Month: July 2010

THE REAL NEWS

Link

by CHRISTINA AIELLO

The syndrome of the perro hortelano, the “dog in the barn,” refers to a dog growling over the food that he neither eats nor lets anyone else eat. This was the image that Peruvian President Alan García evoked in 2007 to describe the many indigenous communities in Peru who intended to protect their lands and resources in the face of the impending free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States. García’s argument was that Peru’s future economic development would be paved with the income generated by the exploitation of the country’s rich natural resources, primarily in the Amazon, which would be facilitated through the signing of free trade agreements. Though García got his wish, and the U.S.-Peru FTA went into effect on February 1, 2009, the problem that continued to disturb him was that the people who lived on those lands had the audacity to stand in the way of Peru’s progress.

North American Congress on Latin America for more

by KATHRYN HADLEY

The names and details of half a million UK radicals and religious dissenters covering a period of 225 years have been made available online, today, for the first time. The Non-Conformist church registers include the baptism and marriage registers and burial inscriptions, dating from 1694 to 1921, of both famous British non-conformists such as Daniel Defoe (1659-1731), William Blake (1757-1827) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and 224,000 ordinary men and women. The records form part of the London Historical Records, 1500s to 1900s held at the London Metropolitan Archive.

History Today for more

by ADAM MARCUS

Morphine is often a cancer patient’s best and final friend. So it came as a shock when researchers at the University of Minnesota published a study showing that doses of morphine similar to those used to ease pain actually spurred the growth of human breast cancer cells grafted into mice. “These results indicate that clinical use of morphine could potentially be harmful” in some cancer patients, the scientists wrote in 2002 in Cancer Research.

Scientific American for more

by MATTHEW GREEN and KATE HOLT

Abdul is one of a number of anxious fathers who have set up underground schools to allow his daughters to continue studying in defiance of an escalating campaign of insurgent attacks designed to thwart a major Nato operation to secure the city.

Financial Times for more

(Submitted by reader)

MANUELA TOMEI (interview)

Manuela Tomei: There have been noticeable improvements in maternity protection over the last 15 years and broad recognition that maternity protection matters for both gender equality at work and maternal and newborn health (MDG 4 and 5). We found that all 167 countries monitored by the new “ILO Database of Conditions of Work and Employment Laws” have national legislation on Maternity Protection. 63 ILO member States have adopted at least one of the three ILO maternity protection conventions and 30 per cent fully meet the provisions of Convention No.183, the most recent one. We noticed a shift towards longer leave periods at the time of childbirth. Whilst in 1994, 38 per cent of the countries offered at least 14 weeks of maternity leave, the number rose up to 48 per cent in 2009. The two regions with the greatest number of countries that increased the length of maternity leave over the last 15 years were the Industrialized Economies and the European Union, and the Middle East.

International Labour Organization for more