Month: February 2009

(submitted by a reader)

Children as young as two experience post-traumatic stress, research shows.

A study on 114 younger children who had been exposed to road traffic accidents in the UK found one in 10 suffered continued anxiety after the event.

Although this is similar to the rate seen in adults, most go unrecognised and untreated, say the King’s College London experts.
Their work is published in the latest edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Undetected
One reason for the lack of knowledge about young children is the difficulty in making psychiatric diagnoses in this age group, as they frequently lack the language ability to talk about their feelings and experiences.
” Children are quite resilient and often parents and close relatives are the best therapy”, Professor David Cottrell, of Young Minds.

And the tools used by doctors to spot and measure post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were designed with adults in mind.

The researchers, from King’s and the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Science Unit Cambridge, used an age-appropriate technique for diagnosing PTSD in the young children that relied on parents’ reporting of how their offspring were coping.

All of the 114 children aged between two and 10 had visited A&E departments in London after a road traffic accident.

Half had been passengers in a car, others were pedestrians or cyclists struck by a car, and all had relatively minor physical injuries.
At assessment in the month following the accident, and again six months later, more than 10% of the children met conditions for a diagnosis of PTSD.

These children had nightmares and difficulty sleeping, displayed avoidance behaviours, such as not wanting to go out in the car or walk on busy roads, and were described by their parents as “jumpy” and “on edge”.

PTSD symptoms:

Flashbacks and nightmares

Avoidance from stressful situations

Increased arousal and feelings of being under constant threat

The symptoms are persistent and disturb everyday life

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(Submitted by a reader)

By Marjorie Cohn

Since he took office, President Obama has instituted many changes that break with the policies of the Bush administration. The new president has ordered that no government agency will be allowed to torture, that the U.S. prison at Guantánamo will be shuttered, and that the CIA’s secret black sites will be closed down. But Obama is non-committal when asked whether he will seek investigation and prosecution of Bush officials who broke the law. “My view is also that nobody’s above the law and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen,” Obama said. “But,” he added, “generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.” Obama fears that holding Team Bush to account will risk alienating Republicans whom he still seeks to win over.

Obama may be off the hook, at least with respect to investigating the lawyers who advised the White House on how to torture and get away with it. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has written a draft report that apparently excoriates former Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, authors of the infamous torture memos, according to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff. OPR can report these lawyers to their state bar associations for possible discipline, or even refer them for criminal investigation. Obama doesn’t have to initiate investigations; the OPR has already launched them, on Bush’s watch.

The smoking gun that may incriminate George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., is the email traffic that passed between the lawyers and the White House. Isikoff revealed the existence of these emails on The Rachel Maddow Show. Some maintain that Bush officials are innocent because they relied in good faith on legal advice from their lawyers. But if the president and vice president told the lawyers to manipulate the law to allow them to commit torture, then that defense won’t fly.

A bipartisan report of the Senate Armed Services Committee found that “senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

Cheney recently admitted to authorizing waterboarding, which has long been considered torture under U.S. law. Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Colin Powell, and John Ashcroft met with Cheney in the White House basement and authorized harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, according to an ABC News report. When asked, Bush said he knew about it and approved.
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Iman Maleki is an Iranian artist considered the world’s greatest realist painter..
His greatest skill, however, is not only that his pictures are photo quality, but mostly in his subject matters, composition, and the profound expressions on the faces of his characters.

Iman Malecki’s site
Submitted by a reader

From The Chronicle Herald

HOW CAN THIS person be only 11 years old?
He speaks so well, so maturely, has seen so much of the world, and is so conscious of the welfare of others.
He must be at least 25, just shorter than most adults.

Bilaal Rajan is a mere 11, a Grade 7 student at St. Andrews College in Toronto, and a worldwide ambassador for UNICEF.
A couple of hundred Grade 7 students at Sackville Heights Junior High School hear Bilaal speak of the impact they can have by raising UNICEF dollars at Halloween to provide poor countries with schools and shelter.

The ovation after his Power Point presentation is thunderous and every teacher in the room, and UNICEF Atlantic regional director John Humble, hope the message has been received.
“Today gave our students a chance to see beyond their own world,” says guidance counsellor Cathy Silverstein. “These good kids are very involved in fundraising for projects like the Terry Fox Foundation, Turkey Club and IWK. Many don’t have a lot, but they come across with funds for good causes.”

Student Kaitlin Welcher was impressed with Bilaal. “It’s amazing that he’s raised five million dollars,” she says. “And I’d never have the courage to talk in front of this number of people.”
“Bilaal grew up in a giving way of life,” says Aman, who, with his wife, Shamim, has always volunteered in their Ismaili Muslim community, which believes in taking care of the other person.

Bilaal, with two books on fundraising and motivation ready for publishing next spring, has spoken to groups for years. Just last summer, he spent several weeks in Tanzania on UNICEF’s behalf. After the tsunami in 2004, he visited Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Maldives to encourage children and adults, and to see where the needs were greatest so he could raise more money.

The young Richmond Hill resident speaks English and French fluently and understands and speaks some Spanish and Mandarin. His marks are straight A’s. He studies while on the road, as he has been for the last 10 days in the Maritimes, addressing schools on UNICEF’s trick-or-treat campaign.
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Bilaal Rajan’s website
(Submitted by Salim Amersi)

The Separatist Conflict in Sri Lanka – Terrorism, ethnicity, political economy
Author: Asoka Bandarage
279pp, Routledge, Contemporary South Asia Series
By Dr. Mahes Ladduwahetty

Dr. Asoka Bandarage’s timely book on the Sri Lankan conflict was launched on February 4, 2009, under the auspices of the Georgetown University’s Mortara Center for International Studies and the South Asia Forum. She was introduced by Dr. Joseph A. Ferrara, Associate Dean of the Georgetown University’s Public Policy Institute where Dr. Bandarage teaches. Dr. Bandarage’s address at this well attended event covered the salient sections of her book, taking the political history of the conflict from pre-Independence, through the post-Independence years and into the current period with its new possibilities of a resolution.
There has been a significant dearth of scholarly works on the Sri Lankan conflict, and Dr. Bandarage’s book helps fill that vacuum. While its target is basically the academic community of political scientists, it is also an immensely readable book that relates a gripping tale to the lay reader interested in this conflict. She takes the reader through the historical underpinnings of the conflict, its British colonial history, the background events that led to the 1983 riots, the Indian intervention and its failure, and into the current internationalization of the conflict with its ramifications. It deals with the multiple actors, political, military and diplomatic, both internal and external, who entered the stage during the period covering the nearly 4 decades in which the LTTE was called to arms by Tamil political leaders; leaders who continue to be described by supporters as being “moderates’ and ‘Gandhian’ despite the LTTE’s modus operandi of violence of the most ruthless kind. The several cycles of the LTTE’s near defeat and revival, coupled with the entrance of international conflict resolution players such as the Norwegians who actively aided the LTTE, as well as the cycles of war and ceasefire/negotiations that have been experienced by the Sri Lankan people with hope and anguish in turn, all in the background of successive Sri Lankan governments with their political agendas as well as partisan politics, are dealt with and analyzed.
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The film was made in 1948 and shows the post Second World War condition in Italy; but it was true of whole of Europe.

Born in 1991, Declan Galbraith is an English singer of Irish and Scottish background. He is very popular in Germany and in schools in China his songs are used for teaching English language.

This is one of the most tumultuous times on record in the global financial markets.

TRILLION-DOLLAR BAIL-OUTS
Huge amounts of money have been committed in financial support for banks.

BILLION-DOLLAR STIMULUS PACKAGES
Governments are spending billions of dollars to kick-start economic growth. Measures include tax cuts and building projects.

VICTIMS
The financial landscape has changed dramatically, with several giants of the business world disappearing.

UK BANK BAIL-OUT PACKAGE
The UK has spent £81bn to prop up Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS and Lloyds TSB as well as nationalised Northern Rock and parts of Bradford & Bingley.

The Treasury and the Bank of England have pledged hundreds of billions of pounds of further support for the fragile banking system.

A £250bn credit guarantee scheme announced in October is being expanded to encourage banks to lend more, with a commitment of up to £50bn.

US BANK BAIL-OUT PACKAGE

There has been an array of measures to provide support to the battered US financial system.

A $700bn scheme approved last year, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Programme, was used to help lenders like Citigroup and Bank of America as well as the automobile industry.

Major changes to the programme have been announced by the new administration, including a partnership with the private sector to buy toxic assets from banks.

ECONOMIES HIT
World economic growth is expected to slow sharply, with the UK among the hardest hit. Developing countries such as China and India should fare better.

LEGACY OF DEBT
As countries try to spend their way out of recession, debt levels are forecast to rise.
See the graphics here

The nation paid homage to the martyrs of the language movement midnight past Friday, with thousand of people streaming barefooted along the roads towards shaheed minars with wreaths and flowers.

The president, Zillur Rahman, in Dhaka, first placed a wreath at the altar of the Central Shaheed Minar on the campus of Dhaka University a minute past midnight, followed by the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina.
Hasina, along with the council of ministers, advisers, lawmkers and her sister Sheikh Rehana, placed one more wreath on behalf of the ruling Awami League.

The Jatiya Sangsad speaker, Abdul Hamid, and the deputy speaker, Shawkat Ali Chowdhury, then placed wreaths. They were followed by the chief whip, Abdush Shahid, and the Dhaka mayor, Sadeque Hossain Khoka.

The chiefs of the three services, General Moeen U Ahmed, Rear Admiral Zahir Uddin Ahmed, and Air Marshal SM Ziaur Rahman, then placed wreaths followed by the attorney general, Mahbubey Alam. The sector commanders of the war of independence, under the banner of the Sector Commanders’ Forum, then placed a wreath.
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(Submitted by Rohila Pritam)