Catégorie : World People

Linked with You and Aids.

Dr. Nafis Sadik is currently Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General with additional responsibilities as Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Asia. She was former the head of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). She is an alumna of Dow Medical College. Dr. Nafis Sadik is daughter of Muhammad Shoaib, former Finance Minister of Pakistan. (Read on wikipedia).

Nafis Sadik – Pakistan

She says: “Pregnancy is a part of a woman’s life but a woman’s life should not be defined by it. In many societies, however, the fact is that bearing and raising children does define a woman. She does many things in her life, but she is only given recognition for one of them … When women are properly valued for all the things they do, then and only then, will their role as mothers be respected and the resources found to protect their lives and health.”

She says also: « At independence, Pakistan was the 13th most populous country in the world, with 32.5 million people; in 1996 it was seventh, with a population of 140 million. Pakistan’s population growth rate is now one of the highest in Asia at 2.7 percent: at independence we added a million people every year or so; today we are adding a million every three months. No conceivable development plan can sustain such a rate of population growth. If we are to meet the challenges of the 21st century, Pakistan must put slowing population growth at the head of its list of priorities. »

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Linked with Nonviolence Book – Notes to CHAPTER 12, BARBARA DEMING, and with A Random Chapter in the History of Nonviolence.

She said: « Non-violent actions are by their nature androgynous. In them, the two impulses that have long been treated as distinct ‘masculine and feminine’, the impulse of self-assertiveness and the impulse of sympathy, are clearly joined; the very genius of non-violence, in fact, is that it demonstrates them to be indivisible and so restores human community … . » (See on Matt & Andrej Koymasky.com).

(1917 – 1984) Barbara Deming – USA

She was an American feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change. She directed plays, taught dramatic literature and wrote and published fiction and non-fiction works.

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Breaking News: Maori Queen Dies At Turangawaiwai, Tuesday, 15 August 2006, 7:40 pm. (See the whole article on Scoop).

WELLINGTON (Reuters) — Tens of thousands of New Zealanders gathered today to bury the Maori queen, one of the country’s most respected indigenous leaders, and celebrate the inauguration of her son as her successor. The tribal home of Dame Te Atairangikaahu, who died of kidney failure last Tuesday, aged 75, was overflowing as Maori of many tribes, New Zealand and Pacific political leaders, and many others of different races attended her funeral ceremony. (Read all on Canada.com).

1931 – 2006, Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, MAORI Queen – New Zealand

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Added July 13, 2008: Linked also with GoDaddy.com, which is also mentionned on wikipedia, and on Hosting Central. See also: AOL/Microsoft-Hotmail Preventing Delivery of Truthout Communications, UPDATE: 09.20.07 (this is obviously an elite’s struggle against an investigative journalist). See also his article State Department’s Iran Democracy Fund Shrouded In Secrecy, July 11, 2008.

Linked with TruthOut.org.

Read his today’s article: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!

Jason Leopold – USA

He says: « … the place to find a scoop is by reading every bit of information contained within documents. For example, if you’re a business reporter assigned to a company or industry you should pore over the company’s past and present SEC filings.

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Linked with Frontal Attack on the UN, and with Norwegian Institute of International Affairs NUPI.

Ms. Torild Skard is currently a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo where she focuses on gender and development issues.

Torild Skard – Norway

She says: « It is part of the picture that the great majority of politicians and providers of socialservices all over the world are men. There are relatively few wom-en and they are usually in subordinate positions. Clients and citi-zens, on the other hand, include 50 per cent or more women. Womenappear to be particularly numerous among the poor. The spotlightin the report on Kerala and Urdah Pradesh (pp. 44–45) has the be-ginnings of a gender analysis that is very interesting, but this is aboutall.

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Linked with Kabir.org – India, and with PARIVARTAN, Fighting Corruption – India.

He says: « I would love to give it all up, if only someone were to assure me of a means of living because Parivartan is not a source for making money. I have to think of something before I bow out of service but I know for sure that I cannot juggle like this forever ». And: « I firmly believe that there is a way out without having to bribe ». And: « I refuse to turn it into an NGO because I want to be accountable to the people, not to the donors ». And « We changed the modus operandi because we began to see ourselves as touts who do not charge. Now we help people do the paperwork and seek their rights ». And: « We helped Ashok Gupta get a new electricity connection that was refused to him for the last three years because he refused to pay a bribe of Rs 5000. Armed with the Right to Information Act, we got the connection in 10 days ». And: « We are living in a society of extortionists where the common man is not allowed to live honestly ». (See all on this site of The Tribune).

Arvind Kejriwal – India

RTE Activist, Kejriwal wins Magsaysay Award. Powai, 13 August 06 – Arvind Kejriwal, head of the NGO Parivartan, has been chosen for this year’s Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership.

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Linked with Tiere sind weder Menschen noch Waren, and with Departement of Biblical Studies, Univ. Fribourg (Switzerland).

He says « I wrote someplace that the Bible doesn’t really have that much about sex, despite the obsession of various Christians with trying to stop people from having it. However, there is one book that seems to be about nothing else but, and that is this one. In the history of the church, the erotic elements of this book have been interpreted as being praise of Solomon’s favorite wife, about God’s love of Israel, the relation of a student to wisdom itself, and so on. Over the last 200 years or so, the natural understanding of the text has regained ascendancy ». (see Othmar Keel, The Song of Songs, A Continental Commentary, Fortress Press, 1994, 290 pages).

Othmar Keel – Switzerland

Keel’s contribution is an extensive analysis of love poetry in related cultures as well as an examination of many drawings, carvings, and so on.

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Linked with Droits de l’Homme ou droit du plus fort?, and with Science of Chaos or Chaos in Science?.

Jean Bricmont is a Belgian theoretical physicist and a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven. He works on renormalization group and nonlinear differential equations. He is mostly known to the non-academic audience for co-authoring Fashionable Nonsense [= Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (ISBN 0312204078; French: Impostures Intellectuelles, published in the UK as Intellectual Impostures, ISBN 1861976313)] with Alan Sokal. Jean Bricmont also collaborates with activist Noam Chomsky and campaigns on a variety of progressive causes. (See more on wikipedia).

Jean Bricmont – Belgium

Research Themes ( on UCL).

His books on Amazon. And on ‘complete review‘.

Son livre ‘Impérialisme Humanitaire’, droits de l’homme, droit d’ingérence, droit du plus fort?, préface de François Houtart: Toute idée, aussi légitime soit-elle, court le risque d’être transformée en idéologie et d’être utilisée par les pouvoirs en place à des fins qui leur sont propres.

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He is a Spanish poet and novelist. He is openly gay and has rejected his home country of Spain, which he sees as over decadent and sexually repressed (see more on wikipedia).

He says: « When the Spanish dictator Franco died 25 years ago, Juan Goytisolo felt liberated. « I discovered that my real, tyrannical father was Franco, » he says, « my mother was killed by his bombs, my family destroyed, and he forced me to become an exile. Everything I created was a result of the civil war », (see id).

Juan Goytisolo was Born on 5 January, 1931, he attended University of Barcelona and University of Madrid, has largely lived in exile since the late 1950s, mainly in Paris and Marrakesh and was visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego (1969), Boston University (1970), McGill (1972), NYU (1973-4). (See on complete review.com).

Juan Goytisolo was married but took male lovers, and fled bourgeois Barcelona for the Islamic world, which inspired him to launch attacks on the intolerance of his native land. Maya Jaggi (in the Guardian) on Spain’s greatest living writer – and its harshest critic.

Juan Goytisolo – Spain

See a spanish BIBLIOGRAFÍA DE JUAN GOYTISOLO onthe Centro Nacional de Informacion y Comunicacion Educativa (not dated).

See an english review of his books on Complete review.com (not dated).

A long Interview with Juan Goytisolo, by Julio Ortega, trans. Joseph Schraibman (Excerpt): … Julio Ortega: I am very interested in another aspect of Count Julian; its close relationship with the new Hispano-American narrative. l would say that Count Julian is the most Spanish novel that you have written, but it is also the most Hispano-American one, because of its diversity of form and of expression which allows you even to gloss Hispano-American oral language in your novel. What importance has the Hispano-American prose fiction had for you?

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Linked with Promoting the Rights, Voices and Visions of Indigenous Peoples, and with Texts about Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights, and with Texts about Economy and Indigenous Peoples, and with Indigenous Webs for Informations, and with Official development aid grows, but not enough to meet goals.

He says:  » … this year’s ECOSOC meeting was significant for the Ministerial Declaration on Employment and Decent Work that emerged from the Council’s high-level meeting held earlier this month. The declaration identified a number of concrete steps to further implementation of the 2005 World Summit commitment to make the goal of full and proactive employment and decent work a central objective of national and international policies ». (See on Accra-mail.com, July 31, 2006).

JOSÉ ANTONIO OCAMPO – Colombia

His statement at the IMF, Sept. 24, 2005.

Listen this video on his statement, Sept. 15, 2004.

Secretary-General appoints José Antnio Ocampo of Colombia new Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, succeeding Nitin Desai, effective 1 September 2003. Mr. Ocampo has been serving since 1 January 1998 as Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC). Earlier in his career, Mr. Ocampo held a number of posts in the Government of Colombia, including those of Minister of Finance and Public Credit, Director of the National Planning Department and Minister of Agriculture. His academic pursuits have included service as Director of the Foundation for Higher Education and Development, Professor of Economics at the Universidad de los Andes and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and Visiting Professor at Cambridge, Yale and Oxford Universities.

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