Month: July 2011

Source: Pambazuka News

The Oakland Institute takes a closer look at South Sudan’s largest land deal to date – the granting of a 49-year lease of 600,000 hectares of land to US-based firm Nile Trading and Development Inc (NTD) by the shadowy Mukaya Payam Cooperative in March 2008. For a sum equivalent to around US$25,000, NTD has full rights to exploit all natural resources in the leased land during this period.

OVERVIEW

The largest land deal in South Sudan to date was negotiated between a Dallas, Texas-based firm, Nile Trading and Development Inc. (NTD) and Mukaya Payam Cooperative in March 2008.[1] The 49-year land lease of 600,000 hectares
(with a possibility of 400,000 additional hectares) for 75,000 Sudanese Pounds (equivalent to approximately USD 25,000),[2] allows NTD full rights to exploit all natural resources in the leased land. These include: read more

Source: The Independent

Read a book with your laptop thrumming. It can feel like trying to read in the middle of a party where everyone is shouting

In the 20th century, all the nightmare-novels of the future imagined that books would be burnt. In the 21st century, our dystopias imagine a world where books are forgotten. To pluck just one, Gary Steynghart’s novel Super Sad True Love Story describes a world where everybody is obsessed with their electronic Apparat – an even more omnivorous i-Phone with a flickering stream of shopping and reality shows and porn – and have somehow come to believe that the few remaining unread paper books let off a rank smell. The book on the book, it suggests, is closing. read more