LiveScience.com - How to Stop Smoking: Simply Don't Plan On It

LiveScience.com - How to Stop Smoking: Simply Don't Plan On It: "Want to quit smoking? Don't plan on it, and don't despair.

Recent research finds that a snap decision to quit smoking cigarettes is actually two to three times more effective than planning ahead for the big day.

Some smokers want to quit, but lack the motivation. Others have tried and failed. The trick, according to Robert West of University College London, is to let the motivation build ('This costs too much money,' 'I don't want to smoke around the kids,' 'I'm afraid of cancer' and so on) and then seize the day when a trigger to put down cigarettes suddenly emerges.

'It very much goes against conventional wisdom in the field,' West told LiveScience.

His research is based on interviews with 1,900 smokers and ex-smokers in England. He found that half of attempts to stop smoking involved no planning ahead and that unplanned attempts succeed for longer than planned attempts."

Poverty and Growth Blog |

Poverty and Growth Blog |: "To conclude, we note that:

(i) growth is the fundamental factor for poverty reduction,

(ii) growth accompanied by progressive distributional change is, however, better for poverty reduction than growth alone; and

(iii) high initial inequality reduces the impact of growth on poverty reduction.

The existing literature suggests that both growth and inequality are important for pro-poor growth and that their relative importance depends on country conditions, most notably the initial level of income and inequality. In order for growth to be pro-poor, it will have to disproportionately benefit the poorer levels of any given society. In low-income countries, the need to accelerate pro-poor growth for poverty reduction has emerged as critical, particularly in the context of poverty reduction strategies and the efforts to accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). "

TCS Daily - Libertarianism and Poverty

TCS Daily - Libertarianism and Poverty: "Libertarianism and Poverty"

PCWorld.com - The 100 Best Products of the Year

PCWorld.com - The 100 Best Products of the Year: "The 100 Best Products of the Year"

VOICES ON GENOCIDE PREVENTION

Another response to Alan Kuperman's oped on Darfur...


VOICES ON GENOCIDE PREVENTION: "Wednesday’s New York Times had an interesting example of what happens when an iffy academic theory collides with reality. The results were not pretty. Alan Kuperman, a young academic at the University of Texas, concluded in an op-ed that the proper course of action in Darfur is to

let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes. This option will be distasteful to many, but Sudan has signed a peace treaty, so it deserves the right to defend its sovereignty against rebels who refuse to, so long as it observes the treaty and the laws of war.

Unfortunately, there are a few facts that interfere with this strategy. First, Sudan’s army will not “eschew war crimes,” as its very strategy for dealing with rebels is to commit war crimes – that is, the strategy it has been pursuing for fully three years. Second, Sudan has such a well-documented track record of not honoring peace treaties it signs (including agreements related to Darfur), that giving it the benefit of the doubt for having signed yet another one is a little, well, naive."

Still a Genocide

Washington Post article on Darfur conflict...


Still a Genocide: "The U.S. government has described the killing in Darfur as genocide, a term that Sudan's government rejects and that the United Nations and Europeans have also shrunk from using. The more that the conflict in Darfur features infighting between rebel factions rather than just atrocities by the government's militia, the more observers may resist pointing the finger at the government and accusing it of genocide. But the reason that Sudan's government is culpable, today as in the past, is that it is deliberately creating the conditions in which thousands of civilians from rebel-aligned tribes are likely to die. First the government and its militia drove these people from their villages. Then it impeded humanitarian workers so that thousands of them fell prey to disease or starved. Now it is obstructing a serious peacekeeping deployment, with the result that its victims will continue to face shortages of medicines and food.

This may not be genocide by gas chamber or machete. But it is still a calculated policy of targeting ethnic groups and planning, meticulously, to eliminate them."

Suffering Persists After Zimbabwe Razing Campaign

All Things Considered, May 31, 2006 · As Zimbabwe's economy collapses under 1,000 percent inflation, many of the people uprooted by a slum-clearance campaign last year remain homeless and unemployed. Human-rights activists in the Southern African nation say the country is on the verge of social upheaval.

A year ago in May, the government of Zimbabwe launched a weeks-long, urban cleanup drive called Operation Murambatsvina. Police and soldiers swept through the slums of Zimbabwe's cities, destroying the houses and informal markets of some 700,000 people.

The government says it was a campaign to eliminate illegally constructed buildings. Critics say it was an effort to punish opponents of President Robert Mugabe.

In addition to the misery inflicted by Operation Murambatsvina, the nation is entering its eighth year of recession. The capital is suffering water and power cuts; fuel and foreign currency shortages are chronic; and almost one-third of the population relies on international food aid to survive.

Death and Taxes

Cover story -- Essay: Do helping hands in Appalachia do more harm than good?

Insights relevant to charitable efforts anywhere...

Cover story -- Essay: Do helping hands in Appalachia do more harm than good?: "Do helping hands in Appalachia do more harm than good?"

...
Third World of the U.S.

But after a year there, I became convinced that the Christian Appalachian Project is not going to change anyone’s life, and in fact in some cases it will only perpetuate dependence and poverty. Instead of somebody like me teaching GED, what Kentucky needs is better schools. Instead of employment with the Christian Appalachian Project, Kentuckians need more job opportunities and improvement in those jobs that are already available. Kentucky needs more people who are appalled at mountaintop removal, the successor to strip mining (although much worse), rather than people who seem to feel they are helpless to do anything about it.

Some have called Kentucky the Third World of the United States, and in many ways it is. The state is rich in natural resources that are being removed and are benefiting others, not the local people. The people here are given meager government aid to keep them quiet, and they, like people we have seen in poor countries, believe that they can do nothing to change their situation.

Nor can Christian Appalachian Project volunteers. Only the people of Kentucky themselves can change things, and if the organization gets involved, it becomes that dirty word, “political.” Some donors will probably stop giving money if the volunteers and their participants start marching to Frankfort to protest the poor schools, the roads that are constantly being destroyed by overloaded coal trucks, the sludge from the mountaintop removals that poisons their rivers and destroys their homes.

Once again we are discovering what we found in Mexico: It is the people themselves who must change things. Kentuckians must be upset enough to want to change their own lives.

One of the things that struck me when I came here to Kentucky was how lacking in dreams and ambitions the people of Kentucky are. It is almost as if the hills limit their views of the world as well as their own horizons. Now there is something very good about being willing to live simply and without desire for material gain. But it is sad to see so much unused talent, so much that is so good lost.

As in Third World countries, the local religious groups tend to support a quiescent lifestyle. The vast majority of people are believers, going to a variety of churches, most of which are of an evangelical, Pentecostal or fundamentalist sort. They believe that God has a plan and provides for everything. I have known people who would not even look for jobs, trusting that God will make one available when and if the time is right. Others expect God to provide a home for them, as if God is a real estate agent. Whatever happens, they believe, is God’s plan. This has the effect that people do not strive to change or improve, only to accept.

This too seems to be part of the poverty of the people, the curbing of their desires and hopes.

Strategic Victimhood in Sudan

Strategic Victimhood in Sudan

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By Alan J. Kuperman

Published: May 31, 2006

Austin, Tex.

THOUSANDS of Americans who wear green wristbands and demand military intervention to stop Sudan's Arab government from perpetrating genocide against black tribes in Darfur must be perplexed by recent developments.

Without such intervention, Sudan's government last month agreed to a peace accord pledging to disarm Arab janjaweed militias and resettle displaced civilians. By contrast, Darfur's black rebels, who are touted by the wristband crowd as freedom fighters, rejected the deal because it did not give them full regional control. Put simply, the rebels were willing to let genocide continue against their own people rather than compromise their demand for power.

International mediators were shamefaced. They had presented the plan as take it or leave it, to compel Khartoum's acceptance. But now the ostensible representatives of the victims were balking. Embarrassed American officials were forced to ask Sudan for further concessions beyond the ultimatum that it had already accepted.

Fortunately, Khartoum again acquiesced. But two of Darfur's three main rebel groups still rejected peace. Frustrated American negotiators accentuated the positive — the strongest rebel group did sign — and expressed hope that the dissenters would soon join.

But that hope was crushed last week when the rebels viciously turned on each other. As this newspaper reported, "The rebels have unleashed a tide of violence against the very civilians they once joined forces to protect."

Seemingly bizarre, this rejection of peace by factions claiming to seek it is actually revelatory. It helps explain why violence originally broke out in Darfur, how the Save Darfur movement unintentionally poured fuel on the fire, and what can be done to stanch genocidal violence in Sudan and elsewhere.

Darfur was never the simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations. The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago — denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. Violence was initiated not by Arab militias but by the black rebels who in 2003 attacked police and military installations. The most extreme Islamists are not in the government but in a faction of the rebels sponsored by former Deputy Prime Minister Hassan al-Turabi, after he was expelled from the regime. Cease-fires often have been violated first by the rebels, not the government, which has pledged repeatedly to admit international peacekeepers if the rebels halt their attacks.

This reality has been obscured by Sudan's criminally irresponsible reaction to the rebellion: arming militias to carry out a scorched-earth counterinsurgency. These Arab forces, who already resented the black tribes over past land disputes and recent attacks, were only too happy to rape and pillage any village suspected of supporting the rebels.

In light of janjaweed atrocities, it is natural to romanticize the other side as freedom fighters. But Darfur's rebels do not deserve that title. They took up arms not to stop genocide — which erupted only after they rebelled — but to gain tribal domination.

The strongest faction, representing the minority Zaghawa tribe, signed the sweetened peace deal in hopes of legitimizing its claim to control Darfur. But that claim is vehemently opposed by rebels representing the larger Fur tribe. Such internecine disputes only recently hit the headlines, but the rebels have long wasted resources fighting each other rather than protecting their people.

Advocates of intervention play down rebel responsibility because it is easier to build support for stopping genocide than for becoming entangled in yet another messy civil war. But their persistent calls for intervention have actually worsened the violence.

The rebels, much weaker than the government, would logically have sued for peace long ago. Because of the Save Darfur movement, however, the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure Sudan to hand them control of the region. Sadly, this message was reinforced when the rebels' initial rejection of peace last month was rewarded by American officials' extracting further concessions from Khartoum.

The key to rescuing Darfur is to reverse these perverse incentives. Spoiler rebels should be told that the game is over, and that further resistance will no longer be rewarded but punished by the loss of posts reserved for them in the peace agreement.

Ultimately, if the rebels refuse, military force will be required to defeat them. But this is no job for United Nations peacekeepers. Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia show that even the United States military cannot stamp out Islamic rebels on their home turf; second-rate international troops would stand even less chance.

Rather, we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes. This option will be distasteful to many, but Sudan has signed a peace treaty, so it deserves the right to defend its sovereignty against rebels who refuse to, so long as it observes the treaty and the laws of war.

Indeed, to avoid further catastrophes like Darfur, the United States should announce a policy of never intervening to help provocative rebels, diplomatically or militarily, so long as opposing armies avoid excessive retaliation. This would encourage restraint on both sides. Instead we should redirect intervention resources to support "people power" movements that pursue change peacefully, as they have done successfully over the past two decades in the Philippines, Indonesia, Serbia and elsewhere.

America, born in revolution, has a soft spot for rebels who claim to be freedom fighters, including those in Darfur. But to reduce genocidal violence, we must withhold support for the cynical provocations of militants who bear little resemblance to our founders.

Alan J. Kuperman, an assistant professor of public affairs at the University of Texas, is an editor of "Gambling on Humanitarian Intervention: Moral Hazard, Rebellion and Civil War."

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Ethiopian girl

Ethiopian girl
Originally uploaded by BoazImages.

Another beautiful image from boazimages

Darfur: Moral Blindness

A critique of Eric Reeves, a leading proponent of intervention in Darfur followed by his response...

Darfur: Moral Blindness

A piece from David Rieff in The New Republic - via Sudan Watch

Obviously, the reason advocates of a U.S. military intervention in Darfur have not dwelt on these issues of global governance and of U.S. security is that they view them as insignificant when compared with the moral imperative of intervening in what Eric Reeves, the most eloquent and passionate proponent of intervention, has called the first genocide of the twentieth century. For Reeves, and for the many thousands of grassroots activists who have been instructed by him, the world that failed to prevent the slaughter of the Rwandan Tutsis must not fail the Darfuris. As Reeves has written, "Will the genocide be allowed to continue? Will international deference continue as the regime's génocidaires predictably and relentlessly assert the claim of 'national sovereignty?' How many must die before the world says, 'Enough?'"

Reeves's use of the term génocidaires reflects not only his moral commitment to stopping the killing in Darfur, but, more problematically, an analytical framework that is not beyond challenge. Yes, in the United States, it is universally believed--so much so that the claim is even enshrined in a unanimous congressional declaration--that a slow motion genocide has been taking place in Darfur. But many reputable groups abroad, including the French section of Doctors Without Borders, whose physicians have been on the ground in Darfur for a very long time, reject claims like those made by Reeves. Does this matter, since everyone agrees the government of Sudan has committed or abetted the most terrible crimes in Darfur? On the most obvious level, the answer is no. The Genocide Convention is itself a deeply flawed document, and the crimes of the authorities in Khartoum have been unspeakable. But, on another level, the recurrent use of the term "genocide" is a way of delegitimizing any questioning of the intervene-now-no-matter-the-cost line. We failed to intervene in Rwanda, and now we know we were wrong; Darfur is the Rwanda of today; hence the only correct thing to do is intervene at once in Darfur. Q.E.D.

The problem with this--the eternal problem posed by the assertion of this kind of Kantian categorical imperative in matters of war and peace--is the problem of politics. Except for those who frankly favor the anti-government insurgents in Darfur--and they are more to be found on the Christian right, which has supported Minni Minnawi's Sudan Liberation Movement as it once supported John Garang's insurgency in Southern Sudan--advocates of a U.S. deployment have been maddeningly vague about what will transpire in Darfur after foreign forces halt the killing.

To his credit, Reeves has written that any outside military force would have to ensure that the rebel guerrillas do not take advantage of the foreign presence to improve their position on the ground. But that is what an international deployment will almost inevitably do, which is why Minnawi and others have been campaigning so hard for one. The deployment of foreign troops, whose mission will be to protect Darfuri civilians, will allow the guerrillas to establish "facts on the ground" that will strengthen their claims for secession. That is what makes the interventionists' claim that the intervention will be purely "humanitarian"--that it will protect civilians being murdered, raped, and displaced by the Janjaweed but do little or nothing else--so disingenuous. For it is virtually certain that this is not the way events will play out if U.S. or nato forces deploy. To the contrary, such a deployment can have only one of two outcomes. The first will be the severing of Darfur from the rest of Sudan and its transformation into some kind of international protectorate, à la Kosovo. But, at least in Kosovo, the protectorate was run by Europeans--by neighbors. In Darfur, by contrast, it will be governed by Americans (who are already at war across the Islamic world) and possibly by nato (i.e., Africa's former colonial masters). Now there's a recipe for stability.

If anything, the second possibility is even worse. Assuming the intervention encounters resistance from the Janjaweed and the government of Sudan (and perhaps Al Qaeda), the foreign intervenors will arrive at the conclusion that the only way to bring stability to Darfur is, well, regime change in Khartoum: In other words, the problems of Darfur are, in fact, the product of Al Bashir's dictatorship, and these problems can be meaningfully addressed only by substituting a more democratic government. Such an intervention may well end up being Iraq redux, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. But, then, it was disingenuous to pretend that the United States could democratize Iraq at the point of a gun.

The idea that, after Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and Iraq, intelligent activists can still speak of humanitarian intervention as if it were an uncomplicated act of rescue without grave implications is a testimony to the refusal of the best and brightest among us to think seriously about politics.

Is this what the marriage of human rights and American exceptionalism has led us to? If so, God help us. My own view is that the main culprit here is human rightsism, a worldview that is based, as John Gray has put it, "on the moral intuitions of the liberal academy ... a legalistic edifice from which politics has been excluded." Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. Another is that, perhaps out of the honorable motives of despair and outrage, it champions the use of American hard power while acting as if American soft power, were it to be diligently and seriously applied, can never produce the intervention that might actually work--for example, one undertaken by African countries with, perhaps, the participation of forces from Islamic countries outside the region. Most gravely of all, liberal interventionism ignores the global political context in which it calls for the use of the U.S. military.

Leave aside Iraq--and the detestation with which the United States is now regarded--and focus on history. Reeves may sneer at the idea of national sovereignty and bemoan the African Union's insufficiently aggressive line toward the government of Sudan. The fact remains that the consensus in postcolonial Africa has been to maintain the national borders that existed at the time of independence, despite their obvious artificiality, because, in redrawing them, Africa might reap the whirlwind. But that is why there was so little sympathy in Africa for Katangese or Biafra secession; it is why most African leaders insist that the Eritrean secession remain an exception for the sake of continental stability. There is nothing stupid, venal, or contemptible about this. And, whatever Reeves may imagine, there are many thoughtful African leaders whose reluctance to confront Khartoum is based in large part on these considerations.

A sense of contemporary Africa should lead those concerned with the fate of Darfuris to emphasize an African--or, at the very most, a U.N.--response, rather than an U.S. or a nato one. To their credit, the interventionists can put themselves in the place of the suffering peoples of Darfur. To their discredit, they cannot put themselves in the place of most people in the world who abhor U.S. military action. Again, the reigning global interpretation of American power may be false, but it is also dominant. And unless, like the conservative writer Norman Podhoretz and his ilk, you believe the United States should be harshly prosecuting what he has called "World War IV" against radical Islam, you are obliged to acknowledge that an intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world. If, on reflection, Reeves and those who think like him believe that it is worth doing anyway, that is a perfectly defensible position. What is indefensible is not seeing--or pretending not to see--the problem.

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Eric Reeves response: Darfur: RE: Moral Blindness

Eric Reeves responds to this recent piece by David Rieff - via the COC blog

All evidence is that the Abuja “peace agreement” of May 5, 2005---signed by one faction of the SLA (the least representative) and the Khartoum regime---is already failing. Unless the Abdel Wahid el-Nur faction of the SLM/A signs on to the agreement in the next day or two, it will collapse entirely. Rieff gives very little evidence of understanding the significance of the two factions of the SLM/A---indeed, he preposterously declares that in the US “the Christian right has supported Minni Minawi’s Sudan Liberation Movement as it once supported John Garang’s insurgency in Southern Sudan.” The SLM/A is, if the creation of one man, Abdel Wahid’s, not Minni Minawi’s. In any event, most Americans in the Darfur advocacy movement can’t distinguish meaningfully between what Minni represents, or even identify his tribe. This is important because he is Zaghawa (perhaps 8% of Darfur’s population), while Abdel Wahid is Fur (perhaps 30% of the population) and much more ethnically ecumenical. Yet again, Rieff simply doesn’t understand the “politics” he declares so important, even its most important features. Perhaps this is why he can descend into ghastly nonsense when speaking of “the political”:

“The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. [ ] To describe [them] simply as victims deprives them of any agency.”

In fact, we must wonder what “agency” a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what “agency” a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what “agency” a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. “Political interests” here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff’s account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious “realism,” to invoke so glibly the difficult “politics” of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.

Rieff’s ignorance, his disingenuousness, his cowardice are supremely instructive: for they are those of the world community at its worst.

posted by Eugene Oregon at 9:59 AM

PSD Blog - The World Bank Group - Private Sector Development

PSD Blog - The World Bank Group - Private Sector Development: "There has been a tendency to conclude that the difficulties for poorer countries to join the ranks of countries able to attract and use nonextractive foreign direct investment for development must be staggering and in the case of tropical countries—including most of sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, and the Caribbean—may be almost impossible to overcome. But the evidence indicates otherwise. Two of the most prominent success stories in the literature on foreign direct investment and development are Mauritius and the Dominican Republic. Their accomplishments required straightforward policy reforms, which are readily duplicable. "

TCS Daily - Why Ruin the World's Best Anti-Poverty Program?

An interesting and comprehensive take on the immigration issue...

TCS Daily - Why Ruin the World's Best Anti-Poverty Program?: "Why do economists think more favorably of immigration than the general public? I think there are three reasons: theory, empirical research, and ethics."

Blogging Bono's trip to Africa

Here is a nice entry from the http://joinred.blogspot.com blog, in which an individual who joined Bono on his recent trip to Africa writes of her experiences. The "Red"" movement by the way is a movement to get corporate sponsors involved in aid to Africa. American Express will soon have a "red" branded card in which a certain portion of transaction fees will be donated by AmEx to African charities. The Gap store is also involved in the "red" movement.

But what I like about this entry the most is that it really captures the generous and optimistic spirit that is characteristic of the African people, and is indeed a testimony as to the power of first-hand experiences in foreign countries in helping to have a realistic picture of other cultures...

We converge in sub-Saharan Africa. First stop – the mountain kingdom of
Lesotho. For me, this was the most amazing leg of the journey. I’ve
spent the past decade on efforts to buoy the economic competitiveness
of countries in this region. But no policy debate in Washington DC or
Brussels has ever been remotely as compelling as the sight of a dozen
factory workers vamping down the runway at the fashion show put on by
the Lesotho garment manufacturers association in the 100 percent
African t-shirts that they themselves produced. It was a beautiful,
beautiful moment, but hardly the last of the trip.

Looking
back, I don’t know that we ever passed a person in the street – man,
woman or child – who didn’t wave and smile. The vibe was infectious. I
think we all felt that incredible energy, so much in contrast our
“busy” “stressful” lives in America, London, Dublin… A third of the
population in Lesotho is HIV positive and they are fired up about
making a better future for themselves. Bono one night recalled a quote
that nailed this determination: “Don’t kick the darkness/make the light
shine brighter.”

I guess if I could communicate one thing that
most struck me in the visits to Lesotho and Rwanda, it’s the honest
lack of cynicism. Rwanda went through a horrifying civil war. The first
hand account given by one survivor was hard even to hear. And yet,
listening to everyone from government officials, health workers, the
hilarious guy that runs the coffee processing facility that supplies
Starbucks to the beautiful women who make baskets in their spare time
to sell to department stores in the U.S., they are determined to
succeed.

It’s funny but sitting in the bar my last night in
Kigali, I realized that Bono wasn’t the only rock star on the trip. If
the commercial equivalent of an autograph is a business card, then the
admittedly groovy Leslie Dance of Motorola was the hot ticket that
night. Motorola has a legacy of engagement in Africa on business and
philanthropic ventures, but it was excitement over the new MotoSLVR for
red, and interest in building components of phones and packaging in
Africa, that really stirred up the crowd.

Wish I had been able
to stay on through to Mali to meet the women who make mudcloth. The
Converse mudcloth high-tops for (product) RED are the perfect
embodiment of the spirit behind this brand we’re building. What’s deep
is cool. Those shoes are the real deal!

AfriGadget

This could develop into an interesting blog--there is no question that the poor often are amazing resourceful, as this blog aims to highlight...

AfriGadget: "The purpose of Afrigadget is to showcase African ingenuity with technology. Many times Africans do not have access to the same quality tools or items that are found in other areas of the world. What is available to be used to solve problems or fix equipment can be wide and varied. You would be surprised at what can be made, fixed or created with bailing wire, inner-tubes and wood.

This post has been filed under Gadgets on May 28th Comments (3) / "

U.N. Says India Now Has Most AIDS Cases

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- India now has the largest number of AIDS infections as the spread of the disease shows no sign of letting up a quarter-century into an epidemic that has claimed 25 million lives, the U.N. reported Tuesday.

"I think we will see a further globalization of the epidemic spreading to every single corner of the planet," UNAIDS head Dr. Peter Piot told The Associated Press in an interview.

The data released by UNAIDS shows that India now has the largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS. With an estimated 5.7 million infections, it has surpassed South Africa's 5.5 million.

But the epidemic still remains at its worst in sub-Saharan Africa, where per capita rates continue to climb in several countries. A third of adults were infected in Swaziland in 2005. By comparison, India's per capita rate is low, at 0.9 percent of its 1.02 billion people.

The 630-page UNAIDS report released Tuesday documents countries' progress and failures, and projects what must happen to keep some regions from experiencing disaster. The agency report was released a day ahead of a high-level meeting on AIDS in New York, and a week prior to the 25th anniversary of the first documented AIDS cases on June 5, 1981.

Nearly 40 million people are living with HIV/AIDS.

"It won't go away one fine day, and then we wake up and say, 'Oh, AIDS is gone,'" Piot told the AP in a recent telephone interview from Geneva.

He said one of the report's most disturbing findings was how few babies are being protected against infection. Only 9 percent of pregnant women in poor countries are receiving services, such as access to drugs, to help prevent mother-to-child transmission, despite a UNAIDS goal of 80 percent coverage.

"The thing I'm most disappointed with and surprised about is prevention of mother-to-child transmission," Piot said. "For HIV, the coverage is still very low and we didn't meet the target. "Here we have something that is non-controversial; it's about saving the babies."

Women's vulnerability to the disease continues to increase, with more than 17 million women infected worldwide _ nearly half the global total _ and more than three-quarters of them living in sub-Saharan Africa, the report found.

Stigma and discrimination still plague those infected worldwide, and young people's knowledge about HIV/AIDS remains low with less than 50 percent having adequate information about the disease _ a far cry from the 90 percent target UNAIDS set for 2005.

Piot said the situation in sub-Saharan Africa remains dismal, where 24.5 million people were infected and home to nearly 90 percent of the world's children living with the virus.

A Plague of Orphans and Lonely Grandmothers

Watch the video that is linked to in this piece by Kristof--it really puts a human face on the AIDS crisis in Africa....

I am also glad that Kristof mentions in the video that 90% of people who are HIV+ don't know it in Africa...



n the early years of AIDS, the virus didn't get attention because the victims were marginalized people: gays, Haitians and hemophiliacs.

Then when AIDS did threaten mainstream America, it finally evoked empathy and research dollars. But now it has slipped back in our consciousness because once more the primary victims are marginalized people — this time, Africans.

Nearly three million people die from AIDS each year. Among them are half a million children under the age of 15, mostly Africans infected during childbirth.

The numbers are numbing, even paralyzing. So for a window into southern African village life today, meet two of those African kids whose lives are being destroyed by the world's inattention to AIDS: Wandile Shongwe and his sister, Temdoline.

Wandile, an 11-year-old boy speaking shyly in front of his hut in central Swaziland, told me his story. First his mother died, and then last year his father followed, along with his older brother.

So Wandile and Temdoline, who is 9, moved in with their grandmother, but a month ago she died of AIDS. They were shuffled off to their last surviving relative, an aunt, and now she is dying as well, and is too ill to care for them.

"Nobody will take care of them after my death," said the aunt, Buduzile Ngcamphalala.

But in fact, no one is really caring for them now. The aunt was too sick to plant corn in the family plot, so there is no food. She cannot buy clothes, so Temdoline's only dress is a school uniform so tattered that it has no seat and completely shows her underwear.

To preserve even that remnant of a dress, she takes it off when she gets home from school and puts on her only other bit of clothing: a pair of shorts, with no shirt. That would be too scandalous to wear to church, so she does not go.

To live such a childhood means not only unending trauma, but also unrelenting hunger. I asked the children whether they had had breakfast that morning. No. Dinner the night before? No. The only meal they regularly get is lunch at school, provided by the World Food Program's outstanding school-feeding program (www.wfp.org).

"Every day I go to school without breakfast," Temdoline said, "and every day I go to bed without dinner."

The children gather the firewood and water, and they wash their own clothes — as well as caring for their aunt. And soon the two orphans will be left to bury their aunt and then try to survive all alone.

"I feel very painful when she is sick," Wandile said of his aunt. "Because after she dies, no one is going to take care of us." (See video of Wandile, if you dare, in my multimedia report on AIDS at www.nytimes.com/kristof.)

After traveling in southern Africa to report on AIDS, on the 25th anniversary of the detection of the virus, I feel a compulsion to share stories of people like Wandile and Temdoline. They spill out of me.

The life expectancy in Swaziland, which has the highest infection rate in the world, with nearly 40 percent of adults infected, has fallen from 55 to 34. This is a land where parents routinely bury their children, and where mothers constantly learn that they have given their babies a death sentence — the AIDS virus — during childbirth or breastfeeding.

In rural Swaziland, a 74-year-old woman named Maria Shongwe told me that 9 of her 11 children have died, along with many of her grandchildren. (It's not certain that all died of AIDS, because so few people are tested that the cause of death is not always known.) I met her as she returned from preparing the body of a 24-year-old granddaughter for a funeral.

The only comparable apocalypse in historical times was the Black Death 650 years ago. But there is a difference.

In the 14th century, we didn't know how to fight the Plague. Today we know what to do, and we have the tools to overcome AIDS — and yet we still don't use them. A $4 dose of a medicine called nevirapine mostly blocks mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V. during childbirth, and yet because of poverty and governmental incompetence, at last count only 10 percent of pregnant African women with the virus got such a drug.

Maybe that's the saddest thing of all. Twenty-five years after we allowed AIDS to spin out of control because its victims were marginalized people, we're doing the same thing all over again. And so today, as every day, another 7,900 people will die of AIDS.

Bono in Africa

Bono is clearly in Jeffrey Sach's camp as opposed to the writer referenced in the previous blog entry from the L.A. Times...

Limits and potential of aid in Africa

May 25th, 2006, filed by Lesley Wroughton

(Ed. note: Reuters correspondent Lesley Wroughton has been traveling with Bono on a six-nation tour in Africa. She interviewed Bono at the end of the trip. Here is what he said.)

On working in Africa… There are multi-dimensional problems. You have to fight a war on at least three fronts and I would call them health, education and the interface with commerce. I couldn’t point you to a single time when these pennies, or dollars, or euros dropped on me and I’m not sure it fully came into focus until this trip.

I’ve moved a distance. We’re all seeing something. We’re more evolved than we were. We used to only see despair and we wanted to help and we wanted to make the funds available to ease that despair. For what was once called foreign assistance, we now need two names: one you can call mercy and response to pandemic-type aid and you can’t hold people ransom to their governments on that. Then there is other aid called investment.

On aid strategies… We have to be very careful where that (investment) aid goes and that is going to be unpopular with some of our activists and it is going to be very unpopular if you’re in a country where your government is not deserving of this new investment and you’re left carrying the can. Oddly enough, it is the activists here on the continent of Africa who are doubly hard on this point. We have to listen to them. They are saying, do not invest in our countries while we have crooked leadership. They’re saying it and I think we have to listen to them. That is hard. That is depressing.

We didn’t go to those countries, so in one sense, this one trip is being skewed in the direction of promise.

On aid limits… We are coming out of the adolescence of optimism, where we thought just putting on our marching boots and pulling a big number could transform the lives on the continent of Africa. You can’t.

There were people campaigning alongside without any conditionality. I don’t agree with them. I don’t agree with the burdensome conditionality that forces liberalization but I do agree with conditionality of tackling of corruption. I think we are growing up.

For somebody who by my trade should be more suited to barricades than the negotiating table, that is part of growing up. The problems are much more complex than we thought they were and I think Africans must have been smiling and cringing at times when they saw us just thinking that money could solve their problems.

To think when we started Live Aid, it was the first kind of aid, the response to famine in Ethiopia. Look how a whole generation has educated itself off the back of that to move from charity to justice and then to move from justice to debt and trade. It’s quite an arc and I think I’ve gone through that. That is the arc of my whole involvement.

The depressing thing again is there are still so many on the continent being held ransom.

(Pictures: (R) Bono visits a market in Ghana’s capital Accra, (L) Bono kisses Hajia Alima Mahama, Ghana’s Women and Children’s Affairs Minister. REUTERS/Yaw-Bibini)

Africa: the corrupt continent

POOR AFRICA! Seldom has debate about the fate of so many been shaped by so few from so far away — and with so little effect.



Increase aid, tackle health hazards and build model "development villages," argues Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, and Africa can be pulled out of the poverty that makes life hell for six of every 10 of its 650 million people.

Not so, retorts William Easterly, economics professor at New York University. We've tried that and failed. Instead, aid agencies should focus on specific tasks — such as getting malaria medicine to the sick, clean water to the poor, textbooks to schoolchildren — coupled with home-grown political and economic reforms.



Yet 50 years after the first of the colonies won independence, Africa's capacity to follow any such advice or to manage its affairs is weaker than ever. Its dependence on foreign "experts" is greater than ever, and the influence of proliferating Western aid agencies is more powerful than ever.



And corruption is endemic. Hardly a country on the continent has enough honest officials who can deliver aid, medicines or schoolbooks without paying or receiving bribes or exploiting the aid for political patronage.



So when World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz put a crackdown on graft at the top of his development agenda, he had his priorities right. Wolfowitz's crusade against corruption is starting to be felt in Asia and South America. In India, the World Bank reportedly held up lending to health clinics because of concerns about possible misuse of funds. In Bangladesh, road contracts have been canceled because of improper bidding. Argentina, under pressure from the bank, has tightened anti-corruption measures. But the crackdown on corruption seems not to have reached Africa, the region that needs it most.



In Kenya, nearly 18 months have passed since John Githongo, the country's former top anti-corruption official, chose to go into exile and expose the details of top-level graft. Yet the response from the World Bank has been mild.



It is hard to believe that the tough Wolfowitz, the former U.S. deputy Defense secretary and architect of the Iraq war, is shirking a fight. Rather, it suggests that he has learned that what works elsewhere in the world does not necessarily work in Africa. That lesson is a prerequisite to change in Africa, which is undergoing a continental crisis distinct from the rest of the developing world. To grasp the depth of Africa's problems, consider two debilitating symptoms of its loss of confidence in itself: capital flight and the brain drain.



Every year, about $15 billion pours out of Africa — a sum that equals international aid. In other words, as fast as aid comes in, capital flows out into Western banks. Roughly 40% of African savings are held outside the continent, compared with 6% in East Asia and 3% in South Asia. Moreover, every year 70,000 of Africa's brightest and best leave to work abroad, and 100,000 foreign "experts" come to work in Africa.



So how should Wolfowitz proceed?



About 30 years after the World Bank warned of the continent's deepening crisis, it is surely time for the world's leading development agency to admit defeat. But the bank should not withdraw; it should reengage.



Admitting defeat means setting a time limit on phasing out development aid — at least five years but no more than 10 — to allow an orderly end to an effort that has cost donors more than $550 billion but left more Africans poorer than before it began. Reengaging means ending the unhealthy dependency that aid has helped create. The bank should, for example, make no new loans or grants unless the recipient government provides matching funds, dollar for dollar.



Africa's own resources must be tapped to replace donor funds. To do this, Africa needs to double its domestic savings, aiming at hitting Asian savings rates. It also needs radical reform of the largely communal land-ownership system. It must introduce a competitive business environment, one that does not, for example, require six weeks to register a new company in Kenya, compared to six days in Hong Kong. It needs a bill of business rights, with provisions to allow arbitration of disputes in a neutral venue abroad, circumventing the corrupt legal systems that have scared off investors. In short, Africa must create the business conditions in which African capital will return.



During a recent visit to Mozambique, British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown remarked: "In the 19th century, the issue was what we could do to Africa; in the 20th, what we could do for Africa; and now, in this century, the issue is what Africa, empowered, can do for herself." One hopes Wolfowitz and the World Bank were listening.