G-8 Summit Winds Down With Africa Aid Pledge

HEILIGENDAMM, Germany, June 8 — As the Group of 8 summit meeting moved toward a conclusion, leaders reaffirmed a 2005 pledge of $60 billion to counter HIV and other illnesses in Africa, but did not set any new deadlines for delivering the aid.
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But critics dismissed today’s AIDS announcement, saying that little progress was actually made.

"I am exasperated," Bono, the activist rock star, told Reuters. "I think it is deliberately the language of obfuscation. It is deliberately misleading."

Collins Magalasi of ActionAids said the pledges were little more than “last-minute face saving measures,” according to Reuters.

Bono Takes Off His Glasses

CNN interview with Bono over the G8 summit

Sudan's At-Risk Villages Get Help from Satellites

Vulnerable villages in war-torn Western Sudan are getting help from high-powered satellites. Using a Web site and satellite cameras, Amnesty International USA plans to track developments in 12 at-risk villages by sending up-to-date images to a Web site.

I Had a Home in Africa

I have many friends from Zimbabwea who could write similar memoirs...sadly...


'When a Crocodile Eats the Sun' is a haunting memoir of Zimbabwe, and a lesson for the rest of us.

The question of whether a white African is an ideal or an oxymoron goes to the heart of one of the world's most difficult problems: can ethnic strife ever be stopped?

Prescription Drugs: Where's the Free Market?

...Such abuses should not be surprising to anyone who appreciates the value of a competitive market. The root cause of all of these problems is government-granted patent monopolies that allow the pharmaceutical industry to sell drugs at prices that can exceed the cost of production by a factor of a hundred, or more. Last fall, Wal-Mart began selling hundreds of generic drugs for $4 per prescription. The vast majority of brand drugs could also be profitably sold for $4 per prescription, if it were not for the patent monopoly granted by the government.

As a result of patent monopolies, drug companies can sell drugs for hundreds of dollars that cost them a few dollars to manufacture. This situation invites the sort of corruption that NYT documents regularly in its pages.

Drug patents do serve a purpose: they provide an incentive to the industry to develop new drugs. However, there are other ways in which this research can be financed. The federal government already spends nearly $30 billion a year on biomedical research conducted through the National Institutes of Health. By doubling this amount, it could probably replace the research conducted by the pharmaceutical industry, most of which currently goes to develop copycat drugs (another problem of the patent system).

As another possible alternative, Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz has suggested a prize system, in which the government would buy out patents at prices determined by their usefulness. The patents would then be placed in the public domain so that all new drugs could be sold as generics.

Poker for Darfur!

An opportunity for DocFreeze!!!!


Actor Don Cheadle and poker star Annie Duke asked themselves how they could use their passion for poker to raise money and public awareness of the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan. What they came up with is the first annual [sic] Ante Up for Africa, No-Limit Texas Hold’em Tournament, which they’ll be hosting in Las Vegas on July 5, in association with the World Series of Poker.

ker with some of the biggest stars from the worlds of poker, sports and entertainment. Cheadle’s Ocean’s Thirteen co-stars George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt are among the celebrities who have already committed to play. (Learn more about their partnership with the IRC here.)

You’ll be asked to donate 50% of your winnings to the event’s designated charities, the advocacy group Enough and the IRC, which provides life-saving assistance to the people of Darfur. That donation is 100% tax-deductible.

Burgeoning Treasury Yields Loom Over Stocks

While stock investors have welcomed signs of a stable, growing economy lately, they also have shrugged off a potentially troublesome byproduct: higher Treasury yields.

Welcome to the Jungle

Watch this and see how it applies to ?our life and society...By the way, this also exemplifies why our next trip to South Africa will include a safari--(as opposed to an East African safari)

The U.S. Population is Functionally Illiterate

If this is true, it is scary indeed...

As I discussed recently in the Ray Bradbury post, and the discussion about the CATO expert believing we as voters are too ignorant to vote intelligently, I found something while searching on google that is dismaying to those of us who are politically and intellectually engaged.

Sudan Sanctions: Too Little, Too Late?

President Bush is imposing new economic sanctions against Sudan in an effort to pressure government officials there to end what he referred to as "genocide" in Darfur. The announcement followed a push by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who spent the past month seeking a diplomatic solution to the crisis. More than 200,000 people have died, and more than 2.5 million residents have been displaced during the four years of conflict in the region. And some say the United States could do more.

John Prendergast, a former Clinton administration official and co-author of Not On Our Watch: The Mission To End Genocide In Darfur And Beyond, said he is unimpressed with the new sanctions. The Africa policy expert also is senior adviser to the International Crisis Group.

Design That Solves Problems for the World’s Poor

“A billion customers in the world,” Dr. Paul Polak told a crowd of inventors recently, “are waiting for a $2 pair of eyeglasses, a $10 solar lantern and a $100 house.”

The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent, creating items like wine labels, couture and Maseratis.

“We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,” he said.

To that end, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which is housed in Andrew Carnegie’s 64-room mansion on Fifth Avenue and offers a $250 red chrome piggy bank in its gift shop, is honoring inventors dedicated to “the other 90 percent,” particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day.

A Rocky Start for Nevada’s New Governor

Negative press coverage of Nevada vernor Gibbons has now extended beyond a number or articles from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times:

CARSON CITY, Nev., May 24 — Life these days for Gov. Jim Gibbons of Nevada might kindly be described as suboptimal.

In the last few months, Mr. Gibbons, a Republican, announced a plan to turn coal into jet fuel to raise money (problematic, as Nevada has no coal to speak of) and proposed paying for a $3.8 billion shortfall in highway construction money by selling water rights under state highways (it turns out the state did not actually own the rights).

He told a local editorial board he could not pronounce the name of his energy adviser because she was “Indian” — she is Turkish — and vetoed a bill that would stop budget-busting tax breaks for builders of “green” buildings before issuing an executive order to end them anyway (with the exception of four companies).

Mr. Gibbons is the subject of a Federal Bureau of Investigation inquiry into whether he failed to report gifts from a military contractor while serving in Congress. The governor, who would not be interviewed, has denied wrongdoing, and once suggested that Democratic operatives might have paid off newspaper reporters who have written about his troubles with the F.B.I.

And faced with a collapsing public education system and extensive state infrastructure needs, Mr. Gibbons at one point threatened to veto the $7 billion two-year state budget and shut down government largely over his desire for a security center in Carson City — an idea that law enforcement officials dislike — and his plan to save small businesses two hundredths of a percent on their taxes.

The travails have taken a toll.

Thorn Artisan Master #079 - Redwood & Rosewood

A sub 100 making it's debut...wow! Hardeep is officially the international man of mystery ;) I believe an entire year went by while he contemplated the inlay design. After multiple false starts, he finally decided on ol' faithful - Firesuns :D #079 may not be as fancy as he had originally envisioned, but I believe it couldn't be any more beautiful than how it turned out. So, here comes #079:


Top: Redwood
Body: Honduran Mahogany
Neck: East Indian Rosewood
Fretboard: Brazilian Rosewood
Pickups: Lollar P-90s w/ Redwood Covers
Controls: Vol. / Tone (Push/Pull adds middle pickup) 3-way toggle, Piezo blend, mini 3-way for piezo/passive blend.
Bridge: Thorn 1-pc. Tremolo w/ LR Baggs Piezo Saddles
Color: Natural

I love the way the grain follows the perimeter of the body, especially in the waist. SteveK may recognize the fretboard too, it was cut from the same stick his 3 were. :)

Tone report:
The last rosewood neck Thorn that shipped had 3 P-90s and a koa top. It sounded amazing and I loved it. Now comes along this rosewood necked, 3 P-90s but with a redwood top...what a surprise - it sounds amazing.
I believe the softer/warmer wood tops tame the mids that the rosewood necks add, along with the P-90s adding a little bite and clarity. This combo works!
The piezo in a tremolo is a cool effect, nice shimmer when called upon.

Hardeep, the wait was very long - but I honestly believe that it will have been worth it for you. This guitar has great tone, sustains like a tuning fork, and is a looker for sure.

Enjoy my friend and thank you,

Ron

A Quiet Revolution in Algeria: Gains by Women

ALGIERS, May 25 — In this tradition-bound nation scarred by a brutal Islamist-led civil war that killed more than 100,000, a quiet revolution is under way: women are emerging as an economic and political force unheard of in the rest of the Arab world.

Women make up 70 percent of Algeria’s lawyers and 60 percent of its judges. Women dominate medicine. Increasingly, women contribute more to household income than men. Sixty percent of university students are women, university researchers say.

In a region where women have a decidedly low public profile, Algerian women are visible everywhere. They are starting to drive buses and taxicabs. They pump gas and wait on tables.

500 Years of Female Portraits in West

This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It)

Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy.

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During a standard life-story interview, people describe phases of their lives as if they were outlining chapters, from the sandlot years through adolescence and middle age. They also describe several crucial scenes in detail, including high points (the graduation speech, complete with verbal drum roll); low points (the college nervous breakdown, complete with the list of witnesses); and turning points. The entire two-hour session is recorded and transcribed.

In analyzing the texts, the researchers found strong correlations between the content of people’s current lives and the stories they tell. Those with mood problems have many good memories, but these scenes are usually tainted by some dark detail. The pride of college graduation is spoiled when a friend makes a cutting remark. The wedding party was wonderful until the best man collapsed from drink. A note of disappointment seems to close each narrative phrase.

By contrast, so-called generative adults — those who score highly on tests measuring civic-mindedness, and who are likely to be energetic and involved — tend to see many of the events in their life in the reverse order, as linked by themes of redemption. They flunked sixth grade but met a wonderful counselor and made honor roll in seventh. They were laid low by divorce, only to meet a wonderful new partner. Often, too, they say they felt singled out from very early in life — protected, even as others nearby suffered.

Solar Flashlight Lets Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages

The utter darkness that sets in post sunset is one of the starkest memories I have with regard to my trips to Africa, as well as other places of destitution across the globe. The lack of light really impacts productivity of individuals in many ways...

Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.

His invention gives up to seven hours of light on a daily solar recharge and can last nearly three years between replacements of three AA batteries costing 80 cents.

Over the last year, he said, he and corporate benefactors like Exxon Mobil have donated 10,500 flashlights to United Nations refugee camps and African aid charities.

Another 10,000 have been provided through a sales program, and 10,000 more have just arrived in Houston awaiting distribution by his company, SunNight Solar.

“I find it hard sometimes to explain the scope of the problems in these camps with no light,” Mr. Bent said. “If you’re an environmentalist you think about it in terms of discarded batteries and coal and wood burning and kerosene smoke; if you’re a feminist you think of it in terms of security for women and preventing sexual abuse and violence; if you’re an educator you think about it in terms of helping children and adults study at night.”
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With a little research, he discovered that close to two billion people around the world go without affordable access to light.

(..)The flashlights usually sell for about $19.95 in American stores, but he has established a BoGo — for Buy One, Give One — program on his Web site, BoGoLight.com, where if you buy one flashlight for $25, he will buy and ship another one to Africa, and donate $1 to one of the aid groups he works with.

The Short, Sad History of Chad’s ‘Model’ Oil Project

A well-written summary of the Chad Oil project fiasco which serves to illuminate why it can be so difficult to do business in many places in Africa...

But since the arrival of the oil money, life in Chad, a country three times the size of California with only a few hundred miles of paved roads, has gotten worse: the conflict in Darfur has spread from Sudan into Chad; the country’s government, already weak and corrupt, has become weaker and more corrupt; and bandits have become rebels. All of this in a country of 9 million people, 80 percent of whom live on less than a dollar a day.
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Statistically, it’s not a surprise that oil money has destabilized Chad. Many academic studies show that underdeveloped countries that are highly dependent on money from natural resources tend to be poorer, less democratic and more unstable than similar countries without resource revenues. What’s surprising is how quickly Chad has deteriorated.
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“The shorthand of what went wrong in Chad is that the revenue-management law was based on the expectation that a law could fix something in a country without the rule of law,” Ian Gary, a policy advisor for the relief agency Oxfam, who has been studying the project since its inception, told me. “Chad has no independent judiciary, no history of peaceful transfer of power and no locally elected officials. All the power is located in the presidency, and it’s only grown more concentrated over time. The [World Bank] characterized the project as ‘High risk. High reward.’ If it went well the bank would have looked good, but all the risk was born by the people of Chad.” (World Bank employees have blogged about their shock and bewilderment at being evacuated because of fighting in the capital this December.)

How to REALLY Trade Like Warren Buffett

Many investors are disciples of Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett. Buffett learned his craft from his mentor, Benjamin Graham, author of the legendary tomes "Security Analysis" and "Intelligent Investor". Graham stated the following in 1976, shortly before his death [to the Journal of Finance]:

"I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities. This was a rewarding activity, say, 40 years ago, when [the bible of fundamental stock analysis, Graham and Dodd's Security Analysis] was first published; but the situation has changed. I doubt whether such extensive efforts will generate sufficiently superior selections to justify their cost."

Would the student be able to prove the teacher wrong? Buffet's Chairman’s Letter [2005] in the Berkshire Hathaway annual report indicates that the per-share book value of Berkshire Hathaway has increased at an average annual rate of 21.5% since 1965. Compared to an average of 10.3% for the S&P 500 total return including dividends, the outperformance is striking.

How To Beat The Stock Market: Buy Companies With High Customer Satisfaction Scores

Using a back-tested paper portfolio and an actual case, the authors of a study published in the Journal of Marketing found that companies at the top 20% of the the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) greatly outperformed the the stock market, generating a 40% return.

From 1996-2003, the portfolio outperformed the Dow Jones Industrial Average by 93%, the S&P 500 by 201%, and NASDAQ by 335%.

Abuses in Enrollment Tactics Found for Private Medicare

Insurance agents in at least 39 states used illegal or unethical tactics to sell private Medicare plans, in some cases enrolling the dead and mentally incompetent, impersonating Medicare representatives, and using personal information stolen from federal records, according to interviews and documents released to Congress.

"Medicare Advantage" plans and enrollments have exploded in the past year, touted by the Bush administration as a valuable alternative to Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors.

This Elephant Asks, What’s Your Dosha?

MENTION the name Elephant Pharmacy to people here and the response is, That’s the drugstore that prescribes yoga. In fact, Elephant Pharm, as it calls itself, offers a wide variety of alternative remedies — yoga perhaps being the most mainstream — besides traditional prescriptions. Such branding is invaluable to a small company like this, which is striving to carve a niche as the only drugstore in America thinking outside the big box.

Elephant Pharm’s mission is to become a “natural community hub,” where conventional medicine meets other forms of health care, a combination that it says is not found in any other drugstore.

Eye on helping others

My dear friends Devin and Laurie Harrison are recognized by the Washington Ophthalmologic Society for their humanitarian work!!!

Each year, the Washington State Academy of Eye Physicians and Surgeons (WAEPS) selects one of its members for the Outstanding Humanitarian Service Award. This year’s award went to Harrison. He was was honored during the WAEPS Annual Meeting on March 30, at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center in Seattle. Harrison spent over two years in Nigeria caring for those in dire need of eye care. Many of his patients overseas can now see, thanks to Harrison’s service and skills as a comprehensive ophthalmologist and cataract surgeon. In addition to removal of many cataracts, he treated numerous serious and unusual maladies of the eye and periocular tissues, many of which are never seen in the U.S. “There is one ophthalmologist per every million people over there,” he said. “There’s such a backlog of people who need help there.”
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“I would love to go back to Africa,” he said, adding that there is a continual need for equipment and training augmentation. And the people he has trained simply need an occasional break.

Harrison’s wife Laurie accompanied him to Nigeria and supported his many humanitarian efforts. With them were their two young children Luke and Kiras. All four were victims of armed robbery and had to be evacuated during riots and fighting between Christians and Muslims.

“The work experience was great,” Harrison said. “Living there was sometimes a challenge.”

The award is based on criteria established by the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the national parent organization of WAEPS and the other state ophthalmology societies throughout the United States. The criteria include exceptional service to disadvantaged people in the United States or abroad, sometimes in settings of high risk to the ophthalmologist, as well as personal sacrifice.

In nominating Harrison for the award, several ophthalmologists spoke of his 24/7 humanitarianism, not just for a month or two years of service but for an ongoing ever-present calling to selflessly serve those in need. He has touched the lives of many, both here and abroad.

“That’s one of the reasons I chose ophthalmology,” he said. “I had dreamed of traveling there for years. There’s such a huge need there.”

Harrison has also been nominated by WAEPS to receive the AAO’s 2007 Outstanding Humanitarian Service Award, which will be presented during the AAO Meeting in New Orleans on November 11.

The Witness Next Door

One of the most unusual people in New Jersey these days is a tall 34-year-old black man named Daoud Hari. Others may lose their tempers at traffic jams on the turnpike, but he’s just glad he’s no longer being tortured.
Mr. Hari has just arrived in the U.S. from Chad and Darfur, where he says he was beaten and told repeatedly he was going to be executed. He is one of just a handful of Darfuris — his lawyer knows of two others — whom the U.S. has accepted as refugees.
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Interpreters and drivers are the secret to good international reporting, and they do much of the work, take most of the risks and get none of the credit. Mr. Hari regularly interpreted for other journalists, repeatedly putting himself in danger to get out the stories.

Finally, after more than a month, Sudan freed Mr. Hari along with Mr. Salopek and the driver. Eventually Mr. Hari made his way back to Chad, and the U.S. granted him status as a political refugee. It is disorienting to be with him here, where we are both clean, rested and safe.

Mr. Hari’s presence in the U.S. underscores a profound difference between Darfur and past genocides: In the past, we could always claim that we didn’t fully appreciate what was going on until too late.It was only a faint reed of an excuse, for in fact information always did trickle out about past genocides even as they were underway. But this time we can’t even feign ignorance.

A superb new documentary, “The Devil Came on Horseback,” provides a wrenching tour through the eyes of a tormented American military observer there. A handful of books chronicle the killings; one of them, “Not on Our Watch,” has hit the best-seller list with its suggestions for what citizens can do. President Bush has described the slaughter in Darfur as genocide since 2004.

Google Earth has developed a first-rate program to observe the devastation from above. On my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, you can see a man whose eyes were gouged out by the janjaweed as well as video from the journey last year with Mr. Hari.

Or, if you live in New Jersey, you can simply turn to one of your newest neighbors, and see the pain in his eyes as he wonders if his sisters are still alive.

Clearly, Frankly, Unabashedly Disabled

The public image of people with disabilities has often hinged on the heroic or the tragic. But Mr. Blue, 28, represents the broader portrait of disability now infusing television and film. This new, sometimes confrontational stance reflects the higher expectations among many members of the disabled population that they be treated as people who happen to have a disability, rather than as people defined by disability.

Fisher Is a Father First, and a Jazz Player Later

The intra-arterial chemotherapy mentioned here seems like it could be a very promising way of treating retinoblastoma...

OAKLAND, Calif., May 10 — Derek Fisher had 30 minutes Tuesday morning to decide whether to remove his daughter’s left eye.
Fisher, a point guard for the Utah Jazz, sat in an office at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, across from Dr. David Abramson and Dr. Pierre Gobin, asking them how to cure the cancer that had formed in his baby girl’s retina.

“He really had three choices,” Abramson said. “Remove the eye, remove the eye or remove the eye.”

Last week in Salt Lake City, an advanced case of retinoblastoma, a cancerous tumor of the retina found in about 300 children a year, was diagnosed in Fisher’s 10-month-old daughter, Tatum. Removing the eye is the most common way to remove the tumor.

There was one other option, but it seemed too risky. Last year, Abramson and Gobin developed a procedure called intra-arterial chemotherapy, which allows them to treat the disease without removing an eye.

DIET: Thin people may be fat inside

LONDON - If it really is what's on the inside that counts, then a lot of thin people might be in trouble. Some doctors now think that the internal fat surrounding vital organs like the heart, liver or pancreas — invisible to the naked eye — could be as dangerous as the more obvious external fat that bulges underneath the skin.

Save the Darfur Puppy

Finally, we’re beginning to understand what it would take to galvanize President Bush, other leaders and the American public to respond to the genocide in Sudan: a suffering puppy with big eyes and floppy ears.
That’s the implication of a series of studies by psychologists trying to understand why people — good, conscientious people — aren’t moved by genocide or famines. Time and again, we’ve seen that the human conscience just isn’t pricked by mass suffering, while an individual child (or puppy) in distress causes our hearts to flutter.
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And after I began visiting Darfur in 2004, I was flummoxed by the public’s passion to save a red-tailed hawk, Pale Male, that had been evicted from his nest on Fifth Avenue in New York City. A single homeless hawk aroused more indignation than two million homeless Sudanese.
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In one experiment, people in one group could donate to a $300,000 fund for medical treatments that would save the life of one child — or, in another group, the lives of eight children. People donated more than twice as much money to help save one child as to help save eight.
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“Our capacity to feel is limited,” Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon writes in a new journal article, “Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” which discusses these experiments. Professor Slovic argues that we cannot depend on the innate morality even of good people. Instead, he believes, we need to develop legal or political mechanisms to force our hands to confront genocide.
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But, frankly, after four years of watching the U.N. Security Council, the International Criminal Court and the Genocide Convention accomplish little in Darfur, I’m skeptical that either human rationality or international law can achieve much unless backed by a public outcry.

So maybe what we need isn’t better laws but more troubled consciences — pricked, perhaps, by a Darfur puppy with big eyes and floppy ears. Once we find such a soulful dog in peril, we should call ABC News. ABC’s news judgment can be assessed by the 11 minutes of evening news coverage it gave to Darfur’s genocide during all of last year — compared with 23 minutes for the false confession in the JonBenet Ramsey case.

If President Bush and the global public alike are unmoved by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of fellow humans, maybe our last, best hope is that we can be galvanized by a puppy in distress.

Diet With Low Glycemic Index Slows AMD Progression

May 8, 2007 (Ft. Lauderdale) — People whose diet consists of foods that lead to a high dietary glycemic index have a substantially higher risk of progression of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to recent long-term results from the Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS).

In fact, consumption of highly refined carbohydrates can lead to up to a 17% increased risk of AMD progression, according to a poster presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Vision and Research in Ophthalmology (ARVO).

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Foods that contribute to a lower dietary glycemic index include things such as legumes, rolled oats, basmati rice, whole bran, whole grains, and even pasta if it is cooked al dente (slightly hard). Foods that contribute to a higher glycemic index include things such as instant oatmeal, overcooked pasta, white bread, and many types of potatoes, she said.

As a rule, foods that are more processed are more likely to increase blood sugar and foods that undergo less processing and are “whole” are thought to provide cardiovascular protection.

Doctors Reap Millions for Anemia Drugs

Two of the world’s largest drug companies are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to doctors every year in return for giving their patients anemia medicines, which regulators now say may be unsafe at commonly used doses.
The payments are legal, but very few people outside of the doctors who receive them are aware of their size. Critics, including prominent cancer and kidney doctors, say the payments give physicians an incentive to prescribe the medicines at levels that might increase patients’ risks of heart attacks or strokes.
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Neither Amgen nor Johnson & Johnson has disclosed the total amount of the payments. But documents given to The New York Times show that at just one practice in the Pacific Northwest, a group of six cancer doctors received $2.7 million from Amgen for prescribing $9 million worth of its drugs last year.
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The medicines — Aranesp and Epogen, from Amgen; and Procrit, from Johnson & Johnson — are among the world’s top-selling drugs, with combined sales of $10 billion last year. In this country, they represent the single biggest drug expense for Medicare and are given to about a million patients each year to treat anemia caused by kidney disease or cancer chemotherapy.
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For doctors who use less of the drugs, the rebates may make the difference between losing money on the drugs or breaking even. Mr. Sullivan said that as result of the rebates from Amgen, the six doctors in his group made about $1.8 million in net profit on the drugs they prescribed.

When Order Creates Itself

An anonymous commenter, responding to my previous column, suggested that my title “Our Lives as Atoms” is “more than a little puzzling,” and wondered “Where will all this lead us?” I’ve written about the amplified polarization of opinion in the political blogs, and about the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which had a disturbingly eerie resemblance to famous experiments at Stanford University 36 years ago. What does any of this have to do with atoms? Fair question. I’d like to start my answer by telling you about a strange phenomenon in Spitsbergen.

Where History Reigns

An interesting essay on the differences between England and the U.S. by the columnist David Brooks at the New York Times:

I got to enjoy many of the features I love about Britain: repressed emotions, overarticulate conversationalists and crustless sandwiches.
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In short, Brits live with the constant presence of their ancestors. When Isaiah Berlin compared F.D.R. and Churchill, he observed that while Roosevelt had an untroubled faith in the future, Churchill’s “strongest sense is the sense of the past.”

History, in the British public culture, takes precedence over philosophy, psychology, sociology and economics. And with a few obvious exceptions, British historians have not seen history as the unfolding of abstract processes. They have not seen the human story as the march toward some culminating Idea.
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Even philosophers in Britain tend to be skeptics, and emphasize how little we know or can know. Edmund Burke distrusted each individual’s stock of reason and put his faith in the accumulated wisdom of tradition. Adam Smith put his faith in the collective judgment of the market. Michael Oakeshott ridiculed rationalism. Berlin celebrated pluralism, arguing there is no single body of truth.

This skepticism permeates national life, for while the British can be socially deferential, they are rarely intellectually deferential. The French and the Germans might defer to their intellectuals, and the Arabs might defer to their clerics, but the British public is incapable. That’s why the British trade unions could take on the upper classes in their day, and why the Brits had an open debate about European unification. The British elites exerted enormous pressure in favor of union, but the tabloid readers didn’t care.

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American journalists, for example, are spiritually descended from Walter Lippmann. We are always earnestly striving toward some future elevated state. British journalists are spiritually descended from Samuel Johnson. They are conversationalists enjoying the inevitable conflicts that, as W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman put it, pit the wrong but romantic against the right but repugnant.

Out of the Mouth of Babes...

"He never listens. I ask him everyday to clean his room and it looks like a tornado visits his room daily. He doesn't have chores. All I want him to do is keep his clean room. Is that asking too much?

As the lament over one of our older child goes on and on in rhythm with the turning of the wheels, it is as thought a dark cloud has descended directly into the front seat of the car, obscuring all else...

Out of the backseat, a beautiful, melodious voice innocently and insistently inquires,

"But do you still love him?"

Pin-drop silence as our 7 year old daughter resets reality for us....a ray of light piercing the darkness and dissolving the shadows of self-wrought distortions...

Angela Jolie--Power Giver

Cause: Helping refugees, disaster victims, orphans. Jolie, 31, began work with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Sierra Leone in 2001, the year she became a goodwill ambassador. She has put her time, influence and millions of dollars into helping people in Sudan, Chad and Thailand.

Impact: She donates one-third of her income to charity, and her three adopted children—Maddox, Zahara and Pax—are examples of her continuing commitment to helping those in need.

More of Angela Jolie's work with the organization, Global Action for Children:

Now Angelina has passionately joined forces with GAC, dedicating time, money and emotion to the cause. “My daughter Zahara was orphaned because of AIDS,” she told the audience in Washington, “So I don’t have to tell you how precious I think these children are.”

Methods Used by Insurers Are Questioned

WASHINGTON, May 6 — Insurance companies have used improper hard-sell tactics to persuade Medicare recipients to sign up for private health plans that cost the government far more than the traditional Medicare program, federal and state officials and consumer advocates say.

The (Not So) Eagerly Modern Saudi

This article is an excellent snapshot of the state of flux in which many Saudis find themselves today. The article importantly highlights the surprisingly OPEN nature of the debate which is emerging... (tip of the hat to James)

SAUDI ARABIA, home of Islam’s holiest sites, flush with oil revenue, and increasingly the most influential player among Arab countries, has long resisted changing its ultratraditional ways. Now the intrusions of global economics and technology have begun to challenge some traditions in ways that the country’s idealists could not. And the strain that this is causing is showing in the form of surprisingly open debate about how much Saudis really want to modernize.

While the notorious religious police still roam this capital city, much is evolving in the way people live. Saudis are suddenly overwhelmed with credit card debt. Thousands have grown rich, and thousands more have lost large sums, in the stock market.
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So Saudis are engaged in an increasingly public debate over their identity. Should the school curriculum be changed, with English taught before seventh grade? Should women drive? Should stores stay open past 10? What constitutes religion and what is tradition?
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The surprisingly open nature of this discussion, itself a rarity in a society where people often do not know their own neighbors, has rattled nerves.
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Fifty years ago, Riyadh, the Saudi capital, was a city of mud houses and people who had to make their own shoes. Today, the center of the city is wireless and has Starbucks, Saks Fifth Avenue and Baskin-Robbins.

The incredible Dominic Frasca playing a 10 string guitar

A Healthy Mix of Rest and Motion

...But new findings suggest that for at least one workout a week it pays to be both tortoise and hare — alternating short bursts of high-intensity exercise with easy-does-it recovery.

Weight watchers, prediabetics and those who simply want to increase their fitness all stand to gain.

This alternating fast-slow technique, called interval training, is hardly new. For decades, serious athletes have used it to improve performance.

But new evidence suggests that a workout with steep peaks and valleys can dramatically improve cardiovascular fitness and raise the body’s potential to burn fat.

Best of all, the benefits become evident in a matter of weeks.
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A 2005 study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology found that after just two weeks of interval training, six of the eight college-age men and women doubled their endurance, or the amount of time they could ride a bicycle at moderate intensity before exhaustion. Eight volunteers in a control group, who did not do any interval training, showed no improvement in endurance.

Researchers find ceiling height can affect how a person thinks, feels and acts

For years contractors, real estate agents and event planners have said that whether building, buying or planning an event, a higher or vaulted ceiling is always better. Are they right? Until now there has been no real evidence that ceiling height has any influence or advantage with consumers.

Jeremy Grantham: All the World's a Bubble

How high will the Dow go? 15,000? 20,000?

How about 36,000?

While euphoria sweeps stock markets here and worldwide, there are at least a few voices of dissent.

One, unsurprisingly, is legendary value investor Jeremy Grantham -- the man Dick Cheney, plus a lot of other rich people, trusts with his money. Grantham, chairman of Boston firm Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, has been a voice of caution for years. But he has upped his concerns in his latest letter to shareholders. Grantham says we are now seeing the first worldwide bubble in history covering all asset classes.

Everything is in bubble territory, he says.

Everything.

Doc Freeze has a new blog!

Check out Doc Freeze's new blog described as a blog about Politics, Poker and other Passions.

I am sure it will be quite entertaining!

World rallies for Darfur action

Protests have taken place around the world to demand intervention to end the fighting in Sudan's Darfur region.

For our part today, my two sons and I met Hilary Clinton who was visiting Reno as representatives of the nonpartisan organization, one.org . She mentioned that "Bono" (of U2) is a great friend...as Bush and Tony Blair have also claimed in the past. It must be great when world leaders are proud of the fact that they are your friend!

A Saudi Prince Tied to Bush Is Sounding Off-Key

WASHINGTON, April 28 — No foreign diplomat has been closer or had more access to President Bush, his family and his administration than the magnetic and fabulously wealthy Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia.

Prince Bandar has mentored Mr. Bush and his father through three wars and the broader campaign against terrorism, reliably delivering — sometimes in the Oval Office — his nation’s support for crucial Middle East initiatives dependent on the regional legitimacy the Saudis could bring, as well as timely warnings of Saudi regional priorities that might put it into apparent conflict with the United States.
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Most bitingly, during a speech before Arab heads of state in Riyadh three weeks ago, the king condemned the American invasion of Iraq as “an illegal foreign occupation.” The Bush administration, caught off guard, was infuriated, and administration officials have found Prince Bandar hard to reach since.

China Needs an Einstein. So Do We.

If you look at Einstein’s major theories — special relativity, general relativity and the quantum theory of light — “all three come from taking rebellious imaginative leaps that throw out old conventional wisdom,” Mr. Isaacson said. “Einstein thought that the freest society with the most rebellious thinking would be the most creative. If we are going to have any advantage over China, it is because we nurture rebellious, imaginative free thinkers, rather than try to control expression.”
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“By being able to visualize and think imaginatively about science, he was able to see what more academic scientists failed to see, which is that as you try to catch up with a light beam, the waves travel just as fast, but time slows down for you. It was a leap that better-trained scientists could not make because they did not have the visual imagination.”
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If we want our kids to learn science, we can’t treat science as this boring or intimidating thing. “We have to remind our kids ... that a math equation or a scientific formula is just a brush stroke the good Lord uses to paint one of the wonders of nature,” Mr. Isaacson said, “and we should look at it as being as beautiful as art or literature or music.”
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My favorite Einstein quotation is that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” A society that restricts imagination is unlikely to produce many Einsteins — no matter how many educated people it has. But a society that does not stimulate imagination when it comes to science and math won’t either — no matter how much freedom it has.

Saudis Arrest 172 Militants, Seize Arms

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Police have arrested 172 militants who were plotting to attack Saudi Arabia's oil fields, Saudi state television reported Friday, showing video of explosives, ammunition and firearms found buried in the desert.

U.N. Aid Chief Tours Darfur's Refugee Camps

Attacks on relief workers in Darfur have increased, with 12 aid workers killed last year. Melissa Block talks with NPR's Gwen Thompkins, who visited the Darfur camps for the displaced and health clinics along with U.N. World Food Program Executive Director Josette Sheeran.

Benefit Rummage Sale in Reno

Recently, Leanna Zamora, a registered nurse at Saint Mary's has been diagnosed with a cancerous tumor at a young age of 39 years. She is a single mother of three children ( 11 years old, 5 years old, and 22 months) and has been given less than 2 years to live.

So how can you help?
Collect all the things that have been building up in your garage or closet. Anything that can be sold, clothes, furniture, dishes, etc.

Where do you bring them?
L'uva Bella Wine Gallery will be a drop site or
this address below:
30 Deer Valley Ct.
(Galena Country Estates)
Take Mt. Rose Hwy
Right on Telluride
Left on Solitude
Left on Deer Valley Ct.

Donations will be accepted until May 4th!!!
May 5th is the day of the Rummage Sale at the above address.

All money raisef from the Rummage Sale will go to Leanna Zamora's children.
Please help us help this young mother secure her children's future.
Thank you for your kindness.

If you have any troubles bringing your donations to these 2 locations please call 775-772-9311 and make arrangments to have them picked up for you.

I Have a Persisting Daydream

From Saudi Eve...



I have a persisting daydream

I walk a Saudi street.. I'm wearing a abaya.. every type of harassment I've ever been subjugated to on a Saudi street (staring, terrifying religious advice, explicit sexual advances..etc.) are instead represented by one action: people pulling on my abaya, one after the other, force depends on how severe the harassment is..

I carry this futuristic beam weapon, I shoot them, they evaporize.
I become larger with each hit I make.. and the abaya gets torn a bit each time.. after a couple of hits, I'm very large (tall as a two story house) and almost naked, I'm left with a two piece ensemble that looks like a belly dancers' costume but black.. yet no one comes near me now.. they are afraid..


after that, I just walk the streets of Saudi.. feminine, and undisturbed.

A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves

I have highlighted the stats but read the article to get a personalized understanding of what these migrants lives. When I was in Saudi Arabia, we had many Filipino, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Jordanian etc..."guest workers." Nearly everyone of these I met was incredibly kind and unselfish, toiling away to send money back home to help their family. In many cases the grandparents raised their grandchildren as the parents were working overseas.
The Filipinos highlighted in this article stood out in their kindness, work ethic, and caring. One of the highlights of my 8 years in Saudi Arabia was developing a deep understanding of the wonderful qualities of the Filipino culture through my many friendships with the nurses st the King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital.

About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest.
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Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums — “remittances” — bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does.
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Yet competing with the literature of gain is a parallel literature of loss. About half the world’s migrants are women, many of whom care for children abroad while leaving their own children home.
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With about one Filipino worker in seven abroad at any given time, migration is to the Philippines what cars once were to Detroit: its civil religion.
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Nearly 10 percent of the country’s 89 million people live abroad.
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There are a million O.F.W.’s in Saudi Arabia alone, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. Yet with workers in at least 170 countries, the O.F.W.’s are literally everywhere, including the high seas. About a quarter of the world’s seafarers come from the Philippines. The Greek word for maid is Filipineza.
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‘Patient’ Capital for an Africa That Can’t Wait

Amen, Mr. Friedman!

Scenes like this remind you that Africa is neither all tragedy nor all renaissance. It is a diverse continent that’s struggling to find its way in the global economy and has both of these extremes, but is much more in a middle place that looks like that field in Karatu: a wild, unregulated, informal, individual brand of capitalism, which we need to channel into formal companies that can grow and scale up, even with corrupt governance.

Africa needs many things, but most of all it needs capitalists who can start and run legal companies. More Bill Gateses, fewer foundations. People grow out of poverty when they create small businesses that employ their neighbors. Nothing else lasts.
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A good example of what happens when you combine patient capital, talent and innovation in Africa is the Kenyan company Advanced Bio-Extracts (ABE), headed by Patrick Henfrey. He and his partners put together a fascinating group of both white and black African farmers and scientists to build the first company in Africa to cultivate the green leafy plant artemisia, often called sweet wormwood, and transform it into pharmaceutical grade artemisinin — a botanical extract that is the key ingredient in a new generation of low-cost, effective malaria treatments commonly known as artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACTs). Malaria still kills nearly one million people in Africa every year.

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Nthenya Mule, Acumen’s Kenya country director, commented to me that the stereotype of Africa is that it is hopeless and just waiting around for the West to come to its rescue. In reality, she added, “there are positive things happening in Africa, but they are not happening overnight, and some are happening quietly. ABE is exemplary. You will not see it as front-page news, but in 18 months they set up a factory with 160 people interfacing with 7,000 farmers and supplying one of the major pharma companies in the world.

CALL IN DAY: Support Targeted Sudan Divestment Legislation for Nevada!

Dear Nevada anti-genocide activists,

Help Nevada lead the charge; over fifteen other states are considering targeted Sudan divestment legislation!

Call in Day on Monday, April 23 2007 from 1- 3pm.

If you are unable to call during the designated time please do so at your earliest convenience.

IT IS TIME TO:
Take back Nevada's dollars from companies that fund the genocide in Darfur.

* Targeted Sudan divestment legislation already has the support of Nevada Congressman Jon Porter and Senator Harry Reid.
* Ask House Speaker Barbara Buckley to support targeted Sudan divestment legislation. Her support is crucial to passing legislation in the state.
* Ask Senators Randolph Townsend and Steven Horsford to support targeted Sudan divestment legislation. Their support is crucial to passing legislation in the Senate.

Nevada Should Not be Complicit in Genocide
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Who To Call

Call Nevada House Speaker Barbara Buckley at 775-684-8537.

You can also e-mail Speaker Buckley:
bbuckley@a sm.state.nv.us

Call Nevada State Senator Randolph Townsend at 775-684-1450.

You can also e-mail Senator Townsend:
rtownsend @sen.state.nv.us

Call Nevada State Senator Steven Horsford at 775-684-1429.

You can also e-mail Senator Horsford:
shorsford@ sen.state.nv.us
What to Say: Talking Points

You are a resident of Nevada who cares about ending the genocide in Sudan. Respectfully ask the Nevada legislators to support targeted Sudan divestment legislation. It is important that Nevada divest from foreign companies that contribute to the genocide in Darfur where over 400,000 have died and 2.5 million have been displaced since 2003.

Please contact us at divestment@genocideintervention.net if you have any questions.
Join the Campaign

Join the Nevada targeted Sudan divestment campaign as we continue to fight for targeted divestment legislation. Email us at divestment@genocideintervention.net if you would like to be part of this campaign.

Money-driven Medicine

Interesting post from the metacool blog..

I was impressed by this book by Maggie Mahar; the subtitle is The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. The book has the most coherent, supportable, and fleshed out anti-market story I've seen. It both tries to explain why the current system works as it does, and historically how it evolved from more modest and less expensive ways of doing business. It's not just a rehash of the usual stories about the VA system or France. The discussions of the growth of for-profit hospitals, the increasing specialization of medicine, the problems with pay for performance, and markets for medical devices are all full of interesting tales.

I interpret the basic story as this: the American health care cost spiral comes from suppliers and their entrepreneurial abilities to market expensive and highly specialized services of dubious medical efficacy. Medical care starts off as ambiguous in value and hard to measure in quality. Customers are cowed by doctors and other family members into accepting or even demanding what is offered to them. Third-party payments make the problem worse, and government intervention has stoked rather than checked the basic dynamic. You end up with massive expenses, lots of stupidity, and - because of its expense -- radically incomplete coverage. Every now and then the extra services do pay off, but not frequently enough to boost American stats on health care quality.

Medical suppliers, and not insurance company overhead costs, are the main villain of the piece. The author wishes to put doctors back in charge and liberate them from the need to satisfy patients as customers.

Joshua Bell: Hailed by peers, ignored on street

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Joshua Bell is one of the classical music world's iconic figures, but fame didn't stop the Grammy-Award winning violinist's music from falling on deaf ears at a subway stop in Washington.

Bell, 39, received the most coveted prize in classical music -- the Avery Fisher prize -- on Tuesday, two days after The Washington Post revealed that he had failed to draw even a tiny crowd while performing in an anonymous setting.

The boyish-looking Bell swapped his formal concert garb for jeans, a T-shirt and a baseball cap to play six classical pieces outside a Metro station in a test of perception and public taste conducted by the Post.

Bell says the results after 43 minutes during morning rush hour -- $32.17 and only one of 1,097 people who passed by recognizing him -- were more surprising than being asked to do the stunt in the first place.

"I was quite nervous and it was a strange experience being ignored," Bell, a former child prodigy who attracts a young following and commands ticket prices of $100 or more at his concerts, told Reuters on Wednesday.

Playing a violin handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari and reported to cost around $3.5 million, Bell said he expected that rush-hour commuters might not be open to listening to music "or experiencing art."

"I expected that, but it was still almost hurtful sometimes when somebody just walked by when I really did try to play my best," he said. "It was difficult to see."

Here's more about the experiment:

Nothing. Or very little -- $32 in exchange for 43 minutes of music, which is only bad if you're Joshua Bell. And aside from the lack of monetary compensation, very little attention from adults (click thru here for a few must-see videos of Bell playing in context). Who listened? According to the article, only the children, with a few exceptions:

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

Why the kids? Partly because they know beauty in their hearts and not in their analytic brains. Partly because they're not rushing somewhere like all the adults (even if they're in tow -- young children don't rush anywhere they don't want to go). The kids were listening because that's what kids do. They listen and observe with an intensity that only the most talented and highly-trained professional ethnographers can muster. In the face of such beauty and mastery, how could they not spend these precious moments of life soaking in the music?

After Cancer, A New World View

“I look at the news differently these days -- not as stories I'll need to cover; I'm more removed now. I look at what's happening as just another person who lives on this planet. And it's clear the world has gone mad. ”

Conan O' Brien Commencement Speech to the Havard Class of 2000

I'd like to thank the Class Marshals for inviting me here today. The last time I was invited to Harvard it cost me $110,000, so you'll forgive me if I'm a bit suspicious. I'd like to announce up front that I have one goal this afternoon: to be half as funny as tomorrow's Commencement Speaker, Moral Philosopher and Economist, Amartya Sen. Must get more laughs than seminal wage/price theoretician.
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I've dwelled on my failures today because, as graduates of Harvard, your biggest liability is your need to succeed. Your need to always find yourself on the sweet side of the bell curve. Because success is a lot like a bright, white tuxedo. You feel terrific when you get it, but then you're desperately afraid of getting it dirty, of spoiling it in any way.

I left the cocoon of Harvard, I left the cocoon of Saturday Night Live, I left the cocoon of The Simpsons. And each time it was bruising and tumultuous. And yet, every failure was freeing, and today I'm as nostalgic for the bad as I am for the good.
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I'll go now, to make bigger mistakes and to embarrass this fine institution even more. But let me leave you with one last thought: If you can laugh at yourself loud and hard every time you fall, people will think you're drunk.

Sullivan Voters Know a Star When They See One

Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Eric Heiden. Mark Spitz. Sarah Hughes. Bonnie Blair.

These are some of the names on the Sullivan Award, given for the past 76 years to the best American athlete in the traditionally amateur sports.

A new name is now going on that trophy, that of a young woman born in Russia, without bones in her lower legs, a double amputee at 18 months.

Jessica Long of Dundalk, Md., is the first Paralympic athlete to win the Sullivan Award, given by the Amateur Athletic Union rather quietly last Wednesday night in New York.

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Long won three gold medals at the Paralympics in Athens in 2004, at age 12, and trains against able-bodied swimmers at home, beating most of them. Last year she won nine gold medals in world competition in South Africa. She also swam in a one-mile race across Chesapeake Bay. And for recreation, she climbs rocks.

“She’s basically fearless,” said Julie O’Neill, the manager of the Paralympic swim team, based in Colorado Springs.

Making Them Talk

More on torture and "24"--video from the New Yorker (no subscription required)...

In her article “Whatever It Takes,” Jane Mayer writes about the use of torture in the televison show “24,” and the politics of the show’s executive producer, Joel Surnow. Here Mayer talks about torture and television, with clips from “24.”

Torture

Last night I heard a most powerful account of a torture victim, Dianna Ortiz, a nun who suffered unspeakable cruelty in Guatemala. She was a young convent graduate who went to Guatemala to teach Mayan children to read and write and to "be proud of their culture."She was abducted in 1989 after numerous death threats and tortured by Guatemalan police, apparently in collusion with American military personnel. Political considerations aside, her individual account of her degradation was incredibly sad.

As she stated, "I wish each of you could have one minute to look into my soul." During several times in her presentation, she backed away from the podium and sat in a nearby chair weeping for minutes on end. She seemed to be crying from a place deep in her soul that we could not see. She seemed to be crying not only for herself, but for torture victims everywhere, for the "woman who is being raped by a coke bottle being thrust in her vagina, for the man who is being 'waterboarded' in a pool filled with human waste, for the mother who is watching the fingernails and toenails being pulled out of her two and a half-year old baby in front of her."

Her promise to herself while in solitary confinement was that she would tell the world the story of her those who tortured her, and not shutter them away in the inner confines of her mind. She also made the point that 98% of the torture victims she has met have confessed to things they did not do in order to avoid further psychological and physical pain--that the hit show "24" and other Hollywood productions misrepresent the validity of torture in obtaining reliable information. She has started an organization "Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International." The website is tassc.org. I would encourage you to to there and check it out and even contribute...

I will see if she will give me permission to put up the audio of her show on a website. If so I will link to it.
She also has published an account of her torture:Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey From Torture To Truth (Paperback). I will have a review up of this book when I am done reading it. Here is a link to a review from salon.com (subscription may be required): "The Blindfold's Eyes" by Dianna Ortiz

Darfur Collides With Olympics, and China Yields

WASHINGTON, April 12 — For the past two years, China has protected the Sudanese government as the United States and Britain have pushed for United Nations Security Council sanctions against Sudan for the violence in Darfur.

But in the past week, strange things have happened. A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs.

So what gives? Credit goes to Hollywood — Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg in particular. Just when it seemed safe to buy a plane ticket to Beijing for the 2008 Olympic Games, nongovernmental organizations and other groups appear to have scored a surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.

Wolfowitz Corruption Push Clashes with Debt Relief

The episode highlighted the debate within the World Bank prompted by the arrival of Paul Wolfowitz. His argument that fighting corruption is a prerequisite for ending poverty is diametrically opposed to the views of many Bank professionals.

"The World Bank is a development institution, not an anti-corruption institution," says Dennis de Tray, who left the bank in 2006 after more than 20 years directing programs from Indonesia to Latin America. "It's not a police force, and it's not a keeper of moral standards. The bank's approach to corruption needs to be seen through a development lens. Corruption is just one of many constraints that developing countries face."

Thinking Thin: A Cognitive Therapy Approach

"Dieters do have willpower," she says. "Most dieters have lost weight before. They've just gained it all back, so their willpower is a little inconsistent." Beck has a lot of tricks to keep willpower strong.

In Medicine, It’s Man vs. Machine

A new system called computer-aided detection, or CAD, can identify the same patterns a doctor can, by referring to a database of known cancer films. And now a third of all second mammogram readings are done by CAD, for $20 each. But the study from the University of California, Davis, showed that a radiologist with CAD was statistically no better than a radiologist alone in finding cancer. Round 1: Doctors.
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What would happen to healthcare-related stocks if we all stayed healthy? Drug stocks alone are worth $1.1 trillion, biotech another $350 billion, and medical devices and equipment some $400 billion. Who would need that stuff if we had fewer heart attacks, strokes and diagnoses of cancer? Good question.
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CT scanners, in other words, are keeping up the same pace of innovation as silicon chips have. A 256-slice CT scanner, sheduled to be out later this year, will scan a heart in 4/10ths of second and create a high-definition, three-dimensional image that a cardiologist can visually fly through.

If such a diagnostic tool were used on, say, everyone over the age of 40, it would cut the market for cholesterol-lowering drugs to only the population that truly needs them. (My guess is that the market would shrink by 75 percent.) What do you think that would do to Pfizer and Merck, pharma companies that are already getting slapped around by the stock market?

The scans now cost about $1000 each, so you can see why insurance companies don’t pay for them. It’s cheaper to let nature do the screening. But what if the price of scans were to drop to $300, or even $100. Considering that it costs about $30,000 to patch up a patient who suffers a heart attack, insurance companies may decide it’s a good idea to make scans part of every physical. Round 2: Machines.

...

Can’t You See What Love Has Done: U2 Fans Give Back

Below, U2 fan expresses a sentiment shared by many of us who have travelled extensively in the third world...

Any U2 fan looking back can see a common thread running through the band’s history. From waving a white flag at Red Rocks to the COEXIST banner at the Vertigo shows, U2 has used the stage as a way to encourage activism from the fans. It is one thing to sign a petition or wear a button at a show – it is something else to commit time and resources to a cause in an effort to improve the lives of others. There are a number of examples of fans giving back – here are a few of their stories.

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On the blog from the trip Rob Trigalet wrote, “Everywhere we go, we find such joy and spirit in the people, and it fills me with so much emotion to see how much they are thankful for what they do have, which by our western standards is not much at all … I think the thing that strikes me the most is their sense of community with each other and how time and time again we have been told of a village which received a well from AWF / Africare and then suddenly they are sharing it with the next village or parish. There is a spirit in these people that I am coming to envy. There is a beauty in these people that I've not experienced before.”

In a Courageous Village, Ballots Bring Bullets

There is a great video that accompanies this piece that shows that people in poor (and Muslim) countries want democracy (and our willing to die for freeedom) contrary to what some Americans might believe...
(subscription required)

President Bush has become a bosom buddy of President Pervez Musharraf and sealed that friendship with $10 billion in military aid, but any American official who praises Pakistan’s “democracy” might want to visit this bullet-scarred village in the Punjab.

Dummerwala held free local elections here last year. But many people voted the “wrong” way, causing the candidate of the local feudal lord to lose. So a day after the election, a small army of gunmen arrived and began rampaging through the houses of the clan members who opposed the lord’s choice.
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“When he was shot, Waheed fell down and begged for water,” said his father, Matiullah. “They were surrounding him. But they just laughed and shot at the water tank and destroyed it. Then they ripped the clothes off the women and dragged them around half-naked.”

For the next two hours, the attackers beat the men and abused the women, destroyed homes, and told their victims that the feudal lord had arranged for the police to stay away so he could teach them a lesson.

Indeed, the police did stay away. Even when two of the villagers escaped and ran to the police station, begging the officers to stop the violence, the police delayed moving for three hours.

By the time it was over, a woman was dying, as was Waheed, and many others were wounded.

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Husain Haqqani of Boston University calculates that the overt and trackable U.S. aid to General Musharraf’s Pakistan amounted to $9.8 billion — of which 1 percent went for children’s survival and health, and just one-half of 1 percent for democracy promotion (and even that went partly to a commission controlled by General Musharraf).

The big beneficiary of U.S. largesse hasn’t been the Pakistani people, but the Pakistani Army.

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Just last week, General Musharraf’s secret police goons roughed up and sexually molested Dr. Amna Buttar, an American doctor of Pakistani origin who heads a human rights organization. Dr. Buttar says that she had been warned by a senior intelligence official not to protest against the government and that she was specifically targeted when she protested anyway.

Architect Claims to Solve Pyramid Secret

PARIS -- A French architect claimed Friday to have uncovered the mystery about how Egypt's Great Pyramid of Khufu was built _ with use of a spiral ramp to hoist huge stone blocks into place.

The construction of the Great Pyramid 4,500 years ago by Khufu, a ruler also known as Cheops, has long befuddled scientists as to how its 3 million stone blocks weighing 2.5 tons each were lifted into place.

Virtuous Reality

How Online Networks Can Boost Good Causes

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.