News & views from our members around the world

'quiet please'

In tennis, 'Quiet please' is a soft-spoken polite request to chattering/gossiping fans.Mix the livelier world of football and the proverbial sex tourism destination, however, and you get more potent results:http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=...427&sec=apworld QUOTE A gunman shot and killed two soccer fans at the beach resort of Pattaya, Thailand after complaining they were cheering too loud during a broadcast of Italy's World Cup opener against Ghana

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trafficking is not a sport

The World Cup starts in a few hours in Germany, and all hope that it will be peaceful and not in any way similar to the Munich games. Our forecast:  France vs Italy and Zidane will get a red card  (...)More serious however is the influx & illegal trafficking of prostitutes from all over Europe to cover the 'needs' of some 3 million, mostly male sports fans.The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women has issued this petition in many languages,http://catwepetition.ouvaton.org/php/index.phpbut one wonders if any of the 'clients' will bother to read it, or really ever comprehend thatprostitution is just the flip side of oppression, and lack of freedom in human relations.

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666 and other nonsense

Thousands of astrologists, witches and other religious experts are hiding today, as 666 is already yesterday and we are all still here. Prejudice, mysticism, secret signs & codes etc will of course gradually re-surface - next year is the 777, then 888 and so on. Witness also the success of the Da Vinci Code feature film, which borders between the banal and the amusing.More important, however is when backwardness and irrationality, masking under religion, directly impact on the lifes of millions: Already 40 MILLION people have contracted AIDS, and 25 MILLION have already died. So what can one say of those religious leaders who keep on preaching against the use of condoms in the developing world on 'moral grounds' and those neo-cons who support them by banning funding to birth control charities? Well, one can say that they are morally responsible for the deaths of millions from AIDS, and that they can, and I bet will, be successfully sued by some clever lawyer out there. Any takers?

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conservation vs expropriation

media are dominated by cries of anguish when autocrats turn 'populists' overnight through some form of divine enlightenement, and decide to expropriate large 'underused' expat/absentee properties, but the idea of big nothern NGOs buying huge swaths of land in developing countries (the sort that 'behave themselves') to 'protect it', 'save it' and other divine interventions, could it also be a form of expropriation?

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blue washing?

Magic:each year the Mediterranean gets cleaner !more and more beaches get the coveted blue flag !Wonderful...Minor detail: measurements are usually made by national authorities, before the start of the tourist season, and after local officials have been notified that the surveyors are due to arrive, so that they make the necessary preparations...Extra: see a not so blue, blue flag sign at http://www.ecoclub.com/news/082.pdf

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will conquers all

Mark Inglis, a former mountain guide who had lost both his limbs to frostbite in his twenties, now in mid-life,already an Olympian (silver medal in the 2000 Paralympics) and a winemaker, reaches Mt Everest and proves that (1) the power of an individual can move mountains, (2) that technological progress matters and can be put to good, peaceful use (3) that a caring, inclusive society can work miracles.Still, I have observed many 'able-bodied' fellow citizens who find it so hard to walk.

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What's in your food?

A fascinating gallery & quick reference guide of microscopic images of the 50 most common pesticides used in agriculture: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/pesticides/index.html Somewhat worryingly, the pictures look similar to those in the beer gallery: http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/beershots/index.html

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On World Intellectual 'Property' Day

The old anarchist adage goes 'property is theft', however few realise that Pierre-Joseph Proudhon meant the property of state, the landlords and the capitalists, rather than the individual. Indeed he saw individual property as "the triumph of Liberty".The same distinction can apply to 'intellectual property'. Indeed intellectual property presents the added problem that it is meant to be shared, unlike, say, your house, your dog, or your toothbrush. And only by risking its theft through publication, does the right come into definition.So there is a distinction between the individual rights of authors and those of a large publishing house. The internet has further complicated matters, by emancipating individual authors and other inventors/creators, but at the same time easing copying/theft -witness peer to peer programs and their agonising persecution by music multinationals. Plagiarism, a form of intellectual theft, abounds online, but on the other hand it can be detected in milliseconds, also thanks to the Internet.Movements such as the Open Source, Copyleft, and Creative Commons, offer another approach, that of organised sharing. However this does not stop others from using such open source raw materials, to create commercial products, and some suspect it thus becomes another form of exploitation, this time with...

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"pro-poor" ad keywords

Q: which is one of the most expensive googlead keywords?A: pro-poor tourism !Something is rotten in the state of Advertenmark

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Got 5,000? kill an Elephant...

"Species Trophy Fee" (USD) Baboon 110 Buffalo first 720 Buffalo second 870 Buffalo third 1010 Bushbuck 410 Bushpig 230 Caracal 90 Civet Cat 170 Crocodile 1010 Dik-Dik 210 Duiker 220 Eland 1010 Elephant 5000Zebra 710More "trophies" and shooting menus at http://www.hunting-tanzania.com/trophy_fees.htmSo much for the "conservation value" of animals and other neo-conservationist talk.If you see animals as bucks that's what you get, sorry. When will this sort of thing stop and how?

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