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[
"Andrea Haffly"
] | 2016-08-26T12:56:24 | null | 2016-08-24T14:45:00 | The inaugural Fly In Drive In movie night is set for Saturday (Aug. 27) as a fundraiser for Friends of Tacoma Narrows Airport and the Gig Harbor Film Festival. Vintage airplanes, automobiles and Disney’s “Planes” movie will be shown, along with food from community businesses at this family-friendly event. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenewstribune.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fcommunity%2Fgateway%2Fg-living%2Farticle97657827.html.json | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-living/13ihd/picture97657822/ALTERNATES/LANDSCAPE_1140/gw_planes_2(2) | en | null | Fly In Drive In event connects Gig Harbor community with Tacoma Narrows Airport, local nonprofits | null | null | www.thenewstribune.com | 1:06 Friends, family honor memory of Braden Edgar at memorial Pause
3:18 Pete Carroll on Seahawks' win over Dallas in 3rd preseason game
2:28 Cascade Christian's speed, athletes have it planning for postseason
1:39 South Sound QB competition -- Sumner
1:58 Human remains found at Gig Harbor construction site
2:30 Fire-ravaged Puyallup school buses a grim sight
0:39 Allenmore offices evacuated because of odor
4:12 WATCH: Franklin Pierce QB Willie Patterson is small in stature, gargantuan in game
1:25 WATCH: South Sound QB competition – Franklin Pierce
1:24 Bethel teachers rally for contract | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-living/article97657827.html | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.thenewstribune.com/055fa69a06c86b97be5fc80901c29ad5486d4069099695a9bf5475c970f5872f.json |
[
"Hugh Mcmillan",
"Contributing Writer"
] | 2016-08-26T13:06:10 | null | 2016-08-24T10:47:00 | There is a beautiful, enormous tree in PenMet Parks’ Sehmel Park at which, more than once, I’ve taken photos of Boy Scouts engaged in projects near. The latest of these was to catch the final act of Boy Scout Troop 212’s Eagle Scout project by Anders Carlson, who’d decided the tree needed protection and chose as his Eagle project creation of a guardian split rail fence. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenewstribune.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fcommunity%2Fgateway%2Fg-living%2Farticle97579212.html.json | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-living/gqps66/picture97579207/ALTERNATES/LANDSCAPE_1140/IMG_5060 | en | null | Boy Scout builds fence around iconic tree at Sehmel Park | null | null | www.thenewstribune.com | 1:06 Friends, family honor memory of Braden Edgar at memorial Pause
3:18 Pete Carroll on Seahawks' win over Dallas in 3rd preseason game
2:28 Cascade Christian's speed, athletes have it planning for postseason
1:39 South Sound QB competition -- Sumner
1:58 Human remains found at Gig Harbor construction site
2:30 Fire-ravaged Puyallup school buses a grim sight
0:39 Allenmore offices evacuated because of odor
4:12 WATCH: Franklin Pierce QB Willie Patterson is small in stature, gargantuan in game
1:25 WATCH: South Sound QB competition – Franklin Pierce
1:24 Bethel teachers rally for contract | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-living/article97579212.html | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.thenewstribune.com/59dd204a60445268062f26f84eebf336478adf542e23d82f222d2ef70ebf9a00.json |
[
"Andrea Haffly"
] | 2016-08-26T13:07:01 | null | 2016-08-17T15:35:00 | Kaytlyn Brabham constructed a new trail and information kiosk at Rotary Bark Dog Park in Gig Harbor during the summer of 2015 to give back to local canines and fellow dog lovers. The project earned Brabham her Gold Award. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenewstribune.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fcommunity%2Fgateway%2Fg-news%2Farticle96274907.html.json | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-news/axcjb6/picture96274902/ALTERNATES/LANDSCAPE_1140/gw_girl_scout_gold | en | null | Gig Harbor Girl Scout gives back to canines, dog owners with Gold Award project | null | null | www.thenewstribune.com | null | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-news/article96274907.html | en | 2016-08-17T00:00:00 | www.thenewstribune.com/76d8a405f89e8a8580a1356df36f910b6429c4b774d8dae943d13f11b69af6c8.json |
[
"Jon Manley"
] | 2016-08-26T12:55:56 | null | 2016-08-25T14:20:00 | Regina and Darius Aldrige, co-owners of Waypoint CrossFit in Gig Harbor, have seen a sharp uptick in people over 40 who want to participate in CrossFit classes. So they started a Silver Nanos program in response to the demand. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenewstribune.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fcommunity%2Fgateway%2Fg-sports%2Farticle97891147.html.json | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-sports/cyrr4m/picture97891132/ALTERNATES/LANDSCAPE_1140/gw_SilverNanos_0001 | en | null | CrossFit class caters to fitness needs of those over age 40 | null | null | www.thenewstribune.com | null | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-sports/article97891147.html | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.thenewstribune.com/cc3b1cbdc1f3decd80c411cf3d65945f858ce73d4028b42d9363d3cab675f1e2.json |
[
"Andrea Haffly"
] | 2016-08-26T13:07:16 | null | 2016-08-25T10:31:00 | Bill Fay will climb Mount Rainier on Sept. 1 and 2 to raise money for Orphans Africa, a Tacoma-based nonprofit organization that works in Tanzania. The money Fay plans to raise will be used in one of the organization’s three schools. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenewstribune.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fcommunity%2Fgateway%2Fg-news%2Farticle97816897.html.json | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-news/26q2wc/picture97816837/ALTERNATES/LANDSCAPE_1140/gw_bill_rainier_climb_0001 | en | null | Fox Island resident raises money for Tanzania orphans with Rainier climb | null | null | www.thenewstribune.com | null | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-news/article97816897.html | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.thenewstribune.com/275633328a7826c60cc0d55478dace61ff18c206d5c84a5a97da34e407133bc4.json |
[
"Joan Cronk",
"Special To The Gateway"
] | 2016-08-26T13:01:38 | null | 2016-08-24T14:22:00 | Paul Dunlap, who has been a barber for 18 years — 12 of them in Gig Harbor — took over the former Gentleman Jim’s barbershop in October 2015 and completely transformed the layout, making it his own. He says his business has increased by 50 percent since that time, mostly due to word of mouth. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenewstribune.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fcommunity%2Fgateway%2Fg-news%2Farticle97647872.html.json | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-news/67lm1j/picture97647867/ALTERNATES/LANDSCAPE_1140/gw_purdy_barber_0002 | en | null | Back-and-forth banter free with any haircut at Peninsula Barbershop | null | null | www.thenewstribune.com | null | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-news/article97647872.html | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.thenewstribune.com/5a787b6b72186b8d773c3fdf212869bb9053abc1a5ccd863ca0ddb36d0e12e77.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:53:07 | null | 2016-08-19T15:43:00 | Cheers and Jeers for the Aug. 18 edition of The Peninsula Gateway. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenewstribune.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fcommunity%2Fgateway%2Fg-opinion%2Farticle96770927.html.json | http://www.thenewstribune.com/static/images/thenewstribune/facebook.jpg | en | null | Cheers and Jeers, Aug. 18 | null | null | www.thenewstribune.com | null | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-opinion/article96770927.html | en | 2016-08-19T00:00:00 | www.thenewstribune.com/bd97f8e323e0c117c3509f425e9d25bbf2d1b581f477c3bf360e170aaa068a53.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:04:49 | null | 2016-08-25T14:24:00 | Cheers and Jeers for the Aug. 25 edition of The Peninsula Gateway. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thenewstribune.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2Fcommunity%2Fgateway%2Fg-opinion%2Farticle97892312.html.json | http://www.thenewstribune.com/static/images/thenewstribune/facebook.jpg | en | null | Cheers and Jeers, Aug. 25 | null | null | www.thenewstribune.com | null | http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/community/gateway/g-opinion/article97892312.html | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.thenewstribune.com/cf7770f4e2a32b8d89ac959cd49c8fe5ad94414066a5d6cebc50f9f879d0704c.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:05:29 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | Alberta's public lands were a disaster, its economy hopelessly mismanaged and the only people actually benefiting... | https%3A%2F%2Falbertaviews.ab.ca%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Fa-plan-for-the-better%2F.json | https://www.albertaviews.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/favicon.ico | en | null | A Plan for the Better | null | null | albertaviews.ab.ca | Related Posts
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Forestburg Read in 2 minutes Forestburg Year incorporated: 1919 (founded: 1861) Population: 2006: 896; 2011: 831 Ages: (% of total pop.) 0-19: 24%; 20-39: 21... | https://albertaviews.ab.ca/2016/08/22/a-plan-for-the-better/ | en | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | albertaviews.ab.ca/70fbc0c104ace22a3536dc35e8efa80ab6865af12e864d8b874844e87a40380f.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:01:08 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | Alberta's performing arts season, running September to June, features theatre, music, dance and opera. | https%3A%2F%2Falbertaviews.ab.ca%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Farts-season-guide-3%2F.json | https://www.albertaviews.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/favicon.ico | en | null | Arts Season Guide | null | null | albertaviews.ab.ca | Related Posts
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The People’s Voice They sold a provincial treasure for ten bucks. When the Crown corporation ACCESS—following the orders of the Ralph Klein government to get out of the ... | https://albertaviews.ab.ca/2016/08/22/arts-season-guide-3/ | en | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | albertaviews.ab.ca/ee70d21534be556e266acb3ff6da93829a983d9de02fee51349056b796a1028c.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:02:04 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | Having written humour for pay, I have theories about how it works. | https%3A%2F%2Falbertaviews.ab.ca%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Fwhats-funny-whats-not%2F.json | https://www.albertaviews.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/favicon.ico | en | null | What’s Funny? What’s Not? | null | null | albertaviews.ab.ca | Related Posts
Rosebud Read in 2 minutes Rosebud Founded: 1885 Population: 2006: 109; 2011: 88 Ages: (2011; % of total pop.) 0-19: 24%; 20-39: 24%; 40-69: 41%; 70+: 0%; ...
Thomas Lukaszuk: Minister of Labour Read in less then a minute Born: Gdynia, Poland Highest level of education attained: B.Ed., U of A Work prior to provincial politics: Teacher (ECSD...
Jeff Johnson: Education Minister Read in less then a minute BIOGRAPHY Lives in: Athabasca Education: BA in psychology, Camrose Lutheran College Prior to politics: President/owne... | https://albertaviews.ab.ca/2016/08/22/whats-funny-whats-not/ | en | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | albertaviews.ab.ca/0d3ac3de03ca4e040279d150ce9dcf3e4832dd7f3278f0bd4ca3fea74075455d.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:04:17 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | A refugee is someone who is forced to flee from persecution in their home country, or who has fled violence, war or destruction. | https%3A%2F%2Falbertaviews.ab.ca%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Fsix-waves-of-refugees%2F.json | https://www.albertaviews.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/favicon.ico | en | null | Six Waves of Refugees | null | null | albertaviews.ab.ca | Related Posts
Diminishing the Demand A couple of years ago I found myself sitting at a table at the University of Alberta with Greg Goss, an expert in aquatic toxicology. Goss had recentl...
Editorial: Systemic Neglect In my Calgary junior high there were two things you really didn’t want to be: gay or “foreign.” Our school had zero gay students as far as we knew. Th...
Washing the Body While she was dying, there was often silence-without-silence. We wanted it to end. Yet we could not bear the thought of it ending. Agonized breathing ... | https://albertaviews.ab.ca/2016/08/22/six-waves-of-refugees/ | en | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | albertaviews.ab.ca/3332d22d9a3c0e15caa4226efdbb0825938c4e4df95d01ee9435c68a7b4ab804.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:01:37 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | Business As Usual; Feast or Famine; The Upside of Insecurity; plus other clips, quotes and controversies. | https%3A%2F%2Falbertaviews.ab.ca%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Fclippings-quotes-and-controversies-44%2F.json | https://www.albertaviews.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/favicon.ico | en | null | Clippings, Quotes and Controversies | null | null | albertaviews.ab.ca | Related Posts
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Joe CeciMinister of Finance Read in less then a minute | https://albertaviews.ab.ca/2016/08/22/clippings-quotes-and-controversies-44/ | en | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | albertaviews.ab.ca/a3a181d2e2309f8deb559b1f9d5b97cc186712c53b85b58a2b95ac2061294588.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:03:33 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | At the University of Calgary you can attend classes in the Canadian Natural Resources Limited Engineering Complex. Lectures are given in the ConocoPhillips, Progress Energy and Encana theatres. | https%3A%2F%2Falbertaviews.ab.ca%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Feditorial-the-corporate-u%2F.json | https://www.albertaviews.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/favicon.ico | en | null | Editorial: The Corporate U | null | null | albertaviews.ab.ca | Editorial: The Corporate U What's wrong with a little sponsorship?
At the University of Calgary you can attend classes in the Canadian Natural Resources Limited Engineering Complex. Lectures are given in the ConocoPhillips, Progress Energy and Encana theatres. You can take books out of a Petro-Canada sponsored library. And when you need a break—perhaps from oil and gas logos—you can relax in the BMO Financial Group Forum (a.k.a. some couches at the end of Scurfield Hall).
There was a time when this kind of corporate sponsorship at a university would have been gauche or even embarrassing—a sign that a school had sold out. After all, universities were designed to be the one place in our society unencumbered by narrow thinking and interests, where students, professors and researchers could freely explore “whatsoever things are true” (from Philippians 4:8; later the University of Alberta motto). Today the U of C brags in press releases about its corporate “partnerships” and lauds companies for their generous support. But this support is neither generous nor benign—and it signals something much worse than the school’s shrinking reputation and integrity.
In fact, companies get this exposure in exchange for one-time donations that amount to a tiny fraction of the university’s budget. ConocoPhillips, for example, paid between $250,000 and $499,999 for its U of C lecture theatre, or 0.04 per cent of the school’s $1.2-billion budget in 2014–15. Enbridge was quoted $1.25-million to have an entire centre named for the company. Students annually provide 20 per cent of the U of C’s revenue, the province some 50 per cent. Yet even trifling corporate donations are met with pomp and ceremony and remarkably consistent photo-ops (“OK, everyone look stiff!”).
Neither does the U of C explicitly say what their corporate partners get in return. Press releases tell us that companies want only to support public education and “create future leaders.” But if companies believe only in supporting public education and fostering leadership, they could donate anonymously. Similar bumph appears at the U of C on in-classroom signage complete with company logos. Here ConocoPhillips at least acknowledges its own self-interest: It wants “to support students… who may become future employees of ConocoPhillips.”
This hints at the bigger problem. Corporate funding of post-secondary is part of a larger ongoing shift, with universities changing from places of critical teaching and learning into factories churning out workers. U of C president Elizabeth Cannon wrote in the April 7 Calgary Herald that our society relies on universities “to produce highly educated, skilled workers.” A week later she announced in a speech: “Universities need more, not less, engagement with the business community.” Post-secondary education, in other words, should serve corporate interests. But what of the student who seeks something deeper: a meaningful life as a free-thinker, questioner, creator and citizen? What of those minds curious about what it means to be fully human?
Sponsored buildings and lecture theatres can be seen as private interest co-opting public education for its own purpose, with institutions themselves (and governments) as co-conspirators. The long-term effects could be worse even than graduates’ dull minds and dreary lives. The student who sees a corporate presence in the classroom—a space he’s understood from childhood is somehow sanctified—comes to believe that it’s normal and right that it should be there. He feels gratitude to those who support his education and help him land a job. Out in the working world, he supports watered-down environmental, tax and labour regulation because it’s good for companies, whose interests he can’t distinguish from his own. # | https://albertaviews.ab.ca/2016/08/22/editorial-the-corporate-u/ | en | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | albertaviews.ab.ca/66869060b69e117d35bd7fbba60128ef17b09c5045a3ae429e684572993a8462.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:00:40 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | Marlin Schmidt knows how to clean up a mess—but the soil contamination expert has his hands full at Advanced Education. | https%3A%2F%2Falbertaviews.ab.ca%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Fmarlin-schmidtminister-of-advanced-education%2F.json | https://www.albertaviews.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/favicon.ico | en | null | Marlin SchmidtMinister of Advanced Education | null | null | albertaviews.ab.ca | BIOGRAPHY
Education: B.Sc., Queen’s; M.Sc., applied environmental geosciences, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (Germany)
Prior to provincial politics: Soil/groundwater contamination specialist, Alta. Environment, 2008–15; remediation specialist, 2002–08
First elected: 2015/5/5
Constituency: Edmonton-Gold Bar
Sworn in as Minister of Advanced Education: 2016/02/02
Number of lobbyist registrations for Advanced Education: 108
Top lobbyists:Genome Alberta; Vertex Pharmaceuticals; Novartis; Water Cluster Scientific; Alta. Dental Ass’n & College; College & Ass’n of Registered Nurses of Alta.; Delcon Development; Building Trades of Alta.; Catholic Health of Alta.; Rogers; Cisco Systems; Imperial Oil; Cenovus Energy
Responsible for: Public post-secondary institution funding; programs approval; private post-secondary institution licensing and certification; student aid, scholarships and bursaries;apprenticeship programs, standards, funding and certification
Minister contact: ae.minister@gov.ab.ca
Deputy Minister:Rod Skura (rod.skura@gov.ab.ca )
Website advancededucation.alberta.ca
REPORT CARD
Grade: B
Marlin Schmidt knows how to clean up a mess—but the soil contamination expert has his hands full at Advanced Education. Eight ministers have held this portfolio in the past five years, which has meant conflicting direction and haphazard funding; some saw post-secondary mainly as job-training and were happy for companies to foot the bill and gain control over university teaching and research. The resulting problems are exemplified by the U of C’s Enbridge scandal. Meanwhile, more teaching is done by low-paid part-timers even as tuitions rise. Falling standards and growing corporate influence won’t change overnight, but the NDP’s spring budget did increase post-secondary operating
grants and freeze tuition (Athabasca’s unique funding crisis remains unresolved). Schmidt’s focus is on change at the top. The stacking of public boards with party cronies and corporate supporters is long-standing local practice. The minister won’t renew any post-secondary board terms, though members can reapply through a “more open” process. His first appointment was Michael Phair as U of A board chair, whose comments so far about the university’s role have been refreshing. Faculty/student groups seem cautiously optimistic, but much work remains. # | https://albertaviews.ab.ca/2016/08/22/marlin-schmidtminister-of-advanced-education/ | en | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | albertaviews.ab.ca/414a01de7201948df2812b6e583068bd70ee0a8518a52b0a865ca253da44de13.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:05:06 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | W. Mark Giles' Seep; Elizabeth McLean's The Swallows Uncaged; James E. Cote's Lowering Higher Education; and more. | https%3A%2F%2Falbertaviews.ab.ca%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Fbookshelf-35%2F.json | https://www.albertaviews.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/favicon.ico | en | null | Alberta Views - The Magazine for Engaged Citizens | null | null | albertaviews.ab.ca | Related Posts
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[] | 2016-08-26T13:03:54 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | The Grand Entrance Hall of the Supreme Court in Ottawa is beautiful in an imposing, not to say forbidding, way. Lined with three kinds of marble in chaste tones of beige and gold, punctuated by 12-metre columns, it’s dominated by a monumental double staircase. But once you ascend the staircase to the main courtroom, things become warmer and more matter-of-fact.
After a security check, anyone can enter this room and watch the Supreme Court of Canada at work. Nine chairs upholstered in red leather stand on a dais, against walnut panelling the colour of dark chocolate. | https%3A%2F%2Falbertaviews.ab.ca%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Fcanadas-top-judge%2F.json | https://www.albertaviews.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/favicon.ico | en | null | Canada’s Top Judge | null | null | albertaviews.ab.ca | Canada’s Top Judge Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin.
The Grand Entrance Hall of the Supreme Court in Ottawa is beautiful in an imposing, not to say forbidding, way. Lined with three kinds of marble in chaste tones of beige and gold, punctuated by 12-metre columns, it’s dominated by a monumental double staircase. But once you ascend the staircase to the main courtroom, things become warmer and more matter-of-fact.
After a security check, anyone can enter this room and watch the Supreme Court of Canada at work. Nine chairs upholstered in red leather stand on a dais, against walnut panelling the colour of dark chocolate. Behind its traditional look, this is a modern courtroom, with display monitors, wireless Internet, laptops on the judges’ bench and a wheelchair-accessible lectern. At 9:30 a.m. the doors behind the dais open and the court attendant announces: “The court. La cour.” The courtroom stands while the judges—four women and five men—take their seats. A small woman who has enlivened her black gown with a striking lace collar makes an informal, smiling entrance and sits in the middle.
Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin introduces the lawyers to her fellow justices. They’re arguing a gnarly case involving the construction manager and owners of an Edmonton building, and an insurance company. The manager and owners claim their insurance contract covers the replacement of windows damaged during cleaning; the insurance company disagrees, citing a clause excluding coverage for “making good faulty workmanship.” The case seems to bring out the inner handyman in several of the justices: the hypothetical questions are full of plumber’s elbows and other tools. McLachlin listens keenly, at times amused at the back-and-forth between judges and lawyers, occasionally asking a question herself. She exchanges some sotto voce conversation with Justice Rosalie Abella, who sits to her right. At one point she stifles a yawn and smooths her silvery hair.
Like the building in which she has worked since 1989, Beverley McLachlin mixes elegant impressiveness with a sturdy practicality. Her judicial and leadership skills, her respect for the law and her sense of responsibility to Canadians are grounded in an unpretentious, even self-deprecating, common sense. She likes to laugh, and often at her own expense. Both the ideals and the pragmatism owe much to her upbringing near Pincher Creek, Alberta.
Except for the fact she is very much alive, the first female chief justice of a Commonwealth high court and the longest-serving chief justice in Canada would be an obvious choice when Canadians go looking for the image of a (dead) woman to put on their money. McLachlin is now in the home stretch of her career, framed by the work of two Trudeaus, père et fils. Although Pierre Trudeau had left office by the time she joined the Supreme Court, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms he championed has profoundly informed her time on the bench. Having weathered the resentment which Stephen Harper’s administration felt for the Supreme Court, she now faces a prime minister with a more conciliatory stance. It is Justin Trudeau who will see McLachlin out when she reaches the obligatory retirement age of 75 in 2018.
After hearing the lawyers’ arguments in the insurance case, the justices adjourn to their conference room for discussion. By 2:30 p.m., McLachlin, dressed in a navy suit with a pin-striped effect and a ruffled white blouse, is working in her office. She has a reputation for guardedness, and it’s true that she is cautious and well-rehearsed on subjects having to do with the court. But she can also be casual and spontaneous. Spotting me across the hall, before I’ve had a chance to introduce myself, she calls out, “You were in court this morning!” When I remark on the dryness of the window-washing case, she laughs delightedly. “There’s nothing like a good tax case or a good insurance case to bring joy to a judge’s heart!” Then, patiently, she explains how the court’s interpretation of a few standard clauses in insurance contracts will provide needed certainty to builders, owners and insurers across the country.
She shows me Robert McInnis’s painting “Pincher Creek,” hung where she can see it from her desk. A road unfurls through grasslands towards a tiny settlement, with foothills in the background. The road is a bit bigger now, she says, appraising the scene where the prairie meets the Rockies, but otherwise it’s the same.
In some ways McLachlin’s mid-20th-century childhood sounds like a more distant time, even like an adventure in a Girl’s Own Annual volume. The first-born of Eleanora Kruschell and Ernest Gietz’s five children, Beverley grew up on her parents’ ranch at the headwaters of Mill Creek, about 30 km along the foothills from Waterton Lakes National Park. The Gietzes were of modest means and supplemented their income with paying guests. But the beauty of their ranch and the spectacular views looking west into a canyon on the eastern slopes of the Rockies gave their eldest a rare sense of privilege. She rode her own saddle horse, hiked the nearby hills and enjoyed the ranch animals. Her parents were devout Pentecostal Christians, with strong ethical views, and that too left its mark on their daughter.
Warren Winkler, a former chief justice of Ontario, also grew up in Pincher Creek. When I asked him if there was something in the local water that produced distinguished judges, he answered without hesitation, “It’s the wind. It’s the windiest place in the world, and it makes your mind work quicker.” I try out this dubious theory on McLachlin and she says, “Absolutely! I concur in that—and the wind makes you resilient. You learn to stand up against adversity.”
One of the adversities of the Gietz ranch was its isolation: too remote for school bus service. So Beverley boarded in town during the week while attending the local high school. Fifteen or so girls lived in a big house with three or four bedrooms, a roster of chores and a den mother named Mrs. Hegel who kept order and saw to the meals. The teenage Beverley was a mystery to her teachers, with a baffling combination of extraordinary reading ability and an equally high lack of attention. One teacher dismissed her reading retention rates—“a girl can’t do much with that”—and advised her to avoid jobs as a telephone operator or a waitress because of her attentional problems. She took that advice at least, enrolling at the University of Alberta in 1960.
By then, Pincher Creek had taught her a lot. A big family in a remote place provided abundant amounts of solitude and companionship: the former taught her self-reliance and the latter compromise and communication skills. “People amused and entertained themselves by talking,” she remembers, and often the talk was about the wide world outside Pincher Creek. Her public school education was similarly broad-ranging, including a memorable social studies teacher who led them in discussions of world affairs large and small. Pincher Creek itself, with fewer than 4,000 inhabitants, included First Nations people, the descendants of English remittance men, Hutterites, Mennonites, Catholics and other immigrants. “It would be hard to grow up in such a setting and think there’s only one right way to live or one religion or one way of doing things that’s exclusively correct or even greatly superior to other ways,” McLachlin says. “When you grow up in a small but very diverse community, it inculcates a certain breadth of acceptance.”
She had planned to study modern languages at university, but finding her 18-year-old brain “very muddled,” she switched to philosophy. “It helped me learn to order my ideas better,” she once told Susan Harada in an interview. “You have to be able to defend or analytically attack a position, and you have to be able to set out either process in clear terms that other people can understand.” When she finished her degree, she considered graduate school in philosophy. Pincher Creek had one lawyer, Garth Turcott (who in 1966 won the NDP’s first-ever seat in the Alberta legislature, in Pincher Creek-Crowsnest), but it never occurred to her to follow in his footsteps. It was her boyfriend Rory McLachlin, whom she would marry in 1967, who suggested that the law would let her apply her logical skills to real problems rather than academic ones. Plus he thought she’d be good at it. Intrigued, she wrote to the dean of law at the U of A for information about applying, and he responded, “You’re accepted.”
Her reaction was measured: “So I thought, I’ll try it. And I’ve been there ever since.”
This is just an excerpt. Pick up the September issue of Alberta Views for the full story. You can find us on newsstands here
Related Posts The Least We Can Do Some programs and services in Alberta have truly Orwellian names. Take “income support” (or what we used to call welfare): the desperate applicants fo... Editorial: A Call for Bold Action In the ancient city of Telmessos, a farmer once tied his ox cart to a post using a fiendishly difficult knot. So intricate was the knot that the cart ... Hot Treasure My favourite garage sale find is a small folk-art sculpture. Bars of beaten copper clasp to form a shimmering triangular tower topped by a pumpjac... What’s Left On the western edge of downtown Edmonton sits a small, triangular park that commands a vista over the serpentine North Saskatchewan River valley. Wi... | https://albertaviews.ab.ca/2016/08/22/canadas-top-judge/ | en | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | albertaviews.ab.ca/e3955629aa5cbddfe9774fa96889bee4016588e2083f18564da58b6c32f3a7d5.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:02:31 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | University of Calgary president Elizabeth Cannon seemed troubled in 2012 at delays in implementing her school's new collaboration with Enbridge. | https%3A%2F%2Falbertaviews.ab.ca%2F2016%2F08%2F22%2Funiversity-debased%2F.json | https://www.albertaviews.ab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/favicon.ico | en | null | University Debased | null | null | albertaviews.ab.ca | In my Calgary junior high there were two things you really didn’t want to be: gay or “foreign.” Our school had zero gay students as far as we knew. Th... | https://albertaviews.ab.ca/2016/08/22/university-debased/ | en | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | albertaviews.ab.ca/ef748c92537adfe70330a448ee18f039cafc9bf7b17a5ec622a1208af822c9cd.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T06:50:48 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Funions-pressure-barrow%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Teachers-raise-their-Belize.gif | en | null | Unions pressure Barrow | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Tues. Aug. 23, 2016–In a meeting with the Association of Public Service Senior Managers (APSSM), Public Service Union (PSU) and the Belize National Teachers Union (BNTU) last Wednesday in Belize City, Prime Minister Dean Barrow requested that they all agree to a deferral of a previously proposed salary increase until next April.
According to the Prime Minister, the framework of the collective bargaining agreement allows for the government to review the proposed salary adjustment if there was “a change in material circumstance.” That change “in material circumstance” was attributed to the recent damages caused by Hurricane Earl, according to PM Barrow.
The term “material circumstance” to which Barrow refers is contained in item 10 of the proposed framework for salary adjustment, which states, “In the event of any extra ordinary circumstances which affect either revenue or expenditure, then the parties reserve the right to re-open discussion.”
While the PM wants to re-open a discussion, however, the Joint Union’s Council of Management is not sleeping at the wheels and is making several major requests, according to documents leaked to Amandala from its meeting held last week.
Among those requests are assistance for teachers and public officers affected by Hurricane Earl, an audit of the execution of the relief assistance and an individual breakdown of estimated costs of assistance per person.
The joint council will also request the revival of the Cost Savings Committee, an extension of the life of the Committee for Enhanced Efficiency in Revenue Collection (CEERC) and a revision of the number of contract officers with a view to reducing it.
Further requests include that the Government institute the Public Accounts Committee, appoint the 13th senator, sign the Anti-Corruption Convention and appoint the Integrity Commission.
The unions also want to actively participate in the reform of the income tax structure and they want to set up a unions’ sub-committee to deal with “accountability and governance.” This sub-committee, they say, must have established the following: (a) clear timelines, (b) a reporting system, and (c) precise and specific mechanisms to carry out its functions.
Finally, the Joint Council wants to press the government to establish a long-term plan to finance national emergencies and disasters.
The Belize District Branch of the BNTU met today, Tuesday, and discussed the Prime Minister’s request, but their president, Kathleen Flowers, was unable to delve into details until the BNTU formulates a consolidated response which may be forthcoming by early next week.
However, she did tell our newspaper that she believes that the BNTU will press the Prime Minister for a renegotiation.
While the Prime Minister is making attempts at moving the goal posts in terms of delaying an agreed salary increase, the unions, it appears, will require some significant concessions from him in return for any such delay. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/unions-pressure-barrow/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/62c9940614d6f26c343fb1c3a3230d1c3fbe97f08c4ae7c2929d89bf0b6c0619.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:47:12 | null | 2014-07-18T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2F6-years-100-crack-cocaine%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Raquel-Gomez-copy.jpg | en | null | 6 years for $100 crack cocaine ! | null | null | amandala.com.bz | Sentence: 3 years and $10,000 — the crack cocaine the woman, 35, was carrying weighed 1.2 grams
A Crooked Tree woman was sentenced to 3 years in prison and fined $10,000 after she pleaded guilty to one count of drug trafficking for 1.2 grams of crack cocaine when she appeared before Magistrate Stephanie Gillett in the #8 Magistrate’s Court late this afternoon.
After Magistrate Gillett read the charge of drug trafficking, she asked Raquel Elizabeth Gomez, 35, to enter a plea.
Gomez, who catches and sells fish for a living, said “guilty.”
Gillett asked her if she knew what it was that she was pleading guilty to.
Gomez replied, “This is the first time I am coming to court.”
After the court prosecutor read the police facts of the charge, Gillett took a five-minute adjournment, telling Gomez to think about what she would say when the court resumed.
The Magistrate returned to the bench and Gomez returned to the prisoner’s dock.
“Now, Ms. Gomez, tell me why I should not send you to jail,” Gillett asked.
“I have a young daughter and no one to leave her with,” Gomez replied. “I no waan go da jail,” she cried.
Gillett remarked: “I no waan send you, either.”
And then the Magistrate dropped the bombshell: “You are sentenced to 3 years in prison. In addition, you are fined $10,000 to be paid by November 15, in default, 3 years in prison. The sentence is to run consecutively to any other sentence being served.”
In tears, the Crooked Tree fisherwoman pleaded: “Miss, I nuh have nobody fi tek care a mi daughter, mi mother done dead.”
“I am sorry; that is the law,” Gillett said, as Gomez took a seat in the court to await the trip to the Belize Central Prison at Hattieville to begin spending her first three years of imprisonment.
The sentences mean that Gomez, if she cannot find $10,000 by November 15, 2014, will most likely spend 6 years in jail.
As the law goes, the magistrate can exercise her discretion to impose only the fine, especially for a first-time offender.
Gomez is the mother of a 17-year-old daughter. She lives with her common-law husband, who is also a fisherman and sells cashew seeds during the cashew season.
Gomez’s sister, Rhonda Gomez, told Amandala this evening that no one in their family has that kind of money to pay the court fine. Raquel’s common-law husband, she said, does not have a regular job. This means, Rhonda said, that Raquel will most likely default on the $10,000 fine, which will add another 3 years to her prison sentence.
According to police, about 5:30 this morning, W.P.C. Thompson and other officers went to conduct a search at the residence of Raquel Gomez in Crooked Tree Village.
A search of Gomez’s house did not yield anything incriminating. However, a search of her person turned up a small tube-like container that was inside the area of her left brassiere.
The container contained a total of 20 pieces of suspected crack cocaine, including three small aluminum wrappers with suspected crack cocaine.
The suspected drug was weighed in Gomez’s presence and amounted to 1.2 grams.
Before Gillett handed down the sentence, Gomez told the court that some friends were at her house and left behind the container with the crack cocaine.
Gomez said that when the police knocked on her door, she put the tube-like container inside her brassiere.
“I was not thinking,” she said. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/6-years-100-crack-cocaine/ | en | 2014-07-18T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/2e118d83ea88ed17a94963d818c02f083100e93e39916b47956655708835059c.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T02:47:27 | null | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fbelize-district-boys-win-atlantic-bankatlantic-insurance-u-17-football-championship%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/u-17-first-place.jpg | en | null | Belize District boys win Atlantic Bank/Atlantic Insurance U-17 Football Championship | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELMOPAN, Sun. Aug. 21, 2016–The road to the FIFA U-17 World Cup began for Belize at the Isidoro Beaton Stadium in Belmopan over the weekend, where the Belize District selection won the Atlantic Bank/Atlantic Insurance Under-17 Football Championships. The Football Federation of Belize (FFB), under Acting-President Marlon Kuylen, had assembled some 160 of the country’s best U-17 players, representing the 8 football district/regions of the country, for a 3-day showcase tournament, whose objective was to help the FFB select the National U-17 team to represent Belize at the upcoming FIFA World Cup 2018 qualifiers for the Central American region, to be held in Panama in November of this year. Participating district/regions included the six districts – Corozal, Orange Walk, Belize, Cayo, Stann Creek and Toledo – along with the capital, Belmopan, and the Mid-South area, which includes players from Independence and surrounding villages. While the luck of the draw, unequal travelling distances, and the number of games packed into 3 days of competition would not necessarily make it a legitimate “national championship,” the purpose was served to have all the teams countrywide showcase their talent, as the first step in putting together a National U-17 Selection.
The 8 teams were divided into two groups, and a single round-robin was played within each group, the top two teams from each group then advancing to the semifinals. The round-robin had 8 games on Friday and 4 on Saturday, with the 2 semifinals taking place on Saturday evening. The 3rd place and championship games were both played on Sunday, all games being 30-30 (30 minute halves).
Round-robin games
In the opener on Friday morning, Belmopan dropped Orange Walk, 4-2, with goals from Freddy Romero, Christian Bush (2) and Justin Kalu; while Izhar Canas and Alexis Chan scored for Orange Walk.
In game 2, Mid-South took a 2-nil first-half lead with goals from Tyrell Estrada and Veilman Lopez. Belize District equalized in second half with 2 goals from Kenny Linares, but Mid-South got a late goal from Zerick Cabral, to register the 3-2 win.
Game 3 saw Stann Creek taking the 1-0 victory over Cayo on a free kick by Malachi Francisco.
Game 4 was another 1-0 affair, as Toledo got a goal from Richard Hines to secure the victory over Corozal.
The low scoring continued in game 5, where Adriel Pech scored the winning goal, as Orange Walk clipped Cayo, 1-nil.
In game 6, Mid-South outgunned Corozal, 4-3, in a penalty shootout, after they had ended 3-3 in regulation. In regulation play, Mid-South got goals from Jeffton Apolonio, Zerick Cabral and Grevisai Cruz; while Corozal equalized through Denilson Novelo, Ray Jones and Imer Patt. In penalties, Jeffton Apolonio, Zerick Cabral, Gabriel Ramos, Jr. and Joseph Ramirez converted for Mid-South; while only Denilson Novelo, Imer Patt and Antonio Pineda made good for Corozal.
In game 7 on Friday night, Stann Creek took the 1-nil lead on a goal by Davis Marshall, but Belmopan rebounded with goals from Christian Bush and Elton Gordon to grab the 2-1 victory.
The game 8 nightcap on Friday night saw Belize District enjoying a 7-0 romp over Toledo with goals from Tyreek Muschamp (3), Jalen Babb (2), Kenny Linares and Ian Pou.
Saturday morning began with game 9 of the round-robin, where Stann Creek dropped Orange Walk, 4-1, with goals from Demille Flores (2), Davis Marshall and Guy Sutherland; while Andir Chi got the sole tally for Orange Walk.
Game 10 was another blow-out for Toledo, as Mid-South registered the 5-0 win with goals from Jeffton Apolonio (2), Veilman Lopez, Gabriel Ramos and Stephen Ramclam, to secure the top spot in their group.
In game 11, Ainsleigh Perez converted a penalty some 9 minutes before the final whistle, to give Belmopan the 1-0 victory over winless Cayo.
Game 12, the last game of the round-robin, ended 1-1 between Belize and Corozal, as Ray Jones struck first for Corozal in the second minute, but Tyreek Muschamp equalized 4 minutes before intermission.
Standings in group 1 (win – loss – draw): Belmopan – 9 pts (3-0-0), Stann Creek – 7 pts (2-1-0), Orange Walk 3 pts (1-2-0), Cayo – 0 pts (0-3-0); and group 2: Mid-South – 9 pts (3-0-0), Belize – 4 pts (1-1-1), Toledo – 3 pts (1-2-0), Corozal – 1 pt (0-2-1).
Semifinals
The first semifinal took place on Saturday evening, and saw Mid-South qualifying to the finals by eliminating Stann Creek, 1-0, with a goal from Gabriel Ramos, Jr.
In the second semifinal, on Saturday night, Belize won a penalty shootout, 5-4, over Belmopan, after going 1-1 in regulation. Jalen Myers gave Belmopan the 1-nil lead at the 15th minute, but Tyreek Muschamp equalized things, 1-1, for Belize at the 39th minute. In penalties, Muschamp, Jalen Babb, Ian Pou, Akeem Sutherland and Shaquille Matute converted for Belize; while Jalen Myers, Korey Gomez, Elton Gordon and Jalan Budna converted for Belmopan.
3rd place game
The 3rd place game was on Sunday morning, and saw the Stann Creek District selection defeating the Belmopan selection, 1-nil, on a penalty converted by captain Kendale Nunez, after Hakeem Smith had been taken down inside the eighteen.
Championship game
The championship game on Sunday afternoon proved to be an exciting high-scoring affair with some outstanding talent on display. Jeffton Apolonio outran the Belize defense to strike the Mid-South’s first goal at the 9th minute; but Ian Pou equalized for Belize when his center from near the left goal line sailed over goalkeeper Albert Palma and curved into the net near the far post to knot the score at 1-1. Five minutes later, Jeffton Apolonio blasted his second goal of the game from close range past Belize goalkeeper Alvin Magandi. It was Jeffton’s sixth goal of the tournament, to lead all scorers. Albert Palma rejected a shot from Belize midfielder Tyreek “Pippin” Muschamp, but it rolled to Kenny Linares’ feet, and he made no mistake, equalizing the score again, this time at 2-2. And that’s how first half ended.
In second half action, Belize took the lead, 3-2, when Tyreek Muschamp’s center from the right goal line found the head of Jalen Babb near the far post. Then Jadon “Cheetes” McGregor caught up to a forward pass and eluded the defense to drill a fourth goal for Belize. After Belize goalie Alvin Magandi had deflected a shot from the left side by Jeffton Apolonio, the ball was picked up by Daren Apolonio, who unleashed a left foot blast beside the right goal post past a diving Magandi for Mid-South’s 3rd goal. But the long whistle came soon after, and Belize District had won, 4-3, to take the U-17 championship over Mid-South.
Following the championship game, FFB Acting-President Marlon Kuylen and Secretary General Michael Blease presented team trophies and individual medals to 1st place, Belize District, and 2nd place, Mid-South, and a team trophy to the third place team, Stann Creek.
The tournament was certainly a great success, as a whole lot of talent was on display, and the FFB should have no difficulty in putting together a strong U-17 selection to represent the Jewel in the World Cup qualifiers in November. Some friendlies will, of course, be needed to fine-tune the squad.
(Information for above article courtesy William Ysaguirre) | http://amandala.com.bz/news/belize-district-boys-win-atlantic-bankatlantic-insurance-u-17-football-championship/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/c94273e0b7e29b6bef41f59c0caa53af71614a55f1042f462bf80bfe9dc2f0e3.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:51:54 | null | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fgenesis-section-53-challenge-part-1%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/tracy-robinson.jpg | en | null | The genesis of the Section 53 challenge: Part 1 | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug 22, 2016–Caleb Orozco’s constitutional challenge against Section 53 of Belize’s Criminal Code represents a landmark ruling for Belize—but it is also an example of “strategic litigation,” designed to achieve broader aims across the wider Caribbean.
According to Tracy Robinson, a Jamaican attorney, almost a decade ago, she worked with a doctoral degree student to conduct a desk review to find “whether there was a reasonable case to be made before a constitutional court regarding the laws criminalizing ‘same sex’ sex.”
Robinson, who once chaired the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an organ of the Organization of American States, said that Belize was chosen because it was the optimal country to bring the case.
“No other country has the constellation of factors, in law, which come together to make Belize the ideal location…” she said, in a video conference briefing held in July 2016, leading up to the ruling by Belize Justice Kenneth Benjamin on August 10.
Strategic litigation: Belize was “most favorable legal environment in which to bring this case,” said Jamaican attorney who led desk review of laws criminalizing “‘same-sex’ sex”
Robinson is the co-founder of the University of the West Indies – Rights Advocacy Project (U-RAP), which has launched challenges to laws in Belize and Guyana through LGBT nationals in those countries.
Robinson reviewed the timeline of the Orozco case, dating back to the desk review of 2007.
She said that in 2008, UWI teachers, an LGBT rep and a Belizean lawyer participated in a regional assessment, which looked at the desk review.
“There was a strong sense from that report that Belize was most favorable environment on paper to litigate,” Robinson said.
Then in 2009, U-RAP, the agency which supported the challenge to Belize’s Section 53 and which is supporting the challenge to Guyana’s cross-dressing laws, was formalized by an academic board at Cave Hill, Barbados. The group wanted to look at constitutional litigation in the English- speaking Caribbean, in challenging laws which they contend undermine the human dignity and human rights of sexual minorities.
According to Robinson, between 2007 and 2009, there was a series of 4 meetings and there were discussions with LGBT civil society about the possibility of litigation.
Some of those discussions, she said, included Caleb Orozco, and within the context of those discussions there were discussions with Orozco about the possibility of a case in Belize.
According to Robinson, in 2010, a human rights lawyer conducted an independent assessment of the socio-political environment in Belize. U-RAP led three visits to Belize and meetings ensued with parties such as the larger LGBT community, lawyers, academics, persons involved in HIV work, “some people close to the Government,” and other human rights groups, she detailed.
Following these Belize visits, in July 2010, the Orozco case was launched in the Belize Supreme Court.
Robinson explained that she was providing a matrix of how U-RAP made an assessment of whether litigation in Belize made sense. They considered whether the Belize Government would undo “positive litigation and positive outcomes by instituting constitutional reforms…”
“You don’t want to litigate somewhere where they are going to use constitutional reforms to undo [the efforts]… so you want there to be strong support for litigation,” Robinson explained.
They also considered the position and attitude of the church, she said.
In detailing the history of the case, she noted that the Commonwealth Lawyers Association, The Human Dignity Trust, and The International Commission of Jurists first joined as interested parties in support of Orozco, which, she said, led to anxiety that the case was not being led by Caribbean parties but by outsiders. Subsequently, the three sets of churches—the Anglicans, Catholics and Evangelicals—also joined. Supreme Court Justice Michelle Arana knocked out UNIBAM as a claimant and so the organization was added as the 7th interested party in the case.
In the 2012 U-RAP report, “Collateral Damage: The Social Impact of Laws Affecting LGBT Persons in Guyana,” by Christopher Carrico, it is stated that, “Homosexual acts are now legal in 113 countries in the world, but there are some 80 countries where they are still illegal. Eleven (11) of these are former British colonies in the West Indies: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago…”
The New York Times article, “The Lonely Fight Against Belize’s Antigay Laws,” said that, “The legal groups [in the Belize case] invoked the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in their argument, with the knowledge that should the appeals court rule in Orozco’s favor on that basis, other jurisdictions would find the criminalization of sodomy very hard to justify.”
The question now is, whether the case will eventually make its way to the nation’s highest appellate court—the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), which hopes to expand its appellate jurisdiction across the Caribbean.
Robinson said, “…there is going to be an appeal almost certainly.” She is of the view that the interested parties may have a right to appeal the case as well, based on new developments in Caribbean constitutional law. An appeal would first have to go to the Court of Appeal before the CCJ. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/genesis-section-53-challenge-part-1/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/bf888bc3e3728d8a9e4957e488b340fd6cd56660b5ca31d034a70fce9a85b454.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:54:19 | null | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fsydney-mackis-thompson-kremandala-raiders-dies%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Mackis-and-the-Kremandala-R.jpg | en | null | Sydney “Mackis” Thompson, of Kremandala Raiders, dies | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 22, 2016–A basketball player of the legendary basketball team, Kremandala Raiders, the most successful team in Belize’s semi-pro basketball history, has died.
Sydney “Mackis” Thompson, 52, died on Friday night at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital after a long bout of illness. He had been suffering from an incurable disease.
After the glory days of Kremandala Raiders, Mackis, who was also a tumbler for the Tumblers, became a car washer and cleaner at the Save U car stand at the Belcan Bridge area of the city, where he cleaned cars daily.
However, a friend of his at that stand told us that something went wrong and Mackis became homeless, and sometimes slept under the Belcan Bridge. Mackis had told his friend that doctors had given up on him due to the disease.
His friend, known as “Chuggy,” told us that Mackis became so ill that he was unable to wash cars. When they heard that he died on Friday, they were not surprised, he said.
Chuggy said that Mackis’ family was in the United States, but he is believed to have had a brother living somewhere in the city, whom they only saw once.
Mackis, his friends said, was easygoing and got along with many people.
However, the man known as Mackis Thompson was an entertaining player for the Kremandala Raiders, who were the sub-champions in the inaugural semi-pro basketball season in 1992.
The Raiders then set an unprecedented record by winning the championship in 7 semi-pro seasons, beginning in 1993.
The Raiders defeated Santino’s Hotpoints in an exciting three-game series in 1993 to win their first championship. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/sydney-mackis-thompson-kremandala-raiders-dies/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/1f0de9c0b89ce422c7ed64bf64b0709fe9c073df3828e5b0520db08300d669a9.json |
[] | 2016-08-28T02:48:05 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fwar-rhetoric-criminals%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Editorial-Oct-25-version.jpg | en | null | War rhetoric criminals | null | null | amandala.com.bz | The CIA was established in 1947 – the same year Washington served notice that its support for Latin American democracy was conditional on the maintenance of order – and began to develop contacts among military officers, religious leaders, and politicians it identified as bulwarks of stability. Yet it was not until 1954 that it would execute its first full-scale covert operation in Latin America, overthrowing Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz and installing a more pliant successor. Arbenz, as CIA analysts and most historians today admit, was trying to implement a New Deal-style economic program to modernize and humanize Guatemala’s brutal plantation economy. His only crime was to expropriate, with full compensation, uncultivated United Fruit Company land and legalize the Communist Party – both unacceptable acts from Washington’s early-1950s vantage point.
Operation PBSUCCESS, as the CIA called its Guatemalan campaign, was the agency’s most comprehensive covert action to date, much more ambitious than its operations in postwar Italy and France or in Iran the year before. Unlike the ouster of the Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, which took a mere couple of weeks. Arbenz’s overthrow required nearly a year. In addition to destabilizing Guatemala’s economy, isolating the country diplomatically through the OAS, and training a mercenary force in Honduras, the Guatemalan campaign gave CIA operatives the chance to try out new psych-war techniques gleaned from behavioral social sciences. They worked with local agents to plant stories in the Guatemalan and U.S. press, engineer death threats, and conduct a bombing campaign – all designed to generate anxiety and uncertainty. They organized phantom groups, such as the “Organization of Militant Godless,” and spread rumors that the government was going to ban Holy Week, exile the archbishop, confiscate bank accounts, expropriate all private property, and force children into reeducation centers. Operatives studied pop sociologies and grifter novels and worked closely with Edward Bernays, a pioneer in public propaganda (and Sigmund Freud’s nephew), to apply disinformation tactics. Borrowing from Orson Welles’s WAR OF THE WORLDS, they transmitted radio shows – taped in Florida and beamed in from Nicaragua – that made it seem as if a widespread underground resistance movement were gaining strength; they even managed to stage on-the-air battles.
- pgs. 42, 43, EMPIRE’S WORKSHOP: LATIN AMERICA, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE RISE OF THE NEW IMPERIALISM, by Greg Grandin, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2006
Always, the big boys in this game, which are the United States of America and the Organization of American States (OAS), feel the need to pamper and coddle the military/industrial complex which has ruled the republic of Guatemala since 1954. We say this because, most recently, the rulers of Guatemala should have been condemned, based on the findings of the OAS inquiry into the April 20 Julio Rene Alvarado Ruano incident, with the same level of regional alarm which Jimmy Morales, the President of Guatemala, dramatically raised on the afternoon of Thursday, April 21, 2016.
Passionately condemning the “cowardly” violence of the Belize Defence Force (BDF) which he blamed for the shooting death of the Guatemalan teenager, Julio Rene Alvarado Ruano, on that Thursday afternoon of April 21 Jimmy Morales announced on national television, an announcement which received widespread regional publicity, that he was bringing his troops to the republic’s western and southern borders with Belize, and in so doing Morales was threatening the peace-loving people of Belize with a military invasion.
It was less than 24 hours after the minor, Julio Rene Alvarado Ruano, who, it is now established, was 14 years old at the time of his death, had been killed in the Chiquibul jungle, and Mr. Jimmy Morales, commander of the largest military in Central America, a military 30 or 40 times larger than Belize’s, had already tried the case, convicted the Belize army, and begun making preparations for punitive military action against Belize.
As is frequently the case, the Prime Minister of Belize, Rt. Hon. Dean O. Barrow, was out of the country, somewhere in the United States at the time. It was days before he made any comment on the Jimmy Morales threat, days before he spoke to the people of Belize. The situation at the mouth of the Sarstoon River in the south had been inflamed between the Guatemalan military and both civilian and military Belizean personnel for more than a year. The Government of Belize, as most often represented by our Foreign Minister, Hon. Wilfred Elrington, had constantly appeared weak and appeasing in the face of aggressive Guatemalan rhetoric and behavior, and now an incident in the Chiquibul dark was being used as a pretext by the Guatemalans to threaten war. On the afternoon of Thursday, April 21, the Government of Belize did not respond appropriately to the threats of the Guatemalan President: the Belize army was not deployed to our borders with Guatemala. The people of Belize were left to guess and suppose and speculate …
For days, the situation appeared surreal. When Prime Minister Barrow did speak to the Belizean people by telephone, to assure us that the tension at the borders was being eased, the Guatemalan Foreign Minister, Carlos Raul Morales, rushed on national television in his republic to declare, no such thing. The republic was demanding justice for Julio Alvarado Ruano who, he repeated, had been murdered by the “cowardly,” “unprofessional” Belizean army.
Four months went by before an official, forensic report on the April 20 incident became available. The Prime Minister of Belize is again out of the country, somewhere in the United States. Our understanding is that the OAS report was tabled, so to speak, on Thursday, August 18. Late in the morning of Tuesday, August 22, this newspaper heard that the report had found that it was the park rangers whose bullets had killed the teenager, not the Belize army. In the afternoon of that same Tuesday, August 22, the newspaper heard an additional detail from the report. We were listening to hearsay, solid hearsay, but hearsay nonetheless. On Wednesday morning, August 23, KREM Radio’s Marisol Amaya, having obtained a copy of the official report, gave a detailed account of that report on the Wake Up Belize (WUB) talk show on KREM Radio/Television.
This offhand manner is not, we submit, how the official report of the April 20 Chiquibul incident should have been handled. This newspaper’s feeling is that, in Washington, the American State Department and the OAS colluded to low-key the findings of the Alvarado Ruano report. On Madison Avenue, they would call this a “soft launch.” Jimmy Morales and Carlos Raul Morales are war rhetoric criminals. They behaved like propaganda terrorists in April. The findings of this report should been presented in such a manner as to have Jimmy and Carlos Raul convicted by the court of regional public opinion.
The really sad part of this whole episode is the crass cynicism with which Jimmy and Carlos Raul Morales used the impoverished, tragic child, Julio Alvarado Ruano, as an excuse to terrorize Belizeans. There is a harsh poverty in the Petén which is painful to contemplate. We Belizeans are, on a whole, sympathetic to that poverty. A major reason for that poverty is all the land grabbing by the Guatemalan military in Petén following the overthrow of the land reformer, President Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954. The people of the Petén have no land to grow food. In desperation, they risk their lives to violate the national sovereignty of Belize.
It was a decision of the American State Department and their Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow Arbenz in 1954 because his land reform threatened the United Fruit Company. State and the CIA were supported by the Guatemalan oligarchy because they felt Arbenz’s land reform also threatened their massive estates. Arbenz properly charged United Fruit Company taxes on land they were not using. Thirty years of Guatemalan civil war followed in the years after Arbenz’s overthrow. Guatemala has yet to deal with the fact that a few Guatemalan oligarchs own most of the land, while the vast majority of Guatemalans, most of whom are Indigenous natives, are landless and oppressed.
Instead of encouraging more equitable land distribution in Guatemala and Honduras, what Washington is trying to do is to have Belize become an oligarchical state like the aforementioned republics – Guatemala and Honduras. That is why Belize has been under attack on so many fronts: the predators are trying to take away the country from us roots Belizeans. The Americans want Belize to become like Guatemala and Honduras. This was the prescription of the Seventeen Proposals in 1968. We rejected that then, and we reject it now.
Power to the people. Remember Danny Conorquie – murdered at Caracol in cold blood on September 25, 2014.
P.S. The Guatemalan government tried to shake the faith of the Belizean people in our BDF soldiers. Their conspiracy backfired. The faith of the Belizean people in our BDF soldiers is now stronger than ever before. Where we do not have faith, is in our civilian politicians. And you can take that to the bank. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/war-rhetoric-criminals/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/5b0749b55faf212d635c1025dc67ccee65e4415b1e41ee1aa135e192cffa5a6c.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:54:48 | null | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fsemipro-football-back-plb-opening-season-21016-2017%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/football.jpg | en | null | Semipro football is back; PLB Opening Season 21016-2017 under way | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 22, 2016–Belize City fans will have to wait a few more weeks before semipro football returns to the MCC, but the new Premier League of Belize (PLB) Opening Season kicked off in four other venues over the past weekend. There are 9 teams participating in this Opening Season, and Police United was excused from Week 1 action, as they just returned from their opening Champions League encounter with Olimpia, which they lost, 4-0, in Honduras on Tuesday, and were making their way to Mexico City for their match with Mexican champion Pachuca tomorrow, Tuesday.
Two games each were played on Saturday, August 20, and Sunday, August 21, in Week 1 of the PLB Opening Season 2016-2017.
At the Isidoro Beaton Stadium in Belmopan on Saturday night, defending champion Belmopan Bandits FC was held to a 0-0 draw by visiting FC Belize, who returned to action after sitting out last year’s competition. Meanwhile, down south at the Michael Ashcroft Stadium in Independence, home standing sub-champion Placencia Assassins FC welcomed Freedom Fighters FC back to the PLB competition (after a year lay-off) with a 3-0 put down, courtesy of first half goals from Ashton Torres (15’), Delone Torres (19’) and Justin Linarez (29’).
In more PLB action on Sunday afternoon, newcomer Orange Walk FC got a rough initiation into PLB action, as visiting BDF FC took no prisoners, leaving Sugar City with a decisive 5-1 victory. BDF got goals from Leon “Chow” Cadle (17’), Ricky Rickets (19’), Osmar Duran (28’ & 81’), and an own goal by Orange Walk’s Ronaldo Quintana. Orange Walk avoided the shutout by a tally in injury time from Alejandro Novelo (90+’). Meanwhile, at the Carl Ramos Stadium in Dangriga, the home team started on the “good foot” with a 2-nil win over visiting Verdes FC. Harrison Tasher (29’) put Wagiya in front in first half, and they also benefitted from a second half auto-goal by Verdes’ Garret Bermudez (58’ auto-goal).
Week 2 schedule (TV = televised):
Saturday, August 27
7:30 p.m. – Belmopan Bandits FC vs Police United FC – Isidoro Beaton Stadium (TV)
Sunday, August 28
3:30 p.m. – Verdes FC vs Freedom Fighters FC – Norman Broaster Stadium (TV)
3:30 p.m. – Orange Walk FC vs Placencia Assassins FC – People’s Stadium
3:30 p.m. – Wagiya FC vs BDF FC – Carl Ramos Stadium
(FC Belize – Resting)
Looking ahead to Week 3:
Saturday, September 3
3:30 p.m. – Police United FC vs Freedom Fighters FC – Norman Broaster Stadium (TV)
7:30 p.m. – Placencia Assassins FC vs Belmopan Bandits SC – Michael Ashcroft Stadium
Sunday, September 4
3:30 p.m. – Wagiya FC vs Orange Walk FC – Carl Ramos Stadium
3:30 p.m. – Verdes FC vs FC Belize – Norman Broaster Stadium (TV)
(BDF FC – Resting) | http://amandala.com.bz/news/semipro-football-back-plb-opening-season-21016-2017/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/f5a14531fccae7edf8bb968976f3586f26515ac7b35ad3d07e39808226c20fa1.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T06:50:02 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fguatemalan-minor-killed-crossfire-bdf-oas-report%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Guatemalans-visit-site.jpg | en | null | Guatemalan minor killed in crossfire, but not by BDF: OAS report | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Aug. 25, 2016–An “independent and transparent” investigation conducted by Dr. James E. Hamby, retired Special Agent of the US Army Criminal Investigation Command, and Dr. Patricia Rosa Linda Trujillo Mariel, Head of Criminalistics of Mexico’s Federal Police, has revealed that Julio René Alvarado Ruano, the Guatemalan minor who was shot on Wednesday, April 20, 2016, during an enforcement operation led by the Belize Defence Force (BDF), was not killed by military fire, as Guatemalan authorities had alleged.
It appears that the bullets which injured the minor came from a .22 caliber weapon and a shotgun – not from a high-powered military rifle, according to a copy of the report leaked to KREM News.
Commander of the BDF, Brigadier General David Jones, told the media earlier this week that he expects his soldiers would be exonerated by the findings.
The OAS investigation, the result of which is being presented to Belize today by Magdalena Talamas, Special Representative of the OAS Secretary-General for Belize-Guatemala Affairs, revealed that Guatemalans visited the scene of the shooting and removed evidence, well in advance of the requisite verification and investigation process set out in the Confidence Building Measures between Belize and Guatemala, signed under the auspices of the Organization of American States.
In fact, images shown in the Guatemalan press reveal that a contingent of Guatemalans, including their military, crossed into Belize the day after the incident, and visited the site where the incident took place. The investigative report indicated that the Guatemalans removed cartridges which apparently came from the BDF weapon, of which they had photos.
However, the investigation found that there were bullet holes in two branches from shots fired from the spot where Ramirez and his sons were, towards where the joint patrol was. The patrol included members of the Belize Defence Force and Friends for Conservation and Development (FCD), the NGO which co-manages the Chiquibul National Park.
Amandala readers will recall that when Alvarado was killed, the Guatemalan government amassed thousands of its elite special forces, the Kaibiles, at that country’s western and southern borders in Belize, fueling fears of a military invasion amid allegations that Belize’s military had “murdered” the minor in what they had condemned as a “cowardly act of aggression.” The story went viral in the international press, as Guatemala portrayed Belize as aggressor and human rights violator.
The independent investigation now confirms what Belizean officials have been saying all along, despite Guatemala’s rush to judgment—that Guatemala’s actions were disproportionate and unfounded. The official account from Belize which was conveyed to that country’s president, Jimmy Morales, indicated that the shooting happened when the Belize patrol was fired upon under the cover of night, and, as expected, fired back in self-defense.
Belize Prime Minister Dean Barrow had told President Morales, while the two were in the US, that “the BDF patrol had come under fire first, and had responded in self-defense, firing in the direction from which they had been shot at.” Barrow had also indicated to the Belizean media that he had “made the further point that the civilian members of FCD, who had accompanied the patrol, confirmed the BDF’s version of events.”
The report of the independent investigation, which is expected to be raised in Parliament when it meets tomorrow, indicates that although shots were fired by the BDF, none of those shots resulted in any injuries to the Guatemalans.
The report, which collated information from the autopsy report, interviews, photographs, lab exams results, police reports, and other documents, explained that the incident occurred 562 meters east of the Belize-Guatemala border. Julio Alvarado, who was 14 and not 13 as previously stated, was killed, and his father, Carlos Alfredo Alvarado Ramirez, 48, and brother, Carlos Alberto Alvarado Ruano, 12, received minor injuries.
The father had claimed that at about 6:15 p.m., when they were crossing close to a maize field (after going to plant pumpkin and beans at a place they called their “job site”), FCD told them, “Don’t move!” and began to shoot at them. He went on to tell the investigators that he ran so fast, he saw one of his sons covered with grass and the other lying in the road lifeless.
However, the FCD rangers said that the incident actually occurred around 7:00 p.m., when it was already dark. They said that they were in a resting position at the corner of the maize field when people came and began flashing a light. They were told to, “Stop,” and that was when, according to the ranger, they were shot at. One ranger said in response, he fired four shots from his rifle; the other said he fired two shots from his .22 caliber pistol.
The account given by the BDF was that he was trying to contact his base to report that he had arrested a Guatemalan farmer, Jose Maria Antonio Reyes, 33, who had been conducting illegal activities in the area. He said that at this point, he ordered the FCD rangers to stay at the position where they were resting, “to prevent the village people [from] trying to rescue the farmer.”
The exchange sounds eerily familiar to that which resulted in the murder of Belizean Special Constable Danny Conorquie in September 2014, after the Belize law enforcement team operating in the Caracol area had confiscated horses used in illegal logging. It is believed that Guatemalans returned and executed Conorquie.
Even as Belizean and Guatemalan authorities had called on the OAS to investigate the death of the minor in April, Belize had also called on the OAS to investigate the shooting death of Conorquie as well as the shooting of Staff Sergeant Richard Lambey in March 2016, when it is alleged that he was ambushed by Guatemalans.
Chief Executive Officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lawrence Sylvester, told our newspaper that the investigation into those incidents has begun and work will continue.
The April incident underscores the need for further efforts to address the problem of incursions by Guatemalans into the Chiquibul-protected areas, where they farm, cut logs, mine for gold and even extract archaeological relics.
Rafael Manzanero, executive director of FCD, told Amandala that he has not yet seen the OAS report. He told our newspaper that their rangers are always at risk and it is necessary for their rangers to be armed. He said that even way back in 2007, when they started to operate in the Chiquibul, they were advised to be armed.
The FCD rangers fired, he said, “because they came under fire.” He emphasized the need for continued cross-border collaboration to address the problems being encountered in the area.
“It is a very unfortunate situation, admittedly, to all of us who are involved on the ground… it is something that we never would really want to occur,” Manzanero said. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/guatemalan-minor-killed-crossfire-bdf-oas-report/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/83d7183770e4c2039d4a6ca210ff16595f01ef21377f683cadbd44f6e3dd73ab.json |
[] | 2016-08-31T06:49:07 | null | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fhouse-speaker-kicks-julius-espat%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/police-manhandle-Julius.jpg | en | null | House Speaker kicks out Julius Espat! | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELMOPAN, Fri. Aug. 26, 2016–The culture of disrespect in the House of Representatives has been around for a long time, but it has never resulted in police being ordered to eject a member of the House who was named by the Speaker in post-independent Belize until today when House Speaker Michael Peyrefitte suspended the Opposition People’s United Party (PUP) Cayo South area representative Hon. Julius Espat after the Pickstock area representative and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hon. Wilfred “Sedi” Elrington, presented the motion to name him.
Hon. Espat, however, refused to leave his seat. Police, in carrying out the order of the Speaker, first cleared the galleries of the House—even putting out members of the media, before they literally dragged Espat out the Chamber of the House of Representatives, with him resisting every inch of the way, as the other members of his party walked out in solidarity, ending the sitting of the House in a controversial way.
The incident was one of those made for television episodes, but the police also cleared media representatives from the gallery, with the obvious intention of preventing them from capturing footage of them manhandling Espat.
The tactic by police did not work, however, because although the media had been cleared out before the ugly first-time incident unfolded, it was nonetheless captured on cell phones that Opposition area representatives had, and the footage made it into the television stations’ evening newscasts.
The tension in the House began to build when Hon. Espat, who has served as the Chairman of the House’s Public Accounts Committee, rose to speak about some of the findings in the recently released, explosive Auditor General’s Report on irregularities in the Immigration Department. The Cayo South area representative insisted that what he wanted to address was good governance.
Things between the Speaker and Espat began to get testy when the Speaker cautioned Espat to not delay in showing how his remarks were relevant to the matters before the House of Representatives. When asked by Espat to specify the rules of the Standing Orders that were the basis for the Speaker’s comments, Peyrefitte responded, “I don’t have the time to read the whole thing for you…”
Hon. Espat responded: “You have to have the time; the people pay you to listen to us. When you have the Prime Minister insulting this gentleman [another Opposition area representative] by name, and you are giving them opportunities to do that, and I am talking about good governance, what is your problem, Mister Speaker?”
The Speaker replied: “The problem is they pay me to ensure that you do your job and that is impossible.”
Hon. Espat then retorted, “They pay you to block me; that’s what they pay you for.”
The Speaker immediately took umbrage at the remark and began asking for a minister to name Hon. Espat. “You know what…That statement; can I get a minister to name this person please?” the Speaker said.
At the Speaker’s request that Espat be named, Hon. Espat exploded: “This goddamn House of Representatives is a joke. You are a mercenary of that government. It is ridiculous that a member of the House cannot speak about good governance in this country. Dah thief unu got over there; thieves. There is nothing that I have done that is illegal or against the orders of this House. Let them raise their hands. Bring it on. Mister Speaker, the reason that you don’t want me to debate is because I am bringing up issues that the Auditor General has put in her report.”
At this point, two senior members of the House, Hon. Said Musa (PUP) and Hon. Michael Finnegan, tried to get the Speaker to reconsider his position and for he and Espat to act civil to each other, but to no avail.
Hon. Espat attempted to apologize, but the Speaker did not want to hear it.
Hon. Espat began his attempted apology by saying, “Mister Speaker…”
Speaker Peyrefitte interrupted the attempt by saying, “Member for Cayo South, I do not want to hear you.”
“Mister Speaker, then I will not withdraw my statement; then it is a fact,” Hon. Espat then declared.
Hon. Elrington then volunteered to carry out the Speaker’s request and presented the motion for suspension of Espat, and Hon. Espat was named, but for how long he has been suspended, it is not yet known.
The suspension of Hon. Espat, however, has been commented on by the former PUP Senator Lisa Shoman, an attorney, who wrote on her Facebook page, “This is what Julius Espat was accusing the Speaker of yesterday, with his inflammatory language — accusing that worthy of being paid to ‘block’ him. But does the accusation rise to the penalty of suspension or naming?
“Suspending a member is a serious matter. Section 44(3) states, ‘The Speaker or the Chairman shall order any Member to withdraw immediately from the House during the remainder of the day’s sitting and may direct such steps to be taken, as are required to enforce such order— (a) (b) where the conduct of such Member is grossly disorderly; or where such Member has used objectionable, abusive, insulting or offensive words or language or un-parliamentary expressions, and, on being called to order, has refused to withdraw such words or language or expressions, and has not offered an apology for the use thereof to the satisfaction of the House.
“We all watched the conduct of Hon. Espat in the House Chamber. He may have used objectionable language, but he did offer to withdraw and apologize, but the Speaker stated clearly that the Member would NOT be heard.”
“Instead, the Speaker point-blank refused to hear Espat, and begged for several minutes for a Minister to ‘name’ Espat and then for a motion to suspend him,” Shoman further wrote.
“The bar is high on suspension or naming, both of which are extreme measures, since both muzzle the guaranteed freedom of speech of a Parliamentarian.
“Read the standing orders. The statement of Julius, no matter if it WAS rude, did NOT rise to the level of naming OR suspension,” Shoman opined.
Before police dragged out Espat, they attempted to muzzle the media by chasing out, and in some cases, manhandling media personnel (including 7News’ Jules Vasquez) from out of the House of Representatives. The objective clearly was to prevent the recording of video footage by the media of Espat’s forcible removal. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/house-speaker-kicks-julius-espat/ | en | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/eb3d8891767e8b97b303e82aac83950278e56704c3686b0fd773d22e2c8eee9f.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T06:50:33 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fexplosive-immigration-audit-leaked%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Dorothy-Bradley.jpg | en | null | Explosive Immigration audit leaked | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Aug. 25, 2016–A damning special audit leaked to the media earlier this week, detailing multiple cases of fraud in the issuance of Belizean visas, nationality and passports—including the high profile case of Korean national Won Hong Kim—is due to be tabled in the National Assembly tomorrow, when the House of Representatives meets in Belmopan and the audits should become public documents.
The audit, published by Auditor General Dorothy Bradley, helps explain how Belize has in recent years seemingly become a hideaway for hoodlums, as persons alleged to be human traffickers and money launderers were listed among those fraudulently assisted with Belize Immigration documents.
Bradley now calls for a police investigation into missing files (164 of which could not be found in October 2013 for nationals of Guatemala, Honduras, China, Britain, Nigeria, Lebanon and Taiwan), allegations of fraud, and possible police collusion in her set of recommendations.
However, she also points to the need for an international police investigation in an attempt to identify fraud agents who may have been using locations such as the UK, Singapore, China and Taiwan to operate the Immigration scheme.
Pending the outcome of the investigations, Bradley is calling on the Director of Immigration and Nationality to ensure that Belizean nationality is revoked for all persons cited in the audit, and a recall and cancelation of all such issued passports.
Bradley’s report documented that several ministers and area representatives intervened for persons seeking to become new Belizeans, when there is no provision for them in the Nationality Act for them to do so. Among those named are Edmund Castro, Erwin Contreras, Manuel Heredia, Jr., Rene Montero, Santiago Castillo, Ramon Witz, Carlos Perdomo, Eden Martinez, Gaspar Vega, John Saldivar, Pablo Marin, Gabriel Martinez, Michael Hutchinson, and Elvin Penner.
When the matter of ministerial intervention was raised in connection with the visa scandal in October 2013, Prime Minister Dean Barrow had said that while it is legitimate for a minister to assist a friend, “…if I hear you intervene 10 times and I hear you intervene 20 times – what I am to think? Except that you’re involved in a hustle. If you hang out with Alibaba you must be one of the 40 thieves…”
Penner was personally involved in facilitating the application for Kim, who got a Belizean passport without the requisite documentation being submitted, purportedly because he promised he would deliver those documents, but never did.
Even worse, Kim was in Taiwan custody at Yilan Detention Center from 1 August to 26 September 2013, so he was not in Belize on 2 September when he supposedly applied for his Belizean nationality and when the nationality certificate was backdated, the audit revealed.
Kim “had strings” with higher-ups in Government, as the reports indicated that he was being facilitated by Belizean officials, including Eric Chang, former councilor at the Belize City Council. The number on the nationality certificate issued to him in 2013 was issued the year before to a Guatemalan, Josue David Coc Uk, who had paid $750 to receive it in October 2012, the audit said.
“Two of those persons, Won Hong Kim and Yakup Sut, never came to Belize to process those applications, while the other three persons, Yiu Pang Chen (Peter Chen), Jackie Jie Qin (Marc Ching) and Quoc Winh Truong, entered Belize as visitors through the PGIA and soon after fraudulently obtained their nationality, which was issued under Section 10 of the Belizean Nationality Act, and subsequently were issued their Belizean passports.
“This Nationality report will reveal more of such cases. We did not receive the nationality files for most of the fraudulent cases we found…” the audit said.
The reports furthermore indicate that “in most cases examined, the processes and procedures were circumvented, displaying blatant disregard, at every level, for a well-established institutional framework…;” and “the system was manipulated to facilitate apparent fraud in so many ways…”
It revealed that some applicants got visas as well as nationality certificates and passports, and “such was the case with Wong Hong Kim, Yakup Sut and other names,” and it later detailed a sample from 100 names found for the period under audit, 2011 to 2013.
The result of the investigation was a three-volume audit report for visas, nationality and passports, which was published by the Office of the Auditor General. This article focuses on the issuance of Belizean nationality and the consequential issuance of suspect passports which were scrutinized in a comprehensive probe by the Audit Department after Bradley got wind of information documented in an internal Immigration memo, which raised suspicions about the issuance of visas to enter Belize.
According to Bradley, it was after the visa investigation was launched that a passport scandal broke. That scandal was evidently over the issuance of a Belizean passport to Kim, for which then Minister of State responsible for Immigration, Elvin Penner, was swiftly sacked from Cabinet.
The substantive Minister, Hon. Godwin Hulse, had unveiled details to the Barrow administration of his findings, for which Penner was never held criminally liable.
The Penner scandal merely scratched the surface of what has now been revealed to be a corrupt network which authorities now suspect had penetrated several government agencies, key among them being the Police, the Vital Statistics Unit and the Immigration Department—critical, since birth paper documents and police records are supporting documents used to acquire Immigration documentation.
What was even more shocking was the finding by the Office of the Auditor General that despite the discontinuation of the Belize Economic Citizenship Program more than a decade earlier (in 2002), persons were still being issued passports through fraudulent backdating.
Amandala readers will recall that back in October 2013, we reported on what had been deemed as an “online scam,” purporting to offer Belize passports under the economic citizenship program for as low as US$9,900. The website for IPC Belize, which the Auditor General cited in her report, has since dropped the price to US$8,900.
The audit notes that Oleg Kalugin, whose place of birth is identified as Russia, was fraudulently issued a Belize Economic Investment Citizenship Nationality Certificate #22/01/98 and Passport P0209568. He supposedly came to Belize on 16 July 2012 on a tourist visa, and the very day after his arrival, was issued a Belizean passport based on a certificate dated 1998 and a passport recommendation from a person identified as Justice of the Peace Demencio Cal.
The suggestion, said the audit report, is that “”all documents including his nationality certificate had been prepared for him prior to his visit and that persons at the Immigration Department may have facilitated his arrival to Belize and accepted fraudulent documents at the Passport section…”
Of note is that the website offering instant Belizean citizenship purports that they have “direct local contacts…” which can facilitate the issuance of a Belize passport in as little as 6 months, although under Belizean law, a passport to a naturalized Belizean is issued after a residency period of 5 years, and some used hotels in Belize as their addresses.
In 2013, when we reported on the claim by the website that they could expedite the acquisition of Belizean citizenship, Immigration Minister Godwin Hulse told us that any scheme like that would be illegal. He indicated to us that he and the Director of Immigration would look into the matter, and we were later advised the matter had been turned over to the international intelligence agency – Interpol.
The audits also demonstrate persistent irregularities, such as the absence of proper vetting for persons claiming to be Canadian and US nationals, who can freely come to Belize without a visa. It said that, there were “no indications that consistent verifications were done to authenticate documents presented.”
The issuance of a Belizean birth certificate to the man who assumed the fake identity of William Mason, the local alias of a man who had previously been known in Canada and elsewhere as Rajesh Ouelett, led to four officers of the Vital Statistics Unit, who are reportedly facing criminal and administrative proceedings. There may be many more similar cases.
Notably, there were cases unearthed in the audit in which name changes were facilitated by the Vital Statistics Unit for persons who were seeking to acquire Belizean nationality and passports.
The report points to “…deliberate changing of the names of persons, complete names in some instances, facilitated by the Belize Vital Statistics Unit…” for some persons named in the audit, before applications were made for Belize passports.
Right after the Penner scandal broke, Prime Minister Dean Barrow said at a press conference that he had heard reports that a number of Cabinet Ministers are involved in corruption, including the selling of visas to foreign nationals, mainly from Asian and Middle Eastern countries. He said that he had spoken to them repeatedly about the allegations, and although he had no proof, he told them: “if you are doing it, for God’s sake, stop it! Stop it!!” | http://amandala.com.bz/news/explosive-immigration-audit-leaked/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/4021e66a83d805d2d837df892d6efa4e022fcfb4f3a54999205e1026e43ab119.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:50:18 | null | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fchurches-protest-section-53-ruling%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Pastor-Lewis-and-his-wife.jpg | en | null | Churches to protest against Section 53 ruling | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 22, 2016–Although they have not formally said that they will appeal the recent decision by Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin to overturn Belize’s sodomy law, the churches are meeting and mobilizing not just to strategize on their next actions—but also to tell the Barrow administration just how displeased they are with its decision not to appeal the Supreme Court ruling.
The National Evangelical Association of Belize (NEAB), which says it represents 280 churches in Belize, is mobilizing its troops for what it dubs “a prayer patrol” around the National Assembly and government administration buildings in Belmopan from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. tomorrow, Tuesday, August 23.
Amandala understands that the demonstration was originally to coincide with the meeting of Cabinet usually held on Tuesdays, but organizers later learned that the Prime Minister had departed the country and is not due to return until Friday. They decided to press ahead nonetheless. Reports to our newspaper tonight indicate that at least 20 buses may be headed to Belmopan for the protest.
NEAB president, Pastor Lance Lewis, told Amandala that they hope to mobilize 500 people for tomorrow’s demonstration.
Lewis said that firstly, they want to express the fact that “the church is not pleased…” and furthermore they want to call on the Barrow administration to “recant…” its decision, announced last week, that it will not appeal Benjamin’s ruling.
“This is a serious thing. The Chief Justice’s ruling goes against what the church believes,” Lewis told us.
The association which is organizing Tuesday’s public demonstration is an offshoot of the Belize Evangelical Association of Churches, one of the 7 interested parties in the case brought against the Government by LGBT rights activist, Caleb Orozco, a homosexual Belizean.
In ruling in Orozco’s favor, the court also found that, because Belize is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the portion of the Belize Constitution which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, also extends to one’s “sexual preference,” since the UN has expanded the scope of the word “sex” in the treaty to include “sexual orientation.”
Lewis says, “…that really is a serious matter!”
“It is going far and it has extreme implications,” he added.
What can the government now do? Lewis replied that legally, there is some window of opportunity for the Government to make the appeal. (That window of opportunity is 21 days.)
He has also been calling for a meeting of the church community, which is being organized through the Senator for the churches, to discuss the matter.
Last week, before Prime Minister Dean Barrow formally announced that the government won’t appeal the Section 53 ruling, but the interested parties or affected citizens could seek leave to appeal, the National Evangelical Association of Belize issued a statement saying that, “In a mere 4 hours, 11 denominational overseers and 132 national pastors responded by text saying they support the request for the Government to appeal the decision.”
NEAB said: “The controversial points of the Chief Justice’s ruling, which we disagree with, violate fundamental beliefs and convictions of the religious community in Belize, as well as the overwhelming majority of the Belizean populace opposing this ruling.”
It added that Benjamin undoubtedly overreached the scope of his office in redefining the Constitutional term ‘sex’ to include ‘sexual orientation’—a move that in other countries has required an amendment of the Constitution which adds those specific words to secure that specific meaning, NEAB added.
NEAB vice president, Pastor Scott Stirm, is of the view that the LGBT community will likely move to challenge Belize’s Marriage Act in seeking to establish same-sex marriages in Belize, based on the same argument — that to deny them would be to violate their right to protection from discrimination based on their sexual preference.
Stirm, who said that the court has given the LGBT community “a blank check,” told us that they will exhaust every option that they possibly can to challenge the court’s decision.
He said that they are discussing the possibility of an appeal with the Roman Catholic Church, which was also an interested party in the Section 53 challenge filed by Orozco. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/churches-protest-section-53-ruling/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/4aeedaf253557418f3304225003ab84a237f56081e53091fbaaa14f95c8f5d69.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:52:25 | null | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Ftropical-wave-belize-flooding-southern-belize%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Flood-in-southern-belize.jpg | en | null | Tropical wave over Belize causes flooding in southern Belize | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 22, 2016–NEMO is advising residents of southern Belize, particularly those who reside in the Toledo and Stann Creek districts, to take extra precaution in light of a flood advisory which has been issued in response to a tropical wave that is passing over Belize.
According to the Chief Meteorologist Dennis Gonguez, a tropical wave is passing through the country today, Monday, and is expected to pass by tomorrow, Tuesday. The tropical wave, he said, is not widespread, but localized in southern Belize.
A statement released by the National Emergency Management Organization (NEMO) advises, “People who live along rivers, creeks, water ways and low-lying areas and whose home is likely to flood are cautioned to move to a high and safe building with friends, family or in the community shelter before nightfall. Drivers are asked to slow down and put on their hazard lights when driving through the rain and flooded areas.”
According to the statement, Jacintoville is currently under flood conditions, while Aguacate is inaccessible and water is 15 feet above the bridge.
Other villages along the Moho River in the Toledo District and villages in the Stann Creek Districts are advised to monitor the flood situation.
For assistance, Stann Creek residents can call NEMO Emergency Coordinator Victor Castillo at 630-9780. Castillo told Amandala that he is not sure how many inches of rain will fall, but if flood conditions worsen, those in low-lying areas can contact him to go to the community shelter.
The NEMO Emergency Coordinator for the Toledo District is Kenton Parham, who can be reached at 630-9787. Parham told our newspaper that since last night, Sunday, the rain began and several roads in the Blue Creek and Aguacate villages have been cut off by water.
H
e further revealed that water rose 4 feet over the Blue Creek Bridge. Those who may be unable to contact Castillo or Parham can contact the NEMO Emergency hotline at 936. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/tropical-wave-belize-flooding-southern-belize/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/e5a28a637a41dec743d28b8b4f4d07eeb56cbf94202bf43ba076074f95a0d239.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:49:15 | null | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Ffaster-banking-promised-national-payment-system%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Marilyn-Gardiner-Usher.jpg | en | null | Faster banking promised with new national payment system | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 22, 2016–New banking sector reforms are due to be tabled in Parliament on Friday which are intended to modernize money transactions, cutting down the waiting period for customers to receive credit from check deposits and enabling the kind of networking that will allow customers to transfer funds in just minutes from an account at their bank to a party at another bank in Belize.
“You can be home in the night and make a credit transfer to somebody in Dangriga at any time of the night—as long as they have a bank account… I can’t wait for it…” said Marilyn Gardiner-Usher, Deputy Governor – Operations at the Central Bank of Belize, who explained the developments in the context of the establishment of a national payment system (NPS) for Belize. The go-live target date is September.
She told Amandala that the changes should reduce operating costs for commercial banks, and the Central Bank expects that the reduction will be passed on to customers.
Gardiner-Usher said that the current system is inefficient, and the Central Bank—the regulatory authority which will be providing oversight of the national payment system—hopes to raise the bar by improving safety and efficiency. The reform complies with core principles developed by the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems (established by the G10) and other payment system experts, and are in line with international best practices, she added.
Currently, Belize’s payment system is largely paper-based, but online banking and the use of payment cards—debit and credit cards—represent a gradual shift towards electronic banking. The payment system reform will cover instruments such as credit transfers, check clearing, direct debit facilities for bill payments, as well as a new instant funds transfer system which will be available 24/7.
According to Gardiner-Usher, the intent is to retain paper checks, since they can still serve as an option for those who might not be able to take full advantage of the electronic services, but the intention is to reduce the importance of checks.
The process to establish the national payment system began with a country study in 2010, which built on a prior study completed in 2006. The banking sector has been involved from the outset, Gardiner-Usher said.
“Banks are ready to go. They have been onboard from the concept stage of the project,” Gardiner-Usher said.
She explained that ahead of this latest reform, there was an earlier reform which resulted in a magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) line being placed on checks. This machine readable feature allows banks to scan checks and automatically update customer accounts.
Even though banks can process checks more easily, the transfer of credit to accounts still takes days—three days for district checks and up to seven days for out-district checks. With the national payment system, the time can be reduced to two days.
Gardiner-Usher explains that “interoperability,” the ability for transactions across banks to be cleared almost instantaneously, will allow payments to move quickly.
“The deficiency [now] is that there is no switch, no network that connects banks. Without this [interoperability] … you cannot easily make an electronic payment to another party at another bank,” she explained.
“While we have access to checks and credit transfers, they are limited in their use because of this lack of connectivity,” Gardiner-Usher said.
One example of an expedited electronic funds transfer is the bulk credit transfer facility used for salary payments. Instead of businesses doling out cash to individual employees or writing checks, which have to be processed by the bank, funds are deposited directly in the accounts of their workers. Being able to perform those transactions across banks should improve the efficiency of the payment system.
The biggest change will be widening the choices and availability of payment instruments and services, the Deputy Governor explained.
Large-value credit transfers—those bigger than $50,000—would be completed electronically in two hours; and large value checks would be replaced by this kind of credit transfer facility to reduce “settlement risk,” Gardiner-Usher said. Furthermore, customers will be able to use this option to move time-sensitive payments across banks in a matter of minutes, she explained.
Under the new regime, these large value and time sensitive payments, and net obligations resulting from funds transfers between banks will be made through the real time gross settlement system, operated by the Central Bank.
Gardiner-Usher, who is the project coordinator of the NPS reform, said that the role of the Central Bank is to operate the new system; oversee other payment service providers licensed by the Central Bank; and also keep abreast of current and new developments in the system and manage them, to ensure that they meet the objectives for safety and efficiency. We asked whether consideration is being given to cyber security. The system will meet the highest security standards, and licensees will have to meet the requisite standards for safety and efficiency, the Deputy Governor told us.
The House of Representatives is due to meet at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, August 2016, to consider changes in the law to support the new national payment system. They include the National Payment System Bill, 2016, which will, among other things, provide for the establishment of a National Payment System and for its regulation and oversight; and consequential amendments to the Electronic Transactions (Amendment) Bill, 2016, to expand the scope of negotiable instruments to which the Electronic Transactions Act can apply. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/faster-banking-promised-national-payment-system/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/018412abee5f35bceb716849ac66bb72ef9b67b54b7192c534ef98c07637ddb5.json |
[] | 2016-08-31T06:50:08 | null | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fmorales-accuses-barrow-belizeans-cynicism%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/carlos-raul-morales.jpg | en | null | Morales accuses Barrow and Belizeans of cynicism | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 29, 2016–Guatemala’s Foreign Minister, Carlos Raúl Morales, has publicly accused Prime Minister Dean Barrow, and Belizeans in general, of being cynics, following a call from Barrow last week for a public apology from Guatemala, after the unveiling of an expert report detailing the circumstances of the April 20th shooting death of a Guatemalan minor inside the Chiquibul National Park.
In response to the shooting incident, Guatemala had mobilized its elite troops to the Belize border and waged a public relations offensive, accusing Belize’s military of a “cowardly act of aggression” and claiming that there were 10 such incidents since 1999; but likewise not detailing the circumstances of the shooting incidents.
The expert report, filed with the Organization of American States by Dr. James E. Hamby (of the USA) and Dr. Patricia Rosa Linda Trujillo Mariel (of Mexico), confirmed that the bullets which killed the minor did not come from the Belizean military’s weapon. It also documented that there were two bullet holes in trees at the location where the Belize enforcement patrol, and particularly rangers of the Friends for Conservation and Development, co-manager of the national park, said that they had come under fire from the Guatemalans, who, according to the patrol, came flashing lights intermittently and then opened fire at them.
Barrow told the media last Thursday that it is “…a little worrying as to how the Guatemalans will react now, because this is clear vindication for the BDF [Belize Defence Force] and [the investigation] exposed the falsity of the position taken by their President, taken by their Foreign Minister and taken by their officials. So I am hoping that they will be mature enough to accept that they were wrong; that the allegations that they made against the BDF were utterly unjustified, and that they owe Belize an apology.”
Belize Foreign Minister, Wilfred “Sedi” Elrington disagrees that an apology is needed. He told the media Friday that, “I really don’t think that we should get caught up with demanding apologies from anybody.” He may have expected the reaction of his Guatemalan counterpart, which suggests that no apology will be forthcoming.
In an interview with José Eduardo Valdizán on the program HORA 15 EU on Emisoras Unidas, a Guatemalan news source, Morales was asked for his comments on Barrow’s call for an apology. He said that it was “”irresponsible,” and added: “That’s how Belizeans are… they are cynics,” although he is incidentally married to a Belizean woman.
“These are hard blows which they give us. Of course it hurts,” Morales said.
Speaking with the press last week, Guatemalan president, Jimmy Morales said that the incident requires a “serious and well-supported investigation,” but declined comment on the report, saying it would be irresponsible for him to do so before having the official presentation from their Foreign Ministry.
The Guatemalan Foreign Minister is also peeved by statements made by Magdalena Talamás, special representative of the OAS Secretary-General on Belize-Guatemala affairs.
“We cannot help what happened and you have to turn the page,” Talamás said, as she called on the parties to begin a process of reconciliation and to focus on the work that lies ahead.
The Guatemalan Foreign Minister Morales took umbrage at her remarks, and characterized the official as “anything” but a diplomat, since, according to Morales, Talamas cannot say that there are more important things than the death of the Guatemalan minor.
Morales has threatened to send a written complaint to her boss, OAS Secretary-General Luis Almagro, denouncing the attitude of his representative on Belize-Guatemala matters.
Morales told the media that although the information detailed indicates that the bullets of the BDF were not the ones which killed Alvarado, Barrow forgets that the death of the Guatemalan minor resulted from bullets of the organization, Friends for Conservation and Development (FCD), an NGO dedicated to the protection of the environment which works jointly with the Belize Defence Force, and which therefore formed part of the patrol.
He went on to confirm that Guatemala’s Ambassador to Belize, Manuel Estuardo Roldan, had been “recalled for consultations” since the incident occurred in April. Roldan told the Guatemalan media following the release of the expert report that relations between Belize and Guatemala have been adversely impacted by the fatal shooting.
Belize Prime Minister Dean Barrow told the media recently that Guatemala had backed out of talks to establish a mechanism for operation at the Sarstoon River, the natural southern boundary between Belize and Guatemala, pending the outcome of the investigations into the Alvarado shooting.
Roldan has said that the information in the expert report is not conclusive since it was derived from testimonies which are not necessarily objective and which should be analyzed. He also questioned the chain of custody of the evidence, but did not mention the claims made in the independent expert report that Guatemalans had tampered with the scene. He said that Guatemalans wanted to have the details of who is responsible for the minor’s death.
Roldan said that the reality is, a minor is dead at the hands of Belize armed forces, and Belize, he said, cannot escape culpability.
Talamas warned that, “The incidents will continue to happen.”
Talamas held a 7-minute press briefing in Belize on Saturday, in which she said that the report was not an OAS report, but a report of the investigators from members of the Group of Friends which had answered the Secretary-General’s call for an independent investigation.
She told the press that these experts will also be investigating the killing of Belize special constable Danny Conorquie in 2014 and the attack on BDF Sergeant Richard Lambey in March 2016.
“The death of this Guatemalan boy was a very painful event—it was very painful of course a devastating event for his family, but also for the community, also for Guatemalan people, Guatemalan authorities, for the OAS and also for Belize…” she said.
“Every time a child is a victim to a tragic incident, it brings the situation to a whole other level…” she said.
Talamas held a 21-minute briefing with the Guatemalan press on Friday, when they questioned what justification Belize had for the fatal shooting of the minor.
She described the border area, which is called the adjacency zone, spanning a kilometer on either side of the Belize-Guatemala border, as “a very complex area.”
“That is to say that the reasons as to why these incidents occur cannot be simplified. In other words, on the one hand you have Guatemalan communities which face enormous socio-economic challenges. Sometimes to survive they have to turn to the culture of subsistence on the Belizean side or to poaching or to the extraction of precious timber, I mean, to be able to survive,” Talamas told the Guatemalan media.
“On the other side of the adjacency line we have natural reserves, pristine forests, species facing extinction, we are witnessing the serious effects of deforestation; the impact of climate change on the water cycle which in turn also affects the Guatemalan communities who live in the area. We are increasingly detecting the scarcity of water in the area. And to this complex situation, a new element is added which is the presence of elements of organized transnational crime,” Talamas said.
“Now I think that with the conclusion of this investigation, the time has come to perhaps turn the page; it’s the time to start the process of reconciliation and to now focus on the work that is ahead of us and which is a lot,” she told the Guatemalan press.
She pointed out that the parties still have pending the ratification of the protocol amending the special agreement; which is the compromis signed back in 2008 to have the Belize-Guatemala territorial differendum adjudicated at the International Court of Justice. She also spoke of the pending negotiations for the Sarstoon mechanism, as well as 3 of 13 bilateral agreements signed in Placencia, Belize, in 2014.
Talamas told Guatemalan reporters that the incident had occurred over 500 meters inside Belize. She added that it was not the first time that this child had returned to that area, and he had previously been detained due to poaching but was released because he was a minor.
She also told them that it had been concluded that the injuries of the father and of the younger son, as well as those sustained by the deceased, were not caused by the BDF’s firearm but by the rangers’ firearms.
The Guatemalan press probed: “Can you say who fired? Who held the firearm fire that was used?” they asked.
“We, the only thing we can do is receive the report of the forensic experts….” Talamas responded.
In an April 22 statement, even ahead of an investigation, the OAS said that its Secretariat “repudiates the death of a Guatemalan minor at the hands of a Belizean patrol, and urges both sides to redouble efforts to establish a lasting peace in the adjacency zone between the two countries.”
It added that the report of an investigation by its office at the Belize-Guatemala border would be delivered to Foreign Ministries of the respective countries for appropriate actions.
“This incident reinforces the need to observe the confidence building measures in place, in order to prevent future confrontations or situations that could put at risk the peace and stability in the Adjacency Zone, as well as in the area of the Sarstoon River,” the OAS said.
It also promotes the ICJ as “the only viable option to resolve the dispute in a peaceful and permanent way.”
Although adjudication by the ICJ would be deemed binding on the parties, there are now questions as to whether Guatemala would indeed honor an ICJ ruling that may turn out not to be in its favor.
(Amandala thanks KREM for assistance with translating portions of the press conference which Talamas held in Guatemala.) | http://amandala.com.bz/news/morales-accuses-barrow-belizeans-cynicism/ | en | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/03b22c01593ed96aa2220ddf353cea125a2dc67f34ec5b855b8edcdc11551a9b.json |
[] | 2016-08-31T06:51:10 | null | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fpup-call-speaker-peyrefittes-head%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Speaker-Michael-Peyrefitte.jpg | en | null | PUP call for Speaker Peyrefitte’s head! | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 29, 2016–The Opposition People’s United Party (PUP) called a press conference this afternoon at their Independence Hall headquarters, where Party Leader, Hon. John Briceño, briefed the media on the party’s plan following last Friday’s spectacle at the House of Representatives meeting, when all PUP parliamentarians walked out in solidarity with the Cayo South area representative, Hon. Julius Espat, who was named and suspended by House Speaker Michael Peyrefitte.
Briceño said that the Opposition has lost confidence in the Speaker and demanded that he be removed, “because he has disgraced the office of the Speaker and brought the House into disrepute.”
Apart from calling for the removal of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Briceño also made several other demands of the Barrow government, among them that the government should call new elections.
The PUP Leader also called for the party’s supporters to begin a series of demonstrations in the streets, beginning next week Wednesday.
The Opposition had harsh words for the Barrow government, which had, according to the Auditor General’s report, issued some 55,000 passports in what Briceño described as a “bucket sale” of passports and had wantonly and illegally engaged in the trafficking of visas.
Prime Minister Barrow, Briceño said, lacks the moral authority to discipline any of his ministers.
Briceño called for the cancellation of all visas and passports that were fraudulently issued.
The PUP will call on its Senators to seek an inquiry into the audit report and said that Senator Godwin Hulse must recuse himself from any such debate.
The Opposition called on the government to sign the United Nations Convention on Corruption and demanded that a fully functional Integrity Commission be installed.
Government should also conduct a re-registration exercise before the next municipal elections, Briceño demanded.
Under the Barrow-led United Democratic Party government, $325 million of PetroCaribe funds has been squandered, and the government is responsible for increasing the country’s debt by 1.1 billion dollars, Briceño said, and he urged the government to appeal the Chief Justice’s ruling on Section 53 of the Criminal Code for and on behalf of the people of Belize.
The Caribbean Shores area representative, Hon. Kareem Musa, explained that the PUP will take a constitutional motion to the Supreme Court on the Speaker’s suspension of Hon. Espat.
Hon. Espat told the press conference that if there is a House of Representatives meeting, he will attend, “because I am not suspended.”
The PUP series of street demonstrations “to save Belize” is scheduled to kick off next week Wednesday, September 7, in Belize City. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/pup-call-speaker-peyrefittes-head/ | en | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/bdfd55c7bd4d007da240fa967053d4a5a271aa31da51fe6fd10dc444ee99ecaf.json |
[] | 2016-08-31T06:49:38 | null | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fpolice-united-goalie-keith-allen-chosen-goalkeeper-week%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Police-United1.png | en | null | Police United goalie Keith Allen chosen “Goalkeeper of the Week” | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 29, 2016–In its “Official weekly recap of the Scotiabank CONCACAF Champions League” for “Week 3, August 23-25, 2016,” Belize goalie Keith Allen of Police United has been chosen “Goalkeeper of the Week,” for his splendid performance against Pachuca of Mexico on Tuesday, August 23, where Pachuca defeated Police United, 3-0, in a game that could have seen a much bigger score, if not for the stellar performance in goal by Allen. According to the concacaf.com report, Keith Allen received 18 shots on goal, stopped 15 of them, while allowing 3 goals by Pachuca. On account of his performance, Allen was also selected as goalkeeper in the “Best XI, Group Stage Week 3” in Champions League.
See excerpt below from concacaf.com: | http://amandala.com.bz/news/police-united-goalie-keith-allen-chosen-goalkeeper-week/ | en | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/3b539197c8282bb716556fdd3254087da6c2b8a0c39f4969e302ff87b1381b70.json |
[] | 2016-08-31T06:49:22 | null | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2F183-6-mil-losses-due-hurricane-earl%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Hurricane-Earl.jpg | en | null | $183.6 mil in losses due to Hurricane Earl | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Fri. Aug. 26, 2016–The damage wrought by Hurricane Earl, which struck Belize on August 3 and 4, 2016, is now estimated at $183.6 million, according to Prime Minister Dean Barrow, who gave a report in Parliament on Friday.
Barrow had previously told the press that individual property losses had been estimated at upwards of $15 million and losses to agriculture and tourism at over $100 million.
In his presentation today, he said that losses to the utility companies—the Belize Telemedia Limited and the Belize Electricity Limited—amounted to an estimated $25 million.
Meanwhile, damage to roads was estimated at $29.4 million.
According to Barrow, 4,684 households were impacted, amounting to an estimated 17,000 persons in the Belize, Cayo, Orange Walk and Stann Creek Districts. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/183-6-mil-losses-due-hurricane-earl/ | en | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/5098dbc15035b9d09ee5b8085c18c8a2d6877943572e2d30bebcaba92fdd38ce.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T06:47:44 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2F13-barrows-current-ministers-named-immigration-scandal%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/perdomo-and-santino-castill.jpg | en | null | 13 of Barrow’s former and current Ministers named in immigration scandal! | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Thurs. Aug. 25, 2016–John Saldivar of Belmopan, Erwin Contreras of Cayo West, Gaspar Vega of Orange Walk North and Rene Montero of Cayo Central are among a list of high-ranking UDP Cabinet ministers who allegedly had intervened in the nationality process without any provision to do so in the Nationality Act between 2011 and 2013, according to an explosive audit published by the Auditor General, Dorothy Bradley.
Manuel Heredia of Belize Rural South and Pablo Marin of Corozal Bay round out the list of current UDP ministers named for intervening in the nationality process during the period audited. Former UDP ministers like Eden Martinez of Toledo East, Elvin Penner of Cayo Northeast and Ramon Witz of Cayo South were also pinpointed by the audit.
Retired UDP ministers Santiago Castillo and Carlos Perdomo of Caribbean Shores along with Gabriel Martinez were also listed by the Auditor General.
However, at this time, the report has not specifically revealed how each of these former and current UDP ministers intervened in the nationality process.
According to the audit, “Ministers Carlos Perdomo and Elvin Penner were among those Ministers who had requested that nationality files be processed while they were the Ministers of Immigration and this fact alone is capable of causing intimidation and pressure on the staff of the Nationality Section to process files for persons who did not qualify for Belizean nationality as we found in several cases.”
The audit further claims that several of these Ministers, “may not have known the persons they were recommending for Belizean nationality.”
For example, the audit cites an undated letter from Minister Edmond Castro retrieved from a nationality file for Olena Moskalyk Curly and Mykola Moskalyk which stated, “I hereby recommend for the file of Oteha Mockajtwik (BNA 28077/12) to be send to the Director of immigration desk to be expedited. Thank you for your assistants [sic].”
The audit affirms that Castro did not know Olena Moskalyk because the letter he personally signed had her name spelt “Oteha Mockajtwik”. Her nationality application was opened in the name “Oteha”, which, according to the audit, suggests that, “no official document from the applicant was submitted before the processing of her file began…”
Nevertheless, she received a Belizean nationality certificate dated February 9, 2012, in the name of Olena Moskalyk three days after she had entered Belize, and by February 24, 2012, she was issued a Belizean passport.
In another instance, this time involving former Minister Santiago Castillo, Jr., he requested the processing of three nationality files for Chinese nationals who, according to the audit, he referred to as “supporters and constituents” even before they were given Belizean nationality.
According to the audit, Castillo kept referring to two of the three applicants as “she” and “her” when they were two male applicants.
The issue of private swearing-in ceremonies for persons with approved Belizean nationality was also brought into question by the Auditor General after a letter dated January 9, 2012, was discovered in the nationality file of Wael Harmouch, apparently from the desk of Cayo Central representative Rene Montero, addressed to then Immigration Director Ruth Meighan.
In the letter, Montero asked Meighan to facilitate him with a series of applications, “for the ceremonies to be held on the 13th January 2012.”
According to the audit, it was not clear if Montero was referring to a general swearing-in ceremony, or if he was making reference to a private swearing-in ceremony. The auditors stated in the audit that they were told, “that private swearing-in ceremonies were a common, irregular practice carried out at the department.”
In an interview with former Minister of Immigration Carlos Perdomo on December 8 2014, regarding his alleged intervention into the processing of a nationality application for Paul Ku, his response was, “…I do not think I directed anything in regards to passports. I would send a note to Ruth Meighan asking for her to kindly assist in regard to people who came to the Ministry for help with their BNA (Belize Nationality Application) file numbers because their applications had been unapproved for a long time.”
Several Chinese and Lebanese persons were assisted by prominent current and former UDP Ministers in their bid for nationality and passport documents. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/13-barrows-current-ministers-named-immigration-scandal/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/02b708e0af0784df503cbe923b2dd83ea46195ee578fcd321c7e404126bd021b.json |
[] | 2016-08-31T06:50:55 | null | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fshocker-candelaria-saldivar-paid-60000-year-15-months-nothing%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Candelaria-Saldivar.jpg | en | null | Shocker: Candelaria Saldivar paid $60,000 a year for 15 months to do nothing! | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELMOPAN, Fri. Aug. 26, 2016–Candelaria Saldivar-Morter, sister of Defense Minister John Saldivar, has strangely been on administrative leave on full benefits—including monthly allowances—for a year and three months, with no news of when exactly she would be re-assigned, according to revelations made in Parliament on Friday.
Last May, it was announced that Saldivar-Morter, who was part of the team which led an internal investigation into the Elvin Penner passport scandal as the Chief Executive Officer responsible for Immigration, had been put on administrative leave until Prime Minister Dean Barrow, who has the portfolio for the public service, can re-assign her, which he has apparently been unable to do for over a year now.
A high-ranking government official had reportedly complained about Saldivar’s “management style.” Saldivar’s boss, Immigration Minister Godwin Hulse, had said that Saldivar was moved to preserve harmony.
He said that “…she’s on the money, she’s precise, she’s accurate, she’s a very good accounting officer and many people found that her strengths were too stiff.”
Hulse added that, “The Prime Minister and the Cabinet had decided, ‘Okay, we will place her in another spot where her strengths will be better utilized’…”
In Parliament on Friday, Opposition Leader Johnny Briceño asked the Right Honorable Prime Minister, as the minister responsible for the public service, to inform the House of Saldivar’s current status.
Briceño probed whether she is still receiving her full CEO salary ($60,000 a year), plus allowances and benefits, which include vehicle, entertainment and housing allowances. He also asked Barrow to inform Parliament for how much longer Saldivar would remain on administrative leave.
In reply, Barrow said that Saldivar-Morter is a public officer and not a contract officer like most other CEOs, and she remains on administrative leave because, he said, “…we have not yet been able to find an office to re-assign her.”
“We have to make sure that she doesn’t lose any benefits by way of her re-assignment. She is, therefore, still on administrative leave with her full benefits. It is long outstanding; we hope to sort it out very shortly,” Barrow added.
He said that “in the normal course, [she] does not exit the public service until she reaches retirement age.”
Barrow told Parliament: “If there simply is not another public service position that is on the same level that she is prepared to accept, we will discuss with her retirement in the interest of the service.” | http://amandala.com.bz/news/shocker-candelaria-saldivar-paid-60000-year-15-months-nothing/ | en | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/e99ed2ed54552337387df5efe287bb92ef7de137fb47aa28af6087ec79e9d42f.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:55:15 | null | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fhomosexual-lover-charged-assaulting-partner%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Justin-Arnold-for-common.jpg | en | null | Homosexual lover charged with assaulting his partner | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Fri. Aug. 19, 2016–On Wednesday, August 10, Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin ruled that Section 53 of the Belize Criminal Code, which makes sodomy an offense, is unconstitutional. The ruling has been hailed as a victory for the LGBT (Lesbians, Gays, Bi-sexual and Transgender) community.
Today, a man who shares living quarters with another man in what appears to be a homosexual relationship was charged with common assault against his partner.
Justin Arnold, 23, appeared before Magistrate Carlon Mendoza and pleaded not guilty to one count of common assault against Noel Garcia, 39, his partner of six months.
Arnold allegedly slapped Garcia, and Garcia went to the police station and made a report about the incident.
Since there was no objection to bail, Magistrate Mendoza offered Arnold bail of $500 plus one surety of the same amount.
Arnold, however, was unable to post bail and so he was still in police custody at the end of the court’s business day.
In his report to police, Garcia said that on Wednesday, August 17, at about 9:00 p.m., at their home at 5 North Front Street, he and Arnold were having supper and Arnold asked him to assist him in pulling down a door.
Garcia said that when he told Arnold he was too tired to assist him, Arnold remarked, “I wah deal with you later,” and that is when he (Arnold) slapped him on the left side of his face, causing him to feel pain, and fearing for his life, he requested court action against Arnold.
Police arrested Justin Arnold and charged him with common assault. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/homosexual-lover-charged-assaulting-partner/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/46b830c3e8967d8633eda89359b1f8b32c7951d589fc824f73f9368c413a061b.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:49:44 | null | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fbdba-firms-basketball-semi-finals-finals-weekend%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Amandala-Sports.gif | en | null | BDBA Firms Basketball Semi-finals and Finals this weekend | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Sun. Aug. 21, 2016–Quarterfinal games were played in the Belize District Basketball Association (BDBA) Firms 2016 Basketball Tournament last Friday and Saturday at the BES gym, setting the stage for the semi-finals and the first game of the finals this weekend.
In quarterfinal action on Friday night, August 19, Belize Bank Bulldogs clipped BWSL, 83-78; and Belize City Council Dragons crushed Heritage Bank Heatz, 78-56. And in the other quarterfinals on Saturday, it was BTL edging Mayan Man Warriors, 85-82; and Infotel blowing out Atlantic Bank, 84-56.
The semi-finals, which will be played this Friday at BES gym, are “knockout” rounds, with the two winning teams advancing to a “best-of-three” finals series.
Here is the schedule:
Friday, August 26, Semi-finals
7:00 p.m. – BCC Dragons vs Bze Bank Bulldogs
8:30 p.m. – BTL vs Infotel
Saturday, August 27, Finals
8:00 p.m. – Finals Game 1
Friday, September 2, Finals
8:00 p.m. – Finals Game 2
Saturday, September 3
8:00 p.m. – Finals Game 3 (if needed)
Junior games will be played prior to the Firms games, beginning from 6:00 p.m. this Friday and Saturday. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/bdba-firms-basketball-semi-finals-finals-weekend/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/b19dfaf121f5885f2a076d0cefdc32e44e5ca2c98e7b8417c6556d3ef0253760.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:47:46 | null | 2014-07-18T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fcane-farmers-meet-bsi-ultimatum-sunday%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Belizario-Carballo-copy.jpg | en | null | Cane farmers to meet on BSI “ultimatum” this Sunday | null | null | amandala.com.bz | Last Tuesday, July 8, the delayed 2013/2014 sugar season concluded with all sugar milling targets having been met, but still, it is certainly not a jubilant time for local sugar cane farmers who are currently in limbo as it relates to their proposed cut of the bagasse profits. The farmers plan to congregate in San Roman Village in Corozal this Sunday, to discuss a number of issues, including what steps will be taken to address the troublesome bagasse negotiations.
The cane farmers deliberately delayed the start of the crop season in order to pressure the factory owners, Belize Sugar Industries/American Sugar Refineries (BSI/ASR), to come to the table to work out a reasonable quantum of payment for bagasse, the much-valued sugar cane by-product, and those discussions were supposed to be completed by the end of the crop season last Tuesday.
However, the unsettled bagasse issue continuously hovers over the embattled industry, since the farmers and factory owners still can’t agree on a final price for bagasse payments.
The current impasse stems from the fact that BSI is offering the farmers 51 cents per ton of cane delivered; however, the cane farmers’ association is not prepared to agree to anything less than $4 per ton.
This past Tuesday, BSI issued a press release advising the farmers to accept the 51 cents for the benefit of the industry, but the Belize Sugar Cane Farmers Association (BSCFA) views the proposal as “utter disrespect” to the local cañeros, citing that BSI basically is giving them (the farmers) an ultimatum instead of trying to negotiate a fair resolution with them.
In the release, which was addressed to the BSCFA’s Committee of Management, BSI’s Chief Financial Officer, Belizario Carballo, stated, “Even though the Interim Agreement has now expired, BSI, in a spirit of good faith, does advise that its offer for a payment for bagasse made during the negotiations (specifically described on the Appendix to this letter) will remain open through 5:00 p.m. on Friday, August 1, 2014.
“Furthermore, BSI advises that if the offer is accepted by BSCFA within such period and subject to concluding a new agreement, BSI is prepared to make the payment for bagasse retroactive for the 2013/14 crop.”
On January 13, BSI and BSCFA – via an uneasy truce – signed an interim agreement in which both parties agreed to negotiate on a number of items, including a quantum for bagasse, before the end of this crop season, but that time has come and gone, and as yet a settlement is nowhere on the horizon, which basically means that the agreement was breached.
The 51 cents per ton of cane BSI is offering to cane farmers is based on a valuation of the quantity of fiber in cane used to generate electricity sold by BELCOGEN to the Belize Electricity Limited, and BSI is of the opinion that the methodology they used is both transparent and verifiable.
At the same time, the company claims that the BSCFA leadership has not presented a clearly articulated and reasoned method of calculation which supports their quantum payment proposal, but of course, the BSCFA says otherwise.
Nevertheless, the BSCFA has agreed to at least take BSI’s offer back to the general membership of farmers this Sunday, and we understand that representatives of the company are requesting to be included in the agenda so that they could get an opportunity to address cane farmers personally, but the BSCFA has not responded to their request as yet.
Regardless of whether that request is granted, it will be interesting to see how the general membership of the BSCFA react to BSI’s “take it or leave it” proposal. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/cane-farmers-meet-bsi-ultimatum-sunday/ | en | 2014-07-18T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/b605e7e2f28e8a30e768270a88858f843580209e5958b7549eee8773ebf4e7d4.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T06:49:16 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fu-10-u-13-games-orange-walk%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Sports-Page-graphic.jpg | en | null | U-10 and U-13 games in Orange Walk | null | null | amandala.com.bz | ORANGE WALK TOWN, Thurs. Aug. 25, 2016–OWFA U-10 Tournament
This weekend, it will be the final week of the first ever U-10 Tournament in Orange Walk, the Orange Walk Football Association (OWFA) U-10 Tournament. The teams are ranked by their won-loss (W-L) records: #1 Vibes Alive (3-0); #2 Minions (2-1); #3 Real Madrid (1-2); #4 Barca Shock (0-3).
Saturday, August 27, Barracks Field
10:00 a.m. – #3 Real Madrid vs #4 Barca Shock
11:00 a.m. – #1 Vibes Alive vs #2 Minions
Closing ceremonies, trophies and awards will be issued after the games. Come and witness the completion of the first ever U-10 tournament.
U-13 Town Council Tournament
The Town Council U-13 Tournament continues in Orange Walk Town:
Saturday, August 27, Barracks Field
1:00 p.m. – Minions vs Corozal Rising Stars
2:00 p.m. – Barca Shock vs Black Wata
3:00 p.m. – Vibes Alive vs Crystal
Come and enjoy a day full of youth football in Orange Walk Town. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/u-10-u-13-games-orange-walk/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/1e6f5755391e336f918cfda54eac8aefb1c8b258d6458e632c59b2f6f8bab406.json |
[] | 2016-08-31T06:50:24 | null | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fpolice-manhandle-media-house-representatives%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/police-manhandle-Jules.jpg | en | null | Police manhandle the media in the House of Representatives! | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 29, 2016–The meeting of the House of Representatives on Friday will go down as unprecedented in the history of this country because of the chaos that followed both outside and inside of the House, when an Opposition People’s United Party parliamentarian was dragged out of the House by Belmopan police, who disgraced themselves by manhandling the media for no good reason.
Police manhandled some members of the media and dragged Channel 7’s news director, Jules Vasquez out of the gallery from where he was recording the House’s proceedings.
Who gave the order for the police to drag media representatives out of the gallery? The media was only doing its work, after all.
“On Friday, when you cleared out the gallery in the House of Representatives, under whose authority were you acting?” Amandala asked Howell Gillett, the Officer commanding the Belmopan Police formation.
“With the authority of the Speaker of the House; we were directed by the Speaker to clear the gallery,” Gillett said, “and the media.”
House Speaker Michael Peyrefitte told Amandala tonight that he did issue instructions to the police, as well as the Sergeant at Arms, Brian ‘Yellowman” Audinett, to have the galleries cleared, and that included the media.
Peyrefitte said that the purpose of having the media removed was not because he did not want the ejection of Espat to be recorded, but, ironically, because he intended not to make a spectacle by having people “booing and cheering” in the galleries. He said that the media has in the past left the gallery, but kept their cameras rolling.
Gillett insisted that, “the police practised a lot of restraint with the media and with Hon. Espat, before we made any decision to remove anybody, because that is one of the last things that I want to do, is to hurt our people.”
“I hate to resort to that kind of policing, but if it comes, we have to deal with it,” Gillett explained.
Amandala asked Jules Vasquez for his reaction to being forcibly removed from the House by the police.
“I told Howell, you did not inform me. You did not tell me that you were moving me on the authority of the Speaker of the House,” Vasquez said.
“Will you be doing any kind of follow-up regarding your ejection from the House?” Amandala asked Vasquez.
“I am quietly investigating a lawsuit, not for myself, but for the media. The media, you just can’t just throw us away like a dishrag. There has to be some intrinsic place that the media has which is non-negotiable, that our pride of place is respected, that it can’t just be there at the pleasure of this one or that one. Something has to be done, that we just can’t be hauled and pulled. There has to be some intrinsic value that the press has in a democracy,” Vasquez said.
Vasquez added, “They [the police] spoke to me in various ways, but none of them said the Speaker said you have to go.” | http://amandala.com.bz/news/police-manhandle-media-house-representatives/ | en | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/cd064c6f601996e7c8254b2f42f36b30889ea0c2933915f8cf67759ee45e7d53.json |
[] | 2016-08-31T06:49:53 | null | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fplacencia-perfect-week-2%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Placencia-Assasins.png | en | null | Placencia perfect at Week 2 | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 29, 2016–The double round-robin regular competition of the Premier League of Belize (PLB) Opening Season 2016-2017 has just completed Week 2, and only one team, Placencia Assassins FC, sports a perfect record so far, with two lopsided wins and no goals allowed, to lead all 9 teams. (See standings below.)
There was only one night game this past weekend, and it was at the Isidoro Beaton Stadium in Belmopan on Saturday night, where Police United, fresh from their first two CONCACAF Champions League outings (both losses, 4-0 and 3-0), were greeted by their Belizean hosts, defending PLB champions Belmopan Bandits, with another defeat, this one by a 2-1 score. Danny Jimenez gave Police the early lead at the 14th minute, but the Bandits came back with goals from Brazilian import Aloisio Teixeira (25’) and Frank Lopez (68’) to register their first win of the tournament.
In the first of 3 Sunday afternoon games, Freedom Fighters FC travelled all the way from Punta Gorda to take on Verdes FC at the Norman Broaster Stadium, and it was the home team taking the 3-1 win with goals from Jarret Davis (21’ PK), Orlando “Leechi” Jimenez (39’) and Darrel Myvete (70’); while Alexander “Pleck” Peters got the sole tally for the Freedom Fighters, who suffered their second loss.
Meanwhile, up north at the People’s Stadium in Orange Walk, the northern newcomers took a 7-0 thrashing from visiting Placencia Assassins FC from Independence. It was Orange Walk FC’s second harsh beating (they lost 5-1 to BDF in Week 1), while Placencia Assassins FC is red hot early in this season, scoring 10 goals so far and yet to concede 1. Dellon Torres accounted for four Placencia goals, including three in the first ten minutes (5’, 6,’ 9’ & 46’ PK); Ashton Torres netted two (61’ & 82’); and Arnie Whyte (75’) completed the scoring.
The other Sunday afternoon encounter saw home standing Wagiya FC scoring 2 goals for the home fans at the Carl Ramos Stadium, but the celebration was dampened somewhat by 2 late goals from visiting BDF FC. Former BDF, now playing for his original home town, Harrison Tasher (46’) opened the scoring for Wagiya, and Ernest “Dubu” Flores (63’) increased the lead to 2-0; but it was not enough to secure the victory over the always resilient BDF squad, as soldier Trimayne Harris struck twice, at the 79th and 86th minutes, to secure the 2-2 draw.
Upcoming Week 3 schedule:
Saturday, September 3
3:30 p.m. – Police United FC vs Freedom Fighters FC – Norman Broaster Stadium (TV)
7:30 p.m. – Placencia Assassins FC vs Belmopan Bandits SC – Michael Ashcroft Stadium
Sunday, September 4
3:30 p.m. – Wagiya FC vs Orange Walk FC – Carl Ramos Stadium
3:30 p.m. – Verdes FC vs FC Belize – Norman Broaster Stadium (TV)
(BDF FC – Resting)
Looking ahead to Week 4:
Saturday, September 10
7:30 p.m. – Placencia Assassins FC vs FC Belize – Michael Ashcroft Stadium
Sunday, September 11
3:30 p.m. – Orange Walk FC vs Freedom Fighters FC – People’s Stadium
3:30 p.m. – Wagiya FC vs Police United FC – Carl Ramos Stadium
3:30 p.m. – Verdes FC vs BDF FC – Norman Broaster Stadium (TV)
(Belmopan Bandits FC – Resting) | http://amandala.com.bz/news/placencia-perfect-week-2/ | en | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/c3be37bd53a764661b3786234f90c8ddacb8a0f46a040317f63fa61f6295a008.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T06:49:00 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fgenesis-section-53-challenge-part-2%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/section-53-challenge.jpg | en | null | The genesis of the Section 53 challenge: Part 2 | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Wed. Aug. 24, 2016–Buggery or anal intercourse between males is only aone of severl sexual acts which are deemed a violation of the sacred books of the three dominant world religions—Christianity, Islam and Judaism. For example, the Torah or the Books of Moses contain commandments against bestiality, incest and rape, and the Laws of Belize criminalize these acts as well. The violations spelt out in the aforementioned sacred books are called “ecclesiastical crimes;” and they made their way onto civil law books in many countries across the world—not just in Belize.
Leviticus 20:13 says: ‘And a man who lies with a male as he lies with a woman: both of them have done an abomination, they shall certainly be put to death, their blood is upon them.” (The Scriptures, 1998 version)
Notably, even European jurisdictions once meted out sentences of death by burning upon homosexuals; but today, those countries have legalized and even liberalized homosexuality.
In Greek and Roman mythology, even certain gods were deemed to have homosexual desires and relationships, primary among them being Zeus or Jupiter, who, despite being portrayed as a womanizer, was also said to be enamored with a young mortal man, Ganymede, whom he supposedly turned into an eagle and abducted to serve as his cupbearer.
Likewise, same-sex relations have existed in ancient cultures, and Nero (37 to 68 AD), infamous for his persecution of Christians, whose “ecclesiastical law” he had rejected, was said to have been the first Roman Emperor to engage in same-sex marriage, twice. He is said to have acted as husband to a young boy, Sporus (whom the emperor allegedly had castrated), and as bride to Phytagoras (for whom he cross-dressed at a public wedding ceremony). This is a glimpse of the ancient backdrop against which there is a new global lobby for state-recognized same-sex marriages.
Although same-sex marriages are not legally sanctioned in Belize—at least not yet—the criminalization of homosexuality has recently been overturned.
Up until August 10, 2016—when Belize’s Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin ruled that Section 53 of Belize’s Criminal Code which criminalizes all “unnatural” sex acts is unconstitutional—Belize was one of the remaining 80 or so countries where homosexuality was deemed illegal, although Belize had not been in the practice of enforcing the law against homosexuals, except in the case of rape or anal penetration of minors.
“These crimes all started as ecclesiastical crimes, which moved to the civil domain,” said Tracy Robinson, the co-founder of the University of the West Indies – Rights Advocacy Project (U-RAP), which had launched challenges to laws in Belize against sodomy and in Guyana against cross-dressing, through LGBT claimants in those countries.
Robinson was speaking at a recent video conference briefing in July, explaining the background to the challenge brought by Caleb Orozco, a Belizean homosexual, to Belize’s sodomy law in July 2010.
Homosexuality is notably criminalized in several Caribbean jurisdictions, and Robinson said that she had led a desk review back in 2007, which revealed that Belize was the best place in the Caribbean to bring such a legal challenge.
Orozco told the media in June 2016, according to an interview published online by Love News, that, “Some work has been done behind the scenes and that started prior to filing the legal documents in Santo Domingo, where we talked about finding the two best countries in the Caribbean to file this court case—which were Guyana and Belize.
“What happened is that Belize ended up getting the challenge to its sodomy law while Guyana ended up with a case around cross dressing.”
According to U-RAP, the Guyana case is expected to go to full hearing in that country’s appeals court in October 2016.
The four applicants—Quincy McEwan, Seon Clarke, Joseph Fraser and Seyon Persaud—were arrested, convicted and fined in February 2009 under section 153 (1) (xlvii) for “being a man, and in any public way or public place, for any improper purpose, appearing in female attire,” U-RAP detailed. The law is found under a section which deals with ‘Offences Against Religion, Morality and Public Convenience’.
The Guyana claimants are also working along with the Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination (SASOD) and Guyana Trans United (GTU).
The Guyana law is another instance where the civil law reflects ecclesiastical law. Deuteronomy 22:5 says: “A woman does not wear that which pertains to a man, nor does a man put on a woman’s garment, for whoever does this is an abomination to YHUH your Elohim.” (The Scriptures, 1998 version)
Robinson noted that whereas older Caribbean laws did not specifically speak against lesbian relations, laws began to emerge in the 80s indicating that same-sex acts between women are explicitly criminalized. She said that the Belize case, which challenges a clause which covers “unnatural sex” regardless of gender, also has important implications for women.
In reviewing the possible outcomes of the Belize case ahead of the Chief Justice’s ruling, she noted that since the Orozco case was heard in May 2013, India’s appellate court had in November 2013 overturned its earlier ruling of 2009, on which the parties supporting Orozco “widely relied.”
In a ruling similar to Benjamin’s ruling, the Delhi High Court had held in a challenge brought by the Naz Foundation, that treating consensual homosexual sex between adults as a crime is a violation of fundamental rights protected by India’s Constitution.
However, the ruling was later challenged in the Supreme Court of India, which ruled in November 2013, after the Orozco hearing was concluded, that homosexuality or unnatural sex even between two consenting adults (under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code) would continue to be an offence, as the provision is not unconstitutional.
She noted that Benjamin’s decision to deliver his decision was timed immediately after the Caribbean Court of Justice issued its ruling on the challenge filed by LGBT activist and attorney, Maurice Tomlinson of Jamaica, to the Immigration laws of Belize, and Trinidad and Tobago, dismissing his case.
Both the CCJ ruling and the Naz Foundation ruling, reversing the lower court’s decision legalizing homosexuality, might have had an impact on what the Chief Justice said, Robinson surmised.
Evidently, those decisions by the CCJ and Indian court did not sway Benjamin from finding in Orozco’s favor. Robinson expects an appeal.
Orozco claimed violations of his human rights to dignity and privacy, but Robinson explained that, “The Constitution of Belize specifically talks about public morality as a legitimate reason for limiting fundamental rights…”
She expressed the view that the interested parties in the Orozco case, which include the churches, may have a right to appeal as well, based on new developments in Caribbean Constitutional law.
Robinson said that this is only a Supreme Court decision, and the precedential value of the case for other Caribbean countries with buggery laws would increase if the matter is appealed and finally ventilated at the CCJ, the regional court to whose jurisdiction she said a growing number of countries are acceding.
She said that, “Even if [the Orozco ruling] has limited precedential value, it could also provide an impetus for law reform, for international action, for changing the mood and the spirit of conversations, about the human rights of LGBT persons…”
In related news, Maurice Tomlinson also filed a lawsuit challenging Jamaica’s buggery legislation last December, but the trial is pending.
Tomlinson told The Gleaner newspaper, according to an online article dated August 11, 2016, that, “I am more hopeful now, because all of the rights which the judge in Belize ruled were violated under their Constitution, are the same rights which I am alleging are violated under our Constitution, by our anti-sodomy law.”
In a statement released on Monday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, of which Robinson formerly served as chair, hailed the decision by the Barrow administration not to appeal Benjamin’s ruling.
The Commission said that in its report titled, “Violence against LGBTI people in America,” it had “highlighted the inconsistency of laws that criminalize consensual sex between same-sex persons with the principles of equality and non-discrimination.”
The Commission, which is an agency of the Organization of American States (OAS), is calling on the Caribbean to put in place a moratorium on enforcing laws against same-sex relations.
The Commission said that it is asking “…other States in the region that have existing laws that criminalize consensual sex between adults of the same-sex, to repeal these laws, and, meanwhile, to impose an explicit and formal moratorium on their application.”
Meanwhile, the most visible groups in Belize’s Christian community, which was said to account for 71% of Belize’s population in the 2010 census, are collectively adamant that laws against homosexuality should remain on the law books, and they rallied roughly 1,000 for a prayer patrol at the seat of Government in Belmopan on Tuesday to make their position known.
They are also discussing a proposal for the churches to seek an appeal of Benjamin’s decision, for which they have a 21-day window period from the release of his decision.
View full video here: | http://amandala.com.bz/news/genesis-section-53-challenge-part-2/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/ab72beb6c2b8db52be94c63240e58096afacc89c4555cd05f49a78e0e77bc5ef.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T06:48:30 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fbrian-ellis-plummer-crime%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Letter-to-the-Editor-Oct-25.jpg | en | null | Brian Ellis Plummer on crime | null | null | amandala.com.bz | Dear Editor,
I would like to add to the discussion about crime.
Crime costs Belize millions annually in security costs, health, law enforcement and other related impediments.
So far the approach to combating crime in Belize and the Caribbean has been combative instead of preventative. All our police forces have been militarized, triggering an arms race between law enforcement and criminals. This has yielded little success.
I would suggest a more comprehensive approach with societal re-engineering. The military or combative approach should be available occasionally, but the mainstay must be education and an adequate social safety net. Criteria-based public assistance.
No successful democracy in the developed world has been able to exist without such a system. We could spend tens of millions in law enforcement and health cost, etc., or spend millions in education, poverty eradication and inclusion. Look at the empirical data globally and locally. Every mouth must be fed or the streets will run red.
For about the past 15 years Belize has been in the top ten of most murderous countries. We have enacted and implemented more draconian laws, such as no search warrant for search and gun possession law. But crime has increased. One can argue they have helped to increase crime instead of hindering it. This assertion will be both from a mathematical correlation and a sociological negative pressure matrix.
This social pressure has caused criminals to adapt and become more brutal, and law enforcement doing likewise in the creation of the infamous GSU.
Results are what count; successive governments have helped to ferment criminal enterprises in Belize. It’s time to act intelligently and not with brute force and ignorance, which studies have suggested contributes to creating more criminals.
Yours truly,
Brian Ellis Plummer | http://amandala.com.bz/news/brian-ellis-plummer-crime/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/106b03c36a8c052fe82232689f9e58c89e33fcf345b658c423bad7d3cace7014.json |
[] | 2016-08-31T06:50:39 | null | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fi-country-back%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Friday-Aug-26-protest.jpg | en | null | “I want my country back!!” | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELMOPAN, Cayo District, Fri. Aug. 26, 2016–“I want my country back,” “leave 53,” and “Barrow have to go,” were among the statements being chanted by the approximately 2,000 protesters who turned up this morning at the footsteps of the National Assembly building during today’s House of Representatives meeting/
The protest was the result of a collaboration between the churches and unions, as well as the activist group Citizens Organized for Liberty through Action (COLA), the “I want my country back” movement and the Poor People Organization for a Healthy and Righteous Society (PPOHRS), who say they are not in support of the Chief Justice’s recent ruling on Section 53 of the criminal code and the corruption highlighted in the recent Auditor General’s report.
Commenting on that ruling, Giovanni Brackett of COLA said, “We do not support the changing of the sodomy laws in Belize. We don’t believe that the government should allow one percent of our society to dictate the morals of an entire nation; this government is not a government of the majority, but of the minority.”
Brackett, speaking on the recent Auditor General’s report, said, “The question should be, which one of the UDP [ministers] is not implicated…it is very nasty, it is the worst scandal that I have seen in the history of this nation.”
Luke Palacio, BNTU National President, told Amandala that the recent ruling on Section 53 will present a dilemma for teachers nationally, because, he explained, “We as teachers are particularly concerned because what this ruling has done, it has left the door opened to many questions and we will have to be the persons charged with the responsibility to try and explain this to our children.”
Pastor Louis Wade, the host of Plus TV’s Rise and Shine morning show and a loud voice in the outcry in the overturning of the sodomy law, remarked, “Today, we are showing the country that Section 53 is not just a church issue; you see, it’s a strategy of the LGBT to call homosexuality a church issue.”
He further explained, “One of the major problems with our country is that Belizeans see these issues one at a time and the Prime Minister jumps these issues one at a time, either by calling them ‘optics,’ saying it is not corruption, or saying he will deal with it in the House.”
Wade additionally commented, “We have a government by one man, we have a dictatorship, in my opinion and the entire Cabinet is corrupt to the core.”
According to PPHORS founder, Raymond Rivers, he attended the protest, for the sake of the future of the nation’s poorest children, whose future he believes is what a billion-dollar homosexual movement wants to decide.
At its peak, the crowd, swollen to almost 2,000, registered its displeasure in unison by belting out their chants to the rhythmic vibrations of Garifuna drums.
Then reputed Southside Gang leader Wababa Noralez, took the stand and announced the need for a shift in focus from crime to governance. He stated that there would be no more gang violence among dispossessed ghetto youth, and that instead, attention would be given to the corruption of this current UDP government.
Noralez told the crowd, “You might not know me. They consider me as a gang leader from Belize City, but I am an educated person and I just grew up in a community whereby the black poor people, especially the males, are stereotyped for being violent, irrational, uneducated poor people weh nuh mean nothing to the country.”
By midday, the crowd had grown restless and Raymond Rivers jumped over the police barrier and attempted to make a run into the House of National Assembly, but was flung down by police, who later called in backup officers to man the barricades.
Rivers returned into the crowd, where a second attempt was made. However, this time he was not alone, as several protesters ran through the broken barrier and attempted to enter the House meeting, but were stopped after police fired a warning shot into the air.
The permit to protest was revoked shortly after midday when a rock was hurled from the crowd at an officer on duty. The crowd erupted and police pursued Johan Okeke, who was among the men that fled from the crowd.
Okeke had gone to Belmopan in a bus of 32 of Hon. Patrick Faber’s supporters who had left from Collet to support their Deputy Party Leader. According to spectators, he was not the one responsible for throwing the rock at the officer but nevertheless, he was manhandled and taken into custody.
According to the supporters of today’s protest, another protest is being organized for Tuesday during the usual Cabinet meeting. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/i-country-back/ | en | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/628440a4b535b0acf4aa3cb7f6cbfecd548540a828f59fd97022186cdcced99d.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T06:48:14 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fkidnapped-9-month-old-baby%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/kidnapped-baby-found.jpg | en | null | Kidnapped 9-month-old baby found | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELLA VISTA, Stann Creek District, Thurs. Aug. 25, 2016–A mother was at home in bed with her 9-month-old baby when two men went into her house in Bella Vista, in the Stann Creek District, at about 1:00 this morning, pointed a gun at her and demanded $50,000.
She did not have that kind of money to give them, and so, at gunpoint, the men took away her baby and drove away in a grey SUV.
At about mightnight tonight, however, we recieved news through Facebook that the baby, Aiden Matus, was found, incredibly, in a cemetery in Belize City, unharmed, by PC Martinez and a Corporal.
Jasmin Alert had been activated and a countrywide alert had been put in place to find the baby, Aiden Matus, who is of Hispanic descent. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/kidnapped-9-month-old-baby/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/ffff2c21bfce43900f4b3703a53b4bfd164c957e978e69129e0bd3c902db6484.json |
[] | 2016-08-31T06:51:25 | null | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fjunie-balls-son-21-killed-early-sunday-morning%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/George-Mckenzie.jpg | en | null | Junie Balls’ son, 21, killed early Sunday morning | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Mon. Aug. 29, 2016–The son of legendary Belizean gangster, George “Junie Balls” McKenzie, met his death shortly after 2 o’clock Sunday morning.
George Mckenzie, Jr., 21, like his father, was listed as a main suspect in several criminal incidents being investigated by police, and was even remanded in 2014 for attempted murder. However, unlike his father, this student of Wesley sixth form, athlete and father to one daughter was never convicted of anything.
His father, George “Junie Balls” McKenzie, was slain on August 27, 2007, and hours after the 9th anniversary of his death, McKenzie, Jr., also lost his life.
McKenzie, Jr., and his girlfriend, Shereffa Jex; his brother, Kiffer McKenzie and friend Michael “Pancho” Usher, all from the Majestic Alley area, had gone to a soca concert held at the ITVET compound in Belize City on Saturday night.
His girlfriend indicated to police that she saw Shane Douglas Harris, also known as “Mud,” of a George Street address, bump into Mckenzie and thereafter, an altercation between the two ensued.
The altercation turned into a brawl in which George Mckenzie, Kiffer Mckenzie and Michael “Pancho” Usher fought initially against Shane Harris, Akeem and Shakeem Humes, Christian Robateau and Elwin Pollard, according to police information.
Police reports name Gevon Clare, Mark Phillips and Henry Harris as also having been involved in the brawl.
According to police information, McKenzie was being crowded by Shane Harris and his associates while another group of men pinned his younger brother to the ground, beating him.
When the beating stopped, Kiffer McKenzie got up to find that his brother had been stabbed repeatedly, 9 times, in fact.
McKenzie had been stabbed 3 times in the left side of the chest, twice in the left ear, once in the left abdomen, once in the right wrist, once in the right side of the back and once in the left buttocks.
He was immediately rushed to the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital (KHMH), where he had gone into an induced coma, but by 2:32 a.m. on Sunday, August 28, while receiving treatment, he was pronounced dead by Dr. Manuel Gutierrez.
CIB police had been called to the hospital at about 1:40 a.m, and a suspect in police custody has since denied stabbing, or even seeing the deceased stabbed. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/junie-balls-son-21-killed-early-sunday-morning/ | en | 2016-08-31T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/68f76eaddaaa985c816c63f8963cdf8cbbdb46305697f87892d0f7f593a90f17.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T06:50:17 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Finjustice-hondo%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Letter-to-the-Editor-Oct-25.jpg | en | null | The injustice at the Hondo | null | null | amandala.com.bz | Dear Editor,
It pains me that we should no longer sing “From proud Rio Hondo to old Sarstoon …” in our national anthem. Guatemala has truncated the Sarstoon River from us and our very own GOB has prohibited the Rio Hondo from us.
Any Belizean who wishes to traverse the Northern Santa Elena Border has to have a travel document stamped and approved by the immigration authorities to be able to access the Rio Hondo, meaning the casinos, the Commercial Free Zone, and the river proper.
That policy, not a law, is in violation of each and every Belizean citizen’s constitutional right to traverse national territory without impediments. We realize that we must have immigration authorities, but they must respect our Belizean citizenship and allow us to pass without a travel document, especially if we are not leaving the country. But, even if we wish to leave and re-enter our country, we should not be penalized, according to the requests of the United Nations.
There is a movement in the North that is trying to address this situation that affects the common people but seem to be getting negative vibes from old school people in authority who think they will lose control of the present situation. Ridiculous. I do not believe we have to protest to fix this problem. A directive from the proper person can remedy this situation, but as usual we will be ignored.
There are enough “”horror” stories of our citizens being detained and threatened if their travel documents are not properly stamped. Any attorney or person knowledgeable in the laws of our country can see that this is an injustice being done to our people.
Regards,
R. Cuello | http://amandala.com.bz/news/injustice-hondo/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/a8ee61b195545900aefd03f62c57a8ce95d9cc5ec04d977b238ecffb172ebdae.json |
[] | 2016-08-27T06:48:45 | null | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2F15-8-mil-curb-illegal-encroachment-chiquibul%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Guest-at-CFII.jpg | en | null | $15.8 mil to curb illegal encroachment on Chiquibul | null | null | amandala.com.bz | BELIZE CITY, Tues. Aug. 23, 2016–The Chiquibul Forest—the largest expanse within the Maya Mountain Massif—and particularly the area spanning the Belize-Guatemala border, has been under sustained pressure from illegal activities for over a decade, and today, the Government of Belize finally announced an “unprecedented investment” aimed at curbing the pillaging of Belize’s natural and cultural patrimony by Guatemalans who illegally enter into Belize to exploit the area.
Dr. Omar Figueroa, Minister of State in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Forestry, Environment, Sustainable Development and Climate Change, announced the launch of the Chiquibul Forest Investment Initiative (CFII) at formal ceremonies held at the Best Western Belize Biltmore Plaza this afternoon, adding that they hope to have a measurable impact on the ground.
Figueroa—who described the Chiquibul as “the Crown Jewel of Belize’s protected area system”—said that over $15.8 million, coming from grants and loan funds, as well as direct co-financing from the recipient organizations, will be invested over the next two years in five contiguous protected areas: the Vaca Forest Reserve, the Chiquibul National Park, the Caracol Archaeological Reserve, the Bladen Nature Reserve and the Columbia River Forest Reserve, located in the Cayo and Toledo Districts.
According to Figueroa, the Maya Mountain Massif is comprised of 14 contiguous protected areas, spanning 45 kilometers along the Belize-Guatemala border—a total of 1.2 million acres, and he said that the enforcement of Belize’s laws there has proved to be “extremely challenging.”
“These protected areas, besides being adjacent to the Belize-Guatemala border, have been selected because of the high levels of threats and encroachments currently ongoing,” Figueroa commented.
He announced that $2.5 million out of the $15.8 million will be invested by the Protected Areas Conservation Trust (PACT) and the Environmental Management Fund, operated by the Department of the Environment. The monies will finance the imminent construction of two additional conservation posts at Caballo and Cabada—the latter of which has been targeted by Guatemalans for illegal farming of crops and marijuana. Two access roads will be built to those new posts.
Furthermore, funds will pay salaries for rangers deployed by the three of the managing authorities which oversee the protected areas: Friends for Conservation and Development (FCD), Ya’axche Conservation Trust (YCT) and the Forest Department. The entities will also receive funds to cover transportation, equipment, training and capacity building, communication equipment, and procurement of drones to assist with the monitoring the area.
Dr. Colin Young, Chief Executive Officer in the ministry, said that the Chiquibul is one of the most difficult and one of the most dangerous areas to manage, and he is grateful that they were able to leverage funds for what he described as “an unprecedented investment.”
FCD’s executive director, Rafael Manzanero, demonstrated the extent of the encroachments in western Belize. He noted that agricultural frontier expansion has increased from about 240 acres since the 1980s to over 10,000 acres today. Over the last year alone, 338 hectares (835 acres) have been lost in the Chiquibul National Park and the Caracol Archaeological Reserve alone.
Manzanero said that one of the major trends is now cattle ranching by Guatemalans on the Belize side of the border, and he hopes that the new investment will enable them to halt this trend. The planting of marijuana by Guatemalans on the Belize side of the border is another major problem, he said. Gold mining by Guatemalans is another major threat, he added. One of the key interventions, he said, is putting more boots on the ground, to curb the encroachments.
Christina Garcia, YCT’s executive director, said that incursions have been documented in both the Columbia River Forest Reserve and the Bladen Nature Reserve. Illegal logging has been one of the biggest concerns in the area, where illegal settlements have also been detected in the past.
“This investment will create more boots on the ground,” Garcia said.
She said that due to monitoring limitations, they do not know of any illegal activities in the deep western portion of Bladen, the largest terrestrial nature reserve, and the initiative should boost their capacity to conduct assessment patrols with government agencies.
The big question is, what will happen after the two-year initiative ends? How will the Government sustain the Chiquibul initiative? Figueroa proposed two solutions.
First, he said, a “willingness to pay” study will be undertaken to canvass views on the increase of the US$3.75 conservation fee charged to tourists, which he said has remained virtually unchanged since 1996. Earlier reviews indicated that tourists may be willing to pay as much as US$20, he said.
The second solution is issuing concessions for harvesting timber and non-timber resources from the Chiquibul, and a portion of the profits would be reinvested into preserving and protecting the area.
“The time has come to think outside the box,” Figueroa said. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/15-8-mil-curb-illegal-encroachment-chiquibul/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/7c8e72f41d18da9a6a6822cb46829ff584907946e91921b68b3ed2473e908357.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:51:25 | null | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fconductress-flung-bus-hit-car%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Mamsie-Caliz.jpg | en | null | Conductress flung out of bus after it was hit by car | null | null | amandala.com.bz | ST. MATTHEWS, Cayo District, Mon. Aug. 22, 2016–A conductress was flung from a Baizar bus as a result of the impact of an early morning road traffic accident on the George Price Highway.
Mamsie Caliz, 42, a conductress for two years, was thrown onto the street when a black car leaving Belmopan ran into the front side of her father’s bus at around 7 a.m. today, Monday.
The bus, which was at the time driven by Omar Barajona, was heading to Belmopan; however, it slowed down near a road bump in Cotton Tree, and at that point a vehicle, allegedly driven at high speed by an unidentified woman, swerved out of its lane and hit the bus.
Caliz reportedly fell from the bus on the right side of her body and suffered minor injuries to the head, face and hand.
According to Caliz’s daughter, she has been treated and released from the Belmopan Hospital, although she is suffering pain in the right side of the body.
The Deputy Officer Commanding Belmopan, Inspector Santiago Patt, told our newspaper that a Notice of Intended Prosecution (NIP) has since been served to the woman who drove the black car.
She has not yet been charged, but charges should be forthcoming by tomorrow, said Patt. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/conductress-flung-bus-hit-car/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/fc426013a3fad1001bc67ccafc558a5aec4ba07af620d9f8816c0e8368774302.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:52:55 | null | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | null | http%3A%2F%2Famandala.com.bz%2Fnews%2Fanti-christs%2F.json | http://amandala.com.bz/news/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Editorial-Oct-25-version.jpg | en | null | Anti-Christs | null | null | amandala.com.bz | The Opposition People’s United Party (PUP) lost a golden opportunity to increase the political discomfort of the ruling United Democratic Party (UDP) when the PUP rushed to support the pro-LGBT ruling of the Belize Supreme Court on Wednesday, August 10, 2016.
Played at its highest level, politics is not about the personal opinions or preferences of the principals. Politics is about establishing positions which the majority of the people (adult voters) support. Politics is always about numbers, majority numbers: 51 means power; 49 amounts to defeat.
It is many years since the Belizean people have marched in numbers in the population center or the new capital. Yet, the explosive issues have come fast and furious – Elvin Penner, rosewood, Chiquibul, Sarstoon, Harmonyville, Petrocaribe, BTL, William Danny Mason, and now, issue of all issues – the homosexual law.
The reason why the homosexual law is the issue of all issues is because the August 10 ruling thereon is the only issue in recent memory which strikes at the heart of the religious beliefs of the majority of the Belizean people. We have spent many years explaining to you how the political system in Belize is structured around the mind control in the primary and secondary schools, with almost all these schools being operated by foreign Christian denominations with their headquarters outside of Belize. Historically, no political party has been able to challenge for leadership of the Belizean nation without publicly endorsing what is referred to here as the “church-state” educational system. The state (which is to say, we, the people) pays, and the churches teach.
The vast majority of Belizeans will spend at least a few years in primary school, where they will learn about God Almighty and His Son, Jesus Christ. Half of the Belizean children born each year have their formal education end after they leave primary school. These form the core of Belize’s God-fearing electorate. The other half of the Belizean children, who spend a year or more in high school, have the basic Christian education they have received in primary school, refined by the more powerful Christian churches which run the secondary schools.
Now here comes an issue, the August 10 ruling on the homosexual law, where the ruling UDP finds itself at odds with a large, militant body of Christians, who are led by the Roman Catholic Church and the evangelical Christians. The Roman Catholics comprise the largest Christian congregation in Belize, and the evangelical Christians are Belize’s fastest growing group, and they own the most radio and television stations in Belize. It was because of great pressure from the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union, that the UDP Government of Belize essentially supported Chief Justice Kenneth Benjamin’s August 10 ruling. This was something no Belizean electoral politician would have wanted to do. The UDP had to do it: the PUP, however, chose to do it. How does one figure? We repeat: there has never been an issue like this before in Belizean politics.
In the settlement of Belize, the Anglican Church established the first primary school in 1814 or so. This was about twenty years before slaves in Belize were freed. The Methodist Church followed the Anglicans into the primary school business in the 1830s or so, and after the Caste War of 1847 had Roman Catholic refugees pour into the Northern Districts of Belize from Mexico’s Yucatan, the Catholics began establishing primary and secondary schools here in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Our understanding of references in the Holy Bible to the anti-Christ says that the Anti-Christ comes in the guise of the Christ, so much so that the faithful can be deceived if they are not informed and vigilant. The Anti-Christ comes in the appearance of Christ. The Anti-Christ is a deceiver. The Anti-Christ is a con man. The Anti-Christ is a predator. The Anti-Christ is a vampire. Belizeans are not a sophisticated people; we are not informed and vigilant. We have been easily deceived in the past.
At this newspaper, what we have dedicated ourselves to doing is informing the people of Belize and increasing our vigilance. There is one who may be described as an Anti-Christ who came here from England in 1985. He was an insightful figure who soon figured out who were the key players in Belize and where they were located. He came on to those key players with money and gifts, and he seduced key players from the two major political parties. He made them into Anti-Christs like himself: the Belizeans who were seduced, continued to appear as sincere as they had seemed before their seduction. They still appeared to be of the Christ, but in reality they had become Anti-Christs. This is what some naïve Christians outraged by the August 10 ruling cannot figure out: Anti-Christ comes in the appearance of the Christ.
Let’s give one example. A multimillionaire Belizean attorney sought this newspaper’s political support in the February 2008 general elections. His opponent was another attorney, the PUP incumbent area representative, who had made known his allegiance to the English Anti-Christ. It was, at the time, an easy decision for us: we supported the UDP candidate, who won the Belize City seat in question.
Within a few weeks of his victory and having entered the new UDP Cabinet as a high-ranking Minister, however, our boy publicly accepted a gift of $200,000 from the English Anti-Christ. Remember now, Christians, our boy is a member of a prominent Christian congregation. And remember again, he is a multimillionaire: he is not in need of the Anti-Christ’s money.
Belizeans, these are the types of human beings who sit in the Cabinet of Belize. They come to you in the appearance of the Christ, but truly they are not. Belizeans, we have sold our souls to the Devil, and our political leaders have led the way. So let it be written, verily, as indeed it has been done.
Power to the people. Remember Danny Conorquie – murdered at Caracol in cold blood on September 25, 2014. | http://amandala.com.bz/news/anti-christs/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | amandala.com.bz/7a4ac288ef3094647e1e93edae35bc11123a7380b7290a97f298c9084f661dda.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T18:47:03 | null | 2016-08-26T18:03:30 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2F2016%2F08%2F26%2Fshavon-ara-dulaney%2F.json | en | null | Shavon Ara Dulaney | null | null | thnews.com | Ms. Shavon Ara Dulaney, 32, of Jonesboro, died on Aug. 21, 2016, at NEA Baptist Hospital in Jonesboro.
Shavon was born Nov. 21, 1983, in Houston to her father the late Melvin Dulaney and her mother Kim Wallace.
Survivors are her mother Kim Wallace of Chicago; her children Treyvon Dulaney, Narada Rogers Jr., and Shakyra Rogers, all of Jonesboro; brothers, Christopher Jackson, Marc Jackson, Kenyan Jackson and Jordan Upchurch, all of Chicago, and Melvin Dulaney Jr., of Forrest City; sisters, Ida Dulaney of Jonesboro, Ashley Dulaney and Monica Johnson, both of Chicago, and Katara Dulaney of Forrest City.
Shavon was raised in the home of her aunt, Anita Taggart, uncle, Rev. Lee Taggart, and cousin, Shaun Taggart.
The funeral service for Ms. Dulaney will be at 2 p.m. on Saturday Aug. 27, 2016, at Prosperity M.B.C. in Forrest City. Interment will be in Casteel Cemetery in Forrest City, under the direction of Clay Funeral Home.
Online condolences may be sent to the family at www.clayfuneralhomeinc.com. | http://thnews.com/2016/08/26/shavon-ara-dulaney/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | thnews.com/8784905d490513bb73134b27ddba41cfffc90ea210e0e56cc964a32593c18ef5.json | |
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[] | 2016-08-26T18:50:04 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64065..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjYvcGFsZXN0aW5lLXdoZWF0bGV5LXRlYW1zLXdvcmstdGhyb3VnaC1wcmVzZWFzb24tc2NyaW1tYWdlcy8%253D%26_s2member_sig%3D1472237186-a6a90e1a17bad443ad323fab0b88c6e3.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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[] | 2016-08-26T12:53:09 | null | 2016-08-24T19:05:33 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2F2016%2F08%2F24%2Fclassic-car-show-returning-to-sfc%25E2%2580%2588fair-lineup%2F.json | en | null | Classic car show returning to SFC Fair lineup | null | null | thnews.com | The classic car show at the St. Francis County Fair has quickly become a fair classic in itself and will be returning for its third year.
Randy Cooper, organizer for the car show, said car owners interested in displaying their classic cars during the week of the fair may call him to schedule a time to bring their cars to the fairgrounds.
“All they have to do is contact me and we’ll set up a time to bring the cars out. I’ll be out there Monday, and that’s when we get most of the cars out there and get them set up.”
Cooper said car owners are welcome to leave their cars at the fairgrounds until Sunday, Sept. 4; however, most take them home on Friday night after the fair closes.
“That’s when the crowds get a little more rambunctious, so a lot of people go on and take them home, but we’ve been really lucky so far. We’ve had a really good experience out there the past few years. I’ve left my cars out there until Sunday and everything has been fine,” said Cooper.
The car show replaced the fair’s traditional antique tractor show in 2014 in an effort to bring a new attraction to fair audiences that is more modern and relatable. While the show is relatively modern, the cars are not. Cooper said the classic vehicles from the 50s, 60s and 70s are an appeal to nostalgia for some of the older fairgoers and an exciting look into the past for younger generations.
To contact Cooper, call 870-494-5465. | http://thnews.com/2016/08/24/classic-car-show-returning-to-sfc%E2%80%88fair-lineup/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | thnews.com/ced67f5b09a054dc772a01a5d9ee686598e2f82639fad50ecc0c52b3d51235f4.json | |
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College subscription - $100.00 nine months
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College subscription - $100.00 nine months
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[] | 2016-08-26T13:05:55 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64036..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjQvc2FsZXMtdGF4LXJldmVudWUtaW5jcmVhc2VzLWluLWp1bHktaW4tZmMtc2ZjLw%253D%253D%26_s2member_sig%3D1472215893-b59b0c69a7a5f3519ba5716fbea8f74f.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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College subscription - $100.00 nine months
If you fail to receive your home-delivered copy of The Times-Herald by 6 p.m. each evening, call 633-3130 between 6 and 7 p.m. and a copy of the paper will be delivered to your home. | http://thnews.com/subscriptions/?_s2member_vars=ptag..level..1..post..64036..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjQvc2FsZXMtdGF4LXJldmVudWUtaW5jcmVhc2VzLWluLWp1bHktaW4tZmMtc2ZjLw%3D%3D&_s2member_sig=1472215893-b59b0c69a7a5f3519ba5716fbea8f74f | en | 2009-07-28T00:00:00 | thnews.com/95b2c8de2127f4b322f0b55e80ee6d6c9c9c9d2e42a275c0d5386cbe1c38070e.json | |
[] | 2016-08-26T18:48:10 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64076..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjYvdC1oLXNwb3J0cy1lZGl0b3ItY29ubGV5LXJldGlyaW5nLWZyb20tZGFpbHktcm91dGluZS1hdC1uZXdzcGFwZXIv%26_s2member_sig%3D1472237142-265bb62efbcb8128a8d6cb24da910268.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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College subscription - $100.00 nine months
If you fail to receive your home-delivered copy of The Times-Herald by 6 p.m. each evening, call 633-3130 between 6 and 7 p.m. and a copy of the paper will be delivered to your home. | http://thnews.com/subscriptions/?_s2member_vars=ptag..level..1..post..64076..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjYvdC1oLXNwb3J0cy1lZGl0b3ItY29ubGV5LXJldGlyaW5nLWZyb20tZGFpbHktcm91dGluZS1hdC1uZXdzcGFwZXIv&_s2member_sig=1472237142-265bb62efbcb8128a8d6cb24da910268 | en | 2009-07-28T00:00:00 | thnews.com/e9422118d34784ce33b6007adb4e1a03b291103fbc7146f4eec6f63f6e2ccfb8.json | |
[] | 2016-08-26T18:50:22 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64082..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjYvZmNzZC1hcHByb3Zlcy1zdHVkZW50LXRyYW5zZmVyLXRvLW5lYXJieS1wd3NkLw%253D%253D%26_s2member_sig%3D1472237234-7c3833647639029323d5ee90462f83df.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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By carrier, in city - $8.50 per month; $9.00 per month by rural carrier
By mail, in county - $139.00 per year, $101.50 six months
Outside county - $169.00 per year, $124.50 six months
College subscription - $100.00 nine months
If you fail to receive your home-delivered copy of The Times-Herald by 6 p.m. each evening, call 633-3130 between 6 and 7 p.m. and a copy of the paper will be delivered to your home. | http://thnews.com/subscriptions/?_s2member_vars=ptag..level..1..post..64082..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjYvZmNzZC1hcHByb3Zlcy1zdHVkZW50LXRyYW5zZmVyLXRvLW5lYXJieS1wd3NkLw%3D%3D&_s2member_sig=1472237234-7c3833647639029323d5ee90462f83df | en | 2009-07-28T00:00:00 | thnews.com/206a1201ed5e641d5fdbc7bd8631f04afbc055d31b503966143365479fd1313e.json | |
[] | 2016-08-26T18:45:54 | null | 2016-08-26T18:04:48 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2F2016%2F08%2F26%2Fcharles-edison-brannon-sr%2F.json | en | null | Charles Edison Brannon Sr. | null | null | thnews.com | Mr. Charles Edison Brannon Sr., age 76, of Searcy died Sunday, Aug. 21, 2016, at Unity Health in Searcy. He was born Dec. 6, 1939 in Brickeys to the late John Edison and Daisy Faye (Smith) Brannon.
Charles was a long-time employee of Warwick Electronics/Sanyo Manufacturing in Forrest City. He also worked for Medallion Foods in Newport, Land O’Frost and Kholer Stainless, both in Searcy. Charles retired from Yarnell’s Ice Cream Company in Searcy.
Charles leaves behind his wife, Velma Gertrude (Davis); four daughters, Sheila Paul (Keith), Glenda Lewis, Jennifer Brannon and Angela Nicholson (Wade); one son, Charles Edison Brannon II; one brother, Eddie Brannon (Elsie); nine grandchildren, Michelle Wilson (John), Jessica Keown, John Cullum, Amber Jones, April Treat (Brad), Kallie Musgrave, Hannah Henderson and Nick Nicholson; seven great-grandchildren and scores of family and friends. Charles will be dearly missed.
In addition to his parents, Charles was preceded in death by five sisters, two brothers and one grandson, Jessie Lewis.
A memorial service to celebrate his life will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, at the Brannon’s home in Searcy.
In lieu of flowers memorials may be made to Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital, P.O. Box 41817, Memphis, TN 38174, (901) 287-6308, or to Arkansas Children’s Hospital Foundation, P.O. Box 2222, Little Rock, AR 72203, (501) 364-1476.
All cremation arrangements have been entrusted to Searcy-McEuen Funeral Home.
Share a memory at www.SearcyMcEuenFuneralHome.com | http://thnews.com/2016/08/26/charles-edison-brannon-sr/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | thnews.com/5ee58677ffccc30348937c8f0c79f01fb33e85eaef858e4c44b553aaca3aa0ad.json | |
[] | 2016-08-29T20:47:54 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64088..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjkvc2ZjLWZhaXItb3BlbnMtdG9uaWdodC13aXRoLWZyZWUtYWRtaXNzaW9uLw%253D%253D%26_s2member_sig%3D1472503612-c69913a6d7b397a96a9b32cc377cb4ca.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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$7.00 / month
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Print Subscriptions
By carrier, in city - $8.50 per month; $9.00 per month by rural carrier
By mail, in county - $139.00 per year, $101.50 six months
Outside county - $169.00 per year, $124.50 six months
College subscription - $100.00 nine months
If you fail to receive your home-delivered copy of The Times-Herald by 6 p.m. each evening, call 633-3130 between 6 and 7 p.m. and a copy of the paper will be delivered to your home. | http://thnews.com/subscriptions/?_s2member_vars=ptag..level..1..post..64088..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjkvc2ZjLWZhaXItb3BlbnMtdG9uaWdodC13aXRoLWZyZWUtYWRtaXNzaW9uLw%3D%3D&_s2member_sig=1472503612-c69913a6d7b397a96a9b32cc377cb4ca | en | 2009-07-28T00:00:00 | thnews.com/b15031447eb60986d79f1ff4c7951ab2fc09714e0848873d97bf5cdd34c9f30a.json | |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:06:13 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64038..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjQvZW1zLWNvbXBhbmllcy1vdXRsaW5lLW9wdGlvbnMtdG8tY2l0eS1jb21taXR0ZWUv%26_s2member_sig%3D1472216078-91ec97a52f4cf22b34e4462adaf25b4a.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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$7.00 / month
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By carrier, in city - $8.50 per month; $9.00 per month by rural carrier
By mail, in county - $139.00 per year, $101.50 six months
Outside county - $169.00 per year, $124.50 six months
College subscription - $100.00 nine months
If you fail to receive your home-delivered copy of The Times-Herald by 6 p.m. each evening, call 633-3130 between 6 and 7 p.m. and a copy of the paper will be delivered to your home. | http://thnews.com/subscriptions/?_s2member_vars=ptag..level..1..post..64038..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjQvZW1zLWNvbXBhbmllcy1vdXRsaW5lLW9wdGlvbnMtdG8tY2l0eS1jb21taXR0ZWUv&_s2member_sig=1472216078-91ec97a52f4cf22b34e4462adaf25b4a | en | 2009-07-28T00:00:00 | thnews.com/d44c393f3232762e2c28acbfa27200acf9f24b86e876edd7ede9b61b2d966778.json | |
[] | 2016-08-30T20:49:19 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64116..LzIwMTYvMDgvMzAvY29tbWlzc2lvbi1wbGFjZXMtaHVnaGVzLXJlY2FsbC12b3RlLW9uLW5vdmVtYmVyLWJhbGxvdC8%253D%26_s2member_sig%3D1472590055-3149aee9991c3c597e019d25dac0f190.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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By carrier, in city - $8.50 per month; $9.00 per month by rural carrier
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Outside county - $169.00 per year, $124.50 six months
College subscription - $100.00 nine months
If you fail to receive your home-delivered copy of The Times-Herald by 6 p.m. each evening, call 633-3130 between 6 and 7 p.m. and a copy of the paper will be delivered to your home. | http://thnews.com/subscriptions/?_s2member_vars=ptag..level..1..post..64116..LzIwMTYvMDgvMzAvY29tbWlzc2lvbi1wbGFjZXMtaHVnaGVzLXJlY2FsbC12b3RlLW9uLW5vdmVtYmVyLWJhbGxvdC8%3D&_s2member_sig=1472590055-3149aee9991c3c597e019d25dac0f190 | en | 2009-07-28T00:00:00 | thnews.com/b12c0d09c3bf1be73c88c9b209370593d0901bd225d5ffde524e87cacc40a2ba.json | |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:04:52 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64054..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjUvdHJhZGl0aW9uYWwtcGFnZWFudHMtdGFrZS1zdGFnZS10dWVzZGF5LXdlZG5lc2RheS1hdC1zZmMlRTIlODAlODhmYWlyLw%253D%253D%26_s2member_sig%3D1472215860-23237b302e167f85f5a5843ba45d9a2c.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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College subscription - $100.00 nine months
If you fail to receive your home-delivered copy of The Times-Herald by 6 p.m. each evening, call 633-3130 between 6 and 7 p.m. and a copy of the paper will be delivered to your home. | http://thnews.com/subscriptions/?_s2member_vars=ptag..level..1..post..64054..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjUvdHJhZGl0aW9uYWwtcGFnZWFudHMtdGFrZS1zdGFnZS10dWVzZGF5LXdlZG5lc2RheS1hdC1zZmMlRTIlODAlODhmYWlyLw%3D%3D&_s2member_sig=1472215860-23237b302e167f85f5a5843ba45d9a2c | en | 2009-07-28T00:00:00 | thnews.com/bcc0e7dfd292d7f11b51f22f0c2789da8520b2a552d41f3c2408f141ce1f7492.json | |
[] | 2016-08-26T18:49:03 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64076..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjYvdC1oLXNwb3J0cy1lZGl0b3ItY29ubGV5LXJldGlyaW5nLWZyb20tZGFpbHktcm91dGluZS1hdC1uZXdzcGFwZXIv%26_s2member_sig%3D1472237176-c2d228937f0210907458b46b95cea8e2.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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College subscription - $100.00 nine months
If you fail to receive your home-delivered copy of The Times-Herald by 6 p.m. each evening, call 633-3130 between 6 and 7 p.m. and a copy of the paper will be delivered to your home. | http://thnews.com/subscriptions/?_s2member_vars=ptag..level..1..post..64076..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjYvdC1oLXNwb3J0cy1lZGl0b3ItY29ubGV5LXJldGlyaW5nLWZyb20tZGFpbHktcm91dGluZS1hdC1uZXdzcGFwZXIv&_s2member_sig=1472237176-c2d228937f0210907458b46b95cea8e2 | en | 2009-07-28T00:00:00 | thnews.com/d3ad0c13779a5994fd1ba1bb14a6044ed003369a5960a68095263635655631c4.json | |
[] | 2016-08-26T12:55:32 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64053..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjUvbWFuLWZsZWVzLWNvdXJ0aG91c2UtbG9ja3VwLWRpc2NvdmVyZWQtbmVhcmJ5LWhpZGluZy11bmRlci1jaHJpc3RtYXMtZGVjb3JhdGlvbnMv%26_s2member_sig%3D1472215737-b951c7637dc3de2037e22f770e964625.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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College subscription - $100.00 nine months
If you fail to receive your home-delivered copy of The Times-Herald by 6 p.m. each evening, call 633-3130 between 6 and 7 p.m. and a copy of the paper will be delivered to your home. | http://thnews.com/subscriptions/?_s2member_vars=ptag..level..1..post..64053..LzIwMTYvMDgvMjUvbWFuLWZsZWVzLWNvdXJ0aG91c2UtbG9ja3VwLWRpc2NvdmVyZWQtbmVhcmJ5LWhpZGluZy11bmRlci1jaHJpc3RtYXMtZGVjb3JhdGlvbnMv&_s2member_sig=1472215737-b951c7637dc3de2037e22f770e964625 | en | 2009-07-28T00:00:00 | thnews.com/7bab20adb5bfa304b660efb11c87d434705083b61f13be463b3f8af30ff521f0.json | |
[] | 2016-08-30T20:48:59 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64109..LzIwMTYvMDgvMzAvZmJpLXdhcm5zLW9mLXBvc3NpYmxlLXN0YXRlLWVsZWN0aW9uLXN5c3RlbS1oYWNrcy8%253D%26_s2member_sig%3D1472590034-57be07ed530bfa28c478197365a85313.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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By carrier, in city - $8.50 per month; $9.00 per month by rural carrier
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College subscription - $100.00 nine months
If you fail to receive your home-delivered copy of The Times-Herald by 6 p.m. each evening, call 633-3130 between 6 and 7 p.m. and a copy of the paper will be delivered to your home. | http://thnews.com/subscriptions/?_s2member_vars=ptag..level..1..post..64109..LzIwMTYvMDgvMzAvZmJpLXdhcm5zLW9mLXBvc3NpYmxlLXN0YXRlLWVsZWN0aW9uLXN5c3RlbS1oYWNrcy8%3D&_s2member_sig=1472590034-57be07ed530bfa28c478197365a85313 | en | 2009-07-28T00:00:00 | thnews.com/ecf895ddcdb7e4389ee39edb095c4973ae84c2dcf39a161ffce198b6ddd5b46b.json | |
[] | 2016-08-30T20:48:48 | null | 2009-07-28T06:51:34 | null | http%3A%2F%2Fthnews.com%2Fsubscriptions%2F%3F_s2member_vars%3Dptag..level..1..post..64102..LzIwMTYvMDgvMzAvdm9sbGV5YmFsbC1zZWFzb24tc2Vlcy1wbGVudHktb2YtY2hhbmdlcy8%253D%26_s2member_sig%3D1472590003-a08d4afd9692f085e27a101ecfa33844.json | en | null | Subscriptions | null | null | thnews.com | Subscriptions
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By carrier, in city - $8.50 per month; $9.00 per month by rural carrier
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[] | 2016-08-26T14:49:53 | null | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | An Indian man who is serving a three-year sentence in Pakistan for illegally entering the country faces 'threats' to his life in prison, Pakistan Human Rights Commission has said and asked the government to ensure his safety. | Pak HRC asks government to ensure safety of Indian prisoner | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Freport%2Fpak-hrc-asks-government-to-ensure-safety-of-indian-prisoner-1%2F20160826.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/news/2016/aug/11jail.jpg | en | null | Pak HRC asks government to ensure safety of Indian prisoner | null | null | www.rediff.com | Last updated on: August 26, 2016 20:09 IST
An Indian man who is serving a three-year sentence in Pakistan for illegally entering the country faces "threats" to his life in prison, Pakistan Human Rights Commission has said and asked the government to ensure his safety.
Hamid Nehal Ansari, 31, a Mumbai resident, was convicted in February in Kohat, a city in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan.
Ansari went missing in Pakistan in 2012 where he had allegedly gone to meet a girl he had befriended on the Internet, authorities last month admitted that he has been in army custody and facing a trial in military courts.
"The former, a young Indian engineer, illegally entered Pakistan because he wanted to help an internet friend, a young girl, and was arrested in 2012. The authorities denied any knowledge of him for a long time and eventually disclosed that he was tried by a military court and sentenced to three years' imprisonment," HRCP Secretary General I A Rehman said.
He said the Peshawar high court is hearing his petition for the inclusion of the pre-trial period of detention in Ansari's imprisonment term, but now concern has been raised about "threats" to his life in prison.
"The government must ensure his safety and it will be proper to start preparing for Ansari's repatriation to India," he said.
According to the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappearances, 56 cases of enforced disappearances occurred in January this year, 66 in February, 44 in March, 99 in April, 91 in May, 60 in June and 94 in July. That is, 510 cases in the last seven months, or an average of 72.86 cases per month.
In reference to the report the commission said, "No review of disappearances can be complete without taking notice of the plight of Hamid Ansari..."
The commission has said although many more instances of enforced disappearance are not reported, the number of cases received by the commission is high enough for the government to abandon its complacency.
"The government of Pakistan should take a fresh look at the problem that has caused endless agony to thousands of families over the last many years," Rehman said, adding the government cannot pretend to be ignorant of the fact that enforced disappearances is still a major human rights issue in Pakistan and that a thorough reappraisal of the efforts to solve it is overdue.
The commission has also decided some 480 cases this year. Of them 111 were dropped for not being enforced disappearances and 372 persons were traced - 189 persons said to have returned home on their own.
The commission however does not tell where these people were during the period they could not be traced by their families.
The Supreme Court of Pakistan had issued instructions for such people to be interviewed so that those responsible for their disappearance could be identified and punished. | http://www.rediff.com/news/report/pak-hrc-asks-government-to-ensure-safety-of-indian-prisoner-1/20160826.htm | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/8148ee0db7555808b061e6b5ab8a519fcc2931b0511c3bf144620d88890165d1.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:35:50 | null | 2016-08-05T00:00:00 | 'He was a quiet, nice kid who had banter with people. He was just a nice kid. I have seen some reports that say he was bullied but it was just banter - he gave back as good as he got.' | London knife attacker quiet, nice schoolboy | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Freport%2Flondon-knife-attacker-quiet-nice-schoolboy%2F20160805.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/news/2016/aug/05london.jpg | en | null | London knife attacker quiet, nice schoolboy | null | null | www.rediff.com | August 05, 2016 15:41 IST
The 19-year-old Norwegian national of Somali-origin, who is in police custody on charges of murder after going on a knife rampage in London, has been described as a “quiet, nice” schoolboy and initial probe indicate that tragic incident was triggered by mental health issues.
Zakaria Bulhan is yet to be officially named by Scotland Yard but British media reports confirm the London schoolboy as the suspect being held over the murder of 64-year-old American retired teacher Darlene Horton.
A schoolmate, who went to Graveney School in Tooting, south London, with Bulhan told ‘Daily Mirror’: “It’s one of the most shocking things I have ever heard.
No-one would have expected that he would turn out like that.
“He was a quiet, nice kid who had banter with people. He was just a nice kid. I have seen some reports that say he was bullied but it was just banter - he gave back as good as he got. It was a two-way thing.”
Norwegian Police said in a statement that the suspect had emigrated from Norway to the UK in 2002 and they were assisting London police.
Scotland Yard had searched addresses in north London and another in south London and concluded that mental health issues were the most likely cause of the “random attack”.
After an initial indication that terrorism was one line of inquiry, the force confirmed that there was no evidence of radicalisation or anything to suggest the attack was “in any way motivated by terrorism”.
“Whilst the investigation is not yet complete -- all of the work that we have done so far, increasingly points to this tragic incident as having been triggered by mental health issues,” Metropolitan police assistant commissioner Mark Rowley said.
“So far, we have found no evidence of radicalisation or anything that would suggest the man in our custody was motivated by terrorism,” he added.
A British man who suffered a stab wound to his stomach in the attack at Russell Square, near the British Museum, remains in hospital in a “serious but stable” condition while an American man, an Australian man and Australian woman, and an Israeli woman were all discharged after receiving treatment for their injuries.
Horton, who died at the scene, was set to return to Florida on Friday with husband Richard Wagner, a psychology professor at Florida State University, after he completed his summer classes on the day of the attack.
It is understood that university officials have flown to London to support him.
Florida State University president John Thrasher said: “There are no words to express our heartache over this terrible tragedy”.
The Met police said there is an increased police presence in the area popular with tourists, which will remain in place for some time.
Image: An armed police officer attends the scene of a knife attack in Russell Square in London. Photograph: Neil Hall/Reuters | http://www.rediff.com/news/report/london-knife-attacker-quiet-nice-schoolboy/20160805.htm | en | 2016-08-05T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/490c79e7351c37a7ed5ef0100b118ac45f64f0318e95312961c12e7161e875b2.json |
[] | 2016-08-29T22:51:58 | null | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | 'We know many things are going to happen.'
'People should be preparing for sea level rise, for increased cyclonic activity, for drought.'
'One reason I wrote the book is to alert people to the dangers that they face.'
'For example, Mumbai faces enormous threat.'
| When Amitav Ghosh issues a warning, it's time to listen | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Fspecial%2Fwhen-amitav-ghosh-issues-a-warning-its-time-to-listen%2F20160830.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/news/2016/aug/29shiva1.jpg | en | null | When Amitav Ghosh issues a warning, it's time to listen | null | null | www.rediff.com | August 30, 2016 02:12 IST
'We know many things are going to happen.'
People should be preparing for sea level rise, for increased cyclonic activity, for drought.'
'One reason I wrote the book is to alert people to the dangers that they face.'
'For example, Mumbai faces enormous threat.'
Amitav Ghosh, one of India's finest writers, discusses climate change, with Rediff.com's Vaihayasi Pande Danel.
Soon after The Great Derangement: Climate Change And The Unthinkable, his latest book released, the areas of Bihar where Ghosh's family resettled after leaving then East Bengal are battling fearsome floods.
Weather and water have been an essential part of the narrative of Amitav Ghosh's life.
Almost like a relative. Also a lead character in many of his books.
Water particularly.
It followed him around wherever he went. In Kolkata the cloudy Hooghly formed the backdrop of his early life. Alexandria, where he studied, had the Nile delta that edges the Mediterranean. Oxford was on the placid Isis river, a portion of the upper Thames. Delhi, merely the distant Yamuna. When he moved to New York, the Atlantic Ocean and the Hudson river wound their way into his life.
For anyone who has had occasion to look out their window at the horizon to where water meets the sky, there are instances when the scene can perturb you. The thunderous heavens or a rising ocean is as discomforting as a calm blue sea is soothing.
But for an author, with as poetic a pen as Ghosh's, every sight of a roiling river and a seething sky, during his travels in this era of inexplicable and alarming climate happenings, would have set his imagination aflame. And perhaps provided inspiration for the next book.
This time, it did not beckon him to write a semi-fictional account of a historic rebellion occurring against the raw landscapes of Bengal's riverine tiger forests. Or about opium-powered voyages down the Ganga.
Instead, it produced a slim, neat volume, abrim with thought-provoking views on climate change. It links, unusually, the embarrassing neglect and boredom we show for the apocalypse awaiting our materialistic, selfish souls with literature, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism. And it offers gentle rebuke.
IMAGE: When a swollen Ganga flooded Rishikesh in 2103, it did not spare this massive statute of Lord Shiva. Photograph: Reuters
The intriguing, startling connections The Great Derangement (that released in India a day after his 60th birthday) constructs between wealth and weather, cyclones and our psychopathy, Flaubert and floods and more, make it a book that jolts a whole variety of pedestrian notions out of your brain and forces you to look at the problem differently. Mainly because Ghosh lays the arguments out neatly in clear prose.
Yes, it is a work of non-fiction. 'Obviously,' you say. 'Climate change is not the stuff of novels!' Shhhh, don't utter that assumption aloud lest Ghosh hears you. One of Derangement's radical points demands why climate change has been so summarily shoved into the province of non-fiction.
Why didn't an Ishiguro or another modern great novelist breathe life into a tale where climate change was an essential part of the storyline? If global warming is a more familiar theme of our everyday life -- rather than something abstruse belonging only in the territory of science, and in books not novels -- we would know how imminent it is, feels Ghosh, and stop it.
But he concludes that didn't happen as the 'orderly bourgeois' Western world 'banished' conversations around cataclysmic weather occurrences in fiction because everything about fantastic weather events, eclipses, deluges, antediluvian floods, fierce bitter winters -- the ullies of Nature -- were more the stuff of epics from 'dithyrambic lands' (read: Pagan people) and definitely not real enough to be part of modern fiction.
Talking about the absence of cultural references to the phenomenon in Derangement, he asks: 'What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction? And what does this tell us about culture writ large and its patterns of evasion?'
'In a substantially altered world, when sea level rise has swallowed the Sundarbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, (Mumbai) and Bangkok uninhabitable, when readers and museum-goers turn to the art and literature of our time,' he asks, 'will they not look, first, and most urgently, for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance?'
'And when they fail to find them, what should they -- what can they -- do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight? Quite possibly then, this era, which so congratulates itself on its self-awareness, will come to be known as the time of the Great Derangement.'
'But in the era of global warming, nothing is really far away; there is no place where the orderly expectations of bourgeois life hold unchallenged sway,' Ghosh adds. 'It is as though our earth had become a literary critic and were laughing at (Gustave) Flaubert, Bankim (Chandra Chatterjee), and their like, mocking their mockery of the 'prodigious happenings' that occur so often in romances and epic poems.'
IMAGE: Troops rescue villagers in Gujarat, August 2015. Photograph: Kind courtesy The Indian Army
It isn't surprising that climate change is a concern dear to Ghosh's heart. Water and weather were part of the trajectory of his ancestors' lives. It rudely jostled them out of their likely picturesque village on the great Padma in current day Bangladesh in the 1850s when the tempestuous river changed its course and saw them migrate to Chhapra in the far western part of the then Bengal Presidency, before moving to Calcutta where Ghosh was born into a military family.
Climate change perhaps gnaws away at Ghosh's spirit for many more reasons. Like it would be distressing to discover that the area your forebears hailed from may very soon not exist on a map again.
There is a strong probability that the Padma hamlet in Bangladesh (a country that contributes approximately a mere .4 metric tonnes per head per year of emissions that are causing global warming, compared to say America's 17*), where it all began for the Ghosh clan, could be destroyed in a few years and underwater in another 60, effectively then making Ghosh and family a species almost as unearthly as Martians!
IMAGE: Amitav Ghosh at the launch of The Great Derangement. Photograph: Hitesh Harisinghani/Rediff.com
An interview with the silver-haired, affable writer unfolds on a monsoon morning at the Taj Palace hotel, Mumbai. The weather, quite aptly, intrudes into the conversation -- banks of clouds and an ominous grey sky peep in.
Inside, a series of tiny signs -- the whispering air conditioners, the army of little bottles of mineral water, the incessant, harsh sound of a marble slab being sawed in the distance, the luxurious environment -- remind us that the conspicuous consumption that we engage in, every second of the day, is indirectly responsible for the fiercer than normal monsoon we are seeing beyond the picture window and living through this season.
Floods have inundated entire swathes of villages, killed scores in north India and drowned rare one-horned rhinos. While we are faintly concerned about climate change and how it will affect maybe Fiji, the Maldives and our children and grandchildren's lives, we still end up lackadaisically paying lip service to the issue in our own lives. All the time.
Ghosh disagrees. "You could change as much as you like -- you could give up everything. I could give up everything. We could hold this (interview) out in the open. It would make absolutely no difference!"
"We are speaking here of gigantic things which create impacts which actually none of us can control or even effect as individuals," he says. "To think of it something that can be solved by individual actions is really to let collective institutions off the hook."
"For example one of the largest sources of emissions in the world today are actually these burning forests in Indonesia. Why are these forests being burnt? It is in order to create palm oil plantations. Who wants this palm oil? A lot of it is going to Europe as bio-diesel. But bio-diesel is not necessarily any more environmentally friendly than any other kind of energy source. Those are issues that you and I can hardly impact. Those are issues that have to be acted on collectively."
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IMAGE: People help a man carry his two-wheeler on a cycle cart in waterlogged Chennai, 2015. Photograph: PTI
Ghosh admiringly raises the example of Mahatma Gandhi in Derangement. He walked the talk and was a man who 'invested himself, body and soul' in the 'politics of sincerity.' In the manner of Gandhi, don't we all need to do more than talk the talk?
"We have to work towards and be prepared for a change in our ways of living," he says, "But it is foolish for us to imagine that you and I could bring this about through individual action."
"Let me give you the example of California. California is going through this epic drought, a long-lasting drought. It is drought is partly caused by human impacts, partly caused by climate impacts, as in fact most things are today. As a result of which water rationing has been put in place..."
"Think about water rationing, about any kind of rationing in a place such as a California, which is so consumerist, where people are so insistent on their right to spend whatever they want and their right to use natural resources."
"Yet, in California people have adapted quite well because they had to. I think that is the perfect analogy. Rationing can't be left to individuals. Rationing has to be a collective decision," he emphasises.
IMAGE: Volunteers supply water bottles to residents marooned during the July 26, 2005 floods in Mumbai. Photograph: Adeel Halim AH/Reuters
It has been a hectic month for Ghosh. Innumerable interviews, launch events, travel and the socialising that happens around a book release. Ghosh doesn't look tired, but his answers are slightly mechanical. Our dialogue shambles ahead.
Awe returns when you remember a passage you read less than a day ago in Derangement when Ghosh talks about materialism fuelling the earth's destruction: 'Culture generates desires -- for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings -- that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy.'
'A speedy convertible excites us neither because of any love for metal and chrome, nor because of an abstract understanding of its engineering. It excites us because it evokes an image of a road arrowing through a pristine landscape; we think of freedom and the wind in our hair; we envision James Dean and Peter Fonda racing towards the horizon; we think also of Jack Kerouac and Vladimir Nabokov.'
'When we see an advertisement that links a picture of a tropical island to the word paradise, the longings that are kindled in us have a chain of transmission that stretches back to Daniel Defoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the flight that will transport us to the island is merely an ember in that fire.'
'When we see a green lawn that has been watered with desalinated water in Abu Dhabi or Southern California or some other environment where people had once been content to spend their water thriftily in nurturing a single vine or shrub, we are looking at an expression of a yearning that may have been midwifed by the novels of Jane Austen.'
While he had innumerable reasons to worry about weather change, what compelled him to finally write about it, especially in this dramatic vein? Could this book for instance have come along, say, 15 years earlier? Or did it need him to hit 60 to have this take?
"I think that's true. I would not have been able to write Derangement 15 years ago. Simply because, amongst other things, the urgency that now exists didn't exist in quite the same way 15 years ago. Or at least our awareness didn't exist in the same way..."
"It was something I always wanted to write about. I think just seeing all the sorts of climate catastrophes that are building up around the world, it made me increasingly concerned. Most of all, I think, reading about the problems that lie in India's future is what really made feel that I had to say something about it."
"There is another issue also -- which is of preparedness," he adds. "We know that many things are going to happen, some of them are predictable. Sea level rise is predictable. People should be preparing for that -- for sea level rise, for increased cyclonic activity, for drought. If anything, what I would like to do, which is one of the reasons I wrote the book, is to alert people to the dangers that they face. For example, Mumbai is a city that faces an enormous threat. And the city should prepare."
IMAGE: Villagers rescued during the Kashmir floods in 2014. Photograph: Umar Ganie
In Derangement Ghosh describes, in grim detail, the possibility of India having a permanently semi-submerged Mumbai soon. That should have Mumbaikars as anxious as Venice or Nauru of ocean rise and increased cyclonic activity.
A day before my interview, he was at a Mumbai radio station and responded to questions from local listeners on how 'Bombay represents a great concentration of risk' in this respect. He was taken aback -- he laughs in disbelief as he recounts it -- how most of his audience had not thought of this scenario, even though it was not improbable at all, with the July 26, 2005, flood providing a prescient warning of the city's future.
The conversation turns to the fraught times we are living through and other calamities the world is facing. And how they might all be connected. Terrorism. Poverty. Weather. The supremacy of the gun. Migration.
"See, these things are not actually separate even though they manifest themselves in different ways," says Ghosh. "When we look at what is happening in the world today, it is not as though things are as bad as they were, for example, in the Second World War."
"When we speak of war," he points out, "we can also see a solution. We can see the end of a war. In this particular case, what makes it actually feel so difficult is that is hard to see an end. It is not like a war, hard to see that there is any solution to (these) things."
"There are even more direct connection, for example, (between) terrorism, migration and so on. There are climate impacts which will lead to intensifying migration," he says. "There was a great drought in Syria in 2008. This drought led to many, many people moving to the cities. They could no longer make their living from the countryside. And this had a deeply destabilising effect on Syria. Of course, there were many, many political (issues), so we don't know really how to separate one problem from another."
"In India, this year, because of the drought hundreds of thousands of people have moved from various drought-stricken areas into cities. Fortunately it has not had a destabilising effect on the country yet," he says. "But if this process intensifies, who knows what will happen because no city can keep on absorbing unlimited numbers of migrants."
"All these issues may have consequences we can't anticipate," says Ghosh. "I can foresee circumstances where we solve (the issues) in relation to terrorism. But it is very hard to see how we can solve the long-term drought in Syria. How do we solve that?"
"We have to prepare for the problems that lie ahead. We all know that large parts of Bangladesh are going to go underwater. Large parts already are going underwater. This in itself is leading to a lot of migration. You know those factories that collapsed in Bangladesh (the Rana Plaza, Dhaka, on April 2013 that killed 1,130 people). A lot was written about the collapse and so on. Very little was written about the fact that most of the people who were working in those factories actually had to abandon their land and move to the city because of the intrusion of salt water. The land had become uncultivable."
"So if the world were a rational place we would be saying: How do we deal with the great numbers of migrants that lie in the future? What are the sorts of institutions (needed)? What are the provisions we can make for them? Where can they be resettled?" he asks.
"These are questions that the international community either doesn't want to ask or is unprepared for. We deal with migration as and when it arises. But these impacts are going to intensify over the future, and we really have made no provisions for dealing with them."
*International Energy Agency's 2010 chart | http://www.rediff.com/news/special/when-amitav-ghosh-issues-a-warning-its-time-to-listen/20160830.htm | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/a25a6897e1efec582157fd0cfe7b8f9f44bfdcb022bde7b7923488d7f5e86bfb.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:04:41 | null | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | 'There were absolutely no guidelines (on surrogacy) and poor women were being exploited.'
'These poor surrogate mothers do not understand the value of life. They only understand the value of money.'
'Germany and Britain banned it because they know surrogacy is exploitation of women's body. Therefore these foreigners were coming to India.' | 'Surrogacy is exploiting a woman's body' | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Finterview%2Fsurrogacy-is-exploiting-a-womans-body%2F20160826.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/news/2016/aug/26baby1.jpg | en | null | 'Surrogacy is exploiting a woman's body' | null | null | www.rediff.com | August 26, 2016 15:57 IST
‘There were absolutely no guidelines (on surrogacy) and poor women were being exploited.’
‘The poor surrogate mothers do not understand the value of life. They only understand the value of money.’
‘Germany and Britain banned it because they know surrogacy is exploitation of women’s body. Therefore the foreigners were coming to India.’
Image: A surrogate mother at a hostel for such mothers in Anand, Gujarat. Photograph: Mansi Thapliyal/Reuters.
For the last 18 months, lawyer Jayshree Wad has been fighting surrogacy in the Supreme Court.
She petitioned the Supreme Court stating that surrogacy had become a business in India, which then ordered the central government to frame rules governing surrogacy.
On Wednesday, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj announced that the Union Cabinet had approved the draft of the Surrogacy Regulation Bill 2016 meant to regulate the process. The bill will be tabled before Parliament in the forthcoming winter session.
Wad, 77, says she is happy the government has taken concrete steps to regulate the procedure. “Surrogacy is exploiting a woman’s body,” she told Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff.com in an interview.
Why did you file a case against surrogacy in the Supreme Court?
We have fundamental rights for every citizen in India. In our petition we quoted Article 14 to Article 23 of our Constitution stating that you cannot exploit anybody. There is personal liberty. And when I read about surrogacy in October 2014, I realised that surrogate mothers were being exploited for money. Therefore I felt something has to be done about this.
In the absence of any law, what is to be done? Because I am a practising lawyer in the Supreme Court for the last four years I filed a petition stating that the fundamental right of such mothers was being infringed upon. And after my petition, the Supreme Court passed a direction to the government. There were absolutely no guidelines (on surrogacy) and poor women were being exploited.
What is your personal opinion about surrogacy?
My opinion is that if a couple do not have child, then through some friend or relation have a child through surrogacy. A surrogate mother must know what is going to happen to her body. Right now poor, illiterate women are going in for surrogacy to make money.
A contract is signed between the surrogate mother and the couple who want to have children, which states that the surrogate mother will not be able to see the child after she delivers the baby. This is quite unusual for a mother who bears the child for nine months.
You are against surrogacy because it was being done for money and had become commercial.
Absolutely true. I am against it because women who are becoming surrogate mothers are completely ignorant about the procedure. This is exploitation of women because they are ignorant.
Did you do any research as to what happens to surrogate mothers after five to six years of delivering the baby? What happens to them emotionally and physically when they give up the child they deliver?
I have done research on this subject and also studied material from the West. I found that surrogacy is taking place in India because we are a poor country and women are being exploited. When a woman goes for surrogacy for money, the whole procedure is wrong.
There is another example. A couple came from abroad and got their baby after the mother delivered the child. Unfortunately the mother died during delivery. But the couple refused to pay any compensation because they said they had a contract only with the dead mother. The woman became a surrogate mother to support her own children financially and safeguard their future. This incident really made me angry.
These poor surrogate mothers do not understand the value of life. They only understand the value of money.
What happens when an unmarried man or woman wants to have a baby or a woman who is divorced wants to have a baby?
At this moment we do not have a law. Therefore I cannot comment on this issue. I took up this case to stop the exploitation of women. I have not taken up the case of any woman who is unmarried or a divorcee. I have read about a woman who has produced more than five children due to surrogacy.
On one hand our government says we should not have more than two children and on the other hand through surrogacy these poor women are producing five children. What will happen to her body? And suppose the surrogate mother dies, what will be the future of her own children?
Countries like Germany and Great Britain have banned surrogacy.
They banned it because they know surrogacy is the exploitation of a woman’s body. Therefore these foreigners were coming to India. | http://www.rediff.com/news/interview/surrogacy-is-exploiting-a-womans-body/20160826.htm | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/248f80f2b79a5d55c1e735432fafdd4574d21d615ce5f3e92e00c13121d40b03.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:11:57 | null | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | As a mother, as a woman, as a human being, Savera R Someshwar is horrified by some of the provisions of the Surrogacy Regulation Bill, 2016. | All that is wrong with the new surrogacy bill | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Fcolumn%2Fall-that-is-wrong-with-the-new-surrogacy-bill%2F20160826.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/cricket/2015/apr/17kids-ipl1.jpg | en | null | All that is wrong with the new surrogacy bill | null | null | www.rediff.com | Last updated on: August 26, 2016 09:08 IST
IMAGE: Shah Rukh Khan with son Abram, who was born through a surrogate. The proposed bill would not allow such a procedure.
As a mother, as a woman, as a human being, Savera R Someshwar/Rediff.com is horrified by some of the provisions of the Surrogacy Regulation Bill, 2016.
And, I read it again.
And, I rubbed my eyes. Again.
Before reading it one more time.
What I was reading, to put it mildly, left me horrified. As a mother. As a woman. As a human being. As a citizen living in what we proudly proclaim is the ‘largest democracy in the world’.
Maybe, the reportage was wrong. Exaggerated. So I hunted for the video.
India’s honourable minister for external affairs, Sushma Swaraj, had actually said all the things I had read as she was explaining the draft of the Surrogacy Regulation Bill, 2016 that has been approved by the Union Cabinet.
The Bill allows ‘altruistic surrogacy’ for a limited section of society. The others, Swaraj said genially, were most welcome to adopt. And why couldn’t they avail of surrogacy? We’ll come to that in a bit.
Some of her views, as expressed in the press conference on Wednesday, were clearly representative of the present Indian’s government’s regressive views.
She began, very kindly, by explaining how surrogacy would now be restricted in India to ‘childless couples, who are medically unfit to have children’. They could, she went on, because clearly it was a tragedy for them, to ‘take help from a close relative’ in a process that she called ‘altruistic surrogacy’.
But what, for example, if you didn’t have ‘close’ relatives who were willing to help?
Maybe, like a reporter pointed out in the press conference, you were two orphans who had chosen to get married to each other and later discovered that one or both of you were ‘medically unfit’ to have children.
Maybe, you married against your family’s wishes.
Maybe, you come from a small family and there are no women who qualify as a surrogate mother, either due to age or due to their physical ability to carry an embryo to term. Or maybe, since the bill demands that a surrogate mother has to be married and have a child, they don’t fulfil those requirements.
Maybe -- and I am sure that Swaraj, as a mother herself, understands the emotional bonding a pregnant woman feels with the baby she is carrying; even if it is someone else’s embryo -- a potential surrogate, closely related to the childless couple and sympathetic to their sorrow, may not be sure that she could cut off the emotional cord as easily as the placenta is snipped off at birth.
Let’s take another look at the ‘close’ relatives suggested by the honourable minister. Ms Swaraj, do you know how women are treated in our country? Will the bhabhi have a choice? What if she does not want to do this?
Will the sister’s husband and in-laws allow her to be a surrogate mother even if she wants to?
Let’s move on to another aspect: Pregnancy. As Swaraj surely knows, this comes with its own complications, right from everyday stuff like nausea, swollen feet to stretch marks, genetic diabetes to having a breech baby to babies dying in the womb to genetically deformed babies. Even if all goes well, there could be problems during delivery. The cord could be wrapped around the baby's neck, the baby could swallow meconium...
But the government is not concerned with all of this. The Bill, among other reasons, is being proposed to prevent the abandonment of the girl child and babies who are challenged, either physically or mentally or both.
If the foetus is discovered to have a problem, what happens if the surrogate mother decides she does not want an abortion for religious or emotional reasons? Will the parents, who are compelled by law to ‘not abandon the child, born out of a surrogacy procedure, under any circumstances’, find themselves capable of taking care of the child?
What if the surrogacy results in a girl child and the adoptive parents want an abortion? Will, given the circumstances in India, the surrogate mother have a choice?
What if the embryo implant results in twins? Or triplets? And this makes the pregnancy risky for the surrogate mother? What if the surrogate mother is advised bed rest for the duration of the pregnancy?
The surrogate mother, according to the bill, has to be a married woman with at least one child because it indicates that she is able to carry a child to term. In the scenarios listed above, what happens to her responsibilities towards her own family? What if she decides, at that stage, that the surrogacy is demanding too much of her?
If help is hired for her in such situations, who pays for it? The surrogate mother/family or the couple who want the baby who, according to the proposed bill, can only pay for medical care?
What about post-natal care? To what extent is the couple who want the baby responsible for it? What if the surrogate mother slips into post-natal depression and needs long term care? Who will take the responsibility?
And then, there are family dynamics and politics -- as well as society’s unfeeling comments -- to be taken into account.
What if relations between the surrogate mother/her family and the couple who want a baby/their family break down irretrievably? Ms Swaraj, I am sure you are aware this irreversible breakdown of relations happens in families. What then?
According to the legal contract that is to be drawn between the would-be parents and the surrogate mother, the child belongs to the parents. But have you thought of the emotional state of the surrogate mother during this time? And what if she had donated her own egg for the surrogacy? Wouldn’t the bond be even more strong and, under the circumstances, even more painful?
The bill also says that a woman can give birth to a surrogate child just once. But what if she’s been forced to abort an earlier surrogate foetus, once or multiple times? What if he had been unable to carry a foetus to term? Will she be forced to become a surrogate again and again until a baby is delivered?
Each pregnancy, whether it results in a delivery or not, takes a physical and emotional toll on the mother.
So, what about the rights of the surrogate mother?
Swaraj is sure those rights can’t be toyed with. After all, according to her, there is so way this industry can go underground. It will always be supervised. “After all, the clinics are there. They are attached to the hotels (she means the apartments where the surrogates live). The mothers will be there, lying down for nine months,” she explained. “Everything is right there. So what can prevent the law from being implemented?”
But you are talking about commercial surrogates, Ms Swaraj. Why would an altruistic surrogate not stay in her own home? Why would she opt for a commercial establishment rented by a clinic? And, in that case, how would any kind of legal infringement be supervised…?
As we leave Swaraj to ponder over how the bill is protecting the surrogate mother, let’s move on to some of the other things the bill says.
If, for whatever reason you cannot have your own child biologically, there are some more terms and conditions. Here’s one: you have to be legally married for five years.
So, if you’re married but haven’t crossed that five-year landmark decided by the government, hard luck.
If you’ve married late and want to start a family immediately, hard luck.
If you are a live-in couple, hard luck.
If you are an unmarried man or woman, hard luck.
If you are divorced, hard luck.
If you are separated, hard luck.
If you have lost your husband/wife to death, hard luck.
If you are a homosexual, hard luck.
If you are a lesbian, hard luck.
If you have a biological child and want one more, hard luck.
If you have adopted a child and want a biological one now, hard luck.
If you are poor, and cannot afford the cost of surrogacy, hard luck.
If you were born in India but now live abroad, or a now a citizen of a different country, hard luck. You can’t ask your sister, or your bhabhi to help.
If you are a divorcee parent who has married a second time -- which means you have a child from your earlier marriage -- and wants to have a child but can’t, the outline of the bill, as presented by Sushma Swaraj, offers no clarity.
In order to make that absolutely clear, let me quote Swaraj, ‘Kaanooni roop se male and female legally wedded couples ko hi yeh anumati di jayegi (Only those men and women who are legally wed to each other will be given permission for surrogacy).’
Which basically means the government has disqualified most of us from opting for ‘altruistic surrogacy’. It has decided to intervene in your private life, asked your sister or your husband’s bhabhi or the mother of either parent, if they are within the age limit defined by the bill -- if one goes by whom Swaraj has qualified as a close relative -- to be a surrogate mother for you, take control of what should have been a personal decision, limited your freedom of choice and basically said, ‘We’ll decide if you can have a child; otherwise, of course, you are free to adopt.’
But is adoption the solution? There are thousands of children, innocent mites, who need a home, but Swaraj, Narendra Modi and the Government of India need to understand that adoption is a personal choice. Not everyone is qualified emotionally to be an adoptive parent and those who do so without being emotionally ready are doing the child a great disservice. And, in India, it’s not just the parents who adopt a child; the family has to have a welcoming heart as well.
Oh, and here’s the reason why live-in and homosexual couples cannot opt for surrogacy. “We don’t recognise homosexuality and live-in relationships. It is against our ethos.”
Whose ethos, Ms Swaraj? And who is this ‘our’ that you are talking about?
And since you’ve decided that you, by which I presume you mean the Government of India, do not recognise live-in relationships, does it mean the Supreme Court judgment last year that an unmarried couple who cohabited continuously as man and life for a long time would be considered to be in a relationship akin to marriage as far as the law is concerned… is illegal?
As for those who fit within the Indian government’s carefully defined outline, you can’t opt for altruistic surrogacy if you have a biological or adopted child, unless your ‘child is mentally or physically challenged or suffers from a life-threatening disorder or fatal illness’.
‘This,’ as Swaraj explains, ‘has been decided so that there's no discrimination between the two children. You may not differentiate between when it comes to food and the way you bring them up, but the discrimination will definitely come in when it comes to property.'
Oh, so siblings don’t scrap about property? They don’t go to court against each other over money-related matters? Really? Is that how it happens? I didn’t know!
And obviously, our adoption agencies are doing a terrible job, handing over kids to all and sundry (actually, that isn’t true… I have had friends and family go through the process and I know how thoroughly each couple has been investigated before they were approved as adoptee parents). The government should be suing the media for all those stories of siblings battling -- and even killing each other -- over wealth and property. Or for reports about physically or mentally challenged people being abandoned by their families/siblings. How, going by these recent revelatory guidelines by the government -- can this possibly be true?
Here’s another remarkable statement Swaraj made: ‘Mujhe dukh hai yeh baat kehte hue ki jo cheez zaroorat ke naam pe shuru ki gayi thi woh ab shauk ban gayi hai (I am saddened to say that something which began as a requirement has now become a hobby).'
And how does she know it? Well, of course, because, and I am going to quote her directly, ‘Kitne hi itne udhaharan hamare saamne, aur badi celebrities ke hain, jinka apna bachcha ek nahi do-do hain, aur beta aur beti dono hai, toh bhi unhone surrogate child kiya hai. Toh yeh zaroorat ke liye toh hai anumati, shauk ke liye nahi hai. Aur na is liye hai ki kyonki patni prasav pida nahi sehna chahati, is liye chalo surrogate child kar lo. Yeh koi anand ki cheez nahi hai.’
Here’s what she’s basically saying.
‘We have so many examples, including that of well-known celebrities who have their own child -- in fact, they have two children, a boy and a girl -- yet they have had a third child through surrogacy. Though this bill, we have given permission for a need, not a hobby. Nor will surrogacy be allowed because a wife does not want to go through the pain of delivery.’
And then she adds, ‘So, because your wife does not want to go through the pain of delivering a child, you will pay a poor woman to do so.’
Ultimately, said Swaraj, here’s what the bill would do. Surrogacy, as an economic activity, would be banned. India would no longer be the world’s cheap, rent-a-womb destination. The government’s reason for doing this was, according to her, purely benevolent, far-sighted and revolutionary. All those women who had been conned/coerced/forced into selling their wombs would now be safe. It will, she said, ‘shut down India's surrogacy industry which has thrived on the misery of poor women’.
In a largely patriarchal India, this does happen more often than any decent human being would like it to. Like most other decisions, the decision of renting the womb is not the woman’s or only the woman’s. Factors, mainly financial, come into play. Many a time, the circumstances are grim enough to override the fear of social stigma and even ostracisation at the thought of a woman carrying a child not created by the union of her egg with her husband’s sperm.
India may now be listed as the seventh richest country in the world, but that statistic makes no difference to her poor, who continue to struggle to eke out a living.
And so, these women rent their womb in a trade where they are most often cheated. In the many fly-by-night surrogacy clinics that have opened up in India over the years, the focus is entirely on the soon-to-be-born child, the source of profit. The mother-to-be matters only as the receptacle bearing this source of this profit.
If, in the process, her health is at risk, it’s not really a matter of concern as long as the baby is not affected. And the fact that she has to part with the baby -- a living, kicking, moving human being she has nursed in her womb for nine months -- is just swept under the carpet.
Sadly, what the bill does is blatantly ignore the ‘commercial’ surrogate mothers and the reason why they rent out their womb. | http://www.rediff.com/news/column/all-that-is-wrong-with-the-new-surrogacy-bill/20160826.htm | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/324048a5d1d171adae2e36efa61b73b47a609cae1807cb0451fd1f57ea0e24f2.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:24:38 | null | 2016-08-17T00:00:00 | The 16-month civil war has killed more than 6,500 people and displaced more than 2.5 million people. | Evacuation of Indians from Yemen not possible now: Sushma Swaraj | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Freport%2Fevacuation-of-indians-from-yemen-not-possible-now-sushma-swaraj%2F20160817.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/news/2016/aug/17swaraj.jpg | en | null | Evacuation of Indians from Yemen not possible now: Sushma Swaraj | null | null | www.rediff.com | Last updated on: August 17, 2016 18:40 IST
After rescuing thousands from war-struck Yemen, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on Wednesday said that the government is not in a position to evacuate more Indians from the Arab nation any more.
She said this in response to a tweet from a person who stated that a woman from Hyderabad was stuck in Hajjah, 127 km from Yemen's capital Sanaa, along with her children after her husband divorced her and left for the United States.
"We evacuated more than 4,500 Indians and over 2,500 foreigners from Yemen," Swaraj tweeted.
The minister said that the government made repeated requests calling upon Indians to leave Yemen.
"We had to close our embassy in Sanaa due to situation prevailing there," she said, adding that some people chose to stay back.
"Some of those evacuated, returned to Yemen," she stated.
"We do not have our Embassy there. It is a war-torn situation. We are not in a position to evacuate people from Yemen at this stage," she added.
Yemen is under attack from a Saudi Arabia-led Arab coalition after an established government was dislodged from power by Houthi rebels.
The 16-month civil war has killed more than 6,500 people and displaced more than 2.5 million people. | http://www.rediff.com/news/report/evacuation-of-indians-from-yemen-not-possible-now-sushma-swaraj/20160817.htm | en | 2016-08-17T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/2d8bc1a927dbc4c4c5ad259c73dfa7513e474397e847d1492131d6b60cd1e679.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:31:31 | null | 2016-08-08T00:00:00 | Security forces launched the operation in Macchil sector in north Kashmir's Kupwara district following information about presence of terrorists in the area. | 3 BSF personnel, 1 terrorist killed in encounter near LoC | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Freport%2Fbsf-terrorist-encounter-near-loc%2F20160808.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/news/2015/aug/07kashmir.jpg | en | null | 3 BSF personnel, 1 terrorist killed in encounter near LoC | null | null | www.rediff.com | August 08, 2016 14:58 IST
Three Border Security Force personnel, including an officer, and a terrorist were killed on Monday in an operation in Macchil sector near the Line of Control in Kashmir, officials said in Srinagar.
Security forces launched the operation in Macchil sector in north Kashmir’s Kupwara district following information about presence of terrorists in the area, an Army official said.
One terrorist and two BSF jawans were killed while five other security force personnel were injured in the initial firefight between the two sides, the official said.
Among the injured personnel -- three BSF jawans and two Army soldiers -- condition of one BSF jawan was critical, who later succumbed to injuries, a police official said.
He said the slain BSF personnel were identified as sub Inspector Mohinder Yadav, Head Constable C P Singh and Constable Babu Shaan.
The operation was in progress when reports last came in, he added.
Image used for representation only. | http://www.rediff.com/news/report/bsf-terrorist-encounter-near-loc/20160808.htm | en | 2016-08-08T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/33f7909939196c25517bf37e8b8d409f977ea61c78a3abb8204e458fc79bcbe9.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:39:46 | null | 2016-08-02T00:00:00 | When deputies got to the home, they say the boy was in the front yard trying to get in the front door of the home. | US couple abandons toddler to play Pokemon Go, arrested | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Freport%2Fus-couple-abandons-toddler-to-play-pokemon-go-arrested%2F20160802.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/getahead/2016/jul/26pokemon1.jpg | en | null | US couple abandons toddler to play Pokemon Go, arrested | null | null | www.rediff.com | August 02, 2016 17:12 IST
A couple has been arrested in the United States for abandoning their two-year-old son alone at home while they drove around playing the widely popular location-based augmented reality game Pokemon Go.
Brent Daley, 27, and Brianne Daley, 25, left their 2-year-old boy at San Tan Valley home in Arizona for 90 minutes in scorching heat without water while they played Pokemon Go in surrounding neighbourhoods.
The couple was charged with child neglect and endangerment after they abandoned their toddler to play Pokemon Go, the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.
Police found the boy at 10.30 pm on Thursday after a neighbour dialed 911 and told authorities she found a child who appeared to have been abandoned.
When deputies got to the home, they say the boy was in the front yard trying to get in the front door of the home.
He was ‘screaming and crying (and) attempting to get into the residence,’ the statement said, adding that the boy was barefoot, red-faced and filthy.
In the home, deputies found a phone number for Brent Daley, so they called and told him his child had been abandoned.
Daley allegedly answered, then said ‘whatever’ before hanging up, officials were quoted as saying by NBC News.
The couple eventually returned and admitted to driving around the area, stopping at parks and elsewhere while playing Pokemon Go, they said.
Sheriff Paul Babeu offered the alleged crime up as a cautionary tale, saying that what the couple had done was ‘beyond comprehension’.
The incident comes amid a surge in incidents of people getting into trouble while playing Pokemon Go.
Last month, two Canadian teenaged brothers inadvertently crossed the US-Canada border while playing Pokemon Go, causing a rare international incident.
Cleveland Police issued a warning after a driver in Stourbridge, West Midlands, was fined for playing while driving.
In another incident in the US, someone drove into a police car while playing the game at the wheel.
A teenager was shot dead in Guatemala after being ambushed while playing the game with his cousin. | http://www.rediff.com/news/report/us-couple-abandons-toddler-to-play-pokemon-go-arrested/20160802.htm | en | 2016-08-02T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/79eae1bf84ea6cde8745952a9b1301fd61b86bc97948074df776ac4a52d210b1.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:18:16 | null | 2016-08-20T00:00:00 | On the intervening night of September 22-23, 2012, three Dalit youths were killed when police opened fire to disperse a violent mob to control a clash between Dalits and OBC Bharwad community members at Thangadh town in Surendranagar district. | 4 yrs after 3 Dalits were killed, Gujarat forms SIT to probe murders | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Freport%2F4-yrs-after-3-dalits-were-killed-gujarat-forms-sit-to-probe-murders%2F20160820.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/news/2016/aug/20dalits.jpg | en | null | 4 yrs after 3 Dalits were killed, Gujarat forms SIT to probe murders | null | null | www.rediff.com | Last updated on: August 20, 2016 18:00 IST
Four years after three Dalit youths were killed in police firing in Surendranagar district, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Gujarat has decided to set up a Special Investigation Team to probe the incident, a move that came in the wake of outrage over Una Dalit flogging incident.
Chief Minister Vijay Rupani took the decision to constitute the three-member SIT to investigate the incident after receiving several representations from Dalit leaders, including those from his party, an official release said on Saturday.
"Chief Minister Vijay Rupani took the decision following representations from Dalit leaders including cabinet minister Atmaram Parmar, former minister Ramanlal Vora, and Rajya Sabha MP Shambhuprasad Tundiya," Minister of State for Home Pradipsinh Jadeja said in a press release.
The government would also form a special designated court and appoint a special public prosecutor to expedite the case and announced an additional Rs 2 lakh compensation to the nearest kin of the victims, over and above what was decided earlier.
The opposition Congress reacted cautiously to the decision, saying it could turn out to be an "eyewash to mislead the people" and demanded that the government table the report of an earlier CID probe into the incident.
On the intervening night of September 22-23, 2012, three Dalit youths -- Pankaj Sumra, Prakash Parmar and Mehul Rathod -- were killed when police opened fire to disperse a violent mob to control a clash between Dalits and OBC Bharwad community members at Thangadh town in Surendranagar district.
The government had ordered a probe into the incident and a report was submitted to it by the then principal secretary of social justice and empowerment department, Sanjay Prasad. The report has not yet been made public.
The issue of Thangadh Police firing came in focus in the wake of recent Una town Dalit flogging incident with opposition leaders and Dalit rights activists raking it up to target the BJP.
At a rally held by Una Dalit Atyachar Padkar Samiti, which organised a march from Ahmedabad to Una, Dalit leaders have demanded justice to victims of Thangadh firing.
Family members of victims of Thangadh had also gone on hunger strike in Gandhinagar, demanding a judicial probe into the incident.
Rajkot city police commissioner Anupam Singh Gehlot, Surat city DCP Zone-2, Parikshita Rathod, and Porbandar Superintendent of Police Tarun Kumar Duggal will be members of the SIT.
The state CID investigation in the case remained inconclusive after the state probe agency filed a C-summary report. No chargesheet has been filed yet into the incident.
Thangadh, located around 65 km from Rajkot,is famous for the annual Tarnetar fair, held eight km from town near the temple of Trinetwshar Shiva temple.
Reacting to the government's announcement, the Congress said it appeared to be a move by the government to mislead people and shield the real culprits in the face of the agitation against atrocities on Dalits getting intensified.
"It has been a way with the BJP government that whenever agitation grows, it constitutes a committee to investigate an atrocity or a corruption case, mainly with the intention to mislead people and shield the real culprit. Such SITs only serve as an eyewash," Gujarat Congress spokesperson Manish Doshi said.
"Good that the government has constituted an SIT to investigate Thangadh killings, but we would again demand from the government that the report of a previous investigation conducted by the state CID crime be placed on the table of the state assembly for discussion," he said.
Atrocities on Dalits have come in sharp focus after seven persons from the community from Mota Samadhiyala village of Una tehsil of Gir Somnath district were brutally assaulted by some self-styled cow vigilantes for skinning a dead cow on July 11.
The incident sparked wide-spread protests after videos of the beating went public.
Several political leaders like Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Bahujan Samaj Party supremo supremo Mayawati had visited the victims in the hospital and their family members. | http://www.rediff.com/news/report/4-yrs-after-3-dalits-were-killed-gujarat-forms-sit-to-probe-murders/20160820.htm | en | 2016-08-20T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/249a1ab7e6cdc06cc9f61cf59b29db32a188f0912148677c96a7ee319f028641.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:17:06 | null | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | The 36th India Day Parade ran through about 13 streets in Madison avenue in Manhattan. | Band, bajaa and masti: Indians celebrate Independence Day in New York | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Freport%2Fpix-indians-celebrate-i-day-in-new-york%2F20160822.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/news/2016/aug/22nyc7.jpg | en | null | Band, bajaa and masti: Indians celebrate Independence Day in New York | null | null | www.rediff.com | Last updated on: August 22, 2016 11:31 IST
Thousands of Indians in traditional finery celebrated India’s 70th Independence Day at one of the largest parades outside the country with the iconic Empire State Building lighting up in Indian tricolour.
IMAGE: An Indian-American woman waves the tricolour during Indipendence Day celebrations in New York. Photograph: Mohammed Jaffer/SnapsIndia
The 36th India Day Parade by the Federation of Indian Associations -- New York, New Jersey, Connecticut ran through about 13 streets in Madison avenue in Manhattan and featured tableaux by various Indian-American groups, marching bands, police contingents and cultural performances by young Indian-Americans.
IMAGE: An Indian waves the tricolour during the India Day parade in Manhattan. Photograph: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Chief Guest at the event Yoga guru Baba Ramdev said India represents the glory of the past, the present moment’s strength and is moving forward with hopes and dreams of a brighter future.
“India has made its mark through its strength, culture, heritage and honesty,” he said, expressing hope that the Indian tricolour continues to fly high around the world.
IMAGE: Families travelled from nearby states such as Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts to witness the parade. Photograph: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
Amid loud cheers and applause, Ramdev, speaking in Hindi, said the world today recognises India’s strength and its tremendous contribution to health, education, political and spiritual system.
“Combining its spirituality and modernism, the country is moving forward,” he said and called on Indians living in the US and abroad to work together to take the nation, its cultural heritage and “Indianness” to greater glory.
IMAGE: Indian music and popular Bollywood songs reverberated through the air as people celebrated with a fervour of patriotism. Photograph: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters
India’s over a billion-strong population and its diaspora spread across the world are working for the country and contributing to its growth and glory from wherever they are, Ramdev said.
Underscoring the importance of yoga, he said it is not just a physical exercise but a “complete medical science, life science and way of living” and promotes non-violence and harmony.
“Ayurveda, non-violence, truth, harmony, co-existence and brotherhood are India’s culture and heritage,” Ramdev said, adding that the people of India have to take this ancient practice forward.
IMAGE: Abhishek Bachchan, the Grand Marshall for the parade, waves to the crowd. Photograph: Deepak Ghadiali
Bollywood actor Abhishek Bachchan, the Grand Marshal of the parade, said it felt 'wonderful' to be the part of India’s Independence Day celebrations in New York.
He recalled that the last time he had attended the parade was in 1997 when his father, Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan was the grand marshal. The senior Bachchan had participated in the 50th anniversary of India’s Independence Day 19 years ago.
IMAGE: Organisers of the event said about 75,000-1,00,000 people joined the day-long celebrations. Photograph: Mohammed Jaffer/SnapsIndia
“It is a huge honour to be here and represent the beautiful nation of ours,” Abhishek said, waving out to the crowd from a stage, as people thronged to click pictures with him and shake his hand.
Amitabh tweeted, 'And this Abhishek in New York a short while ago... Grand Marshall for the India Day Parade in Manhattan NYC, USA. A proud moment... I was appointed the same years ago... now son follows'.
IMAGE: Actress Aarti Chhabria at the parade. She along with Tamil actor Vikram were chief guests at the parade. Photograph: PTI
India and the US share common values of plurality, secularism and justice for all, Jain spiritual leader Acharya Lokesh Muni said in a statement.
The Indian diaspora has contributed significantly to America’s progress and now under flagship programs such as ‘Make in India’, ‘Digital India’ and ‘Startup India’, India is emerging as the land of opportunity for American companies.
IMAGE: A little girl participates in the cultural programmes. Photograph: Deepak Ghadiali
India’s Consul General in New York Riva Ganguly Das, along with several Indian-American leaders, witnessed the parade.
Tamil actor Vikram was also the chief guest at the parade.
IMAGE: The iconic Empire State Building was lit up in the Indian tricolour. Photograph: Twitter
Organisers of the event said they were expecting a crowd of about 75,000-100,000 people for the day-long celebrations, which also included special food stalls, cultural extravaganza and special floats by various Indian organisations based in the US such as Air India and State Bank of India.
On the occasion, the iconic Empire State Building was lit up in the Indian tricolour.
IMAGE: The parade showcased India’s cultural richness as well as the achievements of the diaspora through colourful floats. Photograph: Mohammed Jaffer/SnapsIndia
People chanted patriotic slogans such as ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’, ‘Vande Mataram’ and ‘Jai Hind’ and carried banners, placards along with Indian and American flags as they witnessed the floats and celebrities from the barricaded pavements along the parade route.
Indian music and popular Bollywood songs reverberated through the air as people celebrated with a fervour of patriotism. Several Americans also watched the event.
IMAGE: Indian music and popular Bollywood songs reverberated through the air as people celebrated with a fervour of patriotism. Photograph: Deepak Ghadiali
Families had travelled from nearby states such as Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts to witness the parade, which has been an annual fixture in the city’s calendar since 1981.
IMAGE: Yoga guru Baba Ramdev was the chief guest at the event. Photograph: Deepak Ghadiali
There was a large presence of personnel from the New York Police Department against the backdrop of security concerns doing such large gatherings.
The parade showcased India’s cultural richness as well as the achievements of the diaspora through colourful floats. | http://www.rediff.com/news/report/pix-indians-celebrate-i-day-in-new-york/20160822.htm | en | 2016-08-22T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/0a92801b469af8890d2225b796443ad703f67f1088ff933b8a3a035cb4779038.json |
[] | 2016-08-26T13:28:30 | null | 2016-08-11T00:00:00 | In Lok Sabha, the Opposition demanded action against cow vigilantes.
| Ban gau rakshaks, Opposition demands Centre | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rediff.com%2Fnews%2Freport%2Fban-gau-rakshaks-opposition-demands-centre%2F20160811.htm.json | http://im.rediff.com/news/2016/jul/27cows5.jpg | en | null | Ban gau rakshaks, Opposition demands Centre | null | null | www.rediff.com | August 11, 2016 19:27 IST
Opposition members in Lok Sabha on Thursday took the government to task over its ‘failure’ to check rising cases of atrocities against Dalits, with some members seeking a ban on ‘right-wing’ cow vigilante outfits saying the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes were living in ‘deep sense of fear’.
Participating in a debate on attacks on Dalits, the members focussed on the poor conditions of these downtrodden sections across the country, with K H Muniyappa (Congress) alleging that in Gujarat, the attacks on them have a reached ‘a level never seen in history’.
Initiating a debate on the issue, P K Biju (Communist Party of India-Marxist) spoke about the overall poor conditions of Dalits and cited figures to argue that they were denied equal rights despite the Constitution promising all citizens same rights.
Every day, three Dalit women are raped and every 18 minutes a crime against Dalits occur, he said, adding that over 37.8 per cent of students from the community sit separately in government schools while over 24.5 per cent of them are not allowed to enter police stations.
Referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement against cow vigilante groups, Biju demanded action against these outfits and not remain confined to words alone.
“If you have got such a feedback (about attacks on Dalits by the cow protection groups), then why should you not stop such atrocities? We would like him to take strong measures,” the CPI-M member said.
Observing that he had visited Una in Gujarat where some Dalits were flogged for skinning a cow, he said ‘ban it (cow vigilantes) throughout the country’ and also sought measures to fill up vacancies of posts reserved for Dalits.
Muniyappa said ‘Dalits are living in the grip of deep sense of fear and insecurity. They had faith in the Congress to protect them but have no faith in BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). ... There was no protection needed for SCs and STs earlier. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee was there, such incidents never happened.”
He said quality education will bring SCs and STs to the mainstream and asked the government to open Navodaya Schools for them.
Muniyappa also raked up Union Minister V K Singh’s alleged dog analogy in a case involving Dalits and questioned why he was still in the government.
Referring to cases of atrocities against Dalits in Gujarat, he said over 14,500 such cases have occured there so far since Modi had taken over as the chief minister and added that the conviction rate was only 3-5 per cent.
“This never happened in history,” he said.
Muniyappa and Bhartruhari Mahtab (Biju Janata Dal) sparred for a while when the Congress leader targeted the BJD government in Odisha over the recent killing of tribals in Kandhamal.
Defending his party, BJP’s Udit Raj said no one but the system was responsible for the atrocities on Dalits. “People are encouraged (to attack Dalits) as cases remain pending in courts for years on,” he said, adding that the debate should not get entangled in a war between the BJP and the Congress or the BJD.
He used the opportunity to attack Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati saying under her rule several attacks took place against the community and her government did little to defend reservation in promotion policy in the Allahabad high court. He also said the conviction rate under the Prevention of Atrocities Act varies from 2-8 per cent which was very poor.
Raj also took on the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi saying it has not set up a vigilance committee to assess the progress made in cases relating to atrocities on Dalits.
Saugata Roy (Tirnamool Congress) asked Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh to ban Vishwa Hindu Parishad and ‘gau raksha dals’ saying in the name of cow protection, they were targeting Dalits and Muslims.
Taking potshots at the BJP, he also questioned why the prime minister had only referred to Dalits in his recent statements and made no mention of Muslims. He said it took Modi 26 days to speak out against Dalit atrocities after the Una incident.
“Enough with Hindutva. You have come to power. Now is the time to wipe the tears of Dalits,” he said amid protests by BJP members who questioned why the TMC member named VHP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in his statement.
Roy said while Modi has become the prime minister and was holding a responsible position, his followers were indulging in cow vigilantism. He also questioned the ‘time lapse of nine days’ by then Gujarat chief minister Anandiben Patel in visiting Una after Dalits were beaten up there by the so-called cow vigilantes.
Bhartruhari Mahtab (BJD) said the conflict was growing among dalit community and the society cannot be brought together by force.
“Conflict is growing as Dalits demand for justice. The Constitution provides for equality but the society does not accept it,” Mahtab said, adding that atrocities against Dalits have been growing day by day in last 10 years.
No political party has taken upon themselves to bind the society together and a number of parties are surviving by dividing the society either on the basis of society or caste, Mahtab said.
Image used for representation only: Photograph: Getty Images | http://www.rediff.com/news/report/ban-gau-rakshaks-opposition-demands-centre/20160811.htm | en | 2016-08-11T00:00:00 | www.rediff.com/c5cba04a3b74cf8fe934de9dcfe1c6ba20785be0423ad2182136f8bcb2134a28.json |
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