study conducted by the UN Office On Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that the methamphetamine market in the region has exploded in size and value, and is now estimated to be worth between roughly US$30 billion and $60 billion.
2019/07/19
Senegal’s Offshore Oil Reserves a Pricey Pawn in Covert Deal
A Romanian-Australian businessman with a history of fraud, corruption, and misleading investors appears to have received at least $650 million from a West African oil and gas deal carried out with the help of well-positioned relatives of two consecutive Senegalese presidents.
Indian/Portuguese names
the high court in Goa overturned a previous ruling, convicting Samson D’Souza of culpable homicide, criminal assault and outraging a woman’s modesty, providing narcotics to a person with knowledge that it could cause serious harm or death, and destruction of evidence.
He was also convicted under the Goa children’s code for not providing a safe environment for a child, according to MacKeown’s lawyer, Vikram Varma. A second man, Placido Carvalho, accused of abetting a crime, had his acquittal upheld
Europeans remember the 1980s
when the United States and Russia quickly built up a combined arsenal of nearly 3,500 nuclear-armed medium-range missiles, all aimed at Europe.
2019/07/17
Portugal is the least compliant European country against corruption
Portugal ranks behind Turkey, Serbia, Romania, Belgium, and Croatia, with the Council of Europe criticising the Portuguese State for lacking measures against particularly serious crime.
Moscow braces for renewed protests after opposition politicians excluded from city elections
almost all of the independent candidates standing for election had been told they would not be allowed to run. In contrast, the vast majority of the 216 given the green light were supporters of Vladimir Putin.
2019/07/13
Facebook to be fined $5bn for Cambridge Analytica privacy violations
The (US) Federal Trade Commission has reportedly voted to approve fining Facebook roughly $5bn to settle an investigation into the company’s privacy violations
2019/07/12
Tajikistan is one of the world’s most repressive countries
at least three occasions, Tajikistani dissidents have met terrible fates while working with Nikolaev — in two cases, very shortly after their last meetings with him. Several prominent members of the diaspora now accuse him of selling them out.
In mid February 2019, raw from torture, weary from sleep deprivation, and more alone than he’d ever been, Sharofiddin Gadoev waited in the dank basement of a government office in Dushanbe, the capital of his native Tajikistan. Just two weeks earlier he’d thought himself safe, well away from the dangerous politics of his homeland, living in the Netherlands and visiting Moscow
2019/07/09
The Pentagon Looks to Virtual Reality to Prepare Troops for Nuclear War
In February, Microsoft employees wrote a letter to executives demanding the company pull out of the contract, saying they “refuse to create technology for warfare and oppression.”
2019/07/06
Horrendous crimes are not to be forgotten
Teresa Costa Macedo, a senior government official, said she informed the country's then president, General Ramalho Eanes, and provided photographic evidence. But the photographs were "lost" by police and Mrs Macedo said she was also intimidated by phone calls from anonymous callers
The Casa Pia affair, which has shaken the very foundations of the Portuguese state, finally goes to trial on Thursday. Former presidents have been accused of turning a blind eye to complaints about systematic abuse over more than a decade, while prosecutors have denied that President Jorge Sampaio was under investigation.
Following the shame of the nation’s Casa Pia child sex abuse scandal which involved all manner of previously respected figures and personalities, stories of institutional child abuse are becoming commonplace in Portugal.
The Casa Pia affair, which has shaken the very foundations of the Portuguese state, finally goes to trial on Thursday. Former presidents have been accused of turning a blind eye to complaints about systematic abuse over more than a decade, while prosecutors have denied that President Jorge Sampaio was under investigation.
Following the shame of the nation’s Casa Pia child sex abuse scandal which involved all manner of previously respected figures and personalities, stories of institutional child abuse are becoming commonplace in Portugal.
Figures released show that more than 36,000 children have been the victims of child abuse and neglect since 2008.
2019/07/05
2019/07/02
Ursula von der Leyen set for EU's top job
She studied economics at the universities of Göttingen and Münster before attending the London School of Economics where she used the pseudonym Rose Ladson because she was seen as a potential target for West German leftwing extremists.
Von der Leyen then read for a medical degree, becoming a gynaecologist, and only entered politics at 42. A mother of seven, she has held government positions as labour and family affairs minister, driving forward key policies on gender quotas for company boards and improved maternity and paternity pay and rights.
Rampant deforestation of Amazon driven by global greed for meat
Investigation exposes how Brazil’s huge beef sector continues to threaten health of world’s largest rainforest
2019/06/28
Journalists Killed or Silenced for Environmental Reporting
OCCRP and Forbidden Stories – a consortium of 40 journalists in 15 countries – takes a look at examples from three continents, in Guatemala, Tanzania, and India.
2019/06/26
2019/06/18
Poem from Princess Nunakawa to Okuninusho
Come in the dark,
When the sun has disappeared
And the night emerges
Behind the green hills.
Come smiling, like the morning sun
In all its glory,
And take in your embrace
My arms white as
Ropes of Taku fiber,
My breasts, young and soft,
2019/06/12
In 1920, The Hogarth Press, founded by Virginia Woolf and her husband, published Paris: A Poem by Hope Mirrlees
it seems an unlikely coincidence that one of the most striking lines of Paris refers to “The wicked April moon” and that Eliot’s Wasteland should commence in the “cruellest” month of April.
2019/06/04
The Tibetan Buddhist Canon
The Tibetan canon is divided into two parts, called the Kangyur and the Tengyur.
2019/06/02
The Poetess
Apart from her fascination with the theme of love, Sappho contributed in other ways to the conventions of the lyric genre. Her emphasis on emotion, on subjective experience, and on the individual marks a stark contrast between her work and the epic, liturgical, or dramatic poetry of the period.
"The stars are sinking; the watch goes by; I lie alone."
Ruth Padel, prizewinning poet and former chair of the UK Poetry Society, chooses her favourite poets who happen to be women.
2019/05/28
Big black holes can settle in the outskirts of small galaxies
Surprisingly, some of those potential black holes aren’t at their galaxy’s center, but instead appear to roam the outskirts, astronomer Amy Reines said
2019/05/23
Banned CFCs traced to China say scientists
it took many decades for scientists to discover that when CFCs break down in the atmosphere, they release chlorine atoms that are able to rapidly destroy the ozone layer which protects us from ultraviolet light. A gaping hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica was discovered in the mid 1980s.
2019/05/21
The museum that hid art banned by Stalin
Savitsky risked everything for this collection. Some of these painters were tortured or murdered or spent long years in the gulags. The work collected is of both Russian and Uzbek artists who painted after the 30s, when all work that wasn’t socialist realism was banned by Stalin. Any other styles of the time – the emerging cubism, futurism, even impressionism – were deemed criminal. Formalism, as it was called, was punishable.
2019/05/19
"Église catholique: ça suffit!"
En matière de droits, il n’y a pas de complémentarité, pas de différence, il n’y a que l’égalité, une égalité originelle : « Dieu créa l’humain à son image, homme et femme, il les créa.»
2019/05/16
Fragmentation, interruption and fog
Of course there are precise moments – the moment in Schoenberg's Second String Quartet when the music abandons tonality altogether and a soprano sings of 'the air of other planets'; or Picasso's Demoiselle's D'Avignon where the prettiness of the acrobats and lovers of his blue and pink periods is abandoned for something at once harsh, archaic and foreign.
2019/05/15
2019/05/14
Harvard Thucydides’s Trap Project
the execution of King Louis XVI in January 1793 was the final straw, galvanizing the British to action and prompting Britain to “engineer a grand anti-French coalition.”
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
In 2004 Ayaan gained international attention following the murder of Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh had directed her short film Submission, a film about the oppression of women under Islam. The assassin, a radical Muslim, left a death threat for her pinned to Van Gogh's chest.
2019/05/12
2019/05/09
2019/05/07
2019/05/05
How a Chinese venture in Venezuela made millions while locals grew hungry
Venezuela and China agreed to hundreds of projects to kickstart growth in the South American country. After billions in investments, however, little materialized. A $200 million rice plant illustrates the graft and incompetence that opponents say crippled development by Venezuela's leftist regime.
Police investigating disappearance of Madeleine McCann unmask 'German paedophile and triple child killer
Ney was jailed for killing Stefan Jahr, 13, in 1992, Dennis Rostel, eight, in 1995, and Dennis Klein, nine, in 2001.
Note: it is ethically and morally mandatory to reenacte the death penalty for monsters like that one.
2019/05/04
No booths, no dealers
Perhaps even more radical is the absence of dealers and gallery representatives all together. Sales are facilitated by Object & Thing staff, who are stationed, iPads in hand, around the 15 “islands” at which works are displayed.
"He wants to be Velazquez so he paints stripes"
To our right was a copper painting by Frank Stella, its surface burnished by the light which flooded the room. A Harvard student who had entered the gallery approached us. With his left arm raised and his finger pointing to the Stella, he confronted Michael Fried. ‘What’s so good about that?’
2019/05/03
Beijing’s deterrence fleet is up to six ballistic missile subs
China is becoming a rising power not only in consumer technology and artificial intelligence but also in Arctic military operations and nuclear submarine construction,
2019/05/02
Does poverty cause terrorism?
close inspection of recent terrorist attacks — including the Easter Sunday suicide bombings in Sri Lanka — finds that perpetrators often come from relatively affluent and well-resourced backgrounds, creating doubt over the credibility of the “poverty-terrorism nexus.”
What might trigger the collapse of the EU?
“the expected success of the far-right and far-left in the European parliamentary election in May this year augurs the beginning of the end for the currency union”.
Note: I'm neither from the far-right nor from the far-left but I think that the EU must collapse. The sonner the better [the political correct aberrations must be stopped and any credit for the purchasing of German cars (submarines and so on) will go to a definitely end].
Artists are turning their attention to contemporary social and political issues that have global relevance
Ai made international headlines when he reported on the discrepancies in the official number of deaths caused by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake in China. After the quake, Ai visited the region, interviewed families, and began recording the actual number of people who were missing. He found that thousands of children had died in the collapse of poorly constructed public schools, a fact that the Chinese authorities had not wanted to make public. He documented his findings on his social media feeds for all the world to see and made artworks to commemorate the thousands of missing children. The Chinese government responded to Ai’s exposé with a beating, imprisonment, and charges of tax evasion
How an Elaborate Plan to Topple Venezuela’s Dictator Went Wrong
if the campaign to dethrone Maduro fails, Venezuela could “sink into a dictatorship from which there are very few possible alternatives.”
As the Venezuelan opposition again struggles to topple Maduro, the few hundred soldiers here who have switched sides wonder why they’ve been ignored by Guaidó.
As the Venezuelan opposition again struggles to topple Maduro, the few hundred soldiers here who have switched sides wonder why they’ve been ignored by Guaidó.
2019/04/30
Juan Guaidó posts a video of himself flanked by armed forces claiming he is ‘starting the final phase of Operation Liberty’
“Today it is clear to us that the Armed Forces are with the people and not with the dictator,” Guaidó told the crowd. “We know that all Venezuelans are in favor of change and the Constitution“
2019/04/29
'Biodegradable' plastic bags survive three years in soil and sea
After three years the “biodegradable” bags that had been buried in the soil and the sea were able to carry shopping. The compostable bag was present in the soil 27 months after being buried, but when tested with shopping was unable to hold any weight without tearing.
2019/04/25
2019/04/20
Nusrat Jahan Rafi was doused with kerosene and set on fire at her school in Bangladesh
Many girls and young women in Bangladesh choose to keep their experiences of sexual harassment or abuse secret for fear of being shamed by society or their families. What made Nusrat Jahan different is that she didn't just speak out - she went to the police with the help of her family on the day the alleged abuse happened.
2019/04/19
"Civil disobedience is necessary to create attention to the ongoing climate and ecological crisis"
“It is impossible to exaggerate the awesome nature of the challenge we face: to determine, within the next few years, whether organised human society can survive in anything like its present form,” he said. “The activists of Extinction Rebellion are leading the way in confronting this immense challenge, with courage and integrity, an achievement of historic significance that must be amplified with urgency.”
2019/04/18
Europe Needs a Global Strategy
Europe’s leaders must recognize that China is rapidly building an alternative political system in which a single party digitally controls the masses.
2019/04/16
The dreadful Notre Dame Fire in Paris on Monday 15th April at 5.50pm local time, was predicted by Nostradamus
A quatrain written 500 years ago by the French astrologer anticipated it
2019/04/08
‘The wicked April moon’
‘April is the cruellest month.’ The opening line (although it’s worth remembering that ‘April is the cruellest month’ is not the full line) of T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land is often quoted, especially every time that spring month comes around again. But three years before the publication of Eliot’s poem, a woman named Helen Hope Mirrlees was writing a poem, simply titled Paris: A Poem, which strikingly anticipates many elements of The Waste Land, including the focus on April not as a month of hope and rebirth, but as a time of cruelty and wickedness.
2019/04/07
H.D.’s oeuvre spans five decades of the 20th century, 1911-1961
She is known primarily as a poet, but she also wrote novels, memoirs, and essays and did a number of translations from the Greek. Her work is consistently innovative and experimental, both reflecting and contributing to the avant-garde milieu that dominated the arts in London and Paris until the end of World War II.
2019/04/06
2019/04/04
2019/03/29
Collusion, cut-outs and covert ops; the dangerous ambiguities on which intelligence agencies thrive
Both Barr’s letter and Mueller’s indictments make clear Russian intelligence services aimed to disrupt the 2016 election. Those intelligence operations against our democratic institutions, which persist, operate in similar ways to the aforementioned covert action. They are designed to support and advance Russia’s foreign-policy agenda while hiding the hand of the Russian government.
2019/03/27
By approving Articles 11 and 13
the EU Parliament not only rubber stamped bad legislation, but also ignored the voices of millions of its own concerned constituents. The EU Parliament has sided with lobbyists, and ignored the needs of creators and Internet users. This Directive only further entrenches the largest platforms like Facebook and YouTube – the only ones with the resources to actually comply to these dramatic regulations. The ramifications of this decision will be felt for years to come.
2019/03/21
Norway’s giant oil fund dives into renewables
“These actions by the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund are noticed and contribute to reducing the cost for renewables, whilst accelerating the global shift away from coal.”
2019/03/09
2019/03/07
The Jokhang fire six months on
Despite the seemingly clear evidence of the fire, the events of that evening quickly became contested, with a range of competing claims over the location of the fire and its effects on the Jokhang. Information about the incident was quickly suppressed by the Chinese authorities and has been restricted ever since, apparently in the hope that the official narrative would be adopted: that there was a fire, but it was quickly contained and that no lasting harm was caused to the site or any of the historical and cultural artefacts within. In practice, the secrecy around the fire and its aftermath has served to sow further doubt.
2019/03/06
Seven EU Countries Labeled ‘Tax Havens’ in Parliament Report
The MEPs found that seven of the EU’s 28 member states — Belgium, Cyprus, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Malta and The Netherlands — “display traits of a tax haven and facilitate aggressive tax planning.”
Following increased pressure by the Finnish Government for Portugal to ratify the revised treaty between the two countries, on April 30, 2018 the Finnish Parliament voted in favor of denouncing the Portugal-Finland tax treaty signed on April 27, 1970 (the Old Treaty). As a result the Old Treaty will be terminated effective as of January 1, 2019, in accordance with article 30.º of that treaty. If Portugal does not ratify the revised treaty by December 1, 2018, Finnish domestic legislation will apply, and private sector pensions sourced in Finland and paid to Portuguese residents will be subject to tax in Finland from January 1, 2019.
Following increased pressure by the Finnish Government for Portugal to ratify the revised treaty between the two countries, on April 30, 2018 the Finnish Parliament voted in favor of denouncing the Portugal-Finland tax treaty signed on April 27, 1970 (the Old Treaty). As a result the Old Treaty will be terminated effective as of January 1, 2019, in accordance with article 30.º of that treaty. If Portugal does not ratify the revised treaty by December 1, 2018, Finnish domestic legislation will apply, and private sector pensions sourced in Finland and paid to Portuguese residents will be subject to tax in Finland from January 1, 2019.
2019/03/05
Dutch bank stocks, Austria's Raiffeisen fall on money laundering report
Shares in two Dutch banks and Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) fell on Tuesday after media reports about a money laundering network alleged to have channeled billions of euros from Russia.
2019/03/03
Portuguese judge wants to sue who criticized his decisions
Neto de Moura made public with controversial arguments. The mind-set was exposed to a man who had attacked his wife with a nail because she was unfaithful. "The adultery of a woman is a very grave attack on the honor and dignity of the husband" and there are, as the judge stated, societies "in which the adulterous wife is stoned to death." For Neto de Moura, the aggression in question was not serious enough in this judgment, because "in the Bible we can read that the adulteress should be punished with death."
2019/02/14
In an Effort to Fight Money Laundering, the EU Parliament Wants to Scrap the Freeport System Beloved by Billionaire Art Collectors
The revelations laid bare more than 300 secret tax deals that Luxembourg had struck with global businesses, including Disney, Skype, GlaxoSmithKline, Koch Industries and Black & Decker. In several cases, the deals — known as “tax rulings” — allowed firms to pay less than 1 percent tax in Luxembourg
The European Commission has opened an investigation into one of the 546 secret Luxembourg tax deals exposed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Lux Leaks project almost five years ago.
In March, Juncker dismissed the claims about Le Freeport, saying there was “no evidence showing that free zones in the EU are systematically used to commit fraud.” The final report from TAX3 notes that the committee “deeply regrets” the lack of progress on major initiatives that have not been finalized due to “the lack of genuine political will.”
The European Commission has opened an investigation into one of the 546 secret Luxembourg tax deals exposed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Lux Leaks project almost five years ago.
In March, Juncker dismissed the claims about Le Freeport, saying there was “no evidence showing that free zones in the EU are systematically used to commit fraud.” The final report from TAX3 notes that the committee “deeply regrets” the lack of progress on major initiatives that have not been finalized due to “the lack of genuine political will.”
2019/02/09
Zuckerberg’s new privacy essay shows why Facebook needs to be broken up
Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand what privacy means—he can’t be trusted to define it for the rest of us.
2019/02/08
How the Mafias Came to Slovakia
The slain Slovak journalist was investigating the Calabrian and his connections to then-Prime Minister Fico when he was killed.
Kuciak found that a young female assistant of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico had once co-owned a business with Vadalà — and that the Italian had allegedly scammed the European Union out of 120,000 euros in agricultural subsidies.
Fico has ties to organized criminal groups Kuciak was investigating; Krajmer was inexplicably present at the murder scene shortly after the bodies were found; Fico, Krajmer and Kočner were connected to one another in various ways
Kuciak found that a young female assistant of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico had once co-owned a business with Vadalà — and that the Italian had allegedly scammed the European Union out of 120,000 euros in agricultural subsidies.
Fico has ties to organized criminal groups Kuciak was investigating; Krajmer was inexplicably present at the murder scene shortly after the bodies were found; Fico, Krajmer and Kočner were connected to one another in various ways
2019/02/03
Lithuania Detains 26, Including Top Judges, for Corruption
Lithuanian authorities detained on Wednesday 26 people, including judges and lawyers, in a large-scale anti-corruption probe of the judiciary. The suspects are accused of large-scale bribery, trading in influence and abuse of powers.
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