Protest in front of Parliament in Jordan. Photo Credit: 7iber.com
A protest–albeit not a very large one it seems–took place in front of Parliament yesterday in Jordan, where a journalist is on trial for criticizing the performance of Parliament, which has been a dissapointment since 2007.
I was surprised to read that the protests were not only in support of the journalist, but the protest which was organized through Facebook was calling for more freedom of expression in Jordan.
Sy Hersh of the New Yorker
The Obama Administration’s chance to engage in a Middle East peace.
by Seymour M. Hersh
American and foreign government officials, intelligence officers, diplomats, and politicians said in interviews that renewed Israeli-Syrian negotiations over the Golan Heights are now highly likely, despite Gaza and the elections in Israel in February, which left the Likud Party leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the head of a coalition that includes both the far right and Labor. Those talks would depend largely on America’s willingness to act as the mediator, a role that could offer Barack Obama his first—and perhaps best—chance for engagement in the Middle East peace process.
A senior Syrian official explained that Israel’s failure to unseat Hamas from power in Gaza, despite the scale of the war, gave Assad enough political room to continue the negotiations without losing credibility in the Arab world. Assad also has the support of Arab leaders who are invested in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Sheikh Hamid bin Khalifa al-Thani, the ruler of Qatar, said last month when I saw him in Doha that Assad must take any reasonable steps he can to keep the talks going. “Syria is eager to engage with the West,” he said, “an eagerness that was never perceived by the Bush White House. Anything is possible, as long as peace is being pursued.”
The Chicken that Crossed the Road (R.Sweis)
The Basketball Board that Makes it Impossible to Play Basketball. (R.Sweis)
An article written by Suha Ma’ayah on Jordan’s reform process…
“The government is seriously considering reforms, but it is not clear how far it will go,” said Bassam Haddadin, an independent member of parliament. “Internally the situation has become ripe for reform. The internal political process is fragile and does not allow for the development of the country.”
One of the shortlisted authors for the new but prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Egyptian Youssef Ziedan, has caused a stir with his novel “Beelzebub.” Ziedan and the other nominees — Mohammad Al-Bisatie (Egypt), Fawwaz Haddad (Syria), Inaam Kachachi (Iraq), Ibrahim Nasrallah (Jordan-Palestine) and Habib Selmi (Tunisia) — expect to hear who will take the prize on Monday.
Here’s a great analysis in the New York Review of Books…
As carefully as Barack Obama prepared for it, the presidency has held some surprises for him—some foreseeable, some not, and some of his own making. Seeking to avoid the mistakes of the early Clinton era, Obama concluded that, unlike Clinton, he didn’t want to hold the numerous meetings that can chew up so much of the president’s time. Instead, according to his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, Obama’s style is to drop by an aide’s office—a restless man, he roams the White House corridors—or stop an aide in a hallway and ask, “How are you coming on that thing we were talking about?” Gibbs says, “The worst thing is not have an answer.” Asked what happens then, Gibbs replied, “He gets that disappointed parent look, and then you better go find an answer.”
Here are 32 cool Websites that you may find useful but you don’t hear about…
This is such an extremely useful list of websites that you may ask yourself how you have done without them for so long. They will assist you in countless ways, offer you lots of all-purpose tips, and are great references for any number of interesting services.
An article in the New York Times on the mental health situation in Iraq…since the article came out more than 50 Iraqis have died this week…
Only when the guns fall silent does the extent of damage wrought by conflict become visible. So in Iraq, as security improves, only now are the full effects of the violence on the Iraqi people emerging. Two studies being released this weekend, one on mental health and the other on the status of women, paint a sobering portrait of the enormous difficulties that lie ahead as the country tries to recover from years of war and state-sponsored terrorism under Saddam Hussein and the more recent sectarian and ethnic strife that followed the American invasion.
An article in the Washington Post on Singapore as a window into the reversal of the forces that
brought unprecedented global mobility to goods, services, investment and labor.
Thousands of foreign workers, including London School of Economics graduates with six-digit salaries and desperately poor Bangladeshi factory workers, are streaming home as the economy here suffers the worst of the recessions in Southeast Asia. Singapore is an epicenter of what analysts call a new flow of reverse migration away from hard-hit, globalized economies, including Dubai and Britain, that were once beacons for foreign labor. Economists from Credit Suisse predict an exodus of 200,000 foreigners — or one in every 15 workers here — by the end of 2010.
Singapore’s exports collapsed by a stunning 35 percent in January, mirroring much of the rest of Asia. The export boom here was tied to credit-fueled buying sprees in the United States that stopped abruptly and may take years to return, if ever. Manufacturers are grasping for a Plan B. But none of the options — mining domestic markets, or trying to tap consumers in still-growing China and India — offers a truly viable solution. Adding to fears of a years-long depression for exports is a rising tide of trade protectionism in countries including neighboring Indonesia.
Samantha Power tells a story of a complicated hero, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
This UN diplomat walked a thin moral line, negotiating with the world’s
worst dictators to help their people survive crisis. It’s a compelling story
told with a fiery passion.
![[Commentary]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/ED-AJ110_Barro_DV_20090303165508.jpg)
Here’s an op-ed from the WSJ on international evidence suggestions there is a 20 % chance the American stock market will get much worse.
The most serious concern is that the downturn will become something worse than the largest recession of the post-World War II period — 1982, when real per capita GDP fell by 3% and the unemployment rate peaked at nearly 11%. Could we even experience a depression (defined as a decline in per-person GDP or consumption by 10% or more)?
The U.S. macroeconomy has been so tame for so long that it’s impossible to get an accurate reading about depression odds just from the U.S. data. My approach uses long-term data for many countries and takes into account the historical linkages between depressions and stock-market crashes. (The research is described in “Stock-Market Crashes and Depressions,” a working paper Jose Ursua and I wrote for the National Bureau of Economic Research last month.)
The bottom line is that there is ample reason to worry about slipping into a depression. There is a roughly one-in-five chance that U.S. GDP and consumption will fall by 10% or more, something not seen since the early 1930s.
An article from the Salt Lake Tribune on Iraqi refugees who are leaving their life in the US due to poverty and returning to Iraq.
As human rights organizations call for aid and resettlement for millions of Iraqi refugees, some who are exasperated by America’s refugee system are going home or attempting to return to other countries in the Middle East. They feel abandoned by federal policies that offer limited and brief financial support and leave many refugees living in poverty.
Refugees planning to leave acknowledge they may be less safe in Iraq, but believe they will be better able to afford food, pay rent and receive medical care.
Educated Iraqis eager to re-establish their middle-class lifestyle are making flaws in the U.S. resettlement system more apparent, while the troubled economy is compounding them, critics charge.
My second HuffPost contribution:
A year after the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington and New York, former President Bush’s national security strategy was clear: US interests triumph all else and international institutions would not hinder military actions deemed necessary. Therefore, when contemplating humanitarian interventions, the US would weigh the potential benefits–in terms of foreign lives saved–against the likely costs to the United States. Even if US strategic interests intertwine with internationally accepted humanitarian criteria for humanitarian interventions, it may have consequential effects on the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect.’
Throughout the 1990s, experiences such as Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor among others built a momentum towards the idea that governments had a “responsibility to protect” people suffering in complex humanitarian emergencies. However, according to experts like Thomas Weiss, author of ‘Military-Civilian Interactions’, the September 11th attacks and subsequent US led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, led to two world organizations: “The United Nations, global in members; and the United States, global in reach and power.”
The primary purpose in a humanitarian intervention must be ‘right intention’–to halt or avert human suffering, despite other motives intervening states may have. But the debate after September 11th, shifted to the right to intervene-to protect the intervening country’s people from a threat seen to be originating from another country. The debate shifted to self-defense. Samantha Power, author of ‘A Problem From Hell’, writes that since the September 11th attacks, the “U.S. government is likely to view genocide prevention as an undertaking it cannot afford as it sets out to better protect Americans.”
Security Council resolutions have authorized the use of armed forces led by US-led coalitions, rather than under the command of the UN. In a humanitarian intervention, the intervening states have the responsibility to rebuild. Since September 11th, none of the US interventions taken were primarily called humanitarian interventions, despite clear complex humanitarian emergencies. But Weiss points out the US led invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, turned primarily humanitarian. In 2002, a planned operation against Iraq began to surface. The Bush administration called on the UN to enforce its resolutions on Iraq or risk ‘irrelevance’. But military intervention without a UN mandate raises questions over a country’s motives and capabilities to rebuild in the post-conflict period. The implication of such a reality has also posed a dilemma for the notion of ‘neutrality’ once forces are deployed on the ground and raises concern among independent aid agencies.
Some mistakes are so harmless that nobody is going to insist on noting or fixing them. But The Washington Post decided last week that when your ability to poke fun at yourself is in question, it’s best to say a public “oops” and correct the error.
The comic strip Doonesbury, by Garry Trudeau, follows a single story line through each week, and last week’s was a rerun of a series from 2008 about buyouts at The Post — a potentially sore subject in a newsroom that eliminated more than 100 jobs that way last year. The series of strips had the character Rick Redfern, a reporter, being forced out after 33 years with the newspaper.
An article written by my friend and journalist Suha Ma’ayah on the need and the power of community radio in Jordan:
AMMAN//For the past year, Muneera Shatti and Asma Raja, two young women from the Jordan Valley, have broadcast a weekly radio show that tackles the issues faced by their impoverished community, from a lack of buses and the theft of water, to boys using mobile phones to take photos of schoolgirls.
The work is not without challenges as the tribal-dominated valley on which they report is staunchly conservative and one of 20 pockets of poverty where the average income is about US$1,800 (Dh6,624) per year.
“At first there were men who refused to be interviewed by us. They would say, ‘You are women’. But they got used to us. Just last week I interviewed young men in a cafe to gauge their views regarding public services,” Ms Shatti said. “Interviewing men is something I would have never imagined myself doing before I became a correspondent for the radio.”
In one programme, Ms Shatti reported on the lack of buses connecting her town with a nearby village. Within a week, the Jordan Valley Authority responded and provided the needed bus.
“That was encouraging even though later the bus was taken away as other bus drivers protested that it was affecting their business.”
In another broadcast, Ms Raja, 24, reported on water theft.
“Farmers were stealing water from the main pipes, depriving residents of drinking water. I talked to a senior water official who promised to provide citizens with another source of water while the government closed some of the pipes to try to stop those from stealing. Since then, water theft has declined.”
Because the women do not have a licence to broadcast in their community, Radio Al Balad, an Amman-based community radio, produces and hosts their show, called the Voice of the Valley.
The women take three buses to get to Amman to broadcast the show, but for them, the trip is worth it.
Radio Al Balad has been pushing hard to get a licence to launch the first all-women community radio in Jordan.
But last month, the government turned down the licence application without giving a reason. The country’s laws do not oblige the government to explain why it rejects applications.
Some 70 percent of journalists and media personnel in Jordan believe to a “high and medium” degree that the government resorts to “soft containment” methods to win their support and avoid bad press, a study revealed Saturday.
Of those 70 percent , 32 percent of them believe that permanent or temporary appointments in governmental or semi-government organisations is a tactic the government uses to buy the allegiance of media personnel, according to the poll conducted by Al Quds Centre for Political Studies with the support of the Canada Fund.
The study indicated that 17 per cent believe the government resorts to giving financial incentives to win journalists’ support, while 7 per cent said giving information to particular journalists is a means the government uses to obtain their support.
In addition, 49 percent of opinion leaders in the media sector were subjected to soft containment methods, the study showed.
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