Helping Trafficking Victims

Advice from Nicholas Kristof if you want to help organizations fighting human trafficking...

Helping Trafficking Victims

Gotta read it!

This is a great book I read last year...Tom Peters, business guru, apparently agrees!

Okay, it's last year's book. But I just found it in Logan airport at the start of my current Madrid-Paris-L.A. trip. Wow! Fantastic! Amazing!
The book: The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade, by Pietra Rivoli. The complex issues of trade, globalization, market-power, and market imperfections are brilliantly told via the life of a single T-shirt. Made in China? Obviously! Sorta. How about "Teksa"? The T-shirt "maker," Chinese, patiently explained to the author that this saga starts in Teksa. That is, West Texas, where the cotton is grown. And why is Texas-the U.S.A. still tops in the global cotton market? Um, our markets are not quite as open as we'd like to make the rest of the world believe. There is no "big political message" here. As a professional economist, the author began the story with a very "open markets" bias. It's not that she lost that bias, but that the can of worms (T-shirt) she opened turned out to be, well, full of worms. Nothing is as it seems; think of this as a product of the John LeCarré School of Economics. Though published in 2005, this is my 2006 "book of the year." No issue.

Mad Biking Skills

How the Public School System Crushes Souls

Thoughtful and provocative post here...

Editorial: Dr. Lawyer

Only in America...

Dec. 14, 2006
Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Dr. Lawyer


Fearless prediction: Within 20 years, when you visit your family physician seeking relief for that sore throat or stomach bug, you'll have company in the examination room. And your guest won't be a nurse or a medical assistant. Joining you and the good doctor will be ... the doctor's lawyer.

What other recourse will physicians have, given the coming wave of malpractice lawsuits forecast in the journal Tobacco Control?

According to the periodical, research suggests that tobacco companies aren't the only parties at fault in keeping Americans hooked on smokes. The study says doctors can be successfully sued for failing to browbeat their patients into quitting the nasty habit.

"Experience clearly suggests that, faced with a sympathetic and very ill plaintiff who swears that he would have heeded a warning if it had been given, the jury's sympathy for the plaintiff will incline them to award him some damages, even if empirical evidence as well as common experience suggests how hard it often is to quit," John F. Banzhaf III, a George Washington University law professor who's active in tobacco litigation and supports obesity-related lawsuits, wrote in response to the research. Juror "sympathy" could overpower "dry empirical and statistical evidence and related arguments put forth by 'rich doctors and their greedy insurance company lawyers.' "

In fact, the only greedy party here is the trial bar. Such ridiculous litigation isn't about righting a wrong, it's about creating new revenue streams to support golf and yacht club memberships.

So in the near future, don't be surprised to see a lawyer sitting in on your routine physical exam -- or to see him snap on rubber gloves.

That Ring Makes a Difference

For Ms. Hymowitz, the two Americas do not divide between the poor who are supposedly in need of government assistance and the rest of us. The division is best defined in another way: between those who see marriage as an indispensable condition of child-rearing and those who don't. If we are becoming two Americas, it is one America in which parents are married and another in which they are not. The Marriage Gap, as Ms. Hymowitz calls it, appears likely to have a more profound effect on the future of both Americas than the gender gap so lamented by the feminists.

Despite the "unmarriage revolution" ushered in by the noxious 1960s, the anti-civilization decade, marriage is again flourishing among well-educated women. Today's educated mothers may work outside the home or not, but they and their husbands are committed to what Ms. Hymowitz calls The Mission -- the project of shaping their children into adults (and citizens) who have the requisite skills and self-discipline to prosper in a complex, postindustrialist society.

The Mission, notes Ms. Hymowitz, requires not a village but two married parents. And, no, cohabitation doesn't do the trick. Even cohabiters who have the education levels of their married counterparts are less effective as parents. "As the core cultural institution," Ms. Hymowitz writes, "marriage orders life in ways that we only dimly understand. It carries with it signals about how we should live, signals that are in line with both our economy and our politics in the largest sense."
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The answer, in Ms. Hymowitz's view, is that many among the urban poor have lost the "life script" for future-oriented child-rearing. Policy makers may assume that the problem is a shortage of employed, marriageable men. But the problem is more existential, a loss of a sense that marriage and children are connected.

Circumcision May Cut Risk of HIV

WASHINGTON - Circumcising adult men may reduce by half their risk of getting the
AIDS virus through heterosexual intercourse, the U.S. government announced Wednesday, as it shut down two studies in Africa testing the link.

Advice I'll Pass Along to My Daughter

In 1985, I graduated from college. This past August, I dropped off my daughter Hannah for her freshman year.

Despite the two decades in between, I can still vividly recall the financial struggles of early adulthood, including grappling with credit-card debt, scrambling to come up with a house down payment and watching as one of my stocks plunged 80% in a few short months.

Hannah, of course, will have her own financial struggles, and those will teach her far more about money than I ever could. Still, there are nine key financial insights I'm hoping to pass along -- and most have precious little to do with picking stocks and buying mutual funds.

TimesSelect A Cambodian Girl’s Tragedy: Being Young and Pretty

Is there any greater evil?

Slavery seems like a remote part of history, until you see scholarly estimates that the slave trade in the 21st century — forced work in prostitution and some kinds of manual labor — is probably larger than it was in the 18th or 19th centuries.

Or until you take a rutted dirt path in northwestern Cambodia to a hut between a rice paddy and a river, and meet a teenage girl named Noy Han. The girl, nicknamed Kahan, suffered the calamitous misfortune of being pretty...

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Typically, a girl like Kahan would be imprisoned in a trafficker’s house, tied up and beaten if she resisted, inspected by a doctor to certify her virginity, and sold for hundreds of dollars to a Cambodian or Thai businessman. Virgins are in particular demand by men with AIDS because of a legend that they can be cured by having sex with a virgin.

Afterward, Kahan would have been locked up in a brothel in Pailin, and sold for $10 a session for the first couple of months. The price eventually would drop to $1.50, and by then she would be given greater freedom.
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And slavery is what this is. The real problem isn’t prostitution or trafficking, it’s the enslavement of people.

The Lancet, the British medical journal, once estimated that 10 million children 17 and under may work in prostitution worldwide. Not all are coerced, but in the nastier brothels of Cambodia, Nepal, India, Malaysia and Thailand, the main difference from 19th-century slavery is that the victims are mostly dead of AIDS by their 20’s.

“It seems almost certain that the modern global slave trade is larger in absolute terms than the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th and 19th centuries was,” notes an important article about trafficking in the current issue of Foreign Affairs...

Craisglist Meets the Capitalists

I love this story!...

Jim Buckmaster, the chief executive of Craigslist, caused lots of head-scratching Thursday as he tried to explain to a bunch of Wall Street types why his company is not interested in “monetizing” his ridiculously popular Web operation. Appearing at the UBS global media conference in New York, Mr. Buckmaster took questions from the bemused audience, which apparently could not get its collective mind around the notion that Craigslist exists to help Web users find jobs, cars, apartments and dates — and not so much to make money.
Wendy Davis of MediaPost describes the presentation as a “a culture clash of near-epic proportions.”
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The Tech Trader Daily blog ponders this question: “If YouTube was worth $1.65 billion, who knows what Craigslist would be worth if Jim and [site founder] Craig Newmark ever considred becoming — what’s the word? — capitalists.”
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Larry Dignan, writing on Between the Lines blog at ZDNet, called Mr. Buckmaster “delightfully communist,” and described the audience as “confused capitalists wondering how a company can exist without the urge to maximize profits.”

Conflict Diamonds In the Spotlight

Charmian Gooch, director and co-founder of Global Witness, will be online Tuesday, Dec. 12, at 2 p.m. ET to discuss the issue of "conflict diamonds" and their links to violence in parts of Africa. The new movie "Blood Diamond," starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is a story of the human cost associated with the mining of diamonds in Sierra Leone.

'Heartless Stone' Tracks Rough Diamond Trade

This insightful interview gives an overviews of the dark side of the diamond trade in West and Central Africa. In speaking with various individuals when I was in Sierra Leone last month, it is clear that diamond mining is the equivalent of gambling here in Nevada. However, instead of sticking coins in a slot machine, these desperately poor people engage in back-breaking labor for pitiful wages in hopes of finding the "big one"...

The film Blood Diamond is about the violent underbelly of the international diamond trade. Writer Tom Zoellner's book The Heartless Stone chronicles how diamonds are mined in some of the world's poorest countries.

Blood Diamonds' Decline, but Not Poverty

More on "Blood Diamonds"

DAKAR, SENEGAL — Hollywood's take on "conflict diamonds" has brought attention back in a big way to how gems associated with wealth and glamour have too often meant war and suffering in Africa.

The film "Blood Diamond," which opened Friday in U.S. theaters, is set in late 1990s Sierra Leone, when the West African country was in the throes of a civil war in which untraceable diamonds allegedly funded fighters who hacked off people's hands with machetes and burned entire villages.

The Best Unlocked Cellphones

If you are thinking of buying a cellphone for a Christmas gift, make a political statement to U.S. wireless carriers, by buying an unlocked one...

Cingular Music applications. Relatively few unlocked phones are sold in the U.S., because they're more expensive than subsidized, locked models. That warps our market, giving the carriers veto power over which phones Americans see. If we buy more unlocked phones, more advanced models will come to our shores as cell phone manufacturers decide we're friendlier to phones that the carriers don't necessarily love.

Blood Diamonds

Check out this link for a preview of the movie coming out, "Blood Diamonds.:

http://video.msn.com/v/us/fv/fv.htm?http://video.msn.com/v/us/v.htm

There are two links in the middle of the page to click regarding the movie.

If you need a Laugh...

If you need a laugh this morning, as I do...check out this video:

What it Takes to Make a Student

This is a fascinating (albeit long) article on the interesection between class status and academic achievement

...In the first few years of this decade, two parallel debates about the achievement gap have emerged. The first is about causes; the second is about cures.
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Hart and Risley showed that language exposure in early childhood correlated strongly with I.Q. and academic success later on in a child’s life. Hearing fewer words, and a lot of prohibitions and discouragements, had a negative effect on I.Q.; hearing lots of words, and more affirmations and complex sentences, had a positive effect on I.Q. The professional parents were giving their children an advantage with every word they spoke, and the advantage just kept building up.

In the years since Hart and Risley published their findings, social scientists have examined other elements of the parent-child relationship, and while their methods have varied, their conclusions all point to big class differences in children’s intellectual growth. Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, a professor at Teachers College, has overseen hundreds of interviews of parents and collected thousands of hours of videotape of parents and children, and she and her research team have graded each one on a variety of scales. Their conclusion: Children from more well-off homes tend to experience parental attitudes that are more sensitive, more encouraging, less intrusive and less detached — all of which, they found, serves to increase I.Q. and school-readiness. They analyzed the data to see if there was something else going on in middle-class homes that could account for the advantage but found that while wealth does matter, child-rearing style matters more.

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Lareau found that the middle-class families she studied all followed a similar strategy, which she labeled concerted cultivation. The parents in these families engaged their children in conversations as equals, treating them like apprentice adults and encouraging them to ask questions, challenge assumptions and negotiate rules. They planned and scheduled countless activities to enhance their children’s development — piano lessons, soccer games, trips to the museum.

The working-class and poor families Lareau studied did things differently. In fact, they raised their children the way most parents, even middle-class parents, did a generation or two ago. They allowed their children much more freedom to fill in their afternoons and weekends as they chose — playing outside with cousins, inventing games, riding bikes with friends — but much less freedom to talk back, question authority or haggle over rules and consequences. Children were instructed to defer to adults and treat them with respect. This strategy Lareau named accomplishment of natural growth.
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Concerted cultivation, she wrote, “places intense labor demands on busy parents. ... Middle-class children argue with their parents, complain about their parents’ incompetence and disparage parents’ decisions.” Working-class and poor children, by contrast, “learn how to be members of informal peer groups. They learn how to manage their own time. They learn how to strategize.” But outside the family unit, Lareau wrote, the advantages of “natural growth” disappear. In public life, the qualities that middle-class children develop are consistently valued over the ones that poor and working-class children develop. Middle-class children become used to adults taking their concerns seriously, and so they grow up with a sense of entitlement, which gives them a confidence, in the classroom and elsewhere, that less-wealthy children lack. The cultural differences translate into a distinct advantage for middle-class children in school, on standardized achievement tests and, later in life, in the workplace.
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But the real advantages that middle-class children gain come from more elusive processes: the language that their parents use, the attitudes toward life that they convey. However you measure child-rearing, middle-class parents tend to do it differently than poor parents — and the path they follow in turn tends to give their children an array of advantages. As Lareau points out, kids from poor families might be nicer, they might be happier, they might be more polite — but in countless ways, the manner in which they are raised puts them at a disadvantage in the measures that count in contemporary American society.


What would it take to overcome these disadvantages? Does poverty itself need to be eradicated, or can its effects on children somehow be counteracted? Can the culture of child-rearing be changed in poor neighborhoods, and if so, is that a project that government or community organizations have the ability, or the right, to take on? Is it enough simply to educate poor children in the same way that middle-class children are educated? And can any school, on its own, really provide an education to poor minority students that would allow them to achieve the same results as middle-class students?(read on)

"Frikkin Amazing" how nets stop kids' malaria

Video from Sports Illustrated writer who went to Nigeria to distribute bed nets. If link below doesn't work, you can find the video on cnn.com

javascript:cnnVideo('play','/video/us/2006/12/03/stouffer.nets.cnn','2006/12/10');

Puffing on Polonium

WHEN the former K.G.B. agent Alexander V. Litvinenko was found to have been poisoned by radioactive polonium 210 last week, there was one group that must have been particularly horrified: the tobacco industry.
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The tobacco industry of course doesn’t like to have attention drawn to the more exotic poisons in tobacco smoke. Arsenic, cyanide and nicotine, bad enough. But radiation? As more people learn more about the secrets hidden in the golden leaf, it may become harder for the industry to align itself with candy and coffee — and harder to maintain, as we often hear in litigation, that the dangers of tobacco have long been “common knowledge.” I suspect that even some of our more enlightened smokers will be surprised to learn that cigarette smoke is radioactive, and that these odd fears spilling from a poisoned K.G.B. man may be molehills compared with our really big cancer mountains.

Robert N. Proctor is a professor of the history of science at Stanford University

World AIDS Day

Photoessay: Africa Perseveres