Ethiopian Airlines 'black box' found

Searchers located the black box from an Ethiopian Airlines.

plane that crashed into the Mediterranean shortly after takeoff from Beirut, Lebanon, officials said.

The flight data recorder, critical to the accident investigation, was located about 4,300 feet under water and would soon be retrieved, CNN quoted the Lebanese army as saying Thursday.

Twenty-six bodies were recovered as of Thursday, the army said. It identified five of the dead as Ethiopians.

The Boeing 737-800, carrying 82 passengers and eight crew members, crashed into the sea Monday shortly after it took off in stormy weather from Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport..

The pilot made a “fast and strange turn” minutes after takeoff and flew in the opposite direction from the path recommended by the control tower, Lebanese Transportation Minister Ghazi Aridi said Tuesday.

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman ruled out terrorism as the cause of the crash.

The plane — bound for the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa — went down about 2 miles off the coastal village of Naameh, 9 miles south of Beirut, Aridi said.

Fifty-one passengers were Lebanese and 23 were Ethiopian, the airline said. Two others were British nationals, and the remaining six were Turkish, French, Russian, Canadian, Syrian and Iraqi citizens, the airline said.

The eight crew members were Ethiopian.

-(UPI)

Activities have been launched to promote Ethiopia at the upcoming 2010 World Cup tournament to be held on African soil for the first time.

A relevant consultation programme was held here on Thursday at the National Palace in collaboration with ‘Ye Ethiopia Hidassie Mahiber” (The Ethiopian Renaissance Association) and Vision Tone.

President Girma Woldegirogis, who is also patron of the association, said every opportunity should be taken to promote Ethiopia’s tourism resources, investment environment and ongoing development activities.

Ye Ethiopia Hidassie Mahiber Chairperson Taddele Yimer said the association was striving to promote the country, noting that Ethiopia was changing in all spheres more than ever and this achievement should be promoted with all possible means.

He said efforts were underway to provide tangible information on investment opportunities to attract foreign investment.

Thurday’s consultation was organized with the aim of establishing a taskforce, which would be responsible for the whole promotional work to be carried out at the world Cup to be held in South Africa from june 11 to July 11.

Culture and Tourism Minister Ambassador Mahmoud Dirir discussed at the consullation ways to promote tourism resources of the country at the international event.

Established a year ago, the association has opened branch offices here and abroad. Members of the association include Ethiopian businessmen, intellectuals, members of the Ethiopian Diaspora, as well as foreign nationals of Ethiopian origin engaged in different sectors of the economy. — NNN-ENA

Alemayehu G. Mariam professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino

The inconvenient truth about Africa today is that dictatorship presents a far more perilous threat to the survival of Africans than climate change. The devastation African dictators have wreaked upon the social fabric and ecosystem of African societies is incalculable.

Over the past several decades, bloodthirsty dictators like Uganda’s Idi Amin, Zaire’s (The Congo) Mobutu Sese Seko, Central African Republic’s Jean Bedel Bokassa, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, Chad’s Hissiene Habre, and the political fraternal twins Mengistu Haile Mariam and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia have been responsible for untold deaths on the continent. Millions of Africans have starved to death because of the criminal negligence, depraved indifference and gross incompetence of African dictators, not climate change. Millions more suffer today in abject poverty because corrupt African dictators have systematically siphoned off international aid, pilfered loans provided by the international banks and plundered the tax coffers. Africans face extreme privation and mass starvation not because of climate change but because of the rapacity of power-hungry dictators. The continent today suffers from a terminal case of metastasized cancer of dictatorships, not the blight of global warming.

The fact that greenhouse gas emissions (global warming) from human activities are responsible for a dangerous elevation of the global temperature is accepted by most climatologists in the world. Only clueless flat-earther troglodytes like U.S. Senator James Inhofe believe that climate change is a conspiracy hatched by “the media, Hollywood and our pop culture.” The general scientific understanding is that the planet is facing ruin from an unprecedented combination of extreme weather patterns, floods, droughts, heat waves and epidemics. The developed countries are primarily blamed for the rise in temperatures caused by excess industrial carbon emissions. This is evident in the increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s near-surface air and oceans. Africa has contributed virtually nothing to global warming. For instance, Africa produces an average of 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide per person per year compared to 16 metric tons for every American.

For Africa, climate change paints a doomsday scenario: Global warming will severely aggravate the atmospheric circulation and precipitation in the African monsoonal system resulting in severe shortages in agricultural output. Millions of Africans will die from famine, and the continent’s agriculture will be crippled. Deforestation and overgrazing will cause further increases in global temperatures through emission of greenhouse gases. Africa’s subsistence farmers who already operate in marginal environments will face catastrophic consequences in terms of decreased tillable and pastoral lands. Competition for water, agricultural and grazing land and other resources will inevitably result in conflicts and wars. Vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, trypanosomiasis and others will spread rapidly causing large scale deaths in Africa.

The climate change debate has been honey in the mouths of forked tongue African dictators. It has provided them the perfect foil to avoid detection and accountability for their corruption and mismanagement of their societies, and a convenient opportunity to divert attention from their criminal state enterprises. Global warming has proven to be the perfect substitute for the old Bogeymen of Africa– colonialism, imperialism, neo-colonialism and poverty. Why is Africa reduced to becoming the “beggar continent of the planet”? Global warming! Why are millions starving (euphemistically referred to as “severe food shortages” by officials) to death in Ethiopia? Climate change. African dictators are using global warming as their new preferred ideology behind which they can hide and ply their trade of corruption while expanding their thriving kleptocracies.

The global warming debate has also offered African dictators a historic opportunity to guilt-trip the industrialized countries and rob them blind. Beginning on December 7, a phalanx of African climate change negotiators will swarm Copenhagen to attend the U.N. Conference on Climate Change. For Africa, the outcome of the negations is foreshadowed by pronouncements of comic bravado. On September 3, 2009, the Patriarch of African Dictators and head of the “single African negotiating team” on climate change, Meles Zenawi, huffed and puffed about what he and his sidekicks will do if the industrialized countries refuse to comply with his imperial ultimatum. Zenawi roared, “We will use our numbers to deligitimize any agreement that is not consistent with our minimal position… We are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threatens to be another rape of our continent.” (Whether African dictators or the industrialized countries are raping the continent is an open question. Witnesses say it is a gang rape situation.)

It was vintage Zenawi with his trademark zero-sum game strategy writ large to the world: “My way or the highway!” It does appear rather preposterous and irrational for the master of the zero-sum game to open negotiations with his longtime benefactors by sticking an ultimatum in their faces. Obviously, the strategic negotiating bottom line is to shakedown the industrialized countries and strong-arm them into forking over billions in carbon blood money; and Zenawi did not mince words: “The key thing for me is that Africa be compensated for the damage caused by global warming. Many institutions have tried to quantify that and they have come up with different figures. The sort of median figure would be in the range of 40 billion USD a year.”

Curiously, we could ask what Zenawi and his brotherhood of dictators would do with the windfall of billions, if they could get it? It is reasonable to assume that they will use it to expand their kleptocracies and cling to power like ticks on a milk cow. They will certainly not use to meet the needs of their people. What they have done with the international aid money and loans they have received over the decades provides compelling extrapolative evidence of what they will do with any windfall of carbon blood money.

As Dambissa Moyo and others have shown, in the last fifty years the West has poured more than a trillion dollars of aid into Africa. Today, over 350 million Africans live on less than USD$1. Real per-capita income in Africa is lower today than it was four decades ago. Aid money and international bank loans have been stolen by African dictators and their henchmen to line their pockets and maintain their huge kleptocracies. In 2002, an African Union study estimated the loss of USD $150bn a year to corruption in Africa, and not without the complicity of the donor countries. Compare this to the USD$22bn the developed countries gave to all of sub-Saharan Africa in 2008. In 2006, former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, who faced impeachment for corruption and ineptitude, declared at an African civic groups meeting in Addis Ababa that African leaders “have stolen at least $140 billion from their people in the decades since independence.” Ghanaian economist George Ayittey citing U.N. data argues, “These are gross underestimates… $200 billion or 90 percent of the sub-Saharan part of the continent’s gross domestic product was shipped to foreign banks in 1991 alone. Civil wars in Africa cost at least $15 billion annually in lost output, wreckage of infrastructure, and refugee crises… In Zimbabwe, foreign investors have fled the region and more than 4 million Zimbabweans have left the country along with 60,000 physicians and other professionals….” Is it any wonder that Africa today is worse off than it was 50 years ago?

The question is not whether global warming could impact Africa disproportionately, or Africa is entitled to assistance to overcome the effects of greenhouse emissions caused by the industrialized countries. The question is whether African dictators have the moral credibility and standing to make a demand for compensation and what they will do with such compensation if they were to get it. Certainly, the capo African negotiator has as much credibility to demand compensation in Copenhagen as a bank robber has from the bank owners. It has been a notorious fact for at least two decades that Ethiopia is facing environmental disaster. Ethiopia’s forest coverage by the turn of the last century was 40%. By 1987, under the military government, it went down to 5.5%. In 2003, it dropped down to 0.2%. The Ethiopian Agricultural Research Institute says Ethiopia loses up to 200,000 hectares of forest every year. Between 1990 and 2005, Ethiopia lost 14.0% of its forest cover (2,114,000 hectares) and 3.6% of its forest and woodland habitat. If the trend continues, it is expected that Ethiopia could lose all of its forest resources in 11 years, by the year 2020. What has Zenawi’s regime done to reverse the problem of deforestation in Ethiopia? They have sold what little arable land is left to the Saudis, the Shiekdoms, the Indians, the South Korea and others with crisp dollar bills looking for fire sales on African lands.

There has been a lot of environmental window dressing and grandstanding in various parts of Africa. In Ethiopia, lofty proclamations have been issued to “improve and enhance the health and quality of life of all Ethiopians”, “control pollution” and facilitate “environmental impact” studies. The “nations, nationalities and peoples” are granted environmental self-determination. There is an Environmental Protection Council which “oversees activities of sectoral agencies and environmental units with respect to environmental all regional states.” The Environmental Protection Agency is “accountable to the Prime Minister.” What have these make-believe bureaucracies done to save Lake Koka, just outside the capital, and the 17,000 people who drink its toxic water daily?

Zenawi and his minions will show up looking for a pot of gold at the end of the Copenhagen rainbow. It does not appear that a bonanza of riches will be awaiting them. If the advance Barcelona negotiations held last month are any indication, a deal does not appear possible in Copenhagen. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the Barcelona summit that “global climate negotiations would inevitably drag out after the meeting in Copenhagen ends on Dec. 19.” African dictators deserve our grudging admiration for their sheer tenacity and brazen audacity. After sucking their people dry, they are now moving camp to the greener pastures of climate change to continue their vampiric trade.

The fact of the matter is that while the rest of the world toasts from global warming, Africa is burning down in the fires of dictatorship. While Europeans are fretting about their carbon footprint, Africans are gasping to breathe free under the bootprints of dictators. While Americans are worried about carbon emission trapped in the atmosphere, Africans find themselves trapped in minefields of dictatorship. Handing over carbon blood money to African dictators is like increasing industrial emissions to cut back on global warming. It is the wrong thing to do.

Africa faces an ecological collapse not because of climate change but because of lack of regime change. It is humorously ironic that African dictators who panhandle the industrialized countries for over two-thirds of their budgets should threaten to walk out on them. We know the bravado is nothing more than the “chatter of a beggar’s teeth”. As the bank robber will not walk out of the bank empty handed because of moral outrage over the small amount of money sitting in the vault, we do not expect the band of African negotiators to walk out Copenhagen because they are offered less than what they are asking. We expect to see them making a beeline to the conference door for handouts for there is no such thing as a choosy beggar. We wish them well. Go on, take the money and run….

Regime Change Before Action on Climate Change in Africa!

farmland in africa

Agribusiness and global investors are scooping up farmland. Are corporate farmers the new colonialists?

(Businessweek) – Farmland in developing countries has become an unlikely object of investor fascination. Goldman Sachs (GS), and Morgan Stanley (MS) are each raising hundreds of millions of dollars for agriculture funds aimed at Africa and Latin America. Agribusinesses in the U.S. are leasing vast tracts of African land from which they expect to export crops and glean healthy returns. Arab oil countries, meanwhile, are vying for fertile acreage for fear their homelands are running out of water.

The executives leading this hunt for farmland say they are boosting poor economies. Dominion Farms, based in Guthrie, Okla., leases 17,000 acres in Kenya near the village where President Barack Obama’s grandmother lives. Dominion President Calvin Burgess boasts that his company provides employment for hundreds of local residents. “This area was a malaria-infested swamp before we got here,” he says. Once Dominion is fully in gear, it plans to sell rice to African governments and export farm-raised fish to Europe.

But in Kenya, foreign land investors are beginning to stir resentment. Subsistence farmers and cattle herders complain that they are being displaced without compensation. In the Siaya District of southwest Kenya, families say Dominion hasn’t offered as many jobs as it claims in the six years since it arrived. Villagers accuse it of polluting water and sickening farm animals—allegations the company denies.

Tensions are rising. Charles Onyango Apiyo, 39, raises cattle in Siaya. A year ago, he says, 10 of his cows wandered onto Dominion property. The entire herd of 150 was confiscated by company employees and taken to a police station. The cattle were held for almost two weeks, during which time 20 died, Apiyo says. More perished from dehydration on the trek back to his land. In an interview on the side of a dusty road, he says he has received nothing for his losses.

Dominion’s Burgess expresses little sympathy. Stray cattle, he says, can spread disease. “Can you imagine a rice farmer in Mississippi allowing stray cattle onto his field?”

Several factors explain the rush to invest in farmland in Africa. In 2007 high oil prices drove up the cost of crop production and shipping. The resulting spike in food prices was exacerbated by severe droughts in Eastern Europe and Australia. Sensing opportunity, investors and corporate farmers went shopping in Kenya, Sudan, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Governments in those countries, which annually accept billions of dollars in food aid, leased land to outsiders in exchange for promises of cash, roads, and schools. Local residents, however, often weren’t consulted when land they considered theirs was turned over to newcomers. Centuries-old themes of exploitation inevitably surfaced.

AN UNUSUAL CONFERENCE

In the first half of 2009 private equity funds lined up more than $2 billion to invest in farmland, according to Agcapita, a Calgary-based fund. BlackRock (BLK) has raised $500 million to invest in agriculture. Philippe Heilberg, a former commodities trader for American International Group (AIG), has leased 1 million acres in Sudan. Heilberg’s New York-based Jarch Capital announced in April that it had acquired the land for an undisclosed amount through a Sudanese firm. Jarch plans to grow rice, wheat, and other crops for export. The owner of the land is Gabriel Matip, a son of General Paulino Matip, the leader of the armed wing of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which fought a long war against the government in Khartoum that ended in 2005. In a statement issued to the Sudan Tribune in April, Jarch said it planned to lease another million acres by the end of 2009. The completion of that deal hasn’t been announced.

In June scores of institutional investors gathered in New York for Global AgInvesting 2009, a first-of-its-kind conference. Among the attendees were employees of the endowment funds of Harvard and New York Universities and the pension plan for San Diego County, Calif. The potential investors were told that in Africa, a little Western technology can fertilize crops and generate profits. “It’s a mad scramble for African farmland right now,” says Carl Atkin, head of research for Bidwells Agribusiness, a large British company that recruited investors at the conference.

Japan, China, and other Asian countries have operated farms in Africa for more than 20 years. A million Chinese do agricultural work on the continent, according to the U.N. Now a throng of additional outsiders is arriving.

Saudi Arabia held a lavish ceremony in March in Riyadh to celebrate the first harvest from a $100 million rice and wheat project in Ethiopia. In December 2008, Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki flew to Qatar to meet with officials there about a potential deal under which the tiny Middle Eastern emirate would build a port in the coastal city of Lamu in exchange for a long-term lease on almost 100,000 acres to grow rice.

Dominion Farms’ Burgess began negotiations in 2002 with the governments of Kenya’s Siaya and Bondo districts near giant Lake Victoria. The 58-year-old executive says his interest in Africa was sparked by a member of his church in Guthrie who makes charitable trips to Kenya. Burgess decided to bring American-style agribusiness to Africa. “God has plans for people’s lives,” he says, “and I thought that maybe this was part of His plan for me.”

PLEADING FOR THEIR PEOPLE

Dominion isn’t an obvious candidate for farming in Kenya. Part of Dominion Group, a privately held conglomerate involved in real estate development and manufacturing, Dominion once ran prisons for Colorado and other states. Corrections Corp. of America (CXW) has acquired that business.

When he arrived in Siaya, Burgess rode by Jeep over pock-marked roads to examine land in an area near where the Yala River empties into Lake Victoria. Local officials told him that past irrigation plans had failed, he says. Burgess recounts how he was greeted by two members of the Luo tribe dressed in tattered Western-style suits. The old men pleaded for help for their people, he says. “I made the decision that night.”

Soon thereafter, Dominion secured a 25-year lease on 17,000 acres, with an option to renew for an additional 20 years. Burgess says that to obtain the lease he made a series of agreements in confidential documents signed by members of local councils and tribal chiefs. These agreements were approved by the Kenyan Lands Ministry in Nairobi, says Dorothy N. Angote, the ministry’s permanent secretary.

Dominion is obligated to pay a total of $140,000 in rent annually. On top of that, Burgess says he paid the Siaya County Council $100,000 two years ago. A county official conceded that the $100,000 vanished, according to local newspaper reports. Separately, Burgess says he paid $120,000 to the local Lake Basin Development Authority in 2003. That money also disappeared, he says. Neither the authority nor the county council responded to several requests for comment.

Dominion also agreed to clear 300 acres of its land for residents to use communally. In addition, it said it would rehabilitate at least one school and one health facility in each of the Siaya and Bondo districts.

More than six years later, these arrangements haven’t all gone according to plan. Before the company’s arrival, tens of thousands of farming and herding families used parts of the Yala wetlands now occupied by Dominion. Many of these residents have lost access to land they considered theirs. As a legal matter, land rights were held by the various government bodies that leased tracts to Dominion, according to the Lands Ministry. Scores of homes where Dominion now operates were relocated to make way for a dam and reservoir the company built. Burgess says about 50 families were compensated as a result. Chris Owalla, a local community organizer, estimates that 300 families were displaced.

Burgess says owners were paid amounts roughly double the worth of their properties. Residents say the compensation—typically 4,600 Kenyan shillings, or about $60 per home—was inadequate. Erasto Odindo, who grows beans, maize, and tomatoes on eight acres in Bondo, says he rejected Dominion’s offer because the money was too little.

Dominion has renovated one of the two promised health centers, installing electricity, X-ray machines, and dental equipment. But residents say they have trouble reaching the small facility because the road to it runs through Dominion’s farm and company security officers sometimes deny them access. No schools have been renovated, although Dominion has donated building materials for those projects.

By all accounts, the 300 acres Dominion has set aside for communal farming hasn’t been used for that purpose. The reasons are in dispute. Burgess blames local officials for keeping people off the land. The officials want to supervise the farming and collect the profits, he alleges. Local farmers, in contrast, say that when they tried to plant crops, they were blocked by the company or saw their maize and rice uprooted by Dominion bulldozers, according to Owalla, the community organizer. Burgess denies these accusations. It is difficult for an outsider to get to the bottom of the matter.

Burgess says that overall, Dominion has improved life for Kenyans. “I disagree when people say, ‘Oh, you have to preserve the local culture,’” he says. “If you preserve it, people will starve, and you won’t have a culture to preserve.” He plays down the idea that land formerly used for subsistence agriculture has now been monopolized by Dominion. Farms that surround his company’s property are little more than “unproductive gardens,” he says. Most of the area his company now cultivates simply wasn’t being used before, he says. “No one was there.”

Burgess says Dominion employs 700 local people in various capacities. But villagers dispute this. In 2003 the company hired some 200 people to pull weeds and chase away birds, according to Owalla. As the Dominion farm became more mechanized, jobs dwindled, the activist and local residents say.

During a reporter’s visit to the area over three days, some 40 women were observed working at any one time in the Dominion rice paddies. Three men operated tractor equipment along the road. Several of the women said in interviews that they earn less than 200 shillings a day, the equivalent of $3. They declined to give their names for fear of losing their jobs.

FLOOD DAMAGE

Even some local farmers who have kept their land complain about Dominion’s presence. Odindo, the farmer in Bondo, reigns as the informal mayor of his neighborhood. While chickens and goats roam the mud-walled front yard of his neatly painted white house, he explains that local farmers fear Dominion eventually will force many of them to seek work in Nairobi—a fate they all dread. “How can you suddenly ask them to change their whole life?”

During severe rains in 2007, Odindo says most of his crops were destroyed by flooding he blames on a nearby dam that Dominion built. He holds up worn photos showing his farm almost totally submerged. “We have never seen that kind of flooding before,” he says. More than 1,000 homes were damaged, and some were swept completely away, he adds.

Jackson Oware, who lives nearby, has placed small markers where five of his mud huts stood before the flooding destroyed them. “We are not sure when to replant because it could all be washed away again,” Oware says.

Burgess says the ferocity of the storm caused the damage. “We were in no way responsible for this flooding,” he adds. “These people just want someone to blame.”

Residents report other fears as well. Since Dominion’s arrival, they say, drinking water from the Yala River has a metallic taste they attribute to the company’s use of fertilizer. Odindo says Dominion’s spraying of pesticides has sickened some animals. “Every home has a dead cow or dead goat,” he says.

A soil and water analysis in August, paid for by the antipoverty group ActionAid International, concluded that people shouldn’t drink from the Yala River. Among the concerns mentioned in the analysis are the presence of dieldrin, a chemical ingredient in some pesticides that has been linked to breast cancer and Parkinson’s disease. The Environmental Protection Agency banned dieldrin in the U.S. in 1987.

Burgess says Dominion uses no pesticides in Kenya. Crop-dusting planes that circle the company’s property spray only nitrogen-based fertilizers and herbicides—neither of which is harmful, he adds.

Grahame Vetch, Dominion’s manager in Kenya from 2004 to 2007, contradicts his former employer on the pesticide question. Vetch, who according to Burgess was fired for poor management, now runs his own land development company in the area. He says Dominion did use pesticides to battle crop-eating pests, such as the quelea bird.

Environmental oversight is weak in Kenya. Selalah Okoth, the district officer in Bondo for Kenya’s National Environment Management Authority, says she hasn’t assessed water or soil there since she took the job in 2004. Okoth cites a lack of resources, saying she fears there could be harmful pollution caused by Dominion.

Burgess responds with dismay. “When you try to help these people,” he says, “all they do is complain.” He says his company is trying to foster farming that will attract jobs and investment. He speaks often of his spiritual motivation. A large white Christian cross stands behind Dominion’s main facility. Burgess says he erected it after community leaders told him his farm included sites associated with witchcraft.

The American executive has also preached in local churches to promote good relations. But that hasn’t gone over well with everyone. “Burgess came into my church and claimed that we didn’t know Christ well enough, and we should do it right to prosper,” says Odindo. “Well, we are poorer now.”

EKET, Nigeria — The nine-year-old boy lay on a bloodstained hospital sheet crawling with ants, staring blindly at the wall.

His family pastor had accused him of being a witch, and his father then tried to force acid down his throat as an exorcism. It spilled as he struggled, burning away his face and eyes. The emaciated boy barely had strength left to whisper the name of the church that had denounced him – Mount Zion Lighthouse.

A month later, he died.

Nwanaokwo Edet was one of an increasing number of children in Africa accused of witchcraft by pastors and then tortured or killed, often by family members. Pastors were involved in half of 200 cases of “witch children” reviewed by the AP, and 13 churches were named in the case files.

Some of the churches involved are renegade local branches of international franchises. Their parishioners take literally the Biblical exhortation, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

“It is an outrage what they are allowing to take place in the name of Christianity,” said Gary Foxcroft, head of nonprofit Stepping Stones Nigeria.

For their part, the families are often extremely poor, and sometimes even relieved to have one less mouth to feed. Poverty, conflict and poor education lay the foundation for accusations, which are then triggered by the death of a relative, the loss of a job or the denunciation of a pastor on the make, said Martin Dawes, a spokesman for the United Nations Children’s Fund.

“When communities come under pressure, they look for scapegoats,” he said. “It plays into traditional beliefs that someone is responsible for a negative change … and children are defenseless.”

Two award-winning Wall Street Journal reporters, Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, have collaborated on a new book entitled Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. It is a page turner. Unless you simply don’t give a damn, this is a must read, and it is a must read now.

It’s reality literature at its most compelling; the printed word’s descendant of CBS TV’s “You Are There” series which transported its viewers to seminal moments in history. Thurow and Kilman’s narrative seamlessly covers time and place from the first stirrings of humanitarian concern by nations of plenty for people impoverished by natural disasters and man-made frailties. It reveals how lives of abject poverty intersect those with a deep dedication to their well-being to render both quite extraordinary.

The “What’s In it for me?” Syndrome
But, it also reveals something sinister. They explore how rich countries cynically enable the downward economic cascade that traps the developing world in an unbroken cycle of despair as food aid and developmental aid are offered and withheld to suit the needs of the wealthy. The list is long; and it is disturbing.

Ethiopians die of thirst literally on the banks of the Blue Nile River whose headwaters are in their country. But, they can’t touch it because Egypt, where the Nile River ends, won’t allow anyone to interfere with its water flow. The American government, needing every friend it can find in the Middle East, supports Egypt’s refusal to allow a life saving dam on Ethiopian land, and is willing to sacrifice millions of Ethiopians if necessary.

Ugly Americans
And then there is Ghost of Christmas Past, former Arkansas Senator Dale Bumpers, whose 1986 legislative gift keeps on giving. Bumpers authored an amendment making it illegal to provide agricultural assistance if there is even a remote possibility of another country competing against American agribusiness. It ignores the benefits that could accrue to both sides if the US was more expansive in its generosity with technical information.

It doesn’t stop there. Thurow and Kilman track with astounding clarity how a malevolent “Iron Triangle” impoverishes populations by demanding that food aid be provided only as food and not as cash that can support local economies. American farmers who depend on government purchases of crops at subsidized prices make it impossible for small stakeholder farmers to compete; so they starve. American shippers benefit from a mandate that 75% of all food aid be transported on American ships (adding an estimated $200 a ton to the cost of grain, so less food is delivered).

Even more despicable are the complicit food aid agencies whose existence is leveraged into the legislative protections that prevent cash aid. Reducing the amount of aid delivered as food would take their best player out of the game, so they take a crooked path to saving lives even as it becomes clearer that more food will not solve the problem alone.

But, worse than the Triangulates are religious hypocrites who posture self-righteously about moral values while coldly supporting the perpetuation – and even expansion – of provisions in the Farm Bill that distort world commodity markets to the advantage of bloated American agribusiness while trapping a billion people in desperation at the bottom of the pyramid.

Walking The Walk
Is there any hope? Sure. Bono, the rock star, tours churches, truck stops and meeting halls throughout the Mid-western states preaching Matthew 25:35 and discovering that Americans are often as good hearted as advertised. Jim and Linda Rufenacht of Archbold, OH rally their neighbors in support of a tiny organization called the Foods Resource Bank. Their whole town pitches in and saves people in Kenya in the name of Christian charity. Conservative Republican Alabama Congressman Spencer Bauchus “gets it” that debt forgiveness plays a critical role in rescuing struggling economies and courageously provides moral leadership in urging Congress to agree.

Eleni Gabre-Madhin, a dynamo, passionately forges the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange which gives farmers the opportunity to trade at world prices, store grain, hedge against price volatility, insure their harvests, buy better seeds and, finally, enjoy food security.

Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme innovates the “Purchase for Progress” initiative in which donor nations combine food with cash. Cash underwrites robust markets, discovers realistic pricing, builds economies, creating an upward cascade that leads to civil stability, better health and education, and eventually the ability to consume goods and services from the outside.

TNT Group’s CEO recognizes its value in advising WFP on the logistics of emergency food deliveries and saves lives while stimulating other multi-nationals to join the fight against world hunger.

Outrageous Behavior
Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Laureate, accepted the peace prize in 1970 with the admonition that failure to alleviate famine would amount to criminal negligence. Despite progress, too many of us stand guilty as charged forty years later.

Thurow and Kilman hope to inspire and outrage their readers. Evidence indicates they have. The book’s editor called Thurow at one point and started the conversation saying “I’m infuriated.” “What’s the problem?” he asked as gently as he could. “Nothing’s wrong with the manuscript,” she said, “But I’m outraged at what we are doing to the people in Africa. How could we let this happen?”

This is a professional reader concerned about commas and periods and whether any phrase has been repeated too often. Yet, somehow through the fog of punctuation, her nostrils were filled with the stench of duplicity and hypocrisy, making it clear to her that expressions of concern for those who teeter every day on the line between life and death don’t pass the smell test.

-Huffington Post

[tags]Agra, Alliance To End Hunger, Archbold OH, Chicago Council On Global Affairs, Ethiopia, Fao, Farm Bill, Food For Peace, Howard Buffet, International Food Policy Research Institute, Josette Sheeran, Norman Borlaug, Puchase For Progress, Roger Thurow, Scott Kilman, Spencer Bachus, The Green Revolution, TNT Group, Undp, Universities Fighting World Hunger, Usaid, Wfp, World Bank, World Food Programme, Yum! Brands, Business News[/tags]

(CNN) — What makes a woman want to have sex? Is it physical attraction? Love? Loneliness? Jealousy? Boredom? Painful menstrual cramps?

It turns out that woman have sex for all of these reasons and more, and that their choices are not arbitrary; there may be evolutionary explanations at work.

Psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss, both professors at the University of Texas at Austin, decided that the topic of “why women have sex” deserved a book of its own. They’ve woven scientific research together with a slew of women’s voices in their new collaborative work, “Why Women Have Sex,” published September 29 by Times Books.

“We do bring in men occasionally by way of contrast, but we wanted to focus exclusively on women so that the complexity of women’s sexual psychology was not given the short shrift, so to speak,” said Buss, a leading evolutionary psychologist.

The authors conducted a study from June 2006 to April 2009 that asked women whether they had ever had sex for one of 237 reasons, all of which had emerged in a previous study. About 1,000 women contributed their perspectives. Watch women answer The Question »

It turns out that women’s reasons for having sex range from love to pure pleasure to a sense of duty to curiosity to curing a headache. Some women just want to please their partners, and others want an ego boost.

Buss said he found it surprising how dramatically and variably sexual experience seemed to influence women’s feelings of self-esteem.

“Some sexual experiences that women in our study reported just had devastating effects and long-lasting negative effects on their feelings of self-worth,” he said. “But then for others, their sexual experiences provided the soaring height of euphoria and made them feel alive and vibrant.”

Meston said some 20-somethings defied the gender stereotypes that women should be more chaste than men and not sleep around as much.

“Many of the women were having sex purely because they wanted the experience, they wanted the adventure, they wanted to see what it was like to be with men of different ethnicities,” she said. “Some women said they wanted more notches on the belt. They simply wanted to get rid of their virginity.”

Some women have sex to make money, and not just in the conventional manner of prostitution. A woman from California who goes by “Natalie Dylan” garnered national attention this year with her campaign to sell her virginity and said in January that her top bid of $3.8 million came from a 39-year-old Australian. Read more about selling virginity

There are more factors that influence a woman’s sex drive than a man’s, the authors said, and the factors that make men attractive to women — personality, sense of humor, self-confidence, status — are less important considerations for men when they are choosing women.

There is also evidence that sexual arousal is more complicated for women than for men, the authors report.

A study from Meston’s lab showed a strong correlation between how erect a man’s penis is and how aroused he says he is. By contrast, the link is much weaker between a woman’s physical arousal (as measured inside her vagina) and the arousal she says she feels, the researchers found. This is why drugs to treat erectile dysfunction such as Viagra don’t work as well in women, the authors said.

That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, even though men and women may not consciously think about their choices that way, the authors said. If the goal of a man is to spread his genes, he would need to look for signs of fertility in a woman, which are historically associated with physical cues, Buss said.

“The adaptive problem that women have had to solve is not simply picking a man who is fertile but a man who perhaps will invest in her, a man who won’t inflict costs on her, a man who might have good genes that could be conveyed to her children,” he said.

In this context, women must also be more selective, because wrong choices can lead to much higher costs than for men: pregnancy and child-rearing.

In studies, women have consistently shown preferences for men with symmetrical bodies, a subtle mark of genetic fitness and status, the book said. In fact, simply by smelling T-shirts that men had worn for two nights, women judged the odors of symmetrical men to be the most attractive, and the asymmetrical men’s odors the least attractive, in one study.

Still, symmetry isn’t everything, Meston and Buss said. They pointed to singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett as someone with other positive attributes, such as musical talent and personality, who has clearly done well with women despite asymmetrical features.

“Women are evaluating men on multiple attributes,” Buss said.

Kissing also turns out to be more important for women than for men in some respects: In one study, 53 percent of men said they would have sex without kissing, but only 15 percent of women said they would even consider sex without smooching first, the book said. For women, kissing is “an emotional litmus test,” the authors wrote.

The medicinal value of sex also comes into play for some women, the book said. Sex can help a woman relax and sleep better, and it can ease the pain of menstrual cramps and headaches — and some survey participants cited these as reasons they’ve had sex.

A study from Rutgers University found that, during orgasm, women were able to tolerate 75 percent more pain. Though Meston has not studied the phenomenon in men, she said she would expect sex to have the same effects of reducing headaches and other pain.

The authors collected stories from 1,006 women from 46 states, eight Canadian provinces, three European countries and Australia, New Zealand, Israel and China. Participants came from a variety of ethnic and religious — as well as non-religious — backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses. About 80 percent of the women said they were in a relationship at the time, and 93 percent said they were predominantly or exclusively heterosexual..

The book also explores how women’s perception of sex may change over time, according to whom they’re with and whether they are married.

A 26-year-old heterosexual woman wrote, “When I was single, I had sex for my own personal pleasure. Now that I am married, I have sex to please my husband. My own pleasure doesn’t seem as important as his. I believe he feels the same way.”

It was past mid-night, and as usual, I was widely awake, voraciously surfing the Net, when I run across this particular picture of Ghandi’s on, Google Search. It was one of those, strikingly original and brilliant Google Logos.

It was posted right on their search page, for ALL to see. The picture description went, something like, “celebrating Ghandi’s birthday”.

Obviously, I couldn’t help it but grab this picture, to sort of chronicle it on my blog. For those who had missed it while getting your beauty-sleep, here it is for you – courtesy of, yours truly.

As the number of internet users grows, security further tightens its grip on their activity, namely when it comes to “disseminating and receiving sensitive political information,” according to a report on blogging in Egypt by the US-based NGO, Freedom House.

The report titled “Freedom on the Net: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media,” explores the level of freedom internet users enjoy in different countries including Egypt, Cuba and Ethiopia.

The report explained that although there is no explicit and direct internet censorship by the government, there are other informal methods that establish red lines. The report cited court cases against journalists and “friendly” phone calls from military or security officers to both journalists and activists.

Topics such as the military, the president’s health, Muslim-Christian tensions and torture are among the sensitive topics that bring activists and journalists into the spotlight, the report said.

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