Africa

Source: Planet Ark

Mozambique has approved the construction of a $2 billion hydro-electric dam in a bid to increase power generation and attract foreign investments, the state-run Noticias daily newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The paper quoted Energy Minister Salvador Namburete as saying the new Mphanda Nkuwa dam would be built 60 kilometers downstream from the Cahora Bassa Hydro-electric dam (HCB) on the Zambezi River and would produce 1,500 megawatts of power.

Namburete said ownership of the dam would be split 20 percent by state-run Electricidade de Moçambique (EDM) and 80 percent by a 50-50 joint venture by local company Energia Capital and Brazil's Camargo Correia.

"It's an infrastructure that will bring quality investments that will contribute to industrialization and the economic and social development of the country," Namburete said.

Four turbines each with a capacity of 375 MW would be built in phase one of the project, expected to start in 2011, he said.

Source: Disinformation

In June 2010 the world’s most popular sporting event – soccer’s FIFA World Cup – will come to Africa for the first time. With less than two weeks remaining before the first match of the month-long tournament, one can practically hear the soon to be famous vuvuzelas – ubiquitous and deafening plastic horns that South Africans love to blow during the games – all the way around the world, such is the gathering media hype.

There is no doubting the overwhelming sense of excitement at large in South Africa. However, if one digs a little deeper, there are also those who question the vast sums being spent by the government of what is still a nation with millions of its citizens living in poverty.

On the road, as we travelled from city to city, and town to town, speaking to people, the film’s central theme came into focus. Why would a country with daunting socio-economic challenges, choose to spend its limited resources on building the world’s most modern sports arenas? This question (and the film itself) does not suggest that South Africa should not be hosting the World Cup. It concerns why a Third World country, which will be providing the facilities for FIFA to make more money than it has ever made from a single tournament, should not have used its existing stadiums – as it did when it staged World Cups in Rugby and Cricket, and the FIFA Confederations Cup in 2009 – and staged the event in a manner more in keeping with the country’s actual circumstances and capacity.

What emerged in the course of making the film is that decisions were taken to abandon plans to renovate existing stadiums, in favor of building new facilities. In Cape Town and Durban, the building of new stadiums has rendered existing stadiums obsolete. There will certainly be no use for two large stadiums in each of these cities, and the local municipality has acknowledged that it intends to demolish the 55,000-seat Kings Park stadium – where Manchester United, Manchester City, and every major international rugby team, have played in front of capacity crowds.

Given that the World Cup is essentially a television event, one is left to wonder whether the enjoyment of fans around the world is really dependent on whether a match is being played in a stadium that is less than a year old. Sure, shots of brand new stadiums will look good before the kick-off but, to put things in perspective, is this a good reason to divert South Africa’s limited resources away from keeping people alive and building houses for them? And when the historic significance of a tournament of this caliber being staged in Africa is trumpeted by FIFA and the organizers, is it not curious that a First World model (which South Africa can ill-afford) is being adhered to?

Perhaps the most astonishing part of the film concerns the building of a stadium in Mbombela – a rural area near the Kruger National Park where tourists go to see wildlife. Near a town which does not have a top flight soccer or rugby team, and which does not have a population of the necessary magnitude to provide any enduring fan base, a 48,000-seat stadium is being built to stage 4 World Cup matches over a 10 day period. No coherent explanation has been provided as to the stadium’s use after the World Cup is over.

Source: The Guardian

The Deepwater Horizon disaster caused headlines around the world, yet the people who live in the Niger delta have had to live with environmental catastrophes for decades.

We reached the edge of the oil spill near the Nigerian village of Otuegwe after a long hike through cassava plantations. Ahead of us lay swamp. We waded into the warm tropical water and began swimming, cameras and notebooks held above our heads. We could smell the oil long before we saw it – the stench of garage forecourts and rotting vegetation hanging thickly in the air.

The farther we travelled, the more nauseous it became. Soon we were swimming in pools of light Nigerian crude, the best-quality oil in the world. One of the many hundreds of 40-year-old pipelines that crisscross the Niger delta had corroded and spewed oil for several months.

Forest and farmland were now covered in a sheen of greasy oil. Drinking wells were polluted and people were distraught. No one knew how much oil had leaked. "We lost our nets, huts and fishing pots," said Chief Promise, village leader of Otuegwe and our guide. "This is where we fished and farmed. We have lost our forest. We told Shell of the spill within days, but they did nothing for six months."

That was the Niger delta a few years ago, where, according to Nigerian academics, writers and environment groups, oil companies have acted with such impunity and recklessness that much of the region has been devastated by leaks.

In fact, more oil is spilled from the delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a major ecological catastrophe caused by oil that has poured from a leak triggered by the explosion that wrecked BP's Deepwater Horizon rig last month.

That disaster, which claimed the lives of 11 rig workers, has made headlines round the world. By contrast, little information has emerged about the damage inflicted on the Niger delta. Yet the destruction there provides us with a far more accurate picture of the price we have to pay for drilling oil today.

On 1 May this year a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in the state of Akwa Ibom spilled more than a million gallons into the delta over seven days before the leak was stopped. Local people demonstrated against the company but say they were attacked by security guards. Community leaders are now demanding $1bn in compensation for the illness and loss of livelihood they suffered. Few expect they will succeed. In the meantime, thick balls of tar are being washed up along the coast.

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This point was backed by Williams Mkpa, a community leader in Ibeno: "Oil companies do not value our life; they want us to all die. In the past two years, we have experienced 10 oil spills and fishermen can no longer sustain their families. It is not tolerable."

With 606 oilfields, the Niger delta supplies 40% of all the crude the United States imports and is the world capital of oil pollution. Life expectancy in its rural communities, half of which have no access to clean water, has fallen to little more than 40 years over the past two generations. Locals blame the oil that pollutes their land and can scarcely believe the contrast with the steps taken by BP and the US government to try to stop the Gulf oil leak and to protect the Louisiana shoreline from pollution.

"If this Gulf accident had happened in Nigeria, neither the government nor the company would have paid much attention," said the writer Ben Ikari, a member of the Ogoni people. "This kind of spill happens all the time in the delta."

"The oil companies just ignore it. The lawmakers do not care and people must live with pollution daily.

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One report, compiled by WWF UK, the World Conservation Union and representatives from the Nigerian federal government and the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, calculated in 2006 that up to 1.5m tons of oil – 50 times the pollution unleashed in the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Alaska – has been spilled in the delta over the past half century. Last year Amnesty calculated that the equivalent of at least 9m barrels of oil was spilled and accused the oil companies of a human rights outrage.

Judith Kimerling, a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York and author of Amazon Crude, a book about oil development in Ecuador, said: "Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care."

There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law. Bassey said: "What we conclude from the Gulf of Mexico pollution incident is that the oil companies are out of control.

"It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice."

For all 24 parts click here.

" Announcing his success at a 2001 press conference, the president of Epicyte, Mitch Hein, pointing to his GMO corn plants, announced, “We have a hothouse filled with corn plants that make anti-sperm antibodies."

...they had taken antibodies from women with a rare condition known as immune infertility, isolated the genes that regulated the manufacture of those infertility antibodies, and, using genetic engineering techniques, had inserted the genes into ordinary corn seeds used to produce corn plants. In this manner, they produced a concealed contraceptive embedded in corn meant for human consumption." - William Engdahl

These are complex times, built upon complex systems. The population of the planet is being severely strained now, crop failures and the loss of arable land due to soil salinity, drought, decimated water tables, floods, soil erosion, super weeds, desertification and nutrient depletion only compounds the intensifying shortage of fertilizer availability as price accessibility declines across the planet. The move to sterilize populations is an ill advised attempt to manage the energy and food depletion scenario now playing itself out, the bitter fruit of a Malthusian action plan that has been devised upon an energy scarcity reality model.

Humanity is being led by a conspiracy of belief down a road of utter dependence and helplessness, where the connection between society and food becomes one of sheer desperation. This growing desperation is the elephant in the room, the cancer in the body, and the wholly unnatural development that degrades the status of the human being and deadens the human experience. Our dependence on external forces which are outside the scope of our understanding is based entirely on a mystical and magical belief that someone is taking care of us, that someone is guarding the gates, protecting us from that which we deny about the world.

Strategic local food networks will play a vital role in the world of tomorrow; those who build those networks now, and those who started building yesterday, are going to be the leaders of a hungry world. One thing needs to be very clear however, the Monsanto's and Bayer's of the world must be stopped, they must be overturned, their technology quarantined and relegated to 'secure bio-labs' until we can sort out the science in an objective, non profit oriented way.

The population reduction plan will continue under the guise of philanthropy and nation building, and the agenda of food control will continue as strategic interests consolidate the food chain, carrying out all the while a planned genetic contamination of the worlds staple crops. These things will continue unless and until we do something about it. Hiding on a farm in the middle of Gods land will not protect us from the encroachment, it will only delay the inevitable.


Source: Financial Sense

One long-standing project of the US Government has been to perfect a genetically-modified variety of corn, the diet staple in Mexico and many other Latin American countries. The corn has been field tested in tests financed by the US Department of Agriculture along with a small California bio-tech company named Epicyte. Announcing his success at a 2001 press conference, the president of Epicyte, Mitch Hein, pointing to his GMO corn plants, announced, “We have a hothouse filled with corn plants that make anti-sperm antibodies.”

Hein explained that they had taken antibodies from women with a rare condition known as immune infertility, isolated the genes that regulated the manufacture of those infertility antibodies, and, using genetic engineering techniques, had inserted the genes into ordinary corn seeds used to produce corn plants. In this manner, in reality they produced a concealed contraceptive embedded in corn meant for human consumption. “Essentially, the antibodies are attracted to surface receptors on the sperm,” said Hein. “They latch on and make each sperm so heavy it cannot move forward. It just shakes about as if it was doing the lambada.” 15 Hein claimed it was a possible solution to world “over-population.” The moral and ethical issues of feeding it to humans in Third World poor countries without their knowing it countries he left out of his remarks.

Spermicides hidden in GMO corn provided to starving Third World populations through the generosity of the Gates’ foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Kofi Annan’s AGRA or vaccines that contain undisclosed sterilization agents are just two documented cases of using vaccines or GMO seeds to “reduce population.”

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Gates’ TED2010 speech on zero emissions and population reduction is consistent with a report that appeared in New York City’s ethnic media, Irish.Central.com in May 2009. According to the report, a secret meeting took place on May 5, 2009 at the home of Sir Paul Nurse, President of Rockefeller University, among some of the wealthiest people in America. Investment guru Warren Buffett who in 2006 decided to pool his $30 billion Buffett Foundation into the Gates foundation to create the world’s largest private foundation with some $60 billions of tax-free dollars was present. Banker David Rockefeller was the host.

The exclusive letter of invitation was signed by Gates, Rockefeller and Buffett. They decided to call themselves the “Good Club.” Also present was media czar Ted Turner, billionaire founder of CNN who stated in a 1996 interview for the Audubon nature magazine, where he said that a 95% reduction of world population to between 225-300 million would be “ideal.” In a 2008 interview at Philadelphia’s Temple University, Turner fine-tuned the number to 2 billion, a cut of more than 70% from today’s population.

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But the central theme and purpose of the secret Good Club meeting of the plutocrats was the priority concern posed by Bill Gates, namely, how to advance more effectively their agenda of birth control and global population reduction. In the talks a consensus reportedly emerged that they would “back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.” 18

Global Eugenics agenda

Gates and Buffett are major funders of global population reduction programs, as is Turner, whose UN Foundation was created to funnel $1 billion of his tax-free stock option earnings in AOL-Time-Warner into various birth reduction programs in the developing world.19 The programs in Africa and elsewhere are masked as philanthropy and providing health services for poor Africans. In reality they involve involuntary population sterilization via vaccination and other medicines that make women of child-bearing age infertile. The Gates Foundation, where Buffett deposited the bulk of his wealth two years ago, is also backing introduction of GMO seeds into Africa under the cloak of the Kofi Annan-led ‘Second Green Revolution’ in Africa. The introduction of GMO patented seeds in Africa to date has met with enormous indigenous resistance.

Source: WSWS

Twenty years ago, Nelson Mandela walked free from Victor Verster prison. His release on 2 February 1990 heralded the end of the apartheid system, which maintained rigid racial segregation and disenfranchised the black and coloured majority in South Africa. The elections that followed in 1994 brought Mandela to power as president of a country that was hailed as the “Rainbow Nation”.

Two decades later, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world, despite the ending of apartheid. The limited political gains that were made have not translated into greater social and economic equality. Rather, the gap between rich and poor has widened, and more South Africans now live in poverty than in 1990.

Some 70 percent of the population live below the official poverty line, according to the latest figures. Unemployment stands at about 40 percent of the workforce according to any realistic estimate. At the same time, the richest members of society have increased their annual earnings by as much as 50 percent.

Social inequality has grown between ethnic groups, as well as within them. The majority of black South Africans are still living in poverty, but a tiny minority of those at the top of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) have become billionaires and joined the wealthy elite that ran South Africa under the apartheid regime.