Articles by AJ
We found 350 results.
WikiLeaks’ Obvious Truth
Naj Taylor – Al Jazeera,
12 Sep 2011
People must seek to protect not only WikiLeaks, but also the mechanism by which the information enters into our purview.
→ read full articleThe Silent Humanitarian Crises beyond East Africa
Rajesh Makwana and Adam Parsons – Share the World’s Resources,
25 Jul 2011
The international response to the East African crisis is far short of urgent needs, yet the extreme deprivation being reported is only the tip of the iceberg. A massively upscaled redistribution of resources from North to South is needed if we are to prevent needless poverty-related deaths worldwide, write Rajesh Makwana and Adam Parsons.
→ read full article“BRICS Can Ensure Affordable Drugs”
Ranjit Devraj – TerraViva Europe,
11 Jul 2011
While ‘data exclusivity’ clauses will not feature in the India-European Union free trade agreement (FTA), the threat posed by the impending deal to the world’s supply of cheap generic drugs is far from over.
→ read full articleRay of Hope in Nepal’s Peace Process
Binaya Devkota - Rajdhani National Daily,
13 Jun 2011
Five years after the beginning of Nepal’s peace process, there’s a new turn. The main task of the peace process, integration of Maoist combatants, has been fixed to start. A meeting of the Special Committee headed by the prime minister on Monday approved a time-framed plan of action that promises to complete the groundwork by June 24 this year.
→ read full article(Castellano) Los Piratas Somalíes: Pescadores en Lucha Contra el Saqueo Occidental
Johann Hari, Mohamed Abshirwaldo & Najad Abdullahi - TeleSur,
13 Jun 2011
La prensa comercial en los países del norte sólo hablan de ellos cada vez que un occidental es secuestrado. Nunca han contado le verdadera historia de los «piratas» somalíes ni las condiciones de vida de sus compatriotas. Esta gente está en lucha contra el pillaje de pesca occidental y la descarga de basura tóxica en sus aguas de los países industrializados, principalmente a cargo de las mafias europeas.
→ read full articleRewitnessing the Past
P.V. Rajagopal – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Jun 2011
Sunday June 5th, 2011 will be remembered as a day of chaos, confusion and shock for the civil society organizations throughout India. While most people were sleeping, 5,000 policemen stormed the premises of Ramlila Maidan fairground of New Delhi –a place where people take up nonviolent protest, and the police practiced the lost art of using sticks to beat human beings while they were sleeping. This short note is to ask all friends and supporters of nonviolent struggles for the rights of marginalized to join hands and express global solidarity for change.
→ read full articleAre We in The Presence of the Fourth Reich?
Basem Tajeldine - Pravda,
30 May 2011
William I. Robinson says: “You cannot currently qualify the U.S. regime as fascist. However, all the conditions and processes are present and being propagated.” But it can be said that the conditions for revolutionary possibilities in the capitalist centers of the world are being created. The popular uprisings in Europe have begun to spread to Greece, Spain, Portugal, and possibly to France and Britain. The idea is correct that capitalism in crisis becomes more violent. It resembles a cornered and wounded animal that attacks because of fear and the instinct for survival. The violence of capital in crisis is the act of survival.
→ read full articleIndia: Fukushima Won’t Stop World’s Largest Nuclear Facility
Ranjit Devraj – Inter Press Service-IPS,
2 May 2011
While the Fukushima tragedy has not deterred India from going ahead with building the world’s largest nuclear power facility at Jaitapur on the western coast, the government has announced a tighter safety regime for its ambitious nuclear power programme.
→ read full articleMemorandum on World Government
Nataraja Guru – World Government of World Citizens,
7 Feb 2011
Humanity is one by its common origin, one in its common interests and motives of happiness here on earth in everyday living, and one in its relation to the aspirations and ideals which bind human beings together by bonds of sympathy for each other. A Unitive and Absolute Value is at the basis of human life. This High Human Value knows no frontier either actual or ideological. It makes no discrimination between rich or poor, high or low, civilized or backward. Sympathy for suffering and indignation against injustice to fellow men transcends time and clime, and reaches out evenly or pointedly, as the case may deserve, to the uttermost recesses of the one world which man inhabits.
→ read full article(Castellano) Malvinas: La Cuestión Pendiente de un Exitoso Proceso Descolonizador
Embajador Jorge Argüello – TELAM-Agencia de Noticias de la Republica Argentina,
20 Dec 2010
El formidable proceso de descolonización que el mundo comenzó en 1960 con la Resolución 1514 de la Asamblea de las Naciones Unidas cumple este 14 de diciembre medio siglo, pero el compromiso que tuvo Argentina en ese proceso histórico sigue hasta ahora sin la mejor recompensa para nuestro propio país, por el resabio colonialista que significa la “Cuestión Malvinas”.
→ read full articleDarwinism Dead at 150
Sripad Bhakti Madhava Puri Maharaja, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Dec 2010
The concept that natural selection provides the foundation for evolutionary change has long been challenged for its failure to explain how different forms arises in nature, but only how they may be favored once they do arise. Through the work of scientists like Motoo Kimura, Tomoko Ohta [Theoretical aspects of population genetics, Motoo Kimura and Tomoko Ohta (1971)] and others, it has been concluded both theoretically and empirically that natural selection has little or no effect on the vast majority of the genomes of most living organisms…. It was Darwin, himself who explained how he should be buried: “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”
→ read full articleRethinking the Global Economy: The Case for Sharing
Rajesh Makwana & Adam Parsons – Share the World Resources,
29 Nov 2010
The basic assumptions about human nature that inform economic and political decision-making are long outdated and fundamentally flawed. By acknowledging our interdependence and common ethical values, we can build a more sustainable, cooperative and inclusive global economy.
→ read full articleThe Concept of Strategic Depth: Can the Compass Move?
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Nov 2010
Military planners in Pakistan have landed themselves in an existential mess by backing their American allies a few decades ago to convert free-living tribals into the Taliban. They took this dangerous step to help create strategic depth in Afghanistan against any Indian offensive.
→ read full article‘Peace hath her Victories…’
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Oct 2010
Since the beginning of the Vietnam War, several academic institutions and civil society groups have focused on creating the new discipline of Peace Studies, with varying degrees of clarity, in some places reflecting the urgencies of ‘conflict resolution,’ in others, the needs of communities to arrive at reconciliation.
→ read full articleThe Kashmir Imbroglio: Thinking the Unthinkable
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Oct 2010
Back in the bad old days of the Cold War, the heaviest of the backroom hawks of the Pentagon, Herman Kahn, coined the phrase ‘thinking the unthinkable,’ meaning strategies for wiping out the Soviet Union with nukes. Luckily for all of us, Ronald Reagan had a better idea, the same result could be achieved by an undeclared economic war and arms race that would force the communists to scratch themselves out of the tournament.
→ read full articleDogs, Migrants, and Daughters-in-Law
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Oct 2010
In my experience of seventy years, daughters-in-law in India get a shabby deal. Suffering, misunderstanding, lack of trust and affection are all everyday features in their lives. Many get badly abused for not bringing in enough dowry, or are constantly threatened for being not well read, or too well read, for being backward or being modern, for being ugly or for being too pretty – the list is endless. Physical torture is also added to routine mental torture. Too many are killed so that their husbands can marry richer women, or just because everyone in the in-laws’ house is tired of them.
→ read full article‘Raj Rule OK’ in Independent India
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Oct 2010
Every Indian political party has devised its own unique selling point. The Congress as the mother of all parties distributes patronage and sucks into its vortex corrupt floods of black money. A pattern that others of course follow but with variations. The BJP as the strongest contender for power is risen as the Hindu answer to the Taliban, while the communist parties are home to lost causes. In Tamil Nadu, the southernmost and arguably the best run state, power is divided between two parties, heirs to the great anti-upper-caste, anti-establishment movement of a hundred years ago.
→ read full articleThe Un-Disappeared Orientalist Gaze
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Aug 2010
Ramanujan’s life was enclosed within the theory of numbers, not only loved by pure mathematicians for its sheer beauty, as believed by Hardy, who lived within the privileged cloisters of Cambridge, but as the recently-held International Congress of Mathematicians proclaimed in Hyderabad, it is intimately involved in several practical applications, and even in elucidating the very nature of the Universe.
→ read full article(Italian) La Filosofia di Gandhi in India Oggi
P.V. Rajagopal e Shannon Moran – Ekta Parishad,
26 Jul 2010
In un mondo sempre più indifferente alle filosofie di Gandhi, esiste ancora in India un luogo piccolo ma sicuro dove sopravvive la sua eredità. È nei movimenti popolari, nelle lotte della gente comune, che resistono tuttora i principi di Gandhi.
→ read full articleGandhi’s Philosophy in India Today
PV Rajagopal and Shannon Moran – Ekta Parishad,
19 Jul 2010
In a world that is becoming increasingly indifferent to the philosophies of Gandhi, a small but sure space still exists in India where his legacy survives. It is in the people’s movements, the struggles of the common man that the principles of Gandhi still endure.
→ read full articleAn Account of the General Strike in Nepal
Suvrat Raju – Monthly Review,
17 May 2010
While the world media was focused on a boring battle between the Tories and their New Labour cousins in Britain, a historic struggle was underway in Nepal.
→ read full articleThe Role of Natural Resources in Civil Wars
Phumlani Majavu – Toward Freedom,
10 May 2010
On the surface, it might look like the Congolese have no one to blame but themselves, since they are the ones doing the killing, and to an extent, this argument seems sensible. However, when we go beyond the facade, the facts tell us that foreign governments and multinational companies, greedy for the natural resources found in the DRC, are in cahoots with the militias and they too, are responsible for the plunder and the killings.
→ read full articleBolivia Throws Down Gauntlet, Demands Real Climate Action
Max Ajl – Truthout,
10 May 2010
Is this feasible? Probably, yes. But even if it proves impossible, at least someone is trying, even if they are dreamers. At least the future of the earth is on some leaders’ agendas. At least the future of the earth is on some people’s agenda. The Cochabamba Conference, impelled by a globalized and surging social movement demanding a livable Earth, has thrown down the gauntlet. Hopefully, we will pick it up before gun turrets stud our electrified steel frontier with Mexico, to be built circa 2030 when the Mexican agricultural system collapses under heat stress. That is the world of the future: a dead world of walls. I’m with Morales and Pachamama.
→ read full articleKILLING TRIBAL AND TIGER TOGETHER
Vithal Rajan – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Apr 2010
Tribal and Tiger killed out of SightLike their Forests burnt down at Night… [with apologies to William Blake] The world is witnessing the last great act of a global tragedy that will end not in victory for any one side, but in the defeat of all. And today, all of us are guilty. The world’s […]
→ read full articleRE-VISITING GANDHI’S IDEAL OF TRUSTEESHIP
Vithal Rajan - TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Mar 2010
A great hobby with literate Indians is following their statistics on growth. However much rents and fuel prices may go up, however unaffordable vegetables and milk may get, they feel cheered with good news about growth statistics. Particularly heartwarming is news that since a year ago Indian billionaires have doubled in number with 50 on […]
→ read full articleCROSS-GARTERED BY HISTORY
Vithal Rajan,
17 Mar 2010
“It’s a blow job! I mean – ‘Blow Me Down!’ It’s after all a foreign language, more like a dead language, not that it was wasn’t spoken all round and all over the world when I was growing up, but round me it was almost always spoken wrong, if there is such a thing as […]
→ read full articleSECURING HAITI
Andrew Crosby and Ajay Parasram – Dissident Voice,
2 Mar 2010
Soldiers vs. Doctors in Post-earthquake HaitiWithin hours of Haiti’s devastating earthquake, Cuban doctors, Chinese search and rescue teams and Venezuelan medical professionals were on the ground. When the US military took control of Port-au-Prince Airport, however, they prioritized landing soldiers instead of humanitarian supplies, according to humanitarian organizations like Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) and Amnesty […]
→ read full articleTRANSCRIPT OF A SECRET MEETING BETWEEN AMERICANS AND CUBANS RECENTLY, SOMEWHERE IN HYDERABAD, INDIA
Vithal Rajan,
27 Feb 2010
US Senator: I think I speak for both of us in expressing thanks to our friends in Hyderabad India for facilitating this confidential consultation. It’s the first of its kind between both our countries, and I sure am glad the Press is nowhere in sight. Cuban Rep: That’s the way you wanted it and we […]
→ read full articleCOMMON ACTIVIST ERRORS AND SOME PROPOSALS TO RECTIFY THEM
Yousef Abudayyeh, Mohamed Khodr, Mary Rizzo, Haitham Sabbah and Saja – Palestine Think Tank editorial,
20 Feb 2010
Activism and activists for Palestine have been getting some media attention recently. This is absolutely great news. It is an opportunity that we need to take advantage of, especially since Palestinians themselves are denied space in almost all mainstream mass media. Reflecting on this fact, we at PTT have decided to express some of our […]
→ read full articleCOMMON ACTIVIST ERRORS AND SOME PROPOSALS TO RECTIFY THEM
Yousef Abudayyeh, Mohamed Khodr, Mary Rizzo, Haitham Sabbah and Saja – Palestine Think Tank editorial,
20 Feb 2010
Activism and activists for Palestine have been getting some media attention recently. This is absolutely great news. It is an opportunity that we need to take advantage of, especially since Palestinians themselves are denied space in almost all mainstream mass media. Reflecting on this fact, we at PTT have decided to express some of our […]
→ read full articleINDIA HOLDS PUBLIC MEETINGS ON GM FOOD CROP
Ranjit Devraj – IPS, TerraViva Europe,
16 Jan 2010
As India’s central government begins a series of public meetings across the country this month on the commercial release of genetically modified (GM) brinjal – or eggplant – in this country, activists and farmers’ groups are mobilising to oppose such a plan. The meetings are a response by Union Minister for Environment Jairam Ramesh to […]
→ read full article(SPANISH) HONDURAS Y UNA AMÉRICA LATINA DIVIDIDA
Embajador Robert E. White - Programa de las Américas, Centro de Política Internacional,
12 Jan 2010
A pesar de reportes creíbles de las campañas violentas contra los que apoyan al expulsado presidente, Mel Zelaya, el gobierno de facto de Honduras ha logrado reclamar elecciones presidenciales que salieron mejor de lo que la mayoría de los observadores habían previsto. El vencedor fácil fue el candidato conservador del Partido Nacionalista, Porfirio Lobo. Estados […]
→ read full articleEGYPTIAN SECURITY FORCES ATTACK GAZA PROTESTERS
Max Ajl - Gaza Freedom March organizer,
1 Jan 2010
Cairo, Egypt, 31 Dec 2009 – Egyptian security forces were attacking protesters in Tahrir Square, at the core of downtown Cairo, after they sat down in the middle of a busy Cairo street, protesting the imprisonment of the people of Gaza. Others were literally barricaded inside their hotel, the entrance surrounded by steel riot barriers. […]
→ read full articleGAZA FREEDOM MARCH: PALESTINIAN NON-VIOLENCE AND INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY
Max Ajl - ZNet,
27 Dec 2009
I’m going to discuss the utility of non-violent resistance as it applies to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict and, specifically, the occupation and blockade of the Gaza strip. Even more specifically, I’m going to discuss the Gaza Freedom March (GFM), of which I’m one of the organizers. But before discussing Palestinian non-violence, several things must be […]
→ read full articleA CHRISTMAS STORY
Vithal Rajan,
20 Dec 2009
The First Lady enters the room her eyebrows lifted in a question. “I have made camp beds in the Oval Office for the girls,” she says, “but I don’t understand why they can’t sleep in their own beds on Christmas Eve.” Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA, speaks quietly. “Madam, America faces the gravest threat […]
→ read full articleDRUG MONEY SAVED BANKS IN GLOBAL CRISIS, CLAIMS UN ADVISOR
Rajeev Syal – The Observer,
13 Dec 2009
Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions.Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, […]
→ read full articleBACK TO BASICS FOR PALESTINIAN STRUGGLE
Jake Lynch and Majd Beltaji,
15 Nov 2009
The decision by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas not to seek re-election in January, and the vote at the UN General Assembly paving the way for the Security Council to consider the Goldstone Report, should, between them, prove a turning point in the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Even the patient Mr Abbas has now apparently given […]
→ read full articleDEVELOPMENT-INDIA: FARMERS VS. COCA-COLA IN WATER WARS
Ranjit Devraj,
3 Oct 2009
As India faces its worst drought in four decades, a dispute over water resources between farmers in the Kala Dera area of western Rajasthan state and a Coca-Cola bottling plant located there has sharpened.Farmers and activists in Kala Dera who have been campaigning for the closure of the bottling plant operated by the global beverages […]
→ read full articleHORSES FOR COURSES
Vithal Rajan,
21 May 2009
The largest democracy in the world has just finished a month-long voting process in which over 415 million voters, out of a total electoral list of 715 million, cast their votes to bring back the hoary Indian National Congress to power. The electoral system was inherited from the Westminster ‘first past the post’ British model, […]
→ read full articleTHE TAMIL DIASPORA: SOLIDARITIES AND REALITIES
Nirmala Rajasingam,
18 Apr 2009
The Tamils abroad mobilising in response to events in Sri Lanka need to face difficult truths about the political narratives and forces that have contributed to their compatriots’ plight, says Nirmala Rajasingam. The Sri Lankan Tamil community may not be the largest of the diaspora communities represented in London or other such greatly diverse cities […]
→ read full article‘TOXIC WASTE’ BEHIND SOMALI PIRACY
Najad Abdullahi,
16 Apr 2009
Somali pirates have accused European firms of dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast and are demanding an $8m ransom for the return of a Ukranian ship they captured, saying the money will go towards cleaning up the waste. The ransom demand is a means of "reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually […]
→ read full articleMILLIONAIRES IN SLUMS
Vithal Rajan,
17 Feb 2009
At the end of February 2009, the outcome of two events dominate the minds of the Indian middleclass, though both to any rational person would appear trivial and of no consequence. The first is the question whether Slumdog Millionaire, after sweeping the Golden Globes and the Bafta Awards, would secure Oscars for India. It doesn’t […]
→ read full articleWHY TALK OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE WHEN THERE IS NO GLOBAL JUSTICE?
Vithal Rajan,
21 Jan 2009
Management chatterati have made it fashionable for governments and universities to set up centres of global governance, abandoning any attempt to rectify glaring injustices at a global level. A small section of humanity over consumes, over pollutes, over wastes – and adding injury to insult – over bombs the vast sea of the poor, who […]
→ read full articleWHEN SHALL WE HAVE THE BIG BANG?
Vithal Rajan,
9 Jan 2009
The cosmologist’s concept of the Big Bang is old hat for Hindus, who have believed for millennia that is how the Universe is born, and will perish, a concept beyond all limits of human morality, for as the Rig Veda says, ‘It was born before the Gods themselves, who knows why, or whence It came?’ […]
→ read full articleDIREST SENTENCE FOR A TERRORIST
Vithal Rajan,
1 Jan 2009
The attack by a group of terrorists on the city of Mumbai for several terrible days in the end of November has been called India’s 9/11, and most middleclass Indians are calling for very strong action by the Indian Government. I am one of them. The question remains what action would break the mould, and […]
→ read full articlePIRATES OF THE EMPIRE
Vithal Rajan,
27 Dec 2008
‘Pirates!’ have formed a popular, even affectionate, theme in British pantomimes, which usually are performed with good-humored laughter around Christmas time. Captain Hook is as much a favourite with children as is Peter Pan. All this is culturally understandable if we remember that piracy, as practiced by Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, started this ‘fog-grit’ […]
→ read full articleTHE NATIVES CONTINUE TO BE RESTLESS
Vithal Rajan,
18 Dec 2008
From Hyderabad, India ‘The natives are restless tonight,’ was a stock phrase used in colonial adventure yarns to signify an impending revolt. The sahibs loaded their guns and awaited the night attack. The noise outside the compound could have been a mysterious religious ceremony or just fun, they didn’t care, they knew little about the […]
→ read full articleCATASTROPHE FOR GAZA
Eyad El-Sarraj,
16 Dec 2008
An Israeli Blockade Curtails Food, Fuel, Medicine and Travel Reporting from Gaza — From my home in the Gaza Strip, I followed the American election season with interest. Many times I heard the personal stories of Americans without access to healthcare and the toll illness has taken on their lives. I can relate. For months, […]
→ read full articleTERRORISM: THE ONGOING ATTACK IN MUMBAI
Vithal Rajan,
2 Dec 2008
December 1, 2008 Friends, In the last 24 hours I have received three messages: from Mr. Mazher Hussain condemning the attack on behalf of COVA; a denunciation of this latest terrorist attack from Mr. Ali Asghar of Roshan Vikas; and a political demand from Peace, a Hyderabadi Muslim-led group, for greater Muslim participation in the political process. […]
→ read full article‘TOXIC WASTE? BEHIND SOMALI PIRACY
Najad Abdullahi,
12 Oct 2008
Somali pirates have accused European firms of dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast and are demanding an $8bn ransom for the return of a Ukranian ship they captured, saying the money will go towards cleaning up the waste. The ransom demand is a means of "reacting to the toxic waste that has been continually […]
→ read full article