Russian opposition leader vows to destroy 'disgusting feudal system'

Russia's top opposition leader, Alexey Navalny, has vowed to destroy the "feudal system of power" lorded over by Vladimir Putin during powerful closing remarks to a provincial court that could send him to prison for six years. Blasting Putin's government for "occupying" power, pilfering the country of billions of dollars and leading Russia down a path of vodka-fuelled degradation, Navalny urged his followers not to be afraid as he awaits a likely jail sentence.

"My colleagues and I will do everything to destroy this feudal system that exists in Russia – this system of power where 83% of the national wealth belongs to 0.5% of the country," he said. "Not one of us has the right to neutrality," Navalny told the court (video)in Kirov, 500 miles east of Moscow, where he is standing trial on charges of embezzlement that are widely seen as a means of silencing Putin's most virulent critic. "Each time one of us thinks: 'I'll just stand aside and things will happen without me and I'll wait', then he is helping this disgusting feudal system that sits like a spider in that Kremlin," Navalny said.

Navalny has grown from being a politically active anti-corruption activist into the most prominent opposition leader to organise mass anti-Putin protests that shook Moscow early last year. He has continued to uncover dozens of cases of official wrongdoing, from state-run companies to prominent MPs. Last month, he announced he would run for mayor of Moscow in snap elections called for September.

In a country where independent political activism is crushed and expressing anti-Putin sentiment is increasingly dangerous, many had long expected Navalny's arrest. As Putin unleashed a crackdown against civil society unseen since the Soviet era upon his return to the Kremlin last year, prosecutors brought case after criminal case against Navalny.

In Kirov, state prosecutors allege that Navalny, 37, embezzled 16m roubles (£330,000) worth of timber from a state firm when he was advising the region's liberal governor in 2009. On Friday, prosecutors asked the judge to hand him a six0year jail sentence and a 1m rouble fine – below the maximum 10-year sentence he could have faced, but enough to keep him in jail for Russia's next presidential election in 2018.

"If someone thinks that in hearing this threat of six years I will run away, abroad, or hide somewhere, you are very, very mistaken," Navalny said. "I'm not running anywhere – I have no other choice. I don't want to do anything else. I want to help the people of my country.

"It's been 15 years since huge oil and gas money arrived and what has it brought to the country? Did we get better access to medicine, education, housing conditions? What did we get – those of us on this or that side of the defendants' bench? The only thing that became more accessible to our people now than in Soviet times is vodka... read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/05/russian-opposition-destroy-feudal-system-alexey-navalny

Read More

Day of Solidarity with Ishrat Jahan, Constitution Club, Delhi 5 pm; 6th July / Saturday

Observe day of Solidarity with #Ishrat Jahan 

19-year-old College student executed in cold blood

Public Meeting, Cultural Evening and Candle Light Vigil

Deputy Chairman Hall 2nd Floor,

Constitution Club, Delhi / 5 pm onwards
6th July / Saturday

Ishrat Jahan's family and lawyer will address the gathering

Strengthen the fight for Justice for Ishrat Jahan

Ishrat Jahan encounter case: Cops protecting accused, says Gujarat HC

Ishrat Jehan's mother appeals for justice // CBI Probe Nails IB Officer’s Role // Important interview with Shamima Kauser's lawyer Vrinda Grover

Ishrat Jahan case: Gujarat High Court raps CBI over delay in filing chargesheet

Public Appeal by R.B. SREEKUMAR, FORMER DGP, GUJARAT

Did Narendra Modi, Amit Shah know of the Ishrat Jahan encounter in advance?

Police records show Gujarat riots weren’t a sudden backlash

Sadiq Jamal Case: CBI Files Affidavit, Says Probe In Progress

Gujarat Police killed Sadiq Jamal despite Intelligence Bureau's clean chit

How Varun Gandhi silenced the system - Tehelka expose

1984 carnage - 5 convicted, main accused Sajjan Kumar acquitted

Probe larger conspiracy says Zakia Jafri's counsel, reminds SIT of SC order regarding 2002 riots

Poornima Joshi: Sangh Singh Song

A Hard Rain Falling (private armies and political violence in India) (EPW) 

Read More

Fears of a new Darfur as refugees are caught in violence on Sudan's border

Batul Javil's story is familiar, but terrifying all the same. She had taken her children to visit her parents in a neighbouring village in Sudan's southern Blue Nile state beyond which, after an international border was created in July 2011, Khartoum's rule ends and newly independent South Sudan begins. It was a day, she says, like any other. Then without warning, all hell broke loose.

"All of a sudden, the war came," Javil says. A plane darkened the sky, dropping bombs indiscriminately on the village and its inhabitants. All they could do was run, she says, try to find cover, simply get away. The family could not go back to their village, could not stay where they were, so they headed for the border crossing into South Sudan's Upper Nile state. "It took three days to get to the border. We walked and rested, walked and rested. There was no water. The children were very hungry. All the time the military plane was circling. We were very fearful."

Now, having reached the relative safety of Gendrassa camp in Maban county, one of five centres aided and supplied by Oxfam in co-operation with the UN's refugee agency, Batul says she misses her home and, most of all, her youngest child, who died of complications arising from malnutrition, fever and anaemia during the trek out of Blue Nile.

"I miss my child, I miss my husband. We lost all our animals. We did not even have a chicken to take with us. We have only the clothes we wear … Life is difficult. I don't know when it will end. I don't know when we will go back."

In newly established Kaya camp, down the long, dirt road from Gendrassa and the nearby town of Bunj, Hamed Yusif squats on the ground, carving wooden legs for a bed he is making for his family. A new arrival, he too tells of aerial bombing by the Sudanese armed forces' Russian-made Antonovs and by artillery that forced his family to flee their village. "All the time they are attacking, attacking," Yusif says. "The children and the women ran into the bush. The animals died. The houses were burned by the army. We lived under trees in the bush. We were running for two days. We could only carry water. We ate leaves and berries."

Yusif slices a strip of wood from the stump he is carving, and says he has a message for Sudan's president, whom the refugees hold responsible for the violence in Blue Nile: "I ask Omar al-Bashir, please stop the war, please stop the bombing. If he came here, we would ask him to stop the war." But he is not hopeful his plea will be heard. "I don't want to go home. We will stay here."

The crisis in Blue Nile, and a similar emergency in an adjacent Sudanese border state, South Kordofan, caught the international community unawares when it erupted in 2011 at the time of South Sudan's independence... read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/05/south-sudan-new-darfur-warnings

Read More

80 sexual assaults in one day – the other story of Tahrir Square

On Wednesday night, when Egypt's army chief announced the forced departure of Mohamed Morsi, the streets around Tahrir Square turned into an all-night carnival. But not everyone there was allowed to celebrate. Among the masses dancing, singing and honking horns, more than 80 women were subjected to mob sexual assaults, harassment or rape. In Tahrir Square since Sunday, when protests against Morsi first began, there have been at least 169 counts of sexual mob crime.

"Egypt is full of sexual harassment and people have become desensitised to it – but this is a step up," said Soraya Bahgat, a women's rights advocate and co-founder of Tahrir Bodyguard, a group that rescues women from assault. "We're talking about mob sexual assaults, from stripping women naked and dragging them on the floor – to rape."

Since Sunday, campaigners say at least one woman has been raped with a sharp object.

Such crimes have been endemic at Tahrir protests since at least the 2011 revolution, but they have never been documented in such high numbers.

"It's been underreported because a lot of people are unwilling to come forward," said Bahgat, "and because no one wanted to disturb the sanctity of Tahrir."

In a typical attack, lines of men push their way through the packed square, surround lone women, and start ripping at their clothes until they are naked. Some women have been violated by men using their hands.

"Suddenly, I was in the middle, surrounded by hundreds of men in a circle that was getting smaller and smaller around me," one woman has written of the experience. "At the same time, they were touching and groping me everywhere and there were so many hands under my shirt and inside my pants."

"We call it the circle of hell," said Bahgat, who herself narrowly escaped assault this week.

Since last November, help has been at hand. Two volunteer rescue groups – Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment (OpAntish) and Tahrir Bodyguard – have squads of rescuers patrolling the square in groups of around 15. The two organisations have slightly different tactics and uniforms, but their methods are broadly the same. They seek to fight off the attackers, sometimes with clubs and flamethrowers, and re-clothe the women – and then secret them to safe-houses nearby, or even to hospital. Mobs have been known to try to break down the safe-house doors, while some of the rescuers have been assaulted themselves.

Often, random passers-by join in the attacks. But all activists in the field feel sure the assaults are usually started by groups of men who go to the square together on crowded protest days with the specific intention of violating women.

"There's an absolute absence of any security forces in Tahrir," explained Bahgat, who no longer runs the group. "And also the crowd seems to have become conditioned to it."

Such indifference is not specific to Tahrir. While in the past year many more people have begun to mobilise against it, sexual harassment still remains an accepted part of Egyptian life. According to a UN survey released this April, 99.3% of Egyptian women reported being sexually harassed, with 91% saying they feel insecure in the street as a result.

One problem is that sexual harassment is not properly defined under Egyptian law, which makes prosecuting perpetrators difficult. Another is that when women try to file complaints under more general harassment and assault laws, their cases are not taken seriously by police. "Cases that are reported to the police are handled in a disgusting manner," said Mariam Kirollos, an OpAntish organiser, and an activist for women's rights. "They are not taken seriously. In some cases, girls filing a police report are even harassed.".. read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/05/egypt-women-rape-sexual-assault-tahrir-square

Read More

Five thousand metres under the sea: journey to another world - Marine ecologist Jon Copley

Five kilometres, or 3.1 miles, is not a great distance on land – the length of a pleasant stroll. But five kilometres vertically in the ocean separates different worlds. On 21 June I had the opportunity to make that short journey to another world, by joining Japanese colleagues for the first manned mission to the deepest known hydrothermal vents, five thousand metres down on the ocean floor.

The goal of the expedition, led by Prof Ken Takai of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, was to study the limits of life at deep-sea vents in the Cayman Trough as part of a round-the-world voyage of discovery by the research ship RV Yokosuka. In February, I had led a British expedition investigating the same vents with a remotely operated vehicle, so I was delighted to join the team actually visiting them inside one of the few machines that can carry people beyond five kilometres deep.

Crammed into the two-metre chamber of the Shinkai6500 with pilot Yoshitaka Sasaki and co-pilot Yudai Tayama, we waited for the team on the deck of the RV Yokosuka to hook us up to the stern gantry and lift us out over the rolling blue waters of the Caribbean. We fanned ourselves as the temperature inside our hollow metal ball rose past 30C in the tropical morning sun. At 09.07 we were lowered gently into the water, detached from the ship, and sank beneath the grip of the waves on our journey into the void below.

Five minutes after leaving the surface, we passed 200 metres depth and entered the "twilight zone", where sunlight is already too dim for microscopic algae to thrive. Our portholes became discs of the deepest blue imaginable – a colour eloquently described as "luminous black" by deep-sea pioneer William Beebe, after whom we named the undersea vents below. Beebe and his colleague Otis Barton were the first people to venture into the deep ocean and see its life first-hand, when they dived in their bathysphere in the early 1930s.

At 09.29 we passed 923 metres deep – the maximum depth reached by Beebe and Barton in 1934. Moments later we entered the "midnight zone" beyond 1,000 metres deep, where not even the faintest traces of sunlight remain. With our sub spinning slowly during descent, and an outside water temperature of 5.3C now thankfully cooling us, we were passing through one of the least-known realms of our planet: the huge interior volume of the ocean.

This is a water world without walls, inhabited by creatures of ethereal beauty. From the vantage point of my 10-centimetre porthole, I glimpsed life forms with outlines like blown glass occasionally drifting past our lights, while small crustaceans hovered around like flies, keeping pace with our descent. All are part of the ecology that transfers carbon from surface waters to the depths below, via the perpetual rain of particles processed by those that live here.

At 09.56 we reached 2,200 metres depth – a personal milestone, as that was the deepest I had been before, but this time not even halfway to the bottom. Forty minutes later we passed the average depth of the oceans, at around 3,800 metres. Finally, after free-falling through the water for two hours, we approached the seafloor at a depth of 5,099 metres, stirring up a temporary cloud of silt as we touched down.

As the silt cleared, we found ourselves on a flat plain of yellow-tinged mud, inscribed with pits, burrows and tracks by species that eke out their existence on the detritus that settles from above. To reach the Beebe Vent Field some 400 metres away, we crept across a landscape of alien contours, shaped by processes different from those that sculpt the land.

Within a few minutes, the pool of light in front of our submersible revealed a slope of grey lava rubble, which eventually gave way to jumbled blocks of rust-coloured sulfides – the minerals formed by the deep-sea vents. Soon afterwards, we arrived at our target site: a set of "black-smoker chimneys" at a depth of 4,967 metres.

These slender mineral spires, two storeys high, are pipes from which fluids hotter than 400C gush into the ocean. The hot fluids are quenched by the chilly waters of the deep sea, and form a billowing plume of smoke-like particles that we can detect nearly a kilometre above. Sitting next to this force of nature in the Shinkai6500, surrounded by vast darkness and a pressure greater than half a tonne per square centimetre, was simultaneously humbling and wonderful.

Through dexterous operation of the Shinkai6500's mechanical arms by pilot Sasaki-san, we quickly began collecting samples of rocks, the hot fluids from the vents, and the creatures thriving around them: speckled anemones with almost-translucent tentacles, and the orange-tinted shrimp scurrying among them... read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jul/05/five-thousand-metres-sea-hydrothermal-vents

Mariana Trench: James Cameron completes record-breaking mission

Read More

MARIZ TADROS - Opportunities and pitfalls in Egypt’s roadmap

The only way to safeguard against the emergence of another dictatorship in Egypt is a political settlement that is premised on an inclusive rather than majoritarian political order

In order not to end up with another authoritarian regime in Egypt six or twelve months down the line, we need to understand why the power configurations that emerged at the time of the ousting of President Mubarak in 2011 led to the reproduction of another authoritarian regime.  

Essentially, the Muslim Brotherhood struck a deal with the army SCAF [Supreme Council of Armed Forces] premised on the idea that the Islamists would ensure a safe exit for the army from power and grant them a high level of financial autonomy. In return, SCAF would create an enabling environment for the Muslim Brotherhood to come to power.  This political settlement excluded youth revolutionary forces who had instigated the revolution, the opposition parties and movements, women, civil society, Christians [accounting for 10-15 percent of the population] and just about everyone who was not from the Islamist camp. From the outset, the democratic experiment was doomed to fail because the expectations of these groups in society for power sharing had been thwarted.

While a political settlement involves an ongoing process of negotiating different interests and balancing different power bases, nonetheless, the military’s announcement of a roadmap on Tuesday, July 3 emerged out of talks that included parties of different affiliations. The negotiations of the terms of the roadmap have involved Sheikh Ahmed el Tayeb, heading Sunni Islam’s most respected establishment body, Al Azhar, Pope Tawadrous, leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church, representing followers of the Coptic faith, Mohamed Abd el Azziz, a representative of Tamarod, the youth movement that called for the June 30 uprising, Mohamed el Baradei, representing the non-Islamist political parties and Galal el Morah the secretary general of the Nour party, the political wing of the ultra-radical Islamists.

The presence of the latter challenges the notion that this was a military siding with the “seculars” against the “Islamists”. Also involved in the development of the parameters of the roadmap was renowned writer Sekina Fouad, an intelligent woman who stands for progressive socio-political agendas. Some western media and political analysis are quick to suggest that the Brotherhood were excluded from this political settlement. This is not true, the Freedom and Justice Party (the political party representing the MB) was invited to participate: but not surprisingly they turned down the offer.

The breadth of representation of different political forces that publicly gave their blessing to the roadmap is a promising but insufficient guarantee that the upcoming process will be an inclusive one. Of the political forces mentioned above, we know that the Salafis are the closest to the hearts of the army. When SCAF was in power, it repeatedly called upon Salafi leaders such as Sheikh Mohamed Hassan to mediate in political and sectarian disputes and conflicts. The non-Islamist political forces will have to keep a close eye on how this intimate relationship reflects on the on-going political settlement. It is no secret that the Salafis have repeatedly entered into alliances with the Brotherhood against the non-Islamist forces and have often been involved in violent verbal and physical assaults on women, religious minorities and the Sufis.

Moreover, reducing democracy to a ballot box can only produce a majoritarian political order that is tyrannical and oppressive to difference. In order to produce an inclusive political order that is respectful of women’s full citizenship rights, the rights of religious minorities,and socially and politically marginal groups, there has to be a disentangling between representation, power and influence, and the electoral process. The rights of these groups cannot be left to the ballot box to mediate. If 70% of the people of Egypt voted that women or religious minorities should not be members of parliament or in ministerial office in a free and fair election, the application of such measures would obviously produce a highly exclusionary political order- even if it has the stamp of electoral legitimacy.

There are two major problem areas that can lead to the reproduction of another authoritarian order, possibly worse than that of Mubarak and Morsi. The first is the constitution and the second is the election.

One of the major obstacles in the roadmap that was announced by the army is the suspension of the constitution, rather than its annulment. This was no doubt a concession made to the Salafis: the annulment of the constitution could threaten the gains that the Salafis secured in the constitution which they and the Brotherhood drew up in 2012. It is likely that the Salafis will push for a more Islamist version of the new constitution which directly clashes with the notion of an inclusive democracy. A constitution a la Salafism is one that would turn the country into a theocracy. The distribution of power within the committee responsible for amending the current constitution will be key to safeguarding a new social contract that ensures social justice, full equal citizenship rights for all and the complete separation of the executive, judicial and legislative powers.

The second challenge to building an inclusive democracy has to do with the rules of the game governing Egypt’s presidential and parliamentary elections. The key issue here is the place of religion in politics. The exclusion of the Islamist forces from the political life of the country will only produce a virulent backlash that will undermine any prospects of national reconciliation... read more:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/mariz-tadros/opportunities-and-pitfalls-in-egypt%E2%80%99s-roadmap

Read More

Pyramid in Peru torn down by developers

Real estate developers using heavy machinery tore down a 20ft (6m) tall pyramid at one of Peru's oldest archaeological sites, cultural officials have said. Rafael Varon, deputy minister of cultural patrimony, told reporters on Wednesday that the destruction occurred over the weekend at the ruins of El Paraiso, a few miles north of Peru's capital, Lima.

He said his agency has lodged criminal complaints against two companies for the damage – identified as Alisol and Provelanz – and has moved to seize the equipment used. People who answered the telephone at both companies said no one was available to comment.

Peru's tourism ministry says El Paraiso was built some 4,000 years ago and was a religious and administrative centre, long before the rise of the Inca culture encountered by the Spanish conquerors. Marco Guilen, director of an excavation project at El Paraiso, said the people who tore down the pyramid "have committed irreparable damage to a page of Peruvian history".

"We are not going to be able to know in what ways it was constructed, what materials were used in it and how the society in that part of the pyramid behaved," said Guilen.

Varon said people apparently working for the two companies tore down one pyramid and tried to destroy three others, but were stopped by witnesses.

Mayor Freddy Ternero of San Martin de Porres, the town where the ruins are located, said the pyramids were sited in agricultural fields and were not guarded, though he said the minister of the interior sent police to protect it after the incident.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/04/pyramid-peru-torn-down-el-paraiso

Read More