QUANTUM LEAP

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  2. Posted

    Woman takes on political giants

    in presidential race

    By ADAN MOHAMED

     

    If Asha Ahmed Abdalla has her way, Africa could soon have its first woman president.

     

    When she first announced her intention to run for the presidency of Somalia last week, many reacted with shock and surprise.

     

    Abdulla, 45, made her ambitions known during the final phase of the on-going Somali peace and reconciliation conference, which has been going on in Eldoret and Nairobi for the past eight months. She wants to run for the office alongside 30 other aspirants – all of them men.

     

    After the initial shock elicited by the announcement, reactions to her candidature were numerous and varied. Many welcomed it as a refreshing conclusion to the often tumultuous talks, arguing that her candidature would enhance the democratic process of the talks, especially in the eyes of IGAD (Inter-Governmental Agency for Development) and the international community.

     

    But there were those who reacted to Abdalla's announcement with scepticism and indifference. Hers was a mere declaration of intent, they declared dismissively, because she stood no chance of winning in a field full of established Somali political heavyweights. The forthcoming polls, they said, would follow the traditional pattern in Africa, where only men are expected to contest the presidency.

     

    The presidential race is, indeed, a monumental undertaking for Abdulla. Not only is she taking on a full field of political heavyweights, but she is also the only woman candidate. And this in a country where women have traditionally been marginalised from political and other decision-making positions.

     

    While women the world over have always been the underdogs in the cruel, cut-throat fight for political power, perhaps nowhere is this gender disparity more evident than in Somalia. The combination of a deep-rooted, gender-biased culture, combined with intolerance occasioned by decades of despotic, dictatorial rule has kept women away from leadership positions. And many appeared to have given up the struggle to correct the unjustices against them.

     

    But Abdalla is not one to give up even when all the odds seem stacked against her. Not only does she come armed with boundless energy and determination, she also has an impressive list of academic and professional qualifications.

     

    After graduating from Latole University in Mogadishu with a BA degree, she migrated to the United States with her family in late 1970s. She enrolled at La Guardia College for a Bachelor of Science degree course, and later for a Masters course at the City University of New York. She has also received diplomas in accounting, business management and book-keeping from various colleges in the US.

     

    While in the US, Abdalla was involved in famine relief activities to help ease the suffering of the people in her country. For the better part of the 1990s, she chaired the Washington-based Somali Relief Agency which, besides food relief, also dealt with refugee welfare.

     

    It was not until the year 2000 that Abdalla plunged into the rough and tumble of politics. The holder of a dual US-Somali citizenship, she attended the Somali peace conference in Arta, Djibouti, in 2000. Due to her significant role in the peace effort, she was elected to the Somali Transitional National Assembly. When Abdiqassim Salat Hassan was elected president of the transitional national government (TWG) by the Arta conference, he appointed Abdalla deputy minister for Labour, Sports and Social Affairs. A few months later, she was elevated to head the crucial ministry of Demobilisation, Disarmament and Reintegration.

     

    Abdalla outlines a 12-point agenda for securing the unity of Somalia and mobilising the citizens to rebuild the country. It includes revival of the country's economy; promotion of regional governance to bolster unity in diversity; socio-economic and political empowerment of women; disarmament of all armed groups in Somalia; and strengthening of the judiciary, universal education, child welfare, healthcare and infrastructural development.

     

    According to Kenya's envoy to the Somalia peace talks, Mr Bethwel Kiplagat, a new government of Somalia will have been constituted by early July.

     

    As the process inches closer to its climax, and the new government becomes more of a reality than a dream, even those Somali leaders who boycotted the meeting are now showing a keen interest in the election. The latest entry was that of the transitional government's president, Hassan, who jetted into Nairobi on Wednesday last week and immediately announced that he was in the presidential race. Hassan has been absent from the peace talks all along.

     

    Many of those in the race are factional leaders believed to be proteges of regional and international interests. Hassan was a minister during dictator Siad Barre's regime, and has links with Somali communities in Arab and European countries.

     

    Others include Hussein Aideed, son of former factional leader Gen Mohammed Farah Aideed ; Col Abdullahi Yusuf , who was in self-exile from 1978 to 1991; Prof Abdurahman Barre Osman , Barre's brother and former cabinet minister; former International Football Federation official Farah Adow ; and Dr Najib Abdulkarim, a lecturer in a New York university.

     

    [ June 26, 2003, 06:30 PM: Message edited by: Admin ]

  3. Posted

    Following is an article by Akbar Muhamad. Thought it would give you an insight into the way Western Countries and still at it..

     

    Is Taylor the first African victim

    of 'regime change'?

     

    Will Liberian President Charles Taylor become the first victim of regime change in Africa in the hands of Western powers?

    It is clear they do not want any African leader in power who will interfere with their long-term plans for Africa. We all thought the first victim of regime change under the Bush administration would be President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

     

    But it is obvious this aim has run into some problems. The media throughout the world reported that President Taylor had been indicted on war crime charges by a UN-sponsored tribunal in Sierra Leone.

     

    After the Iraq war, the United Nations, which has virtually lost all credibility, is now turning to Africa to try to flex its muscle by issuing an indictment against Mr Taylor. How does this indictment help stabilise Liberia or Africa in general?

     

    The other issue is that President Taylor was in Ghana pursuing a peace accord with the rebels. This fighting has caused tremendous suffering for the people of Liberia.

     

    Mr Taylor left his country to meet with those he thought could bring an end to the fighting. And the indictment was issued and Ghana pushed to arrest Mr Taylor, which would only have created additional chaos and confusion in West Africa.

     

    Ghanaian President John A. Kuffuor showed great strength in not playing into the hands of those who wanted Mr Taylor arrested. To get an African government to execute the arrest order while the man was pursuing the course of peace would have been totally unacceptable.

     

    The hypocrisy of what is happening to Mr Taylor is that America and Europe preach democracy and democratic reform around the world, while they do not respect these things.

     

    If Western governments do not like the results of an election in African countries, they push to create chaos in those countries. In the confusion, they attempt to remove or overthrow the legitimately elected president.

     

    I wish that space and time would allow those of us who have visited Liberia, the refugee camps in Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana to describe the hardships faced by many there.

     

    These governments are struggling to run the camps with a small UN Aid. When one sees how the people suffer, one realises the importance of peace and stability. This latest attack on Mr Taylor and his threatened arrest only serve to deepen the crisis.

     

    Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Thabo Mbeki of South Africa were in Ghana trying to negotiate Liberian peace when the indictment was handed down. I wonder how they reacted.

     

    When the news of the indictment hit the media, David Crane, an American and a former US Defence Department official, was said to be the person pushing for Mr Taylor's arrest. He is the prosecutor for the tribunal in Sierra Leone.

     

    Why Liberia and why Mr Taylor? This country is rich with an abundance of oil reserves, gold, diamonds, timber and iron ore. It also has rubber.

     

    Mr Taylor is seen as a hindrance to the acquisition of this wealth by American multinationals. Now it is clear why the West wants to get rid of him.

  5. Posted

    Che bro I dont think time helps in this sutuation...whats happening to Somalia is has nothing to do with liberation or for the benefit of the wider Somalis today. The term "Boobiis" has been given a new meaning in the Somali society. What we see today is all about amassing as much as one can and to hell with the rest and the country. We got thieves who are both intellectually challenged and at the sametime cant see beyong their noses.

     

    Perhaps a suggestion to Gediid ......How about we get some boys together out in Hargeisa to be trained to come down and rain on the warlords starting with ofcouse Yusuf and then XANAAR SHIMBIIR KAMADULAYSOO.

  6. Posted

    Sometimes pride has to be swallowed and for the sake of the new peace, the government should have let the old man have his views as long as it didnt cause a coup or have a direct threat to the present regime.

  9. Posted

    Interesting Article....AOL

     

    10 Reasons You Should NOT get Married

     

     

    10. She's a "sweet" girl

    When you come across a universally acceptable gal (the kind you'd take home to meet your folks), you may feel tempted to take her off the market. Just remember though; she has to be right for you, not everyone else.

     

     

     

    9. You're high school sweethearts

    It's great that what began as a teenage crush blossomed into a full-blown romance. But let's face it: If she were someone you wanted to spend the rest of your life with, wouldn't you have asked her by now?

     

     

     

    8. All your friends are getting married

    Being the only unwed guy in the group may feel awkward, but it's nothing compared to the pain of being married to the wrong woman.

     

     

     

    7. Your parents love her

    A marriage is not a group act. The fact that your parents think she's an angel won't make the relationship work.

     

     

     

    6. It's the "right" time

    Most men seem to think that marriage is one of those logical steps in the sequence of life. But just because you've got a great career and a nice house, that doesn't mean you should complete the package anytime soon.

     

     

     

    5. She put up with you, so you owe her

    She's tolerated your countless nights spent in bars, and endured your sloppy ways, but does that mean you should reward her with an engagement ring? The problem is you'll never be able to pay off this "debt".

     

     

     

    4. She wants to change you for the better

    If you aren't willing or ready to mold yourself into her ideal man, you will only resent her for trying to change you.

     

     

     

    3. She asked, so...

    In one of life's unpredictable turn of events, by some freak miracle, she proposed to you. And being on the spot, coupled with the fact that you're head over heels for her, may lead you to say yes without giving it enough consideration.

     

     

     

    2. You get along with her family.

     

    You love her mom's cooking, her dad's a great mentor to you, and her brother is one of your closest friends. But it's not her family that you will have to share a bed with for the rest of your life.

     

     

     

    1. She's pregnant

    Bottom line: kids do not make marriages work. It may not be in your, her, or a child's best interest to see two parents subject themselves to a marriage of convenience.

  11. Posted

    Looool "Parasites! that is what we are. We have abandon our good culture of working hard!"

     

    I remember somalia late in the 80:s when those who did not work were rewarded with Landcrusiers, villas and the best women.

     

    You summed it all up bro Entrepre......after all OLD HABBITS TEND TO NEVER DIE...

     

    About time we got disinfected too Entrepre....We need some strong disinfectant to make our folks more responsible and more honest. Wherever they, they lie through their teeth from the arrival of flight 13 to the being ill for more than five yrs or so just to get afreebie from the state when most people would achive alot more by working hard and earning an honest buck.

     

    If you look at the ones who are educated, they DONT often go for their dream jobs and would rather just chill and milk the benefits and be very wlc at sponging on their parents or relatives. They never even go for appretenceships that are offered all over the world and could be astepping stone to abetter career.

     

    If I may have the luxury of guessing, 70% of the up and coming youth would rather embrace MTV and wearing huge jeans that barely can hang on to their butts and ofcouse talking too loud that you feel small when you are around them.

     

    Ladies and gentlemen our youth are seriously picking on other ghetto culture than what would have been more useful to them (Studying and educating themselves on both the worldly studies and ofcouse their religion which is away of life too).

     

    And as Northerner said, "u have brothers with physics degrees who have been strayed and are now teaching in the merfish....". what a waste!

  12. Posted

    Now this makes a huge difference from the mundane things people here are always caught up in. When you see a sister like Fatima in her attire and despite all the ups and downs getting through it and achieving her dream career, it makes you still have faith and think there are still many more brothers and sisters who work hard enough to escape their past and embrace the future with both hands.

     

    May Allah bless us all

  13. Posted

    You dont have to go very far off to witness how Nomards are abusing welfare systems, freedom of speech, freedom of learning, freedom of land and ofcouse freedom of what they are entitled which is living a happy successful and peaceful life.

     

    We practice a scotch the earth policy of burning and destroying everythinng we come across.

     

    Is our time still in the dark ages?

    Do we deserve these freedom?

  16. Posted

    UK says sorry for ‘dodgy dossier’

     

    Straits Times/ ANN

    LONDON, June 10. — The British government has issued a rare apology for claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in a dossier which was later exposed to be a mish-mash of information from intelligence sources and a 13-year-old thesis by a Californian PhD student.

    The dossier, titled Iraq: Its infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation, was published by the government to boost public and political support for a war against Iraq. It was presented as fresh information from intelligence sources about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s WMD and his attempts to hide them from the world.

    But soon after the dossier’s release, the PhD student came forward to reveal that it contained parts of a thesis he had written in 1990 and which was posted on the Internet.

    More embarrassment for the government followed when Jane’s, the highly respected British-based organisation which publishes detailed books about all the world’s military aircraft, ships and army equipment, said the dossier also used a significant amount of information from its publicly available Intelligence Review.

    The dossier, published in February to coincide with Mr Tony Blair’s war summit in Washington with Mr George W Bush, made no acknowledgement of the sources and gave the impression that the British intelligence had recently gathered the data.

    The government’s rare apology and admission follows the setting up last week of two inquiries into claims that the government concocted intelligence reports about Iraq’s alleged WMD, to justify the war.

    Bush tones down rhetoric: Mr George W Bush has insisted that US forces would reveal that Iraq was pursuing weapons of mass destruction as he tried to douse growing doubts about the credibility of American intelligence, Times, London adds from Washington. The US President, however, stopped short of his previous assertions that Iraq’s WMDs had posed an imminent threat. Nor did he say that the USA would uncover biological and chemical agents.

  18. Posted

    Okay lets see what we can do for our beloved Mrefu **BOGOYA** bure wewe.... :D

     

    Kernel mode and user mode

    Hardware platforms provide a built-in mechanism for switching between these two modes and enforcing the lack of privileges in user mode. However, Linux provides no such mechanism to its processes, so UML constructs it using the ptrace system call tracing mechanism.

    UML has a special thread whose main job is to ptrace almost all of the other threads. When a process is in user space, its system calls are being intercepted by the tracing thread. When it’s in the kernel, it’s not under system call tracing. This is the distinction between user mode and kernel mode in UML.

    The transition from user mode to kernel mode is done by the tracing thread. When a process executes a system call or receives a signal, the tracing thread forces the process to run in the kernel if necessary and continues it without system call tracing.

    The transition back is also performed by the tracing thread, but it’s requested by the process. When it’s finished executing in the kernel, because it finished either a system call or trap, it sends a signal (USR1) to itself. This is intercepted by the tracing thread, which restores the process state if necessary and continues the process with tracing on.

    User: this method puts the thread package in user space and the kernel knows nothing about it. The advantage here is that it can be used on an OS that doesn’t support threads. When threads are managed in user space it need some kind of thread (process) table. If the instruction set has an instruction that allows stores all the register and loads all the register then this would be an order of magnitude faster then kernel threads. The other key advantages are the process can run its threads at will no trapping is needed, no context switching is needed, the memory cache need not be flushed making user level threads, invoking them is more efficient than kernel calls. They can use their own scheduling algorithm, scale better and NO CHANGES ARE NEED TO THE OS.

    kernal — is the part of the operating system that implements the most basic functions of an OS. And Kernel mode: is where the CPU can execute every instruction in its instruction set and use every feature of the hardware.

    An example of what happens is below:-

    Kernel: while user threads have better performance they also have major problems. Allowing a user thread to make system calls is unacceptable as this will stop all threads, how blocking is implemented. The Kernel thread table hold all the information about the thread, registers, state, and so on. Kernel threads do not require any new non-blocking system calls/ if one thread in a process causes a page fault the kernel (but doesn’t have to) can easily check the process for other run able threads that is ready. The main disadvantage of kernel threads is the cost of system calls is substantial. So Mrefu hope the Lady and rudy can take pity on you and say here bro. you can have it on A silver plataa ama?

  19. Posted

    Okay lets see what we can do for our beloved Mrefu **BOGOYA** bure wewe.... :D

     

    Kernel mode and user mode

    Hardware platforms provide a built-in mechanism for switching between these two modes and enforcing the lack of privileges in user mode. However, Linux provides no such mechanism to its processes, so UML constructs it using the ptrace system call tracing mechanism.

    UML has a special thread whose main job is to ptrace almost all of the other threads. When a process is in user space, its system calls are being intercepted by the tracing thread. When it’s in the kernel, it’s not under system call tracing. This is the distinction between user mode and kernel mode in UML.

    The transition from user mode to kernel mode is done by the tracing thread. When a process executes a system call or receives a signal, the tracing thread forces the process to run in the kernel if necessary and continues it without system call tracing.

    The transition back is also performed by the tracing thread, but it’s requested by the process. When it’s finished executing in the kernel, because it finished either a system call or trap, it sends a signal (USR1) to itself. This is intercepted by the tracing thread, which restores the process state if necessary and continues the process with tracing on.

    User: this method puts the thread package in user space and the kernel knows nothing about it. The advantage here is that it can be used on an OS that doesn’t support threads. When threads are managed in user space it need some kind of thread (process) table. If the instruction set has an instruction that allows stores all the register and loads all the register then this would be an order of magnitude faster then kernel threads. The other key advantages are the process can run its threads at will no trapping is needed, no context switching is needed, the memory cache need not be flushed making user level threads, invoking them is more efficient than kernel calls. They can use their own scheduling algorithm, scale better and NO CHANGES ARE NEED TO THE OS.

    kernal — is the part of the operating system that implements the most basic functions of an OS. And Kernel mode: is where the CPU can execute every instruction in its instruction set and use every feature of the hardware.

    An example of what happens is below:-

    Kernel: while user threads have better performance they also have major problems. Allowing a user thread to make system calls is unacceptable as this will stop all threads, how blocking is implemented. The Kernel thread table hold all the information about the thread, registers, state, and so on. Kernel threads do not require any new non-blocking system calls/ if one thread in a process causes a page fault the kernel (but doesn’t have to) can easily check the process for other run able threads that is ready. The main disadvantage of kernel threads is the cost of system calls is substantial. So Mrefu hope the Lady and rudy can take pity on you and say here bro. you can have it on A silver plataa ama?

  20. Posted

    "so here is what the creater of this topic want us to tell him, he wants for us to say i belong to ----- clan"

     

    King all I can say is read the question properly, understand it and answer appropriately.

     

    No one here wants to know your clan....just what you see yourself as clan or Somali? simple.

     

    Gama bro I would say you understood the question and obviously answered it the best way you possibly could. Tnx

     

    [ June 10, 2003, 09:59 AM: Message edited by: Shaqsii ]

  21. Posted

    It was a night to remember and cherish for both the ones with us today and the one who passed away (May Allah repay him for all his good deeds). It was a memorable night..: :D

     

    Personal thanks to those who took the time out from their busy schedule to make it a reality.

     

    MMA you are always wlc bro....and that goes for any Nomard around here. icon_razz.gif

  22. Posted

    "Like it or not..this is a FORUM. Whether it be a Somali one or not, you are going to get many different views..."

     

    True True Opinionated.....but in other forums there are no divisions along the lines of Tribe/Clan etc. In other Forums you dont see hate rather people there get even with ideas and objective arguments and conclusions.

     

    You wouldnt see arguments that start with "they and us" as happnens around here despite the contributors coming from diverse ethnic backgrounds.

     

    So you see opinionated its not all about just having your say but to have to be a forumer who argues their case without getting far too personal to the extent where you feel .."woow someone hates me/them or this clan really has it in for that other clan."

     

    Northerner...your right when you say there has to be diversity of opinion but around here its not diversity but mostly hate and dislike for one another. Besides a question is just aquestion and should be understood for what it is rather than take it as a personal attack. (Though in some cases that too happens)

     

    As the future and probably as the most educated generation, we should be ashamed of some of the remarks and comments we make around here.