Dengue fever is the most common infectious disease transmitted by mosquitoes – some 100 million people around the world are infected. Researchers at the Hygiene Institute at Heidelberg University Hospital were the first to present a three-dimensional model of the location in the human cell where the virus is reproduced. Their research provides an insight into the exact process of viral replication and serves as a model for other viruses whose replication is still unclear, such as the hepatitis C virus. In addition, it offers new approaches for developing measures to prevent or treat dengue fever. Up to now, neither a vaccine nor a specific antiviral therapy exists.

Professor Dr. Ralf Bartenschlager, director of the Department of Molecular Virology at the Heidelberg Hygiene Institute and his team, working in cooperation with colleagues from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) have published their study in the latest issue of the prestigious journal Cell Host & Microbes.

Viruses do not have a metabolism and cannot produce proteins from their genetic material (RNA or DNA) on their own. They can replicate only inside a host cell – but where and how exactly does this take place? The answer to this question is crucial for developing therapy.
Viruses transform human cell membranes for their purposes

Biology News for more

By Gwynne Dyer

In the past two years, various non-African countries – China, India, South Korea, Britain and the Arab Gulf states lead the pack – have been taking over huge tracts of farmland in Africa by lease or purchase, to produce food or biofuels for their own use.

Critics call them “neo-colonialists”, but they will not be as successful as the old ones.

The scale of the land grab is truly impressive. In Sudan, South Korea has acquired 690,000ha of land to grow wheat. The United Arab Emirates, which already has 30,000ha in Sudan, is investing in another 378,000ha to grow corn, alfalfa, wheat, potatoes and beans.

In Tanzania, Saudi Arabia is seeking 500,000ha.

Even bigger chunks of land are being leased to produce biofuels.
China has acquired 2.8 million hectares in the Democratic Republic of Congo to create the world’s largest oil-palm plantation (replacing all that messy rainforest and useless wildlife with tidy lines of palm trees), and is negotiating for 2 million hectares in Zambia to grow jatropha. British firms have secured big tracts of land in Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nigeria and Tanzania.

Only rarely is there protest from local people. One striking exception is Madagascar, where the announcement of a 99-year contract to lease 1.3 million hectares to South Korea’s Daewoo Corporation to grow corn helped to trigger the recent revolution. “Madagascar’s land is neither for sale nor for rent,” said the new leader, Andry Rajoelina, who cancelled the deal.

After the revolution, it turned out another 465,000ha of land in Madagascar had been leased to an Indian company, Varun International, to grow rice for consumption in India. That deal is also being cancelled by the new Government – but elsewhere, the acquisition of huge tracts of African land by Asian and European Governments and companies goes ahead almost unopposed.
Why Africa? Because that’s the last place where there are large areas of good agricultural land that aren’t already completely occupied by local farmers. There are usually some peasants scratching a living from the land, but they are few and poor, and they can easily be bought or driven out.

For the foreigners, the lure is profit, or food security, or both.

New Zealand Herald for more

By Carl Ratner

In developing a psychology of liberation, the key question is, “what do we mean by liberation?” The way we define liberation determines the kind of psychology of liberation that we develop. If we believe that liberation consists of expressing oneself, the psychology of liberation would investigate psychological processes that promote this. If we believe that liberation consists in forming personal meanings about things, then a psychology of liberation would consist of understanding and promoting ways of doing this. If we define liberation as exercising the imagination, then we would understand and promote the psychology of imagination.

Most of us at this congress believe that liberation must be defined more culturally. It must include transforming the culture in which people live — humanizing social institutions, practices, conditions, and values. Such cultural change is imperative for real liberation. Accepting oppressive social conditions diminishes human liberation.
How can psychologists contribute to cultural analysis and change? We can do so by studying the effects of cultural factors and processes on psychology. This approach will identify fulfilling psychological functions and trace them to positive cultural influences. It will also identify unfulfilling, debasing, anti-social psychological phenomena — e.g., insecurity, anxiety, irrationality, prejudice, self-destructive behavior, selfishness, and aggression — and trace them back to negative cultural influences. Identifying positive and negative cultural influences on psychology will point out the ones which need to be promoted and the ones which need to be transformed. In this way, psychologists can contribute to the liberation of people.

This is precisely the kind of analysis that Martin-Baro made of fatalism among Central American peasants. He traced fatalism to real social relations and conditions of the peasants. He argued that these must be changed in order to free people of fatalism.
…
Fascinating research has demonstrated that cultural concepts also shape psychological functions. Concepts act as filters which mediate perception, emotions, memory, self-concept, body-image, and mental illness.

Smith-Rosenberg (1972) explained 19th century hysteria as resting upon cultural concepts. Hysteria was prevalent among white, upper middle class women in the U.S. and Europe. It was rare among men and among lower class women. Hysterical symptoms included deadening of the senses and immobilizing the limbs. According to Smith-Rosenberg, these symptoms reflected the middle class feminine ideal of a weak, spiritual, person. Normal middle class women were expected to shun physical work, take no interest in bodily pleasure, and avoid the mere mention of bodily functions. Even the breast of chicken was euphemistically called white meat to avoid reference to anatomical parts. The ideal Victorian young women was very slim and weak. Her body was restricted by eating extremely little and by wearing tightly laced corsets that produced an 18 inch waist. Normal Victorian middle class women cultivated physical debilitation in order to realize the ideal of weakness, delicacy, gentleness, purity, submissiveness, and freedom from physical labor. The debilitating symptoms of hysteria were only a slight exaggeration of middle class feminine ideals. Middle class hysteria was sympathetically accepted by men and women as characteristic of women.

CEPAOS Review for more

By Amrita Pritam

Her name was Sahiban*. And she came visiting the ‘enemy country’. She came to see the relics of ancient monuments. And carried with her a letter requesting that she be allowed to stay for a few days. The letter was from an old friend who knew that they would be happy to host Sahiban in their home for a few days.

The parents of the family opened for her the airy guestroom, a little removed from the bustle of the living room. On the top floor of the house was a small apartment set amidst a terrace garden in bloom. The son of the family lived in the two rooms of the apartment.

There was tea ready for Sahiban when she arrived. After tea and pleasantries, she went to her room to freshen up. Soon, it was time for dinner. The son of the family had come down to the dining room and was arranging the flowers that he had brought from the terrace. The mother called Sahiban from the guestroom. She introduced Sahiban to her son and started laying out the meal. The family of three sat down to dinner with their guest, making small talk as they ate.

The next morning Sahiban had a cup of tea and ventured out to see the monuments and relics of this ancient city.

She would travel by bus all day, visiting one monument after another. She had brought a list with her. But she would always return home before dark and the dinner ceremony of the first evening would be replicated. There was only one change: Sahiban would always bring some flowers and sweets for the dining table. The mother asked her not to take the trouble, but Sahiban seemed to like coming back home with something for the family.

On the fourth day, there was a minor accident. The son hurt his leg while riding his motorcycle. There was no bruise, but he seemed to have pulled a ligament. He returned from the doctor’s clinic with a bandage on his leg, went straight to his den and lay down. In a few hours, the leg was so stiff that he could not raise it. His mother went up to foment the injury and give him tea.

That evening, when Sahiban returned and learned of the accident, she took the balm from the mother’s hands, went softly up the stairs and started massaging his leg. Then she gently massaged the soles of his feet to work out the stiffness. The young man was embarrassed. But her gentle touch was so soothing that he overcame his shyness.

That night, she took his dinner from his mother and went up to his room and spent the night on a settee there, in case he required any attention during the night. Next morning, she washed up in the bathroom upstairs and then came down to fetch his breakfast. After three days of tender care, the young man was up and about. He could not ride the motorbike, but he could drive the car.

He had taken a week’s leave from work when he got hurt, so he still had a few days off. There were some very interesting old monuments outside the city and some ruins too, he told his mother, and would she lend him the car to take Sahiban there?

The mother laughed in permission. She was relieved to see her son look somewhat happy. He had lost interest in women when the love of his college days did not work out. He would not consider marriage. He wouldn’t even go to parties.

Two days later, Sahiban asked him if he would take her to Hardwar. She wanted to bathe in the Ganga. He mentioned her request to his mother, who had no objection. So the two of them left for Hardwar.

Sahiban was of delicate build and she was always in simple, casual clothes. They reached Hardwar late in the evening. They rented two small cottages for the night at an ashram by the Ganga. Just before dawn, Sahiban went over and woke the young man so that together, they could watch the sun rise over the river.

He was still quite sleepy, but he washed his face and went out with her to the riverbank. Sahiban gazed at the shades of red splashed across the sky and reflected in the water. She climbed down the steps to bathe in the river, fully clad.

The young man stood on the bank. He was carrying neither a towel nor a change of clothing, so he did not climb down with her. He sat on the edge and played with the water. Then he saw Sahiban standing in the water with her hands folded, looking up at the sky, as though she were greeting the sun. He stared at her in amazement.

When she came out, thoroughly drenched, he said, “You should have brought a towel and a change.”

Sahiban smiled. The hut was close enough, she said, she would go and change there.

Back in the ashram, after a change of clothes and a cup of tea, Sahiban said, “Take me to the city bazaar. I want to look in the shops.” They might not be open yet, he replied, but they could stroll down and they might open by the time they got there.

The narrow-laned bazaars were selling river shells, rudraksha beads, scarves printed with the name of Ram, small boxes of saffron and musk. The girl looked at all this in awe. All of a sudden, she stopped by a shop selling red dupattas edged with golden tassel-work, glass bangles and bridal choorhas of ivory. Holding up her wrist to the shopkeeper, she asked for a choorha her size and put it on right there. Then she bought a red dupatta and some sindoor. Surprised, the young man said, “Sahiban, what will you do with all this? You might like them, but how can you return to your country wearing all this? Even the customs officers will wonder!”

The girl laughed, “How do my arms concern them?”

He was insistent, “But what are you up to?”

Sahiban said, “These are debts that Khuda will have to pay back.”

When the two returned from Hardwar, Sahiban had a dot of sindoor on her forehead and some more in the parting of her hair. The wedding bangles were on her wrists and her head was covered with the red dupatta. Sahiban glowed like a bride.

The young man’s mother stared at her, astounded. She did not say a word to Sahiban but she cornered her son alone and said, “Tell me the truth! Have you and Sahiban got married?”

“Not at all, Ma,” he laughed. “Neither of us have even talked of marriage. She took a fancy to those trinkets and put them on!”

“The silly girl shouldn’t return to her country like this,” said the mother, “she will get merry hell.”

Sahiban was to return the next day. Her visa had run out. After breakfast, the young man took the car out of the garage to drop her at the airport. Just then a friend of his arrived. He introduced Sahiban to his friend, adding: “There’s not much time, but let’s sit for a few minutes.” They sat in the living room downstairs.

“Had you come for a pilgrimage of the dargahs?” the friend asked Sahiban.

“I didn’t go to a dargah, but it was a pilgrimage nevertheless,” Sahiban replied.

Then, playing on her name, he asked, “And where is the Mirza of this Sahiban?”

The girl laughed and said, “Mirza must always belong to the enemy clan, and that’s true for this Sahiban’s Mirza as well.” She looked up at the young man for a moment, then lowered her eyes.

On their way out, the friend asked once again, “But this time Sahiban lacks the courage to walk away with her Mirza?”

She shot back, “This Sahiban does not want her Mirza to be killed by the people of her father’s clan.” She got into the car and left for the airport.

Little Magazine for more

Scientists are peering into the brains of people with borderline personality disorder and finding clues to the roots of this disabling illness

By Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg

Key Concepts
• Borderline personality disorder (BPD) accounts for up to 10 percent of patients under psychiatric care and 20 percent of those who have to be hospitalized. People who have BPD suffer from unstable personal relationships, along with an inability to control their impulses and regulate their emotions.
• Parts of the brain’s limbic system, which governs emotion, are abnormally small as well as hyperactive in patients with BPD. According to one interpretation of these findings, a loss of inhibitory neurons in BPD might underlie both impulsivity and overly negative reactions to events.
• New research suggests that individuals with BPD also have problems correctly perceiving social gestures and that a brain structure called the anterior insula plays a key role in the disorder.

Glenn Close’s unforgettably vivid portrayal in the movie Fatal Attraction gave viewers a front-row look at the damaging mental illness known as borderline personality disorder (BPD). By itself, this ailment accounts for up to 10 percent of patients under psychiatric care and 20 percent of those who have to be hospitalized. The defining characteristic is pervasive instability in the patient’s life, especially in relationships. People who suffer from BPD also have difficulty controlling their impulses and regulating their emotions. Their behavior exerts a tremendous toll not only on themselves but also on their friends and colleagues, as well as on the health care system.

Despite the importance of this disorder, surprisingly little is known about what brain mechanisms might underlie it. Over the past few years, however, scientists have found intriguing hints. Structural imaging studies have indicated, for example, that parts of the brain’s limbic system, which regulates various aspects of emotion, are abnormally small in patients with BPD, and the areas that appear most reduced in volume govern negative moods. Investigations of functional abnormalities show that these same limbic areas—including the amygdala—tend to be hyperactive. Some researchers theorize that the smaller size of limbic structures reflects a loss of inhibitory neurons, which might mean these patients’ brains have a weaker rein on behavior and negative emotions, leading to impulsivity and overly negative reactions to events.

Scientific American for more

Two states or a state of two nations?

Following the Israeli elections the far-right leader Avigdor Lieberman has become foreign minister and deputy prime minister. His views on the Arab-Israeli conflict have provoked a clash with President Obama. And he is calling the Israeli Palestinians’ citizenship into question, even talking of eventual ‘transfer’

by Joseph Algazy and Dominique Vidal

David Rotem’s leitmotif is allegiance to the state, but he never spells it out. So much so that, before leaving, we put it to him: “Imagine yourself in Nazi Germany. Where would your loyalty lie?” “To the state,” he replied, without blinking an eye. That retort, given in the Knesset building in Jerusalem, left us stunned, particularly since he went on to tell us how his father left Germany when Hitler came to power.

Rotem is a lawyer, former deputy speaker of the Knesset, prospective director of the new Law Commission and close confidant of Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the Yisrael Beiteinu Party (Israel is Our Home). He rehashes his recent election speeches. “Whether he’s a Jew, a Muslim or a Christian, a citizen must demonstrate his loyalty to the state. If he does not, he’s not a citizen,” he says. The same tirade castigates Rabbi Meyer Hirsh for having met Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (1), and those Arab parliamentarians who dared to protest against the recent Gaza massacres.

The party’s stance is that every Israeli should swear an oath of allegiance to the flag (which includes the Shield of David, the symbol of Judaism), sing the national anthem (which evokes the “Jewish soul”) and do military service (Arabs, apart from the Druze and some Bedouin, are exempt along with ultra-orthodox Jews).

Yisrael Beiteinu’s electoral slogan leaves no doubts: “Only Lieberman speaks Arabic”. The historian Shlomo Sand quipped: “In his native Moldova he was a night-club bouncer. Now it’s the Arabs who get bounced”. This joke does, however, ignore one fact about the “Russian” party (2): its official line is not to expel Palestinians (3) – as in 1948 – but to form a future Palestinian state around the areas where they are most populous, particularly Umm al-Fahm and the northern Triangle. In exchange, Israel would annex parts of the West Bank settled by Jews, starting with those who surround East Jerusalem.

Le Monde Diplomatique for more

By Ronalyn V. Olea

MANILA — In his follow-up report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Prof. Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said the Philippine government has not eliminated extrajudicial killings from its counterinsurgency operations.

Alston visited the country in February 2007 to investigate the spate of killings in the country. A year after, he released his findings and recommendations in April 2008.

In his report to the UNHRC dated April 29, 2009, Alston said that the ‘most important shortcoming has been the Government’s failure to institutionalize or implement the many necessary reforms that have been identified.’

Alston’s primary recommendation is the elimination of extrajudicial executions from counterinsurgency operations.

The special rapporteur noted that, “The AFP has not changed its counterinsurgency techniques in such a way as to eliminate the likelihood that leftist activists will be killed.”

Alston said he is not aware of any public statement by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo instructing the security forces to stop the targeting and public labeling of political and civil society organizations as fronts for New People’s Army (NPA) operations.

In fact, Alston said, Arroyo’s order that the Armed Forces of the Philippines [AFP] should end the insurgency “once and for all” by 2010 has been used to justify vilification of civil society organizations.
While some public statements have been made, Alston said he has not received evidence of any institutional reforms by the Philippine government designed to prevent the targeting and execution of civil society activists.

Bulatlat for more

Evan Abramson

In October, I visited rural communities in two Paraguayan departments, Alto Paraná and San Pedro, to photograph the social conflicts generated by industrial soy production. Slightly smaller than California, Paraguay is the world’s fastest-growing producer of soybeans and the fourth-largest soy exporter in the world. In 2007, soy covered 6.2 million acres of the country, and the area devoted to the crop was expected to increase to 6.5 million acres by the end of 2008.1 This exponential increase is a result of the rising demand for meat and cattle feed in China, as well as the booming agro-fuel industry in Europe. Industrial soy serves these markets.
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Miguela Céspedes Bogado (above), 15, was born in the village of San Isidro, Alto Paraná, without legs. She has a partial foot extending directly from her right thigh, and two fingers are missing from her right hand. Her father used to use a backpack kit to apply pesticides and herbicides to his fields for his family’s own consumption, but stopped doing so about eight years ago. San Isidro, a small community composed of 100 or so houses clustered around one single road, is surrounded by transgenic soy plantations on all sides, at a higher elevation than the community itself. Cancer rates are high in the area; miscarriages are common, and several children have been born with birth defects.

Due to a dangerous combination of widespread corruption among local authorities, porous borders, and lax enforcement of environmental laws, soy cultivation dumps more than 6 million gallons of pesticides and herbicides into the Paraguayan soil every year, including several that are classified by the World Health Organization as extremely hazardous, like 2,4-D, Gramoxone, Paraquat, Metamidofos, and Endosulfan. About 90% of the soy produced in Paraguay is transgenic Roundup Ready, a variety engineered by the St. Louis–based Monsanto Company to be resistant to its patented herbicide.5 Fields of RR soy are indiscriminately fumigated with the herbicide, which kills everything in its path except the soy.

NACLA for more photos and stories

By Heather Pringle

A photo published in the Independent, one of Britain’s best newspapers, this week sparked outrage from some readers. The image showed a new facial reconstruction by British forensic artist Richard Neave of the earliest known anatomically modern human in Europe. Neave based his reconstruction on a partial skull and jawbone excavated from a cave in Romania and radiocarbon dated to some 34,000 to 36,000 years ago. But here was the shocker for some British readers: the reconstruction, made for the BBC’s The Incredible Human Journey program, showed a dark-skinned individual who blended what we think of as European, Asian and African features.

First some background. Neave is a leading facial reconstruction expert whose work has long received accolades from both archaeologists and by British homicide detectives. I have met him, interviewed him, and found him a meticulous researcher. Moreover, current scientific evidence tells us that anatomically modern humans originated in Africa some 200,000 years ago, and likely migrated into Eurasia 60,000 years ago or earlier. So the idea that Europe’s first Homo sapiens sapiens possessed facial features from Asian or African populations makes perfect sense to me and to many others. Indeed, Alice Roberts, a physical anthropologist at Bristol University, reportedly told the BBC’s Radio Times, “That’s probably what you’d expect of someone who was among the earliest populations to come to Europe.”

But some British readers took real umbrage at the idea that they were descended from Africans. “This is total crap. Pseudoscience,” wrote one angry reader on the Independent’s website. “Expect more insults and junk science until the BNP [the far-right British National Party, which reportedly has a whites-only policy] comes into power,” warned another. Someone else offered up his own origins myth. “The white and oriental races are not of this planet,” he explained. “Our first visit here was 22 million years ago….Theories such as originating in Africa from Lucy, Iraq cradle of civilization, etc., is mainstream misinformation.”

There was much here that disturbed me—the blatant racism, the disdain for science, and the touting of nutty ideas gleaned from crackpot internet sites. But I think what bothered me most was that I had heard this all before, when I was researching archaeology and anthropology in Nazi Germany for my book, The Master Plan. Senior Nazis, including Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, believed that most Germans descended from blonde-haired, blue-eyed supermen and women who climbed down from heaven and lived for a time in Atlantis. These Nazi leaders deliberately ignored all the scientific evidence on human origins.

Achaeology for more