an ultimate destination, Benson said.
Today, music here is more than simple entertainment. It has become the vehicle for a decibel-busting national political debate. With the sixth-highest rate of illiteracy in the world and a deep suspicion of the ruling elite, Sierra Leone's 6 million people rely heavily on their pop stars -- often educated and well-traveled -- for an independent take on what's going on.
As the Moroccan government comes under heavy pressure from the United States of America, Guinean Junta leader seems to have been placed under serious military protection otherwise known as indirect arrest, to prevent him from returning to Guinea. It seems the Americans are seizing this moment of opportunity to remove the Guinean dictator completely from the political landscape of the West African Country. The Moroccan government is under tremendous pressure not to release Camara from hospital and Newstime Africa has reliably learnt that the Guinean strongman is about to be moved from the hospital where he has been recouping to a villa in an unknown location in the capital, Rabat.
In this silence there was a vast irresponsibility toward every obligation, a deflation of all my values. A passionate belief in order, a disregard of motives or consequences in favor or guesswork and prophecy, a feeling that craft and industry would have a place in any world -- one by one, these and other convictions were swept away. I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930, I had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures. People still read, if only Professor Canby’s book of the month -- curious children nosed at the slime of Mr. Tiffany Thayer in the drugstore libraries -- but there was a rankling indignity, that to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written
“Schwerpunkt represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time in order to generate a favorable mismatch in time/ability to shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances.”
....
Who is inside who's head?
Whose operations are more consistent an idea, floating around like a gas?
Who is tipping and running, striking with the smallest force at the farthest place? Who is fighting a "war" of detachment and never on the defensive or affording a target, except by accident or error?
Although he reportedly found movie work degrading, Fitzgerald was once again in dire financial straits, and spent the second half of the 1930s in Hollywood, working on commercial short stories, scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (including some unfilmed work on Gone with the Wind), and his fifth and final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. Published posthumously as The Last Tycoon, it was based on the life of film executive Irving Thalberg. Scott and Zelda became estranged; she continued living in mental institutions on the East Coast, while he lived with his lover Sheilah Graham, a gossip columnist, in Hollywood. From 1939 until his death, Fitzgerald mocked himself as a Hollywood hack through the character of Pat Hobby in a sequence of 17 short stories, later collected as "The Pat Hobby Stories."
