ARS NOTORIA

It is not as easy at it looks. Photo Copyright:The Quiet Busker.

Maoists to declare autonomous states Baburam Bhattarai KATHMANDU , NOV 26 - The UCPN (Maoist) on Thursday decided to declare 13 ethnic and region-based autonomous provinces from Dec. 11-18. Maoist Vice Chairman Baburam Bhattarai, who heads the party’s United National People’s Movement, announced the decision on Thursday evening after a meeting of the party’s central office bearers and regional and ethnic fronts.

Truly the Taleban could have arranged as many bombings and terrorists acts as they liked in the UK. There are many Pashtun young men and women in cities in the UK who still have large extended families back in Afghanistan and who could be forced into doing something they should not. But guess what. So far there have been no attacks by Afghans on British soil. Why? It is a mystery. News comes from Afghanistan and the recent UN report that the Taleban and the drug trade are intertwined and that now the Taleban, who are mainly Pashtun, are officially in command of an international drug cartel.  News comes from Afghanistan that Taleban drug lords go to Dubai to live high on the hog and gamble and sleep with women and luxuriate in all the that the freedom to consume has to offer, while their footsoldiers, peasant fighters, are deluded and told that they are fighting a patriotic religious war.  And though they are told they are fighting a religious war what really matters to t...

Anandi Sharan has supplied a list of people to petition. If you have read her previous blog then the essence of it goes like this: "B oycott America's ineffectual measures at Copenhagen: The way to do this is to rush through, for purely procedural reasons, a meaningless 1 page document at the main Conference of the Parties – the CoP15, and then move on to the Meeting of the Parties to the  Kyoto Protocol  – the CoP/MoP5.   "We must write to our leaders and tell them to finish the CoP15 in one day flat, and avoid American filibustering, thereby freeing up the next ten days of negotiations for the CoP/MoP5 - the forum that can deliver real results." I trust Anandi's judgement utterly. She is one of the most perceptive people I know, if not the most perceptive person - a true Cassandra. Anandi was working against climate change and relating it to poverty alleviation in the 90s when everyone else was still talking about El Nino and the hole in the ozone layer. She...

These guys are the real deal A couple of months ago, I did a story that reminds me of why I got into photography in the first place....(editorial photography is getting increasingly difficult to maintain as a career - its fast becoming the preserve of the "gentleman" photographer). A little-known band called  Staff Benda Bilili  from  Kinshasa  were making waves in the international music scene, having just won a big music prize. So what, you might think, but this group of people have a different story to most "rock n roll" bands...they come from the most deprived areas in one of the most deprived, war-torn pats of the world, and if that wasn't hard-core enough, the core members are disabled from polio, that means they can only get about in wheelchairs or crutches. Only a little while ago they were living on the streets or more specifically,  in the grounds of Kinshasa Zoo , living on their wits and talent. Staff Benda Bilili  - which means "...

By Anandi Sharan New technology interventions to create and reinforce sustainable systems, new ownership patterns to make community ownership of natural resources legally enforceable, natural resource conservation done by communities overruling government and oligopolies, equal rights for all species…. It was never going to be easy to deliver on the Rio earth summit treaties. The climate convention was especially treacherous, because no one wanted it in the first place: we wanted an energy convention which would create national quotas of fossil fuel use, not a climate convention where we had nothing to say at all because WE DID NOT CAUSE THE PROBLEM. But that would have meant …well, equity, and that has been the sticking point all along. The only way the UNFCCC process has been kept going for 18 years has been by nearly succumbing and then at the last minute always sidelining the USA. And indeed this is going to be the determining factor in Copenhagen too. The USA forced us all ...