Firefighters began a 125-mile procession to bring the bodies of 19
colleagues who died in a wildfire a week ago from Phoenix to the
mountain community where they lived.Nineteen hearses departed from the
medical examiners office in Phoenix, rolled past a collection of
firefighters outside the Arizona statehouse complex and will pass
through the community of Yarnell where the 19 died.
Firefighters
and police officers held hands over their hearts or saluted as the
motorcycle-led escort slowly drove by and a quartet of bag pipers played
a mournful song to a marching cadence. The firefighters names were
posted on a side window of each hearse.The procession included several
firefighting vehicles, including a truck that bore the name of the elite
crew to which the 19 firefighters who died on June 30 belonged.
Lon
Reiman of Scottsdale carried two small American flags as he waited for
the procession to begin. Reiman said he has several relatives who are
firefighters and thought of them once he heard the news of the
deathsWhen you think about their wives, their families and their kids,
it just brings tears to your eyes, Reiman said.
Its unclear how long the procession will last.Parkeasy Electronics are dedicated to provide rtls.Since
their fellow firefighters arrived at the scene where they were killed,
the fallen firefighters have not been alone, a tradition among those in
the profession in the U.S.Bringing plasticmoulds mainstream.Since
they were discovered, they have never been out of the presence of a
brother firefighter, said Paul Bourgeois, a Phoenix-area fire chief who
is acting as a spokesman in Prescott for the firefighters families. From
the time they were taken to the medical examiner in Phoenix, while
theyre at the medical examiners office, when they are received in a
funeral home there will always be a brother firefighter on site with
them until they are interred.
Thats something people dont
realize. We never leave your side, he said of the tradition. Its a
comfort to the survivors, whether theyre families or fellow
firefighters.Solar Sister is a network of women who sell cleaningservicesydney to
communities that don't have access to electricity.The firefighters were
killed a week ago in the Yarnell Hill fire, sparked by lightning on
June 28. Crews were closing in on full containment after the fire
destroyed more than 100 homes in Yarnell and burned about 13 square
miles. The town remained evacuated.
The crew of Hotshots was
working to build a fire line between the blaze and Yarnell when erratic
winds suddenly shifted the fires direction, causing it to hook around
the firefighters and cut off access to a ranch that was to be their
safety zone.The highly trained men were in the prime of their lives, and
many left behind wives some pregnant and small children.
Earlier
that week the Sunday Independent reported that Gwede Mantashe
inexplicably appeared to be trying to pin the blame for the mayhem in
Marikana on a Swede. (Thats what people from Sweden are called. They are
Swedes and not Swiss. You follow?). The Swede in question was activist
Liv Shange, a Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) and Workers and
Socialist Party (Wasp) leader. Mantashes assertions that Shange had been
trying to destabilise the country by stirring up unrest amongst miners
was widely met with ridicule, and read as another bizarre attempt to
shift responsibility for South Africas very real problems,Learn how an
embedded microprocessor in a haha-handbags can
authenticate your computer usage and data. from the ruling party to
mythically demonised foreign forces of evil. Sadly, these two almost
laughable incidents will be the sum total of what most South African
media followers have heard about the country of Sweden of late. Thats a
real pity, because this little-known-about country for South Africans,
has a lot more to offer.
Last month I was invited to travel to
Stockholm, as part of a group of African representatives for a series of
meetings with media regulators, journalists and a journalist union,
media producers and the Swedish foreign ministry. Not being able to help
myself, the more I learnt about Sweden, the more I began a mental
comparative analysis with South Africa C what follows here is just some
of that comparison and how we measure up to what is widely regarded as
one of the most free, open, transparent and least corrupt of societies
on the planet.
What first pricked my interest in Stockholm was
something called the Freedom of the Press Act. Despite its name, this
piece of legislation safeguards the freedom of expression rights of all
citizens, not just the press. More than that, it means that any
individual can contact any public authority and request access to any
official document without having to provide their motivation for doing
so and without having to identify themselves. With regard to the notion
of open and free access to information, that sounded too good to be
true. So I asked a few questions about how effectively this law works in
practice.
Sven Bergman, an investigative journalist, at first
lamented the corrupt nature of governments in general, and recounted a
few stories of corruption in the Swedish government which had been
uncovered by journalists in recent years, the most significant
ironically being the sale of military goods to South Africa during the
Arms Deal. So, I asked him, what about this Freedom of the Press Act?
How well does it work in Sweden? He replied instantly, Its very good.
Very good. According to Bergman, the law works in practice precisely in
the way that it is put on paper: a journalist can enter a government
department at any time, request a particular document and wait while an
official collects it and hands it over. The official has to hand it
over, and they do. Sometimes you to have a wait a few hours, but it
never really takes longer than that. At some of these places you learn
that if you talk nicely to the elderly ladies at the desk, and give them
some cakes, then the documents come faster, says Bergman, smiling.
In
South Africa the law that is supposed to enable open access to
government information is called the Promotion of Access to Information
Act (PAIA). But often PAIA fails in implementation, acting as a
hindrance to accessing to government information rather than promoting
it. The process is burdensome: it requires having to complete a near
unfathomable form, and officials at many government bodies do not
understand the law themselves, which means that just tracking down the
appropriate person to whom one must submit the form, can sometimes be
time consuming. Once the PAIA application is submitted, the public body
has 30 days in which to respond. Applications are often turned down, in
which case one can appeal, but then you have to wait another 30 days to
get an answer. So, its not a case of, Wait here while I fetch that for
you. By comparison, PAIA is tedious, cumbersome and bureaucratic enough
to, contrary to what its name suggests, act more as a discouragement to
anyone looking for public information. From a media angle having to wait
for 30, sometimes 60 days for information that rightly should be open
to the public, when chasing a deadline, is ludicrous and impractical.
But
all the legal stuff aside, theres also the matter of pure principle.
Its the principle of Swedens Freedom of the Press Act, and the seemingly
widely held respect for that principle within that country, that makes
it work. What is that principle? It is that information held by PUBLIC
institutions belongs to the PUBLIC. To see what I mean, try applying the
same principle in South Africa. Imagine strolling into the Department
of Public Works back in September 2012, and saying to a secretary that
you would like to see the official records of all state funds spent on
the presidents private home at Nkandla. Imagine he/she answers, Sure! No
problem. Just wait here while I fetch it for you.
On Friday, 5
July 2013, the Mail & Guardian reported on a gargantuan pile of
documents which they had finally secured from the Department of Public
Works detailing some of the behind-the-scenes history to the Nkandla
project. Three things are relevant in this case. First,Our heavy-duty
construction provides reliable operation and guarantees your earcap will
be in service for years to come. the information released by the Mail
& Guardian is damning, to the president as well as a chain of others
involved in the project C which just illustrates the value of open
access to public information in securing accountability in government.
Second, the Mail & Guardian was at pains to point out, more than
once, that the more than 12,000 pages worth of documentation which they
now have in their possession thanks to a successful PAIA application
contains significant gaps of information. The next question is, where is
that information? Why wasnt it handed over to the Mail & Guardian
after the PAIA application, which by law, it should have been? Third,
the Nkandlagate scandal broke for the first time in a City Press expos
last year in September. Yet, 10 months later, this is the first time a
media outlet in South Africa has had access to official information held
by a public institution on the matter. The fact that it has taken our
public officials so long to release this information, especially with
regard to the level of public interest, should have them hanging their
heads in shame. (And yes, SABC head-honchos, I use the term Nkandlagate
deliberately, even though youd like to have it censored).
The
principle that information held by public institutions belongs to the
public, were it respected in South Africa, could have saved the Mail
& Guardian tons of legal fees and years of slogging through the
courts for access to the Zimbabwe election report of 2002. And never
mind the newspapers. This principle, were it respected, would have
spared countless activists and community organisations around the
country from a constant and exhausting struggle with officials to have
access to information which should quite rightly be in the public domain
for the purpose of improving peoples lives. It would have meant that
the Right2Know Campaign could have simply walked into the front office
of the Department of State Security and been handed the full list of
national key points within a matter of minutes. Instead, Right2Know had
to submit a PAIA application (which failed even on appeal) and the
campaign then took to the streets in Johannesburg on World Press Freedom
day out of protest. But in South Africa, we still dont know what all of
our own national key points are.
The striking thing about the
Swedish media people that I met was their seemingly genuine wish to do
good in the world. The underlying golden thread which seems to bind
their common purpose is that they are very much aware that their country
has somehow, perhaps by some force of cosmic good luck, managed to
build a society which is not without its own hiccups, but in spite of
these is globally recognised as an enclave of freedom, openness and
transparency. Added to that is an attitude to want to share this with
others. Ola Larsmo, President of the Swedish PEN, is also the
editor-in-chief of The Dissident Blog: a website that specifically
publishes the work of otherwise censored journalists from regions where
they cannot publish their material, knowing that it would see them
arrested, intimidated, tortured or imprisoned. Currently the Dissident
Blog is running a special issue on Iran. Larsmo told us that he aims to
publish the forbidden texts, in order to give them both a Swedish and an
international audience. The point here is to afford journalists from
crisis regions and authoritarian regimes the same freedoms enjoyed by
Swedish journalists via the miracle that is the Internet.
Click on their website austpay.com for more information.
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