U.S. Plan to Lure Nurses May Hurt Poor Nations - New York Times

The Phillipino nurses I worked with in Saudi Arabia were without any question some of the best nurses I have ever worked with in my career. I will be eternally grateful for their compassion and skill in patient care, whether in the OR, the ER, or the floor.

U.S. Plan to Lure Nurses May Hurt Poor Nations - New York Times: "As the United States runs short of nurses, senators are looking abroad. A little-noticed provision in their immigration bill would throw open the gate to nurses and, some fear, drain them from the world's developing countries.

The legislation is expected to pass this week, and the Senate provision, which removes the limit on the number of nurses who can immigrate, has been largely overlooked in the emotional debate over illegal immigration.

Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, who sponsored the proposal, said it was needed to help the United States cope with a growing nursing shortage.

He said he doubted the measure would greatly increase the small number of African nurses coming to the United States, but acknowledged that it could have an impact on the Philippines and India, which are already sending thousands of nurses to the United States a year."

AIDS Vaccine Testing Goes Overseas

A quick overview of the  history and difficulty of developing an AIDS vaccine...

CHONBURI, Thailand -- Inside a ramshackle Buddhist temple here on
the country's southeastern coast, curious villagers gathered last fall
as part of the United States' biggest gamble yet on stopping the AIDS
pandemic.

The informational meeting was almost like a game show
as attractive young hosts revved up the crowd, working up to the big
question, boomed out over loudspeakers: Would the audience be willing
to volunteer to test an experimental HIV vaccine?

The villagers
hesitated. No one moved for a full 60 seconds. Then, tentatively, they
approached the three stands set up at the front, marked "Join," "Not
Join" and "Unsure."

For the past three years, such gatherings
have been held all over Thailand, exhorting young adults to take part
in the largest, most expensive, most resource-intensive AIDS vaccine
trial ever. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, it ultimately
will involve 16,000 people and last 3 1/2 years.

But as the trial
moves forward, at a cost of more than $120 million, some researchers
are raising questions about its validity. They disparage its science,
question its ethics and doubt its efficacy.

One of the chief
dissenters is Robert C. Gallo, who helped discover the human
immunodeficiency virus. He scoffs at the notion that the trial will be
successful. "I thought we'd learn more if we had extract of maple leaf
in the vaccine," he said derisively.

(..)

Despite years of effort, investment in the billions of dollars, and
dozens of small tests in people around the world, there's still no
scientific proof that a vaccine is even possible. HIV is a diabolical
virus that disables the very immune responses a vaccine needs to
trigger in order to work.

And yet the need is so urgent that
scientists have gone forward with preliminary human tests of many
vaccines on the basis of data they acknowledge is weak. The one in
Thailand is the largest.

(..)

The U.S. government last year spent 22 percent of its $3 billion
AIDS research budget on vaccines and other preventive drugs, compared
with less than 8 percent a decade ago. (Most of the rest is devoted to
developing treatments or a cure for those already infected.) Meanwhile,
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation this year designated up to $360
million for AIDS vaccine research, and Congress is encouraging more
research with bills that would provide liability protection and tax
benefits for drug companies.

But the science is daunting and
subjects hard to come by. Scientists have been forced to travel to
remote corners of the world to find communities where the infection
rate is high enough to show results in a reasonable amount of time.

With Bono the preacher man on his mission to Africa

With Bono the preacher man on his mission to Africa






Kamal Ahmed joins
the singer on an extraordinary week as he travels through Lesotho and
Rwanda, to cramped hospitals and plush hotels alike, in his campaign
against poverty and the continent's Aids epidemic

Dan Brown was Here

Newsvine - Treatments for 'Neglected Diseases' Urged

Newsvine - Treatments for 'Neglected Diseases' Urged: "NAIROBI, KENYA — The sickness starts with the bite of a tiny sand fly and mutates quickly from there — chills, then fever, then an onslaught of black lesions that will most likely prove fatal within six months without treatment.

Known as kala azar — a Hindi word meaning Black Death — the disease has killed more people than the 21-year civil war in Sudan, many of them extremely poor children.

'The people who are affected by the problem are poor. That's why we call it a neglected problem,' said Dr. Willy Tonui of the Kenya Medical Research Institute, or KEMRI, in Nairobi. 'Since you're dealing with a poor population, they won't be able to purchase the drug.'

With the United Nations' 192-member World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva, the governments of Kenya and Brazil have sent a resolution asking the panel to urge governments to set drug research priorities based on disease burden. According to the U.N., less than 10 percent of investment in health research goes to diseases "

(..)
Medicins Sans Frontieres, or Doctors Without Borders, says the disease killed a third of the population in Sudan's Western Upper Nile region between 1990 and 1994 — 100,000 of 300,000 people. The organization says it is a tragedy comparable to the bubonic plague of medieval times.

Treatment involves a 30-day course of injections.

The Laughing Yogi

Click on this link and get in a happy mood :) as the yogi leads you through a laughing exercise...

(Make sure your sound is turned on)

http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/2006/05/laughing_yogi.mpeg

Engadget

Engadget: "Sony BMG 'rootkit' class action settled: time to submit your claim

Posted May 23rd 2006 9:20AM by Thomas Ricker
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio
Listen up anyone who 'purchased, received, came into possession of or otherwise used' music CDs containing Sony's flawed DRM software anytime after 1 August, 2003. Under the terms of the class action settlement approved Monday, you are entitled to file a claim for a replacement CD, free downloads of music from that CD (with Apple's iTunes named as one of the three download services, ironically), and even 'additional cash payments' which we presume are likely to amount to a stack of Abes not Benjamins, folks. Pretty much what Sony BMG was already offering to their customers when this whole fiasco hit back in November. Additionally, Sony BMG definitively agreed to halt manufacture or distribution of that XCP and MediaMax nastiness masked by the rootkit. Now be sure to get your claim in now consumers, so that Sony BMG hears loud and clear that you do know what a rootkit is, and yes, you care. Afterall, the settlement only lasts until the end of 2007 at which point Sony BMG is free to introduce copy protection software once again. Click the read link for a PDF copy of the settlement."

Venture capital nudge for microfinance

Venture capital nudge for microfinance

The Seattle Times has a long article on the VC approach to microfinance, and in particular the work of Unitus.

Unitus raises a fund and looks for small microfinance banks around the world that have good management teams and large market opportunities. It helps turn the bank into a for-profit entity, then it makes an investment.The money can give the institution leverage to borrow more money from traditional banking institutions. Unitus also takes a seat on the bank’s board and provides consulting services to set up the infrastructure designed to support fast growth. With the transformation in place, Unitus expects a bank that once served 3,000 people to help 100,000 to 200,000 people in five to seven years…

To make it all work, Unitus had to create a new way it do business. It set up an equity fund that would be an affiliated for-profit entity, registered in the Cayman Islands. The fund raises money from investors who expect a return. So far, it has raised $8.5 million in investments… In all, Unitus expects to raise about $20 million…The fund’s investors are not donors; the idea is that they will get back their money and a return in a traditional way — by an investment going public or being sold…

One of the companies that Unitus has invested in is SKS, the focus of a similar WSJ article last week.

Thanks to Unitus Blog for the pointer. A good opportunity to highlight some other microfinance blogs, many of which have started within the last year: Defeating Global Poverty, Master of 500 hats, MicroCapital, Microfinanzas, Silicon Valley Microfinance Network, and Unitus Microcredit Loans. More on the blogroll.

Posted by Pablo Halkyard at 12:06 PM in Access to finance, Creative approaches, Finance | Permalink

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Hashemi at yale

Hashemi
at Yale


The ultimate in diversity.
5/19/2006

Like
other leading universities, Yale attracts students from all over the
world. But in Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, it may have gotten more than
it bargained for, said Alan Finder in The New York Times.
Hashemi, who’s been taking courses at Yale since last summer, is
a onetime spokesman for Afghanistan’s former Taliban regime.
Prior to Sept. 11, he toured the U.S. as a “roving
diplomat” who defended his government’s Islamic
fundamentalist policies, including its medieval repression of women.
Now, Hashemi has applied to a formal Yale degree program, and the
campus community is in an uproar. “It’s a betrayal of
Yale’s core values,” says alumnus Clint Taylor, founder of
a blog devoted to opposing Hashemi’s admission.
“We’re still at war with the Taliban. They’re
massacring schoolteachers in Afghanistan and fighting American
soldiers.”



Hashemi’s admission, unfortunately, may actually reflect Yale’s core values, said John Fund in The American Spectator.
“Richard Shaw, Yale’s former admissions dean, has all but
admitted that Hashemi got in precisely because of his Taliban
background.” It may seem nuts, but in the politically correct
world of academia, this is called diversity. What could be more
open-minded, more progressive, than enrolling an apologist for the
regime that harbored Osama bin Laden and made 9/11 possible? Yale
contends Hashemi has reformed his views, but he hasn’t, said Natalie Healy in the New York Daily News.
Last year, he wrote an essay that called Israel “an American al
Qaida.” When someone asked him about the Taliban’s public
stoning of adulterers, he retorted, “There were also executions
happening in Texas.” As the mother of a Navy SEAL killed by the
Taliban, I’m astonished that one of America’s most
prestigious colleges can’t find a student more worthy than this
thug.



Hashemi is no thug, said USA Today in an
editorial. He may still be critical of some U.S. policies, but he
“no longer sees the world framed as a religious conflict”
between righteous Muslims and evil infidels. That’s why the State
Department has officially cleared Hashemi to study here. Lately,
he’s been telling friends that he wants to return to Afghanistan
to promote education—without which, he says, no country can make
a transition to democracy. Earlier this year, he told a reporter,
“You have to be reasonable to live in America. Back home, you can
win any argument if you bring up the Islamic argument.” If
Yale’s admissions staff is wise, they’ll resist the
“bullying protesters,” and welcome Hashemi as a living
symbol of “the value of cultural exchange.”

Hope Amid Malawi's Aid Crisis

Hope amid Malawi's Aids crisis

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/41673000/jpg/_41673602_orphans2203.jpg

Last year, the BBC News website published pictures of the village of Njoho in Malawi, highlighting its battle against the HIV epidemic. Patricia Lucas from the World Food Programme returned to see what had changed.

Aids severely affects the school - but they still find the time to play

Despite an HIV prevalence rate that remains close to 50%, it is possible to find signs of hope for the village of Njoho in its ongoing struggle with Malawi's HIV/Aids pandemic.

Last year, Sister Josephine of the Nsanama Convent was pessimistic, warning of villagers' fatalism in the face of HIV/Aids.

"Too often, they have anger in their hearts and voluntarily destroy their and other people's lives by behaving as if nothing has changed," she said.

Six months later, Sister Josephine's outlook is more comforting.

"What I find positive now is the awareness of needs among the leaders, the sense of family in the community," she tells me.

"The children now no longer feel shy to say: 'I am an orphan.' People want to help each other."

Entrepeneur Gets Big Banks to Back Very Small Loans

This is an interesting article from the May 15, 2006 issue of the Wall Street Journal on how an individual went to India one summer and upon seeing the discrepancy of lifestyle between the poor in India and his suburban lifestyle decided to embark on a microfinance project, which eventually drew in major banks such as HSBC and Citigroup. It is a great example of a single individual making a difference in the world. Unfortuantely, I can't get the link to work. However, if you are interested in the entire article just send an email to hdhindsa@gmail.com.



A great site for microfinance is www.globalgiving.com. You can pick a project by theme, e.g. education, health, gender and equality as well as by region. You can then give money online...check it out...

Microlending-for-Profit Effort

In India Draws Business

From Citigroup, HSBC

Ms. Dobbala's Baby Buffalo

By ERIC BELLMAN

May 15, 2006; Page A1

SHIVNOOR, India -- Vikram Akula runs a company that doles out loans of $100 or less to desperately poor villagers so they can buy a water buffalo or a bicycle. But he's hardly a typical do-gooder.

Mr. Akula, the 37-year-old founder of SKS Microfinance Pvt. Ltd., is at the forefront of the latest trend in "microlending," or making tiny loans that help entrepreneurs lift themselves up from the lowest rungs of poverty. Long the province of charitable institutions, microlending is starting to attract the attention of big business. Intrigued by India's red-hot economy and potential market of more than a billion consumers, financial giants such as Citigroup Inc., ABN Amro Holding NV and HSBC Holdings PLC have already provided millions of dollars for SKS to lend out. SKS, in turn, says it has notched up healthy profits for the past three years.

[Vikram Akula]

"This can work driven only by greed," says Mr. Akula, a one-time McKinsey & Co. consultant who was born in India and grew up in Schenectady, N.Y. "That's the magic of it."...

Bono on Tour

Bono on tour

Travelling star keeps up pressure on aid and debt for Africa



By Steve Bloomfield

Published: 21 May 2006



If it's Sunday, this must be Nigeria. Bono, the rock star and

anti-poverty campaigner who was guest-editing The Independent less than

a week ago, is already past the halfway mark in a lightning tour of six

African states. The U2 singer arrives today in Nigeria, Africa's most

populous nation, having already visited Lesotho, Rwanda and Tanzania to

highlight the benefits of his Product RED campaign. But the tour was

almost aborted before it began.



Fresh from his day in the editor's chair on Monday, Bono flew to

Johannesburg, but he was initially barred from entering South Africa.

The reason: so extensively has he been travelling the world to whip up

support for debt relief, increased aid and fairer trade terms for

Africa, he didn't have a blank page left in his passport. A quick call

to Nelson Mandela solved the problem, and the rock star and his

entourage were waved through.



In Lesotho, the tiny, mountainous kingdom surrounded by South Africa,

Bono and his wife, Ali Hewson, visited a textiles factory that was

almost forced to close after an agreement which had protected textile

industries in developing countries ended last year.



The factory, the only major employer in the remote town of Butha-Buthe,

was saved after an order from Ms Hewson for a range of T-shirts to be

sold at U2 concerts. Nakadi Jabbie, the owner of the factory, said the

order was better than aid. "When people work, and they can buy their

own food and take themselves to the clinics, then it means they are

doing it themselves and they are not just receiving food parcels."



Lesotho has one of the highest HIV/Aids infection rates in the world.

Unlike its neighbour, South Africa, the Lesotho government has

encouraged its citizens to take an HIV test. The Prime Minister,

Bethuel Pakalitha Mosisili, has even subjected himself to a test.



Bono said it was "scandalous" that Lesotho had not benefited from debt

cancellation under a global scheme managed by the World Bank and

International Monetary Fund to write off the debts of the world's poor

countries. "The reason Lesotho has not received debt cancellation is

because it has been disciplined, it has been punished for the fact that

it has been a good borrower in the past and has paid back its debts."



There was another indication of the rock star's frenetic pace of

travelling on Thursday. In Rwanda's capital, Kigali, he promised to

keep up pressure on the US and other wealthy nations to make good on

their promises of increased aid for Africa, saying there were signs the

G8 industrial countries were back-tracking on last year's promises to

double aid to Africa by 2010 to $50bn (£27bn).



Ten days earlier, he said, he had been in Washington: "They welcomed us

with open arms ... shook our hands and their eyes misted up at the

right place. When we left town, they slashed the budget."



The G8 is scheduled to meet in Russia in July, and Bono is almost

certain to be there. By then, one presumes, he will be filling up a new

passport with stamps.

BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Bono promotes work to aid Africa

One.org frontman, Bono, helping out in Lesotho...

BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Bono promotes work to aid Africa: "Rock star Bono has a more personal stake in Lesotho than in any other African country. In the remote mountain town of Butha-Buthe his wife Ali Hewson is sourcing t-shirts for a new fair trade line being sold in the US."

My pain, my brain

This is a fascinating though long (6 pages) article form the new york times which looks at the application of modern medicine (functional neuroimaging) as applied to pain control and other maladies...

Violent Rebel Rift Adds Layer to Darfur's Misery

This article illuminates some of the complexity in the Darfur conflict...

Violent Rebel Rift Adds Layer to Darfur's Misery

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Rebels in Darfur, Sudan, have split into warring factions divided by ethnic tensions and territorial ambitions.
More Photos >

Published: May 19, 2006

TINA, Sudan, May 16 — A grisly new battle between rebel factions is raging here in Darfur, casting doubts on the future of a peace agreement to end the war.

Skip to next paragraph

Multimedia

Photographs: Rift Among Rebels

Enlarge this Image

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Villagers were forced to abandon their homes in Tawila because of the
fighting between factions of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army in Darfur.
More Photos »

The New York Times

Tina was attacked in April after a split between rebel leaders.
More Photos >

Two of the main rebel factions
fighting the Sudanese government and its allied militias have turned on
each other, spurred by ethnic tensions and what appears to be a
relentless grab for more territory. Now the rebels have unleashed a
tide of violence against the very civilians they once joined forces to
protect.

Cholera Spreading Rapidly in Angola

It still blows me away how many people die because they can't have access to safe water, while many other inhabitants debate the merits of volvic vs perrier vs evian etc...

Contaminated drinking water, poor sanitation and dense urban living
have caused the worst outbreak of cholera in the history of Angola,
with 1,298 dead and tens of thousands of others infected, international
health officials said.

The outbreak began in February in Luanda,
the rapidly growing capital where most of the more than 4 million
residents live in squalid, trash-filled slums without reliable sources
of clean water. It has since reached 11 of Angola's 18 provinces and,
in some areas, continues to grow worse. Nationwide, officials report
600 new cases a day, more than anywhere else in the world and a pace
more than four times faster than in the world's second-worst-hit area,
southern Sudan. On Tuesday alone, 31 Angolans reportedly died from
cholera.

Crisis in Darfur More than 2 million civilians have fled their homes and hundreds of thousands have died in the Sudan conflict. Full Report   Interactive Feature Photo essay by Patrick Davison documents life in Vukani, a squatter camp near Grahamstown, South Africa. Vukani Means Wake Up!   Who's Blogging? Read what bloggers are saying about this article. HealthWise SWJ Daily News Links Worldwide Sawdust :: Main Page Full List of Blogs (4 links) » Most Blogged About Articles On washingtonpost.com | On the web Save & Share Tag This Article  Saving options 1. Save to description:  Headline (required)  Subheadline  Byline 2. Save to notes (255 character max):  Subheadline  Blurb  None 3. Tag This Article

"I have never seen anything quite like this," David Weatherill, a
water sanitation specialist for Doctors Without Borders, a French
medical aid group, said at a news conference in Johannesburg on
Wednesday.

Saudi Jeans: Saudi Nightlife

Most of our nightlife in Saudi was at the great, but hard to get into, Embassy parties and Western compunds....I have to agree wit Saudi Jans that it seems a bit bizarre to promite Riyadh as a hotbed of nightlife...


Saudi Jeans: Saudi Nightlife: "During a recent tourism promotion expo in Dubai, Prince Sultan bin Salman, head of SCT, told the reporters that Saudi Arabia promises tourists a unique experience, with 'lots of nightlife.' So, nightlife in Saudi Arabia, huh? Actually, it can be pretty exciting: you have to play hide and seek to
enter a shopping mall, which can be fun and challenging. Then, you will be chased by the religious police, and that will raise your adrenaline to the maximum level. After the crazy chasing, you will probably be thirsty, so you can stop somewhere nearby to get your glass of Saudi Champagne. You see, it's all good.

OK, I think I got a little bit carried away. The general secretary of SCT emphasized that the term 'nightlife' for Saudis tends to mean wholesome family activities -- rather than what may be enjoyed after dark in the West. Damn! I was so close to make a toast to SCT, but I guess I will hold my glass for now. Just for the sake of argument: How many of you consider the boring family gathering a 'nightlife' activity? # »"

Horn of Africa: A matter of life and death for 40,000 children-Unicef

©  IRIN

Malnourished child in Hargeysa, Somalia.

NAIROBI,
15 May 2006 (IRIN) - An estimated 40,000 children in the Horn of Africa
risk dying of malnutrition in the coming months, the result of
prolonged regional drought, which has given way to torrential rains,
said the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) on Monday.

Unicef
appealed for US $80 million earlier this year, of which it received
less than half. The agency has called on the international community to
make up for the funding shortfall of $54 million to respond to the
crisis.

Africa, South Asia Top UN List of Forgotten Stories

Africa, South Asia Top UN List of Forgotten Stories
By Peter Heinlein United Nations 15 May 2006

Heinlein report - Download 355k



Listen to Heinlein report

The United Nations has placed Liberia at the
top of its list of news stories the world should hear more about. Four
of the 10 most forgotten stories involve conflicts in Africa.

The list released Monday includes stories that, in the opinion of U.N. officials, escape the glare of world media.

Where two years ago, humanitarian groups were trying to call
attention to the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region, this year's focus has
shifted to Liberia, and the challenge it faces in recovering from years
of civil strife.

Charles Taylor

Director
of the U.N. Public Information Office Shashi Tharoor says in the past,
Liberia drew intense media attention for the alleged misdeeds of former
president Charles Taylor.

But now, with Taylor in jail in Sierra Leone, and a new president in
Monrovia, Tharoor says the equally dramatic story of Liberia's revival
is being largely ignored.

"This is a country, which, when there was war, and killing, and
conflict, that got attention," he said. "When we finally have brought
about a peace and the U.N. does feel very proud about what it has
accomplished, when we have been able to see a fair and free election,
that has elected a strong woman leader, then the spotlight moves away
and it's again focused on a jail cell in Sierra Leone where a bad man,
a not yet convicted bad man, is awaiting trial."

The U.N. has been compiling the list since 2004 to call attention to
items that might otherwise be lost in the multitude of stories about
war, disease and poverty.

Last year's list included the little-known battle to prevent
crippling injuries suffered by women during childbirth, a condition
known as obstetric fistula. Tharoor says a series of stories that
appeared as a result of the list helped raise awareness and money for
the cause.

"I'm not saying that this alone solves the problem, but it means
that suddenly something that no one was conscious about, suddenly when
you talk to someone, 'Oh! obstetric fistula, we read about that, what
was that all about?' and at least you've opened a small crack in the
door," he said.

UN peackeepers patrol in western Ivory Coast

In
addition to Liberia, this year's list of forgotten stories includes
three other conflict-ridden African nations. Among them are the
Democratic Republic of Congo, described as a country in transition from
civil war to peace and democracy; Somalia, where a security vacuum
compounds the effects of a severe drought; and Ivory Coast, said to be
on a "knife's edge" due to fears of renewed violence that could destroy
a hoped-for political reconciliation.

South Asia placed two stories on the list; the tragedy of children
caught in Nepal's 10-year war with Maoist rebels, and the aftermath of
the earthquake that struck India and Pakistan last year.

The Devil in Darfur

Editorial from the Wall Street Journal May 6, 2006 on the recent peace agreement between the largest Darfur rebel groups and the government which concludes that the United States is the only  body which can effectively intervene to stop the genocide....

At last, the news about Darfur appears to be good. In
Abuja, Nigeria yesterday, the government of Khartoum and the largest of
the Darfuri rebel factions, the Sudan Liberation Army, agreed to a
peace deal. Terms include disarming the Arab Janjaweed militia, a proxy
force through which Khartoum has killed 200,000 Darfuris and sent
another two million into exile. The deal also calls for compensating
refugees, transferring some of the government's oil wealth to the
region and enlisting thousands of Darfuri rebels into the regular
Sudanese Army.

It sounds promising, and if it sticks it will be a
diplomatic triumph for the Bush Administration, which has so far
provided $1 billion in humanitarian aid to the region and which sent
Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick to help arrange the deal.

But we have seen Sudanese governments violate too many
previous agreements to place too much stock in this one. Between 1983
and 2005, Khartoum killed as many as two million people (and enslaved
hundreds of thousands) in its war against the black Christians of
southern Sudan. That war itself began when Khartoum violated the 1972
Addis Ababa Accords, which had ended a previous civil war, in a bid to
Islamicize the south.

In 1989, current Sudanese President Omar Bashir took
power in a coup to prevent the ratification of a peace deal. In 1997,
he agreed to a "Declaration of Principles," spelling out the elements
of a workable peace deal. Mr. Bashir also co-opted factional leaders of
the rebel movement by offering them government jobs in exchange for
cooperation against their erstwhile allies. But his war against the
south continued, ending only in 2005 after the rebel movement under
John Garang achieved a military stalemate. Garang was killed in a
helicopter crash later that year.

Mr. Bashir has established a similar pattern in
Darfur, a war which began as Khartoum's battles against the south were
ending. In April 2004, his government signed the Humanitarian Ceasefire
Agreement with rebel groups in N'Djamena, Chad. But Khartoum continued
to kill Darfuris via the Janjaweed. In November, Mr. Bashir agreed to
grant unrestricted access to humanitarian aid groups.

Yet as Jan Egeland, the United Nations' emergency
relief coordinator, wrote in our pages Thursday, "Aid workers in Darfur
are forced to cope with threats, intimidation and an Orwellian
nightmare of unending bureaucratic restrictions [by the Sudanese
government] that effectively -- and intentionally -- impede our ability
to help those in need."

Put simply, Sudan's track record inspires no
confidence that it will abide by the agreement it has now signed.
Unlike the 2005 deal with Garang, Khartoum isn't under any serious
military pressure from the rebels, nor is there any looming threat of
external military intervention. It may serve Mr. Bashir's purposes to
co-opt the main rebel faction, not least as a way of breaking the back
of the movement and destroying the rebels who remain. That doesn't bode
well for ordinary Darfuris, whose most realistic hope of salvation is
their ability to mount an effective self-defense.

A larger problem is the unwillingness of the
international community to treat Sudan as the outlaw state it is. While
unsparing in his criticism of Khartoum, Mr. Egeland is at pains to
emphasize violence "by all sides." When the U.N. Security Council voted
to sanction four Sudanese individuals, two of them were rebel leaders.
More broadly, the Darfur crisis is a reminder that the very
institutions that, prior to the Iraq war, were said to be the only
legitimate arbiters of international intervention turn out to be the
least helpful when intervention is most needed.

At a regional level, the African Union has done what
it can to broker peace and has sent a poorly equipped and operationally
limited 7,000-man force to police Darfur, an area the size of France.
The AU's efforts are at least well-intended. This is more than can be
said for the Arab League, which held its most recent summit in Khartoum
and has backed Mr. Bashir to the hilt.

America's allies in Europe have rejected an
Administration proposal to deploy NATO forces to Darfur. The U.N.'s
humanitarian agencies have done yeoman work to feed and shelter
refugees. But the Security Council has been unable to impose broad and
effective sanctions on Khartoum thanks to Chinese and Russian
opposition.

This leaves the United States, the only country in the
world with the capability and, potentially, the will to aid Darfuris
and every other group threatened with genocide or brutal oppression.
President Bush has certainly been engaged with the crisis in Darfur,
more so than any of his alleged moral betters in places such as France
and Sweden. Yet having endured so much opprobrium and resistance to his
last two acts of international hygiene -- the liberation of Afghanistan
and Iraq -- it's no wonder he's reluctant to carry another burden,
particularly when American interests are not directly at stake.

There's a lesson here for all of those liberal
internationalists who now demand the Administration "do something" in
Darfur: If you want to stop genocide, don't shackle the world's only
policeman

King warns Saudi media over women

A short news piece that illuminates the great divide in the way women are perceived in the Middle East vs the West...

King Abdullah: "Young people are driven by emotion and the spirit, but the spirit can go astray."

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (Reuters) -- Saudi
Arabia's King Abdullah, under pressure from Islamists to curb reforms,
has warned local media against showing pictures of Saudi women, local
newspapers reported on Tuesday.

Many Saudis have said they
hope the king, who came to power last year, will loosen strict
political and social mores in the ultra-conservative kingdom which
imposes an austere version of Islam called Wahhabism.

Newspapers
have broken with tradition and have more frequently begun printing
photographs of Saudi women beside stories, usually with hair covered
but faces showing, which many Wahhabi Islamists consider morally wrong.

(...)

"There are photographs published in some newspapers ... and one needs
to think if he would want his daughter, sister or wife to appear like
that. Of course, no one would," the king was quoted as saying at a
meeting with newspaper editors late on Monday.

Morgellon's disease

In the course of a discussion after a recent talk I gave on unusual diseases in Africa, a member of the audience mentioned knowing someone in South Texas with Morgellon's disease. I did a search for it and came up with this page. I remember as a resident at Baylor learning of the uncommonly high prevalence of leprosy in Texas due to the presence of Armadillo carriers. It looks like Texas has a new, unique disease...

f diseases like AIDS and bird flu scare
you, wait until you hear what's next. Doctors are trying to find out
what is causing a bizarre and mysterious infection that's surfaced in
South Texas.

Morgellons disease is not yet known to kill,
but if you were to get it, you might wish you were dead, as the
symptoms are horrible.

"These people will have like beads
of sweat but it's black, black and tarry," said Ginger Savely, a nurse
practioner in Austin who treats a majority of these patients.

Patients get lesions that never heal.

"Sometimes little black specks that come out of the lesions and
sometimes little fibers," said Stephanie Bailey, Morgellons patient.

Web extra • Exclusive interview: Ginger Savely talks more on Morgellons Web extra •  Morgellons Research Foundation

Patients say that's the worst symptom — strange fibers that pop out of your skin in different colors.

"He'd have attacks and fibers would come out of his hands and fingers,
white, black and sometimes red. Very, very painful," said Lisa Wilson,
whose son Travis had Morgellon's disease.

While all of
this is going on, it feels like bugs are crawling under your skin. So
far more than 100 cases of Morgellons disease have been reported in
South Texas.

"It really has the makings of a horror movie in every way," Savely said.

Truce is Talk, Agony is Real in Darfur

MENAWASHEI, Sudan, May 12 — It took three months for Fatouma
Moussa to collect enough firewood to justify a trip to sell it in the
market town of Shangil Tobayi, half a day's drive by truck from here.
It took just a few moments on Thursday for janjaweed militiamen, making
a mockery of the new cease-fire, to steal the $40 she had earned on the
trip and rape her.

Truce is Talk, Agony is Real in Darfur

Enlarge this Image

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Fatouma Moussa, 18, was raped by janjaweed militiamen as she returned
from selling firewood. They killed another woman, she said.

Enlarge this Image

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

An infant, Menazir Abdullah Adam, was shot in the foot by Darfur militiamen.

Enlarge this Image

Michael Kamber for The New York Times

Hanan Ahmed Hussein, 20, was shot in the leg last week by militiamen,
despite a new cease-fire. Her daughter, Menazir, 1, was shot in the
foot.

Speaking barely in a whisper, Ms. Moussa, who is 18, gave a spare account of her ordeal.

"We
found janjaweed at Amer Jadid," she said, naming a village just a few
miles north of her own. "One woman was killed. I was raped."

Officially, the cease-fire in the Darfur region went into effect last Monday.

This is Zimbabwe » Blog Archive » Action Alert: support the “Dignity. Period!” campaign

This is Zimbabwe » Blog Archive » Action Alert: support the “Dignity. Period!” campaign: "Zimbabwean women want Dignity.Period!Information on how you can help the Dignity. Period! campaign, coordinated by ACTSA, is provided at the end of this post.

One of our bloggers wrote a little while ago about the Zimbabwean government’s crass approach towards the crisis that Zimbabwean women are facing in terms of shortages of sanitary products in the country. This isn’t simply a story about shortages of yet another type of product. Shortages of sanitary ware go to the heart of women’s rights: it’s an issue which raises questions of whether a woman is forced to stay away from work or school; whether she is putting her health at risk by picking up infections or, if she is HIV positive, whether those infections will literally shorten her life span. In short, a lack of affordable hygienic sanitary products translates directly into issues of women’s rights as well as women’s dignity. The story has been picked up by The Sunday Times (UK) again today. The article is cited in full below:"

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Ask your Senators to support critical development assistance

Within the next 2 weeks the U.S. Senate is poised to slash billions of dollars from President Bush's plan to fight AIDS and poverty. This is an outrage - and it can be stopped. Senators Mike DeWine (R-OH), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Richard Durbin (D-IL) have written a letter to their colleagues in the Senate asking them to stop these devastating cuts in funding for the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty.

With just 30 seconds of your time, you can send a quick note to your Senators asking them to support this funding and add their signature to this important letter. Please join us in speaking out right now."

Ms. Goss, Ryan, Justin, and Austin raising money for Darfur

Ryan and friends performing "Lean on Me" at Rally 5-6-6

Teresa Torres Peace Corp worker in Niger at the Reno to Africa rally 5-6-6

Grass Roots Activism and Africa

Nicholas Kristof highlights individuals who have made a major impact in raising public awareness of the Darfur genocide. Kristof, himself also deserves, much credit. I was on a German blogsite the other day where the author was lamenting that there is no journalist like Kristof to consistently highlight global inequality, injustice, and genocide. He felt that is one reason that European countries, such as Germany, are not as active in the struggle for the victims of the Darfur genocide.

Yesterday, I attended a "Reno to Africa" rally at the University of Nevada, Reno, which was put together by several students at the University. There were about 8 bands and speakers who had  been to various countries in Africa. My son, Ryan and his friends and faculty advisor, had a table raising money for Darfur. All the students there were so inspiring, in their putting together this benefit event in the middle of finals week. E.G., I met one young lady, Theresa Torres, who sold all her worldly possessions and joined the peace corp a year ago. She has spent the last year in the poorest country in the world, Niger, as the only westerner in a village of 2500 people. She is back for a month to try and raise money for a pump well for the village. She will return for another year in August.

As she so eloquently stated, "Life tastes better over there."

For three grueling years, Eric Reeves has been fighting for his life,
struggling in a battle with leukemia that he may eventually lose. And
in his spare time, sometimes from his hospital bed, he has emerged as
an improbable leader of a citizens' army fighting to save hundreds of
thousands of other lives in Darfur.

Pressure from that citizen army helped achieve a breakthrough on
Friday: a tentative peace deal between the Sudanese government and the
biggest Darfur rebel faction, brokered in part by U.S. officials. We
should be skeptical that this agreement will really end the bloodshed —
past cease-fires and promises have not been honored — but also rejoice
in a glimpse of sun over the most wretched place in the world today.

If
the violence does diminish — and that will take hard work in the months
and years ahead — part of the credit will go to Mr. Reeves, a scholar
of English literature at Smith College who has used an arsenal of
e-mail messages, phone calls and Web pages to battle the Sudanese
government and American indifference. He was the first person I know to
describe the horrors of Darfur as genocide, and he financed his
quixotic campaign by taking out a loan on his house.

Perhaps the most striking distinction in the history of genocide is not
between those who murder and those who don't, but between "bystanders"
who avert their eyes and "upstanders" who speak out. Professor Reeves
has been a full-time upstander on Sudan since 1999, back when the
people being slaughtered there were Christians in the south of the
country. He noticed immediately in 2003 that Sudan had diversified into
butchering Muslims in Darfur, and his frantic blowing of the whistle
helped alert me and others. Visit his Web site, sudanreeves.org, but be careful — his fury may set your computer smoking.

While Darfur has been incredibly depressing, the grass-roots
movement in this country to stop the genocide is immensely inspiring.
(To join, go to Web sites like www.savedarfur.org or www.genocideintervention.net.)
The activist kids just bowl me over: girls like Rachel Koretsky, a
13-year-old who organized a rally in Philadelphia, distributed
circulars and conducted a raffle to raise money for Darfur as her bat
mitzvah charity project. So far, Rachel has raised $14,000 for Darfur.

Or
kids like Tacey Smith, a 12-year-old in the farm town of Gaston, Ore.
After seeing the movie "Hotel Rwanda," she formed a Sudan Club with a
few friends and has raised $400 for Darfur by selling eggs, washing
cars and asking for donations instead of birthday presents. Her best
friend's Christmas present to her was raising $50 for Darfur. Now Tacey
is organizing a Darfur fair next month.

President Bush has been
more active lately on Darfur, and without the administration's
relentless pushing the peace deal on Friday would have been impossible.
But by and large, there has been a vacuum of leadership on Darfur over
the last few years, and ordinary Americans — particularly young people
— have tried to fill it. I don't know whether to be sad or inspired
that we can turn for moral guidance to 12-year-olds.

Then there
are the entertainers. Frankly, I think it's bizarre that we turn to
movie stars for guidance on international relations. But in this case,
I bow low to George Clooney, who had the guts to travel to the Darfur
area last month, and to Angelina Jolie, who has visited the Darfur area
twice and is pushing for action on Darfur more forcefully than almost
anyone in Washington.

t gets weirder: "CBS Evening News" decided that genocide wasn't
newsworthy, devoting only two minutes to coverage of Darfur in all of
2005 — but there's excellent coverage on MTV's university network and
in episodes of the TV show "E.R." set in Darfur. And one of the best
presentations of life in Darfur is in an extraordinary video game
developed with help from MTV and available free at www.darfurisdying.com. In the game, you're a Darfuri, trying to survive as Sudan's janjaweed militias hunt you down.

So
that's how the response is unfolding to the first genocide of the 21st
century: a video game is one of the best guides to understanding the
slaughter, and our moral vacuum is filled by teenyboppers and movie
stars.

Someday we will look back at this motley army of children
and celebrities, presided over by a man struggling with leukemia, and
thank them for salvaging our national honor.

A Star Is Made - New York Times

A Star Is Made - New York Times: "Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in 'none of the above.' He is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?"
(..)

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking and darts. They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own laboratory experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the "Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of clichés that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular clichés just happen to be true.

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good. Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't "good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

Liveria sex for aid "widespread"

Young girls in Liberia are still being sexually
exploited by aid workers and peacekeepers despite pledges to stamp out
such abuse, Save the Children says.

Girls as young as eight are being forced to have sex in
exchange for food by workers for local and international agencies,
according to its report.

The agency says such abuse is becoming more common as people displaced by the civil war return to their villages.

Marshamllows and Public Policy

Commentary by David Brooks of the New York Times on the psychological underpinnings of success, i.e., self-control and the type of external environment that is necessary for the development of the ability to delay gratification...



Around 1970, Walter Mischel launched a classic experiment. He left a succession of 4-year-olds in a room with a bell and a marshmallow. If they rang the bell, he would come back and they could eat the marshmallow. If, however, they didn't ring the bell and waited for him to come back on his own, they could then have two marshmallows.

In videos of the experiment, you can see the children squirming, kicking, hiding their eyes — desperately trying to exercise self-control so they can wait and get two marshmallows. Their performance varied widely. Some broke down and rang the bell within a minute. Others lasted 15 minutes.

The children who waited longer went on to get higher SAT scores. They got into better colleges and had, on average, better adult outcomes. The children who rang the bell quickest were more likely to become bullies. They received worse teacher and parental evaluations 10 years on and were more likely to have drug problems at age 32.

The Mischel experiments are worth noting because people in the policy world spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve education, how to reduce poverty, how to make the most of the nation's human capital. But when policy makers address these problems, they come up with structural remedies: reduce class sizes, create more charter schools, increase teacher pay, mandate universal day care, try vouchers.

The results of these structural reforms are almost always disappointingly modest. And yet policy makers rarely ever probe deeper into problems and ask the core questions, such as how do we get people to master the sort of self-control that leads to success? To ask that question is to leave the policy makers' comfort zone — which is the world of inputs and outputs, appropriations and bureaucratic reform — and to enter the murky world of psychology and human nature.

And yet the Mischel experiments, along with everyday experience, tell us that self-control is essential. Young people who can delay gratification can sit through sometimes boring classes to get a degree. They can perform rote tasks in order to, say, master a language. They can avoid drugs and alcohol.

For people without self-control skills, however, school is a series of failed ordeals. No wonder they drop out. Life is a parade of foolish decisions: teen pregnancy, drugs, gambling, truancy and crime.

If you're a policy maker and you are not talking about core psychological traits like delayed gratification skills, then you're just dancing around with proxy issues. You're not getting to the crux of the problem.

The research we do have on delayed gratification tells us that differences in self-control skills are deeply rooted but also malleable. Differences in the ability to focus attention and exercise control emerge very early, perhaps as soon as nine months. The prefrontal cortex does the self-control work in the brain, but there is no consensus on how much of the ability to exercise self-control is hereditary and how much is environmental.

The ability to delay gratification, like most skills, correlates with socioeconomic status and parenting styles. Children from poorer homes do much worse on delayed gratification tests than children from middle-class homes. That's probably because children from poorer homes are more likely to have their lives disrupted by marital breakdown, violence, moving, etc. They think in the short term because there is no predictable long term.

The good news is that while differences in the ability to delay gratification emerge early and persist, that ability can be improved with conscious effort. Moral lectures don't work. Sheer willpower doesn't seem to work either. The children who resisted eating the marshmallow didn't stare directly at it and exercise iron discipline. On the contrary, they were able to resist their appetites because they were able to distract themselves, and think about other things.

What works, says Jonathan Haidt, the author of "The Happiness Hypothesis," is creating stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off — and practice. Young people who are given a series of tests that demand self-control get better at it over time.

This pattern would be too obvious to mention if it weren't so largely ignored by educators and policy makers. Somehow we've entered a world in which we obsess over structural reforms and standardized tests, but skirt around the moral and psychological traits that are at the heart of actual success. Walter Mischel tried to interest New York schools in programs based on his research. Needless to say, he found almost no takers.

Life imitating art? This is similar to the plot of "The Constant Gardener" flick...


A panel of Nigerian medical experts has concluded that Pfizer Inc. violated international law during a 1996 epidemic by testing an unapproved drug on children with brain infections at a field hospital.

That finding is detailed in a lengthy Nigerian government report that has remained unreleased for five years, despite inquiries from the children's attorneys and from the media. The Washington Post recently obtained a copy of the confidential report, which is attracting congressional interest. It was provided by a source who asked to remain anonymous because of personal safety concerns.

The report concludes that Pfizer never obtained authorization from the Nigerian government to give the unproven drug to nearly 100 children and infants. Pfizer selected the patients at a field hospital in the city of Kano, where the children had been taken to be treated for an often deadly strain of meningitis. At the time, Doctors Without Borders was dispensing approved antibiotics at the hospital.

Pfizer's experiment was "an illegal trial of an unregistered drug," the Nigerian panel concluded, and a "clear case of exploitation of the ignorant."

The test came to public attention in December 2000, when The Post published the results of a year-long investigation into overseas pharmaceutical testing. The news was met in Nigeria with street demonstrations, lawsuits and demands for reform.

Pfizer contended that its researchers traveled to Kano with a purely philanthropic motive, to help fight the epidemic, which ultimately killed more than 15,000 Africans. The committee rejected that explanation, pointing out that Pfizer physicians completed their trial and left while "the epidemic was still raging."

In the Media

In the Media: "In an earlier commentary in this series, I lamented the fact that, despite clear and substantial evidence of terrorist activities, Sub-Saharan Africa remains largely ignored by both policymakers and scholars when it comes to threat assessment and resource allocation in the global war on terror.

This omission becomes even more egregious when one takes stock of another element in the strategic calculus: that there are direct linkages between radical groups and individuals in the terror wars' main theatre, the Greater Middle East, and the conflicts that have wracked the African continent in recent decades.

To the extent it is known in the West, the Sierra Leonean civil war (1991-2002) is remembered for its brutal limb-amputating rebels from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and its financing through the traffic in so-called 'conflict diamonds.'

Less well-known is that much of this illicit trade-before, during, and after the open conflict-was controlled by members the West African country's Lebanese Shi'a Muslim community. Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Sierra Leonean Lebanese Shi'a community actively supported the Amal militia, one of the armed groups used by the late Syrian President Hafez al-Assad to drive the U.S.-led multinational peacekeeping force from Beirut as well as to undermine the Lebanese government. In fact, Amal's leader, Nabih Berri, currently speaker of the Lebanese National Assembly, was born in Sierra Leone."

latina diamond

latina diamond
Originally uploaded by someonewalksinla.

Excellent photo of immigrant rights protestor in L.A.

Crossroads Arabia » Saudis to Clean Up Libraries

Crossroads Arabia » Saudis to Clean Up Libraries: "Terror Literature to Be Weeded out of Libraries

Riyadh, 2 May (AKI) - The authorities in Saudi Arabia have begun a campaign to weed out terrorist literature from public libraries in the kingdom, local daily al-Watan reports. The daily said that in the conservative city of Buraida, north of the capital, several libraries were offering copies of a reference book on how to make bombs used by Jihadi combattants. The text also reportedly described bomb making techniques, intended to kill the infidels.

The newspaper said that this book and others that the newspaper had managed to borrow from the library have since been removed.

This piece from the Italian news agency AKI, citing the Arabic language daily Al-Watan, is encouraging. It's certainly a good thing that terror-related books are being removed from Saudi libraries. It's a good place to start.

The Saudis also need to go a step further: they need to remove books, articles, and tapes that preach intolerance not only from their own libraries, but the libraries and reading rooms around the world to which they've been sent.

This poses a problem for the Saudi government. Much of the intolerant and unacceptable materials was issued, over the past 30 years, by the late Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, who was Grand Mufti. Repudiating works by a man whose piety was widely acknowledged around the world is difficult, to say the least. But much of what Bin Baz believed and wrote about–he truly believed the world was flat, for instance–is sorely out of date. He was not noted for tolerance toward any aspect of Islam that did not accord with his own, personal view.

Saudi embassies now need to find a way to start removing books that had been distributed to mosques, Islamic centers and schools that no longer reflect Saudi views of the world. The directive to do so needs to come from the top as bureaucrats–even ambassadors–are not likely to take the step themselves: CYA is a universal bureaucratic response."

How Bad Is Inflation in Zimbabwe? - New York Times

How Bad Is Inflation in Zimbabwe? - New York Times: "HARARE, Zimbabwe, April 25 — How bad is inflation in Zimbabwe? Well, consider this: at a supermarket near the center of this tatterdemalion capital, toilet paper costs $417"

But what is happening is no laughing matter. For untold numbers of Zimbabweans, toilet paper — and bread, margarine, meat, even the once ubiquitous morning cup of tea — have become unimaginable luxuries. All are casualties of the hyperinflation that is roaring toward 1,000 percent a year, a rate usually seen only in war zones.

Zimbabwe has been tormented this entire decade by both deep recession and high inflation, but in recent months the economy seems to have abandoned whatever moorings it had left. The national budget for 2006 has already been largely spent. Government services have started to crumble.

The purity of Harare's drinking water, siphoned from a lake downstream of its sewer outfall, has been unreliable for months, and dysentery and cholera swept the city in December and January. The city suffers rolling electrical blackouts. Mounds of uncollected garbage pile up on the streets of the slums.

gladwell.com

Interesting tidbits from Malcolm Gladwell (whose books, "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" are great reads) pertaining to the Duke lacrosse case...

gladwell.com: "But the Duke case is an example of another, even more problematic aspect of eyewitness identifications, and that is that we aren’t particular good at making them across races. "

(..)

The problem seems to be that when we encounter someone from a different group we process them at the group level. We code the face in our memory under the category black or white, and not under the category of someone with, say, an oval face and brown eyes and a prominent chin. Race, in other words, trumps other visual features that would be more helpful in distinguishing one person from another. Why do we do this? One idea is simply that it’s a result of lack of familiarity: that the more we “know” a racial type, the more sophisticated our encoding becomes. Another idea is that it’s a manifestation of in-group/out-group bias. The thing about coding by group and not by facial feature is that it’s a lot faster. And from an evolutionary standpoint, you’d want to use quicker processing methodologies in dealing with those who come from unfamiliar—and potentially unfriendly—groups. The bottom line is that the adage that “all blacks look the same” to whites (and all whites look the same blacks) has some real foundation.

Divisions Cast Aside in Cry for Darfur

Divisions Cast Aside in Cry for Darfur: "Clutching signs that read 'Never Again,' thousands of protesters from across religious and political divides descended on the Mall yesterday along with celebrities and politicians to urge President Bush to take stronger measures to end the violence in Sudan's Darfur region that the United States has labeled genocide."
(..)

They came out as one, they said, to demand that the Bush administration place additional sanctions on Sudan and push harder for a multinational peacekeeping force to be sent to Darfur.
(..)

Among the speakers were Rabbi David Saperstein; Al Sharpton; Joe Madison, a liberal black radio talk-show host who has been pushing the issue; Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention; rap and fashion mogul Russell Simmons; and former basketball star Manute Bol, who is himself Sudanese.

"This is one world, and we are all one family," said Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of the Washington Archdiocese. "What happens to the people of Darfur happens to us."

Speaking later before the crowd, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said: "Paralysis in the face of genocide is wrong. . . . If we care, the world will care."
(..)

"The world policy on Sudan is failing," said actor George Clooney, who recently visited the Chad-Sudan border, where hundreds of thousands of Darfuris live in refugee camps. "If we turn our heads and look away and hope it will all go away, then they will, and an entire generation will disappear."
His father, Nick Clooney, a veteran journalist, said: "We didn't stop the Holocaust. We didn't stop Cambodia. We didn't stop Rwanda. But this one, we can stop."
(..)

As the rally's first speaker, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel drew a direct comparison to his own suffering in Nazi concentration camps.
"As a Jew, I'm here because when we needed people to help us, nobody came," Wiesel, the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner, told the applauding crowd. "Therefore, we're here."

Paul Rusesabagina, a Rwandan hotel manager who is credited with saving 1,200 Rwandans from slaughter, spoke later.
"Twelve years ago, a militia was slaughtering innocent civilians in cities and towns in Rwanda," said Rusesabagina, whose story was depicted in the movie "Hotel Rwanda."
"As Rwanda has been abandoned, Darfur is also abandoned," he said. "The world is still standing by when a genocide was taking place."

Several speakers urged universities and governments to divest their assets from Sudan.

Younis Tagelalla, 40, was among a small contingent of immigrants from Darfur. He looked around in awe at the sea of black, white and brown faces showing their support for his homeland.
When he lived in Sudan, he said, he was told that Jews were the enemies of Muslims.
Yesterday, he knew different.
"This is not about religion. This is about saving humanity," said Tagelalla, a cabdriver, who got on a bus from New York that was funded by a Jewish group.

"The whole world is behind us. We are so grateful."

Peace Corp. - The Boston Globe

The private military firm Blackwater, recently pilloried for providing onadequate protection to its employees in Iraq as well as shooting of unarmed citizens in the wake of the Katrina disaster, now wants to go to Darfur...

Peace Corp. - The Boston Globe: "But according to J. Cofer Black, vice chairman of the private security firm Blackwater, there is another option that ought to be on the table: an organization that could commit significant resources and expertise to bolster the African Union peacekeepers and provide emergency support to their flagging mission.

A few weeks ago, at an international special forces conference in Jordan, Black announced that his company could deploy a small rapid-response force to conflicts like the one in Sudan. ''We're low cost and fast,' Black said, ''the question is, who's going to let us play on their team?'"

The Forgotten Voices of Darfur at The Black Iris of Jordan

A take on the Darfur from a Jordanian blogger...

The Forgotten Voices of Darfur at The Black Iris of Jordan: "Last night I watched Hotel Rwanda for the second time. In the film there is a scene where a camera man named Jack has just captured some horrible images of people being slaughtered and the main character Paul is convinced this footage will force people in the west to pay attention. Jack of course explains the greater reality of the world we live in today by telling him:


I think if people see this footage, they’ll say Oh, my God, that’s horrible. And then…they’ll go on eating their dinners.

I don’t know which tragedy is worse: the fact that thousands have been raped and killed, the fact that the world is generally apathetic, the fact that the Arab and Muslim world in particular is apathetic, the fact that it remains ongoing, the fact that a few years have passed and there are still so many who don’t know what’s going on, the fact that it doesn’t make the news anymore, or the fact that we go on eating our dinners.

The death toll stands at 400,000

Let me repeat that

The death toll stands at 400,000

5,000 every month

2.4 million displaced

In 3 years

The UN calls it “the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis”"

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

The Colbert report on Comedy Central is one of the funniest shows to come along in a long time. I am definitely going to check out the video links to the press press corp dinner...

Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things: "Stephen Colbert kicks ass at White House press corps dinner
Stephen Colbert's routine at last night's White House Press Corps dinner sounds like one of those perfect moments of comedy and commentary -- someone, find me a transcript!

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, 'and reality has a well-known liberal bias.'

He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. 'This administration is soaring, not sinking,' he said. 'They are re-arranging the deck chairs--on the Hindenburg.'

Colbert told Bush he could end the problem of protests by retired generals by refusing to let them retire. He compared Bush to Rocky Balboa in the 'Rocky' movies, always getting punched in the face--'and Apollo Creed is everything else in the world.'

Link (Thanks, Stefan!)

Update: Thanks to Butter71 for links to the transcript and video! w00t!

Update 2: Here's a high-quality torrent of the video.

Update 3: Youtube mirror (Thanks, Jon!)

Update 4: Alternative Quicktime link, Quicktime of Colbert's 'audition reel' (Thanks, Krup!) "

Character vs Reputation

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation,
because your character is what you really are,
while your reputation is merely what others think you are.

 - Dale Carnegie 

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Parrot's oratory stuns scientists

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Parrot's oratory stuns scientists: "The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short.

The bird, a captive African grey called N'kisi, has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour.

He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope - just as a human child would do.

N'kisi's remarkable abilities, which are said to include telepathy, feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine.

N'kisi is believed to be one of the most advanced users of human language in the animal world.

About 100 words are needed for half of all reading in English, so if N'kisi could read he would be able to cope with a wide range of material.

Polished wordsmith

He uses words in context, with past, present and future tenses, and is often inventive.

One N'kisi-ism was 'flied' for 'flew', and another 'pretty smell medicine' to describe the aromatherapy oils used by his owner, an artist based in New York.

When he first met Dr Jane Goodall, the renowned chimpanzee expert, after seeing her in a picture with apes, N'kisi said: 'Got a chimp?'

N'kisi with picture card and teacher Grace Roselli
School's in: He is a willing learner
He appears to fancy himself as a humourist. When another parrot hung upside down from its perch, he commented: 'You got to put this bird on the camera.'"

Scientists Probe the Use of the Tongue - Yahoo! News

Scientists Probe the Use of the Tongue - Yahoo! News: "PENSACOLA, Fla. - In their quest to create the super warrior of the future, some military researchers aren't focusing on organs like muscles or hearts. They're looking at tongues.
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By routing signals from helmet-mounted cameras, sonar and other equipment through the tongue to the brain, they hope to give elite soldiers superhuman senses similar to owls, snakes and fish.

Researchers at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition envision their work giving Army Rangers 360-degree unobstructed vision at night and allowing Navy SEALs to sense sonar in their heads while maintaining normal vision underwater — turning sci-fi into reality.

The device, known as 'Brain Port,' was pioneered more than 30 years ago by Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, a University of Wisconsin neuroscientist. Bach-y-Rita began routing images from a camera through electrodes taped to people's backs and later discovered the tongue was a superior transmitter."

The Free Africa Foundation

An interesting site on current issues pertaining to Africa: http://freeafrica.org/liberty.html

Outlook: Africa's Destructive Leaders

An excellent book I have been reading which covers the economic "infrastructure" behind corruption is the "The Undercover Economist."...

Outlook: Africa's Destructive Leaders: "Douglas Farah , former West Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post and author of 'Blood From Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror,' was online Monday, April 24, at 2:30 p.m. ET to discuss his Sunday Outlook article, African Pillagers , ( Post, April 23, 2006 ), on the capture of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor and the destructive leaders still in power on the continent."

Farmers at the Trough

Farm subsidies are precisely one reason farmers in third world countires can't compete. A good book I have read in this regard is the following: The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy : An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade

Farmers at the Trough: "FARM SUBSIDIES have risen from $8 billion in 1997 to a projected $22 billion this year. Farm earnings have risen, too. Net farm income grew from $36 billion in 2002 to a record $83 billion in 2004. Although that fell last year to $72 billion and is forecast to drop again in 2006, to $56.2 billion, that's still above the 10-year average.

But why let good news stand in the way of even more payments to farmers? The Senate is poised to add $4 billion in 'disaster' payments to farmers as part of the emergency spending bill it's debating. A big chunk would go to farmers who have suffered no other disaster than the high energy prices that are hitting every other sector of the economy -- not to mention anyone who drives a car."

Sabbah’s Blog » Blog Archive » Prostitution is now official and religiously condoned in Arab land

Sabbah’s Blog » Blog Archive » Prostitution is now official and religiously condoned in Arab land: "Well, it’s only turning bad news from Saudi. And unfortunately, it is about woman, again. But this time it’s on a larger scale. It is called; “destruction of all family values.”

I was not shocked when I heard that Misyar marriage is now officially blessed by the highest rank Mullah’s of Saudi. But it really made me feel sick."

Sabbah’s Blog » Blog Archive » Pakistani woman, jailed for being raped in Saudi Arabia, deported

Sabbah’s Blog » Blog Archive » Pakistani woman, jailed for being raped in Saudi Arabia, deported: "[Source] Sixteen-year-old Isma Mahmood was deported to Pakistan last month after serving six months in shackles and handcuffs in a prison in Saudi Arabia. Her crime: being raped by a Saudi man."

Mothers of Nepal Vanquish a Killer of Children - New York Times

Mothers of Nepal Vanquish a Killer of Children - New York Times: "Across the impoverished kingdom of Nepal, 50,000 mothers like Mrs. Gurung, most of them illiterate, are foot soldiers in one of the great unfolding public health triumphs of modern times: the global push to slash the number of children who die from complications of measles.

Nepal's first national measles vaccination campaign last year cut by 90 percent the country's measles-related deaths, usually about 5,000 per year, the United Nations Children's Fund estimates.

But remarkable as it is, that tremendous success is overshadowed by the grievous toll measles continues to take in neighboring India. Experts estimate that more than 100,000 children a year still die there from complications of measles for want of a 15 cent vaccine.

The contrast between the nations highlights both the extraordinary promise of measles control, and the tragedy of its unfulfilled potential."