Documentaries

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Here is an interesting photo. Maybe some of you have already seen it, and if it's not the case, maybe you guessed where it was taken.


Already awarded in 2007 in Bayeux (photo prize and public prize), Mahmoud Hams, 38, is again awarded the photo prize for "Clashes at Gaza's border", made in an difficult-to-access and dangerous area, which is part of these "places to cover without places to be protected" said Thomas Coex, head of the photo coverage of Israel and the Palestinian territories of AFP.

The award-winning photo shows a 29-year-old Palestinian, Saber al-Ashkar, throwing stones during clashes with Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip on May 11, 2018. At least 205 Palestinians were killed by gunfire, most of them during protests along the border, according to Palestinian sources.

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Here are a few other interesting articles.


A Saudi execution squad was sent to kill the journalist Khashoggi, using Jihadist methods. It's clear that Bin Salman could be involved.
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/2168982/decapitated-pompeo-turkey-grisly-details-jamal-khashoggis-alleged

If you are currently visiting Syria, beware of the Islamic State which is currently holding 700 hostages in Hadjin, near the Iraki border. Some of them are American and European.
Allegedly, the caliph is wandering in this area.
http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2018/10/18/01003-20181018ARTFIG00257-l-etat-islamique-detient-700-otages-en-syrie-et-menace-d-en-tuer-10-par-jour-selon-poutine.php

The death toll of the war in Syria.
http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2018/03/14/01003-20180314ARTFIG00343-guerre-en-syrie-sept-ans-apres-les-chiffres-chocs-d-une-tragedie-colossale.php

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A Saudi execution squad was sent to kill the journalist Khashoggi, using Jihadist methods. It's clear that Bin Salman could be involved.
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/2168982/decapitated-pompeo-turkey-grisly-details-jamal-khashoggis-alleged

How did they know he was coming? Did he have an appointment or something?

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How did they know he was coming? Did he have an appointment or something?

Yes he did. He wanted to get papers because he was getting married. And he probably didn't think that mbs had sent a dream team to welcome him.
But mbs is like a gaddafi under steroids. The war in Yemen is in a stalemate. And he's jealous of Qatar because its 200 000 inhabitants are rich, while a large number of Saudis are poor. He decided to isolate Qatar by digging a canal and turn it into an island.

[humbert]

Yes he did. He wanted to get papers because he was getting married. And he probably didn't think that mbs had sent a dream team to welcome him.

Why would he need Saudi documents to get married, especially if his relationship with the Saudi government wasn't very good? He could have gone to [for example] Las Vegas and gotten married there. He could have also applied for the papers to be sent by mail. Many consulates have that service presicisely to avoid long lines.

But mbs is like a gaddafi under steroids. The war in Yemen is in a stalemate. And he's jealous of Qatar because its 200 000 inhabitants are rich, while a large number of Saudis are poor. He decided to isolate Qatar by digging a canal and turn it into an island.

There is no question that the KSA is run by a brutal theocratic dictatorship who justify their repression with their Wahabi interpretation of the Qu'ran. Kaddafy, by comparison, was a madman and a total psychopath. I suppose who's worse is a matter of debate. Clearly this was the reason that in 2011 NATO intervened to oust him, with the blessing of the Arab League.

[scarface]

Yes he did. He wanted to get papers because he was getting married. And he probably didn't think that mbs had sent a dream team to welcome him.

Why would he need Saudi documents to get married, especially if his relationship with the Saudi government wasn't very good? He could have gone to [for example] Las Vegas and gotten married there. He could have also applied for the papers to be sent by mail. Many consulates have that service presicisely to avoid long lines.

But mbs is like a gaddafi under steroids. The war in Yemen is in a stalemate. And he's jealous of Qatar because its 200 000 inhabitants are rich, while a large number of Saudis are poor. He decided to isolate Qatar by digging a canal and turn it into an island.

There is no question that the KSA is run by a brutal theocratic dictatorship who justify their repression with their Wahabi interpretation of the Qu'ran. Kaddafy, by comparison, was a madman and a total psychopath. I suppose who's worse is a matter of debate. Clearly this was the reason that in 2011 NATO intervened to oust him, with the blessing of the Arab League.

I don't know if it's possible or suitable for a Muslim to get married in Las Vegas, with a priest. Likewise, I'm pretty sure it's not possible for me to get married in Mecca. If I tell them that I'm Catholic (I didnt choose) and Muslim (thanks to the teachings of aa1234779 and Maher on the forum), it could work.

[humbert]

I don't know if it's possible or suitable for a Muslim to get married in Las Vegas, with a priest. Likewise, I'm pretty sure it's not possible for me to get married in Mecca. If I tell them that I'm Catholic (I didnt choose) and Muslim (thanks to the teachings of aa1234779 and Maher on the forum), it could work.

Marriages in Vegas are purely civil and not managed by any religious authority. He could have legally married there and then have an Imam perform a religious ceremony. All this assuming he's a devout Muslim to begin with. Even so, Kasshogi's dispute is with the Saudi Royal Family, not with his supposed religion.

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Today, I'm going to give you some news about the Islamic State in Irak. A bit later, I'll try to hold a conference about a different matter, the Bayer Monsanto company.


Iraq declared itself to be the winner against the Islamic State group at the end of 2017 and the violence has drastically decreased in the country, however jihadist cells remain present, especially in the mountainous or desert areas, and are still carrying out attacks.

Lately, three village chiefs were executed by jihadists in less than a week in northern Iraq, local officials told AFP, bringing to nine the number of local officials killed for the past seven months in the area.

In the Hawija area, one of the last bastions of IS in Iraq, 230 km north of Baghdad, and more widely in the province of Kirkuk, jihadists regularly attack public infrastructure.

They attack, in particular, oil or electrical installations, but also state representatives. In the small villages of this mountainous and rural region, the "mokhtar" in Arabic, the village chief, has therefore become a prime target for IS.

Last night, the mokhtar of Mahmoudiya village, near Hawija, was the last victim. "Abdallah al-Ouasmi was executed by IS members who attacked his house," an official told AFP today.

Wednesday evening, it was the mokhtar al-Hanoutiya, a village in the area, who was executed in the same circumstances, he added.

And already on Monday, a provincial official told AFP that "ISIS fighters attacked the house of the mokhtar of al-Jassemiya village, Mohammed Joumaa". "They took him out of his house and executed in front of his home before fleeing," he told AFP.

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Today, I'm going to hold a conference about Bayer-Monsanto.

That day, the Bayer stock tumbled and never recovered. On August 9, 2018, Dewayne Johnson, a former, terminally ill non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma gardener, succeeded in his lawsuit against Monsanto, who did not inform him of the risks he was running by using his flagship product, Roundup. The famous glyphosate product, the most widely used herbicide in the world, is for the first time made responsible for cancer by a court, which condemned Monsanto to pay the plaintiff 289 million $. Bayer, which bought the seed company Monsanto in June 2018, was visibly affected: 10 billion euros in stock market value evaporated in a few hours.

The "Monsanto risk" now corresponded to a monstrous number. And the descent into hell began. Bayer assured investors that the trial would be overturned on appeal, that the sentence would be lightened and that the judge would go to the conclusions of "800 scientific studies" proving the safety of the molecule. But on Monday 22 October, the verdict came down: the judge Suzanne Bolanos will not reopen the trial and upholds the judgment but eases the financial penalty, bringing it down to $ 78.5 million. The stock collapsed again, reaching its lowest level in five years. On November 1, Dewayne Johnson accepted - in order to avoid the weight of a new trial - the reduced damages. Since the acquisition of Monsanto, Bayer lost the gigantic sum of 30 billion euros in market value, while the group made a capital increase of 9 billion euros to complete the merger.

Was the "marriage of the century" at the top of world agrochemistry a mistake? Already condemned by the ecologists, it is also challenged by the markets. Everything in this alliance is disproportionate: the price of the transaction ($ 63 billion); the size of the new group, which has become the world's leading producer of glyphosate and the world champion in agrochemistry; the reputation of Monsanto, a name so negatively charged that Bayer planned to make it disappear. But it is especially the magnitude of the new legal risk that freaks the investors: 7 800 lawsuits are currently brought against Monsanto in the United States, that are billions of dollars of damages and potential interests.
"Monsanto's operations bring high environmental, social and governance risks," said Ingo Speich, fund manager at Union Investment. Has Bayer sufficiently measured the risks? Shareholders are all the more worried that the group's other activities are showing signs of weakness: the nonprescription drug department saw its results decline in the last half of the year. In conventional pharmacy, several Bayer patents are coming to an end, and the new molecules currently being approved will not be able to compensate for the loss of turnover.
Internally, since August, it's the jerk of the fight. "The atmosphere is disastrous. Many had already struggled to swallow the decision to buy Monsanto, given the image they have. But here, the situation is not sustainable in the long term. If a hedge fund wants to buy us, it can do it cheaply, "worries an internal source. To save the merger, even the family jewels are examined. At the end of September, the German press reports that Bayer is closely studying a sale of its animal health business, which could bring in 6-7 billion euros. Information not confirmed by the group.

At the end of September, at a staff meeting in Leverkusen at Bayer Headquarters, Werner Baumann, boss of the group, discussed the possibility of separating from parts of his research department in medicine, one of Bayer's traditional hearts. Employee representatives are alarmed.
Above all, Bayer wants to save the glyphosate soldier. The controversial herbicide is of crucial importance to the group. It accounted for a quarter of Monsanto's sales. In the consolidated Bayer Group, it has a turnover of 3 billion euros.  The pro-glyphosate speech of Bayer's boss is a surprise. Because, since the beginning of 2018, it is quite another speech that was put forward. Liam Condon, director of the Crop Science department, has multiplied the interventions in the press and with environmental associations to explain the approach of the new group. He plays the card of dialogue and appeasement.
At the end of March, in the magazine Capital, a discussion is organized with the co-chairman of the German environmental party, Robert Habeck, on the question of how to feed the planet with 10 billion inhabitants in 2050. This is the first time that such a debate is organized in the country, symptomatic of a double movement: the will of Bayer to cut the ties with the past of Monsanto, which systematically refused the debate with its opponents, and the new orientation of the German environmentalists, traditionally a party of highly educated urban, who no longer want to be seen as enemies of innovation. Positions remain antagonistic, especially on the issue of patents on plants, but some points of agreement are identified. The question is hot: in the context of an increase in population, a climate warming and a species extinction, how to increase agricultural production without extending the arable land to the detriment of wild spaces?
How to adapt agriculture to rising sea levels? How to do it with less water, less fertilizer and less synthetic pesticides?

Liam Condon is Bayer's weapon in this sensitive debate. In mid-June, in the weekly FAS, he gave a glimpse of what Bayer's agriculture of the future might look like: more technique and less chemistry. Even if he continues to defend glyphosate as a "safe" herbicide. "The big solution that will save the world does not exist," he says. Agriculture is too varied. But there will be a series of small contributions. He names three. The first is the Crispr-Cas technology, or "genetic scissors", a technology discovered in 2012 by the French Emmanuelle Charpentier, which makes it possible to modify the DNA of a plant more quickly than before, without resorting to the genetic material of another plant. It could create more drought-resistant and more productive organisms that can grow in salt water, say scientists, who call it a "revolution in agriculture." The method currently divides German ecologists and the case is very controversial in Europe. A judgment of the European Court of Justice in late July has put a brake on the development of technology on European soils. Plants treated with the Crispr-Cas method are considered as GMOs and must be properly labeled.
Bayer's second technology is "digital farming", which involves, for example, the use of autonomous robots in fields that spot harmful plants and destroy them with lasers. Or that of sensors, able to measure as closely as hygrometry and the amount of inputs to use. The third innovation is based on a better knowledge of the microorganisms or microbes present in the soil and their relation to the growth of the plant. It offers biological solutions for soil fertilization or protection against diseases. Some preparations already on the market are also used in organic farming.

Asked by Le Monde, several sources in ecology agree, that these innovations are "interesting" and that they are the emergence of a "post-chemistry" agriculture. But they maintain their condemnation of the concentration of the agrotechnology sector. For shareholders, these new methods do not promise short-term profits. But the stock market is cruel: it measures the environmental risk, but does not want to give up the safe profits. For Bayer, the challenge is twofold: it has to convince that this model of agriculture of the future is as "sustainable" as it claims, and that it can generate as much profit as glyphosate.

The brands that use Monsanto products and therefore containing glyphosate

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Maybe some of you noticed there was a little piglet on the forum. But an expensive piglet. And its wealthy owner is not even talented. humbert and shadow.97 must be thinking I'm talking about Sammy, the one you can see in the "best clips". Actually, I'm talking about the piglet here: http://www.nomaher.com/forum/index.php?topic=2283.msg16077#msg16077

The American artist Jeff Koons has been condemned today by the High Court of Paris for plagiarizing an advertisement of the clothing brand Naf-Naf.

On the left, the sculpture of Jeff Koons 'Fait d'hiver'; On the right, the advertising announcement of Naf-Naf.

The controversial artist, 63 years old, the company Jeff Koons LLC - of which he is manager - and the Parisian cultural institution must pay 148000 â,¬ in damages to Franck Davidovici, the publicist and author for Naf-Naf of the advertisement conceived for the brand in the 80's and that bears a strong resemblance to the sculpture Fait d'hiver (the name is the same too).

In the initial lawsuit, Davidovici had claimed 300,000 â,¬ and the confiscation of the sculpture that was the subject of the controversy, which recreated that advertisement in which a pig was shown helping a young woman in the snow .

Koons, one of the most sought-after artists in the world, was already convicted of plagiarism in March 2017 by the same French court.

On that occasion, his company and the Center Pompidou had to pay 20,000 â,¬ in damages and another 20,000 â,¬ in legal costs to the heirs of the French photographer Jean-François Bauret who denounced the plagiarism of the work "Naked".

In addition, Koons was forced to deliver an additional 4,000 euros to the family for having reproduced the work in question on his website.