Over Tea, Sheik Denies Stirring Darfur's Torment

"The greatest threat to this peace agreement right now is the
janjaweed," said a senior military intelligence officer with the
African Union who is not authorized to speak publicly. "It is not clear
what is in it for them or how it serves their interests to disarm. No
one is sure what they will do or who exactly controls them."

The
first and most critical step of that agreement, signed in May between
the government in Khartoum and the largest rebel faction, is the
disarmament of the janjaweed. The government pledged to submit a plan
to disarm the militias of their heavy weaponry one month after signing
the agreement and to finish the job before the end of October.

But
how do you disarm a phantom army whose sponsors and leaders deny its
existence? And exactly who are the janjaweed — and is it within
the government's power to disarm them?

"Who are the janjaweed?"
asked Eltayeb Hag Ateya, director of the Peace Research Institute at
the University of Khartoum. "It depends on what you mean and who you
ask."

The term itself has long been used to refer to highwaymen
and bandits from tribes living across Sudan's western border in Chad
who roamed the vast, semidesert plains of Darfur, robbing Arabs and
non-Arabs, nomads and farmers.

But the word came to have a new
meaning after rebels attacked a government outpost in Darfur in 2003,
sparking the conflict that would engulf the region and eventually spill
into Chad.

The militias that came to be known as the janjaweed
were deployed as a kind of counterinsurgency proxy force that the
government used in place of and sometimes alongside its military. It
had used such Arab militias with brutal success in the 20-year civil
war in the south.

These fighters were paid a small stipend,
but their greatest reward was the right to loot and seize livestock and
land from the Fur and Zaghawa, non-Arab tribes from which the rebels
drew their ranks.

The chief figure in the deployment of these
militias, according to the State Department and human rights
organizations, was Mr. Hilal, who leads a powerful Arab tribe in Darfur
called Um Jalul.

Long before the war began, Mr. Hilal wielded
control over a fearsome tribal militia, and because of his deep
connections to the Arab elite of Khartoum, he was the first tribal
leader the government turned to when the insurgency among non-Arab
tribes began, human rights investigators say.

Foreign Policy: Seven Questions: The State of Palestine

Foreign Policy: Seven Questions: The State of Palestine: "Seven Questions: The State of Palestine"

BPS Research Digest: Rare counting ability induced by temporarily switching off brain region

BPS Research Digest: Rare counting ability induced by temporarily switching off brain region: "A minority of people with autism have one or more extraordinary intellectual talents, such as the rapid ability to calculate the day of the week for a given date, or to count large numbers of discrete objects almost instantaneously - they're often called 'autistic savants' or 'idiot savants'. Now Allan Snyder and colleagues have shown that by placing a pulsing magnet over a specific area of the brain, these kind of abilities can, to some extent, be induced in people who aren’t autistic."

OUPblog: 6 Myths about U.S.-Saudi Relations

OUPblog: 6 Myths about U.S.-Saudi Relations: "6 Myths about U.S.-Saudi Relations"

LET THE WORLD CUP BEGIN!

LET THE WORLD CUP BEGIN!
Originally uploaded by BoazImages.

A Great photograhic capture of how TV is often viewed as a community event in the Middle East, and much of the rest of the world...

Why aren’t Latin Americans smiling? - PSD Blog - The World Bank Group - Private Sector Development

Why aren’t Latin Americans smiling? - PSD Blog - The World Bank Group - Private Sector Development: "Why aren’t Latin Americans smiling?

Ugo Panizza and Monica Yanez ask why Latin Americans are so unhappy about pro-market reforms. Theory #1:

What matters is the difference between expectations and actual outcome. Policymakers may have made the mistake of overselling the reforms by promising too much, and the disillusionment with reforms documented in this paper could be due to unmet expectations.

Theory #2:

The current economic crisis happened after a period of intense reforms and those who now oppose reforms might believe that there is a causal relationship between the reform process and the economic crisis.

Theory #3:

A final interpretation has to do with the perceived fairness of the capitalist system. Di Tella and MacCulloch (2004) find that residents of poor countries tend to be less pro-market than residents of industrial countries and argue that this is due to the presence of widespread corruption that reduces the perceived fairness of the capitalist system.

Via DBRB. Also see previous posts on the political cost of market reforms or crony capitalism in Latin America.

Posted by Pablo Halkyard at 06:46 AM in Aid effectiveness, Corruption, Latin America | Permalink"

LiveScience.com - Surgeries Using Cadaver Tissue Pose Risks

This is precisely why I refused cadaver tissue for my Anterior Cruciate Ligament repair...of course my autologous graft tore, but that is another story...

LiveScience.com - Surgeries Using Cadaver Tissue Pose Risks: "
Don't worry, the doctor told Brian Lykins' parents, as he prepared to use cartilage from a cadaver to fix their son's knee. A million people a year have operations that use tissue from donated dead bodies. The nation's largest tissue bank had supplied this cartilage. It was disinfected and perfectly safe, he assured them. But it wasn't.

Four days after this routine, elective surgery, Lykins—a healthy, 23-year-old student from Minnesota—died of a raging infection.

He died because the cartilage came from a corpse that had sat unrefrigerated for 19 hours—a corpse that had been rejected by two other tissue banks. The cartilage hadn't been adequately treated to kill bacteria.

None of this broke a single federal rule."

(..)

Even doctors don't understand the risk of tissue they are using. "It comes in a nice package, it looks sterile,'' said Dr. Matthew Kuehnert, a tissue safety expert at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Most physicians don't even know the questions to ask,'' said Dr. Ty Endean, a Tucson, Ariz., orthopedic surgeon. "They order tissue and they leave it up to the surgical center at their hospital. And those people are just going on price.''

Mia Farrow Visits Darfur on U.N. Mission - New York Times

Mia Farrow Visits Darfur on U.N. Mission - New York Times: "She said the scenes of human suffering she had witnessed in Darfur had haunted her since her previous trip. ''I never spend a day without thinking about it ... it's impossible to put Darfur out of one's mind.''

(..)

UNICEF says it only receives 20 percent of the funds it needs to cater to Darfur's suffering masses, and the U.N.'s World Food Program has recently reduced food distribution to below the minimal rations because of lack of funding."

While in Surgery, Do You Prefer Abba or Verdi? - New York Times

I too like to play U2 in the OR, especially on a long case such as 360 macular rotation. However, I play music less and less, and if so, it is usually classical (with the exception of Jimi Hendrix for enucleations). I found that the OR staff and my assistant are too easily distracted if the music had any type of beat. This really hit home to me when several years ago, doing an exceptionally diffcult case in Saudi Arabia, I raised my head from the microscope, and upon looking around, saw everyone from the nursing staff to the anesthetist bopping their head to the beat, eyes staring blankly... I felt as though I was in some kind of a Rave hall. That was the day the music died for me in the OR....


While in Surgery, Do You Prefer Abba or Verdi? - New York Times: "'You're basically sending a message to the people around you that it's a cool place to be,' he said. 'I found I get a lot done when I have U2 in the background,' he said. He does take care to lower the volume when the patient enters the room, and he sometimes asks for requests."

Raising Yousuf: a diary of a mother under occupation: In times of Israeli closure, breastfeed!

A blog that reveals the details of life by a mother living in Gaza ...

Raising Yousuf: a diary of a mother under occupation: In times of Israeli closure, breastfeed!: "In times of Israeli closure, breastfeed!

Ok, I bet you never expected me to mention breastfeeding and Israeli closures in the same sentence. Well, I just did. Now, for the readers who didn't just drop like flies, I'll continue."

Mind not to go off the rails...

Mind not to go off the rails...
Originally uploaded by Bajy.

Amazing colors!!!!

Pure Blue Eye

Pure Blue Eye
Originally uploaded by Iguana Jo.

What incredible lighting to highlight the blue eye!

Hope in football

My partner asked me what the status of Sierra Leone's football team is--this is what I could (sadly) find...(I am headed there in September)...

hope in football

Mon Apr 10, 2:19 AM ET

FREETOWN (AFP) - There are no kit bags or towels at the edges of a
makeshift beachside pitch, just a couple of prostheses and a large
plastic bottle of drinking water, but Sierra Leone’s national
amputees football team is in play.

A group of single-legged young men, all victims of the west African
nation’s brutal civil war in which thousands lost limbs and other
body parts not only to landmines or bullets, but also to hacking by
rebel groups, has come together to seek encouragement and hope.

As with any other sportsmen, they first of all warm up, laying their
crutches on the sand of Freetown’s popular Lumley beach so they
can stretch and jump around before taking to the pitch.

When ready they pick up their crutches, the whistle is blown and the game begins.

Maxwell Fornah (C), captain of the Sierra Leone civil war amputees
football team, tries to slip past a tackle at a beach in Freetown.
There are no kit bags or towels at the edges of a makeshift beachside
pitch, just a couple of prostheses and a large plastic bottle of
drinking water, but Sierra Leone’s national amputees football
team, all victims of the west African nation’s brutal civil war,
have already come third in last year’s World Cup single-leg
soccer tournament in Brazil and dream of one day playing at the
Paralympics(AFP/Issouf Sanogo)

Prosthesis are not allowed on the pitch so they play with just one
foot each while balancing only on the crutches. But their skills at
dribbling, passing and scoring are breathtaking all the same.

“We started playing football as a social game after we became
envious of other boys with two legs. It was painful to just watch them
and not play. It was just after the war in 2001 and we were all at the
camp (for amputees and war victims),” said Victor Musa, striker
for the Sierra Leone Single Leg Amputees Sports Club.

“Now we don’t feel that much disabled anymore, we can play football too,” said Musa.

Now they have turned professional and last year came third, after
England and Brazil, at the World Cup single-leg soccer tournament in
Brazil.

“I plan to continue playing and pray that one day I will play
in the Paralympic Games,” said team captain Maxwell Fornah, who
was shot in the leg in 1998 as he fled home from school after his
village in Kambia, northeast of the capital, came under attack during
Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war.

“I don’t even know if it was a soldier or a rebel who
shot me, the only thing I remember was waking up hours later in a Red
Cross hospital,” he said.

Mmidfielder Mohamed Jalloh, 20, said: “I want to become an
international star like Thierry Henry, or Samuel Eto’o.”

Mohamed Fofana (R) of the Sierra Leone civil war amputees football
team eyes the ball at a beach in Freetown. (AFP/Issouf Sanogo)

The sport has not only provided entertainment, but helped to spread a poignant message of hope.

“We are happy that we can get together and encourage each
other,” said Mohamed Lappia, who stepped on a mine that shattered
his leg.

Saidu Mansaray, 22, is the team’s goalkeeper. He has both his
legs but only one active hand. He catches the ball with one hand as the
four fingers, save the thumb, of the other hand were chopped off with
an axe.

“We were at home in Kissy one day when three rebels came and
pulled me out, one put my hand against a mango tree and cut me up.
Another tried to cut on the wrist, but he did not succeed and gave up,
that is why you see this mark here,” Mansaray said, showing a
scar on his right hand.

“Normally I use one hand to catch the ball and this other helps sometimes to deflect the ball.”

Without sponsorship, the team struggles to find transport fares to
attend practice sessions, let alone pay for soccer boots. Most play
with threadbare sneakers, but that does not dampen their spirits.

They have neither a marked pitch nor permanent nets, but they have a team medic.

Oseh Kabiru used to be a nursing aide for a privately-run clinic in
Lunsar, about 120 kilometres (73 miles) northeast of Freetown before he
was attacked during the war and lost half of his hand.

“I massage them and offer first aid treatment. They need help
but people neglect them, so I help them voluntarily,” said
Kabiru, rolling a strip of white fabric cut into strips the size of
bandages.

Players of the Sierra Leone civil war amputees football team pose at a beach in Freetown. (AFP/Issouf Sanogo)

The team was put together in 2001 with the help of the non-governmental organisation Action for Children in Conflict.

While it may struggle for resources and many of the young men yearn
for an opportunity to go back to school as their education was
disrupted first by the war and now by high fees, they never run short
of supporters.

One ardent fan is Memunatu Kamara. She is also a victim of the war.
She was shot on her left arm, but she handles the drinking water for
the players.

“I am always with the team, wherever they go,” said Kamara who was shot when she was 15 years old in 1999.

As for Liberia’s ex-president Charles Taylor, accused of
sponsoring the conflict and facing a war crimes trial at a UN-backed
court here, team captain Fornah says: “If he is found guilty, he
should spend the rest of his life in jail.”

Why soccer rules the world

Photograph by Marco Anelli, Grazia Neri
This month 32 nations will compete for the World Cup of soccer, the "beautiful game" that unites and divides countries around the globe. To celebrate that we bring you excerpts from The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup.

The Soccer Wars

The Soccer Wars: "The World Cup is coming, which means a flurry of desperate attempts by tournament promoters to excite Americans about an event that electrifies the rest of the world. This year is no different. ESPN, which will broadcast most of the games in the United States, is airing a series of ads with members of the rock band U2. In one, Bono says that the World Cup 'closes the schools, closes the shops, closes a city and stops a war.'

If stopping a war seems like an exaggeration, another ad explains soccer's peace-building qualities in more detail: 'After three years of civil war, feuding factions talked for the first time in years, and the president called a truce. Because the Ivory Coast qualified for the World Cup for the first time. Because, as everyone knows, a country united makes for better cheerleaders than a country divided.'

Does the World Cup really put a stop to war? Does soccer, known for its dangerously rowdy fans, have the conflict-reducing powers that ESPN and U2 proclaim? To be charitable to the World Cup, which this year will be held in Germany starting June 9, the evidence is mixed. It is undeniable that soccer has the power to unite -- but its power to divide should not be underestimated.

International Crisis Group - Sudan: Divide and Destroy in Darfur

International Crisis Group - Sudan: Divide and Destroy in Darfur: "Negotiating the end of a war is tricky enough. But in the case of Darfur, mediators were also faced with the implicit task of ending what the Bush administration calls genocide, and what nobody can deny have been gross crimes against humanity.

Such a tall order, coupled with an abrupt negotiating deadline, produced an agreement that leaves more questions than answers. And unless a United Nations force is deployed immediately to guarantee its implementation, it will also leave over two million homeless Darfurians vulnerable to further exploitation.

One question without a rational answer is why it took so long to broker this deal. When the U.S., UK and African Union finally set a deadline and committed high level support to the process, it took just weeks to finalize a deal. Why didn't this happen a year and a half ago? Up to two hundred thousand lives could have been saved, and the dynamics on the ground would have been more amenable to reconciliation and reconstruction.

Once a deadline was announced and attention galvanized, the mediators tilted their proposals in favor of the government because they recognized the regime's dominant position on Darfur's battlefield. But if that power imbalance is left unchecked, it will allow the government to continue its divide and destroy approach to dealing with its opposition throug"

Indian Beatles

Check out this hilarious bollywood beatles video!

Center for Global Development : Initiatives: Active: HIV/AIDS Monitor

Center for Global Development : Initiatives: Active: HIV/AIDS Monitor: "Billions of dollars in aid are flowing to developing countries to confront HIV/AIDS. The HIV/AIDS Monitor tracks how this aid is allocated and disbursed to help donors and recipient countries do a better job in responding to the epidemic, and to identify lessons that may be relevant to aid effectiveness more broadly. To support this analysis, the HIV/AIDS Monitor team has prepared brief descriptive profiles of three innovative financing sources that provide most of the money. Despite a common commitment to fighting the epidemic, each donor implements programs in different ways with different targets."

In Praise of the Maligned Sweatshop - New York Times

In Praise of the Maligned Sweatshop - New York Times: "Africa desperately needs Western help in the form of schools, clinics and sweatshops.

Oops, don't spill your coffee. We in the West mostly despise sweatshops as exploiters of the poor, while the poor themselves tend to see sweatshops as opportunities.

On a street here in the capital of Namibia, in the southwestern corner of Africa, I spoke to a group of young men who were trying to get hired as day laborers on construction sites.

'I come here every day,' said Naftal Shaanika, a 20-year-old. 'I actually find work only about once a week.'

Mr. Shaanika and the other young men noted that the construction jobs were dangerous and arduous, and that they would vastly prefer steady jobs in, yes, sweatshops. Sure, sweatshop work is tedious, grueling and sometimes dangerous. But over all, sewing clothes is considerably less dangerous or arduous — or sweaty — than most alternatives in poor countries.

Well-meaning American university students regularly campaign against sweatshops. But instead, anyone who cares about fighting poverty should campaign in favor of sweatshops, demanding that companies set up factories in Africa. If Africa could establish a clothing export industry, that would fight poverty far more effectively than any foreign aid program.

"

25 years of deadly lessons

By George F. Will

Tuesday, June 6, 2006; Page A15

"In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California. Two of the patients died."

-- Centers for Disease Control,

June 5, 1981

Those words 25 years ago announced the arrival of something most Americans thought anachronistic -- an infectious disease epidemic. At first it was called GRID -- gay-related immune deficiency. In September 1982 the CDC renamed it acquired immune deficiency syndrome -- AIDS.

Its worldwide toll has already exceeded the 20 million killed by the 14th-century bubonic plague. By 2020 it probably will have killed more than any epidemic in history, with most fatalities in sub-Saharan Africa, where it probably began about 75 years ago after some people who ate wild chimpanzees in Cameroon became infected with a low-virulence progenitor of the virus that causes AIDS.

An epidemic requires both a microbe and an enabling social context. In Africa, aspects of modernity in a primitive setting became a deadly combination: HIV was spread by roadside prostitutes serving truckers and soldiers traveling on modern roads. Africa's wars caused population dislocations; economic development caused migrations of workers across porous borders. Both weakened families and dissolved traditional sexual norms. Jet aircraft integrated Africa into the world flow of commerce and tourism. In 1980s America, the enabling context included a gay community feeling more assertive and emancipated, and IV drug users sharing needles.

AIDS arrived in America in the wake of the Salk vaccine, which, by swiftly defeating polio, gave Americans a misleading paradigm of how progress is made in public health. Pharmacology often is a small contributor. By the time the first anti-tuberculosis drugs became available in the 1950s, the annual death rate from TB had plummeted to 20 per 100,000 Americans, from 200 per 100,000 in 1900. Drugs may have accounted for just 3 percent of the reduction. The other 97 percent was the result of better nutrition and less urban crowding. Thanks to chlorination of water and better sanitation and personal hygiene, typhoid, too, became rare before effective drugs were available.

Which suggests that the most powerful public health program is economic growth. And the second most powerful is information.

The 14th-century Black Death killed one-third of Europe's population, but it was in the air, food and water, so breathing, eating and drinking were risky behaviors. AIDS is much more difficult to acquire. Like other large components of America's health-care costs (e.g., violence, vehicular accidents, coronary artery disease, lung cancer), AIDS is mostly the result of behavior that is by now widely known to be risky.

The U.S. epidemic, which through 2004 had killed 530,000, could have been greatly contained by intense campaigns to modify sexual and drug-use behavior in 25 to 30 neighborhoods from New York and Miami to San Francisco. But early in the American epidemic, political values impeded public health requirements. Unhelpful messages were sent by slogans designed to democratize the disease -- "AIDS does not discriminate" and "AIDS is an equal opportunity disease."

By 1987, when President Ronald Reagan gave his first speech on the subject, 20,798 Americans had died, and his speech, not surprisingly, did not mention any connection to the gay community. No president considers it part of his job description to tell the country that the human rectum, with its delicate and absorptive lining, makes anal-receptive sexual intercourse dangerous when HIV is prevalent.

Twenty years ago a San Francisco public health official explained death's teaching power: Watching a friend die, like seeing a wreck along a highway, is sobering. But after driving more slowly for a few miles, we again speed up. AIDS has a more lasting deterrent effect.

There has, however, been an increase in unsafe sex, because pharmacological progress has complicated the campaign against this behavior-driven epidemic. Life-extending cocktails of antiviral drugs now lead some at-risk people to regard HIV infection as a manageable chronic disease, and hence to engage in risky behavior. Furthermore, the decline of AIDS mortality rates means that more persons are surviving with HIV infection -- persons who can spread the virus. And drugs such as Viagra mean that more older men are sexually active.

Still, even with no pharmacological silver bullet, AIDS deaths in America have been declining for a decade. In Africa, where heterosexual sex is the primary means of transmission, the death rate is steady relative to population growth, and the age of beginning sexual activity is rising, as is the use of condoms. Human beings do learn. But they often do at a lethally slow pace.