Effect of adding exercise has the same beneficial effect on length of life as that of stopping smoking, say American experts

KSTEVEN REINBERG | HEALTHDAY NEWS – MEN who start exercising when they are 50 can extend their life span by more than two years, Swedish researchers say. Their study found that exercising has the same beneficial effect on length of life as quitting smoking in middle age. Nonetheless, almost half of middle- age men don’t exercise, the researchers said. But Dr. Karl Michaelsson, a senior lecturer in the Department of Surgical Sciences at Uppsala University and the study’s lead author, said the study offers more proof that “it’s not too late for a man after the age of 50 years to invest in health and longevity by becoming more physically active.”

“Men who reported an increase in physical activity to a high level at age 60 years had, after an induction period of approximately 10 years, the same mortality risk as those who continued to have a high physical activity from age 50 to age 60 years,” he said. “The magnitude of the reduction in mortality risk with increased physical activity corresponded to that of smoking cessation.”

The report was published in the March 6 online edition of BMJ. For the study, Michaelsson’s team collected data on 2,205 men who were 50 years old and then surveyed them again when they were 60, 70, 77 and 82. Each time, they were questioned about their level of physical activity as well as their weight, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, smoking habits and alcohol use.

After adjusting the data for other lifestyle factors, the researchers found that men who led sedentary lives were most likely to die during the follow-up period, and those who had the highest level of physical activity were least likely to die during that time. In fact, men who exercised the most when they were 50 lived, on average, 2.3 years longer, and men who did moderate exercise lived 1.1 years longer than men who reported the lowest levels of exercise. It might take five to 10 years to see, but men who exercise in middle-age live longer, the researchers noted.

And compared with smoking cessation, “the reductions in mortality risk were found to be equal,” Michaelsson said. “Everyone knows that smoking is hazardous for health and increases mortality risk, but it is not generally known that low physical activity has a similar impact on mortality risk as smoking.”

W h e t h e r women might reap the same b e n e f i t s remains a bit u n c l e a r . Michael s son said he was not aware of a similar study involving older women so, “if you are strict, our results cannot be extrapolated to women.” But, he added, “I cannot see a biological reason why there should be gender differences in effect.”

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(Submitted by a reader)

Many Europeans not registered as they have been content with cash-in-hand

THE number of immigrants who registered as unemployed in Andalucia in March was double that of March 2008. The actual increase is 102.04 per cent and the actual number of foreign unemployed people in Andalucia is 55,825.

Month-on-month there was an increase of almost five per cent in unemployment from February to March this year, which equates to 2,618 foreigner workers. However, the real figure is probably much worse, as many foreigners do not register for unemployment benefit for a variety of reasons. The most common reason, unfortunately, is that many European foreign workers are happy to work cash-in-hand, despite being entitled to work legally. This is often not by choice, but as a result of a cash culture that extends beyond the service industry. As they are not registered with the social security, they are not entitled to receive unemployment benefit. Consequently, out of the 55,825 foreign persons registered as unemployed in Andalucia, the majority come from non-EEC countries (34,937). Nevertheless, the increase was slightly less than the regional total for March, 106.9 per cent.

By sector

Of the 55,825 registered unemployed, approximately 27,000 belong to the service industry, 14,500 in construction, 6,700 previously unemployed, 4,500 in agriculture and 2,940 in the industrial sector.

By province

Province by province, foreign unemployment in March 2009 stands at: Malaga (19,242), Almeria (12,255), Sevilla (6,684), Granada (6,351), Cadiz (4,369), Huelva (2,902), Cordoba (2,247) and Jaen (1,775).

According to the National Statistics Institute, there are 623,279 foreigners registered in Andalucia. Therefore the unemployment rate for foreign nationals in the region is nine per cent.

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Editorial by Pritam K. Rohila, Ph.D.

India and Pakistan, face far greater danger from within than from outside their borders.

The danger stems from the rapidly growing extremism, intolerance and violence. These menaces seriously threaten the security of these nations and wellbeing of their citizens.

In this context, creating a culture of peace in India and Pakistan is very important. Promotion of tolerance, coexistence, harmony and peace in our families and neighborhoods is essential.

We will have to start with children and youth, who will determine the future of India and Pakistan. We will need to teach them, how to live in harmony with those who are different from them; how to disagree with others without being disagreeable; and how to resolve conflicts through dialog, discussion, and empathy. We will have to show them how to be responsible members of their families, schools, and neighborhoods. We should involve them in action-oriented and practical conflict-resolution and peacemaking activities, which they can incorporate their daily life.

More importantly, we need to inculcate in our children and youth a hope for a happy, prosperous and peaceful future for themselves and for their nations. Without hope, our children and youth become easy fodder for the machines of extremism, intolerance and violence, and our nations lose their future.

With these objectives in mind, we, at the Association for Communal Harmony in Asia (ACHA), have initiated planning for a pilot project to be implemented in a couple of schools in Pakistan. Based on our experiences in these schools, we will gradually expand the project to other schools in Pakistan as well as India.

Some ACHA members in Pakistan have agreed to work on the pilot project. One member will spearhead the effort to design suitable curriculum. Another member has agreed to explore the possibility of involving a progressive theater group to design and stage short-duration plays for school children. We will also seek help from other ACHA members in Pakistan, who have received formal training in conflict resolution and peacemaking, as well those who have skills and experience in designing peace and harmony activities in schools.

Further, we have sought guidance from some members of the Peace Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association in designing suitable curriculum for this project.

And, we will definitely need financial support and help of volunteers to successfully implement this project. Please direct your suggestions, and offers of help to me at asiapeace@comcast.net.

ACHA is a small, U.S.-based, non-profit organization, which is dedicated to promote peace in South Asia and harmony among South Asians everywhere. More information about us can be found at our two websites www.asiapeace.org and www.indiapakistanpeace.org

By Mary Wiltenburg | April 9, 2009 edition

Remembering, and moving on: As the 15th anniversary of the beginning of the Rwandan genocide is marked this week, Dawami Lenguyanga recalls fleeing Rwanda for Tanzania in 1997.
(Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff)

As we mark the 15th anniversary of the start of the Rwandan genocide this week – examining the reeducation of former combatants and asking again why US president Bill Clinton failed to intervene on behalf of their victims – here in Atlanta, young Bill Clinton Hadam’s mom Dawami has been sharing memories of fleeing that nation on a road clogged with bodies.

In 1997, nearly three years after the 100-day massacre of some 800,000 of her countrymen and women, Dawami Lenguyanga, her husband Hamisi Hussen, their daughter Neema, and Hamisi’s son Felicie, heeded president Paul Kagame’s invitation to the Rwandan diaspora to come home to a new life in a nation free from ethnic killings. The young family embodied that vision: Dawami was Tutsi, the group primarily targeted during the genocide; her husband was Hutu, the group whose leaders organized most of the killing.

After 1994, though, the tables turned. The Rwandan Patriotic Front, the rebel army that had swept President Kagame to power and ended the genocide, then took part in revenge murders. (Allison Des Forges, the courageous Human Rights Watch Rwanda specialist who died last February in a plane crash in Buffalo, was a tireless voice demanding that they be held accountable for these killings. But few followed her lead.) During and after the genocide, the RPF was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 30,000 people – including, Dawami suspects, her first husband.

When men with guns came to their house in Kigali one evening in April 1997, Dawami and the children fled out the back door. Hamisi was shot dead in the front room. Killings were taking place all over the neighborhood, and Dawami and the kids found themselves in the middle of an hysterical, running crowd. In the chaos, 11-year-old Felicie was lost; to this day, Dawami says, she has no idea if he survived. She only knows that somehow, eating leaves and garbage, drinking stagnant water, she managed to get Neema safely to the Tanzanian border.

“We ran in a group,” she says. “You get in a big group, and you go with them. On the road you find dead bodies, and you step over them. People lose kids, kids lose their parents, but whoever’s moving on moves on.”

For more on Rwanda and Central Africa today, check out Monitor contributor Jina Moore’s excellent blog. Also, I’m leaving for Tanzania on Saturday, for a journey to meet Neema and visit refugee camps where some of Dawami’s friends still live. To make sure you don’t miss a step, join our Facebook blog network and Twitter feed.

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A secret recording reveals the Army may be pushing its medical staff not to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder. The Army and Senate have ignored the implications.

By Michael de Yoanna and Mark Benjamin

“Sgt. X” is built like the Bradley Fighting Vehicle he rode in while in Iraq. He’s as bulky, brawny and seemingly impervious as a tank.
In an interview in the high-rise offices of his Denver attorneys, however, symptoms of the damaged brain inside that tough exterior begin to appear. Sgt. X’s eyes go suddenly blank, shifting to refocus oddly on a wall. He pauses mid-sentence, struggling for simple words. His hands occasionally tremble and spasm.

For more than a year he’s been seeking treatment at Fort Carson for a brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, the signature injuries of the Iraq war. Sgt. X is also suffering through the Army’s confusing disability payment system, handled by something called a medical evaluation board. The process of negotiating the system has been made harder by his war-damaged memory. Sgt. X’s wife has to go with him to doctor’s appointments so he’ll remember what the doctor tells him.

But what Sgt. X wants to tell a reporter about is one doctor’s appointment at Fort Carson that his wife did not witness. When she couldn’t accompany him to an appointment with psychologist Douglas McNinch last June, Sgt. X tucked a recording device into his pocket and set it on voice-activation so it would capture what the doctor said. Sgt. X had no idea that the little machine in his pocket was about to capture recorded evidence of something wounded soldiers and their advocates have long suspected — that the military does not want Iraq veterans to be diagnosed with PTSD, a condition that obligates the military to provide expensive, intensive long-term care, including the possibility of lifetime disability payments. And, as Salon will explore in a second article Thursday, after the Army became aware of the tape, the Senate Armed Services Committee declined to investigate its implications, despite prodding from a senator who is not on the committee. The Army then conducted its own internal investigation — and cleared itself of any wrongdoing.

When Sgt. X went to see McNinch with a tape recorder, he was concerned that something was amiss with his diagnosis. He wanted to find out why the psychologist had told the medical evaluation board that handles disability payments that Sgt. X did not, in fact, have PTSD, but instead an “anxiety disorder,” which could substantially lower the amount of benefits he would receive if the Army discharged him for a disability. The recorder in Sgt. X’s pocket captured McNinch in a moment of candor. (Listen to a segment of the recording here.)
“OK,” McNinch told Sgt. X. “I will tell you something confidentially that I would have to deny if it were ever public. Not only myself, but all the clinicians up here are being pressured to not diagnose PTSD and diagnose anxiety disorder NOS [instead].” McNinch told him that Army medical boards were “kick[ing] back” his diagnoses of PTSD, saying soldiers had not seen enough trauma to have “serious PTSD issues.”
“Unfortunately,” McNinch told Sgt. X, “yours has not been the only case … I and other [doctors] are under a lot of pressure to not diagnose PTSD. It’s not fair. I think it’s a horrible way to treat soldiers, but unfortunately, you know, now the V.A. is jumping on board, saying, ‘Well, these people don’t have PTSD,’ and stuff like that.”

Contacted recently by Salon, McNinch seemed surprised that reporters had obtained the tape, but answered questions about the statements captured by the recording. McNinch told Salon that the pressure to misdiagnose came from the former head of Fort Carson’s Department of Behavioral Health. That colonel, an Army psychiatrist, is now at Fort Lewis in Washington state. “This was pressure that the commander of my Department of Behavioral Health put on me at that time,” he said. Since McNinch is a civilian employed by the Army, the colonel could not order him to give a specific, lesser diagnosis to soldiers. Instead, McNinch said, the colonel would “refuse to concur with me, or argue with me, or berate me” when McNinch diagnosed soldiers with PTSD. “It is just very difficult being a civilian in a military setting.”

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We turn now to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Kenyan environmentalist, lawmaker and civil society activist, Wangari Maathai. Her latest book, The Challenge for Africa, tackles the broad obstacles to living in peace, justice, environmental and economic security for the one billion people across the continent of Africa.
…
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about, first, how you became an environmentalist, what first sparked you, the Green Belt Movement, and then taking that large to all of Africa, what you’re doing today?
WANGARI MAATHAI: Well, anybody who sees the film that will be showing next week on PBS called Taking Root and then reads this book, The Challenge for Africa, will see how I started, first and foremost, as a project for the National Council of Women, responding to the basic needs of women from the countryside and who were members of the National Council of Women; and how that led me into a tree-planting campaign, encouraging women to form groups; and how that led me into governance issues, when I saw that when you have a non-democratic, a non-accountable, a non-caring, a greedy government, that it is very easy to destroy the environment and to destroy the livelihoods of the very people you are leading, and then I started advocating for basic human rights; and then how that led me to deciding that maybe I should become a legislator myself; and how, in the course of all those thirty years, I have come to realize that what we need is a very holistic approach to Africans’ issues and that we need to understand that it is not one track, that there are many issues that need to be approached simultaneously, as we have tried to do in the Green Belt Movement.

AMY GOODMAN: You have written about—in Time magazine, you had an article last month—in the Los Angeles Times, rather—“Where Are Africa’s Obamas?” What do you mean?
WANGARI MAATHAI: What I was reflecting on is the fact that the Obama phenomenon is such an inspiring story in Africa, and young people and leaders in Africa are talking about Obama, are enthusiastic about Obama, are looking up to Obama, and yet they are not creating in Africa an environment, a peaceful environment, a democratic environment, a conducive environment for the little Obamas in Africa to realize their potential, because, after all, there are so many young people who were born at the same time that Obama was born.
And the challenge I was putting to the African leadership is, if this young man had grown up in this region, would he have been able to exploit his potential the way he has been able to do it in the United States of America? Does one have to go to the United States of America to experience their potential? So, in a way, I was putting a challenge to ourselves to create the kind of conducive environment where our children can experience their full potential.

AMY GOODMAN: Wangari Maathai, you have won the Nobel Peace Prize, and I was wondering about your response to President Obama escalating the war in Afghanistan. Though he did initially oppose the war in Iraq, he’s taken a different approach with Afghanistan.
WANGARI MAATHAI: Well, quite obviously, it’s always very easy to criticize from a distance and especially without the insight and the inside story. And we would want to see the war end, but we also know that the world is not as peaceful as we would want it to be. So I’m really hoping that with his commitment to end the war, that he will do whatever it takes to ensure that we have peace.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
AHRC-STM-088-2009
April 14, 2009
A Statement by the Asian Human Rights Commission
PAKISTAN: A lawyer’s life is in danger after witnessing the abduction of three doomed men by intelligence agents
The Asian Human Rights Commission believes that the life of Balochi lawyer, Mr. Kachkol Ali is in danger, after he witnessed the abduction of three clients, shortly before they were found murdered in Balochistan province. Although the captors wore plain clothes, various signs suggest that they were from Pakistan’s military intelligence agencies. Please see our previous report at http://www.ahrchk.net/ua/mainfile.php/2009/3145/.

Local media reports say that state agents are now on the hunt for Mr. Kachkol Ali. His homes in Quetta and Panjgore city are under surveillance and his legal offices in Turbat city have been cordoned off by plain-clothed persons. He is currently in hiding. His fears are based on the fact that – as reported previously by the AHRC – a number of Balochistan men have disappeared after witnessing intelligence agents in action. The three men found dead on April 8, 2009 were themselves members of a committee probing into forced disappearances by the former military government.
Please see http://www.ahrchk.net/statements/mainfile.php/2009statements/1984/

The lawyer had already reported that he believed Military Intelligence (MI) agents were to blame for the abduction of the three activists, and that he saw two unmarked vehicles belonging to the Frontier Core (FC), a Paramilitary force, following the cards that took away the three men.

Para military forces are currently deployed in every Baloch city, where they are curbing the freedoms of citizens, including women and children, who are trying to protest the murder of the activists. According to eyewitness reports, one female protestor has been baton-charged by police and FC members, and a number of women have been arrested in the city of Tump, where the police station was just burned down. It is quite clear that the illegal and often lethal acts by state agencies in Balochistan – and the impunity they enjoy – will only serve to further deteriorate the situation in the province.

The Asian Human Rights Commission calls for Mr. Kachkol Ali to be offered necessary protection, and for his evidence against those in the military to be heard. Those acting on behalf of the state should do so in full uniform. A dialogue must also be revived with Baloch leaders and their parties, and legal and restrained governance demonstrated by those in power. The answer to this crisis will not be found in state-sponsored murder and the general oppression of civil society.
# # #

About AHRC: The Asian Human Rights Commission is a regional non-governmental organisation monitoring and lobbying human rights issues in Asia. The Hong Kong-based group was founded in 1984.

(Submitted by Abdul Hamid Bashani Khan)

Forget Raj Kapoor fans in Russia. An international fan club now stalks Bollywood online, says NISHA SUSAN
WHEN BIRGIT PESTAL stumbled upon a film shoot in India she called Barbara Skoda in Vienna. “They are shooting a song sequence. It’s for a movie called Shaadi Ke After Effects with two actors called Arbaaz Khan and Malaika Arora. Do we know them?” “YES! We do.

They are Salman´s brother and sister-inlaw. You might know him from Hulchul and her as the item girl with SRK in Kaal,” replied Barbara, a 36-year-old manager at a media-technology college but is better known online as Babasko, author of the effervescent blog Baba Aur Bollywood. She and half-a-dozen others from across the world who have formed the group blog Bollywoodbloggers.com are the most visible online presence of non-Indian fans of Indian cinema.

Perhaps it’s not so surprising that Pestal, a German journalist wrote a book on Bollywood (the title roughly translates to Fascination Bollywood: Numbers, facts and background in the German-speaking countries). But one can only imagine Yash Raj Films’ reaction if they knew their big 2008 release Tashan has been most closely tracked by a 20-year-old Finnish girl. Since 2006, Sanni’s been following Tashan, the latest manifestation of her favourite Bollywood phenomena ‘Sakshay’: movies in which Saif Ali Khan and Akshay Kumar appear together. As an annexure to an extensive manifesto on her blog (So They Dance) she writes, “The thing you should know about Sakshay is that they haven’t done a single honest good movie. You have good Sakshay movies (and bad ones), but you don’t have good Sakshay movies. The distinction is very important… Sakshay has previously been cheesy, unintentionally amusing, vaguely homoerotic and undeniably entertaining. Sakshay has previously been 90’s. Now Sakshay is sleek and cool, 2000’s Bollywood… That’s what’s going to make Tashan the best movie ever.”

Neither Sanni nor Barbara are among those newly seduced by SRK’s bravura appearance at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007 alongside the release of Om Shanti Om (with 50 prints OSO was the biggest Bollywood release in Germany yet). Many may have been hooked by slick, global Bollywood a few years ago, but they stuck around for Indian cinema. Greta Kaemmer works for American Express in Boston. She watches 3-5 Indian films per week, blogs at Memsaabstory and would kill to meet Shammi Kapoor. She “prefers the romantic comedies and silly spy thrillers of the 60s and 70s.” Others like Barbara and Michael Langhans, a German advocate, love Tamil and Telugu cinema. Barbara says “Rajni Superstar rulez” and that “None of the 2006 Hindi releases made my heart ache the way Surya did in Sillunu Oru Kaadhal.”
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By LESLEY ALDERMAN

Last November I learned, to my great surprise, that I was pregnant. At age 47, I was not exactly trying to conceive.
My husband and I were conflicted:
Another baby — how wonderful!
Another child — how stressful! How risky! How EXPENSIVE!

With the economy in a free fall, this seemed no time to have a baby.
When the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage at seven weeks, we were sad. But also relieved. My husband’s only half-joking response was, “It’s time for a vasectomy.”

Turns out we were not alone in our thinking. Urologists and clinics have noticed an uptick in recent months in the number of men requesting vasectomies.

It is too early to proclaim a bona fide trend in elective sterilization, because no organization regularly tracks the number of vasectomies performed on an annual or even a monthly basis. The most recent comprehensive data come from a study published in The Journal of Urology in 2006, which estimated that about 527,000 vasectomies were performed in this country each year.

But the recent anecdotal data, if they hold, would have a historical parallel in the Great Depression, when the birth rate fell sharply.
As this recession continues, it is understandable that more people might hesitate to expand their families. A baby born in 2006 — the latest year for which data are available — will cost middle-income parents $260,000 by the time the child reaches 17, according to the Agriculture Department. And that doesn’t include college.

In Southern California, Planned Parenthood says that compared with last year’s first quarter, requests for vasectomies were up more than 30 percent in the first three months of this year at its clinics in San Diego and Riverside Counties, where 64 of the procedures were done.
“The recession has created a new level of urgency among our clients,” said Vince Hall, a spokesman. “We used to have a three- to six-week waiting period. Now men have to wait two-and-a-half months to get an appointment.”

Helping spur demand, he said, might be the fact that unemployed men often qualify for free vasectomies under Family PACT, a California family planning program for low-income households.
On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where the financial industry’s collapse has compressed many a household budget, Dr. Marc Goldstein says he has been performing more vasectomies than usual over the last five months.

Through most of last year, Dr. Goldstein, who directs male reproductive medicine and microsurgery at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, was performing about six vasectomies a month. Then, in November, the number rose to nine, where it was holding steady through the end of March.

“I’ve been in practice for 30 years, and I’ve never seen a spike like this,” Dr. Goldstein said. “Many of my clients work in finance and say they feel anxious about the expense of an added child.”

NY Times