“I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And do you know what? When I need something from them two years later, three years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”
Ouch! You weren’t supposed to tell the truth, Donald!
Cyprus was a divided island from the moment of an ill thought- out Greek coup and the immediate arrival of the Turkish army. Ever since, there have been two Turkish army divisions stationed in the Eastern end of the island and a Turkish policy of encouraging poor Turks to migrate there. Once a minority, the Turks could be a majority. Many Cypriot Greeks fear annexation by Turkey unless there is reunification of the island. Mainland Greece has other priorities, as we well know.
Thankfully, both Turks and Greeks have recently elected moderate leaders, and the good news is that there’s talk of a deal being put to a vote early next year. The bad news is that there’s also talk of putting any deal to a referendum. That’s what happened in 2004, with disastrous results. The UN negotiator, Kofi Annan, came up with the idea of a referendum as a way to get around opposition from the then Turkish Cypriot leader, hard-liner Rauf Denktash. But in the event, it was the Turks who voted in favour of that deal, and the Greeks who turned it down.
Now people fear a re- run of 2004: “rejectionist” Greek politicians whipping up the fears of the many Greeks who have got used to partition and resist the idea of handing back expropriated Turkish properties. “No, let Cypriot leaders negotiate a final settlement on behalf of their two peoples. No war in history has ever ended with a referendum.” (Loucas Charalambous, Cyprus Mail, Nicosia)
Somewhat contrary to the expectations of some observers, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not, so far, introduced any extreme Hindu nationalist measures.
But in provincial India it is a different story. Hindu zealots have banned eating beef in the state of Maharashtra, for instance; the penalty for breaking the ban is five years in jail ( five years?!). This could be a prelude to a total national ban. It is not generally known inthe West, but India is second only to Brazil as a beef exporter, so imposing such measure would an economic disaster. Typically with religious extremists, the Hindus make up their religion as they go. In ancient Hinduism the gods enjoyed a good steak. The idea of the “sacred cow ” only came with Buddhism, which gradually influenced Hindus to abandon animal sacrifice. The extremists ignore history and the written word and rely on general ignorance to impose their own version of the religion. Surprise! Surprise!
The fact is that more than 250 million Indians are not Hindus, and India is a secular democracy, trying to bring itself into the 21st Century. It can do without this sort of ” religious” nonsense. (Based on an article along similar lines by Nirmalya Dutta, Mumbai)
Is Buddhism the only belief system on the planet that doesn’t seem to have its share of extremists? What breeds the need to dominate and boss everyone else around?
Earth is on the verge of a mass extinction, the sixth of its kind in the planet’s 4.5 -billion–year history, and it’s all humanity’s fault.
Thus a new study in the journal Science Advances (see below) which found that over the past century, 69 mammal species have gone extinct, along with some 400 other types of vertebrates, including birds, fish, and amphibians. Such a loss would normally be expected over a period of 100,000 years. Within two generations, scientists say, 75 percent of the species we know today could be killed off. Earth has seen five previous mass die-offs—the last one, about 66 million years ago, wiped out the dinosaurs. But while those past extinctions were triggered by natural disasters, this extinction is being caused by pollution, deforestation, and climate change resulting from human activity. “People think nothing bad will come from species loss, because scientists can’t predict exactly how many need to go extinct before the world collapses,” one co-author says, “The problem is that our environment is like a brick wall. It will hold if you pull individual bricks, but eventually it takes just one to make it suddenly fall apart.” *
But talk of extinction of animals is just part of the threat. World population is now estimated to reach, not 8 billion, but 11 billion, before declining, probably violently. Continued omerta on the issue of population is a recipe for worldwide political uproar, mass population movements, even world war. What is needed, although it could be too late, is a massive family planning program along the lines of a huge anti-smoking campaign. But instead we have silence, silence from industry, which wants an ever- growing population of consumers, and silence from organised religion, stubbornly clinging to pre-historic ideas of unlimited family size. While proclaiming the sanctity of life they are busy destroying it, unwittingly and owing to ignorance.
Our only hope? The educated and enlightened young, under threat and fully aware of it. Maybe they will come up with answers. The present bunch of “leaders” haven’t a clue.
* (“Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction”. Gerardo Ceballos1,*, Paul R. Ehrlich2, Anthony D. Barnosky3, Andrés García4, Robert M. Pringle, and Todd M. Palmer)
My wife and I were recently having an outdoor lunch in Brighton (on the south coast of England). The man at the next table got up for a minute or two to get a drink, leaving his lunch on the table. By the time he returned the seagulls had demolished said lunch.
Believe it or not, but seagulls, and a possible cull of them, have become a political issue, with the Prime Minister weighing in, no less. Patrick Barkham in The Guardian comments: “Gulls – herring gulls, in particular – have moved inland because we have depleted the seas of fish and cleaned up landfill sites, while leaving lots of food lying around in our towns, in plastic refuse sacks and gull-friendly litter bins. Rather than embarking on “futile culls”, we should change our behaviour”. Quite.
In fact, overall numbers of seagulls have fallen. They become more aggressive in the summer, when their chicks are learning to fly. Gulls may be dirty amd noisy, but they are highly intelligent: in ploughed fields, they stamp on the earth to mimic rain and lure worms out of the soil. They are also surprisingly sociable: they live in complex nesting communities, and mate for life.
A few years ago my wife and I went on a gullet (no pun intended) sailing holiday off south- west Turkey. In two weeks on the water we saw practically no seagulls at all, and were offered no seafood to eat, either. Nor was there any sign of fish in the sea ( they might have migrated north at that time, apparently). But the point is that the seas there are fished out and the sea birds are disappearing, along with the fishermen. What we are doing to our planet!
