Month: February 2009

Whoever it was probably lived a few thousand years ago, somewhere in East Asia — Taiwan, Malaysia and Siberia all are likely locations. He or she did nothing more remarkable than be born, live, have children and die.

Yet this was the ancestor of every person now living on Earth — the last person in history whose family tree branches out to touch all 6.5 billion people on the planet today.

That means everybody on Earth descends from somebody who was around as recently as the reign of Tutankhamen, maybe even during the Golden Age of ancient Greece. There’s even a chance that our last shared ancestor lived at the time of Christ.

“It’s a mathematical certainty that that person existed,” said Steve Olson, whose 2002 book Mapping Human History traces the history of the species since its origins in Africa more than 100,000 years ago.
It is human nature to wonder about our ancestors — who they were, where they lived, what they were like. People trace their genealogy, collect antiques and visit historical sites hoping to capture just a glimpse of those who came before, to locate themselves in the sweep of history and position themselves in the web of human existence.
But few people realize just how intricately that web connects them not just to people living on the planet today, but to everyone who ever lived.

With the help of a statistician, a computer scientist and a supercomputer, Olson has calculated just how interconnected the human family tree is. You would have to go back in time only 2,000 to 5,000 years — and probably on the low side of that range — to find somebody who could count every person alive today as a descendant.
Furthermore, Olson and his colleagues have found that if you go back a little farther — about 5,000 to 7,000 years ago — everybody living today has exactly the same set of ancestors. In other words, every person who was alive at that time is either an ancestor to all 6 billion people living today, or their line died out and they have no remaining descendants.

That revelation is “especially startling,” statistician Jotun Hein of England’s Oxford University wrote in a commentary on the research published by the journal Nature.

“Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor,” Hein marveled.

It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman’s family has African roots.
How can this be?
It’s simple math. Every person has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents. Keep doubling back through the generations — 16, 32, 64, 128 — and within a few hundred years you have thousands of ancestors.

It’s nothing more than exponential growth combined with the facts of life. By the 15th century you’ve got a million ancestors. By the 13th you’ve got a billion. Sometime around the 9th century — just 40 generations ago — the number tops a trillion.
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(submitted by a reader)

By Mirela Xanthaki

“Dora”, a young Mexican woman, was helped by another Mexican woman to cross the U.S. border in the promise of a good job there. She ended up in Texas, working in a sweatshop and not allowed to go out or even take a shower.

“Sandra” was sold as a child for 400 dollars to a pedophile, who repeatedly raped her for four years.

Both were victims of a global trafficking network that has ensnared an estimated 10 million people, although hard data about the underworld of human slavery remains elusive – partly because of the reluctance of some countries to cooperate with investigations.

“We have a big picture, but it is impressionistic and lacks depth,” admitted Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), which just released its annual Global Report on Trafficking in Persons on Thursday.

“Although we can talk with specific numbers about drug trafficking, for example, we do not have an estimate for this area of crime [human trafficking],” Costa said.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates 2 million as the yearly net addition to the total number of slaves worldwide. Subtracting the number of people rescued or who die annually, the total number is thought to be over 10 million.

However, the actual number of known trafficking victims is only 22,500.

“We are not able to segment today’s slave markets into their components. We must – but cannot – catalogue different types of slavery. Exploitation through child-begging in Europe is different from what goes on in a brothel, or in a street corner in Australia,” Costa noted.

“Preventive measures must also be adapted to take into account that an Asian father sells his underage daughter under circumstances different than what pushes an illegal immigrant at a sweatshop in the Americas,” he explained. “If we do not overcome this knowledge crisis, we will be fighting the problem blindfolded.”

The report is based on data gathered from 155 countries. Of these, 125 have signed the U.N. Protocol against Trafficking in Persons. However, not all of those who ratified it are enforcing the provisions of the treaty – 40 percent of the countries in the sample did not convict anyone for trafficking in the past year.

Overall, the number of convictions for human trafficking is growing, says the report, notably in a handful of countries, but it is still much lower than the estimated number of victims.

Many large countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Iran remain uncooperative and provided no data.

The most common form of human trafficking is sexual exploitation (79 percent) followed by forced labour (18 percent). Forced labour is detected and reported less because it is frequently goes unnoticed, especially in big cities.

Nearly four in five victims are women and girls. Including boys, 20 percent of all trafficking victims in the world are children, but in some parts of Africa and Asia’s Mekong region, children are the majority.

The report also reveals that intra-regional and domestic trafficking are the major forms of trafficking in persons. “Criminals prey on their own kin, something even animals don’t do,” Costa said.

The report shatters some illusions about victims and victimisers. Although generally speaking, most crimes are committed by young men, when it comes to trafficking, women perpetrators play an important role. In 30 percent of the countries that provided evidence on the gender of traffickers, women make up the largest proportion.

In regions like Eastern Europe and Central Asia, women trafficking women is the norm, according to Costa. Psychological, financial and coercive reasons often induce former victims to become traffickers.

Mira Sorvino, an actress and UNODC Goodwill Ambassador, shared stories of trafficking victims that she had met.

Dora’s trafficker threatened that if she ran away, her family would be killed. “Here in Texas you are lower than a dog,” she would tell Dora. “People here actually care if a dog is abused. No one cares about you.”
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Monali Meher is graduated in Fine arts (BFA-1990) from Sir J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai. In 1998 she received ‘Unesco -Aschberg’ Residency in Vienna by Federal Chancellery for the Arts and Science where she researched the time and space factor in her work and focused on the process of decay. She felt immense necessity to work with her own body and emotions in public as a new expression/ tool. In 1998 she made her first performance, Reflect, ‘A personal window display’ , at Jehangir art gallery in Mumbai with the statement “Nothing is permanent’ & ‘it’s a nature’s law”.
In 2000-01, accepted in Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, funded by Dutch Ministry foreign Affairs; Nuffic, Huygens grant, Amsterdam for research residency programme. In 2006 Sep. she performed at Tate modern museum, London in Mapping Mumbai event, Dadao international performance festival in Beijing, China, Sinop Biennale Turkey and participated in Nederlands Een exhibition in Museum Gouda.

In 2007, she performed at National review on live art Festival (NRLA) Glasgow where she was also invited for the panel discussion, ‘Performance Art and Other Histories’. In (2006-07) manifested a Community Art Project, ‘Quilt/ Deken’ , with Artwalk Stichting funded by Amsterdam fonds voor de kunst, SVP Kunst Stadsdeel Westerpark. Quilts are on permanent installation in Raadszaal, Stadsdeel Westerpark, Amsterdam. Her work has been published in books: ‘Student Body’ by Marina Abramovic, ‘Shifting Map’, ‘RAIN’ project by RABK, ‘Third Text’, ‘Love & Death’, Egon Schiele catalogue, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, ‘Cleaning the house’ , NMAC foundation, Spain. For the last 9 years she has been working with performances, video, photography, Installations. Since year 2000, she is based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Her website

or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a memorable 1964 film by Stanley Kubrick.

The mad generals shown in the movie have much in common with the continuing fabric of past and present US warriors as evident from the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, etc. (Ed.)

By James L. Cavallaro

Does the United States need a truth commission to uncover wrongdoing committed by the Bush administration in the war on terror? Yes, says Sen. Patrick Leahy (D) of Vermont. Earlier this month, he proposed a process to do just that. “Many Americans feel we need to get to the bottom of what went wrong,” he said. “We need to be able to read the page before we turn the page.”
Many in Washington bristle at the idea. “If every administration started to reexamine what every prior administration did, there would be no end to it,” said Sen. Arlen Specter (R) of Pennsylvania. “This is not Latin America.”

No, Senator Specter, this is not Latin America. But as someone who has spent the past quarter century researching and working on human rights issues in the Americas, I cannot help noticing instructive parallels and lessons that we might learn from the experience of our southern neighbors.

To be clear: I am not suggesting that the scale of wrongdoing by the US in the past eight years equals the atrocities of Argentina’s dirty war, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, or Guatemala’s long civil war. But the nature of the abuses and the official responses and justifications are, tragically, similar. How so?
Let’s begin with the violations that characterized the authoritarian Latin American regimes of the 1970s. In Argentina and Chile, state agents employed brutal violence in the interrogation and detention process (torture). They kidnapped political dissidents and suspected subversives whom they often tortured to extract information, and ultimately, secretly executed them (forced disappearances). Latin American judicial systems failed to oversee the actions of the executive branch of government to gauge the legality of security and antiterrorism policies (lack of judicial independence). And, all too frequently, state agents killed suspects without legal process (extralegal killings).

Sound familiar? It should. In the past eight years of the war on terror, the US government has compiled quite a record of torture, forced disappearances, extralegal killings, and lack of judicial independence. In light of these similarities, we should ask – despite Mr. Specter’s objections – whether anything can be learned from the Latin American experience. Two lessons spring to mind:
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by Erik Sperling

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping wrapped up his official visit to Venezuela yesterday, signing a dozen new agreements with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in the areas of energy, telecommunications, information, and agriculture.

Xi pledged another US$8 billion towards a joint development fund for projects in the South American country, while Venezuela agreed to contribute an additional $4 billion. Chavez said the fund will be used for development in education, health, and infrastructure in Venezuela.

The new agreements are the newest sign of the increasingly close ties between Caracas and Beijing.

“We’re near to 300 signed documents, advanced projects that are very strategically important,” Chavez said, during a speech at the China-Venezuela Business Forum.

In the field of energy, agreements were signed allowing for preliminary steps towards new drilling projects in Venezuela’s Orinoco basin, the creation of a company to manufacture oil tankers, and multiple refineries on Chinese soil, including one that would process up to 400,000 barrels per day (bpd).

“We know that Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world,” Chavez affirmed. “All the oil that China needs for its development in the next 200 years is here in Venezuela.”

In honor of Xi’s visit, Chavez formally inaugurated Venezuela’s first cellular phone factory, the Venezuelan Telecommunications Corporation (VTELCA), which was constructed with Chinese support and technology in the northern state of Falcon.

During a live television and radio broadcast, the Venezuelan president connected to the factory via Venesat-1, Venezuela’s first geostationary satellite launched late last year in another Sino-Venezuelan project.
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A police recruit in Colombia is handcuffed naked and fed manure in a initiation rite carried out by his colleagues.

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The fallen Australian soldiers of the notorious Sandakan death march were remembered at an emotional ceremony at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.

About 90 Australians, mostly relatives of those who perished in the forced march, turned up Friday to hear talks by two former prisoners of war (PoWs) recalling the horror days of World War II.
Also present were Sabah Tourism marketing managers Noredah Othman and Josephine Chai as well as Tourism Malaysia Melbourne director Putra Hilmy Elias and marketing manager Hasanti Perera.
The event was organised by the Shrine of Remembrance chief executive Denis Baguley and Sabah Tourism representative in Australia Gwenda Zappala.

Despite their age, Sandakan PoWs Leslie (Bunny) Glover, 88, and Robert (Bob) Ellice-Flint, 90, who travelled from Queensland to be here, recalled vividly, for over an hour, their horror days in Sandakan, Sabah.

In the incident between January and March 1945, over 1,000 Australian and British PoWs were forced to march across 260km of treacherous terrain and dense jungle from the Sandakan prison camp to Ranau.

Only six Australian PoWs survived.

At the start of his enthralling war reminiscences, Glover told a sole Japanese, an antiwar woman, at the ceremony that no one held any grudge or animosity for the “sins of your grandfathers or great grandfathers” during the war when thousands of Australian and Allied troops were massacred.
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By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

So maybe I was wrong. I used to consider health care our greatest national shame, considering that we spend twice as much on medical care as many European nations, yet American children are twice as likely to die before the age of 5 as Czech children — and American women are 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as Irish women.
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Nicholas D. Kristof
On the Ground
Nicholas Kristof addresses reader feedback and posts short takes from his travels.

Yet I’m coming to think that our No. 1 priority actually must be education. That makes the new fiscal stimulus package a landmark, for it takes a few wobbly steps toward reform and allocates more than $100 billion toward education.

That’s a hefty sum — by comparison, the Education Department’s entire discretionary budget for the year was $59 billion — and it will save America’s schools from the catastrophe that they were facing. A University of Washington study had calculated that the recession would lead to cuts of 574,000 school jobs without a stimulus.
“We dodged a bullet the size of a freight train,” notes Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, an advocacy group in Washington.

So for those who oppose education spending in the stimulus, a question: Do you really believe that slashing half a million teaching jobs would be fine for the economy, for our children and for our future?

Education Secretary Arne Duncan describes the stimulus as a “staggering opportunity,” the kind that comes once in a lifetime. He argues: “We have to educate our way to a better economy, that’s the only way long term to get there.”

That’s exactly right, and it’s partly why I shifted my views of the relative importance of education and health. One of last year’s smartest books was “The Race Between Education and Technology,” by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both Harvard professors. They offer a wealth of evidence to argue that America became the world’s leading nation largely because of its emphasis on mass education at a time when other countries educated only elites (often, only male elites).

They show that America’s educational edge created prosperity and equality alike — but that this edge was eclipsed in about the 1970s, and since then one country after another has surpassed us in education.
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(Submitted by a reader)

By Allan Tacca

Dictionaries define “wisdom” as the ability to think and act using a combination of knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight. So we are talking about quite abstract qualities of mind, deployed together.

Especially in our time, it has been possible for one to accumulate a huge stock of information and technical skills, becoming an ‘expert’, without necessarily acquiring wisdom. Man’s capacity for wisdom seems not to have changed much over the last 5,000 years.

If, for example, we look at an advanced country like the United States in its current troubles, we would think that (given the facts and figures available to them) Americans would never again return to their wanton consumption, to the over-valuation of leisure, and to the ugly gas-guzzling road-going monsters that symbolise American freedom and also expose American vulgarity.

We would be mostly wrong. When economic hardships ease, and Americans are able to borrow again, the old habits will very likely return. There will be exceptions of course, but these would not be enough to prevent the next cycle of serious economic mistakes, widespread pain and condemnations.

The greed, selfishness and cynicism that afflict rich countries and are implied in the current economic crisis are in place even in the poorer African countries. But Africa also has its special problems; most notably, that range of undemocratic and marauding tendencies that go under the general name of bad governance.

Bad governance and the slow wisdom of man could conspire to bring back into vogue the phenomenon of military coups. Some months back, the army seized power in Mauritania.

The African Union and the so-called international community went into full voice to condemn the coup; some Western countries cut off aid, but no one drove tanks to the gates of the military junta. From a distance, the Mauritanians seemed a little nervous, but not entirely unhappy with the military action.

A couple of weeks ago, following the death of Guinean President (Gen.) Lansana Conte, an army captain led a bunch of soldiers to take control of the country. The usual condemnations started flowing, and I think the African Union has suspended Guinea’s membership.

Unimpressed by foreign calls for the restoration of the constitutional order, a lot of Guineans seem to have cautiously welcomed the coup. One of the soldiers made two instructive remarks before the media. He said that Conte’s government had spat in the face of the Guinean people.
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