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Adam Bohannon

Mayday 2008 London - Mayfair Mayfayre - 0 views

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    Mayday 2008 was an important annivesary for the Space Hijackers, not only was it the 40th annivesary of the Situationist International palava in Paris, but closer to home it turned out to be the 300th anniversary since the last ever Mayfayre in Mayfair. Every year from the first of May onwards a riotous debauched party would kick off in the centre of London for nearly two weeks. A chance for people to shake off their class constraints and turn the rules upside down, the poor would mock the rich, traditional values would be thrown out of the window and the state turned into an impotent irrelevance. As you can imagine, the powers that be decided that this was far too much fun for the common folk, and in January 1709 a law was passed banning the May Fayre, and the site began it's gradual gentrification towards the uber rich quater of London it has now become.
Adam Bohannon

World Bank accused of razing Congo forests | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

  • · An area of 600,000 square kilometres (232,000 square miles) of forest was earmarked for logging companies.· The bank failed to address critical social and environmental issues.
  • The World Bank encouraged foreign companies to destructively log the world's second largest forest, endangering the lives of thousands of Congolese Pygmies, according to a report on an internal investigation by senior bank staff and outside experts. The report by the independent inspection panel, seen by the Guardian, also accuses the bank of misleading Congo's government about the value of its forests and of breaking its own rules.
  • It ignored between 250,000 and 600,000 Pygmies believed to be living in the Congolese forests, even though their presence was well known and documented.
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  • Criticism is made of the forestry reforms that the bank imposed in return for loans of more than $450m. Initially, said the panel, "the bank provided [to the government] estimates of export revenue from logging concessions that turned out to be far too high. This encouraged a focus on reform of the forestry system at the expense of pursuing sustainable uses of forests, the potential for community forests and for conservation.
  • In a scathing analysis of the bank's economic reasoning, the panel said the bank had "distorted the real economic value of the country's forests" by looking solely at the tax and revenue that increased industrial logging might generate. "There seems to have been little action to support alternative uses of the forest resources," it said.
  • The panel travelled deep into the forest to take evidence from the Pygmy communities, who told it they were not consulted before the bank launched its wide-ranging forestry reforms.
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