Keeping the lights out in Lebanon

Middle East Eye

A Lebanese friend is creating a proposal to install a new power plant in Lebanon. Ideally, it would eventually operate with natural gas and help improve the country’s notorious electricity shortage. The power situation at my friend’s own home in north Lebanon is illustrative: “We can’t run the television and the A/C at the same time. And God forbid someone turns on the iron”.

That’s just the start of it, of course. In parts of the country, the government has been known to supply as little as six hours of electricity per day. Beirut receives 21 hours -a privilege that does not extend to the capital’s poor southern suburbs. Lebanon’s Daily Star newspaper recently reported the looming possibility of intensified power cuts in certain areas.

Under Lebanese law, it is currently not possible to engage in electricity production that infringes on the monopoly of the state-run power company, Électricité Du Liban. This means that the masses of generators that have by necessity become an integral part of the Lebanese landscape are technically illegal. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.

Human Rights Watch’s Revolving Door

Jacobin

Let’s pretend that we want to start an organization to defend the rights of people across the globe that has no affiliation to any government or corporate interest. Which of the following characters should we therefore exclude from intimate roles in our organization’s operation? (You may choose more than one answer.) 

1. An individual who presided over a NATO bombing, including various civilian targets.
2. An individual who was formerly a special assistant to President Bill Clinton, a speechwriter for Secretaries of State Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright and a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff who in 2009 declared that, under “limited circumstances, there is a legitimate place” for the illegal CIA rendition program that has seen an untold number of innocent people kidnapped and tortured.
3. A former US Ambassador to Colombia, who later lobbied on behalf of Newmont Mining and J.P. Morgan — two US firms whose track records of environmental destruction would suggest that human wellbeing falls below elite profit on their list of priorities.
4. A former CIA analyst. 

READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

Uruguay's Mujica: New global role model?

Al Jazeera

Let's play a word association game. What's the first thing that comes to mind when I say "humility"?

Chances are it's not "heads of state".

To be sure, the conduct of government leaders across the globe would suggest a general eschewal of such virtues. A few egregious examples: the late Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan erected a gold statue of himself that rotated in accordance with the position of the sun. Former Ugandan dictator Idi Aminproclaimed himself "Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea", while former US president George W Bush claimed to receive battle commands directly from God.

Recurring Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has boasted of sleeping with eight women in one night, in addition to self-identifying as "the Jesus Christ of politics".

Amidst these tendencies of the global political class, Uruguay's Jose "Pepe" Mujica looks like a veritable freak of nature. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA.