There are times when as individuals with missions to accomplish in life, we come to a point where we become fed-up with life and seek to die. This situation comes particularly at a time when a major milestone has been achieved by you and everyone looks forward for you to move to the next level. Various events in life lead to this and it begins the appearing of a dark spot which most of the time barricades you and your promotion.

Such was the predicament of the celebrated Prophet Elijah. In chapter 18 of First Kings, the prophet Elijah had successfully challenged King Ahab and dared him to recognize the supremacy of God to see if the famine that had descended upon the nation would not end. The challenge came at a time when “For three years no rain fell in Samaria, and there was almost nothing to eat anywhere” (1 Kings 18: 1). And the Lord demonstrated his supremacy when fire fell from heaven to consume the wet burnt offering of Elijah after the four hundred prophets of Baal had failed to do likewise. With the help of God, Elijah beheaded the four hundred priests of Baal and charged Samaria to worship the Lord and at the prayer of Elijah, rain fell on the land after three years.

Despite all these accomplishments, fear descended heavily on Elijah when Ahab’s wife, Jezebel who had turned his husband’s heart away from the Lord and supervised the worship of Baal swore to make Elijah like one of the slain false prophets. The fear led to Elijah’s plea with the Lord to take away his life; since he was not better than his fathers.

Such is life, man could easily be swayed by events and there would be a time when you would wish for your death. Such situation is called the down or cloudy side of life.

Jezebel decided to slain Elijah after she had heard of Elijah’s accomplishment. There are times when an enemy may undermine your achievements and make you look stupid; you may just think yourself as a person without any notable achievements especially when he/she laughs at what you consider an achievement. In Elijah’s time, it was Jezebel, but in your case, it may be a friend, a relative, mother, father, sibling, teacher or classmate who may try to diminish you with worse, simply refuse to be swayed by what that. Forget about what that person says or said, he simply wish to be like you if he has that opportunity.

Friend, do you think Jezebel wouldn’t have been happy if her false prophets had triumphed over Elijah? Sure, it would have been an opportunity to even spread the worship of Baal in Samaria. Such is life, your accuser would have been the same person who would have trumpeting his achievements should he have achieve these feats. Therefore forget about the public opinion that is meant to bring you on your knees; just pursue your life-long dreams without any persuasion from the devil.

Jezebel promised to make Elijah’s life like one of his prophets just to make sure that the worship of God is not entrenched once again in Samaria, would Jezebel had wished for the same fate to happen for the false prophets if they had killed Elijah?  The reason why someone somewhere is threatening and wishing for your downfall has been because you have accomplished or on the way to accomplishing a great feat. The fact that there would continuously be sticks and stones under ripped fruits should tell you that you are a fruit which many are waiting to eat from. No matter where you have reached, stop there and wait for the Lord for he is ready to do great and mighty works in your life. Simply trust him and there would be a great turn around in your situation.

Forget about the discouragement and the people who have sworn never to sleep until you are finished. They are only there to cheer you on as you journey in life. Their presence would help you to chart a better course for your life. If you don’t have an enemy, go look for one because he / she would be the one to sharpen you some way.

Never see his presence as a threat, simply view his comments as part of the process of sharpening. Do not wish for your death like Elijah did but rather wish that the Lord keeps you on track to accomplish great feats in life. Instead of travelling or thinking about dying, why don’t you think of living to demonstrate to the world that the Lord is great and willing to help anyone who seeks him?

So before you think of ending the race of life or wishing for your death, stop to consider the person you are dealing with. The Lord is his name and he has not finished with you yet. Get up, eat and begin afresh and HE would be there to guide you. GOD BLESS YOU. - BY KWAKU NTI

The Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary also defined “profession” as “a type of job that needs special training or skill especially that needs a high level of education.”

One would agree that there are several definitions for “teaching,” but I have chosen to settle on the one by Albert Koomson et al (2000) because it would help me communicate well with my readers. According to Albert Koomson et al (2000), teaching can be defined as an activity performed by a more experienced and knowledgeable person and aimed at helping the less experienced person to learn. He further explained that teaching also involved assisting the learner to either gain or change some knowledge, skills or attitudes. Teaching should therefore involve the full participation of pupils.

Koomson et al (2000) also cite many activities which are involved in teaching. These include talking, and chalking, marking pupils’ work, listening to pupils and reinforcing their behaviour, arranging classroom materials, encouraging and motivating pupils to carry out their work and helping weak ones, explaining questions and organising pupils in smaller groups. From the definition above, the teaching practice surely requires special training and skills to be able to guide or assist learners, pupils or students perform creditably in examinations and other problem-solving tasks in and outside the classroom.

The question then is: “How do we prepare our teachers both in training and in practice to be equipped in rendering those services fixed in the international and modern standard teaching practices?” This comes in the wake of challenges in teaching and the education system as a whole due to social, economical, technological changes and other political forces that have evolved within the 20^th and 21^st century. In addition, among the most significant changes include shifts in population demographics, cultural diversity of the population, changing patterns of learning and education system, increased consumer expectations and the high cost of education financing. Perhaps it is the solving of these challenges that informed recent policies and decision making to increase the intake of teachers to upgrade the basic teachers training institutions to diploma status and also expanding the degrees programmes in the universities. The introduction of diploma and degree programmes has resulted in the expansion of the subjects being taught under these programmes. Courses such as Research Methods, Education, Child Psychology and Development, Guidance and Counselling, Special Education, Methods of Teaching and Religious and Moral Education have been added to equip the teacher with skills to meet the world standard. The decisions specified above were taken to adequately prepare a new qualified teacher to meet the demands of modern trends in teaching as expressed in the vision of many teaching theorists such as Albert Koomson et al (2002). It is imperative from the above analysis that every qualified and registered teacher would be required to use sound methods of teaching, guidance and counselling to deliver quality and effective teaching to their “client” (that is the learners, pupils or students).

However, another question we need to ask is whether the teacher has been adequately supported to meet his or her tasks by providing an environment conducive for effective teaching practices to the expectation of our learners? If not, what can society do to nullify or erase some misconceptions about the teaching profession in Ghana and also equip ourselves in readiness for the task given to us as a group, that is Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Teaching Educators, Training Institutions, including the Universities and all other teaching affiliate bodies like the National Association of Graduate teachers, (NAGRAT) Ghana Education Serves (GES), National Teaching Council (NTC)?

To find solutions to these logical questions there is the need to adopt an empirical or pragmatic approach. It must be generally flexible and dynamic in our socio-cultural environment not forgetting modernity as a factor. In addition, dynamic changing trends in international standards should be considered to ensure continuous competitive nature of the Ghanaian teacher. To this end attempts have been made to interact with some major stake holders and individuals who are so much concerned about contemporary teaching in Ghana and come out with these suggestions mentioned below. These points provided below are responses and comments that were duly and diligently gathered through surveys and seminars in an attempt to provide some possible ways of raising teaching standards to an appreciable level in the country.

-                     Equip teachers with good communication skills

-                     Improve education and training needs of teachers

-                     Continuous refresher courses for practising teachers

-                     ICT training of teacher trainees

-                     Conduct regular researches in teaching

-                     Ensure adequate and efficient working tools in the classrooms

-                     Ensure effective supervisory roles by circuit supervisors, inspectorates boards, etc

-                     Ensure personal discipline in teaching practice

-                     Ensure sanctions against those who misconduct themselves

-                     Awards and motivate those who go the extra mile to excel in the teaching practice especially those in the rural areas) in the midst of numerous obstacles confronting teaching practice or profession

-                     Better the condition of services especially in monetary terms (salary adjustments)

It is in this light that I deem it necessary as a colleague teacher to appeal to all and sundry in this noble profession to strive to brighten the corner one finds him or herself. This I believe can be achieved in a collaborated effort from all teaching groups in the country following approaches which may seem little but will always provide good results if employed.

1. Always remember to appreciate differences in behaviour among different pupils (learners) considering differencing in social, cultural, economic, psychological and religious backgrounds.
2. Do not indoctrinate learners; consider their religious faiths.
3. Be patient enough to listen attentively to your learners and their relative questions and answers. This normally helps you to make better assessments and decisions of your learners’ performances so as to develop an effective teaching response to the pupil’s problem.
4. Always try to act like you are the one receiving the same services that you are providing to your pupils and evaluate yourself to see if you will score an excellent mark. By doing so you will almost give your best.
5. Last but not least, remember to pay your “tithes”, pray to your Maker towards your work each day, if possible before getting to your working environment. This certainly gives you the inner “can do spirit” and strength that is required to be able to implement the suggestions (opinions) above.

To end this discussion, it is imperative for us to understand that every teaching action one takes either in the classroom or outside the classroom or has implications even on the streets.

Yes, we may be justified to criticise the government and other stakeholders for low salary (remunerations), inadequate teaching materials, extensive workload and other structural and administrative challenges. It will also be equally wrong on our part to expect the government and the agencies to instil professional qualities such as patience, tolerance, empathy, discipline, neatness, intelligence and the like in us that is clearly spelt out in our training. It behooves therefore on each of us to see him or herself as a change agent in an attempt to realising the comprehensive evidence-based teaching practice that is being preached across the globe. We should also not forget the essential need to equip ourselves properly in the area of information technology as part of the changing process.

It is my hope and prayer that all honourable members of the noble profession will come to this realisation in order to push a common agenda of quality teaching delivery in our country Ghana as practiced elsewhere on the globe. This I believe is the sure way of establishing a strong, respectable and indispensable teaching profession in Ghana, our beloved country. Let us do our best and God will do the rest. The world needs a shine in every corner. Make a difference, stay tuned, stay blessed and learn more.

BY AMEWORWOR CALEB PHILIP

The writer is a professional teacher at Juaso R/C JSH; an old student of Akrokerri College of Education

Credit: Thoughts from Albert Kobina Koomson (UCC) and Mr. Sarfo Antwi Joseph (Editing and Research officer) NHLMC

Many people believe the latest round of sanctions against Iran constitute an 'act of war'

(Tehran, FNA) The Fars News Agency has confirmed with the Republican Guard’s North American Operations Command that a new elite Iranian commando team is operating in the US-Mexican border region. The primary day-to-day mission of the team, known as the Joint Special Operations Gulf of Mexico Task Force, or JSOG-MTF, is to mentor Mexican military units in the border areas in their war with the deadly drug cartels. The task force provides “highly trained personnel that excel in uncertain environments,” Maj. Amir Arastoo, a spokesman for Republican Guard special operations forces in North America, tells Fars, and “seeks to confront irregular threats…”

The unit began its existence in mid-2009 – around the time that Washington rejected the Iranian leadership’s wish for a new diplomatic dialogue. But whatever the task force does about the United States – or might do in the future – is a sensitive subject with the Republican Guard. ”It would be inappropriate to discuss operational plans regarding any particular nation,” Arastoo says about the US.

Okay, so I made all that up. Sue me. But first admit that, a line or two in, you knew it was fiction. After all, despite the talk about US decline, we are still on a one-way imperial planet. Yes, there is a new US special operations team known as Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Co-operation Council, or JSOTF-GCC, at work near Iran and, according to Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog, we really don’t quite know what it’s tasked with doing (other than helping train the forces of such allies as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia).

And yes, the quotes are perfectly real, just out of the mouth of a US “spokesman for special-operations forces in the Mideast”, not a representative of Iran’s Republican Guard. And yes, most in the US, if they were to read about the existence of the new special ops team, wouldn’t think it strange that US forces were edging up to (if not across) the Iranian border, not when our “safety” was at stake.

Reverse the story, though, and it immediately becomes a malign, if unimaginable, fairy tale. Of course, no Iranian elite forces will ever operate along the US border. Not in this world. Washington wouldn’t live with it – and it remains the military giant of giants on this planet. By comparison, Iran is, in military terms, a minor power.

Any Iranian forces on the Mexican border would represent a crossing of one of those “red lines” that US officials are always talking about and such an international abomination that it be dealt with severely. More than that, their presence would undoubtedly be treated as an act of war. It would make screaming headlines here. The Republican candidates for the presidency would go wild. You know the rest. Think about the reaction when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that an Iranian-American used-car salesman from Texas had contacted a Mexican drug cartel as part of a bizarre plot - supposedly hatched by senior members of the elite Iranian Quds Force – to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Washington restaurant and possibly bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies as well.

Though doubts were soon raised about the likelihood of such an Iranian plot, the outrage in the US was palpable. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted that it “crosses a line that Iran needs to be held to account for”. The Wall Street Journal labelled it “arguably an act of war”, as did Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee. Speaker of the House John Boehner termed it “a very serious breach of international behaviour”, while House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers swore that it crossed “a very dangerous threshold” and called for “unprecedented” action by the Obama administration.

On the other hand, no one here would claim that a US special operations team edging up to the Iranian border was anything out of the ordinary or that it potentially crossed any lines – red or otherwise – or was a step beyond what the international community accepts. In fact, the news, such as it was, caused no headlines in the press, no comments on editorial pages, nothing. After all, everyone knows that Iranians would be the equivalent of fish out of water in Mexico, but that US is at home away from home in the Gulf (as in most other places on Earth).

Nonetheless, just for the heck of it, let’s suspend the laws of political and military gravity and pile up a few more fairy-tale-ish details.

Imagine that, in late 2007, Iran’s ruling mullahs and their military advisers had decided to upgrade already significant covert activities against Washington, including cross-border operations, and so launched an intensification of its secret campaign to “destabilise” the country’s leadership – call it a covert war if you will – funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of oil money; that they (or their allies) supported armed oppositional groups hostile to Washington; that they flew advanced robot drones on surveillance missions in the country’s airspace; that they imposed ever escalating sanctions, which over the years caused increased suffering among the people of the US – in order to force Washington to dismantle its nuclear arsenal and give up the nuclear programme (military and peaceful) that it had been pursuing since 1943; that they and an ally developed and launched a computer worm meant to destroy US centrifuges and introduced sabotaged parts into its nuclear supply chain; that they encouraged US nuclear scientists to defect; that one of their allies launched an assassination programme against US nuclear scientists and engineers, killing five of them on the streets of US cities; that they launched a global campaign to force the world not to buy key US products, including Hollywood movies, iPhones, iPods and iPads, and weaponry of any sort by essentially embargoing US banking transactions.

Imagine as well that an embattled US president declared the Gulf of Mexico to be off-limits to Iranian aircraft carriers and threatened any entering its waters with dire consequences. In response, the Iranians promptly sent their aircraft carrier, the Mossadegh, and its battle group of accompanying ships directly into Gulf waters not far from Florida and then stationed a second carrier, the Khomeini, and its task force in the nearby Caribbean as support. (Okay, we know the Iranians don’t have aircraft carriers, but just for a moment, suspend disbelief.)

And keep in mind that, in this outlandish scenario, all of the above would only be what we knew about or suspected. You would have to assume that there were also still-unknown aspects to their in-the-shadows campaign of regime change against Washington.

Now, pinned to Iran, that list looks absurd. Were such things to have happened (even in a far more limited fashion), they would have been seen across the US political spectrum as an abomination (and rightly so), a morass of illegal, illegitimate, and immoral acts and programmes that would have to be opposed at all costs. As you also know perfectly well, it is a description of just what we do know or suspect that the US has done, alone or in concert with its ally Israel, or what, in the case of the assassination operations against nuclear scientists (and possibly an explosion that destroyed much of an Iranian missile base, killing a major general and 16 others), Israel has evidently done on its own, but possibly with the covert agreement of Washington.

And yet you can search the mainstream news far and wide without seeing words such as “illegal”, “illegitimate”, or “immoral” – or even “a very serious breach of international behaviour” - applied to them, though you can certainly find sunny reports on our potential power to loose destruction in the region, the sorts of articles that, if they were in the state-controlled Iranian press, we would consider propaganda.

While the other three presidential candidates were baying for Iranian blood at a recent Republican debate, it was left to Ron Paul, the ultimate outsider, to point out the obvious: that the latest round of oil sanctions being imposed by Washington and just agreed to by the European Union – meant to prohibit the sale of Iranian oil on the international market – was essentially an “act of war”, and that it preceded recent Iranian threats (an unlikely prospect, by the way) to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the planet’s oil flows.

And keep in mind, the covert war against Iran is ostensibly aimed at a nuclear weapon that does not exist, that the country’s leaders claim they are not building, that the best work of the US intelligence community in 2007 and 2010 indicated was not yet on the horizon. (At the moment, at worst, the Iranians are believed to be working toward “possible breakout capacity” – that is, the ability to relatively “quickly” build a nuclear weapon, if the decision were made.) As for nuclear weapons, the US has 5,113 warheads that we don’t doubt are necessary for our safety and the safety of the planet. These are weapons that we implicitly trust ourselves to have, even though the United States remains the only country ever to use nuclear weapons, obliterating two Japanese cities at the cost of perhaps 200,000 civilian deaths. Similarly, we have no doubt that the world is safe with Israel possessing up to 200 nuclear weapons, a near civilisation-destroying (undeclared) arsenal. But it is our conviction that an Iranian bomb, even one, would end life as we know it.

Added to that fear is the oft-cited fact that Iran is run by a mullahtariat that oppresses any opposition. That, however, only puts it in league with US allies in the region such as Bahrain, whose monarchy has shot down, beaten up, and jailed its opposition, and the Saudis, who have fiercely repressed their own dissidents. Nor, in terms of harm to its people, is Iran faintly in a league with past US allies such as General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, who launched a US-backed military coup against a democratically elected government on September 11, 1973, killing more than died in the 9/11 attacks of 2001. Or such as Indonesian autocrat Suharto on whom the deaths of at least half a million of his people are usually pinned.

Here, then, is a little necessary context for the latest round of Iran-mania in the US: Washington has declared the world its oyster and garrisons the planet in a historically unique way – without direct colonies, but with approximately 1,000 bases worldwide (not including those in war zones or ones the Pentagon prefers not to acknowledge). That we do so, unique as it may be in the records of empire, strikes us as anything but odd and so is little discussed here. One of the reasons is simple enough. What’s called our “safety” and “security” has been made a planetary issue. It is, in fact, the planetary standard for action, though one only we (or our closest allies) can invoke. Others are held to far more limiting rules of behaviour.

As a result, a US president can now send drones and special operations forces just about anywhere to kill just about anyone he designates as a threat to our security. Since we are everywhere, and everywhere at home, and everywhere have “interests”, we may indeed be threatened anywhere. Wherever we’ve settled in – and in the Gulf, as an example, we’re deeply entrenched – new “red lines” have been created that others are prohibited from crossing. No one, after all, can infringe on our safety.

In support of our interests – which, speaking truthfully, are also the interests of oil – we could covertly overthrow an Iranian government in 1953 (starting the whole train of events that led to this crisis moment in the Gulf), and we can again work to overthrow an Iranian government in 2012. The only issue seriously discussed in this country is: How exactly can we do it, or can we do it at all (without causing ourselves irreparably greater harm)? Effectiveness, not legality or morality, is the only measurement. Few in our own little world (and who else matters?) question our right to do so, though obviously the right of any other state to do something similar to us or one of our allies, or to retaliate or even to threaten to retaliate, should we do so, is considered shocking and beyond all norms, beyond every red line when it comes to how nations (except us) should behave.

This mindset, and the acts that have gone with it, have blown what is, at worst, a modest-sized global problem up into an existential threat, a life-and-death matter. Iran as a global monster now nearly fills what screen-space there is for foreign enemies in the present US moment. Yet, despite its enormous energy reserves, it is a shaky regional power, ruled by a faction-ridden set of fundamentalists (but not madmen), the most hardline of whom seem at the moment ascendant (in no small part due to US and Israeli policies). The country has a relatively modest military budget, and no recent history of invading other states. It has been under intense pressure of every sort for years now and the strains are showing. The kind of pressure the US and its allies have been exerting creates the basis for madness – or for terrible miscalculation followed by inevitable tragedy.

In an election year in the US, little of this is apparent. The Republicans, Ron Paul aside, have made Iran the entrée du jour on the US (and Israeli) security menu, a situation that couldn’t be more absurdly out of proportion or more dangerous. In fact, when it comes to “American security”, our fundamentalists are off on another rampage with the Obama administration following behind.

Just as a small exercise to restore some sense of proportion, stop for a moment the next time you hear of US or Israeli plans for the further destabilisation of Iran and think: “What would we do if the Iranians were planning something similar for us?”

It’s one small way to begin, individually, to imagine a planet on which everyone might experience some sense of security. And here’s the oddest thing, given the blowback that could come from a blowup in the Gulf, it might even make us all safer.—Aljazeera.com    ARTICLE: TOM ENGELHARDT

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s 

Awesome universe

EVERY morning is a miracle. Deep inside the morning sun, hydrogen is being fused into helium at temperatures of millions of degrees. X rays and gamma rays of incredible violence are pouring out of the core into the surrounding layers of the sun.

If the sun were transparent, these rays would blast their way to the surface in a few searing seconds. Instead, they begin to bounce from tightly packed atom to atom of solar “insulation,” gradually losing energy. Days, weeks, centuries, pass. Thousands of years later, that once deadly radiation finally emerges from the sun’s surface as a gentle shower of yellow light—no longer a menace but just right for bathing earth with its warmth.

Every night is a miracle too. Other suns twinkle at us across the vast expanse of our galaxy. They are a riot of colors, sizes, temperatures, and densities. Some are super giants so large that if one were centered in the position of our sun, what remained of our planet would be inside the surface of that superstar. Other suns are tiny, white dwarfs—smaller than our earth, yet as heavy as our sun. Some will peacefully drone along for billions of years. Others are poised on the brink of supernova explosions that will obliterate them, briefly outshining entire galaxies.

Primitive peoples spoke of sea monsters and battling gods, of dragons and turtles and elephants, of lotus flowers and dreaming gods. Later, during the so-called Age of Reason, the gods were swept aside by the newfound “magic” of calculus and Newton’s laws. Now we live in an age bereft of the old poetry and legend. The children of today’s atomic age have chosen as their paradigm for creation, not the ancient sea monster, not Newton’s “machine,” but that overarching symbol of the 20th century—the bomb. Their “creator” is an explosion. They call their cosmic fireball the big bang.

What the big bang “Explains”

The most popular version of this generation’s view of creation states that some 15 to 20 billion years ago, the universe did not exist, nor did empty space. There was no time, no matter—nothing except an infinitely dense, infinitely small point called a singularity, which exploded into the present universe. That explosion included a brief period during the first tiny fraction of a second when the infant universe inflated, or expanded, much faster than the speed of light.

During the first few minutes of the big bang, nuclear fusion took place on a universal scale, giving rise to the currently measured concentrations of hydrogen and helium and at least part of the lithium in interstellar space. After perhaps 300,000 years, the universe wide fireball dropped to a little below the temperature of the surface of the sun, allowing electrons to settle into orbits around atoms and releasing a flash of photons, or light. That primordial flash can be measured today, although greatly cooled off, as universal background radiation at microwave frequencies corresponding to a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin. In fact, it was the discovery of this background radiation in 1964-65 that convinced most scientists that there was something to the big bang theory. The theory also claims to explain why the universe appears to be expanding in all directions, with distant galaxies apparently racing away from us and from each other at high speed.

Since the big bang theory appears to explain so much, why doubt it? Because there is also much that it does not explain. To illustrate: The ancient astronomer Ptolemy had a theory that the sun and planets went around the earth in large circles, making small circles, called epicycles, at the same time. The theory appeared to explain the motion of the planets. For centuries as astronomers gathered more data, the Ptolemaic cosmologists could always add extra epicycles onto their other epicycles and “explain” the new data. But that did not mean the theory was correct. Ultimately there was just too much data to account for, and other theories, such as Copernicus’ idea that the earth went around the sun, explained things better and more simply. Today it is hard to find a Ptolemaic astronomer!

Professor Fred Hoyle likened the efforts of the Ptolemaic cosmologists at patching up their failing theory in the face of new discoveries to the endeavors of big bang believers today to keep their theory afloat. He wrote in his book The Intelligent Universe: “The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over contradictions in the big bang theory, to build up an idea which has become ever more complex and cumbersome.” After referring to Ptolemy’s futile use of epicycles to rescue his theory, Hoyle continued: “I have little hesitation in saying that as a result a sickly pall now hangs over the big bang theory. As I have mentioned earlier, when a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that it rarely recovers.”—Page 186.

The New Scientist magazine of December 22/29, 1990, echoed similar thoughts: “The Ptolemaic method has been lavishly applied to . . . the big bang cosmological model.” It then asks: “How can we achieve real progress in particle physics and cosmology? . . . We must be more honest and forthright about the purely speculative nature of some of our most cherished assumptions.” New observations are now pouring in.

Questions the big bang does not answer

A major challenge to the big bang has come from observers using the corrected optics of the Hubble Space Telescope to measure distances to other galaxies. The new data is giving the theorists fits!

Astronomer Wendy Freedman and others recently used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the distance to a galaxy in the constellation of Virgo, and her measurement suggests that the universe is expanding faster, and therefore is younger, than previously thought. In fact, it “implies a cosmic age as little as eight billion years,” reported Scientific American magazine just last June. While eight billion years sounds like a very long time, it is only about half the currently estimated age of the universe. This creates a special problem, since, as the report goes on to note, “other data indicate that certain stars are at least 14 billion years old.” If Freedman’s numbers hold up, those elderly stars would turn out to be older than the big bang itself!

Still another problem for the big bang has come from steadily mounting evidence of “bubbles” in the universe that are 100 million light-years in size, with galaxies on the outside and voids inside. Margaret Geller, John Huchra, and others at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found what they call a great wall of galaxies some 500 million light-years in length across the northern sky. Another group of astronomers, who became known as the Seven Samurai, have found evidence of a different cosmic conglomeration, which they call the Great Attractor, located near the southern constellations of Hydra and Centaurus. Astronomers Marc Postman and Tod Lauer believe something even bigger must lie beyond the constellation Orion, causing hundreds of galaxies, including ours, to stream in that direction like rafts on a sort of “river in space.”

All this structure is baffling. Cosmologists say the blast from the big bang was extremely smooth and uniform, according to the background radiation it allegedly left behind. How could such a smooth start have led to such massive and complex structures? “The latest crop of walls and attractors intensifies the mystery of how so much structure could have formed within the 15-billion-year age of the universe,” admits Scientific American—a problem that only gets worse as Freedman and others roll back the estimated age of the cosmos still more.

“We are missing some fundamental element”

Geller’s three-dimensional maps of thousands of clumped, tangled, and bubbled galactic agglomerations have transformed the way scientists picture the universe. She does not pretend to understand what she sees. Gravity alone appears unable to account for her great wall. “I often feel we are missing some fundamental element in our attempts to understand this structure,” she admits.

Geller enlarged on her misgivings: “We clearly do not know how to make large structure in the context of the Big Bang.” Interpretations of cosmic structure on the basis of current mapping of the heavens are far from definitive—more like trying to picture the whole world from a survey of Rhode Island, U.S.A. Geller continued: “Someday we may find that we haven’t been putting the pieces together in the right way, and when we do, it will seem so obvious that we’ll wonder why we hadn’t thought of it much sooner.”

That leads to the biggest question of all: What is supposed to have caused the big bang itself? No less an authority than Andrei Linde, one of the originators of the very popular inflationary version of the big bang theory, frankly admits that the standard theory does not address this fundamental question. “The first, and main, problem is the very existence of the big bang,” he says. “One may wonder, what came before? If space-time did not exist then, how could everything appear from nothing? . . . Explaining this initial singularity—where and when it all began—still remains the most intractable problem of modern cosmology.”

An article in Discover magazine recently concluded that “no reasonable cosmologist would claim that the Big Bang is the ultimate theory.”—Watchtower.org

The US embassy has been conducting 'outreach' with mosques, such as London's Finsbury Park mosque

 As the presidential campaign begins in earnest, Republican contenders are stirring up racial animosities: Newt Gingrich calls President Obama a “foodstamp president”, and demands a federal law to preempt sharia; Santorum makes derogatory remarks about “blah” people and welfare, and warns of “Eurabia”; Mitt Romney declares that he will not have Muslims in his cabinet and that Obama is trying to turn the US into a “European-style entitlement society”; Gingrich agrees, but then attacks Romney for speaking French. 

Scapegoating and race-baiting during a US electoral season are not new; as the campaign heats up, so will the rhetoric. The irony is that the negative rhetoric surrounding race, Islam and Europe is rising – just as the State Department is trying to counter the “nativist surge” in Europe by showcasing the US model of racial integration, and dispatching African-American and Muslim-American goodwill ambassadors to Europe to extol the civil rights movement.

For several years now, the State Department has been quietly trying to introduce its ideas around race, multiculturalism and affirmative action into European policy and activist circles, aiming to alter the discourse on Islam in Europe – and in some cases, actively trying to help “integrate” European Muslims. The WikiLeaks cables that probably stirred the most anger in European capitals were those where US diplomats castigated allies – France, Britain, Holland – for mistreating their Muslim minorities, and not doing enough to battle domestic extremism.

In August 2006, a year after the bombings in London, the US embassy there sent a cable to Washington stating that “little progress” had been made in combating extremism, warning of rising tensions between the Muslim community and Her Majesty’s government (“HMG”). The US embassy in London then established a project of “Reverse Radicalism” focusing on “at risk” youth. The London cables also describe the US embassy’s efforts to reach “moderate” Muslim communities that “lack the institutional infrastructure to actively mobilise against radicalising influences”. Many among the British press were unhappy with the US embassy’s “secret campaign” to de-radicalise British Muslims, and especially with the embassy’s outreach to mosques considered “radical”, such as the Finsbury Park mosque in North London. US embassy officials and British public opinion don’t appear to agree on what constitutes a “moderate” Muslim.

But it is, perhaps not surprisingly, in France that the State Department’s assessments and outreach to Muslim communities have triggered the most outrage. The dispatches from the US embassy in Paris are blunt in their appraisal – “the French have a well-known problem with discrimination against minorities”. Some cables read like descriptions of a pre-civil right United States: “The French media remains overwhelmingly white… Among French elite educational institutions, we are only aware that Science Po has taken serious steps to integrate.”

The thrust of the correspondence from the Paris embassy argues that the French approach to assimilation has not worked, because, of an “official blindness to all racial and ethnic differences”. And the fear is not only that young French Muslims will gravitate towards extremism – “the USG [United States government] takes seriously the potentially global threat of disenfranchised and disadvantaged minorities in France” – but that ethnic and racial conflict would weaken France. ”We believe that if France, over the long term, does not succeed in improving prospects for its minorities and give them true political representation, it could become weaker, more divided and perhaps inclined toward crises… and a less effective ally as a result.”

The US embassy staff acknowledge France’s reluctance to accept the US model of integration or to “partner” with the embassy, but the cables describe numerous outreach projects (exchange programmes, conferences, media appearance) to raise awareness among state and societal actors about the US civil rights movement.

The response from youth in the banlieues to these programmes has been largely positive. Young French Muslims note that the US embassy’s outreach is different from the French government’s security-centred approach and shrill rhetoric about Islam and immigration (Sarkozy a few years ago threatened to clean up a cité with a Kärcher, a high-pressure hose). Widad Ketfi, a young blogger, who participated in an embassy-sponsored programme says she knows she was targeted by the US embassy because of her Algerian-Muslim background, but adds: “What bothers me is being the target of the French state.” These youths claim that French politicians will visit their enclaves only during election time, surrounded by security guards. “We’re waiting for the president of the republic, for his ministers,” observes Gilbert Roger, the mayor of Bondy, a gritty suburb in northeastern Paris. “And we see the ambassador of the United States.” The residents of Bondy, he says, “have the sense that the United States looks upon our areas with much more deference and respect”.

US diplomats expected resistance to these public diplomacy initiatives from the French establishment. “While direct development assistance from USG is not likely to be available for France,” notes one cable, requesting the availability of funds “to address the consequences of discrimination and minority exclusion in France” - stressing that, given France’s official discourse and self-image, “such an effort will continue to require considerable discretion, sensitivity and tact on our part”.

And there has been a backlash from French officials and commentators. France has long viewed itself as being immune to US-style race politics, priding itself on providing refuge, since the late 19th century, to African-Americans fleeing discrimination, so depictions of the French republic as a prejudiced country in need of US aid and tutelage were not well received. The cable that drew the most indignant responses from French state officials was written by then US Ambassador Craig Stephenson, at the height of the civil unrest in November 2005: “The real problem is the failure of white Christian France to view its dark-skinned and Muslim compatriots as citizens in their own rights.” Speaking on a television show, former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin scoffed [FR], “This [cable] shows the limits of American diplomacy,” adding that US diplomats were wrongly reading the banlieues crisis through their own history, and viewing France’s urban crisis through a religious prism.

The French didn’t like it either when US goodwill ambassadors drew parallels between the banlieues and the US South. When the US ambassador, Charles Rivkin, a former Hollywood executive, brought actor Samuel L Jackson, to visit a community centre in Bondy, and Jackson, addressing a group of youth, compared their struggle with the hardships of his childhood in segregated Tennessee, French media resented the comparison. Another awkward moment came at the unveiling of a painted mural for the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr at the Collège Martin Luther King in Villiers-le-Bel, another restive Parisian suburb, when a group of African and Arab children stood around Ambassador Rivkin and sang “We Shall Overcome”.

As in Britain, segments of French society were displeased by revelations that the US had, since 2003, been deeply involved in the integration process – trying to shift the media discourse, to get French leaders to rethink their “terminology” and “intellectual frameworks” regarding minority inclusion; trying to generate public debates about “affirmative action”, “multiculturalism”, and hyphenated identity; pushing to reform history curricula taught in French schools, and working with French museums to exhibit the contributions of minorities. Left-leaning analysts opposed to US policies in the Islamic world saw this “Marshall Plan” for the banlieues as a diversionary tactic [FR]. One cable notes that, by improving the lot of French Muslims, the US embassy can alter French-Muslim perceptions of the US, to show that the US respects Islam and “is engaged for good in the Arab-Muslim worlds”. Other critics just don’t think US conceptions of race and integration can travel across the Atlantic.

More surprising was the negative reaction of some (neo)conservative voices in France, who tend to agree with the US right’s apocalyptic tone regarding “Eurabia” and Muslim immigration to Europe. Right-wing US bloggers and authors of books such as While Europe Slept and Surrender – that speak of Europe’s “smouldering Muslim ghettoes” and the imminent Muslim takeover of Europe – have long resonated with a segment of the European public. Yet many conservative-leaning French journalists and commentators expressed anger at this exercise in US “soft power”, saying that the “head-hunting” efforts, the grooming of future Muslim leaders constituted a “direct interference,” that was undermining the authority of French institutions and French sovereignty.

As in Britain, the Paris embassy’s efforts to empower “moderate” Muslim voices caused considerable anger. When it emerged that one of the Muslim organisations the embassy was supporting was the magazine Oumma.com – described by the US ambassador as a “remarkable website”, polemicist Caroline Fourest, author of a manifesto warning of the coming “Islamic totalitarianism”, charged that the US right and French Muslims were allying to undermine French laïcité.

Western states have a long history of intervening in the Muslim world to protect and empower religious minorities. This practice continues, in different forms to this day, but it is unprecedented for Western states – allies – to court or protect each other’s minorities. And yet the US is spending millions of dollars to win the hearts and minds of Europe’s disaffected Muslim communities, often vying with European states’ own local efforts.

These outreach efforts show that US diplomacy increasingly views the moral and symbolic capital of the civil rights movement as a form of soft power that can help improve the country’s image in Europe’s urban periphery, while imparting some US racial commonsense. But ironies abound: the efforts to exhibit US racial harmony and forestall ethnic conflict in Europe are taking place as political hopefuls whip up resentment of Muslims and African-Americans in the US. Imagine the reaction – in the current Euro-bashing climate – if it were revealed that the French government was pumping millions of dollars to help “integrate” African-Americans, and elevate the discourse on race in the US.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the State Department’s efforts to showcase the model integration of US Muslims, and to deploy the images and ideas of the civil rights movement in Europe, is that these efforts have been occurring against a backdrop of unfavourable media images of Quran burnings, anti-mosque rallies and accusatory Congressional hearings. The anti-mosque movement has now morphed into a broader “anti-Sharia” movement. Thirteen states from South Carolina to Arizona to Alaska have introduced bills banning Islamic law. The Texas Board of Education passed a resolution rejecting high-school textbooks that are “pro-Islam [and] anti-Christian”, and a similar campaign is underway in Florida. American Muslims are facing a rising tide of discrimination that will no doubt worsen as the 2012 presidential campaign progresses. As for the Democrats, maybe it is politically easier to be photographed with Muslims in Paris singing “We Shall Overcome” than to challenge the organised bigotry brewing at home.--Aljazeera.com

ARTICLE: HISHAAM AIDI

Hishaam Aidi is editor, with Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave Macmillan 2009)

The Ga-Adangbe people inhabit mostly the Greater Accra Plains. Some are found in the Eastern Region at Akuse, Somanya, Dodowa, Akwapim, Akwamu and surrounding areas in Ghana. Others live in the Anecho area in Togo. The modern day Adangbe include the people of Osu, Shai, La, Ningo, Kpone, Osudoku, Krobo, Gbugbla (Prampram), Ada and Agotime who speak similar dialects.

The Ga also include the Ga-Mashie groups occupying neighborhoods in the central part of Accra, and other Ga speakers who migrated from Akwamu, Anecho in Togo, Akwapim, and surrounding areas.

There are over 3,000,000 Ga-Adangbe speakers, making up about 8% of Ghana’s population. Most Ga live in the southeastern coastal region of the country, around the capital of Accra, which the Ga founded in the 16th century as a trading port. The traditional Ga kingdom of Nkran gave Accra its name. Nkran state has been ruled by a succession of kings known as Ga Mantse since its founding in 1510.

In more recent times, Tetteh-Quarshie is given credit for bringing Cocoa to Ghana in the 19th century. Today, Cocoa is one of Ghana’s main exports and Ghana is the second leading exporter of the crop in the world.

Culture

The Ga people celebrate the Homowo festival, which literally means “hooting at hunger.” This festival originated several centuries ago during a period of hunger leading to famine due to failure of the seasonal rains needed by crops in the Greater Accra Region, where the Ga people predominantly dwell.

The passing of this terrible period marked by setting in of the rains caused a return to normalcy for the Ga people therefore celebrated by creating the Homowo festival hence its name and meaning.

The festival starts in the month of May with the planting of crops before the rainy season starts. It takes place every year and is celebrated by all the Ga clans, but in stages by the various groups and “quarters,” beginning with the Ga Mashie and ending with the La.

Homowo is greatly celebrated in Teshie. Celebration includes marching down roads and streets beating drums, chanting, face painting, singing and traditional dances. On this day there is usually a lot of traffic and roads are usually blocked off to accommodate the festival.

Even though it is a Ga tradition, many other ethnic groups are welcomed and also join to celebrate. During this time there is a no noise making because it is believed that the noise would hinder the maturity of the crops.

The Ada people celebrate Asafotu which is also called ‘Asafotufotufiam,’ an annual warrior’s festival celebrated by the people of Ada in the Greater Accra Region from the last Thursday of July to the first weekend of August.

It commemorates the victories of the warriors in battle and those who fell on the battlefield.

To re-enact these historic events, the warrior dresses in traditional battle dress and stage a mock battle. This is also a time when the young men are introduced to warfare. The festival also ushers in the harvest cycle for this special customs and ceremonies are performed. These include purification ceremonies. The celebration reaches its climax in a durbar of chiefs, a colourful procession of the Chiefs in palanquins with their retinue. They are accompanied by traditional military groups called ‘Asafo Companies’ amidst drumming, singing and dancing through the streets and on the durbar grounds. At the durbar, greetings are exchanged between the chiefs, libations are poured and declarations of allegiance made.

The Ga-Adangbe are no different from the other ethnic groups in Ghana in their love for music, drumming and dancing. One of their best known traditional music and dance styles (albeit a fairly modern one) is kpanlogo, a modernized traditional dance and music form developed around 1960. Obo Addy and Mustapha Tettey Addy are Ga drummers who have achieved international fame.

Funerals and paying last respects

The Ga people are known for their funeral celebrations and processions. The Ga believe that when someone dies, they move to another life. Therefore, special coffins are often crafted by highly skilled carpenters since this tradition spread in the 50′s. Pioneers were master craftsmen like Paa Joe, Paa Willy and Seth Kane Kwei from Teshie.

The coffins can be anything wanted by relatives of the deceased from a pencil to any animal such as an elephant. Coffins are usually crafted to reflect an essence of the deceased, in forms such as a character trait, an occupation, or a symbol of one’s standing in the community.

For example, a taxicab driver is most likely to be buried in a coffin shaped as a car. Many families spend excessive amounts on coffins because they often feel that they have to pay their last respects to the deceased and being buried in a coffin of cultural, symbolic as well expensive taste is seen as fitting. Prices of coffins can vary depending on what is being ordered. It is not unusual for a single coffin to cost $600. This is expensive for local families considering that it is not unusual to meet people with an income of only $50 a month. This means that funerals are often paid for by wealthier members of the family, if such a member exists, with smaller contributions coming from other working members of the family. This is needed as the coffin is only a portion of the total funeral cost that will be incurred. Some people foreign to Ghana are known to have been buried in Ga-styled coffins.

The use of these fantasy coffins is explained by the religious beliefs of the Ga people regarding their afterlife. They believe that death is not the end and that life continues in the next world in the same way it did on earth. Ancestors are also thought to be much more powerful than the living and able to influence their relatives who are still living (lucky as they are). This is why families do everything they can to ensure that a dead person is sympathetic towards them as early as possible. The social status of the deceased depends primarily on the size and the success of the burial service and of course the usage of an exclusive coffin. Design coffins are only seen on the day of the burials when they are buried with the deceased. Certain shapes, such as a sword or chair coffin, represent royal or priestly insignia with a magical and religious function. Only people with the appropriate status are allowed to be buried in these types of coffins. Various creatures, such as lions, cockerels and crabs represent clan totems. Similarly, only the heads of the families concerned are permitted to be buried in coffins such as these. Many coffin shapes also evoke proverbs, which are interpreted in different ways by the Ga.

Today, figural coffins are made in several workshops across the whole Greater Accra region. Successful coffin makers are for example Cedi and Eric Adjetey Anang of Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop and Kudjoe Affutu. Most of the figural coffins are used for funerals, only a few are exported for international art exhibitions.

Origin

Some scholars believe the Ga-Adangbe people originated to the east of their current location on the Accra plains. The Ga language, a Kwa Language, suggest the Origin of the people is much the same as their Akan neighbors. Kwa Language speakers are believed to have originated in East/Central Africa.

History of land

Due to the Geopolitical significance of the Land the Ga occupy it was part of the Empire of Akwamu, Akyem, Ashanti and later part of the Gold Coast (British colony).

Notable Ga people

The birth of the 'Bills Gates of Africa'

Known by many as Africa’s “father of technology,” software pioneer Herman Chinery-Hesse has been spawning innovations for two decades, helping to break down tech barriers between the continent and the rest of the world.

The Ghanaian innovator and visionary founded SOFTtribe in 1991, one of the largest and most successful software companies in West Africa that has been creating computer solutions for businesses in the continent.

More recently, Chinery-Hesse who is often described as ‘”Africa’s Bill Gates,” embarked on a mission to spark an entrepreneurial revolution in Africa by bringing e-commerce to the most remote corners of the continent. His latest creations range from virtual shopping malls and electronic ticketing to digital insurance and security.

Here, CNN highlights some of the best innovations Chinery-Hesse and his teams have created over the years. - www.myjoyonline.com

Shop Africa 53: A subsidiary of Black Star Line, the company Chinery-Hesse create in 2007, Shop Africa 53 is a virtual shopping mall for African products and services that enables merchants to sell their goods on the internet and accept payments on a mobile phone.

The website, which Chinery-Hesse describes as an African Amazon/PayPal type of service, allows shoppers anywhere in the world to look for African products and buy directly from local merchants — from art, clothes and jewelry to food products, cookware and appliances.

Chinery-Hesse says enthusiastically that the marketplace can give poor African craftspeople access to global markets.

“What’s going to happen next is that we’re going to augment it with the fact of the poor people in the villages being able to do international trade,” he says. “Some of which might grow into multi-billion dollar companies and so on within the next 20 years — watch this space, Africa is it!”

Keba-Ekong!: This re-usable plastic card, whose name translates to “bring it again,” is similar to the Oyster card, a form of electronic ticketing widely used in London, England for public transport.

But more than just a travel card, Keba-Ekong! is an all-purpose, pay-as-you-go system that is also used for several other purchases, including concert and cinema tickets, inside and outside Ghana.

“If you’re going to watch a concert today in Ghana you’ll probably receive one of those cards as your ticket — when you get to the gate there’s a scanner, peep it goes, wait, checking, you can go in,” says Chinery-Hesse.

“We have orders for concerts outside Ghana and the same thing happens — we just deliver the cards to them and on the day of the event we go onto our server and we setup the whole concert, number of seats … and they can start selling tickets six months in advance and they make their money, their counting is transparent for everybody.”

Quickie: For “Quickie,” Black Star Line collaborated with an insurance company to launch instant, on-demand cover through the use of scratch cards and mobile phone networks.

Just like Keba-Ekong!, Quickie uses the potential of the cloud to offer smart solutions tailored for the Ghanaian market. The product is designed to accommodate the needs of those who are not keen to pay large sums for insurance once a year, says Chinery-Hesse.

“Quickie” users can activate their cover by sending an SMS with the unique code that appears on the card that they’ve purchased from vendors of telecom products.

“You scratch the card, you look at your registration number, you stick it in to our server, you’re insured and the rest is history,” says Chinery-Hesse.

Akatua: Akatua was one of the first software to be developed by SOFTTribe some two decades ago.

Today, the cloud-based product, which has been taken on by many major companies operating in Ghana, claims to be the most efficient, payroll solution in the country.

It is designed to simplify a series of complex payroll issues such as staff salaries, and maintenance of taxes as well as managing deductions and back pay.

Hagelo: Chinery-Hesse’s latest technological solution aims to use the potential of the cloud to offer what is claimed to be superior protection against armed robberies.

Dubbed “Hagelo,” which translates to “Hey, you thief” in Ga, the service incorporates scratch cards and crowd sourcing through an internet and mobile phone based application.

A monthly $10 scratch card allows users to indicate to BSL’s server that their house is under attack. Then, a protection system mechanism is deployed to make sure the thief is caught.

“Within 2 minutes the whole neighbourhood will be awake, the police are on their way, a security company is on their way, the radio stations are announcing [this house is under attack],” says Chinery-Hesse.

“The security people we’re working with predict — this big sign board that’s in the starter pack says: ‘This crib is protected by Hagelo alert systems, don’t even bother, you will run like a wet rat’ — and they say that sign board will put the fear of God into most thieves.”

Iranian nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan's killing was 'a cold-blooded act of terror'

On a recent trip to Libya, I was staying at the Corinthia Hotel in Tripoli at the same time that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir was meeting with members of Libya’s transitional council in the same hotel.

Like many other Libyans I spoke with during the course of my trip, I was outraged by the visit, and extremely critical of the decision of our transitional leadership to host the Sudanese strongman.

After all, hadn’t Libya just endured a painful uprising and sacrificed thousands of lives to rid itself of its own brutal dictator? Didn’t the transitional leaders see a moral conflict (if not a looming public relations disaster) in welcoming Bashir to Libya, their common enmity for the late Colonel notwithstanding? How could our leaders – how could Libya – continue to claim that theirs was a struggle for democracy, human rights and an end to totalitarian rule? Weren’t the hypocrisy and the double standards glaringly obvious? Hadn’t Libya’s transitional leadership – and by extension, Libya itself - lost a crucial part of its moral credibility in the process?

The following week, I returned to my other country, the United States, and to news that an Iranian nuclear scientist and university professor, 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, was killed along with his driver, when unidentified men on motorcycles attached a magnetic bomb to his car in a Tehran street. Again, I felt that familiar sense of indignation, but this time it was even more pronounced, because it involved the killing of an innocent man in cold blood.

Although Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other government officials have publicly denied US involvement in Roshan’s murder, I’m going to go out on a limb and just say what most reasonable observers are probably thinking: The US and/or Israel are almost certainly responsible for (or, in the case of the United States, at least tacitly approving of) this attack, whatever our government officials may publicly claim.

I found myself a bit surprised by the intensity of my reaction to the news of Roshan’s killing. What was it – beyond the ugliness inherent in any act of terror and murder – that made this particular attack so heinous in my mind to the point that it angered me?

After thinking about it for a while, I realised that it boiled down to two things: the impunity with which the attack was carried out and the subsequent apathy with which it was regarded by the US public and its leaders (with the noteworthy exception of commentators and politicians such as Rick Santorum, who actually celebrated it); and the idea that a powerful nation could attack the most precious resource of a much weaker one. No, I’m not talking about oil – I’m referring to the destruction of the latter’s human resources: its brains, its talent and its experts (Roshan was not the first, but the fourth Iranian scientist murdered in recent years).

Politicians in the US may pretend, for a few months every two to four years, to lament our dependency on foreign oil and the danger this addiction supposedly poses to our national security interests. But many Middle Eastern countries have long been dependent on the West for a different type of resource: technology and scientific expertise (the Arab Gulf states are a prime example of this).

Iran is a notable exception in the region, and has a far more technically capable population than, say, Saudi Arabia or Kuwait (indeed, more than most Arab states). An attack on Iran’s scientists, experts, academics and intellectuals – on its most talented human resources - is an attack on Iranian society’s ability to function independently of western hegemony and influence, by forcing that country’s dependence on (among other things) western technical and scientific knowledge – which, as we all know, always comes with strings tightly attached.

As we continue to pressure and now, it would appear, to intimidate the rest of the world into isolating Iran politically and economically, it will become increasingly important to the Iranian state to develop the technical capabilities to function independently of foreign, and particularly Western, influence.

Iranian government officials and their supporters may chant “Death to America and to Israel”, but when we actually bother to examine the historical relationship between Iran and the West (and particularly its history with the US and Britain), it becomes glaringly obvious that gross acts of aggression, intervention and sabotage overwhelming take place in the opposite direction (hence the frequent chants against us).

One startling example, which has long since vanished from the American public’s collective memory, was the shooting down of an Iranian commercial airliner in Iranian airspace (over the Strait of Hormuz, no less) by a US guided missile cruiser, the USS Vincennes, in 1988. All 290 people on board the plane were killed, and the bodies of many mutilated beyond recognition. To this day, our government refuses to apologise or acknowledge wrongdoing for what it has described as a “mistake”. Of course, the toppling of Iran’s democratically elected prime minister by the CIA and Britain’s MI6 in 1953, followed by the installation of a brutal dictator more sympathetic to western economic and energy interests, also come to mind. And there are many other examples.

The Iranian state habitually represses its own people (as do many states that we consider friends), and all conscientious individuals must vigorously and unequivocally condemn its record of gross human and civil rights abuses, as we support the efforts of the Iranian people to demand reform. But this doesn’t change the fact that our foreign policy towards Iran is seriously flawed and not in our nation’s best interest.

Neither are our policies towards Iran in the interest of the Iranian people (for whatever that’s worth to the average US politician). In fact, many Iranians who vehemently oppose their current regime reserve equal condemnation for the West’s lengthy record of interference and aggression towards their country.

Yet Iran represents the Bermuda Triangle of US foreign policy discussions. When it comes to the issue of our relationship with the Islamic Republic, rational debate - or any debate – tends to simply vanish into thin air.

Rather than take a good hard look at why we are so obsessed with the idea of Iran acquiring the bomb (the answer to this and to so many other questions about our self-destructive foreign policies may be found in Israel and its lobby), or whether such an acquisition really poses a serious threat to the most powerful nation in the world (one whose military bases are quite literally choking the Iranian state) and its Middle Eastern proxy, we’ve resorted to blowing up civilian scientists on their own streets in an effort to cut their country’s independent nuclear energy programme off at its knees.

This culture of impunity and contempt for the lives of foreign nationals whom we habitually kill on their own soil is reflected in the painfully telling video, which emerged around the same time as Roshan’s killing, showing US Marines urinating on the corpses of Afghan Taliban fighters as they taunt the dead and appear to revel in their repulsive behaviour.

This was not some random group of debauched individuals engaging in hooliganism, but a group of soldiers belonging to an elite corps of the US military – uniformed representatives of our country before the world. I felt sick watching the video, and once again, ashamed that such individuals represented my country. I couldn’t help but recall the infinitely more barbaric 2005 Haditha massacre, in which Marines slaughtered 24 innocent Iraqi men, women and children between the ages of one and 76, mostly in their homes, after one of their fellow soldiers, Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas, was killed by a roadside bomb.

Like the Haditha victims, the lives of Afghan Taliban fighters were worthless to this group of soldiers, and they had no qualms about desecrating them in the most dishonourable of manners. Dehumanising the enemy - whether real, imagined or created – and acts of unthinkable cruelty and disregard for human life (and death) suddenly become thinkable – even inevitable.

This cycle of dehumanisation and violence is the same mechanism that prompted Daniel Pearl’s captors to behead the innocent journalist back in 2002; that convinced “insurgents” to bomb crowded public markets and holy shrines in Iraq, and to lay the roadside bomb that killed Lance Corporal Terrazas; and that caused the soldiers in the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine regiment to shoot innocent civilians in their homes at point blank range, including an infant, several children and a 76-year-old wheelchair-bound man, in a country the soldiers themselves were forcibly and illegitimately occupying.

Just today, news emerged that Staff Sgt Frank Wuterich, leader of the group of Marines that carried out the massacre at Haditha, accepted a deal to plead guilty to a lesser charge of dereliction of duty, for which he is expected to receive a whopping three months in prison. The remaining soldiers who participated in the massacre have already been acquitted or seen their charges dropped. The failure of our government to hold these men accountable for what amounts to a war crime ought to shake the collective conscience of our nation to its core. But it probably won’t.

As I watched this recent group of Marines urinating on and taunting dead enemy-strangers while fighting an unwinnable war thousands of miles away from their homes, I wondered if they would feel quite as smug or amused with themselves if they could hear how former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had once described them. Military men are “dumb, stupid animals to be used” as pawns for foreign policy, Kissinger told then-White House chief of staff Alexander Haig, according to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their book, The Final Days.

Even in the cold and calculating words of Kissinger, a central architect of US foreign policy whose influence has extended far beyond his time in office, the chilling relationship between dehumanisation and violence – this time directed at duped soldiers – is unmistakable, and the irony undeniable.

To Kissinger’s credit, he was at least honest about the disgraceful and self-serving motives that he and other policymakers have, as they send hapless soldiers off to fight and die in illegal wars while convincing them that they are somehow defending their country rather than advancing the economic interests of a powerful elite. In contrast, most US politicians these days persist in invoking a sanctimonious authority predicated on an imagined moral superiority vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and particularly the non-western world.

Indeed, many in the US bask in this fictitious self-characterisation. We are, after all, what Reagan called “a beacon of hope for those who do not have freedom”, a phrase which has been regurgitated in one form or another by more politicians than I care to count. Yet nearly every administration in recent history – and many current politicians – have not only consistently chipped away at any moral credibility we may have once had as a nation, but now have completely shattered it, even as they continue to invoke meaningless and hypocritical tropes.

For the more thoughtful among us, what happened in Tehran, what happened in Afghanistan, and the moral failure of our government to hold the perpetrators of the Haditha massacre accountable is cause for alarm, and hopefully for engaging in sober introspection and self-criticism. Yet for a significant proportion of our public, and certainly for too many of our political leaders, it would seem that we can do no wrong to others, no matter how much wrong we do. For a great number of US citizens, it seems that our foreign policy decisions – and in particular, our acts of violence against Other states and Other peoples - are justifiable, simply by virtue of the fact that they are ours.

The killing by car bombing of an Iranian nuclear scientist in Tehran was an act of terror, murder and intimidation, period. It is an act that reeks not only of hubris and inhumanity, but also of desperation – the very hallmarks of terrorism.

What do the public and the media’s largely indifferent response to this act suggest about the political culture we inhabit? More importantly, what does it say about the moral culture we live in, and about our collective capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism? About our attitudes toward the value of human life – not just lives of US citizens, but the lives of others as well?

Policy analysts, pundits and much of the media can spin any story they like about the murder, on his home soil, of Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, husband to Fatemeh and father to a young boy – who will now have to grow up without him. They can choose to use sterile language such as “targeted killing” and “elimination” in order to distort US public sentiment regarding his murder. But their questionable rhetorical and editorial choices don’t change the ugly reality that this was, at the very least, a crime and a moral failure which will probably do little in the way of achieving its desired outcome (assuming, of course, that we have a right to pursue such an outcome, which is questionable in itself).

This latest act of aggression, whether committed by the United States or by Israeli agents with the US government’s tacit approval, will only intensify the Iranian public’s widespread distrust for the US and its policies toward their country, a sentiment which is understandable, given the record of western interference in Iranian internal affairs.

Regrettably, it is a record which US politicians and policymakers – as well as most of its media and its public – persist in wilfully disregarding, even as the former continue to pursue a foreign policy which is destructive, both to Iran and to ourselves.—Aljazeera.com

Protesters took to the streets across Nigeria after government removed fuel sudsidies on January 1

Even as the Occupy movement recedes in size, if not in activism, in the global North, it has, to its own surprise, opened up a new front in Africa’s most populous country, Nigeria – where tens of thousands have occupied and paralysed the economy in a protest against the lifting of oil subsidies.

This is a movement that is actually spreading, according to Lambert Strether, as quoted on NakedCapitalism.com:

And although some see Occupy as an aerial canopy of leaping bright fire, I prefer to see Occupy as a species of rhizome: A mass of roots growing slowly and irresistibly, indeed invasively, and scaling horizontally by sending out runners everywhere. Underground and in the dark. Right now cold, but soon to be warm. And just like hops, asparagus, ginger, turmeric, galangal, irises or Lily of the Valley, if you chop an Occupation into pieces, you get as many Occupations as the pieces you chopped.”

Suddenly in rapid succession, protests are popping up in disparate places across the globe. 

Occupiers in the US have moved “troops” from lower Manhattan to Congress in Washington.

Chinese activists are occupying villages and South Africans continue protests in townships against what they call a “new apartheid”. 

And, in Nigeria, a mass movement is gathering, in a country known more for its capitalist proclivities than activist leanings.

Even though the first name of Nigeria’s president is “Goodluck”, he isn’t having much in battling a citizens’ movement, led by unions and activists.  

It all started on January 1, 2011, when the announcement of fuel subsidy removal by the federal government sent everyone into a crazy frenzy, people rushed to petrol stations to see if they could get PMS at the former price of NGN 65 [40 US cents], but the petrol stations had already implemented the new price regime.

“Nigerians suffered under the burden of the new price hike for two weeks, before their cries led organised labour to embark on a nationwide strike to protest government actions. Different organisations and personalities began to emerge as leaders championing the cause of the people; bodies like Nigerian Medical Association and Nigerian Bar Association immediately joining the strike in major Nigerian cities across the country.”

The Africa-oriented news service GIN reports on what happened next. First, the president caved on lifting subsidies, but:

“Soldiers were ordered into the country’s major cities and to remain while “tension” persists – something unseen since the nation abandoned military rule in 1999. The move raises new questions about freedom of speech in a nation where government power still appears absolute.

“Removal of the oil subsidy which had kept gas prices affordable, spurred tens of thousands of Nigerians to take to the streets last week, demanding not just a rollback but the removal of the entire Goodluck Jonathan administration.”

The reason: The protest has never been just about an oil subsidy but pervasive corruption involving the transfer of millions into the hands Nigeria’s politically connected one per cent.

Nigeria’s most prominent intellectual, Nobel Prize literature laureate Wole Soyinka is calling the mobilisation of the army “a gross betrayal”. He asked:

“Was it part of the deal reached by the government of Goodluck Jonathan, Labour Movement and Civil Society, that soldiers would be sent to occupy Lagos and intimidate the populace?”

“This is a gross violation of the rights of citizens to congregate and give expression to whatever grievances bedevil their existence,” he continued. “Until they are removed, Nigerians as a whole should understand that the present civic action is not over and prepare to mobilise and defend their liberty.”

In the past, in the days of military dictatorships, the violent and often out of control soldiers were denounced as “Zombies” in a popular song by the late Nigerian superstar Fela – who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1997, and whose own story is being told in a touring musical that debuted on Broadway. The soldiers he was ridiculing later raided his compound and beat him and his supporters.

Nigeria’s Day newspaper blasted the government, writing:

What began as an audacious error of political judgment and economic desperation quickly graduated into a landmark national upheaval. It threatened to swallow the little democratic gains that have been made in this imperfect republic.
It afflicted the ruling political elite with avoidable insomnia. The fuel subsidy crisis that ended yesterday was a disruption foretold but clearly avoidable. It was foretold because, either way, a removal of subsidy on petroleum prices was bound to dislodge honest private budgets and unsettle public peace.”

Corruption is nothing new in Nigeria, where many believe it was a legacy of British rule. When I visited Lagos back in 1986, I was told to be careful in the airport where “the once around rule” was observed: if you didn’t get your bag on the carousel, the first time it turned, it was fair game for anyone.

I was there reporting for ABC News on a visit by the Reverend Jesse Jackson. When we left, staffers of the protocol office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs tried to shake down the whole entourage for money.

When we boarded our plane to leave, soldiers followed to remove passengers flying on phony tickets. These were minor instances compared with the machinations of ministers who wired their entire budgets to foreign banks over the weekend to capture the interest before the funds were sent back.

Nigeria is known internationally for its email scammers, but the costs of the more entrenched corruption are massive on the Nigerian people themselves.

Now, those people are mobilising with popular demands that could overthrow their government.

The Wall Street Journal quotes a financial manager: “Both the unions and the government have lost control of this process,” said Bismark Rewane, managing director of Financial Derivatives Co in Lagos. The protests, he added, are “becoming a referendum on Goodluck”.

The Journal offers this analysis: “The demonstrations present Mr. Jonathan with one of his biggest challenges in his two years as president. He has staked his presidency on the removal of the fuel subsidy to free up funds for infrastructure investment.

“The move is intended as the first in a series of tough overhauls – including the privatisation of Nigeria’s threadbare electric grid. Aides say Nigeria lacks the funds to restore the subsidy, the principal demand of labour unions.

“Some analysts warn that even if Mr. Jonathan were to restore part of the subsidy, the concession wouldn’t be enough to satisfy the thousands of protesters, who have turned city centres into cauldrons of antigovernment sentiment.”

When you see phrases such as “cauldrons of anti-government sentiment”, you know this is serious.

Local unions are defying orders from their national leaders, report local outlets on AllAfrica.com:

What began as an audacious error of political judgment and economic desperation quickly graduated into a landmark national upheaval. It threatened to swallow the little democratic gains that have been made in this imperfect republic.
It afflicted the ruling political elite with avoidable insomnia. The fuel subsidy crisis that ended yesterday was a disruption foretold but clearly avoidable. It was foretold because, either way, a removal of subsidy on petroleum prices was bound to dislodge honest private budgets and unsettle public peace.”

“Addressing a press conference in Kano yesterday over the strike suspension under the auspices of NLC/TUC/JAF Committee for the Kano Struggle, chairman of the state NLC chapter Comrade Isa Yunusa Danguguwa said the mandate given the NLC’s national leadership by the National Executive Committee of the congress was ‘grossly violated’.”

Meanwhile, the government is trying to placate protesters by sending anti-corruption police to seize documents from the Petroleum Ministry – with no arrests to date.

The next wave of protests is being supported by the popular Nigerian artists of “Nollywood”, with new anti-subsidy songs that have turned into anthems. 

The Osun Defender gives a taste of what’s being said and done:

Actor Desmond Elliot on his Tweeter [sic] page said: “Why does our president need six private jets? Why should our public officials keep their salaries when Obama slashed his? Why should we believe the government when it says the subsidy gain will be properly invested? Bad leadership and corruption must stop. A lot of other stars went beyond just talking, to actually appearing on the streets and speaking at the various rallies, we had notable faces such as; Banky W El Dee, Kate Henshaw, Omoni Oboli, Bimbo Akintola, Desmond Elliot, Ufoma Ejenobor and Ronke Oshodi-Oke appearing at some of the venues of the #Occupy Nigeria rallies.”

Social media outlets, including what they call “Tweeter”, are on the case. Whatever you call it, this movement is no longer just galvanising existing social activists. It is gaining traction with a larger public in a way that Occupy movements in the West only dream about.

It is likely to lead to deeper change or massive repression. 

The Arab Spring is moving south, thanks to #OccupyNigeria. If nothing else, this movement dramatises the global nature of the new wave of Occupy protests.—Aljazeera.com

News Dissector Danny Schechter blogs at NewsDissector.com. His new book is Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street.

It is a normal working day and as I meander through heavy traffic to get to work, I am also listening to one of the legion of radio morning shows that inundate our air waves every morning.

It is the phone in segment and this is what transpires between the host of the programme and a caller. “Hello, hello, my name is Ali Baba.”

“Yes Ali, how are you today and how is the family”? asks the presenter.
“We are all well by the Grace of Allah.”

“Where are you calling from”? The presenter follows up.
“I am calling from Paga and I want to contribute to your programme on the recent floods in Accra.”

“Say again, where are you calling from”? The presenter intentionally gets him to repeat so as to use the opportunity to announce the wide coverage of their network.

Now in my office, I tune in to another station during news hour and the preamble to the news is as follows:

“This news is being heard across the length and breadth of Ghana and even beyond. We are live on Odo Fm, Sefwi, Fuugu Fm, Paga, Dondo Fm, Tumu, Ajaws, radio Axim and Abunu abunu Fm, Otwe be we ate, and on and on the list goes. The news reader tops it up with a list of another 10 stations monitoring from abroad in addition to the 50 local ones.

The above scenario, which has become a daily ritual, has kept me wondering and asking myself a few questions. Granted that as a Ghanaian, Ali Baba has the right to comment on issues confronting the capital, what platform is available to him to reflect on the myriad of problems affecting his immediate community, Paga.

What is syndication when all that one party brings to the fray is an occasional news item from the rural areas which most of the time must border on comedy, pornography or sensationalism to provide some comic relief for the highly stressed city dweller?

It is more than obvious that the relationship between our rural radios and their city counterparts is far from being symbiotic. If anything at all, it could be likened to a friendship between the antelope and the elephant in which for obvious reasons, one party always calls the shots. As it is, the big radio stations in the cities set the agenda for the smaller ones in the rural areas to follow.

But the priorities and developmental aspirations of city dwellers may not be the same as their rural counterparts. While the city dweller may be more concerned about the heavy traffic in the city, or insanitary environment, the rural person may be more interested in programmes on application of fertiliser or school feeding.

The sad thing is that while it has become fashionable for some FM stations to broadcast across the length and breadth of the country in obvious contravention of the terms of their licenses, we as a society led by the regulatory authorities seem to look on helplessly. What has happened to issues on the allocation of frequencies and how geographically limited they should be?

Not only have we failed to put the radio stations in check but perhaps our failure in monitoring programming and content on our air waves is even more catastrophic. To the extent that a high percentage of programmes on our media have no bearing on our developmental aspirations, and most often can be classified as outright garbage.

The result of these failures is a rural radio whose weak voice has been drowned by its more powerful city counterpart. Most of them have, thus, become mere relay outlets for the commercial radios based in the cities. Gradually, the public or community character of the typical rural radio is giving way to commercialization in keeping with their new-found love with the big commercial radios in the cities. This has been exacerbated by issues of survival as these rural or community radios hardly receive any support from government or civil society organisations.

Yet, the practice the world over is for radio stations who have dedicated their time and space to public or community service to be met half way by government, civil society or even individuals with the necessary logistic or financial support to remain in business.

A typical programme outline for most of our rural radios dotted nation-wide is something like this: religious broadcast up to 6a.m., news at 6a.m., picked from one of the city stations followed by the breakfast show also borrowed from the city. This will include the newspaper review, the phone in segment and sports. This will run to about 10a.m. and then local advertisements, mostly of herbal products and funerals till 11a.m. From 11a.m. to noon is local news and other community issues. At noon they go back to their sources to feed on the afternoon news.

From 1 p.m. it is music till about 4p.m. From 4p.m-5p.m. could be for discussions with a local herbalist or a religious broadcast. 5p.m. to 6p.m. is usually funeral and social announcements. 6p.m. is news, fed again from the city station. 7p.m. is for studio discussion of national socio-politico issues handled by people, who in most cases, have no inkling about the issues they are discussing.

This would run up to about 9p.m. when the mumbo jumbo ceases and it is music again until a voice suddenly announces closure for the day at about 11p.m.

The question is, are two news bulletins, morning and evening respectively from the capital not sufficient for the rural folk to keep themselves abreast of happenings across the country and the rest of the world? This would ensure that the rest of the airtime is used to deliberate on issues affecting the well-being of the people.

Clearly the lack of capacity in terms of equipment and even expertise may be cited as reasons why our rural radios would rather depend on their city counterparts for programmes. In terms of cost also, it is usually cheaper that way. It is for these reasons that the government’s recent announcement of a one million dollar budgetary allocation to build the capacity of the media is most welcome. It is hoped that the chunk of it would be channeled into building the capacity of our rural media which is in dire straits.

This has become imperative as attempts by the national broadcaster to operate community radios in all the ten regions of the country have been undermined by issues of competition and survival as they have to compete with commercial broadcasters. Thus, either by commission or omission, they have been compelled to operate along the same lines as their commercial counterparts.

For instance, in an interview with Fred Zeini, CEO of Techiman-based Classic Fm, he lamented that the lack of experts and broadcasters adept in the Bono dialect had undermined his efforts at offering some programmes in Bono, the indigenous dialect of the people. This development, he conceded, may not be peculiar to his station but cuts across the country.

A resident of Tuobodom, Mr. Moses Nimo, said he hardly switched on his radio in the mornings these days “because they are all doing Accra programmes and those programmes don’t interest me.”

In the long term, perhaps the way forward is to embrace rural or community radio in a more committed manner as our neighbours have done. Take the case of South Africa; though it opened its air waves at about the same time as Ghana in the early 1990s, it boasts of about 400 community radio stations while Ghana has a paltry eight, mostly operated by tertiary institutions. Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Mali, Niger etc have all seen the light and embraced community broadcasting wholeheartedly.

The positives of community radio are too overwhelming to be ignored. Apart from its traditional role of informing and entertaining the community, it promotes participatory democracy by allowing the rural folk to be part of decision making. It also helps to preserve the cultural identity of a people. Not to talk about its ability to enhance the self worth of the members of the community as it provides them with an outlet to express their concerns.

The bottom line is that the radio still remains one of the most powerful tools for mobilising people for development; especially in our part of the world where the television may be out of reach of the rural folk. Leaving such a key asset in the hands of private business people alone may not be in our best interest.

Sadly, until such time that our rural or community radios are empowered to build their capacity to generate their own programmes that will resonate with their listeners, they will remain at the periphery and be destined to feed on the crumbs that fall from the table of the big stations in the cities. And the Ali Baba’s of this world would be more interested in issues affecting Accra than the bread and butter issues that affect their immediate communities.

The writer is a Senior Assistant Registrar in charge of Public Relations and Protocol at the University of Cape Coast and a retired Military Officer.