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A very cool resource for music lovers...

War’s Chaos Steals Congo’s Young by the Millions - New York Times

War’s Chaos Steals Congo’s Young by the Millions - New York Times

July 30, 2006
War’s Chaos Steals Congo’s Young by the Millions
By LYDIA POLGREEN

RUTSHURU, Congo — Children die here from the same ailments that needlessly kill children all over Africa — malaria, diarrhea, measles, malnutrition — but on a vast and cataclysmic scale.

The child mortality rate here in the most volatile eastern provinces is almost twice that of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, which already has the world’s highest rate, according to the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit organization that has documented the death toll here in a series of detailed mortality studies from 1998 to 2004.

Though Congo’s civil war supposedly ended four years ago, and the nation’s first democratic elections in more than four decades are scheduled for Sunday, the fighting and chaos here continue to kill about 1,250 people each day, mostly from hunger and disease. In all, nearly four million people have died as a result of the conflict since 1998, almost half of them children under the age of 5, according to the International Rescue Committee.

The stakes in the election are highest for those far too young to vote, but even the most optimistic candidates and international observers say there is little chance that the voting will stop the dying anytime soon. In a report released in July, Unicef described the death toll in Congo as a “tsunami of death every six months.”

“It is fair to say that the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been the deadliest for children in the past 60 years,” said Richard Brennan, health director of the International Rescue Committee. “No other conflict has had the same lev- els of excess mortality, and children have borne a disproportionate degree of this burden.”

About 30,000 children have been forced into militias, while untold thousands of girls have been raped, according to the Unicef report. Children labor under toxic conditions in gold and diamond mines. Orphans choke the streets of Kinshasa, the capital, bedraggled platoons in Congo’s vast army of want.

Do or Die Against Iraq's Death Squads

Do or Die Against Iraq's Death Squads: "Nouri al-Maliki does not strike a commanding pose as Iraq's new prime minister: Slouching, stubble-faced, uneasy before foreign audiences, he looks more like a doughy Mukhabarat officer than the sleek exile politicians who have been making the rounds in Washington over the past decade.

His visit seemed almost a sideshow this week in the apocalyptic mood caused by the Lebanon war. Certainly Democrats in Congress treated it that way, bizarrely hectoring Maliki for not embracing Israel's war in Lebanon. But the visit was important in its own right because it offered a chance to assess the Bush administration's strategy as the Iraq war spins toward the point of no return."

Maliki's government is the last good chance for a democratic Iraq. Many Americans seem to take it almost for granted that the Iraq project has failed. But as bad as the situation is now, it could get worse. If Maliki cannot rally the country behind his so-called unity government, the civil war will shift into a grim new phase, with pitched sectarian battles for control of territory and the prospect of tens of thousands more dead...

Pander and Run

Pander and Run: "After years of struggling to define their own approach to post-Sept. 11 foreign policy, Democrats seem finally to have hit on one. It's called pandering. In those rare cases when George W. Bush shows genuine sensitivity to America's allies and propounds a broader, more enlightened view of the national interest, Democrats will make him pay. It's jingoism with a liberal face.

The latest example came this week when Democratic senators and House members demanded that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki either retract his criticisms of Israel or forfeit his chance to address Congress. Great idea. Maliki -- who runs a government propped up by U.S. troops -- is desperate to show Iraqis that he is not Washington's puppet. And the United States desperately needs him to succeed because, unless he gains political credibility at home, his government will have no hope of surviving on its own."

WSJ.com - Doha Is Dead...

WSJ.com - Doha Is Dead...

Trade diplomats have been quick to point fingers after negotiations in the Doha Round collapsed Monday, and for once they're all correct. Far more important, however, will be whether the world's economic powers continue to push for the free trade of goods and services by other means, or simply retreat and let the protectionists pounce.

The U.S. has taken most of the criticism so far, some of it deserved. The Bush Administration has never escaped the subsidy shadow cast by the 2002 farm bill, which increased government aid to American agribusiness to $190 billion over six years. This largesse, pushed by Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley among others, made it more difficult for the U.S. to cut farm handouts enough for a successful Doha.

It also eroded confidence in the White House's ability to deliver any real cuts in the face of Congressional opposition, particularly with midterm elections coming up. To clear Congress, a Doha deal would have to be ambitious enough in other areas -- such as services and manufactured goods -- to offset the steep farm subsidy cuts that the U.S. would have to make. This is where the talks really collapsed.

George Benson blues miles davis tribute

George Benson and John McLaughlin tribute to Miles Davis

WSJ.com - More Reasons to Eat Your Veggies

WSJ.com - More Reasons to Eat Your Veggies: "Published jointly by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture, the more-individualized advice usually adds up to more than the old five servings, which equaled 2.5 cups of fruits and vegetables. People can calculate their individual needs at www.mypyramid.gov.

The push to step up produce consumption is fueled in part by a growing body of evidence that fruits and vegetables offer even more health benefits than previously understood, and may play roles in preventing heart and eye disease, as well as stomach, colon and other cancers. Also, in 2004, the Institute of Medicine, a federal advisory body, recommended that adult Americans increase their intake of potassium, a mineral that helps to lower blood pressure and is plentiful in many fruits and vegetables."
(..)

People who eat fruits and vegetables more than three times a day reduce their risk of having a stroke and dying from cardiovascular disease by nearly a quarter, compared with those who eat them less than once a day, according to an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study examining data from a national epidemiological survey. Many other studies find a similar inverse relationship between various chronic diseases and fruit and vegetable consumption.

Eating lots of fruits and vegetables may also be one of the best ways to lose weight. For instance, a survey of 7,356 adults published last month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that those who ate at least 4.5 cups of fruits and vegetables a day were less likely than people who ate less to be obese -- even if their diet was high in fat, says Barbara Rolls, one of the study's authors. "Fruits and vegetables really are key players in determining weight status," she says.

There are signs that high consumption of produce may improve bone health, helping stave off osteoporosis. One recent study, also published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found an association between high fruit and vegetable intake and bone mineral density in boys and girls ages 16 to 18, and a similar association involving fruit intake in women ages 60 to 83. Vitamin C and other antioxidants in fruit may play a role, the study's authors concluded.

WSJ.com - The Mossberg Solution

WSJ.com - The Mossberg Solution: "For the blind and visually impaired, technology has been helpful in many ways. Software can dictate the text on a computer screen, and advancements in voice recognition have made it possible to navigate a computer more easily.

But, for reading printed documents, like magazines, menus and mail, many blind and visually impaired people must still rely on other people to read to them, or must use large, deskbound reading machines that do nothing to allow reading while on the go. These dependencies are affecting more and more people, as aging Boomers confront diseases like macular degeneration and the effects of diabetes on eyesight.
[Device Photo]
The $3,495 Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader takes digital pictures of text and reads them out loud. www.knfbreader.com.

Starting this month, there's a new portable gadget for the blind that permits them to 'read' printed documents anywhere, at home or away, without the aid of sighted people. This gadget takes a digital picture of a page of text, and then reads it aloud to the blind person, either through a speaker or through earphones. It's called the Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, and we've been testing it."...

The Would-Be Terrorist's Explosive Tell-All Tale

The Would-Be Terrorist's Explosive Tell-All Tale: "JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- When Abdullah Thabit recently saw a photo of one of the Sept. 11 hijackers for the first time, he felt a jolt of fear, and then a sadness so intense that tears streamed down his cheeks. The hijacker, Ahmed Alnami, was from Thabit's home town, and he looked familiar.

Thabit is the author of 'The 20th Terrorist,' which recounts his years as a religious extremist. He thinks he could easily have been in Alnami's place.

'I felt like someone who'd gotten off a b"

The abolition of slavery - TLS Highlights - Times Online

The abolition of slavery - TLS Highlights - Times Online: "Within fifty years of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, the native population of Hispaniola had fallen from around 500,000 to less than 500. Elsewhere, the collapse was scarcely less dramatic. In Mexico and Peru, it was hastened by the brutal regimens imposed by the conquistadores. Yet, as far away as the Great Plains of North America, people were sickening and dying. Had the Spanish and Portuguese embarked on a policy of deliberate genocide they could not have wreaked a fraction of the havoc caused by the pathogens they had introduced. Unable to comprehend what was happening, they stood amazed as the thriving communities they had conquered evaporated before their very eyes. Within a century of the Europeans’ arrival, roughly 90 per cent of the population of the Americas perished.


What would have happened to Native Americans had they proven less susceptible to Old World disease may be inferred from the fate of the 12.5 million Africans imported to take their place. Africa had been a source of slave labour since ancient times. Over the centuries it is likely that as many slaves had been marched northward across the Sahara as would be shipped westward across the Atlantic. Some were employed as household servants, others as eunuchs and concubines. Many, however, laboured on the sugar plantations that, from the time of the Crusades onward, advanced steadily westward from Palestine to Cyprus, Majorca, the Iberian Peninsula and thence out into the Atlantic. Well before Columbus’s first American voyage, Madeira had become a wealthy sugar colony employing largely African slave labour."...

(..)
H. Lecky describes England’s crusade against slavery as “among the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations”. Great powers do not as a rule behave selflessly. Not surprisingly, Lecky’s comment has generally been regarded with scepticism. Now, knowing vastly more than he did about slavery and its abolition, Davis believes Lecky was basically right. Although the American abolition movement came later and assumed a somewhat different character, the same might equally well be said of it. Slaves had never liked being slaves, but the rise of a climate of opinion that objected to slavery on moral grounds was something new. There had been nothing like it in ancient or medieval times or in any other society of which we have record. The upsurge of popular support for abolition both in Britain and the northern USA was unprecedented. Perhaps, David Brion Davis hypothesizes, moral progress is possible.

Whatever lay behind it, the cost of doing away with what up to then had been a resilient, flexible and expanding institution proved formidable. “I thank God”, declared Wilberforce on his deathbed, “that I should have lived to witness a day in which England is willing to give twenty millions sterling for the Abolition of slavery.” In terms of loss of trade, the cost was much greater. The United States, confronted by a far larger problem and lacking a central government capable of solving it peacefully, barely survived the ordeal.

Foreign Affairs - The India Model - Gurcharan Das

I have been to India five times since 1968. The last trip was about 7 years ago. The turnabout in India's economy has always been a bit of a mystery to me, given the pervasice beaurocracy and corruption. The author touches upon many aspects of the state of the current Indian economy. He feels that the key to the turnaround were modest liberal refroms initiated by Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s. This increased economic growth markedly, but also brought India to the point of fiscal crisis in the early 1990s. This led to critical reforms, created by the current Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, who was then finace minister.
India is a fascinating case study of economic development, and perhaps a model for other developing countries. The article is long, but a good read if you have interest in international economic development...
Foreign Affairs - The India Model - Gurcharan Das: "Although the world has just discovered it, India's economic success is far from new. After three postindependence decades of meager progress, the country's economy grew at 6 percent a year from 1980 to 2002 and at 7.5 percent a year from 2002 to 2006 -- making it one of the world's best-performing economies for a quarter century. In the past two decades, the size of the middle class has quadrupled (to almost 250 million people), and 1 percent of the country's poor have crossed the poverty line every year. At the same time, population growth has slowed from the historic rate of 2.2 percent a year to 1.7 percent today -- meaning that growth has brought large per capita income gains, from $1,178 to $3,051 (in terms of purchasing-power parity) since 1980. India is now the world's fourth-largest economy. Soon it will surpass Japan to become the third-largest.

The notable thing about India's rise is not that it is new, but that its path has been unique. Rather than adopting the classic Asian strategy -- exporting labor-intensive, low-priced manufactured goods to the West -- India has relied on its domestic market more than exports, consumption more than investment, services more than industry, and high-tech more than low-skilled manufacturing. This approach has meant that the Indian economy has been mostly insulated from global downturns, showing a degree of stability that is as impressive as the rate of its expansion. The consumption-driven model is also more people-friendly than other development strategies. As a result, inequality has increased much less in India than in other developing nations. (Its Gini index, a measure of income inequality on a scale of zero to 100, is 33, compared to 41 for the United States, 45 for China, and 59 for Brazil.) Moreover, 30 to 40 percent of GDP growth is due to rising productivity -- a true sign of an economy's health and progress -- rather than to increases in the amount of capital or labor.

But what is most remarkable is that rather than rising with the help of the state, India is in many ways rising despite the state. The entrepreneur is clearly at the center of India's success story. India now boasts highly competitive private companies, a booming stock market, and a modern, well-disciplined financial sector. And since 1991 especially, the Indian state has been gradually moving out of the way -- not graciously, but kicked and dragged into implementing economic reforms. It has lowered trade barriers and tax rates, broken state monopolies, unshackled industry, encouraged competition, and opened up to the rest of the world. The pace has been slow, but the reforms are starting to add up."

Women back under wraps with Taliban vice squad | The World | The Australian

Women back under wraps with Taliban vice squad | The World | The Australian: "AFGHANISTAN'S notorious Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was set up by the Taliban to enforce bans on women doing anything from working to wearing nail varnish or laughing out loud, is to be recreated by the Government in Kabul.

The decision has provoked an outcry among women and human rights activists who fear a return to the days when religious police patrolled the streets, beating or arresting any woman who was not properly covered by a burka or accompanied by a male relative.

'This is a very bad idea at a bad time,' said Sam Zia-Zarifi, the Asia research director of Human Rights Watch. 'We're close to the edge in Afghanistan. It really could all go wrong and it is alarming that the United Nations and Western governments are not speaking out on this issue.'"

Cuts in Africa Aid Thwart U.S. Goals - New York Times

Cuts in Africa Aid Thwart U.S. Goals - New York Times: "WASHINGTON, July 22 — The Bush administration and Congress have slashed millions of dollars of military aid to African nations in recent years, moves that Pentagon officials and senior military commanders say have undermined American efforts to combat terrorist threats in Africa and to counter expanding Chinese influence there.

Since 2003, Washington has shut down Pentagon programs to train and equip militaries in a handful of African nations because they have declined to sign agreements exempting American troops from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

But the policy, which was designed to protect American troops, has instead angered senior military officials, who say the cuts in military aid are shortsighted and have weakened counterterrorism efforts in places where the threat of international terrorism is said to be most acute."

Read All About It - New York Times

Read All About It - New York Times: "Q: You’re one of several Microsoft entrepreneurs who seem eager to live out some fantasy of saving the world. As the founder of Room to Read, do you really believe you can personally “educate the world’s children,” as the subtitle of your forthcoming book, “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World,” proclaims?

We’re trying to open libraries and schools, mostly for kids K to 5, in the developing world at a pace that emulates Starbucks’. With 850 million illiterate people in the world, we need the nonprofit sector to scale rapidly.

But can libraries open as quickly as coffee bars?"

Seed: How We Know

Seed: How We Know: "This revealed the essential connection between learning and doing. The human mind understands the world by interacting with it. When we see an inanimate object that we are familiar with, our mirror neurons instinctively imagine what they could do with that object. A tennis racquet causes our cells to imagine swinging it; a violin causes our cells to imagine playing it. If you happen to be taught algebra by Bob Moses, a math equation might trigger thoughts of taking the subway. A separate brain imaging study has shown that our mirror neurons can even be activated by the sound of words. When we say 'tennis' or 'violin' or 'algebra,' cells in our motor cortex automatically get excited.

What's the point of all this neural activity? Mirror neurons let us comb the world for practical things. Because they translate our ideas into actions, they naturally focus on whatever ideas we know how to use, ignoring the abstract and the theoretical. This makes evolutionary sense. The brain, after all, is an adaptive organ: It evolved to help us cope with a world full of concrete problems, not so that we could excel at metaphysics. (As Goethe quipped, 'In the beginning was the deed.') And even though mirror neurons are just a small cluster of cells, their predilection for action is an essential part of the human mind. They have been implicated in every"

NPR : New Autism Study Shows Discrepancy in Brains

NPR : New Autism Study Shows Discrepancy in Brains: "July 19, 2006 · Men and boys with autism have fewer neurons in a part of the brain involved in memory and emotion, according to a new study by scientists at the University of California in San Diego and the MIND Institute at UC Davis.

The study, which appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, offers the latest evidence that this area of the brain, called the amygdala, may be one of the keys to understanding autism."

NPR : New Autism Study Shows Discrepancy in Brains

NPR : New Autism Study Shows Discrepancy in Brains: "July 19, 2006 · Men and boys with autism have fewer neurons in a part of the brain involved in memory and emotion, according to a new study by scientists at the University of California in San Diego and the MIND Institute at UC Davis.

The study, which appeared in the Journal of Neuroscience, offers the latest evidence that this area of the brain, called the amygdala, may be one of the keys to understanding autism."

Jeff Beck//Santana

One more for you--santana plus beck and ?jan hammer

Jeff Beck

Check out this video of one of my favorite guitarists--the fabulous Jeff Beck. Eternal thanks to my partner, Steve, for getting me 5th row tickets to see Mr. Beck 2 years ago--an experience I will never forget!

Inside Congo, An Unspeakable Toll

Inside Congo, An Unspeakable Toll: "But has Congo -- nominally at peace since a truce in 2002 ended its eight-year civil war, but still suffering spasms of violence -- ever occupied its rightful place on that list? Has the scale of the tragedy engulfing the Congolese people received proper attention? The answer, sadly, is no. Ignorance of the calamity occurring in Congo remains almost universal, even though the numbers that reflect it -- particularly the key indicator 'excess mortality,' the number of deaths above normal levels -- are staggering.

The International Rescue Committee, which has been providing humanitarian assistance in Congo since 1996, conducted four mortality surveys in the country between 2000 and 2004. We found that in the most affected zones, the mortality rate over the years covered by our studies (1998 to 2004) exceeded the 'normal' rate for sub-Saharan Africa by nearly 4 million people. This makes the crisis in Congo the deadliest anywhere since the end of World War II, dwarfing Bosnia, Kosovo, Darfur and even the South Asian tsunami. Yet for the most part, these deaths have gone all but unnoticed.

Perhaps this is because of the nature of the dying. In an era of instant news cycles, more attention is paid to those who die violently than to those who die of disease. In our most recent Congo survey, only 2 percent of the deaths"