http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130306/cuba-decrees-mourning-for-president-chavezs-death

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130305/cuba-mourning-says-chavez-true-son-fidel

President Santos on Chavez’s contribution to peace between Colombia and Venezuela:

http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130306/colombias-santos-laments-hugo-chavezs-death

More from the Caribbean:

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Simpson-Miller–Holness-pay-tribute-to-Chavez

CPI(M) tribute:

cpim-tribute.pdf

Brazilian President Dilma Roussef: “All Latin Americans are saddened by the death of President Hugo Chávez”: http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130305/brazils-rousseff-latin-americans-saddened-by-chavezs-death

Caribbean leaders “devastated”: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/05/3268790/caribbean-leaders-devastated-over.html

Evo Morales “shattered”: http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130305/bolivias-president-shattered-by-chavezs-death

“Argentinean President Cristina Fernández declared a three-day mourning…Some Argentinean ministers exclaimed, ‘Until victory!’ once [...]]]> A first list of reactions and tributes, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, quickly compiled:

Brazilian President Dilma Roussef: “All Latin Americans are saddened by the death of President Hugo Chávez”: http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130305/brazils-rousseff-latin-americans-saddened-by-chavezs-death

Caribbean leaders “devastated”: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/05/3268790/caribbean-leaders-devastated-over.html

Evo Morales “shattered”: http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130305/bolivias-president-shattered-by-chavezs-death

“Argentinean President Cristina Fernández declared a three-day mourning…Some Argentinean ministers exclaimed, ‘Until victory!’ once they were informed about his death”: http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130306/argentina-declares-three-day-national-mourning-upon-chavezs-death

Lula: “Chavez fought for a fairer world”: http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130305/lula-is-positive-that-chavez-fought-for-a-fairer-world

From the English edition of Granma: http://www.granma.cu/ingles/ouramerica-i/5marzo-10chavez-2.html

Jimmy Carter “praised Chávez’s efforts to ‘create new forms of integration’ in Latin America and the Caribbean, noting that during his 14-year tenure Venezuelan poverty rates were cut in half and a more effective participation in political and economic life was facilitated to millions”: http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130306/carter-hails-chavezs-commitment-to-improving-the-lives-of-venezuelans

The Venezuelan people react:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/05/v-fullstory/3268579/hugo-chavez-dead-at-58.html

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/03/05/3269340/venezuelans-react-to-news-of-chavezs.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/venezuela/9911642/Hugo-Chavez-Venezuelans-mourn-death-of-charismatic-leader.html

From the Secretary-General of the Organisation of American States: http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130305/oas-insulza-offers-his-sympathy-to-the-venezuelan-people

Some others:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/4519414e-85df-11e2-9ee3-00144feabdc0.html#slide15

http://www.eluniversal.com/nacional-y-politica/130306/hollande-says-chavez-deeply-marked-the-history-of-venezuela

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html

“If you could slice the world in half right here, you could read the history of this town called Rugeley in the layers. Below the ground are the shafts and [...]]]> An excellent, deeply disturbing piece by Sarah O’Connor in the Financial Times about the future of the labour process and workplace under contemporary capitalism.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ed6a985c-70bd-11e2-85d0-00144feab49a.html

“If you could slice the world in half right here, you could read the history of this town called Rugeley in the layers. Below the ground are the shafts and tunnels of the coal mine that fed the power station and was once the local economy’s beating heart. Above the ground are the trolleys and computers of Amazon, the global online retailer that has taken its place.”

Inside the factory, “hundreds of people in orange vests are pushing trolleys around a space the size of nine football pitches, glancing down at the screens of their handheld satnav computers for directions on where to walk next and what to pick up when they get there. They do not dawdle – the devices in their hands are also measuring their productivity in real time. They might each walk between seven and 15 miles (11 to 24 km) today.

One new Rugeley worker “lost almost half a stone in his first three shifts. ‘You’re sort of like a robot, but in human form,’ said the Amazon manager. ‘It’s human automation, if you like.’”

The basic wage is only 0.10 pounds above the legal minimum wage of 6.19 pounds per hour.

http://twocircles.net/2013feb02/ammaji_qamar_azad_hashmi_passes_away_funeral_today.html

Photograph of Qamar Azad Hashmi as red volunteer, Jama Masjid, Delhi, 1989

(courtesy: Sudhanva Deshpande)

The PTI report appears in different [...]]]> When Manik Sarkar filed his nomination this year for election from Dhanpur constituency in Tripura, he had Rs.1080 cash in hand and his bank balance was Rs.9720. He had inherited a tin-shed home of 432 sq. ft from his deceased mother Anjali Sarkar; its market value was Rs. 2,20,000.

The PTI report appears in different national newspapers: see, for instance,

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/tripura-chief-minister-manik-sarkar-can-vie-for-cleanest-and-poorest-cm-in-country/1064840/

or

http://www.business-standard.com/generalnews/news/manik-sarkar-can-vie-for-cleanestpoorest-cm-in-country/114602/&

Tripura has also, with justice, been described as India’s “best-governed State.” See Prakash Karat’s characterisation here:

http://www.business-standard.com/generalnews/news/tripura-best-governed-state-says-karat/112270/

or here

http://www.northeasttoday.in/our-states/tripura/karat-gears-up-poll-campaign-tripura-best-governed-state/

http://www.themanbookerprize.com/feature/hilary-mantel-teaching-historical-fiction-masterclass

While the growth of gross domestic product in every sub-sector of the Indian economy accelerated during the second half of the 2000s, employment growth in most sectors other than construction decelerated.

“Manufacturing employment in the country fell and employment growth slowed down in most constituents of [...]]]> Jayan Jose Thomas in the Economic and Political Weekly:

While the growth of gross domestic product in every sub-sector of the Indian economy accelerated during the second half of the 2000s, employment growth in most sectors other than construction decelerated.

“Manufacturing employment in the country fell and employment growth slowed down in most constituents of the services sector. The new jobs generated were predominantly in rural construction. The slow progress in the diversification of India’s employment structure has led to large-scale withdrawal of women from the labour force, with the number of women thus ‘missing’ being as large as the population of Brazil.”

Indias_Labour_Market_during_the_2000s.pdf

The Guardian’s two pages of category-wise lists:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/best-books-of-2012

The “100 Notable” list from the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2012.html?src=me&ref=general

Michiko Kakutani’s top 10:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/books/michiko-kakutanis-favorite-10-books-of-2012.html?ref=books

Janet Maslin’s top 10:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/books/janet-maslins-10-favorite-books-of-2012.html?hpw

The Financial Times, though you will have to scroll through a lot of books of interest to capitalists and their lackeys and the very rich before [...]]]> “Best books” of 2012:

The Guardian’s two pages of category-wise lists:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/best-books-of-2012

The “100 Notable” list from the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/books/review/100-notable-books-of-2012.html?src=me&ref=general

Michiko Kakutani’s top 10:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/books/michiko-kakutanis-favorite-10-books-of-2012.html?ref=books

Janet Maslin’s top 10:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/books/janet-maslins-10-favorite-books-of-2012.html?hpw

The Financial Times, though you will have to scroll through a lot of books of interest to capitalists and their lackeys and the very rich before getting to Fiction and Fiction in Translation:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/88bdb3c0-37cf-11e2-a97e-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2FgCeZU5o

Note: don’t stop watching after 15 seconds; replays from different angles are shown after the 37–second mark.

The clip is at

Maharashtra-Committee-statement.pdf

– I own over 200 corporations in the United States and those corporations are people too. Had we gotten to vote only once for every corporation that we own, the results of this election would be quite different. –

More at

http://www.theglobaledition.com/trump-plans-billionaires-march-on-washington/

http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/7320

“Nobody knows what the long term holds for India’s news media. It should be possible, through some kind of regulation, to reform the system to put an end to the major ethical transgressions, not to mention rogue practices like paid news. But I have no illusions [...]]]> N. Ram delivers the James Cameron Memorial Lecture 2012:

“Nobody knows what the long term holds for India’s news media. It should be possible, through some kind of regulation, to reform the system to put an end to the major ethical transgressions, not to mention rogue practices like paid news. But I have no illusions about what it will take to reverse the tendencies that put enormous pressure on independent, professional journalism. My personal hope is that feel-good journalism, focus-group-led journalism, ad-dictated journalism, journalism that sees no need to take account of basic realities – the mass poverty and the multiple deprivations in a country where two-thirds of the population subsist on less than two dollars a day – can be discredited by good, sensitive, progressive journalism that attracts public support. My hope is that effective incentives, moral and material, can be put in place in significant sections of the news media for taking up the basic concerns of hundreds of millions of ordinary Indians – and projecting them, with social responsibility, into the public sphere.”

James Cameron Memorial Lecture 2012, by N. Ram, City University, London, October 3, 2012.pdf

Also see:

http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2012/oct/n.ram-delivers-the-james-cameron-memorial-lecture

The size of each image, however, is in the [...]]]> “…Another approach to capture tack-sharp and high-quality pictures is to photograph in raw. Working in raw is equivalent to generating a negative of the photo. The camera will photograph the image in a manner that is a whole lot sharper and more detailed than JPEG.”

The size of each image, however, is in the region of 30 MB, so fewer photographs per card.

RAW photographs can, of course, be converted to JPEG or other formats, and, in certain cases, “you can concurrently shoot in RAW and JPEG.”

For those who use Nikon, the Nikon Electronic Format (NEF) is Nikon’s RAW file format; see

http://www.nikonusa.com/Learn-And-Explore/Nikon-Camera-Technology/ftlzi4ri/1/Nikon-Electronic-Forma-NEF.html

(via Vikas Rawal)

http://peter.fleissner.org/Transform/Enfu%20Cheng%20Innovative%20Marxism%202012.5.8.doc

justice-katju-statement.pdf

Of [...]]]> In 1981, India made a request for the largest loan ever under the Extended Fund Facility (EFF) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). “Under the access limits then in effect, India could draw up to SDR 7.7 billion ($9 billion) from the Fund over a three-year period (equivalent to 450 percent of its quota).”

Of the deal, and of the conditionality to which India agreed (in secret) to adhere, an Executive Director of the IMF said: “[The] Fund could wish no more than to exercise its leverage with all prospective borrowers in the way it did in the Indian case.”

The exposure of IMF conditionality by N Ram was the most important event in investigative journalism in India at the time. It is interesting to learn now, from a history of the IMF, that, “because of the sensitivity of the information and the delicacy of the negotiations, [the IMF] management regarded this leak as ‘quite possibly the most serious and damaging . . . in the history of the Fund.’”

Read about the IMF-India deal at the link below (pp 709 ff.)

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/history/2001/ch15.pdf

The entire book is at

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/history/2001/

For those interested in the articles of that time in facsimile, see:

Conditions which IMF will impose for loan, Oct 16, 1981

Consultations with IMF – RV’s letter, Oct 16, 1981

Secret India-IMF discussions over months, Oct 16, 1981

The binding performance clauses and conditions, Oct 16, 1981

IMF management recommends India’s loan to Board, Oct 18, 1981

India’s memorandum to the IMF, Oct 19, 1981

IMF sees Indian economy moving in ‘desirable’ direction, Oct 20, 1981

What are the economic policies IMF presses on India, Oct 20, 1981

World’s most powerful supranational Govt., Oct 20, 1981

India’s liberal attitude to foreign collaboration, Oct 20, 1981

New York Times obituary at

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/world/asia/sunil-janah-who-photographed-bengal-famine-dies-at-94.html?_r=1

From a 1998 interview with Sunil Janah:

“I am still,’’ Janah says, “undoubtedly a believer in socialism.’’ Capitalism remains for him an [...]]]> Sunil Janah, the leading Communist photographer of the last years of the freedom movement and early years of Independence, died on June 21 in the United States.

New York Times obituary at

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/10/world/asia/sunil-janah-who-photographed-bengal-famine-dies-at-94.html?_r=1

From a 1998 interview with Sunil Janah:

“I am still,’’ Janah says, “undoubtedly a believer in socialism.’’ Capitalism remains for him an “insane system, based on greed. Its basic feature is that the greedier you are, the higher you go – this is hardly a society, it is a wilderness.’’

The full article is below:

Documenting society and politics

Note: although the link to the photograph mentioned in the article is no longer active, the photograph was archived from the link, and is here.

Sullivan’s “supporters have rallied to her defence, rocking the campus with massive protests demanding her reinstatement.”

The FSLN was formed in July 1961, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, by Carlos Fonseca, Silvio Mayorga, Noel Guerrero (who left the FSLN and the revolutionary movement) and Tomas [...]]]> Tomas Borge Martinez, one of the founders of Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front (Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, or FSLN) and former Nicaraguan Interior Minister, died on Monday.

The FSLN was formed in July 1961, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, by Carlos Fonseca, Silvio Mayorga, Noel Guerrero (who left the FSLN and the revolutionary movement) and Tomas Borge. The event is described in Borge’s tribute to Carlos Fonseca (who was killed in 1976, three years before the Sandinistas won the revolutionary war), a book titled Carlos, the dawn is no longer beyond our reach.

The Associated Press obituary is at:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/01/v-fullstory/2776829/last-living-founder-of-sandinista.html

and the New York Times obituary is at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/world/americas/tomas-borge-martinez-dies-at-81.html?hpw http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/01/v-fullstory/2776829/last-living-founder-of-sandinista.html

From the period of anti-Somoza struggle and through the 11 years of the first FSLN government and later, Borge was considered to be on the left of the FSLN.

Two extracts from Borge’s writing.

On being told of the killing of Carlos Fonseca (Borge was then a prisoner in Somoza’s most notorious jail):

“The Commander at the Tipitapa prison came to my small cell, jubilant…He gave me the news: ‘Carlos Fonseca is dead.’ After a few moments of silence, I answered: ‘You’re wrong, colonel. Carlos is one of the dead who never die.’ The colonel said, ‘You guys are something else.’”

And from Tomas Borge’s poem, “Che,” published in his collection Have You Seen a Red Curtain in My Weary Chamber?:

If yet again we divide history
it must be from that October day
when some learned to tremble
seeing that the fire of the gods
burns in the hearts of men.
…

We learned, Commandante, that no one
can console us, for those who might
do so must themselves be consoled,
and after all is said and done, what we require
is something else –

How to kill death
how to resurrect life
how, in hell, to visualise utopia.

The wage gap could buy women about 92 weeks of groceries, or 14 months of rent, or 3.7 years’ worth of family health insurance premiums.

“Fifteen million households in the [...]]]> “A new report released on Equal Pay Day shows that the yearly median pay for women in America is $10,784 less than their male counterparts.”

The wage gap could buy women about 92 weeks of groceries, or 14 months of rent, or 3.7 years’ worth of family health insurance premiums.

“Fifteen million households in the United States are headed by women, and almost 30 per cent of them live below the poverty level.”

See the report in People’s World at:

http://www.peoplesworld.org/wage-gap-costs-women-extra-92-weeks-of-groceries/

http://centennial.journalism.columbia.edu/50-great-stories/

FC Barcelona over the past five years (“In Adoration”)

http://www.behance.net/gallery/IN-ADORATION/3346099

The current Barca squad

http://www.behance.net/gallery/FC-BARCELONA-VINTAGE-FOOTBALL-CARDS/2834915

…and studies of home and away colours (“When Saturday Comes”)

http://www.behance.net/gallery/WHEN-SATURDAY-COMES/2394082

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/article2960871.ece

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/12/observer-editorial-evra-suarez

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/culture-i/19enero-I%20have.html

And of Cuba’s Casa de las Américas:

April 26, 1959, “in Cuba, saw the founding of the Casa, which has most helped us to discover America and the many Americas which America contains.”

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/culture-i/19enero-Words%20of.html

The current disposable income per capita of a rural resident in China is 36 per cent of the corresponding figure for an [...]]]> By the end of this month, China’s urban population will be larger than its rural population, according to a new Blue Book of statistics published by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

The current disposable income per capita of a rural resident in China is 36 per cent of the corresponding figure for an urban resident, but the rate of growth of incomes of rural residents (13.6 per cent) is significantly higher than the corresponding rate for urban residents (7.8 per cent).

Read the whole report at

http://www.china.org.cn/china/2011-12/20/content_24196513.htm

Although the issue of genetically modified crops is controversial, recognized experts believe that such varieties can contribute to addressing hunger around the world, at a time when the poor rural population — 70% of [...]]]> In a report on the Havana 2011 International Biotechnology Congress, held from November 28 through December 3, a Granma correspondent writes:

Although the issue of genetically modified crops is controversial, recognized experts believe that such varieties can contribute to addressing hunger around the world, at a time when the poor rural population — 70% of the planet’s people — continues to grow and prices of essential foods — rice, corn and wheat — continue to escalate alarmingly.

Read the whole report at

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/cuba-i/1dic-Cuba%20presents.html

(via R. Ramakumar)

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/12/homelessness_around_the_world.html