EU "blue card" scheme could drain developing world Fri 26 Oct 2007, 11:54 GMT [-] Text [+] By Peter Apps LONDON, Oct 26 (Reuters) - A proposed European Union scheme to attract highly skilled migrants risks draining poor countries of essential staff, according to officials and aid agencies. The planned "blue card" scheme -- similar to the United States' "green card" -- aims at making the EU more attractive in a battle with other Western countries for technology workers and hospital staff, increasingly needed to plug labour gaps. But experts say it will increase an existing brain drain from developing countries and make it more difficult for them to improve their national health. "This is a new form of colonisation, of discrimination, and it will be very hard to find support for it among southern countries," said Moroccan international economic law professor Tajeddine El Husseini. "They spend a lot of money educating and training technical students and then in the end the northern countries will cream off the best ... it is a big mistake and a criminal act of the north to drain the south of its brainpower," he told Reuters on Thursday. Remittances -- payments sent back by foreign workers to their home countries -- provide crucial financial support for many families. But many say the overall effect of the brain drain is deeply corrosive. South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel has called the process a "self reinforcing, deteriorating spiral". Liberian Health Minister Walter Gwenigale said the EU scheme could make rebuilding his country's health system after years of war almost impossible. "I don't even want to hear about it," he told Reuters in a telephone interview on Thursday. "If we have a programme in Europe to get qualified people that is a real threat to my programmes ... All of the African countries are complaining about this brain drain but when we talk no one is really giving us straight answers." MAY COST LIVES The European Commission said the proposal, presented on Tuesday, includes measures to avoid the brain drain effects, especially in Africa. "The proposal promotes ethical recruitment standards to limit -- if not ban -- active recruitment by member states in developing countries already suffering from serious brain drain," the European Commission said in a statement. But with many skilled workers, including doctors, keen to leave the poor countries where they trained, many observers say simply stopping active recruiting may not be enough. If they can get the visas, skilled staff will find their way. Aid agency World Vision said it understands skilled workers want to use their training to get themselves and their families a better life but it fears the proposed scheme may cost lives. "Already half a million women die of complications in pregnancy a year in the developing world and taking skilled workers is not going to do any favours," World Vision UK health adviser Rebecca Cooper said. "I think it's quite hypocritical. It doesn't make sense to keep increasing the aid budget year on year and say we want to help if we are doing this." If unanimously agreed by the EU states, the blue card would offer candidates a fast-track procedure to obtain work permits. It faces resistance from some countries reluctant to let the EU have a say in migration policies. (additional reporting by Tom Pfeiffer in Rabat) http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL2683303.html

United Nations envoy urges Somali leaders to end row over power 21 hours ago NAIROBI (AFP) — The UN special envoy to Somalia on Thursday exhorted the leaders of the war-torn nation to patch up differences that have stifled effective governance in the recent months. Ahmedou Ould Abdallah said the power struggle between President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed and Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi was "unhelpful" in the face of escalating insurgency and a deepening humanitarian crisis in the country. Yusuf is pushing parliament to oust Gedi on the grounds that he has failed to end the insurgency raging in the capital Mogadishu, formulate a new constitution and install a federal system of government. "This internal crisis is not helping Somalia to be of interest to the international community," Ould Abdallah told AFP in Nairobi, where he was meeting foreign diplomats to mull ways of helping the country. "The president and the prime minister should talk to each other. This crisis should not bring more devastation." On Wednesday, Saudi King Abdullah invited the president, the prime minister and parliament speaker Aden Mohamed Nur to the oil rich kingdom in a bid to reconcile them following the disagreement that has paralysed the government. Underlying the power struggle is the kind of clan rivalry that has fuelled seemingly endless and bloody power struggles in Somalia since it acquired independence in 1960. Conflict flared after the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. Since then, Somalia has had no central authority and defied dozens of initiatives to restore stability. Yusuf, a past president of the self-declared northern state of Puntland, is a former warlord from the ***** clan, one of Somalia's two biggest clans. Gedi is from the other major clan, the ******, which is dominant in Mogadishu. His government last year suffered mass resignations which forced him to reshuffle his cabinet. The fallout between the two leaders comes as the government is battling Islamist-led insurgents who have been targeting government officials, Ethiopian troops and African Union peacekeepers in the recent months. http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jHJ4V7hmfNHQuj1eW4GePYM61CHA

Return of the Muslim other The far right is reviving the prejudices that used to dominate mainstream European politics Soumaya Ghannoushi Wednesday October 24, 2007 The Guardian In a few days time a cluster of far-right groups under the name the Stop the Islamisation of Europe alliance will hold rallies in London, Copenhagen and Marseilles to demand an end to what they call "the overt and covert expansion of Islam in Europe". Although the events are likely to attract no more than a handful of protesters, their message resonates widely. On Saturday the rightwing People's party, notorious for its virulent hostility to ethnic minorities and Muslims, emerged as the victor in the Swiss elections, taking 29% of the vote, the best electoral performance by a party in the country's elections since 1919. The far right is on the ascendancy in many parts of Europe. Beyond its explicit party political expressions, this assumes a more worrying form. What had been traditionally confined to the margins of dominant political discourse is progressively penetrating its mainstream, with parties of the centre absorbing much of the far right's populist rhetoric. This underlies the complaint by Jean-Marie le Pen, leader of the racist National Front, that Nicolas Sarkozy had "stolen his clothes". Across the Channel, the Tory candidate for the London mayoralty, Boris Johnson, believes that "to any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia - fear of Islam - seems a natural reaction". We are witnessing a reversion to the type of cultural essentialism that dominated political and academic discourse until the mid-1900s. Its central theme, the purity and superiority of European culture, was dealt a powerful blow by the tradition of post-colonial studies and radical critique of Orientalism. The trend brought together progressive, leftist voices from Europe and the US with others from the south amid the dismantling of modern-day empires and the rise of developing world liberation movements. The same discourse is reconstructing its terms today by substituting the classical east-west bipolarity at its core with one of "Islam" and "west". The west's rationality, tolerance, individualism and freedom are now contrasted with Islam's superstition, fanaticism, fatalism and repressiveness. In the history books, this trend has manifested itself in the resurrection of the myth of the benevolent empire, championed by figures such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts. September 11, the emergence of violent radical Islamic groups, and the war on terror have created fertile ground for the revival of this tradition. Its spirit permeates much of the language current in the political sphere and many sectors of the media. What had once been cause for disrepute now goes unquestioned and barely remarked upon. The vocabulary is various, from immigration, integration and citizenship to terrorism, radicalism, Islamism and an endless chain of -isms. But the referent is consistent: Islam and Muslims. It is a game of insinuations, of codes, in which meaning is readily conveyable without need for explicitness or directness. Beyond all the noise about Europe's "Muslim problem" lurks a growing unease about the changing texture of European society. Gone are the days of pure white, Christian Europe. Now Europe is multi-ethnic, multireligious and multicultural, a fact which many find hard to swallow. Muslims are part of this evolving reality, but the idea that the continent is being Islamised is a figment of the right's imagination. In a European population of some 540 million, Muslims number between 20 million and 25 million, or about 4%. The majority are underprivileged, and socially, economically and politically marginalised. Whatever the scaremongers say, Muslim armies are not at Europe's gate preparing to conquer. Obsession with the question of Britishness in the UK and with les valeurs de la République in France reflects a state of anxiety about identity. The collapse of empire, globalisation and flow of immigrants from the old colonies brought new peoples into Europe's bosom. The Muslim other - the Saracen or Turk, in opposition to whom Europe defined its imaginary geographic and cultural borders - is now located within its frontiers, a sort of internal outsider. From the periphery of the empire in distant overseas colonies in Lahore or Algiers, it has moved to the periphery of capitals and industrial cities in London or Paris. The borders of identity and culture are overlapping, making it impossible to draw rigid boundaries between east and west, Europe and Islam, white and black. At the heart of Europe's "Muslim problem" is an impotence and perhaps unwillingness to extend the norm of tolerance to newcomers from the Muslim world. Tolerance is not an abstract concept but the child of a specific historical context. In Europe it was the product of the religious wars, which ended in France, for instance, with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. Following the horrors of the Holocaust, the norm was widened to include Jews. And with the civil rights movement in the US, this was further extended to black people and other ethnic minorities - legally and theoretically, though not in practice. There is still resistance to the norm's broadening to encompass Muslims, something evident in the controversy over the building of mosques in northern Europe, as well as in the "veil problem" in France, Germany and other countries. Some quasi-liberals continuously ask how we can be tolerant with people who preach intolerance - by whom they mean, of course, Muslims. A better question could be: to what extent are those who profess tolerance really tolerant? · Soumaya Ghannoushi is director of research at IslamExpo soumaya@islamexpo.com http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2197942,00.html

Iska daa saxib, iska daa

Opposition political party formed in Somalia parliament 25 Oct 25, 2007 - 7:09:26 PM BAIDOA, Somalia Oct 25 (Garowe Online) - Somalia's interim parliament that is attempting to resolve a row between President Abdullahi Yusuf and Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi officially split in two camps Thursday after pro-Gedi lawmakers declared a new political party. Some 126 members of parliament convened at Hotel Bakiin in Baidoa, a town 250km northwest of Mogadishu that has served as parliament's home since early 2006. Abdullahi Sheikh Ismail, the Somali constitution and federal affairs minister, told reporters at the conclusion of the Hotel Bakiin meeting that 126 MPs signed an 11-point accord, including support for declarations signed in August at the conclusion of the clan-based national reconciliation conference. "We [lawmakers] were originally appointed in a clan-based manner, but after three years of working together we allied ourselves on principles," Sheikh Ismail said. The Somali constitution minister, a close Gedi ally who is also a deputy prime minister, said the 126 MPs formed a new political party known as the United Somali Parliamentarians, a group that stands to "protect the constitution and the government." Prominent USP party figures at today's meeting included Deputy Defense Minister Salad Ali Jeele, Reconciliation Minister Mohamed Abdi Mareye, and lawmakers Mohamed Qanyare and Muse Sudi Yalahow, both former Mogadishu warlords. Prime Minister Gedi flew to Ethiopia yesterday, forcing parliament to postpone a vote of confidence debate on his government for the second time in a week. [ Full story] President Yusuf wants Gedi to face the confidence vote, which the president thinks his prime minister will lose. But many see the declaration of the new USP party as a clear sign that Prime Minister Gedi enjoys sizeable support in parliament. The personal power struggle between the two Somali leaders has severely impacted the functioning capacity of a fragile government that, despite the backing of foreign troops, has been largely unable to control events on the ground, especially in Mogadishu. Ethiopia backs both Yusuf and Gedi as two of its main allies in Somalia. Ethiopian troops helped install the transitional government in Mogadishu last January, but the government struggles to function in the capital in the face of relentless insurgent attacks. Source: Garowe Online

The stadium will be 99% empty LoL

^^Thats what I like to see. An Arsenal fan who can make a prediction.

A new Medical Research Institute has been given the go ahead in the KSA and we have talk of religious police, men and women restrictions, women's rights and Saudi society in general! What ever happened to critical reading (especially a NYT article). A new building is going up somewhere near you in London. There are homeless people sleeping on site at night, violence rains supreme on a weekend night in the same area and prostitution is rife. I wonder if CG and Johnny would blink at such an analysis. At least this new development is in Jeddah ey? :cool:

Ghanima, we are waiting for MC Xamar to confirm dee,,,

Bump

It takes a while to recover from such injury so I dont know. They may risk him but I think we have good strikers in Kuyt and Voronin so would prefer they didnt risk him.

Rank City Population Latitude (DD) Longitude (DD) 1 Muqdiso 1234800 2.050 45.330 2 Hargeysa 328000 9.560 44.060 3 Berbera 232500 10.440 45.000 4 Marka 230100 1.720 44.760 5 Jamame 224700 0.080 42.750 6 Kismayo 183300 -0.350 42.530 7 Baydabo 157500 3.120 43.640 8 Burê¿o 120400 9.530 45.530 9 Bosaso 90100 11.280 49.180 10 Afgoye 79400 2.140 45.120 11 Beled weyne 67200 4.730 45.190 12 Qoryoley 62700 1.790 44.530 13 Galkaê¿yo 57300 6.780 47.420 14 Garowe 57300 8.410 48.480 15 Jawhar 57100 2.780 45.510 16 Bardere 51300 2.340 42.280 17 Qardo 47400 9.500 49.080 18 Ê¿erigabo 41000 10.630 47.360 19 Luq 41000 3.790 42.540 20 Jilib 40900 0.500 42.770 21 Lasê¿anod 39500 8.400 47.330 22 Borama 39100 9.920 43.190 23 Bur hakkaba 33700 2.800 44.080 24 Barawe 32800 1.110 44.020 25 Ê¿eldere 32200 3.850 47.180 26 Dolaw 26800 4.170 42.080 27 ********* 26700 2.620 44.890 28 Balê¿ad 24100 4.480 45.300 29 Awdegle 22700 1.990 44.830 30 Eyl 21700 7.980 49.820 31 Bulobarde 20500 3.860 45.570 32 Dinsor 19600 2.480 42.970 33 Qandala 19300 11.460 49.870 34 Bandarbeyla 16700 9.500 50.810 35 Garbaharey 15400 3.330 42.230 36 Afmadu 14500 0.520 42.060 37 Bereda 13700 11.850 51.050 38 Xafun 13200 10.420 51.260 39 Xuddur 12500 4.100 43.870 40 Baki 12400 10.530 43.120 41 Hobyo 11800 5.350 48.520 42 Jalalassi 11800 3.390 45.590 43 Ê¿adadlay 11600 9.770 44.650 44 Ê¿elbur 11000 4.690 46.620 45 Dusa marreb 10500 5.750 46.510 46 Mahadday weyne 10000 2.990 45.530 47 Saê¿o 9600 1.630 42.440 48 Saylaê¿ 8600 11.360 43.500 49 Lasqoray 8400 11.150 48.180 50 Bargal 8200 11.270 51.050 51 Wajid 8100 3.820 43.240 52 Yet 7900 4.530 43.030 53 Gebilay 7800 9.700 43.110 54 Bandarmuê¿ayo 7300 11.660 50.440 55 Iskusuban 7000 10.260 50.230 56 Odweyne 6700 9.410 45.060 57 Ê¿adale 6500 2.750 46.300 58 Ê¿alula 6100 11.970 50.760 59 Ê¿ek 5200 9.000 45.360 60 Bur gabo 3800 -1.210 41.830 http://www.tageo.com/index-e-so-cities-SO.htm You just about beat Oodweyne

How many?

How many?

Waa runta

LOZ, I didnt see the game but we will se who has 'the juice' on SUnday.

LoL, I see someone is still around,,,,,

^^Any pics of his 'visit' to Burco?? LoooL, dont think so,,,,

Should be another good one. I'm with any black African team but would like to Kanoute and Mali do well this year.

Ghanima, let me know if you need a ticket

Ghanima, let me know if you need a ticket

^^They are into their La Liga but I just dont bother talking football with them. They are more interested in the latest phone, the best car or sun glasses. The Masaaris/Syrians/Lebanese are rageedi though. ps Arsenal did well last night *shudders*

Originally posted by Mslm: Red Sea: This was from June..lol ..and it was posted here previously. You are way behind, buska danbe soo raac(: Noticed how quiet Duke has been this week?

Originally posted by AAliyah416: you consistently pick on pro-united Somali Solers ??? Who are these pro-unity SOLers ya Castarow?

^^^LOOOL Believe it or not, since moving from England, my passion for football has taken a back seat saxib. If we lose a big game I will no longer go out and try to break someone's legs on a football pitch as I did in the UK. Now I just make wudu I just got in and realised its the CL tonight (totally forgot) and still dont have the ART channels. Is Super Sport available here?