Upstream Online
Friday, May 13, 2011

Canadian independent Africa Oil has penned a letter of intent with a mystery drilling outfit in advanced of a planned exploration well in Somalia.

“We are preparing for the Somaliland shilling to be used all over Somaliland,” Central Bank of Somaliland Governor Abdi Dirir Abdi said in an interview on April 24 in Hargeisa, the capital. Abdi said the rate at which the currency will be exchanged has yet to be determined.

Somaliland, a former British colony, declared independence in 1991, following the ouster of former Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. No sovereign state has formally recognized the region as independent.

The Somaliland shilling was introduced in October 1994, according to the government’s website. At the end of 2008, the currency was valued at 7,500 per dollar, it said. The Somali shilling is currently valued at 1,601 against the U.S. currency according to Bloomberg data.

The central bank of Somaliland expects lawmakers to enact a draft banking law by June enabling commercial lenders to extend credit to borrowers for the first time, Abdi said last month. Somaliland is in talks with Banque pour le Commerce et l’Industrie, based in neighboring Djibouti, and two other lenders to grant them banking licenses, Abdi said. The nation of 3.5 million people currently has no banks.

Bloolmberg

The reinstatement of the worker, Derek Fenton of Bloomingdale, N.J., was announced on Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, which sued the transportation corporation on his behalf, arguing that his actions were protected by the First Amendment. The reinstatement was part of a settlement agreement, filed this week in Federal District Court in Newark, in which Mr. Fenton dropped his suit in exchange for getting his job back.

“In America, we have the right to burn all kinds of things — letters, flags, books, Bibles and Korans,” Deborah Jacobs, executive director of the New Jersey group, said Friday.

Ms. Jacobs said the case should “serve as a reminder to our leaders that they can’t punish and censor political expression based on their own emotional reactions or sense of morality.”

Mr. Fenton, 40, was fired two days after the demonstration, accused of violating New Jersey Transit’s employee code of ethics by tearing pages from a copy of the Koran and igniting them with a cigarette lighter to protest plans for building a Muslim community center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero. He was participating in a protest staged by about 2,000 people near the proposed site of the center, 51 Park Place, during a day of memorial and prayer services marking the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

After the civil liberties union sued in February, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey told reporters that he supported Mr. Fenton’s dismissal. “That kind of intolerance is something I think is unacceptable,” he said. “So I don’t have any problem with him being fired. You’ve got to make decisions in this job. I made one.”

Mr. Christie said, however, that he was unaware of the decision to fire Mr. Fenton until after it was made.

A spokesman for the governor’s office did not return several calls and messages on Friday seeking comment. A spokesman for New Jersey Transit referred questions about the case to the state attorney general’s office, but a spokesman there did not return repeated calls.

Frank L. Corrado, a lawyer who represented Mr. Fenton with a co-counsel, Rubin Sinins, both working pro bono, said he did not know why Mr. Fenton felt so strongly about the proposed Muslim center, or whether his action was prompted by the last-minute decision of a pastor, Terry Jones, to scrap plans to burn a Koran that day outside his Florida church.

Ms. Jacobs said of Mr. Fenton, “He just seemed to be angry about the community center being too close to ground zero.” Opponents of the center described the proposed building as an assertion of Islamic “triumphalism.”

At Mr. Fenton’s request, his lawyers obtained an assurance in the settlement agreement that he would not have to attend extra sessions of cultural “sensitivity training” upon his return to work. “He did not want to have to do that,” Mr. Corrado said, “And we felt that thought control should not be the employer’s business here.”

The settlement was reported on Friday by The Star-Ledger of Newark.

Mr. Fenton, an 11-year veteran of New Jersey Transit who was a commuter train conductor before assuming duties as an $86,000-a-year supervisor several years ago, will still undergo “whatever diversity education is required from time to time of every employee,” Mr. Corrado said. “He just won’t get special treatment.”

The code of ethics Mr. Fenton was cited for violating forbids employees from “bringing disrepute” on the agency, Mr. Corrado said. But during the demonstration, Mr. Fenton was off duty and wore nothing to indicate that he worked for the transit agency, the lawyer added.

Pamela Geller, a blogger who was instrumental in organizing the Sept. 11 demonstration, said she did not know Mr. Fenton or condone his actions. “I wouldn’t do what he did, myself; it’s disrespectful,” she said. “But it’s free speech.”

Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights advocacy group, said his organization had not sought Mr. Fenton’s firing. “We have always believed,” he said, “that somebody should not be punished in their employment for actions taken — no matter how reprehensible — in their private lives.”

The NY Times

Hargeisa, Somaliland (CNN) — “We want money,” say the group of inmates with a smile. Somaliland’s highest security prison hasn’t dampened the hustling spirit of its pirate prisoners. My government handler rolls his eyes. They do this a lot, he explains.

I was told there are over 40 convicted pirates in this facility in Hargeisa, capital of the tiny breakaway east African state. The authorities say the coast guard has caught close to 100 in the past two years.

Prison officials tell me that most of the convicts ventured into Somaliland waters from Puntland, a haven for pirates just down the north Somalia coastline. They rarely hijack ships in Somaliland waters, because the coast guard has a reputation for catching them, officials told me. But the pirates often run out of fuel and are forced to come into the Somaliland port town of Berbera.

The first group of pirates brought out to speak with me refuse to talk without money, having decided on a union of sorts. Mohammed Ali Orsamen then comes down the corridor, chancing his luck for some cash but still keen to speak even after I refuse payment. He is serving fifteen years for piracy.

“I am not a pirate, I am a fisherman,” he begins. They all say that, smiles my government minder. Ali Orsamen does however have strong opinions on piracy. “The Westerners are doing illegal fishing and arresting fishermen and accusing them of being pirates,” he repeats several times.

To Ali Orsamen, arresting so-called pirates was an excuse for Western fishing companies to take over Somalia’s fishing territory.

“Because of the collapse of the Somali government there is no patrolling of our territories and that is why there is illegal fishing and those Westerners are entering our territories, and those pirates are only hijacking ships in Somali waters,” he says. “Please tell the international community to stay away from Somali waters. If we hijack one Western ship and we kill one Westerner, then they kill ten of us.”

Ali Orsamen and his fellow inmates are at the mercy of a new and extremely strict judicial system in Somaliland. Pirates in the past used to get five to eight years here, now with the world struggling to combat a major pirate plague in the region, they are being sentenced from 15 to 20 years each.

Osman Rahim, Berbera’s regional court judge, presides over an historic court house in Berbera, just down the dusty street from the old prison. When suspected pirates are caught by the coast guard, this is where they end up before being sentenced and transferred to Hargeisa’s high security facility.

Shortly before my visit, a group of suspected pirates had been caught and taken to Berbera prison, causing much excitement amongst officials. Their boat had been marked by a coalition warship as a pirate vessel, said officials, and their leader was a well-known pirate boss.

The man in question, Omar Abdullah Abdi, disagrees. “We were arrested doing our work – fishing. I don’t know why we were arrested,” he says. The group of six had elected him their spokesman, and none of the others are keen to disagree with his version of events. Pointing out that his boat was marked, Abdi says: “We have not been charged in court yet. We have nothing to do with these charges.”

Rahim explains that Somaliland is taking a very tough stance against piracy, in part to discourage others from following the practice. “Now when they hear that they can get 20 years and 15 years, everybody is stunned,” he adds, “and not going to the sea. That’s why we are sentencing them for a long time – to restrict them.”

With millions of dollars to be made by pirates in hijacking ships for ransom, such risks may seem small in comparison. The hope in Berbera, however, is that these waters gain a reputation for a fierce rule of law: keeping pirates at bay.

More at CNN

Five top grades at A-level were not enough to win a Somalian girl a place, as university admits she was ‘disadvantaged’ by their admissions process

Oxford University has admitted that it bungled when it failed to offer an interview to a bright black student from one of Britain’s most deprived areas.

Somalian-born Fatima Yusuf, 19, had applied to study medicine at Merton College after obtaining the highest possible grades in five A-level subjects and 11 A* grades in her GCSEs. She was penalised by the university because she took five of her GCSEs as a 13-year-old — an achievement that would normally have indicated academic strength.
However, as she gained the remainder of her GCSEs at a more normal age, the university’s admissions department disregarded her results because they had not been taken in a single sitting. It now recognises this was a mistake.

The university also marked her down because she went to an obscure college in east London and it could not find any results for the institution to compare Fatima with her fellow students.

Fatima was forced to appeal and the university conceded that she had been “disadvantaged” by its admissions process. As a result, she was given an interview but still failed to gain a place. Fatima, who lives in Edmonton, north London, said this weekend: “I didn’t want preferential treatment, but I wanted fair treatment and I don’t think I got it. ”

Fatima’s father, Bashir, said: “Fatima was a beacon of hope for the Somali community and an example of what you can achieve.

“The feeling in the community now is that Oxford is off limits because they’ve seen what happened to Fatima and they see what looks like an elitist institution where people from humble backgrounds are not welcome.”

Oxford’s rejection of Fatima has emerged after David Cameron said its admission rate for black students was “disgraceful”. The university hit back, accusing the prime minister of using misleading figures, and pointing out it had invested millions of pounds in trying to attract students from all backgrounds.

Fatima, the eldest of seven children, was a baby when her parents fled war-torn Somalia in 1992. They settled in Edmonton, where Bashir now works as a manager in a Somalian community centre.

It is a highly disadvantaged area. An Enfield council report in 2009 noted: “In Edmonton the indicators of multiple deprivation have shown that our population experiences low attainment in education, higher levels of crime, low income, poor health, housing problems and a poor quality environment.”

Gang violence is commonplace. Last Sunday, Negus McLean, 15, was stabbed to death there in a gang attack as he tried to protect his younger brother.

Fatima attended her local primary school and went to study at an Islamic boarding school in Nottingham. She was homesick and her family struggled to pay the fees, so she left after a year. With no immediate offer of a suitable state school place, she studied for months on her own despite the noise from her younger siblings in the family’s rented terraced home. “It was difficult because I didn’t have a school, but I went to libraries where it was quieter,” she said. “I enjoyed learning and I was motivated to get qualifications.”
She briefly attended a state school, Kingsmead in Enfield, but did not feel sufficiently challenged. She then went to a private tuition college and achieved five GCSE A*s by the time she was 13.

Fatima then studied for A-levels in the sixth form at Seven Kings high school, a comprehensive in Ilford, Essex. She obtained three A*s in A-levels on top of two A grade A-levels taken at her tuition college before the star system was introduced.

In September 2010, after taking a year out from her studies, she applied to study medicine, making Merton her first choice. She also applied for a place at University College London and King’s College London.

A trip to Somalia five years earlier had inspired her choice of career. She said: “I saw the impact of the civil war, the death and destruction, and people lying on the streets without medical care. It made me think that if I did become a doctor, I would be able to help.”

On November 30, she was told by Oxford that she was not being invited for interview, based on her GCSE results and her scores for a BioMedical Admission Test used to assess potential medical students.

She appealed and her father alerted David Lammy, the former universities minister who has highlighted the challenges faced by ethnic minorities applying for university. Oxford admitted in December that it had erred in not offering Fatima an interview.
It transpired that her GCSE results had not even been considered. An email from preclinical medicine admissions admitted that “the assessment of your application was conducted without reference to your GCSE performance” and explained that this was partly because her exams had not been taken at “a single sitting” and partly because the university had been unable to find any published results for her tuition college.

The email, seen by The Sunday Times, added: “The fact that your GCSEs have been achieved at a number of sittings is, in your case, an indication of academic strength rather than weakness and the results that you have achieved must be viewed as excellent in any context.”

Fatima’s GCSE results were in fact better than the average GCSE results of students who were offered a place to read medicine in 2010. According to Oxford’s own figures, the average candidate had 9-10 A* grades at GCSE, compared with Fatima’s 11.

It conceded that its approach “may have disadvantaged” Fatima and she was offered interviews. However, less than a week after the interviews she was told she was not being offered a place. Her experience is reminiscent of the case of Laura Spence, a state school student whose rejection for a place to study medicine at Oxford University in 2000 caused a political storm.

Paul Kelley, headmaster of Monkseaton high school on Tyneside, Spence’s former school, said: “I think the admissions system in many ways has not moved on in the last decade. In America, top universities hunt this kind of person down.”

Fatima’s case has emerged as Britain’s leading universities face a challenge over their record in encouraging ethnic minorities. When Fatima was in the midst of her application to Oxford, Lammy released figures which he said showed that 21 out of Oxbridge’s 69 colleges had admitted no black students in the previous year. Merton had not accepted a black student for the five years before 2010, he said.

Oxford said it had taken 27 black undergraduates and that 19% of its intake are from ethnic minorities — higher than the population as a whole. The university believes it is being unfairly criticised and is working to broaden its intake. Applications from state schools have risen by 80% over the past decade.

Despite some success stories, Oxford’s own analysis shows that a lower percentage of applicants from a number of ethnic minorities are accepted than white applicants. In 2010 black African applicants had an average success rate of 6.7%, while white applicants had a 24.1% success rate. The university argues that part of the problem is that many black applicants choose to apply to its most over-subscribed courses, where competition is fiercest. Nearly 30% of black applicants to Oxford University want to study medicine.

Oxford says attainment at school is the single biggest barrier. In 2009, 29,000 white students got the requisite grades for Oxford compared with 452 black students.

Fatima, who won a place to read medicine at UCL is not bitter but believes Oxford should scrutinise its admissions procedures to ensure its equality policies are properly implemented.

Oxford said in a statement: “We do not discriminate in favour of or against anyone on the basis of race or any other non-academic factor.

“Clearly, the candidate in question is academically excellent. However, there were 1,472 applicants this year for only 152 places to study medicine at Oxford, and in the academic judgment of six or more medical experts there were at least 152 other candidates who demonstrated even higher ability and potential through the selection process.”

Additional reporting: Francesca Angelini

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqf4bWGvd08

Wearing a green safari hat, dark glasses and a black jacket, Gaddafi pumped his fists in the air and waved as people chased his convoy of vehicles through the streets.

A screen caption said the trip had taken place earlier when, according to state-run Al-Libiya TV, Tripoli was under Nato air attack.

Four blasts were reportedly heard and plumes of smoke were seen rising from the south-east of the city.

Government spokesman in Tripoli, Mussa Ibrahim said: ‘A few civilians were killed here in Tripoli. I know that three men who were walking by a checkpoint were killed immediately in the south of Tripoli.’

He added that two men were killed in Sirte, 450 km east of Tripoli, suggesting there had been air strikes there as well, without giving details.

Meanwhile, Libyan rebels begged for more Nato air strikes, saying government artillery had killed 23 civilians, mostly women and children, in besieged Misrata.

They warned of a massacre in the city.

Source

metro.co.uk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXpnZDUDNuE

The massive attack managed to inject the name of several rogue domains into hundreds of thousands of websites.

The link led to a page that carried out a fake virus scan and then recommended fake security software to clean up what it supposedly found.

But despite the huge success by the attackers, swift action by security firms looks to have limited the number of victims.

Blocked visit

The Lizamoon attack was first detected by security firm Websense on 29 March and initially the rogue domains were only showing up on about 28,000 websites.

However, as Websense began tracking Lizamoon the sheer scale of the attack became apparent. By late on 3 April, Google was reporting that more than four million webpages were showing links to the domains involved in the attack.

The way Google counts webpages makes it hard to estimate exactly how many websites were hit but security firms said the number ran into the “hundreds of thousands”.

The attack got its name because the first rogue domain appearing on compromised sites was lizamoon.com. A further 27 domains were also used as redirection points.

The numbers of victims who followed the link, suffered the bogus scan and then bought the fake security software or “scareware” was also hard to estimate.

The many domains used by Lizamoon’s creators to peddle their scareware were shut down very soon after they were created thanks to the efforts of security researchers.

Some of the sites being used were notorious for harbouring scareware and other malicious programs and some security programs have been blocking them for weeks. This also may have helped to stop people ending up on the dangerous domains.

Rik Ferguson, senior security adviser at Trend Micro, said it had only seen a “small” number of victims.

As one of the firms that blocked the domains used in the attack before it was ramped up, it could monitor how many customers actually visiting them.

He said Trend Micro blocked just over 2,000 attempts to visit the domains.

“The sites that were compromised by the SQL injection attack were comparatively low profile sites and thus the attack did not gain significant momentum,” he said.

Graham Cluley, senior security analyst at Sophos, said home PC users were probably the most likely victims of the attack.

“Attacks like this one do underline the poor security that exists on many websites on the internet,” he said, “including sites belonging to well-known organisations and brands.”

“It shouldn’t be so easy for hackers to inject their malicious codes on to legitimate websites that receive lots of traffic, and too many firms are making it too easy to pass infections on to their customers,” he added.

What is currently resisting analysis is the exact route the attackers have taken to get their domains showing up on websites. Initial suggestions that versions of Microsoft’s Windows server products were the common link have not been borne out by events.

Efforts are now underway to produce a quick fix for sites hit so they can update and remove the risk of falling victim to copycat attacks.

The only trait that compromised sites seem to share was that they were small to mid-tier websites, a list of those hit included astronomy groups, social clubs, hospitals, sports teams, funeral homes and many others.

____________

BBC News

LOS ANGELES – The NBA fined Kobe Bryant $100,000 on Wednesday for using a derogatory gay term in frustration over a referee’s call.

NBA Commissioner David Stern issued a swift disciplinary ruling after the Los Angeles Lakers’ five-time NBA champion guard cursed and used the homophobic slur when referee Bennie Adams called a technical foul on him Tuesday night in the third quarter of a victory over the San Antonio Spurs.

“Kobe Bryant’s comment during last night’s game was offensive and inexcusable,” Stern said. “While I’m fully aware that basketball is an emotional game, such a distasteful term should never be tolerated. … Kobe and everyone associated with the NBA know that insensitive or derogatory comments are not acceptable and have no place in our game or society.”

Stern’s action drew praise from gay-rights organizations that had demanded a fuller apology from Bryant and condemnation of his words by the Lakers. Bryant, the sixth-leading scorer in NBA history, issued a statement earlier Wednesday saying his words came strictly out of anger and shouldn’t be taken literally.

“We applaud Commissioner Stern and the NBA for not only fining Bryant but for recognizing that slurs and derogatory comments have no place on the basketball court or in society at large,” Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese said. “We hope such swift and decisive action will send a strong and universal message that this kind of hateful outburst is simply inexcusable no matter what the context.”

Bryant’s words and actions were captured by TNT’s cameras during the network’s national broadcast of the Lakers’ regular-season home finale.

Bryant punched his chair before taking a seat on the bench, throwing a towel on the court near his feet in frustration after picking up his fourth foul in the third quarter. He got his 15th technical of the season for arguing the call, one shy of the cumulative trigger for a one-game NBA suspension.

“What I said last night should not be taken literally. My actions were out of frustration during the heat of the game, period,” Bryant said in a statement issued through the Lakers. “The words expressed do NOT reflect my feelings towards the gay and lesbian communities and were NOT meant to offend anyone.”

The 32-year-old Bryant is a former league MVP, a 13-time All-Star, the leading scorer in Lakers franchise history and sixth on the NBA’s career list after passing Moses Malone last month. He was the MVP of the last two NBA finals while leading the Lakers to back-to-back titles.

Bryant has been among the NBA’s most popular players worldwide for most of his 15-year career, spent entirely with the Lakers, even after he was arrested and accused of sexual assault in 2003 in a case that was later dropped. He has several lucrative endorsement deals with companies ranging from Sprite to Turkish Airlines.

His No. 24 jersey was the league’s best-selling uniform among fans during each of the past two seasons, and Bryant’s jersey finished second to LeBron James’ new Miami uniform in the NBA’s annual rankings released earlier Wednesday.

Gay-rights groups quickly denounced Bryant’s actions against Adams. Jarrett Barrios, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, saw an opportunity to put a spotlight on the unacceptable nature of anti-gay slurs and later praised the NBA for taking action against Bryant.

“When such a prolific cultural institution like the NBA speaks out against hateful words, we are reminded that fair-minded Americans are siding with equality for all,” Barrios said.

Known as a fierce competitor with a nasty edge, Bryant has ranked among the NBA’s top 10 accumulators of technical fouls during each of the past six seasons, and he has edged right up to the line of serious NBA discipline this spring. He ranks second only to Orlando’s Dwight Howard in technical fouls this season, mostly for arguing with referees.

Bryant was called for an additional technical foul that was rescinded Monday. If Bryant gets another T in the Lakers’ season finale at Sacramento on Wednesday night, he would be suspended for the first game of next season, not for a playoff game.

The Lakers will open the playoffs this weekend at Staples Center.

Read more at nbc sports

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