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By Ali Osman Thursday, December 25, 2014 Challenges: Somalia is a country that is coming out of two decades of civil war. The Somali economic challenges are many and addressing them will not happen overnight .  Security situation is improving but still volatile.  The governance is fragile and lacks the capacity to carry out basic functions  of governing in providing security and economic opportunity.  Credible public revenue “ taxation” systems is not fully functioning.  Without taxation, creating jobs,  reconstruction of infrastructure, health and education is very challenging. The political leadership is constantly engaged in a petty political squabbles that squander valuable time and resources.  The majority of the citizens are very poor with not much money to spend outside of their daily necessities such as food, water and shelter.  Government grand vision in  infrastructure development programs to create jobs and eleva...

Photo: a woman places her vote in the box during the Somaliland elections 2010 (photo © Claudia Simoes/Progressio) by Adan H Iman Tuesday, December 30, 2014 The upcoming election must be in the minds of Somalilanders. Will the election, which will elect the President and members of Parliament, be peaceful, free and fair?  “Free” means that everybody, who has reached the voting age, if he or she so desires, can vote while “fair” means that every voter casts one, and only one, vote and that each candidate gets exactly the votes cast for him/her. Will the seeds that were, and are being, planted today have a bearing on the type of fruit that will be harvested come Election Day? The following may impact the conduct and outcome of the 2015 Presidential election: First, the 2012 municipal election, which utilized, for lack of voter registration list, a procedure where index fingers were dipped into ink to cast votes, ended up being anything but free and fair election. Ther...

By Ramzy Baroud December 24, 2014 " ICH " - In terms of losses in human lives, 2014 has been a horrific year for Palestinians, surpassing the horrors of both 2008 and 2009, when an Israeli war against the Gaza Strip killed and wounded thousands. While some aspects of the conflict are stagnating between a corrupt, ineffectual Palestinian Authority (PA), and the criminality of Israeli wars and occupation, it would also be fair to argue that 2014 was also a game changer to some degree—and it is not all bad news. To an extent, 2014 has been a year of clarity for those keen to understand the reality of the ‘Palestinian-Israe...

By ashiftinconsciousness December 26, 2014 " ICH " - " ashiftinconsciousness " - Look at the things we teach our children: that it’s OK to do horrible things – just don’t get caught.    Imagine someone was caught teaching their children it’s acceptable to torture, but not acceptable to talk about it because people would then hate you. That person’s children would be taken away. However, when the CIA tortures people for nothing more than the suspicion that they MIGHT have done something wrong (according to the “moral” code of the dominant war-machine culture) and corporate media complains about the people bringing up the issue instead of complaining about the torture itself, something is seriously wrong. We’re obviously being...

December 17, 2014 By Prof Said S. Samatar Editor’s note :  Peaking into the rich WDN archives full of ten years of rare collection of historical pieces, news, commentary, opinion as well as cultural and poetry analysis and writing from across the globe, we come upon a jewel, a rarity, a genius piece of writings, honest and true and free of bias. Indeed, it could be called the past calling with glaring disappointment. As we celebrate our tenth anniversary, we reflect and share with our readers, esteemed and staunch a series of articles from the past. This article, discusses Sarbeeb, ““the art of oblique communication” that governed inter-clan interactions. As Dr. Samatar demonstrates, pastoral elders of yesteryear had, through bitter experience, learned to address one another—calmly, softly, respectfully—in veiled, soothing indirect speech. Dr. Samatar takes a look at the past in order to make a cogent point about our current national morass”. ——————- ...

Inside Isis: The first Western journalist ever given access to the 'Islamic State' has just returned – and this is what he discovered   By Adam Withnall December 22, 2014 " ICH " - " The Independent " - - The first Western journalist in the world to be allowed extensive access to Isis territories in Syria and Iraq has returned from the region with a warning: the group is “much stronger and much more dangerous” than anyone in the West realises. Jürgen Todenhöfer, 74, is a renowned German journalist and publicist who travelled through Turkey to Mosul, the largest city occupied by Isis, after months of negotiations with the group’s leaders. He plans to publish a summary of his “10 days in the Islamic State” on Monday, but in interviews with German-language media outlets has revealed his first impressions of what life is like under Isis. Speaking to the website  Der tz , Todenhöfer revealed that he actually stayed in the same hotel in Be...

Publication: Terrorism Monitor Volume: 12 Issue: 21   By: Sunguta West   AMISOM troops capturing Barawe, Somalia, in October. (Source: AMISOM) In recent months, Somalia’s main Islamist militant group, Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, better known as al-Shabaab, has suffered serious setbacks in its conflict with African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops. Since al-Shabaab’s establishment in 2006, the organization had successfully entrenched its authority in central and southern Somalia, where it has implemented a hardline form of Shari’a or Islamic law. However, on October 6, its grip on the region appeared to falter after the militants lost the southern coastal town of Barawe to AMISOM forces in Operation Indian Ocean (Sabahi Online, October 6). The coastal town, one of the group’s most significant strongholds since it lost control of the capital Mogadishu in 2011 and the lucrative port of Kismayo in 2012, ...

By Faisal A. Roble Somalis are collective in nature and live in a clan corporate culture where individual merit is often subordinated to the collective one. When their nation state failed in 1991, it seemed as if the collective will to reignite the flicker of hope also died. But it did not die in Nuruddin Farah. Nuruddin’s literary work always focused on the tension between the collective society and the individual. Do the society’s morality and norms determine the outcome of the individual, or the individual often defies and must reject the collective? In practice, though, Nuruddin seems to have defied the odds of his society. In places where the collective failed, his individualism triumphed, and in turn redefined and challenged, or so it seems, the corporate nature of his society. For the last quarter of a century, Somalia was entirely forgotten and unrepresented in global conversations. Yet one of her sons single handedly insisted that his narrativ...