Dilip Simeon's blog

Fishing Communities Need Right Over Water Bodies - National Platform for Small Scale Fish Workers (I) Demands in Press Conference at Delhi In a Press Conference at the Press Club of India, New Delhi on 29th March 2019 the National Platform for Small Scale Fish Workers (I) demanded that the small and traditional fishing communities should have inalienable right over water bodies. Pradip Chatterjee, National Convener of the Platform said that the small and traditional fishing communities are by far the largest primary non-consumptive stakeholders of our water bodies including the seas, rivers, lakes, wetlands, reservoirs, tanks and ponds as well as their natural custodians as Good Fish needs Good Water. But there is no recognition of the fishing communities.  They have no visibility. Fisheries or fishing communities have no mention in the National Water Policy of the country. Water bodies and their waters are being used, encroached, consumed and polluted without even info...

Scotland’s Orkney islands produce more clean energy than their inhabitants can use. Their next step? Hydrogen. Here’s why that matters – and what the rest of the world could learn. I’ve seen thousands of petrol pumps in my life, but this is my first encounter with a hydrogen refuelling station. It sits by the road in the Orkney islands, an archipelago off the north-east coast of Scotland where residents have big dreams: they want to have their cars, ferries and boilers all running on hydrogen. As we approach the station, its normality is striking. There are no attendants in full-body hazmat suits, no sci-fi loud bangs, no bright neon signs. Just your average dispenser waiting to be used. But Adele Lidderdale, a hydrogen project officer at the Orkney Islands Council, is a little nervous: one of her van’s sensors has been malfunctioning lately, she says, and might not accept fuel from the nozzle. Now, she plugs the nozzle into her van and steps back to the screen at the other end of...

Fighting between security forces and armed groups in Kurdish-majority cities began in  Turkey  in 2015, and I, as a Kurdish journalist, felt the need to visit those cities. The media in Turkey, which is almost completely under government control, was only reporting information shared by the security forces, put out in a one-sided and propagandistic way. Zehra Dogan is a nominee for this year’s  Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards In 2015 I was working for the JINHA, a women’s news agency, which was made up entirely of women and wrote all its news from a feminist perspective. There was still one year left before JINHA, of which I was a founder, would be closed by government decree. Before I went to these cities, some people warned me I could be arrested. At the time these places were under military siege, with a 24/7 ban on going out into the streets and the bodies of civilians, who had been killed in the fallout of clashes, lying for days in the middl...

Note dated 30 March 2019 : by Anil Nauriya March 30, 2019 marked the hundredth anniversary of the historic protest in Delhi against the Rowlatt legislation in response to Gandhi's call. Elsewhere in India the protest was observed on 6 April 1919.  The March 30 / April 6  protest was the first all-India hartal and protest on a democratic rights issue In Delhi the Colonial Government resorted to firing and other steps and several people were killed. Here is the beginning of a sample list I'm drawing up: Abdul Ghani , b. 1894. Took part in public demonstration against the Rowlatt Act on 30 March 1919. Killed in bayonet charge by a British Army unit near the Town Hall, Delhi. Died same day. Atam Prakash : Took part in public demonstration in Delhi against the Rowlatt Act on 30 March 1919. Received bullet wound in firing by the police and died the same day. Chandra Bhan, b. 1889 : Took part in public demonstration in Delhi against the Rowlatt Act on 30 Mar...

Ms Caputova started her acceptance speech by thanking voters in Slovak, as well as in the Hungarian, Czech, Roma and Ruthenian languages, turning to all main minority groups. "I am happy not just for the result but mainly that it is possible not to succumb to populism, to tell the truth, to raise interest without aggressive vocabulary," she told a crowd of supporters. Riding a wave of public fury over  corruption , liberal lawyer Zuzana Caputova won   Slovakia 's presidential election on Saturday, bucking a trend that has seen populist, anti- European Union  politicians make gains across the continent. Corruption and change in political style were the main themes ahead of the run-off vote, which took place a year after journalist  Jan Kuciak , who investigated high-profile fraud cases, and his fiancé were murdered at their home. “Stand up to evil”:  Slovakia's first female president hails victory for progressive values Ms Caputova, a pro-EU political...

“Saudi detainees including women activists have alleged that authorities mistreated them with unspeakable cruelty, including electric shocks, whippings and sexual harassment, and new revelations of medical reports appear to confirm what they have said for months.” Political prisoners in  Saudi Arabia  are said to be suffering from malnutrition, cuts, bruises and burns, according to leaked medical reports that are understood to have been prepared for the country’s ruler, King Salman. The reports seem to provide the first documented evidence from within the heart of the royal court that political prisoners are facing severe physical abuse, despite the government’s denials that men and women in custody are being tortured. The Guardian has been told the medical reports will be given to  King Salman  along with reco-mmendations that are said to include a potential pardon for all the prisoners, or at least early release for those with serious health problems. The...

It’s a fortunate thing for  Donald Trump  that the Democrats, and much of the media, spent the past two years focused on the narrow question of whether his 2016 campaign actively colluded with Russian agents to hack his opponents’ emails. Were it not for this singular obsession, we might have come to appreciate the full scope of graft, influence peddling and petty theft that has made this the most crooked administration in US history. One doesn’t have to go to Moscow to see it; pick almost any country in the world. Take my former home, Panama, famous for its canal and secret banks. Towering over the Panama City skyline is a 70 story hotel-casino shaped like a sailboat formerly known as the Trump Ocean Club. Trump had gifted it to his daughter Ivanka as her first real estate deal, which court  records  show earned Trump between $30m and $50m. Ivanka Trump put in charge of its sales a Brazilian financier, whom a Reuters  investigation  identified as an a...

.....There is no easy explanation, either, to find in Richman’s death. There are two contexts, however, that have been hard to ignore. The first is that the previous week two of the teenage survivors of the  Parkland school shooting in Florida  had also taken their own lives. Richman, in his public statements over the years, had often noted how each time there was a new tragedy, a new mass shooting – and there were so very many – he and Jennifer “would just sit and bawl”. Like many Americans, he believed that Sandy Hook would be a turning point for the nation and its gun laws. “When will it be enough?” he said in an interview in 2018. “I feel like we’re letting it happen. That there are things that could be done, that aren’t being done.” The other, related, context in which Richman’s death asks to be viewed is the unspeakable way in which the burden of grief that the Newtown parents have borne was added to by those who sought to exploit the tragedy. In the eyes of the...

A US court ordered Monsanto to pay $80m in damages because it hid cancer risks. That’s a small consolation for victims For the second time in less than eight months a  US jury has found  that decades of scientific evidence demonstrates a clear cancer connection to Monsanto’s line of top-selling Roundup herbicides, which are used widely by consumers and farmers. Twice now jurors have additionally determined that the company’s own internal records show Monsanto has intentionally manipulated the public record to hide the cancer risks. Both juries found punitive damages were warranted because the company’s cover-up of cancer risks was so egregious. The juries saw evidence that  Monsanto  has ghost-written scientific papers, tried to silence scientists, scuttled independent government testing and cozied up to regulators for favorable safety reviews of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. Even the US district judge Vince Chhabria, who oversaw the San Fran...

Series: 1944-2019, 75 years of interference from the World Bank and the IMF ( Part 1 ) In 2019, the World Bank (WB) and the IMF will be 75 years old. These two international financial institutions (IFI), founded in 1944, are dominated by the USA and a few allied major powers who work to generalize policies that run counter the interests of the world’s populations. The WB and the IMF have systematically made loans to States as a means of influencing their policies. Foreign indebtedness has been and continues to be used as an instrument for subordinating the borrowers. Since their creation, the IMF and the WB have violated international pacts on human rights and have no qualms about supporting dictatorships. A new form of decolonization is urgently required to get out of the predicament in which the IFI and their main shareholders have entrapped the world in general. New international institutions must be established. This new series of articles by Éric Toussaint retraces the dev...

Archaeologists  and historians are shedding extraordinary new light on one of the most important events in human history – the horrific battle which gave birth to the  Roman Empire . A detailed study of a unique victory monument, overlooking the sea in northwest  Greece , is revealing some of the long-lost secrets of that crucial military engagement – a great sea battle, fought between  Julius Caesar ’s adoptive son and heir, Octavian (who became Rome’s first emperor) and Egypt’s Queen Cleopatra (and her Roman lover, Mark Antony). The remains of the victory monument still survive adjacent to Nicopolis – the largest ancient ruined city in Greece. Octavian (who received the title Augustus when he became Rome’s first emperor) won that crucial naval clash of arms in 31BC – and, now, more than 2,000 years later, detailed analysis of his great victory monument, overlooking the battle site near the ancient Greek religious sanctuary of Actium, is helping scholars...

Accumulate accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets - Karl Marx They grab whatever they can – be that cheap headlines or fast money – and then crash out, even while loosening the very foundations of the institutions entrusted to them. Crucially, this is a genre of politics that relies on a strong state even as it bilks it of the necessary tax revenue. There is no heroism here, just moneyed nihilism Aditya Chakrabortty - Amoral and venal: Britain’s governing class has lost all sense of duty Even as doodlebugs smashed into the surrounding streets, George Orwell consoled himself with this thought: “One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are morally fairly sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed.” Present those who governed us with an existential crisis, he argued in his essay England Your England, and they would do what they believed to be right for the country. Almost eight decades later, the UK stands on the ver...

स्वामी असीमानंद का बरी होना !  किस दिशा में जा रही है भारतीय न्याय व्यवस्था ?  भारतीय न्याय प्रणाली इन दिनों जिस ढंग से काम कर रही है , उससे न्याय पाना और दोषियों को सजा दिलवाना बहुत कठिन हो गया है . न्यायिक निर्णय , कार्यपालिका ( पुलिस व अभियोजन ) द्वारा न्यायाधीशों के समक्ष प्रस्तुत सबूतों पर आधारित होते हैं . ऐसे में , सत्ताधारी दल की विचारधारा और उसकी सोच की आपराधिक मुकदमों में बहुत महत्वपूर्ण भूमिका होती है . कई मौकों पर , वर्चस्वशाली विचारधारा - भले ही उसके पैरोकार सत्ता में न हों - भी अदालती फैसलों को प्रभावित करती है . यह दुर्भाग्यपूर्ण परन्तु सच है . सन 1992-93 में मुंबई में भड़की सांप्रदायिक हिंसा में 1,000 से अधिक लोग मारे गए थे . परन्तु इस खूनखराबे के दौरान घटित गंभीर अपराधों के बहुत कम दोषियों को सजा मिल सकी . इस हिंसा के बाद , पाकिस्तान की आईएसआई के सहयोग से , मुंबई के अंडरवर्ल्ड ने मुंबई में अनेक बम विस्फोट किए , जिनमें करीब 200 व...