An e-mail to the public account complains about the lack of entries (sorry, tablet destructed, I certainly didn't plan for it to happen). It also complains about the story yesterday where the KRG and Turkey deal was off and how I refused to note it.
I think he means the story about the deal being in doubt, not off. If so, I saw it.
I just didn't believe it.
If I'd been able to do entries this morning, I would have ignored it.
I don't believe it.
Nouri threw a fit.
I saw it as a weak attempt to humor him, at best, but didn't believe the deal was off.
It might happen in the future, but it would take more than just one tantrum from Nouri to destroy it right now.
And that's the case with Humerya Pamuk (Reuters) reporting, "Turkey said Monday it stood by a bilateral oil deal with Iraqi Kurdistan
that bypassed central government but sought to appease Baghdad by
drawing it into the arrangement."
It's not off.
David Bacon's latest book is Illegal People -- How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press) which won the CLR James Award. This is from his "Iraqi Union Leaders In Danger, Call For A New Labor Law" (Equal Times):
Trade unions in Iraq may gain real legal status for the first time in decades, if a proposed new labor and trade union law is passed by Parliament, and if it truly abolishes the anti-labor restrictions of the eras of Saddam Hussein and the U.S. occupation. But even as this possibility seems within reach, the situation of trade union leaders in the country's most important economic sector - oil - seems as tenuous as ever.
" The government wants to destroy our union," said Hassan Juma'a Awad, president of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions, in a recent interview. "They will not allow us to work as a union. Law 150, passed under Saddam Hussein, is still being enforced, and the Iraqi government uses this law to prohibit the operation of Iraqi unions. Another law, special to our union, doesn't allow the workers in the general labor department to join. "
On November 10 a court in Basra dismissed, for the second time, charges against Hassan Juma'a. But Ibrahim Rhadi and sixteen other union activists are still being prosecuted, and face fines totaling more than $600,000, an impossibly large sum for oil workers to pay. Rhadi's fine alone is $30,000. " If Ibrahim doesn't pay, he'll be fired from his job," Juma'a says. "Then they will put him in jail."
My apologies for this morning but there was nothing I could do. I normally take the laptop but I had Christmas presents to bring on the plane and I just took the tablet. The battery was not the problem. When I booted up, the screen was showing three different sections -- one was bleeding, one was all black and one was diagonal lines. I have no idea but I will assume a hacking. The iPhone was also not working. If this had happened to the laptop, I could have probably fixed it -- I've become a wiz with a nail file on the laptop, but tablets are a new thing for me and I've never had to take one of them apart. (Nor did I take that one apart, I trashed it at the airport.) I used Ava's daughter's toy with a jump connection to my AT&T cell phone -- which was working.
I'll dictate an Iraq snapshot in a few hours. Isaiah's The World Today Just Nuts "Barack Talks To Barbara" went up last night.
The e-mail address for this site is common_ills@yahoo.com.
iraq
reuters
humerya pamuk
david bacon
