Charlotte - My Blog

Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe has brutally seized control of his country’s diamond fields and is using the profits from our precious wedding rings and jewelry to finance a vicious political militia.

The group of countries that regulate the global diamond trade are right now meeting in Namibia to decide whether to suspend Mugabe and stop him selling his blood diamonds on the world market.

We have just two days to persuade these countries to act - let’s get a flood of signatures on a petition and deliver it directly to the meeting in Namibia. Sign at the link below and forward this email to anyone who doesn’t want our gifts of love to finance hate:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/diamonds_for_love_not_hate

All diamond producing countries know that their profits are dependent on the brand reputation of diamonds, and that increasing awareness of “blood diamonds” threatens that brand. A massive global petition will show them that the diamond-buying public is demanding action.

Zimbabwe’s diamonds used to be mined by local people. But in the last several months, Mugabe’s thugs have brutally taken over, murdering up to 200 civilians. An international investigation in July found “horrific violence against civilians”.

The profits from these blood diamonds are being used to finance a political militia that has already killed thousands of Zimbabweans, and threatens the fragile unity government in the country. Letting Mugabe keep these diamonds could finance a whole new war.

All of us are learning the ways in which our decisions about what we buy and do can affect the lives of our fellow human beings half a world away. An engagement ring should be something given and worn out of love, let’s tell diamond regulators to keep it that way:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/diamonds_for_love_not_hate

With hope,

Ricken, Alice, Benjamin, Graziela, Luis, Milena, Paul, Ben, Paula, Pascal and the whole of the Avaaz team

PS:

Once you’ve taken action, vote for Avaaz on the influential Huffington Post “New Media Game-Changers” poll! http://www.avaaz.org/huffpo (vote 10 for Avaaz as the ultimate game changer)

Sources:

A Human Rights Watch report on the Zimbabwe mines:
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/06/26/diamonds-rough-0

The Kimberley process report:
http://www.zimonline.co.za/Article.aspx?ArticleId=5303

Articles on the possible ban this week:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8337385.stm

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2009-11-02-zim-faces-possible-suspension-from-global-diamond-trade

More from Global Witness, a member of the Kimberley Process:
http://www.globalwitness.org/media_library_detail.php/861/en/campaigners_call_for_urgent_action_on_zimbabwe_blo

More on Zimbabwe’s political crisis:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article6896171.ece

People will need to turn vegetarian if the world is to conquer climate change, according to a leading authority on global warming.

In an interview with The Times, Lord Stern of Brentford said: “Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Lord Stern, the author of the influential 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling global warming, said that a successful deal at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December would lead to soaring costs for meat and other foods that generate large quantities of greenhouse gases.

He predicted that people’s attitudes would evolve until meat eating became unacceptable. “I think it’s important that people think about what they are doing and that includes what they are eating,” he said. “I am 61 now and attitudes towards drinking and driving have changed radically since I was a student. People change their notion of what is responsible. They will increasingly ask about the carbon content of their food.”

Lord Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank and now I. G. Patel Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, warned that British taxpayers would need to contribute about £3 billion a year by 2015 to help poor countries to cope with the inevitable impact of climate change.

He also issued a clear message to President Obama that he must attend the meeting in Copenhagen in person in order for an effective deal to be reached. US leadership, he said, was “desperately needed” to secure a deal.

He said that he was deeply concerned that popular opinion had so far failed to grasp the scale of the changes needed to address climate change, or of the importance of the UN meeting in Copenhagen from December 7 to December 18. “I am not sure that people fully understand what we are talking about or the kind of changes that will be necessary,” he added.

Up to 20,000 delegates from 192 countries are due to attend the UN conference in the Danish capital. Its aim is to forge a deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to prevent an increase in global temperatures of more than 2 degrees centigrade. Any increase above this level is expected to trigger runaway climate change, threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Lord Stern said that Copenhagen presented a unique opportunity for the world to break free from its catastrophic current trajectory. He said that the world needed to agree to halve global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to 25 gigatonnes a year from the current level of 50 gigatonnes.

UN figures suggest that meat production is responsible for about 18 per cent of global carbon emissions, including the destruction of forest land for cattle ranching and the production of animal feeds such as soy.

Lord Stern, who said that he was not a strict vegetarian himself, was speaking on the eve of an all-parliamentary debate on climate change. His remarks provoked anger from the meat industry.

Jonathan Scurlock, of the National Farmers Union, said: “Going vegetarian is not a worldwide solution. It’s not a view shared by the NFU. Farmers in this country are interested in evidence-based policymaking. We don’t have a methane-free cow or pig available to us.”

On average, a British person eats 50g of protein derived from meat each day — the equivalent of a chicken breast or a lamb chop. This is a relatively low level for a wealthy country but between 25 per cent and 50 per cent higher than the amount recommended by the World Health Organisation.

Su Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Vegetarian Society, welcomed Lord Stern’s remarks. “What we choose to eat is one of the biggest factors in our personal impact on the environment,” she said. “Meat uses up a lot of resources and a vegetarian diet consumes a lot less land and water. One of the best things you can do about climate change is reduce the amount of meat in your diet.”

The UN has warned that meat consumption is on course to double by the middle of the century.

Saturday’s International Day of Climate Action gave us overwhelming evidence of hope at a time of widespread despair on global warming.

Last month, scientists predicted a 6.3 degree rise in average temperatures — higher than previously estimated — by the end of this century, even if the strongest pollution-reduction targets proposed by the world’s leaders go into effect. (The most recent ice age, for context, was triggered by a 3 degree change in average temperatures.) The Obama administration, meanwhile, has been criticized for weakening its stance on the climate issue, and hopes are dimming for an international treaty at the December climate summit in Copenhagen. As Democrats struggle to pass a domestic cap-and-trade bill, partisan battles are increasingly shrill and contentious, casting doubt on the bill’s chance of passage anytime soon. Even if it were to pass, enviros have criticized the legislation as “woefully inadequate” and “less than worthless.”

Most of us are deaf to these laments. The more strident and dismal the climate battle becomes, the more the American public tunes out. We can’t ignore the science, but we’ve got to move past the partisan bickering, past the politics of doom and gloom, and focus on what’s going right. As Saturday’s event made clear, there’s a lot going right:

1. We are connected.

Online organizing and social media — Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, Facebook, blogs — are ushering in a new era of coalition-building and global climate outreach breathtaking in scope. These online tools “enable us to track the growing momentum on this issue,” 350.org organizer May Boeve told me. “That’s vital to movement building.” Daily twitters and blog posts on climate change number in the tens of millions — spreading information, rallying lobbyists, and stoking innovation. Al Gore, for one, has nearly two million followers on Twitter — more than Martha Stewart.

2. We have a target.

The most complex scientific problem humanity has ever faced has been distilled into a three-digit manifesto — 350. Transcending language and education barriers, this global target was spelled out on beaches, mountain tops, monuments, and town squares, in human bodies linked to human bodies.

3. We have youth.

Kids and students were a highlight of the 350 event — reflecting the youth climate movement that has been growing globally in recent years. In the US, the Energy Action Coalition has convened hundreds of thousands of students who are greening their campuses, lobbying state legislatures and Congress, and partnering with activists worldwide — members of the China Youth Climate Action Network, Khmer Youth Association, Accion Climatica Colombia, the Indian Youth Climate Network, among other groups. In place of the panda, they’ve have chosen for their symbol the green hard hat, representing a new era of green jobs.

4. We have diversity.

Saturday’s event produced the world’s first grand-scale portrait of the global climate movement-and most of them looked nothing like Al Gore. The images of activists across all economic strata in Mumbai, Instanbul, Cairo, Dhakam, Gaborone and well beyond made it clear that environmentalism is no longer the domain of the white, privileged Prius-and-polar-bear set.

5. We have a movement.

As the global climate movement diversifies, D.C.-based environmental groups have been joining forces with labor, veterans and religious groups in a broad coalition dubbed Clean Energy Works. The group is mobilizing organizers in 28 states and spending handsomely on television ads to promote climate policies that will transition America to a green economy and create millions of clean jobs.

6. We have action.

In the months leading up to the 350 event, governmental leaders of the Maldives Islands held a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear to expose the global warming threat. Greenpeace activists scaled the Houses of Parliament in London carrying “Change the Politics — Save the Climate” signs. Student activists blockaded the entrance to a coal plant in downtown Washington D.C. This is activism with a wow-factor — reminiscent of the 60s-era outreach that helped trigger a sea change in environmental policy.

7. We have faith.

Churches in the Presbyterians of America alliance tolled their bells 350 times. The target was also spelled out in signs draped across synagogues and mosques. Faith-based climate activism has been gaining ground in recent years, in particular the “creation care” movement spearheaded by evangelicals. With a membership of 45,000 churches and 7,000 megachurches, National Association of Evangelicals, for instance, is supporting mandatory carbon caps.

8. We have profit motive.

General Electric, Google, and Duke Energy are among a multitude of big-brand businesses positioning themselves to profit from a 350 ppm target —innovating climate solutions from electric cars to smart-grid components. We need these climate profiteers. To borrow and reinterpret a line from Thomas Edison: Corporate innovators are finally discovering what the world needs — and they’re proceeding to invent.

In a 1979 presidential address Jimmy Carter quoted an activist friend who said, “We’ve got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying.” These words resonate today as we face so much despair and political paralysis on climate change. The good news is that the sweating, walking and praying has begun.

Amanda Little is the author of Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells, Our Ride to the Renewal Future (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers).

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amanda-little/eight-reasons-for-hope-on_b_336046.html

Yesterday, the English Observer belatedly picked up an article written for the September issue of Standpoint magazine by Jessica Mann, a reviewer who covers crime fiction for the Literary Review. In it, Mann criticizes the genre for revelling in the brutalization of women, and writes that “however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me.”

I sympathize with Mann—I can’t stomach much mutilation, and I wouldn’t want my job to be wading in dismembered female bodies. Judging by the response in the blogosphere, though, you’d think this was kinda like Marlon Brando refusing his Oscar or Jonathan Franzen turning down Oprah. But the problem of crimes against women in crime fiction has been often noted: here’s a rundown of some of the more sickening passages you’ll find in today’s popular offerings.

The debate, however, is not just about female mutilation—it’s about terminology. First, it’s about the “F” word. Mann writes:

The trend cannot be attributed to an anti-feminist backlash because the most inventive fiction of this kind is written by women.

In a 2007 piece in the Guardian, Julie Bendel asked why women love to write and read about other women being brutalized:

Given my work as a feminist activist and writer, you might expect me to hate the crime genre. I have spent the whole of my adult life fighting male violence, and much of my work involves researching topics such as rape, child sexual abuse, pornography and murder…. Yet, when it comes to fiction, the serial killer genre is my favourite.

I understand Mann’s and Bindel’s basic premise—that women who care about women shouldn’t, in a logical sense, like to write or read about violence against women—but they both seem to ignore that women can be part of an “anti-feminist backlash,” that men can be feminists, that feminism means different things to different people, that it might have very little to do with what is going on here. When a headline on a Web site geared toward women asks “Feminist or Misogynist?” in a (thoughtful) consideration of Stieg Larsson’s “Girl” trilogy, is that helpful or merely polarizing? Must we choose?

The “F” word is not alone. There’s another word commonly thrown around in this discussion that really seems to turn people’s heads upside down: the “L” word. In 2007, Ian Rankin caused a stir when he quipped, “The people writing the most graphic novels today are women. They are mostly lesbians as well, which I find interesting.”

I suppose it is terribly interesting—if one’s logic follows the proposition “If L then F,” and if you are quite certain what each variable signifies. The popular media was pretty certain: it badgered Val McDermid, a lesbian, for a response (which the Times Online ran with the headline “Revenge of the Bloodthirsty Lesbians”). She called it “arrant rubbish,” and said, “I’ll tell you what pisses me off more than almost anything: when people say, ‘As a woman, how do you feel about writing on violence?’ Have you ever heard a male crime writer being asked, ‘As a man, how do you feel about writing about violence?’ ”

McDermid keeps it real: this debate is about men and women, and mostly about women, a “demographic” that contains multitudes, that is comprised of individuals who may resist any label, even that of “woman.” So it’s a debate about humans, and it turns on the question “Are Women Human?” Not when they are being lumped into unhelpful categories so that they can be lazily scrutinized by the press.

The New Yorker

• Malaria is a life-threatening disease caused by parasites that are transmitted to people through the bites of infected mosquitoes.
• A child dies of malaria every 30 seconds.
• There were 247 million cases of malaria in 2006, causing nearly one million deaths, mostly among African children.
• Malaria is preventable and curable.
• Approximately half of the world’s population is at risk of malaria, particularly those living in lower-income countries.
• Travellers from malaria-free areas to disease “hot spots” are especially vulnerable to the disease.
• Malaria takes an economic toll - cutting economic growth rates by as much as 1.3% in countries with high disease rates.