By B. R. Gowani

The impact and the reactions caused by the Danny Boyle film Slumdog Millionaire, its Oscar nominations, and consequent winning of eight Academy Awards including 2008’s Best Picture, has been unprecedented in my recent memory. It seems to have evoked praise by just as many people as have blasted it in the way dire poverty in India has been depicted in the movie.

Many of the slum dwellers in Dharavi, Mumbai, where the film is shot have not liked the way their slum has been portrayed. But there may be many who are feeling happy and hopeful that their plight has been communicated to the world and this may hopefully bring some positive change in their lives. In the end, it really doesn’t matter that the conveyor of their plight happens to be a white person and not an Indian. Also, many Muslims are probably glad that, for a change, they are in the spotlight as the victims and not terrorists as the Western media is so fond of portraying them. People impacted by the dreadful poverty depicted in the movie may be somewhat comforted that the world is now seeing the hidden face of India, their India, rather than the utopian depiction romanticized in the media as the up and coming great power only.

It has made the patriots and the nationalists uncomfortable to see their country associated with slums. Actor Amitabh Bachchan criticized the movie: “if SM projects India as [a] third-world, dirty, underbelly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.” He also added: “It’s just that the SM idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative globe recognition. The other would perhaps not.” But On BBC Amitabh clarified: “Fact is – some one mentioned the film on my blog. Some expressed opinion for it, some against. And yes, they contained some strong assumptions. I merely put both of them up and invited debate.” In the past, the famous actress Nargis expressed her dislike in the way the great filmmaker Satyajit Ray portrayed poverty in India, especially in his own state of Bengal.

The argument that Boyle is white and therefore the movie received the awards is thought provoking that even in 21st century racism still exists. (The Academy Awards were instituted in 1927, but it was in 2001 that the Academy decided that a black actress should be granted an Oscar. Halle Berry is the only black actress to have received the honor to date.) After the film had received a couple of awards I knew that its fate had been decided, similar to the slum dog being made the millionaire plot of the movie and the union of the female and male protagonists.

Racism takes many forms. One form is insensitivity and indifference, as happened during the red carpet Oscar Award evening with the E-channel reporter who was covering the dresses, designers, and other aspects of the gala event while conducting mini impromptu interviews with the celebrity actors and actresses. When he saw the SM child actors, he mentioned only two actors’ names, and then put an illegible note with the rest of the actors’ names in front of the camera for a few seconds and the camera moved back on the children who were asked a couple of questions in an amusing patronizing manner. This left many viewers upset.

Hollywood has always been a global affair in so far as its films making money from foreign countries and the televised ceremony of Oscars are concerned. However, only recently is it attempting to give some semblance of globalism in recognizing, or even considering, third world countries like India.*

Slumdog Millionaire is not as artistic as a Satyajit Ray movie but if one compares it to a commercial movie, then I think it was a well made movie. Of course, the idea that a slum dweller can become a millionaire is like winning a super lottery plus [probably without even buying a ticket], so utterly unrealistic, but the film overall has the element to keep one glued to the screen; and many of the things shown in the film are realities for the millions of people who live this poverty on a daily basis. But for those slum children who acted in the film and then attended the Oscar ceremony, it really was like winning the lottery (albeit, without their due of the financial success), to have come all the way from Mumbai slums to the glory and glitter of Hollywood.

I hope that the nationalists and the patriots will do something to eliminate this “dirty, underbelly”, now that the movie has exposed it and it has generated such uproar.

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

*The cosmetics and related industries were quick to recognize India as a country of 1 billion “al consumers.” This happened in the wake of the new 1990s Indian policy of changing to “market economy.” This set the ball rolling. Suddenly now, the judges of the beauty contests in the West discovered that Indian women were beautiful; and so they began to be crowned Miss Universe and Miss World. So in the end, it is the driving need for profit that drives all decisions on who is beautiful, who wins awards, who is “in” etc.

By Dean Nelson and Barney Henderson

But the reality of life for Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail is far closer to that of the characters they play in the story of love, violent crime and extreme poverty in India.
The child actors’ parents have accused the hit film’s producers of exploiting and underpaying the eight-year-olds, disclosing that both face uncertain futures in one of Mumbai’s most squalid slums.
Slumdog Millionaire has won four Golden Globes and is nominated for 10 Oscars. It is on its way to making hundreds of millions of pounds in box office receipts.
The film’s British director, Danny Boyle, has spoken of how he set up trust funds for Rubina and Azharuddin and paid for their education. But it has emerged that the children, who played Latika and Salim in the early scenes of the film, were paid less than many Indian domestic servants.
Rubina was paid £500 for a year’s work while Azharuddin received £1,700, according to the children’s parents.
However a spokesman for the film’s American distributors, Fox Searchlight, disputed this saying the fees were more than three times the average annual salary an adult in their neighbourhood would receive. They would not disclose the actual sum.
Both children were found places in a local school and receive £20 a month for books and food. However, they continue to live in grinding poverty and their families say they have received no details of the trust funds set up in their names. Their parents said that they had hoped the film would be their ticket out of the slums, and that its success had made them realise how little their children had been paid.
The children received considerably less than the poor Afghan child stars of The Kite Runner, who embarrassed their Hollywood producers when they disclosed that they had been paid £9,000.
Rubina and Azharuddin live a few hundreds yards from each other in a tangle of makeshift shacks alongside Mumbai’s railway tracks at Bandra. Azharuddin is in fact worse off than he was during filming: his family’s illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin with his father, who suffers from tuberculosis.
“There is none of the money left. It was all spent on medicines to help me fight TB,” Azharuddin’s father, Mohammed Ismail, said. “We feel that the kids have been left behind by the film. They have told us there is a trust fund but we know nothing about it and have no guarantees.”
Further down the tracks, an open sewer trickles past the hut that Rubina shares with her parents, older brother and sister. Her father, Rafiq Ali Kureshi, a carpenter, broke his leg during filming and has been out of work since. “I am very happy the movie is doing so well, but it is making so much money and so much fame and the money they paid us is nothing. They should pay more,” he said, wafting away the smoke from a nearby fire. “I have no regrets. I just had no knowledge of what she should have been paid.”
His daughter has been overwhelmed by the glamour of her experience and idolises Freida Pinto, the screen beauty who plays her character as an adult, with whom she attended the Indian premiere of the film last week .“I want to be a star like Freida,” she said. “I am going to ask Danny-uncle (director Boyle) to take me to London and be in more films.”
A Fox Searchlight spokesman said: “The welfare of Azhar and Rubnia has always been a top priority for everyone involved with Slumdog Millionaire.
“A plan has been in place for over 12 months to ensure that their experience working on Slumdog Millionaire would be of long term benefit. For 30 days work, the children were paid three times the average local annual adult salary. Last year after completing filming, they were enrolled in school for the first time and a fund was established for their future welfare, which they will receive if they are still in school when they turn 18.
“Due to the exposure and potential jeopardy created by the unwarranted press attention, we are looking into additional measures to protect Azhar and Rubina and their families. We are extremely proud of this film, and proud of the way our child actors have been treated.”
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Azharuddin Ismail and Rubina Ali, actors in the film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’, displayed outfits designed by Ashima Leena during a fashion show on the second day of India Fashion Week in New Delhi. Reuters/Adnan Abidi

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Jeffrey St. Clair is an author and co-editor of Counterpunch website.

Hot Climate Cold Cash – Jeffrey St Clair part 1

Hot Climate Cold Cash – Jeffrey St Clair part 2

Via http://redstaterebels.org/

A scene from film Dil Diya Dard Liya (I Gave my Heart and Got Pain) with Waheeda Rehman, Dilip Kumar, Shyama, and Pran.

Footprints found at Ileret, Kenya, display anatomically modern features

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Ancient footprints found at Rutgers’ Koobi Fora Field School show that some of the earliest humans walked like us and did so on anatomically modern feet 1.5 million years ago.
Published as the cover story in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Science, this anatomical interpretation is the conclusion of Rutgers Professor John W.K. Harris and an international team of colleagues. Harris is a professor of anthropology at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies and director of the Koobi Fora Field Project.
Harris is also director of the field school which Rutgers University operates in collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya. From 2006 to 2008, the field school group of mostly American undergraduates, including Rutgers students, excavated the site yielding the footprints.
The footprints were discovered in two 1.5 million-year-old sedimentary layers near Ileret in northern Kenya. These rarest of impressions yielded information about soft tissue form and structure not normally accessible in fossilized bones. The Ileret footprints constitute the oldest evidence of an essentially modern human-like foot anatomy.
To ensure that comparisons made with modern human and other fossil hominid footprints were objective, the Ileret footprints were scanned and digitized by the lead author, Professor Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University in the United Kingdom.
The authors of the Science paper reported that the upper sediment layer contained three footprint trails: two trails of two prints each, one of seven prints and a number of isolated prints. Five meters deeper, the other sediment surface preserved one trail of two prints and a single isolated smaller print, probably from a juvenile.
In these specimens, the big toe is parallel to the other toes, unlike that of apes where it is separated in a grasping configuration useful in the trees. The footprints show a pronounced human-like arch and short toes, typically associated with an upright bipedal stance. The size, spacing and depth of the impressions were the basis of estimates of weight, stride and gait, all found to be within the range of modern humans.
Based on size of the footprints and their modern anatomical characteristics, the authors attribute the prints to the hominid Homo ergaster, or early Homo erectus as it is more generally known. This was the first hominid to have had the same body proportions (longer legs and shorter arms) as modern Homo sapiens. Various H. ergaster or H. erectus remains have been found in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa, with dates consistent with the Ileret footprints.
Other hominid fossil footprints dating to 3.6 million years ago had been discovered in 1978 by Mary Leakey at Laetoli, Tanzania. These are attributed to the less advanced Australopithecus afarensis, a possible ancestral hominid. The smaller, older Laetoli prints show indications of upright bipedal posture but possess a shallower arch and a more ape-like, divergent big toe.
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Other institutions involved in this research included the George Washington University, Liverpool John Moores University, Smithsonian Institution, University of Cape Town and University of Nairobi.

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By Michelle Fay Cortez and Marilyn Chase

March 20 (Bloomberg) — It may take a decade to replace the prostate cancer test that doctors say is inadequate and risky, yet is used on 75 percent of American men 50 or older.
The PSA cancer-detection test may only prevent deaths in about 7 in 10,000 males with the disease, according to research reported March 16. The exam often leads men without lethal cancer to undergo unneeded treatment that can result in sexual impotence or incontinence, said Gerald Andriole, chief of urologic surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
At least four new tests are being studied in people, said Sudhir Srivastava, chief of the biomarkers research group at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. The research, aimed at distinguishing slow-growing cancers that rarely cause death from malignancies that can spread and kill, will take “at least 10 years” before they’re in common use, said Christine Berg, also at the NCI. In the meantime, scientists are tweaking the current test to make the results more precise.
“The challenge we have right now is, when we find cancer we don’t know if it is a killer cancer or a toothless lion,” said Andriole, who led one of the two March 16 studies on the test, in a telephone interview.
In the U.S., 28,660 men die from prostate cancer each year, and 186,320 men are diagnosed with it, according to the American Cancer Society.

PSA Increases
The existing test measures prostate specific antigen, or PSA, a blood protein that reflects damage to the prostate. PSA levels rise when prostate cancer develops. They also increase with age and when men develop benign conditions, including enlarged prostate glands or a urinary tract infection.
When men get an elevated PSA result, ruling out cancer requires extracting a piece of the prostate, a gland that weighs less than an ounce and is located below the bladder and in front of the rectum. It secretes fluid that helps semen travel during ejaculation.
The biopsy, a procedure most often done using a needle pushed through the wall of the rectum, costs about $2,400, according to Elizabeth Streich, a spokeswoman for Columbia University Medical Center in New York. In a biopsy, a surgeon removes a tiny piece of prostate tissue so that doctors can examine cells under a microscope for the presence, type and aggressiveness of cancer.
A biopsy’s reliability can also be questionable because it “is prone to being subjective, according to who reads the slide,” Srivastava said.

Genetic Markers
Three of the tests now being studied in humans use genetic markers to differentiate between slow-growing and potentially lethal cancer, the NCI’s Srivastava said. Two would be used to screen urine, another is a blood test, and the fourth would be used in a biopsy to offer a more precise measurement of genetic activity leading to metastasis, the process that spreads cancer throughout the body.
Arul Chinnaiyan, a researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is working with privately held Metabolon Inc., a diagnostic screening company based in Durham, North Carolina, on a test for an amino acid called sarcocine that rises when prostate cancer is active, according to the company.
Metabolon’s test would screen urine to check the severity of a prostate tumor, said John Ryals, Chief Executive Officer of Metabolon, in a telephone interview today.
“One of the problems with PSA is that it doesn’t really tell you much about whether you really have cancer or not and how aggressive a tumor is,” Ryals said. “Sarcosine is involved in the transition of a tumor going from a non-invasive state to a more invasive state.”

Urine, Blood Tests
The National Cancer Institute is working with University of Michigan researcher John Wei on a study analyzing urine samples from patients in Ann Arbor, Boston and Baltimore, seeking a biomarker called PCA3, the NCI’s Srivastava said. PCA3 is a snippet of genetic material that is overproduced in prostate cancer cells.
The blood test being assessed in humans is looking for two genes that fuse together once cancer becomes present. The genes are a marker that the cancer is spreading, according to Srivastava at the NCI, which is collaborating on the research. About 200 volunteers are involved in the research being undertaken at the Veterans Administration Hospital in San Diego, Srivastava said.
A fourth method would examine prostate tissue sample taken during biopsy for a gene called GSTPi1 that can act as a switch, turning on the growth process linked with cancer. Quest Diagnostics Inc., based in Madison, New Jersey, is working with Epigenomics AG in Berlin to develop genetic tests for GSTP1 that would help detect disease activity, the companies said in a statement.

Predicting Behavior
“I am hopeful, although I don’t know when it will come, that if we understand the genetics of cancer we’ll be able to predict its behavior,” said Philip Kantoff, chief clinical research officer and chief of solid tumor oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
While testing on new genetic models continues, researchers are working on ways to make the present PSA test more effective. One way may be to weigh a man’s basic PSA score against how fast the number rises over time, according to the NCI’s Berg.
Combining that information with a patient’s age, the size of his gland, and whether the PSA the protein is floating free in blood or bound to other proteins may improve the accuracy of the test over time, Berg said. Elevated PSA in men in their 40s, before age-related damage is inflicted on the prostate, can also predict cancer rates a quarter century later, Andrew Vickers, a specialist in molecular markers and surgical research results at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said.

Really Tell Risk
“With a single PSA test at an early age,” weighed in relation to other factors, “you can really tell who is at risk for cancer,” Vickers said in a telephone interview.

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By Hamid Mir

March 23 is just a public holiday for most of the Pakistanis. Their knowledge about the genesis and significance of this day is very limited. They simply think that March 23 is Pakistan Day because All India Muslim League for the first time adopted a resolution in Lahore for the creation of a separate Muslim homeland in 1940. Very few of them know that word ‘Pakistan’ was not used in this resolution. No Muslim Leaguer including Muhammad Ali Jinnah mentioned the name of Pakistan in their speeches on March 23, except a lady speaker Begum Muhammad Ali Jauhar. This resolution was originally called Lahore declaration but Hindu press branded it ‘Pakistan Resolution.’ The text books in schools and colleges of Pakistan do not say that Lahore resolution was actually passed for at least two separate Muslim states. Rights of the non-Muslims were also protected in that resolution very clearly. It also gave protection to the provincial autonomy because Muslims of the subcontinent wanted economic justice.

The resolution for the creation of separate Muslim states in the British-controlled India was moved by the chief minister of United Bengal Maulvi A K Fazlul Haq. There was no doubt that he surely wanted two separate states. One for the Muslims of Punjab, Sindh, NWFP, Balochistan and Kashmir and the other for the Muslims of Bengal and Assam. Like it or not but the historical realities are difficult to digest. If we read the Lahore Resolution carefully it will be easy to understand that this resolution was not implemented in its true spirit on August 14, 1947, due to the conspiracies of Congress leaders and Lord Mountbatten and also weakness of All India Muslim League.

In fact, the concept of a sovereign independent Bengal had its origins in the Pakistan movement. The mother party of Pakistan was All India Muslim League and interestingly this party was born in 1906 in Dacca in Bengal and not in the present-day Pakistan. Many historians claim that Chaudhry Rehmat Ali introduced the word Pakistan in 1933. United Bengal was not part of his Pakistan scheme. He proposed the name ‘Bangsam’ for the separate state of Bengali Muslims living in Bengal and Assam. Two professors of Aligarh University Syed Zafarul Hassan and Dr Afzal Hussain again proposed two Muslim states in their famous Aligarh scheme in 1935. They proposed that Punjab, North West Frontier Province, Sind, Balochistan, Bahawalpur, Jammu and Kashmir, Kapurthala and Malir Kotla should be one state. Bangal and Assam including the Purena district of Bihar should be the second state and the third state should be the rest of India.

Dr Syed Abdul Latif of Osmania University, Hyderabad, in his book ‘The Muslim Problem of India’ published in 1938 proposed four separate Muslim states. He proposed a state from Patiala to Rampur including Lucknow for the Muslims of UP and Bihar and another separate state of Hyderabad (Andhra Perdesh). He also supported the Pakistan scheme and Bangsam scheme of Chaudhry Rehmat Ali. Another Muslim Leaguer from UP Chaudhry Khaleequz Zaman also proposed the scheme of two separate Muslim states to England in 1939. The adoption of the Lahore Resolution in March 1940 was a significant step towards highlighting the demand for separate homelands for the two Muslim majority zones of India. The Lahore Resolution said:

‘No constitutional plan would be workable or acceptable to the Muslims unless geographical contiguous units are demarcated into regions which should be so constituted with such territorial readjustments as may be necessary. That the areas in which the Muslims are numerically in majority as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India should be grouped to constitute independent states in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.’ The words autonomous and sovereign were used for independent states not for the provinces.

Some historians like Dr Safdar Mehmood are not ready to accept that Lahore Resolution actually meant two separate states. He claims that Jinnah clarified to the foreign correspondents on March 24, 1940, that Muslim League wanted only one state. Few historians even claimed that the real word in the Lahore Resolution was ‘state’ not ‘states.’ It was just a typing error. The office secretary of All India Muslim League from 1914 to 1948 Syed Shamsul Hassan have a different story.

Syed Shamsul Hassan was a trusted man of Jinnah. He clarified that there was no typing error in the Lahore Resolution. The word ‘states’ was approved by the draft committee members including Malik Barkat Ali, Nawab Ismail Khan and Nawabzada Liaqat Ali Khan. The working committee of All India Muslim League again met in Bombay from Aug 31 to Sept 2, 1940 under the chairmanship of Jinnah and this meeting again said that separate Muslim states should be established in the north-west and east of India.

Unfortunately the Lahore Resolution remained undefined until April 1946. It was again the chief minister of United Bengal Hussein Shaheed Suharwardi who moved a resolution in the working committee meeting of Muslim League held in Delhi on April 7, 1946, that Bengal and Assam in the north-east and Punjab, NWFP, Sindh and Balochistan in the north-west of India should be a single state. The word Pakistan was used for the first time in that resolution.

Kamaruddin Ahmad in his book ‘The Social History of East Pakistan’ published in 1967 in Dacca wrote that Secretary General of Bengal Muslim League Abul Hashim raised objection on the resolution moved by Suharwardi. Kamaruddin Ahmad was a die-hard Bengali worker of Pakistan movement. He was present in the meetings of Lahore and Delhi. He wrote that Jinnah explained to Abul Hashim that Delhi resolution was not meant to change the Lahore Resolution but to have one constituent assembly for the Muslim India for drafting the constitution or constitutions of Pakistan on the basis of Lahore Resolution. After few weeks of the Delhi meeting Suharwardi started his efforts for the creation of a separate United Bengal state with the help of Abul Hashim and a Bengali Hindu leader of Congress Sarat Chandra Bose. This Hindu leader was the elder brother of famous freedom fighter Subhash Chandra Bose. He was in Congress but he failed to convince his party for the creation of United Bengal.

A very well respected Pakistani historian Zahid Chaudhry claimed that Jinnah quietly supported the efforts of Suharwardi and Sarat Chandra Bose for a United Bengali state. In his book ‘Bengali Mussalman aur Tehrik-i-Pakistan’ he clearly wrote on page 448 that Jinnah told Mountbatten once that there is no use of Bengal without Calcutta and he will be very happy on the creation of a separate United Bengal and this state will have very friendly relations with Pakistan. Suharwardi, Abul Hashim and Bose also met Mahatma Gandhi and tried to convince him for the United Bengal scheme. Suharwardi even offered that he will form a coalition government with Congress in United Bengal but Gandhi never listened to him. He forced Mountbatten to divide Bengal. He occupied many Muslim majority areas like Kashmir and Gurdaspur in the East Punjab with the help of Mountbatten.

Division of Bengal was a violation of Lahore Resolution as well as Delhi resolution. Bengalis supported Muslim League because they wanted justice. They were a majority in United Bengal but they were economically dominated by Hindu elite. Division of Bengal was a great injustice to them. They never got justice even after the creation of Pakistan. Military dictators of Pakistan never fulfilled the promises made in the Lahore Resolution. Bengali leaders like Suharwardi were humiliated by the dictators and their toady judges.

The creation of Pakistan was the result of a political and democratic struggle but pro-American military dictators destroyed all the democratic institutions and finally Bengalis said goodbye to Pakistan.

We never learned any lessons. Our students in colleges and universities still do not know what the real cause was for the creation of Bangladesh, what provincial autonomy is and what promises were made by the Muslim League in the Lahore Resolution. According to the original draft of the Lahore Resolution, the central government should have control only over defence, foreign affairs, communications and finance. Rest of the powers should go to the provinces. The Lahore Resolution says that Pakistan needs strong provinces, not a strong centre. Late Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rehman demanded this provincial autonomy promised in the Lahore Resolution through his famous six points but Pakistani generals declared him a traitor. Unfortunately Pakistan still has areas like North Waziristan and Bajaur that are run by old British laws. The constitution of Pakistan has no writ in these tribal areas. Local people are suffering from injustice even after 1947. The Baloch are also demanding provincial autonomy. Intelligence agencies are still more powerful than the elected provincial government in Balochistan It needs justice more than the other provinces today. If we implement the Lahore Resolution in its true spirit I am sure there will be no problem in the tribal areas and Balochistan.

The writer works for Geo TV. Email: hamid.mir@geo.tv
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STARK COUNTY — A story that already has people talking nationwide is certain to get more attention with a billboard that encourages former female inmates to report jail abuse. The billboard along Route 62 near Root Avenue in Stark County [in the State of Ohio, US] was put up as a result of the civil lawsuit brought by Hope Steffey against Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson. Steffey’s clothes were forcibly removed by both male and female deputies and she was left completely naked inside the Stark county jail for six hours. Sheriff Swanson says Steffey was considered suicidal so her clothes had to be removed for her own safety. Steffey has denied she was suicidal. The woman’s lawyers discovered during the lawsuit that at least 128 women between 1999 and 2007 were strip-searched or forced to remove their clothing or placed on suicide watch, homicide watch or “naked detention.” This Stark County Sheriff Tim Swanson is like a concentration camp commandant. When asked about the ethics of stripping prisoners – young women, naked in his jail Swanson justified his ‘Abu Ghraib’ style treatment of human beings by stating that he has hundreds of prisoners that are stripped naked in his jail. Swanson thinks the large scale of the crime somehow legitimizes it. Sheriff Swanson should know that many thousands of Jews were also stripped naked in concentration camps and it didn’t make the dehumanizing practice any less of an atrocity. In fact it made it much worse.
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Past-News.php/2009/03/15/billboard-encourages-women-to-report-jai

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By DAVID OKWEMBAH

Nearly four tonnes of unrefined gold from Congo is stuck in Nairobi, setting off an international controversy over its ownership and whether it was smuggled into the country.
The gold was en route to Zurich, Switzerland, from Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
But the Swiss company, which was to receive the gold, Firstar, pulled out at the last minute saying it had learnt that the cargo belonged to Zimbabwean Vice-President, Mrs Joice Mujuru, investigations by the Nation reveal.
A South African businessman, Dancor Spies, claimed to be the key mover in the transaction denies that it had anything to do with the Zimbabwean. He, however, would not disclose who owns it.
Mr Spies ultimately stopped communicating with the Nation and threatened to go to court if the story is published.
The gold, whose worth is estimated at between Sh4 billion and Sh5 billion, is reported to have been flown in on November 28, last year, from Lubumbashi, an area of the Congo where Zimbabwean officials have influence.
Zimbabwe is among nations which have mineral interests in the Congo and at one time sent an army to prop up the Kinshasa government against rebels.
According to the certificate of origin, a copy of which is certified by Nairobi lawyer Cecil Miller, the quantity of gold in question is 3,700 kilogrammes.
Mrs Mujuru’s daughter, Mrs Nyasha del Campo, a commodities trader based in Spain, told the Nation that she was an intermediary in the transaction.
Kenyan law firm
She claimed that the gold belonged to a friend of Mr Spies in Nairobi. In subsequent e-mails, however, she changed her stance: “I am not the owner of the gold. The owner was represented by a local Kenyan law firm and I was not privy as to know who owns this gold. I was just an intermediary,” she wrote.
Mr Spies said the cargo belonged to a mine in the Katanga Province of the Congo. He claimed to have been unable to get in touch with the owner for three weeks.
“Regrettably, I am not in a position to give you any further detailed and confidential information as I am not the owner of the gold. I was unable to make contact with the owner since 3 weeks ago. I am however still trying,” the South African said.
He, however, was categorical that the gold did not belong to Mrs Mujuru’s daughter, her husband or any of her family members.
The gold saga came to light three weeks ago when the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) linked it to Mrs Mujuru and her husband Solomon, the former head of the army under President Mugabe.
Mrs Mujuru and her family are among small elite who have prospered in Zimbabwe as the rest of the country plunges into an ever-deeper economic mire.
According to Swiss gold refinery firm Firstar, the Zimbabwean vice-president was using her daughter, Nyasha, who is married to a Spaniard, Pedro del Campo, to sell the gold.
However, the daughter was unable to pay Sh16 million freight for the 3,700kg of gold to Zurich and is reported to have sought the support of her mother to have the gold airlifted from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA).

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