Category: Uncategorized

By Peter Lee

“Obama to Africa: Drop Dead,” echoing the famous admonition of president Gerald Ford to a cash-strapped New York City in the 1970s, was, for all practical purposes, the message the American president delivered to the African continent in Ghana on Saturday.
Barack Obama, mindful of the shaky United States domestic constituency even for the bailout of the American economy, and loath to display favoritism to his father’s home continent, decided against investing any political capital in a call to provide significant amounts of assistance to sub-Saharan Africa during the current global recession.

His rather empty declaration, “We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans,” provided little consolation or inspiration for the poorer nations of Africa, which are reeling from the balance-of-payments, aid, investment and developmental consequences of the West’s catastrophic exploration of the extremes of sophisticated financial leverage.

Obama’s speech was also a remarkably cynical piece of diplomatic triage, given what is widely recognized to be the genuine state of economic affairs on the African continent.

However, China appears to have made a strategic decision to funnel in more aid and investment, as the West struggles with the consequences of the global recession and fights a losing battle to focus on Africa’s needs for aid, trade and investment.

For Africa, it couldn’t come at a better time.

Even before the current crisis, with optimistic pre-crash assumptions about exports, inward remittances, financial reform and reduced capital flight, the United Nations estimated that sub-Saharan Africa would need tens of billions of dollars per annum in external funding if it were to make any headway in its struggle to alleviate widespread poverty.

Asia Times for more

Several Sudanese women have been flogged as a punishment for dressing “indecently”, according to a local journalist who was arrested with them.

Lubna Ahmed al-Hussein, who says she is facing 40 lashes, said she and 12 other women wearing trousers were arrested in a restaurant in the capital, Khartoum.

She told the BBC several of the women had pleaded guilty to the charges and had 10 lashes immediately.

Khartoum, unlike South Sudan, is governed by Sharia law.
Several of those punished were from the mainly Christian and animist south, Ms Hussein said.

Non-Muslims are not supposed to be subject to Islamic law, even in Khartoum and other parts of the mainly Muslim north.
She said that a group of about 20 or 30 police officers entered the popular Khartoum restaurant and arrested all the women wearing trousers.

BBC for more

Former Vice President Dick Cheney defended the Bush administration’s antiterrorism policies – including warrantless domestic surveillance, ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques for terrorism suspects, and the US Guantánamo prison camp – during a speech in May at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
(Joshua Roberts/Reuters)

With reports that the former vice president kept Congress in the dark, Democrats call for an official probe of a mysterious CIA program.
By Cheryl Sullivan | Staff writer

Now what will Dick Cheney have to say?

The former vice president, self-appointed defender-in-chief of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies, is again the man of the hour amid news reports that he concealed from Congress information about the development of a top-secret CIA counterterrorism program.
In the days since members of the House and Senate intelligence panels learned of the still-unspecified CIA program on June 24, and in the hours since The New York Times reported July 11 that Congress was kept out of the loop for eight years on Mr. Cheney’s “direct orders,” America’s former No. 2 has been mum.

Allegations of illegal action

Cheney may well opt to remain silent – on this particular matter, at least – given that some Democratic lawmakers on Sunday implied or flat-out stated that such a failure to inform Congress is illegal. Intelligence panel members from both the House and the Senate say Congress should investigate.

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D) of Illinois, chairwoman of the House Intelligence Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, said a formal probe is needed of the CIA’s practices and the Bush administration’s decision to keep Congress in the dark.

“What it does is really propel a prompt investigation,” she said over the weekend in an interview with Politico. “An explicit decision was made at the highest levels not to report this program.”

CS Monitor for more

EXPERIMENTAL devices that read brain signals have helped paralysed people use computers and may let amputees control bionic limbs. But existing devices use tiny electrodes that poke into the brain. Now, a University of Utah, United States study shows that brain signals controlling arm movements can be detected accurately using new microelectrodes that sit on the brain but don’t penetrate it.

“The unique thing about this technology is that it provides lots of information out of the brain without having to put the electrodes into the brain,” says Bradley Greger, an assistant professor of bioengineering and coauthor of the study. “That lets neurosurgeons put this device under the skull but over brain areas where it would be risky to place penetrating electrodes: areas that control speech, memory and other cognitive functions.”

For example, the new array of microelectrodes someday might be placed over the brain’s speech center in patients who cannot communicate because they are paralysed by spinal injury, stroke, Lou Gehrig’s disease or other disorders, he adds. The electrodes would send speech signals to a computer that would covert the thoughts to audible words.

For people who have lost a limb or are paralyzed, “this device should allow a high level of control over a prosthetic limb or computer interface,” Greger says. “It will enable amputees or people with severe paralysis to interact with their environment using a prosthetic arm or a computer interface that decodes signals from the brain.”

The Guardian for more

Slowing the rise in human numbers is essential for the planet–but it doesn’t require population control

By Robert Engelman

In an era of changing climate and sinking economies, Malthusian limits to growth are back—and squeezing us painfully. Whereas more people once meant more ingenuity, more talent and more innovation, today it just seems to mean less for each. Less water for every cattle herder in the Horn of Africa. (The United Nations projects there will be more than four billion people living in nations defined as water-scarce or water-stressed by 2050, up from half a billion in 1995.) Less land for every farmer already tilling slopes so steep they risk killing themselves by falling off their fields. (At a bit less than six tenths of an acre, global per capita cropland today is little more than half of what it was in 1961, and more than 900 million people are hungry.) Less capacity in the atmosphere to accept the heat-trapping gases that could fry the planet for centuries to come. Scarcer and higher-priced energy and food. And if the world’s economy does not bounce back to its glory days, less credit and fewer jobs.

Scientific American for more

Tribal women claiming rape by Salwa Judum men in Chhattisgarh put a question mark on the NHRC, which rejected their testimonies.

AJIT SAHI Editor-at-Large

In the Indian setting, refusal to act on the testimony of the victim of sexual assault in the absence of corroboration as a rule is adding insult to injury. A girl or a woman in the tradition- bound non-permissive society of India would be extremely reluctant even to admit that any incident that is likely to reflect on her chastity had ever occurred… [A rape victim’s testimony] does not require corroboration from any other evidence, including the evidence of a doctor. — Supreme Court justices Arijit Pasayat and P Sathasivam, July 2008

FOR DECADES, the Supreme Court of India has cleaved to a rigorous legal standard in cases of rape: the testimony of the victim is enough evidence to launch the prosecution of the accused. Successive judgments over the years have reinforced this position. Thousands of convictions of alleged rapists have been effectively obtained on the basis of victims’ testimonies, with no corroborative evidence sought or offered. Often, the courts have overlooked minor discrepancies in the victims’ accounts, if the main narrative holds up.

Jurists and social commentators in India have long argued that, apart from being a most heinous crime against a woman’s person, her rape doubly curses her in the Indian society by imparting her a stigma that no other crime matches. That is why criminal investigation processes that the police must follow, as well as the judicial procedures prescribed when charges of rape arise, are unambiguous. This is best illustrated in the case of Hindi film actor Shiney Ahuja, who was arrested last month in Mumbai when his maidservant accused him of raping her. Ahuja has been denied bail, and rightly so, for his right to seek justice shall arise at the trial and not before or outside it.

Tehelka for more

By Carole Bass, E Magazine

It’s a beautiful summer day. You pull on your stain-resistant cargo shorts and odor-resistant hiking socks, gulp down an energy-boosting supplement, slather yourself with sunscreen and head out for a ramble in the woods. Are you poisoning yourself? When you get home, you jump in the shower and toss your clothes in the wash. Are you poisoning the environment? Maybe.

Your sunscreen, energy drink and high-tech clothing may be among the 800-plus consumer products made with nanomaterials: those manufactured at the scale of atoms and molecules. Sunscreen that turns clear on the skin contains titanium dioxide, an ordinary UV-blocker in extraordinarily small particles. Odor-eating socks are made with atoms of germ-killing silver. Supplement makers boast of amazing health effects from swallowing nanosolutions that are completely untested for effectiveness or safety. And that stain-repellant clothing? The manufacturer won’t even tell you what nanomaterials are in it.

The problem is not just that you, the consumer, don’t know what’s in the products you use. The much bigger problem is that at the nanoscale, common substances behave in uncommon ways. And nobody-not even the world’s leading nanoscientists-knows what nanoparticles do inside the body or in the environment.

Nanotechnology, a fast-growing global industry, is essentially unregulated. Advocates and independent scientists agree that we need to get ahead of the risks before it’s too late. Some call for a moratorium on the riskiest nanoproducts. Some say we just need more research, and more protection for workers in the meantime. All are worried about unleashing a powerful new technology that could have vast unintended consquences. Nanomaterials are in food, cosmetics, clothing, toys and scores of other everyday products. Yet when it comes to trying to get a handle on them, we can’t answer the most basic questions. What companies are using nanomaterials, and where? What kinds, and in what amounts? How much of the potentially hazardous stuff is escaping into the air, water and soil? Into our food and drinks? Nobody knows.

At a February workshop on what research is needed to better understand nanorisks, speaker after speaker presented questions without answers. Rutgers University environmental scientist Paul Lioy, assigned to talk about human exposures to nanomaterials, was especially blunt.

“This is basically virgin territory,” he said. “The fact that it’s virgin territory is not good for the field, and it should be fixed really quick.”

Big Benefits, Big Risks?

Nanomaterials are not new. Some exist naturally, and others result from combustion-like the ultrafine particles in diesel exhaust that have been linked to respiratory and heart diseases.

Organic Consumers for more

by Malcolm Gladwell

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader.

“They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. “That, to me, is not a model.”

New Yorker for more