The Charity Gap

But there is a surprising disconnect between Americans' philanthropic aspirations and their charitable giving. The vast majority of givers believe the bulk of their donations help those less fortunate than themselves. In fact, less than one-third of the money individuals gave to nonprofits in 2005 went to help the economically disadvantaged.
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It's just not true, in other words, that the major beneficiaries of charity and philanthropy are the disadvantaged.

The "charity gap" is even wider among the affluent. Wealthy individuals claim, according to a Bank of America Study, that their giving is driven by a "feeling that those who have more should give to those with less." But people who earn more than $1 million per year give only 4% of their donations for basic needs and an additional 19% to other programs geared toward the poor.

These numbers matter. Overall donations by individuals are more than four times that of foundation and corporate philanthropic efforts combined. And they matter most among the wealthiest, since fewer than 10,000 families contribute more than 20% of all donations.

While more research is necessary to understand this charity gap, several explanations seem likely. First, it is certainly easier to give -- and harder to say no -- to those in your own community or among your circle of friends. Neighbors deliver invitations to school auctions; classmates call for university capital campaigns. The homeless shelter in the inner city offers neither the peer pressure of a familiar face nor the opportunity for one's friends to see one's generosity. Giving to organizations close to home also offers more comfort that funds will be used effectively.

A second reason may be that donors do not fully understand where their contributions go. For people with annual incomes below $100,000, religious giving dominates, comprising two-thirds of all donations. While the church food drive may be in donors' minds as they reach into their pockets, less than 20 cents of every dollar given to religious organizations funds programs for the economically disadvantaged. For the wealthiest Americans, education and health care comprise the majority of donations. Yet in education, fewer than nine cents per dollar pays for scholarships; in health, only 10 cents per dollar funds programs targeted to the needy.s matter. Overall donations by individuals are more than four times that of foundation and corporate philanthropic efforts combined. And they matter most among the wealthiest, since fewer than 10,000 families contribute more than 20% of all donations.
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The "charity gap" becomes more acute as the scale goes global. The most generous estimate shows that only 8% of U.S. individual donations supports international causes of any kind. Though many organizations including Global Giving and TechnoServe demonstrate that small amounts of money can make an enormous difference in the lives of individuals and communities in poor countries, the world's poorest are virtually ignored by the philanthropic giving of citizens of the world's wealthiest nation.

How to Place Gifts to Charity on Autopilot

The Giving USA Foundation estimates that in 2005, the average household gave 2.2% of its after-tax income to charity. Are you among the inadvertent misers who didn't? Try treating giving like any other monthly bill that you pay automatically via credit card or a direct debit from your bank account.
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About 2,500 churches offer ParishPay as an option now, up from 1,600 just a year ago. Tim Dockery, ParishPay's president, says the average family increases its annual contribution by 75% once it starts using the service.
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If yours isn't among them -- or there are other causes you wish to support with a regular payment -- there are independent services that can set it up. At networkforgood.org, you can schedule multiple recurring payments to just about any school, religious institution or charity, as long as you give more than $10 per contribution to each one.
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Meanwhile, American Express offers a similar service for cardholders at americanexpress.com/give. Want to work through your bank? Its online bill-pay service usually will let you schedule a monthly check for charity.

When Numbers Get in the Way of Compassion

Suppose I were seeking donations to the charity Save the Children, to help feed poor children in Africa. Which of the following three messages would be most persuasive?

(1) A description and photo of one seven-year-old girl in Mali, named Rokia, who “is desperately poor and faces a threat of hunger or even starvation.”

(2) Four statistics about the food crisis, such as, “More than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance.”

(3) A combination of (1) and (2).

Researchers recently tried out all three messages, seeking up to $5 in donations. Message 1 was by far the most effective, yielding an average donation of more than $2. Neither of the other two message averaged more than $1.43 — meaning that whatever psychological effect was created by personalizing the charity ended up negated by the numbers. “The numbers appeared to interfere with people’s feelings of compassion toward the young victim,”
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Prof. Slovic’s focus is on the mass deaths of humans, such as in Darfur. He writes that “we need to create laws and institutions that will compel appropriate action when information about genocide becomes known,” because moral outrage won’t suffice. We are, as his Foreign Policy piece is headlined, “numbed by Numbers.”

The Mozambique Miracle

MAPUTO, Mozambique -- In the Hulene quarter of this former Portuguese colonial capital, private minibuses swerve around holes carved in seas of mud. Metal sheets provide shelter for thousands packed in without electricity or sanitation. Illiteracy and HIV rates are shockingly high. The stench and deprivation take the breath away.

Mozambique is one of the world's poorest countries. It's also an African success story. Here, such things are relative.
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For all the debates over development strategies, the secret to Mozambique's recovery is simple. "We opened our markets and dropped the centralized economy," says Miquelina Menezes, who chairs the country's association of economists
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The payoff is the highest average growth rate, at 8% over the last decade, among the continent's non-oil exporters. GDP per capita is a still tiny $320, but that's compared with $178 in 1992. Since 1997, poverty rates decreased more in rural areas (from 71% to 55%) than in urban (62% to 52%), according to the World Bank. Child mortality has declined to 152 per 1,000 live births from 235. And primary-school enrollment has risen to 71% from 43%. Once a leading recipient of food aid, Mozambique now exports maize, with 5.6% average yearly growth in farming in the last 15 years. Banks, telecom and tourist firms, many from neighboring South Africa, have come in.

For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too

This well done article has elicted a number of good responses including a separate column responding to the article by Judith Warner here.
Ms. Warner writes:
These were girls who took multiple Advanced Placement classes while playing multiple sports and musical instruments, winning top prizes, starring in plays, helping the homeless and achieving fluency in one or two foreign languages. More amazing still: despite all this incredible accomplishment, they weren’t guaranteed access to their first-choice colleges.

I felt a bit sick at heart, at first, when I read this.

And then I thought: It’s probably the best thing that could have happened to them.
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But I do think that figuring out at 18 – and not at 28 or 38 or 48, when the stakes are so much higher – that achievement for achievement’s sake is basically a zero-sum game is a very good thing. That increasing numbers of college-bound seniors are being forced to come to that realization is perhaps the one upside to today’s all-but-random college admissions game.

That is, if they have the eyes to see it. And some clearly do. I defer here to the words of Kat Jiang, a Newton North senior, who dismissed her precollege experience – and her perfect 2400 SAT score (“I was lucky”) in a video interview that accompanies Rimer’s piece online: “You can be good at a lot of things or bad at a lot of things, and it has virtually no impact on whether or not you are good at life,” she said.

Wish someone had told me that when I was her age.

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A lot of success early in life can be a real liability — if you buy into it. Brass rings keep getting suspended higher and higher as you grow older. And when you grab them, they have a way of turning into dust in your hands. Psychologists — from Alice Miller to Madeline Levine — have all kinds of words for this, but the women I know seem to experience it as living life with a gun pointed to their heads. Every day brings a new minefield of incipient failure: the too-tight pants, the peeling wallpaper, the unbrilliant career.

Many, I think, never figure out how to handle the emptiness that comes when the rush of achievement fades away, or the loneliness — the sense of invisibility — when no one is there to hand out yet another “A.” The fact is: when you are narrowly programmed to achieve, you are like a windup toy with only one movement in its repertoire. You’re fine when you’re wound up; but wind you down, and you grind to a halt.
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We could also make the extraordinary article on the Harvard admissions Web site “Time Out or Burn Out for the Next Generation” required reading for all parents, starting when their kids are in preschool. “Even those who are doing extraordinarily well, the ‘happy warriors’ of today’s ultracompetitive landscape, are in danger of emerging a bit less human as they try to keep up with what may be increasingly unrealistic expectations,” the authors, who include Harvard’s dean of admissions, write. “[T]he only road to real success is to become more fully oneself.”

Even as Africa Hungers, Policy Slows Delivery of U.S. Food Aid

MULONDO, Zambia — Traveling to school in wobbly dugout canoes, Munalula Muhau and her three cousins, 7- and 8-year-olds whose parents had died from AIDS, held onto just one possession: battered tin bowls to receive their daily ration of gruel.

Within weeks, those rations, provided by the United Nations World Food Program, are at risk of running out for them and 500,000 other paupers, including thousands of people wasted by AIDS who are being treated with American-financed drugs that make them hungrier as they grow healthy.

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” said Jeffrey Stringer, an American doctor who runs a nonprofit group treating more than 50,000 Zambians with AIDS, “but it will result in the death of some patients.”

Hoping to forestall such a dire outcome, the World Food Program made an urgent appeal in February for cash donations so it could buy corn from Zambia’s own bountiful harvest, piled in towering stacks in the warehouses of the capital, Lusaka.

But the law in the United States requires that virtually all its donated food be grown in America and shipped at great expense across oceans, mostly on vessels that fly American flags and employ American crews — a process that typically takes four to six months.

For a third year, the Bush administration, which has pushed to make foreign aid more efficient, is trying to change the law to allow the United States to use up to a quarter of the budget of its main food aid program to buy food in developing countries during emergencies. The proposal has run into stiff opposition from a potent alliance of agribusiness, shipping and charitable groups with deep financial stakes in the current food aid system.
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Over the past three years, the same four companies and their subsidiaries — Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, Bunge and the Cal Western Packaging Corporation — have sold the American government more than half the $2.2. billion in food for Food for Peace, the largest food aid program, and two smaller programs, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Shipping companies were paid $1.3 billion over the same period to move the food aid overseas, the department’s figures show.

An Army of Housewives Battles TB in Bangladesh

BETGARI, Bangladesh — In the golden haze of dawn, Mohammed Salim Sheikh walked slowly through the paddies, so frail and thin that the lungi wrapped around his waist looked like a clown’s oversize trousers.
Carrying a treatment chart in one hand and a stainless steel water glass in the other, he crossed the threshold of a house. The housewife inside, Zahida Khatun Jharna, rose from her cooking fire, fetched his medication and filled his water glass. Then she ticked off his chart for the day and sent him home.

The routine plays out in countless villages across this country every morning, and it represents a remarkably simple but apparently effective effort to tackle a stubborn and deadly epidemic: tuberculosis, a scourge that kills 1.6 million people worldwide each year.

Lining up the Loan Angels

April 9, 2007 issue - Fighting poverty has along and divisive history, but nothing's shaken up the pundits, wonks and windbags like microfinance. The United Nations declared 2005 the year of microcredit—small loans for the penniless—and last year's Nobel Peace Prize went to Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, which pioneered such lending. Governments from Brazil to Bosnia have launched massive microloan programs, and commercial banks like ABN AMRO, HSBC and Citicorp are rushing down-market. Some 500 million poor worldwide have reportedly benefited from some $6 billion in microloans, which aficionados want to ramp up to $300 billion. "One day," Yunus predicted, "our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like."

That was then. Now a backlash is growing.

Under the Influence

Click on this link for last week's "60 minutes" expose on the incredible entanglement between the government and big pharma...

A Republican congressman talks about the lobbyist-induced frenzy to pass the Medicare prescription drug bill in the U.S. House of Representatives in an interview with Steve Kroft. More...

It's a Profit Deal

Interesting discussion follows the article...

Needing relief from medieval churches and cutesy cafes on a trip to Prague a few years back (O.K., and a tax break), I paid a call on the Prague Stock Exchange, tucked in a blocky, Soviet-style building off the main drag.
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Nonetheless, I learned more in the next 20 minutes about how the world works than I had in the last 20 years sweating on Wall Street as an analyst and running a hedge fund.

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here’s two years of B-school in a nutshell:

* Profits lead to increased living standards.
* Money sloshes around the globe seeking its highest risk-adjusted returns.
* The stock market allocates precious capital to companies it thinks can maximize profits and starves those that it thinks can’t.

In other words, the stock market is democracy’s half-evil, half-angelic henchman, whose tool is more carrot than stick...

A Saudi Desert Fox

April 9, 2007 issue - Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah often has the weary air of a simple man who's lived long enough to see it all, and in many ways he has. He was born more than 80 years ago, into a world of desert warriors where his father had yet to conquer the holy cities of Mecca and Medina or found the nation that Abdullah rules today. No oil flowed from beneath the sands. No Israel existed. The whole of the modern Middle East, for better or worse, has been created in his lifetime.
Yet now, say senior Saudi princes and members of the government, Abdullah has grown so angry and "emotional" about the disasters confronting the region that he's decided to take on a new role. No longer will Saudi Arabia play backup while its ally the United States fronts the band. Abdullah has grown frustrated, almost bitter, with the fecklessness of a divided Arab world. As if taking a line from Plato's Republic—"He who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one worse than himself"—the old king is now trying to lead on virtually every sensitive issue in the Middle East, from an Arab-Israeli peace to Darfur.
This surge of diplomatic initiative has baffled Washington. Bush officials worry whether Abdullah's new activism will ultimately support U.S. policy or undermine it...

Sanctuary for Sex Slaves

An incredibly sad story of human trafficking, which affects an entire family by Nicholas Kristof

Here is a piece that looks at man's capacity for evil: Finding Hope in Knowing the Universal Capacity for Evil

Q. So you disagree with Anne Frank, who wrote in her diary, “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart?”

A. That’s not true. Some people can be made into monsters. And the people who abused, and killed her, were.

The Genocide Olympics

Mia Farrow decries corporate sponsorship as well as artistic involvement (e.g. Steven Spielberg) in the 2008 Olympics to be held in Bejing...
"One World, One Dream" is China's slogan for its 2008 Olympics. But there is one nightmare that China shouldn't be allowed to sweep under the rug. That nightmare is Darfur, where more than 400,000 people have been killed and more than two-and-a-half million driven from flaming villages by the Chinese-backed government of Sudan.

That so many corporate sponsors want the world to look away from that atrocity during the games is bad enough. But equally disappointing is the decision of artists like director Steven Spielberg -- who quietly visited China this month as he prepares to help stage the Olympic ceremonies -- to sanitize Beijing's image. Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?

China is pouring billions of dollars into Sudan. Beijing purchases an overwhelming majority of Sudan's annual oil exports and state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. -- an official partner of the upcoming Olympic Games -- owns the largest shares in each of Sudan's two major oil consortia. The Sudanese government uses as much as 80% of proceeds from those sales to fund its brutal Janjaweed proxy militia and purchase their instruments of destruction: bombers, assault helicopters, armored vehicles and small arms, most of them of Chinese manufacture. Airstrips constructed and operated by the Chinese have been used to launch bombing campaigns on villages. And China has used its veto power on the U.N. Security Council to repeatedly obstruct efforts by the U.S. and the U.K. to introduce peacekeepers to curtail the slaughter.

Confessions of a Car Salesman

A fascinating expose on the wild, wacky, and tawdry world inside a car dealership by an undercover sleuth. It is worth reading this long article in its entirety...
Confessions of a Car Salesman

Sustaining the unsustainable

Global investors are worried about many things. Why is America's current-account deficit not one of them?

A few years ago most economists argued that the spectacle of poor countries bankrolling America's deficits was the perverse and unsustainable consequence of American profligacy. Economic theory suggested that capital should flow from rich countries to poor ones, and that America could not increase its foreign borrowing for ever. Empirical studies showed that deficits of more than 5% of GDP caused trouble.
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Since then, economists have vied with each other to overturn this orthodoxy. Indeed, rejecting the conventional wisdom is now itself entirely conventional, as Jeffrey Frankel, an economist at Harvard University, has pointed out
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They point out that emerging economies have been frantically accumulating real assets, such as assembly lines and office towers, but their generation of financial assets has not kept pace. Thanks to weak property rights, fear of expropriation and poor bankruptcy procedures, many newly rich countries are unable to create enough trustworthy claims on their future incomes. Lacking vehicles for saving at home, the thrifty buy assets abroad instead. In China, Mr Caballero argues, this is done indirectly through the state, which buys foreign securities, such as Treasuries, then issues bonds of its own, which are held by Chinese banks, companies and households.

Santana--Europa

Feel the passion....

Young Sikh Men Cut Hair, Annoying Elders

Sikh spiritual leaders express dismay at the rapidity with which a new generation of young men are trimming their hair and abandoning the turban, the most conspicuous emblem of the Sikh faith. While there are no hard data, Jaswinder Singh, a lawyer and leader of a “turban pride” movement, estimates that half of India’s Sikh men now forgo the turban, compared with just 10 percent a couple of decades ago.
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Since 1699, about two centuries after the founding of the religion, Sikh leaders have prohibited their members from cutting their hair, saying long hair is a symbol of Sikh pride. The turban was conceived to manage the long hair and intended to make Sikhs easily identifiable in a crowd.
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In addition, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Sikhs traveling abroad have complained of being mistaken for turban-wearing Taliban and harassed by airport security guards.

World’s Cruelty and Pain, Seen in an Unblinking Lens

Glad to see recognition of perhaps the world's best social documentary photographer...If I had chosen another career, doing something similar to Mr. Nachtwey would have been my dream...


It matters not a little that Mr. Nachtwey is such an artful composer of images, that his work, although almost too painful to look at, is so graphic and eloquent. He snaps a picture just at the moment that the arms of rushing, dodging medics trading scalpels and scissors form a perfect zigzag of thrusting lines ending with a nurse pressing a fist into a patient’s head wound — the punctum of the image, to borrow Roland Barthes’s term. The nurse’s gesture has a strangeness that carries something of the quality of grace.
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Beauty is a vexed matter in scenes of suffering, cruelty and death. The difference between exploitation and public service comes down to whether the subject of the image aids the ego of the photographer more than the other way around. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Along with bravery and perseverance, Mr. Nachtwey’s pictorial virtue makes him a model war photographer. He doesn’t mix up his priorities. His goal is to bear witness, because somebody must, and his pictures, devised to infuriate and move people to action, are finally about us, and our concern or lack of it, at least as much they are about him and his obvious talents.

Taking our leaders at face value

The qualities that voters think they can discern in a candidate's face have a surprisingly strong influence on how they vote. In fact, if you take the new research at face value, how much voters like (or dislike) a candidate's face is the only thing that will decide who wins or loses.

What matters to voters isn't so much whether a candidate is attractive or not. Instead, voters look for facial cues for personality traits like aggressiveness, intelligence, honesty, friendliness, and competence. The surprising thing isn't that people look for these cues – it's that judgments about a candidate's face all by themselves seem to predict whether he or she will win or lose the election.

The Curse of Oil

The Niger Delta is made up of nine states, 185 local government areas, and a population of 27 million. It has 40 ethnic groups speaking 250 dialects spread across 5,000 to 6,000 communities and covers an area of 27,000 square miles. This makes for one the highest population densities in the world, with annual population growth estimated at 3 percent. About 1,500 of those communities play host to oil company operations of one kind or another. Thousands of miles of pipelines crisscross the mangrove creeks of the Delta, broken up by occasional gas flares that send roaring orange flames into the already hot, humid air. Modern, air-conditioned facilities sit cheek-by-jowl with primitive fishing villages made of mud and straw, surrounded with razor wire and armed guards trained to be on the lookout for local troublemakers. It is, and always has been, a recipe for disaster.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that for fifty years, foreign oil companies have conducted some of the world’s most sophisticated exploration and production operations, using millions of dollars’ worth of imported ultramodern equipment, against a backdrop of Stone Age squalor. They have extracted hundreds of millions of barrels of oil, which have sold on the international market for hundreds of billions of dollars, but the people of the Niger Delta have seen virtually none of the benefits. While successive military regimes have used oil proceeds to buy mansions in Mayfair or build castles in the sand in the faraway capital of Abuja, many in the Delta live as their ancestors would have done hundreds, even thousands of years ago—in hand-built huts of mud and straw. And though the Delta produces 100 percent of the nation’s oil and gas, its people survive with no electricity or clean running water. Seeing a doctor can mean traveling for hours by boat through the creek

Diamonds Move From Blood to Sweat and Tears

It was the first stone he had found in days, and he expected to get little more than a dollar for it. It hardly seemed worth it, he said — after days spent up to his haunches in mud, digging, washing, searching the gravel for diamonds.

But farming had brought no money for clothes or schoolbooks for his two wives and five children. He could find no work as a mason.

“I don’t have choice,” Mr. Kamanda said, standing calf-deep in brown muddy water here at the Bondobush mine, where he works every day. “This is my only hope, really.”

Diamond mining in Sierra Leone is no longer the bloody affair made infamous by the nation’s decade-long civil war, in which diamonds played a starring role.

The conflict — begun by rebels who claimed to be ridding the mines of foreign control — killed 50,000 people, forced millions to flee their homes, destroyed the country’s economy and shocked the world with its images of amputated limbs and drug-addled boy soldiers.

You, Too, Can Be a Banker to the Poor

For those readers who ask me what they can do to help fight poverty, one option is to sit down at your computer and become a microfinancier. That’s what I did recently. From my laptop in New York, I lent $25 each to the owner of a TV repair shop in Afghanistan, a baker in Afghanistan, and a single mother running a clothing shop in the Dominican Republic. I did this through www.kiva.org, a Web site that provides information about entrepreneurs in poor countries — their photos, loan proposals and credit history — and allows people to make direct loans to them. So on my arrival here in Afghanistan, I visited my new business partners to see how they were doing.

Blue Cross cancellations called illegal

Blue Cross of California "routinely" violated state law when it canceled individual health insurance coverage after policyholders got pregnant or sick, making no attempt to determine whether they did anything to merit such "harsh" treatment, according to a state investigation of practices that appear to be industrywide. State regulators plan similar investigations of other health plans in California, and the findings against Blue Cross ratchet up the risk of liability for other insurers, many of whom face lawsuits from consumers who claim they were illegally dumped and subjected to substantial hardships.

The child slaves of Saudi Arabia

On the wealthy streets of Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia, thousands of young child-beggars, under the auspices of ruthless gangmasters, are simply trying to survive.

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior

Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.

Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.

Official Alerted F.B.I. to Rules Abuse 2 Years Ago, Lawyer Says

As mentioned earlier, Bassem is one of the most honorable individuals I have ever known...

WASHINGTON, March 18 — Almost two years before the Federal Bureau of Investigation publicly admitted this month that it had ignored its own rules when demanding telephone and financial records about private citizens, a top official in that program warned the bureau about widespread lapses, his lawyer said on Sunday.

The official, Bassem Youssef, who is in charge of the bureau’s Communications Analysis Unit, said he discovered frequent legal lapses and raised concerns with superiors soon after he was assigned to the unit in early 2005.
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One of the F.B.I.’s few fluent Arabic speakers, Mr. Youssef won the Director of Central Intelligence Award in 1995 for his work infiltrating the Islamic group led by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is now serving a life sentence in prison on charges tied to the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993. From 1996 to 2000, Mr. Youssef was the Justice’s Department’s legal attaché to Saudi Arabia, where he won praise for his work with Saudi officials on investigations of the bombing of the Khobar Towers in 1996.

If Crack Dealers Took Lessons From Walgreens, They Really Would Be Rich

Several weeks ago, I was talking to a physician in Houston, the sort of older gentleman family doctor you don’t see much of anymore. His name is Cyril Wolf. He’s originally from South Africa, but other than that, he struck me as the quintessential American general practitioner of decades past.

’d asked him a variety of questions — what’s changed in recent years in his practice, how managed care has affected him, etc. — when suddenly his eyes fired up, his jaw set tight, and his voice took on a tone of great exasperation. He began to describe a simple but huge problem in his practice: a lot of generic medications are still too expensive for his patients to afford. Many of his patients, he explained, must pay for their drugs out-of-pocket, and yet even the generic drugs at pharmacy chains like Walgreens, Eckerd, and CVS could cost them dearly.

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Here are the prices he found at Houston stores for 90 tablets of generic Prozac:

Walgreens: $117

Eckerd: $115

CVS: $115

Sam’s Club: $15

Costco: $12

Those aren’t typos. Walgreens charges $117 for a bottle of the same pills for which Costco charges $12.

Physicians for Clinical Responsibility

Physicians for Clinical Responsibility was formed by a group of retinal surgeons to address the ethical and financial issues related to pharmaceutical industry influence upon medical care choices. Most recently, we have been alarmed by the rapidly escalating cost of drugs, particularly when extremely costly drugs seem to offer no clear advantage over much less expensive medications. Growing health care costs are not financially sustainable, and we are concerned that rising drug costs in particular will seriously impair the ability of our health care system to address essential health care needs of our citizens.

The pharmaceutical industry plays an important role in drug development, but we are concerned about its growing control over academic research, drug regulation and legislation, and medical education, including medical conferences and medical publications. Like all corporations, pharmaceutical companies are dedicated to making money. This is problematic only when there is insufficient counter-balance from institutions designed to protect the public good.

This website has been designed to allow professionals to express views that are not necessarily favorable to the pharmaceutical industry and that have generally received little hearing in drug-company sponsored publications. The essay Avastin vs. Lucentis: Why It Matters exemplifies our core concerns. We welcome comments and submissions via the links above.

Growing Older, and Adjusting to the Dark

How well do you see at night? If you’re over 50, probably not as well as you think, no matter how many carrots you eat. The typical 50-year-old driver needs twice as much light to see as well after dark as a 30-year-old. Yet few of us compensate adequately for the reduction in nighttime acuity that occurs in the aging eye.

Blind Learn To See With Tongue

Daniel Sieberg reports on a revolutionary technology. Brainport sends electrical impulses to the tongue, using tiny cameras as eyes, essentially creating a picture for blind people.

Grammy-Nominated Artist Makes Music for Yoga

The sonorous chanting of Indian music has always resonated with me, from my early days of going to a Sikh gurdurara...
Check out the link for some nice sonic samples of such by a Western artist..

Jai Uttal's vast musical interests are reflected in numerous world fusion recordings. For more than 30 years he has traveled around the world performing concerts and leading Kirtan, or Indian chanting.

Stereo Eclipse

A Lunar Eclipse of the sun...from space. Click on the link for a pic and a movie...

"The images have an alien quality," notes Guhathakurta. "It's not just the strange colors of the sun. Look at the size of the Moon; it's very odd." When we observe a lunar transit from Earth, the Moon appears to be the same size as the sun—a coincidence that produces intoxicatingly beautiful solar eclipses. The silhouette STEREO-B saw, on the other hand, was only a fraction of the sun's diameter. "It's like being in the wrong solar system."

The Moon seems small because of STEREO-B's location. The spacecraft circles the sun in an Earth-like orbit, but it lags behind Earth by one million miles. This means STEREO-B is 4.4 times further from the Moon than we are, and so the Moon looks 4.4 times smaller.

Win a Trip, and See a Different World

Cast your eyes above and meet Hidaya Abatemam, whom I met last month in a remote area of southern Ethiopia. She is 6 years old and weighs 17 pounds.

Hidaya was starved nearly to death and may well have suffered permanent mental impairment, helping to trap her — and her own children, if she lives that long — in another generation of poverty.

Yet maybe the more interesting question is not why Hidaya is starving but why the world continues to allow 30,000 children like her to die each day of poverty.

Ultimately what is killing girls like her isn’t precisely malnutrition or malaria, but indifference. And that, in turn, arises from our insularity, our inexperience in traveling and living in poor countries, so that we have difficulty empathizing with people like Hidaya.

I often hear comments from readers like: “It’s tragic over there, but we’ve got our own problems that we have to solve first.” Nobody who has held the hand of a starving African child could be that dismissive.

That lack of firsthand experience abroad also helps explain why we are so awful at foreign policy: we just don’t “get” how our actions will be perceived abroad, so time and again — in Vietnam, China, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Latin America — we end up clumsily empowering our enemies.

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Let’s face it: We’re provincial.

That’s one reason that I always exhort college students to take a “gap year” and roam the world, or at least to take a summer or semester abroad — and spend it not in Paris or London, but traveling through Chinese or African villages. Universities should give course credit for such experiences — and offer extra credit for students who catch intestinal worms.

So I’m now putting my company’s money where my mouth is. On Tuesday, in partnership with MySpace.com, The New York Times and I will announce a second annual “win a trip” contest to choose a university student to travel with me on a reporting trip to Africa. And this year, in addition to a student, I’ll choose a schoolteacher — from a middle school or high school — to accompany me as well. We'll probably travel together to Rwanda, Burundi and Congo.

Global Health, China's Pride On Line in Malaria's Clash

Kunming Pharmaceutical Corp. of China makes a potent drug to fight malaria, a disease that kills more than a million people a year. Business is brisk. Yet the World Health Organization calls the sale of the drug a major threat to global health. It is demanding that Kunming and makers of similar pills desist.

It's a dispute that touches on money, national pride and the dilemmas of treating infectious diseases. The WHO says resistance is emerging to the drug, based on the natural substance artemisinin, and in most cases it should only be used in combination with other antimalarial drugs. The leading combination drug is made by Novartis AG of Switzerland.

Kunming and other Chinese drug makers say the WHO is overestimating the risk of resistance -- and underestimating the urgent need for treatments. "This medicine is in huge demand, especially from African countries," says Yu Zelin, Kunming's general director of international trade. The Chinese companies also resent being boxed out of part of a market for a drug Chinese scientists invented.

Teens take Darfur's suffering seriously

That's my boy!


A business card may seem an unlikely item for a 13-year-old student to carry, but Ryan Dhindsa hands you his with a confident smile. "Poverty fighters," it reads. "A genocide that can be stopped. Ryan Dhindsa, president." Ryan, an eighth-grader at Sage Ridge School in Reno, also has a Web site and a worldview well beyond his years.

Wireless Technology Speeds Health Services in Rwanda

Enter Voxiva, a United States company that has built a system that lets health workers send reports by cellphone directly from the field. First deployed five years ago to track disease outbreaks in the Amazon basin, Voxiva’s system is also being used in Indonesia for avian flu reporting and in India in testing of a new drug for leishmaniasis, a disease spread by sand flies.

In Rwanda, the system started being used to track H.I.V./AIDS patients two years ago and now connects 75 percent of the country’s 340 clinics, covering a total of 32,000 patients.

“By identifying individual patients in a central database, we can now follow up on individual patients, even when they change clinics,” Dr. Nyaruhirira said. “The wonderful thing with Rwanda is that mobile phones are everywhere.”

Using mobile phones makes sense across the developing world, said Howard Zucker, assistant director general of health technology and pharmaceuticals at the World Health Organization.

Bargaining Down the Price of that CT Scan

Another letter from the healthcare dialogue referenced below...

Articles like this one miss the point entirely. The amount that doctors and hospitals charge for thier services would appear to make no sense because of its actual irrelevance in the marketplace. In today’s managed care era, doctors and hospitals are told how much they will be reimbursed for their services, an amount which has failed to account for inflation in remaining the same or even declining for years. A physician can charge $500 or $5,000 for a CT scan but 95% of the patients, covered by managed care and medicare, will be watching their third-party payer pay $200 if that. Physicians are not responsible for increased health care costs because frankly they have absolutely no input into what they are compensated for their services - this is done by managed care. The negotiation goes “here’s what we’ll pay the doctor, take it or leave it. But all the patients have already signed up with us.” These “negotiated” fees are often nowhere near the true market value of services (and have absolutely nothing to do with what the charge is for those services) which we’ll never know because medicine is forced to NOT be a part of the capitalist, supply-and-demand economy like everything else is.
When the entire country signs up with managed care and medicare, they ARE telling those third-party providers to “bargain” or negotiate for them, a negotiation that is entirely one-sided. How is it possible that United Health Care last year posted profits of $1.2 billion in the fourth quarter alone and yet six weeks later announced they were CUTTING fees to physicians and continues to raise the premiums they charge? Our country needs to understand that the vast majority of their health care dollars are going into the hands of large corporations and not getting anywhere near actual health care costs. Managed care allegedly did a great job of eliminating all the inefficiencies in the system, but now have become the biggest inefficiency themselves. As a result, instead of people’s health care dollars being put into inproving the quality of care and the way in which care is delivered, updating technologies and improving services, providers are forced to operate on a shoestring budget that prohibits the true possibilities from actually happening.
— Posted by Pete

Project Curbs Malaria in Ugandan Group

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 28 — A simple, inexpensive and surprisingly powerful combination of treatments all but wiped out malaria in a group of H.I.V.-positive children in a study in Uganda, scientists are reporting.

The combination — taking one inexpensive antibiotic pill each day and sleeping under an insecticide-treated mosquito net — reduced the incidence of malaria by 97 percent compared with a control group

Low-Cost Antimalaria Pill Available

This is truly an exciting watershed event in which a big pharma company (from France) will offer an effective anti-malarial at cost for the third world...

Neither version, at either price, will bring Sanofi much profit, “but in terms of symbolism, it means a lot,” Dr. Sebbag said.

A new, cheap, easy-to-take pill to treat malaria is being introduced today, the first product of an innovative partnership between an international drug company and a medical charity.

The medicine, called ASAQ, is a pill combining artemisinin, invented in China using sweet wormwood and hailed as a miracle malaria drug, with amodiaquine, an older drug that still works in many malarial areas.

A treatment will cost less than $1 for adults and less than 50 cents for children. Adults with malaria will take only two pills a day for three days, and the pill will come in three smaller once-a-day sizes for infants, toddlers and youngsters.

In Africa, malaria kills 3,000 babies and children each day, but combination drugs like this are not available for children under 11 pounds, and they require taking a larger number of pills each day, as many as 24 for some adult versions.

(..)

Sanofi-Aventis, the world’s fourth-largest drug company, based in Paris, will sell the pill at cost to international health agencies like the W.H.O., Unicef and the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

The rollout of the drug is the result of a two-year partnership between Sanofi and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, a campaign started by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders to find new drugs for tropical diseases.

Doctors Without Borders, better known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières, has long been one of the harshest critics of the pharmaceutical industry, charging that it spent billions on drugs like Viagra, Ambien and Prozac for rich countries and almost nothing on diseases killing millions of poor people.

But, recognizing that new drugs would have to come from the industry’s major players, Doctors Without Borders founded the initiative in 2003 and began seeking partnerships. This is the first to come to fruition.

“This was not a love wedding, it was a reasonable wedding,” said Dr. Robert Sebbag, Sanofi’s vice president for access to medicines. “But reasonableness is often more important for a long marriage. They’ve seen we are not nasty people working against poor countries and seeking only profits."

In Mighty Arab Hub, the Poor Are Left to Their Fate

A "Day in the Life" of a denizen of Cairo...The utter lack of faith in government to help much less care about the average citizen, parallels what I have seen in travels throughout much of Africa...It is an unfortunate reality that many people in the world live under government indifference at best and oppression at worst...

“Everything is from God,” said Mr. Mezar, the fisherman, who was speaking practically, not theologically. “There is no such thing as government. The government is one thing, and we are something else. What am I going to get from the government?”
(..)
One brick in the foundation of single-party rule has been public resignation. There is no widespread expectation that the authorities will give the common man a voice, and so there is rarely any outrage when they do not. The fisherman, the shepherd and Mr. Fathy all said that the most they could hope for from the government was that it stay out of their lives.

“We hope God keeps the municipality away from us,” Mr. Sayed said as he sat in a wooden chair, surveying his fetid flock of goats and sheep with headlights streaming by.

Such a feeling of separation is one reason that the leadership has been able to clamp down on opposition political activities without incurring widespread public wrath, political analysts say.

Blogger on Ice

Once again Egypt's Hosni Mubarak shows zero tolerance for a secular democratic dissenter.

THE BUSH administration has tolerated Egypt's brutal crackdown on domestic dissent and the broader reversal of its democratic spring of 2005 in part because President Hosni Mubarak argues that his adversaries are dangerous Islamic extremists. It's true that the largest opposition movement in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood; how dangerous it is can be debated. But what is overlooked is that Mr. Mubarak reserves his most relentless repression not for the Islamists -- who hold a fifth of the seats in parliament -- but for the secular democrats who fight for free elections, a free press, rights for women and religious tolerance.

The latest case in point is a blogger named Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman, who was sentenced to four years in prison last week on charges of religious incitement, disrupting public order and "insulting the president."..

Bargaining Down the Price of that CT Scan is Now Possible

Click here for an interesting dialogue on health care pricing at the New York Times.
Here is a sample letter:
17.
February 27th,
2007
7:00 am
I would like to know who told you that Physicians negotiate pricing with insurance companies? And have you ever looked at the size of a CPT Code Book that contains Common Procedural Terminology that physicians must use correctly inorder to get reimbursed? Doctors themselves do not know what they are going to get reimburse because the Usual and Customary Rate changes by region. In New Jersey it was or is being modified from Regions A,B, and C to Regions 1 and 2. This is determined by Zip Code. Then the insurance companies utilize data from a company like Ingenix (owned by United Healthcare) to determine a fee. This data is accumulated by Ingenix to help the insurance industry keep track on the cost of services by code. In addition, they provide physicians with a Fee Analyzer (all is not fair in love and war!) to modify their fees or price themselves in line with the average price in the Region 1 and 2. It really doesn’t matter because the physician could charge $500 for an Office Visit or $100 and they still receive what the Usual and Customary Rate is. In addition, the physician never knows what percentage the insurer is paying because the deductible, co-pays, primary and secondary payors vary for each indivdual plan. The insurance industry is a shell game, or as I call it the best form of organized crime. Their is no transparency in the insurance industry. There is no professionalism (look at the people that are physician provider relations representatives) you cannot get a response from them nor can you get someone on the phone. Based on anti-trust laws, if a physician was able to publicly post his pricing, I assume that he would then be able to share what he is reimbursed with his fellow doctors and the patients. Yet, medicine is not like going to Jiffy Lube, only politicians and CEO’s like to make you think it is that easy. Most consumers are uneducated and overwhelmed when they get sick or hurt and do not know what to think when they get diagnosed or hurt. Let’s be realistic, the internet can only provide you with information, it cannot help you truly understand the ramifications of your decisions or the complexities of your disease or injury. One thing always leads to another. Let’s not make healthcare a doctor/patient issue. Let’s make it a people and money issue. Too many CEO’s are making windfall profits and walking away with absurd sums of money as golden parachutes (see William McGuire from United), too many trial lawyers are only interested in suing on behalf of their clients (what ever happened to all this talk about tort reform Mr. President?) Doctors still make a great living, they need to entrust their business to business people especially when they haven’t received reimbursement increases from insurance companies for 3 years sometimes (you and I wouldn’t run a business if we received no COLA or inflationary adjustments) and the consumer needs to understand that medicine is more art and not accounting. Until individual states Department of Banking and Insurance are made up of individuals with diverse backgrounds, not just directors that are former insurance executive awaiting their next big job after their terms are over, nothing will ever change.
— Posted by John Nieradka

As U.S. Puts Pressure on Iran,Gulf's Religious Rift Spreads

Should be required reading for all members of Congress, many of whom don't know (incredibly) the difference between Sunni and Shiias...
Sunni States See Rise In Anti-Shiite Actions; Scare Tactics in Bahrain
(..)
Washington views Iran as a rogue nation that arms militias in Iraq, wants to build a nuclear bomb and seeks Israel's destruction. From Arab kingdoms on the Persian Gulf to Lebanon on the Mediterranean, however, Iran is also viewed through another prism, as a non-Arab, and, for some, heretical power intent on expanding the clout of itself and fellow Shiites at the expense of the region's Sunni establishment.Shiites make up 15% or less of the world's Muslim community, but in many Sunni eyes they hold outsize influence because of Shiite-ruled Iran, which now rivals and sometimes even eclipses Israel as an object of loathing. On the gallows in Baghdad at the end of December, Saddam Hussein used his last words to denounce Americans and "Persians," or Iranians. He didn't name Israel.
(..)

Saudi Arabia, a prime source of toxic jihad theology in the past, now also churns out bile against Iran and Shiites. At the end of December, Abdel-Rahman al-Barrak, a senior cleric, labeled Shiites "more dangerous than Jews and Christians." King Abdullah, in a recent interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper, predicted defeat for what he suggested was an Iranian-backed campaign to convert the Sunni world to Shiism and "to diminish [the Sunnis'] historical power."

BLIND AMBITION Genentech's Big Drug For Eyes Faces a Rival

The Lucentis-Avastin showdown has thrown the pharmaceutical world into a tizzy. Genentech, fearful that a potential billion-dollar-a-year product could be headed down the tubes, is urging doctors to stick to Lucentis and its proven efficacy in treating age-related macular degeneration
(..)
Now the federal government is hoping to settle the dispute by funding a head-to-head comparison of the two biotechnology drugs, the first such trial by the National Institutes of Health. If Avastin works as well as Lucentis, the government's Medicare program for the elderly could save $1 billion or more a year, officials say.

The mutiny by doctors nationwide against a high-priced drug -- and Washington's willingness to go to bat for them -- is triggering alarms in the drug industry. "Industry doesn't want an equivalency trial where there could be decisions on coverage. They are terrified," says William L. Rich, director of health policy at the American Academy of Ophthalmology, which backs the NIH trial.
(..)
Genentech has refused to provide any funding or drugs for the NIH trial, scheduled to start in April.

Deadly drug-resistant TB in HIV patients

A highly drug-resistant form of tuberculosis has killed about 85 percent of South African HIV patients who have become infected, presenting one of the most worrisome problems in HIV and tuberculosis control, researchers reported Sunday.

A Fight to Save Mothers

In many places in Africa, women have a one in ten chance of dying during pregnancy.
There is a good multimedia feature at the linked site as well.

President Bush’s budget request this month proposes that the U.S. cut spending on global maternal and child health programs to $346 million, or just $1.15 per person in the U.S.

To understand what the cuts mean, meet Simeesh Segaye.

Ms. Simeesh, a warm 21-year-old Ethiopian peasant with a radiant smile, married at 19 and quickly became pregnant. After she had endured two days of obstructed labor, her neighbors carried her to a road and packed her into a bus, but it took another two days to get to the nearest hospital.

By then the baby was dead. And Ms. Simeesh awakened to another horror: She began leaking urine and feces from her vagina, a result of a childbirth injury called obstetric fistula.

Ms. Simeesh’s family paid $10 for a public bus to take her to a hospital that could repair her fistula. But the other passengers took one whiff of her and complained vociferously that they shouldn’t have to share the vehicle with someone who stinks. The bus driver ordered her off.

Mortified, Ms. Simeesh was crushed again when her husband left her. Her parents built a separate hut for her because of her smell, but they nursed her and brought her food and water.

In that hut, she stayed — alone, ashamed, helpless, bewildered. She barely ate, because the more she ate or drank, the more wastes trickled down her legs.

Video Games May Boost Surgeons' Skill

Feb. 21, 2007 -- Playing video games may make for sharper surgeons, a new study shows.
(..)
The surgeons with a history of playing video games for more than three hours per week were the fastest and most accurate on the laparoscopy surgery tests.

Those doctors "made 37% fewer errors, were 27% faster, and scored 42% better overall than surgeons who never played video games," write the researchers.

Torture by Worms

Mr. Carter was shaken by the victims he met, including a 57-year-old woman with a Guinea worm coming out of her nipple.

“She and her medical attendants said she had another coming out her genitals between her legs, and one each coming out of both feet,” Mr. Carter added. “And so she had four Guinea worms emerging simultaneously.”

“Little 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children were screaming uncontrollably with pain” because of the worms emerging from their flesh, Mr. Carter said. “I cried, along with the children.”

We tend to think of human rights in terms of a right to vote, a right to free speech, a right to assembly. But a child should also have a right not to suffer agony because of a worm that is easily preventable, as well as a right not to go blind because of a lack of medication that costs a dollar or two, even a right not to die for lack of a $5 mosquito net.

He has led the way in waging that battle. Because of Mr. Carter’s two-decade battle against Guinea worm disease, it is expected to be eradicated worldwide within the next five years. It will be the first ailment to be eliminated since smallpox in 1977, and it has become a race between the worm and the ex-president to see who outlasts the other.

A Film Star in Kampala, Conjuring Amin’s Ghost

I haven't had a chance to see "The Last King of Scotland," yet, which is about how a young, idealistic doctor from
Scotland goes to Uganda to help the poor, but instead has his life changed by his encounter with Idi Amin.
This article comments upon native Ugandans' impression of their history in the film...

Like others, Mr. Kizito said that after all the Rambo movies, Hindi films and second-rate European action flicks he has sat through, it was a joy to see his own country on film and to learn more about an era of Uganda’s past, much of which is still shrouded in mystery.
Amin, a charismatic army sergeant and fearsome boxer, seized power in 1971, promising to shake off the vestiges of colonialism. Instead, he plunged his country into a bloodbath, brutally eliminating his enemies — sometimes quite personally, with a hammer — until he was overthrown in 1979. More than 300,000 people are believed to have been killed.

The movie tracks those events through a fictional relationship with a young, gullible Scottish doctor, but one reason it seems to resonate with audiences here is because so much of it is true.
The Amin family, meanwhile, is not so happy. Relatives said that the former president, who called himself the “Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea” and “The Last King of Scotland,” among other things, was not the madman that Mr. Whitaker portrayed him as being.

TimesSelect The Health Care Racket

Is the health insurance business a racket? Yes, literally — or so say two New York hospitals, which have filed a racketeering lawsuit against UnitedHealth Group and several of its affiliates.
(..)
But it’s a fact that insurers spend a lot of money looking for ways to reject insurance claims. And health care providers, in turn, spend billions on “denial management,” employing specialist firms — including Ingenix, a subsidiary of, yes, UnitedHealth — to fight the insurers.

Of course, rejecting claims is a clumsy way to deny coverage. The best way for an insurer to avoid paying medical bills is to avoid selling insurance to people who really need it. An insurance company can accomplish this in two ways, through marketing that targets the healthy, and through underwriting: rejecting the sick or charging them higher premiums.
(..)
One major factor is that we spend $98 billion a year in excess administrative costs, with more than half of the total accounted for by marketing and underwriting —

And this is just part of the story. McKinsey’s estimate of excess administrative costs counts only the costs of insurers. It doesn’t, as the report concedes, include other “important consequences of the multipayor system,” like the extra costs imposed on providers. The sums doctors pay to denial management specialists are just one example.

Incidentally, while insurers are very good at saying no to doctors, hospitals and patients, they’re not very good at saying no to more powerful players. Drug companies, in particular, charge much higher prices in the United States than they do in countries like Canada, where the government health care system does the bargaining. McKinsey estimates that the United States pays $66 billion a year in excess drug costs, and overpays for medical devices like knee and hip implants, too.

To put these numbers in perspective: McKinsey estimates the cost of providing full medical care to all of America’s uninsured at $77 billion a year. Either eliminating the excess administrative costs of private health insurers, or paying what the rest of the world pays for drugs and medical devices, would by itself more or less pay the cost of covering all the uninsured. And that doesn’t count the many other costs imposed by the fragmentation of our health care system.

GOLLUM & SMEAGOL SING BARRY WHITE.BLUE VERSION. AMDSFILMS

Icy Waterfall in Kiev

From an HDR master:

Africa's Last Best Chance

The long-stalled Doha round of trade talks recently had, in the words of WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy, a jolt of "new energy" after the recent meeting of key trade ministers in Davos. What is not clearly understood is that if a successful agreement is reached, it will be especially good news for Africa.

Failure, conversely, would have tragic consequences for the continent. It would lead the United States and the European Union to negotiate more bilateral free-trade agreements with key countries, but not with sub-Saharan Africa and other poor countries, which offer few attractive markets for developed countries' manufactured goods and services. Africa, which has seen its share of world trade shrink in recent years, would fall even further behind.
(..)
For the Doha round launched in 2001, however, there is a development agenda. At its heart is agriculture -- a politically sensitive sector in the EU and the U.S. but the largest employer in low-income countries, accounting for about 60% of their labor force and 25% of their GDP. The World Bank estimates that these agricultural products face what former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Portman observed is a practically insurmountable global average tariff rate of 62%, and that 93% of the benefits from a successful Doha round would come from improved market access for developing nations' agricultural products.

Farmers represent less than 5% of the labor force in industrial countries, but they have very substantial political power in the U.S., EU and Japan. These political forces, especially in the EU, led to the eventual derailment of the Doha round last summer. But as the Doha talks take on new life, Congress and the Bush administration need to stay true to the commitments of the Doha Development Agenda, especially in agriculture.

Two weeks ago the administration proposed ending subsidies for 80,000 wealthy farmers, substituting trade-distorting subsidies with cash payments to farmers, and trimming traditional agriculture programs by $4.5 billion over the next decade. These proposals, if approved, would directly benefit some of the poorest people on earth, save lives and ultimately reduce American foreign aid, while helping Susan Schwab, the U.S trade representative, put wind in the sails of the ministers' pledge in Davos to restart serious talks.

Stolen kids turned into terrifying killers

(CNN) -- Warlords are forcing children in conflicts around the world to become killing machines -- nothing more than what one child advocate calls "cannon fodder."

Some children are kidnapped from their schools or their beds, some are recruited after seeing their parents slaughtered, some may even choose to join the militias as their best hope for survival in war-torn countries from Colombia, and across Africa and the Middle East, to south Asia.

Once recruited, many are brainwashed, trained, given drugs and then sent into battle with orders to kill.

There is no escape for what the United Nations and human rights groups estimate are 250,000 child soldiers today. These children, some as young as 8, become fighters, sex slaves, spies and even human shields.

Spread of Religion

Religion spread animation (flash animation)

Maps of War

Maps of War (flash animation)

How Not to Talk to Your Kids

An interesting article that counteracts to some extent my current parenting paradigm

That sold me. I’d thought “praise junkie” was just an expression—but suddenly, it seemed as if I could be setting up my son’s brain for an actual chemical need for constant reward.
(..)
Offering praise has become a sort of panacea for the anxieties of modern parenting. Out of our children’s lives from breakfast to dinner, we turn it up a notch when we get home. In those few hours together, we want them to hear the things we can’t say during the day—We are in your corner, we are here for you, we believe in you.

In a similar way, we put our children in high-pressure environments, seeking out the best schools we can find, then we use the constant praise to soften the intensity of those environments. We expect so much of them, but we hide our expectations behind constant glowing praise. The duplicity became glaring to me.

Eventually, in my final stage of praise withdrawal, I realized that not telling my son he was smart meant I was leaving it up to him to make his own conclusion about his intelligence. Jumping in with praise is like jumping in too soon with the answer to a homework problem—it robs him of the chance to make the deduction himself.

But what if he makes the wrong conclusion?

Faces, Faces, Everywhere

Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the Moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Why are some Lay’s chips the spitting image of Fidel Castro, and why was a cinnamon bun with a striking likeness to Mother Teresa kept for years under glass in a coffee shop in Nashville, where it was nicknamed the Nun Bun?

Patenting Life

YOU, or someone you love, may die because of a gene patent that should never have been granted in the first place. Sound far-fetched? Unfortunately, it’s only too real.

Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor. Gene patents slow the pace of medical advance on deadly diseases. And they raise costs exorbitantly: a test for breast cancer that could be done for $1,000 now costs $3,000.

Why? Because the holder of the gene patent can charge whatever he wants, and does. Couldn’t somebody make a cheaper test? Sure, but the patent holder blocks any competitor’s test. He owns the gene. Nobody else can test for it. In fact, you can’t even donate your own breast cancer gene to another scientist without permission. The gene may exist in your body, but it’s now private property.

TimesSelect Death by Dollars

So I’m against economic sanctions in almost every case. But Sudan is an exception, a rare instance where narrowly focused divestment makes practical as well as moral sense. Partly that’s because Sudan’s economy depends on foreign oil companies, giving the outside world leverage. And 70 percent of Sudan’s oil revenue goes to weaponry, like bayonets used to gouge out people’s eyes. The oil companies in Sudan aren’t American; the biggest players are Chinese companies. Pressure on them is also one way to get the attention of the Chinese government, which is Sudan’s main protector in the U.N. Security Council.


(..)

Fortunately, the Darfur divestment campaign has been remarkably restrained in choosing targets. Organizers are not seeking divestment from all of the more than 400 foreign companies that operate in Sudan, but only from a few dozen that are complicit in genocide without helping ordinary Sudanese. (See the guidelines at www.SudanDivestment.org, developed largely by a recent U.C.L.A. graduate, Adam Sterling.)

(..)

More than other money managers, Fidelity has resisted the pressure and clung firmly to Sudan-related investments. So Darfur campaigners are urging investors to avoid Fidelity mutual funds: more information is at www.FidelityOutofSudan.com.

The biggest U.S. investor in Class H shares of PetroChina, a Chinese oil concern whose parent company is active in Sudan, is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. I have huge respect for Mr. Buffett, and he may be thinking: My obligation is to make money for shareholders, not to use their investments in a dubious attempt to save the world. But surely if Berkshire Hathaway and Fidelity mutual funds saw lucrative opportunities in selling bayonets to the janjaweed, they would balk at that. We do have limits; the question is where we draw them.

The Triumph of Love

The US marine Ty Ziegel suffered horrific burns in a suicide bomb attack in Iraq. After months in hospital, he was eventually able to return home — and marry his childhood sweetheart. By Sarah Baxter. Photographs by Nina Berman

See this link for award winning photo.

Was Anna Nicole a Goddess?

Click on this link
for a mythological analysis of the girl who blew me away in her early years as a model for
Guess Jeans. The visual impact of her famous Guess advertisement is still imprinted on my brain.


This culture has come to know 'goddess' as the title bestowed on models, movie stars, and women who embody an astounding physical beauty that most of us could never emulate. I can see how people may call Anna Nicole a Goddess, yet in some ways she seemed a caricature of that.

I see a modern-day goddess as someone who is spiritual and soulful, with an evolving consciousness. Anna Nicole did not strike me as being in touch with her true inner goddess. But she definitely worked the goddess "thing," and in her public person evoked a sex goddess vibe.

Interestingly, from the perspective of goddess mythology, she lived out several archetypes...
(read on)

Havidol

A great satire on big pharma advertising for the "new drug" Havidol (get it?)
IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION
Problems can be avoided if you take HAVIDOL only when you are able to immediately benefit from its effects. To fully benefit from HAVIDOL patients are encouraged to engage in activities requiring exceptional mental, motor, and consumptive coordination. HAVIDOL is not for you if you have abruptly stopped using alcohol or sedatives. Havidol should be taken indefinitely. Side effects may include mood changes, muscle strain, extraordinary thinking, dermal gloss, impulsivity induced consumption, excessive salivation, hair growth, markedly delayed sexual climax, inter-species communication, taste perversion, terminal smile, and oral inflammation. Very rarely users may experience a need to change physicians.
Talk to your doctor about HAVIDOL

Wealthy Nations Announce Plan to Develop and Pay for Vaccines

ROME, Feb. 9 — Officials from a handful of wealthy nations initiated a long-awaited plan on Friday to support and finance the development of vaccines for children in poorer countries, and to purchase the vaccine once it is produced.

The first phase of the program, which is called the Advance Market Commitment, will cover the pneumococcal vaccine, a shot that is effective at preventing deadly pneumonia in children. It is not well suited for use in the developing world because it is expensive and, in its current version, does not protect against some strains common in poor countries.

The program, to be financed through donations from the governments, will cost $1.5 billion and is expected to prevent 5.4 million deaths among children by 2030, according to the World Bank and GAVI, the global vaccine fund that provided technical assistance. A pneumococcal vaccine for children has been widely used in the United States and other developed nations since the late 1990s.

Struggling African nation hopes Whoopi can help

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau (AP) -- When the government of one of the world's poorest nations learned that Whoopi Goldberg had taken a DNA test showing her ancestors hail from there, the news necessitated a high-level meeting.

It was, the country's leaders decided, a chance to change the image of a nation plagued by coups since wresting independence from Portugal in 1973. If the world could only grasp that a Hollywood celebrity traced her roots to this forsaken corner of the globe, it could bring goodwill from afar -- even fame for Guinea-Bissau, they reasoned.

So they set out to write a letter on official stationary embossed with the country's star-shaped seal. It was hand-delivered to the U.S. Embassy, which passed it on to the State Department in Washington with instructions for onward delivery to the home of the Oscar-winning actress.
(..)

But in an e-mail to The Associated Press, the actress' publicist, Brad Cafarelli, writes that Goldberg never received the letter. "Regardless," he says, "due to the fact that she hosts a live daily radio show from New York and does not fly, it would not be possible for her to travel to West Africa in the foreseeable future."

That message has not yet made it to Guinea-Bissau, however, where the politicians that conceived the letter simply think she's taking her time to reply.

"We're waiting for her with much anticipation," said Prime Minister Aristides Gomes, sitting in his leather-clad office, an oasis of comfort in the crumbling capital.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

The Kremlin this week showed that democracy, human rights and the rule of law are dead in Vladimir Putin's Russia. With extraordinarily cynical timing, new charges -- this time, money-laundering -- were brought against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who once ran Russia's largest oil company, Yukos. These charges have nothing to do with upholding Russia's laws. They have everything to do with the fact that Mr. Khodorkovsky would have been eligible for parole later this year, having served half his eight-year sentence on a politically motivated tax evasion conviction handed down in 2005. Another show trial will surely propel the machinery of so-called justice toward another preordained guilty verdic

Mia Farrow's Harrowing Pictures of Victims of the Janjaweed

This mother's three children were burned alive the day before I met her .
2/8/2007
Dear Friend,
Tomorrow is my birthday, and I can't think of anything I would rather be doing: I am leaving today to visit Darfur's borders with the Central African Republic. On Feb 16th I cross back into eastern Chad. Sadly I know I will return with more photographs of further devastation. In the meantime, please scroll down to see pictures from my three previous trips to the region with the continuing hope that you will see, understand and feel a moral imperative to take action to end the immeasurable suffering of the people of Darfur and eastern Chad. Check back soon and often because I will be reporting from the field when i have access.
With hope,
Mia Farrow

Behind Antismoking Policy, Influence of Drug Industry

Michael Fiore is in charge of revising federal guidelines on how to get smokers to quit. He also runs an academic research center funded in part by drug companies that make quit-smoking aids, and he personally has received tens of thousands of dollars in speaking and consulting fees from those companies.

Conflict of interest? No, says Dr. Fiore, who has consistently declared that doctors ought to use stop-smoking medicine. He says his opinion -- reflected in current federal guidelines -- is based on scientific evidence from hundreds of studies.


Now debate is growing about that evidence, and about who should be entrusted to interpret it. Some public-health officials say industry-funded doctors are ignoring other studies that suggest cold turkey is just as effective or even superior to nicotine patches and other pharmaceuticals over the long run, not to mention cheaper.

The Public Health Service, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, issued guidelines in 2000 calling for smokers to use nicotine patches, gums and other pharmaceutical aids to quit, with a few exceptions such as pregnant women. Dr. Fiore, a University of Wisconsin professor of medicine, headed the 18-member panel that created those guidelines. He and at least eight others on it had ties to the makers of stop-smoking products.

Those opposed to urging medication on most quitters note that cold turkey is the method used by the vast majority of former smokers. They fear the federal government's campaign could discourage potential quitters who don't want to spend money on quitting aids or don't like the idea of treating their nicotine addiction with more nicotine.

"To imply that medications are the only way is inappropriate," says Lois Biener, a senior research fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who has surveyed former smokers in her state. "Most people don't want them. Most of the people who do quit successfully do so without them."
(..)

Many clinical trials have randomly assigned smokers to take one of these products or a placebo. Such randomized trials are considered the gold standard in many medical fields, and they have consistently shown that nicotine-replacement therapy or other medicine confers a benefit.

But these trials have limitations. They tend to compare quitters who wanted medication and got it with those who wanted medication and didn't get it -- which is a different group from quitters ready to try going cold turkey. Also, clinical trials tend to attract highly motivated quitters who may not represent the population as a whole. Even the placebo group in these trials often boasts double the success rate of the population of quitters generally.

Studies of quitters outside clinical trials have shown no consistent advantage for medicine over cold turkey, the pharmaceutical industry's primary competitor. An unpublished National Cancer Institute survey of 8,200 people who tried quitting found that at three months, users of the nicotine patch and users of bupropion remained abstinent at higher rates than did users of no medication. But at nine months, the no-medication group held an advantage over every category of stop-smoking medicine. The study was presented at a world tobacco conference last summer.

Hu Defends China's Role in Africa

Yeah right...

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 7 -- Chinese President Hu Jintao on Wednesday sought to reassure Africans that his country's aggressive investments in oil, copper and other natural resources do not amount to a new wave of colonialism, saying China would "not do anything harmful to the interests of Africa and its people."

Eternal Embrace? Couple Still Hugging 5000 Years On

This story certainly makes one contemplates one's mortality and how one will be remembered...


ROME (Reuters) - Call it the eternal embrace.


Archaeologists in Italy have discovered a couple buried 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, hugging each other.

Doctors and Soccer Players — African Professionals on the Move

This article hits upon the immense problem of "brain drain" of African trained doctors, who seek their fortune abroad. Even those who stay in their home countries often migrate to urban areas, leaving the rural poor without access to adequate healthcare. As the medical director of the ECWA hospital in Jos, Nigeria told me, "It is a "sacrifice" for the country to stay and take care of Nigerians as opposed to working abroad.

Another doctor noted that at his salary of $500/month it was very difficult to provide for his family, esp. since he was sending his two children to mission schools at a tuition of $100/month, as the public schooling in Nigeria is abysmal...

"It's the same for football players as it is for doctors," I was told by Tsiri Agbenyega, dean of the medical school in Kumasi, Ghana. "We have to train a lot more than will end up in Ghana, because they all leave. The football players go to Europe, and the doctors to America and the U.K." Agbenyega spoke with a mixture of frustration, pride, and resignation. He was pleased that Ghanaian athletes and physicians were competitive internationally, but their success meant a loss to the country — a loss more problematic in medicine than in football.
(..)

But not so. For much of the past decade, health improvement in Ghana has been at a standstill, and health statistics in many sub-Saharan African countries are sliding backward.3,4 AIDS is a culprit, but so is the exodus of doctors and nurses who are lured by U.S. training and employment opportunities. According to the Ministry of Health, Ghana has about 13 physicians per 100,000 population (as compared with 256 in the United States) and about 92 nurses per 100,000 (as compared with 937 in the United States). Today, there are 532 Ghanaian doctors practicing in the United States. Although they represent a tiny fraction of the 800,000 U.S. physicians, their number is equivalent to 20% of Ghana's medical capacity, for there are only 2600 physicians in Ghana. An additional 259 Ghanaian physicians are in practice in the United Kingdom and Canada — and this group includes only those who have successfully been licensed after leaving Ghana. In other countries, the situation is even worse: 60% of Liberia's physicians are in practice in the United States or Britain.

(..)

Nonetheless, much can be done in the developed world to help build the health workforces of developing countries, including continued investments in training and retention programs and an increased commitment by U.S. health care professionals to work in developing countries. However, the single most important contribution that the United States could make would be to train more doctors at home. About 25% of the physicians practicing in the United States went to medical school abroad — as did roughly the same proportions in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.5 For years, we have been educating about three quarters of the doctors we need and relying on the rest of the world to supply the balance. For 25 years, the number of students admitted to U.S. allopathic medical schools has remained constant, while the number of physicians we import has climbed steadily. Without ever enunciating a strategy of dependence on the world, we have created a huge U.S. market for physicians educated elsewhere, inadvertently destabilizing the medical systems of countries that are battling poverty and epidemic disease.

A commitment in the United States to ramp up medical school opportunities to a level closer to national needs would do much to slow medical migration and bring stability to medical programs in poorer countries. Perhaps soccer players will always migrate to the elite leagues of the world, but if doctors and nurses stayed closer to home, lives would be saved.

Sky Map.org

Check out this link for a great star-sky map:http://server2.wikisky.org/?locale=EN

As Inflation Soars, Zimbabwe Economy Plunges

Indeed, Zimbabwe’s economic descent has picked up so much speed that President Robert G. Mugabe, the nation’s leader for 27 years, is starting to lose support from parts of his own party.

n recent weeks, the national power authority has warned of a collapse of electrical service. A breakdown in water treatment has set off a new outbreak of cholera in the capital, Harare. All public services were cut off in Marondera, a regional capital of 50,000 in eastern Zimbabwe, after the city ran out of money to fix broken equipment. In Chitungwiza, just south of Harare, electricity is supplied only four days a week.

(..)

The trigger of this crisis — hyperinflation — reached an annual rate of 1,281 percent this month, and has been near or over 1,000 percent since last April. Hyperinflation has bankrupted the government, left 8 in 10 citizens destitute and decimated the country’s factories and farms.

The antioxidant myth: a medical fairy tale

If it turns out that antioxidants in food work because they generate health-promoting quantities of free radicals, that would be an ironic turnaround. It may also explain why supplements and extracts don't seem to work or may even be dangerous: the doses are too high, and produce too many free radicals. For now, the advice is simple. "Stick to flavonoid-rich foods, red wine in moderation, tea, fruits and vegetables," says Halliwell. "Don't start taking high-dose supplements or heavily fortified foods, until we know more."

How Do We See Red? Count the Ways

In fact, human eyes, like those of other great apes, seem to be all-around fabulous fruit-finding devices, for they are more richly endowed with the two cone types set to red and yellow wavelengths than with those sensitive to short, blue-tinged light. That cone apportionment allows us to discriminate among subtle differences in fruit ruddiness and hence readiness, and may also explain why I have at least 40 lipsticks that I never wear compared with only three blue eye shadows.

'Something Is Different Because I Was Here'

“Isn't that all any of us really want? To somehow know, or hope, that the world is different, better, because we passed this way.”

CNN Video on Child Prodigy and Artist

Child draws pictures of heaven and turns her mother from atheism...


Here is the link: http://tinyurl.com/yxewot

(Tip of the hat to pianojoe)

Pole-Vaulter Keeps a Low Profile During Her Ambitious Ascent

In many ways, Isinbayeva already has the arc of her career mapped out. Already, the girl who grew up in Volgograd, Russia, the daughter of working-class parents, has broken 19 world records (both indoor and outdoor) and won a gold medal at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. By the 2012 Olympics in London, which she says will be her swan song as a pole-vaulter (at age 30), she would like to have eclipsed the 35 world records that her male pole-vaulting counterpart, Sergei Bubka, set during his career.

It’s an ambitious plan. But Isinbayeva, who has cleared 16 feet 5¼ inches outdoors, has become so dominant in recent years that her greatest competitor is often herself.

“When you achieve everything,” she said, “in that moment it starts to become more difficult.”

(..)

“I like that I can control my body,” she said. “I like to fly. I like those feelings when you’re over the bar. It’s more beautiful than other track and field events.”

Unhappy Meals

This is a fascinating article which indicts the American food industry at many levels. Written in a wry,yet entertaing voice by the author of "The Omnivore's Dilemma," I found it a great article which puts into common sense verbiage what many of us know at an instinctive level:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay...

That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.
(..)

The story of how the most basic questions about what to eat ever got so complicated reveals a great deal about the institutional imperatives of the food industry, nutritional science and — ahem — journalism, three parties that stand to gain much from widespread confusion surrounding what is, after all, the most elemental question an omnivore confronts. Humans deciding what to eat without expert help — something they have been doing with notable success since coming down out of the trees — is seriously unprofitable...

Thailand widens scope of generic drugs

BANGKOK, THAILAND - Frustrated by the price of imported medicines, the Thai government said Monday it would suspend patents on two prescription drugs, one for treating AIDS and another for heart disease. The suspension would allow Thailand to import or manufacture its own copycat versions, cutting the cost of providing free healthcare to its 64 million people.

Nigeria 'squandering' oil riches

Officials in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta have been accused of squandering funds that should have been used to provide services for the poor.

The Obama Messiah Watch

Introducing a periodic feature considering evidence that Obama is the son of God.