Month: March 2010

by WILLIAM FISHER

NEW YORK, Mar 18, 2010 (IPS) – Despite the fact that the United States spends more on maternal health than any other country in the world, deaths in childbirth among U.S. women are on the rise and already surpass the morbidity rates in most developed countries.

That’s the principal conclusion reached in a new study by Amnesty International and data from the Organisation for Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the U.N.’s World Health Organisation (WHO).

The Amnesty study, entitled “Deadly Delivery”, reports that deaths from pregnancy and childbirth in the United States have doubled in the past 20 years – from 6.6 per 100,000 live births in 1987 to 13.3 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2006.

That would mean that, of the four million women who give birth each year, two to three women die each day in the U.S. from complications related to pregnancy.

While better reporting may account for some of the increase, the study speculates that it’s more likely that the figures may actually understate the problem because there are no federal requirements to report maternal deaths.

Other findings from the study:

U.S. women are now at greater risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes than women in 40 other countries – five times greater than Greek women, for example, and four times greater than German women.

And another 1.7 million U.S. women – a third of all women who become pregnant in the United States – experience some kind of pregnancy-related complication that adversely affects their health. Severe pregnancy-related complications (known as “near misses” because the woman comes close to death) have increased 25 percent since 1998, the study reports.

Inter Press Service for more

by C. M. Naim

My Heartrendingly Tragic Story
By Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan ‘Azar’ Edited By Alberto M. Cacopardo and Ruth Laila Schmidt, Oslo: Novus Press, 2006, pp. xl, 136, 139.

They would have called themselves Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries called them Kafirs – infidels – and their land, thus came to be known as Kafiristan

One day in 1897, near the village Brumotul not far from Chitral, then a semi-independent Muslim state high in the Himalayas, a bunch of boys went walking. They were not Chitralis, but refugees from another place that lay west of the newly demarcated Durand Line. They were not Muslims, either. The boys would have described themselves as Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries used “Kafir” to describe the boys’ ancestors, and “Kafiristan” for their original land. The British had retained that nomenclature for the portion of that land they now controlled, while the Afghan Amir, Abdur Rahman, whose invasion had made the boys refugees, had named his portion “Nuristan” (“The Land of Light”).

The boys stopped on a bridge to watch two “Sahibs” fishing in the stream below, not having seen their likes before. One of the sportsmen came over to them and said something in Khowar, one of the several languages spoken among the Kafirs. One Kati boy understood what was said; he asked his friends to find earthworms for the Sahib. Later, he and another boy carried the day’s catch to the Sahibs’ camp. The man who spoke to the boys was an army doctor named Capt; the Kati boy who understood him was named Azar. Something about the boy struck Harris as exceptional. He sent for him the following day and almost obsessively insisted that Azar—barely ten or eleven at the time—should join his service. Azar offered excuses, his mother cried, but his father, Kashmir, the leader of the clan, gave his permission. Azar became Harris’s servant—first for 18 months at Chitral, and then for two years at Peshawar. Meanwhile, Kashmir was killed by some relatives when he was on his way to Kabul—after converting to Islam—to meet the Amir and seek from him his previous high status.

In June of 1900 Harris was dispatched to China to help suppress the “Boxer Rebellion,” while Azar stayed with the Captain’s spinster sister. However, when she decided to return to England at the end of the year, Azar refused to accompany her. He insisted on staying in service in the army with the Punjabi soldiers he had come to like, and who had been very kind to him. Miss Harris then handed him over to a Capt. A.A. James.

Outlook for more

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Don’t get excited. It’ll never happen. Is there really a crisis in US-Israeli relations? Yes and No. Yes, because the world’s premier power doesn’t care to have its vice president publicly humiliated by a midget of a nation whose entire population is smaller than that of Los Angeles country. No, because the elected politicians nominally running the government of the world’s premier power live in mortal fear of the Israel lobby in the United States. This time, as always, No will carry the day. (You can find a detailed narrative by Jeffrey Blankfort on this site today, from which much of this Diary is drawn.)

Consider Biden’s reaction the day after Interior Minister Eli Yishai, probably with Netanyahu’s foreknowledge, announced the scheduled building of 1600 apartments – Jews only – in East Jerusalem, right at the moment Biden was trying to breathe life into the “peace process”. As the Israeli newspaper Haaretz points out, those projected 1600 units are part of 50,000 planned for the eastern part of the city.

So here’s the vice president of the United States of America,standing with all the injured dignity of a man who has just had a bucket of sewage dumped over his head and who amid his discomfiture, actually did use the word “condemn” and “Israel” in the same paragraph. The next day Biden heads for Tel Aviv university and confides to the audience that he is a Zionist and that, “throughout my career, Israel has not only remained close to my heart but it has been the center of my work as a United States Senator and now as Vice President of the United States.” Get that: “the center of my work.” This mission statement is not quoted in the U.S. press.

Counterpunch for more

by MICHAEL RUSS

Last year was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The anniversary was marked by conferences the world over. I will not tell you how many I attended; ecologically sensitive readers of The Chronicle might start whining about carbon footprints and that sort of thing. Let me just say that I found myself going no fewer than three times through the Quad City International Airport, in Moline, Ill. Moline!

I mention this as background to the publication of a new book by Jerry A. Fodor, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona. The title of the book, What Darwin Got Wrong (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), tells you their opinion of the old English naturalist and of his theory of evolution through natural selection. If Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini were an isolated case, one could dismiss their book with a grimace (if you were a biologist), or welcome them with a cheer (if you were a creationist). But in the philosophical community, there is an increasingly vocal cadre of eminent philosophers harboring doubts about Darwin. To understand their critique, we must first put the clock back a year, to the beginning of the celebrations.

The Chronicle for more

via 3 Quarks Daily

by MARGARET KIMBERLY

Black Agenda Report for more

By ANNE MARXZE D. UMIL

MANILA — She was a feisty and courageous woman who was not afraid to speak the truth, a vocal critic of her former student Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She was also a beautiful and brilliant student, a loving mother and a doting grandmother. She is Josefina Trinidad Lichauco, or Josie to her friends, and colleagues. A lawyer, she turned into an activist when she vigorously campaigned for the ouster of then president Joseph Estrada and current President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Lichauco died of cardio-pulmonary arrest last Feb. 14, 2010, at the age of 75.

Colleagues and friends say Lichauco lived a meaningful life as she made it a point to be on the side of the truth and justice. As former vice-president Teofisto Guingona said in a tribute to her: “She is a woman who is dedicated to what she believed in and she’s not afraid to speak out the truth especially in times of crisis.”

True enough, Lichauco worked closely with the Bagong Alayansang Makabayan or Bayan. She was a key partner, together with Concerned Citizens Movement, in the Oust GMA Movement.

Her working relations with Bayan started when she became one of the key figures in the Estrada Resign Movement. But her involvement did not end when Estrada was deposed. She pursued her activism, protesting the election fraud during the 2004 presidential elections, the NBN-ZTE scandal and the widespread violations of human rights under the Arroyo government.

Bulatlat for more

by DAVID PILLING

Tam Kin-wai’s home has a high ceiling. Unfortunately, the single room he occupies with his wife and 12-year-old son is higher than it is wide or long. At about 35 square feet, it has space for two wooden bunk beds fixed to the back wall, a small black-and-white television balanced precariously on a shelf and a little bedside table. Every inch of space in what feels more like a storage cupboard than a place of abode is piled high with clutter: clothes, chipped cups, bedding, an electric fan, a roll of white toilet paper. Guests can either stand just inside the doorway in the only vacant space, or (as I did) sit beside Mr Tam on the lower bunk bed.

Mr Tam, a retired light-bulb maker who came to Hong Kong from mainland China in the 1960s, is one of an estimated 100,000 people in the territory who reside in cubicle-sized apartments. A short taxi ride away (if you can afford it), Dai Yun-po, a hard-of-hearing 80-year-old, and Kong Siu-gau, 63, live in even more shocking conditions. Retired construction workers fallen on hard times, they sleep in cages with mesh walls and ceilings too low for them to stand up. To do so, they must join a dozen other caged men in a communal area. When I arrived they were all standing – since there were no seats – watching a television programme about the latest Forbes list of billionaires. If Mr Dai and Mr Kong were dogs, someone from animal rights would have taken up their case years ago.

Financial Times for more

(Submitted by reader)

The clash of civilizations between the Islamic world and the West isn’t over — it never began, according to a group of top-notch scholars gathered in Beirut last week.

The scholars from around the world convened at the American University of Beirut to discuss the future of engagement between the Islamic world and the West in a forum sponsored by the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center.

“It’s more appropriate to talk about a clash of ignorances,” said Ali Asani of Harvard University. “People tend to paint each other with one color, with one brush stroke, as simplistic caricatures in utter humiliation.”

In addition to the stereotypes frequently constructed by Muslims against Americans and vice versa, the world is simply too globalized a place to allow for any kind of cultural misconception or hatred, they argued. About one of every five people in the world is Muslim, accounting for up to 1.5 billion of the total population. Almost two-thirds of the world’s Muslims reside in Asia, with Indonesia being home to 15.6% of them.

In fact, more Muslims can be found in Germany than in Lebanon and more in China than in Syria, according to an October 2009 study conducted by the Pew Research Center. Though the U.S. Census is legally prohibited from asking questions on religion, it is estimated that at least several million Americans are Muslim.

Despite such complexities, everyone tries to simplify. “On 9/11, I was confusedly watching my TV and CNN called me and asked, ‘How is the Muslim population responding?’” Roy Parviz Mottahedeh of Harvard recalled. “And I said, ‘How should I know? Canceling my chances of speaking on CNN.”

Los Angeles Times for more

(Submitted by reader)

by ADAMU

Unidentified women react to the sight of dead bodies in Dogo Nahwa, Nigeria. PHOTO/Indian Express

In retrospect, one should have seen the latest clash in Jos coming. In November 2008 and January 2010, Hausa-Fulani were killed in operations in which they found the Plateau State government complicit, Governor Jonah Jang contemptuous, themselves without compensation, and without so much as a kind, soothing word. And while the people were bitterly complaining of police partisanship, Jang was praising the police for their loyalty, dedication and commitment to duty.

Following the November 2008 crisis in Jos, the Inspector-General of Police undertook a reorganization of the Plateau State Police Command. This action, which many expected would include a crackdown on partisan personnel, merely involved the transfer of some officers and men from Plateau to other commands.

Details of the reorganization were conveyed to the command in two letters from headquarters—SB: 4770/PMF/FHQ/ABJ/VOL. 1/50 of 21/11/2008 and CB: 4770/WEL/FHQ/ABJ/SUB. 1/3 of 26/11/2008. But on January 10, 2009, a few weeks after the postings, Jang wrote the IG requesting him to cancel the transfer of 60 affected policemen—seven inspectors, 23 sergeants, 16 corporals and 14 constables—all of whom, except for the sprinkling of a few names, were Berom. Jang said he “found them most loyal, dedicated and committed to their duties.” Astonishing as it might sound, the IG obliged him and all the transfers were cancelled.

Then we all woke up to the tragedy of Sunday. According to the police, what happened were reprisal killings by the Fulani retaliating for what happened to them in January. But according to Gregory Yenlong, Plateau State information commissioner, what happened at Dogo Nahauwa was ‘ethnic cleansing by Fulani against Berom.’ Jang himself said ‘some people came across the border of Plateau State and started attacking villages,’ and the Plateau State Christian Elders Forum said they came from Bauchi. All this is an improvement, because in January, words seemed to have failed all of them—they never told the world what happened at Kuru Karama and surrounding villages with the same passion.

Daily Trust for more

via Counterpunch