Eideard

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Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square, the crucible of their revolution, on Wednesday in a mixture of celebration and agitation to mark the first anniversary of the protests that forced out Hosni Mubarak, the former president.

By midmorning, tens of thousands of people had packed the square here, smiling, cheering and waving Egyptian flags, but it was already evident that the spirit that unified last year’s uprising had been replaced by new tensions between Egyptian political factions over their view of the military rulers who took power when Mr. Mubarak was ousted.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that won nearly half the seats in the newly elected Parliament, sent many of its followers to the square. The Brotherhood’s leaders have endorsed the military’s timetable for a handover to an elected president by the end of June, and they sent thousands of their members out to ensure that a spirit of celebration prevailed, erecting soundstages and setting up security checks at each entrance to the square. An abundance of Brotherhood flags, buttons and disposable plastic hats filled the crowd…

Groups of ultraconservative Islamists known as Salafis, political rivals to the Brotherhood who won about a quarter of the seats in the new Parliament, said they would also turn out to help secure the square and keep the day peaceful, and there were plenty of men with the Salafis’ trademark long beards mingling in the crowd.

The crowd in the square on Wednesday morning was overwhelmingly male, with very few women in sight.

Youth groups and other activists — including many of the leaders of the original uprising — were determined to make the day a huge demonstration calling for an immediate end to military rule, urging Egyptians to gather at mosques, churches and other strategic locations around the city for marches to the square that would arrive by midafternoon…

Superficial decisions continue to be a mistake. They provide, at best, fodder for the news-as-entertainment drones.

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Stéphane Peterhansel celebrated his 10th Dakar win, representing at the same time the MINI ALL4 Racing’ and the X-raid Team’s first triumph in the gruelling event! Just 14 months after the unveiling of the German squad’s latest vehicle, the off-road racing crown was secured by the Trebur based team…

But the success story didn’t end with Peterhansel’s win, as all the five MINIs ALL4 Racing entered by the team made it to the top 10. Nani Roma (ESP) ad Michel Périn (FRA) impressed by celebrating three special-stage wins and finished runner-up, thus giving the Monster Energy X-raid Team a one-two, in the 2012 Dakar. Meanwhile, Russia’s Leonid Novitskiy and his German navigator Andi Schulz demonstrated that consistency is the right approach for being successful. They won the first special stage and afterwards, they successfully avoided getting involved in any major problems. Finishing fourth in the overall rankings represented the well-deserved reward – and the best Dakar result ever secured by a Russian driver in the Dakar’s car ranking. In addition, Novitskyi also was the best-place semi-professional driver in the 2012 edition of the event.

For a long time, Polish-Belgian pairing Krzysztof Holowczyc / Jean-Marc Fortin also proved to be a factor in the battle for a top-three position. In the 10th special stage, however, their ORLEN MINI ALL4 Racing encountered problems that cost them their chance of making it to the podium. The fifth Monster Energy X-raid Team pairing, the Portuguese Ricardo Leal dos Santos und Paulo Fiuza, completed the outstanding team success by taking their red MINI ALL4 Racing to eighth position in the overall rankings.

And the Monster Energy X-raid Team did not only convince by this fantastic Dakar success but also by outstanding reliability. Other than expected by many pundits, all the eight vehicles entered by the German squad – five MINIs ALL4 Racing and three BMWs X3 CC – survived the entire event and made it to the finish in Lima. “Apart from our win, this is the biggest success for our team,” added Quandt. “Our engineers and mechanics did a fantastic job preparing the cars on every single day, thus laying the foundation for this success…”

Dakar record winner Peterhansel switched to Team x-raid following the 2009 Dakar. Up to that point in time, Mr. Dakar had celebrated 6 motorbike wins (1991, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998) and three on four wheels (2004, 2005, 2007), in the legendary event. Now, by his first win in South America, he added triumph No 10 – by delivering in his well-known style. Peterhansel celebrated three special stage wins in this year’s Dakar and convinced – as usual – by consistency and a matured style of driving. Thanks to this approach, he avoided getting involved in any major problems and on day three, he took the lead for the second time to defend it until the rally was over…

I’ve followed the X-Raid team for a decade, now. This year’s victory – their first in the Dakar – succeeded beyond wildest expectations. Essential to their effort has been the reliability of diesel racing engines. This year’s 6-cylinder, twin-turbo BMW powerplant running flawlessly throughout. The all-wheel-drive Minis were stellar.

Congratulations, folks, on a terrific team and a superlative victory.

Celebration in Kingston

Jamaica is set to loosen colonial ties with Britain by moving to replace the Queen as head of state with a president, the country’s new prime minister has indicated.

Nearly fifty years after independence, Portia Simpson Miller, a charismatic populist who won a landslide election victory last week, said Jamaica would move to cut links with the monarchy and become a republic.

“I love the Queen. She’s a beautiful lady,” Simpson Miller told 10,000 guests on Thursday at the residence of Jamaica’s governor-general, the Queen’s representative on the island. Switching to patois, she added: “But I think time come.”

The move reflects an accelerating drift towards republicanism among Commonwealth Caribbean countries. Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago have both dropped the Queen as head of state, while opting to remain in the Commonwealth…

This week Simpson Miller vowed to introduce reforms to make the Caribbean court of justice the final appeal court in all criminal matters. The move would repatriate Jamaica’s sovereignty fully, she said…

Simpson Miller is genuinely popular and has an unrivalled ability to project empathy with the poor and downtrodden. Her PNP party…now has an unprecedented two-thirds majority in parliament. This is enough for her to change the constitution and a win a vote to convert Jamaica into a republic. Then, she has to put her plan to a popular referendum…

Dumping allegiance to a monarch is only a couple centuries overdue. The economic shackles to the UK have been sufficiently weakened since the end of World War 2. It’s about time the intellectual and political shackles were also thrown off.

Transgender groups are applauding a court ruling in favor of a Georgia woman who sued after claiming she was fired from her state position because of a sex change.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta concluded transgender workers are protected under the Constitution. Vandiver Elizabeth Glenn was a legislative editor in the Georgia General Assembly

“The question here is whether discriminating against someone on the basis of his or her gender non-conformity constitutes sex-based discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause,” said the three-judge panel. “We hold that it does…”

The decision is so bloody simple you have to wonder what sort of bigot is asking the question?

Glenn — who was once known as Glenn Morrision — alleged she was told she was let go because her 2005 decision to transition from male to female would be viewed as “immoral” by state lawmakers.

Her boss also objected to Glenn showing up at an office Halloween party dressed as a woman, and asked Glenn to leave.

…The judge, when ruling for Glenn, had said she could return to work, but delayed that until the appeals court ruled. Monday’s decision means she could be back on the job within days.

State attorneys had argued no discrimination laws were broken since protections extended to certain classes of individuals did not include transgender employees. The appeals panel said the reasons cited by the state in its defense were not acceptable.

“An individual cannot be punished because of his or her perceived gender non-conformity,” said the ruling. “Because these protections are afforded to everyone, they cannot be denied to a transgender individual.”

I’m confounded by the lengths politicians will go to construct rationales, excuses, lies to support whatever bigotry advances their cause. It’s popular nowadays for reactionaries to accuse insurgent politics of being the product of some devilish “agenda” – most especially when the question is simply one of civil rights, civil liberties within the definitions afforded by our constitution.

They can’t even stop lying while trying to define their hypocrisy.

At the end of October, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) launched its Shredder Challenge contest. The objective: create a system for reconstructing shredded papers, then demonstrate it by piecing together five documents, the shredded remains of which were posted on the contest’s website.

Although the contest had a December 4th deadline, the “All Your Shreds Are Belong to U.S.” team correctly reassembled all five documents with two days to spare.

The San Francisco-based team, which beat out approximately 9,000 competitors, used “custom-coded, computer-vision algorithms to suggest fragment pairings to human assemblers for verification.” Members of the team spent approximately 600 man-hours developing algorithms and otherwise working on the challenge, completing everything within 33 days. Because it was able to reconstruct all five documents posted in the contest, the team was able to claim the complete prize of $50,000.

DARPA hosted the contest both to develop methods of reading shredded documents left behind by enemies in war zones, and to identify ways in which U.S. shredded documents could be read by other parties, so that countermeasures could be developed.

They still run the risk of Congress reducing funding for an agency that makes it possible to reassemble bits and pieces of evidence like this.

Thekla Walker elected new co-leader of the Greens in Baden-Wuerttemberg
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The Greens have grown out of their woolly jumpers and sandals and turned enough fellow Germans on to environmentalism to make the party — already the world’s most successful green movement — the possible kingmakers in the 2013 elections.

Founded three decades ago by rebels from the 1968 student movement, ‘ban-the-bomb’ peaceniks, ecologists and feminists, the Greens got their first taste of power from 1998 to 2005 under Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democrats (SPD).

But they have come into their own in the past year. A strong run of local elections gave them a presence in all 16 regional assemblies for the first time as well as their first state premier, Winfried Kretschmann, who ousted Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) in conservative Baden-Wuerttemberg…

“We have shown that economics and ecology don’t contradict each other — which is a quantitative leap forward,” said party co-leader Claudia Roth in an interview…

The party has climbed to historic highs in opinion polls in the past year of 15-20 percent, from 10.7 percent in the last elections in 2009.

It has now surpassed the current junior coalition partners, the Free Democrats (FDP), to become the third force in a system that has been dominated by the conservatives, now at around 32 percent, and the SPD, who poll as much as 30 percent…

As conservative German voters’ old animosity to the environmentalists fades, “well-educated, higher-income people — the upper-middle class — are moving toward the Greens and forgetting the old ideological barriers between them,” said politics professor Gero Neugebauer at Berlin’s Free University.

Now renewable energy is creating more jobs than traditional industry in parts of former East Germany, the financial crisis has turned once radical Green ideas like financial transactions taxes mainstream, and the Greens side with the once-demonized International Monetary Fund in some areas of financial policy.

RTFA. Lots of detail, anecdotal information.

The German Greens could give lessons to the middle-class radicals in the United States who occasionally play Lets Pretend to be a Political Party.

An openly gay woman has been elected leader of the Scottish Conservatives after the membership rejected her leading rival’s radical proposals to create a new centre-right party.

Ruth Davidson, 32, widely seen as David Cameron’s favourite, was chosen to lead the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party by a comfortable margin after the most bitterly-fought and divisive leadership campaign in party history.

Officials in London believe that Davidson, a lesbian and the youngest of the four candidates, will be able to freshen up the Tories’ faltering appeal to Scottish voters…

Her victory saves the prime minister from the embarrassment of watching the UK party being split by Davidson’s rival for the leadership, Murdo Fraser.

In a statement released on her election, Davidson said: “With the radical, generational change that I represent, this is a unique opportunity for us to rebuild the party and to once again become a powerful, meaningful and relevant force in Scottish politics and in Scottish life.”

A former Territorial Army officer and kick-boxer, Davidson campaigned vigorously against Fraser’s dramatic proposals to scrap the party and replace it with a new “progressive” organisation which would be independent of David Cameron’s Tories…

Bravo for a gender and sexual orientation victory.

I can’t find my old t-shirt, anyway – that said “don’t blame me I didn’t vote Tory” in Gaelic. But, I’d still nudge my perpetually conservative kin in Scotland to support her achievement.

UNESCO delegates stand and cheer after approving Palestinian membership
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Palestine has become a full member of the UN cultural and educational agency in a move that the United States and other opponents say could harm renewed Middle East peace efforts.

The US had threatened to withhold roughly $80 million in annual funding to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) if it approved Palestinian membership. The United States provides about 22% of Unesco’s funding.

Which is about how the average mafia functions. Extortion doesn’t make for lasting politics.

Huge cheers went up in Unesco after delegates approved the membership by 107 votes to 14 with 52 abstentions. Eighty-one votes were needed for approval in a hall with 173 Unesco member delegations present.

“Long live Palestine!” shouted one delegate, in French, at the unusually tense and dramatic meeting of Unesco’s general conference.

While the vote has large symbolic meaning, the issues of borders of an eventual Palestinian state, security troubles and other disputes that have thwarted Middle East peace for decades remain unresolved.

Palestinian officials are seeking full membership in the United Nations, but that effort is still under examination and the US has said it will veto it unless there is a peace deal with Israel. Given that, the Palestinians separately sought membership at Paris-based Unesco and other UN bodies…

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, last week called Unesco’s deliberation “inexplicable”, saying discussion of Palestinian membership of international organisations could not replace negotiations with Israel as a fast track towards Palestinian independence.

There is no “fast track” towards Palestinian independence if you think that honorable and ethical negotiations will be forthcoming from Israel’s ruling politicians. They hold power from a commitment to manifest destiny and lebensraum.

History and historic decisions aren’t resolved in press releases from the State Department. Especially those offered in support of imperial occupying armies.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

A civic activist and vocal critic of President Lee Myung-bak rode a growing call for political change to become mayor of the South Korean capital, Seoul, winning a poll widely seen as a bellwether for the presidential election in December next year.

The activist, Park Won-soon, an independent candidate who was supported by the main opposition Democratic Party, clinched the mayoral race by winning 53.4 percent of the 4 million votes cast, according to the country’s Central Election Management Committee.

His rival, Na Kyung-won, a candidate affiliated with President Lee’s Grand National Party, won 46.2 percent.

“Citizens defeated political power,” said Mr. Park, who refused to join a political party, billing himself as a “citizens’ candidate.” “Through election, they defeated an outdated era…”

Sohn Hak-kyu, head of the Democratic Party, indicated the victory of Mr. Park as an independent would prompt all the liberal opposition parties to regroup toward “a change of governments next year.”

The race in Seoul, home to one-fifth of the country’s 50 million people, was also widely regarded as a referendum on President Lee ahead of the parliamentary elections in April…

The poll, although confined to Seoul, drew nationwide attention by pitting a woman against a man, a political establishment star against an outsider — and Park Geun-hye against another possible candidate for next year’s presidential election, Ahn Chul-soo, a Seoul National University professor whose meteoric rise to political stardom analysts said reflected a gathering storm for change…

Mr. Park, 55, is a former student activist expelled from his university in the 1970s for demonstrating against former President Park Chung-hee, who was assassinated in 1979. Mr. Park later became a human rights lawyer who led two of South Korea’s most influential civic groups that exposed corruption in the country’s powerful conglomerates and accused members of the conservative elite — including President Park — of collaborating with the Japanese during their colonial rule in Korea.

RTFA to get yourself up to speed on contemporary politics in South Korea. Understand that changes like this one are at least as qualitative as the American attempt at the end of the Bush/Cheney cabal. And may actually produce changes that are qualitative rather than quantitative.

 
Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi died of wounds suffered on Thursday as fighters battling to complete an eight-month-old uprising against his rule overran his hometown Sirte, Libya’s interim rulers said.

His killing, which came swiftly after his capture near Sirte, is the most dramatic single development in the Arab Spring revolts that have unseated rulers in Egypt and Tunisia and threatened the grip on power of the leaders of Syria and Yemen.

“He (Gaddafi) was also hit in his head,” National Transitional Council official Abdel Majid Mlegta told Reuters. “There was a lot of firing against his group and he died.”

Mlegta told Reuters earlier that Gaddafi, who was in his late 60s, was captured and wounded in both legs at dawn on Thursday as he tried to flee in a convoy which NATO warplanes attacked. He said he had been taken away by an ambulance…

His capture followed within minutes of the fall of Sirte, a development that extinguished the last significant resistance by forces loyal to the deposed leader.

The capture of Sirte and the death of Gaddafi means Libya’s ruling NTC should now begin the task of forging a new democratic system which it had said it would get under way after the city, built as a showpiece for Gaddafi’s rule, had fallen.

Overdue.

CONFIRMED.