Archive for October, 2007
Total says it stays in Myanmar, and Bernard Kouchner (French Minister of Foreign Affairs) says he agrees:
“Talking at a press conference, he explained that any closure of business relations in Myanmar should be accompanied by a “perspective” of economic development there. “Imagine that we close Total’s tub [in Myanmar]. Who would suffer? The people [...]
Jim Holt says, in a quite nice piece published in the London Review of Books (the title seems to suggest that the ultimate rationale for the war in Iraq may be oil), that the use of the word ‘fiasco’ should be revised here:
“On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics — dissolving [...]
Today, the French Parliament voted a new law on immigration control, integration and asylum. This is the law that features, among other things, DNA testing as a legal means to verify the genetic integrity of prospective immigrant families (the New York Times gets it right in this recent editorial). But that’s probably peanuts compared to [...]
Sociology is often inclined to define itself in terms of programmatic calls. Sadly, many of these get lost — too old, badly published or, worse, not in English. But the blossoming of open-access PDF repositories of past issues from academic journals opens new sources for the recovery of old treasures of sociology:
“How many times [...]
Tom Engelhardt’s counting lesson (also available from Mother Jones) is very instructive. It is about counting in public or not. He quotes for instance General Tommy Franks:
“We don’t do body counts.” (from “How Many Iraqis Died? We May Never Know”, San Francisco Chronicle, May 3 2003)
And then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:
“We have a room [...]
Readers interested in improving their publicly spoken French can listen to the interview of Jean-Pierre Dubois, president of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, at today’s special program on the “delinquents of solidarity” aired at RFI radio station. The lesson includes, for instance, suggestions about how to speak to police agents that are sitting on [...]
In a video report titled “Toxic Toothpaste: A Consumer Alerts the World” (October 1 2007), reporters from the New York Times portray markets as strangely unmediated: toothpaste directly from (not producers, not distributors, not retailers but a whole distant supply apparatus called “a country”, here unsurprisingly) China to the hands of the sovereign consumer [...]
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