new TRC in Honduras?

By Sean Mattson

TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) - Honduras' de facto government buckled under international pressure and agreed to allow the return to power of President Manuel Zelaya, who was toppled in a military coup four months ago.

The breakthrough late on Thursday followed renewed pressure from senior U.S. officials who traveled to Honduras this week for a last-ditch effort to end a crisis that had handed U.S. President Barack Obama a foreign policy headache.

"It is a triumph for Honduran democracy," the leftist Zelaya said after the rival sides agreed to a deal that could see him restored to office in the coming days.

"We are satisfied. We are optimistic that my restitution is imminent," Zelaya said.

Zelaya, a leftist, was toppled and sent into exile on June 28 but crept back into Honduras last month and has since been holed up in the Brazilian embassy.

De facto leader Roberto Micheletti, who took over the country within hours of Zelaya's ouster, had repeatedly refused to agree for his return but finally backed down.

"I have authorized my negotiating team to sign a deal that marks the beginning of the end of the country's political situation," Micheletti, who took over as de facto leader after the coup, told a news conference on Thursday night.

He said Zelaya could return to office after a vote in Congress that would be authorized by the country's Supreme Court. He said the deal would require both sides to recognize the result of a November 29 presidential election and would transfer control of the army to the top electoral court.

Micheletti said the deal would create a truth commission to investigate the events of the last few months, and would ask the international community to reverse punitive measures like suspended aid and canceled visas.

END OF ISOLATION

The United States, the European Union and Latin American leaders had all insisted Zelaya be allowed to finish his term, which ends in January. They had threatened not to recognize the winner of the November election unless democracy was first restored.

A U.S. team led by Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon and Dan Restrepo, Washington's special assistant for Western Hemisphere affairs, sat in on talks earlier in the day and warned that time was running out to reach a deal.

The coffee-producing Central American country has been diplomatically isolated since Zelaya was rousted at dawn by soldiers and flown to exile on a military plane.

Zelaya had angered many in Honduras by becoming an ally of socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Critics also alleged he was seeking backing to extend presidential term limits, a claim he denies.

Human rights groups have documented major abuses by the de facto government and say free and fair elections would be impossible after Micheletti curbed civil liberties and temporarily shut down pro-Zelaya news organizations.

Obama cut some aid to Honduras after the coup but had been criticized by some Latin American for not doing more to force the de facto government to back down.

The collapse of talks last week prompted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to dispatch the U.S. delegation to push again for a negotiated settlement.

(Additional reporting by Gustavo Palencia in Tegucigalpa; Writing by Jason Lange; Editing by Kieran Murray)

டூ விழத்

there's a large family of scripts (sorry this may be totally known stuff to some, new for me)

partial list from wikipedia: Northern Brahmic

* Kusan
* Tocharian
* Meitei Mayek
* Gupta
o Śāradā
+ Landa
# Old Kashmiri
# Gurmukhī
# Khojki
+ Takri
# Dogri
# Chameali
o Siddhaṃ
+ Tibetan
# ’Phagspa
* Hangul (hypothetical)
# Lepcha
* Limbu
o Nāgarī
+ Devanāgarī
# Modi
+ Nandināgarī
+ Gujarati
o Proto-Bengali
+ Kaithi
# Sylheti Nagari
+ Eastern Nagari
# Bengali
# Assamese
+ Mithilakshar
+ Oriya
o Nepal
+ Bhujimol
+ Prachalit Nepal
+ Ranjana
# Soyombo

Southern Brahmic

* Tamil Brahmi
o Vatteluttu
+ Kolezhuthu
* Tamil
* Pallava Grantha
o Malayalam
o Tulu
o Sinhala
o Dhives Akuru
o Saurashtra
o Khmer
+ Lao
+ Thai
o Cham
o Old Kawi
+ Balinese
+ Javanese
+ Baybayin
+ Batak
+ Buhid
+ Hanunó'o
+ Tagbanwa
+ Sundanese
+ Lontara
+ Rejang
o Mon
+ Burmese
+ Ojhopath
* Kalinga
* Bhattiprolu Script
o Kadamba
o Kannada
o Telugu
* Tai Le
o New Tai Lue
* Ahom

and a helpful beginner guide to learning the scripts is here.:

totally off track but i'm intrigued with the way google promotes this linguistic palimpsest where the computers read in an english foundation (itself a linguistic gui on a massive bit-complex of binary code) but interface visually with indic scripts as representative. to what end, communicate in a language that only the machine can use (from this canadian situation)? while the creative input represents in, for example, Tamil? Siddham, which splinters into Tibetan, among other languages, i've encountered before as the text used for classic buddhist script but i still wonder at the motivation for this project.

any takers?

எ நியூ அட்டெம்ப்ட் அண்ட் எக்ஸ்பெரிமென்ட்

ahh...more learned. so if you enable your blog to transliterate, it will do so but only to titles, in order to make your content searchable in that language...the previous posts were hindi. this title comes in tamil...other languages available are Kannada, Malagayam, and Telugu.

Info from the help site:
"Blogger offers an automatic transliteration option for converting Roman characters to the Indic characters used in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. This lets you type these languages phonetically in English script and still have them appear in their correct alphabet. Note that this is not the same as translation -- the sound of the words is converted from one alphabet to the other, not the meaning."

interestingly, online translators still read the text in roman script and searches for the words in indic script produce no results. one wonders what the point to this is - clearly a fair bit of work has gone into its development. what other indic scripts could be available that are omitted here? why these choices?

more to learn.

chektime: 5min
blogtime: 4min

तरी थिस ओं फॉर साइज़

well. the text gets translated into characters immediately upon spacing. no word yet why or how. unsuccessful in finding a translator that recognizes the characters. more to come...

time investigated: 6min
blog time 3min

कोब्ब्लिंग बीट्स

my project begins to gain some conceptual steam and bits are gathering - i'm working on a chapter for a larger work tentatively titled "the berm also rises" as a poetic/theoretic investigation of empire and land formation. within the context of this class i am working on the threads of (neo)colonial development close to home, through the filter of TNR nexii as we've investigated in this class. i'm hoping for a bit of help, given the many interests and research planes pursued by our group - imagine items of interest within the parameters of calgary and area colonialism, land development, truth and reconciliation movement and challenges - if you find such items in your wandering, can you link them to me? i'm moving into a more productive phase over the next few weeks and hope to start crafting coherent pieces soon.

Thanks!

colin

reading/watching time: lost to the internet
blog post time: 17 minutes.

feeling old and helpless

i have for years now been navigating the blogosphere and its predecessors. from the old pyroto and affiliated BBS systems to their java-enabled inheritors, irc and mIRC platforms and their subsequent social networking sites (Bolt, mySpace, Facebook et al). i have joyfully embraced them and expanded myself through them. i play with data clouds, i network RSS feeds, i spend an obscene amount of time investigating the world through my web portal. i am genX turned cyborg and had no real trouble making the switch from dBase to Flash, even though i learned typing as a youth, rather than keyboarding, as is now taught.

there are, however, limits. i don't tweet - the form is too schizophrenic, even for me. and say what you like about the creative possibilities of the 140 character constraint (sorry Arjun Basu, Sina Queyras) but the simple fact is that the Haiku existed for thousands of years with much greater constraints and it's highly unlikely that the flaccid channel surfing automaton that is the twitter nation will ever produce anything of comparable value in form and content.

within the context of this course, i confess, i struggle. when i read Randy Bass's comment to "slow down and look at learning" i begin to twitch. slow down? i enrolled in english studies because i like to read books. my dissertation is an examination of cultural interfaces with the book object. my life online is characterised by spastic hoppings and jerky reactions to the barkings and hoppings of others. my love life, on the other hand, moves languidly between cover boards. navigating the network of blogs, the ever-shifting lines of inquiry, the rotating reading room (where there is neither room nor reading in rotation, as i must print the vast majority of what i read in order to read it) the snarl of paths and links and sites overlaid upon the incessant noise my laptop already creates...it's too much.

my computer is chained to my leg and it grows heavy. my eyes miss the sun - remember reading on grass outside? i feel weak and myopic and no longer one who directs my research but rather one who is channeled and played by the conductor of an invisible cyborg opera. perhaps, given our subject matter, that is the point. perhaps helplessness in the face of a communication media controlled by another is a worthy experience to have as i engage with the subject positions of people for whom canadian experience can have little other definition.

or perhaps i'm just turning into a curmudgeon and think Brass's "bridge to know-ware" is too symptomatic of an age where our interface with language and information lacks a substance replaced by snide homo-linguistic fluff.

time invested in blog entry: (17 minutes)
time invested in know-ware: i don't no, where has the time gone?

body bags

in case you missed it, here's an interesting story on the federal government response to the aboriginal communities being hit by swine flu in manitoba

the cbc story has a network of links leading up to this story, if a bit less detail.