Month: March 2010

(“Gola” is a ball of shaved ice sprinkled with flavored syrups and is popular in South Asia. Let’s hope Google doesn’t go after this poor vendor through its association with the US National Security Agency. Ed.)

(Submitted by Mansoor Ali Gowani)

MEROE: There is not a tourist in sight as the sun sets over sand-swept pyramids at Meroe, but archaeologists say the Nubian Desert of northern Sudan holds mysteries to rival ancient Egypt.

“There is a magic beauty about these sites that is heightened by the privilege of being able to admire them alone, with the pyramids, the dunes and the sun,” says Guillemette Andreu, head of antiquities at Paris’ Louvre museum.

“It really sets them apart from the Egyptian pyramids, whose beauty is slightly overshadowed by the tourist crowds.”

Meroe lies around 200 kilometres (120 miles) northeast of Sudan’s capital Khartoum and was the last capital of Kush, also called Nubia, an ancient kingdom centered on the confluence of the Blue Nile, the White Nile and the River Atbara.

Kush was one of the earliest civilisations in the Nile valley and, at first, was dominated by Egypt. The Nubians eventually gained their independence and, at the height of their power, they turned the table on Egypt and conquered it in the 8th century BC.

They occupied the entire Nile valley for a century before being forced back into what is now Sudan.

At the end of March, the Louvre will host its first exhibition on the Meroe dynasty, the last in a line of “black pharaohs” that ruled Kush for more than 1,000 years until the kingdom’s demise in 350 AD.

Dawn for more

via 3 Quarks Daily

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Some mullahs in Afghanistan are distributing condoms. Others are quoting the Quran to encourage longer breaks between births. Health experts say contraception is starting to catch on in a country with the world’s second highest maternal death rate.

Afghanistan has one of the world’s highest fertility rates, averaging more than six babies per woman despite years of war and a severe lack of medical care. Awareness of, and access to, contraceptives remains low among many couples, with UNICEF estimating 10% of women using some form of birth control.

But use of the pill, condoms and injected forms of birth control rose to 27% over eight months in three rural areas — up to half the woman in one area — once the benefits were explained one-on-one by health workers, according to the report published Monday in Bulletin, the World Health Organization’s journal.

USA Today for more

(Submitted by reader)

by JAMES BLITZ

More than half of voters in the five biggest European economies believe women should be banned from wearing the burka in public, according to an opinion poll for the Financial Times.

As President Nicolas Sarkozy presses ahead with France’s plans to ban the public wearing of the burka, the FT’s latest Harris poll shows that the move is strongly supported not only in France but also in the UK, Italy, Spain and Germany.

The poll shows that there is most support for the burka ban in France, where 70 per cent of respondents said they supported plans to forbid the wearing of the garment, which covers the female body from head to toe. Similar sentiments were displayed in Spain and Italy, where 65 per cent and 63 per cent respectively favoured a ban.

The strength of feeling in the UK and Germany may seem particularly surprising. Though Britain has a strong liberal tradition that respects an individual’s right to full expression of religious views, 57 per cent of respondents in the country said they favoured a ban. In Germany, which is also reluctant to clamp down on minority rights, 50 per cent favour a ban.

“This poll shows that the number of people in France opposed to the burka is going up and that is the product of debate on burka and national identity,” said Patrick Weil, an expert on national identity at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. “But the figure is clearly going up in other countries in Europe like the UK as well, and that reflects the growing concern that there is about this issue in some parts of Europe.”

In the US, concerns about the issue are far less strong than in Europe. Just 33 per cent of Americans surveyed by Harris supported a ban, compared with 44 per cent who said they did not.

Financial Times for more

by RESHMA VASANWALA

(Ms. Vasanwala is a medical Doctor, and has volunteered her services for Haitian earthquake victims.)

PHOTO/National Geographic

Tuesday, March 02, 2010 8:58 AM

Hi all,

I arrived in Haiti safely–on a UN plane from Santo Domingo. The airport bar at Port au Prince is buzzing with activity–international NGOs, troops (including the 82nd airborne unit), media, journalists, and aid workers.

We are staying at one of the few standing hotels in Port au Prince–a five star hotel that hosted Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, Anderson Cooper, and the like. There are still a lot of CNN folks here and media from all over the world staying at the same hotel. To my surprise, I’m in the lap of luxury—buffet meals, swimming pool,. Its weird that just across the street hundreds of thousands of people are living in tents and slums.

We are not allowed to leave the hotel and we take a private bus everyday to our place of work. Driving just these short distances, one can see the devastation caused by the earthquake and the suffering of the Haitian people.
Continue reading “Reports from Haiti”

From Chapter 1: Self-Defense

Question:
What do you feel is the most acceptable solution to the Palestine problem?

Mahatma Gandhi:
The abandonment wholly by the Jews of terrorism and other forms of violence. (1 June 1947)[1]

On 29 November 1947 the United Nations General Assembly approved a resolution dividing British-mandated Palestine into a Jewish state incorporating 56 percent of Palestine and an Arab state incorporating 44 percent of it.[2] In the ensuing war the newly born State of Israel expanded its borders to incorporate nearly 80 percent of Palestine. The only areas of Palestine not conquered comprised the West Bank, which the Kingdom of Jordan subsequently annexed, and the Gaza Strip, which came under Egypt’s administrative control. Approximately 250,000 Palestinians driven out of their homes during the 1948 war and its aftermath fled to Gaza and overwhelmed the indigenous population of some 80,000.

Today 80 percent of Gaza’s inhabitants consist of refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants, and more than half of the population is under 18 years of age. Its current 1.5 million inhabitants are squeezed into a sliver of land 25 miles long and five miles wide, making Gaza one of the most densely populated places in the world. The panhandle of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza is bordered by Israel on the north and east, Egypt on the south, and the Mediterranean Sea on the west. In the course of its four-decade-long occupation beginning in June 1967, and prior to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s redeployment of Israeli troops from inside Gaza to its perimeter in 2005, Israel had imposed on Gaza a uniquely exploitive regime of “de-development” that, in the words of Harvard political economist Sara Roy, deprived “the native population of its most important economic resources—land, water, and labor—as well as the internal capacity and potential for developing those resources.”[3]

The road to modern Gaza’s desperate plight is paved with many previous atrocities, most long forgotten or never known outside Palestine. After the cessation of battlefield hostilities in 1949, Egypt kept a tight rein on the activity of Fedayeen (Palestinian guerrillas) in Gaza until February 1955, when Israel launched a bloody cross-border raid into Gaza killing 40 Egyptians. Israeli leaders had plotted to lure Egypt into war in order to topple President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and the Gaza raid proved the perfect provocation as armed border clashes escalated. In October 1956 Israel (in collusion with Great Britain and France) invaded the Egyptian Sinai and occupied Gaza, which it had long coveted. The prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris described what happened next:

New Left Project for more

An Evolving Threat

by STEPHEN TANKEL

In 2006, the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba entered the Afghan theater, necessitating its increased presence in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The group is often mentioned during discussions of the Punjabi Taliban, militants from Punjabi jihadi groups, who arrived in large numbers at approximately the same time. But these militants follow the Deobandi school of Islam and are close to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. Lashkar is also a Punjabi group, but its Ahl-e Hadith faith and close relationship with the Pakistani military establishment have contributed to a historically rocky relationship with Deobandi militant groups and other pro-Taliban elements.

Sharing physical space in the NWFP/FATA and operational interests in Afghanistan has created the opportunity for increased conflict and collaboration with al-Qaeda and the various pro-Taliban elements there. As collaboration increases, so too does Lashkar’s threat to Pakistan and the West.

This paper is divided into four sections. The first assesses Lashkar’s historical relations with the different actors operating in the NWFP/FATA. The second discusses the nature of Lashkar’s expansion in the area from roughly 2006 onward. The third explores its collaboration and conflicts with other groups operating there, and the nature of its involvement in anti-Western and anti-Pakistan activities emanating from the region. The paper concludes with a brief assessment of Lashkar’s threat to the West, particularly the impact of its presence in the NWFP/FATA.

New America Foundation for more

(Submitted by reader)

“This song is now considered to be the National Anthem of Scotland. It is about the war between Scotland and England at the time of William Wallace and is a tribute to the lives lost for Scotland, your wee bit hill and glen, (a little area of hills and valleys.) The song asks, ‘when will we see your like again,’ meaning, when will we again see men lay down their lives for their country and it just occurred to me, that is what we are seeing in places like Palestine.” Ingrid B. Mork

HILTON FOUNDATION

Los Angeles – March 5, 2010 – Aravind Eye Care System, the world’s largest eye care provider that has developed innovative technologies allowing it to perform 300,000 eye surgeries each year – 70 percent subsidized or free for the poor – has been selected to receive the 2010 Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize of $1.5 million. The Conrad N. Hilton Foundation presents the annual award, the world’s largest humanitarian prize, to an organization that is doing extraordinary work to alleviate human suffering. More than 200 nominations are received from throughout the world, and an independent international jury makes the final selection.

There are 45 million blind people in the world, the majority in the developing world, and 12 million of these are in India. Because of extreme sun and genetics, Indians get cataracts in their 40s and 50s versus 60s and 70s in the United States. Without surgery they go blind, losing many of their productive years. Realizing that it was possible to end much of the unnecessary blindness in his country, Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, known as Dr. V., upon his retirement in 1976 from government health service, mortgaged his home to start an eye clinic – Aravind – with 11 beds in a rented house in Madurai, Tamil Nadu.

As of 2009, Aravind has handled over 29 million outpatient visits and performed over 3.6 million surgeries. It operates five Aravind hospitals in India supported by a network of clinics, manages four others, and has well established research laboratories and a manufacturing facility producing high quality, low cost ophthalmic supplies. It is now expanding its model globally, establishing seven eye hospitals in Bangladesh with Grameen Bank and training all the staffs. It has worked with over 260 eye hospitals from India and other developing countries to expand their capacity to address eye diseases and conditions in addition to cataracts. It has participated in establishing national eye care plans for India, Rwanda and Eritrea.

Conrad N. Hilton Foundation for more

(Submitted by reader)