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STEVE METCALF
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The Swamp Man
All your kin have all gone on to fields all bathed in sun.
And the only thing left in your possession is an empty bottle and a gun.
And the weekends come and go like tides, and they soak you to the neck.
And pretty soon the weekdays are all the same.
"Bringin' Home the Rain" The Builders and the Butchers
IT WAS SOMETHING ABOUT THE EYES, I guess. With 15 completely different lives I suppose the first thing I looked at was my hands. Lines. Callouses. Dirt. Grime. Cuts and scars. But, later, it was the eyes. People might think that the old adage about the eyes being the window to the soul was a load of crap. Somehow, though, it's true.
It wasn't always the first thing I did, but it had somehow gotten away from me with Riley. The craziness of the Tracy murder wall seemed to throw everything out of whack. But I had finally taken the time to look.
It was Monday morning. I had slept fine the previous night. I felt like I finally had put all the clues together about the events of the last week. Tracy's death. Riley's death. My awakening at the wreckage. I was standing in the bathroom, towel around my waist. Fog decorating the corners of the mirror. I leaned forward and finally had a good look at Riley's eyes. Green. Very pale. There were some bright yellow flecks. They were spaced unevenly. A pattern in its non-pattern-ness. Quite interesting.
I took a deep breath, smiled at my reflection, and finished getting ready.
THE WRECKAGE LOOKED DIFFERENT in the morning light. With fresh eyes. With a brain that wasn't busy resetting itself after dying and coming back to life. With the time taken to actually look around. It truly was a sight.
I had reached the site an hour before the intended time. I drove the Bronco the mile-plus off the road and parked in a flat section near the plane. I spent the time walking around. It wasn't much of a tourist attraction, so the government hadn't bothered with any paved parking lots, souvenir shops or gaudy information booths. There was a small plaque near the front of the ruin. It was basically a mystery. Originally discovered in the late 1980s, officials had never been able to identify the aircraft. There were no flight plans. No passenger manifests. Nothing.
The plaque mentioned the type of aircraft, the year manufactured and that was about it. Everything beyond that was a mystery.
I continued walking. Gentle, sloping dunes. Scrub vegetation. Tiny, mitten-shaped cacti. I found the spot where I had awoken. It was then that I had another small firecracker moment. Not from that day, but from maybe a few weeks … or even months … past.
I was meeting Tracy for lunch. We didn't work too far away from each other, but still didn't make a habit out of it. We both wanted to ensure we remained individuals to strengthen the couple. A notion she brought into the relationship, and I didn't disagree. I remember something about her being burned in college. A relationship that overwhelmed her individuality. She was bound and determined not to let that happen again. I was waiting to cross the street to get to her and she was waiting outside the building. We hadn't made plans on where to eat, just that we'd meet at her lobby entrance.
A small group of men approached her. She had just noticed me and waved, smiling, across the intersection. I waved back. Could actually feel my arm move up in the dream and waggle back and forth. The man at the head of the three took notice of Tracy and gave her the elevator eyes. In other words, looked her up and down and back up again. Her face down to her legs and back up to her chest. He gently elbowed one of the other two men in the side and pointed to her. I could feel myself getting mad inside the memory. I suppose, guys can be a bit predictable. But, damn. So obvious. The three men walked past her and turned to enter the building. The man who had taken the time to drink her in gave her rear a lingering look until his friends pulled him into the building.
And they were gone.
I wasn't sure at that time what I was watching. Who they were. Where they worked. But, now, I could build some context around the scenario.
Jackson.
Riley would find out later, but I only knew from his profile picture on the murder wall. He worked in the building with Tracy. Katy didn't trust him. Said he had a reputation. He was something of a cad, they would have said in decades past.
Riley's distrust for him began almost immediately.
Tracy continued expressing her innocence, reassuring Riley there was nothing to worry about. She had zero interest in Jackson. Even if she wasn't in a relationship, the man simply creeped her out. He, she said, couldn't be trusted.
And then, ejecting me from this episode of the Riley Show, the sound of an approaching car. Tires on gravel. The gentle whine of brakes. I heard a car door open and then close. I was on the other side of the crash, so I stepped around to the front, breathing deeply.
I was nervous, but confident. This type of confrontation could go anywhere.
As I crested the ruined nose of the wind-ravaged aircraft I first saw his car and then him.
Boots.
"I WAS A LITTLE SHOCKED to get your text, man," Boots said, standing by the hood of his car. He spoke loudly as I was still about 20 yards away. He wore a pair of blue jeans and a light gray t-shirt. The logo of some tennis shoe company splashed in yellow across his chest. "What's this all about?"
For me, I was dressed even more casually. Cargo shorts. T-shirt and a Columbia windbreaker. Riley, for whatever reason, seemed to have a closet full of them. Oddly enough, I was wearing a pair of sneakers that matched the brand of Boots's shirt. I had both hands in my pockets. I kept walking forward. I had the same backpack Riley wore Saturday morning slung over one shoulder. It was light. Only carrying a couple objects. Probably more of a histrionic accoutrement than anything else.
I closed the distance to about 10 yards and stopped. He came forward a few paces.
"I bet you were shocked to see me come through the door at Melters, Teddy," I said. Not smiling. Not scowling. Just the facts. A question buried inside a statement.
To his credit, he didn't really react. Just a twitch at the corner of his mouth. The eyes, however, moved rapidly, taking in their surroundings.
"I don't really follow," he said, grinning now. "We were supposed to meet there. Jones and I got there a little early, is all."
I grinned a little at that, but it was calculated. I hid some sad irony in it. A smile that said Sure you did. Of course.
"You were smart about it, I suppose," I said. "But you made two huge mistakes."
I continued walking forward, hands in pockets. I shifted my left shoulder, gently hefting the backpack. Holding it in place. It hadn't moved, of course. It was more of a nervous tic than anything.
"You did a nice job hiding behind Jackson," I continued, now about five feet away from him. I stopped walking and cocked my head sideways. Like a puppy hearing an unfamiliar sound. "I wonder. Did you help Riley build that murder wall? Were you somehow pulling the strings? You must have been mad when the newspaper article mentioned you as the designated driver. DD. Teddy Hoffman. AKA, Boots."
"What are you talking about, man?" Boots said, the same muscle twitch at the corner of his mouth. Again, he glanced around. Was he waiting for backup? Did he send someone out here early? Now that I think about it, he was a bit early. It was still only about 8:45.
I shrugged both shoulders.
"Maybe I'm crazy," I said. "Talking out of my ass. I remember Tracy having other suitors in high school. Maybe a boyfriend or two in college. Maybe one who made a big play for her while he was on a gap year. I don't know. Not all the memories have come back into focus, yet. But I'm getting there." I paused for a moment, taking a deep, steadying breath. "You got pretty lucky, though, didn't you? When I came to you with concerns about Jackson? But still, like I said, two mistakes. Well, three, really. The third one is the problem."
He was quiet. He shrugged his shoulders also, just a big play, sort of a You're being nuts, man gesture.
"I bet you did help him set up that big corkboard," I said. "You knew you were in trouble, though, when Riley started asking different questions."
"Like, where did Jackson get the Rohypnol? Sure, he was a sleaze, but he still had to get them from somewhere. It was you," I said, grinning that sad grin again. "You gave them to him. But you were a designated driver that night for Tracy's company. And the sleaze gave you a plan. You dosed Tracy. I bet you gave her a bottle of water in your car. Claimed it would help her sober up. It was your first mistake. A terrible one. But not your worst. She had accidentally taken a double-dose of her blood pressure meds that day. Plus a bunch of alcohol at the work party's open bar. Then a dose of roofies. Literally stopped her heart. What is it? Unintentional murder? Manslaughter, I think."
"Hey, man," Boots said, holding his hands up, palms out. "This is crazy."
"But, there was a problem. Riley didn't believe it was just a heart attack like the official report said. He started digging. Talked to Katy. Found out about Jackson wanting to make a play for Tracy. Talked to Little York. Found out more about Jackson. Maybe York had a theory about the date-rape drug. Maybe that came later. So, you stepped in to help your buddy build some sort of amateur investigation. That way, you could steer him away from the truth."
Boots had put his arms back down to his sides. The muscles in his face were slumped, but his shoulders were tense. Ready for some sort of action.
"But something went wrong, didn't it? Something that shifted the blame. So you had to take care of him yourself. What was it? Riley chased the Rohypnol too hard, right? Found out the truth. That you were the supplier. You were the DD. You had the crush on Tracy. He had changed his hypothesis and you found out about it. That's why the calls and texts. The warnings from York went unanswered. You lured him out here. And then spread the rumors about Riley coming out here with Jackson. Went on and on about how you've never been to The Wreckage. Made a big show of it at the restaurant."
Boots now had his hands on his hips.
"Dude, you're crazy. I don't know where any of this is coming from."
"Still have that rodent problem out at the farmhouse?" I asked.
His eyes narrowed for a moment and then went wide.
"That was your second mistake. You left the water bottle here," I said as I reached back into the backpack and pulled an empty bottle of Irish River out. I held it in my left hand. "Phosphine. It's a gas that is formed when rat poison mixes with water or stomach acid. It's what kills. Problem is, it leaves a weird smell. Something like fishy garlic. Or garlic-y fish." I wobbled the bottle back and forth, sloshing the remaining water hard enough that it actually made a noise.
Boots sprang into action, he jumped forward and snatched the bottle out of my hand, and then jumped back. It was a quick move, but I was ready for it. I sidestepped a knee that was intended for my groin and let him step away. He quickly opened the bottle and waved out the remaining water, kicking the dirt around and then dropped the bottle to let it air out. Seemingly, to remove any traces of rat poison from the container. This action completed, Boots stood with his feet spread wide – a tad wider than shoulder width. He pulled a gun from the waistband at the small of his back. He pointed it at me. I stood still. Right hand still in my pocket. Left hand, that had held the water bottle, hung limply at my side.
I smiled.
"Yes, you son of a bitch," Boots said. "You kept digging. I don't know why. You hated Jackson. He was a douchebag. It took two seconds to pin the rape drug on him. I felt terrible about Tracy. Loved her. But I wasn't going to jail over it. A dumbass mistake."
"But not your last," I said and flicked my eyes over his right shoulder. A quick movement, but one just visible enough, just hidden enough, to give him pause. A moment of confusion and I leapt forward.
I had spent several lifetimes in various military service units. Professional training as well as alley-fights. Boots was bigger than me, but he stood no chance.
I jumped forward and spun 180 degrees trapping his outstretched gun arm in my right armpit. In one continuous motion, I continued the spin, disarming him with the circular movement, elbowing him in the throat with my left arm and them punching him square in the face as my right fist continued back through the additional 180 degrees. The force was a product of momentum and anger. He had staggered from the elbow to the throat, and he dropped instantly from the broken nose. It was as if his knees had suddenly lost a battle against gravity. He fell to the ground emitting a sound much like BOOF.
Even before his body had completed its bounce against the front bumper of his car, I had reached down and scooped up the pistol, knelt down and held it at the ready in my left hand.
"You've got nothing," he said. "I just dumped your poison water out. I got rid of all the rat poison at my house. Why didn't you die, you bastard? I put enough in that water to kill five men."
"Oh," I said smiling. "You thought that was the water bottle with the poison in it? Remember how you marked the dosed bottle? The little blue dot? No. That was the clean water. The instrument of my death is still locked away safely. Why did Riley have two water bottles? Why did you give him one clean and one contaminated?" I was quiet for a moment. So was Boots. "It's no matter. What's done is done."
I reached back into my pocket with the right hand and pulled out a small device. It was the digital recorder I had purchased at the drugstore. Amplified microphone. I overpaid, but it was okay. I let Boots see it, clicked it off, and put it back in my pocket. It was comical, the progression of visible emotions that ran across the man's face. He was confused, sorrowful, angry and defeated all very nearly at the same time. He realized that the digital voice recorder represented.
"You son of a bitch," he said, under his breath.
"Yes," I said. "I am. And you don't even know the half of it. Now, Jones is here, too," I said, outstretching the gun just a bit. "Not as a friend. As law enforcement. He'll take your actions today and what you've said and start building a case against you. But right now, you're going to shut up and listen to me."
I could tell that Boots was preparing some sort of tough-guy response. Eventually, though, he thought better of it. His eyes flicked to the gun, and then to my eyes. He must have seen something in them. And then he got a taste of his own blood streaming down from his broken nose. It must have been sobering.
"I need you to listen to me and understand something," I said, holding the gun rock-steady, enjoying the weight of it. Felt like ages since I had held one and I always liked it. I was good at it.
"Dosing Tracy was your first mistake but not dumbest thing you've ever done in your life. The dumbest thing you ever did was to go after Riley. You see, poisoning him opened a portal to Hell. And I'm the demon that crawled up out of it."
"What are you talking about, man?" Boots said, his voice slightly blurred because the broken nose and the rapidly congesting sinuses. "You're Riley. Why are you talking like that?"
He wasn't fully grasping what I was saying. And how could he? While reincarnation was a generally known concept, the witch's curse that I had dealt with for nearly two dozen generations was something of a conundrum.
"I don't owe you any sort of explanation, and I've only got a couple minutes," I said, leaning in a bit closer. Boots tried to scoot backward, willing himself, somehow, to creep away from the gun – and my crazy eyes – through the hood of his car. "I've lived for more than 600 years. Going from lifetime to lifetime. I've learned spectacular ways to inflict pain. Now. I don't know how many years you're going to get for the crimes you've committed but, rest assured, I have taken these crimes personally. I'll let you struggle through the consequences of this country's legal system. But if you ever get out, I'll be waiting for you. And you will pay the price that I have determined. And I can almost guarantee that it will be more violent than anything you will face for what you did to Tracy. And what you did to Riley. You opened this door. Now you gotta deal with what came through."
At that point I stood and stepped back from Boots. I had heard the footsteps coming from behind me.
The second text that I had sent last night was to Detective Jones. I drove him out here this morning and he hid over another rise. He wanted to confront Boots himself after we discussed the water bottle. The poison. The name of the Rohypnol supplier – York was more than happy to link Jackson to Teddy "Boots" Hoffman. We just needed some sort of confession to get the entire official investigation running.
He came up huffing and puffing a little and I could hear the sirens coming in the distance. So much had relied on my ability to get a couple crucial bits of information in a short time. I handed Jones the gun – he took it with two fingers at the base of the grip. I think he was trying to salvage any fingerprints. I smiled. The chance to get fingerprints off a weapon's grip are slim to none. His ballistics guys will know to look at the magazine. The bullets. Internal bits.
I took the voice recorder out of my pocket and handed it to him. He held up the small blue and silver device and nodded.
"Stand up," he said, looking at Boots on the ground. "Hands behind your back."
The first squad car arrived, and I turned to walk back to my Bronco, now resting in the shadow of the wreckage. I grinned to myself, and it quickly turned into a smile. The smile of the victor.
© 2014 by Steve Metcalf. Created with Wix.com


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


In Webinar 2 from our Summer Spraying Series 'Summer spray season challenges', we hear from Spray Application Specialist, Bill Gordon.
Correct spray set-up and operation can guarantee efficacy, decontamination and reduce drift. The impact of managing a summer spray event effectively will have benefits to the crop, the neighbours and your 'peace of mind', knowing that drift or volatisation is minimised.
Hit play to hear Bill Gordon explain the risks involved and how to manage the spray event to ensure maximum efficacy.
Watch Webinar 1 'Effect of formulation and environment on dicamba volatility' with Dr Tom Mueller here.


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Trompé Setsuled ( setsuled) wrote,
Trompé Setsuled
Location: A clinic
Music: "Country Comfort" - The Clancy Brothers and Lou Killen
Everything Happens to Him
Mahmad Firouzkoui is just too meek to overcome a streak of extraordinarily bad luck in 1977's The Report(گزارش). This doesn't stop him from beating his wife though from the tone of the film I think we're meant to think he should be forgiven for this, that he's well within his rights. The underlying misogyny of the film is part of its central idea of the injustice of a man being thoroughly emasculated at work and at home. It has some well constructed scenes and good performances--and one great performance.
Ironically, the best performance in the film comes from Shohreh Aghdashloo as Mahmad's wife, Azam. Her character is written entirely based on her effect on Mahmad--she constantly nags him about going out with his friends after work, she complains about taking care of their kid, she complains he doesn't make enough money. The script never gives us anything from her perspective but Aghdashloo through sheer brilliance in her performance actually does a lot to make up for it.
So a film that otherwise would have been a one sided pity party for a much put upon man works out to be much more provoking. Mahmad (Kurosh Afsharpanah) works as a tax collector. He's wrongly accused of embezzlement and is laid off during the investigation. He's frustrated but when he's confronted on the matter he tends to stammer and look at his feet.
When he goes home, it's to the constant nagging of Azam and their arguments become worse as it becomes clear they can no longer afford their home. The tension in these scenes comes across really well. The director, Abbas Kiarostami, uses long takes of the actors exchanging dialogue, giving it a stage play quality. The couple's young daughter, when she laughs or cries, is clearly not acting but her behaviour is always seamlessly incorporated in the scene.
I felt really bad for the kid because there are moments when the director must have intentionally made her cry. I guess there's no other way to get the scenes but it's one of those moments where I'm not sure people should go that far for art. I know I couldn't do it.
The film also has some very good compositions, especially near the end. The climactic episode, where Azam attempts suicide, hits a pinnacle of misogyny as we're clearly meant to feel worse for Mahmad than for Azam as he's faced with the nurses caring for her asking with passive reproach, "Did you beat her up?" The doctor at the clinic knows right away what happened because apparently the clinic receives women regularly who've overdosed on the kinds of pills Azam took, the implication being that Azam may have been only trying to get revenge on Mahmad.
Twitter Sonnet #997
Again the pair repair to coffins lined
And trimmed in cash and coin reclaimed in glass
Replete with empty stares like sleep resigned
Without the thought of rest the night to pass.
Into the light refracted white the prey,
A hunted hat, appearing just above
The hedge, a canny puppet clear as day
Desisted flight and turned to throw a glove.
A strike of acid dries the lemon through,
Deprives the battery of taste before
Electric eyes request to know just who
Could sew the path up to the only door.
The engines cull the vapour from the rock
Inside the face; a deftly hidden lock.
Tags: #997, abbas kiarostami, misogyny, movies, shohreh aghdashloo, the report, گزارش
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Strepsiptera (do gregoː streptos = "torcido"; pteron = "asas"; nomeados, em inglêsː twisted-wing parasites ou twisted-winged parasites -pl.) é uma ordem de insetos diminutos, com distribuição cosmopolita, constituída por nove famílias extantes e cerca de 600 espécies descritas. Foram descobertos em 1793 (na descrição da espécie Xenos vesparum) e são definidos como "endoparasitas entomófagos", atacando espécies de insetos de 34 famílias distribuídas em sete ordens, sendo as ordens Hemiptera (subordem Homoptera) e Hymenoptera as mais procuradas; com uma família (Mengenillidae) atacando insetos Apterygota (Thysanura). Sua classificação como ordem se deu em 1813, por William Kirby. A característica marcante deste grupo de insetos é a presença de asas anteriores reduzidas a halteres, nos machos adultos, e a forma larviforme das fêmeas adultas (neotenia); demonstrando um acentuado dimorfismo sexual. Os Strepsiptera têm dois grandes grupos: os Stylopidia e os Mengenillidia. Os Mengenillidia incluem três famílias extintas (Cretostylopidae, Protoxenidae e Mengeidae) e mais duas famílias existentes (Bahiaxenidae e Mengenillidae; no entanto, esta última não é monofilética). São consideradas as mais primitivas, dentro da ordem, e as fêmeas (conhecidas apenas em Mengenillidae) são de vida livre (descobertas apenas em 1870 e classificadas na ordem apenas em 1919), com pernas e antenas rudimentares e com pupação fora de seus hospedeiros; sendo encontradas na região nordeste do Brasil (Bahiaxenidae), Península Ibérica, Baleares e Canárias (Mengenillidae). Na maioria os Strepsiptera são extremamente difíceis de localizar e muitas vezes é preciso encontrar o hospedeiro para encontrar a fêmea; mas os machos podem ser capturados próximos a focos de luz.

Etimologia e significado
O nome Strepsiptera é referente à peculiar forma das asas traseiras do macho, torcidas durante o seu voo ou de aparência retorcida quando insetos secos foram examinados.

Morfologia

Macho
O macho adulto apresenta vida livre e é alado, com olhos compostos e esféricos, apresentando um número menor de omatídeos relativamente grandes, muito incomuns entre os insetos vivos, o que lhes dá uma aparência de amora, nos quais cada lente forma uma imagem que posteriormente é combinada no cérebro. As peças bucais são degeneradas. As antenas são flabeladas, conspícuas, com longos processos em alguns segmentos. O protórax e o mesotórax são curtos, com o segundo apresentando o primeiro par de asas reduzido. O metatórax é, algumas vezes, dez vezes maior que o resto do tórax e possui um par de grandes asas posteriores com pouca venação. O trocânter é atrofiado ou ausente, raramente desenvolvido. O tarso possui de 2 a 5 artículos. Eles têm uma vida curta, de cinco a seis horas como adultos, e sua única missão, na emergência do hospedeiro, é encontrar e fecundar uma fêmea; localizada, por seu feromônio, geralmente em abelhas ou outros insetos (tamanho dos machosː 1 a 7 milímetros).

Fêmea
A fêmea nunca possui asas. Em espécies parasitas é desprovida de pernas, olhos ou antenas, com sua cabeça e tórax fundidos. Ela não deixa o seu hospedeiro, passando toda a vida em seu invólucro pupal. Toda a cavidade abdominal da fêmea adulta é preenchida com embriões em desenvolvimento. Em sua presença, a cor e a forma do abdome do hospedeiro podem ser alteradas e o hospedeiro geralmente se torna estéril. Em espécies da família Mengenillidae, elas deixam o hospedeiro no final do seu último ínstar larval para pupar externamente e, após a eclosão, são de vida livre e aparência vermiforme; com a presença de todas as outras características do adulto do sexo masculino, como olhos, peças bucais, antenas, pernas e uma abertura genital ventral (tamanho das f̃êmeas: 2 milímetros a 3 centímetros).

Larva
Em Strepsiptera o dimorfismo sexual não existe nos primeiros ínstares e as fêmeas são vivíparas, dando à luz larvas vivas (não ovos), o que é atípico para a maioria dos insetos. Estas larvas logo buscam ativamente um novo hospedeiro; são muito ativas, porque têm um tempo limitado para encontrar um hospedeiro antes de esgotar suas reservas alimentares. Quando estas larvas, chamadas planidia e similares às larvas triangulinas de besouros Meloidae, se prendem a um hospedeiro, elas entram secretando enzimas que amolecem a cutícula, geralmente na sua região abdominal; sendo relatado que algumas espécies entram nos ovos dos hospedeiros, antes de sua eclosão. Uma vez dentro do hospedeiro, elas sofrem hipermetamorfose e se tornam uma forma larval menos móvel e sem pernas, induzindo o hospedeiro a produzir uma estrutura em forma de saco, dentro da qual elas se alimentam e crescem. Em algumas espécies a larva possui cerdas abdominais longas, usadas para impulsioná-la em direção ao hospedeiro.

Classificação
Os Strepsiptera são considerados como uma ordem monofilética e compartilham tantas características com os besouros que alguns entomologistas os classificam como uma superfamília dos Coleoptera. De fato, Strepsiptera e alguns besouros parasitas (nas famílias Meloidae e Rhipiphoridae) estão entre os poucos insetos que sofrem hipermetamorfose, um tipo incomum de desenvolvimento holometabólico no qual as larvas mudam de forma corporal à medida que amadurecem.

Ordens de insetos
Pterygota

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Q: SL4: Passing element in View as parameter to Command in ViewModel We have a user control with context menu on one of its child controls.
The Command is bound to a RelayCommand in the ViewModel.
However, the command has to act on another child control in the View.
What is the best way to do this?  I have tried passing the desired child control as a parameter, but I think the syntax is incorrect:
                        <Controls:ContextMenu >
                        <Controls:MenuItem Header="Center" >
                            <i:Interaction.Triggers>
                                <i:EventTrigger EventName="Click" >
                                    <GalaSoft_MvvmLight_Command:EventToCommand
                                        Command="{Binding RecenterCommand}"
                                        CommandParameter="{Binding ElementName=scrollViewer}" />
                                </i:EventTrigger>
                            </i:Interaction.Triggers>
                        </Controls:MenuItem>
                    </Controls:ContextMenu>

The command:
RecenterCommand = new RelayCommand<ScrollViewer>(Recenter);
private void Recenter(ScrollViewer obj)
{
}

When I use the context menu, Recenter() is called, but the obj param is null.
What is the correct syntax for the ElementName attribute in the CommandParameter binding?
UPDATE:  I tried changing the CommandParameter to:
CommandParameter="{Binding ElementName=LayoutRoot, Path=scrollViewer}"

...but still doesn't work.
Thanks for any insights....

A: I think that you need to add PassEventArgsToCommand="True" so, the code will be like this:
<GalaSoft_MvvmLight_Command:EventToCommand  PassEventArgsToCommand="True":
                                    Command="{Binding RecenterCommand}"
                                    CommandParameter="{Binding ElementName=scrollViewer}" />

and if you want to cath the data in codebehind put (this is code from one of my programs used for a context menu item)
SelectedEmployer e = ((MenuItem)e).DataContext as Employer
I hope this will solve your problem, because you gave me a hint in how to solve one of my problems..

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Q: gspread protect sheet except certain cells I'm using pythons gspread library.
It has given me what I need so far but am stumpted on this one:
How to do the equivalent of protect sheet except certain cells via pythons gspread?
E.g. I want to protect entire sheet (not just a range) except for particular range (use A1 as example).
I can protect a range no probs but unprotecting from that protected range is where I'm stumped.
Any idea how to do this?
Thanks

A: I believe your goal and your current situation as follows.

*

*You want to protect a sheet in Google Spreadsheet.

*In this case, you want to unprotect only cell "A1" of the sheet.

*You want to achieve this using gspread of python.

*You have already been able to get and put values for Google Spreadsheet using Sheets API.

I think that in your situation, AddProtectedRangeRequest of batchUpdate method can be used.
Sample script:
client = gspread.authorize(credentials) # Pleaase use your "client" here.

spreadsheetId = "###" # Please set the Spreadsheet ID.
sheetName = "Sheet1" # Please set the sheet name you want to protect.
emailAddress = "###" # Please set your email address.

spreadsheet = client.open_by_key(spreadsheetId)
sheetId = spreadsheet.worksheet(sheetName).id
body = {
    "requests": [
        {
            "addProtectedRange": {
                "protectedRange": {
                    "range": {
                        "sheetId": sheetId
                    },
                    "unprotectedRanges": [
                        {
                            "sheetId": sheetId,
                            "startRowIndex": 0,
                            "endRowIndex": 1,
                            "startColumnIndex": 0,
                            "endColumnIndex": 1
                        }
                    ],
                    "editors": {
                        "domainUsersCanEdit": False,
                        "users": [emailAddress]
                    },
                    "warningOnly": False
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}
spreadsheet.batch_update(body)

*

*When you run this script, all cell except for cell "A1" in the sheet of sheetName are protected.

References:

*

*batch_update(body)

*AddProtectedRangeRequest


text:
A discussion on Ethiopia's role in Somalia
The following correspondence was received on the September 22 article, "Ethiopia threatens to withdraw from Somalia". Below is a reply by its author, Brian Smith.
Your article about Ethiopia withdrawing from Somalia was very wrong. You seem to blame Ethiopia only. You say Islamic Court Union militants have the support of most Somalis but you ignore the clan factor in Somalia and the fact that the ICU united only the Hawiye clan and never controlled more than 50 percent of Somalia. You are also ignoring many factors, including the role of Arab nations and Egypt in helping the ICU and the fact that the ICU declared jihad on Ethiopia.
Please be balanced. I am an Ethiopian and I would like to see you give a balanced assessment of my country's actions and challenges.
I know your web site WSWS.org is for socialists. As you know our former Ethiopian leader Mengistu was a socialist. But the policy we have today in Ethiopia is the same policy we had during Mengistu. We always protect our country from threats.
So I hope you will be balanced.
Dear ST,
Thank you for your interest in our web site and for your comments.
We do not blame Ethiopia as a whole or the people of Ethiopia for the ongoing illegal occupation and humanitarian crisis in Somalia. However, the Ethiopian government of Meles Zenawi and the puppet Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia, which it supports, are both pawns in the predatory aims of US imperialism as it seeks to control the sea-lanes and resources of the region.
All sides in the ongoing conflict are guilty of crimes against the civilian population. This includes the TFG, the occupying forces of Ethiopia, the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) and the US military, as evidenced in the recent Amnesty International report that we cite. However this report laid greatest blame on those supported by the United States, i.e., the TFG and the Ethiopian troops.
We do not determine our attitude toward this or any other conflict based upon who carried out the worst atrocity. Rather, we start from the social character of the regimes and parties, their programmes and their trajectories.
We have no illusions in the ICU, which advocates a reactionary programme based on religious chauvinism. However, it is still true that it received substantial popular support when it ousted the US and warlord-backed TFG. This does not mean that the Somali population needed or desired Islamic fundamentalist rule. Far from it, but the ICU takeover brought relative peace, stability, and law and order, following 15 years of civil war and decades of looting by the warlords.
There are strong nationalist pressures bearing down upon the peoples of both Somalia and Ethiopia, but neither regime is waging a struggle against imperialist oppression or fighting to defend or extend a more progressive social order against reaction. Their class character makes them incapable of carrying out a genuinely progressive development of their economies and overcoming imperialist domination. Rather these regimes of the national bourgeoisie seek to divert the social aspirations of their respective peoples into chauvinist hatred.
We have previously drawn attention to a report by the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia, which noted that the ICU has been supplied with arms and military training by Eritrea, Djibouti, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Syria, as well as Hezbollah of Lebanon. The report also warned that Somalia could turn "into an Iraq-type situation replete with roadside and suicide bombs, assassinations and other forms of terrorist and insurgent-type activities." (See "US backs Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia")
We observed that these allies of the ICU could not allow the Ethiopian advance to go unanswered, and that Eritrea in particular could not afford to allow Somalia to come under the domination of Ethiopia, with which it fought a bitter war in which hundreds of thousands were killed between 1998 and 2000. We also observed that US imperialism's aggressive policy threatened to ignite an all-out war in the region, which could draw other African and Middle Eastern states into the conflict.
You call Mengistu Hailie Mariam a socialist and imply that we may have supported him, but Mengistu's regime, the Derg, was in no sense "socialist." A number of military dictatorships and bourgeois nationalist regimes at the time, including Mengistu's in Ethiopia, Siad Barre's in Somalia and Nimeiri's in Sudan, adopted the rhetoric of "socialism" and even "Marxism-Leninism" to justify their own rule and the suppression of all opposition, as well as to curry the favour and patronage of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow as a counterweight to the US and other imperialist powers. In this way these regimes were able to extract limited concessions by vacillating between both sides in the Cold War.
The roots of the present conflict are to be found both in colonialism's historical legacy and also in imperialism's ongoing machinations in the region. The Horn of Africa has long been viewed by the US as a strategic area of the globe because of its proximity to the sea-lanes linking the oilfields of the Persian Gulf with the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. Washington initially sought to assert its hegemony over the region by backing Haile Selassie until his ouster, when the US administration adopted the Somali dictatorship of Siad Barre, and the Soviet Union switched its support from Somalia to Ethiopia.
In 1992, under the pretence of famine relief, the US deployed tens of thousands of combat troops in Somalia, which were driven out after the "Black Hawk Down" incident. Washington has since attempted to forge closer ties with the warlords it previously condemned in Somalia, and with the former guerrilla leaders holding power in Eritrea and Ethiopia, both of whom have long since shed their socialist pretensions and embraced free-market policies and foreign investment. Meles Zenawi has become something of a favourite of Washington and also of London, famously sitting with ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair on the Africa Commission.
Whilst recognising that clan ties play an important role in the daily lives of many Somalis, we naturally reject clan politics as reactionary and divisive. Only a programme that seeks to unite all workers, peasants and those oppressed by imperialism, rejecting clan, race, religious and national divisions, is capable of a progressive answer to the historical problems blighting Africa. We call on the working people of Somalia, Ethiopia and the United States to unite with their brothers and sisters throughout Africa, the Middle East, Europe and the world in a common struggle against imperialism and their local oppressors as part of the worldwide struggle for socialism.
We urge you to read other articles we have posted, when it will become clear that our reporting and analysis is balanced. We do not favour one nation over another, but we do oppose all manifestations of colonial-style oppression--even when conducted by proxy. Our bias is toward the political, economic and social liberation of the working class and of all those oppressed by imperialism.
Record 50.8 million people internally displaced in 2019
Protests in Somalia after police killing during pandemic lockdown
SEP candidate Thomas Scripps addresses UK Somali community hustings
Latest US airstrike kills scores in Somalia
Bombings kill 62 in Somalia amid escalating US scramble for Africa
Ethiopian military seizes control of regional capital after offensive against Tigray province
Ethiopia slides towards civil war as Tigray conflict escalates
Armed conflict in Tigray threatens break up of Ethiopia
Riots in Ethiopia over assassination of Oromi singer/activist Hachalu Hundessa
African economies in free fall as coronavirus pandemic worsens
Workers Struggles: Europe, Middle East & Africa
South Africa: COVID-19 cases soar with little prospect of widespread vaccination
US recognizes Morocco's annexation of Western Sahara
Letters to the WSWS
Frontline nurse at UK's Poole Hospital Trust speaks out about unsafe working conditions amid surge of COVID-19
EU-Turkey tensions mount over Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean
Frontline nurse at UK's Royal Bournemouth Hospital speaks out as COVID-19 cases surge
A Canadian firefighter speaks out on the opioid crisis
Letter from a student in China on the COVID-19 pandemic


My experience has been that it takes at least 2-3 calm days < 10 knots and we are not going to get that for at least another week or so A light Easterly is best to clear it up.
10/22 sat Went out of Johns Pass 10 miles at 40', less then 3' vis.
Last edited by turbofly; 10-24-2011 at 07:14 AM.
Was out Sunday 10/23. Vis in 55' was 8'. Very soupy. West of Clearwater.
We may be wrong but with all the wind lately we decided to just fish today ..last week the water at 80 ft was murky and all it has done is blow 15-20 since?? Please let us know if you end up seeing anything!!! Good Luck Be Safe.
Went out today off Anna Maria Island. At 3 miles, 30 feet deep, vis was maybe 10 feet at best. Went to ledges in 45 to 55 feet and the vis was 20-30 feet. Limited out on hog on our first spot in 45 feet.
nice.. im hoping to run out to 80ft saturday..
Last edited by xrispearo; 11-10-2011 at 08:01 AM.
im hoping to go out sat am too, if i can find a buddy... mine are all busy.. anyone?


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text:
How to study Africa: from victimhood to agency
John Lonsdale
On Monday 25 May 1959 Iain Macleod, then minister of labour in a British Conservative government, wrote privately to his prime minister, Harold Macmillan. It was a bad time for British rule in Africa. Eleven Kenyans had been clubbed to death at Hola detention camp after refusing to do the forced labour that was designed to reclaim them from their "hard core" allegiance to the Mau Mau rebellion.
There was also a state of emergency in Nyasaland (Malawi). More Africans had been killed there, this time by police gunfire. In a long letter on how Britain might best respond to such imperial crises there is one particularly arresting sentence. Looking forward to the approaching election, Macleod wrote:
"Black Africa remains perhaps our most difficult problem so far as relationships with the vital middle voters is [sic] concerned. It is the only one in which our policies are under severe criticism and for example the only one on which we are regularly defeated at the universities. Indeed the universities feel more strongly on this issue than on any other single matter." (National Archives/Public Record Office (Kew): PREM.11/2583; emphasis added).
Imagine, British universities then felt more strongly about Africa than about academic salaries or levels of state funding! To have been an Africanist at that time must have been very heaven. The pity of it of course was that there were very few of us, mostly linguists, anthropologists, medical experts, agricultural and veterinary scientists. The Journal of African History and Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines, brave trumpeters of a seemingly new field of scholarship, started only in 1960, the "year of Africa" that followed. So the strength of university feeling must have reflected a general sense of political obligation to Africa among Britain's middle classes.
There was also a widespread perception that Africans were now a political force to be reckoned with. They had to be heard, and were. African leaders who jetted into London to negotiate the terms of their independence electrified university audiences. Press cartoons of the time portrayed Africans not as starving children or emaciated victims of disease, but as virile nationalist giants, overshadowing puny British politicians.
The press could also accuse ministers of ruining Britain's good name in Africa by reason of their cowardice or folly. The same must have been true in France and Belgium – though not in Spain or Portugal, at that time dictatorships not only in Africa but also at home.
This article is adapted from John Lonsdale's plenary lecture at the Aegis conference on African Studies at London's School of Oriental and African Studies on 30 June 2005
Africa has changed since then – as has Europe. Fifty years ago European electorates felt they had responsibilities towards Africa. Africans were their colonial subjects. Africans were also demanding responsibility for themselves. European publics listened. They knew the names of African leaders: Leopold Senghor, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Zik (Nnamdi Azikiwe).
One of the leaders of Mediterranean Africa, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had in 1956 humiliated both France and Britain in the "Suez" fiasco. Had European publics been more ignorant, Iain Macleod would have been less worried. It was a time of hope for Africa and Africans, perhaps of unrealistic expectations. The world expected Africans to use their energetic new sovereignties to slay the dragons of poverty, ignorance and disease. Some African leaders took up the challenge by adopting the slogan "Freedom and Work".
And now? Which European minister would warn his leader – Balkenende or Chirac, Schröder or Zapatero, Berlusconi or Blair – that the outcome of the next election might depend on what they did or did not do about Africa? How many Europeans care what Africans think? How much obligation do they feel towards Africans today? Even after the outpouring of publicity, protest, and pop music surrounding the G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, and the accompanying "make poverty history" campaign, the answers may not be comforting.
How far are the professed "friends of Africa" – scholars, students, activists – to blame for the mix of everyday indifference and latent fear, tempered now and again by pity? What can we do to repair our failures in representation? Perhaps it would be to do what best serves our own professional interest: regard African colleagues as allies in a common cause, and repair the failures in African higher education that so diminish the African ability to speak to the rest of the world as intellectual equals, expert witnesses in their own cause, full citizens of our one world.
These questions and answers raise others. How many Europeans today could name any Africans, apart from the bogeyman Robert Mugabe at one extreme and the twin saints at the other, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu? How many less exceptional African leaders attract attention even when, as in summer 2005, the media overflows with African stories? How many Europeans expect Africans to solve their own problems? Do newspapers report how Africans themselves argue about political and social issues, generally with more commitment than European electorates at home?
Why do we need celebrities to enlist our attention? What Bob Geldof and Bono have done is marvellous (the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen tells me that Geldof proved to be a sharp student of development economics in the telephone tutorials Sen gave at the popstar's request in 2004). But there are also two dangers in the "celebritisation" of Africa's needs:
the sense of guilt that Geldof and Bono arouse in their audiences may prove fleeting and ineffective – when it is important that the G8 and the European Union need to be subjected to intellectually sustained and politically creative scrutiny
the image of the secular saint flatters the self-regarding, even racist, European image as the heroic dragon-slayer riding to the rescue of a voiceless and helpless African continent, trapped by poverty, ignorance and disease
This, after all, is only the latest chapter in a long history of the mirror-construction of two "racial" identities, European and African. It began at least two centuries ago, during the struggle for the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. The slogan of the Quaker abolitionists, coined in 1787 – just before the French revolution – was "Am I not a man and a brother?" But the African slave into whose mouth this revolutionary question was placed was himself shown, on the Anti-Slavery Society's seal, down on his knees before his white audience, not on his feet. (Four years later, black slaves were very much on their feet, musket in hand, following Toussaint l'Ouverture in their Haitian rebellion.)
So today, popular media constructs Africa as the hopeless, history-less, "other", the dark antipodes to the purposeful, liberal – above all, storied – west. The occasion for the resumption of this image, after the hopeful picture painted by African nationalism, appears to have been the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s, when the (London) Sun called secessionist Biafra The Land of No Hope. The self-righteously civilising mission of the past two centuries has thus revived in a post-colonial age.
"Parachute journalists" – so different from the "old Africa hands" like Colin Legum or Basil Davidson, or Richard Dowden more recently – accompany sometimes equally transient aid-givers into what they can understand only as a tribal, lawless, starving Africa, from Somalia and Rwanda in the 1990s to Darfur and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) today.
This populist version of the "civilising mission" infantilises Europeans as well as Africans; it reduces media consumers to voyeurs demanding instant gratification for their immediate feelings – when the real need is to face up to the long, complex, often dispiriting negotiation of critical solidarity with people who demand that their own views be heard.
People specialising in the study of Africa from outside the continent must welcome this task, arduous as it is. But what can we do to help achieve it?
This is a task of enlightenment, in most ways harder than it was for our predecessors of fifty and more years ago. Perhaps in one sense only has it become easier, in that pop stars have created an enormous audience for news of Africa, if one that may have little patience with complex academic discussions. We must learn to engage with – even educate – that audience, even if the politicisation of pop is a two-edged sword.
In other ways, the times have moved against "Africanists". Above all, "freedom fighters" have too often become lords of misrule. The transmutation of Kwame Nkrumah, Hastings Banda, Haile Selassie, or (again) Robert Mugabe tell the melancholy story.
It is difficult to find local heroes today, the equivalent of South Africa's African National Congress in the 1980s. Africa's women have the best claim to that title. But in general, Africans and their friends have become disillusioned with the fruits of freedom: stony and pitiless as in the Sudan and Zimbabwe, shrivelled into nothing as in Somalia, or utterly corrupted as in the DRC.
At the same time, many African states would be capable of delivering the public goods of societal renewal – Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Botswana, South Africa among them – if they were permitted the affordable means to tackle the social cancer of HIV/Aids.
But there is a deeper problem in addressing the task of enlightenment. In the 1960s, students of Africa were able to read the work of African leaders – Julius Nyerere, Frantz Fanon, Tom Mboya, Leopold Senghor – and to learn about Africa in wonderfully cheap books such as the Penguin African Library. The authors were often cosmopolitan journalists with long African experience, such as Patrick Keatley of the (Manchester) Guardian (a Canadian), Brian Bunting of the Rand Daily Mail and (Johannesburg) Guardian (a South African), and Jack Halpern, editor of the Central African Examiner (born in Berlin). African novelists also appeared in Heinemann's equally accessible African Writers Series, launched by Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart in 1962.
A lesser-known series that addressed both European and African students was just as significant. Its authors were often white expatriates, deeply involved in the adventure of setting up new African universities. This was Oxford University Press's "Students' Library", whose first title – George Bennett's Kenya: a Political History – I bought in 1963 for the equivalent of a few pence today.
Academics were then prepared to write short, simple – but learned – books for a student audience (nor were they burdened by today's severe bureaucratic obligations). The OUP's public-spirited authors included Margery Perham, Bolaji Idowu and Fred Welbourn on African Christianity, Merrick Posnansky on the distant past and Philip Whitaker on the relevance of western political theory to African problems.
Whitaker was on the extra-mural staff of Makerere University College, Uganda – as were his better known contemporaries in Ghana, Thomas Hodgkin, Dennis Austin and David Kimble; this is the sort of teaching service that stands in urgent need of revival today.
The enlightenment such people offered was amazing. They brought African and European audiences into the same historical discourse, with, for instance, comparisons between African and European nationalisms or discussion of classical Greek solutions to contemporary African problems.
What has become of the Penguin African Library, or the Student's Library? Which Africans can interested students now read in cheap editions? Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom is the only recent autobiography that comes to mind. James Currey's African Issues series is the sole source, I believe, of moderately priced but unimpeachably expert discussion on contemporary Africa. Perhaps we should be all the more grateful to Geldof and Bono, the Penguin Specials of today.
It is all the more important that younger Africanists should be aware of the precedent set by our predecessors in bringing Africa and Africans to the attention of a western public. Public academic engagement with African issues has a long and intellectually strenuous history, as a brief (and insular) survey of its achievement and inheritance suggests.
Predecessors in hope
The first modern attempt to educate British voters about African issues – leaving aside university support for the 19th century anti-slavery movement and the early 20th century Congo reform movement – seems to have been in 1929, when the Student Christian Movement produced an eighty-page booklet on East Africa in Transition.
This summarised and discussed the 350 pages of a commission of enquiry into the possible "closer union" of the British territories in Eastern Africa, an issue full of racial dynamite in a part of Africa where white settler interests competed with the principles of "native trusteeship" at the heart of British policy. So the precedents go back a long way, even if one ignores them.
A decade later – and nearer to my own theme of the need to listen to Africans as equals – Bronislaw Malinowski presented to a western readership Jomo Kenyatta's work, Facing Mount Kenya. As a displaced Pole, conscious of the twin dangers of fascism and communism, Malinowski believed educated Africans experienced the shared "tragedy of the modern world in an especially acute manner."
Malinowski welcomed Kenyatta's views as those of an observant world citizen. The Commission for Africa's 2005 report is entitled Our Common Interest. The contrast is stark: self-interest rules in place of universal tragedy; Africa is no longer a prophetic voice but a common concern.
Much more sterling work was accomplished by Africanists' predecessors of more than half a century ago, including the international galaxy of scholars who advised Lord Hailey's African Survey (1938). That era of hope for Africa included the renowned figure of Margery Perham, Oxford's University teacher of generations of British colonial cadets. At the intellectual centre of empire, she went to great lengths to include Africans in the circle of a common humanity.
In 1936, Perham edited a collection of biographies, Ten Africans. It is extraordinary to read her introduction today, and to recognise how much she is our contemporary. Britons, she remarked, accepted as normal what was in truth "the peculiar condition of empire under which we control the destinies of people we do not understand." The absence of ordinary social relations between the races, "through which people come to know and like each other", was, she thought, to blame for this misunderstanding. She continued:
"The main reason for this is the 'backwardness' of Africans. It is an obvious and fundamental fact, but one upon which we are apt to lean a little too hard in order to make ourselves comfortable in a difficult situation. In default of true knowledge we too often make do with assumptions: the primary one, that Africans are backward; next, that they are almost all equally backward; even that they are inherently, and so permanently, backward. Cut off as most of us are from any contact with Africans as individuals, we think of them or deal with them in the mass…"
Margery Perham carried on the work of introducing individual Africans to the world after 1945. In 1946 she found a publisher for and wrote an introduction to Obafemi Awolowo's book, The Path to Nigerian Freedom, when he was but a law student. A decade later she wrote an introduction to the young Tom Mboya's radical pamphlet, The Kenya Question: An African Answer, published by the Fabian Colonial Bureau. Ten years later still, she introduced J M Kariuki's shocking memoir of what he had suffered at British hands in Mau Mau Detainee.
Here was a senior academic, one of the chief public moralists for imperial trusteeship, actively helping to give young Africans a subversive voice at the seat of empire – and one who could write, privately, that Jomo Kenyatta was the sort of person with whom one could speak without condescension, "man to man".
Scholars at the time had great faith in human agency – perhaps because willpower seemed so self-evidently decisive during and after the ordeal of world war. Margaret Wrong, secretary of the international committee for Christian literature for Africa, started her book, Five Points for Africa – a plea for a new deal for the continent – with the chapter "We are Men", echoing the question the Quakers had put to the merchants of slavery.
Joyce Cary, former colonial official and no friend to African nationalism, was nonetheless passionate in his call for the sort of African freedom that increased personal choice: "To leave any man in ignorance, sickness, poverty, or racial contempt, without help, is to hold freedom cheap."
Melville Herskovits, a founder of African studies in the United States, was no less eloquent in the cause of African agency, more cultural than individual in his opinion. To him colonial rulers were wrong to suppose that "Africans were … highly malleable, a people whose destiny it was to be mo[u]lded into the image their tutors delineated for them." Africans were "a force in being", no mere "supplementary resource". Nationalism thus restored to Africans the creativity of power: "Culturally, no less than politically, independence made of them free agents."
How might we, in our generation, recover a similar sense of purpose and obligation for ourselves and for Europe, in the cause of an African agency that Africa's recent history, no less than the popular mood of today, seems to deny?
Globalised apartheid?
What we need, I suggest, is an analogy for what got us angry and active in the past.
Would it be too much to compare today's politically and socially divided but economically unified world with the apartheid South Africa of yesterday? The parallels are surely very close. The rich countries' immigration and asylum laws operate in ways not greatly different to pass laws. Northern farmers enjoy the same price guarantees and export subsidies that used to protect white settlers from black peasant competitors. The world's terms of trade, the operations of international oil companies, seem designed to exploit African resources for very little in return other than the arming of African protectors – like the township police of yesteryear. Skilled African workers are recruited to the rich countries' health services; their "social reproduction" costs are borne by poor African states that reap no benefit from their trained manpower – just as black South African migrant labour was reproduced in the Bantustans, more or less cost-free to its white urban employers.
If that analogy is anywhere near accurate, then might not the precedents of the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM), and the campaign against British investment in South Africa, also be useful? Mike Terry, former executive secretary of the AAM, says that "anti-apartheid became part of British student culture and economic boycotts an accepted norm". AAM also embraced the enthusiasm of the pop music world.
A related point is that African studies stand in great need of economists and economic historians who might understand the real impacts of globalisation on Africa. Three simple thoughts arise, to prompt research into complexity.
First, Africa stands in great need of capital, and the formal relations of production and governance that demand the wider distribution of capital's profits than to its owners alone. How capital can thus be "socialised" – whether by foreign direct investment or by African state or cooperative ownership – is surely best argued out between Africans.
Second, is it possible that the precipitate rise of Chinese textile and other exports will make African labour globally redundant, and will thirst for oil and markets make China the newest friend to African dictators?
Third, economists will doubtless never agree on how far the fault for Africa's economic stagnation lies at the door of global structures or the malign local agency of kleptocratic rulers. Existing interpretations of contemporary Africa have paid most heed to changing forms of structural fate. Is it time for a change?
Structure and agency in African studies
Africanist scholarship has not always been the most usefully critical friend of Africa. That judgment may be no more than the prejudice of an historian, whose instinct is for stories of human agency – about who did what to whom, to whose advantage and at whose expense. Historians, like anthropologists, tend to be particularists, resistant to the grand generalisations beloved of sociologists, political scientists and economists.
With this qualification, the problem in studies of Africa over the last two generations is that Africanists have tended to create three successive, "single" models, teleologies or paradigms of Africa in the public mind. All of these are largely empty of the identifiable, awkward, individual Africans that Margery Perham long ago felt made us, or our analyses, uncomfortable.
The first model, friendly to African nationalism and the new African nations, is the "modernisation" theory that held sway in the 1950s and 1960s. This translated the socially mobile behaviour that was thought to characterise industrial Atlantic society, with its urban anonymity and capitalist rationality (but without its class struggles), to an almost entirely pre-industrial, largely rural, scarcely capitalist Africa.
This liberal political theory was totally disconnected from the parochialisms of African societies; it was also strangely empty of human courage and ingenuity. "Charisma" was an analytical category rather than a personal quality in someone like Nkrumah. Nationalism, far from being a creative adventure, was (as James S Coleman wrote) a sociological banality, "the inevitable end product of the impact of Western imperialism and modernity on African societies."
The second model is "underdevelopment", modernisation's dark mirror image. This approach had many strands, some more vulgarly Marxist than others. Its partisans could not agree on how far Africa had been exploited by colonial capitalism. Its proponents tended to argue as if Africa had no hope until the socialist world revolution. But no "underdevelopmentalist" knew how to analyse African social classes and their struggles, a confusion reflected in the common use of the term "petty bourgeoisie", trendy code for an analytical blind alley.
Without well-defined classes, it was hard to discover heroes of class struggle, people who might mobilise a capacity to change things, however tight the constraints on their agency. A truncated teleology of paralysed dialectics generated few of the African voices which Perham had given us.
The third model is "neo-patrimonialism" – although its scholars disagree on the meaning of the term. In general, it signifies a fatal conjuncture between one of the past glories of African history and its modern nemesis, and leads to an emphasis on the creative resilience of free peasantries in self-governing, stateless, frontier societies.
Today, the argument runs, political elites patronise the same small communities – "tribes" – in order to press their private demands on the state's public goods. Clientilism, bound by personal codes of honour, cannot build states that obey a rule of law and, without law, states can expect neither investment nor any wide political legitimacy.
Yet even in such "neo-patrimonial" analyses of what are quintessentially face-to-face politics, it is rare to meet fully rounded political actors. Indeed, there is a curiously mechanical quality to our analyses of the intricately personal politics of neo-patrimonialism. The logic is too inexorable, inviting two objections: it invites acceptance of what is at best questionable, that international non-governmental agencies can resolve problems of governance when it often appears that they absolve African governments of the necessity to tackle them; and that not all African states have followed the same downward path to its inevitable end.
All three analyses of modern Africa have shared a basic weakness: lack of historical depth. Without this it is difficult to see how African states have developed differently from one another over the last half century. But there are indeed many diverse social, political and nationalist histories within Africa, emerging within different sorts of colony, shaping different purposes for independence, and permitting different ways of responding to post-colonial crises.
What the three models miss is the exercise of agency by political leaders, or their failure to act. The social sciences seem structurally averse to recognising such contingency. An understanding of the variety of modern African history rests on a balance between structure and agency.
The recovery of African voices
What is to be done? If the globalisation of apartheid gets anywhere near the truth, then global justice must be the goal for the west's political leaders – as I think it was for Iain Macleod, prompted by the fear of what Africans might do were justice denied.
But there are obstacles in the path of such distributive justice: the protections demanded by producers in the industrialised world; the security priorities of "the war on terror"; popular objections to the immigration of today's huddled masses; the curse of oil and strategic minerals; the age of Chinese mass production that may turn Africans anew into "surplus people". Europeans no longer fear African protest – unless they happen to be Muslim. Conversely, there are few African heroes, allies in development, not least because African states lack so many of the competitive institutional authorities that can, on occasion, call rulers to account.
The G8 has proposed its compromise solutions. But what can mere academics do to see that even compromises are honoured? Our only power is to educate imaginations. But that – both in what we write and in what we advocate – is potentially enormous.
The most powerful goad to action on behalf of justice is surely a universal imagination that Africans are also men and women like us, with the will, however constrained by past history, to change their societies for the better. What Africans perhaps most need from our research are the biographies that give voice to their reflective, polemical, thoughts.
Alexander McCall Smith may have done more for Africa than all the rest of us, with his creation of Mma Precious Ramotswe of Botswana's No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency. Certainly, more people will read McCall Smith than, say, JDY Peel's account of how Yoruba Christians have acted with a consciousness of history as acute as any European's, or John Iliffe's panorama of how a sense of honour has stiffened African agency throughout history, perhaps more so than is prudent for the conduct of modern states. The historical perspective that makes biography worth writing, one that concedes some causal weight to a willed sense of purpose, is beginning to colour our analyses at last.
But Africans need our advocacy as well as our learning; without passionate commitment there can be no dispassionate research. The best way to combine such passion with its opposite, professional disinterest, is for European Africanists to concentrate our public energies on demanding that our governments support the properly funded, properly protected, rebirth of African universities – a matter to which the Commission for Africa paid some, but too little, attention.
There would be many benefits of such an initiative; I will suggest five:
the renewed ability of African scholars, as in the 1960s and 1970s, to challenge the monopoly on what passes for useful Africanist knowledge now held by westerners; our colleagues would again be our competitors, and western leaders too would once again hear African voices to which they would have to pay heed
restored African universities would find the energy to rethink Africa's development needs, and allow higher education to find a new direction, better adapted to a knowledge-based world economy; at the centre of such academic globalisation must surely be the Atlantic African diaspora of academics and other professionals
African universities' access to moral and political philosophers as well as science and technology would be a way for Africans to create a revolution in public morality; a distant, difficult but essential aspiration to offer public thinkers in these institutions
African universities would be enabled to think through problems of social reform and economic competition in the context of the global economy
African universities would be helped to revivify public spheres of political discourse, against the will of rulers unaccustomed to any competing authority; productive effort needs confidence in the future that only politics can provide; and rational bureaucratic politics, held to account by democratic institutions of collective opinion, is the least worst option.
The critical public voices I envisage will need to be protected, to be properly paid, with international standards of information and research infrastructures. This is a tall order. But what is the alternative? African states must be encouraged to submit to the self-disciplines undertaken by the few that have avoided the depths of "clientelist crisis". Most are already subject to many external conditionalities, each a derogation from sovereignty. Another conditionality is as likely as any other to help Africans get off their knees and on to their feet. Is there a not a case for insisting on an "Academic Rights Watch" conducted by some international body, of which the Association of African Universities would be a foundational element? Might that not be a condition for all educational aid? Is this the one simple point that academics might fasten on when considering a goal for our political activism?
Finally, how might we as Africanists equip ourselves for such public advocacy? In our own national academies we are weak, as disregarded as church mice. Our individual national research assets in Africa are puny. But we could turn such separate weaknesses into the beginnings of a collective strength, by forming an "ever closer union" of research activities on Africa
We could also resurrect something like the Oxford University Press's Student's Library. The first title might even be a summary, eighty-page, discussion of the 460 pages of the Commission for Africa (priced at two euros or less)?
How many of us still alive thirty years hence will be able to echo what Basil Davidson said to me in 1998, looking back on his activist journalism of the 1960s: "The names come faltering back, and the dramas associated with them and I am repeatedly made grateful to have lived though those tremendous years"? The responsibility for a new partnership with Africa and Africans is ours.


text:
El Gazzar Presents Egypt's Experience in Urban Development to World Bank
El Gazzar reviews the government's achievements in urban development in seven years during his meeting with the WB officials.
Concept Developments Launches SENET in New Administrative Capital with EGP 200 mn
Chairman of Concept Developments Ihab Abul-Magd unveils the company's new project in the New Administrative Capital, "SENET", with total investment of EGP 200 mn, Invest-Gate reports.
Infrastructure Business
Rowad Modern Engineering Partners With Star-light For Katameya Creeks Project
ELSEWEDY ELECTRIC, the leading wires and cables and integrated energy solution provider in the Middle East and Africa, announces on February 3 the partnership between its subsidiary Rowad Modern Engineering (RME) and Star-Light Company for Urban Development and Tourism
El Gazzar Updates The Nation on New Alamein City
Sunday, 3 January 2021
Minister of Housing, Utilities, and Urban Communities Assem El Gazzar follows up on the implementation of various projects in New Alamein, one of the fourth-generation cities,
El Gazzar Calls for Regular Follow-Up on 'Residence for all Egyptians' Project
Minister of Housing, Utilities, and Urban Communities Assem El Gazzar has emphasized the need for adherence to deadlines and continuous follow-up on the construction of housing units in the "Residence for all Egyptians" initiative.
Mountain View Signs Deal to Develop IT Infrastructure at iCity Projects
Mountain View has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Huawei Technologies to develop information technology (IT) infrastructure at its "iCity" projects in east and west Cairo, with investments exceeding USD 1 mn (EGP 15.8 bn).
Elsewedy Technical Academy Inks MoU to Boost Vocational Education
Elsewedy Technical Academy (STA) has announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Egyptian German Technical Academy (EGT Academy) to support technical and vocational education and training (TVET) in Egypt and MENA region.
El Rabwa Network to Invest EGP 1.5 bn in Mostakbal City: Chairman
El Rabwa Network has unveiled plans to pump EGP 1.5 bn worth of investments into developing the Global Paradigm Schools complex in New Cairo's Mostakbal City, following the opening of the education project's first administrative headquarters in early December.
New Aswan Sees 66 Villas Done, 84 Others in Store for Mid-2021
Merely 66 fully-finished villas overlooking the Nile River, nestled within New Aswan's in-progress 6,000-meter-long tourist strip, have been delivered, with 84 others in the pipeline for handover before July 2021.
Egypt Gets Almost USD 2.7 bn in Funding for Sinai Development in 2020
Egypt teamed up with several international financial institutions for financing several development projects in the Sinai Peninsula, at a combined value of almost USD 2.7 bn (EGP 42.4 bn), in 2020.


text:
cask 'synology-cloud-station-backup' do
  version '4.1-4224'
  sha256 '9e6e0ef536d4a19913bb9e1da3d3c38b3eb1852c4f08ad760318facd25bb4f78'

  url "https://global.download.synology.com/download/Tools/CloudStationBackup/#{version}/Mac/Installer/synology-cloud-station-backup-#{version.sub(%r{.*-}, '')}.dmg"
  name 'Synology Cloud Station Backup'
  homepage 'https://www.synology.com'
  license :gratis

  pkg 'Install Cloud Station Backup.pkg'

  uninstall pkgutil:   'com.synology.CloudStationBackup',
            launchctl: 'com.synology.Synology Cloud Station Backup'

  zap delete: '~/Library/Preferences/com.synology.CloudStationBackupUI.plist'
end

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


For most individuals, doing home exercises using home fitness equipment available in most sporting goods stores, online websites or home television shopping networks is the most convenient method of physical fitness. The pressures of daily living oftentimes make going to the gym almost impossible. To meet the demands of regular physical activity, home exercises are the way to go.
For those who simply want to engage in bodyweight exercises, there's really not a lot of equipment involved except perhaps for a non-slip mat. However, for those who wish to do workouts with exercise equipment, then purchasing a set becomes a necessity. However, there are a few things that you must consider before buying a new set of fitness equipment.
For starters, you have to carefully evaluate the advertising claims of the resistance training equipment or cardiovascular exercise you want to buy. Some of these products claim to burn off fat with a minimum of effort. Any form of weight loss can only be achieved through proper diet and regular exercise. Some manufacturers may use testimonials from highly-satisfied customers to back their claims. However, this does not necessarily represent a wide demographic. When your fitness level stands at a virtual zero, it's even impossible to lose weight with minimum effort.
Another important consideration that you need to keep in mind is that the fitness equipment you are planning to buy must have been approved by the Federal Trade Commission and cleared for use by the Food and Drug Administration. This is your guarantee that the product is safe and free of manufacturing dangers when used as intended.
You also have to get the lowdown on pricing and warranties. Make sure that the price advertised covers shipping costs, taxes and other fees. Also, don't forget to ask for the details of the return policy. Will you be handling the shipping fees should you decide to refund the product when you're not satisfied? If you're ambivalent about an exercise tool, it's better to postpone purchase until you're completely certain that it's what you want. Sending it back to the manufacturer when it does not fit your needs may needlessly cost you money.
Finally, you have to look at the company's customer support services. Nothing else could be more frustrating than calling the toll free number and always getting a busy tone or talking to a representative who does not know anything about the product. Before you purchase a fitness equipment it's much better to call the advertised customer service hotline first to assess if they are easy to reach or are able to answer your concerns knowledgeably and courteously.
Functionality, safety and cost are all important considerations before you buy any exercise equipment. Only after careful deliberation of all these factors should you finally decide on a purchase. Nothing else could signal waste of money than seeing a stockroom full of expensive elliptical trainers, rowing machines and spin bikes that have been stored to simply gather rust. An exercise equipment is a major purchase. This why you should always make sure that you follow logical judgment before you buy one.


Ash Linholm and Juliet Montgomery were once deeply in love, but their families tore them apart. Now, 8 years on, Ash is thinking of marrying for the sake of an heir to his estate. His bride of choice is a relative of the Earl of Monkstead, but the earl is a great believer in marrying for love, and he persuades Ash to revisit his painful past.
Does Juliet still love him after all that has happened? Is it possible for them to find the happiness that was once denied them?
Unforgettable is the first novella in a series about the residents of Mockingbird Square, where the Earl of Monkstead likes to interfere in the love lives of his neighbours and bring about their happy endings.
Lord Ashley Linholm stepped out of his town house at Number Five Mockingbird Square. The square was one of London's famous garden squares, set in exclusive Mayfair. Ash was headed for an address on the other side, beyond the garden, and he was feeling confident and relieved that he had finally made his decision.
He was twenty-seven years old and it had taken his brother Simon's injury and long recovery to jog him into action. At the age of twenty-one, Simon had followed Ash into the army, only to find himself in the most decisive battle of the long war with France—Waterloo. While carrying a message from his superior officer into the fighting, Simon had been badly wounded. It echoed something that had happened to Ash, eight years earlier, and his brother's close call had shocked him into action. Neither Ash nor Simon was married and there was no heir to the Crevitch estate, where their family had lived and ruled for over seven hundred years.
The Earl of Monkstead's dwelling lay ahead of him, the grandest in this Georgian square that was known as a rare architectural jewel. The earl's family had once privately owned this prime piece of real estate, until his grandfather, like so many forward thinking men in the 18 th century, decided to turn it into a place for the wealthy and the well-bred to reside while they were in the capital. It had since become one of the most exclusive addresses in London.
Ash had visited Monkstead's house only last week for a dinner party, and it was then that he had made the acquaintance of Miss Christina Beales.
She was young, barely twenty, and pretty in a fresh sort of way. She came from a good family, with connections, although she was not personally wealthy. She was also shy and quiet and biddable, and after one Season when she hadn't really 'taken', she had been content to step aside for her younger cousins to have their turn. Ash was sure that Miss Beales would be grateful for his proposal, and he told himself she would not make a fuss when he set up a mistress, discreetly of course. And as long as he was polite and thoughtful, he could probably continue to do very much as he pleased.
He was no young, romantic youth, not anymore, and he didn't want a starry-eyed debutante. Someone sensible, he thought, who didn't expect her husband to declare undying love for her. Surely that was all one needed in a wife? Apart from an heir of course, because that was his main reason for shackling himself in marriage to a stranger. Once the deed was done, and the child on the way, they could both breathe a sigh of relief and get on with their respective lives.
Christina just happened to be Monkstead's niece—a poorer side of the family the earl was currently assisting—which was why Ash was heading there now, to ask the earl's permission. He was confident he would be given it. He was young and reasonably good looking, and he was rich with a pedigree that was long and aristocratic.
It was a perfect match.
From the rumours he had heard about Monkstead, the earl was rather keen on making perfect matches among his friends and neighbours. Even if he did not have one for himself. There were other rumours—a miserable marriage made when the earl was a young man, and his desire to spare others the fate that he had suffered. Ash counted himself an acquaintance of Monkstead, rather than a friend—he wasn't sure the earl had many close friends—and he would never presume to ask about such personal matters. But nor did he believe every piece of gossip that circulated in the square.
Ash had sent a note ahead, requesting a meeting with his illustrious neighbour, and had been granted it. As he used the brass knocker on Monkstead's front door, he smiled and told himself it was not arrogance to believe this morning would go just as he planned.
Forty minutes later Lord Ashley Linholm was walking back across the square with his hopes, if not exactly in ruins, then very much torn and shaken about.
He turned the conversation, which he admitted now had been an odd one, over in his mind.
Not exactly a grande passione, I take it? the earl said, with a mocking smile. He was a striking man, in his thirties, and wealthy beyond imagining.
I doubt a marriage for love would be in anyone's best interests, Ash replied cynically, taking the glass of brandy from his host. They were in the earl's study, the large windows looking out to the well-tended garden at the back of his town house.
The earl considered him with a frown. Do you think not? Oh I agree that some love matches can be disastrous, but for you, Ashley, I think it is imperative. He leaned forward seriously. You would be miserable with a marriage of convenience. You need someone to keep you on your toes, and to come home to at night. You need a grande passione! I'm afraid that in those circumstances my niece would see very little of you if you walk her down the aisle.
Ash hesitated, thrown by this defence of love. Everyone knew that the rich and titled married not for love but to further their own ambitions. He remembered again the gossip about the earl making a disastrous marriage and being prepared to go to any lengths to help others to avoid the same fate. He'd dismissed the rumour at the time, but now he wondered if it was indeed true.
All the same, Ash tried for a forceful note, I am asking for your permission to approach her. You cannot say I would not be able to give her an enviable lifestyle, Monkstead? Surely you can have no objection there? She would live like a queen at Crevitch!
There was no glimmer of answering laughter in those dark eyes. Ash had never thought of his neighbour as being a fanatic but now he wondered.
"No, but you will repent it, the earl insisted, his gaze intent upon Ash. Everyone knows of Lord Linholm, who sails through life without a care, never getting involved, never taking anything very seriously—"
Monkstead held up his hand. Let me finish, Ashley. I believe there is a deeper reason for you keeping a distance between yourself and the world. Your heart was once broken and you wish never to repeat the experience! Come, who was it? Who do you lay awake dreaming of at night, your blood running hot? He must have seen something in Ash's face, because now he smiled. Ah, I see I was right. What was her name?
Ash found he had stopped in the middle of the square and had been standing there for some time. A breeze ruffled his blond hair and stirred his perfectly tied neckcloth. Startled, he looked about, wondering if anyone in the adjacent town houses had noticed him staring into nothing. But the square was empty, and with a shaken laugh at his own stupidity, he set off again toward Number Five.
He knew now he should have told Monkstead that there was no lost love in his past, and that he was mistaken. That in fact he had been waiting his entire life for Christina Beales and, contrary to what the earl thought, he intended to remain faithful to her for the rest of his life. He thought he could pull it off, but Monkstead was a tricky fellow and those dark eyes of his seemed to see right through Ash.
He'd felt vulnerable, exposed, and the truth had gushed out of him.
Juliet Montgomery, he said, and then gave a surprised laugh.
Monkstead smiled a knowing smile. Ah, my friend, tell me about your Juliet.
And as if he couldn't help himself, as if those dark eyes had put a spell on him, Ash found himself doing just that.
She was the daughter of one of our neighbours. Her mother ran off with an Italian count when she was in leading strings and her father never forgave the mother. Or the daughter. She was miserably unhappy at home and spent most of her time running wild in the woods. With me.
Did you kiss her, Ash?
Mouths hot and passionate, her body arching against his, both of them beyond thought, beyond anything but the need to join . . .


In November 2013 we contacted Tory MP, Laurie Hawn, informing him about the latest facts of Omar's case and asking when his government will stop using Omar Khadr as a political scapegoat to win votes. His unsubstantiated response adds to the government's prejudicial rhetoric and shows his lack of knowledge about the case. Helen Sadowski of the Free Omar Khadr Now campaign explains the falsehoods in his letter point by point. … Continue reading →.
Last Friday, Omar Khadr, a former child soldier, was denied a request to be moved to a provincial prison to serve out the remainder of his highly questionable sentence. "It is sadly evident that even after more than a year of his being back in Canada, programming has not been put in place that recognizes his right to treatment and support for all he suffered as a child soldier," said Elizabeth May, MP for Saanich-Gulf Islands and Green Party of Canada Leader.
Omar Khadr will now remain in a maximum federal prison and will not likely be able to meet parole requirements. In spite of his desire to learn, he may also be denied the opportunity of education.
The Free Omar Khadr Committee would like to thank the Green Party-in particular Elizabeth May and Joe Foster-for yesterday's media release which highlighted the recent denial of Omar Khadr's court application, the highly inflammatory statements of Stephen Harper, and many of the shocking violations of Omar's fundamental rights in a decade-long history of abuse. Your ongoing commitment to justice for this vulnerable young Canadian is much appreciated.
Our committee seeks to remind Canadians that our government has a legal duty to release Omar who has been illegitimately imprisoned (largely in solitary confinement) since 2002 when he was only 15 years old.
1. Demand the immediate release of Omar Khadr and ensure violations of his rights are investigated and remedied.
2. Protest against the Canadian authorities who wrongly claim that the illegal Guantanamo Bay sentencing gives them the right to continue to imprison Omar.
3. Condemn all prejudicial statements and shocking interference in a judicial process by government officials particularly Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Public Safety Minister Stephen Blaney, and former Public Safety Minister, Vic Toews.
Without independent, impartial courts and the equal application of laws, the rights of all citizens are threatened. The struggle for justice for Omar Khadr is in the interest of all Canadians and we are hopeful it will be a topic for the Green Party in the upcoming session of Parliament.
Dallaire has been an outspoken advocate for Omar's rights, as former child soldier. In July 2012, Dallaire set up a petition putting pressure on Public Safety Minister, at that time, Vic Toews, to honour the plea bargain deal Khadr agreed to in 2010.
35,000 concerned citizens signed the petition. Omar was repatriated in September 2012.
"Omar has been 10 years in jail already, in a jail so many have considered illegal and inappropriate. He's been tortured to get testimony out of him and through all that has seen no support whatsoever.
Now that he's back in Canada the government should simply clam up. It has no more duty in regards to this individual. He's now within the process of our judicial system and in that context the executive has no right to interfere in the judicial process." ~Dallaire, Sept. 2012.
"Omar Khadr needs to be treated the way we treat Canadians according to the rules that exist, according to the laws and principles that govern. He should be treated like any Canadian who as been incarcerated outside of the country. We need to be fair to the way we treat Canadians." ~Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, Aug. 2013, Halifax.
Trudeau isn't ruling out compensation for Omar for the time he served in Guantanamo Bay.
[+] Official Statement by Liberal Leader Bob Rae on Omar's repatriation, Sept. 2012.
"The over-the-top rhetoric that we've come to expect from this minister of Public Safety is most unfortunate, I hope it doesn't influence the parole board's deliberations." ~Liberal MP Sean Casey, Sept. 2012.
"Today, the Conservatives ended nearly a decade of unnecessary delays and allowed Omar Khadr to serve out the remainder of his sentence in Canada. Canada is the last Western country to repatriate their citizens from the discredited Guantanamo prison system.
Mr. Khadr's return to Canada was inevitable, yet the Conservatives chose to drag this process out for years at great cost to taxpayers. Their mishandling has hurt our relationship with the United States, our closest ally, and tarnished Canada's reputation on the international stage.
Both the Supreme Court of Canada and the U.S. Supreme Court, based on the full facts of this case, have found that the military commission proceedings in Guantanamo violated both U.S. domestic law and Canada's international human rights obligations.
Conservatives have previously faced court judgments against them for their mishandling of the case and failure to respect human rights.
The government should now allow Mr. Khadr to be handled by Canadian authorities in accordance with Canadian law, free from interference." ~[+] Official Statement from NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar on Omar's repatriation, Sept. 2012.
"This government decided to play politics with a straightforward foreign affairs case. Rather than simply bringing its citizen home from Guantanamo Bay as other countries did, they tried to polarize and turn this into something else.
They've obviously screwed up massively when it comes to this case, so hopefully they won't do any further damage when it comes to our reputation as a country." ~NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar, Sept 2012.
"Mr. Khadr was the only Western citizen left in Guantanamo. And that's because other countries, Australia for instance and others, had repatriated their citizens back to their countries. We had not done that, we had foot dragged. We'd frankly been pushed in the end by the Americans to take him back. The Conservatives were very stubborn on returning Khadr to Canada, not living up to their responsibility to deal with one of our citizens. Khadr's prolonged detainment in Guantanamo Bay has already been established as a human rights violation and now the government should explain why they resisted bringing him back to Canada. The question now is, what's the government' s explanation for having waited so long to have him come home? Just what was it that made the government so intransigent on this issue? That's going to be an issue for the next number of months for us to delve into" ~NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar, CTV News Sept 2012.


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