CASE 337 - The history of Bulgaria

officially the Republic of Bulgaria (Bulgarian: Република България, Republika Bălgariya, pronounced IPA: [rɛˈpubliˌkə bɤlˈgarijə]), a state in Southeastern Europe, borders five other countries; Romania to the north (mostly along the Danube), Serbia and the Republic of Macedonia to the west, and Greece and Turkey to the south. It is bordered by the Black Sea to the east.
Bulgaria comprises the classical regions of Thrace, Moesia, and Macedonia and has a civilized history spanning more than 6600 years. It is the sovereign successor of a powerful European medieval empire, the First Bulgarian Empire, which at times covered most of the Balkans and spread its culture and literature among the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe. Centuries later, during the decline of the Second Bulgarian Empire, the country fell under five centuries of Ottoman rule. Bulgaria was re-established as a constitutional monarchy in 1878, also known as the birth of the Third Bulgarian Kingdom. After World War II, Bulgaria became a communist state and part of the Eastern Bloc.

Today, Bulgaria functions as a democratic, unitary, constitutional republic, a member of the European Union and of NATO. It has a population of approximately 7.7 million, with Sofia as its capital and largest city.



Geography

Geographically and in terms of climate, Bulgaria features notable diversity, with the landscape ranging from the Alpine snow-capped peaks in Rila, Pirin and the Balkan Mountains to the mild and sunny weather of the Black Sea coast, from the typically continental Danubian Plain (ancient Moesia) in the north to the strong Mediterranean climatic influence in the valleys of Macedonia and the lowlands in the southernmost parts of Thrace.



The Seven Rila Lakes in Bulgaria

Bulgaria comprises portions of the regions known in Classical Greece as Thrace, Moesia, and Macedonia. The mountainous southwest of the country has two alpine ranges — Rila and Pirin — and further east stand the lower but more extensive Rhodope Mountains. Rila mountain includes the highest peak of the Balkan Peninsula, peak Musala at 2,925 meters (9,596 ft); the long range of the Balkan mountains runs west-east through the middle of the country, north of the famous Rose Valley. Hilly country and plains lie in the southeast, along the Black Sea coast in the east, and along Bulgaria's main river, the Danube in the north. Other major rivers include the Struma and the Maritsa river in the south. There are around 260 glacial lakes situated in Rila and Pirin, several large lakes on the Black Sea coast and more than 2,200 dam lakes. Mineral springs are in great abundance located mainly in the south-western and central parts of the country along the faults between the mountains.Bulgaria has a temperate climate, with cool and damp winters, very hot and dry summers, and Mediterranean influence along the Black Sea coast. The barrier effect of the Balkan Mountains influences climate throughout the country: northern Bulgaria gets slightly cooler and receives more rain than the southern regions. Average precipitation in Bulgaria is about 630 millimetres per year. The driest areas are Dobrudzha and the northern coastal strip, while the higher parts of the mountains Rila and Stara Planina receive the highest levels of precipitation. In summer, temperatures in the south of Bulgaria often exceed 40 degrees Celsius, but remain cooler by the coast. The highest recorded temperature is 46.7c near Plovdiv.
The country possesses relatively rich mineral resources, including vast reserves of lignite and anthracite coal; non-ferrous ores such as copper, lead, zinc and gold. It has large deposits of manganese ore in the north-east. Smaller deposits exist of iron, silver, chromite, nickel and others. Bulgaria has abundant non-metalliferous minerals such as rock-salt, gypsum, kaolin, marble.



The Balkan peninsula derives its name from the Balkan or Stara Planina mountain-range, which runs through the centre of Bulgaria and extends into eastern Serbia.

CASE 336 - The cost of living

Cost of living is the cost of maintaining a certain standard of living which will be different in each country, western or 3rd world. Changes in the cost of living over time are often operationalized in a cost of living index. Cost of living calculations are also used to compare the cost of maintaining a certain standard of living in different geographic areas. Geographic differences in cost of living can be measured in terms of purchasing power parity rates.



Top 50 cities: Cost of living ranking
http://www.mercer.com/press-releases/1311145



Other articles relating to this subject

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Price_Index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_living
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_raising_a_child



Cost of living in the 3rd world

The Third World remains poor because the powerful strive to dominate every choke-point of commerce. One key choke-point is political control through the "co-respective" support of local elites. Where loyalty is lacking, money will be spent to purchase it. If a government cannot be bought or otherwise controlled, corrupt groups will be financed and armed to overthrow that government and, in extreme cases, another country will be financed to attack and defeat it

In the 3rd world most people can only afford the essentials or local produce. The price of bread in Ghana is $0.46. In the US $1.28, UK £1.55. Most places in the 3rd world either have no electricity or a little amount at the important places or tourist destinations, where it could cut out at any point, even for days sometimes, but a lot don't pay or the government pay for. Water at the end of the road in a pump or you're lucky and have running water like the hotels. travel costs are either small or nothing

Cost of living in the developed world

electricity bill
phone bill
internet bill
TV license
council tax
working tax
travel costs
water bill
gas bill
rent

Under social class will claim up to £300 per week to live
working class will pay up to £300 per week to live which will be around 80% of their wealth
lower middle class will pay up to £500 per week to live which will be around 70% of their wealth
upper middle class could pay up to £1000 per week to live which could be between 10% to 50% of their wealth, but...... you can always become a politician and get everything payed for by the lower middle class and working class.....!

CASE 335 - Agent provocateurs

An agent provocateur is a person employed by the police, government, corporation or even the elite or other entity to act undercover to entice or provoke another person to commit an illegal act. More generally, the term may refer to a person or group that seeks to discredit or harm another by provoking them to commit a wrong or rash action.
As a known tool to prevent infiltration by agents provocateurs,[1] the organizers of large or controversial assemblies may deploy and coordinate demonstration marshals, also called stewards.



British Government's Agent Provocateurs Exposed!
http://www.sott.net/articles/show/123617-British-Government-s-Agent-Provocateurs-Exposed-



Common usage

An agent provocateur may be a police officer or a secret agent of police who encourages suspects to carry out a crime under conditions where evidence can be obtained; or who suggests the commission of a crime to another, in hopes they will go along with the suggestion and be convicted of the crime.
A political organization or government may use agents provocateurs against political opponents. The provocateurs try to incite the opponent to do counter-productive or ineffective acts to foster public disdain—or provide a pretext for aggression against the opponent (see Red-baiting).
Historically, labor spies, hired to infiltrate, monitor, disrupt, or subvert union activities, have used agent provocateur tactics.
Agent provocateur activities raise ethical and legal issues. In common law jurisdictions, the legal concept of entrapment may apply if the main impetus for the crime was the provocateur.



Provocateurs have always been used by capitalist governments against revolutionary movements. As Lenin remarked to the Second Communist International (point 12): "Notwithstanding their false and hypocritical declarations, the governments of even the most enlightened and freest of countries, where the bourgeois-democratic system is most "stable", are already systematically and secretly drawing up blacklists of Communists and constantly violating their own constitutions so as to give secret or semi-secret encouragement to the whiteguards and to the murder of Communists in all countries, making secret preparations for the arrest of Communists, planting agents provocateurs among the Communists, etc., etc. Only a most reactionary philistine, no matter what cloak of fine "democratic" and pacifist phrases he may don, will deny this fact..."

On the one hand, Lenin says that faced with the internal culture of war, revolutionary movements must go underground and secret, but this has costs of its own, as discussed elsewhere. On the other hand, he goes on to say to the Second International, that no matter how strong the repressive measures of the government, the revolutionary movement must somehow remain visible: "in all cases without exception, the parties should not restrict themselves to illegal work, but should conduct legal work as well, overcoming all obstacles, starting legal publications, and forming legal organisations under the most varied names, which should be frequently changed if necessary."



The danger of provocateurs is associated primarily with secret, underground work, as Lenin experienced on numerous occasions. The agents penetrate into secret organizations and make known their membership and their plans to the government authorities, leading to arrests and to disruption of actions that have been planned in secret. The more public the work of a revolutionary movement, the less effective is this work of the agent provocateur.

The government also uses provocateurs to establish phony organizations that compete with revolutionary organizations in order to divide the movement and confuse the people. Lenin describes one such organization, the Independent Social Labour Party established by agent provocateurs in St. Petersburg in 1905. Within a few years, as is typical for these phony organizations, it went out of existence.

Typically, provocateurs prey on individuals and small groups of revolutionaries trying to convince them to adopt illegal methods, especially the use of violence, in order to trap them and justify their arrest and imprisonment, or even their outright murder at the hands of the police. Lenin's advice was to "spurn ... the efforts of wretched provocateurs to provoke it to fight single-handed..."

Ironically, provocateurs sometimes do more good than harm for the revolutionary cause, because they are forced to do revolutionary work in order to keep their position. Thus, Lenin recalls the case of Roman Malinovsky, who was revealed to have been a secret agent of the Tsar: "As member of the Party’s Central Committee and Duma deputy, Malinovsky was forced, in order to gain our confidence, to help us establish legal daily papers, which even under tsarism were able to wage a struggle against the Menshevik opportunism and to spread the fundamentals of Bolshevism in a suitably disguised form. While, with one hand, Malinovsky sent scores and scores of the finest Bolsheviks to penal servitude and death, he was obliged, with the other, to assist in the education of scores and scores of thousands of new Bolsheviks through the medium of the legal press."



Provocateurs often accuse others of being provocateurs, not only to avoid attention on themselves, but also to discredit effective revolutinaries and to sow disunity and disruption in revolutionary organizations. In his 1903 book, Revolutionary Days, Lenin honored the priest Father Georgi Gapon who mobilized the masses of Russian believers against the Tsar. Many in the movement spread rumors that Father Gapon was an agent, but, as Lenin said, "Only the course of historical events could decide this, only facts, facts, facts. And the facts decided in Gapon's favour."

CASE 334 - Cultures

Culture is a term that has many different meanings as there are many different cultures. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. However, the word "culture" is most commonly used in three basic senses:

Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture

An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning

The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization, or group



When the concept first emerged in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, it connoted a process of cultivation or improvement, as in agriculture or horticulture. In the nineteenth century, it came to refer first to the betterment or refinement of the individual, especially through education, and then to the fulfillment of national aspirations or ideals. In the mid-nineteenth century, some scientists used the term "culture" to refer to a universal human capacity. For the German nonpositivist sociologist Georg Simmel, culture referred to "the cultivation of individuals through the agency of external forms which have been objectified in the course of history".
In the twentieth century, "culture" emerged as a concept central to anthropology, encompassing all human phenomena that are not purely results of human genetics. Specifically, the term "culture" in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Following World War II, the term became important, albeit with different meanings, in other disciplines such as cultural studies, organizational psychology and management studies.



Cultural studies

In the United Kingdom, sociologists and other scholars influenced by Marxism, such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, developed Cultural Studies. Following nineteenth century Romantics, they identified "culture" with consumption goods and leisure activities (such as art, music, film, food, sports, and clothing). Nevertheless, they understood patterns of consumption and leisure to be determined by relations of production, which led them to focus on class relations and the organization of production. In the United States, "Cultural Studies" focuses largely on the study of popular culture, that is, the social meanings of mass-produced consumer and leisure goods. The term was coined by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director.
From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. As the field developed it began to combine political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history to study cultural phenomena or cultural texts. In this field researchers often concentrate on how particular phenomena relate to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, and/or gender. Cultural studies is concerned with the meaning and practices of everyday life. These practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. This field studies the meanings and uses people attribute to various objects and practices. Recently, as capitalism has spread throughout the world (a process called globalization), cultural studies has begun to analyse local and global forms of resistance to Western hegemony.
In the context of cultural studies, the idea of a text not only includes written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of cultural studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture". "Culture" for a cultural studies researcher not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups) and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two, in fact, have become the main focus of cultural studies. A further and recent approach is comparative cultural studies, based on the discipline of comparative literature and cultural studies.
Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field's inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies was developed in the 1950s and 1960s mainly under the influence first of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, and Raymond Williams, and later Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political, left-wing views, and criticisms of popular culture as 'capitalist' mass culture; it absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the "culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British cultural-studies scholars and their influences: see the work of (for example) Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy.
Whereas in the United States Lindlof & Taylor say that "cultural studies was grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition". The American version of cultural studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to, and uses of, mass culture; for example, American cultural-studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom.[citation needed] The distinction between American and British strands, however, has faded.[citation needed] Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who control the means of production (the economic base) essentially control a culture. Other approaches to cultural studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view is best exemplified by the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva is influential voices in the turn of the century, contributing to cultural studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.



Cultural change

A 19th century engraving showing Australian "natives" opposing the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1770
Cultural invention has come to mean any innovation that is new and found to be useful to a group of people and expressed in their behavior but which does not exist as a physical object. Humanity is in a global "accelerating culture change period", driven by the expansion of international commerce, the mass media, and above all, the human population explosion, among other factors.
Cultures are internally affected by both forces encouraging change and forces resisting change. These forces are related to both social structures and natural events, and are involved in the perpetuation of cultural ideas and practices within current structures, which themselves are subject to change.
Social conflict and the development of technologies can produce changes within a society by altering social dynamics and promoting new cultural models, and spurring or enabling generative action. These social shifts may accompany ideological shifts and other types of cultural change. For example, the U.S. feminist movement involved new practices that produced a shift in gender relations, altering both gender and economic structures. Environmental conditions may also enter as factors. For example, after tropical forests returned at the end of the last ice age, plants suitable for domestication were available, leading to the invention of agriculture, which in turn brought about many cultural innovations and shifts in social dynamics.


Full-length profile portrait of Turkman woman, standing on a carpet at the entrance to a yurt, dressed in traditional clothing and jewelry
Cultures are externally affected via contact between societies, which may also produce—or inhibit—social shifts and changes in cultural practices. War or competition over resources may impact technological development or social dynamics. Additionally, cultural ideas may transfer from one society to another, through diffusion or acculturation. In diffusion, the form of something (though not necessarily its meaning) moves from one culture to another. For example, hamburgers, mundane in the United States, seemed exotic when introduced into China. "Stimulus diffusion" (the sharing of ideas) refers to an element of one culture leading to an invention or propagation in another. "Direct Borrowing" on the other hand tends to refer to technological or tangible diffusion from one culture to another. Diffusion of innovations theory presents a research-based model of why and when individuals and cultures adopt new ideas, practices, and products.
Acculturation has different meanings, but in this context refers to replacement of the traits of one culture with those of another, such has happened to certain Native American tribes and to many indigenous peoples across the globe during the process of colonization. Related processes on an individual level include assimilation (adoption of a different culture by an individual) and transculturation.



List of cultures

Celtic,
Anglo-Saxon,
Basque,
Roman,
Greco,
Frank,
Norse,
Slavic,
Baltic,
Sioux,
Iroquois,
Apache,
Choctaw,
Cherokee,
greek,
Pawnee,
Mayan,
Inca,
Aztec,
Inuit,
Semetic,
Turk,
Igbo,
Yoruba,
Hausas,
Punjabi,
Himba,
Maisi,
Maori,
N'go,
Madinkan
Blackfoot
Fox
Mohican
Mandingo
Pontiac
Druids
Norman
Viking
Huns
and Woolof

Here is a list an explanation of more
http://www.culturesinsider.com/dealing-with-business-and-different-cultures/some-different-list-of-cultures-around-the-world/

CASE 333 - Atlantis

Greek mythology, chinese mythology, stories and even the truth movement today claims that The City of Atlantis existed and was destroyed by earthquakes, and major portions of the city sank into the sea, in 9,600 BC, there are many different stories and locations but they all belive that they were advanced humans. The fertile farmlands of the Island of Atlantis sank and formed the Sea of Azov. Tsunamis sweep in over Atlantis City from the Black Sea. Shoals of mud blocked Kerch Strait, which blocked passage into the Sea of Azov.

The historical Hill of Mithridat is located in the center of the Crimean city of Kerch. Beneath the hill are numerous underground rock quarries, rooms and catacombs, as described in Plato's Atlantis Dialogues.

Fifty feet offshore in Kerch Strait, are clearly visible ruins of 7 feet thick stone walls and foundations of guard towers. The foundation stones of a defensive wall, 45 feet thick, have been located submerged in Taman Bay, on the Russian side of Kerch Strait.




Atlantis City was founded by benevolent "gods" which united with primitive Earth-born Tribes. Numerous archeological sites of prehistoric Neanderthal settlements surround Kerch, Ukraine. This area was an ice age haven, which attracted a wide range of animals, including primitive man, to this fertile primeval paradise.



According to Plato, Atlantis was a naval power lying "in front of the Pillars of Hercules" that conquered many parts of Western Europe and Africa 9,000 years before the time of Solon, or approximately 9600 BC. After a failed attempt to invade Athens, Atlantis sank into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune". There have been dozens of locations proposed for Atlantis, to the point where the name has become a generic concept, divorced from the specifics of Plato's account. This is reflected in the fact that many proposed sites are not within the Atlantic at all. Few today are scholarly or archaeological hypotheses, while others have been made by psychic or other pseudoscientific means. Many of the proposed sites share some of the characteristics of the Atlantis story (water, catastrophic end, relevant time period), but none has been demonstrated to be a true historical Atlantis.

CASE 332 - Dole

Dole Food Company, Inc is an American-based agricultural multinational corporation headquartered in Westlake Village, California. The company is the largest producer of fruits and vegetables in the world, operating with 75,800 full-time and seasonal employees who are responsible for over 300 products in 90 countries. Dole markets such food items as bananas, pineapples (fresh and packaged), grapes, strawberries, salads, and other fresh and frozen fruits and juices.
Dole's Chairman founded the Dole Nutrition Institute, a nutritional research and education foundation. Started by James Dole "the pinapple king" in 1851. In 2009 the company had about $6.8 billion in annual revenue.



Starting in 1988, the Philippines undertook what was to be a bold initiative to redress the historically high concentration of land ownership that has impoverished millions of rural Filipinos and undermined the country's development. The Comprehensive Agricultural Reform Program (CARP) promised to deliver land to the landless. It didn't work out that way.

Plantation owners helped draft the law and invented ways to circumvent its purported purpose. Dole pineapple workers are among those paying the price.



Under CARP, Dole's land was divided among its workers and others who had claims on the land prior to the pineapple giant. However, under the terms of the law, as the Washington, D.C.-based International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) explains in an October report, "The Sour Taste of Pineapple," the workers received only nominal title. They were required to form labor cooperatives. Intended to give workers - now the new land owners - a means to collectively manage their land, the cooperatives were instead controlled by wealthy landlords.

Through its dealings with these cooperatives," ILRF found, Dole and Del Monte, (the world's other leading pineapple grower) "have been able to take advantage of a number of worker abuses. Dole has outsourced its labor force to contract labor and replaced its full-time regular employment system that existed before CARP." Dole employs 12,000 contract workers. Meanwhile, from 1989 to 1998, Dole reduced its regular workforce by 3,500.

Under current arrangements, Dole now leases its land from its workers, on extremely cheap terms - in one example cited by ILRF, Dole pays in rent one-fifteenth of its net profits from a plantation. Most workers continue to work the land they purportedly own, but as contract workers for Dole.

The Philippine Supreme Court has ordered Dole to convert its contract workers into regular employees, but the company has not done so. In 2006, the Court upheld a Department of Labor and Employment decision requiring Dole to stop using illegal contract labor. Under Philippine law, contract workers should be regularized after six months.

Dole emphasizes that it pays its workers $10 a day, more than the country's $5.60 minimum wage. It also says that its workers are organized into unions. The company responded angrily to a 2007 nomination for most irresponsible corporations from a Swiss organization, the Berne Declaration. "We must also say that those fallacious attacks created incredulity and some anger among our Dolefil workers, their representatives, our growers, their cooperatives and more generally speaking among the entire community where we operate." The company thanked "hundreds of people who spontaneously expressed their support to Dolefil, by taking the initiative to sign manifestos," including seven cooperatives.

The problem with Dole's position, as ILRF points out, is that "Dole's contract workers are denied the same rights afforded to Dole's regular workers. They are refused the right to organize or benefits gained by the regular union, and are consequently left with poor wages and permanent job insecurity." Contract workers are paid under a quota system, and earn about $1.85 a day, according to ILRF.

Conditions are not perfect for unionized workers, either. In 2006, when a union leader complained about pesticide and chemical exposures (apparently misreported in local media as a complaint about Dole's waste disposal practices), the management of Dole Philippines (Dolefil) pressed criminal libel charges against him. Two years later, these criminal charges remain pending.



Dole says it cannot respond to the allegations in the ILRF report, because the U.S. Trade Representative is considering acting on a petition by ILRF to deny some trade benefits to Dole pineapples imported into the United States from the Philippines.

Concludes Bama Atheya, executive director of ILRF, "In both Costa Rica and the Philippines, Dole has deliberately obstructed workers' right to organize, has failed to pay a living wage and has polluted workers' communities."

CASE 331 - The history of Iran

Present Iran was historically referred to as Persia until 1935 when Reza Shah Pahlavi formally asked the international community to call the country by its native name, Iran. But In 1959 due to controversial debates over the name, it was announced that both could be used.

The First inhabitants of Iran were a race of people living in western Asia. When the Aryans arrived, they gradually started mingling with the old native Asians. Aryans were a branch of the people today known as the Indo-Europeans, and are believed to be the ancestors of the people of present India, Iran, and most of Western Europe.

Recent discoveries indicate that, centuries before the rise of earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia, Iran was inhabited by human. But the written history of Iran dates back to 3200 BC. It begins with the early Achaemenids, The dynasty whose under the first Iranian world empire blossomed.

Cyrus the Great was the founder of the empire and he is the first to establish the charter of human rights. In this period Iran stretched from the Aegean coast of Asia Minor to Afghanistan, as well as south to Egypt.The Achaeamenid Empire was overthrown by Alexander the Great in 330 BC and was followed by The Seleucid Greek Dynasty.

After the Seleucids, we witness about dozen successive dynasties reigning over the country, Dynasties such as Parthian, Sassanid, Samanid, Ghaznavid, Safavid, Zand, Afsharid, Qajar and Pahlavi. In 641 Arabs conquered Iran and launched a new vicissitudinous era. Persians, who were the followers of Zoroaster, gradually turned to Islam and it was in Safavid period when Shiite Islam became the official religion of Iran.

Since Qajar dynasty on, due to the inefficiency of the rulers, Iran intensely begins to decline and gets smaller and smaller. The growing corruption of the Qajar monarchy led to a constitutional revolution in 1905-1906. The Constitutional Revolution marked the end of the medieval period in Iran, but the constitution remained a dead letter.
During World Wars I and II the occupation of Iran by Russian, British, and Ottoman troops was a blow from which the government never effectively recovered.

In 1979, the nation, under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, erupted into revolution and the current Islamic republic of Iran was founded.



Throughout Iran's long history, in spite of different devastating invasions and occupations by Arabs, Turks, Mongols, British, Russians, and others, the country has always maintained its national identity and has developed as a distinct political and cultural entity.

Case 330 - Suez-Lyonnaise Des Eaux (SLDE)

Suez-Lyonnaise Des Eaux (SLDE), now named just Suez is a leading French-based multinational corporation headquartered in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, with operations primarily in water, electricity and natural gas supply, and waste management. Suez was result of a 1997 merger between the Compagnie de Suez and Lyonnaise des Eaux, a leading French water company. In the early 2000s Suez also owned some media and telecommunications assets, but has since divested these. According to the Masons Water Yearbook 2004/5, Suez served 117.4 million people around the world. The company conducted a merger of equals with fellow utility company Gaz de France on 22 July 2008 to form GDF Suez. The water and waste assets of Suez were spun off into a separate publicly-traded company, Suez Environnement.



The privatization of water has had a disastrous impact on the human right to clean water, and the French company Suez is the worst perpetrator of this abuse. The company’s billions of dollars in profit come at the expense of poor people living in countries where thousands lack access to potable water, and, because of private water contracts, are also facing skyrocketing water prices.

Suez goes by many names around the world-<>Ondeo, SITA and others-to mask its worldwide net of controversial activities. In Manila, Philippines, after seven years of water privatization under a Suez company (Maynilad Water) contract, studies showed that water rates increased in some neighborhoods by 400 to 700 percent. These studies also showed that the negligence of the company resulted in cholera and gastroenteritis outbreaks that killed six people and severely sickened 725 in Manila’s Tondo district.

In Bolivia, a Suez company (Aguas de Illimani) left 200,000 people without access to water and caused a revolt when it tried to charge between $335 and $445 to connect a private home to the water supply. Countless people were unable to afford this charge in a country whose yearly per capita GDP is $915.

Unfortunately, the IMF and World Bank are playing a key role in pushing water privatization all over the world. Many countries have been required to open up their water supply to private companies as a condition for receiving IMF loans, and the World Bank has approved millions of dollars in loans for the privatization of water systems.