Matter_Manner_Method

Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress

2008-11-05T21:53:00.003+08:00

NOVEMBER 5, 2008 | ISSUE 44•45 ; Source: www.theonion.com

WASHINGTON—After emerging victorious from one of the most pivotal elections in history, president-elect Barack Obama will assume the role of commander in chief on Jan. 20, shattering a racial barrier the United States is, at long last, shitty enough to overcome.

Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.

"Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, 'Things are finally as terrible as we're willing to tolerate," said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed, uninsured, and debt-ridden supporters. "To elect a black man, in this country, and at this time—these last eight years must have really broken you."

Added Obama, "It's a great day for our nation."

Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked. Another contributing factor to Obama's victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American.

Citizens with eyes, ears, and the ability to wake up and realize what truly matters in the end are also believed to have played a crucial role in Tuesday's election.

According to a CNN exit poll, 42 percent of voters said that the nation's financial woes had finally become frightening enough to eclipse such concerns as gay marriage, while 30 percent said that the relentless body count in Iraq was at last harrowing enough to outweigh long ideological debates over abortion. In addition, 28 percent of voters were reportedly too busy paying off medial bills, desperately trying not to lose their homes, or watching their futures disappear to dismiss Obama any longer.

"The election of our first African-American president truly shows how far we've come as a nation," said NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. "Just eight years ago, this moment would have been unthinkable. But finally we, as a country, have joined together, realized we've reached rock bottom, and for the first time voted for a candidate based on his policies rather than the color of his skin."

"Today Americans have grudgingly taken a giant leap forward," Williams continued. "And all it took was severe economic downturn, a bloody and unjust war in Iraq, terrorist attacks on lower Manhattan, nearly 2,000 deaths in New Orleans, and more than three centuries of frequently violent racial turmoil."

Said Williams, "The American people should be commended for their long-overdue courage."

Obama's victory is being called the most significant change in politics since the 1992 election, when a full-scale economic recession led voters to momentarily ignore the fact that candidate Bill Clinton had once smoked marijuana. While many believed things had once again reached an all-time low in 2004, the successful reelection of President George W. Bush—despite historically low approval ratings nationwide—proved that things were not quite shitty enough to challenge the already pretty shitty status quo.

"If Obama learned one thing from his predecessors, it's that timing means everything," said Dr. James Pung, a professor of political science at Princeton University. "Less than a decade ago, Al Gore made the crucial mistake of suggesting we should care about preserving the environment before it became unavoidably clear that global warming would kill us all, and in 2004, John Kerry cost himself the presidency by criticizing Bush's disastrous Iraq policy before everyone realized our invasion had become a complete and total quagmire."

"Obama had the foresight to run for president at a time when being an African-American was not as important to Americans as, say, the ability to clothe and feed their children," Pung continued. "An election like this only comes once, maybe twice, in a lifetime."

As we enter a new era of equality for all people, the election of Barack Obama will decidedly be a milestone in U.S. history, undeniable proof that Americans, when pushed to the very brink, are willing to look past outward appearances and judge a person by the quality of his character and strength of his record. So as long as that person is not a woman.

James Carroll: Making sense of $700 billion

2008-10-07T22:46:00.003+08:00

How much is 700 billion? The mind registers the number with such imprecision as to make it meaningless. One blogger proposed this way of grasping the figure: As a stack of $100 bills, it would reach 54 miles high. But who can imagine that? On the other hand, someone at the Smithsonian once calculated that counting to one billion, at the rate of one digit per second, would take 30 years. By that scale, counting to 700 billion would take 21,000 years.

Come again? That stretch of time takes us back to the cave painters of Lascaux, the glacial age, the last Neanderthals. The mind is not helped.

By a nice coincidence, though, the U.S. financial rescue package of $700 billion duplicates a number that was also in the news last week - the Pentagon budget. In the fiscal year just beginning, the U.S. Defense Department will spend $607 billion on normal military costs, and an additional $100 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (As of June 30, 2008, Congress had appropriated $859 billion for the wars; Congressional Budget Office projections assume further costs of $400 billion to $500 billion as the wars wind down). But for the coming year, $700 billion is the Pentagon's nice round number (this includes neither Homeland Security nor intelligence costs).

Step back. All of last week's hand-wringing hoopla over the emergency bailout stands in stark contrast to the utter indifference with which politicians approved an equivalent layout for the military - an approval so routine that it was ignored in the press and by the public.

Barack Obama has no issue with current Defense expenditures. The annual American military budget is at least 10 times larger than the military budgets of Russia and China; it is 20 times larger than the entire budget of the U.S. State Department. But last week's demonstration of anguish over the historic financial rescue figure throws an entirely new light on the nearly identical number that will fund the Pentagon for one measly year.

This is not a matter merely of comparison. Here is the question that no one is asking about America's grave financial crisis: By fueling corporate profits, jobs, and private-sector growth for two generations with massive over-investment in the military, has the United States gutted the real worth of its economy?

One needn't be an economist to know that spending money on war planes, missiles and exotic weapons systems, not to mention combat operations, creates far less social capital than spending on education, bridges, mass transit, new forms of energy - even the arts.

The genius of America's most brilliant minds has been yoked for more than half a century to the invention of ways to kill and destroy. ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." - Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," 1956) What if those minds had been put to work imagining alternative futures - the rescue of the environment, the ending of disease and poverty, the artistic fulfillment of new media, the teaching of children? It's a question as old as Eisenhower ("The cost of one modern heavy bomber," he said in 1953, "is this: A modern brick school in more than 30 cities." Leaving office, he said, "We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage." That's us.)

The $700 billion bailout aims to rescue the world's economy, but that, too, raises questions about the Pentagon's prior effect there. Because America has put military invention at the heart of its enterprise, the exporting of weapons to countries that do not need them and cannot afford them has become a main mode of America's being in the world. (The Arms Control Association reports that in 2007 the Pentagon sent $40 billion worth of arms to two dozen nations; that is double the 2007 appropriation for US foreign aid.) Unneeded weapons spark unnecessary wars.

That the majority of humans are in dire straits and that the planet itself is groaning are issues treated like givens of nature, yet they are results of the ways creativity is channeled and resources are shared. $700 billion for rescue. $700 billion for war. Something is wrong with this picture, and last week that coincidence of numbers told us what.

Source: International Herald Tribune, Published: October 6, 2008

Syria and Lebanon agree on border

2008-08-16T13:17:00.001+08:00

Syria and Lebanon have agreed to resume the work of a committee to demarcate their common border, a joint statement by the two countries says.

The neighbours also agreed to examine another disputed issue, the fate of hundreds of people who have been missing "in the two countries" since the 1975-1990 civil war in Lebanon.

The statement was read at a news conference by each country's foreign minister, as Michel Sleiman, the Lebanese president, ended a landmark two-day visit.

Sleiman and Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, agreed on Wednesday to start the first ever full diplomatic relations since independence 60 years ago.

The borders between the two countries are poorly delimited in certain places, particularly the Shebaa Farms, a mountainous sliver of land rich in water resources located at the junction of southeast Lebanon, southwest Syria and northern Israel.

The 25-square km tract of farming land was seized by Israel from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and is now claimed by Beirut, with the backing of Damascus. Israel says they are part of Syria.

Asked whether Thursday's agreement would include a redrawing of the Shebaa Farms, Walid al-Moualem, the Syrian foreign minister, said: "The definition of the Shebaa Farms cannot happen under occupation."

Lebanese and Syrian territories have also been in dispute over several areas of Bekaa and northern Lebanon since the creation in 1920 of greater Lebanon, an administrative district within the French mandate for Syria.

Human rights groups claim that around 650 people who went missing during the Lebanese civil war are being held in Syria, which dominated Lebanon politically and militarily for almost 30 years until April 2005.

Sleiman is the first Lebanese president to visit Damascus since Syria withdrew its troops from Lebanon in April 2005, two months after the assassination in a massive Beirut bomb blast of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.

Damascus has denied any responsibility despite accusations by Lebanese anti-Syrian groups.
Saad Hariri, Rafik al-Hariri's son and political heir, welcomed the establishment of diplomatic ties, describing it as an accomplishment for the Lebanese people.

Ocean 'dead zones' expanding worldwide: study

2008-08-16T13:12:00.002+08:00

Oceanic "dead zones" where marine life cannot survive have been steadily increasing over the past five decades and now encompass 400 coastal areas of the world, a US-Swedish study.

"The formation of dead zones has been exacerbated by the increase in (pollution) ... fueled by riverine runoff of fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels," the study said.

The phenomenon, called eutrophication, is caused by industrial pollution as well as runoff of water containing phosphates and nitrates into the oceans.

Oceans react to the boost in pollution by growing more algae and vegetation in coastal areas.

When the algae dies and sinks to the bottom, it decreases the amount of oxygen available in the bottom waters, a process called hypoxia, eventually wiping out fish and crustaceans that live there, as well as the foods they eat.

Dead zones tend to creep up in calm waters that see lower water exchange, but have more recently been affecting major fishery areas in the Baltic, Kattegat, and Black Seas as well as the Gulf of Mexico and East China Sea, the study said.

The researchers said the expansion of dead zones in these areas threatens commercial fishing and shrimping near the coastlines.

The phenomenon was first noted along the Adriatic Coast in the 1950s.

Seasonal dead zones affect the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and Scandinavian waters.

It can take years to treat severe hypoxia in a coastal region, and only four percent of treated areas have shown any signs of improvement, though the trend is reversible, the study said.

"From 1970 to 1990, the hypoxic zone on the northwestern continental shelf of the Black Sea has expanded to 40,000 square kilometers (15,500 square miles)," the study noted.

"However, since 1989, the loss of fertilizer subsidies from the former Soviet Union reduced nutrient loading by a factor of two to four, with the result that by 1995 the hypoxic zone had gone.

"The study authors said the global warming trend alone was likely to increase oceanic dead zones by increasing temperature, causing changes in rainfall patterns and changing discharges of fresh water and agricultural nutrients into the oceans.

"Climate change also has the potential to expand naturally occurring OMZs (oxygen minimum zones) into shallower coastal waters, damaging fisheries and affecting energy flows in the same way that eutrophication-driven hypoxia does," the authors wrote.

The researchers noted that any return to preindustrial levels of nutrient input into global waters would be "unrealistic".

However, they said "an appropriate management goal would be to reduce nutrient inputs to levels that occurred in the middle of the past century, before eutrophication began to spread dead zones globally."

Source: New Straits Times, 16th August 2008

Bisexuality passed on by 'hyper-heterosexuals'

2008-08-16T13:09:00.001+08:00

Bisexual men might have their "hyper-heterosexual" female relatives to thank for their orientation.

Previous work has suggested that genes influencing sexual orientation in men also make women more likely to reproduce. Andrea Camperio Ciani and colleagues at the University of Padua, Italy, showed that the female relatives of homosexual men tend to have more children, suggesting that genes on the X chromosome are responsible. Now the team have shown that the same is true for bisexuality.

"It helps to answer a perplexing question - how can there be 'gay genes' given that gay sex doesn't lead to procreation?" says Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the work. "The answer is remarkably simple: the same gene that causes men to like men also causes women to like men, and as a result to have more children."

Sexual attraction
The researchers asked 239 men to fill out questionnaires about their families and their past sexual experiences. On the basis of their answers, the men were classified as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual. The results showed that the maternal aunts, grandmothers and mothers of both bisexual men and homosexuals had more children than those of heterosexual men.

Camperio Ciani emphasises that, rather than being a "gay gene", this unidentified genetic factor is likely to promote sexual attraction to men in both men and women. This would influence a woman's attitude rather than actually increasing her fertility, making her likely to have more children.

Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist and writer based in West Hollywood, California, describes this as a sort of "hyper-heterosexuality" and explains how it would help to ensure that homosexual behaviour was passed on through the generations. "The positive effect of an X-linked gene on female fecundity tends to outweigh the negative effect of the gene on male fecundity."

According to Camperio Ciani and colleagues, the same genetic factor appearing to be present in both bisexual and homosexual men provides further support for the idea that sexuality is determined by a complex mix of genes and experience.

"We understand that the genetic component has to interact with something to produce different phenotypes," says Camperio Ciani.

"Genetics is not determining the sexual orientation, it's only influencing it."

Source: NewScientist
15:45 15 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Tamsin Osborne

Mobile wallet, or maybe more!

2008-06-29T19:36:00.003+08:00

Would you like it if one day, you forget to bring your wallet, yet you can still pay for your bus ride or buy a drink from a vending machine? Or you forgot to bring your staff pass, yet you can still enter your office building. When you finally got home, you can open your house doors despite having left the keys home too.

All these and more are enabled by a new technology called mobile wallet. Mobile wallet is mobile phone that has functionality to supplant a conventional wallet and more. Unlike mobile commerce, mobile wallet is a much more versatile application that includes elements of mobile transactions, as well as other items one may find in a wallet, such as membership cards, loyalty cards and travel cards. It also stores personal and sensitive information like passport, credit card information, PIN codes, online shopping accounts, booking details and insurance policies that can be encrypted or password-protected. The technology aims to reduce the number items people will need to carry around.

With mobile wallet, the user can use their mobile phone to pay transactions at merchants that accept mobile payments. To do this, the user just needs to upload digital cash from a credit card to their mobile phone and swipe their mobile phone at payment counters. They can also swipe their mobile phone at ticketing machines. Mobile wallet can be used as a virtual train ticket where customers just wave their mobile phone across the checkout stations instead of using separate swipe cards. Another use is as an identifier to log on to a computer at Internet kiosks. The data is exchanged by mere proximity, without the need for physical contact. Users who use the same mobile wallet applications can also exchange data with one another, example bank account numbers when they need to perform bank transfers among one another. There are several technologies that could enable mobile wallet operations of handsets, including Near Field Communications (NFC), Radio Frequency (RFID), bar codes, and visual recognition.

According to InStat, a high-tech market research firm, as many as 25 million wireless phone subscribers in North America could be using their mobile phones as mobile wallets by 2011. One of the first carriers to launch mobile wallet is NTT Docomo that uses its Felica system to allow those who carry compatible 3G handsets like Fujitsu’s F900iC and other models by NEC, Panasonic, Sharp, Mitsubishi and Sony Ericsson to make payments using their handsets. A credit card-sized Sony smart card powers the system. It holds a chip which can be loaded with personal data.

With a subscription, the wallet phones work by sending data at high speeds and securely over the DoCoMo network. Special readers can also be built into cash machines and cash registers to recognise the transactions. The handsets have built-in security to stop others using the service by using password protection or fingerprint scanning.

In South Korea, SK Telecom has started a mobile wallet service called Moneta. Even in the Philipines, a service known as G-Cash allows the transfer of money via text messages (SMS). This service enables users to send money from mobile to mobile, buy goods and services and pay for business permits and micro loans and won an award at the GSM Association Awards 2005 in Cannes.

Innovations in mobile payment could also benefit people developing content for internet websites. It would be possible to charge small payments on the website using your mobile phone. Even PayPal has joined in the foray by introducing the ability to make payments or to send money to others by sending SMS. All you need is to activate your account using your phone number and you can text a message when you see something you are interested in. Every order will be followed by a Mobile PIN as an added layer of security. Hey, you can even donate money using PayPal’s mobile wallet.

While there is widespread enthusiasm about mobile wallet technology, there are fears of security breaches and identity theft. Having all your personal and sensitive information stored on a phone poses a big risk. Incidents of people having their mobile phone stolen will lead to more loss in personal information like bank accounts and passport numbers. However, it would be great if the day will come when we can leave home without our wallet, credit card, passport, membership cards and keys. There would be a lot of empty space in wallets and handbags.

Source: http://www.mobileworld.com.my

Making no waves

2008-06-12T14:04:00.003+08:00

This article makes me smile =)
Have a good day!

Cher Linn

ATHLETES in the ancient Olympics competed in the buff, on the grounds (among other things) that clothes were a hindrance to performance. Modern technology, however, has changed that. In some sports, notably swimming, the right costume can be an enormous boon. Take Speedo's LZR swimsuit, which was introduced in February. Fully 38 of the 42 world swimming records that have been broken since then have fallen to swimmers wearing LZRs. Indeed, some of those records have been claimed by less-than-notable racers, suggesting that the difference lies in the apparel, not the athlete.

To make the LZR four innovations had to come together. The first is the fabric. The new suit is cut from a densely woven nylon-elastane material that compresses the wearer's body into a hydrodynamic shape but is extremely light. Moreover, there are no sewn seams. Instead, the suit is bonded together using ultrasonic welding. Seams act as speed bumps in the water. Ultrasonic welding removes 6% of the drag that would otherwise occur, according to Jason Rance, the head of Aqualab, Speedo's research-and-development centre in Nottingham in Britain. Compared with Speedo's previous suit, which was used by numerous gold medallists in the 2004 Olympic Games, the new material has half the weight yet triple the power to compress the body.

Second, the suit has what Speedo calls an “internal core stabiliser”—like a corset that holds the swimmer's form. As a swimmer tires, his hips hang lower in the water, creating drag. By compressing his torso, the LZR not only lets him go faster, because it maintains a tubular shape, but also allows him to swim longer with less effort. In tests, swimmers wearing the LZR consumed 5% less oxygen for a given level of performance than those wearing normal swimsuits did.

Third, as a further drag-reduction measure, polyurethane panels have been placed in spots on the suit. This reduces drag by another 24% compared with the previous Speedo model. Fourth, the LZR was designed using a three-dimensional pattern rather than a two-dimensional one. It thus hugs a swimmer's body like a second skin; indeed, when it is not being worn, it does not lie flat but has a shape to it.

The results are a suit that costs $600 and takes 20 minutes to squeeze into, and a widespread belief among swimmers competing in the Beijing Olympics this summer that they will have to wear one or fail. The director of the American team, Mark Schubert, for example, thinks the LZR improves performance by as much as 2%—a huge leap considering that tenths of a second may mark the difference between first and fourth place. Arena, a rival swimsuit-maker, called the situation “unprecedented” and, initially, lobbied for a review of the garment rules in an open letter to the sport's governing body, FINA (the Fédération Internationale de Natation). Another maker, Tyr, has launched another type of suit altogether. It is suing Speedo's parent company, Warnaco Swimwear, Mr Schubert (for more or less insisting that members of his team wear the LZR) and others on antitrust grounds. The LZR is thus being referred to by some people as high-tech doping on a hanger.

Speedo's success is partly due to a subtle rule “clarification” made by FINA in April which confirms that polyurethane areas can be incorporated into racing swimsuits. Other manufacturers complain it is unfair that a revision with sweeping implications took place only a few months before the Olympics. Still, they are rushing to bring forward rival products. On June 4th FINA approved new suits by Arena, Adidas and Mizuno, so Speedo's technological lead may not last. In technology as in sport, records are simply there to be broken.

Source: The Economist 11th June 2008

US: California Marriage Ruling a Victory for Human Rights

2008-05-16T11:18:00.002+08:00

Historic Decision Confers Equal Right to Marriage to Same-Sex Couples

(New York, May 15, 2008) – The California Supreme Court’s ruling today striking down state law that limits marriage to opposite-sex couples is a victory for equality that should set a national and international example, Human Rights Watch said today.

“California’s highest court has affirmed that equality does not come with exceptions,” said Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch. “This historic decision should push the US government to stop obstructing equal treatment of relationships and families.”

On May 15, by a vote of 4 to 3, the court overturned a 2000 ballot measure that had limited the definition of marriage to a union between a man and a woman. The ballot measure presaged the issuing of marriage licenses to same-sex couples by the city and county of San Francisco in 2004. The court had ordered the city and county of San Francisco in 2004 to stop issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, pending resolution of whether California’s restriction of marriage to different-sex couples violated the state’s constitution. The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, and the National Center of Lesbian Rights filed suit under the California constitution’s provisions guaranteeing equality, liberty, and privacy to all state residents.

Opponents of marriage equality in California have been collecting signatures for a further ballot measure this year, which would amend the Constitution to enshrine a discriminatory definition of marriage as restricted to a man and a woman. State authorities will determine next month whether advocates have collected enough signatures to force the measure onto the ballot, which would also invalidate any marriages performed under the court’s decision.

“Human rights aren’t things to be revoked or repossessed,” said Long. “California’s voters, if it comes to that, will respect the principles behind this decision, and refuse to treat equality as transitory.”

In 2005 and again in 2007, the California legislature passed bills which would have ensured equal treatment under the law by allowing same-sex couples to marry in California. Both times, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bills. However, Schwarzenegger has stated he would oppose a discriminatory ballot measure this year. Under the 1996 “Defense of Marriage Act,” the US government is barred from recognizing same-sex relationships. Thus the California decision will still have no effect on marriage rights under federal law.

Source: Human Rights Watch

The Guantanamo Hearings

2008-05-16T10:58:00.005+08:00

In November 2001, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration announced that it planned to try foreign terrorism suspects by special military commissions.

In January 2002 the US began sending persons apprehended in the “war on terror” to the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, and the Pentagon drafted rules to hold military commissions there. These measures were taken in part to prevent US courts from hearing claims by detainees about the legal basis for their detention or charges of mistreatment. Human Rights Watch believes that the US federal courts are fully capable of prosecuting terrorism suspects.

In June 2006, the US Supreme Court ruled that the military commissions were unlawful because they violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions and because the president had not sought congressional authority establishing them. In September 2006, Congress passed the Military Commissions Act, authorizing a new system of military commissions.

Now, more than six years after the commissions were first announced, no case has gone to trial, and only one person -- Australian David Hicks -- has been convicted. He agreed to plead guilty to one count of providing material support to terrorism in exchange for a nine-month sentence, which he served in Australia.

Meanwhile, the military commissions have been subjected to numerous legal challenges and come under a barrage of criticism that they do not provide fundamental fair trial rights. Last year the commissions’ chief military prosecutor resigned stating that it would be impossible for detainees to receive full, fair and open trials in the presently constituted system. Among the primary concerns are the commissions’ vulnerability to executive pressure, what looks like an effort to rush the cases to trial and the allowance of evidence obtained through abuse. Even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has warned that commission trials at Guantanamo will have a “taint” to them.

Despite widespread concerns about the commissions raised in the United States and abroad, commission hearings are proceeding. To date, the US government has announced charges against 15 men, including six cases in which the US is seeking the death penalty.

1) Ali Abdul Aziz Ali; Nationality: Pakistani
2) Walid bin ‘Attash; Nationality: Yemeni
3) Ali Hamza al-Bahlul; Nationality: Yemeni
4) Ramzi Binalshibh; Nationality: Yemeni
5) Ahmed al-Darbi; Nationality: Saudi
6) Ahmed Ghailani; Nationality: Tanzanian
7) Salim Hamdan; Nationality: Yemeni
8) Mustafa al-Hawsawi; Nationality: Saudi
9) David Hicks; Nationality: Australian
10) Mohammed Jawad; Nationality: Afghan
11) Mohammed Kamin; Nationality: Afghan
12) Omar Khadr; Nationality: Canadian
13) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Nationality: Kuwaiti
14) Mohammed al-Qahtani; Nationality: Saudi
15) Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi; Nationality: Sudanese

Source: Human Rights Watch

p/s: Don't you feel something fishy is going on in the military commission? There's only one non-Muslim among the 15 charged and well, he's the only one convicted while the rest remain pending infinitely..

Cher Linn

The Clean Energy Scam

2008-04-05T21:47:00.003+08:00

This is a blog post written by a friend of mine. I find that he did a good summary on what's on about this supposely environmentally friendly + resource saving + profit generatng industry of alternative fuel and what is really the backlash of it.

Cheers,
Cher Linn

"Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class. But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it's dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it." - Michael Grunwald, The Clean Energy Scam.

In the latest cover story of TIME Magazine, Grunwald writes about the basic problem concerning the use of alternative fuels (in this case, corn ethanol): since researchers have mostly ignored the prospect of using corn ethanol on a wide scale, the sudden transition means that the land used to grow fuel leads to deforestation of areas which store large amounts of carbon.

I found the entire article to be extremely interesting, so I feel compelled to share some bits of information about it on this blog. (You can read the full article here.)

The article focuses on the deforestation of the Amazon forest in Brazil. What happens is:
1. 1/5 of the US corn crop is diverted in more than 100 ethanol refineries. The increased demand boosts the price of corn to record levels.
2. Eager to cash in, many US soybean farmers switch to corn. Soybean prices rise as supplies decline.
3. To meet global demand for soybeans, Brazilian farmers expand into fields previously used as cattle pasturelands. Displaced ranchers clear new grazing lands in the Amazon or the Cerrado savanna, releasing carbon.

When the deforestation is taken into account, corn ethanol and soy biodiesel produce about twice the emissions of gasoline (Science magazine). In other words, the apparent solution to the one of the world's biggest problems is one big problem on its own.

The math of all this is surprisingly simple, and I'm knocking myself on the head for never even thinking about this before. And clearly, a lot of people have not thought about it (or have, and chose to ignore it for political reasons) - The US quintupled its production of ethanol and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. And since there's much more money to be made from tearing the forests down than to preserve them, it's extremely difficult to tell Brazilian farmers not to make use of the resources they have to grow crops for the alternative fuel market.

Also, the article also touches on the other non-environmentally-related consequences of the so-called 'clean energy myth'. For example, because corn is being grown for production of ethanol fuels, there is less food available on the market, so the poor will eat less due to soaring food prices. It is predicted that by 2025, the ranks of the hungry will increase to 1.2 billion after adjusting inflationary effects of biofuels (four years ago, it was predicted to fall to 625 million).

Tsunami: the political one and climate change

2008-03-30T21:26:00.004+08:00

Cheers :) W2

Political change: worldwide trend

Malaysia's political sea change
March 9, 2008

Malaysians awoke today to the biggest sea change in politics in almost 40 years, with opposition Islamists and reformists winning control of five states and giving the Government a humiliating wake-up call.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's multi-racial Barisan Nasional coalition (BN) won just a simple majority in Parliament, and his future as leader is in doubt after he watched a record majority collapse to the weakest level ever.

His predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad, urged him to quit.

"He should accept responsibility," said Mahathir who now says he made a mistake in picking Abdullah as his successor and that the current deputy premier, Najib Razak, should have taken over.

Mahathir, who led the ruling United National Malays Organisation (UMNO), which leads the BN, for 22 years before stepping down in 2003, lashed out after the coalition's worst performance in history.

"My view is he has destroyed UMNO, destroyed the BN and he has been responsible for this," Mahathir told reporters.

The streets were unusually quiet today, with many older Malaysians fearful of trouble.

The last time the coalition suffered a heavy setback, in 1969, race riots erupted.

Barisan has effectively ruled since independence from Britain in 1957.

"I am shocked. It feels Malaysia is a whole new country. It feels like it has been reborn," Daniel Sia, a 27-year-old civil engineer, said as he did some shopping in the capital.

Lai Yee Fei, 28, who works at a coffee bar beneath Kuala Lumpur's soaring twin towers, said she was glad that Malaysia now had a strong opposition to press the Government.

"It's good to give some pressure for Barisan Nasional," she said.

"If the opposition parties can stand up for us, on behalf of us, I think it's good."

Abdullah, who only four years ago led the coalition to a record election victory on a wave of hope for change, faced a bleak political future today, his aides stunned but not willing to concede that he must step down.

"Frankly, this is not really the time because a lot of component parties [of Barisan] have been decimated," one close aide said, declining to be identified.

"We have lost a few people and I think it's time to consolidate."

Abdullah's humbling performance nationally - the coalition ended up with 62 per cent of federal seats, down from 90 per cent previously - was compounded by the fact that his own home state, the industrial heartland of Penang, fell to the opposition.

The leftist Chinese-backed Democratic Action Party (DAP) won Penang, the hub for Malaysia's electronics industry, which accounts for about half of exports.

The opposition Islamist party PAS scored shock victories in the northern heartland states of Kedah and Perak and easily retained power in its stronghold in north-eastern Kelantan state.
DAP and PAS also joined the People's Justice Party, or Parti Keadilan, to take control of the industrial state of Selangor and almost all the seats in capital Kuala Lumpur.

Political experts and economists wondered aloud whether the Barisan government could now pursue its agenda, including plans for $US325 billion ($351.5 billion) in development zones across the country.

Without a two-thirds parliamentary majority, Barisan can no longer change the constitution or make some key appointments and could struggle to alter electoral boundaries, powers that the opposition have long maintained were abused by Barisan.

"This is probably not good news for the equity market or the ringgit," said Tim Condon, Singapore-based head of Asia research for investment bank ING.

The pro-government media, Abdullah's cheer-leader during the campaign, changed tack today, urging Barisan to ensure better job and education opportunities in the multi-racial nation.
Malaysia is largely a mix of ethnic Malays, which make up about 55 per cent of the population, and ethnic Chinese and Indians, who account for about a third.

A protest vote from Chinese and Indians, upset over what they saw as racial inequality in terms of business, job and education opportunities, had been expected.

The Indians were merciless, voting out the leader of the coalition's Indian component party and handing a seat to an Indian activist now in detention.

But Malays, who are all Muslims and traditionally support Barisan in good times and bad, completed a perfect storm for the Government, handing the opposition Islamists a record vote in what was perceived as a protest against rising prices.

"Tomorrow we will start building a brighter future," said opposition icon Anwar Ibrahim, de facto leader of Parti Keadilan, which emerged as the biggest opposition party in federal parliament with 31 seats.

"This is a new dawn for Malaysia."

Anwar, a Malay and former deputy premier, is widely seen as the only politician who could unify the ideologically divided opposition into a coherent and credible political force, though many political experts see this an almost possible task.

Anwar was banned from standing in the elections because of a criminal record - he spent six years in jail until 2004 on what he called trumped-up charges - but is expected to take over his old seat from his wife, who has held it since his 1998 jailing.

Results from the elections commission late today showed the National Front with 137 seats in the 222-seat Parliament versus 82 for the opposition, with three seats still being tallied.

Reuters, AFP

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/03/09/1204998272533.html

Kenya

The Kenya public needs to see progress
Story by KEN OUKO
Publication Date: 3/30/2008
Kenneth Boulding authored these famous words back in 1970 in reference to a Europe stuck at the crossroads. He cautioned that what Europe required most was progress but that the feeling of progress had to seep through to the public, be felt by the public and, by subsequence, endorsed by the public. This is the point our two crest-wave leaders are missing.

The Kenyan public needs to be imbued with a sense of progress. The Kenyan public needs to feel a part of this progress. We need to indulge in the renewal of hope clad in the attire of progress.
Oxford Concise offers a variety of definitions of the word public, the most relevant of which is “of or engaged in the affairs or service of the people.” The immediate implication here is that whatever leaders do, it ought to be for the good of the people they serve. In Kenya it seems to be the opposite. What the leaders do seems to be for their own good and for the good of their advisers.

Sociologists, on the other hand, define the public as “a large collectivity of persons with effective inter-member communication regarding an ongoing issue, event or person.” The public plays a critical role in determining who governs them and the pursuant quality of such governance.
Recent Kenyan history has revealed that it doesn’t matter what the declared outcome of an election is until there is public consensus about the mandate to govern. It has also revealed that public sentiment can easily rubbish procedurally endorsed legitimacy given to a leader by existing institutionalised methods.

Global history also teaches that leaders who undermine the need for public goodwill do so at their fatalistic peril. Sadly, this appears to be the precipice President Kibaki and PM-Designate Odinga seem to be dangling their fortunes on.

For, as long as our country has a leadership that seems insensitive to public sentiment, we will never experience change in the true form of the concept.

A sociologist’s take on change is that it must entail two prime components -- progress and an evolved mindset.

The benefits of such progress must be appreciated by the governed public while the transformation of mindset must be exhibited by the leadership. This is the current mouse-trap fix we, as a country, find ourselves in.

The Kenyan public is increasingly becoming disenchanted with its leadership while the leadership is unflinchingly exhibiting a rigidity of mindset that is almost pathological.
Our leaders cannot pretend to have inhaled fresh breath and exhaled steamy hope from the Kofi Annan-led mediation process when their mindsets remain collectively sandwiched between political rigmarole and rhetorical gerrymandering.

What our leaders are putting us through is not very different from inviting the whole world to witness the spectacle of a serial rapist graduate with an exemplary PhD in Gynaecology.
The PNU outfit in particular does not seem to care much for public perception or sentiment.
To even suggest a bloated cabinet at this point in our history is to deliberately stir negative public perception.

Of particular wonder is how a president who has recently been on the mend with the Kenyan public as a man with the interests of the nation at heart can succumb to the avaricious interests of those surrounding him by suggesting the creation of absurdly christened ministries for their comfort.

From the onset of the coalition agreement, observers immediately became aware of the president’s dilemma especially in regard to the incorporation of ODM-K into the PNU side of the bread.

The President needs to realise that ODM is not necessarily composed of angels but his PNU side is suddenly making the ODM brigade look heavenly, which is bad for business. For as long as our leaders remain caught in the spinney-web of combative mindsets and the tiring rhetoric of reductionism, this country will simply never experience meaningful change.

It is hard to name any Kenyan leader in all 44 years of independence with the ideological originality of Napoleon Bonaparte, the pragmatism of Muammar Gaddafi, the fieriness of Fidel Castro or the charisma of Nelson Mandela.

Such is the dearth of leadership quality in Kenya that one has to scratch his head trying to locate a leader who could have or who will lead us into the new Kenya we all thirst for.
A revolution need not be a bloody and violent affair. Modern revolutions simply imply a complete overhaul of the political and economic structures of a nation complete with the transformative social existence that follows such overhaul by natural subsequence.

Only last week, I was cheering the constructive symbolism hidden in Minister Amos Kimunya’s proclamation of goodwill from Mr Odinga. Days later, Mr Odinga contemptuously dismissed Mr Kimunya as unqualified to speak on his behalf.

Meanwhile, as Mr Kimunya is dismissing Prof Anyang’ Nyong’o’s concerns as the whimpering of a misguided individual, ODM MPs are giving ultimatums to Education Minister Sam Ongeri to nullify the KCSE examination results. When did the new-found spirit of joint leadership evaporate?

Ken Ouko is a sociology lecturer at the University of Nairobi

News Updates

2008-02-27T12:01:00.002+08:00

Hi, here are several links to articles or recent happenings around the globe. Check them out and be informed.

Kind regards,
Cher Linn

A hit of a decade:
Earthquake hits much of England

Kenya Crisis: Crying Out for Resolution
Annan suspends talks with Kenyan crisis negotiators

Mr. Mugabe:
Zimbabwe : Divide and conquer

Raul Castro: A Change?
Hints of Change Are Met in Cuba by Cautious Eyes

Bioethics:
Transplant Surgeon Charged in Patient’s Death

Kosovo Independence Day

2008-02-18T14:44:00.004+08:00

ON SUNDAY February 17th Kosovo declared that it had become the seventh state to emerge from the wreckage of the former Yugoslavia. According to a plan worked out by Kosovo's leaders with foreign counterparts, recognition of the new country is likely to follow from Monday onwards, by America, many European Union countries and others.

Tens of thousands of people packed the centre of Pristina, Kosovo's capital, to celebrate. Posters were plastered across the city, thanking America, Britain and the EU for their support.

Technically Kosovo was a province of Serbia, although its jurisdiction passed to the UN in 1999. Serbia, strongly supported by Russia has said that Kosovo's independence is an illegal act of secession and it will not recognise it. Serbia is set to lower, but not break, diplomatic relations with any state that recognises Kosovo.

Of Kosovo's 2m people some 90% are ethnic Albanians who have long demanded independence. There are believed to be fewer than 130,000 Serbs in Kosovo today. About half live in a compact territory in the north, the rest in enclaves scattered across the rest of the territory.

This is the second time Kosovo has declared independence. The first time in 1991, it was recognised by no one except Albania. This time it will be different, but still Kosovo will not become a state equal with all others. Russia will block its membership of the UN and all other international bodies where it has a veto. A big EU mission is beginning to deploy, with a mandate to keep control of police and justice in the territory. Another part of the mission is supposed to make sure that Kosovo lives up to various standards its leaders have committed themselves to.

The risk is that Kosovo becomes dependent on these missions and thus simply an EU protectorate, its leaders shoving responsibility for difficult issues on to foreigners all too willing to rule. Given Serbia's hostility to Kosovo's independence, heavy reliance on foreigners will be a necessity in any case. Today Kosovo's security is assured by some 17,000 NATO-led troops. They will remain for years, perhaps decades, to come.

One of the biggest problems now is going to be dealing with Kosovo's Serbian minority which rejects independence—the leadership of Serbia tell them to ignore independence. They will probably do so. In May, Serbia will vote in local elections. This will be a big test. What would, or could, Kosovo's authorities do when Serbs hold these polls in other parts of Kosovo? Much will become clear in the next few days. Some of Kosovo's power comes from Serbia. Will that be cut? Will Serbia close the border to Kosovo-Albanians and anyone doing business with them?

On Friday Hashim Thaci, Kosovo's prime minister, addressed journalists saying that all would be done to look after and protect minorities in Kosovo. It was a moment pregnant with symbolism. Since no one had bothered to provide a translation none of the now angry Serbian journalists had a clue what he was saying. For too long Serbs and Albanians have been talking at each other not to each other. In the short term this is bound to get worse. Serbia has also, for now, angrily opted to put aside its efforts to join the EU.

Once the parties end difficult problems must be tackled. Serbs in the north will protest against independence. Kosovo's weak economy will still be weak. Kosovo's neighbours, Macedonia and Montenegro are also bracing for trouble, worried that a vengeful Serbia will take harsh measures against them if they recognise the new state.

For years diplomats dealing with Kosovo have tried to find a way to achieve what was called “final status”. Today most Albanians are delirious, but it is unclear whether they have understood that what is happening now is not final, but rather just the end of a chapter. “We had hoped we'd be finishing the book by now,” says one diplomatic source ruefully. Ylber Hysa, a Kosovo Albanian analyst, says that as far as he is concerned the important thing is not so much independence as getting "Serbia out."

Source: The Economist 18th February 2008

The Amazing Noncollapsing U.S. Health Care System — Is Reform Finally at Hand?

2008-01-29T04:47:00.000+08:00

Lawrence D. Brown, Ph.D.
- The New England Journal of Medicine, 24th January 2008 -

Amid the myriad social transformations, corporate reorganizations, and policy innovations that have shaken the U.S. health care system, one great, puzzling constant endures. For roughly 40 years, health care professionals, policymakers, politicians, and the public have concurred that the system is careening toward collapse because it is indefensible and unsustainable, a study in crisis and chaos. This forecast appeared soon after Medicare and Medicaid were enacted and has never retreated. Such disquieting continuity amid change raises an intriguing question: If the consensus is so incontestable, why has the system not already collapsed? Perhaps pondering this question can yield insights into the system as the 2008 elections approach.

The diagnosis of imminent collapse rests on three symptoms. First, without affordable universal coverage, the system leaves 47 million Americans uninsured. Second, health care costs are extraordinarily high: the United States spends about 16% of its annual gross domestic product (GDP), or $6,400 per capita, on health care, whereas France, for example, covers virtually its entire population reasonably well at 11% of GDP and half the per capita spending. Third, the U.S. system is in fact a nonsystem, an incoherent pastiche that has long repulsed reforms sought by private and public stakeholders. Yet this diagnosis misses as much as it reveals.

The sources of collapsing coverage are easily sketched. High insurance costs wreak havoc on the private, voluntary, employer-based system, especially in the small-group and individual markets. As costs increase, purchasers drop or limit coverage or charge workers more for it, leading more workers to do without it. Public coverage fills some but not all of the gap. A system in which the number of the uninsured rises by a million each year must surely be toppling.

The problem with this analysis is that the U.S. health care system consists not of two sectors (private and public) but three, one of which, the safety net, rarely gets proper attention and is poorly understood. The safety net encompasses public and voluntary hospitals, community health centers, public health clinics, free clinics, and services donated by private physicians. Configurations of safety-net providers vary markedly among communities, as does their financing, a shifting patchwork of funds from Medicaid, the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the federal disproportionate share program, tax levies, foundation grants, state appropriations, commercial payers, and other sources. These institutions often live on the financial edge, but with 11th-hour infusions, they mostly manage to stay afloat. This fact is of paramount importance, for these providers also extend a safety net for the political legitimacy of the health care system as a whole. That Americans who lack coverage can "still get care," as President Bush recently declared, drains moral urgency from the health care reform enterprise.

This self-congratulatory proposition is half true: many of the uninsured can make an appointment or drop in for care at a safety-net venue. Should they become seriously ill, however, and need referrals to specialists, inpatient care, high-tech procedures, or a regimen of prescription drugs, access becomes unpredictable and spotty, an ugly exercise in rationing. Yet this reality seems to sit too many layers down for the American public to appreciate it. Hence the reception to (for example) the Clinton health care reform plan of 1993–1994: why let the government muck up the system for 100% of the population merely to bring it to the 15% who can get health care without it? The problem is not so much deficiencies in the U.S. value system as it is a myopic reading of facts that keeps important values out of political play. The social mythology surrounding the safety net lends the system an eerie stability — which does not augur well for reforms requiring redistribution of resources from the haves to the have-nots.

U.S. health care costs have been in "crisis" for roughly 40 years, and they remain high for several reasons, including administrative overhead, high payments to providers, and the practice of defensive medicine. The key variable, however, seems to be a heavy reliance on specialized services and technology. Managed care was supposed to contain these "excesses," but its unhappy fate shows that the country's medical "style" is less a problem to be solved than an entrenched American cultural construct.

The Flexnerian seeds of scientific medicine began to flower 60 or so years ago when the expanding National Institutes of Health began aggressively charting medicine's endless frontier. The top health policy priority of other Western nations — securing the citizenry's access to care — was in the United States entrusted to private and voluntary arrangements backed up by charity care and the safety net. Federal health policy was primarily about encouraging, producing, and disseminating medical breakthroughs to cure disease. As research grants became central to the missions, budgets, and faculty of teaching hospitals, medical schools, and universities ("academic medical centers"), innovation and specialization became integral to medical education and to U.S. definitions of high-quality care.

To be sure, this configuration is not inviolate: advocates for public health, prevention, and primary care decry the system's inverted priorities; some argue that public policies should more accurately reflect the influence of social determinants on health outcomes; chroniclers of transformation and reorganization highlight the impact of managed care. None of these critics have much dented the medical–cultural nexus, however, and the less rapidly rising health costs of the 1990s triggered a strong backlash against managed care. Nothing in today's strategic portfolio holds much promise of disrupting these formidable medical–cultural continuities, so reformers cannot plausibly promise substantial new efficiencies and savings.

Finally, critics have long contended that the U.S. health care system cannot intelligently address problems of coverage and cost because it is really a nonsystem, a fragmented assemblage of private, voluntary, and public powers that resists any semblance of the planning that a $2 trillion annual enterprise demands. The indictment rings true: the system's stubborn localism ("health is a community affair"), voluntarism (employer-based coverage), privatism (an insurance industry free to reject bad risks or price them out of the market), and federalism (wide variation among states in Medicaid eligibility and services) defy coherent ordering.

For about 20 years, however, pundits have opined that the endless shifting of costs and the disconnect between the independent minds and interdependent fates of powerful groups have grown sufficiently frustrating that they may now accept public policies obliging them to trade some autonomy for security. Reform is indeed on the agenda of all the major relevant groups, but the crucial question is how much political capital they are prepared to spend to make it happen. Despite deep differences in the interests of its members, the axis of opposition that has throttled reform in the past — business, insurance, and providers — still concurs on three points: that reform should not make big government much bigger; that the costs of reform ought not to fall on them; and that other items on their agendas take precedence. Lacking a plausible strategy for defeating these interests, reformers may have to work around them. Doing so may admit major expansions of Medicaid and SCHIP but will not turn the patchwork into a true system.

So, though deeply dysfunctional by most standards, the U.S. health care system remains disturbingly stable. That no one really likes it does not translate into the inevitability of real change. Because the system is unlikely to collapse from within, reformers' best hopes lie with shifts in public sentiment and the election of activist and reform-minded political leaders. Such shifts can happen, as they did with lasting consequences in 1932 and 1964. But big bangs do not guarantee comprehensive health care reforms. Franklin Roosevelt declined to include national health insurance in his package of New Deal programs. Lyndon Johnson won enactment of Medicare and Medicaid but declined to fight for universal coverage. Since 1968, U.S. social politics have proceeded largely to the right of center, and the health care reform ideas whose time seemed to have come in 1993 crashed dramatically.

Underestimating the system's resilience risks leading reform astray yet again, but what exactly should be done is far from clear. No one knows how to infuse moral urgency into the push for universal coverage, make the system's medical style markedly less expensive, and thrust reform to the top of the agenda for powerful interest groups. Careful reconnoitering of historical terrain yields no formulas for success but may at least reduce the prospects of déjà vu.

Source Information
Dr. Brown is a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York.

New topics from Debatabase

2008-01-08T05:13:00.000+08:00

Hi people, here are some of the new topics I've found out from debatabase.

Enjoy reading!

Cher Linn

Asylum seekers, welcome for
Summary: What obligations should nation-states have to those seeking asylum?

Drugs, legalisation of
Summary: Should governments legalise all drugs?

Sex change operations, public provision of
Summary: Should sex change operations be provided at public expense?

Driftnets
Summary: Should there be a worldwide ban on the use of driftnets to catch fish, including within each country’s Exclusive Economic Zone?

War Powers for UK parliament
Summary: Should the prerogative power to commit British armed forces to armed conflict abroad be removed from the UK Prime Minister and placed instead in parliament?

Top Changes

2007-12-26T13:14:00.000+08:00

2007 has been a dramatic year. At least in the political scene, quite a number of major political figures have been changed or elected officially. Here are some that I know:

16th May 2007 - Nicolas Sarkozy succeeded Jacques Chirac as the 23rd President of French Republic and assumed office on the said date.

20th May 2007 - Jose Ramos Horta succeeded Xanana Gusmao (current Prime Minister) as the 2nd President of East Timor.

15th June 2007 - Salam Fayyad was appointed the 6th Prime Minister of the Palestinian National Authority, succeeding Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas.

27th June 2007 - James Gordon Brown succeeded Tony Blair (Anthony Charles Lynton Blair) as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom as well as Leader of the Labour Party (on 24th June 2007).

15th July 2007 - Shimon Peres succeeded Moshe Katsav as the 9th President of the State of Israel.

8th August 2007 - Xanana Gusmao succeeded Estanislau da Silva as the 4th Prime Minister of East Timor.

14th September 2007 - Viktor Zubkov succeeded Mikhail Fradkov as the Prime Minister of Russia.

26th September 2007 - The 90th Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe resigned abruptly on 12th September 2007 after less than one year in office. He was then replaced by Yasuo Fukuda.

16th November 2007 - Muhammad Mian Soomro succeeded Shaukat Aziz as the Prime Minister of Pakistan.

25th November 2007 - Nader al-Dahabi succeeded Marouf al-Bakhit as the Prime Minister of Jordan.

3rd December 2007 - Kevin Rudd succeeded John Howard as the 26th Prime Minister of Australia in the 2007 Federal Election on 24th Nov 2007.

10th December 2007 - Cristina Fernández de Kirchner succeeded her former-president husband Néstor Carlos Kirchner Ostoić in the October 2007 General Election in Argentina.

20 December 2007 - Lee Myung-Bak was elected as the President of South Korea, succeeding Roh Moo-Hyun and will assume office on 25th Feb 2008.

In the mean time, Pakistan will hold their election in January 2008 and we can expect Vladmir Putin’s second term as President of Russian Federation will expire in May 2008. Also, US Presidential Election of 2008 will be held on 4 Nov 2008.

Genetically modified wine - Unleash the war on terroir

2007-12-23T22:01:00.000+08:00

An oenological wish-list for the drinking season

FOR the beleaguered winemakers of France, threats come in many guises. One French grower complained that each bottle of New World wine that lands in Europe is a “bomb targeted at the heart of our rich European culture”. But few things agitate French winemakers more than other winemakers' unspeakable irreverence towards the terroir, the mix of soil and climate found in the place where a vine is grown. The strength of feeling is so great that the country even has its own breed of, er, terroiristes. A group of masked, militant French winemakers has attacked foreign tankers of wine, bricked up a public building and caused small explosions at supermarkets.

Now France's balaclava-clad winemakers have a new horror to see off: transgenic wine. Scientists have unpicked the genetic secrets of pinot noir, the grape that produces some of the world's finest wines and also contributes to some blends of champagne (see article). It turns out to be the offspring of two very different parent varieties—they have less genetic material in common, in fact, than humans do with chimpanzees. The researchers' findings, which cast light on the origins of pinot noir's subtle flavours, will make it easier to engineer new varieties that can grow in places where cultivation is impractical today. Efforts to create transgenic grapevines are well advanced, and transgenic wine yeasts are already starting to appear in American winemaking.

Alas, those working on transgenic vines have failed to heed the lessons of earlier GM-food fiascos. They are creating what the producers want (disease-resistant grapevines) rather than making tweaks that also appeal to consumers.

What sort of traits might consumers want, you ask? More reliable flavours for one thing. No longer need you doubt whether a wine truly does possess flavours of exotic coffee, chocolate, Asian spice, roast duck and blackberry and prune liqueur. Genes from those very animals and plants could be spliced straight into the grape's genome. Forget hours spent swilling, swirling, sniffing, gurgling and spitting—it will all be there in black and white, in the sequence data.

From Saint-Amour to Viagra
Why should sauvignon blanc be stuck with boring old gooseberry and cabernet sauvignon with cassis? Genomics could beget some novel wine flavours and combinations to ensure the wine really does go with the food: pinot noir with cranberries, pork, and sage and onion stuffing, perhaps.

And why stop there? It would surely be wise to boost the levels of wine's beneficial ingredients and add a few more for good measure. Consistent amounts of resveratrol, quercetin and ellagic acid will help improve cardiovascular health and may even confirm what the French have known all along—that drinking red wine is good for you.

A gene for producing acetylsalicylic acid, better known as aspirin, would help to prevent heart attacks and blood clots. You could get your doctor to supply your daily half-bottle by prescription. The aspirin's analgesic effect would head off hangovers before they even started. Caffeine could be added to keep drinkers awake during boring dinner parties. And it may even be possible to insert a gene to produce sildenafil citrate, the active ingredient in Viagra. For many men that would help to prevent the ultimate wine-induced humiliation.

The possibilities are endless—all that is needed is a little imagination. Too bad if all this leads to an outbreak of militant shrugging among the good vintners of Burgundy. Times have changed. Scientists have a clear duty. Following the lead of many world leaders, they must make it clear that they are not willing to negotiate with anyone who supports terroirisme.

-----------------------------------

The Economist

19th Dec 2007

Europe's car industry - Collision course

2007-12-23T21:53:00.000+08:00

New emission rules hit German carmakers

IF BALI failed to produce much besides cop-outs and compromises, at least the European Commission showed that it means business when it comes to tackling carbon emissions. Transport-related CO2 emissions in the European Union grew by one-third between 1990 and 2005 and now constitute 27% of the EU total. Of these, the commission reckons, cars and vans are responsible for about half.

On Wednesday December 19th the commission published its final proposals for cleaning up Europe’s cars. Although it will be at least a year before they become law and there is still scope for some of the details to change there is now little doubt that in only a few years’ time European carmakers will have to meet the world’s strictest CO2-emission standards

At present Europe’s cars emit an average of about 160 grams of CO2 per kilometre (g/km). There has been some reduction since carmakers were last threatened with legislation a decade ago, but progress has been painfully slow—about 1.5% a year rather than the 3% needed to meet the voluntary target of 140g/km by 2008 that the industry agreed to a few years ago. The commission is therefore insisting that by 2012, the fleet-average emissions from new cars sold in the EU must not exceed 130g/km, with another 10g/km reduction coming from other sources, such as low rolling-resistance tyres, more efficient air-conditioning and greater use of biofuels.

The proposals have split Europe’s car industry down the middle. The French and the Italians, represented by PSA Peugeot Citroën, Renault and Fiat, have so far been fairly sanguine. In 2006 their fleets, heavily biased towards fuel-efficient small cars, averaged 142-147g/km. It will not be easy for them to meet the new rules without increasing the cost of their cheap, low-margin cars, but they are close enough to be confident that they can get there.

For the Germans it is a different matter. Volkswagen makes plenty of small cars but its fleet-average emissions have actually been rising slightly because of the recent success of its Audi brand. But it is Mercedes-Benz and BMW that feel most threatened by the commission’s plans. Their brands are synonymous with big, powerful cars that promise luxury and high performance. Mercedes props up the 2006 emissions league table with a fleet average of 188g/km, and BMW is next from bottom with 184g/km.

BMW has at least been making an effort to burnish its environmental credentials. As well as reducing the weight of its cars, it is now extending across its range a package of fuel-saving tricks called “Efficient Dynamics”. This brings together the latest engine technologies with energy-saving auxiliary units, automatic start-stop and regenerative braking.

By contrast, Mercedes still seems to be in a state of denial. It has heavily promoted its BlueTec technology, but that is primarily designed to deal with clean-air regulations in America (which have limited the sales of diesel cars), not to meet European CO2 rules. Along with BMW, General Motors and Chrysler, it has developed a new hybrid system called Two-Mode. But this is an expensive option that is likely to find its way only slowly into the firm’s sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) and bigger saloons.

Meanwhile, both BMW and Mercedes continue to build cars that are bigger than the ones they replace and have ever more powerful engines. Both firms insist that as long as customers want such cars, they will build them, particularly as they are highly profitable and popular in export markets such as America, Russia and China. They also point out, correctly, that removing their high-end models entirely from the European market would have only a minimal impact on carbon emissions, because they are a tiny proportion of the overall fleet. They argue that the makers of small cars, which sell so many more vehicles, should have to do more to reduce emissions—perhaps by reducing their fleet averages well below the EU’s proposed 130g/km limit.

Intensive lobbying by BMW and Mercedes, with support from the EU’s industry commissioner, Günter Verheugen (who happens to be German), and the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has had some effect. To the fury of green campaigners, the commission has agreed to a “weight dispensation” that will allow makers of heavier cars (ie, the Germans) to produce higher fleet-average emissions.

The commission is determined not to let the premium carmakers off the hook, however, so much will depend on the slope of the weight/CO2 graph. The most grossly polluting vehicles may not be numerous, but if they do not attract stiff penalties the emission rules will lose all credibility. The commission would like to impose fines of €95 ($137) per car per gram on emissions exceeding 130g/km. Without any weight allowance, the existing Mercedes fleet would attract a penalty of about €5,500 a vehicle. In practice the final figure will be lower. But the commission is adamant that although it does not want to destroy the German carmakers’ business, they must be under real financial pressure to develop and implement radical fuel-saving technologies.

Even though it is clear what new technologies will be needed (smaller engines, more efficient automatic transmissions, various kinds of hybrid and greater use of biofuels) the Germans will struggle. Given that a new car takes five to seven years to develop, new technologies cannot be incorporated straight away, they argue. A further problem, according to Ricardo, an automotive consultancy, is that there are not enough engineering resources to go round. As things stand, the Germans have no hope of avoiding substantial fines unless they are given longer to comply and are prepared to change their mix of models. Neither looks likely.

--------------------------------------

The Economist

20th Dec 2007

Thailand's election

2007-12-23T21:39:00.000+08:00

“WE'RE not selling fish sauce, this is an election rally,” jokes Sombat Ratano as he walks alongside his campaign truck with a microphone, hailing the voters of a rural village in Ubon Ratchathani province. In Isaan, Thailand's poor and populous north-east region, support is still strong for Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister deposed by a military coup in September 2006. Mr Sombat is a candidate in the December 23rd general election. He is standing for the People's Power Party (PPP), a reincarnation of Mr Thaksin's Thai Rak Thai (TRT), which was disbanded after the coup. As he tours the village, he drops Mr Thaksin's name at every opportunity, promising to revive the policies—from cheap health care to farming loans—that made the former prime minister popular.

Pakistan is not the only Asian country where a dodgy military regime is running a general election under dubious electoral rules in the hope of keeping out a similarly dodgy civilian whom it overthrew. The difference is that unlike Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, the exiled Mr Thaksin is not being allowed to take part in the vote himself, and there may be slightly more hope that things will come out right in the end.

Middle-class Bangkokians, who are as snooty about their country cousins as any metropolitan elite anywhere, often say that “uneducated” rural voters such as those in Isaan were bribed and tricked into voting for Mr Thaksin. But rural voters were quite rational in handing him landslide victories in 2001 and 2005. He was Thailand's first party leader to promise and deliver a comprehensive set of policies aimed at the mass of voters. The allegations of corruption, conflicts of interest and vote-buying that surround him are serious but hardly unusual: such practices are endemic in Thai politics.

The gravest allegation against Mr Thaksin is that in a “war on drugs” in 2003 he seemed to be encouraging extra-judicial killings of suspected drug-dealers by police. An investigation into this, started after the coup, remains incomplete—perhaps because the policy, however brutal, was also popular. Amid signs of resurgent amphetamine abuse, the PPP unashamedly talks of reviving it.

On his shirt Mr Sombat bears the logo of King Bhumibol's 80th birthday celebrations, held earlier in December. This is a subtle riposte to the military junta's accusation that Mr Thaksin and his party do not respect the country's revered monarch, whose portrait is as omnipresent in the Isaan countryside as it is around Bangkok's royal palaces. The PPP has also hired Samak Sundaravej, an arch-royalist, as stand-in leader while Mr Thaksin remains abroad. Though close to the palace, Mr Samak is a foe of General Prem Tinsulanonda, the king's chief adviser and, Thaksinites allege, mastermind of the coup.

Many parties, old and new, are contesting the election. Some have brought military men on board, hoping for army backing. Niran Pitakwatchara, a local doctor standing in Ubon Ratchathani for Matchimathipataya, one of the new parties, reckons voters have started to see the flaws in Mr Thaksin's policies. But all the other parties, including Mr Niran's, have adopted copycat versions of them—making them awkward to attack.

The generals who staged the coup claimed to be saving Thai democracy from Mr Thaksin's abuses. Their dictatorship has been a pretty mild one and they are keeping their promise to hold the election by the end of 2007. But they presumably hoped the former leader would be forgotten by now. He has not been. Though Thailand's quirky opinion polls must be treated with caution, most predict that the PPP will win comfortably more seats than its nearest rival, the Democrats, although not a majority. The widespread assumption is that the Democrats will nevertheless form a ramshackle coalition. The problem is that Abhisit Vejjajiva, the Democrats' leader, though young and handsome, may not command enough respect to lead a fractious government.

Until the coup, Thailand seemed to be escaping its historic cycle of alternating military dictatorships and weak civilian rule. By the late 1990s it had become a beacon of multi-party democracy in Asia. Whether that beacon will shine again is unclear. If a Democrat-led coalition takes office, the PPP seems likely to make its life difficult and short-lived. If the PPP leads the next government, a peace pact with the generals is possible but the military men are bound to be nervous. The PPP promises to rescind a political ban that a tribunal created by the junta imposed on Mr Thaksin and 110 allies. If he returns, he would be able to scrap the amnesty that the coupmakers granted themselves—and put them in the dock.

General Anupong Paojinda, a new army chief who took over in October, insists there will be no coup even if the Thaksinites win. Then again, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, his predecessor, repeatedly made the same promise right up to the moment he overthrew Mr Thaksin.

The generals, courtiers and bureaucrats who have been in charge for the past 15 months have ruled dismally. Thailand's economy is now one of the slowest-growing in booming Asia. The army-appointed interim government has become ever more invisible as its popularity has sunk. General Sonthi, presumably fearing humiliation, quietly dropped plans to stand in the election. But it is unclear whether the army and its civilian backers have learned the old lesson that coups and extra-constitutional excursions tend to make political crises worse and do not produce good government.

Thailand's judicial and regulatory institutions are on trial in the election. For example, a new Election Commission, appointed with little dissent in the turmoil shortly before the coup, faces accusations of partiality. It absolved the military junta of plotting to subvert the election by undermining the PPP, despite the discovery of army documents detailing the plot. But the commission is now threatening to disqualify the PPP over the less serious matter of a video clip in which Mr Thaksin breaches his ban on politicking and urges support for his party.
The commission and courts will have lots of complaints to handle after the polls close. If they enforce the rules impartially and promptly, they could set Thailand back on the road to democracy. If they are arbitrary, biased or dilatory, they may doom it to more years of instability—especially if they leave the impression that the people have voted for Thaksinism, only to have their will subverted.

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The Economist

19th Dec 2007

Climate of fear hangs over Myanmar

2007-12-19T13:06:00.000+08:00

For many in Myanmar life is daily struggle simply to get enough food to survive.

In a narrow street in central Yangon, people push their way through a frenzied crowd to get a free plate food.

Many stuff their pockets with rice and vegetables to save for later. Barefoot children throw lollipops and soft drinks into plastic bags, to be shared out later with others whose only home is the street.

It's hard to believe that just 60 years ago Myanmar was one of the richest countries in the region, supplying most of Asia with rice.

Nowadays, despite the country's abundant natural resources, it can barely feed it's own people.

Just four months ago, unannounced fuel price hikes pushed food costs up threefold, triggering street protests that were led by monks and ended with the army turning its guns on the demonstrators.

Today, to talk about food is to criticise the government. So no matter how much the people suffer, few are brave enough to open up.

I asked one woman why food was so expensive. Even with her identity hidden she wouldn't respond, such is the state of fear in Myanmar today.

Yangon's Shwedagon pagoda is one of the country's most important religious shrines and became one of the centres of the protests in September.

Now, in the streets around the pagoda, everything looks normal. Kids sell flowers or offer to wash the hair of worshippers to earn extra money for their families.

Hopes for the future
Inside the 2,000 year old monument, devotees light candles and touch their heads to the marbled ground.

Elderly monks collect alms and give out blessings, as though encouraging the faithful to keep their hopes up for the future.

Along the streets leading up to the Sule Paya Pagoda where troops fired on unarmed civilians, pavements are a riot of colours with stalls hawking goods such as tomatoes, multi-patterned longyis, cameras, gems and watches.

Everyone seems happy, everything seems calm. But of course appearances can be deceptive.

Many of the monestaries which were shut in the wake of the crackdown are still closed.

Dissident monks are banned from returning to their sanctuaries and the dreaded undercover police are everywhere, watching for any signs of agitation that could lead to more protests.

The United Nations estimates that at least 4,000 people were detained following the protests.

Up to a thousand remain in detention or have disappeared. Many activists have gone underground and even those who sympathise with them live in fear of being arrested in the middle of the night.

I found one man willing to talk, but we had to walk through the streets for an hour before he found a place he felt safe enough to talk.

Desperate
The situation in Myanmar, he said, had become desperate.

"The business is very slow so the people are suffering. We also feel depressed. Our spirits are a little down."

He told me that the generals had put forward a series of economic initiatives based on its "Roadmap to Democracy".

More encouraging though was their engagement with the opposition, the National League of Democracy, and its leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi.

But he said the way forward wouldn't be easy.

"Within this period we will have so many struggles and sometime it may be bloody".

For now the primary concern for most in Myanmar is how to stay alive.

These days a bowl of noodles costs the equivalent of 80 cents - an enormous amount for a people who, on average, live off just one dollar a day.

While spirits are low, people in Yangon say they still have hope, if not for democracy then at least for a government that does not starve them to death.

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Al Jazeera English

19th Dec 2007

US Congress raises auto fuel standards, boosts biofuels

2007-12-19T12:58:00.000+08:00

The US Congress overwhelmingly approved Tuesday a bill raising fuel efficiency standards for the first time since 1975 and offering massive support for biofuels, in an effort to slash US dependence on foreign oil.

The bill requires the auto industry to reduce fuel consumption in most cars and light trucks by 40 percent, raising the fuel efficiency standard to 35 miles per gallon (15 kilometers per liter) by 2020.

The current Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard is around 27.5 miles per gallon for cars and just over 22 miles per gallon for light trucks.

The bill also calls for a sixfold increase in the use of ethanol, a biofuel, to 136 billion liters per year by 2022. The provision is a boon to US farmers as the United States uses corn to produce ethanol.

In addition, the legislation sets new energy efficiency standards requiring the use of more electricity-efficient light bulbs and appliances.

Pressure for action on energy policy has been mounting as Americans become increasingly frustrated at rising gasoline prices amid warnings that the United States must wean itself of foreign oil from the unstable Middle East.

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NST 19 Dec 2007

Back from Guantanamo

2007-12-19T02:46:00.000+08:00

Adil Hassan Hamad can scarcely believe he is back with his family in Sudan, because only days ago he was still in the US's Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.

"I am very, very happy and not believing this," Adil tells Al Jazeera, "That I am here with my family - even now I feel this could all be taken away at any moment."

In 2002, Adil and another man, Salim Mahmoud Adam, were picked up from their homes in Peshawar, Pakistan, by Pakistani troops and were later handed over to the US.

Most of his children were babies when their father, who was then working as the director of a hospital in Afghanistan, was taken to Guantanamo.

His daughter, Rahma, now six, was only a few months old when he was taken and now her father seems like a stranger.

"She knows I am her father," says Adil, balancing Rahma on his knee and holding her close. "But she's not used to me."

"Like a cage"
Since his release from Guantanamo, family, friends and neighbours have come to Adil's home in Khartoum to greet a man many thought they might never see again.

Adil recounts stories of torture, interrogation and solitary confinement when speaks of his time in the prison.

"The cell was all made of iron on iron. You don't see anyone or hear anything," he says.

"It was a boring and miserable life... psychologically very tiresome. It was like a cage ... like an animal living in a cage."

Among those present to celebrate Adil's return is Assim al-Haj, brother of Sami al-Haj, the Al Jazeera cameraman imprisoned in Guantanamo six years ago.

He listens to Adil's story of his release from the prison, but knows that his brother's health is deteriorating in captivity.

"Injustice and abuse"
More than 750 people have been held in Guantanamo since January 2002 and only three have been formally charged.

Even with the recent releases, over 270 detainees remain in Guantanamo Bay.

The US supreme court has reviewed the legal status of Guantanamo prisoners on several occasions and found in favour of the inmates - that they should be allowed to have the legality of their detention examined by US courts.

The US administration, which argues that since the base is outside the country rights under the US constitution do not apply, has avoided following this judgment.

Amnesty International, the UK-based human rights group, has called Guantanamo "a symbol of injustice and abuse" and called on the US government to close the down the prison "in a transparent manner which fully respects the human rights of those detained and brings to fair trial all those who are accused of recognisable crimes".

But though the US has drawn international criticism for holding foreign nationals captive in Guantanamo, there are few signs that the US has any plans to close the prison.

Adil and Salim were two of 15 people, the rest Afghan, recently released by the US. Neither have ever been told why they were imprisoned.

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Al Jazeera English

18th Dec 2007

The debate: THW grant detainees in Guantanamo Bay fair trials.

Japan tests interceptor missile

2007-12-19T02:37:00.000+08:00

The Japanese military has successfully test-fired an interceptor missile from a ship at sea, destroying a mid-range ballistic missile in space.

Monday's $55m test off Hawaii was the first time a US ally had shot down a ballistic missile from a ship at sea.

The Japanese navy and the US missile defence agency called the test "a major milestone in the growing co-operation between Japan and the US".

But it may deepen Chinese concerns that Tokyo could use the technology to help the US defend Taiwan if conflict erupted across the straits.

The interceptor fired by the JS Kongo knocked out the target warhead about 160km above the Pacific Ocean, said the US agency, which carried out the test together with the Japanese and US navies.

The JS Kongo is the first of four Japanese destroyers due to be outfitted to counter missiles that could carry chemical, biological or nuclear warheads.

North Korean threatExperts say the test target resembled the Rodong missile owned by North Korea, which has a shorter range than the Taepodong missile North Korea sent over Japan nearly a decade ago.

But North Korea is believed to have an arsenal of about 200 Rodongs, and Japanese defence experts say it represents the greatest threat to Japanese security.

Riki Ellison, a prominent missile-defence advocate who monitored the test, said that by intercepting a missile similar in speed and size to those in North Korea's arsenal "Japan has proven its capability to defend and protect their country from North Korean missiles".

Tokyo has invested heavily in missile defence since North Korea test-fired a long-range missile over northern Japan in 1998.

Shigeru Ishiba, Japan's defence minister, described the successful test as "extremely significant".

"We will continue to strive to increase the system's credibility," he said, insisting the missile shield was worth the high cost.

"We can't talk about how much money should be spent when human lives are at stake."

Japan plans to have spent a total of $11.2bn on missile defence over the four years to March 2008 using the US-developed Aegis combat system, according to the defence ministry.

China offered a muted reaction to Japan's anti-missile test, saying only that it hoped Tokyo's actions would be positive for peace and trust in Asia.

"We hope that the actions of Japan are beneficial to the peac and stability of the region and conducive to mutual trust of the countries in the region," Qin Gang, China's foreign ministry spokesman, said.

Palestinians win $7.4bn aid pledge

2007-12-19T02:23:00.000+08:00

A follow up article about Palestinian aid pledge.

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International donors have pledged $7.4bn in aid at a one-day conference in Paris aimed at helping improve the Palestinian economy and underpin the Middle East peace talks.

Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, said on Monday that the Palestinians would receive the money over the next three years.

"Our goal had been for $5.6 billion. Now we have $7.4 billion," he said at the end of the conference.

The Palestinian government had asked the more than 90 assembled donors for $5.6bn to finance an ambitious development plan to stem the economic decline in the West Bank and Gaza.

"Without the continuation of this aid and without the liquidity needed for the Palestinian budget, we will have a catastrophe in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank," Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, said.

Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, also spoke of the need to secure the funding, calling the conference the Palestinian government's "last hope" to avoid bankruptcy.

Major donors
The European Union pledged $650m over the next year, while France and Kuwait promised $300m over the next three years.

Most of the $555m promised by the US had been previously announced, but is yet to be confirmed by congress.

Britain and Germany pledged a combined $1.08bn by 2010.

However, the World Bank says the situation will improve only if Israel eases restrictions on the movement of Palestinian people and goods.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, said: "The Paris conference must provide immediate support for all the Palestinian territories. "Our financial support will also be used for the population of Gaza. Its prolonged isolation carries great political, economic and security risks.

"The entry points must be reopened to let the economy breath. A full and immediate freeze of settlement activity is a priority."Peace negotiations
Monday's donor conference came after last month's talks in the US city of Annapolis, the first peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians in seven years.

The renewed peace talks are aimed at achieving an agreement on Palestinian statehood by the end of 2008.

But at the conference, Abbas ruled out talks with the Hamas movement which seized total control of Gaza in June.

He said that Israel must freeze Jewish settlements "without excuses" if it wants to be seen as a serious peace partner."If we want to launch serious talks to end the conflict as we and the world have decided to do, then how can a key party pursue settlement activity and expansion?" he said.

Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, did not directly address the settlement issue, but welcomed the Palestinian plans "as a serious effort to build the basis for a responsible Palestinian state".

Rice said the settlement dispute was "ever more reason that it's time to get an agreement" and appealed to both sides not to "consider every bump in the road to be a barrier".

"There is an assumption here that there is not going to be turbulence in this process. There is. I don't care how much you talk to people before, I don't care how much work you do. There will be turbulence."

Political support
The success of the gathering will be measured in more than financial terms. Pledges are also being seen as political support for Abbas.

Of the $5.6bn the Palestinian Authority hoped to secure, 70 per cent would have gone to reducing the government's deficit.

The remainder would have been used for development projects.
Jacky Rowland, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Paris, said: "What we've been hearing from people attending the conference has been the mixture of opportunity and also risk.

"The opportunity now to cease the political momentum started at Annapolis, the good relations and the willingness to engage between the Israeli prime minister and the Palestinian president.

"But at the same time, really quite stark warnings of what is at stake if in fact this money does not come through and the international mission to rebuild the Palestinian economy and build the foundations of a state are not successful.
"Clearly the subtext of this conference is to boost the authority, popularity and credibility of the authorities of President Abbas, at the expense of Hamas."

Gaza 'collapse'
In a report coinciding with the talks, the UN warned that Israel's restrictions on the Gaza Strip had pushed the local economy to the brink of collapse, reducing production to 11 per cent of capacity.

The UN Development Programme report said: "The private sector in the Gaza Strip is on the verge of collapse with no scope for recovery unless the strict imposed closure regime on the strip is lifted."

Israel has so far balked at removing checkpoints scattered across the occupied West Bank, citing security concerns.

It has also tightened its military and economic cordon around Gaza since Hamas gained control in June following factional fighting with Abbas's Fatah movement.

Familiar sound
Al Jazeera's David Chater in Gaza said: "There is a very familiar sound coming out of the conference in Paris from the donors, the diplomats and the politicians.

"The [recent] UN report [shows] that there is a huge dislocation between the fine words and the promises we're hearing in Paris and the situation that we are hearing on the ground.

"Nothing has changed, it's getting worse."

On the ground, Israel killed at least five Islamic Jihad fighters in the Gaza Strip on Monday, including a senior commander and a leading rocket maker, prompting the group to threaten suicide bombings in revenge.

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Al Jazeera English

18th Dec 2007

World powers gather in Paris to bankroll Palestinian state

2007-12-17T14:46:00.000+08:00

I find this Conference of Donors for a Palestinian State a new move to help establish a better condition for the Palestinians. It sounded like the same old relief and developmental aids but this time they believe the brand new PM Salam Fayyad will manage the funding and hence the development of state well.

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Major powers and key donors gathered Sunday in Paris for a conference aimed at raising billions of dollars to help the emergence of a viable Palestinian state and give political impetus to the newly-relaunched peace process with Israel.

Ninety international delegations are expected at Monday's Conference of Donors for a Palestinian State, the biggest of its kind since 1996, which aims to shore up the process jumpstarted in the US city of Annapolis last month.

President Mahmud Abbas is seeking 5.6 billion dollars (3.85 billion euros) spread over 2008 to 2010 for an ambitious development plan to underwrite a promised state and tackle economic hardship in the Palestinian territories.

The amount the Palestinians needed for 2008 was "around 1.6 to 1.7 billion," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told journalists accompanying her on the plane to Paris.

Sources in her delegation said the United States was prepared to shoulder one third of the financial burden in 2008 by forking up 550 million dollars. The German government, meanwhile, promised 200 million dollars by 2010.

"This is an historically large figure. I think this is the largest assistance package that we have ever done for the Palestinians," a senior US official told journalists on condition of anonymity.

Delegates gathering for the occasion include UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Rice and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair, peace envoy for the Middle East quartet -- the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States -- is co-chair of the event along with host country France, peace-broker Norway and the European Commission.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni will represent Israel, which is under pressure to lift restrictions on freedom of movement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip to allow the Palestinian Authority's plan to take shape.

Livni and Abbas held a meeting in a Paris hotel Sunday afternoon after which the Palestinian leader highlighted French President Nicolas Sarkozy's diplomatic credentials.

"He maintains close links with all the parties, Israel and the Arabs, which allows him to play an important role," Abbas said of his host.

Sarkozy will open the proceedings, at Abbas' side, with a speech at 9:30 am (0830 GMT) on Monday, before handing over to French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner for the rest of the day.

At the US-sponsored meeting in Annapolis, Maryland last month, Israel and the Palestinians pledged to seek a peace deal by the end of next year, relaunching negotiations frozen for seven years.

Abbas has said he is confident Paris will clinch the necessary aid -- 70 percent in budget support and 30 percent for development projects -- sending a powerful signal of backing for the peace process.

"It is urgent to stabilise the Palestinian economy and implement measures on the ground that will improve the daily lives of Palestinians," said Sarkozy's spokesman David Martinon.

The Palestinian development plan has been drawn up by the West Bank-based government of the economist Salam Fayyad, whom Abbas appointed prime minister when the Hamas radical Islamist group seized armed control of the Gaza Strip.

In an interview with AFP, Fayyad said his government had undertaken important economic reforms which should reassure donors that their money will not be wasted.

"The reforms are not abstract slogans but concrete actions which he have taken. I can say with certainty that Palestinian financial management is no longer a cause for concern," he said.

Aside from budget support, the Palestinians say the largest chunk of development aid would go to projects in education, health and women's emancipation.

Between 30 and 40 percent of projects would be in the Gaza Strip -- with guarantees to ensure funds do not reach the Hamas militants in control of the territory, according to French and Palestinian sources.

The United States praised Abbas's government before the opening of the conference.

"You have the best Palestinian government since Oslo. This is not only the best Palestinian government, it is also the most moderate in the Arab world," said the senior US official.

Conference members are expected to urge Israel -- which operates 550 checkpoints in the West Bank -- to gradually lift restrictions on movement between Palestinian towns and villages, while asking the Palestinians for a big push to improve security conditions.

"The two have to move forwards in tandem," said a French diplomat, though he said the funds would not be strictly tied to either condition.

The senior US official said Rice may also publicly push Israel to halt construction of new Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

"We may say something publicly. ... Settlement activity is one of the central concerns everybody has."

The Middle East quartet is expected to meet on the sidelines of the conference, while several high-profile participants -- including Ban, Fayyad, Livni and Blair -- held an informal dinner with Kouchner on Sunday evening.

Rice will have a bilateral meeting with Sarkozy on Monday afternoon, his office said.

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From NST 17th Dec 2007

CLinn

Murder and terror blackout

2007-12-09T11:45:00.001+08:00

Media craze comes in seasons. Probably because one high-profile case (often shocking, tragic and sudden) often leads to the reporting of cases similar to it. News-worthy, they call it. Just like suicide cases after a financial crisis; gun laws after random massacres by depressed and neglected (mental illness activists are crying out for more funding to treat more patients) murder and terror has hogged the headlines. Face it, do you want to know more about LIMA or the notorious congregation of people? :)

Terrorist, some call them. Then they were "linked to terrorists". Mainstream and alternative media are at loggerheads at what is the actual situation. People who are on the ground tells a different story. Like the problems facing one of the many structures of our motherland, one of the people I met asked, why is the shutdown scantily reported? What ensued was various speculations and views on what happened. And when we report the (actual?) situation, will it fuel the cause of the perpetrators? like the gun massacre in Virginia High, Finland and the case of Robert Hawkins of late?

The debate is: is lack of information actually fueling the sentiment or diffusing the situation? =)

I WANT TO BE FAMOUS - SHOULD THE MEDIA STOP HELPING?

Robert Hawkins predicted in his suicide note that he’d be famous once he carried out his plan, and he was right. Yesterday, he killed eight people and himself in a Nebraska shopping mall and today his face and name is featured on thousands of TV stations, websites and newspapers.Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in April. He too was confident the media would play its part. Between his two attacks he sent a video to a major US network and days later we all watched him.

Is it time the media took a collective decision to report such massacres with only the bare facts? No pictures, no suicide note, no videos, in the public domain. No live reports from the scene and no blanket coverage? Could it work? Should it be done?

TERRORIST RAGE: NOT JUST MIDDLE EASTERN PROBLEM

Alicia Crall

In a terrorist attack last Tuesday, one congressman and one civilian were killed and several local councilmen and radio journalists were injured in a bombing in an upscale cafe'.

If this story does not sound familiar, it is because it was barely covered in the news media. Considering how "terrorist aware" the news has become, why did this story not merit coverage?
It is because this terrorist bombing took place, not in the Middle East, but in Columbia.

I found this story while on the CNN Web site. I watch the news regularly, so I was surprised a terrorist attack killing a government official was not reported.

Click here to read more...

Debatabase has this to say: Terrorism, should not be allowed publicity

Cheers, and till we meet, have a great training!

PS: the debate research and ppt slides can be summarized and uploaded here for the benefit for those unable to attend the training.

Sesame street unsafe for kids

2007-11-30T21:09:00.000+08:00

You've got to read this! Hillarious, witty and just blows your top!

November 18, 2007

The Medium

Sweeping the Clouds Away

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.

Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

Points of Entry

Caveat teletor: Volumes 1 and 2 of “Sesame Street: Old School” are available on DVD, which you can sample and buy on Sesameworkshop.org. With a few episodes, extras and celebrity appearances by the likes of Richard Pryor and Lou Rawls, “Old School” sounds harmless enough. But are you ready to mainline this much ’70s nostalgia?

The Way Old: YouTube is great for performance art. If 1969 is not far back enough for you, how’s 1935? The Oscar-winning short film “How to Sleep,” by the Algonquin Round-Tabler Robert Benchley, can be found here in sumptuous black-and-white; search for his name and the film’s title on YouTube.

Come of Age: Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the men of “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” have at last introduced their online-only young-adult series, “Quarterlife.” It started Nov. 11 on MySpaceTV.com, and it marks the first time a network-quality series — a long indie film, really — has been produced directly for the Internet. If the old times unnerve you, welcome to the new times.

Freedom of speech in democracy - peaceful protests

2007-11-25T12:16:00.000+08:00

In view of recent happenings in Kuala Lumpur, I believe all of us have a stand or another about the large number of people taking it to the streets with slogans and petitions in hand. While causing massive congestions and the possibility of creating "chaos" and "violence" were the reasons cited by the authorities against these "illegal" rallies, we do wonder whether peaceful demonstrations (as claimed by the protesters themselves) are shows of democracy or detrimental to the peace of a country.

1. Protests in a liberal democracy
Brian Martin writes here about Protests in a liberal democracy. Ok... This is a good article that gives a fair description of the values behind a protest, what it is, what it represents and how the society, be it the government, media or public. =) Enjoy!

Some of the excerpts:

"Challenging the status quo is a difficult business. Dominant groups have various ways to limit the effectiveness of challengers, including promoting a narrow conception of 'acceptable protest,' channelling dissent into appeals to the government and, if necessary, using repression. The very idea of 'protest' should be considered suspect because it diverts attention away from the routine activities of powerful groups."

"At this stage it may be useful to define a few terms. The 'normal channels' of political action in a liberal democracy are those associated with the electoral system: voting, participating in political parties, lobbying and writing letters to politicians. All these methods involve trying to get someone else--usually the government--to take action on an issue. 'Direct action,' by contrast, is political action which does not act through some other group as intermediary. Examples are sit-ins, strikes and boycotts. Many actions aim both to achieve immediate aims and to influence the government, such as rallies and hunger strikes.

'Nonviolence' refers to actions which do not by themselves cause physical harm to humans, whereas 'violence' refers to those which do. If police attack and harm nonresisting demonstrators, it is the police who are violent, not the demonstrators. Whether violence to property counts as 'violence' is an issue that has often been debated.

'Civil disobedience' can be defined as nonviolent direct action that breaks a law. Theorists of liberal democracy usually consider political actions to fall into the category of legitimate civil disobedience if they are deliberate, nonviolent, non-revolutionary, done in public and done mainly to educate or persuade the majority (Zashin, 1972:110)."

2. Gun Control vs Gun Rights
The debate over gun control and the right to protection (gun) has been debated since time immemorial. See the arguments on a few sides of the table (lawmakers, gun manufacturers, economists, and the congress) in US here.

Other news on gun laws and their repercussions: latest news in Finland.

:) WW

Announcement board spamming

2007-11-24T23:14:00.001+08:00

I have to delete the Shout Box due to spamming... will update this blog soon :)

On corruption and transparency

2007-11-03T06:40:00.000+08:00

After the angkasawan successfully 'lift-off', sadly his brother and Uncle Lim has passed on. As usual, the happy moments only last that long. Prices are hiking (please save, people!), top brass is spewing out baffling statements and La-Nina is hitting east coast this monsoon season.

So... this week's highlights:

1. Link: Dealing with climate change - regulations versus market methods
(Cher Linn)

2. People story: Gang members - our own?
(check out this ad!)

3. Link: IMF - help or hindrance --> debatabase
(Cher Linn)

4. New Delhi - Indian court allows man to divorce HIV positive wife

5. Beijing - restriction of travel to heritage sites before Beijing 2008

6. Price hike - the Idea of Inflation - a good read*
(the LRT montly ticket price have increased RM 10! and it is before petrol prices surge *again!)

7. Freedom of speech - The rights to expression and the harm principle

Ok.. that's all from me now...

NHSD motions

2007-10-26T18:47:00.000+08:00

Finally got the time to link =). The pros and cons are IMHO... feel free to comment, or even better, write something about the motions. Any news on the selection outcomes?

NHSD 2007

Theme: 21st Century Medicine: Making us better?

1. THW give the government the go-ahead in eKesihatan. (eventually revoked/put on hold)

Pro: Accountability, Road Safety, Outsourcing.
Cons: Monopoly, Cost-efficiency, Political will, Ethical issues, *A total waste of time? / counterproposal

2. THW stand behind hybrid-embryonic cloning.(*Christ! First, understand what the heck is cloning here.)

Pro: Scientific breakthrough, Medical benefits - eg infertility, Regulations of use
Cons: Playing God, Ethical issues, Abuse, Protection for the Privileged

3. THBT the private sector should do more to support the healthcare service in Malaysia.

4. THW make medical insurance compulsory for all.

5. THBT the Malaysian Government is not paying enough attention to the healthcare sector.

6. THW stand behind a National Healthcare Plan.

7. THW urge the Malaysian Government to play a larger role in women's healthcare.

8. THBT only pharmacists has the right to dispense drugs.

9. THW only honor the words of the terminally ill patient for euthanasia.

10. THW make passing an aptitude and communication test compulsory for all medical student before progressing to their clinical years.

11. THW make organ donation compulsory for all brain dead patients.

12. THBT medical schools should do away with the current PBL based medical curriculum.

13. THBT that medical services provided in-flight by a doctor should be absolutely free.

14. THBT the US child health insurance program should be implemented in Malaysia.

15. THBT athletes suffering from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome should be excluded from the Gender Testing regulations.

16. THBT the government should make it compulsory for the private sector to offer the option of the 5 years maternity leave.

Tagging the forgetful

2007-10-23T06:39:00.000+08:00

This article about tagging forgetful people (Alzheimer's) with chips that store personal info. I'm sure everyone knew about the angkasawan and the debate on space exploration, so i thought I may interest you with something else. Read on!

We've tagged you

Sub Head: Uproar flares in the United States over Alzheimer's tags.

Byline: By CELESTE BIEVER

IT looks deceptively familiar. The patient rolls up his sleeve, the doctor sticks a needle into his arm, and soon it's all over.

But this is no routine vaccination. Instead, the patient has been injected with a fleck of silicon that will uniquely identify him when zapped with radio waves.

Now, nearly three years after their use was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, implantable radio frequency identification (RFID) chips are the focus of a new controversy.

The battle lines are being drawn in a quiet corner of West Palm Beach, Florida. On May 12, some 30 protesters held an inter-faith prayer vigil outside Alzheimer's Community Care, a day-care facility for people with dementia.

At issue is the facility's plan to implant 200 patients with microchips manufactured and donated by VeriChip of nearby Delray Beach. When scanned, the chip reveals a unique ID number, which when entered into a password-protected database gives access to medical information about its owner.

If the plan goes ahead, it will be the first time the technology has been tried on a group of people with a specific mental impairment. The forgetfulness that comes with Alzheimer's can make it impossible for people with the condition to pass on vital information when faced with a medical emergency, which is why advocates are keen to make use of RFID chips with this group.

"If for whatever reason – an automobile accident or hurricane – the person becomes separated from their loved one, they are totally, totally helpless. They can't share what medically is wrong with them," says Mary Barnes of Alzheimer's Community Care. "This could be a safety net."

Privacy advocates say that it is precisely this helplessness that makes the proposed use of the tags unacceptable. "This is a community that is not in a position to give fully informed consent or to say no," says Katherine Albrecht, of CASPIAN, a Florida-based consumer rights organisation. "The nature of the disease is that they can't fully understand."

Albrecht likens "the violent and invasive act" of implanting a chip in someone who does not have the ability to consent to the act of rape. Others agree with the sentiment, if not the comparison. "This is by definition a way of doing something that denies a person control," says Lee Tien, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, San Francisco, California. "If that doesn't strike at the heart of human dignity, I don't know what does."

He and Albrecht would rather see a chip implanted in a bracelet.

Barnes says a bracelet would not be nearly as useful. People might remove it if it got uncomfortable, especially those with Alzheimer's, who might not understand why they should wear it.

Bracelets could also label people as mentally ill, whereas an implanted chip is much less obvious, says Rick Rader, of the Orange Grove Center, Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The centre, which cares for children with Down's syndrome, cerebral palsy and autism, was in the media spotlight two years ago when it considered using VeriChip's device in a similar study on its patients, a plan that has since been put on the back burner.

At the time, there was an outcry from those who saw an implantable RFID as reminiscent of the "mark of the beast", as described in the book of Revelation. As explained on Albrecht's Web site, the Bible states that people who take the mark of the beast – a mark on the right hand or the forehead that contains a number or a name that is required for buying and selling – will receive a "grievous sore" as well as the "wrath of God", while those who refuse will be rewarded.

It is something Albrecht, a Christian, takes seriously. "I don't think anyone is arguing that the VeriChip implant in its current incarnation would meet that definition," she says. "But the concern for many people is that this would be a necessary precursor to getting to that point and therefore probably should be objected to." – New Scientist Magazine/Premium Health News Services/TMSI

Pix: Injecting microchips into patients with Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia would violate their rights, some say.

Some news excerpts: click links to read

2007-10-15T22:49:00.000+08:00

Dear all,

Selamat Hari Raya, and happy holidays! I am also stuck in the Raya mood, and the most exciting event that happened in Malaysia was the Angkasawan blast-off to space. "We have lift-off!". Nina has sent me her take on the AIDS debate, I'll post it online next week. So, just a quick summary on what's interesting (that I know of):

1.'Legalise drugs' report supported (BBC)

North Wales Police Authority has backed a review of drug laws after its chief constable urged legalisation.
Richard Brunstrom asked the authority to back his calls to scrap current laws, legalise most drugs and bring in a new system to control them. While it agreed to support the report - to go to the Home Secretary as part of UK-wide consultation, it stopped short of calling to scrap current laws. A senior police officers' body called legalisation "a counsel of despair".

2. Genetic testing, Discrimination and Privacy (Council for Responsible Genetics)
The Genome Project has sparked a huge debate on its repercussions on the society. One of the most important issue was the abuse of genetic information and accompanying discrimination. Surf this site for more information.

3. Sensationalism in journalism - Yellow Journalism (Wikipedia)
Where do we draw the line?

4. Space tourism and Space exploration
The next frontier vs a total waste of time (and money)

That's all folks for this week :).
WW

The transplant debate

2007-10-06T22:31:00.001+08:00

Weekly highlights - and links to reports/commentaries
1. Heart transplant - MAS
2. Myanmar's violence to silence- there
3. Methadone programme for drug addicts -MAS
4. Deporting and banning Bangladeshi immigrants - MAS
5. Jena Six - USA
*This is not new, but interesting: racial tensions still deeply ingrained in parts of the US.*
6. I hate sports pages... so anything in sports please let us know.

I'm sure all of us had debated organ transplants and organ donations one way or another. Be it the idea of who gets the transplant, the black market and organ "selling", or the rights to organs.

The recent case where Tee Hui Yee, a 14-year-old living on a mechanical heart for about one year, gets not one, but two heart transplants within the span of 1 week. The donor's picture was in the frontpage of nearly every newspaper in town. We celebrated the generosity of the young man, who was killed in the accident. I wonder what happened to the general rule that donors aren't supposed to reveal their identities.

That sparked an idea of a motion: THBT transplant patients can have a second chance.

Do give your supporting or dissenting arguments in the comment box below, or if you have problems with the motion, do shout-out! =)

Cheers, WW

A nuke-free world?

2007-10-06T21:55:00.000+08:00

Source: International Herald Tribune

It's time to junk nuclear weapons

Sometimes I wonder if superpowers like the US wanted world peace. Without the "dictators" in the Middle East needing weapons, or Gaza's troops needing tonnes of bullets everyday, they can kiss a big chunk of their revenue goodbye. I may be cynical, but hey, this is a debate ;).

Should the United States aim to achieve a world free of all nuclear weapons? In one sense, the question is trivial - nuclear disarmament has been a stated aim of the United States since the dawn of the nuclear age. And the United States also committed to working toward this end when it signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968.

But in another sense, the question is fundamental. Although successive administrations (at least until the current one) have mouthed the words affirming this objective, few have actually made this commitment an organizing principle of their nuclear weapons policies. That may be about to change. Earlier this week, Senator Barack Obama pledged that as president he would say: "America seeks a world in which there are no nuclear weapons." Former Senator John Edwards has also pledged to lead an international effort to eliminate nuclear weapons, as has Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico.

And it isn't just presidential candidates who are talking about a nuclear-free world. So are former statesmen like Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Bill Perry, and Sam Nunn. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last January, they urged that the United States set the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons, and proposed specific actions to that end.

Nearly 20 years after the Cold War ended, the time has come to make a concerted effort to verifiably rid the world of all nuclear weapons. The United States must start by recognizing that the threats it confronts have changed and so, consequently, has the role and purpose of our nuclear weapons. During the Cold War we worried about the possibility, however small, of a disarming bolt-out-of-the-blue attack on our nuclear forces. That is no longer a realistic possibility. We also confronted a superior conventional foe in Europe and elsewhere that we sought to deter by threatening nuclear escalation. Today, our overwhelming conventional forces can defeat any nation, anywhere on earth.

Tomorrow's nuclear threats are different. They are that unstable regimes or, worse, nihilistic terrorists get their hands on a bomb and use it. This threat is becoming more real as nuclear technology and materials spread around the world. The first order of business must be to ensure that all the nuclear weapons and materials in Russia and elsewhere are safe and secure. While recognizing the threat of loose nukes and materials, this administration has done far too little to make sure this happens. The next administration must do better.

The second order of business, though, is to reduce the salience of nuclear weapons in order to ease the road to their elimination. The only reason the United States should maintain nuclear weapons is because others have them. There cannot be another purpose. We don't need them to deter a non-nuclear attack on ourselves or our allies; our conventional forces can deal with those contingencies. We certainly don't need them to attack some far-away or deeply buried targets, because there isn't a target whose destruction is worth breaking the 62-year-old taboo against using a single nuclear weapon.

Given this limited role for nuclear weapons, there is much that the United States can do to lift the dark nuclear shadow over the world. It can sharply reduce its nuclear stockpile to 1,000 weapons or less, if Russia agrees to go down to the same level. It can eliminate tactical nuclear weapons to underscore that it understands that a nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon, no matter its size, yield, range, or mode of delivery. It can agree never to produce highly enriched uranium and plutonium for weapons purposes, and accept the need for intrusive verification if other states agree to end such production as well. It can commit never again to test a nuclear device, and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

If the United States were to do all these things, it would make clear, to our citizens and the world, that it is serious about tackling the nuclear danger. It would reestablish the nation as the leader of the global nuclear nonproliferation movement. Above all, it would make the world a much safer place.

Ivo Daalder is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. John Holum led the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Clinton administration. This article appeared first in The Boston Globe.

Matter on AIDS

2007-09-30T12:25:00.000+08:00

AIDS in Malaysia

Malaysia is home to the fifth fastest growing AIDS epidemic in the East Asia and Pacific region with its current rate of HIV infections doubling every three years.

Between the first detected case in 1986 and 2006, 76,389* people have been infected with HIV while 9,155* have died of AIDS. These statistics suggest that an average of 17 people test positive for the virus each day.

Malaysia's epidemic is largely dominated by injecting drug users who make up about 73% of total cases. There is concern however that heterosexual transmission is on the rise. The proportion of women reported with HIV has increased dramatically in the last decade from 4% of new cases in 1995 to 15% of new cases in 2006. Surveys show that in 2006, more housewives tested HIV-positive than sex workers. At the same time, the percentage of babies born with

HIV has also increased from 0.2% in 1991 to 1.4% in 2006.

As in most parts of the world, young people in Malaysia account for an increasing number of HIV infections every year. December 2006 statistics from the Ministry of Health reveal that 36% of infections are amongst people aged between 13 to 29 years old. It is likely that people infected with HIV before the age of 30 were infected in their twenties and sometimes even during their teens.

Gender inequity, stigma, discrimination, silence, denial and ignorance fuel the epidemic in Malaysia.

* Source: Ministry of Health, Malaysia

another related article, but in larger scope:

How widespread is the HIV/AIDS epidemic?

The HIV/AIDS epidemic is an unprecedented challenge to humanity. HIV/AIDS was once concentrated primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, but the epidemic knows no borders. It has spread to every region in the world and affects people regardless of age, gender, wealth, geography or sexual orientation. HIV/AIDS is now the fourth-biggest cause of death worldwide.

Concentrated Epidemics

In many countries, HIV is still considered 'low' or 'concentrated, ' confined mainly within groups at especially high risk, such as men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs and sex workers. An epidemic is considered 'concentrated' when less than one per cent of the general population but more than five per cent of any 'high risk' group are HIV-positive.

Generalized Epidemics

In sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, Central America and the Caribbean, HIV has become a 'generalized' epidemic that is not contained within any section of the population. An epidemic is considered 'generalized' when more than one per cent of the general population carries the virus.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Nine out of ten children with HIV or AIDS are African. Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst affected region in the world. With just 11 per cent of the global population, the region is home to three-quarters of all people living with HIV and AIDS. Some 30 million people are carry the virus, and is AIDS the leading cause of death on the continent. One in ten people between the ages of 15 and 49 are HIV-positive in 12 countries. The majority of new infections occur among young people aged 15 to 24, especially among girls.

In Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, it is estimated that more than 60 per cent of boys currently aged 15 can expect to become HIV-positive. In parts of southern Africa, more than 30 per cent of pregnant women are HIV-positive. Nine out of 10 children with HIV or AIDS are African.

Asia

In Asia, an estimated 7.2 million people are believed to be HIV-positive. Concentrated epidemics among injecting drug users and sex workers have crossed over into the general population in Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand, resulting in generalized epidemics. In Indonesia, Nepal and Viet Nam, infection rates are exploding among those two high-risk groups, of whom the majority are under the age of 25. In China, home to a fifth of the world's population, concentrated epidemics have emerged in several provinces and HIV is moving so rapidly that many fear the country is on the verge of a generalized epidemic. India is home to the world's second-largest HIV-positive population.

Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia have the fastest-growing epidemic in the world. Around 1 million people aged 15 to 49 were living with HIV/AIDS in 2001, and the number is growing by 250,000 people a year. The epidemic is concentrated among addicted injecting drug users, but it is now spreading to a wider population of occasional injecting drug users and their sexual partners, most of whom are young. In the Russian Federation, there were 3,008 reported new HIV infections among injecting drug users aged 10 to 19 in 1999. By 2000, that number had more than tripled to 9,612.

The Caribbean and Latin America

About 1.9 million adults and children now live with HIV and AIDS, and the epidemic is in danger of spreading rapidly and widely. The Caribbean, with a 2.3 per cent prevalence rate among 15¡V49 year olds, is the most affected region after sub-Saharan Africa. Unsafe sex among men who have sex with men appears to be rife across the entire region; a large proportion of these men also have sex with women. Prevalence levels are highest in The Bahamas, Guyana and Haiti. Most new infections are being reported among young women aged 15-24.

Middle East and North Africa

In the Middle East and North Africa, more than half a million people are living with HIV/AIDS. Available data point to increasing HIV prevalence rates, with about 83,000 new infections in 2002. Significant outbreaks among injecting drug users have occurred in about half the countries in the region, notably in North Africa and in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

High-income countries

Approximately 76,000 people became HIV-positive in high-income countries in 2002, and 23,000 died of AIDS. About 1.6 million people now live positively with the virus, in large part thanks to anti-retroviral drugs that have made remarkable headway in holding back the development of AIDS symptoms. Unfortunately, the advancement in treatment comes with an underestimation of the risk and gravity of HIV/AIDS. Infections are on the rise again apparently because many people view HIV/AIDS as a treatable disease and are therefore not taking precautions to prevent contracting it.

source: http://www.unicef. org/aids/ index_epidemic. html

HIV status to tie the knot

2007-09-30T11:47:00.000+08:00

Note: this is an exemplary effort from reno, :) I hope I could maintain this site with contributions from all of you.

28^th Sept 2007 (Fri)

BP training for NHSD

In front of KTSN PBSM, 20000

THW make it compulsory for future spouses to disclose their AIDS status

OG: Matthew, Reno

OO: Izzati, Nina

CG: J, Hafizah

CO: Prisca, Pravita

Adjudicators:

Chair- Bernard

Panel- Wen Nee, Stella

PM:

The problem is basically about the rise of AIDS cases in Malaysia due to unawareness of HIV status. Unawareness of spouse’s HIV status, if the spouse is HIV positive, it is more likely that he/she may be infected, including their offspring. It’s unfairness in marriage.

Mechanism:

Premarriage counseling is conducted on future couples and HIV test is advised and make compulsory
Medical result regarding HIV test must be presented during marriage legalization in marriage registrar
If one/both of the couple is HIV positive, an agreement doc should be signed to make sure another half is well informed of this
Check and balance: regular HIV test for an interval of approximately 5 years

*Medical confidentiality and practitioners of the test should be mentioned

1^st point from the PM: Duty of state (on the societal health)

It is duty of state to make sure that the HIV status of their spouse is being well informed to each other. We want to create a healthy society and increase AIDS awareness in this country, especially in this particular case of marriage.

Leader of Opp:

Rebuttals:

On Duty of State - Right of choice whether to disclose the HIV status or not, because the positive or negative HIV is going to cause a big impact on their relationship.
On Registrar - Feasibility is being question on free HIV test and bribery in marriage registrar (human nature is being brought up)
On trust - It is up to the HIV positive partner to choose appropriate time to disclose his/her HIV status, because we believe in love is built on trust

1^st point from OO: Negative implication of the proposal (Freedom of Choice)

Discussed on the levels of human’s right of making choice and impact of tourism? of M’sia (*not much elaborated because running out of time)

* Adjudicator note: right to privacy is going to be a better point brought upon by Leader of Opp

=> I would love to listen to the argument on HIV status and tourism

DPM:

Rebuttals:

On Freedom of Choice - Right to choice are less likely to be prioritized since it’s jeopardizing another human’s right of information/ fairness/ and even life of another half (even whole family, if including offspring) of the marriage.
On trust and integrity - Bribery cases are insignificant enough to be ignored. Persons elected for the marriage registrar is elite and bound to rules, religion (since this case setup is in M’sia), and regulation.
On feasibility - More people will attend to HIV test after this proposal is implemented, thus create AIDS awareness among Malaysians, which is out objective
Tourism - Impact of tourism is not likely because the HIV status is only known by 3 parties: the patient, their spouse, and marriage registrar

2^nd point from OG: Fairness of the marriage

Discussed in two levels: marriage partner and their children

Deputy Leader of Opp:

Rebuttals:

Why the govt want to target only on disclosure of HIV status in marriage, why don’t target on other things that make more contribution to the HIV population in M’sia? e.g. IVDU (intravenous drug usage)

* 0.3% of M’sian are HIV positive

*60% are caused by IVUD

(it is outdated data; more recent data should be sought)

** please note that the National Health and Morbidity Survey 2006 (once in 10 years) has been released by the MOH lately.I've been trying to get it but to no avail, can anyone with access (doctors and medical line people alike) help? (ww) - would be helpful for debate on health - and politics in healthcare

CG:

Extension: Trickle down effects of the proposal

Stigma removal from society which will further create societal acceptance on this case

*stigma is a good point but not well explained
- stigma always include fear, evasiveness and partial knowledge about an issue.
- revealing HIV status sends out a message that -
1. HIV is a disease, like cancer, like the common flu
2. The fact that it has no cure shouldn't create fear, because unlike SARS/EBOLA/even cancer, HIV is not genetic or highly communicable- (doctors would tell you that even healthy lifestyle may not prevent you from a strong inheritance of cancer), and conscious effort (condoms, abstinence) can prevent it.
*A bit of technical knowledge here - HIV is a Biosafety Level 3 virus, a step below Biosafety Level 4 bacteria, Tuberculosis (TB). If migrant workers are required to undergo check for TB, why not HIV in spouses?
3. HIV exposure will tell people that yes, it is deadly, but there are thousands of ways people can contract HIV - not necessarily promiscuity. And if the spouse can't take it, maybe they shouldn't be in the same bed together anyway. => better than getting a divorce later with HIV eh?

CO:

*Inconsistency because the member of Opp gave me the feeling that HIV is really a serious thing in M’sia, but the whip came out and even said AIDS is just a small matter in this country
Rebuttals are mainly discussing about love, trust, and how disclosure of the HIV status will destroy a marriage. *Better elaboration about it is up to the HIV patient to choose time to tell their partner. It can be countered by saying procrastinating and lazy nature of human. However, it was not brought up by the CG whip

Extension: Impact on the marriage

** I think so…’cause I hardly catch the points being discussed…I knew only trust and love is being discussed throughout in the closing half of the debate. The CO also mentioned about the positive impact if the patient is given the choice to choose their appropriate time to disclose their HIV status.

p/s:

* indicates comment from adjudicators

** is my personal think about the debate

** the whole debate was not carried out well because of the environmental situations. (We actually had people screaming around us during the debate…they got their crazy own activities lah…) Few new people from KTSN is also being exposed what the hell is BP style. Everyone has presented well.

A selection for NHSD in KTSN will be conducted next week…be ready for the battle!

Reno

29 September 2007

It’s late in night…just finished watching Ultraviolet with other guys…sleepy… :)

Welcome!

2007-09-25T22:43:00.000+08:00

Welcome to the first UKM debaters blog. Anyone and everyone in the team can post anything related to debate here. I'm currently working on the links first, and the articles can come later... there is an email I created where everyone can forward their matter mails to, and I will post it here.

Will update more in ukmdebaters@yahoogroups.com, stay tuned! =)