Regularly, when spring comes, people expect flowers and green shoots and optimism prevails. Alas, things in the Middle East are quite different. With every spring that comes, people recall the outbreak of the first spark of the current "Arab Spring" that started in Tunisia 2011 and swept Arab countries, wondering what will come after and where it will hit next. After being caught by surprise, numerous scholars and observers have been writing extensively about the "Arab Spring", trying to uncover its wellsprings and link it to other incidents and circumstances, in an attempt to read the portents of the rough and tumble of the Middle East.

Another blow to the palm oil industry came on March 11 when JP Morgan Asia Pacific Equity Research revealed that the Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG) had disposed of its stakes in 23 Asian palm oil companies in 2012, including several Indonesian companies committed to the sustainability movement.

As we are approaching spring, it reminds us of Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu theatrical gesture at the United Nations General Assembly last September, while holding up a cartoon-like drawing of a bomb with a fuse as he drew the famous “red line” for Iran’s nuclear program. That red line represents this spring and is just below a presumed “final stage” to a bomb.

I recall with shame and frustration the day Saint Isaac’s Cathedral was surrounded by military vehicles and hundreds of riot police bearing down on a tiny pocket of defenseless citizens with anti-Putin pickets.

Jelton Anjain (right) and Paul Ahpoy from Fidji. Hiroshima, 6^th of August 2012. Photo: Ursula Gelis

Bikini, Rongelap and, and…”I was stigmatized as a walking atomic bomb”. Traveling with Jelton Anjain from Rongelap.
 

“Test sites are the grounds for unlimited human suffering”. Senator Anjain-Maddison, Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Today, as we mark the 25th anniversary of the Pogroms against Armenians in Sumgait, in Azerbaijan, and remember the martyrs fallen in this grave crime against humanity, we the freedom-loving, self-determined people of the Nagorno Karabakh Republic, want to draw the attention of people of Norway to how events of 1988 link to policies and practices in Azerbaijan today, and how continued support of Azerbaijani corrupt regime by Norway may lead to grave consequences for the region in general and Norwegian interests in particular.

    Chiyoko Motomura and her poem. Nagasaki, August 2012, Photo: Ursula Gelis

“There was someone leaning on the stone – and it flashed – the body melted - and all that remains was the shadow on the stone …”
Poem by Chiyoko Motomura

His son Ghalib was barely two when Mohammad Afzal Guroo was picked up by the sleuths of Delhi Police from a bus terminal in Srinagar Kashmir as ‘prime’ accused in the Indian Parliament attack case, two days after the attack took place on December 13, 2001.