INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC ACCURACY – PRESS RELEASE: CNN is reporting: “Police in Tunisia’s capital city used batons and tear gas to clear a peaceful demonstration on Friday. … [This occurs] after days of riots that have killed at least 21 people.”

STEPHEN ZUNES
Zunes just wrote the piece “Pro-Democracy Uprising Fails to Keep Washington From Backing Tunisian Dictatorship.”

Zunes is professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER

Alexander is director of the Dean Rusk International Studies Program at Davidson College in North Carolina and a specialist on Tunisia. He is author of Tunisia: Stability and Reform in the Modern Maghreb.

He said today: “Until this week, I was betting that [Tunisian President] Ben Ali would ride this out. But the regime’s traditional tools can no longer address the situation.

“There’s broad-based social unrest, people have no faith in the government given the mafia-type corruption around the president’s family, human rights abuses, and until yesterday, his refusal to make any kind of political reform.

“Economics is huge in this. In mid-December, a university graduate lit himself on fire after police busted him for selling vegetables. The economy has generally been unable to generate good jobs for university graduates and has gotten even worse since the global recession, especially since Tunisia is largely dependent on exporting to Europe.

“The U.S. government has been predictably quiet given that Tunisia  has been pro-U.S. Some WikiLeaks revelations regarding Tunisia became public in November. What struck many Tunisians was that U.S. diplomats seemed to privately have the same conception of Ben Ali that they did. Another aspect of what is happening is the role  social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, has played in protesters organizing themselves.

“General strikes now underway in Tunisia are particularly significant given how hard Ali has worked to co-opt the unions.”

Earlier this month, Foreign Policy published a piece by Alexander titled “Tunisia’s protest wave: where it comes from and what it means”

Graphic video and regular information about Tunisia is available via: angryarab.blogspot.com

Twitter feed about Tunisia

Twitter feed from Tunisia — translation plug-in available

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

HUFFINGTON POST – 34,000 year-old bacteria were found in Death Valley… alive.

A new paper published in the January 2011 edition of GSA Today tells the story of the bacteria, which remained in a virtual “suspended animation” for millennia. “They’re alive, but they’re not using any energy to swim around, they’re not reproducing,” Brian Schubert, the bacteria’s discoverer, told OurAmazingPlanet. “They’re not doing anything at all except maintaining themselves.”

From Live Science:

“It was actually a very big surprise to me,” said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.

Salt crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be floating — or living — nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across, akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.

“It’s permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules,” said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert’s advisor at the time.

In a Seussian twist to the discovery, the tiny ecosystems discovered in this salt crystals seem to be able to maintain themselves, creating a microscopic, self-sustaining environment, according to LiveScience. However, researchers don’t quite know how the bacteria managed to stay alive so long, as DNA typically degrades over time.

Article by Dean Praetorius

© Huffington Post, 2011

Photograph by flickr user Murat Ertürk

The Story of Stuff Project presents the Story of Electronics: Why ‘Designed for the Dump’ is Toxic for People and the Planet. Annie Leonard teaches us that electronics today are hard to upgrade, easy to break and impractical to repair. Her short film takes us through the life of electronics – before and after they are throw away – and explains the consequences of this kind of production and consumption.

THE INDEPENDENT/UK – Soldiers, soldiers everywhere. In the valleys, on the mountains, in the streets of Beirut. I have never seen so many soldiers. Are they going to “liberate” Jerusalem? Or are they going to destroy all the Arab dictatorships?

They are supposed to stop the country of Lebanon from sliding into a civil war, I suppose. Hezbollah, we are told, has destroyed the government – which is true up to a point. For on Monday, so we are told, the Hague tribunal of the United Nations will tell us that members of Hezbollah killed the former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.

America demands that the tribunal name the guilty men. So does France. And so, of course, does Britain. Which is strange, because in 2005, when Mr Hariri was killed 366 metres from me on the Beirut Corniche, we all believed that the Syrians had killed him. Not the President, mind you. Not Bashar Assad, but the security services of the Syrian Baath party. That’s what I believed then. That’s what I still believe. But we are told now that it will be Hezbollah, Syria’s friend and Iran’s militia (albeit Lebanese) in Lebanon. And now America and Britain are beating the drum of litigation.

Hezbollah must be blamed and of course, the Prime Minister – or, to be correct, the former prime minister of Lebanon Saad Hariri, son of Rafiq – has just lost his job.

There are many who believe that Lebanon will now descend into a civil war, similar to the fratricidal conflict which it endured from 1976 to 1980. I doubt it. A new generation of Lebanese, educated abroad – in Paris, in London, in America – have returned to their country and, I suspect, will not tolerate the bloodshed of their fathers and grandfathers.

In theory, Lebanon no longer has a government, and the elections which were fairly held and which gave Saad Hariri his cabinet are no more. President Michel Suleiman will begin formal talks on Monday to try to create a new government.

But what does Hezbollah want? Is it so fearful of the Hague tribunal that it needs to destroy this country? The problem with Lebanon is perfectly simple, even if the Western powers prefer to ignore it. It is a confessional state. It was created by the French, the French mandate after the First World War. The problem is that to become a modern state it must de-confessionalise. But Lebanon cannot do so. Its identity is sectarianism and that is its tragedy. And it has, President Sarkozy please note, a French beginning point.

The Shias of Lebanon, of which Hezbollah is the leading party, are perhaps 40 per cent of the population. The Christians are a minority. If Lebanon has a future, it will be in due course be a Shia Muslim country. We may not like this; the West may not like this. But that is the truth. Yet Hezbollah does not want to run Lebanon. Over and over again, it has said it does not want an Islamic republic. And most Lebanese accept this.

But Hezbollah has made many mistakes. Its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, talks on television as if he is the President. He would like another war with Israel, ending in the “divine victory” which he claims his last war, in 2006, ended in. I fear the Israelis would like another war too. The Lebanese would prefer not to have one. But they are being pushed further and further into another war which Lebanon’s supposed Western friends seem to want. The Americans and the British would like to hurt Iran. And that is why they would like Hezbollah to be blamed for Mr Hariri’s murder – and for the downfall of the Lebanese government.

And it is perfectly true that Hezbollah does want this government to fall. By getting rid of this government, getting rid of this cabinet, it has broken the rules of the Doha agreement, which stated that the government and security services of Lebanon should not be harmed.

It is effectively wiping out the Arab “solution” to the Lebanese sectarian conundrum, and what – with the help of its Christian allies – is turning Lebanon into a frightened state. No wonder there were no drivers on the roads yesterday. No wonder the Lebanese were so frightened to go out and enjoy the Mediterranean sun. We are all frightened.

But I think the Lebanese state has grown up. I noticed, yesterday, that the Christian leader of the Lebanese Forces, one of the Christian militias, Samir Geagea, had a new photograph on the front of his party offices in a mountain town. But he was wearing civilian clothes. He was wearing a suit and tie. Not the militia costume he use to wear. That was a good sign.

No civil war in Lebanon.

Click to read the full article, Lebanon in Limbo: A Nation Haunted by the Murder of Rafiq Hariri.

Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper.  He is the author of many books on the region, including The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

Photograph by Flickr user conjure1

MEDIA ROOTS – Coming from the Northwest, I was exposed to Native American totem poles early in childhood. I always loved the caricatures of beasts, man and gods; bold cuts into monolithic tree trunks with colorful paint made these sculptures come alive.

My own ‘totem’ pole, “Tree of Life” draws its inspiration from our country’s caretakers before us. I wanted to capture the thorny, the soft, the grotesque and the beautiful sentiments that make our world. From an atom in the womb, to the infinitesimal speck of existence exiting above, one travels through life feeling comfort, heart break, strength and fragility and during this transit, complexities and the unknown surround us.

By Rick Pickett