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.

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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...
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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.