I’ve been thinking about writing about this case for a long time. Obiora died in 2006 when the Norwegian police tried to arrest him. Obiora was unarmed, and the involved police officers have been criticized for using unnecessary violence. As a side note, they have had in total 14 violence-related complaints filed against them. The case was investigated by the Special Unit for Police Affairs, but was abandoned on May 4, 2007 concluding that in the case of three officers there was insufficient evidence to pursue an indictment.
Now there exists plans to take the case to the European Court on Human Rights. Lawyer Abid Raja has found that the case bears similarities with the French Saoud-case (No. 9375/02), where a young man suffered death after have being held face down to the ground by French police officers for over thirty minutes. The Strasbourg court held unanimiusly that there had been a violation of Article 2 (right to life) and 6 (right to a fair hearing) of the Convention.
The Supporting Group for Obiora arranges a fundraising for the up-coming trial. They have already collected more than 100.000 NOK, but need at least twice. Their bank account no. is 7878.06.19510, according to Klassekampen 27th June.
More and more ads nowadays contain the word “green”. The world has woken up, environmental-friendly products sell, and advertisers understand that. Which is all good. But “green cars”? What is a green car?
Manfred Braunl, head of marketing in Germany for BMW, says that rather than try to impress TV viewers with ads about new fuel-saving technologies BMW is experimenting with “metaphorical” ads that aim to put viewers in a positive mood about the company and its approach to reducing fuel consumption (via Environmental leader).
And most green car ads are highly metaphorical. If a car company has developed one car that is “greener” than the others, they use this for all it’s worth to promote themself as a green and idealistic company. Like this ad for Toyota Prius.
In Norway, the producers of the electric car Buddy complained about these ads in April last year. What I didn’t know before today what that new guidelines were set into force in Norway in October that states that no car can be called “green”, “clean” or “environmentally friendly”. “Cars cannot do anything good for the environment except less damage than others,” Bente Oeverli, a senior official at the office of the state-run Consumer Ombudsman, told Reuters.
It may seem like banning internet sites is in the wind. Now Turkey do it too. To weeks ago, the creationist Adnan Oktar filed a court order where he claimed that a number of blogs on Wordpress were libellous to him and that the whole site should be banned. And he won!
An interesting point is that the order was carried out almost immediately, because there’s in practice only one broadband-firm in Turkey. This shows the need for several internet providers in a country – and for responsible internet providers. My internet provider here in Sweden, Bredband2, clearly states that they won’t give away personal details or accept to bee cencored.We might take that for granted here, but why should we? Every internet provider should state this.
AP celebrated and the Palestinians celebrated. On the internet-edition of the swedish newspaper Expressen, the two happy newsarticles occured next to each other in an artistic way tonight:
Dan Michael O. Heggø
It's 2007. I'm living on a strange, vulnerable planet called Earth. I'm studying chemistry at the University of Bergen, Norway, maybe getting a chance to understand it better..
